Introduction

There are a lot of Iraq War books and memoirs out there for people to read all the way from White House officials, the former Coalition Provisional Authority leader Paul Bremer, to numerous ex-Generals, and even books written by tactical squad leaders. However, the memoir written by Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Sassaman, Warrior King that describes the actions the battalion he commanded in Iraq, the 1-8 Infantry is the first one I have read where I actually knew some of the people involved.

I did all my train up prior to deploying to Iraq to include a National Training Center (NTC) rotation with the 1-8 Infantry that I was task organized to which at that time was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Phil Battaglia. The 1-8 Infantry I found to be a superb unit and enjoyed working with the people there. Unfortunately I left the 1-8 Infantry when the war plan changed I was shifted to another unit when Turkey at the last minute prevented the 4ID from using southern Turkey to invade northern Iraq from. So I didn’t serve under LTC Sassaman but knew many of the other people depicted in the book and that is why I initially was eager to read this book.

However, after reading the book, I think even people who know nothing about the 1-8 Infantry will find this book of extreme interest for a variety of reasons. First of all if you served in the 4ID you should pick it up because it is the first book I have read where the 4ID’s story was told. Secondly the book describes in great detail many of the challenges the military had to work through during that first year in Iraq because of the lack of planning from civilian leaders in Washington. Finally there are many leadership lessons to take from this book that really get you thinking if what LTC Sassaman did in Iraq was the right or wrong way to handle things?

Background

LTC Sassaman was well known in Army circles because of the fact that he was a former West Point quarterback that led the football team in 1984 to an 8-3-1 record and the academy’s first ever bowl game victory by defeating Michigan State in the Cherry Bowl and the team overall finishing with a nation wide Top 20 ranking.

LTC Nathan Sassaman

Besides his stellar football career at West Point Sassaman went on to become a respected infantry officer and even worked as a special assistant to General Leon LaPorte who at the time was the United States Forces Korea commander. Some of you all stationed in USFK who knew General LaPorte might find this passage in the book extremely interesting:

Among the many lessons I learned during that tour of duty, perhaps the most valuable was this: If you want to become a general officer, you’d better be a shrewd politician. General LaPorte exercised extreme caution in everything he did; rarely did he go off script. Preparation and rehearsal were hallmarks of General LaPorte, as they are of any four star general. Sitting in on one of my first video conferences to the Pentagon with General LaPorte, I watched Secretary Rumsfeld stop him cold in the opening minutes of a presentation. Three slides into the briefing, Rumsfeld abruptly halted the briefing and said, “You’re showing me nothing new. I was the secretary of defense in 1975, and this is the same old stuff. If you guys can’t come up with something more creative than that, I will find somebody who can.”

Sassaman then goes on to talk about how in response to the tongue lashing from Rumsfeld, General LaPorte from then would fly to Washington 3-4 days early before briefing Rumsfeld (read this posting to see what people in the entourage were doing during these trips) in order to find out from Pentagon officials what Rumsfeld wanted to hear from him. Sassaman also says that a common tactic by Rumsfeld was to talk down to his generals in order to get them on board with his agenda. Sassaman also takes a shot at Madeline Albright as being in the same vain as Rumsfeld as civilian leaders that didn’t serve and did not fully appreciate the responsibilities they were entrusted with in regards to using the military.

His stint in Korea taught Sassaman much about Army politics, which as many people in Korea know, General LaPorte was very good at. From Korea Sassaman’s next assignment brought him to Iraq to take command of the 1-8IN.

Deployment to Iraq

The 1-8IN had already been in Iraq for three months when Sassman arrived. Sassman took over for LTC Battaglia and had some nice things to say about LTC Battaglia that I agreed with, that he was a competent commander that was just extremely tired because he had been in command for so long.

LTC Sassaman also writes about his relationship with his brigade commander Colonel Frederick Rudesheim who he had little good things to say about throughout the course of the entire book. Sassaman’s criticisms of Rudesheim throughout the book I thought actually took away from the overall story of the book because it made it seem like this book was written more to bash COL Rudesheim then it was to tell the story of the 1-8 Infantry. I think the book would have been better if less bashing of Rudesheim was included and more about the story of the soldiers of 1-8IN was told.

In this photo you can see Colonel Rudesheim on the right briefing head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers with LTC Sassaman looking on to the left and 4th ID commander General Ray Odierno looking on in the background.

Anyway I spent plenty of time in the 3rd Brigade TOC and have briefed Colonel Rudesheim before on multiple occasions. I did not find him to be a very approachable person because he didn’t seem to have much personality. However, he is not the first colonel I know that was like that, so it is nothing unusual. I did find him very tactically proficient because he did spend a lot of time at the NTC before becoming brigade commander. I specifically remember COL Rudesheim taking a group of us brigade officers around the NTC to give us a briefing on the terrain of the training center. It was actually quite good, but I do remember that COL Rudesheim made sure to take us to a ridgeline that was named after him called Rudesheim Ridge. He seemed very proud of having a terrain feature named after him and this may be an indication of his ego that LTC Sassaman rails against in the book that those of us in the lower ranks didn’t really see as much. Even if the guy had an ego and was aloof, the book in my opinion would have been better without so many attacks against the guy.

In Command

LTC Sassaman took over 1-8IN right after a major brigade operation called Peninsula Strike was launched. The operation was a tactical mess that was described accurately in the book. Sassaman took many lessons learned from the operation as well as other insurgent attacks to implement a vigorous counter-insurgency strategy in the city of Balad following the Peninsula Strike operation.

