Not a Good Day to Die (11 page)

When TF Rakkasan deployed to Kandahar in early January, it included Wiercinski’s headquarters, an infantry battalion, a signals package to enable the brigade to maintain communications in that far-flung, desolate part of the world, beefed-up engineer and military intelligence elements, ten Chinooks with their crews and maintenance troops, eight Black Hawks (including three designed for medical evacuations), and some support soldiers. Wiercinski was also given a military police battalion to run the prison camp being built at Kandahar to house Taliban and Al Qaida prisoners. The force package “was an effort to get the right amount of force for the type of missions we had envisioned,” Mikolashek said. “Our philosophy was that this was an unconventional war that we were going to introduce conventional forces into, and they were going to behave more like unconventional forces than conventional ones, because that had been successful up to that point in time…. We saw afairly depleted, defeated enemy, with some pockets that were out there.” This view emanated from the highest levels of the Defense Department. “Rumsfeld’s view was the war was basically over,” Army Secretary White said. “There was this kind of mindset that this was going to be a low-intensity conflict against an enemy that was running away.” (Rumsfeld fired White in April 2003 after they had disagreed over the Crusader howitzer program, which Rumsfeld terminated.)

Senior U.S. officers also excused the decision to strip the Rakkasans of so much combat power on logistics grounds. Both Kandahar and Bagram airfields had been mined during the Afghan civil war, they noted, and the mines had to be cleared to create space for incoming units. Space at Kandahar was at a premium in the early weeks of 2002, before all the mines were cleared. In addition, the more combat soldiers there were in Kandahar, the more support soldiers would be needed to feed them, run their shower and laundry services, and handle their mail. Faced with potholed and cratered runways in Kandahar and Bagram and a strategic air bridge creaking under the weight of supporting even the relatively small deployment to Afghanistan, CENTCOM and Joint Staff officers were keen to keep the numbers as low as possible.

They were doing so under extraordinarily close supervision by Rumsfeld, who took it upon himself to ensure that not a single soldier was deployed to Afghanistan unless the defense secretary considered that soldier’s presence there absolutely necessary. “Rumsfeld came to the table with a view that commanders are sloppy about their use of manpower,” White said. The defense secretary decided to personally vet each request for forces. To officers hanging on his decisions, this meant an agonizing wait every time a request went forward. “I’ve watched lots of deployments in my life, [and] I have never seen the pain of deployments like there was for Afghanistan,” Edwards said. It usually took two weeks, and sometimes three, for Rumsfeld to approve a request. The defense secretary’s “micromanagement” resulted in what White called a process of “nickel-and-diming” each request for troops. Task Force Rakkasan and Frank Wiercinski fell victim to this process.

According to a senior officer in the Pentagon, Franks was not acting under orders from Rumsfeld or anyone else when he set the force cap. But the CENTCOM commander decided to minimize the number of troops in Afghanistan knowing his boss, the defense secretary, was scrutinizing each and every request for forces. The urge to keep the Rakkasan numbers down was shared by “the services,” including, presumably, some in the Army leadership, who were reluctant to pony up more forces for a war that seemed to be winding down, the senior officer said. This reluctance to a the concern in the Pentagon over the size of the Rakkasan headquarters, and CENTCOM’s obsession—based partly on the tone emanating from Rumsfeld’s office—with keeping the numbers down, all were factors in the decision to drastically limit TF Rakkasan’s combat power. “With Rakkasan there’s a little shame probably on both sides,” said the senior officer. “All of the people had fingerprints on this.” But another Pentagon official, who participated in VTCs with Rumsfeld and Franks, said the defense secretary put extreme pressure on Franks to minimize the number of conventional troops in Afghanistan. “The responsibility goes all the way up the chain,” he said.

White was more willing than others to cut Franks a break. “Tommy did the best he could with a very hardheaded guy who walks into the room thinking he’s right before the discussion’s even started,” White said. In the Army secretary’s view, even if Franks had argued strongly for the deployment of a larger conventional force, he would have gotten nowhere with Rumsfeld.

