Not a good day to die

摘要

In his new book on Operation Anaconda, the United States' biggest battle of the Afghanistan war, Sean D. Naylor lays out the failures that also made the March 2002 operation the bloodi-est fight of the campaign. High adventure or not, invisible walls had to be broken down and cultural barriers breached before an atmosphere of cooperation and mutual trust could prevail at Bagram, the air-base north of Kabul where U.S. task forces gathered to prepare for Anaconda U.S. Central Command's insistence on making [Special Forces'] Task Force Dagger's little Afghan force the main effort and its refusal to countenance the deployment of the rest of the combat power of the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division — the Rakkasans — meant that from the start the command structure for Anaconda was jury-rigged from top to bottom. For a battle that would involve perhaps 2,000 allied troops — less than a brigade's worth — in combat, CENTCOM had cobbled together a force that drew elements from eight countries, two U.S. Army divisions, two Special Forces groups, a hodgepodge of aviation units, and a variety of clandestine organizations.