Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Speedy froze then turned his head away from the valley to look behind him where the noise seemed to be coming from. Below him a couple of hundred meters to the north he saw an old Afghan man, unarmed and alone except for the small herd of goats he was tending. Speedy shrank back. The man hadn’t seen him yet. Grabbing his small handheld MBITR (pronounced “embitter” or “M-biter”) radio, he whispered the news to the others, then squeezed himself further into the crack between two rocks where he had been hiding and lay still. He was well hidden, not only by the rocks but also by the camouflage outfit he was wearing. Designed for hunters and snipers (Speedy and Bob were both), the gear was little more than netting overlaid with artificial leaves, hence its trade name: Leafywear. The two had chosen suits of grayish brown, the same color as the rocks in that part of Afghanistan, topped with soft tan “boonie” hats. Speedy and Bob were virtually impossible to spot as they crouched between the rocks. They hadn’t worn the gear on the way in, but whenever either of them moved forward from where they’d stashed their rucks, they put on the Leafywear, which was less bulky than the traditional “gillie suits” worn by snipers. To Speedy, wearing Leafywear was second nature. He wore the same sort of outfit hunting wild turkeys in his native Kentucky.

  The other two operators were hidden by rocks, and Speedy was confident he hadn’t been seen, but he was still very concerned. The goatherds in these parts had probably been grazing their livestock on the same land for years, and would notice if something seemed out of place, he figured. His mind raced through his options if the goatherd stumbled upon him. He couldn’t think of many. There was no way he would shoot an unarmed civilian, and if they took the man prisoner, his family would probably come looking for him within twenty-four hours. Speedy’s only course of action would be to let the man go and immediately call back to Gardez with the news his team had been compromised. That would probably mean immediate extraction or an order to sneak back out of the valley. It could jeopardize the entire operation. Very fortunately, the wizened Afghan led his goats away. Speedy breathed again and turned his attention back to the valley.

  OVER the next several hours the AFO teams gathered the first empirical evidence of a large-scale enemy presence in the Shahikot. Using Schmidt-Cassegrain spotting scopes, each team methodically scanned as much of the landscape as its members could see from their perch. (The scopes allowed an operator to follow a man and know he was carrying a Kalashnikov rifle from six or seven kilometers away.) The clouds lifted for the first part of the morning, giving India a clear view of the Fishhook, the village of Surki just outside the valley entrance, and the route planned for Hammer’s approach along Whale’s western base. There were no signs of mines, and Surki and the Fishhook appeared deserted, save for a white Jeep CJ5 circa 1980 a few hundred meters northwest of the village.

  Juliet, meanwhile, spotted movement on the Whale—the first confirmed activity on the huge humpback mountain or in the valley. Kris moved his team a short distance to a position that afforded better views of the valley and the Whale.

  Mako 31 had yet to make it to their designated observation post, but they managed to sneak into a position from which they could observe a good road that led south from Marzak and then turned east into a valley. The road was lined with white rocks, a local sign that indicated it was clear of mines. The movement on the Whale that Juliet had seen was the only activity any of the teams spotted during the morning. But their ears told them Blaber’s hunch had been right. Dan and Jason, the Gray Fox operators with India and Juliet respectively, set up their monitoring equipment. Soon each was picking up cell phone or radio traffic from the immediate area. And at 12:10 p.m., Mako 31 heard gunfire coming from the direction of Marzak. It didn’t sound like somebody hunting. It sounded more like marsksmanship training.

  Then, from their new observation post in a narrow valley about 3,500 meters northeast of Serkhankhel, the Juliet operators watched an unnerving episode unfold before them. To their east they spotted five men walking in single file toward them from the direction of a cave complex the operators knew about from examining the overhead imagery. Bin Laden had supposedly stayed at the cave in December. Three of the five were armed with AKs. The other two had RPGs. Their facial features were those of local Afghans. All wore turbans and earth-tone clothing. To the Juliet operators’ great concern, they appeared to be following the tracks left in the snow by the ATVs. There were a lot of tracks muddled in the snow, but if the enemy fighters found the ATVs, Juliet would be in big trouble. Kris used his MBITR radio to warn Bill and Dave, who were sleeping in the tent. They took up defensive positions, but the embankment at first prevented them seeing the enemy troops.

