Even though he’d been fighting to stop the mission, Commando Wrath was a go. Master Sergeant Scott Ford knew that. The commanders had been pushing too hard. So Ford promised to make sure his team and the Afghan commandos were ready and pumped up for the mission.
Pulling his tan desert uniform shirt over his lean, muscular body—minus the undershirt because he would have to hump sixty pounds up a mountain—Ford headed to the team’s operations center.
It was still drizzling, and if it was sprinkling in Jalalabad, he knew it was worse in the mountains.
“Zach, call over to the airfield and see if the birds are going,” Ford said to Senior Airman Zach Rhyner, the Air Force joint terminal attack controller or JTAC. It was Rhyner’s job to call in air strikes when the shooting started.
Ford wanted to tell the guys to be ready, but he also wanted to manage the stress. The mission had been a series of starts and stops for the past several days, and the team all believed it was going to be canceled again.
“It’s socked in. This thing isn’t going to happen,” said Rhyner, a twenty-two-year-old from Medford, Wisconsin. This was his first combat deployment.
Ford looked at Master Sergeant Jim Lodyga, the team sergeant for ODA 3312. His team was supposed to set up a support position and cover Ford and his men as they climbed up the mountain. Both men shook their heads.
“Get your shit. That way we’re ready,” Ford told his team.
The sun was starting to rise when the soldiers all made it to the flight line. They waited as usual, and just as they were getting ready to board the Chinooks, the departure time was pushed back. But the mission was still on. Sitting by the helicopters, Ford reflected back to when he took over the team. They had come a long way.
When Ford joined the team in July 2007, the unit had already been through three team sergeants in three years. They were a very young team, and in Ford’s opinion, they hadn’t been guided in the right direction. There were no team standard operating procedures (SOPs). They hadn’t done a thing in the seven months since their last Afghanistan rotation. Ford knew he had his work cut out for him. He had until October—three months—to get the team ready before they deployed again to Afghanistan. They needed a “team daddy” in Special Forces lingo, to whip them into shape.
And Ford was that guy.
In a way, Ford’s upbringing had prepared him for the military.
He grew up in rural southeastern Ohio, about twenty minutes down the road from Ohio University. The Fords were family oriented. Every weekend there was a cookout or some kind of gathering at an uncle’s house. When his parents got married, they bought his mother’s family’s farm.
Ford learned about hard work on the family farm, where they kept cattle, hogs, and horses. He would get up in the morning before dawn, do his chores, eat breakfast, and catch the bus to school. When he arrived home, he had more chores and sometimes would have a little time to hunt squirrels before dinner.
School just wasn’t Ford’s thing. He did well enough, but he didn’t enjoy it. Sports were the only reason he even attended—and they forced him to study. If you didn’t keep up your grades, you were off the team. He played football—both offense and defense—and basketball. His was the type of school where everybody had to come out in order to field a full team. His graduating class only had sixty students.
Ford knew college wasn’t an option. He just wasn’t disciplined enough—at least not at that point in his life. There was no future in southeastern Ohio. The area had few good jobs—unless you worked for Ohio University in Athens.
So at the end of high school, he decided to join the military, following his father, who had served in the Air Force just after the Vietnam War.
Ford enlisted in the Army—but not until he’d checked out the Marine Corps. When Ford asked the Marine recruiter what the service had to offer, he was given a smug answer.
“You can be in the Marine Corps or you can’t. It’s up to you,” the recruiter said.
It didn’t matter. Ford had always wanted to join the Army so that he could be a Ranger. Ever since the invasion of Panama, an attack the Rangers had spearheaded, he figured that was his best chance to do the high-speed missions. He was planning to go for infantry, when his uncles pulled him aside and told him to get a skill. So he chose communications and went to Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, for basic training.
It was a breeze. For someone who’d grown up on the farm, it wasn’t difficult to get up early and work hard all day. He was used to being told to do something and getting it done correctly the first time. Plus, once he started playing sports, he barely had time to sleep, what with his chores, practice, and schoolwork. If it was sports season or harvesttime, he rarely got eight hours of sleep. Some guys just weren’t used to a little sleep deprivation. Ford thrived on it.
After basic training, he finished jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was assigned to the 319th Airborne Field Artillery at Fort Bragg. There, he was surrounded by a bunch of gun bunnies who spent their days firing howitzers.
