WAZI, Afghanistan — The Green Berets of ODA 2021 were on high alert as their convoy rumbled down the winding, rutted road that day in March 2003. The team had been tipped that armed men loyal to the notoriously volatile warlord Pacha Khan Zadran lay in wait around the bend.
As they approached this mountain village in eastern Afghanistan, the Americans spied the warlord's fighters high on a ridge to their right. They scrambled for cover behind their trucks and Humvees.
Moments later, machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades rained down on their vulnerable position. Though pinned down, the Americans responded with a fusillade of their own.
"The air was snapping like Rice Crispies
," the Special Forces team's newly assigned commander, Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth C. Waller, 32, wrote in a florid after-action report. "So many rounds were flying back and forth that lead was overcoming the oxygen in the air."
Cont'd...