Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Then another issue reared its head: there were two TF Brown Chinooks on the tarmac, but only one was rigged to accommodate his men. The other was going to carry a fuel blivet to the airstrip in Gardez. Self couldn’t understand why fuel was taking a higher priority than getting his men to the downed helicopter. He had about twenty-five men at the airfield, and he wanted to take as many Rangers as he was allowed. He called Mingus and told him about the four-man special tactics team. The platoon leader told the major that he couldn’t take all four, especially as the 160th pilots were telling him that only one aircraft was available to carry his troops. If this were the case, Self would be restricted to taking only thirteen men. “There’s no way I’m taking four of these [special tactics] guys and only nine of my own,” Self told Mingus. Self would definitely be taking his enlisted tactical air controller, Staff Sergeant Kevin Vance. If all four special tactics men came along as well, it would leave room for only a seven-man Ranger squad. If Self took a two-man machine-gun team, that squad would be cut to five men. Mingus told him he could cut one of the special tactics guys. “Why don’t we just not take ’em at all?” Self replied. “We know the aircraft is stable, we’re not going to have cut anybody out of it, there’s no casualties there. What are they going for? I’d just rather take thirteen of my own, so we can fight.” Mingus told Self he needed to take the special tactics men in case his helicopter went down. They debated the issue back and forth, but Self wasn’t getting anywhere. He was left with a load of ten Rangers and a three-man STS team. Self did some quick thinking about who he should take. He decided on Staff Sergeant Ray DePouli’s squad (“because it was the best squad in the platoon,” he said), scaled down to six men, plus himself, Vance, and a two-man machine-gun team. The six-man squad consisted of DePouli as the squad leader, a three-man fire team consisting of a team leader, a SAW gunner, and a 203 gunner, and a two-man fire team with a team leader and a SAW gunner. Calling back to Mingus, Self explained how limited his options would be with such a small force on the ground. “You’re just going to secure a downed bird,” Mingus responded. What about the guy who fell out of the helo? Self asked. “We’re still working on it,” Mingus said, an indication of just how little situational awareness the Blue and Red staffs in Bagram had.

  A captain from the TF Red staff approached Self on the tarmac. “You’ve got launch authority, you can go,” he told the platoon leader. “What’s our mission?” Self asked for the umpteenth time. “We’ve got to get you guys in the air and get you down in that vicinity, fly you to Gardez and put you on the ground,” the battle captain said. “When you get down to Gardez come up on tacsat and we’ll give you further instructions. We just need to get you prepositioned and get you moved, because it’s about an hour’s flight.” As he was speaking another two Chinooks—the original Razor 03 and Razor 04 that had just flown up from Gardez—landed on the runway about 200 meters away. A crew chief for one of the helicopters Self had thought he’d be flying on gestured at the Chinooks that had just flown in and told him those were the helicopters he’d be going in on now. Before he headed over to them, Self turned back to the other Ranger captain. “Get me another aircraft,” he implored. “You’ve got to get some more people down there.” Just then the special tactics team that usually worked with Self’s platoon turned up, back from their mission. Self filled them in on what was going on and told the team he’d just met that he’d be taking the airmen he already knew. Then he and the rest of his chalk ran over to the helicopters that had just landed. When he got to the helicopter he was supposed to be riding on, a special tactics team was already onboard. “Who’s the team leader,” Self asked. “I am,” replied Technigal Sergeant Keary Miller, 31. “You’re off,” Self told Miller. “I got my own guys.” Then he moved forward, plugged into the intercom and spoke with the crew as the Chinook taxied down the runway to fuel up. When he turned around, he saw Miller and his teammates were still there. The two special tactics teams had run into each other on the ramp and agreed that the team already on the aircraft should stay, because their gear—specialized equipment for pulling people from helicopter wreckage—was already loaded on the helicopter. Self wasn’t happy to be stuck with a team that he’d never even seen before that night. He’d have preferred to go in with the first team from the evening. At least he’d had fifteen minutes with them to explain how his platoon did things. But there was nothing to do now but make the best of it.

