Risky Missions and Empty Targets
The vastness of the moonless night sky swallowed the turboprop drone of the four blacked-out Combat Talons high above Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Headed north, the planes crossed into Afghan airspace at about 11 P.M., October 19, skimming low across the Registan Desert. On board were 199 Rangers with a mission to seize a desert airstrip and thus send a message to the world that the United States was able to put troops on the ground in Afghanistan at will. Within days, the Pentagon would release a video of the operation—produced by a psychological operations unit—to the media, but without the essential context that the airfield seizure was supporting a simultaneous mission taking place about 100 miles to the northeast. There, Chinooks and Black Hawks were slicing through the darkness carrying more than a squadron of Delta operators plus a Ranger company on the night’s main effort: a surprise attack on Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar’s residential compound in the Taliban’s hometown of Kandahar, a mission that would be the farthest air assault in history. After five frustrating weeks, this was the night that the U.S. military’s ground war in Afghanistan would begin, and JSOC was taking the lead.1
At MacDill Air Force Base, Tommy Franks watched as icons representing the MC-130s inched across a map on a giant plasma screen in the Central Command joint operations center. Dell Dailey called with an update from Masirah: “Missions on target in nine minutes.” Despite early indications that both targets were empty, “the freshest reconnaissance imagery revealed the Taliban had installed a security force at Objective Rhino,” Franks would later say. (One planner said the pictures showed “people,” but not necessarily a “security force.” Other sources did not recall this imagery at all.) Now Franks checked with Dailey. “Any activity on the ground, Dell?” Franks asked. “Negative, sir. No issues, no drama,” Dailey said calmly.2
But JSOC was taking no chances. A Predator unmanned aerial vehicle had already destroyed two armored vehicles on the target.3 Now, as the Rangers on the Talons made last-minute adjustments to their gear, ahead of them fiery orange blossoms punctuated the darkness of the arid plateau. Global Positioning System–guided 2,000-pound bombs dropped by B-2 stealth bombers were finding their marks. Circling AC-130 gunships also softened up the target, pounding it with 105mm cannon fire. “Initial reports were that eleven enemy had been killed and nine were seen running away,” according to an official history.4
The Rangers’ morale was high. The elite infantrymen saw themselves as the tip of the United States’ spear, ready to exact revenge for September 11. They had spent the last ten days sitting on a desert island becoming increasingly frustrated as their leaders worked to keep them focused. Now the time for action was finally at hand. They were just minutes from making the first Ranger combat parachute assault since December 1989’s Panama invasion. On each plane, the nervous soldiers together recited the Ranger Creed, the twelve-sentence articulation of the regiment’s ethos, ending with the defiant chant: “Rangers lead the way!”5 Then, after almost four hours in flight, with the aircraft nearing the target and jumpmasters barking orders, they stood up and lumbered forward in ungainly fashion, under the awkward weight of their rucksacks strapped to their thighs, their reserve parachutes on their chests and main chutes on their backs. The Talons were a mere 800 feet above the ground, so low that an influx of dust coated the Rangers as the doors opened for the jump.6 Outside, the only illumination came from flares the aircraft dropped to ward off the threat of heat-seeking missiles and from fires already burning on the objective.7 For this jump the Rangers would use a door on each side of the aircraft. After finishing their verbal and hand signal commands, the jumpmasters told the Rangers to “stand by” and turned and readied themselves in the doors. As the muted lights above and beside the doors on the first aircraft turned from red to green, the jumpmasters stepped out into the night.8
* * *
The Masirah airstrip from which the Rangers had taken off had been transformed over the previous fortnight from a deserted stretch of tarmac to a high-tech hub of military activity. A few days into October, massive C-5 transport aircraft carrying everything required to build JSOC’s space-age joint operations center began touching down every ten minutes on the runway at the northern end of the forty-mile-long island. In the searing desert heat and stifling humidity, a tent city began to rise.9 The JSOC advance party deployed from Bragg October 6. Most of the JOC staff followed a day later. The first of eight C-5s transporting TF Brown landed October 8. To deceive any interested parties about JSOC’s plans, Dailey directed troops to deploy wearing woodland green camouflage and then change into desert uniforms once they were at Masirah. The Rangers landed in chartered airliners. Combat Talons from the 1st Special Operations Wing arrived. Dailey himself flew over October 10.10 Twenty-one and a half years after the debacle that resulted in JSOC’s creation, America’s most elite special operators were back on Masirah. It was from here, hidden from the prying eyes of the news media, that Dell Dailey planned to run JSOC’s war in Afghanistan.
