by Sandra Lee
‘I woke up and I was back in Bagram. I was physically drained, and you are beat up and you are all bloody from beating yourself around,’ Peterson says now. ‘You are exhilarated and then all of a sudden, boom, you snap out of it and you’re like, “Oh man, I just survived something that only holy shit knows.”’
En route to Bagram, Jock was hoping like hell that that bull-headed bastard Clint had managed to get on the second chopper. It was a baseless fear because he knew the 10th Mountain would never leave a man behind, but even so, Jock would have felt a thousand times more comfortable if his mate was sitting cheek by jowl with him now.
He couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t sleep, on the aircraft.
‘I was completely exhausted but I refused to go to sleep on that friggin’ helicopter just in case it got shot down on the way home,’ Jock says now. ‘I don’t know what difference it makes dying while you’re awake or dying when you’re asleep, but I didn’t want to die asleep. If this was going to be my last hour I was going to be awake for all of it … I was going to die with my eyes open if I was going to die.’
It was 1955 zulu, 25 minutes past midnight on 3 March, when the Chinooks roared out of the Shahi Kot Valley.
Signalman Jock Wallace and Warrant Officer Class 2 Clint from the SAS Regiment in Perth and most of the 80 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division had been in the bowl of death for eighteen hours.
Eighteen long, brutal hours, and every single one of the men had survived.
The first thing Jock Wallace did when he walked off the tail ramp of the CH-47 chopper was look at the snowcapped mountains surrounding Bagram Air Base and search the skies for the second Chinook. He was filthy, hungry, bloodied, and his wind-and sun-burnt face was gaunt and ghostly; a ravaged mix of exhaustion, relief and shock. He looked exactly how one imagines a man coming back from battle would look and he felt he’d aged at least a dozen years during those eighteen gruelling hours. Jock was wrecked, but adrenaline was still keeping him going. It was at once the best and worst moment of his life.
Sergeant Pete sent some of his men to the dispensary for treatment and led the rest back to the mortar platoon’s tent off to the side of the 10th Mountain Division’s hangar. The blokes who had been left at Bagram waiting for the second airlift into the Shahi Kot Valley welcomed them like heroes. Sergeant Pete lit up a smoke, the first one he’d had in years.
‘No one is playing “Danger Zone”,’ he ordered. ‘If you turn that song on, I will kick your arse. No one plays “Danger Zone”.’
Even now, four years after returning from the Shahi Kot Valley, Peterson is affected by the Kenny Loggins tune. ‘To this day, if I hear that song I am like, oh my God, when am I going to start getting shot at?’ he says.
A few of the Aussie brass had come to the apron on the side of the runway to welcome Jock and Clint, but Jock didn’t give a shit about them.
Where the fuck is Clint? he wondered.
The second chopper arrived a couple of minutes later and Jock fought his way through the crowd of disembarking bone-tired but jubilant Americans to look for his mate, the one other Australian who knew what it was like to be ambushed in Hell’s Halfpipe for eighteen hours. Clint was the only bastard Jock wanted to see.
Finally Clint staggered down the ramp, the weight of his gear pressing on his nuggety frame. Jock grabbed him in a bear hug, while someone else ripped the pack off Clint’s back.
‘Bloody great to see you, mate. Where the fuck did you get to?’ Jock said before releasing him.
Clint and Jock had defied death that day. Nothing more needed to be said.
They hitched a ride back to their tent about a kilometre away at the other end of the base for a chat, a feed and something akin to shut-eye.
‘When I got off the helicopter that’s actually when I felt relief, because … I have made it out alive,’ Jock says.
‘Once I got off the helicopter and cleared the rotor blades and looked back at the bastard, then I knew the mission was over. That job was over. That’s when it dawned on me that I had made it out of there. And if I died now, it wasn’t as a result of anything on al Qaeda’s behalf. They wouldn’t get the satisfaction.
‘We all nearly went to hell.’
