by Eric Blehm
The book Taliban by Ahmed Rashid provided the best information on Afghanistan under that regime. The Other Side of the Mountain, a study of Mujahideen tactics compiled by the Marine Corps Combat Command, outlined, among other lessons learned, how the Soviets were repeatedly ambushed at the same locations. As the team sorted through piles of pseudo-intelligence, most of it dredged from Soviet military archives, it became clear that there was barely enough information to write a high-school history report.
JD floated among the men spread out around the room, some seated at desks, others on the floor, assisting when he could. He had compiled a list of questions about Afghanistan, but there were no resources to consult for the answers.
“You would think,” he said to Amerine, “that with Osama bin Laden identified as our greatest terrorist threat, the CIA, DIA, or some alphabet agency would have files on the country where he operates.”
“You’d think.”
“If the intel existed, we’d have it by now, right?”
“I’m thinking the channels are open,” Amerine said. “There’s just nothing to push through.”
On the third day of isolation, Amerine briefed Sonntag, who was impressed with ODA 574’s unique concept for a full-scale unconventional warfare campaign—especially in the absence of hard information. The other teams had chosen to focus their plans on linking up with the standing armies of the Northern Alliance. He told Amerine to press on.
By the fifth day of isolation, the planning room walls were plastered with large sheets of butcher paper bearing the handwritten step-by-step notes that were the blueprint of their plan. By noon the men were ready to deliver a finalized brief when their AST entered the room.
“Congratulations,” said Sergeant Webb. “You don’t need to brief Major Sonntag; you’re already at the top of the pecking order. You can prepare for deployment to Uzbekistan.”
This news elated the team. The men knew their plan was based on spotty intelligence, but—being the “tip of the spear” for the ground forces—they assumed they would receive better intel at a forward base. The metaphor implies a first-offensive thrust followed by a larger force, but in this case there was no planned follow-through.
General Franks had begun the war as an air campaign. When he committed to unconventional warfare, Special Forces became the main effort, and the other units in all the branches of the U.S. military were directed to support them. The Army and Marine Corps were still working on developing a plan that would get large numbers of their conventional forces into the country, but at this time ODA 574 and the rest of 5th Special Forces Group were not just the tip of the spear, they were the entire spear.
Meanwhile, General Franks appeared to second-guess the plan he’d okayed. While Colonel Mulholland was trying to get the first Special Forces teams into the north, Franks openly voiced his doubts to his subordinates. He was confident the Green Berets could buy some time and thus get Rumsfeld off his back, but he directed the Army and Marines to press forward with their plans.
The idea of large-scale reinforcements was comforting to some in Special Forces; others were troubled by the implication that they would be necessary.
Late on the night of October 19, the men of ODA 574 were busy packing gear and sorting through planning materials when the door of their apartment swung open.
Amerine and JD looked up from folding maps at the table to see their AST standing in the doorway, grinning. They could hear chatter from the usually quiet hallway, then a muffled cheer before Webb slammed the door shut behind him.
“What’s up?” asked JD.
“The first teams are on the ground in the northern mountains,” said Webb, “and the Rangers just completed a raid at an airstrip in the south near Kandahar.”
“Damn,” said JD. “Any casualties?”
“No. The Rangers got out clean.”
“Did they nab anybody?” asked Amerine.
“No, but I don’t think they expected to. It was a symbolic strike, a ‘fuck you’ showing the Taliban we can drop into their backyard and kick them in the nuts. Meanwhile, two ODAs slipped into the north and are with the Northern Alliance.”
Before this, ODA 574 had been skeptical that they would actually have the opportunity to execute missions, but the knowledge that two other A-teams were on the ground sobered the men as they completed their final task before leaving for Uzbekistan: death letters.
Even before he entered isolation, Dan had written a lighthearted letter to his parents and given it to Lloyd Allard to deliver in the event of his death. He had quickly asked for it back and torn it up, saying that his folks would kill him if that was the last they ever heard from him.
Here in the ISOFAC, he began a more serious letter: “Dear Ma and Dad. So sorry you have to be reading this letter today. I guess we can never tell when our time is coming.”
Mike McElhiney wrote three letters, one to his wife, Judith, another to his twelve-year-old daughter, Maria, and the third to his eight-year-old son, Michael Jr.: “I hope Mommy has explained where I am and what I had to do. This war and what has happened to me is for you and all children of your age. I have gone and suffered this fate so you don’t have to. You are now the man of the house and I know this is a big responsibility but when you grow up you will understand. Take care of your mother and sister and I will be watching over you from heaven. I love you always. Your Daddy.”
Mag was too superstitious to write a death letter, especially to his teenaged twins, Shaun and Brittany, who spent summers with him. As toddlers, they had sneaked a blue teddy bear with pink paws into his rucksack, and he always brought it along on deployments to remind himself to be good and be careful. His most precious talisman—the four-leaf clover Brittany had found and given him when she was four, just before he’d deployed for Desert Storm in 1990—had recently gone missing, and he was unable to shake the feeling that something unlucky was going to happen on this mission. As Mag packed for the ISOFAC, he had set out on his bed favorite pictures of his kids, one of him and his girlfriend, Sherry, and some portraits of himself in uniform. That act—acknowledging that he’d been thinking about his loved ones and selecting the photographs he would want displayed at his funeral—was as close to writing a death letter as Mag got.
