Not a Good Day to Die (13 page)

Larsen’s enthusiasm actually unnerved some special operators in the meeting. They became concerned when the Rakkasan executive officer stood up and told them: “The key to success here is the air assault. Throughout history the air assault has struck fear into the enemy’s hearts.” Larsen later said he was trying to repeat something he remembered from Trevor Dupuy’s book
Understanding Defeat
: that most defeats in battle resulted when one side became unhinged by the prospect of an enemy maneuvering on its flanks or in its rear. But to the others his words might just as easily have been spoken by the ghost of Major General Lee using Larsen as a medium. Sixty years after he articulated it, Lee’s vision of the 101
^st
falling on its enemies “like a thunderbolt from the skies” still held the division’s officers in its thrall. Larsen made no apologies for being an air assault true believer, but others in the room, particularly the special ops men, were not convinced that the air assault held the “key to success” in the Shahikot. After Larsen’s outburst, “We kind of looked at each other and got worried,” one attendee remembered. “‘Uh-oh. What did we get ourselves into?’”

13.

IN the late morning of February 10, Wiercinski climbed aboard a Black Hawk at Kandahar and made the four-hour flight to Bagram with Major Michael Gibler, his operations officer, and Major Dennis Yates, his fire support officer.

When the helicopter landed at Bagram in midafternoon, Larsen and Lieutenant Colonel Ron Corkran, the 1-187 commander, were waiting. They took Wiercinski into the tent that housed their tiny headquarters. As Wiercinski tore open an MRE’s brown plastic packaging, the officers huddled around Larsen’s laptop. Over the cacophony of radio chatter inside the tent and helicopter engines just a few yards outside on the runway, Larsen ran through a slide briefing that enlightened the brigade commander on why he had been summoned to Bagram (security concerns had prevented Larsen telling his commander over the phone). “It’s an operation in a place called the Shahikot Valley,” Larsen said. “They’re going to use us as blocking forces initially, in an air assault operation, I would assume. I don’t have the full details about where we would be going [in the valley]—obviously that would be something we have to figure out. It’s going to be a combination of Afghan forces, Task Force Dagger, Task Force Rakkasan, and even, potentially, some other elements.” Wiercinski was excited.
Finally we’re going to get to do a real full-up mission here,
he thought. But his enthusiasm was tempered by skepticism that there was a large enemy force in the valley. “So many of the targets that we and K-Bar had been in were cold,” Larsen explained later.

That evening the Rakkasan officers walked over to the AOB to hear Dagger’s ideas on how to tackle the large enemy presence they had apparently detected south of Gardez. Wiercinski sat down on a folding chair and glanced around. There were about thirty-five men in the room, including Mulholland, Rosengard, Haas and sundry other Dagger officers, as well as Bishop and Nocks from CFLCC, Blaber and Rich, the CIA Kabul chief of station. Out of the corner of his eye Wiercinski spied LaCamera, whom he knew from the Ranger Regiment and who had returned from K2. The meeting followed the normal pattern for an operational brief, with each principal Dagger staff officer speaking in turn. The task force’s intelligence officer, Air Force Major Barry Leister, summarized the intelligence that had led Dagger to focus on the valley. Sweeney presented his “ratline” analysis. Then the irrepressibly flamboyant Mark Rosengard, also newly arrived from K2, took center stage. Dressed as he was in full Tajik garb, including a flat wool “pakhul” hat, with his thick black hair and mustache, many in the crowd assumed Rosengard was an Afghan until he opened his mouth and his broad Boston vowels rang out. Using the laser on his pistol to point to maps and overhead photos pinned to easels behind him, the Dagger operations officer laid out his concept of operation in detail. Wiercinski, Gibler, and Yates were hearing for the first time what the others in the room already knew: that intelligence sources had identified as many as 200 to 250 Al Qaida guerrillas in the Shahikot, but the fighters were thought to be living with and among their own women and children, as well as other civilians who were locals with no Al Qaida connection. This drove Rosengard’s concept, in which Zia’s men would identify the enemy fighters among the valley’s civilian population, before either killing them or forcing them toward the passes blocked by the Rakkasans. (Rosengard referred to the notion of bringing a force to bear that would scatter the enemy fighters towards the valley exits as “splashing the puddle.”)

