Ambush
Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War
by Tim Pritchard
Mass Market Paperback from Presidio Press
2007-
March 23, 2003: U.S. Marines from the Task Force Tarawa are caught up
in one of the most unexpected battles of the Iraq War. What started off
as a routine maneuver to secure two key bridges in the town of Nasiriyah
in southern Iraq degenerated into a nightmarish twenty-four-hour urban
clash in which eighteen young Marines lost their lives and more than thirty-five
others were wounded. It was the single heaviest loss suffered by the U.S.
military during the initial combat phase of the war.
On that fateful day, Marines came across the burned-out remains of a
U.S. Army convoy that had been ambushed by Saddam Hussein’s forces outside
Nasiriyah. In an attempt to rescue the missing soldiers and seize the bridges
before the Iraqis could destroy them, the Marines decided to advance their
attack on the city by twenty-four hours. What happened next is a gripping
and gruesome tale of military blunders, tragedy, and heroism.
Huge M1 tanks leading the attack were rendered ineffective when they
became mired in an open sewer. Then a company of Marines took a wrong turn
and ended up on a deadly stretch of road where their armored personal carriers
were hit by devastating rocket-propelled grenade fire. USAF planes called
in for fire support play their own part in the unfolding cataclysm when
they accidentally strafed the vehicles. The attempt to rescue the dead
and dying stranded in “ambush alley” only drew more Marines into the slaughter.
This was not a battle of modern technology, but a brutal close-quarter
urban knife fight that tested the Marines’ resolve and training to the
limit. At the heart of the drama were the fifty or so young Marines, most
of whom had never been to war, who were embroiled in a battle of epic proportions
from which neither their commanders nor the technological might of the
U.S. military could save them.
With a novelist’s gift for pace and tension, Tim Pritchard brilliantly
captures the chaos, panic, and courage of the fight for Nasiriyah, bringing
back in full force the day that a perfunctory task turned into a battle
for survival.
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