Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Outside, Baltazar’s troops were trading fire with Arab-looking fighters in the hills dressed in lightweight black garb and armed with AKs and RPGs. Thomson dropped two with his machine gun. Koch looked south and suddenly realized the extent of the combat. RPGs flew in all directions, all fired with the same goal: shooting down an Apache.

  AS Apache Team 1 obliterated the mortar position on the Whale, Team 2 was encountering enemy fire in the south of the valley. Hardy was making his first turn through the valley when he felt the helicopter “bounce.” “It sounded like somebody just took their bare hand and slapped the side of the aircraft,” his copilot-gunner Pebsworth remembered. Like most Apache pilots, he had never been shot at and failed to recognize the sound for what it was. “You’re always on the delivering end of a round, you’re never on the receiving end,” he said. “It just wasn’t in my mind, or any of our minds, really, that we were going to be getting shot at.”

  “What was that?!?” the two pilots asked each other. Hardy was one of the few pilots who might have been expected to correctly identify the sound. With Bob Carr still back at Texaco getting his cannon fixed, Hardy’s 3,400 flight hours made him the “highest time” pilot over the battlefield. As A Company’s maintenance test pilot, the rangy forty-year-old was, in Hurley’s words, the unit’s “maintenance god,” responsible for the upkeep of the helicopters and for test-flying those that had been fixed. He knew all the Apache’s quirks yet had no idea what had just happened to his helicopter.

  A few confused seconds after feeling the bump, Pebsworth realized his symbol generator—the electronic device that allowed him to read data such as compass heading, altitude, and air speed by converting it to graphics in his helmet-mounted display—had died. This made the pilots think the “pop” they’d heard was a fuse or some other electrical failure. Pebsworth started pulling the circuit breakers to reset the electronics. But as he did so, he realized other displays had also gone dark. Nothing connected to the electronics bay on the left side of the fuselage was working. Frantically flicking switches and pushing buttons, the pilots tried to isolate the problem’s source. Then reality dawned in the form of urgent radio traffic from the other Apaches. “We started to realize that we’re being shot at, all the aircraft are being shot at,” Pebsworth said.

  The two pilots assumed an RPG had exploded close enough to shower the left electronics bay with shrapnel. How in the world could one bullet cause that much damage? Pebsworth thought. But in fact a single Al Qaida bullet was the cause of their difficulties. That bullet had entered the electronics bay and sliced neatly through sixty wires zip-tied together in a bundle as thick as a man’s wrist, knocking out the weapons and target acquisition systems. The pilots could still fly the aircraft, but were unable to shoot back at the enemy. The Apaches’ battle in the Shahikot was less than fifteen minutes old, and already the most experienced pilot in the fight had been rendered impotent.

  Having recovered from the initial shock of a couple of hundred U.S. soldiers air assaulting into their stronghold, the Al Qaida fighters were directing a fusillade of RPG, machine gun and Kalashnikov fire at the helicopters. None of the pre-mission briefings had focused on the RPG threat to helicopters, even though it was no secret that Al Qaida and other Islamist guerrilla organizations had grown adept at using RPGs to down helicopters. An RPG gunner can set his weapon either to fire in a point-detonating mode, meaning the round explodes when it hits something, or in an air burst mode, meaning it detonates in midair after a preset distance. In the wars against the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Russians in Chechnya, the Al Qaida fighters had honed their expertise at using RPGs in the air burst mode to down helicopters, setting the rounds to explode close enough to an aircraft to shred its hydraulic and electrical innards—and, perhaps, its pilots—with a lethal shower of shrapnel. The pilots were not ignorant of the risk posed by the shoulder-fired weapons. “Every pilot in the tent talked about the RPGs and how they’ve been used in Somalia,” Hamilton said. “Everyone knew that potential might exist, even if it had not been briefed as part of the threat.”

