At around five P.M., the weather on the ridge where the Ranger team and aircrew were hunkered down turned colder, and the wind picked up. The only good news was that the sun was hidden behind nearby mountains, which meant that nightfall was little more than an hour away, but trying to keep the wounded warm and their spirits up was becoming more difficult.
At age twenty-five, Texas-born Capt. Nathan Self was among the youngest of the twenty-seven American survivors on the hill. The oldest, one of the aircrew members, was approaching forty. It fell to Self, as part of his command responsibility, to plan and implement a tactical approach to keeping them all alive until they could be evacuated. But he also had to counteract the natural tendency of men who are facing hours of cold, hunger, pain, and threatened attack by a potentially overwhelming force to lapse into self-pity, hopelessness, and certainly grief for the friends they’d already lost, and this he did by projecting self-confidence in his ability to do the job, even when doubts may have entered his mind.
Self quietly gave in to a bit of introspection, recalling Psalm 121, which he first heard while on a road march at West Point, and had just read again the night before this mission at a Bible study group on the base at Bagram.
I lift up my eyes to the hills—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot slip—
He who watches over you will not slumber;
indeed, He who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord watches over you—
the Lord is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all harm—
He will watch over your life;
the Lord will watch over your coming and going
both now and forever more.
Shortly after six P.M., just as it was turning dark, Jason Cunningham’s condition worsened. With PJ Keary Miller assisting, the Ranger medic began doing CPR, but it was to no avail. In his affidavit, Vance says, “I was watching our medic . . . as he was working on the PJ. I saw him doing CPR and I knew it was bad. I then saw the medic stand up, look over at me, and start walking to me. That is when I got on the radio to Controller and told him we now have seven KIA.”
Cunningham had lived for roughly six hours after being wounded. His death was the result of internal bleeding that could likely have been stopped by surgeons waiting at Bagram, about an hour away.
Just about two hours later, a pair of Chinooks accompanied by Apache gunships lifted off from Texaco FARP, and at eight-fifteen P.M., the first one began lifting Self ’s platoon, the aircrew, and the wounded off the ridge. The second Chinook evacuated the bodies of the seven Americans who died during the battle of Takur Ghar. Yet another helicopter picked up the SEALs, whose abortive attempt to establish an observation post in the middle of enemy-held territory was what triggered the fifteen-hour fight.
By the time the helicopters arrived at Bagram Air Base, Chris Young was already waiting on the tarmac with several other PJs, and with the doctors from the FST team. Chris knew that a PJ had been shot, but didn’t know that he’d died. And he had no idea which PJ had been hit. “With standard triage of patients, the worst come in first, and then it trickles down, until finally the last to come in are the dead. When the birds landed, it sounds bad, but we were looking at the patients—yeah, you’re looking at his injuries—but you’re looking at his face, too, to see, ‘all right, is this my guy?’ So we brought them in, transferred them into the emergency room, and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, cool, the worst patients just came in, and one of our guys wasn’t there. Things are looking good so far.’
“As we were going back out to the flight line to meet the next helicopter is when I ran into Keary Miller, and the fact that he was walking, straight up, no bandages, still had his weapon, that showed me, ‘Okay, Jason was the one who got hit.’ And I went up to him, and the first words out of his mouth were, ‘We lost Jason.’ And the world comes crashing down around you.
“I gathered up all the special-tactics guys, and I said, ‘Hey, look, I just talked to Keary. We lost Jason. Everybody else needs us here right now. We’ll deal with that later.’ ”
Then he went to find Dr. Brian Burlingame, the commander of the FST team who had befriended Jason, and gave him the news. The doctor described his reaction as perhaps the most unprofessional moment of his life. For a moment he allowed himself to react like a friend; then it was back to treating the injured. Later Burlingame had to go into the morgue tent and examine each of the fatalities. They’d been placed in body bags by the PJs who brought them off the helicopters. The doctor recalled the moment he was confronted with the reality of Jason Cunningham’s death. “When I finally did see him, it was very devastating. It’s like losing a friend. We’ve always lost friends in our lifetime, car accident, cancer, and illness. But Jason was a little different, just because of his nature: young, happy guy doing his job, and excited about doing his job, and died in the conduct of doing his job in a selfless manner. He had been in my area three, four hours a day, every day for weeks, and for me, he was as much a part of my unit as any of my other guys were.
“Jason’s death was overwhelming; however, within seconds, there were other things going on. And it sounds almost contrived, but it was almost like turning on and off a switch. If I thought about him for just one second, it was hard. But I could then literally turn my head and engage in another action and be fine.
“I’ve never felt anything before or since like that, where you’re emotionally involved for a minute with one particular thing and then have that not weigh on you. Maybe it’s because other things were going on that were so important that I knew that I needed to be that way. But it was after everyone was taken care of, and Keary was back, and some other folks were back; then you start thinking about it, talking about it.”
Dr. Burlingame continued, “The way you deal with it is saying, ‘The kid did a good job; this is what he lived to do, which is to take care of wounded soldiers.’ And he did it using his training and he did it well. His whole family can rest assured that he didn’t die in vain; he died saving someone’s life.”
