The Spear

We are now twenty-one years past the events of 9/11. America's war in Afghanistan has come to an end yet the repercussions of that day and that war continue to impact foreign policy, strategic positioning, and the lives of those who were there. That makes now an important time to reflect on our Afghanistan experience. Retired Special Forces soldier Scott Neil was one of the first Americans into Afghanistan after 9/11 and his perspective helps shed light on those crucial early days.

In 2012, Sean Marquis was an infantry platoon leader—deployed to Dehqobad, Afghanistan—with a Stryker brigade. The boundary between the platoon's area of responsibility and that of an adjacent unit was a suspected transit route due—US force in the area called it the seam. As villages along the Arghandab River became increasingly restive, Sean set out to find a Taliban recoilless rifle known to be in the area. After reviewing the available information, Sean narrowed in on a nearby orchard as the likely hiding place for the weapon. Reinforced with sappers, Sean and his soldiers stepped off to patrol the seam. For Sean, it was also a developmental moment in his growth as an infantry officer.

In the summer of 1993, Greg Banner was a newly appointed company commander in 10th Special Forces Group. Halfway around the world, ethnic tensions were flaring in the former Yugoslavia. The Cold War had ended but the need for special operations forces in Europe was made apparent as the nation disintegrated into warring states. With only a few weeks’ notice, Banner and his company deployed. Once on the ground, he realized that there existed a complex and confusing command model that jeopardized operational effectiveness and the lives of his troops. He joins this episode to share the story.

In the previous episode of The Spear, Karl Blanke shared a story that featured the actions of one of his former Marines, Lance Corporal Jackson (a pseudonym). “Jackson” was a machine gunner in the 1st Marine Division and took part in the march to Baghdad in 2003, where he was wounded in a firefight and awarded a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with Combat Distinguishing Device for his actions. In this episode, we hear the story from Jackson's perspective.

In 2003, after completing the march up to Baghdad in dramatic fashion, and after an all-night gunfight to seize one of Saddam’s palaces, the Marines of Company C, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment were immediately sent to capture Baath officials suspected to be in a neighborhood nearby. A platoon commanded by Karl Blanke established a cordon and began searching house by house for their targets with little to go on beyond a set of grid coordinates. As the search continued, the cordon came under increasingly intense and accurate fire. One of Blanke’s machine gunners, Lance Corporal Jackson (pseudonym), was among those on the cordon and was responsible for protecting both the Iraqi civilians inside and his fellow Marines. On that day in 2003, his actions left an indelible impression on his platoon commander and his fellow Marines. Note: this episode originally aired in 2021.

Few books have had the impact on generations of young soldiers as Jim McDonough’s Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat. First published in the mid-1980s, Platoon Leader remains on military reading lists worldwide and is still included in curriculum for junior officers and NCOs across the joint and combined force. Detailing the events that shaped Jim’s life as a young lieutenant in the 173rd Airborne Brigade in South Vietnam, Platoon Leader is a tale of leadership, followership, and the burdens of infantry combat on the young men and women in line companies. In this episode, Jim joins host Tim Heck to reflect on the formative experiences he had as a young leader in combat, the moral weight of his responsibility, and how he chose to interact with a population and ally in a way that preserved the humanity required to lead in combat.

In August 2007, a US Army Special Forces team came under fire while passing through a valley in Afghanistan. The call for support went to a nearby base, where an AC-130H Spectre gunship crew was standing by. The crew quickly launched, and shortly later, the aircraft was overhead. This is the type of job the AC-130H was designed for. In the hours that followed, they engaged enemy targets a number of times with both a 40-millimeter cannon and a 105-millimeter howitzer. Lt. Col. Michael Murphy is the commander of the US Air Force's 16th Special Operations Squadron. In 2007, he was a copilot on that aircraft in Afghanistan, and he joins this episode to share the story.

A newly minted Special Forces officer in the spring of 1966, Mike Eiland landed in Vietnam and joined 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne). A team leader, Mike and his team were tasked with reestablishing a Special Forces camp at Hiep Hoa, where a previous camp had been overrun in November 1963. On May 12, 1966, less than six weeks after Mike arrived in Vietnam, the camp was attacked. The ensuing fight was a close-run affair with Viet Cong soldiers breaching the Special Forces team's living quarters. Mike shares the story in this episode.

In the late summer of 2021, after years of service to his country—including four years at the United States Military Academy—Major Naqib Mirzada, an Afghan National Army Special Forces officer, and his family fled Afghanistan after the Taliban's seizure of Kabul. Arriving at Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 15, amid the US-led coalition's withdrawal from the country, Naqib and his family spent several grueling days trying to escape. On this episode, he tells the story of those last chaotic days in Afghanistan and the start of his life in the United States. This episode was jointly produced with the West Point Center for Oral History. The full video of Naqib’s interview will be available on the Center for Oral History’s website in the coming weeks.

In 2012, Rich Kent was a platoon leader deployed to Panjwai in Afghanistan's Kandahar province. Tasked with locating an IED cell in a small village just outside his normal area of operations, Kent was leading his platoon along a trail after receiving a tip about the location of Taliban fighters. After inadvertently drifting onto a different trail less traveled, Kent was reorienting his soldiers toward their target building when he stepped on an IED. He joins this episode to tell the story.