Forrest, on the other hand, could observe what was going on, and had a few moments to plan for impact. “I had enough time to look and to realize, just listening. They’re flying, so I’m just shutting up and listening, but once you realize what’s going to happen—my idea was to lie as flat as possible, ’cause I’m actually sitting on the floor of the helicopter in the back. My idea is to just lie down and hopefully take the impact.”
He was on the floor, about five feet forward of the tail gunner. “One of the things that kind of went through my mind is, when helicopters crash, pieces go all over the place, so I’m going to get as small and as low as I can, so hopefully I don’t have pieces going through me.”
The last thing he remembers seeing out the ramp is the ridge they just crossed, watching it go to a sixty-degree bank and shouting, “What the hell?” He saw the tail gunner turn around and look, and then they hit.
“And you literally get the elevator ride. You can feel the G kind of give out from underneath you, and you’re just waiting for the moment. And I can remember literally watching the tail strike, and then, boom! Everything’s kind of getting bounced around from the back end there.
“About two seconds before the crash, I can still remember my thoughts, verbatim: ‘Holy shit, I’m about to crash. Holy shit, I am crashing. Holy shit, I’m alive.’ ”
One thing that kept him alive is that not one of the helicopter’s five rotor blades—each one thirty-four feet long—hit the ground. That was due to incredible airmanship on the part of the pilot, since he was able to maintain enough control to level the helo, keeping it upright on impact. The other element that worked to minimize the damage was that even though the cockpit flight engineer’s seat broke on impact, Tech Sergeant Abe was able to reach up from the floor to the overhead switches and chop the throttles off, then get the emergency rotor brake on. Otherwise, Nicholas says they would have acted “like a Weed Eater gone crazy.” The blades would have hit the ground, and with all the torque from the pair of 4,330-horsepower engines at full power, the helicopter would have flipped and been chewed apart.
Even if the blades hadn’t touched, but one wheel had hit first, they would have flipped, and the whole aircraft would have twisted over and torn itself to bits.
Forrest explains, “She has so much torque that the tail twisted a full ninety degrees. When it hit, the back end crushed, the tail had bent forty-five, forty-five, and forty-five if you’re looking at it in a three-dimensional axis. It looked like a crushed beer can in the back. Objects were flinging all over the place. I can remember hearing the transmission shaft go under the back, just bumping on the top of the helicopter as it was slowly winding down when Abe shut things down.”
Now, each of the eleven men on Knife 03 had come to a rational understanding that he’d survived the impact. There was a lot of yelling and screaming at each other at the time, but that was because most of the crew didn’t realize they still had their earplugs in and their helmets on. Forrest says, “My realization was all of a sudden, I think it was the pilot, Frank, yelling at me, saying, ‘Take off your helmet, you idiot.’ ”
Up front, the two pilots, Frank and Captain Nicholas, are both in good shape. Nicholas says, “I guess those crashworthy seats the Air Force invested in worked out pretty well. I’m in good shape up front. Frank’s in good shape.” All they can see on each other are some relatively minor bumps and bruises.
Frank involuntarily allows himself a personal millisecond. “The first thing I thought about was my family. I’m not going to see my wife Meredith and I won’t see my son Frankie again. Second thing I thought was, ‘Maybe I can still take off.’ That was a one-second fantasy. The last thing was, ‘Oh, shit! What has just happened? We’re now on the ground.’ ”
It was where on the ground they were that was fortunate. Long after the fact, Frank realized that if they’d crashed another fifty yards farther, or fifty yards to the east, the aircraft would have gone down a steep embankment and would have ended up upside down—or worse. “The fact that we hit where we did was just unbelievably lucky, and the fact that we couldn’t fly out was lucky. We would have been completely in the weather if I’d been able to fly out of it, and probably impacted the opposite side of the valley, which was only a half mile away.”