Jock pauses, taking a minute to reflect on how close he had come to death. ‘That’s what it was like — walking through the gates of hell and back.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
‘It was the largest scale battle fought since Vietnam. It was the largest close air support fight, the largest ground fight, and it was won handily.’
GENERAL FRANKLIN ‘BUSTER’ HAGENBECK, THE US COMMANDER OF OPERATION ANACONDA
‘AT THE END OF Day One we had suffered a setback,’ Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Tink noted in his war diary later that night.
‘If Major General Hagenbeck does not carry the day tomorrow it is difficult to imagine the second iteration of this battle will conclude before mid to late March. At the moment, he does not favour withdrawal and is staking a lot on the ability of the USAF to bomb their way to victory.’
‘And that’s essentially what happened; they bombed their way to victory,’ Tink says now.
Early the next morning in the TOC, Hagenbeck’s chief of staff, Colonel Smith, gathered the commanders together for a briefing.
‘We’ve found them, we are gonna fix ’em and we are gonna kill ’em,’ he said.
Smith was referring to al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the Shahi Kot Valley and his words echoed the OpOrd set down by Hagenbeck less than two weeks earlier, only much more graphically and colourfully.
Operation Anaconda would last another fifteen days before the generals on the ground in Afghanistan and back at CentCom in Florida, together with the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, declared mission accomplished.
What began as a 72-hour operation had turned into a pitched battle involving more than 1400 American soldiers, a thousand-strong Afghan force, plus special operators from the US and six other nations: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and Norway.
Several patrols from the Australian SAS Regiment would remain in and around the Shahi Kot Valley the entire time performing vital and, at times, life-saving work, for which they would ultimately be recognised and highly praised by the American commanders.
After returning from the battlefield, Jock and Clint were greeted as conquering soldiers but Jock didn’t buy into it, thinking it was a load of bullshit.
‘We weren’t heroes, we were just doing our job basically,’ he says. ‘We were in a survival situation fighting for our lives, there was no glory there. We were unfortunate victims of bad planning. That really pissed me off.’
The planning and execution of Operation Anaconda have been a subject of heated conjecture since the end of the mission and those in the US defence forces have argued about the problems and their causes.
The US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines all conducted after-action reviews of the battle plan and its execution to ensure the combined forces would learn from any real or perceived mistakes and avoid them in future operations.
One of the more significant issues to emerge was that of intelligence. No one doubted that the intelligence significantly underestimated the enemy strength and led to the chaos in Hell’s Halfpipe. The initial estimate of 100 to 250 enemy fighters in the villages of Babukhel, Sherkhankhel and Marzak and surrounding ridges of the Takur Ghar was almost doubled immediately before the operation began. It has since been estimated that on D-Day there were anywhere from 400 enemy fighters — at the minimum — up to 1000-plus.
‘Probably the correct figure was 1000,’ writes Norman Friedman in his book Terrorism, Afghanistan and America’s New Way of War.
Hagenbeck, who has since been promoted to a three-star Lieutenant General, says the more accurate number was 400; while the men fighting have guesstimated the number to be anywhere between 800 and as many as 1400.
Before the first week of Operation Anaconda was over, the US Secretary of Defense,
Donald Rumsfeld, conceded that accurate predictions going into the battle were impossible to achieve.
‘We’ve been looking at that area for weeks and have a great deal of intelligence information, but it is not possible to have a good count,’ Rumsfeld said at a press conference in Washington while soldiers were still fighting in the Shahi Kot Valley and searching for Osama bin Laden.
According to the 2005 report by the US Air Force on Operation Anaconda, the planning ‘underestimated two things: first, the enemy situation and its tenacity; and second, the difficulty of combining conventional and Special Forces operations in the terrain of the Shahi Kot Valley.
‘Inaccurate estimate of the enemy situation — numbers present, reinforcements nearby, and intentions — was perhaps the single major shortfall and it coloured the entire operation,’ the report concludes.
‘But the fact remains that commanders in every war generally have to make the decision to execute without perfect intelligence. As General Franks said later, “We’ll never have the precise picture of any particular place where we’re conducting an operation.”’
