I finished ‘The Hunt for Bin Laden,’ an excellent book. It’s a chronicle of the Green Berets that were dropped into Afghanistan after 9/11. Conventional forces take months to mobilize, Special Forces take days. For a fast response they were it.

They would link up with the local rebels, plan attacks and call in air support. The Taliban had had it all their way since the rebels of the Northern Alliance didn’t have the hardware to mount an offensive and take ground. Once our guys were in the bombs started to fall and they kicked butt from one gutter to the other and back again.


It’s a thrilling read, page after page you want to cheer and say, “You guys kick ass.” The Berets actually rode to battle on horseback singing ‘The Ballad of the Green Beret.’ That’s the kind of stuff that if it were fiction critics would say it was just too far. Forget Hollywood, these guys were bigger, and real too.

There are odd things, like when you find out the Alliance and the Taliban know what radio frequencies the other uses. Security anyone, anyone? Perhaps they figured people switched sides all the time, or there were plenty of spies, but it would still make sense to try to keep the other side from overhearing you.

There are funny moments, like when a Beret is talking to a weapons officer in the Spectre flying overhead. An Alliance commander hears the voice of the female officer and seizes the opportunity. He tells the Taliban the US has so little respect for them they send their women to fight them. Then he patches her through and she talks to them. She says she’s there because of the terrible way they treat their women- quite an extreme insult in itself. She becomes known as the Angel of Death.

They brought 5,000 patches from the NYPD and FDNY with them, many of them embroidered with a name from the slain. When they conducted a raid, or just pounded them into the dust, they’d leave patches- to let them know it was payback for 9/11. One time they had a sizable number of Taliban cornered and the Alliance commander tried to negotiate their surrender. A Beret said, forget that, we want to kill them all; it was payback with a vengeance.

I don’t recall any Beret being killed by Taliban, but there were some who were killed in friendly fire accidents- such terrible wastes of our nation’s finest. But accidents happen, especially in a war zone.

They were able to kick the Taliban out of Afghanistan with about a hundred Green Beret in a couple of months. Since the Berets would take care of the population when they weren’t fighting, when the Taliban were gone, the Afghans weren’t just glad the Taliban were gone, they often became pro-American.

It’s a book that makes you proud of the men who fight for this country, and grateful that they do. There are so many terrific stories it just screams for a ‘Band of Brothers’ treatment.

Is it a detached, objective book? No. Around 1964 the author trained with the Green Berets and then wrote ‘The Green Beret.’ He’s their friend and squarely in their corner. He’s an enthusiast, and that’s the perspective it’s written from.


TheHuntForBinLaden