I've got three books on the go at the moment, but the one that's grabbed my attention the most is
Bunch of Five, by Frank Kitson:
Technically, it's an autobiographical work, covering his time in service from 1952 to 1967, during which time he was deployed to Kenya, Malaya, Oman and Cyprus, in time to end up embroiled in events like the States of Emergency in Kenya and Malaya. Frank Kitson's the author of several books (others include
Low Intensity Operations and
Warfare as a Whole) and for a long time has been cited as an authority on staging counter-insurgency operations, based on his experience with gathering and using low-level intelligence.
The book's been a great read so far; I've read through the sections on Kenya and Malaya, and they've both been entertaining and well-told. In each section he gives enough of the background to give a decent idea as to the reason for the insurgency, but he avoids going into huge detail there so that he can instead concentrate on the operations, fieldwork and thinking behind them. Some of the particularly interesting sections were about things like the way people joined and left the Mau Mau and their motivations for doing so, how the counter-gangs were formed that were apparently so successful at breaking up Mau Mau groups, and the personal anecdotes about the various members of the Communist terrorist groups in the districts of Malaya Kitson was deployed to, including those he met who changed sides. I'd definitely recommend it for anyone who's interested in the gathering and use of tactical intelligence and who's interested in learning a bit more about the various conflicts/theatres and what living and fighting in them was like.
