by Ed Darack
The right-side door gunner, Alex, had reached this moment at Shank through his prior combat experience and his love of Army aviation and the CH-47. He had enjoyed a profound mentorship with Extortion Company’s senior noncommissioned officer, Sergeant First Class Kirk Kuykendall. Kirk, whose family had welcomed Alex as one of their own, leaned on his personal experience (dating back to the 1991 Gulf War) to educate and train Alex in all the basics as well as the subtleties and idiosyncrasies of the Chinook, fostering a level of expertise that prepared the gunner to support the most difficult, demanding, and dangerous operations conducted by the U.S. military.
Pat, the other FE onboard Extortion 17, had begun his journey to FOB Shank starting with some of his earliest childhood experiences, particularly Fourth of July celebrations at the home of a neighbor, a National Guardsman. A gifted mechanic with a selfless outlook on the world, Pat fit naturally into Army aviation in general and Extortion Company in particular, eager to learn, aid others, and participate in even the most challenging missions.
Bryan, Extortion 17’s pilot-in-command, had grown up building and flying model airplanes and painting and working on cars and motorcycles. Inspired by his love for flying and encouraged to move into the world of Army aviation by his wife, Mary, Bryan had proved one of the best in his class at flight school. He further excelled during subsequent flight exercises, including his pre-Afghan deployment training at one of the most important facilities for pilots headed to OEF, the High Altitude Army National Guard Aviation Training Site (HAATS) in the mountains of Colorado. Although a young pilot, Bryan quickly gained a seasoned level of experience during his tour in Afghanistan, which had included cockpit time during a near-fatal downing of a CH-47 Chinook just weeks earlier. The pilot on the sticks during that incident, Extortion Company Commander Justin “Buddy” Lee, had saved everyone onboard, including Kirk, through lightning-fast actions as their Chinook, approaching an LZ high in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, suddenly plummeted tail-first toward the ground. The incident shook all involved but boosted Bryan’s wisdom and confidence and fostered what would quickly become a close friendship with Buddy.
In the right seat of the cockpit that night was Dave, the eldest member of Extortion 17. One of the most experienced pilots in rotary-wing military aviation, he had flown with Buddy just the night before when Buddy led the insert of troops on a raid as complex and dangerous as that of the night of August 6. A legend in the world of the Chinook, Dave, a devoted husband and the father of a son and a daughter, had amassed more than 4,000 hours of flight time in a career spanning decades. Self-compelled to fly from his youngest years, Dave had deployed to Iraq, where he and his unit supported complex and dangerous JSOC missions. He had already served as a HAATS instructor, and he’d saved the lives of everyone onboard a CH-47D he piloted in one of the most incredible moments of helicopter flying in aviation history, wresting back control of a severely damaged Chinook at over 13,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies during a rescue mission gone terribly wrong.
As mission planners at Shank pored over maps and aerial imagery of the target complex and the surrounding Tangi Valley and listened to and read updates on the evolving situation from both ground and air participants, trying to determine the next step in the operation, the five men of Extortion 17 readied themselves for any eventuality. Their flight helmets still on and their NVGs flipped up, they listened for word on the specifics of their role in the coming hours or minutes. Meanwhile the APU screamed, keeping their critical systems powered up.
Before Spencer Colson Duncan even glimpsed the light of the delivery room, he was a fighter. His mother, Megan Duncan, noted his scrappiness from the first: “Well, I was there when he was born,” she recalled, laughing. Spencer, the first of her three sons, was born on Monday, February 19, 1990, the birth proving difficult to the point of emergency, yet he survived.
