When Malone and Schultz made their first landing at Jbad, it was, as the aircrews are wont to say, “a bit sporty.”
“We’re going in. Boom! Chaffs and flares firing.” Malone acknowledges that firing flares does tend to reveal the position of the aircraft, and they offer no protection against anything other than heat-seeking missiles. It was, he says, “inexperience of some of the younger pilots, getting used to it. As time went on, those guys were whipping in and out of those runways. They learned the gig quick, and they adapted and overcame.”
The local indigenous population of two hundred thousand, most of them Muslim, was not especially thrilled to have Americans in their midst. In addition to the now de rigueur custom of burning the Stars and Stripes to express their displeasure shortly after Americans arrived at the base, at least one person had been shot and killed protesting the Pakistani government’s leasing more than half of their third-largest air base to the United States. Massed attacks on the facility were not a concern, according to one Air Force officer expressing an unofficial opinion, only because the locals were split into twenty or so political parties—from the control tower their flags could be seen flying in the city—that couldn’t agree on anything. Nevertheless, off-base excursions by American troops were forbidden, a precaution proved sensible less than three months later when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Karachi.
As time went by, security at Jbad was expanded beyond the immediate area of the hangar, and either the locals stopped shooting over the fence every night, or the Americans just got used to it. Since no one had been hit, it was deemed more an annoyance than a threat. Ultimately, Army infantrymen and -women from the 10th Mountain Division relieved the Marines pulling security. The grunts assumed the unenviable task of climbing into sandbagged bunkers on top of hardened aircraft shelters (HAS) and along the perimeter every night, to remain vigilant behind .50-caliber machine guns in near-freezing temperatures while under relentless attack by a strain of mosquitoes that hadn’t gotten the word about cold weather making them sluggish.
Early in Operation Enduring Freedom, American authorities had divided areas of responsibility at the thirty-fourth parallel, which essentially sliced across Afghanistan at the southern edge of Kabul. All rescue and refueling activities north of the line were flown out of K-2, the former Soviet airfield at Karshi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan. And everything south of the thirty-fourth was the responsibility of units based at Jbad. No tanker aircraft were based in Afghanistan itself. The huge field at Bagram, with its ten-thousand-foot runway, was overtaxed with helicopter and cargo plane activity, and the presence of millions of land mines and pieces of unexploded ordnance just off the tarmac made tanker operations there especially dicey. What’s more, unlike the airfields at K-2 and Jbad, Bagram was subjected to intermittent rocket attacks; using the place as a storage dump for hundreds of thousands of gallons of jet fuel was probably not a good idea.
The CSAR mission was assigned to the special-tactics squadrons of AFSOC. They had their own MH-53 Pave Low helicopters, eighty-eight-foot-long behemoths that are the largest rotary-wing aircraft in the Air Force inventory, and the special-tactics teams that included PJs and combat controllers and were trained in commando operations. They also had their own refuelers, the MC-130P Combat Shadow version of the C-130. It was just coincidence that the NCO in charge of the operation in Jbad, Sr.M.Sgt. Pat Malone, and the NCO in charge at K-2, T.Sgt. Keary Miller, were both from the Guard unit at Louisville.
On December 5, the division of labor for PJs in Operation Enduring Freedom got a bit more complicated. It happened with the entry of the Air Force’s Air Combat Command (ACC) Combat Search and Rescue units into the war. ACC CSAR units, such as the 347th Rescue Wing out of Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, flew HC-130 refueling planes and HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters, and carried PJs on both airframes. Their assignment was traditional CSAR: If a plane went down, it was their mission. The AFSOC PJs were now assigned solely to missions that were related to special operations, primarily infiltrating and exfiltrating ground teams for purposes of reconnaissance or combat. The PJs’ purpose in this configuration was to provide a rescue force that would already be on scene if needed.
