18 Hours

by Sandra Lee

  ‘An infantry company practises offensive operations. That’s their craft, closing with and destroying the enemy — that’s what we do,’ Peterson says now.

  Private Jason Ashline’s job in Sergeant Pete’s eight-man mortar platoon was to fire the rounds. The twenty-year-old soldier was on his first posting at the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum in New York and Anaconda was his first combat mission. Another native New Yorker, he’d been a soldier for a mere eighteen months and had a wife and two children, including a six-month-old baby boy, back at Drum. He had every reason to want to come home alive. The baby had been three days old and Ashline was at the local Sears department store collecting the first set of photographs taken of his new son in hospital when al Qaeda attacked America on September 11, 2001. The terrorist strikes had robbed him of the pleasure of being around to enjoy his baby’s first few months of life. That pissed him off.

  To compensate, Ashline packed pictures of his two little tykes and a Bible in his ruck when he deployed.

  ‘It didn’t really feel like we were going into combat at first,’ Ashline says now. ‘I wasn’t nervous or scared. I was really anxious to get there and hit the ground and start doing some stuff. Just really more anxious to get down there and start shooting rounds.

  ‘We expected the enemy there: they [Command] told us during the briefs that there would be enemy forces; that there were suspected enemy in there. But it was a little shock, the amount of enemy forces that were there. We expected it, but I don’t think we expected as much as we got.’

  In fact, the day before Anaconda kicked off, Major General Hagenbeck had received a call from a special operator who said there were about 400 AQ and Taliban in the valley, many in fortified positions. That was nearly twice as many as previously estimated. The SF operators had also discovered al Qaeda positions on the eastern ridgeline right above the LZs.

  Not one single American soldier out there now doubted for a moment that they had been dropped into one of the last strongholds of al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan.

  Signalman Jock Wallace was in the dry rock-strewn creek bed where he had taken cover from the RPG. The mortar platoon were about 300 metres from his position and each move brought them a bit closer, worrying Jock. ‘I’m not a master military tactician, but it didn’t seem smart to me to have your indirect fire support right in amongst your troops,’ he says.

  Within seconds of Jock taking cover, WO2 Clint had charged into the creek bed, quickly joined by Sergeant Major Grippe and his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Paul LaCamera. More troops — including those Jock and Clint had just kicked in the guts to stop the blue-on-blue fire — found their way into the rocky formation sprinkled with snow. The creek bed was a natural fortification equidistant from the valley floor below the eastern ridgelines of Takur Ghar and the Finger and the Whale on the west. It wasn’t a huge area — maybe fifteen metres across and about 45 metres long.

  Some of the young GIs nicknamed the creek Hell’s Halfpipe because it reminded them of skateboard ramps back home. Grippe called it ‘the bowl’, and yet another soldier with him said it resembled a football arena with three sides closed in by slopes that ranged from two to fifteen metres high. The higher wall on one side had a sharp drop into the valley, making it nearly impossible to scale from the outside. The southern end was open and had a gentle slope running down into the valley. It was, Jock says, a fully exposed fire lane.

  ‘The enemy were on the eastern side halfway up the hill — shooting down on us — the bullets going into the earth around us,’ Jock says. ‘Mortars going off. You couldn’t get up off all fours. You couldn’t stand up and not be in the line of fire; you couldn’t comfortably piss or you’d get shot at.’

  Jock took up a position on the southeast end of Hell’s Halfpipe near a small boulder. He dropped his pack and began to get set up. ‘If I’m looking east, it sort of curves down. I’m right down on the end and there’s not too much in front of me,’ he says.

  Clint helped Jock pull soldiers into the bowl before establishing his own position a few metres further north of Jock.

  Clint was an experienced soldier, smart, tough and straight-to-the-point. He’d seen and done enough in the Army to know that things weren’t up to speed right from the word go. He was phlegmatic and raised issues and rationalised them with Jock without making the younger signaller feel nervous. Clint’s equable presence and soldiering skills masked any angst he might have been feeling.

  ‘Clint was definitely not 100 per cent happy with the way things were going,’ Jock says. ‘But Clint’s a soldier and there’s no way he was going to back out.’

