Book review: "A Soldier First..."

Canada's former top soldier says he argued to keep the troops in the relative safety of Kabul, and has rebuffed claims he was responsible for getting the country mired in the bloody battlefields of Kandahar. The decision to send Canadian soldiers to southern Afghanistan was largely made before Rick Hillier became the country's military commander, the former chief of defence staff says in a provocative new memoir. The book, "A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War," is officially released Oct. 24 but an advance copy was purchased by The Canadian Press.