by Mitch Weiss
NO WAY OUT
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NO WAY OUT
A story of valor in the mountains of Afghanistan
MITCH WEISS AND KEVIN MAURER
BERKLEY CALIBER, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Copyright © 2012 by Mitch Weiss and Kevin Maurer
Book design by Laura K. Corless
Front jacket photo: US Army photo by SPC Michael Carter
Maps by Travis Rightmeyer
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FIRST EDITION: March 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weiss, Mitch.
No way out : a story of valor in the mountains of Afghanistan / Mitch Weiss & Kevin Maurer.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 9781101560761
1. Afghan War, 2001—Campaigns—Afghanistan—Shok Valley. 2. Afghan War, 2001—Commando operations. 3. Special operations (Military science)—Afghanistan. I. Maurer, Kevin. II. Title.
DS371.4123.S56W45 2012
958.104’742—dc23
2011028877
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
Version_3
For our wives and families
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die…
“The Charge of the Light Brigade”
by
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Table of Contents
Part 1 Premission
1 Captain Kyle Walton
2 Staff Sergeant Luis Morales
3 Specialist Michael D. Carter
4 Master Sergeant Scott Ford
5 Staff Sergeant John Wayne Walding
6 Staff Sergeant Dillon Behr
7 Staff Sergeant Ron Shurer
8 Sergeant First Class Karl Wurzbach
9 Walton
10 Staff Sergeant Seth Howard
11 Morales
12 Ford
13 Carter
14 Staff Sergeant David Sanders
15 Walding
16 Behr
Part 2 Contact
17 Morales
18 Behr
19 Carter
20 Walton
21 Ford
22 Behr
23 Walding
24 Morales
25 Master Sergeant Jim Lodyga
26 Wurzbach
27 Howard
28 Walton
29 Carter
30 Shurer
31 Walton
32 Ford
Part 3 The Ledge
33 Behr
34 Lodyga
35 Shurer
36 Carter
37 Behr
38 Walding
39 Ford
40 Walding
41 Ford
42 Shurer
43 Walding
44 Behr
45 Morales
46 Ford
47 Howard
48 Walding
49 Walton
50 Carter
51 Wurzbach
Part 4 Escape
52 Ford
53 Carter
54 Howard
55 Morales
56 Walding
57 Behr
58 Howard
59 Walton
60 Howard
61 Sergeant First Class Sergio Martinez
62 Walton
63 Wurzbach
64 Walton
65 Shurer
66 Ford
67 Carter
68 Morales
69 Walding
70 Behr
71 Ford
72 Wurzbach
73 Walton
74 Howard
75 Walton
Part 5 Aftermath
76 Wurzbach
77 Carter
78 Shurer
79 Ford
80 Morales
81 Behr
82 Walding
83 Morales
84 Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wisdom
85 Walton
86 Wisdom
87 Morales
88 Wisdom
89 Wurzbach
90 Wisdom
91 Behr
92 Wisdom
93 Final Report
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
SHOK VALLEY
(April 6, 2008)
The mission, Commando Wrath, sent three Special Forces teams and a company from the 201st Afghan Commando Battalion to the Shok Valley to capture a high-ranking insurgent commander. Considered a sanctuary of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin terrorist group, the valley is far from any major American base.
[Part 1]
PREMISSION
1
Captain Kyle Walton
It was still dark when Captain Kyle Walton stepped into the mist and bounded toward the B team’s operations center. He was sure the drizzle would cancel the mission again. Maybe with another delay it would be scrapped for good—an idea he had been pushing for weeks.
Just a few days before, he and his team of Special Forces soldiers and Afghan commandos had been in helicopters on the way to a target in the Shok Valley. In midflight, they were ordered to turn around after they received word that the target was gone. Plus, everybody had concerns about weather, and this day didn’t look any more promising.
Nothing about this mission looked promising.
Their target was Haji Ghafour, a high-ranking commander of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, HIG, militant group. An extremist, Ghafour claimed to have three thousand fighters scattered in northeastern Afghanistan, and was threatening military-aged males in the Shok Valley with conscription. Ghafour was a tier-level-0 target—the military’s highest priority. It was on the same level as Osama bin Laden.
