by Couch, Dick
The helicopter, though badly damaged, managed to clear the insertion site and crash-land a few miles away. But as it veered away from the insertion, Neil Roberts fell from the craft and found himself on the ground, alone and surrounded by an entrenched enemy. His teammates at the crash site, as well as other SOF elements in the area, knew immediately that Roberts was still fighting but was in mortal danger. He was heavily outnumbered, and time was against him.
The SEAL senior chief petty officer in charge of the element immediately set up security at the helicopter crash site and directed the rescue of his team and the helicopter aircrew. But knowing that Roberts was on the ground, alone and fighting for his life, the senior chief asked to lead a team back to the original insertion site, in spite of the numerically superior force that held the ground. His Navy Cross citation reads: “After a treacherous helicopter insertion onto the mountain top, he led his team in a close-quarter firefight. He skillfully maneuvered his team and bravely engaged multiple enemy positions, personally clearing one bunker and killing several enemy within. His unit became caught in a withering crossfire from other bunkers and closing enemy forces. Despite mounting casualties, he maintained his composure and continued to engage the enemy until his position became untenable.”
The valiant rescue attempt by Neil Roberts’s teammates was met and defeated by overwhelming force and firepower. The episode turned into a complex fourteen-hour running firefight in rugged mountain terrain and waist-deep snow, an engagement that became known as the Battle of Takur Ghar. The SEAL senior chief did a magnificent job of caring for his wounded men and fighting off a determined enemy, but he had no choice but to withdraw. In the end, U.S. Navy SEAL Neil Roberts fought the enemy alone in a close-quarters firefight and was killed in that fight, possibly after being captured. “I will tell you very candidly,” the task force commander, Major General Frank Hagenbeck, said of Roberts, “that individual had been captured by three al-Qaeda members and we knew exactly where they were. We saw him on the Predator being dragged off by three al-Qaeda men.” Hagenbeck reported that Roberts had evidently been executed.
In the larger fight to save Roberts, and then to successfully recover his remains, six more Americans died on that mountain in Afghanistan. The loss of these men shocked many in the special operations community, and was a sobering look at the cost of going back for one of our own. Yet it remains an embedded tradition in SOF culture that the many, at substantial risk, will come back for the one.
Neil Roberts had left a letter with his wife with instructions that it should be opened if he failed to return. It read in part: “My time in the teams was special . . . I loved being a SEAL. I died doing what made me happy. Very few people have the luxury of that.” The balance of the letter was devoted to thanking his family for their love and support. He was thirty-two when he died, and he left behind a wife and young son.
Quickly on the heels of Operation Anaconda, thirty Chechen al-Qaeda fighters were spotted leaving the valley on foot. SEALs and other special operators from Neil’s unit managed to be inserted by helicopter in the path of the fleeing Chechens. Though this SEAL element was outnumbered two to one, they were the ones waiting in ambush. After a fierce firefight and with only minor SEAL casualties, they killed them to a man. No quarter was asked and none was given.
One of the men that the SEAL senior chief carried through the snow as they were driven off from the rescue of Neil Roberts had his lower leg severely mangled. He was rushed back to the States, but nothing could be done to save his leg. It was amputated just below the knee. A year later, this same SEAL warrior was back in Iraq and had his gun back in the fight—on a prosthetic leg. He was behind enemy lines conducting special operations as the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force pushed toward Baghdad. “Not a problem,” he said. “The docs did a great job. I can do anything on the new leg I could do on my old one. I’m still good to go.”
ON THE EVE OF the American invasion of Iraq, the SEALs were preparing to stage their biggest operation in their history so far, an attempt by more than 250 Naval Special Warfare personnel to capture two of Iraq’s key offshore oil platforms and three land-based pumping facilities without their being blown up and triggering an environmental disaster. The capture operation was planned as a coordinated attack just before the Army and Marines pushed in from Kuwait.
