18 Hours

by Sandra Lee

  Some of the al Qaeda and Taliban threw stones, an impotent act the soldiers found comically medieval, given the more modern firepower they had at hand. A chorus of foreign words punctuated by Allahu Akbar rang out down the valley when one of the US troops missed his target.

  The enemy did the same thing after an air strike roared over. As soon as they heard the incoming fast movers, the enemy ducked into their caves and waited for the bombs to explode before emerging in a vulgar display of triumphalism, grabbing their crotches and dancing around.

  ‘Before the dust had settled they were out shooting at us again. They were even waving at us. It was a little disappointing,’ SAS Warrant Officer Clint said soon after the fight.

  It pissed the soldiers off, but at the same time the taunts only served to rev them up more.

  The enemy was so close that Jock could almost smell them. He and Clint had been having a deadly serious but friendly shooting competition — aiming their M4 carbines at the enemy 200 metres away and seeing who could get off the best shot. Jock’s finger was on the trigger, the weapon locked on semi-automatic to conserve ammunition, spitting out well-aimed shots at targets in range. Each round that exploded out of Jock’s chamber was for one of the wounded blokes lying a metre or two away, patched up and morphed up to their eyeballs. Pfffat, pfffat, pfffat, pfffat. It was near on impossible to tell if he got any direct hits with the amount of ammo pounding the ridges, but pulling the trigger was satisfying nonetheless and seeing the enemy duck for cover meant they weren’t trying to kill him.

  Jock wasn’t superstitious but, like most soldiers going into battle, he had mentally written his name on a bullet and put it in his pocket for luck. It meant that he, Jock, had the only bullet marked for himself and there wouldn’t — couldn’t — be another one like it in the bowl of death in the Shahi Kot Valley that day. Myth, superstition, old wives’ tale — screw it. Everything helped.

  He maintained his position on the southern end of the bowl, keeping his hand and ear on the radio and his weapon fully cocked. He was still digging in, creating a deep shell scrape for safety and peace of mind. It was impossible to get comfortable or complacent; to do so meant certain death. Jock’s view was southeast, and most of the enemy were burrowed into positions on the eastern ridgeline higher up and further north; that is, in front of him and over his left shoulder. He could hear the fight hammering his eardrums and he felt the hard spray of dirt and shattered stones ricocheting off the ground when bullets and shrapnel landed nearby, but his job was to watch the backs of the 10th Mountain in Hell’s Halfpipe. Their troops needed cover from the rear as they manoeuvred into position to take aim.

  ‘It was quite unnerving because I had my back to them [the enemy], basically. And if I turned around, then no one was watching our back. Had it all gone to shit, you would have had to turn around and make the best of the situation,’ Jock says.

  Jock was vulnerable in his position but his fellow soldiers were in a direct line of fire and he stood his ground, keeping his focus and maintaining his communications network.

  The enemy inched closer towards the ambushed men. Jock eyeballed al Qaeda creeping along the narrow jagged ledges in his sightline.

  He reacted immediately. ‘Single enemy. Moving left to right,’ he yelled over the roar of death. ‘Reference: large rocky outcrop.’

  A couple of shooters raised up on their elbows, lifting their heads and shoulders over the lip of the halfpipe, took aim, and fired a barrage of bullets from their weapons. Bingo. The enemy was cut down. Gone.

  Hoo-ah!

  ‘If you see the enemy you give a target indication,’ Jock says now. ‘That’s distance, direction, description — you describe the enemy. You always give your range so people will look at that distance. If you say “lone enemy”, people will look around anywhere, but if you say 200 metres, bang, people’s eyes will go out to 200 metres. It becomes second nature.’

  In war, second nature was paramount.

  Fast movers screamed overhead, answering calls for fire further north at one of the six other coalition positions that had been established successfully during the first two hours of Anaconda. LaCamera and Grippe at the northern end of the bowl conferred over their internal field radios with the Rakkasan commander, Wiercinski, at his command post on the Finger.

  A thousand things were going on at once. Each man was engaged in his own personal war and battle for survival. The confined kill zone had men cramped into the bowl, but several squads from the 10th Mountain had managed to combat-crawl up the sides of the halfpipe to secure a better firing position. But in doing so they came under fire from enemy hidden in crevices and crags on the ridge.

