ON March 3 TF Rakkasan commander Frank Wiercinski committed Ron Corkran’s 1-187 Infantry to the fight. Like everything else in Anaconda, this didn’t go entirely to plan. The air assault into LZ 15 was postponed due to the mortar fire Kevin Butler’s men had taken near there that day. But half the helicopters didn’t get the word to abort, so B Company, 1-87 Infantry, which had been attached to Corkran’s battalion, had to wait on the ground until the rest of the force was inserted after dark.
Corkran’s battalion, which was Wiercinski’s reserve, received orders to attack south along the eastern ridge to Takur Ghar—a daunting prospect even after aerial pummeling had steadily ground down Al Qaida forces for the past forty-eight hours. As they moved south they noticed the same compound Preysler’s troops had landed beside on D-Day. U.S. forces had abandoned it and Corkran’s troops saw a mortar tube in there. While clearing the compound (again) they got orders to occupy Blocking Positions Cindy and Diane instead of assaulting down the eastern ridge. That night (March 4) they engaged in an intense firefight, receiving small arms and mortar fire from various positions, but sustaining no casualties.
The change in orders reflected a decision in Bagram to allow “fires”—i.e., bombers, mortars, attack jets and helicopters—to shoulder the load in Anaconda. This decision was never announced or acknowledged, but it is clear from the static approach employed by TF Rakkasan after March 3. The U.S. Air Force’s premier conventional ground-attack aircraft, the A-10 Thunderbolt (more commonly known as the “Warthog”), deployed to Bagram, as did Marine AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters and the other sixteen Apaches from the 101st’s 3-101 Aviation. (The Apaches arrived from Fort Campbell just sixty-eight hours after being alerted—an interesting contrast with the gnashing of teeth at CENTCOM that accompanied the deployment of the first eight attack helicopters.)
The demonstrated value (to allied and enemy forces) of mortars in the Shahikot was underlined when Sergeant First Class Michael Peterson’s 1-87 mortars were ordered back into the valley twenty-four hours ahead of the rest of the troops who had air assaulted into the south of the Shahikot on D-Day. The platoon spent March 3 catching their breath after their ordeal in the Halfpipe, then went straight back into the battle. No one was complaining. “Every soldier wanted to go back out,” Peterson said. “At this point it was very fucking personal.”
Things were different this time. The platoon was working directly for the Rakkasan brigade headquarters for one thing. And for another, this time around they went out forewarned and forearmed. They took two 120mm mortars, two 81mm mortars, about sixty 120mm high explosive rounds, ten 120mm white phosphorous rounds, 150 81mm high explosive rounds, and twenty 81mm white phosphorous rounds. The mortarmen also brought along a Gator to help them carry it all.
They landed at the Rakkasans’ LZ 1 and took over the same compound 1–87’s Bravo Company had recleared earlier that day. The infantry established security on the knolls around the compound. Peterson set his 120s up inside the walls and moved the 81s to a defilade position about 300 meters away. From the moment they screwed the tubes into the baseplates, “We were firing mortar rounds like it’s going out of style,” Peterson said. “At this point we had so many units out there, so many eyes, that we were whacking the enemy left and right…. Once mortars got inserted, we started owning the battlefield. There was nowhere they could go where we didn’t have eyes on.” (Kevin Butler’s mortar position in the wadi near LZ 15 also expanded into a “firebase” like Peterson’s at the compound.)
Taking a page from Al Qaida’s tactics manual, Peterson’s mortarmen put the baseplates in or around the compound and registered the guns, then unscrewed the tubes and remained out of sight until they received a fire mission. Then they would run out to the plates, screw in the tubes, fire the mission, and then run back to their hiding place carrying the tubes. After each mission they would displace to a different location, although they never moved more than 300 meters from the compound. The 120s stayed in the compound, the 81s moved a little up the road, behind a hill in a defilade position.
