The Only Thing Worth Dying For Read online

  Over the previous decade, the thirty-nine-year-old Kelley had watched incredulously as top military leaders downplayed the importance of the Special Forces’ primary mission of unconventional warfare (UW).* He had noted massive cuts to the Special Forces budget as other Special Operations units that specialized in direct-action missions were given increasingly more funding; UW training had been significantly downscaled, and certain UW skills, such as understanding foreign languages and cultures, were losing value in a military that was able to dominate adversaries with speed and devastating firepower. In February 1998, Peter J. Schoomaker, the commander in chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, told Kelley, “Unconventional warfare is not a viable mission for Special Forces. The only reason you train for it is because it is the best vehicle for maintaining your Special Forces skill set.”4

  In other words, why put men in harm’s way to organize and train dissidents against regimes such as the Taliban when we can overwhelm them with superior firepower?

  Kelley found that line of reasoning shortsighted. He had studied the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviets, whose conventional army and air force, in spite of overwhelming firepower, were still defeated by the Afghans. Unconventional warfare was the way to go in Afghanistan, he believed, but there was a vast military hierarchy that needed convincing before a single soldier would touch Afghan soil.

  Offering Miller a seat, Kelley began to brief him on the first “Crisis Action Planning” meeting that had taken place just hours after the Twin Towers fell, when key planning officers from all branches of the military assembled on the other side of the air base at CENTCOM* to figure out how to go after the terrorists.

  “We had nothing preplanned for Afghanistan,” Kelley told Miller. “The Army looked at the geostrategic situation in Afghanistan and said, ‘Whoa, that damn country is landlocked; we’ll have to think on this one…’ The Marines said, ‘Whoa, that country is an isolated bitch. No freakin’ ocean. But we’ll go in lighter and get there before the Army.’ The Air Force said, ‘Let’s bomb the fuck out of them.’ The Navy said, ‘We’ll help the Air Force bomb the fuck out of them.’

  “Finally, I proposed UW on behalf of Special Operations. I said we should avoid a repeat of the Soviet Union’s ‘experiment’—randomly bombing the population and invading with large armies. Instead, we’ll use some of the same guys who just kicked the Soviets’ asses to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”

  “What was the reaction?”

  “Silence,” said Kelley. He stood up and motioned for Miller to follow. “I kid you not, there were guys at CENTCOM who didn’t know what UW stands for. I mean, damn, they’re going forward with a plan to start bombing the shit out of the most destitute country on the face of the earth, where the targets are all holed up in caves. It’s not gonna work.”

  “So how can I help?” asked Miller.

  “Let me introduce you to the guys and I’ll think about it,” Kelley said, ushering Miller into a small conference room where three men looked up from a table cluttered with documents around a map of Afghanistan. “These are my partners in crime, the True Believers.”

  He walked Miller around the table, introducing him to each man. “Lieutenant Colonel David Miller’s focus is the interagency aspects of the planning—CIA and whatnot. Chief Warrant Officer 3 Bret Brown and I focus on connecting tactical reality to strategic vision; I have the strategic piece at CENTCOM and Bret focuses on the ground-level considerations. Retired Chief Warrant Officer 3 Ron McNeal is our conduit into CENTCOM’s inner workings—he knows how to get our ideas onto General [Tommy] Franks’s desk. All four of us have been pushing for unconventional warfare while everybody else charges forward with direct-action mission planning and bombing.”

  “What we need,” Kelley said, “is to make sure Fifth Group is prepared to do something never done before.” The rest of the True Believers nodded their agreement.

  “What’s that?” asked Miller.

  “If we can make this work, Fifth Group will lead a large-scale campaign with unconventional warfare as the main effort.”

  “Not a supporting role.”

  “Nope,” said Kelley. “In Afghanistan, not the supporting sideshow. The Agency [CIA] is moving fast, but they really have no plan beyond putting small teams of guys on the ground with lots of money and some comms [communications equipment]. Fortunately, they know they need Special Forces to accomplish anything of military significance. On the other hand, General Franks is the one who will actually command this war, and he has no plans beyond bombing and a conventional invasion.”

