Roberts Ridge/John Chapman- The Ground Truth feat. Pete Blaber

Summary

The Antihero Podcast: Roberts Ridge/John Chapman - The Ground Truth feat. Pete Blaber

Host: The Antihero Podcast
Guest: Pete Blaber
Release Date: June 30, 2025
Duration: Approximately 4 hours

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1. Introduction and Setting the Stage

Timestamp: 00:00 – 05:35

The episode begins with an engaging conversation among hosts Pete Blaber, Brent Tucker, and Tyler. The initial minutes discuss operational approvals and the challenges faced by first responders in high-stress environments. Tyler introduces himself as the owner of Counterculture Inc., followed by Brent Tucker, who owns FRCC, a company catering to first responders. Advertisements and sponsor messages are strategically placed but are excluded from this summary to maintain focus on the core content.

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2. Welcoming Pete Blaber and Overview of the Mission

Timestamp: 05:35 – 18:02

Brent Tucker introduces Pete Blaber as a seasoned military veteran and the guest of the episode. The discussion quickly delves into the complexities of military operations, particularly focusing on the disjointed chain of command experienced during the mission in Afghanistan. Pete emphasizes the critical lesson learned over two decades of warfare: “decision making and problem solving made by disconnected chains of command never has and never will be able to make sense of what's happening on the ground.” (01:10)

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3. Mission Development and Initial Operations

Timestamp: 18:02 – 39:31

Pete Blaber recounts the formation of Agile Field Operations (AFO) teams amidst the chaos following the rapid fall of Kabul and other key areas. With less than 500 Special Mission Unit Americans on the ground, AFO took the initiative to locate and neutralize foreign fighters without awaiting top-down directives. He highlights the importance of “shared reality” and ground-level intelligence in successful operations. A pivotal moment occurs when a local warlord provides the first tangible clue leading the teams to Gardez, establishing Pete’s headquarters.

Notable Quote:
“We knew our purpose, which was to deny enemy sanctuary in Afghanistan. This was our task.” (20:21)

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4. Overcoming Bureaucratic Obstacles and Expanding the Team

Timestamp: 39:31 – 56:15

Despite initial support, Pete faces resistance from higher headquarters, particularly JSOC, which is focused on rigidly targeting high-value individuals like Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, or Usama bin Laden (UBL). Pete's persistence leads to the approval of additional AFO teams, although not the number he initially requested. This section underscores the tension between ground-level insights and upper-echelon strategic directives.

Notable Quote:
“We were living in a training mentality... they just believed that nothing can happen unless it comes from this all-knowing headquarters.” (55:14)

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5. The Operation in Shahiqot Valley

Timestamp: 56:15 – 99:48

Pete details the tactical execution of the mission in Shahiqot Valley. The AFO teams, equipped with specialized gear and extensive terrain knowledge, conduct reconnaissance and successfully locate enemy fighters. However, their success is short-lived as higher command, dissatisfied with their initial progress, intervenes to take control of the operation. This leads to the introduction of additional SEAL teams who, despite their expertise, are ill-prepared for the specific conditions of the battlefield.

Notable Quote:
“General Hagenbach... understood our coordination and was very cooperative.” (82:22)

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6. Chain of Command Disruptions and Operational Failures

Timestamp: 99:48 – 185:25

A critical breakdown occurs when higher headquarters orders the insertion of SEAL teams mid-operation, disregarding the established protocols and AFO’s strategies. This leads to a chaotic engagement where miscommunication and conflicting directives result in unnecessary casualties. The transcript includes harrowing details of helicopter crashes, errors in identifying targets, and the tragic loss of SEAL Neil Roberts.

Notable Quote:
“General Hagenbach had to change his mind. He had already said, it's off... And he said, okay, we're back in, guys.” (110:42)

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7. Aftermath and Lessons Learned

Timestamp: 185:25 – 199:52

Post-operation analysis by Pete Blaber reveals significant flaws in the mission’s execution due to top-down interference. The disjointed chain of command prevented effective communication and adaptation to real-time battlefield conditions, resulting in the loss of valuable personnel. Pete underscores the necessity of “shared reality” and respecting ground intelligence to avoid such tragedies in future operations.

Notable Quote:
“These guys did not need to die. The chain of command disconnected. Chain of command killed them.” (197:27)

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8. Personal Reflections and Metaphors

Timestamp: 199:52 – 207:29

In a lighter segment, Pete shares a personal anecdote from his military selection training, illustrating the importance of maintaining composure and rational thinking under pressure. This story serves as a metaphor for the broader lessons discussed, emphasizing the need for clear-headed decision-making in high-stakes environments.

Notable Quote:
“Emotions do to you. They send you off on a monorail of senselessness.” (202:10)

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9. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Timestamp: 207:29 – End

Brent Tucker and Pete Blaber conclude the episode by reiterating the central lessons learned from the mission in Shahiqot Valley. They emphasize the critical need for integrated command structures that prioritize ground-level insights and shared situational awareness to prevent operational failures and loss of life in future military endeavors.

Notable Quote:
“And when you do that, even when stuff goes wrong, you can look back on it and sleep at night because you did everything you could to make the best decision.” (199:46)

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Key Takeaways

1. Integrated Command Structures: Effective military operations require cohesive and connected chains of command that leverage real-time battlefield intelligence.
2. Shared Reality: Ensuring that ground-level teams and higher headquarters maintain a common understanding of the operational environment is crucial for mission success.
3. Respecting Expertise: Decisions made by those with direct experience and knowledge of the terrain and enemy behavior should take precedence over rigid hierarchical directives.
4. Adaptability: Flexibility and the ability to adapt to changing conditions on the ground can mean the difference between success and failure.

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Final Thoughts

This episode of The Antihero Podcast provides a profound exploration of the dynamics between ground operations and higher-echelon command structures. Featuring firsthand accounts from Pete Blaber, listeners gain invaluable insights into the challenges of real-world military missions and the enduring lessons that can shape future strategies.

Transcript

[Pete Blaber]

The commanding general, with about 20 conditions attached, said, okay, we'll approve two teams to come over there.

[Brent Tucker]

How many did you want?

[Pete Blaber]

I wanted four.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay, so why not? Why, why would it matter? Like why? If, if. Yeah, if we, if you asked for six.

[Tyler]

Hold on, we're not recording. Do you want to buy a shirt.

[Pete Blaber]

To support military dance?

[Tyler]

People want to see their sausage get made.

[Brent Tucker]

An appropriate level of inappropriateness. Something is my family tonight, the adult force isn't, isn't coming to rescue my, my family, my kids. Like it is. First responders that are, that are going to save my, my family.

[Tyler]

They want the culture to be down. They want people to not want to be cops. And the people that do want to be cops are now walking into the job scared to do the job.

[Brent Tucker]

I'm going to try to act like it didn't happen, although we, we all know it did.

[Tyler]

JV team for life.

[Brent Tucker]

Tyler, how many critical incidents do you think we've covered so far in this podcast, man?

[Tyler]

At least five, six.

[Brent Tucker]

And they're not going to stop, you know, there's. You cannot stop them all. So they're going to happen. And you really have, you know, two charters at that. Obviously one is to stop them from happening, but since you can't stop them all from happening, you owe it to the people that you protect and depend on you to react to those situations in the most effective and efficient manner. And right now, really, whether, you know, you're a fire department, ems, law enforcement, you're stuck with essentially radios.

[Tyler]

And Apollo is the best way to manage resources during these events because it's designed by first responders for first responders.

[Brent Tucker]

It gives first responders a common operating picture which allows them to see where everybody is in real time, overlaid onto a map to see where they are. You can drop pinpoints and let them know where they need to go. And without constant talking on the radio, everybody knows where the incident is, where it's happening, and where they need to be.

[Tyler]

Nepal is an app based application. This is just download and go.

[Brent Tucker]

It's an app and so it works with androids, it works with iPhones.

[Tyler]

Apollo makes sure on the back end, everything works and you can just plug and go. They handle all the licensing, all the encryption compliance, all the security. It's all handled by Apollo. It's crucial to know where everyone is and what they are doing in order to effectively control chaos in one of these, either natural disasters or shootings or anything like that.

[Brent Tucker]

So if you want to learn more about Apollo, scan the QR code and ensure your department is ready to react to any crisis in its most effective and efficient manner possible.

[Tyler]

JV Team for life. Welcome back to the Anti Hero podcast. Part Delta Force, part Street Cop. All truth. I'm Tyler, owner of Counterculture Inc. Go to Counterculture Inc. Threads.com and use promo code ANTIHERO and get yourself 15% off. The best in counterculture graphic tees, stickers, hats, ranger panties, team room flags you need. Counterculture wise. We got it. Refracted wolf apparel, merch, anti hero T shirts, everything. We have it at Counterculture Inc. Threads.com use promo code ANTIHERO 20 off. Oh, 15 off. Not 2015.

[Brent Tucker]

And I'm Brent Tucker, owner of FRCC. This first responder coffee company, first responder cigar company and soon to be first responder cast company with our bourbon line coming out. Stay tuned that. Use FRCC 15 to get 15% off. The world's best coffee and cigars.

[Tyler]

And of course this episode is brought to you by hp-trt.com human performance testosterone. Go to hp-trt.com use promo code HERO and get 20% off. Not just your initial purchase, but every single month you get 20% off. They've got everything from testosterone to weight loss supplements. Anything you need to be healthy and to be optimal you can [e-mail] and if you've gotten your blood work done within the last six months, if you upload those lab results, they're going to waive the blood work and you won't have to pay the 99 fee. So go to HP trt.com promo code HERO and save 20 off every single month.

[Brent Tucker]

And don't forget about our Patreon account. If you want to continue to support us, subscribe to our Patreon. There's two different tiers. You can get access with direct messaging to us. Updates on on who's coming to the show next, guest references, references, guest recommendations. Gosh, guest recommendations. We have different forms you can be a part of as well. Between fitness guns and general discussion. So the Patreon's a good time. Hop on over there to continue to support us. And of course our Thursday Night Live episodes every Thursday night, 8:00pm Eastern Standard Time. Thursday nights for the boys.

[Tyler]

I tried doing all my reads a little bit more monotone because I noticed I was coming out the gate screaming and it was spiking and then I. So I just couldn't keep.

[Brent Tucker]

You couldn't keep the energy?

[Tyler]

No, I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all.

[Brent Tucker]

With us today he's been a guest of the past that on the Thursday night lives your your name still gets brought up about being a guest and sometimes after mine like we Pete Blabber's been been on been here. That's right. Yeah that was. That was a good one. With us today, as I said is is Pete Blaber. Welcome back to the show. The now we've covered the Roberts Ridge event and the battle of of shy cot.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep.

[Brent Tucker]

And but we did it the last guest that that we had on which was a great guest and he had of course like his insight from his perspective and what he gleaned. But it's still the topic is is still something that's in the news in the tactical community if you will because it has a lot to do with the Chapman and the Medal of Honor Museum. And it kind of brought this thing back to light. And so to have you on here and talk about this because you're the ground force commander for all the AFO elements for that whole operation.

[Pete Blaber]

Yes.

[Brent Tucker]

And so would love to have your insight. And I guess, I guess we kick it off by something I just learned right before the episode. For whatever reason I thought you guys were tasked to go support that operation, but you guys broke the intel and started that whole operation. How'd that come about?

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, it was just your classic develop the situation. We were as I'll talk about in a minute. You know, when the Taliban fled and the foreign fighters fled, there was less than 500 Special Mission Unit Americans on the ground at the time. And key was that the rapid fall and exfiltration of the enemy from places like Kabul and Mazar e Sharif totally caused the CENTCOM plan to be, you know, flushed. So there was no plan. We had nothing but out of country chains of command. So we were on the ground. We knew that there were foreign fighters and terrorists that needed to be found and we just started again. The mission was developed a situation to find the enemy and kill or capture them. So off we went. And I'll connect a few of the dots here in a second as to how we the clues that led us to Shahi code.

[Brent Tucker]

You mentioned out of country command, which I think we should have had more of. I mean obviously at some level the command should should be on on the ground. You know, whether it be one level above, two level buzz, two levels above. They do think more commands came into Afghanistan than were required and did not help.

[Pete Blaber]

No doubt. And so you're. You're leading to my overall. No, seriously, it's a Great question. Because to me it's the lesson of g what of 20 years of war. And in fact, I wouldn't make that 25 years of war because as American military generals have been fighting the Ukraine Russia war since 2022 out of Wii Spot in Germany, and the lesson went unlearned in Afghanistan, despite the fact that these disconnected chains of command were responsible for the failure at Tora Bora. For everything you're about to hear that happens in Shahiqot and on Takar Gar. You mentioned the last episode we did. That disconnected chain of command is what really led to the death of Pat Tillman and the injuries of some of his platoon mates. And then it went on, just left a trail of tears behind it throughout the entire gwat. And the lesson is this, that decision making and problem solving made by disconnected chains of command never has and never will be able to make sense of what's happening on the ground or sensible choices about what to do next. And this is not a theory, this is a biologic fact. Our nervous systems evolved to make sense of what's going on around us. And sensible choices about what to do next and the way they do that is by. Is by our brain directing our senses, sight, sound, smell, taste and touch to interact with the environment and make sense of it. That's the only way to make sense of anything. That's a proven fact. So a detached chain of command, by its very definition is detached from the environment it's supposed to make sense from. And if you can't make sense of something and your senses aren't connected to it, then you're senseless. And that's why these disconnect. No matter how good the resolution is on the computer screens, no matter how fast our computers are, there's no technology that can replicate being able to interact with an environment with your senses. And today that's even more valuable because we've got all these AI techniques that can fool you with a video or anything else. But that's the lesson and that's what I'm staying laser focused on here. This shouldn't keep twirling into a partisan battle between services. And I should add, as the AFO commander, both Brits Lubinski and John Chapman were my guys. So I still think of them that way. I don't have a partisan, you know, part of this battle. I don't have any motive other than to learn that lesson. And when you hear what happened, you'll realize this is probably the biggest case study example of the senselessness of the Disconnected chains of command.

[Brent Tucker]

You mentioned Tora Bora real quick. And this was just before my time. I was probably in the Q course, you know, when all this went down.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

Was Tora Bora before or after Operation Anaconda?

[Pete Blaber]

Before.

[Brent Tucker]

Before.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep. Significantly before December. This is February, January, February, March, beginning of March. So right before, in fact, we thought there was some intel that some of the guys from Tora Bora headed here, but.

[Brent Tucker]

Oh, really?

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, I don't, I'm not sure that.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, the, I don't, I don't want to derail it too much, but the. There are some questions about, about Tora Bora. Were. Did you, did you ever believe or hear that, that you, that we thought we killed UBL and Tora Bora? Was that, was that, was that something that was, I don't say rumored or thought to be true at any point?

[Pete Blaber]

I think some of the guys that were part of the element that was there thought maybe. I know the, the troop commander said a few times that, yeah, I think maybe he died. But no one, no one bought into that. There were no bodies. They went down there, did sensitive site exploitation. There were no bodies. You know, everything I know about it, which is a lot because I knew the agency guy who was in charge for the agency. You know, he was there and we ended up letting him squirt away through the back door.

[Brent Tucker]

And I, I really don't mean this to be, you know, some sort of like drawing yen to a gotcha question, because it's not. But, you know, when, when people, when this, I wasn't there for this. So when people say things and it just doesn't make sense to me, I just, I'm just asking you what if you had ever heard this as well. I'll get to it. Just want to make sure that, that, that, that you knew my intent was good on this. That. So John McPhee says that Blackhawk helicopters showed up and whisked UBL away because he wants the, you know, he believes the military complex wanted to continue to make money and, you know, they weren't, they weren't ready for the war to be over yet. Was there any indication, did anyone ever think that blackout helicopters came and, and picked up UBL and got him out of Tora Bora?

[Pete Blaber]

No. And that's, you know, I just say, I did not hear him say that, but I just say off. You know, it was on a. Flat out. It's preposterous. And, you know, we let him go, man. We, like, you'll see in this in this mission and we, you know, we took the failure at Tora Bora to heart. Again, sniper reconnaissance teams, you know, good old fashioned, you know, infantry tactics that have been around are still what win the day in modern day warfare. And Tora Bora. I would just sum up this way. What should have happened right off the bat is sniper recce teams should have moved out. Probably all you needed was two, but I would have sent three to the backside. If you do a go on Google Earth and look at Tora Bora, I've done it a thousand times. It's pretty cool. There's only two ways out and they go right to Pakistan. Then when you look at the two, one of them requires, you know, a decent amount of arduous movement and who knows, could even be a little technical climbing. So there's really only one route.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Pete Blaber]

And the route is so steep that one team with rocks could probably have kept him in Tora Bora. And we knew he was going to head there. And if you just look at the rat line from where you come out of Tora Bora to where he ended up in Banu, it's relative proximity and just makes total sense.

[Brent Tucker]

And if I remember right, we knew that was a possibility and there was partner forces there essentially doing that job that we didn't fully trust to do that job, and that's exactly what ended up happening. Is that correct?

