2RHPZ
05-29-2004, 01:18 PM
Inches divide life, death in the Afghan darkness
By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY
For a few seconds on a frigid Afghan night, Army Master Sgt. Tony Pryor fought
America's war on terror with only his bare hands.
Pryor received the Silver Star Medal for his gallantry in combat during the raid
when he single-handedly eliminated four enemy soldiers.
By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY
One of 26 Special Forces soldiers raiding an al-Qaeda compound in mountains
north of Kandahar last year, Pryor found himself alone in a room with three
enemy fighters. He shot two of them dead in the first few seconds. The third he
would have to fight ? and kill ? hand to hand, so close he could smell the man's
sour breath.
War creates widows, orphans, disabled Purple Heart veterans ? and soldiers such
as Pryor, proficient in the dark art of killing. All of the nation's nearly
30,000 special operations soldiers, sailors and airmen are skilled at close
combat. But Pryor was specially trained. He was one of more than 80 Army Special
Forces troops who drilled relentlessly in close-quarter fighting ? a combination
of martial arts and street fighting ? to prepare for a series of raids in
Afghanistan.
"Whatever digging, scratching, biting, hair-pulling, ear-ripping-off ? whatever
you got to do to get the job done, that's what you do," Pryor says, explaining
actions that night that won him the Silver Star for heroism and saved the lives
of other team members in the compound. "Because, bottom line, I got a life at
home. They (his comrades) got a life at home. And we're coming home."
That kind of close-up killing, though rare in Afghanistan, has become more
common in the broader fighting of Iraq. In several fights, including the attack
on the 507th Maintenance Company in which Pfc. Jessica Lynch was captured,
American soldiers have been required to fight and kill Iraqis face-to-face.
It is killing not from the more sterile distance of a cruise missile launch or
tank turret but so near the enemy that the soldiers sometimes hear the rattle of
a last breath.
"Not nice business," Pryor says grimly.
The specific reason for the assault that night remains a secret. The soldiers
say only that they were after intelligence on al-Qaeda and that the raid was a
success. The fight for the compound lasted 20 minutes. But it was the most
intense clash any of the Green Beret soldiers had experienced.
In a recent interview at 5th Special Forces Group headquarters at Fort Campbell,
Ky., Pryor describes fighting and dying that was nothing like the slick
Hollywood portrayal in action films.
A 40-year-old father, Pryor asks this reporter to turn off a tape recorder
before he recounts the most graphic details of his hand-to-hand struggle.
"Would you want your kid to know that about you?" he then asks.
This is his story.
Epitome of a warrior
On Jan. 22, 2002, as Pryor and the other Special Forces soldiers prepared to
helicopter into the mountains north of Kandahar, they paused for a prayer at
base camp. Sgt. 1st Class James Hogg asked God to fill their hearts with
courage. Pryor wore a medallion of St. Michael, the patron saint of soldiers,
duct-taped to his dog tag.
The men were "direct action" A-Team members, also known as assaulters, door-kickers
or "five-minute wonders." They are the first to enter buildings, and they use
SWAT team-like tactics. Close-in combat skills are crucial.
Pryor, the senior enlisted officer that night, is a bull of a man. Only 5-foot-11,
he weighs 235 pounds. At the time, he could bench-press almost twice that. Team
members call him a ferocious competitor, the epitome of a warrior.
"He makes you a better soldier just being around him," says Sgt. 1st Class Steve
Ourada, a team member. "He built that assault force into what it was. We were on
top of our game."
From aerial photos, their target looked like a U-shaped building within a walled
compound. But on the ground that night, they found it was actually three
buildings separated by covered breezeways.
The team charged into one breezeway and lobbed a flash-bang grenade, designed to
disorient enemy troops, into the central courtyard. The area was filled with
shiny new Toyota pickups and a trailer carrying a dual-barreled anti-aircraft
weapon. Al-Qaeda fighters fired back, and the bullets raised clouds of stone
from walls of the alleyway.
The troops had to push through the gunfire and cut left and right to clear
rooms. Pryor, whose healthy-size cranium has earned him the nickname "Bucket,"
led the way. He stepped around a corner and shot a man coming at him with an AK-47
a few feet away.
