by Oliver North
A-10 Thunderbolt, nicknamed "Warthogs"
An A-10 pulls up after destroying a ground target with its 30mm Gatling gun.
A memorial ceremony was given for Robert J. Miller at Bagram Air Force base after he was killed in battle at Bari Kowt, Afghanistan.
MEDAL OF HONOR: (POSTHUMOUS)
TO SSG ROBERT J. MILLER
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty:
Staff Sergeant Robert J. Miller distinguished himself by extraordinary acts of heroism while serving as the Weapons Sergeant in Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 3312, Special Operations Task Force-33, Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan during combat operations against an armed enemy in Konar Province, Afghanistan on January 25, 2008. While conducting a combat reconnaissance patrol through the Gowardesh Valley, Staff Sergeant Miller and his small element of U.S. and Afghan National Army soldiers engaged a force of fifteen to twenty insurgents occupying prepared fighting positions. Staff Sergeant Miller initiated the assault by engaging the enemy positions with his vehicle's turret-mounted Mark-19 40 millimeter automatic grenade launcher while simultaneously providing detailed descriptions of the enemy positions to his command, enabling effective, accurate close air support.
Following the engagement, Staff Sergeant Miller led a small squad forward to conduct a battle damage assessment. As the group neared the small, steep, narrow valley that the enemy had inhabited, a large, well-coordinated insurgent force initiated a near ambush, assaulting from elevated positions with ample cover. Exposed and with little available cover, the patrol was totally vulnerable to enemy rocket propelled grenades and automatic weapon fire. As point man, Staff Sergeant Miller was at the front of the patrol, cut off from supporting elements, and less than 20 meters from enemy forces. Nonetheless, with total disregard for his own safety, he called for his men to quickly move back to covered positions as he charged the enemy over exposed ground and under overwhelming enemy fire in order to provide protective fire for his team.
While maneuvering to engage the enemy, Staff Sergeant Miller was shot in his upper torso. Ignoring the wound, he continued to push the fight, moving to draw fire from over one hundred enemy fighters upon himself. He then again charged forward through an open area in order to allow his teammates to safely reach cover. After killing at least 10 insurgents, wounding dozens more, and repeatedly exposing himself to withering enemy fire while moving from position to position, Staff Sergeant Miller was mortally wounded by enemy fire. His extraordinary valor ultimately saved the lives of seven members of his own team and fifteen Afghanistan National Army soldiers. Staff Sergeant Miller's heroism and selflessness above and beyond the call of duty, and at the cost of his own life, are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the United States Army.
FIGHTING THE HIG
SHOK VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN
The Taliban aren’t the only enemies we face in Afghanistan. Another insurgent group is called Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG). Founded in 1977 by Hektamyar Gulbuddin, a warlord living in the mountainous border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, his organization received hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and even the United States, despite their hard-line anti-western ideology. Though this militant Muslim group shares its ideology with al-Qaeda and others, it often fought with other factions and was pushed aside when the Taliban came to power in 1994.
When the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance pushed the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001, and NATO troops joined in the coalition, HIG leaders set aside their differences with the Taliban and found new purpose in opposing the coalition. HIG strongholds are still found in remote villages in the area along the Pakistan border. One of them is the Shok Valley.
The Shok Valley has always been dangerous for outsiders—so much so the Soviets never dared venture into it. The deep, narrow mountain cleft has no road leading into it, making the fortress-like village at the valley’s head a perfect hideout for the HIG, situated at nearly ten thousand feet above sea level.
Afghan Commandos, however, don’t share the Russian’s fear.
Trained by teams of U.S. Special Operators, the Afghan Commandos have earned a reputation as tough, capable soldiers who won’t back down in battle. In early April 2008, the Afghan Commandos and the men of Special Forces ODA 3336, who trained them decided to take the fight to the HIG in the Shok Valley, knowing coalition forces had never been up there. Intel reports indicated the village held several high-value targets, as well as a sizable force of foreign fighters who were believed to be stockpiling ammunition and weapons for future attacks against the Afghan government.
Aerial view of Shok Valley
In the early morning hours of 6 April, two twin-rotor Chinook helicopters carrying ODA 3336 commanded by Captain Kyle M. Walton thundered away from Jalalabad and dropped into the Shok Valley, following its contours at low level. In addition to the Green Berets and Afghans, a few others were along for this mission. Twenty-two-year-old Staff Sergeant Zachary Rhyner was on his first combat deployment as an Air Force Joint Terminal Air Controller, or JTAC. A Wisconsin native, he’d only recently finished the intensive two-year training required to qualify for his job.
Staff Sgt Zachary Rhyner
Staff Sgt John Wayne Walding
Staff Sergeant John Wayne Walding was about as American as a man can get. Born on the fourth of July, his parents named him after the iconic hero of the American western. His early life was full of heroes—men who mentored him in his hometown of Groesbeck, Texas, as well as those he watched on television. As they approached the drop zone, however, it became clear there was already a problem. There wasn’t a square foot of level ground upon which the choppers could land, despite their incredibly skilled pilots. Hovering as close as possible to the valley floor, right over a swollen, fast-moving stream, the one hundred Afghan Commandos and two A-teams of Green Berets were forced to jump nearly ten feet to the ground. Some landed in the river—a very bad thing considering temperatures were hovering around freezing.
