The War Logs: Real-Time Violence
BY Nick Judd | Monday, July 26 2010
Veteran New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers used the War Logs released Sunday by Wikileaks to pull together an account of a bloody battle between insurgents and American soldiers not unlike the dispatches he has filed from the field for years.
But this article by the former Marine infantry officer was different. It's an account made possible thanks to documents released on the Internet — and the documents themselves are electronic communications filed in real time by soldiers as they took incoming fire.
The story of Combat Outpost Keating begins like this: The outpost was opened in 2006 in the Kamdesh district in Afghanistan, in a northeastern province thick with mountainous and forested terrain. Initial contacts with the locals were fruitful, but insurgent forces pushed back with propaganda and intimidation, Chivers writes, drawing on the secret documents that Julian Assange and Wikileaks obtained, and gave the Times and two other media outlets a first look at.
The outpost was ordered closed, but was not evacuated until after a bloody firefight that was documented in part by soldiers typing secure messages to higher-ups as the beleaguered base took heavy fire.
Chivers:
But before Combat Outpost Keating could be closed, the insurgents struck.
Early on Oct. 3, they massed for a coordinated attack, pounding the little outpost with mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades and raking it from above with heavy machine-gun fire.
Groups of gunmen rushed the post’s defensive wire. They simultaneously hit a smaller observation post nearby. At least 175 enemy gunmen were involved in the offensive; some accounts described a force twice that size.
The first classified summaries of the attack are a frightening record of a small unit caught at the juncture between old and new ways to fight the war. They depict American troops isolated and overwhelmed on enemy turf. The reports include excerpts of real-time computer messages to headquarters typed by soldiers in the outpost and accounts of pilots who attacked the insurgents from the air.
At first, the outpost reported that Keating and the observation post were “IN HEAVY CONTACT.”
Typing in the casual familiarity of Internet chat, on a secure server, a soldier immediately asked that an “Air Tic Be Opened.”
That was military jargon for shifting available close-air support to troops taking fire. The sense of urgency was clear; the reason chilling.
“We need it now,” another soldier typed. “We have mortars pinned down and fire coming from everywhere.”
Eight American soldiers were among the dead, alongside several Afghan soldiers and guards, and — if their initial field reports are accurate — then anyone in the world with an Internet connection can read primary source documents from the attack that lead to those soldiers' deaths.