?DAMN THE VALLEY? was a phrase regularly uttered by the men that spent any amount of time in the Arghandab River Valley during the deployment of 2 Fury to Afghanistan in 2009?2010. The valley has claimed bodies from the troops of Alexander the Great, the British Empire, and more recently, the Russian Army. Operating in the valley was like nothing the men could have envisaged, they called it the ?meat grinder.? It was a deployment that the media didn't talk about, and the government doesn't acknowledge. Three of the company were KIA, more than a dozen suffered life-changing injuries, and half the company had Purple Hearts ? not many modern-day deployments have a 52% casualty rate. At one point, the entire prosthetics ward at Walter Reed was full of the men who patrolled that deadly area of the world. Since their return, many of the survivors have struggled to move on with their lives, and the unit has been declared at "extraordinary risk" by the Department of Veteran Affairs. This book shares the perspective of the men that were on the ground for that deployment during the fighting season of 2010. AUTHOR: William (Will) Yeske is a combat veteran who served 11 years in the U.S. Army. He is a serial entrepreneur who brings significant expertise in marketing, IT, and project management. He currently runs and operates a marketing company, No Limits Marketing Group (NLMG), founded to help small businesses survive the COVID-19 pandemic. It uses a combination of modern marketing techniques coupled with a non-lethal targeting framework learned in the military to provide clients with winning strategies. Will was also a founding board member of a Veteran non-profit, Rally for the Troops (now part of Racing for Heroes) and has worked on other veteran-based projects. He is currently attending Columbia Business School while running current business projects, creating new possibilities for future endeavors, and parenting his two children with his wife, who is also a US military veteran. 30 b/w illustrations
