Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  “There are two kinds of people out there tonight,” he said, again touching on the subject of the civilians he expected to find in the Shahikot. “There are innocents who don’t want any part of this fight, and there are those out there who want nothing better than to kill an American or kill a coalition partner.” This time Wiercinski’s message was that he didn’t want any hesitation when the time for killing those in the latter category arrived. “Do not be afraid to squeeze that trigger,” he told the young soldiers. “You will know when, you will know why.”

  “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” he continued, channeling Henry V via Shakespeare and Stephen Ambrose, before closing with references to the 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne mottos. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, anywhere else in the world today, than right here with you. Today is your ‘Climb to Glory,’ today’s another chapter in Rakkasan history, today’s our ‘Rendezvous with Destiny.’ You should all be proud of yourselves. God bless each and every one of us. I’ll see you when we come back. Remember our motto: ‘Let Valor not Fail.’ Rakkasans!”

  Wiercinski departed the makeshift stage to cheers. The chaplain led the troops in prayer and the Mountain and 101st troops sang loud, if somewhat off-key, renditions of each division’s song before the units walked back to their tents. The infantry companies on the first lift would be getting up in the middle of the night. Most soldiers hit the chow tent one last time, made sure their rucks were packed and ready, and then racked out. Who knew when the next opportunity for sleep would present itself?

  LATE that afternoon Hagenbeck took part in a video-teleconference with Central Command and CFLCC. Hagenbeck explained that the AFO teams now had eyes on previously unknown enemy positions. He requested additional preassault air strikes the next morning to destroy them. “General Hagenbeck said, ‘Hey, bomb these frickin’ things,’” recalled Mikolashek, who was also in the VTC. This request provoked what Mikolashek described as “a little consternation” on the part of the CENTCOM participants in general, and Renuart, the Air Force general who was Franks’s director of operations, in particular. “Hey, you guys said you wanted this many targets bombed, and now it’s all of a sudden this many. What are you doing?” was how Mikolashek characterized Renuart’s response. Another officer who witnessed Renuart’s outburst was more graphic. “The J-3 [Renuart] went crazy on the VTC, bitching and moaning and yelling, ‘We can’t do that, we can’t adjust,’” he said. “He showed himself big time.”

  In the end Renuart and Central Command said they would try to arrange the additional air strikes. But Renuart’s initial reaction suggested that Central Command was not postured to quickly adapt to changing battlefield circumstances. “CENTCOM, in their defense, had not been exposed to this kind of close combat heretofore,” Mikolashek said. It promised to be a steep learning curve for all concerned.

  AS the infantry slumbered, a single pair of Vietnam-style jungle boots squelched through the mire of tent city. Jimmy was dog tired after a twenty-hour day monitoring the radios and keeping the senior members of the Mountain staff updated on the latest revelations from the AFO teams in the Shahikot. But before he crashed he had a personal commitment to fulfill. Jimmy was a “prior service” officer, meaning he had entered the Army as an enlisted man. As a young specialist in 1st Ranger Battalion’s B Company he had come to know and respect a staff sergeant in A Company, even though the hard-as-nails NCO would drop him for push-ups for parking his motorcycle in A Company’s parking area. By strange coincidence, after Jimmy obtained a commission via a Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania and was given a platoon in 2nd Ranger Battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington, his mentor, now a sergeant first class, was assigned as his platoon sergeant. At first the NCO couldn’t believe his bad luck—taking orders from a kid you used to drop for push-ups is a hard adjustment for a grizzled non-com to make. “But he turned out to be one of the best platoon leaders I’ve ever had,” the NCO said many years later. Jimmy had learned a lot about soldiering from his platoon sergeant. Now, after twenty-eight hard years in the Army, that NCO was preparing to lead men in combat for the first time and Jimmy wanted to help out in any way he could. That’s why he found himself splashing through the mud peering at one tent after another at 2 a.m. on March 2. He found the right tent and pulled the flap back. The light was on inside and he easily picked out the leathery face of his old platoon sergeant, now Command Sergeant Major Mark Nielsen. Jimmy bent over Nielsen’s cot and shook him gently awake. The sergeant major was alert in a nanosecond, looking up at Jimmy inquisitively. The Delta officer whispered a short, potent message: “The LZs are clear. Watch the high ground.” Then he was gone.

