NINE

IN THE CAVES

Shortly after New Year’s Day we learned we would be going on a mission up north to the province of Khost, a few hundred miles northeast of Kandahar and nestled in the mountains right up against the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, home to the infamous Zhawar Kili cave complex, the location where Osama bin Laden is said to have officially declared war on America in 1998.

The second-largest known training camp in Afghanistan, Zhawar Kili was an elaborate training complex of caves and tunnels built into the mountainside. The Soviets had used it during their occupation in the eighties, and the Taliban had now reclaimed it as their own. This place was a key strategic flash point. The entire area was riddled with caves and tunnels and was one of the prime regions where al Qaeda and Taliban leadership was believed to have fled after we heavily bombed their cave hideouts at Tora Bora, some fifty miles to the north. It was also a major corridor to Pakistan.

Hard information on this cave complex was sketchy at best. We knew there was a base camp consisting of three large tunnels, with an unknown number of rooms, caves, and subtunnels. We also knew there was an extensive system of caves and tunnels built into the mountain ridge above the base camp. This cave complex was a frigging warren, encompassing arms depots, communications, hotel-like residences, a mosque, a kitchen, a medical facility—an entire terrorist town drilled into the face of a mountain, with room for some five hundred people at a time.

The place was also a fortress, and damn near invincible. The Afghan government had tried to take it when it was held by mujahideen (rebels) and failed. The Soviets were slightly more successful, but only slightly: They bombed the hell out of the place and forced everyone inside to flee, then went in and planted mines everywhere. Three weeks later the mujahideen were inside again and back in business. The site had been hit by U.S. air strikes shortly after hostilities commenced on October 7, but to little effect. In order to really nail this place, we needed people on the ground exploring the caves themselves on foot and coming back with the specific coordinates that would allow precision strikes.

That’s where we came in.

Our air forces were going to launch a massive air strike, pounding the area with JDAMs (Joint Direct Attack Munition) to soften the target. Our SEAL platoon would go in the following day to bat cleanup.

This was not originally meant to be our mission. The Zhawar Kili site was too large and complicated for a single platoon. Originally it had been allocated to a larger team of Green Berets, but a recent incident had thrown a wrench into those plans. The unit that had been slated for Zhawar Kili was sent on a direct action mission to take a Taliban-controlled compound. Someone got jumpy, and they ended up killing virtually everyone in the place—who all turned out to be not Taliban at all but members of Hamid Karzai’s anti-Taliban forces. It was an unmitigated disaster. You never heard about it in the media, and you probably never will; it was not exactly something the military wanted to publicize. The ODA (Operational Detachment Alpha) team that had screwed up was sent home, and now the task of combing through the remains of Zhawar Kili fell to us.

Our platoon of sixteen was going to need some reinforcements, so our numbers were appropriately goosed with the addition of a ground unit of about twenty marines. These were young guys, in excellent shape, well trained, and highly motivated. I’ve always been impressed with the Marine Corps and their military bearing. When it comes to standing watch, these guys don’t mess around. With marines, from the top officers right down to the basic foot soldier, you know you’re dealing with high-caliber personnel. You definitely sleep well at night knowing these guys are on the perimeter.

We also had our two Air Force CCTs, Brad and Eric, who were damn good at their job and always seemed to have close air support at their fingertips the moment we needed it, and our two EOD guys, Brad and Steve, who had saved our asses at Tarnak Farms and were obviously strong assets. For this mission we were also assigned two guys from the FBI to provide forensic expertise and DNA-sample collection from enemy gravesites, one more from the Counterterrorist Intelligence Center (CTIC), and a chemical weapons expert from the army’s Chemical Reconnaissance Detachment (CRD), for their expertise in combing through whatever we would find out there.

The plan was for the marines to insert with us, then split off and set up a defensive perimeter higher up on the ridge, making sure our backs were covered while we combed through the dozens of caves and tunnels, doing BDA (bomb damage assessment) and documenting whatever was left behind. We would get into the valley, spend eight to ten hours on-site once we made our way to the cave complex, then extract and report back. It would be a solid one-day op, no vehicles, all on foot. Twelve hours from start to finish, max.

At least, that was the plan.

*   *   *

Less than an hour before we were to board the C-130 to fly up to Bagram Air Base for a few days of final briefing and prep, we got an addition to our team. A lieutenant commander, Commander Smith, joined us and said, “Hey, guys, I’m going out there with you.” Actually, that was a slight oversimplification. He was not just coming with us, he was coming with us as ground forces commander.

Now, Commander Smith was an intelligent officer and a nice guy, but he had very little situational awareness here. At the time he was an officer with one of the SDV (SEAL Delivery Vehicle) teams, and the guys in the delivery vehicle community drove underwater subs; it was a completely different sort of mission. He hadn’t been operational in some time and was rotating over here to get some theater experience. Jumping in to join our mission at the last minute was fine, but in my opinion, he’d been out of the game too long to be in charge of tactical decisions on the ground.

A few of us glanced at each other warily. He could see the apprehension in our eyes and quickly reassured us. “Don’t worry, guys, I know Cassidy’s in charge. I won’t get into the decision making here. I’m not going to get in your shit.” Okay. Let’s hope not, I thought.

We resumed with our preboard preparations—and sure enough, within five minutes Commander Smith was in our shit, big-time. He told us he wanted us to go in fully suited up, Kevlar body armor and all.

I raised my hand. “Look, sir, none of us are acclimated to working at 7,000 to 12,000 feet elevation. We’re already carrying a pretty heavy load.” In addition to our weapons, we would also be carrying breachers and explosives, in case we had to blow ordnance or breach our way into a cave. “Plus we have to hump 12 klicks just to get to where the op starts,” I added. The place was likely crawling with hostiles, so rather than insert directly at the mouth of the cave complex, we were going to start out a good distance away, under the cover of darkness, and then hump the distance silently to our destination. “We’re in mountain country, and if we overload ourselves we’re going to be a wreck by the time we get to the site.”

This was not a direct action mission, where you fast rope in and boom! you’re on target. We were going to be patrolling 12 kilometers out—that’s about 7.5 miles. When you carry a heavy load for that long, your situational awareness starts to shrink. At first you keep yourself acutely tuned to everything around you, but after a while your attention starts to flag. Soon you’re just staring at the next footprint in front of you. I’d seen it before. In GOLF platoon and sniper school I’d learned that for a reconnaissance mission like this, it makes a lot more sense to pack light and go fast.

Smith wasn’t budging. “No, this is my call, and everyone wears armor.”

He was already making tactical decisions for us—and he’d just made a bad one. Chief Dye sided with me privately, but what could we do?

“Check,” I said, “got it.”

We started suiting up to go, everyone putting on all their battle armor. I quietly took out my armor plates and left them behind. Call it gross insubordination if you want, but this was fucking ridiculous, and I was damned if I was going to do it.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 6

It was about a three-hour insert by helicopter from Bagram Air Base to the Zhawar Kili complex. We were let off in the mountains well before dawn, about 4:00 A.M. We set up a quick perimeter, checked in with the marines (who had arrived a little ahead of us), made sure we were verified for where we were so our air support team would know we were friendlies and wouldn’t take us out, and set up our rendezvous points for extraction at the end of the day. Then we set off, patrolling our way in the direction of the cave complex.

A few kilometers in I looked over at Shawn, our breacher, who was carrying a hooligan (a big metal breaching tool) on his back along with a ton of explosives. Brad and Steve, our EOD techs, had all their explosive equipment, too. Casey, our AOIC, carried photographic and video equipment to document whatever we would find. These guys had to be miserable. We still had miles to go, and we were gaining altitude. I was so glad I didn’t have my armor plates.

