Not a Good Day to Die (37 page)

The Grim 31 crew was also concerned that they not inadvertently attack a friendly force. They knew that to prevent nighttime “friendly fire” attacks from the air, all Hammer vehicles were supposed to be marked with several strips of “glint” tape—adhesive tape that brightly reflects light within the spectrum for which night-vision goggles and the AC-130’s low-light television sensor are optimized. So Grim 31 “glinted” the convoy for several minutes, illuminating the vehicles with an extra-bright beam in a portion of the spectrum that was invisible to the naked eye but would appear like daylight to anyone wearing night-vision goggles, as the Americans in the convoy were. In one of several unsolved mysteries from the incident that followed, not only did the crew see no sign of glint tape on the vehicles, but no one on the ground reported being “glinted.” Nor could the Grim 31 crew see any sign of VS-17 panels—large orange and purple pieces of cloth that U.S. troops use for identification from the air, and which all Task Force Hammer vehicles were supposed to have fixed to them. Grim 31 called Texas 14 with the news. To Thomas and the others in TF Hammer, the vehicles reported by Grim 31 represented a big threat: a potential roadblock or ambush right in the middle of the Fishhook, a natural choke point through which they had to pass to gain entrance to the Shahikot.

It took a few minutes for the officers and NCOs in the convoy to confirm there was no chance of any Americans being at the spot at which Grim 31 was reporting activity. Thomas verified the grid three times. Onboard the aircraft, the discussion turned to whether to shoot at the vehicles or the dismounted personnel first, and what sort of 105mm howitzer ammunition to use: point detonation or proximity fuse. “If we’re going after the vehicles, let’s go with the PD,” one of the crew said. The crew’s navigator, a major, asked the Air Force Special Tactics Squadron commando who was serving as Dagger’s liaison officer onboard the plane whether he thought the vehicles below were “a good target, and not friendlies,” and the liaison replied in the affirmative. A minute after Grim 31 called Thomas again with a reminder that they would have to leave in a couple of minutes, Schwartz radioed Thomas and said Grim 31 had permission to engage. Thomas told McArthur, who immediately called Grim 31. “Those vehicles can be engaged,” McArthur told the crew at 5:30 a.m. “Cleared hot on those vehicles.”

Harriman’s four-vehicle convoy was inching south, about a kilometer northeast of a hill that confusingly bore the same Pushto name—Tergul Ghar—as the Whale, and so had been nicknamed “the Guppy” by the Americans, when McArthur told Grim 31 it was “cleared hot” to fire. Within sixty seconds the world around the four trucks flew apart as 105mm shells rained down, spraying clods of frozen earth and baseball-sized chunks of shrapnel in all directions. The first round hit about ten feet in front of the lead vehicle with a loud boom, sending a shower of sparks upward. Riding in the Special Forces pickup two vehicles back, Casenhiser thought the lead truck had hit a mine. But as he opened his door intending to run over and check whether everyone was okay, another explosion went off nearby. He and Wadsworth thought they must be getting mortared. In a desperate maneuver to evade the devastating fire, the three trailing vehicles in the convoy were wheeling around to reverse course when a round fell in the bed of the Special Forces truck. Casenhiser felt something hit him in the shoulder and right hip.

Inside Grim 31 the crew pressed home the attack with a ruthless efficiency honed to a razor’s edge in thousands of hours of training. As the pilot, Major D. J. Turner, slowly circled about 10,000 feet above the target, the 105 gunner—who functioned more as a loader; only the pilot and the two sensor operators could fire the howitzer protruding from the aircraft’s belly—opened the gun’s breech after each round was fired and pulled the spent brass casing out, dropping it to the floor and kicking it out of the way. Then he hoisted another fifty-three-pound round into the weapon, slammed the breech shut, and hit the button that let the hydraulics reactivate the gun mount. The whole process took five to seven seconds, at the end of which he yelled “Gun ready!” into his helmet microphone. After the flight engineer had repeated the “Gun ready!” shout, one of the sensor operators aligned the sights on his head monitor over a new target and pressed his “consent” button with his left hand to fire another round.

