by Mark Moyar
The convoy’s other vehicles zigzagged away from the road, chased by rounds of all sorts of calibers. Blaber, following the radio traffic and reports from his reconnaissance teams, soon realized that the shells striking the American convoy might be coming from the AC-130. “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!” Blaber yelled into the hand mike on his satellite radio. Fortunately for the Americans on the ground, the AC-130 was low on fuel and had to discontinue fire after two minutes and thirteen seconds, just before Blaber uttered the words.
Blood seeped from Harriman’s numerous injuries, external and internal, turning his face a ghostly white. One of the other Americans got on the radio to inform headquarters that Harriman had suffered grievous injuries. “Chief is dying! Chief is dying!” he blurted out. A medical helicopter rushed to the scene and picked up Harriman, but a few minutes later he went into cardiac arrest and the medical personnel were unable to revive him.
Long afterward, the Americans would struggle to understand how a plethora of high-tech safeguards and the concerted efforts of seasoned operators had failed to prevent the friendly-fire tragedy that took Harriman’s life. An investigation attributed the mistake to a faulty inertial navigation system on the aircraft. It was unable, however, to solve several mysteries surrounding the incident, including the inability of the aircraft’s beam to detect the glint tape.
Once the deadly projectiles stopped falling from the sky, all of the trucks came to a halt to assess and address the damage. During this pause, at 6:15 a.m., militia commander Zia Lodin and his subordinates turned their heads expectantly toward the Whale. According to the Special Forces advisers, the United States was about to subject the large terrain feature to a fifty-five-minute barrage of air strikes, the likes of which might be expected to extinguish all life on the ridge.
A lone B-1B bomber came into view, soared over the Whale, and dropped six bombs during the space of one minute. Zia Lodin jumped up with his hands in the air and exclaimed, “All the Afghans are screaming ‘Yay!’”
The waves of aircraft that Zia and the Americans expected to follow, however, did not materialize. American air planners had wanted to carpet bomb the Whale, but they had been overruled by ground planners who believed that heavy bombing would kill civilians and induce the enemy to flee before the ground forces could close in. As a consequence, the preparatory bombardment was limited to precision strikes on thirteen targets identified by Blaber’s operators. Three more aircraft were supposed to strike the seven additional targets, but one was waylaid when a bomb got stuck in its bomb bay, and the other two aborted their runs after hearing a report that the first bombs had landed too close to the US reconnaissance teams.
As the remaining fifty-four minutes passed without sight of another aircraft, euphoria turned to despair. Zia, speaking through an interpreter to his Special Forces counterpart, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Haas, asked plaintively, “Where are the bombs you promised us? Where are the planes?”
With the rising of the sun, Al Qaeda spotters received unimpeded views of the inert militia convoy. From positions on the Whale that had survived the mini-bombardment, mortar tubes fired rounds onto the jumbled collection of trucks and militiamen. Zia’s militia commanders, many of whom had lost contact with their troops when the trucks split up to escape the AC-130, ran away in panic. Other militiamen followed suit, casting off helmets and body armor to facilitate a rapid escape. The majority of militiamen departed the valley on foot, the remainder riding out on trucks whose drivers had been calm enough to recognize that running away was not the swiftest or easiest method of escape. The hammer was no more.
For the anvil, the morning was only marginally better. Aided by information provided by Blaber’s teams, the helicopters managed to insert the American infantrymen into the valley without getting shot down, but soon after the insertion a company of American paratroopers came under heavy mortar fire from Takur Ghar, the highest of the valley’s mountains. Three groups of enemy fighters, between fifty and one hundred men each, attacked the American company from three directions. Pinned down until sunset, the unit suffered twenty-six casualties before it was evacuated by air.
Over the course of the battle’s first day, enemy fighters clambered out of caves and bunkers to attack the Afghan militiamen and US soldiers on the valley floor, while others moved from neighboring valleys toward the Shahikot for their chance to participate in the kill. The Taliban and Al Qaeda forays continued into the second day as the American infantry moved out of blocking positions to do the hunting that the Afghan militiamen were supposed to have done. Blaber’s three reconnaissance teams kept vectoring precision munitions onto newly appearing fighters, inflicting most of the casualties that the enemy was to suffer during the battle.
