Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Grippe credited Byrne with giving the battalion’s leaders very professional, unemotional status reports on the casualties that helped LaCamera make decisions. No commander likes to see his men suffer, but after discussing the status of the casualties with “Doc” Byrne, LaCamera decided not to request any medevac aircraft until after dark. He did so knowing that the casualties could survive until then and that if the enemy shot the medevac helicopter down it would change the battle. Even so, the final decision on whether or not to attempt to medevac LaCamera’s wounded rested with Hagenbeck. After talking to Wiercinski, who had in turn been talking to LaCamera, Hagenbeck made what he described as the “excruciating” decision to hold off on trying to evacuate the wounded from the Halfpipe until after dark. “I was hesitant to send them in because RPGs and everything were flying around the valley and I was quite certain we’d have helicopters shot down trying to extract them in daylight,” he said. “In fact I turned some around in midair that were going in.” Kraft said this was the right call. “The soldiers knew going into the operation that we would have to sustain our own casualties until the battle allowed us to evacuate them,” Kraft said. “Every soldier knew that going in. It didn’t cause any leadership problems [with the troops] whatsoever.”

  Among the wounded soldiers Byrne was treating were Maroyka and Abbott, the 1st Platoon leader and platoon sergeant respectively. Maroyka had shrapnel wounds “just about everywhere,” but especially to his calf, Kraft said, while Abbott’s upper arm had been torn up by the same round. When the two arrived from Heather with the rest of the casualties, Kraft realized neither was in a condition to lead troops in combat. Randy Perez, the supply clerk turned infantryman, was now the senior healthy man in 1st Platoon. Kraft was about to hand him an awesome responsibility, but there was no time for pleasantries. “Hey, you’re the 1-6,” the captain told him over the radio, using the 1st Platoon leader call sign. “Roger that, sir, I got it,” Perez said. Kraft told him that 1st Platoon was going to be responsible for the eastern side of the strongpoint. “You’ve got from twelve to three to six.” And just like that, “the supply guy” was given command of a platoon of grunts in the toughest battle U.S. infantry had fought in a decade.

  Perez’s first thought was for the men who’d just been placed under his command. I want to get these guys safe, and I want to get them outta here, he thought. To that end, he immediately ordered them to spread out as they crawled up to the lip of Halfpipe. Then he scanned the ridgeline in front of him, trying to spot the enemy fighters who continued to rake the Halfpipe with Kalashnikov and DShK bullets, RPGs, and mortar rounds. He could see a few in what looked like black uniforms, but they were easier to spot on the Finger than the eastern ridge. Then two Apaches flew over his head from west to east, hammering positions on the eastern ridge with rockets and cannon fire. Perez exulted. These guys are fixing to fuck these guys up. But then a hidden DShK spat fierce resistance in the shape of 12.6mm bullets. The Apaches wheeled about and were gone. Perez was amazed at the enemy’s defiance. It’s gonna be a long fucking day, he thought, gazing up at the ridge. What the fuck is up there?

  The Army’s newest platoon leader slipped into his command role as if born for it. Throughout the day, he walked the line of his men, making sure everyone had enough ammo, handing out magazines to those who needed them, and checking on the casualties. His men were handling their challenges as well as he was handling his. Nobody’s freaking out, nobody’s hugging their weapon, nobody’s in the fetal position, so I have no problem, he thought. Abbott, who had mentored Perez for long hours back at Drum, teaching him everything he needed to survive as an infantry NCO, now got to witness the fruits of his labor. Perez could sense his wounded platoon sergeant monitoring his progress, but he resisted the temptation to lean on Abbott. This is my test and I can’t run to him and ask him what to do every two minutes, he told himself. He needn’t have worried. Six or seven hours into the fight, Abbott, in one of his more lucid moments, told him, “You’re doing a good job.” As the day wore on, Grippe, who had questioned if Perez knew what he was getting himself into when he chose to become an infantryman, watched in awe as Perez proved he had what it took and then some. “He kicked ass as if he was a combat vet from numerous firefights,” Grippe said. “He just did a spectacular job that day.” “He [Perez] was all over the place,” Kraft said. “Sergeant Perez acted as a seasoned platoon leader. If I were to write down the perfect platoon leader in a combat situation, that was Sergeant Perez.”

