The Only Thing Worth Dying For (49 page)

On their way to the JMAUs, Lee and Leithead crossed paths with a group of Green Berets—including Miller, Allard, Cubby, and the two other ODAs—jogging toward the two Marine helicopters waiting to transport them to Shawali Kowt. As he and Leithead neared the two planes, where four Navy SEALs were running the last two litters up the ramp and into the belly of one of the aircraft, Lee was awed by the capabilities of the U.S. military to take care of its own in the middle of this remote desert. He was also disgusted by the way Mattis had hesitated—wringing his hands just long enough for somebody else to solve the problem.

Inside the JMAU, every man with an injury—fourteen total—was at a litter station in the middle or rear of the hold, being tended to by teams of trauma nurses. Already the surgeons were working behind hanging curtains in the sterile front of the plane, performing “damage control surgery” on Mike, Ronnie, and Alex. This included tying off ruptured blood vessels, removing shrapnel, and making temporary repairs to internal organs and fractured bones—whatever it would take to get the casualties to the specialized surgeons awaiting them two hours away in Oman.

Outside, off to the side of the airplane’s massive ramp, Leopold sat on the ground beside the litter on which his friend Cody Prosser was lying; he was holding Prosser’s hand and cradling his head in his lap. Prosser had succumbed to his wounds during the flight and been
pronounced dead at Camp Rhino by Doc Frank. He was the third American to die that day.

Blood was still spraying off the tail ramp of Knife 03, now twenty minutes from Camp Rhino, as Diekman kept his right hand on the machine gun to steady himself and placed his left knee on the stomach of the still-conscious but heavily sedated Afghan. He put his other hand firmly against the man’s chest and, clenching his teeth, pushed down with most of his weight, pinning him against the ramp while Malone used surgical shears to cut into the severely crushed bone and torn skin and muscle. Diekman grimaced as he watched; the Afghan, whose glassy eyes remained open, didn’t even flinch.

Continuing to hold the man down, Diekman looked down the barrel of his gun at the desert rushing past. They’d finally cleared the suburbs and all he could see was blue sky, open land, and Kandahar falling farther and farther behind in their wake. Diekman glanced again at the Afghan just as Malone snipped through the remaining muscle and tissue.
*
In his headset, he heard Schweim making contact with Alexander, the copilot of Knife 04, already on the ground at Rhino. “We have cross-loaded our casualties into the JMAUs,” said Alexander. “They are standing by to head for Oman.”

“Copy that, we’ll be there shortly,” said Schweim. “What are your coordinates?”

Alexander read them off, then said, “You’ll see where we’re at from ten miles out—just look for the dust cloud rising three hundred feet into the sky.”

“What is the frequency for Rhino’s tower?”

“You don’t want to talk to the tower,” said Alexander. “You want to land as close as you can to the two JMAUs. Do
not
land by the helicopters. We’ll be ready to help cross-load your patients.”

Diekman turned his attention to the front of the hold, where five dirty and bandaged Green Berets were looking around with blank, emotionless eyes.
So that’s a thousand-yard stare
, he thought.

Eyes fixed on Dan’s body, Amerine was thinking back to nine years before, when he’d walked beneath the Trees of the Dead on Gabriel Field with his mentor, Dennis Holloway.

“I hope you never have to look at these trees and see the faces of the men they represent,” Holloway had said. “But if it ever comes to that, you will find comfort knowing that they died for something larger than themselves. You will know in your heart that they died doing something that makes a difference.”

As the Pave Low sped toward Camp Rhino, that was what consoled Amerine. He’d led Dan, JD, his entire team to this end, but what they had fought and died for could not have been more noble.

Epilogue

Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.

—Stonewall Jackson’s last words

“The Taliban surrendered thirty minutes after the wounded were taken away from Shawali Kowt,” President Karzai told me as we sat together in his midtown Manhattan hotel room on September 23, 2008.

He shook his head at the irony. “There was the bombing before that, but the Taliban came anyway. And they said that they would surrender; they brought a letter of surrender to me.”

