On January 19, 2010, the New America Foundation hosted U.S. Army Major Jason Amerine, and author Eric Blehm who chronicled the expeditions of Major Amerine and his Special Forces unit in his new book, The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan.

Major Amerine first explained that the goal of his unit was to overthrow the Taliban and install a new Afghani leader. They planned to keep the Northern Alliance in the North, to build a Pashtun guerrilla army under Hamid Karzai’s command, and to seize the important cities of both Tarin Kowt and Kandahar. The plan was simple but held frequent possibilities of failure. Major Amerine himself declared that “it could have gone either way.” Only an estimated thirty American troops were on-site to help the Afghan guerrillas while the guerrillas themselves were ill-trained and frequently fled. The townspeople, however, emerged to join the battle, and with the help of devastating air strikes, the Taliban were successfully beaten away.

Eric Blehm explained that his inspiration for documenting Captain Amerine’s story stemmed from the September 11th attacks. Like many other Americans, he felt a desire to do something for the military men and women abroad and decided to write an account of one of the many untold stories of counterterrorism. Blehm concluded his talk by emphasizing that he wrote this story with no agenda except to write as accurate an account as possible, in order to honor the deeds of the soldiers who fought for American safety in 2001.