Fearless

by Eric Blehm

  Minutes later the MH-47s disappeared, and the assault force made its way down into the forest, which was nourished by a creek that tumbled through the gorge. Though the area had been thoroughly scouted from above, Chris could see that being in the bottom of the ravine, with high ground above them, was a no-win situation if an enemy machine gun emplacement had been overlooked. They would be cut to ribbons.

  The sniper team led the way through the rocky, wooded chaos, followed by the assault force that included a small contingent of Afghan Special Forces soldiers with an interpreter, and two groups of American light infantrymen who would take up blocking positions as the SEALs carried out their raid. Two of the infantrymen had hit the ground so hard roping in that they’d broken their night-vision goggles. Hobbled but determined, they had no choice but to buddy walk, virtually blind, over the brutal terrain.

  After a couple of hours spent negotiating cliffs, traversing avalanche paths, and fording rivers and streams, the Afghans—renowned for being both hearty and nimble in their mountainous element—could not keep up the pace. The interpreter, the strongest Afghan, later described the SEALs and their American military counterparts as “machines.” “They would not stop,” he said.

  The inclusion of these Afghan troops, their physical endurance aside, was a political partnership that none of the SEALs were particularly happy about. While the SEALs carried around fifty or sixty pounds, they’d made sure the Afghan loads topped out at thirty. At one point Adam shouldered an Afghan’s rucksack on top of his own load, giving the man a half-hour breather while the line moved forward. At three hours, the same man lay down on the ground and moaned that he couldn’t go on. Adam picked him up and pushed him down the goat path. At four hours, the man slipped, falling thirty yards down a steep granite face, and Adam hurried down to him with the interpreter.

  “Look,” Adam said forcefully. “You gotta man up; there’s no other way out of here. When the sun comes up, we’re either going to get swarmed by enemy or we’ll be gone. The only way out is down this valley and through the target. So get up or we’re going to leave you right here.”

  About three-quarters of the way to the objective, after the assault force’s route merged into a man-made trail, a dog began to bark ferociously from a small enclave of rock-and-timber huts that air reconnaissance had missed. When an unarmed man wearing a shalwar kameez appeared in a doorway, a contingent of SEALs stopped to speak to him and search the premises. They found tools, cooking utensils, clothing, and bedding—no radios or weapons—but they informed the Afghan that he and his family of seven were being watched, and instructed him to keep everyone inside their homes until after sunrise. If they did not follow these instructions explicitly, they would be killed.

  The doors to the rest of the huts were closed up tight, not a sound heard from within, and the SEALs continued toward Objective Lake James.

  At the rally point, a few hundred yards outside the mountain hamlet where the target resided, the sniper team radioed back its status. There was no time to rest. It had taken over two hours longer than expected to reach the area, and morning was fast approaching. As soon as the rest of the assault force began to arrive, the snipers moved forward to recon the village.

  Along with women, children, and the elderly, every single building Tom and his fellow snipers passed likely held the enemy as well. Tom knew they were completely surrounded and outnumbered, but “after eight years of war,” he says, “we’d been doing it so much, I felt, ‘I’ve got every advantage in the world on these guys.’ I was superconfident.”

  Adding to that confidence, there was no smell from cooking fires and the “eyes in the sky”—intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR)—reported thermal images of people sleeping throughout the valley and almost no movement. From thousands of feet overhead, every SEAL on the ground was immediately informed when an Afghan male stepped outside a hut to urinate, then quickly went back inside. Without night-vision goggles, the world was black, and in the blackness the SEALs found comfort.

  It had taken over six hours for the final remnants of the assault force—the Afghans, prodded by Adam the entire way—to reach the objective rally point. This was late, but not late enough to warrant aborting the mission. No man had completed the journey without numerous falls; one SEAL estimated he’d gone down at least fifteen times, and they were all bloodied, bruised, and fatigued. There was no time to acknowledge any of that, though. The sun would be up in a few hours, and every one of the Americans remembered clearly the intelligence officer’s final remark that capped their briefing:

  “When you get there, be ready for a fight.”

