The Fight To Save Eagle

HERO IN 2009, A JOINT MISSION TO CATCH A TALIBAN COMMANDER INVOLVING GUARD SPECIAL FORCES AND AFGHAN POLICE TOOK A HARROWING TURN, BEGINNING A RACE AGAINST TIME TO KEEP A COMRADE ALIVE.

BY MATT CROSSMAN + ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAMIAN GOIDICH

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he intel gathered by National Guard Special Forces Soldiers was strong: A Taliban commander who was orchestrating ambushes and IED attacks was using a building in a nearby village as a hideout after attacks.

The Soldiers had identified the building, formulated a mission and trained Afghan National Police (ANP) to execute it. Now, they just had to wait for the “high-value target” to appear.

For four days, the Soldiers mustered what former Sergeant First Class Mark Wanner calls “battlefield patience.” Better to be safe, wait and attack when they knew he was there, rather than act prematurely and give away their plan.

On the fifth day, Wanner and his comrades finally received confirmation: The Taliban commander had arrived. The mission was a go.

On May 31, 2009, 18D senior medical sergeant Wanner; Sergeant First Class Sean Clifton, an 18F assistant operations and intelligence sergeant; Sergeant First Class Matt Sheaffer, also an 18D medical sergeant; and Staff Sergeant Matt Maxwell, an 18B weapons sergeant—all from the Columbus, Ohio–based Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 9224, Company B, 2nd Battalion, 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne)—rode across the dusty terrain of Afghanistan.

They were among 14 U.S. Soldiers and 30 ANP officers who planned to assault the building where their target was hiding. After staging just outside the village, the Americans sent ANP members ahead to carry out the mission.

Communication between the U.S. unit and the host nation’s forces would be constant, and the ANP was supposed to send up a red flare if they needed help.

After a while, the Soldiers began to wonder why they hadn’t heard from the Afghans.

Then they saw the flare.

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he target building, shaped like a U, sat on the north edge of the town with nothing but desert behind it. The American Soldiers rushed to help the ANP from behind the building, driving where there were no roads. “When we rolled up, the first thing I saw was that one of my host nation’s Soldiers had been shot, and he was laying behind the building,” Maxwell says.

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PHOTOS FROM SFC MARK WANNER, SFC MATT MAXWELL

Wanner (pronounced WAHN-er) and his teammates exited their vehicles, and in just a few seconds it was obvious that far more enemy combatants were unleashing far more gunfire than they had expected. They had enough training and experience to recognize it as “ineffective fire,” meaning they were in no danger of being hit—not yet, at least. But they also knew immediately that the mission they were about to execute would be far different from the one they had planned.

Clifton, a key player in gathering the intel for this mission, ran into the building’s courtyard, about the size of a basketball court, to join the Afghans as they prepared to breach a door. They had already cleared a couple of buildings nearby.

After Clifton gave the door two swift kicks, it flew open. “And I walk into a wall of gunfire,” Clifton says. “I’m being hit from head to toe in this doorway.”

He was shot four times. The first bullet hit him in the pelvis just below his body armor, the second shattered his wrist, the third struck the American flag Velcroed to his chest, which was covered by body armor, and the fourth deflected off his helmet. Clifton’s night vision goggles flew off. His rifle dropped out of his hand, which now dangled uselessly.

“What happens over the next couple of seconds seems like an eternity,” Clifton says. “I realize it’s not a dream; I’m in bad shape, and I don’t think I’m going to make it out. There’s lots of thoughts about family and my boys back home and my wife, and the other guys on the team, and how the other guys are doing.”

Anger, motivation or something else—he’s not sure what—snapped him out of it. “I can remember clearly in my head thinking, ‘[Expletive] this, I’m not dying.’ ” He grabbed his shattered left wrist with his right hand, squeezed as hard as he could to stop the bleeding, turned and ran. In a step or two he came face-to-face with Sheaffer, a team medic. “I said, ‘Matt, Matt, I’m hit, you gotta save me.’ ” Sheaffer put a tourniquet on Clifton’s arm.

