Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War (23 page)

I had met Cpl. Meyer at Combat Outpost Monti a few weeks after the Ganjigal battle. I was embedded for a second time with Battalion 1-32, and Lt. Jake Kerr insisted that I meet the “pit bull.” I included a chapter about Ganjigal in a book called
The Wrong War
, then turned to other writing assignments.

A year later, Dakota asked if I would write a book with him. I demurred, explaining that an agent could provide him with many qualified writers. That wasn’t the point, Dakota said; he wanted a grunt to deliver his message.

“I can write about battle,” I said. “But I don’t want to hear about your sex life.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re too old to remember what that is.”

* * *

Hmm. I had written my first book,
Small Unit Action in Vietnam
, in 1966. While that had been several decades before Dakota was born, it wasn’t exactly as long ago as World War I. Since then, I’ve been in battles in jungles, villages, deserts, and mountains and written seven books about combat that shared one trait: chaos.
Every retelling of battle is a description of confusion.

Ask a dozen players to reconstruct a football game and you will get a dozen differing accounts. Imagine, then, the confusing recollections after a battle. The Ganjigal battle, given its ferocity and the antagonisms toward the staffs in the rear, had a number of contradictions in the footnotes citing the sworn statements of the participants.

There is agreement, however, about the overall narrative. I was not present at the battle, although I had embedded several times in the Ganjigal region and knew many of the soldiers and advisors. This book is based upon hundreds of hours of discussions with Dakota. I’ve also talked with other participants and have pored over dozens of witness statements and investigations. The quotes are illustrative and not the actual words used in the fight. These are his words and expressions. This is Dakota’s account from start to finish.

In its ferocity, valor, treachery, and bungling, Ganjigal was extraordinary. The battle resulted in thirteen friendly fatalities, two investigations, two reprimands for dereliction of duty, one Medal of Honor and the “loss” of the recommendation for a second Medal of Honor. A writer imposes coherence upon chaos by selecting a point of view and developing themes that tie the narrative together. The focus of this book is the character growth of Dakota Meyer. His story stands as a metaphor for the war. It illustrates three themes: a frustrating
war, a misplaced strategy, and the grit of the American warrior. Let’s look at each of the three.

First, the frustrating war has no end point. by giving the Taliban a sanctuary, the Pakistani generals have ensured that the war will not go on indefinitely. Our soldiers are fighting only so that Afghan soldiers can take over the fight. In Vietnam, I patrolled in a dozen villages like Ganjugal, where the farmers were inscrutable and enemy without uniforms sprang ambushes. Afghanistan is a similarly elusive and maddening war, where the host government is unreliable and tribal loyalties are suspect.

That medieval culture defied reshaping by our policymakers. President Obama called Afghanistan “the good war” and doubled the number of troops, followed by ordering a withdrawal. Our troops have taken the war to the enemy and placed the Islamic terrorists on the defensive. That’s about as much as can be done. Wars fought for fuzzy objectives are not guaranteed to succeed.

Such irregular wars will repeat regularly. Because we are a nation that pursues success, we are frustrated by such ambiguity. We don’t want to divide our country, as in the Vietnam era, when there was an unpopular draft. That is why we have an all-volunteer force. We need warriors like Dakota who fight willingly when our elected commander-in chief gives the order.

A second theme that emerges is strategic overreach at senior operational levels. Our generals insisted that democratic nation-building was the only viable military strategy. Grunts like Swenson and Meyer knew nation-building was too ambitious. A thousand years of culture, religion, and traditions separated us from the tribes.

No outpost was ever established in the valley of Ganjigal. Qari Zia Ur-Rahman, the Taliban commander during the battle, was
a hard-core Islamist dedicated to winning. He often boasted of his victory at
Ganjigal and circulated pictures of the equipment taken from the bodies of Team Monti. Despite a $350,000 bounty, Rahman has remained in command of Kumar for years without being betrayed, a disturbing indicator of the tribal loyalties and the balance of power along the 1,500-mile border. In ten years, U.S. leaders failed to develop a method for changing the nature of the Islamic mountain tribes.

We should have deployed thousands of advisors like Dakota to train Afghan soldiers, and then left. Instead, our generals focused on winning the hearts and minds of tribesmen hurtling headlong into the ninth century. This resulted in top-down rules of engagement that paralyzed mid-level staffs like the TOC at Joyce. The ROE “expressly prohibited” air or artillery strikes unless the ground commander had “
positively identified enemy forces within a residential compound.”

