Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  21.

  OBSESSING over opsec was not the exclusive preserve of Al Qaida and the IMU. The Americans went to great lengths to conceal their plan to attack the Shahikot, which relied on achieving at least tactical surprise. If the enemy leaders knew hours or days ahead of Anaconda when and where they would be attacked, they would be unlikely to stick around. So U.S. forces took extreme measures to keep a lid on information. They decided to permit half a dozen journalists embedded with the Rakkasans in Kandahar to cover the operation. But the journalists they tapped were told only that a mission was in the offing, to have a rucksack packed ready to leave within an hour’s notice, and to not breathe a word to anyone. They were forbidden to bring laptops or satellite phones when they boarded the C-17 that flew them to Bagram February 25, for fear one of them would discuss the mission in an e-mail or phone conversation with his editors, and that that information would find its way back to the Shahikot.

  U.S. forces took other steps to shroud their future actions, but it is hard to believe their enemies in the Shahikot had no idea an attack was coming. Zia and his men were not told of the mission until the day before, but the fact that dozens of Americans were living in a compound in Gardez training and equipping an Afghan force would hardly have gone unnoticed or unreported. The enemy must also have been aware of the Predator drone flying over their positions in and around the Shahikot, which Ziemba acknowledged “sounded like a flying lawn mower.”

  The Rakkasans seemed more intent on achieving total surprise than the other elements grouped under Hagenbeck. This was to be expected. The Rakkasan air assault relied on surprise. If the enemy were waiting with DShKs and, perhaps, surface-to-air missiles pointed skyward when the first Chinooks flew into the valley, the chances of disaster were high. Dagger officers warned the Rakkasans such surprise might be difficult to achieve. The officers in Gardez thought that the moment that the TF Hammer convoy left the safe house, cell phones would be ringing in the Shahikot. “We believed that as soon as Zia got trucks lined up in Gardez…that that was going to be the call to arms for whoever was in that valley,” Rosengard said. “We did tell them [i.e., the Rakkasans], ‘Have no doubt in your mind, that when Zia moves out of Gardez south, that the boys in this valley are going to know something’s coming.’” Nonetheless, U.S. officials remained upbeat about their chances of gaining a measure of surprise. “While we figured the enemy would be able to figure out in general the day of the attack by the AMF, they probably would not be able to [determine] when or where we would insert U.S. conventional forces,” Ziemba said.

  THE Rakkasan company-grade officers and NCOs kept their soldiers busy. Preparations focused on how to survive and prosper in the mountain environment, and how to set up blocking positions and distinguish “bad guys” from the civilians they expected to rush the positions in an effort to escape any fighting.

  Anaconda would be the highest-altitude battle ever fought by U.S. troops. Bagram was at about 5,000 feet, which gave troops a few days to acclimate before going into the valley, the floor of which was at 8,000 feet. Some medical officers gave out altitude-sickness pills, others figured the risks of side-effects weren’t worth the benefit. Sergeants major put their minds to figuring out what gear soldiers should wear and carry so that they could withstand the cold but not be too weighed down.

  In battalion TOCs and around sand tables, battalion and brigade staffs refined their plans, making sure each officer and NCO understood his role in the operation. Outside, sergeants ran their troops through drills that focused on how to identify and apprehend enemy fighters. Space was at a premium, so if the drill required some soldiers to pretend to be Al Qaida leaders fleeing in an SUV, a John Deere Gator (akin to a lawn tractor) was used instead. Special Forces NCOs gave classes on how to subdue, search, disarm and flex-cuff enemy fighters. The special operators warned that Al Qaida troops might try to conceal hand grenades in order to blow themselves and U.S. soldiers up. These battle drills were the only collective training the TF Rakkasan companies could perform. There were no ranges at Bagram for them. They had done no maneuver or live-fire training since leaving Fort Campbell almost two months previously.

