A soldier loses his arm in combat, and fights to get back on his Special Forces team.
Military
Cross Your Fingers
An update on the missing SEAL in Afghanistan:
A purported Taliban spokesman said Saturday that the group has beheaded a missing American commando, but he offered no proof and the U.S. military said it was still searching for the Navy SEAL.
The commando is the last of a four-member elite commando team missing since June 28 in Kunar, near the Pakistani border. One of the men was rescued and the other two were found dead.
“This morning in Shagal district in Kunar province, the Taliban killed the American soldier and cut his head off,” Mullah Latif Hakimi, the purported spokesman, told The Associated Press in a telephone call. “We left the body on a mountainside in this area so Afghan or U.S. soldiers there can find it.”
Hakimi repeatedly has said the rebels were holding the commando. But information from him in the past has frequently proven exaggerated or untrue, and his exact tie to the Taliban leadership cannot be independently verified.
U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara said “the search for the commando continued.
“The only proof we have is that he is missing,” he said. “We will run down these reports to see if anything thing pans out.”
Hope they find him, and fast.
More Good News
I hope they get him and the rest of the team:
An Afghan government official said today that an upswing in Taliban violence would not derail parliamentary elections, and the United States acknowledged that a bombing raid in eastern Afghanistan last week had killed civilians.
Also Monday, an Afghan provincial governor said that a second member of an American special operations unit had been located, and that Afghan forces were attempting to reach him.
“He is in a civilian’s house. He is injured,” Asadullah Wafa, governor of Kunar Province said, according to The Associated Press.
Good News
One of the members of the missing SEAL team rescued:
One member of a four-man Navy Seal reconnaissance team has been rescued after his group were reported missing in a mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan last week, a senior Defense Department official said today.
No details about how the commando managed to evade Taliban fighters for about five days were disclosed. Pentagon and military officials in Washington and Afghanistan declined to release details of the rescue until the status of the three other members of the Special Operations team, still declared missing, could be determined.
The senior Defense Department official said the rescued sailor was in good enough health to be providing the American military with a report of how the long-range reconnaissance mission had gone awry. “He is speaking, so we are gaining information from him,” the official said.
The Seal reconnaissance team, which called for help Tuesday while on a mission to locate Taliban fighters or other insurgent figures, was declared missing after a Special Operations Chinook helicopter sent to extract them crashed, apparently after being shot down, killing all 16 aboard. The helicopter crash was the single biggest combat loss for American forces since the war in Afghanistan started in 2001, and it is the first time American officials had acknowledged that a unit had gone missing in the country.
The successful rescue mission, said to have occurred late Saturday, was first reported today by CNN.
An active search and rescue operation certainly explains all the Pentagon reticence on this issue.
Teams Missing
Cross your fingers:
A small team of U.S. soldiers was missing Friday in the same mountains in eastern Afghanistan where a special forces helicopter was shot down earlier this week, and U.S. forces are using ”every available asset” to find them, a U.S. military spokesman said.
The MH-47 Chinook helicopter — with 16 people on board who all died in the crash — had gone into the mountains Tuesday to extract the soldiers who are now missing. The team on the ground has been unaccounted for since the chopper was downed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara said.
A purported Taliban spokesman, Mullah Latif Hakimi, meanwhile, claimed the rebels had captured a U.S. soldier in the area, near the town of Asadabad, close to the Pakistani border.
”One high-ranking American has been captured in fighting in the same area as the helicopter went down,” he told The Associated Press. ”I won’t give you any more details now.”
Reacting to the claim, O’Hara said, ”We have no proof or evidence indicating anything other than the soldiers are missing.”
Hakimi, who also claimed that the insurgents shot down the helicopter, often calls news organizations to take responsibility for attacks, often with information that proves exaggerated or untrue. His exact tie to the Taliban leadership is not clear.
O’Hara said U.S. forces were using ”every available asset” to search for the missing troops. ”Until we find our guys, they are still listed as unaccounted for and everything we got in that area is oriented on finding the missing men,” he said.
The loss of the 16 troops on the chopper was the deadliest single blow to American forces who ousted the Taliban in 2001 for harboring al-Qaida and are now fighting an escalating insurgency. The bodies of the 16 have been recovered and troops Friday were trying to identify the remains, the military said.
Not sounding good, and the Pentagon has been real hesitant releasing information on this one.
*** Update ***
There are indications a small special operations team of U.S. soldiers
Damnit
Sixteen bodies have been found at the crash site of a US military helicopter in eastern Afghanistan and some were Special Forces, a top US general said.
Lieutenant General James Conway told a Defense Department briefing that 16 bodies had been retrieved from the site where the Chinook military helicopter crashed on Tuesday west of Asadabad, a town in the insurgency-plagued eastern province of Kunar.
The Taliban militia has claimed that its fighters shot down the helicopter but US officials gave no details on the cause of the crash.
Shit.
Army Meets Recruiting Goal
Image Credit: NYT
For the first time since January, the Army met its recruiting goal this month, but it still faces what some senior Army officials say is a nearly insurmountable hurdle to meet the service’s annual quota.
Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a public forum at the Pentagon on Wednesday that the Army exceeded its June goal, but he gave no details. Senior Army officials said in interviews earlier in the day that the Army exceeded the quota of 5,650 recruits by about 500 people. The Army Reserve also made its first monthly goal since last December, the officials said.
That still leaves the active-duty Army about 7,800 recruits behind schedule to send 80,000 enlistees to boot camp with only three months to go in the recruiting year that ends on Sept. 30. The Army has not missed its annual enlistment quota since 1999, when a strong economy made recruiters’ lives miserable.
Army officials publicly insist that they can still reach their annual goal, especially with hundreds of new recruiters on the street for the peak summer recruiting month, armed with big enlistment bonuses and greater leeway to recruit more high-school dropouts and lower-achieving applicants.
But privately, senior Army officials voiced skepticism on Wednesday that the Army could make up the deficit.
“If you ask people point-blank, we just don’t have enough time left to make it,” said an Army official who has been briefed on the June figures, but who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Pentagon does not plan to release them publicly until early July.
They barely made their recruiting goals, and this is after adjusting the goals downward to reflect ‘changing market conditions.’
Two predictions:
1.) There is time to make up the deficit, and they will barely find a way to do it this summer. Maybe. That doesn’t make future recruiting scenarios any rosier, just that I know how resourceful these Army types are in a pinch.
2.) Hugh Hewitt is going to go absolutely ape-shit when he sees an anonymous Army source being quote in the NY Times saying they won’t be able to do it. Because everyone knows, you can’t trust anonymous sources. Plus- they are harder to punish when they stray from Hugh’s worldview. This article needed some balance- why, Hugh has five or six generals who will go on record saying the Army will meet its recruiting goal.
Also, if you are interested, the Washington Post has a long piece on how the Bush administration bringing in the academics to explain how to keep morale up on the homefront. Not a bad idea, at all.