The significance of these military-political memoirs lies in the fact that their author, Colonel Peter Mansoor, served in Iraq as a commander of a combat brigade before returning to serve as an aide-de-camp (staff officer) to General David Petraeus during the launch of the "Surge" operations — a radical shift in U.S. military strategy following America's near-defeat in Iraq in 2006. At that time, all previous American plans to establish stability and build a self-sustaining, broadly accepted democracy among Iraq’s diverse sectarian communities had failed.

Peter Mansoor chronicles the unfolding of daily events and the evolution of the war, detailing the confrontation with the Sunni insurgency on one hand, and with the special Shiite armed groups backed by Iran, which inflicted sustained harm on U.S. forces.