Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  The Grim 31 crew members never heard the “Cease fire!” call. It would have been irrelevant anyway, as they were already heading home. But Glenn’s P. next transmission from the Gardez safe house got through. “We have friendly force receiving mortar fire, break,” the AFO intelligence NCO said. “We hope that’s not you firing on them.” The stark message was the first chilling indication anyone on the AC-130 had that they had been shooting at Americans. “Who is this?” Grim 31’s navigator replied in what one special ops account described as an “audibly shaken” voice. “Ultra 01,” Glenn P. replied, giving Blaber’s AFO call sign.

  A few kilometers away in the main column, Schwartz had been monitoring Harriman’s transmissions and told Haas that Harriman’s element had taken casualties. Haas halted the main column and began organizing a quick reaction force to go to the assistance of Harriman’s convoy. Meanwhile, Schwartz continued communicating with Harriman until the badly wounded warrant officer could no longer talk on the radio. At that point Wadsworth, who could barely operate the radio himself because of his badly wounded hands, took over communications duty while simultaneously struggling to get the Afghans to set up a security perimeter. Schwartz asked Wadsworth a series of questions: What is your location? What is the friendly and enemy situation? What are the numbers of U.S. and AMF wounded? Can you identify an exfil HLZ? Schwartz also kept the TF Dagger command post at Bagram updated on the situation.

  BACK at the site of the attack on Harriman’s convoy, the scene was one of devastation. One of Ziabdullah’s fighters lay dead and another dozen had been wounded, one mortally. Nelson, one of the AFO operators, had suffered super-ficial cuts to his face and head and a scratched cornea. All three Special Forces soldiers were hurt, but Harriman’s wounds were easily the most severe. He now had a fist-sized hole in his back through which his life was quickly ebbing away. Ignoring his own wounds, Casenhiser worked feverishly to try to save his friend’s life.

  About twenty minutes after the main column ground to a halt, a four-vehicle quick reaction force took off for Harriman’s position. In the two lead vehicles—an armored Mercedes SUV and a pickup—were Texas 14’s second-in-command, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Sean Ballard, McArthur, Schwartz, and a couple of Special Forces NCOs, including ODA 372’s other medic, Sergeant First Class Brian Allen. The third vehicle was a truck containing Engineer’s thirty-strong platoon—among the best of the Afghan fighters—and the fourth vehicle was an AFO pickup containing John B. and Isaac H. It took the rescue party about ten minutes to drive north to Harriman’s stricken little convoy. A little more than halfway there, roughly 800 meters from Harriman’s position, they thought they heard the crackle of small arms fire. Ballard charged ahead in his armored SUV. The other vehicles stopped and established a hasty perimeter, with Engineer’s fighters orienting their weapons to the north and northeast. After a short pause Schwartz determined that they weren’t receiving effective fire and couldn’t see any enemy fighters, so he had everyone get back in the vehicles and continued north. While still en route, Ballard heard over the radio that one of the U.S. casualties was going into cardiac arrest.

  It wasn’t yet 6:30 a.m. The Rakkasan air assault had yet to land, but Task Force Hammer was already in the grip of Clausewitzean friction and had ground almost to a halt well short of its objective. The first mutterings of dissension were being heard from the Afghans, and the NCOs in the quick reaction force found themselves already arranging a medevac for their stricken colleagues. Operation Anaconda had not begun auspiciously.

  (A Central Command investigation into the attack on Harriman’s column found that it had been mistakenly engaged by Grim 31. The major factor in the friendly-fire incident was the failure of the aircraft’s inertial navigation system, which led the aircrew to believe they were over the Fishhook when in fact they were flying over very similar terrain just north of the Whale, the investigators concluded. However, their report left several questions unanswered: Why, if the navigation system had failed after Grim 31 engaged Juliet’s targets on top of the Whale, and Grim 31 had flown back to the eastern ridge, as investigators speculated, rather than to the Finger, the aircraft’s crew reported that the flight time to the next target did not match how long it would have taken them to fly to a position above Harriman’s convoy at the northern tip of the Whale; why thecrew saw no sign of “glint” tape on the vehicles they engaged; why the U.S. troops who were attacked didn’t notice when Grim 31 “glinted” their position; and why the navigation system seemed to work perfectly in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Harriman’s column, steering Grim 31 home to K2 through bad weather exactly as it should have. What the investigation did make clear was that, not for the last time in Operation Anaconda, in a situation in which every individual involved was doing his best to secure victory, tragedy resulted.)