  Up and down the length of the valley, a pattern was emerging that would have been familiar to veterans of every clash of arms from Gaugamela to Gettysburg. At every point in the Task Force Rakkasan fight, as young soldiers looked for leadership, noncommissioned officers were providing it. The chips were down and Randy Perez, Andrzej Ropel, Michael Peterson, and their brethren were stepping up. Grippe’s prediction had been on the money. It was a sergeant’s fight, all right, and the sergeants were giving it everything they had.

  Their soldiers didn’t let them down. Pinned down and surrounded by an enemy that outnumbered and outgunned them, and who were fighting with a ferocity that no one had predicted, the young infantrymen responded to the chaos and confusion with a courage that surprised even their NCOs. “I was just amazed watching these young guys under fire for the first time, the way they were moving around and returning fire, they looked like seasoned combat veterans,” Grippe said. “My guys weren’t freaking out. There was no one that thought we weren’t going to get out of there.”

  But as the AK-47 rounds richocheted off the rocks and the RPGs exploded with an orange burst and a puff of black smoke, not everyone in the Halfpipe kept their cool. “You could see a few people starting to fray,” said Peterson. He was referring to one or two members of the signals intelligence team that had accompanied the infantry into the fight. These troops had abandoned their high-tech listening gear with their rucksacks in the mad dash to the Halfpipe. Now unable to perform his job, a staff sergeant lost his nerve during a particularly intense mortar barrage. “We need to get outta here!” he yelled. “We’re all gonna die!” “Where the hell are you going to run to, bud?” Peterson replied. “Just stay here and fight.” The plan was shot to hell, they were pinned down by enemy fire, and their double-figure casualty list would have prevented them from maneuvering their force anyway, but LaCamera and Grippe were not disheartened. Their casualties were stable, their troops were fighting well, and they were in little danger of being overrun. On the rare occasion that enemy fighters tried to maneuver toward them from Marzak, they were killed or driven back by M4 and machine-gun fire from the Halfpipe. The enemy’s unexpected strength in the high ground around Ginger and on the Finger had prevented Kraft’s men from occupying Ginger and forced them out of Heather, but in LaCamera’s opinion his troops controlled each of those positions “by fires.” This point is debatable, but the larger truth is that the rationale for the blocking positions—to prevent the enemy on the valley floor from escaping—had been superseded by reality. Most of the enemy was in the high ground and no one was trying to escape through the passes that were to be blocked by TF Rakkasan. Nevertheless, LaCamera’s preferred course of action was to wait until nightfall, then evacuate his casualties and move the rest of his force to a new position under cover of darkness. When Hagenbeck decided to “reinforce success” in the northern end of the valley while pulling LaCamera’s force out of the south, it frustrated the two ex-Rangers in the Halfpipe. “We didn’t want to leave,” Grippe said. “Higher made the decision to evacuate us…. We had these guys freakin’ fixed.”

  11.

  THE FARP had been a hive of activity from the moment Hardy nursed Apache 203 safely home. When he and the other three pilots climbed out of their cockpits, the adrenaline pumping through their veins began to get the better of them. “Everybody’s talking loud, talking like we were out there catching bullets with our teeth,” Pebsworth said. “I don’t think any of us at that point realized that we c
ould have died. At that point we’re just flexing our muscles, so to speak, and just saying, ‘Wow, we made it.’”

  The other three helicopters arrived back about an hour later. Once they were on the ground, Hardy and Pebsworth, who was studying to become a maintenance test pilot, walked among them, assessing the damage. What they saw stunned them. Each aircraft had been repeatedly hit, in most cases far more times than the pilots flying them had known. Hamilton, for instance, returned to the FARP believing his was the only helicopter not to have been hit. But closer inspection revealed that, in addition to several bullet holes in his rotor blades, his Apache had also taken a bullet to the power-available spindle, which connects the power lever to the engine.

  Also walking among the aircraft was a handful of ground-crew mechanics and armaments soldiers, who were having a busy day themselves.