Walton knew that by all accounts, Ghafour’s men were heavily armed in well
-fortified positions high above the valley floor. They controlled everything that moved in and out of the remote valley buried deep in Nuristan Province.
On paper, the mission was a logistical nightmare. Walton knew it. His team knew it. So did his commanders. Uneasy, Walton awoke just before 3 a.m. As the commander of Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 3336, he wanted to check in with the overnight staff at the operations center to see if the intelligence picture was any clearer.
The valley was a major HIG stronghold in the Hindu Kush—a picturesque five-hundred-mile mountain range that stretched between central Afghanistan and northern Pakistan with peaks topping twenty-five thousand feet. Isolated and surrounded by a wall of mountains, the valley was accessible only by pack mule. Intelligence sources said Ghafour had spent part of the winter in a compound in one of the villages in the valley. Several other nearby compounds were home to HIG subcommanders.
A source in one of the villages said Ghafour’s fighters and supporters were armed with PKM machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). His men were stockpiling DSHK heavy machine guns, ZPU antiaircraft guns, and had collected eight surface-to-air missiles.
Walking into the headquarters at the sprawling Army base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Walton nodded to one of the support crew and moved to the flat-screen monitor hanging on a wall. On the screen was a black-and-white image of a village built into the cliffs possibly hundreds of feet above the valley floor. The Predator, an unmanned plane used for reconnaissance, circled high above, showing the thick mud houses. It made a long sweeping turn and shot video of the wadi—a dry creek bed that snaked through the valley.
On the white eraser board hanging next to the monitor were notes from the unit’s source on the ground. Walton’s eyes scanned the bullet points. It was mostly atmospherics stuff.
They don’t know you’re coming.
HLZ has no running water on it.
There is no snow and running water.
Walton’s eyes flicked back to the Predator feed. He could clearly see snow. On the spots where the helicopters were supposed to land, a river of melted snow raged like white-water rapids. To Walton, the water had to be at least waist-high.
He was worried. Not only did the intelligence reports seem unreliable, but the source knew where the helicopters were supposed to drop off his team. Not a good sign.
And he had no idea who the source was. As the ground force commander, he was uncomfortable basing so much on just one source, especially when the Predator feed in real time was telling him the source was wrong. Walton had been uncomfortable with the reporting from the start. Staring at the snow and water on the landing zones only reaffirmed his concerns.
Walton and his team were comfortable operating with uncertainty. But looking at the target and the intelligence made the hairs on the back of Walton’s neck stand up. This was Walton’s sixth combat rotation. He had been deployed to both Afghanistan and Iraq as a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division. When the hair on the back of his neck stood up, he took heed.
Walton and his team sergeant, Master Sergeant Scott Ford, had clashed over missions in the past, but on this one they agreed: It was a shit sandwich. They had brought up the problems. The intelligence was bad. One source and, from what Walton could glean, inaccurate.
They had aborted an earlier attempt days before because it was reported that Ghafour had moved to another village, and it was unclear when he would return. So, when he popped back up in valley a few days later, commanders wanted to push forward quickly before he disappeared back into Pakistan.
In the end, Walton had no choice. They would hit the target in daylight and climb up the mountain and into the village.
The B Team’s commander, Major Timothy Fletcher, and his chain of command seemed comfortable with it. They discussed the team’s concerns with fighting up hill. But Fletcher and his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Lynn Ashley, believed that Ghafour’s small group of bodyguards would only fight long enough for him to escape, and anyone else in the valley was probably just a part-time fighter.
And if the shooting started, Walton and the other Special Forces teams could pull back and call in air strikes. The soldiers often joked that they would rather be lucky than good—but that was easily said by guys who didn’t have to go into the valley.
Walton knew when you were good you made your own luck. And that there was a fine line between sucking it up and doing the hard missions—like when the team took down several targets in Kandahar—and being reckless.
A few months before, the team had swooped into a village near Kandahar with the Afghan commandos, rounding up several Taliban commanders, destroying an opium-processing lab and a convoy of jingle trucks loaded with weapons and explosives. They had planned it for months, and even when the Taliban shot down a helicopter, the team was able to finish the mission.
But this operation, named Commando Wrath, didn’t feel like that.
We’re fucking awesome, but we’re not fucking miracle workers, Walton thought.