  18

  I Got It!

  “IT’S HARD TO DESCRIBE TO SOMEBODY who hasn’t been in these mountains, and visited these villages, just how badass the Objective Lake James op was,” says an Army NCO (noncommissioned officer) who was on a mortar team at one of the forward operating bases that James had been attacking.

  “Think of it like they infiltrated a hornet’s nest, which is way gnarlier than just kicking it. That whole area was swarming with hard-core Taliban, so they snuck into that valley like it was the entrance to the nest, and they crept past all these hornets who were asleep and went straight for the queen that was James. And then they went ahead and kicked him right in the head, knowing the entire swarm was there on top of them and they still had to get out of the nest. Crazy thing is, these guys were okay with that.”

  Deep inside the hornet’s nest, the assault force moved in staggered formation down the sides of the village’s main thoroughfare: a narrow, rutted dirt road. Stone and earthen-walled dwellings built into the face of a rugged mountain flanked their left side. On their right were a few sporadic buildings whose roofs they could literally step onto, as the slope continued dropping off steeply into farming terraces, all the way to the valley floor a quarter mile below.

  The road veered left, following the contour of the mountain, and buildings appeared on the opposite side of the valley in more stair-stepping terraces, a sleeping honeycomb of enemy intermixed with the local population. Amid the confluence of crowded structures on the left and descending terraces on the right was James’s compound. A bit wider and perhaps twice the length of a basketball court, it was built on its own terrace and surrounded by eight-foot walls. Its western wall—one of the short sides of the rectangular compound—was against the mountain, while the remaining walls jutted out and overlooked the valley.

  Spreading out, a primary assault team of SEALs enveloped the compound, including Adam, who moved to the eastern wall. Meanwhile, Heath Robinson topped the southern wall, where the main gate was. From the images he’d reviewed in planning, Heath already knew there were two structures, a residence spanning the western wall and a smaller barn with animal pens at the northeast corner. Now he took a mental snapshot of the inside of the compound: the number of doors and windows, a tree in the center of the large courtyard, and a porch—inset into the residence—on which two men were asleep.

  As the SEAL assault team moved closer, one of the men on the porch abruptly sat up and scanned the darkness. Then “he picked up his AK,” says Heath. “He heard something, and then he pointed his gun at me. And I was only thirty feet away. Besides the AK, there were some other identifying factors that told me, without a doubt, this was a Taliban fighter. And by the way he handled his weapon, he knew what he was doing.”

  Because the stars on this clear, cold night offered, at best, shadowy definition for the naked eye, the SEALs were concealed by darkness as they peered into the courtyard. From atop the wall Heath read the fighter’s body language, and when the man—whom Heath was all but certain was James—moved his finger onto the trigger, “that’s when I pulled the trigger, because I wasn’t going to take the chance.” Heath’s suppressed shot was a click no louder than a staple gun, and the fighter dropped instantly.

  The other man immediately rose up, spraying bullets with his AK-47 out into the night. Positioned on high ground
beyond the northwest corner of the compound, Tom monitored the situation through his rifle’s scope. Okay, he thought, that woke up the neighbors.

  The second fighter dropped as quickly as he had risen. More gunfire followed as another man ran into the courtyard, firing toward the gate and compound walls. At least three SEALs, including Tom, simultaneously took him out: three of the enemy were now dead, within ten seconds. A moment of complete silence followed; the smell of gunpowder hung in the air.

  Two doors on opposite sides of the porch flew open and people ran out of the residence, screaming. Holding their fire, the SEALs, communicating via radio headsets, reported five women and five young children. Three of the children huddled on the porch, bathed in the dim glow of a kerosene lantern or candle inside one of the rooms. The other two followed the women as they moved in a group to a dead fighter, crying out frantically, throwing up their arms, and wailing—“which we’ve learned can be part of an act,” says Heath, who remained vigilant, his finger poised by the trigger of his rifle.

