by Ed Darack
Then the Iridium rang. Long stepped closer to the SEAL liaison crew as the COC fell vacuously silent. “We’re in heavy contact, commencing our E-and-E [escape and evasion], going down the gulch below the OP.” The lieutenant heard the words as well as the chilling crack! crack! crack! of gunfire buzzing from the handset’s tinny receiver. They’re in the gulch, no wonder their MBITR doesn’t work, he thought. The SEAL liaison then asked for a ten-digit grid marking their position. “Do you hear us!” came the transmission from the recon team. “We’re in HEAVY CONTACT!”
“WHAT’S YOUR POS?!” the SEAL liaison roared.
“HELLO!” Screamed the voice from the lonely mountain over a background of explosions and clatter of automatic weapons. Long instantly realized that the sat-phone had hit a partial blackout spot, allowing just one-way communication—the SEALs on Sawtalo Sar couldn’t hear a single word from the liaison officers at JAF. Like Kinser and the Blessing Marines had discovered in the area, the phone required perfect placement when operated in the steep mountains and deep valleys of that part of the Hindu Kush, something the recon team didn’t have the luxury of seeking at that desperate moment. Long, his eyes bugging out, stared in silent horror as the SEALs at JAF ended the call, then immediately called the four-man team back. The call went through, and maybe the recon team could hear them, but the liaison officers couldn’t hear the SEALS on the ground. They hung up; seconds later, the phone at the COC rang again, the SEAL liaisons answered, but heard just the booms of RPG impacts and the distant rattles of automatic weapons, then nothing but a terrible, bleak silence. Those poor souls, Long thought, cracking his knuckles.
Meanwhile, the four SEALs of the recon team lunged down the chutelike northeast gulch of Sawtalo Sar—leapfrogging with bursts of covering fire to protect one another during their egress—as RPGs exploded around them and interlocking PK machine-gun rounds cracked just inches overhead. Shah, loosing bursts of 7.62 × 54 mm rounds from his PK, directed his RPG gunner and two other AK-47-toting fighters at his side as well as controlling a small number of his other men at different positions through his ICOM. This was the real-life incarnation of the hypothetical ambush about which Justin Bradley had warned his Marines just a few days prior. Shah’s assault sent streams of coordinated deadly fire onto the retreating team, “funneling” the four down the steep gulch. The SEALs fired back, but four men, with no comms for indirect fire support, no mortars organic to them, who were unable to even see the muzzle flashes of the insurgents’ weapons through the steep ravine’s dense trees, couldn’t take down Shah’s team, roughly ten strong, who leveraged their advantage of superior ground, terrain familiarity, and use of RPGs and possibly 82 mm mortars to overwhelm the SEALs with downward ‘plunging’ fire, making their ambush seem as if perpetrated from a team of not ten, but fifty—or one hundred—or more. The number in Shah’s team didn’t matter; their superior, multiple positions geometrically amplified their numbers and weapons’ effects by many orders of magnitude—a basic, albeit relatively unknown, principle of mountain warfare. The four could only hope for a swift QRF as they struggled for survival.
“We need to launch the QRF right fucking now!” an exasperated Tom Wood barked to Rob Scott.
“We can’t. We don’t have the authority,” the executive officer answered what Wood already knew. “The react order is in the hands of SOF.” As the SEAL liaisons rushed to make a series of desperate calls to Bagram and continued attempts to raise the recon team by radio and Iridium, Capuzzi and his Marines of the QRF waited anxiously near a wooden guard shack at the east end of the PRT airstrip. Wood, Long, and Scott burned with frustration while the four men on the ground fought as desperately and valiantly as any U.S. military unit ever had in the history of American warfare. Outgunned, but far more important, outpositioned, the four continued to stave off the extremists and move farther down the northeast gulch into the Shuryek Valley, closing on the village of Salar Ban.
