Word: mountainous
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...Adam says the opportunities for the SAS to prove themselves were so uninspiring that the Australian contingent were packing up to leave just four months into their deployment in Afghanistan. But the U.S. forces finally appreciated their value and skills after an SAS patrol managed to scale a mountain overlooking the Shah-i-Kot "Valley of the kings" in East Afghanistan where they called in reports on a group of al-Qaeda fighters performing training exercises...
...Forces teams going into the area. Unfortunately, says Adam, the Americans chose to infiltrate the area just a few days before the battle - insufficient time to conduct surveillance and gather intelligence of the quality that would have been provided by the Australians. Then when an American contingent of 10th Mountain Division troops (with two Australian soldiers acting as liaison officers) air assaulted into the valley they were pinned down by al-Qaeda fighters who had occupied vast areas of the high ground...
...four days into the operation that the Australian SAS would achieve what the might of the US army - with its satellites, unmanned spy planes, thousands of special forces soldiers and Intel sources - had failed to do. After reading up on earlier mountain battles against the Russians, Adam identified what appeared to be a potential escape route for "White-collar al-Qaeda." On previous occasions other coalition Special Forces teams had attempted to establish secret observation posts in the district, but they had barely lasted a day before being discovered by shepherds or villagers...
...first mission was daunting: to scale a range of steep mountains and set up an observation point overlooking a road the Australians had dubbed Route Titanium, which large numbers of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters were using as a way to the Pakistan border. After an eight-hour journey by truck, the men had just three hours to climb the mountain under cover of darkness. For the next three weeks, they lived off the land. The survival skills needed for such operations take years to acquire - and are the source of one SAS nickname, "the chicken stranglers." According...
...Before the first rays of the sun scraped over the icy mountains that marked the Pakistan border, the men had chosen one of the mountain bunkers as their cover for the daylight hours, says one of the troopers, who spoke to Time on condition of anonymity. He describes the decision as a "curious tactic," given that enemy fighters in the area might have been expected to know the bunker's location. It was the first hint, the trooper says, that on this patrol, the leader wasn't doing things entirely by the book...