BlackFive

Noah Shachtman has a piece up at the Wall Street Journal about the Wikileaks reports.  Shachtman was embedded with a unit last summer that was in a firefight that shows up in the leaked battlefield reports:

Echo company got into a gunfight last Aug. 25 in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. You'll learn that by reading the report found in WikiLeaks's database of Afghan war documents released on Sunday night. You'll learn that, after a chase, the Marines killed one insurgent. You'll learn that the insurgents supposedly fled and that the troops decided to stay the night in the area in case the militants returned.

What you won't learn is that a Marine sniper team sparked the shoot-out with a surprise assault on the insurgents; that every member of that team was nearly killed in the battle; or that the incident would kick off a three-day siege in which the Taliban nearly surrounded the Echo company squad...

I received many emails about this report on some of the back channel sources that I still read.  This piece is picking up momentum so go check it out.