Ford figured he would do the Army thing for a few years, then get out and maybe go to college. But when he was ready to leave the military, his neighbor talked him into checking out Special Forces. His Army hunting buddies were all Green Berets and encouraged him to go to Selection. At first, Ford hesitated. He had never failed at anything and he didn’t want to try and not get selected.
“Don’t worry,” they told him. “You fit the mold perfectly.”
They were right. He made it through easily. The whole time, he wanted more. He just loved the fact that he was getting some real Army training. Knowing that he was going to join a team and would be soon traveling around the world.
Selected as an engineer, Ford was excited: He wanted to blow shit up.
After training, he went straight to 3rd Special Forces Group. His team spent most of their training missions in the islands—the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Saint Vincent. He found the guys on the team were a lot like him. Most had a rural background. They came from small communities in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania. They hunted. Fished. They appreciated home and had matured in the Army.
During the months leading up to the Afghanistan deployment, Ford tried to beat the bad habits out of the new team like his old teammates did to him. He drove them in training, making them come in early for physical training (PT) in the mornings and keeping them late. Everything Ford did was met with resistance until the team realized that they were only going to lose.
On his first day as the team sergeant, he laid down the law. His first move to change the culture: He told the guys to clean up the team room. It was cluttered. Junk was stacked up on all the desks and tables. The top of the refrigerator was covered in papers and binders, and in Ford’s eyes the room looked trashy. It lacked pride.
Part clubhouse, part office, the team room was the one part of Fort Bragg that the soldiers owned. Each team room was unique. They were often decorated with mementos from past deployments. “I want everything off the top of the fridge. If you have clutter on top of everything, it looks like shit,” he told them.
Pulling open the door to the refrigerator, he saw a massive turkey, leftovers from Thanksgiving. It was July, and the picked-over bones had inches of thick mold on them. Ford was sure they had spores that hadn’t been discovered yet.
“Clean the fridge,” he barked.
But the team blew him off. Nobody owned up to bringing in the turkey.
“You all own the fridge,” Ford said. “One, you need to be able to put your lunch in there because you’re not going home every day for lunch. You’re going to be training. Two, I want that thing full of beer.”
Beer in the refrigerator was technically forbidden. They had all been given counseling statements saying they couldn’t keep beer in the team room. So Ford rummaged through all of their folders and tossed all of the statements in the trash.
“I said put beer in there. If I tell you to do something that is illegal, I am accepting the responsibility for it. If you get called out on it, I am going to take that heat round personally,” he told them.
Beer was currency in the Special Forces. And Ford used it to help make his points. If you say you’re doing something for the first time, that was a case of beer. If you made a mistake, that was a case of beer. At the end of most training shoots on the range, there was a “beer shoot.” Each soldier saved a magazine and the worst shot, well, that was a case of beer.
The team had been accruing beer debt, so when the refrigerator was finally clean, Ford told the soldiers who owed beer to stock the fridge before they went home. They came back with twelve-packs. Ford was shocked.
“Did I say you owe half a case or a case? I don’t do half cases. It is either a full case or none,” Ford said.
So Ford broke out the marker and drew a box with twenty-four circles on it.
“Now you have a pictorial view of what a case of beer looks like,” he said. “If you have any questions, come back to this dry-erase board to make sure you know if you have a case or not.”
It was hard for Ford at first. He had come from a team of senior sergeants who knew their job and had been doing it for ten years. On his new team, the most senior guy was Karl Wurzbach. Some of the men had never been in the Army until they joined Special Forces. Ford would often explode because they didn’t know their job. But he soon realized that it wasn’t all their fault. They just hadn’t been given the right guidance.
One time, two soldiers didn’t show for PT. They stayed home and put their kids on the school bus. Ford understood it—but they hadn’t asked him first. The soldiers said they had cleared it with Walton. In Ford’s view, he was the only one who could excuse a soldier from physical training. That was how he ran his team. Old-school. But he knew what the guys were doing. They were playing the “mom and pop” game. If Ford said no, they would go to Walton. That had been going on a lot—and it had to end. Walton was an officer—and was responsible for planning missions. Ford’s job was to whip the team into shape—mold them into a cohesive unit that could tackle any assignment. And physical training was an important part of that process. He knew the mountains in Afghanistan were no joke.
