Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  With explicit orders from Kernan’s headquarters (where Trebon had established temporary residency) to continue with the mission, Hyder revisited the idea of flying to the top of the mountain. Again he chose not to consult with Blaber. Instead he spoke with Razor 03’s pilot-in-command, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Al, and the air mission commander, about whether it was technically possible to land the team directly on their observation post. Al calculated the effect of flying a couple of thousand of feet higher than the original LZ. “I can get you there, but I don’t know that there’s a suitable LZ at your OP,” the pilot told the Navy officer. “It should be no problem,” Hyder replied. “I’ve seen imagery.” The pilots, Hyder and Slab, then decided among themselves to change the LZ at which Mako 30 would be dropped off from LZ 1 to the top of Takur Ghar. They relayed their change of LZ back to Bagram, but not down the road to the AFO TOC, where it would certainly have been countermanded. “The problem was no one was talking to AFO,” said a special operator. “They were making all these calls back to the Blue TOC and Trebon. They weren’t telling the guys they were fighting for.”

  Of course, not only would the SEALs’ decision force them to break a cardinal rule of reconnaissance by infiltrating directly onto their observation post, it also would require them to fly straight onto a mountaintop that Glenn P. had told them not a few hours previously was likely occupied by the enemy. Slab would imply to the official U.S. Special Operations Command investigator that Glenn P. never included this in his briefing to Mako 30. “There were no significant indicators that the mountain was occupied,” he told Colonel Andrew Milani. “…[I]t is incredulous that anyone would believe that we would have gone up to the mountain had our intelligence analysis indicated the presence of enemy personnel.” Other sources flatly contradicted Slab’s version of events. (However, in one respect at least, Slab was speaking accurately. After being informed of the SEALs’ decision to head straight to the mountaintop, Nail 22, the AC-130 working for the Blue teams, flew over Mako 21’s and Mako 30’s LZs. Its fire control officer and navigator scanned both landing zones with their sensors and pronounced each LZ secure. That apparently satisfied Slab that the risks his team was being ordered to take were minimal.)

  But the realization that the enemy, with weeks to prepare, had likely occupied the Shahikot’s most dominant piece of terrain wasn’t confined to Gardez. Earlier that day Jimmy and one or two other TF 11 personnel visited the TF Mountain military intelligence staff and asked where good landing zones might be found for the night’s missions. In response an intelligence officer pointed to the top of Takur Ghar. “Anywhere but here,” the officer said. Then, less than an hour before the two Chinooks lifted off from Gardez for the second time en route to the Shahikot, a report came into the Mountain TOC from the intel staff that enemy fighters were on the top of Takur Ghar. “They’d seen ’em,” said a Mountain TOC source who saw the report. “They’d gotten some sort of IMINT [imagery intelligence], probably from the Predator, that there were bad guys running around that hilltop.” When a battle captain passed the report to Jimmy, whose job it was to keep the AFO TOC apprised of this sort of intel, Jimmy’s response was along the lines of we’ve got it under control, according to a source in the TOC. Of course, what Jimmy didn’t know, because Hyder and Slab had stopped communicating on the AFO satellite net that Jimmy monitored from his desk in Bagram, was that the SEALs had decided to fly straight to the mountaintop. Neither the TF Blue TOC in Bagram nor the TF 11 operations center in Masirah bothered to call Blaber and Jimmy on the AFO satellite net to keep them abreast of the decisions. Yet again in Anaconda, senior leaders’ failure to establish a tight, unified chain of command was adding unnecessary friction to that which is inevitable in any combat operation.

  AT 2:20 a.m. on March 4 the Task Force Hammer convoy pulled out of Gardez and drove down the Zermat road headed for the Guppy. The convoy included about a dozen vehicles the CIA had acquired that were more suited to the mission than the jinga trucks had been: old Soviet gun jeeps and newer (but not brand-new) Toyota pickups and Mitsubishi trucks. Blaber was in AFO’s command and control pickup, equipped with an x-wing satellite antenna that allowed him to talk to any U.S. military headquarters, anywhere. Hyder was now the only officer left in Gardez. When India and Mako 31 returned aboard the three trucks driven by John B., Al Y., and Hans, one of the operators was surprised to find Hyder in charge. “I got the feeling Hyder was now running the show on the ground,” he said. “Of course, he was out of his league.”

