Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  The new position offered only slightly better protection than the last. As enemy fire dogged their every step, a combination of Peterson’s mortarmen and riflemen from Sergeant Thomas Finch’s fire team ran back and forth ferrying the rest of the ammo between the two positions. Just as Peterson and his team seemed to have found their rhythm again, the ears of Maroyka’s RTO, Private First Class Kyle McGovern, picked up an odd whistling sound. A split second later his world turned black as a mortar round exploded with a loud, cracking thud inside the ditch three meters from where Peterson stood with Maroyka. The explosion knocked a dozen soldiers to the ground. As they came to their senses, they checked themselves for wounds. Peterson and Higley were unscathed, but glancing down they realized the enemy had finally done some real damage. No soldiers were dead, but at least half a dozen were wounded. McGovern seemed to be bleeding from his head to his toes (two of which were now missing), and the platoon’s two senior figures, Maroyka and Abbott, were also hurt. Looking at the faces of the wounded men, Peterson saw fear in American eyes for the first and only time that day. He and Higley went to work, Peterson directing the men, Higley bandaging Abbott’s arm, where shrapnel had left a hole in his tricep big enough for Higley to stick his pinkie in. McGovern came to and started yelling, thinking from the pain that his legs had been blown off. Deciding this wasn’t the time for sympathy, Higley screamed right back at him. “Get the fuck up!” The RTO gritted his teeth and staggered to his feet. Everyone realized they had to move before another round caught them in the same place.

  Kraft had heard the mortar round detonate near Heather. Concerned, he picked up the hand mike. “Cobra 1-6, Cobra 1-6, sitrep, over,” he said. In a calm voice Maroyka relayed the bad news. “Cobra 6, this is Cobra 1-6, still taking mortar fire, and I have been hit, over.” With the able-bodied supporting the wounded, the soldiers stumbled across 100 meters of open terrain between Heather and the Halfpipe. Glancing back, they saw a mortar round detonate at the spot they’d just left. By the time they got to the Halfpipe, Kraft had set up a casualty collection point—a place to put and treat casualties—on the outside western slope of the Halfpipe. (He put it there because there were too many people running around inside the Halfpipe.) The battle was now at its most chaotic. Most of the 10th Mountain troops were in the Halfpipe, but small groups were scattered elsewhere on ridgelines and in wadis, taking and returning fire. For those in the Halfpipe, the noise of battle was almost deafening. “You’ve got major explosions from both RPGs and mortar rounds,” Kraft said. “You’ve got the enemy direct fire from both west and east, you can hear it zipping past our heads and cracking into the rocks. Then you’ve got my machine guns, my small arms fire returning fire in both directions. It was pretty much like any war movie you ever see, how loud it is, with smoke and dirt in the air.” Mortar rounds would land every thirty seconds. The prevalence of the enemy’s mortars came as a shock to every American. No one had focused on mortars as a threat at Bagram. LaCamera and his mortarmen were particularly impressed with the speed and accuracy with which the enemy mortars were able to target their locations. As if that wasn’t enough to focus the Americans’ minds, Peterson heard a new threat whistle through the air: the unmistakable sound of an artillery round. Somewhere in the draws and wadis of the Shahikot, Al Qaida had hidden the equivalent of a battery of towed howitzers. Now one or more of them were letting loose. Fortunately, the flat trajectory of artillery fire made it tough for the enemy gunners to drop the rounds into the Halfpipe.

  Peterson’s 120 tube was still sitting no more than 100 meters away, but he had fired all thirty-five of his high-explosive rounds, so there wasn’t much point risking anyone’s life to retrieve the tube. Instead the mortarmen became riflemen manning the Halfpipe’s northeastern corner, which had none of the rocks that offered protection along the rest of the rim of the bowl. Peterson was the first to crawl up to the lip, to make sure his men wouldn’t become instant casualties. His leadership by example left an impression. “His leadership skills were just unbelievable,” said Private First Class Jason Ashline. “He was just so calm during the whole thing. He didn’t show any fear whatsoever.”

  9.

