Monday, January 28, 2013

The Outpost: An untold story of American valor by Jake Tapper



Afghanistan.
Summer 2006.
"But sir...that is a really awful place for a base."
This new camp in the Kamdesh District would, like the dangerous Korangal outpost that their pilots knew too well, be surrounded by higher ground. But whereas the base in the Korangal was situated about halfway up a mountainside, in a former lumberyard, the one in Kamdesh would sit in a cup within the valley's deepest cleft, ringed by three steep mountains that formed part of the five-hundred-mile-long Hindu Kush mountain range.
"So it's located at the base of a mountain peak?" Whittaker asked. It didn't take a Powell or Schwarzkopf to know that as a matter of basic military strategy, it was better to be at the top of a hill than at the bottom of a valley. From the prologue

October 2009.
Hundreds of insurgents attacked Outpost Keating. The 50 Americans fighting off the Taliban insurgents called for air support, but the Apache helicopters wouldn't get there for another hour.
The Americans fought.
Found in the new book section under 958.104742 TAPPE

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