First Platoon

Praise for First Platoon One of Houston Chronicle‘s "10 books that brought a little magic to their genres" in 2021 One of Science for the People‘s "Best Science Books of the Year" On The Octavian‘s 2021 Book List “Jacobsen brings empathy, compassion, compelling writing, and some truly dogged reporting.” —The Washington Post “Jacobsen follows the lives of Americans told to gather that data in Afghanistan—and she questions what the U.S. government means to do with it all.” — NPR “A deeply researched book about modern warfare. A startling prompt to stop worrying about fabricated conspiracy theories and to consider for a moment actual threats to privacy.”— Houston Chronicle “First Platoon tells two parallel stories that will keep those of us concerned about civil liberties up at night. Jacobsen dives into the troubling tale of 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, the disgraced former military leader who ordered the murder of Afghan civilians in one of the ugliest events for the U.S. military in the continuous wars since 9/11. She takes the story far beyond Lorance’s controversial pardon by President Donald Trump, though, detailing a largely unreported secretive program to catalog the personal and physical information of 80% of the Afghan population in a quest for ‘identity dominance.‘” —The Seattle Times “A thought-provoking tale.... Bombshell finding.” —Military History Magazine “This fascinating book functions as modern history but also a cautionary tale about the heavily gray area of the War on Terror and its tactics. This is grade A Journalism. ” —San Francisco City Book Review (five star review)