One Hundred Victories (17 page)

The members of ODA 3316 were buoyed by the success they were having with Nur and his men, compared to the frustrations they had experienced in Kandahar on their previous tour. They were out living the team life away from the headquarters and senior officers. But making the program work as intended required looking after a lot of minutiae. When the Ministry of the Interior team arrived to process the newly minted police, the officials suddenly demanded to see their contracts, not just their government ID cards. Then they said the contracts needed to be in a new format. Seve, the normally genial senior medic, and Ricky, the weapons sergeant, were beside themselves that after weeks of effort to prepare for this milestone that would turn on the Afghan pay spigot, the ministry suddenly presented them with a new requirement. Nur Mohammed, dressed in a sharply pressed white
shalwar kameez
, patiently worked out a solution with the ministry team. The contracts were transferred to the new forms, and eventually all his men filed through the tent at the edge of the base to have their retinas scanned and their fingerprints taken.

Nur was philosophical about the glitches. They were minor annoyances compared to the benefit he believed Kunar would realize from the program. He had had no difficulty raising recruits for the force. One old man had answered the door of his home with an old Enfield rifle in his hand. “I’ll gladly give you my sons,” he had said. Nur personally knew all of the recruits, since he had lived in the valley his entire life. His men all knew who belonged and who didn’t, which was not the case with most of the Afghans in the national police and army stationed in Kunar. “Many of the Afghan army and police are not from here, so we have a much better idea of who is causing trouble,” Nur said.
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The trouble, he added, emanated from the east. “They come down the valley from Pakistan,” he said. When asked if he considered the people on the other side of the border the enemy, he said, “No, no. They are us.” Asked to explain, he said, “They are Mohmand too. It is the Pakistani government that is the enemy.”

FIGHTING UPHILL

The success of the team in Kunar was tempered by reality: the conventional forces kept tasking the Afghan commandos to help with their own priorities farther north. This left the team and the nascent Afghan Local Police without a remedy to the threat closer to their doorstep: the ever-present shadow of the border, and the numerous ratlines leading right to them. Special operators had cheered when General Petraeus had declared their Village Stability Operations and Afghan Local Police program a top priority for the overall campaign. He issued a FRAGO (fragmentary order) directing the conventional battlespace owners to prioritize requests for transportation, gunships, and surveillance assets to support VSO/ALP. But despite that order, in practice the conventional units’ combat operations always seemed to trump the special operators’ requests, especially in the east. The gravitational pull of combat for the military was inexorable. After the remote outposts in northern Kunar and Nuristan were closed, the conventional commanders began to run frequent “disruption operations” to keep insurgents from consolidating their hold in these areas—or chase a few Al Qaeda–affiliated targets that might slip into Nuristan for a while.

The special operations battalion commander for the east, Bob Wilson, was a genial and easygoing man, but this exasperated him no end. Continual disruption operations meant there were likely no assets available to support the special operators’ priorities. It also meant the Afghan commandos and the special operations team assigned to them were in constant demand. The conventional commanders wanted the commandos on all the operations, since they were the best-trained Afghan force. The time commitment amounted to about six weeks in all, when training time, mission planning, and recovery were factored in. In addition, the commandos often took casualties, since they were the sharp end of the spear.

