Pritchard, Tim, Ambush Alley, The Most Extraordinary Battle of The Iraq War, Ballantine Books, 2005
Tim Pritchard’s Ambush Alley, The Most Extraordinary Battle Of The Iraq War is one of those books that you can’t put down once it gets going. It covers a battalion of Marines who attacked Nasiriya during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Americans weren’t expecting any resistance but found themselves in one of the most intense battles of the entire conflict. The author does a fantastic job describing the drama that ensued.
Ambush Alley follows the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment as it entered the city of Nasiriya in March 2003. Specifically it focuses upon Charlie Company that took the brunt of the fighting.
Pritchard’s narrative is a series of stories about individual Marines. He begins with some background about each infantryman, how they joined the Marines and their training and arriving in Iraq. Before getting to Nasiriya no one in the unit believed that they would see any combat. All they had done beforehand was protect a column of Marines moving up through Iraq. Many wanted to get into the fight. They got far more than they expected.
The book portrays what happened in Nasiriya as total complete chaos. It is made into a gripping story by the author. Nothing went to plan. The Marines believed that the Iraqi division within Nasiriya would give up as soon as the Americans arrived and the civilians would greet them as liberators since they rose up against Saddam Hussein in 1991 after the Gulf War. The city was considered important because it had two bridges that needed to be taken so that the rest of the Marine force could make their way to Baghdad. The spans were supposed to be taken quickly and stealthily by the 1st Battalion. Instead they found an army convoy got lost during the night, entered the city, were attacked and took casualties. The battalion commander ordered his unit to find and rescue the soldiers and take the bridges immediately. There were no orders on which company was supposed to do what. That was the root of the problem the Marines ran into.
Pritchard jumps from Marine to Marine and unit to unit within the Battalion to relay the story of what happened. A company of tanks were supposed to support the Marines but they entered the city while the vehicles were refueling. The radios didn’t work most of the time because the buildings interfered with their signals. When they were communicating everyone was trying to talk at the same time so important messages were often missed or couldn’t even be made. Charlie company made it to the second bridge going through a section of the city called Ambush Alley which the book is named after. No one knew they took the bridge and they were attacked by their own planes leading to casualties. To the Marines it felt like all of Nasiriya was fighting them. Families stood around watching the gun battles. Fighters would hide behind women and then open fire on the Marines. Children were used as spotters for the gunmen. Every window seemed like shots were coming from them. The three companies of the battalion got spread out and separated from each other while the commander had his vehicle bogged down in mud and his communications were down. It was up to individual officers and corpsmen to lead their men. It is a truly amazing and bloody tale. So many people were killed. So much was destroyed. It also the main reason to read the book. There are few that capture such an event with so much emotion as Pritchard did.
Most books on the U.S. invasion of Iraq focus upon the big units, the commanders and the politicians. This gives you a ground eye view using the perspective of American Marines. It is a one of a kind story because of the intensity and humanity with which its told. The author puts the reader right in the middle of this small group of Marines that were fighting for their lives. It’s a tale of how insane combat can be.
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