WE’RE SO SECRET
WE DON’T EVEN KNOW
WHAT WE’RE DOING
The unit commander is respected by his aircrews for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the way he keeps his calm, even with ten or eleven things hitting him at once. Lt. Thomas Cahill, who flies for dePalo and was flight lead for the mission that crashed in the Kush, says his boss “gives you the personal authority to do the right thing on a mission where, unfortunately, in the day and age we live in now, most commanders don’t give pilots very much leeway on what they can do. And he does. He basically says, ‘Dude, as soon as you go out the door and you’re on this mission, it’s completely your call, anything you do. Unless you do something gross, I’m not going to challenge that call that you made. Do you put PJs in? Do you not? Whatever you decide to do, man, that’s your call.’ He knows that he’s trained the flight lead to a certain level, and that’s what’s expected of them.”
Cahill adds, with no conscious sense of drama, “Definitely a guy who I’d probably follow into the pit of hell, that’s for sure. And not even question it.”
DePalo may not describe the location his men were going to fly into on the first night of Operation Anaconda as the pit of hell, but he knew it was going to be ugly. “What they were going to do is as close to the edge as anything I’ve ever been involved in,” says dePalo. “Some aspects to that mission, particularly on night one, were unknown. The threat. We knew the threat was bad, but we didn’t know what it would be like in the pitch-black night. We didn’t know how much the enemy had been degraded at that point. The enemy held the high ground, and it had proved to be very tough. Nobody completely understood what kind of threat we’d encounter going in there.”
The aircrews on their upcoming adventure include Capt. Ed Lengel as flight lead of the two-ship mission and pilot of Gecko 11. Capt. John Gallick is the copilot. The flight engineer on his bird is Josh Fetters, with T.Sgt. Troy Durocher as the gunner, and the PJs are S.Sgts. Yandall Goodwin and Michael Ames. The other helicopter is Gecko 12 with pilot John Mangan and copilot Phil Swenson; PJs are Caleb Ethridge and Brian Oswald. A shortage of gunners leads the unit to put two flight engineers on board to handle the miniguns on both sides. S.Sgts. Greg Sisko and Ted Mirich draw these assignments.
Before they even arrive at Texaco, Durocher has been monitoring the SATCOM radio transmissions from “Deliverance,” the code name for the JSRC. “It’s strange, ’cause we could hear them talking as we’re flying up there, we can hear the guy on the ground saying, ‘We need to get our guys out of here. We’ve been getting mortared all day long.’ The guy he’s calling for close air support says, ‘Okay, dude, we’re sending somebody on the way.’ But they sent in some Apaches, from what I understand, and they got shot up and had to limp out. They didn’t feel it was comfortable for us to go in. We sat there at the FARP, waiting for it to cool down enough for us to be able to go in there.”
For several hours, the two crews go back and forth several times from a five-minute alert posture to, “Stand down. We’re going to wait till it cools off.” Finally, according to Durocher, “We got the word that it’s not going to get any cooler than it is right now. The Apaches got shot out of there, and they weren’t going to be able to provide support for us. So they said, ‘You’re cleared in.’ It was up to us whether we went in or not.”
That puts it on the shoulders of the flight lead to weigh the risks. Simply put, he has to ask the question, “Are we going to make it out of there alive? Or is this a one-way mission to try to save somebody?” If it is, they can’t go in. But there’s a reason they call it Combat Search and Rescue. The gunner says, “You weigh your risks and say, ‘Okay, the threat is huge, yes, but we’ve got ways to deal with that.’ We’ve got the minigun, and it’s nighttime, so we had the cover of darkness. We fly low, so it’s hard to find us at night. As a crew, we decided we were going to go in there. We wanted to get those guys out of there.”
Does that mean it’s a discussion and vote among six guys—two pilots, two PJs, a gunner, and an FE? “Not really. It is and it isn’t,” says Durocher. “It’s kind of strange how helicopter crews function. The AC says, ‘What do you guys think?’ and everybody usually goes ‘yea’ or ‘nay,’ and it’s usually a consensus. The AC is the ultimate decision maker. If everybody goes ‘yea’ and the AC says, ‘Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,’ you all go. I haven’t been in a situation yet where one person said, ‘I don’t think so.’ It just gives everybody the warm fuzzy that, ‘Hey, y’know what? I volunteered to do this. I raised my hand and said I’m gonna go do this.’ It’s more a formality that we do with each other.”
