Military officials reported light resistance in the opening hours of combat.
After several hours of combat, the lines around Kunduz were mostly unchanged.
Blakeslee flew almost 500 missions in four years, accumulating nearly 1,000 hours of combat flying.
He had logged more than 1,900 flight hours, with 90 hours of combat and combat support time in B-52G and EC-130H aircraft.
But as he explained in a telephone interview from Afghanistan, the Afghan allies never arrived and his troops became the pointed end of the spear engaging adversaries in the first 18 hours of combat.
The general has more than 450 hours of combat flight experience over Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq and Bosnia, and he has flown F-16 and F-15 fighters and T-37 and T-38 trainers.
Looking at the vintage aircraft, you can't help but feel amazed on multiple fronts: at the scope of the ambition; at the sophisticated feats of engineering; at the hours of combat and suffering once associated with such polished mechanisms.
In the evenings, we'd spend our last weary moments — our respite from the hours of combat training — lolling around in our tents and watching with morbid fixation the parade of ambulances; our eyes tracked these dust-caked vans through a thick haze of cigarette smoke that rose and fell in bluish undulations.
The film, almost entirely autobiographical, is of course about something more: the hunger and shock of war, especially in the first hours of combat, when ordinary teenagers become transformed into soldiers, and killing becomes not just acceptable but a matter of indifference.
Clarence E. Anderson, 78, is a World War II Triple Ace who shot down 16.25 airplanes (five are needed to be ranked as an ace; the.25 was a hit he shared with three other planes) in 116 missions and 480 hours of combat duty over Europe.
