Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  Captain Self was still in a daze when the first four men lost their lives. During the landing, he had been thrown onto the helicopter deck, hitting his head on the floor and knocking his night-vision goggles off their mount. His nose felt numb, as if he had been punched in the face, and his eyes watered. When he looked up, he saw tracer rounds and rocket-propelled grenades flying through the aircraft. Calvert came toward him from the cockpit, an injured hand dangling from tendons and bone, arterial blood squirting between the fingers of his good hand as he tried to stanch the flow.

  Like Crose and Commons, Captain Self deduced that to stay in the helicopter was to court death. Crawling on all fours over men who had been immobilized by injury or fear, Self enjoined them to follow him out of the death trap. Escaping into the freezing air, Self saw that three Rangers were already prone in the snow, trading fire with enemy fighters who would stick up their heads to shoot, disappear for a moment, and then pop up in a new location. Finding no other able-bodied men aside from these three Rangers, Self could do little except add his rifle to make their trio a quartet.

  The four Rangers were surrounded, outnumbered, fighting in daylight, bereft of air support, and facing a skilled force that had just repulsed a SEAL team. They would have to hold the enemy at bay with only their rifles until help could arrive, whenever that would be. Snapping off rounds at the heads of enemy combatants as they popped into view, the Rangers scored several early hits, which instilled greater caution in the remaining militants. Kept in a hyperalert state by the fear of death, the Rangers scanned the terrain in every direction for enemy movement, pinching their triggers at any sign of an imminent thrust. Their well-placed shots frustrated every enemy initiative during the first hour of the battle. Few episodes in the history of special operations forces ever did as much to vindicate what to some minds were the excessive hours that Rangers spent on the rifle range.

  At the one-hour mark, the first American air support materialized, in the form of two F-15E Strike Eagles. A twin-engined fighter, the Strike Eagle excelled at dueling other aircraft, but not at supporting ground forces. Captain Self asked the pilots to conduct strafing runs with their 20mm cannon, for the enemy was too close to the American perimeter to use bombs without a high risk of friendly casualties. Streaking past Takur Ghar at speeds that rendered them invulnerable to machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, the Strike Eagles sprayed thousands of heavy rounds onto the enemy positions. The Rangers celebrated the destruction with cheers and cries of “F-you Al Qaeda.” The enemy’s fortifications, however, insulated the militants from the ammunition’s wrath. As soon as the strafing ceased, they were back to the game of shooting, ducking, and moving.

  Enemy mortar rounds started crashing into the middle of the bowl a short time later. Fearing complete annihilation, Self promptly dropped his reservations about the use of bombs. To minimize the risk of harm to Americans, he directed the pilots to drop their munitions on the reverse slopes of the mountain.

  The Chinook carrying the other half of Self’s Ranger platoon, which had canceled its planned landing on Takur Ghar after seeing what had happened to the first helicopter, deposited its passengers on a nearby plateau, 2,000 vertical feet below the mountaintop. Heading toward the sound of the guns, ten Rangers ascended snow-covered slopes that ranged in grade from forty to seventy degrees. Although they did not know it, they were in a race against enemy fighters who were at this same time heading up another side of the mountain to reinforce their own comrades.

  At this altitude, even the fittest of men struggled to carry their heavy packs up the inclines. Many of the Rangers became dizzy and lightheaded, and several vomited. As their difficulties mounted, Rangers started casting off heavy pieces of gear. Most of them ditched their rear Kevlar plate, though two men held onto theirs for fear that the Army would later bill them for the item, which had a price tag of $2,000.

  According to the initial projection of the Ranger commander, the relief force would reach Self’s position in forty-five minutes. The climb took two and a half hours. Upon cresting the mountain, the Rangers found Self and four other men guarding a small perimeter while medics tended to a large number of wounded.

  With ten additional Rangers, Self could now shift from the role of rifleman to that of platoon leader. He explained to the newcomers that they needed to drive the enemy off the summit as quickly as possible, so that helicopters could evacuate the wounded. After cursory preparations, the Rangers assaulted the peak with the ease and precision of men who have rehearsed assaults for years. They encountered only one live fighter on their way to the crest, whom one of the Rangers shot instantaneously.

