Sean Naylor’s Not a Good Day to Die (Naylor 2005) recounts the courage and organizational mishaps by SOF and coalition conventional forces in the one of the largest military operations in the post-9/11 era, Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, which took place in March 2002.

for nearly two years in the fastnesses of the Polar ice, striving to carry out the ordained task and ignorant of the crises through which the world was passing,

De Long tried to hug the floes but not too closely, for they often had sharp tongues projecting underwater that could ground the boats—or rip a hull apart. The waves constantly gnawed at the ice, honeycombing it with tunnels and hidden voids. “The ice was very much wasted,” De Long wrote, “and had numerous holes extending through to the sea.”