Ambush Alley or The Reapers Line

Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War

Author: Tim Pritchard

March 23, 2003: U.S. Marines from the Task Force Tarawa are caught up in one of the most unexpected battles of the Iraq War. What started off as a routine maneuver to secure two key bridges in the town of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq degenerated into a nightmarish twenty-four-hour urban clash in which eighteen young Marines lost their lives and more than thirty-five others were wounded. It was the single heaviest loss suffered by the U.S. military during the initial combat phase of the war.

On that fateful day, Marines came across the burned-out remains of a U.S. Army convoy that had been ambushed by Saddam Hussein’s forces outside Nasiriyah. In an attempt to rescue the missing soldiers and seize the bridges before the Iraqis could destroy them, the Marines decided to advance their attack on the city by twenty-four hours. What happened next is a gripping and gruesome tale of military blunders, tragedy, and heroism.

Huge M1 tanks leading the attack were rendered ineffective when they became mired in an open sewer. Then a company of Marines took a wrong turn and ended up on a deadly stretch of road where their armored personal carriers were hit by devastating rocket-propelled grenade fire. USAF planes called in for fire support play their own part in the unfolding cataclysm when they accidentally strafed the vehicles. The attempt to rescue the dead and dying stranded in “ambush alley” only drew more Marines into the slaughter.

This was not a battle of modern technology, but a brutal close-quarter urban knife fight that tested the Marines’ resolve and training to the limit. At the heart of the drama were the fifty or so young Marines, most ofwhom had never been to war, who were embroiled in a battle of epic proportions from which neither their commanders nor the technological might of the U.S. military could save them.

With a novelist’s gift for pace and tension, Tim Pritchard brilliantly captures the chaos, panic, and courage of the fight for Nasiriyah, bringing back in full force the day that a perfunctory task turned into a battle for survival.

"Ambush Alley" is a gut-wrenching account of unadulterated terror that's hard to read yet impossible to put down. London-based journalist and filmmaker Tim Pritchard, who was embedded with US troops during the initial stages of the American-led invasion of Iraq, paints a compelling picture of one of the costliest battles of the Iraq war that will at turns anger, horrify, and sadden, regardless of one's political views."
--The Boston Globe

Interesting textbook: Greenspans Fraud or Al Qaeda in Its Own Words

The Reaper's Line: Life And Death on the Mexican Border

Author: Lee Morgan

A true story of violence, drugs, human smuggling and dirty politicians along the Mexican/American border.

When he was 14, Lee Morgan learned to shoot a rifle from a young Marine who later became the "Texas Tower Sniper." Four years later, Lee was conducting CIA assassination missions in Vietnam. Then he spent the next 31 years on the U.S.-Mexico border as a federal agent, where the struggle against smugglers of drugs and starving human beings is as harrowing as anything Lee encountered in Vietnam.

The Reaper's Line is a non-fiction account of unparalleled official corruption, mass murders, gunfights, treason, betrayal, and government wrongdoing.

Publishers Weekly

The U.S.-Mexican border is one of the most violent places on earth, writes retired drug enforcement agent Morgan. He makes his case over 500 pages of gunplay, fisticuffs and bloodshed interspersed with profanity-laced denunciations of rival agencies and clueless Washington officials who believe they understand illegal immigration and drug smuggling. Having enjoyed serving in Vietnam, Morgan sought similar adventure in the Border Patrol and the Custom Service's drug enforcement service. Working mostly in Arizona, he found corrupt officials and Border Patrolmen cooperating with corrupt Mexican officials, police and soldiers to transport drugs and people into the U.S. Still, he and fellow officers intercepted countless shipments, which the author recounts in excessive but lively rounds of shootouts, car chases and murder. Reforms that created the Department of Homeland Security and shifted antidrug enforcement to the Border Patrol are disastrous, he asserts, because the patrol is hopelessly corrupt. Sneering at the current immigration debate, he insists no barrier or law can keep out Mexicans in search of work and that the money would be better spent on making Mexico prosperous enough to provide jobs for its people. Despite the incessant fireworks and macho prose style, the book provides a thoughtful view of these issues. (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Prologue	8
	Author's Note	11
1	The Reaper and the Beast	13
2	The Quickening	28
3	Interdiction	55
4	The Horse Patrol	76
5	The Agua Prieta Cartel	97
6	The Douglas Tunnel	126
7	The King of Douglas	147
8	The Big Sandy Wars	176
9	Naco	199
10	The Border Bandits	221
11	Blue Trucks	246
12	Mules-R-Us	264
13	The Last Trackers	284
14	Plight of the Mexican Aliens	297
15	REMFs and the Vigilantes	323
16	The West Corrals	360
17	The Ghosts of Las Perillas	381
18	Drex and the La Copita	394
19	Informants	416
20	Traitors	445
21	Rabbits and Greyhounds	486
22	The Reaper, the Beast, and the Corrupt DHS	502