The men were calling in bomb after bomb — pinpointing al Qaeda positions in the hills and ridges of Tora Bora, miles from support and operating on their own for days.
In the end, the special operators from the Army’s elite Delta Force did all they could in the face of intense danger, feckless allies and brutal conditions to kill America’s public enemy number one. But to no avail.
The man who led those elite teams of Delta Force soldiers in the earliest days of the war in Afghanistan later wrote a book under the pen name Dalton Fury. Titled “Kill bin Laden: A Delta Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man” it told in granular detail the risks this highly trained counterterrorism unit took to infiltrate the jagged mountains where Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding and stitch together an ever-fraying patchwork of Afghan allies to help block his escape.
“We went into a hellish land that was considered impregnable and controlled by al Qaeda leaders who had helped defeat the Soviet Union,” Fury wrote. “We killed them by the dozen. Many more surrendered. … And we heard the demoralized — bin Laden speak on the radio, pleading for women and children to fight for him.”
“Then he abandoned them all and ran from the battlefield,” Fury added with some satisfaction. “Yes. He ran away.”
Fury was savaged by many in his former Delta and Special Forces community when the 2008 book was released, with many arguing he’d broken a code of silence on the secretive unit’s operations. His former colleagues outed his real name, Maj. Tom Greer, but he kept using Dalton Fury as his nomme de plume for a later series of popular fiction books about door kickers and contractors who hunted the world’s worst.
With the passage of time, the special ops community has settled down and Fury became Greer again. But despite his success in the world of fiction and his survival of many dangerous missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia, among others, Greer is now fighting a battle he may not win.
According to friends and other sources, Greer recently has been diagnosed with terminal Pancreatic Cancer. His supporters have established a Facebook page in hopes of helping his family in their time of need.
Greer is a true warrior and decorated combat veteran of the world’s most deadly counterterrorism unit, doubtless he’ll fight this battle with the same grit and tenacity he did against America’s most dangerous enemies.