Includes bibliographical references (pages [411]-414) and index.

"It was America's first battle of the twenty-first century. At dawn on March 2, 2002, over two hundred soldiers of the 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain Divisions flew into the mouth of a buzz saw in Afghanistan's Shahikot Valley. They were about to pay a price in blood for strategic miscalculations at much higher levels of command." "Believing the war in Afghanistan to be all but over, senior leaders in the Pentagon and at U.S. Central Command refused to commit the forces required to achieve total victory there. Responsibility for fighting the war's biggest battle - a battle that offered the opportunity to wipe out hundreds of Al Qaida fighters and kill or capture some of the most senior terrorist leaders - was delegated instead to a hodgepodge of units thrown together at the last moment in a process their staff officers referred to as "ad hocracy."" "The soldiers who flew into the Shahikot that frigid morning were executing a plan that was the product of negotiation and compromise, and which was based on a series of faulty assumptions that underestimated the enemy's strength and willingness to stand and fight." "Naylor exposes the mistakes behind a hellish mountaintop fire-fight in which seven brave Americans gave their lives. He tells for the first time the extraordinary story of how thirteen commandos drawn from America's most secret units crept unseen over frozen ridgelines and through snow-clogged mountain passes into the midst of hundreds of hardened enemy fighters and in doing so prevented a U.S. military catastrophe."--JACKET.