What if someone on the crew had serious misgivings? “If somebody really believed that they weren’t going to make it out of there alive, or it was a one-way mission, they’d say, ‘Hey, y’know what? What if we waited, or we do this?’ I’ve taught this to all my young gunners: Don’t come up with a problem. Don’t say, ‘We can’t do it because of this.’ Come up with a solution. ‘This is a problem, but this is how we’re gonna fix it.’ Don’t tell me we can’t do it; tell me how we can do it.”
The decision to finally do something rather than sit around freezing their collective butts off energizes everyone. Durocher observes that “as soon as the mission’s going, for some reason you’re not cold anymore. You’ve got so much going on in your mind. Your adrenaline is rollin’.”
The plan, as Ethridge relates it, is to have Gecko 11 and 12 go in and pick up the worst of the 10th Mountain Division casualties, no more than three per helicopter. There is an Air Force TACP—a tactical air controller—with the ground forces, and they know he is setting up a landing zone for them. They also expect that the infantry medics would have triaged the casualties. Beyond that they don’t know what to expect. “We just knew we’re going in to get the worst guys, and get out. And it was still hot. They were fighting all throughout the day, and they fought well into the night.”
They’ve been unable to directly monitor radio transmissions from the unit. Only later would it be reported that most of the unit’s radios didn’t work in the tough terrain, and commanders had to use runners to carry messages from one squad to another. The helicopter crews were getting their information from their own command, and from the Joint Search and Rescue Center.
At nine-thirty P.M. local time, about a half hour after dark, the two helicopters take off from the FARP, flying west-southwest to the ridgeline above Ginger Valley. They fly past snowcapped mountains, trying to stay no more than two hundred feet above terrain, finding their way up through the valleys by following certain landmarks such as dry creeks and identifiable ridgelines. Ethridge says, “We kept going for quite a ways, but it started getting darker and darker and darker and darker. It wasn’t really dark when we left; it was dark, but not that dark. But there was really no illum that night.”
Unlike operations flown by Air Force Special Operations Command helicopters, where planning for a mission can take hours or even days, the CSAR crews, both fixed- and rotary-wing, don’t hesitate to launch a mission and do the planning en route. Sometimes that’s the only way to save lives. Lieutenant Colonel dePalo says it goes with their mission. “A lot of times we don’t know everything about where a survivor is ahead of time, and we have to do that in the air. In this case, we got a lot of good information being fed in from the ground guys through the JSRC back to the helicopters saying, ‘Okay, this is what you should see as you’re coming in,’ and they gave them certain terrain features, a direction to come in that the ground parties had recommended. And those sorts of issues were fed to us in the air, and the crewmembers have to process that, update navigation systems, and make sure everybody on board understands the mission. And then they go from there.”
Scanning from the left side of Gecko 11, Durocher works hard to match what he’s heard on their five primary radios with what he’s seeing out the window, and to interpret it into useful information to feed the pilots. His main job
is to monitor SATCOM transmissions, which is how they’ll hear from Deliverance, and if there’s anything that’s really pertinent, he has to make sure the pilots hear it. With everything they have to do keep the helicopter in the air, it’s easy to miss a critical message. “It’s things like, ‘Okay, they’re attacking this town out to my ten o’clock. This is where they’re going to be attacking in about another thirty minutes, so we gotta be out of this area.’ There’s a lot of things going through your mind as we’re going up there, besides the objective of the mission. We have to get there first.”
In the extreme darkness of the mountainous areas, it is easy to see the attacks taking place. Durocher recalls, “There are bright flashes of light, kind of like Star Wars lasers going back and forth. On NVGs, it’s really a light show. That’s all it is. Of course that’s the standoff portion of it, but once you get in—once you’re in the light show—it’s no longer as enjoyable.”