In the south, the plan worked well after Malone used his rank and twenty years of rescue experience to keep his guys flying when others were arguing that they could be eliminated from helicopter missions. “Because of the altitudes that flights were going in on, and sometimes the equipment that was being carried in or personnel being carried in or out, weight limitations were becoming a concern. We were starting to run into, ‘What can we do without? In order to make a mission successful, what can we do without?’ ”
Because PJs in AFSOC were not considered part of the flight crews (as opposed to ACC, where PJs are as integral to the mission as a loadmaster might be), Malone feels it was relatively easy for commanders to say, “Okay, we’ll cut the PJs, cut the rescue team off.” That’s where he was able to speak to the flying commanders, and say, “Colonels, let’s look at the bigger picture here. You have a job to do within the job: whatever your mission is for the night, but you also have a rescue force to provide. If you start dropping your PJs, or their equipment, then you’re not providing the service you should be providing.”
The Air Force officers who were running the show in the south understood Malone’s argument. But up north, where Keary Miller was dealing with an Army-run operation, there were problems trying to keep PJs on aircraft. Malone says of the younger pararescueman, “He had a fight. The Army didn’t understand that. Army aviation didn’t always understand that. They’re Army. They have their missions, haul Army guys around and do Army stuff. ‘Rescue? Where does that register in this game?’ The answer was, it didn’t.” Malone says Miller was told to sit on the sidelines while the Army flew their mission. If something happened, they’d come back and get the PJs. “Well, in that ‘I’ll come back and get you,’ a lot of people can die, a lot of bad stuff can happen.” It’s a battle that the PJs up north continued to fight, and as would be demonstrated a couple of months later, Malone’s words were prophetic.
December 5, 2001, dawned clear and sunny. This was to be ACC’s first day standing up, pulling CSAR alert for the theater. Since they were shorthanded, Malone was planning on filling in as a jumpmaster team leader on their Herc crew. He briefed the team, and then joined them on the taxiway, checking out the alert aircraft. It was around ten A.M. local time, while he was on the plane, that Ryan Schultz came out to get him.
“Hey, got something going on. You need to come back and start coordinating.”
The original call was mortar fire, with three injured. Then it quickly jumped to seven or eight injured. Not knowing the details, Malone opted to plan big, especially once the decision was made to get the survivors in daylight, which he says was thinking way outside the box.
“I wanted to beef the crews up, rescue-guys-wise, PJs-wise, because I had a funny feeling; you just never know. I’d been on enough missions where one is twenty, or one is fifty, and it’s not eight. If you get out there and it is truly seven, no big deal. We got extra PJs; we can really tend to their needs.”
Two of his crews had flown the night before, till three or four in the morning, and were still in the mandatory twelve-hour crew rest. Ryan would fly as team leader on one of the MH-53 helicopters; Malone would fill in, joining him as a team member, along with two more pararescuemen, S.Sgt. Ryan Hall and Ken Curtis, and CCT Jason Brooks. Two PJs were assigned to the other helicopter, along with an Army doctor and one Army medic.
Malone acknowledges that “everybody’s pucker factor was pretty high; first daylight combat search and rescue mission for the south, with a firefight within half a klick.” This was going to be no ordinary mission.
Just before taking off, Schultz throws an extra accessory kit on his helicopter. It’s got extra medical supplies, bandages, IVs, extra oxygen containers. They also toss on extra litters; the latest report h
ad three dead, eight injured. Malone’s idea of planning for the worst is beginning to make sense.
The flight is going to take about two and a half hours; their destination is near the village of Shawali Kowt, about twenty-one miles north of Kandahar. It is hotly contested territory, with the forces of then warlord Hamid Karzai moving down from the north, accompanied by an American Special Forces team, and the forces of Gul Agha Sherzai, having crossed into southern Afghanistan from Pakistan, moving up from the south. The object of both leaders is to assault and capture Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold of Mullah Omar.
Halfway to their objective, the PJs get another update: eighteen injured and three dead. An hour later, another update. It’s now up to twenty-five injured, and word comes that it wasn’t a mortar attack; it was friendly fire, or what they now call “blue on blue” or even “fratricide.” Pat and Ryan hear the latest report on the radio and look at each other, eyebrows raised. This is going to be a mission to be remembered. To get ready, Schultz sits down on the floor and eats a cold cheese tortellini MRE.
