Call Sign Extortion 17 by Don Brown

revelation by the J3 was intentional, to try and get the truth out, or accidental. All we know is that he was shut down by his boss, the Joint Special Operations Task Force commander, who kept him from saying another word about it.
    This much we know. Mid-­grade officers, who are not so influenced by political considerations, and senior enlisted men, who have seen it all, and often do not give a rat’s derrière about political bull, are the heart and soul of the US military.
    These are the men and women who make the US military engine run. They generally care about truth, duty, honor, and country. They aren’t interested in B.S. rules of engagement or official cover-­ups, and they especially aren’t interested in protecting a cover-­up if a cover-­up is intended to minimize responsibility for loss of life. They know that they, or their buddies, could be next on the short-­end of some politician’s decision to use the military in a foolish way.
    So given this, it would not be surprising if the J3 officer intentionally allowed just enough of a slip about these Afghans to get the truth out. That’s speculation, based on the author’s knowledge of the heart of the military. But if he did, God bless him.
    But the truth always finds a way of percolating to the surface. They could not hide the pink elephant forever.
    How did this J3 officer finally see the light of day? Remember that Extortion 17 was shot down August 6, 2011. It was not until January 11, 2013, seventeen months later, that a senior enlisted soldier in the Army, the sergeant major who accompanied Admiral McRaven into the Vaughns’ home, alerted families that failure to account for the seven missing Afghans was “a very big deal.”
    Here’s the way this came down the pike.
    Billy Vaughn, the father of slain SEAL Aaron Vaughn, was one of the few family members who actually received and read the Colt Report.
    Seventeen months had now passed since his son’s death, but Mr. Vaughn recalled a small sliver of testimony that stuck out in his mind concerning Afghans on board his son’s helicopter before it crashed. That testimony was the testimony of the J3 officer.
    Again, here’s that sliver of testimony, from Exhibit 1, page 118, that Mr. Vaughn remembered:
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    IO-­DEP: Was there a manifest for that aircraft back at the—
    JSOTF J3 (Operations Officer): Yes, sir. And I’m sure you know by now the manifest was accurate with the exception of the [Afghan] personnel that were on. So the [Afghan] personnel, they were the incorrect—all seven names were incorrect. And I cannot talk to the back story of why, but—
    JSOTF CDR: But the bottom line is: We knew the total number that were on the aircraft. We knew the total number that we were trying to account for on the ground.
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    Mr. Vaughn had kept that exchange of testimony in the back of his mind, but had not paid much attention to it, because the testimony was so short, and unlike the issue of the missing black box and other matters, the military had said nothing about it.
    Because nothing had been said about it by the military, because it was not included in the final Executive Summary of the Colt Report , and because so very little had been said about the issue (of the seven Afghansinfiltrating the chopper), Mr. Vaughn assumed that the issue must not have been important.
    But as Admiral McRaven and his senior enlisted advisor sat across from him in his home in Florida on that January day in 2013, the sliver of testimony floating around in the back of Mr. Vaughn’s mind popped to the forefront.
    Eyeing the two highly decorated military men sitting across from him, Mr. Vaughn, as related in his book (co-­authored by Monica Morrill and Cari Blake) entitled Betrayed: The Shocking True Story of Extortion 17 as Told by a Navy SEAL’s Father, asked the question, almost as an afterthought, about those seven Afghans getting on that