Rescue on Roberts Ridge

After the battle on Takur Ghar, the conventional and special operations forces fighting along side each other in Operation Anaconda began to take control of the Shah-i-Khot, the valley where victory had eluded so many foreign armies in the past.

The fighting continued for 10 more days until commanders were confident that all remaining al Qaeda forces were captured or killed.

Gen. Hagenbeck: The world’s a safer place then it was on the second of March when we inserted several thousand coalition forces to put their lives on the line to confront al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists.

Stone Phillips, Dateline correspondent: Despite all of the things that did not go according to plan, how well did your men perform?

Brig. Gen. Frank Weircinski: Magnificently.  We secured our objectives, we completed our mission.  That’s in my book success.

Phillips: What turned the tide in this fight?

Brig. Gen. Frank Weircinski: United States Army soldiers.  Their ability, their discipline, their drive. Their audacity, their will to win turned the tide.

FALLEN SOLIDERS      Remembering Operation Anaconda's bravest — Specialist Marc Anderson — Technical Sergean John A. Chapman — Corporal Matthew Commons — Sergeant Bradley Crose — Senior Airman Jason Cunningham — Petty Officer Neil Roberts — Sergeant Philip Svitak

Eight Americans died in Operation Anaconda.  All of them, Special Ops soldiers.   Of the 1400 conventional soldiers that took part, 86 were wounded.  But they all came home alive.

In the months that followed, military leaders declared the operation a major success.  But others have questioned how much was actually accomplished. 

Sean Naylor, writer for the Army Times: I saw nothing to suggest that hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of al Qaeda fighters had been killed.

Sean Naylor, a senior writer for the Army Times, was embedded with U.S. troops throughout the battle.  He says military estimates that put the number of enemy dead at more than a thousand are an exaggeration.

Naylor: I walked the valley at the tail end of the operation.  There’s no doubt that dozens, scores, probably in the low hundreds of al Qaeda fighters were killed. However, there’s also little doubt that at least an equally large number of al qaeda fighters managed to get away.

Phillips: Sean Naylor estimates 150  to 300 killed and probably that many escaped.  You agree?

Gen. Hagenbeck: I don’t agree with his conclusions at all.  I think there were more killed. And here’s what I would tell you in terms of who escaped from the valley: did some get out of there?  Of course they did.  But in very small numbers.

Phillips: Do you think you took out any high value targets?

Gen. Hagenbeck:  Some that we would call upwards in the hierarchy? Absolutely. Did we take out some of the key leaders that we would have liked to have taken out? No. But, listen this was a huge success.  This was an area where the Osama Bin Laden training camps were located. And we by and large dismantled that entire infrastructure they had.  And we killed the largest majority of those trainers.

Still, Hagenbeck acknowleges that mistakes were made and some painful lessons learned.  First and foremost, commanders violated a fundamental tenet of military leadership called “unity of command”  -- the principle that one leader commands and controls all forces on the battlefield.           

Phillips: So one operation, two commands, separate. You were preparing to fight the largest ground battle that the U.S. military had waged since 1991 in Iraq.  And you didn’t have control over the Special Operations forces?

Gen. Hagenbeck: That’s true. In the classic sense of a single commander over every soldier and agency and element on that battlefield at the outset of the fight, we did not have that.

Phillips: Was that a concern to you?

Gen. Hagenbeck: It was a concern.

The decision to keep Special Ops forces, like the Army Rangers and Navy SEALs, under a separate command was made by U.S. Central command, headed by General Tommy Franks.   As a result, Hagenbeck wasn’t always aware of what the Special Ops side, called Task Force 11, was doing.

Naylor: The Task Force 11 tactical operations center was just down the road, but they were a world away from each other really, in terms of communication.

In fact, intelligence known to Hagenbeck about the strong enemy presence on Takur Ghar was never relayed to the Special Ops commanders who sent in that first chopper carrying Neil Roberts.

Phillips: An hour before the chopper took off with those SEALs, aerial imagery was said to come back showing that the top of the mountain was crawling with enemy fighters. But this was into your command center.  Your command unit didn’t know that they were going to the top of the mountain. And so it just didn’t seem urgent or necessary to pass on that information?

Gen. Hagenbeck: We did not have contact, I did not have specific contact with those choppers out in the field, so the information flow, I was unaware of it not getting to go where it needed go at that time.

A divided command, incomplete reconnaissance, failed communications.  In the end, one of military’s most comprehensive reviews of the battle cited all of those problems and concluded that “the command and control organizations had faltered in small ways that added up to significant collective mistakes.”

Phillips: In your estimation, what was it that brought on the events up on Takur Ghar?  Was it fog-of-war?  Was it a flawed command structure?  Was it a colossal problem with communication? I mean, time after time choppers were landing in the same place taking heavy fire.

Gen. Hagenbeck: I think it’s a confluence of those events over time.  Maybe one of those things in and of itself we could have overcome.  But when you get into the chain of events that you just described—you’re begging for problems.  And we encountered them there.

We may never know, for sure, how many enemy fighters were killed ... Or how many American losses could have been avoided.  This much is known about Harriman, Anderson, Crose, Commons, Svitak, Cunningham, Chapman and Roberts—they fought and died with honor.         

Phillips: It’s never easy sending young men into combat.  What would you say to the families who lost loved ones there?

Gen. Hagenbeck: Well, it is difficult.  You can never regain what you’ve lost.  But I would say that they can be extraordinarily proud of all these soldiers that wore this uniform and died in the cause of freedom. I am proud to be associated with them and wear a uniform like they do.

Now, four years after the rescue on Roberts Ridge, Oscar Escano and Nate Self have both left the army.  One pursuing dreams, the other praying his go away.

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