Book Review

Don’t read Christopher Izant’s memoir if you’re looking for answers. The author served as a marine combat advisor for a unit of the Afghan Border Police, and in the wake of Kabul’s disastrous fall in 2021, everyone has the same question: Was it worth it? “I hate that question,” Izant writes. “Most days, I just find it patronizing.”

Instead of tackling the big picture as such, Izant presents a microcosm. He deployed to southern Helmand, a remote area of a rural province, strategically significant only for its proximity to Taliban supply lines. His project is to tell the story of that deployment, no more and no less. Stretched across the start of each chapter is a day-long patrol that turns into an ambush before giving way to a running gunfight. It’s a bold stylistic choice, lending the memoir a “time is flat” feel and an unputdownable quality. The prose is clear without becoming sparse, well-rendered without losing itself to literary conceit.

That line-level honesty extends to Izant’s discussion of the Afghans he worked with. There are heroic individuals, the sort of warriors whose idea of “explosive ordnance disposal” is dumping gasoline on an IED and lighting it on fire. A trusted interpreter struggles for years to earn an American visa; when he does, he immediately attempts to enlist in the Army. But there’s also a corrupt Lieutenant who engages in pederasty before being murdered by his own men, and patrolmen who smoke weed while set in for a night ambush. Izant balances these two truths in every sense. He doesn’t shy away from acknowledging “serious concerns about the [Afghan Border Police’s] tactical decision-making,” nor does he let America off the hook for executing a time-based withdrawal, rather than waiting for conditions to suggest the Afghans had any chance of independent success.

That they didn’t have a chance at the time of our departure is indisputable. When Izant first arrives in country, the officer he replaces tells him plainly, “This war is a lost cause . . . ain’t worth losing any more Marines.” Though he fights this nihilism, the author later acknowledges that he “witnessed firsthand how unprepared the Afghans were to fight on their own. Their impending defeat was obvious to anyone on the ground.” This was common knowledge. Izant includes a meme in the photo insert section. It’s very 2012: Overlaying a picture of a marine advisor gesturing at a whiteboard in front of three Afghans are the words “JUST SO YOU KNOW, YOU’RE FUCKED WHEN WE LEAVE.”

Of course, America is fucked too. Izant references both the Sandy Hook shooting (around the midpoint of his deployment) and the Boston Marathon bombing (within days of his homecoming). It’s the latter that makes him reflect: “If my service in Afghanistan made any difference, I couldn’t see it.” The very question of whether the Afghan War made America safer seems to have been lost to time. Perhaps it’s the veteran’s job, having stood with a foot in both worlds, to remind us it’s still worth asking.

When Izant makes these questions explicit, it’s often through a relentless focus on his day to day experience, on the intricacies of the war as he found it. I was tempted at points to criticize Final Engagement as technical. Like the author, I served as a marine infantry officer in Helmand Province, though my deployment was far less eventful than his. Still, I found myself having to flip back to the map, recall weaponeering relegated to a dusty part of my brain, quickly reference earlier chapters, remember patrolling best practices. But here’s the thing: Technicalities matter. People want to know how it’s possible we poured twenty years of training, thousands of lives, and billions of dollars into the Afghan National Security Forces, only for them to collapse within months against an adversary who had ostensibly been weakened over the aforementioned twenty years. Like Izant, I believe it’s “clear how [Afghan] bureaucratic corruption caused tangible harms for the frontline war effort.” Like Izant, I believe we failed to properly train the Afghans on “secondary [warfighting] functions like explosive ordnance disposal, intelligence, logistics, and casualty evacuation” before we left. Do you know what that means? No? Then start reading.

And start with the epigraph. It’s Tennyson: “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.” It’s not theirs to ask whether it was worth it. In a democratic country with a civilian-controlled all-volunteer military, it’s yours. Don’t read this memoir for the answers it gives; that’s not what it’s for. Read it for the questions it asks, and read it now.