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Battle for Fallujah gets insider's first-rate look

Although slim in size and scope, "Fighting for Fallujah: A New Dawn for Iraq" is an intense and vivid chronicle of a turning point in the counterinsurgency fight.

The ferocious combat of November 2004 in the core of a city less than 5 square miles in size rivals the epic battles for Hue City, Stalingrad, Cassino and Tarawa.

Author John R. Ballard, who led the Marine Corps' 4th Civil Affairs Group as a colonel in Iraq, ably reconstructs in excruciating detail the horrific executions of four American civilian security contractors in March 2004, the meticulous planning of military operations prior to Fallujah, the ultimate destruction of what had become a vital node of the insurgency, and the resettlement of a fiercely independent but highly relieved civilian population.

Employing a framework of reportorial realism based upon eyewitness accounts, interviews with military leaders and recently declassified records and documents, the somewhat scholarly narrative and its 22 pages of informative footnotes in no way interfere with placing the reader shoulder to shoulder with Marines, soldiers and Iraqi troops as they fought house to house through more than 20,000 structures over three weeks to clear out enemy forces.

Ballard, who today is assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and is a professor of joint military operations at the Naval War College, combines all of the qualifications needed to produce a powerful but balanced analysis of the significant actions, innovative strategies and techniques, and varying requirements for engagements in an urban sea of one- and two-story houses.

"Because urban warfare will certainly dominate most battlefields, my goal in telling this story is for future combat operations to benefit from all the political military lessons learned there," Ballard writes. "Also, I wanted to focus upon emerging concepts for coalition force integration, information operations, interagency coordination, and reconstruction procedures, and especially the everyday heroism ... in the face of a determined, deadly enemy. All that we gleaned in Fallujah is now germane to our war on terror."

An insert of 21 previously unpublished photographs and six maps depicting the attack operations, area-clearing status and the initial resettlement plan add to the tremendous amount of information concentrated in this solid compendium.

Today, Fallujah remains one of the safest cities in Iraq. In describing how that came to be, Ballard's first-rate "Fighting for Fallujah" is as inspiring as the men and women who served during that fight.

‘Fighting for Fallujah: A New Dawn for Iraq.’ By John R. Ballard. Praeger Security International. 184 pages. $45.

Don DeNevi is a freelance writer in California