Not a Good Day to Die (17 page)

ON
February 14 Hagenbeck’s staff assumed control of planning for Operation Anaconda. That was not a signal to give up for the Dagger and Rakkasan planners, whose work was already far advanced, but it was now the Mountain staff’s job to oversee their planning and to add the
oomph
their larger headquarters could provide. The Mountain officers took to their new mission with gusto. A couple of weeks previously, they had been anticipating their return to snow-covered upstate New York. Now they were in charge of what promised to be “the culminating point” of the war. Their headquarters finally was getting a chance to prove its worth. They were determined not to waste the opportunity.

The draft plan for Anaconda had fixed D-Day—the day the attack would commence—for February 25. But first the Mountain staffers faced the challenge of forging a spirit of teamwork and understanding among organizations and units who rarely, if ever, had worked together before. They weren’t helped by the fact that CFLCC waited a week after they got to Bagram to make Hagenbeck’s command of the operation official. This frustrated the Mountain staff, who, in the meantime, could only ask, not order, representatives from other task forces to come to meetings or assume particular missions. At first some of the other units ignored their Mountain counterparts’ requests. Nor did it help that TF Dagger’s men considered themselves the experts on how to make war in Afghanistan, yet now had to take directions from conventional officers who hadn’t spent a week in country. But day by day the cooperation increased as the SEALs and Special Forces soldiers of K-Bar and Dagger mingled with Rakkasan and Mountain light infantrymen, AFO’s Delta operators, and CIA covert operatives. The Australian Special Air Service commandos—perhaps the hardest-looking men in Bagram—added an even more exotic, weatherbeaten aspect to the mix. As soon as the Mountain staffers established their tactical operations center (TOC)—the bustling, high-tech nerve center from which Hagenbeck would run Anaconda—by hooking together about eight modular olive drab tents, liaison officers from the other organizations began drifting in. The TOC soon resembled “the bar scene from
Star Wars,
” said Major Lou Bello, an artilleryman on the Mountain staff. “[There were] guys with ballcaps and beards, and guys with turbans running in and out,” he said. “It was a high-adventure place.”

High adventure or not, invisible walls had to be broken down and cultural barriers breached before an atmosphere of cooperation and mutual trust could prevail. CENTCOM’s insistence on making Dagger’s little Afghan force the main effort and its refusal to countenance the deployment of the rest of the Rakkasans’ combat power meant that from the start the command structure for Anaconda was jury-rigged from top to bottom. For a battle that would involve perhaps 2,000 allied troops—less than a brigade’s worth—in combat, CENTCOM had cobbled together a force that drew elements from eight countries, two U.S. Army divisions, two Special Forces groups, a hodgepodge of aviation units, and a variety of clandestine organizations. Despite the enormous military skill and experience nested in most of these units, the operation’s main effort was to be a few hundred Afghans drawn from different clans and provinces who had barely a month of semiformal military training under their belt. Their Special Forces spine was provided by two A-teams from different SF groups, led (eventually) by Chris Haas, commander of a battalion that included neither of the A-teams. Much of the special reconnaissance mission was the purview of TF K-Bar, a mishmash of units from half a dozen countries under the command of a Navy SEAL whose maritime background had better prepared him for reconnoitering enemy-held beaches than for keeping watch over mountain passes. The air assault/blocking force mission was the responsibility of TF Rakkasan’s three infantry battalions, one of which was from not just a different brigade than the others, but another division entirely, and each of which was missing one of its three rifle companies. Within TF Rakkasan, units had been pulled from companies and battalions and cross-attached to others to such an extent that from the rank of lieutenant colonel down to lieutenant officers were working alongside and under commanders they had never trained with and in some cases barely knew. Even the Rakkasans’ helicopter outfit, Task Force Talon, was a jumble of units from different commands: an Apache company from 3
^rd
Battalion, 101
^st
Aviation Regiment; five Black Hawks from 4
^th
Battalion, 101
^st
Aviation; two Chinook platoons from 7
^th
Battalion, 101
^st
Aviation; and another Chinook platoon from Bravo Company, 159
^th
Aviation Regiment, an XVIII Airborne Corps unit that had spent most of the war in Jacobabad. Perhaps the most tightly bonded, least rearranged unit in Anaconda was Task Force 64, the Australian SAS force whose mission would be to guard the Shahikot’s southern approaches. But, of course, the Australians were all but an unknown quantity to the Americans.

