Under Fire

For Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego, a potential challenger to Senator Kyrsten Sinema, January 6 brought back memories of combat in Iraq

- ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO

WHEN PROTESTERS BEGAN 2 breaking into the U.S. Capitol building during the January 6 riot, Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat and former Marine, instinctively jumped on a desk to give his colleagues advice on how to put on their gas masks and regulate their breathing.

In those chaotic moments, he admits now, he wished he had ADRIAN CAR his military-issued gun. “I wanted my weapon, I wanted my Marines around me at that point,” he tells Newsweek.

In news stories at the time, Gallego was said to have performed heroically, staying calm and helping his frightened colleagues get to safety as rioters poured into the Capitol.

But in his new memoir They Called Us “Lucky: The Life and Afterlife RASQUILLO of the Iraq War's Hardsquillo est Hit Unit (Custom House, November 9), Gallego goes back in time, detailing how a poor Latino student enrolled at Harvard ended up as an infantryman assigned to Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, in the sands of Iraq.

“Dealing with survival everyday is a struggle, but you have to move forward with that.

Gallego was on the ground in March 2005, at the height of the insurgency. His memoir was co-written with Jim De Felice, whose book American Sniper was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie by Clint Eastwood. They write that Lima Company and its approximately 185 Marines were initially called “Lucky Lima” for their lack of casualties in the first couple of months.

But that luck would soon run out.

Lima Company eventually lost 22 Marines and a Navy corpsman killed in action in less than six months. Gallego's battalion ultimately lost 48 men, the most casualties of any Marine unit since the Beirut bombing in 1983.