- When we first, you know, walked into the country,
I mean, you had the weight of the nation on your shoulders.
You know, we were America's response
To the most catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. Soil.
- Ever. - Ever.
- And for a lot of us,
You know, we felt that we had a responsibility
To the people that died,
To set the stage that you just don't do that to America
And not pay the price.
It was about... Not retribution,
But it was about justice.
- What's that saying
About, "who will go?"
"send me."
- You know... - Isaiah 6:8.
- Sir? - Isaiah 6:8.
"Whom will go, and whom shall I send?"
- Yeah, "who will go, and who shall I send?"
Send me, send me,
'cause I'm the dude that wants to make somebody pay
For killing my brothers and sisters.
- I think we have to assume
That there will be more attacks.
- The United States military has begun strikes.
- Coalition warplanes have free rein over Afghanistan.
- The public, though... I think 94% of the public...
Wants us to go in somewhere and do something.
- U.S. Army special forces, known as the green berets...
- The green berets...
- Inside Afghanistan.
Those reports first appeared in Pakistani newspapers...
- Known as the quiet professionals...
So secretive, we've agreed not to disclose
Even their first name.
- I never spoke out the way I felt like I should have.
- It was an American green Bert raid in the dark of night.
- Guns starting to flail back and forth.
Pow-pow, pow, pow...
- This is another type of warfare:
War by guerillas.
- Unconventional warfare.
- And to me, it's like brotherhood.
- What is winning?
- You're just praying
You'll get to prove yourself to your brothers.
- What began as a 100-day mission...
- The longest U.S. War... - It's been a long war...
- The longest war in American history.
- We've been living it for 15 years.
- Think I was 10.
Must have been 9 or 10, about 1970, I guess.
I saw john Wayne, "the green berets,"
And I thought, "man, yeah..."
- They all seemed to think that because my dad joined,
That it was natural for me to join,
But that wasn't the case.
I went to go see a movie.
- Funny thing.
A fella takes one of these into battle,
And he carries a strange sense of guilt
All the rest of his life.
- I figured everything else I'd done in the army
Hadn't been all that hard, for me.
I figured, how hard could it be?
It was pretty hard.
Pretty good, yeah.
♪ ♪
- The Taliban must turn over Osama bin laden
And must destroy the terrorist camps.
Otherwise, there will be a consequence.
- Spokesman for the Taliban denies Afghanistan
Allowed bin laden to strike from its territory.
- Good afternoon.
On my orders,
The United States military has begun strikes
Against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
- I'm as close to these people as anyone in my own family,
And in some ways closer.
These are my 11 best friends in the world.
That's how I feel.
- This is us in Afghanistan.
I mean, we were in, you know, some harsh...
- Probably is as extreme a combat environment
As you can fathom.
It tested you in every way... Physically, mentally...
Emotionally.
- We are it.
And when you need the army,
We are the vanguard, the spearhead, the praetorian.
- This has been happening for, what, 15 years.
- Wow, since Vietnam.
- Yeah.
- We're talking about people.
You know, as a unit, we've been...
We've been deployed doing some pretty crazy crap
For a while.
And you get into a unit like this,
And that's what you do.
That's your game.
- I've been in the military now 30 years.
That mission was the pinnacle of my career,
Absolutely the finest thing
A team of green berets could do.
- Mark wasn't on the team anymore at that time.
So I thought I was good to go.
I was 6 1/2 months pregnant.
And we got a call while we were in a baby store,
Shopping for baby things.
I think Mr. Paul called him and said...
- "get your butt back here."
- "guess what, you're back on the team."
And I was like, "oh..."
- We both realized
I was probably not gonna be there
For the birth of our child.
On the drive back from Nashville, then,
We realized we'd better pick a name.
Amy knew we were gonna go, but she didn't know where.
Hell, I didn't know where we were going exactly.
- Ramp runs down a big cloud
Of that fine talcum powder dust.
We come piling out of the back of that,
Haul all of our shit out in this big, huge clump of stuff.
Helicopter takes off.
Dust kind of settles,
And out of the dust comes the sand people.
- That's right.
- When you see a man with an AK
Who's dressed just like your enemy,
And you've got to walk over to him
And basically ask him, "hey, how you doing?"
And you have no idea whether he's gonna say...
You put out his hand and shake it,
Or he's gonna shoot you.
- The Taliban's army of some 30,000 fighters...
Born from the crucible of war,
Captured Kabul in 1996 and imposed draconian laws.
- Indiscriminate and brutal...
- Whipped in public for adultery
In front of an all-male audience...
- We have a small group...
- The Taliban invited Osama bin laden...
- Osama bin laden would offer money
And his fighters to fight.
- The northern alliance came together
In mutual opposition to the Taliban.
- General Dostum and his advance security party
Come riding up.
- General Dostum, who has a fierce reputation
For his treatment of foreign prisoners.
- He jumps down off the horse, and...
