Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Once all five Apaches were on station, each team began flying “racetrack” patterns in its half of the valley, using Serkhankhel as the north-south dividing line. For Team 2, this meant flying clockwise in an oval no more than two kilometers long and one kilometer wide. The idea was to keep at least one aircraft with an eye on the infantry and Serkhankhel at all times. They flew in this pattern for several uneventful minutes, watching the infantry gather themselves on the ground. Okay, here we go again, nothing’s going on, Chenault thought. “Then all hell broke loose.”

  BY the time Schwartz arrived at the site of the attack on Harriman’s column, all three Chinooks in the first serial were attempting to land at the landing zone that had been marked out. Schwartz told his radio-telephone operator (RTO), Sergeant First Class Eric Navarro, to get on the radio and help the Chinooks land, then opened his door to step out. As he did, someone yelled to him to watch out, the creek bed was mined. Looking down, Schwartz saw an antipersonnel mine right where he was about to put his foot. Sidestepping the mine and breathing a sigh of relief, he walked carefully up to where he could see several personnel performing CPR on Harriman. As soon as the Chinooks landed, Schwartz helped carry Harriman to the nearest helicopter, which was the one piloted by Anderson and Fichter. Looking at Harriman’s glazed eyes and ghostly pallor, Ballard thought it was already too late for his counterpart from 372.

  Once Harriman had been lifted aboard, Casenhiser, Wadsworth, and Nelson climbed in, along with several of the more badly wounded AMF soldiers, two of whom had taken shrapnel to the head. (Ziabdullah told Ballard that all his wounded had been taken care of, but that wasn’t the case. Some had been too scared to get on the helicopters, while others who had jumped on the Chinook were not wounded, but were looking for a way to get out of the fight.) Fully aware that a fellow soldier’s life hung in the balance, Fichter and Anderson wasted no time on the ground. By 6:47 a.m. they were in the air again, en route back to Bagram.

  After the helicopters took off, Ballard set about “sterilizing” the site, recovering sensitive items—especially cryptographic gear—and placing them in his vehicle. But some equipment wouldn’t fit on the remaining trucks and had to be left behind. About fifteen minutes after Anderson’s Chinook had left, half a dozen rounds variously assessed as RPGs, mortars or recoilless rifle rounds whistled over the heads of the troops who remained at the site. The fire, which caused no casualties, was probably aimed at the Apaches flying about 500 meters in front of the U.S. and AMF troops, but it served to focus the Americans’ minds on the task in hand. Nevertheless, it still took them almost an hour to recover all the mission-essential equipment and bandage up the AMF walking wounded.

  John B. and Isaac H., the AFO personnel who had accompanied the quick reaction force, stayed behind to establish an observation post on a hillock just to the north of the Guppy. Ziabdullah moved his forces south to link up with Haas and the main convoy just west of Carwazi, while Schwartz, Ballard, and about twenty of Engineer’s fighters remained at the site and established a hasty defensive position, waiting for Afghan reinforcements to be sent up to provide security for the AFO observation post. Upon their arrival, Schwartz moved them forward and told their leader where to position his forces. As he was driving back to the main convoy, Schwartz got a call from Ballard saying that the AFO guys had left some “mission essential equipment” in their vehicle at the base of the Guppy, and they wanted the AMF troops to bring it up to them. The major returned to their vehicle, secured the equipment, and told a pair of AMF fighters to bring it up to the observation post. Then Schwartz went back to the hasty defensive perimeter, gathered all the U.S. and AMF forces, and proceeded to link up with Haas and the main body.

  ONBOARD Anderson’s Chinook, Casenhiser ignored his own wounds, which were soaking his pants leg in blood, and worked frantically to keep his buddy alive. Blood slickened the floor as he knelt over Harriman. “Go faster! Go faster!” he yelled desperately at the pilots. Fichter and Anderson were already pushing the helicopter as hard as they could, squeezing every last knot of speed from the shuddering airframe as the Afghan landscape flashed below them. They received permission to break formation, leaving the other two Chinooks in their wake as they made a beeline back to Bagram, flying far closer to the ground than they had on the way down. “I didn’t want to waste the time pulling up to gain altitude,” Anderson said. “We didn’t care if we got shot at or not.” The pilots threw all caution to the wind in their efforts to deliver Harriman alive. “We decided to pull everything we had and see what she would do,” Anderson said. They watched the air speed indicator creep up from 130 knots per hour, past 140, 150, 160, then 165, the equivalent of about 190 miles per hour. Fichter had 1500 hours flight time under his belt, while Anderson had 2600. Neither had ever flown a helicopter this fast before. “We just decided we were going to tear it apart to get him there,” Anderson said. The airframe was shaking so violently they couldn’t read some of the instruments. “We were sucking the guts out of the aircraft to get back,” recalled Fichter. As they roared over Kabul less than 100 feet above the ground, the two bubble-shaped windows in the cabin popped out and sailed to the ground. “Somebody in Kabul got a new salad bowl,” Fichter remarked dryly.