The job of lashing this Rube Goldberg organization into a cohesive fighting force fell to Hagenbeck and his downsized staff (almost a third of which consisted of complete newcomers to the 10
^th
Mountain headquarters). This was asking an awful lot of a staff for whom Anaconda would be virtually the first experience of war in Afghanistan. U.S. Army units were supposed to all follow the same doctrine, and the service’s training and personnel systems were designed to allow the Army to take a soldier of any rank from one unit and drop him into another of the same type with minimal fuss. That, at least, was the theory. But the setup forced upon Hagenbeck and the troops under his command would put that theory to the most extreme of tests, with soldiers’ lives on the line. The Mountain staff came up with a word for the organizing principle behind the force they were being asked to control: “ad-hocracy.”

AS
the new arrivals from K2 took the helm, their first order of business was to gain the confidence of the special operations forces. Given the mutual antipathy that had traditionally characterized the relationship between “the big Army” and the special operations community, this was no small task. “There were a lot of holy cows who had to be taken quietly out the back and sorted out before this could become a success,” said Major Jonathan Lockwood, a British exchange officer posted to the 10
^th
Mountain staff at Fort Drum who now found himself going to war with the U.S. Army. It was a credit to Hagenbeck and the other leaders at Bagram that the slaughter of holy cows was allowed to take place at all, he added. The common doctrinal grounding shared by the 101
^st
and 10
^th
Mountain troops was a huge asset in enabling LaCamera’s 1-87 Infantry to blend with Wiercinski’s Rakkasans in a matter of days, while the exchange of liaison officers and NCOs between conventional and special ops units helped bridge the divide between those two communities. Despite the best efforts of all involved, however, Hagenbeck and his team failed to create a seamless organization out of so many disparate parts. That was too much to ask in such a short space of time. To the extent the different elements were able to work together at all, most of the credit must go to a serendipitous alignment in key leadership positions of individuals who already knew each other.

The most obvious prior connection, and one of the most advantageous, was between Hagenbeck and Wiercinski. As a brigadier general, Hagenbeck had served as the 101
^st
’s assistant division commander for operations—a position with decision-making responsibility—when Wiercinski had been the division’s director of operations, or G-3, in which position he would ensure that the general’s decisions were carried out. Now they were together again. Knowing how his boss thought gave Wiercinski a comfort level he would not otherwise have enjoyed working for a division commander other than his own. “Having had a great relationship with General Hagenbeck when he was the ADC(O) of the 101
^st
and I was the G-3 made it incredibly easier, because he understood air assault tactics and how we do things in the 101
^st
,” the Rakkasan commander said. “So I didn’t have to do a lot of explaining. When I was giving my backbrief, he knew exactly what I was talking about, and I knew he did.”

But it was the Ranger Regiment that provided the largest set of shared experiences that connected the leaders gathering at Bagram. The regiment falls under U.S. Special Operations Command but is really an elite airborne infantry force that links the light infantry and special ops communities. Unlike Delta or Special Forces, into which troops tend to disappear for the rest of their careers, soldiers often rotate between the Ranger Regiment and the Army’s light infantry divisions. So it was that many Mountain and Rakkasan officers and senior NCOs had served together in the Rangers. This was a massive slice of good fortune. The 75
^th
Ranger Regiment is a tight community of warriors whose ethos is summed up in the Ranger Creed. There are 241 words in the Ranger Creed, and every Ranger is required to learn them all by heart. But the Creed’s essence is encapsulated in six of them: “Never shall I fail my comrades.”

If the Ranger Regiment Association had opened a Bagram chapter, Wiercinski, Larsen, LaCamera, Grippe, and Nielsen would all have been members. Of these, only Nielsen had not fought with the Rangers in Panama. Other Ranger alumni included Blaber, Jimmy, and Rosengard, as well as Lieutenant Colonel Chip Preysler, who commanded 2-187 Infantry. Blaber and Grippe had served together in 1997 as the operations officer and B Company first sergeant of 2
^nd
Ranger Battalion. When Grippe left the battalion, he bid farewell to Blaber with the prophetic words, “I’ll see you on a distant battlefield.”