- Hell, the horse is still moving, he jumps off.
- Yeah. - He was like, "hey."
- General Dostum agreed to take my team members and I
Up to his forward command post.
"I can't guarantee your safety."
He said, "there's some people
That may be upset that the Americans are here."
So we would mount horses for the first time in combat.
- Mark knows horses.
He knew horses when he got there.
We didn't.
Mark figured out real quick
That you go up to 400 dudes on a horse and say,
"hey, somebody get off their horse
And give it to an American,"
You ain't gonna get a smooth horse.
- We got to general Dostum's headquarters.
My job at that point
Is to establish and maintain rapport.
His plan that he had briefed to us
Was that Mazar-E Sharif was the key to the country,
And if we could liberate Mazar-E Sharif,
The northern provinces would be liberated.
If we liberated the northern provinces,
Then Kabul could be liberated.
And from there, Herat, Kandahar, Jalalabad.
We represented 5th group.
We represented America's foreign policy...
At the point end, nasty, dirty, bloody end of that fight...
That we went in and helped enable
The possibility of a brighter future
For the people of Afghanistan.
- It was my first rodeo.
We got married in April; he left in October.
He was a medic.
I thought it was safe.
Yeah, he lied to me, guys.
No, he didn't lie to me; he was a medic.
- Is that what they're called?
- I don't know.
You know what it is.
- Little dust off that.
- A pickle tea.
- A lot of memories, you know what I mean?
It's like... that you kind of tamp down and put away.
Not so good, but that's okay.
- Every one of the husbands will tell you
That they're gonna die before us spouses do.
- Suck it up, buttercup. - Suck it up, will.
- Hey, how about we toast to everybody who's not here?
- Yeah, there you go.
- 'Cause we got chad, we got Pete...
- Pete. - We got Steve.
- Bill. - Bill, wherever you are.
- Wherever he's at.
- Salud. - Salud.
- Whoo!
That shit's nasty.
- What is this shit?
- Hey.
Say hello.
Come on.
It wasn't until you were forced to retire,
You had to retire.
Then you isolated yourself from your family
And everybody else.
You internalize everything.
You try to find a new normalcy.
- Off.
Sit, sit, sit.
Psst, sit.
What I found kind of peace with
Is to go out here, crawl around on jeeps
And, you know, be one again.
Being out here, I mean, listen.
You know, you get to have no thoughts at all.
Each one of our stories are almost similar,
How we isolated ourselves, our family, everything else.
Started reaching out and found,
You know, the only way we're all gonna heal each other
Is to get back together.
- Holy shit. - That's that blooper.
- Oh, there we go.
Big marky mark.
- Marky mark.
- I'm up here somewhere.
That's me right there.
- You know, in special forces, you have a team,
And a team is 12 men.
You've got a captain, a team sergeant,
A team warrant officer,
Two engineers, two commo,
Two medics, two weapons sergeants.
That formulates a team,
And each team would have a specialty,
Like high-altitude, low-opening jumping
Or scuba diving
Or assaulting direct action.
- I was the greatest tactician
For direct action that there was.
Back then, I thought I was on top of the world.
- In the back.
- Right here? - Yes.
- General franks, again, on special forces,
Can you give us a sense of how the size and scope
Of their mission will expand over the next month,
From classic liaison with northern alliance groups
And reconnaissance,
To more direct action,
Shoot-em-up ambush type of situations?
- A short answer, and that is that...
One should not assume that there has not been
Strategic reconnaissance and direct action activity.
You would not expect for me to tell you
Exactly what they're doing.
- Evidence that another, much more covert operation
Is well under way...
- These special forces are trying to hunt down
Suspected terrorist Osama bin laden...
- The letter-like attacks by commandos
To go after and root out some of that infrastructure.
- The mission statement was to kill or capture
Senior Al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership, stop.
Insert name, stop.
Insert location, stop.
At our level, there was a big map there,
And the big map is synchronized by who's next,
Who's on first, okay?
And then, who's on first is a number
And a picture and a little bit of background.
Went into one room, it was total chaos.
Seven guys, machine guys,
Dodging bullets, shooting people, hand-to-hand.
You run into the next room,
Guys are shooting out the back of the window.
One guy is surrendering.
You went into the next room, Bam.
It was on-off, on-off, on-off, on-off, on...
Helicopter home.
As a kid, I was forced to read homer's "odyssey,"
You know, about a warrior king trying to come home
And the family going through its situation.
You never really understand it,
Because you don't have the maturity.
Now, you know, you're trying to find, you know,
The subtleties and calmness of life.
That, right now, is more valuable
Than a million dollars in the bank.
- As a leader,
You have to balance, you know, "what's the mission?
What are you trying to accomplish?"
And the mission is invariably
To put your soldiers in harm's way.
So, I think, as a soldier,
There's a part of you that, as an individual,
You want to see it, to understand it,
To be tested by it.
But then, as a leader,
You're so terrified at the thought
Of making bad decisions that get your soldiers killed.
- You need a very strong team leader.
Amerine was outstanding.
- It's like a democracy.
You've got to kind of, you know...
There's strong wills.
12 strong wills.
- You're stuck with this bunch of guys
And thrown into Afghanistan.
And it was just fun.
Yeah, it was awesome.
- You know, we identified Tarin Kowt
As the first step in our campaigns.
The goal was, seize Kandahar.
I met Hamid for the first time in the hallway.
You know, he was going to the bathroom,
And I was walking to get some coffee,
And it was just men trying to work with one another
That didn't have any time for bullshit.
Even as all the tensions rose
Between the U.S. And Hamid Karzai,
He still had an uncanny ability
To hold things together over there.
I think it was around 3:00 in the morning or so.
The F-18s spotted a small convoy of trucks heading north.
So here are these F-18s flying overhead,
And they're calling for permission to engage.
And that was when... That was then the war
Really became real.
There was just this moment where Alan looks at me
And says, you know, "are they clear to engage?"
And, like, everybody was suddenly quiet.
I mean, I was...
I was gonna authorize these F-18s
To drop bombs on pickup trucks that were likely the enemy.
But, you know, what if I was wrong?
And it was the silence that always sticks with me.
You know, "are they clear to engage?"
And suddenly all eyes are on me.
I looked at Allen, and I said, "smoke 'em."
And after I said the words,
It was just sort of, where did that come from?
Smoke 'em?
I don't say shit like that.
I mean, that's just not me.
The thing we didn't realize, though,
Is that these trucks weren't the leading edge of the convoy.
They were actually at the tail of the convoy
Of maybe 1,000 Taliban.
- So we're just kind of lookin, you know, with binos,
And we saw this glimmer.
- I mean, these guys were coming heavy,
And we're talking 23mm guns.
A 23mm is, like, that big.
I mean, it will... It will blow you, "pah."
You'll be like mist.
- We tell the pilots,
"okay, we're the two truck right there."
And the pilots would go like, "that's it."
"yep, that's us; everybody else is the enemy south of us."
We were fucked.
- And YOSHIDA assured us, he's like, "man, I'm on tune.
"I'm talking to these pilots.
We're knocking them out."
And he would just keep saying, "cleared hot, cleared hot."
Through the whole night,
It just kept going further and further and further.
And we just, like, bombed out, like 100 vehicles
Through the whole night.
"Pop-pop-pop."
- I mean, I don't know that we were high-fiving and euphoric.
It's like, "whew."
We were just trying to win... And live.
- I think, for me, the notion of fighting from a distance,
Of fighting with these airstrikes,
It didn't sit well with me.
I mean, it...
It almost promoted just the promiscuous use
Of military power.
I don't know how to explain it.
It's just...
I mean, we would have died otherwise.
There was no alternative.
But something just didn't feel quite right about it.
I mean, in the end, we slaughtered them, you know.
And as they were retreating, we kept bombing them.
I mean, we wiped them out.
But I didn't feel good about how we had to do it.
I just felt like...
Felt like I should have been looking the enemy in the eye
Before I killed him.
- We went down, and we started doing battle damage assessment
And counting, you know, destroyed vehicles.
And, you know, in some of them,
There were still some charred bodies
That were just...
They're traveling in these little Toyota trucks,
And you jam as many guys in the back of the truck
And as many guys in the front of the truck as you could.
So there might be eight or nine people
In a Toyota truck,
And there was, you know, hundreds of those trucks.
- I don't know how to describe it.
It was just...
It was just what it is, you know?
You just... you're, like, initially kind of...
I don't want to say shocked, but you're just like, "wow."
I mean, you're seeing people
That are literally burnt and charred to death.
You know, you're like, "ooh, wow."
- That was the first of any of that carnage
That I had seen, you know, with my own two eyes.
It didn't really bother me.
It was just kind of gruesome, whatever.
But you're the enemy, and so it's okay.
And that's kind of how you programmed it.
"If I don't do this to you, you're gonna do it to me."
And it's really that simple.
- One of the things people... They just...
First thing out of their mouth, "how many people you kill?"
I didn't know we were counting.
I didn't know we were supposed to count.
If you know how many people you've killed,
It's probably not enough.
- It's not a scorecard. - It's not a scorecard.
- You know, it's...
- And there's a difference
Between shooting somebody face-to-face
And somebody from a distance dropping a bomb.
It's impersonal, you know what I mean?
"Ah, got him.
Ooh, dust, whoo-hoo, high-five."
You know, little bit longer shot,
"wow, the mechanics of that shot was great."
Face-to-face, I could tell you what they smelled like,
You know, how long it took them to bleed.
Some guys can't get rid of the smell, okay?
Smell of a burning body
Is different than the smell of a burning tire.
And you never know until you walk by
And you're like, "oh, shit,"
'cause that smell is now implanted in your brain,
What that means.
- My beard was covered in blood.
I mean, I didn't just see, smell; I tasted.
I thought I'd broke my nose, but then I realized,
I didn't get hit by anything, and why am I bleeding?
And, oh, it wasn't my blood.
And I still... I will get that flash smell on occasion,
And it'll take me right back.
You just... that's...
You know, that's the horror of it all.
It's very personal.
- I grew up with that strong American cowboy,
U.S. Cavalry heritage.
I was probably on a horse before I could walk.
You know, I'd studied U.S. And confederate
Cavalry commanders.
We had walked the battlefields of Gettysburg
And down through the Tennessee campaign.
It was not lost on me that here I am,
In the 21st century,
And I'm leading a 19th century cavalry.
- One of the things about the sf guys,
Most of them are kind of rough and tumble guys
To begin with.
- She goes, I expect...
- And just slide the bar the other day with that...
- There's no weight behind that.
- No, put that down first.
Put that down.
- The way I grew up in west Virginia,
It was clan-ish, you know.
Certain hollows, all these families lived up this one.
All these families live up that one.
And, you know, if you make an enemy of one guy here,
There's more.
- Afghani...
- Yeah, understanding how tribal people think
Is obviously gonna help.
- Every one of these leaders told us,
Do not become portrayed as the invaders.
You're here as liberators.
That's what you've said.
Because we were so few guys,
We could actually portray
That Taliban are actually the foreign invaders,
The Pakistani Taliban that had come over,
The Al-Qaeda that had taken over
And hijacked these people's country.
- Straight ahead. - Straight ahead.
- That is foreign Taliban. - Foreign Taliban.
- Okay, the one to the left...
- We've now raised this army,
Who are gonna rise up across the northern provinces,
And we're gonna press for Mazar-E Sharif.
The situation dictated that we needed to decentralize.
Each of these three-man cells, then,
Is tasked to support an afghan commander
That had between 300 to 750 fighters.
Each of those cells is a four- to eight-hour horse ride.
It was hot, dusty, dirty,
Riding the meanest, rankest, nastiest horse.
- I rode Vince's horse that one time.
- Rusty?
- I was like, "oh, my god, Vince,
How are you staying on this thing"
- That horse was cross-bred with a werewolf.
That thing...
- The Americans would get bucked off.
The afghans would get bucked off.
And everybody would kind of cheer.
That was another bonding experience.
- Extraordinary defense department photo
Released today.
United states special forces on horseback.
- When was the last time you saw U.S. Military personnel
In combat on horseback?
- Haven't had them in combat in a long time.
That's a tough mission.
- Not till I saw him on TV.
- Yeah, that was kind of a giveaway.
- Yeah, that was when I got the phone call
At 3:00 in the morning.
- Well, and 2 and 2 still make 4.
It's like, "oh, let's see, where could they be?
Afghanistan perhaps?"
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- We couldn't talk about where we were at
Or anything we were about to do.
And coming back from a skirmish, then,
I get a message:
"something's wrong; call home."
- I had...
I had Kaya.
And Michelle, bless her heart,
She was on the phone,
Trying to find a way to get a hold of mark
To let him know that I had delivered our daughter.
And... but I didn't hear from him
Till we were already discharged and at home
Several days later.
- Amy went in for an appointment,
A normal appointment,
And there were some complications, evidently,
And the ob specialist
Said, "you're having this baby today."
And it was over, what, a month early?
- Yeah, she said I had two hours to get my affairs in order,
And I was not to leave,
That I had to stay on the hospital grounds.
So I called...
- She called these wasps.
- These ladies.
- And they came.
And from what I understand,
Every one of you were in the delivery room.
- But it's what you do.
You just do what you have to do
To keep your house in order,
To keep your kids doing what they're supposed to be doing.
- And safe.
- Yeah.
And while they're doing what they do,
You do what you have to do,
And that's just the way we are.
That's the way this group of ladies are.
- Bounce back.
You know, they teach you that in the Q course.
They teach you that in ranger school, in sere school.
You just have to bounce back.
So I regrouped, took a deep breath, and...
We're about to go into battle.
- Morning wood.
- I wish we had that...
The froth, you'll see.
- Yeah, whatever.
- Worth $7 a cup.
I want to do something, man.
- You know there's gonna be a fight.
What are you gonna do, slap each other?
There's a breaking of a wrist,
A breaking of a finger that's on you.
There's a chewing of a nose off.
- We hit one of the compounds,
And you could just tell right away, you know,
That it was gonna be a difficult hit.
- They're on building one.
- You had less than one hour
From the time you left the helicopter,
Because if you weren't on the helicopter in another hour,
They would fly off for 24 hours, and you had to stay there.
- Unlike you, we didn't have any Afghani counterparts.
We were... it was us, on our own,
And we were out in bad guy country
With no support.
- And we breached into the house,
And it's all squishy and everything.
