Marcus luttrell

 
The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed in accordance with sharia law. Only Allah the 
Almighty deserves to be worshipped, not anyone or anything else.
Wraps that up then, right? 
Praise Allah and pass the high explosive. 
The blasting of the Buddhas firmed up world opinion that something had to be done 
about Afghanistan’s rulers. But it took another explosion to provoke savage action against them. 
That took place on September 11, the same year, and was the beginning of the end for the 
Taliban and bin Laden’s al Qaeda. 
Before the dust had settled on lower Manhattan, the United States demanded the Taliban 
hand over bin Laden for masterminding the attack on U.S. soil. Again the Taliban refused, 
perhaps not realizing that the new(ish) U.S. president, George W. Bush, was a very different 
character from Bill Clinton. 
Less than one month later, on October 7, the Americans, leading a small coalition force, 
unleashed an onslaught against Afghanistan that shook that area of the world to its foundations. 
U.S. military intelligence located all of the al Qaeda camps in the mountains of the northeast part 
of the country, and the military let fly with one of the biggest aerial bombardments in modern 
warfare. 
It began with fifty cruise missiles launched from U.S. warships and Royal Navy 
submarines. At the same time, long after dark in Afghanistan, twenty-five carrier-based aircraft 
and fifteen land-based bombers took off and destroyed Taliban air defenses, communications 
infrastructure, and the airports at Kabul, Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Herat. The U.S. bombs blasted 
the big radar installations and obliterated the control tower in Kandahar. This was the city where 
Mullah Omar lived, and a navy bomber managed to drop one dead in the middle of his backyard. 
That one-eyed ole bastard escaped, though. 
The Taliban, its military headquarters now on fire, did own a somewhat insignificant air-
strike capacity, just a few aircraft and helicopters, and the U.S. Air Force wiped that right out 
with smart bombs as a matter of routine. 
Navy bombers taking off from the carriers targeted the Taliban’s other military hardware, 
heavy vehicles, tanks, and fuel dumps. Land-based B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers were also in the 
air, the B-52s dropping dozens of five-hundred-pound gravity bombs on al Qaeda terrorist 
training camps in eastern Afghanistan, way up in the border mountains where we would soon be 
visiting. 
One of the prime U.S. objectives was the small inventory of surface-to-air missiles and 
shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, stolen from either the Russians or the old mujahideen. These 
were hard to locate, and various caches were removed by the tribesmen and hidden in the 
mountains. Hidden, sadly, for use another day. 
One hour after that nighttime bombardment began, the Northern Alliance opened fire 
with a battery of rockets from an air base twenty-five miles north of Kabul. They aimed them 

