Word: mountainous
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More friends, certainly, than U.S. intelligence had detected. "The picture intel painted," says Sergeant Major Frank Grippe of the 10th Mountain Division, who took shrapnel wounds in his legs on the first day, "was just a little bit different from events happening on the ground." That's a soldier's understatement. As they prepared at Bagram, U.S. forces were told to ready themselves to meet from 150 to 200 of the enemy. After less than a week of battle, the Pentagon was already claiming they had killed around 500, and the fighting still wasn't over. What had gone wrong...
...attack Mansoor expected finally came on Saturday morning, March 2, after being postponed for 48 hours because of bad weather. At Bagram, Colonel Frank Wiercinski told his men that this would be a "defining moment" in their lives. Echoing the motto of the 10th Mountain Division, he said, "This is your climb to glory." The helicopters took off and flew south. The division, heading for battle position Eve, attacked the villages of Sarkhankhel, Marzak and Babakul, taking al-Qaeda by surprise. "The bad guys were drinking tea when we arrived," says Hagenbeck. "Our snipers," says one soldier, "whacked a whole...
...arms, you can fight back," says Sergeant David Smith, who was hit twice. "But with mortars, you can't do anything much about it. We had to just lie on the ground and basically take it." By the time the first rescue helicopters arrived at 8 p.m., the 10th Mountain had 17 wounded. One man lost two toes; another had to have blood pumped out of his lungs. "We'd just been in a gunfight for 18 hours," Smith told TIME, before correcting himself. "I would say the gunfight lasted for 17 hours and 58 minutes. The first two minutes...
...fatality that first day. Things went less well in the northwest, where a force of Afghans led by General Ziahuddin, accompanied by American special forces, was to enter the valley from Zurmat. Abdul Sabur, a young Afghan, had signed on with the Americans for $200 a month, plus a mountain parka, a new Kalashnikov assault rifle and the promise of meat at least once a day. The risks seemed worth it; Sabur's own commander had not paid him for months...
...altitudes above 8,000 ft. (2,440 m), troops fought on rocky, snow-patched mountain terrain and faced subfreezing temperatures at night. Enemy fighters were entrenched, zealous and far more numerous than the U.S. had estimated, using rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns against allied ground troops and aircraft...