Last week, Military Times concluded its five-part series "Task Force Violent: The unforgiven."
The series is the first full account of the truth about Marine Special Operations Company Foxtrot's controversial 2007 firefight at Boti Kot in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, a region still gripped by violence as tragically illustrated by Wednesday's insider attack that left one American service member dead and another seven wounded. It's an unsettling tale of how those Marines survived a roadside ambush by killing their attackers — only to quickly be portrayed as possible war criminals by top military commanders more immediately concerned with political fallout than the ground truth.
The complete account is available here:
READ PART 1: The tragic betrayal of an elite American commando unit
READ PART 2: The generals resisted MARSOC. Their Marines paid the price
READ PART 3: Marines survived this nightmare. No one believed their story
READ PART 4: Embattled commandos came under fire — on the home front
READ PART 5: Now on the outside, betrayed Marines fight to recapture stolen honor
These stories each provide insights on the critical importance of supporting service members even as their battlefield conduct is under scrutiny and of the human impact of failing to do that.
Staff writer Andrew deGrandpre's reporting, based on examination of thousands of pages of previously classified documents and on dozens of interviews, reveals the story that has never been told, of how Fox Company — the first Marine Corps Special Operations Command unit sent into combat — had been set up to fail from Day One. Task Force Violent, as the team dubbed itself, was sent into the war zone dangerously under-resourced only to be orphaned once in theater without a clearly defined mission.
But when a military tribunal definitively cleared Fox Company of wrongdoing in the March 4, 2007, firefight, the Marines' exoneration never received the same intense media scrutiny of the initial allegations. The ordeal left many of these men shattered — casualties, they say, of a politicized war and the sensational coverage by a media fed a story that sacrificed the truth from the outset, a truth only now coming to light. Members of the unit say they bear physical and mental scars yet to heal.
When MARSOC next year marks its 10-year anniversary, the Marine Corps should acknowledge that the men of Fox Company unfailingly conducted themselves as good Marines when they came face to face with the enemy. In doing so, the service would help restore their honor, and a measure of its own.
Fox Company's direct-action special-reconnaissance platoon, members of which were falsely implicated in one of the most notorious war-crimes cases since 9/11.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fred Galvin
