Now, the incredible story of a remarkable Marine continues-with harrowing, never-before-published accounts of courage and perseverance. These are the powerful stories of a man who rose to greatness not for personal gain or glory, but for duty and honor. A rare inside look at the U.S. Marine’s most challenging missions-and the one man who made military history.

By: Charles Henderson

Softcover, 336 pages

Published: 2003, Penguin Group, Inc.

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This is the fourth volume of a chronology of Marine Corps activities which cover the history of the U.S. Marines. It is derived from unclassified official records and suitable published contemporary works. This chronology is published for the information of all interested in Marine Corps activities during the period 1965-1969 and is dedicated to those Marines who participated in the events listed.

By: Gabrielle M. Neufeld

Published: 1971, Historical Division Headquarters, United States Marine Corps

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ROBERTS RIDGE

For an elite team of SEALs, the mission seemed straightforward enough: take control of a towering 10,240-foot mountain peak called Takur Ghar. Launched as part of Operation Anaconda–a hammer-and-anvil plan to smash Taliban al Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan –the taking of Takur Ghar would offer U.S. forces a key strategic observation post. But the enemy was waiting, hidden in a series of camouflaged trenches and bunkers–and when the Special Forces chopper flared on the peak to land, it was shredded by a hail of machine-gun, small arms, and RPG rounds. A red-haired SEAL named Neil Roberts was thrown from the aircraft. And by the time the shattered helicopter crash-landed on the valley floor seven miles away, Roberts’s fellow SEALs were determined to return to the mountain peak and bring him out–no matter what the cost.

Drawing on the words of the men who were there–SEALs, Rangers, medics, combat air controllers, and pilots–this harrowing true account, the first book of its kind to chronicle the battle for Takur Ghar, captures in dramatic detail a seventeen-hour pitched battle fought at the highest elevation Americans have ever waged war. At once an hour-by-hour, bullet-by-bullet chronicle of a landmark battle and a sobering look at the capabilities and limitations of America’s high-tech army, Roberts Ridge is the unforgettable story of a few dozen warriors who faced a single fate: to live or die for their comrades in the face of near-impossible odds.

By: Malcolm MacPherson

Softcover, 384 pages

Published: 2006, Random House Publishing Group

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Special operations – in this context, commando or guerilla activities – conducted by the U.S. Army in World War II have been the subject of a good many thrilling adventure stories but little sober, historical analysis. Only a handful of works have examined the critical issues underlying special operations, and the Army’s historical series on World War II treats the subject only in passing. Yet special operations had a significant role that should not be ignored. Ranger units captured positions critical to the success of amphibious landings in the Mediterranean, France, and the Philippines. Partisans advised by American military personnel provided essential intelligence to American forces and harassed enemy troops in support of American operations in Italy, France, the Philippines, and Burma. As special operations forces grow in importance within the U.S. Army, we need to look at our experience with such activities in World War II. I recommend this study as an overview for Army leaders and other interested parties of an important, but often misunderstood subject. It fills a gap in the Army’s history of World War II and honors individuals whose efforts, frequently unsung, nevertheless made a major contribution to the American and Allied victory in that war.

- Harold W. Nelson Brigadier General, United States Army Chief of Military History

Published: 1992, Center for Military History

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By: Larry Chambers

Hardcover, 281 pages

Published: 2003, Presidio Press

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In November 2002 the United States Congress and President George W. Bush established by law the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission. This independent, bipartisan panel was directed to examine the facts and circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks, identify lessons learned, and provide recommendations to safeguard against future acts of terrorism.

This volume is the authorized edition of the Commission’s final report.

Softcover, 567 pages

Published: 2004, W.W. Norton & Co.

Electronic version available also, click here to download (U.S. government site)

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led security mission established by the UN Security Council in 2001 to secure Afghanistan, has opted to leave the announcements up to the respective nation whose soldiers are killed.

Sometimes, the incidents are simply not reported.

Last week, a rogue Afghan National Army soldier turned his weapon on his French trainers in Kapisa Province, killing four, and he wounded over a dozen others. The Afghans were preparing to go on a joint training patrol with the French advisors.

On January 20, ISAF issued the following press release on the incident:

Four International Security Assistance Force service members were killed today in eastern Afghanistan by a member of the Afghan National Army.

The suspected shooter has been apprehended.

It is ISAF policy to defer casualty identification procedures to the relevant national authorities.

On December 29, another Afghan soldier killed two French Foreign Legion soldiers in the same province. There is no record of the attack on ISAF’s website.

The New York Times cited a classified report stating that between May 2007 and May 2011, Afghan soldiers or police killed 58 Western troops in 26 separate attacks. In April, 2011, 14 US service members and one US contractor were killed in just two fratricide incidents.

Six percent of all coalition hostile deaths in Afghanistan were due to Afghans killing their trainers, and the majority of the attacks occurred since October 2009.

Multiple service members have already been murdered by rogue Afghans in 2012, including one US Army soldier, Pfc. Dustin P. Napier, who was reportedly killed while playing volleyball in Zabul Province on January 8.

