marines

McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay was with the Marines in Gangjal, a village in southern Afghanistan, when they walked into “a killing zone of relentless gunfire and rocket barrages from Afghan insurgents hidden in the mountainsides.” Read his eyewitness account of the attack that took the lives of four Marines.

Remember many things, but especially the Marines fighting in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. Here’s a progress report emailed out at 4 p.m. Friday local time/9 a.m. Friday EST from USFOR-A, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan, about Operation Khanjar:
The Marines and Afghan forces are continuing to patrol and have begun engaging with key leaders in the [...]

So after I wrote this post, I checked in with State Department contacts to see what’s on the horizon for resourcing the Marine offensive in the Helmand River Valley. The biggest piece of news I can report: lots of diplomats are anticipating a relaxing Fourth of July. But there’s more.
The two State Department and USAID [...]

Underway in southern Afghanistan. There’s not a whole lot I can add from Washington (or, actually, Detroit, where I’m blogging from right now) to Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s on-the-ground report. Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, the Marine commander in the area, is very well respected by everyone I’ve spoken to, and his admonition that “We’re not going to [...]

Usually when a journalist says “this is a thoughtful piece of writing” what s/he means is “this is a well-expressed recapitulation of things I already believe,” but, really, in the straightforward sense, this is a thoughtful piece of writing from a Marine stationed near Fallujah, brought to us by Tom Ricks. As it happens, it [...]

We’ll know for sure imminently, but McClatchy reports Secretary Bob Gates’ full defense budget may cut purchases of the Marines’s V-22 Osprey aircraft — a kind of super-helicopter that can operate at long ranges –  which the service absolutely adores. Here’s the Marine Commandant, Gen. James Conway, speaking at his most recent Pentagon briefing last [...]

ISTANBUL – It’s 10 p.m. in the lowest level of the Istanbul airport. In 20 minutes I’ll be allowed to board my plane to Kabul, bringing me to the capitol city of Afghanistan at the crack of dawn. Before I made my way down to the gate, an International Herald-Tribune headline caught my eye, for [...]