Walk in My Combat Boots Read online

  Every morning, starting at 4:30 a.m., two sadistic captains work hard to try to kill us all the way up until 8 p.m.

  That’s the goal of Ranger school. There’s sixty-five of us vying for seven slots.

  It’s the hardest physical thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I’m not good at it. I always come in last in everything. I’m so far behind everyone else.

  Four months later, after weeks and weeks of pure hell, I’m one of eight left. And now it’s time to face my personal physical fitness nightmare: dead-hang pull-ups.

  I’m horrible at them. I played college football, and we never did a single pull-up. Now I have to do twelve of them.

  I manage nine.

  I fail.

  I’m not going to Ranger school.

  It’s 2007. I request that they send me to war. They say I’m needed in Afghanistan.

  I arrive in the middle of the night at a base somewhere on the border of Pakistan, to serve with the 173rd, one of the Army’s most prestigious brigades. Because I tried out for Ranger school, I’m two weeks late—and I’m the only leader who doesn’t have a Ranger tab, which is really hard for me.

  The next morning, I wake up to beautiful snow-covered mountains.

  “You’re going to Attack Company,” I’m told. “There in those mountains. They just got in a four-hour firefight last night.”

  Holy shit. What am I going to do here? I’m a twenty-three-year-old newbie field artillery officer who is going to have to call for fire on the enemy, and the only training I have is what I’ve read in my field manual.

  I decide to seek out one of the NCOs. My dad, who worked in intelligence, gave me a great piece of advice: As soon as you show up, go find the NCO you’re paired with, talk to him and earn his respect, and then everything will work out for you.

  I’m six foot three and a big dude. The staff sergeant stands six foot five, and with his shaved head and tattoos, he looks like a Russian mobster. The guy’s neck is flexed, and I know he’s going to tear me a new one the moment I’m done speaking.

  I quickly gather my courage and say, “My name is Lieutenant Nick Black. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing, and I’d truly appreciate it if you’d help me.”

  That big dude just looks at me.

  Melts.

  “All right,” he says. “First of all, sir, your kit is all fucked up. Let’s start with that.”

  He gets me trained and up to speed. Takes care of me. We become partners.

  I soon discover I’m surrounded by an incredible group of guys. There’s 120 of us, and all I can think about is that I don’t want to let any one of them down. I don’t want to screw this up.

  I run into an acquaintance after my tour, a guy about my age—twenty-three—and when I tell him I’ve just gotten back from Afghanistan, he asks, “Did you join the Army because you couldn’t get into college, or did you just want to do this?”

  I’m taken aback.

  “Where did you go to school?” I ask him.

  He tells me. It’s some horseshit liberal arts school in the South.

  “That’s cool,” I say. “I went to Johns Hopkins.”

  “Then why would you want to go in the Army?”

  My parents have dealt with this sort of thing—people coming up to them and saying they’re so thankful I went to war so their kids wouldn’t have to go overseas and fight. There’s this weird segment of the population who can’t understand why college-educated people like myself would want to willingly go overseas and risk their lives to fight the fight. They can’t comprehend what it means to live a life in the service of others.

  We drive somewhere, dismount, and then walk up the mountain to an overwatch position to observe a bunch of Taliban guys, we’re told, who are clearly up to something.

  I spend a good chunk of my first day walking up a big, deep shale-covered mountain while carrying nearly a hundred pounds of gear. It’s brutal, hotter than hell. Same with the second day, when we take a watch position and observe a village.

  Nothing happens.

  On day three, nothing is happening—and we’re running out of water. Then, as the day starts to wind down, we start taking on rockets from a kilometer or two away. They fly over our heads while we take small arms fire from another mountain range, maybe three or four hundred meters away. The gunfire isn’t all that effective, and we can’t see the guys shooting at us.

  We assault our way back up the mountain, which is exhausting, and when we finally reach the top we see where the incoming rockets are coming from. The company commander looks at me and says, “Time to do your thing.”

  I crawl up to my position, thinking, Oh, God, I don’t know what I’m doing.

  Which is why I brought along my field manuals.

  The company commander sits next to me, watching as I take out my manuals. I’m fresh out of school, and I need the manuals to make sure I get the math right.

  After I make the necessary calculations, I call in the artillery.

  The artillery comes in and, thank God, shoots all the targets.

  It gets dark.

  Then pitch-black.

  We’re at the top of the mountain and we have zero illumination—and zero water. We haven’t had any all day. And now we’ve got to make our way back down the mountain, dehydrated and in the dark.

  It’s brutal. I’m so parched, I don’t even have saliva in my mouth.

  I misstep and fall off a ten-foot cliff.

  I hit my head and pass out.

  When I regain consciousness, I find one of the NCOs sitting next to me.

  “How long have I been out?” I ask.

  “Three hours.” He helps me back down the mountain.

  The base is completely isolated. We can’t drive anywhere (there aren’t any roads—and even if there were, there isn’t anyplace to drive), and because the area is so remote, there’s no resupply route, so no one is coming to help us.