Wanner, the senior medic, quickly joined them.

“As [Clifton] sees us, his eyes are big and he falls down,” Wanner says.

As Wanner and Sheaffer treated Clifton, Maxwell hurried toward the door where Clifton had just been shot and joined the Afghans.

SFC Clifton

SSG Maxwell

SFC Sheaffer

SFC Wanner

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“As I’m running up, I’m calling the commander, telling him there’s an eagle down. I’m positioning myself in front of the stack as the one man on that door,” Maxwell says. “I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t amped up seeing one of my brothers get shot. I had a full head of steam. I was going to go in and handle my business, so to speak.”

Still, he remembered protocol. The ANP was supposed to go into buildings first. Maxwell kicked the door open, threw in a flashbang grenade and stepped aside for the Afghans to go in ahead of him.

But before they could enter, someone ran out firing an AK-47. Maxwell had never seen or heard of anything like that, a guy running out of a door the very

second that Soldiers were about to enter. He pointed his rifle at the man and fired three or four times. But the enemy didn’t fall at first.

“I’m a pretty good shot. There’s no way I’d miss from that close,” Maxwell says. “But I’m thinking in my mind, ‘Holy crap, did I just miss this guy’? And he stumbles and falls down, and I’m like, ‘Nope.’ ”

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heaffer and Wanner continued to work on Clifton, but they were still in the courtyard out in the open, and now bullets landed all around them, kicking dust into the air. The ineffective fire had become effective fire. It was coming from somewhere in the village, but nobody knew yet its

CLIFTON HAD A SCARED LOOK IN HIS EYES. BUT AS HE LOOKED UP AT HIS FRIENDS WHO WERE TREATING HIM, HE TOOK COMFORT. AS MUCH AS IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR HIM TO THINK HE WOULD BE OK, HE DID. “THESE GUYS ARE SAVING MY LIFE,” HE THOUGHT.

exact origin. Assessing the danger to himself and his men, Wanner barked instructions: “Not here, not here, we can’t do it here, there’s too much gunfire.”

Wanner and Sheaffer dragged Clifton out of the courtyard and around to the side of the building, where they were safe temporarily. Wanner saw that blood had already soaked through Clifton’s pants. He worried his friend was bleeding to death in his arms.

Wanner and Sheaffer took off Clifton’s pants and body armor to assess the injuries. “I’m cutting one [pant] leg off, Mark’s cutting the other leg off, until we find a small bullet hole maybe about the size of your pinkie right under the abdomen area, where your beltline would be,” Sheaffer says.

Wanner directed Sheaffer to check for a downside exit wound. “As we roll him over, he takes a deep breath,” Sheaffer says. “That’s when massive amounts of blood came up around my fingers, in between my fingers. It was really dark red, which means he had severe internal bleeding. He was bleeding out inside.”

Wanner stuffed the entry wound with gauze, and Sheaffer stuffed the exit wound. They had no way of knowing it then, but their swift and compact packing job, which closed off Clifton’s severed iliac artery, the main artery in his pelvis, would prove critical.

Valuable seconds ticked away from the “golden hour,” that all-important time between when a Soldier gets shot and when he must get to a surgeon to be able to survive. Clifton had a scared look in his eyes. But as he looked up at his friends who were treating him, he took comfort. As much as it was possible for him to think he would be OK, he did. “These guys are saving my life,” he thought.

Wanner knew he couldn’t move Clifton again, so he ran to the trucks parked nearby and grabbed a stretcher.

Sheaffer stayed with Clifton, and Maxwell took a knee at Clifton’s head, running security for his fallen friend and the two medics.

“When I look around and I see my team has my back, and they’ve got security and I don’t have to worry about that, it really allows me to focus in on what I need to do and not worry so much about my own security,” Sheaffer says. “You feel like, OK, there’s all this shooting going on, but you almost don’t notice it.

You’re just working on the patient on the ground; you don’t worry about the environment you’re in.”

After Wanner returned, he and Sheaffer carefully placed Clifton on the stretcher.

