Which brings us back to the mission at hand, inside a freezing cold MH- 47E making its way in the company of two identical Chinooks through mountain passes, from Bagram toward a rendezvous with Ditka 03. In addition to Young and Cunningham, the third PJ on the team is a nine-year veteran, T.Sgt. Keary Miller, a soft-spoken northern California native and father of two, who’d left active duty and moved to Louisville in May 2001. There he joined the 123rd Special Tactics Squadron of the Kentucky Air National Guard to play a role in setting up the first special-tactics unit in the Guard. In October 2001 the unit was federalized, and with ten days’ notice, Miller found himself on a plane headed for K-2, where he worked in the Rescue Coordination Center (RCC). Eventually he took over the CSAR alert teams and relocated to the airfield at Bagram, where the PJs set up shop in the tower building, just down the hall from the Army’s 274th Forward Surgical Team. FSTs are a much smaller, more agile version of the old MASH units. They bring surgical and critical care down to the brigade level in order to stabilize critically wounded casualties who would otherwise not survive the trip to a rear-area combat support hospital.
The night of what turned into the infil-exfil mission, Miller wasn’t even on alert, but at the last minute he joined the team, which included Young, Cunningham, and combat controller Gabe Brown. With combat rescue experience under enemy fire in Bosnia, the tech sergeant was definitely the veteran of the trio of PJs; nevertheless, Chris Young had previously been designated team leader on this flight, and there was no reason to change that.
While the helicopters are making their way toward the rendezvous point, Ditka 03’s crew is killing time. In the cargo bay directly below and behind the cockpit, the radio operator, S.Sgt. Rodney Young, is jumping back and forth between two different sets of cryptological codes in the secure radios, trying to keep track of all the different mission players. Having a single crewmember responsible for handling communications with the world outside the aircraft allows the two pilots, two navigators, and the flight engineer in the cockpit to focus their attention solely on flying the plane over and through Afghanistan’s unforgiving terrain. On this night, they’re being given fits by the IDS, the Infrared Detection System camera (sometimes interchangeably referred to as FLIR), mounted on the nose of the aircraft. It has a normal field of view, and it has a zoom mode. Pilots usually rely on the normal view because it’s basically a one-to-one ratio, the same as they’re seeing through their night-vision goggles. Depending on atmospheric conditions, especially the amount of moisture in the air, on some nights the NVGs mounted on their helmets see better than the FLIR ball does; some nights the FLIR sees a lot better than the goggles, so using them both is a good cross-checking technique for attempting to identify terrain. Experience has taught them that on really dark nights like this one the FLIR ball is typically better. So they rely on it a lot. Unfortunately, as the helicopters are getting closer and they are getting ready to drop down and move into the critical refueling phase of their mission, it begins to malfunction. Uncommanded, it would go into zoom mode, making it impossible for the pilots to get any useful information off of it, and there seems to be nothing that Maj. Don Tyler, the right nav, can do to fix it.
As the cockpit crew is dealing with the FLIR problem, radio operator Young hears something disturbing on the AWACs frequency. The pilot of a reconnaissance aircraft flying over the general area the helicopters were headed to comes up on the freq pretty excited. He’s just had a surface-to-air (SAM) missile almost hit his aircraft, causing him to dump all his decoy flares and half his chaff. What catches Rodney’s attention is the tone of the pilot’s voice. “The pucker factor was definitely up there.” The pilot hadn’t seen the launch; he didn’t see the missile till it broke through the clouds coming up at him. When he settles down enough to rattle off the coordinates of the incident, Rodney relays them to the navigators, who plot them and discover that they are relatively close to the objective area where the infiltration was to take place.
Given their expectation that the target the recon team was going in to find would be highly defended, the SAM launch in that area makes sense. Just something else to keep in mind over the next couple of hours.
