Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Any margin for error that might have existed evaporated when the helicopters took off and immediately flew in the wrong direction. One of the three dozen bullets that hit 203 had lodged in the computer that took Doppler and GPS information and put it into the navigation system, with the result that the electronic compass had stuck on a heading of due north—the direction they needed to fly in. Not realizing this, Hardy, flying lead, thought he was heading north toward the FARP when he had actually pointed the aircraft east-northeast toward Pakistan. In the trailing aircraft Pebsworth’s navigational equipment was also barely functional. Information that should have been flowing into the system was being held up at the severed wire harness, like a vital of convoy of supplies stuck on one side of a collapsed bridge. Dispensing with the high-tech approach, Pebsworth got out his map and spread it on his lap, using the basics of time flown, distance covered and heading to navigate. He quickly realized they needed to turn around, and relayed the information over the radio to Hardy, who reversed course.

  Now it was a race against time. Hardy was flying four or five rotor discs ahead of the Apache now flown by Hurley, so that the pilots in the rear helicopter would be able to warn him early if his engine caught fire or any other visible problem developed. But visibility was proving tricky for Hurley and Pebsworth. The oil Hardy had poured into 203’s transmission was spraying out through the bullet holes and coating the Plexiglas canopy of their cockpit. The 140-mile-per-hour flight was the ultimate white knuckle ride. Pebsworth had plotted a flight back to the FARP that took them over the lowest ground he could find, in case Hardy had to put the helicopter down. But the initial wrong turn out of the wadi put paid to that plan. Now the pilots counted down the minutes as the refigured route took them over snow-covered mountain passes in which, were 203’s engines to fail, there was nowhere to make an emergency landing.

  After twenty minutes the Apaches crested a 7,000-foot mountain range. Spread before them was a flat brown plain. By Pebsworth’s reckoning, somewhere ahead in that dun expanse of semi-desert lay the FARP and salvation. After several increasingly tense minutes the pilots spotted the green hulk of a Chinook sitting on the ground less than two miles ahead. It was Texaco—nothing more than a patch of sand dotted with a few helicopters and tents, and soldiers nervously scanning the sky. Hardy eased his aircraft down to the ground, no easy task with the flying dirt and sand creating “brown out” conditions that can disorient a pilot. With immense relief, he shut down the engines. It was twenty-six minutes since he had taken off from the wadi. Then Jim Hardy jumped out of the cockpit, and into Army aviation history.

  “There are not a lot of folks out there who would have taken that aircraft off the ground,” Ryan said. “It was an incredible action by Mr. Hardy.”

  AS sounds of battle echoed around the compound, the 2-187 leaders conferred. They were with C Company’s 2nd Platoon. Baltazar’s other two platoons had landed in other LZs along the eastern ridge and were also taking fire. Today is not going to be like it was planned, Nielsen thought. Preysler also realized everything had changed. It didn’t look like anyone was trying to escape the valley. The enemy was trying to kill Americans, not run away from them. But over the radio he heard that Task Force Hammer was still on its way, so his mission remained to establish the blocking positions as soon as possible. The fire his troops were taking from enemy positions all around the compound only heightened his sense of urgency. We need to get out of this area, he thought. It’s too hot. We need to fight our way up to the high ground, to our original blocking positions.

  The southernmost of those blocking positions was Diane, on the slopes of a mountain known as Hill 3033 (its height in meters) directly east of Babulkhel. Responsibility for setting up Diane fell to C Company’s 3rd Platoon, led by Sergeant First Class Kelly Jack Luman. Also on his Chinook were a handful of soldiers from Preysler’s scout platoon, under the command of 1st Lieutenant Glen Helberg, twenty-four, whose mission was to establish an observation post directly west of Diane on a hilltop halfway between the eastern ridge and Serkhankhel. Pilots Fichter and Anderson executed a difficult landing in a narrow ravine that sloped down to the valley floor. As the helicopter hovered with only its rear wheels barely touching the ground, the troops jumped off the ramp. As soon as they hit the ground, the scouts split from Luman’s platoon and headed north-northwest, up a shale-covered hill, down into a draw, and then up again, struggling to keep their balance as their feet slid in the snow. The altitude hit the scouts hard. Each was carrying roughly 140 pounds of gear that seemed to bear down on their shoulders more heavily with every step. After Helberg took a brief detour to talk to—and get shot at with—Rick Busko, 2-187’s operations officer, who led a small element that had landed with 1st Platoon, the scouts reached their observation post, 400 meters west of the LZ.