In the days that followed the 120 mortar proved its worth. “It’s awesome when you’re not in direct fire contact all the time, and you’re launching rounds in relative safety,” Peterson said. They fired so often that they ran short of 120 ammo and had to fall back on the 81s. “We were getting target descriptions like, ‘Two flatbed trucks with personnel loading equipment on them,’” Peterson said. “We would just hit them with HE and white phosphorous and burn that shit up.” They were firing into Marzak, Babulkhel, and Serkhankhel, which had all been declared essentially free-fire areas (Marzak had been flattened by air power.) The Rakkasans’ forward observers had reported that the mortars accounted for over thirty enemy killed and eight vehicles destroyed. They even killed a horse. “I felt bad about the horse,” Peterson admitted.
Such was the demand for mortars that to conserve 120 ammunition, Peterson imposed a rule that the higher-caliber tubes were only to be used against targets consisting of over six personnel. Otherwise, the 81s would get the mission. As 120 rounds ran low, Peterson upped the criteria to a minimum of ten personnel or one vehicle.
Peterson’s mortarmen had a lucky escape shortly after their return to the Shahikot. On March 5 or 6, a jet dropped a dud JDAM that landed 800 meters south of the compound and ten meters from a mortar platoon observation post. The bomb’s arming mechanism switched off automatically because it was falling in an unguided fashion, but it still raised a huge dust cloud when it hit the ground. Peterson watched it fall from the sky, thinking My God! These guys have the largest artillery piece that I’ve ever fucking seen in my life! “It just looked like a huge Volkswagen coming down,” he recalled.
AFTER the Takur Ghar battle Trebon’s plan to have Hyder take over the recce missions launched from Gardez was put on hold while the SEAL officer returned to Bagram to take help in the postmortems of the operation. Blaber remained in command. He still had three teams in the Shahikot: Juliet, in their observation post to the east of Preysler’s command post; Mako 21, about 2,000 meters east of Juliet in the same valley; and Mako 22, which had occupied India’s observation post south of the Fishhook.
Mako 22, despite having shown up without some essential gear, went on to impress some of AFO’s Delta troops with the work they did in the valley. “They did a fantastic job calling in air strikes and killing the enemy,” said one account. The team was credited with calling in air strikes on Surki, the Whale, and the tri-city area that killed between twenty and forty enemy personnel. Mako 21 fared less well. They also arrived unprepared, and needed an immediate resupply because they had left important gear behind. Their mission was to watch the Upper Shahikot Valley to confirm or deny whether enemy forces were using it as an escape route. The team established an observation post, but soon reported back that they could see no enemy activity, and requested extraction. But when the operators in Gardez checked Mako 21’s reported location, they found the team was 600 meters short of where they were supposed to be, and could not possibly have eyes on the portion of the Upper Shahikot it was their mission to observe. The SEAL team was resistant to all suggestions from Gardez about other possible observation posts they might occupy. After a lot of coaxing from Blaber, the team repositioned, but still failed to get their eyes on the Upper Shahikot. “It was apparent they were experiencing a difficulty but were not willing to express it,” a special ops account of the operation said. Unbeknownst to the AFO personnel in Gardez, Mako 21 was sending reports back to the Blue TOC in Bagram complaining of being cold and tired and wanting to be pulled out.
Juliet Team left their observation post on March 5 to check out a cave and building complex compound at the eastern end of the pass they had been located in that had been hit by multiple airstrikes. They found the cave destroyed by a thermobaric bomb dropped into it the morning of D-Day, but two D-30 howitzers and several buildings were relatively unscathed, despite repeated AC-130 poundings. The next day Juliet straddled their ATVs and conducted a passage of lines with the TF Rakkasan elements near LZ 15. At dusk they rode up the ramp of a TF Brown MH-47E Chinook and flew back to Gardez, the last of Blaber’s magnificent thirteen to leave the Shahikot.
U.S. commanders’ apparent belief that fires trumped maneuver in the Shahikot was not the only reason TF Rakkasan’s force remained so static. There remained a desire at higher headquarters to give Afghan forces pride of place in Anaconda, at least from a public relations point of view. So instead of sweeping through the villages on the valley floor, the Rakkasans stayed around the edges of the valley. There was little direct fire contact with the enemy after March 4, and no friendly casualties. “We could have taken that town [Serkhankhel] any time we wanted to, but that would not have helped in the overall purpose of legitimizing that [Afghan] military,” Lieutenant Colonel Jim Larsen, TF Rakkasan’s executive officer, said. “So that’s why we just sat there and waited, and waited.”
