Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  The next morning Hagenbeck and Wiercinski briefed the handful of journalists who had flown up from Kandahar. Hagenbeck described the plan. Task Force Hammer would approach the Shahikot from the west, halting at daybreak at the Fishhook, just as the Rakkasans’ first air assault wave landed along the eastern ridgeline. The plan counted on surprise to get the air assault on the ground safely, but it also hinged on the enemy fighters realizing that the Rakkasans had landed. The idea, Hagenbeck explained, was for the enemy leaders to know that Zia blocked the valley’s western exits and the Rakkasans blocked the trails to the south and east. Hagenbeck anticipated a stand-off would then occur, as the enemy leaders pondered their options. The enemy had 150 to 200 fighters in Serkhankhel, the Mountain commander said. But even though “Zia really wants to get these guys,” Hagenbeck said there was no intention for Zia to attack the villages on D-Day, still set for February 28. The enemy would probably try to slip their leaders out using the northeastern trail that the plan deliberately left open and inviting. To preclude that option, at dusk part of the Rakkasans’ second air assault would set down in the northern end of the valley “to close the door,” with the remainder landing in the south to reinforce LaCamera’s 1-87 Infantry. This time, Hagenbeck said, the air assault in the north would probably be unseen by the enemy. “We think the action on D-Day will be completely minimal,” he added.

  On March 1, if the enemy forces had neither surrendered nor tried to escape, Zia would attack Serkhankhel. “He’s willing to go house to house” to root out Al Qaida fighters, Hagenbeck said. He acknowledged that he had never met Zia, but appeared unconcerned that he was commanding a major combat operation in which the man at least nominally in charge of the main effort was an unknown to him. That John Mulholland, the Dagger commander, had faith in Zia was enough of a guarantee for Hagenbeck. “Our Special Forces guys are very, very confident,” Hagenbeck said.

  The Mountain headquarters at Bagram would function as Anaconda’s command-and-control hub, but Wiercinski said he intended to fly with his forward command post into the valley behind the Chinooks, landing lower down the same Finger upon which Mako 31 planned to put their observation post in order to get a firsthand feel for how the battle was going. He planned to just stay for an hour or so and then return to Bagram. It would nearly cost him his life.

  If the enemy chose to fight, Wiercinski predicted it would be in the villages—” That’s where they have cover and concealment.” In a statement that might have surprised Rosengard, who still believed the Rakkasans suffered from a “kill ’em all” mentality, the Rakkasan commander stressed his commitment to the rules of engagement, which only allowed his troops to fire at personnel they had “positively identified” as enemy fighters. “I don’t want to kill women and children in this place,” Wiercinski said. “I don’t want to kill an innocent Afghan. Nobody does.” The Rakkasan commander also noted that, contrary to the fears of the Hammer A-teams, his blocking positions would be located over a kilometer from the villages, so the Rakkasans would not be able to influence any small arms fight in the towns.

  LATER on February 26 Wiercinski held a “confirmation brief” in which his subordinate commanders walked him through how they intended to execute their part of the operation. The meeting was held in “The Hunting Lodge,” a GP Medium tent belonging to Ron Corkran’s scout platoon that had a satellite photo of the Shahikot taped to the tent wall and a to-scale relief model of the valley, made out of dirt. Over forty soldiers clustered around the sandtable, going over the operation one more time. Their comments reflected a focus on distinguishing between civilians and enemy fighters, and their belief that firepower would not be a priority. Chip Preysler, the fresh-faced 2-187 Infantry commander, described how his companies intended to configure their blocking positions: Anybody approaching from the villages would first encounter a fence made from engineering tape with a sign in Pushto saying go away; if they ignored this warning, they would encounter a second sign indicating they were entering a minefield (even though the U.S. troops had no intention of actually laying a minefield); only if they ignored both warnings and continued to advance would the U.S. troops consider shooting at them. (Preysler was more concerned with the prospect of a vehicle approaching at high speed than with pedestrians, who would be easier to deal with.) Wiercinski approved of the false minefield, which fitted with his concept of applying an “escalation of violence” against people approaching the blocking positions.