Once the choppers were gone and the dust settled, the team was able to get a good view of the village and of the challenging climb they would have to reach it. The cluster of stone houses was perched high above, stacked one atop the other and clinging to the steep hillside marked by dozens of stone terraces, each one hand cut by generations of farmers over hundreds of years.
The people in these villages lived much like their ancestors—scratching a meager existence out of what little crops they could grow or animals they could raise in the harsh mountain environment. They burned the dung of their animals in the winter to stay warm, and the village had no electricity, no running water, and no school. Children born there most likely would never travel much beyond the confines of this valley, and so would likely never see the kinds of things American children take for granted, like television, toilets, or even paved roads.
But they did have too much of one thing—militant Islam. And as the team moved out and began their trek up the mountain, they realized HIG wasn’t their only enemy on this mission. The other was gravity. With hearts pounding as they labored upward in the thin air, the men split into three maneuver elements and wondered what kind of reception they would receive once they arrived.
The answer to that question came sooner than anyone hoped. The climb took longer than expected due to the extreme topography and the climb left them much more exposed than anyone would have liked. They were still several hundred meters from the first of the stone houses when one of the men with Walton’s group, SSG Luis Morales, saw several insurgents taking up fighting positions with RPG grenade launchers. Morales opened fire, killing both men.
Then in the words of one participant in the fight, “all hell broke loose.” Enemy fighters appeared from dug-in positions in
almost every direction. The Americans were trapped below, separated on two sides of a narrow wadi, with stone houses on either side. As the firefight erupted, bullets began splattering around the Green Berets like hailstones, raining down from more than a hundred HIG fighters arrayed in an obviously well-planned ambush.
Walton’s interpreter, an Afghan who did his job faithfully for more than six years and weathered hundreds of firefights, was killed instantly. Moments later Staff Sergeant Dillon Behr, Captain Walton’s radio operator, was struck in the leg and went down. He immediately got back up and kept firing.
ODA 3336 opened up with everything they had, intent on pushing up the hill and taking the village. But the three elements were at that point separated by some distance. The command element, including Captain Walton, Behr, the Combat Controller Zachary Rhyner, and Carter, the combat cameraman, took cover in a small cut in the face of the cliff and began trying to suppress the enemy. Then Behr was hit again, this time in the arm. Morales ran to help him and took a bullet in the leg. He continued to work on Behr until he was hit again in the ankle.
Cpt Walton stepped from his position and unloaded on the enemy, drawing fire away from the two wounded men long enough for the combat cameraman, Michael Carter, to drag Behr to safety. Then Carter took the Captain’s place, laying down supressive fire while Walton rescued Morales. One more volley by Carter and SSG Rhyner allowed Walton to retrieve the body of his interpreter and friend.
Closer to the village, the lead assault element led by Staff Sgt David Sanders was pinned down. They could, however, identify the buildings where the enemy took up fighting positions and relay that information back to the control element. The problem then became that when Behr went down, his radio was left in the open. This made it impossible for Walton to communicate effectively. They had to get that radio.
That’s when the young Army combat cameraman, Specialist Carter, volunteered to go get the radio. Walton and Rhyner popped up and gave the insurgents everything they had while Carter sprinted from cover and retrieved the vital communications equipment.
Below them, the Team Sergeant, MSG Scott Ford, was sending 40-mm high-explosive grenades into windows from which insurgents were firing and directing his Afghan counterparts to do the same with their RPGs.
The effect of a five-hundred-pound GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) on a building.
SSG Rhyner was able to make contact with a pair of F-15s on station above them. At Walton’s command, he immediately began to call them in, specifying to the pilots that their bombs would be impacting “danger close.” If the ordnance fell even the slightest bit off target, friendly personnel were sure to be killed or injured. In fact, the enemy was so close even if the bombs landed precisely where they were sent, there was no guarantee SSG Sander’s element—closest to the enemy—wasn’t going to get hurt. But they had little choice. Walton called Sanders to let him know this and received the terse reply, “Send it anyway.”
Rhyner gave the order to drop. A moment later the mountain shook as a load of bombs threw a pall of debris and black smoke in the air, covering the battlefield. Walton called Sanders to see if he was still alive. He could hear gunfire in the background as the Staff Sergeant shouted “Hit ’em again!”
A-10 Thunderbolt on a gun run
Rhyner complied, calling for air support again and again over the next six and a half hours—directing more than seventy danger-close air attacks, which may well be some sort of record. AH-64 Apache helicopters came hammering up the narrow valley at low level to decimate dozens of enemy fighters on rooftops in the village. A-10 Thunderbolts screamed in for the kill, tearing apart buildings with their powerful nose-mounted Gatling guns, and the jets overhead took turns dropping load after load of ordnance, which detonated with heart-stopping concussions only a few meters from friendly forces. All this firepower may have saved the struggling force from being overrun, but no matter how many enemy they killed, the supply of HIG fighters—and their ammunition—seemed limitless. From the way the insurgents kept pouring fire down at them, they must have been stockpiling ammunition since sometime just after the invasion of Alexander the Great.