  Step by step the turbaned warriors inched toward the hidden ATVs. Juliet Team watched and waited as the quintet stood and scratched their turbans, talking among each other and looking at the strange tracks in the snow with bemused expressions. Infrared dots danced around their torsos as the operators took aim and curled their index fingers around their triggers. Kris whispered to his men to hold their fire until the last possible moment, while he juggled the possibilities in his mind. The five fighters might be the lead element of a larger force, and if Juliet shot them the operators would be on the run, on foot. Killing them would also compromise the mission. But if Juliet didn’t kill them, they might raise the alarm and return with more enemy fighters. Or they might be confused and just let the tire tracks pass unexplained. But the AK-toting militiamen were getting closer and closer to the ATVs. Kris was on the verge of giving the order to open fire when they paused, talked to one another for a few moments, and then turned around and walked away. One man turned back toward the ATVs. “It was bothering him, the tire tracks,” an operator said later. “But he’s looking at tire tracks at 10,000 feet on the east side of the valley, with the north being impassable due to terrain and minefields, and the south—you’ve still got the long axis of the valley [to traverse], so how could there be these tire tracks up here, and who could’ve ridden the thing that made it up here? He was probably wondering, what sort of spaceship was able to get up here?” Again, Kris got ready to fire at the confused fighter. Then, “at what would have been his last moment,” as a military report of the incident put it, the inquisitive Taliban fighter appeared to reconsider before turning around and rejoining the group.

  In a turn of amazing good fortune, a blizzard suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Gale-force winds whipped snow into the small knot of guerrillas. As if of one mind, the Afghan fighters apparently decided that in this case discretion was the better part of valor and continued west toward the shelter of the village. Thinking the five enemy troops might be back with reinforcements, the operators broke down the tent and hauled the gear up to the observation post. They set a trip wire with a grenade by the ATVs to give them early warning. The snow fell for the next two hours, smothering the area. After it stopped, Kris looked around and realized this would be their final observation post. He had planned on possibly pushing further south to establish the team on Takur Ghar. But if the team were to move now, the snow would provide what an operator called “a cookie-crumb trail” for the enemy to follow. Of equal import, they now had superb overwatch of the valley and the Whale, and the blanket of snow would give them an accurate indicator of any enemy movement in the area.

  (Juliet sent a data message reporting their close call back to Gardez via satellite. Blaber read it and immediately forwarded it to Hagenbeck, Harrell, and TF 11’s Masirah headquarters. Displaying his renowned flair for the dramatic, he introduced Kris’s report with three words—” We’re in business”—a line taken from the moment in the movie Saving Private Ryan when U.S. troops pinned down on Omaha Beach use a Bangalore torpedo to make a breakthrough.)

  After their brush with catastrophe, Juliet turned their attention back to the Whale. The weather abated long enough for them to spy four “possibly armed” individuals on the east side of the mountain. A few hours later they spotted three enemy positions on the Whale. One was
an observation post occupied by a single guerrilla at the top of the ridgeline facing west. Two other fighters sheltered nearby in a rock shack with a cloth cover. Fifty meters below them were concealed fighting positions. Shortly thereafter Juliet identified another observation post and four fighters moving between a pair of bunkers on the eastern side of the Whale. Kris and his men were starting to realize the Whale was honeycombed with fighting positions. Looking south, they could see a portion of Marzak a little over five kilometers away and reckoned that at least five or six buildings in the town were active.

  The weather worsened as the day wore on. The cloud ceiling descending to 7,000 feet and visibility was restricted to 400 meters. Speedy repositioned India a little lower down their hillside to get under the cloud cover. He and his men were momentarily alarmed to hear gunfire from the direction of Juliet, but quickly concluded it was the same sort of marksmanship training Mako 31 had reported earlier. The Gray Fox signals interceptors became the main effort. They reported every intercept they made quickly back to Gardez. From there the information was sent to Bagram, where Fred Egerer used it to task the NSA’s spy planes and satellites for further collection.

