Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Central to the plan were intelligence assumptions of enemy strength in and around the Shahikot, and of what the enemy’s intentions were. There was broad consensus that there were 150-250 enemy fighters in the valley. The view of Jasey Briley, Hagenbeck’s senior intelligence officer, based on intelligence from sources interacting with the enemy fighters and on Al Qaida’s recruiting activity at local mosques, was that the guerrillas were waiting out the winter in their mountain fastness before launching a spring offensive to retake Gardez and Zermat with the support of local Taliban figures. Two tribal leaders had reported similar Al Qaida plans to the American contingent at Gardez.

  Locals usually described the fighters in the valley as “Arabs and Chechens,” but it is likely that many Uzbeks were referred to as “Chechens” because they shared the Russian language. The Americans believed these fighters would be vastly outnumbered in the Shahikot by the valley’s civilian population, estimated at 800, as well as some of the fighters’ own families. This assumption that they would be forced to distinguish between local civilians and hardened fighters was a driving factor in the Americans’ planning. They geared everything to avoid the nightmare of a battlefield strewn with civilian corpses. The Mountain planners shared Rosengard’s view that using Zia’s force as the main effort would minimize the chances of needless civilian deaths. The Rakkasans focused much of their energy on how to discern enemy fighters among the civilian crowds expected to approach their blocking positions. (No civilians were to be allowed to leave the valley during the operation, however.)

  As to the enemy fighters, the intelligence assessment was that they were concentrated on the valley floor around Serkhankhel. The Mountain intelligence staff expected the enemy to have observation posts just to the west of the valley “for early warning,” and similar positions and air defense systems on the Whale and the eastern ridge. But much of this was little more than educated guesswork. For two months the United States had focused spy satellites, spy planes, and plain old spies on the Shahikot, but was finding it impossible to sketch out the enemy positions with any clarity. “We had just about every available intel asset focused on a ten-kilometer by ten-kilometer box around the objective, but we still had a lot of gaps that we had to fill, and we did that with templates and common sense based on what we had seen before, especially at Tora Bora,” Ziemba said. (By templates, she meant a process by which intelligence analysts, in the absence of hard information, suggest the possible locations of enemy positions based on previous experience.)

  The planners at Bagram were equally in the dark about the weapons enemy forces might use. Their biggest concern was anything that might shoot down a helicopter. Wiercinski, the Rakkasan commander, made it clear that his priority was to get his troops on the ground safely. He was confident in their ability to handle anything that came their way once on the valley floor, but the prospect of Chinooks tumbling out of the sky in flames filled him and the other officers with dread. Such an outcome would give Al Qaida a tremendous propaganda victory, and, in a war that had cost precious few American lives so far, would be viewed in the United States as nothing short of a disaster. Although there had been little use of shoulder-held air defense missiles in the war, and no U.S. aircraft had been shot down, the Mountain planners obsessed over the possibility of the enemy using man-portable missiles such as the Soviet-made SA-7, the American Stinger or the British Blowpipe against the Allied helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft involved in Anaconda. Their fear was based on the mujahideen’s success using U.S.-supplied Stingers against Soviet aircraft. But in the case of the Stinger, this threat had almost certainly evaporated. Although the mujahideen had received thousands of Stingers in the 1980s, the missiles needed careful maintenance, and the chances of any still being useful fifteen years later were low.

  Of greater threat were the DShK heavy machine guns Al Qaida was assumed to have placed around the valley. These simple yet lethal weapons could bring down a helicopter up to a kilometer away. Produced by the Soviet Union and China, thousands found their way into Afghanistan during the 1980s, where they constituted the mujahideen’s standard air defense weapon until the Stinger’s 1986 introduction. Overhead photos revealed a couple of possible DShKs on the Whale. These became the focus of much discussion in planning meetings, but otherwise there was little hard intel about the numbers or locations of these weapons. “We had no clarity on the enemy air defenses in that area,” Hagenbeck acknowledged.

