by Sean Naylor
About fifty miles to the east, in Pakistani airspace, Grim 32, an AC-130H, was just turning back toward Afghanistan after an air-to-air refueling when it received a frantic call: “Any Grim, any Nail, this is Mako 30. We’ve just had a crash landing and need some perimeter security.” Grim 32’s crew was the same one involved in the Harriman incident less than forty-eight hours previously. Now fate had cast them in a key role at another critical juncture in Operation Anaconda. But they would have a steep learning curve to climb. The delays to the SEAL teams’ infil meant the AC-130s that had been briefed on Mako 30’s mission—Nail 21 and Nail 22—had left the area by now. Grim 32 was just arriving on station. Through no fault of their own the crew members knew nothing of Mako 30’s mission and lacked the coordinates for Takur Ghar. Chapman’s call was the first inkling that pilot D. J. Turner and his crew had that anything had gone awry that night in the Shahikot. Grim 32’s crew noted Mako 30’s location and flew straight there, a flight that took about fifteen minutes. The crew saw no sign of any enemy within 2,000–3,000 meters of the downed Chinook. “It looks like we lost somebody at the LZ,” Chapman told Grim 32. “Which LZ?” someone on the aircraft replied. Chapman passed the grid coordinates of the Takur Ghar peak, as well as a description of the LZ, told them Roberts would have an infrared strobe and an MBITR radio, and gave them his call sign and the frequency he was probably using. “They asked us if we could go and check on him and see if we could locate him,” Turner recalled. “We were all in a CSAR [combat search and rescue] mode at that time…Everybody still thought the odds were, he was alive.”
Thinking the Chinook had only flown to the foot of Takur Ghar before crash-landing, Slab began planning to march up the mountain to rescue Roberts. Chapman contacted Jimmy in Bagram at 3:06 a.m. and relayed a message to that effect. (Unlike Army special ops units, SEALs routinely use their Air Force attachments as their primary communicators.) Although Slab quickly realized his error and abandoned the plan, that 3:06 a.m. transmission, monitored by Grim 32 and several headquarters, created a false impression that Roberts was within walking distance of friendly forces.
At this time another AC-130H, Grim 33, arrived over the Shahikot, with even less awareness than Grim 32 of what had transpired. The Grim 32 crew coordinated with Grim 33 for the latter to take up position over the downed helicopter while Grim 32 went to search for Roberts. As they turned south, the Grim 32 crew easily identified the peak of Takur Ghar. Not only was it the highest point around, but at that moment it was also marked by an infrared light winking at them through the darkness. They could see a person holding the strobe, and several individuals around him. The crew kept their eyes on the flashing strobe as they flew south, reporting what they saw to K-mart (the CAOC), Bossman (the AWACS), and Mako 30.
ONCE Slab understood how far they’d flown he knew his team’s only hope of getting back to the top of Takur Ghar in time to save Roberts was to jump on another helicopter. The quickest way to do that was calling Razor 04 back to pick them up. Hearing Grim 32’s report of a strobe on Takur Ghar only heightened Slab’s impatience to return to the mountaintop. He asked Razor 03’s crew if they could remain by the downed helicopter while the SEALs returned to Takur Ghar on Razor 04 to look for Roberts. Al told him he felt comfortable doing that so long as Slab left one SEAL to help in their defense. But when that plan was relayed to Jimmy, the Delta officer recommended everyone fly back to Gardez on Razor 04 and come up with a plan before returning to an LZ where they’d already had one helicopter shot up. (Much of this conversation occurred between Jimmy and Al. Slab seemed reluctant to get on the radio.)
Slab called Blaber, his old battle buddy from Bosnia. The AFO commander was on the Zermat road, about to turn off toward the Guppy when Slab’s first call came through. Blaber stopped, talked for a moment with Slab, digesting the info that one of Slab’s men had fallen out of the helicopter “at the LZ,” and drove on. A short while later, as the convoy passed a little ruined fort near the Guppy, Blaber pulled the convoy over again. With Zia, Haas, and Spider standing around him, Blaber got a more detailed update from Slab. It was only when Slab told Blaber that he wanted to go back “up” to get Roberts that the awful reality of what had transpired sank in with the AFO commander. Fuck, they tried to land on top of the mountain, he thought.
