Lone Survivor_ The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 ( PDFDrive )

Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Herat. The U.S. bombs blasted the big radar
installations and obliterated the control tower in Kandahar. This was the city
where Mullah Omar lived, and a navy bomber managed to drop one dead in the
middle of his backyard. That one-eyed ole bastard escaped, though.
The Taliban, its military headquarters now on fire, did own a somewhat
insignificant air-strike capacity, just a few aircraft and helicopters, and the U.S.
Air Force wiped that right out with smart bombs as a matter of routine.
Navy bombers taking off from the carriers targeted the Taliban’s other
military hardware, heavy vehicles, tanks, and fuel dumps. Land-based B-1, B-2,
and B-52 bombers were also in the air, the B-52s dropping dozens of fivehundred-pound
gravity bombs on al Qaeda terrorist training camps in eastern
Afghanistan, way up in the border mountains where we would soon be visiting.
One of the prime U.S. objectives was the small inventory of surface-to-air
missiles and shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, stolen from either the Russians
or the old mujahideen. These were hard to locate, and various caches were
removed by the tribesmen and hidden in the mountains. Hidden, sadly, for use
another day.
One hour after that nighttime bombardment began, the Northern Alliance
opened fire with a battery of rockets from an air base twenty-five miles north of
Kabul. They aimed them straight at Taliban forces in the city. There were five
thunderous explosions and all electric power was knocked out throughout the
capital.
But the United States never took its eye off the ball. The true objective was
the total destruction of al Qaeda and the leader who had engineered the infamous
attack on the Twin Towers — “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” as
the president described it. And that meant a massive strike on the sinister
network of caves and underground tunnels up in the mountains, where bin Laden
made his headquarters.
The cruise missiles had softened up the area, but that was only the start. The
real heavyweight punch from the world’s only superpower would come in the
form of a gigantic bomb — the BLU-82B/C-130, known as Commando Vault in
Vietnam and now nicknamed Daisy Cutter. This is a high-altitude, fifteenthousand-pound
conventional bomb that needs to be delivered from the huge
MC-130 aircraft because it is far too heavy for the bomb racks on any other
attack aircraft.
This thing is awesome. It was originally designed to create instant clearings
for helicopter landings in the jungle. Its purpose in Afghanistan was as an