No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

It all stemmed from his upbringing in a small Texas town where people were taught to be polite, humble, and praise God for their blessings. Carter was born in Smithville, Texas, a hardscrabble, former railroad town in the southeastern part of the state near the Colorado River. A flyspeck on the map, Smithville, about forty-five minutes south of Austin, had only 2,500 people. It was a place where fathers would take their sons hunting in the woods and fishing in the river, or would watch them play football on Friday nights. It seemed like most of the inhabitants drove pickup trucks—mostly Fords and Chevrolets—and worked on farms, where they raised cattle or toiled in the hundreds of oil fields that dotted the landscape from Corpus Christi to Beaumont.

  Carter’s father, Mark Carter, worked in those oil fields, while his mother, Anna, was a teacher and later a principal in private schools. But there was little stability at home. His family moved all over southeastern Texas from Smithville to Bowie to Katy as his father took a series of oil jobs, including one on an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

  When Carter was a boy, his father would sometimes take him to the refineries—giant playgrounds of pipes and pumps and big metal buildings that turned black crude oil into liquid gold. He would tousle his hair as he told young Carter stories about growing up in south Texas. At night, the sparkle of refinery lights would illuminate the pitch-black sky. To approaching motorists, it would appear as if they were driving toward a magical city. It was more Las Vegas, Nevada, than Lake Charles, Louisiana.

  The more his family moved, the more his parents’ relationship began to dissolve. When Carter’s father worked on an offshore oil rig in Lafayette, Louisiana, he would spend two weeks at a time away from home. It was too much for his mother. When Carter turned fifteen, his parents separated. His mother moved the family back to Smithville and filed for divorce. A few months later, his father died of a heart attack. The sudden death hit Carter hard. His father was a mentor, someone he could talk to.

  After his father’s death, his mother struggled to make ends meet. She was unemployed for a while. Then she took a job in a nursing home. Her life began falling to pieces. She began drinking heavily. It all began to take a toll on Carter and he turned inward. He kept everything inside. He would find solace in hunting and fishing. And guns were his passion. He could tear them apart and put them back together. He knew everything about guns. Maybe that’s why he enjoyed action movies so much—everyone had guns and the action heroes knew how to use them. One of his favorites was Rambo, a former Special Forces soldier who battled a crooked sheriff and later the Soviets after they invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s. Rambo was big and tough and smart and wasted bad guys without thinking. In fact, it was Carter’s love of guns and action movies that sparked his interest in the military.

  At Smithville High School, he was unsure about his future. He knew he didn’t want to go to college or follow his dad into the oil fields. The military was appealing. He had two uncles who were in the Army and his grandfather was a Marine.

  When he told his mother what he wanted to do, she didn’t stop him. She already knew, telling him she had “figured it out.” When he was a boy, she would stare out the kitchen window and there, in the backyard, she would watch him as he ran around with his friends, playing war games in a thicket of woods.

  After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he became passionate about enlisting. He was a sophomore, sitting in English class, when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. His English teacher, Robert Duke, escorted his class into the library to watch history unfold on television. Other classes followed, and they mostly sat there in silence. When the buildings collapsed, Carter had one thought: These motherfuckers are going to get paid back. He remembered looking around the library and spotting some students who were laughing and joking. They weren’t paying attention, and Carter became angry at their indifference. They are attacking your country, he thought.

  When Carter told his uncle he was going to enlist, the older man made a suggestion: “If you’re going in, go for a job that you can take with you when you get out.” That idea clicked. He loved guns, so why not learn how to repair them? With a knowledge of small-arms armament repair, he could become a gunsmith and work with guns for a living.

  So he called up his recruiter and enlisted for six years. All set, Carter said his good-bye to his aunt Raymeh Davis, who helped raise him after his father died, and to all his other relatives. He was excited and couldn’t wait to get to basic training.

