Memorial Day 2023

So for this Memorial Day,  we honor and remember all those who lost their lives in service to our country. I felt it fitting to specifically remember the sacrifice of some of our best within recent and living memory.

On October 3, 2009 beginning at 6 am, the Battle of Kamdesh took place in Afghanistan. Over 350 Taliban armed with heavy machine guns, RPGs, rockets, and numerous small arms, attacked the 79 soldiers at Combat Outpost Keating and Observation Post Fritsche.

Located at the bottom of a valley surrounded and dominated by Taliban-occupied mountains, the placement of the base was almost a deliberate affront to sound military tactics, and an insult to the realities of basic geography.

The base was quite simply dominated from the higher terrain, and fire could be poured down onto and into it from the surrounding heights. On top of that, there were no usable roads to the base, and the helicopter landing zone was across a river from the base and also massively exposed to enemy fire from the surrounding mountainous terrain.

Combine this with some bad leadership prior to the attack, and a stalled plan to shut down the base, resulting in defenses not being enhanced, and it went from horrendously bad to worse.

The battle and the events leading up to it are well recounted in both the book and the movie The Outpost, and the book Red Platoon by Medal of Honor recipient Clinton Romesha (the Audible audio book is narrated by Clinton Romesha and it's worth a credit if you like audio books).  If you haven't read both these books, you really should. The movie is also worth a watch. More than worth your time to learn about some incredible Americans in a horrendous situation.

Thanks to the professionalism and incredible heroism of the American soldiers on the ground (and two Latvians there as well), and the heroism and professionalism of US Army and US Air Force aviators,  the outpost was retaken after being initially partially overrun and the attack repelled.  To say it was a close-run thing, barely preventing the complete destruction of the outpost and the massacre of all within it, would be an understatement.

Eight American soldiers were killed in the battle that day, 14 years gone by now:

SSG Justin Timothy Gallegos, 27;

SGT Christopher Todd Griffin, 24;

SGT Joshua Mitchell Hardt, 23;

SGT Joshua John Kirk, 30;

SPC Stephan Lee Mace, 21;

SSG Vernon William Martin, 25;

SGT Michael Patrick Scusa, 23; and

PFC Kevin Christopher Thomson, 22.

Today, we take the time to remember them, and all those who died while serving in the US military.