The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  On those nights she would sleep.

  * * *

  The Kiowa Warrior helicopter is a small and lightweight military aircraft, a single-engine platform in the bantam class. It stands on a pair of metal skids that span about six feet across; even with a pair of side-mounted weapons pylons attached, the aircraft is less than ten feet wide. Its four rotors beat through the air in a diameter of only thirty-five feet. The Black Hawk, in comparison, rests atop wheels nine feet apart and its rotors spread nearly fifty-four feet. (With external fuel tanks, the Black Hawk can exceed twenty feet in width.) As a single-engine aircraft, the Kiowa is also slow, reaching maximum speeds at level flight around 105 knots, compared to a Black Hawk’s in excess of 150. It is lightly armored and has a large windscreen. At a glance, the helicopter can seem about as safe as a phone booth with a rotor on top, carrying a load of flammable fuel. But the Kiowa possesses a characteristic well matched to the role of protecting infantry: It is extremely maneuverable. When cruising at 60 knots, a confident pilot can put the aircraft through a complete 180-degree turn in about fifty feet. In this way, Kiowa pilots in Iraq could participate in firefights as small, mobile, and semi-mechanical gunfighters, hunting and turning and killing in concert with foot soldiers below. In the configuration that Alpha Troop used, the left pylon held a .50-caliber machine gun. The right held a Hydra rocket pod loaded with 2.75-inch rockets with explosive warheads. Above the Kiowa’s rotors stood a large globe, called the mast-mounted sight, containing a thermal optic with which pilots could separate terrain from its human targets, day or night. The Army painted its Kiowa fleet a shade of dark green. With time, as the aircraft were splattered with oil and exhaust, they inclined toward black—pint-sized American machines that flitted above the infantry, frightening, taunting, hunting the grunts’ tormentors, then darting away to drink fuel before returning again.

  On October 6, Slebodnik woke at midnight for a 2:00 A.M. briefing and a taste of the tour ahead. After preflighting the aircraft, checking its weight and fuel, he flew to an area of the basin north of the base that pilots used as a test range and fired the aircraft’s weapons to be sure they worked. Then he flew off with another Kiowa to cover the infantry on a cordon-and-search in a village near the Tigris River. They watched over the soldiers from 4:30 A.M. until 10:00 A.M. The search turned up a small cache of military equipment in a chicken coop, which the soldiers on the ground destroyed with explosives.

  Kiowas flew at low elevation over Iraq, often less than fifty feet above the ground, which gave aircrews remarkably clear views of people below: shepherds tending goats and sheep, women doing laundry, children playing along canals. Pilots passed through the air at highway speeds, rushing into Iraqis’ lives to see them only for seconds, looking down upon surprised or annoyed faces. The Americans’ enemies hid themselves. The war’s toll was in view. On the flight back, Slebodnik’s Kiowa was thumping low over the Tigris River when he saw a corpse of a man stuck in a fishing net. His hands were bound with zip ties. Slebodnik thought he looked Iraqi but was not entirely sure. He watched the body break free and drift away, out of sight.

  Many flights were uneventful. Others were exercises in frustration for a foreign force on its enemies’ home ground. On October 9 he covered an infantry unit on a nighttime raid to snatch a suspected insurgent from his home. They didn’t catch the man. Slebodnik listened on the radio as soldiers discussed how a Predator drone had spotted an Iraqi fleeing into a building. In the right seat, Slebodnik wore green-tinted night-vision goggles and could see the Predator sparkle the home with an infrared marking laser. The thin beam of light was invisible to the Iraqis but stark and clear to him. All of this technology, the presence of the soldiers, the stack of aircraft above, the almost incalculable expense and extraordinary synchronization of the combined fighting tools—none of it mattered that night. The man escaped. The Predator’s laser was like a flashlight beam sweeping a kitchen through which a resident mouse had dashed.

  Slebodnik was feeling homesick. “It bugs me that I am missing Mike grow up,” he wrote to Tanja afterward. “I see him in my mind doing things.”

