Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  ISR—Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

  JSOC—Joint Special Operations Command, the two-star headquarters at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, in charge of the classified U.S. special operations forces such as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta (i.e., Delta Force). Major General Dell Dailey commanded JSOC during the war in Afghanistan.

  Kalashnikov—The name given to any of the AK series of weapons (such as the AK-47) designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov.

  LZ—Landing zone (for a helicopter). Strictly, this is called a PZ (pickup zone) when it refers to a spot at which troops are waiting for a helicopter to collect them.

  MBITR—Multiband Intra/Inter Team Radio, a handheld radio used by the U.S. military for communication over short distances.

  MC-130—The Combat Talon, the special operations version of the venerable C-130 Hercules, equipped with in-flight refueling equipment, terrain-following and terrain-avoidance radar, as well as inertial and Global Positioning System satellite-guided navigation systems.

  Mi-17—The Soviet-designed “Hip” transport helicopter used by both sides in the Afghan civil war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, as well as by the Central Intelligence Agency.

  NCO—Noncommissioned officer, an enlisted soldier of the rank of corporal or above (in the Army); all sergeants are, by definition, NCOs.

  NSA—National Security Agency; headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, the NSA is the largest of the U.S. intelligence agencies. Its job is to intercept foreign communications while protecting U.S. communications.

  ODA—Operational Detachment Alpha, the 12-man (ideally) A-team around which the U.S. Army’s Special Forces units are organized.

  P-3—The U.S. Navy’s Orion turboprop aircraft, originally designed for tracking submarines, the Orion has spawned several high-tech offshoots, such as the EP-3, which can intercept communications and film action on the ground from high altitude.

  Rakkasans—The name given to the 187th Infantry Regiment by the Japanese after World War II. The regiment was a paratroop unit and Rakkasan loosely translates as “falling umbrella.” Three battalions of the regiment made up the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) at the time of Anaconda.

  RP—Release point, the predetermined location during a helicopter mission at which pilots know that by flying in a certain direction at a certain speed for a given amount of time they will arrive at their LZ.

  RPG-7—The standard rocket-propelled grenade weapon designed by the Soviet Union and used by guerrilla forces the world over. It consists of a reusable launcher and a grenade with a high-explosive warhead.

  RTO—Radio-telephone operator; the soldier whose job it is to man the radio.

  SCIF—Secure, compartmented intelligence facility; the part of a military base at which the most sensitive intelligence issues are discussed.

  SEALs—The Navy’s Sea-Air-Land commandos.

  SF—Special Forces, the Army’s unconventional warfare troops, not to be confused with special operations forces.

  SIGINT—Signals intelligence, i.e. intelligence derived from intercepting radio, telephone, computer or other communications.

  SOF—Special operations forces; in the U.S. military, this consists of all the forces under the command of U.S. Special Operations Command, including Army Special Forces, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and the Air Force’s MC-130 and AC-130 units and special tactics squadrons.

  Texas 14—The code name given to Operational Detachment Alpha 594, the Special Forces A-team led by Captain Glenn Thomas.

  TF—Task force; the designation given to any military unit that has been specially configured for a particular mission.

  TOC—Tactical operations center, the field headquarters for a military unit; in joint (i.e., multiservice) task forces, this is sometimes referred to as the joint operations center, or JOC.

  UAV—Unmanned aerial vehicle, a drone that is remotely piloted.

  VTC—Video-teleconference. A meeting at which participants may be on separate continents, but can see each other via a system of video cameras and monitors at each location.

  PROLOGUE

  THE first gray fingers of dawn were gripping the mountaintops as the three helicopters hurtled between the snowcapped peaks. Packed like sardines inside each of the ungainly Chinooks were over forty combat-laden soldiers, and the aircraft’s twin sets of rotor blades wilted visibly under the strain, making a deeper whoompah! whoompah! whoompah! sound than normal as they bludgeoned the thin mountain air into submission. Two minutes behind them another three Chinooks followed the same route, hurdling saddles and sweeping through passes.