  REACTION TO CONTACT

  1.

  ON the road outside the Gardez safe house, Task Force Hammer got ready to roll.

  Exhaust fumes from over three dozen trucks mixed in the night air with smoke from scores of cigarettes as drivers idled their engines. Dozens of SF soldiers, AFO operators, and CIA personnel mingled with about 400 Afghan troops, whom the Americans were trying to group in their new squads, platoons, and companies as they climbed onto the trucks. The Americans had only told their Afghan allies about the impending attack on the Shahikot earlier that day, but Zia’s men were not in the least surprised. “We’ve been telling you about the Shahikot for a long time,” they said.

  Finally the last militiaman pulled himself up into his assigned truck. The Special Forces NCOs walked down the line of vehicles, checking everyone was where he was supposed to be, then climbed into their pickups. Inside the Americans’ Toyota Tacomas, radios crackled to life. At 11:33 p.m., three minutes behind schedule, the column of vehicles pulled away from the safe house, heading west into Gardez and then south along the Zermat road. After two months of planning and preparation for Operation Anaconda, it was showtime.

  The Americans had done their best to organize the convoy vehicles into a logical order of march. At the front in a couple pickups rode Glenn Thomas, the Texas 14 commander, and “Engineer,” the English speaker who was the most tactically astute Afghan “platoon leader.” Behind them was a four-vehicle element led by Chief Warrant Officer 2 Stanley Harriman, McHale’s second-in-command, known to his men simply as “Chief.” With Harriman were a couple of his teammates and thirty-five to forty Afghan fighters led by Ziabdullah, the local commander in whom the Americans placed less faith than they did in Zia Lodin. Harriman’s mission was to split from the convoy several kilometers northwest of the Whale and position his little force so that it could guard a narrow gap that separated the Whale from the ridgeline just to the north called Gawyani Ghar. Their purpose there was to block anyone from escaping out of the Shahikot to the northwest, preferably by calling in close air support. If Harriman’s force saw an enemy element heading their way, they were to “bomb the snot out of it,” McHale said. Joining Harriman’s force of two pickups and a jinga truck was a third pickup carrying Hans and Nelson (the AFO SEALs) and Thor, a recently arrived Gray Fox linguist. This trio’s mission was to meet Juliet Team as they rode back down out of the mountains on their ATVs and escort them back to Gardez.

  Next in the order of march came McHale and the rest of his men with Hoskheyar’s company of local fighters. Behind them was the Afghan mortar platoon, followed by Chris Haas, the lieutenant colonel who had arrived with a small command cell only a few days previously, and his operations officer, Major Mark Schwartz, each in his own pickup. (Haas’s role was a little fuzzy. Even though Haas outranked Thomas and McHale by two pay grades, Thomas felt in command of the column. “Our teams had the leeway of making the calls on the ground,” with the understanding that Haas or Schwartz could impose their authority at any time, Thomas said.) Haas was leading the second half of the column, which included Zia Lodin, the overall AMF commander, his deputy, Rasul, and the hard core of thirty militiamen recruited with Zia by Texas 14. The Afghans rode in jinga trucks, slightly smaller vehicles, and, in the case of a few senior men,
pickups. The Dagger guys had tried to keep the Afghans in their squads and platoons as they got in the trucks. Each Afghan “platoon” had been assigned a Special Forces NCO as the platoon’s principal instructor. Now the trucks carrying each platoon were together in the column, with the platoon’s associated SF sergeant in a pickup directly in front of them. That way, Thomas and McHale figured, when orders needed to be given, the Afghans would be hearing them from the American they knew best.

  Somewhere in the middle was the Rakkasan engineer squad. There were also a handful of Australian SAS troopers, who were Task Force 64 liaisons, relaying information between Hammer and the Australians south of the Shahikot. Bringing up the rear was another AFO element, consisting of Captain John B., Sergeant Major Al Y., and Master Sergeant Isaac H. in two pickups. Their job was to extract India and Mako 31 after linking up with them at the Fishhook. There were also three empty trucks at the end of the convoy to be used as spares in case of breakdowns.