  * * *

  The ground units that Alpha Troop supported were busy that fall helping Iraq’s government put a referendum for a new constitution to a public vote. For the soldiers, this meant trying to provide safe polling places and protecting the movement of ballots through areas beset by hostility. It was a daunting set of tasks—simultaneous security missions spread across the country—and it forced some units to relocate troops. Slebodnik was shifted to another former Iraqi military base, renamed Forward Operating Base Normandy, northeast of MacKenzie, near the city of Muqdadiyah.

  October 14 was the day before the national vote, and while watching over government trucks bringing ballots to Duluiyah, Slebodnik thought he saw a small bomb hidden against a guardrail outside the city. He called it in. Alpha Company sent a patrol to examine it. The soldiers saw wires protruding from the unknown object and thought it was a bomb, too. As they worked, a sniper fired a single shot at a turret gunner in a Humvee.

  The shot missed.

  Over Slebodnik’s radio came a request.

  The ground patrol wanted him to suppress a tree line from where the shot had come.

  Although the Kiowa carried a forward-looking infrared sensor and a laser range finder, many Kiowa pilots were of an older school. They fought visually. Slebodnik had his own way. During preflight, upon taking his seat in the right side of an aircraft, he pressed his left hand—spread wide from pinkie to thumb—against a spot on the windscreen that only he knew, and drew hash marks with a grease pencil or dry-erase marker. This crude grid became his weapon sight. After taking off, he would fly to a test-fire area, fire a burst of .50-caliber machine-gun rounds, and note if the rounds struck high or low, left or right, relative to his visual guide. From there, his mind attuned to the day’s Kentucky windage, he was ready to fight.

  After the sniper shot, Slebodnik performed a set of aerial maneuvers he had practiced for years. He flew away from where he thought the sniper was hiding, then turned back and rushed the spot head-on. As the distance between the Kiowa and his target shrunk, he bumped the nose of the aircraft up. The helicopter climbed, steeply like a rising roller coaster encased in engine and rotor noise, until it was about 1,000 feet in the air.

  There Slebodnik leveled off, pointed the nose, lined up his sight—and dove.

  Using controls on the cyclic, the flight control stick rising between a pilot’s legs, a right-seat Kiowa pilot can fire rockets or the .50-caliber machine gun. Slebodnik flipped a lever to the left to select for the machine gun, then lifted a safety cover, depressed his thumb on the button, and opened fire.

  The heavy gun began blasting from the pylon to his left, shaking the aircraft.

  Down he dropped, gun thumping, past 800 feet, past 600 feet, adjusting the orientation of his makeshift sight as he descended, lower, to 400 feet, then to 200 feet, and at last below, firing throughout as the ground seemed to rise.

  At this phase of an attack, risks suddenly rise. A Kiowa cannot defend itself from its bottom, flanks, or rear, which means that overflying a target presents an armed foe with the opportunity of firing back, a potentially devastating counterpunch. And so, short of the target and at about 100 feet off the ground, Slebodnik ceased firing and performed the next step in the sequence. He banked hard right, moving away from where the bullets he fired had been thudding, and swung away from the point of greatest vulnerability.

  His copilot said he saw a muzzle flash.

  Someone was firing at them.

  Slebodnik had been in the Army his entire adult life. It was his first combat engagement. He flew the aircraft out of rifle range, turned around, lined up the nose, attacked again, and repeated the dodge. He performed the maneuver a third time, pouring gunfire into the trees.

  Adrenaline flowed through him. He felt elated. He was driving a sniper away from the grunts. He was unsure whether he had hit the man, b
ut the soldiers on the ground were safe. “No more firing came from that area,” he wrote later. “We didn’t see any bodies or blood, but at least we got him to stop. It was the first time I have ever engaged an enemy force. It felt good.”

  Voting proceeded quietly in the areas he flew the next day. Anticipation gave way to relief.

  Then came blood.

