Navy Seals

by Couch, Dick

  A few minutes later, all was quiet. It would be another hour before they had good light on the valley floor, and there was a lot to do before that time. It was a clear night, with no moon and no breeze. A burned-sulfur smell still hung in the air from the JDAMs and TLAMs. Seniff and the others were curious as to what the air and missile strikes had accomplished.

  The fifty-man Marine security detachment was headed up by Captain Lou Taladega. His gunnery sergeant had helped to liberate Kuwait City as a young lance corporal during the Gulf War. There were seventeen SEALs in the platoon, including Seniff. In addition to SEALs and Marines, there were two Air Force sergeants from the Combat Control Teams, two FBI agents, two Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians, an Army chem-bio specialist, and a Navy linguist who would serve as an interpreter. One of the Bureau agents was a former Navy SEAL with experience on the FBI Hostage Rescue Team. The other was a former Marine Corps infantry officer. Both were officially along for evidentiary purposes, not combat duty, but either one could be an experienced gun in the fight if it came to that.

  The operation itself was to be a quick in-and-out sweep of the valley. They all carried a day’s ration of water and a PowerBar or two. All wore body armor, and their weapons and ammunition loads were tailored for a fast-moving assault. This was a large, heavily armed, multidimensional SWAT team. The SEALs who were to check out the caves were prepared for close-quarter battle. The Marines would provide security. Their duties included setting out sniper positions for overwatch of the men working on the valley floor and to serve as a blocking force. They were also prepared for urban battle and light infantry work as needed. Close-quarters battle or close-quarters combat usually refers to fighting inside buildings or inside the compartments of a ship, while urban battle has to do with fighting outside in a city or town—street fighting.

  The terrain was more than rugged. The floor of the valley was desert hardpan, very much like Camp Billy Machen, the SEAL training facility near the Chocolate Mountains in Southern California. The sides were steep, boulder strewn, and cut by deep wadis. The rim of the canyon sides averaged some fifteen hundred to a thousand feet above the valley floor, a nice perch for Taliban or al-Qaeda snipers. Seniff spoke into the boom mike of his radio.

  “Lou, you there?”

  “Right here, sir.”

  A SEAL of Taladega’s rank would call a SEAL lieutenant commander by his first name, but Lou Taladega was not a SEAL; he was all Marine.

  “Get moving. Get your guys to the high ground as soon as you can.”

  “Roger that, sir. We’re on it.” There was a quiet rustling as Taladega’s Marines left the insertion perimeter and began to pick their way up the rocky slopes that led from the valley floor.

  Seniff soon heard a voice in his headset: “Bulldog One in place.” The Marine element on his right was in position. A few minutes later, he heard, “Bulldog Two in place.” Seniff breathed a sigh of relief; his overwatch Marines were in position. He found his SEAL platoon commander.

  “Okay, Chris, take us out of here.” With a hand signal from his platoon officer, the SEAL platoon chief put the platoon of SEALs into a loose diamond formation and they began to move in a northwesterly direction up the valley. The non-SEALs arrayed themselves with Seniff and Cassidy within the security of the moving diamond. Once on the move, they began to check out the cave entrances that lined the walls of the valley floor. The TLAM and JDAM strikes had done little or nothing to the infrastructure of the caves. There were craters at many of the cave mouths, but no significant damage to any of the entrances. They reached the head of the valley an hour after they had inserted and began the process of working their way back, carefully moving into the caves as they went. These were not just holes dug into the steep valley sides; they were sophisticated, interconnected tunnel complexes reinforced with steel I-beams and brickwork. The tunnels were several hundred yards deep, and there were more than seventy of them. The SEALs quickly searched caves while the Marines scrambled along the rough high ground to provide security. In many ways, their job was more difficult than that of the search elements moving on the valley floor.

  Back on the valley floor, the search teams couldn’t believe what they were finding. “It was incredible,” Seniff reported. “There were thousands of tons of ammunition and explosives—thousands of tons! There were tanks, artillery, and antiaircraft guns. There was enough weaponry to outfit an army.”

