Personal Note: residing in the SF East Bay when "the war on terror" emerged my personal location was during 9/11 I was working for SBC Services (Baby Bell) absorbed by AT&T. My work was primarily off-site under a sub-contract with a staffing firm located at 500 Ygnacio Valley Road, Walnut Creek CA. I returned to the San Ramon Campus on 9/18/2001 plugged my SBC provided laptop and within minutes systems across the country began crashing.
The markets were affected just one week after the ENRON Investigation came crashing down in the WTC 7. The virus was part of the 9/11 attacks where I was setup to fail but when the Amerithrax lawsuit filed by SA Rick Lambert emerged the parties connected to Arthur Andersen, PG&E, SBC and Symantec viewed my LinkedIN profile in 2013 they linked up an attorney in a case where my witness was murdered.
The family gathered for a private briefing at the Pentagon, intent on learning the details of how an Afghan soldier had fatally shot their loved one, Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, the highest-ranking American officer killed in a combat zone since the Vietnam War.
They were all there — Harry Greene’s widow, herself a retired Army colonel; his two children, one a first lieutenant educated at West Point; his father, who’d served as an enlisted soldier at the end of World War II; and his two brothers — and they were all furious. The Afghan soldier, perched in an unsecured military police barracks, opened fire Aug. 5, 2014, on senior U.S. military leaders and Afghan troops at the country’s premiere military academy near Kabul. The insider attack wounded 18 coalition and Afghan soldiers and killed Greene, 55, a two-star general who’d made the Army his life for 34 years.
Two months after the attack, the Greenes wanted to know how it could have taken place and who was responsible for the breach of security.
Sitting before the family in a Pentagon conference room were two generals, including Brig. Gen. Donald E. Jackson Jr., the investigating officer. Greene’s widow, Sue Myers, who holds a top-level security clearance, had already read an unredacted version of his 500-plus-page report. Her son, 1st Lt. Matthew Greene, based at Fort Hood, Tex., participated in the briefing via video, listening as Jackson presented a synopsis of his findings.
Among the conclusions: The shooting could not have been foreseen or prevented, and there was no negligence on the part of any military leader.
“There are many things we may learn from this experience that may help us prevent making ourselves an easy target to the next would-be shooter,” wrote Jackson, who declined to be interviewed for this story. “The outcome of this case illustrates what can happen when we combine a determined shooter with a target of opportunity. . . . This incident does, however, bring into question a fundamental problem set in how we must balance the need for maintaining an environment of trust and confidence with our Afghan partners while providing adequate force protection for our advisory team members and leaders.”
Myers, five months shy of celebrating what would have been her 30th wedding anniversary, was not satisfied. She and her family had a litany of questions about how so many military commanders got so close to an unsecured building and why U.S. investigators couldn’t pry more information out of the Afghan military about the slain shooter’s motives.
Jackson couldn’t offer many answers, recalled Myers, in her first interview since her husband’s death.
“When I asked Jackson about all this missing information, he kind of shrugged his shoulders, saying that’s the way it is,” said Myers, 57. “They made a big deal about how the Afghans weren’t cooperating, and we were fortunate to have anything from them at all. I was like, ‘What the hell? Why don’t we pull some [aid] money?’ We’ve got all these guys over there, and we can’t convince them to cooperate?”
Of the 2,351 U.S. service members killed in the longest war in U.S. history, only a small fraction have been at the hands of Afghan allies-turned-traitors. Insider attacks have killed 147 coalition service members and wounded hundreds of others since 2007, when U.S. officials first began tracking them.
But the treachery of “green-on-blue” attacks — the phrase used to describe assaults on NATO forces by members of the Afghan security forces — has had an outsize effect, undermining trust between the two sides and raising questions about whether Afghans will ever be ready to function on their own.
The Greenes are not the only family who say the U.S. military’s investigations into these deaths are flawed or incomplete, a consequence, they say, of the politically awkward dynamics of these shootings.