Night-vision goggles cast everything in a greenish hue and gave the Special
Forces troops an advantage. Al-Qaeda fighters, most of them bearded men wearing
long dishdashas, floor-length shirts, had only the starlight.
Even so, the al-Qaeda men appeared well-trained and disciplined. Twenty-one of
them would fight to the death.
Close-quarters battle
As Pryor entered the first room to his right, he came face-to-face with a second
fighter emerging from the doorway. Unable to see a weapon in that split-second,
Pryor slugged the man and knocked him down, blowing past him into the room. But
the fighter rose with an AK-47. Hogg, still in the courtyard, fired a single
round from his M-4 carbine and killed the man.
Other team members had gone on to clear the rest of the buildings, and Pryor
faced the fighters in the room alone. If any got past him ? or worse, killed
Pryor ? they could shoot other GIs in the back.
It was Pryor's fight now to win. As he entered the 25-by-25-foot room, his eyes
swept from left to right. Bedrolls littered the floor, and two fighters at the
rear of the room took aim through windows at other Americans entering the
compound. Both swung toward Pryor, Kalashnikovs in their hands. Pryor fired, the
rounds striking so dead-center that the men's beards fluttered.
As he reloaded, Pryor felt a foot brush up against his boot. At first, he
thought it was another American. It wasn't. An al-Qaeda fighter struck Pryor
hard from behind. The blow, possibly from a wooden board, dislocated Pryor's
shoulder and broke his collarbone.
The fighter, bearded with his hair in a ponytail, jumped on Pryor's back and
clawed at his face, tearing off his night-vision goggles.
"He started sticking his stinking little fingers into my eyeballs," Pryor
remembers.
His left shoulder felt like it was on fire. He was winded and weary from
fighting at an altitude of 8,000 feet. Without night vision, everything was
black.
The battle outside raged on, punctuated by AK-47 and rifle fire and the steady
boom of a 40mm grenade launcher from a Special Forces Humvee. The air reeked of
gunpowder and the copper scent of blood. Inside that first room, the two
fighters ? al-Qaeda and American ? were fighting to the death.
Pryor had only a single thought: You're not going to kill me.
"That's how I attack things," he says later.
With one good arm, Pryor grabbed his enemy by the hair. But the man's weight,
combined with the 80 pounds of Army gear that Pryor wore, caused the two to
fall. They landed on Pryor's left elbow, and the impact jammed his shoulder back
into its socket.
Now he could fight with both hands. In a few desperate seconds, Pryor broke the
man's neck and finished him with a 9mm pistol.
Miraculously, not another American was injured that night.
"There aren't any widows or orphans because of him," Ourada says of Pryor.
'They'd aged about 10 years'
In his 14 years in the Special Forces, Pryor has killed before, but never in
hand-to-hand fighting. That night, he worried first, however, about his
soldiers, who had shot it out with al-Qaeda inside other rooms.
Jack Gruber, USA TODAY
Master Sgt. Anthony S. Pryor holds his Silver Star.
Around a wood fire at base camp hours later, Pryor offered solace. "I went
around and touched every one of those guys," he says. "Everybody looked like
they'd aged about 10 years."
For him, sleepless nights followed.
He dispelled demons with cathartic heart-to-heart talks with his tentmate Hogg,
replaying details of the fighting and dying. "A little bit of defragging of your
hard drive," Pryor calls it.
Three articles of faith got him through, he says.
First was pride in a successful mission: Training had paid off.
Second was seeing the war as righteous. "We didn't start it," Pryor says. "They
started this fight. We're in the right."
Third was his children and the future. "I remember him saying," Hogg recalls, "
'You know, it's an ugly business, it's a terrible thing for us to do. But
hopefully our kids won't have to cope with it.' "
In addition to Pryor's Silver Star, seven Green Berets in the unit received
Bronze Stars for valor in that fight. Pryor sent letters to their fathers. "I
would like to thank you for raising a fine young man," he wrote. Many of the
letters wound up framed and hung in living rooms.
Including Pryor, 19 soldiers have received the nation's third-highest decoration
for fighting in Afghanistan. One soldier received the second-highest award, the
Distinguished Service Cross.
