Marines pay a price trying to secure an Afghan hot spot

[unhappycamper]

Lance Cpl. Juan Dominguez, 26, left, practices using a biometric prosthetic arm with Todd Love, also from Camp Pendleton, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.


Marines pay a price trying to secure an Afghan hot spot
By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times
January 22, 2011, 8:33 p.m.

Reporting from Camp Pendleton — Marines tell of snipers who fire from "murder holes" cut into mud-walled compounds. Fighters who lie in wait in trenches dug around rough farmhouses clustered together for protection. Farmers who seem to tip the Taliban to the outsiders' every movement , often with signals that sound like birdcalls.

When the Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, deployed to the Sangin district of Afghanistan's Helmand province in late September, the British soldiers who had preceded them warned the Americans that the Taliban would be waiting nearly everywhere for a chance to kill them.

~snip~

The Three-Five had drawn a daunting task: Push into areas where the British had not gone, areas where Taliban dominance was uncontested, areas where the opium poppy crop whose profits help fuel the insurgency is grown, areas where bomb makers lash together explosives to kill and terrorize in Sangin and neighboring Kandahar province.

The result? The battalion with the motto "Get Some" has been in more than 408 firefights and found 434 buried roadside bombs. An additional 122 bombs exploded before they could be discovered, in many instances killing or injuring Afghan civilians who travel the same roads as the Marines.

Some enlisted personnel believe that the Taliban has developed a "Vietnam-like" capability to pick off a platoon commander or a squad or team leader. A lieutenant assigned as a replacement for a downed colleague was shot in the neck on his first patrol.



unhappycamper comment: I've seen this before 40 years ago. :(

[KG]

1. personally, i'm shocked, SHOCKED! that people of a foreign land would

resist a violent and oppressive invader. :eyes:

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. the Taliban, huh?

Didn't we go to Afghanistan to fight Bin Laden *cough cough* and Al Kida?
and didn't the Taliban drive Al Kida out of Afghanistan?

It is heartbreaking to know so many are being killed and maimed over and over and over
for no damn good reason.

[undeterred]

3. Well, I guess they "Got Some".

[roody]

4. Secure for what? A pipeline? Control of drug trade?