Not a Good Day to Die (28 page)

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the senior Rakkasan officers joined the other task force commanders and the Mountain staff in the big tent in the hangar to brief Hagenbeck. About fifty-five personnel, ranging from clean-shaven, uniformed infantry officers to TF 11 representatives in jeans, beards, and ballcaps, crowded in. The more senior officers sat on folding chairs, generals and colonels in the front row. Others stood around the side. The atmosphere was tense, the mood serious. Nobody was expecting a bloodbath, but most attendees had enough experience to realize no combat operation could be taken lightly, even one in which the enemy was not expected to stand and fight. The commanders and planners were putting over a thousand soldiers’ lives on the line, and that heavy responsibility focused their minds. There was little side chatter. Everyone paid close attention to the briefers.

Captain Eric Haupt, the Rakkasan intelligence officer, gave a short rundown on what he expected to find in the valley. Intelligence on the enemy was scant. “We’re looking at approximately 200 to 250 Al Qaida and Taliban fighters,” he said. But he had little solid information on how they were positioned and armed. From overhead imagery they had only been able to identify one DShK position, he said, adding that there must be more. After repeating the intel gurus’ mantra that enemy leaders would probably try to flee, he warned that care must be taken with enemy captives, who were not above hiding hypodermic needles on their bodies. “What we’ve seen in the past is these guys will put grenades on their testicles,” he said.

Gary Harrell added a warning that, in light of events a few days later, prompted surprisingly little discussion: An intelligence source U.S. forces had “picked up” in Khowst had said the enemy fighters in the Shahikot were not in the villages, but were living up in the ridgelines and coming down to the villages to get supplies. Hagenbeck listened intently. This was the first he’d heard of this intelligence report. Harrell said the intel folks thought the source was reliable. Given that the plan was predicated on the enemy being in the villages, it is noteworthy that when the general responsible for collating all the intelligence coming into Bagram indicated that that premise might be false, nobody suggested changing the plan. David Gray, the Mountain director of operations, later said that it was unreasonable to expect wholesale changes based on “single source” intelligence. But Paul Wille, his chief planner, acknowledged that writing the plan had been such a painful process of compromise and negotiation that nobody could face the prospect of tearing it up—or even significantly modifying it—at the eleventh hour simply because the enemy might not be where they were supposed to be. (However, Wille also said that the Rakkasans’ refusal to land in the Upper Shahikot meant there was little that could have been done to change the plan anyway.)

As for engaging targets in the villages, Hagenbeck told the officers any target they wanted to strike with an Apache would be considered “a sensitive target,” and Tommy Franks’s approval was needed before attacking it. This illustrated a drawback of the digital age for tactical commanders: the requirement—absurd on its face—for an infantry battalion or brigade commander to relay a message from a battlefield in eastern Afghanistan to a four-star general in Florida requesting permission for an attack helicopter to take out a single target during a firefight. The requirement was a function of Central Command’s desire to control as much of the fight in Afghanistan as it could from the United States, but it would not have been possible without a dazzling array of technologies that had given some generals the illusory perception that they could control a battle from thousands of miles away. In any case, Wiercinski seemed to dismiss the possibility of using the Apaches in such a situation, saying he wouldn’t need them “in an infantry-on-infantry fight.”

Once the crowd had drifted out of the tent, a smaller group strolled in. Most were TF Dagger members and were there for the TF Hammer rehearsal—a rock drill in which the officers at the spearhead of Hammer could run through their moves using the terrain board on the floor. Rosengard presided and the attendees included Jimmy from AFO, CIA operatives, and at least one 3
^rd
Special Forces Group officer not based at Gardez. “I brought guys to that rock drill that no one else needed to know about,” Rosengard said.

