by Sandra Lee
‘Grippe was determined that those bastards wouldn’t get it, one, to use it themselves, or two, to compromise radios,’ Jock says now. ‘So Grippe is out there trying to square the battlefield away.’
Technology helped. The Spooky shone its infrared search beam the size of two football fields down into the valley, turning the blackness of the Afghan night into a green-coloured daylight for the soldiers wearing NVGs. The infrared beam looked like a lighthouse searchlight as it swept back and forth over the soldiers on the strategic scavenger hunt. To identify themselves as ‘friendlies’, the troops wore around their necks infrared strobe lights detectable by the two sensor operators on the AC-130 who controlled the aircraft’s infrared detection set (IDS) and its all-light-levels television system.
If the crew screwed up and misidentified the troops as enemy fighters, they ran the risk of sending a lethal burst of cannon fire their way.
‘You just get this really eerie feeling when that light passes over you — “I hope he is identifying us as friendly”,’ Jock says now. ‘The AC-130 is infinitely more dangerous to us and infinitely more deadly than the enemy. The AC-130 attacking the wrong coordinates is a very, very big danger and to combat that we openly wore infrared strobes.’
Jock was able to find some humour in the situation. Instead of seeing a battalion out in a kill zone collecting their discarded rucksacks, he saw a battlefield lit up like a Christmas tree.
‘Had the enemy had any good kind of night vision devices he would have seen what I saw, twinkling lights all over the hill, and there’s your target,’ Jock says wryly.
Grippe was keen to recover valuable strategic equipment including Sergeant Pete’s 120mm mortar tube and base plate, and the lanky soldier was more than happy to comply.
Sergeant Pete felt responsible for bringing the 120 into battle and called his decision to do so his ‘snafu’ — situation normal, all fucked up. He didn’t want to leave the tube for al Qaeda to use against other Americans arriving to reinforce the valley over the coming days, including his own mortar platoon. It was not going to be left as a potentially fatal souvenir.
‘It got hit [by mortars] a couple of times but never broke,’ Peterson says now. ‘They blew up our sight box and when we got back we were pulling shrapnel out of our stuff. It got all my gun equipment. One mortar landed right next to it — dinged it up a little bit.’
The retrieval mission was a success and brought an unexpected small victory for Sergeant Pete that might seem trivial to anyone but a combat veteran.
While dragging the mortar tube closer to the designated LZ, he found an al Qaeda mortar. Yeah, payback time.
‘I took one of their mortars, it’s in the 10th Mountain museum,’ Peterson says now, unselfconsciously proud. ‘We got the tube, brought it back, and in the museum it says, “Captured by 1-87 Mortars”. I drove that thing around for ten days because I was so mad at those guys. I stole their mortar, I was like, “You’ll never get this back.” So their instrument of my pain — I got it and brought it back. They have none of mine. I definitely one-upped them.’
Healy instructed the 1-87 soldiers that items that were regarded as beyond retrieval should be clearly marked for the Spooky’s IDS. The gunship would stay in its loiter position after the extraction, ready for a final gun run, during which time it would blast the ruins of war to pieces.
If the enemy thought it was going to get its hands on US Army equipment, it was sorely mistaken.
Signalman Jock Wallace received confirmation that two CH-47 Chinooks were inbound just before midnight on 2 March. The extraction was on. Grippe’s men marked out a landing zone about 200 metres from Hell’s Halfpipe and not far from where the medevac choppers had arrived a couple of hours earlier, and the troops began moving into position.
Jock remained in the bowl. He had to keep his radio transmission up until the very last minute.
‘I’m not taking that thing off line till I start physically moving to the helicopter, so I’ve got everything else squared away. You have to stay up, so you are one of the last ones to leave position, one of the last ones still working, so to speak,’ Jock says now. ‘That’s why they pick sigs of a certain breed. Sigs have got to do their own stuff regardless of what everyone else is doing a lot of the time, so you have to be resourceful and independent and have a certain manner. You know your job and you know that the other people don’t give a shit about your job. When it comes down to it, if you are going to do your job properly staying behind is one of the risks that you take.’
