Former Pentagon chief and Marine Corps general Jim Mattis’ upcoming book about the lessons he has learned during his lifetime of service has been suddenly discounted the day before its Tuesday release.
At BJ’s Wholesale Club, a bulk discount household store, in Falls Church, Virginia, the hardback edition of his book, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, was already on sale Monday at $15.79 — a 43% discount on its full price of $28. On Amazon, pre-ordered copies were available at $18.77, a 32% cut.
The cut price could be attributable to nervousness about sales by the publisher, Random House Books, or in an effort to drive up sales and get the book onto the New York Times bestsellers list. The book could be difficult to sell because Mattis only mentions Trump once — when, in the first two pages, he recounts being picked as Pentagon chief. In an ear of highly-partisan political books achieving huge sales, Mattis cannot be identified as pro- or anti-Trump or even as having sympathies with Republicans over Democrats or vice versa.
The book, co-written by Bing West, who was a Marine officer in Vietnam and has written numerous books about the Corps, delves into more than 40 years in uniform. The book, which is 245 pages with another 50 of appendices. also touches on Democratic front-runner, Joe Biden’s time as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Biden, 76, was appointed by Obama to oversee America’s withdrawal from Iraq. In the book, Mattis, 68, blasts Biden’s decisions for creating the vacuum that led to the rise of the Islamic State and critiques the drawdown of U.S. forces in the region at the time.
Mattis was head of Central Command, which oversees U.S. troops in the Middle East, in 2011 when forces were pulled out despite Mattis warning Biden about the folly of the move.
“He wanted our forces out of Iraq,” Mattis writes. “Whatever path led there fastest, he favored. He exuded the confidence of a man whose mind was made up, perhaps even indifferent to considering the consequences were he judging the situation incorrectly.” Obama, 58, eventually sent troops back to Iraq in 2014 when ISIS began to seize parts of the country and bordering Syria. Mattis had retired the year before after being fired without even a phone call to inform him he was being replaced.
Mattis returned to the public eye in 2017 when President Trump picked him to be secretary of defense. Mattis held the role until his resignation became official in January. He cited Trump’s decision to slash U.S. troop presence in Syria for his departure in a frank letter sent to the administration in December last year.
The general is best known by the nickname “Mad Dog,” which some Trump administration officials said was one of the reasons the president appointed him. But the self-styled warrior-scholar much prefers to be known by his Marine call sign of “Chaos.”
Asked about the “Mad Dog” moniker in 2017, Mattis said: “It was a slow news day I think and somebody made it up. My call sign was Chaos. But I must confess how I got that name. It’s probably because, you know, the great Chinese classical warfare strategist, Sun Tzu. You copied him or something like that. I’d love to tell you it was for a dignified reason like that.”
In fact, however, when he was a colonel and regimental commander in Twentynine Palms in California where, according to Mattis, “there’s nothing to do but go blow up the desert,” he noticed the word “Chaos” on the operations officer’s whiteboard.
“I said, ‘What’s this about?’ I’m curious, you know. We all are. He says ‘oh you don’t need to know that,’” which only further piqued his curiosity.
Mattis continued: “Finally, he kinda said, ‘Well it means the colonel has an outstanding solution,’ and it was very much tongue in cheek, ladies and gentlemen. They didn’t consider all my solutions quite as outstanding as I enthusiastically promoted them. There was never a ‘Mad Dog’ in there, other than some press person who needed a little bit of a fantasy life fulfilled I think.”
