Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Edwards, the CFLCC deputy commanding general for operations, said such behavior was par for the course from CENTCOM, but CFLCC tried to “filter” similar demands to avoid overloading the staffs in Afghanistan with petty requirements. However, not all the the requests for information originated at CENTCOM, he said. “Some of this was driven by the insatiable need for detail in Washington because the SecDef was having a daily press briefing,” Edwards said. “There are many things acceptable in Washington, but what’s the one absolutely unacceptable answer in Washington, D.C.? ‘I don’t know.’

  “When the SecDef started having a [press] briefing every day, it meant that for hours of the day you could not talk to the CENTCOM staff. It didn’t matter what was going on. For hours of the day you were unable to get to a senior person to make a decision at CENTCOM because they were tied up prepping themselves for the SecDef’s briefing. The SecDef called CENTCOM every morning. They had a morning telephone call and I believe they had an afternoon telephone call. And for a couple of hours before that telephone call you could not talk to the CinC, you could not talk to the deputy CinC, you could not talk to the J-3 [director of operations], you probably could not talk to the J-2 [director of intelligence], and therefore you couldn’t get a decision. Numbers became so important that if the SecDef went to a briefing, and we had reported that we had captured fourteen Al Qaida, and it really turned out to be twelve or sixteen, then it would be easier to let two go or go back and capture two more than to go back and try to change the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] number.”

  But many officers were too consumed with the frantic preparations for battle to ponder these issues. To them, the collaborative planning process between task forces, the standing-room-only backbriefs, and the video-teleconferences with higher headquarters were evidence that everything was proceeding as it should. This was particularly so after Mountain held its own VTC February 26 to discuss the fires plan. The VTC connected Gray, Briley, Yates, Bentley, and Donnelly at Bagram, CFLCC and CAOC representatives, and the commander of the aircraft carrier John Stennis’s air wing. “We discussed the pre-assault fires and the follow-on CAS [close air support] plan,” Gray said. “Some minor issues arose and were dealt with, but we left that meeting feeling like everyone was on the same sheet of music.”

  This was an illusion. Everyone was not on the same sheet of music. That evening, when Hagenbeck briefed Franks, Mikolashek, and Moseley via VTC, Moseley said he had only recently been made aware of the operation and had some issues with it. The staffs tried to iron out these differences, but events on D-Day would reveal significant command-and-control problems between Moseley’s Air Force operation in Saudi Arabia and the Mountain staff at Bagram. Even more incomprehensibly, the rehearsals hid—or perhaps, because the Hammer A-team leaders did not attend the Rakkasan-Dagger run-throughs caused—at least three major communication breakdowns between Mountain’s component task forces, two of which would have serious repercussions.

  The first misunderstanding involved what TF Hammer—Zia’s 300-400 tribesmen plus the two A-teams—was to do at dawn on D-Day as it reached the Fishhook. The conventional Mountain and Rakkasan officers thought the plan called for Hammer to halt at the entrance as the Rakkasans air-assaulted into the eastern side of the valley. The Rakkasans expected Hammer to hold at the Fishhook throughout the day and night in the open, while the enemy leaders in Serkhankhel pondered their options before surrendering or making a break for the open trail to the northeast. Only if the enemy was still hunkered down in the village on day two was Hammer to attack Serkhankhel.

  That was not how the Hammer A-teams understood the plan. In their minds there would be no pause; they would round the Fishhook and drive into the villages. Only if they met heavy, sustained opposition would they pull back, in order to let close air support aircraft soften up the target. (However, Haas thought his force would only get as far as Babulkhel on D-Day, occupying that village and some of the Finger overlooking Marzak before halting. Attacking Serkhankhel on D-Day, he said, would have been “a village too far.” It is possible the Mountain and Rakkasan officers misinterpreted this version of the plan as a pause at the Fishhook.)

