Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  The Ktah Khas, riding in the lead trucks, came under fire by a Soviet-era heavy machine gun as soon as they left the perimeter of the 209th Corps headquarters. The Taliban had positioned it inside a captured police compound located several hundred meters away from the gates of the Afghan army base. The convoy ground to a halt. Hutch called for an airstrike to take out the gun so the convoy could move on.

  The AC-130 sent two volleys of fire thundering into the darkness, and a giant cloud rose into the sky. The shooting stopped. He sent the team that had arrived from Bagram Airfield to accompany the Afghans to assess the damage. Afghan commandos quickly shot dead two Taliban survivors who crept out of the darkness. The team reported that body parts were mingled with debris and rubble in the wreckage, and it was difficult to assess how many had been killed inside. They left two different Afghan units arguing over who should stay behind to guard the police compound and moved on to their next objective, a prison run by the NDS, the Afghan intelligence agency, which had fallen under Taliban control.

  About a hundred meters farther down the road, the convoy came under fire from the west. They ground to a halt again. The Ktah Khas returned fire, and the shooting stopped. The Taliban then attacked the convoy from the east. Hutch cleared the AC-130 to fire on a large group of men it had spotted on their flank with its sensors. The aircraft unleashed a volley of fire that cleared their path again, leaving two bodies behind. The convoy at last reached the NDS prison, but it was abandoned when they arrived.

  Hutch jumped out, planning to help a team of US and Afghan soldiers establish a command-and-control node there, but the rest of the convoy was ambushed again several hundred meters down the road. He began to think it might be a bad idea to split up the teams and safer to keep everyone together. The Taliban had put up a much harder fight than he had expected, and they were still far from their final objective, the governor’s office. The ambush up ahead was getting worse, and the team that had advanced with the Ktah Khas reported that it was pinned down with rocket fire and needed close air support.

  The AC-130 identified a group of shooters and opened fire again, killing another eight insurgents. The survivors escaped.

  Hutch resolved that it was too risky to divide the teams. He told the team at the NDS prison to rejoin the convoy, and left a group of Afghan forces behind to secure the compound. He began to worry about how to find the governor’s office. None of the Afghan soldiers were local to Kunduz or knew where it was.

  In the silvery-black darkness the roads looked the same, and the GPS coordinates for the compound seemed to have led them into a maze. Further into the city, the Ktah Khas drove into a roadside bomb, which went off with a huge blast. Hutch felt the shock wave in his chest. He couldn’t believe it when the Afghan soldiers inside the truck jumped out, all of them unharmed. He heard gunfire and urged the convoy forward. He was anxious to get to the governor’s office before dawn. Getting stuck out in the road in daylight would be a disaster.

  The convoy hadn’t driven much farther when a second Ktah Khas truck snagged a trip wire and detonated another bomb. A few minutes later, the vehicle’s passengers again reported that everyone inside was unharmed. Hutch could hardly believe it. The convoy continued ahead and pulled up to the walls of a compound that seemed to match the GPS coordinates.

  It turned out to be a high-end hotel, one that was often used to host government officials and other VIPs visiting the province. The teams continued clearing the buildings around them as the Ktah Khas moved on toward an intersection, where a suicide bomber slipped out of the shadows and rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into the front of the convoy. The explosion sent a pillar of smoke above the square, but engineering triumphed again: the Afghan commandos inside were unscathed.

  Several Bagram team members riding an unarmored Ford Ranger also came under fire at the intersection. The rest of the team, riding the quad bikes, moved to back them up and drove into the group of Taliban behind the attack. Both sides opened fire, but the insurgents were no match for the better-trained and equipped Green Berets, who shot five men dead before the others broke contact and vanished into the night.

  Hutch checked the time. It was after four a.m. They had been on the road for about five hours, and the sun would soon rise. He gathered the captains to discuss a contingency plan. A nearby cement factory could serve as a last resort to provide cover, allowing them to set up operations for the next day. It had fallen under Taliban control and wasn’t an appealing prospect.

