by Sandra Lee
The joker to Jock’s left, a man wearing civvies whom he suspected was an American special operator, had no problems with the vertiginous tacks and turns of the flight or the cold and cramped conditions in which they travelled. In fact, as soon as the chopper was in the air and thwack-thwack-thwacking its way south over the Afghanistan countryside, he rested his head on Jock’s shoulder and fell asleep. Like a fuckin’ baby, Jock thought.
It gave Jock a fair fit of the shits and, as the flight screamed along, he got more and more pissed off as the bloke got more and more comfortable. After a while, Jock delivered a solid wake-up call to the sleeping stranger’s ribs. Oomph.
‘Sit up straight. Stop leaning on me,’ Jock growled.
‘Awww, come on bud.’
‘You’re not my fuckin’ girlfriend.’
‘The guy looked like a little puppy that had his nose rubbed in a puddle of piss,’ Jock says now.
Screw him, he thought, I’m going to war, I don’t want one leg not working because it’s got pins and needles.
Everyone was uncomfortable and this wanker was making it more uncomfortable.
Jock had nothing to confirm that the bloke was a special operator other than that the sleeping stranger, who was travelling with another man, was not wearing the US Army’s full field uniform, which included a flak jacket plus high-tech GORE-TEX and polypro gear for warmth. Clint had been talking to the strangers earlier at the FUP and had told Jock that they had discussed their E&E (escape and evasion) plan with him.
‘If it all goes to shit at LZ 13, they bloody well intend using it,’ Clint had said.
‘That’s a good idea, Clint,’ Jock had replied, ‘but you want to know where you’re going in these parts.’
‘An E&E plan is a double-edged weapon,’ Jock explains now. ‘You can walk five metres in exactly the right direction towards the nearest friendly forces and still hit a mine, because although it’s the right bearing, it might not be the right route. Or you may just wander into a dodgy warlord’s land and get picked up and compromised.
‘Having an escape plan was a good option but trying to get out of that joint by yourselves was pretty risky.’
The Chinooks made good speed, travelling south from Bagram at about 110 knots — 200 kilometres per hour — as the first halo of light started to break through the pitch black of night. Gunners wearing night-vision goggles manned the open right and left doors of the helos as well as the lowered rear ramp. Some blokes tried to steal a few minutes of sleep here and there, but whenever their necks slackened and their heads nodded, they jerked awake. Sergeant Peterson nearly jumped out of his skin when the Chinook gunner test-fired his weapon out the tail end of the chopper. His young soldiers cracked up.
A few more sanguine and seasoned troopers treated the flight as a sightseeing trip and had their faces glued to the windows, taking in the scenery as the chopper tacked sharply and pitched down closer to the rugged terrain of the mountains. As they flew the stomach-churning route banking fiercely every few seconds, Jock noted the fragmented beauty of the country.
One second he could see rocky mountain faces so close he could almost touch them. The next second he saw snow-covered peaks towering above the helo as it banked fiercely in the other direction. The scene changed from sky to cliff to valley floor like a slide show. When the Chinook lurched in a sharp turn, he could spot an occasional village nestled into the valley at the foot of a huge mountain. Here and there he snatched a glance at Chalks Two or Three as they peeled off and plummeted down, contouring the mountains to metres above the valley floor, conducting evasive zigzag manoeuvres as they went. Jock also caught sight of the two Apache AH-64s that had taken off five minutes before the Chinooks and were escorting them in.
The helo was blacked out for security purposes and the only light came from dull red globes mounted on the walls and emitted a red-hued spectral fog. Jock was wearing army-issue earplugs to block out the deafening roar of the 714 engines and it was impossible to talk with, let alone hear, Clint or his American colleagues. Not that he needed an in-flight chat to work out what most of the young blokes around him were thinking. He only needed to look at their faces to recognise fear of the unknown ahead. Jock was more experienced than the young blokes and had been in a few dangerous places before this one. He knew those looks. He’d had those looks himself.