A few minutes later, the radio operator clicks in on the intercom and starts to speak. A big lightbulb had gone off above his head. “Y’know what? The helicopters aren’t listening to the AWACs frequency. They didn’t get that information about where this missile launch came from.” Given the okay to pass it along, Young goes through another command and control network, jimmies his radios around, and relays the attack information directly to the approaching flight of helicopters.
The delay in the arrival of the helicopters does have one plus to it: Ditka 03’s original wingman, Ditka 04, gets his maintenance problems straightened out, and launches toward the objective area. This allows Cline to release the aircraft he requested as a substitute backup, giving the mission a second tanker that has a full bag of fuel on board—certainly much more fuel than Ditka 03 has after spending ninety minutes killing time. Doing some onboard calculating, the lead pilot changes the mission plan slightly. Originally his aircraft was going to refuel all three helos before the infil and after the exfil. Now the plan will be for Ditka 03 to refuel the helicopters going in, climb up high and wait for the ground teams to be inserted and do their job, and, on the way out, 04 will take the lead and pump fuel for the exfil.
When the helicopters radio that they are approaching the refueling track, the two tankers drop down into a long, narrow valley. Even though they are more than ten thousand feet above sea level, they are below terrain on both sides. While this is a comfortable altitude for the fixed-wing aircraft to operate at, it’s at the upper end of the helicopter’s performance envelope for air refueling, and with the exception of the helicopter pilots themselves, no one is more aware of the dicey nature of the maneuver than the PJs aboard Chalk 3.
By their very nature, PJs dislike situations where others are in control of their fate. They recognize that for them to do their job, someone else has to fly the plane. And most have seen that the pilots who fly them, whether in fixed-or rotary-wing aircraft, excel at their craft. But trust and blind faith only go so far—and midair refueling is, for many of them, beyond the trust barrier. During training flights, it’s not uncommon for the pararescuemen to ask pilots to drop them off before they begin practicing refueling. Keary Miller says, “It’s kind of like if you [parachute] jump a lot, and all of a sudden you’re doing a tandem, and you’re the passenger. I’d rather jump and [have] me be in charge of the parachute and not somebody else. Air refueling is not one of my favorite things.”
Sitting on some gear near the rear of the helicopter, his helmet disconnected from the aircraft’s intercom system, Miller is unaware of where Chalk 3 is in the refueling process. PJ team leader Chris Young is still asleep on the floor of the helo, also not on comms. Jason Cunningham, meantime, is paying close attention to everything that’s happening. This is his first mission in combat; it’s precisely what he told the instructors at the PJ school he wanted to be doing. While some in his class were opting for mountain rescue duty in Alaska, and still others wanted to be assigned to bases that did a lot of civilian rescues at sea, Cunningham surprised everyone when he said he wanted CSAR. Now he is getting his wish.
At about three in the morning local time, the flight of 47 Echoes moves in behind Ditka 03 to begin the refueling procedure, a process that should take no more than fifteen minutes if everything goes as it should. Imagine a pas de deux between hippos—neither one is especially nimble, but that doesn’t keep them from trying to perform the dance with some degree of dexterity. The tanker’s job is to run the refueling track with as little deviation from the straight and narrow as possible. If they were refueling the more agile HH-60G Pave Hawk flown by Air Force CSAR units, the ballet would be much more graceful. But instead of a Baryshnikov, what’s coming up behind them is a Pavarotti in toe shoes. An appropriate name for this particular ballet? How a
bout “The Drogue Slayer”?
The reputation has been earned, in good measure, as a result of the way Boeing engineers designed the refueling probe mounted low on the right side of the 47E’s nose. It’s twenty feet long and fixed—that is, it doesn’t lengthen and retract as the ones on the Pave Hawks do. What this means is that the rotor blades extend beyond the end of the probe. In order to plug in and refuel, the pilots must move the helo so that the rotors are actually over the refueling hose itself. At the end of the hose is a forty-two-inch-diameter, circular wire basket, covered with fabric, in the center of which is the coupling through which fuel flows when the probe is locked in. The device is called a paradrogue—drogue for short—and when the plane flies at refueling speed, the drogue fills with air, causing the hose to float behind the wing. The engineering theory that renders the Boeing design for the 47 Echo refueling probe acceptable is that the downdraft from the rotors will actually push the drogue down and away from a potentially disastrous interaction with the blades.
