Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  For instance, Wiercinski’s assertion that assaulting Objective Remington was the farthest thing from his mind is borne out by the series of internal Rakkasan briefings, rehearsals, and rock drills in the days leading up to Anaconda, in which no one mentioned that course of action. The Rakkasans focused on establishing their blocking positions as quickly as possible. Despite Rosengard’s fears of a Rakkasan “kill ’em all” attitude, in talks with his subordinates Wiercinski stressed the importance of fire discipline and safeguarding civilian lives. But the Dagger, Mountain, and AFO officers did not attend these briefings. They had only their perceptions formed in the planning sessions to go on. On the other hand, Rosengard’s idea of leaving the main trail free of a visible American presence—a key element in his version of the plan—made little sense to Wiercinski. “My thinking was, we’re going in here to set up blocking positions,” the Rakkasan commander said. “That’s why you have us. Why is it you want people to escape?”

  MATTERS came to a head at a February 20 war game. Rosengard made a comment that another field grade officer took as a threat to take Dagger out of the operation. “I know that happened,” the officer said. “I was there.” Rosengard emphatically denied making any such threat. “None of us were about to walk away from our responsibilities—immaterial of the command and control relationships that necessarily existed, and despite the resultant friction points,” he said. But the fact that another officer could—even mistakenly—perceive the Dagger operations officer to be threatening to withdraw his forces shows how fractious the meetings had become. Sergeant First Class Frank Antenori, a Third SF Group NCO whose A-team was assigned to TF K-Bar, recalled sitting in Dagger’s AOB building one evening when Mulholland returned from a planning meeting enraged that his advice wasn’t being taken. “He said no general in the history of the United States, if you have the advantage of taking the high ground, would start off on the low ground, and try to take the hill, but these guys were doing it,” Antenori said. “He was fuming mad.”

  It appeared to special ops folk at Bagram that Mulholland was being sidelined. It made no sense to them. The gruff, beefy colonel had extensive special operations experience. In addition to his time in Special Forces units, he had commanded a squadron in the unit now known as Gray Fox and served as a Delta staff officer. And of course, he commanded the task force whose troops had been a major reason for the United States’ victory in Afghanistan, which made the trouble he had getting his point across to the Rakkasans all the more puzzling to others. “This was a guy who basically took this country with twelve A-Teams…and they wouldn’t listen to him,” Antenori said.

  (Not all Mountain officers at Bagram remembered the acrimonious discussions that made an impression on their colleagues. “I thought the relationships and the personalities that came together for that operation came together remarkably well,” said Bentley, the senior fire support officer in Bagram. “There was never a time when I was there that there was any animosity or misgivings as to who was doing what. I was never present in any kind of sessions where there were issues and advice not being taken.” Lieutenant Colonel Mike Lundy, the deputy operations director in Hagenbeck’s headquarters, agreed. “There was very good cooperation,” he said. “It was as close to one team as you could get.”)

  WITH Wiercinski and Larsen at loggerheads with their Dagger, Mountain, and AFO counterparts, it was left to Hagenbeck to make the final decision on the night of February 22. He sided with Wiercinski. The Rakkasans would airassault into the Lower Shahikot, in daylight. Hagenbeck said he made the call based on the Rakkasans’ assessment that flying in to the Upper Shahikot would be too difficult. “The discussions on the LZs had to do with the combat experience or lack thereof of the pilots, and the risk assessment that was made, and the risk management,” Hagenbeck said. Jimmy from AFO went back to Hagenbeck to counsel against the daytime air assault. “Jim, we just don’t have the experience here yet, that’s why we’ve got to do this,” Hagenbeck said. “Roger that, sir, got it,” replied Jimmy. “We’ll do everything we can to protect that.” (Despite this, in one of their last meetings with Hagenbeck before D-Day, Blaber and Spider made a final, unsuccessful attempt to dissuade him from having TF Rakkasan air-assault into the Lower Shahikot.)

