SUCCESS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED

The only thing this man did that everybody else didn't do was to succeed. He was successful and for his sins he had to be punished. He did what Green Berets are supposed to do, I can't believe they burned him for his rank . . . S.L.

Journalist Ann Scott Tyson and Special Forces Maj. Jim Gant in eastern Afghanistan in 2012

In Afghanistan, A U.S. Special Forces Major's Meteoric Rise And Humiliating Fall

A once-promising strategy for stability in Afghanistan ended badly two years ago, along with the career of its author and chief proponent, Army Special Forces Maj. Jim Gant. His gripping story is detailed in a new book, American Spartan, by Ann Scott Tyson, the former Washington Post war correspondent who interviewed him for an admiring story in late 2009. They fell in love. Tyson eventually joined Gant in an Afghan village, where he built a reputation mobilizing local tribes against the Taliban.

A tough, wiry Special Forces soldier, Gant was decorated and recommended for promotion over 22 continuous months of combat in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. But in the end, the iconoclasm and disdain for military protocol that enabled Gant’s success were instrumental in his eventual downfall.

At his peak, Gant, now 46, posed such a threat to al Qaeda’s objectives that Osama bin Laden personally demanded his head, Tyson writes. Gant's lows came later, when he was accused by the military command of drinking and other violations, including keeping a "paramour,” and using tactics that recklessly endangered the lives of his troops. At the heart of the military's discomfort, Gant believes, was his insistence that he could trust his life, and those of his men, to the tribal Afghan fighters he'd trained and armed to reverse the Taliban’s spread across eastern Afghanistan.

To reach these tribes, Gant took a few seasoned Special Forces warriors "downrange," deep into rural communities where the Taliban held sway. He spent hours drinking tea and listening to village elders. He and his men grew beards. They wore Afghan clothing and learned to speak Pashto. They trained and armed village tribesmen and pledged their lives to one another. In the nonconformist tradition of the Green Berets, Gant shrugged away the U.S. military bureaucracy, with its thickets of regulations, codified as official Tactics, Techniques and Procedures. Among them: rules for specific combat operations that dictate the number of troops, types of vehicles and types of weapons used -- requirements often ignored by Special Forces teams, and especially by Gant.

Read the rest of it HERE


America has lost its will to win and Mullholland is a tool. If Churchill was running this war, Gant would have been made a General. But he's not and the piss-poor excuse for a human being we've got at the very top hasn't got a clue what a hero looks like and could care even less.

I'm a Green Beret and you earn the Green Beret every day. Mullholland needs to turn his Green Beret in he forfeited it the day he burned Major Gant . . . DISGRACEFUL . . .

STORMBRINGER SENDS