In a conversation that lasted about two hours, the tribal chief told Jim of his people’s bitterness over Taliban rule. After the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1994 and extended their control to Konar Province in 1996, the movement’s strict form of sharia (Islamic law) and justice began to clash with the less dogmatic ways of the Pashtuns. The Taliban’s religious enforcers forbade villagers to play music, listen to the radio, or smoke. They kept a list of who was not going to the mosque five times a day to pray, and carried out draconian punishments such as cutting off the hands of thieves. Over time, they grew increasingly corrupt and predatory. Not long ago, Noor Afzhal recounted, the Taliban caught a group of local thieves who were breaking into houses in Mangwel and nearby villages and stealing money, jewelry, and other valuables. Taliban officials were about to cut the men’s hands off, Noor Afzhal said, until he and other tribal leaders bribed the officials with 100,000 Pakistani rupees and got the men released.
“After about two years of the Taliban, we got tired of them,” Noor Afzhal told Jim. “They forced everyone to follow their strict rules, and if you resisted, they would torture you and put you in jail,” he said.
Jim nodded. He was listening to Noor Afzhal, but what struck him more than the tribal chief’s stories was his confident tone and the way every other Afghan in the room was hanging on his words.
“When the Americans came to Afghanistan, the Taliban came here in the middle of the night and knocked on everyone’s door and said, ‘Be ready, we will make holy war tomorrow,’ ” Noor Afzhal said. “But in the morning they ran off.”
“The cowards!” Jim laughed.
A slight smile crossed Noor Afzhal’s lips.
“At first, everyone was afraid you Americans would be just like the Russians,” he said. “There were a lot of rumors that because you were infidels you would destroy our country and kill people,” he said. “But you didn’t burn villages like the Russians did.”
“And we will not, I give you my word,” Jim said.
“But until today, not one American has come to speak to me,” Noor Afzhal said, his words trailing off in an implicit question.
“I am not like other Americans,” Jim answered. “We heard there was some kind of trouble here.”
Noor Afzhal stroked his beard, surprised at how much the officer seemed to know. “You are right,” he said. He hesitated for a moment. The Taliban was one thing—but this was a tribal matter. Still, he went on.
“For many years, we have had a blood feud with some highland people near here,” Noor Afzhal said. “They killed three of our people, and we killed three of theirs. Now they are cutting wood on our land. I have a paper signed by the king of Afghanistan showing that it is our land. I can show it to you.”
“I believe you,” Jim said.
“We are preparing to take the land back,” Noor Afzhal said. “The problem is, I do not have enough fighters. I have eight,” he said.
“No,” Jim said without missing a beat. “You have sixteen,” he said, referring to his eight U.S. soldiers.
Noor Afzhal’s eyes lit up. As the conversation progressed, he bent over toward Jim and told him quietly that he had eighty fighters within the village and could rally eight hundred from his Mohmand tribe. As the tribal elder’s trust in Jim grew, he was willing to hint at how many weapons he had and even to boast about his power.
In return, Jim agreed to throw the full force of his team and the bombs and rockets he had at his disposal behind the tribe.
In a gesture of Pashtun generosity, Noor Afzhal insisted on serving the Americans dinner, but lacked enough food. So families all around the village brought dishes for their guests. Noor Afzhal asked several tribesmen to take their rifles and guard the house as they ate. In some other villages, Jim would have confiscated the weapons for security. But that day in Mangwel something about Noor Afzhal made him feel protected, and Jim was beginning to understand the importance of firearms to Pashtun male honor. Jim made no move to take away the tribesmen’s rifles, telling them he had a gun in his house at home, too. “I trusted him right at the start because he was brave and he stayed with us. He trusted us, so I trusted him,” recalled Noor Afzhal. From that night on, Jim’s team and the tribesmen would be allies.
