By the time he settled into the front of the helicopter, Staff Sergeant Seth Howard was tired. Most of the team hadn’t finished all their preparations until after midnight. Then they were up at 4 a.m. While they waited for the green light, they ran the commandos through a few dry runs to make sure they could get off the helicopters efficiently.
Howard was on the same Chinook as Carter and Walton, who was sitting on the ramp listening to the radio traffic. There were only a few radio jacks and Howard didn’t have one. So all he could do was wait.
Howard was a veteran of the team, and this was his third deployment in just a short period. He was senior in that sense, but only a staff sergeant with two and a half years in the Army. An expert marksman, Howard was one of the few holdovers on the team. But when Ford took over, he seemed to pick on him. Maybe it was because Howard was the antithesis of Ford. He had an easygoing, almost lethargic demeanor. In Ford’s view, Howard was lazy—and told him so. He called Howard a sloth and used to rag on him for being the son of a doctor.
Raised in Keene, New Hampshire, Howard came from an upper-middle-class family. His father was a general surgeon and his mother worked in communications, but she basically raised him and his two brothers.
The team leader might be in charge, but the team sergeant really creates the synergy. He shapes the team and is responsible for the culture. And no team is ever good enough. Howard knew that every team sergeant would say he had the best group in the world. But he had a feeling that every team sergeant also secretly wished his team was ten times better than they were.
So, Howard was used to Ford’s tirades and cajoling. He knew at the heart of it, Ford wanted the best team. And no matter what Ford said to his fellow soldiers, they all tried hard to win him over, especially Howard, who was a weapons sergeant. He knew Ford had just come from a sniper team and knew how to shoot and run a range better than most of the guys on the team.
With Howard’s background, no one had expected him to join Special Forces.
He went to Catholic school and then boarding school at Northfield Mount Hermon in Massachusetts. He wrestled all four years and graduated from high school in 2002, before attending Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to wrestle. As a freshman, he got tossed around in the gym and in the classroom. He was at the school only one semester. He signed up for four classes, dropped one, failed two, and got a C in the one for which he showed up to the final exam.
He was having a good time in college, but had no direction. He was only there because that’s what you do after high school. He dropped out because he didn’t want to waste his parents’ money. (Tuition, including room and board, ran more than fifty thousand dollars a year.) He got a job at a syringe and cardboard-box partition factory while he handled paperwork for the Army.
It was 2003 and the Iraq war had just started. While he met with his recruiter, the play-by-play of 3rd ID’s thunder run into Iraq played on the radio. He went to the recruiter wanting to be an “18X,” or a Special Forces recruit. They tried to talk him into doing something with satellites, but it was a six-year commitment and he didn’t want to stare at a computer screen all day.
He wanted to be part of the action. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were big motivators. He didn’t want to miss one of the biggest events of his generation.
And he believed in the mission. He believed the United States had an obligation to act and he couldn’t live with himself if he wasn’t a part of it. He heard the criticism of the wars. But to him, it was hypocritical. The exact same people who were arguing against the invasion of Iraq would be yelling about all the atrocities being committed by Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and demanding that someone do something about it.
Howard was ready. His mother tried to talk him into going in the Navy, even when he was getting on the bus to head to basic training. His father had joined the Navy in order to pay for medical school. But Howard didn’t want to be trapped on a ship.
Before loading the commandos onto the bird a final time, he checked them to make sure they had water and ammunition. On previous missions, they would have guys with seventeen magazines and five knives. What in the hell are you going to do with all of that? Howard thought. But as the commandos jumped on board, he saw they were ready to go, including a small group of ammunition bearers carrying rounds for the Carl Gustav 84mm recoilless rifle. The Carl G looked like a giant shoulder-fired cannon. It shot shells that could punch holes in the thick mud walls of the Afghan villages.
Howard had eight commandos in his group. Every patrol was broken up into three groups: assault, support, and security. Howard was in charge of the support group. As the two assault teams, one led by Walding and Staff Sergeant Dave Sanders and the other by Walton, moved toward the village, Howard would cover them. When they got a foothold, Howard and his men would move up and try to provide support by fire and start clearing houses, too. In a way, he was like a third assault team since most of the cover fire would come from the circling Apache gunships.
They had originally talked about taking a mortar. But in order to shoot it, they would have to clear every shot with the jets and attack helicopters in the airspace above since the rounds are fired in a high arc at a target.
But bringing the Carl G was tough because the weapon was heavy.
Howard remembered watching the wild promotional videos of guys running through the woods with the weapon. The gunner with the actual tube and his assistant carried the rounds in a suitcase. When they reached the target, the gunner sat down and the assistant loaded it up. Howard didn’t see it going down that way. He had never carried the ammunition around like a suitcase.
Most times, guys took the rounds out of the plastic cases and threw them in the back of their assault packs. But the rounds can get damaged. Instead, Howard had taken the rounds, which came in a case of two, and ran half-inch nylon through the loops on the sides of the plastic cases. Grabbing his Afghans, he threaded the nylon through loops on the back of their body armor. When he was done, the men had what looked like little jet packs.
With everybody on board, he settled in near the front and closed his eyes. He recalled a passage from Eric Haney’s book, Inside Delta Force, a lesson he took to heart. Don’t stand if you can sit down. Don’t sit down if you can lie down. Don’t lie down if you can be asleep.
He knew Walton and the crew chief on the bird would wake him up with the one-minute warning when they reached the Shok Valley. So, as the engines whined and the bird picked up off the flight line, Howard dozed off.