by Ed Darack
“Let’s hope. I know the SOAR(A) community likes to work alone; they don’t typically like having conventional air around.”
The aviators of the two Shocks coming from south of Asadabad tore through the skies to reach Sawtalo Sar in time to run an ad hoc SEAD package for the inbound Chinooks. Their cockpits rattling from the speed, they tried furiously to raise TF Brown on their nets. But no luck. With miles of Hindu Kush terrain blurring below them with each minute, the pilots of the lead Shock finally established comms with one of the Chinooks—with the help of two Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II “Warthogs” that just checked in on station, orbiting at fifteen thousand feet above Sawtalo Sar, awaiting a call for close air support runs. “Let us prep the LZ for you!” the Shock pilots pleaded.
“We’re already in zone. We can’t wait.”
“Let us get in there. Orbit the peak. Orbit the peak! Don’t drop in! We’ll be there in less than two minutes! LET US GET IN THERE!”
“Thanks, brotha,” came the calm reply. “But we don’t have two minutes. We don’t have two seconds.” Then, after a brief pause: “You can prep the LZ when we’re on the ground.” The bravado sent chills into the spines of the Shock pilots, now forming up and preparing to roll into the potentially hot LZ.
The TF Brown aviators tore through the air at nearly 180 knots—faster than any other helicopter in the air that day by a long shot. Kristensen, the other SEALs, and the Army crew of the command ship must have been more ardent to save the recon team than anyone could have imagined back at JAF, now that they had eyes on the hulking massif. With the summit now in clear sight, the crew chief lowered the loading ramp and readied a fastrope. All available eyes focused downward, looking—looking—looking for any sign of the four on the ground. Kristensen and the others kept on their radios, trying to raise the team on every net possible. They neither saw nor heard anything. Holding out hope that the team was still alive—fending off the attackers—Kristensen gave the order to roll into final approach. Pigeon’s “handshake deal” wasn’t even a thought at that point.
But it was too late, far too late for three of the four. Murphy, Axelson, and Dietz all lay dead, deep in the chasm of the northeast gulch. Luttrell, having fought both against the fighters as well as to save his teammates’ lives, took a near-direct hit from an RPG—knocking him unconscious as the blast’s concussion threw him behind a large boulder, out of sight of the attackers, where he slowly bled toward death.
“Small-arms fire! Taking small-arms fire!” the Shock pilots heard over their net as they closed on Sawtalo Sar and could just make out two dots roving above the peak’s summit. The Chinooks had made a low pass over the point where the recon team had inserted, and would come back for another attempt to get Kristensen and the other SEALs on the ground. The command bird powered up and banked steeply to the north, and circled around the mountain. Ready for a lightning insert, the lead MH-47 came in fast and flared hard, directly over the insert point. As the crash of thunder resonated through the shadowed valleys radiating about Sawtalo Sar and black curtains of rain swept the peaks of the Hindu Kush on all sides, Kristensen firmly grasped the fastrope and awaited the word from the aircraft’s rope master. As the Chinook’s airspeed dropped to near hover at less than fifty feet off the deck, Kristensen looked down and prepared to quickly and fluidly insert onto the rough patch of ground—just as Shah’s RPG gunner emerged from behind a rock, loaded RPG-7 resting on his shoulder. Perfectly aligned with the bird, the gunner aimed at the open rear of the craft, cried “Alla-u Akhbar! Alla-u Akhbar!” and then as time seemed to stop, squeezed the trigger. Click. With a boom! hiss! and a puff of white smoke, the rocket sailed toward the Chinook—self arming after eleven meters in flight—then a fraction of a second after that, streaked inside the helicopter and connected with the transmission under the rear rotor assembly of the MH. The explosion sent a stream of molten metal into the gears and shafts of the complex beast, incinerating and shattering the precision hub assembly. The Shock pilots watched in horror as the nose of the craft pitched up, then the girthy Chinook fell out of the sky onto the steep, rocky terrain below, erupting in a massive orange-and-yellow fireball as it tumbled 120 feet down the Shuryek Valley side of the peak, coming to a rest under a mushroom cloud of black smoke on a small ledge, instantly killing all sixteen aboard.
