On July 9, 2012, James McDaniel, then a specialist in the Army, was inside a tent at a provincial police headquarters in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device with between 500 and 800 pounds of explosives blew a massive hole in the wall surrounding the compound.
That was the start of an attack that pitted McDaniel and his fellow soldiers against Taliban fighters, who came pouring through the opening in the wall.
“It seemed like the air was on fire,” McDaniel, now a captain, told Task & Purpose on Thursday. “It’s like trying to breathe in a volcano. It was just very hot, and it was loud, of course. I think it was just the stress, the adrenaline, and that kind of thing.”
McDaniel, who was attached to a team that was advising and assisting Afghan Uniformed Police, was within 50 meters of the blast. After the bomb went off, his vision went white, and he became so disoriented that he briefly could not respond to the situation.
“The concussion wave kind of rendered me into a state of altered consciousness,” McDaniel said. “It was very temporary. I couldn’t tell you for how long it lasted. Think of it like a daze, a loss of your mental capacity to just understand immediately until I kind of came back to my senses.”
Even though the Taliban were close, McDaniel and other soldiers got into their M-ATVs for protection from enemy fire and drove towards the attackers, he said.
“We didn’t travel very far,” McDaniel recalled. “We just used them as cover — used them as static positions to set up a defensive position because they were in-filling through the blast hole in the wall, so they were in the immediate vicinity.”
A replacement unit was visiting the compound that day, and the soldiers in the unit were caught off guard by the sudden Taliban assault, he said. They were about 100 meters across the compound from McDaniel’s M-ATV.
“So, I actually got out with my medic and bounded over to them, retrieved them from the building, secured them in our vehicles, and pulled them back to the U.S.-held side of the compound to safety,” McDaniel said. “They went in the vehicles. I remained dismounted and provided support by fire.”
By this point, the Taliban had occupied some of the buildings in the compound.
“In my defensive position, as I was bounding, they were in the compound,” McDaniel said. “They had occupied one of the sides of the compound that they had entered. They were firing from the blast hole. They were firing from open positions.”
When U.S. soldiers were wounded in the firefight, McDaniel ran to a line of M-ATVs, where he helped provide covering fire with his M4 carbine so they could be evacuated.
Bullets impacted all around McDaniel, who said he remembers the sound of the enemy rounds whizzing by. The intense noise from the gunfire and explosions rendered him “intensely deaf,” he later wrote in a narrative of the battle.
Slowly but surely, the U.S. troops and Afghan Uniformed Police began retaking buildings in the compound. McDaniel helped secure the compound’s joint operations center.
“We, with the vehicles, were able to set up our crew-served support and mass our fires and effectiveness to be able to repel them outside of the compound,” McDaniel said.
McDaniel was awarded the Army Commendation Medal with “V” Device for his actions that day.
More than a decade later, McDaniel still suffers from tinnitus along with cognitive and vision issues from the blast. He was initially diagnosed with a concussion, but doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs eventually discovered that he had sustained traumatic brain injury, or TBI, as a result of the attack.
At the time, McDaniel thought he was not eligible for the Purple Heart for such an injury, but years later he decided to submit a request for the award in late 2023. The process involved collecting witness statements and medical information. Although it could be time consuming, it was not difficult, he said.
“Everyone in the Army that supported me was very kind and very thorough, and I’d say it was a pretty simple process,” said McDaniel, who is currently assigned to the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division.
McDaniel was ultimately awarded the Purple Heart in July 2024, and he received the award at a ceremony on Tuesday at Fort Carson, Colorado — the delay was due to scheduling issues, he said.
He credited his wife for helping him to decide to submit a request for the Purple Heart so many years after the attack.
“Talking to her, as she’s been with me through the recovery and my highs and lows, she and I talked about it, and I said I never wanted to compare my injury to other injuries — I felt that there were others that were more deserving,” McDaniel said. “But she let me see the other side of things: The Purple Heart does not discriminate based on the type of injury. It’s that I was injured in combat, and therefore I am eligible for the Purple Heart.”