Megan and her husband, Dale, raised Spencer and his two brothers, Tanner and Calder, in Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, where patriotic sentiment, large Fourth of July parades, American flags on display year-round, and deference for members of the U.S. military characterized their upbringing. Both of Spencer’s grandfathers had served in the Navy during the Korean War era, but his family told him little about their service. “He didn’t get a whole lot of war stories,” his mother said, noting that although her uncle had served in the Vietnam War, he too said almost nothing about it to the family. In the fifth grade, Spencer had watched the twin towers burn and collapse on television. As Megan recalled, her son had said, “This is like the bully bringing the fight to our backyard.” The moment would spur his trajectory toward the U.S. military.
Dale recalled that Spencer “was everything any dad wanted his boy to be: smart, athletic, good-looking.” A natural athlete, Spencer stood 5 feet, 11 inches tall in high school and weighed roughly 190 pounds, and he’d excelled at football from middle school through the ninth grade. Sports, however, required a commitment to school that he chose not to make. In his high school years, he prioritized his energy for a matter much more important to him: supporting his best friend when cancer struck the friend’s mother, and spending as much time with him as possible as she fought for her life. The experience galvanized him to dedicate his life to the service and defense of others and furthered his attraction to military service.
Spencer Duncan, February 2011. Credit 3
Before he could join the military, however, he needed to earn that high school diploma, difficult for a young man who did not care for the classroom. But in the summer of 2008, he met the challenge, even if by the thinnest of margins. “His diploma should have read, ‘Spencer barely graduated,’ ” his mother said. Still, Spencer quickly moved on, calling Megan for a request she did not initially understand: he needed his birth certificate. “Why?” she asked. He had joined the Army Reserve, Spencer answered. “We didn’t get ‘Hey, this is what I’m thinking of doing.’ We got ‘Hey, this is what I’ve done,’ ” she recalled. Specifically, Spencer had enlisted to become a member of a Chinook company in the 7th Battalion, 158th Aviation Regiment (7-158 AVN), based out of the New Century Aircenter, a former naval air station southwest of Kansas City and not far from Olathe.
“His recruiter spent a lot of time with him,” his father said. The recruiter had frequently flown in CH-47s during his own career and had grown fond of the aircraft and its crews, and he explained to Spencer that flying in the tandem-rotor helicopter was an incredible experience. Spencer would fit in well with the culture of the Chinook, the recruiter said, and openings were available at the Kansas unit.
An Extortion CH-47D Chinook, piloted by Captain Justin “Buddy” Lee, carrying a sling load of cargo over the mountains of Maidan Wardak Province during a resupply mission, 2011. Credit 4
“Once he learned about the aircraft and the unit, Spencer was hooked on being a ‘hooker,’ ” Megan said. Chinooks have hooks on their undersides to which crews can attach cables for sling loads; hence the nickname “hooker” for CH-47 crewmen.
Spencer had a natural aptitude for becoming a mechanic, which is how all Chinook crewmen begin their careers. Back in high school, Spencer had spent most of his free time (and most of his earnings from a pizza job) on his favorite avocation: restoring cars and honing his mechanical skills. “He’d come home at the end of the day and open the hood,” his father said, explaining his son’s uncanny ability to repair carburetors, transmissions, radiators, and most anything else automotive. It was the perfect background: After completing his nine-week Army basic training course at Fort Knox, Kentucky, Spencer arrived at Fort Eustis, Virginia, for Advanced Individual Training, where he learned the basics of maintaining the CH-47. Eventually he became interested not just in working on the Chinook but also serving as flight crew during deployed operations.
His deployment orders came in early 2010, but they were not for war. Instead he was sent to work disaster relief in the wake of the January 12 Haiti earthquake. “We didn’t know what he was go
ing to be doing, just that his battalion told him to prepare to spend up to a year knee-deep in disaster,” his mother recalled. Members of the battalion had just four days to prepare to leave Kansas for Fort Hood, Texas. Spencer was single at the time, living alone with his dog, working a day job at a moving company, and drilling with his Chinook company on the weekends. But with the help of his family, he got ready to depart for Haiti within a few days. Megan explained that the orders placed substantially more stress on other members of the battalion than on her son, who was just 19 at the time. Others were forced to quit their careers, and one soldier had to delay marriage plans. “We watched as these guys just stopped their personal lives, got their stuff together, said goodbye to families, and left,” Megan said. “They had from Thursday to Sunday to get their entire lives in order. It was an amazing display of strength and commitment by all those involved: soldiers, families, and friends.” But plans for alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Haiti were changing by the hour, and higher command stood-down Spencer’s battalion just days later. The soldiers returned to Kansas from Texas.
