Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  In Marjah, they found a desperate scene inside the governor’s compound the following morning. A group of Afghan commandos was stranded there without reinforcements. There were ladders on the walls, which the insurgents had apparently climbed, allowing them to fire into the compound. For once, the commandos seemed happy to see the Americans. They told them that a Red Unit, one of the Taliban’s company-sized groups of “special forces,” was in the area and armed with sniper rifles and night vision goggles.

  The team set up a command center in the headquarters, and their attached infantry soldiers established a guard force on the perimeter walls. They found some of the guard towers empty, or Afghan army soldiers inside but smoking hashish or asleep. That night, they heard mortar fire. The Afghans told them it was outgoing fire from an artillery section, but in the morning, as the firing continued and mortars landed close to the compound, they realized it had been incoming after all. An assault force left to clear the area while Chris and the other Bravo stayed behind to set up a mortar tube to fire explosive rounds back at the Taliban mortar team and try to take them out. Ben, known for his dark sense of humor, called it “adult tag” as the stakes were high.

  Kalashnikov rounds occasionally pinged into the mortar pit where Ben and Chris set up the mortar system. For a while, the Taliban mortar team seemed to fall quiet.

  “I thought you killed those guys,” the team sergeant said when another mortar thudded close to the governor’s compound.

  “We’re going to try again,” Chris said.

  Ben hovered in the doorway, calibrating the compass watch used to aim the rounds, which involved walking in circles around the mortar pit and adjusting the watch at regular intervals. He was returning to the pit when a Taliban mortar landed right in the middle of it. A huge explosion threw him back several feet. He was inside the textbook kill zone, the area in which a mortar round could potentially be lethal. Chris and one of the medics ran outside and rushed to Ben’s side. They swept their hands over his clothes to check for bleeds, but the shrapnel had missed him and he didn’t have a scratch.

  They spent the day in firefights with the Taliban, trying to clear an area around the governor’s compound. The insurgents fired nearly two dozen rockets at one of their trucks, but the battalion would not provide air support because of the risk of civilian casualties. The Afghan commandos’ weapons kept jamming in the heat, and mortars continued to land in the vicinity of the compound. It was grueling, and the team was frustrated that the Apaches providing air cover could not fire. Any new areas cleared were returned to the Afghan police, who were supposed to man the checkpoints to avoid ceding ground again.

  The team was disappointed to learn that no GPS-guided parachutes, which would have accurately guided supplies into the governor’s compound, were left in the country because the US military was no longer supposed to be in combat. Instead, they had to secure a wide zone for a nighttime drop of supplies that were pushed out of a C-130 Hercules, the US Air Force’s main cargo transport plane. It was an inaccurate method of resupply because the drop could land hundreds of yards off target, exposing the soldiers to attack while they sought to recover it. After the team drove out, located the supplies, and loaded the boxes onto the vehicles, one of the trucks rolled off the narrow dirt track into a canal on the way back.

  It was the truck with the broken remote weapon system, and the gunner, Josh, was riding open turret with his night vision goggles on when it tipped off the road. He plunged headfirst into water with the twenty-two-ton truck on top of him. The rest of the team watched in horror and leapt to pull the crew out of the truck, which was filling with water. Many soldiers had drowned in their vehicles in Afghanistan because the huge armored trucks were ill suited to navigate dirt tracks designed for donkeys and goats. Inside, their teammates were unhurt. Josh had survived, but was in shock. It was his second brush with death—the first was when Matthew had volunteered to drive the bus in his place and the insider attack had occurred.

  Later in the week, another mortar hit the base. This time it landed at night in the middle of a group of Afghan commandos. Many were seriously wounded. The medics dealt with the worst of the injuries, plastering one man’s back with chest seals in a creative effort to stop the blood loss. The medevac helicopters that were called in landed under fire, performing an incredible maneuver inside the compound. It was a testament to their specialized training and reassuring to the soldiers left on the ground as the helicopters took off.

  “Well,” Caleb said to the others, “at least someone will come and get us if things get bad.”

  Jeff’s team arrived to pull their truck out of the canal and joined them on a mission to clear a route out of Marjah and conduct a raid on a bazaar.

  The goal was to clear a route that would allow the Afghan army to send reinforcements by road, but they had to give up on the mission after advancing just a few miles toward the bazaar. The road was heavily mined, and the commandos refused to occupy the cleared ground. The commandos probably figured they’d end up stranded on the road.

  The teams had a meeting, and they all decided to leave Marjah the next morning. The police chief was furious after he found out that both US Special Forces teams were heading off; he threatened to take them to court. The police at the newly erected checkpoints around the city shot at their trucks on the way out.

  Caleb estimated that there were between three and six roadside bombs buried in the tarmac, and they didn’t have the right equipment to clear them. The team had also taken two members of the Afghan bomb-disposal units into custody after they had apparently threatened to kill their American supervisor for treating them with disrespect. After spending a day at the Lashkar Gah base, the team returned to Camp Antonik.

