More than one CSAR pilot didn’t hesitate to say that PJs are crazy, which, in all fairness, brings to mind the old saw about the pot calling the kettle black. Certainly Ethridge doesn’t think they’re nuts. “I don’t know. A lot of us are itching to do stuff and help people, and we’re always hanging around, waiting. I don’t feel crazy. None of the guys do. We just do things that other people think are crazy.” And they do them for roughly three thousand dollars a month, about the same as paramedics in most large American cities earn.
Crazy or not, the men of the 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum, New York, were thankful the PJs and Air Force CSAR crews were around. The battle on that hill between Al Qaeda forces and the company of eighty-six men from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry, raged for eighteen hours. They took twenty-eight casualties—a third of the force—before helicopters were sent in at midnight to withdraw the Americans and the Aussie special forces.
The Aussie SAS troops were especially candid in their comments about the failure of the American commanders in Bagram to properly plan and support the mission. Interviewed by the Queensland, Australia, Courier Mail, Warrant Officer P and SAS Signaler Jock W said they believe that if they had not been evacuated at midnight, the entire force would have been wiped out the next day. There was no question in their minds that without the support of the AC-130 Spectre gunships, they would never have survived to be evacuated. The obvious problem is that the Spectres fly only at night, and the ground force endured constant enemy fire throughout the day, until the sun set and it was safe for the Americans to send in the low-flying gunships.
While the Aussies claim that heavy casualties were inflicted on the enemy in this opening battle of Anaconda, they were clearly annoyed that “coalition intelligence miscalculated badly in selecting a landing zone on a flat, open plateau, within range of the enemy who controlled the high ground.” They also insist there were problems relying on American air power before the insertion of the 10th Mountain Division company. In the Courier Mail interview with the SAS troops, the claim was made that during the initial phase of Operation Anaconda, American aircraft “dropped just ten percent of the bombs allocated to reduce enemy positions prior to the company assault, whilst those bombs that were dropped seemingly had little effect.”
Finally, being unaffected by the U.S. SOCOM’s restrictions on discussing Operation Anaconda with the media, the Aussies expressed considerable annoyance that “just a few hours before the company was inserted they were told that enemy numbers might be higher than expected, with estimated enemy strength jumping from one hundred to five hundred, and even then they turned out to be more. Indeed some estimates assert that as many as one thousand Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters dug in to fight in the Shah-e-Kot.”
Remarkably—or perhaps not so, considering that the U.S. military and its civilian leadership has a tradition that dates back to Vietnam of trying to convince outsiders that defeat is really victory by another name—Army Lt. Col. David Gray, chief of operations for all coalition forces participating in Operation Anaconda, told the Associated Press that this aspect of the battle was an intelligence coup. “While it was very scary and fierce for the men, it helped us back here realize where the enemy was concentrated. . . . We found the enemy the first day.”
Perhaps it was out of respect to the men who were in it, their families back home, and the Air Force CSAR crews who risked their lives to bring out the casualties that Gray didn’t call it “recon by casualty.” That kind of extrapolation of the combat doctrine of “reconnaissance by fire”—meaning they send in infantrymen to blast the hell out of an area to see if anyone shoots back—might have been too straightforward.
Perhaps, too, if Lieutenant Colonel Gray had any combat experience at all, he would have had the fortitude to call a screwup a screwup, as the battle-hardened Aussies had no difficulty doing. But Gray’s Army résumé indicates that the closest he’s come to combat was serving as a brigade S3 (operations officer) with the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, a location where there’s been no intense enemy contact since December 7, 1941. He has, however, earned a Ph.D. from Ohio State University and served as an assistant professor in the Department of History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Gray’s comment to the press begs several questions: Did the command at Bagram have enough quality intelligence to launch Anaconda? What was the command doing with the intelligence reports they’d received from coalition observation posts? Aussie SAS with American Air Force combat controllers Jim Hotaling, Jessie Fleener, and other CCTs were positioned to observe enemy troop movements in the valley, and special-operations teams with Navy SEALs who had been sent into the Shah-e-Kot valley well before Anaconda began were also gathering intelligence. For Lieutenant Colonel Gray to say that putting a company of the 10th Mountain Division on the low ground directly below enemy guns was a legitimate way to find out where the enemy was hiding reveals a callous disregard for the lives of American fighting forces. What he should have said is, “Sorry, we fucked up.”
