by Sandra Lee
They could see the light at the end of the tunnel and, even though it might have been nothing more than a tiny flicker, it was a light nonetheless.
The medevac birds were on the way.
Robert Healy was the operations sergeant major of the 1-87, a key member of the ‘think tank’ that planned the missions and security. He ordered around everyone below him in the chain of command and called himself ‘the grumpy sergeant’, but the description did him a disservice. He wasn’t grumpy at all, he just had to answer to his bosses, including Sergeant Major Grippe, who simply called him ‘Ops’.
‘You make it happen, Ops, I won’t ask you how,’ Grippe barked at his right-hand man.
Healy did make things happen. Nothing was different out in Hell’s Halfpipe, even with a bullet lodged deep in his calf next to his shinbone and shrapnel behind his ear and a few pieces dug into subcutaneous tissue elsewhere. Together with Lieutenant Colonel LaCamera, Grippe and the battalion’s surgeon Major Byrne, Healy planned every element of the medevac with strategic precision once they got word the evacuation was en route. The small group had honed their skills, drills, tactics and techniques through years of active service and they would put them to best use now. The lives of their injured brothers depended on it.
The leaders tasked their sergeants who then instructed the young privates in their platoons. The chain of command was sacrosanct.
Soldiers who had not been wounded were divided into security squads and evacuation teams. Not all of the 28 wounded would be evacuated. The Priority One casualties would be the first on the chopper, and those able to walk would be assisted by two soldiers each who would then return to the fight, waiting for the full-scale extraction later that night. Those with non-life-threatening injuries would be on the second chopper and the least seriously wounded who were physically able to would remain behind and man their weapon systems until the extraction.
The soldiers were physically and mentally exhausted but they nodded that they understood their missions. Their sergeants, like Peterson, knew they would perform. Except for the couple who had failed during the day to live up to the 10th Mountain’s creed of ‘To the Top’, the rest of the men in Hell’s Halfpipe had done themselves proud.
Things were looking good. Al Qaeda had been relatively quiet since Spooky did his gun run earlier in the night. Said their prayers and gone to sleep, Healy hoped.
WO2 Clint was back and forth between the 10th Mountain’s command-and-control element and Jock, who was listening to his radio for the alert that the CSAR choppers were inbound. Some of the American nets were down, and Jock would pass the word. The rest of the soldiers in the bowl were listening, concentrating on their roles for the medevac and their missions immediately post-evacuation.
Thwomp, thwomp, thwomp. The telltale noise of the choppers’ rotors came like a slow rolling thunder over the bombed-out hostile village of Marzak to the north, growing louder as the Black Hawks came closer.
Halle-fucking-lujah, Jock thought.
The CSAR choppers belonged to the US Air Force and were actually HH–60 Pave Hawks, a highly modified version of the US Army’s Black Hawk. Despite the modifications, the soldiers still referred to the choppers as Black Hawks. The call signs for the choppers were Gecko One One and Gecko One Two. They were crewed by highly trained para-rescuemen whose job was rescuing soldiers injured in the line of fire. They operated in NVG lighting so the enemy on the ground would not see the incoming birds.
Spooky was still on station, higher in the sky, loitering in case he was needed, his drone a soothing presence.
Soldiers from Charlie Company raced out from Hell’s Halfpipe and set up a landing zone about 200 metres southwest of Jock’s location, marking it with infrared strobe lights visible to the high-tech sensors on the aircraft but not to the naked eyes of the al Qaeda and Taliban forces. The Apache swept in first to ensure the LZ was safe. The Black Hawks were just seconds behind, flying slightly to the east of the bowl ready to make a J-turn to the designated pickup spot.
The casualty collection point was crowded with tightly coiled soldiers who had taken their places, ready to bolt out with the wounded as soon as the choppers touched down, not waiting for the dirt and dust to settle. There was no time for such luxuries even if it meant that the wounded would be covered in yet another layer of Afghan earth.
‘Everything had been quiet from when we engaged [the machine-gun position in the southeast] up until the CSAR Black Hawks came in,’ Jock says now.
