Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  (DePouli and Miceli made a grim discovery as they came down to meet Chalk 2: a helmet with a bullet hole in it. From the state of the inside, it was clear the last person to wear it had been shot in the head. That person was Neil Roberts.)

  IT took Hyder nearly an hour to link up with Mako 30. The first member of the team he encountered was gray-faced, shivering, and leaving a trail of blood behind him. Hyder gave him his coat and swapped his wool mittens for the bedraggled SEAL’s wet gloves. The wounded man told Hyder that Chapman was dead, Roberts had not been seen, and a third team member had been shot in the legs and was seriously wounded. This was the first time Hyder realized how serious Mako 30’s situation was. The terse radio conversations had barely hinted at it. There was no way to execute his initial plan, which had been to get the team to retrace the route he had just taken from the LZ. The upward climb was beyond the abilities of the SEALs, who would have to carry one man and help another. Instead Hyder decided to follow the draw downward toward a known LZ, in the hope that another potential LZ might offer itself up en route. They began the trek. Hyder and another SEAL carried the most seriously wounded man between them. The stricken operator was able to put weight on his right foot, but his left leg was shot clean through just above the ankle. The six men moved slowly, pausing every seventy-five meters. At one point Hyder moved up the slope to provide overwatch. He spied a bearded, dark haired man coming down the north face of the mountain into a draw parallel to the one the SEALs were traveling along. Hyder kept his eyes on the man for about five minutes, noting that he was wearing pants and a long jacket. The SEAL officer was waiting for a chance to shoot him. That chance came when, about 175 meters away, the target fell forward and then kneeled up. Hyder put his sight on the man’s torso and pulled the trigger. His first shot hit the man in the chest. The bearded figure dropped to his left side. Hyder shot him again in the chest and the man fell onto his back. Hyder fired again but probably missed. He watched the man lying there for several minutes.

  MORTAL combat doesn’t stop the body’s natural functions. As the reinforcements arrived, Walker realized he had to take a shit. He did so where he was lying, just pulling his pants down and rolling on his side. A moment after he was done. Eric Stebner and Sergeant Patrick George arrived beside him. George went to lie down where Walker had just taken a shit. Walker warned him just in time, but Stebner didn’t hear and dived straight on top of it, which resulted in George then having to try to clean the mess off his buddy with handfuls of snow.

  When Chalk 2’s men had all made it up, Self walked down to the big rock outcropping and gave them a brief overview of events, then told them they would take the lead in assaulting the top of the mountain. DePouli’s squad was going to secure the flanks. He had Chalk 2’s machine-gun team of Specialists Randy Pazder and Omar Vela position their 240 next to the one manned by Gilliam and Brian (who also had 2,000 rounds of 7.62mm ammo retrieved from the Chinook). The platoon leader assembled his assault team: Walker, Stebner, George, Wilmoth, and Specialists Jonas Polson and Oscar Escano. He divided them into two three-man fire teams.

  Now that he had extra manpower, Self decided neither he nor Vance were needed as riflemen. He told Vance to get his radio and start calling up the chain. The rest of the force, poised for the assault, gave Self a quizzical What’s the signal? look. “Just start shooting,” he told them. Both machine-guns opened up as the assault began. The two teams moved in “bounding overwatch” fashion, one team standing and shooting while the other fire team was moving and shooting. It only took them a couple of minutes to assault up the slope and then turn right toward the boulder and the tree. They shot a man on the back side of the bunker. Then Stebner noticed an American body laying facedown by the boulder. “Hey, we have a Blue casualty up here,” Canon told Self. Again, the captain was confused, thinking Canon was using the word “blue” as the U.S. military uses it to denote friendly forces, not realizing he meant Task Force Blue, the SEALs. Not good, Self thought. We just shot one of our own guys. “How do you know?” Self said. “It’s obvious,” Canon replied. “You need to come up here and look at this.”

  Self told him to finish the assault first. They had discovered several bunkers on the back side, and he wanted them cleared. The Rangers went through, tossing grenades and firing shots. Canon tossed a grenade into one, not realizing the position held a pile of RPG rounds, which cooked off, knocking him down. Then they went to the other side of the saddle, which had been cratered by Grim 32 earlier that morning. The Rangers shot and killed another guerrilla there.