Karzai then confirmed that he had known about the delegation the night before the accident. In an interview at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the week before, Major Bolduc had told me that although he and Fox knew there was a delegation en route the night before, they didn’t trust that the Taliban were surrendering. Bolduc also said that Karzai was the one who had authorized the air strikes on the morning of December 5. I read to Karzai that section of the transcript verbatim: “Ultimately, it wasn’t me or Fox that authorized that engagement. It was Hamid Karzai.”

“No,” Karzai said. “He is wrong. Completely, completely. I didn’t even know [they were bombing]. I was, as a matter of fact, going [to the Alamo]. Had I gone that day, had the elders not come, I would be dead now, like Bari Gul, like all those other people.”

He looked through the pictures I’d brought, pausing at an aerial
photo I’d found of the neighborhood and compound where the team had spent their time in Tarin Kowt. He stopped at the next photo, too: ODA 574 sitting with some spooks on MRE boxes, sipping coffee.

“Do you know this place?” asked Karzai.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s the compound at Tarin Kowt.”

He nodded with a smile. The next photo was of Amerine in the back of a truck, driving away from the compound as the convoy left for Petawek.

“This is Jason,” Karzai said, showing the picture to his staff. “Had there been
anybody
else, things would have gone terribly wrong. I have the best memories of that man and his team. He is an exceptional person, extremely polite. You won’t see it in him: He’s very quiet, but he’s very courageous.

“Jason was the best representative of the United States. He came to me one day and said there had been reports of a Taliban get-together…” It had been seven years, yet Karzai vividly recalled when the reconnaissance aircraft had identified a possible Taliban helicopter. “Jason said, ‘What do you think? Should I authorize [bombing] this?’ I said, ‘No, let’s go and find out.’ I sent people, and they found that the camps were refugees from Kandahar. I told Jason and he believed me. Had it been any other person, first, I would not have been consulted. And even if I were consulted, they would have gone ahead, but he didn’t…If the United States had military officers like Jason in larger numbers, it would be a greater country.”

Our scheduled fifteen-minute interview had stretched to nearly an hour when Karzai’s spokesman pointed to his watch for the third time, reminding him that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was waiting outside.

Karzai walked me to the door, shook my hand, and said, “Please send my regards to Jason and his team. I will never forget those men.”

An aide escorted me past security—Afghan bodyguards, U.S. Secret Service, body-armored police, a metal detector, and an X-ray machine—underscoring just how much Karzai’s life had changed since
Time
magazine had hailed him as the Great New Afghan Hope
when he was sworn in as the leader of Afghanistan’s transitional government on December 22, 2001. Six months later, on June 13, 2002, more than 1,500 multi-ethnic delegates from across Afghanistan had convened a Loya Jirga and named Karzai president of the Afghan Transitional Government. Then, on October 9, 2004, he won the country’s first free election, becoming the first democratically elected leader of Afghanistan.

“His Excellency loves to talk about the days of the Liberation,” the aide told me as I left the hotel lobby. “Now his job is very difficult.”

Outside, I paused for a moment to look up at the high rises of Manhattan, where this story began seven years earlier on September 11, 2001. Then I merged into the flow of pedestrians on the crowded sidewalks of Park Avenue. But in my mind, I was still in Afghanistan, sorting through the snapshots of the mission—and thinking about what had become of the men involved.

Shortly after the Taliban delegation arrived in Shawali Kowt to surrender to Karzai, ODB 570, including Cubby, Allard, and Miller, landed at LZ Jamie, the same location that Knife 03 had taken off from an hour before. Even though they had been tasked to get in and out quickly, Mulholland asked them to stay on and assist Fox as a traditional B-team.

As ODB 570 set up a security perimeter on the Alamo, Smith did a final sweep for any remaining papers with sensitive data. It was then that he discovered JD’s Harley-Davidson cap, barely visible under a layer of dirt. He collected what few remains he could find in the immediate vicinity and delivered them to Bolduc.

Temperatures dropped to near freezing their first night in Shawali Kowt, and ODB 570—with little beyond their go-to-hell packs and medical equipment—was forced to scavenge the abandoned rucksacks of ODA 574 for extra clothing and sleeping bags. Come morning, Allard and Cubby saw that they were wearing Dan’s and JD’s clothing.

