Wisdom worked on the report up until the day he left active duty. He started writing it ten months before, and he completed his second draft on April 23, 2009, and was discharged a day later. It took that long.
When he finished, he filed the report—all 298 pages of it. Based on dozens of interviews and hundreds of documents, it went to commanders for review.
It was the real inside story about what happened—not the version that had been presented to the media. The Army had awarded ten Silver Stars to the men trapped on the mountain—the most to any fighting unit since the Vietnam War. The publicity surrounding Commando Wrath was widespread. Every major news organization from the Washington Post to the Associated Press had recounted the tale to a wide audience. It was always the same, how a Special Forces team scaled a mountain to reach a top unnamed terrorist and inflicted heavy casualties on insurgents. There were exciting details about how the trapped soldiers escaped, scaling down the side of a mountain under heavy fire. It was a made-for-Hollywood movie. But there were no details about the origin of the mission—or the tactical problems the soldiers had faced.
None of this mattered to Wisdom. He wrote it so that someone in twenty years could examine the battle and understand what happened. They could examine all the mistakes. And maybe someone could learn from it. So it wouldn’t happen again.
But unknown to Wisdom, his report was never published. The Special Operations Command’s History and Research Office said Wisdom’s report “contained weaknesses in its historical methodology” and the draft would need revisions.