No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

  By March 2008, they had a good idea of how the gem-smuggling operation worked. They also had a source where Ghafour was operating. That was all they needed to start writing up an operation they would call Commando Wrath.

  But they didn’t have enough information on the exact location of Ghafour. They only knew he could be in two villages: Kendal (code-named Patriot 1 and 2) or Shok (Panther).

  So, they called the mission a “cordon and search,” not a raid. With these missions, teams surround a village and then search each building, talking to villagers and building rapport in hopes of rooting out the insurgents. The idea is that villagers will lead the soldiers to enemy fighters and weapons caches and provide information about operations in the area.

  Captain John Bishop, who was a team leader in the previous rotation, was the point man on the staff, and shuttled between Bagram and Jalalabad, to make sure everything was in place.

  The plan was fairly straightforward. Three ODAs with Afghan commandos would swoop into the valley. ODA 3336, led by Walton, would hit Kendal, called objective Patriot 1, and ODA 3312, led by Master Sergeant Jim Lodyga, would hit objective Patriot 2, a row of buildings that ran parallel to Kendal village on the other side of the wadi. ODA 3325 would hit Shok village, called objective Panther. Shok village was smaller than Kendal and at a significantly lower elevation. An air reaction force made up of Special Forces soldiers on Fletcher’s B team would act as reinforcements.

  The operation called for helicopters to fly to a spot above the villages and hover while the Green Berets and commandos fast-roped in. There, they would set up and sweep into the villages, fighting from the high ground down into the village.

  The intelligence picture was unclear at best. Ghafour and his fighters hadn’t been challenged, creating a safe haven for his men and his gem operation.

  While planners believed there would be some resistance, they thought most of the men in the valley were workers in the gem mines. While they expected them to fight, they discounted the danger. The commanders believed they wouldn’t be any match for well-trained soldiers like the Special Forces and commandos. Plus, two sets of Apaches were going in with the assault force and a pair of A-10 and F-15 fighters were positioned nearby, ready to attack if there was trouble.

  The operation was approved by Ashley and he took it to Haas in late March. Because of weather and illumination, the first window to do the operation opened April 1. Haas approved the operation, but only after making a critical adjustment. He nixed the fast roping and instead ordered the helicopters to land in the wadi, out of range of machine guns in the village.

  When Ashley pressed Haas for a reason, the colonel said he didn’t feel the pilots from the 101st Airborne Division, who had just arrived in Afghanistan, were ready to fly such a difficult mission high in the mountains. It also would have been too difficult at those altitudes to have the commandos fast-rope onto rough terrain.

  Once approved by Haas, the operation went to Votel for coordination and was sent back to the teams.

  No one liked the changes, most of all Walton and Ford, since their team was the main effort. They wanted to fight from high to low, basic tactics, instead of landing in the valley and climbing up the mountain. If they had to land, they wanted to do the mission in the dark.

  “We have to hit this at night,” Walton said.

  “Well, the pilots can’t fly in this level of illumination at this time,” Fletcher said.

  “Then let’s wait until they can,” Walton said.

  “The target will be out of there by that time,” Fletcher said.

  Back in the helicopter, Walton could see the commander of the commando company, Captain Mateen. Walton remembered how the Afghan commander hadn’t liked the plan either.

  Walton had brought him into the operations center a few days before. A series of unclassified images of the villages and the wadi were on the table. Nearby was a map. They had learned that the more the commando leadership knew about the mission, the easier it would be for them to do it because they had a stake in it. As Walton outlined the plan, Mateen, a skinny Afghan with a thick black beard, picked up the images and the map. He examined them closely. When Walton was done, Mateen looked at him.

  “This is not a good plan,” the Afghan said.

  Walton, of course, tried to tow the party line.

  “Hey, listen. We’ll be okay. We just have to do what we have to do,” Walton said. “It will be over quick.”

  But the Afghan didn’t respond to the pep talk.

