No True Glory

Title: No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah
Published by: Bantam
Release Date: September 27, 2005
Authors: Bing West
ISBN13: 978-0553804027
Buy the Book: Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound

 
Overview

A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah

Fallujah: Iraq’s most dangerous city unexpectedly emerged as the major battleground of the Iraqi insurgency. For twenty months, one American battalion after another tried to quell the violence, culminating in a bloody, full-scale assault. Victory came at a terrible price: 151 Americans and thousands of Iraqis were left dead.

The epic battle for Fallujah revealed the startling connections between policy and combat that are a part of the new reality of war.

The Marines had planned to slip into Fallujah “as soft as fog.” But after four American contractors were brutally murdered, President Bush ordered an attack on the city–against the advice of the Marines. The assault sparked a political firestorm, and the Marines were forced to withdraw amid controversy and confusion–only to be ordered a second time to take a city that had become an inferno of hate and the lair of the archterrorist al-Zarqawi.

Based on months spent with the battalions in Fallujah and hundreds of interviews at every level–senior policymakers, negotiators, generals, and soldiers and Marines on the front lines–No True Glory is a testament to the bravery of the American soldier and a cautionary tale about the complex–and often costly–interconnected roles of policy, politics, and battle in the twenty-first century.

Praise

“The gripping account of the valor of the Marines in the fiercest urban combat since Hue. Yet, the even-handed description of the vacillation regarding policy will likely please neither some of our senior officers nor the White House.”
– Former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger

“The best book on the U.S. military in Iraq to emerge so far.”
– Tom Ricks of The Washington Post

“The finest chronicle of the strategy behind battle and the fighting during battle that I’ve ever read.”
–General Carl E. Mundy, USMC (ret) Commandant of the Marine Corps