About an hour in, we took a water break. I sat down on the ground next to Shawn. “How you doin’, brother?” I felt so bad for him.

“Dude,” he said, “right about now I would welcome stepping on a land mine.”

Soon we were back on our feet. Everyone else was already tired and sweating. I was set to go, feeling alert and nimble. Shawn’s focus was like a flashlight beam on the ground in front of him. By the time we got within proximity of the site everyone was completely worn out, even Cassidy. I saw Cassidy and Smith huddling up for a couple of minutes.

Then Cassidy came over to us. “All right, everybody,” he said, “we’re going to ditch our armor and stash it. We’ll cache it right here and pick it up again on our way out.” He quietly took me aside and said, “Okay, you were absolutely right. We fucked up. So go easy on me.”

“Forget it,” I said. Then I added, “But fuckin-A, I told you so.”

Everyone started shucking their plates. Cassidy looked over at me. “Hey, Webb. Aren’t you going to stash your plates?” I shook my head. “Nope. I didn’t wear any.” Cassidy looked at me for a moment with no expression, then grinned. “You son of a bitch.”

I wasn’t just trying to be a smart-ass. To my way of thinking, this was critical strategic thinking. Look at the kind of enemy we were up against: Here was a dude running around in the hills carrying nothing but a wool blanket, a wool hat, an AK-47, and maybe a little water and bullets. Not only did this guy have the advantage of knowing the terrain like the back of his hand, but he was also fast on his feet, running through the hills like a mountain goat—and here came a group of American soldiers trudging along, loaded up with God knows what. We needed to modify our equipment load to make us way more nimble if we wanted to have any hope of matching pace with the guys we were hunting.

On the way to our destination we passed a few villages that seemed deserted, nothing but empty buildings and a scattering of animals left behind. As far as we could tell, everyone was gone; no doubt they’d taken off once the aerial bombardment started the night before.

By the time we reached the cave complex, the sun was coming up. We started in at the base camp, taking a cave at a time. Our planes had pounded the hell out of the place. There had been quite a few people in these caves the night before, but there was nothing there now but bits and pieces of bodies, hardly anything even identifiable. It was a scene of pure carnage.

Inside the caves up on the ridge it was a whole other story. As we started penetrating into the mountainside, it quickly became clear that our bombing raid hadn’t done shit. This place was in mint condition. These caves were so deeply burrowed into the mountain that many of them were still completely intact. Hell, some went back a good half mile. Some of the tunnels were reinforced by steel beams and lined with brickwork, with plenty of evidence of Soviet craftsmanship left over from the eighties.

This place was damn near invincible.

We started in, using a procedure similar to the way we would clear a house. Four of us would go in to clear a cave, then come out and report, then move on to the next, and the next, making sure each cave was clear as we went. One cave was an ammo bunker; the next was a classroom, then living areas. It was an extensive network, with some of the tunnels interconnected, and it went on and on.

The caves were so deep that we couldn’t see very far into them. Our night vision was severely limited in effectiveness, because to use night vision you need at least a small bit of ambient light, and it was pitch black in the caves. We had an infrared floodlight function, but this proved to be not very useful. We ended up inching through the caves using the paltry beams of illumination thrown by the small lights mounted on our weapons and clearing around corners with our good old-fashioned SureFire white-lens flashlights.

Those first few hours going deep into those caves and tunnels were intense. We had no idea exactly what we’d find in there. We didn’t know if we would run into anyone, or if there was possibly an ambush lying in wait for us, or if the caves were booby-trapped. We had no idea where the hell we were going, or what—or whom—we might run into.

Fortunately we did not encounter a single person—but we were stunned at how much we found in the way of matériel. There were massive amounts of ordnance, ammo, and fuel, stacked floor to ceiling. They had stocked up on some big hardware, too, including tanks and other Soviet-era combat vehicles. These guys had prepared for quite the campaign.

We found some American-made Harris 117-Delta radios with what appeared to be internally embedded crypto, which completely freaked us out. These were highly proprietary, highly sensitive tools of the U.S. military. How the hell did these characters lay their hands on such things? Many years later, speaking with a gentleman who worked with the company who manufactured these radios, I learned that they were originally sold to the CIA, who in turn gave them to mujahideen forces to help them in their efforts against the Soviets. Geopolitics is a fickle business. We found a bunch of Stinger missiles, too, more fruit of Uncle Sam’s largesse; fortunately the batteries on Stingers are completely drained after a few years, so none of these suckers were operational.

We found classrooms with posters on the walls, sporting anti-American slogans. On one the artist had cobbled together a photo of bin Laden in the foreground with two planes crashing into the Twin Towers in the background. I stared at this freakish piece of propaganda nearly open-mouthed. This thing was created as an al Qaeda recruiting poster for the mission it illustrated. In other words, it had been put together before the event it was depicting had taken place. Standing there deep in the bowels of this godforsaken mountain on the other side of the world, staring at a picture of the attack on New York City that was composited and hung here before the attack itself actually occurred—it was one of the eeriest experiences I’ve ever had. I still have that poster.

It was hot, tedious, nerve-racking work. Within about four hours we had the whole place cleared. Fortunately, we hadn’t run into any resistance.

Now that we knew we were alone and had a general sense of the lay of the land, we went back through the whole place a second time, gathering up intel, collecting the smaller items that we could bring back with us, and planting demolition in areas we would later blow. Brad and Eric recorded the exact GPS coordinates at the entrances to each cave so our guys could follow up with more accurate air strikes, since the shotgun approach of the night before had missed so much. The FBI guys had DNA kits as part of their mission, which was to ID whatever bodies we might find. As we worked, Casey and some of the others documented everything with video and tons of photographs.

Meanwhile, we were constantly reporting back to Harward, who was following the entire operation so closely it felt like he was looking over our shoulders the whole time. It was believed that some key Taliban or al Qaeda leader in the area had been killed recently, and Harward had a hard-on for the DNA evidence. We had found some extensive gravesites, but they were a few weeks old, and the forensic team didn’t think they would yield much of significance. Plus, we were on the clock. The complex had been more extensive and the total cache far larger than we anticipated. We had a date to keep with a crew of helos at our extraction point, so we were wasting no unnecessary minutes.

After gathering everything we could take with us, we got it all ready to blow. We blew up the radios and a ton of ordnance. The explosion created a huge fireball that nearly consumed half the mountain. The secondaries cooked off for probably four to six hours. It was January 6, but it sure looked like the Fourth of July.

Daylight was starting to fade, and we got the hell out of there. We picked up our stashed armor (all except me, since I didn’t have any) and started the long hump back to the perimeter for our rendezvous. We were still on a good schedule. The plan was for us to be extracted in the evening, under the cover of darkness. We finally reached our extract point and got on the radio to base. One CCT was talking to the inbound helo coming to get us; the other was talking to Harward at the TOC (tactical operations center). We were thirty minutes out from our scheduled exfil.

Nothing to do but sit and wait.

One of our EOD techs, Steve, started dumping his water. He’d been carrying extra bottles of water that they would use to shape blasting charges, and he figured now he wouldn’t be needing any of it. That seemed crazy to me. That was potable spring water! When you’re out in the field on any kind of recon, water is more precious than gold. He’d already dumped out several bottles when I saw what he was doing and stopped him.

“Dude!” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m tired of carrying around all this extra water,” he said. “I’m just shedding some weight.” For such a big guy, he sure did complain about the weight of the stuff we carried.

