by Brandon Webb
Suddenly I saw a searing flash of light, nearly blinding in the pitch black. Explosively bright bursts of light streamed out through the wheelhouse windows, accompanied by sharp reports.
The helo pilot yanked on his stick, pulling us off station, ready to bank and haul ass out of there. I knew what he was thinking: We’re taking fire!
“Hold station!” I barked at him as the bird jerked hard left, nearly tossing me out the door. “No—don’t worry!”
It looked like hostile fire, especially on night vision—but it wasn’t. Our guys were just using standard hostile room-entry tactics, using flashbangs, a type of grenade simulator SEALs employ in operations like this. The flashbang is an effective (albeit somewhat dangerous) stun grenade. You crack open the door and roll this baby into the room, it goes off with a loud crash and burst of light, and everyone in the room is momentarily stunned and blinded, giving you a few seconds to move in and take them.
Our helo pilot put the bird steady back on course, and we watched the scene unfold below. Crash! Crash! Cabin after cabin they fanned out, scattering their explosive seeds and harvesting each roomful of stunned prisoners, clearing and securing area after area.
Without firing a shot, our guys had taken the ship.
One group immediately started a reclear, methodically going back through the entire vessel, room by room, making sure there were no stragglers. I heard it all happening over my comm. One of our guys had grabbed the hat off the ship’s captain’s head and now wore it himself. He lit up a cigar he must have found on the ship (the thing was loaded with illegal smokes) and started running from cabin to cabin reclearing the vessel, El Capitán’s chapeau perched on his cranium, chomping on his cigar and brandishing his M-4. Jesus, what a character.
Meanwhile, the rest of the crew were hauling our prisoners out onto the aft deck, about thirty of them in all. Typically guys captured in a slam-bang operation like this will be so frightened they will be pretty submissive at this point, but occasionally you’ll get someone who decides to go aggressive. An incident like that had occurred back in 1999, when a guy from SEAL Team Three got into a scuffle with one of his team’s prisoners. His weapon went off and he took a round in the leg. Another SEAL patched him up. (No doc. Ouch.) Since then we’d started wearing weapons catches; we would slip our primary weapon to the side and into the catch so it would be fixed and not go flopping around (as had happened with Gilroy Jones on my first day with ECHO platoon).
I could see there were some pretty belligerent characters here, and our guys appeared to be giving them some tough love.
“Hey,” I said to the sensor operator, “move the FLIR forward of the superstructure.” And let these guys do their job, I added to myself. The image on the FLIR was being streamed back to the command post on the destroyer, and I wanted to keep these guys out of trouble. There was no outright abuse or wrongful conduct happening here, but our guys would do whatever it took to contain this situation fast and hard. This was not a time for waffling or second-guessing.
In a few hours we would be turning the boat over to a Maritime Interdiction Force, a specially trained navy crew who would steer it down to a holding area off the coast of Dubai, where it would be turned over to one of the alphabet-soup intelligence agencies. From that point on we would never know what happened or exactly what these characters were up to. But it didn’t take a high-level clearance to see that they were up to something big—and not good.
All told, we’d taken about thirty prisoners, a bunch of fake passports, over a hundred grand in U.S. dollars, and a lot of weapons. From start to finish, we pulled off this high-threat takedown in about five minutes, with maybe another ten to comb the ship and make sure everything and everyone was accounted for.
It was a textbook boarding.
* * *
In late November, not long after that successful nighttime op in the Gulf, about half our platoon was flown down to stage on Masirah Island off the coast of Oman, to the southeast of the United Arab Emirates and the easternmost tip of Saudi Arabia, where they would spend a few weeks modifying some army Humvees to ready them for us to use in Afghanistan. Because of my air quals, I stayed behind in Kuwait to pack up all our gear. I knew how to build a pallet, how to label all the hazmats, weight it all correctly, and work with the aircrews to make sure everything was safe and to spec. I got everything packed and all our pallets loaded onto a big old C-130 and boarded it to make the roughly 1,000-mile flight to Oman.
