Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Dawn broke over the Shahikot. From Masirah Chris Naler continued to urge Grim 32 to remain on station until the QRF arrived. But Turner still couldn’t get Naler to tell him when that would be. The reason for this was simple: Masirah had lost track of Razor 01 and Razor 02. In a further sign of how little situational awareness the TF 11 staff enjoyed, Naler, call sign Champ 20, told Grim 32 to “glint” the LZ to enhance the effects of the QRF’s night-vision goggles when the Chinooks arrived. “Hey, Champ, it’s daylight out here,” replied Turner, who was wearing sunglasses by that point.

  Shortly after that, a nearby EP-3 with the call sign Toolbox asked Grim 32 if they’d seen the antiaircraft missile that had just been fired at them. They hadn’t. The missile had been launched from a similar location to the earlier one and had also fallen short, but Turner was much more worried this time, precisely because he hadn’t seen it. “If you look at all the aircraft that have been shot down since the invention of antiaircraft missiles, the vast majority of them were shot down by the missile they never saw,” he explained. Just then two F-15E Strike Eagles flew through Turner’s field of vision, letting him know that they were ready to take over the responsibility for close air support. The gunship pilot now knew that if he left, the SEALs wouldn’t be left defenseless, even though no other aircraft in the U.S. inventory came close to being able to replicate the constant, precise pounding that an AC-130 could deliver.

  The sun was getting higher and Grim 32’s fuel gauge was getting lower. The Strike Eagles were on station and there was no sign of—or word from—the quick reaction force. Turner got on the radio to the F-15Es and filled them in on what he knew, orienting them to Mako 30 and passing them the frequencies for the SEAL team and the TF 11 operations center in Masirah. Then, at 6:01 a.m., Toolbox reported a third antiaircraft missile had been launched at Grim 32. Unlike the two previous launches, which gained so much altitude that there was no doubt they were missiles, Turner conceded that the EP-3 might have mistaken an RPG for a shoulder-launched air defense missile on the third occasion. Nevertheless, the incident helped make his mind up. The Strike Eagles, being much faster than the AC-130, needed more space to operate in; it was broad daylight; his chain of command had already ordered him home; he’d been shot at twice and maybe just now a third time; and no one seemed to know when the QRF was coming. It may be time to get out of the way, he thought. Grim 32 asked again when Razor 01 was due. “We’re figuring that out now,” was the response. No one even passed the Chinooks’ frequency to the AC-130. Grim 32 passed the Strike Eagle call signs to Mako 30, talked to Bossman, which had been telling the gunship to leave for at least thirteen minutes, and then turned for home. “There really was nothing else we felt like we could do,” Turner said. One of his last calls from the Shahikot was to Masirah on the subject of the QRF. “Whatever you do, don’t send them back to this same LZ,” he told Naler. “It is absolutely hot.” It was a message that was sent from Masirah, but never received.

  Ten minutes later Razor 01 flew into the same hot LZ that Grim 32 had warned Masirah about. By now almost everyone in the TF 11 chain of command had belatedly realized that the top of Takur Ghar was not a good place to try to land a Chinook, except for the crews of Razor 01 and Razor 02. Had the men on board Grim 32 known that the two Chinooks were only 10 minutes out when they made the decision to leave, they would have stayed. “If we’d have known they were coming in, there is zero question in my mind we would have stayed there,” Turner said. “That is what we train for and that is the bond we have with those guys. We train with the Rangers daily for that kind of thing…. We’d disobeyed our orders for an hour. Another fifteen minutes wasn’t going to get me in any less hot water.” The AC-130 had less than thirty minutes’ worth of fuel left in the tank beyond what was required to get to K2. However, had they chosen to divert to Kandahar or to conduct an air-to-air refueling over Pakistan they could have circled Takur Ghar for another hour, more than enough time to destroy any enemy forces the Rangers might run into. Yet again, the problems inherent in trying to run a combat operation from over a thousand miles away based only on a couple of overcrowded satellite frequencies and the “soda-straw” view provided by the Predator were making themselves felt in the Shahikot.

