by Sean Naylor
It was around this time that Chenault unleashed the only Hellfire missile the Apaches fired that day. His opportunity arose when an urgent call for help came over the radio from Chip Preysler, the 2-187 commander. He and several of his soldiers were still in the compound, but were pinned down by Kalashnikov and RPG fire raining down on them from an Al Qaida bunker only 150 meters to their west on a plateau a little to the north of Sherkhankhel, and just to the east of the Whale. Chenault was closest to the target, and responded immediately. First he located the 2-187 soldiers on the valley floor, picking out their VS-17 panel. Then they gave him the heading and the range from which they were taking the fire. Chenault flew off in that direction. Within a couple of seconds he and Herman spotted the bunker underneath them. It was no more than a hole in the ground, fortified by some loose rocks around the rim, with no overhead cover. Looking down, the pilots saw two enemy fighters. One was firing a Kalashnikov at the Apache, the other had an RPG launcher on his shoulder. Two backpacks lay beside them in the dirt—one blue, one orange. Realizing their peril, the guerrillas scrambled out of the bunker and sprinted for their lives as Chenault circled back around. As the fighters ran down the side plateau, he let loose with his last twenty cannon rounds. One fighter dropped, but the other survived, and decided his best hope lay in the bunker’s protection. He clambered back up the hill, perhaps hoping to get an RPG off before the Apache could attack again.
Out of rockets and 30mm rounds, Chenault’s only recourse was his Hellfires. He wheeled to face the bunker again. (Unlike the cannon, neither the rocket pods nor the Hellfire pylons are slaved to the pilot’s helmet, so Chenault had to point the helicopter toward the target in order to engage it with these weapons.) He could see the target clearly—too clearly. The Hellfire has a minimum range of 500 meters—if it is fired any closer to the target, it won’t arm in time, and will fail to detonate on impact. Chenault was too close, so he held fire. Wheeling around, he again lined up the Apache with the bunker. The Hellfire is not a true “fire-and-forget” missile—it is guided onto its target by a laser beam that must remain pointed at the target until impact. Rather than passing over the enemy again without firing, Chenault pulled the controls back and put the Apache into reverse. At 520 meters from the target, the laser rangefinder finally locked on. Herman fired immediately. The missile sped off the rail on a flat trajectory, its motor trailing smoke as it rode the laser down.
At the very moment that the Al Qaida fighter reached the top of the plateau and dived for cover into the bunker, the missile exploded dead on target with a white flash and a cloud of smoke and dust. It was a classic case of bad timing on the guerrilla’s part. Chenault and Herman flew over the position one last time. “It was gone,” said Chenault.
Still the remaining three Apaches wheeled and swooped around the valley, trying to be everywhere at once, keeping the enemy’s attention diverted from the infantry. Ryan and Kilburn were making an engagement run on an Al Qaida position just north of Ginger. They had just put a 30mm burst on the target, by now only 200-300 meters in front of them, and were about to break left when the captain was startled by a loud bang, as if a firecracker had exploded just outside the cockpit. Tiny pieces of Plexiglas showered him, collecting on his lap, on the radio console, and on the floor. With a sickening feeling, he noticed blood on his flak vest. “I’m hit!” he yelled to Kilburn, his heart racing as he checked himself for wounds. With relief he found that all his fingers and toes were still attached and intact, and he had no other obvious wounds on his arms, legs or torso. He turned his attention to his head, checking his face in the cockpit’s small mirror, which he usually used to observe his backseater. There was blood running from a small cut on his chin, where a bullet had nicked him after deflecting off the right door frame. After giving Ryan the closest of close shaves, the bullet had exited through the canopy. Al Qaida had come within a couple of inches of killing the commander of Task Force Rakkasan’s Apache force. It was another in the extraordinary series of close calls enjoyed by the task force’s soldiers. Ryan would later wryly refer to the incident as “a significant emotional event”—Army slang for something that scares you shitless.
“I was very lucky,” he said. “It was my day, I guess.”
By then the remaining Apaches were almost out of fuel and ammo. At about 7:50 a.m. Ryan gave the order to return to the FARP, and the three helicopters flew out of the valley.
10.