One of the biggest things with Sassaman was that when attacked you stop and fight. Some people may be surprised by this, but at the time a lot of units would simply flee when hit by contact during a convoy because they were not trained properly to deal with such a threat. In the 1-8IN their policy was to stop and fight and use their infantry training to close with and kill the enemy. They also conducted rigorous patrols as well as beginning to reestablish the local government in Balad. The 1-8IN without a doubt did a great job in Balad.

However, Sassaman felt that his unit was being unfairly criticized by senior leaders because of their aggressiveness in going after the insurgents. At this time President Bush had declared major combat operations over so many senior civilian and military leaders wanted to keep a good face on Iraq; infantry units closing in and killing the enemy was not a sign that major combat operations was over. Sassaman criticizes the senior leaderships decisions to throw unaccounted for money at every problem in Iraq instead of conducting a coordinated counter-insurgency campaign to secure the population followed by an organized reconstruction plan to win hearts and minds. Civilian leaders felt like throwing money around would be enough to keep the peace which as history has shown was an incorrect assumption.

LTC Sassaman meets with tribal shieks.

Sassaman’s own counter-insurgency strategy was so effective in Balad, that towards the end of the 1-8IN’s tour in Iraq they were moved to the city of Samara to destroy the insurgency there. Samara is one of the worse cities in Iraq and back then the Iraqis believed that there were three cities in Iraq the US would never control, Fallujah, Ramadi, and Samara because not even Saddam could control them so he just paid them off to behave. The prior US unit in Samara had been badly defeated by the insurgents and thus the 4ID commander sent in the 1-8IN to clean up the mess which Sassaman was none to pleased with because he had the risk the lives of his men to clean up another unit’s mess. However, within two months the 1-8IN had largely crushed the insurgency in Samara.

However, the event that would make LTC Sassaman infamous occurred during the unit’s time in Samara. A platoon from the 1-8IN had dunked two Iraqi males caught out past curfew into the Tigris River as punishment instead of bringing them to the confinement facility. Later one of the Iraqi males would complain that his companion drowned and that the US soldiers murdered him.

This led to a criminal investigation of the 1-8IN which LTC Sassaman felt that COL Rudesheim did not support him like a brigade commander should over the situation because of their poor personal relationship. The soldiers involved in the incident say the man did not drown because the water was not deep where they dunked him. They also claim to have seen the man walking away from the scene. I don’t know anyone in the 1-8IN that didn’t think that the insurgents intentionally conducted this as a misinformation operation in order to get back at the unit for the aggressive counter-insurgency work they had done in the area.

Fallout from the Incident

Despite the fact no body was ever positively found and the denials from everyone involved that anyone drowned both the platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Tracy Perkins and platoon leader Lieutenant Seville involved in the incident were sentenced to jail terms. They were sentenced to jail not for killing Iraqi because there wasn’t any evidence to convict them for that but for simply pushing the Iraqis in the water.

The company commander Matthew Cunningham’s career was ruined and LTC Sassaman received a reprimand that effectively ended any chances he had at promotion. I worked with Cunningham a lot when he worked in the battalion’s operations office and found him to be an excellent infantry officer. I was saddened to see his career ruined by this incident.

LTC Sassaman with his family at Ft. Carson.

Sassaman’s story would go on to be featured in a long and detailed New York Times article by Dexter Filkins titled, The Fall of the Warrior King. One of the most oft quoted lines from the article is that Sassaman was “the right warrior for the wrong war.” Personally I think this quote from the article is the best one:

One paradox, which Sassaman and not a few others pointed out, was that the Americans could have shot Marwan and Zaydoon that night, and no American officer would have raised an eyebrow. Two young Iraqi men, in a nasty Sunni town, caught driving a pickup after curfew: Iraqi civilians have been killed for less. But in exploring the possibilities of “nonlethal” force – an idea meant to spare Iraqis, not kill them – the soldiers had crossed a line.

What happened to Sassaman and the 1-8IN in Iraq is still talked about quite a bit in the US military with many strong opinions about what happened and in his book Sassaman has plenty of opinions he expresses as well in defense of himself.

However, I do have to take exception to one opinion in the book where he takes a shot at the family of his Engineer Company Commander Captain Eric Paliwoda. CPT Paliwoda was killed by shrapnel from a mortar blast that pierced his heart. In the book LTC Sassaman criticizes CPT Paliwoda’s parents as being against the war and implies they are not as patriotic as another family who lost a loved one in his unit. Paliwoda’s uncle criticizes LTC Sassaman for what he said in the book about CPT Paliwoda’s parents on a reader review on Amazon. The criticism of Paliwoda’s parents was really unwarranted and should not have been in the book.

Conclusion

Overall, though the book is a good and fast read because it really does suck the reader into what life is like during that first year in Iraq. However, readers should keep in mind that this is just one persons view of Iraq and should not be taken as the definitive take of what Iraq is like. Remember Sassaman’s accounts are from the first year of operations in Iraq and in a small battle space in the Sunni Triangle. His book is best read by reading other accounts of the war in Iraq such as books by David Bellavia, Peter Mansoor, and Michael Yon to name a few of the better books available out there about the war in Iraq. Sassaman’s book is not the best book out there about the war in Iraq but it does add to the complex collage of information available for people looking to better understand the war in its full context.

Warrior King available for purchase on Amazon.com.