  As the trucks drove out of the compound, Razor 03 and Razor 04 took off from the Gardez airfield, also headed toward the Shahikot. Razor 04’s mission was still to fly Mako 21 into LZ 15 in the north of the valley. Razor 03 would fly Mako 30 to the top of Takur Ghar. Razor 03’s crew included two pilots, an air mission commander sitting in the “jump seat” just behind the pilots, two door gunners at the side of the helicopter, and two gunners at the back. Mako 30 apparently consisted of eight personnel: six SEALs, led by Slab; Thor, the Gray Fox operator; and Technical Sergeant John Chapman, the combat controller from the 24th Special Tactics Squadron. As the helicopters approached the Shahikot, Nail 22 was no longer on station to cover their infil, having been called away a few minutes earlier to cover U.S. troops in combat elsewhere. In an ironic twist, the faith the SEALs had placed in the AC-130’s ability to confirm or deny the presence of enemy fighters on the mountaintop with its sensors meant they did not consider the gunship’s presence overhead necessary when they actually landed there.

  At 2:38 a.m. Razor 04 landed at LZ 15. Within three minutes it had dropped off Mako 21 and was airborne again, flying back to a holding point over Gardez, where it was to wait for Razor 03 if the latter helicopter hadn’t already caught up with it after dropping off Mako 30. Razor 03 flew on, the black helicopter gaining altitude as it got closer to Takur Ghar. The proposed LZ was a saddle on the southwestern side of the snow-covered mountaintop. As the helicopter made its final approach, with Al’s copilot at the controls, the crew noticed footprints in the snow. This was not uncommon, even at that altitude, and since the AC-130 had already declared the site to be enemy free, Al wasn’t that worried. He told Slab about the footprints. The Mako 30 leader raised no objections so the pilots brought the aircraft down carefully. The team got ready to jump off as soon as the ramp came down. Closest to the ramp was Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts, a thirty-two-year-old SEAL with a wife and eighteen-month-old son at home in Virginia. But as the Chinook settled onto three feet of snow, its rotors furiously churning the thin mountain air, Al’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Team leader, you’ve got a DShK, unmanned, 1 o’clock.” (This was exactly where Glenn P. had predicted a DShK would be.) “Yeah, roger,” Slab replied. Then, with the ramp starting to fall, another crewman reported a donkey tied to a tree at 3 o’clock, and the left door gunner, Jeremy, saw a figure duck behind a knoll at the Chinook’s 9 o’clock. Skinned goat or lamb carcasses hung from nearby trees. Nail 22’s high-tech sensors had picked up none of this. The right rear crew chief, Dan, held his arm up, signaling the SEALs to stay put while Al discussed the situation with Slab over the intercom. “You’ve got a guy at 9 o’clock, stuck his head up, and disappeared,” Al told Slab. “Is he armed?” Slab asked. “I don’t know,” Al replied. With his SEALs poised at the ramp hinge, Slab paused for a moment, then said, “Roger, we’re taking the LZ.” As Dan dropped his arm and stepped aside, Jeremy saw a bright orange flash to the left of the Chinook.

  4.

  IN Bagram, Hagenbeck had retired to the cot in his office less than an hour previously for his first sleep in three days and nights, leaving Harrell and Jones in charge. As Razor 03 flew south toward Takur Ghar, Jimmy was kneeling beside the generals’ desk, talking to them about the next stage of the operation. The AFO radios were crackling in the background, but because he was unaware that the SEAL teams were communicating only on the Blue frequency, Jimmy still had no clue that Mako 30 had decided to land on the mountaintop. H
owever, his RTO was sitting just a few feet away monitoring a radio conversation between the crew of Razor 03 and the Brown TOC in Bagram. “Hey, sir, they’re one minute out,” the RTO called out. “Roger that,” Jimmy replied. As the AFO second-in-command continued chatting with Harrell and Jones, his RTO typed the grid that Razor 03 crew had just broadcast for their landing zone into a laptop computer, which instantly plotted it on a digital map of the Shahikot. The RTO did a double take. He didn’t like what he saw. “Hey, boss, boss, isn’t this the OP?” he said, pointing at the screen. “Hey, I’ll be right with you,” Jimmy replied over his shoulder. The Delta major concluded his chat, stood up, and turned around. His RTO pointed again to the top of the mountain on the digital map. “Here’s where their LZ is plotted,” the RTO said. Almost a hundred miles to the south, the black Chinook slowed to a hover over the top of Takur Ghar. “What?!” Jimmy said. “That’s where their LZ is plotted,” the RTO repeated. “There’s no way, redo it,” Jimmy said. As the RTO hurriedly reentered the numbers into the computer, Razor 03’s wheels sank into the snow on the mountaintop. Again the computer told Jimmy something he had hoped it wouldn’t. The grid Razor 03 had given was not for LZ 1, the off-set location where he had been told they were going. It was for the very top of Takur Ghar, where no one in their right mind would ask a helicopter to land. Alarmed, he grabbed the radio hand mike to call the helicopter off. Too late. At that moment an Al Qaida fighter at the highest point of the Shahikot Valley raised his RPG launcher to his shoulder and took aim at the big, juicy target that had landed virtually in his lap. He couldn’t miss.