We're walking around, we're like, "what he heck?"
Well, at the time, we didn't realize
That they didn't have beds or furniture.
They just piled rugs.
So we're under night vision.
You could barely see anything.
Your eyes were going glean.
And on the floor, you saw some movement,
You know, squirming, like, "what the heck?"
I was a big guy then,
And tony was twice as big as me.
We're looking, and all of a sudden,
We see two little hands come up from this blanket
And lift it over,
And looks up and sees green little eyes,
And she sits up for second, squeezes her eyes like this.
And I'm like...
You know, you don't want to say nothing,
Because her dad could be in the next room.
We all got kids.
Imagine your girl starts screaming.
So all of a sudden, she did.
She started screaming and going nuts.
We're like...
- Yeah, yeah, "be quiet."
- So I pick her up.
Starts screaming even more.
One of the other rooms had caught fire.
So now she's really screaming and going crazy.
- We could hear it over the radio.
- Yeah, so you could hear it on the...
- And I'm like... 'cause we were outside.
- We were all on different houses.
- Yeah, we were outside in a gunfight.
- I remember I had a baby Ruth bar,
So I reach in my pocket,
I pull out a little baby Ruth bar.
I'm like... you know, she doesn't know what candy is.
Going like this,
And she's screaming and turning her head and everything.
I put it on my lips, and I put it on her lips,
And she licks her lips, and she's like, "huh?"
I came around the corner,
Where they were kind of lining up some other family members.
And I come out of the darkness.
And I think it was Rodney Trosco at the time,
Going, "what the fuck are you doing?"
You know, "put the kid down.
We're in a gunfight over here."
I'm like, "I don't know."
I got the rest of my tattoo colored in.
- Did you really?
Wow, I haven't.
I need to get some more...
One of the big things about combat
Is being able to keep your emotion in check.
A lot of people say that we don't have emotions anymore.
Well, maybe it's because we're good
At controlling our emotions
And not letting our emotions overtake everything else.
- Because you suppressed all those emotions
So much and so long,
You don't know what you're supposed to be happy for
Or sad for anymore.
Zero emotions, across the board.
I don't get overly happy.
I don't get overly sad.
I don't get overly excited.
And it, you know, becomes a big burden
For the family, too, because they don't know where I'm at.
"Did I do a good thing, dad?"
"of course, I love you, way to go."
- My name is bill Howell, nice to meet you.
Yeah, I worked with Jefferson.
I'm a special forces guy.
- Oh, you are? - Yes, ma'am.
I worked with him there in 5th group.
Fix the bike, put it back together,
Get it running, yes, sir.
- That's it, right there.
- Holy... look at that.
September '02.
To be able to do this for Jesse is awesome.
- You know, he was man that could walk in the room
And tell you how it is.
That's the way the bike is; it's loud.
You feel it, you know, the engine was strong,
Just like my father.
- Y'all want to try to push it back?
- In my head, that emulates everything my father was
And what I missed about him.
- I mean, there's no way
That anyone could ever replace his dad,
But if each one of us can give him a little something
Of what J.D.'s not able to,
Then I believe we're doing our job as brothers.
I would have never wanted to be my wife.
I wouldn't have wanted to be one of my sons.
Back and forth, back and forth,
Not knowing if you're gonna come home,
Somebody else getting killed.
What kind of... What kind of father was I?
I was young.
Very hard.
Very mean.
It's the whole intimacy of family,
That I didn't have it when I was a green beret,
'cause I was a good green beret.
Did a lot of things wrong.
Good lord.
And if I could, I'd do a lot of them different.
I'd sure be a better father and a better husband.
You know, it's just...
What can you do,
But try to learn and move forward, you know?
- Is that dad? - That's dad.
- I just don't believe it.
- I remember when my dad initially got his paperwork
About how he's gonna be the team sergeant of 574.
And that was honestly my dad's biggest dream,
To be a team sergeant.
- Doing the tobacco.
- Working the tobacco field.
- Yes.
That's a real scorpion right there.
- He left, and then...
It felt...
Normal again in the sense that that's what he did.
He would leave and go do his work,
And we would all be here.
Go to school.
And then he would come back in six or nine months.
We would see him again.
- This is the first letter I received from him.
"Hello, sweetheart.
"today is the 31st of October.
"this has been hardest trip for me.
"I really didn't want to go.
I just didn't want to leave you and the kids."
- I've never read it.
- I kept it for you.
- His love for family
Extended to how he treated the team.
It was an extension of his family.
- He was a good team sergeant.
He was rather soft-spoken.
He was like a big bear, until...
Until you pissed him off, and he'd, you know...
We didn't piss him off a lot.
- The anti-Taliban forces appear to be closing in
On the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.
- Talks on Afghanistan's future began this morning.
- A 44-year-old Pashtun tribal commander, Hamid Karzai.
- After Tarin Kowt,
There were all these terrific indicators
That we had the Taliban scared.