“You have to go back to the invasion beaches at Normandy,” recalled retired SEAL Vice Admiral Robert Harward, then the SEAL task force commander for operations in Iraq, “or some of the larger amphibious operations in the Pacific to find that many men on an operation. And even then, maybe not that many people moving at the exact same time. We’ve never seen the likes of this in our community, and we may never see it again.” He added, “From the outset, we knew it would be the largest coordinated SEAL operation in the history of Naval Special Warfare. As it turned out, more SEALs went in harm’s way that night than were deployed at any one time during the entire Vietnam War. We had a lot riding on this one.”
The Iraqi oil platforms were rigged up to explode, U.S. intelligence reports suggested. One of the platforms could load 1.6 million barrels of oil onto tankers in a single day. If it was blown up, the disaster would be twelve times worse than the Exxon Valdez oil spill—to say nothing of the economic losses. There were political stakes, too: at the time it was thought that oil revenues could be one of the main sources of income for a new, democratic Iraq, and these funds would offset the need for the United States to sink taxpayer dollars into the country.
“I had visions of our SEALs being blown off the terminal at the last minute and into a sea of burning oil,” recalled Admiral Harward. “We could do nothing but watch the gigantic oil slick that would blot the northern end of the Gulf from the Shatt al-Arab waterway to the Kuwaiti border. Eventually, it would work its way east and south and foul the Saudi desalinization plants.”
For the critical off-shore attacks, the SEALs would be supported by the Special Boat Teams. There has always been a bond between the SEALs and the “boat guys,” the Naval Special Warfare specialists who drove the eleven-meter, rigid-hull inflatable boats (RHIBs) and the sleek and fast sixty-five-foot Mark V patrol boats. This relationship goes back to when detachments from Boat Support Units One and Two, the forerunners of the current Special Boat Teams, deployed to Vietnam with SEAL Teams One and Two. They drove SEALs to work right after dark and came back for them just before sunrise. And sometimes, when the SEAL squads found themselves with more Viet Cong than they had bargained for, the boat guys “came in hot” and took them out of harm’s way.
Two nights prior to the night of the operation, the SEALs’ mission was to conduct reconnaissance and gather intelligence, to boost the odds that the SEALs and other allied forces could capture Iraq’s key oil facilities at the beginning of the invasion a few days hence, and to capture them before they were blown up. Again, the two offshore platforms were the key facilities and would be the most difficult to secure. The recon SEALs were traveling about thirty feet underwater in two Mk VIII SEAL delivery vehicles or SDVs. They were “riding wet,” wearing wet suits and fully exposed in the water in the free-flooding SDVs, breathing air from the mini-sub’s on-board air supply. The SDVs’ lighted displays flashed digital images of sonar and GPS coordinates.
After a two-hour underwater journey in their mini-subs, the SEALs briefly surfaced as they neared their targets. The platforms were lit up like Christmas trees, and the vast complexes were each strung out over nearly two miles of ocean. The SEALs already had lots of intelligence to plan their actual assault, from overhead imagery to construction and mechanical schematics, but they needed to inspect the platforms themselves. As any SEAL will tell you, there is no substitute for close-up “eyes on a target.”
“We pulled up to the outboard loading platform pad and tied the boat off to one of the platform legs,” recalled one of the SEALs on the mission. “After we tied up the boat we came up under the platform and went to work. W
e took a lot of pictures and made notes about the latticework and access wells. And we listened a lot. We wanted to get an overall impression of their activity and alert status, and to see if there were any obstacles in making the platform boarding from surface craft.”
“This was a good operation for us,” one SDV pilot reported. “We had a good GPS fix before we made our dive, and my navigator took me straight to our platform. The Gulf is a strange place. Three months later and the temperature there could have been in the low eighties. Cool water is better. It usually makes for better visibility. As it was that night, we could see about twenty feet.”
Of the two offshore platforms, MABOT (Mina al-Bakr Oil Terminal) was clearly the most active. Right up until the invasion began, there was a constant parade of tankers at MABOT. In the weeks leading up to hostilities, a full complement of four tankers were often seen at MABOT, as if Saddam wanted to pump as much oil as possible before the invasion. This was the last gasp of the corrupt UN oil-for-food program, which Saddam Hussein had managed to use to his own advantage, politically and militarily. If this facility alone could not be taken intact and fell victim to intentional sabotage, the environmental disaster would be huge. On the positive side of the ledger, MABOT alone could create billions of dollars in oil revenue.
