Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (33 page)

Events were now moving fast. D-day for Anaconda was set for February 28. Blaber knew he needed to have his teams in place overlooking the valley before the attack began. He also knew that, superb as they were, the two reconnaissance teams he had would not give him the coverage he wanted. He persuaded Captain Joe Kernan, the Team 6 commander, to loan him a five-man reconnaissance team called Mako 31 for the operation. With bad weather delaying D-day until March 2, Blaber launched his three teams the evening of February 27.

This time, Juliet's five operators would not be on foot. They were riding super-quiet all-terrain vehicles equipped with infrared headlights and a variety of navigational aids as they approached from the north, heading toward their desired observation post on the Shahikot's eastern ridgeline. Because passes that had seemed navigable from overhead imagery turned out to be impenetrable, they were forced to ride at midnight through a small village supposedly garrisoned by at least 100 Al Qaeda fighters. They made it through, only to find themselves in a minefield, which they escaped by steering their ATVs along a 45-degree exposed rock slope for several hundred meters. They continued on, ascending through increasingly thick snow, invisible under the moonless night sky to the fighters they spotted manning two heavy machine gun positions about 4,000 feet above them. Finally, after covering twelve kilometers in nine hours, they were in position.

India Team, which for this mission consisted of just the two Delta operators and the Army of Northern Virginia signals intelligence collector, was moving on foot, but found the going much less arduous than the environmental recon. After walking seven kilometers, India Team reported at 5:22
A.M
. that it too had reached its observation post, located at the valley's southwestern corner. Mako 31, which included three SEALs, a Navy explosive ordnance disposal expert, and a combat controller, faced an exceptionally tough hike over 8,000-foot ridgelines and through knee-deep snow to get into position on a finger-shaped ridgeline jutting into the southern end of the valley. Movement was so tough the team had to stop a little short of the observation post as dawn beckoned, resting up until they could cover the final thousand meters the next night. Nonetheless, by dawn, Blaber had passed three teams through Al Qaeda's lines of defense and positioned them in or near the Shahikot Valley. It was an enormous success, the value of which would become even clearer during the next three days. It also validated his approach, which combined tactical boldness with painstaking preparation.

The next day, the teams' reports proved beyond doubt the presence of a large Al Qaeda force in the Shahikot: enemy positions and movement on the western ridgeline, radio communications monitored by the two Army of Northern Virginia personnel, and, just after noon, the sound of marksmanship training from a village on the valley floor. Blaber reported all this and more to Bagram and Masirah, but despite the news that the enemy were in the high ground as much as they were on the valley floor, the commanders made no changes to the plan.

Just after first light on March 1, two Mako 31 snipers crept 500 meters to check out the exact spot the team and Blaber had selected for their observation post. Peering around rocks to get their first glimpse, they made a startling discovery: Al Qaeda had already occupied the position. There was a gray-green tent that could sleep several people and, fifteen meters away, a heavy machine gun positioned to overwatch the narrow southeastern entrance to the valley through which every infantry-laden Chinook and Black Hawk was due to fly in twenty-four hours. The ranges would have been such that the Caucasian heavy machine gunner the SEALs observed and photographed could hardly have missed. Mako 31's infiltration, and, in a larger sense, Blaber's belief in the value of human reconnaissance and the abilities of his men, had saved Anaconda from disaster.

Early the next morning, Mako 31's three SEALs moved stealthily to within twenty meters of the tent, intending to wait until 5:30
A.M.
—one hour before the air assault was to begin—before eliminating the Al Qaeda position. But when a fighter emerged at 4
A.M.
and spotted them, it was game on. As five militants poured from the tent, the SEALs opened fire, only for two of their rifles to jam as soon as they'd fired a single round. The third SEAL held the enemy off as his colleagues quickly cleared the jams and resumed firing. They dropped three of the tent's occupants before calling for fire from an AC-130 overhead, which took care of the others with a few well-placed 105mm rounds.