Walton’s men and their Afghan brethren were still fighting, methodically killing any enemy fighter crazy enough to show himself, but the insurgents punched firing ports through the stone walls of many of the houses and were nearly impossible to kill without a direct hit from a five-hundred-pound bomb. And the volume of fire only let up for a few seconds whenever a bomb came whooshing in. Captain Walton’s biggest fear became the weather. If it moved in and the air support couldn’t fly, his team would very likely run out of ammunition by nightfall, and they would never survive the night.
Another Combat Controller, Air Force Staff Sergeant Robert Gutierrez had already seen his share of combat, including a harrowing firefight only three months earlier for which he earned the Silver Star. On this mission Gutierrez was with a part of the force separated across the wadi from the command element. He could see enemy scrambling all over the mountains around them and worked with Rhyner to call in hellfires and attack helicopters to keep them at bay. Twice during the battle Gutierrez was hit in the helmet by AK-47 rounds yet continued to fight. By this time the firefight had been going non-stop for hours.
Aerial view of Shok Valley
Rhyner called in another air strike and the fighter jet overhead dropped a two-thousand-pound bomb. It hit right on top of a house crawling with enemy fighters and the jaw-dropping explosion brought the entire operation to a halt as everyone gaped at the sight. SSG Seth Howard, a sniper, used the lull to reposition himself to get a much better view of the remaining enemy trying to kill them. But the respite didn’t last long and the enemy reinforced their losses and renewed their attack. From his new vantage point, Howard began lining the enemy up in his sights and knocking them down, one by one.
ODA 3336 recons the Shok Valley
Nearby Master Sergeant Scott Ford was fighting alongside John Walding as they struggled to reach the command element to help evacuate the wounded. They finally made it and were laying down suppressive fire, hammering away side-by-side when Walding took a round just below his right knee, nearly severing his leg. Ford redoubled his rate of fire, watching his comrade out of the corner of his eye as the tough Staff Sergeant put a tourniquet on his own leg, the lower half of which was hanging by a few tendons. He tightened the tourniquet down until the bleeding stopped, then folded the severed member up into his crotch and tied it in place using his boot laces. Ford had never seen anyone so hard core.
Then Walding, grimacing in pain, pulled out a pre-loaded syringe of morphine and tried to self-administer the painkiller. But he had it backwards, and the needle shot into his thumb. He let slip an expletive, then started laughing.
Video capture of Shok Valley
“You gonna be okay, John?” Ford asked.
“Well, my thumb feels pretty great.”
Despite the dire circumstances, they all laughed at that one. But then Ford took a round in the chest. His interceptor body armor saved his life, but he was blown off his feet as if he’d been kicked by a giant invisible mule. Winded, but angry, he jumped up and resumed firing. It wasn’t funny anymore. It was obvious a sniper had them in his sights. As Ford continued firing, he searched in vain for the man who shot him and his partner.
But the sniper found him first. Another round hit him in the arm, almost amputating it right there on the battlefield. He went down again and Walding crawled over and began to administer first aid.
Walton received word over the radio that aircraft spotted another group of two hundred insurgent fighters coming to reinforce the enemy. It was time to get out of there.
Their biggest problem was it would be impossible for them to descend to the valley floor the same way they went up without being shot to pieces. They would have to find another way for those highest on the mountain to get down. Captain
Walton ordered Staff Sergeant Sanders and Specialist Carter to find an alternate route down the mountain.
There were no good options. But after some scouting, the two reported they’d found a way down that offered relatively decent cover. That was the good news. The bad news was the route included several drops that from the top looked almost suicidal. Walton was ready to give anything a try, however, so as Rhyner continued to call down retribution from the sky, the least badly wounded began the arduous process of evacuating those hurt the worst.
It took a long time and there were several spots where they had to literally lower each other down using a length of nylon strap. In other spots they had to just slide over the edge of a wall and drop twenty feet to the terrace below. This maneuver would have been a challenge, even without wounded. But at this point half the team had sustained injuries. John Walding was seen calmly making his way down the mountain, carrying his leg. Captain Walton and SPC Carter risked their necks to gather up the weapons left lying around by the wounded, tossing them down the cliff to keep them from the enemy.
As the team slowly worked their way down, one man stayed behind to cover their withdrawal—the sniper, Seth Howard. At one point, when insurgents were threatening to overrun the command element, he ran into the open and engaged the enemy, driving them back. Soon he was down to only one magazine of ammunition. But he stayed and kept methodically picking off targets, making the HIG fighters think twice about pursuing the team as it withdrew back down the valley. Once everyone got away, Seth left his position and made his own way down all alone.
