No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

  In January 1993, he was sworn in and was deployed to Berlin, Germany. He bypassed basic training because of his National Guard experience. He returned to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in 1994, and met a woman who also was in the military. After they married, she left the Army while he tried to decide what to do with his career.

  He had thought about joining Special Forces, but had put it off. One day his wife challenged him: She was tired of him talking about it and encouraged him to go to Selection. He did in 1996, but he just wasn’t ready. While Wurzbach had no problems with the physical part of Selection, when instructors started talking about patrols and what to do on patrols, it was “all Greek” to him.

  He stayed in the military, but not making Special Forces bothered him. So in 2004, he tried again. This time he made it. He graduated from Special Forces training in October 2005 and was assigned to 3rd Special Forces Group.

  He was with the team when they were deployed in August 2007 to Afghanistan. But he was unhappy with the direction. He liked his fellow soldiers, but the team leadership wasn’t aggressive enough. They weren’t planning enough missions. Like the others, Wurzbach spent most of his time training members of the Afghan National Police.

  When he arrived, the Afghans had minimal training. They knew how to carry their rifles and “march around in a square for show.” But there was no driver training—and few, if any, knew how to operate a car. And if they did, they had taught themselves. They learned by driving a tractor on a farm or they bought an old vehicle, jumped in, put the key in the ignition, and just drove.

  He also realized quickly that they had a very leisurely approach to how they spent their day. They didn’t train like a U.S. fighting unit, which would get up in the morning and have the day planned out in advance. They were not even real soldiers. They were all young, looking for a paycheck, a means to survive. They didn’t have a clue about warfare.

  Wurzbach knew much of the training would have to start with basics. He conducted marksmanship training—firing at targets, teaching them how to use their guns. They had to break bad habits. They were used to lying on the side of a cliff, shooting from their hip up into a mountainside with no cover. That had to change fast.

  The hours were long and tough and often frustrating.

  Wurzbach was more disappointed in the philosophy of his team. On the only mission where they received fire—when insurgents fired an RPG at a patrol—they didn’t plan a follow-up maneuver to track them down. He believed they should look for the insurgents. Instead, they “tucked their tails between their legs” and never went back.

  At a meeting a few weeks later, the commanders asked Wurzbach’s team what they wanted to focus on. His response: “Let’s go back and get the bad guys.” It didn’t happen. The mind-set was different and members of ODA 3336 were disgruntled. This was not what we signed up for, Wurzbach thought.

  But things changed when the team returned to the United States, in part, because team leadership was switched out. Ford and Walton came in, and as soon as they began training, Wurzbach could see that the unit was going to have a new mentality. He could tell that the team was starting to become cohesive again—and it felt good.

  As the new team sergeant, Ford quickly took ownership of the ODA. He expected his team to be prepared. They were going to do the little things well—keep their areas clean, plan, get administrative paperwork taken care of on time. It was back to basics. Get on board or get out, and everybody was willing to practice what he had to preach. Including Wurzbach. Ford was selling a philosophy that was basic: Learn your goddamn job so we can go out there and kick some ass and come home alive.

  At first, though, Wurzbach, like everyone else, had to figure out what Ford was looking for. It was often difficult to ask Ford to articulate what he expected. At times, he could be sarcastic. He came across as: “Seriously. You’re asking me that? What the hell is wrong with you? You know the answer to that?” And Ford was right. Deep down, the team knew the answers. This band of highly trained soldiers—“quiet professionals”—was afraid to take charge. Once the team began to figure out what Ford wanted and understood why they were doing it, everything began to click. Wurzbach realized that Ford was trying to train them to think on their own.

  When they returned to Afghanistan, they knew in advance that the mission would be different—they would be training Afghan commandos. But Wurzbach also knew that the public was more interested in Iraq than Afghanistan.

  By late 2007, most of the U.S. military policy was focused on Iraq, where the war had not been going well for years. Insurgent attacks and a growing civil war had led to total chaos. And U.S. troops were having a difficult time getting things under control. Several thousand U.S. troops had been killed in the conflict and tens of thousands more were injured, mostly by hidden roadside bombs and ambushes, leading to calls back home to withdraw from Iraq.

  Meanwhile, military leaders were pressing President George W. Bush for more troops to help stabilize the country. But the president was in a quandary. The extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had left the military scrambling to find soldiers for deployments. As a result, the military had become more dependent on National Guard units, and leaders were extending deployments, causing more unrest back home. It was a crisis, and with the upcoming 2008 presidential election, it was surely to become a major campaign issue. Bush was prohibited from running for a third term, but he knew the situation could hurt the GOP’s chances of retaining the White House.

  But the war in Afghanistan seemed to be flying under the radar. U.S. and Coalition forces had been in the country since 2002. While most of the fighting units were stationed in remote outposts to prevent Al Qaeda and the Taliban from making inroads, a large contingent of them was in Kabul and major population centers.

  And that’s what worried Afghan leaders the most: Major terror networks were still operating freely in remote areas like Nuristan and posed a major threat to the stability of the entire country. The biggest thorn in the side of the government was the HIG, which, along with the Haqqani Network and Mullah Omar’s Quetta Shura, made up the three strongest terror groups in Afghanistan. All three had close ties to Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups based in Pakistan and Central Asia.

  The HIG was led by Hekmatyar, a notorious opportunist who had links with Al Qaeda, Iran, and Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment. Hekmatyar had been a key player in the Soviet-Afghan war and led one of the biggest insurgent factions against Soviet and Afghan Communist forces.

  But Hekmatyar’s brutal battlefield tactics and wanton destruction of Kabul following the collapse of the Afghan Communist regime in the early 1990s led to the demise of his popularity. The Taliban overran his last stronghold south of Kabul in 1995 and forced him into exile in Iran, where he stayed from 1996 to 2002, when the Taliban government fell to U.S. forces.

  Since he returned, HIG forces had been conducting attacks in northern and northeastern Afghanistan and maintained bases in Pakistan’s Swat Valley as well as in the tribal areas of Bajaur, Mohmand, Kuram, and North and South Waziristan.

  Then in May 2006, Hekmatyar swore his alliance to Al Qaeda’s top leader, Osama bin Laden. “We thank all Arab mujahedeen, particularly Sheikh Osama bin Laden, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other leaders who helped us in our jihad against the Russians,” he said in a recorded message broadcasted by the news agency Al Jazeera. “They fought our enemies and made dear sacrifices. Neither we nor the future generations will forget this great favor. We beseech Almighty God to grant us success and help us fulfill our duty toward them and enable us to return their favor and reciprocate their support and sacrifices. We hope to take part with them in a battle which they will lead and raise its banner. We stand beside and support them.”

  And since that message, he had been leading brutal attacks in Nuristan and other areas. The attacks were destabilizing provinces. His chief lieutenant was Haji Ghafour, who was particularly brutal. He would personally behead villagers for disobeying Islam
ic law. It seemed that the only way to stop the HIG was to kill Ghafour. And the Afghan commandos—at least in the eyes of U.S. commanders and the Afghan Ministry of Defense—had to be part of that operation.

  So when Wurzbach’s unit arrived in Afghanistan in 2007, its main job was to train the commandos. The Ministry of Defense had devoted a large amount of time and energy to promoting the unit. They called them the “Wolves” and hoped the unit would strike fear into the heart of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. With a sense of pride, the ministry wanted insurgents to know that the Wolves could be unleashed anytime, anyplace in Afghanistan, and that the elite team was composed of Afghans, not Americans.

  The reality, though, was that the commandos had a long way to go before they could be even called commandos, Wurzbach thought.

  But in their favor, the commandos all wanted to be there, which would help with training. They all wanted the prestige and mystique of being commandos, too. And they seemed like they were willing to become a cohesive fighting unit. Wurzbach discovered they actually cared about the job.

