When Jim spotted Hanif and his son walking up the dirt road, he went back to the qalat gate and stood in front of it. Hanif approached and tried to shake Jim’s hand, but Jim just stared at him, stone-faced, and refused.
“My men went to see if you needed help, and you disrespected them,” Jim said. “You disrespected my men and me in your home. If I had been there, I would have killed you on the spot,” he said. “I am more Pashtun than you are. I will not disrespect you inside my qalat.”
Hanif started pleading, saying it was a misunderstanding.
Jim ignored him.
“Give me the knife,” Jim said, narrowing his eyes. Hanif handed it over.
“I gave this to a friend who I thought had one face. I was wrong,” Jim said.
Hanif looked at Jim as if he were twisting the knife in Hanif’s gut.
“Listen, if one bullet is shot at my qalat from Chamaray, you are a dead man,” Jim warned.
Jim turned to Hanif’s son, who was holding the AK-47 Jim had given Hanif. He took the rifle.
“Port is seven thousand miles away from home. He is risking his life for you and your people. He is honorable,” Jim said to Hanif. “I don’t ever want to talk with you again, do you understand?”
Hanif looked shocked and said nothing.
Then Jim spat on the ground, turned around, and walked back into the qalat. He gave the rifle to Port, who thanked him.
Word of the incident spread quickly.
That day, Hanif was disgraced as a malik. He walked with his head down, mocked by his own people. Among the Pashtuns, no man should surrender his weapon as long as he is alive. By taking away Hanif’s rifle—his namoos—Jim had destroyed his honor and set an example that strengthened the umbrella of protection around Jim’s own men.
Jim had become more Pashtun than the Pashtuns.
CHAPTER 21
TRIBE 33 HAD COME far since Jim first met his U.S. soldiers that cold February night at COP Penich, particularly in building relationships with the Afghan tribesmen. But the mixed team of infantry and noncombat soldiers still struggled with basic yet critical war-fighting tasks—maintaining weapons, communications, and carrying ample ammunition. Jim was riding them hard. They needed to stay alive.
At about noon on May 7, the team was put to the test. Jim got a call on his emergency Afghan cell phone, which he carried because military radios chronically malfunctioned. Another Special Forces team was caught in a complex ambush high in the Shalay valley. Taliban commander Abu Hamam and about a dozen of his fighters were dug in.
“Hey, bro, we need help in Shalay,” the team chief told Jim. “We’re in a big fight—how quickly can you get up here?”
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Jim replied.
He turned to Sgt. Michael Taylor, who ran Tribe 33’s makeshift operations center in a tent on the qalat, and launched a quick reaction force, that day composed mostly of Americans.
“QRF! Let’s go!” Jim yelled, heading for his Humvee, called Vehicle One.
The team scrambled to get ready.
Chase, the Army Ranger and team sergeant of Tribe 33, climbed into the commander’s seat of his Humvee, called Vehicle Two. “One, One, this is Two. Radio check,” he called to Jim, his voice tense.
Several weeks earlier, a screwup by the team over radios had almost driven Chase and Jim to blows. It was a clear day in early March, and the morning sun had just started to take the chill off the air. The growl of Humvee engines starting up broke the quiet as soldiers loaded up gear for the mission. Jim had been up early reading over intelligence reports and was just finishing his coffee, anticipating a smooth joint patrol of Americans and the arbakai. Jim had briefed the mission in detail to the soldiers the night before. At nine o’clock sharp, he walked over to the staging area where the soldiers were readying the Humvees, expecting them to be good to go. Jim’s driver Chris had just climbed into his seat next to Jim, when Jim tried to conduct a check of the radio on his vehicle. Right off the bat, Jim discovered the radios were not working—again. This is going to get us killed, he thought. He went ballistic.
“The Americans are fucked up! No Americans are going on this mission!” Jim yelled at the team. It was a huge put-down, but, in his mind, justified. The Afghans were by then handling the basics of running the camp, apart from a few technical tasks. He sometimes felt he could do without the Americans altogether. He needed them to step up, and was constantly frustrated when they underperformed. The American team was performing the mission of engaging the tribe incredibly well. But the soldiers had barely trained together for combat, and many of them were still learning on the job, including how to set up unfamiliar radios. They lacked a sense of urgency required to master core tasks, such as communications, that were essential for their survival. Jim had to push the men to higher standards.
