In the Company of Soldiers A Chronicle of Combat

by Atkinson, Rick

• ISBN13: 9780805077735
• ISBN10: 0805077731
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-03-01
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Summary

"Intimate, vivid, and well-informed . . . On the field of battle where more than 770 journalists were 'embedded,' Atkinson stood apart as one of the very rare war correspondents who are also fine military historians." The New York Times Book Review For soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division, the road to Baghdad began with a midnight flight out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in late February 2003. For Rick Atkinson, who would spend nearly two months covering the division for The Washington Post, the war in Iraq provided a unique opportunity to observe today's U.S. Army in combat. Now, in this extraordinary account of his odyssey with the 101st, Atkinson presents an intimate and revealing portrait of the soldiers who fight the expeditionary wars that have become the hallmark of our age. At the center of Atkinson's drama stands the compelling figure of Major General David H. Petraeus, described by one comrade as "the most competitive man on the planet." Atkinson spent virtually all day every day at Petraeus's elbow in Iraq, where he had an unobstructed view of the stresses, anxieties, and large joys of commanding 17,000 soldiers in combat. And all around Petraeus, we see the men and women of a storied division grapple with the challenges of waging war in an unspeakably harsh environment. With the eye of a master storyteller, a brilliant military historian puts us right on the battlefield. In the Company of Soldiers is a compelling, utterly fresh view of the modern American soldier in action.

Author Biography

Rick Atkinson was a staff writer and senior editor at The Washington Post for twenty years.

Table of Contents

Prologue	p. 1
Peace
Rough Men Stand Ready	p. 11
Good for You and Good for Me	p. 29
"This Thing Is Going to Go"	p. 43
The Land of Not Quite Right	p. 61
The Garden State	p. 79
War
"The Bold Thing Is Usually the Right Thing"	p. 103
Enemy in the Wire	p. 125
The Cry of Beasts in Their Desolate Houses	p. 139
"A Man Just Sort of Exists"	p. 159
Alexandria to Zoe	p. 181
An Army of Bones	p. 193
Nebuchadnezzar Goes Down	p. 215
"War Is a Bitch"	p. 241
At the Gates of Babylon	p. 257
"Every Thing Has Its Place"	p. 277
Afterword	p. 297
Author's Note	p. 304
Glossary	p. 308
Index	p. 310
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

From In the Company of Soldiers:

We turned around. Najaf was pacified, at least for today. Back at the middle school where No Slack had its battalion command post, Hodges told Petraeus that he had declared Ali's shrine to be a demilitarized zone, "so there's no military presence west of Highway 9." He also had issued edicts outlawing revenge killings, but allowing the looting of Baath Party or Fedayeen properties. "You see guys walking down the street with desks, office chairs, lights, curtains," Hodges said, and I wondered whether authorized pilfering was a slippery slope toward anarchy.

Before we walked back outside, Chris Hughes showed me a terrain model that had been
discovered in a bathroom stall in a Baathist headquarters. Built on a sheet of plywood, roughly five feet by three feet, it depicted the Iraqi plan for Najaf's defense. Green toy soldiers, representing the Americans, stood below the escarpment on the southwestern approach to the city. Red toy soldiers, representing the Iraqis, occupied revetments along the perimeter avenues, with fallback positions designated in the city center. The model included little plastic cars, plastic palm trees, even plastic donkeys. Nowhere did I see JDAMs, Apaches, Kiowas, Hellfires, or signs of reality.

---

Excerpted from In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat by Rick Atkinson
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.