It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.
Chapter Eight
Sniper: American Single-Shot Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan
By Gina Cavallaro with Matt Larsen
The Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan are far from the site of the attacks that left New York’s World Trade Center in smoldering ruins on 9/11. However, the epic shock of the attacks was very much on the minds of an elite group of soldiers deployed in the rugged mountains six months later. They had unique skills, unique weapons. They were trained snipers, and they would begin writing a stirring new chapter in American warfare. Excerpted from the book of the same title, published by Lyons Press, 2010.
—Lamar Underwood
In the frigid mountains of Afghanistan six months after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Sgt. Stan Crowder took a knee on the jagged top of an icy escarpment. Fierce gunfire had greeted his platoon upon landing, and he was already in the crude sights of an enemy fighter as the helicopter that took them there flew away in a riot of wind.
The soldiers had rehearsed. They were told to expect little resistance and were supposed to arrive before dawn, but it was later than planned and the light of a bright winter sun robbed them of the advantage of darkness.
Even before their Chinooks descended to the landing zone, the helicopters’ door gunners were ripping through the belts of their M60 machine guns in full engagement with fighters on the ground who were shooting rockets and firing machine guns at the birds. An alternate LZ only two hundred meters away was hot, too, leaving the soldiers little choice but to brave the fire on either one and take covering positions as soon as their boots hit the ground.
Crowder and his partner, Staff Sgt. Jason Carracino, were snipers assigned to their battalion’s scout platoon and had just hitched a ride with a rifle platoon with a plan to branch off after insertion. It was March 2002 at the start of a major U.S.-led offensive, and everyone had a role to play.
“A 240B machine gun crew got off just before us. Jason and I went off the back ramp with a ten-foot hover. We looked at each other and we’re both like, ‘Man! here we go!,’” Crowder said through an uproarious laugh, retelling the story years later from the comfort of a kitchen table back home and with obvious nostalgia for the hubris of the early days of the war.
He and Carracino each carried more than one hundred pounds of gear for what they calculated would be about a two-day stay-over, watching the rifle platoon and the back side of a mountain pass where Taliban fighters might escape as the offensive put the squeeze on their camp.
Just moments after they got to the ground, while the rifle platoon infantrymen lay prone, regaining their bearings and trying not to get killed, Crowder, from his kneeling position, took two shots at a man wielding an AK-47 assault rifle. The wounded man was jolted but kept firing. Crowder adjusted his aim, took a calculated breath, and finished him off on the third shot, his first kill on the battlefield.
For the next thirty-six hours, the sniper team would stay to help the platoon, getting an introduction to the fighting prowess of the armed men who lived and fought in Afghanistan’s majestic and forbidding Hindu Kush.
On 9/11 Crowder didn’t even know where the World Trade Center was.
As a kid in the rural town of Pound, deep in southwestern Virginia’s mountainous coal country, Crowder led an uncomplicated life, revolving around family, guns, and hunting, not so terribly different from the lives of so many Afghans—except for such American amenities as running water, electricity, and schooling.
The denizens of New York, where terrorists had rained mayhem on the city, likely knew as much about the people of Pound and Afghanistan as the people of Pound and Afghanistan knew about them. But on that day, Crowder and every American in uniform learned exactly where the World Trade Center was and what the attack meant. For him, the excitement of going to war began to sink in.
He was an infantryman assigned to Second Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment of the Rakkasan Brigade in the cradle of one of the Army’s most storied divisions, the 101st Airborne Division, known as the Screaming Eagles, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The mobilization for the Screaming Eagles, the Marine Corps, and the rest of the military began almost immediately.
Armed National Guard soldiers were posted at American airports, and F-16 fighter jets flew sorties over the nation’s capital. Aircraft carriers were steaming toward the Middle East, and people everywhere waved newly purchased American flags. Support for a war in Afghanistan was strong and widespread.
As it dawned on Crowder that his unit would be one of the first to step foot on the ground overseas, he weighed the implications of going to war, and though his stepfather, a Vietnam veteran who had raised him from the age of four, suggested he think hard about his options, he also answered the question in Crowder’s mind about doing his part.
“It’s your conflict, man,” his stepfather told him. “I had mine, everybody has theirs. It’s your turn.”
“I kinda felt that way in the back of my mind, but once I heard him say it, I was like, ‘Well, all right.’ It kind of fell into place. I guess that was just the way it was supposed to be.”
Trained at SOTIC
During his three years in the Army, Crowder had been a fortunate soldier, too, one of only a very few from the conventional side of the Army who had the opportunity to be trained by Special Forces soldiers in the art of sniping.
The course is for Green Berets and other soldiers in the Special Operations community, but back when Crowder was at Fort Campbell, instructors at the Special Operations Target Interdiction Course, or SOTIC, rounded out its class by offering slots to units located near the school. In July 2001, Crowder, who had already been selected to be in his battalion’s scout platoon where the snipers get assigned, received one of those slots. Though he expected to eventually be trained at the Army Sniper School at Fort Benning, Georgia, it wasn’t a given.
