by Eric Blehm
“I see you, Knife Zero Three,” said Ditka 04. “I will come to you. Let’s keep it low, two hundred feet.”
“Did he say two hundred?” Gregg asked Schweim. “Two zero zero?” Schweim nodded.
Not only had the MH-130 slowed to a speed that barely kept it from stalling, if something were to go wrong while refueling, neither aircraft would have altitude in which to react and correct. Gregg generally refueled above one thousand feet, though he had refueled a few times at five hundred feet in training. He was also accustomed to doing it at night, invisible to those on the ground—not in broad daylight, directly above Kandahar, on his first mission in Afghanistan.
The helicopter ascended to two hundred feet, then Gregg suddenly announced to its crew, “I have the tanker—he’s coming right at us!”
Both pilots watched in amazement as the hulking MH-130 descended toward them in a shallow dive from a few thousand feet and began a wide arcing turn, at the same time dropping its wing flaps to reduce speed and deploying its fuel hoses.
“They’re coming from the front?” Diekman said over the radio.
“He’s coming around now,” said Gregg. “Stand by for a visual.”
“Tally-ho, I have the tanker!” Diekman shouted, staring up at the belly of Ditka 04, which slid into place less than one hundred feet above and slightly behind the tail rotor of the helicopter, and immediately sped forward.
“Holy shit, tanker abeam,” called out the side gunner a second later.
“Ten minutes to flameout,” said Schweim.
At the moment Gregg began to guide Knife 03’s fuel boom toward the basket at the end of the tanker’s hose, the Pave Low encountered moderate turbulence, causing it to shake and drop. Monitoring the radio, Hadley listened as Gregg missed the first attempt to hit the hose, then again.
“Seven minutes to bingo,” said Schweim.
“If you miss again,” Hadley told Gregg over the radio, “I’m going to throw you out of the pilot seat and show you how to refuel a helo.”
“Got it!” Gregg announced. “We’re on.”
Thank God, thought Diekman, who had been desperately searching the urban sprawl for some open ground on which to make an emergency landing.
The scent of jet fuel filled Knife 03. With the refueling complete, Ditka 04 pulled away from the Pave Low and climbed steeply. Simultaneously, Gregg descended sharply to the helicopter’s safety zone, skimming rooftops.
Amerine was feeling the steep descent in his stomach when he noticed a wounded guerrilla—who had joined the team back in Haji Badhur’s Cove—attempt to sit up from where he was lying on the open tail ramp. The man had a badly mutilated arm with a makeshift tourniquet, little more than a rag and stick above a gaping wound on his crushed lower arm. Bright red arterial blood was pulsing out of the wound and running down what was left of the Afghan’s forearm and onto the deck of the helicopter.
PJs Malone and Schultz, who were looking after the critical patients, stopped the Afghan when he tried to stand and laid him back down on the ramp. Malone applied a new tourniquet, but the blood continued to flow.
“Stop the fucking bleeding now!” shouted Hadley, seated between patients near the center of the hold some twelve feet away. Noting that the man did not have an IV, Hadley took an IV bag out of his trauma kit and tossed it to Malone, hitting him in the chest before it dropped to the floor. Malone picked it up and inserted an IV, then readjusted the tourniquet. Nothing was working; the arm was too severely crushed. He looked at Hadley again, shaking his head.
Hadley made a scissors motion with two fingers. “Cut it off!” he yelled. For a second Malone stared at him, puzzled, then Hadley made the motion again, this time against his arm, and pointed at the Afghan. Nodding, the PJ reached into his trauma bag.
At his gun, Diekman focused on the landscape below, trying not to think about what was going on around him. Every time he glanced left or right, he caught glimpses of what looked like a slaughterhouse. But it was impossible to ignore the thick stream of blood flowing down the tail ramp and spraying off into the wind.
He felt a tap on his shoulder.
When he turned his head, the first thing Diekman noticed was the American flag wrapped around the soldier’s body; the red and white stripes calmed him. Still gripping the handles of his weapon, he concentrated on what Malone was asking him to do.