The rest of Operation Anaconda's first day did not go as well for the Coalition. The combined Afghan militia/Special Forces column named Task Force Hammer descended into chaos after a Special Forces warrant officer and two Afghans died in a friendly fire attack from the same AC-130 crew that had destroyed the Al Qaeda observation post. When a planned series of bombing runs on the valley's humpbacked western ridgeline did not materialize, and Al Qaeda mortars opened up on them, Task Force Hammer's attack stalled before reaching the valley. Although the infantry was supposed to be the supporting effort, the air assault continued as planned. But when the infantry companies landed on the valley floor they found themselves under much heavier fire than they anticipated, pouring down from Al Qaeda positions in the mountainsides. One 10th Mountain platoon, plus its company and battalion command posts, were pinned down for most of the day in the southern end of the valley.

During those difficult hours, the AFO presence in the high ground, hidden from the enemy, was a major factor in preventing the infantry from being overrun. Together the teams gave Blaber a better picture of the battlefield than any other commander enjoyed, and from their perches they were able to call down punishing air strikes on Al Qaeda positions. Indeed, Hagenbeck was on the verge of pulling his troops out of the battle before Blaber jumped on the radio and changed his mind, telling him via the AFO liaison officer in Bagram (none other than Jim Reese) that this was “the battlefield opportunity of a lifetime” and he intended to keep his teams in the Shahikot decimating the enemy through air strikes until there was no more killing to be done. Instead of withdrawing completely from the valley, Hagenbeck pulled out two elements that had been pinned down in the south and west and repositioned the other platoons. Incredibly, other than the Special Forces' friendly fire casualty, the U.S. had suffered no troops killed in action up to that point.

But the battle began to turn for AFO the next morning when a bunch of SEALs arrived at Gardez. They were not AFO personnel, but Team 6 operators desperate for action, having seen almost none since arriving in-country. Over Blaber's objections, Trebon ordered him to insert the SEALs that night and to turn his whole AFO operation in the Shahikot over to Team 6 as soon as possible. These orders ran contrary to Blaber's whole approach, which stressed the importance of operators familiarizing themselves with the environment before infiltrating. The careful preparations that lay behind the AFO teams' success were lost on those following the operation from Bagram and Masirah, from which inserting teams into the mountains and calling in accurate air strikes must have appeared easy. When the SEAL commander immediately established separate communications with Team 6 in Bagram and Task Force 11 in Masirah, cutting Blaber out of the loop, command and control of the most successful part of Anaconda began to fray.

The SEALs wanted to put a team on the highest point overlooking the Shahikot, the top of a mountain named Takur Ghar. Breaking one of Blaber's foundational rules, they were going to insert the team that night via Chinook. “Slab,” the team leader, planned to land at an offset location and climb Takur Ghar, but a series of delays meant the infiltration occurred much later than planned. He had been ordered to get in position by dawn, and there wasn't time to ascend the mountain on foot and still make that deadline. Slab reluctantly told the pilots to fly his team straight to the top of the mountain. When they did so, they discovered, just as Mako 31 had, that the enemy was already there. Two RPGs tore into the aircraft, shredding its electrical and hydraulics systems. In an extraordinary display of skill, the pilot managed to get the stricken helicopter airborne and fly it 7,000 feet before having to put it down at the Shahikot's northern end. But in the confusion as the helicopter lifted off the peak, one SEAL, Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts, jumped or fell out the back.

A fog of confusion and miscommunication then descended upon all headquarters trying to control events in the Shahikot. This was the inevitable result of the bifurcated command and control system, under which the senior U.S. officer, Hagenbeck, had no control over Task Force 11. Trebon, who was visiting the Team 6 operations center in Bagram, compounded the problem by taking command and control authority from Blaber and Reese, who had better situational awareness of events in the Shahikot than any other officers. Trebon retained “command” for himself but handed “control” to his desert island headquarters 1,100 miles from the Shahikot. The six-foot-five brigadier general, nicknamed “Chewbacca” on account of his height and bushy, rigorously combed gray hair, placed his faith in Task Force 11's high-tech communications systems and Predator imagery, rather than on the officers best prepared for this crisis.

As a result, although Al Qaeda forces killed Roberts about ninety minutes after he landed in their midst, almost half an hour later another Task Force Brown Chinook returned Slab's team to the top of Takur Ghar in a valiant but vain attempt to rescue their comrade. A blizzard of fire met the helicopter. It was able to drop off the SEALs and get away, but the operators found themselves in a hellacious nighttime firefight, outnumbered and outgunned on the top of a frigid mountaintop. Two were badly wounded and 24th STS Technical Sergeant John Chapman appeared to be killed. What happened next caused a rift between units in JSOC that took years to repair. Under heavy fire and with no time to exhaustively check for vital signs, the fact that Chapman was not moving nor showing any signs of life convinced the SEALs he was dead. Realizing they had bitten off more than they could chew, they withdrew over the lip of the mountaintop and slid down the steep side of Takur Ghar.

