The Afghans can only see these efforts as typical gamesmanship in the context of the corruption endemic in their society. For example, Steffenson works to place a cooperative man as a town’s chief of police and contracts with a warlord to secure checkpoints around their base.
The fictional plot is mostly about how good intentions go awry due to ignorant self-righteousness and poor understanding of a culture used as a pawn in the conflicts of powerful nations for centuries. Here military patrols to take out Taliban insurgents are a sideline to attempts by the occupying forces to stabilize relations and support for town governments and independent warlords and their militia. This is not a typical combat situation against soldiers, such as that portrayed in Junger’s nonfiction account “War”, about American troops at the remote “tip of the spear” outpost in the mountainous northeast. Other main characters include a chaplain who pumps up the spirit of his soldier flock with a religious and romantic blend of memes resembling that of the Crusades, an educated Afghan woman refugee seeking a son being brainwashed by the Taliban into jihad, and a CIA operative working undercover as made possible from his background as a Afghan immigrant to the U.S. Jensen’s four main voices in his story come from ordinary walks of life-the private, Hannah, who comes from an aimless life pursuing weightlifting and rollerblading and inhabits a tough persona undermined by feelings inadequacy the medic, Simon, a pragmatic but selfless butcher’s son, who thrives on a sense of family among the platoon’s “band of brothers” the sergeant Schroder, who was a video game designer and now applies relevant experience of team leadership and problem-solving strategies and the colonel and platoon leader Steffensen, whose background as a city councilor gives him confidence in balancing military and political agendas. As covered in the Brad Pitt movie about field commander General McKrystal, “War Machine”, the soldiers were constrained to firing only in defense and only against armed opponents, a hard policy to follow in the face of IEDs, sniper fire, and Taliban mixing with the civilian population. support of infrastructure, schools and clinics). They are in a forward camp with Brits in the Hellmand Province around 2009, a time when the so-called Petraeus Doctrine was in play, which featured counterinsurgency and nation-building work to garner “Hearts and Minds” of the Afghan people (e.g. The soldiers are green, eager to prove themselves in battle or to make a difference, but they lack family models for military prowess given that for over 100 years the only combat the Danes had as a nation was a resistance to Hitler’s invasions that lasted only a few days. Outstanding tale about the moral corruption of war as told from the perspective of a Danish platoon in the Afghanistan War.
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