by Eric Blehm
An hour after the program aired, Kelley was meeting with his boss, SOCCENT commander Admiral Calland, when the admiral was urgently summoned away. Two hours later, Calland returned, looking distressed. “General Franks just got his ass chewed by Rumsfeld,” he said. “What can we do to get some guys in with the Northern Alliance?”
Kelley all but slapped his forehead. For two weeks the True Believers had preached this precise course of action, but it was a news broadcast that finally sold the secretary of defense.
The True Believers requested five days to plan; the Joint Chiefs gave them three. Word got around, and the True Believers were inundated by requests to brief CENTCOM planners on how UW worked. The detailed explanation was confusing to most, so Kelley whittled the plan down to its key elements, testing his CliffsNotes version late one night on a two-star general:
“We’re going to put small teams of Special Forces guys on the ground in Afghanistan. If CENTCOM gives them two broad powers, then all the complicated tribal nuances, shifting allegiances, tactical reality—they will work it out, and they will win.
“One, we need to give the teams the power to make a radio call and bring great death and destruction from the sky. Instantly, 24/7, no matter where they are.
“Two, they need to be able to make a radio call and at the next period of darkness, we have to be able to deliver from the sky shelter, medicine, lots of weapons, munitions, and explosives for guerrilla fighters.
“If we give them those two powers, the Green Berets will make it happen on the ground.”
On September 30, the True Believers briefed General Tommy Franks in his CENTCOM office, spelling out the advantages and disadvantages of four potential courses of action for conducting UW in Afghanistan.*Franks ultimately chose the True Believers’ recommendation, to begin in the north and ally with the Northern Alliance, which was already fighting the Taliban, despite the potential for civil war if the Northern Alliance took power.
“You talked to me in terms I can understand,” said Franks. “Okay, do it.”
On the morning of October 5, Amerine walked to the end of the hall, where the B-team was headquartered, and found Lloyd Allard talking with the company commander, Chris Miller.
“Must be strange to see how the country changed while you were gone,” Miller said as they shook hands.
“It’s like a police state at the airports,” Amerine said. “And one-hour waits just to get into Campbell. Tell me you have some good news.”
“First of all, you probably heard that I volunteered Mulholland to command the JSOTF. I had no idea what a shit sandwich that job is. Mulholland tried to bow out gracefully, but Admiral Calland wouldn’t budge. He flicked the booger on Mulholland and now he’s stuck with it.”
“Mulholland’s leaving tomorrow,” Allard added. “His staff is saying he’s overtasked.”
“That’s an understatement,” said Miller. “Fifth Group doesn’t have the personnel, the equipment, or the background to stand up a JSOTF, and Calland, who should be running the show, is giving jack shit for support or guidance. It’s a mess, but Mulholland will figure it out. He’s a Green Beret.”
“About that good news?” Amerine said.
“Oh, I don’t want to spoil the surprise,” Miller said, waving him off. “I’m going to get the company together in a little while.”
The Alpha Company Green Berets had lined up along the walls outside their team rooms, and now Miller walked purposefully from his office to the middle of the hallway, nodding at his men as he went. Usually, Miller would ease into meetings with small talk, but today he got right to his announcement.
“All right!” he boomed. “I just got off the phone with SOCCENT. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have approved the war plan in Afghanistan. Let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind: Everyone here is going to war.” He held up his hand to stifle the beginning of a cheer. “You might not be going today, you might not be going tomorrow, but we’re going to be moving out of here. Every single person in this company is going to do what they get paid to do, and it’s coming soon!”
Pulling a scrap of paper from his pocket, Miller said, “Now I give you Rudyard Kipling. He spent a fair amount of time in the region we’ll be operating in and reminds us that if there is a time to be at our very best, that time is now. Because if you fuck up and,” he read,
…you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
There was a roar of laughter.
ODA 574’s senior weapons sergeant, Mike McElhiney, turned to Kevin Moorhead, his hunting buddy from another team, and said, “Looks like we’re not going hunting this year.”
