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command and control conventional and special operations forces. Hagenbeck’s aim was to demonstrate his headquarters’ value to Mikolashek, in the hope of persuading the three-star general to give Mountain a combat operation to head up.
    Wille and Ziemba got to work. A brawny, likable and plainspoken man, Wille was the division’s chief of plans. His job was to coordinate the efforts of all the other planners in the division staff and subordinate units. Ziemba, a slender brunette who as a West Point cadet had somehow acquired the incongruous nickname “Ox,” was the plans officer in the division’s intelligence section. “Okay, where’s some enemy activity?” Wille asked the intel officer. “Right here,” she said, indicating a digital map display on her laptop, her finger pointing right at the Shahikot. “There’s some enemy activity in this valley.” The Shahikot area had been a mujahideen stronghold during the Soviet-Afghan war, she added. To Wille that seemed as good a place as any for which to plan an operation. He and Ziemba applied themselves to the task assiduously. Their “office” was the plans tent, the only unheated tent in the entire command post. In the chill of the Uzbek winter, they often typed with their gloves on. Operating on two hours of sleep a night, supplemented by copious amounts of coffee, the two officers scrutinized maps, analyzed intelligence reports, and put together a rough plan.
    Their job was made all the harder by the fact that no one at the Mountain headquarters, including Hagenbeck himself, had access to the most current intelligence about events in Afghanistan. This was a function of the compartmentalized approach to intelligence gathering in the war, in which, for reasons of operational security and bureaucratic turf protection, intelligence gathered by one U.S. agency or command was often not shared with other senior U.S. officials or military commanders in the region. CENTCOM even held back intelligence from Mikolashek’s headquarters. Nevertheless, by the end of December, Wille and Ziemba produced a well-developed concept paper that showed how the Mountain HQ could use conventional and unconventional forces to crush Al Qaida guerrillas in the Shahikot. Wille presented it to Hagenbeck, who liked what he saw. The concept was forwarded to Mikolashek and his CFLCC planners in the first week of January.
    Hagenbeck heard nothing back from Mikolashek. His frustration gave way to resignation. On January 25 he boarded a plane and flew to Kuwait, there to brief Mikolashek on another plan his staff had drawn up: the one for their imminent return to Fort Drum.
    3.
    WITHIN forty-eight hours of his return to K2 after briefing Mikolashek on his plan to take his headquarters back to the States, Hagenbeck was finally read in on some of the compartmentalized intelligence hitherto denied him. The man sharing the intel was Colonel John Mulholland, a bear of a man who commanded 5 th Special Forces Group. Mulholland had every right to be pleased with the course of his war so far. Under his command a task force of just 316 Special Forces soldiers had entered Afghanistan, organized, trained, and, in some cases, equipped the Northern Alliance and the anti-Taliban Pushtun militias, toppled the Taliban government in Kabul and routed its fielded forces. The entire campaign, from the first A-team flying into Afghanistan on October 19 to the collapse of the Taliban’s home base in Kandahar on December 6, had lasted only forty-nine days. Notwithstanding the critical contributions made by the CIA, air power, and other special operations forces, the defeat of the Taliban was Special Forces’ finest hour.
    Special Forces have been part of the Army since 1952. For much of that time they have been treated like a bastard child. The “big Army” never really felt comfortable with the independence bred and trained into SF soldiers. Unlike the conventional Army, which often maneuvered in 600-soldier