On a cold December day at the end of 2008, the team was finally reunited at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Under the glare of television cameras, Walton, Ford, Morales, Walding, Behr, Howard, Sanders, Shurer, Williams, and Carter were about to receive Silver Stars—the military’s third highest combat decoration. It was the most Silver Stars awarded to a single fighting unit since Vietnam.
Their families arrived early in the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School auditorium as the men made their way to a stage. In a few minutes, their prerecorded voices would recount the daring feats of each soldier. Carter was the only recipient who was not in Special Forces. But he held a special place at the ceremony—he was the only combat cameraman in U.S. military history to win a Silver Star.
The audience was spellbound as the narrators told their story—complete with video. How they were trapped on a mountain. How some were seriously wounded. How they had risked their lives to drag fellow soldiers out of the line of fire. How they’d had to find a path down the side of a cliff to carry the wounded to safety.
Lieutenant General John F. Mulholland, commander of Special Forces Command, told the audience that day that he was awed by their actions.
“Alone and unafraid, working with their counterparts, they took on a tenacious and dedicated enemy in his homeland, in his own backyard. Imagine the Taliban commander thinking, ‘What the hell do I have to do to defeat these guys?’” Mulholland said.
He continued:
“As we have listened to these incredible tales, I am truly at a loss for words to do justice to what we have heard here. Where do we get such men?…There is no finer fighting man on the face of the earth than the American soldier. And there is no finer American soldier than our Green Berets.”
Mulholland was confident that many people simply wouldn’t believe the courage displayed by the men arrayed before him.
“If you saw what you heard today in a movie, you would shake your head and say, ‘That didn’t happen.’ But it does, every day,” he said.
With that, he pinned medals on the men’s chest.
In March 2009, Rhyner was awarded the Air Force Cross—the service’s second highest award for heroism, after the Medal of Honor.
It was the culmination of months of publicity surrounding the mission.
The story captured the public’s imagination. A daring early-morning raid into the heart of an insurgent stronghold. A small force trapped on a mountain, but still able to kill nearly two hundred enemy fighters before escaping after a six-and-a-half- hour battle.
The soldiers were interviewed by dozens of local and national news organizations. They were hailed as heroes. The story was powerful and compelling.
The ceremony took place shortly after Democratic Illinois senator Barack Obama was elected president. As a candidate, he promised that America would shift its defense resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, which he called ground zero for any war on terrorism. He vowed to remove one or two brigades a month from Iraq, and get all combat troops out within sixteen months. In Afghanistan, he said he would ramp up the American military effort, particularly on the Pakistani border, and said that if America received intelligence about suspected Al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he was prepared to act on it.
It was clear that the newly elected president’s foreign policy focus would be on Afghanistan.
If anything, the Shok Valley battle helped illustrate the problems facing American troops in that nation. There weren’t enough ground forces to combat the rising influence of Al Qaeda and its supporters, mainly the Taliban and the HIG. In some areas, like the Shok Valley in Nuristan, the insurgents operated openly and without fear.
Since the lights faded that day at Fort Bragg, the soldiers have moved on with their lives. So it was no surprise that they initially balked when they were approached in April 2010 about being interviewed for a book about Commando Wrath. They said they would have to think about it. They didn’t want any more publicity. Finally, they said they would cooperate—but only if the authors “told the truth” about the mission.
Yes, it was a dangerous mission. Yes, they risked their lives to do their job. But they wanted the entire story told.
So, for a year, the team reluctantly talked to Mitch Weiss and Kevin Maurer about Commando Wrath, their loyalty torn at times between the Army they loved and telling the truth about a battle that has dominated their lives.
To get the full picture, the authors interviewed more than sixty people and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including detailed maps and after-action reports of the mission. (The Army refused to release Wisdom’s final report because it was still in draft form.) Kevin Maurer, who has been embedded nearly two dozen times with Army troops and Special Forces soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, visited Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010 and talked to some of the Afghans who fought that day. (The authors wanted to visit the Shok Valley, but it was too dangerous.)
In interviews, it was clear that the soldiers were proud of how they banded together to get off the mountain. How they overcame overwhelming odds to survive. But it was also evident that they still carried the deep scars of that day.
Since April 2008, Walton, twenty-nine, has been deployed to Afghanistan several times.
He still enjoys military service. When he’s not deployed, he is a volunteer firefighter with a department on the outskirts of Fort Bragg.
Reflecting on the mission, he was proud of the way his men handled themselves. But he hates the notoriety, and he is particularly hard on himself.
