Not a Good Day to Die (16 page)

16.

THE dark gray shape of the Combat Talon descended steeply, a 100-foot-long piece of the night sky falling suddenly to earth, each of its four turboprop engines churning out the power of 4,910 horses as the plane’s undercarriage landed with a short squeal of rubber on the blacked-out Bagram runway. The aircraft taxied to a halt, and an officer with an unusually long—for an infantryman—shock of brown hair that flopped across his forehead rose to his feet. In the luminescent green cabin “slime lights” it was just possible to make out two khaki stars on the desert camouflage fabric covering his helmet. The plane’s ramp swung down, and the officer took his first deep breath of Afghan air. Finally he was here. The months of frustration in K2 melted away. Looking across the tarmac to the headquarters of the various task forces, he could see a few chinks of light escaping through window frames and tent flaps. Inside tumbledown buildings and GP Medium tents, bleary-eyed staff officers and NCOs on the night shift were typing on laptops, staring at map boards, and punching numbers into calculators, honing plans for Operation Anaconda (Nocks and Bishop’s name for the operation had stuck). And the moment the general’s feet touched the ground, he became the senior officer. Not just in Bagram, but in all of Afghanistan. It was 4 a.m. on February 17, and “Buster” Hagenbeck had got his war.

After finally securing Franks’s approval, Mikolashek had notified Hagenbeck February 11 that the Mountain headquarters would be moving to Bagram to assume command of all U.S. conventional ground forces in Afghanistan, plus Task Forces Dagger and K-Bar. The only American military outfit in Afghanistan to remain outside Hagenbeck’s command was Task Force 11, over which Franks retained direct command and control. Mikolashek directed Hagenbeck to change the name of his headquarters from CFLCC (Forward) to Coalition Task Force Afghanistan, once he had established himself at Bagram. Mikolashek made it clear to Hagenbeck that although his task force’s lifespan was open-ended, its first order of business—and the catalyst for its deployment to Afghanistan—was to oversee the planning and execution of Operation Anaconda. However, he delayed issuing the order that granted Hagenbeck formal command authority over the other elements. (Mikolashek later said this delay was not deliberate.) While the rest of his staff began breaking down the headquarters at K2 in preparation for the move to Bagram, Hagenbeck sent several key members of his staff ahead in order to quickly gain some kind of control over the planning process that was already progressing apace. Among the first to arrive, in the early hours of February 13, were Lieutenant Colonels David Gray and Chris Bentley. Gray, a lean, youthful fair-haired officer, was the division’s director of operations. Bentley, Hagenbeck’s deputy fire support coordinator, was the man responsible for ensuring the command had all the “fires”—artillery and close air support—it needed to support its operations. Following hard on their heels later that day were Wille and Ziemba, the two officers whose brainstorming had first alerted the division’s higher-ups to the potential for an operation in the Shahikot. Over the next several days the rest of Hagenbeck’s headquarters loaded onto C-130 and C-17 aircraft and moved to Bagram. The 10
^th
Mountain Division was going to war again.

THE
10
^th
Mountain Division had existed in its present form only since 1985. Despite the division’s name, its troops no longer laid claim to special expertise in mountain warfare. The division traced its heritage back to World War II, when it
was
a mountain warfare unit that distinguished itself in Italy in 1945. Disbanded that November, the division was reactivated in 1948 as a training organization called 10
^th
Infantry Division. Inactivated again in 1958, the 10
^th
did not reappear on the active rolls until the mid-1980s. The Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 prompted the Army to design a “light infantry” division that could deploy quickly to crisis spots. One of four divisions activated or converted to the new design was the 10
^th
, officially designated 10
^th
Mountain Division (Light Infantry).

