Jeff Brunell's Reviews > No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah

I was 17 when the siege of Fallujah was beginning in 2004. As I graduated High School I paid a little more attention to the news as I had friends going into the Marine Corps and being deployed. Admittedly I wanted to read this book because after the war I had no idea about our strategy with the city or the politics involving it. I just knew that even today in 2018 "Fallujah" is a synonym often used for a hard fight or quest. "It's not exactly Fallujah" has been used to describe an easy situation, for example.

I think the book needs to be updated to reflect present-day events. General Mattis is now the SECDEF. Col Dunford is now the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Zarqawi was killed in an airstrike a couple of years after the USMC swept Fallujah, and I was absolutely stunned to learn that Sadr is now a politician in Iraq.

I loved how the book would describe the political situations in one chapter and then seemingly in the next it would discuss a very detailed, squad-level minute by minute account of house clearings and clashes with the insurgents.

I also didn't realize how much politics interfered with the US strategy. From the mainland perspective, given only what was prescribed from the media, I had thought that it was just a slow process to weed out the insurgents and train the Iraqi army. I failed to realize at the time that most of the Iraqi army truly didn't pledge any loyalty to the cause and that we were in a country that was essentially in a power vacuum. It seemed that most of the citizens of Iraq just assumed that as soon as the US left it would return to the same old tribal and religious rule that it had for centuries (and they were right I guess), and that caused a general apathy towards making a stand to better their own country as they were afraid of the consequences. Mr. West was correct in that the greatest asset the insurgents had was intimidation of the general population. I found myself putting down the book and wondering how strategists today battle such situations.