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, I think the troop that was there was totally constrained on what they could do. Same thing we're about to talk about. Everything was on radio back to Bagram. Hey, now Bagram's micromanaging. JSOC is micromanaging the hell out of them. They can't do anything without, you know, putting up a course of action, a PowerPoint presentation. So those guys were kind of in limbo. And you know, I'm sure the sniper recce guys were all advocating for, hey, let us go, let us go close the back door. But they weren't able to. But he was there. We did not black I I. That's one I've never heard. I don't know why anyone would say that. No one else reports that. And it doesn't make any sense.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah. So, but I'm glad you touched on Tora Bora because it is, whether positive or negative, it's unit history. It's JSOC history.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

There are lessons to be, to be learned from it. And that of course, like you said, you guys tried to use some of those lessons learned and brought it over to this one.

[Pete Blaber]

Right.

[Brent Tucker]

So what Was it that got you guys attention to look to slew your eye over to this area?

[Pete Blaber]

Well, you know, first, go ahead to the first picture. So this picture is taken in the Panshear Valley. It's me and my sidekick Jimmy. Yeah, the first one up top, above that. So this is in the Pantcher Valley. This is right after Kabul fell and Mazari Sharif. So I want to say like January 2nd or 3rd or something like that. And we're. This is. You know, we're dressed this way because of our culture of common sense. There was no plan, There was no guidance. This is what I was telling you about. Initially, there were just these guys on the ground, which were mostly made up of guys from the unit, 5th Special Forces Group, and the guys from the agency ground branch. Guys from the agency with a smattering of special mission unit support mixed in. But we immediately self organized, said, hey, let's not just sit around, let's go find these guys. They're vulnerable. You know, desperate men make desperate moves. This is the time where we can take them out. And again, there was no. We didn't make a chain of command. We just broke ourselves into teams. This. This is the Pancher Valley. It goes right back. Bagram is where Bagram is because it's at the base of the Panchshir. So right after this Pict was taken, we went back. General Franks had just flown in the CENTCOM commander to Bagram, and he had read a couple of my. I had sent off what we were calling AFO sit reps, which I'd send out every day or every other day. And he had read one. And he said. He called me, he said, tell blabber to come in and meet me. So I went in to see him, and he said, look, I want you to get some guys out on the frontier, find the enemy, then kill or capture them, and you're in charge. And, you know, I was like, yes, that's the greatest mission statement.

[Brent Tucker]

It's got to feel pretty good.

[Pete Blaber]

It did, you know, it was a blank canvas. And again, you know, I just. I just reiterated the same mission statement. Develop the situation, which is develop. Bring out the possibility and potential situation of what's going on around you. We knew our purpose, which was to deny enemy sanctuary in Afghanistan. This was our task. And, you know, by doing that, you allow the freedom to the teams. We knew we had to get. We had about 45 AFO, you know, pure guys in country at the time. So sniper recce guys broken down into about six teams, and we knew the most important thing initially was get everyone on the same sheet of music. So I went out to each of these. You can go to the next slide, that map. I went out on the frontier with Jimmy to visit each of our AFO teams and tell them, hey, here's how we're going to be operating now. Here's what AFO is. Here's our mission from General Franks. Find the enemy, kill or capture them. To do that, we're going to develop situations. So you look at the map, you can see wherever there's a star. We had an initial team, so Kabul, Gardez, Orgun, down in the bottom, Kandahar, and then up near Herat, we had another one, and those would move all over. We went where the enemy was, but it was clues. The first place we went was Orgun. We were there for a couple days. The second morning of Warlord came in and wanted to talk to me, and he said, hey, can you find out who killed my cousin last night? I was a little taken aback. I was like, sure, but how do you want me to do it? And he points over my shoulder and he goes, I thought maybe you could look at one of your computers. And I realized, you know, this is 2001, which is important for all the context we're going to be talking about. The Afghans had never seen a helicopter, much less a computer. And when he would come to our safe house in the courtyard, all the computers were in one room for generator access outside. So there was this green glow coming out of the room, and he could see that, and he thought, you know, these are magical devices. They can just, you know, type stuff in and figure out what's happening. So to find out what happened to his cousin, one SF guy and one unit guy went out together and found some kids near where he got killed and said, hey, were you guys. Do you guys see anything happen? And they were like, yeah, we saw the whole thing. So we found out how he got killed. He was trying to steal wood from another wood delivery guy. And we told the warlord that the next day, and he was super grateful. And he. And he said, what can I do for you? And I said, well, you can help us find the foreign fighters. Do you know where they're hiding? And he said, I don't, but I have heard some rumors they're in the mountains around Gardez. And so that was our first clue. But it also was a first learning point. We realized how important shared reality was and that, you know, you're not going to be able to share reality unless you interact with people. So we've got to be out front. We got to be talking to these people who know the lay of the land. And from Orgun, we drove back to Kabul. I went to the agency headquarters, was in an old hotel at the time, and we met with our counterparts in the agency and sf. We quickly talked about what happened in Orgun, and everyone agreed, hey, that's the way we should be operating all over the country. And so we said, let's kick this off and let's build these things. We call them pilot teams all around the country with the agency, SF and afo, and we'll divide labor, whatever makes sense. But in general, the Agency will handle the intel and the sources. SF will handle the foreign fighters, the Afghans and whatnot, and do whatever else was needed, all purpose. And AFO would do the operational reconnaissance, going out, planning potential hits if we found something worth hitting. So that's. Those are the two clues. Those took us, if you look on the map there, to Gardez. And that's where we set up our initial safe house in Gardez, our main safe house, which became my kind of headquarters.

[Brent Tucker]

It seemed just by that snippet that the Agency was playing well with others at the beginning, at least on the ground. Is that true?

[Pete Blaber]

It's very true. And there was a reason for that. The Agency, to me is like the military. Your perception of them is in large part based on whoever the leaders are at the time. And if you have some flaming a hole, your perception is going to be bad. If it's a good common sense guy, you can have great, you know, takeaways from him. In the Agency, it's mentioned in my book the Mission of Enemy. The Agency was led by a guy code named Spider who was a friend of mine. We had done a couple ops in Bosnia together. I had a lot of respect for him. Great guy. And he was a super common sense, ex Marine, super common sense leader. On top of that, you had to have the Agency because, remember nothing, the US had no, like, tentacles into Afghanistan except what was going through the Islamabad station. And so the Agency, any sources in Afghanistan, any knowledge of, you know, intelligence that had been ongoing in the years between the Soviet War and 2001. The agency had so, you know, necessity was a big part of getting along with them. Yeah, but they were, you know, I think it was a different time. I think 911 created a culture that, you know, we don't have today. We didn't have even a year later. And that was that We've been Attacked, the country's at war. Everyone pulled together. We're all Americans. And I think that was a big reason why this worked so well and was so functionally synergistic.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, it seems as if, yeah, at that time, people were still mission first, career second, generally speaking. And the longer the war went on, I do believe they flip flopped, generally speaking.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, I agree with that too. So, you know, you can go to the next slide too. So, you know, once we figured that out, we had our agreement. I mentioned we. I met my SF and agency counterparts in Kabul. We agreed to create these pilot teams. We agreed to work together. We agreed who would have primary responsibility. So next I went out on the frontier and this was another lesson. You know what always had bugged me, we're all military historians. We like reading about military. But what had always bugged me was from 1776 on, we had the same doctrinal approach to any problem. You know, send a platoon, send a company, send a battalion, send a division. And it never made sense to me because probably from experience in the unit in Bosnia and also in Colombia was you make teams for the mission, you tailor the team for what you need. And so that's what we did here. No two teams were the same. Those are Afghans I'm with up in the upper left hand corner. We, you know, in some cases, there was no driving. That's us walking in the bottom left hand corner. But we set out to establish what AFO was. And when people would ask me, how do you know what needs to go where? This is the lesson. When you organize to learn, you learn how to organize. And it's just another way of saying when you send out recce guys, reconnaissance guys, they'll tell you what you need on the target and that's what you send. Don't send out 100 guys to recon a target because you're going to get compromised. Send two, have them tell you, hey, this place is rife with enemy. They're everywhere. We could really clean up here. Send me five, ten more guys. And that's what we did. We organized to learn. And soon each of these pilot teams was morphing. Some got smaller, some got bigger. As I mentioned, everything kept leading us to the mountains of Gardez. So go ahead to the next slide.

[Tyler]

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[Brent Tucker]

So the. Do you. I don't know if I don't, I don't know if you do realize it at, at the time, but do you think you recognized at the time and like those, those photos. I mean it sounds dramatic but it's true. Like the country is counting on you guys. You know the, all the special operations guys that were there, which is the lion's share of the fight early on. Like this wasn't at yet an annoying Vietnam. This was, you know, it's the first war we, we'd really been in since Vietnam and it's a completely different environment. You really have no experience and in this exact. Because we haven't been there before. So you have no experience in this exact AO. The whole country's counting on you. 3,000Americans just died. Like is that something you like you think of at night or when in the quiet times or you just.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, I think, you know you're hitting on it. Exactly. And that's why it's so important to take yourself back to this period. Because we had a genuine purpose that everyone believed in. It was not amorphous. It was not unspoken. It was a known purpose. And you know, we had to, we knew their sanctuary was Afghanistan. We had to deny that enemy sanctuary or they were going to keep doing nine one ones all over the western freedom loving part of the world. And so you're absolutely right. It was a motivator. We had this sense of, of a higher purpose and everyone, it was reflected in everyone's work ethic and their dedication to what we were about to do, which was pretty wild. So this is just a picture I told you. We set up in a safe house in Gardez. You know, first in architectural comment this is a classic example of an Afghan house, which is a fortune. You can see in the upper right, that's a guard tower. You can see the entrance right there in the middle. There's a big thick oak door about 10 by 10, closing the place in. To the left is our talk. That's plastic over the windows, which we created a joint dock between afo, SF and the Agency so we could all hear each other's radios. The inside, those walls, they're hollowed, is a lot of space. So the agency and SF took all the good rooms inside. It was first mover advantage. We got there about two hours after them. So we had the tents out in the courtyard, which I loved because I like being able to go out, look at the stars at night, fresh air. And so those tents are where we stayed. That courtyard, you know, is a swamp, but it's where we kept our operational vehicles. We had unit mechanics out there doing PMCs on them. It was resupplied by air, air drops. We didn't want helicopters coming in. The Mi17 was the only Hilo we allowed in initially. And it was just, you know, to, to be a hunter, you got to go where the game is. And there's nothing like a hunting cabin because, you know, there's no social media, there's nobody bothering you. And that's what this was. We were out on the frontier in Gardez. Go to the next slide, please. This is a view from one of the watchtowers. You can just see what it's surrounded by, these snow blasted, barren mountains. The Afghans are setting up their tents right now. This field you're looking at would end up with about a hundred tents in it. And then go ahead, one more slide. This just shows you our nearest neighbor, another fort, who. This guy ended up helping us out.

[Brent Tucker]

What a great defense.

[Pete Blaber]

Didn't like us, right? Yeah, well, he'd probably been there since Alexander the Great, you know, so very. A lot of history. So, you know, I mentioned it's a great place to, you know, conduct an op from. We totally immersed ourselves. Every night we do terrain analysis, we talk the maps. The only maps that were any good were Soviet maps. The Soviet. The Russians gave us their maps. That's what I fought this whole battle with. A Russian map. So do my guys. Yeah, I have one with me. I'll pull it out. And so we studied the terrain. We had two books. We had the Bear Went over the Mountain and the Other side of the Mountain, I think by Lester Grau. Great books, showed all the ambushes, all the battles of the Soviet war. Lessons learned. Everybody read those. We had a database where we marked each of the ambush sites for a Good reason, because, you know, that terrain's been good terrain, like we said, since Alexander the Great. So if you pulled off a successful ambush in the Soviet war from killer terrain, that was still very dangerous terrain. And we wanted to know about that before we drove into it. We also learned from Grau's books that the Afghans are creatures of habit. They always go back to where they had success in the past. And they're not self sustaining. They're not like the Viet Cong living off grubs and plants. They have to have an urban umbilical cord. So whenever we'd look, you know, we wouldn't look in the middle of these mountains, we'd look where the mountains led right to a little village, a little town with road access because we knew they needed lamb meat, they needed water, they needed sustainment items. And that turned out also to be very prophetic for us.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, Talk about being able to narrow your search, you know, just through that.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. Yep. So, you know, I mentioned this is. So even though you can go back to that. So even though we, we had all.

[Tyler]

These clues, that's an afghan at 21 years old.

[Pete Blaber]

That's about right. But even though we had a lot of clues and we continued trolling the areas before I went back over to Afghanistan and I came home, the JSOC sent us home to rotate in the end of December. So I was home for about two weeks or three weeks. And I went and I visited a terrorist who was in federal penitentiary. An intel guy told me about him, sent me some stuff he wrote, and I, this was another example of how the government should work. I just called up a guy from Bureau of Prisons, identified myself, said, hey, I want to talk to this guy because I'm going to Afghanistan. He was like, sure, show up tomorrow. The penitentiary was in the middle of a big city. I walked in, you know, showed my military id. Guy goes, follow me. Brought me up, put me in a room, all the chairs and tables were cemented into the floor. Next thing I know, door opens, swings open, and in comes a guy in chains. It was a terrorist, Ali Muhammad, who had done the reconnaissance for the Tanzanian and Kenyan embassy bombings. He also trained UBL's bodyguards. So when I heard that, I was like, is everybody trying to talk to him? He's like, no, he's been in prison since 98, you know, and this is 2001. I'm like, who cares? Would you tell Warren Buffett you don't want to stock tip because he retired for a year? No, you take that Stock tip. So he was amazing. And one of the things he said, I asked him, how do I find Al Qaeda in Afghanistan? He said, well, first you have to take off your military hat and put on your police hat. This is detective work. And he said, to find Al Qaeda, ask the shepherds, because the foreign fighters need to have lamb meat and they'll buy them directly from the shepherds. Ask the shopkeepers, because the Arabs use different spices than the Afghans and they'll know who they sold them to. Ask the money exchangers, because the foreign fighters all come in from Pakistan. They have Pakistani rubies and the currency of Afghanistan at the time was the dollar, so they would need to change the dollars. And then he said, ask the taxi drivers because none of the Arabs know how to drive. So we took that with us. And as I mentioned, we were in Gardez. No, you know, we're searching, we're trying to figure out where this place Shahi code is, where they're hiding in the mountains. And one day, it was a long day, we were out. There was five of us in the vehicle. We're coming back to Gardez. About eight, nine hours we had been trolling the waters and we all looked over at the same time in the field and there was this shepherd with a bunch of sheep and someone yelled out, a shepherd. And everyone just, holy shit. They slammed on the brakes and we got out of that vehicle. I still remember it like a bunch of little kids laughing our asses off, you know, a motherfucking shepherd. So we immediately put on our game faces very politely. We had our interpreter there and we asked permission to talk to him and then made small talk and then just asked him, you know, point blank, do you know where the foreign fighters are hiding? And he just beckoned us with his arm and he turned around. There was about a thousand foot hill right there. And he put his hands behind his back and he powered up that thing like a gold medal speed skater. He had to be about, I figured he was 70 something years old at the time. You know, I, me and the rest of the team, two of the guys specifically, always talked about being warrior athletes and how important. And so we consider ourselves the fittest guys among many fit guys in the unit. And when I got to the top of that hill, I had my knees, my hands on my knees, I couldn't get my breath. The other guy's like, holy fuck. And there he is at the end of the hill, fresh as day and pointing. And I, you know, my eyes tracked along his gnarled Hand to his weather beaten finger and you can go to the next slide. And there at the end of his finger was the daunting Palisades of the Shahi Code Valley. And he just mumbled two words, Shahi Code. And, you know, we all just stood there like, amazed, looking at this. And to me, the first thing out of my mouth was, we're in business. Because we had been to the Bob Marshall wilderness in Montana that summer and doing just this, we wanted to see if we get over a mountain range in. In 24 hours, like, how long it would take us. So we did like five mountain ranges. And so when I saw this, I was like, we can fucking do this. And we immediately, you know, we thanked the shepherd and then headed back to Gardez, where we started talking about, okay, what do we do now? And, you know, the answer was, we gotta. We gotta get some teams to go in there and confirm or deny their presence.

[Brent Tucker]

Now, I don't know if you can via this picture, but can you walk us on where, where Shahikot Valley is? Is it that valley floor there or is it on the other side? No, of the course of the Coors Mountains over there.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, good. Good question. So the big mountains in the back are the. The back side of Shahi Coat. That medium mountain in the middle is where Tucker Gar is. And the valley is. You can't see the valley, but, like, see the first fold, the shadow fold on kind of the right side? Yeah, where it turns to sun for the first time. So I believe the valley's right down.

[Brent Tucker]

On the other side.