  When the helicopters launched from Bagram a couple of hours previously, there had been no cheering from the ground crews. They watched the Apaches disappear into the gloom to the south, and then—except for a couple of soldiers laboring on Carr’s cannon—turned and headed back to their tent. Like the pilots, the ground crews began the day underwhelmed by the significance of the threat the Apaches would face. That mood didn’t last long.

  “They hadn’t been gone for long when somebody ran into our tent and said they needed all the ammo we had,” recalled Staff Sergeant Chad Bardwell, who was in charge of the maintenance crews for all eight Apaches. The plan was to load the ammo on a Black Hawk or a Chinook and fly it down to Texaco. “After they started asking for all the ammo and sending back reports of the aircraft being hit, it got real—real quick,” said Bardwell, who had been in the Army for seven years, half as a cavalry scout, and half as a helicopter crew chief.

  Bardwell and his soldiers went down to the ammo supply point at the north end of the runway and loaded cases of rockets, Hellfires, and 30mm ammo on to Gators and Humvees before driving the loads half a mile back down the flight line to where the Chinooks were parked. As the reports of damage and casualties filtered back to Bagram, Bardwell got a team of three soldiers together. Their mission would be to head to the FARP and patch up the Apaches so the helicopters could return to the fight as quickly as possible. They loaded fifteen cases of 30mm ammo (110 rounds per case) and two cases of four rockets each on to a Black Hawk. Then Bardwell and his three-man team climbed aboard and flew to the FARP at about midday. When they got to Texaco all six Apaches were waiting for them.

  Bardwell walked down the line of aircraft, inspecting each one. His reaction to what he found was a mixture of relief and shock. Relief that, although the aircraft had taken a lot of hits, some of the more dramatic accounts of damage that he’d received over the radio were not accurate. No helicopter had taken an RPG in its nose, or in its transmission. “I was expecting to see stuff just blown to bits, from some of the reports we were getting,” Bardwell said. Not for the first or last time, the reports reaching Bagram from the battlefield were shown to be significantly wide of the mark. But Bardwell and his troops still were shocked that some of the helicopters had made it back from the Shahikot. Almost all the rotor blades had bullet holes through them, as did several drive shafts, which ran down the Apaches’ tail booms and up the vertical fins to the tail rotors. “That shocked me,” Bardwell said.

  Under Hardy’s direction, Bardwell’s team got to work. “Basically we were looking to see what we could do to get as many birds as we could flyable,” Bardwell said. The crew chiefs tried to patch up the blades by spreading Hysol, a glue-like substance, into the holes to prevent any cracks from spreading and the blades from debonding. Meanwhile the armament guys from worked feverishly to repair the damage to the Apaches’ electronic systems.

  The toll the fight was taking on the attack birds, and their superb performance under fire, persuaded Wiercinski to order the one remaining airworthy Apache in Afghanistan to fly up from Kandahar to join the battle. The two pilots—Chief Warrant Officer 2 Randy Huff and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Sam Bennett—were sleeping when the call for help came in. “They woke them up and said, ‘Hey, we’ve had two shot down, you’ve got to go up there,’” Bardwell said. Together with Carr’s Apache, which had only taken forty-five minutes to fix in Bagram and which had then flown on to the FARP, there were now two undamaged attack birds ready for combat.

  Within an hour of his getting to Texaco, Bardwell and his maintenance team had two more ready to return to the fray. But Ryan decided to risk sending only one of these—that piloted by Chenault—back into the valley. A couple of the others could have been readied for combat if necessary, but neither Apache number 203—the one Hardy had flown back bone dry—nor number 304—Hardy’s original bird, which had lost almost all its electronic systems, were going to be combat ready soon.

  After refueling the Apaches, there was one more task the ground crews had to perform: rearming the helicopters. In particular, they had to replace the MPSM rockets with the point detonating variety. The pilots found the MPSM rockets to be next to useless in the Shahikot, because they were designed to be fired from a hover. The troops were frantically pulling twenty-seven-pound MPSM rockets off the helicopters and replacing them with twenty-two-pound PD rockets, many of them pulled from the four helicopters that weren’t set to go back out that day. The process was repeated throughout the day. “Every time somebody came back to the FARP, every person in this company, regardless of rank, was walking rockets that we could use from the bad birds up to the good birds,” Hurley said.

