The Outpost Quotes

“As Kolenda saw it, none of what he was doing had anything to do with being warmhearted. In his opinion, counterinsurgency was a pretty damned cold-blooded strategy, all about being out there with specific goals—establishing stability and defeating the insurgency—and intelligently using the full range of available leverage, from cash, clean water, and education for local children to bullets, when appropriate, to get the desired results. There was an element of manipulation involved. Sure, he wanted the Afghans to have better lives—how could anyone not, after seeing that kind of impoverishment? But there was also something transactional about American promises of clean water, construction jobs, and a brighter future for Afghan kids. This wasn’t charity; the bottom line was, these offers were made to save American lives and help destroy anyone who hoped to hurt ISAF troops. Kolenda could never understand why some folks viewed the carrots as being somehow inferior to the sticks.”
― Tapper, Jake, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“What his time in Afghanistan was teaching him was that there needed to be better reasons, stronger threats to national security, before the United States deployed its sons and daughters. The abstract threat of terror was not enough,”
― Jake Tapper, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“Army studies indicate that if a wounded soldier arrives alive at a combat support hospital where surgeons and nurses can treat him, the chances of his surviving are extremely high—greater than 90 percent. “Surviving,” of course, doesn’t necessarily entail keeping arms or legs or retaining the ability to function independently back home. The leading cause of preventable death on the battlefield is bleeding. Having a leg blown off by an IED, for instance, can be fatal if quick steps are not taken to control the blood loss. Even deadlier is internal bleeding, a problem for which medics generally don’t have a good answer. A soldier who is bleeding internally needs to be evacuated and delivered to a surgeon immediately if he is to have any hope of survival. The second-leading cause of preventable death is something called tension pneumothorax. If a bullet punctures a soldier’s lung, air can leak from that hole into the “pleural space,” or cavity outside the lungs. That air can build up and eventually interfere with the functioning of the heart. This can be a relatively simple problem to correct: a medic can simply stick a big needle in the soldier’s chest to relieve the pressure in the pleural space.”
― Tapper, Jake, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“Dusk came earlier in the valley than in places outside the mountains’ muscular shadows.”
― Jake Tapper, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“Many troops were far more proficient in PowerPoint than they were with firearms, so”
― Jake Tapper, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“Snyder had been running his twelve-man Special Forces team out of Naray since January. He conducted his operations with a palpable intensity, haunted by the ghosts of nineteen Americans—fellow special-operations troops—who’d been killed before he even arrived.”
― Tapper, Jake, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor