Kill Bin Laden: a Delta Force Commander's account of the hunt for the world's most wanted man (31 page)

Either the terrain was read incorrectly or there was a typo in the coordinates that were sent; the bomb hit right where it was supposed to, but was off by almost a thousand meters. Whatever the cause, it was an egregious error.

It underlined the absolute need for putting the Delta boys up in those mountains to set up observation posts that could provide the needed high-tech target guidance, not just an “over there” estimate based on fingerpointing.

Bin Laden once said that it was the duty of all Muslims to kill not just American military personnel but any American who pays taxes. If the few dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles launched in 1988 at Zawir Khili, near Khost, in retaliation for the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa didn’t impress him, we would soon be introducing him to tons of bombs, courtesy of those same American taxpayers. Although the hype outshone the performance, I’m certain the sheer power of the Daisy Cutter got bin Laden’s attention that morning.

I never saw the photo op cardboard sign of the CIA again.

Thirty minutes after the BLU-82 drop, ten Toyota pickup trucks rolled up to the schoolhouse carrying the Delta snipers and assaulters. They had managed only an hour or so of sleep in Jalalabad before beginning the final leg of their journey. The three-hour trip was uneventful except for a few stops to pick up additional muhj fighters and grab some chow at roadside stands. They even managed to watch the BLU-82 drop and subsequent JDAMs light up the early morning mountainside.

The boys were all smiles, and it was a relief to see them: Caveman, Stalker, Stormin’, Grumpy, Murph, and Crapshoot, to name but a few. Most were full bearded, with long hair dangling out of the back and the sides of their traditional Afghan wool
pakool
caps. They were embarking on a journey they would remember for the rest of their lives.

I caught a glimpse of General Ali stealing a peek at these guys from his doorway. Even Ali couldn’t resist wanting a glimpse of such an awesome set of American commandos.

While bombs grumbled along the ridgelines and valleys every twenty minutes or so, we gave the boys a quick info dump to orient them to the area. After the highlights, they stowed their gear inside their temporary new home and hid the vehicles inside the compound walls.

Ironhead and Bryan coordinated a reconnaissance of al Qaeda’s positions for Jim, another seasoned Delta troop sergeant major who had just arrived, and they left within the hour. It was critical that these leaders got a good look at what I had seen the day before in order to give a quality check to my information and plans. With just a single vehicle and several muhj piled in the back, they slipped by the press and made it up to Mortar Hill without incident.

A bomber was in the sky, so al Qaeda stayed still and let them take in the view and orient their maps, but when the bomber cleared the airspace twenty minutes later, the mortars cranked up and several rounds impacted fifty meters away. They had seen enough, and with no need to push their luck, the three most experienced commandos on the battlefield returned to the schoolhouse.

I gathered the team leaders to update them on the changes in our concept of operation since we had departed the ISB a few days earlier. We had little patience for sitting around or hoping to get lucky with a golden nugget of intelligence. Instead, with the full support of our CIA friends, we were determined to make our own Delta luck by forcing the issue, by making things happen, and by pressuring General Ali to crank up the pressure on Usama bin Laden. Did the American people expect anything less?

Our first call was to split Kilo Team in half to augment the pair of observation posts already in place. OP25-A, occupied by Green Berets of Cobra 25 for the past two days, was located in the eastern foothills several kilometers short of the front lines and abreast of the Agam Valley. The other Green Berets had just joined the second one, OP25-B, which covered the western portion of the battlefield, near the Wazir Valley.

These two observation posts were either unknown to bin Laden and his fighters, or at least al Qaeda had chosen to do nothing about them. Both had done incredible work before we arrived, but were located four miles from the front lines and could not see over the distant ridgelines
where the muhj were attacking. We were planning to move beyond both of the current OPs and establish new and flexible forward positions to take over those duties.

Although the Green Berets were in those OPs first, we needed to put Delta men in there, too, because our guys were familiar with the current game plan, our techniques and tactics, carried compatible radios, and understood the commander’s intent. To maintain unity of command, we needed tactical control of the positions in order to synchronize the fight. The last thing we wanted or needed was another friendly-fire incident like a recent tragedy in Kandahar on December 5, when a bombing strike was called in to block the Taliban from crossing a bridge. The errant JDAM struck the wrong spot, killed three Green Berets, and wounded a halfdozen other Americans with flying shrapnel and rocks.

As expected, the requirement for us to take control became a source of significant friction with Green Beret commanders at higher headquarters, but as often happens when two elite units find themselves occupying the same piece of the battlefield, the guys on the ground eventually worked things out for the common good.

We tapped Kilo Team snipers Jester and Dugan to enter the battle-field first and prepare for insertion to OP25-A that afternoon, December 9. Once they linked with the 5th Group Green Berets and had a chance to acquaint themselves with the terrain, they were to move farther forward and scout for deeper spots where we could establish future OPs and would cut the angles to let us see past the high ridgelines.

