Not a Good Day to Die (54 page)

An examination of maps and overhead imagery in Gardez revealed what looked like a suitable LZ on a spur about 1,300 meters east of Takur Ghar’s peak. The operators in Gardez called it “LZ 1” (ignoring the fact that the Rakkasans had already named another patch of the Shahikot “LZ 1”). There had been no enemy activity reported at the spot. Mako 30 was to be ready on the rough airstrip by the safe house at 10:30 p.m., with insertion planned for 11:30 p.m. The SEALs knew it was important to give themselves plenty of time to scale the mountain and set up their observation post before first light. They thought the climb would take about four hours.

Glenn P. gave the SEALs a detailed briefing on what to expect in the Shahikot. For Mako 30 he could refer to extensive, detailed overhead photographs of Takur Ghar, which he had ordered when it looked like Juliet would end up on top of the mountain. His briefing should have been a red flag to the Navy men. The intel NCO told Mako 30 and Vic Hyder that there was a high likelihood that the enemy already occupied the top of Takur Ghar. He based this conclusion on several factors: human intelligence reports had indicated the enemy was there; an overhead photo appeared to show a man-made trench or fighting position on the peak with what appeared to be a DShK; and the enemy had already demonstrated a determination to occupy the other high ground around the valley, such as the DShK position Goody’s team had discovered on the Finger and the numerous mortar and DShK positions on the Whale. There was no reason to suppose the enemy’s approach to Takur Ghar—the valley’s most desirable terrain—would be any different.

In and of itself, this information should not necessarily have dissuaded Mako 30 from launching on their mission. By landing at the base of Takur Ghar at night and climbing up the mountain, Slab’s team could ensure that any contact they made with the enemy would be in the form of a “meeting engagement”—an unexpected meeting between two opposing forces—and not an ambush. In a meeting engagement, the SEALs’ night-vision goggles, superior marksmanship and the air power they could call upon would likely enable them to break contact and get away.

But already the SEALs were thinking of avoiding the tiring slog up the mountain that a landing at LZ 1 would entail. During the afternoon Slab proposed a couple of alternatives to Blaber, one of which was to land halfway up the mountain. Blaber tried to steer Slab back to the original logic of landing at the offset LZ, and believed he had dissuaded the SEAL from doing anything other than that. Then at 10 p.m. Hyder approached Blaber in the busy AFO TOC and asked the Army officer what he thought of having Mako 30 land on top of Takur Ghar instead of at LZ 1. Any Ranger or Special Forces soldier would have been able to tell Hyder that he was proposing a huge tactical blunder. It is a reconnaissance axiom that a recce team should never infiltrate by helicopter directly onto its observation post, because doing so essentially signals the team’s location to the enemy. But this apparently had not occurred to Hyder. Blaber told him he didn’t think the 160
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pilots flying the mission would go for it. But Hyder said that he lived next to the pilots at Bagram, and he thought he’d be able to persuade them. Shortly thereafter, both SEAL teams moved to the airstrip.

IN
Bagram, Hagenbeck greeted TF 11’s decision to put a recce team on top of Takur Ghar enthusiastically. Because TF 11 worked directly for Central Command, Hagenbeck had no authority to task any of its operators, including AFO, to do anything, and he was not part of the discussions that led to Trebon ordering Blaber to transition command and control of the recce missions in the valley to TF Blue. But the Mountain commander had made his desire for more information about the southeast corner of the valley clear to Jimmy and Blaber, the two TF 11 operators with whom he worked most closely. The Halfpipe battle had revealed the area south of Takur Ghar to contain perhaps the heaviest concentration of Al Qaida forces in the Shahikot, while the deep gorge—now dubbed “Ginger Pass”—that ran along Takur Ghar’s southern edge was likely a major supply route. That evening Jimmy passed the plan to get Mako 30 into position on top of Takur Ghar to Hagenbeck. “Hey sir, we think we can put guys right there,” the bearded special operator told the general. “Jimmy, if you can do that, you’re the man,” Hagenbeck replied. Outside, two 160
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—or Task Force Brown, as the 160th was known in TF 11—MH-47E helicopters, call signs Razor 03 and Razor 04, lifted off at 10:20 p.m. bound for Gardez where a dozen men waited by a dirt airstrip, shivering in the night air that retained an Afghan winter bite.

3.