Encouraged by Spider, Chris Haas, and Pete Blaber, Zia’s troops occupied the Guppy on the night of March 3, but didn’t use it as a base to attack into the valley. Much of the steam seemed to have gone out of TF Hammer. However, U.S. officials were determined to put an Afghan face on the battle. So in the days following Zia’s initial retreat, Rosengard, the Task Force Dagger operations officer, mediated in delicate negotiations between Zia and Gul Haidar, a one-legged Tajik commander from Logar Province offered up by Fahim Khan, head of the Northern Alliance, and the new Afghan defense minister. Haidar brought tanks, which the Americans now thought were important, even though the valley was emptying of enemy by the third or fourth day.
When Zia and Gul Haidar were brought together to discuss how their forces would work alongside each other in the Shahikot, it was clear that they had a history, and not a good one. “You didn’t know the specifics, but you could tell,” Rosengard said. The meeting occurred in the howling desert east of Gardez in Zia’s tent. The two warlords met with Rosengard, Haas, and a couple of assistants in the middle of the night in a big dust storm. Zia’s tent was a low-slung, rotting canvas affair with an arthritic stovepipe sticking out of the middle of it, belching smoke as Zia’s deputy threw hunks of wood in to keep it alive. “It had Afghan carpets around the side, and a couple of pillows, and we’re drinking chai and smoking cigarettes,” Rosengard recalled. “Then you bring in Gul Haidar, a previous some kind of sort of enemy to Zia, here in his tent to negotiate how these two motherfuckers, who don’t like each other, don’t trust each other, are going to [enter] this valley with some effort to coordinate armor and infantry.”
The meeting strained the Dagger negotiators’ patience. They would tell Gul Haidar the attack was “the day after tomorrow,” and that “tomorrow” was the prep day, and his reaction was, “Okay, I go tomorrow.” The issue of deciding who would be first into the valley also caused problems. Each warlord took the position, “Oh, I don’t want to be in front of him, because if he’s behind me, he’ll shoot me.” All the meeting participants were armed, and none of the Afghans ever let their trigger fingers move too far from their weapons. “This was the Wild, Wild West at its finest,” Rosengard said.
WHILE the Rakkasans waited for the Afghans, other units belatedly arrived to offer assistance. Canadian troops were brought in, as were more 10th Mountain soldiers, these ones from 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment. But there was no fighting to match the intensity seen on March 2, 3, and 4. U.S. commanders seemed largely content to sit in their positions in the mountains and let fires kill as many enemy fighters as possible.
Afghan forces finally swept into the Shahikot on March 12, accompanied by the Gardez triumvirate of Blaber, Spider, and Haas. The attack took the form of a pincer, with Gul Haidar’s column of rusting T-55 tanks advancing through the gap north of the Whale. Haas escorted the Northern Alliance commander and was impressed by the one-legged Afghan’s leadership style. Gul Haidar, with his eight-man personal security detail spread out ahead of him, insisted on doing his own “leader’s recon” of the route along which his tanks were about to drive. Hobbling on his peg leg, the Afghan commander proved equal to the challenge of the terrain, climbing onto the high ground to get a good view of the battlefield. Then, inexplicably, he sat down and started “bawling his eyes out,” Haas recalled. “Why are you crying, sir?” the bemused SF officer asked him. “Because General Massoud should be with me at this historic time,” Gul Haidar replied, turning to embrace Haas in a bear hug as he continued sobbing. “Hey, sir, we’ve got to get moving on,” Haas said.
