Their Finest Hour
Five years ago, a Special Forces team with a small force of Afghan irregulars and F-18s stacked up overhead destroyed a column of up to 70 Taliban vehicles and 700 guerrillas bent on wreaking vengeance on Tarin Kot for kicking out its Taliban governor and inviting Capt. Jason Amerine, Hamid Karzai and their men into town. It was a close-run thing, as the outnumbered Americans had to convince their Afghan allies they had the power to take on that force and destroy it.
Cdr Salamander has a roundup here. via Mudville.
SFC Daniel Petithory was the first soldier from Massachusetts killed in the War on Terror. This is what his sister, then a 20-year-old senior at Simmons College in Boston, wanted her war-protesting fellow students to know:
“Peace is something we hold dear. But we do not live in a utopian society where total peace will ever be an option. We live in a real world,” Nicole Petitory said, as she waited to learn when her brother’s body will come home.
“War is an ugly, ugly thing, but it is so necessary, so necessary for the greater good. They are not fighting just to kill people. They are fighting to keep us free from tyranny. Just because more than 200 years have passed since the Declaration of Independence does not mean that fight doesn’t still have to be fought.”
Here’s something I wrote later when I reached Amerine:
Hero soldier’s tragic death wasn’t in vain
Jules Crittenden
2 January 2002
Boston Herald
The orders that sent Green Beret Sgt. Dan Petithory’s team to war were everything the elite soldiers dared to hope for - to go deep behind enemy lines, leading Afghan guerrillas against the Taliban.
“It was a classic Special Forces mission. . . . In our wildest dreams we never could have hoped for something like this,” said Capt. Jason Amerine, who led the team on which Petithory, 32, of Cheshire, served.
In an interview with the Herald yesterday, Amerine discussed the mission’s “phenomenal success” and its tragic end on Dec. 5, when an errant U.S. bomb killed Petithory and seven other men on the verge of Kandahar’s fall. Afghan comrades have said the team’s actions saved one town from bloody retribution and broke the Taliban’s will to defend Kandahar.
Just a few short weeks before, in the wake of Sept. 11, the American warriors were aching for a chance to meet the enemy in battle.
“Dan and I had both expressed our worries, that if we got a mission, it wouldn’t be a good mission, that it would be in a supporting role,” Amerine said. “When this one came down, I looked at Dan and laughed and said, `Be careful what you wish for.’ ”
The team was dropped in by night in mid-October, in the mountains north of Kandahar. There they joined Hamid Karzai - now the country’s interim prime minister - in his effort to raise an anti-Taliban force.
For a month, they trained and organized the fledgling guerrilla force. Karzai contacted tribal leaders, urging them to join his cause.
On Nov. 16, the elders of Tarin Kot, a provincial capital north of Kandahar, expelled their Taliban administrators. Karzai and Amerine raced to occupy the town.
Hours later, they learned a Taliban convoy of at least 80 vehicles and 500 fighters was en route to punish the rebellious town.
It was the first fight for the newly organized guerrilla force, and when Karzai’s fighters saw the Taliban convoy approaching in the dawn, they began to withdraw. The frustrated Green Berets, with their equipment in the Afghan trucks, were forced to fall back with them.
“They didn’t understand what we had going for us,” Amerine said.
Petithory and two others were on the radios, orchestrating an airstrike. The Americans commandeered four trucks and raced back alone. The Afghans, rallied by Karzai, soon rejoined them.
“Here, when it counted, Petithory’s performance was flawless,” Amerine said. “There were a lot of aircraft dropping bombs. It was a good feeling, to see the F-14s screaming across the sky.”
The Green Berets placed Karzai’s guerrillas and a town militia in defensive lines, where they repelled a flanking attack.
Six hours after it began, it was over. At least 30 vehicles and dozens of Taliban bodies littered the valley outside Tarin Kot, and more lay along the road to Kandahar as the jets pursued them.
Karzai later told Amerine that the destruction of that force “had broken the back of the Taliban.”
In the 2 1/2 weeks that followed, the Green Berets and Karzai’s fighters pushed the Taliban before them in a series of skirmishes, but never faced another large-scale Taliban assault.
“We knew we had won a big victory, but we didn’t know the significance,” Amerine said. More important to his team was the trust they had earned from their Afghan fighters.
“We were friends. We had fought together. We had bled together,” he said.
The growing Karzai force moved forward, clearing Taliban resistance from ridges and valleys from Tarin Kot, 50 miles north of Kandahar toward the Arghandab River, about 15 miles north of the city.
“We got into some decent fights. We were getting shot at quite a bit,” Amerine said. “Hamid wanted to get close to Kandahar. He said Kandahar would fall if we put pressure on it.”
On Dec. 3, an advance patrol of Green Berets and about 20 Afghans neared Sayyd Alma Kalay.
“As we got closer to the town, we started taking small arms fire. RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) were going off all around,” Amerine said. “The Taliban didn’t want to give up the town. I wanted the town and I wanted the bridge. I wanted to control everything north of the river.
“It got pretty ugly. We fought our way into the town,” Amerine said. “We couldn’t use air power. It was a civilian town.”
In the face of a determined assault, the Taliban fell back across the river. The next day, the Green Berets assaulted the bridge, suffering their first casualty when Sgt. Wes McGirr was shot in the neck.
Ironically, that injury may have saved his life by taking him away from the scene of the friendly fire bombing the next day.
That morning, Amerine said, his team was on a hilltop post outside Sayyd Alma Kalay and had just received “care packages” from home from a headquarters detachment that had just joined them. Airstrikes were targeting a Taliban cave network nearly two miles away across the river, but his men were not actively engaged in combat.
“It was a Christmas-like atmosphere. . . . As we were bombing the Taliban three kilometers away, one of the bombs impacted on us,” Amerine said.
He declined to discuss what went wrong, saying a military report will be released soon.
The 2,000-pound bomb’s blast left Petithory, Sgt. Jefferson Davis and Sgt. Brian Prosser dead or dying, along with Bari Gul, an Afghan fighter they were close to, and four other Afghans.
“Kandahar surrendered to us that day, as we were collecting our wounded,” Amerine said. “It is one of the sad ironies. The mission was basically complete.”
“It was a tremendous tragedy,” Amerine said. For a year before they went to war, Amerine as the team leader had worked closely with Petithory, the senior communications sergeant.
“Losing him was like losing a part of myself. It’s a hard thing,” Amerine said.
Topics: Uncategorized
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:01 am on Monday, November 27, 2006
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