Listening to Rosengard and looking at the maps, which were already overlaid with acetate sheets marked with colored arrows and lines drawn with alcohol pens, Wiercinski realized that Rosengard’s team had already invested considerable time and effort in the planning. After Rosengard finished, Mulholland discussed what he hoped to achieve. By the end of the meeting the Rakkasan officers were eagerly anticipating the operation. “This is what we had been training for for years,” Larsen said.

With the meeting about to end, Chris Haas and Rich pulled Blaber aside and recommended he give a quick briefing on the Shahikot, emphasizing the need for surprise and the downsides of using Chinooks. When Rosengard asked if there was anything else they needed to discuss, Blaber strode forward. He updated the audience on everything his teams had discovered about the people in the area, including the enemy, and said if anyone had any requests for information to let him know and AFO would do its best to answer them. He then discussed the terrain and environment, and warned the others that using helicopters did not obviate the need for smart tactics. “There are only two air approaches into the valley, and we should assume both will be covered by heavy weapons,” he said. “Remember, every enemy on the planet expects the U.S. military to attack using helos, this enemy will be no different. The time it will take you to brake, flare, hover, and land will make you highly vulnerable to his antiaircraft weapons.”

The briefing over, Mulholland and Wiercinski talked over the operation together. The two had never served together before being posted to Fort Campbell, but they and their wives had gotten to know each other at social functions, and Wiercinski knew of Mulholland’s strong reputation in the special ops community. “I felt very, very comfortable with John Mulholland,” Wiercinski said. To the Rakkasan commander, the tone of his conversation with Mulholland was one of mutual trust and support.

The Rakkasan officers strolled back to their tent. Larsen detected a lack of enthusiasm on the part of his boss about the role that LaCamera’s battalion would play in the operation. The Rakkasan commander—often known by his radio call sign “Rak 6”—had only two of his infantry battalions, 1-187 and 2-187, in theater. CENTCOM’s force caps meant 3-187 still languished at Fort Campbell. It seemed increasingly likely that LaCamera’s battalion would fill the gap left by 3-187’s absence. “Rak 6 wasn’t really keen on the idea because we still had 3-187 back at Campbell and he really, really wanted to get them in the fight,” Larsen said. “It was wearing on him emotionally not to have the entire brigade combat team together. Though Paul LaCamera and his command sergeant major, Frank Grippe, were highly respected within the Ranger community of which Colonel Wiercinski and I were longtime members, and we were convinced that 1-87 would perform well in combat, Rak 6 would have felt like a million bucks if he could get the Rakkasans’ third battalion to Afghanistan.”

Wiercinski, Gibler, and Yates returned to Kandahar the next morning. They now knew the mission. Their job over the next several days was to develop a plan for the Rakkasans that they could present to the other commands involved in the operation. Once back at Kandahar, the Rakkasan planning cell conducted a standard Army mission analysis, which required the staff to examine the mission, the enemy, the troops available, the terrain, and the time period in which the mission must be accomplished. Wiercinski told his planners to give the Apaches a forward arming and refueling point close to the Shahikot, to maximize the use of close air support from fixed-wing aircraft, and to ensure that a large reserve force was retained to conduct follow-on operations. “We thought that by striking hard in the Shahikot Valley, other enemy elements around there would start moving, and we wanted to be able to pounce on them quickly,” Larsen said. Wiercinski told them to assign highest priority to ensuring the safest possible helicopter landing zones for the initial insertion of the infantry force. Without good LZs, an air assault mission would be an invitation to disaster.

MEANWHILE,
Bishop and Nocks remained at Bagram as Mikolashek’s representatives as the plan for the Shahikot developed. One evening a couple of days after the big meeting in the Kabul safe house, the two officers were sitting in the Bowie headquarters, talking about whether the operation in the Shahikot deserved a name of its own, and if so, what that name should be. They knew giving the operation its own name might be courting controversy. So far the guidance they had received was that “there was only one name for any and all operations—Operation Enduring Freedom,” which was the name the U.S. government had given to the entire war against Al Qaida and the Taliban since September 11. But the operation in the Shahikot was shaping up to be the largest set-piece battle of the war. It seemed like it deserved a monicker of its own, so they decided to stick a name on the latest version of the plan and see if it stuck through the next round of briefings. The name Nocks had been using was Operation Shwack, a comic-book–style reference to the idea of suddenly bringing an overwhelming force down on the enemy. Amused, Larsen pointed out that if this operation came off, it would be on front pages all over the world, so it would probably need a “sexier” name than “Shwack.” Nocks and Bishop went back to the drawing board.

