No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

  Most terps will give soldiers and their families gifts. CK followed the tradition. During the deployment, he wanted to buy Morales’s wife a present. He told Morales that he thought about buying her a dress. But Morales, knowing his wife probably wouldn’t wear it, suggested a jewelry box. So CK purchased two, and when she opened them in the United States, she discovered two handmade bracelets inside. The Moraleses were touched. There were times when Morales would be on the phone with Katherine and she would ask to talk to CK. She always asked about him. He was family.

  Morales trusted CK because he knew the Afghan always had his back. CK would be there not only as an interpreter, but as a fellow soldier. His loyalty was critical during missions like the one they had a few weeks before Shok Valley. That’s when Morales’s team and another ODA landed in an area that resembled the Shok Valley: a village with possible insurgents tucked away in a canyon.

  The other ODA had planned an operation to hunt for a Taliban leader whose followers were planting IEDs and hitting U.S. firebases. Morales’s team was drafted because the other ODA didn’t have Afghan commandos, and in Afghanistan you always had to put the Afghan face on every operation.

  With CK at his side, Morales helped prep the commandos for the mission. They rehearsed over and over. Repetition was the key. Everyone had to know their role. At one point, Morales would scribble the plans on a piece of paper, or he would draw it in the dirt—like a schoolyard football play—and say, “Here’s the village. This is where the river flows around it, and we’re going to land just south of it on another hilltop. Then we’re going to run down and take the eastern blocking position, where we won’t allow anyone to come in or out. That’s our mission.”

  That’s how he planned it, and that’s how they executed it when they jumped off the birds. As the other teams headed to their positions, Morales’s team began running down the hill to their spot. But as Morales was moving, he glimpsed a man running in the distance who resembled the target they were looking for. He was a “big dude” and had a long red beard that was unmistakable from a hundred meters away.

  Morales began chasing the suspect, and CK was right behind him. When Morales reached the bottom of the hill, he shouted at the man: “Bast,” which means “stop” in Pashto. But he had already started on his way up another hill, headed to a village across the river. Morales stopped in his tracks, lifted his M4, and peered through the scope. He could see the man had a weapon in his hands.

  Shit, take him down, Morales thought.

  He knew he had to stop him, so he squeezed the trigger and fired three shots.

  Bam.

  Bam.

  Bam.

  As soon as he did, CK opened up. So did the commandos who were right behind them. But by then, the man with the red beard had disappeared, and Morales was unsure whether they had even hit him.

  He ordered his team of commandos—about forty men—to stay at the apex of the river by a building that looked like a mill. Morales had no idea whether the mill was even functional, but it didn’t matter. He told his men that they knew the mission: They were in a blocking position. Make sure no one comes in or out of the area. Then Morales headed to the village with CK and three commandos.

  As they rounded a corner near the village, they spotted the man with the red beard on a ledge. His hands were in the air and he was yelling something unintelligible. Morales shouted for him to come down, but the man stayed in position. Why is he just standing there? Morales thought. Did he run to get reinforcements? Is this a trap?

  Morales told CK to order the commandos to bring the man down. A moment later, eleven men and some women rounded the corner. They must have been leaving the village, Morales thought. Barking orders, CK told the women to leave and for the men to put their hands in the air and move toward them slowly. At first, they all looked puzzled, but when they looked at the man with the red beard, they knew the commandos were serious; he had been shot and was bleeding from the arm and stomach.

  Morales and CK began to zip-tie the eleven men while the Afghan medic treated the man with the red beard. As the medic began patching the man up, he told Morales that he wasn’t the person they were looking for. Morales was skeptical and said he fit the description.

  “I’m his brother,” the man said.

  Morales smiled. “Okay. But you’re on my list, too. You’re already a vetted target.”

