'Many of us never felt more alive'

If war was like the movies, they would have gone at it alone, just Capt. Jason Amerine and his nine Special Forces soldiers and 50 Afghan irregulars against 1,000 Taliban.

Since war isn’t like the movies, Amerine — who is now a major — did the sensible thing.

He called in Navy F-14s and Air Force F-16s.

And since war really isn’t like the movies, the Afghan irregulars fighting with Amerine’s Operation Detachment A (ODA) 574 on Nov. 17, 2001, didn’t stand bravely by and fight to the bitter end with their American Brothers.

No, they were so freaked out by the airstrikes that they fired up the pickup trucks that had brought the entire group up into the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains, and high-tailed it back to Tarin Kot, in southern Afghanistan’s Uruzgan Province.

As soon as the trucks had stopped in the city, their American Brothers had to grab their Afghan Brothers by their shalwar khameezes and throw them out of the trucks, so they could commandeer the damn things and get back up into the pass and try to stop the Taliban.

Because the city was the prize that day, the whole reason Amerine and his soldiers were in the pass.

They were trying to block the Taliban, who were coming in to try and retake the city from local citizenry, who had gotten brave, thanks to encouragement from Hamid Karzai and his band of freedom fighters, and hanged the Taliban-sponsored mayor from a lamppost the day before.

The Taliban had gotten wind of this rebellion, and mounted a very large convoy in Kandahar to come get their city back, according to what Amerine and Karzai had learned through the grapevine.

Amerine and ODA 574 infiltrated Afghanistan by MH-60 Pave Hawk, a special-operations variant of the Black Hawk helicopter, on Nov. 14, 2001.

The small team had a very big mission, Amerine told Stripes in an interview in Washington: to help Karzai, Afghanistan’s future president, and 200 of his fighters foment rebellion against the Taliban in the southern part of the country.

Tarin Kot was a key to the job, because it was the very birthplace of the Taliban.

And everything was going great, until the local guerrillas got unnerved by the airstrikes the ODA started calling in on the Taliban convoy.

Fortunately, Amerine and his team were able to prevail that day despite that temporary setback.

They were aided by the people of Tarin Kot, who “started pouring out of their houses” to defend their town against the Taliban that had broken through, Amerine said.

Hours of close combat later, the people had prevailed. The Taliban were delivered “a crushing blow.”

“That was some pretty heavy fighting,” Amerine said.

Tarin Kot was just their first of many fights that Amerine and his team engaged in over the next few weeks as they and Karzai kept moving ever closer to the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

The team was involved in a street-by-street battle to win the city Showali Kot on Dec. 3, and a Taliban counterattack that threatened to surround the town.

Next, Amerine and his team captured the only bridge that crosses the Arghandab, a major river between Tarin Kot and Kandahar. In the process, the team was attacked by Taliban in the town of Sayyd Alma Kalaya, finally forcing the enemy to surrender.

On Dec. 5, the Taliban sent a delegation to surrender Kandahar.

Amerine was awarded the Bronze Star with “V” device for his contributions in leading ODA 574.

And Amerine wasn’t the only hero on ODA 574.

On his team were the recipients of three Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars with “V” devices, three Bronze Stars and 11 Purple Hearts.

“Many of us never felt more alive than we did in Afghanistan,” Amerine said. “I had a lot of fun there.”

Amerine’s actions, the actions of his team, his medal, and his reaction to the whole affair, sound a lot like the movies’ take on war.

But war isn’t like the movies. So there’s one more part of this story to tell.

Because “the fun stopped on Dec. 5,” Amerine said.

On that day, a B-52 aircraft dropping 2,000 pounds of explosives missed its target while flying a mission north of Kandahar.

The bomb landed 100 yards from the position of Amerine’s Special Forces team.

Three of Amerine’s soldiers died: Staff. Sgt. Brian Cody Prosser, Master Sgt. Jefferson Donald Davis and Sgt. First Class Daniel Petithory. Another 20 U.S. troops, including Amerine, were injured.