  TEAM 1 was breaking a cardinal rule of helicopter combat. The two Apaches were racing north up the Whale hunting another reported mortar position on the ridge’s northeast corner. Chenault was in the lead, almost 2,000 meters ahead of Hurley. Figuring “altitude was gonna help us,” as Hurley put it, both aircraft “rode the backbone of the Whale,” flying along the crest of the ridgeline for its entire length. The pilots were trying to put themselves between the enemy and the sun, to blind any Al Qaida fighters trying to track them with the naked eye. But this silhouetted the aircraft against the sky—a tactical no-no. Chenault reached the Whale’s northeast tip and began a wide right turn. Hurley was preparing to follow suit when from the front seat Stu Contant screamed a warning: “I have a man, 3 o’clock, RPG!” Looking down, Hurley spotted a brown-clad figure 400 feet below. He had an RPG launcher over his left shoulder and was aiming it at the tail of Chenault’s aircraft. Flying about 100 feet lower than Chenault, Hurley banked his Apache into a tighter right turn. He knew the danger was imminent, but his speed had carried him past the enemy. He needed to be facing a target to destroy it with rockets or Hellfires. The cannon could be more flexibly employed, by “slaving” it to the movements of the pilot’s helmet, but at this stage the small brown figure was too far behind them for Hurley to swivel the cannon around to fire at him, even by craning his neck. There was nothing to do but complete the turn. Then, facing the gunner at a range of 800 meters, he squeezed off a ten-round burst. It was too far away for such a small target. The rounds dispersed too widely. Hurley cursed the decision to set the burst limit at ten rounds. Twenty would have been better, he thought. We’re not getting enough steel in the box.

  Hurley flew farther east into the valley, then turned to make another run at the Whale, this time flying out of the sun. He could see five brown spots running from right to left across the ridgeline, all except the RPG gunner carrying AK-style assault rifles. Their brown woolly coats blended perfectly with the rocks and weeds. No wonder these bastards are so hard to spot when they’re not moving, Hurley thought. He fired three or four pairs of rockets at the elusive guerrillas, walking the rounds in toward the scattering brown figures. “We’re almost out of rockets,” Contant cautioned. Hurley switched back to cannon and fired two more bursts of high explosive 30mm rounds. It’s time to switch tactics, he thought. We keep turning to the right. We’ve got to do something different. He made a split-second decision to turn left and head south along the Whale, reasoning that they’d already cleared that route a couple of minutes earlier flying in the opposite direction. But “clearing” a 6,000-meter ridgeline by flying 400 feet above it at over 100 miles per hour is not an ideal method for ensuring it is free of enemy, as Hurley and Contant were about to discover. In the shadows of a crevice at what soldiers would call the Whale’s “military crest”—about twenty-five meters below the actual top of the ridge—an Al Qaida gunner shouldered his RPG launcher, sensing opportunity. He might even have been the same gunner they’d observed a couple of minutes previously. Although they’d seen him aiming at Chenault’s aircraft, they hadn’t seen him fire. Maybe he’d been waiting for a better chance. Having decelerated to ensure greater accuracy, Hurley was just low and slow enough to allow an expert RPG gunner to line the Apache up in his launcher’s metal sights. As Hurley turned left and pulled abreast of the Whale, the gunner pulled the trigger. Unseen by Hurley and Contant, a small puff of smoke marked the launch point as the rocket-assisted projectile hurtled toward their aircraft. It detonated as it struck the helicopter’s left Hellfire launcher, destroying all three missiles on the pylon. Shrapnel tore through the adjacent rocket pod. The helicopter bucked with the force of the explosion. Before Hurley had time to process what had happened, bullets were smacking against the airframe. One burst through the left side of the cockpit at the same moment that the RPG hit. Whizzing inches in front of Hurley’s knee and hand, the bullet lodge
d in the console. A small piece of metal debris hit him in the leg. For an awful moment he thought he’d been shot.

  A dozen bullets hit the helicopter’s fuselage, but Hurley didn’t hear or feel them. “What got my attention was the bullet that came through the cockpit,” he said. “I’m hit, but I’m okay!” he yelled to Contant. Momentarily confused, he wondered how the impact of one small bullet could make the aircraft rock so much. Leaning forward and peering out of the cockpit to his left, he saw a Hellfire’s seeker head hanging down from the pylon. The rest of the missile was missing. It began to dawn on him that he’d been hit by something larger than a bullet. As he straightened the helicopter out, he heard the Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! of an alarm in his headphones. The master caution light—a big light on the left of the dashboard designed to draw attention to smaller warning lights that indicate problems with individual systems—flashed an ominous red. Hurley scanned the array of sixty caution lights to see which were on. The first to flash was the fail light for the helicopter’s back-up control system, a flyby-wire system for use in case of problems with the main controls. One of two main transmission oil lights was flickering, as if hesitant to announce bad news, and the helicopter was handling sluggishly. Hurley’s gut told him he wasn’t going to be able to keep the Apache aloft for much longer.

