This has a few drawbacks. The cavalcade of place names and unit designations could be a challenge for the non-specialist reader. More importantly, however, I could never claim to be objective about most of the people depicted in “The Hardest Place” – men with whom I served in uniform or in the Pentagon as a civilian, and whom I consider to be a great deal. as being friends. Likewise, I have sometimes wondered, as I read this book, if Morgan had moved on to fully questioning the actions of the men with whom he had obviously spent a lot of time. My former commander confessed to me that when he was in Iraq, during the influx of troops, he never had the impression of having any real objectivity about his war: it is indeed very difficult for them. battalion and brigade commanders know when they are winning, and it is also difficult for them to recognize when they are losing. Morgan strongly implies that the Pech Valley Commanders – among his best sources for the book – were doing more of the latter than the former, but it’s rarely as straightforward as the reader might like. He tends to let men and their actions speak for themselves. “I never shed a tear at Kunar,” a commander told Morgan. “Now I have time to think, to ask myself if I made the right decisions. “