  Morales cut the plastic zip ties off some of the prisoners and made them carry the man with the red beard on a makeshift stretcher to where the commandos had set up the blocking position. Morales was trudging back to the commandos with the prisoners when he did a double take. The commandos had captured eleven men who also were trying to leave the village. Now Morales had twenty-three prisoners, including the man with the red beard. They began frantically using zip ties to handcuff the new prisoners. Morales told Rhyner to get Ford on the radio. At that moment he heard his satellite phone in his pocket ring.

  What the fuck? Morales thought. He answered the phone and the voice on the other end was Katherine’s.

  “Hi, what are you doing?” she asked casually.

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

  Then Morales started screaming at the commandos: “Don’t let those guys talk to each other.” He turned his attention back to his wife. “Honey, I can’t talk right now. I have to go,” he said, before hanging up.

  As part of the PACE plan—Primary Alternate Contingency Emergency—the team all carried cell phones. Morales had given his wife the number to use in case of an emergency. But that was the first time she had called on it—and it was a little surreal. Here he was on a mission ten thousand miles from home, he had just captured twenty-three men in the middle of nowhere, and she called like he was back at Fort Bragg and she wanted him to pick up a loaf of bread on the way home from the office.

  A moment later, Ford’s voice crackled over the radio:

  “Luis, what do you got?”

  “Hey, I have twenty-three PUCs [persons under control].”

  “What? You have two or three PUCs?”

  “No I got twenty-three PUCs.”

  “Holy shit,” Ford said. “All right. Send them up.”

  So Morales marched them to the first village and waited for helicopters to arrive to pick up the prisoners and the teams. But when the first helicopters took off, insurgents opened fire, and an RPG barely missed hitting one. Shit, come on. Just hurry up and pick us up, Morales thought. Get us out of here as quickly as you can.

  Back at the base, the prisoners were separated and soldiers began interrogating them, including the man with the red beard. They asked him if he had been leading attacks against U.S. firebases in the area. He said no, and claimed that Americans had set his house on fire, and that he wasn’t a member of any group. No one was sure if he was telling the truth. Was he a member of the Taliban? Al Qaeda?

  Now, sitting in a Chinook headed to the Shok Valley, Morales wondered what had happened to all the prisoners. Of the twenty-three, he knew more than a dozen had been released. Maybe they were innocent and were just leaving the village to escape. In this war, sometimes it was hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. That’s why it was so important to have an interpreter you could trust. The best interpreters had a sixth sense about who was bullshitting. He recalled how he laughed with CK about the mission when they got back to Jalalabad. They captured twenty-three men, including a suspected terrorist leader. Overall, the operation was a success.

  Morales smiled, and wished CK was with his team in the Shok Valley. They worked so well together. They didn’t have to say a word; they just instinctively knew each other’s moves.

  Instead, Morales was assigned Bouya, a tall, crazy, Italian-looking Afghan who liked to wear a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap. It was like Bouya had a gigantic red target on his head, Morales thought. Someone had given him that cap and he refused to take it off because he thought it looked cool. He saw the rest of the Special Forces soldiers wearing baseball ca
ps and wanted to be just like them. It was typical. The terps loved to imitate everything Special Forces did and wore—from kits and body armor to clothes.

  As the helicopters broke through the clouds, Morales stared past the pilots out the front window and glanced at the objective. The compound was on a finger of land on top of a cliff. Concretelike structures were built on the cliff and into the side of the mountain.

  For a moment he forgot where he was, and was impressed by the work. Someone had taken a lot of time to fortify the enclave. Then reality hit: This was no sightseeing tour. His team would have to scale the rocks to get to the village, and the heavily guarded structures protected one of Afghanistan’s most feared terrorists.

