The Only Thing Worth Dying For (9 page)

A couple of hours later, the 10th Mountain Division soldiers posted
nearby were baffled to see a hundred bearded men dashing across the dirt road that separated the ISOFAC from headquarters. Inside the “big tent,” they stood shoulder to shoulder but were forbidden to speak to one another. After thirty minutes of waiting, they were whispering among themselves. After an hour, loud conversations and laughter filled the cramped space.

Finally, General Franks walked in, greeted the Green Berets, and embraced a soldier in the front row, saying, “That’s from the president.” He spoke for just fifteen seconds before reaching the climax of his underwhelming speech: “Aw, fuck. Go get ’em!” Perplexed, the men looked at each other as Franks posed for a photo with Mulholland in front of the 5th Group colors on his way out of the tent.

That’s it?
thought ODA 574’s junior communications sergeant, Wes McGirr.
We wasted three hours for that?

Conrad was used to a warm welcome—or at least good-humored ribbing about being the team’s gofer or ISOFAC “bitch”—but when he entered the tent around noon on November 3, there was hardly a glance in his direction until he rustled some papers and said, “Anybody here interested in a mission?”

Immediately, the men were looking over the three sheets of paper. “Hamid Karzai” was the name, but there was no photo, and the sparse details led the team to believe he was just another warlord.

“This guy is trying to start a Southern Alliance, I guess,” said Conrad.

“Like Abdul Haq?” asked JD.

“Yeah. He’s also a Pashtun, like Haq, and it seems that a living, breathing Pashtun who opposes the Taliban is quite a commodity. We’re going to see about helping him out. How many days will you need before you can brief the colonel?”

“We can be ready in three hours,” Amerine said.

Conrad thought Amerine was confused. “Hours? Three
hours
?”

“That’s all the intel you’ve got on him?” asked Amerine. It wouldn’t take long to incorporate the new information into the plan
for unconventional warfare they’d prepared back at Fort Campbell and had continued to refine since their arrival in Uzbekistan.

“That’s it.”

“We’ll be ready in three hours.”

Two hours had passed when the AST walked back in and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but Karzai is dead.”

Amerine shook his head in disbelief. “Next time you want a G-chief
*
killed, just assign him to us. He’ll be gone before we hit the ground.”

Two hours later, Conrad returned. “New intel. It’s back on. Karzai is alive after all. The Taliban have him cornered in the mountains.”

This time nobody jumped up.

“No shit,” said Conrad. “There’s a QRF [quick reaction force] from Task Force Sword going in to grab this guy. This one’s for real. You’re still going to be ready to brief in an hour, right?”

Colonel Mulholland had been running Task Force Dagger out of K2 for nearly a month. Long hours, high stress, and inadequate sleep had left dark circles under his eyes. Usually clean-shaven, the colonel had a week’s worth of stubble on his cheeks and a thick, wiry mustache. As he faced the men of ODA 574 inside Task Force Dagger’s mission planning tent, he looked exhausted.

Mulholland didn’t know the members of the team, but, as a Green Beret who had commanded his own A-team in the mid-1980s, he knew that they’d been trained to cope with the danger they would face. Gary Schroen, the agent who had led the first CIA team (code-named Jawbreaker) to infiltrate friendly territory held by 20,000 fighters of the Northern Alliance two weeks earlier, called that mission the most dangerous assignment in his thirty-five-year career.
⁸
The mission Mulholland was currently considering for ODA 574 would be the first in southern Afghanistan, a uniquely precarious area de
lineated by the Hindu Kush mountains to the north and the Pakistan border to the south that contained far more unknown variables than any of the missions he’d authorized in the north.

Amerine had to demonstrate to Mulholland how ODA 574 would accomplish its mission without the most basic intelligence, such as the names of the villages, roads, and waterways in the area or where they would infiltrate the country.

For more than an hour, Amerine and his team briefed Mulholland, laying out how they would link up with Karzai, help organize and train his guerrillas, provide them with weapons and other supplies, and take them to war. Once the force grew to three hundred men, they would, per Special Forces doctrine, coordinate for a company B-team to arrive with additional A-teams, at which point they would continue the mission under the B-team’s command. One by one, every member of ODA 574 provided details of the plan, including updated intelligence estimates, anticipated phases of the campaign, logistics, even a rundown of individual equipment and the weight each man would carry.

