The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  The men bolted. Slebodnik was positioned for a good view and a clear shot as his Kiowa bore down. He depressed the button on the cyclic, firing a long burst while swinging the aircraft’s nose and sweeping bullets from the second man toward the first, the way a wet brush, if whipped, will sling an arc of paint.

  The second man tripped. Slebodnik could not tell whether bullets had struck him.

  The first man stopped in mid-stride and crashed hard; Kraft saw that his back seemed to have been torn open by a .50-caliber round.

  The gun run carried them past the pair. Slebodnik came around for a second pass.

  The wounded man rolled in the dirt.

  Slebodnik fired more bursts. The man stopped moving.

  Pilots in the other Kiowa radioed to say that they could not find the man in gray. They turned for the truck.

  Slebodnik followed. He made a first pass with the machine gun, then wheeled around and attacked with 2.75-inch rockets. The first rocket was long. The second struck to the truck’s right. The third was a direct hit, impacting where the pickup bed met the cab.

  He yelled. Kraft was yelling, too.

  As quickly as it had begun, it was over. Slebodnik and Kraft flew past the truck a last time. Their helicopter was in a condition pilots call Winchester: out of machine-gun ammunition. Both aircraft needed gas. They left the engagement area behind.

  The pickup truck was smoldering, sending smoke into the air.

  Slebodnik was trembling when he shut down the aircraft at the base. He shouted again with satisfaction and joy.

  He had killed an enemy combatant. He had been in the Army eighteen years and felt like a true soldier at last. And it was more than a kill: They had caught a rocket team in the act of setting up ordnance, and stopped an imminent threat. He may have saved American lives.

  As more information circulated from other units that visited the field, he heard that after the Kiowa team had left, the man in gray tried to return to the damaged truck. A pair of Apache gunships caught him there and killed him. A ground patrol found the bodies of all three of the men and recovered the rockets.

  That night, still charged with energy, Slebodnik went looking for Kraft, who had spent the hours thinking about what had passed. She felt no sorrow for the men they had shot and had no doubts about how the team had acted; their actions fell well within the mission and the rules. But she had been wondering about the people the dead men had left behind. “I feel bad for their families,” she told Slebodnik. “Why did they do that to their families? They did not just sacrifice themselves. They sacrificed their families.”

  Slebodnik was unmoved. Those men had pointed rockets at a base where thousands of American soldiers, including him and Kraft, lived and worked. They made choices and lost. He sat down and wrote home, sharing with Tanja a detailed account. “Today I killed a man,” he began. He had trained for a moment that at last had played out in front of his windscreen. There was nothing to doubt. “My only real thoughts,” he wrote later, “have been how could I have done it better to get all 3.”

  “I am,” he wrote, “an American soldier.”

  * * *

  Slebodnik had few chances to repeat the flight. Later in December he was reassigned for much of the winter to liaison duty, which required him to work from an operations center coordinating flights for Special Forces missions. He was bored and angry, and lobbied to be returned to the cockpit. He groused to Tanja and sent emails to his senior officers, pleading to be sent back to the action.

  He was granted his wish in March and was soon flying missions again.

  The morning of March 21 began with the familiar routine. Slebodnik and Kraft were on a reconnaissance mission before dawn, checking roads and scouting for signs of the insurgents. Just before sunrise they passed over Muqdadiyah, a city of about 300,000 people just southwest of Forward Operating Base Normandy along the Diyala River, a tributary that feeds the Tigris. They looked in on the governor’s residence. They saw nothing of interest. The city felt quiet. Low on fuel, the aircraft headed to Normandy for gas, flying over farmland.

  The sun was rising. The pilots stowed their night-vision goggles.

  Only one soldier had come out to assist the aircraft at the refueling station. In the trail aircraft, Chief Warrant Officer Lori Hill waited while Slebodnik and Kraft filled up, with Kraft standing beside the aircraft on fire guard while Slebodnik sat at the controls.

  One of the radios became noisy with chatter. The compound in Muqdadiyah used by the joint coordination center, where the local police and Iraqi and American officials worked together on projects, was under attack. An American infantry patrol in the city was alone and under fire, possibly trapped.