  He keyed his mike. “Hey, Rich, I’m hit,” he said to his wingman. “I need to know, where do you guys want me to put this?” But Chenault was now on the northeastern side of the Whale, putting the ridgeline’s rocky bulk directly between the two helicopters. The Apaches’ radios operate on a line-of-sight principle. Chenault might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. All Hurley heard was the hiss of static. As he reached the southern tip of the Whale, both transmissions’ oil pressure lights flashed on. Low on ammo, the weapons stores on his left wing destroyed, and with oil and smoke pouring from his aircraft over enemy territory, he figured now was a good time to call his maintenance god.

  At that moment Hardy and Pebsworth were dealing with a few problems of their own. Unable to shoot, Hardy fell back on a game he had learned as a young AH-1 Cobra pilot. Back then it involved sending an unarmed OH-58 Kiowa scout helicopter out ahead of his Cobra. The idea was that the Kiowa would draw fire by offering such an inviting target that the enemy was compelled to engage it as it flew by. The enemy having revealed his position, the Cobra, following close behind, would move in for the kill. The game was called “hound and hare,” and it involved an obvious risk to the crew of the Kiowa. Now Hardy was putting himself and Pebsworth in that unenviable position. With the damage his helicopter had sustained, no one would have questioned his right to withdraw immediately to Texaco to get his aircraft patched up. But he chose to remain on the battlefield, drawing fire for his colleagues as the Apaches circled the valley.

  Drawing fire was easy. Avoiding it was tough.

  The pilots were for the most part blissfully unaware of the DShK and Kalashnikov bullets peppering their aircraft. The RPGs were harder to ignore. The guerrillas were firing them at a rate of about one every minute, and each round’s relatively slow velocity and short smoke trail meant the pilots could visually track the grenades as they flew through the air and exploded with a puff of black smoke that reminded Hamilton of World War II flak. “They’re shooting RPGs at you,” Hamilton told Hardy as the two helicopters flew along the ridgeline. “I don’t want to hear about it. Just shoot them!” Hardy replied. Then Hurley called. He read off the cockpit warnings. Hardy listened with growing alarm. Hurley and Contant had to leave the battle and return to the FARP immediately. That much was clear. Normal practice called for the damaged Apache’s wingman to leave with him. But Hurley’s wingman was Rich Chenault, whose Apache was holding up relatively well in the maelstrom of RPG and DShK fire. “We need to go with that aircraft, because we can’t shoot anyway,” Pebsworth told Hardy. “It doesn’t make any sense to send a good aircraft out of the fight.”

  His backseater agreed. “I’ve gotta go back to the FARP,” Hardy told Hurley over the radio. “Fall in trail and follow me, and we’ve got to go quick.” But first the two helicopters had to find each other—usually no easy task when all Apaches look alike and four of them were swarming like bees in a one kilometer by three kilometer slice of sky. The risk of a fiery midair collision was high. “Somehow we stayed away from each other,” Pebsworth said. “That was amazing to me.”

  Hardy and Pebsworth easily identified Hurley’s aircraft by the smoke streaming from the burning oil, and flew up beside the stricken Apache. “I’m dipping my nose so you can identify me,” Hardy said over the radio. “I’ve got you,” Hurley replied. The two Apaches flew out of the valley’s southwest corner at high speed, turned north toward the FARP and scooted along the western side of the Whale. Hardy had Hurley take the lead, so that if the latter’s Apache caught fire, the pilots in the trailing aircraft would be able to spot it and alert Hurley and Contant instantly. But no more than two kilometers northwest of the Whale more lights started blinking insistently in Hurley’s cockpit. Their message was blunt: You have no oil left in your transmission. Hurley called off the lights to Hardy as they flashed on. The maintenance pilot knew there was no choice about what had to be done. He needed to assess the aircraft’s condition immediately. “You’ve got to land, and you’ve got to land now,” he told Hurley.

  Spotting a wadi below them that might offer a little protection from any enemy in the area, the pilots steered their helicopters toward it and landed almost simultaneously on a dirt road that ran through the middle of the creek bed. It was a rough landing for Hurley. He had lost the system that stabilizes the aircraft as it lands, and the helicopter rocked forward and backward as he brought it in. As soon as he set the helicopter down in the 100-foot-wide river bed, the extent of the damage it had sustained became vividly apparent. “It was like a hunter when he guts a deer,” Pebsworth said. “He set it down and all this stuff falls out from underneath it. Transmission fluid was leaking from that aircraft from nose to tail.”

