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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sean Parnell
no way had the one we saw survived the bombing.
motored around the turn. Before Baldwin could answer, I saw a civilian flatbed truck obstructing the way forward. It had been parked at an angle so as to serve as a roadblock.
it was safe, we moved forward and pushed the vehicle out of our way.
The roadblock had given them just enough time to scamper back across the border.
this was the best observation point I’d seen in country.
This was a foreign fighter camp.”
Then stench hit us. Offal. Blood. The reek of humans defiled by firepower.
His left side lay crushed beneath it. His right side was still exposed, and I noticed that he was naked.
a bomb’s concussion wave can blow clothing right off a person in its blast radius.
Since 9/11, it had been tested time after time. The enemy would not get our fallen.
Muslims believe that the dead have to be buried within twenty-four
hours,
lest they lose their opportunity to e...
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We cleared the site and set up a platoon perimeter on a neighboring hilltop that afforded a prime view of the enemy base.
we
settled down to wait.
NINE
THE
MORAL
HIGH
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G...
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Lieutenant Colonel
Toner ratcheted up our operational tempo until it pushed our remaining men to the breaking point.
numerical weakness with a constant presence out in the neighborhood.
My platoon walked every hill, mesa, and ridge for fifty miles in all directions around Bermel.
We documented every trail, hamlet, qalat, and compound until we had rewritten our army-issued maps to reflect the changes years of warfare had wrought on the landscape.
To thwart our thermal imaging systems, each dugout was roofed with logs buried under three feet of dirt and pine needles.
What an odd situation—our wounded enemy recovering in our erstwhile “ally’s” medical system.
Instead of sparking hellish firefights, his subterranean investigations revealed supply caches and gleaned bits of valuable intel.
had ravaged the borderland villages. Only a few communities still existed around Bermel.
By the time my platoon arrived on the border, Jalaluddin’s sons had taken over the day-to-day operations.
The network recruited its foot soldiers mainly from Pakistan,
Over the years, young men inspired by their mullahs to fight infidels had become the key source of manpower for the network,
had died in large numbers since 9/11, but there were always ample supplies of idealistic replacements waiting for the chance to leave their madrassas and join the jihad.
Al Qaida, which supplied it with talented jihadists from all over the globe. These experienced men, many of whom had fought in Iraq, Somalia, or Chechnya, formed the insurgents’ version of an NCO corps.
fighting force consisted of about three hundred well-armed fighters built around a core of veteran foreign jihadists. Those numbers came as a shock: Galang outnumbered us almost two to one.
On the seventeenth, Sergeant Burley and his platoon ran straight into a sophisticated, L-shaped ambush established by Galang’s men.
As they fled, Galang’s men hit them again with a secondary ambush.
said, “That was fuckin’ horrible. I can’t go through anything like that again.” I watched them and realized I’d never seen a more shaken group of U.S. soldiers.
Perhaps Galang was using our platoons as sort of a finishing school for his new men.
they had come into our area to gain combat experience and test their weapons, men, and tactics.
Breaking contact on May 17 had been the right call, given the tactical circumstances, but the psychological effect it had had on Burley’s men was all too obvious. Their morale and confidence had
taken
signi...
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hits. I could not let that happen...
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I couldn’t wait to take those rigs into another fight and build our brand with the enemy. They would learn that the green skull platoon was not one to trifle with.
“So here’s what we’re going to do. We will always stay and finish the fight. Got it? We’re never going to break contact. We will never cede the battlefield to the enemy, and we’re never going to give them a moral victory.”
“Okay,” I said with finality, “we will stand and fight.”
PART
III
