Damn the Valley: 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 2/508 PIR, 82nd Airborne in the Arghandab River Valley, Afghanistan [Hardcover]

Featured in Task & Purpose and Army Times. A riveting, unsparing, gritty, first-hand account of life in a great airborne unit that engaged in some of the toughest fighting in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus, former Commander of the Surge in Iraq, US Central Command, former Commander of NATO/US Forces in Afghanistan and former Director of the CIA.DAMN THE VALLEY was a phrase regularly uttered by the men that spent any amount of time in the Arghandab River Valley during the deployment of 2 Fury to Afghanistan in 20092010. The valley has claimed bodies from the troops of Alexander the Great, the British Empire, and more recently, the Russian Army. Operating in the valley was like nothing the men could have envisaged, they called it the meat grinder.It was a deployment that the media didnt talk about, and the government doesnt acknowledge. Three of the company were KIA, more than a dozen suffered life-changing injuries, and half the company had Purple Heartsnot many modern-day deployments have a 52% casualty rate. At one point, the entire prosthetics ward at Walter Reed was full of the men who patrolled that deadly area of the world.Since their return, many of the survivors have struggled to move on with their lives, and the unit has been declared at extraordinary risk by the Department of Veteran Affairs. No one who entered that region was left unscathed. This book shares the perspective of the men that were on the ground for that deployment during the fighting season of 2010.First-hand account from a lower enlisted perspective within Bravo Company, 2/508 PIR, 82nd Airborne, during Operation Enduring Freedom, 200910.The 82nd deployment in the meat grinder Arghandab Valley had a 52% casualty rate.A campaign the media didnt talk about, and the government doesnt acknowledge. A riveting, unsparing, gritty, first-hand account of life in a great airborne unit that engaged in some of the toughest fighting in Afghanistan, in the Arghandab, a district whosl3.