In the grand scheme of things, were those battles all that significant?

My unit spent a year unscrewing an insurgent safe haven in 2005, only to have an entire year's worth of work undone in a month because our AOR was handed off not to a US force, but to an undermanned, poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly led IA unit when we rotated home. My fondest, proudest memories in uniform were in 2005, where we got zero support from our disinterested BDE and hapless DIV, but still managed to stomp the crap out of insurgents and terrorists for 12 months. Regardless, I'll be the first to admit that, in the grand scheme of things, it was irrelevant, because every bit of progress that we made was deliberately squandered by handing off responsibility of the AOR to the IA before they were ready for it. I don't say that lightly. We had a lot of KIAs and amputees.

A lot of our guys did some incredible things that went unappreciated outside of our unit. They earned ARCOMs and Bronze Stars for acts that, if performed nearer to BDE headquarters, would have earned Silver Stars. But, if it's not relevant to the grand scheme of things, then I see no reason for its inclusion in this particular book. Maybe some day it will make for good fodder for a documentary, when all of those young guys are wrinkled old men with VFW and AmLeg hats.