  “This is not a good plan, my friend,” Mateen said. “We are fighting from low to high. And they have the high ground around us.”

  The Afghan captain was right. Walton figured there was no reason to lie. No more bullshit.

  “Listen, we don’t have a choice. We have to go,” Walton said.

  Finally, he reverted to what he had been told.

  “The aircraft can only land here,” Walton said, pointing to the landing zones in the wadi.

  He couldn’t have the commandos refuse to go, or worse, turn on his team. Mateen just stared at Walton and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Okay. If you want to do it that way,” the Afghan said.

  Walton didn’t want to do it that way. But sitting in the Chinook, he knew he had no choice. He was going over the mission in his head when a message in his earphones caught his attention. The pilots in the medevac Black Hawks lifted off and turned north toward the valley. Walton could hear the pilots talking. Everyone was worried about the weather, so the commanders sent a recon bird up to see if they could find a path through the clouds.

  Ford broke in.

  “Hey, Kyle, what if those clouds move and we take casualties, we can’t get the aircraft in to get our casualties out?” he asked over the radio.

  Walton agreed.

  Walton also knew that if the helicopters flew into the valley, the mission could be compromised. Ghafour had asked the locals in a village at the mouth of the Shok Valley to provide early warning to him if they heard or saw Coalition forces. They were also instructed to fight any Coalition attempt to enter the valley. Walton didn’t want to be compromised when the team landed in broad daylight. He was still hoping that they could catch Ghafour off guard and go fast up the hill. But they couldn’t count on luck if bad guys knew they were going to show up.

  Climbing off the back ramp of the Chinook, he pulled out his Roshan cell phone and called Fletcher. The blades of the helicopter were turning, and he could feel the hot exhaust on his face. Walking to the edge of the concrete pad, he pushed his headphones up on his head and pressed the phone hard into his ear to mute some of the noise.

  “We cannot fucking send those helicopters in there. If you send those helicopters and if they make that turn, we have to launch no matter what because we’re blown,” said Walton, practically screaming into the phone over the rotor wash.

  “If they find a path, you’re going,” Fletcher said.

  Discouraged, Walton walked back into the helicopter and plugged his headphones back into the radio feed. He had never been one to question orders.

  When Walton was in the fourth grade, he told his teacher that he was going to West Point. He had wanted to be a soldier like his father for as long as he could remember.

  The Indianapolis-born Walton’s father was a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne and his mother was a nurse. When he was an infant, the family moved to Howe, Indiana, a small town on the border between Indiana and Michigan.

  Walton’s father enlisted as the Vietnam War was winding down. After leaving the service, he worked as a manager, more than two hours away, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His mother continued working as a nurse at Sturgis Hospital in Michigan.

  Walton had two brothers—Cory and Cole. Cory was three years younger and Cole was two years younger. His extended family lived within an hour of his home, and after his mother’s sister died of breast cancer, his two cousins, Eric and Layne, moved in. They were older and became like brothers to Walton.
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  As a kid, Walton was obsessed with being in the Army or being a doctor. He and his brothers used to play hospital. His mother would bring them medical supplies and bandages. If they weren’t saving lives, they were taking them as soldiers.

  Walton’s family moved across the state to Carmel, Indiana, when he was in fifth grade. For Walton and his brothers, it was big change. They were now going to large public schools.

  Walton started playing football in the eighth grade. He was fast. Real fast. He was always a guy who never half-assed things. Even in practice, during conditioning sprints, he tried to outrun everybody.

  Sports made him popular and soon he was getting the attention not only of his fellow classmates, but of colleges looking for a speedy wide receiver. Every day, he looked forward to opening his locker to see if he’d gotten any letters from interested programs.

  When he received a letter from West Point, everything came into perspective. Up until his junior year, he figured he would be a criminal justice or psychology major or a professional photographer. But the letter from the military academy brought him back to his childhood goal. He was going to be a soldier. His goal was to follow his father into the 82nd Airborne, and ultimately the Special Forces.