Forty-five minutes after the hard-compromise call, the Marines couldn’t believe that the order to extract the team hadn’t yet been issued. “By now, we could have birds in the air, eyes on the four SEALs, and grids of Shah and his men’s positions—and then have Apaches run close air support, and get the team the fuck outta there,” the OpsO raged. But the Marines could only stand by, hamstrung by the obscenely convoluted command structure. At a time when every second counted, the Marines in the COC felt helpless. This can’t be happening. Who’s in control of this? What the fuck is going on? Long felt almost dizzy; everything he’d been taught as a modern U.S. Marine seemed to swirl into dissolution around him: airpower was out of their control at that point, as was Doghouse (which couldn’t fire anyway because the gun team didn’t have grids on friendly positions since their comms were down); even the Marine portion of the QRF—composed of grunts from Golf Company—while theoretically under ⅔’s control, couldn’t launch unless the SOF lead element was under way. Scott and Wood, older and more attuned to the pitfalls of “joint discord,” themselves felt the black hole of emptiness in their guts; there were four Americans falling down some sinuous throat of death into the bowels of a monstrous hell. And nothing was being done to stop it. No actionable decisions were being made. Insanity in warfare was supposed to manifest itself as some out-of-control commander slaying innocent locals, incinerating schools, and decapitating children. But that was for the movies. This was real modern war insanity. It was like returning home to find one’s home engulfed in flames and firefighters obliviously playing a game of cards in the driveway. Each of the Marines stood shocked and blindsided by the command and control paralysis—the insanity of inaction at a moment requiring steadfast leadership and resolve. Out of the command and control loop, they could only observe the SEAL liaisons themselves observing the Bagram SEALs at their COC trying to get their higher command to authorize a QRF. Long imagined the scene on Sawtalo Sar that afternoon. Were the four even alive still? How could they survive more than a couple of minutes with rounds raining down on them from above? RPGs detonating with deafening, concussive blasts? PK and AK rounds pummeling the dirt, rocks, and trees of the ravine—and the SEALs, too? Then he imagined their families, so immensely proud of their decisions to join the fight against extremists; worried yet confident in their Afghan deployment—but now completely oblivious to their feverish fight for their lives. Thoughts of their friends and family made the lieutenant even more crazy with frustration that no authorization had come down the pike for a QRF launch for the eternity of hours.
“QRF ready to launch! Two MH-47s out of Bagram,” one of the SEALs yelled to the Marines in the JAF COC.
“Finally.” Wood was seething—the stocky OpsO shook his head. “Hours after it should have gone in,” he said, noting that the time was three in the afternoon. As Wood, Scott, and MacMannis looked to “build their SA” (situational awareness) on the rescue about to launch, Pigeon worked to mitigate any possible disaster involving air.
“We don’t know what the ground situation is like,” he glibly told Wood. “We haven’t heard from the recon team in hours,” the Hornet aviator, who graduated at the top of his class from flight school at Meridian, Mississippi, stated; he feared the worst about the four SEALs. As a Marine aviator, Pigeon pushed for a QRF flight plan based around a threat that he instinctively sought to avoid more than any other: antiaircraft guns, surface-to-air missiles, even lucky small-arms fire taking down the helicopters; “barn doors in the sky,” he called them. “Before any bird comes in zone [approaches a landing or fastrope-insert zone], they’re gonna have to get positive comms with the guys on the ground, or get positive visual on them—or both—and we need to prep the HLZ first, either with Doghouse or with Shock.” Pigeon referred to running a SEAD—Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses—package by bombarding the intended helicopter landing or insert zone with 105 mm high-explosive rounds from Doghouse, or by having Task Force Sabre’s AH-64s (call sign Shock) clear the area with 30 mm gun runs and 2.75-inch Hydra rocket attacks, to
ensure that a bad guy couldn’t pop up from behind a tree or rock and nail the helicopters as they roared in to land or hovered to deploy fastropes.
“I agree with you one hundred percent,” Wood responded. “But it isn’t our call, Pigeon. SOF is the lead on the QRF.”
“With their MH-47s. But I’m going to do whatever I can to work with conventional air, to ensure that the aviators and the passengers—our Marines—keep out of harm’s way,” the captain snapped back to the OpsO. In short order, however, through one of the Task Force Brown liaisons at JAF, Pigeon got a handshake deal—among all the aviators, those of Brown, as well as Task Force Sabre, who would be flying the UH-60s packed with the Marine QRF element and a small number of SEALs. All agreed that they would either acquire visual confirmation of the recon SEALs on the ground, get positive comms with them, or both, before coming in zone. Otherwise, they wouldn’t insert, either by landing or by fastrope.
