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THIS BOOK WAS THE RESULT OF FIVE TRIPS TO THE Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan that I took between June 2007 and June 2008 for Vanity Fair magazine. I was an “embedded” reporter and entirely dependent on the U.S. military for food, shelter, security, and transportation. That said, I was never asked—directly or indirectly—to alter my reporting in any way or to show the contents of my notebooks or my cameras. I worked with a photojournalist named Tim Hetherington, who also made five trips to the Korengal, sometimes with me and sometimes on his own. Our longest trips lasted a month. Tim and I shot roughly 150 hours of videotape, and that material was aired in brief form on ABC News and then became the basis of a featurelength documentary, produced and directed by Tim and me, called Restrepo.

Many scenes in this book were captured on videotape, and wherever possible I have used that tape to check the accuracy of my reporting. Dialogue or statements that appear in double quotations marks (“…”) were recorded directly on camera or in my notebook while the person was speaking, or soon thereafter. Dialogue recalled by someone later is indicated by single quotation marks (‘…’). Some scenes that I was not present for were entirely reconstructed from interviews and videotape. Many scenes in this book are personal in nature, and I have shared those sections with the men involved to make sure they are comfortable with what I wrote. I hired an independent fact-checker to help me combat the inevitable errors of journalism, and a bibliography of sources that were consulted appears at the back of the book. In many cases I have shortened quotes from interviews and texts in order to ease the burden on the reader.