In fact, the assignment of a conventional Army battalion to conduct a Special Forces mission had never happened before. Gen. Petraeus made the decision after realizing that the U.S. military did not have enough twelve-man teams of Green Berets to expand the Afghan local defense initiative, at least not as quickly as he believed necessary. “It was completely unprecedented,” Petraeus told me later.
Special Forces had been in heavy demand in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan since the U.S. military invaded in 2001, and although the Army was working to increase the overall number of teams, they remained in short supply.
In October 2010, still waiting to get back to his tribe, Jim had worked on plans for expanding his strategy over the long term. Asked by his command to brainstorm ways to use regular infantry to supplement the Special Forces effort, he and Lt. Col. John Pelleriti, who oversaw Special Forces operations and plans in eastern Afghanistan for SOTF-E, proposed three different models for an “infantry augmentation plan.” One model involved dividing Special Forces teams and adding regular Army soldiers to each split team, in effect doubling the number of Green Beret–led teams available for the mission.
In a mid-November video teleconference with Special Operations commanders, Petraeus asked Bolduc what manpower he needed to expand. Bolduc described proposals including Jim and Pelleriti’s plan to integrate conventional forces with his Green Berets. While Petraeus offered Bolduc an infantry battalion to “thicken” his teams, it was not without overcoming resistance from the conventional-force leadership about having their unit dispersed across Afghanistan. But within a week, the Army had approved the deployment of the 1st Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment from the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley.
Back at the neatly mowed garrison in northeastern Kansas, news of the deployment elicited a mixture of reactions from Sonny and his comrades of 1-16 Infantry. It was an eclectic group of soldiers. Because its infantry line companies had been severely undermanned, the battalion had just undergone a chaotic reorganization. Senior leadership decided to pull soldiers from the support company—made up of medics, cooks, mechanics, drivers, and an array of other noncombat troops—to fill out the infantry ranks. The men had not trained together, and some were complete strangers. Many were not happy to be there.
Sgt. Jeremiah “Doc” Harvey had learned his wife was pregnant just two days before the word of the deployment came down; he canceled a deal to buy a house.
“A lot of the guys were out-and-out scared,” said Sgt. Justin Thomas, a thirty-eight-year-old mechanic from Kansas City, Missouri. “They said, ‘I didn’t sign up for this crap and to go around carrying a rifle.’ ”
Justin, a former cavalry scout, was more enthusiastic about the idea of working for Special Forces, as were the handful of infantrymen in the platoon. For Sgt. Michael Taylor, a twenty-five-year-old veteran of combat in Iraq, the assignment was a blessing in disguise. “I was really glad to link up with ODAs [Special Forces teams],” he said. “Doing a regular coalition force mission, we would have got slaughtered. We never really went to the range.”
For Mike, Justin, Sonny, and everyone else in the tent at COP Penich that night, though, the mission was a leap into the unknown. And none of the twelve platoon members was prepared for what happened next.
Wearing a baseball cap, jeans, and a jacket, with his beard now fully grown, Jim walked into the tent and introduced himself. He briefly told the men they were going to live in an Afghan qalat in the village of Mangwel. There they would eat, sleep, and fight alongside a tribe, and expand the local defense network as far as possible in Konar and beyond.
“We are trying to win this motherfucker,” he said. “I need guys around me who are willing to do that.” He went on: “What you are going to do is not okay. It’s not fun, it’s not safe, it’s highly stressful. I do not expect all of you to make it home.”
The room fell silent. The men stared at Jim, their faces ashen.
“Now I am going to give you my initial counseling. In the morning, the guys who are standing in front of me on the range at 0700 are the guys who are going to go with me. If, after receiving this counseling, you decide this is not what you want to do, man up and tell me now.”
What Jim referred to as his “initial counseling” was for him a manifesto, one he had shared with four prior teams of men he’d led in combat. This team, he already sensed, would be the most challenging. Over the next two hours, he explained his philosophy of leadership and command. He told the men what he expected of them and what they should expect from him, and he asked them to sign a statement saying they understood. Last, he read a short essay about his own creed as a warrior, entitled “Who I Am.”