  The AQ held the ridgelines with pre-registered mortars and the DShk anti-aircraft machine guns. The crew-served weapon fired 12.7mm rounds. The soldiers did everything they could to dodge the 15cm-long rounds spewing out of the DShK. ‘The calibre is what gets you, and those rounds are big enough that they don’t even have to hit you to hurt you,’ Jock says. ‘They can go past you and hurt you. They can pull things off you just going past you.

  ‘The rounds were landing down in the pipe on the other bank, which left maybe a metre or so in the bottom of the pipe that was clear. You could do what they call a monkey run, when you’re hunched right over and trying to go fast but not expose yourself, just to get anywhere north or south.

  ‘As soon as you went south, that’s when the ground to the east folded down and left everything exposed, and then another slope sort of picked up just to the south of that and you had a little bit more cover.

  ‘But there was a good 20 to 30 metres in the open where you were anyone’s. There was no cover. Just a free field of fire.’

  Grippe and LaCamera established their command post and radio operator at the northern end of Hell’s Halfpipe, while troops from the 10th Mountain took up initial fire positions along the east slope, squeezing off rounds directly on enemy locations or in the direction of the machine gun and small-arms and RPG fire. Grippe was building a 360-degree perimeter for his men.

  Al Qaeda were in well-fortified positions and were camouflaged in the snow and set back in their positions in the rock crevices. The soldiers on the low ground could barely see muzzle flashes, but every so often, they caught a visual of the enemy moving on the ridge.

  ‘They thought they were pretty hoo-ah,’ Grippe says now. ‘And so a lot of them ran out of the hills to meet us on the HLZ [helicopter landing zone] and we immediately just freakin’ killed them because of our superior training and marksmanship. So they ran back up into the hills. They were stupid. They were used to fighting and getting down close and we just killed them, which was to our benefit.

  ‘I wished that however many hundreds were up there all came running down at one time, because we [could have] just killed them all right there on the spot. It would have been more beneficial to us. Would have saved some hours, would have saved some money and munitions. And the all-day fight started.’

  Minutes had passed but so much had already happened in the chaos after landing. Jock and Clint struggled to hear each other over the rain of fire ripping the guts out of the valley. Miraculously it had failed to find any warm bodies. Phhht, phhht, phhht. Bang, bang, bang.

  ‘Shit, Clint, that bloody RPG was close,’ Jock said to his boss.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How come it didn’t go off?’

  ‘Might have been the way it was stored, or how old the ammo was — hard to say.’

  ‘Clint, we would have been fucked if that round went off!’

  ‘No shit, dickhead.’

  Jock figured the RPG had been stored incorrectly, as Clint had said and Hagenbeck later suggested, or didn’t explode because it landed too flat and not on its nose. Or it simply could have been defective and not gone the distance. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t bothered; he was alive.

  ‘I was laughing about it, sort of like, “That’s fucking close, that would have hurt us, mate, it would have knocked us all out, ten of us”,’ Jock says. ‘And he was
sort of, “Yeah you dickhead, you’ve only just realised?”’

  Jock powered up his radio again and hooked up the coaxial cable. Before leaving Bagram he had done a mental calculation of the directions for the antenna, and he was spot on. It was standard operating procedure for Jock, who took enormous pride in his work and left nothing to chance, especially when lives were at risk.

  Less than a minute later he had established comms back to the Australian Regimental HQ at a secret location in Afghanistan, which was passing reports to Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Tink in the TOC.

  ‘One Oscar, this is Niner Charlie,’ Jock said over his push-to-talk radio, adding the locstat (location status) and exact grid references of his and Clint’s position.

  ‘We’re in a bit of a shit fight here. Over.’

  Back at the HQ, an experienced SAS officer who was walking past the comms desk asked the young radio operator what Jock meant by ‘shit fight’.

  ‘By the sound of the gunfire in the background, I’d say they’re in a fuckin’ shit fight, sir,’ the chook said drily.

  The penny dropped for the Rupert. Men were in harm’s way and he, although safe, was a witness via the radio.

  ‘Ask them for a sitrep,’ he ordered.