  In keeping with the overriding belief that any combat would be dominated by small arms and automatic weapons, Preysler said he would not bring any mortars in on the first air assault wave—or lift—and would take just one 60mm mortar team in on the second lift. As with LaCamera’s battalion, only three Chinooks had been apportioned to carry his first lift—just enough to haul most of his C Company plus a twelve-man battalion command post. Preysler asked for another Chinook so he could bring in all of his C Company. But there were no more helicopters to be had. Wiercinski instead suggested that Preysler create space on the second lift by leaving his mortars behind, as LaCamera’s battalion was bringing a 120mm mortar capable ranging of the entire valley.

  Then Preysler voiced a concern heard frequently in the run-up to Anaconda: that Al Qaida leaders would try to escape disguised as women clad in burkas, the uniquely Afghan garments that covered women from head to toe, with just a gauzy latticed slit to see through. “Do you want us to actually take the burkas off?” he asked. No, Wiercinski replied. Special operators had told him the best way to handle the situation without offending Muslim sensitivities was to look at a person’s feet to see if they resembled a man’s or a woman’s.

  The discussion turned to the potential for friendly casualties. “When there’s a casualty, nothing else matters at that time,” Wiercinski told his audience. “Get the casualty to a location where we can bring him out without causing more casualties.” If a Chinook was shot down, the brigade commander said, the other helicopters in the lift should land beside it to perform combat search and rescue, with the Apaches “laying down a wall of steel” between the troops and the enemy. “We go back to the old Ranger creed of never leaving a fallen comrade, hooah!” Wiercinski said.

  After Dennis Yates, the Rakkasan fire support officer, briefed the group on procedures for calling in close air support, Wiercinski gave a prophetic final piece of advice. “Fight the enemy, don’t fight the plan,” he told his men as a series of explosions caused by soldiers blowing up captured materiel echoed in the background. “The second the first shot goes downrange, things are gonna change with the plan.”

  SHORTLY thereafter, Wiercinski convened the Rakkasan “maneuver rehearsal,” also held in the Hunting Lodge, in which each commander repeated how he intended to conduct his mission. The Rakkasan commander again cautioned his audience that “a plan goes about as far as the first shot being fired,” and he reminded them that Zia was the operation’s main effort and TF Rakkasan the supporting effort. “For me, the decisive point of the fight is getting the force on the ground,” he said. Once the troops landed, “the first five minutes of the fight is going to tell the story,” he added presciently. Then he returned to the theme of taking care not to target civilians. “There’s about 800 to 1,000 people in this town,” he said, pointing to Serkhankhel on the terrain map on the floor. “About 10 percent of them are bad people and about 90 percent of them are good folks.”

  NEXT the senior Rakkasan officers joined the other task force commanders and the Mountain staff in the big tent in the hangar to brief Hagenbeck. About fifty-five personnel, ranging from clean-shaven, uniformed infantry officers to TF 11 representatives in jeans, beards, and ballcaps, crowded in. The more senior officers sat on folding chairs, generals and colonels in the front row. Others stood around the side. The atmosphere was tense, the mood serious. Nobody was expecting a bloodbath, but most attendees had enough experience to realize no combat operation could be taken lightly, even one in which the enemy was not expected to stand and fi
ght. The commanders and planners were putting over a thousand soldiers’ lives on the line, and that heavy responsibility focused their minds. There was little side chatter. Everyone paid close attention to the briefers.

  Captain Eric Haupt, the Rakkasan intelligence officer, gave a short rundown on what he expected to find in the valley. Intelligence on the enemy was scant. “We’re looking at approximately 200 to 250 Al Qaida and Taliban fighters,” he said. But he had little solid information on how they were positioned and armed. From overhead imagery they had only been able to identify one DShK position, he said, adding that there must be more. After repeating the intel gurus’ mantra that enemy leaders would probably try to flee, he warned that care must be taken with enemy captives, who were not above hiding hypodermic needles on their bodies. “What we’ve seen in the past is these guys will put grenades on their testicles,” he said.

