11 September 2001
Combat Controller Joe O’Keefe was on his morning six-mile run around the flight line of Pope Air Force Base when a 24-STS four-wheeled Mule cargo buggy pulled up beside him. The driver shouted, “You better come back to the squadron. Now!” He hopped in and returned to the 24 inside the JSOC compound to find the first World Trade Center tower smoking on television, and he knew he was going—where, was difficult to say. Joe, an eighteen-year veteran CCT, was part of a pilot team of Controllers working with Delta Force on advanced force operations (known as AFO), in essence troops who would arrive before anyone else in sensitive or hostile areas. So wherever he was headed, Joe was guaranteed to be at the farthest edge of America’s response.
A short time later, he was on his way to Uzbekistan with a fellow AFO team member by the name of Mario. The two men were to be CCT’s forwardmost element, chopped to the CIA’s Jawbreaker team (responsible for the Agency’s response to 9/11 in Afghanistan). At a stopover in Germany, they and their Delta counterparts split into separate teams: The first, with Mario, went to Pakistan; Joe and his Delta teammate, a sergeant major named Dan, were joined by a CIA case officer and paramilitary contractor and deployed to Afghanistan as a four-man team, designated Jawbreaker Team Juliet.
From Uzbekistan the men, all wearing indigenous civilian clothing provided by the CIA, caught a flight to Tajikistan, where Joe was introduced to Gary Berntsen, the CIA’s lead case officer for Afghanistan and its hunt for Osama bin Laden. The next stop was Kabul, where Calvin Markham and the Triple Nickel were already targeting and destroying Taliban forces. The team flew in a dilapidated Soviet-era Northern Alliance Mi-8 helicopter, skimming just over the Hindu Kush mountains already flush with snow on their 20,000-foot peaks. Below him, Joe watched the ghosts and relics of the Soviet invasion slip past the windows: rusted tank hulks and armored personnel carriers—here and there, artillery pieces and small villages. The steep lunar landscape and abandoned equipment shared an eerie resemblance to the secret test ranges on which he’d trained north of Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.
When they landed at Kabul, which had yet to fall to Calvin Markham and the Green Berets, they staged for their first mission: the rescue of eight Shelter Now International aid workers, two of whom were American. But at the last minute, the rescue was passed to another group. The situation in the capital was fluid and dangerous. As the only CCT attached to the CIA in Kabul, Joe was tasked with landing the first coalition plane at the former Soviet airbase, Bagram Airfield, in support of the Agency, even though it was still a no-man’s-land. He drew on his eighteen years of experience to bring in aircraft. “Then I got orders to land an Iranian plane.” The Iranian government wanted their embassy up and running as soon as possible to counter the American influence but refused to participate in multinational actions or assist the Afghans. As he worked his first days at the airfield, much was in motion but little was known. “There were a lot of things passing in the night,” he recalls. At Bagram, Berntsen approached Joe one day and asked, “Can you help me out?” The CIA case officer, and now station chief for the newest CIA base, had two-foot aviator kit bags stuffed with cash and wanted Joe to manage them—millions of dollars that the Controller dutifully lugged around for weeks, doling out and recording hundreds of thousands of dollars in transactions. “Berntsen was great,” he recalls of the legendary case officer. “He had complete faith in us, and we were fully included in all planning and intel, including cable traffic [the CIA’s classified communiqués].”
By mid-November, the early gains in Kabul by Markham and the follow-on forces were coming apart as factions and nations staked out turf and foreign policy by force. Joe and Delta Dan helped to establish the CIA’s base of operations in a Kabul hotel, where the Agency was holding its first captured Arab Al Qaeda fighters. Under interrogation, they revealed bin Laden was at Tora Bora. Joe recalls, “We’re trying to figure it out. What’s a Tora Bora?” No one had heard of it. Berntsen told Joe’s team, “We’re pushing forward to the Panjshir Valley,” north of Kabul.
Before they departed the hotel, Joe met up with Markham. “It was invaluable. Calvin gave me the lay of the land, pointed out details of the Tora Bora region and Jalalabad.” A CIA safe house at the latter was their next stop and became the staging base for operations to find bin Laden in Tora Bora. There, Joe met George, the CIA’s forward station chief. Also working in the vicinity was a 5th Group ODA with a CCT friend of Joe’s, Bill White. The CIA wanted the Special Forces with Bill to move into Tora Bora and conduct airstrikes to kill or flush out the Al Qaeda leader.