Within a few days, engineers had completed construction of the operations center from which Dailey would oversee combat operations 700 miles away. Consisting of scores of air-conditioned tents arrayed in a spoked-wheel design, the JOC was a testament to the wealth and computing might of the world’s one remaining superpower. Inside, the tents were festooned with the communications gear the staff required to stay connected to operators and headquarters around the globe. As with everything else to do with JSOC, little expense was spared. “Within twenty-four hours of our plane touching down, we were watching the BBC on seventy-two-inch plasma flat-screen TVs,” wrote Blaber, who, along with about fifty other Delta operators was among the first to arrive. However, all those laptops, squawking satellite radios, and video screens offered only the illusion of understanding, according to the Delta ops officer. “There was just one thing missing,” he wrote. “We had no situational awareness of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda or UBL.”11
Despite the size of the tented Taj Mahal JSOC was building at Masirah, the command deployed only a fraction of its ground forces: one Ranger battalion (the 3rd); a squadron-plus from Delta (B Squadron, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Chris Sorenson, plus A Squadron’s second troop, or A2—an assault troop); less than a third of the 160th’s 1st Battalion, plus a few 2nd Battalion Chinooks; and Team 6’s Blue Team. All came with headquarters elements that reported to the JSOC joint operations center. On September 17 JSOC had sent out an “alert force update” with orders to maintain forces ready to conduct 0300 global counterterrorism missions, so the Aztec, Trident, and Bullet packages remained on alert at their home stations, along with roughly half the JSOC staff, ready for any other crisis that might rear its head.12 Those elements that deployed forward acquired a new name: Task Force Sword.
Time on the island was to be fleeting for some of the new arrivals, however, because after steaming more than 6,000 miles in twelve days, the Kitty Hawk neared Oman October 10, ready to receive its complement of about 600 JSOC personnel.13 These included the Delta and Team 6 tactical elements; 3rd Ranger Battalion’s B Company; all twenty Task Force Brown Black Hawks and Chinooks and their crews; and a small Task Force Sword command and control element. While the helicopters and crews self-deployed to the carrier, most others flew out to the ship on a C-2A Greyhound turboprop aircraft.14 By October 15 the JSOC forces were in place aboard the carrier.15
Task Force Sword’s operational security demands, which to outsiders sometimes appeared to border on paranoia, required the Kitty Hawk crew to maintain a five-mile exclusion zone that no other ship was allowed to enter. The sailors began to refer to the ship as the “stealth carrier.” Nor was life for the task force elements aboard the Kitty Hawk without its challenges. Unlike 1994’s Haiti operation, when the Navy took all the jets off the America and turned the carrier into a floating platform just for JSOC, this time a small number of jets, including eight F/A-18C Hornets remained on the Kitty Hawk, flying missions over Afghanistan night and day and playing havoc with the “battle rhythm” of the Task Force Sword personnel, who were on a reverse cycle—working through the night and trying to sleep through the roar of fighter-bombers launching off the deck during the day. Although the Kitty Hawk had sailed to the northern Arabian Sea with only fifteen of the ninety or so planes and helicopters it could hold, those aircraft still jostled for space with Task Force Brown’s Black Hawks and Chinooks. “It was very hard for us and them to juggle twenty-four-hour operations of two totally different types of mission,” said a Brown aviator. “We made it work, but it was a lot of work.”16
* * *
On both Masirah and the Kitty Hawk, planning was under way in earnest for JSOC’s first missions of the post-9/11 era.
On September 20, President Bush had delivered a televised address to a joint session of Congress in which, without naming the command, he hinted at the role JSOC would assume in the months and years ahead. “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen,” he said. “It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.”17 For JSOC, the ultimate covert special ops organization, the irony was that the command’s first missions would fall into the former category, rather than the latter. After the demise of the plan to assault the fertilizer factory, Central Command proposed two targets18 that quickly became JSOC’s priorities. One came directly from Franks: a desert airstrip about 100 miles southwest of Kandahar built for Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the United Arab Emirates’ military chief of staff. A keen falconer, the sheikh had had a 6,400-foot paved runway installed in a dry lake bed to give him access to a nearby hunting camp. After the September 11 attacks he alerted Franks to its existence and suggested U.S. forces use it to reduce the number of troops they might need to deploy to Pakistan. Franks wanted the Rangers to seize the airfield so the United States could use it to deploy a Marine task force into southern Afghanistan.19 The airstrip, which planners quickly dubbed Objective Rhino, also appealed to JSOC planners because it offered the possibility of putting a helicopter forward arming and refueling point there.20 The other target, named Gecko, was Mullah Omar’s compound on the north side of Kandahar city, the Taliban’s base of power.
The Rangers had been examining the possibility of seizing Rhino about a week after September 11,21 when there were still hopes Pakistan might allow the United States to launch raids from its territory. They planned to use a company-plus of Rangers to take the airstrip, which JSOC could then use as a forward support base. Once the fertilizer factory faded into oblivion and Masirah and the Kitty Hawk entered the equation, the planning cell at Benning turned its attention to first Rhino, then Gecko, as the most likely candidates to fulfill the chain of command’s desire for a highly visible “boots on the ground” mission. Rhino was to be a Ranger mission while Delta would be the lead force assaulting Gecko.
The plans for the two missions evolved over the course of four weeks. Although Rhino was the first of the two targets to emerge, it soon became a supporting element to the assault on Gecko: a place where the helicopters involved in the latter mission could consolidate, refuel, and rearm. In late September the planners’ intent was for the Rangers to take the airstrip forty-eight hours before a combined Delta and Ranger air assault on Omar’s compound. D-day for the Rhino mission was set for October 14. But as with the canceled assault on the fertilizer factory, that date continued to slide to the right. As it did so, the plan changed. Now the raids were to take place simultaneously. That caused another late alteration to the plan. Less than a week before the missions launched, both were planned as air assault (i.e., heliborne) missions.22 The Gecko raid would involve the Delta and Ranger elements aboard the Kitty Hawk flying 575 miles straight to the target on Chinooks and Black Hawks.23 The Rhino assault force, made up of 3rd Battalion Rangers, was to land in three Chinooks launched off the Kitty Hawk, supported by three other MH-47Es—one for combat search and rescue, one carrying a quick reaction force, and one configured as a “fat cow” refueling aircraft. Two DAPs—the Black Hawks configured as attack helicopters—would provide fire support. But as the size of the Ranger force assigned to Rhino steadily grew, planners realized there weren’t enough helicopters to run each operation as an air assault.24 The Rangers would have to jump in. So it was that Rhino, originally planned as a “somewhat minimal” helicopter assault to support Gecko, morphed into a substantial and telegenic airborne operation launched from Masirah.
The desire on the part of Dailey, Franks, and Bush for a televised spectacle undoubtedly factored into the decision to make the Rhino raid a parachute assault. “I absolutely remember Dailey talking about the president wanting footage,” a planner said. But some observers suspected that a hankering for glory, rather than any tactical necessity, was also behind the increase in the Rhino assault force, which eventually included both Lieutenant Colonel Stefan Banach, the 3rd Battalion commander, and Votel, the regimental commander, as well as other headquarters personnel (even the 3rd Battalion chaplain) jumping in to command and control a force consisting of little more than two infantry companies. It had been almost twelve years since the Rangers had jumped into Panama and, the cynics said, the chance to gain their “mustard stains”—the coveted gold stars on their jump wings that denoted a combat jump—was apparently irresistible to some. “Numerous [personnel] that normally would not be involved in an operation like that that did it purely to get a combat jump,” said a Masirah source. But Command Sergeant Major Walter Rakow, the regiment’s top enlisted man, who did not make the jump, denied this was Votel’s motive. “That was not Votel’s reason for going,” he said. Rather, with Rangers in several different locations that night, “the commander felt that his best position to work from would have been from Rhino.” Votel saw his role as communicating with the operation’s other moving pieces and Masirah while Banach focused on “the ground fight,” Rakow added.
To many experienced operators on the Kitty Hawk, on Masirah, and back at Bragg, the growing size and complexity of the missions, with their many moving parts and refuelings, bore an unsettling resemblance to the operation whose failure had given birth to JSOC. Indeed, attacking Omar’s compound would require the Chinooks and Black Hawks to fly farther than the Sea Stallions had in Eagle Claw, with each helicopter needing two aerial refuelings en route to the target, another while the assaulters were on the objective, a fourth refueling on the ground at Rhino, and a further two aerial refuelings en route back to the carrier.25
The risks inherent in such long-haul, complex missions over denied territory were one factor behind a growing opposition in Delta and JSOC to conducting the Gecko and Rhino raids at all. “We really didn’t want to go to Desert One again as the primary option,” a retired special operations officer said. Franks himself described each assault as “a moderate-to-high-risk operation.” However, he added, “I had confidence that the Rangers and the SMU operators could handle themselves deep in enemy territory.”26
But there was another reason voices in Masirah were raised against the proposed raids: intelligence suggested each target was empty. “When an intelligence officer first presented ‘the targets’ to us in a briefing, he nonchalantly added that there wasn’t any enemy on either target,” Blaber wrote.27 “A lot of people were of the opinion that it was probably a dry hole,” said Hall. “I think we would have been surprised if Mullah Omar was on Gecko. I think we would have been surprised to find anything significant on Rhino.”
