No Lack of Courage (13 page)
Read No Lack of Courage Online
Authors: Colonel Bernd Horn
Lavoie's assessment was correct. Brigadier-General Fraser conceded, “I would say there was a tremendous amount of pressure from ISAF to âget it done!'”
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However, he disagreed with the soldiers' criticisms. “You don't fight a plan; you fight the enemy guided by a plan . . . The enemy also has a vote and if you ignore the enemy you will lose.”
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By 2 September Fraser believed the situation was changing and it was an opportune time to attack. In short, he felt there was nothing to be gained by waiting another 48 hours.
“I knew a lot of the enemy were there,” Fraser acknowledged. “But, you know, you do two more days of bombardment, how many do you kill? How do you know that? You guess. No matter if you went in on the second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth, guess what, ladies and gentlemen? It is a difficult thing to cross a river and to go into a main defensive area where the Taliban were waiting and wanted to fight on. It would have been gut-wrenching, whatever day was picked to go across the river.”
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Lavoie, the CO of TF 3-06, framed it another way. He focused on the limitations of airpower as a key lesson that emerged from the early combat. He explained:
I sort of kick myself for having to relearn the lesson in regard to airpower because it's something I think every army officer, army soldier knows intuitively, that is, that you cannot win with air power alone. And in the Battle of Pashmul, I just got sucked into itâI probably had an exorbitant dependence on, or overestimation of air power. We dropped thousands of tons of munitions on them in the days before we had to start conducting
the ground operations. But in the end, as we relearned, you just cannot rely on it because until you actually get in there and muck out those fortified defensive positions you just can't be sure. It's a matter of getting those ground forces in there and taking the enemy out. It was hard for us not to get sucked into it because you were sitting on the high ground watching our forces just closing them down with 25 mm cannon fire and the soldiers were seeing just literally hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs being dropped on the objective. You couldn't just help thinking that there was nothing that could survive in there. Well, we found out the hard way that they could. That is a lesson that we probably relearn in every modern battle that we have fought since we started using air power. So, you just can't overestimate the effects of air power on a low tech enemy.
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Regardless of the recriminations, one fact remained: the enemy was in Pashmul in force and had to be destroyed. Moreover, it was later revealed that despite the enormous bombardment, the enemy's positions were still intact. Lieutenant Hiltz observed, “The HE [high explosive] was just like a fingernail scratching on a chalkboard, it wasn't really doing much damage.”
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As Lavoie finally concluded, the infantry were simply required to go in and “muck out” the enemy. Therefore, regardless of the debacle of 3 September, the brigade commander ordered the TF to try again the following morning. The plan was to try and draw the enemy out by feinting more to the south, forcing the Taliban to react and leave their fortified positions. Then, as per the original plan, they could be annihilated with air, aviation, and indirect fire.
Reveille for “C” Coy Gp on 4 September was 0530 hours. They were to launch an hour later. They followed their normal routineâablutions and burning garbage. Then disaster struck. Lieutenant Hiltz remembered vividly:
The boys were eating breakfast, the guys were doing their shift change around and guys were packing their kit up. As was generally our procedure, during daylight hours we would burn our garbage. I'm not quite certain who lit a fire, but one of my members of my platoon lit the fire that morning that was directly behind the OC's vehicle, as well as my right-most vehicle. And then it was approximately about 0515 hours that I remember just vaguely, I remember I was eating a strawberry Pop-Tart, sitting there chatting with one of my section 2 ICs, the vehicle crew commander, talking about how cold it was and we both basically turned to get out of the vehicle as it was time to really pack up our kit, get everything ready, when it was like the 4th of July about 10 metres behind the vehicle. It was the friendly-fire strike by the A-10. I remember jumping back into the vehicle. I remember Master-Corporal Bellamy, the guy who was in the vehicle with me, basically flying into the vehicle. He ended up in the right-hand side of the turret ring. He flew that far from the ramp and he just jumped. He took shrapnel in the back, close to his spine. Private Keegan, who was with me as well, was not hurt and I somehow was not injured. So again, it was my lucky day in that respect. I remember getting out of the vehicle and there was dust everywhere. And I remember running over and we started grabbing guys and getting guys onto people that were more seriously wounded.
