The Long Road Home, by Martha Raddatz

On Palm Sunday, April 4, 2004, a platoon of the First Cavalry Division entered Sadr City, the Shi'ite slum in Baghdad, Iraq, for a routine patrol. Until that date, the Shi'ites had seemed relatively undisturbed by the American presence in Iraq and were, in fact, believed to be grateful to the Americans for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government. By the end of that Sunday, the military and political situations in Iraq would both have been shown to be more complex, and less amenable to American aims, than policymakers and military leaders alike had assumed. This is the story Martha Raddatz tells.

There is another account of the same incident in Rajeev Chandrasekaran's book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. What distinguishes Ms. Raddatz's book-length account of the events in Sadr City is her description of the impact of these events on the families of the soldiers involved. These families, wives and children (and one husband) of officers and enlisted personnel alike, were mostly living in Killeen, TX, at the time. Killeen is home to Ft. Hood, which is the home base for the First Cavalry Division. The contrast between the safe, somewhat sanitized life on the base, in a town whose "nationally-known restaurants" are Bennigan's and Applebee's, and the chaotic life on the streets of Sadr City is particularly wrenching because the latter proves to have the power to reach into the former and negate the families' assumptions of security.

Ms. Raddatz deals with combat on an emotional, as well as a physical level, and she deals with her action sequences quite competently. I would say that she has as little squeamishness at handling combat as my friend David Drake - an author of military science fiction stories, which is to say, no discernable squeamishness at all.

There isn't a lot here about high policy, but there are plenty of comments on the effects of policy on the lives - and deaths, of soldiers. For example, some of the troops went into a hostile urban environment, with snipers firing at them from rooftops, in canvas-topped Humvees and open trucks.

Well-written, powerful, affecting, informative - I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know about life on the ground in Iraq.