  Each cave had to be checked carefully, for there was the ever-present threat of an ambush or booby traps. It was tedious, time-consuming, dangerous work.

  “We were on a search-and-destroy mission,” explained one of the SEALs, “but there was no way we were going to destroy that much munitions and equipment. We were scheduled to be on the ground for twelve hours and we barely had a hundred pounds of C-4 explosive with us.”

  The force moved methodically down the valley, trying to get a rough inventory of what they were finding. It was hard to catalog it all; there were thousands of crates of ammunition and explosives—literally millions of pounds of ordnance. Some of the caves held classrooms and training facilities. There were jail cells and safe-house accommodations that included passports and freshly laundered clothes. The caves were wired with electric lights, but there was no power. The search teams had only their flashlights.

  “This was a classic terrorist-training and terror-export operation on a scale we couldn’t imagine,” said one of the FBI agents. “Al-Qaeda terrorists could be trained, equipped, given false documentation, and filtered across the Pakistani border. Who knows how many terrorist bombers were trained here and sent against targets in the West?”

  As the teams moved from cave to cave down the valley, Taladega’s Marines leapfrogged along the high ground on either side to provide security. Communications were marginal, but everyone now knew this was the biggest al-Qaeda base and terrorist training facility ever found. By late afternoon, they arrived at the extraction point near the end of the valley, just a few miles from the Pakistani border. Most of them had been up for more than thirty-six hours. They were tired and hungry, and it was getting colder.

  “Camel Packer, this is K-Bar actual. You there, Todd?”

  “Go ahead, sir.” Even over the encrypted transmission, Seniff could recognize Harward’s voice.

  “New orders from higher command, Todd. They want you guys to stay in there for another day.”

  “Say again, K-Bar!” Seniff was shouting now. His radio batteries were low, and he wanted to make sure he had understood his commander. He knew the inbound extraction helos were only five minutes out.

  “I say again, we want you to stay there. Can you safely go to ground and stay overnight, over?”

  “Roger, wait one.” Seniff quickly turned to Taladega. “Lou, can we dig in here for the night and hold?”

  “There’s a small abandoned village on the rim of the valley. We could take shelter there and set a good defensive perimeter. But we better get on it. It’ll be dark soon, and it’s going to get cold.”

  “How’re your guys holding up?” Seniff was well aware that the Marines had been through a really tough scramble across the valley walls, some of them at altitudes over 8,500 feet.

  “They’re a pretty tired bunch, sir,” Taladega reported, “but they’re Marines. We’ll make it happen.”

  Seniff glanced at the others. Everyone was excited with the day’s find, but they were all weary. There were seventy-four American souls in that valley besides himself, and he was responsible for them.

  “K-Bar, this is Camel Packer. Roger your last. We will move out from here to the security of the village on the east rim of the valley. Any chance of a resupply, over?”

  “Negative, Camel Packer. We’ll get you at first light tomorrow morning, so you’ll have to make do with what you have, over.”

  Which is nothing, Seniff thought. “Understood, K-Bar. We’re moving to the village and will check in when we go to ground for the night.”

  “Good copy,
Todd, and good luck. K-Bar out.”

  In the fading light, the American force made its way up to the little village on the rim of the valley. It was more a collection of huts than a village, one- and two-room dwellings made of stone and mud. The bombs and cruise missiles of the previous evening had done little to the cave infrastructure in the valley, but they had frightened all the locals away. They had fled, and the village was abandoned. The only inhabitants were chickens, a half dozen goats, and two cows. Weary after a hurried two-mile trek from the valley floor and an elevation gain of twelve hundred feet, the assault force filed into the village for the night.

  Seniff huddled with his two element commanders. “We have a good perimeter here,” Taladega reported. “We have a third of my Marines on guard duty and the others resting. They’re pretty tired, so we’ll rotate them every two hours. Either the sergeant or myself will be on the perimeter at all times.”

  “Thanks, Lou,” Seniff replied. “Your guys did one helluva job today. Any activity out there?”