AFTER helping the battalion mortar troops move their ammo away from the LZ, Ropel linked up with the rest of his squad, who had been on Chalk 1, and together they moved south in a wedge formation. But as he crested a small rise, an Apache flew in behind them and shot a pair of rockets that hit only thirty feet away from Ropel—one to his left rear, another to his right front. Ropel didn’t even realize he was being shot at until the two explosions sent shrapnel whistling past him. With no enemy in his immediate area, it was clear the pilots had mistaken his men, who all escaped unscathed, for the enemy. Other 187 troops who witnessed the near-tragedy quickly spread VS-17 panels on the ground. “We actually got a little bit nervous about the Apaches,” Peterson said. O’Keefe told Ropel to pull his men back to the Halfpipe.
Ropel and his men spent the next ninety minutes in the Halfpipe, but he felt uncomfortable in such a static role. As the Al Qaida mortars rained down, he felt the urge to do something about them. Ropel turned to a Marine NCO attached to the battalion as an interpreter or military intelligence personnel. “We need to get the hell out of here,” he said. “Damn right!” the Marine said. After clearing his plan with O’Keefe, Ropel led his squad and the Marine about 100 meters south from the Halfpipe to a knoll roughly four feet high, twenty feet long, and twenty-five feet wide. They took up position on this hillock, becoming LaCamera’s southernmost outpost in the process. They remained there for a couple of hours, just observing, before Ropel’s instincts again told him to take more assertive action. He was sure that somewhere in the eastern ridgeline there was at least one Al Qaida observer adjusting the enemy’s mortar fires. As he looked east he realized that the eastern wall of the valley was divided into a ridge system. Immediately in front of him was a lower ridgeline that he thought he could scale with his men. He decided to give it a try. Leaving a machine-gun team on the knoll for security he led the rest of his men up the slope. But after only a few minutes he got a call on his ICOM radio from O’Keefe to come back down, because an air strike was inbound for close to his position. This sequence repeated itself several times over the next couple of hours—Ropel and his men would start clambering up the ridge, only to be called back down. On his fifth or sixth attempt Ropel succeeded. Urged on by Ropel in his thick Polish accent and using dead space to hide from the enemy gunners to their south and east, the soldiers gradually climbed the ridgeline, their breathing becoming increasingly labored as the air thinned. The rocks they were moving behind offered less and less cover the higher they climbed, forcing the men to drop first to their hands and knees and then to crawl the last few yards to the crest on their bellies.
Ropel, second from last in the group of seven or eight troops in the assault, found a trail lined by stones that protected him so long as he kept himself flat. Zing! A bullet ricocheted off a large flat rock beside him. Then he heard other ricochets, and the distinctive crack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier as it whipped over his head. But at first he couldn’t tell where the rounds were coming from. He pushed himself a couple of feet back down the hill and looked over his shoulder to see the ground “popping” around the feet of Private First Class Steven Henderson, the “skinny-as-a-finger” soldier bringing up the rear who was standing upright. With a start Ropel realized the troops in the Halfpipe were engaging his squad. Thinking quickly he pulled a green smoke canister from his protective vest, pulled the pin, and rolled it down the hill, hoping the smoke would both conceal his men from the Halfpipe and signal that they were American. Almost simultaneously he yelled, “Cease fire! Cease fire!” into h
is ICOM radio, then told Henderson to get his ass up to the top of the ridge and lay flat behind the bushes there. The men ahead of him had already crawled out of sight, but now the enemy fighters in the mountainsides spotted Henderson and Ropel inching their way upward and opened fire. For a few moments the pair took fire from their front, their right and their left rear, until the troops in the Halfpipe realized their mistake.
Once he was behind cover on the crest, Ropel realized that the ridge fell away in a sheer cliff. He was looking across a gorge to the eastern wall proper of the valley. He and his men settled down between the rocks and scrubby bushes searching for targets that they could engage themselves or bring air strikes in on. Their elevated position meant they had could see further south and east than anyone else who had flown in with LaCamera. Holding the high ground, separated from the static defense of the Halfpipe, and looking for the enemy, Ropel was at last in his element.
HELBERG’S scouts focused their binoculars and scopes on Serkhankhel and soon reached a startling conclusion: The village appeared completely empty. Before they’d fully comprehended the implications of this, they heard gunfire behind them and bullets cracking overhead. They seemed to be coming from the direction of Diane.