“Hey, dude,” I said, “give me the rest. I’ll take all that.” He had eight bottles of water left, and he gave me all of them. I drank four, then started filling up my CamelBak bottles with the remaining four.

Just then we heard the distant but unmistakable sound of the transport choppers, probably five to ten minutes away. They were coming to get us. At that moment Brad, our CCT, called out quietly to one of the FBI team, holding the radio set out to him, “Captain Harward wants a word.” Harward wanted to know if the FBI team had dug up the graves we’d found and conducted any forensics there. They hadn’t. Harward wanted them to go back and look for DNA evidence. One of the FBI team, who happened to be a former SEAL, spoke a few crisp words and handed the radio set back to Brad. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, “that grave is old. We’re not going to find anything new there.”

But Harward had latched on to this thing like a dog on a bone. The DNA business was a very big deal, especially from a public relations standpoint. If the forensic evidence revealed that we’d taken out any of the bigwig bad guys from the top of the al Qaeda food chain, that would be a significant victory to wire back home, and everyone from military top brass to Congress to the White House could get serious mileage out of it. It was more than the DNA, though. Out in those caves we had found a treasure trove of enemy resources that exceeded even the most optimistic expectations, and there seemed to be good indication that there was more out there for the finding. In for a penny, in for a pound: Now that we’d cracked open this prize, Harward wanted us to stay out there and see how much more we could dig up.

Now Harward had Cassidy on the radio. I could see from the set of LT’s face that he wasn’t thrilled at what he was hearing. I saw him nod, say a word or two, and sign off. The sound of the helicopters briefly hovered, then slowly started to diminish. With our extraction just minutes away, Harward had turned them around. Word came down: We weren’t being extracted after all.

We were out there, on our own, for at least another day or two.

Steve looked at me in horror as I smacked my lips, having just polished off the last water bottle. He was devastated. What could I say? Hey, that’s why you don’t pour out your water, ever. You just never know what’s going to happen.

So here we were, out in the middle of nowhere, deep in enemy territory, on our own for the night—and the temperature had already dropped to around freezing. You burn up a lot of calories humping around all day. These were not good conditions. We needed a plan.

Cassidy, Chief Dye, myself, and a few of the other senior guys huddled together to figure out what we were going to do for the night. Commander Smith, apparently still in the shit-getting-into frame of mind, said, “Well, I guess we’ll just go into the hills and lay up in the bushes.”

Chief Dye and I looked at each other in disbelief. We hadn’t brought much in the way of extra warm clothes because we hadn’t planned to be out overnight, and it was quite hot during the day. In fact, we’d been murderously hot while working the caves. But the clothing that felt suffocating during the afternoon now offered little protection against the frigid high-altitude desert nighttime. When you’re pushing up above the snow line, it gets cold as hell.

Even if we had thought to bring it, we didn’t have the cold-weather gear back at camp that we wanted to have anyway. Back when our platoon had first landed in Afghanistan we had put in a big cold-weather-gear request list. Evidently one shipment was sent, but it got lost somewhere on the way. Whether they’d sent a replacement, nobody knew. We kept hearing, “It’s coming … it’s coming next week,” but nothing showed up. For the moment, we were all going with what whatever we each had with us, along with the promise that we’d have better stuff as soon as possible.

On our own, most of us had bought ourselves some pretty decent gear. The SEAL teams are among the best-equipped fighting forces anywhere in the military. We had smart wool-blended socks, good boots from REI, good North Face jackets, that sort of thing. I had a $300 pair of Italian leather mountain boots, and I’d brought along a neoprene shell and wool cap. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something.

The marines, however, had it much worse. These poor bastards didn’t have shit for cold-weather gear, just standard-issue crappy desert boots and cheap white socks. True to their spartan culture, these guys were not going to complain at all, but they were in for a world of hurt with the subfreezing temperatures coming our way. And Commander Smith wanted us to lay up in the bushes?

I spoke up. “Hey, that’s a bad idea. These poor marines are already freezing, and it’s only going to get colder. We’re sure to have some cold casualties if we do that.”

Smith shook his head and said, “We gotta do what we gotta do. We’re just going to have to suck it up.”

Suck it up. This was his brilliant tactical plan? The man was definitely getting in our shit now. It was one thing for us to suck it up, but we had twenty marines we were responsible for, too. They would absolutely suck it up if that’s what they were told to do—but that wasn’t going to prevent our having some cold casualties on our hands.

Chief Dye was having none of it. One of the villages we’d seen during the day lay up at the top of the valley at the end of a ridge, and I knew he had that place in mind as a strategic fallback position. It was on high ground, you could see the entire valley from there, and it was well protected as a fighting position.

Chief Dye turned to Smith and said, “All due respect, sir, your plan sucks. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to take Brandon and a couple other guys, do a recon, clear and occupy that village so we have a place to stay where we can start a goddam fire, get warm, and set up a perimeter for the night.”

“No,” said Smith, “we’re not doing that.”

“Yes,” said Chief Dye. “We are.”

Now Lieutenant Cassidy spoke up. “Got it,” he said. He nodded, and that was the end of that.

My respect for Cassidy was already high, but it had just gone up a notch. He was our officer in charge, but he also knew he wasn’t the most tactically experienced guy there. Like a good leader, he was the first to defer to the person with more experience, which in this case was Chief Dye.

You’ll find officers who think, I’m the highest-ranking officer, I should have the best ideas, but that’s not necessarily so. Being an effective leader doesn’t mean you have to be the smartest guy in the room or always have the best idea.

Years after returning from Afghanistan I was introduced by my friend John Tishler to Dr. J. Robert Beyster, the nuclear physicist who founded SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), a billion-dollar, Fortune 500 employee-owned defense contractor. In the course of a project I was working on in the private sector, Dr. Beyster took me out to lunch. Later we spent some time in his office, where I noticed a sign on his wall:

NONE OF US IS AS SMART AS ALL OF US.

J. Robert Beyster is one serious genius, and one reason he’s gotten to where he is is that he understands this core leadership truth: No matter how smart you are, you’d be stupid not to listen to the experts around you. Cassidy understood that, too. Smith, not so much.

Five of us took off and started moving quietly up the hillside: Chief Dye, Patrick, Heath, Osman, and I. It took us about an hour to get up there. When we got close to the village, it was pretty clear that the place had been completely deserted. Probably whoever had been there left as soon as those bombs started falling the night before. Still, caution dictated that we assume nothing. We snuck around behind and approached from the rear.

The place consisted of several buildings, all mud hut construction, and looked to be a multifamily living situation with a little stable for some goats, chickens, and a couple of donkeys. The doors were secured with some flimsy lock-and-chain assemblies, easy to kick in. Osman and I went through the place with the standard two-man room-clearing procedure while the others stood sentry. Once we’d cleared every room and made sure the place was secure, the others stayed while Osman and I went back down to pass the word and lead everyone back up there.

There was no question Chief Dye had made the right call. In terms of our tactical position, we had excellent visibility (or at least we would once daybreak came), it was very defensible, and we were up high so the radios would work well. Plus, the place had wool blankets, fireplaces and firewood, and plenty of adequate shelter to keep us out of the wind. To us it was like walking into the Ritz-Carlton. The marines were pretty stoic, as always, but you could see the looks on their faces: Thank God.

Right away we set up our comms and called in our location to base camp via sat radio. The last thing we needed was for some gunship flying 20,000 feet over our heads to see our heat signatures and make us the featured guest stars on this night’s episode of Murder TV. Meanwhile the captain in charge of the marines set them up, half to go get warm and get some sleep and the other half to stand the perimeter.