In the weeks and months that followed, Jim and Noor Afzhal traded stories about fighting the Taliban and Russians, and where the best ambush locations were. Jim learned much from Noor Afzhal about the Pashtun codes of honor and revenge. He backed up Noor Afzhal in the land dispute between the lowland clan of the Mohmand tribe in Mangwel and the highland clan of the Sarkan valley. Soon afterward, the highlanders backed down and the dispute was resolved peacefully. The team helped refurbish a well, build a clinic and girls’ school, and provide children with clothing and school supplies. Dan, Tony, Mark, and other team members were practically adopted by village families. Noor Afzhal took Jim and his men to the ruins of his ancestral home high in the valley behind Mangwel, and they shot each other’s rifles there. They began staying overnight at the malik’s house. It was the first true relationship Jim had with an Afghan tribesman.
Jim and his team at times patrolled together with the Afghans. He began to learn Pashto. One day his interpreter, Khalid Dost, gave him a set of Afghan clothes, and he began to wear them around his camp. Khalid had worked with Special Forces units since 2002, but he was struck by Jim’s rapport with the tribe. “Jim was the only team leader who really meant business,” he said.
One sweltering day Jim and his men stopped on patrol near the banks of the Konar River. Dan, the gunner, pulled guard at the vehicles. Leaving their rifles with local Afghans in a gesture of extreme trust, Jim, Tony, Mark, and Scott stripped down, wrapped head scarves around their waists, and jumped into the flowing water for a swim. As they laughed and splashed in the cool water, Jim was overwhelmed by the feeling that he belonged in Konar.
Elders from other tribes heard of Jim and also began to approach him. A group of elders from the Korengal valley, where the bomb financier Dr. Naimetullah was from, had met Jim the day after the raid when they pleaded with him to return opium the team had confiscated from the compound. With all the males in the family either killed or captured, the lucrative opium was all that remained to support the women and children in the family, they said. Jim weighed the risks—he knew the opium might make it into insurgent hands—but then agreed to the elders’ request. He believed it was more important and ultimately safer for his team for him to show respect for the elders’ need to protect the women of the family—the central tenet of Pashtunwali known as namoos.
Those same elders in June 2003 asked Jim to travel deep into the Korengal, where so many U.S. troops would later meet their fate, to help them resolve a tribal dispute over wood. They invited his team to have lunch with them and guaranteed their safe passage. Jim and his men had to leave their own vehicles across the river and get into the trucks of the Korengalese to ride up the narrow, twisting dirt road to their village. Jim and Chief Halstead held a jirga with tribal elders, and then they all sat down to a generous lunch of flatbread, seasoned rice, and stewed chicken. But Jim found the tribal dispute too complicated and murky, and no ready solution was found. The elders began arguing and the tone changed. As they left, one of Jim’s Korengalese hosts warned him: “We have guaranteed your safety here. But do not come back through the Pech River valley past Watapor,” he said.
“I am here for a mission,” Jim replied. “I will go wherever the enemy is.”
“If you pass Watapor,” the elder repeated, “we will attack. As a matter of fact, we may attack you today.”
“So,” Jim said, “we will fight.”
The tribesmen took the Americans back to the footbridge and they departed. Jim decided to move far ahead in the lead vehicle in an “eagle” formation, a tactic that helped give him time and flexibility to react to enemy contact. Suddenly a blast went off near the second vehicle, with shrapnel peppering Tony’s arm. After Mark checked him out, they pushed
forward. But insurgents opened up on the patrol from the left ridgeline with machine guns, rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. With rounds impacting nearby, Scott returned fire on the .50-caliber machine gun. Jim pushed his vehicle back into the kill zone, and Dan hammered some suspicious dwellings with the M240 gun. “We slugged it out until they stopped firing,” Dan recalled. Dan was proving to be the best gunner Jim ever had. “We never ran out of ammo, and Dan never let ’em breathe, not for a second,” Jim recalled. The team headed back to Asadabad.
