The Long Road Home

The Long Road Home
Author: Martha Raddatz 2007 310pp
My rating: 4*
Started February 16 2008, Finished February 16 2008

A Black Hawk Down for Iraq. In April 2004, while assuming responsibility for “peacekeeping” duties in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad, just off the boat patrolling members of the First Cavalry division of the US Army are caught by complete surprise in a paralyzing crossfire – essentially ground zero for the entire Iraqi insurgency -- in what had been up to that moment of the occupation, a trouble free zone. Most of the book provides a minute-by-minute account of the pinned down platoon’s ordeal and the efforts by the rest of the division to rescue them. The rest of the book deals with how the news of the battle and its casualties affect the families back home.
While the book is a consistently riveting and harrowing depiction of the modern day fog of war where communications are still broken, confusion reigns and the pace of battle leads nearly insane decisions, such as sending rescue parties into zones of intense fire in vehicles which are totally open and unarmored, I thought it would have benefited from a little more authorial distance, both emotionally from her subjects whom she seems too love to well and temporally to provide a broader view perspective on the fallout from the battle. Raddatz depicts virtually every named character as blameless and heroic, though from the limited number of medals awarded for this battle indicate that the Army did not find this to be entirely the case; of particular curiosity for me was why the officer in command of the trapped platoon, whose conduct comes off as exemplary, was not personally cited for heroism when one of his sergeants was. Perhaps a future edition postscript would be in order, detailing the longer term consequences for the soldiers and their families – where the current version leaves off, everyone seems to be coping well, even the severely injured survivors and the widows with young children; much as we’d like to believe this outcome, it seems too good to be true.

A couple of nits that should have been corrected in the editing process:

When the rear three of four vehicles driving down a road first come under heavy insurgent fire, the unit commander in the first vehicle “is unaware of what was happening behind him until several minutes had passed … when he looked in the rearview mirror, he saw that the three trail vehicles had lagged and were some twenty yards behind him …” The twenty yard figure has to be wrong: normal vehicle spacing was probably close to twenty yards and a difference in speed of even one mile an hour over several minutes would have opened up a gap many times that. (p47-48)

A while later, when the patrol has abandoned some of their vehicles and made a stand inside of a house, the author describes the enemy concentrating on a nearby street, “where the noise of artillery and grenades was growing louder and louder”, a description which made me wonder “what artillery?” since the insurgents are not described as having any weapons of a caliber bigger than small arms and never used any against any of the US forces described and “what were they shooting at?” since the stranded patrol was the only US force in the area at that time. (p76)