Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  4.

  AFTER the chaos of the first hour, TF Hammer’s ragged convoy was back on track if not on schedule, driving east along a dirt trail toward the Whale, which they expected to see erupt in flame soon from the “fifty-five-minute” bombardment. About seven kilometers northwest of the Whale, Harriman’s four-vehicle mini-convoy split off and headed east-northeast. For about fifteen minutes the trucks carrying Harriman and the others bounced and rattled in a lazy arc that curved back southeast to connect with a wadi running northwest to southeast through the gap between the Whale and the Gawyani Ghar ridgeline. Leading the way was a small truck full of Afghans, followed by Ziabdullah, the untrustworthy militia leader, in a silver Toyota pickup. Next came Harriman’s pickup, which also contained Staff Sergeant Caleb Casenhiser, one of the A-team’s medics, and Staff Sergeant Larron “Larry” Wadsworth, one of the team’s engineers. The AFO pickup carrying Hans, Nelson, and Thor brought up the rear.

  A quietly religious father of two, Harriman, thirty-four, had been sent to Kuwait in late 2001 to work in the office of Lieutenant Colonel Craig Bishop, the special operations coordinator on Mikolashek’s CFLCC staff. The warrant officer made an immediate, positive impact on those he worked with in Kuwait—” He was a super, super guy,” Bishop recalled—but he yearned to be closer to the action. When word came in January that McHale and the rest of ODA 372 were headed to Afghanistan, Harriman pleaded with Bishop to be allowed to rejoin them. The lieutenant colonel relented.

  Now the short, serious warrant officer, a steadying influence on his team who enjoyed huge respect from the Afghans, was bouncing up and down in a Toyota pickup in a wadi en route to the biggest battle of the war, about as close to the action as it was possible to get. As they turned south toward the Whale, some Afghans dismounted and walked ahead of the trucks, scouting the route. The moon emerged from behind its veil of clouds to light their way. Harriman called in reports to the main body every five minutes in a matter-of-fact tone of voice: He wasn’t lost; there were no problems.

  Both Harriman’s convoy and the main column were moving in a south-easterly direction toward Phase Line Emerald, a line planners had drawn from southwest to northeast about 1,500 meters west of and roughly parallel to the Whale. TF Hammer was to pause at Emerald while the air strikes went in against targets on the Whale and the eastern ridge. But soon the main column’s progress stalled again as several of Zia’s trucks got stuck in the sandy, desert-like terrain. The convoy was strung out along several kilometers west of the Whale, making it difficult for the U.S. officers and NCOs to keep track of everyone. As the Hammer troops struggled to free the vehicles, Thomas grew concerned about the threat of ambush in the Fishhook, where the convoy would have to pass through a narrow wadi between two rocky hillsides. Knowing Grim 31, the AC-130 that had just shot up the DShK position for Goody’s SEALs, was available overhead, Thomas asked the aircraft’s fourteen-man crew to check out the area and report what they saw. (Special operators of all branches placed great faith in the AC-130’s two sensors—televisionlike cameras, one geared to the infrared spectrum, the other working from the same image-intensification technology as night-vision goggles—and often used the lethal attack aircraft for reconnaissance.)

  Grim 31 had arrived on station over the convoy at 2:04 a.m., taking over from another AC-130H in the first of a series of late night–early morning missions during Anaconda that would earn the crew its nickname of “The Dawn Patrol.” At first clouds had obscured the aircraft’s view of TF Hammer, but the sky cleared and the crew was able to track the convoy’s progress. However, when it flew south in response to the SEALs’ call for support during their assault on the DShK position, Grim 31 lost visual contact with the convoy. After shooting up the tent and its occupants, the AC-130 answered a call from Juliet to destroy an enemy observation post and bunker they had spotted on top of the Whale from their hideaway on the eastern ridge. Again, Grim 31 was more than equal to the task, scoring several direct hits on the positions at 4:44 a.m. Below them, the pilots saw the crude structures obliterated in bright yellow-orange flashes that blossomed and faded almost instantly.

