With dedication to duty

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No True Glory

A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah

Bing West

Bantam: 380 pp., $25

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The Gift of Valor

A War Story

Michael M. Phillips

Broadway Books: 244 pp., $19.95

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McCoy’s Marines

Darkside to Baghdad

John Koopman

Zenith Press: 304 pp., $24.95

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IN the middle of his gripping account of Marines in combat, “No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah,” Bing West writes of a firefight in which Marines and heavily armed insurgents came within a few dozen yards of each other on a hot Iraqi morning in April 2004.

With insurgents firing hundreds of rocket-propelled grenades and thousands of rounds from AK-47s at the Marines, Lance Cpl. Carlos Gomez-Perez, acting on his own initiative, led a team onto a roof and, braving enemy fire, poured down enough rounds to repel the attackers.

Gravely wounded and bleeding profusely, Gomez’s only thought was to protect his fellow Marines:

“Walking past him, [medical corpsman Benjamin] Liotta slipped in a puddle of blood. He looked more closely at Gomez and saw the top of his right shoulder had been ripped away, leaving a hole the size of a Pepsi can. A round from a heavy machine gun had gouged out enough muscle to rip the arm off a normal-size man.

“[Lt. Ben] Wagner looked at him in alarm.

“ ‘Sorry, sir’ Gomez said, embarrassed to be out of the fight.

“ ‘You’re a beast, Gomez,’ Wagner said.”

In the context of a war with no end in sight, Gomez’s bravery and leadership may seem of only minimal significance. But to West, it is precisely the kind of story the American public needs to know about the Marines in Iraq: that dedication to duty is a given and courage is common.

A former Marine and former assistant Defense secretary in the Reagan administration, West enjoys an access to top brass and enlisted troops that is the envy of other embedded reporters in Iraq. Luckily for all of us, he has made the most of it, starting with his book, “The March Up: Taking Baghdad With the 1st Marine Division,” about the 2003 assault to topple Saddam Hussein, co-written with retired Maj. Gen. Ray L. Smith.

“No True Glory,” rigorously detailed and briskly written, picks up in spring 2004 as the 1st Marine Division returns to Iraq to replace Army troops trying to wrest control of Sunni Triangle cities northwest of Baghdad held in the grip of a brutal insurgency. Using his own exhaustive reporting and articles written by other embedded reporters, West describes the fury of the fighting in Fallujah and Ramadi in a style that makes him part historian, part novelist -- the grunts’ Homer. (This reviewer plays a walk-on role in the book, as do several other reporters.)

West understands how Marines talk and how they think and how they fight. He also understands that when the fighting starts, geopolitics are unimportant.

Part of West’s goal in “No True Glory” is to excoriate a vacillating White House and an out-of-its-league U.S. civilian leadership in Baghdad that refused to allow an all-out offensive when the Marines had the insurgents on the ropes. In effect, the politicians gave the Marines little choice except to abandon Fallujah in April 2004, rendering a month of hard fighting meaningless. The plan to turn Fallujah over to a group of former Iraqi generals who pledged to rein in the insurgents proved to be a tactical blunder for the U.S.-led coalition and a propaganda victory for the enemy. Six months later, U.S. troops had to finish cleaning out the city’s insurgent nests. But by West’s reckoning the overall momentum in killing off the insurgency in Iraq may have been lost in the interim. (Much of that thesis has been reported elsewhere, including in a Fallujah retrospective in fall 2004 by The Times’ Alissa J. Rubin and Doyle McManus, a fact West acknowledges in his footnotes.)

West writes that the Marines “had returned to Iraq in March [2004] to work alongside the Iraqi forces while respecting the Sunni population. The [White House] decision to seize Fallujah and then not to seize it had knocked that strategy off course. Well-intentioned compromise had emboldened the insurgents.”

The surpassing value of “No True Glory” lies not in its political analysis but in its firsthand portrayals of Marines of great bravery and steadfastness -- from better-known figures such as Lt. Gen. James Mattis, then-commander of the 1st Marine Division, and Col. John Toolan, then-commander of the 1st Marine Regiment, to common infantrymen like Gomez, Wagner and Cpl. Graham Golden.