  “We can’t be out here on the street when the sun comes up,” Hutch told them.

  A couple of the guys offered to scout for the entrance to another large compound near the convoy. It was surrounded with defensive HESCO walls made up of earth-filled containers designed to withstand attacks. They bounded around the corner and reappeared a few minutes later to report that it seemed to be the governor’s office. Its entrance lay on the southwest perimeter, and the compound was large enough to accommodate the whole convoy. The trucks proceeded toward the gates and zigzagged through the serpentine barriers at the entrance that were designed to slow down potential suicide attackers.

  The slow progress into the compound gave the Taliban one last chance to fire at them, but the rounds missed the unarmored vehicles. Once inside, they realized that it wasn’t the governor’s office after all. It was the police chief’s headquarters. But with four guard towers and a complete HESCO barrier around the perimeter, it could suit their purposes for the time being. The teams placed snipers in the towers facing west, the direction from which the heaviest fire seemed to be coming. The Afghan commandos took the eastern wall and positioned a truck at each corner of the intersections with the road. By six a.m. the sun was up and the US and Afghan forces were settled in.

  The resistance they had encountered in the city was greater than anything Hutch had encountered in Afghanistan before. He was starting to doubt, for the first time, that the Taliban would give up the city without a fight.

  Footnote

  1 These included ODA 3111 from Kunduz, ODA 3133 from Bagram, three members of ODA 3135, attached US infantry personnel, air force combat controllers, an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team, and Romanian Special Forces.

  CHAPTER 8

  Battle for Kunduz

  HUTCH

  DR. CUA was drying her hands after another surgery at the Médecins Sans Frontières trauma hospital when an assistant approached her for help.

  “Doctor, can you see the patients at the ER and tell us who should go to surgery first?” he said.

  “Now?” she asked.

  “Yes, now.” She could tell by his voice that something was wrong.

  She followed him to the emergency room and stepped back in shock. She had performed hundreds of surgeries over the summer but had never seen anything on this scale. It was like a scene from a horror movie. There were patients everywhere—on chairs, on the floor—all of them in bloody, ragged clothing. The room was filled with their groans of pain and despair. Her first instinct was to turn away and run. One woman was heavily pregnant and spattered in blood. A child who had lost both legs howled as blood gushed out of the wounds.

  She was expected to triage the cases—rank them in order of urgency. She steadied herself and moved around the room, checking patients with her colleague. A man grabbed her sleeve as she headed back to the operating room. She started. No Afghan man had tried to touch her before. She turned to face him and saw an old man. He had a gray beard and a kind, deeply lined face.

  “Please take a look at my son,” he begged, surprising her by speaking in English. “He’s a good man, my youngest boy.”

  He pointed to the black zone, where patients that had no chance of survival were given palliative care before dying. She tried not to flinch when she saw the extent of the young man’s injuries. A huge wound to his chest left part of a lung exposed. His eyes were already lifeless and glassy. He had no pulse. She adjusted the man’s intravenous line and covered his chest with a sheet
, unable to do anything else. The old man looked at her gratefully. She was devastated.

  The patients kept coming, with heartbreaking stories, including a family of six that had been trying to escape the city by car when their vehicle was hit by an airstrike at a roundabout. When Dr. Cua saw their three-year-old daughter, she couldn’t believe the girl was still alive. The blast had severed part of her chest, completely exposing her liver and right lung. Dr. Cua worked to stop the bleeding even though it was futile. The girl died on the operating table. She wiped tears from her eyes. Her assistant surgeon, an Afghan man with children of his own, was also crying. She had never felt so angry, or so desperate. They managed to save the girl’s four-year-old brother, a small comfort.

  Back in Kabul, Guilhem Molinie, Médecins Sans Frontières’ country director, was under terrible pressure. The organization had prepared for a crisis like this, but he was faced with a moral decision as much as a tactical one. The hospital staff wanted to stay and continue to help the population, but they were all in danger. The hospital normally had 92 beds, but staff had increased its capacity to 140 beds by using corridors and examination rooms as makeshift wards. If the hospital closed, hundreds would die without access to medical care.