“I don’t feel like a hero,” Walton said. “I feel like I led a mission that went to shit and we all fought to the death to save our buddies and survive. Did we accomplish our fucking mission? No. Those fuckers are still alive. Granted, two hundred of their closest associates are blown all over the fucking mountain right now. And I am thankful every day we killed them. But that doesn’t make up for losses that we took.”
He recalled Wurzbach once telling him that he didn’t want to be defined by one battle.
But he already has been.
“That battle was a definitive fucking moment in everyone’s lives,” Walton said. “Will there be more? Potentially. But maybe not. But up until that moment in our lives, nothing like that had ever happened.”
As much as he tries to put it behind him, he can’t.
“Is it right to put it behind you and completely forget about it? No. That is probably not the right thing to do. Do you want to think about it? No. It was weeks before I could sleep. I could not fucking sleep. It was not because of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. I wasn’t having nightmares and flashbacks. I was just so fucking pissed off that I could not relieve the stress. No amount of cigarettes worked at the time. I went to the medic and got Ambien,” he said.
Walton has seen subtle changes in his personality. Bright and ambitious, he was always driven to success. He still is.
“But I have a lot shorter fuse than I used to. You can only take so much stress before you snap. The stress came from all the other bullshit. There is a guy missing a leg. One guy has a fucked-up arm. Several guys got out of the Army…So there is a lot of aftermath there. A lot of this stuff is really never going away.”
The thirty-one-year-old Morales has tried to move forward with his life. He is still in Special Forces, even though he has undergone twenty-four operations and has had his leg amputated. But there are times when he stops and thinks about the Shok Valley.
He recalled the day he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was in a case-assessment room with Ford and Behr. As usual, they were all being obnoxious. But when they wheeled Morales to his room, Morales’s parents and his wife, Katherine, walked in. It was a tearful reunion.
“Katherine is crying and hugging me. My dad is emotional and my mom is, too. They were all crying, and in that sort of situation, I deflect emotion. I didn’t break down crying. I try to stay calm in those kinds of situations when other people are losing it,” Morales said.
But when he was alone with Katherine later, it all caught up with him. He broke down. He told her about everything he had been through. About losing CK. They hugged for most of the night.
And he began a desperate fight to save his leg.
He could barely move it—and it hurt like hell. Doctors told him he would eventually develop arthritis. “[They] told me that most of the guys will have their legs amputated when it gets this bad.”
Morales wanted to prove them wrong.
“At that time, I wanted to fight it,” he said.
One surgery, they tried to fill the hole in his ankle. They surgically removed the skin and an artery from his calf. Then they tried to fit them into his ankle to get the blood vessels to connect. It didn’t work.
They also used two vats of leeches to suck out the coagulated blood underneath the skin flap. It was creepy. The leeches usually stayed on the wounds. A few times, though, they crawled up his body. The doctors did this for two weeks.
Over time, surgeons performed more surgery to shave down the skin in order to increase the flow of blood. Along the way, there was hope. He was doing physical therapy.
“I was working my ass off. I was working through pain. I was taking a lot of medication. My goal was to be able to try to play golf,” he said.
Morales was an avid golfer. But now he could barely stand up. In April 2009, a year after Shok Valley, he headed to Duke University Medical Center for a second opinion. He wanted to see if they could do ankle replacement surgery. But the doctors told him he didn’t have enough bone to work with, and ruled him out as a candidate.
Walking to the car from the hospital, Morales became upset. He realized the ankle wasn’t going to get any better unless he had it fused. So he did. He had three pins screwed into his ankle at a ninety-degree angle. But he found it was hard to walk with a fused ankle. So he had to find shoes with a curved sole.
He did that for a while. He even walked with a cane. But it still hurt. In November 2009, he went with Ford and other wounded warriors on a hunting trip in South Dakota. But he couldn’t go hunting. His leg hurt too much. He saw other soldiers with amputated legs, like Walding, moving around fine. So he decided to have his leg amputated so he could have a somewhat normal life.
Katherine wasn’t happy with the decision. She wondered if there were any other options. “I was determined. I was tired of being in pain. I wanted to be able to get around and do other things again without pain,” Morales said.
He had the surgery on January 14, 2010. “I didn’t make it a big deal. It’s another surgery that needed to be done so I could start another part of my life so I could get around.”
For the most part, since the amputation, he has been pain-free. Sometimes he has phantom nerve pain. But now, with a prosthetic leg, he can walk. Play golf. And he was waiting to get a running prosthetic leg. And he was about to start a family. Katherine was pregnant and expecting their first child in late 2011.
He plans to stay in the Army—at least for the next six years. Then he will have twenty years and can retire.
Still, he wants to continue doing intelligence work and hopes to deploy again to Afghanistan.
“For me, I’m helping my buddies. I can’t see being away from the military.”
