"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.