As the first chopper banked around the southern end of the bowl, the flash of an RPG burst from the position where Jock had earlier taken out the RPK machine gunner and several other al Qaeda enemy.
Holy shit, he thought.
The rocket had been set to air burst and roared by, exploding in a brilliant red flash about 50 metres behind the Black Hawk, sending a high velocity spray of shrapnel into the air. The enemy couldn’t guarantee a direct hit so they opted for the air burst to maximise the chances of knocking the medevac chopper out of the sky. For the pilot it would have been like flying through a deadly hailstorm. The RPG missed, and the pilot skilfully put the bird down on the LZ.
‘Oh God, here we go again,’ Healy said out loud to anyone in earshot.
As the second chopper swooped around preparing to land, another rocket exploded from the same location. Schwwoooooooooo. A red streak sped by the helicopter, missing it by centimetres. It smacked into the valley hundreds of metres away. Suddenly, the hills erupted with machine-gun fire as the surviving al Qaeda and Taliban fighters popped out of their caves and opened up their long-silenced weapons.
‘Go, go, go,’ yelled Healy.
The soldiers in the halfpipe returned fire with their machine guns and small arms and, within seconds, the 10th Mountain troops tasked with getting the wounded to the choppers had swung into action, running into the line of fire.
Ttttt ttttt ttttt ttttt ttttt. Al Qaeda and Taliban machine gunners opened up their Dishkas, spraying a torrent of ammo in the direction of the vulnerable choppers. Doc Byrne was with Sergeant Black, who was lying on a stretcher being carried by four GIs about to be met by the para-rescuemen from the chopper. The walking wounded limped as fast as they could out of the bowl, searching for the choppers amid the dust and dirt being tossed up by the rounds and the downdraft of the turning rotors.
‘We thought, “Holy shit, the enemy’s at it again.” And the AC-130 came down and belted them,’ says Jock.
Jock could hear the AC-130 droning overhead; its signature vvvvvrrrr monotone rising in pitch until it sounded like the Spooky was in a dive, screaming down into the valley with guns blasting.
‘We are trying to run wounded towards the helicopter and those rounds are dropping all around the helicopters and that’s when the AC-130 put paid to them as well,’ Jock recalls. ‘He came out of his loiter position and started smashing them. It was almost like he put this plane into a dive and came in doing a gun run, but at the same time the enemy is arcing up with another machine gun just after they’ve fired the second RPG.’
Soldiers began shooting back, laying down a deadly hail of suppressive fire as the casualty evacuation teams pushed on toward the Black Hawks.
As Black’s litter neared the chopper a bullet tore through his knee, the same one that had been blasted to pieces by the mortar hours earlier. Fortunately, the morphine had knocked him out and the soldier, who had been largely unconscious most of the day, felt nothing. Neither did any of the soldiers carrying him. There was so much noise from the gunfire, the chopper engines and thwomping rotors that the bullet and the thud that came with it as it slammed into Black’s knee were just one more piece of the chaos of war.
In fact, Healy didn’t know Black had been shot until a week later, when doctors at the Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, removed the Dishka machine-gun bullet during surgery.
When told of the surgical find, Healy was stunned. He thought the brutal mortar round that exploded in Hell’s Halfpipe, ri
pping into himself, Grippe and Major Jay Hall, as well as Black, had been the sole cause of Black’s injuries.
The gods of war had clearly shone on the soldiers who had been performing the medevac. Skills, drills, tactics and techniques. None of them were hurt.
‘It was amazing, amazing, that nobody went out of there in a body bag,’ Healy says. ‘It was just amazing with that intensity of fire and overwhelming numbers. I’m still amazed.’
It was a fast but completely controlled manoeuvre. The soldiers coming under fire held their ground and completed their mission. Black was rushed onto the first chopper, followed by two more of the most seriously wounded soldiers. The crew gave the thumbs-up sign to the pilot, who immediately lifted the bird off the ground while the helo’s aerial gunner kept his finger on the trigger of his mini-gun.
One of the Black Hawk’s crewmen noted that Sergeant Black was ‘pale and cold; his blood pressure could not be measured’.