  5.

  DESPITE the best efforts of the SF officers and NCOs to hold things together, chaos now engulfed TF Hammer, which was spread out over five kilometers west of the Whale. Some trucks were still advancing, others had stopped, while the SF troops, still believing Harriman’s convoy had been hit by enemy mortar fire, looked to their own defenses and sent AMF fighters out to establish a perimeter around the convoy. It was “a very confusing time,” recalled McHale, who was one of those who had stopped. Glenn Thomas had driven off in his pickup with the quick reaction force, but he only accompanied the other vehicles far enough to ensure they were headed in the right direction. While Thomas was gone, Haas told McHale to move to the front of the column and continue driving southeast to Gwad Kala, a collection of ruins less than two kilometers west of the Whale. Phase Line Emerald ran through Gwad Kala, and McHale was to pause there and wait for the bombing runs against the Whale. Not realizing that Thomas was only accompanying the quick reaction force part of the way to Harriman’s convoy and then returning, McHale understood Haas’s order to mean that he—McHale—was now in charge at the head of the column. The ODA 372 leader did as he was directed, gathering a half-dozen U.S. and Afghan vehicles and moving out smartly. But this only added to the confusion, because when Thomas returned to the main column and resumed movement southeast, he assumed he was still in the lead element and didn’t realize there were seven or eight friendly vehicles ahead of him. “He thought he was in the front, and I thought I was in the front,” McHale recalled.

  The original Task Force Hammer order of march had long since been discarded. McHale had told his team’s senior engineer, Sergeant First Class James Van Antwerp, to lag behind the main column and “keep pushing vehicles forward.” In fact, Van Antwerp ended up in the middle of the convoy, which was where Glenn Thomas ran into him when the Texas 14 leader rejoined the main body of TF Hammer. Elements of the two A-teams were intermixed at the front of the column. Worried there might be unmarked minefields ahead, McHale put one of Texas 14’s armored Mercedes in the lead and drove through a narrow gorge just west of Carwazi, a small village about two kilometers west of the northern tip of the Whale.

  It was about 6:15 a.m. when the first few vehicles from McHale’s element emerged from the defile, still two-and-a-half kilometers north of Gwad Kala with the rest of TF Hammer stretched out for several thousand meters behind them. Behind him, Haas looked at his watch and congratulated himself on being almost on schedule, despite all the catastrophes that had befallen his task force. Haas’s Toyota bounced through the defile, and then up onto some nearby high ground. Raising his gaze, Haas took in the awesome size of the Whale, looming dark and forbidding in front of him. “Holy shit!” he gasped. For the first time he fully understood the dominance the rocky massif exerted over the Shahikot’s western approaches. He looked back at his watch. This was when the bombing was supposed to start. The Americans and their Afghan allies cast their eyes toward the heavens, waiting for the promised fifty-five-minute bombardment to begin. The Afghans, nervous about the enemy they expected to find on the Whale, set great store by the Americans’ ability to deliver death and destruction on command fr
om the air. For their part, the Americans knew their ability to cajole their allies rested on their ability to deliver on their promises. Both parties were about to be sorely disappointed. In an underwhelming display of American firepower, a single B-1B bomber hurtled through the predawn sky, and a grand total of six orange explosions blossomed along the humpback ridgeline. And that was that. The ballyhooed “fifty-five-minute” bombardment had in fact lasted less than a single minute. The Whale was over six kilometers long and, at its broadest point, two kilometers wide. The Air Force had dropped less than one bomb per kilometer on the massive terrain feature.