  On the night of October 17, an infantry company on MacKenzie, Alpha Company, First Battalion, Fifteenth Infantry Regiment, sent out its First Platoon on a route-clearance patrol. Another logistics convoy was due in the morning. The ambush of the KBR convoy in September had cost unarmed drivers their lives, and led to recriminations and at least one investigation. The soldiers were determined not to have a repeat, and planned to clear and secure the route. The lead Bradley held nine people: three soldiers in front and five more in back, plus Bakim, an Iraqi interpreter.

  While crossing Ambush Alley, it drove over a buried bomb.

  The bomb exploded.

  The blast had a dual effect. It perforated the Bradley’s fuel tank and damaged the cable that opened the rear hatch to the troop compartment. The vehicle burst into flames. Bakim and the soldiers inside were trapped.

  Gunfire broke out to the west.

  Sergeant First Class Alwyn Cashe climbed down from the turret and pulled the driver from his hatch. With the vehicle commander, he put out the fire that was burning the other soldier’s uniform and skin.

  Diesel fuel had splattered onto Cashe. Flames spread to him. He did not stop. He returned to the disabled Bradley and, with help from a desperate soldier inside, forced open its rear hatch.

  The troop compartment was an oven. Cashe helped burning soldiers out, through the smoke and waves of heat, but one of the Americans and Bakim, the interpreter, did not appear. His uniform aflame, Cashe plunged in. He crawled into the rectangular metal space, moving forward until he found the last soldier and Bakim, whom he dragged out.

  Bakim was dead. The others were alive, many with severe wounds. When Cashe took his place among them, more than 70 percent of his body had been burned.

  * * *

  In the days after the ambush, Slebodnik began to hear of a plan by the infantry company to return to the kill zone. Cashe survived the medevac flight and the longer journey to the Army’s burn ward at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. But he was covered with second- and third-degree burns. Soldiers were warned he might not make it. The pilots of Alpha Troop was told to ready for a follow-up patrol. An assistant division commander wanted to tour the area. The units spent days organizing a VIP patrol. A Kiowa was set aside to fly the general over the area, and a spare helicopter was assigned to be ready if the first helicopter had mechanical problems. Slebodnik was assigned to the spare.

  At midday on November 2, Alpha Company escorted the general off Mackenzie toward Duluiyah. A Bradley drove in the lead, followed by a pair of Humvees. The first held the general and the company commander, Captain Jimmy Hathaway. The second carried the sergeant major and other soldiers. The patrol rolled heavy. More vehicles followed.

  The column moved past a police station, and had just passed where Cashe’s Bradley had been destroyed on October 17. A rocket-propelled grenade flew from an alley and struck the third vehicle on the armored door beside the driver. Its armor-piercing warhead exploded. The blast severely wounded the driver and injured other soldiers inside.

  The patrol pulled over to fight. Kiowas bore down. Several of the attackers ran to a house and the ruins of the old Baathist party headquarters, which the Kiowas circled. A British jet did a low pass to fix them in place, and was followed by F-15s that dropped a pair of 500-pound bombs, one on each building.

  The fight ended.

  The company set up a landing zone at a soccer field. By the time the helicopters landed, it was too late. The wounded driver was dead. The soldiers placed him on the floor of the Black Hawk, which lifted him away.

  The patrol still had not reached the kill zone from the September ambush. The general asked to keep going.

  “If it is important enough for a kid to get hurt out here, it is important enough for me to continue mission,” he said to Hathaway.

  The patrol reorganized and pushed on. The remainder of its movement was quiet. The air strikes had shut down fighting for the day.

  Hathaway appreciated the general’s decision. He thought it signaled to Alpha Company that its soldiers’ work would not be dictated by those who ambushed them. Slebodnik thought otherwise. He saw the mission as unnecessary. The driver, Specialist Dennis J. Ferderer Jr., was from North Dakota, a twenty-year-old from a family-run dairy farm. He was the type of stock Slebodnik knew from Western Pennsylvania. His death, in Slebodnik’s view, had been caused by a senior officer’s urge to get a peek.