  He tried to reassure himself that all sides had agreed to respect the hospital’s neutrality, but he worried about a stray rocket or that US military might mistake the hospital for a Taliban position. He had learned that the US military had received mixed messages about the hospital. The aid group’s office in New York had just received an inquiry from the Pentagon asking whether there were Taliban inside. He had tried not to panic, but it was deeply disturbing news.

  Guilhem’s point of contact with the US military was a civil affairs officer at Bagram Airfield. The officer, who was part of Col. Johnston’s staff, advised Guilhem to put a flag on the hospital roof as an added precaution. He had also successfully coordinated with the civil affairs officer to allow an ambulance to deliver critical medical supplies to the hospital, and asked if the US military would be able to help them evacuate staff in an emergency. The officer had promised to look into it, but he hadn’t come back with an answer.

  At Bagram Airfield, the SOTF was working on a plan to evacuate hospital staff if needed. It hadn’t shared with Guilhem the reports that it had on enemy activity inside the hospital. The US military officials suspected that the insurgents were using it as a command center. They had tracked the Taliban carrying heavy weapons into the hospital grounds and observed the Taliban using ambulances to carry supplies out to fighters in the city.1

  AT SUNRISE ON THE MORNING of October 1, 2015, the Green Berets hunkering down inside Kunduz police headquarters worked to get their bearings. The building was painted a pale orange, and every room had been looted. The compound was only a couple of stories high, but the guard towers around the perimeter offered a good line of defense. Hutch had the teams check the offices for supplies, particularly hoping to find a map of the city. Their one map, which lacked grids, was spread out on the hood of a truck for everyone to share. The teams came back to report no luck.

  Around seven a.m., Hutch was told that visitors were at the gates.

  “Great,” he said, scrambling to meet them. He was disappointed to learn that they weren’t the reinforcements promised by the Afghan army’s 209th Corps.

  It was the Kunduz police chief, Mohammad Jangalbagh, and the acting governor, Hamdullah Danishi. The original governor had disappeared, which fueled rumors of a deal with the Taliban to hand the city over. Hutch tried to look on the bright side: the battle for the city must be finished if it was safe enough for VIPs to show up. He left his body armor in a corner and went to greet them. The stress and lack of sleep showed in his face.

  The police chief had arrived with a small entourage but without a force to hold the cleared building.

  “When are you guys going to come and reoccupy the headquarters?” Hutch asked the two.

  “Just as soon as we can get it cleaned up,” the police chief promised.

  The police chief posed for photos with the acting governor, took a tour, and again promised that reinforcements were on their way. They were gone in less than an hour. Hutch was dismayed to see them leave.

  Moments later, bullets started to zip into the compound, sending everyone into high alert. The shots were quickly followed by the crash of a mortar that slammed into a building next to them.

  “Incoming! Incoming!” someone shouted over the sound of the explosion.

  They were under attack. The first mortar was followed by others, which landed on the compound walls.

  The sniper teams scouted the streets to see where the firing was coming from. The Taliban were approaching them in groups from all sides and had reached positions just thirty meters away. Many of the insurgents wore military fatigues. Some were on foot, and others headed toward them in pickup trucks mounted with heavy machine guns. The teams, unsure who was who, shouted at their translators to clarify the situation with the Ktah Khas, who were still on the corners, guarding the perimeter. In the confusion, the Taliban continued to fire at the compound, and the explosions sent up clouds of dust, adding to the general chaos.

  Hutch asked for a show of force to discourage the attack. A pair of F-16s appeared overhead. The jet fighters traveled faster than the speed of sound, and their six-barrel Gatling guns could fire six thousand rounds per minute. The strategy to scare off the enemy below was often effective, but not this time. The Taliban knew that the Americans wouldn’t bomb a heavily populated city without being able to see a clear target. The F-16s roared across the sky without effect. Hutch couldn’t rely on Apache helicopters either, which were less widely destructive because they risked getting shot down in an urban battle.

