On the morning of September 11, 2001 the U.S. suffered a direct attack by foreign terrorists. Commercial airliners were hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon killing over 3000 Amercians. Not since Pearl Harbor, 60 years ago, has the U.S. been directly attacked. In less than a month, U.S. Special Forces were deployed to Afghanistan to track down Osama Bin Laden, his Al Qaeda terrorist group and the Taliban government and pave the way for a punishing U.S. military response code named, "Enduring Freedom."
After two weeks of massive airstrikes, the U.S. opened the ground phase of the war in mid October. Under the cover of darkness, U.S. Army Rangers parachuted from three transports onto a Taliban airfield southwest of Kandahar, the first known combat air drop by U.S. forces since Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989. Videos appeared to show more than a 100 Rangers jump from a low altitude above the desert airfield, a Taliban fighter's worst nightmare. The Rangers, in addition to gathering intelligence, cleared and destroyed buildings at the airfield, and a small cache of Taliban weapons and ammunition. They encountered "light" resistance and suffered no casualties in the attack. |