Ford’s relationship with Walton also was a work in progress. They were both type A personalities who wanted to do things their way. Walton was used to being a platoon leader and wanted to micromanage the daily activities. But in Ford’s view, that was the team sergeant’s duty. It made sense. Most team sergeants were rolling with a decade’s worth of experience in Special Forces, while many team leaders rotated in and out of units quickly, and some, like Walton, were brand-new to the job.
So that day, Ford decided to talk to Walton to close that fissure.
“Listen, you stay out of their business,” Ford told Walton. “I am going to change it. I am going to fix it. That is what I do. It is my job to keep you out of our business. If you have an issue, you can come to me..”
So, while the team showered up after PT, Ford took out a marker again and began drawing on the dry-erase board. He started by sketching a stick figure for each team member. Then he drew a stick figure above everybody. That was him. Lightning bolts led to him, and over his figure he wrote in block letters: THE MAN. When the guys arrived in the team room, the message was clear.
“The only guy that relieves anybody from PT, or any other training on this team, is me,” he told them.
Some of the soldiers weren’t used to it. He heard their complaints. Their wives were upset that they weren’t home. Two guys even had the balls to approach Ford to gripe about it. He detonated on them.
“I give a shit what your wife thinks? The reality is you guys sat here and didn’t do anything for seven months,” he said. “You got paid for the extra seven months you didn’t do anything and now you’re paying for it.”
Plus, he knew that if something happened to his men, he wouldn’t be able to look at their wives and families knowing that he hadn’t done everything he could to prepare them for the mission.
Ford had already been to Iraq and Afghanistan. He knew what combat was like and knew this team just wasn’t ready. Not yet. They had a lot of work to do, especially after the team’s previous deployment, in which they didn’t conduct a lot of missions. Ford was set on making sure the team had the skills to survive because he didn’t plan on sitting on his ass in some firebase. They were going after the bad guys.
Soon after taking over the team, he sat down with Walton and came up with the tasks they needed to accomplish. The training ranged from shooting to land navigation to just driving trucks at night.
Thinking back to their premission training in Savannah, Georgia, he recalled one of the first live fire drills. It was a convoy exercise. That’s where a team driving trucks is attacked. He wanted to see how his team would react.
“Upon contact,” Ford told the guys huddled around his truck, “everybody is going to shoot. I want a high volume of fire. If you can shoot in the direction of the contact, you will have a gun out and it will be shooting until I tell you to stop.”
Ford explained that after the initial burst there was nothing but confusion.
“Your truck might be the only one left alive,” he said.
Gaining fire superiority was essential. A few minutes later, the team started down the path in their trucks. One of the instructors placed a smoke grenade on the lead truck, signifying that it had been hit. Then a machine gun fired a few blanks. But his team only responded with a short burst and then silence. Guys with their rifles were just sitting there. Then another gun opened up after a minute.
Pathetic, Ford thought.
He had given the team basic instructions. Everybody shoot.
Jumping out of his truck, he stopped the convoy. His rage was practically palpable. Grabbing his helmet, he threw it onto the road. It hit and skidded onto the shoulder.
“Get the fuck out,” Ford yelled. “Get out.”
The team climbed out of the trucks and gathered up.
“We are going to redo this exercise if it takes us the next three days until you get it right,” Ford shouted at them. “We were going to train to standard and not to time. We can either get this done in a matter of six hours or twenty-four hours.”
Ford had to very quickly teach them how to operate as a team. He didn’t want to come down too hard, but that’s what happened. He didn’t want to see guys trying to learn it in Afghanistan. He owned them from Tuesday through Thursday. They would go to the range, driving in convoy formation, and they would stay out past sundown reacting to ambushes all night. That was when the team really bought into his leadership style. At first they thought that he was a prick.
But after premission training, things clicked. The team understood what Ford was doing and their hard work paid off. The team’s old mentality was buried.
When Ford was growing up in Special Forces, if you screwed up, you found your rucksack in the hallway. It sent a simple message: Find another team. Ford told them if he heard them talk about the last deployment, he was going to throw their rucksacks out of the team room. That’s because during the last trip they’d done nothing. This trip, they were going to do something.
