{"id":59899,"date":"2016-08-10T06:00:20","date_gmt":"2016-08-10T11:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=59899"},"modified":"2016-08-08T08:51:21","modified_gmt":"2016-08-08T13:51:21","slug":"uncommon-valor-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=59899","title":{"rendered":"Uncommon Valor"},"content":{"rendered":"

A company of 88 British paratroopers and Irish infantry, outnumbered six to one, hold out for two months without reinforcements<\/a>…<\/p>\n

And their near miraculous survival has been described as a latter day Rorke\u2019s Drift, evocative of the 1879 siege in which 140 British soldiers held off a Zulu force of 3,000, later immortalised in the blockbuster film starring Michael Caine.
\nFor 56 days in the autumn of 2006, the men at Musa Qala faced constant fire from fixed machine gun posts and mortars.
\nHungry and frequently at the point of exhaustion, they were forced to somehow fend off 360-degree attacks from the Taliban, with little protection beyond a series of low mud walls.
\nThey used up a quarter of all the British Army\u2019s Afghan ammunition for that entire year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and are barred from talking about it for ten years. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet while Rorke\u2019s Drift has been immortalised in film and resulted in 11 Victoria Crosses, Musa Qala has been reduced to a controversial footnote in the history of the Afghan conflict.
\nIt does not serve Whitehall well for details of such a poorly resourced mission to be revealed.
\nSteve Humphries, the award-winning producer who has painstakingly put the jigsaw of pieces together for broadcast a decade later, says: \u2018It\u2019s a shocking account of what was supposed to be a peaceful mission to help bring security and stability to the region.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The whole thing is worth a read – and I may see if the BBC streams it next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A company of 88 British paratroopers and Irish infantry, outnumbered six to one, hold out for two months without reinforcements… And their near miraculous survival has been described as a latter day Rorke\u2019s Drift, evocative of the 1879 siege in which 140 British soldiers held off a Zulu force of 3,000, later immortalised in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-media","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59900,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59899\/revisions\/59900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}