Review: Echo in Ramadi: The Firsthand Story of US Marines in Iraq's Deadliest City

Echo in Ramadi: The Firsthand Story of US Marines in Iraq's Deadliest City by Scott A. Huesing
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

MWSA Review

Ramadi is the capital of Al Anbar province in Iraq. In 2006 it was the location for some of the bitterest fighting in Operation Iraqi Freedom as insurgents and Coalition Forces fought for control of the strategically important city. Into the middle of this cauldron of devastating urban warfare was thrust Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines led by then-Captain Scott A. Huesing.

Though well trained and leavened with a cadre of Iraq war veterans, the Echo Company Marines were still shocked by the ferocity of violence that greeted them during the height of the insurgency, something that never let up during the unit’s deployment.

Echo in Ramadi joins other books on the subject as an excellent account of the Battle of Ramadi. What sets it apart, and gives it a particularly gripping veracity, is that it’s a story of the unit told from the point of view of its commander. Huesing spares no detail, nor himself, in the telling of Echo Company’s effort to wrest neighborhoods from insurgent control. The result is a war with no quarter asked or given—one where, as he graphically details, rules of engagement are callously manipulated by the insurgents and turned into weapons against Coalition Forces.

Huesing’s narrative covers the gamut of Echo Company’s experience, from the bonding that began with training to the fellowship that grew stronger when the Marines went into battle. Huesing reveals the complexity of company command, from basic leadership to the stress of chaos of urban combat. The many interlocking layers of command responsibility are vividly recounted, no more so than when Huesing makes a satellite phone call from his command post to comfort the mother of a Marine under his command who had been wounded.

Huesing pulls no punches in revealing the physical and emotional cost of their deployment. The tally of the butcher’s bill paid by Echo Company did not end when they left Iraq, but continued after they returned to the States and later, after discharge. Along with the physical wounds were the psychological scars of post-traumatic stress that contributed to the suicides of some men from the company and to Huesing’s own brush with death in a single-vehicle automobile crash.

Echo in Ramadi is one of most powerful accounts of the Iraq war. Its page-turning narrative reveals the stark, gut-wrenching triumph and tragedy that is the human cost of war.

Review by Dwight Jon Zimmerman (May 2019)


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