18 Hours

by Sandra Lee

  Just one of those things, he thought, always factor in Murphy’s Law.

  The night before, Ando, another real hard man of the SAS who had climbed through the ranks to be in charge of the regiment’s water operations, had been in the Australian radio ops tent throwing questions nineteen to the dozen at Jock, who was going through his checks.

  ‘Is ya gear ready?’

  ‘Yeah, mate.’

  ‘Got the batteries for your NOD yet?’

  ‘Yeah, mate.’

  ‘Need a hand with anything else?’

  ‘All good, Ando, but thanks, mate. Much appreciate it.’

  Jock packed his night-vision goggles in his pack along with roughly 60 kilograms of other equipment, including his Kevlar-lined armour-plated vest to stop ballistics weapons ripping his guts apart. As soon as he’d confirmed he was going into the Shahi Kot Valley he had marched down to see Sergeant Simon, a decent bloke who ran the Aussies’ Quartermaster Store at Bagram. Jock needed to borrow a vest, having previously lent his own to an SAS trooper heading out on patrol.

  Simon gave his own vest to Jock. ‘No worries, mate,’ he said, handing it over and wishing Jock the best on his way into battle.

  ‘Simon — always a pleasure to work with him,’ Jock says. ‘He gave me his personal vest because he understood that I needed it. And I really appreciated it. He’s in the right job, he wants to give, he wants to help you, he knows the true value of teamwork. I spent five minutes with him. There was no piss-farting around. Everyone knows where I’m going.’

  Jock also stuffed in his pack half a packet of cigarettes, ten litres of water, some pre-packed rations with unique and challenging flavours which could be classified as dangerous to the taste buds, plus cold-weather gear and a sleeping bag. He also packed ammo for his personal weapons, an M4 automatic rifle and a 9mm Browning pistol. He didn’t bother to pack any reading material, figuring someone else always did that and there might not be any time for a trip to the library, anyway. His radio and comms gear was all set, too. Jock had even stocked up on new batteries from the Q the day before and was now squared away and ready to deploy.

  ‘How’s ya gear?’ Ando asked, sussing Jock out again.

  ‘Good, mate.’

  ‘Got ya thermals?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  Ando laughed.

  ‘Jock, mate, you look after that silly old bastard, Clint, out there,’ Ando said, an edge of seriousness creeping into his voice.

  ‘Yeah, no worries, Ando.’

  Jock knew that Clint and Ando were close mates, having trodden similar paths through the regiment. Hell, they’d probably even kicked a lot of the same arses on the way up the ranks. It took a special breed to get into the SAS and an even tougher one to survive and thrive. Jock knew Clint could be a hard taskmaster, but Clint was a man Jock wanted standing beside him on the battlefield. He thought Clint was rock solid. Jock knew instinctively that he could trust Clint and rely on him if things went wrong. They’d be looking out for each other out there in the valley.

  Other blokes had come and gone, wishing Jock well, patting him on the back. Not really saying too much and not needing to. Their presence said it all.

  ‘Not everyone realised it was going to be a shit fight — but there was going to be a gun battle at least,’ Jock says now. ‘What size, it wasn’t clear. So everyone was mentally stepping up into a higher gear and making sure that all the guys around them were alright.’

  At 9pm Jock had been on his way to get some shut-eye outside the green canvas tent that was home for the time being. En route, he ran into the recently arrived commander of the Aussie contingent, Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Tink.

  A tall, taut fellow with a balding pate, Tink had arrived in Afghanistan on 31 January and taken command of the Australian contingent from Lieutenant Colonel Peter ‘Gus’ Gilmore, who had orchestrated the close working relationship between the Australian and US Special Operations forces. Gilmore had recently returned to Australia, having completed his two-month rotation. Jock had been Gilmore’s signaller but, with Anaconda about to get under way, the CO’s sig was available for use in the field.

  Tink had been intimately involved in the planning for Anaconda. He had spent the past two weeks engaged in the daily briefings and strategy sessions with the US brass from the 10th Mountain, the US Army’s 5th Special Forces Group and the US Army’s top dog, a three-star general named Paul Mikolashek, who had overall command of the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC — or C-flick, as it was pronounced).

