18 Hours

by Sandra Lee

  The signature sound of machine-gun fire burst through the air and tracers streaked across the morning sky, bouncing around the men on the ridge, as bullets splintered rocks, kicking up dirt and debris. The men dropped their marker and began diving for cover. Clint and Jock’s instincts kicked in and they charged towards the fire team lying in the prone position, flat on their guts, 50 metres away. The team were squeezing the triggers on their Minimis and M240G 7.62mm machine guns. To some of the young soldiers, the M240 was reminiscent of the M60 used by Sylvester Stallone playing Rambo, jumping out of the river with a big bandolier crossed over his chest and a menacing look on his face.

  ‘Cease fire!’ Jock roared as he ran, his pack slamming into his back with each step, his breathing hindered by the altitude. ‘Cease fuckin’ fire.’

  Clint was with him, standing over the soldiers on the ground, knocking their elbows out with his foot.

  ‘Disengage,’ Clint yelled. ‘Disengage.’

  Jock recalls: ‘Our assessment of the situation — individually — was that they [the men on the ridge] were friendly. We arrived at that on our own and went straight into action. Obviously we have got packs on so aren’t sprinting, and Grippe’s boys got some good bursts off, but we stopped the firing. So that was exactly the sort of incident we were there to prevent. The Americans didn’t even deconflict their own fire, but that’s because their Special Force is so compartmentalised and secretive.

  ‘And that was a big stuff-up, because we were there as liaison officers to deconflict with any Australian SF patrols; but it didn’t appear that the Americans knew they had a patrol in that area. Their attempts for secrecy failed to allow the same mechanisms that we had in place for deconfliction. Those blokes nearly died as a result of it.’

  Jock got his radio up. His job was to ensure that no Australian SAS troops had been compromised or hit by fire. He tuned into the Australian frequencies. No one answered. Good, not our blokes he thought, knowing that they would only reply if they were in trouble.

  Jock dropped into another frequency, hoping to reach the US Special Forces patrols. Nothing. No reply. He wasn’t surprised — the Yanks and the Aussies used discrete nets and wouldn’t be sharing frequencies, and US Special Forces soldiers were notoriously secretive, for good reason. It was later confirmed the men being brassed up by the troops from the 10th Mountain were indeed from Mako Three One.

  ‘I was convinced they were friendly but I didn’t have any idea whose friendlies they were,’ Jock says now. ‘Anyway, the decision to kick the boys in the guts and make them stop shooting was the correct one. So we were on the money by stopping them — it just wasn’t Australian troops we were stopping them shooting.

  ‘Grippe came up and assisted us in getting them to disengage and was very much doing his best to command his troops and keep order in the situation. I don’t remember any of the other Americans attempting to stop it at all, even after we had started to stop it. Grippe came up and said, obviously, “What’s happened?” [In the end] he sorted his boys, who were all fired up. They just wanted to bust some caps off and that’s what they did.’

  The incident was over in two minutes and the Mako Three One patrol disappeared into the hills. Fortunately, no one was hurt

  Fuck me, Jock thought wryly, that didn’t take long. We’ve only just ex-planed and we’ve already had a blue-on-blue. The boys are toey for a gunfight. Bring it on! Osama, I’ve got a present for you.

  Command Sergeant Major Frank Grippe had his men from the 10th Mountain rolling within minutes of the blue-on-blue contact, heading north through the valley.

  ‘For a New Yorker like myself, with a Ranger background, I was ready to go and get into another gunfight. That’s the way we do business,’ Grippe said.

  Jock was incredulous at the first contact. He knew instinctively it was blue-on-blue and it offended the professional soldier in him, but he figured that these young blokes were conventional forces, many of them on their first operation. He himself wouldn’t have done it, and there was no way on earth that Clint would have either. They were from an elite regiment, had a lifetime of experience over most of their fellow soldiers in the Shahi Kot that morning, and bloody well should be able to read the landscape. That’s what years of the toughest Special Forces training in the world had prepared them for.