Jim opened with a quotation from a Pressfield novel about the fifth-century BCE Athenian-turned-Spartan general Alcibiades, one who had never been defeated, and whom Jim most admired: “A commander’s role is to model arête, excellence, before his men. One need not thrash them to greatness; only hold it out before them. They will be compelled by their own nature to emulate it.”
Turning to his own beliefs, he told them: “All that we do must focus on combat. Our preparation for battle and our execution on the field of battle must be flawless.”
However, he continued, combat expertise will not be enough. “This unit must show advanced skills in cross-cultural understanding. We must care about what happens to Afghanistan and its people.
“We will protect our village, our valley, and our tribe—at all costs. We are here to win our part of the war . . . we will be extremely brutal and incredibly empathetic in the blink of an eye. How will we accomplish our mission? Here is how. One year from now, if you can return to the States and look in the mirror and say, ‘I did everything I could, every day while I was in Afghanistan,’ then I promise you, we will succeed. . . . If you will give me, the other team members, and those Afghans we are fighting for all you have, I know for certain that when you are an old man and you start losing your memories, you will beg God to take the memories of the time you spend in the Konar last.”
Jim said he expected his men to be loyal to the team, to provide him with honest feedback, to work hard, and to take the initiative. “Don’t be a private,” he said. In return, he promised to always lead from the front, to make good tactical decisions, to listen, and to treat them as grown men without regard for their rank.
Jim paused and glanced around the room. “It is imperative that you know who I am and what is important to me,” he said. “We will live and die based on how well we learn to work with one another.”
He looked each man in the eye, then continued.
“Who am I? I am a warrior. My physical, emotional, and spiritual self revolves around being a warrior. I believe war is a gift from God. . . . I am not a patriot or mercenary. I fight to fight. . . . I believe if you want to kill, you must be willing to die. I am willing to do both, whichever the situation calls for. I am a student of war and warriors. There will be no blood on my hands because I or my men were not prepared for battle. I will prepare for battle every single day. I will love my men as I love my own children. I will take my men places and show them things that they never believed possible. . . . I will give my life for them as readily as I kiss my children at night and put them to bed. I will be their protector and their avenger if necessary. I will always expect the impossible from them. . . . I believe in God but I do not ask for his protection in battle. I ask that I will be given the courage to die like a warrior. I pray for the safety of my men. And I pray for my enemies. I pray for a worthy enemy. . . . I believe in the wrathful god of combat. I believe in Hecate. The gods of war have received their sacrifices from me. . . . I have a huge ego. It feeds my daimon,” he said, referring to a tutelary spirit. “It is me and I am it. But I know it is there. Passion is power. Passion feeds my soul. I will seek passion out in others. . . . I am my children, my parents, my friends, my tribal family, the men I have gone into battle with, and my enemies. They reside in me. It is for them that I do battle. I
want, need, and long for their acceptance. I want them to be proud of me. I will be loyal to being a warrior for all time. I will prepare a place in Valhalla for the warriors whose paths I have been blessed to cross. I will be with them in this life and the next. I am a warrior.”
Jim surveyed the room and saw the fear in the soldiers’ eyes. Good, he thought.
“That’s all I have, men. Strength and honor,” he said, and walked out of the room, leaving a stunned silence.
Holy shit, who the fuck is this guy? thought infantry squad leader Staff Sgt. Robert Chase, who had qualified as an Army Ranger. Chase considered himself one of the more experienced members of the team. But Jim was a wild card that caught him completely off guard. He’s crazy. He’s off the charts, he thought. Here’s all my training out the window.
Sonny, too, was in disbelief. The cook from Harker Heights, Texas, had never encountered an Army officer remotely like Jim. “It scared me shitless,” he said later. “I was in complete, utter shock.” He searched for words to describe the encounter. “It was like Dances with Wolves meets Charles Bronson,” he said.
Justin felt nervous but excited. Like many conventional soldiers, he had always thought of Green Berets as capable of anything—but also nutty. Still, he found Jim articulate and inspiring.
