In the ensuing 13 hour battle, 27 American soldiers were wounded and 8 lost their lives. On October 3, 2009, only three days before the outpost dismantling was to begin, the Taliban launched a horrific attack by an estimated 300 personnel against an outpost manpower that included 50 Americans and an Afghani military force of about 30. By then, the military realized that the outpost was extremely dangerous because the Taliban enemy held the high ground and rendered the location nearly impossible to defend. In 2009, the American Army’s Black Knight Troop was sent to Keating to close down the base that was set up only three years earlier. In RED PLATOON, author and Metal of Honor recipient, Staff Sergeant Clinton Romesha gives a first-hand account of the brutal attack on combat outpost Keating, the most remote outpost in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. His latest review is for the book RED PLATOON: A TRUE STORY OF AMERICAN VALOR by Clinton Romesha. I'd like to welcome back my dad to Booking Mama. Red Platoon is the riveting first-hand account of the Battle of Keating, told by Romesha, who spearheaded both the defense of the outpost and the counter-attack that drove the Taliban back beyond the wire, and received the Medal of Honor for his actions. The ensuing 14-hour battle-and eventual victory-cost 8 men their lives.

On October 3, 2009, after years of constant smaller attacks, the Taliban finally decided to throw everything they had at Keating. Three years after its construction, the army was finally ready to concede what the men on the ground had known immediately: it was simply too isolated and too dangerous to defend. military in Nuristan and Kunar in the hope of preventing Taliban insurgents from moving freely back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2009, Clinton Romesha of Red Platoon and the rest of the Black Knight Troop were preparing to shut down Command Outpost (COP) Keating, the most remote and inaccessible in a string of bases built by the U.S. Summary: “‘It doesn’t get better.’ To us, that phrase nailed one of the essential truths, maybe even the essential truth, about being stuck at an outpost whose strategic and tactical vulnerabilities were so glaringly obvious to every soldier who had ever set foot in that place that the name itself-Keating-had become a kind of backhanded joke.”

Red platoon book