Not a Good Day to Die (47 page)

As the day wore on, the AFO teams gradually overcame the systemic obstacles in the close air support process. The result was a series of air strikes that pulverized Al Qaida mortar positions, command and control buildings and troops in the open, but also highlighted the weaknesses of a plan that relied almost exclusively on air power for indirect fires. For every air strike called in by AFO that resulted in a destroyed enemy position, there was a bombing run that couldn’t be arranged before the target had moved, that missed the target completely, or, in some cases, that hit right where it was supposed to, but failed to kill the enemy. Typical of the last scenario was India’s experience of chasing three enemy fighters around the battlefield with JDAMs. The team called in a bomb strike on the guard tower they had noticed the previous evening on the southwestern edge of Babulkhel. The bombing destroyed the structure and killed two of the five guerrillas in the building. The three survivors ran from the ruins to a small building just south of Babulkhel. Again India called in an air strike, but this time the bomb missed by fifty meters and the trio escaped and hid in a rock crevice outside the village. Speedy and Bob kept their eyes on them and called in more JDAMs, but the enemy fighters had found a perfect hiding spot to protect them from the flying steel shards. Then, to the astonishment of Bob and Speedy, the three militants emerged from the gap in the rocks that had been their salvation, laid out their prayer mats, and kneeled to begin their prayers. That was all the invitation the AFO men needed. Another air strike was quickly arranged. When it struck, it killed two of the kneeling men. But the third, apparently unharmed, stood and raised his hands to the sky in a gesture of helplessness before walking off to the north.

Together, the thirteen men of India, Juliet, and Mako 31 (with the assistance of the jets and Apaches overhead) were almost certainly responsible for killing more enemy fighters during daylight hours on March 2 than the rest of the U.S. forces in the Shahikot put together. It is impossible to assess the exact number of enemy killed by the air strikes called in by the AFO operators, but a conservative estimate based on the recorded observations of the teams would put the number at several dozen. By identifying a series of Al Qaida mortar and machine-gun positions and command posts so that the jets and Apaches could destroy them, AFO kept the enemy from bringing even more fire to bear on the embattled TF Rakkasan troops in the Shahikot. It is not much of a stretch to state that some of the U.S. infantrymen—who knows how many?—owed their lives to Pete Blaber’s men.

By occupying positions high above the valley floor, the AFO teams had given themselves a near-perfect situational awareness that the Rakkasans could not hope to achieve from either the valley floor or their blocking positions. The special operators also enjoyed a territorial advantage that made up for their lack of numbers. “I was comfortable so long as I held the high ground that I could hold off a hundred of them,” one of the men on the teams said. Their achievements represented a total validation of Blaber’s decision to push the envelope with his chain of command in order to contribute what AFO alone could provide to Operation Anaconda. His belief in “Patton’s three principles of war”—audacity, audacity and audacity—and his trust in the ability of his well-trained, superbly motivated men to make the right calls had been proven right.

By early afternoon three distinct views of how the operation was going were emerging among U.S. commanders. The views of the Special Forces officers associated with Task Force Hammer, which had failed to deliver on the promises made by Mulholland and Rosengard, were unremittingly negative. Their force was in retreat, having been beaten back by an enemy arrayed in more depth than they had been led to expect. The chain of command in Task Forces Rakkasan and Mountain was similarly downcast. Almost half the force they had air-assaulted into the valley was pinned down and had taken heavy casualties. Like Task Force Hammer, they had been shocked at the enemy’s strength and resilience. Nothing was going as planned. Hammer’s ongoing withdrawal had allowed the enemy to focus almost his entire attention on the Rakkasan forces in the valley. Already senior officers were discussing a complete withdrawal from the Shahikot. Only at the AFO command post in Gardez, where Blaber had the most complete picture of the battlefield, courtesy of the reports from his three teams, and fully understood the damage being inflicted on the enemy, was the mood confident and upbeat.

WHEN
Lou Bello, the Mountain fires planner, walked into the TOC not long after LaCamera’s troops had landed, it was clear something big was going wrong. The headquarters tent was more crowded than usual, and there was a distinct tension in the air. “Ashen-faced” officers clustered around the screen showing feeds from the Predator while Hagenbeck and Harrell talked earnestly on the radio and telephone.

