Iraq had left open a side door. The Special Forces would pass through it, after a little cleaning up.
The aircraft entered a steep dive. Kryszewski’s Iraq war was minutes away.
* * *
A little more than a year before, ODA 572 had taken a similar ride into Afghanistan and a much different war. It was December 2001, two months into the bombing campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Kabul had been captured by anti-Taliban fighters and their American partners, and another group of American operators were working in the country’s south with Hamid Karzai, the Pashtun leader who would become Afghanistan’s new president. In Afghanistan’s northeast, Osama bin Laden had withdrawn into the mountains toward Pakistan. ODA 572 had flown by helicopter from Pakistan into the eastern city of Jalalabad to ally with a pair of warlords who said they were pursuing bin Laden and his inner circle to Jalalabad’s southwest, near the village of Tora Bora.
The helicopters landed at a desolate former Soviet airfield ringed by aging minefields. A stickler for preparation and advance research, Kryszewski had been surprised by the almost surreal degree of trust required. The trip aligned with missions he considered at the heart of the Green Berets: collaborating with local forces in ground combat missions in a complicated war.
It had been a whirlwind run of weeks. On September 11, 2001, he had been among the last people allowed onto Fort Campbell, the Army post on the Kentucky-Tennessee line where the Fifth Special Forces Group was headquartered. He passed through one of the base gates and looked in the rearview mirror as the guards locked it behind him. He reported to ODA 572’s team room and watched a live news broadcast as the towers collapsed. The team was almost speechless. Other soldiers began to prepare their equipment, expecting they might leave soon. As a sergeant first class and the communications sergeant, Kryszewski was responsible for organizing the available intelligence and sharing it with his team. He walked to the Third Battalion headquarters building and entered the intelligence section.
“Start getting me up to speed on Afghanistan,” he said to an analyst there. “I want to know everything about it.”
Then he put in a map order.
Two other ODAs from Fifth Group were ordered to Uzbekistan and inserted into Afghanistan. By November, the airfield at Bagram, once a hub of Soviet military activity north of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, had been captured from the Taliban by the Northern Alliance and their new Special Forces allies. Kryszewski and ODA 572 were flown to Bagram and given an order: Prepare to move to Jalalabad for a linkup with Haji Hazrat Ali, a former anti-Soviet guerrilla leader who led part of the fighting in the mountains against the retreating jihadists. Osama bin Laden was said to be among them, trying to escape. With the CIA, the Air Force, and fleets of American warplanes that the team on the ground would direct, ODA 572 was to help Hazrat Ali capture or kill him. The mission had a limit: The team was only to guide air strikes. It was not to go forward and fight.
Kryszewski studied Haji Hazrat Ali, examining photographs and dossiers on the man—a survivor with a reputation for opportunism and corruption, the warlord upon whom the team and the Americans’ mission would depend. This was the type of scenario that had drawn Kryszewski into the Special Forces, and the action he had sought.
* * *
The Army, in Kryszewski’s view, was more than his life. It was a calling that he had no choice but to hear. The descendant of Polish immigrants and the son of a Chicago janitor, he was sure from a young age that he would enlist. As a child he dreamed of Army service in the Pacific theater in World War Two. He suspected these were visions of a previous life, that he was a war veteran reborn. His father, Leonard Kryszewski Sr., had been drafted in the Army for an unhappy tour. He disliked the Army with such passion that his son sensed he would not support his enlistment. Leonard Sr. was a stern man, up at 4:30 A.M. every day and back from work after dark. He kept a thick leather belt hanging on a door handle in the children’s view. Leo spent his teen years biding his time—“bumming around,” as he called it—knowing he would join the Army as soon as he reached legal age and would no longer need parental consent. In June 1985, on his eighteenth birthday, he walked into an Army recruiting station to sign up. When he returned home his father was angry. He ordered his son into the family car and went in search of the recruiter. They found the man carrying groceries. His father confronted the sergeant and demanded that he rescind Leo’s enlistment.
