Getting out of the situation this way meant that the team was able to continue its mission by hiding in a different place and monitoring Al Qaeda activity for a few more days. Finally, they called in other allied forces that took what Hots euphemistically calls “direct action” while his team exfiltrated on helicopters with their ATVs.
While talking about that particular mission, Hotaling laughs when he notes that an off-the-shelf, handheld GPS device he purchased in an outdoor adventure store before leaving the States was what he used to determine their precise location so the observation aircraft could find them. It’s not the only piece of civilian gear that he and other special tactics troops in OEF are using. Since his unit is based in the state of Washington and does a lot of extreme-cold-weather and mountain rescues, they went over with crates of civilian Gore-Tex parkas; fleece tops, pants, and hats; snowshoes; climbing gear; climbing boots; even technologically advanced socks; as well as multiple pairs of the cold-weather gloves of choice, Windstoppers by North Face. Long gone are the days when servicemen in combat are restricted to wearing what Uncle Sam issues, making inoperative the line that had long been a ready weapon in the verbal arsenal of grizzled Army sergeants: “Soldier, if Uncle Sam wanted you to have a [insert object of desire here—anything from beard to earmuffs to wife], he would have issued you one.” In fact, special tactics and pararescue units routinely and legitimately use government funds to buy specialty items off the shelf in civilian stores or from catalogs, if they believe that doing so will benefit the mission.
For four months working out of Kandahar, Hotaling continued doing a variety of operations with special-ops teams from a number of coalition countries. They did strategic reconnaissance missions, direct-action missions, and sensitive-site exploitations, which he describes as “looking at caves or command and control facilities in an effort to exploit any information that was left behind.” The missions might last a week, with a few days in between before he’d be sent out again.
One of those missions got named “the Walk of Death” after his team was assigned to locate and monitor a terrorist training facility. That mission required a climb straight up a cliff in order to get into an observation post without being detected by local villagers.
Some of them were carrying packs weighing up to 140 pounds. “It’s not the X Games or anything like that, where you’ve got safeties and ropes and little helmets and things like this. It is do or die. It is a tough thing to do, but it’s what you have to do in war.” After getting into position, Hotaling was able to call in air strikes that destroyed what turned out to be the second largest Al Qaeda training camp in the country. On another mission they captured one of the top ten most wanted Taliban leaders.
“The most striking thing that I take out of working with coalition forces is that they care just as much as we did about what happened on 9/11, so that was very comforting. It wasn’t like they’re just here ’cause their country sent ’em, or it was just a nice show of cooperation. They cared. And they know it could’ve easily been in their country, or that it’s eventually going to be in their country.”
When there was a break in assignments, it was easy for Hotaling to hitch a ride to the larger American facility at Bagram, about five hundred miles to the northeast and just twenty-seven miles north of the Afghan capital, Kabul. Seven thousand Americans were managing to turn what had been a hotly contested former Soviet airfield into home. Sprinkled with land mines and unexploded ordnance by the Soviets, Bagram hardly qualified as an R&R destination, but for Hots, it was where the living was easy. “Bagram was hooked up for me. They had hot water. They had tons of food. Sometimes they had Cokes and Mountain Dews. They had a television. I lived under a roof. Man, it was easy livin’. So, when I went to Bagram, they used to laugh at me, because I would eat all their food, steal all their Coke, and watch movies from dawn to dusk and have a great time there.”
Hotaling also was reunited at Bagram with a longtime friend, combat controller John Chapman, with whom he’d been stationed at Pope AFB, North Carolina, for five and a half years. Chappie had been on an overseas deployment when Hots got out of the active-duty Air Force, so the two hadn’t seen each other for nearly six or seven years until they met up at Bagram.
“We were both fully bearded, with long hippie hair and just looking all crazy. It was a big reunion with him. Hugs and kisses and just a sloppy, teary reunion for a few hours.”
And then it was back to Kandahar, where another coalition mission awaited, this one to a position near Takur Ghar mountain overlooking the Shah-e-Kot valley in eastern Afghanistan. Hots, carrying his usual 120-pound rucksack, and his Aussie SASR teammates were infiltrated onto a mountaintop for what was planned to be a five-day mission that the world would come to know as Operation Anaconda. From the beginning, he knew this one was going to be different.
The infiltration itself went fine, but the enemy knew that they and another observation team were there—somewhere. Al Qaeda forces tried to get Hotaling’s team to expose themselves by walking mortar rounds through the area where they suspected his group was hiding.
“As the mortars bracketed our position—even if they landed close—it didn’t matter, because they were looking for us to scurry and expose where we were at. We weren’t going to do that; we weren’t going to fall into that trap.”
Enemy mortar shells falling within two hundred meters of their position weren’t the only ordnance coming their way. They also had to worry about friendly fire. “We had various bombs that happened to either fall short, or some bombs—their ground proximity [fuses] would go off in the air as another bomb passed near it. So you had air bursts right over your head.
“I had the feeling it was just a matter of time before something might’ve happened. There were several times when the enemy basically came up [the mountain] on our positions. We had a sister OP that was approximately seven hundred meters from us. The enemy came up and the other observation post actually engaged in firefights at that point to where we were able to stay out of it.”