Then he said something that combat surgeons have known forever: “There’s one fact in war. Young men die no matter what we do.”
For PJ Pat Harding, the pain of that night was excruciating. Not only had he lost a fellow pararescueman, but combat controller John Chapman, who had been killed early in the fighting, had been Harding’s team leader in the early stages of training, and the two were close. Caleb Ethridge was helping with the casualties. “You could see in Pat’s face, you could just see tears, and he had a little bit of anger, sadness—and just pissed. He was just torn up seeing his friend’s body.”
Chris Young was trying to focus on the job, trying to keep the PJ team functioning through their grief. He recalls, “The hardest part for me was the fact that I’ve never lost anybody on my team before like that. I’ve had one guy get seriously injured, but I’ve never had one die in combat, let alone from an injury that just happened to hit him where his armor didn’t protect. You try to think, ‘All right, he was shot. Where was he shot? He was shot in the back. Well, did he have his body armor on? Yes. Did he have the plates in his body armor? Yes. Well, then how the hell did he die? Because it went in underneath his body armor, right below the bottom of it.’ ”
Then Young begins thinking about the message he had monitored on SATCOM, the one that said no attempt would be made to evac the wounded until after dark.
“When it’s our job to treat the injured—‘Save Life and Aid the Injured,’ as the creed goes—and you’re treating one of your friends, that brings it into a whole new realm of, ‘Well, we need a helicopter.’ ‘Well, it’s too hot.’ ‘I don’t care if it’s too hot. Get a helicopter in there.’
“I understand the decision-making process of the higher-ups. I don’t like it. A lot of things happened over there that we don’t like, but you have to understand it.”
Does he understand the notion of sacrificing more lives to recover the body of a dead American, which was how the tragic day started?
“The easiest thing to say is, ‘If I’m the one that’s dead, no, I don’t want you to recover me.’ On the flip side of the coin, ‘If you’re dead, I’m going to do anything I can to recover you.’ Just because that’s the bond that we have with each other.
“If I’d been out there, I would not have even hesitated. We lost a dude; we have to go back and get him. The way that I understand it, they didn’t know one way or the other. If there’s even a question, you have to go back. And then it becomes, ‘Is he dead-dead? Does he have injuries incompatible with life? Or is he just severely injured?’ You don’t know that. Unless you make the effort, you’ll never know. As a leader, that’s something that’ll eat you up.
“I learned a long time ago, the best thing you can do is the right thing to do. The next best thing you can do is the wrong thing to do. And the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
The loss of Jason Cunningham was devastating to another PJ, twenty-five-year-old SrA Adrian Durham. The two had started the indoctrination course together, had suffered injuries and been set back together, and ultimately graduated together. They’d had a long time to get to know each other very well, and to ponder the meaning of their lives. For him, Jason’s death was crushing. “It’s like he was my brother. Jason was, like, more to me than my brothers were. I spent day in and day out with him. We lived with each other as roommates, worked with each other for three years. You see the same people everywhere you go; you get tired of them, but you go away from them and then you miss them. You can’t wait to get back ’cause they’re your family. And I lost Jason, it hurt more than anything else. I’ve had family members who’ve died and never shed a tear, and I couldn’t stop crying when Jason died. It was one of the most hurtful experiences in my life. The only thing that’s comforting me was that he didn’t die needlessly. He didn’t die in some worthless training accident. He died doing the job.
“And then you’re kind of jealous, in a way, because he got to go up there, he had the option to go out and do it. I didn’t get that chance. You’re thinking, ‘When’s it going to be my turn?’ The only terrible thing about that is that he had two beautiful daughters, and they’ll never see him again, and a wife who’ll never see him again. That’s the worst part about it.”
Lt. Col. Patrick Pihana, the commander of the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron to which Jason had been attached, was still coping with the fact that he was the one who had sent him into combat. “Yes, you know you’re in command of troops that you’ve just sent into combat, and you get past the ‘I just talked to Jason at dinner the night before.’ But probably what impacted me the hardest was the night he died. Here I stood knowing what had happened. I knew that we’d lost one of our nation’s children, and there was a family at home that didn’t know yet, a wife and children and mom and dad and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and the whole network of people. I knew there was going to be bad news that was going to come to them, and it breaks your heart. At the same time, you’re trying to carry on the battle, recovering people you still have out there, and continuing on with the next mission.”
Given his position as head of a special-operations unit, Pihana has had to cope with the death of one of his men in the past, and is realistic enough to know he’ll be dealing with a similar situation again. To bear that burden requires a coping strategy. “My philosophy on it has been based on four things: First, a faith. I have a firm belief in God. Then family and friends. I come from a family that’s supported me and, obviously, a family in the Air Force and friends that support us here. And then our flag, our country. So the three Fs, or four if you will, that if I had to prepare myself for this, everything I do kind of stems from the support I get from those three or four areas right there. Yes, it’s always a possibility it could happen. We train our best and do our best to make sure it doesn’t happen, but if it does, we take care of those who are still left behind, and then we carry on as best we can.”
A couple of days later, a memorial service was held at Bagram for the seven men who were killed during the battle on Takur Ghar mountain. The sky was cloudy, but the sun was breaking through in places, accenting the mountains surrounding the base that were still snowcapped. It was a beautiful early spring day that belied the sadness of those who were gathered to mourn. Against a background of continuing air operations, a chaplain offered prayers, an honor guard fired a twenty-one-gun salute, and a close friend of each of the men killed in action stood in front of the mourners and offered remembrances of their friend. Speaking for Jason was his team leader and mentor, Chris Young.
“I talked about how he was an annoying little shit, y’know, about how he crossed over from the Navy, and me being a former Marine, we kind of bonded and joked and things like that. I wanted the guys to know how eager he was to train and to learn, and I know that he failed his first medical class at Bragg, and he got set back to the next one. Well, in between those classes, he was supposed to be doing cleanup chores and things like that. But what he ended up doing was skipping out of his chores and going to listen in on other medical lectures so that he could be a better medic. And then I tasked him with writing a patrol order over the weekend, and it got to the point where he was calling the house so much that my wife would just look at the caller ID and she’d say, ‘Chris, it’s Jason. You get it this time.’ Y’know, so we joked about that. I told them that one of the formal schools I’d been to, the instructor told us, ‘Do good; don’t suck.’ And that’s what I told Jason before I left Afghanistan to go back up to K-2.
“After the service, Captain Self came up to me and he said, ‘Y’know, Chris, three of my guys are alive because your boy did it right up there.’ And when that happened, the only thing I could think of was, ‘Well, if I can’t bring Jason home, then the memory that he was doing it right, right up till the end, is the best thing that we could ask for.’ ”
PJ Keary Miller comforts Theresa Cunningham following the formal presentation to her of Jason’s Air Force Cross (Posthumous) at a ceremony attended by four thousand at Kirtland Air Force Base. (Michael Hirsh)
CHAPTER 12
“I REGRET TO INFORM YOU . . .”
MARCH 5, 2002
Shortly after 9/11, Theresa Cunningham heard the rock group Five for Fighting sing “Superman,” and the lyric “I can’t stand to fly. I’m not that naive, I’m just out to find the better part of me” immediately reminded her of Jason. She bought the CD and would play it for him often. “It was who he was. He wanted to do great things, but he didn’t want to be glorified for it; he just wanted to do it.”
When she met Jason, they were both in the Navy, in Italy. Theresa was twenty-three, Jason was twenty, and though she had never even thought about getting married, the day they met she knew she wanted to be friends with him forever. They got married, had baby Kyla, and got divorced. The trouble was, as she now puts it, “We were both thirteen.” But they never gave up on the friendship, and a couple years later they remarried, and then had their second daughter, Hannah.
By this time they were both out of the Navy, and Jason was on track to become a pararescueman. He’d considered joining the SEALs, but decided he’d rather be in the business of saving lives rather than taking them. Unlike many of the PJs who were aching to get into Operation Enduring Freedom, Jason wasn’t enthusiastic about leaving Theresa and the girls for Afghanistan; she says he was actually upset because there were more medical training classes he wanted to take before he put himself in a combat situation. Once there, however, his calls home and the e-mails he sent her were nothing but enthusiastic.
When Cunningham got his first combat save on the Ditka 03 mission, he called home about thirty times. There
sa, an Air Force ROTC cadet at Valdosta State University, had class all day, and missed the calls. “He kept calling and calling. He was obviously living on the line to get to use the phone. And then he got hold of me, a little past midnight on the fourteenth, on Valentine’s Day, and he began to tell me the story and we got cut off. Just heard a click, and then he called me back later, saying, ‘I guess I can’t talk about it.’ I could hear it in his voice. He was dancing. And he said, ‘Watch the news! Watch the news! I can’t tell you what’s going on, so watch the news and I’ll tell you about it as soon as I get home.’ ” She still has one of his phone calls on her answering machine.
Like any man who goes off to war leaving a family behind, Jason Cunningham wanted to comfort Theresa, assuring her that he was safe, that he was being careful. His e-mails were short and to the point. Safe as usual was a typical message. “I think he was trying to reassure me, and I knew that as much as he was an adrenaline junkie, he really wanted to be careful. He wanted to make sure that he was the most prepared guy there; he wasn’t taking any chances with his life.”
Even so, when Jason’s mom, Jackie Cunningham, called from New Mexico to tell her that the news was reporting a helicopter down in Afghanistan, she got concerned. She’d come home from school to grab lunch, and the phone rang as she was dashing out the door. Theresa doesn’t know what caused her to pick it up. “I never answer the phone when I’m home on my break, ’cause I just want to eat. But I picked it up and it was his mother.”
Jackie Cunningham recalls the conversation vividly. She’d heard a report on the radio and there was no one for her to call for more information except Theresa. “I don’t want to alarm you, but have you heard from Jason? ’Cause there’s a helicopter that went down on a rescue mission.”
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