The morning of 10 February was cold and clear. The frigid wind announced the proximity of the Hindu Kush as two dozen men from a handful of units and government agencies pulled out of the safe house in a convoy heading southeast of the city. The lead vehicle slowed to a stop on a barren stretch of the valley floor.
Kris K. and his fellow Delta recce teammates had departed the US on 9 February. While they were winging their way toward Afghanistan, another reminder of their purpose took place at the Gardez safe house. Shortly after 9/11, Delta’s B Squadron had conducted a social exchange and patch trade with members of the New York Fire Department in Manhattan. A few returned with pieces of the World Trade Center as mementos. Inevitably some of these made their way to Afghanistan, their physical heft serving as raw energy to fuel the men in their pursuit of those responsible. A Delta operator named Kevin ferried one over with the intent of leaving this piece of America in the land that spawned the attacks.
Bundling themselves against the cold, the informal group assembled around the senior CIA officer in Gardez as two men dug a small hole and placed the World Trade Center remnant in the shallow grave. The CIA officer spoke a few words, followed by the senior NCO from 5th Special Forces. Their memorial is buried at approximate latitude 33°33′5.X″ N and longitude 69°15′8.X″ E. To Jay Hill, even though he was on his second tour, the ceremony brought back a sense of the surreal. “Afghanistan was the last place on earth you’d expect to be.”
For Blaber, it was another example of their modus operandi. “Spider, Chris [Haas], and I, we had the time to set aside for this. It just sort of happened, another self-organizing activity. No one really set out a hierarchical structure. We just organized and executed; it was our distilled essence.”
While Jay’s SEALs wanted out, at least one other SEAL wanted in on Blaber’s operations. Homer was a former member of SEAL Team Six, currently on a joint assignment, who arrived shortly after the Trade Center ceremony, and “like a lot of guys, he was looking to get in on the action,” according to Blaber. He became Blaber’s sidekick in his travels around Gardez. Essentially, Homer’s job was to “make stuff happen. He could get anything by trade or trickery, and he was also a good sniper/recce advisor.” His combat experience extended back at least a decade to Somalia, where he and a Combat Controller jointly saved the life of his sniper team partner during the operation that came to be known as Black Hawk Down.
The arrival of Kris and his team completed the AFO force. At the safe house, they separated into two elements, I Team and J Team (I and J were used interchangeably with their phonetic India and Juliet). Kris would lead J, while another sniper, nicknamed Speedy, would lead the other team. Jay Hill wasted no time plugging in to his new team, and Kris welcomed the Controller’s expertise.
Planning began immediately, led by J Team. Their mission, as directed by Blaber, was threefold: Establish observation posts in enemy territory in the Shahi Khot Valley to confirm or deny the presence of senior Al Qaeda leaders; scout designated helicopter landing zones for a pending mission tentatively named Operation Anaconda; and finally, call in airstrikes on enemy positions when identified. With close collaboration between the CIA and Spider in place, this last objective was shaping up to have a significant impact on the American effort. US intelligence estimated enemy numbers at approximately two hundred in the Shahi Khot Valley in the mountainous region east of Gardez. Inside the Gardez TOC, between the CIA and AFO, it was believed the numbers were at least double that. As the teams began their in-depth analysis of the terrain and the enemy’s historical tactics, they had no idea the actual force they were facing numbered between 1,000 and 1,500 in the valley, while an additional 700 staged in the valleys farther to the east toward Khowst.
