by Sandra Lee
‘It was a feeling of hopelessness really, that our mate was in that kind of situation,’ he says now.
Johnny broke all radio protocols and grabbed the handset from the radio operator.
‘Niner Charlie, this is Bravo Three-Four, over.’
‘This is Niner Charlie.’
‘How you going, bro?’
‘Yeah, not bad, Johnny,’ Jock replied, a smile playing across his lips upon hearing his mate’s voice.
‘You hang in there, mate. Hang in there, mate, don’t give up, you’ll be right.’
Johnny says: ‘I would have preferred [the battle] come down to us than have it where Jock was because, I’m not saying we are better than anyone else, but we had made a position and, if we did have to fight there, we had the location.’ Johnny is referring to their strategic spot on the high ground, always an advantage in war and just plain good common sense.
It was a classic military strategy.
‘Where Jock was the opposite — he got thrown into something where they were waiting for him. I was hoping it would trickle down [south] to us so it would take the heat off him. I jumped on the handset and told him to hang in there and I’m thinking of him. You could hear there was a bit of humour in his voice; he and I are pretty close. He knew exactly who was on the handset.’
Johnny told Jock that he would come and help out, and Jock knew that he was the type of soldier who would — and could — do it. For a minute, Jock wouldn’t have minded, but in truth he didn’t want Johnny and the boys coming anywhere near him because, at that stage, he didn’t think he was getting out of there alive.
‘I knew exactly where I was going to go and how long it was going to take me,’ Johnny says now. ‘But it would have been a stupid thing to do; even at the time I thought it was probably not the smartest thing. But when your mate’s in trouble! I didn’t know what I was going to walk into, but at the time you put all professionalism aside and think of your mates.’
Tink was in the TOC when Major General Hagenbeck’s radio operators received confirmation that Stanley Harriman had been killed, possibly by friendly fire. Tink may have been playing hardball when it came to inserting liaison officers with Task Force Dagger operators and insisting on deconfliction protocols in his AO, but he had been right. The lieutenant colonel was not going to negotiate away the safety of his troops, and had done all he could to prevent blue-on-blue fire. Tink felt vindicated for taking such a strong stance, but it was a hollow victory because a good, brave man had been killed.
Calls for close air support were coming in thick and fast from the men under fire at different LZs in the valley, but none were answered.
‘Continue to wait for a bomber strike, now overdue by an hour,’ Tink wrote in his war diary at the time.
The weather was encroaching. Fog had rolled in and blanketed the valley, blocking the Predator’s vision and thereby limiting visibility of the battle in the TOC. One of the SAS patrols radioed that visibility had dropped from four clicks to 100 metres in the space of ten minutes. Forget the oft-quoted line about the ‘fog of war’ in Karl von Clausewitz’s nineteenth-century magnum opus On War. This was literally the fog of war.
With deteriorating weather, Hagenbeck called off a planned second air assault of infantrymen from the 10th Mountain into the valley later that day. Some of the soldiers waiting were the remaining troops in Sergeant Pete’s platoon. They were like cats on a hot tin roof, eager to get in and help their brothers in arms. They paced back and forth in their khaki-coloured general-purpose tents at Bagram, kicking chairs over and hating the fact that their buddies were under fire and there was nothing they could do to help them. They had been about to fly in as reinforcement a couple of times but Hagenbeck had made the call: it was too dangerous to attempt a second lift. It was 0353 zulu time, 8.23am in the bowl.
Tink then briefed the officer commanding 1 SAS Squadron on the battle that was not going to plan. He told Major Dan McDaniel to be prepared to set up a blocking effort outside AO Down Under to the west and northwest of Objective Remington. Task Force Dagger and General Zia’s failure to move into place around the Whale had left the gate open, and Tink wanted the Aussies to be in position to close it if necessary.
Tink’s briefing to the 1 SAS commander was a ‘be prepared’ only task. Tink was all about preparation based on information. Two weeks before D-Day, Tink had attended a ConOps (concept of operations) meeting at Bagram with Mikolashek, Hagenbeck and other commanders preparing for Anaconda. They were told that there was ‘potential for a serious fight’.
