18 Hours

by Sandra Lee

  ‘Roger, this is One Oscar. Wait,’ came the reply from the chook on duty.

  The tent was chockers and several soldiers stood around with worried looks etched on their faces. Jock’s previous communications had not painted a pretty picture and they could hear, loud and clear, the battle raging in the Shahi Kot Valley and it was nothing like the soundtrack of Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket. It was much worse.

  Jock was on the radio, this time asking for the regimental commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Tink, on behalf of Clint, the SAS’s liaison officer with the 10th Mountain Division.

  The two Aussies had spent the past ten minutes nutting out their strategy because it didn’t look like one was forthcoming from Bagram. They had no idea if they were going to get out of the valley alive.

  Jock and Clint discussed an escape and evasion plan in case the al Qaeda and Taliban fighters outsmarted the CAS and outflanked the company in Hell’s Halfpipe. As it was, they were completely surrounded. If Jock and Clint had to execute their E&E, they had to head south.

  ‘We weren’t going to leave them [the US troops], but in the event that we were overrun, or there was a sprint foot-race scenario, then we were going to lead the fight south and try and link up with the Australians,’ Jock says now.

  Jock’s mate Johnny and his SAS patrol had relocated to a new observation point in the south but were just a couple of kilometres away. They listened to the gunfight as planes roared in overhead, delivering death to the enemy and sending clouds of smoke and fire into the sky. An American forward air controller had been placed with the team and they could hear the CAS being called in over the Yanks’ nets. Nine other Aussie patrols were in the AO, ready to take out any fleeing al Qaeda or Taliban fighters. But the enemy had stayed in the valley and were closing in on Jock’s position, fighting to the death in their jihad.

  ‘There was no doubt that we knew we would be dead if we stayed there overnight,’ Jock says. ‘We had taken that many casualties that there weren’t enough men to carry the casualties out — you need two men per casualty. Then, as a result of that, there was no one providing protection and we were in very dire circumstances.’

  Clint needed to talk to the brass. Now. He was about to let Rowan Tink know just how precarious it was and Jock was only too happy to oblige his mate.

  The lieutenant colonel was in the chow line at the back of the main hangar, about to grab his first bite to eat for the day, when he was interrupted by the SAS operations officer, Gavin. The OpsO told Tink that he was needed back in the comms tent. Clint had a sitrep and things were getting worse. Until now, most of the communications from Clint and Jock had been passed through staff to the CO, who was based in the TOC with the American command. As soon as Tink walked into the tent, he clocked the worried faces and realised just how bad things had become after the last-light attack.

  Tink took the radio.

  Jock recalls: ‘Clint was attempting to look after other people’s welfare, just basically having a positive input on the battle. He was fucked off and infuriated at the situation and he was telling Tink, the colonel, “Listen, you have to make a decision.”

  ‘And Tink is going, “You are to remain where you are.”

  ‘[Clint said] “And you don’t know what we’re doing here, do you, mate? What have we been doing for the last fourteen hours? Fourteen hours we’ve been fighting tooth and nail for our bloody lives and haven’t moved a friggin’ inch up the valley.”

  ‘“You will stand your ground.”’

  Tink told Clint to keep digging in.

  Clint replied that unless someone came up with a plan to extract the troops fast, he and Jock would be coming back from the Shahi Kot Valley on ‘a fucking medevac helo’, dead or wounded.

  ‘He’s not just saying, “I’m going to grab a free ride”, he’s trying to get a point across,’ Jock says now.

  The point being that they were surrounded and the enemy was moving in, gaining ground. If the soldiers weren’t extracted from the valley soon, they’d be dead.

  Clint’s ‘ground truthing’ was powerfully confronting; a heat-of-the-battle eyewitness account loaded with danger, anger and a desperate and frustrated sense of impotency because they had been ambushed. The wounded kept coming, some had been there for more than ten hours; ammo was running low — the 7.62 machine-gun ammo had been exhausted in the early hours of the day. As well, their shell scrapes were full of wounded and the two SAS soldiers were surface dwellers with nowhere else to dig.

