Word: shahs
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With 40 other soldiers and their 80-lb. rucksacks crammed into the rear of a Chinook helicopter--a space designed for 33--Randel Perez barely had room to breathe. As they thundered through the darkness toward the Shah-i-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan, the dim cabin lights cast pink and purple shadows on Perez and his fellow infantrymen from the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division. Some chattered about the fight to come, while others managed to catch a last-minute nap. Perez was far away, hugging a baby he had never met. It was early March...
Barely two months later, following the mortar blast in the Shah-i-Kot, Perez found himself in charge of his platoon. With nine of his 26 men wounded, his immediate concern was getting them to safety without making a bad situation worse. "I'm the quarterback now," Perez thought. "Whatever I decide, I'm going to have to live with it, right or wrong." His wounded comrades knew they had to move. "We just needed to get the hell away from where we were," Maroyka says. "Even those of us with leg injuries had a simple choice...
...Bronze Star for valor. Franks declared Operation Anaconda "an unqualified and absolute success," despite claims by some Afghan allies that most of the enemy got away during the 11 days of fighting. Perez and his men dismiss the charge. After the initial fire fight, they returned to the Shah-i-Kot for another week of combat--hunting down al-Qaeda in their most secure redoubt and, they say, killing hundreds of the enemy while losing just eight Americans during the campaign. The al-Qaeda survivors--no one knows how many--fled across the porous border into the tribal zone...
...Khalil's family moved around Afghanistan for 10 years. He fought under Ahmed Shah Massoud against the Taliban. After they fell he came back to Kabul to join his wife and six children, and for two months they have been trying to rebuild. They sleep towards the back of the property, some in a canvas tent too hot to enter during the day, the rest under a tarp. Khalil's wife Shahnaz once worked as a teacher, but she has suffered from severe depression since her father, a civilian, was killed during the earlier Soviet war. She spends much...
...Gardez, Haji Noor Mohammad, commander of Zadran's men, stands guard at one of Zadran's checkpoints. Mohammad says he has just given an intelligence briefing to the Americans. Pointing up to the peaks to the south, he warns, "There are more al-Qaeda here in this area. After Shah-i-Kot, they went to the tops of the mountains." Pacha Khan Zadran is vain, grasping and irksome?but his help may be worth the aggravation...