  The second major breakdown in communication between Gardez and Bagram concerned the airstrikes planned against suspected enemy positions on the Whale as Hammer was approaching from the west. The Special Forces troops thought Mountain’s February 20 operations order specified that the Whale would be pummeled by fifty-five minutes of airstrikes. Mulholland, the Dagger commander, reiterated that to Haas, who was to command Hammer, telling him as early as mid-February that “the Air Force is gonna commit more assets to this fight than they committed to Mazar-i-Sharif and the Kabul campaign, they are on board and this is the main effort for the Air Force, and we’re gonna have fifty-plus minutes, they’re gonna be racked and stacked for you.” This view persisted among Hammer personnel even after the February 26 special ops rehearsal at Bagram. “We were working off the assumption that we would get the fifty-plus minutes of air support,” said Haas, who regarded that level of air support as essential if he were to push his convoy through the constricted terrain of the Fishhook under fire. The SF officers in turn told Zia and his men not to worry about Al Qaida forces on the Whale. Any DShK positions up there would be subjected to a fearsome barrage before the convoy of Toyota pickups and jinga trucks got within range, they told Zia. The awesome capabilities of U.S. airpower had achieved mythical status among Afghans, and the promise—delivered by Haas to Zia—calmed their fears. “Zia had seen what happened in Kabul, he saw what happened in Tora Bora, and that was the kind of air campaign that he expected for his fight, especially as I had been in both campaigns and explained to him how those things were run, and that’s one of the reasons why I was there: to make sure that he had that kind of fire support,” Haas said.

  But the officers in Bagram who would have been responsible for planning and arranging for that sort of bombardment—Wille, Bello, and Bentley—said no plan to bomb the Whale for fifty-five minutes ever existed and were unaware their Special Forces brethren at Gardez were laboring under such a serious misconception. “I can tell you what was not going to happen along the Whale, and that was carpet bombing,” Bentley said. “We didn’t have enough assets in theater to plaster the Whale. It’s a huge terrain feature. And…we did not identify an abundant amount of targets on the Whale.” The fires planners at Bagram identified only five targets to be struck ahead of H-Hour in support of Hammer’s movement from Gardez. Two of those were west of the Whale. Only three were on the Whale itself. The plan’s final version called for thirteen targets around the valley to be bombed prior to H-Hour—the time the first Rakkasan helicopters were supposed to touch down in the valley. These bombs were to be dropped over a forty-minute period, ending five minutes before the first helicopters entered the valley. Bentley later speculated that at some stage in the planning process this series of “prep fires” was supposed to take fifty-five minutes, and that somehow the SF officers at Gardez misconstrued this figure and thought all fifty-five minutes would be devoted to a barrage of the Whale. Haas agreed with this assessment. “That’s absolutely what happened,” he said later. Rosengard, the lead TF Dagger planner, was also unaware that the troops in Gardez were expecting a fifty-five-minute plastering of the main terrain feature in their path. He suggested that perhaps they were confused by “fifty-five minutes of available B-52 [bomber] coverage.” But whatever the source of the confusion, “I’ve gotta take the blame for that,” he said.

  The final misunderstanding between the Special Forces troops who would lead the charge toward the Shahikot and the conventional officers on the Mountain staff concerned the seriousness with which Hammer’s role as Operation Anaconda’s “main effort” was viewed. In Gardez, McHale, Thomas, and Haas took this literally, and expected Mountain to treat them as such. In particular, they expected to enjoy priority of fires. Even Wiercinski repeatedly reminded his subordinates that the Rakkasans were the
supporting effort in Anaconda. But some senior Mountain officers were only paying lip service to the notion that Zia and his SF advisers were the main effort. “Zia was the main effort for information operations perspectives,” Bentley said. Bentley was implying that Zia’s designation as the main effort had more to do with the propaganda value of having an Afghan lead the way into the valley than it did with any military necessity, and that Mountain’s senior leaders would behave accordingly. The problem with this approach was that no one informed the Special Forces officers charged with coordinating Zia’s assault on the Shahikot that they were only being referred to as “the main effort” for “information operations” purposes.

