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Basically an impossible nation-building task in an area with guaranteed ambushes where the ROE forced them to just wait for the next inevitable attack.

It's really well written narrative, though, and greatly benefits from the amount of input those who served there gave the author. Most of the military history I read is 150+ years old and thus can't go into the head of those being written about.

My only critique is that he blatantly foreshadows when someone's about to be killed. He could've interspersed the moving anecdotes, deep personal stories, or placed some "last letters home" that turn out to be just another piece of correspondence to stave off the grim realization that there's another ambush two pages later. Though I guess interpretively it does work as written.