Clint stayed in the bowl with Jock — they’d come this far together, they were going out together. Clint was stubborn but, moreover, he was loyal and this was mateship Australian Army style.
About ten grunts crawled up the eastern slope of the bowl, pulling security for the men on the LZ. Jock checked his immediate surrounds to make sure he hadn’t left anything. Good to go. He checked his pack, making sure its contents were secure, and deliberately left the top open.
Spooky droned overhead.
Nice one.
The thwack and thwomp of the Chinook’s blades grew louder in the dark, as the helos drew near. The first Chinook flew in, found the landing zone and touched down blasting dust and dirt into the air and browning out the vicinity. A sprawl of soldiers immediately charged up the rear tail ramp dragging the remaining wounded with them and crammed into the chopper’s belly as the second Chinook touched down about 50 metres away. There was no time to waste.
Clint looked at Jock.
‘You wanna catch that one?’ he yelled under the din of the rotors and shouting soldiers. It was a rhetorical question. Clint didn’t need an answer.
Jock radioed the SAS HQ.
‘One Oscar, this is Niner Charlie. Extraction is here. Closing down now. Out.’
Jock didn’t wait for a reply. He quickly packed up and slammed his antenna into his open pack and slung it over his shoulders and with his free firing hand picked up his M4 and started legging it out of Hell’s Halfpipe.
‘There was shit hanging out the top of my pack, but I got everything. Had all my equipment, it just didn’t look too neat. There was stuff bulging out the side, but that’s because of the way I left the position. I kept my means up for everyone’s benefit and suddenly found I’m packing my antenna up and 30 people are running past me for the choppers.’
Jock lost sight of Clint when one of the helos lifted momentarily after its first approach and looked like it was going to make an attempt to land where they were. He skidded to a halt, spitting up gravel underfoot, tacked and ran back, then turned looking for Clint, his chest screaming in pain as his lungs tried to suck in the thin, cold air. But no Clint.
Shit, he thought.
Jock could hardly breathe and seriously considered ditching his pack and the radio equipment but thought better of it.
‘The tight-arse Australian Government would have made me pay for it,’ he says now, with a laugh. And besides, to leave it behind would be against the very principle of being a highly skilled signaller.
Jock took one last look around for Clint but couldn’t see him. Most of the soldiers had already boarded the Chinooks. Must be on the other chopper, he thought, and kept running towards the CH-47.
The last 50 metres were the toughest. Jock fought off fears that the ninja al Qaeda fighters would pop out of their caves one more time and deliver an RPG or mortar round into the waiting Chinooks as they’d almost done when the medevac choppers landed.
Sergeant Robert Healy had exactly the same thought.
‘I’m going, “When are they going to start shooting at us again?”’ he says.
Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Tink was in the TOC with Major General Hagenbeck and various colonels, captains and commanders watching the Predator vision on the video screen at the front of the tent. The CIA were hoping to capture Osama bin Laden or his most senior lieutenants and had their UAV focused on the valley, directly over the extraction site. Hagenbeck also had the Army’s drone
dedicated to the area for the extraction mission.
The Predator vision distorted the action and made the rotor blades look as if they were turning in slow motion, but the troops on the ground were moving in double time.
Jock raced up the rear tail ramp into the blacked-out Chinook and peered through his night vision monocular. A sea of exhausted green-tinged faces looked up at him, packed in like cattle. He collapsed on the floor with his back to the right side of the bird, shoulder to shoulder with the nearest soldier, facing east and looking out the ramp and back into the valley. He looked straight to where the last RPG was fired from, the same spot at which the RPK machine gunner had been earlier before Jock whacked a round from his M4 into him.
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,’ he yelled at the Chinook crewie to no avail.
