Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  The efforts of both the mortar crews and the captain had not gone unnoticed by their fellow soldiers. “We’ve got the best mortarmen in the battalion,” a soldier was overheard telling a buddy later in the afternoon. “And the best company commander,” his pal replied.

  BALTAZAR’S 3rd Platoon, under the command of Kelly Jack Luman, bore the brunt of the barrage of DShK, mortar and RPG fire. The platoon was crossing a creek about 400 meters south of—and within sight of—Baltazar when the Al Qaida gunners opened up. “They were lighting our ass up,” Luman recalled. Luman ordered Schmitz to stay on the lip of the wadi to cover the platoon’s movement with his machine gun. As Schmitz and his twenty-year-old assistant gunner manned their weapon, DShK rounds chewed up the ground inches from their faces, spewing dirt into Schmitz’s mouth. Luman gave the order to drop rucks and take cover in the wadi. As his soldiers scrambled for cover, an RPG flew in, exploding beside Sergeant Earl Beaudry, Jr., who was lying on the ground trying to identify the source of the enemy fire. The explosion blew the chest plate clean out of Beaudry’s body armor and sent shrapnel tearing into his legs and buttocks. “That’s when it really became real for me,” Schmitz said. Soldiers descended on Beaudry and dragged him to cover in the wadi. “My AG [assistant gunner] is going crazy: ‘Sergeant, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?’” Schmitz said.

  Watching his men getting slammed by mortar fire, Luman felt helpless. “My heart sank,” he recalled. He had called for close air support, but the jets were still twenty minutes out. There was nothing to be done but hope Luman and the other leaders down in the wadi system could hold the men together.

  As the mortar rounds landed closer and closer, the company executive officer, a lieutenant who was moving with Luman’s platoon, completely lost his nerve. “We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die!” he shouted as he curled into the fetal position. Luman was infuriated with the officer’s behavior. “Shut the fuck up!” the sergeant shouted at the lieutenant cowering in the dirt. “It was affecting my men,” Luman explained. As he moved down the wadi telling his guys everything was going to be fine, Luman heard a report over the radio that the 10th Mountain company following him was also taking heavy fire.

  AS his men took a breather and his medics treated the heat casualty, Crombie’s ears detected the sound of a mortar tube firing from a flat ridgeline to his south. This round wasn’t aimed at Butler’s troops up north, but at Crombie and his men as they weaved their way north. The mortar rounds were quickly followed by small arms fire. As the young Americans sought cover, bullets cracked over their heads and ripped holes in the rucks they had temporarily laid aside. Crombie, like Butler, assessed that his column was being engaged from three sides.

  “This becomes one big battle drill—reaction to contact,” Crombie recalled. In most cases, reaction to contact requires a soldier to do two things: seek cover and return fire. Training kicked in and Crombie’s soldiers did exactly that. “Our fire was far more effective than the enemy’s fire was,” Crombie said. Nevertheless, the captain had no desire to just sit and trade fire with an enemy who controlled the high ground. He told his platoon leaders to disentangle their troops from the fight and continue north. Crombie led a small element—his command post, half of his 1st Platoon and a couple of scouts—down into some low ground from which they could engage the enemy on the ridgeline to their right. From there they called in fire from Butler’s mortar section. Meanwhile, at the back of the column, half-a-dozen soldiers remained in the kill zone, holding off the enemy to their rear in order to allow the rest of the force to maneuver north.

  Crombie ordered his men to drop their rucksacks. His men were too exhausted to move under fire while carrying the heavy rucks, he thought. They were only about 700 meters from Preysler’s position and could always return for the rucks at a quieter time. The fatigue was even getting to the company commander. Like many of his troops, his canteen had run dry. His tongue felt twice its normal size. More incoming mortar rounds signaled the enemy’s intention to keep the pressure on Crombie and his men. But for once the Al Qaida mortar crews’ were off their game. The rounds fell 200 meters away from the Americans, and served only to irritate Crombie. This is unbelievable, he thought. We are the United States Army, and somebody is firing mortars at us. Why aren’t we destroying these mortars? He was convinced that at least one of the mortar tubes was located inside or right behind the compound seized—and then vacated—the previous day by 2-187.