  Mako 31 then asked the AC-130 to fly back around the Finger to ensure there were no enemy survivors from the DShK position lurking in the rocks. The Grim 31 crew spotted nothing, and it was then that they received Thomas’s request to reconnoiter the Fishhook. Onboard the aircraft, the crew members knew they were getting close to “bingo” fuel—the point at which they would have to turn for home. But even had they had a full tank, dawn was barely an hour away, and that meant their time over the battlefield was drawing short. The AC-130 was the vampire of the Air Force’s fleet of attack aircraft, extraordinarily lethal at night but incredibly vulnerable in daylight. The gunship community was haunted by the memory of Spirit 03, an AC-130 brought down by an Iraqi SA-7 antiaircraft missile during the January 1991 battle of Khafji. Spirit 03 had stayed on station until 6:35 a.m. to help some embattled Marines, allowing an Iraqi air defender to use the early-morning light to line up the slow-flying aircraft in his sights. The AC-130 community was determined to never again lose a plane to daylight, and prior to Anaconda the rule was that all AC-130s had to be out of Afghan airspace by dawn. Those rules had been relaxed to give the troops on the ground more coverage during Anaconda, but Grim 31 was still required by the Task Force Dagger leadership to be clear of the Shahikot area before sunrise.

  The crew of Grim 31 had other problems, the extent of which they were as yet unaware. The plane’s computer systems were acting up. Both had failed totally earlier in the flight. The crew thought they had solved the problems by rebooting the computers. But although the systems seemed to be up and running, hidden problems remained. Most seriously, the inertial navigation system, which told the navigator and pilots where they were flying, was giving incorrect readings. Believing they had fixed the trouble, Grim 31’s crew, one of the most experienced in the 16th Special Operations Squadron, based at Hurl-burt Field, Florida, did not raise them as a major issue with the TF Hammer personnel on the ground. (Although they did hint at it: When asked by Texas 14 to reconnoiter Serkhankhel, they sent possible target coordinates that were ten kilometers off to the convoy. When TF Hammer pointed this out, the aircrew replied that their “systems” had problems that evening.)

  Investigators would later suggest that Grim 31’s inertial navigation system failed again before they turned back to perform the “cleanup” reconnaissance for the SEALs. Under this hypothesis, the AC-130 never actually returned to the Finger from the Whale, but instead unwittingly flew in a more easterly direction and reconnoitered a portion of the eastern ridgeline believing it was the Finger. Then, at the direction of the navigator, regarded by his fellow officers and airmen as the best in the squadron, the pilot flew about three kilometers northwest to a position which appeared to match the Fishhook’s terrain as it was depicted on his 1:100,000 map. It was now about ninety minutes since Grim 31 had left its station over Hammer to support Mako 31, and the crew no longer had a firm grasp of the location of the convoy, from which Harriman’s element had already split off. Instead of scanning the wadi that ran around the southern tip of the Whale, they were actually about eight kilometers off course, flying over a streambed that curled around the northern end of the Whale, just to the south of the Gawyani Ghar ridgeline. Looking down, the crew saw several vehicles driving in the wadi, including two with their headlights on, with twenty to thirty personnel walking ahead of them. Based on an examination of the map, Grim 31 passed what they thought was the location of the convoy to Glenn Thomas’s enlisted tactical air controller, Air Force Master Sergeant William “Buddy” McArthur, with the message that if Texas 14 wanted the target attacked, they had to speak up soon, because Grim 31 only had five minutes’ station time left.

  McArthur told Grim 31 to stand by and passed the grid reference the crew gave him to Thomas and Haas to verify there were no friendly forces in that location. With McArthur present, Thomas read the grid to his drive
r, Sergeant First Class Charles “Todd” Browning. All three agreed there were no friendly vehicles at that grid, which was squarely in the Fishhook. Thomas figured the vehicles and personnel being reported were an enemy force trying to make their escape from the valley westward via the Fishhook. But whatever their purpose, they appeared to be on a collision course with Task Force Hammer and needed to be taken care of. Thomas called Mark Schwartz, Haas’s operations officer, seeking approval for Grim 31 to engage the target. Schwartz passed the information straight to Haas. Meanwhile, Harriman, by now heading south toward the Whale, was concerned. He had heard Grim 31’s radio call about the small truck convoy with dismounted personnel and was worried that it sounded a little too much like his. As a precaution he broadcast his grid coordinates over the radio. They were over six kilometers from where Grim 31 was saying they could see a possible target.