“Yes we are,” responded Moorhead. “We’ll be hunting for man.”
That afternoon saw two new faces at ODA 574’s standard end-of-day meeting.
Sergeant First Class Wes McGirr was a twenty-five-year-old Californian with intense eyes but a laid-back attitude, who introduced himself and explained that his former team, ODA 582, had just been “ghosted”—temporarily disbanded because too many positions were vacant. Its members and equipment had been shuffled around to fill the needs of the other teams in the battalion. “It’s good to be here,” he said with the brevity of a good communications sergeant. “I’m ready to go to work.”
A native of Tennessee, Sergeant First Class Ken Gibson was in his mid-forties, Amerine guessed, and out of shape: The medic didn’t look as if he belonged in the Army, let alone the Special Forces.
“I know I’m fat,” Ken said by way of introduction, “but I promise I can keep up with you guys. I really want to go on this deployment—and I’m good at my job.”
Amerine thought Ken, who had been sent over from 3rd Special Forces Group to fill a medic slot at 5th Group, conveyed an air of superiority as he gave his teammates an overview of his background—he was a Gulf War veteran with extensive medical skills—but his attitude also suggested that he probably was good at his job. Even though any Green Beret medic who had been at it as long as Ken had to be competent, Amerine still sensed that the man was “ROAD,” a pejorative acronym for Retired on Active Duty.
After the meeting, Dan took Wes out for a beer, telling Amerine the following morning that the new junior communications sergeant was “gonna work out just fine. But I keep thinking about the medic. I’ve got a major problem with him.”
“What’s that?” asked Amerine.
“He’s not Cubby.”
Thirty-two-year-old Sergeant First Class Tim “Cubby” Wojciehowski had been ODA 574’s medic since 1996. While the team was in Kazakhstan, Cubby had been attending the Advanced Noncommissioned Officer Course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where, after 9/11, he, like many Special Forces NCOs, was checking off career boxes. To his frustration, he was ordered to complete the course rather than rejoin his team. ODA 574 was family to Cubby; Dan had been both his roommate and best friend on the team.
“We’ll miss Cubby,” said Amerine. “But we have to be thankful we got a medic at all. They’re in short supply.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Dan. “But it still doesn’t feel right going to war without him.”
On October 7, 2001, the United States sent fifteen land-based bombers and twenty-five carrier-based fighter bombers to attack Taliban targets in northern and southern Afghanistan. U.S. ships and British submarines in the Arabian Sea launched fifty Tomahawk missiles, targeting Taliban compounds, command centers, and airfields. In the first hours of Operation Enduring Freedom, the small—forty combat aircraft—Taliban air force was destroyed, along with its supply of anti-aircraft surface-to-air missiles.6 This offensive kicked off the air campaign, with bombing raids continuing both day and night.
Two days later, Miller and his B-team staff, including Lloyd Allard, were in the Alpha Company command office watching the morning Department of Defense briefing on tele
vision when a reporter asked Secretary Rumsfeld to verify the rumor that pilots flying the bombing missions were running out of targets.
“We’re not running out of targets,” Rumsfeld said. “Afghanistan is.”
The remark that drew laughter from the crowd at the press conference reminded Miller of Kelley’s prediction: CENTCOM would quickly run out of targets. “The enemy is not stupid,” Kelley had told Miller. “Once the bombing starts, we’ll take out their air defenses in short order, then the Taliban will hole up in caves. We need small teams of Green Berets teamed up with the Northern Alliance, and together they will assault Taliban positions, driving them out of their caves and making them vulnerable to airpower. Without men on the ground, we’ll be pounding sand.”
The men in Miller’s Alpha Company command office began to discuss an e-mail being forwarded around 5th Group, written by a pilot who had been ordered to rebomb targets that had already been destroyed. “This is such bullshit,” he wrote. “If the rubble of two walls forms a 90-degree angle on imagery, my orders are to drop a precision-guided munition on it.”
