Congressman's memoir corrected to remove reporter criticism

The publisher of a memoir by Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona is correcting a passage about a deadly Iraq War battle that falsely alleged a journalist had reported Gallego’s entire platoon was lost

NEW YORK -- The publisher of a memoir by Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona is correcting a passage about a deadly Iraq War battle that falsely alleged that Ellen Knickmeyer, the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post at the time and now with The Associated Press, had reported his whole platoon had been lost.

“They Called Us ‘Lucky’: The Life and Afterlife of the Iraq War’s Hardest Hit Unit,” co-written by Gallego and Jim DeFelice, was published last November by the HarperCollins Publishers imprint William Morrow. Gallego, a Democrat first elected in 2014, is a Marine Corps veteran who was deployed to Iraq in 2005 and served with Lima Company, which in eight months lost 22 Marines and a Navy Corpsman.

In the book, Gallego alleged that Knickmeyer had mistakenly given the impression that the entire Lima platoon had been killed in a single battle. Four, as correctly reported by Knickmeyer, were lost when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac. They were “the last battle-ready members” of an individual squad, but not the whole company.

In “They Called Us Lucky,” the authors blamed Knickmeyer for causing unneeded hardship back home. They allege that Knickmeyer's story was “indicating everyone was dead” and that she had mistakenly heard someone say the platoon “was wiped out.”