Once on the plane and nestled safely among the pallets, I settled in to grab some sleep.
A short while later, I woke up. Something was wrong. The plane was humming along, but at an odd pitch. I jumped up and headed for the cockpit to see what was going on. Didn’t take long to find out. We’d lost an engine.
I woke up our crew chief and told him what was happening. He freaked out. It was the middle of the night, and we were rapidly losing altitude over the Persian Gulf. Warning lights were going on all over the cockpit. I woke up the rest of the guys and briefed them in a few sentences. We had work to do.
To help compensate for the plane’s awkward angle and the resulting shift in its center of gravity, we had to move our gear. A crew of us got behind one big pallet and started pushing that sucker forward. It was mighty heavy, and because of the plane’s tilt the push was all uphill. We moved it about 10 feet and locked it into place, then got to work on another one. Pretty soon we had the plane leveling out, and the pilot made a successful emergency landing in Bahrain, about halfway to our destination, where we spent the rest of that night before giving it another try the next morning.
It was a mighty inauspicious way to start a mission into one of the deadliest places on the planet. It was a good thing I didn’t believe in omens. Or at least, not as much as I believed in our guys and our training.
The next day we and our C-130 made it the rest of the way to Oman, where we joined the rest of our platoon at a large staging area. By this time operations in Afghanistan were well under way. On October 7, while my buddies and I were boarding oil smugglers off the coast of Iraq, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair each announced the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom, a joint effort between the Afghan United Front and U.S. and U.K. forces to oust the Taliban and al Qaeda influence and destroy their terrorist training infrastructure in Afghanistan. That same day, American and British air forces began massive aerial bombardment of Kabul and a few other key locations in Afghanistan. By the time our platoon was staging in Oman, the Taliban’s control over Kabul had been decimated, and our guys were starting to establish a foothold.
We knew there was a lot going on over there and that we would be joining the action sooner or later, but we didn’t know exactly when or exactly where, or what we’d be doing when we got there. In fact, we didn’t know much of anything. They did their best to brief us in Oman, but information was sketchy. Maps of the area, for example, were either a mess or nonexistent. We had some old Soviet-era maps, but they were next to worthless. Our briefings covered the current political situation and the latest intelligence, both of which were in a state of constant flux. It was amazing just how little we knew about Afghanistan.
A lot of our C-130 gunships were based there in Oman. They would take off from our staging area and fly northeast across the mouth of the Persian Gulf and then through Pakistani airspace until they were over Afghanistan, where they would wreak havoc on Taliban enclaves.
The C-130s videotaped these raids, and the gunship crews would invite us over each day to watch their videotapes from the night before. We watched hours of this footage, and it was one of the most bizarre things I’d ever seen. It sounds trite to say it looked like nothing so much as a video game, but that’s about the size of it. There would be a basically blacked-out screen, dotted with dozens of tiny little green trails zipping around. These, we knew, were the heat signatures of people running for their lives into the mountains while the C-130s continued pounding them from the sky. These gu
nships fly at 20,000 feet with their howitzers trained on the ground below. They are so high up, those poor bastards on the ground couldn’t see or hear a thing up there—all they knew was that death was raining down on them. We called it Murder TV.
We watched them wipe out hundreds of enemy forces. Holy shit, I thought, and I was pretty sure the other guys watching were thinking the same thing. This is no joke. I knew one thing: I did not want to be a little heat signature on the end of that kind of firepower.
Meanwhile, we pitched in with the rest of the platoon, helping to get all our gear together and convert those Humvees, ripping off their doors and getting everything customized to save weight. This was not Desert Storm terrain or the relatively flat Somalian plateau of Mogadishu; Afghanistan was home to a section of the frigging Himalayas. As little prepared as we were for the terrain, we were similarly unprepared for the weather. Temperatures could be up into the high 90s and higher during the day and plummet to below freezing at night. More on that topic later.
