Fearless (36 page)

James’s résumé had been scrutinized—he and his fighters were not the type to surrender. “When you get there,” a briefing officer informed the assault force, “be ready for a fight.”

About forty-five minutes into the squadron’s meeting, Kelley sent Adam a message on Skype, hoping he was there. “Hi, sweetie,” she wrote. When she didn’t receive a response within a few minutes, she sighed and set about helping the kids get ready for school. It was Wednesday, Saint Patrick’s Day, and both Nathan and Savannah were wearing green. While Savannah chattered on in her usual manner about what the day had in store, Nathan was subdued.

“He was quiet that morning,” says Kelley, “which is how Nathan gets when he’s sad. I didn’t have to ask why; I knew it was because he missed his daddy.” What Nathan didn’t tell his mother and sister was that he had awakened that morning worrying about his father, a feeling he couldn’t shake.

After dropping the kids at school, Kelley spent some time with Michelle, taking an aerobics class, having a smoothie, then shopping for household supplies at Target. “It was Saint Patrick’s Day,” says Michelle, “and Kelley has never liked the color green,
but everything in the store was green that day, and out of the blue she said, ‘I think I’m starting to like the color green. I’m going to start embracing the color green from now on.’

While his teammates wore double-eyepiece night-vision goggles, Adam was easily identifiable as the lone operator with a mono lens. He is shown here post-raid during a mission in an undisclosed location.

“Okay,” said Michelle. “You do that.”

Soon after night fell, the assault force was driven to the tarmac, where double-rotor MH-47 helicopters awaited. Their crews performed the final flight checks as the men loaded their gear and piled in for the “commute” to work.

In the lead helicopter, Tom Ratzlaff and his sniper team settled into their seats.
On liftoff he silently recited his usual prayer when heading into someplace hot:
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven …
He followed the Lord’s Prayer with,
Lord, take care of my wife and kids, protect them and watch over them. Protect my buddies and forgive them of all their sins and me of all my sins. Amen
.

Then it was game on. As with the rest of the team, Tom focused completely on the operation, mentally reviewing the enemy-occupied terrain they were infiltrating. He and his fellow snipers had helped choose the landing zone and mapped out the route over which they would lead their teammates through the mountains to Objective Lake James. Once on target, the snipers’ job would be to position themselves so they had eyes on the SEALs that would be assaulting the target, to cover their brothers and put a bullet through the head or chest of any enemy presenting a threat.

Tom never prayed for protection for himself; he considered that God’s decision. Instead, he devoted his body and soul to protecting the team. In his role as overwatch, Tom had never lost a man.

In the Hindu Kush mountains, the helicopters hugged the terrain, flying low and fast along a steep ridgeline. Kevin, who was in the second MH-47, felt the helicopter slowing down. The engines’ pitch changed while the helicopter banked and descended into the mouth of a small side canyon.

Out the window to Kevin’s right, only a granite ridgeline was visible; it was nearly vertical at the top and spilled downward into a steep and rocky slope. Taking in the greenish night-vision hues of the landscape, he leaned toward the window for a better look but could see only treetops—a dark swath of evergreen forest concentrated in the deepest recesses of this narrowing chasm. To the sides and above the helicopter, the jagged slopes appeared to squeeze in on the spinning rotors that labored to keep the machine airborne and steady. The pilots held their altitude, hovering as they searched for a suitable opening to land these dual-rotor beasts.

Gnarly
, thought Kevin. Hands down, this was the most hellacious landing zone he’d encountered in his entire career.
Nobody in his right mind would fly a helicopter into this ravine
, he thought—exactly
why
it had been chosen as their LZ. The elite pilots of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment could fly and “park” these “buses” like sports cars just about anywhere.

Generally, these types of infiltration happen in seconds, but on this night the pilots circled back up and out of the gorge and came in a second time. Finally, the message came over radio headsets: “We’re roping in.”

As the SEALs led the assault force by sliding down ninety-foot “fast ropes” into the enemy’s backyard, Chris Campbell slammed into a boulder the size of a van. From the boulder he bounced against a slope that he estimated at sixty degrees. Sliding on his rear in the loose granite, he hustled to get out of the way before the next guy landed on top of him. Dust from the rotor wash gave the scene a misty, sinister appearance through his night-vision goggles.

Minutes later the MH-47s disappeared, and the assault force made its way down into the forest, which was nourished by a creek that tumbled through the gorge. Though the area had been thoroughly scouted from above, Chris could see that being in the bottom of the ravine, with high ground above them, was a no-win situation if an enemy machine gun emplacement had been overlooked. They would be cut to ribbons.

The sniper team led the way through the rocky, wooded chaos, followed by the assault force that included a small contingent of Afghan Special Forces soldiers with an interpreter, and two groups of American light infantrymen who would take up blocking positions as the SEALs carried out their raid. Two of the infantrymen had hit the ground so hard roping in that they’d broken their night-vision goggles. Hobbled but determined, they had no choice but to buddy walk, virtually blind, over the brutal terrain.