  12

  Ford

  Ford knew there wasn’t much he could do now except knuckle up and get ready to execute. As the commandos and his team filed into the helicopter, he began pounding on his chest. As they passed, he knocked knuckles with the Afghans, Shurer, Wurzbach, Staff Sergeant Ryan Wallen, a twenty-two-year-old communications sergeant from Palm Springs, California, and Sergeant Matthew Williams, of Texas, who’d arrived with Walding, another Texan, a few weeks before the team deployed. The twenty-seven-year-old was a weapons sergeant and Texas A&M Aggies fan. Ford used to tease the Texans since Walding was a burnt-orange-bleeding Texas fan—the Aggies chief rival.

  “Listen up. You need to show the commandos we are ready to get this thing done. We’re going to do our jobs,” he shouted over the din of the whirling blades.

  Ford and Wurzbach sat near the back so they could see off the back ramp. All doubts and concerns were gone as soon as Ford heard the engines start to power up.

  Go time. Let’s get it done.

  The wheels lifted off the ground, the nose of the Chinook dipped forward, and the aircraft seemed to leap into the air.

  Ford understood how to lead foreign special operations troops. He was with the team that started the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force team. His team selected the first ICTF troops, trained them in Jordan, and prepared them to combat Al Qaeda in Iraq.

  In 2004, he led a team to the Shiite holy city of Najaf after Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s revolt. After the fall of the Saddam government in 2003, Muqtada al-Sadr organized thousands of his supporters into a political movement, which included a military wing known as the Jaysh al-Mahdi. In April 2004, fighting broke out in Najaf, Sadr City, and Basra. Sadr’s Mahdi Army took over several points and attacked Coalition soldiers.

  Ford worked with the snipers. Soon after arriving, he and his Iraqi team were sent into the most dangerous parts of the town to conduct sniper missions. Moving into a valley controlled by the HIG would be even more dangerous.

  The HIG was one of the three strongest terror groups in Afghanistan. Led by Hekmatyar, the HIG was one of the biggest insurgent factions against Soviet and Afghan Communist forces.

  Hekmateyr’s group was focused on northeastern Afghanistan, with bases in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Attacks on security forces increased in 2005.

  The “Nuristan-Kunar Corridor” is the gateway to Kabul, and Al Qaeda was making a major push to secure it. In response, the sector had become home to more than 3,500 members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. The paratroopers were spread out over at least twenty-two posts, many of which were built just months before by the 10th Mountain Division.

  In Nuristan in August 2006, the United States set up FOB Kamdesh—now called Combat Outpost Keating—and several other outposts in towns like Urmul and Kamu; towns along the winding narrow road that runs next to the Kunar River toward Kunar Province, then Pakistan. It was this road—nicknamed “Ambush Alley”—that the United States wanted to control.

  The flight took about an hour. The whole time, Ford kept his eyes fixed on the clouds until the armada made its turn into the valley. Then he was able to start seeing the mountains. The peaks towered above the helicopter. Each one was still covered in snow.

  Ford hadn’t worn a T-shirt under his desert uniform top. He knew that in a little while he would be climbing a cliff and figured that with all the kit he would be hot. But glancing at the snow, he almost broke out his spare shirt rolled up in his three-day bag near his feet. Damn, I might have to use my bag today, he thought.

  Each member of the team had one strapped to the floor. It contained extra clothes, food, and other gear that the team might need, but was too heavy to carry on the assault. The crew chiefs on the birds knew to be ready to kick the bags off if the team called for them.

  As the helicopter dipped and turned around the peaks, Ford could hear the pilots on his headset calling off the checkpoints on the map. The helicopters flared out and started to settle near the wadi.

  “Ice. Ice.”

  “Ice” meant it was a cold landing zone. No enemy fire.

  As the helicopter settled into a hover, Ford peeked out of the portal on the side of the Chinook. Streaked as it was with dirt and grime, it was difficult to see anything, but he could glimpse the steep hills surrounding him.

  We have to get off of this thing. We’re in a huge bullet trap.

  The helicopter was at a lower elevation than the village, which meant that Afghan fighters could easily look over the lip of the cliff and shoot down at the hovering Chinooks and Black Hawks.