It was too late. Leo, sitting silently in his father’s car as the two men argued, was an adult. His father’s objection had no legal standing. The son followed a short, straight route: Early that October he left Chicago and reported to Fort Benning, on the Georgia-Alabama line, for basic training and airborne school, and then was assigned as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division.
For a decade Kryszewski held almost every job available to an Army infantry NCO. He was a team leader, a squad leader, a platoon sergeant. He graduated from the Army’s Ranger Course and served in the First Ranger Battalion. He was assigned to a mechanized unit in South Korea, where he led small-unit patrols in the DMZ.
He was eager for battle but kept missing the chance. In 1988, after Nicaragua’s Sandinista government sent troops into Honduras, his battalion was among the American units dispatched as a quick-reaction force. The paratroopers landed, departed the airfield, and moved to the Honduran countryside, setting up in the mountains. The Sandinista withdrew. Kryszewski was a pawn on the global chessboard. He was not impressed. Beneath the headlines about Washington’s Cold War gambit, he glimpsed his Army’s caution, even hesitation, in the field. His commanders did not issue live ammunition—nothing more lethal than smoke grenades—to paratroopers on long-range mountain patrols. Soldiers walked the jungle with empty weapons, a mark of the Army leadership’s distrust of soldiers and its willingness to risk lives in maddening ways. The following year Kryszewski was transferred to South Korea, and had just begun his new duties when his old unit parachuted into Panama for the invasion that deposed Manuel Noriega. He was furious to have missed the action.
In Korea he immersed himself in patrols in the demilitarized zone and had a close-up look at the United States’ allies on the ground. Again he was underwhelmed. His unit included a young Korean soldier, known as a KATUSA. The United States publicly championed the augmentation program, which put Koreans in American fighting units. Kryszewski considered him worthless—a rich kid whose family wrangled the assignment for him rather than have him placed in a Korean line unit. One day the man calmly told several Americans he might betray them in battle. “If the shooting starts, I’ll probably end up shooting you guys in the back,” he said. Kryszewski believed him.
His tour in Korea meant he missed the Persian Gulf War—Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm—and watched other soldiers on television on missions he thought should have been his. He arrived later, when Kuwait had been retaken and the region was quiet. He was a man who wondered whether he was a reincarnated soldier. And he was living a career without a gunfight.
His service in Korea propelled him in a new professional direction. As a paratrooper, he bristled at being in a mechanized unit. He wanted something more challenging, and with more fit and aggressive soldiers. His company commander in Korea had recently finished a tour as a Ranger and put him touch with the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment’s sergeant-major. With this referral, Kryszewski was assigned to the Ranger School and then to the First Ranger Battalion. The battalion handpicked members and drilled for specific missions, including airfield seizures. Haiti’s government had been overthrown by a military junta in 1991, and in 1994 the American military was preparing to invade. The First Ranger Battalion was rehearsing to seize part of the presidential palace. It spent weeks practicing, including in a mock-up of the relevant sections of palace in Florida. His unit boarded the USS America for a voyage to the island, only to have the raid aborted when the junta’s leadership ceded power.
A nomad within the Army, he had avoided soft duty and
continuously honed his infantry skills. He never felt like he had quite arrived. There was only one route left to try. Throughout his years in the Army he remembered a particular sight from his first tour with the 82nd Airborne. A sergeant who had been selected for the Special Forces had returned to visit more than a year later. He was wearing a green beret. Someday my uniform is going to look like that, Kryszewski told himself. He was accepted for the Special Forces Qualifications Course in 1995. The Q Course, as it is colloquially called, screens and trains soldiers for unconventional warfare. Kryszewski was selected as a communications sergeant. The course lasted more than a year, capped by an exercise, known as Robin Sage, in which students operated as a team off-base in North Carolina, among American civilians. Their mission was to infiltrate an area said to be undergoing political instability and collaborate with local guerrillas, known as the “G-force,” which was in turn led by a “G-chief”—the guerrilla commander who was to be won over by the team.
