Not a Good Day to Die (23 page)

NO
sooner had the Rakkasan, Mountain, and Dagger planners gathered in mid-February to begin putting flesh on the bones of the operational concept for Anaconda than they found themselves deeply divided over a key issue: when and where the Rakkasans should conduct the air assault. Rosengard’s original concept envisaged most of the Rakkasan force landing under cover of darkness in the Upper Shahikot, then walking west to stealthily occupy the blocking positions in the passes. Only the troops who were to occupy the southernmost blocking positions needed to land in the Lower Shahikot, near Marzak, he thought. He and Paul Wille, the lead Mountain planner, thought it imperative to leave open the most heavily used trail that ran out of Serkhankhel through the eastern ridgeline. Rosengard’s vision was of Zia approaching to block the western avenue of escape and a Rakkasan element landing in the gap between the Finger and the eastern ridge, preventing any exit to the south. The enemy fighters in the villages would then, he thought, make a run for it via the trail that appeared open, only to be confronted and trapped by the Rakkasans who had landed in the Upper Shahikot and, unseen, marched west to block the pass out of the valley. Rosengard and Wille thought it might even be possible to land the helicopters far enough away that the guerrillas wouldn’t hear them and the Rakkasans could reach the blocking positions before the Al Qaida fighters realized they had landed. (Wiercinski, the air assault expert, ridiculed this notion: “Everybody’s gonna hear those helicopters coming in.”) In all this, Rosengard and Mulholland were supported by the Mountain planners as well as by Blaber and Spider. All preferred a night air assault into the Upper Shahikot.

From the moment they became involved, however, Wiercinski, Larsen, and the other senior Rakkasans were fiercely resistant to this concept. They wanted the entire air assault to go into the Lower Shahikot in daylight. The Rakkasans put forward several arguments to support their position. By landing an element in the Lower Shahikot and the rest of the air assault force in the Upper Shahikot, Wiercinski would be separating his forces by a mountain range, making mutual support impossible if either or both of the elements came under fire in the battle’s opening minutes. In addition, unlike the Lower Shahikot, where overhead imagery revealed numerous potential landing zones, the Upper Shahikot was entirely snow-covered, making it impossible to determine whether there were any suitable LZs, the Rakkasans said. Dagger and Mountain staffers strongly disagreed, pointing out what they thought were several good LZs. “We determined that the snow was not that deep and we could use them,” Wille said.

But, the Rakkasans argued, even if it were physically possible to land a Chinook in the Upper Shahikot, doing so would dramatically cut into the number of soldiers in the air assault. If the air assault went into the Lower Shahikot, they said, each Chinook could be filled to the max with about forty-two infantrymen. But as the altitude got higher and the air got thinner, the amount each helicopter could lift got lower. Larsen said that the proposed LZs in the Upper Shahikot were at 11,000 feet, which would only allow the Rakkasans to half fill the Chinooks. Given the tiny number of Chinooks CENTCOM had given for the operation—Hagenbeck described the number of Chinooks as “the long pole in the tent” of the Anaconda plan—landing in the Upper Shahikot would therefore impose great constraints on how many Rakkasans could get into position at the start of the battle, according to Wiercinski and Larsen.

Wiercinski also expressed doubts about trying to land helicopters in the Upper Shahikot, particularly at night. The Rakkasans had already experienced a very close call trying to land a Chinook at night in difficult terrain. A Task Force Talon Chinook had suffered a “hard landing” on the night of January 28 while inserting a small infantry force into Khowst to protect the safe house there. No soldiers were killed, but sixteen were injured and the helicopter destroyed. Wiercinski had no desire to repeat the experience. His nightmare was losing a helicopter during the air assault, and he was willing to go to the mat to minimize that risk.