  The enemy was creeping in closer, trying to surround Charlie Company.

  ‘We had to shoot them off the rocks, morning and afternoon,’ Jock says now.

  It was chaos. The troops were being attacked by al Qaeda and Taliban fighters dug into positions higher up the ridge behind Jock; he couldn’t see the enemy but he could hear their gunfire. ‘At that stage I don’t know that there’s not twice as many coming from the other end,’ he says.

  Back in the TOC, Major General Hagenbeck listened intently to the battle raging more than a hundred kilometres away. The racket of explosions and gunfire had turned into a white noise of war — ever present; unceasing. And it was being broadcast in real time over the radio and accompanied by almost surreal Predator vision from the kill zones. Hagenbeck’s liaison officer relayed the updated sitreps from the various positions in the Shahi Kot Valley.

  The battle plan had changed, significantly. Hagenbeck had spent two weeks mapping out the AO and strategising Anaconda with the commanders from various arms of the US military, including the Special Forces, the US Air Force, the Navy and the Marines, as well as the commanders of the international coalition forces. But war is organic and human responses are unpredictable.

  Surprise is the best weapon; without it, you’re done.

  By early afternoon, things were increasingly fluid for the planners in the Tactical Operations Center. Hagenbeck had the whole valley and all seven blocking positions to consider. Wiercinski’s command post was under fire, but holding its position. ‘We survived three mortar barrages during the day, and at one point, we had nine to ten al Qaeda coming to do [kill] us. But instead, we did them,’ Wiercinski later told reporters at Bagram Air Base. ‘They had been building this place and this defence for years. We definitely put a spike through their heart.’

  General Zia Lodin’s Northern Alliance forces — the main effort in Anaconda — were slowly withdrawing from the valley. The Afghan warlord had lost three soldiers and 24 were injured. Almost all of his trucks had been destroyed. They would not return to Gardez until much later that night and would not get back into the fight for a couple of days.

  Other US Special Forces patrols that had infiltrated into the mountains were feeding reports back to the TOC, describing enemy hideouts at other locations.

  About 200 enemy fighters had launched a barrage of accurate mortar and machine-gun fire on 45 men from Charlie Company with the 2–187 in the northwest soon after they exited the Chinook. It was another version of the same story: al Qaeda had the valley direct-fired and the American soldiers copped a hiding, but they fought on.

  More al Qaeda forces were sighted travelling into the valley in a convoy of nine beaten-up old trucks mounted with machine-guns. Coalition aircraft responding to a call for CAS spied the convoy and took aim. As one soldier on the ground later told reporters: ‘Luckily, the 200 people were neutralised from the air. They weren’t holding back. We gave them every chance to surrender. They had their minds set on killing Americans.’

  The combat order was changing, minute by minute. The coalition supporting effort — the Anvil to General Zia’s Afghan Forces’ Hammer — was now the main effort in Anaconda.

  Hagenbeck had decisions to make.

  Colonel Mulholland, who headed the 5th Special Forces Group, had previously told him t
hat this would be a different kind of fight; that if the enemy were Arabs they would stay and fight rather than try to escape through the rat lines. But others in the intelligence community had the opposite view and believed that, once cornered, the enemy would try to escape.

  Hagenbeck’s battle strategists had briefed him on several courses of action including how to capture and kill escaping enemy fighters and how to deal with their surrender. But he had assumed Mulholland’s worst-case scenario; that they were going to be in for a pitched battle. His assumption was right.

  ‘So early afternoon the discussion that went on back at the headquarters was, “What do we do?”’ Hagenbeck says.

  He knew he had to medevac the wounded soldiers out of the Shahi Kot Valley and he wanted to maintain and continue the momentum further north where other soldiers had secured their blocking points.

  ‘We decided — to describe it doctrinally — to reinforce success,’ he says. ‘So the decision in early afternoon [was that] when the sun went down, we would fly in medevac helicopters to the south to pull those guys out. And we would take that second lift of six helicopters and fly into the north, instead of the south, and we would reinforce the north and they would move down the ridgeline towards the south. So we thought it was going to go pretty good from that aspect.

