by Ed Darack
Soon after the drones of the Grips’ turbofans faded into the background of the Hindu Kush, the Boars sped into zone. Meanwhile, Pigeon’s radio operator had gotten the FAC’s communications up and running once again. Pigeon, who was accustomed to going into battle in the front seat of a Marine Corps F/A-18D Hornet, driving the supersonic aircraft with steel-cold nerves, carried that experience with him on his ground tour, under the press of combat. But it was one thing to be forced to watch fellow Marines thrown into the air by RPG blasts and to witness a mortar-shell burst just meters above his head, not to mention the continuous barrage of machine-gun rounds ripping throughout his position. Having to deal with his failing radio was quite another.
“Come on, Pigeon. Get that shit rollin’!” Konnie wailed. “Get some! Motherfuckers be turnin’ tail and runnin’! Clear some shit hot and shred those bastards! Dorf’s marks are on the ground!”
Boar-21 jumped on the net, “coaching” Pigeon: “Venom, slow it down, buddy. We know you’re in a shit sandwich. Take a second and key the mike before you talk. We’re here to help you, but if we can’t understand what you want to communicate, we can’t do anything but fly around way, way above all the action. Talk us on. Get us into the thick of it.”
Pigeon sat back and laughed at the irony of his situation. He remembered his time in the cockpit of a Hornet during OIF-I, supporting an FAC near Al Asad, in Iraq’s Al Anbar province. That guy was in a panic, he thought. Pigeon had told the FAC in Al Asad to slow it down, just as the Boar pilots directed him—but he wasn’t in a panic that day in the Hindu Kush, far from it, in fact. His radio was teetering on the edge of frying itself, sending out chopped transmissions. He finally got it working yet again.
“Konnie.” Pigeon looked toward the lieutenant. “Listen; these guys can’t attack unless they have a confirmed target. I’ve been too busy working this radio and coordinating the air side of things to get eyes on to confirm anything. Their rules, you know. You got a confirmed target?”
“Abso-fuckin’-lutely I got targets,” Konnie piped up. “All along that ridge to the east.” He peered through binoculars and passed positive identification of the fighters to Pigeon, noting their positions relative to Dorf’s illum marks. “The bad guys are fleeing. Smoke-check their asses. Every last one of ’em!”
Pigeon nodded, “Gotcha. Roger. Will do,” the FAC said, then he and Dorf expertly deconflicted the mortar fire, having Middendorf shut down the mortar barrage to ensure that the A-10s wouldn’t collide with a high-explosive mortar round meant for one of Ahmad Shah’s men. Seconds later, after passing to the A-10 pilot a “nine-line brief”—a standardized set of instructions guiding a pilot onto a ground target—Pigeon uttered the words that Konnie had been waiting so desperately to hear: “Boar-21, you’re cleared-hot for a thirty mike-mike gun run.”
“Roger.” Boar-21’s voice echoed from the radio. The Marines gazed skyward as the A-10 approached the target ridgeline, made a tight bank turn, then dove into an attack run. Cheers rang out as the target lit up like a massive, high-speed Fourth of July sparkler as the 30 mm rounds detonated in coruscating explosions upon impact. Then the Warthog banked hard, expending flares—standard operating procedure to cloak its path from potential incoming ground-to-air heat-seeking missiles—and pulled into the cobalt sky above. Heartbeats later, the sound of the furious salvo echoed throughout Fox-3’s position, a deliciously guttural brrrrrrrrr! of loosed high-explosive rounds, punctuated by the whine of the aircraft’s twin turbofan engines. Three more cleared-hot gun runs, and Pigeon sent the Boars back to base.
“Thanks for a great job,” Pigeon calmly announced.
“No problem. Anytime, Venom,” one of the pilots replied.
With that job completed, Pigeon’s most difficult task of the day began. The Army UH-60 Air Ambulance Dustoff medevac birds approached, accompanied by Army Shock AH-64 Apache gunships. Einarson and Wilson were hurting, and Pigeon knew it. Get ’em out of here, back to Bagram, where they’ll have the best medical care in the world, the FAC thought. As Middendorf’s mortar barrage and Pigeon’s A-10 attacks were going down, Crisp had led Marines carrying the wounded to a designated helicopter landing zone, a high point to the west of their position. There they waited . . . and waited. One of the Marines who helped haul the wounded up the hill, Lance Corporal Mark Perna—one of Wilson’s closest friends—watched as Wilson passed out on morphine, and waited for the extract, wondering if his friend would ever see the light of day again.