Six years after he graduated from the Q Course, as ODA 572 prepared to meet Haji Hazrat Ali, Kryszewski understood that he was no longer missing the real missions. At last he was doing what the Army had trained him to do.
* * *
The available information on Haji Hazrat Ali was not promising. As Kryszewski read the reports, he saw a man of shifting loyalties. A member of the small Pashai tribe, he had fought against the Soviets in the 1980s, allied with anti-Taliban fighters in the 1990s, and then forged ties with Iran before seeking the hand of the CIA. After the attacks by al Qaeda against the United States, General Ali, as the Americans called him, voiced support for American action—a choice that stood him as a local power broker when American intelligence officers turned their attention to his turf. His bravery was unquestioned. His reliability and integrity were not. He was a gangster, more politely labeled a warlord in Western news reports. That he could summon thousands of irregular fighters to his side meant he was to be the Pentagon’s latest ally of convenience. The $25 million reward the United States promised for bin Laden, and money the CIA had already begun disbursing to him, were incentive enough for him to give the arrangement a try.
General Ali told the CIA that bin Laden, pressured by airpower and the gathering strength of militias cooperating with the United States, had withdrawn with hundreds of fighters into the mountains around the White Valley. General Ali had moved some of his own fighters into the high ground in supposed pursuit. American pilots needed targets, and controllers on the ground to help them differentiate between the opposing forces—circumstances that called for hurrying ODA 572 to the battlefield, in spite of senior misgivings in the Pentagon and in the headquarters in Tampa of the United States Central Command, which was supervising the war.
The team flew from Afghanistan to Pakistan, transferred to helicopters, and was inserted at Jalalabad’s airfield. The Americans soldiers, dressed in local Afghan attire, stepped off the aircraft to be whisked through a process Kryszewski, behind his straight face, found unnerving. It was December 4, nighttime, cold and dark. The airfield was desolate and looked unused. A crowd of Afghan gunmen were waiting. Kryszewski heard no English. No one in General Ali’s circle had arranged for a translator. The Afghans gestured to vehicles. Soon they were all racing in the backs of trucks toward a safe house in the city, a short drive away.
Kryszewski watched as they passed knots of Afghans with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The team arrived at a small building and the soldiers were brought to a large room with richly patterned carpets and no furniture. They placed their weapons against the wall as a gesture of trust. He noticed some of the Afghans grow tense. A door opened. There stood Haji Hazrat Ali. Kryszewski walked toward the man and introduced himself.
“General Ali,” he said, “we’re very pleased to be here.”
The general had a translator. The conversation began.
He welcomed them. His first assessment of General Ali was mixed. He sensed the man’s power. But the militia leader seemed preoccupied and rude. He sat cross-legged and picked at his bare toes. Kryszewski knew the team had no choice but to work through whatever was in store. There is no “We can’t get along with this guy,” he thought. We have to make it work. Kryszewski introduced the detachment’s leadership—the captain and warrant officer—and eased away. They had met their Afghans. He had to set up radios and satellite phones and get a report out to officers waiting in Kabul.
The CIA had preceded the Special Forces into Jalalabad. Intelligence officers were paying General Ali large sums of cash, and had already journeyed with his fighters to frontline mountain positions. The ODA, as reinforcements, had the communications equipment and numbers to expand the link to American airpower, and it could deliver other tangible things, including airdrops of aid for General Ali to distribute around Jalalabad, and more cash. All of these could demonstrate their utility to their host.
After the first meeting, the CIA team arrived. Relations between Agency staff and the Special Forces could be strained, but not in this case. Kryszewski knew the team from a previous assignment and liked its members and the man who led them, a middle-aged Texan who treated the military as partners. The chemistry among the Americans, Kryszewski felt, was good.
