On top of that, hypoxia is beginning to set in. Hypoxia occurs most often above ten thousand feet in people who haven’t been acclimatized. It’s a state of oxygen deficiency in the body’s tissues that causes impairment of function. The symptoms vary from person to person, are slow to develop but are progressive, and worst of all, are insidious. Intellectual impairment is an early sign, making it improbable that an individual can comprehend his own disability. According to the Mountain Flying Bible, “in later stages of hypoxia, thinking is slow, calculations are unreliable, memory is faulty, judgment is poor and reaction time is delayed.” It’s not a condition that bodes well for assisting with their own rescue, and fighting off the enemy if it should come to that.
While the PJs weren’t immune to the effects of the high altitude, Nicholas feels they tolerated it better than the aircrew. “I was paired up with Ken [Curtis] for the movement south for that seven miles. He was leading and I was navigating right behind. We were the first two people out. At that hole-up site, I was sitting next to him. We had a long discussion about where he’s from. I can’t remember exactly, but it was up north where there’s snow, so he felt like he was at home. He seemed like he was enjoying himself, to be honest with you. The PJs were very professional and did an outstanding job.”
The condition of Gee, the interpreter, was the greatest cause for concern. He was in significant pain, but they didn’t dare give him morphine or any other drugs the PJs carry to battle pain. Forrest says, “The main thing is you don’t want to knock this guy out. We’ve got to hike seven miles, and we’re kind of looking at him for his input on what he thinks and what he needs. You don’t want to do morphine or some other type of drug because it’s more designed for someone in a controlled atmosphere where, ‘All right, I can put you on the litter and I’m going to carry you.’ Well, sorry, I don’t have a litter, and we’re going to be having arms over shoulders, and that’s how we were actually walking that last quarter or half mile before we said we need to take a break and regroup—Gee was in the middle, hanging on to the shoulders of two of the healthy guys, trying to walk.”
It is becoming increasingly apparent to the mission commander that with their physical conditions deteriorating, a seven-mile hike is out of the question. That’s when he sends a radio message to the pilot of Knife 04, telling him their GPS coordinates, their altitude, and that this is going to have to be the spot.
The response is encouraging: “Looks like we can probably try to do the rescue, but we’re waiting for the weather to clear a little bit more before we come in.”
At this point, the guys who aren’t injured are given security assignments, and everyone prepares to sit it out for an hour or so. Optimism returns. Help is on the way.
But so are the locals.
Nicholas says, “We got compromised again. The weather getting better was negative, so to speak. They acquired us again and they started yelling and screaming and shining flashlights at us when they were still several hundred yards away.”
The last thing this crew wanted was a firefight. In fact, earlier they’d been asked by pilots in the F/A-18s about blowing up the wrecked helicopter, and Forrest said absolutely not. “We don’t start the fight. We don’t want to start a fight. And whether it’s a bomb dropping or us taking a shot, once the fight starts, all bets are off. So we didn’t want to have any of that.”
As far as they knew, only residents of the small village nearby were aware of the crash. But there were several other villages on other ridgelines, a mile or two away. If the jets had bombed the wreckage, everyone would know that something was going on, and in Nicholas’s opinion, they would have been compromised and it would have jeopardized any rescue attempt.
His concern wasn’t that they weren’t able to defend themselves. Unlike a fighter pilot who bails out with a 9mm pistol and nothing more, the crew had their rifles and sidearms, and were lugging a significant amount of ammunition. “We’re eleven quite well-armed guys roaming on the ground here, and they don’t know who we are. And it took them by as much surprise as it took us. So when these guys show up, our main thing is we just want to keep it nice and calm.”
This is when the decision not to give their interpreter, Gee, any morphine begins to make a whole lot of sense.
“We’re talking to Gee, and he’s trying to figure out what they’re saying. He says, ‘They want to come talk,’ and we’re basically telling him, ‘No! Just tell them to go away. We mean them no harm. Go away!’ ”
Then things begin to get dicey. Two of the Afghans move down from the ridge they’d been on and start coming toward the crash survivors. They make it to the bottom of the hill, and then a third man comes down. Nicholas recalls it in vivid detail. “The third guy kept his distance. It looked like a bad drug deal, y’know? The guy stands off in the back, guarding everything, while his other guys go up to do the talking and negotiations.”