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“I knew immediately what happened,” asserted the OC, Major Sprague. “You can't mistake that noise.”
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The A-10 was called in to attack an enemy position identified by a small fire. When the responding pilot popped-up over Ma'SÅ«m Ghar, he spotted the burning garbage on Battle Position 301 and became briefly disoriented. Before he realized his error he unleashed a partial burst of deadly fire from his seven barrelled 30mm
Gatling gun, killing former Olympic athlete Private Mark Graham and wounding 35 others, including the “C” Coy Gp OC.
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“The first rounds hit about 10 metres behind me,” Corporal Jordache Young recalled. “We saw flashes and looked backâit was mass devastation.”
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Sergeant Brent Crellin observed, “There were sparks in the dust, like the sparklers you wave on Canada Day . . . And then we heard the burp of the gun and then we felt sick.”
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Captain Rob Carey was briefly disoriented. “I was just up and I heard a burp in my right ear, which was odd because all the A-10s were staying in front of us because we were basically facing north. I heard it in my right ear and I didn't think anything of it and my LAV sergeant, Sergeant Dinsmore, said 32 [8 Platoon] is under contact.” Carey assumed the Taliban had attacked. “Shit, they [enemy], snuck in behind us, they got in behind on the mountainsâthat's the first thought . . . So we all stood to and jumped into our vehicles.”
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Within minutes the tragic truth sunk inâit was a friendly fire, mass casualty incident.
Major Ivey, the battery commander, explained, “At around 0500 hours the A-10s were still on station. They had probably been working in that area for about two hours already, maybe a little bit more than that . . . And they had dropped on the north side into Pashmul already. They went back to refuel and came back down to help us out againâthe same pilots.” Ivey elaborated, “So they had been on the go for about three hours at that time. Captain Matheson and his crew were engaging targets on the north side of the river around where the white school was and some of the other target areas from the morning before. And for whatever reason, the pilots who admittedly came back and said pilot error over the radio afterwards, confused north with south.” Ivey noted that it was “a bad time of day, nightfall turning to day” and that the pilot “had been working his butt off flying for us” and he unfortunately “confused the south side with the north side and ended up strafing what he thought was a group of Taliban huddled around a fire.” Luckily, the FOO on station was able to get the pilot to abort and stop the second aircraft on-station from doing a follow-on gun run. Ivey explained, “The tactics for the A-10s call for the second aircraft to follow-up and watch for the splash of the shot and pick up where the last aircraft left off . . . The
aircraft were pushed back up into a holding pattern above usâGod bless them, those same guys stayed and provided air cover while we did the casualty evacuation. Concurrently, we threw a fairly extensive smoke screen across the river on the north side to at least blind the enemy from seeing what was going on.”
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But the drama was not yet over. The crisis was on the brink of getting worse. The 155mm guns were about 10â15 kilometres to the north firing their smoke mission. The smoke canisters were flashing up in the air and tumbling down from the south towards the BG position. A stiff wind from the southwest blew the billowing smoke nicely down along the river valley, creating a grey veil through which the enemy could not see. As the wall of smoke built up, the first UH-47 Chinook medium-lift helicopter could be heard in the distance pounding its way to the landing zone for the medical evacuation (MEDEVAC). Inexplicably, it ignored the briefing from the ground control crew and rather than looking for the designated purple smoke, it flew over the position, saw the smoke canister billowing on the north side of the Arghandab River, and made a direct line towards it.
“So you must appreciate,” expounded Major Ivey, “that there is a mass casualty scenario under contact on one side of the river and now you've got a Chinook helicopter flying into bad guy country into the line of fire of disbursing smoke canisters . . . Just to make matters worse.” The lumbering Chinook helicopter actually touched down “for about a millisecond and then realized what the hell was going on,” described Ivey.
