​This book focuses on the war in Afghanistan. In 2010 and 2011, the author took a leave from her faculty position at the University of California, Irvine to train and then deploy as a cultural advisor with two U.S. Army combat units in Afghanistan. Her account begins with the U.S. Army’s four-month training program for cultural advisors, follows her deployment, much of it on missions to remote and volatile areas far from brigade headquarters, and concludes with her uneasy return home.

She examines the everyday lives of Americans sent to conduct a war of counterinsurgency,...