  But, like their brethren elsewhere on the battlefield, Crombie and his men were surprised by the enemy’s use of a weapon system no one had mentioned in the run-up to Anaconda. “It’s like, ‘Mortars? This wasn’t in the brief,’” he said after the battle. “We never thought they’d have so many mortars.” The incoming rounds at least had a salutary effect on the heat casualty. “He recovered real quick,” Crombie said. “He got his clothes and gear on very quickly once that first mortar round landed.”

  The last element to move back was the tiny rearguard led by Sergeant Reginald Huber, with Specialist James Brossoie keeping the enemy’s heads down with his 240. “This was a coordinated ambush that we walked into,” Crombie said. “I was just amazed that there were no casualties.”

  Crombie’s men spent the rest of the day keeping a low profile in the creek bed. When night fell, they moved out to try to recover the gear they had dropped. “It’s a much easier movement now,” he joked later. “We don’t have rucksacks.” They got to a point about 300 meters from the rucksacks, when they spotted an enemy fighter in a position overwatching their gear. The U.S. troops ceased their movement and directed an AC-130 to the guerrilla’s position. Crombie’s men put out infrared strobes to mark their own position just as the medevac Chinook for Beaudry was flying in. The helicopter crew saw the strobes and landed, thinking that Crombie’s element had the casualty. Confused and worried about the attention that the helicopter would draw to their position, one of the infantrymen ran up to the helicopter. “What do you want?” he shouted at the crew. “Where’s the casualty?” a crew chief asked. “We don’t have any yet, but if you don’t leave, we’re going to have some,” the grunt told him. The troops moved back to the creekbed. They would wait until the next day to recover the rucksacks.

  BALTAZAR’S 2nd and 3rd Platoons and Helberg’s scouts also spent the rest of the day hunkered down in the wadis, before linking up with Baltazar that night. In the meantime the captain sent a team down to Luman’s platoon to collect the wounded Beaudry and carry him up to Baltazar’s position, from where soldiers from Butler’s company carried him down to their wadi to prepare him for medevac. Baltazar told his men they would occupy Blocking Position Amy the following day, at a time to be synchronized with 1-187’s attack south. Butler’s men held the position in their wadi, with Preysler’s command post about 100 meters to the east in the same creek bed.

  Hagenbeck had intended his reserve—a task force built around Ron Corkran’s 1-187 Infantry—to fly into LZ 15 in midafternoon. But the reports of heavy enemy fire in the north end of the valley caused him to abort the mission and reschedule it for after dark. However, the order to abort only got through to three of the six Chinooks. As a result, 1-87’s B Company, parts of 1-187’s C Company plus 1-187’s engineer platoon all landed (safely) at LZ 15 at about 3:10 p.m. and spent the rest of the afternoon waiting for their colleagues to show up.

  THE day had been another learning experience for the infantrymen. Their enemy still showed little sign of withdrawing or losing heart, and had again pounded them with an arsenal of crew-served weapons. But the U.S. troops had more than held their own tactically, responding to each attack with accurate firepower from their own weapons and from the aircraft overhead. Incredibly, despite the thousands of bullets and hundreds of high explosive mortar rounds, artillery shells, and rocket-propelled grenades Al Qaida forces had fired at them, the Americans hadn’t yet lost a man. Task Force Rakkasan’s luck was holding.

  MARCH 3 began frustratingly for the AFO te
ams. At about 2:25 a.m. an MH-47 that had flown straight from Bagram on a resupply mission dropped off Mako 22, another Task Force Blue team, a couple of kilometers to the south of India’s position. Mako 22’s mission was to take over India’s observation post so Speedy, Bob, and Dan could return to Gardez to refit and rearm before being reinfiltrated elsewhere in the Shahikot. Speedy had not had prior warning that Mako 22 was inbound, but wasn’t alarmed when he saw the SEALs walking toward his observation post. The new team quickly explained they were his relief. But Mako 22 was a five-man assault team, not a reconnaissance and surveillance team like Mako 31, and hadn’t brought all the right gear needed for their mission in the Shahikot, forcing Speedy to leave some of his own equipment behind for the SEALs to use. (Mako 31, which didn’t make it all the way to India’s location south of the Fishhook during the night, was also due to leave with India.)

  The Chinook crew on which Mako 22 flew in also kicked out India Team’s “speedball” resupply duffel bag, which burst and spread its contents over the mountainside. When India had finally gathered the batteries, water and MREs, Speedy, the quintessential hunter and carnivore, got on the radio and said he would like to personally thank whoever packed him twenty-four vegetarian MREs. “Thanks a lot. Out.”

