Editor’s Note: This article is part two of a three-part series by Travis Allen, a former U.S. Army Infantry Officer. In this installment, Allen recalls the lead-up to deployment in late 2011, training at the National Training Center, and working through early tensions with his platoon sergeant who would later commit one of the worst U.S. war crimes since Vietnam.

If you haven’t read part one, you can find it here . What follows is his continued story.

—Rumors were going around within a week of being on the job that we were deploying to Afghanistan that winter, only four months away. Right before we loaded up for a month-long rotation to the National Training Center (NTC), it came down the pipe that our battalion would be given the Village Stability Operations infantry uplift mission fo

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