The brief concluded when Amerine said, “Sir, ODA 574 is ready to execute the mission.”

Mulholland’s face betrayed his grave misgivings as he considered whether to authorize the mission. He let out a long, contemplative breath.

This shit’s grim
, thought Mike, sensing that the colonel wasn’t telling them everything he knew.

Moving from man to man, Mulholland looked each one in the eyes and asked, “Are you ready for this?”

“We need to get him out of here,” JD whispered to Amerine, who knew he had to get between Mulholland and his men before the colonel killed their morale.

Amerine was trying to figure out how to do this when Mulholland said, “Good brief. We’ll keep working with our CIA counterparts to figure out when and how to put you on the ground.”

Following Mulholland out of the tent, Amerine reassured his boss that the team was ready. The men back inside heard Mulholland’s response: “Well, if it gets really bad, if it’s looking like it’s going to be really bad, just kill as many of them as you can.”

Oh fuck
, thought Mike.
We’re not coming back.

When the men walked back to their tent, the mood was as dark as the cold, damp night. The situation was ripe for a one-liner from Dan, but even he was silent.

Amerine returned a short time later and whispered something to JD, who immediately perked up.

“Listen up!” JD shouted. “I’m posting a timeline for the next eighteen hours. We’re on standby to infiltrate tomorrow night, so get your shit packed up!”

Working through the night, ODA 574 packed rucksacks and boxes and sanitized the work space. The following morning, JD yelled from the tent entrance, “Initial precombat inspection in one hour!” eliciting a renewed flurry of activity, during which Mike paused to write a quick last letter home. He cast a vote on Maria’s request for her own phone, asked about Michael Jr.’s progress in hockey, and sent Judith his love and thanks for holding down the “fort” as a full-time parent and pre-med student, reminding her that she was his hero.

After sealing the envelope, he double-checked the only personal items he would carry with him into battle—a tiny crucifix and a two-inch-by-three-inch American flag—and tucked them into a split seam on his uniform, a secret pocket that he hoped would remain undetected if he was captured. For Mike, the American flag stood for more than just duty, honor, and country. It represented family and would bring him both comfort and resolve if he fell into the hands of the enemy.

Sergeant First Class Mike McElhiney’s mother, Tammy, was a Daughter of the American Revolution: She had traced her family’s roots back to a Revolutionary War soldier, and in her research, discovered that both her relatives and those of Mike’s father, Bill, had fought in nearly every war since then. Bill retired from the Navy after serving in Vietnam but remained active as an MP company commander in the local Army Reserve in Kansas City, Missouri. As a child, Mike often accompanied his father to the armory, where the
sergeant in charge would show him around and let him handle the weapons. He could stare at the rows of guns for hours.

Mike’s neighborhood squad waged war in the woods behind Westridge Elementary School, constructing elaborate battlefields complete with foxholes, trenches, and forts. Bill McElhiney made wooden models of a Thompson submachine gun with a drum magazine and an M60 machine gun with blanks glued onto its stock. During the summer, the boys would drink Kool-Aid out on Mike’s porch while they polished their “guns” for battle just like real soldiers.

“Shit,” Dan said as Mike was addressing the envelope. “Don’t forget to fill up your water bottles.”

How the hell did I forget that?
thought Mike.

As the men continued to prep their gear, their AST walked in, accompanied by Captain Glenn Thomas, the team leader of ODA 594.

“Change two,” Conrad said to Amerine. “The old plan just got thrown out the window; have fun with this new one. Mulholland decided to make this a two-team mission. You’re going to hook up with Captain Thomas’s team and go in together. And Mulholland is sending Lieutenant Colonel Mark Rosengard to keep Task Force Sword from fucking with you.”

For the next half hour, Amerine and Thomas reworked ODA 574’s original plan.

“This actually makes things much easier,” Amerine said. “I was trying to figure out how to work with the G-chief while leading my men in combat operations. With you and your men coming, I’ll park my ass beside the G-chief. He’ll be my focus, and you can lead both our teams.”