  Jock was pumped. Clint and he had already potentially saved lives and the sun wasn’t even fully up yet.

  ‘It felt a bit like Christmas. It was just very exciting. I remember feeling fired up, like we were part of something significant, that we were doing something good and, obviously, very high risk,’ Jock recalls. ‘There was a lot of unknown.’

  He fell into formation with the huge NCO Frank Grippe at the front, flanked by Grippe’s Aussie SAS counterpart, Clint. Completing the formation was Sergeant Robert Healy, a former US Ranger instructor who hailed from Michigan and had joined Uncle Sam’s Army as a scrawny seventeen-year-old in 1985. Healy had three little kids at home in upstate New York, two boys aged nine and seven, and the apple of his eye, a little girl aged four.

  The rest of the company were spreading out across the LZ in a standard drill: some forward, with the Ruperts — a nickname for officers — in the guts, and more troops bringing up the rear. The valley had returned to silence, broken only by the sound of footsteps on the frosty ground.

  Grippe marched fearlessly forward, inspiring the same fearless attitude in his men.

  It was no wonder. By February of 2002, Grippe had notched up two decades in the US Army and loved every minute of it. He was Army through and through; lived it, breathed it. There was nothing he would rather do. Grippe had enlisted in the infantry as a nineteen-year-old in his home state of New York in 1981 and over the following twenty years had been a rifleman, a machine gunner, a reconnaissance squad leader, a Ranger, a paratrooper and an instructor. He had led teams, squadrons, units, platoons and battalions in training and into fights.

  In 1989, he had been involved in the daring operation that led to the ousting of Panamanian dictator General Manuel Noriega. Grippe, then a Ranger, made a night combat parachute assault onto the Rio Hato airfield and military complex in Panama in Operation Just Cause. He was then a staff sergeant, working one grade up as a platoon sergeant, and assigned to Charlie Company, 2nd Ranger Battalion. He and his men jumped out of a C-130 Hercules at 150 metres after a seven-hour ride from the US. Every one of the thirteen C-130s used in the operation received ground fire damage and sustained bullet holes from Noriega’s loyal troops.

  The mission in Just Cause had taken Grippe’s Ranger platoon just 55 hours to execute. The men had been paged at 7pm on Sunday and went into immediate lockdown on their base in Washington state on the northwest coast of the US, to prevent information leaks. They left home base the next day and arrived at Fort Benning in Georgia where they prepared for and rehearsed the mission, drawing ammo and rigging parachutes. At 1am on Wednesday, they parachuted into Panama and took the Rio Hato airfield which was being defended by Noriega’s Panamanian Defence Force. Noriega eventually surrendered and is now doing time in an American prison for drug trafficking. Mission accomplished.

  Grippe had also served with the Rangers in the United Nations-led Operation Uphold Democracy to restore democracy to Haiti in 1994.

  ‘We were called in to do a manhunt for a group of renegade Haitian military and police members who thought they were going to start their own insurgency,’ Grippe says now. ‘They started with threatening the US Special Forces operating in the area and then actually shooting and wounding a Special Forces soldier. We flew a Ranger force in and conducted direct-action operations to police up the renegades. We did just that and brought stability to the southern city of Les Cayes.’

  Grippe sure as hell had earned his stripes, working his way through the ranks and garnering respect as he climbed the ladder. He had completed every course possible for a non-commissioned officer.

  When decked out in full dress uniform, Grippe’s puffed-u
p chest was a riot of colour. He had been awarded the Bronze Star for Valor a few times over, the Purple Heart, the Army Good Conduct Medal, the Humanitarian Services Medal and the Army Achievement Medal, to mention just a few. His duty to country had taken him abroad and he was one of a few US troops to be able to wear — with pride — the French Armed Forces Commando Badge and the British and Royal Thai Armies’ Parachutists Badges.

  By any standards, Grippe was an accomplished soldier and, to Jock, a bloody top bloke.