  AS the Al Qaida fighters in the mountains ran to their fighting positions and aimed the first RPGs at the American troops below them, two Black Hawks flew low and slow over the Finger. They carried Wiercinski’s tactical command post (known as the TAC), which sounds like a big headquarters but in reality consisted of only a handful of men and radios. The Rakkasan commander’s aim was to land on the Finger, stay for thirty to sixty minutes, long enough to get a sense for how the operation was unfolding, and then fly back to Bagram. The first challenge, however, was to find somewhere to land. The ridgeline looked like a knife edge from the air, a thin sliver of rocky terrain pointing into the heart of the valley. For several minutes the pilots circled, searching for a flat space wide enough to land in. Every second spent over the valley made them more vulnerable. Both helicopters were flying with external fuel tanks on their wings in order to allow Jim Marye, the air mission commander, to stay aloft long enough to oversee the first phase of the operation. These tanks were not bulletproof. A single bullet or shard of shrapnel would turn one into the equivalent of a torpedo-shaped firebomb strapped to the side of the helicopter. Mako 31 had taken care of one DShK that would have spelled certain death for the men on the two helicopters, but other threats remained in the shadows of the Shahikot.

  Trying not to think of the dangers lurking below, the men on the birds concentrated on finding an LZ. Savusa, Wiercinski’s stalwart sergeant major, thought of his family and said a silent prayer. If this is it, then let it be so. Wiercinski spotted a bowl-shaped gap in the rocks that looked just big enough to accommodate a Black Hawk. “Put us down there,” Wiercinski told the pilots, pointing to the location about halfway up the ridge’s spine. But the pilots of his Black Hawk had a hard time trying to put the bird down in the narrow strip of land between large rock formations the colonel had identified. After not making it the first time, they opted to fly around the valley and try again.

  The pilot of the other helicopter (which carried Savusa, Corkran, plus a captain and two lieutenants from Corkran’s battalion, who were there to provide security for the TAC and get the lay of the land, in case they were called forward as the reserve), then gave it a shot, and succeeded in deftly maneuvering his aircraft into the space. The soldiers in the back held their breath as the whirring blades flashed no more than two feet from sheer rock walls as the helicopter settled on to the Finger. They jumped out but, with no space to run, just kneeled as the helicopter took off in cloud of dust.

  Meanwhile, Wiercinski’s aircraft, which also carried Michael Gibler, Dino Murray, Jim Marye, and Specialist Brandon Hall, circled around the valley. Unseen by those aboard the Black Hawk, who were distracted by the first radio calls from the valley floor reporting fierce enemy resistance, an Al Qaida fighter below them shouldered his RPG launcher and took aim. The rocketassisted projectile shot upward, exploding just beneath the chin bubble of Wiercinski’s Black Hawk and hurling a big piece of shrapnel into its under-belly. Another fighter pointed his Kalashnikov at the same aircraft and pulled the trigger. His aim was even better, but not quite good enough. The bullets peppered the helicopter’s tail rotor hub, one of the rounds nicking a push-pull rod in the tail rotor assembly. “If that thing had severed, we’d have lost tail rotor control, and we’d have been gone,” Marye said. “It was by the grace of God that that didn’t happen.” A lone AK-47-wielding guerrilla firing a bullet that cost pennies had come within millimeters of downing a multimillion-dollar Black Hawk helicopter and consigning the brigade commander, his air mission commander, operations officer, and air liaison officer, as well as an RTO and the air crew, to their doom. Such a disaster in the opening minutes of the battle would have left Operation Anaconda hanging by a thread.

  Unaware of how close they had just come to catastrophe, the pilots arrived back over the precarious
LZ on the Finger and again attempted a nerve-jangling landing. This time they got it right, sliding the helicopter down perfectly between the rocks.