This year, 86 additional Silver Stars were awarded by the Army for fighting in
Operation Iraqi Freedom. And one Army engineer, Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith,
made a last stand with a .50-caliber machinegun against dozens of attacking
Iraqi soldiers during fighting in April at the international airport outside
Baghdad. He is being considered posthumously for the Medal of Honor, the
military's highest decoration.
'No idea of the toll it takes'
"The thing that kind of boggles my mind," says James Bradley, author of Flags of
Our Fathers, the story of the fighting and flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World
War II, "is that (the nation is) sending out these guys who would rather be
whittling and spending time with their kids. And they're sending them out to
kill. They have no idea of the toll it takes on humans to do something like
that."
Maj. Gen. Geoff Lambert, a former Special Forces commander, agrees.
"In all wars, there are certain circumstances like this that happen to good
men," Lambert says. "We try to train them the best we can to have them ready for
these moments. We hope that they are few."
To cope with killing, Pryor says he lives two lives: one consumed with training
for and fighting war, the other immersed in family.
"Two different lifestyles, two different on-and-off switches," he says. "If
you're Johnny on the spot, focused on destruction, destruction, destruction all
the time, where do you have time for compassion in a relationship with your
wife? We're dedicated to our job. But there has to be a time to turn that off."
It is not easy for him to explain how he flips this switch, though he says that
one way is to simply not discuss work and war when he leaves the base.
It bothers him that civilians might see him and his troops as Rambo-like
soldiers.
"People look at people who do this stuff and it's always, 'They're killers, and
that's what they live for,' " Pryor says. "That is so far from the reality."
Certainly, they don't shrink from the task of taking life if necessary. Pryor is
a student of Sun Tzu's classic The Art of War, and a favorite topic is the
legend of the Mongoday, the elite warriors of Genghis Khan. He and his troops
train exhaustively in spotting the enemy and withholding fire.
The night of the assault, members of a farming family armed with a rifle in a
building that was searched nearby were left untouched because they offered no
resistance. And at the height of action, with adrenaline raging, an al-Qaeda
fighter chose to surrender and was taken unharmed.
The control seems as ingrained as the reaction.
The other GIs tell of a firefight weeks earlier during which Pryor entered a
room that was ablaze and spotted movement under a blanket. He didn't shoot.
Pausing to search, he found a baby girl, pulled her free and passed her to a
team member.
Off the battlefield, Pryor has a gentle reputation. For security reasons, he
declines to discuss immediate family, but he says he forbids toy guns in his
home.
Ourada remembers finding "Bucket" in his garage once nursing a newborn raccoon
with an eye dropper. "The wives just think he's a big old teddy bear," Hogg
says.
'It never goes away'
Raised in the logging town of Toledo, Ore., Pryor grew up admiring perseverance
and hard work. A strong influence was his father, Jerry Pryor, who started out
as a timber man and became the town chief of police.
The first movie Pryor saw in a theater was The Green Berets with John Wayne. He
says the image of these soldiers stayed with him when he enlisted in the Army
out of high school in 1981.
Though he was earning straight A's by the end of high school, college held no
appeal. Like other young men from rural towns, he longed to escape. In 1988, he
was accepted into the Green Berets, one of 79 chosen from an entry class of 429.
He has been on missions in Haiti, Somalia, Kuwait and other locations that
remain classified. Early this year, he led a team in Iraq. Next year, he attends
the Army's Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas, on track to attain the
highest enlisted rank.
He has also started working toward a business degree. After retiring from the
Army, perhaps in three years, he hopes one day to manage a sawmill.
He has had two reconstructive surgeries to repair damage from that battle in
Afghanistan. A chunk of his collarbone, removed during an operation, is kept in
a jar as a souvenir. That, and the violent images, are what he has left.
"It never goes away," Pryor says. "It just gets put further back in your mind."
Hogg, the teammate who helped Pryor exorcise his demons from that night, says
these are the prices they pay for lethal work.
"I wouldn't wish it on anybody," Hogg says. "But there are a few of us who are
called to it. So that's what we do. Maybe people should at least keep us in
their prayers."