[Pete Blaber]

It's between the sun and the shade on that right side there, and then runs the whole length of that mountain range. So, you know, inside the talk that night, we. We pulled out our maps, we studied it, we, you know, figured out what do we need to do? Well, one of the first things we did was look, if this is a real, you know, I think we called it pocket of Al Qaeda fighters, We need to get in there and achieve surprise. So we immediately established a no Hilo policy. And that was influenced too. Again, this is 2001. That was influenced, I believe, even today, but then especially every despot dictator on the planet because of Somalia and a few other ops expected the US to come in helicopters. And I didn't want anything to do with that. I didn't want to lose surprise. The shepherd just taught us, you know, they can, they can get away from us in these mountains. Our red blood cells are not that thin. You know, they know the terrain. They can get away we got to trap them in there and, you know, kill or capture them. So the no Hilo was first for surprise, but second, I had a real issue with everything was Hilo at the time, everything, you know, that JSOC made us do. Every training exercise, you had to use hilos. And my observation, which was from a collective observation from a lot of our guys, was that helicopters make you default to, you know, the simplest solution, and they prevent you from immersing yourself in the details of enemy behavior. And, you know, combat is still like we talked about, just like it was a thousand years ago. It's about outthinking your enemy, and you can't out think them if you're not thinking. What were you guys wearing, what you saw? We were outfitted with, you know, the finest thermoregulating REI clothing that money could buy.

[Tyler]

So, like, I'm assuming a couple years into the war, depending on how you dress, when you go and meet someone, you know, if you're dressed like that, it typically means that you come prepared, you could give a lot of money, and you're making big decisions. Did they have that same impact then, or did they not know anything from anything?

[Pete Blaber]

No, they. They did. And. And the reason when people see us in all the beards and, you know, like, Brett's beard there, and they're like, oh, you guys did that just because you couldn't. No, we didn't. We did it because that's what the Afghans had, and we wanted to meet them halfway. This was their country, their culture. So. Your question's a good one. We all had smocks. We'd overthrow on our, you know, we weren't wearing REI stuff on the outside. When we went to meet these guys, we'd. We put different garb on, always earth tone, nothing bright, nothing shiny, nothing looking expensive. But, you know, everything else we did to accommodate them, to meet them halfway, show them we respected their culture. We had no intention of staying there. Of course, I never knew. Imagined we'd stay for 20 years, but, you know, we wanted them to understand that every time we interacted with them, so, you know, not out thinking the enemy. You got to understand what time they take breaks, they change guard shift, all that stuff. And I wanted us to do that. I wanted that to be what drives our plans. And this wasn't just me. All my guys agreed we can't use hilos to go in there. So that was the first big takeaway. The other was, we need PhD strategic reconnaissance sniper recce guys for this. And I, you know, fortunately knew where the greatest readout of of PhD sniper recce guys is in the world. And that's at the unit. And I called back and told three teams, hey guys, get ready, I'm gonna get you over here. And they were like, we don't believe it. You'll never get approval. And I said, just get your shit together.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, humor me. Yeah, back your backs.

[Pete Blaber]

And I didn't know, but I didn't know what I was about to go up against. But I was confident that I had the logic that, you know, there's no way they're going to turn me down. So this is where the higher headquarters comes in and I'll talk a little bit about that. So AFO's highest higher headquarters during all those early days was TF11, which is JSOC. And they had a unbelievably simple, rigid, doctrinal mission which was kill or capture high value targets. And that might sound okay, but the rigid part of it was the interpretation. That meant if you had intel for a lieutenant, a guy who was the second in command, that was no good. If he wasn't either Zawahiri, Mullah Omar or ubl, those were the three high value targets. So there was your work. This force is going to sit here in Bagram until the intel comes up that says one of those guys is present. And we tried to argue, well that doesn't make sense. We got to make the intel to figure out where they're at. But they were having no part of that. And the rest of what TF11 was really commanding was one operational squadron. In this case it was a Blue squadron, a SEAL squadron. They had rotated, I think B squadron out in December. So this was now a seal squadron. The 160th was there, a Ranger, I think battalion and a half was there from 1st Battalion, all at Bagram, all sitting around waiting, waiting on the word. So I flew back to Bagram. The commanding general of JSOC at the time was a two star general. He was a helicopter pilot. And the deputy commanding general was a one star Air Force general. He was a fixed Wing C141 pilot. So I flew back to Bagram to get on a VTC with the Air Force One star who was in Masira, Oman, 1,000 miles away, and the commanding general in Fort Bragg, North Carolina in his office. And I will say, you know, I went in bright eyed and bushy tailed. I was proud of what we'd done. We had all kinds of intel, all kinds of appreciative feedback. To include, you know, still General Franks was sending messages to us. This is great analysis. We had them necked down. You know, I mean, the farthest thing in my mind would be I would get, you know, friction on this. But as soon as I finish explaining everything, all the intel, all the clues, the commanding general came on and he just, you know, snorted. And then he said, what makes you think that a pocket of Al Qaeda would ever co. Locate anywhere in Afghanistan? I didn't answer because it was a rhetorical question. And he said, you know, the area you've pointed out, we have satellite imagery of that. We've gone over the satellite imagery. There's nothing there. There's no Al Qaeda in any number. There's no weapons. You know, you're. You're. You're out there just chasing ghosts. There's nothing out there. And then his tone changed. He started kind of attacking me as, you know, the. As this guy trying to do something, you know, that wasn't in line with the mission, which was find the enemy. And I explained to him, sir, you know, there's a. There's a good chance if. If there is a pocket of Al Qaeda, they. There's high likelihood they're protecting something. So high likelihood if one of those guys is still in country, that he's.

[Brent Tucker]

Here, connecting the dots.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. So chicken and egg thing and vice versa. You know, if they're hiding somewhere, they're going to want to hide where they have protection. And, you know, he still scoffed at it, but what I found out later was JSOC was under so much pressure from General Franks, he was telling him, why are you just sitting at Bagram, you know, get guys out. You need to do something. We're paying all this money. The President's asking me what's progress. We're not making any. And so the commanding general, with about 20 conditions attached, said, okay, we'll approve two teams to come over there.

[Brent Tucker]

How many did you want?

[Pete Blaber]

I wanted four.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay, so why not? Why. Why would it matter? Like, why? If. If. Yeah, if we.

[Tyler]

If you asked for six.

[Brent Tucker]

If we want to get as many, you know, people on the ground and see and try to, you know, flush this out and find these guys, we're good. We're going to need teams. Yeah, I wonder why it wasn't an asset, you know, thing. We could easily got four teams.

[Pete Blaber]

You know, we were living in a training mentality. Again, I'm. I've said this already. I'll say it again. It was 2001. No one. You. You brought it up. No one had been in a pitch battle since Somalia, which was 93. And that was a very short lived pitch battle. I mean hours, but an intense, but not ongoing, not a war.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Pete Blaber]

So we were living in this training mode of, you know, believing that we used to have these massive multimillion dollar exercises called JRXs where it was like set piece stuff flying all over deserts in Nevada and whatnot. And everyone would just go, why are we doing this? It's so, you know, set piece. And so, you know, the timeline's rigid, there's no flexing, there's no adaptability. But I think they just believed that, you know, nothing can happen unless it comes from this all knowing headquarters.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Pete Blaber]

And you, you know, you peasants are not going to find a pocket of Al Qaeda guys, which is crazy, but you'll see it's going to happen over and over as this develops.

[Brent Tucker]

I know that no, should you have said this? But my first thought when he comes back with that answer is like, oh, well then why don't you go back to the satellite imagery and tell me where they are? Since you can tell me where they're not. Get back to your satellite imagery and you tell me where they are. Sir.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

Sir.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. You always come up with the best responses after they happen. No, you know that, that's a great point. And you know, we, my, my thing with the commanding general, he had shown this behavior before was what I tell my guys is don't charge the machine gun nest, go around it. And so, you know, we would, we were always very respectful, not disobeying any order or anything, but, you know, don't set yourself up to get node. And, and so two days later, those two teams came. They were two teams from the squadron I just commanded. They were outstanding.

[Brent Tucker]

Two days later. Two days later, 48 hours, boots on ground.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep.

[Brent Tucker]

So that's crazy.

[Pete Blaber]

He literally told them they were, he was like, how long will it take you guys to get ready? Like, we're already ready. You guys get your shit ready for. And so they were all shaking their heads, going, I can't believe you got approval. And back then the C17s were flying out of Pope, not just daily, but, you know, every couple hours and taking logistics stuff and whatnot. So they just hopped on a C17 and I think it was 23 hour, you know, with refuel, and they were there two days later.

[Brent Tucker]

So half of that was flight time almost.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, yeah. So they were, you know, great, great teams. Couldn't ask for better. These were PhD sniper recce guys, you know, again, for people watching the show, there's no shortcuts to being a, an accomplished, competent sniper reconnaissance guy. And you know, there a lot of missions would prove that further in the war. Lone survivor is an example of that principle being violated. These guys are the first guys to go out in training. The last guys to come in, they have the most thankless job. You know, they sit out on some hilltop freezing, with no food, no water. They get to pass, you know, a couple lines of, of guidance, reconnaissance guidance. And then they come in and oh yeah, they usually jump in Halo night jumps.

[Brent Tucker]

So if they do their job right, they won't see any action.

[Pete Blaber]

Exactly right. And you know, I'd say this about why it takes so much time because, and most, you know, even rangers are pretty experienced at this. You got to do a couple hundred raids to get good at doing a raid because you're going to get compromised. 95 out of a hundred raids, someone's gonna sneeze, someone's gonna step on a stick, you're gonna get too close, you're gonna, you know, carry too many things that are making clang sounds as you move. Try to close with the target. You know, that's why there's a special psych eval for sniper recce guys. Patience is a big part of it, but they're a different animal. They're hard as woodpecker lips. And there's no substitute for experience. So, you know, these, this team is all, I think the lowest ranking guy is, you know, an E7. All the rest of them are E8s and they are as good as it gets. So once we got them in, you know, I gave them the mission, developed the situation. We're going to go into these mountains. They did all the. Started doing the same stuff we were doing. Study the terrain, talk to the Afghans, talk to the special forces guy, get a briefing from the agency intel guys, then go out, begin testing your equipment. This is 7,800ft, the Gardes safe house. We're looking that peak up there is 11,000. So 7,800ft is where we're operating. Everything works different. Nickel cadmium batteries don't last as long in the cold and altitude. You need different lubricants on your weapons. But camo is huge. And this was, you know, this. Every mission is different. And this is why, you know, even seasoned sniper recce guys will tell you you got to rehearse and do every contingency you can think of because you only got so many radios. So you need all the freaks that you might need out there, you need to know how to access the. Those freaks. You know which direction the satellites are in from where you're going, all this stuff. And they did it. And they, they prepped and we did. We had two things we want them to do. We want them to do first a road reconnaissance to open all these roads because remember, no helicopter. So we got to do vehicle drop offs to get the sniper reconnaissance teams into the valley. And then the second thing we did was we just called it environmental recon. The purpose was to confirm or deny enemy presence in the valley, but it was also to see how hard it was to move in these mountains to see if there was any water sources at all. You know, to see again the operational part on como on batteries and what was the minimum, minimum amount they could carry and still accomplish the mission as.

[Brent Tucker]

Well as pattern of life for the locals.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, yeah, very well said. And where there guys cutting through there? Where do you need to stay away.

[Tyler]

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[Pete Blaber]

Revenge is an act of passion.

[Brent Tucker]

Vengeance is an act of justice.

[Pete Blaber]

Injuries are revenged.

[Brent Tucker]

Crimes are avenged. Almost a century ago, big pharmaceutical companies re engineered medical school curriculum and faculty.

[Pete Blaber]

With one goal, putting profit before progress. Anyone pushing back against the medical matrix they carefully crafted was threatened, silenced, censored, financially ruined or worse. They are the problem.

[Brent Tucker]

We are the solution.

[John Chapman]

You're clear to engage. Initials Mike G Alpha. You're clear to engage with weapons. You're clear to engage with weapons.

[Pete Blaber]

Okay.

[Tyler]

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[Pete Blaber]

So they went in. It was. The weather was horrific. This is February about 17 they went in. The night they were going in was sideways sleet. It was hypothermic weather. And this is, I didn't mention it. But another thing that bugged all of us about helicopters. Once you decide to go helicopter centric on your mission, you're a prisoner of that helicopter's flight profiles. If it's bad weather, they're not going to fly. When the irony of that is bad weather is the best time for a sniper recce guy to go into a target. It means the guys on guard are all hanging around fires, hanging around where they can get warm. They're not out wandering around and potentially bumping into a sniper recce team. So they went in, was a brutal, brutal overnight. But they saw a number of things. They saw a lot of civilians going out on Camelback coming out of the valley. They could see about, I think 15 guys in the valley. They counted, all had AKs, all were armed. So you know, it was a successful. It confirmed there are armed combatants in there and they're pushing the civilians out. And again, you know, we, we assessed we're in business. But we also realized from their recommendation, we needed another team. And just like you asked for, right? So I was like, oh, man, am I gonna go back and go through this again? So, you know, luckily at the time, there were a number I didn't have, like a, you know, a traditional sergeant major. There were three of them there. Two of them were also sniper recce guys. One of them was from the seals. His name was Homer. Great guy. And as we were talking about it, he goes, hey, you know, the seals are going crazy at Bagram. If you go ask the SEAL commander, who I knew and got along with, well, if you go pitch this case to him, and I'll do a little work before you get there, I bet you he'd be willing to give up a team. And I was like, okay, sounds good to me. So that next day, Tier one seals or the Blue Squadron that's down there. And so I called him up on the red phone the next day, explained everything to him. He said, yeah, I'll send you. I asked him for two. He said, I'll send you one team. And he sent me. You only needed one? Yep, I only needed one, exactly. So this was Mako3 1. Everybody you know, Mako3 Zeros, the team that goes in on the mountain. But three one led by a guy named Mike Goodenbo. Tall, lanky guy, diminutive. He was referred to as Goody. I knew him. I met him on. We used to do exchanges between blue and green, and he was one of the exchange guys. He was there for, like, a week. So I knew him well. Funny shit, super competent recce guy, very dedicated. He showed up the next day. We did the exact same thing. We gave him all the time in the world to first and foremost acclimate himself, which takes about three to five days. But to read all the documents, talk to all the Afghans, talk to the two teams that were just up there so he could, you know, reconfigure his kit. The camo is different in the mountains, so we had different camouflage patterns that we were using. But Goody was. Was set and became an instant, you know, member of the team. So that takes us up. You know, we're prepping the 17th of February. Even though our own chain of command still did not believe there was any enemy in there. We were sending out these sit reps every day, sharing intel with 10th Mountain, or, excuse me, they were about to be assigned sharing intel with other forces in Afghanistan. And Franks just took it upon himself to tell the 10th Mountain Division commander General Hagenbach, who was in country, I believe, or he was in Uzbekistan. Hey, come down. When these guys find the, this enemy redoubt, you're going to be the lead to go in and destroy them. So me and Spider, my agency counterpart, drove back to Bagram and met with General Hagenbach. Great guy, he was totally accommodating. Even though he had no control over us, we were separate. We told him, hey, we consider we're working for you. Your guys are going to follow us into the shahi coat. Everything we find out, we're gonna feed to you. And to make sure that happens, I'm gonna leave my deputy here, Jimmy. And so from that day forward, Jimmy set up in his talk, had a wall of radios right next to Hagenbach where he could just lean back and talk to him if he had something important to tell him. And Hagenbach totally appreciated it and was a great, great colleague throughout this. Very cooperative, very collaborative. Go ahead.

[Brent Tucker]

How long of a drive is that when you, when you're driving from basically the.

[Pete Blaber]

It's about four hours.

[Brent Tucker]

Four hours, yeah.

[Pete Blaber]

And roads were still full of potholes, so very slow in that regard.

[Brent Tucker]

What was, what was the limits for, for you guys having to do that drive? Did you have like two, three vehicle convoy limits? Were you concerned at all about, about ambushes or IEDs at the time? Or is it fairly, I'll loosely use the term like semi permissive at this point on, on the roads?

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, I would call it. Everything you just said is, is accurate. We were, you know, as we drove, we paid attention like cats. Everyone had a sector of that vehicle they never took their eyes off of. We were always expecting if there was a vehicle pulled over on the side, we expected that to be an ambush. But I would, I think you said it, it was semi permissive. At that time. There were definitely no IEDs. The enemy had fled, you know, so they were, they were disorganized. But our only rule on convoys was never driving one. So it was always one or two vehicles. And even if it was two, they were spread apart. But we were usually just one vehicle. Guns up.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Pete Blaber]

Radios on and eyes open. Point.

[Brent Tucker]

I think I remember you saying that from the, from the chat. We had the same reaction then too.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, I think we did use that. So, you know.

[Brent Tucker]

I'm sorry I said Chapman, I meant.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, Tillman.

[Brent Tucker]

Tillman. Yep.

