Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  THE 10th Mountain Division had existed in its present form only since 1985. Despite the division’s name, its troops no longer laid claim to special expertise in mountain warfare. The division traced its heritage back to World War II, when it was a mountain warfare unit that distinguished itself in Italy in 1945. Disbanded that November, the division was reactivated in 1948 as a training organization called 10th Infantry Division. Inactivated again in 1958, the 10th did not reappear on the active rolls until the mid-1980s. The Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 prompted the Army to design a “light infantry” division that could deploy quickly to crisis spots. One of four divisions activated or converted to the new design was the 10th, officially designated 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry).

  The 10th survived the cuts at the end of the Cold War and had the dubious privilege of being the most deployed Army division in the 1990s, serving in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. (The deployments exerted a disproportionate strain on the 10th because, alone among the Army’s remaining ten divisions, it had only two maneuver brigades, instead of the standard three.) In November 2001, when duty again came calling to Fort Drum, the division was already stretched thin by peacekeeping commitments long forgotten by most Americans. The 10th had about half its division headquarters plus a brigade combat team in Kosovo, a battalion task force in Bosnia, another battalion task force in the Sinai, and, of course, 1-87 already in Uzbekistan. But Hagenbeck and most of his principal staff remained available for deployment, and it was to them, rather than a more intact division like the 101st, that the Army turned to establish the CFLCC (Forward) headquarters at K2. This decision guaranteed that if the headquarters dispatched to Uzbekistan ever moved to Afghanistan to command combat operations, it would have few troops of its own in the fight.

  WHEN Mikolashek, the CFLCC commander, decided to put a forward headquarters in K2, he did so fully aware that the headquarters the Army gave him might move to Afghanistan and oversee combat operations. For that reason he insisted the headquarters should be commanded by a general. He did not specifically request a division headquarters, but when the Army’s decision-makers examined the request, they realized that a division command post most closely matched Mikolashek’s requirements.

  Once Forces Command decided a division headquarters was needed, the choice of division became a process of elimination. Forces Command oversaw only the Army’s six divisions in the continental United States, not the four overseas. Of these six the three heavy (i.e., mechanized or armored) divisions were not considered suitable for Afghanistan’s terrain, and anyway, the Army wanted to hold them in reserve in case of a war against North Korea or Iraq. That left the three light divisions in XVIII Airborne Corps: 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne (Air Assault), and 10th Mountain (Light Infantry). The 82nd was disregarded because of its mission to maintain a brigade as a national reserve, ready to deploy on very short notice. That left a straight choice between the 101st and 10th Mountain. The 101st’s combination of helicopter-provided mobility and light infantry strength should have made it the obvious choice for Afghanistan. Unlike 10th Mountain, whose troops were scattered around the world, the 101st was at home (except for the brigade returning from Kosovo and the battalion in Pakistan) and being put through an intensive training regimen by its commander, Major General Dick Cody, a former commander of Delta’s aviation squadron who knew most of the special ops commanders in Afghanistan. The Army could have deployed Cody’s headquarters to K2, knowing that if the headquarters later moved to Afghanistan to command combat operations, there would be three infantry brigades at Fort Campbell just waiting to be called forward to go to war with their division commander. But it was not clear to those making the decisions in the United States that the headquarters they picked to go to K2 would ever command a combat operation in Afghanistan. And they knew that once committed to Afghanistan, the 101st, a unique division, would not be available in case trouble flared elsewhere. “The 101st is on every war plan there is,” said Major General Julian Burns, Forces Command’s deputy chief of staff for operations.

