I read a lot of military history and find this fascinating and hard to categorize. The true focus of the book is to explain what War and specifically combat is like at an individual and team basis. as such this could have been about any war, any unit vs. Afghanistan and the US Army. however don't take that to mean it's a military style memoir like so many others out there, Sebastian Junger is a gifted journalist interested in capturing the reality of modern war and it's effects on young men deeply involved in contact and that gives him a much more objective viewpoint in describing not only what is happening but what it does to the men involved. based on that you can understand that War therefore is not about the tactics, history or any broader perspective but intimately about capturing the experience of it. it's honest, far more so than any military memoir. as a sidebar it also shows how embedding has changed the nature of military journalism and captures some interesting side notes of the Afghan war. makes for excellent reading to understand how war feels, day in and day out but don't expect any wider context. but what it does it does very very well.