  Platoons practiced getting on and off Chinooks. (Most infantrymen are used to riding in helicopters, but the use of Chinooks was unusual. Black Hawks are the Army’s air assault helicopter of choice, but the Chinooks got the nod for Anaconda because their twin sets of rotors gave them more power in the thin mountain air.) In an exercise that was part rehearsal, part deception operation, the entire first lift of helicopters planned for D-Day took off with its assigned complement of soldier-passengers. But instead of flying south toward the Shahikot, the helicopters flew north before returning to Bagram.

  22.

  EVERY few days in the second half of February, an Mi-17 would settle on the Bagram tarmac and out would step Blaber and his CIA counterpart, Spider. After a short SUV ride from the flight line the bearded warriors would sweep into the hangar that held the overflow workstations that didn’t fit in the Mountain TOC. Followed by the gaze of curious staff officers, the CIA operative and the Delta Force lieutenant colonel would stride into a closed-door meeting to brief Hagenbeck on their latest discoveries.

  By now Blaber was working as much for Hagenbeck—albeit unofficially—as he was for Trebon and TF 11. The AFO commander had taken it upon himself to begin reporting to the two-star general, who, unlike Trebon and Dailey, took Blaber’s reports seriously and hungered for more information from the Shahikot. Hagenbeck otherwise had little contact with TF 11, whose commander preferred to keep his distance. Without Blaber and Spider coordinating their operations with Mountain, Hagenbeck would have had no direct access to the intel being developed at Gardez. Such coordination was doubly important because Blaber was planning to send his teams into the Shahikot ahead of Hagenbeck’s troops. With Hagenbeck enjoying no authority over AFO or any other TF 11 operators who might be running around in his Shahikot “battle-space,” a close relationship between the Mountain commander and staff on one hand and Blaber and Jimmy on the other not only made sense, it was essential. Knowing that if the AFO teams made it into the Shahikot they would run into the Rakkasans, Jimmy, who usually wore black jeans, a bright blue polar fleece top, and jungle boots, even put on a fashion show for the Rakkasan leaders, dressing up in garb that the AFO troops would be wearing, so the Rakkasans would not mistake them for the enemy.

  But when word of the close interaction between AFO and Mountain reached JSOC headquarters, it infuriated Dailey. The JSOC commander became so angry with what he considered Blaber’s freelancing that he considered bringing the AFO commander home. This was in keeping with Dailey’s reputation for disdaining interaction with or use of conventional forces. “In almost every case Dell Dailey was probably resistant to using any kind of conventional force,” said Warren Edwards, the CFLCC deputy commanding general for operations, who participated in numerous video-teleconferences with Dailey.

  But in Dailey’s view, Anaconda could only divert TF 11’s attention away from the mission to track down bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar. He had heard nothing to convince him any of the “big three” were in or around the Shahikot, and when Trebon told him that he had committed TF 11—principally AFO—to help out Hagenbeck, Dailey was not pleased. “Hey, Greg, we are in manhunt mode, and this is a conventional fight here,” Dailey said to his deputy. “How did we get hornswaddled into this?” Trebon replied that AFO was only supposed to be “on the periphery” of the fight, not in the middle of it. This cut no ice with Dailey. “This is gonna blow up in our face, but if you’ve made the commitment, then we need to honor the commitment,” he said. However, the perception remained that Dailey’s attitude to AFO’s role in Anaconda was one of grudging acquiescence at best, outright opposition at worst.

  With Dailey trying to undercut Blaber’s efforts, Gary Harrell’s support was crucial in smoothing the AFO commander’s path into Hagenbeck’s office. When Harrell, the former head of Delta Force, u
rged Hagenbeck to take advantage of AFO’s capabilities, his black special ops credentials gave his advice added weight. “He was a good sounding board, a good reality check, and I think he emboldened Hagenbeck as far as ‘Damn right you should be using those guys [i.e., AFO], and damn right you should be a little more audacious,’” said an officer who watched the two generals interact in the Mountain TOC. Over the course of several weeks, Blaber and Hagenbeck developed a strong mutual respect, yet another example of a personal bond that helped paper over the cracks in the command-and-control setup.

