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Takedown: The Third Infantry Division's Twenty-One-Day Assault on Baghdad: The 3rd Infantry Division's Twenty-one Day Assault on Baghdad
Author(s): Jim Lacey (Author)
- Publisher: Naval Institute Press
- Publication Date: 30 April 2007
- Language: English
- Print length: 288 pages
- ISBN-10: 1591144582
- ISBN-13: 9781591144588
Book Description
Over time the impression has grown that the 2003 invasion of Iraq met with little resistance and that, with few exceptions, the Iraqi army simply melted away. As this book clearly shows, nothing could be further from the truth. In its drive to capture Baghdad, the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division was in nearly constant combat for twenty-one days. While Americans were watching Saddam’s statue being torn down on TV, a brigade of the 3rd ID was on the verge of being overrun by Iraqi Republican Guard units trying to escape north.
Takedown tells the little-known story of what happened to the 3rd ID during its struggle to win Baghdad, a campaign that some call one of the most vicious in American military history. To offer this first-hand account, Jim Lacey, a former Time magazine reporter embedded with the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, draws on extensive interviews that he conducted with the American soldiers involved as well as access to personal papers and war memoirs. This story is also enriched through his extensive use of interview transcripts of senior Iraqi army officers along with their personal written recollections. From the Kuwaiti border to the streets of Baghdad, these dramatic eyewitness descriptions of what went on give readers an accurate look at the brutal engagements in which the division fought for its life.
In making use of such a wealth of primary source material, Lacey has succeeded in writing a fast paced narrative of the conflict, backed up by verifiable facts, that shows how modern wars are really fought.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Jim Lacey is a retired U.S. Army infantry officer who works as a military analyst for the Institute for Defense Analyses. He is co-author of The Iraqi Perspectives Report: Saddam’s Senior Leadership on Operation Iraqi Freedom from the Official U.S. Joint Forces Command Report, and editor of the book Fresh from the Fight, a collection of essays on the war in Iraq.
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Lacey worked for
Time magazine as an embedded journalist and was with the 101st Airborne Division during the march to Baghdad. He has been published in more than a dozen major magazines and has written numerous articles and editorials on international and military affairs in many of the nation’s leading newspapers.
