Reviews
The Most Comprehensive Account of Operation Anaconda
Not A Good Day to Die: The Untold
Story of Operation Anaconda. Sean
Naylor. Berkley Books. 425 pages;
maps; photographs; glossary; index;
$25.95.
By Col. Robert B. Killebrew
U.S. Army retired
S
hortly after dawn on March 1,
2002, two members of a U.S. reconnaissance team were inching forward
on a rocky ridge in rugged eastern
Afghanistan. Their mission, along
with two other highly trained teams
on neighboring peaks, was to put
“eyes on” a concentration of al Qaida
fighters regrouping in the isolated
Shahikot valley and to overwatch the
first commitment of U.S. conventional
forces against al Qaida in Afghanistan. Planners had dubbed the coming battle “Operation Anaconda.”
As the SEALs surmounted a small
rock pile to eyeball their final position, they got a nasty shock. There,
nestled against a rock outcropping
and dominating the valley and the air
route to be used by U.S. forces, was a
gray-green tent, a DShK machine gun
wrapped in plastic against the elements and, emerging as they watched,
a motley crew of al Qaida fighters
who were well-equipped to deal with
both the elements and attacking
Americans. Despite the best technical
intelligence America could focus on
the Shahikot, a gun that could stop
Anaconda in its tracks had been entirely overlooked until human eyes
were focused on it from a few meters
away.
The discovery of the DShK, the
planning and risk-taking that put the
teams on those critical ridges and the
battles that raged in the mountain
peaks and valleys in March 2002 are
the subjects of Sean Naylor’s pageturning Not A Good Day to Die, the
most comprehensive account of Operation Anaconda ever likely to be writ-
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ARMY ■ May 2005
ten. Written with the intensity of an
author who was there, Naylor’s story
is not only of the details of the battle
and of acts of heroism and self-sacrifice on a battlefield far from home. He
also provides a rare perspective of
special operations in Afghanistan and
of the interplay of high-level commanders and staffs, whose confused
interference with operations risked
success among the rocky peaks and
led directly to the deaths of brave men
on the ground. A trace of restrained
anger runs through this book, as well
as genuine affection for the soldiers
Naylor knew at the point of the spear.
By February 2002 the war in Af ghanistan was winding down. Taliban
forces had crumbled in fall 2001 at the
hands of the Northern Alliance, assisted by U.S. and allied special operations forces (SOF) and airpower.
Kabul had fallen in November. Most
of the Taliban had melted away, leaving hard-core elements and al Qaida
forces regrouping in the outlying
provinces. An attempt to corner and
destroy them at Tora Bora had failed.
But even as U.S. Central Command
(CENTCOM) began turning its atten-
tion to the upcoming invasion of Iraq,
special operations forces still in
Afghanistan continued their hunt for
al Qaida leadership. By late November, intelligence from a variety of technical and human sources pointed to
an al Qaida concentration in the
Shahikot, with the strong possibility
of the presence of several al Qaida
leaders—maybe even bin Laden himself. CENTCOM and subordinate
commanders determined to enter the
Shahikot with a mixture of SOF and
Afghan forces, and, to ensure there
would be no repetition of Tora Bora,
to use conventional U.S. forces to
block the enemy’s retreat toward Pakistan.
By February 2002, U.S. forces
around Afghanistan fell under a mix
of white and black special operations
and conventional headquarters, among
them a unique SOF organization
called advanced force operations
(AFO), drawn from 1st Special Forces’
Delta Force, whose mission was to
track down al Qaida leadership. In a
superb example of initiative and skill,
AFO recon teams would infiltrate the
Shahikot and identify al Qaida positions in advance of the Afghan-U.S.
attack on the valley. On the white side
of special operations, Army Special
Forces (SF) teams were to raise and
train local militias for the attack into
the valley that would drive the hardcore al Qaida forces into the American
blocking positions. As it turned out,
the main effort into the Shahikot was
ultimately to be a few hundred hastily
trained tribal fighters, advised by two
courageous Special Forces teams,
though from different SF groups, commanded by a hard-charging SF battalion commander named Haas whose
unit included neither team and who
arrived late on the scene.
