Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) by Sean Naylor Read Free Book Online Page A

that could hold liquid was fair game. With that in mind, they destroyed fuel tanks at an airfield near Lashkar Gah as well as a fuel truck in the area. Once the Little Birds returned from their second turn, the Combat Talons started landing at 1:15 A.M. The helicopters and FARP were taken out first, with the last Talon lifting off with the final load of Rangers and vehicles at 2:51 A.M . 14
    Not to be outdone, the MH-6 assault variants of the Little Bird also saw action that week, conducting a series of what a pilot called “hide site operations” with Delta’s B Squadron. As with the Pinzgauers, the Little Birds would arrive with aircrews and Delta operators aboard Combat Talons that landed at desert landing strips—often the same strips used for the AH-6 missions. Between the Pinzgauers and the Little Birds, a JSOC staff officer estimated that Delta conducted four to six “search and destroy” missions.
    The task force took no fatal casualties, but at least one B Squadron operation took a nasty turn when an MH-6 bringing a team of operators back to the desert landing strip browned out and rolled over. “A guy got his leg caught underneath the skid, it was kind of ugly,” said the staff officer. “Nobody died but there were some pretty serious injuries.” It could have been even worse, but for a stroke of luck. The pilot in command of the MH-6 was a maintenance test pilot and for no good reason at all had his maintenance test pilot checklist—“which is pretty thick,” as another Little Bird pilot put it—on the helicopter. “In the crash sequence, somehow that checklist became dislodged from the cockpit and actually ended up on the ground, between the ground and the skid, which prevented the skid from taking the guy’s leg off,” the Little Bird pilot said. 15
    Those mid-November missions represented the only action the Little Birds would see in Afghanistan for many years. The men who flew them would participate in hundreds of other perilous missions in Iraq during the coming decade of war, and some would pay a high price for the privilege of doing so, but they considered those first missions unique because of the autonomy the crews enjoyed, and the knowledge that they were very much alone above the Afghan desert. 16 Comparing the Little Bird actions in November to later operations, Rainier described them simply as “the most dangerous mission that we did.”

 
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    Rumsfeld Falls for JSOC
    On September 24, as Pete Blaber and his colleagues were stewing in the Delta compound, 300 miles up Interstate 95 Don Rumsfeld was in a packed Pentagon conference room also getting impatient with the military brass.
    Less than two weeks previously, in the hours after the September 11 attacks, with smoke still billowing through Pentagon corridors, the defense secretary had moved to the Executive Support Center, a suite of rooms protected against electronic eavesdropping and designed to host the most senior Defense Department officials during a crisis. From there , surrounded by other senior Pentagon officials, he had spoken via videoteleconference with Charlie Holland, head of U.S. Special Operations Command. As SOCOM commander, Holland’s job was to prepare U.S. special operations forces for operations overseas. JSOC fell under SOCOM for administrative purposes, but SOCOM did not command overseas missions conducted by JSOC or any other U.S. special operations forces. JSOC’s operations were run under the auspices of the National Command Authority (the president and defense secretary), with responsibility sometimes delegated to the regional commander-in-chief, who also ran any non-JSOC special operations missions. But Rumsfeld seemed unaware of this distinction, and tasked Holland to come up with a plan to strike back at Al Qaeda. “I don’t want you to wait around for a 100 percent plan,” he told the Air Force general. “This is going