Hearts and mines

"These are my memories of life as a member of one of the United States Army's three-man Tactical Psychological Operations Teams (TPTs). While attached in support of the U.S. Marine Corps' Third Battalion, Second Marines, and Third Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Marines, operating along the Euphrates river valley in western Iraq's Anbar desert during the spring and summer of 2005, I witnessed what was at the time some of the most vicious counterinsurgency fighting of Operation Iraqi Freedom since Fallujah. I do not claim to be a historian, or even to have been privy to the big picture of the war reserved for the generals and their staff. Nothing I did was heroic or changed the course of history or any battle. Mine was the perspective of a low-ranking sergeant, isolated from the media's reports and influenced by the stresses of fatigue, fear, and moral uncertainty. ... But as for the memories of one soldier who was there, what follows is what really happened."--Preface, p. 12