No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

  When Wisdom landed, he watched the organized chaos around him: It was a typical military base with trucks and soldiers everywhere kicking up dust. He was picked up from the airfield and taken to a meeting with leaders of the B team.

  Wisdom was at the very beginning of his research and was trying to get a handle on the mission. At the meeting, Mark Guzman, the B team’s warrant officer, and others on the team told him they would fill him in on the entire mission. It was a multimedia presentation. For an hour, they told him what happened, handed him documents, and revealed even more details through a PowerPoint:

  MISSION: 201st Commandos and ANP 03, combat advised by AOB 3310 and ODAs 3336, 3325, 3312, conducts a cordon and search of Shok (OBJ Panther) and Kendal (OBJ Patriot) villages IOT Capture/Kill…vetted target Haji Ghafour (A high-ranking HIG commander)

  The plan seemed straightforward enough. It was divided into phases, with an air assault into the vicinity of the target compound, followed by a move into the village. Then they would begin their search for Haji Ghafour, starting with “known INS targets.” The teams would then conduct “tactical site exploitation” and remove the troops by helicopters back to the base.

  The objective was clear. By capturing or killing Haji Ghafour, the SF teams would be able to “greatly” disrupt the HIG ability to “fund the insurgency.” In addition, they would “deny enemy sanctuary.” Again, all good goals—on paper.

  But Wisdom was unsure if planners had taken all of the factors into consideration. It seemed that the planners had predicted a short fight, and thought that the teams could wrap up the operation fairly quickly. But Wisdom later determined that, based on the information in front of him, this was a bad assumption.

  According to intelligence, Ghafour claimed to have three thousand fighters—possibly one thousand in the Shok Valley—and had been threatening military-aged males with conscription. The extremist had been stockpiling weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, PKM machine guns, DSHK and DPU antiaircraft guns, and RPGs.

  Ghafour had distributed the weapons to HIG commanders in the valley. He also told supporters southwest of Kendal and at the mouth of Shok Valley to provide early warning of approaching U.S. forces and to fight all troops attempting to enter the valley. HIG subcommanders lived in nearly a dozen compounds in the mountains.

  And then there was the terrain.

  The Shok Valley was an insurgent stronghold. The area was “extremely rugged and mountainous.” Not to mention isolated. There was no Coalition presence. In the Kendal village, the population was loyal to the insurgents. And soldiers would have trouble reaching the village. Aircraft would be unable to fully touch down in the HLZ because of jagged rocks and the fast-moving water that covered the landscape. Soldiers would have to jump up to ten feet off aircraft in the HLZ.

  There were multiple wadis in the vicinity of objective, and soldiers would be surrounded 360 degrees by structures with enemy fighting positions. The ground had intermittent ice and snow, and there was a “myriad of structures not previously identified by imagery.”

  The intelligence said that stepped terrain led up to target buildings. There were thirty to forty buildings on multiple mountainsides, and there were sniper holes in the structures. Soldiers would have little to no cover or concealment. And the entire mission would be conducted at an altitude of ten thousand feet in forty-degree temperatures with descending cloud cover.

  It took at least a week before Wisdom had a basic grasp of what happened. But after Wisdom examined some of the information from the actual battle, he concluded that the men had walked into a hornets’ nest.

  Not only was the enemy numerically superior, they were highly disciplined and well trained and fought until death. This was not some ragtag unit. They had some degree of command and control and utilized fire and maneuver tactics. The enemy soldiers were extremely effective with their sniper and machine-gun positions. They had large-caliber sniper weapons systems. They had men stationed on flat roofs and shooting out of windows, firing with deadly accuracy. And they had a high number of reinforcements throughout the Shok Valley that were alerted—they would do everything to protect Ghafour and his gem-smuggling operation.

  During the battle, Ghafour was in the village, according to a source. The military had intercepted communication in the firefight showing that Ghafour was in the Shok Valley and had been staying at Mullah Habibullah’s house. In fact, he was apparently heard saying, “Thank God. I have the rockets and binoculars.” At one point, a source inside the village told the U.S. teams that they had reached Ghafour’s compound, but hadn’t gotten to “the proper building yet.”

  As Wisdom thumbed through the mission documents, he discovered that Army aviation had played a major role in the mission. Aircraft were riddled with bullets. One pilot was shot during the evacuation. Black Hawk medevacs landed under heavy fire. All told, the battle raged for six and a half hours and there were nearly seventy danger-close air strikes. Two Afghan commandos were killed, and fifteen U.S. and Afghan soldiers were wounded, many of them seriously.

  At some point, Wisdom realized that this was the battle he had listened to a week earlier in Kandahar—along with seemingly all military personnel in Afghanistan. The contact between the soldiers and pilots was being piped to the radio network at the bases. It was riveting. Everyone was clustered around the speakers. They could tell something bad was going down. Special Forces soldiers were talking about casualties, possibly being overrun. Bombs were exploding in the background. It seemed that every fighting unit in Afghanistan was getting ready to rescue the SF team.