When they entered the pass, Gul Haidar gave the Americans an object lesson in leadership by example. After finding a handful of antitank mines half-buried in his tanks’ path, Gul Haidar called for rope and grappling hooks, with which his men traveled for just this purpose. As the Americans watched in horror, the Afghan commander and one of his aides hurled the grappling hooks at the mines, expertly catching their sides with the hooks. “No, no, no! You’re a general, you’re going to get yourself killed!” Haas yelled. Gul Haidar gave the American officer an almost condescending glance. “I know how to do this,” he said calmly before walking back behind a rock, the rope still in his hand, and yanking the first mine out of the road. Then he walked over to the mine, knelt down, unscrewed the bottom and pulled the fuse out, all as Haas continued to plead with him to stop. To cap his remarkable performance, Gul Haidar picked up the mine, walked over, and handed it to the American officer. “Here, no problem,” he said. The Afghan repeated the process four or five more times. “Then he calls his tanks forward,” Haas recalled, clearly impressed with what he had seen. “How many armor generals actually get out there and clear the mines for their tanks? Well, Gul Haidar did. Then he’s standing there like Patton, waving his tanks through. It was something to see.”
Unfortunately, when Haidar’s tanks rolled into the valley, the first thing they did was fire at the Rakkasans on the mountainside. A T-55 crew put a main gun round right through a 2-187 Infantry pup tent. Fortunately for all concerned, no one was hurt and frantic radio calls soon corrected the mistake. “That’s exactly why we wanted to pull out of there, because we had not trained with these guys,” Larsen, the Rakkasan executive officer, said.
Meanwhile, Blaber was rounding the southern end of the Whale in an SUV with Zia’s troops. This time the Afghans were given free reign to fight as they saw fit. It made a big difference. “They were on fire at this point because they were actually using their own tactics,” Blaber said. Everywhere the AFO commander looked, he saw friendly Afghans manning crew-served weapons on the high ground. “You just knew that whole valley was clear,” he said.
This was it, the moment of official victory for the allied forces in Anaconda. It was something of an anticlimax. The battle had been all but over for a week. Rather than the original concept of Zia’s men confronting Al Qaida troops in the villages, the U.S. operators and Afghan militiamen drove through ghost towns on the valley floor. Using the grid references passed to him by his teams, Blaber went to several sites at which his operators had directed air strikes. The bombs had done their job. He photographed over thirty enemy corpses.
Blaber and his men discovered five working artillery pieces (four 122mm howitzers and a 152mm howitzer) in the riverbeds, as well as an explosives laboratory. But what they didn’t find were people. There was no sign of life, and no sign of civilian death either—none of the corpses in the villages were those of women or children. “I didn’t even see a dead animal,” Blaber said. No one fired at them. The enemy was gone. But where?
Many never made it out of the Shahikot alive. But just how many were killed is hard to nail down. Senior U.S. commanders described numbers of enemy dead as high as 800 publicly and over a thousand in private. However, they offered no evidence to back up their claims. “Ginger Pass,” the gorge just south of Takur Ghar, was a key logistics route into the valley for Al Qaida forces and hence one of the most heavily bombed parts of the Shahikot. Yet a walk through the gorge on March 18, the last day of the operation, yielded no tangible proof that anyone had been killed there. The sides of the pass were scorched brown and black by high explosives. Shards of shrapnel big enough to cut a man in two littered the ground. There was even an unexploded bomb in the waters of the creek that ran through the gorge. But there were no corpses, bloodstains, shallow graves, or body parts. Bodies were found in other parts of the Shahikot, but usually in ones and twos and threes, not dozens. Some of this can be explained by good guerrilla tactics—no irregular army leaves its dead in the field of battle if it can help it, precisely because removing the bodies confuses its enemies about how many they have killed. But it is hard to imagine 600 or 700 bodies being spirited out of the Shahikot without anyone noticing—even America’s imperfect eyes in the sky. (Interestingly, estimates of enemy dead in the Shahikot tended to rise the further the officer making the estimate was from the battle.) Some observers put the numbers as low as the double digits. But there are enough firsthand accounts of enemy fighters being killed—and enough bodies—to suggest this is too low. A better estimate—and one more in keeping with the number of bodies and body parts that were found, and the numbers mentioned in Al Qaida documents obtained by U.S. intelligence—is between 150 and 300. Given the size of the enemy force in the Shahikot—estimated by U.S. commanders in the first week of the operation as upwards of 1,000—one is forced to conclude that at least as many Al Qaida fighters escaped the Shahikot as died there.
