by Mitch Weiss
As a student of history, Wisdom knew that this was an issue in Special Forces. Traditionally in Special Forces, especially in the 1950s and well into the 1960s, SF teams, had large companies commanded by lieutenant colonels. You had companies and teams, and the teams were often out in the middle of nowhere. The teams would develop their own plans and execute them, and they would resource them all the way back to the top so they had aircraft and air cover and air support.
The Green Berets were independent operators in many ways. By the 1970s, the Regular Army wanted little to do with Special Forces. The Army didn’t want anything to do with counterinsurgency warfare. These were simply not discussed, not talked about in the Regular Army.
“In fact, Special Forces practically went away,” Wisdom recalled. “It was on life support. There was a lot of resentment toward Special Forces in Vietnam as well as [toward] Army aviation. Those were the only two branches that came out with their heads held high.”
So Wisdom watched the shift from the Vietnam-era concept of Special Forces—according to which Green Berets lived in the boonies and worked with host-nation forces and tribes—to a more conventional unit.
Wisdom noticed just how conventionalized Special Forces had become in Afghanistan. In his view, Operation Commando Wrath illustrated this change. The mission was a conventional operation. Just because it was led by Special Forces didn’t make it a special operation. He concluded: It was an operation that a good infantry company could have handled.
Fortified with his information, he wanted to write a report that could stand for twenty years—the military could learn from its mistakes.
To do that, he needed to collect more information, and to his surprise, it came from unlikely sources. Many NCOs and officers who knew he was writing the report started slipping him information “under the table.” To Wisdom, this was another indication that there was more to Commando Wrath than just a fight that went bad. Fights do go bad, he knew. Some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets you. But here he had soldiers giving him material that no one else had been willing to turn over. It was always: “Hey, you need to look at this.”
He had to put together a time line, which he did in part by listening to the radio traffic.
One of the problems with Commando Wrath—and it helped illustrate the many problems in the war—was that many of the operations were driven by sources. Everyone seemed to be running their own sources. Even Grandma has her own network, he thought. So who was working for whom? How much circular reporting was going around? With Commando Wrath, they had a source telling them Haji Ghafour was in the Shok Valley and that, for the most part, he could be easily taken.
Easily taken? That was flat-out wrong—and it was something he would hint at in his report.
91
Behr
It seemed like the entire team was at Walter Reed.
In the months following the mission, Behr saw Ford, Morales, and Walding. They were all on different floors.
A steady stream of people visited them. For Behr, his time at the hospital was filled with reflection—and great physical pain.
Just like Walding, he knew he had died on the operating table in Bagram. The infection was so bad, that doctors didn’t know whether they would be able to save him.
He underwent eight operations. For the first six months, he had to stay in bed because most of his hip was gone. Doctors had to wait for the wound to heal completely before performing hip replacement surgery. He began walking again only after massive rehabilitation. It was a struggle.
Whenever old friends visited, they would tell him they’d heard the battle over the network radio. That they were angry and had wanted to head to the Shok Valley to help. The U.S. military was like that. Everyone was truly a band of brothers. They might argue. They might bitch and moan. But when the shit hit the fan and one of their own was in trouble, they joined forces and discarded all the bullshit. That’s just the way it was.
Behr’s family visited. Even his wife, Amanda. They had separated long before he was deployed to Afghanistan, but she wanted to make sure he was okay. He knew their marriage was over. The two of them had too many issues. It was difficult being married to a Special Forces soldier. They work long hours when they are in the United States, and are always deployed, most of the time to secret locations in war zones. They carry a lot of stress because they deal with life-and-death issues.
Behr was wrestling with his future. What he was going to do once he was released. One day when a friend was visiting, he spotted a nurse, Mary Elizabeth Just, a volunteer with the American Red Cross, leaving the hospital. Pretty, she had visited Behr’s room several times to help. Behr’s friend glanced at Mary and asked her to have lunch with them. Behr was embarrassed. He liked the nurse and thought his friend was making a move.
In her midtwenties, she seemed smart and perky, with a bright, friendly smile. Every time she came into Behr’s room, it snapped him out of his funk. The three had lunch that day. By the end of the meal, just before she got up to leave, Behr said he wanted to see her again. She said yes.
Now, sitting in the hospital room, Behr didn’t know what his future would hold with the Army—he had been thinking about getting out—but he hoped it would involve Mary. He smiled for a moment. It was another ironic twist. He had found someone he liked under the worst possible circumstances. He knew he wouldn’t have met her if he hadn’t been wounded on the worst day of his life.
92
Wisdom
Wisdom became consumed with the report. He wanted to know every last detail. For example, the role of joint tactical air controllers (JTACs) is critical in any battle. They are the pilot’s eyes on the ground, leading them to targets and, in many cases, away from civilians. But Walton had an inexperienced JTAC on his team. And when the shooting started, they had to turn to the JTAC on ODA 3312, Robert Guttierez, to help call in the danger-close strikes.