During the operation, General Franks also told the American ABC television program This Week that ‘we will almost never have perfect intelligence information’. Two years after the battle was over, a now-retired Franks published his autobiography in which he wrote that the ‘carefully balanced details of the plan did not survive first attack with the enemy. Anaconda was turning into a hell of a fight.’
Another serious issue that has been raised was the cooperation between the US Army and US Air Force, and each service’s concept and understanding of the battle strategy.
Air Force commanders pointed the finger at Hagenbeck, the then Army two-star who had overall command of Coalition Joint Task Force Mountain, and therefore Operation Anaconda. USAF brass said Hagenbeck did not involve the Air Force in planning early enough and that that, effectively, had an impact on the fight.
‘Ambiguous command structures established on an ad hoc basis and approved by US Central Command created conditions that inadvertently excluded the Air Force from the planning of Anaconda,’ writes US Army Major Mark Davis in his Master’s thesis — cited by Elaine Grossman in the online publication Inside the Pentagon.
‘In the rush to conduct combat operations in Afghanistan, CentCom lost sight of two age-old principles of war: unity of command and unity of effort.’
General Hagenbeck, in published interviews, countered that the close air support was unreliable at times and air power could take anywhere between 26 minutes to an hour to respond to a call for CAS from the valley floor.
Other contentious issues that have been put under the microscope include whether the crucial pre-H-Hour bombing raid on selected al Qaeda and Taliban targets was extensive enough and whether the ambushed troops received adequate CAS during the crucial first day. Similarly, questions have been raised about the decision to omit artillery from the battle on that Saturday, although it was introduced later in the operation; as well as the efficacy of segregated command posts for various services in Bagram, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Tampa, Florida, and the complex chain of command that did not always answer directly to Hagenbeck.
On top of that, a cascade of accusations were traded within the US military and between the US and Afghan forces about the reliance on the Afghan Army as the main thrust in Anaconda. Ultimately, that reliance was misplaced on D-Day when Zia’s Afghan Forces withdrew in the opening hours of the operation.
Even so, most of the soldiers who fought nose-to-nose against al Qaeda and the radical Taliban militia have no doubt D-Day was a success. Some put it down to sheer good luck, others to prayers and yet others to pure skill, exceptional training and good soldiering. And there are some troopers who would say it was a combination of all of the above.
Any which way, Operation Anaconda can be hailed a success insofar as 82 soldiers air-assaulted into the base of an al Qaeda stronghold on D-Day came out alive. Even though they had failed to secure the southern blocking point, reinforcements would subsequently complete the mission and rout the al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from the region. It just took longer than anticipated.
Command Sergeant Major Frank Grippe believes D-Day was a success, but has in the past said the intelligence had flaws. Instead of looking at the negatives, though, Grippe prefers to focus on the positives, and contrasts it with his second tour of duty in Afghanistan during which seventeen of his men were killed in action. That, he says, puts D-Day of Anaconda into perspective.
‘It was quite a significant battle and how we didn’t lose anybody still amazes me,’ Grippe says of D-Day now. ‘We were blessed and there was a lot of skill involved. We were pretty much a well-trained unit, there is no doubt about that — our equipment, our marksmanship, our tactics, just our steadfastness — but we were lucky that we had no KIA that day.
‘It was a great feeling watching the boys fight — their braveries and their skill.’
Grippe also sees the victory of D-Day and the overall operation on a broader canvas and sweeps it with the brush of history.
‘Al Qaeda thought they were safe up in the mountains, and we historically fought at the highest altitude the US Army has ever fought at,’ he says. ‘The floor of the valley was 8500 feet [2600 metres], the surrounding mountains, some of them, were over 11 000 feet [3350 metres], and we showed al Qaeda that they weren’t safe anywhere. Brought the fight right to their doorstep, literally. Killed hundreds and really disrupted their supply system. And you know, psychologically, they could talk the talk but they all ran to Pakistan. The little bastards all talk how bad they are …’ he says, trailing off.
