10 Silver Stars Issued For A Single Battle

This--simply stunning:

After jumping out of helicopters at daybreak onto jagged, ice-covered rocks and into water at an altitude of 10,000 feet, the 12-man Special Forces team scrambled up the steep mountainside toward its target -- an insurgent stronghold in northeast Afghanistan. "Our plan," Capt. Kyle M. Walton recalled in an interview, "was to fight downhill."

But as the soldiers maneuvered toward a cluster of thick-walled mud buildings constructed layer upon layer about 1,000 feet farther up the mountain, insurgents quickly manned fighting positions, readying a barrage of fire for the exposed Green Berets.

A harrowing, nearly seven-hour battle unfolded on that mountainside in Afghanistan's Nuristan province on April 6, as Walton, his team and a few dozen Afghan commandos they had trained took fire from all directions. Outnumbered, the Green Berets fought on even after half of them were wounded -- four critically -- and managed to subdue an estimated 150 to 200 insurgents, according to interviews with several team members and official citations.

Literally the stuff that usually only happens in movies. Not sure exactly what the term "subdued" in that last sentence is meant to imply, unless the terms "rout" ""annihilate" or Heaven forbid "defeat" were just not deemed palatable by the Washington Post readership. I simply have my doubts that twelve green Berets took a hundred prisoners. Perhaps the Post should do a focus group study on the term "rendered the insurgents carbon neutral" and see how it plays.

-R