© Copyright 2004 USA TODAY
By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY
For a few seconds on a frigid Afghan night, Army Master Sgt. Tony Pryor fought
America's war on terror with only his bare hands.
Pryor received the Silver Star Medal for his gallantry in combat during the raid
when he single-handedly eliminated four enemy soldiers.
By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY
One of 26 Special Forces soldiers raiding an al-Qaeda compound in mountains
north of Kandahar last year, Pryor found himself alone in a room with three
enemy fighters. He shot two of them dead in the first few seconds. The third he
would have to fight ? and kill ? hand to hand, so close he could smell the man's
sour breath.
War creates widows, orphans, disabled Purple Heart veterans ? and soldiers such
as Pryor, proficient in the dark art of killing. All of the nation's nearly
30,000 special operations soldiers, sailors and airmen are skilled at close
combat. But Pryor was specially trained. He was one of more than 80 Army Special
Forces troops who drilled relentlessly in close-quarter fighting ? a combination
of martial arts and street fighting ? to prepare for a series of raids in
Afghanistan.
"Whatever digging, scratching, biting, hair-pulling, ear-ripping-off ? whatever
you got to do to get the job done, that's what you do," Pryor says, explaining
actions that night that won him the Silver Star for heroism and saved the lives
of other team members in the compound. "Because, bottom line, I got a life at
home. They (his comrades) got a life at home. And we're coming home."
That kind of close-up killing, though rare in Afghanistan, has become more
common in the broader fighting of Iraq. In several fights, including the attack
on the 507th Maintenance Company in which Pfc. Jessica Lynch was captured,
American soldiers have been required to fight and kill Iraqis face-to-face.
It is killing not from the more sterile distance of a cruise missile launch or
tank turret but so near the enemy that the soldiers sometimes hear the rattle of
a last breath.
"Not nice business," Pryor says grimly.
The specific reason for the assault that night remains a secret. The soldiers
say only that they were after intelligence on al-Qaeda and that the raid was a
success. The fight for the compound lasted 20 minutes. But it was the most
intense clash any of the Green Beret soldiers had experienced.
In a recent interview at 5th Special Forces Group headquarters at Fort Campbell,
Ky., Pryor describes fighting and dying that was nothing like the slick
Hollywood portrayal in action films.
A 40-year-old father, Pryor asks this reporter to turn off a tape recorder
before he recounts the most graphic details of his hand-to-hand struggle.
"Would you want your kid to know that about you?" he then asks.
This is his story.
Epitome of a warrior
On Jan. 22, 2002, as Pryor and the other Special Forces soldiers prepared to
helicopter into the mountains north of Kandahar, they paused for a prayer at
base camp. Sgt. 1st Class James Hogg asked God to fill their hearts with
courage. Pryor wore a medallion of St. Michael, the patron saint of soldiers,
duct-taped to his dog tag.
The men were "direct action" A-Team members, also known as assaulters, door-kickers
or "five-minute wonders." They are the first to enter buildings, and they use
SWAT team-like tactics. Close-in combat skills are crucial.
Pryor, the senior enlisted officer that night, is a bull of a man. Only 5-foot-11,
he weighs 235 pounds. At the time, he could bench-press almost twice that. Team
members call him a ferocious competitor, the epitome of a warrior.
"He makes you a better soldier just being around him," says Sgt. 1st Class Steve
Ourada, a team member. "He built that assault force into what it was. We were on
top of our game."
From aerial photos, their target looked like a U-shaped building within a walled
compound. But on the ground that night, they found it was actually three
buildings separated by covered breezeways.
The team charged into one breezeway and lobbed a flash-bang grenade, designed to
disorient enemy troops, into the central courtyard. The area was filled with
shiny new Toyota pickups and a trailer carrying a dual-barreled anti-aircraft
weapon. Al-Qaeda fighters fired back, and the bullets raised clouds of stone
from walls of the alleyway.
The troops had to push through the gunfire and cut left and right to clear
rooms. Pryor, whose healthy-size cranium has earned him the nickname "Bucket,"
led the way. He stepped around a corner and shot a man coming at him with an AK-47
a few feet away.
