by Eric Blehm
It took two and a half hours to reach their landing zone in Uruzgan Province. Stepping off his helicopter, Amerine felt a surge of adrenaline in his legs. Quickly he scanned the surrounding area through his NODs. All appeared clear, and he got the tribal leaders out of the Black Hawks and made sure they were crouching safely on the ground. He gave them the bag of grenades, and took two additional fragmentation grenades out of his ammo pouch and placed them in Bari Gul’s hands before climbing quickly back through the open side door, the helicopter lifting off before he was even seated.
The Black Hawks gained elevation, dropped their noses, and screamed across the landscape, the familiar pull of G-forces tugging at Amerine’s stomach as his pilot navigated the mountainous terrain. Casper was in the other helicopter, and it felt strange to Amerine to suddenly be alone in the back of the bird. He ate a sandwich that he had surreptitiously taken from a bag of food beside one of the pilots, then lay on the floor with his go-to-hell pack under his head, the banking of the helicopter rocking him to sleep.
The absence of city lights made for pitch darkness as Amerine waited on the tarmac the following evening to meet the other half of ODA 574, whose arrival at J-Bad had been delayed by a day. He heard the MC-130 land and experienced a feeling of vertigo triggered in part by fatigue—he’d slept just two hours since returning from the drop-off in Afghanistan.
The roar of the props grew, then died down as the massive airplane taxied, stopped, and lowered its ramp to reveal JD, Dan, Ronnie, Victor, and Brent in the dim light of the cargo hold. Amerine’s exhaustion evaporated when he saw his men. Heavily shadowed by the lighting, their expressionless faces made them look ghostly as they silently descended the ramp, JD giving a brief nod to Amerine, who had to stifle a chuckle. Were these seasoned Green Berets actually pouting? But he couldn’t blame them. Had he been in their boots, he would have been pissed off, too.
“Have them throw their bags in the truck and we’ll get moving,” Amerine said to JD. “Mag will show you to your rooms. Drop your bags, then join me in the meeting room. I want to get you guys caught up before you go to bed.”
Still silent, JD, Dan, Ronnie, Victor, and Brent filed into the room and sat down on the chairs Amerine had arranged to face a map of southern Afghanistan. It bothered Amerine that Mag and the others followed in a second group: ODA 574 was one team, and he had to bring it back together.
“Welcome to Pakistan,” Amerine said, noting that most of the new arrivals were slouched down in their chairs, studiously avoiding eye contact with him. “For the last seven days, we have been working with Hamid Karzai to develop an unconventional warfare campaign to start an insurgency in the Pashtun tribal belt. Hamid is the only tribal leader in southern Afghanistan working with the United States. Our mission is to support him in starting an insurgency from the ground up in Uruzgan Province, the birthplace of the Taliban movement.
“Hamid believes, and I agree, that the Taliban regime should be removed only by fellow Pashtun. The campaign in the north is going well, but we cannot allow the Northern Alliance to come south to continue the fight once they finish retaking their land; if that happens, the country will descend into civil war. Our team’s job is to lay the groundwork for Hamid and his followers to seize southern Afghanistan by themselves.”
Amerine paused, scanning the faces of his men, who now sat upright, all eyes on him. “Their numbers are currently fewer than a hundred.”
The hostility in the room immediately dissipated. Now, the new arrivals were excited, a little scared, and definitely listening.
“On November 14, our eleven men will take Hamid and infiltrate Uruzgan along with a nine-man CIA element. We will establish a guerrilla base in the mountains of eastern Uruzgan and grow an army for the next four to six months. Once we have the manpower, we will lay siege to Tarin Kowt, capital of Uruzgan. From there, we will continue to expand our force, fighting our way south to Kandahar. When Kandahar falls, the south will fall, and this stage of the war will be won.
“I know you were ticked off about being stuck in K2,” Amerine said. “Now get over it and get some sleep.”
He left the room quickly, his dour expression giving way to a smile once he cleared the door.