What neither Schultz nor Malone could know at that point is that there may be as many as fifty or sixty wounded and close to thirty dead, among them three American Special Forces soldiers. They’d been hit by one of our own two-thousand-pound bombs, outfitted with a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance tail kit. It converts a dumb gravity bomb into what manufacturer Boeing, the Air Force, and the Navy call “accurate, adverse weathersmart munitions.”
The twenty-thousand-dollar kit puts a new tail section on the two-thousand-pound BLU-109/MK 84 warhead. It contains an inertial navigational system and a global positioning system guidance control unit. Once released from the aircraft, the JDAM autonomously navigates to the designated target coordinates that were either loaded into the JDAM’s guidance unit before takeoff, or manually altered by the aircrew before the weapon is released. When GPS data is available, the bomb will nearly always hit within forty feet of its target, even when released from a B-52 flying at forty-five thousand feet, up to fifteen miles away.
In 1996, after testing demonstrated the weapon performed as advertised by Boeing, the U.S. Air Force ordered 62,000 and the Navy another 25,496 JDAM bomb kits.
So what had happened?
According to Lt. Col. David Fox—the U.S. Special Forces battalion commander whose mission included advising Hamid Karzai as he negotiated with the Taliban for the surrender of Kandahar—his units had been taking intermittent fire from across a nearby bridge over the Arghandab River. At about nine in the morning, they spotted a cave entrance about two and a half kilometers to their south. Air Force controllers brought in a flight of F-18s, and once the controllers put lasers on the target, the jets dropped laser-guided munitions.
Fox says he watched two munitions fall a little short of the cave entrance, and it didn’t look like much damage had been caused. The controllers, in the meantime, were talking to a B-52 overhead about dropping the JDAM.
About nine-thirty in the morning, as Lieutenant Colonel Fox reached down to grab his binoculars, he was knocked to the ground. “I can’t figure out exactly what had happened. I look around and once I see the devastation, I knew that we had been hit by a very large munition.”
Initially he thought it was enemy artillery; but there was no such artillery reported in the south. It took about three or four hours before it was officially determined that they’d been hit by friendly fire. The two-thousand-pound JDAM had fallen approximately two kilometers short of its intended target, and had impacted directly on the Special Forces position. Karzai suffered a minor face wound, either from shrapnel or a piece of glass from blown-out windows. An Afghan fighter standing near the soon-to-be head of government was decapitated.
None of this information, of course, is conveyed to the two inbound helicopters, rocketing toward the area as low as twenty-five feet above the ground. The only advantage they have going into an unknown situation is that before departing Jbad, they found a soldier who had actually been exfilled from the area the night before, and brought him with them. The hope is that his familiarity with the ground situation will keep them from becoming an easy target for enemy fighters armed with RPGs.
As the pair of Pave Lows approach the objective, their impromptu adviser says to Malone, “Hey, whatever you do, don’t let ’em fly over the river. That’s right where the firefight is.” And until he spoke up, that’s just what the helicopters were planning on doing, circling over the river and landing on the far side, near the village where the accidental bombing took place.
Malone immediately keys the intercom, warning the pilots, who adjust their approach. Standing on the open ramp at the rear of the helicopter, Schultz is getting ready to unhook and exit the aircraft as soon as it touches down. As they come in he sees the river, then rolling hills with people on top of them watching the big helicopter approach. That’s a brain-jarring moment. He’s already dealing with what it’s going to take to treat a couple dozen casualties, up from a mere handful when they first got the mission. Now he’s wondering whether or not he’s going to have to defend himself in a firefight before he can begin treating the injured. And if there is a firefight, are the helicopters going to sit there, or are they going to insert the PJs and get out of the way, allowing the CCT to bring in close air support to deal with the folks on the hill-tops?
Even though the PJs’ expectation was that they’d hop off the helicopters, triage, treat and load patients, get back on, and leave, their training prevents them from assuming anything—including the fact that the helicopter is going to wait for them. Malone explains: “A PJ’s perspective on a rescue mission is, ‘Once I step off that helicopter, until I step back on, it’s never coming back.’ They have to be prepared to stay in the field, stay in the environment, whatever that environment is.