  ‘And we also began that afternoon to pick up, for the very first time, indications [al Qaeda] might be reinforcing. But we can tell you now, the signal intercepts that we had, they thought that they had us where they wanted us … The Russians had fought two major fights there and been hurt badly and they thought this would be a repeat. They were calling this the jihad against America and its allies, and they were calling every able-bodied person to come into the fight.’

  Al Qaeda were preparing for a bigger showdown and kept coming into the valley in small groups spread out over the treacherous terrain, making them a more difficult target. They moved in during the daylight knowing that the American forces had superior technology at night.

  ‘We had all the night vision advantages, from satellites all the way down to the soldiers on the ground with night-vision goggles, and if they moved at night they were killed and they knew that,’ Hagenbeck says.

  ‘But days later when they tried to escape to the south, that’s when the Aussies lit them up — the SAS.’

  It was 1.30pm local time in the Shahi Kot Valley. The fog, which had been playing havoc with the Predator vision during the morning, had cleared well and the sun was burning through the thin air and into the faces of the soldiers in Hell’s Halfpipe.

  Sergeant Robert Healy, Bob to his mates, was at the command-and-control point for the 10th Mountain and put his sunglasses on, tucking the arms under his helmet, looking every bit like the rock star soldier.

  Lieutenant Colonel LaCamera walked by, clearly amused. ‘Hey, is it Cool Guy sunglasses time?’ he asked and quickly whipped his own shades out and put them on as well.

  The sergeant laughed. It was a much needed moment of levity.

  But the sunglasses didn’t last long.

  ‘I figured out, boy, I’m getting shot at real close here,’ Healy says now. ‘I figured out my glasses were giving off a nice glare and I was a real nice little target. Put my sunglasses back away for the day.’

  He got another laugh soon after when Major Jay Hall got caught in the cross hairs of a sniper and came barrelling down the bowl, skidding in on his arse.

  ‘Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafe,’ he called, baseball style.

  Rowan Tink was in the TOC with Hagenbeck, paying close attention to the reports coming in from the battle. Tink, a country boy from Dubbo, had graduated from the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1977 at the age of 22, and in 1996 was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to his country in the field of reconnaissance and surveillance.

  He understood the mercurial nature of war, having commanded Australian and New Zealand SAS forces on operations including Operation Desert Thunder against Iraq a few years earlier. He had also been out on a couple of SAS patrols in southern Afghanistan in the preceding weeks, meeting the troopers and strategising with the SAS squadron commanders about the Aussies’ roles in Anaconda.

  Tink had a direct pipeline to Hagenbeck in the TOC. He asked the general about a blocking requirement to the west of the Whale, in a crucial position that had been left unsecured when General Zia’s Afghan Forces began to withdraw earlier that morning after three soldiers were killed. Hours earlier, Tink had briefed his 1 SAS Squadron and ordered that a patrol be prepared to move in and act as a blocking force to cover for Zia’s exit if need be. Tink’s strategy turned out to be prescient.

  Hagenbeck gave Tink the thumbs-up to establish the position.

  ‘It was clear that Zia’s forces weren’t around there,’ Tink says now.

  Tink wanted to plug the hole — ‘“a gate was left open” is the best way to describe it’ — to ensure that any escaping forces would not rush between the Whale and 1 Squadron’s position. It was a strategic manoeuvre.

  Tink spoke again to the officer in command of 1 Squadron, Major Dan McDaniel, and told him to pass the assignment to a small SAS patrol. The troopers had been prepared and instantly swung into action setting up an ambush at a place inside AO Down Under that they named Papa. All up, at that point, there were about 50 Aussies in the AO under Tink’s command, including Jock and Clint who were still taking fire and fighting, quite literally, for their lives. Tink was well aware of the danger his men were in and the exceptional job they were doing defending their positions.

  Thirty minutes later, reports filtered into the TOC that Zia’s forces had broken to the rear on the north – south highway, having totally withdrawn from the valley. Tink noted that Zia was taking his troops back to Gardez.

  The mood in the headquarters was sombre.

  ‘This is a bitch,’ said someone in a thick American accent.

