Within a few days of the incident our first investigator arrived at the FOB in Jalalabad to find out what happened. Within a couple weeks another one showed up to do the exact same thing. I got the feeling like the military had no idea how big this thing was going to get and had a hard time believing the information the first guy came back with. I mean, I get it. They heard about this whole thing over the wire and from some news reports. They had a brief summary of what was told to them in the After Action Report. The first investigator came back with reams of statements and a story that didn’t match up with what they were told by their counterparts. Senior Brass in the military is often completely out-of-touch with reality and facts on the ground, much like our politicians in Washington. “Well this can’t be right! That one guy doesn’t know what he’s doing! Send our buddy out there to get to the bottom of this! My first star is on the line here!” I’m willing to bet there were some conversations and statements made comparative to that.
I think one of the investigators was an Air Force guy, maybe a Colonel, and the other one was an Army guy. Honestly, I can’t keep them straight anymore or remember which one showed up first. I remember a Colonel Pihanna, and I do think he was first, and I do think he was in the Air Force. I remember giving him pages and pages of written statement, the same story I’ve given you here, obviously with more detail then because it was fresh in my mind. The big parts of the story are the same, and I’ve been consistent with them for the last 17 years. Now I may have forgotten a few names of people in the Unit back then, or names of the investigators, or color of the local woman’s clothing, but I can still see the whole thing in my head today almost as clearly as when it happened. I remember hearing the tat-tat-tat short round bursts of the turret gunner in front of us. I remember seeing the other Marine peaking up over the sidewall and ripping a few shots off. It’s not something you forget.
I remember being in fear from the moment the first investigator showed up until the time I finally set foot back on American soil. Things were so obviously hush-hush about The Incident. Nobody talked about it on purpose. It was ignored. Marines acted like that patrol never happened. I had given my wannabe Recon Marine team chief the down and dirty version right after the incident, and he never again spoke to me about it until the NCIS were investigating us in Kuwait. Then I could sense he was just probing me for information on what I told the investigators so he could relay to his buddies.
The investigators in Jalalabad were interviewing everyone who was involved with the mission. Some people were only in with the investigator for 15 minutes or so. I was in there for hours and it was getting noticed. That was a problem. It was very apparent that a story had started to come together from the Platoon guys because I was being asked about a crack in a side window on one of the Humvees. Turns out they were trying to use that as evidence that we were shot at during the attack, but I had different information on that.
You remember in a previous post when I told you the Platoon guys were beating up role players during training and sending them to the hospital? That occurred at Fort Campbell, KY when we were training with the 160th SOAR in November of 2006. Another interesting point of that training exercise is when I noticed that crack in the Humvee window when we were preparing to move out on the training mission. I even pointed out the crack to one of the guys in the Platoon and asked “is that a bullet strike from you guys or did it get hit with something?” That one lone ding in the side window turned out to be a major part of the evidence used to justify the whole Incident, even though I provided information that it was previous unrepaired damage from 2006.
I was isolated within the Unit from them on. Maybe it was a combination of self-isolation because I was becoming so paranoid, and actual isolation because people were avoiding me. It was uncomfortable to say the least and I was stuck in the middle of the Afghanistan mountains with nowhere to go. I became more paranoid, more isolated, and it was a downward spiral. What I never did though, was lose the faith in what I was doing. My information was consistent and detailed to the investigators and I did not stray from what happened. I knew the hallmarks of an honest source because I evaluated and vetted sources for honesty and trustworthiness and I knew I need to be perceived as one. That part was easy, the truth is always the easiest part because you don’t have to create anything or worry about remembering it. I didn’t have anything to hide anyways because what I was doing wasn’t for the military or the person who was asking the questions. My duty was to a cause greater than us. My duty was to my fellow Man, my Creator, and my history. The path I was walking during that time was dark and full of terrors, but my mission was clear.
So what am I talking about? What was I afraid of? Being fragged quite honestly. Being knifed or gutted in the dark between buildings. Being drove out on a mission in the mountains and being left to the Taliban, pushed over a cliff, or just outright shot in the head. Again. Any number of things that heavily armed psychopaths are capable of when they feel threatened. Make no mistake, I was definitely surrounded by some outright psychopaths. The beating of role players in training showed us that. The wanton killing of women and children proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. I was just some “intel guy” getting in the way. The avoidance and cold shoulder I was getting from my team chief didn’t help matters either. Matter of fact, I figured he’d be the one they sent to do the dirty work.
Not long after The Incident happened our company executive officer/intelligence officer decided that we needed to do something big to get back into the good graces of Special Forces Group and CENTCOM in general. We were still in the purgatory period with initial investigations and the military trying to grapple with what actually happened. There was still hope that this would just go away. Our XO came into the intel office and asked what reporting we had on weapons caches we could go after. We had nothing solid. We had at best some single-source reporting of a cache in some general area in the mountains and the name of a village elder nearby, that’s it. Well he wanted it. He wanted that cache so bad he could taste it and the promotion he’d surely end up getting afterwards. I tried to convince him we couldn’t go after that target. One, he wanted us to go in the middle of the night, up the side of a mountain with 1000 ft drops, on a goat cart trail, on night vision goggles, in extremely heavy Humvees. Two, we had no direct information on where the cache was at or if it actually existed. Three, we had never made contact with this village elder before. Four, there was no Quick Reaction Force or any support what-so-ever if shit hit the fan. Despite all of the very valid arguments against, he decided we were going. Not him, us, with some of the Marines from the Security Platoon who had still never been in the shit. Matter of fact there weren’t any officers going along. Myself and the Security Platoon Sergeant were the highest ranking Marines going: Bad sign man, bad sign.