Every four to six weeks, Wilson was asked to send his team and commandos to Nuristan, with a population of only 120,000. His assessment of the seven operations for which he was requested to supply commandos and his team was scathing. “These operations achieved nothing permanent. They did not extend the government’s reach,” he said. This focus on enemy-centric operations in lightly populated areas was contrary to the campaign plan. Wilson reminded his conventional counterparts that Village Stability Operations were supposed to be a priority, but they viewed their priority as disruption operations.
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Wilson also argued that the overreliance on the Afghan commandos was keeping US conventional forces from bringing their Afghan army partners to a higher level of battle-readiness. The conventional forces were not prepared to partner and mentor as intensively with their own Afghan partners as special operators routinely did. Usually American conventional forces sent 3 or more of their own troops on an operation for every 1 Afghan partner soldier. By contrast, the special operations teams—12 to 16 men—would go into battle alongside a 120-man Afghan commando force. In the case of Afghan Local Police, one team oversaw an average of 300 police. As the special operators routinely partnered in ratios of 1:12 or higher, the conventional command set a goal of moving from 3:1 to 1:1 partnering ratios. This was not a formula for moving Afghans quickly to the forefront.
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Wilson did his best to represent the special operations’ perspective from his tiny headquarters in the middle of the sprawling Bagram base of 40,000 souls. But he was a lieutenant colonel pushing against a two-star command led by a division and a general who had never been to Afghanistan. Wilson’s subordinate company commander, Major Eddie Jimenez, based at Jalalabad Airport, lived an even unhappier life. Jimenez shared the Jalalabad base with the conventional brigade commander responsible for N2K, a colonel who apparently disdained the junior officer. Jimenez and his company sergeant major, Pat Rotsaert, were for their part astounded by the weak concepts of operation drawn up by the brigade staff. In those operations, troops—often their commandos—were dropped on low ground and forced to fight uphill to enemy positions. Jimenez cemented the animosity when he went over the colonel’s head to object to a planned mission in a hornet’s nest called Watapur. Jimenez objected because his men would be on the firing line. They had already come to the rescue of soldiers dropped into a hot landing zone in Nuristan and pinned in a six-hour firefight. The general agreed, to the fury of the colonel.
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OPERATION SAYAQA

Just before winter set in, Jimenez’s company was granted permission to run a commando operation to support the local police and stability operations in lower Kunar. They were going after the insurgent camp in Maya village at last. The conventional forces agreed to supply the needed air support and surveillance assets in early October 2011. Matt and his team were ecstatic. The intelligence reporting was ample and consistent: insurgents used this village on the Pakistani border as a major way station to stage attacks in two districts and beyond.
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The commandos and the special operations team partnered with it, ODA 3313, submitted their “concept of operations,” or CONOP, which described the purpose of the mission, the detailed plans for conducting it, and the types of support that would be required. The team received the green light to launch. The major issue was where the helicopters would land. This was tricky because the Afghan and Pakistani governments did not agree on the exact location of the border, which had never been formally demarcated. To make sure they were landing on the Afghan side of the border, the team studied two sets of images. Then the soldiers hit the shooting range, which was about fifty yards from their dining room and gym at Camp Dyer, on their patch of the Jalalabad base, for some last-minute nighttime target practice, as they always did before missions. They drove to the flight line and boarded the two Chinooks that would ferry them in. As they approached the landing site, insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades, and the pilots decided to abort rather than risk losing the birds. The commandos and the team returned to Camp Dyer. They would let the area cool off for a bit, and make another try after the insurgents’ attention had turned elsewhere.

In late November, the mission was reapproved. The commandos and their special operations team brushed off their plan, updated it, and rehearsed it. It was officially called Operation Sayaqa.
Sayaqa
was Dari for “lightning,” which was the motto of the 1st Afghan Commando battalion, or
kandak
. This was the original Afghan commando battalion and therefore the most experienced one. It was based in Kabul, but the company that was on active rotation lived at a forward base in the barracks beside the team at Camp Dyer.
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Once again, the team and the aviators surveyed the possible landing sites. The pilots pushed for a site close to the village, but the team selected a site that was a bit flatter and with fewer obstacles to navigate in the nighttime insertion. Given the steep terrain, it was still going to be a two-wheeled landing. The Chinooks would touch down on their back wheels, keeping their noses in the air, and open their rear hatches for the commandos and teams to offload, before taking off again.