  On the morning of September 19, Miller was walking from the parking lot outside SOCCENT when he saw Kelley—in a rare moment above ground—standing near the steps that led into the bunker. For the past eight days, Kelley had been sleeping on the floor of his office, or leaving after dark and returning before the sun came up.

  For the first time since Miller’s arrival, Kelley was grinning as he explained that they had figured out a back door into the war. An air campaign would require combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) teams to be in the region, on standby to rescue downed pilots. ODAs were qualified CSAR teams.

  “So I can get Green Berets into the region as search-and-rescue,” Kelley told Miller as the two men walked into the bunker. “Then, when somebody wakes up and realizes the only way to get to the terrorists is by unconventional warfare, we’ll have ODAs ready to go.”

  “Great idea,” said Miller, “but how in the hell are you going to make it happen? Lots of other units do CSAR.”

  “I know the fellow putting together the force list over at CENTCOM, a Navy SEAL. I told him we have to be on that list.”

  “What did he say?”

  “‘I can’t do that.’ So I told him he was the first SEAL I’d ever met who said ‘I can’t.’”

  Miller laughed. “Where did it end up?”

  “We’re on the list. Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs don’t have to sign off, but they will. They can’t authorize the air campaign without checking that box.”

  “You’re a genius,” said Miller as he rushed off to a meeting about the formation of the Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF),5 the Special Operations command center for the war.

  He entered the conference room and took a seat in the back just as a SOCCENT officer was asking, “Any nominations for who’s going to run the JSOTF?”

  Recalling that a JSOTF had something to do with commanding Special Operations forces, Miller immediately spoke up. “We got it,” he said.

  “And who are you?” asked the officer.

  “Fifth Special Forces Group, representing Colonel Mulholland.”

  Within the hour, Rear Admiral Albert Calland, the commander of SOCCENT, approved the nomination, and Miller called Mulholland to relay the good news. “Sir! Got us in the fight! We’re going to be the JSOTF.”

  There was a long silence, then Mulholland said, “You’re joking, right?”

  “No, sir. You’re the JSOTF commander.”

  More silence.

  “We don’t do that, Chris,” said Mulholland. “Generals run JSOTFs. As a group commander, I’m supposed to fall under the JSOTF—not run it!”

  Oh shit, thought Miller.

  “I’ve got to get down there and do a face-to-face with Admiral Calland,” Mulholland said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.” He hung up.

  Jesus, thought Miller, we’ve gotta get out of this thing.

  With commercial flights to the United States grounded after 9/11, the men of ODA 574 spent ten agonizing days in Kazakhstan, unsure whether they would remain in the “Stans” as part of an invasion force or get back to Fort Campbell and find they’d been left behind. Once flights resumed, the team was ordered to return home. The country they knew had changed in their absence. Driving home to Clarksville, Tennessee, after landing in Nashville on Saturday, September 22, Amerine watched low-flying Apache attack helicopters patrolling Fort Campbell’s fence-line perimeter. Stern-faced guards stood at h
astily erected sandbag-and-concrete barricades in front of each gate.

  There was no welcome home for Amerine. Before his last deployment, he had helped his ex-wife move her belongings out of their Clarksville house. On his first night back, he spread a blanket on the floor beside the fireplace—it would be days before he could bring himself to sleep alone in their bed. The following day, as the men on his team stepped back into their other lives—went to church, had barbecues, cuddled their children, made love to their girlfriends or wives—Amerine awoke on the hard floor of his living room, laced his boots, and drove the nine miles to Fort Campbell, which felt more like home than his own house.

  Amerine had grown up a haole—a white kid—in Honolulu, Hawaii, surrounded by the freethinking academics and legal eagles who were friends of his anthropologist father, Ron, and his lawyer mother, Carol. When Amerine was ten years old, Ron introduced him to the writings of Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, which instilled in him the belief that life was short and fickle so he’d better make it count for something. Amerine read widely, and his heroes were mostly the dreamers and madmen who clung to idealistic notions about the way the world ought to be—the Don Quixotes of literature. Few of them had happy endings.