The prognosis was bad. Black had lost a lot of blood while lying in the valley for nearly six hours.
Thinking quickly, the para-rescueman pushed in an intravenous line and began giving Black a blood transfusion as the chopper roared towards Bagram, arriving at the base in record time. Black would survive both the mortar round and the accidentally accurate al Qaeda machine-gunners firing blind towards the choppers. He ultimately received a medical discharge from the Army, but only after being presented with the Purple Heart for his actions in Operation Anaconda.
The Black Hawk’s gunner would later view the videotape taken of the medevac by the AC-130 crew supporting the mission.
‘I watched the video taken from the escort gunship a month after the mission and saw all that was going on,’ the Air Force man later told the Pacific Air Forces News Service. ‘My mother would probably cry if she saw that video.’
As they had done for the Spooky earlier that night, the men from Charlie Company started pointing their infrared lasers onto the location of the flashpoints from the RPG and Dishka machine guns, again effectively handing the enemy’s hideouts to the crew of the AC-130. The Spooky did a run but couldn’t engage the positions, so roared over the valley and banked around for a second assault, this time hitting the targets full on.
‘The Spectre [Spooky] did his turn and basically blew up that position pretty bad,’ Robert Healy says now. ‘There were a lot of secondary explosions after that. It sounded like there was a bunch of animals up there where they were shooting from, so he started pumping 40-mm at it and things started blowing up up there.’
The explosions lit up the night sky for several minutes, indicating that the enemy had massive stockpiles of ammunition. The mission report for the Spooky, call sign Grim Three One, stated that the gun run killed two or three enemy fighters.
Within minutes, six more wounded US soldiers were loaded in the second helo as soldiers on the ground scoped the hills, ready to attack if an al Qaeda sniper reared his head. Just before the second Black Hawk lifted off, a young lieutenant who had sustained no injuries during the day ditched his weapon and made a desperate run for the chopper. Whether he was emotionally and psychologically defeated, completely physically exhausted, or just plain cowardly, no one knew and they weren’t stopping to find out. A soldier loading the casualties grabbed the man and heaved him off the chopper.
‘I don’t know who it was but I know he wouldn’t have been able to jump on there,’ Healy says now, his comments dripping with understatement.
Everyone knew the Black Hawk was for the wounded, not the shit-scared.
Jock held his breath, waiting for another machine gunner to open up at the birds on the valley floor with their Mix Masters, as he called their rotors, turning. Nothing.
The pilot got the thumbs-up and reciprocated. Soldiers moved away from the helo as its rotors thwomped into life. The second Black Hawk gained altitude and went at full throttle with its nose pointing towards the ground and tail up above them, gaining speed and catching up to the first bird.
Lucky bastards, Jock thought as they disappeared from view.
But Jock was waiting for the bubble to burst and he didn’t want to bet the house on a successful mission just yet in case he jinxed it.
‘I wasn’t sure that they were getting out of there,’ Jock says now. ‘I felt relief that the enemy hadn’t hit these helicopters yet, and elated that the guys had been able to get the wounded out finally, especially the ones who had been lying around for ten or so hours. But I was still not a hundred per cent confident … that the helicopters were going to get out of the valley.’
Jock’s fears, while appropriate, were thankfully not realised.
The evacuation was a success. The most seriously wounded were roaring back to Bagram under experienced medical attention. The radio crew on the choppers called the hospital at the air base, preparing the emergency teams in the triage centre. They stabilised the soldiers before sending them off for surgery and more intensive treatment at the US Army hospital in Germany.
‘The lead pilot, I believe, was awarded the Silver Star for flying in,’ Frank Grippe says now. ‘And I’m reading this account of the pilot’s Silver Star [citation]… and the pilots flew through flak and mortars, through the Valley of Death. And man, the hair on the back of my neck is standing up. I’m like, “Holy shit, this guy’s a hero.” And I’m thinking, “I was there all day, goddamn.” No disrespect to those guys — they had it going on. And it was good to get our wounded out. My men did a really wonderful job. Everyone should have had a Silver Star in that fight.’
