‘Viper’s Nest’ reminds Americans they are not alone in Afghanistan - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

‘Viper’s Nest’ reminds Americans they are not alone in Afghanistan

The book is dedicated “to the fallen, of every nationality and creed.”

The “killed in action” list of 26 includes names from Denmark, the U.S. and the United Kingdom. The index, divided into categories including Afghan, British and U.S. units, also denotes multinational coalition groups.

British journalist Stephen Grey’s book, a dramatic record of the 2007 battle for the city of Musa Qala, is distinctive in its reminder to some readers that Americans are not alone in Afghanistan. The territory is historically familiar to the British Army, which has “returned to the banks of the Helmand after a gap of 126 years.”

And the other-side-of-the-Atlantic perspective unexpectedly compares the Taliban to the Irish Republican Army: “One senior British intelligence source pointed out to me that the lessons from the battle against the IRA were that terrorist leaders only entered into meaningful talks once they grew tired of the fighting.”

The author, who received the 2005 Amnesty International Media Award for reporting on the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programs, gives most of the space to the International Security Assistance Force operation, headed by Task Force 1 Fury: 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division and including Scots Guards and Royal Commando Marines. Grey reports from his experience as an embedded reporter and as an interviewer.

He also analyzes the bigger picture. “Viper’s Nest” asks whether the presence of western troops will make a difference in a land where “the Taliban were strong because the Afghan government was weak.”

One observer believes “the whole Musa Qala operation had not been so much about restoring the power of the Afghan government in the valley but about wresting back control of the opium trade.”

The country is a place where “it was as if rebellion was spreading, not from an organized leadership, but from the smoldering embers of discontent with [President Hamid] Karzai’s government.”

What about tomorrow? “I am no soldier or general,” Grey writes, but “I could think of no worse thing than to give up and fail in this campaign — to leave this great country to fall into chaos and into a far, far worse civil war.”

But the book’s focus is the chronicle of a battle.

One soldier is U.K. Sgt. Lee “Jonno” Johnson, a boxer and judo champion with a thick Yorkshire accent. In civilian life, “Everyone who wanted to prove himself in a bar wanted to take Jonno on” and the soldier usually complied.

He was about to fight for his life in Musa Qala. “But was he going to come back alive? He was getting spooked ...

“He’d had a night with his brother to mull things over. Lance Corporal Don Johnson was deployed to Afghanistan in the same regiment as Jonno.”

In a pre-battle e-mail, Jonno tells his fiancée that “this is the biggest thing since D-Day and I am not lying. I am worried.”

His premonition is sadly accurate. Jonno dies when his Vector vehicle strikes a Soviet anti-tank mine. “Both of Jonno’s legs had been amputated in the blast. No one could survive that. Jonno must have died instantaneously.

“He had felt no pain,” but a reader does.