Shoot Like a Girl

by Mary Jennings Hegar

  “Yeah. Good to see you. Gotta run . . . On alert . . .” I walked past him with my gear back toward the TOC. It was a long walk, but I didn’t hear or see him on the way back. I haven’t seen him since, but I’m sure he still thinks I have a lot to thank him for—and he was right. Colonel Johnson definitely gave me a lot of motivation to go to pilot training and prove to myself that he had been wrong about me.

  Throughout my life I had known tragedy and triumph. Love and loss. Strength and weakness. I had come a long way from that scared little girl sitting on the fireplace, watching in terror as my sister got her ass beat. Everything I had experienced and all of the leaders—bad and good—from whom I had learned would soon culminate in the biggest challenge I would ever face. I would be tested to the extreme. Every pilot I knew wondered exactly how they would handle the ultimate trial. In hindsight I guess I should consider myself lucky—I was about to find out.

  EIGHT

  In July 2009, about halfway through my five-month deployment, I heard a familiar voice as I walked into the morning brief. I’d know that mellow Caribbean accent anywhere. When I turned the corner, I saw the broad shoulders and big smile of TieJie “TJ” Jones, my buddy from California. Our commander, Lieutenant Colonel Rhys Hunt, started to address the group, welcoming our comrades who had just arrived. TJ stood next to Colonel Hunt, wearing his signature troublemaker’s smirk. On the colonel’s other side was a new guy I’d never met before. He was only an inch or two taller than me, a little older, and had an air of serenity around him that seemed to balance out the restless energy in the room.

  Midway through any deployment, some of us would go home and a few of us who had been left behind would come in to replace them. I was losing my Gunner and my Aircraft Commander, and I was eager to hear who my new crew would be. I was of course hoping that Steve and I would stay together, though it wasn’t a given. They could and often did change up crews at the drop of a hat, but I didn’t particularly want to fly with anyone except Steve. Anything we did together took half as long. After our time running drug missions in California that previous summer, we could almost read each other’s minds through the call-and-response dance of Co-Pilots and Flight Engineers.

  Colonel Hunt looked over at me. “MJ and Steve, Teej is your new Gunner.” YES! This was going to be great—TJ was a top-notch Gunner. Now, who would be sitting in the seat next to me?

  “I want you all to welcome to our squadron Major George Dona. He’s coming to us from active duty, and this is his first time in country. MJ, take good care of him.”

  The new guy. I looked my new Aircraft Commander over and gave him a nod. For his first time in Afghanistan, he didn’t look very worried. George smiled, showing sun-worn wrinkles around his eyes. Even standing ramrod straight, hair high and tight in the same short cut all of the guys wore, his vibe still screamed Hawaiian surfer dude. George Dona. We’d heard about him. None of us had ever flown with him before, but his reputation from active duty was stellar. When not required to be in a flight suit, George was known to immediately change into his natural uniform of flip-flops and board shorts. He and TJ were going to fit right into our Kandahar gazebo team, I thought.

  When the brief ended, we gathered around the recent arrivals.

  “Teej!” I said, and he grabbed my hand and pulled me in to bump shoulders—even though his shoulder hit the top of my head.

  “Welcome aboard, George—the men you’ll fly with here are top-notch,” I heard Doug Sherry say, around the unlit cigar in his mouth. It was seven a.m.—seriously, did he sleep with that thing in his mouth? George wore a smile at all times, so I couldn’t tell if he’d caught the men comment. I was pretty sure Sherry didn’t mean it as a pointed jab in my direction, but it just solidified for me once again how utterly invisible I was to him. He never missed an opportunity to show me—intentionally or not—that he didn’t think of me as a part of his team.

  Later that day, we walked out to our Pave Hawk with the new team for a dry run, George caught in the crossfire of our banter.

  “You haven’t flown with MJ before,” Steve informed him jokingly. “Please don’t judge all of Team Hawk by our one weak link.” On cue, he deftly stepped out of the way before I could slug him. Experience had taught him well.

