Tony and Jim were both returning fire on the right. They needed backup.
“Bravo team in!” Jim yelled. A second group of his men rushed in the door under fire, including Scott, the breacher, and Staff Sgt. Dan McKone, the former Peace Corps volunteer turned Special Forces medic.
As the gun battle raged, a group of Afghan women and children ran into the front courtyard—apparently pushed out by the male shooters to give them time to escape. Caught in the line of fire, the women scattered, leaving an infant lying on the ground. As bullets from an automatic rifle shot across the courtyard, Scott scooped up the baby and moved it to safety in an adjacent room.
Soon after that, the shooting stopped. Dan spotted two Afghan women lying wounded in the courtyard, and rushed over to begin treating them. Other women and children were wailing around him, and Dan was operating in the dark. Reserved and meticulous, Dan had joined the Green Berets to be a medic, not a machine gunner. He moved methodically to assess their wounds. He saw that one of the women had a serious leg wound, and quickly applied a tourniquet. Then he turned to another and applied a pressure bandage and some antibiotics. Finally, he slipped an IV into the arm of the woman with a severe leg wound. “They will be all right,” he reassured the family members, speaking through the team interpreter.
Meanwhile, Jim got a report from Special Forces Chief Warrant Officer 3 Brian Halstead, who had gathered intelligence for the raid and was the overall ground force commander, that an AC-130 gunship was circling overhead. The pilot had spotted some other fighters moving toward an adjoining qalat next door. Jim, Tony, and Mark looked over the wall into the blackness of the neighboring compound. Jim couldn’t see anything. Were the fighters inside? He couldn’t tell. Tony found a ladder and dropped it over the wall. Jim climbed down it.
I’m about to get shot, Jim thought as he stepped down the ladder. He reached the bottom, and covered Tony and Mark as they followed him down. They began searching the rooms, found four men huddled in one, and detained them. Halstead then directed soldiers in scouring the compound for intelligence and other sensitive items and confiscating a computer, wads of cash, and opium.
The gunfight marked the first close-quarters battle for Jim’s brand-new team, ODA 316. They accomplished the mission. Dr. Naimetullah was dead. Sometime during the chaotic night he was killed or fatally wounded and his body surfaced downstream in the Pech River a few days later. All the other males in his family had been captured. The Americans had all lived to fight another day. When they finally reached their tiny camp near the town of Asadabad, the capital of Konar Province, at about four o’clock the next morning, their emotions poured out.
“With that proximity and the volume of shooting, we were amazed no one got shot,” said Tony, the tall Sri Lankan who was Jim’s right-hand man. “How did we walk away from that?”
Just six weeks before, Jim and his men had arrived in Afghanistan having been given no idea where they were going in the country, no intelligence reports, no current maps, no briefings on the people or the culture. Standing in the darkness on the tarmac at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, about to board a Chinook helicopter for Asadabad, the intelligence officer of Jim’s battalion walked over and gave him a piece of paper with a handwritten mission: “Kill or capture ACMs [anti-coalition members].”
“Roger that,” Jim replied.
The terse mission statement summed up the U.S. military strategy for Afghanistan—or, more accurately, the lack of a strategy. It had been less than two years since the Al Qaeda terrorist network had killed thousands of Americans in attacks on U.S. soil on September 11, 2001. The Bush administration had swiftly retaliated, leading a punitive invasion in October to overthrow the Taliban regime for giving Al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan. The U.S.-led coalition, spearheaded by CIA operatives and Special Forces teams, ousted the Taliban from power in December 2001. But the Taliban and Al Qaeda were far from eradicated. As the U.S. military turned its attention to Iraq, launching a full-scale invasion in March 2003, the Taliban regrouped and made a steady comeback. But the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan failed to evolve. It remained simplistic and driven by revenge.
“The American people wanted blood, and we were that instrument of destruction,” Jim recalled. “There was no plan.”
At the time, the pure kill-and-capture mission suited Jim, a new ODA commander itching for his first taste of combat. Jim relished the opportunity to lead men in battle all the more because it had been so long in coming.