  Slebodnik waved his arms at Kraft.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  “Ground guys are pinned down,” he shouted. “We need to get gas and go!”

  Slebodnik and Kraft finished topping off. Time was pressing. The radio reports were saying the attack in Muqdadiyah was complex, and the patrol was small—only two Bradleys from the First Squadron of the Thirty-Second Cavalry Regiment—and under heavy fire. Muqdadiyah was not far, about three miles away. Hill opted to leave before her tank was full.

  The two aircraft lifted off, cleared Normandy’s outer wall, and gathered speed, heading southwest. It was 6:00 A.M. The light was getting bright. They needed only minutes to reach the soldiers calling for help.

  Slebodnik had flown about halfway when gunfire encased them.

  Red tracers streaked past the windscreen in tight, consistent lines, like machine guns, not rifles. He heard the crack of bullets going by and felt the metallic thunk of other bullets strike his aircraft.

  Hill’s voice sounded over the radio.

  “Mike, you’re getting shot at!” she said.

  From his left side Kraft was yelling, too. “Break right!” she shouted.

  Slebodnik turned so abruptly that Kraft thought one of the Kiowa’s four rotors might have snapped. There was an explosion. A rocket-propelled grenade projectile had burst in the air nearby. Slebodnik sorted through multiple thoughts, beginning with surprise. What are they doing here? he wondered. We aren’t near the grid yet.

  Kraft was rushing through an assessment. The gunfire had been thick and come up at them from multiple firing points in an L-shaped formation. She recognized what was happening. Whoever was attacking the joint coordination center in Muqdadiyah had set a trap for reinforcements.

  This looks pretty organized, she thought. This is not some farmer.

  Slebodnik had laid the aircraft hard over to right and was still taking their Kiowa through the turn. The motion swung Kraft up in the air, above him, to his left. She heard the torque indicator alarm bonging and thought: What damage have the bullets done? Looking down, she could see Slebodnik’s lips moving as he held the turn. He was mumbling a prayer. She wondered: Last rites?

  She marveled at how much she could see and think at once, as if time had slowed or her mind had sped up.

  We’re going to die, she thought.

  The trail aircraft opened fire with the .50-caliber machine gun and broke right, too, following Slebodnik’s lead. The ambushers missed with another rocket-propelled grenade. A bullet struck the second Kiowa as it flew through the gunfire. It passed up into the aircraft, stopping about three inches behind the left seat, near the back of First Lieutenant Kevin White, who was flying with Hill.

  The multifunction displays in Hill and White’s aircraft, one in front of each pilot, briefly went dead.

  Slebodnik eased out from the turn and leveled off.

  They were clear, out of range. He turned north to regroup. Alarms sounded. His mast-mounted sight had gone blank; either it or one of its cables had been hit. The AC and DC generators were off-line. The cockpit display indicators told the two pilots that they were now on battery power. Hydraulic fluid leaked in the cockpit.

  A helicopter without hydraulics cannot fly long.

  Hill and White caught up. Sleb
odnik was talkative, awash in the wonder of being alive.

  “I may have been praying back there,” he said to Kraft.

  “You were definitely praying,” Kraft shot back.

  He had choices to make. According to the alarms, the helicopters should return to base. They did not have many minutes to fly. But the two Bradleys—a small patrol led by a lieutenant using the call sign Rock 16—were a short distance to the south.

  Slebodnik was the senior pilot. “The aircraft is still flying,” he said to Kraft. “We can support those ground guys. Do you agree?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Take your M4 out, because I can’t protect you on the left side,” he said.

  Kraft lifted the carbine and fastened it to herself with a carabiner. She was ready to fire out the left door as Slebodnik maneuvered. The carabiner would keep the rifle attached if he turned again as he had minutes before.

  Low to the earth, just above the farmers’ fields, Slebodnik chose another route toward Muqdadiyah and headed for the trapped grunts.

