Book Review: One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick

Thoughtful and Reflective. I'm writing this review over 20 yrs since the original publication of this book in 2005, over 19 yrs since I first picked it up in February 2007, and 18 ish years since I read it in paperback in 2008 as one of the 53 books I read that year - the first time in my life I had recorded reading more than a book a week for a year.

I also happen to be writing it on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and I remember even now both where I was as an 18yo male college student fresh out of high school just months earlier with a Selective Service card actively in my wallet at the time... and where Fick says he was on that day in this very book, on leave in Australia that quickly got cancelled so his ship could set sail for Afghanistan and where he would be among the very first boots on the ground there.

25 years after the attacks and nearly that long after the initial American invasion of Afghanistan - and just a few years after we finally pulled out, with virtually nothing actually gained other than a *lot* of dead, many more wounded, and even more forever psychologically scarred soldiers - and with a lot of memoirs written in that time from other soldiers up and down the chain of command, to me this book still both holds its own against any of them - and even stands out quite a bit, both directly from Fick's experiences as one of the first soldiers in both Afghanistan and Iraq and in exactly how he writes about this period of his life.

Some of its final words are words that have haunted and in some ways shaped me for nearly 20 years now: "There wasn't any pride simply in being there. The pride was in our good decisions, the things we did right. I hoped I'd done more right than wrong, hoped that I hadn't been cavalier with people's lives. I was learning to accept that sometimes the only way to fight evil was with another evil, however good its aim."

With hindsight and seeing all that has transpired, all that continues to transpire (particularly as I'm now reading Ruben Andersson's Age of Security, out in January 2027 from Mariner Books, and promising to be for security and surveillance what Radley Balko's 2012 book Rise Of The Warrior Cop was for militarized policing), this book becomes an ever more haunting reminder of those early eras of the various evils and issues that have metastasized in the years since and now threaten both the US and indeed all who claim to be free, no matter their nationality or current location.

On this day of remembrance, this quarter century anniversary of such a momentous event, Fick's book continues to hold its weight as both a chronicle and reflection of those early days, from someone who was on the ground in some of the thickest parts of it. The writing is both raw and thoughtful, desperate and reflective. Even now, all these years later, it still speaks with the same power it hit with at its original publication.

Very much recommended.

This review of One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick was originally written on September 11, 2026.