In the most dramatic and intimate account of battle reporting since Michael Herr's classic Dispatches, NBC News's award-winning Middle East Bureau Chief, Richard Engel, offers an unvarnished and often emotional account of five years in Iraq.

Engel is the longest serving broadcaster in Iraq and the only American television reporter to cover the country continuously before, during, and after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Fluent in Arabic, he has had unrivaled access to U.S. military commanders, Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iraqi families, and even President George W. Bush, who called him to the White House for a private briefing. He has witnessed nearly every major milestone in this long war.

War Journal describes what it was like to go into the hole where U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Saddam Hussein. Engel was there as the insurgency began and watched the spread of Iranian influence over Shiite religious cities and the Iraqi government. He watched as Iraqis voted in their first election. He was in the courtroom when Saddam was sentenced to death and interviewed General David Petraeus about the surge.

In vivid, sometimes painful detail, Engel tracks the successes and setbacks of the war. He describes searching, with U.S troops, for a missing soldier in the dangerous Sunni city of Ramadi; surviving kidnapping attempts, IED attacks, hotel bombings, and ambushes; and even the smell of cakes in a bakery attacked by sectarian gangs and strewn with bodies of the executed.

War Journal describes a sectarian war that American leaders were late to understand and struggled to contain. It is an account of the author's experiences, insights, bittersweet reflections, and moments from his private video diary — itself the subject of a highly acclaimed documentary on MSNBC.

War Journal is the story of the transformation of a young journalist who moved to the Middle East with $2,000 and a belief that the region would be "the story" of his generation into a seasoned reporter who has at times believed that he would die covering the war. It is about American soldiers, ordinary Iraqis, and especially a few brave individuals on his team who continually risked their lives to make his own daring reporting possible.

"NBC News' Middle East bureau chief Engel (A Fist in the Hornet's Nest) tags along on marine patrols and survives his share of ambushes, truck bombs and kidnapping attempts in this riveting memoir of the Iraq War. His worm's-eye reportage of the spiraling carnage exposes the grisly details omitted from nightly newscasts — a dog carrying a severed human head, a massacre scene in a bakery redolent of sweet aromas and the merry trilling of a victim's cellphone — along with his own numbed reactions. His battles with network suits and right-wing bloggers who insist that he find good news to report are a leitmotif, as is his scrupulous discernment of the big picture beneath the chaos of war. Fluent in Arabic, with access to Iraqi prime ministers and insurgents as well as American leaders (including George W. Bush), he deftly elucidates the bitter rivalry between dethroned Sunnis and rising Shiites and, behind that, Iran's skillful consolidation of power in Iraq as the United States flounders. Engel's fine, heartfelt but disabused account of this bewildering conflict renders the suffering in Iraq with understanding and compassion. Photos. (June 3)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

To those who experience it firsthand, the war in Iraq is a fickle master. It can bestow glory, wisdom, adventure, even romance, but more often it wields the power to take. That much is obvious from the latest crop of journalistic memoirs. If there's an "I-went-to-Iraq-now-here's-my-book" threshold, these works vault past it, carried cleanly over on loss of life, limbs and illusions.

... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Michael Hastings found love just as he had one foot out the door, headed to Baghdad for his first assignment as a war correspondent. He acknowledges in "I Lost My Love in Baghdad" that the prospect of war cranked up the heat in his fledgling relationship with Andi Parhamovich, an aide worker. "I was keenly aware of our time together, the self-consciousness of our romance, as if we were living on film, playing the roles of a correspondent back from the front, his beautiful love at home waiting for him." He was a young, green war reporter for Newsweek. She was blond, blue-eyed and idealistic, determined to join him in Iraq. "And how I wish I could know what you see," she wrote to him from New York.

We see what neither of them could, that tragedy was coming. That knowledge pulls us through what would otherwise be inane fights over his infrequent changes of bed linen and her flair for storming out of the room after an argument.

Hastings forces such details, adamant that we know Andi as he did, first in New York and later in Iraq, where she got a job with the National Democratic Institute. For readers, it's a bit like being a stranger at a wedding reception, obligated to sit through the uber-personal video of the bride and groom, their declarations of love and their own personal mix-tape. Hastings' descriptions of events on the ground in Iraq are flat and impartial, delivered in just-the-facts style. But that only heightens his complete candor about his soul-shattering loss from Andi's death in a Baghdad gun battle.

In "Breathing the Fire," CBS News reporter Kimberly Dozier chronicles her recovery following a car bomb that claimed the lives of two colleagues, their military escort and a translator. The blast all but shredded both of her legs. She bravely acknowledges that as she recuperated, she faced biting criticism: Some co-workers thought her decision to take the day's military "embed" assignment was part of an aggressive grab for rank among her CBS peers. "Even as I was lying in the hospital bed fighting to survive, some in London shouted and recriminated, asking if the new spirit of intercorrespondent rivalry had gotten (cameraman) Paul (Douglas) and (soundman) James (Brolan) killed. Even my friends were asking the same thing."

With self-deprecating wit, Dozier recounts her determination to recover, never straying into self-pity. Her wounds gave her an insider's perspective on one of the top military stories on the homefront: inattention to veterans' medical and psychological care. As a television celebrity, however, she faced the opposite problem: a crush of attention from other reporters. "I was a single representative showing (the public) in a horribly fresh way something they'd long been numb to."

In a previous memoir, "A Fist in the Hornet's Nest" (2004), Richard Engel recounted how the war gave birth to his high-flying television news career. When the United States invaded in 2003, he was a freelancer for ABC; a scant five years later, he is NBC's chief foreign correspondent. In his new book, "War Journal," Engel describes how his initial, adrenaline-fueled feeling of invincibility gradually yielded to the realization that luck always runs out. Yet he still could not tear himself away from Iraq. "I felt comfortable there," he writes, "perhaps in a way that some battered wives can't leave the men abusing them. I now believed Baghdad would eventually hurt or kill me, but I wanted to stay."

Engel's longevity in the field has made him television's go-to guy for perspective on Iraq; even President Bush thought so, summoning him to the White House for a debriefing. But he does not explore his internal conflicts with the same grit. He stops short of revealing too much, which is understandable for a man who took to sleeping on the floor in his Baghdad hotel, wedged behind mattresses in case an explosion sent shrapnel his way. He has a need to protect himself.

Kimberly Johnson is a freelance journalist who has reported from Iraq for USA Today. Her book about the war will be published next year.

Reviewed by Kimberly Johnson, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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NBC News' Engel, the most dynamic and longest-serving television journalist in Iraq, provides a vivid, earthy account of the war. 8 pages of b&w photographs.