Not a Good Day to Die (50 page)

The G-chief in whom the Americans had placed so much faith was becoming unhinged. “Zia is just beside himself now,” Haas recalled. “He’s embarrassed by his guys, he didn’t get the fifty-five minutes of [close air support] like he thought he would, he’s taking casualties, and he feels like he’s been let down by his guys, by me, by everybody.” Again the Afghan leader walked up to Haas and, with a face like thunder and his hands raised to the heavens, screamed “Kojast planes?!?” (“Where are the planes?!?”) “He didn’t speak much English, but he understood ‘planes,’” Haas recalled.

In his frustration and desire to redeem himself in the eyes of the Americans, Zia confirmed his patrons’ worst fears. “I am attacking Zermat!” he told Haas through an interpreter. “The enemy is there, I can’t get to the valley, so I am attacking Zermat—there are enemy there.” “No you’re not,” said Haas, appalled that his G-chief was even proposing this course of action. “I am attacking Zermat!” Zia reiterated. “They are all traitors. They told everybody we were coming. We are attacking Zermat!” With that he turned and began rounding up his men.

The SF officers at the heart of TF Hammer knew everything had changed. They were no longer being treated as the main effort—if they ever had been—and events in the Shahikot were now playing the decisive role in the decision-making at Bagram. They needed to know what role Mountain headquarters foresaw for them. “Were we counter-attacking? Were we relieving pressure? It was now a totally different ball game,” McHale said. But the SF officers couldn’t even get a clear picture of how the battle was unfolding elsewhere. “We were not getting good feedback on that—where were the 101
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? How far had they gone?” McHale recalled. The confusion and chaos had reached “the point where our attack didn’t make sense…. Nobody likes going backward, but where are we going to go to? What piece of terrain are we going to go seize and what support are we going to get to get there? If you can slice us something [in terms of air power], and it’s effective and useful, then put us somewhere. But there was no mission given to us…. There wasn’t a good, solid FRAGO [fragmentary order] that came out from any one headquarters that said, ‘Okay, break, break, break, here’s the situation, this is what we’re gonna do,’” McHale said. “None of that was coming down. Nobody had another plan for where do we go from here.” There was no way Hammer was going to stay where they were. “We needed to get out of there, because staying right there outside of Zermat and camping there that night was bad juju,” McHale said. The morale of their Afghan allies had sunk to new lows. “They were pissed, they’d taken casualties, yet they didn’t feel like they were getting any air support,” McHale said.

For Hammer’s remaining Afghan fighters, the Americans’ inability to deliver their vaunted air power when it was needed was the final straw. They had suffered chaos, confusion and casualties in the drive from Gardez, then been attacked by an American aircraft, killing and wounding more of their colleagues, seen the promised “fifty-five-minute” bombardment of the Whale turn into something closer to a fifty-five-second bombardment, and when the enemy fighters left undisturbed on that massive humpback mountain turned their guns and mortars on the convoy, the Americans had no response.

Now Task Force Hammer was back on the road where its problems began over twelve hours previously. They were out of range of the mortars on the Whale, but their new location wasn’t making the SF officers feel much more secure. Many of the trucks were parked just fifty meters from a compound where anyone could have stuck their head over the wall and sprayed the line of vehicles with AK fire. “Zermat was not a friendly town, we were standing out in the middle of the desert, we couldn’t drive off the road, so we were really not in a defendable place right there,” McHale recalled. “It was just a horrible place to be.”

Haas eventually dissuaded Zia from attacking Zermat, but the price was high. The furious Afghan leader decided to pull his troops off the battlefield altogether. “I’m not staying here,” he said. “If I can’t attack Zermat, it’s stupid for me to stay, because I will be attacked from Zermat. You let me down. I am going back to Gardez.” At the same time, Mulholland called, urging Haas to get Zia back into the fight. Haas, who felt that his force had already “taken an ass-kicking,” tried to explain why that wasn’t possible. “I’ve got a serious problem here,” the lieutenant colonel told his boss. “Zia’s unloading.” “You’ve gotta stop him,” replied Mulholland, who had promised the Mountain planners that his G-chief would not let them down. “You’ve gotta keep him in the fight.”

