Posted on 02/23/2008 1:09:19 PM PST by maine-iac7
WE TUMBLED OUT of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar. Yaka China was just a few villages south and around a bend in the river from the Americans’ small mountain outposts, but the area’s reputation among the soldiers was mythic. It was a known safe haven for insurgents................The Korengal Valley is a lonely outpost of regress: most of the valley’s people practice Wahhabism, a more rigid variety of Islam than that followed by most Afghans............close to Pakistan’s frontier regions where Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda figures are often said to be hiding out. The Korengal fighters are fierce, know the terrain and watch the Americans’ every move....The insurgents regularly use civilians as shields, children as spotters and women as food suppliers. NATO killing civilians is great propaganda for the Taliban.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This is a brutal story. This is an area that the Afghani gov't has all but written off, due to it's geographical isolated region and the villagers and elders being largely Taliban -
This is an area you don't read about when you hear Gates and others talking about sending extra troops = this is an area you don't hear even mentioned by Gates or DOD.
But our troops are there - and they deserve not to be forgotten...
Do yourself a favor = read the whole story
The question is, why is this story in the NYTimes? Once they OWN the gummint the agenda is going to be PRO war, bet on it. They are just getting folks ready for 100 years in Iraq under Democrats.
defeatist claptrap.
If Gates or anyone else in the DOD was to speak directly about every hard place that US troops are currently at work in Distributed Operation type environments, they’d have to spend several dozen hours listing places and events. And the list would be obsolete before the presentation could even begin.
Just because they’re not on the evening news does not mean they’ve been forgotten, except by those who’s entire reality is formed by the evening news.
These docs are USMC centric but the DO operational model is getting widely used by all combat branches.
http://www.mcwl.usmc.mil/SV/DO%20FAQs%2016%20Mar%2005.pdf
http://www.mcwl.usmc.mil/SV/SV_DO.cfm
Small unit detachments operating in dispersed nodes is how things are being done and how it’s going to be done in much of the fighting we’re going to see in the foreseeable future.
Something that definitely needs to be taken care of, though, is this continued mistaken concept that personnel of a non-uniformed force are “civilians” and any part of “innocent” when they conduct support operations, either as intel gatherers, communicators or logistics operators, be they young, old or female. If they’re assisting the enemy, their proper designation is as targets.
For so long as we let ourselves get played by such, we’ll continue to get punked by such.
The 173rd from it's deployment from home base in Vicenza, Italy, was scheduled for embeds - One was a military photogragher, Brandon Aird.
There was the team of Sebastian Junger (Perfect Storm) and British photographer, Tim Hetherington (who's photo of one of the soldiers in Battle Co. just won first prize - out of 80,000 submitted - for the 2007 World Press Photo Award. link below:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7240590.stm
Their story was shown in an ABC documentary in Nov and in the Jan issue of Vanity Fair.
This NYT Magazine piece was done by a team of two women embedded during the same time -
I have been waiting for months for this to get to publication,,,was afraid I'd miss it, not knowing just which forum they would use or when.
An online contact gave me the head's up on it this morning.
This is an important story of the worst and most dangerous spot in the whole WOT - these incredible troops deserve recognition and to not be forgotten =
I do hope anyone who posts on this story will first read it in it's entirety...it's one small thing we, who enjoy our peaceful sleep back home, can do for them
Everyone in America - civilian, politician or military, should be required to read your words 100 times - maybe some of them would get it.
The 'rules of engagement" should be exactly what you write
How so
“I do hope anyone who posts on this story will first read it in it’s entirety...it’s one small thing we, who enjoy our peaceful sleep back home, can do for them”
Amen.
Semper Fi
But the NYTimes doesn’t give a d@mn about soldiers. The point I was trying to make is we can EXPECT to start seeing positive stories on our military now that Dems are about to take over. They have to turn the bus around before Obama or Hill get there so the libs support the war by then.
Awesome story and very sad too. I sometimes think the asshats in the Pentagon ought to be put in the field to see what crap their policies cause our soldiers.
mY FIRST choice of as*hats to send would be the politicians - for one glorious moment last week, I thought that might have happened, by accident, when Senators Biden, Kerry and Hagel were forced down, during a helicopter trip from Pakistan to Bagram - forced down "In the snow in the mountains' of the north eastern region - the area the 173rd fight every day =
The article doesn't name the Province = but all I could think of was "Where the he*l are the Taliban when you need them?"
