The Lion of Sabray

by Patrick Robinson

  The iron men who exit the helos and swing down to the rescue are known as the pararescuemen, or the PJs (that’s pararescue jumpers). No one in all of US military history has been anything less than thrilled by their sudden arrival on the scene. Their creed sends shivers down the spine: “It is my duty to save lives and to aid the injured . . . These things I do, that others may live.”

  Airman Second Class Duane D. Hackney, the most decorated airman in the entire history of the US Air Force, was a pararescueman. He received the Air Force Cross for his actions while recovering a downed pilot under heavy fire in the jungles of North Vietnam in 1967.

  Hackney carried him up and into the aircraft, and when the helicopter was hit, he gave the wounded man his own parachute, saying afterward, “That’s my job. Rescuing people.” He was the first enlisted man—and, at twenty, the youngest—to receive that award, and he earned twenty-seven others for valor, for a total of more than seventy decorations in all.

  There were other heroes like Duane in the 920th, and these were the guys Gulab and Marcus awaited. No one else could do what they could do. No one else had the background to put down in the Sabray opium field with about two feet of clearance on either side.

  The 920th was stationed in Bagram, and a lot of Special Forces had many reasons to be thankful for them. Everyone just liked knowing those guys were there if push came to shove. And in Marcus’s case, it surely had. He still couldn’t walk.

  He wouldn’t know for months exactly how far the ripples from Operation Redwings had extended. At this point, he had a rough idea that the Chinook had gone down with everyone on board—Gulab had tried to tell him. But the first source was the Taliban rabble, who had all shouted and laughed, sliding one open hand over their own throats and making circular helicopter blade motions with the other.

  The SEAL commanders swiftly understood that the 920th were the exact right men. If anyone could find the downed Chinook and then possibly Marcus, it was that Air Force Rescue Wing.

  They were commanded by the tall, craggy Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey L. Macrander, a veteran command pilot with more than 4,600 hours’ flying experience in five different aircraft. He was a military scientist and a weapons expert destined for personal high command. For some outlandish reason, he was known universally as Skinny.

  Commander of the second rescue helicopter was Major Jeffrey Val Peterson, a highly educated airman who had attended both Brigham Young and Arizona State Universities and earned an MBA in business administration. He and his crew had participated in over a hundred combat missions in Afghanistan, pulling wounded people off mountains, out of deep valleys, and clear of firefights.

  For some reason, he acquired the nickname of Spanky, but Peterson also had a huge reputation as a Special Ops pilot, commanding one of the most advanced and sophisticated helicopters ever built: the Sikorsky HH-60 Pave Hawk, with its twin turbo-shaft engines, a toned-up derivative of the legendary UH-60 Black Hawk.

  Like Skinny and Spanky, this baby is a true specialist. It’s built for combat search and rescue, or, as the Air Force prefers, “recovery of personnel under stressful conditions, day or night, in hostile environments.” Marcus’s predicament slotted right into that job description.

  Although a cousin of the Black Hawk, the Pave Hawk is a highly modified version, featuring an upgraded communications and navigation suite, with an integrated navigation/global positioning system, satellite comms, and secure voice. It’s like a flying NASA ops room—which I guess it really is. PAVE stands for precision avionics vectoring equipment.

  You almost need a scientific degree just to fly the thing, with its automatic flight controls, special lighting for night vision goggles (NVGs), forward-looking infrared system for low-level ops at night, and a personnel locating system. It’s got weather radar in color, anti-icing on the rotors, machine guns, and an antimissile system, dispensing a chaff countermeasure. It also has a hoist capable of lifting six hundred pounds from a hover height of two hundred feet. The Pave Hawks are the sixty-five-foot-long workhorses of USAF Rescue. It is an awesome helicopter, with a main rotor diameter of almost fifty-four feet, and the ability to fly nonstop for fourteen hours in any weather, night or day, cruising at 184 miles per hour for, if necessary, 375 miles.