Luman’s small force had moved 200 meters east when fire erupted from a position 300 meters ahead of them. Luman, who had begun the deployment to Afghanistan as 3rd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, but been made the platoon leader when Preysler removed the weak lieutenant who had held that position, was disappointed with some NCOs’ slow reaction when the bullets started flying. “Get the fuck up and lead your fucking men!” he yelled, and called up a pair of snipers and a 240 team led by Sergeant Henry Schmitz. The machine gunner spotted two armed men in a U-shaped position built into a crevice. One fighter was standing, visible from the waist up. Schmitz lined the man up in his iron sights. “I got eyes on, can I take him?” he asked. “Take the motherfucker down,” Luman said. Schmitz fired a burst at the fighter’s waist, chest, and head. The man in his sights “splintered,” Schmitz said. “There was stuff going everywhere.” Schmitz fired a burst at the other guerrilla. Forty rounds silenced the position.
Luman’s men began a punishing climb up a steep ravine toward Diane. In the rarefied air even the fittest young 11 Bravos felt their thighs and lungs burning. With every step the air got thinner and the rucks seemed to get heavier. As the column of men crossed the snowline, a few of the signals intelligence troops Dagger had attached to Rakkasan units to conduct radio intercepts struggled to keep up. Luman was losing patience. A final ridgeline stood between the platoon and Diane. The rock face was as smooth as it was steep. No ledges or goat paths offered themselves as routes to the top. They would have to make the ascent the hard way: straight up, hand over hand. The men scrabbled up the slope as best they could, but they were close to total exhaustion. Every potential handhold was slippery with ice, every toehold hidden by snow. Again and again, soldiers made it halfway up before losing their grip and sliding back down. They’d grit their teeth and try again, but often with the same result. “By textbook standards it was no-go terrain,” Schmitz recalled. One by one, however, the infantrymen finally hauled themselves to the top with a supreme effort. But the linguists weren’t making it.
Luman, almost at the top, heard a shout from the bottom. “We’ve got a guy down.” I don’t need this shit, he thought. We always got told “March or die.” I don’t want my boys to die today. It’s not a good day to die. He retraced his steps to find a linguist totally spent at the bottom of the slope. Schmitz came down to help. One by one Schmitz carried the linguists’ rucks up the slope. Then he pushed and pulled the linguists up. Luman got the platoon moving again. After another 300 meters he announced they were at Diane. The troops set up the blocking position using white engineer tape and other materials they had hauled up the mountain. They started with a sign about 300 meters from their position that said TURN BACK, THERE ARE MINES! At 200 meters a second sign read TURN AROUND NOW! LAST WARNING. Anyone who proceeded past both signs would run into a wall of lead from Schmitz’s 240.
It was 8:45 a.m. Luman had heard little from 1st and 2nd Platoons. The radio was quiet. The soldiers caught their breath and began digging fighting positions. “Then all hell broke loose,” Luman recalled. The soldiers sent down to set up the blocking position had just returned when the platoon started receiving small arms fire from several directions. Luman believed the most accurate fire came from caves near the top of Hill 3033. He called Baltazar and asked permission to move out and “clear” the caves. Baltazar restated Luman’s task and purpose—” to establish Blocking Position Diane in order to prevent enemy escaping from AO Remington”—and told him to stay put. A fusillade so intense that Luman compared it to the fire on the Normandy beach depicted in the movie Saving Private Ryan rained down from Hill 3033. Luman strode to the edge of the perimeter, where his men were sheltering from the bullets. Holding his M4 by his side like a pistol, he pointed out the enemy positions to his troops, directing their fire. If they couldn’t see the enemy, he told them, they were to rake the hilltop and the ridgelines to the left and right with fire. Third Platoon began giving it back to the enemy in spades. Within a couple of minutes the 240 gunners had fired about 400 rounds of 7.62mm, the SAW gunners between 200 and 400 rounds of linked 5.56mm ammunition, while those firing M4s were also emptying magazine after magazine of 5.56mm ammunition.
For thirty minutes Diane reverberated to the crackle of automatic weapons fire and the occasional boom of an exploding RPG. Then the enemy fire faded away briefly. Luman walked over to his RTO. A couple of extra medics who had been attached to 3rd Platoon were there, also, huddled with their aid bags. “Welcome to combat, motherfuckers!” Luman barked. The stunned medics looked at him, he said, “like I was smoking crack.”
