Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  To Hagenbeck, these decisions reflected the best options left to him. But some of his subordinates viewed them as the products of vacillation and a plan that was flawed to begin with. These officers were dismayed when the initial decision was taken to pull TF Rakkasan out. “The reaction [in the TOC] was ‘What?! You don’t take ground and then give it up!’” recalled a field grade officer. The same officer was cutting in his criticism of the way Hagenbeck “piecemealed” his forces into the valley without enough mortars, then pulled the Rakkasans out of their blocking positions and evacuated LaCamera’s troops from the Halfpipe (a decision, he said, which taxed the limited number of Chinooks at Bagram). “It put the operation a couple of days behind,” the officer said. Pulling out of the blocking positions “gave the enemy twenty-four to forty-eight hours to reinforce,” he added. Instead, he said, “We could have moved forces to the Upper Shahikot Valley and gotten on the other side of the enemy. If I were making the decision, we would have gone there initially.”

  But D-Day afternoon was no time for Hagenbeck to dwell on what could or should have been done previously. His planned main attack element, the Afghan forces organized by TF Dagger, was withdrawing without ever having reached the mouth of the valley. The prevailing wisdom in Bagram had been that the Al Qaida forces in the valley numbered no more than a couple of hundred, and that they were living among 800 civilians in the villages. Now it appeared the enemy’s strength was substantially larger than that, and there was no sign of any civilians. There were indeed enemy fighters in the villages, but there were also hundreds dug in on the eastern ridge and the Whale—the same high ground the special operators and CIA had been concerned about. The prediction that the enemy would try to either escape or negotiate a surrender now looked silly. The enemy was fighting hard and well, with high-caliber weapons—mortars, recoilless rifles, and howitzers—that no one in Bagram had warned of. Wiercinski and LaCamera had cautioned their troops before D-Day that “the enemy always gets a vote.” Well, now the enemy was voting and the turnout was high.

  12.

  AS Ropel scanned the face of the ridgeline opposite him, he saw a black shape moving about 175 meters away. Peering through a three-power scope that he’d removed from a set of night-vision goggles and fixed to his M4, he realized that what he’d seen was the head and torso of an enemy fighter. The figure was in a bunker made by building a stone wall to connect a boulder to the side of the mountain. It was through a little window in the wall that Ropel could see the enemy. Because Ropel’s ridgeline sloped down to the north, the bunker offered an excellent view of the Halfpipe as well as the spot where the VS-17 panels marked the location of some of the 1-87 rucksacks. Ropel immediately surmised the figure he could see was the observer who had been causing them so much trouble. But killing him proved difficult. The guerrilla knew he was being watched and seemed to enjoy the attention. He teased Ropel by popping his head up for a split second, then ducking before Ropel squeezed the trigger. After each shot Ropel fired, his target would yell “Allah U Akhbar!”—” God is great!”

  Ropel quickly tired of this “cat-and-mouse game.” He couldn’t afford to waste the ammo, and so slunk back out of sight and waited for his adversary to lose patience. By now his men were also eyeballing the guerrilla’s hiding place. Ropel told them not to fire. He had a better line of sight. “I did not want to scare him so he would go away,” Ropel said. “I wanted him to think that we were gone.” Sometimes the enemy fighter would lift his AK over his head, poke it through the window, and let off a burst without looking where he was firing. Ropel and his men watched and waited. Finally, as Ropel had figured he would, the figure raised himself for a couple of seconds to look around, exposing his head and upper torso. That was all the Polish NCO needed. He lined up the man in his sight and pulled the trigger. “I don’t know if I hit him or killed him, but I didn’t hear any more ‘Allah U Akhbar!’” Ropel said. There was also a pause in the mortar fire, lending credence to Ropel’s suspicion that his target had been calling it in.

  The troops on the ridgeline with Ropel took only one casualty that afternoon—Sergeant Thomas Finch, who was shot in the foot. Finch later told his buddies that the bullet pulled from his foot was a 5.56 round, the caliber of the Americans’ M4s and SAWs, but not of Al Qaida’s AK-47s. Finch had almost certainly been hit from a bullet fired from the Halfpipe.