After a moment, he realized what that was: The PJ was going to amputate the Afghan’s arm, right there on the ramp, and he needed Diekman’s help.
At Camp Rhino, Master Sergeant David Lee stepped out of ODB 540’s command tent and into the dust storm. He was amazed that all three MC-130s—the two JMAUs and one transport carrying Major Miller’s quick reaction force from K2—had arrived in quick succession, only minutes before the first helicopter full of casualties.
“They couldn’t have planned it better if they’d planned it,” he told Leithead, who, along with other members of ODB 540, was hurrying over to the JMAUs, where they would help transfer the wounded.
Lee didn’t know that the trucks the CCT in the control tower promised to transport the wounded had never arrived. The B-team’s tent was on the opposite side of the runway a couple hundred yards from the Marine helicopter parking area and Knife 04. Because of the brownout, they had lost visual contact with nearly everything on the base.
The Green Berets had been following the rescue operation via radio and, once Knife 04 was en route to Rhino, they passed the information along to General Mattis that the Air Force had evacuated the wounded—without taking any enemy fire. It was then that Mattis released his Marine pilots to fly: The helicopters that had just departed were headed to Shawali Kowt for the wounded Afghans unable to fit into Knife 03 and Knife 04.
On their way to the JMAUs, Lee and Leithead crossed paths with a group of Green Berets—including Miller, Allard, Cubby, and the two other ODAs—jogging toward the two Marine helicopters waiting to transport them to Shawali Kowt. As he and Leithead neared the two planes, where four Navy SEALs were running the last two litters up the ramp and into the belly of one of the aircraft, Lee was awed by the capabilities of the U.S. military to take care of its own in the middle of this remote desert. He was also disgusted by the way Mattis had hesitated—wringing his hands just long enough for somebody else to solve the problem.
Inside the JMAU, every man with an injury—fourteen total—was at a litter station in the middle or rear of the hold, being tended to by teams of trauma nurses. Already the surgeons were working behind hanging curtains in the sterile front of the plane, performing “damage control surgery” on Mike, Ronnie, and Alex. This included tying off ruptured blood vessels, removing shrapnel, and making temporary repairs to internal organs and fractured bones—whatever it would take to get the casualties to the specialized surgeons awaiting them two hours away in Oman.
Outside, off to the side of the airplane’s massive ramp, Leopold sat on the ground beside the litter on which his friend Cody Prosser was lying; he was holding Prosser’s hand and cradling his head in his lap. Prosser had succumbed to his wounds during the flight and been pronounced dead at Camp Rhino by Doc Frank. He was the third American to die that day.
Blood was still spraying off the tail ramp of Knife 03, now twenty minutes from Camp Rhino, as Diekman kept his right hand on the machine gun to steady himself and placed his left knee on the stomach of the still-conscious but heavily sedated Afghan. He put his other hand firmly against the man’s chest and, clenching his teeth, pushed down with most of his weight, pinning him against the ramp while Malone used surgical shears to cut into the severely crushed bone and torn skin and muscle. Diekman grimaced as he watched; the Afghan, whose glassy eyes remained open, didn’t even flinch.
Continuing to hold the man down, Diekman looked down the barrel of his gun at the desert rushing past. They’d finally cleared the suburbs and all he could see was blue sky, open land, and Kandahar falling farther and farther behind in their wake. Diekman glanced again at the Afghan
just as Malone snipped through the remaining muscle and tissue.*In his headset, he heard Schweim making contact with Alexander, the copilot of Knife 04, already on the ground at Rhino. “We have cross-loaded our casualties into the JMAUs,” said Alexander. “They are standing by to head for Oman.”
“Copy that, we’ll be there shortly,” said Schweim. “What are your coordinates?”
Alexander read them off, then said, “You’ll see where we’re at from ten miles out—just look for the dust cloud rising three hundred feet into the sky.”
“What is the frequency for Rhino’s tower?”
“You don’t want to talk to the tower,” said Alexander. “You want to land as close as you can to the two JMAUs. Do not land by the helicopters. We’ll be ready to help cross-load your patients.”
