The Operator Read online

  Because we weren’t yet cleared to take on the Taliban, we weren’t going to be sent on any night raids against them, which meant we had to get used to living like normal people, awake during daylight hours. We’d wake up in the morning, get a workout, read the intel reports, wait for our meals. When we weren’t eating or lifting, we’d sit around what we called the family room in the main building, which used to be the hotel lobby, and watch the seventy-inch flat screen we’d ordered from Bagram. That screen was way too big for the space, but it gave us an excuse to spend time collecting old DVDs. We watched every episode of The Shield more than once, and we all wanted to imitate Vic Mackey, the lethal badass cop who’s the main character.

  A lot of the time spent in these safe houses is dedicated to building them up, making them a better place to live. We had a certain amount of money budgeted. We brought in locals to build this really small pool. When I say small, I mean, bathtub-size—like four feet deep. We had treadmills and ordered weights and an elliptical. The Green Berets had a gym and we’d trade out with them. We also got hold of some mats so we could practice jujitsu.

  It’s odd to say, but to us, Jalalabad was a peaceful city. We had motorbikes we would drive around town. We’d go shopping in the bazaars, hit the shawarma and falafel stands.

  It’s not like we forgot our mission. We were always looking for sources, for people we could potentially run across the border to Pakistan to find out what was going on. While we were conducting interviews with former mujahideen, we were also trying to find locals to hire as security guards, electricians, interpreters. We had a huge backyard where we did the interviews. Lines formed down Chocolate Alley—dozens of locals hoping to work for the Americans. There wasn’t a huge American presence at that time, so we didn’t feel like occupiers. None of us dressed in uniforms. Our outfit was unconventional in more than its conduct of warfare, and we flaunted not having to abide by the strict dress codes that applied to all other US military personnel overseas. I guess we owed our sartorial liberation to SEAL founder Dick Marcinko, the ultimate rule breaker. But the more casual attire also served a purpose. It helped us blend in and be less intimidating when we drove or walked through the city. Every time we made our way up and down the alley, kids would come out and say, “Chocolate, chocolate,” and we’d hand them chocolate. So that’s why it was called Chocolate Alley. The kids loved us and we loved them back. The parents saw that and grew protective of us.

  To further blend in, we hired people to drive us in these three-wheeled vehicles we called tuck-tucks. We’d dress up in local garb and tour Jalalabad, with no particular goal in mind. We’d drive out along the river, check out the dam, visit the bazaars. These days, if an American were to wander the city they might get their head cut off.

  Back then it wasn’t that bad. But there were still some bad guys out there. We were developing new technologies to track them—a lot of signal intelligence stuff I still can’t talk about in detail. We’d fly in experts to work their magic. They’d get a bead on someone talking to people in Pakistan, trying to coordinate attacks on Americans. When we could be sure of the specific house where that guy lived, we’d hit it. Since Adam had only the three of us in the safe house, we’d fly a team of six from Bagram down to Jalalabad. Then we’d go.

  The first mission I went on was a step on the learning curve. I grabbed my EOD guy, Harp, and I said, “Hey, man, what’s the suicide bomber threat here? What’s the IED [Improvised Explosive Device] threat?” He reassured me it wasn’t that bad, but having seen the movies and watched the news, I was convinced suicide bombers were everywhere. We drove to the house we’d targeted a few hours after sundown. There isn’t a lot to do in Afghanistan so the locals go to sleep early. They don’t know what time it is or how old they are, but they do know it’s time to get some shut-eye when the sun dips below the horizon. So we drove down Chocolate Alley, through a roundabout with a big globe in the center, made a right on the main street, drove a few blocks, and made a left, and then we stopped. This was an op in our own damn neighborhood. Adam led us on foot for a few more blocks and then pointed out the house. I put an explosive breach on the front gate. I was on edge, but when the breach blew the gate and we started to move, everything got so clear. I remember watching my boss, the team leader, and being amazed at how smooth he was, so unafraid, just walking around alertly, calmly taking care of business. I was thinking, How can you be so cool?