Chase watched the men’s faces fall. That was a gut shot. He walked into Jim’s tiny room at the back of the operations center.
“Jim, I need to talk with you,” he said tersely. “First, I don’t kiss ass. It’s hurt my career and got me in a lot of fights.”
He looked Jim straight in the eye.
“These were my men before we left Kansas, and they will be my men when we get back,” he said. “What you said was fucked up.”
Jim flew into a rage, slamming his fist down.
“Have you ever seen anyone die in combat?” Jim yelled. “Have you had to speak with their families about it?” His face was crimson, and only inches from Chase’s. “You are fucked up, Ranger!”
Chase stood his ground. He spoke as calmly as he could, calling Jim “sir.”
“My men are tired, sir. Sonny was a cook. Chris worked in a little office in the communications shop. We’re doing the best we can,” he said.
Whether the men were tired or not, the mistakes were inexcusable, Jim said. But Chase refused to back down. “There has to be a different approach,” he said.
Jim took a deep breath. Right or wrong, he had to respect Chase for speaking his mind. They stepped outside onto the qalat’s gravel courtyard.
“I am not going to apologize,” Jim said. “We are under a lot of stress. This mission is so important. I love you all. I don’t want to live with one of you getting killed.” His eyes welled up. Chase, too, held back tears. They embraced, and Jim went back inside the operations center.
Chase sat down and lit a cigarette.
The soldiers looked on, their eyes wide.
A few minutes later, Jim spoke to the team. “You have one of the best noncommissioned officers in the military,” he told them. They had seen Chase bear the brunt of Jim’s frustration over their poor preparation for combat. Jim deliberately let them see it as a catalyst to draw them together. In coming weeks, the team’s track record on radios improved.
THE SUN WAS BEATING down on the qalat when the call came on May 7. Most of the team was just finishing a lunch of rice and flatbread, when they heard Jim shout, “QRF!”
Sonny, the thirty-two-year-old Army cook, jumped behind the M240 machine gun in Jim’s Humvee. A large, broad-shouldered man, Sonny easily loaded the gun, pulling back the charging handle and thrusting it forward with a sharp clack. A sergeant, Sonny had served three deployments in Iraq, standing guard at Baghdad checkpoints and making supply runs. But as a support soldier, he had seen other commanders retreat from attacks. “They just ran,” he recalled. Jim’s ultra-aggressiveness came as a shock to him but also gave him confidence. The morning after he met Jim at COP Penich, Sonny volunteered to man the main gun on Jim’s Humvee. “I just raised my hand,” he said. Now, as he strapped on his helmet, he realized the next day was his birthday. Maybe this was his birthday present.
Pfc. Miah Hicks, a twenty-year-old fresh out of basic training, was helping ready the guns. The son of a Baptist missionary from Springfield, Missouri, Miah had wanted to join the military ever since he was a kid playing toy soldiers and hearing his grandpa’s stories about the Korean War. He enlisted in the inf
antry in April 2010 after being kicked off the Missouri State University football team for fighting. A freshman middle linebacker, Miah had taken on a three-hundred-pound senior offensive lineman who was bullying one of his buddies. The Army was his element. He was hardworking, fit, and ambitious. He wanted to serve on an elite Special Operations unit.
When Doc Harvey ran out of the tent with the QRF list, Miah ignored the fact that his name was not on it.
“Sir, I’m ready to go. Do you need another gun?” Miah ventured.
“Get your shit!” Jim replied.
Miah flashed a smile and climbed into the back of Jim’s Humvee.
Jim got into the Humvee and radioed the team caught in the ambush.
One of the arbakai unlocked the big metal gate of the qalat, and the two Humvees rolled out. They turned down a dirt path through fields of scrub brush to the main paved road that wound through Mangwel and other villages along the Konar River. After about four miles, the Humvees turned up a rocky trail carved into the red, rain-washed soil of the Shalay valley.
“Zombie 16, this is Tribe 33, we are turning up the Shalay road,” Jim radioed to the other Special Forces team, ODA 3316.
“Tribe 33, this is Zombie 16,” the ODA 3316 team leader, Capt. Matt Lommel, answered. “Hold at the clinic and wait for the ANA,” he said, referring to a contingent of Afghan National Army soldiers.
“Good copy,” Jim said.