  An hour later, the police headquarters was still under attack from all sides. Hutch approached the western perimeter, which was taking heavy fire, for an update. The Bagram team captain, Pat Harrigan, briefed him. He was tall and wiry and loved the outdoors. He had a reputation for being outspoken. The Taliban were charging up the main streets, he told Hutch, ducking into doorways and alleys between sprints. His snipers were shooting as many insurgents as they could before they reached the next covered position, but the survivors were now barely twenty meters away.

  “Some of our guys have already killed twenty men each,” Pat concluded. “If you can believe it.”

  Hutch realized that early assessments about the number of Taliban fighters in the city may not have been that exaggerated after all. Rockets continued to strike the perimeter walls and land close to the Ktah Khas trucks. He worried they were going to get overrun. Two more low passes from the F-16s failed to stop the shooting. Hutch requested a strafing run, which was less damaging than an airstrike. That move temporarily halted the attack on the western perimeter.

  The teams turned to deal with the assaults continuing from the north and the southwest. One of the Bravos, a weapons sergeant, leapt over the wall with a shoulder-fired antitank weapon and shot it into a platoon-sized assault force of Taliban approaching from the north. A sniper team pinned down another group of insurgents on the southwest, forcing them to take cover in a building about a hundred meters away. Air support was critical. The F-16s returned to carry out two more strafing runs close to the perimeter. Two armed drones identified by call signs and controlled by operators hundreds of miles away at Bagram Airfield also joined the battle, hunting for fighters through the city.

  One of the drones, call sign Gunmetal, spotted a large group of men who appeared to be armed and heading for the northwestern perimeter and fired a missile at the group. The explosion hit hard, halting the attack. A fresh assault began on the opposite perimeter, but it was halted after the soldiers killed at least a dozen of the men advancing and the F-16s returned to carry out two strafing runs. Things got quiet for a moment.

  IN THE LULL, a convoy of about sixty Afghan police officers sent from Kunduz Airfield to reinforce the teams and commandos arrived at the compound.
The police, who had evidently been forced to assist the US and Afghan soldiers against their will, immediately stated they did not plan to join in. The entire unit went indoors and refused to come out. It was nearly five p.m. The US and Afghan commandos had been engaged in almost nonstop combat since the morning, and this was their second day in battle.

  Hutch was unimpressed. He went to check on the teams guarding the northern and western walls. Adrenaline was keeping them going, but tempers were growing short. They were all running low on ammunition, water, and food. They had prepared to stay for up to forty-eight hours but had shared their supplies with the Afghans. The batteries powering their equipment would soon run out as well, which would create fresh problems with coordinating the various teams and forces. Hutch called the captains to a meeting.

  “How about we leave the Afghans here, go back to the base, resupply, and come back out,” Hutch said, as the crack of gunfire and rockets continued sporadically around the police headquarters. “If we do it when it’s dark, we can probably pull it off.”

  There was too much gunfire for a helicopter to land with a drop of supplies, and the postage-sized compound was too small to make an accurate drop from the air. The captains thought the Afghan commandos, who were just as exhausted, might abandon the compound if the Green Berets left. The teams all wanted to stay with the commandos. If they failed to retake Kunduz, it could undermine the entire mission in Afghanistan. The Ktah Khas, who planned to rotate teams from the airfield once a day, could bring them ammunition.

  Hutch called the battalion with an update on their situation. Col. Johnston had been following the mission moment by moment from the operations center. He was doing everything he could to support them with assets from across the country. He was frustrated with the amount of time it took to get clearance to fire on targets in the city. It had taken him seven hours to obtain permission to destroy one of the Russian tanks that the Taliban had captured and were driving around in celebratory figure eights and ramming into checkpoints.