  About 750 meters southeast of Helberg and Luman’s LZ, Captain Roger Crombie landed with a similar mix of infantry, scouts, and assorted attachments. Crombie commanded 1-87’s A Company. His job as the northernmost of LaCamera’s chalks was to establish Blocking Position Eve astride a pass on the north side of Takur Ghar. After deciding not to land in their assigned LZ—LZ 5—because there were personnel on it, the pilots landed in a wadi farther north, only about 100 meters from Eve. But after releasing the scouts, whose objective was farther south, Crombie and his men faced a back-breaking climb a steep slope to get to Eve. En route they spotted two enemy fighters in a crevice 150 meters to their north. Sergeant Reginald Huber fired three M203 40mm grenades at the pair, neither of whom looked over eighteen. The grenades bounced off the back wall of the guerrillas’ position and exploded. “They didn’t stand a chance,” Crombie said. They continued to climb as bullets cracked high overhead, fired from somewhere to the north. When Crombie reached the top, he realized the two-hour climb had been worth it. He had commanding views of the valley down to Marzak, and was only vulnerable to fire from Takur Ghar, the peak of which was about 1,800 meters to the southeast on a map. This is a good piece of terrain, he thought. We can defend this. He got his satellite radio set up and called the 1-87 command post to find out how things were going elsewhere.

  7.

  THE scene on board the three Chinooks carrying about 120 10th Mountain infantrymen into the Shahikot differed little from that on the trio of helicopters that had landed their brethren from the 101st a few minutes earlier. The men aboard these aircraft had been away from home longer than any of the other conventional troops in the operation. They had spent long, boring hours guarding the perimeter at K2, and, like their division commander, they had resigned themselves to the likelihood that they would return home without having the chance to fire any bullets at the enemy. Now, almost unexpectedly, they were getting that opportunity. It was payback time.

  Frank Grippe, the troops’ sergeant major, detected “a feeling of elation that we’re actually finally going to go in and do the overt offensive operations that we’re so well trained in.” But the strapping non-com ensured that his NCOs didn’t allow their enthusiasm to overwhelm their professionalism. He made sure every one of his sergeants going into the Shahikot understood that the mountainous terrain would break battalions, companies, and platoons into squads and sections. This was going to be “a sergeant’s fight.”

  One of the sergeants most frustrated with the way the battalion’s war had turned out so far was a trim twenty-nine-year-old squad leader with short, spiky blond hair riding in the second helicopter. Little in Staff Sergeant Andrzej (pronounced Andr-zhey) Ropel’s early years suggested he would one day be leading American infantryman in combat. Born and raised under Communist rule in northeast Poland, where he and a friend taught themselves English in their spare time, Ropel had evaded compulsory military service in his home-land by having a doctor who was a family friend sign a form saying Andrzej had a spinal problem (“which of course was fake”).

  Ropel’s life changed the day his mother won a visa lottery that allowed her to move to the United States with her fami
ly. Andrzej’s parents moved to New York, but, unsure whether he wanted to leave Poland, their son accompanied them over to help them settle, but stayed for only ten days. That was all it took. “I loved New York City,” he recalled. “That was the city for me.” He returned to Europe, but only to settle up his affairs there. A few months later he stepped off a plane at New York’s JFK Airport, this time with the goal of making a new life for himself in America. The sort of fellow who always lands on his feet, Ropel worked a series of jobs in construction, personal care for the elderly, and upscale commercial decorating. All the time he improved his English and fell slowly in love with the United States, where, as he put it, “starting from basically nothing, by working hard you can actually achieve something.”