  As the sun sank toward the western horizon, O’Keefe tried to call them back down off the mountainside, but Ropel’s ICOM was attached to his vest and he was lying on it, inadvertently muffling it. Unable to reach Ropel by radio, about ten minutes after Ropel took his last shot at the Al Qaida observer, O’Keefe sent a single soldier scurrying up the mountainside to pull Ropel’s team back down. They returned to their knoll and spent the rest of the evening helping with the casualties and retrieving whatever they could from the abandoned rucksacks.

  As the afternoon lengthened, the Apaches and fast-movers vanished from the sky. The Americans prayed for nightfall, when they knew their night-vision equipment would give them an edge. The Al Qaida fighters must also have realized this, because after a lull in early afternoon, they raised the intensity of the fire they were aiming at the Halfpipe. Every weapon Al Qaida could bring to bear opened up on the Americans. Automatic weapons fire raked the Halfpipe from one end to the other. Volleys of RPGs flew overhead. Then the mortars started walking in, crump! crump! crump! “This was probably the enemy’s biggest push to try to kill us,” Kraft said. Even as the mortar rounds whistled in, his men were scrambling back up the slope to return fire. It was a sight Kraft would never forget.

  Bullets suddenly chewed up the ground inches in front of the mortarmen in the northeastern corner of the rim. “We’re moving,” Raul Lopez said. Ashline raised his torso off the ground, only to feel a massive thud against his rib cage that spun him backward. “I’m shot!” he yelled. Fearing the worst, Lopez took hold of the handle on the vest’s collar and dragged Ashline to the floor of the Halfpipe. Ashline slid his hand under his vest, looking for blood, but found none. His bulletproof plate had done its job perfectly. The round’s impact had done no more than knock the wind out of Ashline and put a slight dent in the plate. He wasn’t even bruised. “Get your ass back up there, there’s nothing wrong with you,” Lopez told him as Ashline scampered back up the slope.

  Others were not so lucky. At about 3 p.m. those in the Halfpipe heard a thump as another enemy mortar round left the tube. Someone yelled “Incoming!” and everyone put their heads down. This time the Al Qaida gunners got it right. Buzzing “like a big bee,” the round hit the battalion command post, wounding six soldiers. LaCamera ordered the troops to move to a safer position. As they did, two more rounds hit, but this time no one was hurt. It was the last effective mortar fire aimed at the Halfpipe. (Sergeant First Class Robert Healy, 1-87’s operations NCO, suspected that this was because an air strike seemed to score a direct hit on the mortar position shortly after those rounds fell.)

  In the dirt of the Halfpipe, sodden with piss and blood, the troops’ heaviest weapon, the mortar, had long since run out of ammo. Now their machine-guns were running low. Because M240B ammo was so heavy, it was shared out. Most infantrymen carried at least 100 rounds. Unfortunately, all that precious lead was in the rucks that littered the free-fire zone between the landing zones and the Halfpipe. In addition, the graphite powder that troops had been told to pack instead of oil as a lubricant for the weapons wasn’t working and the guns were seizing. They could do nothing about the lack of oil, but soldiers sprinted in pairs to the rucks, frantically foraging for ammo and warming gear for the casualties as bullets nipped at their ankles.

  Unlike Preysler’s second lift of helicopters, which sat on the tarmac at Bagram all day, LaCamera’s took off in late afternoon in an effort to give him some reinforcements. The 1-87 commander had made some long-range adjustments to the chalks, calling back to Bagram to order the rest of Peterson’s platoon and every 60mm mortar section in the battalion to l
oad into one of the Chinooks. He wanted to turn the Halfpipe into a firebase and hammer away at the enemies in high ground. The three Chinooks appeared over the Shahikot at dusk, carrying Kraft’s 3rd Platoon in addition to the mortar reinforcements and ammo for Peterson’s 120, which had been silent for seven hours. But the intensity of the battle raging on the valley floor prevented them from landing and they diverted to the FARP. Then they flew back to the valley, but were still unable to find a safe spot to put down. To the intense frustration of the troops on board, who knew that their buddies below were in a fight for their lives, the Chinooks turned and headed back to Bagram.

