This book certainly has won praise by many amazon.com readers as witnessed by the numerous five star ratings it has received. True, it is written as a fast-paced narrative, and flows well. You might call it an "easy read" as a result. However, if we take it as a work of history, rather than a "war story," it has some faults. The chief flaw in this book is that it lacks context, as do so many of these modern war tales ("instant histories") we find rushed to print seemingly before the smoke has cleared from the ruined enemy vehicles in the wake of US armored columns. Mr. Zucchino unfortunately gives us VERY little background information about the reason for these runs, why they were important, how they were really supposed to topple Sadam, and what they really did. There's very little perspective from above. We get lots of shooting, good impressions of the men involved, and get a great picture of what these mostly young soldiers were required to do, but not much else to put things in perspective, esp. at the high command level. For example: Zucchino has a great description of when the task force's TOC gets hit by a missle or rocket, and the utter confusion and devastation this event caused for men and equipment. However, we never find out more details about the attack--where did the rocket come from? How'd they make such a direct hit? After the battle, did anybody in the Army figure out who fired it and were these "bad guys" taken out? Several places like this in the book make it limited in its scope.

I picked this up to read on a month long travel trip. I ended up reading it in one sitting! Consequently, Im very glad I had also purchased a few other titles on the same topic. I really good read, disturbing and terrifying at times with a great deal of insight, but a great read.

This is hands-down the most compelling book I've read so far on the war in Iraq. It made me late going back to work during several lunch hours because I just couldn't put it down until I finished another chapter.

I think too many people have this image of the invasion being an absolute cakewalk -- this book will put that notion to rest in a big hurry. The soldiers faced some ferocious fighting during their push into Baghdad and Zucchino paints a very vivid picture of it.

Outstanding account of the two Thunder Runs into Baghdad by TF 1-64 Armor (5 Apr 03) and 2nd Bde, 3rd ID(M). From individual tank/Bradley commanders and Soldiers to the brigade and battalion commanders, this riveting account of the battles gives a good view of the planning and execution involved. This shows the gritty side of war at the lower tactical level, bringing home timeless lessons on the battlefield. A great addition to any military professional's library!

Zucchino's book Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad seems to be one of teh best accounts of the 3rd IDs "Thunder Run" into Baghdad. I've recelently read a lot of literature on the invasion of Iraq, including excellent books such as One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick and Generation Kill by Evan Wright which highlight the Marine advance and feign that helped contribute to the fall of Saddam, as well as other books about the Army's advance, to include Rick Atkinson's excellent account on the 101st Airborne. However, there have been relatively few books out there that have been able to concentrate on a specific battle. That's not to say that its such a bad thing. Many of the books listed above provide incredible insight into the commander's thoughts and the experiences of the troops through the 23 day advance and even the pre-invasion deployments of the 3rd ID to camp Doha, then Yankee, etc.
Nonetheless, Zuccino's book is an excellent overview of the troubles and successes of the Spartan Brigades experiences in Baghdad, the ferocity of the battle, the trepidation and elation of the soldiers, and the brutality that goes with war and the loss of comrades. Immediatley the author is shot en-media-rez into the action during the night that the brigade receives the WARNO and then the hasty OPORD to go to battle. Zuccino then takes the reader on a harrowing adventure of the first Thunder Run which killed or wounded an estimated 1,200 enemy and then the brave decision to move the brigade to the center of the city and hold it.
But the adventure isn't as easy as it seems and the reader begins to understand the complexities of keeping this force alive, supplied, and preventing it from being isolated. Zuccino takes you to the brutal intersections of Larry, Moe, and Curly, Saddam's palace, and the staging point of BIAP, then Saddam International Airport. Zuccino's task, like Mark Bowden with the Battle of Mogadishu, was immense: to study and disseminate the pivitol battle of the war, and he succeeds magnificiently.

Zucchino's book Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad seems to be one of teh best accounts of the 3rd IDs "Thunder Run" into Baghdad. I've recelently read a lot of literature on the invasion of Iraq, including excellent books such as One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick and Generation Kill by Evan Wright which highlight the Marine advance and feign that helped contribute to the fall of Saddam, as well as other books about the Army's advance, to include Rick Atkinson's excellent account on the 101st Airborne. However, there have been relatively few books out there that have been able to concentrate on a specific battle. That's not to say that its such a bad thing. Many of the books listed above provide incredible insight into the commander's thoughts and the experiences of the troops through the 23 day advance and even the pre-invasion deployments of the 3rd ID to camp Doha, then Yankee, etc.
Nonetheless, Zuccino's book is an excellent overview of the troubles and successes of the Spartan Brigades experiences in Baghdad, the ferocity of the battle, the trepidation and elation of the soldiers, and the brutality that goes with war and the loss of comrades. Immediatley the author is shot en-media-rez into the action during the night that the brigade receives the WARNO and then the hasty OPORD to go to battle. Zuccino then takes the reader on a harrowing adventure of the first Thunder Run which killed or wounded an estimated 1,200 enemy and then the brave decision to move the brigade to the center of the city and hold it.
But the adventure isn't as easy as it seems and the reader begins to understand the complexities of keeping this force alive, supplied, and preventing it from being isolated. Zuccino takes you to the brutal intersections of Larry, Moe, and Curly, Saddam's palace, and the staging point of BIAP, then Saddam International Airport. Zuccino's task, like Mark Bowden with the Battle of Mogadishu, was immense: to study and disseminate the pivitol battle of the war, and he succeeds magnificiently.