“CHINOOK DOWN! CHINOOK DOWN!” the lead Shock pilot called out. Bambey, hearing the message, struggled to find Sawtalo Sar, to see what had just happened, to find a plume of smoke—to see something . But he could see nothing but the sweeps of perdurable Hindu Kush mountains and an ever-darkening sky. The Skillful pilots of the Marine QRF element immediately thrust their craft into hard, evasive maneuvers, pressing the grunts deep into their seats under G-loading, and forcing one side sharply into the center of the craft while the other side pulled toward the open doors of the bird like a wild roller-coaster ride during hard evasive maneuvers. The Skillful pilots didn’t know at that moment what had brought the Chinook down—just that it was down. For all any of them knew, the craft could have had mechanical failure—or Shah could have gotten his hands on an SA-7 shoulder-launched antiaircraft missile, one of the greatest fears of pilots in Afghanistan ; hence the hard, evasive turns. But with sixteen more Americans down, Bambey felt that much more eager to insert. Let’s just get in—get in and do something. Americans are down, the twenty-six-year-old thought. Why are we just circling? He shook his head in frustration. What . . . Bambey then noticed features not of the terrain over which the two Apaches and three Blackhawks had been in a holding pattern, but of the Kunar Valley. We should be going in! We’re headed back to Jalalabad?!
7
STORM OF CHAOS
After nearly an hour in the air, spending most of that time carving tight, steeply banked turns over the same parcel of the Hindu Kush in a feverish holding pattern, Bambey realized that the Skillful Blackhawks were bound not for Sawtalo Sar but for Jalalabad. Capuzzi, too, recognized the dustier, flatter terrain on the city’s outskirts as he gazed down at the shadows of the QRF’s helicopters. We’re gonna refuel, recock, and get back up there. Four guys are down, and now also a Chinook and all its crew. We gotta get back up there! The thoughts raced through Capuzzi’s mind. The Skillful aviators landed their Blackhawks in perfectly orchestrated formation, rousing a blinding tempest of dust into the sky; the Marines squeezed their eyes shut and clenched their jaws tight as gritty swirls of air punched through the open doors of the 60s. As the whine of turbine engines grew lower and the roiling brown fog enveloping the craft bled away to reveal typically clement afternoon conditions at Jalalabad, Bambey squinted at the sight before him, wondering if the helicopters had landed at an airfield other than JAF. He recognized familiar landmarks of the base, but couldn’t see a single Marine—just crowds of SOF personnel—most sporting their signature beards and baseball caps—heatedly preparing . . . something. Preparing what? the lieutenant wondered. As the Hawks idled, Capuzzi raised the lieutenant over the net: “Bambey, we’re off. We’re done. Outta the loop.”
“What, sir?” Bambey responded with shocked disbelief.
“You and your Marines exfil the bird. We’re convoying back to the PRT, where we wait for further orders,” Capuzzi responded in a pissed-off tone.
“Roger.” Bambey, feeling insanely piqued, burned to argue with his company commander—to plead to get back into the air, to race back to Sawtalo Sar, to hit the ground and rescue any survivors. But he quickly realized that Capuzzi felt just as bewildered, just as frustrated, just as sucker-punched as he, and he figured that the order originated from a level far, far above even the highest ranks of ⅔. We were right there—right fuckin’ there! Twenty-four Marines. Four SEALs. Two Apaches to rip the shit out of an LZ for us to insert onto! his thoughts screamed. The lieutenant shook his head, trying to wake himself out of the surreal nightmare he was living, then motioned for the Marines in the Blackhawk to move out of the bird. “We’re convoying back to the PRT base!” he yelled o
ver the drone of the idling engines.