  TJ waved a dismissive hand. “You sure about that, Steve? I hear that it’s the Flight Engineer who is the weak link on Hawk.”

  “Shut up and go oil your barrel, Gunner,” Steve shot back, laughing.

  George smiled and nodded, not saying much. Clearly he took the quiet approach. I could tell he was waiting to see if all this cockiness bore out when we got in the air. And it did. As soon as we got the bird up in the air and crossed the fence out of Kandahar, we all sat a little straighter and looked around a little more intently. Within a few days, it felt like the best crew I’d ever flown with. Steve, TJ, George, and me. We had our rhythms coordinated, and we quickly trusted each other’s instincts. It felt like a true team.

  It was a damn good thing the team managed to gel so quickly. Only two weeks after George arrived, I would experience the longest day of my life with them.

  —

  In the early afternoon of July 29, 2009, I was sitting in the left-side pilot’s seat of our Pave Hawk, Pedro 15 (or “Pedro one five”). My crew had just come on shift, so I was checking the radios and had the main power spun up. Rows of other helos sat waiting on the bone-dry taxiway, heat shimmering off it in waves. Even in my flight suit, the temperature didn’t get to me anymore, but I tied the arms around my waist to help me cool off. The heat could fatigue a crew pretty quickly, but it could wreak more havoc with the aircraft, decreasing the power of our engines and slowing us down. In this kind of climate, we flew with both pilots’ doors off, in order to ventilate the cabin and help us to see the ground when the dust clouds engulfed the helicopters.

  I reached down to align the navigation system with the GPS satellites. When I looked back up, I saw George and the team jogging toward me across the hot tarmac.

  When George reached the aircraft, he flung a piece of paper across the seat to me. I slapped it down on the console with my gloved hand before the wind snatched it. As George hauled himself up into the chest-high cockpit and strapped himself in, I scrutinized the paper, plugging in the coordinates off it. By the time Steve and TJ jumped in the back and put on their helmets, we were just about ready to fly.

  “Battery on, APU on,” Steve read over the intercom, going through the scramble checklist.

  I had already spun those up, so we were ahead of the game.

  “Fuel selectors on, number one engine, number two engine.”

  My fingers found the switches before Steve finished reading them off.

  Behind me, I heard TJ pop open an ammunition box, feeding the belt into his door gun and slapping the cover down with a clap. He and Steve hooked into a lanyard so they could move around the cabin and—if they had to survey the landscape below—safely hang out the doors while we flew. Instinctively, I reached a hand back and touched my rifle, making sure it was right where it belonged behind my seat.

  The mission sheet said we were on our way to rescue three critical American soldiers. Their convoy had hit an IED-complex ambush about twenty-five minutes out from Kandahar—well inside that “golden hour” when our medics could save almost anyone.

  Our helo was nearly ready to go, and just in time, three PJs climbed on board. Short and muscle-bound, they looked like G.I. Joe action figures, with all the high-speed gear laced into the webbing of their body armor and short GUA-5 assault rifles pinned to their chests. The PJs are the most unsung heroes of the war. Few people back home have heard of Air Force Special Ops, but every grunt on the ground has. Besides making the medical decisions, the PJs take charge in the unlikely event that we end up in ground combat.

  Today I recognized one of the three—Technical Sergeant ***** ******—a rock-solid airman I’d flow
n with before. He was the PJ team lead, and his team was ready to go. The soldiers we were going to rescue didn’t even know how lucky they were that he was on board.

  Once the PJs were strapped in, we were off. We cleared our takeoff with the radio tower and flew out across the fence in a gale of dust. We flew over Kandahar’s civilian airport, where, despite the war going on all around them, you could see Afghans stepping down airplane gangways, wearing suits or robes or light blue burkas. Once we had passed over the one straight paved highway, all we could see ahead were imposing rocky hills.