The first question facing the teams heading into enemy territory was how to get there. As Americans, their obvious first choice was the ubiquitous helicopter. Thanks to the CIA, AFO had access to Russian-made Mi-17s, a common sight throughout Afghanistan that didn’t raise eyebrows the same way US helicopters did. There was, however, a downside to employing any helo, even Russian birds: Weather and high altitudes were significant restrictors to their use. And if one was used to successfully insert a team, there was no guarantee, given the same challenges, you could rely on it to get them out, forcing you to gamble lives on the odds. Additionally, Blaber stood in strong opposition to helicopters for lift. This mindset stemmed from the necessity of AFO masking their presence inside the Shahi Khot Valley but was rooted in a deeper understanding of the very nature of their use. The history surrounding mission failure in helicopter-borne operations stretched back to their inception in Vietnam, through Somalia, and up to “dry hole” raids conducted early on in Afghanistan. After Somalia, a personal experience for Delta Force and CCT, Blaber’s assessment was that “every despot, drug kingpin, and dictator who had any reason to believe that the United States might be coming for him expected that when and if we actually came, we’d come in helicopters.”8
With the US default choice a nonstarter, the team turned to vehicle drop-off, known as VDO, as a means to get close enough to their objectives for them to hike or climb the remainder of the way. As a test of the VDO concept and to get a feel for the enemy situation, Kris, Jay, and two other Delta operators, Bill and Dave, set out for an abandoned town ten kilometers east of Gardez. It was called Dara and was a gateway to the team’s early choice for an OP some twenty kilometers farther into the mountains. This was the first time Americans had traversed enemy terrain in the area. They used civilian Toyota Hilux pickups, a sort of low-grade version of a Tacoma, and they were accompanied by fifteen ATF fighters who piled into the open back of the pickups for use as security. Just as important, the Afghans could be used to gather information from locals and the environment. In this, the ATF were indispensable.
Clothed for the frigid February temperatures, their ATF escorts huddled in the back sporting brand-new CIA-supplied sage-green winter coats and AK-47s, the team set off for the mountains. They got as far as the ghost town before the deepening snow halted all progress, well short of the distance necessary for the team to haul their supplies and packs to their OP. Their mud-caked trucks could not get any farther through the snow and ice on the steep mountain slopes.
The reality of what they’d be facing in the coming weeks dropped on the men like a mountain avalanche. In front of them towered a massive 12,000-foot-high peak that would have been an expedition by itself. Even the terrain in front of the numerous summits left them “uncertain that we would even be able to get over some of the cliffs that were en route,” according to one operator. Conferring in the snow, Jay and the Delta operators realized they wouldn’t make it to their OP without getting resupplied, whether they encountered enemy forces or not. Furthermore, trucks were now no more an option than helicopters.
As the Delta operators continued to revise and shape their infiltration plan, Jay was experimenting with overhead air support. On the early missions, this usually took the form of a Navy P-3 Orion. Originally designed for antisubmarine warfare, the 1960s-era plane had four turboprop-driven engines and carried a suite of electronic tracking equipment designed expressly for finding subsurface signatures and, therefore, lacking the sophistication of other airborne systems coming online in newer platforms. SOF troops had been using them as a poor man’s ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, the term referred to any overhead surveillance) for over a decade. Without sophisticated electronics and optics for ground terrain, they nevertheless provided a presence and coordination platform in the event of a crisis.
Better still were the armed MQ-1 Predators beginning to roam the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. These had been purpose-built for the CIA and US Air Force a few years earlier as a low-cost, remotely piloted surveillance platform and were available in armed and unarmed versions, with the former eventually comprising the majority of the fielded fleet.
In the early days of the war, the potential for fratricide was an ever-present danger to unconventional forces. Driving civilian trucks stuffed with Afghans in the back and similar to Al Qaeda’s, the AFO shunned US fatigues, and separating them from the enemy was an elusive task even on the best coordinated of missions. Pilots simply weren’t used to identifying American forces not in uniform, especially when they were riding in nonmilitary vehicles.
The responsibility fell to Jay, as the lone CCT on the team, to manage and direct any aircraft. The eastern Afghan frontier remained the Wild West, even in the skies overhead. Controlling that air traffic with its multinational composition—diverse and often fragmented by competing missions—and the pilots’ limited understanding of conditions on the contested turf kept the Combat Controller on high alert whenever the team traveled. Jay’s reality, with hundreds of sorties per day spanning the country (any one of which could find itself overhead on short notice), made it equally impossible for him to maintain a complete air picture. It was critical, though, that he take control of the airspace directly overhead in the event they came into contact with the enemy or were ambushed.
On the next recce test foray, a drive between Gardez and Khowst, an armed Predator began tracking them as hostiles. Even though he succeeded in establishing contact, the team was nearly fired upon by their own country because they were traveling in a suspect convoy. It was becoming painfully clear that getting to their objective, as challenging as it was proving to be, was only a fraction of their problems.
