Service: A Navy SEAL at War

by Marcus Luttrell

  “Marcus?” one of the Rangers asked.

  Just hearing English spoken for the first time in almost a week felt liberating. I said, “Hey, bro. It’s good to see you.”

  He turned his head to the rear and shouted, “We got him, down here!” I grabbed hold of that guy and hugged him as though we’d been friends our whole lives. (I’d never hugged a man that way before; I hope he didn’t think it was weird.)

  The Rangers and Green Berets marched me to higher ground and put me in what I figured was a goat pen, judging by all the manure. Their medic, T.O., began dressing my wounds. We were far from out of the woods, of course. Outnumbered in an area crawling with the enemy, we were all in the same boat and the sea state was rough.

  The soldiers set security around the settlement while T.O. doctored me up. When they tried to post a watch outside my hut, the Afghans stepped in firmly and said they wouldn’t have Americans doing any such thing, not while their tribal law required them to protect my life with their own. The doctrine of lokhay warkawal, a precept of hospitality that is part of their ancient tribal code, Pashtunwalai, had gotten me this far. They weren’t about to be relieved of that ancient obligation now. It turned out pretty well for everyone—the soldiers got some rest while the villagers took the watch.

  I was talking with T.O., joking around a little to lighten the mood, when he leaned over and dosed me with a gunshot cocktail—basically a big shot of antibiotics with a morphine chaser. Preferring to keep my mind clear, I wanted to decline it. As a medic, though, I knew better than that, and the Ranger, sizing up my weakness and my wounds, gave me no choice. Soon afterward I started throwing up. I was seriously sick, infected with a parasitic bug of some kind that wouldn’t let go of my stomach. “This isn’t good, dude,” he said. “We have to get you out of here.”

  Those helos needed to show up, and fast.

  As I lay down to rest again, the commander and his platoon sergeant came in to say hello. They were followed by some of the Rangers. As they took turns walking over to shake my hand, I could see how rough they had had it. They were heavily loaded, with full body armor, kits, and weapons that seemed out of place in steep, high terrain. “Man, you look like hammered shit,” I said to one of them. “Did you come down the mountain the same way I did?”

  I knew that if I were in their shoes, I’d be cussing the stump-headed Navy cowboy who’d gotten his ass stuck this far out on a ledge. (They confirmed for me that, yes, they had done just that.) I apologized to each of them. They were at the limit of their endurance, and now their survival depended, as mine did, on the rescue helicopters getting in and taking us home. All that was left to do was recite our most heartfelt prayers that nothing would stand in their way.

  18

  “You Might Want to Pray Now”

  As Skinny and Spanky flew through the night toward us, they were dismayed to see storms socking in the entire area. They had been praying that the monsoon weather would stand off to the east. No such luck. Clouds blanketed the earth and rains scoured it clean. Worse, the overcast blocked the sources of ambient light that their NVGs needed to work properly. Still, they pushed on.

  Having studied their route using drone imagery, the pilots knew they would have to “lighten ship” to reach the LZ. This meant dumping precious fuel to reduce weight. Spanky hesitated to release the kerosene-based JP-8 jet fuel over a populated area, but knew he had no other choice. A short stretch outside Asadabad, he pulled the safety wire, saying quietly, “This is for Penny and the boys.” As his tanks opened, five hundred pounds of fuel showered the earth. With less fuel on board, he would have less margin of error maneuvering into and out of the landing zone, but at least with a lighter aircraft, he now stood a decent chance of reaching it in the first place. Dave Gonzales, the copilot, said over the intercom, “If you guys are praying guys, you might want to pray now.”

  Finding the LZ was going to be their biggest problem. The coordinates they had put them in the ballpark, but to touch down safely they needed a good visual sense of the ground. And that required lights.

  As I was led over mountain paths toward the LZ, we occasionally took fire from Taliban fighters sneaking around the surrounding mountains. Now and then I pitched in, lasing targets for the aircraft covering us using the laser designator the Afghans in the village had detached from my rifle. At one point, I saw one of the guys open a laptop computer. As the bright white light bathed his face in the dark, Gulab quickly conveyed the idea that he needed to shut it down. We were sitting ducks already, and any light could have given away our position. It was important to observe strict discipline regarding light. Just a few nights before, Gulab had torn me a new one for activating the light on my G-Shock watch, just to check the time.