  The attack on Muqdadiyah, large in scale and well prepared, was rife with betrayal and plans for fratricide, a marker of the bitter and confusing war that had sprung up around the American occupation. Earlier that morning, as the sun was about to rise, the helicopters had flown over the participants’ final arrangements. The joint coordination center’s compound held a courthouse, a jail, and a station for the Iraqi police. At 4:30 A.M. Muqdadiyah’s mayor, who was a member of a prominent Sunni political party, vacated the compound with his bodyguards, leaving the area to be attacked by darkness. An hour and fifteen minutes later the militant raid began, with gunmen opening fire from three nearby buildings. One building was the local headquarters of the same party as the mayor; another was the home of the deputy governor, also a party member.

  Outside the city, hovering above the fields, Slebodnik checked his map, planning the angle at which he would approach. Kraft and White were trying to raise Rock 16 on the radio. Slebodnik looked north and saw a burning police truck.

  The two helicopters flew toward the truck and were fired upon, this time from a tree line. Slebodnik rolled the aircraft to the right and fired. Hill passed him on his left. He had flown days without finding insurgents. Now they were everywhere. As he opened fire, the Kiowa was directly above a farmer standing in the field with a shovel. The burst startled Kraft. She shouted and slapped him on his left thigh. Slebodnik laughed.

  He turned south. He was shaking. He did not know why.

  He held up a hand to show Kraft.

  “I’m scared,” he said, but wondered if he meant it. Machine gunners were hiding in the approaches to Muqdadiyah, trying to shoot the little helicopters down. Maybe he was just excited.

  Hill and White radioed to say they could see smoke rising from the compound. Hill thought the American soldiers would be nearby. Slebodnik headed that way, through more gunfire they ignored.

  At the city’s edge, the pilots reached Rock 16 over the radio. He said his patrol was under fire. The Bradleys had left their base before sunrise on a counter-IED patrol, an assignment to search roads for bombs, and had not been expecting to fight. Each vehicle had only one soldier in the rear troop compartment, leaving the patrol leader, First Lieutenant Chris Hume, with no forces to dismount and maneuver. The attack did not seem intended for them, but they had tried driving to the center’s aid and been stopped by gunfire.

  Slebodnik asked Rock 16 to protect him with covering fire as he bumped up high to have a look. The Kiowa climbed.

  He saw a white building below, surrounded by concrete walls. Vehicles burned within; there was no one to fire upon. He broke right, just as more machine guns sounded below. Tracers streaked past, and he heard the crack of bullets again, and felt the impact on the aircraft as the Kiowa was struck once more. Behind him, Hill opened fire.

  Someone from the Bradleys called on the radio. The helicopters had surprised the attackers around the building, who had shifted fire off the American ground troops.

  “You’re being shot!” Kraft heard. “You’re driving them away.”

  “Get out of there!” she answered. “That’s your opportunity to go.”

  A female voice cut in on another radio frequency, a growl tinged with surprise. Kraft heard its urgency and pain.

  Slebodnik asked if the trail aircraft had been hit.

  Hill did not answer. Slebodnik turned his head and saw Hill was still flying. Her aircraft looked intact.

  Lieutenant White’s voice sounded on the net. “We took some fire,” he said. “We’ll see you on the other side.”

  Hill’s voice followed his. She said she had tried following Slebodnik and climbed, but their aircraft had been hit again. Now she was flying low over the buildings, a dangerous move in a city swarming with gunmen. But their Kiowa was damaged. She had no choice.

  Slebodnik lost sight of her aircraft in the smoke but understood they were heading back. He followed and cleared the city, then passed out over the cropland.

  Kraft was trying to get his attention. She had been watching indicator lights in the cockpit displays. One stack of lights had fallen from green to red and then to empty. It was the transmission fluid level. A blue light glowed, indicating the gauge was working. There was no pressure to measure.

  “Mike, we’ve lost all transmission fluid,” she said.

  He did not answer.

  She raised her voice.

  “Mike,” she repeated, “we lost all of our transmission fluid.”

  He smelled the leaking fluid now. They were a few miles from Normandy, flying on residual lubrication. They might make it before the transmission seized up. But they might not. He dropped the aircraft lower, within thirty feet of the ground, and decelerated. At that altitude and speed, if the transmission froze, they would have a better chance of surviving the crash.

  The other Kiowa was flying the same way. He caught up and passed it.