We figured we would use this place as a kind of forward operating base the whole time we were out there, however long that would turn out to be. It was a smart decision—because we would be out there in the wild for a lot longer than one or two days.

MONDAY, JANUARY 7

The next morning we split up. Part of the platoon went out with the forensics team to go dig up those gravesites and see if they could bring Harward some fresh, juicy DNA. Four of us—Cassidy, Osman, Brad, and I—went out before dawn to patrol a site where a C-130 gunship had engaged some forces the night before, to see if we could find any bodies.

We reached the coordinates we’d been given just moments before the indistinct grays of predawn resolved into the pastels of daybreak. Before we could do any serious searching, we heard voices coming from some nearby caves above us. The four of us instantly hit the ground and waited. As we watched, a spill of enemy fighters started pouring out of one of the caves—twenty, at least, and all armed.

If this were happening in the movies, we would all just leap to our feet and blow these guys away, but in real life it doesn’t work that way. We were outnumbered at least five to one, and we were not exactly armed with machine guns. This was not the OK Corral, and if we leapt to our feet we would all be mowed down in short order. There was no hiding until they were gone, either: These guys were headed our way. We would have to call in an air strike, and do it fast.

There was a B-52 nearby; Brad got it on the radio. It was my job to give him the coordinates—but there was a snag. The only way to ensure that the team in the B-52 dropped their fireworks on the other guys and not on us was to give them exact coordinates. Typically we would do this using a high-powered laser rangefinder hooked into a GPS so that when it ranged the target it would give us not only distance but also the target’s GPS coordinates, which we could then pass on up to whoever we were calling for air support. These bombers are extremely accurate with their ordnance, like vertical snipers in the sky.

We’d only planned for a simple twelve-hour mission and didn’t have all our usual equipment. Typically, for a full-on recon mission, I’d have at least a good sniper rifle. We didn’t have even a decent rangefinder.

Training, training. As a SEAL sniper I’d been taught to estimate distances on the fly even without all the usual tools, using only my five senses and my gut, but typically I’d be shooting a 10-gram bullet from the muzzle of a rifle. In this case, we were shooting a 1,000-pound “bullet” out of a 125-ton aircraft, flying 20,000 feet above us at near the speed of sound, at a target less than 500 yards away from where we sat—I had to get it right.

Range estimation. This was something else we covered in sniper school: You visualize a familiar distance, say, a football field. That’s one football field, two football fields, three football fields … but this can be risky when you’re not on level ground. Here I had to sight up a rugged, rocky incline. And daybreak lighting can play tricks with distances.

Those twenty-plus al Qaeda, or Taliban, or who the hell knew who, were trickling down the slope heading straight for our position. They hadn’t seen us yet, but it would be only seconds before they did. If we were going to do this thing, it had to be now.

“Brandon!” Cassidy hissed. “You need to Kentucky-windage this drop!” “Kentucky windage” is a term that means basically this: Wing it. Give it your best shot. I gave Cassidy a bearing I estimated as 100 meters past the group. If I was going to be off at all, better to guess long than short, and if I was balls-on accurate, a drop 100 meters behind them should at least buy us a few seconds to adjust and drop a second time.

Now the enemy cluster was so close we couldn’t wait any longer. We were concealed but not covered; that is, they couldn’t easily see us, but once they knew where we were, our concealment would give no protection against incoming fire. We quickly moved to cover—and that’s when they spotted us. There were a few alarmed shouts and then the sounds of small-arms fire.

There is nothing quite so galvanizing as the distinct crack! snap! of semiautomatic weaponry being fired over your head, the crack! being the sound of the initial shot itself and the snap! being the bullet breaking the sound barrier as it zings past you.

We returned fire. I sighted one guy wearing a black headdress, dropped him. Quickly resighted and dropped a second, this one wearing the traditional Afghan wool roll-up hat. Sighted a third—then glanced up and saw vapor trails in the sky. The B-52 was flying so high it was invisible to us, but I knew exactly what was happening up there: They were dropping the first bomb.

When you are this close to a big explosion it rocks your chest cavity. You want to make sure your mouth is open so the contained impact doesn’t burst your lungs. Brad got the call: We were seconds from impact. We opened our mouths, dropped and rolled.

The Joint Direct Attack Munition is a big bomb and extremely accurate. When the first set of JDAMs hit, it shook the mountain under our feet, throwing rubble everywhere.

I whipped around and glanced back up the incline to assess the strike. Perfect—about 100 yards behind the target. I rolled again, adjusting numbers in my head, and quickly shouted the new coordinates to Cassidy, who gave them to Brad to relay up to the bird. In moments like this your senses go into hyperacute mode and seconds seem to stretch into minutes, hours, a timeless series of discrete snapshots. I focused on my breathing, making it slow and deliberate, feeling the cool morning air mixed with the distinct smell of explosives teasing my lungs. I knew my numbers were accurate and that the men shooting to kill us would themselves be dead in seconds. For a brief moment, I was at peace. And then an unexpected sound sliced through the strange silence: the wail of a baby crying.

My stomach twisted. I had a five-week-old baby boy at home whom I’d not yet held in my arms; hopefully I would survive this war to meet him face-to-face. Someone up on that hillside had a baby they would never see or hold again.

I knew these people had made the decision to bring their families out here to this godforsaken fortress, knowingly putting them in harm’s way. Sometimes, I’d heard, they even did this intentionally, using their own children, their flesh and blood, as living shields to prevent us from attacking. It was their choice, I told myself, not ours. But I’ll never forget the sound of that baby’s cry.

We opened our mouths, ducked and rolled. The second drop took them all.

*   *   *

We continued our patrol but never did find anything from the previous night’s air strike. We were at the exact coordinates they’d passed to us. Maybe they got the GPS coordinates wrong. We headed back for our new base of operations, and on the way we came upon another little village that appeared deserted. We started doing two-man house clearings, room by room. There was a well there, so we collected some water to bring back with us, since we were already running out of supplies at our impromptu base camp. Before hauling it, we treated the water with the iodine tablets we had on us as part of our standard survival supplies.

Even though we had planned to be out in the field for only twelve hours, SEALs are well acquainted with Murphy’s Law. We wouldn’t think of going out on any mission, no matter how brief, without certain critical supplies. Before inserting the day before, for example, we had been supplied with updated maps, such as they were (which wasn’t much), and had each gotten an updated blood chit. A blood chit is a map of the area you’re going to be patrolling that has a notice written on the back, in this case in both Arabic and Pashtun, promising a substantial cash reward (I think it was $100,000) to anyone who gives assistance to the bearer. Each of us carried an escape and evasion kit, which included a piece of flint, water purification tablets, and a knife, along with our blood chit. If we got into a situation where we had to ditch everything, this was what we’d keep as last resort. Some guys sewed their blood chit into a hideaway pouch tucked into their clothing, so that if everything but their clothes was taken away from them, they’d still have it on their person.

The last room we cleared led out into a stable area. Cautiously, I made my way in to check it out. There was nobody inside except a single donkey. I slid up onto the donkey’s back. It’s SOP when you exit a room after clearing it to call, “Coming out!” so you don’t surprise anyone. I called out, “Coming out!” then smacked my mount on the ass and emerged from the stable like a gunslinger in a Western, except that my steed wasn’t exactly a tall white horse. Poor thing could barely support my weight. The other guys cracked up. Someone said, “Which one’s the jackass?”

In one of the houses we found caches of suitcases filled with passports, money, and clothing. Evidently this was a safe house for Taliban and/or al Qaeda in their war against the infidels. After taking GPS coordinates, we left; a subsequent air strike reduced the building to rubble.