ISAF’s press release reads: “An International Security Assistance Force service member was killed today in southern Afghanistan apparently by a member of the Afghan National Army.”

At least two other US soldiers were injured in the attack.

It takes some investigative journalism to learn whether US service members are killed by their Afghan counterparts. The New York Times determined the name of the fallen soldier from “Afghan officials” – the Pentagon disclosed Napier’s cause of death simply as “injuries from small-arms fire.”

No link to the Times article can be found, but Stars and Stripes has a brief write-up mentioning the connection.

Whether or not Americans know if “friendly” or enemy bullets killed Pfc. Napier is not the point. What matters is that our mission in Afghanistan is nearly over, and our supposed “allies” are murdering our soldiers. And these attacks are increasing.

Rather than whitewashing fratricide events in Afghanistan, military leaders should be working to stop them.

The US and NATO plan to transfer security responsibility to the Afghan government in 2014, so the fate of the mission rests in the ability of military advisers to train Afghan army and police units. But when there is an increasing epidemic of fratricide, and NATO responds by not publicly disclosing the attacks, one has to wonder whether victory is even possible at this point.

He refers to the ‘absurdities’ created in an environment created by the unusual mix of non-combatants, friendly combatants and ‘irregular’ fighters. The absurdities he refers to amount to forcing friendly combatants to measure the value of life on a sliding scale with the non-combatant at the top and the friendly combatant at the bottom. To his credit, he makes it clear that a commander should never take the indefensible position of not considering protection of his force when planning and carrying out the mission.

The main problem with the piece is that while it accurately portrays the combatant as being the instrument through which a sovereign nation can project violence to protect it’s citizenry and thus rightly assumes risk on it’s behalf, it never-the-less tries to equate all human life. From the vantage point of a government’s responsibility to it’s citizenry, that should never be an issue. From a strictly objective view point and certainly through the eyes of our Founding Fathers and our Constitution, all men are indeed created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights “by their creator”. The problem, however, is that men are free to determine for themselves who that “creator” is and whether he has indeed established that standard for literally all men or if he has decreed that unbelievers should be brutalized, and killed.

While I do recognize and agree with the Founding Fathers on the rights of all men, I do not see the world as flat. I recognize that there are indeed men who have given themselves to ideologies that run counter to our unique understanding of that vision and that some men in fact hold ill in their hearts for any who do not believe as they do. Such are they who hold to the doctrines of Islam and the entire population in Afghanistan stands in excess of 98% compliant with that religion.

Colonel Pfaff continues and quotes from Walzter (emphasis mine):

While commanders are expected to conserve soldiers’ lives as a matter of military necessity, the demands of irregular warfare—where support of the local population is critical to mission accomplishment—place almost all the risk associated with conducting operations onto the soldier.

The difficulty for the standard view [conventional warfare] is that when choosing where to transfer risk—mission, enemy civilians, or themselves—combatants must always choose to transfer risk to themselves, except when the mission itself is at stake. By placing friendly combatants lowest in priority in terms of risk avoidance, one effectively denies them the right to life. By denying them the right to life, they are denied the protection of the state they are defending. This view is explicitly held by Walzer who notes:

“The immediate problem is that soldiers who do the fighting …lose the rights they are supposedly defending. They gain war rights as combatants and potential prisoners, but they can now be attacked and killed at will by the enemy. Simply by fighting … they have lost their rights to life and liberty … and they have lost it, even though, unlike aggressors states, they have committed no crime.”

Doesn’t this by necessity draw into question the efficacy of COIN warfare? While history demonstrates not only the unusual risks associated with this sort of campaign, it also illustrates the futility of defining mission accomplishment in an environment where the local population and/or the government is not equally invested to the point of willingness to sacrifice their own lives for their own benefit. The popularized phrase, “winning of hearts and minds” in itself is a damning indictment of the reluctance of the local population to even agree with the “liberating force”. And if they must be “convinced” first, was there ever an emergency of conscience to begin with?

This is a further indictment against our Sovereign leader’s ability to define the enemy and separate them from the “non-combatant/innocents” in that country. It should also force us to reconsider just how far from the original mission of retribution for the actions of 9/11 we have strayed!

The Colonel then moves the discussion from combat operations to law enforcement with such fluidity as to suggest they not only should exist simultaneously, but says that the Soldier and Marine should be expected to operate in both environments, alternately, with ease. While that may seem reasonable as an operation ages and in fact did happen in both Japan and Germany in the forties, it is worthy to note that the transition there did not occur until after Germany and Japan had capitulated. It is also worthy to note that we were fighting regular forces answerable to the Sovereign governments of both those countries. We were also battling and then working with men who had a sense of personal honor not unlike our own. Their understanding of their responsibilities to their sovereign government and then to us as occupiers was measured by their own government’s mandate for them. Once their government capitulated, they essentially laid down their arms.