‘You can see it in their face, they’re scared and they don’t want to be there. But they’re not acting scared or that they don’t want to be there,’ says Jock now.
‘But by and large, it wasn’t the overwhelming thing you noticed. Everyone was confident and everyone was really willing and everyone knew what was coming — as in, we were going into battle.’
The two flights of three Chinooks ferrying Charlie Company’s 120-odd men and the 100-plus from the 101st Airborne had left Bagram, altitude 1770 metres, and were flying into potentially hot LZs at no less than 2600 metres. It was the highest altitude battle ever fought by American soldiers. They had been drilled that altitude is your enemy almost as much as al Qaeda is. One American officer had been advised to expect, realistically, an altitude attrition rate of up to 40 per cent. It was one of the last things the troops heard at the form-up point — that and their NCO yelling at them to stay alive.
The SAS soldiers weren’t worried; they were well prepared, having undertaken extreme training in the mountain ranges of Australia, New Zealand, Europe and even the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. As Jock peered out the window, he had one overriding thought: Let’s get into it.
It was around 5am on D-Day — 2 March 2002 — and Major General Franklin Hagenbeck had been in the Tactical Operations Center for hours, getting ready for the bombing raid before H-Hour. This was going to be a baptism by fire for his infantrymen; the first time conventional forces had been used in Afghanistan. The Special Forces had invited them to the party and Hagenbeck had command. He wanted to be there for every minute of what he had sent his troops to do, and in the era of high-tech modern warfare he could watch it play out in real time.
Two unmanned Predator drones were in place over the valley, being flown by remote control by US Air Force pilots sitting in a top-secret compound at the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Armed with state-of-the-art satellite technology, the drones beamed live video footage of the action back to two screens at the front of the Tactical Operations Center.
The TOC was attached to an austere bombed-out hangar that the Soviets had used during their ten-year invasion of Afghanistan two decades earlier. That military effort was an abject failure during which the Soviets lost 15 000 troops. One of the worst days saw the mujahideen kill 250 soldiers — 200 of whom were rumoured to have been stoned to death after being captured. The Soviets also sustained 55 000 casualties. After the Soviet Union’s ignominious defeat, it retreated from Afghanistan, leaving Bagram littered with disused and unexploded mines and ordnance.
Hundreds of destroyed Russian aircraft shot down by the mujahideen’s CIA-donated weapons, including the lethal American-made surface-to-air Stinger missiles, lay wrecked alongside the useless shells of Afghan MIG fighter jets that had met a similar fate. The roof of the main hangar had been blown off, and walls were almost non-existent.
After the Special Forces soldiers removed the Taliban from Bagram in December, Army engineers began transforming the aircraft graveyard-cum-minefield into a tent city to house several thousand troops from dozens of countries that formed the coalition in the War on Terror. They built paths known as duckboards for soldiers to safely circumnavigate the base without stepping on the explosives. Huge wooden signs stuck in the mud warned the troops of the dire and potentially fatal consequences of any diversion. Dire is an understatement.
When Major General Hagenbeck moved in, he found an unexploded bomb protruding from the hangar wall. Stunned, he called in the ordnance and explosives unit who detonated it without a hitch.
‘Everywhere around the place, if you stepped off the concrete you risked getting hi
t. In fact, in the first 30 days we were there, eleven people either were killed or lost a limb stepping off the concrete, that’s how many bombs there were,’ Hagenbeck says now, reflecting on the conditions into which he had moved his control-and-command element. Some of the ‘streets’ on the base were subsequently named after the dead troops.
‘The Soviets had just saturated the countryside in their ten years with mines and bombs, and so there was a lot of unexploded ordnance, not just mines.’
The TOC had been set up to accommodate the various forces that were involved in Operation Enduring Freedom. A curved wooden table was built on a raised platform in the centre of the tent. It was long enough to seat at least a couple of dozen officers. The TOC was crowded with officers, intelligence operatives, communications experts and soldiers. As the overall commander of Operation Anaconda, Hagenbeck was allocated prime position bang at the centre of the table, with top-ranking officers from other units and coalition forces fanning out to his left and right. Sunken boxes were attached to the desk to hold telephones with lines to the field, other unit commands and back to General Tommy Franks, who was running the entire show from US Central Command in Tampa, Florida — 11000 kilometres and ten time zones away.