  We blew the door and rolled in just like in CQB training. People were still sleeping. I was amazed that they could sleep through that stuff, or that they’d pretend to sleep through it. I would see that behavior over and over again, but this was a first. The kids were asleep, the wives were asleep. The targets are never alone in the house. If there are three adult males, there are nine wives and twenty children. It just multiplies. We went room to room and rolled up every adult male and then talked to them using the interpreter. In this culture the women are so subservient to the men that they just go sit in corners and the kids follow. There’s some crying at first, but that stops once we give them glow sticks or candy. At that time the interpreters were still Afghan militia guys, so they carried guns, too. They actually rolled in with us and then they’d interrogate the suspects and tell us who the bad guys were. In this case the guy we were looking for was a big fat Saudi Arabian. Most of the time, when you run into an Arab in Afghanistan, he’s not there for good reasons. I was all business as I was cuffing him, but then I noticed his grubby T-shirt well stuffed with belly fat. I couldn’t help cracking up. It said in English—and I’m guessing he didn’t even know what it meant—“It’s not a beer belly, it’s a fuel tank for a sex machine.” Funny terrorist.

  We hauled him out, drove him to the airfield, and put him on the plane to Bagram. Up there they had expert interrogators from different agencies and military branches who’d figure out this guy’s reasons for being in Jalalabad and, hopefully, get some intelligence that could lead to other targets. He was probably low-level and would be deported with little fanfare. (I didn’t know it then, but you had to be a pretty significant evildoer to merit waterboarding, let alone be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay.)

  That was it for my first operation, but I was beginning to understand the proper attitude: You don’t need to sweat everything. Just do it like you’ve practiced a million times and you’re going to be just fine.

  We carried out a half dozen more missions without firing a shot or being fired on.

  Once we came close, though, and I learned an important lesson. We were sneaking up on a house at night using night vision when we saw some armed guys coming at us. I trained my gun on them. They were lit in my night vision by my flood light and laser—completely invisible to the naked eye. They had dots on them and they didn’t even know it. We were getting ready to go hot when Adam said, “Hold on. I can de-conflict this. I don’t think these are bad guys.”

  He was savvy enough to know that in Afghanistan, just because someone is armed doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy. There, guns are like cell phones. Everyone has one.

  We kept our guns on the guys while we had a tense conversation in our broken Pashto, but it turned out they were Afghan cops on patrol.

  If we’d killed them, which we could have, it would have been a huge incident, but because my team leader was so on top of it—I’ll take care of this—he saved about five lives that night. I’ll never forget watching how cool he was, and wanting to be just like him.

  *

  BY JUNE 2005, EVERYTHING WAS winding down in Jalalabad. Out at the airfield, they were doing some kind of buildup, creating a command center. They set up some tents and flew in some guys from SEAL Team Ten and SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team One. We were all excited. We heard rumblings that they wanted to put snipers up in the Korengal Valley in the rugged mountains near the Pakastani border. It was nicknamed the Valley of Death, and was, quite possibly, the most dangerous place in the world. The remote, forested mountains were loaded with a toxic mix of al-Qaeda and Talib
an and allied warlords. SEAL Team Ten wanted to go after one of the most significant threats there, a guy by the name of Ahmad Shah. He’d actually fought against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in 2001, but he’d since switched sides and was a key player in smuggling in foreign fighters to swell al-Qaeda ranks.

  In emails and phone calls, our team leaders both from Jalalabad and Asadabad discussed with the SEAL Team Ten commander, a guy named Erik Kristensen, plans to go get Shah. Kristensen was a “task unit commander,” which meant that he could propose missions to the overall “battle space owner”—an officer further up the command chain. My bosses, who were parallel to Kristensen, weren’t optimistic about the timing. They told him, “We’re not even sending in SEAL Team **** snipers. We think they have surface-to-air missiles.”

  There was a lot of back and forth about whether to go in or not. But Kristensen was an aggressive commander. You absolutely need guys like that, always willing to take it to the enemy. It’s a risky business for sure, but so often, that’s how wars are won.