  But days before he was scheduled to leave, his mother was hospitalized with pneumonia. She told him to go, but he was worried about her. She was growing weaker and weaker. Carter stayed with her at the hospital, monitoring her condition and praying. But she continued to deteriorate and soon passed away. Carter was heartbroken. He loved his mother and to see her die so young was heartbreaking. Now, as a young man, he had no parents. His aunt Raymeh stepped in and promised to help his younger brother. She encouraged Carter to go.

  So on an autumn day in 2003, Carter boarded a plane in San Antonio and flew to Louisville, Kentucky, then took a bus to Fort Knox.

  But there was a problem. He had missed the beginning of basic training. That meant he would be late for the small-armament repair program—and he had to be there for the first class. So Carter had to find another military occupation specialty, or MOS. He was disappointed, but there was nothing he could do. As he sat in an office at the base flipping through a book of possible specialties, nothing seemed to grab him. Sometimes, Carter asked the sergeant what a certain MOS entailed. But when he heard the details, he would shake his head no.

  He was searching for an MOS that would allow him to split time between the field and the office. When someone mentioned a combat cameraman, he paused for a moment and asked the sergeant to explain. When Carter heard the fine points, he perked up. He had never thought about becoming a photographer. Sure, in high school, he had a few “happy snap cameras.” But it never crossed his mind that he would do something like that for a living.

  He accepted the MOS, but it didn’t take Carter long to discover that there was more to taking pictures than squinting through a lens and pressing a button that trips the shutter release. There was a real skill—and science—to shooting good photos.

  When he arrived at photography school at Fort Meade, Maryland, he quickly realized that most of the people in his class had some photographic background. They had owned digital cameras and studied the art. For them, it had been a calling. But Carter struggled.

  He had to learn how to use the shutter speed, which controls the length of time the shutter remains open. Not only did he have to understand the terminology, he had to deal with math and science. (Typical shutter speeds are measured in fractions of a second, such as 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500, and 1/1000 of a second.) Then there was the theory of prisms—how, when light passes into a material at an angle, the light beam is bent or refracted. And when beams are refracted, they can cause problems with camera lenses.

  At first, Carter had a hard time grasping the concepts, calling it “fucking stupid.” But once he started going out in the field to shoot, the concepts clicked. And he soon discovered that he could be at peace with his cameras. He could be an observer and fade into the background. And he discovered that he was pretty good at shooting video—a critical part of his job.

  After his graduation, the Army gave him a thirty-day leave before he was deployed to Germany, to join the 7th Army Training Center. He flew back to Smithville and visited his aunt and brother, who was considering becoming a corrections officer.

  While he was there, he stopped by the recruiting office to help a local recruiter. It was early 2004 and the war in Iraq had entered a new phase. It had morphed from “shock and awe” when U.S. troops quickly dispatched Saddam Hussein from power, to Al Qaeda and insurgents attacking soldiers and planting improvised explosive devices, known as IEDs. Still, it appeared to Carter that people in his hometown wanted to enlist. The country was in the middle of a patri
otic boom, still angry at the terrorists’ attacks.

  At the end of his leave, Carter boarded a plane and headed to Germany. Inside, he was a little apprehensive. He knew he still had a lot to learn about photography and Germany would be a perfect place to train. It was better to learn his craft in a peaceful country than in a war zone.

  And he was right.

  He worked with the training support center, and shot stills and video of companies conducting training exercises. But Carter quickly grew bored. The job just plain sucked. Here he was, documenting everyone else prepping to go to war while he was left behind. He felt like he should be going, too.

  After two years in Germany, he returned to Fort Meade. A few months later, he was told he would deploy to Afghanistan. Now he was stoked. This is what he had been looking for all along. He wanted to prove his mettle in firefights. Finally, he was going to be a real combat cameraman. He felt in-spired and invigorated.

  Transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia, for more training, Carter was informed that he would be assigned to Special Forces. He smiled when he heard a commander tell him, “Don’t fuck up. You’ll have to be able to do what they do. You need to train with these guys so you don’t stand out. So you all look the same.”

  Carter took the words to heart. For several weeks, it was like he was back in basic training. He knew the commander was right: He would have to be in the best shape of his life if he was going to be embedded with Special Forces.

  The night before he shipped out to Afghanistan, his friends threw a big party in the barracks. Carter and his buddies drank all night—Jack Daniel’s, beer; whatever they could get their hands on. They swapped stories and laughed at the frat-house jokes. And at dawn, Carter showered and got dressed, and boarded a plane for the first of a series of flights that would end at the Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan.

  When he landed, it was unlike anyplace he had ever seen. He gazed at towering mountains with snowcapped peaks in the distance. When he opened his mouth, he could taste the gritty blowing sand. The temperature was hotter than a typical southeastern Texas day in the summer, but with less humidity, which made it somewhat bearable. He actually liked it.

  Over the next year, Carter traveled with 7th Special Forces Group, and then 3rd Special Forces Group. He would go from firebase to firebase, talking to soldiers and taking photos. He enthusiastically tackled each assignment and, thankfully, he didn’t see serious action.

  And he was packing his bags, getting ready for the long trip back to the United States, when he heard that his friend Dennis was sick. The next thing he knew he was packing his gear and heading to Jalalabad to hook up with Walton’s team.

  Now here he was, waiting to board a helicopter with the other soldiers for an operation to hunt and kill a top terrorist—a mission that seemed straight out of Mission: Impossible. And for a moment Carter couldn’t help wondering if his final mission in Afghanistan would be his last.

  4

  Master Sergeant Scott Ford

  Even though he’d been fighting to stop the mission, Commando Wrath was a go. Master Sergeant Scott Ford knew that. The commanders had been pushing too hard. So Ford promised to make sure his team and the Afghan commandos were ready and pumped up for the mission.

  Pulling his tan desert uniform shirt over his lean, muscular body—minus the undershirt because he would have to hump sixty pounds up a mountain—Ford headed to the team’s operations center.

  It was still drizzling, and if it was sprinkling in Jalalabad, he knew it was worse in the mountains.

  “Zach, call over to the airfield and see if the birds are going,” Ford said to Senior Airman Zach Rhyner, the Air Force joint terminal attack controller or JTAC. It was Rhyner’s job to call in air strikes when the shooting started.

  Ford wanted to tell the guys to be ready, but he also wanted to manage the stress. The mission had been a series of starts and stops for the past several days, and the team all believed it was going to be canceled again.

  “It’s socked in. This thing isn’t going to happen,” said Rhyner, a twenty-two-year-old from Medford, Wisconsin. This was his first combat deployment.

  Ford looked at Master Sergeant Jim Lodyga, the team sergeant for ODA 3312. His team was supposed to set up a support position and cover Ford and his men as they climbed up the mountain. Both men shook their heads.

  “Get your shit. That way we’re ready,” Ford told his team.

  The sun was starting to rise when the soldiers all made it to the flight line. They waited as usual, and just as they were getting ready to board the Chinooks, the departure time was pushed back. But the mission was still on. Sitting by the helicopters, Ford reflected back to when he took over the team. They had come a long way.

  When Ford joined the team in July 2007, the unit had already been through three team sergeants in three years. They were a very young team, and in Ford’s opinion, they hadn’t been guided in the right direction. There were no team standard operating procedures (SOPs). They hadn’t done a thing in the seven months since their last Afghanistan rotation. Ford knew he had his work cut out for him. He had until October—three months—to get the team ready before they deployed again to Afghanistan. They needed a “team daddy” in Special Forces lingo, to whip them into shape.

  And Ford was that guy.

  In a way, Ford’s upbringing had prepared him for the military.

