by Jim Proser
That first night Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick and Bravo Company sleep on the icy cement floor of the warehouse. At daybreak they move outside the walls and dig in. Bravo takes the southeastern corner. Charlie Company is on their left flank, and Alpha on the right. The landing team’s weapons company digs in their mortar positions behind Bravo’s position. Explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams comb the grounds inside the compound for mines, booby traps, and unexploded munitions. So far, the operation is textbook seize and hold. No sign of chaos on the ground, no word from Chaos on the radio. The perimeter is secure, and word goes back to the Peleliu. Forward Operating Base Rhino is captured without a shot. Task Force 58 is operating smoothly—no confusion, no accidents—except for one diplomatic complication. Operation Swift Freedom is a success.
Support personnel, flown in from the staging base at the Pasni airfield in Pakistan, partition buildings and select spaces for the command post, hospital, maintenance areas, supply warehouse, antenna array, and latrines. Samples from the water well are flown back to the Peleliu for testing.
On the hangar deck of the Peleliu, more Marines prepare to ferry ashore to Pasni on hovercraft for an evening helicopter flight to FOB Rhino to reinforce Operation Swift Freedom. Reporters watch as the Marines load gear and ammunition into multiple rucksacks. Marine doctrine specifies 50 pounds as the correct combat load for a rifle or weapons company Marine; these Marines routinely carry up to 175, in multiple packs. Finished packing, they paint their faces with tan-and-black camouflage war paint. Mattis enters the deck and visits with his fighters. Embedded news reporters move to Mattis. They want to know how the operation is going so far. Feeling optimistic and probably relieved at the smooth function of the operation, he lets his guard down and makes a political blunder. He tells the reporters that the Marines are “going to support the Afghan people’s effort to free themselves of the terrorists and the people who support terrorists. . . . The Marines have landed and we now own a piece of Afghanistan.”20 Colonel Thomas D. Waldhauser, commanding officer of the Fifteenth MEU, will later recall, “It was really . . . awesome . . . one of those days where things go well and you just have to savor it.”21
Similar relief and pride swells throughout the ranks of the Marines. At FOB Rhino, Lieutenant Fick wants to check out a small hill next to the base runway as a possible observation position, since the corner guard towers would be the first targets in an attack. He takes his sergeant with him and keeps one eye on the ground, since a landmine might have been missed by the EOD teams. Fick writes in his book One Bullet Away:
While looking down at the ground, I spotted a piece of paper plastered against the dried husk of a bush by the incessant desert wind. I peeled it off. It was notepaper, the size of a thank-you card, bearing a photocopy of the famous picture of three firefighters raising the American flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center. Above them, in block letters, were the words freedom endures.22
Nearby, an American flag waves on an improvised flagpole in the freezing winter wind. Sergeant Joseph R. Chenelly, a combat photographer assigned to Fifteenth MEU, writes in his journal, “One of the first platoons on the ground raised an American flag high into the new dawn sky on a makeshift pole proudly marking the Marines’ successful landing.”23
That first platoon is Charlie Company. Charlie’s staff sergeant Norris, a native of Brooklyn, stands under the flag and speaks to the handful of grunts who gather around it. He speaks emotionally, the images of 9/11 still raw in his memory: “This is for our great country, the United States, and the great city of New York. Marines take pride in raising the flag, and pride doesn’t begin to describe the feelings today. I hope these colors can be seen all the way across Afghanistan.”24
Unfortunately for Sergeant Norris and General Mattis, they are. They are seen all the way to Washington, DC. The State Department gets wind of the flag raising and hears Mattis’s comments on the evening news reports. Mattis gets a call the next day: the Marines are to stow their pride and take down the flag. In a Washington press briefing later that day, Secretary Rumsfeld walks back Mattis’s comments, saying that the Marines are
not an occupying force. Their purpose is to establish a forward base of operations to help pressure the Taliban forces in Afghanistan to prevent Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists from moving freely about the country. We think of them as a—establishing a forward operating base. And we don’t discuss future plans or developments, so there’s really nothing one would say beyond that, except that that’s what the—these are hundreds, not thousands, of Marines.25
Although he does not mention him by name, Rumsfeld covers for Mattis saying he is a, “. . . very fine officer . . . clearly exuberant . . . speaking figuratively, not literally.”26
On Mattis’s end, every Marine he sees peppers him about the flag coming down and the diplomatic backtracking. Mattis toes the political line, saying no one wants the Afghans to think they are being conquered. They are being liberated. The final slap comes from General Franks at Central Command. He bans use of the name Operation Swift Freedom.27 The Marines’ first act of retaliation for 9/11 is uncelebrated and will remain unnamed.
