Savidge discusses secret Afghan mission

CNN's Martin Savidge during his eight weeks in Afghanistan

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Reporters from all around the world are covering the war in Afghanistan, but CNN's Martin Savidge was the first television reporter to travel with U.S. troops during Operation Anaconda. Now back home in Atlanta, Georgia, Savidge sat down and talked about his experience with CNN's Kyra Phillips.

PHILLIPS: 80 days!

SAVIDGE: 80 days.

PHILLIPS: Whoa! I bet you're glad to be home.

SAVIDGE: Yes, I'm very glad to be home.

PHILLIPS: And I remember -- we were working together for a number of weekends before you took off on your assignment, and you were excited to go. You didn't really have a lot of expectations. Once you got there, how did things start to unravel for you?

SAVIDGE: Well, you know, we went to Kandahar, which is where I saw a lot of the Marines which we welcomed home just yesterday. And then the 101st Airborne was there. Six weeks primarily hanging around the Kandahar air base, significant air base but there wasn't a lot, really, to report on. And we became very frustrated, and I think there was a program where I came on the air and expressed it rather vehemently. Access was the question.

We knew that there was a lot going on, that there were missions going on every day, and that there were important developments that we couldn't bring to you because of security. And apparently, that may have been heard. And then it was about two weeks later, when it was very clandestine -- it was like -- it was like James Bond. This officer, a public affairs officer, came to me and he said, "Why don't we go look at the mountains?"

And I realized he didn't want to look at the mountains, but he wanted to talk to me. So we went outside, and we did look at the mountains.

PHILLIPS: Sure you did.

SAVIDGE: And he sort of says, "There's going to be a mission." And that's how it all started. He told me, he said, "You cannot tell anyone, can't even tell fellow members of the media. You will drop away. You'll drop out of sight. Can't even tell CNN. And you may return in three days, could be seven days, could be longer." So that was how it all began. And we went up to Bagram, and that was the introduction to Operation Anaconda.

PHILLIPS: All right. And your first wake-up call was what, one or two bullets flying past your head?

SAVIDGE: Well, no, the wake-up calls came sooner than that. First of all, when we got up to Bagram -- we weren't even told we were going up to Bagram. We were just flown in an airplane, get off in the dead of night, get taken to a command tent. And there on the floor, laid out on the -- almost as big as this studio, was a reproduction in clay models of the entire Shah-e-Kot valley. And it's when we look at that and saw all the objectives out there that we realized this was going to be the biggest military operation of the war so far in Afghanistan. So that was one tip-off.

Then about three days before we went in, some of the soldiers, especially the officers, the lieutenants, came to us and talked very seriously about giving us guns because they said, "It's going to be extremely dangerous, and the fact that you go in, you and a cameraman, reduces the firepower in our unit by two guns. We want you to have weapons."

We went back and forth on that one, finally said no, there's no way we're going to carry weapons. So that also made me think it was going to be serious.

PHILLIPS: Now, why did you make that decision not to have a gun?

SAVIDGE: I guess it was that journalistic integrity inside of me, which, you know, you felt that a journalist is not a combatant. But I did understand their dilemma, that we do reduce the effective firepower and thereby perhaps jeopardize the other members of the unit. So we made somewhat of a compromise and said, "No, we will not take a weapon. We will agree to be taught quickly how to fire it and use it, should it come down to a worst-case scenario."

And then the next tip-off was when they asked us to carry our own body bags in, which I thought, "OK. Serious."

PHILLIPS: Was there a point where your heart started beating and you thought, "OK, this is the real deal. I'm a little nervous right now."

SAVIDGE: The helicopter ride. The first lift. They had divided the carrying of the soldiers into the mountains by what they call "lifts," meaning first wave, second wave. It was first lift -- we were on the second lift, supposed to follow two hours later. Get to the helicopter about 7 o'clock in the morning. Everybody was in full battle gear. Load up on the helicopter. You're packed in there like sardines. The rotors are spinning.

And the radio technician plugs into the net. And we thought this was going to be a fairly benign, pretty simple military operation. And he starts calling out on the radio and announcing to all of us, like a play-by-play sportscaster, "Heavy fighting that's being reported. Confirmed missile launches that are now coming out of the various nearby communities or villages up there." And he said, "Four of the six Apaches are out of the fight."

And that just stunned us all because these are, like, $13 million, state-of-the-art attack helicopters. They had only been up for about six hours. And in that time, the Taliban and al Qaeda had managed to not knock them -- not out of the air -- but effectively take them out of the fight. And that's when we realized we were heading into something that was much more severe than we originally anticipated.

PHILLIPS: Well, your coverage was amazing. And of course, we talked about it so much. Everybody here talked about it. You brought us some of the best pictures. Thanks.