  As they drove down the Zermat road toward the turnoff to the Shahikot, the task facing the men of TF Hammer was clear. They were to drive east to the Whale, then south until they reached the Fishhook. Once through that potential ambush point, most of Texas 14 and the company of Afghan fighters under Zia Lodin and Rasul would charge into the valley, clearing the villages from south to north, starting with Babulkhel. Meanwhile, Hoskheyar’s force with McHale’s team (minus Harriman’s element but plus a couple of Texas 14 sergeants) would move into a position on the lower, northernmost reaches of the Finger that Mako 31 had selected for their observation post. From there they would support Zia’s men with mortar and machine-gun fire if necessary as they wheeled into the valley.

  It is a military cliché that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. But in TF Hammer’s case, the plan for Anaconda didn’t even last that long. Things began to unravel within an hour of the convoy departing Gardez. The problems stemmed from the fact that the plan to load several hundred Afghan fighters into top-heavy jinga trucks driven in the middle of the night with no lights by inexperienced drivers along a “road” that was no more than a dirt track on a tight timeline was fundamentally unsound.

  The Zermat road was in awful condition. It wasn’t really a road, but a muddy track that in places was completely washed away, forcing the drivers to cross wadis the floors of which were up to fifteen feet below the surface of the road. To make matters worse, two days of rain had softened the ground. It would have been hard to drive a jinga truck along such a treacherous route in broad daylight, let alone at night with all lights off, as the Special Forces officers had ordered for tactical reasons. The Americans quickly realized they had underestimated how challenging their drivers would find this route. For the U.S. troops in their pickups at the head of the convoy, driving with lights out posed few problems. Their night-vision goggles enabled them to choose a safe path, and, of course, their four-wheel-drive Toyotas were inherently more stable than the jinga trucks. But the Afghans enjoyed no such advantages and were forced to negotiate the treacherous passage with only the moonlight to guide them. The SF troops belatedly realized their mistake in assigning driving duties to Afghan militiamen who had volunteered for the job out of a desire not to let the Americans down, not because they knew how to drive trucks. “We should have gone somehow with truck drivers that drive all the time,” McHale acknowledged. Haas also admitted he had “underestimated” the difficulties they would face on the road. Some drivers became visibly nervous in the perilous conditions, unsure of how to control the jinga trucks that swayed this way and that, their short chains jangling against the sides of the vehicles. First a jinga truck became irretrievably stuck, tilted over at such an angle that half of its wheels spun uselessly in the air. A few minutes later, just after midnight, another jinga truck driver completely lost control of his vehicle as he drove over a log bridge that covered a four-meter gap in the road. The heavy truck tipped over on its side, spilling its load of Afghan fighters onto the ground. The Special Forces soldiers could sense their allies’ morale plummeting as militiamen with injuries of varying severity lay wailing beside the tipped-over truck. Thinking quickly, an SF medic announced through an interpreter that the most seriously injured fighters should climb on a nearby truck. As several guerrillas roused themselves with suspicious speed and clambered onto the truck, he turned to treat those too badly hurt to move. Three were no longer fit for combat—their injuries included broken ribs and a punctured lung—so they were evacuated on two small trucks to a local hospital.

  No sooner had the SF soldiers dealt with that crisis than another truck got stuck fast. The “friction of the battlefield”—first described as such by the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz in a phrase that has become a cliché—was rearing its ugly head. Something close to chaos descended along the length of the stalled column as Afghan fighters milled around in the dark trying to find their colleagues. Shouts and curses flew as the SF soldiers tried to bring some order to the situation against a backdrop of revving engines as drivers tried to free their trapped trucks or maneuver the spares forward from the back of the line. Only too aware that they were falling behind schedule, the Special Forces troops got most of the Afghans who had been riding on the three disabled trucks to climb onto the reserve trucks, but in the darkness it proved impossible to keep each truck’s contingent of fighters together and load them all onto the same empty truck. Neither the extent of this mix-up nor the fact that some Afghans were jumping onto the backs of the American pickups so as not to lose contact with their own buddies was immediately clear to the U.S. troops.