The Khawr al-Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT) was a smaller facility with less capacity. It then operated at a capacity of some two hundred thousand barrels per day. KAAOT was deliberately blown up by the Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq War, at a huge environmental cost to the area. Repairs had been ongoing to this offshore terminal, but many international oil shippers still questioned its safety. Yet its potential economic benefit to the postwar recovery of Iraq was substantial. And like MABOT, it remained capable of an environmental disaster.
“One of the problems was its sheer size,” recalled one of the SEALs on the MABOT operation. “Picture if you can four platforms connected by a latticework highway some twelve miles out into the Persian Gulf. The first is an inboard platform used as a helo platform to offload personnel and supplies. The second one, some three hundred meters farther out, is the first loading platform. It’s as long as a football field and can handle two tankers, one on either side, for loading. The third, another loading station, is another three hundred meters out from there. Both the loading platforms are crammed with plumbing and holding tanks for servicing the tankers. The forty-eight-inch pipelines come out of the seabed and up to these platforms. The last platform, again some three hundred meters from the second refueling station, is the berthing and living quarters. Sitting on this platform is a four-story building. It’s a huge platform—the whole facility was huge. That’s why we, the force who was to board the platforms, were going to be a large one—at least large for a SEAL special operation.”
For two hours, the teams of SDV reconnaissance SEALs snuck around the bottom of the huge MABOT platform, inspected the below-the-water sections of the structure for mines, and discreetly took above-water pictures and video. Recalled one of the SEALs, “It was pretty quiet, but the platforms themselves were pretty well lit. We stayed in the shadows underneath; they never knew we were there.”
The good news was the SEALs couldn’t find any explosive charges positioned underwater on the platform. But there were many critical spots above water they couldn’t see, and they could not rule out the possibility that they were rigged to blow.
Before they left the Iraqi MABOT oil platform that night, the SDV SEAL recon team leader took a chance. He expected to be a member of the assault team on the platform a few days later, and he noticed a perfect place to access the structure—a ladder leading out of the water straight up onto the structure. He swam over to the ladder and quietly climbed up a few steps to check if it was secure. It was.
The SEALs then vanished into the water.
AT 10 P.M. ON March 20, 2003, armed with the intelligence gathered on the reconnaissance mission, Lieutenant Chuck Forbes and three groups of SEALs were drifting peacefully under a starlit sky in three eleven-meter RHIBs, holding their positions just three hundred yards away from the MABOT oil-tanker-loading platform, waiting for the order to strike. The Iraq War was about to begin.
Lieutenant Chuck Forbes was an experienced SEAL platoon commander. He had been around the teams for a while, and then some. He was a mustang officer, which meant he had prior enlisted experience. In the planning for this coordinated operation—a mission to secure the Iraqi oil export infrastructure intact—it became apparent that the MABOT terminal would be the most important and perhaps the most dangerous of the five targets, consisting of two offshore oil complexes and three land-based pumping stations. The smaller KAAOT oil platform would be attacked by another SEAL element and the SEALs’ close allies, the Polish GROM. The task group commander had wanted one of his best men on the MABOT platform. Forbes was selected to lead the SEAL force against this key installation. He was chosen for his leadership skills as well as his operational experience.
Forbes had grown up in Naples, Florida, and enlisted in the Navy shortly after high school. After boot camp, he received orders to BUD/S, where he graduated with Class 130 in 1984. He had two deployments as an enlisted man before being accepted into a Navy educational program that sends outstanding sailors back to college on their way to becoming commissioned officers. It took Forbes a little over two and a half years to complete his four-year degree—in nursing. He was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy Nurse Corps, a former Navy SEAL in a largely female community, perhaps the only one ever. For the next three years, he attended to his nursing duties at Balboa Naval Hospital. In the early 1990s, an oversupply of Navy nurses and an exodus of officers from the Teams allowed Forbes the opportunity he had been looking for. In 1994, he returned to the Teams and began operational training for duty as a platoon officer. This was his third deployment since his return to the Teams.
