At War is a newsletter about the experiences and costs of war. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox every Friday.

I have two Moleskine notebooks, from each of my deployments to Afghanistan — the first in 2008 and the second in 2009 and 2010. For each entry, you’ll find the date, a few events, maybe a map or a list of acronyms. In the back I wrote the names of our platoon dogs, the books I read and the things I was going to buy when/if I got home.

Below are entries from three days that happened almost exactly nine years ago, during the 72 hours before Operation Moshtarak, the helicopter assault on the town of Marjah in Helmand Province. I was a 22-year-old rifleman with First Battalion, Sixth Marines. It was the first big mission of President Obama’s 30,000-troop surge. All of my friends were still alive

Back then we felt as if what came next would decide the end of the war, that Marjah was the Taliban’s last hold in a country that desperately wanted them gone. We were young and wrong.