  The Rakkasans and Zia’s militiamen would be going into combat unprotected by tanks or other armor, but little attention was paid at Bagram to any indirect fire assets such as artillery or mortars that the enemy might use to devastating effect against light infantry caught in the open. Ziemba would later say she and the other intel officers had “expected some mortars” in the Shahikot and also identified an artillery piece of unknown type there. But neither the mortars nor the howitzer were emphasized at the Mountain or Rakkasan rehearsals in the final days of February. Ziemba and her colleagues were also concerned about the threat of mines, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and booby traps, as well as a BRDM reconnaissance vehicle reported to be in the area. But the commanders’ focus remained on the air defense threats.

  Worries over antiaircraft weaponry aside, the bottom line was that at Bagram, as at CFLCC, CENTCOM, and, apparently, the Pentagon, the thinking was was that victory was assured before the battle had even begun. “The belief was that the enemy resistance had all but collapsed,” Hagenbeck, the Mountain commander, said. The assessment of “virtually all” intelligence agencies “was that they weren’t going to stand and fight,” he added. “That once Zia’s forces confronted the enemy inside Shahikot, that there would be a standoff for somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours, in which any HVTs would try to negotiate their way out or escape by night. And then when the sun came up the second day, the fight would be on or they would surrender. But the important people that might have been in the valley would have tried to escape. Therefore it was important for us to get our infantry troops into the blocking positions…and to have the main effort [be] Afghans on Afghans and Afghans against the Al Qaida early on. In all of the fights leading up to this point, there had not been…fierce resistance.”

  (Rosengard, on the other hand, said later that in Dagger’s view, the enemy leaders would try to escape—hence his plan to leave the eastern trail open—but the rank and file would fight hard to cover their leaders’ withdrawal, albeit with nothing heavier than machine guns and RPGs. Ziemba’s prediction, she said, was similar: once U.S. and allied Afghan forces appeared in the Shahikot, the enemy’s priority would be to get their senior leaders out. Their next objective would be for as many fighters as possible to slip the noose tightening around their positions while some stayed to inflict U.S. casualties and, if possible, take an American prisoner. Finally, the enemy would try to get their remaining fighters out, in order to regroup elsewhere when conditions permitted. The enemy’s center of gravity was its senior and mid-level leadership, the Mountain intel staff concluded. “It seemed that their loss would unhinge the defense,” Ziemba said.)

  Like other officers in Bagram, Hagenbeck noted that he and his staff had war-gamed several scenarios to ensure that if events didn’t go quite according to plan, they had enough combat power in reserve to handle the unexpected. “We worst-cased it, but the reality was that the intel said there was 150 to 250 bad guys in the valley and we had more than enough troops and firepower—read air assets—to take care of that size of a force,” he said. Asked what he felt in his gut prior to the operation, Hagenbeck replied: “I had no reason to doubt the intel.”

  To help with the fight on the ground, Blaber asked Trebon, the TF 11 commander, to permit TF Red’s Rangers to be used as additional blocking forces in the Shahikot. If there was a large enemy force in the Shahikot and it decided to fight, Blaber knew even a couple of platoons of Tony Thomas’s superbly trained and equipped Rangers could be invaluable. But Trebon refused to release the R
angers from their gate-guard and quick reaction force duties at Kandahar and Bagram unless Blaber could prove there was a high-value target in the Shahikot. Of course, there was no such proof. The Rangers remained in their guard shacks and TOCs, planning for missions that never came off. Then Blaber turned to Kernan, the commander of SEAL Team 6 and TF Blue, and suggested the Navy officer commit his entire squadron to help man the Shahikot passes. But Kernan also preferred to keep his force intact at Bagram, waiting for one of the “big three” to be located. (In such an event the entire operation was supposed to freeze while the Rakkasans cordoned off the patch of terrain the high-value target was in and TF 11’s operators launched from Bagram, over an hour’s flight from the Shahikot, to snatch him.)

  Undeterred, the AFO commander asked Kernan to instead release just his twelve-man recce troop to Blaber’s command. Blaber was thinking ahead to the recce missions he wanted to run into the Shahikot. He only had India and Juliet available. They were good teams, but they wouldn’t give him all the coverage of the valley he desired. SEAL Team 6’s recce troops had a good reputation. Blaber held them in high enough regard to figure he could send them into the valley with the two Delta teams. Blaber had worked extensively with several of the recce SEALs in previous operations. He not only had full confidence in them, but from conversations with them knew they were itching for the sort of mission he had in mind. Kernan compromised and gave Blaber one of his two teams. The five-man team’s call sign was Mako 31. It was led by a lanky, gregarious senior NCO called Mike, but better known to all as “Goody.”