A few weeks before the team left for Afghanistan, Ford discovered that his team was getting the battalion’s most important mission. The battalion’s operations officer had gone to Selection with Ford and respected him. He knew Ford was a badass team sergeant who could get the job done.
“You’re going to mentor these commandos,” the officer told him at Fort Bragg.
Ford was excited. “We can run with it,” he said.
His team was going to build Afghanistan’s first special operations force from the ground up. But he knew it came with a risk. The commandos were the Afghan Ministry of Defense’s “shiny new toy,” and Ford knew that training them would involve a lot of politics. He expected Afghan officials to showcase the unit, and use them as a symbol of the country’s new military prowess. But if his team broke that toy—if the training went poorly or if they were attacked and many commandos were killed in combat—his team would be the embarrassment of the regiment. We have to execute this well, he thought.
The officer tried to ease Ford’s fears. “With what you did in Iraq, this should be a piece of cake,” he said.
But Ford knew it wasn’t going to be easy. His team was young and still subscribed to the idea that Special Forces was like a SWAT Team, rescuing hostages and killing terrorists. Yeah, that’s part of the mission, Ford thought. But training host-nation soldiers was the real work. He had done it in the Caribbean before 9/11. He had trained Iraqis after the attacks. Now he would be back in Afghanistan doing the same thing.
Back in the team room, he gave the team the good news. They had earned it. In a short few months, they had transformed themselves into the best team in the company and probably the battalion. But this mission was going to be hard. Few of the guys had trained foreign soldiers before. They’d been taught how to do it, but lacked experience. Ford knew it would require a lot of hands-on work.
Walton ordered the team a bunch of manuals and each soldier received a copy of 7-8, the Army’s basic infantry skills guide.
“As long as you and the commandos can operate under this book, then we’re going to be fine. Nothing sexy,” Ford said. “I don’t want them to think about sexy. Basic 7-8. Because if you can’t master that, we can’t go on to any-thing sexy.”
But most of all, he stressed that the team had to buy into the commandos and their mission, or the whole thing would fail.
Right before they deployed, Staff Sergeant John Wayne Walding and Staff Sergeant Matt Williams showed up right out of the qualification course. Ford would have to get them up to speed in-country because within two weeks, they would be on a plane going to Afghanistan.
Wheels up, baby. Here we go, Ford thought.
When the team landed in Afghanistan, Ford pushed them hard the first few months. His team killed themselves getting the commandos ready for operations. The chain of command on both the Afghan and U.S. side kept pressing to get the new unit onto the battlefield, but Ford and Walton pushed back. The Afghan commandos weren’t ready yet. The team was already working eighteen-hour days training them.
Eat. Sleep. Train on infantry tactics.
Ford knew he had to keep morale up. So when he discovered that team members had been stalking and smashing each other with three-foot fluorescent-tube lightbulbs, he let it go. But Ford added his own twist, of course.
No one was injured except for a little cut on the hand from the glass. Ford didn’t want to take the fun away from the guys, even though it was a bit unsafe. It was a way to relieve stress. Plus, he viewed it as training.
So, one day, Ford sat down and created rules and a name for the game: Punisher Sword, named after Marvel comics most famous vigilante. And in typical Ford style, he put together a PowerPoint presentation. After one team meeting, Ford walked the team through the rules of engagement.
“I can put out any rule. I could tell you not to do it and I know it is going to happen. So rather than make a bullshit rule I can’t enforce, I will make a rule we can respect and live by it,” he told the team.
The rules were simple. All attacks had to take place in the team house and the mess had to be cleaned up afterward. Nothing below the belt. Nothing above the breast line and each ambush had to be recorded. If it wasn’t videotaped or the “sword” didn’t break, the victim got to take the bulb from the attacker and, in front of the team, smash back. After each team meeting, Ford would ask if there were any “Punisher Sword” violations.
Soon the team house became a war zone. Typically, it would involve five or six guys. It got to the point that when a guy called someone over to talk, the other guy would walk the other way. The soldiers began setting up ambushes around corners. Guys would come into the house, even coming from the shower, and surreptitiously find their way down the hall and back to their rooms. It was a game, but it also meant that the unit was using skills they would need to enter houses in a combat situation, clearing the corners and doing it better than they’d have been able to do if Ford had taught them on a range.
Because now it meant a blow to the ego and the curse of a video showing you getting beaten down with a lightbulb.