Rage Company

Bing West, USMC (Ret), from his foreword to Rage Company:

“So vivid are his descriptions that the reader can sense the tipping point and can anticipate that al Qaeda in Iraq will strike back savagely. What a tale Daly tells! You won’t read this in textbook theories about counterinsurgency.”

Nathaniel Fick, author of the New York Times bestseller, One Bullet Away:

“Rage Company will stand apart from the many Iraq memoirs and histories already published.”

T. X. Hammes, Colonel, USMC (Ret) author of The Sling and the Stone:

“Tom Daly captures the uncertainty, chaos, fog and friction inherent in all combat…In particular, he provides an inside, street-level look at the emergence of the Anbar Awakening… Definitely belongs on the bookshelves of professionals.”

From the Author:

“The first time I put ink to paper was to capture what my fellow Marines Melia, Ahlquist and Chavez died for. The three of them, along with Rage Company, had one mission when they were killed: to root al Qaeda out of Ramadi. In life and death they accomplished that mission.

“I’ve been asked a hundred times by those who watched them die what they died for. If you isolate each incident by itself, you would say Melia died in an exchange of gunfire in an open field, no noble objective, just a routine mission; that Ahlquist died in an intersection walking back to his squad, nothing heroic, just stepped on an IED; and finally Chavez, well, he truly died for nothing because another Marine shot him with his own shot-gun. Those circumstances aren’t exactly what Marines would give their lives for.

“What I am trying to say is that when I started writing, it was to answer that question, why? The average lance corporal never interacted with the scouts like I did, they didn’t see the intelligence that I had access to, never realized the significance of the Anbar Awakening and the revolution they created on the eastern outskirts of Ramadi in early 2007. That is the story I want Marines and the parents and family of Melia, Ahlquist and Chavez to read.

Like Band of Brothers, Rage Company is about the company, not just an individual.”

Filled with on-the-ground details and insights on military operations and strategy, Rage Company cements the accurate history of the unlikely alliance that redirected the Iraq War—and which many are still using a model for the future in Afghanistan.

Every day, more bombs were planted than the Marines could clear. They avoided taking the same route twice, they never walked out in the open, and they steered clear of roads that hadn’t been “swept” in the last hour. They were in Ramadi, one of the deadliest cities, in the dangerous Anbar Province in Iraq.

It was 2006. First Lieutenant Thomas Daly and his fellow Marines were in Ramadi to implement Operation Squeeze Play.

Al Qaeda was in control of the population, the U.S was losing on two critical fronts in Iraq and “The Awakening” and “The Surge” weren’t household terms yet.

Yet a year later, the tide of war was flowing in the coalition’s favor. What happened?

Did the Surge change the tide in Iraq, and cause the Awakening? Or was the Awakening under way before the Surge took place? Which version of history is correct? And—will the Surge and Awakening in Iraq work in Afghanistan?

In this powerful memoir, Daly describes the early days in Ramadi, through the Surge and the Awakening, under the commands of General David Petraeus and LtGen Raymond Odierno. He describes the valor and the selfishness, the heroics and the mistakes, the rush to judgments and the regrets—and the results of an unlikely alliance between Daly’s company and Thawar al Anbar.

The first four chapters of Rage Company take the reader to the southern Second Officers District. Attached to the U.S. Army’s 1st Battalion, 37th Armor the Marines of Rage take to the streets. 

Next up is Qatana—the beating heart of Ramadi. Its maze of urban structures and lack of a coalition presence led to the insurgents declaring it the capital of the Islamic State of Iraq. Ten weeks after this declaration Rage Company is tasked with clearing the district. 

On the night of January 25, 2007, Daly met a former Saddam General and leader of the Anbar Awakening movement’s military wing. For the first time this group of former insurgents began combining guerrilla warfare with the conventional tactics of U.S. forces. They executed raids, tactically questioned detainees and shared intelligence as allies. Their knowledge of al Qaeda’s bureaucracy, operations, and most importantly, the identity of its members and leadership, proved invaluable.

The final five chapters detail the beginning of al Qaeda in Iraq’s demise.