by Eric Blehm
7. During my research to understand the difference between the two types of forward air controllers in the Air Force—CCTs, like Alex Yoshimoto, and TACPs, like Jim Price—I spoke with an Air Force Public Affairs officer who simplified it a bit.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “Both TACPs and CCTs are elite airmen who work alongside ground troops—both conventional and Special Operations forces. A CCT’s career field covers a wider range of capabilities.” She explained that CCTs are also certified Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controllers, who can, and have been known to, open and run airfields seized behind enemy lines. Both CCTs and TACPs are highly trained, and “to confuse matters more, both can be JTAC [Joint Terminal Air Control] certified, which broadens their capabilites even further to include calling in close air support from both fixed-wing and rotary-wing [helicopter gunships] aircraft; forward firing weaponry [missiles]; artillery from ground units; and sea-based weapons platforms [artillery and missiles from ships at sea].”
As one team member put it, Alex and Price were “the guys who will call shit in when we need it.”
In his book Danger Close, Steve Call describes in detail who these men are and what they do. Many consider the CCTs and TACPs “America’s secret weapon.” See Danger Close: Tactical Air Controllers in Afghanistan and Iraq (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007).
8. Gary C. Schroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (New York: Ballantine, 2005).
CHAPTER 4: THE SOLDIER AND THE STATESMAN
1. Though Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, fervently denied that he was strong-armed into providing these basing rights, Secretary of State Colin Powell had delivered to him the Bush party line: “You are either with us or against us.” Under a “leasing” agreement with high rent and numerous conditions, the United States was also granted a narrow flight corridor into and out of Pakistan, to be used only for logistics and aircraft recovery; no attacks could be launched from within Musharraf’s country. See Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2006).
2. Woodward, Bush at War.
3. Robert McFarlane, “The Tragedy of Abdul Haq,” Wall Street Journal, November 2, 2001.
4. James F. Dobbins, After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2008).
CHAPTER 6: THE BATTLE OF TARIN KOWT
1. Every member of ODA 574 was issued a detailed, topographical Joint Operations Graphic “pilot survival map,” generally carried by pilots in the event they are shot down or crash behind enemy lines and must evade the enemy. Special Forces in Afghanistan used any number of maps, but many found this survival map the most useful for referencing such things as terrain, roads, waterways, and mountains. Names of villages, road locations, bridges over waterways, and other features on the map, however, differed greatly from what the men discovered once on the ground.
2. “Under Operations Safe Haven and Safe Passage nearly 7,300 Cubans were transported from Panama to Guantanamo Naval Base between 01 February 1995, the date the movement began, and 20 February 1995. The mission of the transfer operation was to move the Cuban migrants from Safe Haven camps in Panama to Guantanamo in a safe, orderly manner.” See http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/safe_haven. htm.
CHAPTER 7: CREDIBILITY
1. Maura Reynolds and Alissa J. Rubin, “Response to Terror: The Front Lines,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 2001.
2. U.S. Army Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan, Weapon of Choice: ARSOF in Afghanistan, official history, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kans., p. 157.
3. While I interviewed James Dobbins personally, much of what I gleaned or quoted can be found in his book After the Taliban. The book also provides an overview of the process at Bonn.
CHAPTER 8: MADNESS
1. The U.S. Army was unable to deliver this situation report, in spite of a Freedom of Information Act request. As such, the content is paraphrased, but deemed accurate by team members who read the original.
2. Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: ReganBooks, 2004), p. 309.
3. Weapon of Choice, pp. 158–66. To further understand the uprising, and how a headquarters element ultimately called in a bomb on its own position, I interviewed members of ODAs operating in northern Afghanistan at that time who confirmed that they had requested to return to the prison to help with the rescue efforts but were told by Queeg’s headquarters staff that they were not needed. 4. From September 27 to October 31, Fox had led a training exercise in Jordan. Upon completion, the battalion was ordered to hold in place, at El Jafr air base in Jordan. A week later, Fox was told to pick fourteen members of his battalion staff who could function as a nimble command-and-control group to execute missions into northern Afghanistan. From Jordan, Fox and his fourteen-member SOCCE staff were sent to Uzbekistan aboard a commercial airliner, then made their way to K2 on a public bus. Two and a half days later, they were in Pakistan for Thanksgiving, on standby at J-Bad until they joined ODA 574 and Karzai.
5. While some called the town Shawali Kowt (it is also the main town in Shawali Kowt District), others called it Sayd Alim Kalay, which was the name used in investigations conducted by the U.S. military. I chose Shawali Kowt, the name used by Amerine and Karzai.
