by Sandra Lee
‘I could talk to Wiercinski, and Wallace was … calling in close air support.’
Reports of Jock’s transmissions were being passed to Tink in the TOC who informed Hagenbeck.
Hagenbeck, a considerate and educated man, was relying on Wiercinski’s judgement and a number of transmissions from the field, including those from Jock. The two-star could also hear other calls for fire coming into the command centre over the American networks, including from LaCamera who was about twenty metres away from Jock.
Wiercinski and LaCamera were in contact from their two positions in the battle, and the special operators were radioing in with reports from their observation posts in the valley, updating their commanders who were in the TOC next to Hagenbeck. As the commander of Operation Anaconda, Hagenbeck carried a very big stick and had spent the previous two weeks meeting at least once a day with the commanding officers of all the units involved in the fight, seeking their situational awareness of the enemy locations and listening to their suggestions about how they would contribute to the battle. Nine countries had provided small contingents to the US-led operation, and Hagenbeck met with all of the commanders as a matter of course, as well as his fellow commanders from the US Marines, Navy, Air Force and Special Forces. This approach was typical of his management style.
The day before the operation, immediately after the battle update brief, Hagenbeck’s chief of staff, Colonel Joe Smith, had invited all the commanders to a meeting in the major general’s office.
The meeting was followed by tea and cake. Official invitations were distributed. Lieutenant Colonel Tink attended, as did Colonel Mulholland, Colonel Wiercinski and a liaison officer from Task Force K-BAR.
Tink found the tea party to be a ‘most quaint formality’.
‘To this day it still blows me away that we sat around and had tea and cake,’ Tink says. ‘It almost had a surreal feeling of the Last Supper. It was only a small table, and we all sat around it with tablecloth and proper cups and saucers, and small bread-and-butter plates with slices of teacake.
‘There were a couple of jokes being made, but overall there was an upbeat sort of mood to it all. We had been going flat out for a long time, and there was pressure on Hagenbeck from behind to get this thing going. This was the first time to sit down and have tea and cake together and all the work has been done and all we can do now is do it tomorrow. Showtime.’
The afternoon tea was typical of Hagenbeck’s well-mannered and collegiate approach.
‘Here’s how I approached it,’ Hagenbeck says now, referring to the way he planned Anaconda. ‘We’ve got two weeks to go into this fight; everybody wanted to be in the fight. We had the smart guys lay out concepts, we had them lay out courses of action, and every day I met with my commanders, just us in my office … just once a day, sometimes twice. And I let them have their say about what they thought they could do and about what they could bring to the fight.
‘And part of it was to get to know each other, to develop expectations. Now, I made the decisions on the play, ultimately, but I let all of them have a say in the development of this fight and we went from worst case to best case.’
Hagenbeck wanted the commanders of the conventional forces and special operators to have a complete understanding of the task and purpose of Operation Anaconda and how each other thought. He wanted each of the main players to be full bottle on their missions so that, when and if separated, they would all be singing from the same song sheet.
Hagenbeck knew his top brass and how they thought, and he also had absolute faith in Jock and Clint and the Aussie SAS troopers in the field. Years earlier, Hagenbeck had spent time at the Singleton Army barracks in New South Wales as part of the US Army’s exchange program with the Australian Army. When the 10th Mountain moved to Bagram, Hagenbeck reacquainted himself with the commanding officer of the SAS Regiment in Afghanistan, Rowan Tink. The veteran soldiers shared old war stories from Hagenbeck’s days in Australia in the 1980s, when the two career soldiers had known each other. Tink had attended a course at the School of Infantry in Singleton where Hagenbeck was serving at the time.
The US – Australian exchanges were common and other soldiers in Operation Anaconda had also benefited from a visit Down Under. Sergeant Robert Healy spent three weeks at the Australian Army’s parachute school on the south coast of New South Wales in 1989. Healy, a US Ranger instructor, loved the laid-back Aussie lifestyle and even managed to guest-star on one of the Crocodile Hunter shows with Steve Irwin.