  For the rest of his junior and senior years, he focused on the goal. While his grade-point average was decent, he took the SATs five times in order to get the best score he could and signed up for every extracurricular activity he could find. After months of cajoling the staff of Congressman Dan Burton, a Republican, he earned a nomination to West Point and was accepted in 1997.

  Walton went to West Point to play football, too. It helped him get in. In high school, he could run past defenders, but when he got to Highland Falls, New York, he couldn’t. In college, everybody was fast. Before he arrived, he sat outside of his house in Indiana and read about West Point’s football program. He expected not only to make the team, but to be one of its stars. He had more yards in two games in high school than any of West Point’s receivers.

  He soon learned that college football was about the X’s and O’s. It was about execution.

  On the first day of practice, the coaches handed Walton a thick playbook. As he studied it, he tried to pick up the idiosyncrasies, like where to line up if the defense is in “Cover 2.”

  But looking at the playbook, Walton knew he was over his head. He didn’t know how to read defenses.

  At West Point, there were a bunch of other receivers. Usually, freshmen are red-shirted and get a chance to learn. Not at West Point.. During one of the scrimmages, Walton ran the wrong route. It was one of many mistakes he committed. He just wasn’t getting it and the coaches knew it. They pulled him aside after practice and told him he wasn’t at the level he needed to be at. His football career was over. As he left the practice facility, the sense of failure stung him. It was the first time he had failed.

  But soon he had other worries, like academics.

  The science- and math-heavy curriculum gave him fits. He was always in danger of getting thrown out. The constant pressure helped him learn to operate under the gun. He learned how to speed-read. He learned how to push through pain—physical and mental.

  During his first year, he found the Special Forces branch representative right away.

  “What’s the quickest and best way to become a Green Beret?” he asked.

  “There is no abbreviated path to the top. Start by learning a language,” the Special Forces officer told him.

  He figured the Middle East was where he would likely find himself and so he settled on Arabic. By his second year, he figured out that he had a knack for it. He joined the Foreign Academy Exchange Program and went to Egypt, traveling to Cairo in the spring of 1999. Before his senior year, he went to Tunisia.

  Walton graduated the United States Military Academy in June of 2001 and selected the infantry branch. Fort Bragg was his first duty station. During the infantry officer’s basic course and Ranger school at Fort Benning, he heard that the twin towers had been hit. He was about to start a live fire exercise when his instructors came out and told them they were at war.

  “If anybody has any family in New York—at the Trade Center—get on this truck. The rest, keep training.”

  They kept training for the next five days. Walton could feel the increased intensity.

  At West Point, he fully expected he was going to war. He remembered Somalia and Desert Storm. Now he was going. At Fort Bragg, he was assigned to Bravo Company, First Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. It was the exact unit that his father had served in twenty years earlier. Shortly after he arrived, his unit deployed to Afghanistan. Soon after returning from eight months of missions near the Pakistan border, Walton was in Fallujah, Iraq. After returning from his second combat deployment, he got selected for the Special Forces. He served briefly at the Army’s Special Operations Command before completing the qualification course in 2007. His life had been a list of goals to be checked off.

  Football.

  Check.

  West Point.

  Check.

  Special Forces.

  Check.

  On and on and on, he met every one. And the mission in the Shok Valley was no different. He still wanted to accomplish it, but not like this. He wanted a better plan.

  The recon bird’s flight seemed to take a lifetime. Sitting on the back of the Chinook, Walton could hear the pilots reporting back after they had reached certain checkpoints on the map. Most of the transmissions were pilot talk, but he could tell from their tone that they were anxious. Flying by instruments with almost no visibility, they were uncomfortable. Just listening to them made him more anxious. Then one of the pilots made the hairs on his neck perk up again.

  “I’ve found a way through the clouds.”