As they soared closer to Takur Ghar, the Grim 32 crew kept their high-tech “eyes” fixed on the infrared strobe light flashing on the mountain peak. Whoever the personnel surrounding the individual holding the strobe were, the fact that it was on at all gave everyone hope. But after thirty seconds it disappeared forever.
5.
BATTLEFIELD friction was now swamping headquarters from Gardez to Bagram to Masirah. As each TOC tried to figure out what had happened, officers drowned each other out on the satellite nets and misinterpreted the messages they were getting. The official Special Operations Command investigator summed the situation up thus:
As each of the separate headquarters attempted to sort out exactly what was happening, there was considerable confusion as to: 1) where Roberts had fallen off the helicopter, 2) where Razor 03 actually had set down in relation to Takur Ghar, 3) on which landing zone Razor 03 had attempted to insert Mako 30, 4) what the enemy and friendly situations were near Razor 03, 5) what the friendly and enemy situation was in Roberts’ vicinity, and 6) whether the IR strobe light with personnel around it was at the Razor 03 site, at Mako 21’s linkup point [with Juliet], or on top of the mountain.
Other than Slab’s men and the Razor 03 crew, the individuals with the clearest picture of what was happening were Pete Blaber and Jimmy. Blaber had excellent line-of-sight communications with the men from the downed helicopter as well as Grim 32 overhead, while his satellite radio allowed Jimmy to feed him any information from the Predator feeds. Both Jimmy and Blaber understood that Roberts had fallen out on top of Takur Ghar, that there were no friendly forces near him, and that Razor 03 had landed in the far north of the valley, only a couple of thousand meters north of Chip Preysler’s command post. Blaber also knew from his deep reading on the behavior of the various enemy forces, especially the Uzbeks and the Chechens, that unless action to rescue him was taken immediately, Roberts would soon be dead, if he wasn’t already. By contrast, in the Blue TOC just down the road from the Mountain headquarters and in the TF 11 Joint Operations Center off the coast of Oman, confusion reigned. In those headquarters officers still believed that the individuals Grim 32 had spotted on the top of the mountain around the person holding the strobe were friendly troops rescuing Roberts. The TF 11 and TF Blue operations centers also appear to have mistaken Chip Preysler’s men for an enemy force moving toward the little knot of aviators and SEALs.
BLABER and Slab put a plan together on the fly. Blaber knew the personnel that Grim 32 reported walking towards the strobe on Takur Ghar could not possibly be friendly. He told Grim 32 that as soon as they were over the mountain, they were to fire as close to the group around the strobe light as possible without hitting them. Then, if the AC-130 crew saw someone break away from the group, to assume that was the missing American and use their fires to protect him. Meanwhile, Mako 30 would get on Razor 04 and fly back to the top of the mountain immediately. That was also what Slab recommended, and Blaber believed in trusting the guy on the ground. Razor 04, reached at its holding station over Gardez, was inbound.
Colonel Joe Smith, the Mountain chief of staff, walked into Hagenbeck’s office and gently shook the general awake with words no commander ever wants to hear: “Sir, we’ve had a helicopter shot down.” Hagenbeck quickly walked the few yards to the tent housing the Mountain TOC, which was becoming filled to capacity as word spread that another crisis was brewing in the Shahikot. Staffers and hangers-on strained to see the Predator screens as other officers and NCOs focused their attention on the radio traffic. Few of these people were in a position to make any difference to the events unfolding before them. Because this was a TF 11 mission that had gone sour, only folks in TF 11’s
chain of command were authorized to fix it. This was the inevitable result of the bifurcated chain of command the Pentagon and CENTCOM had imposed on U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The only guy inside the Mountain TOC whose job entitled him to issue orders to the men in the Shahikot was Jimmy. He was standing on his bench with a radio mike to his face, towering above the crowd in an effort to make himself heard and to keep his eye on the Predator screens as he coordinated events on the battlefield.