At a base in Uzbekistan, itching to
get into the fight, was the headquarters of the U.S. 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), commanded by
then-Maj. Gen. “Buster” Hagenbeck,
whose available forces amounted to a
two-battalion brigade from the 101st
Airborne Division (Air Assault) and
two battalions of his own 10th Mountain. Critically, neither the 101st nor
the 10th had been allowed by CENTCOM to deploy a complete brigade
task force, with artillery and other
support. In the case of the 101st, the
understrength brigade was denied a
normal brigade “slice” of the division’s attack helicopters; only strenuous objections by the 101st’s commander had permitted the later deployment of eight Apaches from Fort
Campbell, Ky. CENTCOM’s reluctance to deploy any force but light infantry was to have a powerful impact
on the future battlefield. Impressed
with the success of precision airpower
in the initial stages of war against the
Taliban, sensitive to appearances of
being an “invading” force and, Naylor
alleges, distrustful of the Army’s leadership, CENTCOM’s micromanagement of the conventional force deployment ensured that, when the infantry of the world’s most powerful
Army got into the fight, it would be
outgunned by Taliban irregulars. But
the U.S. high command seemed to feel
it had discovered a new way of war.
“American commanders had already
bent or broken so many rules in
Afghanistan without suffering a reverse that leaving the Rakkasans’
(101st) most reliable source of firepower behind didn’t seem misguided,” Naylor writes. “Rumsfeld’s
view was that the war was basically
over,” said former Secretary of the
Army Tommy White. “There was this
kind of mind-set that this was going
to be a low-intensity conflict against
an enemy that was running away.”
As planning commenced for the operation, leaders on the ground worked
against time to overcome tangled
command lines. Hagenbeck, designated the conventional force commander, put his 10th Mountain staff to
planning the blocking force mission
and integrated the understrength
Rakkasan brigade task force and the
two 10th Mountain battalions into
Task Force Rakkasan, under brigade
commander Frank Wiercinski. Meanwhile, the AFO commander, Lt. Col.
Pete Blaber, and a CIA operative
named “Spider” established close ties
with the 10th Mountain commander
and his planners—a move that got
Blaber in hot water with the commander of the Joint Special Operations
Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., Maj.
Gen. Dell Dailey, who opposed AFO
involvement with conventional forces
in Anaconda. Since the conventional
warriors had no access to black intelligence, the findings of Blaber’s reconnaissance teams in the Shahikot would
have to be filtered through AFO’s second in command, who Blaber installed in the Mountain operations
center. Coordination for air support of
the operation, which became a controversial subject after the battle, proceeded haltingly with, Naylor says,
CENTCOM’s failure to shift gears
from pinpoint strikes at fixed targets
to the masses of firepower required to
support troops engaged with enemy
fighters.
It did not help that virtually all the
Air Force planners who had fought
through the earlier campaign in
Afghanistan had rotated back to the
United States, leaving inexperienced
staffs and key personnel in the air
support structure. (There is enough
guilt to go around though; Air Force
Maj. Pete Donnelly, scrambled in February with a six-man team to augment
10th Mountain’s air planning, pushed
for massive air strikes on possible enemy positions on the high ground surrounding the 10th Mountain and
Rakkasan landing zones, but was
turned down by Mountain planners.)
Second, all levels of command from
Hagenbeck’s headquarters to CENTCOM seemed to lack urgency in nailing down precisely the coordination
required for ground support. Anaconda was no secret to CENTCOM’s
air component; the 10th Mountain
plan was published on February 20
and sent to CENTCOM’s air component, but little happened. One pilot
later complained that “Those guys
[10th Mountain] are having rock drills
at Bagram and we, the guys who are
supposed to fly the missions in sup-
port of it, aren’t part of it? What the
(expletive), over?”
Even with the strenuous efforts of
all concerned, the makeshift command arrangements inevitably meant
that important parts of the plan were
misinterpreted. The most serious was
misunderstanding on the part of the
Special Forces and Afghan forces concerning their priority for fires. The
concept called for the SF/Afghan force
to provide the main attack, driving up
the valley toward the American blocking positions. One of the SF team leaders objected to attacking toward the
U.S. forces—“We’re gonna have two
American forces on either side of the
objective attacking toward each other
in close proximity, which hasn’t been
a good idea since, like, the Revolutionary War”—but he was overruled.
The SF advisors and their Afghan
counterparts expected to have priority
of fires—the expectation of U.S. air
support was a major factor in the
Afghans’ confidence in American
leadership and in themselves. At 10th
Mountain, though, little was done to
provide fires to the Afghans, where
one staff officer said he believed the
Afghans were designated the main attack “for information operations purposes.” This disconnect could have
been ironed out had there been a single commander or even a single briefing for the attack on the Shahikot, but
in fact each contingent—10th Mountain and the Special Forces advisors to
the Afghans—held separate rehearsals
and did not attend one another’s rock
drills.