Tension rises as the first two men come within shouting distance. The Americans don’t want to shoot, and they know that talking is going to be difficult for Gee, since he is still in extreme pain from the injury to his back. Nevertheless, he puts down his weapon and struggles to his feet, then climbs on top of the bunker-type hill they’ve been hiding behind, and begins talking.
Captain Nicholas had high praise for what he did. “The professionalism he displayed that day was immense. He worked it to where there wasn’t a firefight, and no lives were lost.”
Forrest concurs. “Without [Gee’s language] capability, about the only thing we would’ve been able to do is fire a shot to say, ‘Go away.’ Are they going to take that as a warning shot, or are they going to take that as a missed shot, and the fight’s on? The shooting would have had to start just to be able to say, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re just too close. You gotta go away.’ ’Cause we can’t let those guys approach us.”
While the talking is going on, eight gun barrels are pointed at the interlopers, but Jamie Clark is moving from man to man, urging them not to shoot, to wait and see if they’re armed and what they want. Nicholas had a set of binoculars in his hit-and-run bag that he gave to the other PJ, but he can’t tell if the men have weapons. A couple of the survivors still have their night-vision goggles, and they, too, can’t tell if the men Gee was talking with are armed. It was an uncertainty that would continue to concern them as the night wore on.
Forrest feels that when Gee began speaking the local language, it confused the two men. They couldn’t figure out just who it was they were talking to. “Anything we can do to keep a low profile, keep these guys guessing, where are we? Who are we? What are we? Is it a bad guy? Maybe it’s one of their local helicopters that crashed? Who knows what? The idea is to keep as low a signature as possible, no lights, nothing. We just want to let them think it’s a normal night, they heard a lot of banging and go back to sleep.” Whatever it was that Gee said, it worked. The locals, apparently friendlies, walked away.
Then the crew is given another reason for optimism: the weather is clearing up. From total cloud cover and low light, it would go to 100 percent illumination as the moon broke through the clouds, lighting up the valley. Forrest, who was dealing with a lot of pain and an early stage of hypoxia, says he remembers that while they were walking, they suddenly thought they saw automobile headlights in front of them. The headlights turned out to be the moon shining across the valley.
It is while they are waiting to get word when Knife 04 will be ready to try to pick them up that they begin pondering whether or not the helicopter will have enough power to evacuate all eleven men. That helicopter already has nine people on board, and everyone knows how power-limited the MH-53s are at that altitude.
Nicholas says, “Frank and Jamie had a talk about who would go, who would stay, and that’s a sickening feeling when you know two guys are sitting on the side, talking about the fate of your life. Are you going to be a chosen one, or are you going to stay behind? I tell you the truth, I wasn’t injured, and I’m thinking, ‘Shit, this
sucks. How can I break my leg? I can get out of here.’
“They came back and said, ‘aircrew’s going and the team’s going to stay,’ which sucks for them.” The team is the trio of special tactics operators—the two PJs and the combat controller.
“We were trying to get a message back to Lieutenant Mike in the other helicopter,” says Forrest. “We were trying to get the answer to ‘What can you pick up? What’s realistic?’ And the unfortunate problem was, we had to go through the fighter guys, who then went over another relay net, trying to talk back to our helicopter. So the translation didn’t go through too well.
“But our main thing was, if he comes in and he’s power-limited—the first thing was if you can only get one or two guys out, what do we do? If you can only get a few more guys out, what do you do? And Jamie was the first one to say, ‘I’ll tell you what, boss, there ain’t no way I’m going out of here. I’m trained for this. I know how to do this stuff. If anybody’s going to have to walk their way out, that’s what we’re going to do.’ ”
The credo “That Others May Live” had just kicked in, and Forrest recognized it. “From the days when I was in rescue, I had a PJ that I knew from Vietnam who jumped off a helicopter because they were so power-limited they couldn’t get out of an LZ. He jumped out and wound up walking out of Vietnam. It took him six days to get out. These guys realize that they’re the best-trained, best-equipped person in the world to do their job.
