by Brandon Webb
The environment was not the sand desert of Kuwait but a rough, high desert terrain. Just outside Kandahar it was more plains than mountainous, the largely flat area far more manageable for our vehicles than what we would experience later on, farther up north. We had two EOD guys with us, Brad and Steve, as well as our new Air Force CCTs, another Brad and Eric, who were solid, mature guys and fit in right away. Chief Dye had clearly made the right move firing the younger pair back in Oman.
On the ride out we didn’t encounter anyone, but the journey was a little hairy nevertheless because we kept seeing red rocks everywhere, which we assumed signified mines, or at least the possibility of mines. We’d stop, our EOD team would dismount and scope everything out, then they’d get back in the vehicle and we’d keep moving forward. Progress was slow and tense.
We had set out in the early evening, maybe 2000 hours (8:00 P.M.). After six or seven hours of this halting progress, we’d hit all our checkpoints and hadn’t seen anything worth noting. By now it was two or three in the morning, time to lay up for the night and get a few hours’ sleep. We had just come to a river and were looking for a good spot to cross. On the other side, we could see a series of massive, beautiful, dark red sand dunes that rolled on for miles. They were gorgeous, like something you’d see in an epic film.
Right in the middle of the dunes I noticed a small cluster of trees. I was in Cassidy’s vehicle, and I saw that he was focusing on this cluster of trees, too. Alarm bells went off quietly in my head. This was something we’d been taught in sniper school: It’s human nature to gravitate to an object of note in an otherwise featureless stretch of landscape. If you’re looking at a wide open stretch of beach, for example, and you see a cluster of rocks and not much else, you’ll automatically gravitate to those rocks. That was exactly what was happening with Cassidy and that little cluster of trees nestled into the endless stretch of sand dunes.
As snipers we were taught two things about this. First, it’s a natural tendency to be drawn to that unique feature. Second, fight it! Do not give in to the obvious. Not only do you not want to be predictable to the enemy, you also don’t want to be accidentally compromised. If you are drawn to that landscape feature, other people will be, too—and those other people might be there right now. Or they might be drawn there once you’re settled in and starting to relax.
I sidled over to Cassidy and said, “Hey, LT, that’s not a very good option. No doubt other people have been there and will use that place to hole up. We’d be better off going out into the open, setting up our own camouflage netting and camping out on the sand dunes.”
He fought me on it. “No,” he said, “we’ll go own that area. We’re out in the middle of nowhere. There’s no good reason to think that there’d be anyone else holed up there.”
I didn’t like it. I mean, why would we want to take the risk? Sure, we could bring serious firepower to anyone we might run across—but still, why do that when there was an entire open desert available to us? I could see that everyone was tired and wanted to get some shut-eye, and yes, choosing that cluster of trees as our site for the night would make setting up camp quicker and easier, which would translate into getting to sleep sooner, which might even translate into getting a slight bit more sleep. I understood all that—but I still thought that none of this was any reason to take the easy route.
We had a short, heated discussion. “Point taken,” Cassidy finally said, “but this is the decision we’re making.” After fording the river, we headed for the cluster of trees.
As we started setting up, I shone my flashlight on one spot on the ground—and sure enough, there at my feet was a fire pit. I nudged Cassidy and pointed with my flashlight beam. “Hey, LT,” I whispered, “there ya go.” It was as if we had followed Fodor’s Guide to Terrorist Afghanistan. It wasn’t just that one fire, either. There were fire rings everywhere, a few days old at most. Some forces, God knew who, had recently stopped by these trees and camped out exactly where we were standing right now. Fortunately there was no one there at that moment. But there easily could have been.
“Goddammit,” said Cassidy, and he nodded. He knew I was right. We set up a watch and pitched our camp.