Anaconda got under way on February 27 when Blaber’s three recon
teams—two Army, one SEAL—
moved out to infiltrate the Shahikot
by a combination of foot and special
SOF all-terrain vehicles. By the next
morning two of the three teams were
in, with one to move to a final position after nightfall. All three teams began reporting more enemy activity
than anticipated, and, ominously, enemy positions on high ground—the
Mountain plan was to establish blocking positions on the valley floor. In
fact, the Anaconda concept was based
on the idea that the enemy would be
May 2005 ■ ARMY
81
flushed from the villages in the valley
and flee toward the blocking positions, where the 101st and 10th troopers had made elaborate plans to separate suspected fighters from refugees.
An enemy that dug in to fight on the
high ground would be an entirely different situation. By the evening of
February 28, the news was beginning
to seep back to the conventional
forces, now in their final rehearsals.
“We may have an uphill fight,” Naylor quotes one battalion commander
as saying. At dawn on March 1—less
than 24 hours before the Rakkasan assault—the SEAL team, moving to its
final overwatch position, discovered
the DShK dominating the 101st’s air
route. Blaber ’s stubborn determination to put “eyes on target” and the
dedication and skill of the SOF recon
teams had paid off decisively. By
midafternoon on March 1 the facts
vindicated Blaber ’s conviction that
the enemy force in the Shahikot was
larger than the Americans anticipated,
and they were going to stand and
fight.
Task Force (TF) Hammer—the Afghan/U.S. assault force—rolled out
toward the Shahikot in a motley collection of trucks on the evening of
March 1. Led by the two Special Forces
A-teams, they began having trouble
right away with inexpert Afghan drivers, bad roads and such lousy visibility that the SF teams decided to drive
with headlights, thus unavoidably
alerting enemy forces on the high
ground ahead. In the process of their
stop-and-go approach, a circling AC130 gunship picked up their movement and—because of a malfunction
in the aircraft’s navigation system—
took one element under fire, mortally
wounding a SF warrant officer, seriously wounding others and giving TF
Hammer its first of several setbacks
that eventually aborted its attack.
Naylor’s reporting of TF Hammer’s
travails, of the heroic efforts of American and Afghan leadership to rally
brave but disheartened troops, is one
of the highlights of this book—any
soldier who has worked with irregular forces can see vividly the picture
that Naylor presents. At length, ral82
ARMY ■ May 2005
lied and prepared to assault, the
Afghan troops who had remained
faithful settled down to watch the
awesome U.S. airpower support they
had been promised—and got a single
B-1 bomber and six bombs. “Zia
Lodin, upon whose troops the Anaconda plan revolved,” Naylor writes,
“turned to Haas and said, ‘Where are
the bombs you promised us? Where
are the planes?’”
Even so, the SF advisors were able
to convince the Afghans to attack into
the valley, but when they came under
accurate mortar attacks from enemy
positions in the high ground, they had
had enough and simply left the battlefield. Their advisors, who had performed superbly and had been bloodied, had no choice but to leave with
them.
Meanwhile, the insertion of the
101st and 10th Mountain troops was
proceeding, though hampered by
weather and a shortage of CH-47 lift.
Earlier, the threatening DShK had
been eliminated by a combination of
SEAL assault and AC-130 fire; now
the infantry crunched into the rough
dirt of the valley floor and immediately came under withering fire from
the high ground.
Naylor’s recounting of the battle of
“Hell’s Halfpipe” and the other blocking positions focuses, as it should, on
the superb performance of soldiers
and leaders as they came under fire
for the first time. These men reacted
like veterans. It was a sergeant’s fight
on the floor of the Shahikot, and over
and over again it was squad leaders
and platoon sergeants showing the
way. “At every point in the TF
Rakkasan fight, when young soldiers
looked for leadership, noncommissioned officers were providing it.”
Many stepped up when wounds incapacitated their leaders. The 10th
Mountain’s SSgt. Randel Perez, a former supply clerk with a burning desire to prove himself as an infantry
squad leader, suddenly found himself
at the head of his platoon. “If I were to
write down the perfect platoon leader
in a combat situation,” Naylor quotes
his company commander as saying,
“that was Sgt. Perez.” Along with a
barrage of small arms and RPG fire, al
Qaida mortars began taking a toll on
the Americans seeking cover; some
U.S. mortars began replying, but not
all the units had brought their mortars
in—mortars had not been anticipated.
At least one D-30 122 mm howitzer
was employed against the United
States that day—against TF Hammer—and other abandoned artillery
pieces were found later, after the battle. The U.S. forces on the ground,
dropping their 80-pound rucks and
going to ground, were outgunned.
For fire support, the Americans had
five of the eight Apaches in the country, two of which were damaged early
and had to be withdrawn from the
battle. The remaining Apaches carried
on despite repeated hits from ground
fire and were tremendously effective.
One of the recon teams had a radio intercept operator monitoring enemy
transmissions as the battle went on.