Since the Army’s training revolution of the early 1980s, one of the service’s rules of thumb had been “train as you fight.” Whatever the rationale behind the decision, by forcing Wiercinski to deploy with less than half his brigade combat team, CENTCOM was ripping that page from the rule book and tearing it into tiny little pieces.

OVER
the course of the first three weeks of 2002, Task Force Rakkasan’s soldiers kissed their loved ones goodbye and climbed aboard chartered airliners that flew them to Germany, where they boarded military transports for the flight to Kandahar. Behind they left a country whose wounds were still raw. The chartered flights passed over New York, and at least one pilot, after telling air traffic control that he was flying troops en route to Afghanistan, received permission to divert from his assigned flight path in order to give his passengers a chance to gaze down at the floodlit Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center had stood. It was a somber moment, reinforcing for each of the soldiers why this deployment differed from those to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, or the Sinai. They were being sent to Afghanistan as neither peacekeepers nor nation-builders, but as defenders of their country.

SITUATED
several miles outside the city of Kandahar on the edge of a desert, the airfield that was to be the Rakkasans’ home for the next six weeks was bitterly cold. The troops from Fort Campbell arrived to find that special operators had taken all of the prime real estate—the string of garages and compounds on the grounds of the airfield, which had served as both a military air base and civilian airport—and the Marines had taken most of what was left. But the Marines were on their way out, and the soldiers’ khaki GP (for General Purpose) Medium tents, which could sleep about a dozen troops in reasonable comfort, soon replaced the Marines’ tiny pup tents. The Rakkasans quickly assumed the perimeter security mission. The infantrymen filled hundreds of sandbags as they built bunkers and guard posts along the edge of the airfield to replace the rudimentary “hasty fighting positions” left by the Marines. A couple of Rakkasan platoons escaped the drudgery of Kandahar when they flew north to perform security for the pilot team safe house in Khowst. Others went to Zawar Khili, about twenty miles southwest of Khowst, to conduct sensitive site exploitation missions (combing through the debris left after enemy hideouts were hit from the air). But the vast majority of the Rakkasans remained at Kandahar. They repelled a few minor probing attacks of the airfield by unknown assailants but otherwise settled into a life of dreary routine. The exceptions to this rule were Wiercinski and his staff. Not only were they coordinating the steady buildup of their task force, they were also handling a new mission from Mikolashek, who had designated the Rakkasans as the quick reaction force for Task Forces K-Bar and 64 (the Australian Special Air Service). This meant the staff had to draw up a plan to reinforce or rescue the commandos every time one of the special ops forces launched on a mission, which was several times a night. The pace got so hectic in early February that the Rakkasan staff wrote seventeen plans in seventy-two hours. “The battalion and brigade staffs were literally pulling their hair out,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel Jim Larsen, Wiercinski’s executive officer. “We were dealing with a mission we’d never trained on, with people we’d never trained with, facing an ambiguous threat in a completely unknown environment. It was chaotic. We were all walking around in a state of sleep deprivation for the first month.”

But because the Rakkasans never had to execute any of these missions, they remained transparent to Wiercinski’s increasingly frustrated junior officers and enlisted troops. Every night the infantrymen watched K-Bar’s SEALs and Special Forces operators fly off on secret missions. For the Rakkasans, eager for action after months of hard training and with a proud legacy to uphold, shivering in the sand at Kandahar watching tumbleweeds blow on the other side of the perimeter fence was less than they had bargained for.

AS
the Rakkasans adjusted to their new environment, Cody, Edwards, and others continued their efforts to beef up the task force. Wiercinski asked again for his artillery, as well as more Chinooks and Black Hawks. The generals finally persuaded Franks to allow a single company of Apaches—eight attack helicopters, only a third of a battalion—to join TF Rakkasan in Kandahar. They also got permission to deploy another three Chinooks, although a crash quickly reduced the total number in the task force to twelve. But as far as U.S. troops were concerned, that was it for TF Rakkasan. Cody never received a straight answer about who had prevented his brigade commander from taking more combat power with him into a war zone. But at CFLCC the answer was clear. Tommy Franks “had at the back of his mind, just like Rumsfeld did, that the Army was too big, too slow, too unresponsive, and wanted too many things,” Edwards said. (The reader may question why Franks, an Army general after all, and an artillery officer into the bargain, would take so many decisions that appeared to denigrate the value of the Army and of artillery. In this context, it is worth noting that Army leaders thought that Franks believed he owed his appointment as head of CENTCOM to the Marines, and to Marine General Anthony Zinni, his predecessor at CENTCOM, in particular. If the choice had been up to the Army’s leadership, Jack Keane probably would have become CENTCOM commander. “It did give Franks some disgruntlement with the Army way of doing business,” a general said.)

