Just before 6 a.m. on Sept. 23, 2003, Army Capt. Ryan Worthan was exercising inside Firebase Shkin in Afghanistan — a walled base four rugged miles from the Pakistani border.

Worthan commanded A Company of the 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry, 10th Mountain Division, and carried a radio during workouts.

On that morning, it started squawking louder than usual.

The message detailed an attack on a patrol, one Worthan had sent out to investigate stepped-up rocket fire aimed at the base.

The attack exploded into a 12-hour battle between Worthan's men and an unknown number of terrorists.

U.S. forces at Shkin were used to taking regular rocket fire as al-Qaida and Taliban forces tried to enter Afghanistan through a break in the mountainous terrain. The porous range set at 7,800 feet was a known entry point for the enemy.

In the days leading up to the battle, Worthan and his men — 250 U.S. soldiers and 150 Afghan troops — expected a fight. Attacks grew more accurate and the munitions deadlier.

Now supply helicopters were on the way, and they would be prime targets. "We had to do something about it," Worthan said. "It's one thing to have rockets falling outside (the base). It's another to have rounds impacting inside your wire."

He sent a patrol to the border to search for the source of the rockets. What his men found were the early stages of a full-scale attack.

As the sun rose, the platoon reported on Worthan's radio that it was taking heavy fire. The terrorists were throwing their load into the fray: AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and mortars.

Worthan left the base's makeshift gym and hit the battlefield running. He started calling the shots from inside a bunker. When the fighting turned more intense, Worthan saddled up a group of soldiers and headed to the front — through a dry river bed 150 meters deep and 500 meters wide. The team drew enemy fire.

At the same time, Worthan was coordinating attacks from above.

He directed bombs targeting enemy mortars and troop positions while he dodged sniper fire.

But smoke on the battlefield became too thick to provide accurate coordinates. Time to change strategy. He contacted Apache attack helicopters and an A-10 Warthog gunship in the fight and asked them to coordinate targets — a tactic the pilots later told him they hadn't used since flight school.

"I couldn't see anything in front of my face," Worthan told IBD. "I couldn't tell what was going on. I had to improvise."

The battle raged all day, and fighting moved from ridge to ridge. When the smoke cleared, more than 20 enemy fighters were dead, with the Americans suffering the one death — of Pfc. Evan O'Neill — while repelling the attack.

Improvisation alone doesn't win, Worthan says. He attributes his success on the battlefield to training.

"It's not natural to charge into fear and death, and come out alive," he said. "If you want soldiers to act a certain way, you have to condition them to do it. It has to become muscle memory."

He says his West Point training taught key lessons, including the importance of teamwork. "Don't ask your men to do something you won't do yourself, whether it's picking up garbage or sticking your ass out. Respect matters," he said.

Worthan points out another crucial learning experience: returning to the battlefield to analyze what went right and wrong.

He did just that after the Shkin battle, going back to the site where O'Neill fell. It was the first death under Worthan's command.

"I really struggled with Evan O'Neill's death," he said.

"After walking the ground, there was nothing I could have done," he added, noting the bravery that led to a Bronze Star for O'Neill.

Worthan says he always tries to return to the scene of a fight, looking for better tactics. That doesn't mean he believes in second guesses or overvalues hindsight.

"If you worry about 'Maybe I should have done more,' you are found lacking," he said.

Worthan's leadership under fire during that battle won him the Silver Star in June 2004. Last fall, he was given the Alexander E. Nininger Award for Valor at Arms by a group attached to the U.S. Military Academy, where he graduated in 1997 and captained the rugby team.

He used his Nininger acceptance speech to commend the bravery of his men in the battle.

When presenting Worthan's Silver Star, Maj. Gen. Lloyd Austin III said, "Worthan did his part as a leader and to make sure that the outcomes were the right outcomes, and in this case that is in fact what happened." Austin called Worthan's unit "overwhelmingly successful."

Worthan's resume includes three deployments to Afghanistan and one to Iraq, countries a world away from his birthplace, Storm Lake, Iowa, in terms of distance and culture. He offers this pointer: When in a foreign land, adapt quickly.

During his first stint in Afghanistan, where he arrived on Thanksgiving Day 2001, the reality was jarring. "We had very little intelligence and very little knowledge. There was nobody on the ground feeding us (information)," he said. "We didn't have interpreters. We didn't have much of anything.

"You're trained the Army will provide you with everything you need . . . but what we found was that our battalion got into country and the communication and logistics networks were not there."

That meant forging relationships with locals. Conversations with chieftains and other Afghans took hours and frustrated soldiers used to getting things done fast. But building trust was key. Worthan says it required a change in perspective.

"You can't cram American culture down their throat," he said. "The cultural experience and knowledge of culture matters a lot. The person that doesn't take into account somebody else's culture is going to fail."

Now a major, Worthan, 32, is stationed with his wife, Amy, in Rhode Island at the Naval War College where he is set to begin a master's degree program.


BY KIRK SHINKLE