One Hundred Victories (30 page)

The commandos and SEALs were operating without the cover of darkness on the morning of August 16, 2012, as they inserted into the rugged moonlike landscape of northern Kandahar’s Shah Wali Kot District. The plan was to clear suspected Taliban locations there and work their way north and west, with other teams following behind to set up camp and recruit local police. As they came in for a landing, one of the UH-60 Black Hawks was hit by an RPG. It spiraled down to the ground and crashed, becoming consumed in a fireball. The other UH-60 took evasive action and then maneuvered to land near the flaming crash site so the men could try to rescue their comrades. They put out a security perimeter and feverishly searched the wreckage for survivors. There were none. Reinforcements arrived in helicopters, and the sad business of retrieving comrades’ remains and investigating the crash began.
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Eleven men died in all, including seven Americans—the four crew of the Black Hawk helicopter, two SEALs, and a US Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technician. Three Afghan commandos and an Afghan interpreter were also killed in the crash. After recovering the remains, the even grimmer business of identifying and separating them began. At Camp Simmons the following day, a soldier came into the operations center to ask a SEAL if he could help find a toothbrush or other item that would provide a DNA sample of his deceased teammate. All of the men had been through years of war and loss, but it did not dull them to the pain of loss. Hayes had been monitoring the crash and subsequent rescue, and he prepared to fly to Kandahar that night for the memorial service. General Allen and special operations commanders would fly in from all over Afghanistan to pay their last respects.

At Kandahar Airfield, those who would be carrying caskets gathered on the patio of Camp Brown to practice for the ramp ceremony that would be held that night as the caskets were loaded onto the plane. Major Angel Martinez, one of the special operations company commanders for Kandahar, arrived for a meeting at the command and stopped to watch the rehearsal for a moment. He noticed the commandos standing at attention, listening to instructions regarding the order of the night’s ceremony. Then he saw that they were surrounded by American plainclothes security guards holding rifles. He shook his head. The special operators fought beside these commandos every day, and they had just lost three of their own. The security measures had been imposed because the US military command in Kabul was in a great turmoil about mounting insider attacks. So far in 2012, thirty-four Americans had been killed by Afghans dressed in uniforms. Two Marines special operations teams had just been hit by such attacks, and earlier in the spring an Afghan special operator had shot and killed a US team member before he was taken out. The special operations command was debating standing down all SOF operations and revetting every one of their partners, the Afghan special operators as well as their Afghan Local Police. Martinez thought that was an overreaction, but he was, above all, offended that these particular Afghans, grieving the loss of their comrades, had to be surrounded and guarded like suspects. He spoke briefly to one of the guards. “I just think that it is a shame that they have to do that so visibly,” Martinez said. “I don’t think it’s necessary.”
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This day of heavy loss reminded Martinez of the death of his best friend, Sergeant First Class Pedro Munoz, in 2005, in the western province of Herat. Recalling how he had failed to bring his teammate home safely to his wife and daughter, on that first of his four tours, he sat on a bench to reminisce about his friend, shedding a tear for him and the newly fallen. Reminders of special operators who had died were everywhere: their names were affixed to buildings, camps, and outposts all over Afghanistan. Pedro’s was at the entrance of their camp in Bagram, and Camp Maholic was named for one of their teammates, Thom Maholic, an avid cyclist and Grateful Dead fan who had been with them in Colombia. Brown, Vance, Eggers, Montrond, and Simmons were all special operators who had given their lives in Afghanistan and had camps named after them. The deadly SEAL crash in Wardak exactly one year earlier, in August 2011, was also on everyone’s mind that day. A Chinook full of SEALs and Afghans had been shot down as they came to the assistance of Rangers caught in a nighttime firefight. That was the worst mass casualty event in the history of naval special warfare; it took the lives of thirty-eight Afghans and Americans, including twenty-five special operators. It was also the deadliest single day of the Afghan war.

At 2 a.m. on August 18, 2012, hundreds of servicemen and women, and civilians, filed quietly out to the ramp, passing through the chain-link fence under the glaring white lights that lit the airfield and runway. Most of the people were staff and contractors who worked at the sprawling Kandahar base: their desk jobs meant that these ramp ceremonies were their most direct, visceral contact with the war going on outside the gates. The roar of transport aircraft and the occasional deafening scream of the fighter jets, the background noise of their lives, continued as people lined up in formation, two large blocks of troops at one end. The commanders formed a corridor through which the caskets would be carried into the open hatch of the massive C-17 transport plane that would bear the Afghan dead to Kabul and the Americans on to Dover, Delaware. Hayes and the other special operations commanders took their positions on the ramp. Then the field fell silent, as the takeoffs and landings were halted for the ceremony.

The hot summer wind blew over the crowd as ten RG armored personnel carriers crawled slowly along the concrete apron, their lights blinking in the night. One by one the giant vehicles turned in an arc around the plane to stop behind the assembled ranks, and the caskets were unloaded one by one. The troops were called to attention. Taps was played, then “Auld Lang Syne.” A chaplain stepped forward to a portable podium beside the plane’s belly, the ramp down and lights shining brightly within. He said a simple prayer and then read the name of each fallen warrior and his unit and hometown. One by one, the troops carried each flag-draped casket into the plane. A female soldier stood at attention off to one side. To no one but the desert night she whispered, “There are so many.”

CHAPTER NINE

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GOOD ENOUGH?