Blue mountain ridges rose high on either side as the vehicles mounted the narrowing Shalay valley toward a roadside clinic. Lommel’s team was about two miles farther up the road, separated from Jim’s team by entrenched Taliban fighters. Dry streambeds crisscrossed the valley, creating a natural trench network for the Taliban that allowed them to maneuver almost invisibly. The scorching sun glinted off the vehicles as they passed a roadside clinic, nearing the ambush location. A half dozen Afghan soldiers arrived from their camp at the bottom of the valley and pulled up in a truck after Jim’s team arrived.
“Sonny, are you ready? We are going to drive into these guys and let them have it,” Jim called up behind him.
“Yes, sir!” Sonny replied.
The Humvees pulled into position about four hundred yards across the valley from a small village. The village contained a mosque and a cluster of four mud-brick qalats that the Taliban had been shooting from. Jim decided to move in and clear the qalats.
“Miah, grab those ANA soldiers and follow me!” he said.
Jim and Ish started maneuvering on foot toward a rocky slope that dropped steeply before rising again toward the village and insurgent position. Miah and the Afghan soldiers fell behind. Ahead was a village with a distinctive tall structure the soldiers had nicknamed the “smokestack,” where Jim believed the Taliban insurgents were concentrated, reportedly protecting their leader, Abu Hamam. As Jim and Ish moved toward the village, bullets from a Russian machine gun and AK-47 rifles suddenly began tearing up the dirt just ten yards away.
“Oh, shit!” Miah yelled. Ahead he saw Jim and Ish get down. Alone with the Afghan soldiers, Miah led them sprinting back up the hill to take cover behind some rocks. At first the Afghans weren’t shooting, but Miah shouted at them and they started firing their PKM machine gun toward the qalats until they ran out of ammunition.
The staccato of Taliban gunfire grew louder and closer to Ish and Jim, who lay prone but exposed behind a small rock. With bullets then kicking up dust a few feet away, Ish was spraying automatic rifle fire at the compounds. He reloaded his AK-47 and unleashed another burst at the Taliban positions. Jim scanned for targets with his M4 carbine. Still the gunfire intensified. Both men were sweating and breathing hard. They were pinned down.
“Cover me!” Jim told Ish.
Suddenly Jim spotted a Taliban fighter dart from a tree and move into a dry streambed, or wadi, a few hundred yards away. Jim’s eyes blurred in the sweltering heat, and he lost the fighter from his sights. He knew he only had one shot; a stray bullet would alert the fighter to take cover. He steadied his breathing, took aim, and slowly squeezed the trigger. The Taliban fighter dropped.
Jim felt a rush of elation that came only from battle, or, more precisely, from killing. It was a high that many men in combat felt but few spoke of. To kill, Jim would often say, you have to expose your throat, to be willing to die yourself. To win in close combat, the Americans had to risk getting out of their armored vehicles in order to draw the Taliban out of their rock-covered positions. It was exactly the tactic he was using that day.
Jim and Ish needed to move. Just then, from about 150 yards away up a hill, Miah again opened up on the Taliban positions. He took a knee and fired with everything he had. At the same time, Sonny was hammering the compounds from a nearby terraced field with some of the three thousand rounds he pumped out that day. Jim always told his men to shoot when they needed to and promised he would back them up later by saying that he had given the order and taking any heat for it. When Sonny saw Ish and Jim pinned down, he got his chance.
“Die, you motherfuckers!” Sonny shouted as he squeezed the trigger on his M240 machine gun and held it down, the vibration of the gun running up his arm.
Together Sonny and Miah caused enough of a lull in the enemy fire to give Ish and Jim a chance to run to a little dip in the ground that offered better cover.
Miah maneuvered back toward the Humvees. Jim popped a white smoke grenade to help direct the Humvees carrying Sonny and Miah to a path between the terraced fields, giving them a better firing position.
Well-aimed insurgent bullets rained down on them again—this time from three directions. Tribe 33 again returned fire. One Taliban bullet slammed into the M240 machine gun ammunition can on one Humvee, just a few inches from the chest of Jim’s medic. A rocket-propelled grenade burst in front of the vehicle.
Another bullet snapped by Chase’s head, giving him goose bumps. “Son of a bitch!” he said. “This is awesome!”
Chase knew Jim was on the exposed side of his Humvee and thought he’d been hit. But then he saw Jim walk around the vehicle “calmer than shit.”