  “Here’s what’s gonna happen,” Self told them. “He’s gonna be my RTO,” he said, motioning towards Vance. “Who’s the combat controller?” The special tactics guys pointed at Staff Sergeant Gabe Brown. “You’re gonna control fires,” Self told Brown. Self wanted Vance as his RTO because he knew Vance knew all the call signs and frequencies for talking to the Blue TOC. Brown, with less experience than Vance, would be responsible for calling in close air support if necessary.

  Meanwhile Canon had gone to the TOC in the hope of arranging another aircraft. When he got there Mingus told him there was another helicopter waiting and to go get on it. He went back down to the airfield, collected his men and got on the Chinook, call sign Razor 02. On Self’s aircraft, Razor 01, the platoon leader was on the intercom with the crew as they prepared to take off. He had no idea that the other half of his force was coming along until he heard the Razor 02 crew on the radio say they had Rangers on board. It was a huge relief to Self. Now he had the people he needed: nineteen Rangers, an ETAC, and a three-man special tactics team.

  Shortly after 5 a.m. the helicopters took off. There were twenty-one men on Razor 01: two pilots, the air mission commander, four crew chiefs, one medic from the 160th, three special tactics men, one enlisted tactical air controller, and nine Rangers. Razor 02 carried sixteen men: two pilots, four crew chiefs, and ten Rangers. No one on either aircraft had more than the vaguest idea of what awaited them at the other end of their flight. Self and Canon each believed they were going to land at Gardez, get a more detailed briefing and then fly in to the valley to secure the downed helicopter. Seated toward the front of his helicopter, Self had the aircraft intercom plugged into one ear—allowing him to listen to the radio transmissions being sent and received by the pilots—and his MBITR plugged into his other ear, so he could talk to DePouli at the other end of the aircraft. The crew was tuned in to the TF 11 satellite frequency, known as Tiersat. Self recognized some of the call signs, but the only voice with which he was familiar belonged to Pete Blaber. The captain tried to piece together what was happening from the disjointed radio calls. When he heard a Mako call sign mentioned, Self inferred that somehow the SEALs had managed to secure whoever it was that had fallen out of the helicopter. Two and a half hours after Roberts had dropped into the snow on top of Takur Ghar, Self was still laboring under the misconception that the man who’d fallen out was probably some unfortunate private from the 101st. However, one thing was clear from listening to the radio chatter: Everyone wanted to know when the QRF was going to arrive. Self hoped they would all show some patience. We’ve got to stop in Gardez first and figure out what’s going on, he thought.

  On Razor 01 the three 160th warrant officers in charge of the flight—the air mission commander, a chief warrant officer 5 called Don, the pilot-in-command, a chief warrant officer 4 named Chuck, and the pilot, a chief warrant officer 3 called Greg, thirty-seven, from Louisville, Kentucky—were on their third mission of the night and having the devil of a time figuring out what was supposed to be happening. They divided up the radio responsibilities among them, with each monitoring different nets. Sitting in the jump seat, Don was trying with great difficulty to talk with Bagram. There wasn’t much getting through directly from the Blue and Brown TOCs. Most of what the air mission commander heard was coming from a Navy EP-3 aircraft, which was relaying messages to the inbound Chinooks from Masirah and Bagram.

  As they flew through the mountains north of Gardez, the helicopters lost radio contact with each other. Aboard Razor 01, Don was talking to the EP-3, which was
trying to pass the grid coordinates for the Chinooks’ LZ. Don made the EP-3 repeat the numbers three times before he was sure he and the others listening on Razor 01 had heard them right. “We almost wrote down the wrong grid,” Self recalled. Given what followed, he acknowledged, such a mistake “might have been good.” Self was doing his best to follow along and keep his men in the loop. He took a lightboard (a piece of Plexiglas taped on one side to give a white background and illuminated with a chem light) from his pocket and using a grease pencil wrote down the basics of what he could make out from the garbled radio transmissions, then passed it around. He wrote that “SEAL snipers” were near the man who’d fallen out of the aircraft, that they were “possibly in contact” and were requesting the QRF. It became increasingly clear the Chinooks weren’t going to stop in Gardez. One of the few orders that got through from Masirah and Bagram was to head straight into the valley to help the SEALs.