  The Grim 31 crew was also concerned that they not inadvertently attack a friendly force. They knew that to prevent nighttime “friendly fire” attacks from the air, all Hammer vehicles were supposed to be marked with several strips of “glint” tape—adhesive tape that brightly reflects light within the spectrum for which night-vision goggles and the AC-130’s low-light television sensor are optimized. So Grim 31 “glinted” the convoy for several minutes, illuminating the vehicles with an extra-bright beam in a portion of the spectrum that was invisible to the naked eye but would appear like daylight to anyone wearing night-vision goggles, as the Americans in the convoy were. In one of several unsolved mysteries from the incident that followed, not only did the crew see no sign of glint tape on the vehicles, but no one on the ground reported being “glinted.” Nor could the Grim 31 crew see any sign of VS-17 panels—large orange and purple pieces of cloth that U.S. troops use for identification from the air, and which all Task Force Hammer vehicles were supposed to have fixed to them. Grim 31 called Texas 14 with the news. To Thomas and the others in TF Hammer, the vehicles reported by Grim 31 represented a big threat: a potential roadblock or ambush right in the middle of the Fishhook, a natural choke point through which they had to pass to gain entrance to the Shahikot.

  It took a few minutes for the officers and NCOs in the convoy to confirm there was no chance of any Americans being at the spot at which Grim 31 was reporting activity. Thomas verified the grid three times. Onboard the aircraft, the discussion turned to whether to shoot at the vehicles or the dismounted personnel first, and what sort of 105mm howitzer ammunition to use: point detonation or proximity fuse. “If we’re going after the vehicles, let’s go with the PD,” one of the crew said. The crew’s navigator, a major, asked the Air Force Special Tactics Squadron commando who was serving as Dagger’s liaison officer onboard the plane whether he thought the vehicles below were “a good target, and not friendlies,” and the liaison replied in the affirmative. A minute after Grim 31 called Thomas again with a reminder that they would have to leave in a couple of minutes, Schwartz radioed Thomas and said Grim 31 had permission to engage. Thomas told McArthur, who immediately called Grim 31. “Those vehicles can be engaged,” McArthur told the crew at 5:30 a.m. “Cleared hot on those vehicles.”

  Harriman’s four-vehicle convoy was inching south, about a kilometer northeast of a hill that confusingly bore the same Pushto name—Tergul Ghar—as the Whale, and so had been nicknamed “the Guppy” by the Americans, when McArthur told Grim 31 it was “cleared hot” to fire. Within sixty seconds the world around the four trucks flew apart as 105mm shells rained down, spraying clods of frozen earth and baseball-sized chunks of shrapnel in all directions. The first round hit about ten feet in front of the lead vehicle with a loud boom, sending a shower of sparks upward. Riding in the Special Forces pickup two vehicles back, Casenhiser thought the lead truck had hit a mine. But as he opened his door intending to run over and check whether everyone was okay, another explosion went off nearby. He and Wadsworth thought they must be getting mortared. In a desperate maneuver to evade the devastating fire, the three trailing vehicles in the convoy were wheeling around to reverse course when a round fell in the bed of the Special Forces truck. Casenhiser felt something hit him in the shoulder and right hip.

  Inside Grim 31 the crew pressed home the attack with a ruthless efficiency honed to a razor’s edge in thousands of hours of training. As the pilot, Major D. J. Turner, slowly circled about 10,000 feet above the target, the 105 gunner—who functioned more as a loader; only the pilot and the two sensor operators could fire the howitzer protruding from the aircraft’s belly—opened the gun’s breech after each round was fired and pulled the spent brass casing out, dropping it to the floor and kicking it out of the way. Then he hoisted another fifty-three-pound round into the weapon, slammed the breech shut, and hit the button that let the hydraulics reactivate the gun mount. The whole process took five to seven seconds, at the end of which he yelled “Gun ready!” into his helmet microphone. After the flight engineer had repeated the “Gun ready!” shout, one of the sensor operators aligned the sights on his head monitor over a new target and pressed his “consent” button with his left hand to fire another round.