  The SH-60 carries a six-man crew: two pilots, a flight engineer, a gunner, and two pararescuemen (PJs) in the back—this would be a couple of guys who passed one of the most brutal indoctrinations in the US military: the Air Force “Superman School” in San Antonio, Texas. It’s modeled on SEAL training and is reputed to be just as tough. Maybe, nearly. But no one is as tough as the SEALs.

  Almost all search and rescue ops are conducted under the cover of darkness; by hugging the ground at night, it’s nearly impossible for the enemy to see or hear them approaching. In the Pave Hawk, they can see in the dark. Their state-of-the-art night vision goggles amplify the available light from the moon and the stars about five thousand times. There have never been NVGs as good as that, and everything appears phosphorus green. That’s by design, for the human eye can identify more shades of green than any other color.

  Skinny and Spanky had already been up on the mountainside looking for Marcus and his fellow SEALs. They took off from Bagram at 1840 just before nightfall on Wednesday evening, June 29, while Marcus was nearly bleeding to death on the mountain.

  Exactly where Marcus was and where the 920th guys were during this time is a bit of a mystery. But Marcus, in those earlier hours of the night, was making very slow progress up the mountain, while they must have been searching the valley where the wreckage of the Chinook was scattered on the hillside.

  They definitely found it, but it was in very small pieces, and they located it through the heat-seeking infrared system, flying close to the mountain wall, back and forth, back and forth, searching for any sign of life. But, of course, there was none. No one could have possibly gotten out of that crash alive.

  Skinny piloted the first helicopter, and Spanky flew the second. They always work in twos, and when they fix on a target for rescue, one goes in hard and low, and then banks away steeply in an attempt to draw enemy fire. That’s when the second Pave Hawk goes in real low and makes the landing. In this case, Spanky would be the one making the rescue.

  But after hours of searching, they had not located the missing Redwings, or, rather, Redwing. But they had picked up on the emergency frequency a faint clicking, which must have been Marcus’s beacon. Anyone could understand how jumpy they must have been—had the Taliban grabbed that beacon off one of the dead SEALs and were now using it to coax yet another US helo into rocket range?

  Skinny was quoted as saying, “We were just hoping that beacon was still with one of the SEALs. The Taliban had already shown if you fly close enough, they are capable of shooting you down. And this was not a distant possibility. We were searching the exact same area where they’d just done it.”

  No one wanted to abandon the search. Spanky recalls those hours: “It was coming up to midnight, and we were still getting that faint clicking on the frequency. I just hated the idea of leaving someone alone down there, but nothing was coming up on the infrared.

  “I remember flying through that dark, right up against the mountain wall, peering through my NVGs, my copilot glued to the IR. I kept saying to myself, or anyone else who might be listening, ‘If there’s someone there, please, please make yourself known, anything you can do, just let us know. We are United States Air Force rescue. We’ll do anything just to get one of the PJs down there, pick you up, and get you out.’ ”

  Spanky’s copilot, Lieutenant Dave “Gonzo” Gonzales, kept thinking over and over, “They gotta be close by; they gotta be close by.” But they all knew it was like searching for a needle in a haystack, seven or eight thousand feet high in the mountains.

  Their iron determination applied especially to a truly fearless pararescue man, Staff Sergeant Chris “Checky” Piercecchi. A highly trained trauma specialist, he’d be first out of the heli
copter, if and when they located Marcus, and dropped down into the landing zone. If they had to hover, Checky would be the man coming down the rope.

  But the clouds never lifted. It remained pitch-dark all night, and this added to the danger for the rescuemen. The NVGs had no heavenly lights to amplify their instruments, since they were flying way below the clouds and relying entirely on the heat-seeking camera to negotiate the mountain passes.

  The camera can detect heat even when there is absolutely no light. Which is a miracle, since up there, when the ground has been baked all day by the sun, the rock registers as a glaring image in the cockpit, and nothing is easy to spot.

  But neither their equipment nor their determination could find Marcus as he crawled up the escarpment below them. They kept going until it was almost time for the sun to push up above the peaks.