  After we flew north over the hills, the landscape started to turn green—a seemingly pretty change from the dusty dry brown that surrounds the base and most of central Kandahar. But after three tours, I’d learned the downside of a fertile landscape. In Helmand at Bastion, it would have been poppy fields, but here in Kandahar, they were more likely to be pomegranate orchards and lush grapevines trailing over tall mud-brick walls. It looked idyllic, sure, until a man in cheap shades and a turban pops out of the scenery with a rocket-propelled grenade to shoot down your helicopter.

  I saw a cluster of farmhouses ahead—another thing I’d learned to avoid.

  “Come right thirty,” I said.

  George acknowledged with a sharp bank of the aircraft, changing our heading to thirty degrees right of our course. He had more years as a pilot than me, but no ego to prevent him from responding to my input. He and I had gotten along well from the start, and I knew what an enormous responsibility I had to him as the combat-seasoned veteran on board. He would be depending on me to help him make decisions, and I wasn’t planning to let him down.

  Behind us our sister ship, Pedro 16, followed a course skewed off to one side and behind us, both of us flying low and fast. Like us, Pedro 16 carried a handful of PJs and a crew of four. If one helo went down, the other should be able to rescue the entire second crew and the patients in need. Pedro 15 was lead ship this time—so Pedro 16 was our backup and would hang back and cover us with their door guns while we got the wounded out.

  “Threat suppressed for now, over.”

  The radio traffic from two Army choppers supporting the hobbled convoy from the air was reporting that the firefight we were heading into was over, at least for the moment. The Army choppers were OH-58 “Kiowa Warriors”—nimble two-pilot helicopters with a giant bug’s eye of a surveillance camera sitting on top of the rotors. They packed a punch, too—rocket launchers above one skid and a large-caliber machine gun over the other. It sounded like the Kiowas had pushed back the Taliban enough that we could make it in to grab the wounded without taking too much fire.

  I got on the radio to Shamus 34, the Kiowa.

  “Shamus three four, Pedro copies.”

  There was a silence. Our sister ship broke through the static: “Pedro fifteen, did you catch that? Shamus three four reported they have suppressed the threat to the convoy for now, but there may still be enemy forces to the south.”

  Of course we’d caught it. That’s why I’d responded to the Kiowa! I was confused, but very quickly it dawned on us: No one had heard our reply.

  George looked at me and rolled his eyes. Our own radio jammers, put in place to scramble the enemy’s communication efforts, sometimes left our aircraft deaf and dumb. It was possible we had a malfunction, but we had tested the radios before we left. Regardless, now we’d have to relay all our communication through our sister ship. And when you’re flying into hot enemy territory, it’s not really the best time to play “telephone.”

  A high-pitched voice came across the FM receiver. “I . . . pickup . . . out of here . . . wounded . . . now . . .” Even with the broken-up transmission, we could all hear that the soldier was scared.

  “Fox-Mike bent,” I said to my crew, meaning the FM radio wouldn’t be reliable today.

  “Yeah, comms are shit.” George nodded, saying aloud what I’d been thinking.

  Before I could worry much about the radios, our helo cleared a ridge, and the broken-down convoy appeared in the valley below us, like gladiators in a Roman arena. From our vantage point on high, the line of drab US Army trucks looked like a toy train, blocked in by a scorched crater. Taliban gunmen who were hiding in the village to the south had the whole squad pinned down.

  “Contact,” George said. “I have them three o’clock low.”

  “Roger, contact,” Steve confirmed.

  “Pedro one six. One five in the blind. We’re coming right two seven zero landing north of the convoy,” reported George, telling our sister ship we would be doing a right turn all the way around to face west.

  George didn’t even know if our sister ship could hear him, but going “in the blind” meant that he would continue to transmit just in case Pedro 16 could hear us. He was going to swing around in a horseshoe pattern and land to the right of the convoy, putting the reported enemy activity to the south, out our left door. That way the armored trucks between us and the enemy guns would provide cover for the PJs and the wounded while we loaded up the helo. We’d drop in to allow two of the three PJs to jump off. Then we’d pull pitch, heading back above the ridgeline, allowing the PJs to work on the wounded without having to scream over our rotor wash. When they were ready, they’d call the third PJ, still on board our aircraft, on their inter-team radio to bring us back.