“Back then,” he said, “they would send forty guys [to Benning], and five would graduate. It was a heartbreaker and costly. SOTIC was attractive because it was right there at Fort Campbell.”
Crowder eventually did go to the school at Benning in 2004, and he later became an instructor there after a tour to Iraq in 2006. But what he learned at SOTIC, he said, was what he took to war with him.
When his unit got orders to deploy to Afghanistan the week before Thanksgiving in 2001, the excitement level among his brothers in arms exploded. “I think I felt like I won the Heisman Trophy! I called everybody. I told them, ‘I can’t tell you what’s going on, all I can say is keep watching the news,’” he said. “My dad said he knew what it meant. ‘I got it,’ he told me. ‘Just don’t do nothin’ dumb.’”
Arriving in Kandahar and the Crash
The Kandahar air base in southern Afghanistan on January 18, 2002, the day Crowder arrived, was an austere smattering of living quarters—tents, mostly—and brutally cold.
Incredibly, to him, within a few short days of arriving at the compound, he and his partner at the time, Spc. Justin Solano, were given the job to work sniper missions for three months with a Special Forces team at a safe house in Khost.
Along with the enviable mission came the obligatory swagger of superiority. “Some guys who had been on the team longer, one guy in particu
lar, were peeved,” Crowder said. Not one to let a good taunting go by, he smugly informed the peeved soldier that “tenure doesn’t matter if you can shoot better.”
But the elation of getting his first combat mission so quickly would be violently interrupted by one of those things that happen when you’re just trying to get somewhere: The CH-47 Chinook helicopter taking the soldiers to Khost to their mission with the Army’s elite Green Berets crashed on landing, leaving Crowder practically blind in his right eye and teetering on the edge of getting sent home for good.
The disaster happened in the moments before they were to make a running landing, a method of inserting troops quickly in which the helicopter pilot points the aircraft’s nose skyward and angles the rear of the bird downward with the back ramp open during a skilled hover so everybody can run off onto the landing strip.
Crowder was sitting on the port side of the helicopter with his knees smashed against the fuel blivet, a giant rubber-like bubble cell filled with sloshing jet fuel that allows the pilots to refuel in flight and make fewer stops. The bird was packed with troops lining the benches on the sides of the aircraft, and everyone’s stuff was piled loosely into the middle. About forty-five minutes out, he said, the door crew did a test-fire, and then the troops got their one-minute warning.
“It was like we’d done a million times in training at Fort Campbell. We were told they would do a running landing, which we had even practiced at Kandahar a few days before,” Crowder said.
But the air crews stumbled on the landing order. Crowder speculated that it was because they had failed to perform a preflight commo check and were unable to talk on the radios with one another when the first helicopter landed in the wrong place. “When the chalk went to land, bird one landed in bird two’s spot, and bird two landed in bird three’s spot. I was on bird three,” he said, suggesting that the crew flying the third Chinook suddenly had to execute an unplanned landing. “Even if they had an alternate plan, they had no way of communicating it to each other. Bird three, which had almost no visibility because of the sand and dust being blown around by the other two birds, landed on its nose while everyone was standing up.”
Crowder was knocked out cold on the impact, and everybody’s untethered gear tumbled down on top of him. The helicopter rolled as the rotors turned and the fuel blivet burst open.
When he came to, he remembered seeing the dim illumination from a half-moon, and he instinctively checked for his weapons. He still had his M4 slung across his chest, and his pistol was snug in its holster, giving him some assurance that he could fight back if the enemy was swarming the helicopter. He remembered lowering his NODs just before impact and saw stars in the sky through the back of the angled helo.
But no enemy fighters were approaching the bird just yet. A rescue was under way and people were injured, but no one was killed. Crowder was soaked with fuel, and the right side of his face was numb.
A young soldier on his first ride in a Chinook who was sitting to Crowder’s left during the flight had the sense to escape through the door gunner’s hatch, but Crowder couldn’t move. He was pinned under the weight of the jumbled equipment, his helmet was gone, he was disoriented, and as he started to push through the weight on top of him, he saw lights darting around in front of his left eye, the only one that was working.
The eerie flickers were coming from the handheld flashlight of a Green Beret who pulled him out of the helicopter by the shoulder straps of his chest rig and patched him up before his evacuation to a U.S. field hospital in Uzbekistan.
Had the unidentified Special Forces soldier not taken care of him as expertly as he did, doctors told Crowder in Uzbekistan, he would have lost his right eye. Crowder never learned the name of the guy, but the guy remembered him when they met several months later. Crowder ate some humble pie when the guy reminded him how belligerent he’d been during the rescue.
In Uzbekistan, under the shock of bright hospital lights, his eye was irrigated and bandaged before Crowder was flown to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
The excitement of war had ended as quickly as it began, and his anxiety mounted as he realized he was getting farther and farther away from the unit and the mission with the Special Forces soldiers in Khost that he had been so pumped up to do.
