Exorcising Somalia

For military aviators, there are two kinds of darkness. There is the night of a luminous moon and the patchwork carpet of sleeping cities, nights where targets are easy and the runway is near. And then there is the Afghanistan night during a new moon, so dark it seems to suck up the starlight. The blackness below might shroud a desert plateau, or the sharp edge of a mountain, or a small figure aiming an antiaircraft gun at the sky.

These are the things that go through men’s minds when they ride in on those nights, huddled in the belly of an MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft. That their paratrooper pack is strapped on and ready. That their wife seemed to hold on for an extra moment when they left her a few weeks before. That the plane seems to be slowing and it’s almost time to get hooked up and ready to jump. That the Taliban probably has a few Stinger missiles. That when it’s time they’ll line up at the door and leap into the void, counting out the seconds before they can expect the invisible ground to pound into their feet. Run through the script: 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 25 seconds, contact! Find your buddies and start moving. Once again: Hook up, line up, jump, count, hit, move. That outside the cargo door that just opened there’s a great big, windy patch of night, and Jesus never made a night so black.

It is 10:45 p.m., Oct. 19, somewhere over the desert of southern Afghanistan. The new crescent moon is still lodged under the horizon. In unison, over the roar of the MC-130’s big engines, the men begin to shout the creed of the U.S. Army Rangers:

I accept that as a Ranger my country expects me to move farther, faster and fight harder than any other soldier. Never shall I fail my comrades .... Energetically will I meet the enemies of my country. I shall defeat them on the field of battle, for I am better trained and will fight with all my might. Surrender is not a Ranger word. I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy .... Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger objective and complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor.

“One minute, thirty seconds,” the pilot radioes into Staff Sgt. James Anderson’s earpiece. Just ahead is a Taliban airstrip with a complex of buildings, one of which has been identified as a military barracks for a small guard force. The buildings are aflame from a barrage of U.S. preassault airstrikes launched moments before. The mission for these 200 men of the 75th Infantry (Ranger) Regiment of Fort Benning, Ga.: take over the airstrip, kill any Taliban still resisting, gather intelligence documents from the complex, secure the buildings, then get out again.

“Target in sight,” Anderson shouts over the roaring noise of wind and engine coining through the open doors. “Thirty seconds.”

Ten seconds out, Anderson steps back and thumps the first two jumpers. “Go!” he screams. From all four planes, two jumpers exit each second, and soon all 200 are suspended in the Afghan night, gliding down through the terrible no man’s land between aircraft and ground, between safety and peril, between what has already happened and what is going to happen next.

Contact! Look for your buddies in the dark. Move.

Before this raid on the airstrip near Kandahar that night, the war in Afghanistan was a 2-week-old air campaign, conducted by remote control from planes that dropped bombs and broadcast the results on video screens. When the night was over, the Americans had conducted their first full-fledged ground assault, and even the oldest, gruffest generals back home could call what was happening in Afghanistan a war. American troops had landed. They had been shot at, and shot back, and heard the screams of dying enemies. A combat squad had walked into a Taliban outpost, keyed the mike on the radio and declared, “Clear.”

It was not a huge battle--about 20 Taliban died, most from preassault airstrikes. The American casualties came not from enemy fire but from a helicopter accident, and legs broken when they landed hard oil the desert floor. There was no new front line established -- a few hours after the Rangers landed on the airfield, they left again.

But the raid marked a crucial turning point in the new war, not only for the military strategists who demonstrated the U.S.’ ability to strike deep within enemy territory, but for the Army Rangers themselves, who that night launched their first major combat mission since the 1993 quagmire in Mogadishu, Somalia -- the miserable street battle that left 18 soldiers dead and inspired the recent Hollywood release “Black Hawk Down.”

After that night, the U.S. was able to move in a battalion-sized expeditionary unit of Marines, who would use the airstrip as a forward operating base known as Camp Rhino. Soon after that night there was no longer any real question that American forces could operate virtually unimpeded anywhere in Afghanistan, including on the doorstep of the Taliban’s spiritual headquarters at Kandahar.

“The mission was to destroy the Taliban at that location. It was to gather intelligence on what exactly was going on at that facility, and really the most important thing, after all was said and done, was the fact that we established it as it legitimate forward staging base in southern Afghanistan, setting the stage for having a permanent American presence. That’s a classic Ranger operation,” says Maj. John Renda, who conducted electronic warfare operations for the 75th Regiment in Southern Afghanistan.