A football player at the University of Arkansas, Golden quit college after Sept. 11 to enlist. His father was a Marine machine-gunner in Vietnam, his grandfather in Korea. And now Golden was a machine-gunner in Fallujah, refusing to take cover when his fellow Marines were pinned down and in need of help. “The [Humvee] driver Corporal Tom Conroy wasn’t about to argue with the huge corporal, so he reversed and pulled up slope enough for Golden to bring his machine gun to bear. Over the next few hours, Golden put three thousand rounds downrange, a fair day’s shooting.”

West believes that the American media are giving an incomplete portrayal of the war in Iraq. In the name of journalistic objectivity, he charges, the media have largely downplayed the courage and dedication of Marines like Gomez, Golden and innumerable others: “There would be no true glory for our soldiers in Iraq until they were recognized not as victims, but as aggressive warriors. Stories of their bravery deserved to be recorded and read by the next generation.”

While West ranges over the entire battlefield, Michael M. Phillips, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, focuses his attention on Marines patrolling a dangerous stretch along the Syrian border, far from the media spotlight. The result is “The Gift of Valor: A War Story,” a minor masterpiece of precise and detailed reporting about the life and death of Cpl. Jason Dunham, who tried to save his buddies on April 14, 2004, by smothering an insurgent grenade with his helmet, only to be gravely injured. He died eight days later at the military hospital in Bethesda, Md., his parents at his bedside.

Dunham was the kind of ordinary/extraordinary young man found in Marine infantry units, a high school baseball star from upstate New York who enlisted to find discipline and a challenge, and because he lacked the money and, frankly, the desire to go to college.

“The Marine recruiter spotted Jason in the Wellsville [N.Y.] Kmart the summer before his senior year in high school,” Phillips writes. “[W]hen the Marine recruiter told him the Corps bred the toughest of the tough, he didn’t have to work very hard to get Jason to enlist.”

In the Corps, Dunham showed natural leadership and a rare compassion for other Marines. “Gift of Valor” follows him through training at Twentynine Palms and then to Iraq, capturing the high-spirited, often profane, behavior of Dunham and his fellow grunts.

On Dunham’s sad journey home as a medical emergency case, after just six weeks in Iraq, Phillips shows us the corpsmen, doctors and other medical personnel who tried desperately to save his life. The reporting is close-up and vivid.

At a field hospital near Baghdad, the case of the young Marine who hovered between life and death affected all those who tried to save him: “Heidi Kraft [a Navy psychologist pressed into caring for wounded Marines] couldn’t shake the memory of the strong young Marine pulling on her hand, clinging to her as they parted. She looked back at her few hours with Cpl. Dunham as a spiritual awakening that explained why she was in Iraq at all.”

In lesser hands, the story of Cpl. Dunham probably would have been used as a parable of either support or, more likely, opposition to U.S. policy in Iraq. But Phillips is too good a reporter to impose politics on the story -- a story that has its own integrity and heroism separate from any wisdom or folly coming from Washington. The same could be said of greater and lesser stories of other Marines throughout Iraq.

In “McCoy’s Marines: Darkside to Baghdad,” San Francisco Chronicle reporter John Koopman takes a different tack from that of West or Phillips. He inserts himself into the story, and much of the book is his account of the problems, joys and fears of being an embedded reporter during the Baghdad assault in 2003.

Koopman, a former Marine, had either the good luck or foresight to attach himself to one of the Marine Corps’ go-for-broke characters: then-Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy, whose radio call sign was “Darkside.” It was his battalion that fought in Al Kut and then toppled Hussein’s statue in Baghdad; not for nothing is he known by other Marines as “Killer” McCoy.

Koopman is taken aback by the young Marines’ coolness under fire: “Bullets are plinking off the [vehicle] armor and off the pavement. The Marines have a serene, internal calm. The violence, the threat of death all around them, seems to mean nothing. They just sit up there and shoot.”

McCoy is charismatic and often profane. When he hears shooting, he speeds his Humvee directly toward it, to lead from the front. Like a lot of Marine Corps officers, McCoy has thought deeply about the role of military power in the modern world and its limitations.

“War is an extension of the political process,” he told Koopman. “It’s not up to Marines to question that.”

The corollary, of course, is that the public, and the media, should not transfer its opposition or distaste for a particular mission to the troops.

In the final line of “No True Glory,” West cribs an epigram from the Greek poet Pindar. Lt. Gen. Mattis used the same line when talking to reporters on the eve of the 2003 assault: “Unsung, the noblest deed will die.”

With good reporters like West, Phillips and Koopman following the troops, the chances of that happening are diminished greatly. *