Back in the TOC, Tink also noted that twenty-plus personnel had disappeared into a tunnel in one corner of the compound at Sherkhankhel further north. ‘Movement was sighted in this compound,’ he wrote.
The name Osama bin Laden was still on everyone’s mind.
CHAPTER TEN
Jock wiped the blood from his hands onto his camos, grabbed his M4, stood up and raced back into the line of fire to help the last of the wounded to safety.
JOCK WALLACE WAS THINKING ABOUT survival. About 30 blokes had managed to get into Hell’s Halfpipe but the rest were still scattered out on the valley floor, finding whatever cover they could and engaging the enemy with their small arms. Bullets cracked overhead; men jockeyed for position in the halfpipe.
Jock was set. He had his pack to one side, his radio to the other and his M4 5.56mm rifle switched to semi-automatic, with his rounds ready to rip.
Signallers often felt like a bit of a dick drag, being tied to the radio, but Jock wasn’t going down without a fight. He was nose to nose with the enemy.
‘Incooommmming.’
‘Incoming’ was the warning to get down before the round detonated.
Jock looked out of the halfpipe and saw Sergeant Pete’s mortar platoon about 200 metres away, setting up then blasting off a 120mm mortar and racing for cover in a wadi to avoid a return AQ mortar.
Check him out, Jock thought as he watched Sergeant Pete, that bloke inspires confidence. Those kids will do anything for him.
The enemy onslaught was constant. Frank Grippe’s men were shooting at anything that looked like an enemy target, picking off terrorists from 500 metres, hoo-ahing when one went down.
‘Any time we could actually visibly see a target, we’d eliminate that al Qaeda element,’ the sar-major told reporters at a Department of Defense press briefing five days after the opening round of Anaconda. ‘We’re here to kill and destroy al Qaeda. It’s that simple.’
In times of crisis, people make double-handed deals with their god, promising all types of good behaviour in exchange for a break. Don’t smite me, Lord, and I’ll give up the fags, quit the grog, never ever say the word ‘fuck’ in church again, not even in anger, and never in front of the kids. Jesus, I’ll even go to Mass on Sundays, I swear.
Jock Wallace was having none of it. Never a by-the-book religious man, he didn’t place any store in being touched by the hand of God in the hellhole in which he’d found himself. No amount of believing and praying was going to help him in the Shahi Kot Valley at 9am on a Saturday morning with the enemy on the hillside making the dirt dance viciously around his feet.
If anything, Jock was making a straight-up deal with the gods of self-reliance and close air support. He was a chook, a signaller, and he had the radio — one of the few means of communication back to the Aussie headquarters after the Americans dropped their packs in the kill zone while running for cover.
Well that’s reassuring, Jock thought.
He had wanted to go to the gunfight, but hadn’t been expecting this.
The Apaches were long gone. At 9.53am local time, Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Tink in the Tactical Operations Center noted in his war diary that a number of Killer Spades were unserviceable, and some had taken direct RPG hits, something the soldiers in the halfpipe already knew. One pilot had been hit in the face. While the pilot and all the helicopters would survive to fight another day, they had been KO’d on Day One of Operation An
aconda.
Out in the valley, Sergeant First Class Michael Peterson was getting jacked off. Al Qaeda mortars had nailed his eight-man mortar platoon for more than an hour. Sergeant Pete had ordered his men to take cover in a wadi and shoot at the enemy on the hill with their small arms, leaving the 120mm tube perched on its tripod out in the open and sitting pretty. Whenever there was a lull in gunfire, he charged across the rock-covered terrain to the mortar, set the target coordinates on the laptop computer, rammed a bomb down the barrel, and let rip.
Sergeant Pete and his young bucks were taking down targets, but their successful strike rate had turned them into al Qaeda’s biggest target. If the terrorists wanted to survive, they had to knock out the mortar, which was the most dangerous weapon the Americans had. AQ were punishing.
