9/11 changed Fort Drum and the north country forever

FORT DRUM — On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Carl A. Ashmead was a platoon sergeant preparing to spend the morning conducting routine training for 10th Mountain Division machine gunners.

Then he heard the news that the United States was under attack by unknown terrorists. He promptly gathered the soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry to deliver the somber news.

“I'm not sure what this means,” he remembers telling them, ”but I think we might be at war.”

And with that, Sgt. 1st Class Ashmead, who today is Command Sgt. Maj. Ashmead, switched modes from teaching set-up and firing techniques to preparing his men for battle.

Within weeks, he and his soldiers boarded planes headed to central Asia to fight in a war that the United States is still fighting today.

The decade at war, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has cost the division 278 lives. Its deadliest foe has been the improvised explosive device or IED – a simple weapon that has resulted hundreds of soldiers suffering from severe brain injuries, surgeries to remove shrapnel and amputations. The bomb has been a staple for insurgents who blend in with the civilian population, forcing the entire U.S. military to change the way it fights.

Repeat and extended deployments have wreaked havoc on military families, many of whom are already coping with their soldier's psychological wounds of war.

The decade saw a new generation of computer savvy teenagers join the military to avenge those who attacked the nation, despite being so young on 9/11 that they have only vague memories and little emotional connection to the terrorist attacks.

In as many ways as the 10th Mountain Division was challenged by wars, it was challenged by growth, as was Jefferson County and the north country. Almost non-stop business and home construction has taken place following the decision to add the 3,500-member 3rd Brigade Combat Team to the post. And the community has been hard pressed to increase its medical services to deal with the emotional and physical devastation that combat has dealt soldiers and their families.

And 10 years after 9/11, Fort Drum and the north country continue to grapple with the toll of war.

A LEGACY OF BATTLES

The 10th Mountain Division first made a name for itself in World War II when it defeated the Germans in Italy's North Apennine mountains. The division's “Mountain” tab above the unit patch is a remnant from those World War II battles, said Fort Drum museum curator and acting division historian Kent A. Bolke.

While those soldiers were specially recruited and trained to fight mountain battles and did so in 1945, the current division has taken part in battles that were fought at altitudes as high as 10,469 feet, some 900 feet higher than any 10th Mountain soldier ever fought in World War II. They have also returned to the frigid Afghan mountains repeatedly since 2001.

“We officially wear the mountain tab to honor the World War II soldiers,” he said. “However, (today's 10th Mountain soldiers) have earned that mountain tab.”

When the division was reactivated in the 1980s and assigned to Fort Drum, it didn't take long before it again entered this history books, this time as it fought Somali warlords in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, which was immortalized in the book and movie Black Hawk Down.

Even before 9/11, the division was the most deployed division in the Army, said Andrew M. Exum, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who, as an officer served with the division in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2009, he was an adviser to now retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan.

The division is appealing to war planners because of its utility and flexibility, he said, and like other light infantry units in the Army and Marine Corps, has steadily been used in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The 10th Mountain Division was active in real key battles and campaigns in these two wars,” he said.

The unit's shoulder patch — showing crossed bayonets on top of a gunpowder keg silhouette — has become one of the most easily identifiable military symbols for the American public. But it is also a ubiquitous sign in foreign lands. It serves as a valuable tool for 3rd Brigade Combat Team commander Col. Patrick D. Frank for gaining the trust of Afghan elders in Kandahar's tribal lands.

“We tell them we're also from a tribe – the tribe of the crossed swords,” he said by phone from Kandahar. “It is a visible symbol for them that the soldiers they are dealing with are from an honorable warrior tribe.”

THE 10TH GOES TO WAR

Within a month of the terrorist attacks, then Sgt. Ashmead found himself and his 16-man platoon at an Uzbekistan airbase, conducting reconnaissance missions in Afghanistan. They were given the task of supporting Army Special Forces and Northern Alliance teams in retaking a fort captured by al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners at Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, where Central Intelligence Agency officer Michael Spann was killed and where John Walker Lindh, a 20-year-old Taliban recruit from northern California, was being held.