The 10
^th
survived the cuts at the end of the Cold War and had the dubious privilege of being the most deployed Army division in the 1990s, serving in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. (The deployments exerted a disproportionate strain on the 10
^th
because, alone among the Army’s remaining ten divisions, it had only two maneuver brigades, instead of the standard three.) In November 2001, when duty again came calling to Fort Drum, the division was already stretched thin by peacekeeping commitments long forgotten by most Americans. The 10
^th
had about half its division headquarters plus a brigade combat team in Kosovo, a battalion task force in Bosnia, another battalion task force in the Sinai, and, of course, 1-87 already in Uzbekistan. But Hagenbeck and most of his principal staff remained available for deployment, and it was to them, rather than a more intact division like the 101
^st
, that the Army turned to establish the CFLCC (Forward) headquarters at K2. This decision guaranteed that if the headquarters dispatched to Uzbekistan ever moved to Afghanistan to command combat operations, it would have few troops of its own in the fight.

WHEN
Mikolashek, the CFLCC commander, decided to put a forward headquarters in K2, he did so fully aware that the headquarters the Army gave him might move to Afghanistan and oversee combat operations. For that reason he insisted the headquarters should be commanded by a general. He did not specifically request a division headquarters, but when the Army’s decision-makers examined the request, they realized that a division command post most closely matched Mikolashek’s requirements.

Once Forces Command decided a division headquarters was needed, the choice of division became a process of elimination. Forces Command oversaw only the Army’s six divisions in the continental United States, not the four overseas. Of these six the three heavy (i.e., mechanized or armored) divisions were not considered suitable for Afghanistan’s terrain, and anyway, the Army wanted to hold them in reserve in case of a war against North Korea or Iraq. That left the three light divisions in XVIII Airborne Corps: 82
^nd
Airborne, 101
^st
Airborne (Air Assault), and 10
^th
Mountain (Light Infantry). The 82
^nd
was disregarded because of its mission to maintain a brigade as a national reserve, ready to deploy on very short notice. That left a straight choice between the 101
^st
and 10
^th
Mountain. The 101
^st
’s combination of helicopter-provided mobility and light infantry strength should have made it the obvious choice for Afghanistan. Unlike 10
^th
Mountain, whose troops were scattered around the world, the 101
^st
was at home (except for the brigade returning from Kosovo and the battalion in Pakistan) and being put through an intensive training regimen by its commander, Major General Dick Cody, a former commander of Delta’s aviation squadron who knew most of the special ops commanders in Afghanistan. The Army could have deployed Cody’s headquarters to K2, knowing that if the headquarters later moved to Afghanistan to command combat operations, there would be three infantry brigades at Fort Campbell just waiting to be called forward to go to war with their division commander. But it was not clear to those making the decisions in the United States that the headquarters they picked to go to K2 would ever command a combat operation in Afghanistan. And they knew that once committed to Afghanistan, the 101
^st
, a unique division, would not be available in case trouble flared elsewhere. “The 101
^st
is on every war plan there is,” said Major General Julian Burns, Forces Command’s deputy chief of staff for operations.

The generals and colonels at CENTCOM and CFLCC were fully aware of the 101
^st
’s unique capabilities. In the weeks after September 11, they had worked on a plan called “Desert Viper” to put the 101
^st
in a country close enough to Afghanistan that it could be used in the war that America was only just beginning to wage there. “We were hoping to get the 101
^st
in theater,” Mikolashek said. His planners considered positioning the division at airfields in either Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan, but ruled both out as “politically unfeasible,” he said. A third option was basing the division in a remote desert airfield in Oman. This appealed because Oman was close enough to allow for flights into Afghanistan without having to negotiate overflight rights with any country other than Pakistan, but also provided easy access to other likely Al Qaida hiding places, like Yemen and the Horn of Africa. “We didn’t know where Al Qaida was,” Mikolashek said. “We thought we might have to go in and do an Afghanistan-like operation in Somalia.”