  The first thing Murray did as he jumped off the helicopter was chamber a round in his M4. This was an altogether new experience for the Rakkasan air liaison officer, an F-16 pilot who had always imagined experiencing combat from behind a joystick, not dodging bullets with a rifle in his hand. The nine men who jumped from the aircraft (Marye’s role as air mission commander required that he stay airborne) realized they were being shot at even before the helicopters pulled away. Bullets cracked and popped over their heads. “Is that sound bullets going by?” Murray asked innocently, a comment that was to pass into legend in the Rakkasan headquarters. Assured that it was, the twenty-nine-year-old Air Force Academy graduate from Chicago’s South Side tensed up. Man, what did I get myself into? But Wiercinski had chosen the site well. The bullets that weren’t flying overhead were pinging off the boulders that lined the eastern edge of their position. Nevertheless, no one on the ridge was happy about being taken under fire. “Guys, I’ve heard this sound before. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now,” said Wiercinski, his mind flashing back to that dark night in Panama in December 1989.

  Bullets or no bullets, there was work to be done. Moving north down the ridge a little way, Corkran and his scout platoon leader, 1st Lieutenant Justin Overbaugh, established an observation post from which they saw about ten enemy fighters maneuvering toward them from the direction of Serkhankhel along a low ridge that ran east of and parallel to the Finger. After the Rakkassan TAC troops took them under fire, the enemy squad sought cover behind some rocks on a low ridgeline about 200 meters to the northeast. Those members of the TAC not consumed with command and control responsibilities on the radio then traded fire with the enemy squad for about thirty minutes, killing at least one of them with rifle fire. The fight ended when the TAC called in some help from a pair of Apaches, which fired several rockets and bursts of 30mm at the position, silencing it. Meanwhile, Wiercinski, Gibler, and Murray began to work the radios, talking to Preysler and LaCamera on the valley floor, the aircraft overhead, and the different headquarters at Bagram. The ferocity of the battle and the difficulty of landing at the LZ forced Wiercinski to postpone the TAC’s departure from the Finger. He sent the Black Hawks back to Bagram so they could refuel and return with the second lift of Chinooks. That would make them available to pick Wiercinski and the TAC up, but the Rakkasan commander only planned to use that option if he knew his forces and TF Hammer had total control of the valley. Otherwise, he would send the Black Hawks back empty.

  Several hundred meters up the slope of the Finger, the TAC personnel could see the corpse of one of the guerrillas killed by Mako 31 and the AC-130 earlier that morning. The SEALs now occupied the DShK position and they signaled their presence by laying a brightly colored VS-17 panel on the ground. The Rakkasan TAC personnel signaled back using their own VS-17 panel. Having already been mistakenly engaged by LaCamera’s troops, Goody decided to link up with the TAC to reduce the risk of a more serious friendly-fire incident. He and his men walked down the slope, calmly introduced themselves to the soldiers as “recon and surveillance snipers,” and quickly went to work expanding the TAC perimeter and applying their expert skills to the job of killing the Al Qaida fighters maneuvering to gain positional advantage over Wiercinski’s tiny band. Savusa, who hadn’t even been aware of the DShK’s existence until he had landed, now realized the significance of what Goody’s men had accomplished. “I owe my life to those guys,” he said. “If it wasn’t for them taking out that machine gun, who knows what would have happened to us.”

  In addition to beefing up the TAC’s security element, the arrival of Mako 31 also provided Murray with invaluable assistance in the shape of Andy, the combat controller from 24th Special Tactics Squadron, the Air Force special ops outfit that worked most closely with Delta and SEAL Team 6 (and was known as Task Force White when it did). Andy and Murray quickly formed a team. Andy used his Viper laser rangefinder to get the precise coordinates for the targets that Murray then arranged to have bombed by talking directly to the pilots of the fast-movers. The young Air Force officer stayed glued to his radio throughout his time on what later became known as “Rak TAC Ridge,” so much so that he was the only man on the ridge who didn’t fire his weapon. So engrossed was he in his duty that he failed to notice when the enemy fire was creeping dangerously close to his location. “Dino, get down before you get your fucking head blown off!” Wiercinski yelled at him.

