by Mitch Weiss
And he began a desperate fight to save his leg.
He could barely move it—and it hurt like hell. Doctors told him he would eventually develop arthritis. “[They] told me that most of the guys will have their legs amputated when it gets this bad.”
Morales wanted to prove them wrong.
“At that time, I wanted to fight it,” he said.
One surgery, they tried to fill the hole in his ankle. They surgically removed the skin and an artery from his calf. Then they tried to fit them into his ankle to get the blood vessels to connect. It didn’t work.
They also used two vats of leeches to suck out the coagulated blood underneath the skin flap. It was creepy. The leeches usually stayed on the wounds. A few times, though, they crawled up his body. The doctors did this for two weeks.
Over time, surgeons performed more surgery to shave down the skin in order to increase the flow of blood. Along the way, there was hope. He was doing physical therapy.
“I was working my ass off. I was working through pain. I was taking a lot of medication. My goal was to be able to try to play golf,” he said.
Morales was an avid golfer. But now he could barely stand up. In April 2009, a year after Shok Valley, he headed to Duke University Medical Center for a second opinion. He wanted to see if they could do ankle replacement surgery. But the doctors told him he didn’t have enough bone to work with, and ruled him out as a candidate.
Walking to the car from the hospital, Morales became upset. He realized the ankle wasn’t going to get any better unless he had it fused. So he did. He had three pins screwed into his ankle at a ninety-degree angle. But he found it was hard to walk with a fused ankle. So he had to find shoes with a curved sole.
He did that for a while. He even walked with a cane. But it still hurt. In November 2009, he went with Ford and other wounded warriors on a hunting trip in South Dakota. But he couldn’t go hunting. His leg hurt too much. He saw other soldiers with amputated legs, like Walding, moving around fine. So he decided to have his leg amputated so he could have a somewhat normal life.
Katherine wasn’t happy with the decision. She wondered if there were any other options. “I was determined. I was tired of being in pain. I wanted to be able to get around and do other things again without pain,” Morales said.
He had the surgery on January 14, 2010. “I didn’t make it a big deal. It’s another surgery that needed to be done so I could start another part of my life so I could get around.”
For the most part, since the amputation, he has been pain-free. Sometimes he has phantom nerve pain. But now, with a prosthetic leg, he can walk. Play golf. And he was waiting to get a running prosthetic leg. And he was about to start a family. Katherine was pregnant and expecting their first child in late 2011.
He plans to stay in the Army—at least for the next six years. Then he will have twenty years and can retire.
Still, he wants to continue doing intelligence work and hopes to deploy again to Afghanistan.
“For me, I’m helping my buddies. I can’t see being away from the military.”
But there are triggers that take him back to the Shok Valley.
While he was at Walter Reed, Morales attended a Major League Baseball game with his father. At the end of the game, there was a crescendo of fireworks. Morales turned to his father: “Dad, that’s what my firefight sounded like.” Both father and son “teared up.”
Walding made a remarkable recovery and was running again. Before the injury, he averaged about fifty miles a week.
He still believed he could do the job, and proved it when he trained to be a sniper instructor.
While recuperating, Walding worked as an assistant instructor at 3rd Special Forces Group’s sniper detachment. But to become a full-time instructor, he had to complete a sniper course. The seven-week Special Forces Sniper Course teaches sniper marksmanship, semiautomatic shooting, ballistics theory, and tactical movement. During the course, many of Walding’s classmates didn’t even know about his injury and prosthetic leg.
When he was finished in the summer of 2010, he hoped to work his way back to an ODA—maybe even deploying to Afghanistan.
Not anymore.
He realized that physically, he would never be the soldier he was the morning of the Shok Valley mission. While he enjoyed being an instructor, he joined Special Forces to “hunt down and kill the bad guys.”
He still loved Special Forces. But he said it was time for his family to head to southeast Texas to be around their aunts and uncles and grandmother. (His grandfather—the inspiration of his life—died two days before Christmas in 2008.)
It was a difficult decision.
“I prayed about it a lot. I feel that God has a plan and the best thing for me to do is try something in the civilian market. Move back to Texas. Be close to home. I want to contribute to the fight. That’s what I’ve done for the last ten years—protect our country. And if I can’t do it in the Green Berets, I’d still like to contribute somehow,” Walding said.
Walding is proud of how Americans have come together to support Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, especially wounded warriors.
Everywhere he goes there are special nonprofit groups waiting to lend a hand. Some organizations were set up just to help wounded warriors get back on their feet. It’s a far cry from Vietnam, when returning veterans were shunned by the public.
Because of those groups, Walding is going back to school. He was accepted in a special program that pays for living expenses while veterans go to college. And there is another organization that is helping him build a house in Texas.
As far as the mission is concerned, his missing leg is a constant reminder of everything that went wrong.
He said that sometimes it’s hard for him to get up in the morning. He doesn’t have the energy he used to have—and this is not uncommon for someone who suffered injuries like his. He said Ford told him he had the same symptoms.
