"On a clear night last spring in Afghanistan's eastern mountains, a U.S. infantry platoon went looking for an al-Qaida operative named Habib Jan, and they found him. Outside an abandoned village clinging to a rocky hillside, the platoon was ambushed in a rain of deadly rifle and machine gun fire. Twenty-seven Americans and five Afghan Army fighters together fought 90 or 100 of Habib Jan's Islamist extremists.
For 17 hours, the American platoon was pinned down. Bullets snapped and hissed as the enemy slowly closed in. Ammunition ran low. Water ran out. Sniper rounds plucked at the soldiers' helmets and sleeves and drilled through boots as they shifted and returned fire. Night stretched into day and on into night again and the fighting intensified."
Great story from the Baltimore Sun regarding an intense firefight in Afghanistan. Which they got despite the Army, not because of it. It's a pretty heroic tale, as 3 Silver Stars for the action would tend to indicate, and a tactical success. But the Army won't release the information, citing Pentagon rules that are later proved not to exist... whereupon the Army does not change its position. The troops involved think this is b.s. Decorated Vietnam combat vet and historian Doug Sterner puts it succinctly:
"The military's always complaining about how nobody writes about their heroes. Well, how the hell are you supposed to write about heroes if the Defense Department doesn't give up the information?"
People have been saying all along that we're in an information war as much as anything else... and this illustrates that some people in authority don't get that.
My personal hunch, for which I have no hard evidence, is that the Army is more reluctant to let a story out than the other branches. Perhaps it's the not-entirely-unfounded fear of a straight story turning into a front page "gotcha" piece.
I know that stupidity rather than conspiracy is more likely, but what if it was not stupidity.
Someone needs to track back to whoever decided not to release the info and publish the ratbags name and photo.
The only thing I can think of that would make sense of this is not so much the fear of a "gotcha" story as rather the fear that by reading the newspapers the jihadis or their dhimmis might pick up a concrete tactical detail or 2 that would allow them to know what they're doing wrong and do something about or what we are doing right and figure out how to counter that. Thus a general "Loose lips sink ships!" policy. Whether the question of tactical knowledge shouldn't be balanced against the question of public and military morale is a seperate question that I would not envy anyone having to make. _;
It really comes down to whom are you going to believe and why. If you support the invasion of Iraq you want the story to be told. Your problem is if you release information too early and end up w/ a Pat Tillman on your hands. If your against it one is likely to use it as an atrocity story.
I suspect what divides us into such extreme camps is there is a lack of shared experience about what combat really is, i.e. a determined effort to kill the enemy by any means. When you are fighting a fanatical enemy like this one you do not even have a reference point/historical point to stop them such as you had in Japan at the end of WWII. When the Emperor realized that he would watch the end of Japan by nuclear destruction he said stop(We were fortunate no one went against him in this decision).
Because we can not find this point and probably are shaken in our souls by this knowledge everyone has become relucant to discuss it at all.