To those outside the military it provides an inkling that even with the many aerial surveillance tools, such as the unmanned Predator, that were supposed to help revolutionize the way war is fought, the generals still needed to rely on ground troops going nose-to-nose with the enemy to really find out what was going on. And this battle was just the opening chapter in Operation Anaconda.
Predator unmanned aerial vehicle armed with a Hellfire missile (U.S. Air Force photo)
CHAPTER 10
KIA
MARCH 4, 2002
When he arrived at Bagram before the Ditka 03 mission, SrA Jason Cunningham was suffering the normal anxieties of a young man about to face the ultimate test of his manhood. But the twenty-six-year-old PJ’s apprehension was less about how he’d perform under fire than whether his training in trauma care had prepared him well enough to do the job when the surgeons could be hours away and a soldier’s life might be in his hands and his alone. It wasn’t long after he moved into the spartan accommodations the PJs had commandeered in the base of the airfield tower that he wandered down the hall and began hanging out with the FST team.
The surgeon in charge was Maj. Brian Burlingame, and he likened Jason to the kid brother who hangs around making a pest of himself when your friends are over. “He just wanted to hang around all the time, like any little brother. He just won’t leave. Eventually your friends start liking him, and he becomes part of the group. That’s the way he was. He hung around and became part of the group.”
The doctor got to know Jason very well, on both a personal and professional level. “His motives were absolutely pure, and his desire to take care of wounded guys was pure. It wasn’t because he wanted to be a guy with a bunch of medals on his chest or have others say great things about him for a long time. He just wanted to do that job, ’cause he felt strongly about it. I can’t say that about every single doctor I meet, every single nurse I meet, every single PJ I meet. In that regard, I don’t want to say ‘unique,’ but certainly a cut above in terms of his motivation and his desires and his purity. The smartest PJ I’ve ever seen? No. The most technically proficient one? No. But I found him to be the most ready to do whatever it takes to take care of somebody. By ‘whatever it takes,’ I mean, both putting himself in danger and then, before getting to that point, finding out his knowledge deficits and correcting them. And then finding where he had ability to improve and what was out there new and highspeed that he could put in his aid bag.”
The fact that Cunningham suddenly found himself part of a special-tactics team assigned to the Special Operations Command QRF at Bagram was unusual. Coming out of the PJ school, he was assigned to the 38th Rescue Squadron at Moody AFB, Georgia. That’s an Air Combat Command unit in the Big Blue Air Force. Blue has always been concerned about having its own CSAR capability to go in and snatch downed fighter pilots from the enemy’s grasp. It’s a mission that certainly proved itself in Vietnam.
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But when the Special Operations Command was created in 1987 to boost the morale and effectiveness of U.S. special forces, the Air Force began funneling more support to AFSOC, the service’s own Air Force Special Operations Command, creating special-tactics teams with their own aircraft and mission.
Some in the Air Force will say, off the record, that elements of AFSOC have “gone native,” meaning they’ve begun thinking of themselves as no longer part of the Big Blue Air Force, but their own branch of service. They think their mission is more important, more au courant, more difficult, and, of course, more secret than Big Blue’s. One example: AFSOC crews flying MC- 130 aircraft and helicopters over Afghanistan are told not to provide media interviewers with their full names, ostensibly because the enemy might track down their families, but aircrews flying 130s and helos in ACC CSAR units over precisely the same territory are allowed to fully identify themselves.
