War by video conference: how al Qaeda fought us to a draw in the biggest battle in Afghanistan.

• Author: Carter, Phillip
• Position: Not A Good Day To Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda - Book Review

Not A Good Day To Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda By Sean Naylor Berkley Hardcover; $25.95

The crew of the Chinook helicopter hovering above noticed the footprints in the snow as they prepared to land on Takur Ghar, a forbidding, 10,469-foot high peak overlooking the Shahikot Valley of eastern Afghanistan. It was just before 3:00 a.m. on March 4, 2002, and U.S. forces were launching Operation Anaconda to wipe out a contingent of Taliban and al Qaeda forces. An A.C.-130 gunship flying just ahead of them had seemed to confirm earlier intelligence that there was no significant enemy presence in the valley. But as the crew waited for the landing ramp to drop, an al Qaeda fighter fired his rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) into the Chinook, blowing out the electrical system and rendering the bird's navigational displays and radios useless. Shrapnel from a second RPG sliced through the aircraft, spraying hydraulic fluid all over the chopper floor. The Chinook had been on the ground for all of 45 seconds. Enemy soldiers were now visible to the naked eye, as was a donkey lashed to a tree and a goat or lamb carcass hanging from the branches.

Clearly, the intelligence had been wrong. As the helicopter began to lift, a 32-year-old Navy SEAL named Neil Roberts, perhaps unable to hear that the chopper was trying to take off, "made as if to jump." It isn't clear what happened next. A comrade made a frantic grab for Roberts in vain as he slid out of the aircraft onto the ground below.

After falling into the snow, Roberts was hit in the thigh, yet he continued to fight ferociously with his light machine gun. He was losing blood so rapidly that he couldn't resist as the enemy soldiers dragged him to their bunker. A little over an hour and a half after he had fallen from his chopper, Roberts was dead with a single gunshot to the head. The other SEALs on Roberts's chopper mounted a rescue attempt, only to find themselves trapped too by tenacious enemy fighters.

An Army Ranger quick-reaction force eventually reached the stranded SEALs, but they, too, were hit by ground fire on the way in. The temperature was in the 20s, and at nearly 10,500 feet, these fittest of men were exhausted. In spite of the conditions, the Americans prevailed, securing the hilltop long enough to bring in more helicopters to evacuate them. But victory came at a tremendous cost. Seven of America's most elite warriors--Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, and Air Force Para Jumpers--died on the mountain that day.

Although Operation Anaconda would become the largest infantry battle fought in Afghanistan, it has never received the kind of attention paid to the war in Iraq. Enter Sean Naylor's Not a Good Day to Die, a book based partly on his reporting as one of the first journalists "embedded" with U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. Naylor...