Raid Night

By Michael J. Totten

Award-winning foreign correspondent Michael J. Totten embeds with U.S. Army soldiers in Baghdad during the Surge. They were sent out as bait to lure an insurgent commander, but instead find themselves stalked in the dark by a shadowy faceless militia.

Michael J. Totten is a foreign correspondent and foreign policy analyst who has reported from the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, City Journal, LA Weekly, The Jerusalem Post, Beirut's Daily Star, Reason, Azure, and the Australian edition of Newsweek. He is a contributing editor at City Journal and writes regularly for Commentary. He lives with his wife and two cats in Portland, Oregon, and is a former resident of Beirut. Visit his Web site at www.MichaelTotten.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Belmont Estate Books
• Release date: Oct 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466150034

Michael J. Totten

Michael J. Totten is a foreign correspondent and foreign policy analyst who has reported from the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, City Journal, LA Weekly, The Jerusalem Post, Beirut's Daily Star, Reason, Azure, and the Australian edition of Newsweek. He is a contributing editor at City Journal and writes regularly for Commentary. He lives with his wife and two cats in Portland, Oregon, and is a former resident of Beirut. Visit his Web site at www.MichaelTotten.com.

Book preview

Raid Night

Michael J. Totten

We want to use you as bait, Sergeant Eduardo Ojeda told me when I embedded with his unit on what was shaping up to be a night raid.

Excellent, I said. That’s why I’m here.

This is what passes for black army humor in Baghdad.

Our TST [time-sensitive target] blew up a vehicle and killed four soldiers and an interpreter in the next AO [area of operations], he said. He’s somewhere in our AO now.

He could tell by the frozen and dubious look on my face that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.

Don’t worry, he said. "These guys hardly ever fight back when we nail them. And they always lose when they do. Come on.