Special Forces Who Avenged 9-11

From an article by Ms. Alex Quade, titled "Special Forces Who Avenged 9-11 (Alex Quade's "Horse Soldiers" Short)" posted on the Small Arms Journal.

These are the Green Berets who avenged the 9/11 attacks. War Reporter Alex Quade spent 5-years tracking the Operators down and persuading them to go on camera and share their photos and stories. Three ODAs ("A-Teams') of 34-men on horseback -- including Special Forces, Combat Controllers and CIA Operatives -- worked with the Northern Alliance after 9/11 to overthrow the Taliban and Al Qaeda, before America even knew that we were at war in Afghanistan. Alex Quade did stories for CNN, the Washington Times and a full film narrated by Actor Gary Sinise. Quade is releasing this SHORT version from her Edward R.Murrow Award-winning documentary, for the 15th anniversary of 9/11, and the rededication of the statue at Ground Zero.







Alex Quade is a war reporter and documentary filmmaker who has covered U.S. Special Operations Forces on combat missions since 2007. Extreme storytelling and risk-taking lie at the heart of Alex’s work. She's the recipient of more than two dozen professional awards for excellence in journalism.

Among the more notable awards: Two Edward R. Murrow Awards, one for her film Chinook Down and the other for her documentary Horse Soldiers of 9-11; the Congressional Medal Of Honor Society’s Excellence in Journalism Award for her “honest & courageous” war reportage; a Peabody award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (a CNN group award); an Emmy award for coverage of the 9-11 terrorist attacks (also a CNN group award); and her in-depth, frontline reporting on the Asian Tsunami was individually listed in CNN’s Du-Pont Columbia Award.

Alex started her career at the White House. She's worked in television covering global conflicts and hostile environments for CNN, Fox News, Headline News (HLN) out of Frankfurt, Germany and New York. She's produced special video reports for The New York Times, and The Washington Times. Alex Quade's first book, "Danger Close", will be published by Hachette Books in 2018.

Green Beret Major Jim Gant - Lawrence of Afghanistan

This article was published by the NY Post under the title: Green Beret brings girlfriend to Afghanistan, "goes native". This title, does not give Major Gant justice, while the accompanying article is more middle of the road. What is more telling about Jim Gant is the respect and admiration he has received from his fellow Green Berets - that should be enough.








The Green Beret Soldier Who Went Native in Afghanistan - the NY Post article by Gary Buiso

In a remote village in the dangerous northeastern Kunar province of Afghanistan, Army Green Beret Major Jim Gant was doing something few others had — he was making progress against the enemy.

To do so, he and his men went native — trading their body armor for traditional Afghan garb, growing long beards, speaking the local Pashto tongue, and forging close alliances with tribesmen, who would come to revere Gant as “Commander Jim.”

But when he went to bed at night, Gant had one thing his men did not — company. Ann Scott Tyson, a Washington Post war correspondent, quit her job to live secretly with him on the front lines — where he taught her how to shoot an assault rifle for protection. They drank alcohol and made their own rules.

When his commanders got wind of the domestic bliss he carved out for himself in the heart of a war zone, Gant was quietly relieved of his command and pushed to retire in disgrace.

Once nicknamed “Lawrence of Afghanistan” by Gen. David Petraeus, Gant was now more like Col. Walter Kurtz, the Green Beret who goes native — then loony — in the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.” Gant indulged in a “self-created fantasy world,” his commanders charged.

To this day, Gant remains as defiant as Kurtz. “They treated me like a crazed criminal instead of who I was,” Gant, 46, tells The Post. “My expectation was only ever that I would be treated honorably, and that just did not happen.”

The son of schoolteachers, Gant grew up hunting rattlesnakes in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he was inspired to enlist after reading Robin Moore’s 1965 book “The Green Berets.” “I grew up pretty tough. I had a real tough dad,” he says. “Ever since I could remember, I’ve never had a problem fighting. I used to fight a lot when I was younger — so it almost felt like an extension of that for me.”

He enlisted in the Army in 1986, went through special forces training and fought in the first Gulf War. In 2003, Gant was deployed to Afghanistan. He quickly learned there were only two ways to succeed — either get in a gunfight with the Taliban, or find people who would be friendly to the cause. And in the village of Mangwel, where he met tribal chief Malik Noor Afzhal, he found the latter.

Gant showed the leader — whom he nicknamed “Sitting Bull”— footage of the 9/11 attacks, which Afzhal said he had never seen before. “I said we had come there to fight the enemies of my country,” Gant recalls.

