Realizing there was nothing he could do about the STS situation, Self did a quick assessment of who was on the aircraft. There were a total of twenty-one people—eight aircrew, three STS, and ten members of the Ranger team, with all but the aircrew sitting on the floor of the aircraft.
For the special-tactics team that had been together on the Ditka 03 mission, this one was palpably different. The Ditka crash was not the result of hostile fire. At that moment they were on their way into an area where one helicopter just like the one they were on had been shot out of the air, and another had been crippled and managed to limp away. Already at least one man—an airman just like they were—had been shot and killed, and no one knew how the battle had gone while they were flying out from Bagram.
At a few minutes before six in the morning, local time, according to a sworn affidavit by Vance, the men on the helicopter were told “a military member was on the ground in a hostile area in Afghanistan after falling out of a helicopter.” Their orders were to link up with the SEALs on the ground, and extract them along with the man who had fallen. Beyond that, they knew nothing. The Department of Defense review of the battle of Takur Ghar says “the QRF was unaware that a squad of Al Qaeda fighters, who by this time had already killed two Americans, were poised and expecting their arrival.” As in Somalia, even the enemy apparently knew that U.S. military policy was to leave no man behind, and they were sophisticated enough to prepare to exploit it.
Self told the Post, “You have this dilemma: Hold guys on the ground longer so they know exactly what they’re going to do, or push them ahead so we can affect the situation sooner. A quick reaction force is never going to know everything that’s going on. If they did, then they wouldn’t be quick.”
Commanders at Bagram say they tried to notify the Rangers that the SEALs had retreated from the ridge top and to direct the helicopters to another landing zone farther down the mountain. Due to intermittently functioning aircraft communications equipment, the Rangers and aircrew never received the instructions, nor were attempts by HQ to “provide situational awareness to the QRF commander on board Razor 1” successful, stated the Post.
“As a consequence, the Rangers went forward believing that the SEALs were still located on top of Takur Ghar, and proceeded to the same location where both Razors 3 and 4 had taken enemy fire.”
At about ten after six, Vance noticed they were flying in circles around the mountaintop. Through one of the windows he had identified the same terrain features twice, and could also see that the sun was just beginning to crest the mountains to the east of the LZ. As the pilots put the Chinook into a hover preparatory to settling into the LZ, they were hit with a rocket-propelled grenade. Sparks flew from the right side of the aircraft and it started to shake violently. Aborting the landing was out of the question; the pilots had their hands full trying to have it land wheels-down. The helicopter, according to Vance, “seemed to just fall out of the sky about fifteen feet to the ground.” Photos released by the DoD show the helicopter on the ground, nose pointing up the hill toward the main enemy bunkers where Air Force combat controller John Chapman had been killed.
The RPG had taken out the right engine at the same time that small-arms fire peppered the Chinook from three directions in a classic landing zone denial ambush. The closest enemy shooters were no more than ten meters away; the farthest about fifty or sixty meters out.
Between the time the RPG hit and when they struck the ground Vance remembers nothing other than “it was a blur.” Sgt. Philip J. Svitak got off a one-second burst from his minigun before being struck and killed by an enemy bullet. The other forward gunner, David, also returned fire and was almost immediately hit in the right leg, breaking one of the bones. Everyone in the cargo area of the aircraft was slammed to the floor upon impact, but apparently no one was injured as a result.
At the same time, bullets were slamming into the cockpit as well. A round shattered the leg of one of the pilots, Chief Warrant Officer Chuck, and another round or piece of shrapnel almost severed the left wrist of the other pilot, CWO Greg Calvert. Chuck opened his emergency side door and slipped onto the snow. Calvert staggered from the cockpit toward the rear ramp, holding his wrist as it spurted blood.
Within a few more seconds, another two or three RPGs hit the helicopter, one of them starting a fire as machine-gun bullets turned the Chinook’s insulation into confetti. Someone in the rear passed a fire extinguisher to the 160th SOAR(A) medic, Sergeant First Class Cory, and through the blood dripping from a cut on his forehead, he was able to see enough to put out the blaze. Cory later told Bradley Graham of the Washington Post that in fifteen years in the service, which included combat in Panama in 1989 and the Persian Gulf in 1991, he had never seen fire so intense.
Soldiers and aircrew in situations like this describe a downed bird as “a bullet magnet,” and their first job after surviving the initial impact and attack is to get out and get cover. Normally the Ranger team has a prescribed order for exiting the helo, but in this case, all that mattered was to get out. As they attempted to do that, Sp. Marc Anderson, thirty, was shot and killed while at the top of the ramp. By the time Captain Self, who had been forward in the helicopter, got to the ramp, two more Rangers had been killed. They were twenty-one-year-old PFC Matt Commons, and twenty-two-year-old Sgt. Brad Crose.
Vance, the radio operator, had difficulty unsnapping his safety line, so his exit from the helicopter was delayed by about fifteen seconds. “I knew we had three killed in action [KIA], which left seven of our team, three of whom were injured. I had shrapnel in the arm, but did not notice it until later. My platoon leader had shrapnel in his leg, a pretty good chunk, and another team member had shrapnel in his lower left calf and was moving slowly.” Vance notes that his team knew how to fight and operate on the ground, but the Army aircrew didn’t have the same training.
