He kept his troops mobile, moving into or camping on the outskirts of friendly Pashtun villages, accepting hospitality and then traveling on to the next rendezvous, recruiting all the way. These mountain men were unbelievably difficult to trace, but even they need to rest, eat and drink, and perhaps even wash, and they need village communities to do all of that.
Almost every morning Chief Healy would run the main list of potential targets past Mikey, our team officer, and me. He usually gave us papers with a list of maybe twenty names and possible locations, and we made a short list of the guys we considered we should go after. We thus created a rogues’ gallery, and we made our mission choices depending on the amount of intel we had. The name Ben Sharmak kept on showing up, and the estimates of his force size kept going up just as often.
Finally there was a tentative briefing about a possible Operation Redwing, which involved the capture or killing of this highly dangerous character. But he was always elusive. First he was here, then there, like the freakin’ Scarlet Pimpernel. And the photos available were just head and shoulders, not great quality and very grainy. Still, we knew approximately what the sonofabitch looked like, and on the face of it, this was stacking up to be like any other SR operation — get above the target, stalk him, photograph him, and, if at all possible, grab him.
We had very decent intel on him, which suggested the CIA and probably the FBI were also extremely interested in his capture or death. And as the various briefings went on, Ben Sharmak seemed to get progressively more important. There were now reports of an eighty-troop minimum and a two-hundred-troop maximum in his army, and this constituted a very big operation. And Chief Healy decreed that me and my three buddies in Alfa Platoon were the precise guys to carry it out.
We were not expected to take on this large bunch of wild-eyed killers. Indeed, we were expected to stay quieter than we had ever been in our lives. “Just find this bastard, nail him down, his location and troop strength, then radio in for a direct action force to come in by air and take him down.” Simple, right?
If we thought he might be preparing an immediate evacuation of the village in which he resided, then we would take him out forthwith. That would be me or Axe. The chances were I’d get only one shot at Sharmak, just one time when I could trap him in the crosshairs and squeeze that trigger, probably from hundreds of yards away. I knew only one thing: I better not miss, because the apparitions of Webb and Davis, not to mention every other serving SEAL, would surely rise up and tear my ass off. This was, after all, precisely what they had trained me for.
And in case anyone’s wondering, I had absolutely no qualms about putting a bullet straight through this bastard’s head. He was a fanatical sworn enemy of the United States of America who had already murdered many of my colleagues in the U.S. Marines. He was also the kind of terrorist who would like nothing better than to mastermind a new attack on the U.S. mainland. If I got a shot, he’d get no mercy from me. I knew what was expected of me. I knew the team boss wanted this character eliminated, and when I thought about it, I was damned proud they considered me and my buddies the men for the job. As ever, we would do everything possible not to let anyone down.
Every day we checked the intel office to see what further data there was on Sharmak. Chief Healy was right on the case, working with the ops officer and our skipper, Commander Pero. The problem was always the same: where was our target? He was worse than Saddam Hussein, disappearing, evading the prying eye of the satellites, keeping his identity and location secret even from the many CIA informers who were close to him.
There was of course no point in charging into the mountains armed to the teeth with weapons and cameras unless we were absolutely sure of his whereabouts. The Taliban were a serious threat to low-flying military aircraft, and the helo pilots knew they were in constant danger of being fired upon, even on night ops. These mountain men were as handy with missile launchers as they were with AK-47s.
There is a huge amount of backup required for any such operation: transportation, communications, available air support, not to mention ammunition, food, water, medical supplies, hand grenades, and weapons, all of which we would carry with us.
At one point, quite early on, we had a very definite “Redwing is a go.” And preparations were well under way when the entire thing was suddenly called off. “Turn one!” They’d lost him again. They had data, and they had reason to believe they knew where he was. But nothing hard. The guys in intel studied the maps and the terrain, ringed probability areas, made estimates and guesstimates. They thought they had him pinned down but not sufficiently narrowly to place him in an actual village or a camp, never mind with the accuracy required for a sniper to get off a shot.
Intel was just waiting for a break, and meanwhile, me and the guys were out on other SR missions, probably Operation Goat Rope or something. We’d just come back from one of these when we heard there’d been a break in the hunt for Ben Sharmak. It was very sudden, and we guessed one of our sources had come up with something. Chief Healy had maps and studies of the terrain under way, and it looked like we were going straight out again.
We were called into a briefing: Lieutenant Mike Murphy, Petty Officer Matthew Axelson, Petty Officer Shane Patton, and I. We listened to the data and the requirements and still regarded it as just another op. But at the last minute there was a big change. They decided that Shane should be replaced by Petty Officer Danny Dietz, a thirty-four-year-old I had known well for years.
Danny was a short (well, compared with me), very muscular guy from Colorado, but he lived with his spectacularly beautiful wife, Maria, known to all of us as Patsy, just outside the base in Virginia Beach. They had no children but two dogs, both of them damn near as tough as he was, an English bulldog and a bullmastiff.
