No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

  But first he had to pass a basic physical training test. To his surprise, he failed. Given a chance to take it again, he trained like a boxer for a championship fight. Endless push-ups and pull-ups. He ran several miles a day. When he retook the test, he aced it and was inducted in the Army. It was the beginning of his two-and-a-half-year journey to Special Forces.

  In Special Forces training, he learned the skills that turned him into a communications expert. He was trained to build and operate computers, and set up networks and satellite communications in the field. He could do the little things, too, like make an antenna out of anything that conducted electricity, including trees and people. Behr also learned how to speak Arabic. It was difficult—and there were days he felt so tired that he could collapse on the spot—but for the first time in his life, he felt good about the direction he was headed in.

  Just before he graduated Special Forces school, he asked Amanda to marry him. She said yes, and moved to North Carolina. It was one of his proudest moments. He accepted his Green Beret with his family and Amanda in the crowd watching the ceremony.

  After training to be a communications sergeant, Behr finally got to 3rd Special Forces Group in July 2005. But the barracks at Fort Bragg were empty. His team was already in Iraq. After getting his equipment ready, he was deployed, but he didn’t have time to get acclimated. The day he showed up in-country and met the team, he was told they were going on a combat mission to Tal Afar.

  At the time, the city was controlled by Al Qaeda insurgents who had been launching attacks against U.S. and Iraqi positions in the area. The offensive was launched on September 1, 2005, and the initial fighting was heavy. It was classic urban warfare, with troops fighting from building to building, door-to-door. Although most of the city was secured in a few days, Tal Afar was still a dangerous place. There were pockets of snipers who would pick off soldiers before disappearing in a building or alleyway. It wasn’t until the end of the month that all the fighting ceased and the Army declared the mission accomplished.

  Behr learned fast that there was a difference between training and real combat. Everything moves faster. There is more chaos, and your adrenaline rises to the point where your senses are heightened. You can hear every sound. Every movement. You can see clearer. And you understand that you can’t make any mistakes because if you do, you could end up dead. It was sobering to see the death and destruction, rubble and body parts. There was the stifling heat exacerbated by their heavy equipment—rucksacks, body armor, and weapons. And then there was the stench. It smelled like a landfill. A shithole. It was so thick you could almost taste the rotting garbage.

  After they secured Tal Afar, his team was assigned to train Iraqi troops. But they became bogged down in jurisdictional infighting between the “Big Army” and Special Forces over who did what and in what parts of the city. There were days when his team did nothing. They were bogged down by the military bureaucracy. In the end, his team may have helped capture Tal Afar, but they accomplished little else for the rest of the operation.

  When he returned to the United States, he shared some of his experiences with Amanda. He told her about terrain and people, but couldn’t bring himself to talk about the death and fear.

  His next deployment with ODA 3336 was to Gardēz, Afghanistan, where, unlike in Iraq, he saw almost no action. It was mostly a training mission. The team worked with the Afghan National Police (ANP), and for Behr, it turned into a frustrating operation. Training indigenous forces was a key Special Forces’ mission, but it’s not always the “coolest thing in the world.” A team would rather be patrolling, searching for the enemy. Any combat MOS would agree. If you’re sitting at an FOB, you feel like you’re being wasted.

  In Gardēz, Behr got his first taste of training Afghans—and the difficulties associated with trying to get them to grasp basic military concepts. He taught advanced combat maneuvers—tactics that would be challenging to Americans who had never been exposed to the military. But with the Afghans, Behr was dealing with police officers who had the intelligence of third graders. So he had to figure out a way to break down the lessons like he was teaching a child. He knew he had to be very clear and concise and simple. Break it down into small parts and work your way up to the more complex ideas.

  If you’re talking about room clearing—barging into a room with your gun drawn looking for the enemy—you start by drawing a big square in the dirt. You tape off the area so that it’s completely open. You place an imaginary door is in the middle. Then you run your guys through that door a hundred times with their guns in position. Turn left. Turn right. Shout “all clear” if no one is in there. Sometimes you have to show them how to hold their rifles so they don’t end up shooting everybody in the room. Once they have that principle down, you move to the next step. You might change the position of the imaginary door. You might add a person in the room. Behr discovered that you had to be patient with the Afghans. He knew that they would master the concept one day, only to forget it the next. It was two steps forward, one step back. For the entire mission, it seemed like the team was “handcuffed” to the ANP.

  When they returned to Fort Bragg, his team was disappointed—and somewhat fractured. There were disputes and bickering among the team leaders about the direction of the mission—some wanted to go out on more combat missions—and that caused a wedge among the team members. You put twelve hardheaded individuals together long enough, and without a strong team leader, there will be disputes. Team members came away from the deployment feeling disenchanted. There was no sense that they had accomplished anything.

  That all changed when Ford took over.

  He molded the men into a cohesive unit. Together with Walton, he told the team in no uncertain terms: This is the way we’re going to roll. Check your egos at the door. This is how we’re going to handle training. Deal with it or else. At first, some of the team grumbled. But soon the bickering stopped, and the team began preparing in earnest for its next deployment.

