Six months later, Aury got himself stuck inside the besieged perimeter of Bastogne with the 101st Airborne Division during the Battle of the Bulge. I come from an old Nevada ranching family with military traditions that date back to my grandfather Aury Smith, who took his brother's place in the draft during the summer of 1943 and eventually wound up getting sent into Normandy as a combat engineer just a couple of days after D-day. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.

“ Red Platoon is sure to become a classic of the genre.”-Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers and In the Kingdom of Ice “A vitally important story that needs to be understood by the public, and I cannot imagine an account that does it better justice that Romesha’s.”-Sebastian Junger, journalist and author of The Perfect Storm Red Platoon is the riveting firsthand account of the Battle of Keating, told by Romesha, who spearheaded both the defense of the outpost and the counterattack that drove the Taliban back beyond the wire and received the Medal of Honor for his actions. The ensuing fourteen-hour battle-and eventual victory-cost eight men their lives. On October 3, 2009, after years of constant smaller attacks, the Taliban finally decided to throw everything they had at Keating. Three years after its construction, the army was finally ready to concede what the men on the ground had known immediately: it was simply too isolated and too dangerous to defend. In 2009, Clinton Romesha of Red Platoon and the rest of the Black Knight Troop were preparing to shut down Command Outpost (COP) Keating, the most remote and inaccessible in a string of bases built by the US military in Nuristan and Kunar in the hope of preventing Taliban insurgents from moving freely back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan. “‘It doesn't get better.’ To us, that phrase nailed one of the essential truths, maybe even the essential truth, about being stuck at an outpost whose strategic and tactical vulnerabilities were so glaringly obvious to every soldier who had ever set foot in that place that the name itself-Keating-had become a kind of backhanded joke.” The only comprehensive, firsthand account of the fourteen-hour firefight at the Battle of Keating by Medal of Honor recipient Clinton Romesha, for readers of Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden and Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell.

Red platoon book