Humanity puts great stock in symbols, images and individuals who can either inspire us to achieve our wildest dreams or remind us of the darkness that lies within us all. They can drive civilization forward on the back of all they've sacrificed to give us peace and stability, or seize us in selfish hatreds that harden our hearts and narrow our minds. But for all their historical and rhetorical power, symbols are only what we invest in them. After all, our symbols would be meaningless to someone who lived a thousand years ago, much less a thousand years from now. And yet, in the heat of moments of pain and confusion, this lesson is forgotten, neglected for the pleasures of exorcising them, a lesson taught quite well in Dalton Fury's adrenaline-fuelled memoir.
Though the September 11 Attacks sent powerful shockwaves of emotions through much of the world, they, in their audacity and their horror, also formally introduced the general public to Usama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born jihadist who had spent most of the previous 20 years funding and engineering acts of rebellion and terrorism. His crimes, even prior to 9/11, were legendary within international circles, but after this bold and heinous strike at monuments of American economic power, he became legendary, a creature of near-mythical powers who could direct devastating assaults against the world's most powerful nation, all from the relative comfort of the remote, tribal Hindu Kush.
This mountainous, central Asian region shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan had already proven, in the 1980s, to be a successful base of operations from which Afghan guerillas, supported by Arabian jihadists, attacked and disrupted the Soviet occupation of their country, eventually leading to the USSR's withdrawal from the unruly nation. Now it would perform a similar function for Usama Bin Laden who hoped to use his attacks against America to provoke his enemy into a ruinous war in the mountains he knew so well. Here, on familiar ground, he could watch America's might break against his winter stronghold and, in doing so, reveal to the world the extent of American weakness.
Instead of committing to such a war, the United States sent special operatives to Afghanistan, teams of Rangers, Deltas, SBS operatives and CIA agents armed for battle and packing the millions of dollars necessary to purchase the loyalty of local warlords who would execute the American-backed assaults against both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. This campaign would culminate in the Battle of Tora Bora, a series of skirmishes that would eventually smash Al-Qaeda, sending its key men into hiding and largely ending it as an organized force.
The commander's eye view of this most consequential battle, Kill Bin Laden is an arresting narrative of a hunt that narrowly missed capturing the world's most famous terrorist. Dalton Fury, the pseudonym for the Delta commander in charge of this mission, draws from his journal of those difficult few months to paint a thorough, if nationalistic, view of the battle, its protagonists, antagonists and the circumstances that lead to them clashing in this most remote mountain range. Supplementing his account with colorful anecdotes of life as a special operative, and detailing the absolute extremity of the training these soldiers endure to join such elite companies, Fury succeeds in conveying a sense of what it's like to be a member of the world's supreme fighting force, both its rewards and its disappointments. In this, he leaves little doubt of just how far these men have deviated from the normal life and the price they pay for living so far outside this most customary box.
However much Kill Bin Laden educates us about the lives and the demands of special forces, it stumbles when attempting to carry out its primary mission, to provide an unbiased account of the Battle of Tora Bora. Fury certainly reconstructs the combat, and the chain of events that lead to it, but these details are drowned out by his incessant need to denigrate the Afghans with whom he operated. In light of the fact that these warlords and their armies required American cash as motivation to fight, it seems reasonable to conclude that Fury is right to criticize their reluctance to fully engage with a fundamentalist enemy ravaging their homeland. But his tone so often devolves into outright scorn that his contempt for these men and their ways creates a great deal of room for doubt as to whether or not he's given them a fair hearing here.
That said, one gets the sense from these pages that Fury is not a man interested in outside criticisms, that he'd no more be interested in disguising or shading truths than he would be in retreating from a battle. And so, though we may harbor some doubts as to his fairness, the author has absolutely succeeded in his attempt to communicate his own personality and the ethos of the Deltas, facts which, alone, make this a worthwhile read.
History shifts on pivotal moments like these. Had Bin laden died at Tora Bora, it seems likely that the pretext for the War in Iraq would have been too weak for it to eventuate. The history of the 21st century's first decade would have unfolded far differently in the wake of such a monumental change. To see such a moment play out is a gripping experience no matter how prejudicial the execution. (3/5 Stars)
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