Kosovo had lived an uneasy existence in the fraying Yugoslav
federation since Belgrade revoked its autonomy in 1990. In mid-1998, the Serbs
began using police raids, artillery and helicopter attacks, and executions to
push hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians out of the province and into
neighboring Macedonia and Albania. Another fruitless chapter of diplomacy and
saber-rattling ensued. NATO fighter jets conducted exercises and Marines were
moved into nearby countries, and NATO approved air strikes but they were not
launched. For months Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic toyed with international
negotiators and ignored their ultimatums. By the time NATO issued its final
deadline there were 11,000 dead and a million refugees.
Finally, in the spring of 1999, U.S. and European leaders
decided to employ force. They were haunted by having stood aside so long in
Bosnia, and history was repeating itself in Kosovo. NATO began a limited air
bombing campaign and escalated it until Milosevic acquiesced, seventy-eight
days later, in June 1999. Fifty thousand peacekeeping troops moved in under
United Nations auspices to stop further violence and to keep the conflict from
destablizing the neighboring countries, especially Macedonia, where ethnic
frictions were mounting. Kosovar Albanians were rumored to be sending arms and
men across the border to their ethnic kin. The Special Forces played much the
same role as they had in Bosnia, moving around in teams to gather information,
win friends and influence people, and keep tabs on the troublemakers.
The accord reached on Kosovo was a bare bones affair with no
road map for resolving the status of the province, the return of refugees, or
any other core issues. This may have been the key lesson of the decade’s
“humanitarian interventions”: they were always too little, too late. The
impulse to save lives was laudable, even if it was galvanized by television
cameras broadcasting scenes of dying or starving people, but it did not
constitute policy. Acknowledging the suffering did not suffice as a diagnosis
of its cause or what would be required to remedy it. The application of
military power in the absence of an accurate diagnosis and adequate solution
was bound to result in confusion and impotence or, at worst, tragedy and
failure.
The United States and the United Nations had pulled out of
Somalia entirely by 1995, and the U.S. defense secretary had resigned, but that
lesson had not been learned. Other humanitarian interventions were attempted
nonetheless, without much greater success. U.S. troops were used to restore
Haiti’s elected president to office, but the overriding goal was a
casualty-free short-term occupation rather than lasting governability. Special
Forces ODAs from 3rd Group were sent all over the country but were withdrawn
before they had a chance to cement their progress. The Balkans experience
combined ineffective diplomacy with halting interventionism that left the
majority of victims displaced, key war criminals at large, a lingering international
constabulary, and no clear end in sight a decade later.
A road map for Kosovo would have helped everyone involved,
but the Special Forces were better prepared than most to deal with such murky
situations. Kosovo’s conflict featured unconventional tactics, a separatist
guerrilla army, a popular revolt, and nationalist and regional dimensions—a
stew of complexities. As part of the UN mission, the ODAs worked to disarm the
belligerents, protect the civilians, and keep ethnic strife from breaking out again
or spilling over the borders.
Although 10th Group provided the lion’s share of Special
Forces manpower to the Balkans effort, 5th Group lent its expertise at various
junctures to work with Bosnian Muslims, Arab countries who provided
peacekeepers, and the Kosovar Albanians, who were also Muslim. Alan Johnson had
been in 5th Group’s first deployment to the Balkans in 1994, when a half-dozen
Special Forces soldiers were sent to Bosnia. He spent a bleak Christmas there,
another one away from home. His split team was assigned to gather information
on the warring parties and to advise and assist the commanders of a Pakistani
battalion, which was part of the earliest, fledgling, and ultimately
unsuccessful United Nations effort to help shield Muslims in five “safe havens”
from the Serbian attacks. The massacre of 7,000 men and boys in one of the safe
havens, Srebrenica, in July 1995 finally jolted the United States into
concerted diplomatic action that led to the Dayton Peace Accords.
For the rest of ODA 563, the team’s deployment to the
Balkans in the summer of 1999 was an entirely new culture and experience. Even
the physical environment—wooded, mountainous, and temperate—was a sharp
contrast to the desert or subtropical regions where it usually deployed. A
handful of teams from 5th Group was sent there to work with the Arab members of
the UN peacekeeping force UNMIK and to serve as a liaison between those
countries and American forces. Randy and Alan’s team worked with the United
Arab Emirates and the Jordanians. The teams were also to use their cultural
skills and understanding of Muslim norms to engage the Kosovar Albanians. The
Kosovar Liberation Army had agreed to disband and assume the role of a domestic
police force, but some of its members were reportedly helping foment
irredentist sentiments across borders. Macedonia looked unstable, perhaps the
next Balkan domino to descend into bloodshed and fragmentation.
Mule trains had been bringing in arms from Albania, across
the mountains that formed the western border, from the bottomless cache of the
Soviet-backed regime that had collapsed almost two years earlier. On the
southern side of Kosovo, arms were being funneled across the border into
Macedonia to arm ethnic Albanians there. One of ODA 563’s jobs was to help
interdict these arms flows and uncover weapons caches hidden in the mountains.