In his autobiography, Franks said Central Command had “chosen” not to bomb Omar’s compound, “hoping it would serve as a magnet for Omar and his deputies.” But he cited no intelligence indicating the target was occupied. Rather, the CENTCOM boss gives two other reasons for assaulting Gecko and Rhino: an expectation that JSOC forces would find a wealth of exploitable intelligence on Omar’s compound, and the desire to conduct a surprise attack in the Taliban “heartland,” thus demonstrating that the United States “could strike anywhere, at any time of our choosing” while fixing the Taliban’s reserves in the south, preventing them from reinforcing the northern positions that the Northern Alliance would soon be attacking with help from their American friends.28
Although Franks claimed credit for the decision to have the task force assault Gecko and Rhino, the idea of attacking empty targets in order to send a message to the Taliban was pure Dailey, the self-styled information operations expert. “He believed that if we raided empty targets in Afghanistan and filmed the raids for the world to see (he always said CNN), we would have some kind of morale-breaking effect on the enemy,” Blaber wrote.29 But using the JSOC task force to raid Gecko and Rhino just to show the Taliban that U.S. forces could do it rubbed many in the command the wrong way. “This was a demonstration mission, which is not exactly what JSOC ought to be used for,” said a retired special operations officer.
Several senior JSOC officials advised Dailey against conducting the raids.30 “I gave that counsel to the general, I absolutely did,” based on the level of risk and the likelihood that the targets would turn out to be “dry holes,” said Mike Hall, Dailey’s senior enlisted adviser. “You were hanging some people out there in the middle of nowhere with not tremendously good plans to back them up,” he said. “I just did not think it was a good idea.… I’m not sure anybody really thought Omar was there and I just thought it was a lot of risk with so many enemy forces so close by.”
To a Delta operator familiar with the planning, the decision to raid the airstrip and Omar’s compound originated from the same misguided thought process that came up with the fertilizer factory target: “That got killed off and so what do we do? Let’s go raid Mullah Omar’s empty house and this empty airfield out in the middle of the desert.” Although others, including Franks, suggested the targets originated with Central Command, the operator blamed Dailey for the decision to proceed, which he described as “monumental recklessness that can’t be emphasized enough.”
But Dailey overrode these objections, to the dismay of senior Delta personnel. “It’s like a nightmare unfolding in front of us,” said the operator. “There were no fucking off-roads at this point. The plan was the plan.” This view was not unanimous, however. A planner who had opposed the fertilizer plant mission was less worried about this one. “Of course we were concerned, because the time/distance issues and the amount of aircraft made it extremely complex and extremely difficult,” he said. But he added that the detailed planning “prepared us extremely well for having the ability to pull this off.”
The JSOC commander’s determination to drive on with the missions reflected his faith in the units involved, according to his senior NCO. “General Dailey had a tremendous amount of confidence in those organizations, especially the special mission units, but also the Rangers,” Hall said.