  So here Wisdom was, reading about the mission and ensuing battle, and expected to write a glowing story about the operation. He took a deep breath and turned to one of the B-team members. “This thing was operationally unsound.”

  The silence only confirmed his suspicions: The mission had been a tactical disaster.

  87

  Morales

  At first, things didn’t go well for Morales at the U.S. military hospital in Ramstein, Germany.

  At the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, where nearly thirteen thousand wounded U.S. service personnel have been evacuated since 2004, he was placed in a room and started complaining about being hot. No matter what the nurses did, it didn’t matter. He was sweating.

  It was still winter in Germany. There was snow on the ground, but it felt like Morales was in the middle of the desert.

  Finally, the doctors discovered what was wrong: Morales had developed prickly heat—a condition in which pores get clogged with sand or dirt or salt.

  He had spent days scratching. He itched so badly, he felt like ants were biting him.

  He was pissed off and cranky.

  He couldn’t move his leg. The pain was intense. And he was anxious to see his family. He had talked to Katherine and his parents on the phone. They were all worried about him. He told them he was doing better and would be home soon. They wanted to fly to Germany to visit, but he said he would be returning soon to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

  They were worried about that. They had read about a scandal at Walter Reed. In February 2007, the Washington Post published a series of investigative articles outlining cases of neglect and poor hospital conditions. Morales assured them that conditions had changed for the better. That’s what friends had told him.

  Besides, he knew he would need more surgeries and physical rehabilitation in order to get back on his feet. He was going to try to do everything to save his leg.

  Still, he was down—until he heard that Major General David Rodriguez, the commander in charge of Coalition forces in eastern Afghanistan, was visiting the hospital in order to see him. When the general arrived, he pinned a Purple Heart on Morales in his hospital bed. It was one of the proudest days of Morales’s life. His grandfather had received a Purple Heart after he was wounded in the Korean War. Now Morales was the recipient of one for his wounds in Operation Enduring Freedom.

  In a wa
y, he had come full circle. He was carrying on the family tradition. He only hoped that, with his wounds, he would be able continue his military service.

  88

  Wisdom

  Wisdom had a lot of work to do in a short time. He wanted to interview everyone associated with the firefight before he headed back to the United States. But he was realistic. He knew that being able to wrap up the report while he was still in Afghanistan was unlikely, and that much of his work would probably continue when he returned home. But he was driven to get as much done while he was in-country as possible.

  Interviews with the B team and others at Jalalabad helped. The documents and the after-action reports were critical. When he began interviewing Walton’s team, he found answers to some of his questions. Some of the soldiers were at the base, including Walton, Sanders, Howard, and Wurzbach. He also interviewed soldiers from the other ODAs and began talking to the helicopter pilots.

  He learned from Walton and team members that there had been real concerns about the mission from the start. He discovered that Walton’s team didn’t play much of a role in the planning. The mission was basically handed to them.

  But the inherent dangers were clear to Wisdom. Fighting uphill was dangerous. The village was well defended, and any element of surprise was lost when the troops landed in daylight. If anyone was wounded in combat, it would be a logistical nightmare for helicopters to swoop into position and extract him. And the planners didn’t seem to take into account the area’s dangerous history. That, Wisdom thought, was a too common practice in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

  If the commanders had studied the area, they would have understood the dangers facing the teams. Up until the late nineteenth century, many Nuristanis practiced a primitive form of Hinduism. It was the last area in Afghanistan to convert to Islam—and the conversion was accomplished by the sword. When the Nuristanis adopted Islam, they embraced its most conservative form. Wisdom knew that no one else in Afghanistan practiced Islam like the Nuristanis. Every law was taken literally; there were amputations for stealing, and women were stoned to death for adultery. In fact, the Islamic Republic was founded in Nuristan during the Soviet War. And Haji Ghafour was the first commander of the revolution, and he was particularly brutal. He interpreted religious law so narrowly that he offended even ultraconservative Muslims in the area. The Nuristanis were also fiercely anti-American.

  So it was no surprise that Ghafour’s followers were involved in ambushes against U.S. troops in September and October 2007. The province was a brutal hot spot. There was speculation that Haji Ghafour was behind the attacks. Indeed, the Shok Valley itself was a place where Ghafour felt safe. It was a remote valley where no Americans had ventured. Genghis Khan? He had avoided the valley nearly nine hundred years earlier. So did Alexander the Great. The Soviets? They didn’t even try to go there. Surely the Americans would bypass the valley.

  But Ghafour figured wrong, and Wisdom, after studying the battle plans, concluded that the U.S. military approach to the operation was extremely risky. Commanders had put not only the soldiers, but helicopters at great risk.

  Wisdom knew the two biggest fears of the Army’s chain of command in Afghanistan: a U.S. soldier being taken hostage, or a large helicopter, like a Chinook, being shot down. These were rarities, but when they happen, the command structure has to scramble for damage control. The negative publicity is intense.