  It was almost three hours since Razor 03 had been shot down, but the commander of the quick reaction force en route to the Shahikot still had no appreciation of the SEALs’ location relative to the downed helicopter and continued to believe that the helicopter crash-landing because of enemy fire or a maintenance problem (he still didn’t know which) and the serviceman falling out of a helicopter were unrelated incidents. On Razor 02, Canon had heard nothing about the change in plans. He was familiar with Gardez from a previous mission and as the helicopter soared overhead he looked out of the window, recognized the town below and realized they weren’t landing. Something has obviously changed, he thought.

  The helicopters entered the north end of the Shahikot. The night had faded and the crews were flying aggressive nap-of-the-earth techniques, hugging the ground to avoid presenting a target to any Al Qaida gunners. Glancing out, they were surprised to see they were flying over the dark form of Razor 03. Until that moment they had all assumed that they were flying to that crash site. Don asked the EP-3 if they were sure of the LZ coordinates, because they’d just flown over the crashed helicopter. “No, this is a different location,” the man on the EP-3 said. “It’s on top of a 10,000-foot mountain.” “Are there friendlies or enemy there?” The EP-3 told Don there would be friendly troops on top of the mountain. “Are they stationary, moving, what?” Don asked. “They’re moving,” the EP-3 replied. By now the two Chinooks had flown back out of the valley and were in a holding pattern while Don, Self, and the pilots tried to get the details straight.

  Meanwhile, in Bagram and Masirah, at 6:08 a.m., staff officers were trying to get through to Razor 01 and Razor 02 with no success. The satellite communications were failing them just when the special operators sitting beside banks of radios in the operations centers and behind controls in the Chinooks needed them most. The message the TF 11 staff was trying to deliver was a simple, important, lifesaving message: do not land on the mountaintop, where Razor 03 and Razor 04 had already taken fire; land at an offset LZ farther down the slopes of Takur Ghar. These instructions were never received on the helicopters, who were still acting on the orders they’d received via the EP-3. Again, the decision to take Blaber out of the command chain was revealed to be a terrible mistake. As the official Special Operations Command investigator wrote: “Here the [AFO] commander on the scene would clearly have made a difference. At the least he would have insisted that Razor 01 use an offset landing zone. He would also have been in a position to give this direction personally, using the more reliable line of sight radios, which would have significantly reduced the chances of misunderstanding.”

  As Razor 01 bucked and swerved, the men in the back held on. There were no seats in the cargo area, so they were sitting on the floor, trying not to get tossed around. Bracing himself, Nate Self scrutinized his map by flashlight, trying to figure it all out. He was still confused, but somehow he managed to deduce—and tell his men via the lightboard—three things: they were going to land “in the vicinity of the enemy”; the SEALs were in contact with that same enemy; and the SEALs were also not far from the man who’d fallen out of the helicopter. Self wrote his troops that they were going to do “a hot extraction on a possible hot LZ” (something the pilots had failed to pick up on). Speaking to each other over their MBITR radios, Self and DePouli established a game plan, the essence of which was that they were going to run off the back of the helicopter, secure the immediate area, link up with the SEALs and, maybe, the guy who’d fallen off the helicopter, get them onto their Chinook and fly away as quickly as possible. “Watch your fires coming off, there’s friendlies in the area,” Self wrote on the lightboard. At the very least he wanted his men to understand that there was a high likelihood of combat on the LZ and that the SEALs they were picking up would be breaking contact with the enemy as they ran toward the helicopter. He refocused his attention on the radio. The call signs were all from Bagram. Then he heard Blaber’s voice, urgent now. Everyone seemed to be talking about the AC-130.

  8.

