Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (41 page)

“TF Blue went down,” said a senior JSOC officer. “We were in communications with the team leader constantly. They were coached to try and go in and almost negotiate his removal. They weren't directed to forcibly pull him out. He [the team leader] was more or less going there with the Department of State—I think the ambassador was involved, there may have been others too—and it was designed basically to provide security and protect [Aristide] and escort him out and ensure that he got out.”

But a Team 6 officer said that although the small SEAL element, which included a master chief named Pete Kent, did not use physical force, their discussions with Aristide left little doubt as to what his options were. Kent told the Haitian politician, “Get on the plane now!” the Team 6 officer said. “I was told that to avoid bloodshed I'd better leave,” Aristide told CNN. White House press secretary Scott McClellan strongly denied this at the time. But several officers familiar with the mission said the Team 6 personnel were influential in getting Aristide on the plane, which ultimately took him to exile in the Central African Republic. “That's when McChrystal told me, ‘We need more guys like that master chief, because he could sell a fucking bad bucket of stones to somebody,'” said an officer.
4

(Two years earlier Kent had achieved a certain level of notoriety as one of then interim president of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai's bodyguards during a September 5, 2002, assassination attempt on the president. Karzai's SEAL Team 6 bodyguards shot the would-be assassin, as well as two Afghans who were wrestling with him. In the course of the fight, a round ricocheted and hit Kent in the head, lightly wounding him, but forced him to take his shirt off and wrap it round his head as a bandage. The photo of him naked from the waist up, brandishing an assault rifle, with a shirt around his head was picked up by many news outlets.)
5

*   *   *

Meanwhile in Iraq it was becoming clear that the campaign against the “former regime elements” had run its course. A new enemy more capable and far more dangerous than any of Saddam Hussein's henchmen had emerged: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In January, “Zarqawi became our primary focus,” McChrystal wrote.

Zarqawi's group had embedded itself in Fallujah, a religiously conservative city of 285,000 in the Sunni heartland of Anbar province about thirty miles west of Baghdad. The city was part of the 82nd Airborne Division's area of operations until March 2004, when the 1st Marine Division relieved the 82nd as the “landowning” conventional force responsible for the city. But neither unit had the manpower to keep the lid on insurgent activity in Fallujah, which had become a no-go area for U.S. forces.
6
Residents threw rocks at low-flying Little Birds on daylight missions in mid-January. By February, they were aiming more dangerous projectiles. A shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile narrowly missed a Little Bird flight just south of Fallujah on February 26. A few days later in the same area, a similar missile—later determined to be an SA-14—brought down an AH-6, destroying the helicopter and injuring the pilots.
7
It was on this cauldron of anti-Coalition sentiment that the task force focused its attention in spring 2004.

The task force almost got lucky with one of its earliest missions into Fallujah. In February, McChrystal accompanied a Delta strike force on a night raid on a suspected Zarqawi safe house in the middle-class Askari neighborhood in the city's northeast. (The JSOC commander made a habit of going along on such raids, believing they gave him a better feel for the war and allowed him “to build relationships and mutual trust” with his troops.) But Zarqawi eluded them, probably jumping into a dark alleyway from a second-floor window as the operators closed in. Just as with the decision not to proceed with Delta's 1999 bin Laden mission, JSOC's history and that of the unit might look very different had the task force captured Zarqawi that night in Fallujah, before the Jordanian's goal of inspiring a Sunni-Shi'a civil war in Iraq had gained traction.
8
As it was, the operators continued to make frequent forays into Fallujah and Ramadi throughout March, hunting Zarqawi and his lieutenants. They ran into trouble on the night of March 24 when insurgents ambushed a mounted Delta patrol outside the city. With operators forced to shelter behind their vehicles, a firefight ensued, the ferocity of which can be judged by the fact that somehow a detainee managed to escape. Two troops were wounded before the operators could withdraw.
9

Less than a week later came the event that would sear the word “Fallujah” into the American consciousness, when insurgents ambushed four employees of the security firm Blackwater as they were driving through the city, killing all four and stringing two of their corpses up over the bridge across the Euphrates. The incident recalled 1993's battle of Mogadishu, when Somalis had dragged fallen task force soldiers' bodies through the streets. The episode's fallout prevented Delta commander Colonel Bennet Sacolick from attending a commanders' conference that McChrystal hosted the first week of April at Bagram. The commanders, deputy commanders, and senior enlisted advisers of JSOC's units, as well as McChrystal's senior staff officers, attended the conference. With his force dispersed across the globe, McChrystal held such gatherings regularly to ensure his immediate subordinates understood his intent. The JSOC commander left no doubt that he was dissatisfied with the task force's level of knowledge of their enemies. “We fundamentally do not understand what is going on outside the wire,” he told his men.

