The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (2012 original; edició 2012)

What an excellent, exciting, and emotionally moving read! Jake Tapper covers the events during America's counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, concentrating a small outposts, especially Camp Keating, that was in the middle of a valley surrounded by mountains, hundreds of insurgents, and lacking both the necessary firepower and manpower to effectively hold them. The American soldiers were attacked practically everyday, sometimes with potshots taken at them, other times with hundreds of insurgents coming down the surrounding mountains with more than enough of their own firepower to meet, if not overpower, than in the small outposts.

Tapper shows us the complications of war, its failures and successes, its gains and losses, and the toll it takes on our fighting men who are, so it seems, ignored by the American mainland most likely because, the war having gone on, at the time the book was written, for more than 10 years, "familiarity breeds contempt," a very sad and unworthy response towards those who fight to preserve our freedoms. This is a must read. ( )

The book The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, is a book of heroism, sacrifice, betrayal, honor, and confusion. It tells the true story of an American outpost in remote Afghanistan that is constantly under attack from rebel forces, and in the end, faces the fact that the whole reason for Outpost was flawed.

The author Jake Tapper examines the reasons for the outpost, and describes in heartbreaking detail the efforts American soldiers undertook to keep the outpost from Rebel attack. Each soldier is described honestly, and each death or injury came as a blow.

This is a terrific book describing the war in Afghanistan, the heroism and sacrifice of American soldiers put in an impossible place. ( )

A tough read, a good read, and a depressing read. I firmly believe that we have been at war for so long because so many of us are so removed from it. This book is a good antidote. ( )

This is a book that I originally received from the Goodreads review program. I wanted to share it with LibraryThing users....

Disclaimer: I received this book as a "FirstReads" free premium from the fascinating GoodReads web site, a place for readers seeking and finding wondrous examples of the media we still call print.

"The Outpost" hits hard and it hits often. What makes these hits difficult to bear is that they are true. These hits are done by young men and women involved in some of the end results of the United States of America's and allied nations "War on Terror". They are the ones accomplishing the large goal of trying to stop this threat to our present civilization. They are the ones not on the front lines because there are no front lines; they are surrounded all the time by varying degrees of danger, some extremely acute, some not, but it's always in the atmosphere.

They are the ones doing the missions that are impossible, just like the tv show and movie, just like "Mission Impossible". But there is no dramatic music nor action packed closeups and quick cutting, no plots that cause us to gasp as how these things will be done. Just a back and forth dialogue of orders and acknowledgments, sometimes further discrete discussions of what and how it is to be done…
"Sir, can I talk to you?
"What about?
"I would be remiss if I didn't talk to you about the danger of driving at night... (That is, driving an LMTV--light medium tactical vehicle--light is relative, it's more than 8 feet wide and weighs more than 8 tons-- driving it down an extremely narrow dirt road constantly exposed to enemy threat .)
"We can do it…
"Sir, I don't think that it's the safest to do to drive that thing at night…
"We're going to get it done." (The lieutenant colonel…) repeated. And then he walked away.

That last phrase, "And then he walked away." I think is critical to this book. These soldiers doing these missions are not cowards, they accept orders even if they strain a belief in common sense from officers who themselves are extremely heroic. But where these orders come from and this uneasy sensibility of what they are really trying to accomplish…is it an officer making points with headquarters, is it appeasing a local tribal chief whose alliance switches sides to those with the biggest wallets, is it remote politicians immersed in just executing the Emperor's New Battle Plans for making a nation where there may be none yet…these are the concepts that author Jake Tapper relates to us throughout this book very powerfully. It all adds up to a scary scenario, all the more so because these are true events and he tells them with a straightforwardness that he himself had to modify at times--"The most difficult choice…lay in deciding how honest to be about the horrors of war."

The cumulative effect of this book is harrowing. The author went through an amazing amount of effort with many interviews and research to put all this information together into something that made chronological sense. He takes us back and forth from the battle scene in Afghanistan to the American backgrounds of the soldiers. We realize that after all the Afghans are just folks too, trying to survive in a harsh climate and country under circumstances that would try the souls of most civilized beings.

The contrast of how the support systems of our country's bureaucracies barely moves along in response to the circumstances of troubled returned veterans is nowhere more apparent than when the parent of a just buried son gets a phone message from the VA that his son is late for his appointment.

I won't give it away but the first three words of the Prologue is a summation of the lessons that this book has or should have for all of us. Reading it was a pleasure although unsettling but unsettling because of events that I think that we all want to feel could be prevented. I have to admit that I have grown more apprehensive in the few weeks after reading this book and reflecting about what happened to those Jake Tapper talks of. He's written something we should all read sometime regardless of any potential uneasiness we might have about the circumstances and the subject matter.

A Personal Note: This book's circumstances hit me quite hard because my oldest son was a Marine who did 2 tours in Helmand Province in Afghanistan as a Scout/Sniper. Just like the soldiers in this book he was out "beyond the wire" under a tarp for weeks at a time. I wanted to read this book because I thought that it would give me a slight idea of what he had gone through. He and I have talked, at times at great length, but I know that he cannot share everything he had experienced nor would he want to. He's back, he's well with no repercussions and he's starting on a career hopefully leading to becoming a Physician's Assistant. I have to thank Jake Tapper for a story that has given me even more reason to be thankful that my son is here and Home Safe.

Basically, afghanistan war makes a lot of people get killed, become alcoholics, helicopters are thrown down mountains and then other helicopters are thrown on top of them to try to rescue the first helicopter, and a lot of wheat and fruit trees get destroyed. Yet, even me making light of how absurd and pointless it is/was is part of the stupid absurdity of it all. War, you knew it was bad and stupid while it was happening but, for me at least, I couldn't face the reality of just how bad and stupid until recently. Not that it's over, but maybe this particular instance has receded, or something. Whatever. There's no explaining chaos and death.