Walking out of one of the many briefings held at Bagram in the prelude to Anaconda, another soldier whispered to Wiercinski, “Holy smokes! Look at everybody’s right shoulder!” In the U.S. Army, soldiers wear their unit patch on their left shoulder. The space on their right shoulder is reserved for the insignia of a unit in which they have served in a combat zone. As Wiercinski glanced around, on right shoulder after right shoulder he saw the small black scroll-shaped patches of the Ranger battalions. It told him these were men who lived the values of the Ranger Creed, men who would not let him down.

For Wiercinski, still smarting from the refusal of generals far above his level to allow his third battalion to join him in Afghanistan, there was some solace to be gained from knowing that its place would be taken by a unit led by LaCamera, who had been the operations officer of the Ranger Regiment’s 1
^st
Battalion when Wiercinski had been the regiment’s deputy commander. “I knew him very well—superb reputation, great soldier,” Wiercinski said. “I know we all train to the same standards, but that would have been a little bit different, had I not known Paul LaCamera and served with Paul LaCamera before, and understood exactly how he trained and the kind of leader that he was.”

Then Hagenbeck made an inspired decision. A division commander is normally supported by a pair of one-star generals who serve as his assistant division commanders, one for operations and the other for support (i.e., logistics). But neither of Hagenbeck’s assistant division commanders was in Afghanistan. One was in Kosovo, where about half the division was stationed. The other had fully expected to deploy to K2 with Hagenbeck. But Forces Command ordered Hagenbeck to leave a general behind at Fort Drum, even though there were few troops left to command there, because the four-star headquarters felt more comfortable with a general available to handle any tasks assigned to the post as part of Operation Noble Eagle, the mission to secure key facilities in the United States after September 11. So Hagenbeck had to deploy to a war zone without either of his right-hand men. Once he got to Bagram, the Mountain commander realized he could use some general officer help, both to organize the various components of his new command into a cohesive whole and then to help him run the battle. There weren’t many generals in Afghanistan to choose from, but the two Hagenbeck had in mind were perfect for the job. One was Gary Harrell. The other was Brigadier General Mike Jones, a six-foot-four Special Forces officer who was in Kabul as the military’s liaison to the CIA. Both brought impeccable credentials as warriors with contacts throughout the special ops and intelligence communities. When asked by Hagenbeck, the two readily agreed to serve as his deputy commanding generals. Hagenbeck then got Franks to approve their assignments in that capacity. Harrell began working with Hagenbeck around February 22. Jones came on board several days later. Now Hagenbeck had two seasoned special ops generals—officers well known to many of the other leaders in Bagram—at his side. These weren’t just experienced special ops officers, they were generals willing to use their rank to break bureaucratic logjams at CENTCOM and other higher headquarters. In the days and weeks ahead they would prove invaluable.

Harrell and Jones were also useful intermediaries between Hagenbeck and the two elements of U.S. force in Afghanistan over which he exercised no control: Task Force 11 and the CIA. That the CIA was beyond the control of the military commander in country was to be expected. But CENTCOM’s decision to retain control of TF 11 in Tampa caused concern in Bagram, even though that too was par for the course in large military operations. Because of the covert nature of their specialized missions, the sensitive intelligence on which those missions were often based and the equally highly classified methods used to conduct them, black special ops units were rarely placed under conventional two or three-star commanders. But this didn’t mean such circumstances met with the approval of the generals cut out of the command chain. Hagenbeck and his staff were preparing to fight the largest set-piece battle the U.S. military had waged since the 1991 war with Iraq, and yet American units over whom they exerted no control would be running around on the same battlefield. This was a clear violation of the military principle of unity of command—the idea that a single commander should control all forces involved in an operation. U.S. officials like to say that in circumstances in which unity of command is impossible, “unity of effort” is the goal. But this doctrinal sleight of hand only papers over the cracks left when two generals at the same base each command forces operating over the same patch of ground, yet neither is answerable to the other, or to another commander in the theater of operations. In the Mountain TOC, the situation made officers uneasy. “There’s definitely some concern any time you’ve got two forces working in the same location, and there’s so little known about what one of them is doing,” Wille said.