The longitude and latitude might have been new, but Rawhide
knew just the solution to deal with this terrain. He had used pack horses and
mule trains for years in his family’s outfitting business. For years he, his
father, and his cousins had led elk hunts in the mountains outside Cody. They
did everything for the city slickers who came to bag big game: tracked the
animals, set up camp, cooked the meals, and packed the gear. After the paying
customers got their elk, they were free to get theirs. The cowboy life was
where Rawhide started, and where he intended to end up one day.
By sheer luck, Rawhide’s team had been working with horses
over the past year at Fort Campbell. ODA 563 and a few others had updated the
field manual on pack animals and practiced packing techniques. Some people had
criticized their little project as a lark and a waste of time. The command had
disagreed and dipped into the discretionary funds so the team could train on
horse-related skills at the post’s stables and local facilities. The men had
argued that one never knew what kind of techniques might be needed in the Third
World—or even in Europe, as it turned out.
In Kosovo, ODA 563 used pack horses so they could stay in
the mountains for days at a time, running continuous interdiction operations.
It also solved the problem of the Arab partners’ unwillingness to hump
100-pound packs. Their allies from the United Arab Emirates had never been in the
mountains, so the team showed them how to use and care for the horses, even how
to shoe them, and how to navigate and camp in the terrain. The team scored
numerous successes against the arms smuggling, turning up caches and stopping
mule trains loaded with Soviet-made AK–47s, pistols, and ammunition from
Albanian stocks.
One day, the communications sergeant, Mark Reynolds, was
tinkering with his SATCOM radio and antenna at their base camp in the
mountains. The faint sound of a motor’s whine made him prick up his ears.
“Did you hear that?” he asked Alan.
“No, what?” Alan said.
“I think a helo just went down. Sounded like a Kiowa.”
Reynolds was well suited for the communications job; he had
extraordinary hearing and an analytical mind, and paid attention to details.
His guess was confirmed a few minutes later, when the pilot’s distress call
came over the radio. Realizing that they were the only soldiers in the area and
that it would be difficult for a heliborne search-andrescue team to spot the
pilots in the heavily wooded mountains, Mark, Alan, and a couple of other
sergeants set off to search for them. Mark’s sharp ears and keen sense of
direction led them to the site. The pilot and co-pilot were uninjured, but
their little Kiowa scout craft was wrecked. They walked down the mountain to
where the medic, Matt Nittler, and a few men were standing by as a
quick-reaction force. They drove the pilots back to their headquarters at Camp
Bondsteel, the American base for the peacekeeping operation.
The team’s orders were issued from Bondsteel, as were its
supplies, but otherwise ODA 563 stayed out roaming around. It was assigned with
its Jordanian and UAE partners to search an area surrounding Pristina, Kosovo’s
capital, that contained seventeen villages. ODA 563 knew the rules when it came
to dealing with Muslim families: one dealt with the men, not the women. If the
head of the house was not there, the sons, no matter whether they were the
youngest people present, were the ones to talk to.
The armed resistance, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), had
not been keen to give up its guns, despite the formal agreement to do so. The
Kosovars were still smuggling guns in because they believed they would have to
fight the Serbs again, and many of them remained committed to the cause of
independence. They would not give up their goal of seceding from Belgrade, by
force if necessary. A referendum on Kosovo’s status had been promised but no
date set. From the standpoint of the international community, independence in
the short term would provoke Serbian violence anew and send the Russians into
orbit, as they saw ominous parallels between the Kosovo experience and their
own breakaway Chechen republic. Those were the geopolitical realities—but on
the ground the Special Forces were trying to stabilize the country one village
at a time.
The village searches were tricky affairs. There was a good
chance that the teams might stumble on dedicated KLA fighters who would shoot
rather than surrender their arms. The population was not neutral; they were
generally ardent supporters of their militia. The Serbs, for their part, had
left booby-trapped buildings everywhere and were still ambushing people in the
countryside and near the borders. Randy and Alan, both experienced in close-quarters
tactics, knew they had to be executed precisely to avoid injury. They
meticulously planned every operation and made sure each man knew his part.
Everyone had to stay alert for that hair-thin wire attached to a grenade behind
the door, a stack of strategically placed debris blocking their path, and a
thousand other things. The vehicle was checked every single time before they
got into it. One moment of casual inattention was all it took to end up dead.
Doc Nittler, the medic, was compact and extremely agile. His
teammates called him “carni” because he could do flips and walk on his hands
like a carnival entertainer. That made him the obvious candidate to be heaved
into crawlspaces, attics, and barn lofts as the team searched the villages and
countryside of Kosovo. It was a dangerous job, because an armed man lying in
wait would likely have his gun trained on the opening, watching for someone to
come through. In the close-quarter training, the instructors call this the
“fatal funnel” because the target is perfectly silhouetted by the light behind
him. This was Nittler’s lot, time and again. They were not at war and there
were civilians everywhere, so the men could not shoot before entering or throw
a smoke grenade inside. They just tossed Doc into the void, to land and react
as best he could. Day by day the entire team became more proficient. They would
move quickly and quietly into a room or building, covering each other from
every angle, and search their pre-determined quadrants with textbook precision.