  The RPG slammed into the electrical compartment in the left side of the helicopter, the only place in the aircraft where all the otherwise redundant electrical systems came together, before plowing through the left ammo can and exploding, punching a hole in the Chinook’s right side, hitting the right side electrical compartment, wounding Jeremy in the right leg and blowing his M4 rifle in half. The helicopter instantly lost all AC electrical power, knocking out the M134 miniguns that were its principal means of self-defense and jamming the ramp in the down position. Also out of action were the pilots’ multifunctional displays, navigation and automatic flight control systems, as well as all the radios except part of the intercom. A moment later another RPG fired from the same area hit the ground in front of the aircraft, showering the multimode radar pod with shrapnel as bullets peppered the aircraft, slicing through hoses to send hydraulic fluid spraying across the floor. Acrid smoke filled the cabin. The door gunners had lost their intercom connection, but those in the rear could still talk to the pilots. The SEALs were still on the aircraft. “Get us out of here!” yelled Slab over the intercom. “Fire in the cabin! Rear ready!” shouted Dan to Al, also over the intercom. “Pick it up! Pick it up! Go! Go! Go!” As he finished yelling at Al that it was okay to take off, Dan, the senior crew chief, fired a bust from his M60 machine-gun mounted in the right aft cabin window.

  Al’s copilot had been flying the helicopter, but he wasn’t moving fast enough. Al could see men off to his left with guns and wasn’t prepared to wait a second longer. He took the controls and prepared to take off. In the back, Dan felt a jolt and thought another RPG had hit the aircraft, but in fact what he’d felt was a bullet slamming into his helmet. The Chinook had been on the ground no more than forty-five seconds when Al lifted it off the ground. With almost all his instruments blacked out the veteran pilot was flying by feel. But not everyone in the back had got the message that they were leaving the mountaintop. As the helicopter lurched from side to side, Roberts, who was closest to the ramp and, like the rest of his team except Slab, not plugged into the intercom, made as if to jump out the back. (Al speculated that Roberts, who was standing beside Dan, may have misinterpreted the senior crew chief’s shout of “Go! Go! Go!” as a directive to get off the Chinook.) Noticing Roberts’s movement, Dan tried to stop him, but was restrained by his safety harness. It’s unclear whether Roberts realized that he wasn’t supposed to get off, but slipped in the oil and hydraulic fluid coating the floor as he tried to stop himself, or whether he never got the message. Whichever is the case, he went flying toward the back of the ramp, which the power loss had stuck at about a fifteen-degree slope. Realizing what was about to happen, the left rear gunner, Alexander, tackled Roberts in a desperate attempt to prevent him falling out of the aircraft. He caught the SEAL by the ankle, but had no hope of holding on to Roberts, who was a beefy six feet two wearing a 150-pound ruck and carrying a SAW. The helicopter shuddered again, breaking Dan’s hold. Alexander slid off the end of the ramp and fell about three feet before his safety harness jerked taut, leaving him dangling under the ramp. Roberts flew ten feet and landed in the snow.