  One woman pulled a military chest rack bulging with ammunition from a body, and the wailing group returned to the porch, where she hid it under some bushes. Says Heath, “You know you’re dealing with bad guys when the women are trained to create a diversion to retrieve and then conceal weapons and ammo. It’s rehearsed. They’re hiding the evidence, and then they tell everybody that these guys were unarmed.”

  In the same fashion the crying women removed the chest racks from the other two bodies. “It was chaotic,” says Tom. “The women were jumping around and the interpreter was doing all he could, shouting out in the local dialect that they were surrounded by coalition forces and to freeze and put their hands up.” At that moment a SEAL blew the lock on the gate and swung it open, providing an exit for the women and children as well as any remaining fighters who might surrender.

  The women appeared to be lining up per the interpreter’s instructions when Heath reported on the radio, “The one in the dark-colored robe just picked up an AK. She’s hiding it under her robe.” Tom confirmed seeing the same action from his angle, and the assault team leader, Rick Martinez, relayed this to the interpreter, who yelled something along the lines of, “We saw that, lady! Drop the weapon!”

  Instead, she pulled the AK-47 out and began to wave it about wildly, endangering numerous concealed SEALs. At least three trained their gun sights on her. “The bad guys have spread the word that we’re heartless, mindless killers,” says Tom. “We are not. We play by the rules. We had the right to drop her where she stood, but everybody showed restraint.”

  From eight feet up on the wall, Heath diligently watched the woman’s trigger finger as she continued to brandish the weapon. “Drop it!” the interpreter shouted again. “Drop the weapon now or you will be shot.”

  The children, on the porch and pressed up against the four other women, cried and screamed as the armed woman advanced on the gate, appearing both angry and determined. Machine-gun fire sounded, outside the compound’s walls but nearby; from their flanking position, the light infantrymen were firing warning shots ahead of approaching locals, some of whom were armed but had not raised their weapons.

  “As all that’s going down,” says Heath, “a guy with a pistol in his hand comes out of a door on the near side of the porch and crouches behind the kids while he bolts across the porch. I’m tracking him but I can’t get a shot—I don’t want to shoot the kids. He runs into the door on the far side and slams it shut.”

  Outside the open gate, four SEALs were against the wall, ready to move in. The armed woman was now only a couple of strides away from the gate, and Heath was going to have to make the decision to shoot her. It was the last thing he wanted to do, but any minute she might charge through the gate and open fire. She was directly below him when he bellowed out in Pashto, praying she would listen, “Drop it! Now!”

  Startled, the woman looked up, set the gun on the ground, put her hands over her head, and walked through the gate. She was searched and seated along the wall, then quickly joined by the other women and the children. As Afghan soldiers guarded them, a SEAL asked who lived in the compound, who remained inside, and whether that included any more women and children. He briefly held a red-lens flashlight on each of their faces so they could account for those present.

  “They were adamant,” says Brian Bill. “ ‘There is nobody inside the building,’ they said. We told them, ‘Okay, we are going to blow the building up, but we don’t want anyone to get hurt. Do you want to reconsider your answer?’

  “ ‘Nope,’ they said. ‘Nobody is inside. We are just simple farmers.’ ”

  From inside the residence an unseen shooter, presumably the man who had darted across the porch, began to fire randomly through the windows into the courtyard. At the same time, the assault team began to take what is known as ineffective fire—mostly AK-47, but some light machine gun as well—from buildings both close by and across the valley. “When you hear a bullet whack the wall by your head,” says Brian, “you know how effective that ineffective fire could have been.”

  It had been confirmed via multiple intelligence sources and surveillance techniques that the men in this compound were James and his Taliban militants. With three fighters dead, it had already been a semi-successful mission, but there was no way for the SEALs to verify that James was among them without exposing themselves to the shooter in the residence. And when asked about James (using the Taliban leader’s real name), the women “of course had never heard of him,” says Brian.

