18 Hours

by Sandra Lee

  Grim Three One opened up the 105mm howitzer, relentlessly strafing the target with deadly ammunition. Cobra Seven Two soon suspected that the precise targeting of the ammo could only be friendlies, not mortars or machine-gun fire from enemy al Qaeda.

  As shells began blasting the earth around the mini-convoy, a male voice came over the radio yelling they were taking incoming.

  The voice belonged to Warrant Officer Class Two Stanley Harriman, a 34-year-old Green Beret and second-in-command of Cobra Seven Two.

  They were being pasted bad. The convoy raced to evade the shells spewing razor-sharp shrapnel in every direction upon impact. A piece of torn metal cut through the door of Harriman’s truck and ripped through his back. Two other SF soldiers were seriously wounded. Harriman and the wounded were medevaced out minutes later after an incoming Chinook had delivered the Rakkasans from the 101st Airborne in the northern end of the valley on the eastern side of the Whale. Despite the best efforts of the American medics and the chopper pilots who got the wounded SF man back to Bagram, Harriman died. According to Robin Moore in The Hunt for bin Laden, the father of two was the first Green Beret warrant officer ever to be killed in action, and the first fatality of Operation Anaconda.

  General Zia lost three of his men, and twenty more sustained injuries.

  Anaconda had begun. Badly.

  Back in the Tactical Operations Center, the Australian SAS’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Tink, listened as it was reported that Dagger had taken fourteen casualties.

  ‘Confirming Texas or Cobra,’ Tink wrote in his war diary, referring to two of the US Special Forces patrols in the valley.

  It was Cobra Seven Two.

  Out in the valley, Zia’s main column heard the attack and deployed a quick-reaction force to their stricken comrades. Meanwhile, they halted progress, as planned, to wait out the scheduled bombing raid before troops were inserted into the remaining LZs in the valley.

  While stopped, parts of the convoy came under heavy attack from al Qaeda terrorists on the Whale. Eventually, with the growing chaos, casualties and destroyed trucks, the Afghan Forces would make the decision to withdraw.

  Zia’s decision to withdraw would ultimately result in a crossfire of accusations between US and Afghan forces about who had let whom down. The arguments would also consume some Special Forces soldiers who had spent time training the Afghan soldiers — each of whom was paid US$200 per month — and who defended Zia’s men, and the US conventional soldiers who believed that relying on the Afghan Forces was a serious mistake.

  ‘We got our arses mortared off,’ the SAS liaison officer recalled after the battle. Before Zia’s force pulled back, SAS observers with the convoy discovered more AQ positions on the Whale, something Brigadier Lewis later confirmed at a press conference in Australia.

  ‘Just prior to that [air assault going in], literally just before the sun came up — these guys [the Afghan militia] got fired upon,’ Hagenbeck says now. ‘Two things happened. They were fired upon by the al Qaeda with mortars and D30 howitzers, but unfortunately — and we suspected shortly after it happened and we later confirmed it — there was a fratricide [in] which an AC-130 inadvertently opened up and killed some Afghan militia and killed one Special Forces guy.

  ‘We had to shift our main attack to the air assault elements because they [Hammer] had to withdraw and they did not get back into the fight for three days or so. And it was understandable. It would have happened to any military force.

  ‘While this was going on, some special operators in the hills killed some al Qaeda that were in the hills; they had heavy machine guns lined up and also some mortar positions,’ Hagenbeck said, referring to the Mako Three One incident. ‘So they were instrumental in making sure the air assault got in … So that’s the opening salvo. That is the way it all began.’

  It was now around 6.15am.

  The first air strikes of the pre-H-Hour bombing raid screamed through the darkened skies in the east and west of the valley. A fast-moving F-15E dropped a massive thermobaric bomb on an intricate cave system used by al Qaeda. The so-called fuel-air munition hadn’t been used before in Afghanistan. The massive explosion should be efficient and deadly, sucking the oxygen out of the cave system and incinerating anyone in its way. The thermobaric was chased by a barrage of joint direct attack munition bombs — or JDAMs — which exploded along the back of the Whale, supposedly destroying enemy positions with withering accuracy.

