A lieutenant's gripping, personal account of the legendary U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division's heroic stand in the mountains of Afghanistan--a vivid, action-packed, and highly emotional true story of enormous sacrifice and bravery.

The War on Terror has drawn the Army's 10th Mountain Division to the most dangerous parts of Iraq. This book documents that danger, specifically the events of May 12, 2007, when Iraqi insurgents killed four soldiers and an Iraqi translator and, presumably, seized three others.

Using newly declassified documents, interviews, and published sources, a member of General David Petraeus' personal staff provides an insider account of the troop surge in Iraq and how key political leaders orchestrated it.

The inside story of the small group of soldier-scholars who changed the way the Pentagon does business and the American military fights wars, against fierce resistance from within their own ranks.

"Colonel Gian Gentile's 2008 article "Misreading the Surge" in World Politics Review first exposed a growing rift among military intellectuals that has since been playing out in strategy sessions at the Pentagon, in classrooms at military academies, and on the pages of the New York Times. While the past years of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan have been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN), Gentile and a small group of dissident officers...