The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (35 page)

Now, Commander Smith was an intelligent officer and a nice guy, but he had very little situational awareness here. At the time he was an officer with one of the SDV (SEAL Delivery Vehicle) teams, and the guys in the delivery vehicle community drove underwater subs; it was a completely different sort of mission. He hadn’t been operational in some time and was rotating over here to get some theater experience. Jumping in to join our mission at the last minute was fine, but in my opinion, he’d been out of the game too long to be in charge of tactical decisions on the ground.

A few of us glanced at each other warily. He could see the apprehension in our eyes and quickly reassured us. “Don’t worry, guys, I know Cassidy’s in charge. I won’t get into the decision making here. I’m not going to get in your shit.” Okay.
Let’s hope not,
I thought.

We resumed with our preboard preparations—and sure enough, within five minutes Commander Smith was in our shit, big-time. He told us he wanted us to go in fully suited up, Kevlar body armor and all.

I raised my hand. “Look, sir, none of us are acclimated to working at 7,000 to 12,000 feet elevation. We’re already carrying a pretty heavy load.” In addition to our weapons, we would also be carrying breachers and explosives, in case we had to blow ordnance or breach our way into a cave. “Plus we have to hump 12 klicks just to get to where the op starts,” I added. The place was likely crawling with hostiles, so rather than insert directly at the mouth of the cave complex, we were going to start out a good distance away, under the cover of darkness, and then hump the distance silently to our destination. “We’re in mountain country, and if we overload ourselves we’re going to be a wreck by the time we get to the site.”

This was not a direct action mission, where you fast rope in and
boom!
you’re on target. We were going to be patrolling 12 kilometers out—that’s about 7.5 miles. When you carry a heavy load for that long, your situational awareness starts to shrink. At first you keep yourself acutely tuned to everything around you, but after a while your attention starts to flag. Soon you’re just staring at the next footprint in front of you. I’d seen it before. In GOLF platoon and sniper school I’d learned that for a reconnaissance mission like this, it makes a lot more sense to pack light and go fast.

Smith wasn’t budging. “No, this is my call, and everyone wears armor.”

He was already making tactical decisions for us—and he’d just made a bad one. Chief Dye sided with me privately, but what could we do?

“Check,” I said, “got it.”

We started suiting up to go, everyone putting on all their battle armor. I quietly took out my armor plates and left them behind. Call it gross insubordination if you want, but this was fucking ridiculous, and I was damned if I was going to do it.

S
UNDAY
, J
ANUARY
6

It was about a three-hour insert by helicopter from Bagram Air Base to the Zhawar Kili complex. We were let off in the mountains well before dawn, about 4:00
A.M.
We set up a quick perimeter, checked in with the marines (who had arrived a little ahead of us), made sure we were verified for where we were so our air support team would know we were friendlies and wouldn’t take us out, and set up our rendezvous points for extraction at the end of the day. Then we set off, patrolling our way in the direction of the cave complex.

A few kilometers in I looked over at Shawn, our breacher, who was carrying a hooligan (a big metal breaching tool) on his back along with a ton of explosives. Brad and Steve, our EOD techs, had all their explosive equipment, too. Casey, our AOIC, carried photographic and video equipment to document whatever we would find. These guys had to be miserable. We still had miles to go, and we were gaining altitude. I was so glad I didn’t have my armor plates.

About an hour in, we took a water break. I sat down on the ground next to Shawn. “How you doin’, brother?” I felt so bad for him.

“Dude,” he said, “right about now I would welcome stepping on a land mine.”

Soon we were back on our feet. Everyone else was already tired and sweating. I was set to go, feeling alert and nimble. Shawn’s focus was like a flashlight beam on the ground in front of him. By the time we got within proximity of the site everyone was completely worn out, even Cassidy. I saw Cassidy and Smith huddling up for a couple of minutes.

Then Cassidy came over to us. “All right, everybody,” he said, “we’re going to ditch our armor and stash it. We’ll cache it right here and pick it up again on our way out.” He quietly took me aside and said, “Okay, you were absolutely right. We fucked up. So go easy on me.”