“A consistent theme running through
al Qaida’s radio chatter was the enemy fighters’ fear of the Apaches,
whose presence over the battlefield
they had not anticipated,” Naylor
writes. “The aircraft was able to shoot
the target from a short distance until
the target was destroyed,” one afteraction account said. “This was something that aircraft at 18,000 feet could
not do.”
Air support for the beleaguered
Rakkasans was another matter. “No
issue to emerge from Operation Anaconda has generated more heat and
less light than the question of why the
airpower upon which TF Rakkasan
was forced to rely for indirect fire did
not deliver the results they expected,”
Naylor writes, and even within TF
Rakkasan there were different views.
One of the battalion commanders
complained of long periods of time
when airpower was not available, but
an Air Force tactical controller in the
same outfit is quoted by Naylor as
saying, “I don’t know what he’s talking about; we were turning aircraft
away just because there weren’t
enough targets.” Incredibly, despite
the maelstrom of fire and mounting
casualties, TF Rakkasan had no fatalities, while accurate American fire was
killing enemy fighters by the score.
By far the greatest killers on the battlefield were Blaber’s recon teams, situated as they were with an eagle-eye
view of the battlefield and with radio
contact with U.S. aircraft. Enemy mortar crews, concentrations of al Qaida
fighters, command posts and even
chow lines were all spotted by the
teams and destroyed by precision
strikes. But even then, the full effectiveness of the teams was compromised by competition between the
teams and the 101st for fires; often the
troops on the ground had only the
vaguest idea of enemy locations firing
at them, while the teams in the mountains could see the enemy plainly but
had to wait, sometimes for hours, to
arrange for an air strike on the target.
“Listening to the AFO teams ask for
any aircraft to drop JDAMs [joint direct attack munitions] on enemy mortar positions without execution for
hours, while hearing (Rakkasan) calls
for medevac was very frustrating,”
wrote a special operator afterward.
Naylor writes:
As the day wore on, the AFO teams
gradually overcame the systemic obstacles in the close air support
process. The result was a series of air
strikes that pulverized al Qaida mortar positions, command and control
buildings and troops in the open, but
also highlighted the weakness of a
plan that relied almost exclusively on
air power for indirect fires. For every
air strike called in by AFO that resulted in a destroyed enemy position,
there was a bombing run that couldn’t
be arranged before the target had
moved, that missed the target completely, or, in some cases, that hit
right where it was supposed to but
failed to kill the enemy.
As the day wore on and as U.S.
wounded mounted, Hagenbeck weighed
his options and was considering
pulling U.S. forces out until Blaber
suggested withdrawal would be a
“huge mistake.” Relayed through his
exec, Blaber pointed out that this was
“the battlefield opportunity of a lifetime,” that he intended to keep his
teams in “until there was no more
killing to be done,” Naylor writes. Hagenbeck agreed and decided to stay in
contact but to shift the bulk of his
troops after nightfall to more advantageous positions. Meanwhile, the enemy continued fighting hard and
well, writes Naylor, with mortars, recoilless rifles and howitzers—that no
one had anticipated.
Meanwhile, Blaber’s immediate superior in the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC) and its deputy
commander, Air Force Brig. Gen. Gregory Trebon, had been monitoring the
fight from his tactical operations center (TOC) at Bagram Air Base. Trebon,
who had been placed in command of
JSOC forces in Afghanistan (known as
Task Force 11) when Maj. Gen. Dailey
rotated back to Fort Bragg, wanted to
give two of JSOC’s remaining SEAL
teams a chance to get into the fight—
that night (March 3). In fact, Trebon
said, Blaber was planning to pull out
his successful teams and replace them
with SEALS. Blaber, who was preparing to join the SF teams of TF Hammer in another attempt to get the
Afghans into the fight, suggested the
teams be given time to study the terrain and prepare, as the original AFO
teams had done. But Trebon was in a
hurry. “Trebon spoke as if to leave
Blaber in no doubt. He was to put
both SEAL teams straight into the
fight that night. That was an order,”
Naylor recounts. Upon arrival at
Blaber’s headquarters, and without
his knowledge, the SEALs and their
commander established separate communications links with TF 11 headquarters on Masirah Island in the Persian Gulf and effectively took independent command of their segment of
AFO operations in the Shahikot. This
act by the SEALs split existing command arrangements and set the scene
for the tragedy that played out on the
top of Taku Ghar, a 10,469-foot peak
overlooking the Shahikot valley.