  Right now Grippe had his eyes on the scene in front of him. Looking up he saw the rugged brown cliff faces and small crevices and hollows that time and weather had carved into the steep mountain. On the valley floor was a line of shallow hollows known as a wadi. Few things were robust enough to grow and survive at this altitude except a scattering of juniper shrubs and grass tussocks that could endure the brutal winter conditions and the vicious summers when the sun sucked the moisture out of the scorched soil. The towering snowcapped eastern ridgeline was in shadows with the sun coming up behind it and the details of the landscape merged together.

  Before leaving Bagram, Grippe had told his men that Operation Anaconda would be a ‘sergeant’s fight’. The terrain, he explained, would fragment the battalion into sections, and thus each sergeant would be forced to fight a different fight to his compatriot just metres away in a wadi or beside a rock outcrop offering protection from the enemy. No man’s war would be the same.

  The troops had moved about 100 metres from the LZ, pushing north, when bang, off in the east, all hell broke loose.

  Jock caught sight of a brilliant flash off the eastern ridge. Oh, that’s pretty, he thought. Then whoooomph! A black dot in the middle of a bright light was wwssshhhhing across the valley floor on a direct collision course with Jock in formation. Realisation struck him like a bolt of lightning — Jesus Christ, it’s a fuckin’ RPG corkscrewing straight towards me — and he bolted, running as fast as he could away from it toward what looked like a dry creek bed with a dirt wall rising up a couple of metres high at its closest point to Jock. Others charged after him.

  Stuck out in the open with no cover, a rocket-propelled grenade spelt danger. Al Qaeda terrorists had long used the Russian-made shoulder-fired RPG-7, a lethal and versatile weapon that fires a high explosive charge through the air rotating like a football at speeds of up to 294 metres per second. When it impacts, boom, it’s all over, red rover.

  Jock didn’t want his morning in the high mountain country to be over so soon, nor in such a nasty way, courtesy of al Qaeda. Bugger that, he thought. He sprinted, looking back over his shoulder to check if the RPG was on his tail. It was like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

  ‘Once I realised it was time to run, there was no slowing me down. It’s coming straight at me, leg it, look back. Nah, leg it, and look back a couple more times and it’s gaining on me, it’s gaining on me, it’s coming in,’ Jock says.

  Back at the TOC Major General Hagenbeck was watching the troop insertion via the Predator vision and keeping an eye on the eastern ridgeline.

  He had been holding his breath that there wouldn’t be Stinger missiles or RPGs that would knock the helicopters out when they landed or took off again. ‘I thought we were going to land — and it turned out to be accurate — by surprise. But they knew we were coming, we couldn’t keep a secret; nobody can keep a secret in a coalition outfit. We knew they knew,’ Hagenbeck says now.

  ‘The only thing that we could do was effect surprise by the time we came in, the direction we came in and where we went in, and that all worked. And that was some smart guys figuring out how to do that. I felt pretty comfortable that we were going to get the infantry soldiers on the ground. What I was concerned about early enough [was] were the helicopters going to get hit while they were dislodging the troops, when they were getting off, or when they took off?

  ‘Afghanistan, we knew, had gotten thousands of Stinger missiles and it turned out some were shot. We didn’t know it at the time, but they were ineffective. I guess they had been stored in these high levels in the cold. I was told after the fact that they were ineffective. But [there were also] rocket-propelled grenades.’

  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. And then, almost miraculously, it stopped.

  ‘The only thing I could do was witness it arriving. It was coming straight at us. We physically couldn’t get out of its way quick enough. I could hear the sssssssss behind me because all the snow and dirt was just baking off with this hot round hitting the ground. It just kept sliding up until about a metre from my heels when it finally came to rest.’

  Jock wasn’t hanging around to see if it would detonate. He took a couple more steps before diving head first into the top of the lip of the creek. But he hadn’t accounted for the weight of his pack and didn’t make it over the top. The RPG was still there, sizzling menacingly. His arms, legs and rifle flailed as he righted himself and launched at the summit of the creek bed again, finally dragging himself over and into cover. He was in.