  ‘How’re you going, Jock?’ Tink asked.

  ‘Not bad, sir.’

  ‘You all ready?’

  ‘Yep. Sure am.’

  ‘Hope you’re ready for it. It looks like you’re going to meet a bit more resistance than expected.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  Jock kept walking, thinking about the briefing that the troops from the 1-87 Infantry Regiment had received earlier that day. They’d been told that US Air Force jets would launch a devastating bombing raid in the valley in the 60 minutes preceding H-Hour, obliterating more than a dozen enemy targets that had been identified as established fortified positions. Pilots flying B-1B and B-52 bombers, and two F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets had thirteen targets in their sights along the valley. Teams of AH-64 Apache helicopters would hover overhead, watching the bombs wreak havoc before swooping down to check the strike zone and determine if the incoming Chinooks would be flying into hot or cold LZs. Cold was good. Hot was not; it meant they would be under enemy fire.

  Once infiltrated, the conventional infantry troops should be prepared for a gunfight with any surviving pockets of enemy fighters. The briefing anticipated that the HVTs, the high-value targets, would — if they were there and if they survived the bombing raid — flee through the rat lines leaving small groups of well-armed and well-trained foreign al Qaeda to do the fighting. The message from the briefing was clear: expect the enemy to fight to the death.

  Jock figured it was all the same, regardless of the numbers mentioned at the briefing or Tink’s late-night words, which sounded like a warning. One hundred, two hundred, two-fifty, or even a hundred more, it didn’t matter. There was no going back. Whatever came would come, and Jock Wallace had done everything possible to prepare for it.

  Bring it on, he shrugged.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Everyone of our generation has been called to do something for his country. We are no different. We have been called on to fight the war on terrorism.’

  COLONEL FRANK WIERCINSKI, COMMANDER OF THE 3RD BRIGADE, 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION (AIR ASSAULT)

  THE MISSION ON WHICH Jock and his fellow soldiers were about to embark, and the list of dangers it entailed, could not have been clearer. Seven days earlier, on 23 February, Major General Franklin ‘Buster’ Hagenbeck, the commander of Coalition Joint Task Force Mountain, who was running the show, published the Operations Order (OpOrd) for Anaconda, which was originally planned to take 72 hours.

  Major General Hagenbeck’s OpOrd contained four key goals. The first was to capture or kill key al Qaeda leaders. The second: destroy AQ’s foreign fighters. Third: prevent the escape of enemy AQ. And finally, fourth: defeat Taliban forces that continue to resist the Afghan military and their coalition partners.

  ‘I will use a combination of conventional and special operation forces working in conjunction with Afghan Forces to complete the destruction of identified al Qaeda leadership, organisation and infrastructure and prevent their escape to Pakistan,’ Hagenbeck stated in his OpOrd.

  The battle plan for Operation Anaconda was a classic Hammer and Anvil strategy. Hagenbeck’s plan involved a series of simultaneous ‘non-linear operations in the non-contiguous areas of operations’. The convoluted military jargon aside, the plan included about 400 Afghan soldiers under the command of the fiercely anti-al Qaeda and anti-Taliban Afghan, General Zia Lodin, who hailed from Logar Province. The Americans wanted the main thrust of the fight to be led by the
Afghan Forces (AF), mainly for political reasons: it was their country and the US did not want to be seen as an occupying force. The heroes and liberators of Afghanistan had to be Afghans.

  The AF would work with about 30 advisers from the US 5th Special Forces Group who had trained them in warfare tactics. Alternatively known as the Green Berets, the 5th Group’s area of operation was in central and southwest Asia and fell under the command of Colonel John Mulholland. The Green Berets, whose motto is ‘To Liberate the Oppressed’, had been sent to war in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and had set up a base at the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base, dubbed K2 for obvious reasons, in Uzbekistan. Their skills were unconventional warfare. Their goal was to oust the Taliban and capture or kill al Qaeda. In Afghanistan the US Special Forces were known as Task Force Dagger and included various teams such as Cobra Seven Two and Texas One Four.

