Michener’s (1963) Caravans is a much better book, and also has a mention of the boy-sex as a sub-sub-plot, but that isn’t the main point (unlike the Kite Runner, which I think wouldn’t have been successful without that as the main plot point).
The main point of Caravans was the complexity of the local cultureS, the inability of outsiders to comprehend, and the clashes of not only culture but change. I’ve read it a few times, and still own a copy (the original inherited from my father has long since fallen apart!)
I can’t tell for sure, but it looks as if maybe most or almost all of his unit was medevacked after the B-52 incident. I say that because he says that everybody was wounded, some more than others. Also, he talks about a “B team” and another ODA coming in, and he uses the term backfill, which I guess means that people were brought in to replace those who were too badly wounded to participate in the upcoming fight. They also tried to take care of the Afghan wounded. About that, he says (at about 1:01:59), “That wasn’t something that higher [i. e., higher headquarters] wanted to do, but we talked 'em [or ‘im?] into doin’ it, because it was the right thing to do.”
He decided to go through with the operation anyway, and it appears–I could be mistaken–that they met no resistance (at about 1:02:20):
He then takes responsibility for the friendly-fire bombing incident, which involves a technical explanation (beginning at about 1:02:49).
My sister in law thinks this kind of thing is hard wired into all gods creatures. Does go into the open field before the bucks. Hens before toms. Etc. she’s not wrong!
I’m an absolute non-tech-head, so it baffles me that the people who make these things couldn’t just make the thing so that it wouldn’t target the targeter whenever the targeter changed the batteries. I guess there’s a good reason. Or maybe they did modify it later, but other text in this thesis gives me the impression that they just came up with some kind of workaround in their procedures (at least at the time of the thesis, but I only glanced at the thesis, so it’s quite possible I misread/misunderstood it).
Or maybe nowadays they have a technology that renders all that irrelevant.
At about 1:11:00, Gen. Bolduc talks about how the Taliban vehicles in Kandahar were covered with mud “because that’s what they did to try and hide from our aerial observations,” and adds that this was also “a way for us to identify . . . if they were bad guys or good guys.”
At about 1:11:52, General Bolduc relates the freeing of Jan Mohammad from jail. The General says that Jan Mohammad was a “very, very close friend of Karzai,” and that Jan Mohammad had been “imprisoned by the Taliban and tortured for a very, very long time.” The General says he became friends with Jan Mohammad.
At about 1:12:52, Gen. Bolduc describes Jan Mohammad as “a wild man” and says that he was needed in Uruzgan Province, because “it was full of Taliban, and it was full of Al-Qaeda, and we needed a guy like that to go up there and, you know, clean house.” The General adds that Jan Mohammad’s methods were different from what might be acceptable to the international community, “and so we had to keep a very close eye on that.”
At about 1:13:30, the General relates an event that took place after Jan Mohammad entered Mullah Omar’s office:
Edited to add that their initial successes understandably produced an optimistic outlook. At about 1:14:13:
I hope to get to that part eventually.