#BATTLE IN THE FORGOTTEN CITY SERIES#

The building he had ordered the AC-130 gunship to strike was not a Taliban control center, but a trauma hospital run by MГ©decins Sans FrontiГЁres. That meant he didnвЂ™t know that things had gone seriously wrong. It didnвЂ™t help that HutchinsonвЂ™s team had run out of the batteries needed for the video receivers typically used to communicate with the aircrew.

#BATTLE IN THE FORGOTTEN CITY SERIES#

Hutchinson ordered the gunship to fire.ДЄ series of technical and communication failures aboard the aircraft had prevented the crew from preparing for the mission. After hearing gunfire erupt, HutchinsonвЂ™s interpreter was able to reach them and confirm they needed air support for the building they were attacking. Communications were patchy, but this process had become routine. The Afghans didnвЂ™t have radios, though, and were relying on limited cellphone coverage to make contact with Hutchinson. Hutchinson was in contact with an AC-130 gunship, which was circling overhead, to provide air support to his Afghan colleagues who were preparing to hit a building believed to be a Taliban command and control center. They were under attack from all sides, and only air strikes and the snipers on the walls were preventing the Taliban from overrunning the base. That wasnвЂ™t the original plan: They were supposed to have established a foothold at the governorвЂ™s office, but got lost in the dark. This post was excerpted from DonatiвЂ™s upcoming book.ДЄfter four days of fighting, they were still hunkered down at the cityвЂ™s police headquarters, where the American and Afghan teams had set up a command center. They had a single map between them, and no one had set foot in the city before. Some had driven into Kunduz on quad bikes. The Green Berets had reached the area by air and lacked armored vehicles.

Hutch, as the other soldiers called him, worried that the slightest mistake or miscalculation could end in disaster. The Afghan army and police, plagued by corruption and poor leadership, had abandoned their posts and left the city to the Taliban with barely a fight. The mission had been scrambled together after Kunduz had come under attack four days earlier.

It was his fifth combat deployment, counting three tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, yet he had never experienced such intense fighting. M ajor Michael Hutchinson, a Green Beret with the 3rd Special Forces Group, was in charge of the secret operation to help Afghan commandos recapture Kunduz. militaryвЂ™s worst disasters in Afghanistan shows the perils of relying on Special Operations alone to fight the nationвЂ™s wars. The story of how it led to one of the U.S. Under-resourced and unprepared, the soldiers found themselves in the midst of a pitched battle with conflicting orders. Special Forces were dispatched on a secret mission to help Afghan commandos recapture it. When Kunduz, a major city in northern Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban in 2015, U.S.

The strategy has kept recent episodes of the 20-year Afghan War out of the public eye, but it is failing to stabilize the country and is straining the United States militaryвЂ™s elite troops, who serve back-to-back combat tours without an end in sight and disproportionately give their lives in service of a war the public knows almost nothing about. on February 3, 2021.Д«oth the Trump and Obama administrations relied heavily on highly trained Special Forces units to keep Afghanistan from collapse.

Battle in the forgotten city