Debbie Roth’s Reviews > Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan—and the Path to Victory > Status Update

You see, the way I figure it, there are soldiers and there are warriors in the military. Soldiers do everything by the book. They just follow orders. Warriors … well, warriors understand that their job is to win. Their primary objective is to adapt and achieve victory over the enemy by adjusting and changing their tactics and procedures as necessary to stay one step ahead of them.

Medals are always pinned on the left over the heart. The Bronze Star—awarded to service members in combat—was a one-and-a-half-inch star suspended from a red, white, and blue ribbon. On the reverse, it read HEROIC OR MERITORIOUS ACHIEVEMENT along with a place to have my name engraved, although no one I knew got their medals engraved.

I thought about Willard’s journey up the river and into the “heart of darkness.” Maybe we were going to have to do something to get at these guys where they lived…Operation Dark Heart. That’s what this would be. Over the next twenty-four hours, I mapped it out: a long-term operation to destabilize the Taliban and al Qaeda and reduce their ability to reconstitute and train.

I moved toward the door of the…Black Hawk. As the door opened, out came Christiane Amanpour of CNN in a bright yellow nylon jacket, cameraman in tow. She stopped and stared at us, clearly surprised but intrigued. She seemed on the verge of speaking to us…we quickly moved past her…I gave her a thin smile and helped the crew chief slide the door closed behind me. Within two minutes we were back in the sky and rolling.

We went through demonstrations of force…with more troop convoys coming into the city. Moreover, to deliver the message in a distinctly more intimate fashion, we sent a B-1 bomber at full afterburner buzzing over his house—and I mean over his house—just about 50 feet above. Message delivered. It was two days later that we knew, through intelligence and diplomatic channels, that Fahim had backed down.

Their tactic was comprehensive attack. They had started by getting control of the police stations, as we had seen on the video, as a way to disrupt the central order of the country. If that strategy was successful, it wouldn’t take long before they were aiming for Kandahar. We believed that Mullah Omar was making trips inside Pakistan to recruit fresh Taliban troops.

No matter what, you kept going. That was the guidance given…on the sidewalk, on the median…If you got in an accident, you kept driving, faster than before because it might have been a setup for an assault. Even if you hit a pedestrian, you kept moving and notified the American Embassy later. We rode without seatbelts in the city. That way, if a bomb or hand grenade were thrown into our vehicle, we could bail out.

After a mountain pass on Russian Road, where we slowed down slightly and passed a lumbering 10th Mountain convoy, we really hit the gas as we headed downhill into Kabul. We then decelerated as we entered the traffic bedlam of a city with about two million residents—and only one working traffic light.