  The three good Apaches flew several more sorties through the valley that day, but none came close to matching the intensity of those first ninety minutes in the cauldron of the Shahikot. That evening all the Apaches flew back to Bagram (the other four all having been patched up enough for noncombat flight). At the airbase they were able to conduct a more thorough review of their helicopters. The amount of damage they had sustained was truly extraordinary. In addition to the three most obviously damaged Apaches, the others had all sustained numerous bullet holes, and damage that would have sent lesser helicopters tumbling from the sky.

  There was at least one bullet hole in all but one of the Apache force’s twenty-eight rotor blades. Several had bullet holes to their Robertson fuel tanks, none of which self-sealed as they were supposed to, the pilots were quick to note. One Apache had taken two bullets to the stringer, the main support beam that holds up the tail boom. Other bullets had shredded tires, damaged landing gear, and punched holes in cockpit Plexiglas.

  Of course, the fire hadn’t all been incoming. The Apaches had fired 540 cannon rounds, several hundred PD rockets, four MPSM rockets, and one Hellfire. They had also saved countless lives, according to the testimony of the grunts below them, and of the commanders watching the battle from nearby hillsides and monitoring the fight from the headquarters in Bagram. “Captain Bill Ryan and his guys were absolutely magnificent,” Hagenbeck told a press conference March 6. “They really made a difference for us. Any other helicopter in the world would have crashed.” Wiercinski went even further, saying the Apache “clearly saved the day” for his task force on March 2.

  The Apache itself emerged as a hero from that first day’s combat, dispelling the awkward memories of Task Force Hawk and surprising even some of the soldiers who know it best. “The aircraft took a lot more damage than I thought they would, and they all kept flying,” Bardwell said. “Some of the components they hit, I didn’t think the aircraft would still fly and it did.” “It was billed as something that was very combat survivable, and regardless of what we say about the airframe, it did exactly what it was billed to do for the last two decades,” Hurley said.

  A couple of days later twenty-three-year-old Senior Airman Stephen Achey showed up at the Apache drivers’ tent at Bagram, looking for Chenault. His face streaked with tears of gratitude, he explained that he had air assaulted into the Shahikot as the enlisted tactical air controller for Charlie Company, 1-87 Infantry, but had become separated from the others o
n his chalk almost immediately. He had taken cover behind his rucksack in a small dent in the ground. When he turned around, everyone else had sprinted to the Halfpipe. Al Qaida troops had spotted him, pinned him down with machine-gun fire, and were steadily walking mortar rounds toward him. They had already shot up the huge satellite radio in his ruck and almost hit him with an RPG. Seeing no way out of his predicament, he had given up hope when out of the clear Afghan sky Rich Chenault’s Apache came spitting fire at his attackers. As the Al Qaida fighters shifted their attention, and their fire, to the new threat that seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, the young airman made good his escape. Now he had come to pay his respects to his saviors.

  The pilots knew they also had much to be grateful for. “Luck was on our side that day, no doubt about it,” said Ryan, who had cheated death by a couple of inches. “It definitely could have been a lot worse.”

  ROGER Crombie’s men spent most of the day in a gunfight with a dozen guerrillas gathered around a forty-foot-high hill 1,000 meters to the northwest. The skirmish began when two of the fighters, whom the Americans had been tracking as they walked north from Marzak, advanced from the hill until they were only 800 meters from Eve. At that point 240 gunner Private First Class Mark Henry opened fire on the lead man. His first burst was high. The pair dropped to the ground and returned fire. But within moments Henry killed them both. For a couple of hours the two sides exchanged fire harmlessly. Then the scouts returned after hearing they and everyone else would be pulling out. The scouts, who had worked their way farther south along the base of Takur Ghar, had spent two hours watching one of the very few female enemy fighters observed by U.S. forces during Anaconda. The woman, in her mid-thirties, wore her hair in a ponytail, a long scarf that draped all the way to her knees, and an AK-47 on her back, said Sergeant Jorge Alcaraz. The scouts watched as she sat on a ledge at the foot of Takur Ghar cooking. Enemy fighters, some of whom had been sniping at the scouts, would come down to eat and then return to their positions. As the scouts picked up to move, a mortar attack they had called in from Peterson’s men in the Halfpipe pulverized her position.