In Landstuhl he was recuperating with about six other soldiers who had been wounded in the helicopter crash—some more critically than others—and while he was trying to figure out a way to avoid going back to Kentucky, he found a surprising ally in the Air Force surgeon who had tended to his eye wound.
The doc, a former pararescue jumper, not only said that he understood Crowder’s desire to get back to the fight in Afghanistan, but he also tipped him off to a bar run by an Irish lady at the end of the road from the hospital and suggested he might check it out. “He knew that infantry guys wanted to stay with their units, could kind of speak the language and understood a lot of what I was talking about, the stuff at the crash site,” Crowder said.
The doc and his young patient met daily for medical follow-up and sometimes ate together. Then one day Crowder got just the kind of tip he was looking for—with a little wink of the eye, the doc told him that two C-17s were headed to Afghanistan, leaving the door open for Crowder to make his own decision.
Crowder didn’t even have a uniform to speak of. His had been cut off his body during the medical evacuation, and he had no gear, either. Plus, he was expected in the rear at Fort Campbell where the other wounded soldiers were going. Wearing his hospital-issued DCUs, Crowder showed up at one of the birds and asked the Third Special Forces Group soldiers loading up if he could hitch a ride with them to Kandahar. “They gave me some clothes, but I showed up in Kandahar with no weapon or gear,” he said.
His gear—a drag bag, a chest rig, and a pair of mini-binos—had in fact been split up between the two guys, peeved soldier included, who took the mission in Khost after the crash.
Operation Anaconda
What Crowder didn’t know was that the mission to work in Khost with the Special Forces soldiers would pale in comparison to what he and some two thousand other U.S. and coalition air and ground troops would take part in just a few weeks later.
Operation Anaconda was launched on March 1, 2002, in the Shah-i-Kot valley in southeastern Afghanistan south of Gardez, and it remains one of the largest U.S.-led offensives to occur in Iraq or Afghanistan since operations began in each country.
The massive operation took place over a seventy-square-mile area in extremely frigid temperatures that dropped to as low as fifteen degrees Fahrenheit at night in fighting positions that had to be established in mountains with altitudes higher than ten thousand feet. Well-trained Taliban fighters numbered in the hundreds, a considerably higher number than U.S. planners were aware of, and their tenacity as warriors was compounded by their intimate knowledge and mastery of the terrain.
“We were told to expect like a pocket of one hundred or so hard-core fighters, and everybody else would be local to the area. It was the other way around,” Crowder said. “There were big-wig hard-core fighters, hundreds of them. They were pretty smart about it; they were just waiting for us to come in.”
The mission, he said, “went south really fast.”
“We practiced going in at night, but when we got to the Shah-i-Kot valley for the mission, the sun had been out for about fifteen minutes; so we’re flying in over villages where there were people outside waving at us.”
He’s nervous, too, he said, because the helicopter flight is only his second one in country since the night of the crash. And the guy sitting next to him is the same one who sat next to him during the crash.
But Crowder had a lot more on his mind than helicopter crashes when he took that knee on the icy mountaintop, moving solely on instinct to put down the enemy fighter most willing to close with them on the landing zone.
While members of the pl
atoon engaged sporadic gunfire, firing the first live shots of their lives at human targets, Carracino was behind Crowder pulling his M24 rifle out of his bag and checking it over. Once organized and ready to move, the soldiers would march to a blocking position about five hundred meters up, even though it wasn’t the plan envisioned by the sniper team.
The wind was wickedly erratic, and there were close shots all around. Crowder was looking south toward an area where he’d heard rounds coming out every few seconds. What he saw was more than rocks and boulders staring back at him.
“I saw an Afghani wearing like a pizza hat, those hats that are rolled up. At first I second-guessed myself because it was all boulders and rocks, I didn’t know if it was the guy or not. Jason asked if I had something,” Crowder recalled. “I could see more than half the guy and I thought, ‘That’s kinda dumb,’ but then I thought, ‘He’s probably not alone.’”
With his M4 trained on the pizza-hatted shooter, Crowder took him on. “I put my red dot on him, acquired him as a target. I shot him twice, saw my rounds impact, and it kind of knocked him for a loop for a little bit, but he didn’t actually ever go down. He kind of recomposed himself and continued moving forward. So I took another few seconds, went through my breathing pattern one more time and slowed down and shot again.”
This time he had adjusted his hold from the enemy’s high chest area and beamed his lethal red dot on the man’s nose, squeezing the trigger that scored the kill.
“I saw it hit right on the base where the neck and the chest meet, and he went down. It was probably like 125 or 150 meters,” Crowder said, speculating that the Afghani hadn’t seen him because, as he points out himself, “I’m not a very tall man” and can easily disappear behind a boulder. But he may have seen Carracino, who is almost six feet tall, and the other platoon members behind him.
War Stories Page 19