I relate this not to toot my own horn but to make the point again about our training. Sniper school simply makes you into a better operator. It trains you to pay attention to things others might miss, even other Navy SEALs, and it trains you to pay attention when others might get lazy. Sniper school squeezes the lazy out of you. It forces you to make good decisions even when you’re tired. I saw similar things happen many times over.
One thing about Cassidy I really appreciated: He wasn’t afraid to admit when he’d been wrong. To me, this is one of the strongest marks of great leadership. Nobody is always right. Great leaders use that to learn and improve, instead of fighting it.
The patrol was otherwise uneventful, and we headed back the following day, patrolling as we went, and worked our way back to camp by evening. Although nothing much happened, it was good to shake out the cobwebs and get ourselves moving out in the field.
* * *
A few days after Christmas, an event occurred that shook us up and showed us how little margin for error there was here—and how far we still had to go to get our shit sufficiently together if we intended to come out of this place alive.
About a thirty-minute drive from the Kandahar Airport there was a place called Tarnak Farms, where the 9/11 attackers were said to have trained. (Tarnak Farms was also believed to have been home to bin Laden for a while and was the site of a narrowly missed opportunity to take him out a few years earlier.) Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the news channels had run a captured video clip of terrorists-in-training running an obstacle course and monkey bars at a training camp. That was Tarnak Farms.
The place had now been completely leveled by Coalition bombing raids, but it was still a useful training site. We had set up a mock shooting range there and would go out to test weapons, check our explosives, and blow off captured enemy ordnance. We had been out there not long before Christmas and had used the site to sight our .50 cal and grenade launcher and do some basic weapons training.
Now, a few days before New Year’s, we headed out there again to do some more testing on our weapons and make sure our zero was good. We didn’t have a lot of the technology we’ve developed since then. Today I wouldn’t need to go anywhere to confirm my rifle’s zero; I could just plug my local coordinates into my software and it would correct for that part of the world, with its particular elevation, degree of latitude, and environmental conditions. Back in 2001 we didn’t have that sophisticated software, and nothing could replace getting out on the range and physically testing the weapons. We also had a bunch of enemy ordnance we wanted to take out there to blow.
About half the platoon went out this time, maybe eight guys including our two EOD guys, and we took just two vehicles. We arrived and parked, and as I stepped out of the Humvee I’d been riding in I happened to glance down at the rear tire. My eye caught a glimpse of something that looked like a pink pig’s tail sticking out from under the tire. I bent down slowly to get a closer look. Damn, that looked an awful lot like det (detonation) cord.
It was det cord.
Shit. I froze. “Hey, Brad?” I called out to one of our EOD guys. “You want to take a look at this? It looks a whole lot like det cord to me.”
Det cord looks much like an M-80 fuse, only bigger. I’d done enough demolitions to know what I was looking at, but when you have an expert handy it never hurts to get a second opinion. This was a situation where it would certainly pay to be sure.
Brad stepped over cautiously to where I stood and angled in close for a good look. “Holy shit,” he murmured, and he looked around at the other guys. “Okay,” he said quietly, “everybody slowly step back.”
Everybody slowly stepped back.
Brad called over his buddy Steve, who slipped over to Brad’s side to become part of our tableau. Brad and Steve
very slowly, very carefully, checked the whole scene out, inch by freaking inch. I heard Brad let his breath out, and it was not from relief. It was from the need to maintain maximum control, which you can’t do effectively when you’re holding your breath. “Okay, guys,” he said, “here’s the situation. We have parked directly on top of an antitank mine. Which happens to be tied into three antipersonnel mines.”
It did not take a degree in physics or expertise in demolition specs to know that the shit our Humvee was sitting on was enough to blow us all to Pakistan.
We stood in place while Brad and Steve dismantled the whole mess, wondering how on earth we hadn’t set the explosives off. I mean, we didn’t just lightly brush the damn thing. We parked a frigging Humvee on it. Why were we still standing here, left alive to tell the tale? Not that we were complaining any—but it was weird not knowing. Was the thing a dud, or were we just ridiculously lucky?