[Pete Blaber]

So, you know, even though we had this great relationship and you already covered it with the CIA, it didn't matter. We were all Americans. No one saw themselves as tier one or anything. Else like that, at least not the guys on the ground never thought of that way. And we were proud of this collaborative relationship that we had. And, you know, 10th Mountain loved it, too. But apparently word got back to Fort Bragg about what we were doing, and the commanding general was furious. And, yeah, someone told me that. I had the same reaction. I just laughed. I'm like, what's he furious about? I don't know. But, you know, you might be in trouble. I'm like, so that night I got back, drove back to Gardez, and the red phone rang around midnight, and it was a colonel in JSOC headquarters. He goes, pete, I don't have much time. Look, the CG hears your sharing intel with 10th Mountain and the agency and helping them out, giving him all the stuff that your guys find out. He thinks you're on a fishing expedition. You've already proven there's no enemy in there, and he's. He's talking about bringing you home. And, you know, like, I was just completely taken back by it. I didn't know what to say, to respond, you know, I mean, because your emotions are cycling. You're pissed, you're frustrated, you're like, you know, what the. Why me? What. What's he. How can this be? But I. I didn't do any of that. I just thanked the colonel. I said, hey, man, thanks for the heads up. Let me, you know, think about it and I'll let you know. So I did what I always did. I put on my shetali hat and I went for a long walk. And I just thought about it. And the title of that book is Mission to Men and Me. And I use it all the time to make big decisions. And this was one. And I just reflected, what's my mission? General Franks, four star general told me, find the enemy and then kill or capture them. That's what I'm doing. What about my men? Well, every man in AFO I'm in charge of, meaning I'm responsible for their lives. And if I'm responsible for their lives, I need to make sure that they don't get killed because I didn't share information either back to another friendly force or from the friendly force to them. Everything needs to be boundaryless or I'm not doing my job of taking care of my guys. And as for me, you know, I'd already. I think this was my 16th year in the army. I'd already thought about, you know, like everyone does around that time if they're going to stay. And I was like, yeah, you Know, I don't know what I'm going to do, but I know one thing. I'm not going to compromise my integrity and hang out. So if this is, if I end up getting fired for this, so be it. But I'm going to do the right thing for the mission, the right thing for the men and the right thing for me. And I just walked back in and I sent a message to that guy, we're going full speed. Ad said thanks for the heads up. So, you know, I did not stop.

[Brent Tucker]

Coordinating and I love that. And again, it's really easy for, for. I'm glad you shared that. For, for listeners to that, that know what happened and that you were absolutely justified. You were right obviously, as we're about to find out. So I want to get too far ahead. But everyone knows you were right, but you don't, you don't really know it at the time. You know, I mean you're. You there, there are, there are indicators. But you're still kind of going with your gut going totally this. I think I'm right and they have to go prove it.

[Pete Blaber]

Right. Right. We still didn't have any pictures or any physical. And me so. And you know, like you, I'd already been through, you know, 10,500 dry holes. So no matter how excited you get about any, that's why unit guys don't get too excited because more often than not it's a dry hole and you don't want to disappoint yourself when you find that dry hole. So. So we kept coordinating this takes us up February 26th and 27th. This is. Were about to go in on the 26th. The teams are making final prep to go in on the 27th. And on this day, significant day, an Afghan fighter came down, walked up to our checkpoint, surrendered. We brought him in our intel. We had interrogator there, intel guy. And our. He was also spoke Pashtun. And we quickly found out, you know, you always check motive first. His motive was he was pissed off. He was a Taliban squad leader. He had 13 men under him, all Taliban. And he, he left because he couldn't stand the Arab foreign fighter, al Qaeda fighters. And he also didn't like the Uzbeks. And the majority of the guys up there were. Were Uzbeks. They were. Had a little more than the Taliban. And then there was about 100 Al Qaeda, you know, Arab fighters from all over the Arab world. Morocco, Libya, Egypt. And he said they treat us like dogs. It's a caste system. We're at the bottom. And it's our country. We're not. Yeah, we're not allowed to talk to the, the guys in charge. And then we can't talk to a lot of the other guys because of the language difference. They don't know Pashtun. And a lot of people don't know that. Even though Uzbekistan's right up to the north, Uzbek does not. Is not compatible with Pashtun. And you know, there's a language barrier between them.

[Brent Tucker]

So what a gift that guy was.

[Pete Blaber]

He was. And we took it totally positive. We're like, this is. Fuck, we're in business, man. These guys are. Have their heads up their ass. They're just like our command. They're not talking to each other. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't lost on us. We were like, wow, man, they're going through the same thing we are.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Pete Blaber]

So we were, you know, we were very grateful for this information and. And the language thing will come back into play when we get up to Takagar. So that day it was about 20 degrees out. Another, it was snowing again outside. And the teams were ready. You can go to the next slide. It should be a map. So Juliet team. Yep, Juliet team, you see them on the bottom of that slide right there? Juliet team was five men. They would infill the valley from the north and occupy the east side of the valley. After hundreds of hours of experimenting with everything including donkeys, Juliet team decided to use ATVs to carry their supplies and get into their op. These ATVs were unit ATVs specially modified by unit mechanics. They were up powered motors and suspensions as well as super quieted mufflers and IR headlights. So pretty audacious on their part. India team, which you see below the AC130 there, they're at the entrance, the main entrance exit. You see how it's shaped like a fish hook? Was called the fish hook. That's only three men. Again, less than I would normally say is needed for a sniper recce team. But the two operators, one of them's a linguist SIGINT intercept guy. The two operators were two of the poster child operators of all time. You know, I compared them to Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton, who were the two greatest frontiersmen in the 1700s. These guys could shoot, they could move. They were just incredible. And they made up India team and then Mako3one, who you see to the left as you're looking at it, of India team. That's five men that's led by Mike Goodenbo, the SEAL they would follow India up from the vehicle drop off point and then break off from India team and handrail a ridge around the backside to come up to what the terrain features called the finger. And you can see in front of them, it's a finger. It points like a dagger into the heart of the valley. And the reason we chose that terrain was because a lesson learned from Dien Bien Phu, Dien Bam Phu fell when the Viet Cong took this battle position by the airport. And the significance of it. It was a hill that was just like this in the middle of a valley, mountains on both sides that pointed like a dagger. And once you have that, you control all air infill exfil corridors because you have frontal enfilading fire on any aircraft that comes from the north or the south. The only ways to get in there. So his control right there would control the whole valley. And when occupied, we believed these three positions would enable us to control the whole valley and to trap and destroy the enemy that was inside there. So we did our final briefs. This is afternoon of the 26th, going into night at 27, you know, the guys left. It wasn't lost on me that, you know, this was a pretty big deal. You know, you're about to go in and infill over 10,000 foot peaks with 13 guys to take out, you know, 500 to 1,000. But, you know, the guy's biggest concerns was that it was going to get called off at the last minute. So no one was really worried about their, their life or anything. Goody thanked me profusely for breaking him out of Bagram. He was, he was like, you know, I said to him, goody, your mission is huge. You've got to be in position by H hour. And he said, hey, Panther, if I'm, if we're falling behind and I can't make it, I'll start dropping equipment. And if we're still behind, I'll drop, keep dropping equipment until there's five naked guys with guns standing on that RP and hr. I was like, where do we get such a man?

[Brent Tucker]

No kidding. Love the mentality.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep, I love it too. And that's what I mean. They were more, they were like, this thing better not get called off. And, and it did not. So we were set. You can see we infilled that night. Juliet team, with a Predator flying in, took a long roundabout path. They went through two minefields, you know, found themselves in an area stopped, and the rocks were all painted red and white. So that was pretty hairy. But by 04.45 on the 27th, Juliet team called me. Juliet in position. About an hour, not quite an hour later, India team moved into position. And that was 5540 when India team Mako, because they had a much higher elevation and a much longer movement, was not able to make it in that night. But that was fine because they, they still had plenty of time and, and I told them just hold on and you know, bed down for the day and we'll continue moving that night in the middle of the day. First Juliet called me in at about 11 o' clock and said a simple message, the enemy is everywhere. And they had I think 23 targets pre planned. So you see that Turgogar whale on the right side where the explosions are? That thing was just infested with enemy right across from them. So they were lays in every, every position, you know, getting a NATSAS grid and preloading those for the, the fast movers for after each hour. India team had 12 key targets, all relative proximity to them. And they were ready. At 1300 that day, Juliet team heard the snow crunching from behind them and they, they had already gone through this contingency. They were completely hidden. They just laid stock still. And out from behind them, around a rock walked four foreign fighters, AKs, RPGs. And they stopped and they had hidden their ATVs. But like one of the ATVs had left a weird tire print in the snow. And so they stopped right at the tire print and one of them was literally scratching his turban. As you know, they were talking and Chris Kosum, who was the Julia team team leader, called me on the radio and with whisper, whenever anyone calls you, whispering, whispering like yawning is contagious, you whisper back. So he goes, roger, this is Panther, I'm in a safe house. And he explained what, he had four guys right in front of him. And then he said, what do you want me to do? And I said the same thing I said numerous times after that, what's your recommendation? And he just started describing, well, we could take them out. Our muzzles are pointed at them right now. We've got silencers on. So we could take all four of them out simultaneously, but it looks like they're going somewhere and they might be in place. Important, right? So they're going to come looking for them. And if we take them out, we may compromise the whole op.

[Brent Tucker]

Love the tactical patience. Yeah, that's the difference. Yeah. But to have senior men on the ground that understand the whole operation and not about what's Just in front of them. And such a. Such a key, key move on their part.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. So he said, I'm, you know, I'm going to see what happens and if they walk away, we'll let them walk away. And they did. Suddenly a blizzard blew up. It was snowing sideways. They tucked their chins into their coats and headed down into the valley. So he. He ended up letting those four go.

[Brent Tucker]

And that's actually just rhymes of something else that, that you talked about a little bit earlier. And that was with Juliet team them inserting. Going through minefields. I have to look at through the lens of. Of. Of when you guys were there early in the war. What, what I ended up knowing later was, you know, from things that guys like you have, I had already learned and got to pass down to me. You guys had to learn it and the time, the preparation that you allowed them to do and for them to be the consummate professionals. Learn the area, learn the familiarization again. This is an area we've never been in before. Before Afghanistan. If you'd have told me, hey, here's a field and there's red and white rocks painted. I've been like, okay, that's so so. But these guys knew it. And that. That alone could have. Could have compromised this whole thing. But the preparation and the area fam. And talking to the people was so important. And the as always, like the mission gets one in preparation. The execution was some. Is something we always train for the execution. It's kind of easy, honestly.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

But it's the preparation that allows to. Allows you to get to the execution.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. Well said again. So you know, that was that we had all the targets. Now Goody starts scooching up into position. So Mako three one on the. On the finger. And he sees movement up ahead. And go ahead to the next slide. One after that. And this is what's on his position. We picked this position because it controlled the valley. And here's what's on it. This guy's got a Gore Tex jacket tied around his waist. He's got camouflage pants. He also had reddish hair and a beard. You're going to see that again. I believe he was a newsbeck. Initially we thought he was a Chechen, but I believe he was a uzbek. That's a ZSU234 wrapped in plastic. The ammo you can't see it is in a dugout right next to it, neatly arranged. And it's aiming directly as I described it, on the long axis of the valley and point Blank range for what on H hour is going to be where the lead, uh, 60 carrying the brigade commander of the 101st is going to try to land. So this position, you know, a lesson is when you pick the best terrain, expect enemy to pick the same thing. And that's what we found here. So goody, he had a little. He took a camera with him like a good sniper recce guy did. Takes a picture, sends it back. We were. This is probably the beginning of text messaging, secure texting. He's texting me, picture comes up. He says, roger, we got this guy. There's a tent nearby. What do you want me to do? And I came back with the same response. What's your recommendation? And he then just started talking. He said, well, if I take him out now, it's going to compromise the whole op. You know, obviously they're an important position. So my, what I recommend is that we scooch back about another 50 to 100 meters, and then tomorrow morning, about an hour or two before H hour, we'll start moving very slowly into position, get up there, and then five minutes before H hour, I'll either use the AC130 or our long guns to take them out in their tent. And I said, roger. And he said, then he followed up and he said, look, I know we're a sniper reconnaissance team, and you know, in blue, it's against SOPs for a sniper recce team to assault a target. So I'll do whatever you want, but I understand if you tell me, you know, that this is not a mission for my team. And I just texted him back, terminate with extreme prejudice. And he text me back, thank you so much, man.

[Brent Tucker]

I tell you what, that, that picture says a lot to me. Actually, it's not, It's. It tells me two things. It tells me a lot about the enemy. One, they're. They're not, they're not dirt farmers, just them having that plastic protection over. We, we take it for granted that this is what the American. Well, the American military is a professional, you know, organization. The dirt farmers don't take care of, of their weapons. Just him taking care of that weapon kind of shows the level of proficiency of, of the enemy there and him having. And again, it seems like it's not that important because it's red and it's not camouflage, but him having Gore Tex and him having cold, you know, cold weather gear, you know, ready for the conditions that they're fairly well equipped. And that's. Yeah, that is, that's something, something you're going to want to know. Right, right, right. Before, you know, you get into that, these, these guys are here and they're ready to fight.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep.

[Brent Tucker]

And they're. And they're capable of it more than likely.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep. So that picture arced its way across the entire military, political spectrum. Bush had it, Frank's had it, everyone had it, JSOC had it. You know, and I don't have. I would have loved to have been a fly in the wall when the commanding general got it because, you know, this was the, the dry hole, the, the chasing shadows. But suddenly, you know, we had empirical proof that not only were these guys in there, but they were ready to fight like you said. And so right after, you know, that conversation, the General Hagenbach, because of the weather, put h hour off 24 hours. So.

[Brent Tucker]

Poor recky guys.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, and it wasn't just poor. It's like, you know, this is really, you know, I didn't, wasn't interacting with them because I was in Cardes. So it had already happened but you know, now that was 24 more hours of water, battery, power and 24 hours we had to stay uncompromised. So what I love about that picture is, you know, in modern day I'm not, I'm not aware of any other sniper recce teams that snuck up behind enemy, you know, in 10,000 foot mountains and able to take pictures like this and then scooch back and never be compromised. So amazing testimony, testament to that team. Mike Goodenbo, incredible guy. Also to Juliet, Chris Kosum and his team over on their, their op for not shooting those guys. So go ahead yet. Right, right. So go ahead to the next slide. This is just. So when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured, they got his computer and off it. Apparently one of the foreign fighters in there kept a diary and this is what he wrote about this day. You know, you can go ahead and I guess I'll read it. The early presence gave us sufficient experience and much knowledge inside and out its dangerous parts in the way of them and allowed us to master their use by bounty of Allah the most high for our operations. We the America when Allah caused us to encounter them in the area. Sayf Raham Mansour was a military commander. He's relatively famous number two under Haqqani for the duration of the previous phase of battles. He had been involved in preparing the bases and occupied with arranging and fixing ambushes. We planted mines accurately on the roads which led to the village. We set up heavy artillery in the surrounding mountain peaks. In the early days we spent all our time prepping the area. Our numbers totaled 440 mujahideen in all. Compromising. 175 Afghan mujahideen from Mansoor's group, 190 mujahedeen from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and about 75 Arab mujahedeen, the majority of whom had previous military knowledge. So this is telling you what they're doing. And, you know, it's kind of important because like you said, this is no. This is no joke. You're up against some really competent enemy. So. So now we're. It's sundown on March 1st. The plan that Hammer and Ambo was to get the Afghans forward so that they could be that the Hammer. So they left the Gardes safe house. Around midnight, battlefield friction started happening. The trucks they were in began turning over. It was chaos. They were packed. Each truck had like 40 or 50 Afghans in it. Guy, one guy died, number of guys were badly injured. They were screaming. So right off the bat, you know, the. The hammer was broken, and we hadn't even hit HR yet.

[Brent Tucker]

And they were being pushed by the SF guys.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, and the SF guys did a great job. But by the. When they got up to the Fish Hook area where they were going to move in, they came under mortar fire, took a couple more casualties. And the Afghans just started heading back on the road, walking, heading back toward Gardez, and. And, you know, SF guys were chasing him. Come on, man. And soon they realized it was futile, and they just followed him back. So that's them. Goody moves up, and you can go to this next slide. So Goody moves up. It's early morning, barely light. This was taken the day before, but it shows you they're in the tent. Goody's in position. They got all guns aimed at the tent. And he had already talked us through with the guys. Hey, we got to be ready if a guy gets out. Someone said, why is he gonna get out in the middle of the night? And he was like, to take a piss. Sure enough, the guy comes out to take a piss, walks right over by their position, probably 40, 50ft away. You know, when you're taking a piss, you stare around, you look, your eyes, you know, begin to focus in on stuff. And spider senses have something to do with that. He just noticed something and looked right at them. And then they saw him panic, and he ran back for the tent. And Goody opened up. The AC130 was overhead, and he used the AC130 and direct fire. His long guns I think he had SR25s to take them out. And they. There were five guys in that tent. So they killed all five guys there that morning. And Goody called me up and I. And I said, yeah, you know, he's like, sit rep Fowls. All enemy terminated with extreme prejudice. And so we were in business. He then occupied the. That position that guy's standing on, and that became Mako. Three ones OP.

[Brent Tucker]

And now they have a 10.