They’d packed for a five-day mission. By day four they realized they were going to run out of food long before they could get off the mountaintop. A resupply airdrop was out of the question because it would expose their position. So they went into survival mode, rationing their food and making snow cones with flavored drink mix to ease the hunger pangs. When he ran out of battery power for the radios, someone from the nearby OP crawled to him in the middle of the night, delivering his own supply so Hots could keep calling in close air support.
As Hotaling tells the story of what turned out to be fourteen days on the mountain, there’s no attempt at bravado. It’s just what he and others like him have trained to do, and now they’re being called upon to do it. Was there fear? Of course.
“You use it as a motivator. You work through fear. There’s not much of a difference between a lot of what we do in training and in war. And so you learn to control that fear. You’d be a liar and fool if you said you weren’t fearful every time you were in enemy territory. Obviously you are, but you just gotta work fast, use it to keep your senses well tuned.”
Then Hotaling explains precisely what he means. “Each guy is obviously very different. But what I think is, the more fearful I am, the more I’m not in sensory overload, but my senses are completely tuned to what the job is and everything else disappears.” Hots says some people, like himself, are able to “focus in,” while others “focus out and get real berserky.” For him, “when things really start going crazy, I end up being able to focus on the job and I’m able to communicate, whether it’s to aircraft or to the commanders in the rear who need to know what’s going on and what needs to happen.”
He’s also acutely aware that the mission is his mission. He’s the CCT, the man with the radios who can reach out to combat controllers with units in the valley below, or by satellite to Central Command Headquarters in Tampa, or to an assortment of points, both moving and static, in between. The five special t
actics men accompanying him have but one primary job—to protect Hotaling so he can stay on the radio. True, at least some of the others are trained to call in close air support, but the pilots dropping the bombs and firing miniguns or cannons at the enemy are Americans; there’s a concern that even though the coalition forces he’s with speak English, in the heat of combat their Aussie accent may not be understood by pilots. So it’s Hotaling’s job to stay on the radios.
For a covert mission like this one, “field sanitation” becomes a quaint notion in the military manual of the same name. “You go from your first few days to literally just putting it back in your MRE bags and things like that, to where you lie on the ground and you go in a bottle when you can’t even stand up.” Toward the end, when coalition forces controlled the area, they could actually go a little ways away and take care of business behind a bush. “That,” says Hots, “was easy livin’.”
“People don’t realize that you come back from a situation like that, and I know this isn’t a glamorous thing, but you’re smelling like urine, smelling like crap, because a lot of times you literally have to do that in your pants. That’s just the way it is. That’s never in the movies. That’s not Hollywood.”
With temperatures ranging from a high of forty during the day to ten below at night, Hotaling worked for three days and three nights without rest, relying on his teammates to spot both targets and friendly forces. “They’re calling out coordinates; he’s checking them on the map; I double-check them; he double-checks me; I call it in and work the close air support. So it’s a huge team effort. Maybe one or two are sleeping, and you just keep going in that rotation.”
Both Hotaling’s team, and another Aussie squad that included U.S. Air Force S.Sgt. Jessie Fleener as its CCT, were put in place in advance of what turned out to be the biggest battle of the war in Afghanistan, called Operation Anaconda after the snake that squeezes its prey till it suffocates. Anaconda was supposed to last no more than five days, but ended up running almost three weeks.
What they were trying to do was help keep the enemy from overrunning the American units that had become trapped on a ridge on the eastern side of the Shah-e-Kot valley, approximately two miles away and downslope from the position where Hots and his fellow observers were dug in. The trapped Ranger units were on Takur Ghar Mountain near Objective Ginger, a mountain pass that was a main supply route and an Al Qaeda stronghold that U.S. Army intelligence says had been built up over the last twenty years with caches of arms and ammunition.
Operation Anaconda began on March 2—it had been delayed two days because of inclement weather—when elements of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division and 101st Airborne Division were airlifted into the Shah-e-Kot valley. The plan was to seal the Al Qaeda escape routes from the valley, and then slowly squeeze the Taliban fighters who were caught in the trap. Unfortunately, as every combat arms officer learns, sometimes painfully, the plan is not the mission and the map is not the terrain.
The Afghans who were supposed to block the west end of the valley were pushed back by mortar attacks. Their convoy was confused with Al Qaeda vehicles and mistakenly targeted by a Spectre gunship, killing an American, Special Forces CWO Stanley L. Harriman. Bad weather delayed the arrival of the 101st Airborne Division units that were supposed to block escape routes to the north. They were more than twelve hours late getting into position.
But what really confounded the American military planners was that the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces opted not to run, but to stay and fight. Lt. Col. David Gray, the chief of operations for all coalition forces participating in Anaconda, which included soldiers from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway, said, “We looked at a combination of hit-and-run tactics, and the possibility they would stay and fight for a couple of days, and then exfiltrate the area. Then we looked at what we considered the most dangerous course of action, which was that the enemy would try to stay and fight American soldiers toe-to-toe. In this particular case, he decided to stay and fight.”