“Okay. They’re close. Approaching our position,” Pigeon stated.
“Got a message from battalion,” Grissom interrupted. “CJTF-76 is demanding a SEAD package before they’ll let any Dustoff inbound.”
“What!” Konnie shouted. “Let’s get those birds on the ground, get the Marines back to Bagram! What the fuck good is a suppression package going to do now? Those guys are in retreat!” Pigeon agreed, knowing that with AH-64 escort—more than capable of not just prepping an LZ, but engaging specific-point targets—starting up a SEAD would just waste precious mortar rounds.
“Check in the box,” Grissom replied. “Anything with a helicopter needs to be done to the letter of the rules after the Chinook shootdown, every box needs to be checked. Let’s just do what we gotta do to get these guys out.”
Although little known to the general public, Dustoffs, a blanket term for Army medevac Air Ambulance units, rank as some of the most selfless, capable aviators in the entire United States military. Flying completely unarmed—only their bright Red Cross symbol distinguishing them from standard UH-60 Blackhawks—the Dustoffs (a name coined in Vietnam because of the dusty rotor wash of the aircraft at landing zones, and today an acronym for Dedicated Unhesitating Selfless Service to our Fighting Forces), the Dustoffs have earned a reputation of flying not only into hot landing zones, but any landing zone, regardless of threat level.
“Okay,” Grissom said after conferring with Middendorf. “Let’s get this SEAD under way.” The captain laughed. But while fast inbound, the two Dustoff UH-60s, commanded by Army Chief Warrant Officer Jim Gisclair, and accompanied by two Shock AH-64 Apaches, didn’t have direct communications with Pigeon. And with the mortar barrage running for the suppression package, Middendorf needed to know just when the birds would arrive so he could work with Pigeon to deconflict the lobbed mortars with the inbound Dustoffs.
“Sir, I think you should know that four Army helicopters just entered the Chowkay Valley,” came the nervous message from a Whiskey Company Marine at a vehicle checkpoint at the opening of the Chowkay to Rob Scott.
“What! They’re there already! The SEAD is under way!” Without deconflicting the mortars with the Dustoffs, a friendly-fire disaster was imminent. Rob immediately got on the hook with Grissom, who passed the information to Pigeon, who contacted Middendorf. Middendorf, although not formally trained as a fire support team leader, had taken on the job for the mission, drawing on skills he’d learned at Infantry Officers’ Course as well as from technical publications he’d read dealing with the complex art. With direct comms finally established with the Dustoffs, Middendorf arranged for a “lateral offset” deconfliction, allowing the 81s’ barrage to continue as the birds slipped by to the west of the mortars’ trajectories; as well, the 105s at Asadabad, under the watch of Matt Tracy, had been able to range to a ridge to the north of the Chowkay and suppress any enemy activity there.
“Dustoffs are here,” Pigeon stated. “They’re ready to extract the wounded.” The FAC grabbed his radio and sprinted to the top of the hill where the Dustoffs would land.
“Okay. Let’s get these Marines the fuck out of here,” Grissom declared as he folded his arms. “Okay. SEAD complete, bring the Dustoffs in.”
Minutes later, the escort gunships arrived. AH-64 Apaches, driven by Shock Army aviators who wanted nothing more than to smoke bad guys and help the Dustoffs get the wounded out, roared overhead, energizing the grunts’ spirits with their menacing head-on profiles and the growling drone
of their engines. Heavily armed, rotary-wing CAS—delicious, Konnie thought to himself. The unarmed Blackhawk Dustoffs orbited in the safe distance.
Pigeon, talking the Apaches onto their position, then built the situational awareness of the Shock aviators to the greater battlefield. Although forged from different air-ground combat doctrine (the Army considers helicopter gunships to be “maneuver” platforms, used to attack ground targets without ground control, a mission called “close-combat attack”), Pigeon and the Shock aviators seemed to read one another’s minds. His hair practically standing on end at the sight of the raw skill and professionalism of the Apache aviators as they coursed up the valley, Pigeon knew that the tide of the morning battle had decisively shifted to the side of the Marines. The FAC passed his plan to the Shock aviators: scan the ridgelines first for enemy, engage them if found, then the FAC would bring the Dustoffs in to land.
