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What happens when the Pentagon sends three Americans to help carry out the most audacious experiment since Vietnam? On the day Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, a small group of American civilians took their optimism and experience to Afghanistan, then considered Americas good war. They were part of the Pentagons controversial attempt to bring social science to the battlefield, a program, called the Human Terrain System, that is driven by the notion that you cant win a war if you dont understand the enemy and his culture. The field team in Afghanistan that day included an intrepid Texas blonde, a former bodyguard for Afghan president Hamid Karzai, and an ex-military intelligence sergeant who had come to Afghanistan to make peace with his troubled past.