  That the Mountain commander made his decision only after carefully considering all sides of the argument helped mollify those whose recommendations were not taken. “He deserves an incredible amount of credit,” Blaber said. “I’ve got a lot of respect for his leadership and management techniques. He follows the number one rule of a solid combat commander—always listen to the guy on the ground. It doesn’t mean you have to do exactly what he says, but always listen to him, and you’ll have a much better chance of making optimal decisions for your men.” Nevertheless, Hagenbeck’s decision did not sit well with everyone. One Mountain officer felt the Rakkasans had cynically played the “safety” card to advance their own interests at the expense of the larger plan, knowing how difficult it is for a commander to order a subordinate to do something that the subordinate says is “unsafe.” In the modern Army, the officer said, “as soon as we mention ‘safety,’ then it’s all over with.”

  Wiercinski prevailed on another point. He disagreed with Mulholland and Rosengard that the trail east out of Serkhankhel was the most likely avenue of escape for any senior enemy figures. The Rakkasan commander thought a wadi-trail combination that led from the Whale’s northeast corner across the top of the valley through a gorge in the eastern ridgeline was the route that U.S. forces should leave open, before using the second wave of the air assault to cut off any enemy leaders making their exit along it. The final version of the plan reflected this. The first lift of Chip Preysler’s 2-187 Infantry was given the mission to block the trail out of Serkhankhel that the Dagger leaders wanted left open. The northern path was to remain untouched until later on D-Day, when the second wave of air-assault troops would arrive to “close the back door.”

  WHILE the Dagger and Mountain officers worried about the Rakkasans’ perceived desire to become the main effort, the Mountain staffers joined their conventional Army brethren in the 101st in concern over whether Dagger could deliver on their promise to get Zia into the fight at the prescribed hour, which was now dawn on D-Day. The force of 300–400 Afghan militiamen accompanied by a couple of dozen SF troops was supposed to travel in convoy down the Zermat road, then veer onto a dirt track that ran east toward the Whale before turning south and then east again into the valley around the southern end of the Whale, a turn that became known as “The Fishhook.” Zia’s fighters and the A-teams—Task Force Hammer—were the main effort in the biggest battle U.S. troops had fought in over a decade. The conventional officers wondered if they were up to the task. “The big concern from the [Rakkasan] battalion and brigade commanders was that the Afghan forces would not do their job,” said Wille.

  Rosengard and Mulholland tried to put the conventional officers’ minds at rest. They “flat guaranteed” that Zia would arrive at the chosen hour on the battlefield, according to Wille. “Rosengard said on a couple of occasions, ‘Don’t worry about Zia, we’ve got the Zia piece licked,’” recalled Major Lou Bello, a Mountain fires planner. Despite these assurances, Hagenbeck and Wiercinski had a fall-back option if Zia’s forces failed to show up: air-assaulting the TF Rakkasan reserve, Lieutenant Colonel Ron Corkran’s 1-187 Infantry Battalion, into the Fishhook.

  This plan reflected an apparent contradiction: Zia’s force was the main effort, but its presence on the battlefield—let alone its successful execution of its mission—was not deemed essential to the success of Anaconda. “We were going to go into the Shahikot Valley, with or without Zia,” said Bentley, Hagenbeck’s senior fire support officer. “We always knew that we weren’t going to get full resolute cooperation from the Afghans,” Bello said. “We had several discussions on this because we knew the Afghans were fickle, we knew that they may or may not cooperate. We knew that they at some point would decide, �
�Hey we’ve got to go back to the farm now and tend goats,’ so that was always factored in. The plan wasn’t hinging on the success of that Dagger piece with Zia…. There was always that concern in the planning process that Zia and the boys might not be fully cooperative.”

  The conventional officers voiced their doubts about Zia in terms that left their Dagger counterparts shaking their heads in the belief that the Mountain and Rakkasan officers did not understand the “human terrain” in which they they were about to fight. “There were some open comments and discussions [about whether Zia could be relied upon], which increased the friction,” Wille said. “The 5th Group [i.e., TF Dagger] guys were kind of insulted by…the regular Army guys saying, ‘These Afghan units are not gonna do shit for us.’…It was a sensitive issue. I specifically heard several of the staff from Colonel Wiercinski’s brigade discuss it. It was brought up when everybody was in the same room and frequently brought up separately. The 5th Group guys knew their concern and said, ‘We will be there.’”