THE two Chinooks touched down in Gardez at 11:23 p.m., picked up the SEALs and flew off again. But six minutes later, as they approached the Shahikot, word came that the infil for each team would now be delayed fifteen minutes in order to allow an AC-130U gunship to get into position. The 160
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pilots wanted the gunship crew to use their high-tech optical systems to search the landing zones and, in the case of Razor 03 and Mako 30, the top of Takur Ghar for signs of enemy activity. This was not unusual. To an alarming degree, special operators had become psychologically dependent on the presence of aircraft like the AC-130 “clearing” their landing zones and objectives. “The special ops community has gotten so that we can’t go in now unless a UAV is looking at it or an AC-130 is looking at it,” an operator in Afghanistan said. The Task Force Brown pilots considered the AC-130U, call sign Nail 21, essential to the mission. At 11:41 p.m., with the Chinooks finally inbound to their respective LZs, Nail 21 reported that it could not get “eyes on” Mako 30’s LZ because of an ongoing B-52 strike. The senior Chinook pilot, a chief warrant officer 4 called Al, Slab, and the Mako 21 leader decided to return to Gardez. The air strike would not have stopped the Chinooks from flying to their LZs. Only the AC-130 was affected, because of its wide turning radius. However, so firm was the pilots’ conviction that AC-130 coverage was a sine qua non, that despite Mako 21 and Mako 30 being only six and nine minutes out respectively from LZs at which no enemy activity had been spotted, they aborted the mission.

Their plan was to sit on the ground at Gardez for a few minutes and then fly back to the valley as soon as the B-52 strike was over. By then Nail 21 would have left the area and they would have to work with a new AC-130U, Nail 22. Once they had landed at Gardez, however, Razor 03, which was due to fly Slab’s team to the foot of Takur Ghar, developed an engine problem. Al, the flight lead (the pilot in charge of getting both helicopters to their destinations), called Bagram to request a replacement helicopter. The 160
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always flew in pairs in Afghanistan, so the TF Brown TOC’s solution was to dispatch a pair of MH-47Es from Bagram to replace the two on the ground at Gardez. The two helicopters duly arrived. Razor 04 was low on fuel by this point, so the air mission commander (a 160th captain) and the pilots from Razor 03 and Razor 04 got into the new aircraft (the Razor call signs transferred with the pilots), with the incoming pilots taking their places in the helicopters that had been sitting on the ground in Gardez. (The new pilots included a maintenance pilot for Al’s original aircraft. After checking it out he flew it back to Bagram alongside the original Razor 04.) The crew chiefs in the back all remained on the helicopters on which they’d flown to Gardez. But the repeated delays were eating into the precious hours of darkness. As Razor 03 and Razor 04 were about to launch, the pilots were told they would have to wait a little longer while a 101
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helicopter mission went into the valley. This final delay slammed Mako 30’s window of opportunity shut. The pilots told Slab the earliest they could land him at LZ 1 was 2:30 a.m., too late to allow the team to climb to the mountaintop in darkness.

Mako 30 and its chain of command faced a choice. They had two good options: They could abort, and delay the mission until the next night; or they could fly to LZ 1, go to ground in a hide site until it got dark the next evening, and then move up to the mountaintop. Slab’s recommendation was to “bump” the mission twenty-four hours. But the lack of clear guidance about who was in charge of the recce missions being launched from Gardez now began to reap disastrous results. In theory Blaber was still in charge, because no firm time had been set for turning the mission over to Hyder and Task Force Blue. But from the moment they arrived at Gardez that morning, Hyder and the two SEAL teams had behaved as if the transition of authority had already occurred. This critical moment in Operation Anaconda was to be no exception. Just 1,000 meters away at the safe house, helping coordinate the preparations for Operation Payback (not scheduled to launch until 2:20 a.m.), was Pete Blaber, a man whose entire career had prepared him to make the sort of decision Hyder now faced, a decision upon which would hang the fates not just of Hyder’s men, but of others as well. Blaber had spent weeks immersing himself in the tactical situation that confronted recce teams in the Shahikot. He was also still—officially—the officer commanding the reconnaissance effort in the valley. But Hyder chose to ignore him and instead seek guidance from the Blue TOC, which was almost 100 miles away and staffed with Navy personnel who had never been anywhere near the Shahikot. He used Razor 03 to relay his message on the TF Blue satellite frequency, which he knew Blaber would not be monitoring. “The earliest infil time possible is now 2215Z to 2230Z [2:45 a.m. local to 3 a.m. local],” the Blue TOC was told. “Mako 30 requests to bump twenty-four hours. What would you like to tell the team?” The message back to Razor 03, Hyder and Slab from the Blue TOC was clear and unequivocal: “We really need you to get in there tonight.” (Task Force Blue officers tried to pin this decision on an enlisted man who had been manning the radio at the time, but the call sign used, according to the TF 11 Joint Operations Center log, was that of the TF Blue operations officer.)