Amerine didn’t write a letter. “Dad, I’m not going to die over there,” he had told his father, Ron, on their last phone call before isolation. His only fear was losing any of his men.
On October 22, the night before ODA 574’s scheduled departure after nine days of isolation, Cubby knocked on the back door. Amerine had asked Allard to buy a “BFK”—a Big Fucking Knife—to present to the guerrilla leader they would link up with, and Cubby was delivering it along with a prewar toast: a couple of six packs of beer and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, “Tennessee’s finest,” in JD’s honor. Alcohol was forbidden in the ISOFAC but it was tradition for teams to have a nip on their way out the door.
As the men said good-bye, Dan—Cubby’s best friend on ODA 574—gave him a rough hug. “Don’t worry, Cub,” he said. “You don’t want to go on this one anyway. We aren’t doing anything big. It’s going to be boring.”
“You’ll probably link up with us in-country later,” JD added. “We’ll see you then.”
By the next morning, their gear was packed and waiting on pallets to be loaded onto a C-17 transport plane. The team had “sterilized” the apartment by placing in a burn bag all the sensitive planning materials they were leaving behind.
Amerine double-checked the isolation bay, pausing to read one last time the printout of an e-mail he’d received from his father before heading into isolation:
Jason Luke,
With the reality sinking in of your likely imminent departure for a war zone, I found myself at work tonight contemplating the burdens you are shouldering, and how much physical, emotional, moral, and intellectual strength they will require of you. I hope you’ll remain confident of your strength, intelligence, and highly developed skills as a profes
sional warrior, whatever ordeal you find yourself facing. I hope you’ll find inspiration in the fact that, in response to a terrible evil, your country now looks to you to help deliver it from danger. I will be thinking of you every day that you’re gone, and hoping fervently for your safe return.
And then I hope you live a very long, happy, and peaceful life, taking pride and satisfaction in having helped secure peace and safety for your country in one of its most trying times.
To millions of Americans you represent the best of us, entrusted to lead and defend us. As you know, though we’re a country of hundreds of millions, we grieve for even one loss among those who represent and serve our nation. I hope, then, that as you confront danger you’ll know that the prayers of many, many others are with you.
So I hope it’s not simply an awful experience, Ole’ Son, though most wars, for most people, have been just that. You’re enough of a realist to prepare for that; but I’m enough of an optimist to hope…I’m hoping you’ll come through it triumphant, and then regard it with some degree of satisfaction for the rest of your life. You’re strong, you’re skilled, and unlike many of your foes, you agree with Patton that you should make the other poor bastard die for his cause. I’m sure you’ll temper courage with prudence, especially because you want to bring all your men home.
I’m with you in my thoughts, and I remain awfully damned proud of you.
Trust your luck, Luke, it’s always worked for you in the long run.
Love,
Dad
Crumpling the letter, Amerine tossed it into the burn bag and joined his men outside.
Twenty-four hours later, around three in the morning Uzbek time, the C-17 touched down on a crumbling Soviet-era runway. Bleary-eyed American staff officers checked in the members of ODA 574 while Uzbek soldiers looked on, then Sergeant Tom Conrad, the team’s new AST, led them down a gravel road and onto the air base at Karshi-Khanabad or “Camp Stronghold Freedom,” better known as K2. Here, Colonel Mulholland had set up a large tent to house JSOTF-North, dubbed Task Force Dagger, from where he would oversee the Afghan theater of operations until JSOTF-South was established and ready to take over the lower region of the country—roughly south of the Hindu Kush mountains. Until then, Mulholland was responsible for the entire country.
As they walked, Conrad checked off the inconveniences the men were likely to encounter at K2, including floods, electrical outages, and heater malfunctions. Ideally, they would have remained isolated in a high-security location within the base, but there was a dearth of manpower and building material this early in the war. The “isolation area” was just a handful of tents with a single strand of concertina wire running around their perimeter, and the teams could hear each other planning through the thin fabric walls.
Starting at daybreak, it rained for the next seventy-two hours, flooding the camp. The men of ODA 574 had to empty their planning tent in order to shovel out the mud, and they struggled to protect electronic equipment from both standing water and leaks in the sagging roof. But the soldiers of 5th Special Forces Group were accustomed to austere living conditions and took pride in the hardships of their profession.
Stateside on October 26, smoke continued to rise from the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center, the threat of another terrorist attack loomed large, and parents debated whether they should let their kids go trick-or-treating. In the White House Situation Room, a National Security Council meeting was in progress.
President George W. Bush sat with his principal advisers—Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice—as they briefed him on the status of the war. Three ODAs had successfully infiltrated northern Afghanistan: ODA 595 had linked up with Northern Alliance general Abdul Rashid Dostum and split into two six-man teams south of Mazar-e-Sharif; ODA 555 had joined Northern Alliance generals Fahim Khan and Bismullah Khan at an old Soviet air base they controlled at Bagram, near the Shomali Plain; and ODA 586 had linked up with another Northern Alliance general.