Two days after the bombing, ODB 570 accompanied Karzai and the uninjured members of Fox’s headquarters staff across the bridge
over the Arghandab River and into Kandahar, where they received a warm reception from the local population. Allard and Cubby quietly dedicated the day to ODA 574, who they knew should have been leading the convoy to Mullah Omar’s palace: their new command post and Karzai’s new headquarters.

Several days later, a Green Beret discovered that the palace had been rigged to blow up, its roof imbedded with hundreds of artillery rounds. A bomb squad identified a single wire, buried underground and leading a few hundred yards from the palace to within a few feet of a large battery concealed in a hut; the explosion could have killed Karzai and nearly one hundred Special Forces soldiers. They could only guess that the Taliban assigned to touch the wire to the battery and detonate the bomb had fled.

ODB 570 would remain with Fox and Bolduc and the uninjured headquarters staff for the next four months, providing security for Karzai and fighting pockets of Taliban in and around Kandahar who refused to surrender.

The surviving members of ODA 574 were evacuated from Camp Rhino to Oman. Wes was at the hospital recovering from his gunshot wound, and was shocked by the arrival of his team, who, as he put it, looked as if they had been “blown to hell.” Brent broke down when he told Wes that JD and Dan were dead. Had he not been shot, Wes realized, he probably would have been alongside Dan when the JDAM hit; the bullet he’d taken in the neck likely saved his life.

While the rest of the team flew from Oman to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, Mag was taken directly to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Amerine stayed an additional day in Oman so that he could escort JD and Dan back to the United States.

Amerine brought JD home to Elizabethton, Tennessee, where hundreds of police and firefighters from across the state lined the highway along with thousands of citizens. The town honored JD by naming a bridge over the Wautauga River after him—the Jefferson
Donald Davis Memorial Bridge. His family had a bench inscribed with the Special Forces insignia and placed it under a dogwood tree by his grave, where they often find friends, neighbors, and strangers sitting in the shade, paying their respects.

Dan was buried that same weekend in Cheshire, Massachusetts, at a funeral attended by many of his fellow 5th Group Green Berets. The trail across the street from the house where he’d played soldier as a boy was named in his honor—a fitting gesture considering the last line of Dan’s death letter to his family: “If you ever get sad and down about this, just open up the front door and listen for the kids down the neighborhood playing Army and think of me.”

After extensive surgeries spanning more than a year, Mike—whose right arm had to be amputated below the elbow and who had suffered hundreds of shrapnel wounds and a collapsed lung—returned to Special Forces, where he serves as one of only a few amputees on active duty. When Karzai made his first post-9/11 trip to the United States in late January 2002, Mike sat beside him and First Lady Laura Bush, who had extended the invitation to ODA 574, at the president’s State of the Union address.

Ronnie’s heart and lungs were punctured by shrapnel, but he recovered and returned to 5th Group less than a year later. He and his wife, also an Army NCO, both deployed to Iraq in 2003. While patients at Walter Reed, Ronnie and Mike attended Cody Prosser’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, sitting side by side in wheelchairs. On January 29, 2002, Ronnie and Amerine joined Mike at the State of the Union address, where the three men were reunited with Karzai for the first time since December 5.

In the days after the bombing, Amerine had learned, Casper had informed Karzai that Fox and his staff, not Amerine and ODA 574, were responsible for the accident. Following President Bush’s speech, Karzai personally thanked the three men from ODA 574, then introduced them to their commander in chief, saying, “Look at what these men sacrificed for both America and Afghanistan. These are some of the bravest men I have ever met.”

Alex returned to Hurlburt Field, Florida. While going through rehab, he was visited by then–Secretary of the Air Force James G.

Roche, who asked if there was anything he could personally do for Alex. “Don’t let this type of accident happen to anyone ever again” was Alex’s reply. Despite being permanently disabled with a shattered shoulder, Alex continues to work in the Air Force Special Operations community as an expert in close air support and combat controller operations. He led the team that pioneered a system designed to help eliminate possible errors by allowing combat controllers to digitally communicate targeting data to attacking aircraft. His assignment with ODA 574 became a model for combat controllers in the Air Force, who continue to be placed with ODAs in both Afghanistan and Iraq.