"Outnumbered 8 to 1"

My hats off to these "guys" fighting for their lives, over the holiday, in Iraq and Afghanistan. What a story as told in "One Marines View" blog about a firefight in Afghanistan. What started out to be an ambush of a Marine patrol, turned into a fight with the junkyard dog and some bad guys paying the ultimate price.

"During the battle, the designated marksman single handily thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machine gun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy fighters with his devastatingly accurate precision fire. He selflessly exposed himself time and again to intense enemy fire during a critical point in the eight-hour battle for Shewan in order to kill any enemy combatants who attempted to engage or maneuver on the Marines in the kill zone. What made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn't miss any shots, despite the enemies' rounds impacting within a foot of his fighting position." '"I was in my own little world,"' the young corporal said. '"I wasn't even aware of a lot of the rounds impacting near my position, because I was concentrating so hard on making sure my rounds were on target."

This story reminds me of desperate times the Marines had at Guadalcanal, of the tough fights where ones self is lost in the second by second fight for survival. My thanks to those few reporting such heroism. As the Marine says:

"Such an amazing story of heroism and victory would have been on Page One in every paper in the country during World War II. Just 30 Marines giving eight hours of hell to 250 insurgents is the kind of story that would make a good movie - if that kind of movie still could be made. But these days, it did not even make Page 10. I couldn't find a story about it anywhere. The only mentions were on conservative blogs and military Web sites. The soldiers who are fighting for their lives and our country might as well be in another dimension. News from the battlefronts in Iraq and Afghanistan is apparently not important. It reminds the jaded anti-war crowd that they were wrong. We're winning. It reminds a self-centered nation that some Americans are making sacrifices much bigger than a loss in their 401(k)s. So we don't hear about it. But we need to hear news like that, because a good day for the Marine Corps is a good day for freedom. And that's a good day for America"

Hats off to all those in "Harms Way".