Iraq War History

Every day ordinary young Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq, with the same bravery, honor, and sense of duty that have distinguished American troops throughout history. One of these is Jason Dunham, a 22-year-old Marine corporal from the one-stoplight town of Scio, New York, whose stunning story reporter Michael M. Phillips discovered while he was embedded with a Marine infantry battalion in the Iraqi desert.

From one of the most important army officers of his generation, a memoir of the revolution in warfare he helped lead, in combat and in Washington. When John Nagl was an army tank commander in the first Gulf War of 1991, fresh out of West Point and Oxford, he could already see that America’s military superiority meant that the age of conventional combat was nearing an end.

In 1990, U.S. Army Major Martin Stanton was a military advisor stationed in Saudi Arabia. Encouraged by the Army to broaden his cultural horizons, and assured by the U.S. embassy that Kuwait was perfectly safe, Stanton took off for a long weekend there. Roused by gunshots his first night in Kuwait City, Stanton looked out the window and discovered he was in the middle of a full-scale invasion.

"I never thought it would be a foregone conclusion that I would be seeing a fight when I entered the Teams. I thought that perhaps I would get the chance to answer that call, but I never knew for sure until today. I hope that I never get in a rough situation, but if I do, I hope I will have the courage to see it through." Less than four years later, on June 28, 2005, Matthew Gene Axelson answered his own question.

Welcome to a place where even beer runs are a matter of life and death. As the Iraq War draws to an official close, Joshuah Bearman tells the funny and poignant tale of the real-life Baghdad Country Club, a bar in the Green Zone during the conflict's bloodiest years. Against all odds, its proprietors struggle to keep their raucous watering hole safe and well-stocked as the insurgency rages outside.