Roughneck Nine-One
The Extraordinary Story Of A Special Forces - A Team At War.
Authors - Frank Antenori and Hans Halberstadt, published by St. Martin’s Press, 2006 (ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35332-2)
On April 6, 2003, some thirty American Special Forces personnel attacked a crossroads near Debecka, in Northern Iraq, and held off a counter-attack of over 150 Iraqi army personnel, tanks and armored personnel carriers. During the action, a group of Kurdish allies and a BBC news team, including veteran reporter John Simpson, was hit by an American bomb which was supposed to strike at the Iraqi T-55 tanks.
This incident was televised around the world while it was happening, and with Antenori’s retirement from Special Forces, we can now read the inside story of what really happened.
Over the past 60 years, the concept of “Special Forces” has revolutionized modern military fighting tactics. Sgt. Antenori gives the reader a view of what the term “Special Forces” means in the modern U.S. Army. While superficially this battle has some resemblance to the heroic and desperate fights one finds common in military history, where outnumbered soldiers manage to survive the assault of overwhelming forces, A-Teams in Afghanistan and Iraq are equipped with modern weapons and satellite communications, and can call on an entire arsenal of advanced support to defeat any opposing forces.
Antenori and Halberstadt engage the reader by taking a step-by-step overview of what preparations and training a modern A-Team engage in.
It is useful, four years on, to review the opposition to the American invasion in March and April, 2003, and how the enemy has changed from a poorly trained regular army, to numerous sectarian and religious groups who have the sources of funding for weapons and are gaining experience in fighting the American military.
Sgt. Antenori’s war lasted only a few weeks, while today’s American forces in Iraq are staying and fighting for many months at a deployment. Many military personnel are on their 3rd, 4th or 5th deployments to Iraq. Antenori’s Special Forces defeated the Iraqi Army. Those who followed have not had the same success - for all their training - in the years since.
Having said that, this book is worth reading, and gives a personal view of the invasion of Northern Iraq in 2003. It will not be a classic book of the war, but it provides a good counter-point to such books as “The March Up” by Bing West, and “In the Company of Soldiers” by Rick Atkinson.
Rating (out of 5): 3 Stars.