And this, says Maxwell, “is where it gets hairy.”

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unfire coming from the village was dangerously close now, only the Soldiers still didn’t know where it was coming from. Maxwell unloaded suppressive fire, which bought them time but didn’t end the threat. At virtually the same time, gunfire erupted from a door and a blacked out window, just 15 or 20 feet away. “Bullets were falling to the ground, going right between [our] legs,” Sheaffer says.

Maxwell and Wanner pumped dozens of rounds into the window, which was about 4 square feet.

Wanner and Sheaffer moved Clifton tight to the building, out of the gunman’s range of vision. Wanner, Sheaffer and Maxwell then flattened themselves against the wall and plotted their next move.

“Wanner is one of those guys, he always had everything,” Maxwell says. “If you could think of anything you might need on a mission, he would have it on his person.”

In this case, it was a fragmentation grenade, which Wanner told Sheaffer to grab out of a pouch on his back. Sheaffer and Maxwell agreed on a plan: Maxwell would kick the door open, and Sheaffer would throw the grenade in. There was no time to wait for host nation forces to enter first. If the Americans didn’t neutralize the enemy combatants behind that door, and soon, they might all be dead.

“This is one of those things I’ll never forget,” Maxwell says. “As amped up as I was, I couldn’t believe this happened. I kicked it; I pretty much gave it all I got. When I kicked it, I took it straight off the hinges.

The problem with that was the door went kind of cockeyed, and it didn’t open enough that Sheaffer could throw in the grenade with any accuracy. I was kind of worried that it would come back and hit us or kill us.”

He stopped Sheaffer just before he threw the grenade. They started the process over, only this time with the knowledge that whoever was behind the door knew they were coming. Maxwell can’t remember if he was thinking this at the heat of the moment, but he knows it now: That’s how Clifton got shot.

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room. They had already put their instruments into a device that uses heat to sanitize them. They were so hot that doctors poured saline solution onto them to cool them off enough to handle them. When they opened Clifton back up, they found that Wanner’s observation was correct—he was still bleeding internally.

“There was definitely a higher power looking out for us that day,” Wanner says. “His iliac vein was severed, which is the size of about your pinkie. How that didn’t bleed out, I don’t know.”

Wanner didn’t leave Clifton’s side for three days, until he was transported to the U.S. Army hospital at Landstuhl, Germany.

Doctors eventually determined that the bullet that entered Clifton’s waistline damaged five major organs.

As Clifton was being operated on, Sheaffer remained at the battle site. An airstrike dropped three 500-pound bombs on the Taliban’s hideout, reducing it to a crater 30 feet deep.

Above: Members of Operational Detachment Alpha 9224 in Afghanistan.

When Maxwell kicked the door the second time, the door took the frame with it. Sheaffer threw in the grenade. He stood on the door’s left side with Wanner.

Maxwell stood on the right, and they both turned away to protect their faces from the coming blast. Wanner used his body to shield Clifton because they weren’t sure how stable the building was. They worried the explosion could cause it to collapse.

“We don’t want to move and have this thing go off and have fragmentation go out the window or out the door and tag us. So [Sheaffer and I are] counting, out loud together, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand,” Maxwell says. “We both get to five thousand, and we look at each other, and we’re like, ‘Oh, [expletive], I don’t think this is going to …’

“And then boom.”

The shooting from the building stopped, enabling the Soldiers to fall back to an area where a medevac helicopter was headed. As they gathered about 200 meters from the site, the commanding officer asked Maxwell to fire an 84 mm round, about the size of a 100 GX VOL. 11 // ISSUE 2

grapefruit, from his Multi-Role Anti-Armor AntiPersonnel Weapon System (MAAWS, known as a “Carl Gustaf ” rifle), into the building. For Maxwell, the weapons expert, this was like asking a toddler to eat an ice cream cone. “Hey, no problem, sir,” he said.