  Self walked over to look at Roberts (he still didn’t know his name). The dead SEAL was wearing a U.S. desert combat uniform, but had a big beard. Self continued to suspect trickery. He wondered if this operator had been on a joint observation post with Afghans who turned on him. The RPG gunner who DePouli had killed with a shot to the head was bizarrely still half standing, leaning backward but held up at the knees by the snow. His hat lay a meter behind him where DePouli’s bullet had carried it. Meanwhile Wilmoth’s team went into the bunker and found two more dead enemy fighters and another dead American—John Chapman. Mako 30 finally came up on the radio again and settled things. “No, those are our guys,” a SEAL told Self. “One of them’s the guy who fell out of the helicopter.” Still Self didn’t understand. Okay, he fell out of the helicopter down there in the valley. They captured him alive and forced him to call us in. They baited us and then they killed him anyway. It took one more radio call with Mako 30 for the Rangers to finally understand what had transpired on Takur Ghar. It was 11:15 a.m.

  12.

  AT 8.30 a.m. two more TF Brown Chinooks took off from Bagram bound for Gardez with 35 TF 11 commandos, mostly from TF Blue. After take off the helicopters got a message to rendezvous with Razor 02 at FARP Texaco. The helicopter force gathering at Texaco to insert the new quick reaction force to pull the Razors 01 and 02 personnel plus Mako 30 off the mountain included three MH-47s and two “Killer Spade” Apaches. The air mission commander, flight leads and SEAL officers huddled to plan the extraction. TF Rakkasan Chinooks landed, ferrying fuel to the FARP. Meanwhile, Commodore Bob Harward’s TF K-Bar caught wind of events on Takur Ghar and began planning to send reinforcements. In Kandahar, B Company of the 160th’s 3rd Battalion was alerted at 10:30 a.m. The company had only arrived in Afghanistan a week earlier and had yet to conduct a mission. As K-Bar officers planned, the 160th officers in Kandahar woke their men up and prepared to fly the special ops troops to Bagram in four MH-47D Chinooks.

  SELF brought Vance and Brown up to the crest and set up his command post behind a boulder. Brown finally got through to the TF 11 operations center and told them Takur Ghar was secure and the LZ was cold. Self’s next priority was to move the casualties up and over the crest onto the reverse slope, partly because the most obvious LZ was up there and partly to keep the casualties out of sight of whoever had been directing the mortar fire against them. But just as Shawn, Stebner, and two other Rangers had begun this process, dragging Dave halfway up the slope on the Skedco, Al Qaida counterattacked. Bullets flew across the hillside. “Take cover!” someone yelled. The four stretcher-bearers dropped Dave into the snow. He had to reach out and grab a small bush in order to keep himself from sliding away for a second time that morning. This is bad, he thought. “Don’t worry, Sergeant, we’re coming to get you!” Stebner yelled at him. “You don’t have to,” Dave replied. “You fight.” Despite Dave’s bravado, Stebner tried twice to run out into the open and pull Dave to cover, but on each occasion he was driven back by fierce enemy fire. “Just leave me alone!” Dave yelled. “Shut up, I’m not gonna leave you there!” Stebner shouted back. On his third attempt, Stebner made it all the way to Dave and pulled him back behind cover as bullets bit into the snow with a pffftt! pffftt! sound.

  The enemy was hurling a furious barrage of RPG, machine gun, and AK fire at the Americans from positions high on a ridge 300 meters to the southeast. On maps the enemy’s location appeared part
of the Takur Ghar peak, but in reality it was separated from the mountaintop by a saddle. Looking across, the Rangers could see what looked like a couple of cinder-block bunkers on the ridge.

  Self watched an RPG fired from the opposite ridgeline skip on the lower part of the slope the helicopter was on and then soar up to the top of the mountain, close to where he was. It exploded harmlessly, but the enemy was really pouring it on. The captain could only see five or ten enemy fighters, but they were fighting as if they had several times that number. “That was some of the most intense gunfire that we had all day,” he said. Self ducked back behind a boulder as bullets chewed up the snow and dirt. “It was like in the movies,” he recalled. “The ground was just exploding around me.” The enemy was below them, which didn’t help in this situation, because the guerrillas’ fire was “grazing,” raking up the slope endangering everyone. Self and Canon repositioned their men to adjust to the new, potent threat. DePouli told Gilliam to turn his machine-gun around so he could take the enemy behind them under fire. Gilliam did so and began firing long bursts at the enemy fighters. The biggest problem was going to be the casualties. Greg and Chuck were still strapped into their stretchers on the rock face. With them were Cory, Don, and Cunningham. They were all directly in the line of fire. Self knew he had to get his wounded to the top of the hill fast.