“We were attempting to encourage them not to fall back, but instead to hold what they had, to stay in the field,” Rosengard, the Dagger operations officer, said. “We knew that to be a stretch, but we wanted it to occur.” While Haas spoke with Mulholland on the Dagger command net, Zia paced up and down the line of trucks talking to his subordinates on his own hand-held radio. Haas was caught between a rock and a hard place. His boss was ordering him to prevent Zia from leaving the area, but the Afghan leader had other ideas. Haas struggled to explain the reality on the ground to the TF Dagger commander while keeping Zia close enough to ensure that the G-chief didn’t take off on his own again. After a few minutes Zia had had enough. He climbed into his pickup, gave the order to move and the Afghan convoy began heading toward Gardez.

Haas spoke bluntly with Mulholland. “This is the deal,” he said. “Zia’s leaving.” If Hammer had to retain a presence near the Shahikot, Haas suggested concentrating his U.S. troops with the AFO guys at their observation post by the Guppy. Mulholland wasn’t interested. “You’ve gotta get Zia to stay,” he insisted. “Zia’s not staying,” Haas replied. “In fact, Zia’s driving down the road right now. We can either lead him, or follow him.”

The time for a hard decision had come. To Haas, it was crucial that the Americans stick with Zia, even in retreat, in order to maintain some semblance of rapport with the G-chief. “Had we left him, it would have been, ‘Okay, they cut me loose, I’m not gonna play with these guys anymore, they’re untrust-worthy,” he said. “I explained to Mulholland that I could no longer debate the situation or options—I needed his approval to lead Zia home. Despite what I am sure was intense pressure on Mulholland not to give me that approval, he relented anyway and supported me, the on-scene commander. It was a tough call, but the right call.” At about 2:30 p.m. Schwartz told Rosengard that Task Force Hammer was returning to the safe house. The depleted convoy drove north, and by nightfall all surviving members of TF Hammer were back in Gardez. There, Zia Lodin and Hoskheyar denigrated the Americans for letting them down.

HAMMER’S
retreat resulted in mutual recriminations between some Mountain staff officers, who had always doubted the Afghans would show up for the fight and now felt vindicated, and those in TF Dagger who had guaranteed that the AMF fighters wouldn’t let the Americans down, but felt that by not arranging for close air support TF Mountain had not kept up their side of the bargain. The Special Forces officers were particularly infuriated when, in the days following Hammer’s withdrawal from the battlefield, Mountain officers made disparaging comments about the Afghans. “They wanted to turn around and bad-mouth the jundees and 594 and 372, because they fell back,” Fletcher said in exasperation. “Why’d they fall back? Because they were out in the open, coming up to the Whale in that big open area, and they were just getting pounded by mortars. They had nothing to fight against the indirect fires that they were taking, because they couldn’t get any CAS [close air support] in there to take it out. And they had no artillery. So they were left exposed. They would have been able to push into that little gap there no problem, if they had the CAS.” But to Bentley, who said he didn’t recall ever not providing a close air support asset to Hammer, the cause and effect were reversed. It was Zia’s failure to reach the Shahikot that resulted in close air support being devoted to Task Force Rakkasan, not the other way around. “There was no intent or malicious effort to empty the sky for Task Force Hammer at all…I was never under the impression that our lack of bombardment of the Whale was a contributing factor to Zia not fulfilling his piece of the plan,” Bentley said. “Once Zia’s movement ceased and we knew it wasn’t going to happen, we were going to go into the Shahikot valley, with or without Zia.”

“The bottom line is the attack failed,” Rosengard said. “The attack was turned back by the enemy, and the commanders on our side, rather than having caused that to happen by a decision, accepted that as the imminent reality, and then went back to reorganize, to live to fight another day.”

14.

NIGHT finally cast its protective cloak over the beleaguered soldiers in the Halfpipe. The enemy fire died down as the guerrillas lost sight of the troops in the darkness. Then the most effective weapons system the United States was to employ against Al Qaida forces in the Shahikot arrived overhead—the AC-130 Spectre. The grunts in the Halfpipe quickly figured out the best way to use the gunship. They would identify enemy positions using their night-vision goggles and fire at them, causing the enemy to fire back, inadvertently confirming their position. Then the Americans would point their rifles’ laser sights (invisible to the naked eye) at the enemy locations as the Spectre arrived overhead to pummel the enemy with 105mm howitzer fire, each round sending a shower of sparks into the night sky. “A lot of the enemy would go into the caves, but the AC-130 was pretty damn effective,” Kraft said. “It caught a lot of them with their pants down.” For the first three hours after the sun went down, he said, “We handed their ass.”