Slightly more than two months after 9/11, the most strategically important city in Afghanistan, Kabul, surrenders to Afghan forces advised by Americans. After a twelve-day siege, five thousand Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters are trapped in the city of Kunduz, ninety-seven miles east of Kabul. They surrender on November 26. The Taliban’s capital city of Kandahar in the south is next in Mattis’s playbook.
On the Peleliu, Mattis gives the order to begin moving his command post up to FOB Rhino. On November 27, a Marine KC-130 transport flies Mattis, Colonels Lethin and Broadmeadow, other key command staff, a communications team, and a Seabee liaison officer to FOB Rhino. Task Force 58 staff is now stretched between Rhino, the Peleliu, and Bahrain. Mattis delegates naval operations to the shipboard commander of the Peleliu and focuses his attention on the ground operations of taking Kandahar.
Mattis strides down the loading ramp of the plane, carrying his own gear, and crosses Camp Rhino toward his new forward command post. Fick and his sergeant are scouting resources for Bravo Company among the bustle of activity on the base when they see the general coming toward them. “Good afternoon, sir,” they greet Mattis without saluting—Marines in the field don’t salute officers, to avoid identifying them to enemy observers and snipers. Mattis is genuinely happy to see the men. He grabs Fick’s whole arm and works it like a water pump. “Good afternoon, young warriors.”28
Fick goes on to describe his first encounter with Mattis: “Of slender build and wearing glasses, he carried his pistol in a leather shoulder holster. Without preamble or small talk, he praised our mission in Afghanistan. ‘You need to know how much you’ve already accomplished by being here. You prove that the United States has the balls to put troops on the ground in Afghanistan. You’ve emboldened the Northern Alliance to renew its pressure on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Kandahar. You’ve reassured Americans at a time when they sorely need it.’”29
Mattis chats with the men for a moment longer, and he’s on his way. He finds the small, windowless building that is in the process of becoming his forward command post, climbs the stairs, and pushes through the plastic sheet doorway into another overcrowded room. Computer stations fill the far corner; overhead lighting shines on the laminated maps taped together across the longest wall. Rifles are stacked by the door like brooms. Chatter and activity from the dozens of infantry officers, helicopter pilots, SEALs, Australian Special Air Service men, and CIA operators in parkas and wool caps crowded around the monitors and maps is already jacked up like the bar at a Saturday-afternoon ski lodge.
Mattis gets down to work. His military plans are complicated by the simultaneous humanitarian assistance campaign. Decades of war and several recent years of drought have brought Afghanistan to the brink of starvation just as international aid organizations are fleeing the country, fearing the US military campaign. Now,
with winter closing in, hundreds of thousands of Afghans depend on supplies that the United States and her allies deliver.
Airdrops started weeks before from C-17s flying out of Ramstein Air Base in Germany, delivering food rations, blankets, and other supplies. Over the course of Operation Enduring Freedom, 2.5 million meals, along with raw wheat, 55,000 blankets, and other humanitarian supplies, are delivered.
* * *
Future Afghan president Hamid Karzai commands Afghan recruits advised by US Special Operations Forces in an advance on Kandahar from the north. Karzai’s father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, was the chief of the powerful southern Popalzai tribe until he was assassinated in 1999 by agents of the Taliban. Now Hamid, as the new chief of the Popalzai, whose home territory is Kandahar Province, joins forces with Gul Agha Shirzai—nicknamed Bulldozer for his coercive tactics—who advances from the south, also advised by US Special Forces.
