{"id":6117,"date":"2008-12-12T06:49:49","date_gmt":"2008-12-12T11:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=6117"},"modified":"2008-12-13T11:30:09","modified_gmt":"2008-12-13T16:30:09","slug":"10-silver-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=6117","title":{"rendered":"10 Silver Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night Just A Grunt<\/a> 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<\/a> writes this about the action;<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“Our plan,” Capt. Kyle M. Walton recalled in an interview, “was to fight downhill.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> with some of the combat footage;
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