Late on March 3, Blaber received a call from Air Force Brigadier General Gregory L. Trebon, Dailey’s deputy. Trebon told Blaber to withdraw his three teams from the valley and turn the reconnaissance mission over to a couple of units from SEAL Team Six. Trebon wanted one of those SEAL units to go to Takur Ghar to eliminate the enemy mortars that were continuing to bombard the valley floor.
In the opinion of Blaber and other Delta operators, Trebon was a nice guy who knew plenty about flying aircraft but very little about operations on the ground. The ground operators were willing to tolerate aviators like Dailey and Trebon who, in the interest of comity among the services, held leadership positions in a joint command. But they had little patience for those who thought their authority entitled them to override the views of men with ground expertise and firsthand awareness of the situation, as appeared to be happening now. They also suspected that Trebon was pushing for insertion of the SEALs as a means of giving another service its turn.
Blaber attempted to dissuade Trebon from the proposed course of action. “Sir, my teams are fine for at least another forty-eight hours,” Blaber explained. Any new teams that came into the area, Blaber added, would need to go through the same preparations as the teams already there, which included spending time at the forward base at Gardez to get acclimated to the altitude and talk with Americans familiar with the area.
Blaber’s objections failed to sway Trebon. Having become acquainted with Blaber’s skirting of orders from above, Trebon knew better than to get into a lengthy debate. He proceeded, instead, to force the issue by sending in two SEAL teams without notifying Blaber. The teams, Mako 21 and Mako 30, arrived at Blaber’s headquarters with their own commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Vic Hyder, whom Trebon had not placed under Blaber’s authority.
Trebon directed Hyder to put the SEALs into the Shahikot that night, which meant flying them into the valley by helicopter. To limit the risks to helicopters and passengers alike, the SEALs would fly to offset locations and move on foot under cover of darkness to their observation posts. Mako 21 was to land on the valley floor and march toward the Upper Shahikot. Mako 30 would land at a site 1,300 meters northeast of Takur Ghar and climb for several hours to the top of the mountain.
The performance of Mako 21 was one of several episodes in the battle that would become subjects of complaints from Delta participants about the capabilities of SEAL Team Six. According to the account of journalist Sean Naylor, the members of Mako 21 neglected to take along all of the required equipment when they boarded the helicopters for insertion. Once they were on the ground, therefore, they had to request an immediate resupply, thereby putting more aircraft at risk and divulging their location. After the team had established an observation post, the team leader reported that the SEALs could not see any enemy and requested extraction. But analysis at higher headquarters determined that Mako 21 was six hundred meters away from where they were supposed to be, and hence could not see the section of the Upper Shahikot Valley that they were supposed to be watching. After rebuffing several exhortations from Blaber to move the observation post, Mako 21 eventually shifted location, but at the new location they still could not see the upper valley. It later came to light that they were telling their SEAL headqu
arters that they were cold and tired and wanted to be withdrawn from the battlefield.
Mako 30 was scheduled to insert before midnight in order to give its SEALs enough time to climb to the top of Takur Ghar before dawn. The helicopter slated to deliver the team, however, developed engine trouble, necessitating the dispatch of a replacement helicopter from Bagram. By the time the new helicopter was ready, the insertion time had been moved back to 2:30 a.m. If the team departed at that hour, the march from the landing zone to the top of Takur Ghar would not be completed before the rising of the sun exposed them to enemy eyes.
SEAL Petty Officer Britt Slabinski, the leader of Mako 30, recommended delaying the insertion by twenty-four hours. Task Force 11, the JSOC headquarters element overseeing the battle, rejected the recommendation, notifying Slabinski, “We really need you to get in there tonight.” To get in before sunrise, they would have to land on top of Takur Ghar. A cardinal rule of reconnaissance was that a team did not insert by helicopter onto its observation post, since it would give away its position and could draw overwhelming enemy forces to the location. But now they had no choice.