While the cockpit crew is checking each other and coming to the realization that they’re alive, the mission commander has discovered that the tail gunner is missing. One second he sees him—they call him Daisy—on the ramp behind his gun; the next second he was gone. Forrest says, “It’s one of those funny things—time stands still. As we’re hitting, getting thrown around, the back end of the helicopter went from about six feet high to about a foot high on the back right. I thought Daisy was crushed underneath the tail, ’cause the tail was now resting on his fifty-cal.”
After taking mere seconds to realize that he’s alive and lucky to be so, the copilot starts trying to make more Mayday calls, but when the generators aren’t running, that particular radio doesn’t work. He begins shouting at Abe to get his transmitter working on the UHF “guard” frequency—the one that’s monitored by all military aircraft in the area for just such an event.
What they have no way of knowing at that moment is that the original Mayday call had been heard, but not by the other helicopter. The fighters they had asked for at the beginning of the sortie, Navy F/A-18 Hornets, were to come on station thirty minutes prior to their landing to pick up the survivor, and then escort them out. The jets had arrived just in time to hear the Mayday.
Nicholas’s instructions about the radio are interrupted on the intercom by the pilot, who tells everybody to check in. Quickly, the two pilots and Abe check in, followed by the left and right gunners. Forrest’s comm box had been destroyed in the crash, but they knew he was alive. They don’t, however, hear from Daisy or any of the STS guys, the two PJs, the combat controller, or their interpreter. What immediately goes through Nicholas’s mind is a crash a few years earlier at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, in which a tail gunner perished. Everyone knows that he’s the most vulnerable person on the crew, sitting way back out on the tail ramp.
That’s when the other flight engineer tells the pilot, “Hold on, boss; I’m going to go off comm and run to the back and get accountability for you.” Seconds later he’s back up on comm, saying, “Hey, I got accountability for everybody. We’ve got some injuries, but everyone’s alive and everyone’s still here.” He doesn’t mention the five-foot hole that’s been torn in one side of the aircraft.
Forrest, who’s in pain from “wrapping his back around a crate” on the floor during the crash, still doesn’t see the tail gunner. He’s yelling, “Where’s Daisy? Where’s Daisy?” “My mind told me, ‘he’s dead,’ and he’s standing right beside me. Finally, he hit me and told me, ‘Oh, yeah, by the way, I’m here!’ He had been thrown forward when we hit and the tail came down. He went past me, so that’s why, when I hit and looked right back at him, he wasn’t there, because he’s now on my opposite side. His gunner’s restraint was the only thing that wound up keeping him from getting tossed all the way forward in the helicopter. He wound up hitting our linguist.”
The linguist, T.Sgt. Navid Garshasb, or “Gee,” got hurt because he hadn’t caught on that they were about to crash. When Daisy came flying forward, he slammed into Gee, who was sitting sideways. The impact broke several vertebrae in Gee’s back, and when everything settled, he had the tail gunner in his lap.
With everyone accounted for, the pilot continues making Mayday calls on the guard frequency, trying to get the message out that they’re down, provide a status report, and make contact with friendlies so they can begin to work their own rescue. As the mission commander says, “Now the rescuers have become the rescuees.”
Only moments before the crash they’d flown over a village, and then over a small ridge. It had been all but forgotten in the crash. The people in back are still attempting to figure out how bad their injuries are, the PJs h
ave crawled out of the new five-foot-wide hole in the side of the helicopter and have taken the linguist outside to check his injuries, when the left gunner calls out, “Hey, we got company.” And as they turn to see whom he’s talking about, Gee says, “What’s that smell?”
The smell is fuel, leaking all over the place, pooling on the floor of the helicopter. The tanks had ruptured in the crash. Once more, the fact that the flight engineer had been able to shut down the engines quickly comes into play. Any source of flame was gone; moving parts that could generate sparks had been stopped.
That’s when most of the rest of the crew crawls through the hole. Forrest remembers the scene vividly: “We could see the guys coming, like eleven guys coming over the hill. And at that point, it’s, ‘Gather your gear, ’cause things are going to get interesting around here.’ ”
While Major Forrest is the mission commander, he clearly recognizes that the need for his expertise in flight operations had effectively ended when Knife 03 went from being a high-tech weapons system that cost $40 million, to a pile of scrap metal worth perhaps 2.2 million afghanis—about fifty bucks. The guys with the know-how to get them out of this mess are the STS team, and team leader Jamie Clark.