Another plan, for which the 101
^st
was considered “the force of choice,” according to a senior officer, was for a limited war with Iraq. The response of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership to September 11 had been to agitate for an immediate attack against Iraq, despite the lack of evidence linking Iraq to the terrorist attacks and the fact that a war in Afghanistan would strain the military’s airlift capability all by itself. President George W. Bush rebuffed those initial urgings from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. But in October the Pentagon asked CFLCC to draw up a plan to seize the southern oil fields in Iraq. Mikolashek’s planners put together a plan involving two brigades of 1
^st
Cavalry Division—an armored division at Fort Hood, Texas, that already had a brigade in Kuwait—and at least one brigade of the 101
^st
. Mikolashek said the operation might have been launched as “a fairly early preemptive” attack if the United States received any intelligence indicating that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was considering an attack on Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

Burns was unaware of the plan to seize the oilfields, which was never executed, but others in the decision-making chain at CFLCC, Central Command, Joint Forces Command, the Joint Staff, and the Department of the Army surely were. Every senior officer knew his civilian bosses might order a war in Iraq sooner rather than later. “In the minds at the Defense Department and in the CinC’s [i.e., Franks’s] staff, that was a real possibility,” recalled Warren Edwards, Mikolashek’s deputy commanding general for operations. “There was clearly a thought process that was being worked at the highest levels that said, ‘We may want to do something else, somewhere, and a piece of that will probably be the 101
^st
.’” One senior special operations officer who served in Afghanistan said Central Command was distracted from the war in Afghanistan by the need to plan for a “general war” in Iraq, which was originally scheduled for much earlier than March 2003, when it actually occurred. “It was supposed to go in October [2002],” he said. “That was the plan, that’s what everybody was working for…. That’s what CENTCOM was focused on. They believed that it was done in Afghanistan and that the 10
^th
came in to do this civil goodwill, start to rebuild things.”

At the recommendation of XVIII Airborne Corps commander Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, the Army passed on the 101
^st
and instead selected Hagenbeck’s headquarters—the most undermanned, stretched, and stressed division headquarters in the Army—to deploy to K2 in preparation for a move into Afghanistan. Asked if Forces Command was told that the 101
^st
should be kept on the shelf for Iraq, Burns replied: “That was certainly implied in the message that we got to deploy the 10
^th
Mountain.” Burns and General John Hendrix, head of Forces Command, were frustrated that a division as obviously suited to Afghanistan as the 101
^st
was being left on the shelf. “That was our frustration, but we were told continue to train,” Burns said.

Again it bears pointing out that senior U.S. commanders had completely misread the situation in Afghanistan. They were already patting themselves on the back for a job well done and looking ahead to the next war, despite the fact that the Al Qaida leadership remained at large in Afghanistan and in command of hundreds, probably thousands, of well-trained, highly motivated fighters. The United States faced a stark choice: to deploy conventional forces into eastern Afghanistan and destroy those enemies or to allow them to escape and foment violence against America and her allies for years to come. But neither the opportunity—nor the risk of not seizing it—appeared uppermost in the minds of senior leaders who already had one eye on Baghdad. Shortly after the Mountain headquarters deployed to K2, Burns again asked Joint Forces Command and CFLCC, “What is the mission set for them?” “The answer I got back,” he said, “was that they were going to return in early February because this war was over.”

AS
they would a few weeks later with the Rakkasans, CENTCOM’s restrictions bit deeply into the force 10
^th
Mountain was preparing to deploy. Franks’s planners sent a message that all that was needed was a force smaller than a division tactical command post (a forward headquarters of about sixty-five to seventy people usually commanded by a brigadier general). By the time this message reached Fort Drum, it had been translated into an informal directive to deploy only fifty to sixty troops. The 10
^th
Mountain staff knew such a skeletal headquarters would never be able to maintain round-the-clock operations, and they managed to negotiate a limit of about 160 troops. Roughly a third of these were augmentees from XVIII Airborne Corps and Forces Command, replacing division staffers deployed in the Balkans. The new troops—many of whom were assigned to Mountain’s intelligence section—were good, professional soldiers. But for Hagenbeck, being forced to deploy with almost a third of his headquarters filled with unfamiliar faces was hardly an auspicious start.