  Now, less than five minutes after the first shots were fired, support aircraft overhead reported movement all over the area. Says Heath, “People knew we were there. Explosions had already gone off; the enemy was starting to wake up and mobilize. We got multiple reports such as ‘Okay, you got five to ten personnel maneuvering to the southwest across the valley.’ ”

  But without being able to positively identify whether they were women, children, or armed males, “our air assets could not engage them,” says Matt Mason.

  The precariousness of the situation escalated by the minute, with some of the assault force pinned down by increasingly steady fire coming from virtually all directions, yet the primary SEAL assault team remained calm and focused on the shooter inside the residence. They were “working the problem,” methodically rooting the snake out of its hole.

  “We were being flanked, maybe even surrounded. It was a bad situation,” says Heath. “And our scale for what is a bad situation is significantly different from normal people’s. A bad situation for us is catastrophic for most people. So yeah, it was not a good place to be in.”

  At three o’clock local time, Adam caught a glimpse of the shooter through a window of the residence and confirmed his location: “I got a shooter moving in building one, window one,” he reported.

  “Can anybody get a grenade in there?” Rick asked.

  “There’s no way,” said Heath, “too much exposure.” No SEAL was positioned close enough to throw a hand grenade through the window without becoming fully exposed to the shooters. “A forty-mike might work,” Heath added, referring to a 40mm grenade fired from a grenade launcher.

  “I got it,” was Adam’s immediate response.

  Of course you do, thought Kevin, hearing Adam’s words through his headset as he repositioned himself beyond the compound’s northern wall. “Adam was Mr. ‘I Got It,’ ” he says. “It didn’t matter what it was. Nobody knows what was going on in his mind, but I was thinking, this target is going to shit, guys are pinned down, and we still have a long walk to a helicopter, so let’s get this Taliban, let’s get his ass out of the gene pool and go home before we see what this place looks like in the daylight.”

  Still positioned along the south side of the compound, Heath watched Adam top the east wall, swing a leg over, and scan the now-quiet courtyard. From Adam’s perspective, the interior to his left was bare ground all the way down the long wall to the gate, then the residence with the shooter in it
beyond that. To his right were the animal pens, shaded by a thatched roof and backed by the small barn. In the center of the courtyard and in front of Adam, the branches of a barren tree blocked his view of the window where the shooter was.

  A rock wall about four feet tall extended from the compound’s outer east wall inward toward the tree, whose branches Adam would aim through. Lowering himself onto this foot-wide catwalk, he began to inch forward, the stubby 40mm grenade launcher in his hand, his carbine slung across his chest.

  It had been about ten minutes since the assault began.

  Halfway to the tree, Adam paused and aimed the grenade launcher through the branches, but was apparently unable to get a clear shot and continued forward. Not more than fifteen feet away, Kraig Vickers, an EOD, was on the roof of the barn. A burst of gunfire echoed from within the courtyard. “Where’s that coming from?” Kraig said urgently into his headset.

  A longer burst of AK-47 fire erupted, and sparks flew from bullets raking the wall Heath was behind. He instinctively ducked down as small rocks and debris showered his helmet and shoulders. Noticing the sparks, Kraig called out to Adam, “Get down! They’re shooting at you!”

  An instant later, Adam cried out in pain.

  Looking over the wall, Heath saw Adam—who had fallen when he was shot through both of his lower legs—lying on his back on top of the shorter rock wall, tangled in the branches of the tree. “Roll off the wall, Adam!” Heath spoke urgently into his radio. “Roll off the wall!”

  Struggling to free himself from the tree, Adam waved his arm toward the barn. “They’re over there,” he grunted angrily. “In there.” At that moment, this newly identified shooter sprayed the tree and wall with a long volley of bullets, many of them hitting Adam’s exposed left side between his armor plates. Only then did Adam speak the code word that signaled an American was down.