In the end, only two of the twelve soldiers in the tent that night quit. Jim was more than Staff Sgt. Scott Fitzpatrick could stomach. Fitzpatrick had just been promoted and planned to leave the Army after the deployment. The last thing he wanted was a dangerous mission led by an officer as zealous as Jim was about combat. He decided then and there to quit the team. Fitzpatrick asked Spec. Francis Mitchell, a twenty-two-year-old mechanic from Peabody, Massachusetts, to take his place. Mitch liked Jim’s irreverence, his shunning of rank structure, and his “big-boy rules.” He also liked one line in particular in Jim’s counseling statement: “Don’t be a pussy.”
“Sure, I’ll go,” Mitch said.
Another young private, Pfc. Russell Kiggins, was on the fence. Kiggins had just gotten married and was always sneaking off to the phones to call his wife. He decided to drop out. Taking his place was Pfc. Andrew Gray, a twenty-two-year-old machine gunner from Stokesdale, North Carolina. Drew had nearly been charged with a felony after high school for destroying a string of mailboxes with his fist. Drew believed all Afghans—all Muslims, for that matter—were bad. Never in a million years had he thought he would be living on an Afghan qalat. But he wanted to go to Mangwel because he believed Jim would build a close-knit military team.
The next morning at 0700, Drew took his place with eleven other soldiers lined up in front of Jim at the training range on COP Penich. Each one of them handed him his signed counseling statement. As soon as they launched into individual weapons training, Jim realized the magnitude of the task before him. Many of the soldiers didn’t know how to use their night vision goggles or rifle lasers. They couldn’t load, clear, or fix a malfunction on the machine gun. He was stunned and angry at how ill-prepared they were. It meant Jim would jam three months’ worth of training into a day and a half straight.
Then on February 12 they headed for Mangwel.
CHAPTER 16
IT WAS BELOW FREEZING and sleeting on the afternoon of February 12, 2011, as Spec. Chris Greenwalt nervously got behind the wheel of Jim’s Humvee for the first time. Chris was a communications soldier and, by his own admission, drove like a grandmother. Now he would steer the lead Humvee of the combat patrol as the American team rolled out of COP Penich in five vehicles and headed southwest through insurgent-influenced territory toward the village of Mangwel. There, the handful of Americans would begin a bold and unprecedented experiment in the war, living in one of the most contested areas of the country under the protection of an Afghan tribe.
“Guns up, Sonny!” Jim called.
“Roger,” the cook replied, loading the weapon for his first stint as a machine gunner in Afghanistan.
A broad, sandy stretch of the Konar River valley gave way to terraced fields and farming villages. They passed a cemetery, with the shale gravestones aligned one way for men and perpendicularly for women. Then the road twisted back and forth as it hugged a steep, rocky hillside in a natural ambush location, where two weeks earlier four U.S. soldiers had been wounded by a roadside bomb. It was a prime location for insurgents to place IEDs. Jim named that portion of the road “Zombieland,” in honor of Burns’s 20th Group Special Forces team, which had the call sign “Zombie.”
“Center road!” Jim told Chris, who squeezed the steering wheel tightly. Jim always rode in the lead vehicle—or sometimes on the hood—to look for signs of bombs and to let the enemy know he did not fear them. Being his driver was one of the most demanding jobs on the team. Standing at the gun, Sonny scanned the ridgeline, his jaw taut.
The patrol continued through the tribally mixed village cluster of Kawer, where Taliban insurgents moved freely. Afghans came out of shops and qalats and watched the U.S. vehicles curiously. They knew the Americans were moving into Mangwel, but they were uncertain what it would bring. More killing? More broken promises?
Next the vehicles rolled past a boys’ school and entered Mohmand tribal territory, where Noor Afzhal had sway. Through the window of the Humvee, Chris saw the first layered walls of Mangwel village rising to the east and giving way to a long mountain valley. Dense gray clouds obscured the peaks. Fifteen miles beyond them lay the Mohmand tribal areas of Pakistan.
At the far end of the village, Jim told Chris to turn off on a dirt road. The road led a quarter mile past flat land covered with scrub brush and stopped at what appeared to be the largest qalat in Mangwel. The outer mud walls of the qalat were about twenty feet tall and formed a rectangle some 120 feet wide by 200 feet long. The qalat was missing a front gate, but the walls were topped with four guard towers. Looking more closely, Chris got his first glimpse of a tribal fighter, wrapped in a woolen blanket and armed with an AK-47, peering down from a tower at the American patrol.