But there are triggers that take him back to the Shok Valley.
While he was at Walter Reed, Morales attended a Major League Baseball game with his father. At the end of the game, there was a crescendo of fireworks. Morales turned to his father: “Dad, that’s what my firefight sounded like.” Both father and son “teared up.”
Walding made a remarkable recovery and was running again. Before the injury, he averaged about fifty miles a week.
He still believed he could do the job, and proved it when he trained to be a sniper instructor.
While recuperating, Walding worked as an assistant instructor at 3rd Special Forces Group’s sniper detachment. But to become a full-time instructor, he had to complete a sniper course. The seven-week Special Forces Sniper Course teaches sniper marksmanship, semiautomatic shooting, ballistics theory, and tactical movement. During the course, many of Walding’s classmates didn’t even know about his injury and prosthetic leg.
When he was finished in the summer of 2010, he hoped to work his way back to an ODA—maybe even deploying to Afghanistan.
Not anymore.
He realized that physically, he would never be the soldier he was the morning of the Shok Valley mission. While he enjoyed being an instructor, he joined Special Forces to “hunt down and kill the bad guys.”
He still loved Special Forces. But he said it was time for his family to head to southeast Texas to be around their aunts and uncles and grandmother. (His grandfather—the inspiration of his life—died two days before Christmas in 2008.)
It was a difficult decision.
“I prayed about it a lot. I feel that God has a plan and the best thing for me to do is try something in the civilian market. Move back to Texas. Be close to home. I want to contribute to the fight. That’s what I’ve done for the last ten years—protect our country. And if I can’t do it in the Green Berets, I’d still like to contribute somehow,” Walding said.
Walding is proud of how Americans have come together to support Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, especially wounded warriors.
Everywhere he goes there are special nonprofit groups waiting to lend a hand. Some organizations were set up just to help wounded warriors get back on their feet. It’s a far cry from Vietnam, when returning veterans were shunned by the public.
Because of those groups, Walding is going back to school. He was accepted in a special program that pays for living expenses while veterans go to college. And there is another organization that is helping him build a house in Texas.
As far as the mission is concerned, his missing leg is a constant reminder of everything that went wrong.
He said that sometimes it’s hard for him to get up in the morning. He doesn’t have the energy he used to have—and this is not uncommon for someone who suffered injuries like his. He said Ford told him he had the same symptoms.
“This is something I’m going to face for the rest of my life,” he said.
On his youngest daughter’s first birthday, he knew he had to get the house ready for the party. But he had to force himself to get out of bed. “You know, I’m hardworking. I have a great work ethic. I used to go days without stopping. Once I get up, I’m okay. It’s just getting started.”
He recalled that the first time he told his aunt about the mission. He showed her pictures of the Shok Valley. She was stunned.
“To kind of prove the point about how tactically flawed this was, I showed her the video of the Shok Valley and showed her the ground and how we went up the mountain and everything. And my freaking little hippie aunt looked at me and said: ‘Why were you all charging a hill? Isn’t that tactically not a good thing to do?’
“If my hippie aunt could realize that this was a stupid mission, that should say something how obvious [it was that] this was not the right way to do it. It was basically this one guy who wanted to do this mission and it didn’t matter why and this was going to happen. And that’s what happens whenever you stop listening to the five principles of patrolling, and the last one is common sense,” he said.
Behr, thirty, left the military in June 2010 and is back in college—this time at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is enrolled in the security studies program with a concentration in technology and security.
He divorced his wife, Amanda, and is dating Mary Elizabeth Just. They are planning a life together. “She is the one,” he said.
Behr’s road to recovery was difficult. He underwent eight operations. His wounds resulted in severe intestinal damage and a hip replacement. He was on his back for six months, and spent the next six in rehabilitation trying to walk. It was a grueling process, but he can now walk without help.
Now he is employed by a small technology consulting firm and began cycling in order to rehab his injury in 2009. He fell in love with mountain biking, which he learned to do with the aid of two friends at Walter Reed.
Behr said he had been thinking about leaving the military before his last mission. But after the Shok Valley, he knew he had to leave. He could no longer physically perform at Special Forces level.
“It was a tough decision. I loved Special Forces. But I’m entering the next phase of my life,” he said.
He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts.
“But I think about it,” he said about the mission. “Sometimes it just comes up. Those guys saved my life. I wouldn’t be here without them. They saved my life. “
Shurer also left the Army and is employed with a government agency. His first son was born shortly before the Shok Valley mission, and his second son, Tyler, was born in April 2011.
While he loved the military, he is happy with his new life. He tries not to think about what happened in the Shok Valley. He believes he took the right measures on the mountain. But at first, it was difficult to come to grips with everything that happened.
