Stand By!: An American Paratrooper in Afghanistan, 2012-2013

By Jacob Sharp

In 2009, at seventeen years old, Jacob Sharp walked into a National Guard armory looking to enlist. The recruiter wasn't in that day.

With equal parts spite and youthful enthusiasm, he signed up for the active-duty Army instead: six years as an airborne infantryman. By June 2010 he was at Fort Benning earning his blue cord and jump wings; by that November he was in Vicenza, Italy, wearing the patch of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, the U.S. Army's only forward-deployed airborne unit in Europe. Two years later he was in eastern Afghanistan's Wardak Province, standing watch at outposts with names like Chak District Center and COP Dash Towp engaged in frequent combat. Stand By : An American Paratrooper in Afghanistan, 2012-2013 is his story.

This is not another special-operations hero-inspired narrative. Sharp's war was fought with equipment layouts and hierarchical politics just as often as it is with rifles, machine guns, and improvised explosive devices. Stand By preserves the day-in, day-out details of Able Company's mid-war deployment to RC East, highlighting the sacrifice and valor of America's oft-forgotten volunteer soldiers. Sharp also recounts something rarer than a heroic combat memoir: the story of a young soldier's breakdown under the unexpected stressors of life after combat, and the slower, harder story of earning his way back.

Written in the years following the fall of Kabul, when America's attention had already moved on from its longest war, Stand By is a reminder that the reckoning belongs to the soldiers who fought it, long after the headlines stop. Self-deprecating, honest, and often devastating, this is a ground-level account of what the middle years of America's longest war really looked like, a war of ordinary young men standing watch, meeting combat when it found them, and carrying the results for the rest of their lives.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1611218179
• ISBN13: 9781611218176
• Release Date: June 2027
• Publisher: Savas Beatie
• Length: 228 Pages