  “Thirty seconds,” the pilot said.

  The Special Forces soldiers got the commandos up. Ford stood near the ramp and started to beat his chest. It was his war cry. With each thump, he sent a simple message: It was time to jump off this bird and kick some ass.

  “Go! Go!” the crew chief yelled.

  Ford looked over the ramp. The bird was still eight to ten feet off the ground. And the soldiers were jumping out with at least sixty extra pounds of equipment.

  “Put it down. Put it down,” Ford yelled back.

  “GO!”

  Wurzbach and Ford looked at each other. They knew there was nothing they could do.

  “It is go time,” Ford said.

  He jumped off first. Holding the ramp with one arm, he still didn’t touch the ground. So he let go and landed with a thud, sliding off the basketball-size rocks covered in ice. Scrambling to his feet, he tried to set up security as the others made the same fall. He figured 10 percent of the force was going to be out with knee or ankle injuries. But as the last commando hit the rocks and the helicopter climbed into the air, Ford checked for injuries and only got thumbs-up and smiles. No casualties.

  All that working out at Fort Bragg had paid off.

  13

  Carter

  Carter was blown away by the scenery. Jumping off a Chinook hovering ten feet above the ground, he landed hard on the rocks just like the other soldiers. But he bounded up and grabbed his Nikon and began snapping frames. Snowcapped mountains wrapping the valley. A river snaking through the rugged terrain. A layer of ice-slicked rocks covering the landscape. Very cool, he thought. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. He was snapping away like a photographer on a fashion shoot.

  This was Carter’s last mission before he headed home and he wanted to document the entire adventure. So on the helicopter ride to the Shok Valley, he pulled out his Sony PD170 to videotape the flight. Men’s faces. Stern. Grim. Hardened. It was a documentary for a mission that had an entirely different feel from the others he had been on. Special Forces. Afghan commandos. Chinooks and Black Hawks flying in under a low, thick white shroud of clouds. This was World War II–esque.

  He could tell this was serious before the helicopters deployed to the Shok Valley. Before they boarded, some soldiers were cracking jokes, but underneath he could sense that they were anxious. He really didn’t know any of the Special Forces soldiers. He had met most of them the night before the mission. But several told him that the mission might be called off because of bad weather.

  When they were waved on board, the mood changed to deadly serious. It was tense.

  When the helicopter arrived in the valley, the pilot couldn’t land because of the terrain. So everyone jumped
off the back of the Chinooks. They flowed out and hit the ground and quickly regrouped. That’s when Carter began snapping away.

  The Shok Valley was geographically amazing. The wadi was like a narrow, rock-filled road completely surrounded by high mountains. Think of a punch bowl. The team was at the bottom of the bowl in the wadi. Like the sides of the bowl, the mountains curved and rose to the clouds. And those mountains had high cliffs that overlooked the valley floor. But sitting on top of the cliffs were buildings—part of a village—that looked more like a fort. The structures were impressive—built on top of one another like an apartment complex. He glimpsed one that looked like it was four or five stories high.

  He kept his camera out. He was still clicking as his team of Walton, Morales, Behr, and Rhymer moved toward the objective. They were looking up at the mountains like tourists visiting the big city for the first time.

  One of the first obstacles they faced was the fast-moving river that ran across the wadi. A plank spanned the crossing, but it wasn’t strong enough to support the men and some of the soldiers fell into the river. In a hurry, others walked straight through the water. In some spots it was ankle- to midchest-deep. All made for the camera, Carter thought. He panned the landscape from ground level to compound. A veneer of thin ice covered everything. It was cold, probably in the forties. He wasn’t expecting that. He knew the mountain passes were closed during the winter because of snow. But for some reason, he was expecting it to be warmer. But he knew everyone would warm up once they started their ascent.

  The climb was going to be brutal—especially with his all camera equipment. Thank God the guys had stripped his bag and forced him to leave some of his equipment back at the base.