JSOC also tried to find a mission for Team 6. Some planning went into a possible assault on what a TF Brown source described as “a set of power line stanchions that they wanted to take down”—named Objective Badger—about twenty-five miles southeast of Gereshk on Highway 1 between Kandahar and Herat. However, Rumsfeld withheld approval. Instead the Blue operators on the Kitty Hawk busied themselves preparing for a much higher profile mission: a hostage rescue from under the Taliban’s noses in Kabul itself.31
* * *
Planning for Rhino and Gecko entered the final phase. Another rock drill was held on Masirah October 14.32 The operation was growing more complex by the day. As was often the case with JSOC, the complexity revolved around the helicopters. The distance a helicopter can fly depends on a variety of factors, including the altitude at which it’s flying, the air temperature, the weight of any passengers or cargo, and the amount of fuel in its tanks. Keeping these in balance so the aircraft had enough fuel to get where they needed to go, but not so much that the fuel’s weight overly restricted what could be carried, challenged TF Brown’s planners and meant the helicopters did not top up their tanks when being refueled, but instead “managed” their fuel levels to ensure they could still carry their passengers. For the Gecko raid, in order for the Black Hawks to carry the gas they needed, they could only take five operators each. “Those five operators were probably planning to be 300 pounds apiece, with all their kit,” said a TF Brown source. The distances the aircraft would have to fly to and from Gecko and the number of operators they’d be carrying required an exquisitely choreographed refueling ballet, with the helicopters being refueled in midair by turboprop MC-130P Combat Shadows, which in turn would cycle back and forth to a KC-135 Stratotanker jet at a higher altitude for their own aerial refueling. (It was this need for the MC-130Ps to hit the KC-135, and the timing of it, that required the helicopters to land at Rhino for one of their refuelings.)33
A couple of days before the raids two AC-130s flew from Masirah on a path that took them over Rhino and Gecko before returning to the island. Although the gunships hit what a TF Sword source described as “targets of opportunity” en route to and from the objectives, they made the flight to confirm the mission timeline and to desensitize anyone on the ground to the sound of the planes overhead.
The flights detected no enemy on either objective, yet in a bizarre twist the closer the missions loomed, the more paranoid the intelligence briefings became about what the task force might encounter on the targets.34 Having initially suggested the targets were empty, intel folks now warned the operators to “assume” there might be enemy forces on Rhino equipped with advanced night vision goggles. Much talk centered on the Taliban’s air defenses, which—in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary—some alarmists in the intelligence community were hyping out of all proportion to the actual threat. A September 28 briefing warned that Rhino was mined, and that a ZSU 23-4—a tracked, radar-guided, four-barreled antiaircraft weapon—was on the objective. The planners were particularly focused on the threat from Stinger and Redeye antiaircraft missiles that the United States had given the Afghan mujahideen during their 1980s struggle against Soviet occupation forces. An October 1 briefing said Kandahar was defended by “a picket line” of man-portable air defense missiles. “There is a ring of fire around Kandahar,” an intelligence officer warned. “It consists of concentric circles of rockets, handheld missile launchers, and antiaircraft guns.”35
If true, these weapons represented a serious threat to the fixed and rotary wing aircraft that would carry the assault forces to Rhino and Gecko. The mission was going to require every Combat Talon at Sword’s disposal. Even the quick reaction force (QRF), which consisted of a Ranger element and a pair of AH-6 Little Birds, would have to remain three hours away on Masirah because no aircraft were available to stage them closer to the objectives.36 “The plan was, if something happens and the QRF needs to be launched … the [M]C-130s that were supporting the mission at Rhino would have to fly all the way back to Masirah and pick us up and take us back out there,” said a Little Bird pilot. “So there was nothing ‘quick’ about the QRF.”
In preparation for the missions, Sword moved its primary medevac and combat search and rescue assets to a Pakistani military airfield in Jacobabad, about 300 miles southwest of Kandahar. Staff on Masirah also drew up plans to establish a forward arming and refueling point (FARP) and emplace a Ranger platoon on the night of the missions at a small Pakistani airfield about forty-five miles south of the Afghan border at Dalbandin. (The FARP was for emergencies. If Gecko went according to plan, there would be no need for any aircraft to refuel there.)37
Unlike the Delta operators, who all had prior military experience before being selected into “the Unit,” many Rangers were first-term enlistees and therefore much younger than their special mission unit counterparts. This was their first combat operation and they were wondering when the “combat” part of that phrase was going to apply. “Are we going to do something, Sergeant Major, or what?” they asked Rakow after a week cooling their heels on Masirah. Rakow and other senior NCOs told the younger soldiers to get used to it. “We had to talk to Rangers about the reality of combat, that sometimes there’s huge periods of boredom interspersed with high levels of activity,” he recalled.
Now, with action just hours away, the Rangers paused to listen to Rakow and Votel deliver speeches. The two were a study in contrasts. Rakow’s was brimming with testosterone, reminding his audience that what they were about to do—leap into the darkness from a perfectly good airplane to possibly confront their nation’s enemies—was what the country paid them to do, and what they lived for. “If your dick ain’t hard getting ready to do this then you ain’t alive and breathing,” he told them.