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The helicopter quickly lifted off and flew around the BG position, finally landing so that the MEDEVAC could be undertaken. Remarkably, the enemy had not reacted at all to the unexpected target of opportunity.
The latest calamity to hit “C” Coy Gp was disastrous. Having lost most of its command structure and almost a third of its strength in the friendly-fire incident, it was now combat ineffective. “Twenty minutes away from an assault river crossing and Omer [Lieutenant-Colonel Lavoie] lost half a company,” asserted Brigadier-General Fraser. “We delayed 24 hours but at the end of the day we had to get it done.”
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Luckily for the rest of the BG and coalition forces assigned to Operation Medusa the opening moves of the operation were not as catastrophic. In the
north, “B” Coy was well established. In fact, by the time Charles Company went across on 3 September, “B” Coy had already been in position for a few days. They were pulled out of Forward Operating Base (FOB) Martello two days prior, passing the responsibility of its security to a Dutch subunit so that they could deploy to assist in the combat operations, since no other NATO countries provided forces to fight.
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On 1 September 2006, “B” Coy moved to Patrol Base Wilson (PBW) and established a large leaguer inside the PBW compound. The next day they deployed and established a two kilometre blocking position, from the town of Pasab west to Howz-e Madad, on the south side of Highway 1.
Their task was relatively simple. “We were to give a feint south of the highway to distract the enemy,” said Major Geoff Abthorpe, the OC.
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The CO's intent was for “B” Coy to push across Highway 1 and protect it as well as the BG lines of communication. Lieutenant-Colonel Lavoie also hoped to draw away some of the attention of the Taliban from the south to the north.
“B” Coy was deployed in line, close to the forward edge of their first objective, code name “Cracked Roof,” which was a very deep canal and road system that went through Pasab, a small village north of Pashmul. The ground actually favoured The Royals and their LAV IIIs. From their blocking positions the ground lay open for approximately 500â700 metres to Cracked Roof, which represented the Taliban front lines in the north.
Lieutenant Jeff Bell, the 5 Platoon commander, described, “When the operation started we were in a leaguer up to the northeast of Patrol Base Wilson. We launched from there and my platoon was on the far west flank of the company . . . We were essentially in a blocking position. It was an extended line with the LAVs out in a fairly open position and we had a treeline about 500 metres away that we were watching.” Bell added, “We were right in the vicinity of a yellow bunker. We were essentially covering that.”
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Shortly after “B” Coy moved into their position, they were attacked by two Taliban gunmen who fearlessly opened fire on an entire platoon of LAV III armoured vehicles with nothing more than their AK-47 assault rifles. “It was the most surreal thing,” commented an astonished Major Abthorpe. “The two Taliban stood up in the open on a mud wall
and started shooting at the LAVs with AKs, nothing else.”
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Lieutenant Bell immediately conducted a hasty attack on the enemy-occupied compound. In support, the 155mm guns fired a salvo of air-burst munitions that abruptly ended the enemy resistance, allowing 5 Platoon to clear the compound. Despite a thorough search only one body was found.
On the night of 2 September, Major Abthorpe also received notice that timings for the operation had changed. “I get the call saying âStandby, Charles Company is going across. Pass the word,'” revealed an astonished Abthorpe. “âOK,' I thought. âThis is interesting.'”
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The next morning “B” Coy conducted its feint up and down Cracked Roof, waiting for the outcome of the battle to the south. “The air strikes started to come in,” described Lieutenant Bell. “We had A-10s, as well as Apache attack helicopters firing on the yellow bunker and a variety of other buildings that were assessed as enemy . . . We also engaged with the LAV 25mm cannons. After the initial strikes, however, we went into a holding pattern.” He explained, “It was an effects-based operation and we were now waiting to see what happened down south to set the stage for our manoeuvre.”
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But no one was prepared for the news they received later in the morning. “They [âC' Coy] crossed over,” explained Abthorpe. “We know what happens. They redeploy back south across the river so we go into holy-fuck mode.”
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“B” Coy held their position and waited for orders, which came quickly.