Constantly attuned to the danger, Jim honed what he called his “sixth sense” and learned to listen to his instincts about when and where the insurgents were likely to strike. One day in mid-July, after returning from a trip to Kabul, he intended to train but was tasked to go on a mission planned by another team. He expressed reservations but was directed to treat it as a “training mission”—a concept that to Jim was an oxymoron. That day, when the patrol was moving slowly and towing a broken-down vehicle, a strike by a massive IED made of antitank mines seriously injured three soldiers on ODA 316, including two assigned to the team after it reached Afghanistan. One of them, Staff Sgt. Luke Murray, a civil affairs soldier, lost a leg. Another, a psychological operations soldier named Jonathan Wines, lost the full use of one of his arms. A third, Staff Sgt. Brian Macey, sustained a traumatic brain injury. They evacuated the wounded. Then back at the camp in Asadabad, Jim began explaining to Sgt. Maj. Robert “Buzz” DeGroff what had happened. A comrade from Desert Storm, Buzz made no effort to hide his dislike for officers in general, but he had observed Jim training and caring for his men. As Jim spoke, Buzz saw him start to break down. Buzz kicked the table that was between them out of the way, wrapped his arms around Jim, and let him cry. “I felt completely responsible,” Jim said. He always considered it his highest priority to protect his men, and he blamed himself for not spotting the IED. But he also swore he would avenge the casualties.
In coming weeks, ODA 316 would pursue all four Afghan insurgents involved in the IED strike. The financier of the attack was an Afghan named Kharni Jan Dahd, who owned a mine and factory that produced marble and other stone. Because of that, he was able to purchase explosives. Jim, together with Chief Halstead, who was in charge of gathering intelligence, lured the Afghan, nicknamed “Marble” Jan Dahd, to the Asadabad camp in what was known as a “Trojan horse” raid. As a veteran Special Forces noncommissioned officer, Halstead had played a key role in Jim’s early development by acting as a sounding board and serving as the overall ground force commander during key missions, allowing Jim to lead the assault element. Once Kharni Jan Dahd arrived with his bodyguards, Halstead had tea with him while Jim and his team prepared to detain them. In an agreed-upon signal, Halstead picked up a can of Coke, triggering the detention operation, after which Jim, his men, and another Special Forces team left to raid Kharni Jan Dahd’s compound. They confiscated explosives and bomb-making materials, and Kharni Jan Dahd was sent to the U.S. military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for three years.
Another insurgent named Norullah, who oversaw the IED operation, was a member of the Afghan Border Police (ABP). He worked under Haji Jan Dahd, the Safi tribal leader and former mujahideen fighter, who was then commander of the ABP in Konar Province. Jim and his men tracked Norullah to the border brigade outpost at Barabat, across the river from Haji Jan Dahd’s large house. The police at the outpost denied knowing where Norullah was, irritating Jim. “Do you have any weapons here other than your AKs [AK-47s]?” Jim asked them. They shook their heads. “If I find anything other than AKs, I am blowing this place up,” he told them. So Jim and Tony began searching the compound, and in the first room they pulled up the floor and found piles of mortars, rockets, and a heavy machine gun. They demolished the outpost and the munitions in it, setting off a mushroom cloud. At the time, it seemed like an appropriate retribution for the uncooperative police, but years later both Jim and Haji Jan Dahd would, only half jokingly, bemoan the destruction of the weapons. The next day, Jim’s team found and detained Norullah.
Meanwhile, Jim was spending more and more time in Mangwel with Noor Afzhal. Noor Afzhal promised to protect Jim as he would his own son, and he was true to his word. The tribal intelligence network had more than once tipped off Jim and his men to danger, or given them critical information to capture a target. Noor Afzhal also faced growing threats, as insurgents accused him of spreading Christianity in the area by associating with Americans. The two men would talk late into the night under the stars on the roof of Noor Afzhal’s mud-walled Afghan home, with the smell of smoke rising from wood fires and dogs barking in the village paths below. Jim began to think that no matter how many insurgents he killed or captured or how many weapons he blew up, the only place where he was making a difference in Konar was in Mangwel, and that was because of his relationship with Noor Afzhal and his tribesmen. Jim and the team called Noor Afzhal “Sitting Bull” after the great nineteenth-century Sioux warrior and tribal chief. Jim felt that, like Sitting Bull, Noor Afzhal was a proven fighter, but he had been chosen to lead primarily due to his strength of character, charisma, and concern for the safety of his people. From then on, Noor Afzhal would be known to many Americans and Afghans alike as Sitting Bull.