As an embedded reporter, David Zucchino has managed to tease apart the relationships between men, machines, combat, the politics of platoon life, and its position in the larger picture of a military campaign. Zucchino is at once microscopic and telescopic, zooming in on the thoughts and actions of one soldier, and then zooming back out to place the consequences of those actions amidst the confusion of capturing Baghdad.

Zucchino's book is simply impossible to put down and reads as fluidly as the work it is most often compared to, "Black Hawk Down." Mark Bowden wrote the introduction, and he and Zucchino have previously worked together; the upshot, read the book and wait for the film, it seems inevitable.

This is an interesting book. The author, Zucchino, was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division. Late in the fighting, the truck he was riding in wound up in a canal, and he lost his laptop and all of the notes he'd made while reporting. Presumably, if he hadn't been dunked in an Iraqi canal, we might have wound up with a book from him about the 101st (Rick Atkinson provided a very good one, so we don't really need a second). Instead, he was fished out of the canal by soldiers, and wound up with the 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd (Spartan) Brigade at Baghdad airport, swapping stories. Eventually, he heard enough from them to decide that *here* was a real story, and he first wrote an article about them (for the LA Times) then this book.

Zucchino gets right to it. On the first page of the book, the troops are firing up the engines on their Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, and they roar into combat almost immediately. The second run--the one that resulted in the capture of downtown Baghdad--is recounted after a discussion of the command and strategy brainstorming that led to the attack in the first place.

Zucchino wasn't there, and he isn't a character in the book (pretty unique among the books by embedded reporters) but he has a keen eye for detail and he gets everything that happened in the columns on each day--who was wounded, killed, frightened, panicked, confused, disoriented, brave, etc. The chaos of the situation is very well done, so well that at times you'd like a better set of maps (maybe a diagram of how the columns were arranged each day would have been appropriate) but overall things are understandable.

Two things struck me about this book. One is the way the command structure of the American military has changed in recent years. The second Thunder Run basically ended the regular phase of operations in Iraq, and the whole thing was conceived by a brigade commander. He got approval from his superiors, but he basically ran the whole thing himself, and the resulting situation was something the higher command then had to accomodate and fit their plans to. So the war was essentially concluded by a rather junior soldier.

The second thing is the level of casualties. The Spartan Brigade (less than a thousand men) suffered a handful of fatalities (so few that each one can be recounted separately in the book), but the perspective of the book, or at least of the soldiers portrayed in it, is that they suffered horrifically. The author recounts that during the first run, they suffered one dead and several wounded, and some of the soldiers felt "defeated" afterwards. This is very amazing. A battle of this intensity, with this few casualties on our side, is clearly a decisive victory for our forces. In World War II, a U.S. Marine Divisions suffered *thousands of casualties* in individual battles that lasted a few days. Almost 900 men died on the day of the invasion of Tarawa. I'm not saying that the deaths of the individuals in either of these "thunder runs" or elsewhere in Iraq aren't tragic--all deaths are--but I am saying that our perspective on these things has changed, and I'm not sure for the better.

I enjoyed this book a great deal, and would recommend it to anyone interested in reading something very well-done about the war.

It's fitting that the author of Black Hawk Down wrote the foreward to this book, as it reads with the pulse-pounding excitement of Bowden's classic book of urban warfare. Think of this book as Black Hawk Down with tanks. Excellent examination of the flexibility of armor in an urban environment, and although it won't give you the broad view of a more comprehensive work like "COBRA II" it is an excellent detailed examination of the strikes that led to the fall of Baghdad.

This was a hard fought battle and an excellent read. The news reports on this battle didn't do it justice. A page burner.

One criticism, while this is mostly about an armored assault, I wished Bowden would have given the line troops holding positions in Baghdad, more of their personal stories. This is personal, and it doesn't take away from the 'overall' of this book.

It is worth a Five Star review as it stands.

