Upton Bell Collection at UMass Lowell Libraries: Moore

“As the [al-Qaida terrorists] charged one wall, three Green Berets leaned over the parapets, oblivious to the enemy small-arms fire that was cracking by their heads and shoulders. “ ‘Focus, squeeze, focus, squeeze,’ they recited quietly. . . . Each time . . . the lifeless body [of an al-Qaida terrorist] would snap back through the desert air and drop onto the sandy courtyard.” The war in Afghanistan was the most secret conflict since the CIA’s covert war in Laos; thousands of journalists covered it, yet, ironically, little is known about how it was waged or what really happened—until now. The Hunt for bin Ladenplunges the reader into America’s War on Terror, from the first top-secret meetings of TASK FORCE DAGGER in Tampa on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, through the liberation of Kabul sixty-two days later and the tragedies of OPERATION ANACONDA. The book takes the reader into the heat of battle—as seen through the eyes of the Green Berets on the ground. This is the story of how only a few hundred men, operating from a secret Special Forces base, changed the course of history in Central Asia and destroyed a hundred-thousand-man terrorist army in less than ninety days. Action-packed and controversial, The Hunt for bin Laden is teeming with revelations and inside information: the truth about John Walker Lindh and Mike Spann; the failure of the “conventional” generals; the courage of the Northern Alliance; the wounding and murder of journalists; and the flaws and frustrations of the hunt for bin Laden himself. In mid-December 2001, Robin Moore arrived in Afghanistan, where he joined his old friends, whom he had celebrated thirty-five years earlier in his bookThe Green Beretsand who were now calling in airstrikes and fighting alongside the armies of the Northern Alliance against the terrorist al-Qaida and Taliban. In less than three winter months, about a hundred Green Berets accounted for the deaths of perhaps as many as forty thousand terrorists and the winning of a war in Afghanistan—where the Soviets had found fighting a war all but impossible.