We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder With the Marines Who Took Fallujah

 by Nathan Alexander  

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 In his book We Were One, Patrick K. O'Donnell helps transform the debate on Iraq from a survey of whether or not non-democratic nations approve of America bringing democracy to Iraq — to one involving our neighbors, families, sons and daughters.

We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines who took Fallujah
by Patrick K. O'Donnell
published Da Capo Press (2006)
Hdbk., 244 pgs.
ISBN: 0306814692

Patrick K. O’Donnell has written We Were One, an account of 3rd battalion, 1st Marine regiment’s assault into the occupied Iraqi town of Fallujah, to remind Americans that the war in Iraq is more than just the debate over WMDs or whether one agrees with the policies of George Bush. The men who are fighting in Iraq are part of the next “Greatest Generation,” he writes, and fight as a “modern band of brothers.” O’Donnell went through basic training to get the right to accompany “Lima” Platoon in its Fallujah operations. “From the ground” he follows the experiences of four sets of friends from their high school days through their time in Fallujah. Only four of these men made it home.

We Were One attempts to be an action-packed account of the bloody fighting that would cost Lima platoon 32 casualties among its 46 members. Descriptions of combat are graphic and O’Donnell isn’t afraid to include the Marines’ salty commentary. Technology may have altered the way wars are fought, but ground soldiers remain the backbone of modern urban combat.

O’Donnell makes a number of interesting observations concerning the nature of the war. Coalition troops, as was the case in Vietnam during the mid-sixties, operate from their bases — they do not live closely with the Iraqis. Towards the latter years of the Vietnam War, the Marine Corps had success in pacification by placing smaller units in villages.¹  Despite frequent comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, I’ve yet to read anyone advocate that Americans adopt this successful strategy in Baghdad.

O’Donnell does a good job discussing how current “Rules of Engagement” cost American lives. For example, while most if not nearly all of Fallujah’s civilians had departed the city before the battle, Americans were prevented from using artillery and mortars to engage the enemy from a distance. In fact, “America’s high tech firepower, smart bombs, and artillery had largely been neutralized . . . in part by political pressure.”  Much of the combat in Fallujah was accomplished with improvised weapons — Bangalore torpedoes and bulldozers. Despite bipartisan insistence from the U.S. Congress of “support for the troops,” there has yet to be any account of how the current “rules of engagement” have resulted in higher US casualties.

O’Donnell reports that “over half” of Fallujah’s 99 mosques were filled with insurgents who used them as fighting positions and arsenals. It would be interesting to know if in any conflict involving Islamic radicals whether Jihadists have ever shown any deference to sacred sites or holidays. O’Donnell reports that the Islamacists whom the Marines encountered were fully aware of the American rules of engagement and exploited them at every opportunity. Without air support, the Marines were forced, for instance, to resort to using mirrors to look around corners. O’Donnell reports that many if not most of the Jihadists were under the influence of drugs, such as cocaine and amphetamines. These were used to enhance their aggression. The insurgents were often from other countries. Chechens, in particular, frequently dressed in coalition uniforms.

O’Donnell’s accounts of the international press are darkly amusing. While many had insisted on accompanying the Marines, nearly all fled at the first sound of gunfire. One German journalist squawked, “This is horrible they are bombing schools and hospitals, I’ve got to do something.” She then fled to the rear — no doubt establishing in print what she failed to see with her own eyes.

We Were One is written unevenly. While O’Donnell at times does a good job relating the details of combat, the book often jumps wildly from military operations to Marines “confessing” how “intense” things are — sometimes in embarrassing, Oprah-style, streams of profanity. This, no doubt, is to create an impression of “authenticity.” The book begins with thumbnail sketches of the Marines whom the book ostensibly will focus on. However the book is not long enough to permit the reader to identify with the men, and their individuality is quickly lost. While the copy of We Were One I read was an early review edition, it was difficult to know what the Marines were accomplishing. There was no map which might have been used to indicate progress or objectives. Even more oddly, after 150 pages of “rock-n-roll” war, the book ended with a chapter on “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” — the last thing that you would expect from the caricatures of macho Marines the book goes to such length to convey.

We Were One is spattered with references grandiosely comparing the battle in Fallujah to Gettysburg and Hue (Vietnam). Unfortunately, O’Donnell’s prose fails to live up to its subject. The writing is so full of clichés that I felt at times I was playing a "shoot-em-up" videogame instead of reading an account of a military operation. (One chapter begins by quoting lines from AC/DC.) For a book supposedly about the fraternity of men, there was less focus on the men, and more on “things that go boom.”

Whatever the outcome of the war in Iraq, the decisive battles will be fought in the American and, increasingly, the international media. During the Vietnam War, there were many important battles — the Tet Offensive of ’68, the Easter Offensive of ’72 — but their significance was determined far from the battlefield. In the recorded sessions he made with his generals and colonels, General Creighton Abrams spent a good deal of time joking darkly about how the American media would turn American and South Vietnamese victories into defeats. By substituting non-military objectives for military objectives, the media was able to present allied efforts in Vietnam as hopeless. The South Vietnamese and American defeat of the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive was presented to the American public in the image of Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong with a shot in the head.²  The heroism of South Vietnamese forces in their victory over the North in the Easter Offensive of 1972 was dismissed as being “dependent on US airpower.”³

When America chose to invade Iraq, Colin Powell insisted that we seek UN approval for our actions. Nations without democratic traditions and unable to defend themselves against terrorist attack were asked to commit themselves to supporting future military action against an allegedly nuclear armed Iraq. The resulting spectacle of American diplomats begging and cajoling third world dictatorships for support was the result of subjecting US foreign policy to non-democratic public opinion.

We Were One does a fine job bringing to Americans the reality of combat in Iraq — something the major news media has scrupulously avoided reporting. In doing so, O’Donnell is helping transform the debate on Iraq from a survey of whether or not non-democratic nations approve of America bringing democracy to Iraq — to one involving our neighbors, families, sons and daughters. In short, he is giving democratic public opinion an opportunity to educate itself.

Endnotes

1. See Andrew Krepinovich’s The Army and the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins, 1988).

2. The photo was of Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong captain Nguyen Van Lem, the leader of a “Revenge Platoon” and responsible for murdering the families of police officers.  Loan had just been told that Lem had succeeded in killing a police major, one of Loan’s closest friends. While the photograph was carried around the world (and a silent video tape embellished  with the sound of a “shot” also was circulated by the western media), no context was provided to the viewer, who was left to assume that the South Vietnamese regime was barbaric.

3. In his A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (Harvest, 2000), Lewis Sorley argues that the South Vietnamese Army’s incompetence is one of the myths American’s have embraced to excuse their abandonment of Vietnam in 1973. The absence of scholarly work on the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) would seem to support Sorley’s contention. I haven’t read the recent book on the ARVN by Robert Brigham (ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army, University of Kansas, 2006), but it is doubtful that the 130 pages it dedicates to its subject will change matters significantly. See Quang Pham’s review of it on the Amazon.com website.

We Were One is available on Amazon.com.

Book Reviews, Foreign Affairs: Iraq War

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