The situation was confusing, and the Afghan government claimed nearly 140 Afghan civilians were killed. A later independent investigation estimated roughly 90 civilians died in the incident. In the days afterward, Afghans rioted in the provincial capital after men from the village drove into the city and parked a truck, loaded with fifteen bodies of dead Afghans, in front of the governor’s house. Their shouts—“Death to America . . . Death to the government . . .”—caused anguish in Kabul, and serious reflection in the Pentagon.
“Our willingness to operate in ways that minimize casualties or damage, even when doing so makes our task more difficult, is essential to our credibility,” I testified. “I cannot overstate my commitment to the importance of this concept.”
I would soon find in the villages and office parlors of Afghanistan voices confirming just how critical this point was. What I only partially understood that day in the Senate, and would soon come to grips with, was how monumentally difficult it would be to change how we operated.
* * *
From experience, I knew I had to build a team of talented, experienced, and deeply committed professionals. I started at the core. My executive assistant, Charlie Flynn, would go, and he would be the primary architect of the team. As it was on the Joint Staff, his role in Afghanistan would be to understand my intent on a host of issues—everything from tactics to diplomacy—and ensure what I wanted done was translated into action. Never far away, Charlie would be a trusted, forthright adviser. But more than that, he would share with me the emotional highs and lows of command that provided witness to awesome heroism and humanity, as well as spells of frustration in the face of an obstinate, complex war.
It was asking a lot of my enlisted aide Sergeant Major Rudy Valentine, back less than a year from an eighteen-month tour in Afghanistan, to return there with me. But he looked at me quizzically and stated with quiet finality, “I’m going.”
When the chairman had first told me I’d be heading to Afghanistan, I’d had the presence of mind to ask him to let me take selected talent from his staff, and immediately identified Charlie Flynn’s older brother, Mike, as the first and most important. Mike had helped transform TF 714, and I had a hunch the Afghan war effort’s gathering and use of intelligence needed similar retooling. The chairman smiled, having fully expected the request, and agreed on the spot. In the weeks that followed, he let me strip his staff of further talented members. Lesser leaders might have balked. But the chairman’s strong, quiet conviction to do what’s right, and his instinctive admiral’s sense of control for everything around him led him to act swiftly when pressing priorities required it.
The rest of the team came together in the following days and weeks as we reached out to talent we needed. On a phone call, Mike Hall, who’d helped me lead the Ranger regiment a decade before, came out of retirement to be the senior enlisted adviser of ISAF. Charlie meanwhile caught Colonel Kevin Owens, a former Ranger who’d spent a year at the Council on Foreign Relations as I had, while Kevin was having a beer in Germany.
“Count me in,” Kevin said. “Where do I go, what job will I do?”
“I have no idea,” Charlie said. “Get here, get in-processed, we’ll get you a flight to Afghanistan. From there we’ll figure it out.”
Others simply appeared, most of whom had served in Iraq or Afghanistan before, ready to drop everything and rejoin the fight. A joke circulated that “the band’s getting back together,” and calls came in offering to put lives on hold, to take on any position we needed filled. There was a sense of purpose that drew steadfast, dedicated women and men.
* * *
On June 11, 2009, we boarded a military aircraft that would fly to Brussels and then to Kabul. I had no illusions about the difficulties ahead of us. But as we settled into our seats on board the flight, and I looked around, Lincoln’s words—“The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships”—came to mind.