  Snipers were inserted up into the valley to scout things out. Oddly, these were the SEAL Delivery Vehicle guys, members of the submarine unit nobody wanted to be in. Four of their snipers—Michael Murphy, Danny Dietz, Matthew Axelson, and Marcus Luttrell—had drawn this tough mission.

  Team Ten flew into Jalalabad Airfield to prepare for their incursion into the valley to take out Shah once the recon team had determined his whereabouts. We went out to see them at the airfield and had a nice little bullshitting session, catching up. These were guys I’d known from training or previous assignments, Jeff Taylor, Dan Healy, Jeff Lucas, and my friend Mike B. Healy and I had gone to sniper school together in 1998. He was a mountain of a man from New England who would only drink Sam Adams. The bushy beard he’d grown made him look bigger, but almost nicer, which wasn’t possible. We talked about beer and how great it was going to be to get back home. No Sam Adams here. I hadn’t seen Jeff Taylor since a birthday party at my mother-in-law’s house in Virginia Beach a few months prior, but we picked up the conversation where it had left off: skydiving and base jumping. This guy was as good at extreme sports as he was fearless, and our wives were best friends. I kept hoping I’d go on the raid with them. My team said goodbye and rode back to our safe house.

  Truth is, we were envious. They were about to see some significant action while we’d only been transporting obese Arabs to the airport. We hunted up our outstation chief and told him we wanted to go on the raid with them when the time came.

  He said, “Hell, no. Take everybody from SEAL Team **** off those helicopters.” There were none on there, but HQ wanted to be perfectly clear: SEAL Team **** would not be involved. He knew something bad was going to happen. We had the intelligence but SEAL Team Ten didn’t listen.

  Even as we’d been chatting in that tent at the airfield the four SEAL snipers were fighting for their lives. Some locals had spotted them in the valley and informed the Taliban. Fifty enemy fighters seized the high ground and began a devastating three-sided attack. The four SEALs, all wounded in the early minutes, nonetheless managed to elude quick defeat or capture by bounding down the steep slope with leaps of twenty to thirty feet at a time. Now they had cover, but their position among rocks deep in the ravine made it impossible to make a distress call. Dietz, the communications guy, scrambled for open ground, but as soon as he emerged from cover an enemy round shot through his hand, shattering his thumb. Murphy knew the only chance was for him to use his iridium satellite phone so he sprinted for an open place to make the call. The official Navy report reads:

  Moving away from the protective mountain rocks, he knowingly exposed himself to increased enemy gunfire… . While continuing to be fired upon, Murphy made contact with the SOF Quick Reaction Force at Bagram Airfield and requested assistance. He calmly provided his unit’s location and the size of the enemy force while requesting immediate support for his team. At one point he was shot in the back causing him to drop the transmitter. Murphy picked it back up, completed the call and continued firing at the enemy who was closing in. Severely wounded, Lt. Murphy returned to his cover position with his men and continued the battle.

  We were hanging out in our tiny pool behind the safe house when a Ranger major—the overall commander for that area—came out and said, “Hey, your boys just got their asses handed to them.”

  He told us something had happened up in Korengal, and some MH-47 Chinook helicopters had taken off on a rescue mission. We sprinted to our motorcycles and raised dust getting back down to the airfield. When we got there, they told us that one of the helicopters had been shot down.

  According to the Navy account, a Chinook with eight SEALs had set out with an escort of heavily armored Army attack helicopters that were there to, as the official account puts it, “neutralize the enemy and make it safer for the lightly-armored, personnel-transport helicopter to insert.”

  Knowing that every minute that passed decreased the chance that their brothers would survive, the men in the Chinook made the decision to leave behind the much heavier and slower attack helicopters. From the official account: “They knew the tremendous risk going into an active enemy area in daylight, without their attack support, and without the cover of night … but knowing that their warrior brothers were shot, surrounded, and severely wounded, the rescue team opted to directly enter the oncoming battle in hopes of landing on brutally hazardous terrain.”