  Some of the pre-planned targets were perilously close to the US Special Operations forces that had infiltrated the mountain. Months after Anaconda had ended, an Air Force report revealed part of what happened next. ‘As bombs started to fall, teams on the ground were uninformed of the pre-planned fires and believed they were being fired on by friendlies, which resulted in them broadcasting a “knock it off” request part way through the strike.’

  Friendly aircrews heeded the call and did indeed knock it off.

  In a much discussed and controversial interview about six months after the operation, Major General Hagenbeck told Field Artillery magazine why the pre-H-Hour bombing raid was so limited.

  ‘We knew the enemy’s “centre of gravity” was inside the caves where his soldiers and logistics were. But we did not know how much C2 he had inside that valley. I did not want to attack dozens and dozens of cave complexes arbitrarily without having some sense of what was in them.’

  So that was it. The anticipated 55-minute bombing raid that would have obliterated thirteen enemy targets hardly eventuated.

  Jock Wallace and most of his fellow baby-faced fighters on the incoming airlifts were oblivious to the catastrophe unfolding on the ground below them. For all Jock knew, everything would be in place when the chalks landed. They’d had their briefings and everyone had a job to do and knew how to do it.

  Lieutenant Colonel Paul LaCamera had been wearing cans — earphones — and was getting some sense of the chaos on the ground below. He informed his number two, the indefatigable Sergeant Major Frank Grippe, the big bloke whom Jock had got to know over the previous five days down at the 10th Mountain headquarters at Bagram.

  ‘We weren’t expecting to make a major contact although we were ready to make a major contact if need be. We are all fighters,’ Grippe says, sitting in his office at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

  ‘There was definitely a sense of urgency, definitely a sense of adventure. About 45 minutes out from landing we got the word. I was sitting next to LaCamera and he had the headphones on and we were getting the word that the Special Forces and the Afghan Forces were taking heavy mortar and heavy machine-gun fire and I thought, “Well this ought to be interesting. We will definitely be making some contact.”

  ‘But again, we didn’t know if it was just an anomaly — a small strongpoint or just a cell of al Qaeda and Taliban forces. I knew the Special Forces had lost a soldier, there was a report on that, but I can’t recall if it was killed in action or wounded. We said there was some contact made, as simple as that. Bottom line, up front, you are going to go flying into this valley and land, either way.’

  Charlie Company was minutes out from landing and everyone was switched on, even the previously sleeping bloke beside Jock. Jock was getting revved up. This was the adventure he’d been waiting for since November. One of his best mates in the SAS, Johnny, was already out in the Shahi Kot. Jock was a signalman, a comms expert, and he knew the Aussie blokes had been taking numbers in the mountains. The SAS patrols had done sterling work and located enemy positions. Jock wanted to join the fight, just like Johnny.

  The Chinooks were flying low and fast. The doors were open, the back cargo ramp was down, and an icy wind ripped through the helo. A US soldier standing at the back of the aircraft held up two hands with his fingers splayed and shouted: ‘Ten minutes, wheels down.’ The hand signals were SOP, standard operating procedure, in the US and Australian military.

  Ten minutes to showtime, Jock thought.

  He was pumped; his heart was p
ounding. He did a mental checklist and reassured himself that he was good to go. And he was. No pins and needles in his legs; gear ready and in working order; radio and satellite equipment well juiced; weapon in action condition, locked and loaded. Jock looked at Clint and gave him a smile and a wink that would have been equally at home on a fifteen-year-old boy about to pop his cherry.

  The bombing raid should have ripped the guts out of the al Qaeda and Taliban positions by now, Jock was thinking.

  In the Tactical Operations Center at Bagram, Jock’s boss, Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Tink, had his eyes on the Predator footage on the big screen.

  Tink turned to his diary and noted the time as 0158 zulu time. ‘Commander realised the bomber did not hit the AQ caves,’ he wrote. The intention was to wipe out all the known al Qaeda caves in the valley with the aerial bombing. But the aerial bombing had not gone entirely to plan.

  Two minutes later, at 6.30am, the helos in the first flight carrying the men from the 2–187 from the 101st Airborne touched down in the north of the valley. Then came Jock’s Chinook at BP Ginger further south.

