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The American soldier is the reason General David Petraeus's brilliant strategy of moving our soldiers off isolated bases and out among the Iraqi people is working. Working to find and kill terrorists, reclaim neighborhoods, and help lead Iraq to democracy.

Yon is no cheerleader. According to the New York Times, he has logged more time in combat situations in Iraq than any other reporter. When failed American leadership was driving Iraq into chaos and civil war, nobody told the story earlier or better than Michael Yon. The top brass was so mad that twice the U.S. military denied him access to Iraq.

So Yon has supreme credibility when he says that we are finally winning, not primarily with our overwhelming technology, not with shock and awe destruction, but with the even more powerful force of American values--with the courage and leadership, strength and compassion of our soldiers.

Iraqis respect strength, says Yon. They know American soldiers are "great-hearted warriors" who vanquish the Al Qaeda terror gangs that "raped too many women and boys, cut off too many heads, brought drugs into too many neighborhoods."

But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic or a school or a neighborhood. They learned the American soldier is not only the most dangerous man in the world, but the best man too. That's what turned defeat into victory.

Here is the true, untold story of the American soldier and the courage and values that are bringing victory for America--and Iraq.

Average Customer Rating:

Book a bit thrown together, but still the best on Iraq War

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I have found it very frustrating how hard it is to get an accurate sense of what is going in the Iraq War. Much of the media, of course, has a bias that they wear on their sleave: they see the war as Vietnam Act Two, and they strain every nerve to find disaster and defeat in everything. We get dozens of stories about prisoner abuse and the alleged massacre in Haditha; we get close to nothing about Medal of Honor winners. The problem, however, goes beyond ideological bias, as bad as that has been. The larger problem is that the media does not understand what they are looking at. What facts indicate success? What facts indicate failure? The media, by and large, does not have a clue. They thus confine themselves to reporting the obvious -- like the latest car bombs -- and to printing the opinion of some windbag pundit as if it were news. In this respect, the Right has often been no better than the Left. While the Left sees doom and gloom in everything, the Right sees American victory in everything. In this total desert barren of understanding, Micheal Yon has been and continues to be one of the few beacons of actual information to come out of the war. Yon is not a conventional reporter. Yon is an ex-Green Beret, who turned into a writer and who does freelance reporting from Iraq. I have read his reports for several years now on the internet. They have been the best single source of information that I have found on the war. In this book, Yon pulls together what he has seen and where the war is. As he sees it, the war has gone through three phases. First, we had the fast and easy phase when American firepower knocked down Saddam Hussein. Second, we had the disasterous phase when grotesque incompetence on the part of Rumsfield and Bush threw the victory away. Their primary error was not to create law and order in the post-Hussein Iraq. We dismantled the Iraqi army and police, leaving Iraq with no functioning government, but we replaced it with nothing for far too long. In Yon's view, we were also too brutal and too rigid in this phase of the war, with the exception of the work done by General Petreaus as commander of the 101st Airborne. All of these mistakes lead to Al Queda taking over most of the country. This then lead to the third phase, in which Al Queda's unbelievable brutality toward the Iraqi people lead them to turn back to the U.S. and gave us a second chance for victory, which, in Yon's view. General Petreaus is brillantly exploiting, in his new role as overall commander. Yon is very knowledgeable about the technical aspects of his subject. He understands modern weapons and he understands modern war, particularly that part of the war which is fought in the press. What he stresses, however, is primarily morality. Al Queda lost, in his view, because they had no morality. They acted like savage beasts, killing, raping and stealing from the Iraqi people, which lost them the critical moral high ground. In Yon's view, America is now winning the war, because -- while the Iraqis often saw us as stupid and out of touch -- we were never seen as evil. On the contrary, as Yon describes it, the Iraqi people have gained incredible respect for America, because of the exemplary behavior of our troops. The Iraqis respect strength and fighting spirit, which our soldiers have shown in spades. They also deeply love their children and their families. When they came to see Al Queda as threatening their children and their families, and the U.S. military as protecting them, that was the turning point in the war. This book has flaws as a book. It is not very polished. It reads at times more like a bunch of reports stuck together than a book. It often assumes that the reader knows about things which the reader might well not know about. But none of this matters. This book tells the truth about the Iraq War. Amid all of the partisan distortion and ideological hype, here is a guy who knows what he is talking about, who loves the United States and our military and who is dedicated to bringing us the truth, in all of its complexity and ugliness.

Finally an unbiased account of the recent happenings in Iraq

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While I wish the Iraq war had never happened and personally think it was the biggest favor we could ever do for Iran, I also want to know what is truly happening and not have it filtered from either a right wing or left wing bias. I found this to be a tremendously interesting book. Yon is rightfully critical of the original war planners as being totally unprepared for an insurgency, but tells vivid first hand accounts of how the war is actually now being won. More importantly, he portrays the amazing heroism of the soldiers and leaves you stunned at their courage. He even has pictures of actual battles backing up his accounts. It seems like the turning point was putting General Petreus in command and getting rid of the bozos before him. If anyone is interested in an account of the last year in Iraq which will really give you info you never hear, then I really recommend the book. Even if you are anti-war, it is must reading.