  But by the mid-1990s Ropel felt he needed a new challenge. He was thinking of going to college, but couldn’t see how he could make that leap straight from his decorating job. He decided to join the Army, a decision many young Americans in his position make, but a curious choice for a man who had been so determined to avoid entering the ranks in Poland. However, Ropel discerned a stark difference between the U.S. military and what he had seen of the military in Poland. “In the U.S. Army a soldier has dignity,” he said. “Over there he didn’t.”

  In March 1996 he entered basic training after enlisting as an 11 Bravo—an infantryman. Possessed of a sharp, technically oriented mind, Ropel could have had his choice of less combat-focused Army jobs that might have prepared him for a lucrative career after his service, but he never had any regrets about becoming a grunt. “I think the infantry is the best school of life,” he said. “I cannot even imagine myself working for ten hours a day like we do and just sitting behind a desk doing paperwork.” A four-year stint in Hawaii with the undermanned 25th Infantry Division (Light) gave him the opportunity to learn a variety of infantry positions—from rifleman to antitank gunner manning an obsolescent Dragon missile launcher to company armorer to mortarman—treating each as an opportunity to expand his knowledge. He earned his Expert Infantryman Badge and after four years left Hawaii as a sergeant for the distinctly chillier climes of Fort Drum. There he found the pace of training slower than in the Pacific, as a result of the harsh winters, but the unit cohesion stronger.

  September 11, 2001, found Ropel halfway through an eight-week course for young sergeants at Fort Benning, Georgia. Stunned, he watched in a television lounge filled with silent soldiers as the news replayed again and again the destruction of the World Trade Center, a complex he had helped decorate for Christmas 1992. At Fort Drum, 1-87 Infantry was alerted for possible deployment within days. Ropel called his unit and pleaded in vain to be allowed out of the course so he could deploy with them. But his senior NCOs told him the course was important for his career, and that if they left before he graduated, he could follow them over. The rest of the battalion deployed for K2 a few days before Ropel graduated as a distinguished honor graduate from his course. As soon as the ceremony finished, Ropel, still wearing his Class A dress uniform, jumped in his car at midday and started the long drive to Fort Drum, sleeping for three hours in a truck stop before arriving on post at 4 p.m. the next day. He drove straight to the battalion headquarters, where he ran into the absurd lengths to which the military sometimes goes in order to convince itself that it is dutifully protecting operational security. His own chain of command wouldn’t tell him officially that the unit had deployed to Uzbekistan. “It was a joke,” he recalled. “You could find out more from TV sometimes than from your own commander.” It was an open secret that the battalion had gone to K2, and all Ropel was concerned with was catching up with them as soon as possible. But to his immense frustration, the date of his deployment was repeatedly delayed. He finally left on November 21.

  But at K2 he found only more frustration. “We did everybody else’s job, but not ours,” he said. The infantrymen—trained to close with and destroy the enemy—were put to work cleaning latrines and functioning as military police. Only those elements designated as the quick reaction force had a job that fell within the mission profile of an infantry unit. Ropel’s squad got to spend a few weeks conducting security missions for Task Force Dagger in Mazar-i-Sharif and Sheberghan in northern Afghanistan. That was better than sitting around the airfield at K2, but when they returned to Uzbekistan they embarked on an emotional roller coaster that was to last a month. First they were told they were headed back to Fort Drum. Then the news changed: They were going to Bagram instead. At first morale plummeted, as would be expected when troops who have made the mental switch from “going to war” to “going home” are told they aren’t going home yet after all. But soon after they arrived in Bagram, it became clear that they had not been brought down for more of the same sort of glorified gate-guard duty that they had been performing at K2. A real mission was in the offing. For Ropel, the sergeant who loved leading soldiers, but hated the monotony of guard duty, the prospect of a combat mission was a godsend. He was not alone. “Morale went up because we were actually going to do something,” Ropel said. But the briefing they received February 25 made the chances of seeing combat during Anaconda seem remote, and the last few days’ training before D-Day had focused almost exclusively on the procedures for properly apprehending and searching detainees, not on combat. As his Chinook turned into the southeast corner of the Shahikot, Ropel, who had to put his application for U.S. citizenship on hold when he deployed, was anticipating little more from Operation Anaconda than a break from the tedium of camp life. “We did not expect we were actually going to have any [enemy] contact,” Ropel said. “I don’t think anybody expected that.”