Already the plan had gone wildly off course. The strength of the opposition that confronted Zia surprised Hagenbeck, who had expected Anaconda to proceed along the same lines as earlier battles in Afghanistan, with little actual combat in the early stages. Hagenbeck thought Zia would be able to proceed into the Shahikot’s villages and conduct “negotiations” over the enemy’s surrender. “There might be a few shots fired” during the “negotiations,” he said, but otherwise he thought TF Rakkasan would be able to land relatively unhindered along the eastern side of the valley to establish the blocking positions.

Task Force Hammer’s failure to gain entrance to the valley presented Hagenbeck with his first critical decision of the day: whether or not to proceed with the supporting effort—the air assault—when his main effort had been stymied. Believing that Task Force Hammer would get back into the fight quickly, he decided to press on with the air assault. Zia’s attack meant there was little chance of achieving any tactical surprise by delaying the rest of the operation. “To think we could come back and do this twenty-four or forty-eight hours later was just not realistic,” he said.

About two hours into the fight, Hagenbeck spoke for the first time with Wiercinski, whose location on the Finger afforded him a ringside seat from which to observe the action on the valley. The Rakkasan commander also had good communications with Preysler and LaCamera as they fought their pieces of the battle. Hagenbeck was coming to the realization that Marzak was a nest of enemy fighters, rather than a village full of civilians, as much of the intelligence had claimed. He asked Wiercinski whether he saw any signs of civilians there. Wiercinski replied in the negative. Hagenbeck was getting similar reports from the AFO teams via Jimmy, who, he said, “was like a shadow, always whispering in my ear, telling me what was going on.” Convinced there were no women or children in the village, the two-star general decided to use the Air Force and Navy jets to “level” Marzak.

Hagenbeck then faced a decision about where and when to insert the second lift of six Chinooks carrying the remainder of Wiercinski’s force into the valley. The 250-plus soldiers spent the day sitting on the tarmac by their helicopters waiting for the word to launch. As the Mountain commander considered various courses of action and different flight routes to get the lift into the valley, some of his staff officers, trying to get ahead of the game, indicated that a “go” was imminent. As a result, some of the chalks climbed aboard their Chinooks three times, thinking they were about to go into combat. Each time they they were ordered back off the helicopters, their frustration mounted. Finally Hagenbeck decided to delay the second wave indefinitely, in the belief that the LZs were too hot and that LaCamera and the other commanders had the situation well in hand. “I didn’t want a shoot-down, and we were pretty well stabilized by early afternoon,” Hagenbeck said.

But as frantic reports of troops in heavy contact along the length of the eastern ridge poured in to Bagram, it appeared to observers in the Mountain headquarters that Hagenbeck was on the verge of pulling everyone out of the Shahikot and “recocking,” i.e., trying again. Hagenbeck acknowledged that was an option he seriously considered. Perhaps anticipating an official order to that effect from Hagenbeck, his subordinates directed all the Rakkasan forces in the Shahikot to prepare for extraction that night.

By early afternoon TF Rakkasan radios were crackling to life throughout the Shahikot with orders from Bagram to pull out of the valley. The details changed as the afternoon wore on, but the essence of them was that helicopters would land after dark near the Halfpipe to evacuate LaCamera’s troops who were pinned down there. All others, including Crombie’s element, were to march north to LZ 15 at the top of the valley and prepare for extraction. This meant a tough movement of up to six kilometers through difficult, possibly enemy-held terrain at night. Up and down the eastern ridge, exhausted TF Rakkasan soldiers who had fought hard to gain their blocking positions now prepared to abandon them. When he heard the order come over the radio at Blocking Position Betty, Mark Nielsen was shocked at what such a directive implied about the enemy strength.
There must be thousands of ’em here,
he thought.