  Again and again the earth around the little column of vehicles erupted as Grim 31’s crew repeated the process, chasing the troops on the ground as they frantically tried to escape the rain of fire. Caught in the midst of the terrifying maelstrom, Wadsworth noticed there were none of the telltale whistles that announce incoming mortar rounds, just a series of sudden explosions. He was not alone in his suspicions. As they raced down the wadi at forty miles per hour trying to evade the barrage, the other special operators realized the rounds that followed their every twist and turn were raining down far too accurately for mortar fire.

  “I’m taking incoming! I’m taking incoming!” Harriman yelled into his radio, a transmission monitored by the rest of TF Hammer and in Dagger’s operations center at Bagram, but not by Grim 31. Then a shell exploded with a vicious boom! right beside Harriman’s truck. A racquetball-sized lump of shrapnel punched a hole through the right passenger side door and hit the warrant officer in his lower back. Another piece of shrapnel, this one about the size of a golf ball, just missed Harriman but angled up and caught Wadsworth’s hand as he twisted the steering wheel, skinning his fingers to the bone. The truck stopped moving as the other vehicles kept trying to outrun the murderous fire. Despite his wound, which was critical, Harriman got back on the radio and, with a weakening voice, requested support. On board Grim 31, the crew chatted in a businesslike fashion as they lined the targets up in their gun sights. “They’re un-assing the area,” said one crewmember, as the troops in the convoy tried desperately to evade Grim 31’s merciless pounding. “That last one is trying to boogie,” replied another. “Scanners keep your eyes peeled.” “The first one is stopped.” “Second one hit.” “Get out in front of that lead vehicle and lead ’em.” Soon all the vehicles in the little convoy had stopped and anyone who could walk was taking cover behind rocks. Above them, Grim 31 had made one-and-a-half orbits of about a two-kilometer radius. The crew had fired between eight and ten rounds and could see there were still targets left to engage. But they were at “bingo” fuel and dawn was coming, and so Turner pointed the aircraft north. Two minutes and thirteen seconds after the firing began, it was over.

  As soon as the rounds stopped falling, Casenhiser and Wadsworth ran back to their truck, where Harriman remained, his breathing labored and his blood spilling onto the seat. Casenhiser checked his pulse, then began CPR on him. Meanwhile Wadsworth grabbed the PRC-148 radio and called up the chain to say they were receiving fire and that Harriman was badly wounded. “Chief is dying! Chief is dying!” Haas heard a clearly rattled Wadsworth yell over the radio. Their colleagues in the main column, which had only just started moving again, had heard muffled gunfire in the distance but didn’t make the connection between the AC-130 mission and the tragedy that had just befallen the smaller convoy. “Looks like our northern OP is now taking on mortar fire,” one of the special operators said over the rad
io. At first, ironically, TF Hammer asked Grim 31, who they believed was still engaging targets in the Fishhook, to fly north and attack the enemy mortar position presumed to be firing on Harriman’s element. But a faint pink-yellow glow along the eastern horizon announced the impending dawn. “Uh, we gotta leave,” Grim 31’s navigator reported. “It’s daylight. We are ordered to leave.” Instead, they would get an inbound flight of F-15E Strike Eagle fighters to come to the rescue, the aircrew told TF Hammer as they flew north.

  Meanwhile, in Gardez, Blaber, Glenn P., and the other operators in the AFO operations center had been monitoring the radio exchanges and were now scrambling to figure out what Grim 31 was engaging. Because they could combine the reports from the three AFO teams in the valley with all the other message traffic, they had a better sense of what was happening in the valley than any other headquarters, a fact which would become increasingly apparent over the next seventy-two hours. None of the teams had reported an enemy convoy in the Fishhook, and when they heard Grim 31 report they had disabled at least two vehicles, Blaber and Glenn P. became worried. Then, a minute or two later, at about 5:35 a.m., John B.’s three-man AFO team with the main body of TF Hammer radioed back to Gardez that the northern convoy, including Hans, Nelson, and Thor, was being mortared. Blaber and Glenn P. immediately made the connection. “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!” Blaber yelled into the satellite radio hand mike. Glenn P. shouted the same into a hand-held MBITR as he ran outside to get better transmission on the line-of-sight radio.