With the 1st Marine Division in Iraq, 2003: No Greater Friend, No Worse Enemy

With the 1st Marine Division in Iraq, 2003, is a unit history written by the participants in the same vein as its predecessors—The Old Breed—written at the end of World War II and— The New Breed—authored during Korea. It is a narrative describing the actions of Marines in combat during the liberation of Iraq. Portions of the story have been told by embedded journalists—but this full account is told by those who made it happen. The 1st Marine Division, in concert with the U.S. Army’s 3d Infantry Division, captured Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. The division’s 28-day “march up” from Kuwait to Baghdad, a distance of 250 road miles, was a remarkable achievement. It represented a validation of the Corps’ maneuver warfare strategy, particularly the seamless integration of air into the ground scheme of maneuver and the Marine logistics command’s innovative support. “Blue Diamond,” the 1st Division’s Operation Iraqi Freedom nom de guerre, consisted of some 20,000 Marines and sailors and 8,000 vehicles organized into three regimental combat teams. Designed to be light and self-sufficient, the regiments “conducted the longest sequence of coordinated overland attacks in the history of the Corps,” according to Lieutenant General Wallace C. Gregson, then commander of Marine Forces Pacific. The authors of this account were somewhat more colloquial, preferring to state that it “focuses on the collective action of Marines who served as part of the ‘Blue Diamond.’ It is not a story of each of them, but the story of all of them.” Their story is an authentic documentation of the feel, concerns, triumphs and tragedy of the campaign in Iraq.