Stuff You Might Not Know...

You may have seen the headlines the other day...

NY Times
9 Americans Die in Afghan Attack

By CARLOTTA GALL
Published: July 14, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents carried out a bold assault on a remote base near the border with Pakistan on Sunday, NATO reported, and a senior American military official said nine American soldiers were killed.

CNN
Scores die in wave of attacks in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Nine U.S. troops were killed Sunday in an attack on a base in a remote province of eastern Afghanistan, a Western official said.

It was the deadliest attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan in three years.

NEWSWEEK
US abandons Afghan outpost where 9 troops died
US abandons remote outpost in Afghan border region where 9 troops died in fighting
By JASON STRAZIUSO Associated Press Writer AP
Jul 16, 2008

What they didn't tell you about was this...

From Stars and Stripes
Soldiers recount deadly attack on Afghanistan outpost
By Steve Mraz, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Saturday, July 19, 2008

Everything was on fire. The trucks. The bazaar. The grass.

It looked surreal. It looked like a movie.

That was what Spc. Tyler Stafford remembered thinking as he stepped onto the medical evacuation helicopter. The 23-year-old soldier would have been loaded onto the bird, but the poncho that was hastily employed as his stretcher broke. His body speckled with grenade and RPG shrapnel, the Vicenza, Italy, infantryman walked the last few feet to the waiting Black Hawk.

That was Sunday morning in eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar province. At a forward operating base — maybe as big as a football field — established just a few days prior.

Outnumbered but not outgunned, a platoon-plus element of soldiers with 2nd Platoon, Company C, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne), 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team accompanied by Afghan soldiers engaged in a fistfight of a firefight.

After maybe two hours of intense combat, some of the soldiers’ guns seized up because they expelled so many rounds so quickly. Insurgent bullets and dozens of rocket-propelled grenades filled the air. So many RPGs were fired at the soldiers that they wondered how the insurgents had so many...

...The whole FOB was covered in dust and smoke, looking like something out of an old Western movie.

"I’ve never seen the enemy do anything like that," said Walker, who was medically evacuated off the FOB in one of the first helicopters to arrive. "It’s usually three RPGs, some sporadic fire and then they’re gone … I don’t where they got all those RPGs. That was crazy."

Two hours after the first shots were fired, Stafford made his way — with help — to the medevac helicopter that arrived.

"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."

Stafford offered a guess as to why his fellow soldiers fought so hard.

"Just hardcoreness I guess," he said. "Just guys kicking ass, basically. Just making sure that we look scary enough that you don’t want to come in and try to get us."

It's called context, something you'd think people might have learned about in that thing they call a college. It's also called a war. In a war the enemy gets a vote. They want to win as badly as some of us do. For people not to expect the enemy to try and hurt us and actually inflict some damage in the nearly 7 years this version of the fight against terrorists has been going on, is ridiculous. And even though they managed to kill nine brave Americans, what was the cost to the enemy? DO you know? Can you find it anywhere?



Read the entire article HERE