American surveillance aircraft had spotted no enemy combatants on the summit of Takur Ghar. To make doubly sure, an AC-130 flew over the peak and scanned it with an array of sophisticated infrared sensors, optical devices, and radars. It detected nothing. “Nobody is there,” the AC-130 reported to the Chinook that was carrying Slabinski and the rest of Mako 30. “You are cleared in.”
On the Chinook’s approach to the landing zone, the sixty-foot blades of its twin rotors swirled up funnels of snow. Squinting through night-vision goggles, the crewmen and the SEALs began to glimpse disturbing signs of human activity.
“Footprints in the LZ,” reported pilot Al Mack, using the acronym for landing zone.
“Got a donkey at three o’clock in the tree line,” related the helicopter crew chief, Sergeant Dan Madden, through the aircraft’s internal communications system. Another man attested that he saw decapitated goat carcasses hanging from trees.
Crew chief Jeremy Curran was the first to see a live person on the landing zone. “Guy just popped his head up,” Curran said into his microphone.
“What’s he doing?” Mack asked.
“He put his head back down.”
Mack was concerned that there might be Afghan civilians on the mountain. Perhaps the butchered goats had belonged to innocent goatherds. Mack directed his men to fire only if fired upon.
Moments later, Mack saw a man stand up from behind a snowy berm twenty-five yards away, the grenade launcher on his shoulder pointed straight at the helicopter. The rocket-propelled grenade rushed at the helicopter with a glare that blinded Mack and others who were looking through night-vision devices. A bevy of RPGs followed in rapid succession, several of them penetrating the Chinook’s fuselage and exploding inside. The helicopter lost electrical power, disabling the potent miniguns. Hydraulic fluid and oil spilled across the floor. From three directions, automatic weapons fire screeched through the frigid night air and banged into the Chinook in a metallic cacophony.
“Fire in the cabin,” Sergeant Madden shouted over the intercom. “Go! Go! Go!”
That command was meant for the pilot, directing him to leave the landing zone before more munitions slammed into the lumbering beast. But one of the SEALs, Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts, thought that Madden was telling the passengers to get out of the helicopter, which at the moment was just a few feet off the ground. Heading toward the ramp at the aircraft’s rear, Roberts slipped on the syrupy mixture of hydraulic fluid and oil. Madden and Sergeant Alexander Pedrossa, the left door gunner, saw Roberts sliding down the ramp and reached out to stop him, Madden catching hold of a boot, Pedrossa grabbing the SEAL’s ruck belt. Roberts himself, discerning that something was amiss, attempted to reverse course, but the soles of his boots could gain no traction. Carrying an eighty-pound pack and a twenty-seven-pound machine gun, Roberts altogether weighed more than three hundred pounds, giving him a momentum that pulled Madden and Pedrossa along with him across the helicopter’s slick steel floor.
Mack, having correctly interpreted Madden’s directive as aimed at him, had begun to lift the helicopter skyward. As Roberts neared the back of the aircraft, Madden’s safety harness went taut, which halted the SEAL’s progress momentarily. The crew chief clung desperately to Roberts’s foot, straining every muscle to keep him on board. Three seconds later, the injured helicopter jerked violently. Madden lost his grip, and Roberts and Pedrossa went out the back.
Pedrossa’s immersion in the frosty mountain air was followed immediately by the hard jerk of his safety harness as the line reached full extension. No such tether restrained Roberts, either because he had disconnected his harness moments earlier, or because he had never connected it in the first place, a common SEAL practice that helicopter crewmen bemoaned as reckless bravado. As Roberts hurtled past, his belt was ripped from Pedrossa’s hand, severing the SEAL’s last tie to the aircraft. Roberts fell into the snow ten feet below.
The helicopter had pulled away from Takur Ghar by the time Madden was able to key his mike. “We lost one,” he informed the cockpit. “We got a man on the ground. Break right! We got to go back in!”