Black Hawk Down was a superb telling of a tactical fight. But that fight was a small incident that is important only in the effect it had of making the army leary of taking any combat casulties. (It did teach the army some about urban fighting.)

Thunder Run is written in the same style and is every bit as well written. But it is about two thunder runs in the attack into Baghdad that ended with the army taking control of the center of Baghdad (now the green zone), and the combat involved in learning from the first run, and in the second run holding open the supply road and bringing in supplies.

This will be studied for years. First because it meant the end of Saddam's power. Even more important because it turned the lessons of Somalia and other places on it's head. The lesson had been you do not send tanks into cities and instead clear them with house to house fighting which leads to lots of casulties.

But what this showed is that you can send tanks into cities and by doing so can take control of a city in 1 day and do so with many fewer casulties.

It also does a very good job of showing the cost and confusion of war. I could not put this down.

If you want to know what Soldiers fight for - read this book. It is a down and dirty account of fighting from the view point of soldiers within the turret of a tank or rattled around in the back of a Bradley. I was overwhelmed with a sense of pride for having been a soldier after reading about the bravery of these young Americans. I choked up when reading about their wounds or deaths.
If you want to understand why the American military is so successful this book describes the bravery, adaptiveness and capability of young Americans who when given an challenge can rise to new levels.
I bought the book out of curiosity because the brigade commander was then COL Perkins and is now Brigadier General Perkins, the commanding general at Grafenwoehr Training Area where I work. I hope this book will be made into a movie similar to Black Hawk Down.

Like many who watched the war unfold from home, I was secure in our military might and unquestioned superiority on the field of battle against the Iraqis. Wasn't it only a few years ago that we saw our forces slice through the worlds fifth largest army during Desert Storm?

This book reminds you of the bravery and guile of the field commanders, NCO's and enlisted men who had to put their money where the politican's mouths were.

A truly harrowing narrative, full of experiences and events that simply were not conveyed through the media:The onslaught of suicide bombers, the scores of Syrian mercenaries with money literally bristling from their pockets, and the incredible amount of ordanance aimed at our troops enroute to Baghdad.

You will walk away from this book with a greater appreciation of the bravery and commitment of both sides, and a richer understanding of what it's really like to be in the chaotic realm of combat.

It is one of the many great peices of military non-fiction that reminds the armchair hero in all of us, that war is dirty, dirty business, and you want no part of it.

I was shocked to find out that David Zucchino only wrote one other book: Myth of the Welfare Queen. With his writing prose I expected him to be the author of far more literary classics. This is one of them. This book is a non-stop, action-packed thriller --certainly bound for the Silver Screen. Even more astounding is that it's true.

David Zucchino's "Thunder Run" is a fascinating, fast-paced account of the "thunder runs" (fast-moving armored thrusts) by 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, into Baghdad during April 2003. The thunder runs were the daring, ad hoc attacks that effectively collapsed the Baghdad defenses. Zucchino was an embedded reporter who, due to an accident, ended up embedded with the 3rd ID. Zucchino is a friend of Mark Bowden, author of "Black Hawk [sic] Down," and this book is written in the same vein as "Black Hawk Down:" it gives exciting, firsthand, personal accounts of modern urban combat.

Zucchino does not waste time giving any type of background - the book jumps immediately into the action as the first thunder run begins up Highway 8 in the Baghdad suburbs. The action jumps from tank to tank and unit to unit, and Zucchino uses these opportunities to give the background for most of the soldiers in the book: where they are from, how long they've been in the Army, what family they've had, and what previous combat experience they've had. This helps the reader learn more about the units and soldiers involved.

The well-written narrative gives excellent first-person accounts of the combat. Because this book is based on numerous interviews with the participants, Zucchino is able to describe their emotions and thoughts as well, and this gives an intimate look at the soldiers on the battlefield. The reader can sense the chaos, excitement, fear, and exhilaration of the battle. Most readers will probably be shocked by the countless suicide attacks by the Iraqis and Syrians and will learn to admire the professional competence of the American soldiers.

Zucchino also does a good job describing the decision-making process behind the thunder runs. The original concept was for the heavy 3rd Infantry Division to hold the perimeter of Baghdad while lighter forces cleared the city, but the commanders on the ground sensed that their armored forces could survive urban combat if they moved quickly and decisively, striking before most Iraqis realized that the Americans were near Baghdad. Zucchino and many commentators since have hailed this as a revolution in military doctrine, but one has to wonder if the thunder runs would have been successful against better trained, better led, and better organized soldiers, such as the Chechen soldiers who destroyed a Russian armored brigade during the first battle of Grozny.