  WHILE scores of officers and NCOs at Bagram filed in and out of briefing after briefing, VTC after VTC, Spider and his CIA team in Gardez reported startling news to the others in the safe house February 26. One of the CIA’s local sources—a Taliban “squad leader” who claimed to command thirteen fighters—divulged a treasure trove of information that would have significantly changed the outlook of those huddled around the sand tables in Bagram, had they been made aware of it. It might have at least persuaded them that Gary Harrell’s comments had the weight of authenticity.

  The Taliban fighter told the CIA that 580 to 700 Al Qaida fighters were in the Shahikot area—triple the numbers those in Bagram were expecting to face—and they were not living in the villages, but higher in the mountains. The source based this estimate on his observation of thirty-five local residents who prepared food for the Al Qaida fighters. The guerrillas would descend into the villages, collect the food, and climb back into the mountains. The Al Qaida–Taliban force was divided into three tiers, the source reported. The Taliban were at the bottom of the hierarchy. Armed only with AK-type weapons, they provided an outer ring of security for the Al Qaida force in the Shahikot. Mostly, this meant manning a series of mobile checkpoints. Approaches not covered by checkpoints were seeded with mines that could be turned on and off. He said he was one of sixteen Taliban squad leaders to whom this task had been assigned, each of whom commanded between twelve and fifteen fighters. Most of the Taliban fighters had families nearby and had been “forced” into providing security for Al Qaida, the source said.

  Occupying the enemy hierarchy’s middle tier were fighters the source described as “Chechens,” equipped with small arms and DShKs. At the top of the pecking order were Arabs, armed with mortars, sniper rifles, and two “Stingers.” The mortars had preplanned fire plans—they were already set up to fire at certain targets in and around the valley. The mention of “Stingers” caught the Americans’ attention, as there was still a concern among U.S. forces that their aircraft would fall victim to the very weapons they had provided the mujahideen in the 1980s. The source assured the Americans that he knew the difference between Stingers and similar weapons systems. Even more disturbingly, the Taliban fighter said the Al Qaida force was arrayed in small groups in fortified positions around the valley and prepared to resist to the bitter end. “They are described as being dug in and not going anywhere,” an account of the source’s report stated. The Arab fighters would not allow the Taliban to talk to them, the source said, but nevertheless he said he knew that the Al Qaida forces were aware of the Americans’ presence in Gardez.

  None of this information made it to Hagenbeck, to Wille, his chief planner, or to the Rakkasans. David Gray and Jasey Briley, Hagenbeck’s operations director and senior military intelligence officer respectively, each said he might have heard the gist of the agency report, but not the fine details. But at the time each was reluctant to place much fath in “single source” intelligence. Gray remembered a report that said “there are more in there than we think…and more in the high ground than down in the villages,” but he was never told the source of the intelligence. “At my level there’s no way of knowing who these characters are,” he said. Gray assumed it was coming from Pacha Khan Zadran, the local warlord with a reputation for dishonesty. No one in the CIA, Task Force Bowie, or the Mountain headquarters bothered to brief Eric Haupt, the Rakkasans’ senior intelligence officer, on what the Taliban squad leader had said. “I wish to hell I had had that report,” he said later in bitter frustration. The failure to share such crucial intelligence among the different task forces was another symptom of the patched-together operation at Bagram, where some officers seemed so busy congratulating themselves that they were able to work together at all that they neglected to consider what might be falling between the cracks that separated the different components of the allied effort. “I just didn’t get anything from Mountain,” Haupt said. Briley, whose job it was to pass such intelligence down to Haupt, acknowledged that the system did not work as smoothly as it might. How such a detailed CIA report could have escaped wider dissemination—especially to the commanders whose troops would soon be in combat—may never be fully established. But with D-Day fast approaching, the Anaconda plan appeared to have built up so much momentum that intelligence that ran counter to the premises on which the plan was based was all but ignored.

  24.