At least, they had to cool their heels on the ground in enemy territory until our troops could be rallied to the rescue some hours later - how galling, to have to save their sorry. traitorous as*ses/
You're taking a page out of Caesar's Commentaries .... he took the same tough line with the Germans who'd passed the Rhine and gotten into Gaulish territory with their baggage trains (it was actually the beginning of the Germanic invasion/migration -- replayed 250 years later, and then 150 years again after that in 405 A.D. when they crossed the Rhine for good).
Caesar deployed against the Usipetes' and Tencteri's battle line which they presented when confronted, but he also sent a strong detachment around in a flanking move and attacked the German camp and its weak baggage guard. The Germans heard the uproar in their rear and broke their lines to rush back to protect their families, and that's when he fell on them and defeated them in detail, driving them into the river with great loss of life......and then the German tribes on the far bank whose territory they'd crossed previously finished the job. Those tribes weren't wiped out, btw -- they survived, and together with two other tribes amalgamated into a new supertribe that called itself the Franks. And thereby, as the storyteller said, hangs a tale.
The fight in Afghanistan is hard rock, and our guys up there definitely need some help. Bush and Gates's successors need to stop playing around and start recruiting for real, and bump up the Army and Marine Corps.
I agree with you there - but I think "a funny thing" happens to reporters like these who don't just go in with a preconceived notion = or even if they do - after they spend weeks with them, and go through the battles at their side, experience the up close and far too real death of troops they have come to know personally - they write from a different perspective than they may have or than their editors had envisioned...kind of a 'Stockholm Syndrome" in reverse?
My thoughts were exacty the same as yours. Too damned bad they didn’t get to really “experiance” the mis-understood Taliban figters as they just might have had a real change of heart in their B.S. democrap policies of being anti-American senators.
AMEN
Gates keeps saying he'll make NATO step up and send the troops, equipment they committed too but never sent. He uses this as his rationale for not 'bumping up' = and NATO keeps thumbing it's collective nose at him.
Well, GATES, in the meantime, while you're playing politics, how about sending some helP - not take take the case that isn't and looks like won't be - but the case that IS...
By the way, none of the Dems are talking about pulling out of Taliwhacker country, au contraire, they've been talking like they want to send all three MarDivs up there and a couple more Army divisions.
The writer made a good point: That force up there in the mountains with the bad guys all around, is keeping them tied down and off the good guys further down the valley who are being shored up by the Afghan government and the coalition.
The bind is that, all through Afghan history, these guys bite you in the back instantly, when you look the other way. Alexander spent a long time running around Afghanistan stomping hell out of people who did that, and finally he did the political thing and married Roxana to tie up the big cheese and put someone local into the scales on his side so his detachments wouldn't get eaten up after he left. His policy worked: the Greek kingdom he founded up there lasted something like 180 years. Not bad for an outpost. They're still finding Greek cities up there -- the basis of Rudyard Kipling's story (and a damn good Sean Connery/Michael Caine movie), The Man Who Would Be King, which I read before the film came out.
The British eventually left Afghanistan alone, after two of their armies got jobbed up there.
If the Romans had had our level of ability to reach out and touch folk at a distance like we do, there’d have been no Franks and therefore, no Frenchmen today.
I blame the Romans for lacking in industrial motivation.
But, actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Ceasar at Alesia.
I was also considering the US and allied forces actions vs the “werewolf” operations in Germany after the fall of Berlin and the more effective methods of getting tribal scumbags to pay attention during the Philippine Insurrection.
They aren't called Task Force Bayonet for naught. They are the spear - the fodder, if you will.
They need a break and/or some extra boots
I think that was the real reason for the mumble about Petraeus getting rotated to NATO Europe..... not that I think it would necessarily be a good idea.
But you're right, that is still "playing politics" and we need to step up ourselves and not depend on NATO; if the Italian Alpini show up -- good troops, but I don't know if any European troops or even most of ours are equal to what we were reading about -- well, so much the better.
We need the Brits to send the Gurkhas. Those guys will sort out these jihadi tough guys p.d.q.
“Did you notice, too, that the story is a) by a woman and b) “to be continued”?”
Yeah, I did notice that. There’s some knee jerk pity party playing in the piece, but that’s to be expected from any journo who’s only real understanding comes no higher than tourist level.
Y’all might want to gird up your girdles because Distributed Ops is how things are going to be. Not because we’re short on men, but because communications, weapon and support technology make it possible.
Smaller units working larger areas with command pushed downward as far as functionally possible to the smallest element. This is a pretty big development.
Also, all wars have their ebb and flow, priorities shift and reshift as situations develop. Don’t let the tourists confuse you with post card quality communications.
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