  Before that could happen, the helicopter, which was carrying sixteen men—including the guys I’d just been chatting with: Jeff Taylor, Dan Healy, Jeff Lucas, and their boss, Erik Kristensen—was blasted out of the sky.

  The other guy we’d been talking to in the tent, Mike B., had survived. There had been two rescue choppers with SEAL Team Ten operators on them. One—the lead helicopter, the one that went down—was called Turbine 33. The other was Turbine 34. Before they took off, Dan Healy, who’d been on Turbine 34, grabbed Mike B., who’d been on 33, and asked him to switch. Dan was an SDV guy and Mike was Team Ten. “Those are my guys on the ground,” Dan told him. He wanted to be the first one to get to them. Mike agreed.

  They had no idea they were making a decision that would determine who would die in the next few minutes.

  When the surviving helicopter returned, we were waiting at the airfield in Jalalabad. The pilots were so shaken they landed at the wrong base across town. The guys had to run across the city to get back to the airfield. I saw them as they were coming in, one at a time: Greg Czar, Luke Newbold, then Mike, and with each face I thought, “The world’s a better place because you’re still in it.”

  “What the hell just happened?” I asked.

  One said, “They’re shooting missiles at us.”

  The official report said that a rocket-propelled grenade brought down Turbine 33. But the guys in the second helicopter told us they saw two missiles come out of the valley and turn. Rocket-propelled grenades don’t turn. Heat-seeking missiles do. The first one hit Turbine 33. It wasn’t like in the movies where it takes the hit and then tumbles down the mountain. They said it exploded on impact. The second missile missed Turbine 34. If it really was a surface-to-air missile and it missed, then someone was watching out for them, because those things are designed to shoot down jets.

  With no rescue imminent, the four SEALs, pinned down in the ravine, were running out of ammunition. They’d held out for two hours and managed to kill a few dozen of their attackers. But finally their guns fell silent. Murphy, Axelson, and Dietz were dead. Luttrell miraculously survived a near miss from an RPG round, which blew him over a ridge and knocked him unconscious.

  Again from the official account:

  Regaining consciousness some time later, Luttrell managed to escape—badly injured—and slowly crawl away down the side of a cliff. Dehydrated, with a bullet wound to one leg, shrapnel embedded in both legs, three vertebrae cracked; the situation for Luttrell was grim. Traveling seven miles on foot, he evaded the enemy for nearly a day. Local nationals came
to his aid, carrying him to a nearby village …

  Of course we knew none of that. All we knew was that we needed to get to the crash site, but we weren’t going to fly there. At this point there were plenty of helicopters—Apaches, Chinooks, and other aircraft—coming in, but nobody was going to fly up to the valley with the possibility of anti-aircraft missile defenses. It was up to us to get there on the ground—which was arguably even more dangerous than by air.

  This wasn’t some command decision. We were sending people around to find a coalition of Special Forces guys—literally, going from hut to hut saying, “Hey, we need a couple volunteers. Here’s the situation. A helicopter’s been shot down and there are four snipers missing.”

  Every single Ranger we talked to hopped out of bed and said some variation of, “It should take us ten minutes to be ready but we’re going to be out in five.”

  Within minutes we had Army Rangers, Air Force guys, Navy, EOD, Navy SEALs, Green Berets. We knew people were still working on other methods of rescue, and that at some point—nobody knew when—an airborne rescue might be launched. But we weren’t about to sit around and wait for that. This was a five-alarm fire and we were the bucket brigade. We commandeered vehicles, Humvees, Hiluxes, whatever we could find, and then we drove. We drove north from Jalalabad, heading up the Korengal River road to a point we knew was directly on the other side of a mountain from the Korengal Valley. We drove up as far as we could and met up with our other SEALs from Asadabad. They had some donkeys, which we loaded with food and water and whatever shit we had on us. Then we started walking. Straight up. We started at about two thousand feet of elevation and had to walk up to ten thousand feet in less than a day, with temperatures well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.