* * *
The two original AFO SEALs, Hans and Nelson, had participated in some of the recce trips, but tensions between them and the Delta operators came to a head on one mission when the Delta team leader pushed the four-man Army/Navy patrol mercilessly, to determine their ability to move in steep, high-altitude terrain. Broadcasting his displeasure, Hans stated: “This is bullshit.” After they returned to Gardez, more discussions took place directly addressing the disparity of approach to missions and attitudes, which Delta felt was unsatisfactory on the part of the Navy. In the end, Blaber let them know, “Hey, guys, it’s not working out.” So he chopped them to Chris Haas’s Green Berets, where “they were happy to go on to something else.” This cemented the decision and effectively cut the two SEALs from the AFO mission.
Even as his two former SEAL teammates were exiting the scene, Homer understood the potential of the unfolding operations. One night, while he and Blaber were checking on the safe-house guards and perimeter, he mentioned that recce SEALs from ST6 were restless in Bagram. They felt imprisoned by the constraints of TF-11 targeting and planning. “They’re chomping at the bit to get out of their barracks and into the hunt.”
Blaber was in a quandary. He needed more troops, as he’d known even before they launched their first mission. But his relationship with the TF-11 commander was becoming more strained as he continued to form a force and operations extracurricular to TF-11’s core mission of targeting high-value individuals. These were personified most publicly in the form of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, the number-two Al Qaeda leader. But Blaber believed that was not AFO’s only purpose. He recognized the disproportionate and decisive impact a handful of the world’s best operators, well positioned and hidden among the enemy, would have on the coming battle. Some in the TF-11 operations center had taken to referring to Blaber as “Peter the Great” or “Colonel Kurtz,” in reference to the movie Apocalypse Now, for his obvious “gone native” immersion. But Blaber saw “skepticism and sarcasm as net positives,” because “it was far better to be doubted than micromanaged.” It was clear any request for additional Delta Force troops would be unsuccessful, yet there was another option, especially for a non-parochial opportunist such as he. Just because the previous SEALs in AFO weren’t interested, it didn’t necessarily translate to the rest of SEAL Team Six. There were SEALs already in-country, largely locked up inside their Bagram base due to TF-11’s mentality. That group included a frustrated Slab and his CCT, John Chapman.
Blaber recalls, “The SEALs weren’t interested in doing AFO at the time. They thought it was a waste of manpower. At one point I had a sixty-minute VTC with [TF-11 commander] General Dailey and he was not interested in what we were doing. Not interested in giving more manpower. But I persisted. Basically, with a minute to go on the VTC, he said, ‘Fine, I’ll give you some SEALs,’ and then signed off.” Those SEALs were from Team Six and therefore belonged to the unit’s commander, Captain Joe Kernan.
Kernan tasked the only SEAL snipers under his command based in Bagram, which meant Slab’s men from Red Team, along with John Chapman and Andy Martin. But the tasking didn’t clarify who would be moving a hundred miles south to Gardez and who would stay in the hope of killing HVTs (high-value targets) with TF-11. Kernan only agreed to send half a dozen men with one Controller.
Slab was of the opinion that TF-11’s Bagram mission construct was more likely to produce confirmed kills. He had a dozen men, including the two CCT, broken into two elements. Slab himself led the first element, designated Mako-30. The second element, designated Mako-31, was led by the operator called Goody. As Controllers, Chapman and Martin took their call signs from their respective assigned elements but used an additional designation. CCT on the battlefield and in published communication matrices were almost always identified by a C suffix, pronounced phonetically in transmissions as “Charlie.” This distinct designation allowed leaders, gunships, helicopters, and other CCT to readily identify them as Controllers. In practice, the designation expedited close airstrikes because fighters, bombers, and gunships knew any “Charlie” call sign would belong to an experienced and expert strike director. When the two Controllers on Slab’s team separated, Chapman’s call sign, working for Slab, was always Mako Three Zero Charlie and Martin, working for Goody, was Mako Three One Charlie.
The decision on who to send was Slab’s to make as team leader, and he elected to send Goody’s four SEALs and Andy Martin, choosing to hold the HVT mission for himself. With orders given to relocate, Andy and his SEALs began to pack and prepare for extended mountain operations, some of them grumbling about relegation to the “B-team” mission.
Having seen the value and action in his previous non-HVT missions, Andy took the opposite position. “I was motivated.”
Goody, taking the decision in stride and in keeping with his reputation as easygoing, went about prepping his men without complaint, but asked the Controller, “You ready for this?”
Not prone to statements of ambiguity, Martin replied, “Fuck yeah!”