This Man's Army

Read an Excerpt

A Soldier's Story from the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism
The sun rose over the mountains to the east, flooding the valley with light. While it remained dark, we could still tease ourselves into thinking that the job we had to do today was some way off.

Chapter 1: From the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism, Part 2
I grew up in East Tennessee, just outside the medium-sized city of Chattanooga. If ever there was a Southern city rooted in the past and struggling to find its path in modern America, Chattanooga was it.

Chapter 1: From the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism, Part 3
The Army was different from the rest of Penn. I was good at ROTC from the start. I knew how to navigate in the woods better than the Northerners, even in the flat woods of New Jersey, where we trained on weekends.

The first combat memoir of the War on Terrorism: the gripping story of a young man's transformation into a twenty-first-century warrior.

Born into a family with a long history of military service dating back to the Revolutionary War, Andrew Exum enrolled in Army ROTC to pay for his Ivy League education. Shortly after graduation in 2000, he joined the infantry, then endured the grueling rigors of Ranger School before becoming a platoon leader with the storied 10th Mountain Division. He thought that perhaps, if he was lucky, he and his men would see action on a peacekeeping mission. Then came the fateful events of September 11, 2001.

Called to action as a twenty-three-year-old, he led his troops into Afghanistan to root out the hard-core remnants of Osama bin Laden's forces. Thrown into the maelstrom of modern war, Exum contended with Afghani warlords, cable news correspondents, and the military bureaucracy while hunting a desperate enemy in a treacherous land and on a mountain ridge in the Shah-e-Kot Valley he would confront and kill an al-Qaeda fighter. After returning home, Exum struggled to come to terms with the media coverage and public perception of the war while seeking to make peace with the man he had become.

By turns harrowing and reflective, this powerful memoir gives voice to a generation of soldiers that has risen to confront the threats of a dangerous new world.

Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Andrew Exum is a veteran of Operation Anaconda. He reached the rank of captain with the U.S. Army Rangers before leaving the service in May 2004. He currently lives in Beirut, where he is studying Arabic at the American University..

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