by Mitch Weiss
Before he lived with his grandparents, there was little discipline or structure in Walding’s life. Once he and his brother arrived, his grandfather made them get up in the morning and work on the farm. He taught the boys to treat people with respect and dignity, and never prejudge anyone. You judge a man by his actions, his character—not by his looks, not by whether he was rich or poor.
After his grandfather retired, he moved to four hundred acres his family owned outside of Groesbeck, a farming and mining town. He had a cattle ranch with two hundred acres of pasture—Walding’s grandparents owned fifty head of cattle—and the rest was woods, where his grandfather would take young Walding hunting. On weekends, he would take his grandson fishing at Lake Limestone, where they would catch bass and catfish.
His grandparents were supportive of everything Walding did. They encouraged him to follow his dreams. They never tried to impose their own on him. Sure, he had to do chores around the ranch, bale hay and feed the animals. That was expected and Walding never complained.
He remembered on his sixteenth birthday, he loaded over eight hundred bales of hay. Dripping with sweat, Walding was tired and just wanted to hang out with his friends. But he stuck with it, and when he was finished, his grandfather handed him four hundred dollars. Walding hadn’t known he was going to get paid. That wasn’t the point. He hauled the hay because his grandfather asked him to, and he always did what his grandfather asked. He respected and loved the old man.
Sam Walding didn’t have more than an eighth-grade education, but he had a strong work ethic. It rubbed off on his grandson. Walding never complained, even when it came to pain. Once, when he was horsing around, he fell out of a second-floor window at the house and broke his arm. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t cry. He had a high tolerance for pain. Real men don’t cry, he thought. That’s not the way he was raised.
In a way, Walding was the quintessential East Texas boy: He played football and baseball—he was on the all-district baseball team—and dated a lot of girls. He had one serious relationship: Lane Neil. They would spend long hours making out in his car or under the bleachers. She had the picture-perfect life. Her father was the president of a local bank. Their house looked like something out of a TV sitcom of the 1950s, and Walding liked to call her family the Brady Bunch. Everyone was happy and cheerful, not a chair or picture out of place in the house.
Walding knew that when he graduated high school he wanted to make money. While he was a good student, he had no plans to go to college right away—not like Lane, who was accepted at Texas A&M in College Station.
So after graduation, he took a job with a company laying cable lines. Walding and his cable crew traveled all over the state, and the company put them up in hotels. It was a great gig. He was pulling down about a thousand dollars a week, and he was spending every penny.
Every once in a while he would visit Lane at Texas A&M, but that wasn’t working out. The turning point in his young life came when he took a trip to Las Vegas with a few buddies. All weekend long, he drank and gambled, and returned home with no money in his pockets. He was broke. He looked at himself in the mirror and was brutally honest with himself: He had to find another job. He had to do something else. He didn’t want to continue with that lifestyle. That’s not the way he was raised.
A day after he returned from Las Vegas, he ran into a friend who had joined the Army. The friend told him about traveling and shooting guns, and Walding thought it would be a good gig. He needed that kind of structure again. Plus, the military was a job where you can “lay down your head at night and be proud of it.” So he told his grandparents his plans.
As usual, they were supportive, and encouraged him to work hard. So Walding enlisted. A month before basic training, he decided to go to Las Vegas for his birthday. He asked his best friend in high school, Jackie Don McKinley who was in the Air Force stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in California, to join him. Jackie said he would, and asked if he could bring along his cousin Amy Stovall, who lived in Waco.
Walding agreed, and Jackie gave him his cousin’s number. Walding had never met Amy, and when he called, they hit it off. They talked every night for a month. They had that same East Texas background and friends and experiences. As they talked, they began to flirt. When he picked her up at her house to take her to the airport, his heart melted. She was pretty and funny. And by the end of the long weekend in Las Vegas, he asked her out. She said yes, even though he was headed to basic training and they didn’t know when they would see each other again.
So on August 16, 2001, Walding began basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. But everything changed less than a month later, on 9/11. That morning, they were learning about hand-to-hand combat when a sergeant interrupted training and marched them back to a classroom. The sergeant sat them down and told them what happened. Then he carried a television into the classroom and they watched the events unfold. Walding couldn’t believe it. How could terrorists do that? And like most of the soldiers in the room that day, he became angry. He wanted to quit training right there and hunt down the people who were responsible.
The next day, the base was the same—but it had changed. Concertina wire surrounded the installation. The entire Army had gone into high alert. Even the focus of the training changed. The Army had a new mission. All the drill sergeants gave the recruits the “we’re going to war” speech. He knew it was every drill instructor’s wet dream to give that speech. It helped the recruits focus. But now they knew it was serious. No bullshit. And the irony wasn’t lost on Walding.
When he joined, there was no war. But less than a month after he started basic training, the United States was on the cusp of a major military action. His mind-set had changed. He thought he would join the Army, maybe get some college in the future, and serve his country. For a moment he wondered if he had made the right move.
