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| For his actions, Mitchell will receive the Distinguished Service Cross today in Tampa, where he is stationed. It is the military's second-highest award for valor, after the Medal of Honor. He is the first soldier to receive the Army medal since the Vietnam War. |
Soldier to receive honor for valor in Afghanistan Special Forces major led effort that quelled prisoners' uprising
By Dave Moniz
USA TODAY
WASHINGTON -- Maj. Mark Mitchell doesn't like to talk about what happened in Afghanistan in late November 2001. But the Army thinks it's a pretty big deal.
Several hundred al-Qaeda prisoners rioted. They killed CIA officer Johnny ''Mike'' Spann and threatened to overrun a gigantic fortress near the city of Mazar-e-Sharif. But Mitchell, a soft-spoken Special Forces officer, rallied a handful of commandos and eventually quelled the uprising. For his actions, Mitchell will receive the Distinguished Service Cross today in Tampa, where he is stationed. It is the military's second-highest award for valor, after the Medal of Honor.
He is the first soldier to receive the Army medal since the Vietnam War.
''This has evolved into a bit more of an event than I had anticipated,'' says Mitchell, 38, a Milwaukee native who is a veteran of the 1991 Gulf War. ''I said to my boss and to my friends, this award is not necessary.'' His comrades might not agree.
Over the course of three days, during which he slept for perhaps two hours, Mitchell commanded a hastily organized, 15-man Special Forces unit that rushed to the aid of desperate Afghan allies. He had been alerted by Northern Alliance troops that the fortress -- known as Qala-I-Jangi -- might fall to rampaging al-Qaeda prisoners who had been taken there for interrogation. Mitchell and his men raced to the scene in SUVs on Nov. 25.
When he arrived, Mitchell recalls, he heard a cacophony of gunfire inside the 70-foot walls of the fortress. There, about 500 captured al-Qaeda fighters who had been questioned by Spann and another CIA officers had overpowered their captors and threatened about 100 Northern Alliance soldiers.
Had the al-Qaeda guerrillas and Taliban prisoners overrun the fortress and escaped, they could have stalled a Northern Alliance military offensive during a critical juncture in the Afghan war.
''It would have been very, very serious,'' says Navy Cmdr. Kevin Aandahl, a spokesman at U.S. Central Command.
Speaking by telephone from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa on Thursday, Mitchell describes a ferocious gunfight that has received little public attention.
The battle began for him and his men at about midday Nov. 25. After consulting with Northern Alliance commanders hunkered down inside the fortress, Mitchell divided his small unit in two groups. One went to the main gate in the event the al-Qaeda fighters tried a mass escape.
The second climbed a wall in the middle of the fortress to observe a large section that al-Qaeda forces had quickly overrun. Mitchell and his comrades climbed the 20-foot partition with the aid of a Northern Alliance soldier who unfurled his turban and dropped it, in the manner of the fairy tale princess Rapunzel, so that the Special Forces troops could scale the wall.
Once he could assess the scope of the problem facing him, Mitchell dialed the commando's equivalent of 911.
''We decided we had to call in airstrikes to give us some chance of holding the line,'' he recalls.
Mitchell contacted the Navy, which sent F-18 fighter jets to drop satellite-guided bombs on enemy positions, some less than 175 yards away from Mitchell's men. The Navy jets dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs, killing dozens of al-Qaeda forces and crippling their ability to attack.
That night, Mitchell and his men retreated to their command post about 15 miles away and set up a defensive perimeter in the event that other al-Qaeda fighters tried to ambush them.
At first light on Nov. 26, Mitchell and his men returned to Qala-I-Jangi, surprised to once again hear gunfire. ''Frankly, I was pretty flabbergasted,'' Mitchell says. ''These guys were still fighting.''
Mitchell again entered the fortress and called in Navy jets to bomb the al-Qaeda positions.
Only this time, something went wrong. A satellite-guided bomb malfunctioned, missed its target and injured nine of his 15 men, some critically.
Mitchell immediately called off the airstrikes and began to evacuate the wounded to a safe position outside the fortress, waiting three hours for rescue helicopters to arrive from Uzbekistan.
At that point, with only six men left to fight, he decided to remain outside the fortress walls, where he and his remaining men came under constant mortar fire.
Mitchell says that despite the small number of men, he was determined to finish the fight. He got the chance when two AC-130 gunships arrived later in the day, and with directions from the Special Forces troops, began pummeling the al-Qaeda forces from the air. For several hours, the AC-130s flew slowly over the fortress and unleashed volleys of cannon fire.
On the night of Nov. 26, a direct hit on a weapons cache inside the compound ignited a gigantic fire that burned through the night and sent plumes of smoke several hundred feet into the sky.
The next day, Northern Alliance reserves showed up and began routing the remaining al-Qaeda fighters.
A day later, American John Walker Lindh was captured among a group hiding out in basement rooms and Mitchell and his men were able to recover the body of CIA interrogator Spann.
''I was physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted,'' Mitchell says. ''My reward was serving with some absolutely fantastic soldiers.''