Part of the concern is that there are so many different command and control chains that communication between them is rarely perfect; more often it’s spotty, untimely, or nonexistent. It’s very easy for ground forces to call for air support, and for the air support to be coordinated without concern for other assets that might be coming into or passing through the area. And then there’s the possibility that even with perfect communications, mistakes can happen. The B-52 pilots who dropped the two-thousand-pound JDAM that fell two klicks short and landed on the special forces unit with Hamid Karzai did what they were told to do. One report says that the pilots were mistakenly given as a target the map coordinates where the SOF troops were, rather than where the intended target was located.
With thirteen years’ experience doing what he’s doing, Durocher knows things can go horribly wrong. “They were supposed to drop some pretty large-sized bombs, some JDAMs in the vicinity, and as much technology that goes into the JDAM, you still have that in the back of your mind that sometimes that technology just doesn’t work out. You don’t want to be on the receiving end of a JDAM gone wrong. So making sure we were staying clear of that JDAM going in was a priority.”
When the big bomb goes in, the helicopters are still about four miles away. “It was a huge light show. It smoked! There was a big, bright, long-lasting flash that went quite a ways in the air. You could only kind of hear it. There’s so much noise, with the radios and the helicopter, and trying to talk on the intercom, it’s very faint, almost like someone politely knocking on the door.”
With all the distractions from the basic job of flying the helicopter, the HH-60G crews need a system to make sure nothing gets by them. It helps that most of the time they’re “hard-crewed.” The same pilots, flight engineer, and gunner not only fly together, they live together in the same tent; it works that way whether they’re at Jacobabad, Kandahar, or Karshi-Khanabad. The backenders get to know the idiosyncrasies of the pilots to the point that they can tell whether it’s the AC or the copilot on the controls just by the way the ship is being handled. Hard-crewing also allows them to use their own shorthand when they communicate with each other in the air, and leaves little room for tasks falling through the cracks. Everyone knows what they’re supposed to do, where they’re supposed to be looking, and when. Durocher says, “My job is to scan to the left; FE’s scanning to the right and checking the systems, making sure we got good fuels, got enough fuel to do the job, enough power to do the job. And then the copilot is usually heads down, watching our map displays and following us on the map and trying to make sure we’re following the right course. And then the pilot—actually whoever is on the controls—is pure on the controls, scanning forward and making sure that we stay safe. When we’re on a flight lead, like this mission, there’s a little bit more for them to do. But those guys are experienced; they’ve been doing this for quite a while.”
Within twenty minutes after taking off from Texaco, the two helos have reached their insertion point and are ordered to hold, to wait. For a while they are just circling, burning holes in the sky. Finally they get the call to go in.
What they see as they fly into Ginger Valley are the mountains looming behind the landing zone, mountains that they know are filled with Al Qaeda soldiers who have no shortage of ammunition, and who have had hours to target the LZ. About a half mile from the objective, they begin to see heavy tracer fire. Through it all, they’re trying to locate the flashing infrared strobe, visible only through NVGs, that would show them where the ground team they need to locate is positioned. Durocher is scanning when he realizes the strobe is going to be less than useful for finding their LZ. “When we get into this valley, there’s probably fifty strobes going on. And then the enemy also had some strobes, so you couldn’t tell who was good and who was bad, ’cause rounds are going both ways and strobes are everywhere.” And if the enemy has IR strobes, they also have night-vision goggles that enable them to see the American infrared strobes, which are invisible to the naked eye, and don’t even need to be worn outside the uniform. Just turning them on in a pocket reveals their location to anyone with NVGs.
This is the moment this crew realizes through firsthand experience that the Al Qaeda or Taliban forces they are fighting are not some ragtag bunch of guerrillas. Afghanistan is not Vietnam; the enemy is not the Viet Cong, forced to make hand grenades out of discarded Coke cans. The enemy here is well equipped, well commanded, and well trained. The only shortcoming that seemed to be regularly reported by American forces was that while the Al Qaeda fighters had plenty of ammunition, their marksmanship skills were often—but not always—lacking.