Pressure to put the two new SEAL
teams in “that night” caused the
leader of the Taku Ghar team, a senior
chief petty officer, to choose to land
directly atop the peak that was to be
his observation post, breaking a cardi-
nal rule of covert surveillance operations. Both the recon team leader and
his commander, a Navy officer who
had already been sanctioned for questionable judgment in previous operations, were briefed that intelligence reports indicated a high probability that
the enemy occupied the peak. Nevertheless, the decision was made and
the mission took off; the first indication of trouble was when Blaber ’s
exec, in the Mountain TOC, plotted
the coordinates of the insertion.
“What [the exec] didn’t know, because
[the SEALs] had stopped communicating on the AFO satellite net that
[the exec] monitored from his desk in
Bagram, was that the SEALs had decided to fly straight to the mountaintop,” Naylor recounts. As the exec
plotted the coordinates and reached
for his radio to warn off the team, the
160th Aviation Squadron CH-47 carrying the SEAL team touched down on
the peak of Taku Ghar and was immediately taken under fire by a large al
Qaida element on the peak. One SEAL
fell out of the aircraft, which lurched
forward off the peak, one engine and
the hydraulics shot away. In a brilliant
display of airmanship, the pilot managed to land the aircraft safely on an
open space below the mountain.
As he counted noses at the landing
site, the SEAL team leader had only
one thought—to return to the peak
and rescue his teammate. Calling in a
companion helicopter—aviation operations in Afghanistan mandated flying in pairs—the SEALs remounted
and began the flight back to the
mountaintop. Meanwhile, an AC-130
nearby responded to the recon team
leader’s call for help and, after some
initial confusion, identified the peak
of Taku Ghar—and an unknown individual holding a strobe, which
blinked for about 30 seconds and then
went off forever. Meanwhile, Blaber in
the Shahikot valley and his exec at the
Mountain TOC, trying to put together
a rescue plan, were not aware that Trebon at Bagram had effectively cut
them out of the command net by
changing the satellite radio frequency
on which the operation was being
managed.
May 2005 ■ ARMY
83
Blaber was talking on and listening to
the AFO satellite net, up to that point
the frequency on which all TF 11-related action in the Shahikot had been
discussed. But now the TF 11 operations center in Masirah [1,100 miles
distant] and the TF Blue TOC in Bagram [100 miles away] were trying to
run things on their frequency ...
which Blaber wasn’t monitoring, because TF 11 didn’t bother telling him
of the change. As a result, he was
powerless to provide corrective guidance when interference from Masirah,
based on the TF 11’s staff’s misreading of the situation, put paid to his
plan. ... Grim 32’s crew [the AC-130
with eyes on the mountaintop] received a welter of contradictory directions from Masirah, where … the
TF 11 fire support officer had been
placed in charge of events in the
Shahikot. ... This was maddening for
the AC-130 crew. From their vantage
point they could see the group on the
peak getting larger and larger. Somewhere below them an American
might be fighting for his life. Of all
U.S. elements in the area, only they
had the ability to help him and yet no
one was giving them clear guidance
on how to do that.
The second assault on Taku Ghar
fared little better than the first; the
SEALs landed, immediately were in a
fight for their lives, the helicopter was
shot up but managed to return to
base, and in the heat of battle, an Air
Force member of the team was severely wounded and left for dead.
Diving off the side of the mountain,
the surviving wounded and unwounded SEALs called for help.
Meanwhile, Trebon alerted the Ranger
reaction force at Bagram, which
launched in the midst of confusion
with these instructions, according to
Naylor. In response to Capt. Nathan
Self’s question “What’s our mission?”
a staff officer said, “We’ve got to get
you guys in the air and get you down
to that vicinity,” he said, “When you
get down to Gardez (a location nearer
the Shahikot), come up on the tacsat
and we’ll give you further instructions.” They did not land at Gardez,
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ARMY ■ May 2005
but instead flew straight toward Taku
Ghar, following instructions from a
Navy EP-3 aircraft that was relaying
instructions from Masirah and
Bagram. As they flew toward the
mountaintop, staffers at both headquarters were trying to get through to
the CH-47 with a simple message—
”Don’t land on top of the mountain.”
But communications had been lost
with both the Rangers and the EP-3,
so the reaction force’s two helicopters
flew on. Above, the crew of the AC130 that had been protecting the remaining SEALs continued to fly cover
in daylight, disobeying orders for it to
return to base. (There was also a tussle
over who actually had authority over
the AC-130, but the pilot remarked
later that they would have stayed under any conditions. “Hey, guys, don’t
leave us,” called the SEALs. “We’re
staying,” one of the crew responded,
“We just have to work through this
Rules of Engagement crap.”)
By the time the Rangers landed on
the top of Taku Ghar, everybody at
Masirah and Bagram had realized that
the mountaintop was too hot—except
them. Trebon’s faith in communications technology had failed utterly.