  On each helicopter, cramped soldiers sat facing inward on red nylon seats along the sides of the cabin. A third row sat between them on the floor facing the tail ramp. Wedged among a welter of rucksacks, rifles, mortars, and machine guns, and further constrained by their bulky webbing, helmets, and body armor, few soldiers could do more than turn their heads a few inches from side to side. The din of the engines made conversation impossible, and many soldiers sheltered under blankets the aircrew had handed out as shields against the icy blasts blowing in through the open side doors and tail ramps.

  The harsh, jagged terrain of eastern Afghanistan sped past a couple of hundred feet below, an alien landscape dotted with mud-brick villages little changed since Alexander’s hoplites marauded through the region 2,300 years previously. Those soldiers close enough to see out of one of the Chinooks’ few windows peered down to spy villagers gazing up in awe and astonishment at the war machines thundering overhead. It was as if the sky belonged to a different century than the earth below. A few Pashtun tribesmen hazarded a wave at the aircraft. Others pointed and gaped, and one woman threw herself back into her home through a window, such was her haste to escape the scrutiny of the twenty-first century warriors above her.

  Sergeant Carl Moore, the lead Chinook’s left door gunner, glanced over his shoulder into the aircraft’s interior and saw a sea of faces, most so young they wouldn’t seem out of place crowding a high school corridor. The average age of the men in the back of the helicopter was twenty years old. But these teens and twenty-somethings weren’t on their way to class, but to a trial by fire at 8,000 feet. Nestled in a mountain valley somewhere ahead, their commanders had told them, were hundreds of enemy fighters. It was going to be the job of the soldiers on the helicopters to capture or kill them before they could escape to Pakistan or foment rebellion against the American-installed government inside Afghanistan. When word of the mission had started to leak out a few days previously, the young Americans were excited. They had grown tired of the tedious duty of guarding air bases, which was all most had been doing since they arrived months before in central Asia. But now they were minutes away from combat. For all but a handful, it would be their first taste of “real-world” action, and intimations of their own mortality naturally intruded. Moore saw fear on several faces.

  His counterpart manning the right door gun, Sergeant Eddie Wahl, also looked back inside the aircraft and saw a range of emotions on the young faces. One soldier stared blankly ahead. Another nervously checked and rechecked his weapon and ammo pouches, making sure everything he would need in a fight was instantly accessible.

  Specialist Matthew Edwards, a clean-cut twenty-four-year-old armed with a light machine gun called the Squad Automatic Weapon, or SAW, kept his eye on his squad leader, Staff Sergeant Chris Harry. As a private in the 75th Ranger Regiment, Harry had parachuted into a fierce firefight at Rio Hato airfield during the 1989 invasion of Panama. That experience made him the only combat veteran among the infantry in the Chinook. Edwards, a lean, thoughtful soldier with a finance degree from Virginia Tech, tried to take his cue from Harry’s demeanor. The squad leader didn’t let him down. When Moore and Wahl test-fired their M60 machine guns halfway through the flight, several troops glanced up, alarmed. But Harry smiled broadly and looked around as if to say Her
e we go, boys; don’t be nervous, this is what we train for. Edwards felt a surge of confidence. We’re ready for this, he thought.

  Private First Class Jason Wilson, a rascal-faced nineteen-year-old Oklahoman so short and skinny that his platoon sergeant referred to him as “an elf,” allowed himself to be rocked to sleep by the vibrations. His SAW leaned between his knees, barrel pointing down so in case of an accidental discharge the bullet would shoot harmlessly through the floor, not into the rotor blades churning overhead. Several of Wilson’s comrades also dozed fitfully, a common reaction of soldiers flying toward combat. These troops were “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne Division, and their predecessors in that storied unit had slumbered in much the same way in the transports that flew across the English Channel in the early hours of June 6, 1944, or, more recently, when Black Hawk helicopters ferried them into battle in the 1991 Gulf War.

  Wilson and his buddies had been in grade school when the United States and its allies crushed the Republican Guard and the rest of the Iraqi military in that conflict. Since then, the “peace dividend” defense cuts of the 1990s had almost halved the Army that drove Saddam Hussein’s legions from the field. As training funds dried up and peacekeeping missions proliferated, combat readiness suffered. The privates, specialists, and buck sergeants in the Chinooks swooping through the mountains belonged to what their elders disparagingly referred to as “the Nintendo generation.” They came of age in the era of Internet chat rooms, gangsta rap, and grunge. Senior NCOs in the Army that Wilson joined complained that recruits at the turn of the twenty-first century showed up at basic training softer and less fit than their predecessors. As the United States lamented the passing of “The Greatest Generation” that secured victory in World War II, many Americans—and many enemies of America—questioned whether this latest generation of Americans had the stomach for a fight.