  10

  Staff Sergeant Seth Howard

  By the time he settled into the front of the helicopter, Staff Sergeant Seth Howard was tired. Most of the team hadn’t finished all their preparations until after midnight. Then they were up at 4 a.m. While they waited for the green light, they ran the commandos through a few dry runs to make sure they could get off the helicopters efficiently.

  Howard was on the same Chinook as Carter and Walton, who was sitting on the ramp listening to the radio traffic. There were only a few radio jacks and Howard didn’t have one. So all he could do was wait.

  Howard was a veteran of the team, and this was his third deployment in just a short period. He was senior in that sense, but only a staff sergeant with two and a half years in the Army. An expert marksman, Howard was one of the few holdovers on the team. But when Ford took over, he seemed to pick on him. Maybe it was because Howard was the antithesis of Ford. He had an easygoing, almost lethargic demeanor. In Ford’s view, Howard was lazy—and told him so. He called Howard a sloth and used to rag on him for being the son of a doctor.

  Raised in Keene, New Hampshire, Howard came from an upper-middle-class family. His father was a general surgeon and his mother worked in communications, but she basically raised him and his two brothers.

  The team leader might be in charge, but the team sergeant really creates the synergy. He shapes the team and is responsible for the culture. And no team is ever good enough. Howard knew that every team sergeant would say he had the best group in the world. But he had a feeling that every team sergeant also secretly wished his team was ten times better than they were.

  So, Howard was used to Ford’s tirades and cajoling. He knew at the heart of it, Ford wanted the best team. And no matter what Ford said to his fellow soldiers, they all tried hard to win him over, especially Howard, who was a weapons sergeant. He knew Ford had just come from a sniper team and knew how to shoot and run a range better than most of the guys on the team.

  With Howard’s background, no one had expected him to join Special Forces.

  He went to Catholic school and then boarding school at Northfield Mount Hermon in Massachusetts. He wrestled all four years and graduated from hig
h school in 2002, before attending Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to wrestle. As a freshman, he got tossed around in the gym and in the classroom. He was at the school only one semester. He signed up for four classes, dropped one, failed two, and got a C in the one for which he showed up to the final exam.

  He was having a good time in college, but had no direction. He was only there because that’s what you do after high school. He dropped out because he didn’t want to waste his parents’ money. (Tuition, including room and board, ran more than fifty thousand dollars a year.) He got a job at a syringe and cardboard-box partition factory while he handled paperwork for the Army.

  It was 2003 and the Iraq war had just started. While he met with his recruiter, the play-by-play of 3rd ID’s thunder run into Iraq played on the radio. He went to the recruiter wanting to be an “18X,” or a Special Forces recruit. They tried to talk him into doing something with satellites, but it was a six-year commitment and he didn’t want to stare at a computer screen all day.

  He wanted to be part of the action. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were big motivators. He didn’t want to miss one of the biggest events of his generation.

  And he believed in the mission. He believed the United States had an obligation to act and he couldn’t live with himself if he wasn’t a part of it. He heard the criticism of the wars. But to him, it was hypocritical. The exact same people who were arguing against the invasion of Iraq would be yelling about all the atrocities being committed by Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and demanding that someone do something about it.

  Howard was ready. His mother tried to talk him into going in the Navy, even when he was getting on the bus to head to basic training. His father had joined the Navy in order to pay for medical school. But Howard didn’t want to be trapped on a ship.

  Before loading the commandos onto the bird a final time, he checked them to make sure they had water and ammunition. On previous missions, they would have guys with seventeen magazines and five knives. What in the hell are you going to do with all of that? Howard thought. But as the commandos jumped on board, he saw they were ready to go, including a small group of ammunition bearers carrying rounds for the Carl Gustav 84mm recoilless rifle. The Carl G looked like a giant shoulder-fired cannon. It shot shells that could punch holes in the thick mud walls of the Afghan villages.