In April 2010, Spencer learned of his next deployment. “We got official word that we were headed to Afghanistan in 2011,” said Sergeant First Class Kirk Kuykendall, a flight platoon sergeant and FE instructor in the battalion’s Chinook company. Spencer’s dream of becoming a member of a flight crew came to fruition around this time, shortly after he had “come on orders,” meaning the military had activated him to serve full time in the Reserve. “In the Army, with Chinooks, you start off as a mechanic in Delta Company,” explained Kirk. “The air crew belong to Bravo Company.” Although still a mechanic when the Army activated him, Kirk and others in the unit thought Spencer had great potential to join a flight crew as a door gunner. Some soldiers choose to remain in maintenance for their entire careers, providing an important base of experience throughout Army aviation, but, as Kirk said, “we hand-picked the guys we wanted in Bravo Company because they were motivated to fly, and Spencer was one of them.”
Spencer traveled to California to qualify as a door gunner, learning the basics of the Chinook’s defensive weapon system, the M240B medium machine gun, which fires belted 7.62mm rounds. Other weapon systems that use the gun include the M1 Abrams tank and a variety of armored personnel carriers. Spencer also trained for general flight qualifications, learning his roles during takeoff and landing and undergoing desert environmental immersion—flying throughout the California desert to acclimate to conditions he would face in Afghanistan. In early 2011, with months of training behind them and having returned to their base in Kansas, Spencer and Bravo Company readied to embark to Afghanistan. On March 16, he, Kirk, Alex Bennett, and other soldiers of their unit prepared to climb aboard Bravo Company’s 12 Chinooks, arranged in a line on parking pads in the northwest corner of New Century Aircenter.
Spencer Duncan at Virginia Beach in the spring of 2009, after graduating from Advanced Individual Training to become a CH-47D Chinook repairer. Credit 5
“I’m a worrier by nature,” said Megan, “but I wasn’t worried as he prepared to board the Chinook. I was so darn proud of him. Spencer knew he was going to make a difference, to fight for people less fortunate than him. He didn’t join because some judge said for him to go, [or] because he couldn’t do anything else. He had a deep sense of responsibility for the job. He was so mature because of the Army Reserve, and at only 21. I had a moment of ‘Oh, my goodness, our oldest son is really doing this.’ We believed he was going to do his job and do it really well, and then come home. I can still feel his hug, see his eyes.”
Spencer Duncan on the day his unit left Olathe, Kansas, for Fort Hood for deployment to Afghanistan. Credit 6
The Chinooks’ pilots spun up the aircraft, the ground crew unchocked the CH-47s’ wheels, and the helicopters lifted into the air. Family and friends who had come to bid the soldiers farewell watched the Chinooks soar above them and aim south for the 550-mile flight to Fort Hood, the last stop for Bravo Company before they headed to war.
Weeks later, after completing the final phases of predeployment training, Spencer and his fellow soldiers relaxed for three days. When his mother called him, he and his friends were toasting the SEALs who had stormed Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing the terrorist mastermind. With his training complete, Spencer and others of his unit were looking to do their parts in the ongoing war with insurgents and terrorists led by those not as well known as bin Laden but equally determined.