Neither the Taliban nor Al Qaeda represents a Sovereign government or a people if we are to believe the ISAF and United States narrative. I have argued that at least the Taliban are as much an Afghan phenomenon in Afghanistan as their brothers in Pakistan are, Pakistani. Because of that distinction, separating them from the civilian population is not only daunting, but fruitless because they are, essentially, the same. Making that case need not go further than a quick look at IED proliferation. I will use an analogy: We live on a rural dirt road, in a rural town that is approximately 3.5 miles long and has a population of approximately 100. I can tell you with confidence that no one can travel down this road, much less spit on it without someone and sometimes everyone knowing it. As such, enforcement of the law and security of property and lives here is a relatively simple task. In any case, nothing goes undetected.

In Afghanistan, if we are to believe the narrative, the average Afghan citizen only wants ‘peace’ and security from the Taliban. According to Karzai and our government, we are (were) there to offer them that opportunity. If this is true and the average Afghan does not agree with the Taliban, then there should be very few instances of IED’s being successfully set and nearly zero of ISAF, NATO and American troops falling victim to them. The facts show something decidedly different, however. In a land that is by any measure rural and where digging a hole in a road and setting an explosive device would surely be noticed by some if not all of the population adjacent to the IED site, there is little evidence that a plurality of the population in any of the areas we have operated in, have made a good faith effort to aid in the identification and location of either the IED’s or the ‘perpetrators’ and the staggering numbers of amputees and deaths as a result of that lack of non-combatant good faith effort punctuates the point.

If we extend this conversation of Afghan civilian/non-combatant situational awareness to the presence of Taliban and Al Qaeda members in their midst, it is extremely difficult to make the case that the ‘non-combatant’ element of Afghan society is not also complicit on some level. And if they are complicit, there is one question that has not been adequately answered by the Colonel and that is whether anyone, with a straight face, can declare any portion of the population as non-combatants. And if we can’t, then the apparent ethical problem plaguing our Sovereign government and our upper echelon military leaders is a self-inflicted wound that has neutralized their ability to consider force protection as primary during combat operations in an ideologically monolithic society like Afghanistan.

As a consequence of that misplaced ethical concern for an inappropriately identified non-combatant population, they have unnecessarily endangered our forces and reduced their combat effectiveness by forcing them to consider the lives of these ‘non-combatants’ as superior to their own. This is the very definition of ‘unreasonable risk’.

As an unintended consequence, this has made this Sovereign nation less secure and it’s population less safe.

At the same time, they have emboldened an unsophisticated gaggle of murderers and their compatriots (the complicit ‘non-combatant’) and have caused our allies to have far less confidence in our ability to accurately identify legitimate threats across the world and drawn into question our willingness to meet them on any field of combat with appropriate force.

Colonel Pfaff also quoted Israeli Asa Kasher and then Major General Amos Yadlin who refuted Waltzer’s earlier claim that the state should always place the life of the combatant as a last concern remarking:

“…the duty to minimize casualties among combatants during combat is last on the list of priorities … we reject such a conception because it is immoral.” The authors argued that the state’s obligation to protect its citizens from harm—which justifies the use of force in the first place—extends also to soldiers. While recognizing that soldiers do assume risks friendly civilians do not, they argue that soldiers still retain their rights to life. The state may be justified in putting his life at risk because of its obligation to defend all citizens, but the obligation to protect the soldier to the extent commensurate with his duties does not go away.”

To which I say; AMEN!

Semper Fidelis;

John Bernard

[Originally published at Let Them Fight or Bring Them Home]

In this dramatic behind-the-scenes chronicle, Eric Haney, one of the founding members of Delta Force, takes us inside this legendary counterterrorist unit. Here, for the first time, are details of the grueling selection process—designed to break the strongest of men—that singles out the best of the best: the Delta Force Operator.

With heart-stopping immediacy, Haney tells what it’s really like to enter a hostage-held airplane. And from his days in Beirut, Haney tells an unforgettable tale of bodyguards and bombs, of a day-to-day life of madness and beauty, and of how he and a teammate are called on to kill two gunmen targeting U.S. Marines at the Beirut airport. As part of the team sent to rescue American hostages in Tehran, Haney offers a first-person description of that failed mission that is a chilling, compelling account of a bold maneuver undone by chance—and a few fatal mistakes.

From fighting guerrilla warfare in Honduras to rescuing missionaries in Sudan and leading the way onto the island of Grenada, Eric Haney captures the daring and discipline that distinguish the men of Delta Force. Inside Delta Force brings honor to these singular men while it puts us in the middle of action that is sudden, frightening, and nonstop around the world.

By: Eric L. Haney

Softcover, 416 pages

Published: 2003, Random House

This is the real story of the operation, the first eyewitness account of the Battle of Tora Bora, and the first book to detail just how close Delta Force came to capturing bin Laden, how close U.S. bombers and fighter aircraft came to killing him, and exactly why he slipped through our fingers. Lastly, this is an extremely rare inside look at the shadowy world of Delta Force and a detailed account of these warriors in battle.

By: Dalton Fury

2008, St. Martin’s Press