  THE inclusion of Harward’s Task Force K-Bar in the plan as the outermost ring of security for the operation injected more tension into the planning process. “TF K-Bar were a real pain in the butt to deal with as far as getting them to locations on the other side of the Shahikot Valley where we wanted reconnaissance done,” Gray said. It took “three or four days of wrangling” before Harward agreed to put his units in the observation posts the Mountain staff had chosen for them, said another Mountain staffer. “It was like working out a divorce contract for each one of those positions,” he added. “If CJTF Mountain tried to tell those organizations [i.e., K-Bar and Dagger] what to do, and they didn’t want to do, then it became a big food fight—a polite food fight—in terms of getting them to do it.”

  That they had to negotiate with units that were supposed to be working for their commander was intensely frustrating for the Mountain staff. “I could never count on units actually doing what they were tasked to do in the operations order,” Wille said. “I never knew for sure. The joke was that we were running a blue-light special, and commanders could sign up for a mission if they wanted to, but they didn’t have to.” Their difficulties were compounded by the fact that CFLCC’s order formalizing Mountain’s authority over the other task forces did not take official effect until February 20. Prior to that date, Hagenbeck’s staff held a series of important synchronization meetings to ensure that everyone knew what was supposed to be happening on the battlefield at each stage of the plan, in order to minimize the risk of friendly fire. With no authority to compel other task forces to send representatives, the Mountain staff found the right people rarely showed up. “We never had everybody in the same room at one time,” Wille said. “Even when we did have representatives there, they weren’t always decision makers. They didn’t always have the authority to speak for their commander.” Only after February 20 did “the more competent people” start attending the meetings, he said.

  The rancorous debates that blighted the final fortnight of planning would never have happened had most of the forces involved in Anaconda been part of the 10th Mountain Division (or if Major General Dick Cody’s 101st Airborne headquarters been deployed instead of Hagenbeck’s, along with one or two complete brigade combat teams of its own). Lieutenant colonels and colonels from the same division, who worked day in and day out for the same commander (who in turn exercised great power over their careers), would not have dared engage in such disruptive and divisive arguments while planning a major operation. But Central Command’s enthusiasm for assembling the Anaconda force in piecemeal fashion from a grab bag of units was now paying predictable dividends. In theory, Hagenbeck and his senior staff officers should have quickly settled the arguments that arose. But that was easier said than done when the Rakkasan and Dagger officers had been in Afghanistan longer than anyone from 10th Mountain. Mikolashek had sent Hagenbeck to take firm command of all these task forces and lash them together. The Mountain commander did his best in difficult circumstances. “I met with the commanders of all of these disparate units at least once and many times twice a day about an hour or so at a time in my office,” he said. “The whole purpose was to build this team…to war-game and make a determination on how each of us thought, so that we would at least have a sense of how people would react under given situations.”

  But until Harrell and Jones came aboard, no Mountain staffer outranked Wiercinski or Mulholland. This encouraged the colonels and their subordinates to continue their debates longer than necessary. David Gray, Hagenbeck’s director of operations, said he and his colleagues had twelve days to bring together “a coalition of coalitions of coalitions.” They were very sensitive to any perception on the part of Rakkasan or, particularly, Dagger that Mountain was now in charge, even though Mountain was in charge. “We didn’t want to come across as 10th Mountain taking over,” said Wille, a statement as extraordinary as it was undoubtedly accurate.

  Through all the distractions, Wille worked tirelessly on a plan that would somehow take all these disparate parts—from Norwegian special operators to barely trained Afghan tribesmen to 10th Mountain infantrymen and 101st Airborne Apache pilots—and glue them together into a war machine that would not break apart the moment it came into contact with the enemy lurking in the Shahikot. His wife Karen e-mailed him a photo of their sons Pete, Jake, and Matt, ages eight, six, and two respectively. To motivate himself and remind others of their responsibilities, he printed the photo and pinned it on the plans bay door, together with a message he had added: “If these were your sons going down to the Shahikot Valley, would the plan be good enough?”

  19.

  AMIDST all the squabbling over the Rakkasans’ landing zones and K-Bar’s observation posts, one historically significant detail about the operation being planned went unnoticed: For the first time since the November 1942 invasion of Papua New Guinea, the U.S. Army was sending a brigade-size infantry formation into battle against prepared enemy positions with no supporting artillery.