In August 2003, Jim and his team gave Noor Afzhal a 12-gauge shotgun with his name engraved on it and ammunition. Then Jim said goodbye to his Afghan father, promising to return one day.
OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL years, the fighting in Afghanistan escalated sharply, taking a toll on the men of ODA 316 as well as Noor Afzhal and his tribe in Mangwel.
In October 2003, ODA 316 flew home—but not for long. Jim got a rare opportunity to stay on as the leader of the team for another rotation into Afghanistan in January 2004, this time to the southern province of Helmand, a Taliban stronghold and opium-growing area where virtually no other U.S. forces were operating. There, ODA 316 bonded even more closely. One chilly February day a new weapons sergeant arrived for the team. ODA 316 was so tightly knit that newcomers had a hard time winning acceptance, and the team had already run off a string of them. Sgt. Christopher M. Falkel was different. The twenty-one-year-old from Littleton, Colorado, had a baby face and sometimes looked even younger than he was. With a slight build, he appeared no more than a boy next to others on the team. Still, he quickly won over the team’s veterans with his hard work and terrific sense of humor. Jim, wanting to bring Chris up to speed with the rest of his battle-hardened men, was deliberately tough on Chris. He made him ride in the back of his Humvee for the first month. Finally one night Tony came to Jim.
“Chris is good to go,” Tony said. “He’s ready for a team patch.”
Two days later, Jim placed a lambda patch on Chris’s shoulder, a ritual he would repeat many times in coming years with men he led in combat. Soon afterward, Chris was made a gunner, along with Dan and Scott.
In 2004, the team again returned to Fort Bragg. Jim was relieved to have brought all his men home alive. He handed over command of ODA 316 to another captain. In a final gathering with his teammates and their families at his home in Fayetteville, he reflected on the Afghanistan mission as he saw it at the time.
“We will never win in Afghanistan,” he told the team. “But know—now and always—that does not matter. That is an irrelevant fact. It gives us a place to go and fight, it gives us a place to go and be warriors. That’s it.
“Think back to who you were two years ago, and some of the fears you felt before you were seasoned and proved yourself under fire. Never forget that person,” he went on.
“My biggest battles are in front of me . . . as it is with you. Your next great triumph will be celebrated without my presence. And your first huge defeat, I will not be there, either.”
If any of them were wounded, he said, he would stay close to them. And if any died, he promised to look after their families “until I cross the river of death and we are together again.”
He closed with a poem from Steven Pressfield’s n
ovel The Virtues of War about the sarissa, the long, tough wooden spear that Alexander’s Macedonian army used so effectively in their phalanx formations.
The sarissas’ song is a sad song.
He pipes it soft and low.
I would ply a gentler trade, says he.
But war is all I know.
In the summer of 2004, Jim was selected to serve for the next two years on a special team conducting a classified mission. Sitting at the gate waiting for a flight in the Denver airport a year later in August 2005, he got a call from Afghanistan. It was Buzz, his old sergeant major. His voice was tense. ODA 316 was pinned down by Taliban insurgents in a remote valley in the Mari Ghar region of Zabul Province in a series of gunfights that had already raged over two days.
More than seven thousand miles away, high in the dusty Mari Ghar valley, Dan was crouched next to his vehicle pumping out rounds from an M249 light machine gun toward insurgents ensconced behind large granite boulders several hundred feet above. Dan, Scott, Tony, Chris, and other members of ODA 316 were fighting their way through the fifth heavy ambush of a two-day patrol. Their higher command had earlier failed to resupply them with machine-gun ammunition. Worse, it had inexplicably ordered them to circle back through a hostile village that had already been cleared. That gave the Taliban insurgents ahead an extra hour to prepare the biggest attack of all in a U-shaped ambush location that Afghan mujahideen used against Russian troops in the 1980s.
Why the fuck did you have us turn around? Dan thought when he heard the order.
Soon afterward, the team and the Afghan army soldiers with them were hit by a massive barrage of machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades from the high ground. The Afghan soldiers stopped their trucks on the dirt road in front of the three U.S. Humvees and ran off, blocking the Americans in the kill zone.
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