Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Self thought that if he could just suppress the enemy’s Bonsai tree position, perhaps with close air support, he and the other healthy Rangers could assault it, seize the hilltop, and then Razor 02 could come and pick them up. Although he had feared from the start of the fight that they wouldn’t be able to leave until night fell, he was coming under pressure from the medical personnel to bring a medevac in for the wounded.

  Normally Vance would be trying to arrange close air support and talk to higher headquarters. But Vance had left his radio in his rucksack sitting in the snow beside the ramp. Even if he’d had it with him, it would have taken time to attach the satellite aerial and then figure out the correct azimuth in which to point it. “That wasn’t gonna happen anytime soon,” Self said. Anyway, with so few able-bodied men, Self felt he needed Vance’s help in holding off the enemy. As he had planned in Bagram, the captain used Gabe Brown, the Air Force combat controller, as his RTO and to call in close air support. Brown was sheltering behind a rock in a tiny, shallow depression twenty meters behind Self’s position. Self and one or two of the other Rangers yelled back at him to get on the radio and see what planes were available. Oddly, the Rangers had somehow gotten the impression that Brown’s first name was Jeremy, and that is what they called him until, about an hour and a half into the fight, between radio calls he told them, “That mission’ll be here in about five minutes, and oh, by the way, my name is Gabe.”

  For this first mission of the day, a pair of F-15Es was inbound. Brown asked Self whether he wanted them to strafe the enemy position with their cannons or to drop bombs on it. Vance and Self talked. Vance yelled down to Brown to tell the planes to only use their cannons. It was just before 7 a.m. when the first F-15E came in on a dry run, popping flares. Vance, the more experienced coordinator of close air support, didn’t like the angle of approach and told the pilots to adjust it. They zoomed in on another dry run. “That’s good,” Vance said. “Bring them in, guns hot.” Every American put his head down. The jets swooped down firing their 20mm cannon into the tree position. To Don it sounded like someone stepping on bubble wrap. The tree branches flew apart. The planes went around and rolled back in. Somewhere an enemy antiaircraft gun opened up, and black clouds burst behind the jets. The gun run was accurate. The tree top was shredded. But after a couple of passes, the Strike Eagles were out of ammo. They tried to persuade the Americans on the mountain to allow them to drop JDAMs, but Self resisted. His impression was that fast-movers were always trying to “push” JDAMs on their close air support customers, but he wasn’t ready to take that risk just yet. Sitting about sixty meters from where the bombs would land, his position just about defined “danger close.”

  THE Americans on the mountaintop were fighting for their lives, and dying, in large part because their satellite communications had let them down when they needed it most. Commo problems continued to hamper them throughout the day. Brown was having no luck on the frequencies TF 11 should have been monitoring. He tried using his own call sign—Slick 01—as well as those of Vance and Self. No one in TF 11 answered him, except for Juliet, the one AFO team left in the valley from the original three that had trekked in. From their OP Juliet had an excellent view of Takur Ghar. They told Self that they could see several enemy fighters milling on the back side of the mountain (i.e., just below and behind the bunker).

  When Razor 02 landed at Gardez at 6:25 a.m., Canon went up to the cockpit to talk to the pilots. They told him they were awaiting instructions from higher headquarters. As calmly as he could, the NCO explained that his chalk accounted for half of the QRF, and the other half needed them to get back to the valley as soon as possible. Canon went back to the rear to tell the others what was happening, at which point Vic Hyder walked up. “Hey, I’m Vic Hyder,” he told Canon. “Those are my guys out there.” Together the SEAL and the Ranger NCO went forward to talk to the pilots. The aviators had a new set of grid coordinates for an offset LZ on the slopes of Takur Ghar and were cleared to return to the Shahikot. They also told Canon that Razor 01 had been shot down on its LZ and there were casualties. At 7 a.m. Razor 02 took off. The men oiled their weapons and got their game faces on. Halfway to the mountain Mako 30 called on UHF and told the aircrew the LZ was hot, a bombing run was beginning (the first F-15E dry run) and that Razor 02 needed to hold off. They flew to an adjacent valley and waited for the Strike Eagles to finish their gun runs. Then Mako 30 called back and vectored them in to an LZ close to the SEAL team. As they approached the LZ, together the Rangers in the back recited the Ranger Creed.