Information was coming in from all over the valley and other areas of operations in that part of Afghanistan. Directly in front of Hagenbeck at the front of the tent stood a one-and-a-half-metre-wide video screen displaying an image of the battle map. To the left were screens for the live Predator feed and a log of action coming in live from the field via the communications networks. A whiteboard with maps was elsewhere with the words: ‘Who else needs to know?’
It was well before dawn on the blistering cold Saturday morning and the atmosphere in the TOC was tense, the anticipation palpable. There was a real sense of expectation and a quiet acknowledgement that this day was to be historic in one sense or another. A US Army chaplain was on hand to lead the officers in prayer when Anaconda began. Hagenbeck knew what every general going into battle knows: the plan is only good until the first shot is fired.
‘Let me tell you who these terrorists were, because I think it’s important,’ Hagenbeck says now, sitting in his office in the east wing of the Pentagon which was rebuilt after the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into it on September 11.
‘You’ve seen all the little film clips on TV about the terrorist camps that Osama bin Laden ran,’ Hagenbeck says, his voice sinking an octave. ‘These were the guys that ran the camps. These were the Chechens, the Uzbeks, the Mongol-Chinese, some Pakistanis.
‘These were, by and large, veterans that would, in our Army, be captains or majors or sergeant majors that run our training bases back in Australia, back in the United States. And so the purpose was not just to kill them because they are al Qaeda, but to kill them because they’re the ones that were producing all of these terrorists in those years in Afghanistan.’
Major General Hagenbeck meant business.
His predecessor by two, Lieutenant General Timothy Maude, was at his desk inside the famous Department of Defense headquarters when the Boeing 757 exploded through the walls, killing him instantly. It was less than twenty metres down the hall from where Hagenbeck and I are talking. A memorial to those killed at the Pentagon adorns the wall in the corridor leading to Hagenbeck’s office. Maude, a three-star general, was the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel and had been Hagenbeck’s golfing buddy and close personal friend. General Maude was 53 when he was killed, and his death made this war very personal for Major General Hagenbeck.
Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Tink, the commander of the Australian forces in Afghanistan, arrived in the TOC before 5.30am and took a seat to the right of Hagenbeck. Tink had been dragged out of bed a couple of hours earlier by a liaison officer to discuss the positions of Australian SAS patrols doing long-range surveillance and reconnaissance in the Shahi Kot Valley. Tink was concerned about the potential for conflict on the ground with other US Special Forces operators and wanted to ensure that his SAS troopers, who had been in the valley for a while, were in no danger of being accidentally fired upon by members of the US Special Forces teams as they were resupplied or withdrew through the Australian lines.
The SAS and the US SF would not know the whereabouts of their counterparts for security reasons. The last thing Tink wanted was a friendly-fire fatality (or fratricide) before the real fight began and he’d already discussed his safety measures, via phone, with Brigadier Duncan Lewis, the commander of Special Operations who was in Australia, and the national component commander in Kuwait.
The staff in the TOC had their attention drawn to the Predator screen and electronic C2 — command-and-control — display. They had already seen surreal images of an attack by a US Navy SEAL patrol, call sign Mako Three One. (The number 31 is pronounced Three One in accordance with standard radio protocol, as are all numbers in call signs.)
The only men over whom Hagenbeck did not have direct command were the Special Forces soldiers from the US Tier One Delta Forces, and SEAL Team 6. The US had various known Special Forces operating in Afghanistan but it also had ‘black operations’ Special Forces outfits — those whom the Pentagon does not formally acknowledge — including one known as Task Force 11. Task Force 11 was a Tier One group and worked closely with strategic assets. Its main operation — to hunt down and capture or kill Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda command — had top priority. Named in memory of September 11, the burly and usually bearded blokes in the task force worked in utmost secrecy and were commanded from Florida. They had their own mission. As Robin Moore says in his book, The Hunt for bin Laden, Task Force 11 ‘would concentrate on POW snatches, grabbing suspected and known terrorists and taking them into custody, kidnapping AQ leaders and killing individual terrorist threats’.