Night-vision goggles cast everything in a greenish hue and gave the Special
Forces troops an advantage. Al-Qaeda fighters, most of them bearded men wearing
long dishdashas, floor-length shirts, had only the starlight.
Even so, the al-Qaeda men appeared well-trained and disciplined. Twenty-one of
them would fight to the death.
Close-quarters battle
As Pryor entered the first room to his right, he came face-to-face with a second
fighter emerging from the doorway. Unable to see a weapon in that split-second,
Pryor slugged the man and knocked him down, blowing past him into the room. But
the fighter rose with an AK-47. Hogg, still in the courtyard, fired a single
round from his M-4 carbine and killed the man.
Other team members had gone on to clear the rest of the buildings, and Pryor
faced the fighters in the room alone. If any got past him ? or worse, killed
Pryor ? they could shoot other GIs in the back.
It was Pryor's fight now to win. As he entered the 25-by-25-foot room, his eyes
swept from left to right. Bedrolls littered the floor, and two fighters at the
rear of the room took aim through windows at other Americans entering the
compound. Both swung toward Pryor, Kalashnikovs in their hands. Pryor fired, the
rounds striking so dead-center that the men's beards fluttered.
As he reloaded, Pryor felt a foot brush up against his boot. At first, he
thought it was another American. It wasn't. An al-Qaeda fighter struck Pryor
hard from behind. The blow, possibly from a wooden board, dislocated Pryor's
shoulder and broke his collarbone.
The fighter, bearded with his hair in a ponytail, jumped on Pryor's back and
clawed at his face, tearing off his night-vision goggles.
"He started sticking his stinking little fingers into my eyeballs," Pryor
remembers.
His left shoulder felt like it was on fire. He was winded and weary from
fighting at an altitude of 8,000 feet. Without night vision, everything was
black.
The battle outside raged on, punctuated by AK-47 and rifle fire and the steady
boom of a 40mm grenade launcher from a Special Forces Humvee. The air reeked of
gunpowder and the copper scent of blood. Inside that first room, the two
fighters ? al-Qaeda and American ? were fighting to the death.
Pryor had only a single thought: You're not going to kill me.
"That's how I attack things," he says later.
With one good arm, Pryor grabbed his enemy by the hair. But the man's weight,
combined with the 80 pounds of Army gear that Pryor wore, caused the two to
fall. They landed on Pryor's left elbow, and the impact jammed his shoulder back
into its socket.
Now he could fight with both hands. In a few desperate seconds, Pryor broke the
man's neck and finished him with a 9mm pistol.
Miraculously, not another American was injured that night.
"There aren't any widows or orphans because of him," Ourada says of Pryor.
'They'd aged about 10 years'
In his 14 years in the Special Forces, Pryor has killed before, but never in
hand-to-hand fighting. That night, he worried first, however, about his
soldiers, who had shot it out with al-Qaeda inside other rooms.
Jack Gruber, USA TODAY
Master Sgt. Anthony S. Pryor holds his Silver Star.
Around a wood fire at base camp hours later, Pryor offered solace. "I went
around and touched every one of those guys," he says. "Everybody looked like
they'd aged about 10 years."
For him, sleepless nights followed.
He dispelled demons with cathartic heart-to-heart talks with his tentmate Hogg,
replaying details of the fighting and dying. "A little bit of defragging of your
hard drive," Pryor calls it.
Three articles of faith got him through, he says.
First was pride in a successful mission: Training had paid off.
Second was seeing the war as righteous. "We didn't start it," Pryor says. "They
started this fight. We're in the right."
Third was his children and the future. "I remember him saying," Hogg recalls, "
'You know, it's an ugly business, it's a terrible thing for us to do. But
hopefully our kids won't have to cope with it.' "
In addition to Pryor's Silver Star, seven Green Berets in the unit received
Bronze Stars for valor in that fight. Pryor sent letters to their fathers. "I
would like to thank you for raising a fine young man," he wrote. Many of the
letters wound up framed and hung in living rooms.
Including Pryor, 19 soldiers have received the nation's third-highest decoration
for fighting in Afghanistan. One soldier received the second-highest award, the
Distinguished Service Cross.