With explicit orders from Kernan’s headquarters (where Trebon had established temporary residency) to continue with the mission, Hyder revisited the idea of flying to the top of the mountain. Again he chose not to consult with Blaber. Instead he spoke with Razor 03’s pilot-in-command, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Al, and the air mission commander, about whether it was technically possible to land the team directly on their observation post. Al calculated the effect of flying a couple of thousand of feet higher than the original LZ. “I can get you there, but I don’t know that there’s a suitable LZ at your OP,” the pilot told the Navy officer. “It should be no problem,” Hyder replied. “I’ve seen imagery.” The pilots, Hyder and Slab, then decided among themselves to change the LZ at which Mako 30 would be dropped off from LZ 1 to the top of Takur Ghar. They relayed their change of LZ back to Bagram, but not down the road to the AFO TOC, where it would certainly have been countermanded. “The problem was no one was talking to AFO,” said a special operator. “They were making all these calls back to the Blue TOC and Trebon. They weren’t telling the guys they were fighting for.”

Of course, not only would the SEALs’ decision force them to break a cardinal rule of reconnaissance by infiltrating directly onto their observation post, it also would require them to fly straight onto a mountaintop that Glenn P. had told them not a few hours previously was likely occupied by the enemy. Slab would imply to the official U.S. Special Operations Command investigator that Glenn P. never included this in his briefing to Mako 30. “There were no significant indicators that the mountain was occupied,” he told Colonel Andrew Milani. “…[I]t is incredulous that anyone would believe that we would have gone up to the mountain had our intelligence analysis indicated the presence of enemy personnel.” Other sources flatly contradicted Slab’s version of events. (However, in one respect at least, Slab was speaking accurately. After being informed of the SEALs’ decision to head straight to the mountaintop, Nail 22, the AC-130 working for the Blue teams, flew over Mako 21’s and Mako 30’s LZs. Its fire control officer and navigator scanned both landing zones with their sensors and pronounced each LZ secure. That apparently satisfied Slab that the risks his team was being ordered to take were minimal.)

But the realization that the enemy, with weeks to prepare, had likely occupied the Shahikot’s most dominant piece of terrain wasn’t confined to Gardez. Earlier that day Jimmy and one or two other TF 11 personnel visited the TF Mountain military intelligence staff and asked where good landing zones might be found for the night’s missions. In response an intelligence officer pointed to the top of Takur Ghar. “Anywhere but here,” the officer said. Then, less than an hour before the two Chinooks lifted off from Gardez for the second time en route to the Shahikot, a report came into the Mountain TOC from the intel staff that enemy fighters were on the top of Takur Ghar. “They’d seen ’em,” said a Mountain TOC source who saw the report. “They’d gotten some sort of IMINT [imagery intelligence], probably from the Predator, that there were bad guys running around that hilltop.” When a battle captain passed the report to Jimmy, whose job it was to keep the AFO TOC apprised of this sort of intel, Jimmy’s response was along the lines of
we’ve got it under control,
according to a source in the TOC. Of course, what Jimmy didn’t know, because Hyder and Slab had stopped communicating on the AFO satellite net that Jimmy monitored from his desk in Bagram, was that the SEALs had decided to fly straight to the mountaintop. Neither the TF Blue TOC in Bagram nor the TF 11 operations center in Masirah bothered to call Blaber and Jimmy on the AFO satellite net to keep them abreast of the decisions. Yet again in Anaconda, senior leaders’ failure to establish a tight, unified chain of command was adding unnecessary friction to that which is inevitable in any combat operation.

AT
2:20 a.m. on March 4 the Task Force Hammer convoy pulled out of Gardez and drove down the Zermat road headed for the Guppy. The convoy included about a dozen vehicles the CIA had acquired that were more suited to the mission than the jinga trucks had been: old Soviet gun jeeps and newer (but not brand-new) Toyota pickups and Mitsubishi trucks. Blaber was in AFO’s command and control pickup, equipped with an x-wing satellite antenna that allowed him to talk to any U.S. military headquarters, anywhere. Hyder was now the only officer left in Gardez. When India and Mako 31 returned aboard the three trucks driven by John B., Al Y., and Hans, one of the operators was surprised to find Hyder in charge. “I got the feeling Hyder was now running the show on the ground,” he said. “Of course, he was out of his league.”