The seconds stretched on forever. Jock thought he was dead.
How long are we just going to sit here?
‘I didn’t come all this way to sit here while you fuck around for ten minutes and get an RPG through the side of the helo,’ he roared.
He sat there for what seemed like an eternity, like a lifetime, waiting for that stinking helicopter to lift off.
‘I was sitting on that helicopter just waiting for the side to rip open, just waiting to see an explosion. That’s one of the worst feelings I’ve ever had, because you are just so close to getting out of there, you are nearly there. You are actually on that bloody bird and the bird’s sitting on the ground, and why is the bird sitting on the ground? Because they haven’t brought the rest of the fucking wounded — there are still guys limping towards us …’
Jock was looking out the back and saw two soldiers about 50 metres away, limping toward the back of the helicopter. Two of the walking wounded. They’d been left to their own devices and had packs over their shoulders and equipment in their hands.
Unfuckingbelievable.
Jock dropped his pack, launched himself from the floor of the crowded chopper and bolted down the back ramp toward the incoming soldiers. Another young grunt took his lead and followed. They grabbed the equipment of the young privates and helped them onto the Chinook.
‘It was just like every man for himself getting to that helicopter, that’s the way it seemed to me,’ Jock says now.
It was a similar story for Sergeant Healy and his radio operator who were heading toward the other chopper, loaded like packhorses with their own equipment as well as the radio gear left behind when Sergeant Andrew Black had been medevaced earlier in the evening. Healy was covered in a mix of his own and Black’s blood. The Doc had cut one leg of Healy’s battle fatigues open, and he was limping and dragging his wounded but bandaged leg through the dirt.
‘Everybody got on the aircraft and I’m like, “Oh shit, they’re gonna take off without me.” So we dragged up there and got on, and everybody’s on there, and I’m, “Okay let’s go, let’s go”,’ Healy recalls.
‘When we took off you held your breath for a few minutes to see if you weren’t going to get shot down. I was just expecting to start seeing bullet holes in the side of the aircraft, but I guess Taliban went to sleep for the night. They just didn’t want any more Spectre, the AC-130.’
The boarding had been chaotic and according to Sergeant Pete ‘probably the worst part of the fight’. The soldiers had gathered in one spot before charging up the back ramp and, to Sergeant Pete, that represented a huge and attractive target for al Qaeda.
Like Jock, neither Peterson nor Healy had discounted al Qaeda or shown any hubris by underestimating AQ’s threat to fight to the death.
Sergeant Pete was manoeuvring towards the chopper and saw the injured Major Hall and a couple of other sergeants loading up with Charlie Company’s rucksacks and ran over to help.
‘Everyone had just made a beeline for the birds and these guys were stuck out there, loading rucksacks by themselves,’ Peterson says. ‘And so we were sitting on the LZ all that time, and I just think some people probably need to be smacked a little bit … Some of them, self-preservation was their priority.’
With almost all the troops crammed into the choppers, the soldiers bringing up the rear did a quick scan of the bowl to ensure no one was left behind. There was nothing but an empty battlefield. It was the closest thing to a head count, but with the choppers firing up and ready to roar less than a hundred metres away, there was not a chance in hell that any soldier worth his salt was staying in the halfpipe. No one was going to be left behind. Confident of their scan, the men didn’t linger and moved up the ramps into the Chinooks, taking their place at the very back, exhausted and relieved.
The Tactical Operations Center at Bagram was tense with expectation. The Predators showed the two Chinooks lifting off and turning to fly back to base. Every metre higher brought the soldiers closer to safety, but they had to get past the hostile eastern ridgeline.
As soon as they cleared the valley floor the pilots radioed in with a mission success report. Seventy-three soldiers, including two Australians with the elite SAS Regiment, were on board the two birds and coming home. And they were all alive. The extraction was complete. The excitement in the TOC was palpable but, within minutes, the atmosphere went from one of utter jubilation to disbelief.
