His mission wasn't impossible, but it was going to be tough: Enter Afghanistan and lift the locals.

In November 2001, it was one of the earliest tasks in Operation Enduring Freedom, designed to flush out the terrorist network in Afghanistan responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Army Capt. Jason Amerine's goals had two prongs: roust the illegitimate government run by the Taliban, and train and assist Afghans to destroy the terrorists and form a loya jirga, or grand council of tribal leaders, in order to establish a popular government.

His went in with 10 teammates from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Operational Detachment A team 574.

He would also be aided by the man who was to become the country's president, Hamid Karzai, and a rag-tag group of Afghans who had no military training.

"We weren't worried about our careers or getting promoted or the medals we might earn," said Amerine, 36, who did earn a Bronze Star with Valor and the Purple Heart for his work in Afghanistan in late 2001.

"We weren't worried about at the end of the day what's going to make us look good, but instead just what's going to work," he told IBD.

As the Taliban continued its oppression of much of Afghanistan's population, the U.S. moved to assist in forming a new government.

Senior Job

Amerine, who called himself "a very junior officer trying to do these things that obviously had very political consequences," had no idea what working with Karzai and the Afghans would be like.

He and his team also had no idea that Taliban rule would collapse in Afghanistan within the month.

As an officer who'd earned his rank over years of training to wear the famed Green Beret, Amerine knew that working well with others would prove invaluable. Special Forces guys, he said, "pride ourselves on going out of our way to make friends with everyone."

He added: "Modesty is a pretty important characteristic. We go to all these schools and get all these patches and tabs pinned to our chest, and the thing I found over the years is that it's very important to develop cohesion with people you're working with, to know how to cooperate with them and operate with them."

Often, the only translator or friend his team had was Karzai.

Amerine knew he could rely on the future president, but not many others, during the operation. "At times it felt like we were in there as friends," he said. "We felt like the only people focused on the mission was our team and him."

Born in California, Amerine moved westward when he was 3 as his parents pursued graduate degrees at the University of Hawaii.

"Growing up in Hawaii, everybody is a minority, everybody was different," he said. "Everybody had to seek a degree of acceptance, and at the same time everyone had a sense of cultural sensitivity and an awareness of the environment."

While his father studied in the anthropology department at UH, Amerine hung on stories his father's professors and fellow Ph.D. candidates told of the cultural mix.

"I would sit there like a sponge hearing stories," he said. "And I developed a hunger for cultural diversity, to be influenced by all these cultures."

The military was where Amerine thought he might enjoy a similar experience. So he joined the Army's Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program in high school, becoming battalion commander his senior year. Then he was off to New York to enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

He graduated with a degree in Arabic in 1993.

Eight years later in Afghanistan's central regions, Amerine was flush in a different culture. As his team's commander, he met with Karzai to take and defend Tarin Kowt, 100 miles from Kandahar, another Taliban stronghold. Special Forces would be working separately from the U.S.-Afghan coalition, but still would have U.S. air and naval support. "There were often diverging agendas, or agendas that appeared to be off track, but it came down to how to keep the coalition together and how to keep moving forward," Amerine said of the juggling act.

In mid-November, Amerine was at a meeting with Karzai and members of the Pashtun tribal belt when the future president heard through local leaders that the Taliban had 100 vehicles in Kandahar and planned to move on Tarin Kowt.

Amerine and Karzai had set up headquarters in Tarin Kowt. The captain knew they had to cut off the convoy, or the town would again fall victim to Taliban violence. ODA 574 grabbed its weapons and jumped into the Afghan guerrillas' vehicles.

It seemed the convoy would head to Tarin Kowt from a mountain pass. Amerine found a ridge that let his men and the Afghan freedom fighters eye the Taliban rolling through the valley below.

Over the next few hours, ODA 574 radioed to air controllers to designate targets for airstrikes on the Taliban cars. As if lightning had struck, many of the lead vehicles in the convoy were incinerated.

With the bombs dropping and his team watching with laser scopes and radios in hand, Amerine heard yelling behind him and the sound of car engines. The Afghan guerrillas — many of them, as he said, "literally country boys who would know how to shoot, so they'd come out to fight" — were getting the heck out.

The way Amerine saw it, "We knew they weren't abandoning us. We just knew they were in over their heads."

Karzai, still the team's main translator, was back in Tarin Kowt. So Amerine couldn't convince the freedom fighters to stay. He had one option: He ordered his men to jump in the trucks with them and head back to Tarin Kowt for fear of being left stranded on the mountain.

Amerine regrouped his men once they reached Tarin Kowt. They grabbed the keys to the Afghans' trucks and returned to the airstrike-filled action outside of town.

When the smoke cleared, Amerine's men had defended Tarin Kowt. Over the next two weeks they moved farther south toward Kandahar as many rebels began giving up loyalty to the Taliban.

"We were just an average team, which is to say these are amazing soldiers — just to think about all the things they had to do already to get to that point in their careers," Amerine said. "We really didn't do anything differently than anybody else would have done in our circumstances. We were given the opportunity to do something amazing."

In early December, the soldiers seized the town of Damana and fought the Taliban to seize Showali Kot. They set up on a hill overlooking Showali Kot, near Kandahar, while the Taliban shot at them.

Firestorm

On the morning of Dec. 5, every soldier's nightmare hit hard. One of the men on the ground directing airstrikes gave the wrong coordinates, and a U.S. B-52 dropped a bomb on the hill where Amerine, his team, Karzai and his freedom fighters were stationed. Two of Amerine's men, Master Sgt. Jefferson Davis and Sgt. 1st Class Dan Petithory, and another Special Forces soldier were killed. Amerine and others were hurt and flown to safety.

Just days after the disaster, the Taliban surrendered Kandahar. The key triumph led to the end of the terrorists' rule in Afghanistan.

A month after leaving the country, Amerine received his Bronze Star and was a guest of honor at President Bush's State of the Union address. Amerine also was promoted to major and today is stationed at his old homestead, Hawaii.

Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek, who oversaw the land war in Afghanistan, praised Amerine's "exceptional courage, dedication to mission and personal sacrifice. . . . (His) remarkable performance and selfless commitment to his fellow comrades in arms serves as the standard for others to emulate."

BY KASEY SEYMOUR