  BY late February the Gardez safe house was bursting at the seams with over 100 heavily armed commandos. This included the two A-teams; the AFO headquarters personnel plus India, Juliet, and Mako 31, and upward of 20 CIA personnel. But there were three new elements taking up residency in the little fort: a small Australian SAS command-and-control element from TF 64; a squad of 101st Airborne engineers, who were to clear mines or other obstacles from TF Hammer’s approach to the Shahikot; and the fourteen-man tactical command post of Chris Haas’s 1st Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group. Haas’s February 25 arrival resulted in another confusing command-and-control situation. Haas saw his job as threefold: to provide a headquarters that could relieve the A-teams of responsibility for communicating with Mountain and Dagger in the run-up to and execution of the battle; to exercise command over the A-teams, eliminating the awkwardness of having one captain command another; and to show Zia Lodin that the Americans cared enough about the operation to put a lieutenant colonel in charge. But neither A-team in Gardez belonged to Haas’s battalion, and they were confused about his role. Blaber, however, liked Haas’s attitude and was glad to have a kindred spirit show up on his doorstep. “He was all over, cutting through the bureaucracy and working missions based on what the best solution was for America, rather than a particular unit or staff,” Blaber said. The AFO commander’s respect for Haas gave the SF officer instant legitimacy in Spider’s eyes, bringing all three together as a team whose members happened to work for different organizations.

  It was now time for Blaber to implement his plan to send three teams into the Shahikot itself. He gathered his men and told them it was going to happen. If they managed to infiltrate the valley unobserved, they had three tasks: to confirm or deny the presence of any senior enemy leaders; to check that the Rakkasan landing zones were usable and prevent enemy forces from concentrating near them when the air assault went in; and to call in air strikes on targets of opportunity. These were veteran Delta, SEAL Team 6, and Gray Fox operators, but what Blaber was proposing set their pulses racing: to sneak overland into a valley occupied by hundreds of enemy fighters without being seen. It would be the mission of their lives if it came off. “We were a reconnaissance unit and that’s what we’d trained all our careers for,” said an operator. They were due to depart the next night, February 27, but the members of India, Juliet, and Mako 31 were still skeptical that they would get a green light for such an audacious mission. “We thought this wasn’t gonna happen’ cause it was too risky. You’re not gonna send four guys into 700,” said one team member. But it was slowly dawning on the AFO operators that they were working for an unusual commander, one willing to take calculated risks to achieve tactical, operational, and strategic gains, and more than willing to buck the system to make it happen. “Blaber is the first commander I’ve worked for willing to take the risk,” said an AFO operator. “He’s not risk averse. He leaves the tactical decisions to the guy on the ground, especially the enlisted guys. His officers he’s pretty hard on.” Of course, Blaber knew Delta was one of the few organizations in the Army in which the enlisted soldiers usually had far more experience than most officers. A captain in Delta might have eight years in the Army. Most NCOs in his troop would have double that. Indeed, some operators would tell you that all but the best troop commanders in Delta were “figure-heads.” It was the sergeants major who ran the troops.

  The operators also respected the fact that by conducting a mission Dailey so clearly disapproved of, Blaber was laying his career on the line. “Blaber was leaning farther forward” than the TF 11 and JSOC headquarters realized, according to one operator, who said Blaber had not been his favorite officer back at Fort Bragg, but had won him over at Gardez. “He was taking career-political risks to get guys on the ground,” he said. “That’s why I changed my mind about him.” Blaber gave each team a final mission brief. After walking the India Team members through the mission as he saw it, the AFO commander joined Speedy outside in the frosty, moonlit night. “Sir, now I know you don’t really care whether I live or die,” the team leader joked in his Kentucky drawl after hearing what Blaber expected of him and his men. “Speedy, your dying is none of my concern,” Blaber replied with dry humor, but added shortly afterward, “Speedy, it’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I know how good you are, so I don’t have to worry about you dying. You’re uniquely qualified to execute this mission. It’s your destiny.”

