SAS signalman Jock Wallace was pumped. It was the
start of Operation Anaconda, the US-led military
offensive designed to flush out and destroy Al-Qaeda and
the Taliban from their last stronghold in the notorious
Shai Kot valley in Afghanistan. Jock was riding into
battle alongside 80 troops of the US Army's 10th
Mountain Division. If intelligence reports were correct,
there were between 100 and 250 enemy fighters holed up
in the extensive cave network buried in the mountain
ridges around the valley. But reports can be wrong.
Minutes after the combat-ready troops stormed down the
rear ramps of the Chinook helicopters, Jock's company
came under heavy fire from the high ground overlooking
their position in a dry riverbed. Pinned down by nearly
1000 enemy fighters in what was later nicknamed Hell's
Halfpipe, Jock and his American comrades stared eventual
death in the face. Eighteen relentless hours of hell
were just beginning. With machine-gun bullets kicking up
the dust and rock around their feet, mortars and
rocket-propelled grenades bursting among them, and with
a quarter of the troops sustaining injuries, it seemed
that the soldiers had been cut off and trapped. But
there was no way Jock was going down without a fight.
Nor were the men he was with. Holding off the enemy at
close range, rescuing the injured, dodging the bullets,
counterattacking alone, reporting to base, calling up
air support - Jock gave all that he had, and more. And
as dusk and the enemy began to close in, he was
determined he was not going to die on foreign soil, not
at the hands of al Qaeda...This is the gripping true
story of how an elite SAS soldier fought the fight of
his life against the world's deadliest terrorists in the
most dangerous corner on earth and came out victorious,
a saviour to his fellow troops and a decorated hero in
his homeland. It is the clearest account yet of one of
the fiercest engagements in the history of the special
forces war on terror.
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