[Pete Blaber]

It was blown to. I didn't show you that picture. It's pretty bad. So enemy forces. So then income. It's 07am Is H hour. So income. The 47s, the Blackhawks, the 10th Mountain lands first wave on the. On the valley floor. This is just one position. There's vehicles. Were they in? They were in helicopters. Okay, 47. Yeah. So they get out the back. And we had tried to dissuade them from using helicopters, but it didn't work. And so like I said, they. They landed the first wave within minutes. I think 18 guys were injured. And they were just down in the valley. And they, you know, they're. They're kitted out with. They were way too heavy. Kevlar, everything. There's just nothing they could do. The enemy who's all over that valley. So this is a good, you know, view of the valley. They're. They're in all these hills. The enemy likely couldn't believe their eyes. I have another passage, but it's not. I'm not gonna. It's not up there. And. But to engage these guys, they had to get out of their fixed positions, which were mostly high up, and get down low enough to get within effective range of their AKs or their SVD's or whatever they had. So the enemy started spilling out of the mountains, and especially on Turgo Gar, you could see them coming out, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40. And again, to them, they were probably laughing like we were for the shepherd. For them, it was like shooting fish in the barrel. Unfortunately for them, they were the fish because they didn't realize that AFO was looking at every one of them. And as they came out, you know, they were evaporated and, you know, guys in fives, in tens. We had so many targets. We had every aircraft in the Middle east was stacked up, and, you know, word got out, just, yeah, just get on the ultra AFO net and just take all guidance from them. And. And these guys went to work, and hour after hour, and these guys kept pouring out. And I said to my intel rep, I'M like, you know, because the guys were narrating this. We told them, you know, narrate the behaviors you see so everyone else can understand what's happening. And I said, wonder why they keep coming out, you know, as they're getting destroyed. And my intel rep said. He said it's what that defector said. They're not talking to each other. There's no comms between them, and so no one's learning. They just go out, disappear, get blown up, and then no one passes it on to anybody else. So, you know, no shared reality. Not listening to the guys on the ground. Little did we know we were about to be victims of the same lesson. So everything you know, this first day was incredibly successful. The 18 guys, 10th Mountain, got injured. So they're down in that valley floor. General Hagenbach called off the second wave of helos. Again, we had told him, do not fly in here on helos. So he called it off. So only one wave was in. And, you know, I can't remember how many guys that was. It wasn't a lot. 100, maybe. Called off the second wave. You go back to Mako3 1's position. That Blackhawk landed right below them, right about 50 meters below that. Dishka and Mako3 1. We talked this contingency ahead of time. It was like, hey, have VS17s, everything possible. Well, within about an hour of the brigade talk, positioning there, they started shooting at Mako 3 1. And he got on. I gave him the freak. He got on their freak and told him, hey, we're right above you. Well, his radio wasn't working. The brigade commander, Rakasan brigade commander. So he walked up to Goody's position, said, can I use your radio? I got a call back to General Hagenbach. And so he's on afosat and we're all listening. And he gets on. He goes, sir, this is. Everything has gone wrong. I recommend we call off the op, pull everyone back to Bagram and reset for another day. And General Hagenbach, you know, is listening to his guy on the ground, says, roger, got it. We're going to call off the rest of the op and we'll begin planning the X fill. So I'm listening to this in Gardez, which is 7km from there at the time. And I realized again, you know, we don't have a shared reality. They have no idea what our guys are doing and how many enemy we've destroyed already in the first day. So I got on the radio. It's my radio net. And General Hagenbach was right there with Jimmy. And I said, sir, I think pulling out would be a huge mistake. This is a battlefield that we control. We're in all the key terrain, the dominant positions. I can't even give you a battle damage assessment estimate, but it's definitely above 100 enemy killed. If you guys can just hang a little longer, we'll clear out a few more of these positions, and they should be able to get in, no problem, by tomorrow. And General Hagenbach, to his great credit, and I called this out in the book, he changed his mind. He had already said, it's off. Yeah. And he said, okay, we're back in, guys. Brigade commander, you're staying there. You know, staff plan, the reinsertion of Chalk Two. We're going back in tomorrow morning. And he did, and it was the right thing for the mission, the right thing for his men, and the right thing for General Hagenbach.

[Brent Tucker]

What was the. For the conventional forces that. That made it in wave one. So now they're basically staying the night on the. On the valley floor.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep.

[Brent Tucker]

Were they able to get into some sort of position? Did they move back to, you know, to. To the high ground? What would they end up doing for this?

[Pete Blaber]

There's rocks. There's rock outcroppings all over. So they stayed on pretty much the floor. And there was no real direct engagements down there. There might have been some I didn't hear about, but the enemy was up high, and. And, yeah, they just consolidated positions. They had mortars and everything else, so.

[Brent Tucker]

Nice.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, I think their combat power, they were untouchable. But, you know, again, when you got all that Kevlar on and. And all your equipment and stuff, you're not going very far. At 7,800ft in the mountains, not very.

[Brent Tucker]

Far, not very fast.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. So the night nightfall came. You know, it's March 2nd. Night, darkness, fog rolls in the light. The calls were coming in around 1800. Calls are coming in, the pictures out. Everyone's listening to the AFO sat. It's on its CENTCOM headquarters. It's on in the White House. So congratulatory phone calls are coming into JSOC and Fort Bragg and to Misira and Bagram. To the Air Force One star. Great job you guys are doing this. I don't. I didn't know that was happening. A couple staff officers told me this afterwards, and the commanding general and the deputy commander, the helicopter pilot and the fixed wing had a meeting. And after that meeting, they came out and they said, hey, we need to take Control of the battle. And, you know, you can read into that what you want. It was obviously an emotional thing. They were suddenly this, you know, this battlefield success like no other was happening. And their multimillion dollar headquarters had nothing to do with it. And I think they just decided, you know, we can't allow these guys to control the battle. We got to take it over.

[Brent Tucker]

And midstream.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep, midstream. And so at midnight that night, the Air Force One star calls me up and he says, and this pretty much verbatim, Pete, wonderful job. General Franks told me to pass on his compliments. Listen, we can't let you continue this. AFO wasn't designed for this. I'd like to send some seals down and let them take over. You and AFO need to go out and find the next battlefield. And, you know, sometimes when someone says something to you so outlandishly senseless, you're, you know, you don't have words to respond because there's a thousand things I could have said that countered, you know, pulling us out in the middle of an intense battle and putting guys in who have no idea about the battlefield geometry or who's where or any of the, you know, hours and days and weeks of tacit knowledge that we had built up. I also had three teams all engaged at the time, so I couldn't, you know, get into a debate with him on the phone.

[Brent Tucker]

We're not talking about weeks here. It's days. You guys are going to spend, what, a few more days here?

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. So what, you know, he just wanted to take over the battle.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Pete Blaber]

And so, you know, my response to him was, sir, my teams are fine. They have all confirmed they can go a minimum of 48 hours on their current supplies. They'll then need a resupply. All want to stay in position until the end of the battle. We have a no helicopter policy. So it'd be impossible to put any new teams in for at least 48 to 72 hours, because the new teams would need to go through the same preparatory process the current teams went through. And the most important is they need to acclimate to the altitude, study the training history, talk to the rest of the teams, and then do rehearsals on their comms, their weapons, and their nods. Sending any teams into the valley before they do that doesn't make sense and is setting them up for failure. He ended up. He ended the call by saying he talked to me later.

[Brent Tucker]

Wow.

[Pete Blaber]

So my. I hung up the red phone. My intel analyst was red hot, pissed off. He's like, I Knew it. I knew they would try to take this over. They have no idea what we put in, the preparation time we put in. They have no idea how complex this is. I just knew this was going to happen. And, you know, I think I mentioned a heavy fog had set in so that the teams couldn't see anything. I had been up for, like, 50 hours. So, you know, you got to manage your sleep. So I said to Glenn, hey, Glenn, let's do shift. You know, come get me if anything happens, but I'm gonna go get a few hours sleep. So I went to the tent and laid my head down and my watch alarm went off. A few hours later, I popped up, walked outside. It was light out, you know, presidential, blue sky, and it was warmer. And I was like, shit, we got to change our camouflage pattern. And then I started walking back toward the talk, and Glenn came running out, and he goes, two seals showed up right before daylight, and our team leader's in the talk and he wants to talk to you. And I'm like, what the fuck? So first I was, you know, upset because we had had two guys, two vehicles shot up by the Afghan guards. So, you know, it was like, never approach these unless you've already coordinated. Never, never approach our guard posts unless we've already coordinated, have an LNO out there. So somehow they just drove down. Luckily, a good guy was on guard let him through. But I just said, hey, man, what's going on? What are you doing here? He said, well, the deputy commander sent me down here. He said, I'm in charge of the seals, and I should report to you, and my job is to put them in tonight. And, you know, I just shook my head, grabbed the sat phone, walked outside, called this Air Force One star up. And I said, hey, sir, what's the deal? And he said, same thing I told you last night. I want you to get these seals in tonight, and then let me know when you can pass the baton to the seals to take over the battle. And, you know, I went through the same logic again and told him, hey, you cannot do this. You're. You're going to get these guys killed. And, you know, his. His reply to me was, pete, both SEAL teams need to get into the fight tonight, and that's in order. And then he hung the phone up. He yelled that into the red phone at me.

[Tyler]

Bureaucracy and careerism.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. And so why would you.

[Brent Tucker]

Why would you ever trust the guy on the ground?

[Tyler]

Right?

[Brent Tucker]

Why is there to do that? Why is there? It's so crazy.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

Everything he Said obviously it just. Obviously you didn't. You didn't want to be right.

[Pete Blaber]

Right.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, because we.

[Pete Blaber]

Not even about being right. It was about taking care of the guys and, you know, responsibility to them, knowing what was needed and that, you know, it had nothing to do. I'm like, fine, okay, we'll put them in if you really want them in, but, you know, let's put them where we need them and let's get. Give them the chance to be successful, which you're taking away by forcing them in tonight. So. And that would also require helicopters. So they began planning with the staff back in Bagram and Masira, the JSOC staff, on where to put these guys. You know, one of the. One of the. There were two SEAL teams. One of them, I recognized the team leader, and it was Brit Slabinski. And I knew him from Bosnia. We lived in the same safe house for about four weeks. I drove around in a car with him for 10 or 15 hours. Clandestine reconnaissance. I knew him. He was a good guy, quiet, competent, recce guy. And so I said to him, hey, Slapp, can you follow me outside? And he was like, yeah, sure. So I walked outside with them. I said, dude, you guys cannot go in tonight. And I'm, you know, I would not be saying this if it was. If I wasn't, you know, seriously concerned with your welfare. You need to acclimate. You need to get your weapons, commonads all set up. You need to talk to the guys who've already been in. You need to talk to the Afghans, and, you know, I need your help to prevent them from putting you in. And he said, I totally agree with you, Panther. And I tried telling them that back at Bagram, but right now I feel like I'm flying blind. I was ordered by my chain of command, and I have no choice but to obey orders. And he said something like, you know, it's different from us than you guys. We have to obey orders. And so, you know, I was like, God damn. And, you know, I just. Again, there's a lot of things, you know, this is 2001. No one really believes you can get killed. They've been watching this op, you know, they just. The guys at Bagram, the non combat, you know, people in Bagram, and they were like, all you got to do is get the guy on the hill, call for fire, and, you know, it's a piece of cake. So no matter what we were saying, they were ignoring it. They wanted control of the battle. And then you come do it. Yeah, well, I wouldn't you know, and you can't even do that because you'd be. You'd be leaving them. So afternoon, evening of March 3rd, this is that. That day, the SEAL teams briefed the rest of us on their plan. The first team would go in fairly innocuous on the valley floor right below Juliet team. They would. They were going to land in an lz that the 10th mount was using for resupply. So nothing, nothing, you know, dangerous about that. And then they were going to just walk up, give their resupply, drop the resupply off for Juliet team, and then occupy a position down in the valley that, you know, they could watch from. Mako 3 0, though, that's the wanted to go. They, they said we gotta, we gotta go to Takar Gar. So we first had to make them an lz. And you can see on the left side of that picture LZ1. We made that LZ because we could cover that. Juliet team could see that LZ when they infilled. We wanted to. We knew how dangerous it was going to be, but at least we. We could cover it. There's no 10th Mountain on that side of the valley. No one had been over there. And then Slab's plan was he was going to. He needed four to six hours to walk about 2,500ft up to the top of Takar Gar there. And that's what he briefed us on. And, you know, the AC130 would be an integral part of that. It would do reconnaissance ahead of time of the LZ and of Takar Ghar and provide fire support. So it seemed like, you know, they could pull it off. That night we were reinserting the Afghans. So we, we all, you know, got into position. You can go to the next slide real quick. We were ready to drive at sundown back into the valley. And this is. You see that, the Jenga trucks on the road. And then that's the. See the 400 Afghans lined up? That's. Those are Afghans. Yeah, shrubbery. Yeah, shrubbery. You can see, remember what I said? It got warmer. So those. The snow's already melted. And that's why we had to change our camel, our camel patterns. Our vehicles are those vehicles in front. The SF guys have these really nice Mercedes SUVs. Their European or Middle Eastern SUVs. Those are theirs. The white ones. The Tacomas are ours. That's mine. The red one, that's my combo guy outfitting it. I had everything I had in the talk. I had Satcom uhf. I had a little portable Predator downlink video display monitor. So I had everything in that vehicle. And all three of us, the SF commander, AFO commander and the CIA head of the agency, were all going to go back in because we were so concerned about friendly fire and de conflicting the Afghans had to go in. This had to be an Afghan op. They had to be the guys to clear the valley. And you know, I agree with that. It was, don't have our guys, clear the mountains, send them in. That's what they do best. So it's almost 1800. We're going to leave at darkness. The LZ time for the seals is 10:30. All these times are local. So the 47s get delayed on the way down here from Bagram. They don't get there till 11:23. After the 247s landed, they both developed engine problems. So as a result, the pilots informed slab Mako 30 that the soonest they could get him in to LZ1 was 2:30am with sunrise at 6:15. That slab instantly calculated that would not give him enough time to walk up to the top of Takar Gar. So he turned around, he said the SEAL troop commander was there. He said, hey, I recommend we push this back 24 hours. I don't have enough time. It's going to be daylight and we're going to be trying to walk up that hill. The troop commander got on the radio instead of calling me, which, you know, I had told him before I left, look, anything happens, call me. You got any questions, call me. Any changes of plan, he got on the satcom, but he called back to Bagram to his TF Blue headquarters and said, hey, here's what's going on. Hilos are busted. The Mako 30 team leader recommends we push back 24 hours. What do you want me to do? And they said, we really need you to get in tonight, so if you can find another way, let's put them in tonight. So he went back, he had some imagery, he talked to the lead pilot, I think it was Al Mak, and he said, hey, can you put us right on top of Takar garbage? So, you know, to give you an example of this, we already knew there were enemy up there. We had seen them moving. Mako3one had actually called it in the day before, but they weren't doing anything. They were just moving around up there. So it was kind of like we were going to address that once everything else was, you know, we stopped killing all the guys in the valley. So you know, if anyone had told me they were going to fly directly on top of Taka Gar at that point, I would, you know, it was a very easy response, but I had no idea. And Al Mack, you know, the Great Task Force 160 pilots was like, yeah, we can get you in there as long as this imagery is accurate. And so the mission was now a go to drop them right on top of Takur Gar.

[Brent Tucker]

Do you know what the. The hurry was? What. Why their command was like, no, they have to get in there tonight. What is it that they think that they knew that required them to get in tonight?

[Pete Blaber]

I think it was mostly like that this was still a juicy target. You know, this had guys on it, and they weren't. They didn't want, you know, they wanted to take this thing over. And I'm. This is supposition, so I can't get inside their heads. I've thought about it many a times, but I think they just wanted to get in. The intel guys have been talking about Tucker Gar in the rear for, you know, for the last couple days. They said, yeah, we got to do something. So it probably had become, you know, on some slide, a priority target, but it was not a priority target to us, and I had no interest in, you know, doing anything but approaching it the same way. We approached everything else incrementally, with caution. If we think it's key terrain, they do. And there's probably, you know, a lot of enemy up there. So, you know, it's an important point here on this hlz, you know, on the frozen blackness of a guard. As hlz, this, you know, junior officer had made a decision about a mission he was unsure of against an enemy he was unaware of on a battlefield he had never stepped foot on. He ignored the recommendation of the guy on the ground and the guidance from the guy he was supposed to be reporting to. So, you know, the two overriding lessons, you know, they're in the book are it's not reality unless it's shared. And always listen to the guy on the ground. And it was a massive violation of both those. Even I would have, just as an afterthought, said, hey, I need to tell Panther we're putting them in, you know, just to protect my guys so they don't get shot when they're coming in. But they. They did not tell me they were going on. And, you know, that's the thing about sharing knowledge. It's not selfless, it's selfish. When you tell other people what you're doing, they're going to pressure test it and you stand a good chance of someone coming back going, dude, I would not do that, man. From my vantage point, there's 10 guys up there, there's a dishka, there's an PKM machine gun up there. Did not do that. But that didn't happen.

