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Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq. By Peter R. Mansoor. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. 416 pages. $28.00. Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Charles P. Moore, Director, Basic Strategic Art Program, US Army War College.
At the sixth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, bookstore shelves sag under the weight of unsold polemics on the war. Conspiracy theories, diatribes, and politically motivated memoirs-from the individual soldier to the ambassadorial level-threaten to stifle the reader's appetite for serious new material. Yet there are many critical aspects of the war that remain largely unaddressed. Peter Mansoor's most recent book, Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq, is one such example. Mansoor is uniquely qualified to provide an informed perspective on the war. He combines the trained eye of a long-serving US Army combat arms officer, the informed view of a history professor, and a firsthand account of leading men in battle to create the only brigade-level command memoir from the Iraq War to date.
The reader joins Mansoor as he takes command of the already committed Ready First Combat Team (RFCT), 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, in Baghdad. He chronicles the early occupation of Baghdad and the developing counterinsurgency efforts by Coalition forces from June 2003 to July 2004. Situated east of the Tigris River, the 3,500 soldiers of the RFCT...