Final Engagement: A Marine’s Last Mission and the Surrender of Afghanistan (Diversion Books, 2024) is 2010 Boston College graduate Christopher Izant’s reckoning with America’s longest war, told through his team’s deadly last showdown fighting alongside Afghan forces against the Taliban. It was 2012, and with base-closure and troop-withdrawal timelines fixed by America’s top brass, the Marines had only six months to prepare the Afghan Border Police to stand on their own. Readers join then-Lieutenant Izant and the last team of Marine Corps combat advisors in the southern Helmand Province where a clash in the Afghan borderlands forebode the countrywide collapse to come. In Final Engagement, Izant describes “the impossible conditions and strategic blunders that disillusioned a generation of American service members and all but guaranteed defeat.” Izant served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2010 to 2014. After his service, he completed a joint degree program at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government, where served as an editor-in-chief of the Harvard National Security Journal and as a co-director for the Harvard Veterans Organization.