With three of the Ranger shooters dead and a heavily dug-in enemy attempting to destroy them with withering fire, Vance made a decision: He would concentrate on shooting with his M-4 rifle, abandoning his duties as a radio operator for the moment. The platoon leader’s initial concern that CCT Gabe Brown didn’t know their radio frequencies and command structure was about to come home to roost. The enemy had confounded Self ’s backup plan to use Vance as his RTO. The good news was that Vance trained with the Rangers and knew how to maneuver and fight with them.
Vance says, “I exited the aircraft and threw my rucksack off but kept it within twenty meters from me. I figured out which way we were being engaged from and I sought cover behind a cutout in the rock face. It was just big enough for four team members to kneel behind it. We set up a perimeter. Two other members were back to my right and three members to my left. I was closest to the enemy. There were two enemies about fifty meters north of us near a tree. There was one enemy behind me and to the right, already dead. There were some more enemies to the south coming out. Then we started to engage them.”
Vance’s personal plan was to keep firing with his rifle, and then seek assistance for close air support (CAS) on the PRC117F radio that was still in his rucksack. At one point he turned around and yelled at combat controller Gabe Brown to begin working on communications, but saw that Brown was already on his own radio. “I decided that I needed to be on the line fighting. If I had been on the radio, then the combat controller would have been sitting there doing nothing because he doesn’t have the assault training.”
Vance told Brown that his rucksack had a radio in it, and had a member of the aircrew drag the rucksack over to the CCT. The problem with having Brown do the job was his lack of familiarity with communicating for a Ranger unit, rather than operating independently, as CCTs routinely do from observation posts overlooking combat situations. Brown didn’t know the Ranger team’s call signs or the call signs of some of the assets that were flying overhead. He also didn’t know the call signs of assets such as SEAL observation posts that were collecting intel for the Ranger task force. Communicating with
CCT Jim Hotaling wasn’t an issue, but Hotaling and the Aussies he was with were at least two klicks away, and didn’t have a visual on the fight that was raging.
While it might seem to be a simple matter for one radio operator to tell another what the correct frequencies and code names were, with a gun battle raging and Vance taking the place of one of the three dead Rangers, it didn’t happen right away. It took Brown nearly twenty minutes from the time of the crash to get in touch with headquarters and request air support. With the communications confusion, the only way he could contact the Ranger command and control people at Bagram was to have his messages relayed through the air command net.
When all the various accounts of the battle are stitched together, there are some pieces that just don’t seem to fit. And since the U.S. Special Operations Command has put discussion of Operation Anaconda with the media by any of the participants off-limits, serious questions remain.
One example: The Washington Post reported that while Razor 1 was crash-landing, military commanders in Bagram, including Major General Hagenbeck, were watching the action live on a video feed from a Predator drone. “It was gut-wrenching,” the Post quotes Hagenbeck as saying. “We saw the helicopter getting shot as it was just setting down. We saw the shots being fired. And it was unbelievable the Rangers were even able to get off that and kill the enemy without suffering greater losses.”
Although Hagenbeck was the commanding general of the 10th Mountain Division and the senior U.S. commander with responsibility for planning and running Operation Anaconda, he didn’t control the Rangers. Under a plan that appears to have its origin in the doctrine of “Divide and maybe conquer,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Gregory Trebon had that responsibility. That’s presumably why Hagenbeck told the Post, “Literally, we were spectators watching. We did not know what the SEAL rescue squad on the ground had been reporting. I still don’t know to this day what they reported to the commander here and what was transmitted to the Rangers on board the helicopter—whether they said ‘there’s no other way to get here,’ or if they said we can suppress enemy fire, or if they said we’re going to lose some guys but it’s the only way to do it. We were just looking at a screen without any audio to it.”
For all the good watching the much-touted and highly secret Predator feed did, one can infer from Hagenbeck’s confession of ignorance weeks after the battle that Trebon wasn’t going out of his way to help him interpret what they were seeing on the television monitor, much less putting their heads together to figure out what they could cooperatively do to help Captain Self and his beleaguered platoon.
Why didn’t an Air Force general immediately order fast movers over the battle and let them try to establish contact with the radio operators on the ground, and by their very presence compel the enemy to keep their heads down? Such an approach may have saved lives. Indeed, in the sworn affidavit given at Bagram three weeks later, TACP Kevin Vance says, “Every time the plane showed up and you could hear them, we weren’t being shot at. Just having the planes nearby kept the enemy away.” (He was referring to the planes that eventually showed up once radio contact was established.) What was General Trebon proactively doing to try to save the lives of the guys who were still deep in the shit? We don’t know, because Trebon refuses to answer any questions related to Anaconda, including whether or not interservice rivalry had struck again, this time actually costing American lives.