“You won’t see that quote on the news,” said Allard as Major Kurt Sonntag entered the room.
Sonntag had two announcements. First, Lieutenant Colonel Queeg, their battalion commander, had deployed forward with Colonel Mulholland, so Sonntag was now in charge of 3rd Battalion. Then he said, “The battalion is isolating. Tell your teams to say good-bye to their families and report to the ISOFAC* on Sunday.”
When Miller relayed the news to the team leaders later that day, he wasn’t certain what pleased them more: their impending missions or Queeg’s departure.
Late on the morning of October 8, four men riding tandem on two clunky motorbikes approached the Afghan border from Pakistan.
Without weapons or even the most basic military training, Hamid Karzai and his friends were armed only with their faith that the Pashtun people were ready to rise up against the Taliban and take back their country.
The week before, in Islamabad, Karzai had met with his CIA case officer, a man named Casper, and assured him that his tribe was prepared to revolt. Casper had given him a satellite phone, his own phone number and those of other Pakistani-based CIA operatives, and instructions to call once Karzai had raised an army in Afghanistan—the Agency’s way of saying “put your money where your mouth is.” Those in the higher echelons of the CIA seemed to consider Karzai’s quest an impractical dream at best; he might be helpful down the line in forming a post-Taliban government—if he survived.
To Hamid Karzai, that satellite phone symbolized hope.
CHAPTER THREE
To War
* * *
There was tremendous pressure from the Secretary of Defense to do some thing. [We] went forward with a plan, and I believe that most of the senior officers at CENTCOM did not believe it was going to work and that it was just to buy time.
—Lieutenant Commander Philip Kapusta, Joint Strategic Plans and Policy staff, Special Operations Command Central, 20011
* * *
The two-story brick building surrounded by a simple chain-link fence looked like a cross between an industrial warehouse and an Econo Lodge, not a state-of-the-art Special Forces isolation facility. On Sunday, October 14, the A-teams chosen by 5th Group to isolate for Operation Enduring Freedom arrived one by one to the ISOFAC—located not far from the 5th Group block.
Some brought family members to their team rooms for a private good-bye before heading over to the ISOFAC; others opted for a public farewell in the parking lot. Most maintained smiling composures to alleviate their families’ fears. All of them knew of Afghanistan’s reputation as “the graveyard of empires,” where invading armies had been routed since the time of Alexander the Great.
After taking leave of their families, the men of ODA 574 entered the self-contained, electronically pimped-out “Bat Cave” and were greeted by Sergeant Bob Webb, half of ODA 574’s two-man administrative support team, or AST. Each team member had the shadow of a beard that would thicken during isolation, which could last anywhere from five days to several weeks. During this period of time, Webb would serve as a twenty-four-hour on-call link to the outside world, procuring anything the team might need: a piece of intelligence, a weapon diagram, a photo of a warlord, or a New York–style pizza. Now he led ODA 574 to one of twenty-four isolation dorms, a two-story apartment opening onto a central hallway where the Special Forces motto, De Oppresso Liber, was posted. The phrase, which means “to free the oppressed,” wasn’t exactly resonating with the men. News channels were still looping footage of the airliners striking the World Trade Center, and the country was still mourning. The people living under Taliban rule certainly qualified as oppressed, but 5th Group’s core mission was to avenge the United States of America.
Inside the apartment, the décor was “military clinical”: gray and white, concrete and metal. Even the dull desert camouflage worn by the men added color to the drab interior. A double-wide door with small square windows led outside to a fenced cement “yard,” and a stairway in the corner led to the bunkroom and communal bathroom upstairs. Walking in, Dan Petithory shouted out, “All right! Where’s the keg?!” Then he and Wes wired their laptops into the ISOFAC’s secure network at desks along the walls of the cavernous planning room. Mag headed upstairs to claim the lower bunk in the quietest, darkest corner of the room before returning to stand quietly at Amerine’s side.