Paktika 2012–2013

WEST PAKTIKA

In 2012 two new teams took over from Hutch’s team in Paktika. His success in creating local police and growing security in a large swath of the province was a hard act to follow. It had been engendered by a good strategy, well-executed, with considerable assistance from an unorthodox Afghan partner, Commander Aziz. Aziz was a longtime ally of special operations forces who had been embraced by a multiethnic array of officials and elders in Paktika, but rival tribes kept up a barrage of criticism that periodically prompted yet another investigation. Hutch’s team time was now over; it was the fate of the team leader to move on to the life of a staff officer. He was promoted to the rank of major and awarded a fellowship year to study for a master’s degree at the prestigious Naval Postgraduate School. Eventually Hutch would make it back to the field, he hoped, to command a special forces company.

One of the two new teams was charged with consolidating Hutch’s gains. But the focus now shifted to the western side of the province, and the second new team was sent there to extend the Afghan Local Police program to three districts.

Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 1114 was the team sent to western Paktika. Its jumping-off point was a base with a name that sounded like it belonged in a Seth Rogen movie: Super FOB. The team was to start there but move as quickly as possible into a mud-walled qalat in a village. The team’s battalion commander insisted that teams should embed in villages to live next to the Afghans they were trying to mentor; he felt that too many teams under previous commanders had diverged from the stated methodology of embedding in the villages. The tradeoff, however, was that the teams would be farther from the district centers and the district police chiefs. The experience of the past years had also shown that it was hard for teams to connect their security bubbles as they grew if they remained too tied to one village. The tensions and tradeoffs between village stability operations and district stability operations were unavoidable.

Another consideration was the time it would take to find a qalat that was suitable from a security standpoint and that the owner was willing to rent. Villagers in insurgent-dominated areas were invariably nervous about the attention that the special operators attracted from the Taliban—and the likelihood that they would get caught in the crossfire. In addition, the Afghans feared the men would see their women. Even when villages eventually decided they wanted the benefits of the program, the early days were usually marked by an understandable wariness.

During the first year or so of the program, special operations commanders had generally tolerated the long, slow courting period as Afghan villagers debated the risks and rewards of what the operators were offering them. But by 2012 there was a distinct air of urgency emanating from the top levels of the special operations command. Teams were being asked to show results, and quickly, and to move to a second site to repeat the process during one six-month tour. It was an extremely ambitious strategy that put the teams under enormous pressure.

ODA 1114 was commanded by a newly minted and extremely serious special forces captain named Jason Russell. His team sergeant, Russ, was a classic special forces senior noncom: confident, personable, and dominant in running his team of sergeants. The team’s chief warrant officer was a studious guy who had memorized a social science encyclopedia’s worth of information about Afghanistan, Paktika, and the districts the team would be working in. Russ’s gregarious, hands-on personality would nicely balance the more introverted and academic nature of the other two leaders.

ODA 1114 and the rest of its parent 1st Special Forces Group normally deployed to Asia, but the manpower demands of the Afghan Local Police initiative required them to come to Afghanistan. A battalion command and other 1st Group teams had been deployed to western Afghanistan. The use of 1st Group in the region was not without precedent: Russ had been sent to Iraq to train and advise special police units in Kurdish Iraq, for example, and several other 1st Group teams had been sent to Mosul and Kirkuk. Russ, age thirty-nine, had deployed to ten countries in three regions, including Nepal and Somalia; he joked that he received his initial cross-cultural training from his Irish-Jamaican wife.

Although Afghanistan was a new culture for the team, much of their experience in foreign internal defense and the nuances of working with sensitive, prickly nations was fungible. Russ had taken his previous team, ODA 1112, to Jolo Island in the Philippines, where US special operations forces had been invested continuously but in relatively small numbers since 9/11. The Abu Sayyaf terrorist group had taken US hostages and had in general been running rampant through the heavily Muslim southern part of the archipelago. In an odd juxtaposition that showed the global reach of Islamic extremism, Abu Sayyaf was named for the Afghan Islamist leader Rasul Sayyaf. While nominally espousing militant Islam, the group had devolved into a largely criminal gang that carried out kidnappings for ransom, among other crimes. But Abu Sayyaf worried the Philippine government and US counterterrorism officials for two reasons. For one thing, such groups could find fertile soil among the Muslim population—the Moro Islamic National Liberation Front was the long-standing separatist guerrilla movement that operated in the same general area. Equally worrisome, the Indonesian-based Jamaat Islamiya (JI) group, a more potent node of the worldwide Al Qaeda federation, was making inroads in the Philippines. JI had been responsible for the largest act of post-9/11 terrorism in Asia: the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002.

Special operators considered their past decade’s work in the Philippines to be one of their unheralded successes, along with Colombia. They had made it a point to thoroughly analyze the mix of religious, tribal, and political conditions underlying the conflict before jumping into action, and they had worked closely with the Philippine government every step of the way. Those two steps could be considered the golden rules of a successful foreign internal defense program. After undertaking a thorough assessment of conditions in Basilan, in tandem with the Philippine government and US civilian experts at the US embassy, special operations teams, alongside Philippine forces, had begun to make contact with the population through civil affairs projects, information operations, and humanitarian assistance. That enabled them to gain a firsthand knowledge of the islands. Russ, who spoke both Tagalog and Thai, trained Philippine Marines and helped them track and eventually rescue American hostages held by Abu Sayyaf. The advisory mission, which involved US special operations units from the army, navy, air force, and marines, was commanded by a joint special ops headquarters (Joint Special Operations Task Force–Philippines, or JSOTF-P) that maintained a very close relationship with the US embassy. The Philippine armed forces retained all combat roles, but US forces provided a variety of direct support during operations, including intelligence, surveillance, and tactical advice. The only thing the US forces were not allowed to do, according to rules of engagement fashioned to respect Philippine sovereignty, was to pull the trigger of any weapon.
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