Product Description

On 8 November 2004, the largest battle of the War on Terror began, with the US Army's assault on Fallujah and its network of tens of thousands of insurgents hiding in fortified bunkers, on rooftops, and inside booby-trapped houses. For Sgt. David Bellavia of 3rd Platoon, Alpha Company, it quickly turned into a battle on foot, from street to street and house to house. On the second day, he and his men laid siege to a mosque, only to be driven to a rooftop and surrounded, before heavy artillery could smash through to rescue them. By the third day, Bellavia charges an insurgent-filled house and finds himself trapped with six enemy fighters. One by one, he shoots, wrestles, stabs, and kills five of them, until his men arrive to take care of the final target. It is one of the most hair-raising battle stories of any age -- yet it does not spell the end of Bellavia's service. It would take serveral more weeks before the Battle of Fallujah finally came to a close, with Bellavia, miraculously, alive. In the words of the author: "HOUSE TO HOUSE holds nothing back. It is a raw, gritty look at killing and combat and how men react to it. It is gut-wrenching, shocking and brutal. It is honest.It is not a glorification of war. Yet it will not shy from acknowledging this: sometimes it takes something as terrible as war for the full beauty of the human spirit to emerge."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #191423 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Review
Staccato account of infantry combat in Iraq.In November 2004, Army staff sergeant Bellavia led his men into the chaotic urban fighting described here. They were part of the successful recapture of Fallujah, a command base for Iraqi insurgents. Months earlier, the burnt corpses of four American contractors had been hung from a bridge in the same city. Written with military historian Bruning (The Devil's Sandbox, 2006, etc.), this rapid-fire recreation of the block-by-block fighting captures perfectly the horror - and horrible peak-experience attraction - of war. In an era of high-tech weaponry, Bellavia puts us on the ground with modern-day grunts who could just as easily be fighting in World War II in Europe. They are filthy, hot, tired and dehydrated as they slog through rubble, broken glass and dead bodies to conduct risky searches of houses that may be "clean" or filled with booby traps and enemy soldiers. The frantic, present-tense narrative abounds with scenes and dialogue that make this account of battle read like a realistic war novel. Bellavia emphasizes the close bonds among disparate comrades, including Lance Ohle, master of the light machine gun, who talks like a gangsta rapper; Piotr Sucholas, the Michael Moore - loving liberal with ice water for blood; and Bryan Lockwald, the guitar-playing intellectual with wire-rimmed glasses and a handlebar mustache. The men enter homes through holes blown into walls by tanks, work their way to rooftops and engage a resourceful enemy, one of whom the author knifes to death in vicious hand-to-hand combat. Discharged in 2005, Bellavia finds he misses the feeling of importance and usefulness he derived from combat, returns to Iraq briefly as a Weekly Standard journalist, then comes home to try to repair strained relations with his wife and son. Take his word for it: "War's a bitch, wear a helmet. (Kirkus Reviews)

The First Post website
'One of the best accounts of close quarters fighting of our time . . . disturbingly good'

James Holland, Sunday Telegraph
'If there is a better book conveying what it is like to take part in a brutal, violent, urban battle, I've yet to read it . . . Stunning'

Customer Reviews

FAST PACED, GRUSOME, BRILLIANT
The title says it all. With this book you feel like you are actually fighting the battle; you duck when the rounds start flying, wince as you see people exploding, and smell the insurgent's breath as you kill him. Far better than many of the other books that have come out of Iraq, and if you are a father it'll bring tears to your eyes at the end. A real rollercoaster and you will not be disappointed.

Not the best
This book gives an insight into what the soldiers are enduring whilst serving in Iraq, however I did not think it was well written. I feel some of the prose was provided in an attempt to keep the reader 'hooked', when the subject matter was more than enough to achieve this. An interesting book that provides much food for thought, however not the best in the genre.

A page-turner of modern warfare
I've read quite a few accounts be soldiers of life in war zones, including Somalia, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and WWII Europe. This account of fighting with the infantry in the streets of Fallujah, Iraq, is not the deepest philosophically, but definitely the most gripping in the intimacy and detail of its description of the action.

We don't hear much about the motivation of the soldiers involved on either side or how the invasion of Falujah came to be deemed necessary in the first place. we are left in no doubt though that once the battle was joined it was bloody and intense.

Combat is described in frank and sometimes gory detail. Many war authors are content to tell us simply that the enemy was killed. Bellavia tells us exactly how they were killed, whether they screamed or cried, were disintegrated by an explosion, or eaten by dogs once they were dead. Not for the faint hearted.

The lack of background and concentration on the specifics of violence does not make this a shallow story. I found myself caring more even for the insurgents that are killed than for any other opposing forces I have read about. And even though we don't learn much about the US soldiers fighting their way around the city, their lives in the US before or after the war, it is still heart-breaking to hear about them being wounded or killed. It has the attention to detail of Black Hawk Down but a much faster pace.

It also makes it clearer why the insurgency against allied forces in Iraq has only gathered pace in the intervening years. Fallujah was not an isolated incident of a few dozen men fighting each other. It was a full scale obliteration of an entire city, leaving a mark on the country and the minds and bodies of those involved that will never heal. Some of the men in Bellavia's platoon were 19 when they went to Fallujah. how do you live the rest of your life in peace when you've shot someone, seen them run over by an armoured vehicle, and then seen dogs licking their blood from the tank's tracks? Or fought your way through a house single-handed, bludgeoning a man to death with your helmet and then stabbing him to death with your pocket knife?

An amazing story I found impossible to put down once the action began.