Free eBook about the Iraq Surge, "Surging South of Baghdad: The 3rd Infantry Division and Task Force Marne in Iraq, 2007-2008"

USA.Gob Gab - Free eBook About the 2007 Surge in Iraq

"The U.S. Government Printing Office runs an excellent blog called Government Book Talk in which they highlight remarkable government publications. Today’s blog post highlights Surging South of Baghdad: The 3rd Infantry Division and Task Force Marne in Iraq, 2007-2008, a book describing “the experience of one unit participating in its third deployment to Iraq.”

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US Army History - Surging South of Baghdad

Here's the first page of Preface;

During the autumn of 2006, the 3d Infantry Division was preparing for its third deployment to Iraq. Since the capture of Baghdad 3½ years earlier, the division had participated in a broad cross-section of the fighting—from the heady days of April 2003 when armored “thunder runs” paralyzed the Iraqi Army’s resistance and spearheaded the fall of Baghdad, to the sectarian violence in 2005 that heralded the early rise of the Sunni insurgency. To counter the deteriorating situation, President George W. Bush decided to send in extra troops, a one-time limited “surge” of U.S. ground forces aimed at tamping down the burgeoning violence. This is the story of the surge through the experiences of the 3d Infantry Division, which provided two of the five brigades, numbering some thirty thousand soldiers, that deployed to Iraq between February and June 2007. For almost fifteen months, the division occupied a key portion of the battlefield south of Baghdad, fighting the insurgents and trying to rebuild the lives of ordinary Iraqis worn down
by years of conflict.

Although the war in Iraq continues to this day, historians, journalists, and participants commenced writing about it almost immediately. Dozens of books on topics ranging from how the United States got into a war in Iraq to the fall of Baghdad to the battles of Fallujah and Ramadi have been published, but the process of writing about the surge has only just begun. The Center of Military History became an early participant in this first draft of history when the 3d Division asked for an Army historian to cover its events as it started to deploy in the spring of 2007. I volunteered, arriving at the division’s new headquarters at Camp Victory outside Baghdad in May.

Conditions were spartan. The influx of new troops to Iraq had quickly outpaced housing facilities, and most of the new soldiers and civilians— including me—were billeted in tents, which sprouted up around the base in enclaves of concrete corrals built as protection from the rocket attacks that were becoming an almost daily occurrence. Despite some personal privations, there was ample technology at the division headquarters. Banks of the latest computers and telephone systems kept this modern command post running night and day, sharing intelligence and maintaining instant and constant communication with the smallest unit in the remotest reaches of the operational area. I spent much of my time tapping into the mass of data, which, along with interviews in the field and personal observation, provided the basis for this book.

We're talking a 453 page PDF here...