Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wisdom walked into his deputy commander’s office at Bagram and waited. He was unsure why the deputy commander had requested the meeting. Wisdom only had two weeks left in-country and, after thirty-two years of active duty, was months shy of leaving the military for good. But from the commander’s tone, he could tell it was important.
Wisdom was assigned to the Special Operations Command History and Research Office. Deployed to Afghanistan, his job was to move around the country with Special Forces teams documenting their missions and occasionally writing articles.
“Sit down,” the commander told Wisdom. He seemed anxious and jumped right to the point. “Whatever you’re doing, I want you to stop it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I want you to go out—and the chain of command wants you to go out—and write this article,” the commander said.
He was looking for a positive report about Commando Wrath. Explaining that the operation was a critical success, he described how Special Forces had worked closely with Afghan commandos and Army aviation. He said he wanted an inspired piece that would be published in a “nonclassified magazine extolling the interoperability, the great partnership between Special Forces and the conventional Army.”
The assignment was important. Major General John F. Mulholland, then commander of Special Operations Command Central, had requested the report after Colonel Christopher Haas told him that the operation had caused a “significant disruption of a major insurgent sanctuary.”
Wisdom wondered, Why the push? More importantly: Why him? He only had a short time left in Afghanistan, and had planned to spend it with a Special Forces team in the Orūzgān Province, a starkly beautiful area in the Afghan central highlands. That mission was a big success story, he thought. The SF commander had partnered up with Afghans and “did some real things, things that made a difference.” To Wisdom, the big success story overall was the soldiers in Regional Command South—not the operations in Regional Command East, where Operation Commando Wrath took place.
From the deputy commander’s tone, Wisdom knew he was expecting a “feel-good article” and there was nothing Wisdom could do. He was stuck and pissed off.
After the meeting, he called his boss, John Partin, to complain. He told him that the commander wanted him to write a story about Operation Commando Wrath. Wisdom said he never heard of the mission. He bitched that the deputy commander knew that military historians usually didn’t have time to write and research stories while they were deployed. They were covering too many fighting units. There were too many people pulling them in different directions.
Wisdom knew it also took time and patience to conduct interviews, examine documents. Then he would have to interpret the material and write. It was a time-consuming exercise. How was he going to get all that done in just two weeks? It sounded more like an assignment for a military reporter than a military historian.
After he hung up the phone, he began thinking. If the operation, as the commander suggested, was such a success, maybe he could wrap up the assignment quickly, and still have time to embed with that Special Forces unit in Orūzgān. But he would have to hustle. So Wisdom packed and headed to Jalalabad.