  THE two A-teams were less sanguine about their roles in the upcoming mission, and their concerns increased as they watched the plan evolve through the second half of February. Thomas and McHale, the A-team leaders, were particularly worried that the plan called for their ragtag force to conduct a tightly synchronized advance, crossing phase lines on the map at precise times. “That clearly showed us that nobody was giving a darn about how difficult it was going to be to get our guys down there,” said McHale. They had not expected this when they had been told they were the main effort. The SF officers thought the sequence and timing of the preparatory strikes and the air assaults should be triggered by TF Hammer’s movement, not the other way round. “Because if you’re the main effort, everybody supports you,” McHale said. With such an inexperienced force, it was hard for the A-team leaders to guarantee that Zia’s fighters would be exactly where the plan required them to be, when it required them to be there. They had bonded with their militia brethren as well as could be expected, but were not blind to their weaknesses. Zia’s men were hit-and-run fighters, but the plan called for them to behave like American light infantry, using tactics they had just learned and weapons they had only owned for a few days. This reflected a split between the Dagger leaders at Bagram, who promised their Rakkasan and Mountain counterparts that Zia’s force would stick to the tight schedule, and the A-team leaders in Gardez. To McHale and Thomas, the planners in Bagram seemed to have lost touch with reality. The A-team leaders suggested that instead of landing along the eastern ridge, at least one Rakkasan company land behind their task force as it swung east into the Fishhook, to provide extra firepower in case they had to close with an enemy force in the villages. The suggestion got nowhere at Bagram.

  Haas, McHale, and Thomas knew instinctively that just moving a few hundred Afghans and a few dozen Americans in the dead of night along rutted, washed-out dirt roads was going to present a significant challenge. The Americans would travel in a combination of Toyota pickups and a few armored Mercedes SUVs donated by Norway. But moving the 300–400 Afghan fighters was a challenge of a different scale. “We labored intensively trying to figure out how we were going to move all these dudes,” Haas said. The Americans’ preferred solution was to buy more pickup trucks. But the CIA couldn’t find fifty pickups for sale on such short notice anywhere. In the end the CIA bought a couple of dozen “jinga” trucks—the gaudily decorated, seemingly top-heavy trucks that are ubiquitous in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. But who would drive them? Hoskheyar had been a truck driver, and some of the other Afghans claimed experience in driving trucks. “So we thought okay, let’s just have our own [Afghan] guys drive these trucks,” McHale said. “Well, in their culture they hate to say no when they can’t do things. So we ended up with some guys who weren’t really truck drivers.”

  Haas shared his team leaders’ concerns about moving hundreds of men into battle down poor roads in nontactical vehicles. “There were spots where we knew we were going to have problems,” Haas said. “We said it
’s a risk, but it’s the only way to get Zia’s guys into the battle.” If the SF officers felt a sense of foreboding, they weren’t the only ones. Not long before D-Day an intelligence report reached the safe house that someone in Zermat, the local Al Qaida logistics hub, had placed an order for 165 coffins.

  23.

  THERE was an eerie feel to Bagram on those nights in late February. Tendrils of fog snaked around the tents and even on overcast nights the sky retained a ghostly pallor. A Rakkasan soldier making a nocturnal trek from the Mountain headquarters hangar back to tent city would have noticed the base was a little chillier than Kandahar and a lot wetter. Pools of water lay everywhere, surrounded by mud rutted with the tracks of Humvees and SUVs that plied the main routes around the base. Half-closing his eyes and gazing between the strands of barbed wire that surrounded the special operations compounds, the soldier could have imagined himself somewhere on the Western Front during World War I.

  ON February 25, Wiercinski met with his commanders in a large tent erected inside the hangar that housed Hagenbeck’s headquarters. On the floor was an eight-foot by nine-foot scale model of the Shahikot, surrounded by a map overlaid with operational graphics, and two large aerial photos that each measured about thirty inches by thirty inches. The officers gathered around, serious and attentive, but not noticeably nervous.

  “You’re making history here,” Wiercinski told them. “You need to be proud of yourselves, you need to be proud of your soldiers.” Leaders would have a critical role to play on the Anaconda battlefield, he told them. “Do not slacken up…. Our soldiers will do what we tell them. They always have.” Then he reiterated his priorities: “The most important thing is surprise and opsec and getting 100 percent of the force on the ground.”