House To House: An Epic of Urban Warfare
By David Bellavia
Simon & Schuster £16.99, 336 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

A former army staff sergeant in the US First Infantry Division, David Bellavia served in Iraq during some of its toughest conflicts from 2004 to 2005. He has been recommended for the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross. House to House is his personal recollection of the street fighting in Falluja in November 2004.

For Bellavia and the other US soldiers in his team, the fighting is not about global strategy, defending the homeland or rebuilding Iraq - it is about pitting their finest warriors against the best of the opposition. “In Falluja, we face an insurgent global all-star team,” says Bellavia. “It includes Chechen snipers, Filipino machine-gunners, Pakistani mortar men, and Saudi suicide bombers.”

This is a competition of manhood, and 29-year-old Bellavia and his men are sorely tested in combat - some of it hand-to-hand. But the idea of proving their masculinity is what carries these young men through their horrendous ordeal.

In the first pages of this book, I did not like Bellavia. He is too self-aware, too ready to quote from a war movie. He clearly sees himself as the protagonist of his own action drama. Surrounded by the enemy, he tells his men: ‘Prepare to defend yourselves!’ I quote Sam Elliott playing Sergeant Major Basil Plumley in We Were Soldiers. It is not as funny as I thought it would be. The men look stricken but resolute.”

This irritation passes as the team advances deep into the streets of Falluja. Under fire, their heroics begin to resemble scenes from a war movie. But they also learn to admire the courage of their opponents: some of the Iraqis they encounter charge to certain death to mark out US firing positions to their comrades. At times, the bravery of the enemy is bolstered by shots of the drug epinephrine stolen from US supplies, says Bellavia, “pure adrenaline that will keep a heart pumping even after its owner has been exposed to nerve gas or chemical weapons”.

The climax of the book is astounding. With several of his closest comrades dead or wounded, it is Bellavia’s turn to test his own manhood against a house full of Mujahideen. On the first occasion, he fails and escapes the fighting. It is almost comic to read about him pacing up and down in the street, muttering incentives to himself to go back into the house.

Eventually, Bellavia does summon up the courage to go back in, and what happens next is an account of some of the most ferocious hand-to-hand combat I have ever read. Like Mark Bowden’s classic account of fighting in Mogadishu, Black Hawk Down, Bellavia’s talent as a writer is to communicate the gut-wrenching reality of close combat, but also, at times, the black comedy of a desperate situation.

Tim Newark is the author of ‘The Mafia at War’ (Greenhill).