Troops and munitions continue to arrive at Camp Rhino in the buildup toward offensive operations against Kandahar. Fick’s Bravo Company, with 168 troops and nine Humvees, is stretched with Alpha and Charlie Companies over a J-shaped defensive perimeter enclosing the airfield, ammunition supply point, fuel dump, helicopter park, and headquarters. The front line covers almost two miles, and it takes about two hours to walk the line, checking on the Marines in their fighting positions.
1120 Hours—27 November 2001—FOB Rhino
An armored convoy is detected fifty miles northwest of the base, near Lashkar Gah. There are fifteen vehicles, including two Soviet-era armored personnel carriers. Central Command observes the convoy for three and a half hours to make sure it is not a humanitarian group. Eventually two patrolling Grumman F-14B Tomcats from the USS Carl Vinson attack the two personnel carriers at the head of the convoy. Two AH-1W Super Cobra helicopters hear the F-14 pilots over their radios and join in the attack on the rest of the column, destroying it.
Captain Barranco, piloting one of the Cobra helicopters, describes the attack: “At least some of the Taliban were out of the vehicles. I’m guessing they thought they hit a mine since the F-14s were so high. They heard us and some of them started firing wildly in the air toward the sound of the Cobras—the rest started running. We made several passes destroying the vehicles and killing the squad.”30 Passing back over the convoy, the pilots use their night-vision goggles and infrared sensors to make sure that nothing and no one survives.
Back at FOB Rhino, Mattis seems concerned that this early encounter with armored vehicles could mean enemy tanks aren’t far behind. He calls his light armored vehicles forward to reinforce the dozens of Humvees now at Rhino. A section of C-17 transports fire up onboard the USS Peleliu and prepare to deliver the vehicles to Rhino.
At Fick’s front line, the grunts dig deeper to improve their fighting positions, but discover limestone bedrock under twelve to eighteen inches of sand and rock dust. Standard-issue entrenching tools pry up chunks of rock. Improvised picks and crowbars are scrounged from the supply depot to break the hard rock. Mortars are test-fired in earthshaking blasts that send plumes of dust high into the desert sky. Several times a day Fick and his Marines clean the talcum-fine rock dust from their weapons. They adopt an operations cycle starting at 0500 hours, about an hour before sunrise. The Marines “stand to” in the bone-chilling predawn wind, manning their fighting positions, raising their security posture to 100 percent alert. An hour after sunrise they “stand down,” dropping to 25 percent alert, where one man in four is armed and ready for action. Charlie Company’s Captain Putman recalls, “The Marines were not suffering from boredom; we kept them focused.”31
One night, well after midnight, when the temperature is again far below freezing, Fick walks the defensive perimeter, checking on his men. He finishes inspecting about half the fighting holes in his sector and is in the middle of a gravelly flat near the runway’s end when he approaches another fighting hole, careful to come from the rear and listen for the verbal challenge. It is a combined anti-armor team made of one anti-tank Javelin rocketeer and a rifleman. There should be two Marines in the hole, but in the bright moonlight, he sees three heads silhouetted against the sky. He slides down into the hole and finds Mattis leaning against a wall of sandbags, chatting with the sergeant and lance corporal like they are waiting in the chow line.
Fick writes about this encounter,
This was real leadership. No one would have questioned Mattis if he’d slept eight hours each night in a private room, to be woken each morning by an aide who ironed his uniforms and heated his MREs. But there he was, in the middle of a freezing night, out on the lines with his Marines.
General Mattis asked the men if they had any complaints. “Just one, sir. We haven’t been north to kill anything yet.” Mattis patted him on the shoulder. I had heard that he was old school, that he valued raw aggression more than any other quality in his troops. “You will, young man. You will. The first time these bastards run into United States Marines, I want it to be the most traumatic experience of their miserable lives.”32
Mattis is about to keep his word to the young lance corporal. He has already drawn up orders to send his men to cut off the southern escape route from Kandahar. Reports that nineteen thousand Taliban currently hold the city mean that they will certainly be outnumbered by escaping fighters as Afghan forces under Karzai from the north and “The Bulldozer” Gul Agha Shirzai from the south close in. Their saving grace will be air power overhead, the force multiplier that allows Mattis to maintain a fast, light assault force against much larger numbers.