‘Hey, have a look at this,’ an American officer yelled back in the TOC.
‘Holy shit!’
At least a dozen armed men were swarming over the landing zone where the Chinooks had just been and were picking through Charlie Company’s discarded booty, the equipment that posed no security risk.
‘That’s al Qaeda!’
Rowan Tink couldn’t believe it. ‘Within a matter of minutes of the helo extraction taking off, a bunch of people appeared right on the location,’ he says. ‘It was only a matter of minutes, so they were close — that’s the point. The helos came in and took off, and the next thing, you have enemy wandering on.’
But the Spooky was on station, loitering overhead and doing pylon turns around the snowy mountain peaks, ready to rock if needed.
Sergeant Healy’s earlier instruction to mark the non-retrievable items with infrared sensors was about to pay off. The gunship’s battle management centre was a hive of activity, processing coordinates, prepping the fire team and briefing the pilots who flew the AC-130 into the valley. As it swept in, the gunners let rip with the 105mm howitzer and the 40mm Bofors cannon.
Boom!
The enemy were taken care of. The Predator vision showed them laid to waste.
For Jock, the Spooky’s final delivery was the best possible kind of salvation, although he didn’t hear about that until later.
‘They just started moving in and trying to rip shit off, looking for things like coded radios and any sort of weapons and information,’ Jock says now. ‘They would have been loving that, any sort of equipment that they could have captured, especially a radio with a code. I’m not sure what sort of procedures Osama has in place for his operatives but I’m sure he would like to get his hands on something like that.’
With the enemy killed it is impossible to know why al Qaeda and Taliban fighters did not attack the extraction choppers and the surviving men from the 10th Mountain as they previously tried to destroy the medevac helos. No doubt, they would have heard the Spooky droning overhead and knew they were up against overwhelming firepower, and that to expose themselves would have meant certain death. Alternatively, they might have been out of ammunition, or perhaps, contrary to what the commander of the 5th Special Forces Group had said earlier, this lot were not, at this point, in a fight-to-the-death scenario but wanted to live to fight another day.
Whatever the motive, that certainly wasn’t going to happen now.
Jock was spent, physically and emotionally. He felt a ripple of relief but a knot of anxiety stopped him from relaxing. He still fully expected to be hit by a rogue RPG from a
dirty AQ man hiding along the Takur Ghar ridgelines or in one of the adobe houses in the villages on the valley floor.
There’d be one lucky bastard who’d survived the day, he thought.
Jock looked around at the crush of humanity and the hollow looks staring out from the young faces that had been so eager to charge into battle eighteen hours ago. They were not so sanguine now. Their uniforms were stained with blood and covered with mud from the Shahi Kot Valley. Their hands were like Jock’s — red raw and bloody with white knuckles pushing through ragged skin. Some were wrapped in bandages. Their eyes told a tale of exhaustion, elation, fear and frustration.
Holy fuck, he thought. How the hell did we get out of that alive?
‘I cannot explain why we didn’t have any deaths on the day,’ Jock says. ‘I don’t know why the al Qaeda didn’t keep smashing us with their mortars. They seemed to drop a few mortars eventually into the halfpipe but they could have been dropping them in there all day and basically just smashed us by morning tea.
‘They really wanted us badly, they were out there to take some names and they did a reasonable effort with the resources that they had at their disposal.
‘For the life of me I can’t explain why they didn’t persist with the mortars and drop them into the halfpipe earlier in the day.’
On board the helo Jock let out a sigh of relief. Some of the soldiers around him fell into a deep sleep. Kids began snoring like old men, exhausted from a day of fighting for their lives. Extreme situations provide their own solace and silence.
Sergeant Pete was exhausted. He leant on a young private and dropped into a sleep of the dead, half smothering the poor soldier. The GI was probably too afraid to wake the non-com who had just led him through the most frightening and exhilarating day of his life.