“Something I shared with the boys every day as I would leave for work,” Dale recalled, “was to tell them to have a great day, to make it count. That was our mantra: Make it count.” Just a few days after celebrating the SEALs of Operation Neptune Spear, Spencer, Kirk, and Alex began their journey with Bravo Company to FOB Shank, which lies just 85 air miles from Jalalabad Airfield, where the Abbottabad raid had launched. “The last thing Spencer texted me before leaving for Afghanistan,” Dale said, “was ‘Dad, I’m going to make this count.’ ”
A significant part of Spencer Duncan’s transformation into a soldier—and specifically into a Chinook crewman—actually occurred after his predeployment training, once he had arrived in Afghanistan. This ongoing professional development, for some a trial by fire, came from the top down: the highest echelon of Extortion Company’s leadership. Its commander, Buddy Lee, had been carefully chosen by his superiors to lead the company. Buddy had spent years in training and flying a variety of types of missions in CH-47s, his real-world lessons taught to him by some of the most experienced pilots and crewmen in the Chinook community. His leadership not only helped those in the unit endure the rigors of their deployment but also helped them grow professionally, molding Spencer and the others in the spirit of Army aviation. As was typical of pilots such as Dave Carter and Bryan Nichols, Buddy’s real-world education, too, had begun just weeks after flight school.
Fifteen days after Buddy graduated from flight school at Fort Rucker, Alabama, on October 8, 2005, the ground violently shook under Muzaffarabad, a city 50 miles northeast of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. The 7.6-magnitude quake kicked off landslides and collapsed homes and buildings, killing almost 100,000 people, injuring nearly as many more, and leaving roughly 3 million without homes. The U.S. government immediately pledged the support of every available Chinook crew in Afghanistan as part of a massive humanitarian relief effort. The CH-47’s large cargo capacity and excellent performance at high altitude made it ideal for the mission. “At flight school graduation, we had a speaker who told the class that at least one of us would be deployed within the month,” Buddy recalled. That “one” turned out to be Buddy himself. Thirty days later, the newly minted pilot prepared to head to Pakistan.
Like Spencer, who was 15 at the time of the quake and just starting his sophomore year at high school, Buddy had chosen to serve in the military without direct influence from friends or family. Yet, as was true of Spencer’s upbringing, the culture and tenor of Buddy’s home town and state influenced him to join the military. His parents raised him and his brothers on the outskirts of the east Texas city of Tyler, named after John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States. “People in that part of the country have a deep respect for the military and those who serve,” Buddy explained. “Not that one part of the country is any more patriotic than any other, necessarily, but where I’m from, everyone seems to know someone who is serving or who did serve—usually more than one.”
At Lindale High School near Tyler, where his classmates had voted him most likely to succeed due to his outgoing personality and zeal to explore new horizons, he envisioned his life as a series of diverse adventures. He started his freshman year at Texas A&M University in fall 1999, entering through the Corps of Cadets program, the largest Reserve Officer Training Corps outside the service academies (the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs).
When Buddy told his then-girlfr
iend (now wife), Christy, that he was joining, he explained that it would not be a lifetime career, which some chose, but rather that he felt compelled to serve the nation for a number of years and that his thirst for adventure had fueled his decision, as it does for many who enter the military. Of course, joining up means risking shipping off to war. “I told Christy that if there was a war, then of course I’d not just go but that I’d want to go,” Buddy recalled. He approached his Army representative about a contract the next day. After an hour-long discussion, the representative told him that he stood absolutely fit to become an officer in all regards—except one. In 1997, at the outset of his junior year at Lindale, Buddy had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee during varsity football practice. The injury not only ended his high school football career; it could have precluded him from this more important life endeavor.
Now Buddy required a medical waiver to finalize his Army contract, so he made an appointment with his hometown orthopedist at the earliest opening, 11 a.m. the following Tuesday—September 11, 2001. The doctor saw him just minutes after World Trade Centers One and Two had collapsed and as the Pentagon continued to burn, the coordinated attack killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring more than 10,000. “You feel ready to go to war?” the doctor asked. “Because we just got one declared on us.”