Seeing that the villagers—or worse—were still a couple hundred yards away, Clark begins to put his Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion (SERE) training to work and calls for the crew to break contact by leaving the helicopter and seeking shelter elsewhere. His first move is to motion the entire crew over a hill, down the other side, across a creek or two, into a stand of trees. Unfortunately, the back side of the hill would make a good black diamond ski run at Park City. It’s steep. Everyone falls down at least once, if not twice, twisting ankles in the process.
The move to the trees seemed to work. “Fortunately,” says Nicholas, “the villagers were more interested in the helicopter at that point than a foot chase, which they were going to get into if they started coming after us. Or they were going to eat some lead.”
At that point, the PJ team leader calls for them to take inventory of everything they took with them when they left the helicopter. At the same time, he wants a self-assessment of their injuries. What is it they need to worry about? What equipment do they have?
That was the moment when Forrest discovered how badly he was hurt. “When I sat down, that’s when the adrenaline kicked off, and that’s when I first realized I’d busted my back and my head. We noticed that Jamie had a pretty good cut above his eye. It was kind of funny, ’cause it looked like camouflage in the dark, but it was actually blood going down the side of his face. We knew that Gee was the most seriously injured. That we could tell right off the bat. We also find out at that point that we have one foot injury with our tail gunner.
“All of us can move, we’re mobile, but we’re not comfortable by any means, especially Gee. We knew we were going to have to work and help him out. He was in pretty severe pain.”
The next step was to deal with security. Clark had the trio who were most seriously injured remain in the center of a circle that was roughly thirty or forty yards in diameter. They had the radios. Then he began positioning each of the other survivors around the circle, sending the other PJ, Ken Curtis, and the combat controller around to make sure that each understood the field of fire he was responsible for, should they come under attack. The instructions were very precise, recalls Forrest: “All right, this is your responsibility. I want you to look from here to here; you’ve got that. And he’d walk off to the next guy and go through it again. It was quick, down and dirty. The main thing at that point is that it’s allowing you to keep your mind in the game. One of the factors was if you start worrying, and everybody starts talking, we start forgetting that we’ve still got guys that are around here who don’t like us. He did an awesome job of being able to maintain the calm, being able to give everybody a job to do.”
Nicholas concurs that Clark was very effective at keeping everyone focused on solving problems, not lamenting their situation. “It was important, because at that point the adrenaline has worn off and the pain’s starting to set in. Guys are starting to realize things, the doom-and-gloom picture, like, ‘Great, I just crashed. I’m being followed. And now I’m freezing and it’s snowing all over the place.’ By being able to say, ‘Hey, this is your job, do it,’ it got us thinking, ‘Hell, screw it. I can stay cold for a while.’ There was definitely a distribution of duties, including designated radio duty instead of eleven guys all trying to talk at the same time.”
Then Jamie Clark says, “Okay, guys, what’s our plan?”
While Major Forrest, the mission commander, had the rank, Captain Frank, the aircraft commander, had the responsibility, they both had no difficulty putting the fate of the entire crew into the hands of the PJ team leader. Frank had trained with special tactics teams, and with Jamie Clark in particular, and had absolute confidence in the PJs. “I gotta tell you, I haven’t met a PJ yet that I have had any lack of faith in. I think they do a great job of weeding people out. I just can’t express how much confidence I have in them or their training. Never a doubt at all; we’re on the ground, it’s their ballgame now; that’s where they shine. My impression of Jamie from the get-go was ‘What a great guy, level-headed, squared away.’ These guys were just awesome.”