Iraqis and Google Maps

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While the changes in Iraqi are often attributed to a "surge" or increase in the numbers of our troops there. Michael Yon makes it clear that the real change came when our military began to adopt the 'live with the people' tactics of our special forces. And with that came a change in the attitudes of Iraqi citizens. Here's how he put it: "We'd spent billions of dollars to protect ourselves against roadside bombs in Iraq, while mostly failing to cultivate the most effective defense of all: an Iraqi citizen with a cell phone. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on combat operations that might have been avoided if we'd learned from our successes in Mosul in 2003, rather than compounding the blunders of 2004." But then we'd gotten, miraculously, our second chance. And we were making the most of it. Cell phones? Iraqis are e-mailing our guys Google Earth maps to show where the terrorists are. With the increasing support of citizens and the growing prowess of the Iraqi Army, American troops have been able not only to leverage their combat effectiveness but spend more time in cop-on-the-beat mode, building closer ties to their communities, which then translates into being more effective in working on local civil affairs issues." --Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II

This book is AWESOME!!!

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If you want to know what is really happening in Iraq, read Michael Yon's book. The title says it all - 'Moment of Truth in Iraq'. Truth is what Yon writes in this book - aided by photographs which genuinely deserve to be called 'searing'. One such photo has since become world famous after Yon snapped it in May 2005. Up until that point, the only photos which the American media showed were negative photos (such as Abu Ghraib, etc.) which all painted American soldiers as depraved sadists. Yon's photo, however, was a staggering rebuttal to the press slant. Nicknamed 'Farah's photo', the picture showed a desperate American Major Mark Bieger frantically clutching the blood soaked body of tiny little Farah as he raced her to medics in a desperate attempt to save her life. Moments earlier, Iraqi insurgents had deliberately detonated a car bomb amongst a group of small children of which little Farah had been a member. The reason? The insurgents had been angered by the sight of the children gathering eagerly in front of a Stryker to receive candy from the American soldiers. The sadism of the Iraqi insurgents becomes even more horrible in contrast with the heartbreaking grief of Major Bieger. Overcome with emotion, the picture showed him stopping in mid-race to hug the dying little girl in a desperate attempt to comfort her. This photo and so many others, as well Yon's incredible descriptions of the brave soldiers those photos are about, are in his book "Moment of Truth in Iraq." Truth is what Yon went there to find out. Long before then, two painful experiences had taught him that he couldn't expect it from the media. The first horrible lesson had involved the death of an old high school friend of Yon's, ex-Navy SEAL Scott Helvenston. Helvenston was a victim of Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah who'd not only murdered him but mutilated his body, afterwards 'dancing and chanting' in triumph over the grisly remains. The media, however, had blamed Helvenston for his own death by labeling him a 'mercenary'. This vicious treatment struck an especially painful nerve with Michael Yon. Years earlier, he himself had been the same victim of lies in the press when the media labeled Yon a murderer after a fistfight in a nightclub. Though the charges were completely false and eventually dropped, Yon had endured the agony of watching lies printed about him in the media. Seeing the same thing now happen to his old friend and then to other American soldiers finally compelled Yon to come to Iraq on his own and report the truth. This book is the result. And it is an incredible read. I began reading this book as an act of solidarity with Michael Yon's cause - but I ended the book for a different reason. It is superbly written, it is gripping. It is real. And - as the title makes clear - it is the truth. Please read Yon's book. In more ways than one, it will be one of the best books you've ever read.

One of the most important writings on Operation iraqi Freedom

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In a sea of cynical books and media coverage on the war in Iraq, which lead US service members to ask themselves "Are these guys even covering the same war that we're fighting daily!?" Michael Yon does indeed deliver a "Moment of Truth". He writes from the point of view of the infantryman and cavalry scout: the young men who enlisted specifically to put themselves into harms way and fight a cunning enemy. Unlike his contemporaries, Yon understands the meaning of honor and sacrifice, that casualties are a part of war, and that it is the American soldier's ability to overcome the horrors and fight on that wins wars. Unlike the mainstream news media who focuses on the loss of life while turning a blind eye to the success that loss of life paved the way for, Yon paints an intimate unbiased (left OR right) view of the commitment of this generation's warriors who have turned the tide in the sands and cities of Iraq. He does not candy coat the truth, or gloss over failures, he simply paints the entire picture. In the end I believe that this is hands down one of the best books written about the war in Iraq, and is a must raed for both those for and against the war as it is one of the few objective accounts of the battles being waged thousands of miles from home.