Suddenly another voice came on the radio, that of Brigadier General Gregory Trebon, the TF 11 commander, who was a few hundred meters away in the TF Blue TOC. “We don’t need you getting all worked up on the radio,” the Air Force officer told Jimmy condescendingly. “Get off the net, we’ve got it.” “Goddamn!” said Jimmy, stunned and furious, as he ripped his headset off in bitter frustration and hurled it—with the cord still attached—in the direction of the generals a few feet away. It hit the bench between Jones and Hagenbeck, narrowly missing the latter. “Jimmy!?” Harrell exclaimed, turning around in his seat. “Sir, he just took me out of the fight,” Jimmy explained. “What!?” the one-star replied in amazement. “Sir, he says they’re going to fight it from there,” Jimmy said. Harrell, who did not enjoy a good relationship with Trebon, fumed. In deciding to remove command and control of events in the Shahikot from the AFO leadership—Blaber and Jimmy—and manage it himself, Trebon was making a decision he would come to regret. He was taking the two men whose professional backgrounds and current situational awareness best qualified them to organize the rescue operation in the Shahikot out of the loop, and replacing them with staff officers in the TF Blue and TF 11 TOCs, roughly 100 miles and 1,100 miles away from the battlefield respectively. Trebon took this action in the belief that simply having access to the satellite radio nets and, especially, the Predator feeds gave the officers in Masirah as much understanding of events in the Shahikot Valley as they needed to run things from there. His faith in the power of technology trumped the principle of trusting the guy on the ground.
Perhaps acknowledging that his own background hardly qualified him for the situation in which he had placed himself, Trebon told his staff in Masirah, “I have command, you have control.” JSOC officers would debate the meaning of these words long after Anaconda had ended. Command and control usually go together in military operations, but a Trebon supporter said the Air Force general’s decision to separate them made perfect sense. “Command is the decision-making, control is the mechanism that supports the decision-making,” this officer said. Few others agreed. In the space of a few seconds, Trebon had ensured that what was about to bubble into the fiercest close-range firefight U.S. troops had waged since Mogadishu, a close quarters, take-no-prisoners battle fought on a frozen Afghan mountaintop, would be “controlled” by officers watching video screens on a desert island and “commanded” by a man who had made his name flying transport aircraft.
IT took Razor 04 about half an hour to fly to Razor 03’s position at the north end of the Shahikot. The Chinook landed 60 meters from its stricken sister aircraft at about 3:45 a.m. Shortly thereafter a signals intelligence element aboard Grim 32 intercepted an Al Qaida transmission that suggested enemy forces were aware a helicopter had crashed and were preparing to assault it. Grim 32 passed the intelligence to Grim 33, which was still circling over the two helicopters. Grim 33 in turn relayed the message to the men on the ground and scanned the area around the Chinooks for any sign of the enemy. When its crew saw a couple of mortar tubes and about forty personnel an estimated 1200 meters from the helicopters, they were convinced this was the enemy force getting ready to assault the small group of Americans by the helicopters, and they called down to the air crewmen and SEALs to warn them. Of course, what Grim 33’s crew was looking at was Kevin Butler’s A Company, 2-187 Infantry, including the mortar section that had performed so magnificently the previous day. Fortunately for those 101st infantrymen, the confusion in Bagram and Masirah meant Grim 33 was not given permission to open fire. But the combination of the radio intercept and the erroneous report about enemy troops on the ground spelled doom for the plan formulated by Slab and Blaber to leave the Razor 03 crew on the ground while Mako 30 flew back to Takur Ghar to find Roberts. With enemy fighters apparently closing in, the priority became getting everyone away from the crash site on Razor 04. Instead of flying them to the Rakkasan position just to the south, Razor 04’s pilot wanted to get out of the area altogether. The extra seven men from Razor 03’s crew would make the helicopter too heavy to fly to the mountaintop. There was no option but to fly them back to Gardez before setting off for Takur Ghar with Mako 30. Razor 03’s crew set about stripping all the sensitive items—such as the miniguns—from their helicopter and loading them aboard Razor 04. Grim 33’s message about enemy troops approaching caused a moment of panic as Razor 04 flashed its lights in a failed attempt to alert two crewmen making a final sweep of Razor03. Finally Razor 04 took off and flew over to land right beside the downed Chinook in order to get their attention. The two men climbed aboard and at 4:10 a.m. the helicopter lifted off and flew north, away from Takur Ghar. Had the TF 11 personnel in Masirah and the Blue TOC been more closely tied in with TF Mountain, they could easily have put together a plan in which the Rakkasan troops with Preysler and Butler secured Razor 03 and its crew, allowing Razor 04 to pick up Mako 30 and fly back to Takur Ghar immediately, as Blaber had urged. Instead, the confused staffers and the Razor 04 pilot unwittingly scratched the last, best chance they had of saving Neil Roberts.