Diekman turned his attention to the front of the hold, where five dirty and bandaged Green Berets were looking around with blank, emotionless eyes. So that’s a thousand-yard stare, he thought.
Eyes fixed on Dan’s body, Amerine was thinking back to nine years before, when he’d walked beneath the Trees of the Dead on Gabriel Field with his mentor, Dennis Holloway.
“I hope you never have to look at these trees and see the faces of the men they represent,” Holloway had said. “But if it ever comes to that, you will find comfort knowing that they died for something larger than themselves. You will know in your heart that they died doing something that makes a difference.”
As the Pave Low sped toward Camp Rhino, that was what consoled Amerine. He’d led Dan, JD, his entire team to this end, but what they had fought and died for could not have been more noble.
Epilogue
* * *
Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.
—Stonewall Jackson’s last words
* * *
“The Taliban surrendered thirty minutes after the wounded were taken away from Shawali Kowt,” President Karzai told me as we sat together in his midtown Manhattan hotel room on September 23, 2008.
He shook his head at the irony. “There was the bombing before that, but the Taliban came anyway. And they said that they would surrender; they brought a letter of surrender to me.”
Karzai then confirmed that he had known about the delegation the night before the accident. In an interview at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the week before, Major Bolduc had told me that although he and Fox knew there was a delegation en route the night before, they didn’t trust that the Taliban were surrendering. Bolduc also said that Karzai was the one who had authorized the air strikes on the morning of December 5. I read to Karzai that section of the transcript verbatim: “Ultimately, it wasn’t me or Fox that authorized that engagement. It was Hamid Karzai.”
“No,” Karzai said. “He is wrong. Completely, completely. I didn’t even know [they were bombing]. I was, as a matter of fact, going [to the Alamo]. Had I gone that day, had the elders not come, I would be dead now, like Bari Gul, like all those other people.”
He looked through the pictures I’d brought, pausing at an aerial photo I’d found of the neighborhood and compound where the team had spent their time in Tarin Kowt. He stopped at the next photo, too: ODA 574 sitting with some spooks on MRE boxes, sipping coffee.
“Do you know this place?” asked Karzai.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s the compound at Tarin Kowt.”
He nodded with a smile. The next photo was of Amerine in the back of a truck, driving away from the compound as the convoy left for Petawek.
“This is Jason,” Karzai said, showing the picture to his staff. “Had there been anybody else, things would have gone terribly wrong. I have the best memories of that man and his team. He is an exceptional person, extremely polite. You won’t see it in him: He’s very quiet, but he’s very courageous.
“Jason was the best representative of the United States. He came to me one day and said there had been reports of a Taliban get-together…” It had been seven years, yet Karzai vividly recalled when the reconnaissance aircraft had identified a possible Taliban helicopter. “Jason said, ‘What do you think? Should I authorize [bombing] this?’ I said, ‘No, let’s go and find out.’ I sent people, and they found that the camps were refugees from Kandahar. I told Jason and he believed me. Had it been any other person, first, I would not have been consulted. And even if I were consulted, they would have gone ahead, but he didn’t…If the United States had military officers like Jason in larger numbers, it would be a greater country.”
Our scheduled fifteen-minute interview had stretched to nearly an hour when Karzai’s spokesman pointed to his watch for the third time, reminding him that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was waiting outside.
Karzai walked me to the door, shook my hand, and said, “Please send my regards to Jason and his team. I will never forget those men.”
An aide escorted me past security—Afghan bodyguards, U.S. Secret Service, body-armored police, a metal detector, and an X-ray machine—underscoring just how much Karzai’s life had changed since Time magazine had hailed him as the Great New Afghan Hope when he was sworn in as the leader of Afghanistan’s transitional government on December 22, 2001. Six months later, on June 13, 2002, more than 1,500 multi-ethnic delegates from across Afghanistan had convened a Loya Jirga and named Karzai president of the Afghan Transitional Government. Then, on October 9, 2004, he won the country’s first free election, becoming the first democratically elected leader of Afghanistan.
“His Excellency loves to talk about the days of the Liberation,” the aide told me as I left the hotel lobby. “Now his job is very difficult.”