“And then it was, ‘Okay, who are the first guys out?’ You get the injuries out, ’cause you’re our gimps. You’re the guys who’re going to slow the rest of us down. The hard part was, me being one of the injured, I didn’t like having to say that, yeah, I’m gonna be one of the guys out. I’m also going to be the guy who’s going to get these guys killed if I try to stay with them. And Gee, he was our number one, we gotta get him out of here. We’d love to have the language skill, but he’s just too injured, he’s too hurt.”
One way to make it possible to get another one or two bodies on the helicopter was to dump gear. At the same time, it allowed them to make sure that any supplies that might be of use to the men left on the ground were given to them. The stay-behind bag held food, ammo, water, radio batteries, and warm clothing.
The PJ team leader had spotted Nicholas’s backpack and claimed it to carry the supplies. But first, the copilot had to empty it, which was a bit like emptying a magic Christmas bag—the more you take out of it, the more it seems to hold. “I had everything from snakebite kits, aspirin, bandages, flashlights, fire starters, lighters, matches, candles, extra signaling mirrors, an extra GPS.”
To each item that he pulls out, the PJ team leader is saying, “No, no, no.” Then Nicholas says, “Well, I got an ax. You want an ax? He’s like, ‘You ain’t got no fuckin’ ax.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I got an ax.’ He says, ‘Good, then dig a hole with that ax and bury everything.’ ”
This is all taking place only about thirty minutes prior to the scheduled pickup by Knife 04. Except for concern that the STS team is going to be left on the ground, things are looking up. They’re hearing on one of the radios that the helicopter is heading off to get some gas before coming in to try the rescue. It’s in the midst of this rising euphoria that Gee goes into shock and collapses.
Meantime, the combat controller has left their hiding place and gone out in the middle of the nearby field to mark the landing site. Realizing that they’re all going to have to cross a little ridge and a stream to get there, the rest of the group follows, with Abe and Nicholas helping Gee walk between them, very slowly and gingerly. The object is to get Gee as close as possible to where the helicopter would be directed to land by the CCT, and they have nearly completed the journey when someone asks, “What if the helicopter balls it in?” That’s Air Force jargon for crashing on landing, as in “going down in a fireball.”
The thrust of the question is that they all realize the helicopter has one shot at making the landing. An acceptable batting average in this game is not .300. Only perfect will do. That’s because landing a helicopter at this altitude requires a gradual reduction in speed; once the aircraft is below a certain speed, it’s committed to the landing. There’s no way to ramp up power and fly out of it. It truly is a controlled crash.
Making the landing even dicier is that it will be done in full whiteout conditions. That means that as the helo gets between roughly 100 and 150 feet off the ground—one and a half to two rotor diameters—the downward thrust of air beneath it will hit the ground, causing the snow to billow up, completely obscuring the ground, eliminating any chance of maintaining a visual on a horizon, and filling the entire aircraft cabin, including the cockpit. Under those conditions, anything can happen, including an extreme bank angle resulting in a total loss of lift and that rapid elevator ride down to the ground.
Once the vision of that possibility made the rounds, the wisdom of moving well back from the intended landing site becomes apparent. It is at that moment that Clark notices that Gee still has his Helicopter Emergency Egress Device attached to his flight suit. The HEEDS bottle is sort of a miniature scuba tank, filled with enough air to give an aviator a minute or two to escape from a ditched helicopter and swim up to the surface. While it doesn’t contain pure oxygen, the gas within it is certainly richer than the air they were breathing. Sure enough, after the PJ has Gee take a couple of puffs, some color comes back into his face. That’s when Forrest realizes that he, too, still has his HEEDS bottle. He pulls it out and hands it off to Nicholas, who at that point is quite literally falling to the ground with what was probably hypoxia-related exhaustion. After a few puffs, Forrest says the copilot seemed to just snap awake. “It was, like, ‘Hi, guys, where you been?’ ”
Once again, a momentary euphoric high was crushed by reality. Knife 04 came in, flew over them, and left. “The worst feeling in the world,” says Forrest, “is you’ve been waiting and waiting for somebody to come in and save you, and the guy comes, he flies over, and he flies away. And you feel very lonely at that point.”