On the day of the mission, November 25, the weather threatened to scrub the launch, but it lifted by nightfall. At 8:30 p.m. they loaded into the ramshackle base trucks. Eddie Jimenez and his sergeant major, Rotsaert, accompanied the team and the commandos to the airstrip to see them off, as they always did. After the birds lifted off, Jimenez returned to the operations center at Camp Dyer to monitor the mission. He would spend the night in the bare-bones center, watching the video feed and listening to the satellite radio communications. Jimenez’s bedroom was across the hall, in a room that doubled as his office and private conference room. Their boss, Bob Wilson, would also be watching from his base at Bagram, along with those on watch duty at the CJSOTF down the street at Camp Vance.

It was cold, about 30 degrees, and there was very little moonlight, as the moon had not yet risen. The half-hour flight due north of Jalalabad to the staging base at FOB Joyce, just south of Asadabad, passed without incident. The two Chinooks made several trips to ferry all the commandos and the team first to the base and then on to their destination, Helicopter Landing Zone (HLZ) Khoda, deep in the mountains. Hovering like a giant mechanical insect, rotors chopping the thin air, the first Chinook tilted back and delicately touched its tail wheels down. The Americans and Afghans released their harness belts and jumped out of the rear hatch as it yawned open. The team’s chief warrant officer, Mike, was the first to unload with his portion of the team. They fanned out to secure the landing zone for the rest.

Mike was the ground commander for the operation. There were fifteen Americans in all: ten members of his special forces team plus a Special Operations Team–Alpha (SOT-A) signals intelligence specialist, an Air Force combat controller, two navy Explosive Ordinance Disposal experts, plus an army combat cameraman. Two or three Americans were distributed among each of the four thirty-man Afghan commando platoons, as was the team’s usual practice. Those in the second group disembarked, hoisted their packs and weapons, and set off at a quick clip so that the troops would not be all bunched up on the landing zone. They went forward about 150 meters and began conducting searches of the woods and manmade structures to clear the area.

Mike’s plan was for the entire force to stay together and move around the bowl from west to east and then enter Maya. They had landed about a kilometer and a half from the border, southwest of Maya. They were at roughly the same altitude as the village, but the undulating terrain meant that they would need to go down and climb again to reach it. The mountains right behind Maya, on the border, rose straight up about 2,000 meters in sheer cliffs.

Mike sent the first group down into a hollow to clear a cluster of buildings, and then moved off the landing zone to make way for the two final drops. They all started moving around the bowl. As he reached the ridgeline, Mike heard machine-gun fire. The troops clearing the small village below were being shot at. Mike peeked up over the knoll, and the fire suddenly shifted to his location. He called the battalion on the radio and told the assistant operations officer, “Hey, we are sitting here near the Pakistani border taking fire. There’s fire coming from the Pakistani border. You need to make sure the border coordinations were done.” The major agreed to contact the conventional two-star command, Regional Command–East, which was the entity responsible for making sure the Pakistanis were informed of impending operations.

The accuracy of the machine-gun fire led Mike to believe that the shooters were wearing night vision goggles. The team, per procedure, was wearing infrared strobe lights that helped their own aircraft avoid hitting them. He instructed the team members to turn them off.

A few moments later a barrage of 60 mm mortars landed about twenty-five meters from Mike, who immediately called the battalion back to let them know the team was now receiving mortar fire. He requested permission to fire on the targets that were shooting at them.

The Chinooks had already lifted off, but the men on the ground were not alone. Their overhead support consisted of a lumbering but heavily armed AC-130, two AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships, and two F-15E fighters on station higher up, in addition to an MC-12 King Air plane loaded with additional intelligence and surveillance sensors. Mike did not have a direct line of sight to the origin of the fires, but the AC-130 crew told him they saw the fire coming from the mountaintop behind Maya. It was too dark and too far for the men on the ground to see the location with their NODs, but the air crew described the structure on the mountain that was firing in their direction. A fort, which had not existed a month before, was surrounded by men with guns who were visible through the plane’s thermal and infrared sights.