Team Apache battles tough terrain, Taliban

[unhappycamper]

Humvees bearing members of the 4th Infantry Regiment's 3rd Platoon, Company A, 1st Battalion ford the Arghandab River in Zabul Province, Afghanistan, on Friday.


Team Apache battles tough terrain, Taliban
By Seth Robson, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Sunday, December 16, 2007

FORWARD OPERATING BASE LANE, Afghanistan — Zabul province, on Afghanistan’s porous border with Pakistan, is a land of rugged mountains and parched valleys where luckless inhabitants scratch out an existence growing almonds or throw their lot in with the Taliban for a few dollars a day.

This is the battleground for Team Apache — a company of Hohenfels, Germany-based soldiers from 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, charged with securing three districts covering hundreds of square miles.

The soldiers, who have been in country since late July, fall under Task Force Zabul, led by the Romanian army’s 33rd Mountain Infantry Battalion. The task force fights out of Forward Operating Base Lagman in the provincial capital of Qalat — a city of 10,000 people — and secures Highway 1, the main road linking Kabul to Kandahar.

Lagman, also home to a U.S. provincial reconstruction team, sits on a hill overlooking Qalat. On another hill stands an ancient fortification that locals call Alexander’s Castle, a reference to Alexander the Great, the Greek conqueror who founded the nearest large city, Kandahar, in 330 B.C.

Members of the 1-4’s Headquarters Platoon here and at Kandahar spend days and nights loading and unloading Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters with ammunition, food, water and building materials to supply the unit’s three outer FOBs — Lane, in Arghandab District; Mizan, in Mizan District; and Baylough, in Dey Chopan District.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=51020