This is not the book for you if you're unfamiliar with modern weaponry and military lingo - context clues will only get you so far. The characters aren't interested in babying you; they want to tell their fucking stories without stopping for bullshit, peppered with copious profanity. Each chapter is a new story, with new people; I made severely disjointed notes that will be helpful to exactly no one.

redeployment
The dogs, man. That is fucking heartbreaking.

frago
Soldiers have some unique insults - "dumber than Fabio on two bottles of NyQuil."

after action report
"When Corporal Garza reached up to grab my balls, which he sometimes does to fuck with me ..." - man, the hypermasculinity of the military sure is kinda gay.

bodies
I didn't even know there was a Mortuary Affairs Corps, but it makes sense. A horrible sort of sense. Further research shows that the Marines didn't even have a dedicated unit until Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some legacy Bush has granted us.

oif
This is a story of too many acronyms and a wearied sense of duty, which I think is a general metaphor for our whole military system.

money as a weapons system
"Istalquaad," I said, trying out the sound of the word, eager to get it right.
"I think that's how you say it," Bob said. "It means freedom. Or liberation. Something."
"That's nice," I said.
"They didn't name it," he said. "We did."

This chapter was just an unrelenting landslide of how US bureaucracy stomped into Iraqi culture and fucked all sorts of things up.

in vietnam they had whores
I can't say I'm terribly sympathetic to this particular plight (lack of brothels during deployment). This whole chapter was very ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ for me.

prayer in the furnace
This chapter was too real. As a chaplain, how can you justify war as part of God's plan to the men who go out in it every day? A hopeless endeavor. The list of suicides from the chaplain's battalion after deployment is depressing, to say the very least.

psychological operations
"... talking with anybody who thought they had a clear view of Iraq tended to make me want to rub shit in their eyes." Aaaaand scene.

war stories
I can see Jenks's facial disfigurement. The term "boiled-pork-pink smoothness of his skin grafts" really sticks with you.

unless it's a sucking chest wound
"I was out of the Corps. I wasn't a Marine anymore." This belies everything I have ever heard as a civilian.

There's such a sad, resigned quality to all of the stories from the Marines, running under the cursing and overtly offensive language. The ending of After Action Report sums that up best for me:

[complaining about a fellow soldier bragging about attention from women due to his bullet wound scars] "What do you want him to say?" I said. "He got shot in the neck and he's going out tomorrow, same as us. Let him say what he wants."
I could heard Timhead breathing in the dark. "Yeah," he said. "Whatever. It doesn't matter."
"No," I said. "It doesn't."