Again and again the earth around the little column of vehicles erupted as Grim 31’s crew repeated the process, chasing the troops on the ground as they frantically tried to escape the rain of fire. Caught in the midst of the terrifying maelstrom, Wadsworth noticed there were none of the telltale whistles that announce incoming mortar rounds, just a series of sudden explosions. He was not alone in his suspicions. As they raced down the wadi at forty miles per hour trying to evade the barrage, the other special operators realized the rounds that followed their every twist and turn were raining down far too accurately for mortar fire.

“I’m taking incoming! I’m taking incoming!” Harriman yelled into his radio, a transmission monitored by the rest of TF Hammer and in Dagger’s operations center at Bagram, but not by Grim 31. Then a shell exploded with a vicious
boom!
right beside Harriman’s truck. A racquetball-sized lump of shrapnel punched a hole through the right passenger side door and hit the warrant officer in his lower back. Another piece of shrapnel, this one about the size of a golf ball, just missed Harriman but angled up and caught Wadsworth’s hand as he twisted the steering wheel, skinning his fingers to the bone. The truck stopped moving as the other vehicles kept trying to outrun the murderous fire. Despite his wound, which was critical, Harriman got back on the radio and, with a weakening voice, requested support. On board Grim 31, the crew chatted in a businesslike fashion as they lined the targets up in their gun sights. “They’re un-assing the area,” said one crewmember, as the troops in the convoy tried desperately to evade Grim 31’s merciless pounding. “That last one is trying to boogie,” replied another. “Scanners keep your eyes peeled.” “The first one is stopped.” “Second one hit.” “Get out in front of that lead vehicle and lead ’em.” Soon all the vehicles in the little convoy had stopped and anyone who could walk was taking cover behind rocks. Above them, Grim 31 had made one-and-a-half orbits of about a two-kilometer radius. The crew had fired between eight and ten rounds and could see there were still targets left to engage. But they were at “bingo” fuel and dawn was coming, and so Turner pointed the aircraft north. Two minutes and thirteen seconds after the firing began, it was over.

As soon as the rounds stopped falling, Casenhiser and Wadsworth ran back to their truck, where Harriman remained, his breathing labored and his blood spilling onto the seat. Casenhiser checked his pulse, then began CPR on him. Meanwhile Wadsworth grabbed the PRC-148 radio and called up the chain to say they were receiving fire and that Harriman was badly wounded. “Chief is dying! Chief is dying!” Haas heard a clearly rattled Wadsworth yell over the radio. Their colleagues in the main column, which had only just started moving again, had heard muffled gunfire in the distance but didn’t make the connection between the AC-130 mission and the tragedy that had just befallen the smaller convoy. “Looks like our northern OP is now taking on mortar fire,” one of the special operators said over the radio. At first, ironically, TF Hammer asked Grim 31, who they believed was still engaging targets in the Fishhook, to fly north and attack the enemy mortar position presumed to be firing on Harriman’s element. But a faint pink-yellow glow along the eastern horizon announced the impending dawn. “Uh, we gotta leave,” Grim 31’s navigator reported. “It’s daylight. We are ordered to leave.” Instead, they would get an inbound flight of F-15E Strike Eagle fighters to come to the rescue, the aircrew told TF Hammer as they flew north.

Meanwhile, in Gardez, Blaber, Glenn P., and the other operators in the AFO operations center had been monitoring the radio exchanges and were now scrambling to figure out what Grim 31 was engaging. Because they could combine the reports from the three AFO teams in the valley with all the other message traffic, they had a better sense of what was happening in the valley than any other headquarters, a fact which would become increasingly apparent over the next seventy-two hours. None of the teams had reported an enemy convoy in the Fishhook, and when they heard Grim 31 report they had disabled at least two vehicles, Blaber and Glenn P. became worried. Then, a minute or two later, at about 5:35 a.m., John B.’s three-man AFO team with the main body of TF Hammer radioed back to Gardez that the northern convoy, including Hans, Nelson, and Thor, was being mortared. Blaber and Glenn P. immediately made the connection. “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!” Blaber yelled into the satellite radio hand mike. Glenn P. shouted the same into a hand-held MBITR as he ran outside to get better transmission on the line-of-sight radio.