  Landing without hydraulics is difficult. Hovering is nearly impossible and flight controls become stiff. Slebodnik landed first, a running landing. He and Kraft stepped out from their Kiowa and saw Hill and White coming in behind. Both were at the controls, fighting the aircraft. They flew through a gap in the trees around the base so as not to have to climb, cleared the outer wall by inches, and landed just behind them. Expertly, Slebodnik thought.

  Hill staggered out her helicopter’s right door and fell to the ground.

  Slebodnik did not understand. Neither did Hill. She had felt an object slam into her foot as she flew, which caused her to growl in pain as bullets hit her aircraft and tracers zipped by. She thought perhaps something had been knocked loose in the front of the aircraft.

  Slebodnik and Kraft ran to her. She sat up, clutching her right ankle in pain. Blood dripped from a hole in the bottom of her boot.

  “Lori, your heel is leaking,” Slebodnik said.

  Now she knew what had happened. “I got shot,” she answered.III

  The bullet had passed through the sole of her foot and exited through her ankle. They pulled off her boot and rolled away her bloody sock, revealing a foot streaked in blood. “At least I painted my toenails,” Hill said.

  Slebodnik had forgotten his camera. He borrowed hers, took several photos of the wound, and helped Hill to the operations center, where they called for a medevac.

  He talked by radio with a pair of Apache pilots, to direct them to the fight at Muqdadiyah, where Lieutenant Hume’s patrol was still fighting to relieve the besieged coordination center. Then he called his headquarters, seeking a maintenance officer from Balad to fly to Normandy and begin the repairs on the two shot-up Kiowas by the refueling point. He was frustrated. He paced, as if caged. He wanted to get back to the battle down the road. It was 6:30 A.M. Only thirty minutes had passed since they set off for Muqdadiyah, and he was a cavalryman with nothing to ride.

  Both Kiowas were repaired by the evening, and at 5:00 P.M. Slebodnik and Kraft flew the short hop back to Balad and
headed to the Alpha Troop area. Other pilots told them that Hill was going to be okay. The brigade commander, a colonel, congratulated them and suggested that the four pilots on his team had followed the traditions of the Army’s cavalry, pushing into uncertainty to help their own, and should be commended for judgment, valor, and skill. Slebodnik was annoyed. He felt he had not done enough. There had been so many insurgents out there, in the tree lines, fields, and city, and they had been shot up and forced to turn away.

  Reinforcements from Forward Operating Base Normandy had at last reached Muqdadiyah, and with Lieutenant Hume’s patrol the ground units pushed through the last of the resistance. Once the Americans reached the compound, they understood the militants’ motives. They had raided the place to free captured fighters from the jail. Some of the police inside survived by barricading themselves in a building. But the attackers killed as many as twenty Iraqis and freed thirty-three inmates before vanishing into the city and countryside.

  Slebodnik felt tired. He had managed to fly the broken helicopter, empty of transmission fluid, back to base. He had seen masterful flying by Hill. But Hill had been wounded, and the insurgents, moving almost openly in their safe haven in the Diyala River valley, had replenished their ranks. It had been the most intense mission of his career. He had a message to send to Tanja.

  Down safe.

  * * *

  I. A chain gun is a machine gun that uses a chain driven by external energy, as from an electric motor, to cycle ammunition through the weapon.

  II. Sergeant First Class Cashe was awarded a Silver Star. Several of his former commanders have nominated him for a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest and most prestigious valor award.

  III. For her actions on this flight, Chief Warrant Officer Hill was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in October 2006.

  Voters elected a Parliament in Afghanistan in the late summer of 2005, seating many former or active warlords in a process that lent them and the government a degree of official authority. But the Taliban was regrouping, attacking American forces more frequently and with more vigor than in any year since the war began, and using an increasing numbers of improvised bombs. The American force remained under 20,000 troops, about one-seventh the size of the force in Iraq, and faced enemies who found sanctuary in Pakistan. Fighting and terrorist attacks in Iraq continued apace. Afghan and Iraqi security units, which the Pentagon was trying to recruit and deploy into areas where government authority was weak, were disorganized, underequipped, and prone to brutality and sectarian loyalties. In the United States, career officers and noncommissioned officers were realizing the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq would likely dominate their professional lives. The United States was mired in two wars, with no clear path out of either.