  No one disagreed.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The pilot misjudged the chopper’s height from the ground and slammed the aircraft into the runway, coming in on its side like a Hollywood stunt. Booooom. A huge orange fireball exploded and the chopper caught fire.

  UNTIL ANACONDA, JOCK WALLACE had been having a busy if bullet-free war. After a brief refuelling stopover at a beautiful atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, he had landed in Kuwait towards the end of November, ten weeks after the September 11 attacks which were still fresh in his mind. The SAS Regiment arrived on a Royal Australian Air Force 707 and hit the ground running. As the commanding officer’s signaller, Jock formed part of a small advance party that set up in Camp Doha. The group was top heavy with colonels, captains, majors and warrant officers. Jock was the only digger. The boss was the SAS Regiment’s Lieutenant Colonel ‘Gus’ Gilmore, who went to work on securing a role for the 150 SAS troops the Australian Government had sent to the War on Terror.

  Jock set up the communications network back to Australia in a room in a shed also used by an American Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) under the control of James N. Mattis, who was the brigadier general in command of the 1st MEU and Task Force 58 in Afghanistan.

  Doha was a forward operating base left over from the first Gulf War. It was manned by a skeleton crew of Americans in case Saddam Hussein decided to have a second crack at invading Kuwait, after being successfully repelled by Western allies in 1991 in the war known as Desert Storm.

  Jock was flat out, running around like a blue-arsed fly, meeting with the Yanks, establishing relationships and securing equipment and codes from them. As the CO’s chook, he had to ensure that everything was ready for when the SAS boys known as Task Force 64 arrived. The Aussies set up in a huge hangar in which they installed ATCO huts for offices. There was room enough to sleep up to 300 soldiers. The Yanks, who had money and were armed to the teeth, generously built a wall in the hangar which Jock and his mates dubbed the ‘$40 000 wall’. It provided the Australians with privacy.

  It was short-term. Gilmore received
word that the entire Aussie contingent was heading into southern Afghanistan to FOB Rhino.

  This was a coup. The Australians operated under their own control and command, unlike Special Forces from other countries who were attached to Task Force K-BAR.

  K-BAR was officially known as the Combined Special Operations Task Force — South, and was located in southern Afghanistan under the control of US Navy SEAL Commodore Robert Harward. (Task Force Dagger was its equivalent in the north of Afghanistan.) Made up almost entirely of special operators from the SEALs, US Army and Air Force, as well as SF soldiers from various coalition forces, it was charged with a series of high-risk roles. The primary job for K-BAR commandos was to destroy the al Qaeda and Taliban infrastructure and disrupt their ability to conduct terrorist strikes. In short, the mission was to find the enemy hiding in the southern and eastern parts of the country, and capture or kill them. (The Americans were big on naming most of their task forces after some mean mother of a weapon, usually a knife, as in K-BAR, Dagger and Sword.)

  Jock was stoked about the move. This was the real deal and Rhino was in the thick of al Qaeda country, just a couple of hundred kilometres south of Kandahar, heartland of the Taliban.

  The Australians exited in the pitch black of night on board a huge C-17A Globemaster III cargo jet, courtesy of the US Air Force. The flight to Afghanistan would take about two hours and the men were fully prepared. This was no joy flight. Fearsome ‘devil vehicles’ — the Aussies’ LRPVs — sat in the guts of the aircraft behind several surveillance-and-reconnaissance vehicles. Closest to the rear exit ramp were Polaris four-wheel motorbikes known as quads, and some ‘sixbies’ — six-wheel motorbikes used for patrolling and transportation. The vehicles were all chained to the floor to prevent any mid-flight accidents.

  Jock was sitting on a sixbie. Beats walking, he thought. He had his night-vision goggles (NVGs) draped around his neck and wore his Kevlar-lined body-armour vest with front and back ballistic plates over his brand-new MK1 desert camouflage gear. He had his 60-kilogram ALICE pack loaded on the back of his bike, his fifteen-kilogram ammunition webbing slung across his chest, bandolier style, and his M4 slung in the opposite direction to the webbing across his front, barrel pointing down. His helmet was where it should be — protecting his noggin.