While the MABOT oil platform complex was a difficult and dangerous target, it was still the kind of leadership challenge that a SEAL officer waits his whole career for. As a former enlisted man and Navy nurse, Chuck Forbes had simply waited longer than most. And he would have to wait a while longer as yet another team of SEALs were to perform a final underwater recon of the two offshore platforms.
Some 250 Navy SEALs and allied support personnel were poised to strike this platform, the nearby KAAOT platform, and three onshore oil pumping stations. They included allied Polish GROM Special Forces, British Royal Marines, U.S. Marines, and a host of allied support aircraft overhead. But they were being ordered to hold their positions, so all the pieces of the complex assault could be moved into place for the simultaneous attacks on five targets. All had to be taken by surprise at the same time.
While their brother SEALs closed for their simultaneous raids on oil pumping facilities ashore, two SEAL assault elements moved into position to attack the offshore terminals. The moon was not yet up, but the terminal was brightly lit up, and the three rigid-hulled craft were trying to stay just outside the bubble of illumination thrown out from the series of platforms that constituted the terminal. The boats were heavily laden with SEALs and their support personnel.
“We can’t stay here much longer, sir,” Chief Jim Collins said to Lieutenant Chuck Forbes. Collins was in charge of the SEALs’ three-RHIB flotilla. “And if we get any closer, they’re sure to see us. Hell, they may have already seen us.”
This was the exact situation that Forbes had feared and tried to avoid. He glanced at his watch; he could feel the element of surprise slipping away. Aboard his little fleet of three boats were forty-nine souls—thirty-one SEALs, twelve Special Warfare Combatant Craft crewmen, two Navy EOD techs, two interpreters, an Air Force combat controller, and himself. Forbes was responsible for all of them.
“Screw them!” muttered Lieutenant Forbes. He wasn’t cursing the Iraqis. He was furious at his commanders several layers up the chain of command, who still wouldn’t let the SEALs move forward.
“We’re compromised!” radioed For
bes to his commanding officer. “We need to hit this platform now!”
The SEALs were ducking down trying not to be seen, but they were starting to drift into the illumination bubble of the structure’s floodlights. The SEALs wore green jumpsuits and body armor stuffed with ammunition, and black balaclavas over their faces. By now, Forbes was sure they’d been spotted. SEALs usually like to attack very fast, but tonight they were like ducks floating dead in the water. They’d wanted to approach the platform by sneaking up to the target underwater, but against their advice, the mission planners put them in open, exposed surface craft so the SEALs’ movement and timing could be coordinated by radio with the other pieces of the assault.
“We gotta wait ten minutes,” said the mission commander over the radio. In the sky above, spotters in U.S. aircraft were relaying real-time intelligence into the SEALs’ earpieces on the radio network, counting off the fortified positions, machine-gun nests, and sandbags on different points of the complex. The SEALs’ boats were drifting so close to the platform, Lieutenant Forbes recalled, he could see Iraqi figures running around on it. “I could see one guy who looked like he was surrendering waving a white handkerchief or something, but we couldn’t be sure.”
Planning and rehearsals for MABOT and KAAOT were built around intelligence that the oil terminals were staffed by civilian oil workers with a token security force, just like the onshore pumping facilities. The SEALs were supposed to first secure the valving that controlled the flow of oil to the terminals to prevent the oil workers from venting crude into the Gulf. Once the pipelines, valving, and storage tanks were secured, the assaulters would then move to clear the terminal of any Iraqi personnel. Plumbing first, then people. That was the plan right up until they approached the attack launch window. But in the last forty-eight hours, U.S. intelligence had detected an ominous development—the Iraqi oil workers manning the platform, it seemed, were replaced by heavily armed elite Republican Guard troops, the most feared unit in Saddam’s military. It was assumed that they would fight to the death. The intelligence reports had them aboard the offshore platforms with heavy weapons, RPGs, and crates of explosives.