  Later that afternoon Mako 31 also spotted enemy positions on the Whale. Once darkness fell, Goody and his troops struck out for their OP. A thick blanket of fog covered their movement, but the going was even tougher than the previous night’s efforts. With snow and sleet stinging their faces, the five men picked their way carefully along the steep, jagged ridgeline, only too aware that the slightest misplaced step could send them tumbling hundreds of feet into the dark crevasses below. It took them six hours to cover about 1,000 meters. They halted at about 2 a.m. on the morning of March 1 in a depression about 250 meters southwest of the Finger’s highest point. This would be their mission support site where they would stash their rucks and rest. The next morning they would push out and establish the observation post a little farther along and on the eastern side of the crest. That night the AFO operations center passed a message to the teams in the valley: H-Hour was set for 6:30 a.m. March 2, less than thirty-six hours away.

  BY the evening of February 28 word was seeping into the Mountain and Rakkasan final rehearsals that the enemy might not be concentrated on the valley floor after all. At 8.30 p.m. the senior officers and NCOs from Chip Preysler’s 2-187 Infantry gathered in a dark GP Medium tent where Captain Denis Holtery, the battalion’s intelligence officer, told them the focus was turning to the mountains that surrounded the valley. “The change is we’re not so much worried about taking rounds from the town,” Preysler then explained to his men. The threat to the platoons conducting the air assault was more likely to come from the mountains on the Shahikot’s eastern side. “We may have an uphill fight,” in which case the plan was to send the Apaches against the enemy positions in the mountains, he said. There was also new thinking on when the air assault’s second lift would be committed, Preysler told them. Originally scheduled to touch down in the valley at dusk on D-Day, the plan now was for the second lift of infantry to arrive within three hours of the first lift, he said. (The reason was that the planners now considered it impossible to seal all the blocking positions without those additional forces.) However, despite the reports reaching Bagram of an enemy presence in the ridgelines around the valley, no effort was made to change the plan to accommodate these new facts.

  The focus for most Rakkasans that day had not been on new intelligence from the Shahikot, but on the flyaway rehearsal Wiercinski used to tailor his load plans for the aircraft. The extra forty-eight hours they had gained courtesy of Hagenbeck’s weather call also gave the battalion commanders and command sergeants major more time to focus their soldiers’ minds on the mission. Their messages reflected the curious dichotomy that existed at the higher levels of command. On one hand, the plan and the forces used to execute it were a function of the expectation that the enemy would not put up a big fight. Hence the focus at the small unit level on how to screen crowds of civilians for the presence of guerrillas trying to escape. On the other hand, in the world of the infantry officer or NCO, it was considered almost criminal to allow your soldiers to go into a “real-world” mission without mentally steeling them for combat. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the meeting Preysler held with his subordinates that evening. Mark Nielsen, Preysler’s wiry sergeant major who commanded enormous respect among the battalion’s enlisted men, personified this hardheaded, combat-oriented mentality. His eyes sweeping the tent, he told the company first sergeants to scrub their lists of soldiers heading into the Shahikot and leave behind those they thought couldn’t cut it physically or mentally. “I don’t want any pussies going on this mission,” Nielsen said, glowering like a bulldog in the weak electric light. “There’s no pop-up targets this time, boys; there’s fucking real flesh and blood out there. Let’s get ’em on the ground, meet the enemy, and destroy him.”

  Major Rick Busko, Preysler’s operations officer, reminded the infantrymen that the eyes of President Bush and everyone else in their chain of command would be on them in the Shahikot. “At the National Command Authority-level…this is the only game in town,” he said, adding that company commanders and first sergeants needed to tell their soldiers “now is the time to perform.” The message was getting through to the soldiers. As he stood in line outside the chow tent waiting for dinner, Sergeant David Dedo of 2-187’s Charlie Company reflected on the mission to come. “Osama bin Laden made a comment that U.S. soldiers are ‘paper tigers,’” he said. “Well, now he’s got a chance to find out.” But, he added, displaying the hard-boiled realism of an infantry NCO, “I don’t think this is going to be the new-age Normandy the 101st is looking for.”