“The other part was sending a message to the Taliban leadership,” Renda says. “That U.S. forces could act with relative impunity, attack at will, leverage massive firepower at a precise location. And then disappear.” Unspoken was the unofficial desire to purge the demons of Somalia, to show the world that the disaster on the streets of Mogadishu was a tragic exception.

AIRFIELD SEIZURES ARE A BREAD-AND-BUTTER OPERATION FOR THE RANGERS, a force of about 2,100 highly trained light infantry soldiers who are the only mainline Army troops able to conduct special operations -- to enter enemy territory unseen, engage in major combat to secure new ground and attempt to return alive.

Rangers are the kind of soldiers who slog through swamps with 107-pound packs without food for days on end, prepared to be deployed anywhere in the world within 18 hours. They sport the unmistakable, shaved-on-the-sides haircut -- extremely tight and very high,” they tell their barbers -- that distinguishes them from what they tend to dismissively call “the big Army.” No women, and kindly don’t ask them why.

The Kandahar airfield raid, timed to coincide with a special forces assault on Mullah Mohammed Omar’s compound the same night, actually began as a training drill at Ft. Benning only a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, though the soldiers had no idea at the time that they were training for the real thing.

The airfield they would target had appeared on no maps or satellite imagery prior to 2000. A confidential informant told U.S. intelligence officers about the small complex of buildings there, surrounded by a 7-foot-high perimeter wall and observation posts, with a small Taliban guard force housed outside.

“We thought, ‘How many people would it take to defend this building 24 hours a day, seven days a week? We figured, four people per shift in this building, plus one or two people in the guard towers -- 15 to 20 people,” says Col. Robert Whalen, the regiment’s 44-year-old intelligence officer, who helped design the operation.

Whalen, unlike the 18- and 19-year old recruits who normally try out for the Rangers, had come late to soldiering. After growing up the son of a career Marine officer, Whalen was determined to have nothing to do with the military. He got a degree in economics at Yale, another B.A. and a master’s in economics from Oxford University, and was thinking of going to law school or medical school. Then he went to Germany on a scholarship and visited East Berlin.

I had never seen a communist country before, a dictatorship,” he says. “It was really astonishing to me. And it really brought home to me that there are really good reasons why we have armies in places like Germany, to allow people to live ordinary lives. It hit me like a punch to the solar plexus. And I thought it might not be a bad way to spend a career.” He signed up for the Rangers, as a first lieutenant in 1988.

Whalen and regiment commander Col. Joseph Votel were careful not to tell the rest of the men that the operation they were rehearsing at Ft. Benning was a dead ringer for an assault on a desert airstrip in Afghanistan.

But most of the men had known as soon as they turned on their televisions on Sept. 11 that they wouldn’t be home much longer.

“We were out doing a training exercise when Sept. 11 happened,” recalls 1st Lt. Tom Bostick, 32, who left the small town of Llano, Texas, to work as an Army enlisted intelligence analyst, then went to officer training school and became platoon leader for the Rangers’ Alpha Company. “We heard a plane hit one of the buildings, and we came back and saw on TV the second plane hit. Then we knew there might really be something. Really, our thoughts were, ‘Oh my God, we’re gonna go.’ ”

Capt. Douglas Vincent, administrative headquarters commander, was driving into the office after a workout when he heard the news on NPR. “I came in and we had CNN on in the office. We all had a feeling that something would be happening.”

Vincent was careful not to say anything to his four brothers and sisters when they called. But keeping an impending deployment under wraps on base was another thing. The wives just seem to know that sort of thing, Vincent says. They can sense it.”

Vincent had gone to the same high school in Boca Raton, Fla., as his wife, but the two didn’t meet until a few years later, when he was home on leave from the Virginia Military Institute. A priest who taught at their high school married them, and when Afghanistan began to loom in the news, Vincent’s father took a handful of medals of St. Michael, patron saint of paratroopers, to be blessed by the same priest.

Vincent had four of them in his pocket as he and the other Rangers left Ft. Benning Oct. 12, headed for a forward staging base at a secret location, a few hours’ flight from Afghanistan. He told his wife they’d be protecting him. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We’re the best guys possible to do this mission. I’m probably in the safest place I could be, because of the nature of the people around me.”

He really felt that way, Vincent says. He had spent more time with these men than anyone, probably even his wife. He knew how strong they were. He knew how bad it had to be before they broke. He knew they wouldn’t come home without him. And he knew if somebody ought to be sent over there to do something, it ought to be them.