“That day was rough for a while. I spent a fair amount of time beating myself up. You go back and look at stuff and you say: ‘Could I have done that a little bit faster? Should I have wasted so much time trying to do that?’”
But over time, he has learned to live with the decisions he made during the firefight.
“What ended up helping me with that was when you talk to surgeons who worked on everyone and they’re all like: ‘What you did saved his life. Don’t beat yourself up. You did what you had to do. Every one of them—all four of them—had life-threatening wounds. Every one of them would have died without treatment.’”
He stopped and took a deep breath.
“It took a while to really kind of process that and not keep going over it. I got them out alive,” he said.
But there are days when he is haunted by the images.
“There are some days it pops in your head,” he said.
And there are triggers. He can’t watch war movies.
“You just have to come to grips with it. Once you do, it gets better,” he said.
For Ford, it was a long, hard journey. He spent months in rehabilitation. There were days when he felt like giving up.
But he is back doing what he loves best: training snipers. The 3rd Special Forces Group asked him to take over their sniper committee.
In the years since the Shok Valley mission, he has gotten married and had a daughter. He tries not to think about the battle.
“I have my confidence back. I am shooting all the time. In the last six months, I came back out of my shell. I am really just enjoying my career. We’ll find out in the next few months if I can go back and take a team. I think they are going to let me take a team. I am just really happy. Cher and I had a baby last summer. I’ve never been closer to a family or the family I have now.”
The same can’t be said about the team. They’ve all drifted away from one another. Some to pursue other career opportunities. Others because of rifts among teammates. A Special Forces team, more than almost any other unit in the military, is a family. And as is the case with even the best families, there is always some drama. But Ford knows that over time the bonds they formed in that valley will last.
“I wanted that team to stick together for the rest of their lives. Keeping in contact every five years. Ten years,” Ford said. “Always having that brotherhood from being on that team.”
Many of the soldiers, like Carter, Sanders, Howard, Williams, Rhyner, and Wurzbach, are still in the Army. And in 2011, Sanders, Williams, Wallen, and Wurzbach returned to Afghanistan for another deployment.
Sanders said he was embarrassed by the attention.
“We certainly weren’t the first guys to get in a firefight and we won’t be the last, and as far as that goes for me, don’t take this wrong, even with the book, I kind of feel sort of awkward. It’s almost kind of embarrassing really.”
Carter tries to downplay his role. Yet it’s hard to ignore. A combat cameraman, he ran into the line of fire to pull wounded soldiers to safety. He tended to the wounded. He climbed down a mountain to help find a path off the mountain. Then he carried the wounded down that dangerous trail.
Now stationed in Hawaii, he works with an Army forensic team trying to find the remains of missing soldiers from earlier wars. “It’s pretty much what Indiana Jones does. We use archaeology to help identify remains of missing soldiers. We look for the remains of POW and MIAs,” he said.
It usually starts with tips. Then the investigation team tracks down possible witnesses.
“They’ll get the information from them and mark the site and they come back and let them know where they need to go, and that’s when the recovery teams will go out and dig the site,” he said.
Still, the Shok Valley mission creeps into his memory when he least expects it. It could be late at night. Or when he’s out with friends. Or when he’s on assignment. In a flash, the images return, and he feels like he’s back on the mountain.
“I fight it,” he said. “But sometimes it’s hard.”
Carter’s experience is a typical one for the soldiers in the Shok Valley that day. They experienced things that most Americans will never see—their friends blown apart in a mission that nearly wiped out their team. They faced serious injury and death. And pinned on a mountain in that remote, hellish valley, they overcame their own fears and fought overwhelming odds to save one another.
Years after the battle, one thread connects them: In conversations, they emphasized over and over that they did what they had to do. They were always quick to add that other soldiers, facing similar circumstances, would have done the same.
We’ll never know if other soldiers would have performed the same way. We only know what they did on April 6, 2008, and it was remarkable. Trapped in a brutal firefight on a narrow ledge with a terrorist group, a team of Special Forces soldiers carried their wounded comrades to safety. They battled hard to return to their families. They received Silver Stars. They were called heroes.
But if you dig deeper, this mission serves as a cautionary tale for politicians sitting in the comfort of their living rooms—the ones who are so quick to send our troops to war. The soldiers didn’t want to undertake this mission. They knew the plan was flawed. But in the end, they went. They overcame near-freezing weather. They exposed themselves to protect their teammates and climbed through machine-gun fire to save every man. So be careful what you ask soldiers to do because they will die trying to accomplish their mission.
They won’t fight and die for just the flag or the other lofty goals of freedom and democracy plastered over recruitment posters and commercials.
They fight and die for each other.