Later Votel would gently chide Rakow for using such language with a few women in the audience, but for now the regimental commander turned to the troops. His speech was also an expression of pride in his soldiers, but was less bombastic than his sergeant major’s. The regimental commander told his men he was looking forward to making a combat jump with them that night, and cautioned them to stay focused on their part of the mission, which he reminded them was connected to a wider set of operations. After the speeches, the Rangers—not for the last time that evening—recited the Ranger Creed, which the proximity of combat had imbued with extra significance. Eager to get on with things, the Rangers got rigged up, loosely attaching their gear, which they would tighten during the flight.38 The regimental chaplain invoked a blessing on the task force and the soldiers walked onto the planes.
The need to produce a televised spectacle meant a four-man psychological operations team39 joined the Rangers on the aircraft, one of numerous additions that meant there was no space for the two Little Birds that had originally been part of the plan. “We really don’t need you because there’s not much of a threat there,” the Sword staff told the crews. This caused some griping among the AH-6 pilots, who suspected standard operational procedure was being ignored to ensure more paratroopers got a combat jump. (The AH-6s were integral to most airfield seizures, taking to the air to provide security as soon as Rangers cleared the objective and the Talons landed.)
* * *
The Combat Talons above Rhino were in trail formation, separated one from the other by several thousand feet, so the sticks of paratroopers floated down roughly on a line that began beyond the end of the runway and ended at the compound itself.40 After landing, the Rangers quickly gathered and stowed their parachutes to ensure the airstrip was clear for the planes and helicopters due there soon. Although braced to encounter resistance, only one “enemy fighter” (in the official history’s words) appeared. Fire from several of 3rd Battalion’s C Company soldiers quickly cut him down. C Company went on to clear the compound, which had sustained surprisingly light damage from the AC-130 fire. Meanwhile, A Company, together with an attached sniper team secured nearby locations and set up preplanned blocking positions to fight off any counterattacks. The Rangers swept through the compound. It was empty, rendering superfluous the repeated loudspeaker broadcasts in three languages from the psy ops team telling any Taliban to surrender.41
Airfield seizure was, of course, the quintessential Ranger mission.42 But the presence of combat cameramen on the ground and of a Navy P-3C Orion command and control plane overhead underlined the priority given to the operation’s propaganda role. (The Orion was transmitting video of the assault in real time back to a psychological operations detachment at Masirah.)43
The Rangers cleared Rhino so quickly that fourteen minutes after C Company entered the compound, an MC-130 landed with a team from JSOC’s elite Joint Medical Augmentation Unit (JMAU). The team was there primarily to treat any combat casualties from the two missions, but its only patients at Rhino were two Rangers injured on the jump. Six minutes later came the sound of rotor blades churning the night air.44
* * *
As the Rangers floated down to Rhino, Franks’s attention was on Gecko, from where a Predator was beaming live video of the assault back to his Tampa headquarters as well as to Masirah. “The sheer speed of the insertion was unbelievable,” the CENTCOM boss would later write. “The big tandem-rotor helicopters swept in from two directions, so low that the pilots flying in night vision goggles had to pop up to clear the compound walls. As the dust billowed, the operators pounded off the tailgates and moved toward their objectives, firing on the run.”45
But the infiltration was not quite as smooth as Franks implied. The AC-130 that was supposed to quickly take out the guard tower missed with its first several shots before finally hitting the target. Someone shot at the inbound helicopters without effect about a kilometer short of Gecko, while smoke from the AC-130’s “pre-assault fires” obscured much of the compound as the helicopters arrived, preventing the DAP flight lead, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Casey Ragsdale, from firing Hellfire missiles at his preassigned targets.46 (Ragsdale was piloting one of four DAPs committed to the Gecko assault.)47 And in an accident that foreshadowed events on an even higher profile mission nine and a half years later, “the second Chinook in clipped a wall,” said a Delta source who watched it happen.48 The MH-47E, call sign CRESCENT 93, was carrying A2 operators, including Pat Savidge, the troop sergeant major and acting commander, whose presence earned him the dubious distinction of having crashed in all three of the 160th’s basic airframes (the other two being the Little Bird, during the Kurt Muse rescue in Panama, and the MH-60 Black Hawk, during jungle training, also in Panama).49 The Chinook got banged up several times as it tried to land, said another Delta operator. The accident ripped away most of the landing gear and caused a hydraulic fluid leak, but the helicopter was able to take off again. While the other helicopters went into a holding pattern until the operators were ready for exfil, Dailey ordered CRESCENT 93 to fly to Jacobabad. The A2 operators would get picked up by “the flying spare” that TF Brown always included in its plans for just such circumstances.50
As for Franks’s comment about operators “firing on the run” as they came off the helicopters, an experienced Delta man who watched the whole mission said it didn’t ring true. “Nobody was shooting inside that place,” he said.
