Modern War Heroes

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.

Today, Walton and nine of his teammates from Operational Detachment Alpha 3336 of the 3rd Special Forces Group will receive the Silver Star for their heroism in that battle — the highest number of such awards given to the elite troops for a single engagement since the Vietnam War.

This account of these men is astronomically amazing. One soldier is quoted as saying that they shouldn’t be alive – they should have been killed in this mission. But they sure proved their mettle. Through some seriously gutsy moves, the combat team managed to take out almost 200 Afghani insurgents and get the entire team out alive. Dang. Granted, 15 were injured, some critically, and 2 Afghani interpreters were killed. When they all reached the helicopter, they only had a couple magazines of ammunition apiece left.

Read the rest of the article. These men really take it to the next level. Those men really earned those Stars.