‘I’ve had enough of this shit,’ Sergeant Pete yelled.
He gave his men a rapid-fire pep talk and led them at full gallop into enemy fire to break down their mortar and move it to a better location. Peterson enlisted Sergeant Darren Amick and another fire team leader from 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, who’d flown in on the Chinook with his crew. He barked out instructions, ordering them to provide security and lay down suppressive fire.
Jock looked over and saw Sergeant Pete and Private First Class David Brown heaving the mortar tube about 50 metres from its original location toward Hell’s Halfpipe. The riflemen from 2nd Platoon ran out to help haul the mortars on the their SKEDCOs to the new spot while shooting at the enemy and dodging the steel rain of direct fire.
‘I had more help than I could ever ask for, that’s how great these kids are,’ Peterson says now. ‘They were out of control. You know, all you had to do as a leader is be the first one out and they will follow you to hell.’
It was pure bravery, but Jock was concerned.
Don’t you bring the enemy to me, he thought, I’ve got 30 blokes in here looking for cover so they can fight the terrorists.
‘I didn’t understand why a heavy weapon like that was employed so close to us when we’ve got radios. Mortars don’t need to see where the enemy are, they just need to be told where to shoot,’ Jock says.
Jock thought the move closer to the halfpipe would compromise their position, give it away, and he was already privately questioning the overall planning. Had the mortar platoon been infiltrated a couple of clicks up the valley, the enemy attacking the soldiers in the halfpipe would not have known where the US mortars were coming from, giving the coalition troops the critical advantage of surprise.
But Jock knew that the strategies and principles of warfare often gave way to the fluid realities of a battlefield.
‘You appreciate if you send a mortar crew off unguarded further away, then they’re running a real likelihood of compromise or death,’ he says. ‘It was bad planning and they should have been supported and put into a position where they could have applied effective fire from a safe distance.’
Jock was applying basic battle strategy. The 120mm mortar has a range of 7200 metres and could have reached targets further north in the valley, which was one of the reasons Sergeant Pete decided to import the weapon. But by bringing the big gun, the big mortar, he had sacrificed mobility, something he was starting to regret.
‘We all know the intel was pretty jacked up. In hindsight I would have gone in with two guns of 81 millimetres,’ Peterson says now.
‘Common sense tells you, don’t land on the low ground when the enemy is on the high ground. It’s always the first rule of war; seize the high ground. But, whatever; I’m not going to second-guess anyone in my chain of command because I pray to God they know more than me. I think they do.
‘I thought for sure the intel was jacked up, somebody dropped the ball in the intel, but again, who cares? That’s where the enemy is and, alright, there could be a million of them, let’s fight. And I am not trying to sound all bravado now; I think that was our mindset.
‘We’re there to fight, we’re from New York, we want to fight. It was absolutely personal for us, for that battalion. You know, we didn’t sit back in the United States and get to mourn these people — everything in our heads was fresh from 9/11.’
Sergeant Pete didn’t have time to ponder the possibilities. He had other pressing concerns, including guiding a bunch of young soldiers in their first ever real life battle. They had done plenty of live firing in exercises back at Fort Drum, home of the 10th Mountain Division, but most had never fired a shot at a real enemy in real combat conditions.
Peterson had seen action with the 82nd Airborne Division in the first Gulf War and, while he only fired about six mortars during his entire deployment, he knew what war was like, how the sound of mortars exploding and shrapnel whizzing past could make a man piss his pants or rise to the occasion.
His young guns didn’t know first-hand what war was like. Leadership was king.
‘One of my fire team leaders [Raul Lopez] crawls up to me and says, “Sergeant Pete, can I fire my two-oh-three?” And I’m like, “Jesus Christ, you’re not firing your two-oh-three?” And you know, the kid is just so used to the peacetime army and he just went crazy with that two-oh-three and took out quite a lot of people with that thing. You know, he was awesome. He crawled up to me and I’m like, “Fucking fire your two-oh-three.”’