When we got back to camp, the other guys were returning from blowing up some more caves, not only to destroy more matériel they’d found but also to do their level best to make the place uninhabitable.

We were now feeling the pinch of our lack of supplies. We had each brought with us a single MRE, and that was long gone. We decided it was time to start slaughtering some of the animals there. The marines were reluctant to do this. These guys count their bullets and do inventory after every operation. We had no such scruples. Osman and Patrick pulled out their guns and bang! shot a few chickens dead, followed by one goat, then started dressing it all up to cook and eat. The captain of the marines seemed a little freaked out. “Holy shit,” he said, “you guys don’t mess around.”

Still, there were only so many chickens to go around. With our twenty marines and our platoon of sixteen now swollen to twenty-five, we had a crew of forty-five mouths to feed. In addition to food, we also needed fresh batteries for our radios. We radioed in and were told we’d be getting resupplied the following day.

When two big H-53 helos landed the next morning with our resupply, they had brought a few large cases of radio batteries—enough to last a month of talking twenty-four hours a day. Then they kicked out one case of water and one case of MREs and took off.

We stood there staring at the case of MREs. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” someone said. The warehouse at Bagram was full of these things. A case of MREs is ten meals. Ten. That was not even enough to feed a single meal to one in four of us. How were we supposed to divide these things up? It was like chopping up an M&M into thirty pieces.

This was a classic case of military communication. (It’s worth noting that the terms SNAFU, “situation normal: all fucked up,” and FUBAR, “fucked up beyond all repair,” both originated in the military during World War II.) Someone had probably passed on our request: “Hey, those guys up at Zhawar Kili need some food and water.” So they’d sent us some food and water. We hadn’t specified how much food and water.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 8

On day 3 (after our exciting resupply) we started systematically patrolling specific areas we had charted out over the previous two days, getting a feel for the area and following up on reports from our C-130s, who were continuing to see activity at night, giving us new targets to search for and additional bomb damage assessments (BDA) missions to run the following days.

Walking along a narrow, twisting mountain road, we heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. We quickly formed ourselves into an L-shaped ambush formation, with the longer element stretched out across the road and the shorter, perpendicular element (consisting of Chief Dye and me) parallel to the road, lying hidden with some heavy weapons behind the bushes that lined the road.

As the vehicle came around the bend we could see what it was: a little white Datsun pickup with three guys in it, two in the front and one in the back. As soon as they came face-to-face with our guys lined up across the road, Chris and I popped up out of the bushes with our big guns. By the time they knew what was happening they were locked in a crossfire setup, outgunned, with no avenue of retreat and no options.

These three characters were hardcore and clearly up to no good. The one in the front passenger seat seemed to be in charge. He wore a black turban and a beautiful dark red shawl, a particular kind of earth-colored wrap the Taliban used, that did double duty: It kept him warm and also served as camouflage. Shit, I thought, that looks pretty warm.

We took their weapons away from them, zip-tied them, and threw them in the back of the truck. Now we had a vehicle.

I knew some basic Arabic, enough to get by on ship boardings (“Get down! Get up!”) and order a meal, but that was about it. These guys were not Arabs, though, and my Pashtun was almost nonexistent. Fortunately, we had our interpreter with us: The dude from CTIC was a cryptologist and an accomplished linguist, and he spoke Pashtun. He interrogated them briefly, and they pointed out a village that we had already checked out and thought was abandoned. Turned out this was where they’d just come from.

We went back to the site and looked where these guys directed us. They were caching weapons there. This was SOP for these guys: They would dig hideyholes on the outskirts of abandoned villages and use them to stash weapons and other matériel.

Exactly what we were looking for.

We couldn’t take this stuff back with us, so we marked the GPS coordinates and took off, our three prisoners in the back with sacks over their heads. We drove far enough away that we could still see the village location from a safe distance and stopped. Chief Dye called in the coordinates to the platoon so Brad or Eric could call in a CAS (close air support) strike. He pulled the leader’s sack off his head a few seconds before the bombs fell, so he got a glimpse of his village blowing up, then slammed it back on again, and we headed back up the mountainside for our camp.

Now, in addition to keeping ourselves alive, we had three prisoners to keep, feed, and guard in our little village. The next day, another squad went out and rolled up two more vehicles (a little pickup and a Daihatsu mini-SUV, both diesel) and a half dozen more guys. Thank God we had the marines to watch them all.

One day back in Kandahar, just before flying up to Bagram, six of us were walking back from the TOC when a marine general accosted us. This particular general was your perfect image of the archetypal hard-hitting, cigar-chomping, no-bullshit marine, like General Patton incarnate. His nickname was Mad Dog.

“Hey, are you guys my SEALs?” he barked at us. Yessir, we told him. “You boys going up north?” Yessir. He pointed over toward the makeshift EPW (enemy prisoner of war) camp we had set up, where there were now several hundred prisoners incarcerated. “You see that EPW camp over there?” Yessir. “I already got enough fucking prisoners there. You get my drift? I don’t want any more fucking prisoners coming back here. You get what I’m sayin?” Yessir. It wasn’t a subtle message: You find any guys out there, you take them out. Don’t bring ’em back. He hadn’t actually come out and said that (in other words, there was plausible deniability), but the intent was understood.

Now here we were, developing our own little prisoner-of-war camp out in the field. We had nine prisoners we would soon be airlifting back to Kandahar. Mad Dog wasn’t going to be happy with us.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 9

On day 4 we went out on patrol again and found another village to clear, this one fairly substantial in size. We divided up the platoon, each of us clearing half the village to make sure it was abandoned. It was, and we collected a good amount of both weapons and intelligence, including all sorts of plans and notes. Some we photographed; some we brought with us.

As we were going through this process of rounding up our spoils, we had one of the biggest—and certainly happiest—surprises of our entire deployment. From inside this abandoned village we had just cleared, who should come trotting out toward us but a small, light tan puppy. Last thing we expected to see, that was for sure. I’m a sucker for animals; most of us were. We named him JDAM, and he became our platoon mascot. Cassidy eventually adopted JDAM as his own and brought him back to raise him in the States. Later on we found a second puppy, whom we called CAS, and he ended up with an adopted SEAL home, too.

Finding JDAM was not the only memorable thing about that particular patrol. At one point the group I was with found another of those hidey holes with a cache of weapons in it. Osman and I went down inside, leaving Newman, one of our platoon mates, to stand watch while the others moved on. Osman and I had been in there for a little while, rummaging through passports, money, and various materials, when all of a sudden we heard Newman say, “Hey, guys, come on out here.” His voice sounded strained. We crawled out and looked up at him. “What is it, Newman?”

He had his gun raised and pointed, and his eyes were like the proverbial deer in the headlights. We swiveled around to see what he was pointing at. Less than 50 yards away stood four Taliban dudes, heavily armed and staring at us from behind the crest of a hill.

Osman and I immediately drew our weapons, and the four turned and ran back in the direction they’d just come from. They had been walking up the hill toward us and had just started cresting when they’d come to a standstill, so they were still half-concealed by the hill and visible only from the waist up. Now they quickly sank below the ground line again. We got a few shots off but didn’t hit them.

Osman and I both turned on Newman. “What the hell is wrong with you? ‘Hey guys, come on out here’—and you don’t happen to mention that there are four guys with fucking guns out here? What the fuck, Newman?”

We were just about apoplectic with fury. He’d nearly gotten us killed. To this day, I am completely baffled as to why those four didn’t simply shoot us in the back as we crawled out of that hole oblivious to their presence.