“This is something I’m going to face for the rest of my life,” he said.
On his youngest daughter’s first birthday, he knew he had to get the house ready for the party. But he had to force himself to get out of bed. “You know, I’m hardworking. I have a great work ethic. I used to go days without stopping. Once I get up, I’m okay. It’s just getting started.”
He recalled that the first time he told his aunt about the mission. He showed her pictures of the Shok Valley. She was stunned.
“To kind of prove the point about how tactically flawed this was, I showed her the video of the Shok Valley and showed her the ground and how we went up the mountain and everything. And my freaking little hippie aunt looked at me and said: ‘Why were you all charging a hill? Isn’t that tactically not a good thing to do?’
“If my hippie aunt could realize that this was a stupid mission, that should say something how obvious [it was that] this was not the right way to do it. It was basically this one guy who wanted to do this mission and it didn’t matter why and this was going to happen. And that’s what happens whenever you stop listening to the five principles of patrolling, and the last one is common sense,” he said.
Behr, thirty, left the military in June 2010 and is back in college—this time at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is enrolled in the security studies program with a concentration in technology and security.
He divorced his wife, Amanda, and is dating Mary Elizabeth Just. They are planning a life together. “She is the one,” he said.
Behr’s road to recovery was difficult. He underwent eight operations. His wounds resulted in severe intestinal damage and a hip replacement. He was on his back for six months, and spent the next six in rehabilitation trying to walk. It was a grueling process, but he can now walk without help.
Now he is employed by a small technology consulting firm and began cycling in order to rehab his injury in 2009. He fell in love with mountain biking, which he learned to do with the aid of two friends at Walter Reed.
Behr said he
had been thinking about leaving the military before his last mission. But after the Shok Valley, he knew he had to leave. He could no longer physically perform at Special Forces level.
“It was a tough decision. I loved Special Forces. But I’m entering the next phase of my life,” he said.
He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts.
“But I think about it,” he said about the mission. “Sometimes it just comes up. Those guys saved my life. I wouldn’t be here without them. They saved my life. “
Shurer also left the Army and is employed with a government agency. His first son was born shortly before the Shok Valley mission, and his second son, Tyler, was born in April 2011.
While he loved the military, he is happy with his new life. He tries not to think about what happened in the Shok Valley. He believes he took the right measures on the mountain. But at first, it was difficult to come to grips with everything that happened.
“That day was rough for a while. I spent a fair amount of time beating myself up. You go back and look at stuff and you say: ‘Could I have done that a little bit faster? Should I have wasted so much time trying to do that?’”
But over time, he has learned to live with the decisions he made during the firefight.
“What ended up helping me with that was when you talk to surgeons who worked on everyone and they’re all like: ‘What you did saved his life. Don’t beat yourself up. You did what you had to do. Every one of them—all four of them—had life-threatening wounds. Every one of them would have died without treatment.’”
He stopped and took a deep breath.
“It took a while to really kind of process that and not keep going over it. I got them out alive,” he said.
But there are days when he is haunted by the images.
“There are some days it pops in your head,” he said.
And there are triggers. He can’t watch war movies.
“You just have to come to grips with it. Once you do, it gets better,” he said.
For Ford, it was a long, hard journey. He spent months in rehabilitation. There were days when he felt like giving up.
But he is back doing what he loves best: training snipers. The 3rd Special Forces Group asked him to take over their sniper committee.
In the years since the Shok Valley mission, he has gotten married and had a daughter. He tries not to think about the battle.
“I have my confidence back. I am shooting all the time. In the last six months, I came back out of my shell. I am really just enjoying my career. We’ll find out in the next few months if I can go back and take a team. I think they are going to let me take a team. I am just really happy. Cher and I had a baby last summer. I’ve never been closer to a family or the family I have now.”
The same can’t be said about the team. They’ve all drifted away from one another. Some to pursue other career opportunities. Others because of rifts among teammates. A Special Forces team, more than almost any other unit in the military, is a family. And as is the case with even the best families, there is always some drama. But Ford knows that over time the bonds they formed in that valley will last.
“I wanted that team to stick together for the rest of their lives. Keeping in contact every five years. Ten years,” Ford said. “Always having that brotherhood from being on that team.”
Many of the soldiers, like Carter, Sanders, Howard, Williams, Rhyner, and Wurzbach, are still in the Army. And in 2011, Sanders, Williams, Wallen, and Wurzbach returned to Afghanistan for another deployment.
Sanders said he was embarrassed by the attention.
“We certainly weren’t the first guys to get in a firefight and we won’t be the last, and as far as that goes for me, don’t take this wrong, even with the book, I kind of feel sort of awkward. It’s almost kind of embarrassing really.”
Carter tries to downplay his role. Yet it’s hard to ignore. A combat cameraman, he ran into the line of fire to pull wounded soldiers to safety. He tended to the wounded. He climbed down a mountain to help find a path off the mountain. Then he carried the wounded down that dangerous trail.
