No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

  They stayed up most of the night bullshitting and cracking jokes—just like they were back in the team room. The nurses joined in, and it felt like a party.

  “Hey, you guys going to share a pair of boots now?” Ford joked.

  “Hey, Scott, can you wipe your own ass?” Morales shot back.

  During the night, Lieutenant Colonel Lynn Ashley visited the hospital with Colonel Christopher Haas and Sergeant Major Terry Peters. They told the men how proud they were. They fought hard. They were heroes.

  Then Ford broke away for a moment and called his girlfriend. It was the middle of the night in Bagram, but she was in a Target in the Washington, D.C., area. It was early afternoon on April 7, 2008.

  He told her what happened. He didn’t tell her many of the details. Just that they ran into “bad shit.” And that fellow soldiers were wounded. He told her he was shot, but that he would recover. That he would be coming home soon.

  “I’m safe. It’s going to be okay,” he said.

  But it would take a long time for Ford to actually believe it.

  80

  Morales

  Morales didn’t remember much about his flight to Bagram. Actually, he didn’t remember much about anything after he was loaded onto the helicopter in the Shok Valley.

  He was in such severe shock—he’d lost so much blood—that he couldn’t open his eyes. All he could think was: Thank God I made it.

  He vaguely recalled those first few hours inside the Bagram hospital. He could hear all sorts of doctors and nurses treating him. One woman grabbed his hand as she was talking to him. She was asking him questions. Every question she asked, he responded to. But for some reason, he thought he was being “kind of a smart-ass” with his answers. He didn’t know why.

  Morales recalled that they removed his wedding ring and stuck it into his top pocket. Then they cut off his clothes and covered him with a warm blanket, and connected an IV just below his collarbone. He was still shivering after plowing through the cold river. He had hypothermia. Then he was out.

  When he awoke, it took a while for his eyes to adjust. It was like peering through a microscope. He had never been in surgery for anything. But then he heard a familiar voice.

  It was Ford.

  When he spotted Ford, the team sergeant still had his arm. The doctors managed to save it. Morales smiled. It was good news.

  As for his own leg, the jury was still out.

  It was still attached, but the doctors told Morales that he would have a long, hard road to recovery. That he might never regain full strength in his leg, mainly because of his ankle. At the time, Morales was just happy to be alive. He didn’t want to think about it now.

  81

  Behr

  Behr knew it was bad.

  He had been complaining about his stomach since he regained consciousness after his operation.

  Surgeons had managed to stitch up his pelvis and arm. He was in fair condition, and they were optimistic about his recovery.

  How he was still alive, no one really knew. He should have been dead. He had been on that mountain for hours with life-threatening wounds.

  No doubt Shurer’s care helped. He’d paid close attention to Behr.

  Still, when Behr was loaded on the helicopter, he was in severe shock.

  Now his stomach hurt.

  He had complained for hours, but was told it was probably from the stitches.

  But after he ate ice cream, he felt nauseous and nearly passed out.

  Concerned, the doctors took X-rays and discovered the problem: His intestines were perforated.

  Apparently the rock that hit his stomach on the mountain did more damage than anyone thought. His intestines were infected. So that night, doctors rushed him into emergency surgery to remove part of his intestines. It was an operation that saved his life.

  82

  Walding

  Walding was grateful to be alive. But late that night he began wondering about his future.

  Hours earlier, when he was rushed into the hospital, doctors didn’t know if he was going to live.

  When he arrived in Bagram, his temperature was dropping. Three times on the operating table, his heart stopped beating. But the doctors wouldn’t give up. Each time he flatlined on the operating table, they resuscitated him.

  Finally, they were able to stabilize him. But they also amputated his badly damaged leg below the knee. On the battlefield, he knew his leg was probably lost. Still, when he woke up, it was shocking to see it was no longer there. He knew his life had changed.

  He had worked so hard to join Special Forces. For the first time in his life, he’d felt special. That he was giving back to the country he loved.

  Now here he was, in the hospital, without a leg. He’d made a promise on the ledge to keep fighting—and he had. He’d fought to stay alive there. He fought to stay alive in the operating room.

  But he knew the hard part was ahead.

  For all intents and purposes, his Special Forces career was over. Sure he wouldn’t be discharged. He would stay in the Army. But he knew he would probably never go on a mission again.

  He was still groggy when Lieutenant Colonel Ashley visited him in the recovery room. Walding’s first question was about his career.

  “Hey, sir, am I going to have to leave the unit?”

  “No, John. You’re not. That is not even something you need to be thinking about,” Ashley said.

  “Well, good. With a name like John Wayne Walding, what else would I do?”

  Still, he wondered how his family was going to deal with the injury. How would his wife react? He would need special care—at least for the short term. He would have to be taken care of—a big responsibility.

  At the core of his discontent: He didn’t want to depend on anyone. It ran counter to his moral code. He was supposed to protect others. That’s was his responsibility. Hours removed from the firefight, he was finding it hard to think clearly. But at least he knew he would be there for his wife and children. He would always have his family. And for Walding, that was the most important thing.