Soon the word came down: We were heading to Kandahar Airport, one of the first bases we were establishing on the ground. Kandahar International Airport had been occupied by the Soviets at the beginning of their ten-year siege starting in December 1979 and was severely damaged during that decade. In recent months it had become one of the toughest Taliban strongholds, but the Taliban forces there had been squeezed by Afghan loyalists (tribal fighters) led by Gul Agha Sherzai, the pre-Taliban governor of Kandahar, and Hamid Karzai, who would later become the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan, and U.S. forces had ramped up the effort. An expeditionary force of marines was sweeping in from nearby Camp Rhino to the south, the Coalition’s first ground-based stronghold, to take the airport.
Kandahar Airport would now become the base of operations for Task Force K-Bar, the Spec Ops group we would be joining. One of the first ground assault teams in the U.S.-led invasion, Task Force K-Bar was composed of Special Operations forces from eight different nations: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Turkey, and the United States. Here also was some interesting news: Task Force K-Bar was being run by none other than Captain Bob Harward—our second CO at SEAL Team Three, the guy who had taught me how to take the lead in a beach run by tying up the other guy’s boots. Good. Harward was an animal, and I mean that in the best sense. He would pull no punches.
At Oman they went over the current rules of engagement (ROE) with us, and this was a surprise. The ROE seemed to boil down to this: You see any dark-skinned male of fighting age, i.e., fifteen years old or older, and you’re cleared to engage.
Now that was highly unusual. Normally the ROE for combat missions are pretty complicated and quite strict. If anything, SEALs can tend to feel frustrated and operationally hampered in combat situations by what often feel like unnecessarily restrictive (and perhaps more politically than strategically motivated) ROE. (For example, read Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor with an eye out for this point, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.) But they were not messing around here. This was something like the conditions that prevailed on the damaged USS Cole. At the time of that attack, the forces on the deck had felt hamstrung by ROE. By the time we got there eight hours later, the ROE had drastically changed by presidential order: Anyone gets within 500 feet of this ship, you kill him.
We got the general impression that there were Taliban and al Qaeda running around everywhere, and it was often difficult to know who was who and who was on which side. Some of these tribal leaders were smart fuckers, too, and knew how to take advantage of our own lack of clear orientation. They would tell Coalition forces, “Those guys over there, across that ridge, are Taliban,” and then U.S. troops would go wipe out those guys over there, across that ridge—only to learn later that they had just wiped out a rival warlord that the first guys had been battling for decades, and that it had nothing whatsoever to do with al Qaeda or Taliban. I did not learn about this latter complication until we’d been in-country for a while, but we did get the general impression that it was chaos over there.
We didn’t know what to expect. We’d seen all this footage from the C-130s, and it looked like a free-for-all, like the Wild West. I asked Chief Dye exactly what he thought we were walking into. “Man,” he said, “I don’t know. All I can tell you is, we’re going into the shit.”
* * *
Before we left Oman, an unfortunate episode occurred. Two Air Force Combat Controllers (also called Combat Control Technicians, or CCT) had been assigned to our platoon. They would go along with us on missions once we were on the ground in Afghanistan and be in charge of calling in whatever air support we needed.
Air Force Combat Controllers are fantastic, and we were glad to have them. All these guys do is comms, and they’re really good at it. Unfortunately, as we soon realized, these two particular Combat Controllers were quite young and inexperienced. Actually, I’m being nice. It wasn’t their lack of experience that was the problem, it was their attitude. Chief Dye wanted to make them feel they were part of the platoon and tried to get them to roll up their sleeves and participate, but they just did not play ball. They’d been in Oman for a while, and they were not that focused on what we were doing. They never offered to help out. We’d tell them, “Hey, guys, we need you here tomorrow morning to help us work on these Humvees,” and they wouldn’t show up.
Finally Chief Dye caught them playing grab-ass with some of the air force girls on base. That was the last straw, and he fired them, saying we would get some more mature air force guys once we got over into Afghanistan.
When the two guys came over to pick up their stuff, one of them tried to get back a pair of boots he’d traded to Chris Osman. Osman wasn’t about to give up those boots and was not that interested in whatever this guy’s problem was. In the course of the exchange the guy said something insulting to him.
