Final Engagement

Through a deadly last showdown beside Afghan forces fighting the Taliban, Marine Corps veteran Christopher Izant illustrates the impossible conditions and strategic blunders that disillusioned a generation of American warriors and all but guaranteed defeat.

They were stepping into a world of hidden minefields, cultural clashes, green-on-blue insider attacks, and a patient, relentless enemy. But Christopher Izant and the Marines on his team volunteered to train and fight alongside the Afghan National Security Forces despite the risks and a seemingly futile mission they would term advise and abandon made by policymakers a world away.

Final Engagement embeds readers with then-Lieutenant Izant and his team of combat advisors at Combat Outpost Taghaz during one of Operation Enduring Freedom's most crucial and challenging campaigns. It was 2012, southern Helmand Province, and with fixed base-closure and withdrawal timelines, the Marines had only six months to sustain the hard-won victories of the infantry units and prepare the Afghan Border Police to stand on their own. But before Border Advisory Team 1 lay down arms, there would be one last deadly battle with a devastating aftermath.

Izant relives a fight in the Afghan borderlands that forebode the fall of Kabul nearly a decade later and confronts the violence and anguish that transformed a generation of American and Afghan warriors from idealist volunteers for a just war to disillusioned veterans of a lost cause.