“WHAT?!” the Marines bellowed in near unison before releasing their spiderweb restraints and jumping out of the helicopter. But once the MH-47 went down, returning to JAF was really the Golf Company Marines’ only feasible option, as the downed Chinook carried not only the QRF’s on-site ground commander, Kristensen, but its on-site air-element commander, Reich, leaving the rescue team literally with no leadership. With no contact with the four recon SEALs on the ground, and an insert zone made deadly to unknown proportions by Shah and his men, rolling in was out of the question. The Blackhawks and over-watching Apaches had actually been orbiting at a position well away from the destruction on Sawtalo Sar: Task Force Brown had requested that Pigeon hold back the three UH-60s and their escorting AH-64s when the MH-47s pulled ahead of the group of five helicopters during the initial push to the mountain; the five birds waited in their holding pattern over the Narang Valley region, seven miles to the south of Sawtalo Sar. Pigeon, his imagination full of nightmarish scenes the instant he learned the horrifying news of the MH-47’s downing—scenes ranging from slow, choking deaths inside the burning craft, to Shah and his men torturing and then beheading survivors—at that point acted solely to mitigate further bloodshed. He’d been outraged upon learning that the Shock aviators had been waved off when they requested to prep the insert zone for the now-downed craft, and felt adamant that not another mistake, of even the slightest consequence, would be made. When he learned from the aviators of the second MH-47, after they made a fast flyby high above the crash scene (again taking small-arms fire), that nobody could have survived the explosive downing, and with no comms with the recon team, Pigeon made a quick analysis of the QRF’s options. Since the “invisible” enemy had just proven it could melt into the very geography of the peak, rendering a thorough SEAD prep virtually impossible (with the exception of a massive artillery bombardment on the entire upper chunk of Sawtalo Sar, possibly killing any surviving Americans and innocent Afghan civilians), the skilled aviator realized he could make only one decision: he called the three Skillful Blackhawks and their two Apache escorts back to JAF. The second MH-47 lingered in the area to try to gain visual contact with the recon team, but was unsuccessful. In addition, they were low on fuel, and with violent weather closing in fast, the crew had no choice but to return to their base at Bagram.
Inside the JAF COC, MacMannis, Rob Scott, and Tom Wood literally watched from a corner as planners from an array of SOF units—ODAs, ODBs, and SEALs—heatedly argued about the next move in the operation, an operation now called Red Wings II (the primary intent of part two being the rescue of the recon team and the recovery of the bodies from the crashed MH-47). If the command and control situation had been convoluted just a few hours prior, it became indecipherable to the Marines once the various SOF teams of CJSOTF-A started planning Red Wings II. But the C2 would morph into even more outrageous contortions within just minutes.
After a quick meeting with planners from yet another SOF unit—the Army Rangers based at JAF (Task Force Red, which, commanded directly by CENTOM’s special operations element—SOCCENT—fell completely out of the command structure of even the highest echelons of Afghan-based command, including CJSOTF-A)—Wood briefed MacMannis and Scott: “SOCCENT just slapped down a JSOA [Joint Special Operations Area—an ad hoc SOF geographic operating area superior in command to any area of operation already in place], and the Rangers are going to take the lead in the recovery effort from here out.” The command of Red Wings, initially intended to be placed with the Marines at JAF when Wood built the mission plan, then relocated to Bagram with NAVSOF (with special operations liaisons placed at the Marines’ COC), now shifted half a world away—to Tampa, Florida, at CENTOM’s headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base.
“That’s fuckin’ great, Wood. We’re all the better for it—aren’t we?” Rob Scott sarcastically began. “I mean—” He stopped and half laughed as he shook his head. “They have some great fucking golf courses there at MacDill, don’t they? I hear the op planners love sunny Florida—and the orange juice. Makes up for the hurricanes and summer humidity.”
“You’re just a dumb grunt, Rob. Shut up. What do you know?” Wood responded, the two majors resorting to humor as their only outlet as they watched the mission’s last gasps of operational rationality shatter into stunning absurdity before their eyes. “Didn’t the same sort of thing happen just a few years ago . . . Anaconda, wasn’t it?” Wood, maintaining the sarcastic tone, referenced the operational melee that resulted from poor command and control and essentially nonexistent SOF-conventional-forces integration during March 2002’s Operation Anaconda. “We should’ve just had ’em walk in. We should have just had Eggers and Team Ronin walk in for this, and then had Kinser and his crew walk in, and then had Golf Company walk in, too—anything would have been better than what we got with this setup.
“This is way worse than Anaconda, Tom—on a whole lot of levels,” Rob responded.
“No shit.”
Despite the storm of chaos raging at the JAF COC before them, the fate of the now essentially abandoned recon team continued to dominate the Marines’ thoughts. They not just hoped, but expected, that all four had survived the ambush, and were holding firm somewhere on Sawtalo Sar. But they knew that as plans for Red Wings II were devised, discarded, augmented, and argued over, the SEALs of the recon team had to cling to life completely on their own that evening, doing anything and everything they could to reunite themselves with friendly forces, including seeking refuge with locals—a frightening proposition given the inimical allegiances many of the people living on the slopes of Sawtalo Sar had forged.
Knowing that survivors of the ambush could have traversed to virtually any point on Sawtalo Sar’s many facets by late on the twenty-eighth, MacMannis, Wood, and Rob Scott worked up ⅔’s part of Red Wings II in short order. They developed a simple scheme of maneuver: Golf and Echo companies would push south into the Shuryek and Korangal valleys, sweep for surviving members of the recon team, hunt for Shah and his men, and continue their campaign of outreach toward the local population—granted that their plan was approved within the new command structure. While SOCCENT designated Red Wings II as a rescue/recovery mission, the Marines still hoped to attain some of the goals of their original operation.
Wood contacted Kinser early in the evening of the twenty-eighth. “You and Eggers and your best guys take some ASF and get into the Korangal. There are some missing personnel, four of them, and they’re somewhere on Sawtalo Sar. Some may be injured, some may be dead—or all of them may be dead—for all I know. But right now we’re assuming that they’re all alive and well. That’s all I can tell you right now. The worst place they could be is in the Korangal, and that’s why you’re going there.” Kinser immediately drafted a detailed op order, submitted it to Wood, and gathered his twenty best Marines. At one o’clock in the morning on the twenty-ninth, Wood gave Kinser the go-ahead: “Move your ass, Kinser. Get up into the Korangal, establish a patrol base, then I’ll push you out as needed.” Wood felt a dire urgency to save the lives of any surviving members of the recon team, knowing that the convoluted command structure, long mission-approval processes, and individual-unit egos at the planning levels would just continue to delay the rescue operation. With Kinser, Eggers, and crew located at an ideal spot from which to pounce onto a position anywhere throughout the Sawtalo Sar massif to vector onto the position(s) of the missing personnel, the survivors might not be so abandoned after all.
Under pitch darkness, the force of thirty-seven slipped outside Camp Blessing’s wire and moved quickly down the Pech Road on foot. Every one of the group carried enough MREs and bottled water to last at least three days; while nights were often cold, particularly after heavy thunderstorms, the temperatures of the summer days would reach well in excess of 115 degrees, so each carried as much water as possible. The group, which included some of the best of the Blessing Marines—Doc Anaya, fully laden with extra supplies
to aid those they searched for; mortarmen with two 60 mm mortar tubes and rounds; SAW gunners; M240G light machine gunners; and Corporal Joe Roy, Eggers’s spotter from Team Ronin—moved quickly along the shores of the treacherous Pech River, entering the mouth of the Korangal Valley after just two and a half hours of stiff walking. Also moving with Kinser and crew were “Hamchuck” and “Henrietta,” Blessing’s two loyal “Afghan war dogs”—local strays, trained by a SOF direct-action team temporarily stationed at Blessing before ⅔’s arrival—that the team lowered in specially made harnesses when they fastrope-inserted on hard-hit raids, using the dogs to help flush out bad guys. Kinser planned to use the two well-behaved canines to locate the as-yet-unidentified lost personnel. In addition, the friendly Hamchuck and Henrietta proved great companions to the grunts. The group set up a camp near the village of Kandagal, at the mouth of the Korangal, and awaited Wood’s order to move into action.
Unknown to the Marines, only one of the four recon-team SEALs had lived through Shah’s ambush. And hours after the last of the attackers’ rounds had been loosed from their weapons, he barely clung to life. With all his teammates dead, suffering from multiple penetration injuries throughout his body and massive blood loss, Marcus Luttrell fought off almost certain death as he regained consciousness. Deep in the bowels of the northeast gulch, his position on the declivitous slope provided him with one glimmer of hope: the people of the Shuryek Valley, into which the gulch fed, had traditionally been at odds with villagers of the Korangal Valley, particularly those of Chichal, bumping heads over grazing-land boundaries. And while not overly friendly to American forces, people on the Shuryek side of Sawtalo Sar hadn’t proved nearly as supportive of anticoalition militia forces as those of the Korangal. Furthermore, Luttrell had roughly just one mile of downhill travel in order to reach one of the Shuryek’s largest villages, Salar Ban. Best of all, relations between American forces and people not only of the Shuryek Valley, but throughout the greater Pech region, had very recently taken a quantum leap forward—a quantum leap that had been launched eight miles to the northwest of Luttrell’s position, at Camp Blessing.