  The generals and colonels at CENTCOM and CFLCC were fully aware of the 101st’s unique capabilities. In the weeks after September 11, they had worked on a plan called “Desert Viper” to put the 101st in a country close enough to Afghanistan that it could be used in the war that America was only just beginning to wage there. “We were hoping to get the 101st in theater,” Mikolashek said. His planners considered positioning the division at airfields in either Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan, but ruled both out as “politically unfeasible,” he said. A third option was basing the division in a remote desert airfield in Oman. This appealed because Oman was close enough to allow for flights into Afghanistan without having to negotiate overflight rights with any country other than Pakistan, but also provided easy access to other likely Al Qaida hiding places, like Yemen and the Horn of Africa. “We didn’t know where Al Qaida was,” Mikolashek said. “We thought we might have to go in and do an Afghanistan-like operation in Somalia.”

  Another plan, for which the 101st was considered “the force of choice,” according to a senior officer, was for a limited war with Iraq. The response of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership to September 11 had been to agitate for an immediate attack against Iraq, despite the lack of evidence linking Iraq to the terrorist attacks and the fact that a war in Afghanistan would strain the military’s airlift capability all by itself. President George W. Bush rebuffed those initial urgings from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. But in October the Pentagon asked CFLCC to draw up a plan to seize the southern oil fields in Iraq. Mikolashek’s planners put together a plan involving two brigades of 1st Cavalry Division—an armored division at Fort Hood, Texas, that already had a brigade in Kuwait—and at least one brigade of the 101st. Mikolashek said the operation might have been launched as “a fairly early preemptive” attack if the United States received any intelligence indicating that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was considering an attack on Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

  Burns was unaware of the plan to seize the oilfields, which was never executed, but others in the decision-making chain at CFLCC, Central Command, Joint Forces Command, the Joint Staff, and the Department of the Army surely were. Every senior officer knew his civilian bosses might order a war in Iraq sooner rather than later. “In the minds at the Defense Department and in the CinC’s [i.e., Franks’s] staff, that was a real possibility,” recalled Warren Edwards, Mikolashek’s deputy commanding general for operations. “There was clearly a thought process that was being worked at the highest levels that said, ‘We may want to do something else, somewhere, and a piece of that will probably be the 101st.’” One senior special operations officer who served in Afghanistan said Central Command was distracted from the war in Afghanistan by the need to plan for a “general war” in Iraq, which was originally scheduled for much earlier than March 2003, when it actually occurred. “It was supposed to go in October [2002],” he said. “That was the plan, that’s what everybody was working for…. That’s what CENTCOM was focused on. They believed that it was done in Afghanistan and that the 10th came in to do this civil goodwill, start to rebuild things.”

  At the recommendation of XVIII Airborne Corps commander Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, the Army passed on the 101st and instead selected Hagenbeck’s headquarters—the most undermanned, stretched, and stressed division headquarters in the Army—to deploy to K2 in preparation for a move into Afghanistan. Asked if Forces Command was told that the 101st should be kept on the shelf for Iraq, Burns replied: “That was certainly implied in the message that we got to deploy the 10th Mountain.” Burns and General John Hendrix, head of Forces Command, were frustrated that a division as obviously suited to Afghanistan as the 101st was being left on the shelf. “That was our frustration, but we were told continue to train,” Burns said.

  Again it bears pointing out that senior U.S. commanders had completely misread the situation in Afghanistan. T
hey were already patting themselves on the back for a job well done and looking ahead to the next war, despite the fact that the Al Qaida leadership remained at large in Afghanistan and in command of hundreds, probably thousands, of well-trained, highly motivated fighters. The United States faced a stark choice: to deploy conventional forces into eastern Afghanistan and destroy those enemies or to allow them to escape and foment violence against America and her allies for years to come. But neither the opportunity—nor the risk of not seizing it—appeared uppermost in the minds of senior leaders who already had one eye on Baghdad. Shortly after the Mountain headquarters deployed to K2, Burns again asked Joint Forces Command and CFLCC, “What is the mission set for them?” “The answer I got back,” he said, “was that they were going to return in early February because this war was over.”

