The Snake Eaters Counterinsurgency Advisors in Combat

"Every deploying adviser, and every American interested in how we are fighting our wars, should read Owen West's gripping and important book" (Max Boot, The Wall Street Journal). The Snake Eatersfollows a team of underprepared reservists and National Guardsmen who arrived in Iraq, built an Iraqi battalion from the ground up, and plunged into battle side by side. Owen West, a third-generation U.S. Marine, was deployed as an advisor to Iraqi Battalion 3/3-1, the "Snake Eaters," who became the first Iraqi soldiers granted independent battle space. With a novelist's flair and a warrior's eye for combat detail, West takes readers inside the poisonous city of Khalidya, where violence came often and suddenly in the ongoing quest for intelligence about an enemy that was closely mixed in with the population and no one dared speak the truth. The young American and Iraqi soldiers on patrol and the local townspeople come alive ,revealing war as a series of human acts. From Major Mohammad, the Snake Eater who draws the greatest respect from the Americans precisely because he likes them the least, to the big-hearted Sergeant Blakley, a medic stalked by a sniper, the people West writes about are as complex as the war that changes them.

Owen West is a former Marine major who served two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of two novels, including Sharkman Six, which won the Boyd literary award for best military novel, and his work has appeared in Men’s Journal, Playboy, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications.