When Freedom Dies – Prologue
Tora Bora, in the White Mountains, Afghanistan. December 17, 2001.
The wind blew down bitterly cold from the snow-covered peaks five thousand feet above them. The twelve Americans, heavily camouflaged and almost invisible on the frozen mountainside, waited for instructions to move in and eliminate their target. Eleven of them prayed to whatever god they knew that they would find him in one of the lower caves, preferably the first one. The twelfth member, lieutenant William Baker Armstrong, was convinced their mission was doomed from the outset. Far from considering the possibility of having to climb who knew how many hundreds, or even thousands, of feet higher, he thought only of getting the hell off these mountains and out of Afghanistan before they wrapped him in plastic and shipped him out.
“This is a frigging disaster about to happen. He’s to hell and gone across the border by now,” Armstrong complained “We’d have a better chance of finding him by knocking on doors in Islamabad than flushing out these bloody caves.”
“Our intelligence tells us that he’s here,” his commanding officer reminded him.
“Is that the same intelligence that taught four of those bastards to fly our own planes into the Trade Centre and the Pentagon? Intelligence my ass! Intelligence would have told them to nuke this bloody place a week ago and spare us the indignity of being massacred by a band of rag-tag Arab scum. They’re hiding in every crack and bloody crevasse on this mountainside, just waiting to blow our asses off as soon as we make a move.”
“A land-based attack on this stronghold is the last thing he’d be expecting,” colonel Scott Matthews insisted. “He’s convinced that we’re going to try to bomb him into oblivion.”
“Then why the hell are we clinging to the side of a bloody mountain hoping we don’t get blown off by this howling gale? If you’re right, why don’t we just march right in there and blast the bastards to pieces?”
“You volunteering to lead the charge, Armstrong?”
“We’re going to get it either way. I’d rather take one in the chest than in the back.”
“No one’s going to be retreating back down this mountain, Armstrong.”
“Well, that’s probably the only thing you’ll be right about in this whole bloody nightmare. They’ll blow us into little bits before we can say Hail Mary, full of grace. And for what? So Bush can convince himself that he’s avenged the 3000 corpses from 9/11? What a crock of shit! It was our brilliant administration that put that bastard bin Laden in power in the first place. As long as he was fighting the Russians we were only too pleased to jump into bed with him and give him all the arms he wanted. Whose brilliant intelligence was that? He’s a fanatical Muslim, for crying out loud! He couldn’t wait for an opportunity to blow us to hell and back as soon as he got the Commies out of his front yard.”
The argument continued for half an hour. At least it took their minds off the bitter cold. Then the order came to flush out the first cave.
“Okay, Armstrong,” Matthews said, “here’s what you’ve been waiting for.”
“You haven’t been listening to me, Colonel. I’m not waiting to go in, I’m waiting to get shipped out. And not in a bloody body bag.”
“Then, let’s do it. Let’s get that murderous coward and then we can all go home.”
They began to move in formation up to the entrance of the cave. Then the full fury of the heavens rained down on them.
The fighting lasted less than ten minutes before the Taliban forces disappeared up the mountain and the Americans limped away to lick their wounds.
“What’s the damage?” Matthews asked when they had retreated behind a rock outcrop.
“Six injured and one missing.”
“Do we know who didn’t come down?”
“Yeah, Colonel, it was Armstrong.”
“Damn it! We’ve got to take his body down to the base camp.”
It took them three hours to get the injured and Armstrong’s body back to camp. Nobody dared to say, “he told us so,” but everyone thought it.
The next day the Delta Special Forces unit learned that a company of 4,000 marines had arrived a week earlier in the Afghan theater under the command of Brigadier General James Mattis and that their Commander had insisted that he could have surrounded bin Laden’s hideout and trapped the Taliban leader in the Tora Bora caves. The general was refused permission to deploy his troops and bin Laden disappeared across the border into Pakistan sometime during the night of December 16. The Bush administration later conceded that the refusal to dispatch the marines was their gravest error of the war.
And there you had it. A quiet little apology, offered almost as an aside, and the latest mess in America’s war against terrorism screw-up was swept under the White House carpet.
There were others, however, who had very different opinions as to the culpability of the United States’ war policy, and they would certainly make their voices heard.