At Bagram, Berntsen spoke with 5th Group commander Colonel Mulholland and requested that he send the ODA and White forward. Mulholland asked if the CIA had detailed information on the situation in Jalalabad.
“It’s bad,” admitted the CIA agent. “Nobody’s really in control, and large groups of armed Taliban and [Al Qaeda] fighters are still creating havoc.”
“Do you have a fixed location where you’re going to set up?”
“No, I don’t,” he said, adding, “I’m not prepared to wait for security to improve. I’m going now.” Berntsen, knowing any lock on bin Laden would be fleeting, was not going to miss perhaps his only opportunity to kill the terrorist.
Mulholland, an experienced Special Forces soldier, was aware how fast things could change; his first two ODAs with Markham and another CCT named Matt Lienhard were lucky to be alive. Gambling another entire team on the CIA’s assessment of an uncontrolled battlefield was not a solid bet in what was shaping up to be a long war, and he declined to commit the ODA.
With Mulholland’s refusal to commit, the CIA was stuck. Upon receiving the news at the safe house in Jalalabad, George turned to Joe and Delta Dan. “Don’t you guys do this?” he asked. When Joe answered that yes, he could coordinate and call in airstrikes from anywhere, George stated, “Okay. Be prepared to move out as soon as it gets dark.”
Joe and Dan exchanged looks, knowing their decision, while fully within their capabilities to execute, had committed them to a mission they knew little about. Joe quickly drew up a fire support plan. “I forwarded it up the food chain, and just like that, we were in. We four Americans were the first to arrive at Tora Bora.” The date was 3 December.
But getting in wasn’t just half the challenge, it was almost the fatal half. The four Americans were placed in the back of a covered truck and had cargo stacked on top of them to facilitate being smuggled into enemy territory. Bouncing through the night, they felt the truck stop at a checkpoint. Beyond their claustrophobic confines, an argument broke out between the ten or so Afghans ferrying them and the unknown checkpoint guards. It occurred to Joe at that moment that their lives were in the hands of CIA-purchased Afghans belonging to a warlord named Babrak. “We had AKs [AK-47s] and Afghan garb and hats, but we’re, you know, white.” If they were discovered, there’d be no doubt the four men were Americans. Luck, however, was on their side, as the situation calmed, and the team felt the truck finally lurch forward and continue on its way, eventually stopping where they unloaded. From there, they proceeded on foot alongside mules packed by their Afghan guides.
After walking several miles in the dark, they were introduced to a village chieftain, who was their next link forward but who was concerned the Americans would bring more of the bombs that had already decimated other villages. “I assured him we were there to ensure no bombs hit villages,” states Joe.
The team told him they needed to move farther, but the chieftain was under orders not to let anything happen to the Americans, not so much for their well-being but because, as the Afghan currently responsible for their security and moving them forward, Babrak feared that if he lost “his” Americans, the CIA cash he was receiving would stop. So he refused to take them deeper into the White Mountains, where the locals knew bin Laden and hundreds of Al Qaeda had established a redoubt. The Americans insisted, however, and continued higher and deeper into the snow-covered slopes. They were deep inside Al Qaeda’s lines, topping 11,000 feet in elevation but with no idea exactly where the concentrations of enemy forces were, or of bin Laden’s location.
Joe recalls, “We’re underequipped, not prepared to engage anyone. I’ve got an AK with three magazines. My gear space is taken up with my SOFLAM, laser rangefinder, and batteries.” Though they were all overloaded, like virtually every CCT, Joe was carrying more weight than anyone else on his team.
After more punishing miles and some understandable paranoia, they arrived at a suitable observation point, facing the highest mountain peaks, and got their first good look at the enemy and what they were up against. Joe set up the SOFLAM and put Dan and one of the CIA agents in charge of turning it on and lasing the targets he’d call in. The other CIA agent, a former Delta Force member, surveyed the enemy positions in front of them and determined their first target while Joe set out his radios and laser rangefinder, checked the equipment, reviewed his procedures, and made his first call to an AWACS, an airborne battlefield platform expressly designed to coordinate complex air situations. The AWACS aircraft circled above the battle space as Joe told them where he was and that he needed strike aircraft. There was no higher headquarters or clearance for the small team; they’d been empowered, not by the military but the Central Intelligence Agency, to execute their mission at their own discretion. It may have been a CIA mission, but Joe was now in charge.