  So Wurzbach and other members of ODA 3336 had to make sure the commandos understood the basics of missions. They had to build a structure so they could learn how to plan and conduct operations on their own. It was like the old proverb: Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. In a way, they were teaching the commandos how to fish. And to do that, they had to teach them basic skills, just like they did with the Afghan National Police.

  But as it had been with the ANP, Wurzbach found that he had to “physically walk them through training.” If they were on patrol, he would show them “Crayola style” how to do things—literally drawing pictures on a piece of paper.

  Several times, Wurzbach stopped convoys, dismounted, and literally walked every commando truck into position. He would often engage in fierce battles with the leader of the Afghan commandos about the way to do things. It would sometimes reach a boiling point, where Wurzbach would finally tell him, “Dude, we’re not going to sit on the side of the road anymore.”

  Then he would give the commander a choice about the way to proceed: He could listen to Wurzbach and order his men to do it the right way. That way he would save face. Or Wurzbach would take over right there, and the commander’s men would know he fucked up. It usually worked.

  Throughout training, the reputation of the commandos continued to spread throughout Afghanistan—even though they had not been tested in a single major battle. They appeared in parades and other government functions. Afghan children cheered and said they wanted to be commandos. The Taliban and Al Qaeda were gun-shy of picking a fight with the commandos, in part because they knew U.S. Special Forces was paired with them. And that meant the commandos had air support.

  In a short time, Wurzbach thought his team had whipped the commandos into shape. The Wolves had a real sense of who they were and what their jobs were. The problem was that the Ministry of Defense rarely let them go on missions. They were afraid they would fail. But Wurzbach’s team knew the commandos needed to go out on operations. That was the only way to get true combat experience. To see what they could do and learn from any mistakes. Still, getting approval to take them along was tough sledding. They had to have permission, and almost every planned mission kept getting overruled by the Afghan government.

  While the commandos had gone out on a few operations with Wurzbach’s team, they faced little resistance. He had no idea how they would react on a mission like the one in the Shok Valley, where there would be no room for mistakes. The plan was to kill or capture Haji Ghafour. But Wurzbach had some serious reservations about the plan.

  Standing on the flight lines, Wurzbach remembered his conversation with Ford after he heard about the mission. How they argued.

  “Seriously, Scott, we’re going in a helicopter to the low ground? Why?”

  “Dude, don’t you think I argued this point?” Ford snapped.

  “Okay. I got it. But seriously, this is what we’re doing? Come on, now. This is nuts. We’re going to get killed.”

  Wurzbach knew they had no clear way into the objective area.

  But Wurzbach’s biggest concern was finding a way to get everyone on the high ground so they didn’t have to fight their way up a mountain. That was the biggest thing when it came to the plan—no matter how Wurzbach skinned it, that was the biggest headache. He knew you can’t fight up a hill—even if it’s just two insurgents, you’re still fighting up a hill. That gave the enemy a major advantage. They had the cover. They had the buildings.

  It didn’t make sense when Wurzbach first heard the plan, and as he got ready to board the helicopter, it still didn’t make sense.

  He just wanted to get back from this “camping trip” alive.

  9

  Walton

  Walton had never balked at any mission.

  But something didn’t feel right about this one. Sitting on the back ramp of the Chinook, he plugged his Peltor headphones into the jack and listened as the pilots went through their preflight checklist.

  In his mind, the problems were clear. Rough terrain. Intel gaps. Shit, now we’re socked in by bad weather, he thought. Before heading to the helicopters, Walton had to try one more time to stop the mission.

  Along with a team leader from ODA 3325, which was in charge of searching a nearby Shok Valley village code-named Panther, he went looking for Fletcher.

  They found him near the helicopters.

  “We’re not going to do this fucking mission,” Walton said. “Unless you order us to do it, I am not going to do this fucking mission.”