  The landing was unopposed. The Rangers poured out of the back and assumed a security perimeter while the helicopter lifted off. Canon was pleased to find the snow hard-packed and firm underfoot. This isn’t gonna be that bad, he thought, pulling out his compass, his GPS and his map to figure out exactly where he was. The NCO could hear Self and DePouli talking on the platoon radio net. He grabbed his MBITR and told the captain he was on the ground. But he still didn’t grasp the scale of the mountain or the magnitude of the task ahead of him. Hyder pointed to where Mako 30 was sheltering several hundred meters away. “Let’s go over and get my guys and then we’ll go to the top.” Canon, who could hear the sound of automatic weapons fire from the valley, spoke to Self. “I’ve got Vic Hyder with me,” he said. “He wants us to go exfil his guys.” Self wasn’t surprised to hear that Hyder was with Chalk 2, but he was infuriated that the SEAL officer was trying to take the Ranger reinforcements away from the battle. “No, I need you up here,” Self told Canon. “He can go and get with his guys, they’re not in contact. We are in contact and have casualties. You’re coming here.” Canon told Hyder he was taking the Rangers up the mountain. The SEAL officer later said his impression was that the Rangers on the top of the mountain “had their situation under control” and that the “immediate need” was to assist the two badly wounded SEALs. He struck out alone in Mako 30’s direction. The spectacle of the senior ranking officer on the mountain—and a special mission unit member at that—not heading to the sound of the guns himself did not disappoint Self as much as might have been expected. “I didn’t want him to come up,” Self said, explaining that he thought a SEAL officer showing up in a Ranger gunfight might just have confused the situation. “They’re Navy. They do things differently. We knew that from working with them previously.”

  With Hyder out of the picture Self and Canon spoke again. Self thought Chalk 2 had landed just southwest of the mountaintop. He told Canon that they should just assault up the mountaintop and through the bunker position while the men from Razor 01 suppressed the enemy. “You can just wipe right through them and we’ll be done,” he told Canon. He fired a star cluster to give Canon a fix on his position. Canon couldn’t see it. Only then did they realize Canon had landed much farther east, away from the mountaintop. Self told Canon to move south to a draw, and then walk up the draw toward the top, meaning Chalk 2 should crest the mountain immediately behind the Ranger position. The captain asked Canon how long he estimated it would take Chalk 2 to hike up the mountain. About forty-five minutes, Canon said.

  WHILE he waited for Chalk 2, Self opted to just keep his men pulling security and not try any more gun runs from the fast-movers. They weren’t worth the risk, now that reinforcements were on the way, the captain reckoned. But his men were still taking sporadic fire from at least one enemy fighter under the Bonsai tree. Then mortar fire started raining in on them from the higher reaches of the mountains on the eastern side of the Upper Shahikot Valley, about 3,000 or 4,000 meters to the east. “Here we are on the side of a snowy mountain with a big, huge black helicopter on it—it’s kind of an easy target,” Self said later. The first mortar salvo landed about fifty meters off the nose of the helicopter, which was tremendously accurate for a first round. (The Al Qaida gunners clearly were not too worried about the risk of fratricide.) The next set landed behind the Rangers, farther down the mountain. The enemy had them bracketed. Self worried these opening salvos would be foll
owed by rounds falling in between where the first two had landed; in other words, right on his men. We’re in trouble, he thought. He began to get extremely impatient about getting his men off the side of the mountain. The enemy might be firing these mortars in preparation for an assault, he thought. He had been on the ground less than two and a half hours.