“Sucks for you,” Thomas said, “but sounds like a good way to handle it.”

“It’s the right thing to do,” said Amerine. “I’ll advise the G-chief while you lead from the front.”

Five hours later, Conrad came back to the tent and pulled Amerine aside. “Change three. You and Thomas each need to pick two guys from your teams. You’re heading to Pakistan with Lieutenant Colonel Rosengard in half an hour to sort all this out.”

Every member of ODA 574 was ready to go. Uncertain how to
break the bad news, Amerine said a few words to JD. Then he quietly told Mag, “Be ready to walk out of here in five minutes. You and Alex are heading out.”

The three men retrieved their already packed equipment from the foot of their cots. Once they were out the door, JD called out behind them, “Okay, change in plans: Colonel Mulholland wants a leader’s recon to sort things out in Pakistan, so he’s sending the team leaders with a couple guys each. Mag and Alex are going with the captain.”

As he walked away from his teammates’ curses of frustration, Mag was chuckling on the inside. For the first time in weeks, he felt lucky.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Soldier and the Statesman

It is the ODA commander who will internalize the implications of acting or failing to act and the ultimate impact on United States foreign policy. The burden and responsibility for sound decision-making under such circum stances goes way beyond the normal expectations of a United States Army Captain. But this is a Special Forces officer, and he will be held to a higher standard.

—Colonel Gerald Schumacher, U.S. Army Special Forces (ret.),
To Be a U.S. Army Green Beret

Shortly after two in the morning on November 4, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Rosengard, Captain Jason Amerine, Captain Glenn Thomas, and their subordinates walked off the ramp of the Special Operations MC-130 transport airplane and onto the tarmac at Jacobabad Air Base (known as J-Bad)
¹
in Pakistan. U.S. forces had the run of the base but occupied a cordoned-off section near the halfway mark of a two-mile-long airstrip—where Hamid Karzai and seven Pashtun tribal leaders had disembarked from helicopters only hours earlier. Access roads were barricaded and guarded by Marines, creating an enclave of whitewashed adobe administrative buildings, bombproof jet fighter shelters, metal storage containers, and a massive, camouflage-painted hangar.

As Rosengard led the Green Berets to the hangar, he explained that despite his higher rank, he was there only to oversee, a laissez-faire command style that indicated his confidence in Special Forces
captains. “You two do your jobs,” he told Amerine and Thomas, “and don’t worry about me. I’ll advise as needed.”

Lights flickered a third of a mile to the west, where a town edged up against the base’s perimeter fence. The side of the hangar facing the town was barricaded by steel Conex shipping containers stacked on top of each other.

“The locals in that urban sprawl over there weren’t too happy when we got here,” announced J-Bad’s deputy commander, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Steve Hadley, nodding toward the containers as he strode out from the hangar to greet them. “They weren’t very good shots, but we wanted something to stop the bullets from coming in where we’re sleeping.”

Forty-six-year-old Hadley, one of twelve pilot-physicians in the Air Force and the only one with a Ranger tab, was known to his men as a human Swiss Army knife, as sharp as they come both physically and mentally. In the fluorescent light coming from the hangar, Hadley’s thick mustache was prominent against his wind-chafed, sunburned cheeks. Amerine could just make out his West Point class ring, while Mag honed in on the bumpy rash covering the lieutenant colonel’s forearms.

“Mosquitoes,” said Hadley with a grin. “This was a bare base when we got here. Had some standing-water issues that started a whole ecosystem for a while, but things are better now.”

This was hard to believe, judging by the smell. The influx of Air Force personnel—some 250 were living in the hangar like refugees in a high school gymnasium—had overwhelmed the septic system, and there was standing sewage on the low ground surrounding the buildings.

“That’s your place out there, on the other side of what we call Lake Jacobabad.” Hadley pointed across the sewage runoff pond.

The men piled into the back of a waiting cargo truck and were driven seventy-five yards to a modern-looking flat-roofed structure, about two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, which was their “safe house.” They unloaded their gear and carried it beneath an unlit balcony and past darkened windows, stopping in front of the building at a sliver of light shining through the crack at the base of a closed door.