  NO sooner had the Rakkasan, Mountain, and Dagger planners gathered in mid-February to begin putting flesh on the bones of the operational concept for Anaconda than they found themselves deeply divided over a key issue: when and where the Rakkasans should conduct the air assault. Rosengard’s original concept envisaged most of the Rakkasan force landing under cover of darkness in the Upper Shahikot, then walking west to stealthily occupy the blocking positions in the passes. Only the troops who were to occupy the southernmost blocking positions needed to land in the Lower Shahikot, near Marzak, he thought. He and Paul Wille, the lead Mountain planner, thought it imperative to leave open the most heavily used trail that ran out of Serkhankhel through the eastern ridgeline. Rosengard’s vision was of Zia approaching to block the western avenue of escape and a Rakkasan element landing in the gap between the Finger and the eastern ridge, preventing any exit to the south. The enemy fighters in the villages would then, he thought, make a run for it via the trail that appeared open, only to be confronted and trapped by the Rakkasans who had landed in the Upper Shahikot and, unseen, marched west to block the pass out of the valley. Rosengard and Wille thought it might even be possible to land the helicopters far enough away that the guerrillas wouldn’t hear them and the Rakkasans could reach the blocking positions before the Al Qaida fighters realized they had landed. (Wiercinski, the air assault expert, ridiculed this notion: “Everybody’s gonna hear those helicopters coming in.”) In all this, Rosengard and Mulholland were supported by the Mountain planners as well as by Blaber and Spider. All preferred a night air assault into the Upper Shahikot.

  From the moment they became involved, however, Wiercinski, Larsen, and the other senior Rakkasans were fiercely resistant to this concept. They wanted the entire air assault to go into the Lower Shahikot in daylight. The Rakkasans put forward several arguments to support their position. By landing an element in the Lower Shahikot and the rest of the air assault force in the Upper Shahikot, Wiercinski would be separating his forces by a mountain range, making mutual support impossible if either or both of the elements came under fire in the battle’s opening minutes. In addition, unlike the Lower Shahikot, where overhead imagery revealed numerous potential landing zones, the Upper Shahikot was entirely snow-covered, making it impossible to determine whether there were any suitable LZs, the Rakkasans said. Dagger and Mountain staffers strongly disagreed, pointing out what they thought were several good LZs. “We determined that the snow was not that deep and we could use them,” Wille said.

  But, the Rakkasans argued, even if it were physically possible to land a Chinook in the Upper Shahikot, doing so would dramatically cut into the number of soldiers in the air assault. If the air assault went into the Lower Shahikot, they said, each Chinook could be filled to the max with about forty-two infantrymen. But as the altitude got higher and the air got thinner, the amount each helicopter could lift got lower. Larsen said that the proposed LZs in the Upper Shahikot were at 11,000 feet, which would only allow the Rakkasans to half fill the Chinooks. Given the tiny number of Chinooks CENTCOM had given for the operation—Hagenbeck described the number of Chinooks as “the long pole in the tent” of the Anaconda plan—landing in the Upper Shahikot would therefore impose great constraints on how many Rakkasans could get into position at the start of the battle, according to Wiercinski and Larsen.

  Wiercinski also expressed doubts about trying to land helicopters in the Upper Shahikot, particularly at night. The Rakkasans had already experienced a very close call trying to land a Chinook at night in difficult terrain. A Task Force Talon Chinook had suffered a “hard landing” on the night of January 28 while inserting a small infantry force into Khowst to protect the safe house there. No soldiers were killed, but sixteen were injured and the helicopter destroyed. Wiercinski had no desire to repeat the experience. His nightmare was losing a helicopter during the air assault, and he was willing to go to the mat to minimize that risk.