Mack attempted to steer the Chinook back to the mountain. Within seconds, however, the hemorrhaging of the hydraulic fluid caused the controls to lock up. The helicopter was “shaking and shimmying like a washing machine out of balance,” as Mack later described it. Madden poured cans of hydraulic fluid into an emergency port and cranked a small handle that fed the fluid into the lines. The infusion bought enough time to land the helicopter, but not enough to go back to the mountaintop. Mack landed at the nearest clearing he could find. The rescue plan was off.
The SEALs and the Chinook’s crew set up a perimeter in the snow and awaited their own rescue. A helicopter soon showed up to take them to the airfield at Gardez, twenty miles to the north. Intent on saving Roberts, Petty Officer Slabinski searched the base for a helicopter and a pilot that would carry his SEAL team back to Takur Ghar. One of the Nightstalker pilots agreed to take them to the mountain in his Chinook, Razor 04.
Slabinski requested that gunships saturate Takur Ghar with lead before his team paid its second visit. From overhead, airmen could see the heat signatures of twenty-five men walking around on the summit. But the gunship crews refused to open fire, on the grounds that they might hit Roberts. Haunted by the friendly-fire disaster that had taken the life of Harriman, the airmen were taking no chances.
Upon reaching the mountaintop, the Nightstalker pilot steered Razor 04 into a swale that shielded the helicopter from most of the enemy fire. Slabinski, four other SEALs, and Air Force radioman John T. Chapman jumped out of the helicopter, which then flitted away, unscathed, into the darkness. Alerted by the rumble of the Chinook, an enemy force roughly four times the size of Mako 30 locked horns with the Americans. The SEALs espied several well-protected machine-gun positions, which they attempted to flank and destroy with close-range fire and grenades. An enemy gunner knocked Chapman down. A SEAL was hit in the leg.
Taking fire from three sides, with two of his men incapacitated, Slabinski decided to pull back. The SEALs had to leave behind Chapman, who appeared to have stopped breathing. To cover the withdrawal, Slabinski threw a smoke grenade and the SEALs took turns providing suppressive fire. Another SEAL took a bullet to the lower leg during the retreat, but the five SEALs were able to get away. None of them had seen any sign of Neil Roberts. It would later be learned that Roberts had been killed by enemy fighters before the rest of his team returned to Takur Ghar to save him.
General Trebon now decided to send a force to rescue the unsuccessful rescue force. Two Chinooks took off from Bagram with a Ranger platoon that served as a quick-reaction force for JSOC. The headquarters of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment wanted the two Chinooks to take the Rangers to an offset landing zone, below the top of Takur Ghar, from which they would fi
ght their way up the mountain. Because of communications mishaps, however, the Chinooks received instructions to land on the summit.
The Chinook that was carrying the Ranger platoon commander, Captain Nate Self, reached the top of Takur Ghar at 6:10 a.m. Flaring fifty feet above the peak, it was suddenly assailed with swarms of projectiles, as if it were a knight just coming within range of a castle’s archers. Bullets penetrated the chin bubble and smacked into pilot Greg Calvert, who would likely have been killed had it not been for the protection of his Kevlar body armor. A Nightstalker noted for his daring, Calvert decided that the intensity and accuracy of the enemy fire warranted aborting the landing.
Before Calvert could steer the helicopter clear of danger, enemy fire shredded the turbine blades of the right engine, leaving him no choice but to set the helicopter down on the mountaintop as best he could. Like a bird with an injured wing, the helicopter fluttered down without full control of its speed or direction. Drawing upon an array of skills mastered through thousands of hours in the cockpit, Calvert kept the helicopter upright until it thudded on the ground, sparing the passengers from anything worse than bumps, bruises, and scrapes. The aircraft came to rest in the middle of a bowl, the rim of which was dotted with prepared defensive positions. The men inside those positions fired excitedly into the fifty-foot hull of the motionless helicopter.
Rangers Brad Crose and Matt Commons decided that they were better off trying to attack the enemy than sitting in the helicopter, waiting to be killed by grenades or bullets. The moment the ramp of the helicopter went down, Crose and Commons charged out. Both were shot dead at the bottom of the ramp. Two more Americans fell dead while still inside the cabin. The helicopter had been on the ground for only fifteen seconds.