“Forget it,” I said. Then I added, “But fuckin-A, I told you so.”

Everyone started shucking their plates. Cassidy looked over at me. “Hey, Webb. Aren’t you going to stash your plates?” I shook my head. “Nope. I didn’t wear any.” Cassidy looked at me for a moment with no expression, then grinned. “You son of a bitch.”

I wasn’t just trying to be a smart-ass. To my way of thinking, this was critical strategic thinking. Look at the kind of enemy we were up against: Here was a dude running around in the hills carrying nothing but a wool blanket, a wool hat, an AK-47, and maybe a little water and bullets. Not only did this guy have the advantage of knowing the terrain like the back of his hand, but he was also fast on his feet, running through the hills like a mountain goat—and here came a group of American soldiers trudging along, loaded up with God knows what. We needed to modify our equipment load to make us way more nimble if we wanted to have any hope of matching pace with the guys we were hunting.

On the way to our destination we passed a few villages that seemed deserted, nothing but empty buildings and a scattering of animals left behind. As far as we could tell, everyone was gone; no doubt they’d taken off once the aerial bombardment started the night before.

By the time we reached the cave complex, the sun was coming up. We started in at the base camp, taking a cave at a time. Our planes had pounded the hell out of the place. There had been quite a few people in these caves the night before, but there was nothing there now but bits and pieces of bodies, hardly anything even identifiable. It was a scene of pure carnage.

Inside the caves up on the ridge it was a whole other story. As we started penetrating into the mountainside, it quickly became clear that our bombing raid hadn’t done shit. This place was in mint condition. These caves were so deeply burrowed into the mountain that many of them were still completely intact. Hell, some went back a good half mile. Some of the tunnels were reinforced by steel beams and lined with brickwork, with plenty of evidence of Soviet craftsmanship left over from the eighties.

This place
was
damn near invincible.

We started in, using a procedure similar to the way we would clear a house. Four of us would go in to clear a cave, then come out and report, then move on to the next, and the next, making sure each cave was clear as we went. One cave was an ammo bunker; the next was a classroom, then living areas. It was an extensive network, with some of the tunnels interconnected, and it went on and on.

The caves were so deep that we couldn’t see very far into them. Our night vision was severely limited in effectiveness, because to use night vision you need at least a small bit of ambient light, and it was pitch black in the caves. We had an infrared floodlight function, but this proved to be not very useful. We ended up inching through the caves using the paltry beams of illumination thrown by the small lights mounted on our weapons and clearing around corners with our good old-fashioned SureFire white-lens flashlights.

Those first few hours going deep into those caves and tunnels were intense. We had no idea exactly what we’d find in there. We didn’t know if we would run into anyone, or if there was possibly an ambush lying in wait for us, or if the caves were booby-trapped. We had no idea where the hell we were going, or what—or whom—we might run into.

Fortunately we did not encounter a single person—but we were stunned at how much we found in the way of matériel. There were massive amounts of ordnance, ammo, and fuel, stacked floor to ceiling. They had stocked up on some big hardware, too, including tanks and other Soviet-era combat vehicles. These guys had prepared for quite the campaign.

We found some American-made Harris 117-Delta radios with what appeared to be internally embedded crypto, which completely freaked us out. These were highly proprietary, highly sensitive tools of the U.S. military. How the hell did these characters lay their hands on such things? Many years later, speaking with a gentleman who worked with the company who manufactured these radios, I learned that they were originally sold to the CIA, who in turn gave them to mujahideen forces to help them in their efforts against the Soviets. Geopolitics is a fickle business. We found a bunch of Stinger missiles, too, more fruit of Uncle Sam’s largesse; fortunately the batteries on Stingers are completely drained after a few years, so none of these suckers were operational.

We found classrooms with posters on the walls, sporting anti-American slogans. On one the artist had cobbled together a photo of bin Laden in the foreground with two planes crashing into the Twin Towers in the background. I stared at this freakish piece of propaganda nearly open-mouthed. This thing was created as an al Qaeda recruiting poster for the mission it illustrated. In other words, it had been put together
before
the event it was depicting had taken place. Standing there deep in the bowels of this godforsaken mountain on the other side of the world, staring at a picture of the attack on New York City that was composited and hung here before the attack itself actually occurred—it was one of the eeriest experiences I’ve ever had. I still have that poster.