  “Nothing close by, but we can see them signaling with lights in the hills to the west and north. They know we’re here, and they’re talking about it.”

  “I’m going to have a look around,” Seniff said to Cassidy and Taladega. “Let me know if you see or hear anything. I don’t want any of those gomers [the name SEALs often used for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters] slipping back in here and surprising us.”

  Back in the tactical operations center at Kandahar, Bob Harward was reading Seniff’s report. “Holy shit,” he exclaimed when he got to Seniff’s estimate of the enemy stores they had found. Harward turned to his watch officer. “Get Todd’s report out to the SOC [Rear Admiral Bert Calland, special operations commander for General Tommy Franks’s Central Command] right away.”

  Word was racing through CENTCOM that the Zhawar Kili complex was by far the largest al-Qaeda arms cache and training base found to date. Predator drones and P-3 Navy surveillance aircraft now had the valley under constant surveillance. The following morning, Lieutenant Chris Cassidy led a squad of SEALs along with a few Marines and an Air Force combat controller over a ridge to the west of Zhawar Kili. As they left the valley rim, they spotted a group of some thirty armed men moving below them. It appeared that al-Qaeda was starting to get organized and wanted their valley back.

  “They were shuffling along in a loose formation,” as a platoon SEAL described it. “Most of them had weapons that they carried draped over their shoulders and some had bandoliers of ammunition. They were turned out in mountain garb—robes, turbans, and sandals. We watched them with binoculars for a while before they saw us. A few of them fired at us, but we were well out of effective range. We had position on them and most of us were just itching to get a few rounds downrange. The lieutenant [Cassidy] just turns to the air controller and says, ‘Take care of them.’ By now they are only three or four hundred yards away.”

  “So our controller breaks out his map, gets on the radio, and raises a section of Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles. They talk for a moment, and then he turns to the rest of us. ‘It’s on the way,’ he says. ‘Look the other way and keep your mouth open; there’ll be a pretty good shock wave.’ A few seconds later, four five-hundred pounders land right in the middle of those guys. The concussions felt like someone was punching you in the kidneys. We went down to the strike area and there was nothing but sandals, body parts, and a few mangled weapons. They’d simply been erased.”

  There was some reluctance on the part of senior commanders to believe that the SEALs could have found that quantity of stores and munitions in such a remote mountain location. But once digital images of the stockpiles in the Zhawar Kili began arriving through the satellite communications (SATCOM) link, the upper-echelon commanders became believers. Seniff was then able to get all the JDAM smart bombs he wanted.

  “It all came through Pakistan,” Seniff explained of the huge quantity of stores and munitions. “We found heavy vehicle tire tracks leading from the Pakistani border into the valley. They brought it in by the semitrailer load. This stuff must have come in through the port of Karachi, then up through western Pakistan, each warlord taking his fee as it passed through his district. Borders don’t mean too much here. Clan boundaries and smuggling routes do. We could see the border guards from the lower end of the valley. No one can tell me they didn’t know what was going on there.” While the search crews toiled in the caves, Cassidy and his reinforced SEAL squad continued to range out from the valley cave complex, looking for caches of al-Qaeda material and documents. By the seventh day and into the eighth, the Americans in the Zhawar Kili Valley were fully acclimatized and used to hard living—sleeping on the floor and cooking over an open fire. They couldn’t get any dirtier, and all but the Marines were wearing local gear.

  Throughout the operation the Air Force combat controllers rained JDAMs into the valley. On the seventh day, Harward informed the SEALs they would be pulled out the following day and told them to make all preparations for leaving the Zhawar Kili Valley and redeploying back to Task Force K-Bar at Kandahar. That afternoon, the SEALs and EOD technicians set out to blow the last cave the old-fashioned way—with C-4. They had found barrels of diesel oil and a small quantity of gasoline in this cave. They divided their C-4 into three charges and primed them with time fuse and blasting caps. The first two charges detonated with little or no effect, and seemed like firecrackers compared to the 2,000-pound JDAMs. When the third charge went, the ground began to move . . . and kept moving. It seems that there were fuel and ammunition stores buried well inside the cave, munitions they hadn’t found—until now. All night long the rumbling continued as more cached stores and fuel fed the ongoing explosion. With this final demolition, all the caves in the Zhawar Kili Valley had been demolished or collapsed, and the weaponry hid in the wadis and ravines destroyed.

