No True Glory (56 page)

CHAPTER 26

Battalion 1/8 . . .
“The magnificent bastards” is a sobriquet from its past. At Tarawa in 1944 eight hundred Marines waded across a thousand yards of reef covered by Japanese machine guns; 450 men made it to the beach. See William Manchester,
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1979), p. 239.

Marine Corps ROTC . . .
The correct technical term is “Navy ROTC with a Marine Corps option,” because the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps are separate branches of the Department of the Navy. The U.S. Marine Corps is the senior branch, organized by an act of Congress on November 10, 1775.

CHAPTER 28

journalist . . .
Kevin Sites, “Open Letter to 3/1 Marines,” November 17, 2004,
www.kevinsites.net
.

body parts . . .
Jackie Spinner, “Military Believes Zarqawi Headquarters Found,”
Washington Post,
November 18, 2004, p. A1.

letters from Zarqawi . . .
Robert F. Worth and Edward Wong, “House in Fallujah Seems to Have Been Base for Jordanian Terrorist,”
New York Times,
November 18, 2004, p. A1.

Ford Explorer . . .
Jackie Spinner, op. cit., p. 1

Zarqawi complex . . .
Rowan Scarborough, “U.S. Declares Insurgency ‘Broken,’ ”
Washington Times,
November 19, 2004, p. A1.

handed us over . . .
John F. Burns, “Tape Condemns Sunni Muslim Clerics,”
New York Times,
November 25, 2004, p. A1.

75 to 100 buildings . . .
Data provided by RCT 1 air officers in ops center at Camp Fallujah, July 28, 2004.

main gun rounds . . .
Ordnance data provided by division ops center air officers and MEF Lessons Learned team at Camp Fallujah, November 28, 2004.

buildings were damaged . . .
Ann Scott Tyson, “Increased Security in Fallujah Slows Down Efforts to Rebuild,”
Washington Post,
April 19, 2005, p. A15.

Wounded . . .
MEF statistics for Operation Dawn, provided to author on March 21, 2005.

EPILOGUE

inches . . .
Tony Perry, “Polls Stand Empty in Sunni Stronghold,”
Los Angeles Times,
January 31, 2005, p. A1.

a year ago . . .
Gen Myers, Press Conference, Pentagon, April 26, 2005.

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____

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———.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
____

FROM THE TIME SADDAM FELL IN April 2003 through the Iraqi election in January 2005, twenty American and four Iraqi battalions battled in and around Fallujah. In preparing this book, I made five trips to that city, spending about five months with many of the battalions. Over the course of sixteen months, I interviewed or observed at close hand on operations more than seven hundred soldiers and Marines in the Fallujah area. Many interviews extended over weeks, and the Internet was a tremendous tool for checking back about firefights and battles. As word spread, I received a steady stream of e-mails from soldiers and Marines, some poignant, some hilarious, and all filled with that cocky grunt spirit that pervades American infantry battalions.

Regrettably, sheer space and the demands of narrative coherence made it impossible to include many of the stories or to write of every unit. Mr. John Ripley and the Marine Corps Historical Division are hard at work writing the definitive accounts of Najaf and Fallujah, to include all units in those battles.

Mr. John Flicker of Bantam Books performed an absolutely superb job as editor. A former scout team leader in the 82nd Airborne with a strong work ethic, Flicker worked tirelessly to trim and shape this book. My agent, Dan Mandel, provided, per usual, sage advice.

And special thanks are due to Janet Biehl for the careful copyediting and to Betsy Regan for constant encouragement and valued critiques of the draft manuscript.

WITH APPRECIATION