“Today I feel like a Ranger,” shouted
one private first class, who was dead a
minute later, killed as the lead CH-47
touched down. Self waved off the second CH-47, hit the ground with his
stick, and was immediately under
withering fire from al Qaida fighters
fending off their third helicopter assault in six hours. The CH-47 was immediately disabled, men were killed
and wounded in the hail of fire, and
the Rangers were pinned down in a
desperate battle that lasted until they
were reinforced by their teammates
after a cross-country march from a
more secure drop zone and until airpower was brought to bear on the surviving enemy fighters. In cleaning up
the battlefield, the bodies of both the
missing SEAL and his Air Force teammate were recovered. Both men had
apparently put up a fight—in the airman’s case, he held out almost long
enough to have had a fighting chance;
an investigation concluded that he
had reached a bunker for his final
fight, which lasted until about 45 seconds before the Rangers arrived.
Counting the two members of the
SEAL team, seven servicemen died on
the Taku Ghar, including an Air Force
pararescue specialist who died of
wounds while waiting for a delayed
medevac. Eleven were seriously
wounded. When the evacuation birds
landed, the SEAL security forces
made no effort to help the Rangers
load their wounded and dead, embittering the Rangers. After a cross-country trek, the original SEAL team’s survivors were evacuated by another
CH-47.
On March 3, Hagenbeck committed
more forces to the fight, and a subtle
shift in priorities allowed “fires” to
take the lead in Anaconda—there was
no more talk of caution about civilian
casualties. More aerial firepower arrived, including 16 Apaches from Fort
Campbell (the gnashing of teeth at
CENTCOM over force caps having
apparently stopped). Air Force A-10s,
Marine Corps AH-1Ns and other assets were now available to TF Rakkasan. The infantrymen’s mortars
were deployed as “fire bases,” and the
mortars, Apaches and other firepower
continued through the 3rd and 4th to
pound al Qaida positions. Blaber returned to command the AFO teams
around the valley, and they continued
to kill enemy fighters until March 5,
when the last of Blaber’s magnificent
men left the Shahikot. More troops arrived to support TF Rakkasan. Finally,
on March 12, Afghan forces moved
into the Shahikot, advised by Blaber,
Haas and the CIA’s paramilitary expert. In the valley, among other debris, were two D-30 122 mm howitzers. Blood trails and other jetsam of
battle found by Blaber’s AFO teams—
now employed to follow up the surviving enemy as they retreated toward Pakistan—led Naylor to
estimate that between 150 and 300 enemy fighters were killed, with as
many escaping as were killed. Only
one enemy leader—a local Taliban
leader named Saif Rahman Mansour—was killed. The Pentagon declared Operation Anaconda over on
March 18. The Rakkasans and Moun-
tain troops returned to their bases,
and Blaber ’s AFO began follow-up
operations to renew their search for al
Qaida leaders, nearer, now, to Pakistan.
So what to say about this book? It
was obviously written with a good
helping of indignation, which can be
understood since Naylor was on the
ground with some of the units involved and maintains the soldier’s
dirt-level perspective on what worked
and what didn’t. He has done a remarkable piece of work in sorting out
the higher-level decisions and actions
that surrounded the operation, particularly in the face, he says, of an official CENTCOM and Special Operations Command ban on discussing
Anaconda with the press. (The ban
eventually eased with the departures
of the commanders involved in the
operation.)
To overcome stonewalling, Naylor
worked with sources cultivated in the
special operations community and
elsewhere. The conventional Army, by
contrast, was “refreshingly straight-
forward and easy to deal with,” he
says. Even though anonymity might
have been required to protect careers
and to bring events to the light of day,
the use of unnamed sources will trouble some readers. But until a better
book comes along, this is liable to be
the best available source on Operation
Anaconda. In this operation, as Naylor’s book points out, the Army’s soldiers and unit leaders—particularly
the NCOs—performed superbly, and
generous helpings of praise are due
for members of all services in the
fight—Blaber, Hagenbeck, Wiercinski,
Perez, “Speedy,” one of the recon
team leaders and all his anonymous
SOF brethren, Ropel, Petersen,
Savusa, Kraft, Luman, the AC-130
crew who disobeyed orders, the CIA’s
“Spider” and others too numerous to
name. They did their duty and more.
A reader must say the same for the
staff officers who, in the conscientious
performance of their duty, involuntarily became part of the overlapping
and confusing web of contradictory
command relationships and miscom-
munications that contributed to the
missed chances and casualties in the
Halfpipe and on the peak of Taku
Ghar. But the performance of many of
the senior leaders in Afghanistan during this period cannot be so excused.
