Following some 15 years on the heels of his bestselling Peacekeeper: The Road to Sarajevo comes Major-General (retired) Lewis MacKenzie’s newest book, Soldiers Made Me Look Good. The earlier book chronicled MacKenzie’s military career, culminating in his experiences during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992. Soldiers is nominally an expansion and continuation of his memoirs. “Nominally” because the book drifts from autobiography to memoir to apologia to soapbox speech.
    The book, formally in two parts, actually contains at least three. A traditional autobiography of MacKenzie’s formative years is followed by several loosely bound highlights from his early military career. We then leapfrog over the contents of Peacekeeper to his extraordinarily active decade and a half of retirement. Chapters detail, among other things, his positions on Canada’s role in Afghanistan, the enduring myth of peacekeeping, and his own top 10 tips on leadership.
    Also in the latter part of Soldiers are apologias regarding the various controversies in which MacKenzie has found (or placed) himself. Specifically, he uses the book to a) defend himself against absurd rape allegations orchestrated by various Bosnian Muslim organizations; b) discredit journalist Carol Off and her negative portrayal of MacKenzie in her 2000 book, The Lion, the Fox and the Eagle; and c) dig himself more deeply into his dispute with retired general Roméo Dallaire, ostensibly over priorities in military leadership. For the latter issues, using a memoir as a bully pulpit smacks of, at best, a temper, and at worst, protesting too much. In particular, the snide tone he uses with Dallaire comes perilously close to conduct unbecoming.
    Various parts of the book will appeal to various readers, but will satisfy few, and no particular part is sufficiently hefty to warrant a book unto itself.  It is unfortunate that the fragmented nature of Soldiers gives the impression that there was neither enough life to fill an autobiography, nor enough opinion to fill a compilation of op-eds. Perhaps a more fully imagined integration of the book’s parts – or simply a revised and expanded Peacekeeper – would have rendered a fuller picture of the general.