The Only Thing Worth Dying For (53 page)

8. Gary C. Schroen,
First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
(New York: Ballantine, 2005).

C
HAPTER
4: T
HE
S
OLDIER AND THE
S
TATESMAN

1. Though Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, fervently denied that he was strong-armed into providing these basing rights, Secretary of State Colin Powell had delivered to him the Bush party line: “You are either with us or against us.” Under a “leasing” agreement with high rent and numerous conditions, the United States was also granted a narrow flight corridor into and out of Pakistan, to be used only for logistics and aircraft recovery; no attacks could be launched from within Musharraf’s country. See Pervez Musharraf,
In the Line of Fire: A Memoir
(New York: Free Press, 2006).

2. Woodward,
Bush at War.

3. Robert McFarlane, “The Tragedy of Abdul Haq,”
Wall Street Journal
, November 2, 2001.

4. James F. Dobbins,
After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan
(Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2008).

C
HAPTER
6: T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
T
ARIN
K
OWT

1. Every member of ODA 574 was issued a detailed, topographical Joint Operations Graphic “pilot survival map,” generally carried by pilots in the event they are shot down or crash behind enemy lines and must evade the enemy. Special Forces in Afghanistan used any number of maps, but many found this survival map the most useful for referencing such things as terrain, roads, waterways, and mountains. Names of villages, road locations, bridges over waterways, and other features on the map, however, differed greatly from what the men discovered once on the ground.

2. “Under Operations Safe Haven and Safe Passage nearly 7,300 Cubans were transported from Panama to Guantanamo Naval Base between 01 February 1995, the date the movement began, and 20 February 1995. The mission of the transfer operation was to move the Cuban migrants from Safe Haven camps in Panama to Guantanamo in a safe, orderly manner.” See http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/safe_haven. htm.

C
HAPTER
7: C
REDIBILITY

1. Maura Reynolds and Alissa J. Rubin, “Response to Terror: The Front Lines,”
Los Angeles Times
, November 25, 2001.

2. U.S. Army Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan,
Weapon of Choice: ARSOF in Afghanistan
, official history, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kans., p. 157.

3. While I interviewed James Dobbins personally, much of what I gleaned or quoted can be found in his book
After the Taliban
. The book also provides an overview of the process at Bonn.

C
HAPTER
8: M
ADNESS

1. The U.S. Army was unable to deliver this situation report, in spite of a Freedom of Information Act request. As such, the content is paraphrased, but deemed accurate by team members who read the original.

2. Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell,
American Soldier
(New York: ReganBooks, 2004), p. 309.

3.
Weapon of Choice
, pp. 158–66. To further understand the uprising, and how a headquarters element ultimately called in a bomb on its own position, I interviewed members of ODAs operating in northern Afghanistan at that time who confirmed that they had requested to return to the
prison to help with the rescue efforts but were told by Queeg’s headquarters staff that they were not needed. 4. From September 27 to October 31, Fox had led a training exercise in Jordan. Upon completion, the battalion was ordered to hold in place, at El Jafr air base in Jordan. A week later, Fox was told to pick fourteen members of his battalion staff who could function as a nimble command-and-control group to execute missions into northern Afghanistan. From Jordan, Fox and his fourteen-member SOCCE staff were sent to Uzbekistan aboard a commercial airliner, then made their way to K2 on a public bus. Two and a half days later, they were in Pakistan for Thanksgiving, on standby at J-Bad until they joined ODA 574 and Karzai.

5. While some called the town Shawali Kowt (it is also the main town in Shawali Kowt District), others called it Sayd Alim Kalay, which was the name used in investigations conducted by the U.S. military. I chose Shawali Kowt, the name used by Amerine and Karzai.

C
HAPTER
9: D
EATH ON THE
H
ORIZON

1. Charles Gray Robertson,
Kurum, Kabul, and Kandahar
(1881; rept. Elibron Classics), pp. 209, 210.

C
HAPTER
10: T
HE
R
UINS

1. Mag’s and Wes’s accounts of being left behind by Ken were nearly identical. Despite numerous attempts, I was never able to get Ken’s version of the story to see if he might have thought they were both in the back of the vehicle when he sped off. Neither man confronted him later that night, and he never apologized. Numerous people told me that it was Ken’s job to make sure his passengers were in the vehicle. Ultimately, both Wes and Mag assumed he had simply panicked and lost all situational awareness.

2. While nobody on ODA 574 knew anything about Bolduc’s thwarting of an enemy flanking maneuver on the late afternoon of December 4, 2001, I was able to find one semi-witness to the events. Nelson Smith confirmed that Bolduc did take a number of guerrillas with him down off the Alamo (while the battle for the ruins by the bridge was in full swing) toward the river after verbalizing his suspicions to Smith that there might be enemy coming across it, something Bolduc inferred from some intercepted radio traffic. A few minutes later, while Nelson was trying to set up a hasty defense of the Alamo with the remaining guerrillas in the area, he heard gunfire coming from the direction of the river.
     