Nine wounded men had got out alive while under heavy and direct fire.
Robert Healy took a moment to enjoy the victory, but the night had some hours to go and 73 men were still left in the Shahi Kot Valley. The command-and-control element got stuck into finalising the extraction plans for the soldiers in Hell’s Halfpipe.
Jock peered down the bowl nearest to him and it looked half empty with nine of the injured soldiers gone. He radioed in to the chooks in the HQ and confirmed that the evacuation had gone off without a hitch. A quiet wave of jubilation swept through the tent.
Minutes later, the word came back from Bagram.
‘Niner Charlie, this is One Oscar. Extraction scheduled for 1900 zulu. Stand by. Out.’
It was still two hours or more away, but at least it was an answer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jock was desperate to go. His heart was beating at an accelerated pace and felt like it would burst through his bulletproof vest. ‘Get this fuckin’ helicopter off the ground.’
TIME TICKS BY DIFFERENTLY in a war zone and it ticks by differently for each man fighting for his life. To Jock Wallace it seemed like every minute since the Black Hawks left the Shahi Kot Valley had been stretched to infinity and beyond, each one taking longer than the one before. He was increasingly frustrated, and impatient to get the hell out of Hell’s Halfpipe, but at the same time he had a deep sense of responsibility and honour and his personal ethics meant he couldn’t leave until the job was done. There’s also the small issue of transport, he thought to himself with a laugh.
The enemy had gone quiet. Jock didn’t know if the Spooky had wiped them out, or if the al Qaeda and Taliban fighters had fled the valley through the rat lines into Pakistan or were just playing doggo waiting to pop up at any time. Similarly, they could have retreated into their caves to regroup and come back stronger at first light a few hours away. First-light and last-light attacks were always the most dangerous. Jock didn’t care to go through one again.
As the minutes ticked by and without the distraction of gunfire and Smufti and Snegat ducking in and out of their hideouts to unleash an unholy jihad, Jock was beginning to lose that loving feeling.
The waiting was its own kind of torture.
Every ten minutes Jock hunkered down over his radio, crushed his handset to his ear and called in to the chooks back at Regimental Headquarters. The radio calls became his personal metronome, something to mark the time.
‘One Oscar, this is Niner Charlie, radio check, over,’ Jock whispered into the handset.
The only thing keeping the enemy on the surrounding ridgelines at bay from the troops in the halfpipe was the gunship hundreds of metres above, so Jock whispered to keep the company’s position noise to a minimum.
‘Roger, over,’ replied one of his fellow signallers.
‘Roger, out.’
The calls lasted less than five seconds and were a mental safeguard for Jock because they confirmed his radio link was still up and making effective contact after sixteen-odd hours of nonstop use. He had maintained its integrity and hadn’t dropped the codes, even when he swapped the batteries. Notice of the extraction would come via his radio and Jock did not want to be inadvertently off the air when it did because he hadn’t adhered to his usual checks and counterchecks while sitting in the darkness twiddling his thumbs and getting dirtier on the Ruperts responsible for putting the 82 soldiers into a hornet’s nest.
He’d rather be doing more productive things, like providing the comms network and being the bearer of good tidings to the brave young grunts who had stayed to man their positions despite being fragged. Jesus, they’d fought their rings off, they deserved nothing less, he thought.
Two hours and counting.
Command Sergeant Major Frank Grippe and Sergeant First Class Robert Healy were issuing orders. Healy issued an edict for accountability — meaning he wanted all personnel accounted for, with their gear squared away, ready to board the CH-47 helicopters as soon as the Chinooks appeared. Helo LZs were dangerous places, as they had found out twice already that day. There was no time to dick around.
Grippe ordered the GIs to retrieve their abandoned rucksacks — particularly the ones that were still intact and had not been used for target practice by al Qaeda. They were loaded with machine-gun ammunition, radios, GPSs, NVGs, cold-weather gear and rations — all of which would come in handy for any lingering enemy fighters. Anything in a salvageable condition that could be collected would be collected.