But there wasn’t time to ream Newman out in the manner that he deserved, at least not now. We hopped on the radio and told Cassidy what was going on, then ran over to the hilltop to search out the retreating four Afghans. We glassed them, and sure enough, there they were, tearing for the Pakistan border where we could not pursue. We called in an air strike fast and took them out with a 1,000-pounder before they could get make the border.

Then we went back and unloaded on Newman. I wanted to call in an air strike on him, too.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 10

After the previous day’s close call, on day 5 we decided to go out and set up a reconnaissance position so we could have the whole valley in view and watch enemy forces sneaking back and forth along a series of mountain trails that led across the border into Pakistan.

Osman and I took a map and planned the whole thing out. We would go in and insert before dawn, at 3 A.M., driving out on night vision in vehicles that were completely darked out. We’d go in two teams. Four of us—Osman, Patrick, a guy named Mark, and I—would insert at the north end of the valley (where the caves were) and take a position on the northeast corner of the area we were surveilling. A team of six marines would take a position across from us on the northwestern corner, so they could observe the other side of the valley from their vantage point. Two of the marines were first-rate snipers, and they were pretty psyched to get out there and do a sniper op for a change.

By now we knew there was a significant level of enemy activity going on here in this valley. The idea was for these two teams to hide out for the entire day and fill in as many details in our overall picture as possible: who was moving around and where, what they were up to during the day, and where they were laying up at night. We would pass any intel we gathered back to the platoon, who would sort through it all and feed it back to base at Bagram.

Since our resupply, I now had my .300 Win Mag. I felt much better going out on patrol with my proper sniper gun.

Two other guys from the platoon were going to insert us, Jackie and Doug, with Doug driving and Jackie riding shotgun. Osman, Patrick, Mark, and I would ride in the back and quietly slip out when we reached our location at the top of the valley.

In preparation for the mission that night, we each had our specific tasks. Doug and Jackie’s job was to tape up all the vehicle lights before we left. There were two reasons for this. First, obviously, was to dark out the vehicle so the enemy couldn’t see it. Anyone who happened to be close enough would be able to hear the vehicle, but without any lights showing we’d be invisible, so they wouldn’t be able to place us or even know for sure who was driving it. (This was, after all, a vehicle we’d taken from some of their guys.) The second reason was equally important, and that had to do with our ability to see what we were doing. Night vision is so sensitive that any significant source of light renders it useless. Even a vehicle navigation light will flood you with too much illumination and make you as good as blind.

At 2:30 the next morning we were ready, present, and accounted for, our gear assembled and tied in tight. The six of us loaded up our vehicle and climbed in. We were already buzzing with anticipation. This would be a dangerous mission; inserting smack into the midst of armed enemies of unknown number and location is always a relatively freaky thing to do. We had no way of knowing how many hostiles we might encounter, or where, but we were as ready as we’d ever be, and itching to go round up all the intel we could.

Doug switched on the ignition—and all the dash lights came on.

No one had taped them up.

“Jesus,” I muttered. Osman leaned over into the front seat and glared at Doug. “Doug, dude, what the fuck?”

“Damn,” said Doug. “I thought I told Jackie to tape them up.” In the next seat over, Jackie responded with a look that said, Hey, don’t lay it on me.

I was furious. This had been their one and only job: Tape up the damn lights. It was a mission-critical task. Doug was in charge of making sure this happened—and it didn’t.

We clambered out of the vehicle and tried to make a quick job of it, but it was too late. Timing was critical. The sun would be up by five or earlier, and if we were going to do this at all, we had to be out there before then. The marines were waiting on us, because they’d be taking off a few minutes after we did to create a staggered insert (SOP). We couldn’t hold things up. We had to make the call: Go now, or cancel the mission. I did not want to make that insert with our lights on, but there was a lot riding on this mission. We needed that intel. “Fuck it,” we said, “let’s go.”

We tried driving with our night vision, but it was hopeless; the dash lights made it impossible, as we’d known they would. So of all ridiculous things, we now had to drive out there with our headlights on, meaning we could be seen from miles away. Halloooo, Taliban, anyone out there? Here we are! Doug drove up the valley while Osman and I did our best to get our rage under control.

We reached our insert point at the northern end of the valley, and the four of us rolled out of the backseats. Doug turned the vehicle around and headed back the way we’d come. We took cover and sat like statues, watching the lights slowly disappear.

The rule of thumb for an insert like this is that once you’re dropped off, you immediately rally up in a small perimeter behind cover and then spend your first few minutes motionless and silent, doing nothing but sitting, waiting, watching, and listening. We sat motionless and silent for about fifteen minutes, waiting, watching, listening. We saw and heard nothing.

After a few minutes, we proceeded to make our way up the mountainside as silent as the snow, heading for high ground. We stopped about an hour later when we’d gotten about three-quarters of the way up the mountain, reaching what we call military crest.

This was something we’d all learned way back in Third Phase of BUD/S, in the land nav training. Gaining high ground is one of the most basic tactical advantages known to every military force in history. High ground gives you a better view of your field of engagement, and if you should become embroiled in any direct action it’s a lot easier to fight downhill than it is to go up against someone who is above you looking down. On the other hand, you don’t want to take position at the very peak of your terrain, called skylining, because there you’re more exposed.

Once we reached the ideal elevation (probably at something like 9,000 feet) and found an appropriate hide site, we clipped on some veg and dug into the mountain’s flank. We had all three of the conditions we wanted: good concealment, solid cover from potential gunfire, and good eyes on our sector.

Just then the sun started coming up. We called over to the marines on the radio. “ECHO-1,” they said, “we’re not set. We ran into a little problem on our way out. We’re not exactly sure what to do here, over.”

“Roger that,” we said, “we’ll be right there.”

Osman and I left Mark and Patrick there and headed back down the mountain to where the marines had stopped. When we reached them we could see that they’d been scared shitless. They described what had happened.

The marines’ team had gotten a late start, and by the time they reached their insertion point it was already near sunup. On their way up the mountain to their surveillance location, they had stumbled across a cluster of heavily armed Afghans in rough fighting position. Despite their arms, these characters were disheveled and disorganized; it looked like they’d just woken up and the marines had startled them. Evidently these Taliban guys hadn’t realized that the shock and surprise were mutual. They dropped most of their guns and ran. The marines could not believe what they’d left behind: guns, rocket launchers, grenades, a frigging armory. After marking the location, they moved on and were just debating what to do when we called them.

Osman and I told them to go set up on the northwest mountainside according to plan, and we’d go check out the location they’d marked.

We started patrolling back toward the coordinates the marines had given us, which were in the general direction of our insert point. It was daylight by this time, so we had to go slow, using cover all along the way. It took us a while. We finally got to the spot, stopped, and looked around us.

There were rocks stacked up into a fighting position. Clearly this place had been used before. From what we could see, there’d been five guys there. We found one bedroll with about four RPG (rocket-propelled grenades) wrapped in it, a bunch of Chinese hand grenades, a few Enfield bolt action rifles, a few AK-47s, and a bunch of other shit they’d left behind. There was a teapot on their little cookstove. The teapot was still hot.

After thoroughly checking out the site, we started looking around at the surrounding terrain and glanced down the hillside. We both saw it at the same time.

It took an effort to keep my knees from buckling under me.

The spot we were staring at, maybe 150 yards downslope from this heavily armed campsite, was the precise location where we ourselves had inserted four hours earlier, fully lit up and headlights blaring. We had driven practically right into these guys. Our vehicle had to have awakened them up when it drove by. There was no way they would not have heard that thing coming and seen its headlights—and they had the high ground.

