The Spear Modern War Institute at West Point

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. Michael Murphy was a copilot on that aircraft in Afghanistan, and he joins this episode to share the story.

In this episode, host Tim Heck is joined by Lt. Col. Blake Schwartz. In 2009, Schwartz was a Special Forces team leader deployed in Afghanistan's Uruzgan province. Enemy fighters in the Langar valley, a restive area astride a vital road network, were a particular target for Schwartz’s soldiers. Schwartz attempted three times to enter the valley with his forces. On his final attempt, while countering a Taliban ambush, he authorized the firing of a Hellfire missile from an orbiting MQ-1 Predator. The impact had unintended consequences for the mission and for Schwartz.

When Chris L’Heureux joined the Army in 1999, it was before the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that would define a generation of US Army service. Like many others across the Army, he would go on to deploy multiple times to those war zones. But his first deployment was very different. As a platoon leader, Chris and his soldiers were sent to Kosovo as peacekeepers. In his words, the United States had committed to placing American service members “in between two groups of people that desperately wanted to kill each other.” Some of his experiences would foreshadow challenges of future counterinsurgency operations. But one incident—which drew the platoon directly into an extraordinarily difficult situation when locals accused Russian peacekeepers in the area of criminal violence—presented dilemmas few lieutenants are fully prepared to face. He joins this episode to share the story.

In early 2003, Karl Blanke was a Marine platoon commander during the early stages of the US-led invasion of Iraq, when his battalion was given an objective: secure a bridge over what was known as the Saddam canal. It was meant to be a straightforward task. The intelligence briefings they received did not expect the Marines to meet with resistance from Iraqi military defenders. But as they approached the objective, that intelligence was quickly proved wrong. The lead elements began to engage, follow-on elements maneuvered alongside, and the battle began. Karl describes the fight that followed in this episode.

This episode features a conversation with Ryan Hendrickson. After almost losing his leg in an IED blast in 2010, he was back in Afghanistan just eighteen months later. He shares the stories of three missions from that first deployment back, when he was testing his body physically and working to prove that he was ready to be back at the tip of the spear, on a US Army Special Forces team.

Before his NFL career, Alejandro Villanueva was a rifle platoon leader in the 10th Mountain Division. During a deployment to an especially restive sector near Kandahar, Afghanistan, his unit faced heightened security challenges due to a prison break that freed a large number of Taliban fighters. But Villanueva also had to contend with a unique dilemma: after a member of the Afghan National Police accompanying his platoon opened fire on an approaching motorcycle, they lost sight of the driver. The potential that this was a civilian casualty led Villanueva's brigade headquarters to task his soldiers with determining what happened. The task was made much more challenging when Taliban radio communications indicating they were planning to attack the Americans along one of the most dangerous wadis in the area: Route Mariners. He joins this episode to share the story.