  The able-bodied began carrying the seriously wounded to the top on Skedco plastic litters. The caravan’s progress was interrupted by raking gunfire from approximately twenty-five enemy shooters on a ridgeline one hundred yards away. One of the injured Americans, Staff Sergeant Dave Dube, was left in the open when the two men carrying him jumped for cover. Another man, Staff Sergeant Eric W. Stebner, ran out and began pulling Dube’s Skedco toward the peak, forty feet above. Staff Sergeant Harper Wilmoth, astounded by Stebner’s daring, warned him that he had better get out of the open or he would get shot. Stebner paid him no heed. Wilmoth thought to himself, “OK, I’ll just sit here and watch Stebner get killed.”

  The enemy marksmen did not hit Stebner. They did, however, strike several other Americans, of whom the most severely injured was Jason Cunningham, an Air Force pararescue jumper, whose liver was pierced by a bullet. Preserving the life of a man with such an injury lay beyond the capabilities of a combat medic and his small array of tools and salves. Cunningham needed to get to a hospital, and fast.

  Once US airpower had squelched the enemy counterattack, Self notified Task Force 11 headquarters that Cunningham and another wounded man were in need of urgent medical evacuation. General Trebon wanted to dispatch a helicopter to retrieve the wounded, but he had reason to fear that the enemy would shoot down the next helicopter too. Reports were coming in of more enemy personnel heading toward the landing zone, including a camera crew that intended to film the annihilation of the Americans. The less risky option would be to send a helicopter after dark.

  The preliminary reply from the headquarters was, “We’re working to get the package ready for you.” Minutes without word of an inbound helicopter turned into hours. A distraught Self started sending Trebon’s headquarters assurances that the enemy had been so thoroughly thrashed that an American medical evacuation helicopter would have nothing to fear. On several occasions, however, he was still on the radio when the gunfire of newly resurfaced adversaries perforated the mountain air.

  As the afternoon wore on, the warnings from the medics took on tones of pleading and despair. Self notified headquarters that if the casualties did not get out soon, three of them might die. Eventually, a voice on the other end said, “It’s not nighttime. It’s a hot LZ. We don’t feel safe.” No helicopter would be coming before nightfall.

  Cunningham’s condition took a sharp downward turn in the waning hours of daylight. Medic Matt LaFrenz kept telling Cunningham, “They’re going to come get us. We’re going to be out of here soon.” Cunningham, who himself knew combat medicine and could sense that his end was near, whispered to LaFrenz a message that he wished to be passed on to his wife. When the last drops of his life force appeared to be draining out, the medics inserted a breathing tube and administered CPR.

  At 6 p.m., Jason Cunningham died under a twilight sky. Self looked across the snowcapped peak to see LaFrenz and several others weeping.

  The first rescue helicopter arrived ninety minutes later. Trebon had put a group of SEALs aboard to help secure the landing zone and load the Ranger casualties. When the aircraft landed, however, the SEALs ran off to set up defensive positions without offering any assistance in the loading of the wounded. The job of hauling the casualties aboard the helicopters was left to the Rangers who had escaped injury, whose exhaustion was now blended with anger
at the SEALs. The loading took twenty minutes, much longer than anticipated, although not long enough to cost any more men their lives.

  For several more days, American infantry continued to battle the extremists in the Shahikot. The enemy gradually withdrew fighters from the valley, using routes that the US ground forces, having abandoned their blocking positions in order to take the place of the hammer, were unable to seal off. When Zia Lodin’s forces finally got up the nerve to sweep through the valley, on March 6, most of the enemy were either dead or gone.

  After the battle, the count of enemy who perished and the count of those who escaped became matters of high controversy. Combined Joint Task Force Mountain estimated the enemy death toll at 800. The small number of enemy corpses and body parts found on the battlefield, however, led others to conclude that the number was in the vicinity of 150 to 300. Whatever the number of enemy actually killed, the majority of enemy combatants most likely escaped, considering that the enemy had an estimated 1,000 fighters at the battle’s beginning and sent additional combatants into the valley during the fracas.