  Lying in the dirt, Kraft glanced around and made a quick assessment. The enemy was throwing everything they had at the Halfpipe, but his men were still holding their own. They had 360-degree security, they were returning fire, and they had put the casualties in as safe a location as the Halfpipe offered. Still, one thing gnawed at his mind. Here they were, several dozen American soldiers pinned down under heavy fire in an operation that had been in the pipeline for weeks, yet there hadn’t been an aircraft over the battlefield for half an hour. Where the hell is our close air support? he wondered.

  WHERE the hell, indeed. No issue to emerge from Operation Anaconda has generated more heat and less light than the question of why the airpower upon which the TF Rakkasan troops were forced to rely for indirect fire did not deliver the results they expected. The debate began raging within the commands that had responsibility for Anaconda before the end of the operation. It then broke into the public eye in September 2002 with an interview that Hagenbeck gave Field Artillery magazine, the official journal of the Army’s field artillery branch, in which he complained that it “took anywhere from twenty-six minutes to hours” for air strikes to go in. Air Force officials responded by saying they had been largely left out of the planning for Anaconda, and that what advice they had offered had been ignored.

  Lost in all the vitriol was the fact that for long periods in the early stages of Anaconda, fixed-wing aircraft provided critical fire support to the troops on the ground. When the first wave of air assault troops ran into far greater resistance than they anticipated, the first thing they did was call for close air support. Often those calls were answered quickly with supremely accurate bombing that hit right where the young sergeants and captains asked for it, knocking out mortar positions and machine-gun nests, and slaughtering advancing enemy fighters. But at other times the wait for salvation from the sky seemed interminable to infantrymen like Kraft, facedown in the dirt dodging bullets. LaCamera complained of long periods during D-Day when there seemed to be no aircraft available to help his beleaguered men. But Stephen Achey, the senior airman whose job it was to arrange close air support for Nelson Kraft’s C Company, and who was stuck in the Halfpipe just a few yards from LaCamera, saw things completely differently. “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Achey said of LaCamera’s comments. “We were turning aircraft away because there just weren’t enough targets.”

  By seizing the low ground, TF Rakkasan had put itself on terrain from which it was hard to identify the enemy positions from which it was receiving fire. The allied forces with the best awareness of the enemy’s layout were the AFO teams, but TF Rakkasan took precedence over them when it came to whose calls for fire were answered first. The AFO teams and the TF Rakkasan units on the valley floor nevertheless managed to kill scores of enemy fighters using close air support on March 2, using everything from JDAMs dropped by B-52 bombers to F-15Es strafing enemy positions with their cannons, which were designed for air-to-air combat. However, many other targets went begging, despite Achey’s protestations to the contrary. Officers and NCOs from Hammer, Rakkasan, and AFO all told similar stories of opportunities to kill enemy fighters missed because their calls for close air support went unanswered.

  The problems that plagued the provision of close air support during the opening days of Anaconda would be argued over between Army and Air Force generals long after the last round had been fired and the last bomb dropped in the Shahikot. Inside the Beltway the problem was discussed exclusively in “Army versus Air Force” terms, but in reality it was a subset of other, wider problems afflicting Anaconda: CENTCOM’s decision to treat the operation as a pickup game and its failure to establish a clear, tight chain of command for the operation; the reliance on aircraft to provide almost all the heavy firepower; and the overriding belief in all higher headquarters that the war was virtually over. Although Al Qaida’s forces remained in the field and the leaders who had planned the September 11 attacks were still at large, much of CFACC commander Buzz Moseley’s staff had been sent back to the United States, many to work on war plans for Iraq. During the critical last week of February, when his command should have been working closely with Mikolashek’s and Hagenbeck’s headquarters to prepare for Anaconda, Moseley was not at his desk at Prince Sultan Air Base, but was touring capitals in the CENTCOM region laying the diplomatic groundwork for the war with Iraq.