  NOT all the passengers aboard that first Chinook bore the stamp of fresh-faced youth. Seated toward the front were Lieutenant Colonel “Chip” Preysler and Command Sergeant Major Mark Nielsen. Preysler, forty-one, the senior officer on the helicopter and the infantrymen’s battalion commander, spent the flight glued to his radio, monitoring the brigade command net. Nielsen was his wiry sergeant major straight out of central casting—five feet eight inches and 169 pounds of weather-beaten rawhide toughened by fifteen years in the Ranger Regiment. Sergeant First Class Anthony Koch, thirty-four, the platoon sergeant of the infantrymen on the Chinook, thought the forty-eight-year-old Nielsen looked grizzled enough to have been in the War of 1812. But like Koch and Preysler, the sergeant major had yet to hear a shot fired in anger.

  In the cockpit Chief Warrant Officer 3 Brett Blair, the pilot in command, removed his night-vision goggles as the light of dawn spread across the horizon. His adrenalin started pumping in earnest. When they had taken off, the weather brief had been “Clear, blue, and twenty-two,” aviator talk for perfect flying weather. But now the Chinooks were squeezing through a 100-foot gap between a bank of fog beneath them and layer of cloud above. Hesitating, the three Chinooks circled as the clouds seemed to close in. Hell, we’re gonna screw the whole thing up because we can’t get in, Blair thought.

  Then, scanning the thin strip of pale sky between the fog and the clouds, he glimpsed a white-capped mountain range in the distance. It was a moment of decision for the nineteen-year veteran. Blair got on the VHF radio to the other two birds in his serial. “Follow me, we’re going through,” he said. Pulling the thrust lever up with his left hand while using his right to push the cyclic lever, Blair put the Chinook into a rapid right turn. The other helicopters followed suit.

  They flew on, dead east, and the skies began to clear. Blair’s instincts had been sound. He picked up speed and lost altitude, taking the helicopter down to just thirty feet above the ground, hugging the terrain. About an hour after taking off from Bagram air base, he made a final sharp turn to the north as he closed on the valley. The helicopters behind him fell in trail. Now he was just a couple of kilometers from the release point, the predetermined location at which pilots are free to drop their maps because they know that by flying in a certain direction for a given amount of time at a certain speed, they will arrive at their landing zones. Over the intercom Blair told the crew in the back that they were ten minutes out from the LZ. In a sequence repeated on each of the Chinooks, Moore and Wahl turned to the infantrymen closest to them. “Ten minutes!” they shouted, holding all ten fingers up simultaneously in case the troops couldn’t hear above the noise of the engines.

  The word got passed quickly down the helicopter, each soldier tapping the grunt next to him on the shoulder and repeating the “Ten minutes!” shout while showing all ten fingers. The warning galvanized the troops. Those who had been huddled under blankets threw them off. No one was sleeping now. There was a distinct change in the atmosphere aboard the Chinook as the infantrymen’s restlessness to escape the cramped confines of the aircraft mingled with their anxiety about what they would encounter on the ground. Soldiers fastened and refastened the straps on their Kevlar helmets and cinched their assault packs a little tighter so they wouldn’t lose anything if they had to run. To Moore, the troops’ faces reflected their realization that Oh, shit, we’re really doing this.

  As if to underline the proximity of danger, the lingering aroma of high-explosive bombs dropped on suspected Al Qaida positions near the LZs a few minutes previously now filled the helicopter. One young soldier looked confused by the acrid smell filling his nostrils. “That’s just the Air Force doing its job!” Nielsen yelled at him.

