Captain Dan Kearney, the commander of Battle Company, drove down to Aliabad in a Humvee to help evacuate the casualties and remembers turning a corner in the road and hitting a wall of Taliban firepower. “I was blown away by the insurgents’ ability to continue fighting despite everything America had to throw at them,” Kearney told me later. “From that point on I knew it was—number one—a different enemy than I fought in Iraq and that—number two—the terrain offered some kind of advantage that I’d never seen or read or heard about in my entire life.”
