War’s prologue: Special ops team faced rough road in first days of Afghanistan war - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

War’s prologue: Special ops team faced rough road in first days of Afghanistan war

Army Capt. Jason Amerine and a Pashtun tribal leader by the name of Hamid Karzai are walking on a gravel road “adjacent to unplanted fields softly illuminated by starlight.”

Two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the pair are discussing the mission that the author says “changed the course of history.” The reader is there with Amerine and Karzai — because the narrative is so compelling and the conversations so convincing.

Amerine leads the 11-member Operation Detachment Alpha 574, a Special Forces team sent into southern Afghanistan “to destroy the Taliban in the important southern city of Kandahar.” And to unite northern and southern tribes against the Taliban. And to prevent a civil war.

That is the strategy.

On the ground, Amerine and his men face three challenges:

• To make sure nothing bad happens to Karzai, a Pied Piper gathering anti-Taliban fighters.

• To convince Afghan recruits to shoot and not to run.

• To convince the CIA and the American military brass to let special forces do their jobs without second-guessing.

The CIA usually listens. The higher-ups do not. After three months, each member of ODA 547 is wounded, and two die from friendly fire.

“Battalion headquarters directed the air strikes in spite of the presence of the ODAs who should have been calling in the bombs.”

After ODA 574 and the Afghanis successfully took a hill dubbed the Alamo, headquarters wanted some action too, Blehm writes. Except there was no more action. “There hadn’t been so much as a bullet fired in the past 15 hours,” and ODA 574 anticipated the arrival of a Taliban surrender party.

But ODA 574 and Karzai’s fighters are mistakenly hit after a headquarters lieutenant colonel gives orders to “put a bomb” on a cave he suspects hides Taliban members, and a Joint Direct Attack Munition bomb is off target.

“There was a hot and blinding flash. The explosion sounded like a thunderclap and felt like a paralyzing kidney punch that sucked the air out of Amerine’s lungs and tossed him through the air.”

Amerine is not this story’s only hero, but Blehm’s interviews with eyewitnesses show that the West Point graduate is a combat leader to respect and remember.

After the other wounded are evacuated, Amerine searches an area “littered with blackened shreds of clothing, bits of sandals, and pieces of burnt or bloody flesh — looking for part of a dog tag, a wedding ring, a finger that might identify an individual” — an individual his fellow soldiers called JD.

A headquarters commander is “watching as the captain wandered around the impact zone, staring at the ground.” He speaks.

“You’re in shock, Captain,” he tells Amerine. “You need to come back and sit down.”

“I’m not in shock,” Amerine replies. “I’m looking for my team sergeant.

“We have to find something for his family to bury. I’m fine.”

Even in duress, the wounded Amerine understands that “accidents happen in war and people are fallible, but this one had been avoidable.”

Fallible? Indeed. Karzai is in a second term as president of Afghanistan and often maligned — eight years after one ODA 547 soldier who died in the bombing said Karzai was “too good a man” for politics. “They’ll eat him alive.”

———

Huffman is a Military Times book reviewer.