Special Forces sergeant posthumously honored after combat death in Niger
SANTA CLAUS, Ga. — For nearly two years, a deadly ambush of U.S. soldiers in Niger has spawned investigations, recriminations and reprimands. On Wednesday, it resulted in the awarding of one of the military’s highest honors for acts of valor.
As an Army captain read the award citation for Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, the lights flickered and a summer storm rolled through this small southern Georgia town. A general spoke about the definition of a hero, and then Wright’s father cleared his throat, gestured to the two photographs beside him and said, “This is my son.”
“He was my John Wayne,” the father, Arnold Wright, told the crowd in the community center. The Army posthumously awarded Dustin Wright the Silver Star for his actions Oct. 4, 2017, when his 11-man Army Special Forces team and more than 30 Nigerien soldiers were ambushed by fighters with the Islamic State group outside the village of Tongo Tongo in northwestern Niger.
The medal, the thirdhighest military honor that recognizes singular acts of valor and heroism, was one of nine awards given to members of Wright’s Special Forces team. It was, in many ways, a fitting coda to the months of investigations the ambush generated.
But for Arnold Wright, himself a veteran, it was not just a tribute to his son but another marker in his attempts to understand that day and to hold highranking officers accountable for what happened more than 22 months ago.
As Capt. Rick Dickson, a press officer, read the citation, a crowd including family members, soldiers from Dustin Wright’s Special Forces team and the major general in charge of the 1st Special Forces Command, John Deedrick Jr., listened, some wiping their eyes.
“With total disregard for his personal safety or life,” Dickson said, Wright “maneuvered multiple times across open terrain through intense and accurate fire from an overwhelming hostile force to protect and recover two of his fallen comrades.”
As Wright turned back for his teammates, he was shot and killed.
The deaths of Wright and three other soldiers from his Green Beret unit, Operational Detachment Alpha, Team 3212, were the largest loss of life in combat in Africa since the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia. Four Nigeriens and an interpreter were also killed in the battle.
The awards mark the last component of the Pentagon’s yearlong-plus investigation into the incident.
In June, Patrick Shanahan, the acting defense secretary at the time, finished his high-level review, which agreed with earlier findings that had mostly blamed junior officers and endorsed reprimands for eight Army Green Berets and a two-star Air Force general.
But other officers in the chain of command escaped punishment, including a Green Beret colonel, Bradley Moses, who was responsible for Special Operations missions in northwest Africa at the time and is now slated for promotion to brigadier general.
The length of the investigation and lack of reprimands for high-ranking military officials for ordering the team on the mission without knowing the enemy’s strength have infuriated Arnold Wright, who is calling for the punishment of Moses and the lieutenant colonel below him, David Painter.
“I told them one thing: I said don’t lie to me. And they did,” Wright said Wednesday.
In Miami on Friday, La David Johnson’s family will receive his Silver Star.
The body of Johnson, an Army mechanic and the driver of one of the Americans’ trucks, had been missing for two days before he was found by locals in the area. He had been pinned down by heavy fire and could not get back into the driver’s seat of his truck. He ran for almost a quarter-mile before taking cover, firing until the advancing militants surrounded and killed him.