Left of Boom: The Struggle to Defeat Roadside Bombs in Iraq and Afgthanistan [Download: PDF] [Digital]

Rick Atkinson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rick Atkinson is a Washington Post reporter currently on leave to write a three-volume history of World War II. The first volume, "An Army at Dawn," won the Pulitzer Prize for history.

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By late September 2003, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's operations chief, believed that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, who included his two sons and a nephew, but also posed a strategic risk to U.S. ambitions in the region. "The IED problem is getting out of control," he told Col. Christopher P. Hughes, a staff officer. "We've got to stop the bleeding."

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• Digital: 32 pages
• Publisher: The Washington Post (October 5, 2007)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,679,442 Paid in Books (See Top 100 Paid in Books)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The essence of future warfare, July 1, 2008

By 

John C. Fullmer (Bellevue, Nebraska) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Left of Boom: The Struggle to Defeat Roadside Bombs in Iraq and Afgthanistan (Digital)

Outside of a couple paragraphs of typical Washington Post RealPolitik (Bush bashing, doubt Washington Post editors could/would ever publish anything without it), this more than anything else I've read so far illustrates the essence of the military battle/challenge going on in Iraq right now. Without IED's there would essentially no longer be an Iraqi terrorist fight to deal with. Also, learning how to deal with this kind of assymetrical threat "left of boom" is vitally important not just for Iraq and Afghanistan, but for dealing with the overall threat of unlawful intimidation/terrorism anywhere, potentially at home as much as overseas.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars PDF missing many images, September 18, 2010

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Dylan Hazelwood - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Left of Boom: The Struggle to Defeat Roadside Bombs in Iraq and Afgthanistan (Digital)

This is a powerful series well worth reading, and I was hoping (since I'm paying for it!) the same version as was printed in the Post at the time - however, a lot (and I mean most) of the original images that were printed in the article are missing here - when I compare this PDF to the copy of the newspaper I have I'm missing a lot of important images (I wanted a clean digital copy of what I have on paper). This is disappointing - I could have gotten most of this from the [...] online articles.