The aviators of the 160th, however, looked to fly without Shock escorts, aiming to move onto Sawtalo Sar alone. By culture and doctrine, the “Night Stalkers” sought to keep their aerial footprint as small as possible; in other words, the fewer aircraft, the better—giving the enemy less chance of catching wind of an impending attack. Operating in heavily armor-plated Chinooks defended by multiple .50-caliber machine guns, the pilots and crew of the 160th’s MH-47s felt that they didn’t need Shock escort. The MH-47s also could fly significantly faster than the Apaches and even the swift Blackhawks, due to 100 percent of the Chinook’s engines’ transmission power moving the two counterrotating blade assemblies that provided both lift and directional thrust, as opposed to conventional helicopter designs exemplified by the 64s or 60s, where raw physics mandated a tail rotor to counteract the inertial force of the single lift/thrust assembly, a substantial power drain (upward of 30 percent). Furthermore, they would be flying at altitudes of nearly ten thousand feet—in the afternoon, meaning a density altitude of nearly fourteen thousand feet (density altitude being a function of actual altitude and temperature—the warmer the ambient temperature, the thinner the air, and hence the more power required to maintain normal performance), conditions easily manageable by the big Chinooks, but that posed serious speed and handling problems for the Blackhawks and Apaches. But the lightly armed and relatively thin-skinned Blackhawks did require Shock escort, and since the QRF would consist of both Task Force Brown Chinooks and Sabre’s Blackhawks, by default, the Apaches would run with the pack—or so the handshake agreement dictated.
At roughly 3:30 P.M. local time, as streaks of grayish-white clouds knifed into the baby-blue sky above Nangarhar province, three Blackhawks, call sign Skillful, streaked over the pastoral lands surrounding the Jalalabad PRT base with two Shock Apaches flying close cover. A scene just moments earlier defined by gentle breezes under the blistering sun and murmurs of small talk among the grunts was now an adrenaline-infused uproar of five powerful U.S. Army aircraft on approach that incited the Marines to stand ready for an insert into the monstrous unknown. Flaring steeply just before contacting solid ground, the Blackhawks touched down with blazing speed and razor precision, each kicking a doughnutlike ring of roiling dust out from under the craft. After refueling, the 60s “hopped” a few dozen yards, and Marines piled inside the sleek craft, then together with the Shocks, they made the short flight to Jalalabad Airfield, where, as the helicopters idled, the Marines made final preparations for the launch onto Sawtalo Sar.
A total of twenty-four Marines of Golf Company would embark on the rescue mission: ten, including Capuzzi in the lead Blackhawk; another ten, including First Lieutenant John Bambey, commander of Golf Company’s Third Platoon, in the second bird (following USMC protocol, the two spread out in multiple craft to ensure that if a helicopter went down carrying one commander, another officer would survive to lead the fight forward); and four Marines accompanied by three members of SEAL Team 10 jumped into the third, “light” Blackhawk, which kept enough room onboard to load the four recon SEALs. With all of the Marines having fastrope-qualled during the days leading up to the launch of Red Wings, the Blackhawk aviators would fly their craft with their doors off, ready to insert the grunts with lightning speed—to get onto the ground and save the members of the recon team. With morale high, the Golf Company grunts felt rush after rush of energizing adrenaline, excited to insert onto the high slopes of Sawtalo Sar and take care of business, ultimately reuniting the SDVT SEALs with friendlier ground.
And with as much ardor the grunts felt for saving the foursome, Erik Kristensen, the commander of the ground aspect of the rescue operation, burned with even more resolve to save the team. As the Golf Company contingent of the QRF loaded into the Skillful Blackhawks at Jalalabad, Kristensen and four other members of SEAL Team 10 (Chief Petty Officer Jacques J. Fontan, Petty Officer First Class Jeffery Lucas, Lieutenant Michael McGreevy, and Petty Officer First Class Jeffrey S. Taylor) accompanied by three members of SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1 (Senior Chief Petty Officer Daniel R. Healy, Petty Officer Second Class James Suh, and Petty Officer Second Class Eric Patton) boarded the lead MH- 47D, commanded by Major Stephen Reich of the Third Battalion of the 160th SOAR(A), commander of the air side of the QRF, at Bagram. Seven other members of the 160th also crewed the command ship: Staff Sergeant Shamus Goare, Chief Warrant Officer (3) Corey Goodnature, Sergeant Kip Jacoby, Sergeant First Class Marcus Muralles, Master Sergeant James Ponder III, Sergeant First Class Michael Russell, and Chief Warrant Officer (4) Chris Scherkenbach.