AT THE FORWARD STAGING BASE, WHALEN AND HIS INTELLIGENCE CREW BEGAN the painstaking task of assembling an exact picture of what the Kandahar airstrip looked like, along with the terrain around it.

“It was my job to gather all the imagery we could,” Whalen says, first from satellite photos, then drone aircraft, and later, as U.S. planes took control of the skies, Whalen’s own imagery specialist, flying in a P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft equipped with infrared sensors able to take still photos and video imagery of the target during daylight and at night.

“We needed to find out: This is what the target looks like, this is how big it is, these are the walls, this is how high the walls are, this is where the doors are, we think the doors open inward or outward, these are the people that are defending the target, these are the kind of weapons they have. What does the runway look like? How is the terrain -- how hard are you going to hit when you fall?”

Some of the answers to the questions came from carefully studying photographs of the same location over different days. Tents that were there one day and gone the next -- what did that mean? Vehicle tracks one day, no tracks the next day, or tracks in a different direction. Footprints in the sand. Allcould provide clues to the number and location of Taliban who were likely to be on site at P-hour -- the time the paratroopers landed.

“We’d try to figure out, what the hell goes on inside each of those buildings, and what would be needed to defend it?” Whalen says.

With the evidence available, Whalen’s team prepared a situation template, representing their best guess of what the paratroopers might expect when they arrived, displaying it in a powerpoint slide presentation transmitted back to headquarters in the U.S.

Two nights before the mission, scale photos were laid out on a large concrete floor inside a warehouse, and small model buildings were laid on top for a “rock drill,” a talkthrough of the mission that brought together not only the Rangers who would be on the ground, but the various commanders, pilots, refuelers and others who would have a role.

By then, each Ranger knew what rock he was supposed to go to for meeting up with the other members of his team, what depression in the ground would indicate he was almost to the rock, the location where one team would set up covering fire, another would enter a building, another would watch the perimeter.

The men, meanwhile, were preparing themselves, mentally and physically. They started reversing their sleep cycles, sleeping by day and remaining awake at night. “The longer we were there, I sort of started tapering off, I got to the point where I was only eating once a day. A couple times I stopped eating for 48 hours,” says Sgt. 1st Class Thomas Pendleton, 30, a sniper platoon sergeant.

Anderson, 26, who was a weapons squad leader in addition to his role as jump master on the inbound flight, drilled his squad repeatedly. They rehearsed the way they would set up a support-by-fire position with their three M-240-B machine guns to cover the line squads as they moved in to attack the enemy position. They practiced what they would do if they got engaged by the enemy and had to move to a different position. Anderson would go to each man on his squad. “What are we doing?” he’d ask, so many times it got tedious. “What’s our mission? How am we going to assemble?”

“The day before the mission, we had pretty much the entire day for ourself,” Pendleton says. “We spent the entire day doing last-minute changes to equipment. Guys could take their time packing things, making sure everything was in its right place.”

There was a moment of last-minute panic, when a new surveillance photo came in showing what looked for all the world like the turret of a tank sticking out of one of the tents.

“One of the analysts came in and said, ‘I think there’s a tank on the objective,’ and everybody just shut up. Because that changes everything,” Renda says. “They went in and did their magic manipulation, and figured out it was not. But it was almost surreal. We had been studying this thing for a month. We had rehearsed communications, rehearsed the fire-support package, everything, it was like written out in a book. You were on autopilot. And when that little event occurred, it makes you realize, this is for real. Let’s not get too comfortable.”

OCT. 19, DUSK. FOUR MC-130 COMBAT TALON AIRCRAFT TAKE OFF FROM THE forward staging base, just behind an assault force of AC-130 gunships headed for a pre-assault airstrike on the target in the minutes before the paratroopers land. The goal: wipe out as many of the 15 to 20 members of the guard force on the ground as possible before the first paratrooper jumps out of the plane. Leave the rest of them stunned.

It takes several hours to reach southern Afghanistan. “A lot of guys slept on the way in, which is normal,” says Vincent. “Actually, what I was thinking about was exiting the airplane. And then every single thing I do from the moment we stand up, to the moment I go out of the aircraft, to the moment I touch the ground. Visualization is what they call it. It just makes me feel calm. And then I pictured everything I needed to do on the ground, which was assemble all my guys and move my guys to where we need to be to do what we need to do when we get there, which is command and control.”

A little after 10:30 p.m., the men on each aircraft began to recite the Ranger Creed. It was something they don’t normally do on combat jumps-but this wasn’t a normal jump. Then, 10 minutes out from target, Anderson gave the command: “Everybody up!”