  Scrunched into a seat in the back of the lead Chinook was another young sergeant whose path into the ranks of the infantry’s NCO corps had been less than straightforward. Like Ropel in the helicopter behind his, thirty-year-old Staff Sergeant Randel Perez was a squad leader in Charlie Company, 1-87 Infantry. But unlike his Polish counterpart, this grandson of Mexican immigrants hadn’t envisioned himself leading troops in combat when he joined the Army. Far from it. Born and raised in the small Texan town of San Benito, twenty minutes from the Mexican border, Perez joined the Army in 1991 to escape the drudgery of life in the Rio Grande Valley. But the infantry’s life of mud, blood, sweat, and tears was decidedly not what he was looking for. “When I joined the military, I was gonna come in, do two years, get some college money, and get out,” he said. At the insistence, of his father, a senior Border Patrol agent who exerted a strong influence on his early life, Randy avoided the combat arms—infantry, armor, and artillery—and opted for a job as a supply clerk. His father’s stated aim was to ensure his son’s time in the military set him up for a job in civilian life, which he thought would be less likely if Randy chose a position in the combat arms. But Randy’s father was also concerned about his son’s physical safety in a branch like the infantry. “I think the fact that it, was dangerous had a lot to do with it, too,” Perez said.

  Perez began his Army career at Fort McClellan, Alabama, a sleepy Southern post where his biggest challenge was confronting the racist attitudes that remained entrenched in the Deep South. He was called “half-breed” to his face in one restaurant. His black friends were, if anything, treated even worse. In the mid-1990s he was posted to Germany just as the Balkan peacekeeping missions were looming. Unlike McClellan, where he had worked in a large headquarters, in Germany he was assigned as the supply clerk for a mechanized infantry company, a job that entailed a much faster pace than he was accustomed to. “I wasn’t really used to getting up early in the morning and doing PT,” he said. “I wasn’t used to going to the field.” But he decided he liked the more soldierly approach of what he termed “the go-go-go Army.”

  A tour in Bosnia opened Perez’s eyes to the possibility that greater job satisfaction could be found in the Army, but outside the supply corps. His company was undermanned, so he was pressed into service on raids as a makeshift infantryman. He noticed the sergeants in a combat unit had a responsibility
he had never experienced in his “soft skill” job, and the infantry platoons had a cohesiveness missing from the noncombat organizations he had observed. “There was thirty-odd guys, and they were like one big family,” he recalled. This is pretty cool, he thought. I could do this for a living. The soldiers’ role on the raids reminded him a little of that of police officers. Perez had always suspected that his father wanted him to follow him into the law enforcement world. Maybe this ain’t following exactly in his footsteps, but it’s close to it, and it’d probably make me happy, he thought. Perez made up his mind to become an infantryman. He knew he’d make a good one. Now he just had to persuade the Army to allow him to make the switch from supply clerk to infantry sergeant.

  The Army in the 1990s had a chronic shortage of infantrymen, but it was still the Army—a large impersonal bureaucracy in which common sense often went missing in action. What should have been straightforward—keeping a soldier in the Army by permitting him to enter a field that was short of men and which he wanted to join—instead became tied up in red tape. In Germany, Perez argued in vain to be allowed to follow his dream. The reaction of those above him veered between bemusement at why anyone would want to become an infantryman several years into their career and intense pressure to reenlist as a supply clerk. He reluctantly did so, adding only a year to his current enlistment, and was reassigned to an air traffic control unit at Fort Campbell. There he took up the fight again, only to run into similar resistance (although his commanders, former infantrymen themselves, tried to help).