- We'd go through a village and not even fire a shot.
These guys would come out of the woodwork.
And you... you would be amped up.
You'd be like, "wup, wup."
You know, you're about ready to shoot.
You know, they'd be like, "ahh!"
You know, waving.
Once they could see the force coming in,
They were all about it.
They wanted to be with you.
They wanted to get the Taliban out.
- We were literally throwing as in the back of SUVs,
And just, you know, stacks and piles.
"hey, we got a couple more, guys.
Let's keep going."
- We had this few hundred man mob of afghan fighters,
And we just had to move this mob down to Kandahar.
- That's when we coined the tem
"fucked up like an afghan convoy."
- I knew it was completely unrealistic
When I went into special forces
That I'd be given the kind of autonomy
That, holy shit, here I have...
It was exactly the campaign I, you know, dreamed of.
- Northern alliance commander..
They have moved their troops
Into areas close to Mazar-E Sharif...
- Fighting is intensifying.
- We had greater maneuverabiliy on horseback in that terrain
Than the Taliban or Al-Qaeda did.
They're in armored vehicles and pickup trucks.
They're tied to their fuel depos.
And so we were able to cut them off
From reinforcement
And cut them off from retreat.
I probably rode 300 miles or more.
I was determined I was gonna ride that horse
All the way into Mazar-E Sharif.
- Crossed over the river.
The water was higher enough
That the horses actually started to float down the river.
And, of course, we did not want to go for a swim.
- Standing in the water, very cold water,
Water up to my waist.
I just looked back, looked south,
And then I just realized, it was...
It was the most unbelievable shot I'd ever seen.
It was a thousand riders on horseback.
It was peaceful, yet magnificent.
- Mazar-E Sharif has indeed been captured
By the northern alliance.
- They perceived us as liberators.
I didn't learn until later
That they perceived my team,
From the Uzbek lore, as Malakas,
Avenging angels with swords of lightning.
- The fall of the city
Is the biggest blow to the ruling Taliban
Since the allied airstrikes began 35 days ago.
- That was the pinnacle
Of what all sf soldiers train for.
- I graduated from the university of Nevada Las Vegas
With an accounting degree.
Went to work for an accounting firm
And determined that I did not like it at all.
And I said, there's got to be more to life
Than balancing a checkbook.
Don Bolduc was the best officer in my battalion.
He was also my operations officer.
- It was the opinion of our senior leadership
In the pentagon
That they wanted a lieutenant colonel,
A more experienced officer,
On the ground in Afghanistan.
And so that's why we deployed.
To me, it was...
It was exciting.
- I mean, one day I'll tell my grandkids about it
When I'm old and decrepit,
And they'll go, "oh, yeah, sure, grandpa."
- You know, while left to our own devices,
We felt like we were able to get quite a lot done.
It was almost the seeds of our own destruction,
Because everything went so well.
Then we find out, you know, a headquarters with 20 folks
Are going to come in.
- I remember celebrating thanksgiving in Pakistan,
And then we infilled the next night.
- Okay, they're moving in.
- Well, once I got there, I had a big meeting,
You know, getting coffee-breath close with them.
And I explained it to them.
I said, "okay, here's the deal.
"This is the way it's been organized.
"this is the way it's been directed.
"and we're soldiers, so let's salute the flagpole
And get beyond the emotion of it.
- So the thing we had feared when this higher command
Comes in and starts giving us orders,
We're gonna have to follow them.
Well, higher command came in, giving us orders,
And now we have to follow them.
So somebody else was now controlling the fight.
- I meet captain Amerine for the very first time,
Captain Amerine and master sergeant Davis.
I don't think they were...
I don't think they were real happy.
- Oh, god, I hate it, telling this story.
It just sucks.
Always sucks.
I've seen all the ways that the truth can be twisted.
And...
I couldn't let that happen.
- How are you?
- I don't know.
I don't know.
The morning of the 5th, things were done.
- 7:00, we started seeing people, "oh, all right,"
You know, and then, "hey, what's going on?"
And then the mail, so we were reading mail
And burning it as soon as you read it.
- On the 5th of December,
The targets were predominantly in this area.
We received intel
From what we considered a very reliable source
On where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda
That were still resisting us
On the other side of the bridge were.
So I went to colonel fox.
I said, "sir, I would like to start initiating
"some close air support,
Daytime close air support in this area."
- The hostilities were over.
The Taliban were coming to surrender.
Why was the battalion headquarters
Calling in an airstrike to begin with?
I mean, to me, it was pretty obviously
A way to say that they'd engaged the enemy
Before the war ended.
- I don't know if the sun hit it just right.
But we observed the opening of a cave.
- Every airstrike that we directed
Was basically personally authorized by me.
I explained it to fox and Bolduc.
- You know, I'm a colonel; he's a captain.
So both professional enough to know,
You know, I'm giving the orders.
You execute... You execute the orders.