After a couple of hours spent negotiating cliffs, traversing avalanche paths, and fording rivers and streams, the Afghans—renowned for being both hearty and nimble in their mountainous element—could not keep up the pace. The interpreter, the strongest Afghan, later described the SEALs and their American military counterparts as “machines.” “They would not stop,” he said.

The inclusion of these Afghan troops, their physical endurance aside, was a political partnership that none of the SEALs were particularly happy about. While the SEALs carried around fifty or sixty pounds, they’d made sure the Afghan loads topped out at thirty. At one point Adam shouldered an Afghan’s rucksack on top of his own load, giving the man a half-hour breather while the line moved forward. At three hours, the same man lay down on the ground and moaned that he couldn’t go on. Adam picked him up and pushed him down the goat path. At four hours, the
man slipped, falling thirty yards down a steep granite face, and Adam hurried down to him with the interpreter.

“Look,” Adam said forcefully. “You gotta man up; there’s no other way out of here. When the sun comes up, we’re either going to get swarmed by enemy or we’ll be gone. The only way out is down this valley and through the target. So get up or we’re going to leave you right here.”

About three-quarters of the way to the objective, after the assault force’s route merged into a man-made trail, a dog began to bark ferociously from a small enclave of rock-and-timber huts that air reconnaissance had missed. When an unarmed man wearing a
shalwar kameez
appeared in a doorway, a contingent of SEALs stopped to speak to him and search the premises. They found tools, cooking utensils, clothing, and bedding—no radios or weapons—but they informed the Afghan that he and his family of seven were being watched, and instructed him to keep everyone inside their homes until after sunrise. If they did not follow these instructions explicitly, they would be killed.

The doors to the rest of the huts were closed up tight, not a sound heard from within, and the SEALs continued toward Objective Lake James.

At the rally point, a few hundred yards outside the mountain hamlet where the target resided, the sniper team radioed back its status. There was no time to rest. It had taken over two hours longer than expected to reach the area, and morning was fast approaching. As soon as the rest of the assault force began to arrive, the snipers moved forward to recon the village.

Along with women, children, and the elderly, every single building Tom and his fellow snipers passed likely held the enemy as well. Tom knew they were completely surrounded and outnumbered, but “after eight years of war,” he says, “we’d been doing it so much, I felt, ‘I’ve got every advantage in the world on these guys.’ I was superconfident.”

Adding to that confidence, there was no smell from cooking fires and the “eyes in the sky”—intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR)—reported thermal images of people sleeping throughout the valley and almost no movement. From thousands of feet overhead, every SEAL on the ground was immediately informed when an Afghan male stepped outside a hut to urinate, then quickly went back inside.
Without night-vision goggles, the world was black, and in the blackness the SEALs found comfort.

It had taken over six hours for the final remnants of the assault force—the Afghans, prodded by Adam the entire way—to reach the objective rally point. This was late, but not late enough to warrant aborting the mission. No man had completed the journey without numerous falls; one SEAL estimated he’d gone down at least fifteen times, and they were all bloodied, bruised, and fatigued. There was no time to acknowledge any of that, though. The sun would be up in a few hours, and every one of the Americans remembered clearly the intelligence officer’s final remark that capped their briefing:

“When you get there, be ready for a fight.”

“I
T’S HARD TO DESCRIBE TO SOMEBODY
who hasn’t been in these mountains, and visited these villages, just how badass the Objective Lake James op was,” says an Army NCO (noncommissioned officer) who was on a mortar team at one of the forward operating bases that James had been attacking.

“Think of it like they infiltrated a hornet’s nest, which is way gnarlier than just kicking it. That whole area was swarming with hard-core Taliban, so they snuck into that valley like it was the entrance to the nest, and they crept past all these hornets who were asleep and went straight for the queen that was James. And then they went ahead and kicked him right in the head, knowing the entire swarm was there on top of them and they still had to get out of the nest. Crazy thing is, these guys were okay with that.”

Deep inside the hornet’s nest, the assault force moved in staggered formation down the sides of the village’s main thoroughfare: a narrow, rutted dirt road. Stone and earthen-walled dwellings built into the face of a rugged mountain flanked their left side. On their right were a few sporadic buildings whose roofs they could literally step onto, as the slope continued dropping off steeply into farming terraces, all the way to the valley floor a quarter mile below.

The road veered left, following the contour of the mountain, and buildings appeared on the opposite side of the valley in more stair-stepping terraces, a sleeping honeycomb of enemy intermixed with the local population. Amid the confluence of crowded structures on the left and descending terraces on the right was James’s compound. A bit wider and perhaps twice the length of a basketball court, it was built on
its own terrace and surrounded by eight-foot walls. Its western wall—one of the short sides of the rectangular compound—was against the mountain, while the remaining walls jutted out and overlooked the valley.