  Gary Harrell added a warning that, in light of events a few days later, prompted surprisingly little discussion: An intelligence source U.S. forces had “picked up” in Khowst had said the enemy fighters in the Shahikot were not in the villages, but were living up in the ridgelines and coming down to the villages to get supplies. Hagenbeck listened intently. This was the first he’d heard of this intelligence report. Harrell said the intel folks thought the source was reliable. Given that the plan was predicated on the enemy being in the villages, it is noteworthy that when the general responsible for collating all the intelligence coming into Bagram indicated that that premise might be false, nobody suggested changing the plan. David Gray, the Mountain director of operations, later said that it was unreasonable to expect wholesale changes based on “single source” intelligence. But Paul Wille, his chief planner, acknowledged that writing the plan had been such a painful process of compromise and negotiation that nobody could face the prospect of tearing it up—or even significantly modifying it—at the eleventh hour simply because the enemy might not be where they were supposed to be. (However, Wille also said that the Rakkasans’ refusal to land in the Upper Shahikot meant there was little that could have been done to change the plan anyway.)

  As for engaging targets in the villages, Hagenbeck told the officers any target they wanted to strike with an Apache would be considered “a sensitive target,” and Tommy Franks’s approval was needed before attacking it. This illustrated a drawback of the digital age for tactical commanders: the requirement—absurd on its face—for an infantry battalion or brigade commander to relay a message from a battlefield in eastern Afghanistan to a four-star general in Florida requesting permission for an attack helicopter to take out a single target during a firefight. The requirement was a function of Central Command’s desire to control as much of the fight in Afghanistan as it could from the United States, but it would not have been possible without a dazzling array of technologies that had given some generals the illusory perception that they could control a battle from thousands of miles away. In any case, Wiercinski seemed to dismiss the possibility of using the Apaches in such a situation, saying he wouldn’t need them “in an infantry-on-infantry fight.”

  Once the crowd had drifted out of the tent, a smaller group strolled in. Most were TF Dagger members and were there for the TF Hammer rehearsal—a rock drill in which the officers at the spearhead of Hammer could run through their moves using the terrain board on the floor. Rosengard presided and the attendees included Jimmy from AFO, CIA operatives, and at least one 3rd Special Forces Group officer not based at Gardez. “I brought guys to that rock drill that no one else needed to know about,” Rosengard said.

  But segregating the special ops rehearsal from the Dagger-Mountain briefing to Hagenbeck meant the officers leading Anaconda’s main effort were walking through their battle plan unseen and unheard by the Rakkasan and Mountain leaders. The opposite also held true. Neither Glenn Thomas nor Matthew McHale—the two A-team leaders charged with taking Zia’s force into the valley—had even been to Bagram before, let alone attended any Rakkasan or Mountain-level briefings or rehearsals. They had no idea what the conventional troops expected of them. Had just one officer from the operation’s “main effort” attended the walk-through of the operation with Hagenbeck, all participants would have been on the same page when it came to how events were expected to play out in the operation. The A-team leaders had not heard the latest version of the plan, but Rosengard’s first words were not encouraging. “He starts out with a disclaimer, saying, ‘You cannot argue over what the 101st is doing. This is done. This is the way it’s gonna be. This is how you’re gonna execute,’” McHale recalled, a memory seconded by Haas. (Rosengard said he remembered his opening remarks being along the lines of “The good-idea window is closed…. The course of action has already been determined.”) Then Rosengard laid out the plan, with the Rakkasans landing along the eastern side of the valley. This doesn’t make any sense, McHale thought. He and Thomas bit their tongues as Rosengard went around the tent calling on other officers to say their piece. Finally he asked the two team leaders for their thoughts. “Well, sir, I think what’s gonna happen is, the 101st will land, and they’re gonna take fire from the villages, and of course, they’ll return fire, so they’re gonna get in a firefight,” McHale said. “And if that happens about the same time we’re coming around through the south side [of the Whale], you’re gonna have two American forces on either side of the objective attacking toward each other in close proximity, which hasn’t been a good idea since, like, the Revolutionary War. Also, the 101st will be in contact, getting shot at, and they don’t know what my guys look like. So I think we’ll have an extreme chance of fratricide. And so it’s gonna get all fucked up, sir. And that’s what’s gonna happen.”