  During his freshman year of high school Amerine met a retired Green Beret and Vietnam veteran named Howard Noe; talking with Noe about his combat experiences, Amerine became hooked on the idea of the military as a career and joined his school’s Junior ROTC program. He wanted to see the world, explore exotic cultures, and commit his life to something important. At seventeen he enlisted in the Army Reserves at the same time his JROTC instructor, Sergeant Major Kenneth Ching, ordered him to apply to the U.S. Military Academy, in West Point, New York. Carol was reluctant to embrace her only son’s military aspirations, having seen too many of her friends die young in Vietnam, but she ultimately supported his decision. “You’ve always been an idealist,” she told him at his high school graduation, “and following your ideals is the only thing worth dying for. Just remember that: Don’t ever put your life on the line for something you don’t believe in.”

  Now thirty, Amerine had worked on five continents and led two Special Forces teams, ODA 572 for a year and a half before moving to ODA 574, 3rd Battalion’s military free-fall team, whose specialty was high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) parachute insertions behind enemy lines—the most dangerous way to infiltrate a hostile area.

  On September 11, Ron had thought immediately of his son. While most of the world was shocked by the attacks, he was certain that for Jason, they were also a calling.

  After a short stack at G’s Pancake House, where Amerine reveled in the Americana of diner coffee, the smell of bacon frying, and a waitress who called him “honey,” he drove onto Fort Campbell. He parked in a half-full lot that was usually empty on Sundays, and walked onto the 5th Group block past the ZPU-4 anti-aircraft artillery gun that ODA 523 had captured in Kuwait City during Operation Desert Storm.

  Fifth Special Forces Group (Airborne) began operating in Vietnam in 1962, a year after being activated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In 1988, after its focus shifted from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the deserts of the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Africa—the CENTCOM area of responsibility—it relocated to a block on Fort Campbell that was a far cry from the high-security compounds of the other units in Special Operations: Rangers, Delta Force, and SEALs. The men of 5th Group didn’t care. Their decrepit barracks, built in the 1940s for the infantry of the 101st Airborne Division, served as a reminder that their profession was intended to keep them away from Campbell.

  “We don’t fuck around with giant fences and restricted airspace,” a sergeant major had told Amerine about their modest home base. “We don’t create cloak-and-dagger nonsense as if our every waking moment involves a classified operation. We do our job, go home to our families, and look forward to the next deployment. Special Forces is an elite unit. Some of the other Special Operations units are elitist units.”

  Amerine made his way to the Trees of the Dead, located on Gabriel Field*—the parade ground. As he walked onto the lawn beneath parallel lines of sugar maples, their leaves just beginning to take on the yellows and oranges of autumn, he thought about the two months in 1992 when he was assigned to ODA 512 for an internship while still a cadet at West Point.

  That summer, a senior noncommissioned officer (NCO)** named Dennis Holloway had brought Amerine to the field and told him that each of the twenty-one maples memorialized a Special Forces soldier from 5th Group killed in the line of duty. Holloway had introduced Amerine to some of the “men” he had known, represented by more than half of the trees.

  “I prefer the heat,” Holloway had said, moving out from under the maples. “I hope you never have to look at these trees and see the faces of the men they represent. But if it ever comes to that, you will find comfort knowing that they died for something larger than themselves. You will know in your heart that they died doing something that makes a difference. They will have died because they strived to make the world a better place.”

  Almost a decade later, Amerine could recall Holloway’s words as they had walked away from the maples that day: “Too much damn shade on this field.”

  In the 3rd Battalion building, at the end of a long hallway of doors belonging to the six ODAs of Alpha Company, Amerine stepped into the stale air of his team’s room. Nobody had been in this space, the size of a two-car garage, for the past two months.