That got their heads in the game, he thought.
The night of November 12, less than forty-eight hours before the infiltration, Amerine was going over last-minute details with Karzai as they drank tea in the safe house when the statesman’s satellite phone rang. Amerine had grown accustomed to standing quietly by as Karzai spoke to journalists from the BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, tribal leaders, foreign dignitaries, and family members, including his wife and brother in Pakistan. He seemed to have boundless energy for these calls, which he conducted fluently in several languages. This one, in Pashto, lasted five minutes.
“I have news,” he said to Amerine, calmly putting down the phone. “That was Mullah Omar.”
“You were speaking with Mullah Omar personally?”
“It was his protégé, though I suspect Omar was nearby.”
The intermediary had probed Karzai for his location and intentions. “What do you think you are going to accomplish?” he’d asked. “How do you see this conflict ending?” Karzai had reiterated the demands of the United States: unconditional surrender of the Taliban regime.
“We will talk again,” Omar’s intermediary had ended with.
Mullah Omar had not reached out to anybody in the United States or the Northern Alliance—in fact, he had scoffed at the demand for surrender when it was delivered through Pakistan. He also had refused to hand over Osama bin Laden.* This phone call to Karzai could mean any of three things: 1) Omar viewed Karzai, a fellow Pashtun, as someone with authority; 2) Omar was opening the door to negotiations; or 3) Omar thought that Karzai was a chump who could be easily played.
“What do you think?” Karzai asked Amerine.
“If they are willing to negotiate,” said Amerine, “then maybe you should talk to them further. Once the Taliban collapses in Kandahar, many of them are going to keep fighting as insurgents if you can’t find a way to achieve some kind of reconciliation.”
“Rumsfeld expects unconditional surrender,” Karzai said, “and so does the Northern Alliance. I might be able to calm the Northern Alliance, but I can’t risk alienating the U.S. by negotiating with the Taliban. What do you think, Jason? How do you feel about these unconditional demands?”
“Regarding Osama bin Laden, there is no question. He needs to be turned over unconditionally. Period. But as far as the Taliban goes…” Amerine felt himself veering into a gray area he wasn’t certain he should discuss. “Let me put it this way,” he continued. “It is much easier to be an insurgent than to defend against an insurgency. Ask yourself, Hamid: Once the Taliban are defeated, do you think they will go away? Or do you think they will regroup and do exactly what we are doing—against the government your Loya Jirga elects?”
Karzai laughed. “Jason, you have answered my question with more questions. You could be a diplomat.”
Amerine laughed too. “I’m not sure it is my place to provide the answers, but tell me this. You say there were good people in the Taliban?”
“Yes. There were, and there still are.”
“Would it make sense to negotiate with them, bring them into the Loya Jirga process? Or should we just kill them all?”
“We could never kill them all,” Karzai said, shaking his head.
Amerine smiled and said nothing. Karzai was impressed. The U.S. military has done a good job training this one, he thought.
“I need to contact my chain of command and let them know about this phone call,” Amerine said, excusing himself. He hurried down the hall of the safe house to the communications area and instructed Wes to send a situation report (SITREP) to Task Force Dagger with the subject line “Mullah Omar” and a summary of the exchange: Omar had reached out to Karzai, perhaps hinting that he was willing to negotiate. “Request guidance,” it ended.
&
nbsp; Hours later, Task Force Dagger responded: “Acknowledge receipt of SITREP. Keep us informed.”
That’s it? thought Amerine. I guess we’re on our own.
Though Karzai had assured Amerine that his tribal leaders would be able to recruit three hundred men, he could offer no proof of their numbers.
Casper’s suggestion to Amerine was for Karzai to call the tribal leaders on the ground and have them gather the group at a prearranged location. He could then send an unmanned Predator surveillance drone to the site, and the “pilot” could take a photo and count heads.