The Rakkasans thought they were putting forward reasoned arguments based on the professional opinions of Lieutenant Colonel Jim Marye, the TF Talon commander, and his senior pilots. “All the helicopter guys were saying, ‘No way in hell can we get back up in there,’” Larsen said. But to everyone else, it appeared as though each time they knocked down one Rakkasan argument, Wiercinski or his staff would raise another. Among the Mountain, Dagger, and AFO field grade officers, there was deep suspicion of the Rakkasans’ motives. Everyone thought the Rakkasans—the Johnny-come-latelies to the planning process—were trying to elbow the others aside with the goal of redrafting the plan so that the Rakkasans, not Zia’s force, would end up assaulting Objective Remington. The Rakkasans were using the safety argument in order to become the main effort, the Dagger and Mountain officers thought. “The real reason is Colonel Wiercinski wanted to get as close as he could to Serkhankhel, to the point that they would start taking fire from taking fire from Serkhankhel and once they were taking fire they could use it as an excuse to take down the objective themselves, rather than letting Task Force Dagger with Zia’s forces take care of Serkhankhel,” said a Mountain officer who closely monitored the planning debate. Wiercinski flatly denied any such thought crossed his mind. “Never,” he said. “We always knew our mission was as the support for this thing…. We weren’t going in to attack or seize anything.”

The conversations between Wiercinski and the Mountain and Dagger officers were “not very” strained, according to the Rakkasan commander. Other participants begged to differ. There was no shouting, but a lot of raw feelings were on display, they said. “There was a lot of emotion about who gets to take down the objective,” said Wille. “[Lieutenant] Colonel Rosengard, Colonel Mulholland, and Colonel Wiercinski were very emotional on the issue.” Rosengard was worried that by landing along the eastern ridge’s western slopes, the Rakkasans would jeopardize his goal of “making the enemy do what he already wanted to do”—flee the valley via the trail deliberately left open. “We wanted him to think that’s open,” Rosengard said. Putting the first air assault in close to or astride that avenue of escape could “fuck up” the plan that sought to convince the enemy to enter the trap, Rosengard told Wiercinski.

Rosengard and several other Dagger personnel were convinced that the Rakkasans failed to grasp the plan’s subtleties and were interested only in executing a magnificent air assault into the valley, killing everyone they could see and claiming victory. “I part company with the Rakkasans on the fact that they lost the vision of what we were trying to accomplish,” Rosengard said. “To them it was an airmobile assault into this valley.” To Rosengard, the Rakkasans seemed obsessed with air assaulting almost on top of the suspected enemy positions on the valley floor. “They were seeking—and I heard these words come out of their mouth—’ the psychological impact of the appearance of helicopters on the battlefield,’” he said. “I respect them for the warriors that they are…but in my exposure to them their instantaneous reaction to this is ‘We just need to do the air assault and get in there and kill ’em all.’”

The A-teams in Gardez who would accompany Zia into the valley were equally concerned. The Special Forces captains and NCOs thought the Rakkasans wanted to land far too close to Serkhankhel. Above all, the SF soldiers feared a friendly-fire incident between the Rakkasans and Zia’s troops. “We had a good clear idea of where the 101
^st
was gonna go, [and] that was a stupid, stupid, stupid thing, because they’re landing right on an objective that I’m treating as a hot objective,” said a Dagger officer in Gardez.

The constant references by Larsen and Wiercinski to “the psychological impact of helicopters on the battlefield” only reinforced the special operators’ view that the Rakkasans were more concerned with their place in history than with fulfilling the supporting role assigned them in the original plan. “The 101
^st
decided that this was a helicopter legacy mission,” said a special ops officer who participated in the meetings. “They allowed that to overwhelm their own common sense.” But Wiercinski said all he wanted was to ensure the plan minimized the risk attached to the few moments when his force was at its most vulnerable—when the Chinooks entered the valley from the south and flew north to deposit their troops near the villages. “You only get one shot at surprise and I wanted to get that first lift down, situated in a position where they could overwatch those three towns almost immediately.” he said. “Our job was to block people coming out of these towns.” Rosengard and Mulholland on one side and Larsen and Wiercinski on the other were talking past each other. Their TOCs were only fifty meters apart, but in their understanding of each other’s approach to warfare they were separated by a yawning cultural chasm.

For instance, Wiercinski’s assertion that assaulting Objective Remington was the farthest thing from his mind is borne out by the series of internal Rakkasan briefings, rehearsals, and rock drills in the days leading up to Anaconda, in which no one mentioned that course of action. The Rakkasans focused on establishing their blocking positions as quickly as possible. Despite Rosengard’s fears of a Rakkasan “kill ’em all” attitude, in talks with his subordinates Wiercinski stressed the importance of fire discipline and safeguarding civilian lives. But the Dagger, Mountain, and AFO officers did not attend these briefings. They had only their perceptions formed in the planning sessions to go on. On the other hand, Rosengard’s idea of leaving the main trail free of a visible American presence—a key element in his version of the plan—made little sense to Wiercinski. “My thinking was, we’re going in here to set up blocking positions,” the Rakkasan commander said. “That’s why you have us. Why is it you want people to escape?”

