It Was What It Was: A Tale of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq (2006-2008)

"...the timeless tale of a young leader and his soldiers on the ground seeking to find meaning and purpose in the gritty, visceral reality of war at the small unit level." General David Petraeus

As the dust settled on the U.S. military's initial victory in Iraq, the Army found itself mired in a difficult campaign to defeat a growing insurgency and rebuild the war-torn country. Untrained for counterinsurgency and without enough troops to secure the population, the Army responded by creating several new brigades specifically to meet these requirements.

It Was What It Was invites readers into the life of a freshly commissioned lieutenant in one of these units. Join him and his comrades as they stand up a new brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, train and equip it, and deploy together to the heart of Baghdad.

Essential reading for aspiring military leaders and a treasure trove for historians and enthusiasts, this book sheds light on the strange and often contradictory difficulties of small unit leadership in 21st century warfare.

Hi reader, I'm Daniel Pace, a retired Special Forces Officer and an avid lifetime reader of fiction, history, and philosophy. I used to fight bad guys and do cool stuff around the world, but that's in the past, and now I mostly hang out at the beach with my family, think, talk, and write about things I find interesting.My current projects are focused on figuring out how to improve the way the military teaches ethics and putting together some of the lessons we learned over twenty years of war in the middle east to ensure we don't keep repeating our mistakes.I hope you enjoy my work, and please reach out if you'd like to collaborate on something.Thanks, Dan