  Maj. Gabriel was waiting at the base. He told the team leaders to eat first, but they wanted to meet straightaway, so they headed to the team room. He told them the team was fired. The team had requested and received air assets and supplies for the mission but had called it off without telling the battalion in advance. Those resources could have been put to use elsewhere. Now another ODA would have to pick up the mission where they had left off. The whole battalion had seen the failure, and the team had lost their last chance to prove themselves.

  The captain tried to counter that the commandos had refused to cooperate, but it was too late for explanations. The meeting quickly descended into a shouting match as the rest of the team listened outside. They felt as though Maj. Gabriel was accusing them of cowardice, and the words stung.

  Outside, he told them it was their last mission in Helmand. It wasn’t conceivable to just swap out their leadership. The team would sit out the rest of the tour at Camp Morehead, the training school for the Afghan commandos in Kabul. The British called it Sandhurst in the Sand after the British officer training academy. Among Green Berets, it was widely viewed as the dullest assignment in Afghanistan because it didn’t involve combat operations. The new team was already on its way to Helmand to swap out.

  Caleb felt betrayed. Offensive operations were supposed to be prohibited, and there were no resources to hold cleared ground. No one in the chain of command had articulated a change in rules or tactical guidance, or what they were meant to accomplish. Their presence seemed to be a stopgap solution to prevent Helmand from making the news until the US election in 2016. They all could have died in Marjah. This was the final straw.

  “We don’t know what our goals are because they keep changing all the time,” he exploded. “You don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing, and yet you keep sending us on crazy missions where we could all die for no reason!”

  “That’s a cop-out,” Maj. Gabriel said, trying to contain his anger. “None of you understand the operational environment.”

  “Well, whose responsibility is that?” Caleb shot back.

  Maj. Gabriel watched him storm out of the room.

  CALEB and a couple of other teammates were told to stay in Helmand to help the new team settle in. He had
mixed feelings about it. It was hard to watch everyone else leave. As difficult as things had been on the team, they were still going back to Utah together. But he also thought he owed it to the new team, ODA 9115, to assist them. They had little time to prepare for Helmand, and he could help them stay safe. Originally from Washington, they were reputed to be a strong group with good leadership. The leader, Andrew MacNeil, was young but capable, and the sergeant, Dan Gholston, had spent years in 5th Group and had served multiple times in Iraq.

  The news of the team’s firing spread through the battalion, along with rumors about the team refusing to go on missions. It was exceedingly rare for a team to be fired.

  The relief in place mission, in which the incoming and outgoing teams run an operation together, went without a glitch. The teams raided the bazaar in Marjah that they’d been unable to reach by road; intelligence gathered earlier indicated that a stash of weapons was housed there. Caleb thought the evidence of a weapons cache was weak, and he was right. The two teams infilled by helicopter and hiked a couple of miles on foot. In the bazaar, they found only fertilizer and no trace of weapons. He viewed the failure to turn up anything more as confirmation of the lack of leadership at this stage of the war. They could have died for nothing on the road seeded with improvised bombs. What a shock, fertilizer in a bazaar, he thought.

  But life in the camp underwent a rapid transformation under the new team’s leadership. They cleared up the mess caused by the fire and fixed the logistics and supply issues, which meant there was enough food and water to go around. An unpopular army colonel, who had been dispatched there to work with the 215th Corps and treated the Green Berets like his personal staff, was evicted from the Special Forces camp. It was still the place where high-ranking officers and other visitors came to “see the war,” but the new team established a schedule for visitors’ mealtimes, which gave the resident team a chance to eat first, before hot meals ran out. Caleb began to feel more positive about the deployment for the first time since the insider attack. Everyone got on well, which was a nice change, and pranks became a form of entertainment.

  The main instigator was Matthew McClintock, a Charlie, one of the engineer sergeants. He was new to the team, and everyone called him Mick. His primary target was the combat controller, Ryan Rynkowski, or Ski. Mick was qualified as a joint terminal attack controller, which meant he, too, could direct combat aircraft, and he drove Ski crazy by taking over his desk and using the phone that connected to the air supervisor, code-named DOOM01. The supervisor was a woman, and Ski had a crush on her. Mick would occupy Ski’s chair and keep DOOM01 on the phone talking about air issues for as long as possible after Ski walked in, to make him jealous.

  For some time, Caleb had been thinking about switching to active duty to have a steadier income and schedule, and Mick encouraged him to try. It was a complicated process decided by a board, but Mick told Caleb that his qualifications made him a good candidate. Mick also had a young family and was trying to figure out how to juggle his new commitments with army life. He had served with 1st Group and quit after losing a close friend in Afghanistan in 2013. He blamed the army for the friend’s death, but he had missed the camaraderie and lobbied to join the tour with the National Guard that year.

  Mick’s wife, Alexandra, who lived in Seattle, had just given birth to their first son. She had thick, wavy red hair and tattoos, and they had been married for a year. Mick was given leave to return home for the birth and proudly showed everyone photos when he came back. Alexandra had developed severe postpartum depression but insisted that Mick return to complete the tour. The army would have let him stay in Seattle, but she didn’t want to keep him from doing the job he loved. He had gone to great lengths to get on the team and deploy back to Afghanistan. She was devoted to him and felt strong enough to recover on her own.

