The Ragged Edge

A US Marine’s Account of Leading the Iraqi Army Fifth Battalion

By: Michael Zacchea, Ted Kemp

Narrated by: John Pruden

At a time when the United States debates how deeply to involve itself in Iraq and Syria, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Zacchea, USMC (Ret.), holds a unique vantage point on our still-ongoing war.

Deployed to Iraq in March 2004, his team's mission was to build, train, and lead in combat the first Iraqi army battalion trained by the US military. Zacchea tells a deeply personal and powerful story while shedding light on the dangerous pitfalls of training foreign troops to fight murderous insurgents.

The Ragged Edge is the first American military memoir out of Iraq or Syria that features complex Arab and Kurdish characters and that intimately explores their culture and politics in a dispassionate way. Zacchea's invaluable lessons about Americans working with Arabs and Kurds to fight insurgency and terrorism come precisely when such wartime collaboration is happening more than at any time in US history.

©2017 Michael Zacchea and Ted Kemp (P)2017 Tantor

important message

being ideologically consumed and denying reality likely will result in harm than good. this book is a very good lesson on why the previous statement has relevance to Western leaders.

Compelling story

I felt like I was living this story right along side Mike! Very well written and performed

A Good Listen

This was a really interesting read. The author broke his experience into a captivating story .

A great and gripping read! Highly recommend!

Mike Zacchea was a personal friend, fellow military officer, and veteran. I worked with him through the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans (EBV) program, a cutting-edge training course that teaches small business management to post-9/11 veterans.

In The Ragged Edge, Mike tells a deeply personal and powerful story while shedding light on the dangerous pitfalls of training foreign troops to fight murderous insurgents. He immersed himself in Iraq’s culture: learning its languages, eating its foods, observing its traditions—even getting inducted into one of its Sunni tribes.

His book is the first American military memoir out of Iraq that features complex Arab and Kurdish characters, and which intimately explores their culture and politics as he experienced it. His invaluable lessons about Americans advising Iraqis to combat a growing insurgency tells an unknown history of the war.

The advisor's role at this stage in the war was arguably the most critical element in the U.S. military strategy in Iraq. As advisors, Mike and his team lived, worked, and fought alongside his Iraqi soldiers, mentoring them and earning their trust. As embedded trainers, they went into combat alongside the Iraqis. As mentors, they were specially trained to act as emissaries for this strategic mission. The goal was for the Iraqi Army to stand alone one day and quiet their country's terrorist elements by themselves, allowing U.S./Coalition forces to pull out of Iraq for good.

Mike's book starts in March 2004, a year after the American-led invasion of Iraq. He relates his experiences as leader of the Iraqi Army 5th Battalion, the first Iraqi battalion to be activated after the fall of Sadaam, at a time when the insurgency exploded. He exposes the origins of the tragic and confounding story of building the Iraqi Army, exploring the history of Saddam's Iraq and detailing the stories of Iraqi and U.S. soldiers heroic and doomed, shadowed by the recklessness of their commanders in Washington, D.C. and a war built on constantly shifting sands.

He reminds the reader the last Westerner to build and lead an Arab army was Col. T.E. Lawrence, more famously known as Lawrence of Arabia, more than 100 years before. After several months of training and equipping, the 5th Iraqi Battalion became part of the Second Battle of Fallujah (Operation Phantom Fury) a successful joint operation by American, Iraqi and British forces that took nearly seven weeks and became the bloodiest battle of the entire Iraq War.

Mike's memoir is important book, because it gives us the unvarnished account of one combat advisor's tour of duty in Baghdad during the tumultuous year after the American occupation. The reader will learn much about what went wrong in Iraq, and also what was wrong with the American military. There are also valuable lessons for anyone about command in combat.

After being retiring from the Marine Corps., Mike continued to serve, devoting himself to veteran economic reintegration through business ownership, serving on numerous state and federal organizations to assist veterans. In 2009, he founded the UConn EBV program, through which he has helped veterans start more than 140 businesses. Mike helped form a non-profit organization of military advisers in 2006 to help Iraqi interpreters immigrate to the United States, known nationally as Netroots: the List Project. He served on a multi-agency cross-disciplinary working group chaired by the CT Dept of Veterans Affairs focusing on veteran reintegration, education, training, and workforce re-entry issues.

Mike Zacchea passed away in April 2022.

A great and gripping read. The versatile narrator's voice rings loud in this no-holds-barred memoir that traces this decorated veteran's essential story.

Lessons on cultural values

Oration was good. Story was great. Good mix of war and reflection of war. Great!

Amazing account from a true hero

Great account of the Iraq war from great man. We will miss you Mike. Thanks for all you did for us.