“We’re taking small-arms fire,” the lead Apache coolly informed Pigeon as the craft passed over one of Cheshane Tupay’s ridges to the east of Fox-3. Pigeon radioed a quick six-line brief, a set of instructions, similar to a nine-line, first developed by the 160th SOAR(A) aviators for autonomous aerial fire missions.
“Cleared to engage.” Pigeon gave the call for the Shocks to attack the targets. The two Apaches lit up the ridgeline with their 30 mm guns and 2.75-inch Hydra rockets. They made a second pass—and then a third. The grunts of Fox-3 stood in awe as the Shock pilots maneuvered their aircraft in ways the Marines didn’t even think possible—at one time one of the Apaches hung vertical, facing directly onto a ridge, while firing, then rotated ninety degrees, then another ninety on another axis, as the pilots continued the attack. One of the most amazing displays of combat aviation he’d ever seen, the performance of the Shock aviators that morning caused Pigeon to wonder if he should have flown helicopters instead of Hornets.
Topographic map of the upper Chowkay Valley
“Cherry ice,” the lead Shock AH-64 called, indicating that the landing zone was cold, that is, ready to safely accept the unarmed Dustoffs. The AH-64s continued to reconnoiter throughout other parts of the valley. But Shah’s skilled, motivated men were still feeling bolstered by their successful ambush of the Navy special operations team and subsequent shoot-down of the MH-47 just weeks before. As the aviators of the lead Dustoff approached the designated landing zone, they hoped for a quick extraction. The Marines had chosen a good location—good cover from the ground troops, a relatively flat top to the hill, and no tall vegetation to threaten the spinning rotor blades. Pigeon ordered a green smoke flare popped to indicate the exact location on which to put down, as well as the direction and speed of any wind. The pilots rolled in hard, as usual for the Dustoffs, and pulled back steeply. The aviators could feel the ground effect cushioning their craft’s close approach to the deck. Instinctively, they scanned right, then left . . . okay. Wait . . . What was that? One of Shah’s men popped up from behind a refrigerator-size rock, toting a loaded RPG, high on the slopes of Hill 2510. Somehow, he’d hidden his position from the Marines, the Shocks, and the A-10s. Somehow, he knew that the wounded would be extracted from the hill to his north. But the Dustoff pilots already had their craft flaring hard. They couldn’t pull out; they’d fully committed. Would this be a repeat of the special operations disaster? the crew wondered, icy chills zipping up and down their spines. The Dustoffs had no choice but to continue on their path; they had no weapons onboard to defend themselves, and the Apaches were too far off to provide cover. They could only hope that the RPG gunner would miss.
But he probably wouldn’t. In fact, he was probably the same terrorist who had downed the MH-47, killing all on board. He, like others in Shah’s group, was probably one of the world’s most proficient, most determined extremist fighters. And after having sent the MH-47 to the ground in flames, he was confident that he could blow the Dustoff bird out of the sky. He rested the RPG launcher on his shoulder, dropped his right index finger onto the trigger, and buttressed his stance, preparing for the sharp blowback of the RPG launch to which he’d become so accustomed.
Seven hundred meters away, near Middendorf’s mortar line, Lance Corporal Lavon Pennington, a combat engineer attached to Fox-1, saw the terrorist spring forth, holding the RPG launcher. An image of a fiery explosion and senseless death flooded Pennington’s mind. He lifted his standard-issue M16, squeezed his eyes shut—knowing that he’d have only one chance, one shot. Pennington opened his eyes and positioned the insurgent in his iron sights. Then he squeezed the trigger. Crack!
The eyes of the Dustoff aviator on the right seat of the Blackhawk were transfixed on the RPG gunner. He could have thought of his home, his family, his dog . . . his car. He knew he could do nothing, so he just continued to do his job. Life before him continued in real time—no slow motion; he didn’t even pray for survival. He just worked the tough machine through the wispy air, readying for a landing and to get wounded troops to safety. He ignored the fact that he was about to be blown out of the sky, that he was about to be incinerated on top of some forlorn peak deep in the hinterlands of Afghanistan, that he would never see his home again.
