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armed contingent of soldiers to help her get the job done. In many respects it was a powerful, almost intoxicating, experience. She ended up staying in Afghanistan for the next twenty-nine months and eventually was promoted to the civilian equivalent of a brigadier general before she was thirty-two.
    Launching the PRTs in Afghanistan also hinged on recruiting diplomats to fill State Department positions on the teams. But within the Foreign Service, details were still scant about what, exactly, the job entailed. All they knew was that it meant an assignment to a combat zone, far outside the confines of the capital and the embassy. It was a potentially dangerous job, one for which few Foreign Service officers were trained.
    John Mongan, a junior diplomat, first heard about the PRTs during the 2003 “bid cycle,” the time of the year when Foreign Service officers apply for their next rotational assignment. Mongan was intrigued by the idea of joining a PRT: As a student he had considered joining the military and was enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. And he was fascinated by America’s experiments in counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War. “Everybody else in my ROTC and poli-sci classes were studying wars we had won,” he later recalled. “And it made sense to study a war you had lost, because we pretty much know how to fight a major tank battle in Europe.”
    Mongan also had some experience in conflict zones; he had joined the Foreign Service after a stint in Kosovo with the international charity Mercy Corps, where he had worked setting up food distribution networks. The idea of being a diplomat had initially sounded very stuffy and boring to someone like him, but full-time jobs with nongovernmental organizations were hard to come by, and his parents wanted him to get a job and get on with his professional life. He took the Foreign Service exam and passed. While waiting for his security clearance to come through, a time-consuming process of background checks that usually took several months, he took the job in Kosovo.
    NATO’s bombing campaign over Kosovo began three weeks after he joined the Foreign Service. Since he spent some time there, he was eager to continue with his Foreign Service career and put his Kosovo experience to work. First, however, he had to complete his A-100 class, the orientation and training course for new Foreign Service officers. After he completed the course, in 1999, the State Department informed him it was sending him to Angola.
    Mongan was unhappy with the Angola assignment. Eventually he heard through the bureaucratic grapevine (“I met a guy, who knew a guy, who knew a guy”) that James Dobbins, a veteran diplomat who had been President Clinton’s special envoy to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, was looking for a staff assistant. Mongan was able to get an introduction, and was offered a one-year assignment as Dobbin’s aide.
    It was an educational year. Dobbins had one of the longest diplomatic résumés in Washington; he had also served as the Bush administration’s special envoy on Afghanistan. But after his assignment with Dobbins, Mongan found that there were few really hands-on nation-building jobs in the Foreign Service. Then, in mid-2003, he read an internal cable saying the State Department was looking for volunteers for something called a PRT in Afghanistan. He was intrigued. He contacted the officers running the program to volunteer for it. Initially he was told that he was “under grade”—too junior—and that he was ineligible because he had never held a job providing relevant experience in political affairs. But few Foreign Service officers were clamoring for the chance to live on a remote Army outpost in the middle of a combat zone, and Mongan eventually got the call to work at a PRT in Ghazni, southwest of Kabul.
    He arrived later that summer in Kabul on an Air Azerbaijan