Up north, at the U.S. base at Karshi-Khanabad, PJ team leader Chris Young had been awakened with the terse announcement, “The QRF’s been shot down.” Young knew that some of his buddies were likely to have been out with the quick reaction force, and when he arrived at the operations center tent, his fears were realized.
“The worst thing about SATCOM is you know for a fact you can pick up that handset and talk straight to the guy at the other end. You’re hearing this happening,” Young says. “You’re hearing your friend’s call signs come up on the radio, and you want to call them and tell them, ‘Hey, dude. I’m here. I’m going to get you as much help as I can,’ but you know you can’t do that, ’cause then you’re just tying up the net.”
Back on Takur Ghar, the survivors of Razor 1 continued to fight for their lives, while inside the carcass of the Chinook, the two pararescuemen and the aircrew medic were treating the wounded. The pilot, Chuck, had been pulled from the outside of the cockpit, around the back of the helicopter, and was doing all right with a bullet through his leg. The copilot, who’d had his left hand almost shot off, seemed to be okay for the moment, but there was concern that he’d lost a lot of blood, even though a tourniquet now seemed to have the bleeding under control. The third casualty, flight engineer David, with the bullet wound that had apparently broken his leg, also seemed to be doing okay. Even though their patients were stabilized, the medics were concerned that a combination of shock and cold could cause any one of them to crash, and they discussed the need to get the casualties evacuated as soon as possible.
Outside in the snow, Captain Self was hearing the pleas from the casualties, the medics, and the flight crew to do whatever it took to get them off that mountain. Without a doubt, it was a lot of pressure on a twenty-five-year-old who found himself in charge and under fire for the first time in his life. They’d been exchanging small-arms fire from the moment the helicopter slammed into the ground, and while none of his men nor any of the helicopter crew had been hit since the initial seconds of the battle, it was clear they’d need help to keep the enemy at bay. But at that point, the CCT still didn’t have contact with jets that could provide them with close air support.
And then the Al Qaeda forces upped the ante. They began firing mortars at the Rangers. The first one hit thirty meters off the nose of the downed helicopter. That put it at the twelve-o’clock position up the hill from them, just to the left of what they’d soon discover was a manned enemy bunker hidden next to and beneath trees. The next volley landed to their rear, a couple hundred meters behind them. It quickly became apparent to Captain Self that the enemy had their position bracketed, and they were going to start walking the mortars in on them. The two PJs and the aircrew medic, who had moved the casualties out of the helicopter because it was an easy target, now carried the wounded back inside the Chinook in an attempt to protect them from shrapnel.
That was about the time that Self decided they needed to assault the hilltop to improve their position. With only six men capable of actually skirmishing—and some of them already wounded—doing the Ranger thing and going on the offensive seemed like a Hail Mary play. But he decided to chance it. Four of them, Sergeants Vance and Raymond DePouli, his squad leader, Sgt. Joshua Walker, and Self attempted an uphill assault with covering fire provided by a fifth Ranger on a machine gun while one of the aircrew worked as his assistant gunner.
Rifles at their shoulders, they moved up the hill firing: two or three shots, then peer over the top of the sights trying to acquire a fresh target; fire another two or three shots and do it all over again. On the left, Sergeant Walker was firing his M-203 grenade launcher, trying to reload as they moved uphill. On the right, Sergeant DePouli had a grenade ready to toss as he blazed away with his rifle. They advanced in a classic fire-team wedge, spread out, shooting. Vance and Self held the center positions. They had gotten about halfway up—about twenty-five meters from the enemy—when Self noticed that rather than charging into an enemy concealed behind natural rocks or trees, they were actually attempting to attack a well dug-in, fortified position. Four wounded soldiers climbing uphill in knee-deep snow were no match for the Al Qaeda fighters, and despite Hollywood depictions where the good guys always seem to manage to make it up the hill, dropping grenades into the bunkers and blowing the enemy to kingdom come, Self did a reality check. When he recognized that the risk of losing everyone on the assault was a very real possibility, common sense prevailed, and the captain yelled, “Bunker! Bunker! Bunker! Get back.”
It was shortly after they’d backed off from the assault attempt that Ga
be Brown established a radio link with the SEAL team that Self ’s platoon had come in to rescue. That was the first word they had that the SEALs were no longer on the ridge top. Brown relayed to Self that with two wounded, the SEALs were holed up for the duration until someone came in to pull them out.
Moments after he reached the SEALs, Brown also got through to air controllers and requested air support. They gave him additional frequencies, and presumably the right codes, so he’d be able to talk directly with incoming jet fighters. It was about twenty minutes after the crash when he was finally able to shout, “We have F-15s inbound on station.”
The first thing the Rangers wanted the jets to do was take out the bunker above them. Not wanting to fall victim to a bomb gone astray, Brown asked for strafing passes first, from the jets’ 20mm cannon. The first passes from the F-15s didn’t silence the bunker, so more fire was brought to bear from a pair of F-16s that had been 180 miles away over north-central Afghanistan when they got the call. They, too, emptied their guns, but the Al Qaeda fighters hunkered down and came back up firing.
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