  As the AC-130 flew away from the valley, Blaber made one last effort to persuade it to stay. “If you pull off station before the QRF come in,” he said, “we will have a helo knocked out of the sky.”

  AT 6:07 a.m. Razors 01 and 02 were about to break from their holding patterns outside the Shahikot and fly toward Takur Ghar. Slab and four of his Mako 30 teammates were sheltering under a ledge on the side of the mountain. But on the peak something curious was happening. At a time when there were supposed to be no Americans alive up there, a fierce firefight was underway.

  The fight, captured by a Predator, was vicious and brief. At 5:52 a.m., an Al Qaida guerrilla wearing a pair of desert camouflage Gore-Tex pants he had looted from Neil Roberts’s corpse or rucksack emerged from a concealed position and spent the next fifteen minutes slowly and methodically flanking the bunkers that Mako 30 had engaged at point blank range. As he moved, another fighter fired an RPG at one of the bunkers. Both guerrillas were clearly attacking someone in one of the bunkers. At 6:07 a.m. the Al Qaida fighter who had spent quarter of an hour maneuvering to the side of the bunker opened fire at it, only to be killed by rifle fire from the bunker. The fighter who had fired the RPG then assaulted the bunker, killing whoever was inside.

  The burning question remains: Who was inside that bunker, putting up such fierce resistance? There are only two possibilities. The first is that an Al Qaida fighter reoccupied the bunker and then mistakenly fired upon his colleagues to the south, thinking them to be elements of Mako 30 who had remained on the mountaintop. Under this scenario, the Al Qaida fighters who had been fired upon returned fire and assaulted the bunker, thinking that the man inside was an American, when really he was one of their own. Colonel Andrew Milani, who conducted an exhaustive investigation of the entire Takur Ghar battle for U.S. Special Operations Command, noted two weaknesses with this explanation for the events seen on the Predator tape. The first is that there was already enough daylight at that hour for the enemy fighters to quickly realize their error. The second is that the AK-style assault rifles with which enemy fighters were armed sound distinctly different from the Americans’ M4 rifles, so much so that any experienced fighter would immediately recognize it if his assailant was using an AK-47 or one of its many variants.

  The second possibility, one far more troubling for U.S. Special Operations Command, is that the man in the bunker, fighting on alone against insurmountable odds on a frozen Afghan mountaintop, was Air Force Technical Sergeant John Chapman, who had been left for dead by Mako 30 less than an hour previously. Slab had been convinced that Chapman was dead, but he never physically confirmed that by taking his pulse or otherwise examining his body. There had been no time for that in the heat of battle. Chapman’s body was not found where Slab said he left it, however, but twelve feet away in the bunker the two Al Qaida men had assaulted at 6:07 a.m. Slab said that before he and his men scrambled off the mountaintop, he’d briefly checked where he thought Chapman fell, and had seen Chapman’s corpse “in an unnatural position.” But the location cited by Slab is in fact the exact location at which Roberts’s body was later found. It is possible that Slab took his eyes away from Chapman when Chapman was shot, or shortly afterward, then looked back in that direction, noticed the body lying there, and assumed it to be Chapman’s, when it was in fact Roberts’s. Meanwhile, under this scenario, Chapman had climbed into the bunker to continue the fight.

  Nate Self, who became very familiar with the top of the mountain and the Predator footage, said the video shows the person in the bunker firing at the enemy while the SEALs were still on the mountaintop. The SEALs then pop at least one smoke canister to cover their withdrawal, while the man in the bunker continues fighting. There is no break in the film, and the man ca
n be seen in the bunker until the fight at 6:07 a.m., when several Al Qaida fighters assault the bunker from two different directions and he is killed. Self also noted that the rifle shot from the bunker that killed the enemy was a very difficult shot that he doubted an Al Qaida fighter could have made. (Many U.S. troops remarked on their enemies’ poor marksmanship during Anaconda.)

  Chapman sustained wounds to his upper and lower body. The lower body wounds would not have killed him and might well have allowed him to fight on after coming to his senses and crawling into the bunker. The upper body wounds would have been almost immediately fatal. It goes without saying that someone standing and fighting from a bunker would be more likely to receive wounds to his upper body than his lower body. Counting against this theory, however, is the fact that no calls were recorded from either of Chapman’s radios (his big satellite radio and his MBITR) during this period. A man fighting for his life who was an expert radio operator might have been expected to use his communications know-how to call for help in that situation.