  Although the pilots’ position was perilous—they were within sight and weapons range of Al Qaida positions on the Whale, and they could still hear the din of the battle raging in the Shahikot—Pebsworth hadn’t lost his sense of humor. “I think he’s got a transmission fluid leak,” he told his backseater with more than a hint of sarcasm.

  Jumping out of his cockpit, Hardy told Hurley to shut his engine down. As the rotors slowed, the maintenance pilot opened the cowlings and began to inspect the engine, much like a doctor conducting a triage examination of a patient. The damage to the Apache was shocking. In addition to the torn and dented rocket pod and the mangled Hellfires, the Apache had a cracked rotor blade and almost three dozen bullet holes, out of which the last of its transmission fluid was leaking. It was a testament to the helicopter’s sturdy design that it was still flying at all, and that neither pilot had been hit.

  Hardy had a tough decision to make. It was a decision that could prove fatal if he chose wrong, and he had to make it fast. One option was to try to fly the helicopter back to Texaco, about thirty minutes’ flying time away. Thanks to engine bearings that have a felt wicking designed to collect and hold oil, helping to lubricate an otherwise dry engine, the Apache is supposed to be able to fly for thirty minutes with no oil. That, at least, was the manufacturers’ claim. But it had never been done before, and this was a hell of a time to put the theory to the test. The alternative was to fly back to Texaco with Hurley and Contant strapped to the wings of his helicopter. This was not quite as dangerous as it sounds, and—although never done in training—is an approved method for evacuating downed pilots in such situations. Each Apache carries nylon ropes with a metal D-ring attached for just such a purpose. However, it would mean abandoning Hurley’s damaged Apache. Such an outcome held no appeal for Hardy, a plainspoken man who had grown up on a farm in Alabama and now raised cattle for market on a farm of his own.

  “It would have been a superior victory for these guys t
o shoot down one of those Apaches, and that was something we couldn’t let happen, something I wasn’t going to let happen,” he said. As A Company’s maintenance test pilot, Hardy viewed all the aircraft as “his.” Of the four pilots in the wadi, his maintenance background, and long years of flying gave him the best “feel” for the Apache, a fingertip sense of the nuances required when flying a badly damaged bird to safety. His thoughts drifted back to a promise he had made Jim Marye the previous evening. “I told Lieutenant Colonel Marye that if an aircraft went down, instead of sending more guys out there to get shot at, if it could crank, I’d fly it out of there.”

  Hardy told Hurley to trade seats with him, and that he was flying the leaking Apache back to the FARP. The distinctive sound of the other Apaches’ 30mm fire could be heard over the roar of his own aircraft’s engine as he announced the decision—a reminder of how close to the enemy they were. “There wasn’t time for a committee decision,” Hardy said. “The bad guys were just on the other side of the hill.” Hardy set a clock in the dashboard so he could keep track of exactly how long he had been in the air. “Don’t dick around,” he told Hurley. “When I get it started, I’m going.”

  Each Apache carried three spare one-quart cans of oil for emergencies. Well, this qualified as an emergency under anybody’s definition, so Hardy grabbed all six cans and emptied them into the leaking transmission, then hoisted himself up to the cockpit. When he saw Hardy climbing into 203’s backseat and realized what that meant, Contant, who had stayed in the aircraft, was alarmed. “He didn’t want to go at first,” Hardy said. “I was called ‘stupid’ along with some other adjectives to go along with it. But the airplane wasn’t going to be left there. I was flying with him or without him. He sucked it up, and we took off.” Pebsworth, who had also remained in his aircraft, with the engine running and rotors spinning, was just glad to be leaving. “I was scared,” he said. “I was paranoid.” The only Al Qaida-held position from which the helicopters could be seen was the top of the Whale. Pebsworth’s eyes were glued to that ridgeline, watching for any enemy fire or movement. We’re sitting ducks if they come over the top, he thought. But the guerrillas failed to notice that two of their most highly prized targets were located so vulnerably just two kilometers away, and less than ten minutes after the Apaches landed, they were airborne again.