  It didn’t take Don and the others long to realize how exposed they were tending the casualties. Bullets snapped past their ears and cracked against the rocks. Don returned fire, the muzzle of his M4 barking its resistance just eighteen inches from Chuck’s head. For some reason, Don’s weapon seemed louder than the others, and Chuck let him know it. With his arms strapped to his sides, unable to cover his ears, he could only yell “Ow! Ow!” as Don leaned back against the rock face and fired round after round at the enemy fighters moving back and forth between boulders and bunkers. What do you want me to do, Chuck? Don thought. Quit firing?

  The natural human instinct for Don and the others would have been to take cover behind nearby rocks. But that wouldn’t have helped Chuck and Greg. Everyone stayed. Cunningham had just started another IV on Greg. We’re not leaving these guys was the attitude. We’re gonna stay here and shoot it out. Cory was distinctly unimpressed with the enemy RPGs. They’re nothing compared to the 500-pounders, he thought. The three noncasualties tried to move Greg, but didn’t have the strength. After several minutes of fruitless effort, Don decided to go to the top of the hill to get the Rangers to help move the casualties. As he got up to run, the enemy opened up again. Within the space of two seconds, Cory and Jason were hit. “Uh! Uh!” each grunted as the bullets hit home. For the next few seconds they lay there moaning. Neither of them knew how badly they’d been wounded. Cory knew he’d been hit twice in the belly, just below the edge of his body armor. “It felt like somebody hit me as hard as they could with a sledgehammer,” he said. There are no good places to get shot, but the belly’s one of the worst. Cory had been married for ten years, with a seven-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. As he came to his senses he thought how unfair it was on them that he was going to die on that mountain. He was scared to reach down and feel where he’d been shot. This is really gonna suck, he thought. But when he put his hand down he could feel wetness but not too much bleeding. The bullet had torn up his bladder, but he didn’t know that at the time. He just hoped he wasn’t bleeding too badly internally. Cunningham was in worse shape. He’d been shot in the pelvis and suffered heavy internal bleeding. He was in a lot of pain. Cory checked his watch. It was 11:30 a.m.

  THE ratio of healthy medical personnel to wounded troops was getting worse. With Cunningham and Cory out of action, that left only Miller and Matt LaFrenz, the Ranger medic who’d arrived with Chalk 2, to care for the casualties. LaFrenz crawled over to the casualty collection point and began treating Cory and Cunningham. Meanwhile, the Rangers, and particularly the machinegunners, kept up a murderous rate of fire to suppress the enemy. The Al Qaida men on the opposite ridge would pop up from behind cover, fire, and then drop down. But one of them exposed himself for a second too long. Pazder shot him. The Rangers saw more guerrillas maneuvering toward them. Canon told Vela to go back to the Chinook for more 7.62mm ammo. Vela sprinted as fast as he could in the snow towards the helicopter, 150 meters away, but on his way back came under fire and was forced to take cover with Stebner behind a rock. He crawled over to DePouli and put the ammo in a spare barrel bag that he then heaved halfway back to Canon. The squad leader ran out, grabbed the bag, and helped Pazder fire the 240 at the advancing Al Qaida troops. The Ranger 203 gunners kept up a rain of 40mm grenades. This was to be their fight for the rest of the day, keeping the enemy from moving closer or engaging them from the ridgeline. The Al Qaida forces broke into smaller and smaller teams in an effort to close with the Americans. Navy F-14s arrived carrying 500-pound bombs. Vance guided them in, but a bomb fell short and exploded seventy-five meters away from the Rangers, blowing DePouli’s helmet off and hitting Wilmoth’s helmet with shrapnel. Walker looked around with a What was that? expression for a moment and then resumed shooting. By that stage, little could have surprised the Rangers. Another JDAM hit the front slope of the enemy-held ridge and Self watched a three-foot long, eight-inch wide piece of shrapnel rotating through the air about thirty meters above him. The ridgeline they were aiming at had trees along the top. Brown called in more bombs—1,000-pound and 2,000-pound JDAMs. Soon the trees had gone. So had many of the enemy. The U.S. troops cheered as one bomb tossed three guerrillas’ broken bodies through the air like rag dolls. That all but ended the battle. From then on, the enemy was only able to offer intermittent, ineffective mortar and AK fire.