Danny was with me at the SDV school in Panama City, Florida. We were both there on 9/11. He was heavily into yoga and martial arts and was a very close friend of Shane’s. Guess those beach gods and the mystic iron men have stuff in common. I was glad to have Danny on the team. He was a little reserved, but underneath he could be very funny and was a sweet-natured person. It was not a great plan to upset him, though. Danny Dietz was a caged tiger and a great Navy SEAL.
Now it seemed Redwing was again given the green light. The four-man team was nailed down. The two snipers would be Axe and me; the two spotters, Mikey and Danny. Command control, Mikey. Communications, Danny and me. The final shoot-on-target, me or Axe, either one of us spotting, whichever way it fell on the terrain.
The plan was to sit up there and hide above the place we believed Sharmak was resident, if necessary for four days, probably not able to move more than a foot, remaining deadly still in a deadly place — high in the hills.
At no time would we be anything but carefully concealed, watching these heavily armed mountain men, who were lifelong experts on the local terrain, awaiting our chance to gun down their leader. It doesn’t get a whole lot more dangerous than that.
We were actually in the helicopter, dressed and organized, ready to leave, “Redwing is a go,” when the mission was called off again. “Turn two!” It was not so much that we’d lost track of Sharmak as the fact that the slippery little son of a gun had turned up somewhere else.
We disembarked and wandered back to our quarters. We shed our heavy packs and weapons, changed out of our combat gear, cleaned the camouflage cream off our faces, and rejoined the human race. The break lasted for two weeks, during which time we did a couple of minor missions up in the passes and nearly got our heads blown off at least twice.
I surpassed myself once by nailing down one of the most dangerous terrorists in northeast Afghanistan. I had POSIDENT, and I actually saw him make a break for it on his own, riding a freakin’ bicycle along the track. I didn’t shoot him because I did not wish to betray our position by opening fire or even moving. We were expecting his complete camel train of high explosive to move along this route anytime, and we wanted both him and his munitions. At least I did
n’t emulate the actions of a former colleague, who, according to SEAL folklore, fired up the direct link and advised a cruising U.S. fighter/bomber of the GPS position. Then he watched a five-hundred-pound bomb demolish the terrorist, his camel, and everything within fifty yards of him. On this mission, we halted the camel train and managed to capture the terrorist and unload the explosive without resorting to such wild-and-woolly action.
Sorry, lefties. But, like we say back home in Texas, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
And so the days passed by, until on Monday morning, June 27, 2005, they located Sharmak again. This time it looked really good. By noon the detailed maps and photos of the terrain were spread out before us. The intel was excellent, the maps weren’t bad, the photographs of the terrain passable. We still didn’t have a decent picture of Sharmak, just the same old head and shoulders, grainy, indistinct. But we’d located other killers up here with a lot less, and there was no doubt this time. “Redwing is a go!”
Right after the briefing, Chief Dan Healy said to me, quietly, “This is it, Marcus. We’re going. Go get the guys ready.”
I gave the crisp reply expected from a team leader to a SEAL CPO. “Okay, Chief. We’re outta here.”
And I walked out of the briefing room and headed back to our quarters with a lot on my mind. I can’t quite explain it, but I was assailed by doubts, and that feeling of disquiet never left me.
I’d seen the maps, and they were clear. What I couldn’t see was a place to hide. We did not have good intel on the vegetation. It was obviously bad and barren way up there in the Hindu Kush, around ten thousand feet. You don’t need to be a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Institute to know this is arid country above the tree line, not much growing. Great for climbers, a goddamned nightmare for us.
The village we were surveying had thirty-two houses. I counted them on the satellite picture. But we did not know which one Sharmak was in. Neither did we know if the houses were numbered in case we got better intel while we were up there.
We had some pictures of the layout but very little on the surrounding country. We had good GPS numbers, very accurate. And we had a short list of possible landing zones, unnecessary for the insert, because we’d fast-rope in, but critical for the extract.
I was certain we’d need to blow down a few trees on a lower level of the mountain in order to have cover when we left and to bring the helicopters in with the DA force if it was required. Barren, treeless mountainscapes are no place to conduct secretive landings and takeoffs, not with Taliban rocket men all around. Especially the highly trained group that surrounded Sharmak. He was goddamned lethal, and he’d proved it, more than once, blowing up the Marines.
The one aspect of the mission that dominated my thoughts as I walked back to meet the guys was that there was no place to hide, no place from which to watch. You simply cannot do effective reconnaissance if you can’t get into good position. And if those mountain cliffs that surrounded the village were as rough and stony as I suspected, we’d stick out on those heights like a diamond in a goat’s ass.
And there were likely to be between eighty and two hundred armed warriors keeping a very careful lookout on all the land around their boss. I was worried, not about the numbers of our enemy but about the problems of staying concealed in order to complete the mission. If there was a very limited selection of hiding places, we might have to compromise our angle on the village, not to mention our distance from it.
I met Mikey back at the bee hut. I told him we were going in, showed him the maps and what photographs we had, and I remember his reply. “Beautiful. Just another three days of fun and sun.” But I saw his expression change as he looked at the pictures, at the obviously very steep gradients, truly horrible terrain, a mountain we would have to clomp up and down in order to find cover.