  And no matter what happened on his journey, he vowed to himself to keep fighting.

  83

  Morales

  Talking to visitors, Morales glanced around the hospital room and spotted two of the team’s interpreters.

  Blade and Mustafa stood there, looking as if they were afraid to walk inside. Morales quickly waved them in. He wanted to talk to them.

  “Hey, how are you doing?” he asked.

  They told him they were trying to recover from the battle and wanted to pay their respects to him. They also were in Bagram to pick up CK’s body and bring it home for burial.

  After the battle, CK’s corpse was taken to the morgue at the air base. Now his friends had to claim it. They wanted to make sure he had a proper burial. It was a solemn moment. The terps knew CK’s mother would be distraught. Blade had been his best friend and would take care of arrangements. CK took the job to help his family.

  CK had tried to become a terp a few years earlier, but was rejected because he looked too young. He was just a teenager, but lied about his age, saying he was in his twenties. His baby face gave him away.

  Morales knew CK hadn’t been afraid to risk his life. He died fighting alongside Special Forces. He wanted so badly to be a Special Forces soldier. And he might have died because he was wearing an American uniform. A sniper had been targeting soldiers wearing the tan desert camouflage.

  Morales could tell the terps were grieving. They talked for a few more minutes about CK. It was a way for everyone to deal with the grief. He told them CK was a great interpreter and that he was in a good place. A place without wars.

  A few minutes later, it was time to leave. The terps said good-bye. It would be the last time Morales would see them. The next day he was flown to Germany—the first step in his long recovery.

  84

  Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wisdom

  Lieutenant Colonel M
ark Wisdom walked into his deputy commander’s office at Bagram and waited. He was unsure why the deputy commander had requested the meeting. Wisdom only had two weeks left in-country and, after thirty-two years of active duty, was months shy of leaving the military for good. But from the commander’s tone, he could tell it was important.

  Wisdom was assigned to the Special Operations Command History and Research Office. Deployed to Afghanistan, his job was to move around the country with Special Forces teams documenting their missions and occasionally writing articles.

  “Sit down,” the commander told Wisdom. He seemed anxious and jumped right to the point. “Whatever you’re doing, I want you to stop it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I want you to go out—and the chain of command wants you to go out—and write this article,” the commander said.

  He was looking for a positive report about Commando Wrath. Explaining that the operation was a critical success, he described how Special Forces had worked closely with Afghan commandos and Army aviation. He said he wanted an inspired piece that would be published in a “nonclassified magazine extolling the interoperability, the great partnership between Special Forces and the conventional Army.”

  The assignment was important. Major General John F. Mulholland, then commander of Special Operations Command Central, had requested the report after Colonel Christopher Haas told him that the operation had caused a “significant disruption of a major insurgent sanctuary.”

  Wisdom wondered, Why the push? More importantly: Why him? He only had a short time left in Afghanistan, and had planned to spend it with a Special Forces team in the Orūzgān Province, a starkly beautiful area in the Afghan central highlands. That mission was a big success story, he thought. The SF commander had partnered up with Afghans and “did some real things, things that made a difference.” To Wisdom, the big success story overall was the soldiers in Regional Command South—not the operations in Regional Command East, where Operation Commando Wrath took place.

  From the deputy commander’s tone, Wisdom knew he was expecting a “feel-good article” and there was nothing Wisdom could do. He was stuck and pissed off.

  After the meeting, he called his boss, John Partin, to complain. He told him that the commander wanted him to write a story about Operation Commando Wrath. Wisdom said he never heard of the mission. He bitched that the deputy commander knew that military historians usually didn’t have time to write and research stories while they were deployed. They were covering too many fighting units. There were too many people pulling them in different directions.

  Wisdom knew it also took time and patience to conduct interviews, examine documents. Then he would have to interpret the material and write. It was a time-consuming exercise. How was he going to get all that done in just two weeks? It sounded more like an assignment for a military reporter than a military historian.

  After he hung up the phone, he began thinking. If the operation, as the commander suggested, was such a success, maybe he could wrap up the assignment quickly, and still have time to embed with that Special Forces unit in Orūzgān. But he would have to hustle. So Wisdom packed and headed to Jalalabad.

  85

  Walton

  Walton sat in an office staring at his computer screen.

  He was supposed to be writing his sworn statement—a paper that would detail every minute of the firefight.

  Walton would write a few lines and stop. Maybe it was because he hadn’t been able to sleep for more than a few hours a night. This had been going on for a week. He needed Ambien. Every time he closed his eyes, he replayed the battle in his head. The gunfire. His wounded teammates.

  He was pissed off more than anything else. Angry that they hadn’t been allowed to conduct the operation the “right way.” Angry that commanders in Bagram hadn’t deployed a quick reaction force to help his team get off the mountain.