Our answer came soon enough. Brad came over to us after they’d finished their work and said, “Whoever set this thing up missed one step. They didn’t set up the drum correctly. As a result, the pressure plate didn’t rotate properly and failed to initiate the charge. Which, all things considered, was a good thing.”
We couldn’t argue with that. Without that one human error, the thing would have gone off and taken all of us with it—us in our Humvees with no armor and no doors.
I still have a picture of that little det cord, and with it, another picture of me standing in that same area initiating a charge later that day on some of our captured ordnance, and in this one you can see a bombed-out blue minivan in the background. We’ll come back to that second snapshot again, because that blue minivan took on new significance to me about three months later.
Here was the really freaky thing about our close encounter of the nearly fatal kind: Only a few days beforehand, an EOD team had been out there and cleared the whole area. So how was it we’d just driven in and parked our Humvee square on top of an economy-sized Armageddon, when the whole place had already been scoured and pronounced clean? There were only two possibilities. Either our EOD guys had completely missed this series of mines, which was extremely unlikely—or else someone was out there surveilling the area and had slipped in and booby-trapped the place after the EOD guys left, figuring that we’d be back. I was pretty sure it was the latter.
Three months later, I would be 100 percent sure of it.
NINE
IN THE CAVES
Shortly after New Year’s Day we learned we would be going on a mission up north to the province of Khost, a few hundred miles northeast of Kandahar and nestled in the mountains right up against the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, home to the infamous Zhawar Kili cave complex, the location where Osama bin Laden is said to have officially declared war on America in 1998.
The second-largest known training camp in Afghanistan, Zhawar Kili was an elaborate training complex of caves and tunnels built into the mountainside. The Soviets had used it during their occupation in the eighties, and the Taliban had now reclaimed it as their own. This place was a key strategic flash point. The entire area was riddled with caves and tunnels and was one of the prime regions where al Qaeda and Taliban leadership was believed to have fled after we heavily bombed their cave hideouts at Tora Bora, some fifty miles to the north. It was also a major corridor to Pakistan.
Hard information on this cave complex was sketchy at best. We knew there was a base camp consisting of three large tunnels, with an unknown number of rooms, caves, and subtunnels. We also knew there was an extensive system of caves and tunnels built into the mountain ridge above the base camp. This cave complex was a frigging warren, encompassing arms depots, communications, hotel-like residences, a mosque, a kitchen, a medical facility—an entire terrorist town drilled into the face of a mountain, with room for some five hundred people at a time.
The place was also a fortress, and damn near invincible. The Afghan government had tried to take it when it was held by mujahideen (rebels) and failed. The Soviets were slightly more successful, but only slightly: They bombed the hell out of the place and forced everyone inside to flee, then went in and planted mines everywhere. Three weeks later the mujahideen were inside again and back in business. The site had been hit by U.S. air strikes shortly after hostilities commenced on October 7, but to little effect. In order to really nail this place, we needed people on the ground exploring the caves themselves on foot and coming back with the specific coordinates that would allow precision strikes.
That’s where we came in.
Our air forces were going to launch a massive air strike, pounding the area with JDAMs (Joint Direct Attack Munition) to soften the target. Our SEAL platoon would go in the following day to bat cleanup.
This was not originally meant to be our mission. The Zhawar Kili site was too large and complicated for a single platoon. Originally it had been allocated to a larger team of Green Berets, but a recent incident had thrown a wrench into those plans. The unit that had been slated for Zhawar Kili was sent on a direct action mission to take a Taliban-controlled compound. Someone got jumpy, and they ended up killing virtually everyone in the place—who all turned out to be not Taliban at all but members of Hamid Karzai’s anti-Taliban forces. It was an unmitigated disaster. You never heard about it in the media, and you probably never will; it was not exactly something the military wanted to publicize. The ODA (Operational Detachment Alpha) team that had screwed up was sent home, and now the task of combing through the remains of Zhawar Kili fell to us.
