those daylight probes with mortar fire alone.
Ali said that of the twenty-seven men who had been lost since the fighting began, all but thirteen of them died by mortar fire. He claimed the enemy mortars were extremely accurate because they were “computerized.” For us, it was obvious that one of the first major steps had to be to stop those costly daylight attacks and remove the enemy mortars from the equation.
We were skeptical when Ali praised his fighters for locating three former Soviet tanks that were now used by bin Laden’s people. His men had come upon a series of caves just past the foothills and heard the rumbling of metal tank treads rolling over uneven rock beds. We knew how difficult it was just to walk over that terrain and considered that it was probably too difficult to maneuver with heavy armor. Ali insisted that several of the caves carved out during the Soviet jihad could easily hold several tanks. We just didn’t buy it. We were unaware that just a few days earlier, the combined CIA and JSOC team had photographed several armored vehicles from a distance before eliminating them with powerful smart bombs called JDAMs, joint direct attack munitions.
Within seventy-two hours of doubting Ali’s claim about the tanks, those same tanks moved from fiction to fact. Our own snipers spotted them even deeper and higher in the mountains. Hard to believe, but it was true. The tanks must have been part mountain goat.
The result of all the discussions, picture taking, and planning led to a pretty elementary conclusion. The Tora Bora Mountains were to our front, and bin Laden was reportedly garrisoned up there with as many as three thousand loyal fighters. The solution was to launch a full attack.
Some great mind once said that there are two kinds of original thinkers. There are those who, upon viewing disorder, try to create order. And the second group does just the reverse. It is made up of those who, on encountering order, try to create disorder. That’s us. Delta operators thrive on chaos like no other group of humans alive. It’s intoxicating. It’s intense. And it is extraordinarily addictive.
The fundamental Delta principle has long been “Surprise, Speed, and Violence of Action.” It applies to commando tactics. If during an assault you lose one element, the implied response is to increase it in the next. For example, if we lost surprise during a stealthy approach to a target before reaching the breach point, we would increase the pace from a deliberate move to a stepped-up jog or sprint. At the breach, if it became obvious to the team leader that whatever or whoever waited on the opposite side of the door or window was alert and expecting visitors, we escalated to an even more violent explosive entry.
Regardless of how Delta enters the crisis point, the expression “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” still applies when conducting close-quarter combat, or CQB. Watching Delta operators conduct “free flow” CQB on targets with unknown floor plans is one of the most awesome sights of controlled chaos one can imagine. The sequence is anything but choreographed, but the operators effortlessly sweep through a structure like red ants going through familiar, twisting corridors. Delta’s method and skill in CQB is unmatched by any other force in existence.
We absorbed an enormous amount of information by studying the muhj style of warfare during the first couple of days.
Afghans are afternoon fighters by nature, and their methods are straight out of Barbarian Tactics 101. Sometime after midday prayers, they would muster with AK-47 rifles, PKM machine guns and RPGs as far forward in the foothills as they safely could. After clustering around, seemingly as if nobody knew who was in charge on that particular day, they would plough straight uphill, firing wildly. It was a good show that apparently was played out to convince the watching reporters that General Ali’s forces were on the offensive. But it was also grossly ineffective.
This was centuries-old tribal warfare, more symbolic than savage, more duty than deadly, more for spoils than scalps. It was not intended for anyone to really get hurt. The skirmishes would last a few hours, then the fighters would do some looting and call it a day and retreat back down the ridgelines, giving back to al Qaeda any of the day’s hard-earned terrain.
This style of fighting was nothing new to these people. Since the days of the Prophet Muhammad’s assault on Mecca in 622 A.D., fighters have halted to loot captured enemy stores and sift through overrun fighting positions, cave dwellings, and linear dugouts. War booty and cave treasures provided the same financial incentive to fight al Qaeda in Tora Bora that Saladin provided to his Muslim soldiers many centuries ago. Booty or martyrdom, one or the other, is a promise from Allah. The cost of living in eastern Afghanistan was probably less than a dollar a day, so a little looting could go a long way.
We wanted Ali to switch gears, throw bin Laden some curveballs, and add a few night games to a schedule of day games only. But he wanted us to just sit tight in relative safety while his muhj did the fighting. Let him worry about locating bin Laden. The general wanted more bombs, but no American casualties, and he would let us know when it was safe to come out and play. Not unexpectedly, some American commanders in the upper echelons shared Ali’s concern about American casualties and preached the same wait-and-see attitude. More than once, I heard them say, “Let things develop.” It was vexing.
Ali’s desire was to maximize the bombing to save as many of his troops’ lives as possible, and Colonel Ashley had a similar wariness. Ashley’s caution was meant to stave off our natural impetuousness and was hard to dispute, for he still carried with him his experiences in the deadly streets of Mogadishu in 1993.
Ashley’s point was well taken, but it made us wonder how America would react to hearing a commander state, “Let them [the Afghans] finish the job. This is about using surrogate forces; it’s their war.”
As much as I respected both of their positions, I also disagreed with them, and so did my men. We did not like hearing such statements while the rubble was being cleaned up from the attack on the World Trade Center.
Ali’s track record so far was analogous to throwing firecrackers into a fishing hole. Sure, you get a few dead fish to float to the top, but if you want the kingfish, you had better be prepared to do some serious trolling in dangerous and deeper waters.
Fortunately, our CIA partners also were in no mood to sit around, and George consistently hounded Ali to attack. Our immediate deployment into the mountains could motivate, or even shame, Ali’s fighters into action, and the idea slowly gained traction.
What Ali really needed, even if he didn’t know or even desire it yet, was example. Combining the best of modern Marine Corps recruiting mottos, what was needed here was “A Few Good Men” to enter the mountains and prove that “Superior Minds Have Always Overwhelmed Superior Force.”
We American commandos had to prove to the general that we could operate inside the mountains, surrounded by al Qaeda day and night, and not stamp our time cards at the end of the day. We certainly planned to give Ali his wish by throwing more fireballs into bin Laden’s mountain castle: lethal fireballs in the form of bombs from the bellies of B-52 and B-1 bombers, bombs that came complete with nasty attitudes and pinpoint accuracy to collapse the hidden cave openings that protected the elusive terrorists. But we also needed to see where the projectiles landed in relation to the pockets of enemy and the well-camouflaged cave entrances.
And we were growing very impatient. We wanted to do it soon! As the Greek writer Euripides stated back in 425 B.C., the God of War hates those who hesitate.
After the ten-hour drive from Bagram, through Kabul, and then east to Jalalabad, the boys finally linked up with Manny on the outskirts of the city. A short time later, Jim rested the boys safely in a large two-story safe house in Jalalabad that had been provided by the good General Ali.
The snipers led the way, with an hour’s head start, to break up the convoy. When their lead truck blew a tire just on the other side of the volatile town of Sorubi, the convoy pulled over to wait for it to be repaired, a move that left the rearmost vehicles still in the heart of the town. Within a few heartbeats, hundreds of locals, many armed with AK-47s, spilled out of the shops and market area. It looked like a giant ant hill had been stepped on.
Some school-age children curiously reached under the tarps covering the equipment in the truck bed, and one daring young thief reached through an open window and grabbed a Garmin GPS off the dashboard, then dashed into the crowd. Delta sniper Dugan dismounted from the backseat with only his concealed Glock pistol for protection, and began playing with the children to draw their minds away from messing with the truck.
A bunch of armed locals started rocking the Land Rover of the British SBS commandos because they refused to get out. As Dugan tried to keep the crowd back, a rock came flying out of nowhere and smacked him in the back of