The theory passes the reality test with Chalk 1 and Chalk 2. The lumbering helos are able to simultaneously attach themselves to the hoses coming from pods under the left and right wings, get several thousand pounds of J-8 jet fuel each, and back out of the contact without event. On the right side of the plane, loadmaster Jeff Pohl is able to take a break. Chalk 3 is going to refuel off the left hose, typically the one used when a single helo is refueling because there’s less turbulence coming off the 130’s left wing than the right. It is loadmaster Chris Langston’s job to flash the infrared light signals that tell the NVG-wearing pilots when they’re cleared to the contact position.
He does his job well. Unfortunately, the pilots in Chalk 3 are having a bad night. Langston does a running play-by-play for the benefit of the cockpit crew, and the line that he uses most often is, “Swing and a miss.” Chalk 3 would be cleared for contact, the 47 Echo would move in, and the guys in the back of Ditka 03 would feel the characteristic lift and push as the Chinook snuggled up to them. They’d make a stab at the drogue, miss, and have to back out and wait to try it all over again until flight engineer Jeff Doss could reset the hose. When the helo does manage to connect, he stays on for only a few seconds, then falls off.
Langston recalls this going on for a good twenty or twenty-five minutes, and conditions were not getting any better. “The further we went down the track, the worse the turbulence got, and the hose was bouncing around, and he was bouncing around.” To try to minimize the hose movement the flight engineer tried weighting the hose down with fuel. No help. When he began to get concerned that Chalk 3 might really be desperate to get gas, he changed the release settings so that fuel began flowing the instant the probe made contact, rather than waiting until they had a solid lockup.
John Cline, who’s the chief MC-130P pilot evaluator for the Air Force Special Operations Command and a former instructor at the MC-130P Schoolhouse at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, and is known as an especially skilled and intuitive pilot, can empathize with the Chinook drivers. They’re at high altitude, actually on occasion going above the limits the flight plan called for because the terrain is forcing them up, and the helo’s controls are very mushy in the thin air. “We were going east to west, and the further west we got, the more mechanical turbulence we started to encounter. It wasn’t gross,” Cline says, but, “the guy was already having a little bit of a hard night; it definitely exacerbated his problems trying to get on the hose.”
When pilots of air tankers are preparing for a mission, they need to take into account not only how much fuel they’ll have to pass and when, but also where the refueling can be done. In a combat situation, they want to orient the refueling track so it takes the helicopters near their ultimate objective, but not so near that it wakes up the neighborhood. An ideal situation is to tank the helicopters on a track that ends at a point roughly twenty-five miles from where the helos are due to land and infiltrate the recon team. In this case, the track Ditka 03’s crew had chosen was twice as long as what would normally be needed to give these three helicopters the amount of fuel they wanted. Depending on circumstances that include, among other things, what tank on the airplane the gas is coming out of and what tank on the helicopter it’s going into, they can normally transfer 500 to 1,000 pounds of fuel per minute. Chalk 3 had asked for 4,600 pounds, just under 800 gallons.
Now, according to Cline, they’re “down about five or six miles from the end of the track, he’s on the hose, he’s taking his fuel. He’s only going to need to be on the hose for another two to five minutes. So I’m thinking, ‘Hey, this is going to work perfect. We’re going to hit the end of the track; this guy’ll be done and we’ll press on with the plan.’ ”
Some sort of unscrambled telepathy undoubtedly communicated that bit of optimistic thought to the demon of all things vital, Murphy. That would be the Murphy of Murphy’s Law, which states, “If things can go wrong, they will, at the worst possible time,” and its corollary, which asserts that “Murphy never rests.” He may catnap, but it’s always with one eye open for an opportunity to step in and really screw things up.