Central Command had chosen not to bomb Gecko, partly in an attempt to lure Omar and other senior Taliban leaders there and partly out of a desire not to destroy “the trove of intelligence” Franks hoped to find.51 But the ploy hadn’t worked. Led by ground force commander Chris Sorenson, the Delta operators found themselves scouring an empty target, just like their Ranger counterparts at Rhino. “There certainly wasn’t a heck of a lot of great intelligence that came off of there,” Hall said.
Later accounts, including Franks’s autobiography, gave the impression that the Delta operators encountered resistance. “The Taliban had attempted to defend the sites, as we had expected,” Franks wrote, referring to Gecko and Rhino. “Several of our men had been wounded, some of the enemy killed.”52 In a New Yorker article published a couple of weeks after the missions, Seymour Hersh wrote that during a running firefight with the Taliban, “Twelve Delta members were wounded, three of them seriously.”53 But several sources with firsthand experience of the mission denied all of this. “None of our men were wounded in the raid,” wrote Blaber,54 Delta’s operations officer at the time. “We didn’t medevac anyone out of that target,” said a retired special operations officer. Even Franks, in the days after the mission, said, “We had no one wounded by enemy fire,” appearing to contradict his own yet-to-be written book.55
According to a Delta source, the stories of operators getting hurt stemmed from two separate episodes that had nothing to do with the Taliban: the crash landing, and an incident in which operators got too close to one of their own grenades when it exploded as they were clearing the compound. “Somebody decided to throw frags instead of bangers,56 and when they chucked a frag into a room, it was like a thin tin wall, and the frags peppered them, so they ate their own frags,” he said.57
None of this prevented one of two AC-130s overhead opening up on what had been called in as “an enemy bus fleeing from the target.” The gunship, which boasted a stabilized 105mm howitzer plus 40mm and 25mm cannon, locked on to the bus with its targeting system and followed it away from the compound before firing. “The 105s were exploding left and right,” said a source who watched it happen. “The bus skidded to a stop.” The AC-130 crew watched their sensor screens, on which warm objects, such as humans, show up darker. “Out came this single file of black blobs out the front right door. They were running down the middle of the road, again, 105s exploding on both sides of the road.” A Delta officer on the plane as a ground force liaison watched events unfold with growing unease. Something didn’t feel right. “They did not starburst out of the bus [as trained guerrillas would], they ran down the middle of the road,” the source said.
“Who called the target in? Was this target called in by the ground force?” the Delta officer said, before calling the operators on the ground himself to find out. “Negative, we’ve not seen a bus,” they replied. Then a voice from the other AC-130 came on the net and said that crew had called in the target. The AC-130 crew that had already fired—and was about to fire for effect—reexamined the target. “You could see that there were double blobs, one slightly smaller than the big one, they were kind of attached,” the source said. “I think they’re holding hands,” the Delta officer said. “I think that’s a parent with a child—Cease fire! Cease fire!”
The cease-fire call was controversial. “It was a big deal because … that was the one target to shoot at out of Gecko that night,” a Delta source said. “By the time they got back they were still kind of pissed and then they reviewed the tapes and saw that it was women and children.”
Whether or not any actual Taliban were on the objective—and the evidence suggests there were not at the time of the mission, although as many as eight armored vehicles had been seen nearby earlier that day58—some were on the move nearby. Staff in Masirah monitoring the Predator feed could see tanks approaching. At 11:55 P.M., the operators called for the helicopters to pick them up twenty minutes later.59 Protected by the circling AC-130s, the raiders were able to fly away before the tanks got close enough to cause any trouble, the retired special ops officer said. The Delta operators left a few NYPD and FDNY baseball caps as calling cards on the objective. “It was basically a ‘Fuck you—we’ve been here,’” said a Task Force Sword officer.