Osman and I stared at each other, both in full realization that it was a marvel we were alive. Because we had sat there in silence for fifteen minutes after rolling out of the truck, and had kept ourselves extremely quiet once we did get on the move, these guys had not seen us. If they had, we’d be dead men. No doubt about it.

We examined the campsite again and did our best to work out exactly what they’d been doing there. It clearly was not a makeshift or impromptu site, such as you’d set up if you were passing through and needed to hole up for just one night. It was a planned location, not 150 yards from a road they’d probably seen us traveling before. They were here to ambush us, plain and simple. They knew we were operating in this area and figured one of our daytime patrols would pass by again sooner or later. Only a matter of time. They had dug in a well concealed fighting position on this hilltop and were waiting for us. They just hadn’t expected anyone to run into them in the middle of the night.

We worked out the sequence of what must have happened.

Our truck woke them out of a dead sleep at something like 3:00 A.M., then surprised them by turning around abruptly and leaving the area. They shook off their sleep, made some hot tea, and were in the process of setting up for the day—when a team of armed marines on foot stumbled into them. Murphy’s Law.

We radioed back to base. Commander Smith happened to be monitoring the radio. We explained the situation and reported that we were sitting on a substantial cache of weapons, as well as a bunch of paperwork and field notes these guys had (incredibly) left behind. What did he want us to do?

“Just take the paperwork,” he said, “and leave the weapons there.”

Leave the weapons? Why—so these guys could come back and shoot at us the next day? It made no sense. We signed off. Osman and I each took an AK-47 and brought it with us just to have as extra weapons, then carefully dismantled everything else. We hid the rockets, then destroyed the RPG launcher. It took us about an hour to get it all squared away, but there was no way we were leaving all that weaponry there for someone else to use.

After we’d sanitized the place, we made our way back to our hide site up on the northeast face, where we met up with Mark and Patrick and told them what had happened. We spent the day out there, but it was unsatisfying. We saw little, and there was not much to bring back in the way of intel. As much as we’d hoped to chart out the comings and goings of the bad guys we knew were all over the place, we weren’t able to see much.

We returned to camp at night a little frustrated—and angrier than ever at Doug. Osman and I wanted to kill him, and he was not happy about being dumped on. But this was the second time in two days that someone’s carelessness or laziness had nearly gotten me killed.

Back to that 90/10 rule. Our platoon now consisted of sixteen people, not including the EOD and air force guys and ancillary experts who were with us for this mission. Fortunately, we had jettisoned Gilroy Jones in Oman. (When Harward learned he was in our platoon he said something like—and I’m not quoting directly here but probably close to it—“What? If the guy’s a fucking turd, get rid of him!” Harward was my kind of commander: He did not suffer fools lightly. In fact, he didn’t suffer them at all.) Even without Gilroy, four of our current sixteen were liabilities, at least from my perspective. Four out of sixteen is 25 percent. We were pushing that 90/10 rule way past its limits.

There had been some tension before, but from this point on a sharp rift developed in the platoon. Osman and I knew this was not a good state of affairs. Of course you want to operate as a team. Of course you want to have harmony among all your forces. We knew that—but damn, we could not afford to tolerate even the tiniest scrap of laziness. We were in the freaking mountains of Afghanistan. Our shit needed to be seriously dialed in tight, and it wasn’t, not enough. Not yet.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 11

The next day we went out on another village op. There were genuine bad guys hiding out there, and there were people who were just living up here in the mountains, usually with a wife and couple of kids, living the simple life, farmers wresting their keep from the land. We could usually tell the difference pretty clearly—but not always.

There was a place we’d been watching for a few days now. These people appeared to be farmers, but we were not 100 percent positive. We decided it was time to go out there and see up close. I was set up as sniper overwatch to guard the platoon as they went in to meet the people and talk.

It was morning. I watched as Cassidy and his team made their way up there to where a small group of these guys was congregated in a few buildings. It wasn’t like we were storming the place; this was more of a diplomatic mission.

Having dug into my sniper overwatch position, in the kind of well-concealed hide we’d been trained to construct in the stalking phase of sniper school, I used the scope on my .300 Win Mag sniper rifle to get a closer look at these people. The villagers clearly saw Cassidy and the guys approaching. Something was going on there, but I couldn’t tell what. They were talking something over, looking a little hurried about it. I caught a glimpse of a few of them running around, as if they were in a rush to get something done. Something felt suspicious about it to me, but it could also be completely innocent.

I relayed my observations to Cassidy on the radio and told him to be on his toes.

As I continued moving my rifle in a small oscillating arc, shifting my view back and forth between Cassidy and his team and the little knot of Afghan farmers, I noticed one guy standing off to the side. He had a gun.

Shit.

The man had his rifle slung casually over his shoulder, and there was nothing threatening about the posture. I couldn’t tell if he was a bad actor or an innocent farmer. I was leaning toward farmer—but why was he carrying a gun? Alarm bells were going off in my head.

Cassidy and the team were now close to the house. Man oh man, I was thinking, do I take the shot? Will it put Cassidy in a tough spot?

The guy was about 600 yards away, slightly more than six football fields. I knew I could take him out in a heartbeat. No problem. I felt my finger against the trigger. Breathe out … focus … squeeze … pop. It would be that easy.

But if I did, it would certainly complicate the situation. If I shot the guy and it turned out he was innocent, we’d have quite a scene on our hands. On the other hand, if I didn’t and he wasn’t innocent, the team could be in danger. Even if these guys had more arms stashed close at hand, Cassidy and our guys would clearly outgun them, but you don’t want to let things get so far that the question of who outguns whom is your determining factor.

Shit!

What do I do? I had all the information I was going to have. There was no more intel to weigh, no path of logic to make the wiser choice. It came down to pure instinct. Do I take the shot, or not?

I breathed out … focused … squeezed …

I decided not to take the shot.

A moment later Cassidy and the guys were there, talking to these Afghan farmers—and suddenly I caught a glimpse of movement way off to my left. Some character in Arab dress, clearly not Afghan, was hightailing it out of there, tearing along a little goat trail up the mountain toward Pakistan for all he was worth.

Motherfucker!

This guy could have been out there on his own, but I didn’t think so. They’d been hiding him. That’s what I’d been sensing. The Afghan farmer I’d been targeting had been standing sentry, trying very hard not to look like that was what he was doing. They were covering for this al Qaeda dude or whoever he was, and the moment they had Cassidy and his team engaged in conversation, one of them had told him to take off.

I switched to my binos and caught him scurrying up the mountain, closing in on a kilometer away. I couldn’t get an accurate shot off in time, and I couldn’t go after him, because to do that I’d have to leave my hiding spot and would no longer be supporting Cassidy and the team. I didn’t have the radio resources to call in close air support, and in moments that son of a bitch would be over the border.

I got back to Cassidy on the radio and told him what happened. I could see him now, going back and forth with the farmers, who were hotly denying everything. I’d seen enough to know they were lying.

Thinking back over the whole sequence, I didn’t see what I would have done differently. With the information I had, giving this farmer the benefit of the doubt still seemed to me the right decision. Yes, these Afghan village people would sometimes harbor other Afghans who were Taliban or Arabs we would call al Qaeda. For the most part, though, they were not bad people; they were just trying to get along and survive, to go on living there in the mountains the way they had been for generations without getting caught in the crosshairs of battle.