We desperately needed human eyes on the back sides of those ridgelines to conduct what the military calls terminal guidance operations—TGO—a fancy way of saying directing bombs to intended targets, either by a laser designator or by providing GPS coordinates.

The other half of Kilo Team would get ready to move the following morning to augment the other post, OP25-B.

The rest of the reconnaissance troop would be preparing for an intended insertion within twenty-four hours, with the assaulters on standby as both an emergency assault force, should we receive actionable intelligence about bin Laden’s location, and as a quick-reaction force should observation posts 25-A or 25-B get into trouble.

The reconnaissance troop was pumped. Seeing the look in the
assaulters’ eyes, I knew it would be hard to hold these guys back. I prayed for a bin Laden sighting.

After returning from his recon of the front lines, Troop Sergeant Major Jim took one of the CIA guys around the schoolhouse to examine the mountains. He looked up at the highest point he could make out with the naked eye, referred to his map, looked up again, and set his finger on that peak on the map. The map legend confirmed he was looking at Hilltop 3212, which was nestled in the middle of several other slightly lower peaks. Jim raised his compass and made a mental note of the 172-degree magnetic azimuth.

The CIA guy thumbed the edges of his own map and began to explain what they were looking at. He pointed left.

“Half of ODA 572 is over there, up on that piece of high ground. That’s OP25-A,” the CIA man stated.

Jim nodded. “Okay, now point out the other OP.”

“Ummm, over there. That’s OP25-B,” said the CIA guy, pointing to the southwest. “See those three hilltops that are fairly even? Well, that tallest one is Hilltop 3212, the tallest one in the area, and it lies directly on the border with Pakistan.”

Jim paused for a moment, and then turned to look at the CIA operative.
You must be kidding
. He wasn’t. The CIA man had misidentified the highest peak within view from the schoolhouse.

“Give me your map, pal,” Jim calmly told him. “That is definitely not Hilltop 3212, it’s Hilltop 2685. Hilltop 3212 is about two thousand meters farther southeast.” He traced his finger across the map before handing it back.

“Huh? You sure?” the Agency operative said sheepishly, studying his map closely. “Damn, maybe it is.”

Jim raised an eyebrow and walked away. No wonder bombs were sometimes being delivered to the wrong address.

He had a low tolerance for bullshit, and I had received that silent arched eyebrow reprimand many times myself during the more than three
years that Jim and I spent together as troop commander and sergeant major.

He was six feet tall, usually wore a ball cap, and sported a dark thick goatee that he only shaved off once a year, for his required annual Department of the Army photo. I considered him to be one of the best operators in Delta, and a twenty-first-century warrior who was the equal of the seventeenth-century French commander Jean Martinet, whose name has gone down in history as meaning strict and stubborn. Jim could be almost a despotic taskmaster at times, but the difference was that he was respected by every person in the building.

He had grown up in the 3rd Ranger Battalion and moved to the elite 75th Ranger Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment before heeding the call of Delta. Shortly after returning from the invasion of Panama, he found himself in the mountains of the northeastern United States in the Delta tryouts, which were almost a formality since Jim was destined for Delta. The physical portion of the testing was almost ridiculously easy for the thickmuscled but remarkably limber and quick Ranger. He was not as fast as some of the others, but nobody could really outrun him. Jim would stay right next to you until you quit or one of you passed out.

He was a gifted shooter with his own unique style of drawing his .45-caliber pistol that was indiscernible to the naked eye, but if he slowed his draw stroke down a bit and allowed a good view of his technique, you wouldn’t believe it. It was shocking how much faster he could lift the pistol from the holster and place two hardball rounds inside the space of a dime of a target forehead by using his patented unorthodox draw. We slung a boatload of brass downrange together, and I was usually still looking for my front sight post when Jim was already policing up his spent brass.

However efficient I became as an operator was a direct reflection of Jim’s extraordinary training skills, his patience, and his genuine friendship. I consider myself darn lucky.

Around noon, our friend Colonel Al stopped in to our humble corner room for a visit. He brought news that the initial reports received
about the BLU-82 being a dud had been untrue. I guess with all the hard sell, almost everyone had expected an explosion of earthshattering intensity. Even better, Al said that back at the Pentagon and in Langley, Virginia, the home of the CIA, the Daisy Cutter was being hailed as a spectacular success.

All of us who had watched its impact agreed, however, that even if the bomb had not been a mechanical dud, it had been a psychological dud among our allies. The CIA folks out here who had been charged with selling the bomb’s capabilities to General Ali knew the fireworks had been so lame that it had shaken the general’s confidence in American technology. I’m not sure what exactly Ali had hoped to witness, but the BLU-82 obviously was not what he expected.