  Clint and Jock felt stranded.

  Tink didn’t doubt the gravity of the situation Clint was outlining in his bull-headed way. The CO turned off the speakers that had been broadcasting the conversation.

  ‘There was a concern [in Clint’s voice] that you could only attribute to someone believing that they may not get out of this alive,’ Tink says now at HMAS Kuttabul at Garden Island, on Sydney Harbour. ‘He believed that there was a good chance that they may well die out there in that location … this was not the sort of information that I wanted everyone to hear.

  ‘In that report Clint referred to the sequence of events that had occurred throughout the day. He referred to the fact that they had been attacked on three sides. He referred to the number of injuries that the Americans had suffered up to that particular stage.

  ‘Clint’s assessment, at the end of the day, was that he believed the enemy would have a decided tactical advantage come night time, in that they would be able to get in much closer to them. Whereas, at the moment, they were able to hold these guys off at a distance.’

  Clint’s forceful tirade was accompanied by the symphony of war. Ordnance was being dropped, machine-gun fire was going off, orders were being barked out, and the wounded were moaning and begging for morphine. Soldiers were shouting pumped-up war cries as they aimed and fired. It was war.

  Hoo-ah, motherfuckers.

  Jock could hear Clint getting more and more pissed off because he wasn’t getting the answers that he wanted.

  ‘Just trying to relay shit under that noise was difficult,’ Jock says.

  ‘Clint was fully aware that he had my life as well as his own to look after, and that we were with a coalition force,’ Jock says. ‘We had been on the ground all day … we’d had casualties for over eight hours when this was occurring, and Clint had had enough. He just said this is bullshit and he told them in no uncertain terms.

  ‘Clint said that we are not in a very good position at all, tactically. We haven’t moved all day. Are there plans to get us out of here and if not, are we allowed to E&E ourselves, basically escape and evade ourselves?’

  Clint was a senior warrant officer telling his CO that he’d been stitched up and would like the opportunity to fight his own way out of there; would like permission to fight for his own life in a manner that he considered appropriate. To Jock, Clint was a hero and the brass cocooned inside the safe HQ were a bunch of REMFs who had no idea what it was like under fire in the halfpipe.

  When Clint told Jock that one of the orders was to continue digging in, Jock pissed himself laughing, a mix of dark humour and disgust.

  ‘Bloody handy hints from the supercoach. What do they think we’ve been doing all day?’ Jock said.

  The SAS patrols in the valley could hear the discussion between Clint and Tink over the Australian radio network. Jock’s network wasn’t working as well as it should have been. His antenna, which the guys jokingly dubbed the ‘death ray’, had been repeatedly knocked down as the injured soldiers manoeuvred to safety, causing brief, occasional dropouts.

  ‘Once the wounded were piled up in there,[other] people were standing over them and tripping over the antenna. It was a bit of a battle round dark just to keep the comms up, because the antenna was getting knocked arse over head the whole time,’ he says now. ‘You can’t blame anyone. There were wounded people lying everywhere and other people trying to do their jobs and you’ve got very little space to do it and so you adjust. You realise that when you
’ve been flapping your gums for a minute or so and no one has answered you, it’s probably because the antenna is down.’

  Despite Tink’s response to Clint, the report made an impact on the CO, who understood that the two men he had assigned to the 10th Mountain Division were in perilous circumstances. Lieutenant Colonel Tink was responsible for his men and, after the tragic death of SAS trooper Sergeant Andrew Russell two weeks previously, he did not want another fatality in his unit. One was too many, and Russell’s death had been keenly felt among the troops and by the CO. It was another reason why Tink had been such a hard-arse with the American command on the issue of deconfliction.

  Earlier that afternoon, Tink had begun to suspect that Major General Hagenbeck’s statement about the valley being in a stalemate situation was off the mark. The information Tink’s staff had pieced together indicated the opposite. Now that he had spoken directly with Clint, the CO was 100 per cent sure of it. Over the next couple of hours, more conversations were had with Clint, resulting in a passage of information via Tink back to Hagenbeck in the TOC and his deputy general and chief of staff.

