Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (20 page)

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 team
39
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 day
58
—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