“Everybody’s got enough gear to stay out there. Some water [in a CamelBak], an MRE or two. All your ammo, your guns, your medical gear.”
Despite the fact that you’re coming in on a large helicopter with Kevlar armor on its belly that should be able to stop small-arms fire, the factors you can’t control are what cause a knot in the pit of the stomach and the involuntary clenching of sphincter muscles—the legendary but very real pucker factor. You don’t think you’re going to get hit, you don’t believe you’re going to get hit, but like a fighter in the ring you brace for the punch. It would have to be a lucky rifle bullet that finds you inside the Pave Low. But the windows are open for the gunners; the ramp is wide open. The odds are not infinitesimal, especially since they’re doing what American special-ops helicopters almost never do: they’re landing in bad-guy territory in broad daylight.
The lucky rifle shot is not their only worry. The pièce de résistance for rebel armies is the rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG. It’s a grenade with a small motor, fired from a bazookalike tube. The Russians invented it in the 1960s as an antitank weapon, but skilled Afghan mujahideen gunners used them successfully against Soviet helicopters, and in 1993, Somalis firing RPGs brought down a pair of U.S. Black Hawk assault helicopters. Schultz and Malone know that an RPG aimed at their helicopter can easily ruin their day. A skilled shooter can hit moving targets from a distance of three hundred yards, and as the helicopters flare to a landing, there’s plenty of time for more than one shot.
What doesn’t seem to be bothering the PJs is the total brownout on landing. This part of Afghanistan is a moonscape of cocoa-colored dust that has the consistency of talcum powder. The instant the helicopter’s downdraft hits the ground, the aircraft is enveloped in a cloud of choking dust that fills the interior, blinding its occupants. Goggles and bandanas keep it from disabling the crew, but it still takes many heart-pounding seconds for the dust to settle enough so that safe movement off the ramp is even possible. Even then, visibility remains impaired for more than a minute. Schultz has done a lot of landings like this, so he just rides it out, listening on comm. “I listen to what the pilots are doing, but their voices aren’t ra
ised. They’re not high-pitched, they’re not all over the place, so I’m not that worried.”
Schultz and Malone’s helo settles in about thirty seconds after the other helicopter lands. When the dust clears, they can see that the two 53s are about three hundred yards apart, with their ship closer to the dirt road that ran perpendicular to the river, and the other helo southwest of them, closer to the village. Telling PJs Hall and Curtis to grab two extra litters, they step off the ramp. True to Malone’s word, they are all prepared to be there for a while if necessary. The rucks they’re carrying weigh roughly forty pounds. Body armor adds another twenty-five pounds. The LBE—the load-bearing vest—is carrying at least seven thirty-round magazines for each man’s rifle, plus extra clips for the 9mm pistol strapped to his thigh, plus additional medical and survival gear, and weighs another twenty-five pounds. Add the weight of the M4, the cut-down version of the standard M16 rifle, and each man is hauling more than a hundred pounds.
With that burden, it doesn’t take long for the altitude to get to them. Even for men in great physical shape, sudden exertion at six thousand feet is enough to wind them. And then there is the emotional wallop of what they see.
Pat Malone says, “The minute we stepped off that plane and the dust started to settle, you got that vision of the chaos of war. It was so evident. The guy that approached us was completely shell-shocked, almost to the point of incoherency.”
The man is one of the American Special Forces troops, apparently sent from where the bomb hit to guide the PJs in. But he can barely talk. Malone recalls that they couldn’t communicate enough to get the information they needed to know about where the patients were, where the PJs needed to be.
Schultz says when he asked the soldier where everyone was and what was going on, he said, “Don’t really know. They should be coming.” That’s when he spots the man’s interteam radio, grabs it, and hooks his comm system to it, and tries in vain to contact the ground team. At this point, the assumption is that they are still at least half a mile from the patients who are near the river to the south, where the firefight had taken place. Then he sees people starting to line the hills on the other side of the helicopter.
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