Last week there were a lot of headlines, but few details, about a tough battle in Afghanistan's Kunar province that cost nine U.S. soldiers their lives. The Taliban threw a lot of resources into the fight, outnumbering and nearly outgunning the American platoon-sized unit.
Afterwards, more media reports indicated the good guys had been forced to abandon their forward operating base.
Now Stars and Stripes has an account of the fight itself and the details are dramatic; our guys were tough as nails. Read the whole thing, but wounded Spc. Tyler Stafford summed it all up this way:
"It was some of the bravest stuff I’ve ever seen in my life, and I will never see it again because those guys," Stafford said, then paused. "Normal humans wouldn’t do that. You’re not supposed to do that — getting up and firing back when everything around you is popping and whizzing and trees, branches coming down and sandbags exploding and RPGs coming in over your head … It was a fistfight then, and those guys held 'em off."
As a follow-up, Stars and Stripes also has a reaction from a senior officer who doesn't quite agree with the early media reports.
"The sky is not falling," Col. Charles "Chip" Preysler, commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, said Saturday from Jalalabad, Afghanistan. [...]The Army did not "abandon" the base after the attack, as many media reporters have suggested, Preysler said.
He said the decision to move from the location following the attack was to reposition, which his men have done countless times throughout their tour, and to move closer to the local seat of government.
"If there’s no combat outpost to abandon, there’s no position to abandon," he said. "It’s a bunch of vehicles like we do on patrol anywhere and we hold up for a night and pick up any tactical positions that we have with vehicle patrol bases.
"We do that routinely.... We’re always doing that when go out and stay in an area for longer then a few hours, and that’s what it is. So there is nothing to abandon. There was no structures, there was no COP or FOB or anything like that to even abandon. So, from the get-go, that is just [expletive], and it’s not right."
He also didn’t like the media’s characterization that his men were "overrun."
"As far as I know, and I know a lot, it was not overrun in any shape, manner or form," an emotional Preysler said. "It was close combat to be sure — hand grenade range. The enemy never got into the main position. As a matter of fact, it was, I think, the bravery of our soldiers reinforcing the hard-pressed observation post, or OP, that turned the tide to defeat the enemy attack."
Belmont Club has, as usual, a better take than most on the whole incident, including the heroic defensive effort by the Americans.
[T]his was a tale whose ending the Taliban had hoped to write themselves. The entire purpose of the operation — what the Taliban hoped to achieve by their extraordinary exertion was probably not simply the death of 9 infidels — but press headlines saying ‘American unit massacred in Afghanistan’ or ‘Airborne outpost annihilated on the Pakistani border’. Had they succeeded in provoking those headlines the fight in Kunar would have become the focus of talking points in Congress, the subject of talk shows on the networks and speeches on the Presidential campaign trail. It was a story that many Taliban were undoubtedly prepared to give their lives to project. But they failed.They failed because a new ending to the story was written at the last minute by the men of the 173rd Airborne. In the nature of the media coverage it will not necessarily be portrayed as a victory for US forces, but at least it won’t be trumpeted as a victory for the Taliban. What happened in Kunar was not only a saga of arms under desperate conditions but a defensive victory in the war of information.