There are a number of books about 3/4, the Third Battalion Fourth Marines, which toppled the statue at Firdos Square. John Koopman, who was an embedded reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote McCoy’s ...
The Literature of 3/4
Category: Documents
The Strategic Corporal at Firdos Square
If Leon Lambert, a 35-year old gunnery sergeant, hadn’t been at Firdos Square, the statue of Saddam Hussein probably wouldn’t have been toppled on April 9. It was Lambert who gave a sledgehammer and rope to a handful of Iraqis at the square, thereby triggering the process that led to the ...
The Map to the Palestine Hotel
The Marines who were dispatched to the Palestine Hotel were given a grid coordinate for an area that was a square kilometer large but they did not know where the hotel was located in that area; the hotel was not marked on the map they used. The map is posted above. The red circle, which I placed on ...
Shelling the Palestine Hotel
On April 8, the day before Marines arrived at Firdos Square, an Army tank on the Al Jumhuriya Bridge fired a shell at the Palestine Hotel, killing two journalists and injuring three others. Those killings increased pressure on the Pentagon to secure the hotel, so that no further harm would come to ...
Inside the Palestine Hotel, 2
On the fifth anniversary of the invasion, New York Times reporter John Burns wrote about the precarious status of journalists at the Palestine Hotel, and how he felt when Marines arrived at Firdos Square.
The Psychological Operations Myth
In 2004 the Army published a report that credited a psychological operations team with playing a crucial role at Firdos Square. A ...
The Map for Invading Baghdad
The final assault into central Baghdad was planned in a surprisingly ad-hoc manner. I had thought it would have been prepared in depth, with lots of intelligence and surveillance on hand, but instead it was devised on the outskirts of Baghdad, at the Diyala canal, by two majors, John Schaar and ...
Academic Studies of the Firdos Toppling
There are a number of interesting media studies about the toppling at Firdos Square. The best was done by a George Washington University team led by professor Sean Aday; entitled “As Goes the Statue, So Goes the War: The Emergence of the Victory Frame in Television Coverage of the Iraq War,” ...
My Other Stories About the Third Battalion
The military unit that toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein at Firdos Square was the Third Battalion Fourth Marines, based at Twentynine Palms, California and led by Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy (who is now a full colonel, based in Tampa with Central Command). During the invasion I was what the military called ...
The Passion of Command
Col. Bryan McCoy, who commanded the battalion that toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, has written a fine book about military leadership. It’s called Passion of Command: The Moral Imperative of Leadership, and it has a lot of admirers in the military community.