“Damn the Valley,” which quickly became a kind of unofficial slogan for the company. It seemed to be shorthand not for the men’s feelings about the war—those were way too complicated to sum up in three words—but for their understanding of what it was doing to them: killing their friends and making them jolt awake in the middle of the night in panic and taking away their girlfriends and wiping out a year—no, fifteen months—of their lives. Their third decade on the planet and a good chunk of it was going to be spent in a valley six miles long and six miles wide that they might not leave alive.
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