The Grim 31 crew members never heard the “Cease fire!” call. It would have been irrelevant anyway, as they were already heading home. But Glenn’s P. next transmission from the Gardez safe house got through. “We have friendly force receiving mortar fire, break,” the AFO intelligence NCO said. “We hope that’s not you firing on them.” The stark message was the first chilling indication anyone on the AC-130 had that they had been shooting at Americans. “Who is this?” Grim 31’s navigator replied in what one special ops account described as an “audibly shaken” voice. “Ultra 01,” Glenn P. replied, giving Blaber’s AFO call sign.

A few kilometers away in the main column, Schwartz had been monitoring Harriman’s transmissions and told Haas that Harriman’s element had taken casualties. Haas halted the main column and began organizing a quick reaction force to go to the assistance of Harriman’s convoy. Meanwhile, Schwartz continued communicating with Harriman until the badly wounded warrant officer could no longer talk on the radio. At that point Wadsworth, who could barely operate the radio himself because of his badly wounded hands, took over communications duty while simultaneously struggling to get the Afghans to set up a security perimeter. Schwartz asked Wadsworth a series of questions:
What is your location? What is the friendly and enemy situation? What are the numbers of U.S. and AMF wounded? Can you identify an exfil HLZ?
Schwartz also kept the TF Dagger command post at Bagram updated on the situation.

BACK
at the site of the attack on Harriman’s convoy, the scene was one of devastation. One of Ziabdullah’s fighters lay dead and another dozen had been wounded, one mortally. Nelson, one of the AFO operators, had suffered super-ficial cuts to his face and head and a scratched cornea. All three Special Forces soldiers were hurt, but Harriman’s wounds were easily the most severe. He now had a fist-sized hole in his back through which his life was quickly ebbing away. Ignoring his own wounds, Casenhiser worked feverishly to try to save his friend’s life.

About twenty minutes after the main column ground to a halt, a four-vehicle quick reaction force took off for Harriman’s position. In the two lead vehicles—an armored Mercedes SUV and a pickup—were Texas 14’s second-in-command, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Sean Ballard, McArthur, Schwartz, and a couple of Special Forces NCOs, including ODA 372’s other medic, Sergeant First Class Brian Allen. The third vehicle was a truck containing Engineer’s thirty-strong platoon—among the best of the Afghan fighters—and the fourth vehicle was an AFO pickup containing John B. and Isaac H. It took the rescue party about ten minutes to drive north to Harriman’s stricken little convoy. A little more than halfway there, roughly 800 meters from Harriman’s position, they thought they heard the crackle of small arms fire. Ballard charged ahead in his armored SUV. The other vehicles stopped and established a hasty perimeter, with Engineer’s fighters orienting their weapons to the north and northeast. After a short pause Schwartz determined that they weren’t receiving effective fire and couldn’t see any enemy fighters, so he had everyone get back in the vehicles and continued north. While still en route, Ballard heard over the radio that one of the U.S. casualties was going into cardiac arrest.

It wasn’t yet 6:30 a.m. The Rakkasan air assault had yet to land, but Task Force Hammer was already in the grip of Clausewitzean friction and had ground almost to a halt well short of its objective. The first mutterings of dissension were being heard from the Afghans, and the NCOs in the quick reaction force found themselves already arranging a medevac for their stricken colleagues. Operation Anaconda had not begun auspiciously.

(A Central Command investigation into the attack on Harriman’s column found that it had been mistakenly engaged by Grim 31. The major factor in the friendly-fire incident was the failure of the aircraft’s inertial navigation system, which led the aircrew to believe they were over the Fishhook when in fact they were flying over very similar terrain just north of the Whale, the investigators concluded. However, their report left several questions unanswered: Why, if the navigation system had failed after Grim 31 engaged Juliet’s targets on top of the Whale, and Grim 31 had flown back to the eastern ridge, as investigators speculated, rather than to the Finger, the aircraft’s crew reported that the flight time to the next target did not match how long it would have taken them to fly to a position above Harriman’s convoy at the northern tip of the Whale; why the
crew saw no sign of “glint” tape on the vehicles they engaged; why the U.S. troops who were attacked didn’t notice when Grim 31 “glinted” their position; and why the navigation system seemed to work perfectly in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Harriman’s column, steering Grim 31 home to K2 through bad weather exactly as it should have. What the investigation did make clear was that, not for the last time in Operation Anaconda, in a situation in which every individual involved was doing his best to secure victory, tragedy resulted.)

5.