Generals should be as competent in
their duties as sergeants are expected
to be in theirs. If the core competency
of a professional NCO is expertise in
the close-in fight, the core competency
of senior officers is the organization
and direction of war according to professional principles. If Naylor ’s account is correct, those competencies
were critically lacking in the events
surrounding and during this battle.
One can only hope that future leaders
take the lessons of this book to heart,
and the next Operation Anaconda will
be free of the mistakes made on the
rocky ridges of Afghanistan in February and March 2002.
COL. ROBERT B. KILLEBREW, USA
Ret., was an infantryman for more than
30 years and now writes and consults
on defense issues.
Revisionist Examination of Motivation for America’s Wars
The Dominion of War: Empire and
Liberty in North America, 15002000. Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton. Viking. 520 pages; illustrations;
maps; notes; index; $27.95.
By Col. Stanley L. Falk
AUS retired
I
n the two and one-half centuries
since the American Revolution, the
United States has been involved in an
almost steady stream of wars. These
include major wars—the Revolution
itself, the Civil War, the two World
Wars, Korea and Vietnam; lesser but
still important conflicts—the War of
1812, the Mexican War, the SpanishAmerican War; and a host of smaller
military engagements, including the
century-long Indian wars, fought on
battlegrounds from Florida to California. All of these had a clear impact on
the form and development of the nation—geographically, economically
and politically—and on how America
related to the rest of the world. The
United States is, indeed, a country
shaped by war, and it is this concept
that constitutes the basis of Fred An-
derson and Andrew Cayton’s stimulating and provocative study of American military history.
The two authors are academic historians with impressive publication
records. They postulate two basic
themes. The first is the very obvious
effect of wars on the growing nation.
They have little difficulty illustrating
this relationship, although conceivably paying insufficient heed to a
number of other key contributing factors. Still, their point is well made.
Their second theme is perhaps more
original, certainly more complex and
not as easily proven. American wars,
they argue, that have long been regarded as having been fought for liberty and the spread of freedom were
in fact begun for less idealistic purposes. They were, insist the authors,
the result of “imperial ambition” and
fought “less to preserve liberty than to
extend the power of the United States
in the name of liberty.” America is thus
May 2005 ■ ARMY
85
no different than other imperial powers that sought to impose their rule on
allegedly dangerous, unstable or desirable peripheral regions while
claiming more altruistic motives. This
proposition, while not entirely new, is
stated here more boldly and explicitly
than in many previous examinations
of our history. It is difficult to ignore,
however much one may question it.
Professors Anderson and Cayton
support their thesis with a broad survey of American military history
structured on the lives and times of
eight key leaders. The first of these
was the French explorer Samuel de
Champlain, who founded New
France in Canada even as British
colonies were establishing themselves
further south along the Atlantic coast.
Champlain’s alliances with the Indians laid the groundwork for a century
and a half of Anglo-French imperial
conflict in North America. These
struggles also saw the coercive exploitation of native tribes by both
sides, setting a pattern for what
would follow in future years. Then,
the eventual triumph of British over
French imperialism would lead in
turn to the American Revolution and
the establishment of what the authors
term a new “imperial republic.”
Meanwhile, in contrast to the violence that characterized most AngloFrench relations with the Indians, a
different example was being set by the
pacifist William Penn in the British
colony that bore his name. Penn, an
Englishman who died half a century
before the American Revolution, offered the Indians peace, fair trade and
benevolent treatment. He thus earned
not only their trust, but also the
means by which Pennsylvania flourished and expanded into Indian lands
to its immediate west. This proved indeed to be the most efficient method
of enlarging British territory in North
America. It differed from the pattern
of military expansion prevalent elsewhere but nonetheless marked Penn
as a more successful imperialist than
any of his fellow countrymen.
The Anglo-French struggles for
eastern North America were part of a
century-long series of dynastic and
86
ARMY ■ May 2005
colonial wars fought in Europe and
Asia as well as on this side of the Atlantic. In America, England’s victory
in the French and Indian War (17551763) eliminated the French threat to
her colonies. The colonists, in turn, no
longer needing the protection of
British Redcoats, resented their presence and the taxes to support them,
and soon sought and gained their independence.
The Dominion of War describes these
violent developments by examining
the life and career of George Washington. His ambitions, say the authors,
both as a military and political leader
and as a speculator in western lands,
simply carried on the imperial designs of previous years and underlined the growing expansionism of
the new nation he led.
Turning to the military and political
career of Andrew Jackson, Professors
Anderson and Cayton next examine
what they characterize as continued
American imperialism. They specifically refer to attempts to invade
Canada and to push out the country’s
western borders in the War of 1812
and to military actions in Florida
against the Spanish and the native Indian tribes. Yet while these conflicts
served to expand the country, the
fight with England was equally concerned with freedom of the seas for
American vessels and in any event
was opposed by much of the country.