  So to ask Army aviation to go down into these valleys where they would be sitting ducks took a lot of balls, he thought. In effect, the commanders were putting aircraft down into a position where they were utterly defenseless. Anyone who has ever been in a helicopter with door gunners knows they can only shoot down. They can’t shoot up—they can’t shoot through the rotors. So once they start dropping below ridges, the door gunners are pretty useless. The Afghans know that. The insurgents’ fathers passed down to their sons the tactics they used to defeat Russian helicopters. They would lure the helicopters down in the valleys where the aircraft was defenseless.

  American and Coalition pilots were extremely conscious of this fact. They were one of the few groups that took seriously the lessons learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.

  When Wisdom interviewed Ford, the team sergeant told him he’d had a similar reaction to Wisdom’s about landing in the valley. Ford believed it was an operationally untenable plan. You don’t land guys in a valley and ask them to fight uphill or go uphill. Ford told Wisdom that his team did look seriously at the alternatives to landing on the low ground—including fast-roping to an area above the compounds.

  But by landing in daylight in the middle of the valley, the enemy knew they were coming. Their men were in position on the high ground for the ambush. As Wisdom listened to Ford, he concluded that Walton’s team and the pilots—and possibly members of the other ODAs—could have been massacred. And if that had happened, the publicity in the United States would have been overwhelmingly negative. The antiwar folks would again focus on Afghanistan—and push hard to bring home the troops that were stationed there. The pressure could have turned the tide of the war—or at least public sentiment, which still favored the U.S. presence in Afghanistan because of the country’s role in planning the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

  One of the things that helped save lives was that ODA 3312 had been in a similar ambush a few months earlier. Wisdom talked to members of ODA 3312 and discovered that they had been on a reconnaissance patrol near Gowardesh in the mountains. Their mission was to clear the valley of insurgents who had been attacking Coalition forces. But while on patrol in January 2008, they were attacked. It was a brutal firefight, and one of the Green Berets, Staff Sergeant Robert Miller, was killed providing fire for his men to escape. Members of ODA 3312 said that the Shok Valley’s landscape—and the mission—reminded them of the earlier operation. Uneasy, they moved cautiously as they headed to their positions to support Walton’s team. They weren’t surprised by the Shok Valley ambush and knew all the insurgents’ tactics. They stood their ground and were able to hold them off so they couldn’t overrun Walton’s team.

  With most of the material in hand, Wisdom called his boss. He explained to him that Commando Wrath had the potential to be a massacre—and the potential to have the “entire chain of command relieved.”

  Wisdom didn’t know what his commander would say. But after a brief pause, he told Wisdom the words Wisdom had hoped to hear: “Go ahead. Write the report.”

  89

  Wurzbach

  Wurzbach took his role as the interim team sergeant seriously.

  He began collecting the sworn statements from the soldiers, and handling paperwork—something Ford would normally have taken care of.

  But Wurzbach also had concerns about the future of the team. They were so badly shot up. Would they go home? Would they stay in Afghanistan? What was next for the team?

  After waiting for a while, he decided it was time to speak to his commander.

  He told the commander that there was a rumor that the team would be going back to their original firebase outside of Kabul and would switch out early. He paused before adding, “Having just heard of this—but I’m pretty certain that I speak for everyone on our team—if you do that you’ll have a real big problem on your hands. We’re not done. We’re still the mission company. We’re still combat effective. We can conduct missions and we’re ready to go. Let’s start working our next target. We may need a little help. But let’s get ready to roll. Let’s get back on the horse. We’re not going to put our tail between our legs and go home. It’s not going to work that way.”

  The commander said he’d figured that would be the sentiment.

  And so the team—sans Ford, Morales, Behr, and Walding—stayed in Afghanistan and conducted a few missions. They were mostly minor operations, and a few months after the Shok Valley battle, the team was redeployed to the United States.

  90

  Wisdom

  Flying back to the United States, Wisdom real
ized his research was leading him in an entirely different direction. There was no question that the soldiers reacted heroically under fire. But Wisdom questioned the thinking behind the entire mission.

  When he returned to the United States, he began discussing the mission with several historians at United States Special Operations Command among others. He sought their input and perspective. What he found was disturbing. Reviewing the information—and everything he knew from all his years in the military—he realized that Operation Commando Wrath was more than a failed mission. It represented many of the operational failures in Afghanistan.

  You had a special operations community “hell-bent to validate this whole man-hunting concept.” Even though it had never been shown to be effective, the military’s infatuation with network analysis and net-centric warfare had become part of the eventual replacement of sound operations and tactics.

  The mission had had a high potential for aircraft full of troops going down. The Green Berets were extracted because of aircrews that were willing to assume an extraordinarily high degree of risk. When you’re an infantryman, you can get down the rocks. You can’t do that in a Chinook. You can’t do that in a Black Hawk. They still have a lot of weight and balance issues. The air quality definitely affects Apaches and Black Hawks.

  At the command level, it was believed that the mission had been planned out meticulously. But one question Wisdom was unable to answer was: Who pushed this plan? He knew Walton’s team was given the plan but had little input into its details. Planning is a critical part of any operation—and plans have to be approved down the line. You develop a plan and it has to be approved from above until it reaches the final “seven or eight guys who are going to execute it.”