The strategy and tactics of Mattis’s plan are derived in part from the Vietnam era “firebase” concept of using airpower instead of artillery for fire support. Only his critical personal trust in Combined Forces Air Component commander General T. Michael Moseley allows Mattis the confidence to leave behind his artillery for the first time in thirty years and entrust Moseley with the lives of his Marines.
Mattis also consciously draws from his study of the Civil War, particularly Grierson’s Raid in Mississippi. This was a demonstration of how a relatively small unit can create chaos in the enemy’s rear by attacking lines of communication. With continuing pressure in the north, Mattis’s Marines and Afghan partners will simultaneously attack Kandahar in the south, forcing the Taliban into a dilemma and sowing the enemy chaos Mattis covets. In his commander’s intent document that every Marine is ordered to commit to memory, he describes his intended outcome, “. . . Taliban/Al Qaida leaders in disarray, facing an operational dilemma on how to allocate their forces [northern front or southern Afghanistan].” He goes on to describe his intent for the enemy’s state of mind: “. . . destroy the enemy’s sense of security and shatter his will.”33
In the fighting holes on this cold night, Mattis checks the one fundamental element he can’t find in his study of the history or theories of war: he checks the actual understanding of his commander’s intent and the level of motivation of the young men he will soon send to face overwhelming numbers of the enemy.
* * *
Kandahar is the spiritual home of the Taliban movement and appears to be their Alamo as well, as resistance in the north continues to collapse. Fifty miles east of Rhino a force of four hundred fighters is detected, and sixty miles to the north a SAM missile is launched at a Navy fighter jet. The Taliban consul general announces that “the fireworks would begin . . . in the United States during the last week of Ramadan in mid-December and that Americans would . . . die like flies.”34
Australians fight in the Helmand River valley to the west, while SEALs and Special Forces take down Taliban units along the Pakistani border to the east. Karzai’s fighters capture a bridge four miles north of Kandahar International Airport.
In Washington, Air Force general Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summarizes the situation for reporters: “Omar [Taliban commander Mullah Omar] seems to be trying to organize the fighting of the Taliban, and bin Laden, on the other hand, seems to be concentrating
on hiding. . . . Again, in Kandahar it’s sort of the last bastion, we think, of Taliban resistance. You get mixed reports on whether they’re about ready to leave and give up or not. I will go with the secretary on this, in that, from Omar’s standpoint, we think . . . they’ll dig in and fight, and perhaps to the end.”35
Just as the pace of men and equipment into Rhino for the assault on Kandahar is stepping up, Mattis runs into a bit of chaos from Central Command. They notify Mattis that they are limiting the number of Marines and sailors allowed at FOB Rhino to 1,000. This throws Mattis a curve in the middle of his meticulously planned operation. Responding coolly that there are already 1,078 personnel on deck, and more on the way, he effectively ignores the order, while over the next few days, Central Command gradually raises the allowable number to 1,400.
In spite of Mattis ignoring Central Command, he confides to other commanders that Command “. . . knew thoroughly that I wasn’t asking for 4,500 Marines with the idea of using only 1,000 of them,” and that the decision to scale back the number of troops was “. . . managerially incompetent.”36
Mattis’s supply chain rattles to a halt as subcommanders chose which personnel to keep and which to send back to the ships. Lieutenant General Gregory S. Newbold, former director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a friend of Mattis, learns of the force cap through e-mail exchanges and gets involved. He later explains,
The only way that [Task Force] 58 or any other operation in the south could have had an effect is if it threatened the Taliban materially—if it were able to strike and distract or defeat. And ultimately, it had to encircle al-Qaeda and the Taliban in a way that could result in their destruction. . . . That was not possible because of the constraints that General Franks personally put on the introduction of forces there, and it was only much, much later that we moved other ground forces in there, as you know, the 10th Mountain Division.37