  Based in the Tactical Operations Center, Tink had a wider view of the entire battle. Unlike Clint, Tink didn’t believe the situation would deteriorate at night because the Americans and Australians had the technological advantage of night vision devices. But there was another critical issue. He knew that a quarter of the company were wounded, which meant the blocking force had been neutralised and had to be reinforced or withdrawn by dawn. After first light when the sun rose over the Shahi Kot Valley, the advantage would revert to the enemy on the high ground. Hagenbeck already had decided that the medical evacuation would go in after last light, but no decision had been made about the option to reinforce the troops or withdraw them.

  ‘Indeed, Hagenbeck had advised earlier that he would not make that decision until first light the next morning,’ Tink says now.

  Referring to the discussion about whether the two Aussies in the bowl should have an E&E if things turned really bad, Tink explains, ‘This is typical military planning, particularly on our part. If this really turned bad overnight, how would we get them out?

  ‘And at this particular stage my response to Clint was that the survival of that group was dependent on all remaining in location, sticking together and awaiting extraction, which I indicated to him I would report to Hagenbeck and recommend in the absence of other information.’

  Tink had also asked where Lieutenant Colonel LaCamera was. Clint reported that he was at the other end of the bowl and that because of the nature of the enemy fire it was too dangerous to get him.

  It was clear to Lieutenant Colonel Tink that Clint was seriously disquieted about the mortars and firepower of the enemy.

  ‘My direction to him was to continue to dig in as best he could because, statistically — this is a dreadful thing to have to say to someone, but it’s a fact — statistically if he was below ground the chances of survival were good,’ Tink says. ‘Now I think they had already done a fair bit of digging.

  ‘I had two guys who were out with an American unit that was in serious trouble. There was a clear belief that they may not survive it in their current circumstances and particularly if they remained there all night. I was steadfast in the fact that they would remain with this unit.’

  Tink did not take the decision lightly, because he knew the possible implications of his order. It was one of the hardest decisions he’d ever had to make. ‘You may well be committing these guys to their death,’ Tink says. ‘I’m not trying to dramatise it.

  ‘To a large extent [a man’s] survival may well depend on what you do or don’t do, or what you tell him to do,’ Tink says. ‘But at the end of the day he is putting over what he is seeing and he is waiting to hear what I direct him to do.’

  Tink knew the best he could offer Jock and Clint at that point was the direction to dig in. He ordered the SAS staff to remain in regular contact with their colleagues. Tink wanted to ensure that the two troopers out in Hell’s Halfpipe were kept abreast of the evolving battle plan and reassured they had not been abandoned in their darkest hour.

  ‘The last thing you wanted to do was have your arse in a sling and have no one talking to you,’ Tink says. ‘It can be very lonely out there when you’re having your arse shot off and no one is on the end of the radio.’

  Once again Jock’s radio was the umbilical to the HQ. The US airmen operating as forward air controllers on the ground could call in CAS to the Bossman flying overhead in the AWACS, but Jock was passing information that was crucial to the strategy planning in the Tactical Operations Center.

  ‘That’s why they were saying my radio was essential, because Hagenbeck was the decision maker but Hagenbeck wasn’t getting fed by LaCamera,’ Jock says.

  Six months later, Hagenbeck would tell Field Artillery magazine that he had challenges communicating with his brigade and battalion commanders on the ground in the Shahi Kot Valley.

  ‘Operation Anaconda quickly became a platoon fight led by platoon leaders. From that perspective, it was very decentralised. This was not a “push-to-talk” war.’

  Over the next hour, from 6.39pm, Tink and Clint spoke three times. Armed with Clint’s first sitrep, Tink and his OpsO strode into the Tactical Operations Center where they met with Hagenbeck and his two deputy commanders: Brigadier General Gary Harrell, a one-star general and the top dog of the intelligence cell located at Gardez; and Brigadier General Mike Jones, a Special Forces soldier who was the military’s liaison to the CIA. Harrell’s legend was cemented in 1993 when he was the US Special Forces commander who hunted down the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid after the Black Hawk Down crash in Mogadishu. Also present at the TOC meeting was Hagenbeck’s chief of staff, Colonel Joe Smith.

