Bing West

Francis J. "Bing" West is an author and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan Administration. His 2004 book The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the First Marine Division, written with United States Marine Corps General Ray L. Smith, was awarded the Marine Corps Heritage Prize for non-fiction, as well as the Colby Award. West writes about the military, warfighting, and counterinsurgency. In the Vietnam War, he fought on major operations and conducted over a hundred combat patrols in 1966-68. For the United States Marine Corps, he wrote the training manual Small Unit Action in Vietnam, describing how to fight in close combat. As an analyst at the RAND Corporation, he wrote a half dozen...