  Behr’s team knew their assignment before they left Fort Bragg for Afghanistan in October 2007. They were going to train seven hundred would-be commandos in the very first Afghan kandak, or battalion, of Special Forces soldiers. (A small group of commandos had graduated in May 2006 and had gone on a few missions.) The team only had a few months to accomplish the task. The 201st Commandos would have to be in the field by the end of the year. It seemed like a daunting assignment. How were twelve men going not only to train seven hundred troops, but to equip them, teach them how to plan missions, and, in effect, turn them into a self-sustaining force?

  It would be difficult but not impossible. These were the types of operations that jumped off the pages of Special Forces training manuals. In Vietnam, ODAs would sneak deep into the jungles along the Cambodian and Laotian borders to establish outposts to train the Vietnamese and track the enemy. During the U.S. involvement in the conflict, which lasted from 1965 to 1973, Special Forces trained thousands of Vietnam’s ethnic tribesmen in the techniques of guerrilla warfare. They took the Montagnards, the Nungs, and others and molded them into the sixty-thousand-strong Civil Irregular Defense Group. Those troops became the Special Forces’ most valuable ally in battles fought in faraway corners of Vietnam, out of reach of conventional U.S. fighting units.

  In Afghanistan, the Special Forces had the commandos. Born from the Afghan Army, the commandos had been chosen by military planners to become the country’s elite force. They would hunt high-profile targets like Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, like the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin whose core members had been together for nearly thirty years.

  Behr knew the HIG was causing major problems in Afghanistan, especially in the northeastern part of the war-torn nation.

  First, the HIG fought the Soviets. Then they focused on fellow Afghans in a brutal, internecine struggle. Now they had turned their attention to Coalition forces led by the hated “infidels.” And the HIG had their own arsenal: RPGs, AK-47s, and even SAMs. They were well equ
ipped, blended into the population, and didn’t care who got in the way. With the HIG, there were no rules of engagement. No Geneva Conventions. They ruled by sheer terror. And the HIG had another advantage: They knew the land. They were fighting in their own backyard. They knew every ridgeline, every stream, every cave. They built fortresses that blended into mountains. This was no cakewalk. Behr and his team knew that.

  During this period in the fall of 2007, U.S. policy was focused on Iraq. Most of the casualties were in Iraq—primarily because of IEDs and snipers—and the nation was precariously close to falling into all-out civil war. Some experts said it was already in a civil war, though the Bush administration disputed that assertion. For the most part, Afghanistan was relegated to the inside pages of newspapers while Washington focused on Iraq. But the Bush administration knew—and so did commanders—that Afghanistan would become a major problem. There weren’t enough U.S. and Coalition troops deployed there to hunt down the HIG and pockets of Taliban insurgents who were threatening the Kabul government. And at that point, there was little hope that the administration would increase the number of troops in Afghanistan to counter the growing threat. If the country was ever going to be stabilized, Afghans had to help. Under U.S. guidance, the Afghans were going to have to handle more of the fighting. And the only way to do that was to train more Afghans. But finding Afghans willing to do the job—and who also had the intelligence to master basic techniques—was difficult.

  The team understood the dilemma from the day they landed for their second deployment. But going into this important mission, Behr’s team had a goal and a clear plan. Each team member would train a group of commandos in a different specialty. They would go slow to make sure the commandos understood every concept. Then they would take their team of commandos out on training missions. It was all about repetition. The more they practiced, the more the commandos would, hopefully, “get it.”

  Behr’s job was to teach the reconnaissance unit—a group that collects intelligence and spies on the enemy. But he knew it would take time, which he didn’t have. There was pressure from commanders to get the commandos in the field. He knew the commandos were commandos in name only. They didn’t have the education or training. The vetting process to select commandos hadn’t been followed. All candidates had to read at a certain level. But about two-thirds could barely read at all. They had to pass a physical fitness test, but most of the trainees couldn’t do a push-up or sit-up. They had to know how to shoot and drive a vehicle. But that wasn’t the case either. In most cases, they were just regular guys “right off the streets.” Behr guessed that if the criteria had been strictly enforced, his team probably would have been training a company rather than a battalion. It made the job that much more difficult.

  On the positive side, he knew that the commandos wanted to be there. They had all volunteered. It was different from training the Afghan National Police. With the ANP, the team had a hodgepodge of officers who regularly missed training exercises. They were always making excuses for not showing up or training hard. The commandos, though, were in camp every day and trying their best to be good soldiers.

  Behr was told he would get some of the brighter guys in the commandos. And he did, but decided that wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the team. They had to divide up the soldiers with above-average education so they would have strong leaders in all the platoons. That was a critical step to building cohesive units. They had to spread out the smart soldiers so those commandos could help train others.

  Behr began by teaching his unit the basics of collecting intelligence. He wanted to get the commandos thinking forward. He knew that a lot of the soldiers were from towns and villages in mountainous places where Special Forces and U.S. forces might need to go. So Behr wanted to develop a network through which the commandos could help the Special Forces gather intelligence—information that could help them plan missions, help them find out where the insurgents were hiding.