- I was livid.
Again, trying to contain my anger.
There was no valid target to bomb there.
- He's a commander.
I mean, he outranks you.
He can do whatever he wants, really.
Is it the most tactically proper way of doing things?
No, not with us being there.
- We could have done nothing.
But nothing was...
You know, I don't believe
That was the proper course of action.
We were just... We were just trying
To interdict them
And drop enough ordinance on them
To make a statement
And, you know, kind of ruin their day
And get them to dislodge and go in retreat.
- B-52s overhead.
They look back at me and say,
"are we cleared to drop a 2,000-pound JDAM
On the cave opening?"
I say yes.
I, you know...
I'd say it's something that I'll take to my grave with me,
As a, you know, should I have done something different?
Should I have done...
Should I have...
You know, should I have just ignored this?
- When you call in an Airstrik, you have to be hypersensitive
Of all the things that could go wrong.
You're talking about a 2,000-pound bomb.
- I would give everything back,
All the promotions, all the recognition,
All the medals, everything that I have,
Everything that I have,
For none of this to ever have happened.
- All emotion and everything
Just kind of shut off for a little bit.
And I remember this feeling.
It was, "fuck you, I'm not dead."
- The next thing I know
Is that my head's being driven into the dirt.
- Mag was blown apart over her.
You know, this was... I didn't see anybody.
I mean, you're focused right here.
- And I had blood and body parts,
You know, various... All over my uniform.
- And I'm just sitting there looking at myself,
And this thumb was touching the inside of my arm here.
I'm like, "oh, that's bad."
As I arched, because I had a big sucking chest wound,
All this blood starts blasting out of my shirt here.
And I remember starting to kind of go into shock,
And I said, "oh, my god," three times.
And so the last thing I thought was,
As I was looking at that, is,
If I go face-down, I'm gonna drown in this.
So when I go out,
I got to go and turn my head this way.
And that's the last thing I remember, and I...
- You know, there's really not a day
I don't think about that whole event.
I mean, we never found enough of master sergeant Davis.
We had to do a DNA analysis,
Because the bomb hit exactly where he was standing.
- Our company sergeant major came in with the news
That 574 had a JDAM dropped on their position,
And said J.D. And...
- Dano.
- Dano were k.I.A.
And that was kind of a devastating moment.
- The 574 casualties hit me pretty hard.
Trying to figure out what I want to...
How I want to tell you this, but...
- These guys on your left and right,
And they will always be there, no matter what.
And, to me, it's like brotherhood.
Excuse me.
- I finally shut off for a minute,
And I just cried my eyes out.
The first Americans killed in Afghanistan
Were killed by their own people.
- Afghan fighters have deserted the Taliban.
- Soldiers are now deserting in the hundreds.
- They surrendered Kandahar that day.
And... I just need a minute here.
- In four short months,
Our nation has begun to rebuild new york and the pentagon,
Rallied a great coalition...
- I was down there below, on the floor of congress,
Listening to the president give the "evil empire" speech,
Which would end up being a very defining speech
For the next 14 years, really.
- Terrorist training camps,
Saved a people from starvation,
And freed a country from brutal oppression.
- What does victory feel like?
It felt like we had done our jobs.
I mean, as hindsight, it was the perfect...
You know, it was the mission that we'd trained for
From the time we came in special forces.
That was the mission.
- We had less than 100 guys.
We topped the Taliban and ran Al-Qaeda off.
Add 20,000 troops, been bogged down every since.
- I think we did make it look too easy.
But we didn't really have time to reflect on that
Before we were invading Iraq
With the expectation it would be over quickly.
- What we have found in Afghanistan confirms
That, far from ending there,
Our war against terror is only beginning.
- So when we chased bin laden
Out of Afghanistan, into Pakistan,
As far as the commander told us,
We have done our job.
"great job."
We all but tied the bow on Afghanistan at the time.
That same team, that same group of guys
Went to Iraq, and less than 90 days,
We thought Iraq was over too.
- Yeah.
- We were having tea in Baghdad.
- Literally.
- Eating in a restaurant.
- You're welcome.
Yeah, here's your country.
- You know, nine months later, you come home again,
And you got a new mission.
You used to go in a VFW,
And you hear one guy had one tour,
And you're like, "oh, wow."
And you hear one guy had two tours,
You're like, "ooh, he's a little crazy."
You know what I mean?
Somebody had three tours,
You know they're out of their minds.
- Yeah.
- And what you see now is, you know,
People have five, seven, nine, ten tours,
And they're still going.
- Me and Scotty...
Scotty and I retired the same year.
And when I retired,
I just went home and...
And I'm gonna tell you this.
11 days after I retired, I put my wife in the hospital.
I don't even know why.
I just kind of freaked out.
I'm not saying it's PTSD.
I'm not saying it was anything.
I don't even really remember what happened.
It's just... it's just like,
You know, you go, and you do things,
And you do some, really, stuff that's crazy.