  Worried that the enemy would get lucky, hit the aircraft in a vulnerable point and blow it up, Don recommended moving the casualties from the helicopter to a little depression in the rocky slope at about the Chinook’s 5 o’clock position, close to Self’s command post. Cory countered that the helicopter had already withstood RPGs and machine-gun fire, and moving the casualties outside could induce hypothermia. But Cory changed his mind when another mortar round fell far too close for comfort. Don, Cory, Cunningham and Brian carried the patients over one by one, Chuck and Greg on regular stretchers and Dave on a Skedco. The distance was little more than twenty meters, but the movement was extremely hard, even with four men carrying each casualty. By now the altitude had sapped their reserves of energy. They were exhausted. As they prepared to move Dave, Cunningham tripped and lost his grip. The Skedco, designed to move fast on snowy terrain, skidded away. “Dave was on a toboggan ride,” Don recalled. Fortunately for all concerned, Dave’s Skedco ran into Chuck’s stretcher, allowing Brian and Don to grab it before it slid another 800 meters down the mountainside. “Sorry, are you alright?” Dave said to Chuck. “Yeah, as soon as you get off my leg,” Chuck replied dryly.

  Greg decided to do what little he could to make himself more comfortable and used his good arm to cut the chest straps and loosen the leg straps on his litter. Lying on his back he looked up to see a Predator high in the sky circling the mountaintop. If only that were an AC-130, he thought.

  11.

  ONCE they left the LZ, the consistency of the snow under the feet of Canon’s men turned from hard-packed to dry powder, and it was no longer “underfoot,” but knee-to-mid-thigh-deep. So much for the easy hike the squad leader had anticipated. His mens’ route required them to move 800 meters laterally and to ascend 2,000 feet up a 70-degree slope. The loose rock under the snow only added to their problems. Slipping, falling and stumbling, they were soon spitting up blood from the effort demanded of their lungs. The Rangers had dressed in preparation for a static mission—securing a downed helicopter—not mountaineering. Many were wearing light or medium-weight thermal long johns and tops under their fatigues. With their body armor weighing them down, the men were overheating in the sun. Within fifteen minutes Canon stopped the climb and told the men to remove some clothing. But he still wasn’t optimistic about their rate of progress. There’s gotta be something else we can download, he thought to himself. He called Self and asked for permission to get rid of the back plates in the troops’ bulletproof vests. The captain, impatient for his reinforcements, readily agreed. Canon told the men to dump the plates. They hurled them onto rocks below in an attempt to break them. “Have fun,” the squad leader joked. “It’s the most expensive Frisbee you’re ever gonna throw.”

  WEjust can’t sit here and take mortar rounds, was the thought going around and around in Self’s mind. We’ve got to assault. He called DePouli over to his position. Then he told DePouli, Vance, and Walker that the four of them were going to assault the enemy position at the top of the mountain, which Self thought was little more than a couple of guys hiding behind the Bonsai tree. None of the Americans had realized they were up against a well-entrenched bunker. With Brian, the left rear crew chief, serving as his assistant gunner Gilliam hammered the enemy position with 240 fire. But from that angle the machinegun could do little damage. The bunker’s aperture was facing down the slope towards where Self and the others were assaulting. They didn’t realize it, because they couldn’t see how the enemy had built up the position under the Bonsai tree, but the 240 was aimed right at the bunker’s thick wooden wall. The Al Qaida fighters had constructed the bunker by digging away at the base of the tree, and then surrounding and reinforcing the pit with logs, with more branches covering the roof of the bunker. It was undetectable from the air and almost impenetrable from the ground. The four men in Self’s little assault team struggled manfully up the slope, with their weapons up and firing as they went. Even if they hadn’t been tired out from the altitude and their exertions so far, the knee-deep snow would have made it impossible to run. DePouli was ready with a hand grenade clutched in one fist while he shot his M4 with his other hand. One of the enemy fighters emerged from behind the tree and fired his AK at the Americans, then ducked back down. Only thirty meters away and closing, Self saw the guerrilla was standing in a waist high fighting position. The captain realized the extent of the fortifications he was assaulting. He knew there was a machine-gun in there somewhere. In training, it always took a full platoon of more than thirty men to take down a machine-gun nest. Here he was trying to do it with four guys at 10,000 feet stumbling uphill in the snow. “Bunker! Bunker!” the captain yelled. “It’s a bunker! Get back!” The four turned and staggered back down the slope to their original positions in the rocks.