  A moment later, Fletcher came in.

  Walton was still upset at Fletcher but knew enough to hold his tongue. Fletcher was his superior officer. It was one thing to lash out at him when they returned from the mission. Everyone was emotional. It was another to be disrespectful a week later. Suck it up and keep it inside.

  Fletcher explained that during the battle some of the Afghan commandos had confronted about a dozen armed villagers. The commandos with ODA 3325—nearly a mile from where Walton’s team had been pinned down—killed six or seven of them, and the rest surrendered and were taken prisoner. Now the village elders were coming to Jalalabad to try to get them released.

  Walton was appalled. He’d had no idea that anyone had been captured. But he was adamant about the prisoners: They should not be released. Not under any circumstances. If they were on the mountain and armed, they were combatants. It was that simple.

  Walton exploded. “I will fucking kill them if I see them. They are responsible for the whole thing.”

  He refused to meet with the elders and resumed trying to write his statement. He wasn’t the only one. Everyone on the team had to write statements—and the commanders wanted it “written a certain way to meet the intent of the higher-ups.”

  He was getting annoyed.

  No one knew what happened on that mountain—except the men who were there. And four were still in hospitals.

  After some revisions, he finally finished the report and signed his name to it.

  Then he put the men in for awards.

  In his days as a team commander, Walton rarely put people in for awards. A soldier had to do something special to win one. But this was different. A guy who climbed up a cliff, knowing he could die, just in order to help wounded colleagues deserved a medal. So did the soldier who carried wounded guys down a cliff under fire. Walton knew no one on the team wanted any awards. As one soldier put it, you don’t get awards for doing your job. Maybe that was true. But what his team had done was above and beyond heroic. Walton couldn’t give a shit if he ever received an award for the Shok Valley mission, but he was going to fight like hell for the others.

  Following the battle, the military started to get reports that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Commander Kashmir Khan—another major terrorist—had actually been in the village that day to meet with Ghafour. Nothing was confirmed, but the presence of hundreds of well-disciplined and supplied fighters, a large number of radio transmissions in Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto, the latter two languages not commonly spoken in the region, had led commanders to believe that they had stumbled on this meeting by accident.

  The day after the battle, newspapers in Pakistan featured stories about how Hekmatyar and Khan had been killed or injured in a raid in Afghanistan. This was one of the indicators that the two had been in the village. It was clear, though, that Ghafour had survived.

  The governor of Nuristan held a press conference, without being prompted by the Americans, and talked about a mission targeting Ghafour during a meeting with Hekmatyar and Khan.

  Walton wasn’t surprised. The fighters he’d faced were well trained and disciplined. And they had one major advantage—they had the high ground.

  The captain wasn’t sure what happened to the source who tipped off the military that Ghafour was in the village. He had continued to report after the battle started. The source even called headquarters asking why it was taking the SF team so long to get up the mountain. But after a two-thousand-pound bomb was dropped on one of the buildings, he was never heard from again. They believed he was killed.

  A few days after Fletcher told Walton about the detainees, the village elders from Shok and Kendal—including a mullah—returned to plead their case. But this time Walton talked to them.

  During the meeting, the men adamantly denied playing any role in the attack. “It wasn’t us shooting at you,” one of them said. “It was twelve men who snuck into our village. We couldn’t do anything to stop them. They started shooting.”

  Then an elder added, “You killed some of our civilians with bombs.”

  Walton had had enough
. He slammed his hand on the table.

  “Bullshit. We fucking know your civilians fucking left, which is evident because you’re fucking standing here right now. We know exactly what happened. Everybody there was fucking bad. We killed hundreds of their asses and we know that.”

  Then Walton stared right into the eyes of one of the elders—a short, dark-skinned man with long white hair and a white beard.

  “I think you fucking know that we’re both experienced fighters sitting at this table,” Walton said. “And we both know what it feels like to go up against two hundred of our enemy. And what it feels like to go up against ten of our enemy.”

  At the end, Walton stormed out of the meeting—but not before issuing them a warning: “The next fucking time you see me will be the last time. Because you are an enemy of Afghanistan and you’re an enemy of the United States.”

  He walked out of the door. He had to leave or he would have killed them. Only days before, the elder had tried to kill Walton and had taken out half of his team. Now he wants to negotiate to get his detainees back? Really? No fucking way.

  A few days later, though, the detainees were released and, in all likelihood, headed back to the valley.

  86

  Wisdom

  Flying into Jalalabad, Wisdom glanced out the window. The landscape was spectacular. The town was surrounded by a large irrigated plain, producing fruit, almonds, rice, and grain. On the Kabul River, the city had become a major center for U.S. forces. The city was positioned on the key route from Kabul, about 110 miles north-northwest, via the Khyber Pass, of Peshawar, Pakistan, and handled much of Afghanistan’s trade with Pakistan and India. The town occupied an important strategic position, commanding the entrances to the Laghman and Kunar valleys.