  It took us maybe twenty minutes to reach the landing zone. Hunkering down underneath a stucco-and-rock wall that bounded its cliffside edge, we sipped the dregs of our canteens and waited for salvation to descend from heaven.

  It was just before midnight. Spanky Peterson and Skinny Macrander had turned away from the dry riverbed they had been tracking through the valley and began to climb. The chatter of a whole airborne cavalry filled their headsets on five frequencies. Tight and crisp, the voices announced their positions and confirmed their movements—and, as always, there were some (a few of them located more than a hemisphere away) that were constantly demanding to know the status of this and the status of that. Spanky could feel his own status through the soles of his boots. When his altitude reached seven thousand feet, his two General Electric T701 turboshaft engines registered their distress by trembling and shaking, which Spanky picked up through vibration in the floor pedals.

  The plan called for the Rangers to toss an IR strobe into the middle of the LZ to mark it for the pilots. But that plan went south fast: once those Warthogs started strafing their targets, our troops were quick to make their positions known. Each man carried a strobe for just such a purpose, and quickly the entire mountainside came alive in a constellation of blinking IR. Speeding uphill at high speed, surveying the terrain ahead, Spanky had no idea which one of the dozens of flickering phosphorescent green lights was his landing zone. The place was like a 1970s disco. And, two minutes from touchdown, he had little fuel to waste on delays.

  At this point, all hope rested in the AC-130 Spectre gunship orbiting the LZ. The mission plan called for the plane to shine its powerful infrared spotlight on the landing zone thirty seconds prior to landing. The IR device carried by the Spectres is huge, but its output is invisible to anyone not wearing NVGs. Properly equipped, however, what you see is a bright flood of light illuminating the LZ. The aviators refer to it as an artificial sun.

  Throttles maxed, the two Sikorsky-built angels took on the ancient mountain, rising toward us, higher and higher, through thinning air. The twelve souls on board were soon to confront the most dangerous stage of their mission. The ultimate test of their training was almost upon them.

  When Spanky was about ten minutes out, Mercury, the A-10 pilot flying as Sandy 1, the mission commander, announced, “All players: execute, execute, execute.” The AC-130 Spectre rocked sideways as its belly-mounted 105mm howitzer opened up on suspected Taliban positions. The A-10s ripped out short bursts of 30mm cannon fire at a rate of seventy rounds a second, sounding across the ridges with a distinctive, throaty urrrrp. The gunship’s 40mm Bofors cannon joined in, too, and soon the mountains were a killing field. Anyone in the way would have been cut down by high explosives. The smallest of these shells had the hitting power of a hand grenade.

  In the hills around my village, I had seen the fires of the Taliban encampments and the bobbing lights of their lanterns as they moved around. Now the enemy, if they had managed to survive, either had gone to ground or died. I felt my heart move to my throat.

  Through his helmet-mounted night-vision goggles, Spanky could see the clouds saddling the mountain peaks flicker and flash with sudden pulses of light from all around. The A-10s made several strafing passes
not far from us, and several additional runs on ridges farther away, to divert the enemy’s attention from the actual landing zone. The hellacious racket also masked the sound of rotors as the two helicopters approached.

  Rushing upward over that stark terrain, Spanky still could not actually see the LZ. Less than a minute out, he was still counting on the AC-130 to bathe the landing zone in infrared light. He was wondering where his spotlight was when he heard a voice on his radio, cool and professional, slightly urgent, but scarcely betraying the desperation of the moment. It was the pilot of the AC-130 gunship high above.

  “Halos: negative burn, negative burn.”

  “Halos” was the call sign for the two helicopters. “Negative burn” meant the AC-130 was unable to illuminate the landing zone. Cloud cover was total. When the technician in the plane turned on the IR spotlight, it couldn’t penetrate the vast blanket of white. Without it, there was no way Spanky would be able to land.