Puff! And that was it. The end. The men in the second Dustoff saw it all: as the lead bird was in final flare, Shah’s RPG gunner locked onto the Blackhawk, clasped the trigger of the launcher, just as had been done before the MH-47 shoot-down . . . and then the RPG gunner’s head disappeared in a cloud of pink mist. Pennington’s 5.56 mm round had connected with his scalp just a neuron’s response time before he could squeeze the RPG trigger. The lead Dustoff swooshed down, cushioned by the craft’s ground effect, and landed on the small flat spot amid the steep terrain.
As Pigeon knelt under the rotors, barking orders into his radio, Konnie had his two “horses”—twenty-year-old Lance Corporal Albert Mendiola and twenty-three-year-old Lance Corporal Justin Monk—race down the hill to carry the casualties and their gear up to the aircraft. “So, sir,” the interpreter known as the Rock began before he was loaded into the medevac, “I am leaving. I will see you soon. Try to kill all of these Taliban fucks.”
“Will do, Rock,” Konnie replied.
“I wish I could stay and watch them all die!” the big terp finished.
“I think most of ’em are dead, after all that.” The lieutenant smiled.
“Look, sir.” Lance Corporal Jason Dunaway grabbed Konnie’s attention by holding up a carbon-scored piece of melded lead and copper. “The 7.62 round—we pulled it out of my SAPI.”
Konnie laughed at the sight, the round having gone through Dunaway’s left biceps before lodging into the front ceramic-plate insert on his flak jacket. “Now get on the bird with Einarson, Wilson, and the rest of ’em,” he ordered. All told, five Marines and the Rock had to be evacuated that morning, including Lance Corporal Anthony Adams, with shrapnel to his arms and legs, and Lance Corporal Dustin Epperly—one of Fox-3’s most proficient Marines—with shrapnel to one of his arms from an RPG burst.
Waving off the second Dustoff—the LZ didn’t have enough space for two birds at the same time—Konnie and Pigeon huddled as the pilots spun up the first Blackhawk’s engines, lifting the bird into the sky. The second craft landed, and Konnie and his Marines loaded it with gear from the wounded—which would get the lieutenant in a bit of trouble later on, as Air Ambulances adhere to strict rules forbidding the carrying of anything but wounded personnel.
The Marines had thwarted what Ahmad Shah surely felt was his destiny for that day. They dashed his goals through skill, through perseverance, through sheer will—and though some classic USMC improvisation as well. The grunts relied not just on their instincts, but on the lessons the Marine Corps had ingrained into them. Armageddon had descended upon the grunts. They fought hard. They fought harder than anyone could imagine. And they won. Armageddon had been denied.
But to what extent had they won? Had Ahmad Shah survived? Would he continue in his campaign of terror? Was he mortally wounded? Or dead? And what of his die-ha
rd adherents? How many of them had fallen to the Marines’ trigger pulls, to the mortar teams’ 81s, to the A-10s’ 30 mm guns and the Apaches’ rockets? Only time would tell. And that time would come soon.
11
ONE RIDGE DISTANT, A WORLD APART
I know the SEAD was a little rough. But the Dustoffs got everyone out—” Rob Scott was explaining to a senior member of Task Force Devil’s command, a very irate senior member, who cut the XO off mid-sentence. Shah’s force had come too close to downing another helicopter, and with Marines still operating deep in the Chowkay and other surrounding valleys, another Dustoff extraction might be necessary if the extremists attacked again. As he’d done through the entire operation, Major Scott continued to battle to keep the grunts of ⅔ fighting the enemy, and the critical date of 19 August, when CJTF-76 mandated that Whalers draw to a close, loomed larger with each passing hour. As much heat the XO took from the Devil staff, however, Devil took tenfold from CJTF-76, who, after the battle on the morning of the fourteenth, wanted to pull the Marines out entirely. And while tensions flared between Rob Scott and TF Devil, Rob knew that the task force had fought just as hard as he and other senior members of ⅔ to keep the Marines on track—the way they’d vowed upon arriving in Afghanistan—regardless of vexing Army-Marine Corps cultural differences.
With Shah’s force in tatters and on the run, with untold numbers of dead and wounded, Fox Company worked to hold security of the area after the Dustoffs lifted the injured to the safety of Bagram. “Konnie, find me an LZ large enough for Chinooks to come in and extract us,” Grissom instructed the lieutenant.