But segregating the special ops rehearsal from the Dagger-Mountain briefing to Hagenbeck meant the officers leading Anaconda’s main effort were walking through their battle plan unseen and unheard by the Rakkasan and Mountain leaders. The opposite also held true. Neither Glenn Thomas nor Matthew McHale—the two A-team leaders charged with taking Zia’s force into the valley—had even been to Bagram before, let alone attended any Rakkasan or Mountain-level briefings or rehearsals. They had no idea what the conventional troops expected of them. Had just one officer from the operation’s “main effort” attended the walk-through of the operation with Hagenbeck, all participants would have been on the same page when it came to how events were expected to play out in the operation. The A-team leaders had not heard the latest version of the plan, but Rosengard’s first words were not encouraging. “He starts out with a disclaimer, saying, ‘You cannot argue over what the 101
^st
is doing. This is done. This is the way it’s gonna be. This is how you’re gonna execute,’” McHale recalled, a memory seconded by Haas. (Rosengard said he remembered his opening remarks being along the lines of “The good-idea window is closed…. The course of action has already been determined.”) Then Rosengard laid out the plan, with the Rakkasans landing along the eastern side of the valley.
This doesn’t make any sense,
McHale thought. He and Thomas bit their tongues as Rosengard went around the tent calling on other officers to say their piece. Finally he asked the two team leaders for their thoughts. “Well, sir, I think what’s gonna happen is, the 101
^st
will land, and they’re gonna take fire from the villages, and of course, they’ll return fire, so they’re gonna get in a firefight,” McHale said. “And if that happens about the same time we’re coming around through the south side [of the Whale], you’re gonna have two American forces on either side of the objective attacking toward each other in close proximity, which hasn’t been a good idea since, like, the Revolutionary War. Also, the 101
^st
will be in contact, getting shot at, and they don’t know what my guys look like. So I think we’ll have an extreme chance of fratricide. And so it’s gonna get all fucked up, sir. And that’s what’s gonna happen.”

Haas was of like mind. “That’s an infantry [force] that pride themselves on being meat-eaters, and they weren’t going to sit in the blocking positions,” he explained. “The minute they took fire, their training told them ‘fire and maneuver, engage, close with, find, fix, finish the enemy.’”

Unbeknownst to McHale and Thomas, Rosengard had been arguing the same points unsuccessfully over the past two weeks. But there was no turning back from what had been agreed with the Rakkasans. “That’s where they’re going, so you’ve got to deal with it,” he told the team leaders. Then a Texas 14 soldier asked whether TF Hammer was still considered the main effort. Rosengard said yes. “It was very clear that we were the main effort,” said McHale. The young Special Forces officers left the meeting under the impression that as the main effort, they would enjoy “priority of fires”—first call on the close air support aircraft—until they had cleared the villages.

McHale and Thomas had some time to kill before their helicopter left for Gardez. As they chatted in a dark passageway that led from the main hangar bay to a side door, Rosengard walked up. “You guys the team leaders from down there?” he asked in his broad Boston accent. “Yes, sir,” they replied. His next comment shocked them. “The best thing that can happen is [for you] to get around the south of that mountain [the Whale] and make contact with the enemy. Because if you’re in contact, the 101
^st
won’t land in front of you.” It took a moment for the implication of what Rosengard was saying to sink in. McHale recalled their confusion: “I remember Glenn and I looking at each other and saying out of frustration, ‘You’re telling us that this thing has to get screwed up for us to succeed…. I mean, that doesn’t seem right.’ And the colonel cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. Certainly, that’s just what he was trying tell us.” The captains suddenly understood they weren’t the only ones with profound doubts about the plan. “It was clear to me at that point that it wasn’t our chain of command that thought this was a great idea,” McHale said.

BETWEEN
all the rock drills, the task force commanders, and senior staffers in Bagram had to find time to attend three daily video-teleconferences that linked them with Mikolashek’s CFLCC headquarters in Kuwait, Moseley’s CAOC in Saudi Arabia, and Franks’s Central Command headquarters in Tampa. Video-teleconferences were Franks’s preferred tool for managing operations in central Asia from Florida, but they imposed a strain on staffs, especially because of the eight-and-a-half-hour time difference between Bagram and Tampa.