  The Rakkasans thought they were putting forward reasoned arguments based on the professional opinions of Lieutenant Colonel Jim Marye, the TF Talon commander, and his senior pilots. “All the helicopter guys were saying, ‘No way in hell can we get back up in there,’” Larsen said. But to everyone else, it appeared as though each time they knocked down one Rakkasan argument, Wiercinski or his staff would raise another. Among the Mountain, Dagger, and AFO field grade officers, there was deep suspicion of the Rakkasans’ motives. Everyone thought the Rakkasans—the Johnny-come-latelies to the planning process—were trying to elbow the others aside with the goal of redrafting the plan so that the Rakkasans, not Zia’s force, would end up assaulting Objective Remington. The Rakkasans were using the safety argument in order to become the main effort, the Dagger and Mountain officers thought. “The real reason is Colonel Wiercinski wanted to get as close as he could to Serkhankhel, to the point that they would start taking fire from taking fire from Serkhankhel and once they were taking fire they could use it as an excuse to take down the objective themselves, rather than letting Task Force Dagger with Zia’s forces take care of Serkhankhel,” said a Mountain officer who closely monitored the planning debate. Wiercinski flatly denied any such thought crossed his mind. “Never,” he said. “We always knew our mission was as the support for this thing…. We weren’t going in to attack or seize anything.”

  The conversations between Wiercinski and the Mountain and Dagger officers were “not very” strained, according to the Rakkasan commander. Other participants begged to differ. There was no shouting, but a lot of raw feelings were on display, they said. “There was a lot of emotion about who gets to take down the objective,” said Wille. “[Lieutenant] Colonel Rosengard, Colonel Mulholland, and Colonel Wiercinski were very emotional on the issue.” Rosengard was worried that by landing along the eastern ridge’s western slopes, the Rakkasans would jeopardize his goal of “making the enemy do what he already wanted to do”—flee the valley via the trail deliberately left open. “We wanted him to think that’s open,” Rosengard said. Putting the first air assault in close to or astride that avenue of escape could “fuck up” the plan that sought to convince the enemy to enter the trap, Rosengard told Wiercinski.

  Rosengard and several other Dagger personnel were convinced that the Rakkasans failed to grasp the plan’s subtleties and were interested only in executing a magnificent air assault into the valley, killing everyone they could see and claiming victory. “I part company with th
e Rakkasans on the fact that they lost the vision of what we were trying to accomplish,” Rosengard said. “To them it was an airmobile assault into this valley.” To Rosengard, the Rakkasans seemed obsessed with air assaulting almost on top of the suspected enemy positions on the valley floor. “They were seeking—and I heard these words come out of their mouth—’ the psychological impact of the appearance of helicopters on the battlefield,’” he said. “I respect them for the warriors that they are…but in my exposure to them their instantaneous reaction to this is ‘We just need to do the air assault and get in there and kill ’em all.’”

  The A-teams in Gardez who would accompany Zia into the valley were equally concerned. The Special Forces captains and NCOs thought the Rakkasans wanted to land far too close to Serkhankhel. Above all, the SF soldiers feared a friendly-fire incident between the Rakkasans and Zia’s troops. “We had a good clear idea of where the 101st was gonna go, [and] that was a stupid, stupid, stupid thing, because they’re landing right on an objective that I’m treating as a hot objective,” said a Dagger officer in Gardez.

  The constant references by Larsen and Wiercinski to “the psychological impact of helicopters on the battlefield” only reinforced the special operators’ view that the Rakkasans were more concerned with their place in history than with fulfilling the supporting role assigned them in the original plan. “The 101st decided that this was a helicopter legacy mission,” said a special ops officer who participated in the meetings. “They allowed that to overwhelm their own common sense.” But Wiercinski said all he wanted was to ensure the plan minimized the risk attached to the few moments when his force was at its most vulnerable—when the Chinooks entered the valley from the south and flew north to deposit their troops near the villages. “You only get one shot at surprise and I wanted to get that first lift down, situated in a position where they could overwatch those three towns almost immediately.” he said. “Our job was to block people coming out of these towns.” Rosengard and Mulholland on one side and Larsen and Wiercinski on the other were talking past each other. Their TOCs were only fifty meters apart, but in their understanding of each other’s approach to warfare they were separated by a yawning cultural chasm.