The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor
By Jake Tapper
Little, Brown and Company
November 2012
688 pages
$29.99
The subtitle Jake Tapper chose for his book is one that legitimately salutes the incredible bravery and perseverance of America's troops in Afghanistan. But it could just as easily be subtitled the first sentence on the inside flap of the book: They never should have been there. Or, better yet: They deserved SO much better.
Tapper's book is a heartbreaking, detailed day-to-day account of several units assigned sequentially to one of the stupidest, most life-wasting assignments in all of a very understaffed war in an indefensible valley in a little explored region in a vastly under-researched country. In fact, so little was known about the Kunar and Nuristan provinces in northeastern Afghanistan when U.S. troops were sent there that, according to Tapper, "The citations for the briefing written by one intelligence officer for 3-71 Cav included Wikipedia, from which he drew heavily."
Welcome to war on the cheap. So cheap, in fact, that troops who rotated in from Iraq'quagmire that it was' were appalled, as you can read below the fold:
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