  As Blair coaxed and wrestled the helicopter between craggy outcrops, a voice crackled over the radio with alarming news. Special Forces troops near the valley had come under attack, and a “litter urgent” casualty required evacuation by helicopter ASAP. Litter urgent. The words resonated in the cockpits of all six Chinooks. It was an anodyne Army phrase that referred to a casualty so badly wounded that he had to be evacuated within the hour to stand a chance of survival. This wasn’t good. The infantry weren’t even on the ground yet, and already a friendly soldier’s life was ebbing away somewhere ahead of and below them. It was the first sign anyone on the Chinooks had that events weren’t going completely to plan.

  The release point was in a draw just to the east of a ridgeline that jutted into the southern end of the valley. Despite the fog, the Chinooks hit the RP right on time. As they flew into the valley, the ground dropped away before them. The pilots began sweeping the terrain a couple of miles ahead with their eyes, searching for their LZs. By now Blair was flying along what aviators call “the nap of the earth,” scudding just fifteen to twenty feet above the ground at the base of the valley’s eastern ridgeline. A few hundred meters to the west lay the mud-colored villages in the center of the valley. To American ears, these villages had odd, exotic-sounding names—Serkhankhel, Babulkhel, Zerki Kale—but the troops knew them simply as Objective Remington.

  Looking out of his open window across the terraced fields toward the villages, Moore swiveled his M60 machine gun back and forth. These were the most dangerous moments of the flight. His body tensed as he watched and waited for the sudden appearance of tracers arcing out of the village, or even worse, the small orange fireball of an incoming rocket-propelled grenade. Across the cabin the part-Cherokee, part-French-Canadian Wahl did likewise, searching for any sign of the enemy in the snow and rocks of the mountainside that stretched up for several thousand feet. Here and there cave mouths appeared as black gashes in the rock face. But there was no sign of life. Nothing, it seemed, was stirring. Maybe, just maybe, the air assault had achieved surprise after all.

  IN fact, there were at least thirteen fighters hidden in the crags and crevices up ahead who knew the Chinooks were coming and were eagerly awaiting their arrival. But these men were all Americans, members of the U.S. military’s most elite units. In the dead of night they had ridden on all-terrain vehicles and marched over frozen ridgelines through thigh-deep
snow to emerge unseen in the heart of the enemy’s last remaining stronghold in Afghanistan. They had already saved the operation from catastrophe once and would do so again in the days ahead. But few of the men sitting in the helicopters would ever realize the debt they owed to these secretive athlete-warriors who embodied their commander’s credo of “audacity, audacity, and audacity.”

  WITH five, three, and two minutes to go, the air crew repeated the “x minutes out” warning, each alert ratcheting the tension up another notch inside the helicopter. As the minutes wound down, Captain Frank Baltazar, the troops’ popular company commander, insisted on repeatedly high-fiving the soldier beside him, Specialist Dan Chapman. The twenty-one-year-old team leader understood this to be his commander’s way of dealing with his nerves. Other soldiers made hasty, last-minute adjustments to their equipment.

  At the three-minute mark the troops stopped checking their gear and focused their gaze on the rear of the helicopter, each mentally planning his route off the bird and going over in his mind what actions he was supposed to take immediately upon hitting the ground. A few got a kick out of the patch the Chinook’s rear crew chief, Sergeant Mike Cifers, had Velcroed to the back of his helmet. “Fun Meter,” it said, with a little arrow pointing all the way to the right. Maximum fun. Yeah, right.

  At “Two minutes!” Koch barked a simple yet profound order: “Lock and load!” Simple, because it only required the troops to chamber a round in their M4 assault rifles, which they each did instantly with a series of metallic kerr-chunks. Profound, because the order is only given when combat may be imminent.

  After careful analysis of maps and satellite photographs, the planners had given Blair an LZ next to a walled compound just north of a gully that ran west into the valley from the eastern ridgeline. But maps of the valley were notoriously unreliable, and satellite photos could be deceptive. A couple of days previously the CIA had flown a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter over the area, filming the valley floor. Blair and the other pilots had watched the video, but it still hadn’t been clear enough to tell him whether or not the spot picked out for his LZ was really suitable. To minimize the chance of a helicopter being shot down, the Chinook pilots were told that under no conditions were they to double back and fly south—they were never to fly over the same piece of terrain twice. Therefore the pilots had agreed with the infantry officers that they would put the troops down at “the first sure thing” close to their assigned LZs.