  ‘This is One Oscar, send sitrep. Over.’

  ‘Niner Charlie, roger. Wait out.’

  Out in the field, Jock turned to Clint.

  ‘Give us a grid ref, mate.’

  Clint gave the map reference and Jock passed the sitrep to the Australian higher command.

  Tink was in the TOC with the US command and a couple of Aussies. ‘HLZ 12 and 13 taking mortar fire. HLZ 12 and 13 taking an RPG hit from behind,’ Tink wrote in his war diary, noting the time.

  It was 0230 zulu, 7am on the battlefield.

  The sun had been up for 38 minutes.

  And Jock and Clint were under fire in Hell’s Halfpipe.

  That’s some welcoming committee, Jock thought ruefully.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘The Apaches got pasted up, got the shit shot out of them.

  Two of them, one after the other. You could hear them getting whacked. They were definitely getting impacted.’

  JOCK WALLACE

  JOCK WALLACE HAD DONE his homework. He knew that he and Clint and the boys from the 10th Mountain had landed in a place the Russians had named the ‘bowl of death’ more than a decade before. Now he knew why it had earned that charming appellation. Bullets rained down on them relentlessly, RPGs tore through the air, and mortar shells exploded, sending deadly shards of shrapnel into Hell’s Halfpipe where he’d taken cover.

  So this is where the muj smashed the Russkis, Jock thought, trying to adjust his hearing to the deafening roar of war as he got his chook gear set up. He’d heard about a book called Afghanistan, the Bear Trap, which opened with the chilling line: ‘Death by a thousand cuts — this is the time-honoured tactic of the guerrilla army against a large conventional force.’

  The man who wrote it, Mohammad Yousaf, had commanded part of the mujahideen’s successful fight against the Russians. He knew of what he spoke. ‘Ambushes, assassinations, attacks on supply convoys, bridges, pipelines and airfields, with the avoidance of setpiece battles; these are history’s proven techniques for the guerrilla.’

  Jock wondered if any of the US Army’s chiefs had got hold of a copy of Yousaf’s battle book. Fuck, it’s for sale on Amazon, he thought, they bloody well should have read it. It was a strategic template for the Afghan guerrillas’ ambush and assassination tactics, detailing with great pride in one section how 250 Russian soldiers had been killed in one day in that very place in the Shahi Kot Valley. The Soviets had even lost the eight helicopters used to deliver the troops. Jock and the 10th Mountain had just been ambushed; small mercy that the three Chinooks which infilled them into the valley got out okay.

  ‘The enemy was on a wide front — a very big front that was initially directly opposite where we were,’ Jock says. ‘They were just smart. They’ve been fighting in those hills for thousands of years and the people are well versed in tactics — they knew when you’re going to be in the poo and when to inflict things on the enemy. And they pasted the Russians in the bowl of death.’

  Jock powered up his radio again and contacted the Regimental HQ, giving a situation report to a fellow chook named Dicko. Despite the noise and gunfire, Jock spoke calmly, detailing as much information as possible while keeping an eye on the battle from his place in Hell’s Halfpipe.

  ‘We were probably in the only bit of cover that was worth anything in that entire valley for about 800 metres north or south,’ he says now.

  The 1st and 2nd Platoons from the 1-87 had spread out and were moving to their BPs, Heather and Ginger, in a similar manner to the way the Australian infantry operates — some forward, the bosses in the guts, and more people bringing up the rear.

  Bang. The al Qaeda and Taliban fighters upped the ante, and the soldiers started taking a withering barrage of direct fire and mortar rounds.

  ‘What is that? What is that?’ yelled Staff Sergeant Thomas Oldham, one of the 1-87 Battalion mortar crew.

  ‘It’s AK-47 fire,’ screamed his non-com officer, Sergeant Michael Peterson, who had brought the massive 120mm mortar into battle.

  Jock looked up and saw al Qaeda soldiers dressed in black, shooting down on them from the eastern ridgeline.

  ‘That’s Smufti and Snegat up there, on the eastern ridge,’ Jock said, using a couple of the names the troops applied to the enemy, in the way soldiers have done throughout history.