  Sometimes a Black Hawk will come screaming by to kick out body bags full of water. But because they’re being dropped from fifty feet up, they hit the ground and explode, and we’re left trying to cup in our hands whatever’s left to drink.

  We’re alone—120 guys from random parts of America, all under twenty-five. It’s like we’ve been left on an island to fend for ourselves. In a lot of ways, life has never been simpler. I’ve never felt more invincible, or had tighter bonds and connections with the people around me, guys I completely trust—and yet, at the same time, life is bad. Humans hunting other humans.

  During my long fifteen-month deployment, I’m a part of long, grueling missions hunting bad guys on the mountains. Every time I go out, my rucksack is packed with ammo, high-calorie protein bars, and high-calorie electrolyte powder to mix in my water.

  We’ve taken over a little ranch compound, with walls made of brick and mud, located three hundred meters away from the Pakistan border and about twenty kilometers north of our main base. This place is supposed to be this really big infiltration route for the bad guys to come into Afghanistan.

  We have an observation post on the nearby mountain, about thirty meters away from the Pakistan border. For two months, we rotate guys in and out, about fifteen at a time, and aside from a couple of scrapes, nothing big happens.

  Then one night, when I’m at the observation post, I wake up at around 2:00 a.m. to what sounds like a popcorn machine going off.

  The entire mountainside is lit up with gunfire from RPGs and machine guns.

  We start going at it. One hour turns into three and then six, and the enemy is moving closer and closer and a lot of us are running out of ammo. B-1s and A-10s come on station, fly in and unload everything they have, and fly away.

  The enemy comes through the wire. They’re literally getting into our perimeter, and a group of them is trying to overrun the observation post. Our guys hold fast. The leadership of the staff sergeant, the way we all come together—it’s incredible. Despite the circumstances, I’ve never felt such an intense level of
satisfaction.

  By some miracle of God, all fifteen people on the observation post make it out alive. We’re all going home.

  The week after I get back, I find out that one of the three intel guys attached to us in Afghanistan killed himself. Two exits before Fort Bragg, he pulled off and shot himself in the head.

  I can’t reconcile that. How do you make it through fifteen months of combat only to come home and kill yourself two weeks later?

  I have another eye-opening experience when a good friend of mine from Johns Hopkins ROTC sends me an email with a startling statistic: the numbers of service members we’ve lost to suicide is far greater than the number of service members killed by the enemy.

  How the hell can that even be possible?

  I don’t know, but it pisses me off so much that I start a nonprofit called Stop Soldier Suicide. Through years of grinding, suffering, and just trying to do the right thing, my staff and I are fortunate enough to have built it into an organization where I no longer have to take phone calls in the middle of the night from veterans in need.

  But we have to get all the best minds in the room, come up with a solid plan of action to reduce the national average of veteran suicides, attack this problem, and then go out and do it.

  I want to see a day when veterans have no greater risk of taking their lives than any other American.

  GREG STUBE

  Greg Stube grew up as a Navy brat. His father served for thirty years, and all of Greg’s brothers joined the military. Greg started ROTC at the University of Tennessee. He enlisted in 1988. He was a Special Forces medic, 18 Delta. After serving twenty-three years, he retired from the Army as a sergeant first class.

  You’re not going to make it,” everyone in my armor battalion keeps telling me. “Hardly anyone makes Special Forces.”

  I’d rather go to Ranger school, but my leaders won’t let me. It’s not a priority for them; they don’t want to spend the money in their budget. If there’s ever a Ranger-qualified guy in an armor battalion, he always comes from somewhere else. Which leaves Special Forces as my only option to get out of my battalion, because I’m woefully disappointed by most of the people around me.

  Being in the military is nothing short of a calling for me. I work very hard to max my PT test. Then, when I begin to train for my Expert Infantryman Badge, my attitude is, the harder I train for it, the sooner in my career I can get it.

  A lot of the sergeants and senior guys in my platoon—guys who are more established, have been at it longer—work hard training me. I am the only one who passed, and that creates some bitterness. What I discover along the way is that just because I want to excel at everything doesn’t mean everyone else feels the same way. Some guys just want to get through each day, then crack open a Budweiser.

  I’m not criticizing people who are happy with the status quo, but that’s not me. I want to be a warrior. But the harder I try to advance my personal goals, the more resentment I get from people who believe I’m making them look bad. They act like I think I’m better than everyone else.

  I’m not. There are plenty of people who have the ability to do just as well as I do. They just don’t want to put in the effort.

  It’s true that the odds of me getting selected for Special Forces are low. If I fail, then I’ll have to go back to my armor battalion and face everyone who said I’d never be a Green Beret.

  I put in my packet.

  Get selected to try out in 1992.

  I’m the baby in the program. In many ways, I know I don’t belong here. I end up being behind on a lot of things. I’m physically fast because I’m light and small, but the weight-bearing training exercises are hard on me. Near the end, both of my feet are nearly broken. And I don’t have a lot of the emotional maturity that’s going to be required of me.

  But I make it through. I get selected.

  The next part is out of my control: my specialty. They go through everyone’s packet and decide what it is you’re going to do in Special Forces.