  Tink began relaying what Clint had told him.

  ‘Between the wounded, the attacks that had happened on the ground during the day and what they expect to occur tonight, if they remain in that area, they are going to be in a worse tactical position than they have been today,’ Tink recalls telling the meeting.

  ‘From where my guys stand, this is what they see and this is what they are reporting to me.’

  Tink looked directly at Hagenbeck. ‘Sir, this is not what I would describe as a stalemate.’

  ‘Goddamn,’ Harrell declared.

  ‘They did not have that sort of information; they were surprised when I went over and gave it to them,’ Tink says now, adding that he was not surprised at Harrell’s response — it was typical of the big bloke.

  ‘I did not come up and say, “You have to withdraw them,”’ Tink says now.

  He didn’t have to.

  Hagenbeck asked if he could see the transcript of the conversation between Clint and Tink.

  ‘No worries,’ said Tink, believing that this would further improve Hagenbeck’s ‘situational awareness’.

  Tink had deployed the highly skilled Australian SAS patrols at various OPs in the valley and they had updated their sitreps throughout the day. The Aussies were, as Hagenbeck says, his eyes and ears.

  The information was critical and Hagenbeck and his top aides consulted on a course of action. The general had decided to send in casualty evacuation choppers and with Tink’s information added to other intelligence that was coming in, they decided to withdraw the remaining forces later that night. He further planned to reinforce the northern blocking points that had been secured by the Rakkasans and other Charlie Company troops and fly in more troops as reinforcements for the south the next morning.

  Over the next hour, Tink received two more sitreps from Jock and Clint.

  They confirmed the ‘gravity of the situation in their location’, he wrote in his war diary.

  Tink was busy coordinating between the Australian Regimental HQ and the TOC, delivering the sitreps to Hagenbeck and company.

  ‘That particular hour [from 1409 to 1507 zulu] was quite important to me because (a) I had become aware of the perilou
s situation both men were in and (b) because I had become closely engaged myself, whereas I hadn’t up to that particular stage — I had depended on my staff. I am over in the main tent the whole time, and they are passing information forward to me and I’m briefing and being briefed about every hour or two. But it became quite obvious to me that we have got a problem over here and it was not as Hagenbeck believed.’

  The small village of Marzak had sprung to life again after the mid-afternoon B-52 blitz. Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters had begun to emerge from hiding-holes like woodworms in summer, snaking south toward the ambushed soldiers. The 10th Mountain had a platoon and hunter-sniper scouts on interdiction missions in the hills overlooking Marzak, and a ground forward air controller radioed in for CAS.

  Fucking Smufti and Snegat, Jock thought when he heard the call.

  The enemy didn’t get far.

  At precisely 6.28pm, a B-52 responded to the call. The long-range heavy bomber, which had launched from mainland USA some hours previously, located its target near the crop of small adobe houses on the hillside. Jock, tuned into the radio, heard the crew of the B-52 prepare to drop their bombs and eavesdropped on the chatter between the TOC at Bagram and the FACs on the ground.

  ‘They’re gonna wipe it off the map,’ a voice said confidently.

  Jock waited for the ominous telltale sound of the JDAMs dropping through the pitch-black sky, then whoooshka, the darkness exploded as massive orange-red fireballs shot into the air.

  ‘It was a helluva strike,’ Jock says now. ‘You wouldn’t drop that sort of shit during training and, as a result, every man was thinking, “I hope they are on target,” because if they are not, we were well stuffed.’

  Hoo-ah!

  Frank Grippe and his men welcomed the plume of fire and smoke that broadcast the end of Marzak.

  ‘We made it disappear. Killed a lot of people in that air strike,’ Grippe says now. ‘There were no civilians up there, there were no farmers or families [just enemy].’