  Sometimes you have to let a tough situation develop before you can finally find a way through. As I know from my career as a SEAL, the right solution never comes from panic or despair. And what happened next is a perfect example of how a professional handles adversity: he lets the situation develop.

  After Spanky got the bad news from the AC-130, he radioed Skinny, and the pilots went back and forth:

  “Which strobe is the LZ?”

  “You got it?”

  “I don’t see it….”

  The A-10 flight lead, Mercury, must have heard the rapid-fire exchange. Like the rest of them, he was well aware that the weather was getting thick. The thunderstorms were swelling through every altitude. There had to be another way of illuminating the landing zone. There would be no second chances.

  Mercury couldn’t do it himself. His armament control panel, which he used to operate the laser in his targeting pod, had had a system failure and was not working. This left him with no way to shine his targeting laser on the landing zone. But his number two might be in position to pull it off. Sandy 2 (Mercury’s exec, in effect) was a Warthog pilot known as Wookie for his unusual height and gentle nature. Seeing what might be the mission’s only chance, Mercury toggled his radio and said, “Sandy Two, mark the LZ.”

  Wookie copied Mercury’s order while he was making a gun run on a Taliban fighting position. Focused on the target in front of him, he alerted his flight lead as a matter of course: “Two’s in hot”—meaning that he was about to open fire. This news put Mercury into a minor panic. He was expecting a simple acknowledgment. Thinking that Wookie had heard him wrong and was preparing to blast the landing zone with high explosives instead, Mercury shouted, “Negative! Abort! Use your laser marker, not the gun!”

  Recognizing the harmless confusion, Wookie smiled. Coolly finishing his strafing run, he pulled his aircraft into a climb and turned it sharply onto its right wing. Then he activated his targeting pod and slaved it to the coordinates for the LZ. Even in his elite peer group, Wookie’s touch at the stick was exceptional, but a divine hand must have guided him, too. The mass of low-level clouds down on the deck was still substantial, but there was an opening in that thick carpet, right where we needed it to be. When Wookie triggered his targeting laser, that small patch of open sky was passing right between his aircraft and the landing zone. Luckily for me, the critical window stayed open for about twelve seconds and his beam hit it dead center.

  Still hovering, Spanky saw the beam shine down through the hole in the clouds. As his copilot, Dave Gonzales, would say, it was like the finger of God marking the landing zone with infrared light.

  The two helo crews had gotten the idea from aerial photography that the LZ was about the size of a football field—an easy mark for an experienced HH-60 driver. However, owing to the optical illusions created by the satellite camera’s angle, they had no idea how steep and tight it really was—a small shelf in the mountain near a cluster of gingerbread huts. Spanky knew that no sane pilot would ever try landing there, even by day. It was nearly midnight. As he made his final approach, a warning came over his headset: “Known enemy one hundred meters south of your position.” The back of his neck prickled—the LZ was just as hot as they feared it would be. But there was no backing out now.

  This close to landing, a pilot and crew have to work as a team. The pilot has his hands on the stick, controlling the helicopter’s three axes of movement. The copilot is on the throttles, ready to pull emergency power and get out of Dodge. The flight engineer monitors the engines and other systems, while the gunner and the PJs in back stay alert for any obstacles and follow the aircraft’s progress toward touchdown, talking to the pilot all the way. If, for example, the gunner says, “Stop left,” the pilot knows he has to correct his leftward drift immediately. This is tough to do by day, much harder at night, and just about impossible when the helicopter, as it did at that moment, starts kicking up a storm of sand and dirt with the downwash of its rotors. Spanky was lost in a brownout, flying totally blind.

  It was after 11:30 p.m. when I saw the helo approaching the ledge, descending, descending, then holding, and holding, and holding… Just above the brownout, I could locate Spanky’s main rotor by the luminescent disk it sparked in the sky, fifty-four feet in diameter—a disk made by the friction of the titanium blade tips striking particles of sand and dirt. Seen through NVGs, it was a floating green halo, standing in the night.

