PROLOGUE

A Special Forces funeral always brings me to tears, and this was no exception. I was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), who had been deployed in Iraq since they left Afghanistan in May of 2002, and who were the first to go into Iraq before the war was officially declared.

We were here to honor and pay our respects to two Special Forces soldiers who had been killed in a predawn firefight in the Iraqi town of Ramadi, about seventy miles from Baghdad. Seven others from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group were wounded in the raid.

The Special Forces motto, De Oppresso Liber, or “To Liberate the Oppressed,” was embodied in the deeds of these two fine soldiers who gave the ultimate sacrifice: freeing people from tyranny and oppression—first from the Taliban, and now from Saddam Hussein, and at the expense of their own lives.

Sergeant Major Kenneth W. Barriger was asked to take the roll call of the team of Green Berets to which the fallen soldiers belonged.

As he read off their names one by one, the men attending the funeral of their lost friends replied: “Here, Sergeant Major.”

Finally, the sergeant major called the name of Sergeant First Class William Bennett, but there was no reply from the team.

Once again, Sergeant Major Barriger called out “Sergeant First Class Bill Bennett.”

Again—no answer.

After a long silence, the sergeant major called out the name of another member of the team.

“Master Sergeant Kevin Morehead.”

Once more, a long silence filled the Fort Campbell chapel.

With the answer of a twenty-one-gun salute, the two Green Beret sergeants were accounted for as Killed in Action.

Master Sergeant Kevin Morehead and Sergeant First Class Bill Bennett were two of the first Special Forces men in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of September 11. They had been in Afghanistan with Captain Mark Nutsch’s team (ODA 595), and went on from there as part of the first Special Forces on the scene of the new war in Iraq.

I had crossed paths with both men while writing The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force DAGGER. Both I and Chris Thompson, my coauthor and project coordinator on the Bin Laden book, had met with their wives only months ago. Bill Bennett was a talented Special Forces Medical Sergeant, in the Army since 1986 and active in numerous overseas deployments and combat operations, including the Gulf War. Kevin Morehead was one of a few Special Forces soldiers who had buried a piece of the World Trade Center in an Afghan battlefield. He was killed two days before his thirty-fourth birthday, and less than two weeks before he was to return home.