Moreover, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United
States without any recourse to military action, while a peaceful agreement with Britain in 1818 settled the
contentious dispute over the nation’s
northwest boundary.
Jackson’s aggressive expansionism,
viewed popularly as “manifest destiny” and the defense of freedom, led
inevitably to the annexation of Texas
and the war with Mexico. For these
events, the authors focus briefly on
the aggressive Mexican dictator Santa
Anna and then more fully on the
American Ulysses S. Grant. Santa
Anna’s attitudes and actions, supported by most of his fellow countrymen, had much to do with bringing
on the war. Yet the prime movers were
the states of the American south, eager to extend slavery’s borders into
new and inviting territory. Many
Americans, however, including young
Lt. Grant and future President Lincoln, futilely opposed the conflict as
an unnecessary and immoral aggression.
Gen. and President Grant’s career
spanned both the clash with Mexico
and the American Civil War, along
with the continued efforts to crush
and expel Indian tribes from the expanding frontier. The great new territories gained in the Mexican War exacerbated the conflict between North
and South over the extension of slavery and, as Grant wrote later, brought
on the Civil War.
The latter was not an “imperial
war” but, as historians Anderson and
Cayton argue, it brought about a vast
increase in national power, reinforcing
long dormant dreams of expansion in
the Caribbean and Central America.
They agree that much of the subsequent extension of American hegemony took place through forceful persuasion rather than actual coercion,
but it nonetheless culminated in the
“imperial war” against Spain at the
end of the century. This conflict, in
turn, “marked a sea change in the
character of American imperialism
and the opening of the Age of Intervention” under the guise of promoting freedom. Half a dozen “interventions” in the Caribbean would clearly
illustrate this development.
For the long period from the Spanish-American War through the war in
Korea, the book focuses on the career
of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The general believed that the United States
had “a special destiny” in the world.
America had fought World War I in
the name of spreading democracy and
not for conquest, yet, reflecting
MacArthur’s view, much of the country held that the nation had a continuing duty to expand the borders of liberty throughout a not always receptive world.
The realities of the post-war years
soon dampened expectations. Not until the end of World War II would the
United States be in a position to domi-
nate the international scene. The occupations of Germany and Japan, the
widespread establishment of American military bases and a generous
American economy seemed to suggest
as much. Yet once again, reality—the
Cold War and frustrating conflicts in
Korea and Vietnam—stymied American empire building.
Professors Anderson and Cayton
admit the “necessity” and “fundamental justice” of fighting World War
II and defending freedom in the Cold
War, but winning the peace, they say,
“required the expansion of American
hegemony.”
The authors close their ambitious
volume with a short laudatory essay
on Gen. Colin Powell and the Powell
Doctrine, along with a brief reference
to the uncertainties of the current situation in Iraq. A war fought to defend
freedom and end a putative threat to
America, they say, has brought “unpredictable outcomes,” strange contingencies and a new and different
world with which the nation will have
to deal for a long time.
The Dominion of War is thus a revisionist examination of the traditional
belief that America’s wars have been
fought solely in the defense of free-
dom and liberty. It argues, instead,
that imperial ambition was as much
or more a motivating factor and that
the United States was thus like any
other powerful nation seeking to extend its rule. There is much to dispute
in this interpretation but also much
truth. Readers will have to make up
their own minds. Whatever they conclude, however, they will find this
volume both stimulating and informative. It is very readable and well
worth examining.
Each picture offers a different view
of the memorial, some focusing on the
quotations or unique features around
it. Unlike the text-heavy The World War
II Memorial: A Grateful Nation Remembers by Douglas Brinkley, this book focuses exclusively on presenting the
memorial’s beauty and symbolic significance. Anyone interested or familiar
with the memorial will want to take a
look at this book, which salutes the
World War II generation and those
who designed and built the memorial.
—Kevin M. Hymel
COL. STANLEY L. FALK, AUS Ret., Ph.D.,
is a military historian and author.
Varied Fare
WWII Memorial: “Jewel of the Mall.”
Photography by Stephen R. Brown. The
Foundry (www.jewelofthemall.com). 90
pages. Color photographs; $24.95.
Stephen Brown has put together a
stunning tribute to the World War II
Memorial in Washington, D.C. The
first part of this photo book shows the
memorial at sunrise, sunset, day and
night, winter and summer, from closeup views to impressive vistas. The
second part shows the building,
sculpting and carving of the memorial. In the book’s introduction, Sen.
Bob Dole, who led the effort to build
the memorial, points out that war
memorials are not about wars but
those who contributed to the effort.
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