Here, the seeds were sown for Gant’s combat philosophy, which would inform a 45-page treatise he wrote in 2009 called “One Tribe at a Time.” “It’s about people. It’s about face-to-face relationships. It’s about the ability to get in there and find out what is going on on the ground and figure out how you can best leverage that resource in Afghanistan which means the most — people,” he says.

He didn’t get the chance to fully realize this initiative until 2010, when Petraeus, then in command of the US forces in Afghanistan, ensured that Gant would go back to test out his “native” theory, charging him with supervision of “village stability operations.”

By that time, Gant — awarded a Silver Star for a brutal battle in Iraq in 2006 — was attracting attention from journalists such as Tyson, 55, a Kansas native who covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The two first spoke over the phone in 2007 and eventually met in Washington, DC, in 2010, when the pair — both separated from their spouses and each with four kids — quickly fell in love. “We spoke each other’s language,” Tyson says.

When they met, Gant was grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder — he still is — and it was Tyson’s wartime experiences that provided her with a deep understanding of what he was going through. “Not only could I talk to her, I loved looking at her, and she is a very wonderful woman, as well,” Gant says.

Gant left for Afghanistan in June 2010, and in March 2011, Tyson left her job to join him. She was a true believer. “The mission he was embarking on made a great deal of sense to me,” Tyson says. “I had seen the military take a much different approach to the point that they were having zero contact with the Iraqis and the Afghans. It was not working.”

The couple lived alongside Afghan tribal fighters in mud-walled compounds with crude latrines and no running water. An Afghan cook whipped up meals for everyone, usually rice and beans with flatbread. On special occasions, they’d eat watermelon.

The couple would stroll through the village together, where they’d meet locals, who would sometimes invite her alone into their homes. “One woman brought out a copy of the Koran, and she started reciting it and asking me to recite after her,” Tyson says. “It was very moving for them to share their religion with me — an infidel American woman. It was extremely powerful.”

And she made an impression on Sitting Bull, who called her his “daughter-in-law” and took her into the interior courtyard of his home — where even Gant had never set foot. “It was a family atmosphere, totally different. Joking, laughing, children were playing on swings. The babies were in the hammocks,” she says. “The symbolism was that I was part of his family.”

Gant taught his lover practical skills — such as how to fire weapons. “I mainly learned how to use a 9mm, AK-47 and an M4. I learned a bit on the larger guns mounted on vehicles,” she says. “This was all as a last resort, in case of a dire emergency.” She said she fired the guns only in training, where she also learned how to hand off ammo to a turret gunner. “You can absolutely say I was his right-hand woman,” she says. “I had many different roles, primarily offering a rare opportunity to build relations with the women in the village.”

Gant says it was not irresponsible for him to bring his lover to Kunar, a hornet’s nest of Taliban and al Qaeda. Rather, it showed the tribesmen the ultimate respect — he trusted them with the safety of the woman he loved.

While there, she was working on her new book, “American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant.” Before long, Gant and the 17 men in his command didn’t even need to request assistance when things got hairy. When there was word that a suicide bomber was headed to Mangwel, it was the local mosque that sounded the alarm over its loudspeaker. “We did not ask them to do this,” Gant says. “That’s a pretty remarkable thing to happen in an Afghan village. I didn’t have one checkpoint in Mangwel, I had 4,000.”

So it was no wonder that when Petraeus awarded him a Joint Service Commendation Medal for his work in Mangwel, Gant knew who also deserved the honor — his old friend Sitting Bull. The next day, he gave it to him. “Without you, there is no me,” he told him.

Twenty-two months after he arrived — and almost a year since Tyson joined him — a lieutenant tipped Gant’s superiors to their cozy living arrangement, as well as other behaviors, including prescription drug and alcohol use. “None of his bosses knew that Ann was there,” Army 1st Lt. Thomas Roberts told ABC. “He didn’t follow any [rules]. He was definitely erratic. He did not act in a stable manner.”

Roberts filed a sworn statement in March 2012, accusing Gant of “immoral and illegal activities and actions,” claiming the major was “intoxicated and under the influence of pain medications.” Gant was airlifted out of Afghanistan, stripped of his special forces honors, demoted to captain and pushed into retirement — a case the Army kept quiet about until Tyson wrote her book. His beard was shaved, and he received a letter of reprimand, signed by Lt. Gen. John Mulholland. “In short, your actions disgraced you as an officer and seriously compromised your character as a gentleman,” the letter reads.