Then, during another lull, LaCamera finally got the chance to medevac the worst of his two dozen casualties, some of whom had been lying in pain on the cold ground for fifteen hours. The agents of their salvation were the crew members of an Air Force HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter that flew into the valley with an Apache as its escort. When Kraft heard the birds were inbound, he ordered Staff Sergeant Robert Brault to establish an LZ about 200 meters west of the Halfpipe, marking the LZ with infrared “chem lights” and strobe lights. The medevac helicopter found Brault’s LZ. As it landed, the guerrillas in the ridgelines awoke to the fact that an American helicopter was hovering tantalizingly within range. An RPG flew out of the darkness and exploded in midair behind the Pave Hawk’s tail.
Oh, no, now we have a helicopter down,
thought Ropel, watching from the top of his knoll.
Something else to worry about.
But with relief he realized the helo had survived and was making a 90-degree turn before landing. Once it was on the ground, the 1-87 troops detailed to help the casualties rushed the most seriously wounded aboard. They weren’t the only ones making a dash for the helicopter. A lieutenant who had not been wounded, but was clearly shaken by the day’s combat, was seen to throw his weapon away and run toward the bird as it sat on the ground with its rotors turning. As he tried to jump aboard, Brault grabbed him by his webbing and threw him away from the helicopter. “This bird is for wounded!” he shouted at the terrified lieutenant. (“Some people just weren’t meant for combat,” Brault said later.) The fighters in the mountains weren’t done. A DShK gunner fired two ten-round bursts at the helicopter as it sat still and vulnerable on the valley floor. Healy’s heart sank.
They’re gonna hit the medevac bird with our guys on it,
he thought. But again, the enemy’s aim had been off. The 240 gunners in the Halfpipe returned fire furiously, while Ropel’s men pointed their lasers at the spot where they thought the DShK was. Moments after the Pave Hawk had pulled away with the casualties on board, the AC-130 opened fire and the DShK position disappeared to cheers of “Yeah, motherfuckers!” from the troops in the Halfpipe.

Knowing they were due to be pulled out of the valley in a couple of hours, the 1-87 leaders focused their efforts for the rest of the night on two goals: killing as many of the enemy as possible with close air support, and retrieving as much gear as possible from their abandoned rucksacks. Kraft sent fire teams from 1
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Platoon to retrace their steps to their LZ, searching for dropped gear, while 2
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Platoon fire teams did the same to their LZ. By now enemy fire was minimal. The AC-130 had done its job well, and for the first time all day the soldiers were able to search for abandoned rucksacks without having to dodge bullets. Priority was placed on retrieving complete rucksacks (many had been torn apart by Al Qaida fire) and sensitive items like night-vision goggles. LaCamera was keen to avoid taking risks in order to salvage items of dubious importance. He didn’t want to have to write a letter that said, “Dear Mrs. Jones, your son was lost because he was going to get a set of binos.”

Word came that the helicopters were inbound. 1
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Platoon remained in the Halfpipe, rifles aimed at the eastern ridge, providing cover while the rest of the force moved to a new LZ Brault had set up about fifty meters from where the medevac bird had landed. (Chinooks, being larger aircraft, need a bigger LZ.) Peterson and his mortar troops recovered their tube and the rest of their gear and moved to the LZ with 2
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Platoon. Despite the pain he was in from the dozen pieces of shrapnel lodged in his legs and buttocks, Grippe had stayed on the battlefield rather than be medically evacuated. Now he carried his own ruck as he limped away from the Halfpipe. 1
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Platoon then withdrew from the Halfpipe, followed by Kraft and Hall. The arrival of the two Chinooks led to one last adrenaline rush as the troops piled aboard and then sat for what seemed an eternity waiting for takeoff, bracing for an RPG or mortar round to hit them on the brink of their escape. But none came. Exhausted from a day of battle, cowering in fear of the AC-130, or dead, the enemy had shot his bolt. The Chinooks lifted off. After they had been airborne for a couple of minutes, the soldiers breathed a little easier. The battle of Hell’s Halfpipe was over and they had all lived to fight another day.