  Milani was unable to reach a decision as to which of the two scenarios represented reality. But other sources who had seen the tape and were otherwise familiar with the events on Takur Ghar were sure the man fighting from the bunker was Chapman. An officer who watched the fuzzy Predator feed live in the Mountain TOC was convinced that Chapman fought on after the SEALs ran off the peak. “I remember clearly seeing that blob still shoot after the other two blobs broke contact,” he said.

  If the man holding off Al Qaida from the bunker was Chapman, he held out almost long enough to give himself a fighting chance of survival. A mere forty-five seconds after his resistance was finally ended, the attention of every Al Qaida fighter on top of Takur Ghar was drawn to the rhythmic thunder of two giant sets of rotor blades as the dark shape of Razor 01 appeared over the mountaintop.

  9.

  THE Razor 01 pilots circled the mountain three times looking for a place to land. They saw footprints in the snow, but no SEALs. Chuck, Greg, and Don talked among themselves. None of them felt comfortable with this situation. Chuck called Razor 02 and told them to return to Gardez and wait. Better to have only one aircraft shot down, not two, Chuck thought. In the back Self paused his examination of the map for a moment to glance at his men. Their faces reflected a natural anxiety that any men in that situation would feel—” the fear of the unknown,” as Canon, on Razor 02, described it—but that fear was mingled with confidence. The training at Tarnak Farms had honed their skills to something close to perfection. Their weapons were zeroed. The more religious among them had attended a church service the previous day, which was a Sunday. They were combat ready. They were at the top of their game.

  Dave, the staff sergeant who was the left door gunner, turned and gave a thumbs-up to Sergeant Phil Svitak, the right door gunner, then yelled at everyone in the back, “Get ready!” Self leaned over and squeezed the shoulder of Specialist Marc Anderson, a 240 gunner, and gave him a thumbs-up as a sign of assurance. Anderson turned to his assistant gunner, Private First Class David Gilliam, slapped him on the back and shouted in his ear, “Today I feel like a Ranger.”

  After a brief discussion with the other pilot and Self over where they should land, Greg, the right seat pilot at the controls, picked out a spot on a gentle slope about seventy-five meters from the very top of the mountain peak and brought the helicopter in on a normal approach. Well, this is it, make it a good one, he thought. Below him at the 2 o’clock position he saw three men about sixty meters away aiming weapons at his helicopter. Before he had time to react the right windscreen shattered, his right multifunction display went out and two bullets hit him square in the chest, thudding against his body armor. Another bullet pushed his helmet to the left. “Taking fire at 2 o’clock!” he yelled.

  Svitak also saw the men shooting at the helicopter. He turned to Cory, the sergeant first class who was the crew’s medic. “Doc, you’d better move back,” Svitak told him. Then he fired a one-second burst from his minigun—whiiirrrrrr!!!!!—and slumped over with two bullets in his stomach. He was dead within seconds. The right rear gunner, a sergeant called Shawn, fired four rounds from his M60 machine-gun—dum!dum!dum!dum! At that moment, as the Chinook slowed to a hover about eighty feet off the ground, one of the enemy fighters who had just killed the mystery figure in the bunker under the tree climbed up on a boulder and fired an RPG at the helicopter. It hit the right engine and exploded. Instantly there was a loud whine from the left engine as it picked up the load to compensate for the right engine being knocked out. Dave, the left gunner, was hit in the thigh as the Al Qaida fighters raked the helicopter with fire. The round struck his knife, shattering it and embedding pieces of it in his left leg. He felt as though a sledgehammer had hit his thigh, from which blood was now spraying. Angry, he swept his minigun from left to right, fighting fire with fire. Beside him Cory was hit by several rounds, none of which penetrated his body armor or his helmet.

