“One of the best accounts yet of the American experience in Iraq.” Publishers Weekly

· A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2009

“Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter at the Washington Post, describes the war on the ground, day by day, for members of an Army battalion sent to Baghdad during the surge in 2007. With a novelistic sense of narrative and character, Finkel shows the fallout that the decision to invade Iraq and the war’s ‘ruinous beginnings’ would have on a group of individual soldiers (average age 19), who by various twists of fate found themselves stationed in a hot spot on the edge of Baghdad.” National Post

“[A] ferociously reported, darkly humorous and spellbinding book… Finkel has made art out of a defining moment in history. You will be able to take this book down from the shelf years from now and say: This is what happened. This is what it felt like.” New York Times