Wiercinski’s force was also boosted by the arrival in late January and early February of a 900-strong battle group formed around the 3
^rd
Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. The Canadian formation was placed under Wiercinski’s command and included three infantry companies and some reconnaissance elements. Wiercinski planned for the Canadians to take over the security mission at Kandahar, freeing the 101
^st
troops for missions further afield. When he took the call from Bagram, Wiercinski knew Task Force Rakkasan didn’t represent anything close to its usual killing power. Nevertheless, the colonel thought he had enough forces on the ground to conduct “full-spectrum” operations. After a month manning guard posts and conducting uneventful patrols, the Rakkasans were ready for some action. As he put the phone down, his heart started to beat a little faster. He wondered what challenges lay ahead.
Sounds like the pace is picking up,
he thought as excitement coursed through him.
It’s time to go to work.

12.

THE addition of Wiercinski’s force drove Mikolashek to reexamine the forthcoming operation’s command and control structure. What had started out as a plan for a fairly limited mission by Dagger and Zia’s troops under Mulholland’s command had more than doubled in size. Moreover, Mulholland and Wiercinski held the same rank—colonel—and would need someone above them to make decisions in the case of disagreement. Mikolashek realized he needed to install a tactical headquarters in Bagram to integrate the special operators and conventional forces. Mulholland had already come to the same conclusion. In early February he sat in one of Bagram’s decrepit buildings discussing the evolving plans for the Shahikot with Haas and Blaber, who was still based out of the Ariana, but making frequent trips to Gardez, Khowst, and Bagram. All three officers were dressed in civilian clothes and their conversation was similarly informal. The chat turned to who should be placed in charge of the upcoming operation. “You should,” Blaber told Mulholland, who was wearing his signature black-and-white Arab kaffiyeh headdress as a scarf. “How am I going to get the assets?” replied Mulholland, referring to the larger headquarters he believed was required to command and control such a complex operation. “Sir, you don’t need the assets,” Blaber said.

Blaber thought Mulholland, the Dagger boss, should command the operation because he alone of the various colonels and generals in Bagram had followed the operation from its inception, he had the most experience of operations in Afghanistan and his troops along with Zia Lodin were to be the main effort. Some special ops officers were wary of allowing command and control to pass out of their hands. Up to now, Afghanistan had been their battlefield. The introduction of an infantry brigade and a higher headquarters from the conventional Army would distinctly alter the war’s character. To Blaber, the most critical part of the battle would be finding and isolating the enemy in the Shahikot. He knew the team of CIA operatives, Special Forces soldiers, and AFO operators at Gardez could accomplish that. Once battle was joined, tight coordination between allied forces would be vital. Since Mulholland’s Dagger staff had worked with all of them and understood who was doing what and why, Mulholland was the ideal choice to command the operation, Blaber said.

Blaber welcomed an expanded role for conventional forces. But other special ops troops feared the arrival of the “Big Army” would stifle initiative and impose a rigidity from which the campaign had heretofore been refreshingly free. Mulholland understood these concerns. But as he watched the concept of operations for the Shahikot developing, the Dagger commander couldn’t help but conclude that it was growing too big for his headquarters to handle on its own. He had already been sharing intel on the Shahikot with Hagenbeck, the Mountain commander. Now he took the conversations a step further. If Franks wanted to attack the valley, Mulholland told Hagenbeck, then the size of the enemy and the way they appeared to be arrayed argued for a higher-level headquarters on the ground. “Would you be willing for me to ask General Franks for you to command and control this?” Mulholland asked the two-star. Hagenbeck’s answer was as immediate as it was predictable: “Absolutely.”