26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A First-Rate, First-Person Story of the Iraq Surge, April 8, 2010
This review is from: Rage Company: A Marine's Baptism By Fire (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Every war produces hundreds of books by those who were there, and those who weren't. Most aren't very good. It's the rare book that combines excellent writing with the honest perspective of someone who was in the thick of it, but that's exactly what Thomas Daly has done with Rage Company." Daly was a Marine Lieutenant involved in Operation Squeeze Play, an operation intended to take back large areas of Al Anbar province from insurgent forces, and to occupy the cities. Working with local tribes who had joined the government side as part of the "Awakening", Daly and his fellow Marines and soldiers fought a house-to-house, street-by-street battle.
This is not a big-picture book about the war in Iraq, although Daly offers a number of observations that apply to the entire war; as a Lieutenant leading a platoon, his perspective rarely goes beyond the company level. He's focused on the actions and the experiences of individual soldiers, and his own education under fire. What makes this work is Daly's remarkable ability to reconstruct, in tremendous detail, the sequence of events in every patrol, and every encounter with the enemy; one assumes he must have written down copious notes after (and perhaps during) every engagement. It doesn't hurt that Daly is obviously a very educated Marine (he's a graduate of the University of Rochester), with a good knowledge of history, first-rate writing skills, and more than a passing familiarity with Arabic.
I suspect that "Rage Company" will become one of the classic first-person narratives of the Iraq war. It's certainly a must read for students of modern warfare, and those who want to know exactly what it means to be a soldier in Iraq.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Superb first person urban combat narrative; slightly clinical point of view, April 14, 2010
This review is from: Rage Company: A Marine's Baptism By Fire (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
At a time when the US is involved in combat in two locations (and our footprint in Iraq was still large during the events described in this book...as was our casualty rate), fewer and fewer Americans have served in the armed forces. There are probably fewer still who appreciate the nature of the current engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. The maneuver phases in both Iraq in 2003 and Afghanistan in 2001 ended in short order because of our massive advantage in military capability.
What remains for US forces in both places are sustained operations against foes who don't wear uniforms, who don't muster in garrisons, who prefer to avoid direct confrontation with their opponents and whose operational elements are not only spread among a civilian population, but are also often hiding in plain sight.
In "Rage Company", Thomas Daly does yeoman's work in detailing the manifold challenges on the streets where national policy gets interpreted by the armed forces in southwest Asia. Small unit leadership at the platoon and company levels while conducting anti-insurgent warfare in an urban environment requires its practitioners to maintain delicate balances between kinetic engagement and sidewalk diplomacy. This must happen while keeping subordinates informed and measuring the risk you place them in, carrying out the objectives of superiors and staying out the headlines and casualty reports. Part diplomat, part weapons expert, part city planner, part motivational speaker, part carpet merchant...these are the moving parts that company grade officers must grapple. Daly addresses these complexities in vivid detail.
Parts of this book are tape measure home runs in the genre of first person combat narratives. Those unfamiliar with combat operations get insight into the stressors and danger of facing hostile weapons and people. Daly reminds us of the other parts that the Marine on the ground faces; sleep deprivation, primitive sanitary conditions, discrepancies between what is needed to do one's job and what one actually has. His accounting of December 7th, 2006 and the kit he packed for that patrol are very reminiscent of Tim O'Brien's
The Things They Carried. Strapping on a hundred pounds of stuff just to head to work --and never complaining about it-- is heroic enough.
This book chronicles Daly through four months of combat patrols in and around Ramadi...the eastern gateway to Baghdad in Iraq. It pulls no punches in describing the the challenges they faced; strategic, tactical and logistical. As with his stoic approach to carrying 100 pounds of weapons, ammunition and armor, Daly is never asking for a concession about the goodness (or not) of his mission. He is simply describing a Marine going about his business as honorably as possible under the circumstances; circumstances often complicated by ambiguity and degrees of chaos.
The only shortcoming in this book is the abruptness in which Daly begins the story --already in Ramadi-- and ends it. He makes brief references to the training that preceded his deployment when detailing the muscle memory that's part of proficiency with a weapons (in a potentially disastrous --but quite funny-- shotgun accident) and when describing the "orientation" command to a pre-mission briefing, I was left unsure if he felt properly prepared for his role as a leader in combat; this was a question I really wanted him to answer. Even though he painstakingly provides descriptions of military terms and hardware, the overall tone is surprisingly clinical. He is a skilled and detailed chronicler of events, but I wanted to hear more from Thomas Daly the writer and less from Thomas Daly the Marine. Neither of these detract seriously from the book. If you want a sense of what post-invasion combat operations in Iraq are all about, you'll gain plenty from this book.
And for that, I salute the author.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must read for anyone interested in the history of the Iraq war, April 2, 2010
This review is from: Rage Company: A Marine's Baptism By Fire (Hardcover)
After reading this book in less than a week, I highly encourage anyone interested in Iraq war history and small unit tactics to read this. It is descriptive of the strategies that failed and those that succeeded. It is about as close as you can get to a modern version of Rommel's 'Attacks' or Swinton's 'The Defense of Duffer's Drift.' It is a little difficult to make out the maps in the kindle version though. Just got the hardback and they are much better.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