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hat bought the unit more time as the medevac approached. Wanner, Maxwell and Sheaffer credit that team—manned by Guard Soldiers from Nevada—for its quick and precise execution. The guys on the helicopter and the guys on the ground had become close over the previous two weeks, having barbecues and hanging out, when they were stationed together. “In case something ever happens, you want them to put a face with a name when there’s an emergency call,” Sheaffer says.

The sound of the blades triggered a memory in Clifton. As he lay there, he thought of a presentation he had seen long ago, in which he learned that the chances of survival for a wounded Soldier taken off the battlefield on a helicopter are much greater than for a Soldier

Go to GXonline.com/ oda9224 to see video of SFC (Ret.) Wanner and MSG Clifton at Wanner’s Silver Star ceremony

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PHOTO FROM SFC MARK WANNER

taken by a motor vehicle. “All I’m thinking is, ‘Please, Lord, let me make it onto the medevac,’ ” he says.

The helicopter landed “just blade tips off of our vehicle,” Wanner says. “We had no [landing zone] set up, but they saw two vehicles, so [they thought] it must be right there.”

Three Afghan police officers who were hurt got on one helicopter with Maxwell. Wanner piled onto the other with Clifton. Sheaffer stayed behind.

When the helicopters arrived at the base, Clifton was taken immediately to surgery. Wanner went in with him, offering to help the surgeons however he could. Pacing the halls, cussing because he thought he would lose his friend, Maxwell asked Wanner what he could do to help.

“Mark says, ‘You need to get people here to give blood because he needs it.’ OK. I’m on it,” Maxwell says.

“I’m unfamiliar with this post. It’s dark. I’ve got my red light on trying to find people. I stumbled my way into one of the officer’s barracks. You don’t want to disturb those guys if you don’t have to. But I didn’t care—my buddy’s bleeding out. He’s dying on me. I’ve got to get blood. I knock on every door that I find. ‘This is who I am, teammate’s down. He needs blood right now. I need your help.’ I ended up getting 10 or 15 people.

Nobody’s going to say no. There were guys of all rank, different branches.”

Maxwell, now a sergeant first class (18B weapons sergeant), sat down and gave the first two pints himself. “He claims it’s his blood that kept me alive through this whole process,” Clifton jokes. Clifton needed 33 units of blood throughout the ordeal. He was completely transfused three times. After surgery, he was wheeled out for transport to another helicopter. And Wanner saved his life again.

“He’s lying on the gurney. I could see he still had a lot of red blood coming,” Wanner says. “I said, ‘Doc, this is not right. I don’t know what’s wrong, but it’s not right.’ ” The doctors pushed Clifton back into the surgical

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s Sheaffer, who today is a master sergeant (18Z operations team sergeant), gathered intelligence in the village after the bombings, he started to understand what had happened. The intel before the attack indicated there would be one Taliban commander with a handful of security guards, but instead there were six commanders and more than a dozen security guards.

Roughly 25 enemy combatants died in the attack, including the commander who had been the focus of the mission.

Clifton, now also a master sergeant (18Z operations team sergeant), spent six months at Walter Reed Hospital, recovered at home for two years and endured more than 20 surgeries. Focusing on athletics as motivation helped his recovery. In the spring of 2012, Clifton completed a triathlon. He still serves in the Guard and recently started a deployment.

“The best way I know how to pay those guys back is to be a better person, a better Soldier, a better father, a better husband and a role model,” Clifton says. “I can do that, I can be that better person, because those guys allowed me to by keeping me alive. ‘Thank you’ is never enough. If I can make my world a little better because those guys kept me alive, I’m going to do it.”

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and Major General Gregory L. Wayt, Ohio adjutant general, presented Wanner the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest medal for valor in combat, for his actions in saving Clifton, during a ceremony Feb. 6, 2010. It was the first such award for an Ohio National Guard member since the Korean War. In his 20-year military career, Wanner, who retired at the rank of sergeant first class (18D senior medical sergeant), was also awarded the Bronze Star twice and the Legion of Merit.

Before that mission of ODA 9224, there had been two or three ambushes or IED attacks every day in that area of Afghanistan. In the 30 days after it, there was none. 1 GXONLINE.com 101