Gant admits to popping pills and says he knows his superiors’ hand was forced once the allegations surfaced. “Any statement that I lived in a self-indulgent fantasy world is not correct. I did drink alcohol. I did take sleeping pills. I did take pain medication. I did break other rules with regard to operational guidance,” he says. But he says those are minor infractions compared to the progress he was making. “It’s ironic to me that [they] would use the term fantasy. It’s almost as though their view of Afghanistan is the real fantasy,” says Tyson, who escaped the country on her own. The brass never caught the two together.

The couple was finally married in Maryland in May 2013 and went back to Afghanistan to “properly” say goodbye to Sitting Bull that September. They now live in Seattle, and plan to one day return to Afghanistan. “Under the right circumstances,” Tyson says.

Captain Keel, latest SF Casualty of Afghanistan

Captain Andrew Michael Pedersen-Keel, 28, of Madison, Conn., died Mar. 11, of wounds received from small-arms fire in Wardak Province, Afghanistan.

He was assigned to Company B, 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), Fort Bragg, N.C., and was deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Pedersen-Keel was commissioned as an Infantry Officer after graduating from the U.S. Military Academy in 2006. After graduation he attended the Infantry Officer Basic Course and the U.S. Army Ranger School at Fort Benning, Ga. Following his training, he was assigned to the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division (Light) at Fort Hood, Texas.

In June 2008, Pedersen-Keel deployed to Afghanistan for 12 months with the 3rd BCT where he served as a company executive officer and platoon leader. Upon completion of the deployment, he volunteered for the Special Forces Assessment and Selection Course. After completing the Special Forces Qualification Course and language training, he was assigned to the 1st Bn., 3rd SFG (A) as a detachment commander in August 2012. He deployed with the unit to Afghanistan later that year.

His military education includes U.S. Army Airborne School, U.S. Army Ranger School, Combat Lifesaver Course, Combatives Level I Course, Sniper Employment Leaders Course, Pathfinder Course, Maneuver Captain's Career Course, the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape Course, and the Special Forces Detachment Officer Qualification Course.

Pedersen-Keel's awards and decorations include the Bronze Star Medal (2), the Army Commendation Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Afghanistan Campaign Medal with two Campaign Stars, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, the Army Service Ribbon, the Overseas Service Ribbon, the NATO Medal, the Air Assault Badge, the Expert Infantryman Badge, the Parachutist Badge, the Pathfinder Badge, the Combat Infantryman Badge, the Ranger Tab, and the Special Forces Tab. 

He is survived by his parents and sister.

Special Forces Ordered out of Afghanistan Province

From an Associated Press by Patrick Quinn, titled "SF Ordered out of Afghanistan Province"

Afghanistan's president on Sunday ordered all U.S. special forces to leave a strategically important eastern province within two weeks because of allegations that Afghans working with them are torturing and abusing other Afghans.

The decision seems to have caught the coalition and U.S. Forces Afghanistan, a separate command, by surprise. Americans have frequently drawn anger from the Afghan public over issues ranging from Qurans burned at a U.S. base to allegations of civilian killings.

"We take all allegations of misconduct seriously and go to great lengths to determine the facts surrounding them," the U.S. forces said in a statement.

Also Sunday, a series of attacks in eastern Afghanistan showed insurgents remain on the offensive even as U.S. and other international forces prepare to end their combat mission by the end of 2014.

Suicide bombers targeted Afghanistan's intelligence agency and other security forces in four coordinated attacks in the heart of Kabul and outlying areas in a bloody reminder of the insurgency's reach nearly 12 years into the war.

Presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi said the decision to order the American special forces to leave Wardak province was taken during a meeting of the National Security Council because of the alleged actions of Afghans who are considered linked to the U.S. special forces.

He said all special forces operations were to cease immediately in the restive province next to Kabul, which is viewed as a gateway to the capital and has been the focus of counterinsurgency efforts in recent years.

The Taliban have staged numerous attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces in the province. In August 2011, insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter, killing 30 American troops, mostly elite Navy SEALs, in Wardak. The crash was the single deadliest loss for U.S. forces in the war.

Afghan forces have taken the lead in many such special operations, especially so-called night raids.

"Those Afghans in these armed groups who are working with the U.S. special forces, the defense minister asked for an explanation of who they are," Faizi said. "Those individuals should be handed over to the Afghan side so that we can further investigate."