A plan took hold. The terrain where Osama bin Laden had sought refuge was a region of cragged peaks, deep ravines, and winding dirt roads. The border with Pakistan extended deep into the area known as the Parrot’s Beak, which had been a major route for weapons smuggling and infiltration by anti-Soviet fighters in the 1980s. In late November the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan helped prod Pakistan’s military and border forces to increase their presence on their side of the border. But the trails were many, and border-straddling tribes held more local influence than federal troops. The dozen soldiers of ODA 572 could be neither shock troops nor a hunting party. They could, however, direct airpower for Afghan fighters, who would be joined by a contingent from the CIA and Delta Force, and eventually British commandos, to try to kill bin Laden. The ODA was given a code name, Cobra 72, and assigned to different ridges with different fields of view, which would be called A and B, from which to direct strikes.
On the day they were to leave Jalalabad for the mountains, Kryszewski witnessed something he found incredible. General Ali gathered the Americans into Toyota trucks and set out into the city. They drove a short distance and stopped at a small, fortresslike compound with armed men at the gate. The gate opened and they were allowed inside, where they sat with a group of armed men and drank tea. The warlord and Afghans conferred. By the time they left, General Ali had convinced four trucks of fighters to follow him. The slightly larger convoy, bristling with gunmen, stopped at another compound and repeated the process. When they left later, the convoy, by Kryszewski’s estimate, had fifteen trucks, each crowded with fighters and weapons. Word traveled around the city that Haji Hazrat Ali was heading to the mountains for the big fight. The process continued for hours. By evening the trucks formed into a huge convoy that pointed at last toward Tora Bora and snaked down the roads. It drove past the city’s staring residents, past tall kilns where brickmakers were at work, and out toward the borderlands, where Kryszewski knew that the Qaeda remnants would hear that it was coming. He figured General Ali had put about two thousand fighters together in a day.
In the lower ridges of the mountains, the fighters spread out uphill while the team moved with General Ali to a schoolhouse. Kryszewski put up his antennas, then set out for the long climb with the other soldiers to the ridgetop observation posts. They wore civilian clothes—Kryszewski was in a black watch cap, jeans, and green hiking pullover—topped with a chest rig loaded with ammunition and a sling for his M4 rifle. They were accompanied by about twenty Afghan fighters provided by General Ali and rented donkeys to carry heavier equipment. Kryszewski marveled at how the United States paid Afghans for services. The teams had showed up with money—all of it in $100 bills. Afghans had no smaller bills to make change. Consequently every minor purchase or ren
tal agreement cost at least $100.
When they reached the ridgeline, he looked out at the spectacular snowcapped peaks at the border. The Qaeda fighters, to the south, had perfect positions; it would take a massive and well-disciplined force to sweep the ground in front of them. Sounds of intermittent fighting echoed from that direction. The soldiers began building their hide site, stacking rocks as windbreaks and for camouflage and protection. They set up radios, laser-guidance systems, and the largest spotting scope Kryszewski had ever seen. From more than six kilometers away Kryszewski could see cave entrances and men coming and going inside. Some had weapons—the indicator the Americans required for what came next.
General Ali’s Afghan fighters needed all the help they could get. They were far from the valley’s further reaches. The forces defending bin Laden had the high ground and kept them back with mortar and machine-gun fire. Kryszewski could not see how General Ali’s militias would break through, or even much pressure the Qaeda positions. The Air Force controller went to work. The “stack” appeared overhead—American aircraft after American aircraft, lined up to strike.
Looking through the scope, the Americans determined the distant fighters’ locations or marked them with laser designators. Airplanes began taking turns attacking; the Air Force controller talked to the pilots as they checked in for their turns. For smaller aircraft, the controller gave precise directions and laser guidance. For strategic bombers, he offered Point A to Point B spreads. The aircraft dropped every bomb on board in long rows.
The Fighters Page 5