  The Rakkasans also used the extra time to give some last-minute instruction on how to fight and survive in the frozen conditions they expected to find in the Shahikot. Standing on the hood of a Humvee on the edge of tent city, Staff Sergeant John Hodges, a squad leader in 2-187 Infantry’s A Troop, gave a cold-weather operations class to a walk-up crowd. Hodges had been stationed in Alaska for three years and had gone through cold-weather training at the Army’s Northern Warfare Training Center at Camp Greely. He ran through the basics that might never have occurred to soldiers unused to operating in sub-freezing temperatures. “In the cold it’s going to take two to three times as long to do anything,” he said. A simple task like loading a magazine could take ten to fifteen minutes in extreme conditions. It was vital to keep eating and drinking water, particularly at high altitude, Hodges said. Then he explained the three types of cold weather injuries—chilblains, hypothermia, and frostbite—and how to avoid them. Finally Hodges gazed around the crowd and asked whether there was anyone who had never seen snow before. Two soldiers raised their hands. “If you’ve never seen snow, don’t worry about it,” Hodges told them. “Here’s your chance, and the Army’s picking up the tab.”

  26.

  SHORTLY after dawn on an overcast March 1, Goody sent two Mako 31 snipers up the Finger to scout the location the team had selected for their observation post. The two SEALs inched forward for 500 meters along the rocky ridgeline until they could put eyes on the exact spot Goody and Blaber had agreed on. As they poked their heads above the rocks to get a good look, they got the shock of their lives. Someone had beaten them to it. There, in the lee of a large, jagged outcrop, on the very patch of ground on which they intended to establish their observation post, sat a gray-green tent big enough to sleep several people. As the commandos digested this unexpected turn of events, their eyes fastened on an even more unsettling sight. About fifteen meters up the rock-strewn slope, they discerned the outline of a tripod-mounted DShK wrapped tightly in blue plastic. The discovery was momentous. The position dominated the southern end of the valley—that, after all, was why the AFO operators wanted to occupy it—and overlooked the 700-meter gap through which TF Rakkasan’s helicopters were to fly between the Finger and the eastern ridge. With an antiaircraft range of 1,000 meters, the DShK w
as ideally located to shoot down the infantry-packed Chinooks due to fly into the valley in less than twenty-four hours. It would be Frank Wiercinski’s worst nightmare come to horrifying life.

  The loss of even one Chinook full of Rakkasans would be a disaster from which Operation Anaconda might not recover. Troops would have to be dispatched from their previously assigned missions to secure the downed helicopter, all while enemy fire poured down on them from the mountainsides. Any reserves flown in would have to brave the same gauntlet of fire that had precipitated their arrival in the first place. But the DShK was positioned to deal an even more devastating blow to the operation. Wiercinski planned to bring his forward command post, containing himself, Savusa, Marye, Corkran and Air Force Captain Paul “Dino” Murray, the Rakkasans’ air liaison officer, into the valley on two Black Hawks and land just a few hundred meters farther north along and a little farther down the Finger from the DShK. At such close range it would be hard for the Al Qaida gunner to miss. As he emptied his weapon into the two American helicopters, even he would not have dreamed that the Black Hawks cartwheeling to the ground were carrying to their deaths not only the commander of the entire air assault force but also the commanders of his aviation task force and his only reserve, as well as his senior NCO and the officer responsible for coordinating close air support for the troops who survived the initial air assault. In the opening minutes of Anaconda a single heavy machine gunner would have dealt the operation a shattering blow.

  “The success or failure of your mission will predicate the success or failure of the entire operation,” Blaber had told Goody. The AFO commander learned how truthfully he had spoken at 10:02 a.m., when India Team relayed a message from Mako 31 to the safe house stating the bare facts of their discovery: an unmanned DShK and a tent sitting on the observation post. The news validated Blaber’s bold decision to risk an infiltration of the Shahikot before D-Day. Without the audacity displayed by the AFO commander and his three recce teams, the staffs at Bagram would have remained ignorant of the DShK’s existence until the moment Task Force Rakkasan flew into a buzz saw of high-caliber bullets. This was a lesson for anyone who thought the U.S. military’s billions of dollars’ worth of spy satellites and surveillance aircraft obviated the need for ground reconnaissance. Despite the boasts at Bagram that “every national asset” was being focused on the valley, none of the satellites or spy planes—not even the Mi-17 helicopter the CIA had flown over the Shahikot the previous day with an operative filming the valley floor—had revealed either the tent or the weapon that could have spelled defeat for the Americans in the battle’s opening moments. Lou Bello, the Mountain fires planner, compared searching for a single DShK on a mountainside from the air to “looking for a needle in a haystack.” In the giant haystack that was the Shahikot Valley, Mako 31 had found a needle and it was pointing straight at the heart of Operation Anaconda.