  At first neither the Americans nor their Afghan allies could believe that they had just witnessed the entire bombardment. As the first bombs erupted along the spine of the Whale, Zia Lodin jumped with his harms raised aloft in a universal gesture of triumph. “All the Afghans are screaming ‘Yay!’” Haas recalled. When Zia was done with his premature victory jig, Haas called him over and explained that as soon as the bombing finished, in about an hour, they had to be ready to move forward. Then they looked back toward the Whale expectantly. “And I’m waiting, and I’m waiting, and I’m waiting,” Haas said. Nothing happened. Where’s the rest of the bombs? McHale wondered. The bombs, of course, had been lost in the miasma of miscommunication in the days preceding the operation. Apprehension among the Afghans deepened. Zia Lodin, upon whose troops the Anaconda plan revolved, turned to Haas and said, via an interpreter, “Where are the bombs you promised us? Where are the planes?”

  THE events surrounding the air strikes that were supposed to hit the valley prior to H-Hour remained clouded in mystery two years after the operation. The plan called for thirteen preplanned targets to be struck by a B-1B bomber, a B-52 bomber, and two F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers in the hour prior to H-Hour. Some of these bombs went in as planned, including a thermobaric bomb that struck the cave complex that Juliet had identified two days previously and the JDAMs dropped on the Whale. But others—the exact number and location of the targets involved is still debated, but there is general agreement that they included targets in the southeast of the valley—did not.

  Two factors lay behind the failure to drop these bombs. The first is that the B-1B had a bomb get stuck in its bomb bay. It requested permission from the Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi Arabia to jettison the bomb over the target area and then waited for several minutes for permission to be granted. Meanwhile, the B-52, which had three bombs left to drop (fewer than the B-1B), waited for the B-1B to finish its bombing run. Before the CAOC could come back with an answer for the B-1B, the aircraft all heard what they interpreted as a “knock it off” call from a special operations reconnaissance team—presumably one of the AFO teams, as these were the only teams in the valley at the time—that felt the bombs were falling too close to its position. This was reported by the crews of one of the F-15Es and the B-52, but without any specifics as to the call sign or location of the recce team. Blaber, who was monitoring all three teams’ radio transmissions, said that he was unaware of any of his teams making such a call. It is possible that the air crews misinterpreted a radio call from the ground, or even that they had heard the “Cease fire!” calls directed at Grim 31 by Blaber and Glenn P. in Gardez. (Major Richard Coe, the weapons systems officer on the lead F-15E, acknowledged that it might have been the “Cease fire!” calls from Gardez that he heard.) Whatever the source of the “knock it off” call, the result was that no more bombs fell before the Chinooks entered the valley.

  WITH Task Force Hammer stalled in the sand west of the Whale and the Chinooks carrying the first wave of Rakkasan infantry already skimming the mountaintops en route to the Shahikot, Hagenbeck faced a critical decision: Should he abort the mission? If he did, surprise would have been lost, and the episode would doubtless be portrayed by the press as a significant military setback. But if he continued with the air assault, he ran the risk of having his supporting effort land in Shahikot with no main effort to support. The Rakkasans could occupy their blocking positions, but with no Task Force Hammer to drive the enemy into those positions, the Rakkasans would be nothing but static targets for enemy gunners. But Hagenbeck was not concerned with the delay to Hammer’s movement, which he considered temporary, and he thought the notion of turning the air assault force around to try again later was unrealistic. “We can get ’em moving again,” the Dagger leaders in Bagram told Hagenbeck and his staff concerned about Hammer’s lack of progress. “Colonel Mulholland and Colonel Rosengard were very confident that they could get the Zia forces to move,” said Bentley, Hagenbeck’s senior fires officer. “It was just as much a surprise to them as to anybody that they were not moving.” However, among the Mountain leaders in Bagram, there was a determination to put Task Force Rakkasan into the Shahikot, even if the main effort failed to show up for the fight. “We weren’t going to wait on Zia to dictate to us what the plan was going to be,” Bello said.