CHAPTER 9: DEATH ON THE HORIZON
1. Charles Gray Robertson, Kurum, Kabul, and Kandahar (1881; rept. Elibron Classics), pp. 209, 210.
CHAPTER 10: THE RUINS
1. Mag’s and Wes’s accounts of being left behind by Ken were nearly identical. Despite numerous attempts, I was never able to get Ken’s version of the story to see if he might have thought they were both in the back of the vehicle when he sped off. Neither man confronted him later that night, and he never apologized. Numerous people told me that it was Ken’s job to make sure his passengers were in the vehicle. Ultimately, both Wes and Mag assumed he had simply panicked and lost all situational awareness.
2. While nobody on ODA 574 knew anything about Bolduc’s thwarting of an enemy flanking maneuver on the late afternoon of December 4, 2001, I was able to find one semi-witness to the events. Nelson Smith confirmed that Bolduc did take a number of guerrillas with him down off the Alamo (while the battle for the ruins by the bridge was in full swing) toward the river after verbalizing his suspicions to Smith that there might be enemy coming across it, something Bolduc inferred from some intercepted radio traffic. A few minutes later, while Nelson was trying to set up a hasty defense of the Alamo with the remaining guerrillas in the area, he heard gunfire coming from the direction of the river.
Bolduc later called it a flanking maneuver by the enemy. ODA 574 was dubious of the story because in the unanimous opinion of all team members I interviewed, if there had been such a flanking maneuver by the enemy in progress while the men were engaged in combat at the ruins, they should have been informed about it immediately, as they were the ones potentially being flanked.
In my interview with Bolduc, he told me that he saw a group of armed Afghans (estimated at thirty) coming out of an orchard across the river, and opened fire on them as they made their way onto the dry riverbed. The guerrillas he brought along joined in, and the Afghans retreated into the orchard. When I interviewed Fox (who had moved forward to JD’s support-by-fire location at the time), he said that he hadn’t heard about Bolduc’s combat back near the Alamo until Bolduc told him about it in person a couple of hours later, once Fox had returned to the Alamo. Bolduc’s own version of the account has been documented in Weapon of Choice, pp. 176–77.
CHAPTER 11: THE THIRTEENTH SORTIE
1. The facts, quotations, and sequence of events used to describe the B-52’s mission were taken from the recorded transcripts of the official Air Force Accident Investigation, in which all five crew members were questioned under oath. See Report of Investigation: 5 December 2001 JDAM Incident Near Sayd Alim Kalay, Afghanistan (redacted/unclassified versi
on), 2003.
EPILOGUE
1. After remaining anonymous to the public ever since the accident occurred, Jim Price allowed me to use his real name and to hear his account of the events. Since the technical aspects of what went wrong have been simplified herein, and because what truly went wrong was never discovered in the investigation, some further explanation is warranted.
Price ultimately discovered his error on a field exercise supporting 5th Group ODAs in August 2002, after a Special Forces operator questioned Price about an odd “gross deviation error” on his GPS screen. Price shut down the exercise and after a couple of hours tinkering with the device, discovered “deliberate” and “hasty” modes in the software.
On the morning of December 5, 2001, Price had calibrated the Viper laser range finder after talking with the F-18 pilots. One of the calibration points was the ground in front of him that he had lased. Because the Viper had been borrowed from the weather detachment and configured to measure cloud heights, its software was set on “hasty” mode, which allowed Price to scroll past a “gross deviation error” message warning him that the coordinates were too close to his current location. Had the software been set on “deliberate” mode—the proper configuration for close air support—the device would not have allowed him to pull up a coordinate in the immediate vicinity. The software also stored only ten sightings and would not overwrite the final target sighting, so it stored his test location rather than discarding it as he had expected. When Price called in the bomb, he inadvertently used that stored location, directing the bomb to a coordinate only a few feet ahead of his position. Had he double-checked the target coordinates on the military GPS with his personal GPS, he would have caught the error.
A warning report was ultimately issued throughout the military on January 16, 2003, that stated the equipment Price was using created a “fratricide risk”: “There is a potential of fratricide when using the PLGR II or the V-PLGR with a Viper/Vector LRF while in ‘Hasty’ or ‘Deliber ate’ LRF mode.” Also, “As a result, munitions may be called on an Operator’s position when using the [equipment] set to ‘Hasty’ LRF mode.”