  Fletcher didn’t flinch: “I order you to do it.”

  Fletcher knew that only Ashley could abort the mission. He had called his boss and discussed the weather in the valley and how it was clear in nearby Nangarhar and lower Laghman provinces. They also talked about the intelligence. Their source confirmed that Ghafour was in Kendal, another Shok Valley village, and both agreed the risk was worth it. It was their one chance to get the HIG commander.

  Walton snapped a salute, in more of a smart-ass than a respectful way.

  “Roger,” Walton said, turning to head toward the helicopters.

  Walton knew in a few hours he would be at the bottom of the valley looking up. And that wasn’t a good feeling.

  Missions in Special Forces weren’t supposed to be planned like this. From the beginning, teams are drilled on planning a collective effort that includes every member of the unit. And once a plan was set, it traveled to the B team for approval, then the battalion, and a final inspection by the headquarters in Bagram. But at its core, a Special Forces mission is almost always planned by the team.

  But not Commando Wrath. Almost from the start, the teams had been told how to operate. Where they would land. When they would go.

  The mission had been in the works for months.

  It started after a platoon of paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team was ambushed in October 2007, heading back to their base camp in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, the site of some of the war’s most fierce fighting.

  All day, there had been warnings of an attack. Stretched along a goat trail on a spur near their outpost, insurgents ambushed the paratroopers with RPGs and PKM machine guns. The ambush lasted three minutes, and when the fighters retreated, they tried to carry off Sergeant Joshua Brennan, a twenty-two-year-old fire team leader from Ontario, Oregon, who was gravely wounded.

  Specialist Salvatore Giunta ran through enemy fire to push back the fighters who were close to overrunning his squad. When he saw the two insurgents carrying away Brennan, Giunta chased after them, killing one and wounding the other. They dropped Brennan, who was evacuated but died in surgery the following day.

  Giunta, who left the Army in June 2011, was awarded the Medal of Honor, the U.S. military’s highest award for valor under fire.

  Major General David M. Rodriguez, commanding general of Combined Joint Task Force 82, was
in charge of all the forces in eastern Afghanistan. It had been his men who were ambushed in the Korengal Valley. An ambush that was well coordinated and executed almost to perfection. If not for Giunta’s actions, the fighters would have escaped with a captured American soldier.

  Weeks after the ambush, Rodriguez and Brigadier General Joe Votel, the officer in charge of operations for the task force, called Colonel Christopher Haas and Ashley. Haas was in charge of all special operations forces in Afghanistan and Ashley’s battalion operated in the eastern provinces of Afghanistan.

  “We’ve got good information that Haji Ghafour’s fighters were behind this ambush,” Rodriguez said. “We want you guys to target him.”

  The mission fell to Ashley’s battalion. But Ashley and most of his staff had never heard of Ghafour. So they spent the next few months tracking the elusive Afghan commander. Ghafour seemed to survive by moving only on foot or donkey and did not use a cell phone. So there was no way to track him using satellite phone transmissions.

  Iraq was the main effort in 2008. Afghanistan was still only a support effort. Almost all the assets commanders now enjoy, from unmanned drones to elite special operations units, were fighting in Iraq. That meant intelligence resources were sparse, too.

  But Ashley’s staff slowly started to piece it together with the help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Ghafour was the main facilitator for the HIG in Afghanistan. He had amassed a massive weapons cache of machine guns and RPGs, and he had thousands of recruits.

  All of his operations were financed by his massive gem-smuggling enterprise. It alone had been bringing in millions of dollars for the insurgents—money his network used to kill U.S. troops. Some of the gems—emeralds and rubies—were even found in a shop in Arizona.

  Soldiers on Ashley’s staff watched a documentary, The Gem Hunter in Afghanistan, to learn more about the routes used to move the gems, and even interviewed the filmmaker, Gary Bowersox, in hopes of gleaning enough information to track down Ghafour.