  And they dared not risk a daytime sighting by the Afghani missile men. As dawn cracked the dark skies apart in the Hindu Kush, the two rescue helicopters reluctantly turned back to the west and headed home to Bagram, without the lost SEAL.

  Every member of that rescue crew remembers the somber mood in the helos. The 920th is not used to failure, and in this case, the men felt they’d been very near to finding the missing Redwing but never quite nailed it.

  It did, of course, have a lot to do with Murphy’s Law. They were searching around the SEALs’ last known position—standard practice in any military or naval operation. There was only the crash and Mikey’s phone call to guide them.

  Since those two events, Marcus had been hurrying away from the area, covering a distance that surprised even him. By the time Gulab found him, he was about seven miles from that original mountain location, so the rescuers were starting their search in the wrong place. No fault of theirs. Even the tribal goat-herders were amazed at how far the giant Texan had gone.

  Everyone was beginning to assume that Marcus was dead. And a couple more days went by, during which time he had passed into the care of Gulab.

  The men from the 920th had previously been looking forward to this Fourth of July weekend. Spanky had been scheduled to go home to the States, to his very pretty wife and four boys. That was called off the moment he was chosen by Skinny to fly one of the Pave Hawks up into the mountains.

  Although many people thought there were no Redwing survivors, Spanky was not one of them. He had heard in the cockpit that faint clicking of Luttrell’s beam. That sound kept him awake at night.

  He also felt that he, Skinny, and the boys had been close to finding the SEAL; that they’d been forced to give up because daybreak was approaching, as well as low fuel and inaccurate GPS numbers.

  The mission of the 920th was never to capture a place, or storm anything, or win firefights. It was always to rescue people. Nothing more. And the events of the night of June 29–30 had left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. It was not their fault. It was just the way the cards fell.

  But Major Spanky was quietly longing for another shot, just to get the Pave Hawk fired up and head right back up there to locate the missing SEAL. He waited at Bagram with all the other rescue crewmen, hoping for a word, a signal—any sign there was still a mission to complete up in those mountains.

  Colonel Skinny was of the same mind. He also knew all too well about the clicking beacon. As the overall commander, he needed to assess the danger level of flying back into hostile Taliban country when it was so difficult to see anything below, and their NVGs might not work again because of the cloud cover.

  The objective of the mission would not change. It was still to pick up Marcus, if he were still alive, and then find the bodies of the other three.

  “It was,” said the colonel, “a huge responsibility. Our job was to get these men back to their families, dead or alive. Even before we left for the second leg of the operation, I was praying—a simple prayer, but the best I could do: ‘Oh, Lord, please, please do not let me screw this up.’ ”

  All through that Friday, July 1, the guys waited. The Pave Hawks were fueled up, every operational part checked, the electronics tested. No two military helicopters were ever in better shape for an operation that had yet to be given the green light.

  The SEAL ops room was receiving no word from the Taliban battle zone apart from brief reports on US Air Force activities in the area, and the Rangers were not yet within striking distance of the village. Pilots sometimes thought there was a faint electronic clicking from Sabray, but nothing definite.

  There was certainly nothing to countermand Colonel Skinny’s orders from High Command, which meant broadly: “The United States cannot afford to lose another helicopter on that damned mountain.”

  Like all their other meals, dinner for the 920th was a gloomy occasion. No one had heard anything since they’d returned at dawn on Thursday morning. No one wanted the rescue mission called off. But there was plainly no point in charging back up there with no more information and guidance than they’d had the first time.

  And now it was Saturday night. Back home in the United States, the Fourth of July weekend was under way. Men who should have been with their families just sat around reading, watching television, not speaking much. Just thinking, worrying, their minds locked on those steep, cold hillsides up there in the Hindu Kush.

  Each of them understood that several dozen Taliban killers, armed with antiaircraft missiles, were hunkered down in their mountain bunkers, waiting just for them. But the part that counted much more for the 920th rescuers was the upsetting possibility that somewhere up there was a freezing-cold American hero, all alone, trying to stay alive, and probably praying to the same God as Colonel Skinny.