  ‘Wheels down,’ Tink noted.

  It was 6.38am in the valley.

  Chalks One and Two touched down 400 metres apart and about one click south of Marzak, heading for blocking points Ginger and Heather, the two southernmost points on the eastern side of the valley. Chalk Three landed two clicks north. The Rakkasans were further north again. The twin rotors of the massive beasts sent a blinding blast of dirt, dust and gravel into the air.

  ‘Go,’ Charlie Company’s sergeants bellowed as their men deplaned and took their first steps in the Place of the King, trying to suck what little oxygen there was in the high-altitude air into their pounding chests.

  Peterson’s mortar platoon were running as fast as they could, considering they were hauling their mortar tube and dragging their SKEDCOs, each stacked with fifteen to twenty rounds of ammo and weighing what felt like a tonne — roughly 275 kilograms each — trying to get out of the way of the following troops.

  Jock bolted off, holding his M4 fully automatic carbine diagonally across his chest with his right hand while automatically tapping his belt to triple-check that his Browning 9mm pistol had not been dislodged on the flight and was still on his belt. He felt the weight of the 60-kilogram backpack and, as soon as he was out from under the tail of the Chinook, he looked up and saw the snowcapped mountains around him — the eastern ridges of Takur Ghar and the deep crevices of the rat lines that ran to Pakistan. To the northwest was that monstrosity known as the Whale, a huge piece of rock rising hundreds of metres high, cutting the valley in half, north to south, and home to a hidden enemy. Closer west was a smaller mountain feature dubbed the Finger, where Mako Three One had earlier wiped out an al Qaeda terrorist position and set up its own observation point overlooking the valley.

  Fuckin’ awesome, Jock thought. Could’ve been a ski field if the Russians and Taliban hadn’t screwed with the country and riddled it with landmines.

  Clint was right behind him, breathing down his neck. Next came the thunderous footsteps of Sergeant Major Grippe, followed by Lieutenant Colonel LaCamera. Clint and Grippe would stay close. They had to — Clint was the liaison officer for his fellow SAS troopers on patrol in the surrounding rugged terrain.

  Within two minutes, the empty Chinooks lifted off and were hurtling down the valley, growing smaller in the distance. Jock now noticed something wrong. He had been expecting an overwhelming odour of cordite to be hanging in the air from the ballyhooed bombing raid. But there was nothing.

  Jesus Christ, he thought.

  ‘There was absolutely no evidence that there were any bombs dropped in our vicinity as we had been led to believe in the briefings — that they were going to smash that place, both ridges, before we came in,’ Jock says now. ‘And if they were talking about the eastern ridge, then it had surely settled down pretty quickly and had blown all the cordite to the other side of the valley. Which is crap. It seemed like there were no B-52s that bombed anything. If a B-52 drops its guts, you know about it for a long time later.

  ‘Basically we were told there was going to be a helluva lot of ordnance dropped before we got there, that they were going to lay it on thick on the ridgelines — the Americans were going to intensively bomb this area prior to us alighting from the helicopters and prior to the helicopters even arriving, so it’d end just before our arrival. And we’d get out and into position with the enemy still having his ears ringing et cetera.

  ‘When I got off, that’s the first thing that I noticed: there was no smoke, no indication of battle damage or recent bombing. We are in this pristine, beautiful, snowcapped and ringed valley with patches of snow on the ground. The air was just mountain winter air — cold, crisp. You could hear a chicken crowing from miles away.

  ‘That sort of put me a little bit on guard in my mind, in that I knew basically once again no matter who is calling the shots it comes down to you. You just switch into another mode — “Okay, you blokes are unreliable, I can’t rely on what you’re saying and I have to do it myself.”’

  An eerie silence settled on the LZ. Jock started to hump his gear north, creating a formation with Clint, Grippe and Grippe’s right-hand man and operations officer, Robert Healy, aka ‘Ops’. Standard drill. Heading for the blocking point called Ginger, under the majestic Takur Ghar.