Bolduc later called it a flanking maneuver by the enemy. ODA 574 was dubious of the story because in the unanimous opinion of all team members I interviewed, if there had been such a flanking maneuver by the enemy in progress while the men were engaged in combat at the ruins, they should have been informed about it immediately, as they were the ones potentially being flanked.
      In my interview with Bolduc, he told me that he saw a group of armed Afghans (estimated at thirty) coming out of an orchard across the river, and opened fire on them as they made their way onto the dry riverbed. The guerrillas he brought along joined in, and the Afghans retreated into the orchard. When I interviewed Fox (who had moved forward to JD’s support-by-fire location at the time), he said that he hadn’t heard about Bolduc’s combat back near the Alamo until Bolduc told him about it in person a couple of hours later, once Fox had returned to the Alamo. Bolduc’s own version of the account has been documented in
Weapon of Choice
, pp. 176–77.

C
HAPTER
11: T
HE
T
HIRTEENTH
S
ORTIE

1. The facts, quotations, and sequence of events used to describe the B-52’s mission were taken from the recorded transcripts of the official Air Force Accident Investigation, in which all five crew members were questioned under oath. See Report of Investigation: 5 December 2001 JDAM Incident Near Sayd Alim Kalay, Afghanistan (redacted/unclassified version), 2003.

E
PILOGUE

1. After remaining anonymous to the public ever since the accident occurred, Jim Price allowed me to use his real name and to hear his account of the events. Since the technical aspects of what went wrong have been simplified herein, and because what truly went wrong was never discovered in the investigation, some further explanation is warranted.
      Price ultimately discovered his error on a field exercise supporting 5th Group ODAs in August 2002, after a Special Forces operator questioned Price about an odd “gross deviation error” on his GPS screen. Price shut down the exercise and after a couple of hours tinkering with the device, discovered “deliberate” and “hasty” modes in the software.
      On the morning of December 5, 2001, Price had calibrated the Viper laser range finder after talking with the F-18 pilots. One of the calibration points was the ground in front of him that he had lased. Because the
Viper had been borrowed from the weather detachment and configured to measure cloud heights, its software was set on “hasty” mode, which allowed Price to scroll past a “gross deviation error” message warning him that the coordinates were too close to his current location. Had the software been set on “deliberate” mode—the proper configuration for close air support—the device would not have allowed him to pull up a coordinate in the immediate vicinity. The software also stored only ten sightings and would not overwrite the final target sighting, so it stored his test location rather than discarding it as he had expected. When Price called in the bomb, he inadvertently used that stored location, directing the bomb to a coordinate only a few feet ahead of his position. Had he double-checked the target coordinates on the military GPS with his personal GPS, he would have caught the error.
      A warning report was ultimately issued throughout the military on January 16, 2003, that stated the equipment Price was using created a “fratricide risk”: “There is a potential of fratricide when using the PLGR II or the V-PLGR with a Viper/Vector LRF while in ‘Hasty’ or ‘Deliber ate’ LRF mode.” Also, “As a result, munitions may be called on an Operator’s position when using the [equipment] set to ‘Hasty’ LRF mode.”

2. By mid-September 2009, the votes had been cast in Afghanistan’s second democratic presidential election, and the Afghan Independent Election Commission determined that Karzai had achieved the necessary votes to defeat his closest contender, Dr. Abdullah, and would remain president for a second term. His victory, however, was tainted by allegations of electoral fraud and ballot stuffing. A subsequent investigation reduced his total votes from 54 percent to 49.7 percent, .3 percent short of the votes required to avoid a runoff. A runoff election was scheduled for November 7, 2009, between Karzai and Abdullah, the Northern Alliance leader who had first endorsed Karzai’s interim leadership in November of 2001, two days following the battle of Tarin Kowt. On October 25, 2009, correspondent Fareed Zakaria interviewed Karzai on CNN, asking the incumbent president whether or not he had been pressured into accepting the runoff. Karzai responded that to not accept the runoff was to “insult democracy” based upon the evidence of vote rigging. He added that it was required “For peace, for stability, for the future of democracy in Afghanistan, and for the future of institutional order in Afghanistan.”
      On Sunday, November 1, just a few days before this book went to press, Abdullah dropped out of the race, and the following day the Independent Election Commision proclaimed Karzai the victor. He will lead Afghanistan for a second five-year term as president.

About the Author

ERIC BLEHM
is the author of
The Last Season
, which won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for best nonfiction book of 2006 and was a Book Sense bestseller;
Outside
magazine called it one of the “top ten adventure biographies ever written.” He lives in Southern California.

www.onlythingworthdyingfor.com

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Also by Eric Blehm

The Last Season

P3: Pipes, Parks, and Powder

Agents of Change: The Story of DC Shoes and Its Athletes

Credits

Jacket photograph from ODA 574 Archives

Copyright

THE ONLY THING WORTH DYING FOR
. Copyright © 2010 by Eric Blehm. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

EPub Edition © December 2009 ISBN: 978-0-06-195979-0

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1