  With Casenhiser working full-time on Harriman, Sergeant Jonathan Gurgel, the flight engineer, passed out blankets and used the aircraft’s medical supplies to dress the wounds on the walking wounded, some of whom were going into shock. About ten miles from Bagram, the pilots radioed the airfield tower with the message that they were inbound carrying a litter-urgent American casualty receiving CPR. Only thirty minutes after they had taken off, Fichter and Anderson brought their Chinook hurtling over the mountains surrounding Bagram airfield at 170 knots. With Anderson at the controls, they tore up another page from the rule book by using a banned maneuver called an “Australian decel” to land the aircraft at high speed. Anderson barely slowed the aircraft before suddenly tilting it on its side, pivoting, and almost slamming it to the ground in a move that took no more than a couple of seconds. A small convoy of cargo Humvees that served as ambulances for the elite medical professionals of the 274th Forward Surgical Team raced out to meet the helicopter and unloaded Harriman immediately.

  As the Humvee with Harriman in the back sped away, Casenhiser, at last relieved of his medical duties, turned to one of the Chinook crew and asked casually, “Is there blood on my leg?” There was. “He had blood all over his thighs,” said Anderson, who marveled at the SF medic’s ability to put his own pain out of his mind in order to focus on treating Harriman.

  Once the casualties were unloaded, the crew realized how much blood there was on the floor. Knowing they were due to fly another load of infantrymen—” Joes”—down to the Shahikot soon, they started throwing dirt on the seats and the floor to soak it up. “Nothing will degrade morale more than to have blood on the floor and seats when you’re picking up forty-three Joes,” Fichter said.

  Later that day Anderson walked over to some Special Forces soldiers and asked how Harriman was doing. A warrant officer told him Harriman had died. The news hit Anderson and his crewmates hard. They rehashed the flight, trying to figure out if they could have saved an extra few seconds anywhere along the route. Anderson was so troubled by these thoughts that he went back to the forward surgical team’s doctors in the medical center that they had established in the airfield tower building. They told him Harriman had been beyond help, and that a few minutes here or there wouldn’t have made any difference. It was cold comfort to the air crew. “We wanted to tell his wife we did it as fast as we could,” Anderson said. “I don’t think any other helicopter or any other crew could have done it any quicker…. We just wanted to make a difference.”

  MCHALE’S ragged formation of seven or eight vehicles, including three jinga trucks, an armored SUV, AFO’s Sergeant Major Al Y. in his truck, an AMF Toyota pickup, and McHale in his pickup, continued south to Gwad Kala. (When Thomas came through the defile believing he
was at the front of the column and then caught sight of McHale’s element up ahead, he was confused, but did not fire at them.) McHale halted and dismounted the troops at Gwad Kala with the intention of sending the trucks back to the main body of the convoy, which was still north of the defile. He needed to do this because so many trucks had broken down, rolled over, become stuck or been dispatched north with the quick reaction force that, despite starting the night with three spare trucks, Task Force Hammer was now running out of vehicles, so there were more fighters back west of Carwazi than the vehicles there could accommodate. The steady attrition of the convoy’s trucks also caused the system of squads, platoons and companies into which the A-teams had carefully formed their 400 Afghan allies to completely break down. This became clear to McHale the moment he alighted from his truck at Gwad Kala and watched the Afghans dismounting. “They were looking at each other like ‘Who are you?’” The Afghan “platoon leader” McHale had placed in charge of the three AMF trucks in his advance force was nowhere to be seen. “It became apparent that their command and control was lost,” McHale recalled. It was now daylight, and the Al Qaida fighters on the Whale had a clear view of the straggling column. McHale and the other SF soldiers pointed to a nearby wadi and motioned for their Afghan colleagues to seek cover there. As the Afghans walked over, the Al Qaida mortar crews nestled in the Whale’s rocks let fly. With a boom! the first round landed among the one-story adobe ruins about 200 meters from the column. McHale, under indirect fire for the first time in his life, thought briefly that it wasn’t as loud as he expected. He didn’t have much time to chew on that thought, however, because a few seconds later another round exploded, this time about 150 meters on the other side of the column.