Had they still had their wits about them, they would have understood what Lieutenant Mike was doing. But all the guys on the ground can think is, “Where is he? What’s happening?” During what had to be the longest five minutes of their lives, they can barely hear Knife 04 and certainly can’t see him. Everyone at that point has the same wish: They just want him to come in and get their asses out of Dodge. They’re tired, they’re cold, and they’re ready to go home.
Finally, Knife 04 comes back. Forrest has vivid memories of the scene. “It’s kind of weird when you watch it landing, ’cause all of a sudden you see him come in, and then the whiteout cloud comes over him. It was kind of like back before the crash, where we’re flying and the one second he’s there, and the next second he’s not. The snow envelops him, and your best sense at this point is your ears. You’re just waiting to hear the sounds you want to hear, and that was the engines winding down as he lets out the power, sounds that meant he didn’t crash.”
Not only didn’t Knife 04 crash, the landing was so perfect that when the helicopter came to a stop, the combat controller who’d marked the LZ was sitting on the ground, just outside the rotor path. It was so close that Forrest says it scared the hell out of Jamie Clark, who saw his CCT suddenly disappear in a snow cloud, and thought that he was about to be landed on.
Air Force PJs have certain, secret authentication procedures they’re supposed to go through when approaching downed aircrew. The purpose is to prevent the enemy from pretending to be the downed pilot they’ve homed in on, and then attacking the rescuers. At a minimum the procedures require that the survivor know the correct password and display some form of official identification. Rules are rules, and this is one that’s important to the very survival of rescue personnel.
Nevertheless, with eleven survivors to authenticate and uncertainty as to the whereabouts of the curious locals, the PJs on the incoming aircraft came running off the tail ramp, took one look at the g
roup of guys they’d been living with at Jacobabad, and dispensed with a request for identification authenticator code words, saying instead, “Get your asses on the helicopter; we’re leaving.”
It turned out that when they’d flown over the site they were able to measure its precise altitude with both barometric and radar altimeters, and to record the ambient temperature. With those numbers plugged into the flight engineer’s computer, along with their weight, they were able to calculate how much fuel they’d have to dump in order to land, take everyone on board, and have enough power to take off. They had also matched up the LZ they could see through their NVGs with information the PJs on the ground had passed along as far as precise GPS coordinates, size, suitability, and shape of the pickup site.
With two of the rescuees carrying Gee, all eleven begin climbing aboard, most of them moving as far forward as possible, finding space on the floor to settle in for takeoff. The last to board are their PJs, Staff Sergeants Jamie Clark and Ken Curtis.
Now comes what Maj. Peter Forrest describes as the second scariest moment of his life. “Mike pulls into the hover, and in all honesty we’re doing some high-fives there, and then as he pulls in, trying to get the power, you could hear the helicopter groaning.”
The survivors who were celebrating didn’t hear the grinding, but those crewmembers who heard it could tell that the pilot was pulling every ounce of energy he could out of that helicopter and wound up getting only about five feet of altitude.
Lying on the floor of Knife 04, Frank recalls, “I was fairly filled with dread, because I didn’t know if they were going to get off the ground. And then he starts pulling power and I can hear the same sounds I heard hours before when I was crashing. There were a couple of guys celebrating, and I just looked at them and thought, ‘Oh, fuck,’ and I had actually put my head down to brace for impact, thinking, ‘Jesus, there’s no way out now.’ ” Frank acknowledges that by that time, he was emotionally drained. What he’d been through in the past several hours was just beginning to hit him. All he wanted to do now was believe that everything would work out.
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