Walton sat in an office staring at his computer screen.
He was supposed to be writing his sworn statement—a paper that would detail every minute of the firefight.
Walton would write a few lines and stop. Maybe it was because he hadn’t been able to sleep for more than a few hours a night. This had been going on for a week. He needed Ambien. Every time he closed his eyes, he replayed the battle in his head. The gunfire. His wounded teammates.
He was pissed off more than anything else. Angry that they hadn’t been allowed to conduct the operation the “right way.” Angry that commanders in Bagram hadn’t deployed a quick reaction force to help his team get off the mountain.
A moment later, Fletcher came in.
Walton was still upset at Fletcher but knew enough to hold his tongue. Fletcher was his superior officer. It was one thing to lash out at him when they returned from the mission. Everyone was emotional. It was another to be disrespectful a week later. Suck it up and keep it inside.
Fletcher explained that during the battle some of the Afghan commandos had confronted about a dozen armed villagers. The commandos with ODA 3325—nearly a mile from where Walton’s team had been pinned down—killed six or seven of them, and the rest surrendered and were taken prisoner. Now the village elders were coming to Jalalabad to try to get them released.
Walton was appalled. He’d had no idea that anyone had been captured. But he was adamant about the prisoners: They should not be released. Not under any circumstances. If they were on the mountain and armed, they were combatants. It was that simple.
Walton exploded. “I will fucking kill them if I see them. They are responsible for the whole thing.”
He refused to meet with the elders and resumed trying to write his statement. He wasn’t the only one. Everyone on the team had to write statements—and the commanders wanted it “written a certain way to meet the intent of the higher-ups.”
He was getting annoyed.
No one knew what happened on that mountain—except the men who were there. And four were still in hospitals.
After some revisions, he finally finished the report and signed his name to it.
Then he put the men in for awards.
In his days as a team commander, Walton rarely put people in for awards. A soldier had to do something special to win one. But this was different. A guy who climbed up a cliff, knowing he could die, just in order to help wounded colleagues deserved a medal. So did the soldier who carried wounded guys down a cliff under fire. Walton knew no one on the team wanted any awards. As one soldier put it, you don’t get awards for doing your job. Maybe that was true. But what his team had done was above and beyond heroic. Walton couldn’t give a shit if he ever received an award for the Shok Valley mission, but he was going to fight like hell for the others.
Following the battle, the military started to get reports that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Commander Kashmir Khan—another major terrorist—had actually been in the village that day to meet with Ghafour. Nothing was confirmed, but the presence of hundreds of well-disciplined and supplied fighters, a large number of radio transmissions in Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto, the latter two languages not commonly spoken in the region, had led commanders to believe that they had stumbled on this meeting by accident.
The day after the battle, newspapers in Pakistan featured stories about how Hekmatyar and Khan had been killed or injured in a raid in Afghanistan. This was one of the indicators that the two had been in the village. It was clear, though, that Ghafour had survived.
The governor of Nuristan held a press conference, without being prompted by the Americans, and talked about a mission targeting Ghafour during a meeting with Hekmatyar and Khan.
Walton wasn’t surprised. The fighters he’d faced were well trained and disciplined. And they had one major advantage—they had the high ground.
The captain wasn’t sure what happened to the source who tipped off the military that Ghafour was in the village. He had continued to report after the battle started. The source even called headquarters asking why it was taking the SF team so long to get up the mountain. But after a two-thousand-pound bomb was dropped on one of the buildings, he was never heard from again. They believed he was killed.
A few days after Fletcher told Walton about the detainees, the village elders from Shok and Kendal—including a mullah—returned to plead their case. But this time Walton talked to them.
During the meeting, the men adamantly denied playing any role in the attack. “It wasn’t us shooting at you,” one of them said. “It was twelve men who snuck into our village. We couldn’t do anything to stop them. They started shooting.”
Then an elder added, “You killed some of our civilians with bombs.”
Walton had had enough. He slammed his hand on the table.
“Bullshit. We fucking know your civilians fucking left, which is evident because you’re fucking standing here right now. We know exactly what happened. Everybody there was fucking bad. We killed hundreds of their asses and we know that.”
Then Walton stared right into the eyes of one of the elders—a short, dark-skinned man with long white hair and a white beard.
“I think you fucking know that we’re both experienced fighters sitting at this table,” Walton said. “And we both know what it feels like to go up against two hundred of our enemy. And what it feels like to go up against ten of our enemy.”
At the end, Walton stormed out of the meeting—but not before issuing them a warning: “The next fucking time you see me will be the last time. Because you are an enemy of Afghanistan and you’re an enemy of the United States.”
He walked out of the door. He had to leave or he would have killed them. Only days before, the elder had tried to kill Walton and had taken out half of his team. Now he wants to negotiate to get his detainees back? Really? No fucking way.
A few days later, though, the detainees were released and, in all likelihood, headed back to the valley.