  “Eighteen D,” they tell me. “Special Forces medic.”

  They send me to learn surgery, anesthesia, trauma management, minor dentistry, and veterinary medicine. The last two, I’m told, are designed to help win the hearts and minds of local populations in other countries. Pulling a painful tooth for someone who has never been to a dentist before can be a life-changing thing. Same with their livestock, which can be hard for them to get help for. Performing these services can help build rapport really quickly.

  Learning all these things helps expand my mind—and it’s also very humbling. Up until this point, everything I’ve accomplished in the Army has been top-notch. Nobody has beaten me at anything. Now, though, I’m doing my best, and I’m in the bottom 20 percent of the class.

  After completing the medical portion of my training, I’m sent to Special Forces language training—the last step in becoming a qualified Green Beret. For the next six months, I learn Russian. That right there pretty much destines me to go to the 10th Special Forces Group.

  At twenty-five, I’m the youngest in the group. Everyone else is significantly older—the average age is thirty-five. What I start to notice right away—what I love and respect about these guys—is that everyone pitches in and helps each other out.

  Still, it’s intimidating, and there’s a lot I have to learn. The real technical and tactical proficiency starts now. We’re preparing to go to Bosnia.

  The country is at the tail end of its five-year civil war, and there’s a lot going on when we arrive: genocide, mass killings, and an unbelievable number of amputations from land mines. There are well over six million land mines planted in the ground around our operational area.

  I see the trauma up close when a six-year-old girl picks up an antipersonnel mine. It had a plastic body on it, and she thought it was a toy. When it blew, the bomb traumatically amputated her arm. I complete the amputation by removing devitalized tissue, up to and including the lower half of the cubital (elbow) joint. This allows for a more functional amputated limb, or stump.

  Treating her, pulling teeth for some of the locals, providing prenatal care, reducing the infant mortality rate—all these things wind up helping our relations in the community and help further our objectives in the area. I try to maturely wrestle with everything I’m seeing, wrestle with these mortality issues, but all I do is become arrogant and narcissistic. I believe I’m ten feet tall and bulletproof. I believe the rest of the world will never fully comprehend what I see and do every day—and probably couldn’t handle it anyway. I have no idea my maturity is going in the wrong direction, that I’m setting myself up for a much bigger failure down the road.

  After 9/11, the Army reinvents and relaunches its 18 X-ray program, or 18X, in order to address the need for more Special Forces soldiers. The Army gets an influx of kids from all walks of life—many of them giving up lucrative, high-status positions in law or medicine or passing on athletic scholarships and professional sponsorships because they can get a first-time enlistment for 18X and become Green Berets. The Army calls these kids SF babies, which stands for Special Forces babies. It’s kind of a disrespectful name, because these kids, for all intents and purposes, are babies. They don’t even know what’s in the box, and now they’re supposed to start thinking outside the box.

  I’m working for the Army’s Special Warfare Training Group as an instructor in surgery and anesthesia when I go to the sergeant major of the medical training center and volunteer to train these kids. “Instead of complaining about this,” I tell him, “I want to be there to try and make a difference for these guys.” He grants my wish.

  I’m really tough on my students.

  It’s very difficult to watch them go to war before me. I decide to talk to some people, and in August of 2006 I’m sent to Afghanistan. I see some of my former students. One guy runs up to me and says, “Sergeant Stube, we’ve got this crazy mission ahead of us. It looks like we’re going to be going up against the Mongolian hordes an
d we really, really need you. Can you come with us? Can you get on this mission?”

  You never know how many opportunities you’re going to get to fight alongside the people you’ve trained. You never know how many mentorship chances you’ll get, and I don’t want to miss my chance to go out with these guys.

  I go through the appropriate channels and then, finally, get the approval from Special Forces Command. I join the mission with the 3rd Group.

  Three Special Forces teams are assigned to the mission called Operation Medusa. We’ll provide a blocking force to help support the Canadian command. It’s our job to go into the Panjwayi Valley and flush out the bad guys. As they flee, the Canadians will crush them.

  We head to a hilltop called Sperwan Ghar. It’s the nucleus of the Taliban—the birthplace of the Taliban. NATO had spent a lot of money developing the area, building resources like schools, and after NATO left the Taliban moved back in and reclaimed it. It’s Taliban headquarters now and used as a training center. Our intel is very deficient, so we have no idea just how many Taliban fighters there are waiting for us.

  We also have no idea how they’re going to fight. From everything we’ve seen, they engage in guerilla warfare tactics: ambush, then disengage and disappear.

  Our plan is to head south from Kandahar and move up through the desert along the border of Pakistan—a route that they would never anticipate. Our vehicles keep getting stuck in the soft red sand dunes. It takes us well over a day to travel those hundred miles through the desert. It’s miserable, arduous work.

  As soon as we get through the desert, we make contact.

  The Taliban digs in and fights.

  They aren’t going anywhere.

  During the first hour of fighting, as we’re advancing on the hill, there’s so much shooting that we go what we call black on ammo. We’ve got zero ammunition left. C-130s drop pallets of fresh ammo behind our position, and we have to leave our positions to go retrieve it.