Although this book is excellent, it still has a few flaws. One is that, because the action described is so personal, it gives an incomplete picture of the two thunder runs that it describes, so it is not an authoritative account of the battle and should not be read as such. Zucchino is a journalist and not a military professional, and often his descriptions of military procedures and terms are incorrect or misleading. He also almost always identifies the soldiers by their last name only (without rank), which makes it harder for the reader to keep the many participants straight and to remember where that soldier falls in the rank structure (which is very important to seeing the bigger picture in the battle). Finally, based on a handful of interviews with Iraqis after the battle, Zucchino tells the "Iraqi side" of the battle in a couple of pages in the middle of the book. Although this technique of interviewing participants in both sides of the battle often works for authors such as Cornelius Ryan, it felt out of place in this book because the sample was so small that it simply broke the flow of the book.

Interestingly, Operation Iraqi Freedom has sparked a much larger body of literature than Desert Storm did. Among the large and increasing body of OIF literature, "Thunder Run" stands out. It is a must-read account of the climactic battle of the high-intensity conflict phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

This is such well written book describing the thunder run that accelerated the fall of Baghdad by weeks. After reading "Generation kill", I was wondering if I would ever find a book packed with so much action and intensity from beginning to end. Well thanks to the informative reviews by readers at this site I just finished reading "Thunder Run".

Just like any other person watching the news about the progress of the war I thought that the Iraqi army had rolled over and let the U.S Tanks and Bradleys take Baghdad easily. After reading this book I learned that actually the Iraqis fought hard and violently, pouring an intense wall of fire consisting of Ak-47, RPG and Suicide Cars into the U.S forces that drove right into the heart of Baghdad and the forces holding the intersections on highway 8 to secure the resupplies. In the end, better training and equipment prevailed.

This book is about 5 days in April 2003 in Baghdad telling the story of five days on a Brigade level (about 3,000 soldiers) where the Spartan Brigade was assigned to take three highway inter-changes and run a gauntlet of enemy fire into the heart of the City.

Although the action is conducted at the Brigade level, the author writes with such familiarity about the soldiers that it seems more like a Company (about 100 soldiers). He knows them by name and in a fiction like presentation, the author recounts their thoughts and exact words, as if he were right there.

Of course he wasn't at every interchange and couldn't possibly know the exact words and thoughts of each soldier at different times and places, which I found a bit of a literary stretch, but once you get past that, the story is compelling and entertaining. The story on that kind of Brigade level was also the books undoing, and by not focusing at the Squad or Platoon level, like "Generation Kill" did, the author lost a oportunity to tell a story with a few characters a read might care about. Instead, he may have told too much of the story, so the characters get confusing.

But please, don't let this minor detail disuade you from reading the book. Treat it as entertainment, and relax and enjoy this fine book. It is well written and the author who makes the most mundane part of a soldier's life seem exciting. I think David Zucchino could write about my cat and make it interesting.

The author gives a blow by blow, minute by minute account of these 5 days which at some points in time will scare the bejesus out of you, and makes this book a true page turner.

If you liked Black Hawk Down, or Generation Kill, you will love this book and it is truly a must read.

A true story about the heroism of our buys in combat. Taking Bagdad wasn't as easy as we all thought.

In this book you will live the moments of war that never make the nightly news. The fear, wonder, and amazement of spontaneous battle with a determined but untrained enemy. You will be exhausted when you finish this book in one sitting, which you will.

I was glad I read the book based on the recommendation of others. The only things lacking were more maps, pictures, and technical diagrams to bring the text into detail. The book shows just how much of an overmatch the US military has over all others. This book should be required reading for bad guys worldwide so that they will know how we will crush them, and there's nothing they can do about it.

If you read just one book about the Iraq war, make it this one. This book is not an overview of the whole conflict but deals with the decisive battle of the war, the Spartan Brigade's armored thrusts into the heart of Baghdad from April 6-8. The three days of combat are described in awesome detail and in the brutal fighting that took place, scores of Iraqi fighters attacked relentlessly and without any coordiation.

The fighting showed just how undisciplined and unorganized the enemy was in comparison to the most professional army in the world. Hundreds of them were gunned down and dozens of their vehicles(pick up trucks, cars, buses, taxis) were destroyed in their suicide charges. Nevertheless, the Spartan Brigade took casualties with men being killed or wounded and Mr. Zucchino did an excellent job describing how the soldiers dealth with it.

Another huge plus for this book is the lack of anything political. Other accounts by embedded journalists that are coming out usually have the author's opinions about the war slipped in somewhere, whether they be right or left. Here is simply a great read about the soldiers of the Spartan Brigade in action and will probably down as one of the greatest books on Modern Combat in the 21st Century. Excellent work Mr. Zucchino!!!

Honest, unsparing, and interesting. Good perspective, honestly written. Goes up and down the chain clearly. well done!