ON March 13 Blaber again drove south from Gardez to the Shahikot, this time to drop off India Team, who he wanted to track the fleeing enemy. Speedy again put his hunting skills to good work. Following footprints, trash, and discarded clothes, he soon picked up the trail, which traced the route that AFO had long suspected the enemy would take from the Shahikot: east through Ginger Pass or the next gorge down into the Upper Shahikot Valley. From there some enemy fighters moved east to Obastay. Others traveled south to Celam Kac, before following a track southeast through the mountains to the Neka Valley, about seventeen kilometers southeast of the Shahikot. The Afghan forces who were supposed to be watching these routes with U.S. Special Forces had apparently abandoned their positions. “There was no one to stop the Al Qaida from escaping Shahikot south, southeast, or southwest,” a special ops source said. From Neka, the guerrillas took old mujahideen routes into Pakistan, where they headed for Miram Shah, a wild town in the North West Frontier Province where Jalalluddin Haqqani had made his headquarters during the 1980s. Signs of distress India discovered along the way—a bloody hat here, a used bandage there—led AFO to refer to the route as “the trail of tears.”
Over the next several weeks AFO and CIA personnel moved through the towns and villages on this route, talking to local leaders. “We really got a great forensic autopsy of what happened,” Blaber said. The warlords and tribal elders told the Americans that Al Qaida had been building up for months in the area, preparing a spring offensive. The locals said they were glad Al Qaida—” the Arabs”—had left, because they treated their hosts poorly.
But “trail of tears” or no, the U.S. failure to fight a successful battle of encirclement in the Shahikot meant several hundred experienced Al Qaida fighters—Arabs, Uzbeks, and Chechens—escaped to Pakistan. Undoubtedly some senior enemy leaders were among them. Just how senior is a matter of conjecture.
The only enemy leader known to have been killed in the Shahikot was Saif Rahman Mansour, an Afghan who led the Taliban force in the area. He may have been the banner-carrying leader killed by an air strike called in by Juliet on D-Day. By contrast, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan leader Tohir Yuldeshev was known to have slipped the United States’ clutches in the Shahikot. Over the next two years the couple of hundred Uzbeks he commanded who made it out formed the core of the Al Qaida force in the North West Frontier Province’s tribal areas. Yuldeshev became the day-to-day commander of Al Qaida’s skirmishes with Pakistani security forces.
No intelligence surfaced that bin Laden had returned to the Shahikot since December. But there were persistent, although unconfirmed, reports that his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been in the Shahikot, and might have been wounded before making his escape. In this regard it is interesting to note that on March 6, an Australian SAS team covering the Arme Khwar stream about eight kilometers south of the Shahikot saw thirteen armed personnel moving through the area. The Aussies said the force consisted of an advanced element of four men, two to three men providing flank security on each side, and a main body of five men. In the center of the group walked a man with a cane who appeared older than the others. “All twelve security personnel wore black balaclavas,” said a report of the episode. The Australians called in an A-10 strike on the group, which split into two elements. The A-10 attacked, but, frustratingly, no allied forces were able to conduct any bomb damage assessment. There were unconfirmed reports Zawahiri suffered a head wound during this period. If so, he survived and was still releasing audiotapes rallying the faithful to Al Qaida’s cause in 2004.
THE Pentagon declared Operation Anaconda over on March 18, but in reality it had been all but done for well over a week. The Rakkasans returned to Kandahar. But for AFO, there was to be no heading back to the relative luxury of Bagram or Kabul. The Delta operators were already hunting the enemy ever closer to the Pakistan border. Blaber was quietly agitating for cross-border missions. To him the Pakistan border already resembled the Cambodian border during Vietnam conflict—a barrier to U.S. troops behind which their enemies found succor.
It was going to be a long war.