Review Patrick O’Donnell, We Were One, Shoulder To Shoulder With The Marines Who Took Fallujah, Da Capo Press, 2006

O’Donnell, Patrick, We Were One, Shoulder To Shoulder With The Marines Who Took Fallujah, Da Capo Press, 2006

 

Patrick O’Donnell went to Iraq in 2004 to witness the 2^nd Battle of Fallujah and tell the story of some of the Americans involved in the fight. He eventually came across the 1^st platoon of the 3^rd Battalion, 1^st Marine Regiment. He told their story in We Were One, Shoulder To Shoulder With The Marines Who Took Fallujah. It is a traditional combat story emphasizing the comradery and bravery of the Marines.

 

The book is divided into three main parts. The first is on the training the 1^st Platoon went through to prepare for the Battle of Fallujah. O’Donnell found that the non-commissioned officers tried to make the platoon feel like a family believing that would bond the Marines together so that they would stand together in combat. This is where the author also goes through the biographies of some of the men that would be featured in the fighting.

 

The majority of We Were One was about the 2^nd Battle of Fallujah. It criticizes the civilian and military leadership that didn’t allow the U.S. forces to attack the insurgents inside the city before the battle began because they were afraid of civilian casualties. He used examples of insurgents doing training out the in the open and the Marines not being able to do anything about it. The author went as far as to say that cost the lives of Marines.

 

O’Donnell then goes through the major combat the 1^st Platoon went through. It faced some of the heaviest fighting and highest casualties because it was tasked to go through the Jolan neighborhood which was manned mostly by foreign fighters and was heavily fortified. 4 Marines were killed and over 70% of the others were wounded. The author does a good job explaining how each one of these losses affected the platoon emotionally and psychologically. Many wanted revenge for instance and wanted to blow up everything in front of them to avoid any more casualties.

 

The author had a missed opportunity at the end as the 1^st platoon took a one hour class on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) before it went home. One Marine said it was meaningless because they were being treated like they’d gone through a regular deployment rather than combat. Another said that the Marine Corps needed to make a much bigger commitment to the Marines going back to the U.S. to make sure they could deal with their stress. Rather than following through with the unit to see what happened to them afterwards O’Donell simply drops the topic there. That might have been because he was focused upon the bravery of the Marines and their fighting prowess. Talking about them suffering afterwards would have undermined that narrative.

 

Another issue is that the book doesn’t touch on what the battle meant for the people of Fallujah. It noted that more than half the city was destroyed in the fighting. Then when civilians were allowed back into the city weeks after the combat they didn’t thank the U.S. One Marine felt a bit of resentment about that. He obviously didn’t realize that leaving Fallujah in rubble would not make Iraqis happy and full of compliments for the Americans. Like most Western books on Iraq the Iraqis are largely absent.

 

Overall We Were One is a good story of combat in Iraq. The 2^nd Battle of Fallujah was one of the most intense operations during the entire occupation of Iraq. O’Donnell captures what the 1^st Platoon went through. Books like this fill in the gaps of what happened in Iraq on the ground level while most histories focus upon the politicians and generals.

 

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