[Brent Tucker]

And they were planning in a vacuum.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, yeah. And so now things are falling apart. And again, remember that, that lesson we talked about in the beginning. So it's March 4th, you can go back. Yeah, we're on the map. So it's the AC130 had already checked LZ1, it's 2:40am TF11 told them to also check Takar Gar, which they did, but only for a few moments due to ARD confliction. And what the AC guy said later was, you didn't tell us to check it out as an op, you just told us to check it out. So they did a cursory flyby and despite it being spider webbed of footprints, a donkey tied to a tree, a dishka submachine gun, a trench, they didn't see any of that. And so at 251the aircraft carrying Mako 30 slab steam 21 went in on no problem. Mako 30 at 2:51am, braked, flared, hovered above the top of Takar Ghar and was met with a fusillade of RPK machine gun fire and rpg. They were knocked out of the sky by one of the RPGs or they weren't knocked out of the sky. Their hydraulic lines were severed. And because they were hovering for a landing, one of the seals had unhooked his safety line and it moved back toward, you know, the back of the aircraft. It's a common thing, guys do it again unless you've done it 100 times and been warned about the potential. And so when the RPG hit, the aircraft bucked like a bronco and he flew out the back. The aircraft, you know, had no hydraulic pressure. They were pumping it in manually. He crash landed, you can see in the map, dislabeled, abandoned 47. Incredible airmanship. He guided that thing down to there. Slab gets on the radio, gets on line of sight, radio to me and you know, I'm, you can go to the next slide. I'm with the Afghans, the agency where we stop when I get this call and it's lab. And he explains to me he's excited but still calm and collected like he usually is. And he told me that the aircraft had crash landed on the valley floor. And that one man, Neil Roberts, had fallen out of the Hilo when they took fire as they tried to land on top of the mountain. And like a lot of this, I can remember it like it was yesterday. In my head, it was like, on top of the mountain was an all time, you know, what the fuck moment? And, you know, I instantly realized they must have tried to land directly on the mountain. But there was no time for lamenting, no time for, you know, we had a guy that either needed to be rescued or recovered. And so we had. It was problem solving time.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Pete Blaber]

Another thing you asked earlier about the terrain. So this is going to play in tonight. If you look up at the waves of mountain, there's the first wave. That's the brown desert. Then the second, which is partially snowed in that next wave. And on the left side of the slide, you can see Takar Ghar with the little sun on it. That's Takar Ghar. Behind it is that massive palisade. And that will come into play because at BMNT you expect the top of mountain to get light, but not this one, because that's looking east. But anyway, I use my line of sight radio to talk to the AC130. He could see where Roberts fell out. His strobe was on, which gave us some hope. Initially he was alive, you know, but he was surrounded. And I told the AC130, okay, you need to narrate to me what you see. And he told me, and I said, look, I need you to use your best judgment because I can't see this. But if you can either fire a couple rounds nearby to see if maybe he breaks away, or if not, if he's motionless, then go ahead and take out all the guys that are co located around. There was like 20 guys, and the AC130 said Roger. And he was assessing the situation. But what was happening behind the scenes were this guy falling out of the helicopter. And now every TOC jock that I had mentioned before, Masira, Bagram, all over centcom, all went beehive. You know, we got a contingency, we got a guy. What are we going to do? The nets were going crazy. I kind of calmed them down. And then Slab and I started talking about a plan. It's Slabs never wavered. He's like, I'm going back. I got it. I got to recover him or rescue him. And I'm like, okay, well, you figure that out, we'll. We'll get another Hilo in here to pick you up. You look at the map, figure it out terrain wise, but the only thing you can do is you're, you know, a sniper recce team. I didn't even have to say that. Get up there, land offset, do not land in the same place. Go to Defilade, contact the AC130 and then do recon by fire. If there are targets, take them out the and if not, then stay where you're at and just use the AC130 to protect you and we'll pull you back out. And he was like, roger that. They got brought back the gardez. And then the radio came on again. Now we're on line of sight, AFO fires net. And this time it was from Mako30 Charlie. Unbeknownst to me, that was Chapman and he was calling on the AFO fire nets to announce the aircraft were there to pick them up and take them back to the mountain. He, he. So John Chapman is the CCT. He downloaded his PRC 1117 radio, which is a big satcom radio and UHF and for weight, he downloaded that and just went with his M biter handheld as his primary. So he was now on afo. Fires was on that net. AFO sat was on that net. So him and Slab were the, were on that net. And we, we know that from his call. So let's see where it does just catch up here. So now you know the, all these talks are going beehive, people are yelling in, we need to sit rep. What's you know, what's going on? What else do you need? Well, Jimmy, my deputy has the best essay of anyone. Situational awareness. He knew where the 10th Mountain guys were. He knew knew where AFO was, where SF were. He could see the predator feed from where he was sitting in the 10th Mountain talk. He could hear what the AC was saying. And he was experienced. He knew how all this fit together. He got on the radio to update everyone on what the AC130 was reporting on the fires net. And he barely got the words out of his mouth. The enemy is out in the open and vulnerable. And he was about to continue. The one star deputy commanding general got on the radio and he said, we don't need you getting all worked up on the radio. Get off the net. We got this. So in that moment, the guy who had without a doubt the best situational awareness, the best understanding of the battlefield geography was ordered by the Air Force Brigadier General to stop talking on the radio in a real world ops. And he immediately turned to his staff, the Brigadier General to take Over. And you know, they realized they had to take control. Now he had said it. And so what they did was they shifted the primary SatCom net from AFO sat to purple sat. And that alone would have been disruptive. But what made it deadly was they didn't even tell us they were changing everybody to the purple sat. So now all the stuff I'm listening to, we're all pressure testing, we're all saying yes you can do that, no you can't. We can't hear anything. It's on a separate net and they're manning that net is not this Brigadier general, not the two star general, not even a colonel. They have a bunch of colonels up there. It's a fire support officer. He happens to be a Marine major who they put on the radio. He's never commanded and controlled a maneuver battle before. He's a thousand miles away in one time zone in Masira. He has no idea of the battle space geometry, no idea where friendlies are, who the friendlies are. He doesn't even know where Neil Roberts fell out of the helicopter. And what you're about to hear is the mass confusion that's created by his lack of situational awareness. So again I'm not aware this is happening but Slab and John Chapman can hear it on their radios and we're going to go ahead and play some never before heard audio of that I didn't hear till just recently and it really connected some dots for me. So go ahead and play the first one.

[John Chapman]

Yeah, just still in the slave window. Coordinate support as required. Okay 290 if you're going to work some of that, here's the situation.

[Brent Tucker]

We have.

[John Chapman]

We have one MIA in a vicinity. We have no location on him. Grim Three Two is on station. I've got a 50, 55 minutes left to play time at the Grim. We have to do an assault back into there. I would like to know of the.

[Pete Blaber]

So he when I first heard this and he said when I first heard this and he said we have to do an assault. My, my head just dropped to my hands. My heart almost fell to the floor. In combat arms, words matter. And they especially matter when you're telling someone to do an offensive task. Assault is a mission, especially on a bunker is a mission that requires surprise and superior firepower and personnel. We had no surprise. This is a sniper reconnaissance team. They're not even wearing helmets. Some of them have the old fashioned plastic skateboard helmets on so they can wear their nods. They have no armor, they're not loaded. They've got SR25s. They don't have assault weapons. He just changes this to assault. And he's going to say it over 10 times in these next couple tapes. But it's beyond belief. And again, it's not just him. It's not his fault. He's like somebody shoved this microphone in front of him. And I have no angst against him because what I told you, if you're a commander then the only one who should be given orders is the commander. If you can't get on the radio and command and control a battle, you don't deserve to be a commander. And so that's what you're seeing here. All these high ranking people are sitting by while this guy just sews chaos and confusion into the fight. Go ahead.

[John Chapman]

What is their combat power? In order to come back to this lz? I don't want to have a blue on blue. I want to coordinate the H860s with Razor 04. I want the frequencies for this, those helos so they can talk to come back in 2029copy the situation. Standby for frequency and combat power. Okay, QRF is located here.

[Brent Tucker]

We might want to let camp know.

[John Chapman]

And all players updated the following. Razor 04 Gas has four shooters and again four shooters on board. That's the combat power we have. Grim, you are forced to work this in order to do the assault. Champ 2 Nine. What I want you to do is figure out what's my combat power for the HH 60s to put you back into this LZ. Then we're going to link them up on a Halo Comet so we can have a coordinated attack. Razor 04 will be the mission commander for this over in Grim 3 3. I would like Razor 04 to push to stat Alpha correction. Yeah, I want Razor04 to push to Sat Alpha so I can coordinate this with him.

[Pete Blaber]

So just real quick. Grim is the AC130. Mostly you're hearing him. Champ is the JSOC guy commanding control in the battle when he's talking to this HH60. That is a medevac helicopter that he just told and he's going to say it again and again. You're assaulters now you're going in for a coordinated assortment. I found this out through serendipity. The HH 60s can't fly above 10,000ft so it wouldn't have been able to operate anyway. But he's telling this aircraft you're going to be part of the assault. Combined with the guys in blue Mako, the Grim guys as you're about to hear, he's about to tell them the wrong. He has no idea where Roberts fell out of the Hilo, that it's on top of the mountain. He has no idea that the 10th mountain is in the valley. And the 10th mountain has a mortar platoon that somehow comes up on the AC130 conversation. And he's going to tell them to waste the mortar platoon. And then he stays fixated on the mortar platoon instead of fixated on the mountaintop where the enemy is just milling about ripe for the picking. And those guys are gonna end up being able to stay alive and affect the battle. Go ahead.

[Brent Tucker]

All right, we'll have to pause it here for a second because it is 7:12.

[Pete Blaber]

Okay.

[Brent Tucker]

And I got. I think at 7:15, 8:37. Yeah.

[Pete Blaber]

Okay.

[Tyler]

Yeah, good.

[Brent Tucker]

Let's go. Yep.

[John Chapman]

The four packs that were moving that you reported earlier on their own. Do you see those four packs at all two zero. Grim three three did not, repeat, did not report four packs moving. That is Grim 32 at the LZ where the MIA is possibly located. You're on a. Okay, good to go. Grim three two Camp two zero. What are your total personnel at the original lt? Over. I think you finally figured it out. Yeah, I'd like to kick his ass.

[Brent Tucker]

Nav pilot standby for words on uniform.

[John Chapman]

Form one copy pulling it up.

[Pete Blaber]

Listen in, Grim three three.

[John Chapman]

I need you to make comps with Razor 04. What is their current status? Over. Three one three three copies. Standby. Razor 04 grand three three. Grip three three. Razor 04, go ahead sir.

[Pete Blaber]

Chase.

[John Chapman]

This time 04 has two niner zero zero counts on board.

[Pete Blaber]

Understand?

[John Chapman]

Champ two zero with the relay from Razor 04 with 2,900 pounds of fuel awaiting. Roger. I want Razor 04. They can load up whatever gas he needs to get back in there. I want him to put the enough personnel that he can pick up one. Whatever his ACL is for that have him figure it out, he will do an assault. I say again, he will assault back in to the position in order to get the MIA.

[Pete Blaber]

Here's my concern.

[John Chapman]

56. The two of you, you are men force minutes. I need you to stay on stage particularly grim 3 2. Continue to look for that mis. Go ahead and tell Ranger pure force in gas and launch back to the original LZ with enough personnel to do an assault. Rim 3 copies. Will relay.

[Pete Blaber]

Hi our focal. Can I get you this okay? Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

They don't have enough people to to do an assault.

[Pete Blaber]

He's telling Razor04 he's telling the team leader, you know, in his helicopter. He told Razor04 he's the assault Boris commander, he's the pilot of, you know, the helicopter. It's, it's craziness. But this is what I mean. I believe, you know, the two guys who can hear this are Slab and John Chapman. And you know, luckily Slab is going, yeah, this guy's out to lunch because he's experienced. But you know, John. And you heard the AC130 guys are totally fed up with them and you're about to hear he's gonna. This is where they almost obliterate an entire mortar platoon from the 10th Mountain. And the AC130 pilot is actually very heroic and stopping it from happening.

[Brent Tucker]

Now, where, where are you during all this? As far as essay of what's going on? Have they.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, I'm at the base. We're down by the fish hook, kind of looking up. So I have line of sight at this point here. I'm walking around and we're under, I think IL 76 rocket fire. They're shooting rockets at us, but I can't get down or I'll lose the signal. So I'm walking around and they're, you know, exploding. But I, you know, I was not about to lose com. So with these guys, go ahead.

[John Chapman]

Copy orders 1-82995, over. No. Okay, what is it?

[Brent Tucker]

That's the primary.

[John Chapman]

1885. 1885. Okay. 9561, Whiskey Bravo 188 956. I repeat, 188-956- Location mortar position. We are tracking.

[Pete Blaber]

Bravo 200892.

[John Chapman]

UAVs report three individuals at that position.

[Pete Blaber]

Break position.

[John Chapman]

Whiskey Bravo 1-88-956 is 100 by 200 meters from rock. That is 100, that's, that is six minutes out. Grim three three, grim three three. Check firing, check firing. Check firing. Grim three three, rim 33 is cold and has been.

[Pete Blaber]

Sir.

[John Chapman]

No rounds expended. Be advised, Razor 04 is three minutes out.

[Brent Tucker]

Good job.

[John Chapman]

Roger, Ultra Hero 2. We have a mortar at 182995 confirmed. No friendly at 182995. GMC IR pilot, go.

[Pete Blaber]

Pilot, what are you looking at right now?

[John Chapman]

Okay, listen up. Grim 33. I don't want Razor 04 coming in just yet. Tell them to hold up. I do not want to push it into the LC where they lost that person. Do not push him in just yet. We need to organize a assault.

[Pete Blaber]

So. Still hard to listen to, you know, he's got these, he's got two grids mixed up completely. The one grid is the mortar platoon. Rocasan is the 101st Battalion. So it's 101st mortar platoon. He keeps thinking that's where Roberts fell out of the helicopter on top of Tucker guard Grimm. Luckily, Grimm 33 saves the day. They realized this is a mortar platoon. It's not, you know, enemy. They're down in the valley. And the guide fell out on top of the hill. The grids is what I was talking about. You know, before I mentioned, I brought my Russian map and you know, you can see I acetated it and then put the grids in the box, you know, the main battle space. So by this point in the battle, you could say any four grid combination. And I knew what grid square you were talking about. So when I first heard this, I knew exactly which was which. But this guy again, is a thousand miles away in Masira, Oman and one time zone. He doesn't have any idea about the battlespace geography or the relationship between units. And we're just squandering. You can hear at one point, Razor 04. That's what Mako 30 is on. And they are. They're heading into the back to Takara Gar. There's no talk about prep fires. They're supposed to be prepping the objective. If you watch the long form tape, which is out there, the enemy is still milling around on top of the mountain. But he won't let them fire because he doesn't know where Roberts is. And it's very clear. Roberts by this point is dead. And again, I'm not hearing any of this because they're on a different frequency. They change the frequency. So I'm just standing there with my guys going, what is happening? Why aren't we hearing anything? So next we're gonna go right to the videotape. And the videotape is the one that's online. I believe it was prepared for the Medal of Honor. I think the Department of Air Force put it together. You can just fast forward, go wherever it starts with the.

[Brent Tucker]

ISR footage.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, Yep, yep, right there. So let's go. Yeah. Okay, so this is highly edited from the actual tapes. And that's what's kind of confusing about it. They don't say that. And they should because there's massive, massive parts left out that explain what you see in the part after it.

[Narrator]

Highest award, the Medal of Honor. Chapman and the seals exfil their MH47 helicopter. John is the second individual to exit and immediately moves in the direction of the summit. He can be seen moving off to the right of the screen alone. The team is taking heavy fire from every direction as indicated by the arrows. As Chapman begins engaging targets.

[Pete Blaber]

Okay, so what? This is what I'm talking about. So the plan was get off the helo, move to defilate position, which is what they went to. They picked it out on the map, it's a great position. And then assess the situation immediately, make contact with the AC130, use the AC130 to do reconnaissance and reconnaissance by fire. I, when I first saw this tape, and I saw it three days after these guys were pulled off the mountain, General Hagenbach had me come back and watch. All of them include parts that are missing, tapes that are missing now. And when I saw this, when I saw the guy get off, it was same thing, you know, I wanted to put my head in the hands, hands again and go, what is that guy doing? I had no idea who it was. It could have been Slab. So I wondered, God, did they change the plan? And why would only one guy move forward? And it wasn't until I heard those tapes that everyone just heard that I realized he was the rto. He likely heard the assault. We're going to do a hasty assault assault. He's relatively new. And so, you know, to him it's like, wow, they just changed the mission. And also being new, he's the cctrto. And people don't say this, but they should because future RTOs and CCTs are watching this. But a CCTRTO never goes out in the lead of any patrol. Whether you're in contact or not, your job is that, you know, your trigger is to push, to talk on your radio. And without. If you're not doing that, then they don't need you attached to the team. So his also, the fact he's new, I think, prevents him from instantly realizing, what am I doing? Taking a knee and waiting for guidance from his team leader. But instead, he keeps walking. The narration says, they're under fire. They're not. The enemy in bunker two and bunker one are shooting at the 47 as it takes off. Remember, they don't have night vision goggles. They can't see and it's still dark. So they're shooting at it. Once it's all the way off, they stop shooting and it's quiet on the mountain for, I think, 15 seconds. And then Slab yells to him, chappie, what are you doing? And Chappie turns around and says, I don't know. And that's when the mountain opened up and the firefight began. So go ahead.

[Brent Tucker]

Otherwise it's safe to assume that they weren't sure there were any people exactly on the mountain until. Until they heard something.

[Pete Blaber]

That's exactly right.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Narrator]

You can see spent cartridges ejecting from his M4. Chapman then begins closing with the enemy, forcing his way up slope in knee and thigh deep snow. He is constantly under fire as he does this. Chapman's team leader begins to close on Chapman, following his trail through the snow. The dark mass above Chapman is a fortified bunker containing two enemy fighters, each armed with AK47s, who are firing down on the team in the dark mass. This bunker will come to be known as bunker number one. To the left of the.