  As their radios buzzed and crackled with different plans to resupply or relieve them, the teams spent the morning trying to call in air strikes on enemy positions on the Whale, in Babulkhel and on Hill 3033. Several of these positions included mortars or machine-guns firing on the Rakkasans. Others consisted of enemy fighters building new defensive positions in the valley. But in almost all cases during the first half of the day the teams could not arrange for aircraft to strike their targets. To the NCOs sitting in their observation posts around the valley watching enemy fighters shooting at U.S. troops with virtual impunity, the close air support system seemed completely gummed up.

  Exceptions to this pattern included a series of air strikes that Mako 22 called in at about 6:40 a.m. on targets in Babulkhel, a B-1 bombing run on the Whale arranged by Juliet, and an impressive Apache strike on a two-man position spotted by India on the southeast corner of the Whale. On other occasions bombs were dropped, but missed their targets. The situation improved somewhat as the shadows lengthened. At 6:04 p.m. a B-52 dropped seven JDAMs on an Al Qaida observation post and bunker complex on the Whale where Juliet had spotted an enemy fighter peering through binoculars at the Rakkasan troops. The mission was a complete success, scoring a direct hit that obliterated the enemy positions and almost certainly killed all nine enemy fighters seen there. About thirty minutes later Juliet finally got the bombing runs on Hill 3033 for which it had been waiting most of the day. A B-52 conducted two bombing runs, one for each of the 400-by-1000-meter bomb boxes Juliet had sketched out on the mountain. The first bombing run made seven guerrillas, a mortar tube and a DShK “disappear” and the second killed one of four “support personnel” nearby, the team reported.

  One of the more successful air strikes in the valley wasn’t carried out by the military, but by the CIA’s Predator UAV. Both the Air Force and the CIA were flying Predators in Afghanistan, but unlike the Air Force’s version, code-named Pacman, the mission of which was pure reconnaissance and surveillance, the CIA’s Predator, code-named Wildfire, was armed with a couple of the same Hellfire missiles fired by the Apache. The CIA was also free of many of the bureaucratic processes that were tangling up the business of close air support in the valley. At 5:15 p.m., after observing enemy fighters moving in and around a Zerki Kale building that signals intercepts was suggested a possible command and control facility, the CIA Predator fired a Hellfire into it.

  Shortly after dark India and Mako 31 left their positions and walked southwest out of the Shahikot to meet the three-vehicle exfil convoy led by Captain John B., Sergeant Major Al Y. and Hans. As they marched, they heard another B-52 emptying its bomb bay onto the Whale. It sounded as if the entire mountain was exploding. The teams’ departure meant that of the original thirteen operators who had ventured unseen into the Shahikot, only the five men of Juliet remained. The dynamic of the operation was changing, nowhere more so than in Gardez.

  TAKUR GHAR

  1.

  AS dawn cast faint shadows across the Gardez safe house courtyard on March 3, the AFO headquarters personnel went to sleep for the first time in over two days. They awoke two hours later to be greeted by a sea of new faces. A slew of Task Force Blue operators had arrived via road and helicopter while the AFO men were asleep. The new arrivals included two SEAL teams code-named Mako 30 and Mako 21, a Gray Fox operator named Thor, and in charge of them all, a TF Blue officer named Lieutenant Commander Vic Hyder.