  Agents from the Central Intelligence Agency were also to be embedded with the SF and Afghan troops, marking the first time in history that CIA and Special Forces operators worked together in war. A patrol of Aussie SAS troopers would also be attached to the US 5th Special Forces Group and General Zia Lodin’s Afghans as liaison officers. Their job was to coordinate movements between US, Afghan and Australian forces and prevent accidental friendly fire on small SAS patrols on surveillance and reconnaissance missions in the valley.

  The 5th Special Forces men and Zia’s Afghan Force were dubbed the Hammer. They would approach the Shahi Kot Valley from the west via the Zermat road in a heavily armed convoy. It was a treacherous track across rugged terrain in difficult countryside which left troops vulnerable to ambush. The road was muddy and frequently impassable, and at that time of year was still at risk of being snowed in. Live landmines and other ordnance left over from the mujahideen’s war against the Soviets were yet another danger.

  Zia’s men would set out at midnight with their US and Australian Special Forces soldiers charged with the primary role of entering the Shahi Kot, passing potentially ambush-rich positions around a smaller mountain that rose up from the valley floor dubbed the Whale, so called because it looked like the back of a humpback whale. As the Hammer and main thrust, Zia’s forces would move across the face of 1 SAS Squadron in the field and flush out AQ and Taliban enemy in the three villages within Objective Remington. Intelligence estimated the enemy numbers in the villages at between 100 and 250.

  Two other units of Afghan soldiers, together with their own Special Forces operators, would be tasked with controlling the perimeter to the east and southeast. The complete thousand-strong Afghan component comprised many soldiers from Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance (a loose coalition of men under the control of various Afghan warlords who had been, at one time or another, at war with each other), members of the local mujahideen, and even, ironically, some former Taliban. Loyalties frequently shifted in the country, partly the result of pragmatism and partly due to the Afghan tradition in which the conquered would side with the victors without any loss of face. In all, the AF was integral to the success of the mission.

  Four companies of incoming air-mobile infantry troops from the 10th Mountain and the 101st Airborne would land on the eastern side of the Whale in the south and northeast of the valley, setting up blocking points lyrically named Ginger, Heather, Eve, Diane, Cindy, Amy and Betty. They would cover any escape routes — rat lines — over the eastern Takur Ghar into Pakistan. Together, these four components formed the Anvil.

  A second wave of air assault troops would be inserted later on D-Day to reinforce secured positions.

  The Australian SAS soldiers were so respected that they had been assigned the difficult role of establishing a blocking force and observation posts across the southern end of the valley — several kilometres wide — and had been in place for days.

  The plan did not involve the use of heavy artillery or protective armoured vehicles. It was extremely difficult to airlift these to the oxygen-starved heights of the Shahi Kot but the decision not to take artillery would be the subject of debate later. The troops would rely on their own light infantry weapons including rifles, machine guns, mortars and explosives. It wasn’t ideal because it gave the soldiers a smaller ‘kill circle’, meaning that their fire range was not as far as they would have liked. But Hagenbeck’s plan allowed for the lethal firepower of close air support from the US Air Force, Navy and Marine fighter jets which, when called in by the SF or infantry units in the valley, would bomb enemy targets.

  The general’s OpOrd had another thing going for it. Immediately before H-Hour — the time the flights of Chinooks touched down and disgorged their combat troops — fast-moving jets and bombers would swoop in and unleash holy hell on known enemy locations spotted by the covert SF patrols in the Shahi Kot in the preceding weeks. If everything went to plan, the bombing raid would be a crippling 55-minute reign of terror.

  Hagenbeck had spent weeks planning the mission, but the 10th Mountain almost missed the show.