  SELF asked Brown whether any strike aircraft were on station. A pair of F-16s was available, but they only had “dumb” 500-pound bombs, not JDAMs, Brown said. Self told him to have the jets drop the first bombs on the other side of the mountaintop, and then walk them up the slope onto the bunker. This worked, up to a point. The first bomb landed close enough to shower the bunker with debris. The next hit closer to the bunker. The fire from the bunker stopped briefly, and then restarted. But Self did not feel comfortable having unguided bombs dropped any closer. Then more mortar rounds fell. Canon reported that the Chalk 2 soldiers climbing the mountain were also receiving ineffective mortar fire. Miceli, covering the eastern side of the Chalk 1 position, spotted a couple of men walking around the valley to the east, pointing up at the Americans on the peak of Takur Ghar. Self concluded they were enemy observers calling in the mortar fire. They were beyond the effective range of any of the weapons the Rangers had at their disposal. Miceli harassed them with his SAW fire, trying to push them away, but they continued advancing slowly toward him.

  Again, Self felt he had to take action to hasten his men’s departure. He knew Brown had been talking to Wildfire, the call sign for the CIA’s Predator, for much of the morning. He asked Brown to find out if the Predator was armed. Brown didn’t know what he was talking about. “Armed?” he said. He had no idea there was such a thing as an armed Predator. “Yes, some of the Predators have Hellfires on them,” Self said. Brown queried the Predator operator. “Yep, it’s got two,” he reported to Self. “Get ready to use it,” the platoon leader told him. But Vance was nervous. “No sir, we’re too close,” he told Self. “Don’t use the Hellfires.” Yielding to his ETAC’s advice, Self decided to hold off. But thirty minutes later more mortar rounds landed. Self pulled a little card out of his pocket that told him the “minimum safe distance” ranges for every indirect fire weapon system. Nothing he read suggested that the Hellfire would pose an inordinate risk. “We’re good,” he said, knowing his men enjoyed the protection of a defilade position, with the rocks sheltering them from any blast. He told Brown to call in the Predator strike. “Put it in the bunker,” the captain said. But Brown told the Predator to do the same thing he’d done with the bombs: to fire the first one a safe distance away. That’s exactly what the Predator did. Self was surprised to see the missile explode “way off” target to the north. Canon, on the other hand, immediately got on the radio. “Hey, whatever that was, don’t do that again, you almost hit us,” he said. “We’re a lot closer to it than you are,” Self told him. Then he turned to Brown. “Look, there’s only one [Hellfire] left,” he said. “Put it right in it.” The men put their heads down. The second Hellfire shot was perfect. Rocks, dirt and branches flew over the Rangers’ heads. They cheered. When the smoke had cleared from the top of Takur Ghar, the bunker had collapsed and part of the tree was missing. They took no more fire from
there.

  AFTER forty-five minutes had passed since he had spoken with Canon, Self called the squad leader again. “What’s your ETA?” he asked Canon. Another forty-five minutes, was the answer. When that time elapsed with no sign of Chalk 2, Self’s patience was wearing thin. I’ve only got so much time before the enemy decides to counterattack, he thought. I’ve gotta get these guys off the side of the mountain. He called Canon back. “Look, you’ve gotta move faster,” he said. “We’re moving as fast as we can,” Canon replied.

  They marched on in single file, Staff Sergeant Harper Wilmoth and Staff Sergeant Eric Stebner leading the way. They received ineffective mortar fire, almost certainly from the same enemy 82mm tubes that were bracketing the Rangers on the mountaintop. Canon could hear the air strikes going in up ahead. What in the hell is at the top of this hill that is requiring us to bring this much firepower to bear? he wondered.

  At about 10:00 a.m. the Chalk 1 Rangers fired another star cluster in the air. Canon and his men still didn’t see it. How could they not see it if they’re as close as they think they are? Self wondered. It was half an hour later, just past 10:30 a.m., when Canon finally spotted Miceli and DePouli, the two men closest to his approach. “I think I see you all,” Canon said over the radio. Miceli and DePouli weren’t sure. Canon told them to pick up snow and throw it. They did. “Yeah, that was you,” Canon said. “We’re moving into your location now.” It took another twenty minutes to make the linkup, but when it happened, Self’s tiny force on the top of the mountain had doubled.