  The impetus of the takeoff carried the helicopter over the edge of the peak. Beneath the aircraft the mountain fell away in a 3,000-foot drop, over which Alexander was now dangling in his tether as tracer rounds from the Al Qaida positions chased the helicopter. In the cockpit Al was unaware that Roberts had been left on the mountainside and that one of his crew was swinging helplessly underneath the Chinook, but he knew he was in a life-and-death struggle to keep his aircraft aloft. The helicopter was already shaking violently when someone in the back yelled over the intercom, “We lost an engine! We lost an engine!” That was very bad news. Al knew he couldn’t fly the helicopter at that altitude on a single engine, and immediately lowered the thrust to begin autorotation to the valley floor. In the back the severed hydraulic hose had filled the air with a red mist. Everyone was lying on the wet floor. Dan got on the intercom to report that both engines were in fact running, then got down on the ramp and pulled Alexander back on board. Al leveled the helicopter, which he said was “shaking and shimmying like a washing machine out of balance.” Then an even worse report came in from the back: one of their own was still on the LZ. Al felt sick, thinking one of the team must have deliberately gotten out of the helicopter and been left behind in the rush to get off the mountain. “No, he fell out, he fell out!” his crew corrected him. “Where is he?” Al asked. “He’s back on the hill,” one of the crew chiefs said. “Okay, we’re going back, any objections?” Al replied. There were no dissenting voices. Never leave a fallen comrade.

  As Al banked to the right, he felt the flight controls vibrating so strongly they were becoming difficult to move. He was losing cyclic control, losing the ability to turn the aircraft. Dan, returning fire with his M60, also felt the helicopter shaking and saw hydraulic fluid continuing to spray the cabin. He realized the hydraulics system was failing. When it completely ran dry, the helicopter would drop from the sky like a twin-rotored stone. He looked at the three hydraulics gauges by his crew station. All three were at zero. Dan kept four spare cans of hydraulic fluid in the back. Using a can opener dangling on a string, he began opening them and pouring the contents into the hydraulic fill module, a device that allowed crew chiefs to replenish the hydraulics system in flight. As soon as he had emptied each can, he grabbed a hand pump and began manually pumping the fluid into the system. Al felt the cyclic controls return. “Okay, we’re still going back,” he announced. But as soon as Dan stopped pumping to open a new can, the controls locked up again. It was a simple race. To give Al a chance of keeping them all alive, Dan had to pour and pump hydraulic fluid into the system faster than it was spraying out of the shredded hose. Even with Dan pumping vigorously, however, Al was unable to gain enough cyclic control to turn the helicopter all the way back toward Takur Ghar. There would be no going back for Roberts aboard Razor 03. Al knew he had to put the helicopter down very soon. “I aborted the rescue in order to save the aircraft,” he said. He leveled the helicopter and descended, aiming for LZ 15. Meanwhile his copilot monitored the backup attitude indicator, which was the only working flight instrument, and called out the helicopter’s airspeed, altitude and direction to Al. “You’re at 90 knots, 700 foot a minute,” he said. Al may not have realized it, but he was flying over Kevin Butler’s command post at the no
rthern end of the valley. He couldn’t descend fast enough to put the helicopter down at LZ 15, so he picked out a spot about 1,000 meters to its north. Al coaxed and cajoled the Chinook into an acceptable landing attitude and steadied it over a gently sloping smooth piece of terrain. As he brought the helicopter down, the crewmen called out how far they were from the ground. At ten feet Al felt the controls lock up. They were out of hydraulics fluid. The helicopter fell to earth with a bump. It settled at a precarious angle, but to the crew’s surprise and relief didn’t roll over. The time was 2:58 a.m. They had flown just over seven kilometers from Takur Ghar.

  The landing had been hard, but no one was hurt. Al shut the engines down. Slab had his men drop their rucks, exit the aircraft and position themselves on nearby knolls. He counted heads to confirm what he already knew: Roberts was missing. The pilots collected their maps and other classified materials and jumped out, while the crew chiefs stripped 7.62mm ammo from the miniguns for their two M60s, which they carried out of the helicopter to join the SEALs. The air mission commander, an officer new to the 160th, turned on an infrared red strobe light to mark their position. Despite their superb performance in avoiding what could easily have been a catastrophic crash, the crew members were feeling down about having to crash land the helicopter, until Chapman piped up. “Aw, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ve felt harder PLFs [parachute landing falls].” Then Chapman set up his radio beside the Chinook and went to work.