According to an Associated Press analysis of Operation Anaconda based largely on information provided by Lieutenant Colonel Gray, within two hours of landing on the morning of March 2, American infantrymen had secured six of the seven mountain passes on the eastern ridgeline above the valley, often after brief but intense firefights. It was at the seventh pass, code-named Ginger Valley, where things didn’t go nearly as planned.
In an intelligence failure reminiscent of Vietnam, helicopters dropped eighty-six soldiers from the 10th Mountain nearly on top of a large Al Qaeda position. They immediately took withering mortar and small-arms fire. Despite pounding by Apache attack helicopters—several of which were hit and forced from the fight—AC-130 Spectre gunships, and B-52 bombers, the enemy fighters continued to slam the Americans.
In an interview with the Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia) published on June 17, 2002, two Australian SASR veterans of Operation Anaconda said they protected themselves and the mounting number of casualties by digging foxholes with their bare hands and combat knives.
“I was lying on my back in my hole looking up and the tracer fire was crisscrossing like the laser alarm systems you see in the bank vault of a movie,” an SASR officer said.
A 45-year-old father of two from Perth, SASR Warrant Officer Clint P [per SASR policy, the newspaper couldn’t disclose his full name], said he knew he was in trouble soon after arriving by chopper. As he ran from the Chinook, the smoke of a rocket-propelled grenade [RPG] was trailing straight at him. He stopped and as he instinctively threw up his left arm, he watched the grenade pass beneath it and hit the ground about 2m behind him. It didn’t explode.
The time was 6.45am on Saturday, March 2, 2002, on the opening day of . . . the Operation Anaconda. “We hadn’t moved 100 metres from the choppers when we started taking heavy fire from machine guns and RPGs. It was relentless,” he said in an interview at the SASRs Perth headquarters. “There was no cover and 82 people were looking for some. We didn’t understand what was out there.”
“The strategy,” according to the Courier Mail SASR sources, “during the opening phase of Operation Anaconda had been to block a large concentration of enemy fighters in the Shah-i-Kot Valley by massing troops at either end.” Yet due to intelligence failures and the fog of war, unbeknown to the American planners hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters had anticipated a Coalition assault on the Shah-i-Kot and had fled into the mountains nearby. Consequently the enemy came to control positions within shooting distance of the landing zone selected for the American company.
The enemy was dug in above the snow line on the eastern ridge, yet thanks to the high angle of fire no one was hit during the opening salvos. The only available cover was a small depression, with a dry creek bed running through the depression. The two SASR men hit the ground and began digging in with their bare hands, with mortar rounds exploding around them. Things got worse when the SASR soldiers noticed a force of about 26 enemy fighters on the opposite ridge line. “We killed some of them but then started taking fire from that side as well,” Warrant Officer P was quoted as saying. Air strikes were subsequently called in but the Apache helicopters were forced back after taking heavy volumes of fire. B-52 bombers later hammered the enemy positions, yet as Warrant Officer P continued, “Before the dust had settled they were out shooting at us again. They were even waving at us . . . it was a little disappointing.” By the end of the afternoon the creek bed had been completely dug out to protect a large and growing number of wounded. “They were packed in like sardines. If a mortar had landed in there it would have been carnage.”
At Kandahar, air crews from the 66th Expeditionary Rescue Squadron and PJs from the 38th ERQS were spending a lot of time in the Army tactical operations center listening to the war going on. The TOC was a tent filled with radios, computers, and classified Internet systems—but no live video from Predator drones—all of which seemed to be pumping out bad news.
Before lunch, they know that the company fro
m the 10th Mountain has been ambushed. By late afternoon, the PJs learn that there are at least twelve casualties, and they get their first call. “You guys are Alert Five. You’re going to escort an Apache Killer Spade 76 up to Texaco FARP.”
A FARP is a forward arming and refueling point, a ground position where a Chinook with a rubber fuel bladder in the cargo compartment has been positioned to refuel helicopters close to the action. It’s a more efficient way of giving them gas than midair refueling in this type of situation. Texaco FARP is just a “brown nothing” at approximately seven-thousand-feet elevation. There is a small village to the west, mountains to the east. With the Army pulling security, an Air Force combat controller directing traffic, and a couple of Chinook “fat cows” giving gas, the field has become nearly as crowded as New York’s La Guardia Airport on a Friday afternoon.
The local villagers, who probably haven’t seen helicopters there since the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, are riding up on bicycles or in cars to watch the excitement. They are being told to go back to their homes by one of the Afghan interpreters brought in by the Americans, who is speaking to the villagers through a portable loudspeaker system.
As soon as the HH-60G helicopters arrive following a two-hour flight from Kandahar, they learn that the Apache they’ve guided up there is to replace one that has been shot up during the initial assault, and they watch as he loads up with Hellfire rockets and takes off for the battle. Then the combat search and rescue teams settle in to wait alongside Army medevac helos and special-ops Chinooks belonging to the QRF, the quick reaction force. The powers that be won’t let them go in to evacuate the casualties. The word is that the battle raging fifteen minutes’ flying time away is still too hot for rotary-winged aircraft, and the likelihood is that they won’t be allowed to go in until after dark.
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