Major Cline remembers it this way: “We’re down below this overcast now, and the guy falls off the hose right by the end of the track, and he’s only got about half or two-thirds the amount of fuel he needs to do the mission. We didn’t have all the information we typically have. I didn’t have their flight plan; otherwise I’d have just pressed right on down there, whatever their next leg was on their flight plan. I would’ve just dragged ’em down that way.”
In addition to lack of information, time is becoming a problem. “We’ve slipped all night long. Sunrise is approaching, and obviously we’ve got to do these missions all during the cloak of darkness. I think it was approaching three or three-fifteen in the morning. At that point, we had a limited window to get these guys in and get them out with the amount of darkness we had. So I was left with a choice: I could either just press on straight down this valley, which looked like some pretty bad weather. Could turn back around and head back east, which would be taking them away from their objective area, which [means that] every minute we fly east is two minutes that they’ve got to fly back west. So I just asked them where they needed to go.”
The AMC in Chalk 1 responds with a heading of 210 degrees, a left sixty-degree turn, which makes sense to Ditka 03’s crew because the objective area was about twenty-five miles south of where they were at that moment.
Cue Murphy, one more time.
Just as the AMC makes that call, Chalk 3 starts launching defensive flares, which light up the sky and wash out the image on everyone’s night-vision goggles. For fifteen to thirty seconds, everyone is essentially blind. Caution dictates the instantaneous assumption that must be made is that they’re under attack. Cline says, “The reason to launch flares is ’cause somebody’s shot a missile at you. That definitely got our attention. We’re now cruising a little bit beyond the end of the helicopter refueling track, trying to discern what that flare launch was all about. It takes—whatever it takes—half a mile, mile, [till someone] comes back to say, ‘That was a false alarm, nobody shot at us.’ ”
In the back, Chris Langston guesses that Chalk 3 had their electronic countermeasures set to automatic, and something as benign as a fire on the terrain below triggered them, not an altogether unusual occurrence. It’s just that given the frustrations of the last half hour, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Score one more for Murphy, because now the choices get tougher. They can opt to pull in the hoses, leave the area, and set up to refuel in a different valley. Or they can press on with the refueling where they are. Cline and Lieutenant Colonel Buss confer by radio, and the decision is made to press on, and again Buss requests a heading of 210 degrees.
The Army commander describes routine midair refueling as a “high-adventure event,” and a real-world mission “at ten thousand feet is much more high-adventure.” He’s certain that “the pilots were doing their best, but as with man
y things, the more you try, the harder you work at it, the more difficult it becomes. So I’m just going through this pilot’s mind now. I’m sure he’s trying to relax.” Buss is convinced that his pilots will be able to stay on the hose long enough to get the gas they need. As a matter of fact, he sounds almost nonchalant discussing the difficulty Chalk 3 had been having. “It’s a precision maneuver to connect with the refuel hose. You move up into what’s called the ‘refuel position,’ and then it’s a workout just staying on that hose under good conditions. Any little thing, any little bump or maneuver, or you get a little bit off cue, the basket just comes off the probe. Happens all the time.”
Nonchalance aside, Buss does acknowledge what-iffing the situation. “It was going through my mind, ‘What if he can’t get his gas?’ and I was thinking through contingencies if I had to send him down or have him land somewhere, if we could continue the mission. But I thought that the terrain was more favorable down the route further. I thought he’d get his gas, ultimately. So I wasn’t too worried at this point.”
Turning Ditka 03 in the direction of the insertion point for the recon team is a compromise to save time. The risk is that if the accidental flare drop didn’t announce their presence to the bad guys, the noise they’re generating might. A flying circus comprised of a pair of four-engine turbo-prop airplanes flying single file, two hundred to five hundred feet apart, accompanied by three twin-rotor Chinooks in close formation, produces only slightly less racket than fifty thousand prepubescent girls at a Britney Spears concert—especially when they’re flying relatively close to terrain that causes sound to echo side to side as well as up and down intersecting canyons.
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