Umara Khan, his piercing green eyes missing nothing, immediately spotted his old friend Jim as the first Humvee rolled into the qalat. A wiry man no more than five feet tall, he slung his rifle over his back, scurried down a wooden ladder, and went to meet Jim, his angular face bright with excitement.
“Salaam aleikum, tsenge yay, wror? Peace be with you. How are you, brother?” Jim said, placing his hand over his heart in the Afghan way and hugging Umara Khan.
“Khe yum, I am well. It is good to see you again, brother,” Umara Khan replied. He had moved into the compound along with a dozen or so other brand-new Afghan Local Police to secure it for Jim’s arrival.
Noor Afzhal, too, came to welcome Jim, as did his sons Asif and Azmat, each embracing him in turn.
But Jim’s eyes kept returning to Umara Khan.
A farmer, Umara Khan had known Jim since the American first came to Mangwel in 2003. He was dirt poor, even by the standards of Mangwel. He had seven children ages four to sixteen, and only a tiny plot of half a jreb (a quarter acre) of land. Illiterate like most of the villagers, Umara Khan wasn’t sure how old he was—he guessed forty-five—and when he smiled ripples of deep wrinkles creased his cheeks and forehead. But his eyes flashed bright. He spoke with energy and intensity. He was a fighter, and he loved Jim.
Jim laughed. The tension of the move, the weight of responsibility for his men, the urgency of protecting the qalat—all for a moment felt less daunting. He looked up at the four guard towers and saw tribesmen in each one, their AK-47s pointing outward. He knew all they had to do was pivot and they could gun the Americans down without a contest. But something about Umara Khan’s look, quizzical and intent and warm, assured him they would not. This just might work, he thought. He was betting his life and those of his men that it would.
For Chris and the other Americans, the Afghan qalat was a rude awakening. Apart from the sheer danger of being in the middle of a remote village in Konar, the compound had no electricity, running water, or latri
nes. COP Penich was just five miles down the road. But in terms of living conditions, the isolated military compound with its chow hall, hot showers, gym, wide-screen televisions, and Internet, all surrounded by reinforced walls and concertina wire, might as well have been a thousand miles away.
Inside the qalat walls, there were not yet any interior structures or buildings, just an expanse of ankle-deep mud. The soldiers barely greeted the Afghans as they struggled to unload the vehicles, sloshing through the muck in the freezing rain. The sun was going down, so they hurried in the last light to erect a tent for themselves to sleep in. Once darkness fell, it would be too dangerous to use flashlights or lanterns—that would signal their position to insurgents who could easily see into the qalat from an adjacent hillside the Americans nicknamed “Bad Guy Hill.” They managed to raise the tent and connect its heater to a generator. Soon they bedded down for the night, taking turns on guard duty, scanning Bad Guy Hill and the surrounding high ground using a .50-caliber gun mounted on an armored vehicle.
Jim observed his team, then quietly went to lie down in the unheated, leaking tent where Umara Khan and the other tribesmen were staying. Beside Jim was his close Afghan comrade and interpreter, Ismail Khan, nicknamed “Ish.” Jim had interviewed and turned down dozens of possible Afghan interpreters over several months, and had almost decided to go to Mangwel without one. Then, in February at the base in Jalalabad, he met Ish. Tall and handsome, with a reserved but focused manner, Ish was a schoolteacher. He was twenty-five years old but seemed wise beyond his age. There was an unmistakable sincerity in his large brown eyes that made an impression on Jim. “There was something in his eyes. He was very strong but humble, intelligent. I could see he had a very good heart,” Jim recalled. “He was not what I was looking for, but exactly what I needed.” Thirty minutes later, Ish was hired. During the most critical and delicate period of the mission in Mangwel, Ish never left Jim’s side. That first night set the tone. It was miserably cold, and Jim, chilled to the bone, barely slept. Ish curled up on the ground next to him. Together they shivered through the night. The next morning, he gathered his men outside in a cold drizzle and taught them their first lesson in tribal engagement.
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