I buy this book every Christmas for all my Corporals and below and I have Professional Military Instruction every January based on it.
War isn't pretty, and books that make it appear so aren't just banal -- they do a disservice to those who serve in future wars, as well as those who send them there. James Webb, on the other hand, tells it like it is -- bloody, brutal and final.
As a Gulf War veteran and a writer (Prayer at Rumayla), I have long admired Webb for his incredibly good story.
True, Webb's characters don't have the depth of some. He's working with an ensemble cast, and he's trying to get a lot of information in. If you're looking for a character study, you might try Kent Anderson's Sympathy For the Devil and its sequel Night Dogs, which do just the opposite of Fields of Fire: follow a single character before, during, and long after the war, without a lot of attention to sequence, context, or minutiae. But I'd have to say Fields of Fire is stronger: the ensemble is diverse, and none of the characters are stereotypical or even flat. Likewise, Webb's prose is not perfect, but he never holds forth.
One other book that goes well with Fields of Fire is The Nightingale's Song, by Robert Timberg. Among other things, Timberg writes about Webb's life and what went into Fields of Fire. But this is an excellent book even without a counterpoint or a companion piece.