  “We all left that valley ten or fifteen pounds lighter than we entered it,” Todd Seniff reported. “I’d say we worked twenty hours a day and never slept for more than a two-hour stretch. We were dirty, hungry, cold, or hot most of our waking hours. It was wonderful. Had they taken us from the Zhawar Kili Valley and dropped us into another valley, we were good to go. There is absolutely nothing like being given an important and difficult mission and seeing your men accomplish that mission.”

  On the morning of January 14, two Marine MH-60s landed to collect a third of Seniff’s force. That afternoon they returned to collect the last of the SEALs and the Marines, and one well-fed and totally rehabilitated Afghan dog. The SEALs’ coming ashore for the first strategic-reconnaissance missions in the heart of Afghanistan was a large step for the maritime component of America’s special operations forces. So were the many initial platoon-sized, direct-action missions conducted by Task Force K-Bar. But the mission into the Zhawar Kili Valley was as unique as it was propitious. Never in their history had SEALs conducted an airborne assault that far inland. Never before had they operated with a ground force that large, let alone provided the command and control on the ground for such a force. Zhawar Kili laid the groundwork for the larger multi-unit, multi-service operations that the SEALs would conduct in Iraq.

  “We learned a lot at Zhawar Kili,” SEAL Lieutenant Commander Todd Seniff recalled. “We directed some 404,000 pounds of ordnance into that valley. Not since Vietnam have that many bombs been dropped into that small of an area, and never that much so close to friendly troops. We did it routinely. As far as I know, it was the largest ground-controlled aerial bombardment in history. This was probably the largest and most important al-Qaeda training and resupply facility in Afghanistan, bigger than Tora Bora. We closed it down barely four months after the September 11 attacks. I’m proud of the role I was able to play in this operation. What made it happen was the way the ground force worked together: the Marines, the SEALs, the CCTs, the Bureau [FBI] agents—all of them. Every man contributed. We sweated it out during the day and froze our butts off at night, but we made it happen.”

  “Zhawar
Kili was a turning point for us,” recalled Captain Bob Harward. “It showed that even with a large, complex objective we could plan and execute the mission in a very narrow time window. And once on the ground, we could adapt to various contingencies as they arose. After Zhawar Kili, the joint command structure was much more willing to give us the job and tell us to simply do it, rather than having us reporting back up the chain every step of the way for direction and permission. It all seems routine now, but not back then. Think about it: SEALs in the mountains running direct-action and strategic-reconnaissance missions. No one thought we could do it, let alone do it better than anyone else.”

  Todd Seniff is now Commander of Naval Special Warfare Group One at the Naval Amphibious Base at Coronado, California. SEAL Teams One, Three, Five, and Seven report direction to Seniff and Group One. Chris Cassidy was selected by NASA to be an astronaut in May 2004, two years after he took part in the SEALs’ Zhawar Kili caves operation. From 2006 through 2008, he served as Capsule Commander (CAPCOM) in the Mission Control Center. During his NASA career, Cassidy completed six spacewalks, totaling 31 hours, 14 minutes, and accumulated 182 days in space. He is currently in charge of the extravehicular activity, or spacewalk, branch within the Astronaut Office.

  ON MARCH 4, 2002, U.S. Navy SEAL Neil Roberts was all alone, fighting for his life near the top of a snow-covered mountain in Afghanistan.

  Operation Anaconda was one of the biggest ground attacks of the initial Afghan campaign, and it was an attempt to clear entrenched al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Neil Roberts and his teammates made up a reconnaissance element that was trying to insert on a nearly ten-thousand-foot mountaintop in support of a joint special operations mission to oust al-Qaeda and Taliban forces from the Shah-i-Kot Valley. While trying to land near the summit, the MH-47E Chinook helicopter took enemy RPG and small-arms fire.