army command was sending us to Iraq instead of Afghanistan, and the timeline rapidly accelerated. Months and months of pre-deployment work was instantly worthless. We’d prepared for a rural mountainous region, and now we were going to an urban environment in the high desert, in a different country, on a silty floodplain. I had to develop a brand-new set of maps and imagery, build new data sets and entirely new professional relationships, grasp a whole new set of knowledge. The political geography was also new—eastern Afghanistan lies in the shadow of Pakistan, while the drive from Baghdad to
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