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straight at Taliban forces in the city. There were five thunderous explosions and all electric 
power was knocked out throughout the capital. 
But the United States never took its eye off the ball. The true objective was the total 
destruction of al Qaeda and the leader who had engineered the infamous attack on the Twin 
Towers — “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” as the president described it. And that 
meant a massive strike on the sinister network of caves and underground tunnels up in the 
mountains, where bin Laden made his headquarters. 
The cruise missiles had softened up the area, but that was only the start. The real 
heavyweight punch from the world’s only superpower would come in the form of a gigantic 
bomb — the BLU-82B/C-130, known as Commando Vault in Vietnam and now nicknamed 
Daisy Cutter. This is a high-altitude, fifteen-thousand-pound conventional bomb that needs to be 
delivered from the huge MC-130 aircraft because it is far too heavy for the bomb racks on any 
other attack aircraft. 
This thing is awesome. It was originally designed to create instant clearings for helicopter 
landings in the jungle. Its purpose in Afghanistan was as an antipersonnel weapon up in those 
caves. Its lethal radius is colossal, probably nine hundred feet. Its flash and sound is obvious 
from literally miles away. The BLU-82B is the largest conventional bomb ever built and, of 
course, leaves no nuclear fallout. (For the record, the Hiroshima atom bomb was a thousand 
times more powerful.) 
On the upside, the Daisy Cutter is extremely reliable, no problems with wind speed or 
thermal gradient. Its conventional explosive technique incorporates both agent and oxidizer. It is 
not fuel-air explosive, like the old FAE systems used for much, much smaller bombs. It’s nearly 
twelve feet long and more than four feet wide. 
The BLU-82B depends on precise positioning of the delivery aircraft, coordinates gotten 
from fixed ground radar or onboard navigation equipment. The aircraft must be perfectly 
positioned prior to final countdown and release. The navigator needs to make dead-accurate 
ballistic and wind computations. 
The massive blast effect of the bomb means it cannot be released below an altitude of 
6,000 feet. Its warhead, containing 12,600 pounds of low-cost GSX slurry (ammonium nitrate, 
aluminum powder, and polystyrene), is detonated by a 38-inch fuse extender a few feet above 
ground level, so it won’t dig a crater. The entire blast blows outward, producing overpressure of 
1,000 pounds per square inch. Hence the nickname Daisy Cutter. 
The United States has never specified how many of these things were dropped on the 
Tora Bora area of the White Mountains, where the al Qaeda camps were located. But there were 
at least four, maybe seven. The first one, according to a public announcement by the Pentagon, 
was dropped after a reported sighting of bin Laden. We can only imagine the crushing effect 
such a blast would have inside the caves where the al Qaeda high command and senior 
leadership operated. Wouldn’t have been too good even if you were standing in the middle of a 
field — but a cave! Jesus, that’s brutal. That thing wiped out hundreds of the enemy at a time. 
The United States really did a number on the Taliban, flattened their stronghold in Kunduz in the 

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north, shelled them out of the Shomali Plains north of Kabul, carpet bombed them anywhere they 
could be located around the Bagram air base, where, four years later, we were headed in the C-
130. 
In the fall of 2001, the Taliban and al Qaeda were mostly fleeing the U.S. offensive or 
surrendering. In the subsequent years, they drifted together on the other side of the Pakistani 
border, reformed, and began their counteroffensive to retake Afghanistan. 
Somehow these hickory-tough tribesmen not only survived the onslaught of American bombing 
and escaped from the advancing Northern Alliance, but they also evaded one of the biggest 
manhunts in the history of warfare as an increasingly frustrated United States moved heaven and 
earth to capture bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and the rest. I guess their propensity to run like hell 
from strong opposition and their rapid exit into the Pakistani mountains on the other side of the 
border allowed them to limit their human and material resources. 
It also bought them time. And while they undoubtedly lost many of their followers after a 
front-row view of what the American military could and would do, they also had many months 
to begin recruiting and training a brand-new generation of supporters. And now they were back 
as an effective fighting army, launching guerrilla operations against the U.S.-led coalition forces 
only four years after they’d lost power, been driven into exile, and had nearly been annihilated. 
As we prepared for our final approach to the great, sprawling U.S. base at Bagram, the Taliban 
were once again out there, killing aid workers and kidnapping foreign construction workers. 
Parts of eastern and southern Afghanistan have been officially designated unsafe due to 
increasingly daring Taliban attacks. There was evidence they were extending their area of 
influence, working closely again with bin Laden’s al Qaeda, forging new alliances with other 
rebel groups and anti-government warlords. Same way they’d grabbed power last time, right? 
Back in 1996. 
Only this time they had one principal ambition before seizing power, and that was to 
destabilize the U.S.-led coalition forces and eventually drive them out of Afghanistan forever. 
I ought to mention the Pashtuns, the world’s oldest living tribal group; there are about forty-two 
million of them. Twenty-eight million live in Pakistan, and 12.5 million of them live in 
Afghanistan; that’s 42 percent of the entire population. There are about 88,000 living in Britain 
and 44,000 in the U.S.A. 
In Afghanistan, they live primarily in the mountains of the northeast, and they also have 
heavily populated areas in the east and south. They are a proud people who adhere to Islam and 
live by a strict code of honor and culture, observing rules and laws known as