McChrystal, who was bouncing between Pope, Bagram, and Baghdad during this period, flew to the Iraqi capital with his staff on April 5, arriving as the Marines launched an attack to rid Fallujah of insurgents.
10
(Major General Jim Mattis, commander of 1st Marine Division, had counseled a patient approach after the Blackwater incident, but with anger and a desire for revenge coursing through the American body politic, Army Lieutenant General Ric Sanchez, the senior U.S. military leader in Iraq, ordered him to attack.)
11
At the urging of Delta's Fallujah team leader, one or two of the unit's operators linked up with Marine platoons entering the city. The aim was to add a little more lethality and combat savvy to the Marine elements, but because the operators enjoyed superior communications links with each other and the task force JOC, they were able to give their higher headquarters superb situational awareness of events on the battlefield. By his own admission, McChrystal “became addicted to this ground-level reporting for the rest of the war.”
12

Four Marine battalions began to sweep through Fallujah. But the same political forces that had forced Mattis to attack before he was ready abruptly changed tack after Arab media outlets reported that the initial stages of the assault had killed hundreds of civilians. On the advice of Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, President Bush decided the attack had to stop, an order Abizaid delivered to Mattis April 9.
13
Surprised by the halt, McChrystal realized he had not established close enough links to Mattis's headquarters. He sought to rectify that oversight by placing liaison officers not just with Mattis's Marines, but in as many conventional unit headquarters as possible. Many regular units were reluctant to accept the JSOC representatives, however, so the process took almost a year. McChrystal's approach mirrored his strategy with other government agencies. He placed more than seventy-five liaison officers in Washington and 100 elsewhere, including on the staffs of Joint Chiefs chairman Myers, CIA director Tenet, CENTCOM boss Abizaid, and the U.S. ambassadors to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The liaisons were limited to four-month tours, to prevent them losing touch with the battlefield. McChrystal had come to two conclusions. The first was that not just in Iraq but across the globe, JSOC was confronting a networked enemy—one that went by many names, but shared values, goals, personal connections, and, in many cases, people. McChrystal's second realization was that to have any chance against Al Qaeda's global brand of Sunni Islamist militancy, JSOC would have to create its own network by availing itself of the knowledge, the manpower, and, sometimes, the legal authorities that resided in other parts of the military and the U.S. government. “It takes a network to defeat a network” became McChrystal's mantra.
14

*   *   *

The Marines' pause in Fallujah became a withdrawal to the city's outskirts at the end of April. Although a hastily cobbled together local security force called the Fallujah Brigade replaced them, the reality was that Zarqawi's men controlled the city. It was on April 26, a few days before the withdrawal, that Hollenbaugh, Briggs, Boivin, and the Marines of Echo Company found themselves in a desperate fight to avoid being overrun.

Spying the grenade as it rolled under the blanket, the already wounded Boivin dived down the stairwell, crashing into Zembiec and his radio operator. Hollenbaugh had just enough time to duck behind the stairwell wall before the grenade exploded harmlessly. But he noticed it had been thrown from roughly the same area as the previous two. Grabbing a grenade of his own from a pouch on his body armor, he pulled the pin while walking toward that side of the roof. “About three quarters of the way there I let the spoon fly, counted
one, two, three
and threw it down hoping to get the guy,” he recalled. “Never saw any grenades come up over that [wall] again, but you just don't know.” He then did a quick tour of the roof, moving from hole to hole, firing multiple single shots from his M4 when he saw a target or a suspected insurgent position. He turned to check on Boivin, who was sitting in the stairwell with his head in his hands. “Larry, are you okay?” Hollenbaugh yelled. “Yeah, Don, I'm okay,” Boivin replied shakily. But he was very pale. The original dressing had come loose and he was bleeding heavily. Hollenbaugh redressed the wound with new Kerlix, taking even more care this time and tying it off so tightly that Boivin worried it might crush his skull.

