Dirty Wars Page #3

got it wrong.

Again, they were hoping

it was gonna go away.

Well, it wasn't.

Like yourselves, we set off

very early one morning

from Kabul through

Logar to Gardez...

When up rolls a huge convoy

of countless Afghan

officers and soldiers.

And among them is a man

wearing a uniform

that I recognize

as sort of U.S. Marines,

but it says U.S.

Navy on his lapel.

But I didn't know who he was.

They off-loaded a sheep,

and three Afghan soldiers

knelt on this sheep

in exactly the same place

where these soldiers had been

when they started the raid.

They were offering to

sacrifice the sheep.

The soldiers tried to stop

Starkey's photographer,

Jeremy Kelly,

but the family insisted.

Otherwise, there'd

be no evidence

that this extraordinary

event occurred,

no proof of who

the killers were.

Like so much about this war,

they would have remained unseen.

He said that, "My

soldiers were responsible

for the deaths of these

members of your family,"

and for that, he apologized.

I would not trade my sons for the

entire kingdom of the United States.

America unleashes

the Special Forces on us.

And the Special Forces

beat and kill poor, innocent people.

These Special Forces with the

beards did cruel, criminal things.

They all have beards.

We call them

the American Taliban.

BROOKLYN, NY

I returned home

and tried to put the story

of Gardez behind me.

But coming home is never easy.

I didn't want to admit it,

but life back home was dull

after being in a war zone.

Ordinary life was just that.

I tried to forget about Gardez

but couldn't.

We pulled everyone out, okay?

Now, at that point,

I'm watching what's

going on here.

I see it all go down. Now...

The video was chilling,

but I couldn't see their faces.

All I had were images

of their hands

and the sound of their voices.

Okay, the blood trail.

This is it.

This is the last room.

This is where the

engagement was.

He comes in here. There's-

There's a woman crying

in the doorway.

None of these clues

were supposed to exist-

the cell phone video,

the photos of the

admiral and his sheep.

The killers were meant to

disappear without a trace.

The family had called

them "American Taliban. "

But who were they,

these American

soldiers with beards?

As a reporter, you

learn that every story

has conflicting points of view.

You try to understand

all of them

without letting your

own get in the way.

But there was something

about this story

and the way it was covered up.

The photo of the admiral

had seemed to answer

our questions about the raid.

But the longer I looked at it,

the less sense it made.

I could read the name and rank,

but who was this man

delivering the sheep?

Vice Admiral William McRaven

wasn't from NATO

Headquarters in Kabul,

and he wasn't from the

Eastern Regional Command

that owned that battle space.

I'd never seen the RO1

insignia on his shoulder.

And it was hard to find

mention of him in the press,

much less a photograph.

But I found an old DoD

press briefing from 2008

that mentioned

McRaven's nomination

to lead an obscure unit

within the military

called JSOC,

the Joint Special

Operations Command.

After more than a decade

as a war reporter,

I thought I knew most of

the players involved,

but I'd never heard of JSOC.

There was little

official record,

but JSOC was formed in 1980

after the failed hostage

rescue mission in Iran.

It was designed

as the most covert

unit in the military

and the only one that reports

directly to the White House.

So why would the

President's elite force

be kicking down the doors

on a family in Gardez?

I knew Gardez wasn't

an isolated incident

and went back to NATO's

daily press releases

with their lists of

killed and captured.

I expected the list to be long,

but I had no idea how long.

Every week, the tempo

of raids increased.

In the last three months,

there had been 1, 700 night

raids in Afghanistan.

It was a staggering figure

and meant that stories

like the one in Gardez

were unfolding nearly

20 times each night.

An endless list of raids

but not a single name.

I could see that Gardez was

part of a bigger story-

much bigger.

But the very thought of

it was overwhelming.

With 1, 700 raids,

who would compile the

list of the dead?

The surge of night raids

was clearly changing the

war in Afghanistan.

It didn't take long for

JSOC's actions to ricochet.

Matthew Hoh has become

the first U.S. official

to resign in protest

over the Afghan war.

Hoh is a former marine

who spent five months

working for the State

Department in Afghanistan

and is, by all accounts,

well-respected.

CPT. MATTHEW HOH

FORMER STATE DEPT. OFFICIAL

A lot of times, yeah,

the right guys would

get targeted,

and the right guys

would get killed.

And then plenty of other times,

the wrong people

would get killed,

sometimes innocent families.

And then that sets

you back so far.

You know, nothing like

going into a village

in the middle of the night,

knocking a door down,

and, like, killing

a woman or a child

to just undo everything that

infantry battalion command

had been trying to do for, like,

the last nine, ten months.

You were in a position

where you were

trying to vet lists

to make sure that

the wrong people

weren't being killed

by these task forces.

Were there 500 people

on this list, 1,000?

No, I can't-

I can't tell you.

- Oh, you can't?

- Yeah.

You can't tell me because...

I can't tell you 'cause I

can't tell you that stuff.

- You can't talk about it?

- Yeah.

I saw the list. I saw

how big they are.

Yeah, everything else, yeah.

I mean, that's-

I can't tell you.

I was just...

The Joint Special

Operations Command

had never numbered more

than a few thousand.

But under William McRaven,

Afghanistan had

become JSOC's war.

How had such a small covert unit

taken over the largest

conventional war

on the planet?

Andrew Exum had experienced

the change firsthand

when he served as part

of McRaven's high value

targeting campaign,

not in Afghanistan

but in Iraq.

He led a company

of rangers in 2003

as part of JSOC's

Iraq task force.

CPT. ANDREW EXUM

75TH RANGER REGIMEN I watched the way

things began to change.

You know, kind of

the iron rule was,

you don't go anywhere unless

you've got, you know,

a company of Army

Rangers in reserve.

In 2003, nobody was in reserve.

I mean, people were hitting

targets every single night

in a very dispersed way

and just-bam, bam, bam.

I mean, you remember

the deck of cards.

We kind of had this

poster of all these guys,

and we went out looking

for them every night.

So we would, you know,

kick down a door

and pull somebody

out of their home

in the middle of the night,

and the next morning, you know,

people would be rioting

in the streets.

I'm in!

Clear!

Come out!

On your f***in' face.

On your face.

Yeah, I remember one

night going out.

You know, we found out later

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