  The selection of Hyder to command and control the SEAL elements in Gardez was a strange decision on the part of Captain Joe Kernan, the Task Force Blue commander. Hyder had already been involved in two incidents in which he had displayed, in the view of many people familiar with them, extremely poor judgment. On New Year’s Eve he had been the senior man in a group of SEALs who had “violated instructions,” according to a TF 11 officer, by taking an armored SUV that belonged to TF Bowie and driving it down the Bagram to Jalalabad road on what Hyder described as an “area familiarization” reconnaissance outing. The TF 11 officer said it could also be described as “a joyride.” Against the advice of the others in the vehicle, Hyder, who hadn’t been in country long, had the driver blow through a couple of checkpoints manned by Afghan militiamen loosely allied with the U.S. forces. When they tried the trick a third time the militia fighters fired at them. The SEALs must have thought they were safe in their armored cocoon, but a bullet pierced the rubber seal between the bulletproof glass and the armor at the back of the SUV, went through the backseat and the driver’s seat before striking the driver. He was not badly wounded, but had to pull over. The SEALs were traveling with their rifles stashed in the back of the vehicle, rather than on their persons. So rather than fight their attackers off, they meekly surrendered to the tribesmen, who took whatever they wanted from the vehicle. (The joke around the rest of TF 11 was the episode resembled the scene in the movie Stripes in which Bill Murray’s hapless American troops surrender their weapons to the Czech police.) The only long-range communications system the SEALs had was an Iridium satellite telephone. But they had neglected to bring the number for the TF Blue TOC in Bagram. Hyder was left with little choice but to call the SEAL Team 6 headquarters in Dam Neck, Virginia, and ask them to call Bagram for help. Pulling the SEALs out of that sort of jam would usually be a job for the Ranger quick reaction force. But Hyder had picked the very evening that one Ranger force was departing Bagram and another arriving, and the gear for both elements was stowed on pallets when the plea for help came in. In the end a British force stationed at Bagram sent one of its helicopters down to pull the SEALs’ chestnuts out of the fire. The SUV episode reflected “bad judgment” on Hyder’s part and alerted JSOC commander Dell Dailey to a potential problem with the SEAL lieutenant commander, according to a senior Army officer. But other than being “counseled” by his chain of command, no further action was taken against Hyder.

  The second of what came to be known in Joint Special Operations Command as “Vic Hyder’s three strikes” occurred on a dark Afghan night when he had led TF Blue troops on what turned out to be a “dry hole” mission. While they were waiting, hidden, in the dark, Hyder and his men saw an unarmed old man approaching through their vision goggles. The man was unable to see them in their hiding positions. Hyder ordered him—in English—to stop. When he failed to do so immediately, Hyder shot him through the eye and killed him. An investigation apparently cleared Hyder of criminal wrongdoing in the matter, but the incident left a very sour taste in the mouths of many of his TF 11 comrades. The senior Army officer, who was familiar with the repercussions from Hyder’s actions, defended Kernan’s decision to keep giving Hyder missions that carried huge responsibilities, adding that SEAL Team 6 handled their internal discipline issues “at least a
s well” as Delta. “Hyder got as much of a fair hand as any other person would who ultimately showed, probably, not the right judgment,” the general said. “You can’t pick out a lousy judgment type guy right off the bat.”

  So Hyder was still around to take charge of the SEAL force in Gardez. His third “strike” was yet to come.

  THE AFO operators in Gardez were stunned to see the new arrivals. It was the first time any TF 11 personnel had shown up at Gardez without first giving them a heads-up. “What are you doing here?” they asked Hyder. The SEAL officer told them he was there “to C2 [command and control] the Blue guys,” and had orders to infiltrate the two SEAL teams into the Shahikot as soon as possible to support the fight. Blaber and Glenn P. assumed that Trebon had acted upon Blaber’s suggestion to place a TF Blue officer under his command at Gardez to help integrate more SEAL elements into the battle. But the SEALs’ first priority appeared to be establishing their own communications with TF Blue at Bagram and TF 11 in Masirah. It was becoming clear that Blaber would have no say in which teams were inserted into the valley, and that his strong recommendation that the Blue teams take time to familiarize themselves with the region was being ignored. Someone—AFO—had finally found the enemy, and now everyone wanted a piece of the action, especially TF Blue, which had seen almost none so far. “Once Blue realized there was a fight going on they were gonna get their guys in the fight come hell or high water,” said another TF 11 operator.

  In Bagram a satellite call came in for Trebon. On the other end of the line was Blaber. “What’s going on, sir?” “Same thing I told you,” Trebon replied. “I want these guys in the fight. Vic is in charge of the Blue guys, you just stay in charge of the AFO guys, and when do you think you can turn them over to TF Blue?” Trebon was telling Blaber he would no longer even be in command of the non-Blue AFO teams—India and Juliet—and perhaps not even the other AFO personnel at Gardez. Blaber said he didn’t know when he could turn everything over to TF Blue. He was planning to accompany Chris Haas and the rest of TF Hammer as they tried to get Zia Lodin back to the Shahikot that night. To Blaber, the Zia mission was the most important thing going in the next twenty-four hours. He, Chris Haas, and Spider all planned to accompany Zia, for two reasons: to reduce the risk of friendly-fire incidents, and because they thought from the ferocity of Al Qaida’s resistance that there might be a high value target trapped on the Whale. “I can’t give you a time,” Blaber told Trebon. But the general was insistent. “I want you to come back to me when the exact time is that you’re transitioning this to Blue,” he said.