Roughneck Nine-One: The Extraordinary Story of a Special Forces A-team at War [Hardcover]

"Roughneck Nine One is a rare and unexpectedly personal look into the elite world of a Special Forces A-Team."
---Jack Coughlin, Gunnery Sergeant, USMC, and New York Times bestselling author of Shooter
 
"A terrific inside look at a Special Forces A-Team at war. Frank Antenori didn't pull any punches in combat, and he doesn't in this book either."
---Sean Naylor, New York Times bestselling author of Not a Good Day to Die
 
"Pure Special Forces---deadly, professional ... Cool!"
---Jim Morris, Major, US Army Special Forces (Retired), and author of War Story
 
"Roughneck Nine One, written with retired Green Beret SFC Frank Antenori, is clearly Hans Halberstadt's best work yet! He brings to the table his exceptional background and years of well-honed expertise in writing books on special operations. This, combined with Antenori's "eyes on, ground truth" Special Forces soldier's experience, perspective, and insights, produces a truly groundbreaking, first-of-a-kind book. Roughneck Nine One takes you behind the scenes into the struggles, complications, preparation, training, and turf issues faced by our most elite forces as they go into battle. Ultimately your nerves will be tested as Antenori's Special Forces A-Team, searching for a fight, finds themselves in front of a large enemy force, out-manned, out-gunned, and largely unsupported. What's more...they plan on attacking!"
---Col. Gerald Schumacher, US Army Special Forces (Retired), author of To Be a US Army Green Beret and A Bloody Business: America's War Zone Contractors and the Occupation of Iraq
 
"Frank Antenori and Hans Halberstadt team up to give readers an updated version of the classic 'David and Goliath' story, a powerful no-holds barred, first-hand account of actual ground combat in Iraq. Roughneck Nine One most definitely captures the professionalism, comradeship, self-sacrifice, and courage that define the heart and soul of America's finest warriors---US Army Special Forces. A must-read book!"
---Col. Tom Yarborough, USAF, author of Da Nang Diary

On April 6, 2003, twenty-six Green Berets, including those of Sergeant 1st Class Frank Anentori's Special Forces A-Team (call sign Roughneck Nine One), led a violent battle against a vastly superior force at the remote crossroads near the village of Debecka, Iraq. In an already legendary conflict that will influence US Army doctrine for years to come, the Green Berets stopped an enemy unit that included battle tanks and more than 150 well-trained, well-equipped, and well-commanded soldiers. Any normal American light infantry unit finding itself outnumbered over five to one and outgunned on the ground by such a heavily armored force would have turned and run for cover. But Green Berets don't like to run and Nine One Don't Run was Antenori's team's motto from the very beginning. In a spectacular fight, they battled Iraqi tanks and personnel until only a handful of Iraqi survivors finally fled the battlefield.
In the process, Nine One encountered hordes of news media, and at the peak of the fight, a US Navy F-14 dropped a 500-pound bomb in the middle of a group of supporting Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, killing and wounding dozens. This is the never-before-told, unsanitized, unedited story of the fight for the crossroads at Debecka, Iraq, and a unique inside look at a Special Forces A-Team as it recruits and organizes, trains for combat, and eventually fights a battle against a huge opposing force in Iraq.
Roughneck Nine One is a powerful look inside a Special Forces A-Team and its dramatic and controversial battle against a huge opposing force, and a revealing story of the role of Special Forces in the ongoing war in Iraq.

SFC Frank Antenori, US Army (Retired) joined the Special Forces in 1988. Since then, he has participated in numerous operations in over thirty-four countries and has been awarded numerous decorations and citations, with seven received for combat actions.
 
Hans Halberstadt has authored or coauthored more than fifty books, most on military subjects, especially US special operations forces, armor, and artillery. He served in the US Army as a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam.

Looking back on it, I got my job as team sergeant for Operational Detachment Alpha-391 (ODA-391) as the result of an enemy ambush. It was a bloody business, but the good guys, with one exception, all lived, and the bad guys, from what we could see, were killed or captured.

I was assigned to Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group, and I was the company medic at the time. We were operating out of a "safe house" near Gardez, Afghanistan. Along with the other guys on the B-team, I had the job of providing support for the A-teams running patrols and operations in the Shah-e Khot valley in the weeks following Operation Anaconda. Home for us all was a walled compound typical of the area, and inside were two ODAs from 3rd Group, one from 20th, and another from 5th Group; we had set the place up with a little mess hall, a tactical operations center (TOC), a supply room, and my clinic.

I was having breakfast when a small convoy left our compound early on the morning of April 8, 2002, heading downtown to buy supplies at the local market. There were about twenty local AMF (Afghan Military Forces) and a few Special Forces guys from ODA-395 along for the ride, all mounted in pickup trucks and Land Rovers. The AMF soldierswere from the Eastern Alliance, a faction led by Gen. Zia Lodin. In the lead was a four-door Toyota Hilux pickup truck with two AMF men in the front seat, two in the back, and another six or so in the bed of the vehicle. There were two or three of these trucks in the lead, the Land Rovers followed.

There was only one practical route into Gardez, and that was over a bridge crossing a dry streambed. It was an obvious choke point and an ideal ambush location. The enemy knew this, and so did we, and the convoy approached the location with caution.

As the driver of the lead vehicle rolled up to the bridge, he saw what appeared to be a taxicab broken down on the road, with another vehicle parked alongside, apparently trying to help with repairs. The driver of the first truck responded in typical Afghan fashion by beeping his horn, yelling, and gesturing at the drivers to clear the road. The cab driver shrugged and indicated by gesture that he couldn't move the taxi.

The AMF driver was somehow convinced that this was an innocent event, and that turned out to be a bad mistake. The cab driver ambled over as if to talk, and he must have been a good actor because he got as far as the driver-side window, then dropped the first of several hand grenades inside. Before it detonated, he tossed another in the back of the truck among the half-dozen AMF. About the same time that the first grenade detonated in the cab, two Taliban popped up from the side of the bridge and opened up with AKs (as the AK-47 assault rifle is called) from close range, spraying the whole convoy with machine gun fire. The blast from the grenade blew out the windows of the cab, showering the bridge with millions of tiny shards of glass and severely injuring the four men inside.

The lead actor in this little play, the apparent cab driver, must have known he would not survive, but he stood there on the bridge throwing grenades at all of our vehicles for a few seconds. The AMF troops riding in the second vehicle cut him down almost immediately, with dozens of bullets hitting him in the head and chest. Then the AMF troops hosed down his accomplice, who was standing near the taxi on the bridge. When the AMF focused their fire on the two Taliban at the side of the bridge, their overwhelming fire forced the Taliban to flee into Gardez. The unharmed AMF quickly dismounted and took chase afterthem. On the bridge lay close to two dozen of their fellow AMF soldiers, wounded and dying.

Back in the safe house, we all heard the detonations of the grenades and the chatter of the automatic weapons and knew something must have gone wrong. Then the radios came alive: "Phoenix Nine-Zero, Phoenix Nine-Zero, the AMF have been hit! AMF have been ambushed at the bridge and have taken casualties. No American casualties. We're going to assist the AMF."

I looked up from my breakfast and across the table at Jeff Hull, but before I could get a word out, Jeff was making a beeline for the door. We grabbed our weapons, body armor, and an aid bag, ran outside, and jumped on ATVs. We were roaring out the front gate when Maj. Mike Hopkins, my company commander, ran out and stopped us, yelling, "Stop! Frank, Stop! I need you to set up a casualty collection point here. I'm going down there to find out what's going on."

Of course the whole compound was in controlled chaos. Mike took ODA-394, the quick-reaction force (QRF) , and they roared off in their Ground Mobility Vehicles (GMVs) to support Nine-Five and the AMF.

After a quick look around, I discovered I was the only medic in the compound. I told all the remaining guys to start collecting cots from our hooches and setting them up in the courtyard. With their help, I started setting up a little MASH operation. While the cots were being collected, the first truck rolled in the gate.

Jeff Hull was on the truck. "Casualties, casualties!" he called, and I ran over to begin dealing with the victims. In the back was the poor soul who was in the front seat of that first vehicle, clearly already dead. All the flesh on his left leg had been cleanly removed and the bone revealed; he had a gaping hole in his side, and his right hand was gone. The grenade had apparently detonated in his hand while he was leaning over, trying to pick it up to throw it back out of the window of the pickup. "This guy is gone," I told Jeff. "Let's put him to the side and make this the start of the dead pile."

Then I asked the interpreter to find out how many more were coming in. "Twenty!" he said.

"Holy cow!" I said. "If we get twenty more like this, we're in trouble!"

The next truck that pulled in was literally a meat wagon, with about half a dozen wounded in the back, some sitting up, others lying down. The guys started taking them down, and I got to work on the one who seemed to be the most seriously wounded. He already had that ashen gray look and was unconscious, but he still had a pulse. It was hard to tell who was bleeding and who wasn't because the bed of the truck was covered in blood, and it had gotten on all of them, so we started cutting their clothes off. One guy had a major chest wound; another had lots of grenade fragments peppering his torso and head. Some were conscious and screaming.

When medics assess wounded for injuries, part of the inspection we do is by touch, and while I was running my hand down along the back of his head, two of my fingers disappeared into a hole at the base of his skull just behind the right ear. I carefully turned his head over and saw this gaping hole, definitely a major injury, thinking, This guy is toast--he will never make it. Although I didn't expect he'd survive, I called over the company sergeant major, Gary Koenitzer, and told him, "Take some of this Curlex [an absorbent bandage material] and start working on the rest of this guy's wounds."

Chris Manuel, our company operations warrant officer, asked me what he could do to help. "Chris, get on the radio and get us some helicopters," I said. "We're going to need at least two medevac aircraft, possibly more." Chris and one of the company commo guys ran back to the TOC and put in the call to the JSOTF ( Joint Special Operations Task Force headquarters) at Bagram Airbase for help.

Even though the other guys were not medics, they had all been through the Combat Lifesaver program and had plenty of medical training to deal with just this sort of mayhem. And even though most of them had never had a chance to put that training to work before, they all dove in and performed brilliantly--a perfect example of why we all cross-train on each other's skills. They were clearing airways and putting on dressings, and I didn't have to show any of them what to do.

This let me deal with the most seriously wounded, and there were enough of them to keep me busy. One was a guy with a huge shrapnel wound to his back about the size of my fist; it was centered in thevicinity of his kidney. The wound was bleeding badly, so I started shoving Curlex into the hole, then slapped a dressing on it and told one of the guys to hold pressure on it as I moved to the next guy.

Both medics from Nine-Five arrived with the next truckload of casualties, so now there were three SF medics to deal with the worst cases: Matt Duffy, Jason Adams, and myself. "Matt, you grab the guy with the chest wound; Jason, you work on the guy with the head injury; and I'll take the kidney wound."

"Frank, we've got some more serious ones coming in," one of them said. A few minutes later, two more medics showed up from the 20th Group team who had been out on patrol but had hustled back to the compound when they heard the shooting. That brought the total of SF medics to five--literally a miracle for the Afghan soldiers. Because of the high level of difficulty and the long duration of Special Forces medical training, SF medics are usually in short supply. Many times, teams would be forced to deploy with only one medic instead of the standard two. Teams usually operate on their own when deployed, and if they are unfortunate enough to face a mass casualty situation, there will probably be a single medic handling all the chaos of both triage and treatment. This large number of medics at the compound would be the first of many miracles our wounded allies would be fortunate enough to experience.

We now had thirteen seriously wounded. Five of them were in critical condition, and if they did not receive immediate surgical attention, they would soon die. In addition, there were some others who were lightly wounded and would have to wait.

Jason's head-wound patient suddenly became the top priority. He began to have a ...