Our platoon of sixteen was going to need some reinforcements, so our numbers were appropriately goosed with the addition of a ground unit of about twenty marines. These were young guys, in excellent shape, well trained, and highly motivated. I’ve always been impressed with the Marine Corps and their military bearing. When it comes to standing watch, these guys don’t mess around. With marines, from the top officers right down to the basic foot soldier, you know you’re dealing with high-caliber personnel. You definitely sleep well at night knowing these guys are on the perimeter.
We also had our two Air Force CCTs, Brad and Eric, who were damn good at their job and always seemed to have close air support at their fingertips the moment we needed it, and our two EOD guys, Brad and Steve, who had saved our asses at Tarnak Farms and were obviously strong assets. For this mission we were also assigned two guys from the FBI to provide forensic expertise and DNA-sample collection from enemy gravesites, one more from the Counterterrorist Intelligence Center (CTIC), and a chemical weapons expert from the army’s Chemical Reconnaissance Detachment (CRD), for their expertise in combing through whatever we would find out there.
The plan was for the marines to insert with us, then split off and set up a defensive perimeter higher up on the ridge, making sure our backs were covered while we combed through the dozens of caves and tunnels, doing BDA (bomb damage assessment) and documenting whatever was left behind. We would get into the valley, spend eight to ten hours on-site once we made our way to the cave complex, then extract and report back. It would be a solid one-day op, no vehicles, all on foot. Twelve hours from start to finish, max.
At least, that was the plan.
* * *
Less than an hour before we were to board the C-130 to fly up to Bagram Air Base for a few days of final briefing and prep, we got an addition to our team. A lieutenant commander, Commander Smith, joined us and said, “Hey, guys, I’m going out there with you.” Actually, that was a slight oversimplification. He was not just coming with us, he was coming with us as ground forces commander.
Now, Commander Smith was an intelligent officer and a nice guy, but he had very little situational awareness here. At the time he was an officer with one of the SDV (SEAL Delivery Vehicle) teams, and the guys in the delivery vehicle community drove underwater subs; it was a completely different sort of mission. He hadn’t been operational in some time and was rotating over here to get some theater experience. Jumping in to join our mission at the last mi
nute was fine, but in my opinion, he’d been out of the game too long to be in charge of tactical decisions on the ground.
A few of us glanced at each other warily. He could see the apprehension in our eyes and quickly reassured us. “Don’t worry, guys, I know Cassidy’s in charge. I won’t get into the decision making here. I’m not going to get in your shit.” Okay. Let’s hope not, I thought.
We resumed with our preboard preparations—and sure enough, within five minutes Commander Smith was in our shit, big-time. He told us he wanted us to go in fully suited up, Kevlar body armor and all.
I raised my hand. “Look, sir, none of us are acclimated to working at 7,000 to 12,000 feet elevation. We’re already carrying a pretty heavy load.” In addition to our weapons, we would also be carrying breachers and explosives, in case we had to blow ordnance or breach our way into a cave. “Plus we have to hump 12 klicks just to get to where the op starts,” I added. The place was likely crawling with hostiles, so rather than insert directly at the mouth of the cave complex, we were going to start out a good distance away, under the cover of darkness, and then hump the distance silently to our destination. “We’re in mountain country, and if we overload ourselves we’re going to be a wreck by the time we get to the site.”
This was not a direct action mission, where you fast rope in and boom! you’re on target. We were going to be patrolling 12 kilometers out—that’s about 7.5 miles. When you carry a heavy load for that long, your situational awareness starts to shrink. At first you keep yourself acutely tuned to everything around you, but after a while your attention starts to flag. Soon you’re just staring at the next footprint in front of you. I’d seen it before. In GOLF platoon and sniper school I’d learned that for a reconnaissance mission like this, it makes a lot more sense to pack light and go fast.