MATTERS
came to a head at a February 20 war game. Rosengard made a comment that another field grade officer took as a threat to take Dagger out of the operation. “I know that happened,” the officer said. “I was there.” Rosengard emphatically denied making any such threat. “None of us were about to walk away from our responsibilities—immaterial of the command and control relationships that necessarily existed, and despite the resultant friction points,” he said. But the fact that another officer could—even mistakenly—perceive the Dagger operations officer to be threatening to withdraw his forces shows how fractious the meetings had become. Sergeant First Class Frank Antenori, a Third SF Group NCO whose A-team was assigned to TF K-Bar, recalled sitting in Dagger’s AOB building one evening when Mulholland returned from a planning meeting enraged that his advice wasn’t being taken. “He said no general in the history of the United States, if you have the advantage of taking the high ground, would start off on the low ground, and try to take the hill, but these guys were doing it,” Antenori said. “He was fuming mad.”

It appeared to special ops folk at Bagram that Mulholland was being sidelined. It made no sense to them. The gruff, beefy colonel had extensive special operations experience. In addition to his time in Special Forces units, he had commanded a squadron in the unit now known as Gray Fox and served as a Delta staff officer. And of course, he commanded the task force whose troops had been a major reason for the United States’ victory in Afghanistan, which made the trouble he had getting his point across to the Rakkasans all the more puzzling to others. “This was a guy who basically took this country with twelve A-Teams…and they wouldn’t listen to him,” Antenori said.

(Not all Mountain officers at Bagram remembered the acrimonious discussions that made an impression on their colleagues. “I thought the relationships and the personalities that came together for that operation came together remarkably well,” said Bentley, the senior fire support officer in Bagram. “There was never a time when I was there that there was any animosity or misgivings as to who was doing what. I was never present in any kind of sessions where there were issues and advice not being taken.” Lieutenant Colonel Mike Lundy, the deputy operations director in Hagenbeck’s headquarters, agreed. “There was very good cooperation,” he said. “It was as close to one team as you could get.”)

WITH
Wiercinski and Larsen at loggerheads with their Dagger, Mountain, and AFO counterparts, it was left to Hagenbeck to make the final decision on the night of February 22. He sided with Wiercinski. The Rakkasans would airassault into the Lower Shahikot, in daylight. Hagenbeck said he made the call based on the Rakkasans’ assessment that flying in to the Upper Shahikot would be too difficult. “The discussions on the LZs had to do with the combat experience or lack thereof of the pilots, and the risk assessment that was made, and the risk management,” Hagenbeck said. Jimmy from AFO went back to Hagenbeck to counsel against the daytime air assault. “Jim, we just don’t have the experience here yet, that’s why we’ve got to do this,” Hagenbeck said. “Roger that, sir, got it,” replied Jimmy. “We’ll do everything we can to protect that.” (Despite this, in one of their last meetings with Hagenbeck before D-Day, Blaber and Spider made a final, unsuccessful attempt to dissuade him from having TF Rakkasan air-assault into the Lower Shahikot.)

That the Mountain commander made his decision only after carefully considering all sides of the argument helped mollify those whose recommendations were not taken. “He deserves an incredible amount of credit,” Blaber said. “I’ve got a lot of respect for his leadership and management techniques. He follows the number one rule of a solid combat commander—always listen to the guy on the ground. It doesn’t mean you have to do exactly what he says, but always listen to him, and you’ll have a much better chance of making optimal decisions for your men.” Nevertheless, Hagenbeck’s decision did not sit well with everyone. One Mountain officer felt the Rakkasans had cynically played the “safety” card to advance their own interests at the expense of the larger plan, knowing how difficult it is for a commander to order a subordinate to do something that the subordinate says is “unsafe.” In the modern Army, the officer said, “as soon as we mention ‘safety,’ then it’s all over with.”