Eight Wheeled Warriors and Grunts, by Lt. Col. David E Kelly, USMC (Ret.) immerses the reader in a sweeping account of four Marine battalions in 2004 during Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Colonel David E. Kelly volunteered to return to Active Duty as a USMC History Division field historian in order to deploy with the I Marine Expeditionary Force and conduct oral history interviews to record Marines’ experiences immediately after they happened.  The narrative begins with his commentary, arriving in April 2004 and heading out to the first of four battalions.  He quickly switches from his impressions upon arrival to first person accounts gleaned from his interviews with the Marines with whom he interacted.  His introduction of each Marine gets into their backgrounds and who they are as men and Marines, giving significant depth to his “cast of characters.”  Kelly’s commentary throughout serves to tie the interviews together well.

He builds a keen sense of tension as he becomes familiar with the situation on the ground and his interviews with members of the four different Battalions gives the reader a broad slice of the Marine’s view of the conflict. The 252-page narrative is broken down into six main chapters around each unit with which he spent time.  Most of the book focuses on the area in and around Ramadi. Chapter 1 opens with the 2d Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) Battalion in June, covering their counterinsurgent and counter IED operations.  The next three chapters, more than 100 pages, focus on 2d Battalion 7^th Marines moving from Al Asad airbase (Company G) to FOB Hit (Company E) and ultimately to FOB Korean Village (Company F) through July 2004.  The final two chapters cover the 1^st LAR and 2d Battalion, 4^th Marines.  Both, unfortunately feel like afterthoughts rather than as a continuous part of a larger story.  The 2/4 chapter was the last in chronological order of the interviews Kelly conducted but covers combat from the previous April. 

I was hoping for some great images of LAVs in Iraq in the photo section.  There is a nice 8-page photo spread at the book’s center.  Printed on nice glossy paper, the first page showed four nice shots of LAVs in Ramadi. But the next several pages are all headshots of individual Marines from all four battalions. While it does help place a face with those interviewed Marines, as a historian of technology who is constantly scrambling to find more visual information on the LAV’s combat history, I was disappointed.