Boivin descended to an open-air patio on the second floor and continued to fight from there with the Marines. Hollenbaugh remained on the roof and fought on alone, shifting from position to position, staying in one place only long enough to squeeze off a few rounds or toss one of the sixteen grenades he'd brought. Twelve were regular M67 fragmentation grenades, but four were thermobarics. Essentially a smaller, hand-thrown version of the “thermo” AT4 round, a thermobaric grenade needed to land in an enclosed space for optimal effect. With insurgents in neighboring houses, Hollenbaugh hurled his thermobaric grenades at their windows. “A couple” hit the target, he said. Dodging grenades, RPGs, and bullets, the experienced operator needed all his tricks to keep the insurgents at bay. When a Humvee arrived to evacuate the wounded, insurgents fired a well-hidden machine gun at the medics from an upper-floor window of a building to the south. Unable to see the machine gun itself from his position on the south wall, Hollenbaugh identified its location from the visible gases emanating from its barrel. He fired against the alley wall at an angle that he calculated would send the ricochets into the window. The gun went quiet. Hollenbaugh turned his attention to an insurgent-occupied house to the northeast. “I started putting rounds into the building,” he said. “Skipping bullets in off the floors and the walls.”

After an hour, Hollenbaugh was down to his last magazine and his final thermobaric AT4. His ears were ringing from the multiple explosions around him; his throat and nostrils were filled with the smell of gunpowder smoke, RPG accelerant, and the sweet tartness of C4 explosive; and his boots were tracking his colleagues' blood across the dusty rooftop. The machine gun opened up again. He had just grabbed his last AT4 when Zembiec appeared on the roof. “Hey Don, it's time to go,” the Marine captain said. “Let me shoot this,” the Delta operator replied, shouldering the AT4. Zembiec knelt down behind him, too close to the launcher's back blast area for Hollenbaugh, who motioned for him to move forward, then fired. The rocket flew just inside the edge of the machine gun nest window and exploded. “It shut the gun up,” Hollenbaugh said later. Satisfied, he followed Zembiec down the stairs. It was then he realized that everyone else had long since pulled out (eleven Marines having departed on stretchers). Only his one-man impersonation of an infantry squad had prevented the insurgents from storming the southern building. “It never came into my mind that I was alone,” he said later, telling
The Fayetteville Observer
. “I am glad someone did a head count.”

A single Marine, nineteen-year-old Lance Corporal Aaron Austin, died in the firefight. For their roles, Hollenbaugh and Briggs received the Distinguished Service Cross and Boivin the Silver Star.
15

The Marines' withdrawal and the predictable collapse of the Fallujah Brigade shortly thereafter gave Zarqawi the run of the city. In a late May meeting at the Coalition's Camp Fallujah on the edge of the city, a frustrated Abizaid let McChrystal know he expected his task force to take the lead in striking back. “We need to hit some targets,” he told the JSOC commander, slamming his fist on the table. But with no Coalition troops in Fallujah, the task force relied on Predators to track insurgent movements. By now, JSOC was rotating forces through Iraq about every ninety days. From April through June 2004 Mark Erwin's A Squadron was on point as Task Force Green. Wanting more from the Predator coverage, the squadron's team leaders put their heads together and came up with a new system. They placed an experienced operator alongside the intel analysts monitoring the Predators' real-time video feed around the clock. Once a drone caught sight of a suspect, the operator would have the pilots back in the United States follow the target relentlessly, keeping careful notes of his movements. “We would follow these guys all over—
went in this house with two guys, got in this car, changed cars here
—and plot all this on a map,” said a Delta source. At shift's end, the operator passed the logbook to his relief, so the task force was able to build a detailed picture of the suspect's “pattern of life.” According to McChrystal, this new way of operating meant both analysts and operators felt as if they “owned” the mission, “which in turn increased activity on the ground by moving targeting decisions down the ranks.” The system wasn't perfect yet—there weren't enough Predators to track every target, for one thing—but it was the beginning of what JSOC came to call the “Unblinking Eye.”
16