  The escape of large numbers of enemy fighters, and whatever senior leaders were with them, ensured that Anaconda would not be seen as a redemption of the Tora Bora operation. The collapse of the Afghan militias put the advising of US Special Forces further into disrepute, bolstering the argument of conventionally minded officers that if Americans wanted to get a job done, they had to do it themselves. Anaconda’s numerous calamities exposed serious flaws in the organizational and operational relationships between Army and Navy SOF, between air and ground units, and between tactical units and higher headquarters. They showed, too, that the most advanced optical devices, precision weapons, and communications systems of the information age had not eliminated the “fog and friction” of war that the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz had identified two centuries earlier—the misperceptions, confusion, and chance mishaps that made the easiest of tasks difficult.

  Anaconda marked the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan. With the departure of most Taliban remnants into Pakistan and the installation of Hamid Karzai as head of a new Afghan government, Anaconda seemed to have been merely an unpleasant afterthought to what had been the surprisingly easy and rapid overthrow of the Taliban. The US military checked Afghanistan off its to-do list and moved on to the next item, a new addition that was becoming the talk of Washington.

  PRESIDENT BUSH WAS at this moment rattling America’s saber at Iraq, demanding that dictator Saddam Hussein come clean on his inventory of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. US intelligence agencies suspected that Saddam would furnish weapons of mass destruction to anti-American terrorists, who would employ them in attacks that might eclipse even the destruction of the Twin Towers. American suspicions grew as Saddam refused to give a full accounting of his weapons programs.

  In early 2003, with war plans coming together at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld decided to commit 10,000 SOF to the invasion force, the largest SOF contribution to any war in US history. Although JSOC was still struggling to become a global counterterrorism powerhouse, Rumsfeld’s admiration for special operations forces as a whole was continuing to rise, fueled by the perception that their leaders had the intellectual flexibility and creativity required to reshape the military for the new millennium—qualities that Rumsfeld had found wanting in the conventional forces, especially the regular Army. Rumsfeld was at this time preparing to install a Special Forces officer, General Peter Schoomaker, as Army chief of staff, making him the first special operator ever to head an armed service.

  Schoomaker was to take the place of General Eric Shinseki, an infantry officer who had upset Rumsfeld with, among other things, his resistance to radical change and his hostility toward special operations forces. Shinseki, who had once scoffed to Rumsfeld that “no Special Forces soldier ever pulled me off the battlefield,” had attempted to snub the special operators by authorizing every Army soldier to wear the black beret, which had hitherto been reserved exclusively for the Rangers. The Ranger community howled that the policy would make a mockery of the black beret, while the Special Forces denounced it as an assault on their own beret-wearing tradition. Rumsfeld, concluding that Shinseki had been led astray by his dislike for SOF, had intervened personally in the matter, forcing a compromise in which the Rangers adopted the tan beret as their own while regular soldiers were allowed to don the black one.

  Rumsfeld at first contemplated invading Iraq with a small force, such that SOF teams would constitute a large percentage of the ground troops. Military planners, however, persuaded him that defeating the Iraqi armed forces—which were far larger than those of Afghanistan and did not have a hostile army like the Northern Alliance near their capital—would require an invasion force of 145,000 ground troops. In the final war plan, some of the special operations units were assigned to supporting tasks for conventional units, such as reconnoitering bridges in advance of conventional columns, or infiltrating the enemy rear to help rain bombs on supply depots and radar installations. Others were charged with unconventional warfare, raiding, and other missions in which conventional forces would support them.

  General Tommy Franks, who still headed Central Command and thus was in charge of this invasion as well, divided authority for special operations forces among several multinational commands. The Naval Task Force would command the US Navy SEALs and Polish naval commandos, who would be transported within the theater by regular Army and Navy units. At the start of the invasion, on March 20, its forces seized oil and gas platforms and the tanker terminal at Al Faw to keep Saddam from sabotaging them.