  He grew up in rural southeastern Ohio, about twenty minutes down the road from Ohio University. The Fords were family oriented. Every weekend there was a cookout or some kind of gathering at an uncle’s house. When his parents got married, they bought his mother’s family’s farm.

  Ford learned about hard work on the family farm, where they kept cattle, hogs, and horses. He would get up in the morning before dawn, do his chores, eat breakfast, and catch the bus to school. When he arrived home, he had more chores and sometimes would have a little time to hunt squirrels before dinner.

  School just wasn’t Ford’s thing. He did well enough, but he didn’t enjoy it. Sports were the only reason he even attended—and they forced him to study. If you didn’t keep up your grades, you were off the team. He played football—both offense and defense—and basketball. His was the type of school where everybody had to come out in order to field a full team. His graduating class only had sixty students.

  Ford knew college wasn’t an option. He just wasn’t disciplined enough—at least not at that point in his life. There was no future in southeastern Ohio. The area had few good jobs—unless you worked for Ohio University in Athens.

  So at the end of high school, he decided to join the military, following his father, who had served in the Air Force just after the Vietnam War.

  Ford enlisted in the Army—but not until he’d checked out the Marine Corps. When Ford asked the Marine recruiter what the service had to offer, he was given a smug answer.

  “You can be in the Marine Corps or you can’t. It’s up to you,” the recruiter said.

  It didn’t matter. Ford had always wanted to join the Army so that he could be a Ranger. Ever since the invasion of Panama, an attack the Rangers had spearheaded, he figured that was his best chance to do the high-speed missions. He was planning to go for infantry, when his uncles pulled him aside and told him to get a skill. So he chose communications and went to Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, for basic training.

  It was a breeze. For someone who’d grown up on the farm, it wasn’t difficult to get up early and work hard all day. He was used to being told to do something and getting it done correctly the first time. Plus, once he started playing sports, he barely had time to sleep, what with his chores, practice, and schoolwork. If it was sports season or harvesttime, he rarely got eight hours of sleep. Some guys just weren’t used to a little sleep deprivation. Ford thrived on it.

  After basic training, he finished jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was assigned to the 319th Airborne Field Artillery at Fort Bragg. There, he was surrounded by a bunch of gun
bunnies who spent their days firing howitzers.

  Ford figured he would do the Army thing for a few years, then get out and maybe go to college. But when he was ready to leave the military, his neighbor talked him into checking out Special Forces. His Army hunting buddies were all Green Berets and encouraged him to go to Selection. At first, Ford hesitated. He had never failed at anything and he didn’t want to try and not get selected.

  “Don’t worry,” they told him. “You fit the mold perfectly.”

  They were right. He made it through easily. The whole time, he wanted more. He just loved the fact that he was getting some real Army training. Knowing that he was going to join a team and would be soon traveling around the world.

  Selected as an engineer, Ford was excited: He wanted to blow shit up.

  After training, he went straight to 3rd Special Forces Group. His team spent most of their training missions in the islands—the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Saint Vincent. He found the guys on the team were a lot like him. Most had a rural background. They came from small communities in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania. They hunted. Fished. They appreciated home and had matured in the Army.

  During the months leading up to the Afghanistan deployment, Ford tried to beat the bad habits out of the new team like his old teammates did to him. He drove them in training, making them come in early for physical training (PT) in the mornings and keeping them late. Everything Ford did was met with resistance until the team realized that they were only going to lose.

  On his first day as the team sergeant, he laid down the law. His first move to change the culture: He told the guys to clean up the team room. It was cluttered. Junk was stacked up on all the desks and tables. The top of the refrigerator was covered in papers and binders, and in Ford’s eyes the room looked trashy. It lacked pride.

  Part clubhouse, part office, the team room was the one part of Fort Bragg that the soldiers owned. Each team room was unique. They were often decorated with mementos from past deployments. “I want everything off the top of the fridge. If you have clutter on top of everything, it looks like shit,” he told them.