  In the cockpit a bullet caught Chuck’s left leg just above the knee. Another hit his helmet, knocking his head back. But Greg, unaware that his colleague was wounded, still had control of the helicopter. Greg’s first instinct was to repeat Razor 03’s exploits of a few hours earlier and try to nose the helicopter over the edge of the mountain and fly away, except he’d have to manage it on a single engine. But very quickly he realized that if he tried to gain airspeed he’d lose altitude and wouldn’t make it over the peak. He brought the nose back up into a landing attitude and slowed the helicopter to put it on the deck. His left seat pilot and flight lead, Chuck, reminded him that he was landing on a slope. He brought the helicopter down fast. The rear wheels hit first. Then the forward landing gear came down with bump. “It was probably the best damn landing I’ve ever made in my fourteen years of flying,” he said. Given the circumstances, that was almost certainly the case, but to Nate Self and his Rangers in the back, the Chinook seemed to just fall out of the sky.

  As they hit the ground another RPG flew in through the right cabin door. It didn’t explode, but it hit an oxygen tank above the left window, sending sparks flying around the cargo area and starting a small fire. Bullets shredded the insulation and soundproofing material in the ceiling and it fluttered down like confetti. The bump when they fell to earth knocked everyone in the back to the floor. Now they were either still lying there or scrambling on their hands and knees to get out the back of helicopter. Self had been prepared for a hot LZ, but not this hot. He had no idea they’d just tried to land on an LZ at which two helicopters had already been shot up. Lying on the floor as machine-gun fire cut holes in both sides of the helicopter, he tried to make sense of the situation. Somebody screwed us big time, he thought. It was 6:10 a.m.

  Shawn hurt his knee in the landing but got to his feet and dropped the ramp. The first Ranger to run down it was DePouli. As he got to the bottom a bullet hit him in the back, a fraction of an inch above the bottom of the rear bulletproof plate in his vest, spinning him around. Seeing an enemy fighter at the helicopter’s 8 o’clock position, he fired an entire magazine from his M4 at the guerrilla. Behind him two bullets hit Sergeant Joshua Walker’s helmet. He didn’t even notice the impact. Spotting a bunker to his right he too fired off a full clip at it then headed left. Specialist Aaron Totten-Lancaster followed him out, wading into the knee-deep snow and then diving into the prone position by the airframe’s lower right corner. Gilliam picked up Anderson’s 240 and crawled off the right of the ramp on his knees and elbows. Vance, the ETAC, dropped his rucksack, heavy from the weight of the big radio in it, off the ramp and jumped out. But as Self crawled across the floor and onto the ramp he realized that not all his men had been as lucky as DePouli and Walker. Specialist Matt Commons lay face up on the ramp, his eyes open but unseeing and a neat bullet hole in his head. His blood was dripping off the ramp, staining the snow red. Sergeant Brad Crose was lying dead facedown in the snow at the bottom of the ramp. Like their Ranger forefathers who landed on Omaha Beach, Crose and Co
mmons had stormed down the ramp only to be cut down in a hail of machine-gun fire. Anderson, who only moments earlier had been telling Gilliam that he felt “like a Ranger,” didn’t even make it to the ramp. He was hit in mid-cabin and fell to the floor. Senior Airman Jason Cunningham, the PJ medic, crawled over and did his best but couldn’t save him.

  Sitting in the companionway, Don saw bullet holes appearing in the windscreen. He’d been in the Army twenty-six years but this was the first time he’d been shot at. He unbuckled his seat belt, grabbed his rifle and ran a couple of steps toward the back, only to encounter a scene of devastation. It seemed as though everyone had been shot. The troops were either on the floor or already outside, so he ran out the back.

  As soon as the helicopter was on the ground, the same men Greg had seen firing on the approach advanced toward the aircraft. Still holding the cyclic stick in his left hand he grabbed his M4 with his right and fired a couple of bursts at them out of his sliding side window, forcing them back behind the rock. Greg’s company commander had made his crews practice this exact scenario “ad nauseam,” the pilot said. “At the time, I thought, Oh my God, do we have to do these shootdown things again?” he said. “It was like he could see into the future and knew exactly what was going to happen. So everything I did was kind of muscle memory. I attribute it to training. I don’t attribute it to heroics or anything like that. It’s just what I was taught to do.”