Seeing the strobes causes significant angst for Durocher, who sits behind the GAU-2 minigun that fires at a rate of up to six thousand rounds per minute. It’s obvious that the American force is under fire, but from the helicopter, there is no surefire way of sorting out the good guys from the bad. “That’s when I elected not to fire,” he says. “We weren’t getting engaged, and I don’t want a fratricide,” which is the term du jour replacing friendly fire.
“That’s my number one goal. I’m not going to kill anybody who doesn’t need killing. There was nobody to shoot at, ’cause they’re shooting at each other and pretty much leaving us alone.”
The lead helicopter pilot, flying his ship slow and low, goes straight in, hops over a slope, and prepares to land behind it. The landing is sketchy, minimum power, certainly not enough to hold a steady hover that will let them really pick their spot.
Just as they are about to settle in, the pilots realize that they’ll be pointing in a direction that offers no escape if they come under fire. As a result, they opt to make a U-turn before coming to a hover and beginning to settle. The second ship, with PJs Ethridge and Oswald on board, comes in and prepares to land, but at the last second the pilot realizes that the two birds would be nose-to-nose, a less than ideal situation considering the nearby threat.
Ethridge says his pilot tried to hover and turn around, but it wasn’t working. “We’re not getting too much power. We’re just bup-bup-bup-bup, drooping the rotors. We’re having a hard time hovering, and kind of sliding left. It felt like we were going to just fall out of the sky. Even though we weren’t very high—about twenty feet—it still felt like we could, any minute, just kind of—whoa!
“Finally we turn around so we’re facing out. As we’re coming around, there’s an explosion about fifty meters—or fifty feet, I’m not really sure—but it hits. I didn’t see it, but I heard it. It’s right in front of lead and kind of spooks him a little bit.”
A couple of RPGs landed about fifty feet off the tail of Gecko 11. Durocher says, “You don’t see it coming at you, but you see the big flash, the light-show effect again. You see a quick fire, and then you see the explosion. We didn’t even know those guys were there, ’cause it came from a different spot than the normal fire. We’d seen the two groups that are firing at each other, and while we’re on the approach, out of nowhere comes these two RPGs and some small machine-gun fire, and then the mortars that were u
p on the hill firing down on the guys trained their sights on us. They got off a couple rounds before the AC-130 Spectre gunship took out the mortar position.”
Neither helicopter has actually landed at that point, and the incoming rounds cause the pilots to think twice about committing. Complicating the situation is that they can see infantrymen heading their way with casualties, and the blast from their rotors is knocking them to the ground. Ethridge is on the right side of the helicopter behind the flight engineer, with the door wide open. “The blast kind of spooks everyone. We weren’t really sure what it was. We’re just asking, ‘Oooooh, what was that?’ But everyone’s still focused.”
What happens next is something he was not prepared for. “It’s like Night of the Living Dead in a way. It looked like an exercise, how we moulage patients—rip their clothes off, make ’em bloody and all that stuff for training. I just see three wounded soldiers and other soldiers who are not injured helping them up, up the hill up to me, as I get out. Then I look behind them, and I see red tracers just shooting up, shooting down. I can’t see the guys who are firing ’cause it’s so dark in the valley, but I can see tracers going like crazy up the mountain, coming down from the mountain. They’re just constantly firing on each other, ’cause all the Al Qaeda and Taliban had the high ground. And they were just pinned down, shooting up. And Al Qaeda was just lobbing mortars and RPGs and whatever.” Clearly it’s a scene that has stuck with Ethridge, even though it was not the first time he’d been under fire.
Pararescuemen carry an assortment of weapons on missions, and are fully prepared to engage the enemy in order to defend their patients. In addition to the standard 9mm sidearm—which a lot of the guys dislike because it doesn’t have the close-in knockdown power of the old .45—Ethridge has chosen the GAU-5, a version of the M-4 rifle, which is a cut-down, special-ops version of the M-16—other PJs carry the GAU that not only fires the small 5.56 round, but has the M-203 grenade launcher underslung beneath the barrel. Preference even extends to choice of ammo for the grenade launcher, with high-explosive, white phosphorous, and tear gas rounds all in the arsenal.
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