  There were also specific problems that hurt the relationship between ground and air forces during the planning and execution of Anaconda: The small, enclosed battlefield meant the calls for fire often outnumbered the number of aircraft that could safely fly bombing runs over the valley simultaneously; the icy relationship between Mikolashek and Moseley, who should have been working hand in glove, trickled down to their staffs; the Mountain staff’s failure to anticipate the likelihood of ferocious resistance on the enemy’s part meant they had given only cursory attention to close air support issues; and the Combined Air Operations Center staff had grown used to controlling air strikes from their base in Saudi Arabia, rather than yielding that authority to the ground commander, as called for in joint doctrine. As ever in combat, it was left to captains and sergeants to bear the consequences of mistakes made by generals.

  13.

  BACK on the west side of the Whale Task Force Hammer was getting nowhere. By now they should have been sweeping through Serkhankhel, but instead they were hunkered down five kilometers short of the Fishhook under sporadic mortar fire. To make matters worse, they were discovering how little their designation as Operation Anaconda’s main effort really meant. The February 26 special ops-only rock drill at Bagram had left McHale in no doubt Task Force Hammer would have first call on the close air support aircraft overhead. “It was very clear that we were the main effort,” he said. “We had priority of fire all the way up until the point where we had cleared the valley.” But now, with the shit well and truly hitting the fan in the Shahikot, those guarantees were revealed as nothing more than empty promises. During the hours of darkness, Hammer had been able to call on Grim 31 for support, but once dawn broke they were dependent upon staff officers at Bagram to line up conventional jets to provide close air support, and it wasn’t happening. “We couldn’t get another aircraft to drop bombs to save our lives,” McHale recalled. “Nobody would drop a bomb on our side of the hill.”

  “Fires priority was, first and foremost, troops in contact,” said Chris Bentley, the senior fires officer on the Mountain staff. “Then high payoff targets—those targets that must be engaged for you to have success; an example would be a heavy machine-gun. We knew we had to at least neutralize that target for our helicopters to have success coming in to the helicopter landing zones. And then the third category became main effort vice supporting effort. So to say the main effort would always have fires isn’t always going to be true, because sometimes the main effort is supported by supporting the supporting effort, to allow the main effort to maneuver. So when 1-87 came under fire down in the southern part of the eastern ridge we simply provided them assets.” When questioned whether, using his own criteria, the fact that Hammer was not only the main effort but was also in contact with the enemy meant it, rather than TF Rakkasan, should have enjoyed priority of fires, Bentley expressed skepticism that the accounts from Hammer personnel of being engaged by the enemy were accurate. “Did they ever take enemy fire?” he asked rhetori
cally, many months after the battle. Whether Bentley doubted the honesty of the Hammer officers or was merely misinformed about the opposition they encountered on D-Day, the fact that the senior fires officer in Bagram was making decisions based on such a serious misunderstanding of events on the battlefield tells its own story about how information was being shared between the different components of CJTF Mountain.

  BY the time Texas 14 leader McHale had pulled back to the perimeter at Carwazi, Hoskheyar’s troops, under the guidance of a couple of McHale’s fourteen sergeants, had set up four of their own 82mm mortars. They oriented one tube towards Carwazi, another to cover the Fishhook, while the remaining two went straight into action, firing back at Hammer’s tormentors on top of the Whale. Even though the mortar rounds aimed at his troops in the perimeter were falling short, Haas was determined not to just sit and take fire from the Whale without returning it. He already was fending off Zia’s entreaties to be allowed to assault the Whale. “We’re firing back,” Haas recalled. “That gives Zia at least something to be happy about.” This exchange of mortar fire continued sporadically for the next several hours, with Southworth convinced that the Hammer mortars put at least one enemy mortar crew out of action within thirty minutes. The overall Task Force Hammer situation had become so confused that the Special Forces soldiers decided to call formation in an attempt to count and then organize their remaining AMF fighters. In between shell bursts the SF troops got the Afghans lined up in platoons and counted heads, a process that took half an hour. The results were mildly encouraging. Although many of the AMF fighters appeared to have run off during the convoy’s travails, almost all had made their way back inside the perimeter west of Carwazi. Once the formation broke up, at about 9 a.m., McHale finally sat down and tore open an MRE.