[Pete Blaber]

What you're seeing in the bunker is actually a donkey and Robert's body. There's no bunker one. It's a dugout that was used for cooking. So it's on, it's right off to one side of a tree. They dug it out and they just used the rocks to hold the dugout earth from tumbling downhill. But there's no bunker there. You're going to hear constantly say cleared the bunker in and out. There's no in or out. There's no roof on it. It's a cooking area and that's it. So there is a guy in bunker two and like I said, there's a donkey, a living donkey up there that lives until they get right up on top and either Chapman or Slabinski shoots it. So go ahead.

[Brent Tucker]

How do, how do you know that? How do I know that's a kitchen? You know, like the details that you just.

[Pete Blaber]

So, so you're gonna see. We went up three or four days after this happened and it's completely untouched. Did a sensitive site expectation. You're gonna see the bodies and, and so took pictures and everything else and it's, that's what it is.

[Brent Tucker]

And I ask that because I, I think you're probably prepared for this. But I think, and I've talked to you already, I don't. We didn't go as deep as we're about to. But then you're gonna hurt some people's feelings with what they thought happened and that they believe that to be true and then hearing some things from the guy on the ground and then who eventually went there and can put these pieces together.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, well, they've always been true. I'm not trying to say anyone's right or wrong. I'm not trying to go against anything. I'm Telling you what I think and what I know about what happened. And my only, my laser focus is on the lesson learned. And you can't learn if you're not accurately interpreting what you're looking at. So that's all I'm doing. And anyone you know, the people with this tape, the full tape, I'll know too. Because when you look at the full tape and when you see what I'm about to show you with the enemy, it becomes even more apparent. So go ahead.

[Narrator]

The tree and bunker one is another gray mass. This is a rock outcropping that came to be called the boulder. Between bunker one and this boulder can be seen the body of slain SEAL Neil Roberts, the man Chapman and the others are attempting to recover. Chapman, still alone and closest to the enemy, pauses to engage targets as his team leader follows him, but never actually catches up with him. Chapman on his own, now makes the decision to charge directly into the enemy bunker. Despite withering point blank fire, Chapman, now literally on top of the enemy, engages the two combatants and kills them, saving the lives of the remaining seals. He does this from a distance of no more than 10ft. These actions by themselves earned him his first Medal of Honor. He then climbs into and takes control of the bunker. Having cleared the immediate threat, Chapman is then joined by his team leader in bunker one. You can then see Chapman and his team leader engaging the next bunker known as Bunker 2, which is situated to the left edge of the screen. This bunker, manned by a handful of Chechen and Uzbek fighters, also contains a heavy PKM machine gun, hand grenades and rocket propelled grenades. John Chapman is shot twice at this time in the torso and collapses, incapacitated. You are now looking at a new angle and at the left of the screen can be seen the two man fire.

[Pete Blaber]

So you know the new angle. The, the tape is now skipped. 3 minutes, 6 minutes and then I think 30 something minutes. So you know the new, the new angle is one thing, but you know what's happening in between, right? It should be at least addressed. And you can see there's, there's plenty of enemy up there. They're just not right where they're talking about in bunker one. There is an enemy all the time in bunker two and then around the out very outside perimeter, which I'll show you in a minute. Go ahead.

[Narrator]

Team leader. On top of the boulder, just below it is bunker one with the mortally wounded Chapman. One Seal can be seen firing his modified M60 machine gun from the hip into bunker two on the right side of the screen. Until he is struck by grenade shrapnel and tumbles 10ft off the top of the boulder, collapsing at the feet of his team leader. Thus setting off a chain of events that would lead to the SEALs abandoning Chapman on the summit. The wounded SEAL and the team leader can be seen conferring about his injuries. Moments later, the SEALs decide to retreat from the summit because their position is untenable in the face of continued massive enemy firepower. They can be seen moving toward the right side of the screen and passing the body of Neil Roberts. Unfortunately, the seals do not pass John Chapman, who is above them and inside bunker one. This angle shows three seals in a triangle. The larger black heat signature is a smoke grenade. Just to its left is a donkey and dead Al Qaeda fighter killed by Chapman. The steepness of the mountain can be seen as the seals begin to slide down the near sheer floor face. The team leader, desperate for relief and now with two wounded teammates, asks for uncontrolled air strikes from an orbiting Air Force AC130 gunship. The impacts you see are from 105mm howitzer rounds being fired up onto the ridge top in order to save the remaining seals. Because neither the SEALS nor gunship know Chapman is alive, he is experiencing these detonations from his position at approximately 5, 20, 20.

[Pete Blaber]

So from 523 to 550 is when the AC130 is firing from 457, 458. They landed at 44057 to the beginning of of the AC firing. 523. The AC130 is pleading for somebody, anybody, to allow it to engage the enemy that I described to you that are all around the perimeter, but no one's answering. So I'm on line of sight. AFO fires net on my inviter. It's same thing Slab, same thing Chapman has. And I begin like you're supposed to do from 5 to 5:23. Every minute I'm calling saying Mako 30 or Mako 30 Charlie, this is Ultra 0 1, over. Trying to contact them. So for, you know, 20 something minutes, I'm doing that because the AC130 asked me, can you give me permission to fire? And I said no, I, I can't see what's happening up there. The only guys that can are Mako. And you know, I knew John happened to be the rto. I didn't know John or anything then, but I knew that the RTO's radio worked and that he had it on the right channel because he called from Gardez to say the helicopter was there. So when nobody answered for these 20 minutes, I only found this out retrospectively only. John was monitoring the AFO fires net slabs was on his team internal primary, and the rest of the guys did not have time to load the AFO fires net. So every guy in afo, you know, that's our. That's the most important net you can have. And so going back to being hurried in that team. And Remember, this is 2001 calling for fires to an assaulter or even a recce guy is. Yeah, that's pretty in extremis, so it's not at the top of their checklist. And this is. We're paying the price for it. But from the. From, you know, the day after this happened on, when I heard John died, I just always believed that he did die. When he got shot, the narrator described it as a, you know, mortal wound. The first rounds that hit him because he didn't answer the radio for 23 minutes. And why would a CCT, you know, his lifeline is that radio when he's wounded. He was up there when you saw the rounds. Those were 105 rounds impacting. Why would he not get on, adjust fire, talk to the ac? The AC never heard him come up on the radio either. And he's flying right above him with perfect line of sight comms. So, you know, it's just hard to figure out, you know, what could have happened. But it was very frustrating. And again, the rush, the higher headquarters rush to put these guys in on top of everything else, it did cost these guys right here because they're not taking advantage of the biggest killer on the battlefield that's locked in on these enemy guys.

[Brent Tucker]

I mean, to this point, it's safe to say no operation goes perfect. But you guys had some. Had some hiccups before this, you know, like the Afghans turning around.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, Friction battlefield.

[Brent Tucker]

Right. But you were dealing with them. And the same way you dealt with the, you know, the commander, the CF commander is like, well, no, no. Wave to let's pull them out. And then you're like, hold on. The truth is, this is. This is still working. So you're continuing to problem solve. You're continuing to deal with what the battlefield's given you. It's not been a failure by any means. You guys are stacking bodies up there. And it's not until JSOC gets involved and commanders from a thousand miles away put their nose into it, and people outside of it press to have people put. Put in too fast, too soon. In the wrong place, they take over the net. And essentially everything that's going wrong right now has everything to do with them.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. And you heard me in the beginning define senselessness is making decisions without using your senses. And that's what all these decisions. They're the most senseless examples of decision making you can ever imagine. And as I said, from here on out, the. The video as a huge cut in it. And so what I wanted to do is switch and first show you the enemy activity that's missing because the QRF aircraft's on its way in and no one knows. Slab, the Mako 30 team leader, thought the QRF was 10 minutes behind him. That's what he was told by again, the same guy narrating and command in the battle JSOC. They were really like 55 to an hour out.

[Brent Tucker]

Wow.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. So he. I would never have allowed him to go up there. He would not have gone. Especially he was delayed a half hour doing an air loiter. So, you know, it just, it's. It's bad. Worse. And again, what you see here, you know, you said some people be disappointed, but I don't think they should. I mean, what you just saw, Chapman Dew, was he just charged a machine gun nest because he was ordered to. And you know, to me that's pretty heroic too. Pretty gutsy. It was a senseless order, but he's a new guy and that's what happens to senseless orders. You know, the other thing you don't have in your mind is, I'm not fucking doing that. Doesn't make any sense. But, you know, he did it and so there should be no hurt feelings. And when you understand how mixed up this was and how these guys just everything they were told did not happen, you know, there's no real reason. The mistakes are minor. That, you know, I called that out about the radios. They admit that, but that's not their fault either. You know, we had five days to two weeks to prep for this. They had not even a day before they went in and they weren't even acclimated. So I said, there's a skip. I want to show you the enemy thing. That's what we're going to do before we do it. It's very confusing looking at that battle space. So let's go back to slides. You can leave, leave that and we'll go back to the slides. And let's start with the schematic. Yep. Next one down. 19, I think it is. Yep. So just, you know, so everyone understands the battle space. Up there you can see Bunker one, which is the stove. That's a tree. It's next to Bunker two is a real bunker. There's a tree on that too. A real fortified position. There's a trench and a dish connects to that, that point down into the valley. You see the rocky outcropping at the bottom of this schematic. And then a little rock and it's called FP1. And that's where there's two enemies this entire time. They sit there, it shows you they can't see. They were probably shooting at these guys too, but they're kind of firing blind. So as I mentioned, Mako gets off the Hilo. Everybody goes to the, where they're supposed to, which is to take a knee in Defilade. But John, John believes the mission has changed. That's my, my explanation for it. He heads right for what's called Bunker one. Next slide. This just shows the seals. Then they're under fire. They, they split up like they're supposed to. Two guys go left up to Rock one. Two guys go right to hold the right security, right flank security slabs in the middle. You can see Robert's body is marked there. John's right under. It's right at the B. B1. And he's still alive. Next slide. Yep. Then Slab goes down to almost 50%. They decide to move off the mountain. The smoke grenade goes off as their passing. The smoke grenade was good placement, it just didn't work. The Bunker two shot another guy. So now Slab has two guys shot and two, you know, two guys down. John and Neil Roberts. And so they move off the X. They are now taking fire from three sides from FP1, from south of the helicopter and from the bunker that chewing them up with PKM machine gun fire. Next slide. Yeah, so this just shows, this is the, the final one. It shows them going off the smoke grenade. It shows where they landed. And then go ahead, next slide. This is going to show you the red marks where the enemy is about to move. And this is what makes the narrative kind of hard to make sense of when you understand what happened in this period. That's edited out of the video. So go ahead, next slide. So just first or. This picture was taken about 48 hours after we cleared everyone off the mountain between 24 and 48. It was the morning, so we got them off late in the evening. So this shows you a couple things. First, this is, this battlefield is the top of a mountain. So look at the helicopter and look at Bunker one and Bunker Two, that's five stories right there. A five story climb. So when you saw them before, and the narrator says Slab still hasn't caught up with them. Well, you know, they're sucking air at, you know, 10,000 something hundred, 600ft. They're sucking air up there. And these guys are well acclimated. The, the other thing about this enemy is they sat there not just from the time slab landed at 457, but then through the entire AC130, 105 Bombardo, which went from 520 to 550. At exactly 550, the AC130 is told by boss man who's in the AWACS, hey, you need to get off station. It's going to get light. And he stops firing and leaves station. I tried ordering him to stay. It's on the another tape. You can hear me ordering them. And I tell him, if you leave now, they're going to blow that QRF aircraft out of the square guy. But he left. And so as soon as he left, these two enemy begin movement. And this first slide, you see the red dots? This enemy we call Red Beard. And I'll show you why in a minute. He begins movement northwest at 550 across the open area. When he's approximately halfway across his comrade, enemy two fires an RPG toward the bunker area. But it hits the ground and rolls toward the bunker. Next slide. So this shows you a still of the video shot. And there's enemy two. There's where his RPG hits, there's where it bounces. Red Beard is literally IMT ing individual movement technique. He's going up, down, and he's shooting a little. You can only see Robert's body here because Chappie is under the B1 part of the tree. Next slide. So Red Beard, I'll start at the bottom, moves northwest. Then he cuts east toward the bunker area, staying in defilade, which is what was down there to both B1 and B2. You cannot see that where that arrow is from the bunkers. So you actually, if you're down low, they can't shoot you from there. Then he changes course and heads up to B1 toward B1 by staying south. And at 6:03 he looks inside B1, then backtracks west again. So you know, if John was alive, something happened right there. And you know, don't ask me what, but Redbeard went to right where his body and Robert's body was then turned back around. Go ahead. Next slide. I should also mentioned enemy two began moving There, toward. Toward Bunker two. So here we go again. Red Beard, there's his path. He goes down first. Then he went up toward bunker Bunker one. Then he stood there for a few seconds. Then he headed back down again and around Rock two toward the enemy in Bunker two. And you can see a live body, how dark the body is. And it only lasts that way for a short period, even after you're killed. And you'll see that with Redbeard in a second. Next slide. So enemy two now arrives and takes position at the edge of B1. And his comrade, B2, appears to. Or his comrade Redbeard, appears to engage B2 with a grenade and then small arms fire. So what we have here is a red on red incident. These guys think Mako is inside these bunkers and they're literally going to take the bunkers back. So it shows some real determination, real gutsiness. But Redbeard backtracks to the west again, then cuts northwest around rock two. That's R2 then stops. You can see this on video. He engages, throws a grenade. Then you see muzzle flash. 7.62-AK muzzle flash. He engages bunker two at 6:04am Next slide. So here's just the still of it on the video. You see Red Beard at Rock two. You see Bunker two, Chapman, Roberts. Enemy two is almost up. We're next to Chapman and Roberts. Next slide. Now Enemy two closes. He's in Bunker two. And he can see Redbeard. Redbeard's in a firefight with Bunker two. And Enemy two just stays in that defilate position, not where Robert or not where Chapman is because chaps is still in the open and shootable from bunker two. So he moves back a bit. At 6:05, a muzzle blast is observed from bunker two, as are hot impacts by Redbeard. And at this point, you can watch it on video. Red Beard goes down and never moves again. I'm going to show you in a second this sensitive site expectation photo. He's. We found him exactly where. This shows exactly where the video said he dropped. He never moved again. Next slide.

[Brent Tucker]

So all this is saying it's not Chapman who got back up and started fighting, but it's. But it's, it's a red on red. That's. That's going on.

[Pete Blaber]

That's what it certainly appears to be. And the bodies. There's no other explanation for it, as you'll, as you're about to see, because here's from the video. And you've got, again, you've got Enemy two Laying right next to Chapman in, in bunker one. And remember, Red Beard had just done the same thing. So, you know, and you'll see why it can, it can't be, it can't like be both. Yeah. So go to the next slide. This is what we found when we went up and did the sensitive site exploitation. This is Red Beard. Pretty. You know, I don't, I don't like showing dead bodies, but I have a lot of respect after seeing this for these guys. Look at the gloves, look at the outfit. Layered, loose, layered. He's wearing Roberts Gore Tex pants. So that tells us he came from here. He knew, you know, this was his position. He's coming back to take his position back. He had been there when Roberts went down, obviously took his Gore Tex pants off, put him on. But this guy, this is a hardcore mountain fighter. And this is where we found him, exactly at the spot no one ever moved him, that he went down.

[Brent Tucker]

In the video, you see him like four days later.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. So, you know, again, that's what I mean. It can't be any. If he went to bunker one and then walked back and then died, and you see him on the video die and then we find him in the spot. It's hard for there to be another explanation. Next slide. This was also just a zoomed out shot. That's Red Beard, that clump in the background. This just shows you this position was a prepared position. It had a trench. There's a dishka up there. It's pointing right down into the valley. They never used it, but this was a full fledged fighting position. If, I don't know if I read it, but when that deserter came in, one of the things he said was they, they have kitchens up in the mountains. They only come down to get supplies. Then they cook the food, go back up and distribute it. So maybe that's what this was, the C2 site and the kitchen for all the guys on all sides of this mountain. Go ahead, next slide.

[Brent Tucker]

I'm guessing some, some warm weather came in from, from knee deep to, to no snow there.

[Pete Blaber]

Well, remember I told you I woke up that morning that the SEAL showed up and it was like 50 degrees. And that's when I was like, this stuff's gonna melt and we need to change our camo again. So now we're back to bunker one and enemy two. And he. Here's the approach of the QRF elo again, I did not know this when it happened, but the QRF hilo with the rangers who don't have a satcom. So no one's talking to them. I'm certainly not talking to them. They did a flyover and flew right over this objective, which cued, I believe, Enemy two. He moves between bunker one and Rock one to a position of COVID where the Mako team leader engaged B2. And it's 6:07. He fires on B2, then moves back south of B1. And here he's observed moving around, doing something. Can't tell. Then he moves back between R1 and B1, and it's 608 fires in RPG toward B2 and falls back to the south again. So next slide.

[Brent Tucker]

And this is essentially, essentially the third time we've used this lz.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep, yep. And it's all this.

[Brent Tucker]

The first time wasn't good. The second time wasn't good.

