Iraqi War Stories
Individual unit stories of the Iraq war are beginning to come out and make for interesting reading. Some snippets from some accounts I saw recently and remembered to bookmark:

Mackubin Thomas Owens at NRO provides The Marines’ Perfect War:

The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the 1st Marine Division by "Bing" West and Major General Ray "E-tool" Smith, USMC (ret) provides a remarkable description of a campaign conducted by some truly remarkable young Americans.
...
My daughter asked about his nickname. "E-tool" is an abbreviation for "entrenching tool," military jargon for the small shovel that soldiers and Marines carry for digging their fighting holes. Trying not to be too graphic, I explained Smith's nickname by paraphrasing his own words: "Unlike a rifle, a shovel doesn't jam." As is the case with most legendary characters, the story of how he earned his sobriquet has many variations. Let's just say that the incident involved Ray Smith, a small shovel, and one or more North Vietnamese soldiers.

Sounds like a Kumbaya shortage!

The jihadis asked no quarter and the Marines gave them none. The Marines

knew the difference between these jihad fighters and the militia. Consequently the Marines shot them in the ditches and in the field. They threw grenades into the bulrushes and shot the fighters when they ran out. They threw grenades into the drainage pipes running under the road…A few of the foreign fighters surrendered, but most did not — they had come to Iraq to die, and die they would.

As one Marine put it, this was the perfect war. "They want to die, and we want to kill them."

It's great when everyone is happy!

Also worth reading is Thom Shanker in the NY Times who provides How Green Berets Overcame the Odds at an Iraq Alamo. The major story is how lightly armed Special Forces held off an Iraqi armored column with Javelin missiles for which Sargeants Adamec and Brown won Silver Stars. But what happened next is interesting too:

There was a move by some Iraqis to surrender. More than a dozen Iraqi infantrymen left their trenches waving pieces of white paper. But two white S.U.V.'s drove up, and six men got out. Their flowing robes suggested that they were enforcers for the governing Baath Party; fedayeen fighters favored combat gear.

"Through our binoculars, we could see a heated discussion, and then these guys in robes started executing those guys who were trying to surrender," Sergeant Antenori said. "They shot every one of them, and then walked around to make sure they were dead."

The massacre was over in less than 30 seconds. The Americans decided something had to be done.

"We called in an F-18 to drop a 750-pound bomb on those S.U.V.'s," Captain Wright said. "It was like a magic show. You know, now you see 'em, now you don't. The S.U.V.'s, the guys in the white robes — they simply vanished."

They blowed up real good!