Hagenbeck’s experiences in Australia filled him with confidence about the SAS’s contribution to Anaconda. ‘I knew an awful lot of the Australian SAS, having lived down there and having trained with them,’ he says.
‘They don’t get any better. They are superb. I mean, they are true professionals in every sense of the word,’ Hagenbeck says of the troopers involved in Anaconda.
‘I knew what they could bring to the fight. I had seen what they were able to do already, and at that point I felt very comfortable. I knew how tough they were physically and mentally, and they were very straightforward and candid. I knew quite well that they would tell me what they thought they were capable of doing, and if they said they could do it I knew they could.
‘In a bit of a scuffle, they don’t let go till they win.’
As the information came in from the battlefield, Hagenbeck and his operations and intelligence officers in the TOC processed it.
‘I went to great extents to keep my mouth shut, because I did not want to be guilty of trying to fight the fight on the ground when I didn’t really know the specifics of that sort of thing,’ Hagenbeck says, explaining his tactics on the day. ‘My conversations were with Wiercinski only, and you can count them on one hand. He called back and made reports and we’d get a ‘Roger, out’. Wiercinski had called me and told me that all the soldiers that had been wounded had been stabilised and there were a handful of them that were in very bad shape, but he thought that they could hold on for a while, so I went with his recommendation.’
Around 4pm, the calls for CAS were answered when an AC-130 gunship armed with a 105mm howitzer roared overhead and ripped into the countryside. A B-1 bomber followed soon after and delivered several 1000-pound JDAMs in a box pattern on the mountain, razing a Zeus (ZSU–23) 23mm anti-aircraft artillery piece that was spotted jutting out of a cave on the ridgeline.
According to the official US Air Force report released in 2005, the crew of another B-1 later reported that it dropped fifteen JDAMs on six targets in six bomb runs. Around 4.30pm, stacked higher in the sky above the B-1s, a B-52 dumped several 1000-pound JDAMs on Marzak and repositioned to launch 27 free-fall MK82 bombs which exploded along a string of targets.
The afternoon bombing raid was a double-edged sword for the men in Hell’s Halfpipe. Jock was lying on the hard ground of the halfpipe watching the bombers drop their load.
‘I hope they’re on target. I hope they’re on target. I hope they’re on target. I hope they’re on target,’ he said over and over.
‘It’s a real mongrel feeling because you know they are there to help you, but one slight stuff-up and the help will be the opposite,’ he says now.
‘They dropped their guts. It felt like 60 000 kilograms. It didn’t feel like three 2000-pounders, let’s put it that way. They landed about 400 metres from us. I had my fingers in my ears and I was just waiting to die, basically.’
By late afternoon, Hagenbeck’s command had received more intelligence from the special operators and soldiers in the valley. According to the USAF report, Hagenbeck’s Coalition Joint Task Force Mountain informed the Coalition Forces Land Component Command, or CFLCC, that ‘hardcore elements, sensing success against coalition forces, perceive no need to exfiltrate at this time’.
It was bad news and confirmed that Colonel Mulholland’s prediction that al Qaeda would fight to the death was spot on. Not that any of the blokes in the bowl doubted it.
‘Around mid-afternoon, [al Qaeda] wer
e [so] confident that they would stand outside the cave entrance and grab their genitals and flip us off, wave to us,’ Jock says now, ‘because by that stage they realised we only had 5.56mm [weapons] and we didn’t have enough and we couldn’t reach out to them. They could shoot down into us but our weapons didn’t make it back.
‘I felt useless, ripped off. You just felt frustrated and it’s a sinking frustration.’ Jock was armed with an M4 but would have preferred to have an SLR (self-loading rifle), which had a longer range. ‘I would have been shooting those little pricks off rocks all day with one of those. They will go twice as far as an M4,’ he says of the SLR.
The old SLRs had a range of 600 metres and would have put the majority of the enemy in Jock’s range. His M4 had a laser sight aimpoint but it was only good to 360 metres.