This year, 86 additional Silver Stars were awarded by the Army for fighting in
Operation Iraqi Freedom. And one Army engineer, Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith,
made a last stand with a .50-caliber machinegun against dozens of attacking
Iraqi soldiers during fighting in April at the international airport outside
Baghdad. He is being considered posthumously for the Medal of Honor, the
military's highest decoration.
'No idea of the toll it takes'
"The thing that kind of boggles my mind," says James Bradley, author of Flags of
Our Fathers, the story of the fighting and flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World
War II, "is that (the nation is) sending out these guys who would rather be
whittling and spending time with their kids. And they're sending them out to
kill. They have no idea of the toll it takes on humans to do something like
that."
Maj. Gen. Geoff Lambert, a former Special Forces commander, agrees.
"In all wars, there are certain circumstances like this that happen to good
men," Lambert says. "We try to train them the best we can to have them ready for
these moments. We hope that they are few."
To cope with killing, Pryor says he lives two lives: one consumed with training
for and fighting war, the other immersed in family.
"Two different lifestyles, two different on-and-off switches," he says. "If
you're Johnny on the spot, focused on destruction, destruction, destruction all
the time, where do you have time for compassion in a relationship with your
wife? We're dedicated to our job. But there has to be a time to turn that off."
It is not easy for him to explain how he flips this switch, though he says that
one way is to simply not discuss work and war when he leaves the base.
It bothers him that civilians might see him and his troops as Rambo-like
soldiers.
"People look at people who do this stuff and it's always, 'They're killers, and
that's what they live for,' " Pryor says. "That is so far from the reality."
Certainly, they don't shrink from the task of taking life if necessary. Pryor is
a student of Sun Tzu's classic The Art of War, and a favorite topic is the
legend of the Mongoday, the elite warriors of Genghis Khan. He and his troops
train exhaustively in spotting the enemy and withholding fire.
The night of the assault, members of a farming family armed with a rifle in a
building that was searched nearby were left untouched because they offered no
resistance. And at the height of action, with adrenaline raging, an al-Qaeda
fighter chose to surrender and was taken unharmed.
The control seems as ingrained as the reaction.
The other GIs tell of a firefight weeks earlier during which Pryor entered a
room that was ablaze and spotted movement under a blanket. He didn't shoot.
Pausing to search, he found a baby girl, pulled her free and passed her to a
team member.
Off the battlefield, Pryor has a gentle reputation. For security reasons, he
declines to discuss immediate family, but he says he forbids toy guns in his
home.
Ourada remembers finding "Bucket" in his garage once nursing a newborn raccoon
with an eye dropper. "The wives just think he's a big old teddy bear," Hogg
says.
'It never goes away'
Raised in the logging town of Toledo, Ore., Pryor grew up admiring perseverance
and hard work. A strong influence was his father, Jerry Pryor, who started out
as a timber man and became the town chief of police.
The first movie Pryor saw in a theater was The Green Berets with John Wayne. He
says the image of these soldiers stayed with him when he enlisted in the Army
out of high school in 1981.
Though he was earning straight A's by the end of high school, college held no
appeal. Like other young men from rural towns, he longed to escape. In 1988, he
was accepted into the Green Berets, one of 79 chosen from an entry class of 429.
He has been on missions in Haiti, Somalia, Kuwait and other locations that
remain classified. Early this year, he led a team in Iraq. Next year, he attends
the Army's Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas, on track to attain the
highest enlisted rank.
He has also started working toward a business degree. After retiring from the
Army, perhaps in three years, he hopes one day to manage a sawmill.
He has had two reconstructive surgeries to repair damage from that battle in
Afghanistan. A chunk of his collarbone, removed during an operation, is kept in
a jar as a souvenir. That, and the violent images, are what he has left.
"It never goes away," Pryor says. "It just gets put further back in your mind."
Hogg, the teammate who helped Pryor exorcise his demons from that night, says
these are the prices they pay for lethal work.
"I wouldn't wish it on anybody," Hogg says. "But there are a few of us who are
called to it. So that's what we do. Maybe people should at least keep us in
their prayers."
© Copyright 2004 USA TODAY