Around 4am the five-man American SEAL team had snuck up on an al Qaeda crew and its Soviet DShK anti-aircraft gun that had been strategically placed on a rocky slope overlooking one of the landing zones designated for the incoming infantrymen of the 10th Mountain. The enemy position on a small mountain feature could have wiped out the entire battalion, including Jock and Clint.
Mako Three One’s snipers approached and opened fire, killing two AQ fighters and wounding another. Two others escaped, but the patrol radioed the coordinates of their kill to an AC-130 Spectre gunship flying above, as per Hagenbeck’s OpOrd.
The Spectre’s call sign was portentous — Grim Three One. It responded ferociously, unleashing a barrage of lethal fire into the position while tracking the two escaping AQ and opening fire. It was a good kill.
Shortly after, Grim Three One received the co-ords from a second SF patrol in the valley for another confirmed enemy observation point on the Whale. It circled over the valley and flew into action again, blasting the target and enemy combatants into oblivion. Strike two successful.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘We weren’t expecting to make a major contact although we were ready to make a major contact if need be.
are all fighters.’
SERGEANT MAJOR FRANK GRIPPE, THE TOP NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICER OF 1ST BATTALION, 87TH INFANTRY REGIMENT, 10TH MOUNTAIN DIVISION
AT 0100 ZULU TIME — 5.30am in the valley — General Zia’s Hammer stopped west of the Whale. It hadn’t been easy going, and the formation was spread out over several kilometres. The Zermat road was a joke; parts had been turned into impassable muddy bogs by rain and melting snow. The jinga trucks loaded with the Afghan Force broke down, or couldn’t traverse the terrain. Some tipped over, injuring soldiers. The AF, knowing the countryside and the enemy as they did, believed it would get worse.
A mini-convoy of about 50 US soldiers and 40 Afghan fighters, whom the Americans dubbed ‘jundees’, had already broken off from the main column to secure another position a couple of kilometres north of the Whale. About 30 were on foot as they closed on their location. The SF guys, riding in Toyota pickup trucks, were decked out with all the high-tech equipment needed to se
e at night. All of a sudden, boom. A hail of mortars and machine-gun fire rained down on them.
They were under attack, but from where? They suspected AQ had seen them coming from positions hidden along the ridgeline of the mountains overlooking the valley floors. Shrapnel exploded all around, hitting coalition targets and inflicting a string of casualties among Zia’s men and the hard men from Task Force Dagger. It was chaos; pure destruction.
Back in the TOC at Bagram, the fight was being monitored over the radio and screens for the Predator vision, as well as being fed back to US Central Command in Florida.
‘Attention in the TOC,’ a voice boomed, silencing the continuous hum of talk.
The stern announcement indicated a call for fire was about to be declared. Grid coordinates for the target were yelled out to ensure that the coalition forces in the valley were not in the kill zone. It was standard operating procedure.
This time the coordinates were for a target locked on by the crew of Grim Three One, the same AC-130 gunship that had laid waste to the two al Qaeda positions earlier that morning.
A Special Forces patrol had radioed the crew of the AC-130 and asked it to fly over one site of potential ambush around the Whale — to check for enemy positions. The Spectre’s crew replied that they saw several trucks and personnel on foot and relayed the information to Special Forces on the ground, asking them to check their locations. All reported no friendlies at the location co-ords cited by Grim Three One. Somehow, though, Grim Three One’s coordinates did not match its location, but the crew were unaware of the error. The gunship was actually over the mini-convoy that included the Cobra Seven Two team and General Zia’s AF, not over the location of the coordinates it read out.