In the seventeen years since he left for Army basic training, Jim had worked to hone his skills, first as an enlisted Green Beret and then as an officer leading small combat units. He tested himself on the Army’s shooting ranges and training fields and immersed himself in the study of military tactics and history. He earned the respect of commanders and the love of his men. Through all of this he emerged with a distinctive creed and identity—one that revolved around the Spartan ethos and ancient call of men to arms: he wanted to prove himself as a warrior, and Afghanistan was a place to fight.
In August 2002, Jim had been assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group, which was heavily engaged in the Afghanistan conflict. The Afghan war and the looming showdown with Iraq had dramatically increased the demand for Special Forces teams, and the 3rd Group was reactivating some teams eliminated in the 1990s because of a shortage of manpower. In January 2003, Jim was given command of one of the new teams.
“Congratulations, Capt. Gant. You are the first member of ODA 316,” the battalion commander, who was in charge of more than a dozen ODAs, told him. The team was scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in April with the rest of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group.
“I knew I had a lot of work to do,” Jim recalled. Because the team was starting from scratch, it had to beg and borrow and steal everything from existing units—including gear and personnel. What it got were hand-me-downs and cast-offs, and some inexperienced new Green Berets. “We had no team room, no equipment, nothing. And we were hitting the box in ninety days,” Jim said. The “box” was Afghanistan.
Two days later, Tony Siriwardene, a friend of Jim’s from Arabic-language school, walked into the company area. Having learned Jim was the team leader, Tony signed on right away. A staff sergeant, Tony had just graduated from the Special Forces qualification course and had never deployed before. Next came Dan, who had lived all over the world but also never deployed to a combat zone. The third brand-new Green Beret on the team was Scott, a muscular farm boy who was a communications sergeant. Two other soldiers were assigned to Jim after other teams released them: Sgt. 1st Class Chuck Burroughs, also trained in communications, and Staff Sgt. Brian Macey, whose specialty was weapons. So when Jim got word that he was about to get another apparent reject soldier, he balked. “Quit giving me everyone’s fucking trash!” he complained to the company sergeant major. Outside, he got into a fight with the soldier’s team sergeant, who was offended by the accusation. Still, just hours before they left to deploy, he got one more seeming outcast: Sgt. 1st Class Mark Read, a boisterous medic from the backwoods of Georgia who had just been kicked off the HALO team, an ODA specially trained in high-altitude low-opening parachute jumps. An ODA is supposed to have twelve men, but Jim’s team would deploy to Afghanistan with only seven.
Training was an urgent priority for the new team, given the short amount of time before they left for the war zone. But Jim had a problem: the team had no weapons. So he obtained “rubber duckies”—nonfiring M16s made of rubber—and used engineer tape to mark off some “rooms” for training in close-quarters battle.
Other equipment was also missing or in poor condition. The team received broken radios, Global Positioning System devices that did not work, malfunctioning machine guns, and outmoded night vision goggles. Team members had to buy their own chest racks for carrying ammunition and other supplies. In a particularly egregious logistical shortcoming, the military failed to give the team tourniquets or blood-clotting agents, so Dan bought them wi
th his own money. They also had a mishmash of maps—the old Russian ones were accurate but illegible, while the American maps had the wrong grid coordinates.
In April 2003, the seven members of ODA 316 flew to Bagram Air Field and soon afterward boarded a Chinook helicopter for Asadabad. They touched down at a landing zone near the banks of the Konar River and dragged their bags into a tiny, dusty compound. The Asadabad camp, known as a “mission support site,” was austere. Jim and his men lived in a single large room with mud walls and dirt floors covered with straw mats. Another Special Forces team and command element were also stationed at the camp, along with a small CIA contingent and their Afghan partner force, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams (CTPT). Jim and the head of the CIA paramilitary unit in Asadabad sat down over a beer one night and figured out how they could cooperate and thereby skirt operational restrictions each side faced. The CIA could go after terrorist targets, for example, but not after insurgents who were laying bombs in the road outside the base. So when the CIA had information on a target they could not pursue, they had Jim do it for them. But for all intents and purposes, the team was on its own, with $30,000 a month in funds and very little guidance from above.