The Gecko assault force flew straight to Rhino, refueling there before returning to the Kitty Hawk at sunrise.60 Although questions remain as to whether the assault force took any fire on Gecko, there is no doubt the helicopters were fired at on their flights across Pakistan to and from the objective. “When they went across Pakistan is when they got shot at the most,” said a 160th pilot, adding that the fire likely came from civilians in the tribal areas near the border, rather than from the Pakistani military. Once the helicopters had departed Rhino, the Rangers gradually collapsed their perimeter, boarding two Combat Talons that had landed on the airstrip. Once the last Talon landed, task force members picked up the infrared airstrip markers that had helped guide the planes in, got on the aircraft, and left. The Rangers had spent five hours and twenty-four minutes on the ground.61
Back in Tampa, Franks was about to call Myers, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, when Dailey called with bad news.62 Task Force Sword’s luck that evening had run out at Dalbandin, where 26 B Company, 3rd Battalion Rangers, and two 24th STS operators had flown in from the Kitty Hawk on Black Hawks to establish a forward arming and refueling point and a quick reaction force to support that night’s missions. TF Sword had received word that somehow the locals had learned Americans were coming to Dalbandin, so the Rangers conducted their arrival there as an air assault, rather than as a more routine landing, even though they were still in Pakistan, a notional ally. As the second Black Hawk in—call sign RATCHET 23—was repositioning, it kicked up a dust cloud that obscured the landing zone, creating what aviators call a “brownout” and disorienting the pilots. The helicopter hit the ground hard and rolled onto its right side, pinning several Rangers who’d been aboard the helicopter underneath the fuselage. Despite their colleagues’ best efforts, two Rangers—Specialist John Edmunds and Private First Class Kristofer Stonesifer—were killed.63
News of the accident hit the task force like a punch in the gut, but Dailey stayed calm. “To Dell Dailey’s credit … he responded relatively well to serious incidents like that,” said a Task Force Sword officer. “He was able to compartmentalize that specific thing and not allow it to drive the rest of the mission.” But others instantly flashed back to the Eagle Claw disaster, which had also occurred as a helicopter repositioned in a brownout at a FARP.64 “The first thing that people said was, ‘Jesus, we’re going to have another freakin’ Desert One,’” recalled Rakow.
In addition to sadness over the sheer tragedy of the losses, the accident was a source of intense frustration in the 160th. A senior Night Stalker noted that the regiment traced its origins to the aftermath of Desert One. With pre-mission comparisons between the Rhino/Gecko operation and Eagle Claw fresh in aviators’ minds, there had been a focus on operating safely at the Dalbandin forward arming and refueling point. “It amazed a lot of people that that’s where that accident happened,” he said.
* * *
As the Rangers and Delta operators flew back to Masirah and the Kitty Hawk, in the JOC a fifteen-soldier team from the 9th Psychological Operations Battalion was editing six hours of raw footage from the Rhino mission into a three-minute clip to be forwarded to the Pentagon. Propaganda, after all, was the mission’s raison d’être: to demonstrate the United States’ ability to put troops wherever it pleased in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld, who had not watched the missions in real time, but had stayed up to date over the phone, wanted the film available to the U.S. television networks for their evening news broadcasts later on October 20. He got his wish. At a lunchtime news conference that day in the Pentagon, Myers aired the clip, which would be shown on every major news program in the United States and around the world.65
The Joint Chiefs’ chairman stayed on message throughout his press conference. He offered little detail about the missions, saying nothing about Masirah or the Kitty Hawk, but continually reinforcing his point. “U.S. forces were able to deploy, maneuver and operate inside Afghanistan without significant interference from Taliban forces,” he said. In case the reporters didn’t get it the first time, he repeated the point some minutes later: “One of the messages should be that we are capable of, at a time of our choosing, conducting the kind of operations we want to conduct.”66
Assessments of the value of the Gecko and Rhino missions were as divided after the fact as they had been before.
“It was disappointing when they conducted that operation that they didn’t catch more, but I have to say that the operation had strategic value,” said a senior member of the Joint Staff. “That changed the way Omar thought about the conflict and the word I heard was that he was terrified that he was not safe and his sanctuary was violated. The operational and tactical effects of a strategic operation are that he becomes isolated, insular, communications are constrained, so that when other things take place … they have more limited ability to react to those things.”
But to the skeptics, the raids had been worse than a waste of time: they had placed troops’ lives at risk for nothing more than a propaganda effort that resembled a joint readiness exercise. “So many guys almost died so many times on both targets, for no fucking reason,” said a Delta source who monitored the operation in real time. “That was just a complete JRX done for the sake of the cameras.”
Understandably, the Rangers’ mood was somber, the twist of fate that took the lives of two of their buddies serving as a wake-up call for the young soldiers. The task force held a memorial service for Edmunds and Stonesifer at Masirah October 23.67 Then the Rangers turned their minds to the future. They would soon be back in action.