  ON the morning of February 27, a forecast of bad weather for the next day forced Hagenbeck to postpone Anaconda forty-eight hours. H-Hour was now set for 6:30 a.m. on March 2. Few would openly admit it, but there was a lot of relief in TF Rakkasan, which had been sprinting flat out to be ready in time for February 28. Now they could draw breath, refine their plans, and make other final adjustments. Wiercinski used the time to conduct a full-up flyaway rehearsal for his task force. On February 28 all soldiers slated for the first lift into the valley climbed onto six Chinooks in exactly the order prescribed for Anaconda, but instead of flying south toward the Shahikot, the helicopters flew north before turning around and returning Bagram. The rehearsal not only allowed the Rakkasan aviators to fly a full load of soldiers into the mountains and see how the helicopters responded, but because the troops were carrying exactly what they intended taking into combat, it gave senior NCOs a chance to assess the “soldier load” for the mission—the amount of gear each soldier was bearing. The rehearsal proved the troops were overburdened for high-altitude infantry combat. “We had guys who were huffing and puffing just getting off the aircraft, dragging these humongous packs,” Wiercinski said. Horrified, the three battalion sergeants major overhauled their soldiers’ packing list before D-Day.

  Of all the non-American forces involved in Anaconda, it was the Australians who inspired the most confidence among the U.S. officers. Paul Wille found the Aussies’ commander, Colonel Rowan Tink, “a pain in the butt sometimes,” but overall considered Task Force 64 “very cooperative and extremely effective,” more so than the rest of the American-led Task Force K-Bar. “K-Bar was a joke, compared to TF 64,” Wille said. “They were a bigger pain in the butt to work with, and they were nowhere near as effective as 64 was. I loved to work with those guys.” Ed Burke, Mountain’s deputy director of logistics, had a similar impression of the tanned, grizzled Australian warriors. “They rarely needed anything,” he said. “They were pros.”

  The Australian SAS was designed along the same lines as the British SAS and Delta Force, with three line squadrons, each of which had three troops. Task Force 64 was built around 1 Squadron and included three troops—A, B, and C—plus headquarters and support elements for a total of about 100-150 soldiers. When the Aussies first got to Afghanistan in early December they fell under the operational control of Marine Task Force 58. When the Marines left in January, tactical control of the Australians shifted to TF K-Bar, which left the Australians less than perfectly happy. The Aussies regarded themselves as the equivalent of Delta or the British SAS and felt K-Bar’s missions were neither challenging nor prestigious enough for a unit of their capabilities. They were not alone in this perception. U.S. special operators observed that K-Bar seemed to exist as much for public relations reasons—the need to find missions for allied special ops units—as it did because of any military necessity.

  By mid-February the Australians were o
n the verge of going home. Then they got word of Anaconda and asked to participate. The Australian operations officer said to Craig Bishop, the special ops coordinator in Mikolashek’s CFLCC headquarters, “Craig, if there’s any way you can get us involved in what’s going on, we want to be involved.” Bishop supported their request and suggested to Mulholland that TF 64 be used to plug a gap in coverage southwest of the Shahikot. The Aussies could be used to watch for “squirters,” as the Americans referred to enemy personnel who might escape the dragnet thrown by Hammer and Rakkasan, and as a quick reaction force, Bishop said. He suggested this because the Australians enjoyed an advantage over K-Bar’s other non-American special ops units: They had their own vehicles—four-and six-wheeled sand-colored Long Range Patrol Vehicles that looked like Land Rovers on steroids and were all but indestructible. “One of the reasons why we didn’t employ the other nations’ special operations forces to a greater extent is that nobody but the Australians brought their own transportation,” Bishop said.

  AT the Gardez safe house February 27 was a day of last-minute preparations for the AFO recce missions: weapons cleaning, radio checks, and preparing and loading the trucks that would take the teams to the drop-off point. Jay, the Air Force special ops combat controller, gave a class on how to “rack and stack” aircraft for close air support operations. This was particularly important for India Team, which was not taking a combat controller into the valley this time.