By March, the division, along with other special operations and conventional forces waged a deadly campaign against Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in the Shah-e-Kot Valley, as part of Operation Anaconda, led by Maj. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, commander of the 10th Mountain Division. Members of the division's 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment fought alongside the division's 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment.

With a mean elevation of 9,000 feet, the Shah-e-Kot Valley's unforgiving spring tested the 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry's motto — “We Overcome Might and Mountain.” The soldiers found enemy fighters in the valley to be better equipped and more entrenched in fighting positions than they had anticipated. The high elevation prevented attack helicopters from engaging the enemy and providing close ground support. The battle would be in the hands of infantry soldiers alone.

The fighting started tough, with troops being fired on before they could establish positions. Medics were soon racing over jagged terrain to help wounded soldiers, despite being exposed to enemy fire.

The battle spanned dawn to dusk and on to midnight March 2, 2002 until night vision-equipped soldiers regained the upper hand.

“It was a victory, eventually,” said Richard W. Stewart, chief historian at the U.S. Center of Military History, who was present at the battle as a historian. “The first couple of days were a little bit dicey. The enemy finally picked up and moved out.”

The 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment suffered 25 injuries in the fight, but miraculously, not one 10th Mountain soldier was killed. Division chaplains soon referred to the fight as the “18-hour-miracle.”

In the following months, the soldiers returned to Fort Drum and held award ceremonies, which were attended by Army, state and national leaders. While soldiers then wore woodland camouflage, Sgt. Maj. Ashmead remembered the soldiers were allowed to wear their tan desert uniforms for weeks – and they weren't shy about showing off.

“We came back and sewed all of our ‘I love me' badges on and starched them,” he said.

North country residents and soldiers on post showed their gratitude to the soldiers.

“It was just kind of an outpouring from across the board,” he said.

Other division soldiers would soon join them in donning desert fatigues.

The division continued to deploy to Afghanistan and, in 2004, Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited Fort Drum and presented two soldiers — Spc. Victor Thibeault and Sgt. Daniel Swank — with the Purple Heart and thanked them for heroics the previous year when Spc. Thibeault allowed a grenade to explode inside the vehicle he and Sgt. Swank were in, instead of throwing it back onto the road where Afghan civilians would likely be hurt.

AND NOW, IRAQ

By 2003, American officials decided that the Iraqi government was a threat. The Army sent the 10th Mountain Division's 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment to Iraq, where it supported the 10th Special Forces Group and secured airfields and oil transfer stations. It also trained Kurdish militias. Additionally, the 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment was sent to Djibouti to support terror-fighting efforts.

In Iraq, the division met its biggest killer — the improvised explosive device. Using the hidden bombs became a major tactic for insurgents, not only there, but later in Afghanistan.

In 2005, Sgt. Maj. Ashmead deployed to Iraq but now as a first sergeant with the 1st Brigade Combat Team's 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment. The IED threat there was the worst he ever saw.

“You just drove around all day waiting to get banged,” he said.

The 2nd Brigade Combat Team, the division unit with the most deployments to Iraq, spent its 2006 to 2007 deployment in the “Triangle of Death” near Baghdad where it lost 54 soldiers.

In addition to the IED threat, units were faced with the dangers of ambushes. In 2007, two soldiers of the brigade — Spc. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass., and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich. — went missing after a close range attack. They were later found dead.

The vehicles, body armor and medical equipment soldiers currently use are far improved from what they had when the first two wars had begun. Progress, Sgt. Maj. Ashmead said, is evolutionary not revolutionary, but the soldiers immediately improvised to improve equipment and tactics. Some of those improvements were adopted as policy.

“The IED has changed not just Fort Drum, but the entire Army,” he said. “The IED made the Global War on Terror battlefield 360 degrees.”

In his first Afghan deployment, the enemy was seen as a traditional threat and soldiers had more freedom to shoot at a suspected enemy combatant, he said. But if a civilian was killed – in both Afghanistan and Iraq – members of the population would use the event as fuel to turn against the American forces.