It was hot, tedious, nerve-racking work. Within about four hours we had the whole place cleared. Fortunately, we hadn’t run into any resistance.

Now that we knew we were alone and had a general sense of the lay of the land, we went back through the whole place a second time, gathering up intel, collecting the smaller items that we could bring back with us, and planting demolition in areas we would later blow. Brad and Eric recorded the exact GPS coordinates at the entrances to each cave so our guys could follow up with more accurate air strikes, since the shotgun approach of the night before had missed so much. The FBI guys had DNA kits as part of their mission, which was to ID whatever bodies we might find. As we worked, Casey and some of the others documented everything with video and tons of photographs.

Meanwhile, we were constantly reporting back to Harward, who was following the entire operation so closely it felt like he was looking over our shoulders the whole time. It was believed that some key Taliban or al Qaeda leader in the area had been killed recently, and Harward had a hard-on for the DNA evidence. We had found some extensive gravesites, but they were a few weeks old, and the forensic team didn’t think they would yield much of significance. Plus, we were on the clock. The complex had been more extensive and the total cache far larger than we anticipated. We had a date to keep with a crew of helos at our extraction point, so we were wasting no unnecessary minutes.

After gathering everything we could take with us, we got it all ready to blow. We blew up the radios and a ton of ordnance. The explosion created a huge fireball that nearly consumed half the mountain. The secondaries cooked off for probably four to six hours. It was January 6, but it sure looked like the Fourth of July.

Daylight was starting to fade, and we got the hell out of there. We picked up our stashed armor (all except me, since I didn’t have any) and started the long hump back to the perimeter for our rendezvous. We were still on a good schedule. The plan was for us to be extracted in the evening, under the cover of darkness. We finally reached our extract point and got on the radio to base. One CCT was talking to the inbound helo coming to get us; the other was talking to Harward at the TOC (tactical operations center). We were thirty minutes out from our scheduled exfil.

Nothing to do but sit and wait.

One of our EOD techs, Steve, started dumping his water. He’d been carrying extra bottles of water that they would use to shape blasting charges, and he figured now he wouldn’t be needing any of it. That seemed crazy to me. That was potable spring water! When you’re out in the field on any kind of recon, water is more precious than gold. He’d already dumped out several bottles when I saw what he was doing and stopped him.

“Dude!” I said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m tired of carrying around all this extra water,” he said. “I’m just shedding some weight.” For such a big guy, he sure did complain about the weight of the stuff we carried.

“Hey, dude,” I said, “give me the rest. I’ll take all that.” He had eight bottles of water left, and he gave me all of them. I drank four, then started filling up my CamelBak bottles with the remaining four.

Just then we heard the distant but unmistakable sound of the transport choppers, probably five to ten minutes away. They were coming to get us. At that moment Brad, our CCT, called out quietly to one of the FBI team, holding the radio set out to him, “Captain Harward wants a word.” Harward wanted to know if the FBI team had dug up the graves we’d found and conducted any forensics there. They hadn’t. Harward wanted them to go back and look for DNA evidence. One of the FBI team, who happened to be a former SEAL, spoke a few crisp words and handed the radio set back to Brad. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, “that grave is old. We’re not going to find anything new there.”

But Harward had latched on to this thing like a dog on a bone. The DNA business was a very big deal, especially from a public relations standpoint. If the forensic evidence revealed that we’d taken out any of the bigwig bad guys from the top of the al Qaeda food chain, that would be a significant victory to wire back home, and everyone from military top brass to Congress to the White House could get serious mileage out of it. It was more than the DNA, though. Out in those caves we had found a treasure trove of enemy resources that exceeded even the most optimistic expectations, and there seemed to be good indication that there was more out there for the finding. In for a penny, in for a pound: Now that we’d cracked open this prize, Harward wanted us to stay out there and see how much more we could dig up.