  As mortar rounds bracketed their vehicles, the Afghans’ nerve broke. “They started scattering like cats,” McHale said. Now the disruptive effect of the cross-loading of personnel precipitated by the earlier truck accidents came into play. Task Force Hammer might have stood a chance if the Afghans had retained unit integrity, with each Afghan platoon grouped together under its original platoon leader. But that was not the case. The Afghan force had become hopelessly mixed up, and under the stress of sustained incoming mortar fire, it broke. McHale looked in vain for an Afghan commander of any rank that he recognized. But because the column had become so intermingled and Engineer’s platoon—the best of the Afghan fighters—had been dispatched with the quick reaction force, the ODA 372 team leader recognized none of the Afghans around him.

  To McHale’s horror, not only were the Afghans running away, but they were running straight toward the ruins where the first round had landed, and which the mortar teams on the Whale had obviously used as a target to register their tubes. McHale ran to the three AMF trucks, only to find that their drivers had abandoned them and taken the keys with them. The A-team leader jumped back into his truck with his commo NCO, Sergeant Bill Guthrie, and an American Pushto interpreter, then raced after the fleeing Afghans. With mortar rounds raining down, he tried to rally the Afghans and persuade them to get back on the trucks so that they could withdraw in good order. It was a hopeless task. “They were more in the self-preservation mode at this point,” McHale said. But although the incoming fire had spooked the Afghans, it wasn’t effective enough to inflict any casualties. “If you were organized you could have sustained and continued the maneuver under it,” McHale said. “The difficulty being you can’t just stand there and continue to have those guys running around like chickens in an open valley where you’re clearly being observed.”

  McHale realized quickly that the mortar rounds seemed to follow his truck. The guerrillas on the Whale were obviously more interested in killing U.S. troops than they were in killing the Americans’ local allies, and it didn’t take long for them to zero in on him. When a round landed close enough to shower him with dirt, he knew it was time to beat a retreat. But for the first time Task Force Hammer’s men had “eyes on” their enemy. Staff Sergeant Christopher Grooms of Texas 14, who had been a mortarman in the regular Army before joining Special Forces, spotted the puffs of smoke from the tube firing at them. Meanwhile, Sergeant Major Al Y. and a Special Forces medic attached to the CIA were taking shelter in a ditch and thought they could see the Al Qaida mortar crew’s observer popping up from behind cover. Guthrie and Sergeant First Class John Southworth (Texas 14’s commo sergeant) raised the Apaches on the radio, hoping they could take care of the problem.

  Hearing the calls for help, the two Apaches in the northern part of the valley broke from their racetrack pattern and flew up the west side of the Whale. Spotting the mortar pit’s location using the vague directions they had received seemed an impossible task. At that hour the Whale’s west side was still bathed in shadow. “It was like trying to see fleas on a dog,” Hurley said. But there it was, in a wadi at the base of the southwest side of the Whale, manned by eight enemy fighters wearing traditional Afghan brown woolen pakhul hats, with brown scarves around their necks. After one pass over the enemy position to positively identify it, the Apaches wheeled around and came diving in. Chenault took the lead, struggling to keep his crosshairs on the mortar as his helicopter closed on the target at a speed of about 115 miles per hour. At 1,000 meters from the tube, his left index finger squeezed the trigger and the pods on his aircraft’s stubby wings spat a pair of high-explosive rounds at the target. The rockets sped toward the target, short yellow flames trailing from their motors. Chenault squeezed again and again, each pull on the trigger firing another two rockets, walking them closer and closer to the mortar pit. At 200 meters from the enemy position, he yanked on the controls and broke to the left. Five rotor discs behind him, Hurley flew in firing three rocket bursts to suppress any enemy to the right of Chenault’s target area. Then he also broke left. Out of the shadows leaped two streams of tracers, arcing under the nose of Hurley’s aircraft. Making a mental note of the spot where the tracers had been fired, Chenault and Hurley turned and barreled toward the target yet again. Both pilots put their rockets right where they remembered the tracers coming from. Bull’s-eye. The mortar position blew apart in a cloud of dust.

