17 September 2009 will be remembered as one of the blackest days for the Folgore Parachute Brigade.
We are in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, and it is the 12.10 p.m. local time, 9.40 a.m. in Italy.
The two-armoured Lince patrol of the 186th Parachute Regiment Folgore commanded by the Parachutist Lieutenant Antonio Fortunato, is near the Massud roundabout, in the opposite direction to the airport. It is transporting to ISAF headquarters some soldiers who have returned from a short leave in Italy and were picked up right at Kabul airport.
Arriving at the roundabout Massoud Lieutenant Fortunato's Lynx blocks the road to his right to let the second vehicle pass.
A few dozen metres and from a side street an old white Toyota Corolla car slips in between the two vehicles.
It explodes.
The first vehicle holds the impact. Inside, the Lynx is incandescent. The rally driver, First Corporal Gian Domenico Pistonami is slumped inside. He is dead.
The injured, the 1st Air Force Marshal Felice Calandriello and the Paratroopers 1st Corporal Parachutists Rocco Leo, Sergio Agostinelli and Ferdinando Buono are stunned by the explosion. They get out of the vehicle and immediately receive gunshots: they return fire, securing the area by switching off the frequencies set on their radios: dozens of civilians quickly approach the vehicles and the bodies of the soldiers who died in the explosion.
An exemplary behaviour, the result of hard training work and a modus operandi that has always distinguished the Folgore Parachute Brigade: coolness and determination even in the most difficult situations.
Parachutist Rocco Leo later stated in the Sky's 'Reduci' docufilm that they thought only they had been caught in the explosion and that the first vehicle had managed to get inside the Italian embassy.
Around the area the devastation is total: cars, houses and shops destroyed. The scene is apocalyptic.
Lieutenant Fortunato's heavy Lince armoured car was thrown like a sheet of paper a hundred metres away. The car, it would later become known, was driven by a kamikaze and had 150 kg of explosives on board, according to the ROS investigation.
They died instantly on Parachutist Lieutenant Antonio Fortunato, the Parachutist Sergeant Major Roberto Valente, i First Parachute Corporal Massimiliano Randino, Davide Ricchiuto e Matteo Mureddu.
There were also many dead and wounded among the Afghans, including five policemen.
The news reached Italy immediately and the drama entered the families of the fallen and all Italians.
The claim came immediately, after a few minutes: a Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid claimed the attack in a text message reporting that a man named Hayutullah had blown himself up against the ISAF military convoy in the centre of the capital.
This is the biggest military loss in the international arena since the Nassirya attack of 12 November 2003.
Here comes the condolence of the highest offices of state.
Defence Minister La Russa, historically close to the Paratroopers of Italy will define in parliament "infamous and cowardly" the bombers.
The Parachute Brigade suspends all exercises in Italy, the municipality of Siena (headquarters of the 186th Regiment) postpones all scheduled appointments.
The bodies of the fallen will arrive in Italy on 20 September aboard a C-130, welcomed at Ciampino airport by the grieving but proud families of their husbands, sons and brothers.
Also present at the arrival of the bodies were the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano and other high state officials. The next day, 21 September, a day of national mourning, a solemn state funeral will be held in the basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome.
The event, presided over by Monsignor Vincezo Pelvi, Military Ordinary, will be broadcast worldwide by RAI.
It is a sad day, where an entire nation rallies around six young lives deprived of their future for having fulfilled to the full the duties the state had assigned them.
It is a sad day where thousands of Paratroopers, wearing the glorious amaranth beret, will invade Rome and the Basilica to honour their brothers fallen in arms.
Meanwhile, in Kabul, the Folgore continued to carry out its work with an operational efficiency that will leave all coalition allies stunned ISAF.
It was precisely this modus operandi on the part of the men in the amaranth beret that annoyed the rioters.
The military considerations about this attack are well known: the Italians, the Folgore in particular, were 'bothering' the Taliban militia. The Folgore in these months mission did not stay in tents and patrol the centres of large cities.
The Folgore went further. Because of the conformity of its units (in this respect it was defined by General Bertolini, ISAF Chief of Staff, 'one of a kind') carried out an unprecedented hunt for the Taliban.
It went deep, made itself felt in the furthest places, giving security to peoples overwhelmed by terrorist mentality.
And it annoyed. It annoyed to the point of being hit with a violence never seen even in these places.
But it did not back down. Parachutist Colonel Aldo Zizzo, Commander of the 186th Regiment, on the day after the attack, during the flag-raising declared to his men that despite the losses "...the mission goes on. We will not leave Afghanistan a minute earlier than planned at the beginning of the mission'.
And it went on, because as always, as happened to El Alamein sixty years earlier, and as happened in Mogadishu on 2 July 1993, the Paratroopers of Italy showed that they can bend, but never break.
Thus reiterating the concept: drop the coward, not the Folgore.