The AWACS sent his first aircraft, a two-ship formation of F-14s with GBU-10s (laser-guided 2,000-pound bombs). “My heart was pounding. I can see the AQ [Al Qaeda] guys right out in front of us.” Joe waited for the planes to arrive, and because the F-14s can self-lase, there was no need for the team to turn on the SOFLAM on the first strike. When the Navy fighters reported in, “I cleared them hot and the bomb dropped right in the position.”
As two thousand pounds of mixed TNT and aluminum powder (a heat impulse enhancer) tritonal explosive obliterated an unaware enemy bunker, and the roiling smoke and telltale mushroom of the explosion and its shock wave reverberated throughout the confined valley in front of them, the four men looked at each other and nodded. Joe O’Keefe had just opened the personal war on Osama bin Laden (within the military he was known by the acronym UBL). He reattacked immediately with additional AWACS-provided fighters, and the team, working together with Dan on the SOFLAM, cleared the immediate vicinity surrounding their first target, creating a one-kilometer clear free-fire zone from which they could operate.
Their CIA lead agent called back to George, who was working from a location between the team and their safe house in Jalalabad, and reported their intent to bound forward into the airpower-cleared space.
George, himself former military, was elated and told the men, “Great news. Listen, this is being briefed at the White House and they’re really interested in this. I want you to keep moving forward.”
However, not only were the men and their Afghan guides not armed for a gunfight, they weren’t equipped to operate unsupported in the frozen mountains. Of their supplies, Joe recalls, “I had a one-quart Nalgene water bottle, one MRE, and only a couple spare batteries. We were only supposed to be out for one night. But okay, we’re doing it.” The men continued their 11,000-foot march through the frigid mountains, aware that each ridgeline they crossed could hold dozens, if not hundreds, of Al Qaeda. Each step was one snowy footfall from death.
At their next OP, as they set up their position, Joe had the other men sketch targets and work up the data to support airstrikes while he drew up a terrain map of the mountains and enemy in front of them. They’d managed to take the high ground and were looking down on a hornet’s nest of activity. When one of the Agency guys passed him a sketch and coordinates to their own location, Joe was confronted with a reality about his situation as the lone CCT. “I realized I couldn’t go to bed. I couldn’t leave them alone to call strikes unsupervised.” It was his responsibility to ensure no friendly-fire incidents occurred and that their own position was safe. Should he fail in this single task, the burden of failure wouldn’t rest on any other man’s conscience. Joe stayed awake for the next forty-five hours, without break, calling every airstrike while the team around him fed him coordinates and battlefield information.
Joe and the team didn’t know that the first fratricide of the war had just taken place, and an immediate halt to precision JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition, the ubiquitous laser-guided bomb) employment had been directed, with one exception: call sign VB2, Joe O’Keefe. As a result, every aircraft loaded with weapons in Afghanistan or on its way was now being pushed to the Combat Controller.
It is in this type of situation that a Combat Controller and all others certified to call airstrikes diverge. Joe explains: “I had so many aircraft thrown at me, I started stacking them in two-thousand-foot increments using standard non-radar air traffic control procedures. All of them dissimilar. I had B-1s, B-52s, F-16s, F-15s, F/A-18 Hornets. It was endless, really.” The planes would check in with the AWACS, who forwarded all of them to Joe. As it had with Calvin Markham, and as it would over and over again throughout the new war, it was the expertise of a Combat Controller that drove the mission’s success.
The situation was incredibly complex—he had his headset on, listening to the AWACS in one ear and controlling airstrikes and managing an international coalition airport above his head in the other, keying the mikes on his two radios, one after the other. His map border and notepads filled up with call signs, aircraft types, and bomb loads. He became the most popular man with every pilot in-country. As each plane checked in with the AWACS, Joe could hear them requesting, “I want to go to Victor Bravo Two,” because they knew they’d get to strike right at the heart of Al Qaeda, even if they weren’t aware that Joe was trying to kill bin Laden himself.
That’s when things really got exciting and exhausting for the Controller. He began a nonstop, around-the-clock bombing campaign that went on for days. Without sleep, through the below-freezing nights, without food, Joe bombed Al Qaeda. Two days into the onslaught, his Agency team leader called back to Berntsen and stated, “We’re going to shut down now and catch some sleep.”