As the men begin hooking their static lines onto a long cable running the length of the aircraft, Anderson opened the doors and leaned out into the slipstream, where he was suspended over the desert in a blast of freezing air. It was so black he couldn’t see anything except the glow of burning buildings ahead in the distance -- a reassuring sight. It meant the gunships had done their job. It meant many of the Taliban down there were already dead.

As they quickly found out on landing, a single Taliban soldier had survived the aerial assault and was firing green tracer rounds from within the building complex. A Ranger squad made out the soldier with their night-vision goggles. “As soon as the SAW [machine gun] gunner opened up, it was over. The guy dropped, and he was done,” Renda says.

Almost immediately, the psychological operations team began broadcasting a prerecorded message in Pashto, the southern Afghanistan dialect, over loudspeakers. “U.S. forces are here to conduct combat operations,” the message said. “For your own safety, remain flat on the ground with your arms extended. If you encounter U.S. forces, remain on the ground, you will not be harmed.” But there was no one to broadcast to. Everyone was already dead.

Vincent located Votel and the other senior commanders in the landing zone, and it took them less than eight minutes to walk to the prearranged command and control location near the runway. “I basically memorized the layout of the airfield, and I knew basically how far it was from where we were assembling to where we were going,” Vincent says. “I’d pace count, look for prominent features. I knew there’s a little rise in the ground here, a dip in the ground there

As he stood guard, he could hear explosions in the building complex behind him. But Vincent’s job was to keep his back to the commanders, standing with his rifle staring out into the darkness around them.

At the tactical operations center back at the staging base, Renda was anxious.

“I was sitting in the command and control tent, we had the radios on speaker so you could hear all the transmissions from the regimental commander. Here we’re responsible for doing all these plans, to make sure everything happens the way it’s supposed to. And we just listen to the radios, hoping everything goes the way it’s supposed to. Your heart’s with these soldiers,” Renda says.

“We were listening to the airplanes, and we heard ‘em say, ‘Jumpers away. ‘ Then the pilots stopped [talking], they dropped off the net, and it took a long time for the regimental commander and his little cell to come up on the radio. There was a good 15, almost 20 minutes when we were sitting there, ‘Oh God, what the hell happened?’ And then all of a sudden, comms came up. It was like, ‘Yeah, we’re all here, a couple of minor injuries on the jump, but we’ve got the situation under control here and we’re getting ready to move on the compound.’”

Suddenly, a soldier on the thermal weapons site spotted some lights and heat in the distance, and looking in his nightvision goggles, he saw a vehicle heading toward the airstrip. Bostick’s crew called in the sighting to command and control, and an aircraft fired on the vehicle, destroying it.

“I think they were surprised at how well the U.S. military can see at night,” says Pendleton. “I think they figured if they just flipped off the headlights, they’d be good.” Several other Taliban vehicles were similarly dispatched.

Bostick took his squad and cleared out a dug-in fighting position overlooking the airfield. Just below it was a tent with fresh tire tracks around it. “We cleared it and went back to our fighting position,” he says.

Teams began moving through the buildings in the complex, looking for documents of possible intelligence value and any evidence that the Taliban -- as some suspected -- might have been using the buildings for drug processing. Another team examined the runway, to determine whether it could safely support the MC-130s, and any other aircraft the military might want to use to supply a base there later. When it was deemed safe, the MC-130s landed, and exfiltration -- loading the paratroopers back onto the aimraft for the flight home -- began.

The Rangers left behind a pile of fliers with the famous picture of the New York firefighters raising the flag at the World Trade Center. “Freedom endures,” it said in English and Pashtu.

It was still not dawn. Imagery after the fact showed about 30 Taliban bodies, either at the complex or in vehicles nearby. The U.S. tally was far less. Two American troops had sustained leg and ankle injuries during the parachute landing. Two others were killed many miles away in Pakistan, when a helicopter supporting the mission crashed on landing. There was a certain sense of letdown on the quiet flight back, that the fighting hadn’t been fiercer, but more keenly there was a sense that America had gone to war, and they had done their part.

“When my kids are in school reading, ‘Hey, there’s this thing in Afghanistan,’ You can tell ‘em, ‘We were there first. We were the first guys over there,’ ” Anderson says. “We’re. part of history now. No matter how big or little it was, one day your kids can tell you, ‘Hey dad, what about this?’ And you can say, ‘Sit down and let me tell you.’”