  AS they would a few weeks later with the Rakkasans, CENTCOM’s restrictions bit deeply into the force 10th Mountain was preparing to deploy. Franks’s planners sent a message that all that was needed was a force smaller than a division tactical command post (a forward headquarters of about sixty-five to seventy people usually commanded by a brigadier general). By the time this message reached Fort Drum, it had been translated into an informal directive to deploy only fifty to sixty troops. The 10th Mountain staff knew such a skeletal headquarters would never be able to maintain round-the-clock operations, and they managed to negotiate a limit of about 160 troops. Roughly a third of these were augmentees from XVIII Airborne Corps and Forces Command, replacing division staffers deployed in the Balkans. The new troops—many of whom were assigned to Mountain’s intelligence section—were good, professional soldiers. But for Hagenbeck, being forced to deploy with almost a third of his headquarters filled with unfamiliar faces was hardly an auspicious start.

  ON February 14 Hagenbeck’s staff assumed control of planning for Operation Anaconda. That was not a signal to give up for the Dagger and Rakkasan planners, whose work was already far advanced, but it was now the Mountain staff’s job to oversee their planning and to add the oomph their larger headquarters could provide. The Mountain officers took to their new mission with gusto. A couple of weeks previously, they had been anticipating their return to snow-covered upstate New York. Now they were in charge of what promised to be “the culminating point” of the war. Their headquarters finally was getting a chance to prove its worth. They were determined not to waste the opportunity.

  The draft plan for Anaconda had fixed D-Day—the day the attack would commence—for February 25. But first the Mountain staffers faced the challenge of forging a spirit of teamwork and understanding among organizations and units who rarely, if ever, had worked together before. They weren’t helped by the fact that CFLCC waited a week after they got to Bagram to make Hagenbeck’s command of the operation official. This frustrated the Mountain staff, who, in the meantime, could only ask, not order, representatives from other task forces to come to meetings or assume particular missions. At first some of the other units ignored their Mountain counterparts’ requests. Nor did it help that TF Dagger’s men considered themselves the experts on how to make war in Afghanistan, yet now had to take directions from conventional officers who hadn’t spent a week in country. But day by day the cooperation increased as the SEALs and Special Forces soldiers of K-Bar and Dagger mingled with Rakkasan and Mountain light infantrymen, AFO’s Delta operators, and CIA covert operatives. The Australian Special Air Service commandos—perhaps the hardest-looking men in Bagram—added an even more exotic, weatherbeaten aspect to the mix. As soon as the Mountain staffers established their tactical operations center (TOC)—the bustling, high-tech nerve center from which Hagenbeck would run Anaconda—by hooking together about eight modular olive drab tents, liaison officers from the other organizations began drifting in. The TOC soon resembled “the bar scene from Star Wars,” said Major Lou Bello, an artilleryman on the Mountain staff. “[There were] guys with ballcaps and beards, and guys with turbans running in and out,” he said. “It was a high-adventure place.”