Some officers appreciated the opportunity for almost face-to-face contact with the senior leaders in Kuwait and Florida. On the evening of February 26, Wiercinski came away from a VTC with Franks with renewed self-confidence. “I got one of the greatest feelings when I talked to General Franks,” the Rakkasan commander said. “It was one of the best things any general officer had ever said to me. Because I didn’t know what he thought we could do. When he said, ‘You all will know what to do on the ground. I have full faith and confidence. You will know when not to squeeze the trigger, you will know when to squeeze the trigger.’…It just gave me a sense that he trusted us and I had—we all had—his full faith and confidence. That did a lot for me personally as a commander, because to hear it from your big, big boss is important.”

But others in Bagram and Kuwait saw CENTCOM’s command-by-VTC approach as symptomatic of Franks’s tendency toward micromanagement. Within twenty-four hours of the VTC in which Franks had imbued Wiercinski with confidence, Central Command ordered the Mountain staff to forward to Tampa a PowerPoint slide showing the proposed D-Day locations of TF Rakkasan troops in the Shahikot down to the platoon level. This extraordinary order—four-star generals and their headquarters are usually concerned with moving corps, not platoons, around a battlefield—sent a shiver through officers who feared CENTCOM’s habitual reluctance to commit conventional troops to the fight was rearing its head yet again. “That created a lot of concern among us because at the last moment [we thought] they were going to start taking away forces that we had already gone through rehearsals with,” said a Mountain staff officer. The attitude of those at CENTCOM who demanded the slide seemed to be: “Why do you need that many forces? Why can’t you do it [with fewer]?”

Edwards, the CFLCC deputy commanding general for operations, said such behavior was par for the course from CENTCOM, but CFLCC tried to “filter” similar demands to avoid overloading the staffs in Afghanistan with petty requirements. However, not all the the requests for information originated at CENTCOM, he said. “Some of this was driven by the insatiable need for detail in Washington because the SecDef was having a daily press briefing,” Edwards said. “There are many things acceptable in Washington, but what’s the one absolutely unacceptable answer in Washington, D.C.? ‘I don’t know.’

“When the SecDef started having a [press] briefing every day, it meant that for hours of the day you could not talk to the CENTCOM staff. It didn’t matter what was going on. For hours of the day you were unable to get to a senior person to make a decision at CENTCOM because they were tied up prepping themselves for the SecDef’s briefing. The SecDef called CENTCOM every morning. They had a morning telephone call and I believe they had an afternoon telephone call. And for a couple of hours before that telephone call you could not talk to the CinC, you could not talk to the deputy CinC, you could not talk to the J-3 [director of operations], you probably could not talk to the J-2 [director of intelligence], and therefore you couldn’t get a decision. Numbers became so important that if the SecDef went to a briefing, and we had reported that we had captured fourteen Al Qaida, and it really turned out to be twelve or sixteen, then it would be easier to let two go or go back and capture two more than to go back and try to change the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] number.”

But many officers were too consumed with the frantic preparations for battle to ponder these issues. To them, the collaborative planning process between task forces, the standing-room-only backbriefs, and the video-teleconferences with higher headquarters were evidence that everything was proceeding as it should. This was particularly so after Mountain held its own VTC February 26 to discuss the fires plan. The VTC connected Gray, Briley, Yates, Bentley, and Donnelly at Bagram, CFLCC and CAOC representatives, and the commander of the aircraft carrier
John Stennis
’s air wing. “We discussed the pre-assault fires and the follow-on CAS [close air support] plan,” Gray said. “Some minor issues arose and were dealt with, but we left that meeting feeling like everyone was on the same sheet of music.”

This was an illusion. Everyone was not on the same sheet of music. That evening, when Hagenbeck briefed Franks, Mikolashek, and Moseley via VTC, Moseley said he had only recently been made aware of the operation and had some issues with it. The staffs tried to iron out these differences, but events on D-Day would reveal significant command-and-control problems between Moseley’s Air Force operation in Saudi Arabia and the Mountain staff at Bagram. Even more incomprehensibly, the rehearsals hid—or perhaps, because the Hammer A-team leaders did not attend the Rakkasan-Dagger run-throughs caused—at least three major communication breakdowns between Mountain’s component task forces, two of which would have serious repercussions.