[inteldump] Phillip Carter: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me . . .

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Posted by Phillip Carter:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me . . .
http://inteldump.powerblogs.com/posts/1198709735.shtml


   [1]In this month's issue of Vanity Fair, Sebastian Junger has a truly
   breathtaking dispatch from a combat journalism tour with 2nd Platoon,
   [2]Battle Company, [3]2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, deployed
   in Afghanistanâs dangerous Korengal Valley. According to Junger, the
   valley is considered most dangerous place in Afghanistan: nearly
   one-fifth of all combat in Afghanistan occurs in this valley, and
   nearly three-quarters of all the bombs dropped by NATO forces in
   Afghanistan are dropped in the surrounding area. Junger describes the
   combat he saw in stark terms: "The fighting is on foot and it is
   deadly, and the zone of American control moves hilltop by hilltop,
   ridge by ridge, a hundred yards at a time. There is literally no safe
   place in the Korengal Valley. Men have been shot while asleep in their
   barracks tents."
   The story continues with several vignettes from Junger's time with 2nd
   Platoon. Together, these pieces illustrate how tough the fighting in
   Afghanistan has become; how much resilience the Taliban and Al Qaeda
   have; the complex nature of the counterinsurgency fight there. Here's
   a snippet:

     Second Platoon is one of four in Battle Company, which covers the
     Korengal as part of the Second Battalion of the 503rd Infantry
     Regiment (Airborne). The only soldiers to have been deployed more
     times since the September 11 attacks are from the 10th Mountain
     Division, which handed the Korengal over last June. (Tenth Mountain
     had been slated to go home three months earlier, but its tour was
     extended while some of its units were already on their way back.
     They landed in the United States and almost immediately got back on
     their planes.) When Battle Company took over the Korengal, the
     entire southern half of the valley was controlled by the Taliban,
     and American patrols that pushed even a few hundred yards into that
     area got attacked.
     If there was one thing Battle Company knew how to do, though, it
     was fight. Its previous deployment had been in Afghanistanâs Zabul
     Province, and things were so bad there that half the company was on
     psychiatric meds by the time they got home. Korengal looked like it
     would be even worse. In Zabul, they had been arrayed against
     relatively inexperienced youths who were paid by Taliban commanders
     in Pakistan to fightâand die. In the Korengal, on the other hand,
     the fighting is funded by al-Qaeda cells who oversee extremely
     well-trained local militias. Battle Company took its first casualty
     within days, a 19-year-old private named Timothy Vimoto. Vimoto,
     the son of the brigadeâs command sergeant major, was killed by the
     first volley from a Taliban machine gun positioned around half a
     mile away. He may well not have even heard the shots.
     I went to the Korengal Valley to follow Second Platoon throughout
     its 15-month deployment. To get into the valley, the American
     military flies helicopters to the Korengal Outpostâthe kop, as itâs
     knownâroughly halfway down the valley. The kop has a landing zone
     and a clutch of plywood hooches and barracks tents and perimeter
     walls made of dirt-filled hesco barriers, many now shredded by
     shrapnel. When I arrived, Second Platoon was stationed primarily at
     a timber-and-sandbag outpost named Firebase Phoenix. There was no
     running water or power, and the men took fire nearly every day from
     Taliban positions across the valley and from a ridgeline above them
     that they called Table Rock.
     I spent a couple of weeks with Second Platoon and left at the end
     of June, just before things got bad. The Taliban ambushed a patrol
     in Aliabad, mortally wounding the platoon medic, Private Juan
     Restrepo, and then hammered a column of Humvees that tore out of
     the kop to try to save him. Rounds rattled off the armor plating of
     the vehicles, and rocket-propelled grenades plowed into the
     hillsides around them. One day in July, Captain Daniel Kearney, the
     27-year-old commanding officer of Battle Company, counted 13
     firefights in a 24-hour period. A lot of the contact was coming
     from Table Rock, so Kearney decided to end that problem by putting
     a position on top of it. Elements of the Second and Third Platoons
     and several dozen local workers moved up the ridge after dark and
     hacked furiously at the shelf rock all night long so that they
     would have some minimal cover when dawn broke.
     A Black Hawk helicopter comes in to land on the roof of a village
     house in Yaka China to take out Captain Dan Kearney following a
     village meeting to discuss insurgent activity.
     Sure enough, daylight brought bursts of heavy-machine-gun fire that
     sent the men diving into the shallow trenches they had just dug.
     They fought until the shooting stopped and then they got back up
     and continued to work. There was no loose dirt up there to fill the
     sandbags, so they broke up the rock with pickaxes and then shoveled
     pieces into the bags, which they piled up to form crude bunkers.
     Someone pointed out that they were actually ârock bags,â not
     sandbags, and so ârock bagsâ became a platoon joke that helped them
     get through the next several weeks. They worked in 100-degree heat
     in full body armor and took their breaks during firefights, when
     they got to lie down and return fire. Sometimes they were so badly
     pinned down that they just lay there and threw rocks over their
     heads into the hescos.
     But rock bag by rock bag, hesco by hesco, the outpost got built. By
     the end of August the men had moved roughly 10 tons of dirt and
     rock by hand. They named the outpost Restrepo, after the medic who
     was killed, and succeeded in taking the pressure off Phoenix mainly
     by redirecting it onto themselves. Second Platoon began taking fire
     several times a day, sometimes from distances as close as a hundred
     yards. The terrain drops off so steeply from the position that
     their heavy machine guns couldnât angle downward enough to cover
     the slopes below, so the Taliban could get very close without being
     exposed to fire. Lieutenant Piosa had his men lay coils of
     concertina wire around the position and rig claymore mines
     hardwired to triggers inside the bunkers. If the position were in
     danger of getting overrun, the men could detonate the claymores and
     kill everything within 50 yards.

   On the shelf of nearly every Army officer, you'll find a book by
   retired Col. T.R. Fehrenbach on the Korean conflict titled [4]This
   Kind of War. At the end of World War II, confronted by the military
   revolution brought on by the atomic bomb, America cut its military
   from a wartime high of 16 million down to a few hundred thousand.
   Bombs and airplanes -- not soldiers -- would now protect America's
   shores and cities. After fighting as a grunt in Korea, Fehrenbach
   thought otherwise. Transformation was great for the Air Force and
   Navy, but for the Army and Marine Corps, the essential nature of
   warfare remained unchanged. Unfortunately, many in the defense
   community have still not learned this [5]basic lesson, that humans are
   more important than hardware, and that the human element of warfare is
   paramount.
   "You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it,
   pulverize it and wipe it clean of life," wrote Fehrenbach. "But if you
   desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you
   must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting
   your young men into the mud."
   That was true 55 years ago in the harsh mountains of Korea, and it is
   true today in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan.

References

   Visible links
   1. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/01/afghanistan200801
   2. http://www.173abnbde.setaf.army.mil/2-503rd/BATTLE.html
   3. http://www.173abnbde.setaf.army.mil/2-503rd/home.htm
   4. http://www.amazon.com/This-Kind-War-Fiftieth-Anniversary/dp/1574882597
   5. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0306.carter.html

   Hidden links:
   6. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/01/afghanportraits_slideshow200801