And then, when you're done,
They just tell you, "bye."
You know?
- I just came back from Afghanistan again,
Another deployment over there.
This was my 26th deployment total.
I forgot to give him some stuff last night.
- I'm just filling him.
How long have I known mark?
For as long as I can remember.
Probably since 3 or 4.
So I've known him for a long time.
I usually know what he's thinking,
And sometimes he does me.
- I know.
- Yeah, but...
- Amy's, you know, raised our family,
You know, being a single working mom
Majority of the year.
- I've had some trying times at home,
But I manage to get through it,
And then I yell at him for it later,
Going, "this is what I had to deal with."
- It's just adapting,
Continuing to evolve and adapt to that new normal.
Maybe that's part of it,
Is, you keep turning up the heat a couple degrees at a time
Over 26 deployments,
And then you're kind of at that new normal.
My tolerance level for bullshit
Is kind of at its max.
And, you know, I...
I'd say that's maybe one thing,
Just lose some patience with myself
Or my family, or...
- When he comes home from deployments,
We try to bring everybody here to just be a family,
Hang out outside.
- Is that good?
- But, yeah, 14 years.
Kaya was born when he was in Afghanistan.
She's almost 14.
- Wait, wait...
Now.
- I keep going back because I want to believe
That we made a difference.
You know, the ranger creed they instill in us
Is, you know, "readily will I display
"the intestinal fortitude to carry on to the objective.
Though I be the lone survivor, I keep going back."
- I remember that morning.
It was like 2:00 in the morning.
I happened to be just up.
And I see it on CNN.
It goes, two special forces soldiers got killed.
And I'm just thinking,
"oh, god.
I hope they're nobody that I know."
- I was 13.
Yeah, I was at school.
They called my name for dismissal,
To come to the office to be dismissed.
And I went, and the person picking me up
Was someone who I never thought would be picking me up.
And we got in the car, and we were driving home.
I said, "well, why are you picking me up?"
And he said, "well, your mom just wanted me to come get you,
Pick you up early."
And I remember saying out loud to him,
"maybe my dad came home."
I said, "maybe my dad's coming home today."
- I walked in the door,
And that's when I saw the chaplain standing there.
I actually saw my mom and my sister crying.
The next day, when they said that they dropped a bomb
And it hit him,
I was angry.
I actually hated the military for a little while,
But I had to act like I didn't.
- How many soldiers die?
And what is it for?
What is it for?
Okay, it's for our country.
But what is it for?
- Hey, this is a little special rum from Guatemala
That was introduced to me by a good friend.
His team worked in Guatemala for like a year,
Doing a fid mission, and kicked ass.
So...
- All right, one for the brotherhood.
One for the legion.
- One for the legion. - The legion, brothers.
- Hello, cuz.
You doing all right?
Good to see you.
Mikyong, how are you?
Good to see you.
What you think, man?
- Yeah.
She's here, man, that's the main thing.
She's here.
- Dude, it's...
- Are you excited? - Very, very.
- Program's clean.
What do y'all think, man?
- I'm ready to start it.
- Give it a try?
- Just make sure it's in neutral.
Turn the key on.
Let her rip.
- Yeah, it's in neutral.
Hey, you want to sit on it?
- Jesse, why don't you sit on it?
That way, you can balance it, 'cause it's not on the stand.
There you go.
Pop the thrust, get some fuel in that bad boy.
Yeah!
Whoo-hoo-hoo!
- All right!
Whoo!
- Just hearing the bike,
It was almost hearing my dad again.
Like, "I'm here."
Like, "I'm right here."
- There are just certain spots around the world
Where I feel like I can just kind of get lost,
You know, just being able to disappear.
Every soldier I ever led in action
Was wounded or killed.
What does that say about me?
What does it say about my abilities as a leader?
What does it say about me as a soldier?
Everybody was off the hill,
And I walked back up on the hill to where I knew J.D. Had been,
And I just started kind of doing a loop,
Looking for anything I could.
I looked.
I couldn't find anything.
It...
All that could come to mind for me was this poem,
"futility" by Wilfred Owen.
There was all this...
There was this pervasive naivety about what modern war was about.
And then, the trenches of Europe
Wiped out a generation.
"Move him into the sun.
"gently its touch awoke him once,
"at home, whispering of fields un-sown.
"always it woke him, even in France,
"until this morning and this snow.
"If anything might rouse him now
"the kind old sun will know.
"think how it wakes the seeds...
"woke once the seeds of a cold star.
"are limbs, so dear-achieved, sides
"full-nerved, too hard to stir?
"Was it for this the clay grew tall?
"O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
"to break earth's sleep at all?
Here's another one.
I'm gonna slide next to you.
- You know, what's amazing to E is, we're not dead.
Because they don't put things out like this
Unless you're dead.
- Well, there's a difference between a monument
That's why it's a monument, and not a memorial.
- Exactly.