As Wisdom examined the course of the battle, he discovered other mistakes: The command structure, for example, had downplayed the intelligence. Walton, the mission’s ground force commander, was too close to the front lines.
It was a case where you had one ground force commander leading three ODAs, and you had two-thirds of an Afghan commando company spread out over four locations, over extremely rough terrain. How do you maintain command and control? Walton was leading the charge. And when the ambush occurred, he found himself immediately cut off. He became, for the most part, combat ineffective. He had to rely on the radio, and that’s not something you want to have to do in that type of terrain.
Finally, Wisdom completed a draft of the report, which detailed every aspect of the mission. What went right? What went wrong and how had they avoided a complete disaster? Luck played a major role.
Then he presented his findings to his deputy commander.
“Tell me what really happened?” the man asked.
It was an open invitation to be candid, and Wisdom took advantage of it. The deputy commander listened intently as Wisdom spent an hour talking about the mission. He noted the lack of enthusiasm the soldiers had felt about the operational soundness of the mission.
“Well, when things finally get to our level, they have been so sanitized, so whitewashed, we often don’t know really what happened,” the commander said.
He added that the operation had come across as a huge success. Wisdom was shocked. “The team didn’t get the objective of the operation,” he told the commander. The deputy commander told Wisdom that while they didn’t catch the bad guy, they “disrupted the enemy.” He took a deep breath. “You’re not going to change the report, right?”
Wisdom was worried. He knew that the soldiers were pretty upset and some had expressed concern that he was going to whitewash the mission.
The deputy commander looked Wisdom in the eye and said, “Write it up. Warts and all.”
And that was what Wisdom did.
93
Final Report
Wis
dom worked on the report up until the day he left active duty. He started writing it ten months before, and he completed his second draft on April 23, 2009, and was discharged a day later. It took that long.
When he finished, he filed the report—all 298 pages of it. Based on dozens of interviews and hundreds of documents, it went to commanders for review.
It was the real inside story about what happened—not the version that had been presented to the media. The Army had awarded ten Silver Stars to the men trapped on the mountain—the most to any fighting unit since the Vietnam War. The publicity surrounding Commando Wrath was widespread. Every major news organization from the Washington Post to the Associated Press had recounted the tale to a wide audience. It was always the same, how a Special Forces team scaled a mountain to reach a top unnamed terrorist and inflicted heavy casualties on insurgents. There were exciting details about how the trapped soldiers escaped, scaling down the side of a mountain under heavy fire. It was a made-for-Hollywood movie. But there were no details about the origin of the mission—or the tactical problems the soldiers had faced.
None of this mattered to Wisdom. He wrote it so that someone in twenty years could examine the battle and understand what happened. They could examine all the mistakes. And maybe someone could learn from it. So it wouldn’t happen again.
But unknown to Wisdom, his report was never published. The Special Operations Command’s History and Research Office said Wisdom’s report “contained weaknesses in its historical methodology” and the draft would need revisions.
EPILOGUE
On a cold December day at the end of 2008, the team was finally reunited at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Under the glare of television cameras, Walton, Ford, Morales, Walding, Behr, Howard, Sanders, Shurer, Williams, and Carter were about to receive Silver Stars—the military’s third highest combat decoration. It was the most Silver Stars awarded to a single fighting unit since Vietnam.
Their families arrived early in the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School auditorium as the men made their way to a stage. In a few minutes, their prerecorded voices would recount the daring feats of each soldier. Carter was the only recipient who was not in Special Forces. But he held a special place at the ceremony—he was the only combat cameraman in U.S. military history to win a Silver Star.
The audience was spellbound as the narrators told their story—complete with video. How they were trapped on a mountain. How some were seriously wounded. How they had risked their lives to drag fellow soldiers out of the line of fire. How they’d had to find a path down the side of a cliff to carry the wounded to safety.
Lieutenant General John F. Mulholland, commander of Special Forces Command, told the audience that day that he was awed by their actions.
“Alone and unafraid, working with their counterparts, they took on a tenacious and dedicated enemy in his homeland, in his own backyard. Imagine the Taliban commander thinking, ‘What the hell do I have to do to defeat these guys?’” Mulholland said.
He continued:
“As we have listened to these incredible tales, I am truly at a loss for words to do justice to what we have heard here. Where do we get such men?…There is no finer fighting man on the face of the earth than the American soldier. And there is no finer American soldier than our Green Berets.”
Mulholland was confident that many people simply wouldn’t believe the courage displayed by the men arrayed before him.
“If you saw what you heard today in a movie, you would shake your head and say, ‘That didn’t happen.’ But it does, every day,” he said.
With that, he pinned medals on the men’s chest.
In March 2009, Rhyner was awarded the Air Force Cross—the service’s second highest award for heroism, after the Medal of Honor.