  That at least persuaded the enemy fighters on the Whale’s western slopes to keep their heads down long enough for McHale and his colleagues to get back in their vehicles and beat a retreat north to the security perimeter that the remainder of the column had established just south of the defile. One of the Afghan drivers returned to his truck, but most of the Afghans chose to walk back in ones and twos. “There was nothing organized about it,” McHale recalled. Over the cacophonous din of incoming mortar rounds, men shouting in two languages, and the static bursts from several radios, McHale’s ears caught another sound drifting over the Whale from the Shahikot valley: automatic weapons fire, and lots of it.

  6.

  SERGEANT Scotty Mendenhall’s feet hit the ground and he peeled left to take up position at the Chinook’s three o’clock. Behind him the rest of 2nd Platoon fanned out and formed a perimeter around the battalion and company command post personnel as the helicopter took off. Raising their heads as they lay on the scrubby grass and hard-packed dirt, some soldiers were stunned to see a walled compound just 150 meters to the north. Frank Baltazar, commander of 2-187 Infantry’s C Company, wasn’t surprised. In the days leading up to D-Day he’d seen overhead photos of the compound that indicated it was empty, nothing to worry about. He’d told his battalion commander, Chip Preysler, he’d clear the compound—run his troops through it to check it out—before moving into the blocking positions. Staff Sergeant Chris Harry, one of Baltazar’s squad leaders, knew his first mission was to clear the compound. Within three minutes of landing, seven of his men were “stacked” to the left of the doorway along the outside wall. Sergeant David Dedo approached the door-way from the right and peered into the courtyard. “One American dead!” Harry heard him shout. The soldiers had been briefed that TF 11 troops—the AFO recon teams—would be in the valley. They feared the worst. “One American dead?!?�
� Harry exclaimed. “No, one American TENT!” Dedo replied, explaining he’d spotted a U.S. military-style tent in the courtyard. Relieved, the troops surged through the doorway.

  But as Harry’s troops stormed in, bullets ripped over the men still sitting exposed on the LZ, fired from a position about 400 meters to their west on a low east-west ridgeline that ended just short of the compound. Machine gunners Mendenhall and Specialist James “Fred” Thompson returned fire as their buddies sought cover. A running battle ensued as soldiers maneuvered down and up the banks of a creek between the LZ and the compound, exchanging fire with a dozen enemy fighters. Preysler and Baltazar moved their command posts to a nearby bluff. “Look out!” Baltazar’s RTO yelled. Foolishly the captain raised his head to see an orange fireball hurtling straight at him. He slammed his head down as the RPG flew over and landed harmlessly fifty meters behind Preysler. The leaders waited the ten minutes it took Harry’s squad to clear the compound, then they and the rest of 2nd Platoon went inside, where they encountered a scene reminiscent of an Al Qaida Marie Celeste. Someone had left in a hurry moments before the Americans burst in. The teapot was still warm, as were the half-eaten breakfasts of goat meat and the bedclothes for thirteen to fifteen men strewn on the floor of the compound’s one-story main building. The place was an arsenal that proved the guerrillas were better armed than the Americans had expected. They found several recoilless rifles, 82mm mortar tubes and rounds, dozens of AK-style assault rifles and RPGs, Dragunov sniper rifles, three sets of U.S. PVS-7 night-vision goggles, binoculars, and handheld ICOM radios that Sergeant First Class Anthony Koch, the troops’ platoon sergeant, said “were better than ours.” There was also a sports bag from a Nike store in Beaverton, Oregon, full of blasting caps and prayer beads, plus Middle Eastern currency and a notebook full of Arabic writing on military tactics, including a diagram on how to shoot down an aircraft. Fifty alarm clocks, a number of Casio watches, and books on digital electronics suggested a bomb-making operation. “These guys weren’t taking an electrical engineering exam in that compound,” Wiercinski said. Human hair lay on the floor, as if beards had been hurriedly shorn.