Peterson had seven men under his control, and the blokes from 2nd Platoon were also in the vicinity. He felt personally responsible for every single one of them and wanted to get them all home.
‘You don’t worry about yourself, you know what I mean?’ Peterson says. ‘It’s getting it done, and getting your guys home. You are tense, because you have a lot of responsibilities. One is to do the job that the American taxpayer has been paying you to do. And I think the biggest one is to make sure you get your guys home. You know, you are kind of the mother hen and although there’s a blood lust — you want to take these guys [al Qaeda] out — the number one priority for me is to make sure all of my men survive. And sometimes … you can be the best leader in the world [but] men die, that’s what war is.’
Sergeant Pete set up the 120mm in a wadi across the open valley floor from Hell’s Halfpipe and used a weed on the hillside as a reference point. Mortars were scattered between the first and second locations; the SKEDCOs were spread out; and three of his men’s rucksacks had been blasted to pieces by al Qaeda RPGs. Boom, boom, boom. Food, water, cold-weather gear, ammo, night-vision goggles and a raft of other vital supplies were gone.
What a bloody waste, Jock thought.
Section Sergeant Thomas Oldham manned the computer and registered the target coordinates and fire trajectory.
‘Watch this shit, I’m going to kill all these guys,’ Sergeant Pete yelled to Oldham, a half-Irish half-Japanese soldier whom Sergeant Pete regarded as a brother.
Riflemen from 2nd Platoon ran into the open field to deliver ammo to Sergeant Pete who began hammering away at al Qaeda positions. Once the gun was going again, the enemy massed all their fire on the mortar, firing shells that bounced all around them.
The battle was a free-for-all — in the valley and in the small washout of Hell’s Halfpipe. Al Qaeda mortars and RPGs exploded every minute, and bullets from Kalashnikovs filled the spaces in between, coming from the eastern ridge, effectively trapping the men in the pipe. The soldiers responded with machine-gun and small-arms fire from their M4 carbines and M240s; Peterson did his supreme best with the 120mm.
Sergeant First Class Thomas Abbott sent his men to help Peterson move the remaining mortar equipment. A former Ranger, Abbott had been in the Black Hawk Down hell fight in the hostile Third World country Somalia back in 1993, in which eighteen American soldiers were killed.
Suddenly, boooom. Sergeant Pete’s crew — now about 100 metres from Hell’s Halfpipe — took a hit.
Jock saw the explosion out the corner of his eye while sweeping the terrain for the al Qaeda terrorist who kept lobbing mortars at him.
‘I went, “Fuck. Oh fuck.” My heart’s just dropped o
ut. My heart sank for those guys because I thought they were all dead, Jock says. ‘They literally were there one second and there was a puff of smoke and when the dust and smoke cleared there [were guys] screaming and lying around and writhing on the dirt. And more mortar rounds are coming in while these bastards are lying there.
‘If you wanted to see a mortar team getting blown up, it would be a good piece of cinema.’
The platoon literally was blown off its feet. Six soldiers were hit. Blood gushed out of wounds and men screamed in pain. They were the first injuries of the day, and Jock hoped they would be the last. Al Qaeda made the most of their direct hit, and began firing artillery along with the rest of their deadly arsenal of 82mm mortars and RPGs. It was an onslaught, coming from every direction.
Shells from a D30 howitzer blasted the ground, but they were off target. They enemy didn’t have the smarts to know how to fire indirect artillery, and were launching it with a flat trajectory, sending it straight into the side of the mountain where it exploded without too much damage. There were no greenies in the valley that day to care about a mountain copping a caning.
Thank God these cats don’t know how to lob it, Sergeant Pete thought. Thank God they don’t know how to fire high artillery.
‘So now you’ve got a bunch of 82s and now there’s a D30 and things are kind of getting crazy, mortar rounds are still landing around us,’ Peterson recalls.
Sergeant Pete was unscathed, but his ears were ringing. He did a quick recce to see the damage and began searching through the smoke and dust for Sergeant Oldham, screaming his name.
He didn’t want to lose one of his guys.