This review departs from this site’s usual fare of campaign histories and grand strategy, and it begins with a disclosure: I know Jake Kelly. He and I co-authored a professional paper on combat simulation experimentation, and I have watched him lead soldiers. So read what follows knowing the reviewer is not neutral — and knowing, too, that I would not put a colleague’s book on this site if it did not earn its place. The Spurs of Service earns it.
This is a book of poetry — and before any reader raises an eyebrow at a cavalry officer writing verse, that reaction is precisely the point. The title works two ways: the literal spurs of a Cav trooper, and the cowboy archetype they evoke — tough, rugged men who do not share what they carry. Kelly’s project is to show that the toughness and the sharing are not opposites. The poems move through the arc of a soldier’s interior life: the pride and weight of leading, the losses that do not stay overseas, the strange difficulty of ordinary things — how you come home, how you hold your child again, how you become human again — and, in the closing pages, the peace the author finds in his faith.
The book’s gravest ground is approached with honesty and restraint. Kelly writes about losing a soldier under his command to suicide, and about his hope that the book might help even one person choose differently. That is not a literary ambition; it is a leadership one. Every commander knows the after-action review that can never be closed out, the name that stays with you. Kelly has done what few leaders do: he has made that burden visible, on the record, under his own name — and in doing so he gives every soldier who reads it permission to say me too, I am carrying something. Hundreds of copies have already been purchased for wounded warriors, which tells you the work is landing where it was aimed.
As a leader development practitioner, I want to name what this book actually is: an act of leadership by personal example. We train leaders to inspect weapons, plan operations, and counsel performance. We are far less good at training them to model emotional honesty — yet the data and the tragedies keep telling us that connection and permission-giving are protective, and that the culture of silent endurance costs lives. A field-grade officer publishing poetry about grief, doubt, and faith does more to change that culture in his formation than a dozen mandatory training slides. The final section’s charge to the reader — that success is who you are when no one is watching, and that you should carry your own fire and light the way for others — reads less like verse than like the best command philosophy you will encounter this year.
An honest note on craft: this is soldier’s poetry — direct, plainspoken, built for reach rather than for the literary journal. Readers who come to poetry for dense allusion will find something simpler here, and that simplicity is a choice: these poems are meant to be handed to a young trooper in the motor pool, or to a veteran who has not talked about it in twenty years, and understood on the first read. Judged by that standard — the right standard — the craft serves the mission.
In summary, The Spurs of Service is a brave, generous book by a serving officer who decided his hardest experiences might be someone else’s lifeline. Buy it for the soldier or veteran in your life; better yet, if you lead troops, read it yourself and let them see you reading it. And a closing word for any reader carrying more than they can say: you are not alone, and reaching out — to a battle buddy, a chaplain, or a professional — is a soldier’s act, not a civilian’s weakness.