  WHEN Ballard reached the site of the friendly-fire incident, he found the vehicles and the casualties in a streambed that was seeded with six rows of mines. The AMF fighters were hiding behind rocks looking very scared. Casenhiser, suffering from significant wounds himself, was still working urgently on Harriman. Wadsworth brought Ballard quickly up to speed on what had happened. The warrant officer directed that an HLZ be marked out so that one of the inbound TF Rakkasan Chinooks could pick up the casualties after dropping off the infantry and take them back to Bagram. The Chinooks were supposedly already inbound, but Ballard couldn’t raise them yet on his radio.

  THE helicopters’ flight south to the Shahikot was difficult. Low clouds hid the moon and pockets of fog obscured the ground. Dawn was almost an hour away when the Apaches took off, so the pilots used their helmet-mounted thermal night-vision sights to penetrate the haze as they flew between the snowcapped peaks. Chenault and Hurley kept an altitude of at least 150 feet above ground level for most of the flight down. But after an hour, as they were closing on the Shahikot, they hit a cloud bank that forced them to rise to over 500 feet above ground level—far higher than they would usually fly on the approach to an engagement area. Behind them, Team 2’s pilots dealt with the fog differently as they raced toward the Shahikot, preferring to hug the earth. The three helicopters bounced and swerved over and around the ridgelines at 125 miles per hour, sometimes just a couple of dozen feet above the ground. The Team 2 aircraft lost visual contact with each other several times. An Apache’s instruments did not allow for easy flight through clouds, and the pilots discussed turning around. But in their hearts they knew that wasn’t an option. Their colleagues in Team 1 were already over the Shahikot, having taken a different route. More important, the infantry-laden Chinooks ahead of them had avoided the worst of the weather and were nearing the Shahikot. The plan called for the second flight of Apaches to arrive on station just as the 10th Mountain troops were establishing their blocking positions. If Team 2 turned around now, the infantry would land and move to their positions, only to find themselves bereft of their primary means of fire support. Peering into the gloom, the pilots flew on.

  IN fact, the weather had already played havoc with the aviation plan. Somehow the first three Chinooks, carrying the 2-187 troops, had gotten ahead of the Apaches and were already turning into the valley. The two Apaches of Team 1 followed hard on their heels, but they couldn’t catch them in time. The Chinooks would have to do without the benefit of the “cherry/ice” call.

  The smoke from the air strikes had barely dissipated as the Chinooks swooped into the valley. The three helicopters spread out as they selected their individual landing zones along the foot of the eastern ridge. At the controls of chalk number three were Chief Warrant Officer 3 Loyd Blayne Anderson and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jeff Fichter. Anderson was the more experienced and higher-ranking pilot, but was acting as copilot that morning. “I told Fichter I’d fly with him that day,’ cause he’s got a little girl coming in May, and so my job was to keep him alive,” Anderson said. About fif
ty miles north of the Shahikot they and the other first serial Chinooks had received a call from the Air Force E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft that was controlling the airspace for Anaconda. The AWACS—call sign Bossman—needed them to divert from their flight path home to pick up the casualties taken in Harriman’s column and fly them back to Bagram. Now, as they lowered themselves to the valley floor to deposit their precious cargo of soldiers, the two pilots were already making the mental adjustments to their flight plan. Within two minutes they were airborne again.

  THE medevac mission interfered with Apache Team 2’s flight. The second serial of Chinooks was due soon, carrying the 1-87 troops whose establishment of blocking positions was to coincide with Team 2’s arrival. But as the three Apaches in Team 2 approached the Shahikot, they were forced to slow down to allow the first serial of Chinooks that had just dropped off the 101st troops to divert from their flight path in order to land and pick up the casualties. The delay put Team 2 several minutes behind schedule, but otherwise the bad news caused remarkably little alarm among the pilots. “We still weren’t expecting much resistance when we got there,” Hardy said. “There wasn’t a lot of adrenaline pumping.”

  By the time Team 2 got to the release point, the weather had improved slightly. As the second serial of Chinooks flew into the Shahikot, the three Apaches turned north and tucked in behind them. The attack helicopters circled as the three Chinooks landed and disgorged their infantry without incident.