This proposal seemed like a roadblock for the mission, and Amerine had advised against it, saying it was not only heavy-handed but also unrealistic. The guerrillas would remain scattered until the Americans arrived. To gather three hundred men for a “Karzai’s Rebellion” class photo would never happen—even if Karzai did have these numbers, which, Amerine privately suspected, wasn’t the case.
Now, the day before the scheduled infiltration, Amerine had to address this problem. He walked from the safe house to the AFSOC headquarters, sat down at an open desk, took a deep breath, and dialed Colonel Mulholland on a secure line. Mulholland had been clear: Karzai had to have three hundred men already assembled, not arriving eventually, Insha’Allah. Amerine would not lie to his commander—that went against everything he stood for as an officer—but abandoning Karzai went against everything he stood for as a Green Beret.
Someone picked up on the other end.
“This is Captain Amerine. I need to speak to Colonel Mulholland.”
“He isn’t available. Would you like to speak to his deputy?”
“Please.”
The deputy commander, an Air Force colonel currently assigned to Task Force Dagger, came on the line.
“Sir, this is Captain Amerine. I command ODA 574. I’m preparing to infiltrate my team into southern Afghanistan. Colonel Mulholland’s guidance was not to execute until I could confirm I would link up with an element of no less than three hundred tribal fighters. The situation is that I cannot confirm that and will not attain those numbers unless I infiltrate with my tribal leader and commence operations. I am confident, however, that we will attain that number. I am seeking permission to infiltrate tomorrow.”
“All right,” said the deputy commander. “You have the go-ahead. I’ll pass this on to Colonel Mulholland.”
“Thank you, sir,” Amerine said.
After hanging up, he paced the floor of the AFSOC headquarters, rubbing his beard. It had been too easy—almost as if he had just played Mom against Dad to stay out past curfew—and he considered calling back to clarify that the permission he’d been granted was valid.
Then he made a decision. “Fuck it,” Amerine said, attracting strange looks from nearby Air Force personnel as he strode out of the hangar to inform his men.
The mission was on.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Taliban Patrol
* * *
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
—T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)
* * *
On November 14, in the mountains of Uruzgan Province, the single flashlight had been joined by three others, each beam sweeping across the landscape, moving closer. Mag, Mike, Ronnie, and the CIA spook Zepeda, lying prone in the darkness behind their go-to-hell packs and tracking the movement through their NODs, could now make out four men, each wearing a shalwar kameez and carrying a Russian assault rifle over his shoulder. Garbled voices could now be heard in the distance. The Afghans had been there too long to just be passing through.
“If they come over this way,” Mag said, his weapon trained on the men, “I’m gonna light them up.”
Mike noted a tension in Mag’s voice he’d never heard before. This was a situation, sure as hell: separated from the rest of the team and unable to establish communications. What had been incomprehensible chatter became shouts that Mike, who spoke Farsi, recognized as Pashto, and the flashlights suddenly appeared to stop. It took Mike a moment to realize that they hadn’t stopped—they were coming directly toward them.
“Shit,” whispered Ronnie.
Shifting slightly, they steadied their aim at the group 150 yards away and closing. Infrared laser dots from their carbines covered the chest of the lead man, several yards ahead of the other Afghans, an easy kill. “Dead man walking,” whispered Mag.
“Let him come in,” said Ronnie. The Americans held their fire, allowing the group to advance. Their training had taught them to anticipate the worst and engage the enemy only if they had the upper hand, and these four men might be only a foot patrol sent out from a much larger Taliban force close by. A single gunshot would reveal the Americans’ position. For now, their only advantage was to remain invisible.
High in the mountains to the west, separated from Mag, Mike, Ronnie, and Zepeda by roughly one and a half miles of steep, rugged terrain, the main group of ODA 574 were still trying to reach their missing comrades while Karzai and Casper wandered around somewhere in the darkness.