  But teaching the commandos how to gather information without people knowing what they were doing was challenging. You just didn’t walk up to someone and ask if they knew where the Taliban guys were living. You asked people in the village about their own families. How were things going? Was anything new going on in the village? Look around the village like a tourist and don’t be suspicious. Be friendly and pump the locals for information gently. You just don’t blurt it out. There were other basic training, issues, too. The commandos learned how to pack a rucksack and shoot and maintain their weapons.

  After a week or two, it reached a point where Behr believed his commandos were ready to learn how to use a GPS. They had the most basic GPS unit available—an eTrex, a lightweight navigator that could fit in the palm of a hand. Simple to operate, the GPS could run a day on just two AA batteries. While roaming, it could store up to five hundred waypoints in memory for easy retrieval—a plus when you were humping over rough terrain, in places with no street or terrain maps. The devices were so basic that they looked like a child’s toy. And they were set up to play basic navigation games, so an eight-year-old could learn how to use the device. After explaining how they worked, Behr told his commandos to take the units home over a weekend and practice with them.

  But when they returned to the next formation, the commandos told Behr their GPS units were broken. The screens were black. He shook his head in disbelief. How could they be broken? They were brand-new. Right out of a box. He’d put the fresh batteries in himself. So Behr started playing around with the units. Still nothing. Then he opened the back and noticed something strange: the batteries had bite marks—like they had been crunched between somebody’s teeth.

  Behr lifted the batteries and asked the group, “Please tell me why there are bite marks in these batteries?”

  A soldier raised his hand. “That makes the batteries last longer. We thought they were out of juice so we bit them.”

  He noticed that most of the soldiers in the unit bobbed their heads up and down in agreement. Behr was dumbfounded. Almost to a man, the soldiers believed that the way you extended the life of batteries was by biting them.

  He took a deep, cleansing breath and told the unit, “Don’t do this anymore. This does not make a battery last longer.”

  Behr played around with the GPS devices and discovered that the commandos had accidentally turned the brightness of the screen all the way down. There was nothing wrong with them at all.

  That was a “wow, really?” moment for Behr. And it taught him a good lesson: Don’t assume the commandos know anything. Expect the unexpected. That lesson was hammered home when he began a session on how to draw targets, including buildings. On paper, it seemed like a simple assignment. But there’s nothing simple in Afghanistan, and it turned into an elementary school lesson on shapes.

  One of the things Behr had wanted the commandos to do was to learn how to sketch targets, mostly buildings. This skill would help them on missions. That way they could not only describe a target, they could draw it. His lesson began when he hung a picture of a house in the training room. He had studied drafting in high school and drew 3-D images all the time. For Behr, it was routine. But that wasn’t the case with the Afghans. He was shocked at some of their drawings. Many of the pictures were just amorphous shapes. Scribble. Nothing that even closely resembled a house. At that moment he knew what he had to do. He had to teach the men basic shapes. Even more rudimentary, he started by showing them how to draw a straight line. Then he moved up to a square, then a triangle, then a circle. He did this for a few days, and when they showed they were grasping the concepts, he had them begin sketching cylinders and cones. Soon they started on 3-D images—tables, chairs—and Behr took them out on the base, where they sketched buildings. Some soldiers grasped the ideas quicker than others. But by the end of the weeklong session, most of the commandos understood it. With all the drawing and teaching, though, Behr felt more like an elementary school teacher than a soldier.

  Other training proved just as difficult. />
  Few commandos knew how to drive. But the team had to show them how to drive a Humvee, the U.S. military’s all-purpose, modern-day jeep. With four-wheel drive and automatic transmission, this diesel-powered off-road beast is among the most capable all-terrain vehicles in the world. Like the versatile jeep it replaced, the Humvee has many configurations, including troop carrier, command vehicle, ambulance, and weapons platform (Stinger, .50 cal, MK19 automatic grenade launcher). Giving the commandos Humvees was part of the plan to separate them from the rest of the Afghan fighting units. The commandos were the only unit to have Humvees. They were given body armor and had helmets like the Special Forces wore. They actually looked special compared to the rest of the military. They even had different patches. But what good was all that equipment if they didn’t know how the use it?

  The Humvees helped illustrate that point. They are relatively easy to drive. They all have automatic transmissions. No shifting gears. They’re easy to use—if you know how to drive and have been doing it your whole adult life. But not only did the commandos have to learn how to drive, they had to be taught how to maneuver the vehicles into tight places, and the correct way to position-park them on a convoy. When you are out on a mission and need to stop somewhere, you want to place your vehicle in a prime location. You want the vehicle to have good cover and your gunner to have the best field of view so he can defend the troops properly. That’s the case even when you park in a big open area and you have several vehicles in the convoy. You place the vehicles in a circle or some kind of shape facing outward with even lines of fire. Getting the commandos to understand this was mind-blowing at times.

  And forget about night driving. That is a critical part of moving troops in any operation. It’s all about the element of surprise. There’s no surprise if you have a convoy of thirty Humvees moving with their lights on. But to maneuver at night, soldiers have to use night-vision goggles. The Afghans did not like using them. At times, that training seemed like a scene straight out of a slapstick movie. Humvees were running into each other. They were running off the road.