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.
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.