  The danger meter was pegged all the way to the right. If Spanky touched one of his tires down on the ground while the bird had any sideways drift, it would roll over into the mountain. If it drifted too far left, it would pile into the cliff’s stony face, burying its rotors and balling up in flames on the ledge. If it rolled right, it would fall straight off the precipice, plunging to the rocks fifteen hundred feet below—or falling right down on top of us.

  Huddled with T.O., Gulab, and the rest of the Army team just below the landing zone, on the other side of that low stucco-and-rock wall, we pulled as much of the prayer load as we could. Let me tell you, I’ve never taken such a bath of flying crud in all my life. The helicopter’s twin engines, producing more than three thousand shaft horsepower between them, made an unending metallic scream, loud enough to drown out all thought. If the darkest place in the world was that Persian Gulf sewer pipe that Master Chief had explored, the loudest place in the world is right in the dust-choked footprint of a landing helicopter.

  Even all these years later, some of the events that night remain a bit of a blur. I think there were troops in contact not far away from us. I believe the LZ itself—that is, we—may even have been taking some fire, though it was hard to tell in all the noise and dust. The Air Force was still working a few ridgelines nearby. And right there above us, in the middle of it all, the helicopter’s crew was keeping calm and collected as they called adjustments to Spanky over the radio headset. The space they occupied between life and death was narrow. But I guess their legacy was assured. If they died here on this mountain, they would go out as heroes, pushing a daring mission to the limit. And if they lived, well, the result would speak for itself. Heroes all around.

  As the calls of “Stop left” and “Stop right” became increasingly urgent, several of the crew in back lay down flat on the deck of the crew compartment—standard aviation fieldcraft for anyone looking to avoid a fractured spine. Though as calm as he could be, Spanky couldn’t prevent thoughts of his wife, Penny, and his four sons from pushing through.

  Though the finger of God—also known as Wookie’s targeting laser—had shown Spanky the way, yet another heavenly sign arrived. Through the cyclonic vortex, Spanky suddenly saw something ahead and to the side: the trembling branches of a shrub of some kind. I think his rotors must have washed half the dirt off that mountainside before it was possible for him to see it. But there it fluttered, fixed in space and calling to him like a sign from the Old Testament. As I said, sometimes you have to let a situation develop. With the shrub as a visual reference, Spanky adjusted to a steady hover and eased ninete
en thousand pounds of steel to the earth. The two Air Force PJs bounded out of the helicopter’s right-side door as soon as it landed.

  Time for us to move, too. As T.O. slapped me on the leg, I rose to my feet, knowing in the back of my mind that if there were any enemy nearby, they would be sure to send an RPG downrange and blow us all to kingdom come. As Gulab and I came over the stucco wall and began walking toward the helo from behind, the more immediate danger, of course, was getting our heads split in half by the spinning tail rotor. It was hard to figure out where the aircraft even was.

  Looking for their prize, the PJs saw us approaching them, about fifty meters away. I was dressed in a pair of Gulab’s “man jammies”—traditional local garb—just like a mujahideen. Gulab was looking a little bit fierce, too, I’m sure. Both of the pararescuemen, Chris Piercecchi and Josh Appel, were based in Arizona. When 9/11 happened, Chris (known as “Checky”) had retired from a 1990s stint in the PJs and was working as a paramedic with the Albuquerque fire department. Then the crumbling towers in New York called him back to full-time service in the reserves. Josh had just finished medical school at the University of Arizona en route to becoming an emergency-room doctor. When the war started getting hot, he had the same feeling Checky did: there were greater challenges out there, and more valuable ways for him to serve. That was Josh’s route into the elite pararescue community.

  I was glad to see them—except that they almost killed me before they saved me. Suspecting we were hostiles, Checky and Josh dropped the Stokes litter they were carrying and drew their M4s. Through the monocular night-vision scope mounted on his helmet over his left eye, Checky studied our hazy green figures hobbling toward him and put the infrared dot of his laser sight on my chest. He saw I was armed, but the way I was holding my rifle—stock in hand, barrel pointing toward the ground—gave him the small margin of comfort he needed to keep from blowing me away in an instant. They didn’t shoot. They let the situation develop.