  The Mountain and Rakkasan planners wanted artillery, but they had been told repeatedly by CFLCC and CENTCOM that they weren’t allowed any. “We were told we were not going to get any more than what we had already,” Wille said. “That was it, period. We could not have any more forces, and we really had to work to pull the forces we did from Jacobabad, K2, and Kandahar.” Bello sat through a lot of video-teleconferences involving flag officers in Bagram, Kuwait, and CENTCOM’s Florida headquarters. Whenever the subject of artillery came up, the senior leaders “tap-danced” around it. “I never heard a general officer say, ‘Okay, here’s why we’re not bringing artillery,’” Bello said. “Nobody ever said, ‘Because Don Rumsfeld said we can’t have artillery,’ or ‘General Franks said we can’t have artillery.’…It was a sensitive decision.”

  Bello was unaware that Franks had told Mikolashek to forget any thoughts of deploying artillery. But after repeatedly running into negative or evasive answers when he asked his chain of command in Bagram and CFLCC headquarters in Kuwait about the possibility of bringing over artillery, Bello concluded that artillery had fallen victim to the pervasive fear at MacDill and the Pentagon that if the United States deployed anything heavier than a few mortars to fight the war in Afghanistan, the locals would view the Americans as no better than the Soviets. “If you study the Soviet Afghan experience, you come away with learning that the Soviets indiscriminately used artillery, leveled cities and towns, and that was not the impression that we wanted to give,” he said.

  Hagenbeck knew his staff was asking their CFLCC counterparts about artillery, but felt he had no grounds to take the matter up at the general officer level. His planners had war-gamed several scenarios that predicated an enemy in the Shahikot with more strength than intelligence reports indicated. On each occasion CJTF Mountain had enough combat power to achieve victory. The two-star thought his mortars could handle any requirement for ground-based indirect fire. “In my view I didn’t have any feasible or reasonable argument
to go back up the chain to General Franks and say, ‘I need more of this or more of that,’” Hagenbeck said. The result was that Mountain was “operating with reduced assets,” Bello said. But in Bentley’s view, their task was to figure out how to maximize what had been given to them. “The force package [for Anaconda] will be debated for years,” he said. “Our job was to employ the assets that we had.”

  When it came to fire support, those assets were not insignificant. But most were airborne. If anything packing a bigger wallop than mortars was required to subdue the enemy, it would have to come from the sky. Few in Bagram had any concerns over this state of affairs. Airpower had worked wonders in the war up to this point, and there would be a wide variety of aircraft on hand to support the troops in the valley, ranging from Apache attack helicopters to F-15E Strike Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter-bombers and B-52 heavy bombers. At night they would be able to call on AC-130 gunships whose sensors and rapid-firing cannons could track a man or a vehicle relentlessly from 15,000 feet in the sky. But close air support was not the equivalent of flying artillery. There were several key differences between the capabilities of the aircraft that would be over the Rakkasans’ heads in the Shahikot and those of the artillery batteries they had been forced to leave behind. The standard bomb used by the Air Force and Navy jets in Afghanistan—the Joint Direct Attack Munition, better known as the JDAM—was much more precise than a howitzer round. Each JDAM had a Global Positioning System-updated inertial navigation system allowing a crewmember to program it to hit a particular grid reference point. But this precision was only useful if an enemy’s exact location was known. At anywhere from $27,000 to $37,000 each, using JDAMs to blanket a hillside with fire to keep enemy fighters’ heads down—what the military called “suppression”—was prohibitively expensive. Once on the battlefield, artillery could keep firing under almost any conditions unless it ran out of ammunition or was physically overrun by the enemy. Airpower could not always be relied upon. Bad weather often mitigated against the use of helicopters and jet aircraft, and the Air Force kept the slow-flying AC-130s out of harm’s way during daylight hours and even brightly moonlit nights. Aircraft also had to fly away from the battle area to be refueled. Unlike artillery, which always belonged to the ground commander, Wiercinski and Hagenbeck would not “own” the fixed-wing aircraft providing their close air support. Those pilots answered to their own Air Force or Navy chain of command. If the commanders on the ground needed their help, they had to request it. They could not order it.