Meanwhile, a confused Task Force 11 headquarters in Masirah ordered the quick reaction force—1st Platoon, A Company, 1st Ranger Battalion—led by Captain Nate Self to launch. But nobody told Self or the aircrew that they were flying to a heavily defended enemy position where the two previous helicopters had taken heavy fire, a mountaintop the SEALs had already vacated.

On that mountaintop, a fierce firefight was under way between an individual in a bunker and two other combatants maneuvering against him. The individual in the bunker killed one with an expert shot, but was killed by the other. A Predator unmanned aerial vehicle overhead captured the entire episode. Colonel Andy Milani, a 160th officer later tasked by Dailey to investigate the Takur Ghar fight, concluded that there were only two possible explanations: confused Al Qaeda personnel were fighting each other, or Chapman was still alive and, wounded and alone on the mountain, was taking it to the enemy. (However, another source who watched the video noted that the fighter in the bunker was firing his weapon on full auto, which would be very unusual for a special mission unit operator, and that Chapman's rifle had a suppressor, which the man in the bunker's did not.) Whatever the truth, forty-five seconds after the bunker combatant's resistance was finally ended, the Chinook carrying Nate Self and half his men loomed over the mountaintop. The quick reaction force had arrived.

On the mountainside below, Slab saw the Chinook approaching. He tried desperately to raise the helicopter on his radio (the only one of his team's that still had battery power), but the quick reaction force was using a different frequency than the one to which his radio was set. He frantically switched over to a new frequency, but it was too late. At that moment, as the Chinook flared to land, Al Qaeda greeted it with a brutal fusillade, killing a crew chief and a Ranger, while wounding a pilot and another crew chief. The helicopter landed with a bump, the ramp dropped, and the Rangers charged off, straight into a hail of bullets. Two more fell, killed instantly, as the other Rangers sought cover where they could and returned fire. For the next several hours the battle raged on the snowy mountaintop, as the Task Force 11 staff on Masirah struggled to figure out what was happening. For the first time, an armed CIA Predator was used as close air support for ground troops when the unmanned aerial vehicle destroyed a troublesome Al Qaeda bunker with a Hellfire missile. The little band of Rangers, aviators, and airmen fought bravely, steadily gaining the upper hand over the Al Qaeda fighters. When the second half of the quick reaction force arrived on foot, having landed farther down the mountain, the Rangers assaulted and cleared the top of Takur Ghar, taking no further U.S. casualties.

But before Self could arrange a medevac for his casualties, Al Qaeda counterattacked from a neighboring ridge separated from the peak by a saddle. This attack seriously wounded two more Americans: a 160th medic and an Air Force pararescueman. Bombing runs from an endless stack of jets subdued the counterattack, but Trebon, with support from Dailey, who was monitoring the operation from JSOC headquarters at Pope, refused to send medevac aircraft to pull the wounded out until after dark. Senior Airman Jason Cunningham, the pararescueman wounded in the counterattack, died in the intervening period. He was the last U.S. casualty on Takur Ghar
.

Anaconda would continue officially for two more weeks, but the Takur Ghar battle was the last heavy fighting. The coalition forces—especially the three AFO reconnaissance teams—had inflicted scores, possibly hundreds, of casualties on the Al Qaeda forces. But as at Tora Bora, hundreds of others escaped to Pakistan, including the militants' presumed leader in the Shahikot, Tohir Yuldeshev, who headed Al Qaeda's Central Asian franchise, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The operation served as a warning of the dangers of relying too heavily on technology. Overhead imagery systems had not detected many Al Qaeda positions, including those on Takur Ghar, and communications systems failed repeatedly at key junctures. But Anaconda also validated Blaber's approach to strategic reconnaissance, which he summed up by referencing what he called “Patton's three principles of war”: “Audacity, audacity, and audacity.” This served to expose the deep rift between Delta's way of doing business—as exemplified by Blaber—and the micromanagement favored by Dailey and Trebon.
2
That rift would widen during another daring operation in a different theater the following year.