DESPITE the best efforts of the SF officers and NCOs to hold things together, chaos now engulfed TF Hammer, which was spread out over five kilometers west of the Whale. Some trucks were still advancing, others had stopped, while the SF troops, still believing Harriman’s convoy had been hit by enemy mortar fire, looked to their own defenses and sent AMF fighters out to establish a perimeter around the convoy. It was “a very confusing time,” recalled McHale, who was one of those who had stopped. Glenn Thomas had driven off in his pickup with the quick reaction force, but he only accompanied the other vehicles far enough to ensure they were headed in the right direction. While Thomas was gone, Haas told McHale to move to the front of the column and continue driving southeast to Gwad Kala, a collection of ruins less than two kilometers west of the Whale. Phase Line Emerald ran through Gwad Kala, and McHale was to pause there and wait for the bombing runs against the Whale. Not realizing that Thomas was only accompanying the quick reaction force part of the way to Harriman’s convoy and then returning, McHale understood Haas’s order to mean that he—McHale—was now in charge at the head of the column. The ODA 372 leader did as he was directed, gathering a half-dozen U.S. and Afghan vehicles and moving out smartly. But this only added to the confusion, because when Thomas returned to the main column and resumed movement southeast, he assumed he was still in the lead element and didn’t realize there were seven or eight friendly vehicles ahead of him. “He thought he was in the front, and I thought I was in the front,” McHale recalled.

The original Task Force Hammer order of march had long since been discarded. McHale had told his team’s senior engineer, Sergeant First Class James Van Antwerp, to lag behind the main column and “keep pushing vehicles forward.” In fact, Van Antwerp ended up in the middle of the convoy, which was where Glenn Thomas ran into him when the Texas 14 leader rejoined the main body of TF Hammer. Elements of the two A-teams were intermixed at the front of the column. Worried there might be unmarked minefields ahead, McHale put one of Texas 14’s armored Mercedes in the lead and drove through a narrow gorge just west of Carwazi, a small village about two kilometers west of the northern tip of the Whale.

It was about 6:15 a.m. when the first few vehicles from McHale’s element emerged from the defile, still two-and-a-half kilometers north of Gwad Kala with the rest of TF Hammer stretched out for several thousand meters behind them. Behind him, Haas looked at his watch and congratulated himself on being almost on schedule, despite all the catastrophes that had befallen his task force. Haas’s Toyota bounced through the defile, and then up onto some nearby high ground. Raising his gaze, Haas took in the awesome size of the Whale, looming dark and forbidding in front of him. “Holy shit!” he gasped. For the first time he fully understood the dominance the rocky massif exerted over the Shahikot’s western approaches. He looked back at his watch. This was when the bombing was supposed to start. The Americans and their Afghan allies cast their eyes toward the heavens, waiting for the promised fifty-five-minute bombardment to begin. The Afghans, nervous about the enemy they expected to find on the Whale, set great store by the Americans’ ability to deliver death and destruction on command from the air. For their part, the Americans knew their ability to cajole their allies rested on their ability to deliver on their promises. Both parties were about to be sorely disappointed. In an underwhelming display of American firepower, a single B-1B bomber hurtled through the predawn sky, and a grand total of six orange explosions blossomed along the humpback ridgeline. And that was that. The ballyhooed “fifty-five-minute” bombardment had in fact lasted less than a single minute. The Whale was over six kilometers long and, at its broadest point, two kilometers wide. The Air Force had dropped less than one bomb per kilometer on the massive terrain feature.

At first neither the Americans nor their Afghan allies could believe that they had just witnessed the entire bombardment. As the first bombs erupted along the spine of the Whale, Zia Lodin jumped with his harms raised aloft in a universal gesture of triumph. “All the Afghans are screaming ‘Yay!’” Haas recalled. When Zia was done with his premature victory jig, Haas called him over and explained that as soon as the bombing finished, in about an hour, they had to be ready to move forward. Then they looked back toward the Whale expectantly. “And I’m waiting, and I’m waiting, and I’m waiting,” Haas said. Nothing happened.
Where’s the rest of the bombs?
McHale wondered. The bombs, of course, had been lost in the miasma of miscommunication in the days preceding the operation. Apprehension among the Afghans deepened. Zia Lodin, upon whose troops the Anaconda plan revolved, turned to Haas and said, via an interpreter, “Where are the bombs you promised us? Where are the planes?”