Battle For The City Of The Dead

Amid the thousand-plus modern war journalist-pundits, popular writers, scholars and historians, two indisputable authorities stand out: the iconic David Glantz, who devoted a decade to meticulously researching, then penning, the groundbreak­ing, definitive “Stalingrad Trilogy,” and the prolific, indefatigable Dick Camp, a retired Marine colonel who has written seven books and more than 70 military articles in less than six years.

Ironically, each is a fresh source of ur­ban combat insight.

Glantz, who almost single-handedly rescued from oblivion a host of World War II documents, narratives and memoirs about the infernos on the Eastern Front, and Camp, who followed, then critically critiqued, the ferocious fight­ing for Fallujah and Najaf in Iraq, have fundamentally revised and reshaped our understanding of street-by-street, house-by-house engagement strategies.

Intense combat in the open is as clean as war can be. But against religious or political fanatics at close quarters it is beyond horrific—as brilliantly chronicled in Camp’s latest effort, “Battle for the City of the Dead: In the Shadow of the Golden Dome, Najaf, August 2004.” When the author’s initial two-part article describing the first day of a three-week battle for that holy city appeared in Leatherneck (November and December 2010), Marines as well as the military-minded public marveled over the clarity and vivid narrative skill in describing the confusion and com­plexity of cemetery fighting.

Now bristling with added technical details, and magnified by anecdotes and vignettes obtained from two dozen personal interviews, organizational charts, colorful maps, as well as numerous hitherto unpublished color photographs, “Battle for the City of the Dead” forces a remembered scene from the World War I classic film “All Quiet on the Western Front” when German infantry died under writh­ing shellfire in a French cemetery. As in that movie, the intense firefights in one of the largest Muslim graveyards in the world, and around Najaf’s Imam Ali Mosque, the sacred shrine of the Iraqi Shiites, slowly moved beyond the old city walls, then across open squares, and down narrow streets to yet more doorways and basements.

Camp depicts the entire story, from then little-known, troublemaking Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordering his Mahdi Militia of several thousand disbanded angry, disgruntled well-armed Iraqi army veterans to rebel against the struggling country’s newly elected Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), to Captain Bruce Sotire passing out rubber balls to schoolchildren after al-Sadr surrendered and the militia left the city.

In between, the story unfolds of how hundreds of the enemy took cover in the ancient cemetery, declared a safe haven or exclusion zone because of its religious significance. In 120-degree heat, and behind and among crypts, tall grave shrines and markers, as well as mausoleums, the brave 1st Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment leathernecks fought alone during the first day, then were joined by the 1st Bn, 5th Cavalry Regt and the 2nd Bn, 7th Cavalry Regt.

As in Camp’s other books, especially “Operation Phantom Fury: The Assault and Capture of Fallujah” and “Last Man Standing: 1st Marine Regiment on Pele­liu,” a salty prose produces a thrilling immediacy that permeates throughout the text. “Battle for the City of the Dead” may well become a paragon in the Iraqi war literature.

No wonder the Corps celebrated Camp by selecting him to serve as vice president for Museum Operations at the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, overseeing the operations of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va.

BATTLE FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD: In the Shadow of the Golden Dome, Najaf, August 2004.
By Dick Camp.
Published by Zenith Press. 320 pages.
Stock #0760340064.
$27 MCA Members. $30 Regular Price.