Jim started laughing.
This guy is nuts, Chase thought. Then he broke out laughing, too.
Jim’s confidence inspired his men as they rallied and counterattacked, giving Capt. Lommel’s pinned-down team an opportunity to withdraw. Jim’s team kept fighting until the insurgent gunfire dwindled into pop shots as the shadowy fighters slipped away. Mission accomplished.
As their two Humvees rolled out of the Shalay valley toward the qalat in Mangwel, the men of Tribe 33 were euphoric from the battle. To some of them it felt as good as or better than sex. To others, it was like a drug. They all wanted more. Tribe 33 was the fifth team of men Jim had gone to war with, and he was proud of them. They fought bravely today, Jim thought. They had their first taste of blood.
The team was helping Mangwel and other lowland villages push the Taliban out, creating a cocoon of security. So, the next day, Jim did not hesitate to bring Petraeus in.
CHAPTER 22
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS LOOKED out the window of his Black Hawk helicopter as it flew over the glistening Konar River, banked at the valley’s edge, and dropped steeply—not, as usual, inside the fortified walls of a U.S. military outpost, but onto an open field in the village of Mangwel.
Petraeus pulled off his radio headset as the chopper whipped up a cloud of dust and touched down on a spot marked by a green smoke grenade. He was surprised by what he saw next. Not a single U.S. soldier guarded the austere landing zone. Instead, scores of tribal arbakai, with black vests as uniforms, stood watch on the adjacent ridgeline and hills and surrounded the field, their visages stern and proud. The general smiled.
A few months earlier, it would have been unthinkable for the American four-star commander to land in the middle of Konar protected only by Afghans. Even more telling, Petraeus arrived wearing no helmet or body armor—just a soft Army cap and field uniform. That was a testimony to the early success of the experiment i
n Mangwel, the only place in eastern Afghanistan at the time where U.S. forces were living in a qalat guarded exclusively by Afghan Local Police.
Since Jim’s team moved to Mangwel in February, tribal forces there and in nearby villages had created a belt of safety in one of the most dangerous provinces in Afghanistan. In the May 7 firefight and other operations, Tribe 33 was moving deeper into insurgent-held territory such as the Shalay, in an effort to keep the enemy away. Taliban leader Abu Hamam had been in the Shalay during the fight, and afterward spread the word that Jim was trying to bring arbakai into the valley. Abu Hamam had already made clear that he was determined to kill Jim—one of the clearest indications that the tribal strategy in Konar was working. Known as the key instigator of the initiative in Konar, Jim was specifically targeted by name by Abu Hamam and an array of assassins, suicide bombers, and insurgents emplacing deadly roadside devices. The Taliban propagandists reportedly called Jim the “father of evil.” One report after another confirmed that the Taliban leadership saw the recruitment of local Afghans to defend their tribes and villages as a major threat, one the Taliban intended to attack.
Petraeus was eager to see how the strategy was unfolding from Mangwel. The lean general stepped briskly out of his helicopter and shook hands with a small entourage of U.S. military brass who had arrived in advance for his visit. Then Petraeus saw Jim, dressed in sandals and a flowing white cotton tunic and pants.
“Hey, Jim!” Petraeus shouted over the beating of the helicopter blades, throwing an arm over Jim’s shoulder. “I guess we pulled that off!”
“Yes, sir, we did,” Jim replied as they walked toward the qalat.
The feat Petraeus was talking about was getting Jim’s deployment orders changed from Iraq to Afghanistan. But he could just as easily have been referring to the local security program as a whole. Petraeus had championed the initiative at the top levels of the U.S. and Afghan governments for the past year and a half. The program had taken off rapidly since Petraeus and his subordinate commanders, Brig. Gen. Miller and Col. Bolduc, launched it in the summer of 2010. With the U.S. military initially choosing the locations, distributing the weapons, and controlling the pay, U.S. Special Forces teams quickly recruited, armed, and trained thousands of local police around the country by early 2011. Bolduc cut through U.S. military bureaucracy to grant the Special Forces teams far greater leeway, streamlining and speeding up the convoluted approval process for operations by reducing the people involved from thirty-five to two. Bolduc also created “ops boxes”—geographic areas where the teams had authority to act without concern for interference from other military units. Petraeus was eager for the initiative to show results as he prepared to brief Congress on the progress in the Afghanistan war.
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