He told us we were going to get out there, knock on some doors (in the middle of the night), find out who the elder was, and have him take us to the weapons cache. YES, it was really that rudimentary of a plan, that much of a sad joke, and really that crass, but we’re Marines so “Aye-aye sir.” With everything that was already going on and now this to dress up and get ready for, sometimes I don’t know now how I didn’t have a nervous breakdown then. I was definitely tougher and younger then. Maybe I really was bullet proof back in the day.
After the sun went down and the evening came, we marshalled all the Humvees together and briefed the mission for that night. We did a map reconnaissance as best we could to establish grid coordinates for certain points along the way, and we set out sometime around 9pm local. I remember it was very dark that night; either a lot of cloud cover or very little moonlight, but things on night vision were still pretty dark. With the infrared headlight on the front of the Humvee we still didn’t have more than 20 yards visibility out in front of us. I think I was in the 2nd vehicle in the order of movement, sitting in the front passenger seat, or the vehicle commander seat as we called it. I was fully geared up, had handsets for the radios strapped to me, guns, and mission equipment, and we were hauling along at a pretty good clip headed east down the main route on the paved road out of Jalalabad.
All of a sudden out of nowhere these concrete road barriers that they use here in the States to divide left and right lanes popped up in our view out of nowhere right in the middle of the road. We’re in a military convoy, we’re driving straight down the middle of the road. I mean, we’re probably doing 50 mph and we’ve got 20 yards of visibility ahead of us, you just heard a collective “SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT” in the Humvee while the driver yanked the steering wheel to the right, then the left, then the right, then the left, and we were skidding, out of control, trying to stop the truck, and just before we could get stopped the rear tire caught traction on the side of the road over onto the right side we rolled. Immediately everything in the truck fell on me. All the ammo cans, odds and ends, and I was laying on my right side against the door on the ground. Amazingly our turret gunner didn’t get thrown clear or killed. He ducted down just in the nick of time and just got tossed around a bit. I look up over my shoulder and my poor interpreter is hanging there in midair, thankfully he had is seatbelt on.
I was trapped and I couldn’t move. The gear all over me, the radio handset cords wrapped around me, gun slings, body armor, helmet – I was stuck. Obviously the convoy came to a stop and then the recovery effort begun. Shortly thereafter, Marines were helping get everyone out of the Humvee from the turret hole, setting up security, calling back to base, and assessing the situation. They asked me if I needed help but I told them I’d just sit tight until they rolled the Humvee back over. Then, I started to smell fuel. Not wanting do die in a Humvee fire, I began the frantic effort of setting myself free. I pulled the ripcord on my body armor and just let it fall off. I ditched my helmet, my guns, and everything else. I started to inch myself towards the turret hole when I just felt like, a dozen hands just lift and pull me out of that thing like I was floating in the air. It was a strange sensation, almost out-of-body.
Well, I was the Staff Sergeant there so no time to waste. I got after assessing the situation and making sure we had a plan to pull the truck back over. Meanwhile there was a commotion with some locals going on right next to the crash so I jumped over there to see what was up. No guns, no helmet, no body armor, just me standing there feeling pretty naked with my interpreter. Turns out the reason for the concrete barriers was because this was the tax collection point for commercial goods coming into Afghanistan from Pakistan, and these old timers lived next to the road in a tent where they worked out of, collecting taxes. The back end of our Humvee took out a leg of the tent and the old man’s father, the even older man, had ran crazily out into the dark to get away from us. We had just killed a bunch of their people a few days before, so naturally they were pretty afraid of us. When he came back we saw he had boogered up his leg a little bit so I tried to make some inroads by getting the Corpsman to patch him up.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t Shoot!” they kept saying. “No Taliban here” they told us. “Don’t worry” I said, “we’re not here for that, we just had an accident. No one is getting shot tonight” I told them. Just then, about 25 yards up the road “KAPOOOW!” echoed out the shot of a 5.56mm NATO. I looked at the old man and lied, “That was not a gunshot.” Well, it was very obviously a gunshot and what happened was one of the Security Platoon Marines attempted to fire a warning shot at an oncoming driver. He slightly missed the warning part and ended up grazing some local, who we had get treatment for. Yeah.
Well, we got the Humvee pulled back over and turns out the door latch on my door was now broken and wouldn’t hold the door shut. There was no way we could wander up a mountain goat trail with a 1000 pound door swinging wildly, and I could barely keep it closed enough just on the highway by holding it. The mission was officially scrubbed and we RTB’d. What we didn’t know was at the same time we were having our little adventure, 1st Platoon had been on another convoy coming back from an outpost and had themselves a vehicle roll-over as well. What a great night it was for the whole company! When I returned from the scrubbed mission and made my way into the Tactical Operations Center, I got in there just in time to see the message come up over the big screen: “MSOC F is ordered to cease all operations.” That message came straight from Special Forces Group in Bargram, probably at the direction of CENTCOM. That was the end of MARSOC’s first foray into combat operations.
To be continued…