  “The general went on his sightseeing tour, and 1-15 lost a guy,” he wrote to Tanja. “What a waste.”

  Slebodnik was patriotic and committed to the Army; sometimes he groused about negative media coverage of the wars. But he was also a career soldier of the middle rank, unshakably dedicated to younger troops, and not above criticizing an officer he thought had done them wrong. “All just so the General could see what it was like,” he continued. “He had a taste alright, but at the cost of one of ours.”

  The next day Slebodnik felt down and lethargic. He did not go to the gym or do his usual run. “It’s depressing,” he wrote. A few days later, word came down about Cashe, the sergeant who had been flown to the burn ward. He had died, too.II

  * * *

  To fight the elastic insurgency, American commanders often changed plans and shuffled forces. In November, Alpha Troop was reassigned, and flew its helicopters to the air base at Logistics Support Area Anaconda, at Balad.

  Anaconda, still growing, had become a super-base—an operational and logistical hub. Built near the serpentine Tigris River, in the years since the invasion it swelled into an American military city, with compounds and housing centers protected by mazelike arrangements of concrete blast walls. Just beyond its outer perimeter was another world. Farmers tended seasonal crops on fields drenched by water pumped from the river. Date palms and fruit trees stood in groves. The vegetation and the many roads, waterways, bridges, and footpaths offered uncountable places where gunmen were shielded from view and from where rocket and mortar crews could fire. Unlike Mackenzie, where shelling and incoming rockets had declined, attacks still shook Anaconda. Troops were often alerted by alarms warning of incoming ordnance, followed by explosive blasts.

  On December 5, Slebodnik led another team of two Kiowas on a flight northeast of the base, on the opposite side of the river. It was a typical scouting mission, a matter of making the rounds through areas where enemy activity had occurred in the past, and checking previously used rocket firing points. In the Kiowa’s left seat was Chief Warrant Officer Mariko Kraft, a young pilot on her first tour. Slebodnik had been training her. The two often flew together and had a rapport.

  When the two aircraft were low on fuel, they planned to head to Forward Operating Base Warhorse, near Baqubah, for gas. It had been a quiet flight and Slebodnik and Kraft were chatting amiably. Kraft was lamenting at how little they had seen. Slebodnik was used to disappointment. Iraq was beset by war, but the insurgents were patient and knew how to stay out of sight.

  “Sometimes you don’t find anything out here,” he said.

  They were flying over farmland. They passed a white Toyota pickup truck in a field between two stands of tall trees. Three men stood next to the truck. The field was barren. Its crop had been harvested. Slebodnik came from farm country. This was an unusual place for idle men.

  He brought the Kiowa around for a second look.

  The men broke and ran.

  Slebodnik fired a warning burst, away from the men. They did not stop. He watched them split up. Two of the men wore black and stayed together while a third man, dressed in gray, veered away. Slebodnik asked the trail aircraft to follow the men in black. They were heading acros
s open ground for the trees to the west.

  He swung back to check their truck.

  Kraft called out from his left.

  “I see mortar rounds,” she said.

  Slebodnik did not see them. He swung the Kiowa around again. “I am going to go by low and slow,” he said, and asked Kraft to lean back and shield herself behind the vertical armor plate along the left-side door. “Stay in a protective posture,” he said. “I don’t want you to get shot in the face.”

  As they drew close to the truck, Kraft pointed. “Over there,” she said.

  Slebodnik saw them: three long, dark green projectiles spaced in a row about eight or ten feet apart. They were in a ditch by the pickup truck’s front end and aiming southeast—directly at the American base.

  “Those aren’t mortars, they’re rockets,” he said.

  Rockets fired at Balad often were rigged to timers that launched ordnance only after the men who emplaced them were safely gone, at no risk of being hit by return fire. These men had been far along in their task when the Kiowas happened upon them. Slebodnik radioed to the second Kiowa that the men in black were combatants and could be engaged. He turned the nose of his Kiowa toward where they had fled, to join in.

  The other aircraft opened fire.