Other elements were being added to the plan. In addition to the battle of envelopment conceived by Rosengard, in which Zia’s force would attack from the west while the Rakkasans sealed the escape routes in the east, there was talk of using other G-chiefs and A-teams to create a wider perimeter around the Shahikot, in order to capture or kill any enemy fighters who slipped the noose being drawn by the Rakkasans and Zia’s troops. Task Force K-Bar teams would be inserted to watch the passes that led toward Pakistan. The concentric circles of pressure around the enemy in the Shahikot reminded Nocks and Bishop of a snake crushing its prey in its coils. Each would later—politely—claim credit for the suggestion that followed, but what is beyond reasonable doubt is that by the end of the conversation they had decided on a name they thought fit the operation perfectly:
Anaconda.

14.

THINGS were getting crowded—and sometimes a bit tense—at the Gardez safe house. Thomas and his Texas 14 team were scheduled to return home, but with the Shahikot operation just weeks away, they were told to stay put. Meanwhile, their replacements, ODA 372, a team from 3
^rd
Special Forces Group led by Captain Matthew McHale, had arrived. With two A-teams and burgeoning CIA and AFO recon contingents, there was little space left in the house itself, so Thomas put the new team up in a tent in the yard. Initially neither A-team was comfortable with the new arrangement. Special Forces teams prefer—indeed are trained—to operate on their own, not with other teams. “It’s like moving in with your brother,” McHale said.

CONDITIONS
were primitive. “It was wintertime, and it saps you. It snowed and rained almost every day,” said an inhabitant. “The place was mud.” At each of the compound’s four corners was a guard tower that contained a room reached by ladders from the ground. The AFO operators used these as sleeping areas. There were two spacious rooms in the front wall, divided by the gate into the compound. The Dagger and AFO men worked in one of these rooms, the CIA in the other. Spread over a wall of the Dagger/AFO operations center were maps and overhead imagery of the Shahikot, including a 1:100,000 map of the area from the valley all the way back to Gardez and another map of the Shahikot on which all the past signals intelligence “hits” had been marked. The upstairs was divided into bedrooms. There was no plumbing. “We were shitting in one hole,” said a resident. Food and water were air-dropped regularly by MC-130s. The Americans fixed sheets of clear plastic across the window spaces in the mud walls. At night they used candles. They had a generator, but the need to conserve fuel meant it was used only to power the radios. (Candles also had the advantage of not silhouetting the men through the windows.)

DESPITE
the spartan living arrangements, the Dagger soldiers felt they were making good progress in their primary mission: organizing and training the Afghan troops. Texas 14 had laid the groundwork with Zia. The team hadn’t seen any combat with Zia, but they had forged tight bonds with him and his men. The G-chief was physically brave and, an operator said, “smart in a crafty kind of political way.” Zia’s second-in-command was his cousin, a fighter in his thirties named Rasul. Almost six feet tall, of slender build and dressed in a brown leather jacket he never took off, Rasul was a reserved man with an almost effeminate demeanor. But the U.S. soldiers soon realized he was also “super smart” and that they would do well to mark his words.

With Texas 14 having bonded so well with Zia’s troops, it might have been difficult for McHale’s team to make an impression with the Afghans. But an incident shortly before they arrived in Gardez led to a solution. The background to the episode was a power struggle between Pacha Khan Zadran, a local strongman, and the Gardez shura. The two sides fought a battle in which the safe house was caught in the crossfire. After Texas 14 sent some of Zia’s troops to warn each side to stop, the Gardez shura decided to contribute some better troops to work with the Americans. So a new company of Pushtun fighters under a commander named Hoskheyar joined up with Texas 14 a few days prior to McHale’s arrival. The U.S. officers settled on a logical division of labor: Thomas’s team would continue working with Zia and Rasul, while McHale’s team focused on organizing and training Hoskheyar’s force.