Pete Blaber (113:43)
Not even about being right. It was about taking care of the guys and, you know, responsibility to them, knowing what was needed and that, you know, it had nothing to do. I'm like, fine, okay, we'll put them in if you really want them in, but, you know, let's put them where we need them and let's get. Give them the chance to be successful, which you're taking away by forcing them in tonight. So. And that would also require helicopters. So they began planning with the staff back in Bagram and Masira, the JSOC staff, on where to put these guys. You know, one of the. One of the. There were two SEAL teams. One of them, I recognized the team leader, and it was Brit Slabinski. And I knew him from Bosnia. We lived in the same safe house for about four weeks. I drove around in a car with him for 10 or 15 hours. Clandestine reconnaissance. I knew him. He was a good guy, quiet, competent, recce guy. And so I said to him, hey, Slapp, can you follow me outside? And he was like, yeah, sure. So I walked outside with them. I said, dude, you guys cannot go in tonight. And I'm, you know, I would not be saying this if it was. If I wasn't, you know, seriously concerned with your welfare. You need to acclimate. You need to get your weapons, commonads all set up. You need to talk to the guys who've already been in. You need to talk to the Afghans, and, you know, I need your help to prevent them from putting you in. And he said, I totally agree with you, Panther. And I tried telling them that back at Bagram, but right now I feel like I'm flying blind. I was ordered by my chain of command, and I have no choice but to obey orders. And he said something like, you know, it's different from us than you guys. We have to obey orders. And so, you know, I was like, God damn. And, you know, I just. Again, there's a lot of things, you know, this is 2001. No one really believes you can get killed. They've been watching this op, you know, they just. The guys at Bagram, the non combat, you know, people in Bagram, and they were like, all you got to do is get the guy on the hill, call for fire, and, you know, it's a piece of cake. So no matter what we were saying, they were ignoring it. They wanted control of the battle. And then you come do it. Yeah, well, I wouldn't you know, and you can't even do that because you'd be. You'd be leaving them. So afternoon, evening of March 3rd, this is that. That day, the SEAL teams briefed the rest of us on their plan. The first team would go in fairly innocuous on the valley floor right below Juliet team. They would. They were going to land in an lz that the 10th mount was using for resupply. So nothing, nothing, you know, dangerous about that. And then they were going to just walk up, give their resupply, drop the resupply off for Juliet team, and then occupy a position down in the valley that, you know, they could watch from. Mako 3 0, though, that's the wanted to go. They, they said we gotta, we gotta go to Takar Gar. So we first had to make them an lz. And you can see on the left side of that picture LZ1. We made that LZ because we could cover that. Juliet team could see that LZ when they infilled. We wanted to. We knew how dangerous it was going to be, but at least we. We could cover it. There's no 10th Mountain on that side of the valley. No one had been over there. And then Slab's plan was he was going to. He needed four to six hours to walk about 2,500ft up to the top of Takar Gar there. And that's what he briefed us on. And, you know, the AC130 would be an integral part of that. It would do reconnaissance ahead of time of the LZ and of Takar Ghar and provide fire support. So it seemed like, you know, they could pull it off. That night we were reinserting the Afghans. So we, we all, you know, got into position. You can go to the next slide real quick. We were ready to drive at sundown back into the valley. And this is. You see that, the Jenga trucks on the road. And then that's the. See the 400 Afghans lined up? That's. Those are Afghans. Yeah, shrubbery. Yeah, shrubbery. You can see, remember what I said? It got warmer. So those. The snow's already melted. And that's why we had to change our camel, our camel patterns. Our vehicles are those vehicles in front. The SF guys have these really nice Mercedes SUVs. Their European or Middle Eastern SUVs. Those are theirs. The white ones. The Tacomas are ours. That's mine. The red one, that's my combo guy outfitting it. I had everything I had in the talk. I had Satcom uhf. I had a little portable Predator downlink video display monitor. So I had everything in that vehicle. And all three of us, the SF commander, AFO commander and the CIA head of the agency, were all going to go back in because we were so concerned about friendly fire and de conflicting the Afghans had to go in. This had to be an Afghan op. They had to be the guys to clear the valley. And you know, I agree with that. It was, don't have our guys, clear the mountains, send them in. That's what they do best. So it's almost 1800. We're going to leave at darkness. The LZ time for the seals is 10:30. All these times are local. So the 47s get delayed on the way down here from Bagram. They don't get there till 11:23. After the 247s landed, they both developed engine problems. So as a result, the pilots informed slab Mako 30 that the soonest they could get him in to LZ1 was 2:30am with sunrise at 6:15. That slab instantly calculated that would not give him enough time to walk up to the top of Takar Gar. So he turned around, he said the SEAL troop commander was there. He said, hey, I recommend we push this back 24 hours. I don't have enough time. It's going to be daylight and we're going to be trying to walk up that hill. The troop commander got on the radio instead of calling me, which, you know, I had told him before I left, look, anything happens, call me. You got any questions, call me. Any changes of plan, he got on the satcom, but he called back to Bagram to his TF Blue headquarters and said, hey, here's what's going on. Hilos are busted. The Mako 30 team leader recommends we push back 24 hours. What do you want me to do? And they said, we really need you to get in tonight, so if you can find another way, let's put them in tonight. So he went back, he had some imagery, he talked to the lead pilot, I think it was Al Mak, and he said, hey, can you put us right on top of Takar garbage? So, you know, to give you an example of this, we already knew there were enemy up there. We had seen them moving. Mako3one had actually called it in the day before, but they weren't doing anything. They were just moving around up there. So it was kind of like we were going to address that once everything else was, you know, we stopped killing all the guys in the valley. So you know, if anyone had told me they were going to fly directly on top of Taka Gar at that point, I would, you know, it was a very easy response, but I had no idea. And Al Mack, you know, the Great Task Force 160 pilots was like, yeah, we can get you in there as long as this imagery is accurate. And so the mission was now a go to drop them right on top of Takur Gar.
