The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan »

With the pacing of a thriller and the examining eye of a true nature lover, outdoor enthusiast Eric Blehm's The Last Season heralds the arrival of "a big-league writer coming into full voice," observes Outside magazine. An accomplished writer and editor, Blehm spends plenty of time away from the keyboard and out in the great wide open.

On a moonless night just weeks after September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Forces team ODA 574 infiltrates the mountains of southern Afghanistan with a seemingly impossible mission: to foment a tribal revolt and force the Taliban to surrender. Armed solely with the equipment they can carry on their backs, shockingly scant intelligence, and their mastery of guerrilla warfare, Captain Jason Amerine and his men have no choice but to trust their only ally, a little-known Pashtun statesman named Hamid Karzai who has returned from exile and is being hunted by the Taliban as he travels the countryside raising a militia.

The Only Thing Worth Dying For chronicles the most important mission in the early days of the Global War on Terror, when the men on the ground knew little about the enemy—and their commanders in Washington knew even less. With unprecedented access to surviving members of ODA 574, key war planners, and Karzai himself, award-winning author Eric Blehm cuts through the noise of politicians and high-level military officials to narrate for the first time a story of uncommon bravery and terrible sacrifice, intimately exposing the realities of unconventional warfare and nation-building in Afghanistan that continue to shape the region today.

Publishers Weekly

The early, relatively heroic days of the conflict in Afghanistan are memorialized in this engrossing if glamorized war saga. Blehm (The Last Season, a B&N Discover Award winner) follows the exploits of Capt. Jason Amerine’s Special Forces team Alpha 574, which choppered into Afghanistan in November 2001 to help future Afghan president Hamid Karzai organize anti-Taliban insurgents in the south. The team’s mission—to turn chaotic and perpetually stoned Pashtun tribesmen into effective soldiers—seems impossible and, ultimately, proved unnecessary. Indeed, according to Blehm’s account, the Green Berets’ worst enemies were other Americans: meddling CIA honchos and army brass, a do-nothing Marine officer, and the air force spotter who mistakenly called in an air strike on 574’s position, with ghastly results. The author overplays the comradely bond between Karzai and Amerine, who come off as a latter-day Washington and Lafayette, but doesn’t quite succeed in wringing a military epic out of what was essentially a turkey shoot. Still, Blehm’s warts-and-all account of the U.S. military machine in action is full of tension, color, and real pathos. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Jan.)

Prologue 1

1 A Most Dangerous Mission 3

2 The Quiet Professionals 21

3 To War 47

4 The Soldier and the Statesman 67

5 The Taliban Patrol 95

6 The Battle of Tarin Kowt 111

7 Credibility 139

8 Madness 161

9 Death on the Horizon 201

10 The Ruins 233

11 The Thirteenth Sortie 259

12 Futility 283

13 Rescue at Shawali Kowt 299

14 Worth Dying For 321

Epilogue 341

Map of Tarin Kowt 352

Map of Shawali Kowt 354

Acknowledgments 357

Selected Bibliography 363

Notes 367