2. By mid-September 2009, the votes had been cast in Afghanistan’s second democratic presidential election, and the Afghan Independent Election Commission determined that Karzai had achieved the necessary votes to defeat his closest contender, Dr. Abdullah, and would remain president for a second term. His victory, however, was tainted by allegations of electoral fraud and ballot stuffing. A subsequent investigation reduced his total votes from 54 percent to 49.7 percent, .3 percent short of the votes required to avoid a runoff. A runoff election was scheduled for November 7, 2009, between Karzai and Abdullah, the Northern Alliance leader who had first endorsed Karzai’s interim leadership in November of 2001, two days following the battle of Tarin Kowt. On October 25, 2009, correspondent Fareed Zakaria interviewed Karzai on CNN, asking the incumbent president whether or not he had been pressured into accepting the runoff. Karzai responded that to not accept the runoff was to “insult democracy” based upon the evidence of vote rigging. He added that it was required “For peace, for stability, for the future of democracy in Afghanistan, and for the future of institutional order in Afghanistan.”
On Sunday, November 1, just a few days before this book went to press, Abdullah dropped out of the race, and the following day the Independent Election Commision proclaimed Karzai the victor. He will lead Afghanistan for a second five-year term as president.
About the Author
ERIC BLEHM is the author of The Last Season, which won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for best nonfiction book of 2006 and was a Book Sense bestseller; Outside magazine called it one of the “top ten adventure biographies ever written.” He lives in Southern California.
www.onlythingworthdyingfor.com
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Also by Eric Blehm
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Credits
Jacket photograph from ODA 574 Archives
Copyright
THE ONLY THING WORTH DYING FOR. Copyright © 2010 by Eric Blehm. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* A long, loose shirt with pajama-like trousers.
* The official name for the joint U.S., U.K., and Afghan military action that began in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, as part of the Global War on Terror.
* The post–Soviet occupation civil war lasted from 1989 to 1992.
* A lightweight assault rifle with a telescoping stock.
* NOD, night observation device, or NVD, night vision device; commonly referred to as night vision goggles.
* A laser pointer built into a gun’s target sighting system. It is invisible to the naked eye, so only those using NODs can see the beam or the “dot” that the beam casts on its target.
* The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began in 1979. Over the next decade of Soviet occupation, some 15,000 Soviet troops were killed, over 1 million Afghans were killed, and another 5 million Afghans fled to Iran and Pakistan. In 1989, the Soviets withdrew. The war in Afghanistan is often considered the Soviet equivalent of the United States’ Vietnam War.
* Fort Campbell is located on the Kentucky-Tennessee state line.
* United States Special Operations Command Central is responsible for planning special operations throughout the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, which includes, but is not limited to, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa.
* “Unconventional warfare, or UW, is a broad spectrum of military and paramilitary operations, predominantly conducted through, with, or by indigenous or surrogate forces organized, trained, equipped, supported, and directed in varying degrees by an external source. UW includes, but is not limited to, guerrilla warfare, subversion, sabotage, intelligence activities, and unconventional assisted recovery (UAR).” See Field Manual 3-05.20, Special Forces Operations, June 2001.
* In 2001, United States Central Command was responsible for planning and executing all U.S. military operations in the central area of the globe, located between the areas of the European and Pacific Commands. This included the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa.
* On April 8, 1962, Specialist 5 James P. Gabriel was shot in the chest during a Vietcong attack upon his four-man advisory team and a group of Civilian Irregular Defense Group trainees near Danang, Vietnam. Critically wounded, the twenty-four-year-old Green Beret continued to defend their position and radio for reinforcements until his position was overrun. He was captured, then fatally shot, before reinforcements arrived. His sacrifice is considered the ultimate testament to the dedication of Special Forces soldiers.
** In the U.S. Army, commissioned officers wear the rank of second lieutenant or above. NCOs, always junior to commissioned officers, are enlisted soldiers who have earned the rank of corporal through sergeant major. They have managerial responsibility over enlisted soldiers, and usually act as advisers to seasoned officers and informal mentors to inexperienced officers. Special Forces is unique in that there are no junior enlisted men such as privates on the ODAs. All members of an A-team are senior.
* Proposed Courses of Action: 1) Start in the south. Advantages: Pashtun majority, can’t win the country or the war without winning in the south. Disadvantages: Extremely risky, no allies/rebels in the south, Taliban stronghold. 2) Start in the north. Advantages: The Northern Alliance is already fighting the Taliban, best chance for killing terrorists. Disadvantages: Politically risky, Northern Alliance is minority tribes, potential for civil war if it takes power. 3) Simultaneously begin operations in north and south. Advantages: Prosecute war as quickly as possible on multiple fronts. Disadvantages: Very risky in the south. 4) Never put U.S. boots on the ground; train and equip guerrillas in an adjacent country and provide air support to them. Advantages: Lowest risk. Disadvantages: Would take a long time, operations could not be directly overseen, lowest chance for success.