Outside, I paused for a moment to look up at the high rises of Manhattan, where this story began seven years earlier on September 11, 2001. Then I merged into the flow of pedestrians on the crowded sidewalks of Park Avenue. But in my mind, I was still in Afghanistan, sorting through the snapshots of the mission—and thinking about what had become of the men involved.
Shortly after the Taliban delegation arrived in Shawali Kowt to surrender to Karzai, ODB 570, including Cubby, Allard, and Miller, landed at LZ Jamie, the same location that Knife 03 had taken off from an hour before. Even though they had been tasked to get in and out quickly, Mulholland asked them to stay on and assist Fox as a traditional B-team.
As ODB 570 set up a security perimeter on the Alamo, Smith did a final sweep for any remaining papers with sensitive data. It was then that he discovered JD’s Harley-Davidson cap, barely visible under a layer of dirt. He collected what few remains he could find in the immediate vicinity and delivered them to Bolduc.
Temperatures dropped to near freezing their first night in Shawali Kowt, and ODB 570—with little beyond their go-to-hell packs and medical equipment—was forced to scavenge the abandoned rucksacks of ODA 574 for extra clothing and sleeping bags. Come morning, Allard and Cubby saw that they were wearing Dan’s and JD’s clothing.
Two days after the bombing, ODB 570 accompanied Karzai and the uninjured members of Fox’s headquarters staff across the bridge over the Arghandab River and into Kandahar, where they received a warm reception from the local population. Allard and Cubby quietly dedicated the day to ODA 574, who they knew should have been leading the convoy to Mullah Omar’s palace: their new command post and Karzai’s new headquarters.
Several days later, a Green Beret discovered that the palace had been rigged to blow up, its roof imbedded with hundreds of artillery rounds. A bomb squad identified a single wire, buried underground and leading a few hundred yards from the palace to within a few feet of a large battery concealed in a hut; the explosion could have killed Karzai and nearly one hundred Special Forces soldiers. They could only guess that the Taliban assigned to touch the wire to the battery and detonate the bomb had fled.
ODB 570 would remain with Fox and Bolduc and the uninjured headquarters staff for the next four months, providing security for Karzai and fighting pockets of Taliban in and around Kandahar who refused to surrender.
The surviving members of ODA 574 were evacuated from Camp Rhino to Oman. Wes was at the hospital recovering from his gunshot wound, and was shocked by the arrival of his team, who, as he put it, looked as if they had been “blown to hell.” Brent broke down when he told Wes that JD and Dan were dead. Had he not been shot, Wes realized, he probably would have been alongside Dan when the JDAM hit; the bullet he’d taken in the neck likely saved his life.
While the rest of the team flew from Oman to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, Mag was taken directly to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Amerine stayed an additional day in Oman so that he could escort JD and Dan back to the United States.
Amerine brought JD home to Elizabethton, Tennessee, where hundreds of police and firefighters from across the state lined the highway along with thousands of citizens. The town honored JD by naming a bridge over the Wautauga River after him—the Jefferson Donald Davis Memorial Bridge. His family had a bench inscribed with the Special Forces insignia and placed it under a dogwood tree by his grave, where they often find friends, neighbors, and strangers sitting in the shade, paying their respects.
Dan was buried that same weekend in Cheshire, Massachusetts, at a funeral attended by many of his fellow 5th Group Green Berets. The trail across the street from the house where he’d played soldier as a boy was named in his honor—a fitting gesture considering the last line of Dan’s death letter to his family: “If you ever get sad and down about this, just open up the front door and listen for the kids down the neighborhood playing Army and think of me.”
After extensive surgeries spanning more than a year, Mike—whose right arm had to be amputated below the elbow and who had suffered hundreds of shrapnel wounds and a collapsed lung—returned to Special Forces, where he serves as one of only a few amputees on active duty. When Karzai made his first post-9/11 trip to the United States in late January 2002, Mike sat beside him and First Lady Laura Bush, who had extended the invitation to ODA 574, at the president’s State of the Union address.