'This is the finest book yet written on platoon-level combat in the Iraq War.  Unforgettable - raw, moving, and rendered with literary control.  No one who reads this book will soon forget its imagery, words, or characters.'
STEVE COLL, author of The Bin Ladens

It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. 'Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,' he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.

Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home - forever changed.

What isthe true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questionsthat the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washing Post reporter David Finkle grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale-not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.