The relentless CIA officer, who viewed himself as the long arm of American retribution, was incredulous. “What? What the hell do you want to sleep for? You’re killing the enemy!”
“Chief, I’m sorry. But we’ve been doing this for fifty-six hours straight. Before that, we had to hump up here. We’re wiped out.” The men had bounded forward four times, deeper into Al Qaeda–held territory than any American force. Yet they were still only four men.
From the comfort of CIA station Kabul, Berntsen realized he couldn’t appreciate the pressures or conditions the men were facing. “I’m sorry. Get some rest. Help’s on the way. We’ll have an SF [Special Forces] team there in less than forty-eight hours.”
“That’s great news. We’ll be back up on the air in six hours. Juliet Forward out.” The team was so played out they were unaware of the approach of the village chieftain they’d met days earlier. Their security, provided by Babrak, had quit two days prior, leaving the Americans entirely alone. The chieftain, clad in sandals and Afghan “man jammies” (the ubiquitous outfit worn by Afghan and Arab males that to Westerners resembles a calf-length dress), walked up on their position in the snow without warning. His purpose? Having watched the utter destruction of the mountainous valley during a continuous inferno of smoke and earth-shaking explosions, one after another, he had traveled to thank the Americans for killing the Arabs. “If he’d been Al Qaeda, we’d all have been dead,” recalls Joe, adding, “If [Al Qaeda] had even sent out patrols to find out how the Americans were targeting them, we’d have been wiped out.” But Al Qaeda never caught on to how the new game was being played.
The other team was the ODA provided by Colonel Mulholland, with CCT Bill White attached, now in position on a ridge on the opposite side of the valley from Joe. After a single six-hour break, Joe and the team stayed up sixty-five of the next seventy-two hours, moving ever closer toward the most hardened Al Qaeda fighters and their leader. When Bill showed up with the Green Berets and occupied a location across the valley from Joe, the two Controllers began coordinating from their different OPs, dividing the terrain and aircraft to keep the pressure on. Because Al Qaeda was communicating on open radio frequencies, CIA SIGINT collectors were getting real-time intelligence on the impact the airstrikes were having. “We’re getting B-52s dropping forty-five Mk-82 [500-pound unguided] bombs in a single pass. All this within a couple kilometer square. It was unbelievable.”
From 3 to 8 December, Joe O’Keefe, a single CCT, controlled and cleared 688,000 pounds of bombs in the Milawa Valley of the White Mountains, a record that still stands for tonnage dropped by a single CCT, or anyone else, during an engagement in the history of airborne warfare. The exhausted men, out of food, out of batteries, were exfilled by the CIA on the eighth and returned to the Jalalabad safe house, knowing they’d killed hundreds of hardened fighters, but not having destroyed bin Laden. The CIA had pinpointed the Al Qaeda leader’s transmitter only 1.8 kilometers in front of VB2, but that was as close as the ill-equipped team got. “I was spent. No food, no water. But it was adrenaline city,” recalled the first CCT to directly target UBL. He would not be the last.
More help was at hand. Delta Force had been forwarded by JSOC commander Dell Dailey to enter the fight and kill bin Laden. Forty Delta operators, led by a young officer by the name of Tom Greer and accompanied by Mike Stockdale, a 24 CCT and teammate of O’Keefe’s, arrived as the Jawbreaker team pulled out.7
Mike Stockdale was relatively junior at the 24 in the fall of 2001. A Denver native, he’d graduated from the 24’s Green Team in 1998. Unlike O’Keefe, he’d been in Hungary on a JSOC exercise at the time of 9/11. After returning home with the majority of the command’s staff and operational units, he’d quick-turned and found himself on strip alert as part of a CSAR (combat search and rescue) package in Turkey, where nothing exciting happened. He got his break when Delta’s A Squadron needed another CCT and he found himself on an MC-130 Talon to Bagram, where he met up with A Squadron’s sergeant major, Ironhead, and his new immediate commander, Tom Greer, known by all as Redfly.
