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'Friendly fire' kills 3 in fight for Kandahar
Compiled from Times wires CAMP RHINO, Afghanistan -- Three U.S. Special Forces soldiers were killed and 20 others wounded by "friendly fire" Wednesday, and U.S. officials warned that the toll could rise as the hunt for Osama bin Laden moves deeper into the perilous mountains of Afghanistan. "It's no longer a game," Marine Capt. Stewart Upton said after a 2,000-pound "smart bomb" dropped by a B-52 fell within 100 yards of the soldiers' position near the last Taliban bastion of Kandahar. "It's life and death." It was America's most costly day of combat in Afghanistan, and it came as U.S. forces supported thousands of Afghans in a narrowing search for bin Laden and other hard-core terrorist and Taliban holdouts. President Bush said he regretted the loss of life, but the soldiers "died for a noble and just cause." The Pentagon identified those killed as Master Sgt. Jefferson Donald Davis, 39, of Watauga, Tenn.; Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Petithory, 32, of Cheshire, Mass.; and Staff Sgt. Brian Cody Prosser, 28, of Frazier Park, Calif. All were members of the Army's 3rd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group, stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky. Petithory, a communications specialist who was single and had served in the Gulf War, grew up in western Massachusetts. Michael Petithory described his brother as a practical joker who always wanted to join the Army. "As kids, I wanted to play baseball," his brother said. "He wanted to play Army." Davis was a Green Beret who made a career in the military. His family was proud of his service, his cousin Penny McCracken said. "He was always a good guy." Davis leaves a wife and two children, who live in Clarksville, Tenn. Prosser "was a leader, a warrior and proud to be a soldier," his brother Jarudd Prosser said. Prosser, 28, lived in Frazier Park, about 50 miles outside Los Angeles. He had been captain of his high school football team. Prosser is survived by his wife, Shawna, his brothers and his parents. Sixteen of the wounded were Green Berets and four were Air Force special operations controllers from the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron, based at Hurlburt Field near Fort Walton Beach. Pentagon officials said they could not immediately explain what went wrong in the deadliest friendly fire accident of the war. Whatever the cause, it illustrated the danger inherent in the kind of support U.S. forces are providing to Afghan fighters: calling in airstrikes on nearby enemy positions. The soldiers who radioed for the airstrike were accompanying Afghan opposition fighters engaged in a battle with the Taliban, said Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He called the huge bomb a "devastating weapon." Choosing to drop it, the soldiers were probably looking for "maximum blast effect," he said. "This is one of the potentially most hazardous type of missions that we use as a military tactic," Stufflebeem said. Five Afghan fighters were killed and 18 others wounded in Wednesday's incident. All casualties were evacuated, first to Base Rhino, the desert airstrip southwest of Kandahar seized last week by U.S. Marines that has a Navy field medical unit with 10 doctors, and then out of Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai, the southern Pashtun leader and newly designated head of the provisional government in Afghanistan, was reported slightly injured by the same bomb as he led a group of anti-Taliban fighters near Kandahar. In eastern Afghanistan, anti-Taliban Afghan tanks shelled a network of caves and more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers fought their way into the mountains near Tora Bora, searching for bin Laden as B-52s bombed his rumored hideout. An estimated 2,000 diehard soldiers from bin Laden's al-Qaida network, mainly Arabs and Pakistanis, defended the remote area about 35 miles southwest of Jalalabad. One wounded Afghan commander, Jan Shah, speaking from a hospital bed in Jalalabad, said his men came face to face with al-Qaida fighters who materialized from heavy brush and woods or stood up in foxholes. Each side shouted, "Allah is great," and then "firing from both sides started," he said. The Pentagon said U.S. Special Forces were on the ground in that region, targeting U.S. airstrikes, though local Afghan leaders said they were not coordinating their actions with the Americans. The Pentagon blamed Wednesday's accident on a weapon called a JDAM or Joint Direct Attack Munition. The $18,000 "JAY-dam" kit, made by Boeing Co. in St. Charles, Mo., attaches to the tail of a conventional 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound warhead and is supposed to produce a satellite-guided glide bomb, accurate to within at least 30 feet. The JDAM can be launched from 15 miles away and an altitude of 45,000 feet. The incident was the third JDAM mishap known in the campaign in Afghanistan. The Pentagon, which has ordered an investigation, says it has used 3,500 of those bombs against the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists. The U.S. troops radioed for the airstrike, Stufflebeem said, a request that would have included the geographic coordinates of U.S. forces and of the enemy, and the time when the bomb should be dropped. A long-range B-52 bomber, frequently employed for air support of ground troops, responded at 10 a.m. local time, 12:30 p.m. EST. Then, something went wrong. Experts offered two likely explanations: Either erroneous coordinates were relayed from the field or the bomb's aiming mechanism went awry. "As a pilot, I can do everything perfectly with a perfect weapon system and still cannot account for every weapon going exactly where it's supposed to go. And that's just a fact of unfortunate life in this case," said Stufflebeem, who has logged more than 4,000 hours as a Navy pilot. Whatever the reason, the accident raised to four the number of Americans killed in combat in Afghanistan. CIA employee Johnny "Mike" Spann was killed Nov. 25 in a prisoner uprising in northern Afghanistan. Five soldiers, also members of the 5th Special Forces Group, were wounded in that uprising when a U.S. bomb went astray. Four American military personnel have died in accidents.
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From the Times wire desk Susan Taylor-Martin
From the AP |