Immediately Jim conducted a short train-up in Asadabad and then launched into an aggressive pace of operations. With almost no information on where they were or who was who, they began scraping together any intelligence they could get from Afghans on the ground. Their first mission, eight days after the team landed in-country, involved a six-mile patrol up steep mountain paths in the freezing cold and wind to locate a village, Adwal, that was of interest to commanders. On their next combat foray, they were ambushed near the village of Pashad by two enemy fighters firing rocket-propelled grenades. Together, the missions set the tone for the deployment: the terrain and people would make this a tough fight—harder than Jim had expected. In their first ninety days operating in Asadabad, they spent eighty-nine in missions outside the wire of the camp. Their objective was making contact, either with the enemy or with friendly Afghans. Certain rules applied to every mission: Jim always rode in the lead vehicle, the patrol always carried triple the required ammunition, and his men were authorized to shoot whenever they felt necessary—these became known on the team as “Gantisms.” Jim kept telling his men they would have a day to rest. It never came. “You can rest when you die” became his motto—written on a sticker on the back of his helmet.
With so few men on his team, Jim had to make sure every body counted, and he badly needed another gunner—one who would kill without hesitation. The least likely choice was Dan. Unlike the other team members, Dan hadn’t gone to Afghanistan to hunt insurgents. A hardworking and dedicated medic from the northern California coast, Dan once asked to stop a patrol to help injured Afghans by the side of the road. He spent hours treating the parade of Afghans who showed up at the base—farmers who had blown up their feet stepping on old land mines, or children burned by cooking oil. But something told Jim to test out Dan on his vehicle’s M240 machine gun.
At first Dan was apprehensive about the responsibility. Not for long. After a few days with Dan up on the gun, the team rolled in from a mission and Jim jumped on the top of the Humvee to pull the M240 off for cleaning. Dan stopped him.
“What the fuck?” Jim asked.
“Jim, that’s my gun,” Dan said point-blank.
Jim looked at Dan and backed off. He had his gunner.
From then on, when Dan wasn’t treating patients he spent most of his time on the camp cleaning and zeroing his machine gun, and upgrading the turret. He figured out a way to get more than 800 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition linked and ready to go in the gun, with more than 3,500 rounds in the turret and another 4,000 rounds in the Humvee. The total of more than 8,000 rounds far exceeded the roughly 1,800 carried by other units—following the “Gantism” on maximizing ammunition. Other members of the team proved themselves beyond Gant’s initial expectation—medic Mark Read turned out to be highly aggressive in combat and communications sergeant Chuck Burroughs mastered every job on the team and was the best shot of all the men.
In between missions, the team trained hard by day and at night would drink the cheap Kentucky whisky Early Times. At the Asadabad camp, rain poured in through a large hole in the collapsed roof, creating a stream of water that flowed through the sleeping quarters and crude operations center where Jim planned missions and held team meetings. “We sweated our balls off. We didn’t sleep for three months. Our house was a fucking swamp,” Mark recalled. Sanitation was poor and at first they got horribly sick with vomiting and diarrhea from eating Afghan food. “We all took turns going down for three or four days,” Tony said. The camp had no Internet and the only phone was a satellite phone that they used to call home once a week.
“All we had was each other,” Jim said.
As the team bonded and fine-tuned their combat skills, Jim realized he needed to somehow give his men a more meaningful mission than “kill or capture.” So he gathered them together one night in the operations center and told them the story of the three hundred Spartan warriors at the epic battle of Thermopylae in the fifth century BCE. Shoulder to shoulder in a narrow gorge, the Spartans held out to the last man against an onslaught by thousands of Persians. Jim’s expectation, he said, was for his men to fight and show bravery together with the same warrior ethos that defined the Spartans. He showed them the Greek letter lambda he had had tattooed on his left forearm shortly before they left Fort Bragg. The lambda stood for Laconia, the Spartan homeland in ancient Greece, and appeared on the shields that Spartan warriors wielded in an impenetrable phalanx. Together they were invincible, he told them. “That was the mission, and they all accepted that. It was what we all needed,” he said. The next day, Jim turned to his men as they put on their body armor and readied to roll out the gate and hit another target. “A Spartan never asks how many, just where are they,” he said. It became a way of life for them.