Now, dissing Osman to his face is not a wholesome plan. The guy can go from zero to seeing red in seconds. He very calmly set down the MRE he was eating and quietly said, “Okay, you and me, we’re going outside right now.” He said it so evenly that the guy didn’t quite understand what he meant, but he immediately got uneasy.
“What,” he said, already backpedaling.
“You just insulted me in front of my guys,” replied Osman.
“Okay,” the guy said, “but what do you mean, we’re going outside?”
“Well,” Osman explained as he slowly got to his feet, “we’re going outside, and I’m going to kick the shit out of you, and then I’m going to come back in here and finish my MRE. That’s what’s going to happen.”
The guy literally started to tremble. It was sad. “Look,” he stammered, “I—I—I don’t want any trouble—you can have the boots, I’m out of here,” and he was gone.
The two air force guys felt they’d been embarrassed by the whole episode, and they were not happy about it. Months down the road, this would come back to bite us. It planted a seed of resentment that ended up costing me a medal and getting Osman sent home.
* * *
In the middle of December our boots hit Afghan soil for the first time. Rolling down the ramp of the C-130, hitting the ground and looking around, it felt like being dropped onto the set of a classic Vietnam movie like Platoon or Apocalypse Now. Helicopters filled the air; equipment was moving everywhere. Chaos. There was clear evidence of that initial firefight in which the marines had wrested control of the airport from Taliban forces: broken glass everywhere, and bloodstains all over the place. Our buddies from the Corps had clearly kicked some serious Taliban ass taking this place.
The first guys in hadn’t yet quite figured out our footprint here, and EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) teams were still working to clear the perimeter, which was no small task. When the Soviets had been here years earlier, they had blanketed the place with land mines. In fact, Afghanistan is one of the two or three most heavily land-mined countries on the planet. The morning after we landed, a marine we
nt out walking and veered too far off perimeter. He stepped on a mine and blew his leg off. One of the SEAL corpsmen, Marco Gonzalez, put a tourniquet on the guy and patched him up.
That first week at Kandahar Airport things were pretty crazy, as our command structure worked to set up a tactical ops center and hammer out some kind of order in this place. Meanwhile, we got settled in as best we could. We constructed a homemade shower, built a fire pit, and a sort of lounge (though there was no alcohol on the premises, or at least there wasn’t supposed to be), and carved out little rooms for ourselves in some of the outer-perimeter airport buildings. We had taken over a set of buildings right next to the Army Special Forces unit where we had our compound, which looked like nothing so much as a little shantytown.
We set up camp with stuff that we foraged in those areas that had been cleared by the EOD team. It was like a treasure hunt, and we found all sorts of wild and crazy stuff. There were old Soviet tanks and MIGs rotting away on the tarmac. A few guys found AK-47s wrapped in rags and hidden in the bathrooms, locked and loaded and ready to go. We found torture rooms, including boards outfitted with leather straps that clearly had been used for some kind of prisoner interrogation, and not the polite kind.
Kandahar Airport also served as our prisoner-of-war staging camp. As the Afghanistan effort proceeded, all the Taliban, al Qaeda, and others who were captured in the field would be brought to Kandahar to be processed and interrogated before being flown to Guantánamo. By the time we got there, people had already set up a large prison camp facility that bore a striking resemblance to the POW camp I’d been incarcerated in at SERE school: guard towers, barbed wire, the whole package. Surreal.
* * *
On Christmas Day 2001, we went out on our first patrol in Afghanistan. We spent all afternoon packing our gear and were ready for anything. We had the Mark 41 automatic grenade gun, which launches a series of mic-mic (40 mm) grenades. It’s like shooting a machine gun, only instead of bullets, you’re firing a string of grenades. We had rocket launchers and LAW rockets strapped all over our vehicles, as well as a .50 cal and an M-60 machine gun. Our comm antenna was hooked up so our comms guys could link into satellite, and we were all outfitted with night-vision gear. We were, in other words, loaded for bear.