The AFSOC public affairs officer, Maj. Karen Finn, actually said that ACC and Air National Guard PJs could not possibly qualify to do the same missions to which AFSOC pararescuemen are assigned. That, of course, begs the question, what was Jason Cunningham doing with the QRF at Bagram? The answer is quite simple. Even though AFSOC seems to collectively disassociate itself from the regular Air Force, it still needs Blue to create PJs and CCTs; it doesn’t have its own pipeline. And because Blue won’t lower its standards, and only recently got an influx of cash to begin advertising for pararescue recruits, it hasn’t been able to mint PJs fast enough to meet the demand. So in the early months of Operation Enduring Freedom, AFSOC discovered that it was rapidly burning out its own PJs, and issued a call for help. They brought in Reservists from the 123rd Special Tactics Squadron at Louisville, which was where Keary Miller and Pat Malone came from. They also borrowed PJs from ACC units, among them the 38th Rescue Squadron, which was how Cunningham found himself in Bagram hanging out in the FST operating room, learning the latest techniques that he could adapt to delivering trauma care to the far-forward injured soldier.
Dr. Burlingame says, “Some guys ask for knowledge because they want you to see how smart they are. Some guys ask for knowledge because they want to see if you’re a smart guy, because they have to depend on you. So it’s like a test. Jason asked about knowledge for the sake of having it and for the sake of using it to improve his ability to take care of soldiers.”
Working out of Bagram, Jason Cunningham, his PJ teammate Keary Miller, and combat controller Gabe Brown were now a special-tactics team “embedded” CSAR, riding Army Chinooks belonging to the 160th SOAR(A) Night Stalkers. But Cunningham, Miller, and Brown were Air Force—and not the Air Force guys who habitually trained with and had gotten to know the Rangers. The Rangers had mission rehearsals with their PJs and CCTs on how to offload a Chinook their way, how to conduct CSAR their way. They knew each other’s faces and names. They trusted their Air Force guys. But not the Air Force.
No one in combat trusts an institution. Not even when ordered to. American fighting units in Vietnam were most often less than thrilled to find themselves on joint operations with their South Vietnamese counterparts. And the distrust isn’t necessarily of another country’s forces. Consider that when the Army’s 101st Airborne Division arrived in Afghanistan, they flew a platoon of troopers to Khowst in order to take control of the airfield. When the platoon landed, one of their Chinooks rolled in the LZ and several people were hurt. As soon as that happened, an order came down through the task force controlling the Army Rangers that none of their soldiers was to set foot on 101st aircraft, no matter what. They didn’t trust the 101st pilots to do the job.
The problem also exists at the so-called “coalition forces” level as well. Canadian ground forces are not likely to be thrilled to hear that close air support will be coming from U.S. Air Force jets, not after one of their units was mistaken for enemy troops firing on American jets, and bombed, resulting in the loss of four lives. In the opening battles of Operation Anaconda, the tough Australian SAS soldiers who were married up with U.S. units precisely because they knew how to fight and survive in that kind of terrain and weather were hardly enamored of U.S. Army planners. These were the same Army planners who put them on the ground at an Al Qaeda ambush point precisely where Russian units were obliterated by mujahideen fighters a little over a decade earlier.
What it comes down to is that while the paperwork and the press releases may have called Anaconda a “joint” operation, that’s a top-down description, not bottom-up. In combat, bottom-up is all that counts.
It’s one thing for Special Operations Command to tout the joint nature of its operations; it’s another to have the guys actually doing the missions believe in it. In the case of Operation Enduring Freedom, it seems clear that SOCOM, CENTCOM, and the Department of Defense have done a much better job of selling the concept externally than internally. Even in Bagram, the headquarters of the commander of regular Army units on the ground, Maj. Gen. Franklin L. “Buster” Hagenbeck, who was responsible for planning Operation Anaconda, wasn’t colocated with the headquarters of Air Force Brig. Gen. Gregory Trebon, who was commander of special-ops troops including the Army Ranger units, the Navy SEAL reconnaissance teams, and the observation posts manned by Australian coalition forces and American combat controllers. A liaison officer who reported to Trebon sat near Hagenbeck. Since Trebon has refused requests for interviews, there’s no way of knowing whether he deigned to have a representative of the Army general in his command post.