These thirty-six men—grainy photos of them in Afghan garb and riding horseback alongside Northern Alliance soldiers had appeared in newspapers around the world—represented the extent of the U.S. invasion force one week into the ground campaign. These few Americans were critical in directing pilots to enemy positions if the United States hoped to avoid bombing and bombing again the same charred rubble. In one eighteen-hour period, they had called in close air support that destroyed more than eighty-five enemy vehicles, including armored personnel carriers, twelve command positions, and a large munitions storage bunker.
There had been no combat casualties, in part because the Northern Alliance generals were very protective of the Green Berets, forbidding them at first to even approach Taliban positions. “Five hundred of my men can be killed,” General Dostum told the men of ODA 595, “but not one American can even be injured or you will leave.”2
In contrast to the action going on in the north, Condoleezza Rice told the president, the south was still “dry”: There were no U.S. soldiers or intelligence agents on the ground.3
While the CIA had nurtured a few friendly relationships within the Northern Alliance over the years, the Agency had failed to recruit any effective operatives within the enemy ranks of the Taliban in the south. George Tenet was familiar with two Afghans, Hamid Karzai and Abdul Haq, Pashtuns who had been exiled by the Taliban and who felt there were sufficient gaps in the Taliban armor—and enough popular resentment in the south—to initiate an insurrection. Karzai had sneaked back into Afghanistan in the beginning of October; Haq had entered the country a couple of weeks later, traversing the mountains on a white horse, with nineteen armed supporters riding with him.
Both Haq and Karzai were attempting—independently—to rally Pashtun tribes in the provinces surrounding Kandahar, an endeavor considered so dangerous by Tenet and the CIA that he was not willing to put Americans on the ground with them. The CIA had limited its involvement to offering both men satellite phones in order to monitor their progress and gather intelligence, and dangling the carrot of American support if they could create a fledgling Southern Alliance.
Haq, a well-known Mujahideen war hero, had refused the satellite phone.4 He was reportedly offended that the United States was supporting the Northern Alliance with soldiers and arms while offering him only a phone that he believed could be used by his enemies to track him. Karzai had accepted the phone and kept in touch with the CIA as he traveled through the south.
The conversation in the White House returned to the north, with President Bush asking when more teams would be joining those already on the ground.
“We have five teams in Uzbekistan waiting to get in,” said Rumsfeld.
The math was sobering: thirty-six Green Berets in-country, close to sixty ready to infiltrate from K2, and a handful of Delta Force teams. This was the extent of the force mustered by the United States to conquer the Taliban and hunt down Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda cronies.
The following day at K2, Conrad entered ODA 574’s tent to find the entire team lounging on their cots after lunch.
“Something is brewing,” he said to Amerine, who swung his feet down and stood to face the AST. “It’s sounding like a real UW mission—building a resistance from scratch. I’ll tell you more when I know.”
Amerine thanked Conrad and then, for the hell of it, fished for a little more information. A warlord’s name, perhaps? A location? Anything?
The AST waved his hand over the lower portion of the map of Afghanistan unfolded on the table and jabbed his finger. “Somewhere down here. Kandahar.”
The tent went silent. Kandahar—the spiritual capital of the Taliban movement—was a well-defended stronghold where the Taliban would likely make its final stand. Kandahar Province was part of the Pashtun tribal belt, and the Pashtun were thought to be fiercely loyal to the Taliban. For an American soldier, the south was no-
man’s-land. There were no established armies with whom to ally and no warlord fiefdoms in which to seek refuge if they had to retreat. And while history has branded all the tribes of Afghanistan for their proficiency at routing foreign invaders, the warlike, ruthless, and vastly numbered Pashtun have been particularly adept at the enterprise.
British General Andrew Skeen, who faced a similar military mission in 1939, wrote, “When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat. All expeditions into this area sooner or later end in retreat under fire.”5
Conrad returned a short time later with a dossier on Abdul Haq. The team crowded around the table to pore over this latest clue to their mission: Haq was trying to garner support among the Pashtun in southeastern Afghanistan, which could only mean that he had a serious following, serious firepower, and serious cojones.
Two hours later, the AST poked his head inside the tent. “Bad news,” he said. “Abdul Haq is dead.”
After only four days in-country, Haq and his men had been ambushed by Taliban soldiers at a village in Logar Province, north of Kandahar.6 Word was that Haq, once surrounded, had used his personal satellite phone to call his supporters in Peshawar, Pakistan, who in turn desperately sought help from the U.S. embassy. This plea was relayed to the CIA, which sent an unmanned drone to launch a Hellfire missile at Haq’s attackers. The response had been both insufficient and too late: Haq had been taken to Kabul, tortured, and then hanged within the ruins of a building destroyed by an American bomb.
For Amerine, this news generated a new set of questions: If Haq was important, why hadn’t the CIA provided him with more support? Why hadn’t an SF team been with him? Haq’s death signaled either a grievous breakdown in communications or the profound peril of operating in the area. Or both.