The whole team’s discomfort was palpable. He and Ford had several conversations. They had tried to hide their misgivings, but in private they all came out. Not only did the basic tactical plan of attacking up a mountain not work, but it was unclear how they would evacuate casualties or which unit was going to act as reinforcements if things went badly.
“There is no fucking medevac plan here. This is not good,” Ford said.
Walton took his and Ford’s concerns to Fletcher, urging him to take them up with Ashley and higher if necessary.
But at every level he got the same answer: You’re going to do it.
Staring into the monitor at the village sitting on top of the mountains, he wasn’t sure a Ranger battalion or a battalion of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne could do this mission, let alone three Special Forces teams and one hundred Afghan commandos.
After rehearsing it again the day before, they all had the feeling that it was going to be a weather call again. They were prepared to go, but everyone, in the back of his mind, believed the mission would be halted.
But when Walton walked into the operations center and examined the Predator feeds—when he saw they weren’t going to make a change off the live intelligence—the captain knew the mission was a go.
Grabbing Fletcher, who had walked into the operations center, Walton tried one more time to spike the mission.
“The intel you have is not fucking accurate. And now I have to contend with landing in a freaking river,” Walton told Fletcher. “Hey, is this an abort call?”
All missions had abort criteria in place so commanders could halt an operation instead of moving forward just because they had assets in place—aircraft, men, and equipment.
He hoped to convince Fletcher to call Ashley and abort the mission. It was clear to Walton.
The intel was bad.
The weather was bad.
The whole thing felt like a setup.
Abort.
2
Staff Sergeant Luis Morales
It was dawn and a steady stream of soldiers at the base began getting dressed for the mission. As always, Staff Sergeant Luis Morales was one of the first to get ready. The night before, Morales, an intelligence specialist, had been sitting at a desk in the team’s operations center. Leaning back in a chair, he had tried to stay awake. It was late and he was tired, but he had promised himself he would review the plans for the upcoming mission one more time.
Pulling a pack of Marlboro Lights from his pocket, he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. He glimpsed the bright maps of Afghanistan’s eastern provinces—Nuristan, Kunar, Nangarhar, and Laghman—on the drab beige walls. A bank of black laptops on the tables was closed, and the only noise was the incessant humming of a clock on the wall.
Morales had been working tirelessly for weeks, collecting intelligence for Commando Wrath. That was a critical part of his job and he was passionate about his work. Now, on the eve of the mission, he had to make certain everything
was right. No mistakes. Every detail was important. He knew preparation was the key to the success of any operation.
Morales had prepared an extensive report about the Shok Valley. It was important to let his team know what to expect. So he spent weeks studying Military Grid Reference System maps, intelligence reports, satellite imagery, and Predator feeds of the terrain and targets. Then he wrapped his findings in a PowerPoint presentation.
When he was ready, Morales stood in front of a room filled with Green Berets, clicking slide after slide, warning his men about the treacherous terrain: steep mountains that disappeared in the clouds, jagged ridgelines, boulders, loose rocks, and soft ground that, with the melting snow, made every step perilous. And their main target—Haji Ghafour—was located somewhere in a heavily defended compound high above the valley floor.
By the end of the presentation, he was confident that his team understood the dangers. Still, it was one thing to watch a PowerPoint. It was another to land in the middle of a wadi in the early morning, scale a mountain with more than sixty pounds of equipment strapped on your back, and surprise an enemy that had been defending the valley for generations. The valley was so dangerous that the Soviet Union, during its decade-long occupation of Afghanistan, had refused to go there. U.S. forces had never been there either. That’s why Morales reviewed the intelligence one more time.
He learned this work ethic—paying close attention to details—from his father and grandfather, who’d had long and distinguished military careers.
His grandfather Luis Guillermo Morales enlisted in the Army in 1950, at the start of the Korean War. Growing up in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, a picturesque fishing village on the northern coast, he dreamed of one day emigrating to the United States. Only five feet four inches tall, Guillermo was proud and fiercely patriotic, telling recruiters at Puerto Rico’s Fort Buchanan that he wanted to be an infantryman. He got his wish, fighting on the front lines. Even though he was wounded in action—shot in the hand—Guillermo stayed in the Army. He retired in 1975 as a sergeant major.