The Last Platoon: A Novel of the Afghanistan War

A platoon of Marines and CIA operatives clash in a fight to the death with the drug lords and the Taliban, while in Washington, the president seeks a way out.

This authentic war story vividly displays how a warrior must replenish his own moral courage and not allow ambition to coarsen his sense of decency.

The Last Platoon explores firefights expertly told by a combat veteran. Readers feel like they have entered a strange, alien world as they watch the Marines and Taliban clash, circle each other, probe for weakness, and clash again in primordial violence, neither side yielding. While intrigue and deceit play out at the higher levels, in Afghanistan’s bright poppy fields only the killing instinct will decide the winner.

“Bing West is the grunt’s Homer.” —L.A. Times

“No correspondent has spent as much time on this ground as former Marine, Bing West, and no one has brought to it as much real-world, infantry-command experience.” —Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire

“Bing West is on his way to becoming the Thucydides of the global war on Terror.” —The Washington Times

“Some of the most compelling descriptions of small-unit combat that I have ever read.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Bing has seen more war than most professional soldiers…utterly gripping—and utterly different from the sanitized picture.” —Max Boot, author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present

“West shows in the most granular, detailed way how and why America’s counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is failing.” —The New York Times

“West has become the Marine Corps’ bard of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as an embedded reporter in some of the most brutal fighting.” —The Washington Times