Bing West, a Marine combat veteran, served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. A frequent contributor to National Review, he is the author of The Strongest Tribe, No True Glory, and The Village, as well as the co-author of The March Up (with Maj. Gen. Ray L. Smith). His books on Iraq have won the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation’s General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award for nonfiction, the Colby Award for military nonfiction, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars Media Award. He appears on The NewsHour on PBS and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and St. Crispin’s Order of the Infantry. He lives in Newport, Rhode Island.