  Jock thanked the early morning light that had cast long shadows on the valley floor, helping him get his bearings — vital for him setting up his communications network and radio antennae. The sun had been up for sixteen minutes but had done nothing to alleviate the sting of the sub-zero temperatures. He breathed the thin air and exhaled, instantly creating white clouds as his hot breath condensed on contact with the cold.

  The formation moved forward, crunching the snow-patched rocks and dirt underfoot. Jock scanned the ridgelines looking for enemy. The men from the 1st and 2nd Platoons of 1-87 had fallen in and were on the move.

  Where’s the fuckin’ cordite, Jock thought to himself, badly wanting to smell the acrid aftermath of the bombing raid, a telltale sign that Anaconda was on track.

  He didn’t have long to think about it.

  Within minutes, Jock’s world exploded. Cordite was the last thing on his mind.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The RPG hit the ground about five metres away from Jock and he could hear it sizzling through the snow as it closed in on him. Closer, closer, sizzle, hiss.

  MAJOR GENERAL FRANKLIN HAGENBECK’S battle-plan aphorism did not disappoint. No plan survives the first round, and the first round in the Shahi Kot Valley was about to be fired at the adamantine men from the Special Forces Mako Three One patrol. The five-man team had earlier obliterated the al Qaeda position on the Finger and now occupied the destroyed enemies’ vantage point with its uninterrupted line of sight down the valley. It was a perfect sniper hide and the men watched as the CH-47 Chinooks emptied the soldiers of the 10th Mountain at LZ 13 and LZ 13a.

  As soon as the formation began to move on the valley floor, the special operators emerged from the cover of the rocks and displayed a bright orange VS–17 fluorescent marker panel to signify their presence and identify themselves as coalition soldiers. It was standard operating procedure. If they were hoping for a friendly reaction, they were wrong.

  A handful of men in the lead section from the 10th on the valley floor instantly went to the ground, took up positions and opened fire on them with their M4s and squad automatic weapons.

  Clint and Jock followed the tracer fire and found the target: a small team of men wearing what looked like traditional Afghan gear. They were about 500 metres away, up the hill, and could have been al Qaeda or Taliban fighters.

  Human intelligence from local warlords and militiamen as well as from the surveillance and reconnaissance patrols in the mountains estimated the enemy numbers in the valley at up to 250, concentrated mostly around the small northernmost village of Sherkhankhel and around Marzak, which was f
urther south. AQ terrorists and Taliban loyalists had been on the run since the systematic fall of the country’s major cities, beginning with Mazar-e Sharif in early November, followed in quick succession by Herat, Kabul, Jalalabad and, by early December, Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban.

  Many sought sanctuary in the villages in the valley or took up residence in the intricate cave system tunnelled deep into the mountains, which had been used for thousands of years. In preparation for a fight to the death, al Qaeda and Taliban loyalists gave food or small amounts of cash to 700 or so locals, particularly women and children, to get them to leave the villages. They also gave them sheep as an inducement to depart so they could take over their modest homes.

  ‘They told us that we should go and they would stay,’ one villager told a reporter from The New York Times in early March. ‘They told us that Shahi Kot will be bombed by the Americans and if we stayed, we would probably be killed and they would not be responsible for our deaths.’

  Terrorists later distributed to the villagers pamphlets known as shabnama, or night letters, promising them a reward of US$50 000 if they captured or killed a Western soldier, aid worker or journalist.

  Conspicuous strangers get shot in these parts and covert operators did what they could to melt unobtrusively into the local scenery.

  When Jock and Clint looked to where the American troops were pounding the ridgeline, something didn’t add up. The two quick-thinking Aussies instantly recognised the VS–17 marker for what it was and realised that the heavily bearded and scruffy blokes wearing the brown wool pakhul hats, lungee (turbans) and local woollen coats weren’t the enemy at all. They were US Special Forces men.

  After weeks out in the field with no access to the modern comforts of hot running water, a bar of soap and a razor blade, they easily passed as mountain tribesmen. Jock didn’t think you’d have to be a rocket scientist to work it out, nor should it take more than a second to do so, but the soldiers in Frank Grippe’s company had been drilled that men on a battlefield were either shooters or targets.