  Small-section sergeants instantly began manoeuvring their troops and locking on the enemy target. Frank Grippe had told his men that this would be a sergeant’s fight. Now his ‘big four’ of training were paying off. Not only had Grippe’s peacetime Army focused on peak physical fitness and combat life-saving training for all troops so they could supplement the medics, they had been indoctrinated with battle drill training and shooting skills, paying particular attention to night shooting with lasers. Watching his soldiers pick off the enemy, Grippe knew he’d pulled the right rein.

  ‘We have a saying, “known, likely and suspected enemy positions”. So you put down effective fire and well-aimed shots into those positions,’ Grippe explains. ‘A known target is a knucklehead that you can see or a muzzle flash that you can see. A suspected target is a muzzle flash or some type of movement, or just an area that if I was an enemy, well, that’s where I would have a position.’ And the same with likely — what looks like a rock outcropping or a bunker.

  The Yanks were pouring 7.62mm medium machine-gun fire into the hill, as well as a vicious torrent of rounds from the M240G 5.56mm light machine gun. Jock saw a couple of black-clad figures go down on the ridge and thought, You bloody beauty. More AQ had joined the party. The level of enemy fire was rapidly increasing, as was the noise. RPGs landed outside Hell’s Halfpipe, some of which failed to go off, like the one that chased Jock into the creek bed. Mortars exploded way too close for comfort.

  ‘The enemy started coming out doing some assaults, lining up across the valley and heading down and trying to dislodge us,’ Jock says. ‘A couple of times, twenty or so of them went around, trying to come around the rocky cliff face to our northwest, but they were repulsed and shot off the cliff.’

  Repulsed is the military’s anodyne term for shot dead.

  Sergeant Pete’s eight-man mortar platoon got the 120mm tube set up within minutes and began providing indirect fire support for the 10th Mountain Division, aiming the weapon in the direction of the AQ mortars in the mountains. Booooom.

  ‘I put my guys down, all my soldiers, I put them down as a security perimeter and we just started firing,’ Sergeant Pete says.

  Peterson fired explosive 120mm mortars onto the AQ positions as fast as the battalion fire control officer could get them into the tube, but it wasn’t fast enough. He hadn’t counted on the enemy pre-registering their war machinery. Each 120mm mortar he delivered to al Qaeda was
greeted with a return 82mm mortar, as the enemy walked their own rounds right into Sergeant Pete’s location. This was only the beginning. The mortar section started taking direct fire from enemy sniper and machine-gun positions.

  ‘I can’t believe the bastards are firing at us,’ Sergeant Pete yelled to his soldiers. ‘Let’s see what we can do about that.’

  ‘At first we were firing kind of blind, you know, we saw the mountain and we knew where the fire was coming from but we just couldn’t pinpoint any of the enemy locations. But we were going to fight,’ Peterson says now. ‘So we started firing at the mountain. As soon as that 120 took off it seemed like they focused a lot of their direct fire on us. They definitely turned the Dishka machine gun and their mortars on us.’

  As the fire intensified, Sergeant Pete and his men ran for cover in a wadi and returned small-arms fire at any target they could see. In between dodging bullets and directing his young troops to take cover, Peterson ran back through the fusillade and armed the mortar tube by himself. It is a job normally done by four or five soldiers. Twenty-nine-year-old Captain James Taylor Jr, who would be injured during the day, later commented: ‘When the fire became too intense, Peterson sent his soldiers to a covered location while he remained behind, without regard to his own safety, to man the mortar by himself.’

  No wonder Sergeant Pete’s men worshipped him.

  ‘I guess the big surprise for me was the amount of people we were fighting,’ Peterson says now, adding that they were briefed by their S2 intelligence guy they would be up against 150 to 200 al Qaeda and Taliban fighter remnants in the valley.

  ‘And so I wanted to go in with the 120 [mm mortar] and get as many of those guys as we possibly could, but there was probably twice that number right where we were at when we landed. And it just got bad.

  ‘The 120 is awesome. It’s just not good when you are going against about eight other mortars and an artillery piece and there’s just one of you.’