‘We went into a valley where the Russians had just gotten their arses whipped twice in a row, and they went into the valley with artillery and tanks and everything else. And we were just in the valley by ourselves — they went into the valley with hundreds upon hundreds — and the first day in the valley there was just 250 conventional American forces and some small teams here and there doing reconnaissance.
‘It wasn’t like a huge, overwhelming force. Definitely didn’t have the three-to-one ratio as per doctrine, but you know, we didn’t need that. We kept the small footprint that we needed inside of Afghanistan to show the Afghans that we weren’t there to occupy. We were just there in a blood feud, hunting al Qaeda, and the warlords really respected that.
‘[We said:] “We’re here to hunt al Qaeda, we’re not here to disrupt your lifestyle and impose our will on you.” And they really accepted that.’
Sitting in the Pentagon, General Hagenbeck says the operation was a victory, particularly on D-Day when all but one of seven blocking positions were secured under heavy fighting.
‘This was extraordinary, when it all comes down to it. It was the largest scale battle fought since Vietnam. It was the largest close air support fight, the largest ground fight, and it was won handily,’ Hagenbeck says. ‘That doesn’t mean that there weren’t some times when we were holding our breath, but it really was [a huge victory].’
Asked about the criticism that a lot of things went wrong on the opening day of what was originally conceived of as a 72-hour operation, Hagenbeck defends the plan.
‘I think a lot of things went right,’ he says. ‘The plan is always described as only good until the first shot is fired.
‘There is, I think, a mischaracterisation that we flew, initially, a smaller number of troops to the fight and there were a thousand al Qaeda waiting for us in the valley. That’s not true. There were about 400 on the first day and over the next three days they continued to reinforce and, yes, they did reach in excess of a thousand people in the valley, they sure did. But it’s not like we flew everybody into the teeth of a thousand al Qaeda waiting for us. It was about 400 that were there.
‘Now, granted, on that first lift we only put in about 250 or 260 infantry against 400 and then they started reinforcing and we didn’t get another 250 in, actually less than that, a little over 200, 225,
[until] the second lift [the next day].’
According to General Hagenbeck, some enemy escaped but not in the large numbers that were originally reported in the media in March 2002. However, the high-value targets Osama bin Laden and the Taliban’s leader, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, were not captured, nor were their bodies found, and by April 2006 bin Laden was thought to be still alive, sending taped messages to his terrorist fighters.
‘Now, did a handful of fighters get out of that valley? Sure they did. But did they escape from Shahi Kot Valley in large numbers? Heck, no. You will never convince me.’
Similarly, the Americans are reluctant to reveal how many enemy fighters were killed during Operation Anaconda because they do not want to be accused of engaging in a body count as they were after the Vietnam War. Early reports variably estimated that 400-or 500-plus enemy fighters had been killed in the first six days of ground fighting, but other reports have put the total figure as high as 1000 — a number that some commanders will privately confirm but publicly deny knowledge of.
Still, only about 100 bodies were found, with commanders saying that they had either been incinerated by bombs, buried in collapsed caves, or dragged away by the al Qaeda and Taliban fighters as part of the guerrilla warfare tactics to deny the enemy a benchmark by which to measure success.
On 8 March 2002 in Australia, the commander of Australian Special Forces, Brigadier Duncan Lewis, told a press conference that the SAS Regiment had been pivotal in eliminating enemy forces.
‘US battle-damage assessments indicate that a high proportion of those killed is attributed to the actions and professionalism of the Australian Special Forces,’ Brigadier Lewis said.
Toward the end of Operation Anaconda, Hagenbeck gave a press conference at Bagram Air Base in which he was quoted saying that the lack of bodies in the Shahi Kot Valley could be attributed to the devastating intensity of the bombs dropped on the villages and the extensive cave system in the surrounding mountains. According to the USAF’s 2005 report, 231 bombs were dropped on D-Day.