  ‘Had it detonated, there would have been ten of us down straight away, and that would have included Grippe and Clint. It would have taken out Grippe — the thing slid up a metre behind me but it probably nearly landed on Grippe.

  ‘I don’t know if any of the Ruperts were around then, but if they were, “Tally ho, Rupert”. If that initial round went off, shit, it would have just been carnage, mayhem, because that would have taken out half the command group.

  ‘That’s how arsey it is.’

  Jock was safe, but he was powerless to do anything to help his mate Clint. Suddenly, the air opened up with small-arms fire and lethal rounds from a DShK anti-aircraft heavy machine gun, a weapon the troops called the Dishka.

  Jock had been about to stick his head up and sing out for Clint but thought better of it as the DShK opened up and began thumping rounds overhead into the bank. Instead, he reached over and began pulling people to cover.

  ‘The AQ who fired the RPG had jumped on to the Dishka, or one of his mates has come along shortly thereafter and jumped on to their machine gun,’ Jock says. ‘It just seemed to me he’s fired the rocket, the rocket hasn’t gone off, he’s pissed off because it’s been a really good shot, and he’s jumped on his gun to finish the job, so to speak. He’s very unlucky on all accounts not to get any casualties.’

  Frank Grippe hadn’t moved. Neither had Clint. It had happened so fast, they didn’t have time. The hulking non-com just stared down at the RPG sizzling on the ground beside him and looked over at Clint. This was Taliban country, and their al Qaeda guests — the reason the coalition troops were there in the first place — meant business.

  ‘It’s going to be a long freakin’ day now,’ Grippe said to Clint.

  Softly, with a touch of irony, Grippe now says: ‘I’m like, “Okay, this is going to be interesting” — and this is the first five minutes of the fight. The interesting part at the beginning of the day was the RPG landing between two Americans and two Australians. What an unlikely combination of four soldiers on a combat mission! There is a whole battle going on around you, but there was the four of us. I mean, you talk about the unity of the Australians and the Americans, you know. Australia didn’t have to jump on board in this fight. I mean, we were less than six months into 9/11 and who would ever think that you would have this group of four soldiers — two American and two Australian — moving together in a valley floor in Afghanistan and have an RPG land, bam, right in the middle of you and not explode?’

  Any fatalities could have been reported in the press. ‘That would have probably blown the SAS cover right there, having a couple of casualties like that. And of course the fact that it was two sergeants major — it would have been an IO [information operations] campaign victory for the enemy because they would have gone, “Fuck, yeah.” You know, I am humble about this, but at my rank if I go and get whacked �
�’

  The coalition troops were out in the open in an al Qaeda kill zone. As if on cue, the enemy began launching mortars and hammering their heavy machine guns. They had pre-registered their fire positions and knew the precise range of the ammo’s trajectory. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, Jock thought. The sneaky bastards have done their homework. Every position in the valley floor had been covered with tactical planning. The guerrillas had observers, front and rear. It was a fully fledged battle. The enemy had the high ground and good fields of fire, which meant a lethal advantage.

  ‘Holy shit, you alright, man?’ soldiers yelled at each other.

  ‘Fuckin’ A,’ came the positive replies as the earth burst to life beneath them when bullets struck.

  Jock noticed some of the troops under heavy fire drop their packs as they bolted for cover. A US captain later said he was worried that the size of the packs would slow his troops down and get them killed. Jock couldn’t believe what he was seeing. A soldier’s pack is a soldier’s best chance of survival — you just don’t leave it in the line of fire like a sitting duck on opening day of the hunting season. The men had left priceless equipment on the ground, not to mention machine-gun ammunition that had been divided between the soldiers because of its weight.

  For Grippe, also, there were circumstances in which dropping the packs was SOP — standard operating procedure. His men had to do something to get out of the line of fire.

  Grippe began moving his troops into position, executing what the Americans call battle drill two. They were reacting to contact. Platoon lines began manoeuvring over the terrain and Sergeant Peterson’s mortar platoon humped the fully loaded SKEDCOs into position to set up the 120mm mortar with its powerful range of 7200 metres.