  On 25 January, Hagenbeck had flown to Kuwait for a meeting with the overall CFLCC boss, General Paul T. Mikolashek, who commanded America’s conventional ground forces in 25 countries in the Middle East, Central Asia and Horn of Africa. The massive area was known as US Central Command, or CentCom, and was one of the Pentagon’s five regional commands around the globe. Mikolashek answered directly to General Tommy Franks, a towering Texan with a southern drawl who commanded CentCom out of Florida and had a direct pipeline to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. Hagenbeck wanted to talk to Mikolashek about redeploying the 10th Mountain, which was based at K2 and had been operating as a quick-reaction force for Task Force Dagger (the 5th SF Group). It was a perfect fit for the infantry unit, particularly since its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul LaCamera, his command sergeant major, Frank Grippe, and Grippe’s operations officer in 1-87, Sergeant First Class Robert Healy, had all been Special Forces operators, members of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

  But the battalion-size regiment of 500-odd soldiers from the 10th Mountain had seen little action since the stunningly rapid collapse of the Taliban just 62 days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent installation of Hamid Karzai as president of the interim Afghanistan Government. As the political landscape changed, so too did the requirements of war, and Hagenbeck’s infantry would not be needed for the new phase of security and the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

  A week later, though, the top dog of the 5th Special Forces Group, Colonel Mulholland, called on Hagenbeck with information that would change the course of the 10th Mountain’s redeployment.

  ‘Colonel Mulholland was the commander of Task Force Dagger, a special operations outfit, and he told me that there were what we called compartmentalised intelligence of foreign al Qaeda that were coalescing in Shahi Kot Valley,’ Hagenbeck recalls, explaining that intelligence was coming in from various sources.

  ‘And he was assuming that he was going to be given the mission to go destroy them, defeat them. And he said, “Sir, if this is as many as I think there’s going to be, I don’t have the means or the command and control to do that. And I’m going to talk to General Franks about it. Would you mind if I suggested that you take on and be the commander of the larger fight because we are going to need more than just our assets to do this?” So, absolutely, I jumped at the chance. It really began from that small conversation.’

  A few days later, once the politics and strategic command-and-control elements had been established, Mikolashek, via a video-teleconference from Kuwait, told Hagenbeck: ‘I want you to learn how to spell Bagram.’

  Even though the conference was conducted over secure lines, Mikolashek was using a form of veiled speech. Technology was not limited to the coalition forces. Who knew who might be listening?

  ‘I knew immediately what he was talking about and so I picked up the phone afterwards, on a secure and confidential line, and spoke to him about it,’ Hagenbeck says.

  By
the second week of February, the 10th Mountain had moved from K2 into the boggy air base at Bagram and the planning for Anaconda began in earnest.

  Jock Wallace arrived at Bagram Air Base in mid-February as part of an advance party for the SAS squadron, who would be known as Task Force 64, in preparation for the Aussies’ role in Operation Anaconda. Anaconda would be the first real action Jock had seen since leaving the SAS Regiment’s headquarters at the Campbell Barracks at Swanbourne, not far from Perth, the previous November. For the past four months he’d been putting in time as the regiment commanding officer’s signaller — or CO’s chook — chilling his balls through a glacial winter at forward operating bases in Doha in Kuwait, then Rhino in southern Afghanistan, followed by Kandahar. Finally, he made it to Bagram.

  The Australians had been secured for Anaconda earlier in the month after Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Tink had a series of meetings with the US brass about what the diggers could bring to the table. A lot, as it turned out.

  Jock and his superiors in the advance party were given a table in the 10th Mountain Division’s headquarters which was under the command of Major General Hagenbeck, and were initially hosted by the 5th Special Forces Group, who gave them quad bikes to get around the boggy air base.

  Bagram was a mess. It was the tail end of winter and the ground was covered with snow and huge puddles that resembled muddy lakes. The duckboards that served as pathways were surrounded by bogs as deep as the soldiers’ ankles and there was no way to keep clean, no matter how hard the blokes tried. Jock just gave up. Bird baths would have to do, and anyway, he wasn’t out to impress anyone.

  The 10th Mountain’s HQ tent was attached to the massive hangar located off the side of the runway near a place called the Cross Roads. It was dominated by the air-traffic control tower that was flanked by the Spanish hospital on one corner and the form-up point on the other. The main gate at the front of the base was about a kilometre away. Outside, the muj, as Jock dubbed the friendly locals, had set up a small market selling a range of local arts and crafts, including the traditional Afghan dress and woollen pakhul hats. Captured Soviet military belts, local hashish, and rations and supplies that made their way into the ramshackle stalls from the base supermarket (the PX) or from the Bagram rubbish dump were also given a price.