Asked to respond to those accusations, Maj. Genieve David, a spokeswoman for U.S. Central Command, said: “The U.S. military is known for having a great support system in place and if any of our military families reached out to CENTCOM for support, we’d absolutely assist them any way we can and refer them to any resources and people they needed.”
The Greene family’s three-hour briefing at the Pentagon did little to soothe Matthew Greene, 26.
“It feels,” he said later, “like we’ve been not only betrayed by the Afghans — a select few, who think it’s a good idea to gun down the people trying to help them — but also by our Army, completely betrayed.”
That building was clear’
At close to noon on Aug. 5, 2014, Greene and other military leaders from Britain, Germany, Denmark and other coalition countries were finishing a tour of Marshal Fahim National Defense University, Afghanistan’s West Point.
The military academy was trying to expand, but it was facing a serious water shortage. Greene wanted to make sure the water supply could be fixed before awarding $70 million in U.S. aid for a new assembly hall, training ranges and classroom spaces.
After Greene and others examined an underground water tank and other facilities, the route back to their convoy required everyone to walk past an Afghan military police barracks.
The tour’s organizers were already nervous about the building because it was located at the edge of campus and bordered a major road. Fearing insurgents could fire rockets at the VIPs, coalition troops had been positioned on the barracks’ roof.
Capt. David Stone, an Army reservist who organized the tour, said he was given assurances on the way there that the building was safe. “I was told that building was clear, that there were no armed Afghan soldiers in the barracks,” he said.
As the officers walked past the barracks, an American contractor pulled out an easel to deliver an impromptu presentation on the campus’s water problems, according to the military investigation. Greene and the others stopped to listen. In an interview, Greene’s personal security detail said he was standing several feet away from his boss, scanning the barracks, but reassured by the sight of the snipers on the roof. He, too, presumed the building was safe.
Suddenly, as the presentation ended, gunfire rattled out. Greene was shot in the head, chest and right thigh. He crumpled.
None of the senior officers were wearing helmets or Kevlar vests, a standard way to show trust with the Afghans.
Greene’s aides carried him to one of the up-armored vehicles so they could take him to a medevac site. On the way, one of his aides checked for his vitals. He couldn’t find a pulse. The military report said he probably died immediately.
Coalition forces quickly realized that the enemy was shooting an M-16 rifle from a bathroom window in the barracks — the very building the snipers were standing on. The whole group was floored. How could that be? Hadn’t the building been cleared?
“You don’t put guys on the roof of the building unless it’s clear,” said Greene’s bodyguard, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. “If I had just one second, I could have dodged General Greene out of the way, and I would have been hit, and he’d still be here, rather than have this national tragedy.”
Coalition forces returned fire, killing the gunman, Rafiqulla Tashkera, a 22-year-old Pashtun apparently upset that he’d been denied leave for Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking Ramadan’s conclusion, the investigation found.
The firefight was over in about a minute. The gunman got off as many as 30 rounds, the investigation showed.
Stone and others entered the barracks and saw Tashkera surrounded by Afghan soldiers in a pool of blood. He’d been shot, but also stabbed, Stone said.
Afghan military police told Stone’s translator that they had knifed his body because they were so ashamed of what he’d done. “They didn’t want us to think they were like him,” Stone said.
In Northern Virginia, Myers was at her office at ManTech, where she worked at the time as an accounts manager, when her boss asked her to come with him to his office.
There, she was greeted by the Army’s chief of chaplains and two other generals. “We regret to inform you that Harry was killed,” one of them told her. “I asked them ‘How?’ but they didn’t have a lot of information, other than that it was at this Afghan training base.”
She’d been looking forward to seeing her husband later that week. Greene had been planning to fly back to Washington on Aug. 7 for a short leave and to celebrate her birthday. Instead, his body arrived at Dover Air Force Base on Aug. 7, and he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 14, the day before Myers turned 56.
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