FNC reporter Greg Palkot was on "Fox & Friends" this morning talking about his recent embedment in Afghanistan, and all I can say is that Palkot (above, negotiating the terrain with the Marines during "Operation Mountain Lion") is one tough son of a gun:
PALKOT: I have been on many, many military embedments for Fox News in the last five years since Sept. 11th, but I can say without reservation that I am just back from the roughest embedment I have ever been on... Osama bin Laden has been known to frequent the mountains and the caves there...The terrain [the marines] are dealing with, 100-pound packs, getting over that terrain, just as difficult. The guys had weapons on their backs. We had TV gear on our backs, so we felt their pain.
And anytime your nine-to-five includes identifying and keeping very close track of several different kinds of gunfire and explosions that are happening in your personal space, well, then you are not just tough but awesomely cool under pressure: check out this bit of Palkot's televised reporting from on the ground in Afghanistan:
PALKOT: Behind me, you're hearing gunfire, very certainly could be insurgent elements here in this Kunar province, we're near one of the villages thought to be harboring many, many terrorists. We've been seeing tracer fire over the hillside here. You can catch that. Also an illumination flare could be sent up by either side to try to pinpoint, try to find the people on the ground here, that is the terrorists, as well as the marines themselves."
And that, as they say, is not the half of it: witness Greg's most recent "Operation Mountain Lion" reporter's notebook:
The Chinook arrives, and we trundle out. The officer barks at us to move faster. Not easy when you're carrying 80-plus pounds. Then, as we stand beneath the whirring chopper blades, we're turned around and told to go back. Our bird has sprung a gas leak. We'll have to find another. Oh boy, that's a great start.
Several other choppers come and go before ours arrives and we pile in. It's about 1:30 a.m. now. Noisy. Crowded. Dark. We only have to travel a few minutes and a few miles, but it's over tall mountains. I look ahead and I can see through the front windshield. It's an incredible sight. The chopper appears ready to crash head-on into the side of one precipice after another, only to veer away at the last moment. It's disorienting, and after watching this for about five minutes, I stop.
We finally stop at our drop-off point. It's the wrong one, but we'll go with it. I was informed by Lt. Desantis, the Commander of D.O. Platoon, that we'd have to hike about 150 feet away and wait a bit. That's when I realized that nothing would be quite as fluid as it had been presented. We marched up sharp sand-shifting ground — altitude about 9,000 feet — as fast as we can...
Greg Palkot, bringing it.
