The enemy couldn’t hope to inflict real damage on the Americans as long as they were in their bases, and the Americans couldn’t hope to find the enemy and kill them unless they left their bases. As a result, a dangerous game started to evolve over the course of the summer in the Korengal Valley. Every few days the Americans would send out a patrol to talk to the locals and disrupt enemy activity, and they’d essentially walk until they got hit. Then they’d call in massive firepower and hope to kill as many of the enemy as possible. For a while during the summer of 2007 almost every major patrol
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