Now stationed in Hawaii, he works with an Army forensic team trying to find the remains of missing soldiers from earlier wars. “It’s pretty much what Indiana Jones does. We use archaeology to help identify remains of missing soldiers. We look for the remains of POW and MIAs,” he said.
It usually starts with tips. Then the investigation team tracks down possible witnesses.
“They’ll get the information from them and mark the site and they come back and let them know where they need to go, and that’s when the recovery teams will go out and dig the site,” he said.
Still, the Shok Valley mission creeps into his memory when he least expects it. It could be late at night. Or when he’s out with friends. Or when he’s on assignment. In a flash, the images return, and he feels like he’s back on the mountain.
“I fight it,” he said. “But sometimes it’s hard.”
Carter’s experience is a typical one for the soldiers in the Shok Valley that day. They experienced things that most Americans will never see—their friends blown apart in a mission that nearly wiped out their team. They faced serious injury and death. And pinned on a mountain in that remote, hellish valley, they overcame their own fears and fought overwhelming odds to save one another.
Years after the battle, one thread connects them: In conversations, they emphasized over and over that they did what they had to do. They were always quick to add that other soldiers, facing similar circumstances, would have done the same.
We’ll never know if other soldiers would have performed the same way. We only know what they did on April 6, 2008, and it was remarkable. Trapped in a brutal firefight on a narrow ledge with a terrorist group, a team of Special Forces soldiers carried their wounded comrades to safety. They battled hard to return to their families. They received Silver Stars. They were called heroes.
But if you dig deeper, this mission serves as a cautionary tale for politicians sitting in the comfort of their living rooms—the ones who are so quick to send our troops to war. The soldiers didn’t want to undertake this mission. They knew the plan was flawed. But in the end, they went. They overcame near-freezing weather. They exposed themselves to protect their teammates and climbed through machine-gun fire to save every man. So be careful what you ask soldiers to do because they will die trying to accomplish their mission.
They won’t fight and die for just the flag or the other lofty goals of freedom and democracy plastered over recruitment posters and commercials.
They fight and die for each other.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book grew out of a story written by Kevin Maurer for The Associated Press. The piece focused on the dangerous mission—and how the Special Forces team was awarded ten Silver Stars for bravery in the Shok Valley firefight.
Turning the story into a book was a long journey, and we want to thank a number of people who helped us along the way. We would like to thank the entire team—ODA 3336 and Michael Carter—for allowing us to write the book. We spent countless hours on the telephone—sometimes several time zones apart—and in their living rooms asking endless questions about the mission, and details of their childhood and personal lives. It gave us incredible insight and allowed us to write with authority.
At the beginning of the journey, we made the men a promise: We would pull no punches. We would write a compelling book about the mission. And that happened because of their cooperation.
Special thanks to Scott Ford and Luis Morales, the team’s unofficial historian. Ford was instrumental in getting the story to the page and gave his time generously to make sure we understood what his team accomplished against some staggering odds. Whenever we needed information or a contact, Morales was always there. A true hero, Morales wanted no credit. He downplayed his role and always gave credit to his fellow soldiers.
We’d also like to express our gratitude to Kyle Walton, Dillon Beh
r, Ron Shurer, Karl Wurzbach, Carter, Seth Howard, and David Sanders for their support and time. Another special thanks to John Wayne Walding, an incredibly brave and tough soldier. We wish him—and the other team members—only the best as they move forward in their lives. They truly are the quiet professionals.
We would like to recognize Carol Darby, Major Manny Ortiz, and Staff Sergeant Jeremy Crisp and the rest of the USASOC and USSOCOM public affairs office who made this book possible. And we would also like to express our gratitude to Major General Michael Repass for his advice.
We’d also like to thank our agent Scott Miller of Trident Media Group who recognized the value of the story, and we would also like to express our gratitude to the team at Penguin Group for their editorial support, including Natalee Rosenstein, our book editor, who truly understood the importance of the story and pushed us to greater heights.
Top: American Special Forces looking through scope on weapon up at Kendal village in Shok Valley with two interpreters. Middle: Looking back to the helicopter landing zone in Shok Valley, guys avoiding crossing the freezing deep river. Bottom: Movement to Kendal village in Shok Valley. U.S. Army photo/Sgt. Michael Carter
CK (interpreter) and Afghan commandos crossing a freezing river in Shok Valley.
U.S. Army photo/Sgt. Michael Carter
Afghan commando giving a child some candy in Uzbin Valley.
U.S. Army photo/ SFC Morales Luis
ODA 3336 on the border of Nangrahar and Pakistan, reinforcing a combat outpost from possible attack. U.S. Army photo/ SFC Morales Luis
Staff Sergeant Morales and CK (center) explaining how to hold on to rope when fast-roping, Jalalabad. We’re on the roof of a four-car-garage motor pool that was transformed into a hockey rink.
U.S. Army photo/ SFC Morales Luis
Staff Sergeants Walding, Shurer, and Morales prepping demo on hood, Tagab Valley, Kapisa. U.S. Army photo/ SFC Morales Luis