Tall, thin, with weathered eyes, brown hair, and an easy disposition, Mike already had a reputation as unflappable inside Delta, but this was his first opportunity to go to war with them. He was met by another CCT, Sean Gleffe, who outranked him, but when Greer pushed farther north to Jalalabad with his forty-man contingent, and from there to George’s forward-staged Jawbreaker position, Gleffe gave the mission to Stockdale, telling him, “We got Al Qaeda and UBL up there. Get airpower on it.”
As Stockdale arrived in the vicinity of Tora Bora, he watched the drop of a BLU-82 15,000-pound bomb, affectionately called the Daisy Cutter. The size of a VW van and of similar shape, the bomb was dropped by an MC-130 Talon, extracted by a parachute that gently delivers it to its target. The resulting mushroom cloud resembled an atomic bomb’s. Along with the Delta operators, friendly “muhj” forces (the term Delta used for friendly Afghan forces), and Al Qaeda fighters in Tora Bora, he was stopped—stunned—by the immense, singular display of firepower. The bomb was a parting gift to bin Laden from Joe O’Keefe.
George, still running the overall battle for the American side, was pushing local warlord General Hazrat Ali to get his forces into the fight and planned to use Delta as the catalyst. Redfly and Ironhead had prepped their shooters and CCT as the sun set and the temperature dropped. They were to move out for a mission, planned to last several days, beginning in the wee hours of the coming morning.
With a hundred-pound rucksack full of radios and batteries, his SOFLAM and laser rangefinder prepped for the mission, Stockdale finally lay down, hoping to get a few hours’ sleep before they departed, ready for what was to come: his first battle. He’d just nodded off when a Delta operator shook him awake. “They need you.” He found his immediate boss, a Delta sniper and recce team leader called Hopper, who told him, “The muhj are saying they’ve got momentum to break through the AQ lines, but they’re stalled out on the mountainside. They need air support.”
Stockdale nodded. “Got it.”
“We’re gonna go fast, go light, and go now.”
“Got it,” repeated the Combat Controller. In his corner of the CIA’s forwardmost safe house, an abandoned schoolhouse, he stripped his “go” ruck (a mini backpack) from his hundred-pound recce ruck. He stuffed in a radio, a few batteries, his IZLID IR pointer, and some water. They were only going to be out for a short time. He rolled up his SOFLAM, too big for the “go” ruck, inside a threadbare wool blanket and carried it by hand. Their team would be Hopper, Stockdale, an Afghan driver for the Toyota Hilux pickup, and Khan, one of George’s CIA men, a former Afghan national and Marine who had been forwarded to Berntsen and George by another government agency.
Stockdale’s instructions were simple: (1) Make sense of the battlefield, and (2) support the assault to break through enemy lines with air support.
The four men climbed into one of the beat-up-looking Hiluxes. (Appearances were deceptive; in actuality, they were specially engineered trucks equipped with beefy suspensions and winches and were tuned for high altitude. They were intentionally made to look beat-up to avoid attention.) As they drove up into the mountains, it quickly became clear that the front lines were close. On the ridgelines above them, they saw muhj recoilless-rifle positions. As they wound their way up the single-track road toward the Milawa Valley, they started to receive sporadic Al Qaeda mortar fire, which didn’t seem too bad until they rounded a corner and were confronted by a stuck Russian truck with a twin-barreled 27mm antiaircraft cannon mounted in the rear. In front of it was an ancient faded Soviet T-55 tank, attempting to pull it out. Hopper, the most experienced operator in the vehicle, immediately recognized the peril and wasted no time. “Let’s get out of this truck and into some defilade. Now!” he shouted as the men scrambled into an adjacent deep-channeled ravine.
No sooner had they dropped behind some rocks than an 82mm mortar round landed right beside the Hilux, sending shrapnel shrieking over their heads and peppering the pickup. A group of muhj was squatting nearby when another round dropped among them, center mass, killing them all. When the Russian truck was pulled clear, “We jumped back in and were on our way, rounds still coming in, targeting us as we drove,” recalls Stockdale.
At the next intersection, half a kilometer upslope, they found another disabled T-55, this one with two muhj cowering underneath. They skirted the tank and drove to where the road petered out. Their driver, motioning up a ridgeline, stayed in the cab. Clearly it would be by foot from this point. For Stockdale, it turned into a bit of a circus as they scrambled up a rock scree field in the dark, NVGs their only advantage, allowing them to make the climb. Above them, “We’d encounter one group of muhj, then be passed to another, all of them sort of taking possession of us. It was major confusion.”
