10 Silver Stars

Last night Just A Grunt emailed me about the 10 Special Forces operators that are being awarded Silver Stars today for a raid they conducted in conjunction with their Afghan commando trainees. The Washington Post writes this about the action;

After jumping out of helicopters at daybreak onto jagged, ice-covered rocks and into water at an altitude of 10,000 feet, the 12-man Special Forces team scrambled up the steep mountainside toward its target — an insurgent stronghold in northeast Afghanistan.

“Our plan,” Capt. Kyle M. Walton recalled in an interview, “was to fight downhill.”

But as the soldiers maneuvered toward a cluster of thick-walled mud buildings constructed layer upon layer about 1,000 feet farther up the mountain, insurgents quickly manned fighting positions, readying a barrage of fire for the exposed Green Berets.

A harrowing, nearly seven-hour battle unfolded on that mountainside in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province on April 6, as Walton, his team and a few dozen Afghan commandos they had trained took fire from all directions. Outnumbered, the Green Berets fought on even after half of them were wounded — four critically — and managed to subdue an estimated 150 to 200 insurgents, according to interviews with several team members and official citations.

There’s more of the story at WaPo and there’s supposed to be a video of the battle floating around and I’ll try to find it. In the interim, here’s a video report from MSNBC with some of the combat footage;

Category: Support the troops, Terror War