  The two A-team leaders conferred. The rule about driving “blacked-out” was hurting their cause more than helping it and so the two captains gave the order to turn on the headlights. Three dozen pairs of yellow-white lights flashed on. If the Al Qaida pickets on the Whale had been in any doubt about the convoy’s location up to that point, now they knew for sure. With some Afghan fighters running beside the trucks because there was no room for them anymore, the convoy moved on. Task Force Hammer was the main effort, but the tight timeline for the opening hours of the operation revolved around the supporting effort—the Rakkasans’ air assault. The convoy had to reach the valley in time for the air assault. The Rakkasans were not going to wait for them. The Special Forces soldiers spurred the Afghans on. They were painfully aware that they were “a little bolloxed up,” as McHale put it later, and “racing time.”

  Nevertheless, the convoy was moving again. It turned east off the Zermat “road” and drew ever closer to the Shahikot. From their perch just south of the Fishhook, India Team reported seeing lights approaching the Whale from the west. The time was 2:55 a.m. Maybe Task Force Hammer would make it after all.

  2.

  SHORTLY after midnight, at about the time Task Force Hammer’s trucks were getting stuck and rolling over, Goody and the other four men of Mako 31 left the hollow they had used as a hide site and crept toward the enemy observation post. Goody moved ahead of the others, scouting a site where they could drop their rucks about 500 meters from the enemy position. The explosive ordnance disposal expert assigned to Mako 31 and Andy, the team’s Air Force combat controller, remained with the rucks to minimize the chances of the enemy overhearing them as they arranged AC-130 and P-3 coverage of their assault on the tent position. Trying hard to keep to the long shadows cast by a full moon, the three SEAL Team 6 snipers advanced toward a small ridgeline on the other side of which sat the tent. They could hear the low drone of the AC-130 overhead.

  Once they reached the ridgeline, their plan was to wait until H minus one(i.e., 5:30 a.m., an hour before H-Hour) and then assault the tent, coordinating their attack with the AC-130. Not long after they had found cover behind some rocks on the reverse slope of the ridge from the tent, an enemy fighter appeared on the ridgeline like a ghostly apparition in the moonlight. He looked around, then turned and retraced his steps without noticing the nearby SEALs. Goody and his men settled down to
wait. But at 4 a.m. the same fighter appeared, again walking up from the tent (which the SEALs could not see from their vantage point) and gazing west. Perhaps he was looking for the approaching TF Hammer convoy, word of which was undoubtedly circulating on the enemy’s radios and cell phones by now, or perhaps he was merely seeking some privacy to relieve himself. Either way, it was a fateful decision. Glancing up, the enemy fighter caught sight of the SEALs before they had time to duck behind the rocks. Yelling a warning, he sprinted back to the tent, his body’s “fight or flight” mechanism pumping adrenaline into his bloodstream.

  For the SEALs, it was now or never. Goody gave the order to attack. The commandos charged over the ridgeline and down toward the tent twenty meters away. From inside the tent an Al Qaida fighter fired off an entire magazine in the general direction of the Americans, who could see the Kalashnikov’s muzzle flash between the tent flaps. The SEALs dropped to their knees to return fire. A SEAL fired a single round into the tent from his M4 before the rifle jammed. Goody fired next, but he, too, got off only one round before his rifle jammed. The two SEALs worked frantically in the frigid night air to clear their weapons as the third sniper kept the enemy at bay. Five Al Qaida fighters poured from the tent as the SEALs cleared the jams and began picking them off. The first guerrilla sprinted straight at them. In a split second a commando put the red dot of his laser sight in the middle of the fighter’s chest and squeezed the trigger. Several bullets slammed into the fighter’s body and sent him tumbling lifelessly to the frozen earth. The next man out of the tent broke right but got no more than a couple of steps before he was felled by another SEAL fusillade. A third tent occupant tried to escape over the backside of the ridge, only for the SEALs to put their long hours of marksmanship training to good use yet again.