[Pete Blaber]

Right. This guy had no satcom. The next guy is no. They put him in helicopters without satcom. So just, again, the amount of, you know, friction that was going against these guys is frustrating, but it's sad when you. When you take it in totality. So this just shows, again, the predator view. You see Robert's body, Chapman's body. Enemy 2 is definitely still alive. That's that black blob.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Pete Blaber]

That RPG he fired hit the ground again. And, you know, as much as it sounds like something could be going wrong, he's shooting up slope. And so, you know, he might just not be compensating. The enemy in B2 is definitely there. And you can see Red Beard is going cold already. Next slide, same thing. The rpg, just. This just shows the rpg, the other piece of it. Next slide. It's the same thing, I think. Go ahead. Yeah. So this just shows the totality of their movements. The yellow is enemy 2. The red is Red Beard, and shows what they did, where they ended up. And, you know, I don't. I don't have an opinion, like I said, but to not. When I first saw the video, I was like, where's the enemy? Because when I. When I first saw the Internet video, because I saw all these videos fresh, every one of them from each AC130 from the predator all the way through. And I was amazed to see Red Beard Im teen across the battlefield firing up, down, up, down. You know, the guy was trained, and he's. He's maneuvering like a textbook guy out of Fort Benning, Georgia. And so when I saw the Internet video, I just said, where's the enemy?

[Brent Tucker]

Right. It was taken out.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah. And it was made by the department of the Air Force. And so I'm not the guys who are on it and whatnot. Probably. I have no idea how that process worked or if they had any idea they were given a chopped up video. I don't know that I. And, and that's not my purview. I just know what I see and what I saw when I reviewed the tapes and the audio recordings. Next slide. So just catching up here. Okay, so this shows us the Razor, the QRF infill, which is the Rangers. Same thing. No, no comms. They have no idea they're going into the exact same hlz. They're slightly offset, but they're still in frontal enfilading fire from B2. And if you think about what I showed you already with, with the, with the slope right there, the five stories, think about that as that hilo's coming in. You're even with the Hilo when he's five stories up. So it's like, you know, you could probably. Same thing we were talking about Tora Bora. You could probably use a rock to knock that thing out of the sky.

[Brent Tucker]

Sit and duck.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep, total sit and duck. So I also want to why this is up, just kind of give you a bit of a backtrack timeline. So at 5:50, when the AC130 ceased, Bossman ordered Grim 32 off station. That was their last rounds fired. At 5:52, I ordered them Grim 32 to stand station. Warned that the QRF would be blown out, but they had no choice. Bossman ordered them off. 603 to 608, Grimm departs the area. They must have heard that because you know, they're moving this whole time pretty freely. Razor01, who's this aircraft does not have Satcom. So he's clueless. And because you heard part of the audio, you can understand he's not telling anybody, you know, not sharing information. So it's his priority. Should have been tell the QRF do not land on top of the mountain. Land offset. But that's never on the audio. And you know, these Rangers got on this helicopter at Bagram and when they said what's the mission? Someone just told them, hey, you'll find out. Fly to Gardez, we'll tell you there. Well, they had no satcom, so they got the Gardez. They still didn't know when they flew to this mountain, they did not know that Roberts had fallen out of a helicopter, that the seals were up there. They knew nothing about what they were doing until they got on this mountain and the firefight started. Yeah, what an injustice. So. So the ACS off station this614, you can see at the bottom, Razor 01, Chalk 1, shot down, falls out of the sky. Svitek, Anderson, Cross and Commons were all KIA within the first two minutes. They never, you know, they were either shredded inside the aircraft or immediately when they stepped off the aircraft. Razor01, the fatal shot was a RPG. They were also hit by a lot of small arms. And it came from B1, enemy two that we showed you earlier. The right seat pilot is quoted in his 2002 AAR as seen his cockpit windscreen and chin bubble start to come apart with bullet holes as he keyed the internal comms to tell the aircraft, we're taking fire from 2 o' clock, which you can see 2 o' clock is bunker number one. And moments later, RPGs impact the engines and Razor 01 crashes down onto the mountain. So enemy two is firing to the south at the helicopter. This pilot's chest plate of his body armor took 10 rounds. His helmet took two rounds. One round hit him and entered his body. When he saw this video, the Internet video, and he heard the video described the individual who's shooting at him from B1AS, as John Chapman providing covering fire for the helicopter, the pilot said, if that was John, then he shot me in the head. And, and let's be real, whoever came up with that, John's not going to shoot at a helicopter. That is, if he's alive. It's his rescue helicopter and he's. There's no other helicopters up there. He's not going to turn around and open fire on a helicopter. So they don't explain that in the, in the video. They just say he provided covering fire, but the guy shooting is shooting from right there. And, and it's enemy one. Next slide.

[Brent Tucker]

Wow.

[Pete Blaber]

This is them getting off. You can see, I believe that's Anderson and one other who were shot dead as soon as they stepped off to Hilo. Next slide. This just shows the distances, shows in a relationship. There's only one hilo up there. 01.04 was what Mako came in on, but that's where they landed versus where 01. Next slide.

[Brent Tucker]

50 meters apart.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, still frontal inflating. This is a great artist depiction, I think Deets did this, of the firefight up top. The only thing inaccurate, those fast movers never were anywhere close to the mountain. They were 20,000 AGL most of the time. And I never could see them. I was looking up, I, I could see there the bombs drop, but I never could see the aircraft. So they were out of visual range. I'll just real quick finish off with the timeline. You can leave that up. So there's another QRF47. It's called Chalk Two. It's behind Chalk One. It's got a satcom. It got word finally. Do not land on top of the mountain. It lands at the base of Takargarh to the northeast. And those rangers climb up the mountain. It takes them hours to get up, but they make it up completely safe. So this is 614. The other chalk kits links up with Chalk Two. Links up with chalk1 at 10:33. So they make it up. They take over. They now have overwhelming firepower. The guy is still in Bunker two, shooting initially the CCT up there. The QRF CCT is trying to use fast movers. Again. I'm on a different freak. He's not talking to me. So when I get on, Juliet had already said, tell him to use the Predator. It's got Hellfires. And so I was like, of course. So finally I get him. I said, hey, man, you need to talk to me. You know, I'm commander. You're not. No one's talking on the radio. Stop using fast movers. Use the Hellfire on the Predator. And of course, I think he only fired one round. He might have fired two, but he destroyed the bunker. And things were pretty quiet. The bunker was destroyed at 11:35. But just to show you how many enemy were in the area at 3:31, 15:31. Jason Cunningham was shot in the gut. That's him at the back of the aircraft. He's a pj. Heroic actions. I wish I had the testimonials of some of the wounded pilots that he's treating back there. He's cool as a cucumber. He kept them alive, saved a couple limbs. He gets shot in the gut and then he's telling them, don't worry about me. You know, he's still narrating to one of the pilots what to do with his IV bag and his bandages. This creates another crisis. I'm trying to get that HH60 in to dust him off. Golden hour. But higher headquarters would not approve it. Said, we can't risk another helicopter. And Jason died heroically about an hour and 15 minutes after he was shot. Eent came at 20:16 local. A couple 47s flew in there, picked up everybody, took them off and brought them back to Bagram. And the battle for these guys ended that night. We kept fighting. Next slide.

[Brent Tucker]

Could you imagine how gassed those rangers were that landed at the bottom and.

[Pete Blaber]

They were helmet full body armor.

[Brent Tucker]

They moving like people's lives depended on their rivals.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, they were. They were heroic too.

[Tyler]

I know you.

[Brent Tucker]

You.

[Pete Blaber]

I don't.

[Tyler]

You didn't spend any time in the infantry. But I remember as a new guy, they told us like they would 12 miles up the Cool concert for Bragg. Just running and sprinting uphill. And then like, now you gotta fight.

[Brent Tucker]

In your tires, right? Yeah.

[Tyler]

Now you have to fight here. Yeah, yeah.

[Pete Blaber]

No, it's, it's. It's a smoker. But like you said, they were coming to the aid of their fallen comrades. So, you know, they never, never took a break. They just powered up that. So this is a sensitive site exploitation. That's India team on the bottom. Heroes and two members of Juliet team on the top. They hiked up there. I believe it was either three or four days later to do the sensitive site exploitation. Did charts. Next slide. This is what I believe is enemy two. He's the Uzbek. This is right where the hellfire hit. It obliterated the. Not just the bunker, but it obliterated the tree. Split it wide open. And did the same to him in another Uzbek, but he was in that position again. You can see hardcore fighter fighting to the end.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Pete Blaber]

You know all that taking all those rounds and they're still stayed in the battle. And then next slide. This is me. We. We can. Like I said, those guys flew back to Bagram. We continued prosecuting the fight. This is us cleaning up the battlefield. We went to every spot. We called in Aaron and killed guys to do battle damage. Took a lot of pictures. That's Takar Gar behind me. The path is right up to where the Dishka was. Was at. And then right over that is where the downed Hilo is. And final slide is the next one. It's just me with the Afghans doing the same thing, same day, cleaning up the battlefield. And. And that's it. That's.

[Brent Tucker]

Did you guys. I'm assuming just what you said back in the day, you guys did take the valley and did take the terrain? Yes, completely.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, we brought the. The Afghans came in that next day, did. Fought like they're supposed to fight. You know, another lesson for us in the US don't try to train foreign armies to be Americans. We just said, you know what? They asked me, what do you want? What do you want me to tell them to do? And I said, do what Afghans do. Crawl across these hills like ants and tell us what they find any, you know, any maps, any documents, take pictures, but let us know what you find. And they, like ants, went through all the hills and cleared it out within really 24 hours. They were pretty quick about it, so.

[Brent Tucker]

Well, you did exactly what I thought you're gonna do, Pete, the same thing you did with the Tillman episode. I mean, I knew exactly what happened, you know, in that episode. And anyone who, who watched this, who thinks they, you know, may have known about it or knew about some things of it, I mean, you just laid out exactly everything that happened from beginning to end. But the most frustrating thing is that, you know, almost makes me. Well, you know, we took it at the end of the day, you were right. And it's not about you being right, I know that, but you were right at the end of the day. And the guys on the ground had the most essay. I don't know why we have to keep learning that lesson. But of all those positives, like, the tragedy is no one had to die. This whole thing would have went, all the successes would have still been there, been there, and no one had to die if Higher didn't stick their nose and into where it shouldn't have been.

[Pete Blaber]

Thank you for summaring up, summing up like that. That's, that's the lesson. And, and like I said, it happened all throughout gwat, and it's still happening today. As you know, we've exported this it, you know, the lesson learned. The lessons learned from gwat, you know, were never solidified. They're, let's face it, they're institutionalized by the highest ranking people. And the reason generals, like the disconnected chain of command, command and control model, is because they get to be platoon leaders and company commanders again. They get to tell people what to do. But everyone with any sense in their head should have a red light alarm that starts blinking anytime you're trying to tell someone what they're seeing or what to do next when your senses aren't attached to the environment. And that's the main lesson. And we've got to learn it. We got to learn it now before we stumble into another one of these wars and get our asses kicked because this is happening. And look at what you know. That's America's best and brightest right there. Those are our patriots. Cut down. Those guys in the hilo, they never even stepped foot off the aircraft. They were shot inside and stepping off the rear ramp and you know, Chappie, again, I will just say he unfortunately heard this, you know, cacophonic senselessness coming from Higher headquarters, and I believe totally assumed that was what the mission was and heroically, you know, charged a machine gun nest. So there's no, there's no negative, you know, shade cast there. What. But what was happening was we were neutralizing and covering up. The real lesson of this, which is what you summed up already, these guys did not need to die. The chain of command disconnected. Chain of command killed them. Was.

[Brent Tucker]

Was there ever an AR done on this for, you know, for internal lessons learned.

[Pete Blaber]

And I thought it was shady right off the bat. There were little pockets of ars. It was never comprehensive, and I'd already seen that before. And I won't name the major incidents, but whenever Higher is at fault, you'll never have a comprehensive ar. I'm serious. And I. Look, you know, I'm not being. Yeah, I'm not up on some high horse, you know, I. I was a colonel, and so I'm part of the problem. I'm talking about. But I learned the lessons and I learned. That's why I said it's not selfless, it's selfish. If you don't want to, you know, make a mistake that you're going to be tossing and turning about the rest of your life, you better share information. You better defer to the guys on the ground. And when you do that, even when stuff goes wrong, you can look back on it and sleep at night because you did everything you could to make the best decision.

[Brent Tucker]

I tell you what, I'm not, Not real happy right now hearing this story. I mean, no one listening story, honestly, should. I mean, like I said, you know, you take that and take, take, take the positive, the lessons, learn from it. But we're gonna have to have you back here again, and you're gonna have to talk about something happier.

[Pete Blaber]

Okay.

[Brent Tucker]

You know, the. For a funny story at the end, could. Will you take a request? Because I, I still tell this. Not. I don't necessarily tell the story. Sometimes I do, but I use the phrase almost every training event I go to. Will you explain to them what don't get treated by a Chihuahua means?

[Pete Blaber]

Will I explain? Yeah, yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

It's just like the story. And how can give us the story of don't be and where the stain came from.

[Pete Blaber]

Were you talking about the, The. Oh, selection. Yeah, yeah. It's just. Tree by Chihuahua is a metaphor for, you know, not overreacting. Literally climbing up a tree in fear from a Chihuahua barking at you. And for me, it was learned at Selection. You know, I boneheadedly picked a route that I thought would be fastest.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Pete Blaber]

And it was right through a manzanilla vine forest. Got stuck in it. I guess a lot of people do because I heard stories of other guys getting it, getting caught in for sure. And you know, I, I was smoked. I tried to climb and make my way through the vines. I fell down. And when I fell, I heard something moving in the brush behind me. And I was stiff like an old man with rheumatoid arthritis from walking all those miles. I won't say how many it is because it's delta selection. And I just turned my head part way and I saw this black thing squealing. And of course I thought, black bear. Yeah. And so of course, you know, fight or flight or has to be adrenaline buzz. I flew up, you know, with my 40 pound ruck on, just switched it around in front of me and ran through the, the manzanilla vines. Plowed my way through. I could hear it. I could hear something else even bigger behind it charging after it, squealing. You know, I should have. That should have been my first hint. Bears don't squeal. And I ran and I came to the edge of a seriously steep drop off and I just said, fuck it, I'm. I can't get eaten by a bear. I'm gonna jump.

[Tyler]

Squealing.

[Pete Blaber]

So I jumped, I rolled down this thing, caught a tree probably 75ft downhill. Lost my map, which I pretty sure is a disqualification thing. I think if you lose your map, your weapon. Lost my map. And then I, you know, came to, looked up and it was a pig staring down at me, a mother and baby pig. And you know, I'm from Illinois and, and then California, so I didn't. And back then wild pigs weren't that, you know, everyone didn't. Oh yeah, but they won't, they're not going to kill you or anything. And so I was treated by Chihuahua. I made a move without, you know, taking a deep breath, thinking through it, thinking the context of situation. And that's what emotions do to you. They send you off on a monorail of senselessness. Because the only part of your brain that can make sense is your neocortex, your thinking brain. And when you're emotional, it's switched off. You're 100% emotional brain. So that's why when you take a deep breath, you switch to your neocortex. The only part of your brain that can take conscious control of unconscious actions is your neocortex. So it calms you back down. Now you can Think and you're like, bear wouldn't be squealing like that. So. And then, you know, I made a. I said, I still got to go. I gotta, you know, make it to the. What I believed would be the end. Everyone kind of has a feeling they're getting close to the end. But it was dark and so I had done like six rotations through jungle school. I learned that when you can't see, you navigate with your feet. Your feet tell you what terrain you're on. If you're flat, you're walking on the ridgeline. You know, if your foot curves this way, you're going down the left side, right side, downhill. So I just walked. I knew there was, you know, a ridgeline trail that went to my final point and I walked, kept course correcting to stay on top of the ridge. Finally made it drone in my brains out. And, you know, there was a guy there and yeah, he gave me some shit and I told him I didn't have my map. He's like, yeah, I'd go over there and over there was with the guys that made it. So it had a happy ending, but a lesson that I took with me and you know, still, still stay true to today.

[Tyler]

How long did it take you to tell that story?

[Pete Blaber]

A long time, you know, and I kind of forgot it. But one of the senior guys at the unit was one day, you know, I. I had been there like five years and he was a sergeant major. And we were having. You have all these back and forth sarcastic things with guys. And I said something to him, we, he was a good friend of mine. And then he said, yeah, well, I never tumbled down a cliff with and lost my map. And I was like, how the you doing that again? I was the guy at the last point. He goes, we all knew what you did. I'm like, you did? Yeah, man. So I hadn't even thought of it. I just, you know, covering it up as best I could. But he revived it.

[Brent Tucker]

They had to be thinking at some point for sure. Minus points for losing your map.

[Pete Blaber]

Yep.

[Brent Tucker]

Plus points for getting to your location without a map. Yeah, you still get points for that.

[Pete Blaber]

Yeah, well, you know the deal, whatever that formula is, I think you're like strongly all you. Some people, you know, you're strongly. In others, you're hanging by a thread. So whatever that genius formula is, somehow I made it through.

[Brent Tucker]

I love it.