  High adventure or not, invisible walls had to be broken down and cultural barriers breached before an atmosphere of cooperation and mutual trust could prevail. CENTCOM’s insistence on making Dagger’s little Afghan force the main effort and its refusal to countenance the deployment of the rest of the Rakkasans’ combat power meant that from the start the command structure for Anaconda was jury-rigged from top to bottom. For a battle that would involve perhaps 2,000 allied troops—less than a brigade’s worth—in combat, CENTCOM had cobbled together a force that drew elements from eight countries, two U.S. Army divisions, two Special Forces groups, a hodgepodge of aviation units, and a variety of clandestine organizations. Despite the enormous military skill and experience nested in most of these units, the operation’s main effort was to be a few hundred Afghans drawn from different clans and provinces who had barely a month of semiformal military training under their belt. Their Special Forces spine was provided by two A-teams from different SF groups, led (eventually) by Chris Haas, commander of a battalion that included neither of the A-teams. Much of the special reconnaissance mission was the purview of TF K-Bar, a mishmash of units from half a dozen countries under the command of a Navy SEAL whose maritime background had better prepared him for reconnoitering enemy-held beaches than for keeping watch over mountain passes. The air assault/blocking force mission was the responsibility of TF Rakkasan’s three infantry battalions, one of which was from not just a different brigade than the others, but another division entirely, and each of which was missing one of its three rifle companies. Within TF Rakkasan, units had been pulled from companies and battalions and cross-attached to others to such an extent that from the rank of lieutenant colonel down to lieutenant officers were working alongside and under commanders they had never trained with and in some cases barely knew. Even the Rakkasans’ helicopter outfit, Task Force Talon, was a jumble of units from different commands: an Apache company from 3rd Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment; five Black Hawks from 4th Battalion, 101st Aviation; two Chinook platoons from 7th Battalion, 101st Aviation; and another Chinook platoon from Bravo Company, 159th Aviation Regiment, an XVIII Airborne Corps unit that had spent most of the war in Jacobabad. Perhaps the most tightly bonded, least rearranged unit in Anaconda was Task Force 64, the Australian SAS force whose mission would be to guard the Shahikot’s southern approaches. But, of course, the Australians were all but an unknown quantity to the Americans.

  The job of lashing this Rube Goldberg organization into a cohesive fighting force fell to Hagenbeck and his downsized staff (almost a third of which consisted of complete newcomers to the 10th Mountain headquarters). This was asking an awful lot of a staff for whom Anaconda would be virtually the first experience of war in Afghanistan. U.S. Army units were supposed to all follow the same doctrine, and the service’s training and personnel systems were designed to allow the Army to take a soldier of any rank from one unit and drop him into another of the same type with minimal fuss. That, at least, was the theory. But the setup forced upon Hagenbeck and the troops under his command would put that theory to the most extreme of tests, with soldiers’ lives on the line. The Mountain staff came up with a word for the organizing principle behind the force they were being asked to control: “ad-hocracy.”

  AS the new arrivals from K2 took the helm, their first order of business was to gain the confidence of the special operations forces. Given the mutual antipathy that had traditionally characterized the relationship between “the big Army” and the special operations community, this was no small task. “There were a lot of holy cows who had to be taken quietly out the back and sorted out before this could become a success,” said Major Jonathan Lockwood, a British exchange officer posted to the 10th Mountain staff at Fort Drum who now found himself going to war with the U.S. Army. It was a credit to Hagenbeck and the other leaders at Bagram that the slaughter of holy cows was allowed to take place at all, he added. The common doctrinal grounding shared by the 101st and 10th Moun
tain troops was a huge asset in enabling LaCamera’s 1-87 Infantry to blend with Wiercinski’s Rakkasans in a matter of days, while the exchange of liaison officers and NCOs between conventional and special ops units helped bridge the divide between those two communities. Despite the best efforts of all involved, however, Hagenbeck and his team failed to create a seamless organization out of so many disparate parts. That was too much to ask in such a short space of time. To the extent the different elements were able to work together at all, most of the credit must go to a serendipitous alignment in key leadership positions of individuals who already knew each other.

  The most obvious prior connection, and one of the most advantageous, was between Hagenbeck and Wiercinski. As a brigadier general, Hagenbeck had served as the 101st’s assistant division commander for operations—a position with decision-making responsibility—when Wiercinski had been the division’s director of operations, or G-3, in which position he would ensure that the general’s decisions were carried out. Now they were together again. Knowing how his boss thought gave Wiercinski a comfort level he would not otherwise have enjoyed working for a division commander other than his own. “Having had a great relationship with General Hagenbeck when he was the ADC(O) of the 101st and I was the G-3 made it incredibly easier, because he understood air assault tactics and how we do things in the 101st,” the Rakkasan commander said. “So I didn’t have to do a lot of explaining. When I was giving my backbrief, he knew exactly what I was talking about, and I knew he did.”