But the order to launch from Kristensen’s higher command, for reasons still unknown, never came. Kristensen, as great a hero as America has ever produced—intensely driven to save the team of four recon SEALs—ultimately gave the order to launch the QRF himself. He simply couldn’t wait any longer. At three-thirty local time, the two Task Force Brown MH-47Ds of the Red Wings QRF spun up and lifted into the crystalline skies above Bagram—an extremely rare daytime launch for the 160th—bound for the dark unknown swirling about Sawtalo Sar.
With the MH-47s roaring inbound, the Marines and SEALs in the three Skillful Blackhawks made their final preflight checks—all their gear was secured, their “spiderweb” multipoint restraints were locked in tight yet ready to release with a robust twist, and nothing would snag, not even a shoelace. With the thoughts of everyone of the Quick Reaction Force focused on the SEALs on the ground, the collective seismic howls of ten turbine engines thundered across Jalalabad Airfield as the five craft rose into the sky in a deafening, tornado-like symphony. The birds then carved steep turns above the billowing dust storm that rose in the wake of their launch to merge with the MH-47 Chinooks rocketing toward the Kunar Valley. Bambey, sitting in the rearmost right-side seat of his Blackhawk, made sure that his M16A4 was pointed out the door, then focused on the terrain below as he monitored the nets with his PRC-119F radio. As cooler, cleaner air swept out the ground-level smoky odors of rural Afghanistan, Bambey could see storms building ahead of him—hazy gray cumulus bunching up atop the dark, shadowed mountains toward which the craft sped. Soon, he knew, those gray clouds would turn black, and begin shedding curtains of drenching rain. No matter, the group had lives to save, American lives in duress—he imagined the recon team’s plight, careening down the steep gulch, each keeping the others in sight, fighting both the onslaught of their attackers and the raw environment. The collective assets of the QRF—aircraft, the aviators and crew, the SEALs, and the stone-faced, ultrafocused grunts, shot ahead like a clenched fist.
The five Sabre birds never merged into formation with the MH- 47s, flying only within about a half mile of the Chinooks. Bambey recognized the craft as MH-47s by the “stinger” refueling probes he could see protruding from the nose of each, the telltale profile difference between the M and the conventional version. The lieutenant’s attention then reverted to the ground below—his chosen realm as a grunt. The attentive Marine officer immediately pinpointed the craft’s exact location by terrain features he’d traversed by foot and Humvee, and c
ould mentally plot the course the seven aircraft were taking. But when he looked up again, he could only count five birds total—the two MH-47s had disappeared. With dark curtains of rain careening ground-ward on all points of the compass, Bambey wondered why the two SOAR(A) Chinooks had slipped away—then he heard over the pilots’ net one of the Skillful aviators remark, “They’re pushing ahead”—referencing the MH-47s.
“Let’s move up to eight hundred AGL [feet above ground level],” another stated. “That’ll give us enough space to keep out of SAFIRE [small-arms fire] range but still close enough to the hills to spot the SEALs.” Bambey kept studying the ground features—ridgelines, peaks, dry washes. And then he felt a mild jolt of déjà vu. Those peaks, he thought, we just went over them—we’re flying in circles! The lieutenant craned his neck around to spy the view from every possible window in the Blackhawk as the pilots torqued the powerful craft into steeply banking turns. He saw the other two Blackhawks as well, the two Shock Apaches, but still no sign of the TF Brown Chinooks—nor of Sawtalo Sar; just the same terrain, over and over. What are we doing? Why aren’t we moving toward the mountain? While he could listen to the pilots, he didn’t have a microphone hookup at his seat, so he couldn’t ask them what he burned to know. Bambey glanced at his gear, his Marines, then to the ground below—ever darkening under a thickening deck of storm clouds. Then he felt the first drops of rain strike his cheeks.
“I just got two Shocks to break off from an op south of Asadabad and head toward Sawtalo Sar,” Pigeon told Wood. “They should be up there right about the time the MHs get in zone.”
“Good. Hopefully they’ll let the Shocks prep the LZ for ’em.”