  The TAC withstood three distinct mortar barrages consisting of three or four rounds. On each occasion the first round landed a safe distance away, but the subsequent rounds would walk closer and closer to the TAC, stretching nerves to breaking point. The next attack would begin closer than the previous one, but otherwise the pattern would be repeated, leading Murray to conclude that the Al Qaida mortar crews had at least one observer calling in the fires. There was little the Rakkasans could do about the attacks, because they had no idea where the enemy mortar positions were located. After one round landed less than fifty meters away, Wiercinski and Savusa looked at each other. “Okay boys, it’s time to pack,” Wiercinski said, and troops gathered up the radios and moved a short distance along the ridge in an attempt to escape the enemy mortar crew’s attentions. Back in the Rakkasan TOC in Bagram, Jim Larsen listened as his commander signed off with the words, “We’re in contact, we’re moving.” For an hour Larsen sat by the radio waiting nervously until the TAC reestablished communications. “There was a certain helpless feeling,” he said. “You couldn’t do anything about it, they were on their own.”

  Murray’s own nerves were calmed somewhat by the coolness under fire of Wiercinski and Savusa. Not many colonels, even in the infantry, got to engage in direct firefights, and Murray speculated that the engagement “brought back some memories” for the brigade commander. “He was in his element,” the Air Force captain said. “He looked like an infantryman at some times and at others he looked like a guy in command of hundreds of men that were in a tough dogfight. He looked drained and stressed at times, but most of the time he looked like he was in his element. I’d go back on the mountain with the guy anytime.”

  The sporadic small arms fire aimed at the TAC began to morph into a more concerted attack. “Whenever you want bombs, just let me know,” Murray told Wiercinski, aware that the situation was getting worse. A short while later there was a brief lull in the calls for fire from the valley floor, and Wiercinski took the opportunity. “Dino, let’s get some bombs in there,” the colonel told his air liaison officer. “What can you do for me?” Murray wished Wiercinski had asked a little earlier, as the enemy was now within “danger close” range of the TAC. Because of the guerrillas’ proximity, the captain issued a request for any aircraft equipped with laser-guided bombs. Two F-16s were vectored in. Murray crawled to a little ridgeline to get the coordinates for the target area. “We’ve got troops in contact,” he told the pilots. “We’re taking fire from the north.” He described where they were on the Finger, and used a mirror to try to signal his location to the pilots overhead. But the pilots couldn’t identify the Rakkasan TAC on the ground, which raised the tension level a notch or two. “When you’re dropping that close, you’d really like him to know where the friendlies are,” Murray said. So Murray first had one of the F-16s drop a bomb outside of the danger close range. The bomb hit exactly where Murray had asked for it. “You see where the bomb hit? Now I want you to come up that ridgeline about halfway and tell me what you see,” he said to the pilot. “I see some guys maybe running around in there, and certainly I see a little cave entrance and stuff like that,” the pilot replied. “That’s where I want the next bombs.” “All right, how close to the friendlies?” “Three hundred meters.” “All right.” Murray then passed the ground commander’s initials, in this case, “FW,” for Frank Wiercinski—a necessary step whenever a force on the ground asks an aircr
aft for a “danger close” air strike.

  There was a brief pause as the bombs fell to earth, then an orange explosion was followed by an earsplitting boom as the bombs detonated right on target. “There’s nothing left down there,” one of the infantry officers told Murray. “Thanks, you guys saved us,” Murray told the F-16s as they prepared to leave. But he had no time to bask in the satisfaction of having solved the immediate problem to his north. The battle around the Halfpipe demanded his attention.

  WITH the departure of the two stricken Apaches, Ryan consolidated his remaining aircraft in a team of three helicopters. The fight in the south was becoming even more chaotic. Communications problems hindered the pilots’ ability to get a good read on the location of friendly and enemy forces at that end of the Shahikot. Having to fly straight into the early-morning sun didn’t help matters. The pilots knew that LaCamera’s troops had taken refuge in the hollow that became known as Hell’s Halfpipe, but they were having a hell of a hard time locating it on the ground. They had to take several turns on the racetrack pattern around the valley before they saw it, and every time they flew past the Whale, they would get shot at.