  ON the side of Takur Ghar, Mako 30 was in trouble. Slab and his four teammates who had made it off the mountaintop had managed to hustle and hobble down to a hiding place beneath a rock overhang that protected them from the fire that had chased them off the peak. But the only thing preventing the guerrillas up top from coming to look for them was Grim 32’s presence overhead. Every time either the SEALs or the gunship crew saw the enemy trying to outflank Mako 30’s position, the AC-130 would open up with a few of its trademark 105mm rounds. (“We felt like the 40s just weren’t making a big enough boom to keep heads down,” Turner said.)

  But there was a limit to how long Mako 30 would be able to count on Grim 32’s support. Air Force rules required the AC-130 to be out of the combat zone by dawn, less than an hour away. In the gunship’s cockpit, Turner looked at his watch and then called Bossman to make sure there were some fast-movers available to support the SEALs once he had to break station. At the same time Grim 32 called back to its higher headquarters, the Dagger air component at K2. “We are in a firefight with these guys [i.e., Mako 30] for their lives,” Turner told K2. “We’re requesting permission to stay later.” Dagger’s answer was: “No, you will return to base.” This sat well with neither the gunship crew nor a host of other officers monitoring the call. Radio and phone calls flew between Bagram, Masirah, K2, Bossman (the AWACS), and the Shahikot as these officers engaged in a high-level tussle with a few Air Force officials over who “owned” the AC-130. An unclear chain of command was again playing havoc with the effective control of the operation.

  On the side of those arguing to keep Grim 32 on station were Blaber, Harrell, Mulholland, and Trebon. Putting up stubborn resistance, however, was Frank Kisner, who wore two hats as Mulholland’s deputy at Task Force Dagger and the commander of Joint Special Operations Air Component (North). Kisner was apparently gripped by the fear of a daylight shootdown that has haunted the AC-130 community since Spirit 03’s demise over Khafji. The dispute led to some fierce telephone arguments with Mulholland.

  The folks most worried when they heard the radio calls about the Grim 32 being pulled off station were the SEALs of Mako 30. “Hey, guys, don’t leave me,” Slab said to the gunship crew. “If you leave, we’re dead.” Grim 32 told Slab not to worry. “Until you have somebody else that can take care of you, we’re staying,” one of the aircrew told him. “We’re just trying to work through this ROE [rules of engagement] crap.” They continued shooting. To the SEALs and the crew of Grim 32, the argument for keeping the gunship on station beyond dawn was straightforward: the SEALs needed its firepower to keep the enemy off their backs. But to the others arguing in favor of keeping the AC-130 on station, its importance to the inbound quick reaction force was at least as important. One of the loudest advocates for holding Grim 32 over Takur Ghar was Pete Blaber. As soon as he heard Turner talk about breaking station, Blaber came up on the net. “Negative,” he said. “I am ordering you to remain on station and support these guys. You’re going to be the fire support when the QRF comes in.”

  This
argument would have made perfect sense to Turner and his crewmates, except that they were running out of fuel as well as darkness and no one seemed to be able to tell them when Razor 01 and Razor 02 were going to show up. The best estimate Turner got from Task Force 11 was “within the hour.” The pilot knew he didn’t have an hour’s worth of fuel left, if he was to make it back to K2. Then, from a ridgeline about five miles to his south, a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile arced upward toward his aircraft. Through Turner’s night-vision goggles it looked like the space shuttle was zooming toward him. The missile fell well short of Grim 32, but it was a wake-up call that reinforced their fears of their own vulnerability once the sun rose. “In daylight an AC-130 looks like a blimp overhead at a football game,” Turner said. At least the base back at K2 wasn’t bothering them any more with calls to return to K2. In fact, K2 had been surprisingly quiet. Turner called back to his electronic warfare officer, who controlled the radio channels that the aircraft listened to. “Hey, I haven’t heard anything from Dagger for a while now,” Turner said. “What’s going on with them?” “Boss, it’s just too busy up there, you guys are making the right decisions, I turned them off,” the officer replied. He had a strong relationship with Turner and knew the pilot would remain on station until he ran out of gas or someone arrived to replace them, whichever came first. Under those conditions, there was no point listening to the increasingly frantic calls from K2 for them to return to base. “He turned them off so we couldn’t hear them ordering us to come home anymore,” Turner said.