Not even the Kiowa pilots flying ten feet above the houses could “positively” identify enemy who didn’t wear uniforms. Capt. Kaplan, who had been on the southern outpost (OP), told the investigators that the rules of engagement shielded the villagers who were helping to kill Americans.

“The ROE protects civilians at the cost of American lives,” he said. “I understand this to be within the spirit of COIN (counterinsurgency), and the intent of the Commander, but it does not adequately account for
situations in which there may be no non-hostile actors.”

With the villagers aiding the Taliban, who was not hostile? Using stronger language, Fabayo echoed Kaplan’s condemnation.

“I have never heard of a rule that would not allow you to fire on a house,” Fabayo said. “They always teach you that
you always have the right to defend yourself.”

Gen. Scaparrotti had promised, “our fallen heroes and Gold Star
families,
you’ll not be forgotten.” The angry Gold Star families, however, believed that the investigation was a
cover-up for the higher-ups. Swenson was so furious that he mocked the senior staffs for playing video games.

“The ground commander is calling in that mission because he feels that he needs it,” Swenson testified. “It’s not JAG [lawyers’] responsibility to interject to say, ‘Hey, we are concerned that you’re going to hit a building … I am concerned with saving as many lives as I can … When I am being second-guessed by somebody that’s sitting in an air-conditioned TOC, well hell, why am I even out here in the first place? Let’s just sit back and play Nintendo … I am not a politician. I am just the guy on the ground asking for that ammunition to be dropped because it’s going to save lives.”

The senior command had issued rules of engagement without addressing who had the authority to make the final decision. Maj. Williams believed he was only an advisor, and that the Afghan major, who didn’t know how to call in fire, was in charge. Swenson believed he had the right to assume the role of ground commander and make the decisions. The staff back at the ops center in Joyce overrode his fire requests. Authority was diffuse, and no single person was held accountable. What a mess!

Gen. Colin Powell, widely admired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early 1990s, had a strong opinion about command decision-making. “The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise,” he wrote. “In my experience, the people closest to the problems are often in the best position to see the solutions.
The key here is to empower and not be the bottleneck.”

* * *

The third—and most important—theme of the book is grit. Under fire, some men put their faces in the dirt, most shoot back, and a very few charge forward. Dakota’s story was remarkable for its dogged aggressiveness. Most acts of bravery occur at a single point in time; Dakota rushed toward death, not once, not twice, but
five
times. Between each attack, he had time to reconsider. Once inside the wash, he repeatedly left the truck for so long that
Rodriguez-Chavez several times thought he had been killed. Can you imagine dodging bullets to carry back wounded Afghan soldiers, or leaning over the side of a truck to shoot a man, or pounding in a man’s face with a rock?

The Medal of Honor pays no attention to rank, education, or background; it symbolized the American fighting spirit. In concept, Dakota understood that the Medal honored the sacrifice of his comrades. At night, though, monsters crept out of his closet. When he sipped a beer with his commander-in-chief, I knew what he eventually blurted out.

“You either get them out alive, or you die trying,” he said on
60 Minutes
. “If you didn’t die trying, you didn’t try hard enough.”

Dakota believed he was accepting an award for failure, a burden he no doubt will carry with him for the rest of his life. But had he not driven off the jihadists who swarmed his truck, the medevac helicopter would have been a sitting duck—
Fabayo tried to wave off the chopper—and the escape route out of the valley sealed off, turning a tragedy into a full-blown catastrophe. Intellectually, I think he understands that. Emotionally, he focuses on what he is convinced that he did not do—save his brothers.

What drove him forward? Was he shaped by his upbringing in a farming community with traditional American values, or by his tough training as a Marine sniper?

His nature led him to charge into the fire. That instinct sprang
from a Kentucky upbringing that stressed determination.
Finish the game
.

Regardless of his grit, in that valley he was a dead man, had he not been so expert with a variety of weapons. He wouldn’t have stood a chance had he not been able to handle a .50-cal, a 240 machine gun, a grenade launcher, and an M4 rifle without ever thinking. He had the muscle memory of a professional athlete, an instinct acquired by thousands of hours of practice. Four years of Marine training and discipline had nurtured his skills.

So was it nature or nurture that drove him forward into the fire? In the case of Dakota, it was both—testimony to the invincibility of the American warrior.

Kunar River (Monti at center left).
(Capt. Jacob Kerr)

Combat Outpost Monti (Afghan section at lower left).
(Capt. Jacob Kerr)

Big Mike Meyer, Dakota Meyer, and Bing West at Big Mike’s farm.
(Bing West)