The team had halted on a bald hillock, a bump on a ridge located at the far end of the valley where they’d landed an hour before, while the donkey train carrying most of their gear continued on toward War Jan along with the majority of Karzai’s supporters. JD had placed Wes, Alex, and Ken, along with the remaining CIA spooks, in a defensive perimeter around Dan, who, taking advantage of the high ground they occupied, continued his mantra over the radio: “Any Texas element, this is Texas One Two, over…”
Amerine had chosen this high position to provide his senior communications sergeant the best radio signal vantage overlooking the mountains that spread out below them like a starlit relief map. Kneeling beside Dan on the cold, hard, wind-scoured ground, he said, “I sure am glad you’re here instead of patrolling the Massachusetts Turnpike.”
Dan paused. “You heard that I almost got out?”
“Yeah, I heard.”
A fourteen-year veteran commo sergeant, Dan had recently considered leaving Special Forces to become a state trooper so he could live in his hometown of Cheshire, Massachusetts, near his parents, big brother, and little sister. He had been talked out of it by his fellow soldiers. Dan was known around 5th Group as the “funny guy,” but that came second to his reputation as a master in his field. In 1994, on a training mission in Pakistan, he had established a high-altitude communication outpost when a blizzard hit, trapping all six of Alpha Company’s A-teams on a mountain. Ordered to hunker down for the storm, the men weathered an exhausting siege inside crowded, smelly tents that were in constant danger of collapsing under the weight of the snow. The situation became even more perilous when avalanches began to roar down the mountain in the dead of night. That was when Dan announced over the radio: “Donner Party, your table is ready.”
Every half hour, Dan would check in on the teams with a joke, getting them through until the next morning, when the men began to post-hole with their heavy packs through waist-deep snow and deeper drifts. It took them five hours to move just over a kilometer, carefully picking their way over you-fall-you-die terrain.
“This is Rockin’ Dan Petithory comin’ at ya live from the Swat Valley’s number one radio station!” came over the men’s radios. “Taking requests all day long! If we got it, we’ll play it!” Dan proceeded to play rock songs by request over the air by holding down the push-to-talk button of the radio, which he held next to his Walkman.
Here, in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, as Dan turned back to his radio and reached out over the airwaves, there were no lighthearted antics.
“Any Texas element, this is Texas One Two, over,” he repeated, letting out a low growl in response to the static.
“Don’t take it personally,” said JD, who stood next to Amerine. “If Dan Petithory can’t
reach them, they can’t be reached.”
The missing men anxiously scanned their flanks and rear, wondering if the slow pace of the patrol in front of them was simply a decoy, allowing the enemy to pin them down.
Four Afghans were now between the Americans and their gear, about sixty yards away and closing in; each of the Afghans was tagged by a laser dot from an American carbine. Mike alternated aiming from the head to the chest of his designated man, which helped to steady his nerves as the minutes crept by.
Suddenly, one of the men yelled “Don’t shoot!” in Farsi, and Mike heard another shout “Americans!”
The group had paused at forty yards out and were shining flashlights at the boot prints in the sandy soil. They kept their assault rifles over their shoulders. In fact, the more commotion they made, the less they seemed like a patrol on the hunt.
“I think they might be friendlies,” Mike whispered.
“That’s what I’m thinking too,” said Mag.
“They’re going to find us here,” said Ronnie. “We should initiate, before they get here.”
“All right,” said Mag. “Mike, you know Farsi. You go forward a bit, away from this position. I’ll be right behind you. Everybody else, cover us. I’ve got the lead man. We’ll be back in a hurry if this goes bad.”
Mag and Mike double-checked the accessibility of their grenades—which they would use in the event of a rapid retreat—and with carbines aimed, crawled forward, carefully avoiding the shrubs that crackled when crushed. “I’ll be right with you,” Mag told Mike. “If my guy so much as raises that rifle, I’ll light him up.”
Thirty yards away from the Afghans, Mike yelled out in Farsi, “Are you a friend of Karzai?”
If the men were startled, they didn’t show it. Nobody raised a weapon. Someone answered in a dialect Mike couldn’t understand, though he thought he might have heard the word Hamid.