‘Even at 300 metres, the red dot of the aimpoint nearly covers the whole body so you could be shooting him in the tip of his toe or parting his hair, you don’t know,’ Jock says.
The M4s are versatile weapons and good for operating in cars and jungles, but lousy in the open when the enemy is more than a few hundred metres off in the distance.
Lieutenant Colonel Tink was in the TOC for a 1200 zulu briefing — 4.30pm local time. The briefing confirmed that the Americans had taken fourteen casualties and reiterated the one KIA (killed in action) — Stanley Harriman who had been killed earlier that morning. At that point in the TOC no one knew for sure that friendly fire had claimed the first American life in Operation Anaconda. The harsh reality would come later. Tink also recorded that 21 Northern Alliance soldiers were wounded, with one KIA.
The ‘stalemate’ mentioned by Hagenbeck earlier did not accord with the information Tink’s staff were pulling together from the SAS patrols in the field and Jock and Clint’s sitreps.
Tink’s operations officer (OpsO) also informed him that he believed the communications between Wiercinski and Hagenbeck were intermittent and lacking detail. Tink tasked the OpsO to seek what is known in military terms as ‘ground truthing’, or more detailed reports from the scene of the battle. Tink wanted to supplement the Americans’ information.
‘The 1200 briefing … was the point at which it became apparent to me that Hagenbeck and I were receiving differing reports about the gravity of the situation,’ Tink says now.
At 4.44pm Tink further noted: ‘Raiders taking heavy mortar fire.’
The raiders were Jock and the 10th Mountain Division. The tension in the TOC was palpable.
At 5pm Hagenbeck’s command contacted CFLCC with another message. CFLCC fell under the leadership of the US Army’s Lieutenant General Paul Mikolashek. Hagenbeck’s newest estimate for the situation in the southern end of the Shahi Kot Valley was that there were still between 200 and 300 al Qaeda in the three villages, with at least another hundred in the surrounding hills. Not all were Afghans, and some were foreign fighters who had joined the jihad.
‘The enemy positions on Takur Ghar and Marzak are presenting robust defences,’ CJTF Mountain reported.
Back in the valley Jock’s ears were ringing from the sustained bombardment. He felt like he’d been held up by his ankles and shaken. He simply could not believe the number of enemy fighters in the valley.
As he looked south, he could see them manoeuvring in closer, inching their way along the precarious goat tracks on the rocky ledges a couple of hundred metres away. He checked on the wounded in his shell scrape, made sure they were covered, and pulled the trigger on his M4. Ttttt, tttt, tttt, ttttt.
And again. Ttttt, tttt, tttt, ttttt.
‘How’d you go, buddy?’ asked one of the injured American kids.
‘Yeah, not bad, mate,’ Jock replied. He had to remain positive so the kid wouldn’t give up hope after lying in that hellhole for the past eleven hours with a chunk ripped out of his body and pinned down by the enemy. Another young fella crammed in next to him was morphed up, feeling no pain at all, the lucky bastard.
Jock still had a bit of confidence in the firepower that was coming in to back up the troops. Even so, he felt at a serious disadvantage. They had the best troops and the best equipment but they weren’t able to use it in the best possible way to gain ground. The troops couldn’t put the firepower down range to attempt to gain ground, and because they were using close air support it was too dangerous to send soldiers forward because the US bombs could have taken them out.
‘That’s the compromise of using air — you have to take a tactically inferior position in that situation.
‘Guys were pissed off and there was a realisation — you definitely knew they knew they were in the shit,’ Jock says. ‘I’m not saying that the individuals there on the day did a bad job; I’m saying they were let down by the system that put them there. They were told one thing and given another.’
Jock believed also that the soldiers couldn’t successfully fight their way out of the valley if they had wanted to. ‘As a group we could have made a concerted effort to fight out, back south down the valley, but we couldn’t because we didn’t have the weapons or the bloody terrain to do it.’
Jock figured the air assault had gone in half-arsed but he wasn’t blaming the troops on the ground for the situation they now found themselves in. Instead, he was dirty on the REMFs — the ‘rear echelon motherfuckers’ — who, he’d lay money on it, couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.