When we first arrived, in Kuwait and Oman and finally Afghanistan, we were hyped up and angry and ready to deliver payback. We were coming right off the shock of 9/11, and we had all sorts of people e-mailing us from the States, voicing their support and cheering us on. Underneath that caricature of the white devil and “3 ECHO” on our platoon patch, I’d had a legend stitched that said, EMBRACE THE HATE. That’s the mode we were operating in, and our rules of engagement certainly supported that. When in doubt, take them out. However, as we got more immersed in the culture and started seeing things from the point of view of the people who lived there, things began to shift a little. I’d been in Afghanistan long enough now to understand that not everyone had to die. I didn’t want to shoot anybody who didn’t need shooting.

Still, the shot I didn’t take sometimes haunts me as much as some of the shots I did.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 12

By day 7 we were starting to wrap up the operation and prepare to return to base. We had now been holed up in this mountain range for a week and had cleared out a ton of enemy resources, taken a handful of prisoners, and racked up dozens of enemy KIA (killed in action), but there were still a lot of bad actors in the area that we hadn’t been able to track down. Even our surveillance tactics of a few days ago had had limited success. Sitting in that one spot for the whole day, we weren’t able to observe nearly as much as we’d have liked.

Osman and I had an idea. We wanted to get out there on our own, just the two of us, and patrol the area without having to be tied to a whole squad. A two-man mobile surveillance unit.

We pitched the idea to Cassidy. We proposed that the two of us go out, insert at two in the morning, and spend the entire day scouting the area. See what was really going on out there and what we could turn up.

There was a checkpoint we had observed, maybe 5 miles south of our position, a controlled vehicle access point usually manned by two to four guys at any one time. Because of the Army Special Forces incident that had mistakenly taken out a bunch of Karzai’s people, we were especially cautious about making sure who these guys were before we took any action. Osman and I had been watching these guys for days, and by now we were clear that they were Taliban. They were facilitators, ground warriors whose primary mission was to run combat supplies back and forth across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—money, passports, intel, and other tools of the trade. We also knew they’d been surveilling our own platoon. Hell, they’d nearly ambushed us more than once. Now we wanted to go out countersurveilling the guys who were surveilling us.

Cassidy and Chief Dye gave us the thumbs-up. That night we mapped out our route, got our plan together, and packed up our kit.

We headed out early the next morning, about 3:00 A.M. Before leaving we had checked in with Mark, who was our comms guy, and told him what we’d be doing throughout the day and to make sure to check us in with TOC and let that C-130 know they’d have two friendlies out there. We had our IR glint tape on, a special reflective tape like joggers wear at night, except that instead of reflecting visible-range light it reflects infrared. We hoped they’d see that, but it sure wasn’t something we’d want to count on. We did not want to be little green heat trails in the C-130’s video game.

By this point Osman and I were totally garbed out in traditional Afghan gear. We were wearing wool shawls and Afghan roll-up hats; we had water, bullets, a little food, and guns. At a casual glance, we could have passed for Taliban. We’d gotten the lay of the land and were now running around those goat trails, too. As much as it was possible to do, we had become mirror images of the guys we were about to hunt.

We got to the bottom of the hill, humped over to our first observation post, settled in, and waited for the light to come up. Osman looked over at me and said, “Sure hope Mark called that damn C-130.” I nodded. I sure hoped so, too. We were pretty vulnerable out there and had put our lives in Mark’s hands.

The cold morning air hung thick in the valley. Each warm exhale of breath briefly fogged the outside corner of my scope as I waited and watched.

There.

I could just make him out: a middle-aged man, wrapped in traditional Afghan dress, darting furtively back and forth and breaking down his makeshift campsite with seasoned efficiency. I noticed a slight crook in his step—an old wound, perhaps a story from the days of the Soviet occupation. The man had been at his clandestine trade for years. He would be at it for less than twenty-four hours more. I saw a faint wisp of smoke from the campfire he had just extinguished, and my brain automatically registered the direction and intensity of the gust of breeze that flirted with the smoke, calculating windage, distance, and elevation. We could take him out right then and there; Cassidy had given us the go-ahead. If we did, though, it would likely be our only kill of the day, because the moment you fire your weapon you’ve risked compromising your position, and you never know who else is lurking around the corner or somewhere behind you, especially in an environment like this. Besides, we had a bigger strategic goal. We could kill one … or we could find them all, mark their positions, and they would all die.

I’ve since been deer hunting quite a few times; that’s what this was like—except that we didn’t expect to shoot anyone. Today it was not our marksmanship we’d be practicing but our stalking craft. As much time, energy, training, and focus as we put into our marksmanship skills, the core skill of the expert sniper is not to shoot. It is to hunt. If intellectual capacity is a sniper’s foremost qualification, the number two trait is patience. We will take out any enemy we have to when the situation calls for it, whether that means using a rifle, a handgun, a knife, or our bare hands. Yet the sniper’s fundamental craft is not killing a person, but being able to get close enough to do so. Osman and I were on a classic sniper stalking mission: track, sneak up, observe, and disappear again, leaving no trace behind.

The man was moving out now, ready to start his day. So were we.

A short while later we found the spot. The man and a few of his cohorts had been using this site to lay up at night: bedroll stash, food and water, some ammo, evidence of a small fire for cooking. Chances were very good they’d be back that night. We marked the GPS coordinates and backed out again, leaving everything exactly as we found it, and moved on.

We spent the day out there, covered a good 10 to 12 kilometers and located about half a dozen sites.

We got back to camp about midnight. After reporting in, we sat down and put our notes together, lining up all the coordinates so we had a tight sequence. By this time we were already familiar with the process of calling these coordinates in ourselves. Brad and Eric had spent so much time over the week calling in air strikes that they’d gotten some of us to spell them at times, just so they could take a break to eat and get some rest. By this point we had already called in a lot of ordnance in this valley.

Now, in the middle of the night, they set Osman and me up on the radio, and we called in our sequence ourselves. We had laid a gigantic trap, and now we would be the ones to spring it.

The site we had occupied with Chief Dye that first night at Zhawar Kili gave us an amazingly clear view of the valley below, such that we were able to gaze out with our binos and get an easy visual on all the locations we’d marked during the day. One by one, we saw the barest flicker here, a glint there, telltale flashes as they fired up their cookstoves and campfires signaling us that, yes, this site was occupied again tonight. We called in our coordinates, one by one.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

One after the other, we called in the numbers to our F-18s overhead and sent them all to hell.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 13

After a week of forensic spelunking, and even with all the air strikes we had called in, we knew we still had not come close to destroying all the equipment, weaponry, living supplies, and other matériel that was stashed away in that mountainside. This place was a Fort Knox of war-making wealth. There was no way we could carry all this stuff out with us, and we didn’t want these guys coming in here after we left and digging out their stashes of ammo and whatever else they might be able to find. So we choreographed one last hurrah. All the intel we’d gathered over the week was orchestrated into one final bombing session, the largest since the bombing of nearby Tora Bora exactly one month earlier. We pounded that place, and caved in the side of the mountain.

Our twelve-hour mission had turned into a military and political bonanza. In a network of more than seventy caves and tunnels, we’d uncovered nearly a million pounds of ammunition and equipment, along with a ton of intelligence, including extensive papers documenting cross-border traffic and other aspects of enemy tactical plans. More than 400,000 pounds of ordnance was dropped on the targets we flagged. We had destroyed one of the largest terrorist/military training facilities in the country and had taken out a significant number of enemy personnel.

The following day, Monday, January 14, on the ninth day of our twelve-hour mission, we boarded a pair of helos and lifted out of Zhawar Kili, bound for Bagram and Kandahar.