Traveling in Kajaki, Afghanistan, last year, I learned that we’d be spending a couple nights in a small mud compound with Marines… and a nest or oriental hornets. The insects looked monstrous — they can grow to more than two inches long — but there were no incidents worth mentioning. A video recorded in 2007 suggests that hornets in Afghanistan aren’t always so harmless, however. It went viral online today, after being posted to Reddit, Gawker and other sites: [HTML1] Anybody else feel like they need some long sleeves? Clearly, these bugs aren’t fans of controlled detonations like Marines. The…
Browsing: Afghanistan
With a deadly firefight raging, five men hopped into a Humvee and rode toward a small mountainside village in Afghanistan looking for a four-man team of U.S. forces that had gone missing in combat. The possibility that all five men wouldn’t make it out of the village of Ganjgal, in Kunar province, was high. Already, multiple Afghan troops the Americans were training had been cut down by machine-gun fire in a fierce ambush that was launched about dawn on Sept. 8, 2009. U.S. Army officers at nearby Forward Operating Base Joyce had declined to send air support in a timely…
Midway through his speech Wednesday at Camp Pendleton, Calif., President Obama shifted from talking about military policy to highlight the sacrifice of a Marine wounded warrior and his wife, both of whom continue to serve in the Marine Corps. Capts. Matthew and Camille Lampert, were asked to stand after Obama briefly described their last few years. Lampert was a special operator in Afghanistan when an improvised explosive device took both of his legs, Obama said. He survived that 2010 attack, and set out on a grueling recovery so he could get back to his team. “So Matt endured excruciating rehab,…
UPDATE, Aug. 8, 8 p.m.: The White House has fixed the transcript online. See it here. ————————— President Obama addressed a crowd of about 3,000 Marines, sailors and military family members at Camp Pendleton, Calif., and the speech went off without any major hitches. There was no major gaffe, for example, like mistakenly saying Army Sgt. 1st Class Jared Monti was alive to receive his Medal of Honor. In fact, the president’s speech was short on details, but hit on a lot of meat-and-potato issues. He correctly named Marjah, Sangin and Now Zad as districts in which Marines have faced…
Check out what Marines are up to around the world, as of Aug. 7: [HTML1]
Gen. Joseph Dunford has a father who fought in Korea as a Marine, loves his hometown Boston Red Sox and was lured to join the Marine Corps after seeing a recruiting poster at college. Those are among the details published in a new Boston Globe story about the Marine general who leads the war in Afghanistan. Dunford, a Boston native, was profiled by the newspaper on Sunday, and met with a Globe reporter in Kabul. The story is short on details about the war, but highlights the general’s rise from South Boston to four-star general. He played a fair amount…
Lance Cpl. Joel Murray was aboard Forward Operating Base Shir Ghazi in Afghanistan on May 13 when a truck laden with explosives detonated outside. Three Georgian soldiers were mortally wounded, and several other Georgians and U.S. Marines sustained injuries. Murray, an engineer equipment operator with Combat Logistics Regiment 2, quickly rushed to the site of the blast, Marine officials said. Insurgents were attempting to penetrate the security perimeter of the base, in Helmand province’s Musa Qala district. Murray killed an enemy fighter, and then applied a tourniquet to a Georgian soldier who had sustained a life-threatening leg injury, according to…
Marine commanders are planning to draw down to about 4,400 service members in southwestern Afghanistan by early 2014, as the U.S. continues to shrink its footprint across the country. That’s one of the takeaways of this new Marine Corps Times story, which was published in our print edition this week. It outlines the way the Corps continues to reshape its force in Helmand province, where tens of thousands of Marines have deployed and tangled with the Taliban since 2008. Marine officials released the proposed troop number for Helmand province to me for the story, while acknowledging it is subject to…
It has been nearly three years since Lance Cpl. Kyle Carpenter’s life changed in a white-hot grenade blast. Posting security on a rooftop with another Marine in Afghanistan, his body was mangled in ways that are difficult to fathom: He sustained catastrophic injuries to his right arm, neck and face, including a jaw that was nearly blown off. Carpenter has undergone more than 30 surgeries since, sharing his story along the way to bring attention to the dangers U.S. forces face. He refused to give up, giving thanks for his survival while pushing through thousands of hours of physical therapy.…
A short walk from the main U.S. headquarters facility at Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan, sits a hulking two-story building behind chain link fences and cement walls. It cost $34 million to build, and it will likely never serve any purpose for U.S. forces. That’s the groan-worthy findings of John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. The 64,000 square-foot building has been roundly panned in the media today, after it was highlighted in a Washington Post story this morning. SIGAR, as Sopko’s organization is known, sent Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel a letter this week asking about the decision-making process that…