When they finally arrived at the military crest of a ridgeline—the name for the terrain just below summit, which allows for travel without fear of being silhouetted against the sky—and found some vantage over the fighting, he was stunned. The mountainsides and valley in front of him were strewn with the detritus of battle, uprooted trees, splintered and mangled. Joe O’Keefe had done his work well.
From their position, Stockdale could see three separate Al Qaeda DShK pits chewing up the muhj fighters. He and Hopper prepped his gear so he could get airstrikes onto the closest DShK. Within minutes, “the Admiral” had a pair of F-18s inbound from the USS Carl Vinson. With steep terrain and no ability to put a laser right on the DShK, it was going to have to be an old-school talk-on to the target, Laos style—the art of Combat Control. It was also Stockdale’s first in combat. With the impossibly steep terrain and well-masked positions, any miscommunication or misinterpretation would result in a potentially catastrophic miss. Meanwhile, the evil green arc of DShK tracers continued to track and destroy the Afghan forces. Hopper watched Stockdale at work as he calmly talked the planes on and destroyed the first DShK position. “When the first DShK went down, it completely changed the dynamic, because it was really chewing up the forces.”
The three men and their newest muhj “handlers” used the destruction to move farther forward onto the battlefield, against the desires of the Afghans, as Stockdale continued to call strikes. Into the day the battle raged. Stockdale recalls, “Those first planes are the only ones I remember,” as strike after strike blurred together. Finally, night began to fall and he received great news: “I’m getting an AC-130. Now it’s going to be ‘game on.’” They were now among the muhj fighting positions, and the Afghans were launching RPGs wildly. “It was ringing the shit out of your bell. [Hopper] was doing his team leader thing, keeping down the chaos and the muhj under control so I could do my job.” He had his SOFLAM set up and his IZLID pointer ready for the AC-130.
“It was the perfect situation,” he recalls. “The gunship is going to be rolling in, Saxon [a British AWACS] is vectoring more air my way.” His next set of strike aircraft were B-1s. But before they or the lumbering four-engine angel of death could establish themselves overhead, clouds descended rapidly in the high mountains, rolling down the mountainsides like avalanches. A storm was coming. “The pressure changes were so extreme my ears were popping,” he remembers. With the storm inbound, gunship and B-1s were lost, and the men were forced to sit out the freezing weather.
The next day broke with new promise and renewed effort. Planes began pouring in and Stockdale was ready, calling strike after strike in the confined few kilometers of the most contested space in Afghanistan. The battle hit fever pitch. To the Delta operators, “The Admiral is one smooth talker on the radio,” stated Greer in his book Kill Bin Laden. “Most important in this business was his willingness to risk everything for his fellow man, an unhealthy but common trait among Air Force Combat Controllers.”
By that time, Stockdale, Hopper, and Khan had moved into the middle of the battle space, stunning the muhj fighters, protecting themselves as best they could behind the wall and destroyed structure of a shepherd’s hut.
At George’s schoolhouse, he received an eight-digit grid coordinate on bin Laden’s location, putting the terrorist within a ten-meter spot on the earth, the first real fix on the world’s most wanted man since the late 1990s, and he gave the information to Redfly (Greer). It was the opportunity all had been waiting for. Across the battlefield, as the other Delta forces tried to maneuver, they “listened to the Admiral steadily bringing in the bombers while the distinct sound of gunfire muffled some of his calls. Just listening raised goose bumps on Jester’s [another Delta team leader] arms,” reported Greer.
The Admiral had just emptied nine F-18s and a B-1. “He had no idea that he was likely the primary reason that bin Laden, the most wanted man in the world, was on the run.” His own position was under extreme enemy counterfire, forcing him to make his calls with his head pressed into the battle-mulched earth. An intercept from the enemy confirmed that “Father [bin Laden] is trying to break through the siege line.” Listening in with Ironhead, Greer knew the three-man team was in a perilous position.