Razor 04 landed at Gardez about 4:34 a.m. The helicopter had lost radio contact with Bagram and Masirah and was relaying messages through Grim 32. (The satellite radios on all MH-47Es were notoriously unreliable. This problem would plague TF 11 for the rest of the Takur Ghar fight.) Hyder drove out to meet Razor 04. The Razor 03 crew got off, as did Thor, the Gray Fox operator. The air mission commander and the remaining six members of Mako 30 remained aboard. At 4:45 a.m. Razor 04 took off, headed at last to Takur Ghar.
It took Grim 32 only a couple of minutes to get on station over Takur Ghar. The strobe had disappeared, but between five and ten people were visible on the mountaintop. From the north of the valley, Mako 30 inundated Grim 32 with questions: What can you see? Can you tell if he’s alive? Can you tell if they’ve got him? Grim 32 told the SEALs that they couldn’t answer most of their questions. Mako 30 told the aircrew they were going to go back to the top of Takur Ghar. At 4:10 a.m. Blaber asked Jimmy if he could identify Roberts on the top of the mountain from the Predator feed. Jimmy said he could not. Ten minutes later Blaber, who by now was in sight of Takur Ghar himself, asked Grim 32 what they were seeing on the peak. They told him they couldn’t see any strobe light or glint tape that would identify Roberts, but they could see about eight personnel who were almost certainly enemy fighters. Blaber decided a variant of the plan he’d drawn up hastily with Slab was still the only chance of saving Roberts. He told Grim 32 to fire into the middle of the group of eight enemy personnel when Razor 04 was between one and three minutes out from landing Mako 30 (i.e., before the enemy fighters heard the inbound helicopter and took cover). If one person broke away from the group, the AC-130 crew should use their judgment and if they decided he was Roberts, to continue to fire on the others. The AFO commander emphasized the importance of killing as many enemy fighters as possible while they were in the open and vulnerable. Razor 04 made a similar request to Grim 32, asking the AC-130 to put prep fires on the LZ when the helicopter was a couple of minutes out.
But unbeknownst to Blaber, Trebon’s insistence on taking command and control away from him and Jimmy meant the satellite radio frequency on which much of the operation was being managed had also changed. Blaber was talking on and listening to the AFO satellite net, up to that point the frequency on which all TF 11-related action in the Shahikot had been discussed. But now the TF 11 operations center in Masirah and the TF Blue TOC in Bagram were trying to run things on their frequency (known as SAT-A or Tier-net), which Bl
aber wasn’t monitoring, because TF 11 didn’t bother telling him of the change. As a result, he was powerless to provide corrective guidance when interference from Masirah, based on the TF 11 staff’s misreading of the situation, put paid to his plan. Instead of going ahead with Blaber’s suggestion, Grim 32’s crew received a welter of contradictory directions from Masirah, where Marine Corps Major Chris Naler, the TF 11 fire support officer, had been placed in charge of events in the Shahikot. Naler’s directions veered between telling Grim 32 to “waste” everyone on the top of the mountain, then seconds later ordering them not to fire, telling the crew, “Don’t worry, our good guy has been picked up by a friendly team,” and informing Turner, Grim 32’s pilot, that he, Turner, was now the on-scene commander (a message contradicted minutes later). This was maddening for the AC-130 crew. From their vantage point they could see the group on the peak getting larger and larger. Somewhere below them an American might be fighting for his life. Of all U.S. elements in the area, only they had the ability to help him and yet no one was giving them clear guidance on how to do that.
(Turner expressed sympathy for the TF 11 staff officers with whom he was speaking. “They had a lot of heat, a lot of general officers and colonels pumping them for information and offering advice, and they had the least SA [situational awareness] down there in their cave,” he said. At this point the TF 11 staff in Masirah still thought Roberts had fallen out somewhere near where Razor 03 had crash landed. It would be hours before they realized this was not so.)