After basic training, he learned how to work radar and light maintenance on Patriot missiles, and was sent to Iraq for the invasion in 2003. His unit provided air cover for troops, who were leapfrogging from Iraqi city to city. And by July, the war was over—at least for him. He remembered watching Special Forces soldiers, how they operated, how they always seemed to be in the middle of action, and decided that he wanted to be one of them. He wanted to be the best of the best. He didn’t want to be sitting in the rear again. If he was going to stay in the Army, why not? It made sense. He never took any shortcuts.
When he returned home that summer, he asked Amy to move in with him. She agreed. While he was in Fort Gordon, a recruiter came into the office one day and asked who wanted to join the Green Berets. He jumped at the chance.
Walding brought home a video they had played at the recruiting station to show Amy what he was getting into. He knew it was dangerous. But it would be fulfilling, he thought. He was afraid that if he didn’t try, he would regret it. As he told Amy, he didn’t want to be that guy at sixty years old on the front porch saying, “Man, I wonder if I could have done that.”
He married Amy in August 2004 and they had a son—the first of their three children. After making it through Selection, he headed to the qualification course.
It was grueling, but Walding thrived. And when he joined the 3rd Special Forces Group, it was one of the proudest days of his life. He finally made it. Before he headed to Afghanistan in October 2007, he promised Amy he would be careful. That he would do everything to return home safely.
Walding had fully bought into the concept that Special Forces were force multipliers—a few men training many to become cohesive fighting units. He enjoyed training the Afghan commandos. He knew that it was making the commandos better soldiers. They were more prepared to fight and die for their country. If they were ever going to defend their country, they had to learn to do it themselves.
But he discovered that many commandos didn’t have his work ethic or a sense of urgency. Sometimes in the middle of a training exercise, they would stop for prayer. That was frustrating and sometimes hard t
o understand. Walding believed that if his people were being waxed by the Taliban, he was going to concentrate more on training than on praying. But he understood that the Afghan commandos didn’t see it that way. They had to pray to Allah. And who was he to say they were wrong? That’s their life. And he made sure he articulated that it was okay to stop training for that purpose.
But there were other problems, including the Afghans’ “intelligence level.” Walding and other team members had to teach them basic math. If you’re telling them to add five plus five, what good is it if they don’t understand what it means. And throw in night vision and lasers and it was just overwhelming. They were never taught life skills that Americans take for granted.
And it was a hard sell to get the commandos to use the high-tech equipment. The Afghans hated using their night vision. They would always use the flood lamps to “see better.” Walding would tell them that they might be able to see better but “you can also be seen better.” He would say they couldn’t be naive to think the Taliban didn’t have night vision. If you just walk around with a flood lamp, it’s just going to give away your position. It took time to get them to understand basic concepts. When you put it all together—the training—it was a long day’s work. And he wasn’t sure they understood everything.
But he couldn’t think about that now. Not when he was standing on the flight lines, wondering if the Shok Valley mission would even take place, and if it did and they hit resistance, how would the commandos react?
He knew that training was one thing, and real combat was another. He had been in battle before and you had to keep your wits. You had to stay calm under fire. It was a lot of pressure and he didn’t know how the commandos would handle it.
6
Staff Sergeant Dillon Behr
As a seasoned combat veteran on this third deployment, Staff Sergeant Dillon Behr was ready. He had been in fierce firefights. He had been on sweeps through insurgent strongholds in Iraqi cities, and on patrols through mountainous passes in Afghanistan where danger lurked behind every ridge.
The Special Forces communications sergeant had the experience to tackle just about any crisis in the field. But it was unclear how the Afghan commandos would react in a firefight. And that’s what worried him as he prepared to deploy to the Shok Valley.
Within an hour or two, three teams of Green Berets and a company of Afghan commandos would be in the heart of the valley, struggling to find a clear and unobtrusive path to an enemy compound on top of a cliff overlooking the basin. In a firefight, Behr knew he could depend on his fellow American soldiers. They were Special Forces. They knew what to do. The Afghan commandos? They were a wild card. They had performed fairly well on previous missions with a lot of American help. But this mission was tougher. They were going after an HVT—a high-valued target, which meant bodyguards, often Arab fighters, ready to fight to the death. How would the commandos react if they made contact with that kind of enemy? Would they run? Stand their ground and return fire? Would they be able to even hit their targets? Behr had spent months helping train the commandos in the basics and intricacies of modern warfare. But training was one thing; execution under intense enemy fire was entirely different.
The bulk of Behr’s time during this deployment—and even the previous one—was spent training Afghans. While he preferred combat operations—rooting out terrorists—he understood that training was a critical part of the Special Forces’ mission. And Behr was a good teacher. He was patient, understanding, and found creative ways to explain complicated skills to a largely uneducated battalion of Afghan soldiers. It all stemmed from his midwest childhood, where he was more of a “nerd” than a jock, a quiet teenager who was on his high school Scholastic Bowl team and found solace in the confines of a Pentecostal church.