By 10:30 a.m. Baltazar’s three platoons were all in their blocking positions. Only Luman’s was still in heavy contact. Preysler and Baltazar had moved their command posts up to Betty, which was occupied by Baltazar’s 2nd Platoon and was the northernmost of the three blocking positions set up by Preysler’s first lift of troops. The battalion’s leaders monitored the urgent radio traffic between Wiercinski and LaCamera. It was clear 1-87 faced a significantly larger force in the south than had been predicted. A glance at the map told the 2-187 leaders that the enemy attacking the Halfpipe could easily move up the eastern ridge to assault them. Preysler and Nielsen figured the Al Qaida fighters would back off at night and then use hit-and-run tactics against their troops on the eastern ridge the next morning. Someone in the Halfpipe pleaded for close air support over the radio and the mood at Preysler’s command post turned somber. Holy Christ, they’re taking a pounding, Nielsen thought. That could be us tomorrow.
LACAMERA called Kraft up to his location soon after the casualties arrived. Usually a company commander doesn’t want his battalion commander 75 meters away when he’s trying to execute his mission. But Kraft realized there were two big advantages to having LaCamera there. First, the 1-87 commander could use his rank in the struggle to coordinate timely close air support from the fixed-wing jets overhead. Second, LaCamera’s calmness filled his subordinates with confidence. “Up until that point I really didn’t know my battalion commander,” Peterson said. “I thought he was kind of aloof. But in the crunch he showed his true colors. He’s a warrior.” Kraft appreciated the fact that LaCamera let him control his own fight, rather than reaching down and micro-managing it for him. “Think of how easy it would have been for him to just take over,” Kraft said. “He didn’t. He is one of the big reasons why I want to have a career in the Army.”
When Kraft arrived at the battalion command post, LaCamera was talking to Wiercinski on the radio. When the conversation ended, he turned to Kraft. It was time to “relook the plan,” LaCamera said. They had anticipated a few “leakers” trying to escape along those routes, but not the entrenched, heavily armed force that surrounded them. “Okay, here’s what I’m thinking, Nelson,
” LaCamera said. “We can keep what we’re doing we’re doing here, and strongpoint this area, or we can try to move back to the south a little bit and establish our blocking positions back there. What do you think?” “Well, based on the number of casualties I’ve got right now and the number of rucksacks I’ve got out on the LZs, we ought to strongpoint this,” Kraft replied. His boss agreed. “Hooah, sir,” the junior officer said. “I’ll make it happen.”
Kraft called O’Keefe and told him to move his men into the Halfpipe. Leaving Ropel’s squad on their knoll 100 meters to the south, the rest of 2nd Platoon moved to the Halfpipe in a “bounding overwatch”—in which one element provides covering fire while another moves. En route they were struck by mortar fire that wounded several men. When they reached the Halfpipe, Kraft had about a squad from each platoon in the bowl. He gave O’Keefe’s men to man the western side while the Peterson’s mortarmen and the remnants of 1st Platoon engaged the enemy on the eastern ridge.
O’Keefe’s casualties joined the others at the casualty collection point, where Major Thomas Byrne, the battalion surgeon, presided over a bloody scene. The soldiers’ Kevlar helmets and body armor had stopped a lot of shrapnel, meaning there were few life-threatening injuries but lots of wounds to soldiers’ limbs. Soldiers’ pants legs had been torn off so their wounds could be dressed. No one was panicking. Even the worst off, Specialist James Burkins, a SAW gunner, and Kyle McGovern, Maroyka’s twenty-one-year-old RTO, were stable. Burkins, it would transpire, had a shrapnel wound to his heart (the shrapnel had entered through the unarmored side of his vest) and was drifting in and out of consciousness. McGovern seemed to have been hit almost everywhere not protected by his helmet and body armor. In addition to their protective gear, the wounded men owed their stable conditions to two factors. One was the priority LaCamera placed on training his medics and getting every soldier qualified as a combat lifesaver. The other was “Doc” Byrne, who, under fire for the first time, impressed every soldier in the Halfpipe. When the shout of “Incoming!” went up, he covered the wounded with his own body. When casualties were taken outside the Halfpipe, he ran to treat them with no concern for his own safety.