  Haas was of like mind. “That’s an infantry [force] that pride themselves on being meat-eaters, and they weren’t going to sit in the blocking positions,” he explained. “The minute they took fire, their training told them ‘fire and maneuver, engage, close with, find, fix, finish the enemy.’”

  Unbeknownst to McHale and Thomas, Rosengard had been arguing the same points unsuccessfully over the past two weeks. But there was no turning back from what had been agreed with the Rakkasans. “That’s where they’re going, so you’ve got to deal with it,” he told the team leaders. Then a Texas 14 soldier asked whether TF Hammer was still considered the main effort. Rosengard said yes. “It was very clear that we were the main effort,” said McHale. The young Special Forces officers left the meeting under the impression that as the main effort, they would enjoy “priority of fires”—first call on the close air support aircraft—until they had cleared the villages.

  McHale and Thomas had some time to kill before their helicopter left for Gardez. As they chatted in a dark passageway that led from the main hangar bay to a side door, Rosengard walked up. “You guys the team leaders from down there?” he asked in his broad Boston accent. “Yes, sir,” they replied. His next comment shocked them. “The best thing that can happen is [for you] to get around the south of that mountain [the Whale] and make contact with the enemy. Because if you’re in contact, the 101st won’t land in front of you.” It took a moment for the implication of what Rosengard was saying to sink in. McHale recalled their confusion: “I remember Glenn and I looking at each other and saying out of frustration, ‘You’re telling us that this thing has to get screwed up for us to succeed…. I mean, that doesn’t seem right.’ And the colonel cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. Certainly, that’s just what he was trying tell us.” The captains suddenly understood they weren’t the only ones with profound doubts about the plan. “It was clear to me at that point that it wasn’t our chain of command that thought this was a great idea,” McHale said.

  BETWEEN all the rock drills, the task force commanders, and senior staffers in Bagram had to find time to attend three daily video-teleconferences that linked them with Mikolashek’s CFLCC headquarters in Kuwait, Moseley’s CAOC in Saudi Arabia, and Franks’s Central Command headquarters in Tampa. Video-teleconferences were Franks�
��s preferred tool for managing operations in central Asia from Florida, but they imposed a strain on staffs, especially because of the eight-and-a-half-hour time difference between Bagram and Tampa.

  Some officers appreciated the opportunity for almost face-to-face contact with the senior leaders in Kuwait and Florida. On the evening of February 26, Wiercinski came away from a VTC with Franks with renewed self-confidence. “I got one of the greatest feelings when I talked to General Franks,” the Rakkasan commander said. “It was one of the best things any general officer had ever said to me. Because I didn’t know what he thought we could do. When he said, ‘You all will know what to do on the ground. I have full faith and confidence. You will know when not to squeeze the trigger, you will know when to squeeze the trigger.’…It just gave me a sense that he trusted us and I had—we all had—his full faith and confidence. That did a lot for me personally as a commander, because to hear it from your big, big boss is important.”

  But others in Bagram and Kuwait saw CENTCOM’s command-by-VTC approach as symptomatic of Franks’s tendency toward micromanagement. Within twenty-four hours of the VTC in which Franks had imbued Wiercinski with confidence, Central Command ordered the Mountain staff to forward to Tampa a PowerPoint slide showing the proposed D-Day locations of TF Rakkasan troops in the Shahikot down to the platoon level. This extraordinary order—four-star generals and their headquarters are usually concerned with moving corps, not platoons, around a battlefield—sent a shiver through officers who feared CENTCOM’s habitual reluctance to commit conventional troops to the fight was rearing its head yet again. “That created a lot of concern among us because at the last moment [we thought] they were going to start taking away forces that we had already gone through rehearsals with,” said a Mountain staff officer. The attitude of those at CENTCOM who demanded the slide seemed to be: “Why do you need that many forces? Why can’t you do it [with fewer]?”