They did so well that the soldiers were handed another slice of territory as
soon as they finished the first seventeen towns.
The extensive close-quarters searches welded the team into a
finetuned machine as few other assignments could. The men learned to read each
other’s facial expressions and body language, making speech and the standard
hand signals almost superfluous. Their skills kept getting better, team members
bonded and the esprit de corps solidified. This was the epitome of what an ODA
should be, and Randy and Alan were immensely gratified to see how well their
mix of new and old blood, intellectual and instinctual types, acrobats like Doc
and giants like Alan and Roderick Robinson, had come together. Their second
communications sergeant, in addition to Mark, was a smart newcomer named Rich
Davis. A few months before he had walked into Alan’s office and announced that
he’d been assigned to his team. “Don’t I know you?” Alan asked, then recalled
that he had encouraged Davis to try out for the Special Forces when he was a
young soldier in the 101st Airborne Division. A friend had asked Alan to talk
to Davis about the Special Forces, and here he was, three years later, on
Alan’s team. Al had been mentored the same way. This is the most successful means
of recruiting Special Forces candidates, because the soldiers themselves can
often spot who has the right traits to fit in. Davis was one of them.
The team was humming, but Randy found Kosovo to be the most
depressing place he’d ever been. The wholesale extermination of civilians had
no possible justification. People had been driven from their homes and
everything they owned was burned and pillaged. One day, as he watched from the
road, a woman tilling a field was killed when her hoe struck a mine. It was a
senseless, random death, which he had been powerless to prevent, but he felt
terrible nonetheless. He knew many places where the law of the gun
prevailed—much of the world, in fact—and he knew the Arab world’s strongmen,
the chaos of Africa, but nothing so troubled him as this place. Education and
wealth and “civilization” had not impeded this country’s descent into violence
in the least. The Albanians and Serbs were still teaching their children to
hate each other just because they were different, breeding the next
generation’s war as he watched. If this could happen in Europe, he wondered,
could it happen at home? What would it be like if war came to America?
Randy, Alan, and the rest of ODA 563 were at their compound
on the army base, Camp Bondsteel, outside Pristina when they heard the news. It
was mid-afternoon on September 11. Alan was outside with other team members,
preparing their vehicles for a border patrol. Someone called him to come into
the team’s operations center, where CNN was always on. He watched as the second
plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City. Randy, who had been asleep
on his cot, resting for the night shift, was awakened. Alan, who had been
reading up on Al Qaeda since his millennium mission, instantly guessed that it
was them and his team would be going after the perpetrators. He told the
sergeants to pack their gear. Within twenty-four hours, while they were still
in Kosovo, ODA 563 had initiated its mission planning process, set up target
folders, and drafted concepts for operations. The way Special Forces works, the
team with the best plan gets the job, and 563 intended to be ready. It seemed
to Randy that everything in his life had been a preparation for this moment. It
was the first time the United States had been directly attacked in almost sixty
years, and he was sure that the country would retaliate, and soon. They would
be called on to defend their country, and this was the war they would tell
their grandchildren about.
Back at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Major General Geoffrey
Lambert had taken the standard bearing the colors of the U.S. Army Special
Forces Command from his predecessor four days earlier, on September 7, at a
ceremony on the parade ground of Meadows Memorial Plaza. His new job came with
a second star. Standing in front of a towering sculpture of a Special Forces
soldier known as Bronze Bruce, the first Vietnam memorial, Lambert made a short
and simple speech. “It’s great to be home,” he said. He thanked the soldiers
from all seven of the Special Forces groups gathered for their work in the
“dark, wet, and cold, in strange and lonely far-off places.”
They had no idea where he was about to send them, and
neither did he. But Lambert had more than a premonition. All summer long he had
been reading top-secret intelligence reports and intercepts that convinced him
and his colleagues that Al Qaeda was going to strike somewhere, soon. For the
past two years, he had been the director of operations, plans, and strategy at
the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, where terrorism was the
number-one topic that he woke up to and went to sleep with every day. They
“war-gamed” the most likely scenarios, the worst scenarios, and what they might
do to stop them. They knew an attack was imminent—there was just too much
chatter on the bad guys’ networks. But they did not know where and they did not
know when.
On the morning of September 11, Gen. Lambert was holding his
first staff meeting at his headquarters in the three-story Robert L. McClure
building on Desert Storm Drive just off Yadkin Avenue. An aide came in and said
there was something on television that he should see. Lambert stepped out of
the meeting, saw the smoke billowing from the first World Trade Center tower,
and said simply, “They got us.” He stepped back into his meeting and announced
to the colonels and majors and captains assembled in the conference room: “We
just got hit.”
