CDR Salamander - Fullbore Friday

When you read military history, you read all the time about "fighting retreats" and "rear guard actions" and with few exceptions, that is about the only mention they get, maybe a paragraph or two. That rarely does justice to the incredible sacrifice a few knowingly make to help save the many.

Those ordered to be the rear guard, or to execute a holding action, know exactly what they are being asked to do - and yet they do it willingly through good discipline or simply duty. Often they are not even ordered to do it, local commanders see the need, know commander's intent, and do it.

There are some well known events, Napoleon's Dutch engineers at Berezina is one, and for the maritime crowd Taffy-3 - but mostly they are footnotes.

I didn't know until this AM what we needed for today's FbF, and then on my commute in, it came to me clear as day.

Ten Marines and at least one Navy hospital corpsman are among the 13 U.S. troops dead following the two suicide bomb attacks on crowds struggling to get into the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday, USNI News has learned.

Eighteen U.S. service members were wounded and an unknown number of Afghans were killed and wounded in an attack believed to have been perpetrated by ISIS Khorasan. The military believes a suicide bomb was detonated near the Abbey gate at HKIA and another bomb – which it doesn’t have much information about – was detonated near the Baron Hotel by the airport, U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Frank McKenzie told reporters today at a Pentagon briefing.

Abbey Gate. This is where they were. This was their mission. Yes, “we” are doing an evacuation, but they are conducting the holding action to enable it:

This has been a numbing couple of weeks, but anything I or anyone else is feeling is nothing compared to the few thousands who are in AFG right now giving everything they can to salvage as honorable a departure as possible from this national humiliation.

To get a few ideas what they were doing before the attack, here is a series of short videos from the day prior.

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