What this separation of powers meant is that Trebon didn’t hear Army communications from the battle, and Hagenbeck didn’t hear special operators, and he certainly didn’t hear radio communication from the Chinook helicopters that were being targeted by Al Qaeda.
The lack of interservice or even intraservice trust influenced and undermined the decisions made about CSAR as well, with the attitude of some units being, “Those are our own guys; we’ll go in and get them out.” One source, speaking not-for-attribution a year after Anaconda, says, “Command and control of CSAR was messed up from the get-go, and I don’t know if it’s fixed yet.” Even a command like the Joint Search and Rescue Center at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, may be “joint” down to a certain level, but then things fall apart, because generally units just don’t want to get involved with—read “trust”—other units.
Consider the Air Combat Command CSAR units flying HC-130s out of Jacobabad and K-2, and HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters out of K-2 and Kandahar. These units take orders from the JSRC, who tells them when to launch, where to go, and often tries to tell them what they can do when they get there. But if the unit whose troops need rescuing doesn’t bring the JSRC into the loop, the best-trained Combat Search and Rescue people in the American military will just burn holes in the sky or camp at a FARP. Given the parallel systems of command and control, it’s very easy for a ground unit not to talk to an Air Force rescue unit, even when the ground unit has an Air Force TACP or CCT with it. That’s because those guys aren’t talking to rescue. They’re either talking to the people overhead in AWACs or J-STAR aircraft who control air support assets already in the air, or directly to the pilots flying the planes that will deliver bombs and bullets to keep bad guys at bay.
On March 3, 2002, the second day of Operation Anaconda, General Hagenbeck regrouped and repositioned his forces, most often on higher ground, to more effectively continue the fight with Al Qaeda who were presumed not to have fled the area. While the infantry was being moved about, the bombing campaign was accelerated, including the first-time use of a two-thousand-pound thermobaric bomb that was designed to pulverize the interior of caves and tunnels that were too deep for the occupants to be affected by conventional bombs. (While acknowledging the use of the controversial new munition, which some say violates international warfare treaties, the American command did not indicate whether the bomb had hit its target.)
That night, another pair of 66th Rescue Squadron Pave Hawk helicopters flying out of Texaco FARP made
a spectacular pickup of three injured American soldiers, coming in under fire from mortars and machine guns. The mission would earn the flight lead, Lieutenant Thomas Cahill, a Silver Star, and his crewmembers the Distinguished Flying Cross. The PJs on that mission were T.Sgt. Patrick Harding and SrA Michael Flores flying with Cahill, and S.Sgts. Caleb Ethridge and Bob Roberts flying with Capt. Jeremy Turner.
Early on the morning of Monday, March 4, a Chinook carrying a SEAL recon team was ordered to put the special-forces unit onto Takur Ghar mountain. The plan was to do the infiltration under cover of darkness, with enough time to allow them to climb to the summit unobserved. In Bagram, General Hagenbeck explained that “it was a dominating piece of terrain, and if we had observation up there, it gave us a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree look across several trails as well as Shah-e-Kot.”
Is it conceivable that no one believed that the well-equipped Al Qaeda forces had the same thought about that “dominating piece of terrain”—only sooner? Did no one on the general staff study the history of the valley before committing American forces? Did the general really believe that bull and bluster could beat the enemy? This was an enemy that had already proved itself not to be your garden-variety towelheads, to use the vernacular that got tossed around after 9/11 that made it easier to demonize them, as had nasty nicknames like gooks, slopes, dinks, zipperheads, japs, nips, and krauts in earlier conflicts.
None Braver Page 32