Only his aunt Olga called Sergeant First Class Gilbert Magallanes, the team’s intelligence sergeant and third-in-command, by his first name; to everyone else he was Mag. Raised in Livermore, California, Mag had cruised around Oakland as a teen, Mexican machismo coursing through his veins and the chest-out-shoulders-back-stand-tall posture to match. After high school, rather than join the family tile business, he enlisted in the military, where he became a Ranger-qualified Green Beret and earned a reputation as the type of guy you wanted at your side in a firefight—“the strong, silent type,” as a fellow NCO put it, “minus the word silent.” Like JD and Ken, Mag was a Gulf War veteran; during the war he’d been tasked with photographing the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein’s forces upon the Kuwaiti people.
Amerine seemed entranced by the map of Afghanistan taped to the wall.
“There she is,” said Mag.
With a wry smile, Amerine said, “Here there be dragons.”
“Yeah,” replied Mag, “but not for long.”
The room was silent. The half-dozen A-teams, including ODA 574, that were gathered in the ISOFAC briefing chamber had been warned not to talk outside their teams, and nobody wanted to get blackballed from a mission for violating this order. Major Kurt Sonntag, standing next to a white screen onto which was projected a PowerPoint briefing, began to speak.
“This morning we are going to tell you everything we know, which frankly isn’t much. Be patient and don’t beat up your ASTs for information that none of us have. This is not going to be your typical isolation. We will go over your likely mission and discuss what has been going on in Afghanistan since the first ODA tried to infiltrate four days ago. A storm forced the helicopters to turn around, and bad weather has been keeping them grounded, but they should get in very, very soon. We’ll keep you posted.”
Excited whispers filled the room. Their fellow Green Berets from 5th Group were already pulling missions—it was really happening.
Breaking protocol that called for complete secrecy from one team’s mission to the next, Sonntag explained that teams already in place at a forward operating base in Uzbekistan were preparing to link up with warlords of the Northern Alliance. “You won’t be conducting classic unconventional warfare,” said Sonntag. “You won’t be recruiting, organizing, and training the Northern Alliance soldiers—they’ve been doing this for years. We’ll be working alongside them and supporting them. They will guide us to the enemy.”
Seated beside JD, Amerine scribbled notes for the next hour while intel and operations officers took
turns briefing the men, but as Sonntag had warned, the information was thin. There was little beyond a general outline of Northern Alliance safe havens and the names of both Northern Alliance and Taliban leaders.
“What do you think?” JD asked Amerine as they returned to their apartment.
“Get all the guys together in the planning bay. I have an idea how to tackle this,” said Amerine.
“Those are the scariest words a captain can say.”
“It gets scarier.”
While Amerine suspected that this was going to be a long war, he knew that only a few teams were going in right away, which meant they were all competing for a limited number of imminent missions. He had to be creative with his concept for a plan—and ODA 574 needed to lay it out flawlessly. Back in the planning room, he hastily wrote bullet points on an easel before assembling the men.
“Okay,” Amerine said to his team. “Our mission is to ‘conduct unconventional warfare in order to destroy al-Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan.’ Instead of traditional guerrilla warfare, CENTCOM thinks our teams will be linking up with the standing armies of the Northern Alliance in their safe havens to call in air strikes and advise the warlords. That isn’t too hard to plan, so we aren’t going to do it.”
Amerine registered the puzzled looks with a smile.
“We are going to plan an unconventional war from scratch, from making friends with happy little villagers to organizing them as an army of killers and taking them to war. I intend for us to pull a plan out of our asses in five days that will make us marketable for just about any mission they throw at us. With any luck, that will get us out the door first.”
Amerine’s “broad concept” plan proved difficult to construct. The men needed a big-picture analysis of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, their current numbers and locations, leadership structures, and weaponry. If ODA 574 was going to foment a rebellion among the locals, the team would also need detailed reports on Afghanistan’s ethnic geography.