“It just goes on and on and on,” he said. “That's kind of the evolutionary process.”

After the insurgency picked up momentum, he said, soldiers began to see the local population as a base that can either support or reject enemy forces, so protecting the civilian population became a top priority for Americans.

“That is a lesson that they learned and relearned and has been kind of hammered home to them: ‘You don't want to do more harm than good around here, so, make sure, when you pull the trigger, that the person you're shooting is the person you want to shoot,'” he said.

“A tool to do that is the rules of engagement to help soldiers on using force appropriately in appropriate situations.”

The new approach required Americans to transition from being the attacking force to train and partner with Iraqi security forces.

Sgt. Maj. Ashmead returned to the dangerous Iraqi area in 2009 and saw security forces who were finally able to fight on their own.

“We had handed the ball off to them, previous to our deployment,” he said. “We were just watching them running to the goal line.”

After the deployment Vice President Joseph R. Biden welcomed the soldiers home, touting their success in allowing American forces transition from a combat role to the reconstruction mission Operation New Dawn.

Sgt. Maj. Ashmead and other soldiers who had previously fought in the area were surprised to drive in the same neighborhoods and not be attacked. The landscape changed too.

“The roads were actually paved,” he said. “There weren't IED craters every 75 to 100 meters.”

Closure for the brigade came because of the unit's presence, the sergeant major recalled, when an Iraqi man saw the division patch on a young officer and tapped it. The man said he knew the insurgent who had killed Spc. Jimenez and Pvt. Fouty. The suspect was in jail for an unrelated charge. With the news information, the man was later convicted of the killings, Sgt. Maj. Ashmead said.

“It felt good, seeing the triangle of death actually improve,” he said. “Most everybody left Iraq with a positive sense of what … had been accomplished there.”

The Brigade's achievements — which included a 59 percent decrease in insurgent activity in its sector — contributed to an early return home.

BETRAYAL AND COURAGE

One soldier, however, left a black mark on the otherwise successful deployment. Pfc. Bradley E. Manning — who was then a specialist — was arrested and charged with leaking 150,000 State Department cables, a classified video and PowerPoint presentations to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, where they were posted on-line in 2010.

The soldier's actions have not had a significant effect on the wars, but have had a broader impact, said Mr. Exum.

“The diplomatic cables have really shaken U.S. Diplomacy and internal politics,” he said. “It's a real irony that what Bradley Manning did has been more important in a lot of ways than what units of the 10th Mountain Division did.”

That has been evident in one of the Army's most significant controversies in Iraq, he said, when reports of prisoner abuse by Army reservists in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison surfaced in 2004. The fallout included a surge in violence in the country and changes by coalition forces.

“The actions of an individual can have a strategic effect,” he said.

The 10th Mountain Division had a similar event in 2005, when eight division soldiers were demoted following an incident two years earlier in Afghanistan in which the soldiers took pictures of themselves pointing unloaded weapons at a bound and hooded detainee.

As of 2009, the majority of the division's deaths were in Iraq, but the unit kept a near-constant presence in Afghanistan and made national headlines when Sgt. 1st Class Jared C. Monti was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama. In 2006, Sgt. Monti ran into enemy fire repeatedly to rescue a fallen comrade. In his memory, the Pines Plains Fitness Center on post was renamed the Monti Fitness Center.

NO END IN SIGHT

Nobody knows for sure when the unit will stop fighting overseas.

Currently, more than 10,000 division soldiers from Fort Drum and Fort Polk are serving in Afghanistan and thousands more are preparing to deploy. While Mr. Biden thanked the division for helping close the combat chapter in Iraq last year, President Obama delivered the harsh reality to division soldiers on post in June by announcing a drawdown in the country.

“There's still some fighting to be done,” he said, adding that the division would be represented there until the country fully transfers authority to the Afghans.

His plans call for the division — the first conventional forces in the country — to see the mission to the end.

“I hope that all of you can both take pride in what you've done over the past years, but also understand that there's a future there that is brighter not only for the Afghan people, but for — most importantly, for American security,” he said. “And you guys are the tip of the spear.”