Hopper told Stockdale and Khan they’d done all they could and needed to move back. The enemy had a bead on the exposed American team, and the three battle-formed friends suddenly realized their muhj handlers were missing. They’d abandoned Stockdale, Hopper, and Khan. Only three muhj had remained, and the six of them were trapped, pinned down. In their exposed and lone position in front of the friendly lines, Hopper knew their situation was untenable. They couldn’t fight on their own, and to stay would be to wait for death. In the fluid dynamics of a pitched battle, they were no longer forward of the friendly lines, but deep inside Al Qaeda territory. They were going to have to escape and evade (E&E) death, or even worse, capture. Stockdale, wrapping his SOFLAM back into his hobo blanket, ever the calm voice, made the radio call announcing friendlies were on the run for their lives. “Warpath. Warpath. Warpath.”
As the three began winding their way through no-man’s-land, friendly fire stretching out over their heads at Al Qaeda positions, and the enemy returning it, the bombs stopped while Stockdale was off the radio. There was still another CCT, Bill White, in the mountains with the Special Forces, but since no one knew where the three men were, restarting airstrikes was out of the question. Greer and Ironhead were left with a choice: Continue to pound a fleeing bin Laden or throw every man they had at recovering the E&Eing men. Greer’s orders had been clear: “Kill bin Laden” and bring back proof. If the risks and costs of such a task were low, it wouldn’t be a Delta mission, but the choice was not made lightly. As Greer pondered his options, Ironhead stated, “Your call, sir, but whatever we do, I don’t think we should leave here until we have our boys back.”
Greer certainly agreed they must eventually recover the men, but UBL just might be killed within the next few hours. He pondered an eternity of a minute before saying, “We need to concentrate on recovering our boys first. If things change between now and then, we’ll go for bin Laden too.” He would recall that the decision was simultaneously the hardest and easiest of his career.
The full force of all available Delta operators, along with Controller Sean Gleffe, tried to wind its way through the mortars of Al Qaeda. There was a very real chance that Al Qaeda, with hundreds of well-armed and mortar- and rocket-supported men, could mount a serious counterattack, especially given that their leader was still somewhere in the caves and cliffs of Tora Bora.
Stockdale, Hopper, and Khan, crawling and evading across bomb-cratered earth, managed to make it through two kilometers of enemy-held territory over the next two hours, gratefully arriving at the abandoned friendly T-55 tank…only to find it was no longer quite so friendly. The muhj of General Ali they’d been supporting and risking their lives for, some of the very men who’d abandoned them, were now managing it as a checkpoint and wanted payment for the Americans to pass through. A furious Khan held back his anger and promised Ali would pay them later. The tribal custom of bribery was common, but a pissed-off Khan neglected to tell Ali that any money was owed. While Khan was negotiating their “safe” passage, Stockdale took the opportunity to get on the radio and contact Greer, who was elated to learn he hadn’t lost any men in the battle, yet.
Safely back at the schoolhouse, Stockdale and Hopper rearmed and refitted. This time, Delta was going out in force. Augmented by British SBS troopers, the new plan was Delta on each flank, with their CCT on the high ground for airstrikes, and SBS up the middle. But a cease-fire was under negotiation between Ali and the other warlords and Al Qaeda, bringing offensive operations to a temporary halt. Greer was under strict orders not to spearhead any assaults on bin Laden’s position, only to facilitate muhj advances and remain close behind. The lone exception was airstrikes. Combat Control would remain Delta’s only direct shot at killing the terrorist.
When operations were resumed, a wily bin Laden had already safely escaped. Airstrikes and Delta patrols went on for days, with both Stockdale and Gleffe on the radio, but UBL was gone. Of Stockdale’s performance, Ironhead would recall, “During the Battle of Tora Bora he proved his mettle. He and [Hopper] were separated from the rest of the squadron behind enemy lines. Stockdale took the entire episode in stride and got right back in the fight.”
Ironhead’s sentiments are representative of the strong relationship between CCT and the other best units within black SOF, particularly Delta and SEAL Team Six. To men like Greer and Ironhead (who would go on to become the sergeant major of the entire Ranger Regiment before retirement), their Combat Controllers weren’t some “attachment,” some “other,” but respected members of the Unit (as members refer to Delta) with expert skill sets of their own. In Kill Bin Laden, both Stockdale and Gleffe are simply listed as part of “The Boys of Delta” in the book’s list of key characters.
Stockdale’s view of the events was summarized humbly as, “I basically jumped out of the back of a truck, running from Afghan to Afghan, trying to figure out where the war was.” But he discovered that the war went where he did, and wherever that was, he had the power to change the course of history through the handset of his radio.