There were very basic questions that needed answering. Where were they? They set about figuring it out on the map. Forrest says, “I remember Jamie making a comment; ‘We’re not in a good location, ’cause if I want to go look for a bunch of people hiding, I’m gonna look at the only cluster of trees around, and guess what? That’s the one we’re in.’ ”
The good news, of sorts, is that it is now snowing heavily, with visibility down to fifteen, maybe only ten feet. So even if the locals could have seen the trees, it’s not likely they will discover the crew unless they stumble into them. The temperature is obviously below freezing, which is causing a problem for several of the survivors. When they took off from Jacobabad, it was above ninety degrees, and the aircrew wasn’t wearing heavy thermal underwear beneath their Nomex fire-resistant flight suits. The STS team was dressed in the standard DCUs and was probably better prepared for the weather they now found themselves in.
Some of the aircrew had cold-weather gear in their hit-and-run bags, but weren’t able to find them when they had to quickly abandon the wreckage. Nicholas is fortunate that he does have his bag, and in it he’d packed a full set of DCUs, plus a turtleneck sweatshirt, watch cap, and Gore-Tex winter-weight gloves, all of which he put on. He gives his Gore-Tex camouflage jacket to Abe, since the flight engineer is one of those who didn’t have any extra clothing. By the time he’s re-dressed himself, two or three inches of snow have accumulated on his gear. He settles into his post with his bag in front of him, his weapon on top of that.
An early concern is making sure that the information they were transmitting about their location was accurate. They’d all heard horror stories from downed crewmen in Bosnia who transmitted the coordinates on their handheld GPS devices, only to learn later on that the instrument was wrong. Almost as soon as they left the helicopter, Nicholas fired up one of the two he’d brought with him—one personal, one squadron-issued. Moments later Clark came along and grabbed the GPS device that had been turned on so that he’d have his own and a backup when the time came to figure out where they were.
While they are unable to directly contact Knife 04, they are able to relay information to their sister ship through the Hornets orbiting high overhead. Unfortunately, the weather has gotten so bad that three times they can hear Knife 04 trying to penetrate past the ridgeline near the village, and three times he has to turn around and leave the area.
Soon after the third try, they get word on the radio from the jets that they will have to move seven miles to a suitable pickup zone. The actual message had gotten screwed up when it was relayed from Knife 04 to the jets, and then passed on to the survivors, but they don’t know that. The result is that the tiny comm
and group sucks it up and says, “Well, if we’ve got seven miles to go, we’d better get going now.” They know they aren’t in a good place to defend themselves, especially with the weather beginning to clear up.
At that point, Clark goes out and has everyone collapse into the center of the circle to be briefed. The plan is to hike down the valley they were originally going to try to fly into before the crash. They have a healthy group of survivors and an injured group. By mixing and matching, they put together groups of twos and threes that can help each other and avoid spreading out too much. And then, somewhere between one and two in the morning, they start walking. As they move out, Clark has the guys with extra clothing take some of the layers off. He knows they’ll be working up a sweat, and if they are all zipped up with no way for it to evaporate, they run a greater risk of hypothermia.
It doesn’t take too long before the PJ team leader, the pilot, and the mission commander all come to the same realization: With the injuries their people have, they’re not going to be able to go seven miles very easily. Forrest says, “I think we realized that we’re over ten thousand feet, you’re in freezing cold temperatures, you’ve got the stress of just going through a crash, and you’ve got injuries. I don’t know many healthy people out there who can go and do a nice hike at over ten thousand feet. Fatigue was setting in. In fact, I kind of got paranoid, ’cause I’m sitting there going, ‘My God, I can barely get my breath. Hell, I can’t be that far out of shape.’ Now I’m seeing the PJs, who are in awesome shape, and they’re huffing and puffing just as much, so I felt a little bit better at that point.”
The upshot is that they realize that the valley they are in at the moment is actually a pretty good pickup point. So they find another hole-up site, mainly to take care of the badly injured guys. That’s when Gee begins going into shock, and they start seeing hypothermia setting in on a few of the crew. Forrest says he was seeing “confusion, frostbite in the toes. You see a lot of the shaking going on. The cold was getting so extreme, when you say ‘bone chilling-cold,’ this was it.”
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