By this time Axe and Danny had appeared. We briefed them and wandered, a bit apprehensively, over to the chow hall for lunch. I had a large bowl of spaghetti. Right afterward we went back to dress and get organized. I wore my desert bottoms and woodland top, mostly because intel had said the landing zone was fairly green and we would drop into an area of trees. I also had a sniper hood.
Mikey and Danny had their M4 rifles plus grenades; Axe had the Mark 12 .556-caliber rifle, and I had one as well. We all carried the SIG-Sauer 9mm pistol. We elected not to take a heavy weapon, the big twenty-one-pound machine gun M60, plus its ammunition. We were already loaded down with gear, and we thought it would be too heavy to haul up those cliffs.
I also took a couple of claymores, which are a kind of high-explosive device with a trip wire, to keep any intruder from walking up on us. I’d learned a hard lesson about that on my first day, when two Afghans got a lot closer than they should have and might easily have finished me.
We took a big roll of detonator cord to blow the trees for the incoming landing zone when the mission was complete or for the insert of a direct action force. At the last moment, still worried about this entire venture, I grabbed three extra magazines, which gave me a total of eleven, each holding thirty rounds. Eight was standard, but there was something about Operation Redwing. It turned out everyone felt the same. We all took three extra magazines.
I also carried an ISLiD (an acronym for image stabilization and light distribution unit) for guiding in an incoming helo, plus the spotting scope, and spare batteries for everything. Danny had the radio, and Mikey and Axe had the cameras and computers.
We took packed MREs — beef jerky, chicken noodles, power bars, water — plus peanuts and raisins. The whole lot weighed about forty-five pounds, which we considered traveling light. Shane was there to see us away: “ ’Bye, dudes, give ’em hell.”
All set, we were driven down to the special ops helicopter area, waiting to hear if there was a change. That would have been “Turn three!” The third time Redwing had been aborted. But this time there was only “Rolex, one hour,” which meant we were going as soon as it was dark.
We put down our loads and lay on the runway to wait. I remember it was very cold, with snowcaps on the not-too-distant mountains. Mikey assured me he had remembered to pack his lucky rock, a sharp-pointed bit of granite which had jabbed into his backside for three days on a previous mission when we were in a precarious hide and none of us could move even an inch. “Just in case you need to stick it up your ass,” he added. “Remind you of home.”
And so we waited, in company with a couple of other groups also going out that night. The quick reaction force (QRF) was going to Asadabad at the same time. We had just done a full photo recon of Asadabad, which they carried with them. The deserted Russian base was still there, and Asadabad, the capital city of Kunar Province, remained a known dangerous area. It was of course where the Afghan mujahideen had almost totally surrounded the base and then proceeded to slaughter all of the Russian enlisted men. It was the beginning of the end for the Soviets in 1989, only one range of mountains over from the spot we were going.
Finally, the rotor blades began to howl on the helos. Apparently the many moving parts of Operation Redwing, so susceptible to change, were still in place. The call came through, “Redwing is a go!,” and we hoisted up our gear and clambered on board the Chinook 47 for the insert, forty-five minutes away to the northeast. “Guess this fucker Ben Sharmak is still where we think he is,” said Mikey.
We were joined by five other guys going in to Asadabad, and the other helo took off first. Then we lifted off the runway, following them out over the base and banking around to our correct course. It was dark now, and I spent the time looking at the floor rather than out of the window. Every one of the four of us, Mikey, Axe, Danny, and me, made it clear, each in his own way, that we did not have a good feeling about this. And I cannot describe how unusual that was. We go into ops areas full of gung ho bravado, the way we’re trained — Bring ’em on, we’re ready!
No SEAL would ever admit to being scared of anything. Even if we were, we would never say it. We open the door and go out
side to face the enemy, whoever the hell he might be. Whatever we all felt that night, it was not fear of the enemy, although I recognize it might have been fear of the unknown, because we really were unsure about what we would encounter in the way of terrain.
When we reached the ops area, the helicopter made three false inserts, several miles apart, coming in very low and hovering over places we had no intention of going anywhere near. If the Afghans were watching, they must have been very confused — even we were confused! Going in, pulling out, going back in again, hovering, leaving. I’m damn sure, if Sharmak’s guys were out there, they could not have had the slightest clue where we were, if we were, or how to locate us.
Finally, we were on the way into our real landing zone. The final call came — “Redwing is a go!” The landing controller was calling the shots: “Ten minutes out...Three minutes out...One minute...Thirty seconds!...Let’s go!”
The ramp was down, we were open at the rear, the gunner was ready with the M60 machine gun in case of ambush. It was pitch black outside, no moon, and the rotor blades were making that familiar bom-bom-bom-bom on the wind. So far no one had fired anything at us.
The rope snaked from the rear of the aircraft to the ground, positioned expertly so our guns could not get caught as we left. Right now no one spoke. Loaded with our weapons and gear, we lined up. Danny went first, out into the dark, I followed him, then Mikey, then Axe. Each one of us grabbed the rope and slid down fast, wearing gloves to avoid the burn. It was a drop of about twenty feet, and there was a stiff, biting wind.