  Caleb predicted that the new team would come under the same pressure to go out on operations, and he was proved right. Their goal for the remainder of the deployment, apparently, was to keep the 215th Corps in Helmand from collapse. The team conducted about one operation a week, and between planning, rehearsals, execution, and refit, the tour started to move at an intense pace. Caleb was relieved to have a busy schedule, but he was unconvinced that the army’s leadership had any long-term vision of what they wanted to achieve in Afghanistan, except to avoid a catastrophic loss before the upcoming US election.

  CHAPTER 15

  Internally Inconsistent, Implausible

  HUTCH

  HUTCH had been sitting at Bagram Airfield for weeks, waiting for the results of the preliminary investigation into the airstrike on the trauma hospital in Kunduz. It was his first experience with living on one of the army’s megabases in Afghanistan. Bagram Airfield, a base first used by the Soviets and then split between rival Afghan warlords, was the heart of US military operations in the country and a major transit hub for cargo, passengers, and troops. Even at this late stage of the war, it was still the size of a small town. Soldiers and contractors ate at fast-food restaurants and shopped at base exchanges; few actually saw the Afghanistan outside the base.

  Few seemed aware of the life-or-death battles the Special Forces were fighting in Kunduz or down in Helmand. Hutch tried to keep his spirits up and created a routine to fill the time. He ate, worked out, called home, and repeated. He couldn’t tell Tina much over the phone, but he tried to reassure her that everything would be fine once the investigation had run its course. Everyone in his chain of command had reassured him the investigation would find that the strike was a terrible mistake that had occurred in the fog of war, and not a deliberate decision to bomb an international hospital.

  Tina tried to put on a brave face as well. She texted Hutch memes and jokes to cheer him up and was careful to keep things light with him. She knew others might be reading any communication that passed between them. She longed to see him and talk face-to-face. The truth was, she was terrified of losing him. On the news, analysts still discussed whether the strike fit the criteria of a war crime, and whether those responsible should be sent to jail. The incident had risen to the attention of President Obama, who had publicly expressed his condolences to the victims.

  Tina also feared a revenge attack by the victims’ relatives. It was a common concern among special operators and their families and one reason their full names were closely guarded overseas. She reasoned that it wouldn’t be hard to find their address, and she would be helpless if someone showed up while she was unloading the groceries or collecting the kids from school. She was on her own, just a mom, who was sick, pregnant, and vulnerable. Hutch felt impotent while talking with her, and he was grateful that she was coping. Other partners might not handle things as well as Tina. “I’m not going to jail,” he promised her.

  Tina knew that asking questions was futile, but she was scared about what was going to happen to them. The images from the hospital were etched on her mind. She couldn’t help but read the terrible stories about the staff and patients who had survived, even if in her heart she knew that Hutch had done his best. There were two sides to every story, and she knew better than anyone that the news rarely reflected what actually happened on the ground. Meanwhile, life continued apace. She planned a high school reunion, Christmas, and New Year’s, after which her husband would be home. He could tell her everything then.

  Hutch really did believe that everything would be fine—at first. A steady stream of visitors who passed through Bagram Airfield offered him moral support, including two former teammates from previous tours in Paktika. They all seemed to feel sorry for him, and some seemed concerned about his fate. But he had to believe that the investigating officers would realize the soldiers had done their best and the strike was an unfortunate mistake made in the heat of battle. He planned to bravely accept whatever punishment the military saw fit to administer and move on. When a chaplain visited from Kabul, he was shocked to find Hutch in good spirits. He was assessed to be a suicide risk. “I’m fine,” Hutch told him
, trying to sound upbeat.

  Hutch tried to believe it himself, even though his early optimism was fading. The mission had succeeded in driving the Taliban out of Kunduz, sparing its residents a long, costly battle that would have destroyed the city and killed more people than those who died in the hospital. The strike was a terrible mistake, and it should never have happened. But, Hutch reasoned, it would have been worse not to go into the city and take it back decisively.

  He began to hear that some in the army’s headquarters believed he had violated the rules of engagement and wanted him to stand trial for murder. He tried to fight off the depression and negative thoughts nagging at his brain, keeping to his gym routine and assuring everyone he was fine. He was called in for questioning over and over. He felt that people would understand if they heard firsthand how the mistake had occurred. The US military’s repeated change of story, followed by the secrecy surrounding the investigation, fueled the public’s worst suspicions. Hutch asked to be allowed to explain publicly what had happened. The battalion told him it wasn’t a good idea.

  Toward the end of the investigation, Brig. Gen. Kim approached Hutch. He didn’t believe Hutch’s version of events.

  “Would you like to change your story?” he asked.

  Hutch was outraged.

  “No, I don’t want to change my story, sir,” he said.

  Hutch couldn’t believe that anyone would question his integrity. He had sacrificed so much for the army. The terrible patrols in Ramadi at the height of the Iraq war. The back-to-back tours in the mountains in Paktika, spent in isolation in service of the Village Stability Operations. He couldn’t count how many times he’d put his life on the line. It finally sunk in how bad this situation could turn out to be. Reluctantly, he stopped cooperating with the investigation and asked for time to consult with his defense counsel, and he asked for written questions in advance.