  If they were cleared to take off, it might be lethal. It could be the last mission any of them would ever attempt. But their primary thoughts were always of the rescue, not the risks. And the words of the PJ creed echoed silently among them—the words they were sworn to uphold: “that others may live.”

  Midnight came and went. The rescuers were waiting one hour at a time. And the time crawled by. Sometimes they dozed off, but they were all on a self-imposed standby, waiting for something to happen—anything—just to let them know there was a target up there in the mountains. Someone in need of help.

  Shortly after 0430, with the pale light of dawn breaking over the mountain peaks, they got it. A message came in from the small US base at Asadabad. An elderly tribesman had arrived at the gates, and he had brought a handwritten message, written and signed by one of the four original Redwings: Marcus Luttrell.

  Maluk, Gulab’s seventy-five-year-old brother-in-law, had made the twenty-mile trek over the mountains, with the news the entire US military had been waiting for. Marcus was alive, and the letter he had written told them what they needed to know.

  He was in the care of the villagers of Sabray—he had written in the GPS numbers—and confirmed what they probably knew: the place was being blockaded by the Taliban army, which was intent on killing him and anyone who might object.

  Marcus did tell them that he was pretty badly wounded in more places than he could count, but he was definitely breathing. The one thing no one knew was precisely when the village elder had arrived at Asadabad. The US Army had obviously spent some time checking out poor old Maluk, who’d done a lot for Marcus—such as saving his life, twice—and did not deserve rough treatment.

  But the US guards needed to be sure. Maluk might even have been a Taliban suicide bomber with an improvised explosive device, or IED. Anyhow, they believed him in the end, assumed the letter was genuine, and alerted those who needed to know: the battered, soaking Rangers on the hill. And the rescue guys at the Bagram base.

  And very swiftly, the operation to save Marcus Luttrell swept into place. Within hours, they had satellite photos of Sabray on the network. By late morning, the helicopter commanders were finalizing their strategy.

  And a squad of towering heroes, with names like something out of an old Western movie, were gearing up for action: Skinny, Spanky, Gonzo, and Checky. Four men who
se bravery Marcus will never forget.

  On Saturday morning, July 2, the sun rose out of the eastern Himalayas and cast its mountain light on Alexander the Great’s ancient city of Bagram.

  Hard alongside this storied place, the giant US military air base, home to thousands of American troops, braced itself for another burning hot day—even here, five thousand feet above sea level in the foothills of the five-hundred-mile long Afghani range.

  Right now, before 0530, the air was cool, but all along the lines and lines of barracks huts (B-huts), half-awake military personnel understood one thing that would set this day apart: they were going in tonight, the rescue guys, to try to grab the big, lost Texan SEAL Marcus Luttrell from under the hooked nose of the Taliban chief, Ahmad Shah.

  Everyone in Bagram knew about this unfolding tragedy in the mountains. Everyone knew about the past week’s battle, and the helicopter crash, which had added up to the worst day in US Special Forces history. And everyone knew the Rangers were still just short of the local area.

  The 920th Wing’s rescue helos were going in alone—into the teeth of Taliban gunfire and rockets, and into some of the most dangerous flying country in the world: the massive steep-sided rock gorges of the Hindu Kush.

  It might have been just another rescue mission for the Americans, but this one was different. Ahmad Shah had dealt the SEALs a savage blow: not a general attack on the West through the murderous destruction of the World Trade Center four years previously. This one hit even closer to home: a deliberate attack on America’s most beloved fighting force. And eleven of them were dead, plus eight other US Special Forces.

  And right now, there seemed to be just one survivor from that infamous day. And that survivor might also be dead. No one knew. But everyone cared. And when Skinny and Spanky lifted off from the main Bagram runway tonight, they would not be alone, because, in so many ways, every last man on that base would go with them. No rescue operation ever carried a greater burden of hopes and good wishes. To Skinny and Spanky, it seemed that the outcome of the entire Afghan war hung in the balance as they clattered up through the passes, sweeping the valley for a sign of the missing Marcus.