Damn the Valley (Paperback)

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 2009–2010. 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 didn’t talk about, and the government doesn’t acknowledge. Three of the company were KIA, more than a dozen suffered life-changing injuries, and half the company had Purple Hearts—not 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.