But then, after listening in to a radio conversation in which Hagenbeck and Wiercinski appeared to reach a decision to pull their forces out, at 3:27 p.m., Pete Blaber made the most important radio call of Operation Anaconda. Speaking to Jimmy, who sat just a few feet from Hagenbeck and the other generals, Blaber said that pulling out would be a huge mistake. The three AFO teams held much of the key terrain in the valley. The enemy was being decimated by the air strikes they were calling in. Regardless of the actions taken by Wiercinski and Hagenbeck, Blaber said the AFO teams would stay in position at least until the next day. This was “the battlefield opportunity of a lifetime,” he told Jimmy, and he intended to keep on killing the enemy until there was no more killing to be done.

Jimmy walked over and recounted the conversation to Hagenbeck. After hearing him out, the Mountain commander gathered his three most senior advisers—Harrell, Jones, and Joe Smith, his chief of staff—and pulled them outside to discuss the situation. They considered three options: pulling everyone out, holding what they had, or doing something else. Hagenbeck’s assessment, he said, was “we were being extraordinarily successful, except in one place,” an almost exact rendition of the sitrep Blaber had delivered via Jimmy minutes earlier. The outcome of the huddle was a decision to “reinforce success” by putting the next lift into the northern end of the valley, with the intention of having the troops then fight their way south, while extracting the troops pinned down in the Halfpipe and on Rak TAC Ridge after dark.

To Hagenbeck, these decisions reflected the best options left to him. But some of his subordinates viewed them as the products of vacillation and a plan that was flawed to begin with. These officers were dismayed when the initial decision was taken to pull TF Rakkasan out. “The reaction [in the TOC] was ‘What?! You don’t take ground and then give it up!’” recalled a field grade officer. The same officer was cutting in his criticism of the way Hagenbeck “piecemealed” his forces into the valley without enough mortars, then pulled the Rakkasans out of their blocking positions and evacuated LaCamera’s troops from the Halfpipe (a decision, he said, which taxed the limited number of Chinooks at Bagram). “It put the operation a couple of days behind,” the officer said. Pulling out of the blocking positions “gave the enemy twenty-four to forty-eight hours to reinforce,” he added. Instead, he said, “We could have moved forces to the Upper Shahikot Valley and gotten on the other side of the enemy. If I were making the decision, we would have gone there initially.”

But D-Day afternoon was no time for Hagenbeck to dwell on what could or should have been done previously. His planned main attack element, the Afghan forces organized by TF Dagger, was withdrawing without ever having reached the mouth of the valley. The prevailing wisdom in Bagram had been that the Al Qaida forces in the valley numbered no more than a couple of hundred, and that they were living among 800 civilians in the villages. Now it appeared the enemy’s strength was substantially larger than that, and there was no sign of any civilians. There were indeed enemy fighters in the villages, but there were also hundreds dug in on the eastern ridge and the Whale—the same high ground the special operators and CIA had been concerned about. The prediction that the enemy would try to either escape or negotiate a surrender now looked silly. The enemy was fighting hard and well, with high-caliber weapons—mortars, recoilless rifles, and howitzers—that no one in Bagram had warned of. Wiercinski and LaCamera had cautioned their troops before D-Day that “the enemy always gets a vote.” Well, now the enemy was voting and the turnout was high.

12.

AS Ropel scanned the face of the ridgeline opposite him, he saw a black shape moving about 175 meters away. Peering through a three-power scope that he’d removed from a set of night-vision goggles and fixed to his M4, he realized that what he’d seen was the head and torso of an enemy fighter. The figure was in a bunker made by building a stone wall to connect a boulder to the side of the mountain. It was through a little window in the wall that Ropel could see the enemy. Because Ropel’s ridgeline sloped down to the north, the bunker offered an excellent view of the Halfpipe as well as the spot where the VS-17 panels marked the location of some of the 1-87 rucksacks. Ropel immediately surmised the figure he could see was the observer who had been causing them so much trouble. But killing him proved difficult. The guerrilla knew he was being watched and seemed to enjoy the attention. He teased Ropel by popping his head up for a split second, then ducking before Ropel squeezed the trigger. After each shot Ropel fired, his target would yell
“Allah U Akhbar!”
—” God is great!”