  It was a good plan. George’s confidence, when he was only a few weeks in this hostile country, continued to impress me.

  Then he did something spectacular.

  A normal helo approach is a forty-five-degree-angle glide into the landing zone, slowly bleeding off airspeed on the way down. Normal means predictable, though, and with Taliban guns ready to take target practice on us, predictable just means an easy way to die. Instead, George flew full-speed at the last truck in the convoy. It felt almost like an autorotation. I’ll admit I was holding my breath the entire time. I had full faith in him, but given the fact that we had just started flying together, I hovered my hands over the controls, ready to take over if he was going to plant us into the ground.

  “George?” I said, just about at my limit for comfort.

  “I got it . . .” he said, reading my mind. And he did have everything under control. Just forty feet before impact, he suddenly pulled the nose up, bleeding off the airspeed in an instant, flying alongside the convoy, rotors pitched back like a falcon pumping its wings to land in a treetop. I’d never seen anything like it. You can feel in your body when a helo is out of control, and George never came anywhere close to that. He wasn’t macho hotdogging, like I’d seen with Top Gun wannabes in flight school; George knew the limits of the aircraft and pushed against them to do what needed to be done. He flew like I tried to—using the aircraft as an extension of his body rather than a vehicle in which to sit.

  The PJs jumped out and ran toward the convoy, one after another. Tech Sergeant ***** ******, the PJ I’d flown with before, was still on board. And thank goodness he was, because that was about when the day started to go very, very wrong.

  —

  I heard a crack like a baseball bat hitting a home run, and then the helo’s windshield shattered right in front of my eyes. Through the web of splintered glass, the Kandahar desert hills stretched out for miles in front of me. But all I saw was the perfectly round little hole in the middle of the windshield, where the hot desert air was whistling in from outside.

  My right arm felt warm and wet, but I ignored it. I was thinking only about the wrecked windshield. It was brand-new—our maintainers had just spent hours in the searing heat replacing it the day before. I’d joked with the crew chiefs that we should just kick the old glass out instead of going by the book and painstakingly removing it in one piece. All their work was ruined now.

  Maybe they’ll kick this one out?

  One look at George’s horrified face reeled me back to the present tense. His lips moved, and I knew the whole crew was shouting at me
over the intercom, but for an instant all I could hear was the high whine of the engine and the deep comforting thunder of the rotor blades. I followed George’s gaze to the blood spreading over my exposed arm and the leg of my flight suit. I had the strangest split-second moment of relief that I had tied my sleeves around my waist in an attempt not to overheat. Now I wouldn’t have to patch a bullet hole in the arm of my uniform.

  How can I be hit in two places if there’s only one hole in the windscreen?

  Snap out of it, I told myself. I quickly assessed my situation.

  “I’m hit, but . . . I can still fly,” I told them, fully confident that I was telling the truth. “I’m hit, but I’m okay!”

  “Are you really okay?” There were four voices shouting all at once in my headset.

  George pulled the helo up in the air and out of rifle range as *****, the PJ team lead, squeezed over the console to look at my injuries. With his bulk and all his medical gear, he barely fit, and it probably didn’t help that I was trying to swat him away so I could get back to the mission at hand.

  Shrapnel peppered my right forearm and right thigh. The arm wounds were superficial. I couldn’t see the leg wound, but the spreading bloodstain was worrying—first it was the size of a grapefruit, and then it grew larger and larger until it was the size of a basketball. But after a few minutes the stain stopped spreading, and I began to breathe easier. I’d never been shot before, but I’d flown so many wounded troops that I could tell a serious wound from a paper cut. No reason to call off the mission.

  In the back, TJ was doing just that. “I repeat . . . Pedro one five Co-Pilot hit . . . We’re RTB . . .” Return to base!

  I didn’t blame him—I was covered in blood, but I was in no way ready to head back to base.

  “Gunner—hold that,” I said. I could sense the look he was giving me without even having to turn around. They were all looking at me in disbelief. Even George had started to look a little pale through his dark Hawaiian complexion.