It was the culmination of months of publicity surrounding the mission.
The story captured the public’s imagination. A daring early-morning raid into the heart of an insurgent stronghold. A small force trapped on a mountain, but still able to kill nearly two hundred enemy fighters before escaping after a six-and-a-half- hour battle.
The soldiers were interviewed by dozens of local and national news organizations. They were hailed as heroes. The story was powerful and compelling.
The ceremony took place shortly after Democratic Illinois senator Barack Obama was elected president. As a candidate, he promised that America would shift its defense resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, which he called ground zero for any war on terrorism. He vowed to remove one or two brigades a month from Iraq, and get all combat troops out within sixteen months. In Afghanistan, he said he would ramp up the American military effort, particularly on the Pakistani border, and said that if America received intelligence about suspected Al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he was prepared to act on it.
It was clear that the newly elected president’s foreign policy focus would be on Afghanistan.
If anything, the Shok Valley battle helped illustrate the problems facing American troops in that nation. There weren’t enough ground forces to combat the rising influence of Al Qaeda and its supporters, mainly the Taliban and the HIG. In some areas, like the Shok Valley in Nuristan, the insurgents operated openly and without fear.
Since the lights faded that day at Fort Bragg, the soldiers have moved on with their lives. So it was no surprise that they initially balked when they were approached in April 2010 about being interviewed for a book about Commando Wrath. They said they would have to think about it. They didn’t want any more publicity. Finally, they said they would cooperate—but only if the authors “told the truth” about the mission.
Yes, it was a dangerous mission. Yes, they risked their lives to do their job. But they wanted the entire story told.
So, for a year, the team reluctantly talked to Mitch Weiss and Kevin Maurer about Commando Wrath, their loyalty torn at times between the Army they loved and telling the truth about a battle that has dominated their lives.
To get the full picture, the authors interviewed more than sixty people and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including detailed maps and after-action reports of the mission. (The Army refused to release Wisdom’s final report because it was still in draft form.) Kevin Maurer, who has been embedded nearly two dozen times with Army troops and Special Forces soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, visited Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010 and talked to some of the Afghans who fought that day. (The authors wanted to visit the Shok Valley, but it was too dangerous.)
In interviews, it was clear that the soldiers were proud of how they banded together to get off the mountain. How they overcame overwhelming odds to survive. But it was also evident that they still carried the deep scars of that day.
Since April 2008, Walton, twenty-nine, has been deployed to Afghanistan several times.
He still enjoys military service. When he’s not deployed, he is a volunteer firefighter with a department on the outskirts of Fort Bragg.
Reflecting on the mission, he was proud of the way his men handled themselves. But he hates the notoriety, and he is particularly hard on himself.
“I don’t feel like a hero,” Walton said. “I feel like I led a mission that went to shit and we all fought to the death to save our buddies and survive. Did we accomplish our fucking mission? No. Those fuckers are still alive. Granted, two hundred of their closest associates are blown all over the fucking mountain right now. And I am thankful every day we killed them. But that doesn’t make up for losses that we took.”
He recalled Wurzbach once telling him that he didn’t want to be defined by one battle.
But he already has been.
“That battle was a definitive fucking moment in everyone’s lives,” Walton said. “Will there be more? Potentially. But maybe not. But up until that moment in our lives, nothing like that had ever happened.”
As much as he tries to put it behind him, he can’t.
“Is it right to put it behind you and complet
ely forget about it? No. That is probably not the right thing to do. Do you want to think about it? No. It was weeks before I could sleep. I could not fucking sleep. It was not because of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. I wasn’t having nightmares and flashbacks. I was just so fucking pissed off that I could not relieve the stress. No amount of cigarettes worked at the time. I went to the medic and got Ambien,” he said.
Walton has seen subtle changes in his personality. Bright and ambitious, he was always driven to success. He still is.
“But I have a lot shorter fuse than I used to. You can only take so much stress before you snap. The stress came from all the other bullshit. There is a guy missing a leg. One guy has a fucked-up arm. Several guys got out of the Army…So there is a lot of aftermath there. A lot of this stuff is really never going away.”
The thirty-one-year-old Morales has tried to move forward with his life. He is still in Special Forces, even though he has undergone twenty-four operations and has had his leg amputated. But there are times when he stops and thinks about the Shok Valley.
He recalled the day he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was in a case-assessment room with Ford and Behr. As usual, they were all being obnoxious. But when they wheeled Morales to his room, Morales’s parents and his wife, Katherine, walked in. It was a tearful reunion.
“Katherine is crying and hugging me. My dad is emotional and my mom is, too. They were all crying, and in that sort of situation, I deflect emotion. I didn’t break down crying. I try to stay calm in those kinds of situations when other people are losing it,” Morales said.
But when he was alone with Katherine later, it all caught up with him. He broke down. He told her about everything he had been through. About losing CK. They hugged for most of the night.