  The effort to move the casualties continued. The loss of Cunningham and Cory as active participants forced Self to rotate two more men out of the perimeter to help out. It was a sign of how physically spent the men were that it would take four men in superb physical condition twenty minutes to move a man eighty meters, albeit under fire. Every time the teams reached the top of the slope, they had to rest for a couple of minutes.

  When the casualties—six dead and six wounded—were collected at the top of the hill, Miller and LaFrenz redoubled their efforts to save those still alive. LaFrenz’s assessment was that both Cory and Cunningham were “urgent surgical” casualties—a phrase used to describe only the most extreme, life-threatening cases. He was particularly worried about Cunningham, whose condition was rapidly worsening. The Ranger medic had stopped the external bleeding, but he couldn’t discern the extent of the wounded PJ’s internal bleeding. At 1 p.m. Vance called Masirah and told them an urgent medevac was required. In the TF 1l operations center and the TF Blue TOC in Bagram, where the staffs suffered from the worst situational awareness of just about anyone involved in the operation, there was extreme reluctance to send any more helicopters to the top of Takur Ghar. As if to reinforce their fears, just as Vance answered their question about whether the LZ was hot or cold with the word “cold,” a mortar round landed nearby. The time was 1:30 p.m. and at Texaco the elaborate, massive rescue operation was ready to launch.

  AFTER being wounded Cory could no longer work on casualties himself, but despite the pain he was in, he directed the others, in particular telling Don how he could help. The first thing he asked Don to do was run back through the field of fire to fetch his aid bag, which was still sitting on the rocks where he had been shot. Don was reluctant. “Look Cory, it’s too hot down there right now,” he told the flight medic. But a little later, when the enemy fire died down, Don grabbed another soldier and together they ran down to retrieve the bag. (The troops felt more secure moving across open ground in pairs.) Once he had returned, Cory’s directions continued: “Get in my first aid bag, get in the second pouch, reach down a third of the way, pull this out, and give it to ’em, they’re gonna need it.” LaFrenz renewed his pressure to get a medevac in for Cunningham and Cory. “These guys have to have surgery,” he told Self. “They’re urgent, a couple o
f them may die.” LaFrenz got on the radio and told whatever RTO or staff officer was on the other end, “We have three urgent-surgical casualties.” (In the TF 11 after-action review of the battle, someone said that no one in Masirah knew what “urgent-surgical” meant.) The platoon leader, who had been relaying most of his messages to Masirah and Bagram through Vance, got on the radio himself. He told the headquarters that he had three casualties who would lose limbs or die if they were not taken off the mountain immediately. The rest of his force could wait until after dark, Self added.

  TF 11 told him a seventy-man enemy force was moving toward him but that TF 11 was dispatching seventy reinforcements to his position. “We don’t need the [seventy extra] bodies,” Self told them. “We’ve got no room for ’em. We just need aircraft to get out.” The platoon leader told Masirah there was an LZ on a reverse slope that offered good protection from enemy fire. “We’re working on that,” the staff officer in Masirah told him. Self sensed that the operation had changed, and that getting his casualties out was no longer TF 11’s highest priority. “I got the impression we were being patronized with the exfil,” he said.

  IN Masirah and Bagram, Trebon, Kernan, and their staffs pondered their options. From their perspective, they were in a no-win situation. Listening to Self, LaFrenz, and Vance discuss the casualty status, knowing that if they chose to delay the medevac until nightfall at least one and maybe more of their men would die, must have been excruciating for Trebon and the other leaders. But the equally harrowing experience of watching four men die in a few seconds live on the Predator feed as Razor 01’s complement of Rangers ran off the back of the Chinook was also fresh in their minds. Trebon decided not to risk another helicopter flight to the top of Takur Ghar in daylight. He thought his decision would cost Cunningham and Cory their lives and he called back to JSOC headquarters in North Carolina to get some moral support from Dailey, who was tracking the operation closely. “Sir, I just need some moral confidence here,” Trebon told his boss. “Greg, I’ve monitored all this, you have made absolutely the right decision,” Dailey responded. “It will be tough. You’ve already identified who the guys are who will possibly die on that mountainside. But you’ve made the decision, it’s the right decision so drive on.” Meanwhile, Hagenbeck called Franks. He asked for and received command and control over TF 11 for the duration of Anaconda. This belatedly conferred unity of command of the operation.