With gunfire erupting in the valley, Master Sergeant Jim Lodyga had to rethink his plans.
When ODA 3336 started toward their objective, Lodyga and his team, including Eric Martin, Staff Sergeant Nick McGarry, and Sergeant First Class Sergio Martinez, peeled off toward the other side of the wadi.
It was their job to scale the opposite mountain and set up a machine gun to cover ODA 3336’s ascent.
From the wadi, the team could see a massive two-story mud-walled building and six other buildings clustered nearby. That was their target. The plan called for them to climb the mountain and clear that village while they also set up a machine gun to cover ODA 3336’s assault across the wadi.
Lodyga had broken his ODA and commandos into fire teams. McGarry, the team’s senior weapons sergeant, was leading one group, and Martin, the team’s communications sergeant, was leading the other. With McGarry’s Alpha team concealed and covering the mountain, Lodyga sent a half-dozen commandos forward to the cliff. It was a fifty-meter sprint over the rocks. When the Afghans got to the base, they started to climb.
The imagery of the mountain hadn’t done it justice. It was massive, and even the Afghans, accustomed to living and fighting in the terrain, were having problems. They had made it about a quarter of the way up, clawing for every inch, when the first shots echoed across the valley.
Lodyga knew immediately that ODA 3336 was in a fight. The fire started with a few pops and then it quickly built into a roar. Lodyga and his teammates knew the sound well.
A few months earlier, ODA 3312 had been in a similar ambush. They were on a reconnaissance patrol near Gowardesh in the mountains. Their mission was to clear the valley of insurgents who had been attacking Coalition forces. But while on patrol, in January 2008, they were attacked. It was a brutal firefight, and one of the Green Berets, Staff Sergeant Robert Miller, was killed while providing fire for his teammates to escape. (Miller was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in 2010.) To Lodyga, the Shok Valley’s landscape—and mission—reminded them of the earlier operation.
They weren’t surprised by the Shok Valley ambush and knew all the insurgents’ tactics.
“Squat hold right here. We need to see what is developing,” Lodyga told his team. “It sounds like these guys are getting hammered.”
As the machine-gun and rifle fire built to a crescendo, Martinez, the team’s medic, could see children running down a trail away from the fighting. Lodyga could hear the radio calls from ODA 3336 as they tried to call in air strikes.
Lodyga knew he had to wait on his objective in order to figure out what was going on with ODA 3336. After talking to McGarry, he decided to put his mission on hold because he didn’t want to get strung out climbing the mountain and not be able to help if ODA 3336 called.
Finally, Lodyga heard Ford calling over the radio. He told them that ODA 3336 was getting hammered and they needed Lodyga’s team to start moving to help.
“Things are bad,” Ford said. “You might want to come over here.”
If we are not going to make it to my target, we have to go up and help Ford, Lodyga reasoned. He made the call to abandon his objective and started moving to help his brothers across the valley.