File this in the “department of little-known tales about the Special Forces”: the Taliban, fearful and confused, believed the Americans possessed a “death ray” that could incinerate any target. This and other colorful nuggets about the Special Forces can be found on an excellent website for a PBS documentary that aired a few weeks ago. A Special Forces soldier recalled how General Rashid Dostum exploited, to ingenius advantage, the Taliban misperceptions: “At Kunduz, we were negotiating back and forth to try to get these guys to surrender. They were saying, ‘We’ll surrender, we’ll march into your camp, but we want to keep our guns.’ Dostum finally said, ‘Put your guns down, take your jackets off, march in here or we’re turning the Americans onto you with the death ray.’ Instantly you could see the guys bend over. They put their guns down, they took their cloaks off and they started marching in, in single file right up into the middle of our perimeter, because they knew that it was over if that death ray was coming out.” Another Special Forces soldier provided the best explanation, or at least the most colorful one, of the strangeness of the war: “This whole situation is like the Flintstones meet the Jetsons.”
