When investigative journalist and #1 NYT bestselling author Lynn Vincent learned that America’s increasingly globalist and politically-correct military was systematically ruining the lives and reputations of young soldiers, she knew she had to dig deeper.
Now, after more than two-hundred hours of interviews and thousands of hours of documentary research, the result is her new book, written with Captain Roger Hill, Dog Company: A True Story of American Soldiers Abandoned by Their High Command. (Center Street, April 11, 2017.)
Captain Hill is a West Point graduate, decorated combat veteran and a man of devout Christian faith. His story of moral courage uncovers a lawyered-up military in which attorneys and investigators treat every armed engagement with the enemy as a potentially criminal act—so much so that American soldiers are now afraid to fire their weapons on the field of battle.
After just six months in the violent province of Wardak, Afghanistan, a third of Hill’s unit, Dog Company, 1-506th, had been wounded in battle. Then two soldiers are killed on a routine patrol. Working with an Army counterintelligence team, Hill and his First Sergeant, an old-school former drill instructor named Tommy Scott, find out why the enemy always seemed to know they were coming: A dozen enemy spies, posing as local national workers, have infiltrated their base.
Hill and Scott detain the spies. Then, in order to head off a massive Taliban attack, they must learn what the infiltrators know. But pro-enemy rules of engagement set off a ticking clock: Hill has just 96 hours to transfer the prisoners to his higher command—or he will be forced to set free the spies who helped kill and maim dozens of his men.
Hill and Scott, both model soldiers, had always followed the letter of military law. Now, though, abandoned by their high command, they suddenly face an excruciating choice: follow Army rules on prisoner treatment, or damn the rules to their own destruction and protect the men they’d grown to love.
For this, Hill, Scott and many of their men were investigated and prosecuted. Several, including Hill, were forced out of the Army with less-than-honorable discharges. But unlike other soldiers and Marines now incarcerated, Hill narrowly escaped a long sentence in the military prison at Ft. Leavenworth. Because of that, he and Vincent were able to tell his story.
A harrowing true story that weaves vivid battlefield action with military courtroom drama, Dog Company exposes the threats American soldiers face from within their own military system—a sometimes bizarre world where lawyers second-guess the judgment of battlefield commanders, and the rights of enemy fighters take priority over the safety of our own troops.
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