Wisdom had a lot of work to do in a short time. He wanted to interview everyone associated with the firefight before he headed back to the United States. But he was realistic. He knew that being able to wrap up the report while he was still in Afghanistan was unlikely, and that much of his work would probably continue when he returned home. But he was driven to get as much done while he was in-country as possible.
Interviews with the B team and others at Jalalabad helped. The documents and the after-action reports were critical. When he began interviewing Walton’s team, he found answers to some of his questions. Some of the soldiers were at the base, including Walton, Sanders, Howard, and Wurzbach. He also interviewed soldiers from the other ODAs and began talking to the helicopter pilots.
He learned from Walton and team members that there had been real concerns about the mission from the start. He discovered that Walton’s team didn’t play much of a role in the planning. The mission was basically handed to them.
But the inherent dangers were clear to Wisdom. Fighting uphill was dangerous. The village was well defended, and any element of surprise was lost when the troops landed in daylight. If anyone was wounded in combat, it would be a logistical nightmare for helicopters to swoop into position and extract him. And the planners didn’t seem to take into account the area’s dangerous history. That, Wisdom thought, was a too common practice in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
If the commanders had studied the area, they would have understood the dangers facing the teams. Up until the late nineteenth century, many Nuristanis practiced a primitive form of Hinduism. It was the last area in Afghanistan to convert to Islam—and the conversion was accomplished by the sword. When the Nuristanis adopted Islam, they embraced its most conservative form. Wisdom knew that no one else in Afghanistan practiced Islam like the Nuristanis. Every law was taken literally; there were amputations for stealing, and women were stoned to death for adultery. In fact, the Islamic Republic was founded in Nuristan during the Soviet War. And Haji Ghafour was the first commander of the revolution, and he was particularly brutal. He interpreted religious law so narrowly that he offended even ultraconservative Muslims in the area. The Nuristanis were also fiercely anti-American.
So it was no surprise that Ghafour’s followers were involved in ambushes against U.S. troops in September and October 2007. The province was a brutal hot spot. There was speculation that Haji Ghafour was behind the attacks. Indeed, the Shok Valley itself was a place where Ghafour felt safe. It was a remote valley where no Americans had ventured. Genghis Khan? He had avoided the valley nearly nine hundred years earlier. So did Alexander the Great. The Soviets? They didn’t even try to go there. Surely the Americans would bypass the valley.
But Ghafour figured wrong, and Wisdom, after studying the battle plans, concluded that the U.S. military approach to the operation was extremely risky. Commanders had put not only the soldiers, but helicopters at great risk.
Wisdom knew the two biggest fears of the Army’s chain of command in Afghanistan: a U.S. soldier being taken hostage, or a large helicopter, like a Chinook, being shot down. These were rarities, but when they happen, the command structure has to scramble for damage control. The negative publicity is intense.
So to ask Army aviation to go down into these valleys where they would be sitting ducks took a lot of balls, he thought. In effect, the commanders were putting aircraft down into a position where they were utterly defenseless. Anyone who has ever been in a helicopter with door gunners knows they can only shoot down. They can’t shoot up—they can’t shoot through the rotors. So once they start dropping below ridges, the door gunners are pretty useless. The Afghans know that. The insurgents’ fathers passed down to their sons the tactics they used to defeat Russian helicopters. They would lure the helicopters down in the valleys where the aircraft was defenseless.
American and Coalition pilots were extremely conscious of this fact. They were one of the few groups that took seriously the lessons learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
When Wisdom interviewed Ford, the team sergeant told him he’d had a similar reaction to Wisdom’s about landing in the valley. Ford believed it was an operationally untenable plan. You don’t land guys in a valley and ask them to fight uphill or go uphill. Ford told Wisdom that his team did look seriously at the alternatives to landing on the low ground—including fast-roping to an area above the compounds.
But by landing in daylight in the middle of the valley, the enemy knew they were coming. Their men were in position on the high ground for the ambush. As Wisdom listened to Ford, he concluded that Walton’s team and the pilots—and possibly members of the other ODAs—could have been massacred. And if that had happened, the publicity in the United States would have been overwhelmingly negative. The antiwar folks would again focus on Afghanistan—and push hard to bring home the troops that were stationed there. The pressure could have turned the tide of the war—or at least public sentiment, which still favored the U.S. presence in Afghanistan because of the country’s role in planning the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
One of the things that helped save lives was that ODA 3312 had been in a similar ambush a few months earlier. Wisdom talked to members of ODA 3312 and discovered that they had been 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 providing fire for his men to escape. Members of ODA 3312 said that the Shok Valley’s landscape—and the mission—reminded them of the earlier operation. Uneasy, they moved cautiously as they headed to their positions to support Walton’s team. They weren’t surprised by the Shok Valley ambush and knew all the insurgents’ tactics. They stood their ground and were able to hold them off so they couldn’t overrun Walton’s team.
With most of the material in hand, Wisdom called his boss. He explained to him that Commando Wrath had the potential to be a massacre—and the potential to have the “entire chain of command relieved.”
Wisdom didn’t know what his commander would say. But after a brief pause, he told Wisdom the words Wisdom had hoped to hear: “Go ahead. Write the report.”