‘You felt betrayed; there had been a breach of agreement basically,’ he says. ‘I will go in and fight for your cause, I’ll give my life, but I’m not just going to walk up to the block and surrender it. I’m going to fight for it. But as a soldier I anticipated if you are going to go off and fight in someone else’s country you may as well make it a good bloody effort …’
The sun was sinking slowly in the western sky, and with it the temperature. It was positively freezing. Jock’s bloodied knuckles had crusted over, a mix of dirt, blood and, he was sure, ice. He looked up at the majesty of the landscape and marvelled at how it had all come to this.
Jock didn’t want to think ahead, but he knew what would come next. Guerrilla warfare was ugly and its fighters often left their most fearsome assault to the last light of the day.
These jokers would be no fuckin’ different, he thought.
‘Things had sort of gone quiet for a little bit, that’s the calm before the storm,’ he says. ‘Have you ever heard the expression “things are too quiet”? Well, they bloody were, that’s because these little mongrels were doing all their manoeuvring to get into position. And then all of a sudden, bang, all hell broke loose again.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Gently, he shifted his torso and placed the grenade under his chest. The weight of his body kept the safety bail down, preventing the fuse in the grenade from being lit and detonating under him.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. The thunderous explosions announced the onslaught and broke the deceitful silence that had fallen on the Shahi Kot Valley while the al Qaeda and Taliban fighters covertly negotiated positions for their last-light attack. Jock didn’t look at his watch — no need to when you’re living each minute according to someone else’s battle plan — but a gentle darkness had started to shroud the valley and long shadows from the Whale blanketed Hell’s Halfpipe. He guessed it was around 5.30pm, maybe a little later — almost half a day since they landed at the foot of an al Qaeda stronghold.
Boom. The fifth rocket, like the ones before, smashed into the eastern bank of the bowl; all in quick succession, all fired from the eastern ridgeline. Once the dust had settled, a wicked torrent of machine-gun fire rained down from the western side high above a precipitous cliff that dropped straight to the valley floor.
The barrage was full-on, the most intense fire of the day and there was absolutely nowhere to hide.
‘How the fuck did the motherfuckers get over there?’ Jock said under his breath, using the soldier’s preferred profanity in almost every possible grammatical combination.
The enemy was less than 200 metres away
on the west. Perfect sniping position. The rockets and mortars from the east, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, were the signal to terrorist elements on the west to open fire. Al Qaeda had the men from the 10th Mountain pinned down, surrounded on two sides, east and west, and closing in from Marzak one kilometre north, zeroing in on the ambushed soldiers with mortars and RPGs and giving it everything they’d got. Which was a shit-load.
Machine-gun rounds cracked like bullwhips overhead, smacking into the halfpipe, kicking up dirt and rocks on all sides of the bowl. If a trooper got up, he’d be caught in the crossfire.
You’re not going to get me, Ahmed, not tonight, not here.
Jock thought of Johnny on patrol further south in the valley, hoping that he didn’t decide to lead his men up to Jock’s position to save his mate. Soldiers are like that. In the Army, mateship is king. Your fellow soldier isn’t just a fellow soldier, he’s your brother. You’d bloody well die for him.
Jock was on the southeast corner with his radio, his backpack and a handful of wounded piled into his and Clint’s shell scrapes. Grippe’s men were combat-crawling in and out of the line of fire, trying to find protection on the eastern slope of the bowl where they had positioned themselves to shoot into the eastern ridgeline. But now they were getting their arses shot off from the western side. Sergeant Pete thought the whole world was shooting at him personally.
‘Where the hell are they comin’ from, the sky?’ he yelled at Grippe.
The soldiers spun around, returned fire at the western sniper positions and somehow avoided getting killed as they manoeuvred up and down the bowl, taking effective countermeasures by scrambling up the western slope. But that put them directly into the line of fire from the bad guys who had been there all day on the eastern ridge. It was a no-win situation in a confined kill zone, which is what the enemy wanted. There was bugger-all cover.