  The western desert of Iraq belonged to Task Force Dagger, consisting of the 5th Special Forces Group, a company of National Guardsmen from the 19th Special Forces Group, and several foreign special operations units. The 5th Group spent the early days of the war looking for Scud missiles, based on intelligence reports that Saddam had several dozen Scuds in the desert, but not a single Scud was found. Two ODAs from Task Force Dagger attempted to mobilize resistance forces in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, whose predominantly Shiite residents were believed to be simmering with hatred for the Sunni-dominated Iraqi government. When the Special Forces sent two Iraqi dissident officers into Najaf to link up with resistance groups, however, the men were captured and put on Iraqi state television. Abandoning the resistance support mission, the Special Forces teams turned to collecting intelligence for conventional forces. A company of the 5th Special Forces Group that attempted to back resistance elements in the city of Basra likewise failed to make any headway and ended up supporting conventional units.

  Task Force Viking, which had three hundred soldiers of the 10th Special Forces Group as its core and was subsequently reinforced by the 3rd Special Forces Group and several conventional units, had responsibility for supporting 50,000 Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq. The main objective in the north was to tie down the 150,000 Iraqi troops in the region so that they could not reinforce the Iraqi units defending Baghdad. Through the direction of air strikes, American special operators enabled the Kurds to wipe out much of the Iraqi fighting strength in the north and keep most of the remainder from heading south prior to the fall of Baghdad, all without a single American casualty.

  JSOC and a supplemental quick reaction force from the 82nd Airborne Division fell under Task Force 20. Two days before the invasion, the Delta Force commander, Colonel Ron Russell, suffered a brain aneurysm while jogging around the Saudi airfield where the unit was staging. Russell was not one of the 40 percent of victims for whom a brain aneurysm is fatal, but that was only modest consolation for a man who had trained and sacrificed for decades to lead troops into a war such as this. To take the place of the incapacitated Russell, JSOC commander Dell Dailey had several options. He decided on Pete Blaber, an act of considerable respect and magnanimity considering Blaber’s prior clashes with Dailey.

  Operation Iraqi Freedom, the invasion of Iraq, began on Ma
rch 20, 2003. While the massive convoys of a US Army Corps and a combined task force of US Marines and British armor rolled from Kuwait into southern Iraq, helicopters ferried Delta operators and Rangers to sites suspected of holding the chemical and biological weapons that had provided America’s causus belli. The special operators did not find any such weaponry.

  Dailey lobbied for the use of the Rangers in taking down the Baghdad International Airport, but the task ended up going to the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, which could bring much greater firepower to bear. The Rangers did get to capture three airfields in western Iraq, the garrisons of which offered little resistance before capitulating. At Haditha, Rangers seized the city’s five-mile-long dam to prevent the Iraqis from unleashing a flood against oncoming US forces. The dam’s civilian staff did not even know that the Rangers and their supporting aircraft had overpowered the installation’s defensive force until a group of Rangers barged into their sixth-floor office.

  As in the case of Afghanistan, Dailey dedicated some of his JSOC units to assaults on locations known to be empty, for the purpose of generating footage that could be aired publicly to demonstrate American impunity. As in Afghanistan, too, Pete Blaber tried to find innovative ways to involve Delta in the bigger war, and ran afoul of Dailey in so doing. Blaber wanted to insert seventy-five Delta operators into Iraq one day before the opening of hostilities, using fifteen Swiss-made Pinzgauer vehicles and two civilian sport utility vehicles. To help them interact with locals, they would bring along a psychologist, an Iraqi American veterinarian from Philadelphia, and a former Iraqi Army private who had fled Iraq by hiking through the desert on foot before becoming a successful real estate agent in San Francisco. Blaber contended that this approach would attract less attention from the Iraqis and yield more information than if the men were inserted by air, which was what Dailey advocated. When Dailey attempted to scuttle Blaber’s plan, General Franks intervened personally to preserve it, owing to his high regard for Blaber, whom he had come to know in Afghanistan.