He was born in Rock Island, Illinois, where five cities straddle the Mississippi River on the Iowa-Illinois border. The metropolitan area is home to three hundred thousand residents, but outside the city limits, there was nothing but rich farmland.
While he lived in a rural area, his parents were blue-collar. Behr’s parents divorced when he was two, and he lived with his father, who was a Rock Island firefighter. At the time, his mother gave up custody so she could go back to college, and when she graduated she became a police officer. His father had remarried and had three children with his new wife; two girls and a boy. His house was always filled with activity. His stepmother was a stay-at-home mom and shuttled the children back and forth to school-related events. That included Behr, who was active in baseball. A third baseman, he played in Little League and summer leagues. While he loved the game, he excelled more in academics, and was a fixture on the honor roll.
His parents didn’t have a lot of money—they were public servants and his father took a construction job on the side to make ends meet. Still, his father and stepmother’s was a loving, tight-knit household. On most days, passersby would see Behr and his siblings playing in the backyard.
When he turned sixteen, Behr began working after school and on weekends to earn money—bagging groceries at the Hy-Vee store in Rock Island, working concessions at a movie theater, or helping his father in construction.
During high school, Behr had a few good friends, but he was mostly the quiet kid. Probably the last person anyone thought would become a Green Beret. He was an important member on the Scholastic Bowl team—a Jeopardy!-like game for high school students. He also spent time at the Pentecostal Assembly of God in youth groups. That’s where he felt most comfortable. During high school, he hung out in a church recreation room, playing games and listening to music. He spent most of his free time there.
When he graduated in 1998, he attended North Central University, a Bible college in Minneapolis, with plans of becoming a missionary. He took a job at an American Eagle clothing store in a mall to help support himself in school. But he decided to leave North Central after two years. He became disillusioned and decided that he “didn’t want to follow that path.” In a way, his job at American Eagle changed his life. He started hanging out with a “different group of people.” He began “getting exposed” to the world.
His childhood had been somewhat sheltered. It was all focused on school and church and small-town values. His new friends had a different perspective—they partied and smoked and drank—and it influenced him. Behr didn’t like the old philosophy of “God’s way or the highway.” He wanted to have fun. He wanted a change.
After dropping out of Bible college, he returned home, moved in with his biological mother, and started attending Scott Community College in Bettendorf, Iowa. He took general courses, but was lost. In high school, he had taken a drafting class in hopes of becoming an architect. He had even thought about applying to the University of Illinois or Southern Illinois University in order to major in architecture. But even that didn’t interest him anymore.
After taking an acting class at the community college, he decided on a whim to become an actor. Behr received a scholarship to attend Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa, a liberal arts school with just 650 students. But he dropped out after one semester, in part so he could continue dating a girl he met just before he left. That girl, Amanda Emmert, was bright and funny. But in order to make the relationship work, he felt he had to be in Rock Island. He didn’t want a long-distance relationship.
When he returned, Behr was at a crossroads. He had spent four years in colleges, but didn’t even have an associate’s degree. He was, by his own account, “screwing off.” He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He was smart. But so what? He certainly wasn’t living up to his potential. So he did the unthinkable: He decided to enlist. He had the “idealistic view” that the military would somehow “straighten him up,” give him structure. Maybe it would give him a sense of purpose in his life.
His father, who had served in the Navy in the 1970s, was opposed. It was a dangerous time to join the military, he told his son. It was 2002 and the United States was fighting in Afghanista
n. President George W. Bush and his advisers—Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld among others—were beating the war drum to invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. They claimed the Iraqi dictator had played a critical role in the terrorist attacks, and also had weapons of mass destruction.
Amanda also was less than thrilled about his decision. But at that point, Behr stood firm. His mind was made up. He was enlisting. It was time to leave the Quad Cities and do something meaningful with his life. If he hung around there too long, who knew what would happen? Before too long, twenty could turn into twenty-five. What then? Would he still be bagging groceries at the Hy-Vee? He had to leave, and explained to Amanda that he wanted to continue dating her. After some trepidation, she agreed to the plan. They would try to make the long-distance relationship work—even though Behr would probably be away for months, maybe even years.
When Behr enlisted, he didn’t know much about the Army, and had no idea what kinds of jobs were available in the military. After discovering the Army had multimedia editor’s jobs, he told a recruiter he would like to pursue video editing. But first he had to pass a test.
Every recruit has to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test. It gives recruiters a snapshot of the recruit’s intelligence. When Behr’s results came back, the recruiter was stunned. Behr had scored extremely high and the recruiter told him to forget about multimedia. Instead, he pushed Behr toward Special Forces.
Behr had never heard of Special Forces and that night took home a promotional video. It changed his life.
In the video, he saw a soldier hiding in a thicket of trees and then, without warning, the soldier disappeared. He became one with nature. The video explained how Green Berets were elite soldiers. The presentation was so impressive that when the credits rolled at the end, Behr knew he would join. It was his chance to actually live up to his potential. Do something great.