The team later adopted the call sign “Spartan.” Several members got lambda tattoos identical to Jim’s on their left forearms—even Dan, the most skeptical of the group, who got his last. They began to wear unauthorized shoulder patches with the lambda. Tony and Mark made the first set of woven cloth patches, which were round and three inches in diameter with a black lambda on a gray background. The patches had to be earned. The significance of the patches grew over time, both for Jim and his men, many of whom coveted them as a symbol of belonging to a unique group of warriors.
Jim’s leadership, his philosophy, and the team’s rigorous training created what Tony called “combat chemistry.” “What it comes down to is, we wanted to try to win the war,” he said. “People like us can identify other people like us. It’s just energy,” he said. “We were better trained than teams that had been together three or four years. I am the first guy going in the door, I will take the round, as long as we win the battle,” he said. “In Konar, we were in our zone.”
What Jim didn’t fully realize until years later, though, was that by proving they were aggressive fighters, he and his men were also taking the first and perhaps single most important step toward gaining entry to the warring culture of Afghanistan’s Pashtuns. Indeed, in many ways Jim’s assimilation into the culture started naturally, because the stark values and dichotomies of the Pashtun people so closely mirrored his own. He would offer them food with one hand and a knife with the other; they would invite him to lay down his arms and eat with them, then attack him on the road out.
On one April mission in Konar, Jim was told there was trouble in the village of Mangwel, a twenty-mile drive southeast from Asadabad down a rough dirt road. The team rolled warily into the village, their vehicles bristling with guns, only to be greeted by a mild-mannered man with soft brown eyes who introduced himself using some broken English as Dr. Akbar. Dr. Akbar lived next to the road and, unbeknownst to Jim, had been selected by the powerful and fierce old tribal chief, Malik Noor Afzhal, as the emissary to the first American
soldiers to set foot in the village since the war had begun eighteen months before. In fact, through word of mouth, the Mohmand tribesmen in Mangwel had learned the Americans were headed their way and had enough time to squirrel away their weapons in the nearby hillside. Everyone in the village, including Dr. Akbar, was afraid. But Noor Afzhal decided the doctor’s house was the safest spot to meet with them.
“Will you drink tea?” Dr. Akbar asked Jim, who agreed and followed him into the house.
Nearby, Noor Afzhal was determined to show these foreign soldiers the pride and hospitality of his Pashtun people. “I am not one bit scared,” he told his younger brother. “The only person I am scared of is up there,” he said, pointing toward the sky. So he put on his best silver turban and a black vest. Then, a prayer on his lips, he strode into Dr. Akbar’s greeting room, his head held high.
“Salaam aleikum, peace be upon you,” Noor Afzhal said to Jim, placing his hand on his heart.
“And peace be upon you,” Jim answered. He immediately noticed the aura of respect the broad-chested, malik, or chief, commanded.
Noor Afzhal sat down cross-legged on a red carpet facing the bearded American.
“I am Commander Jim, and these are my men,” Jim said.
After an exchange of pleasantries and another serving of tea, Noor Afzhal turned to Jim and looked him in the eye.
“Why are you Americans here in Afghanistan?” he asked.
“Our country was attacked. We came here to fight the Taliban and others responsible for this,” Jim replied. Then he pulled out a laptop and showed Noor Afzhal video footage of the Twin Towers crumbling to the ground on September 11. “My men and I are warriors. But we are not here to fight you,” Jim said. “We want to help you.”
Noor Afzhal was visibly moved. He was silent for a moment, and took a sip of tea. Then he spoke again to the young American. “If you can come all the way to Afghanistan from the United States to help us, then why should I not help you?” Noor Afzhal said. “We don’t want the Taliban here.”
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