A statement the security council issued in English said the armed individuals have allegedly been "harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people."

Ceasing all such operations could have a negative impact on the coalition's campaign to go after Taliban leaders and commanders, who are usually the target of such operations.

Faizi said the issue had already been brought up with the coalition.

The U.S. statement said only that the announcement was "an important issue that we intend to fully discuss with our Afghan counterparts. But until we have had a chance to speak with senior Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan officials about this issue, we are not in a position to comment further."

The brazen assaults, which occurred within a three-hour timespan, were the latest to strike Afghan forces, who have suffered higher casualties this year as U.S. and other foreign troops gradually take a back seat and shift responsibility for security to the government.

The deadliest attack occurred just after sunrise — a suicide car bombing at the gate of the National Directorate of Security compound in Jalalabad, 125 kilometers (78 miles) east of Kabul.

Guards shot and killed the driver but he managed to detonate the explosives-packed vehicle, killing two intelligence agents and wounding three others, according to a statement by the intelligence agency. Provincial government spokesman Ahmad Zia Abdulzai confirmed the casualty toll and said the building was damaged in the attack.

A guard also shot and killed a man in an SUV filled with dynamite that was targeting an NDS building on a busy street in Kabul, not far from NATO headquarters. The explosives in the back of the vehicle were defused. Blood stained the driver's seat and the ground where security forces dragged out the would-be attacker.

Shortly before the Jalalabad attack, a suicide attacker detonated a minivan full of explosives at a police checkpoint in Pul-i-Alam on the main highway between Kabul and Logar province. One policeman was killed and two others were wounded, along with a bystander, according to the NDS.

Also in Logar province, which is due south of Kabul, a man wearing a suicide vest was stopped by police as he tried to force his way into the police headquarters for Baraki Barak district, said Din Mohammad Darwesh, the provincial government spokesman. The attacker detonated his vest while being searched, wounding one policeman, according to Darwesh and the NDS.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the Jalalabad attack and two others in the eastern province of Logar in an email to reporters. He did not address the attempted assault in Kabul.

The Invasion of Afghanistan - CPT Jason Amerine and ODA-574

CPT Jason Amerine and ODA-574 led the invasion of Afghanistan linking up with then unknown Hamad Karazi to defeat the Taliban in Khandahar Province. The interview below is after Jason Amerine was promoted to Major and was teaching at West Point. I remember meeting Jason when he was a third year cadet assigned to my "A" team during the summer period for his branch exploration OJT.

SOF Congressional Report, July 2010

U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF Background and Issues for Congress
by Andrew Feickert, Specialist in Military Ground Forces
July 9, 2010

SFA Chapter IX is posting the Summary of this report here with a link to the whole report at the bottom on this article.

Summary

Special Operations Forces (SOF) play a significant role in U.S. military operations and the Administration has given U.S. SOF greater responsibility for planning and conducting worldwide counterterrorism operations. The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) directs increases in SOF force structure, particularly in terms of increasing enabling units and rotary and fixed-wing SOF aviation assets and units.

The USSOCOM Commander, Admiral Eric T. Olson, in commenting on the current state of the forces under his command noted that SOF forces are deployed to more than 75 countries and 86% of these forces are in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility. Admiral Olson also noted ongoing growth in SOF units and aviation assets and the effectiveness of Section 1208 authority, which provides funds for SOF to train and equip regular and irregular indigenous forces to conduct counterterrorism operations. USSOCOM’s FY2011 budget request for $9.8 billion has been recommended by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees for full funding, and both committees have also recommended additional funding for unfunded requirements.

Afghan-related issues include the impact of new command relationships as well as rules of engagement, which have limited SOF nighttime raids targeting insurgent leadership. These SOF raids have been characterized as being highly successful, even though on some occasions they have resulted in civilian casualties. U.S. SOF have been given the mission of training Afghan Civil Order Police, who are responsible for manning checkpoints and interacting with locals. A more controversial mission involves up to 23 Special Forces Operational Detachments – Alphas (ODAs) training local militias in remote areas of Afghanistan to fill a security void. Potential
issues for congressional consideration include how command relationships and rules of
engagement are affecting special operations in Afghanistan and whether training police and militias is the best use of U.S. SOF.

For the full report, please go to: http://www.sflistteamhouse.com/tempfiles/US_Special_Operations_Forces_-_Background-1.pdf