  A wall of twelve lockers to his left represented a full-strength ODA, but currently carried only eight names. Amerine, the captain, was from Hawaii; the team sergeant, thirty-nine-year-old Jefferson Donald Davis, or JD, was from Tennessee; the engineer, Victor Bradley, twenty-nine, was from South Dakota; weapons sergeants Mike McElhiney, thirty, Ronnie Raikes, thirty-seven, and Brent Fowler, twenty-seven, were from Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, respectively; the thirty-eight-year-old intelligence sergeant, Gil Magallanes, Mag, was from California; and the communications sergeant, Dan Petithory, thirty-two, was from Massachusetts. After five years with ODA 574, the warrant officer and second-in-command, forty-one-year-old Lloyd Allard, had just been promoted to the company B-team (which oversees the ODAs, the A-teams) under Major Chris Miller, leaving four vacant lockers. If JD and the battalion’s sergeant major couldn’t figure out a way to get ODA 574 more bodies, the team would be severely undermanned.

  Desks lined the other three walls, and a large planning table stood in the center of the room. Amerine’s desk, along with those of the second-in-command and the team sergeant, were squeezed into an adjacent office. Amerine had just opened the windows and settled in his chair when Allard walked in.

  “Sir,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Came in to clear my head before the shit storm,” said Amerine. “How about you, chief? Shouldn’t you be with your family?”

  “I was getting up to speed for my new job. Ran over here to clean my desk out.”

  “Well, you’ll be in a good position to keep an eye on us,” said Amerine. “You can make sure we’re operational: We’re short a medic, a junior communications sergeant, a junior engineer, and now a warrant officer since you’re bailing on us.”

  “Shit, sir,” Allard said with a grimace. “Don’t make it any harder than it already is.”

  “So, what’s going on down the hall? When is Miller coming back from CENTCOM?”

  “Should be any day. Big news is Colonel Mulholland is going to be the JSOTF commander for the entire war effort. They’re giving him the ball. Everybody is pumped up to go kill terrorists, but there’s no plan yet. You didn’t hear this from me, but we’ve got a few teams in isolation now, set to do CSAR when we start bombing. Bad news is General Franks seems to be leaning toward a conventional approach.”

  “Worked so well for the Soviets,” Amerine said.

  The men of ODA 574 assembled in their team room on Monday, September 24, to prepare for a war they knew little about—and might never fight
.

  With Allard gone, Master Sergeant Jefferson Davis, the team sergeant, was now second-in-command. A proud southerner from a small town in Carter County, Tennessee, where he grew up fishing, camping, and playing football, JD was married, with two children. Nearing forty, he was a veteran NCO and the oldest member of ODA 574. The Kazakhs had called him Gray Wolf because of the gray hair at his temples, and the name had stuck with his own team.

  The role of Special Forces team sergeants is often described as a tough “father,” while the team medic acts as the gentler “mother.” As JD was also a trained medic, he was able to shift his personas to fit the situation. His most important duty, however, was to serve as the conduit between Amerine and the NCOs who made up the rest of ODA 574.

  To maintain momentum and synchronize their preparations for war, JD would be calling team meetings twice a day. He would also hand out endless “to do” lists that included packing personal gear, taking inventory of team gear, and requesting mission-specific gear; prepping weapons, radios, and optics; attending classes on new equipment; scheduling live-fire exercises; and preparing the men’s families for a long separation.

  Over a week and a half of fifteen-hour days, Major Miller had watched the True Believers trying in vain to persuade the powers at CENTCOM that unconventional warfare was the way to go in Afghanistan.

  During a break on September 26, Miller and Kelley were in Kelley’s office, watching a television interview that a British reporter in Afghanistan was conducting with a Mujahideen commander of the Northern Alliance. Holding an AK-47 rifle, the fighter stood on a ridgeline overlooking the Shomali Plain and pointed out the Taliban’s front lines. Journalists had invaded Afghanistan before the U.S. military.

  “How come,” Kelley said, “it’s this easy for a reporter to go in and have a conversation with the Northern Alliance—within view of enemy positions, no less—and we can’t convince anybody that sending in Green Berets to conduct UW with the Northern Alliance is the best way to fight this thing?”