THE VIOLENCE OF ACTION

"Things aren't about to get any better... For us, that phrase expressed an essential truth — perhaps even the essential truth — about the situation of men pinned down in a combat outpost whose tactical and strategic weaknesses were plain to see for any soldier, to the point that the name of the post itself, Keating, had become a kind of byword. It symbolised the army's ability to stack every possible odd against itself to ensure that things could spiral into catastrophe without ever having to admit it." In 2009, Sergeant Clinton Romesha and the rest of his Red Platoon were preparing to dismantle Combat Outpost Keating, one of the most isolated and inaccessible ever built by the U.S. Army in the provinces of Nuristan and Kunar, with the aim of blocking Taliban movement between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It had taken the army three long years to acknowledge that this outpost, the target of incessant attacks, was far too isolated and dangerous to defend. But on the morning of 3 October, just as Keating was on the point of closing for good, the Taliban threw all their forces into a new and devastating assault. More than three hundred insurgents armed with heavy weapons, recoilless rifles, mortars and rocket launchers were poised to annihilate the fifty lightly entrenched American soldiers tasked with defending this insignificant outpost. The fighting would last more than fourteen hours, with things never looking close to getting any better.