March 23, 2003: U.S. Marines from the Task Force Tarawa are caught
up in one of the most unexpected battles of the Iraq War. What
started off as a routine maneuver to secure two key bridges in the
town of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq degenerated into a nightmarish
twenty-four-hour urban clash in which eighteen young Marines lost
their lives and more than thirty-five others were wounded. It was
the single heaviest loss suffered by the U.S. military during the
initial combat phase of the war.
On that fateful day, Marines came across the burned-out remains of
a U.S. Army convoy that had been ambushed by Saddam Hussein's
forces outside Nasiriyah. In an attempt to rescue the missing
soldiers and seize the bridges before the Iraqis could destroy
them, the Marines decided to advance their attack on the city by
twenty-four hours. What happened next is a gripping and gruesome
tale of military blunders, tragedy, and heroism.
Huge M1 tanks leading the attack were rendered ineffective when
they became mired in an open sewer. Then a company of Marines took
a wrong turn and ended up on a deadly stretch of road where their
armored personal carriers were hit by devastating rocket-propelled
grenade fire. USAF planes called in for fire support play their own
part in the unfolding cataclysm when they accidentally strafed the
vehicles. The attempt to rescue the dead and dying stranded in
"ambush alley" only drew more Marines into the slaughter.
This was not a battle of modern technology, but a brutal
close-quarter urban knife fight that tested the Marines' resolve
and training to the limit. At the heart of the drama were the fifty
or so young Marines, most of whom had never been to war, who were
embroiled in a battle of epic proportions from which neither their
commanders nor the technological might of the U.S. military could
save them.
With a novelist's gift for pace and tension, Tim Pritchard
brilliantly captures the chaos, panic, and courage of the fight for
Nasiriyah, bringing back in full force the day that a perfunctory
task turned into a battle for survival.
""Ambush Alley" is a gut-wrenching account of unadulterated terror
that's hard to read yet impossible to put down. London-based
journalist and filmmaker Tim Pritchard, who was embedded with US
troops during the initial stages of the American-led invasion of
Iraq, paints a compelling picture of one of the costliest battles
of the Iraq war that will at turns anger, horrify, and sadden,
regardless of one's political views.""
--The Boston Globe
"From the Hardcover edition."
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