The Final Mission of Extortion 17

by Ed Darack

  As the Chinooks sped away, the ground assault force checked their gear, preparing to advance toward their objective: a complex of mud-walled buildings where intelligence had revealed that a powerful regional Taliban leader would be holding a meeting to further his control over the area. The warlord, who held direct ties to the Pakistan-based “shadow governor” of the Tangi Valley, had recently filled a power void opened when American forces killed his predecessor a few weeks prior in a raid similar to the one undertaken by Extortion 16 and 17. The members of the assault force knew the leader and his fighters to be capable, battle-hardened, and incredibly determined. The team would rely on a tightly interwoven and synergized tapestry of skill, technology, and experience to encircle the Taliban commander and his fighters with overwhelming force and then strike. The mission’s speed and efficacy were possible because the pilots and crew of Extortion 16 and 17 had stealthily positioned them at their carefully chosen location.

  Members of the 47-man assault force began their movement after a few minutes of final preparations, quickly and quietly jumping canals, jogging around trees and bushes, and transiting fields to approach the Tangi’s main road corridor on the valley floor’s northern periphery. Each of them was simultaneously aware of the others and of the manmade and natural aspects of their surroundings, making each movement, breath, and glance with deliberate purpose.

  They faced a multitude of threats with each moment and footstep. Civilians in the area of the LZ, under pressure from or sympathetic to the enemy, might have tipped off the Taliban upon hearing the whine of the Chinooks’ engines and the thuds of their spinning rotor blades, and the alerted fighters might have begun moving toward the force from any number of directions. Armed enemy fighters might have lived in a village near the LZ and set an ambush after the clamor of the insert had awakened them. The assault force might encounter an IED that could shred limbs, kill its members, and disastrously end the mission that they had just begun. They also faced environmental perils, including potentially bone-snapping divots, ditches, and logs unseen on the ground, as well as natural threats such as flash floods.

  The assault force members leaned on their years of training in every aspect of their roles in the mission, and each member had far more experience than the average warfighter. This was also true of the pilots and crew of Extortion 16 and 17, who like other personnel in their unit had flown both conventional and special operations forces on missions in Afghanistan. The strike itself, like others in the Tangi Valley, required personnel of the highest caliber. Due to the importance of the region and its fierce enemy activity, senior strategic war planners had placed responsibility for missions against insurgents and terrorists of the critical area into the hands of the American military’s most specialized counterterrorism forces, those of the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC (pronounced “jay-sock”). JSOC includes a number of individual units composed of the most experienced warfighters in the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). These include the Naval Special Warfare Command’s Development Group, or DEVGRU, popularly known as SEAL Team 6 (SEAL is an acronym for sea, air, and land). It also includes those who formed the core of the strike force delivered by Extortion 16 and 17 that night, the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment.

  Despite their years of combat and their expertise, however, the members of the Ranger-led ground team, like the pilots and crewmembers of Extortion 16 and 17, were involved in an operation influenced by a factor that they could never avoid or defeat: sheer chance. Once they arrived at their destination, they could face any or a combination of numerous fluid scenarios. The Taliban leader might have long absconded into the night, leaving his fighters to ambush them from multiple positions at close range with heavy machine gun fire, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and mortars. They might find the warlord surrounded by all of his fighters in a single room, at which point the enemy might surrender en masse or resist to the death, killing any number of Americans in the process. The warlord’s fighters might have dispersed throughout the complex of buildings, and one might be waiting in a vehicle packed with high explosives, ready to launch a suicide bombing followed by a coordinated ambush by others in his cadre. The Americans knew much about the enemy target and his cell but could never know with certainty how the mission would unfold once they arrived at their objective.

  Regardless of their lack of a combat crystal ball, however, the assault force did have a wealth of battlefield wisdom about the spectrum of enemy scenarios they might face that was continuously updated by a little-known, highly secretive matrix of related sources. The two attack helicopters and the higher-orbiting gunship did not fly alone above the Tangi Valley that night. Some of the U.S. military’s most important but least-known aviation assets also plied the skies in support of the operation, collecting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) data as well as maintaining critical communication links. Virtually unknown even to most members of the military, these ISR platforms are so secretive that one used that night does not even have a publicly disclosed name. The aircraft kept watch on the enemy leader and his men, providing a constant feed to the assault force as well to mission commanders at various operational command posts in the rear. The operation could never have been developed or executed without these aircraft, data from which had helped the Americans build knowledge about the enemy target in the days prior to the insert.

  After the Chinooks returned to base, ground crew topped off the tanks with JP-8 jet engine fuel. Then the pilots lifted each helicopter a few dozen feet above the ground and air-taxied to their parking pads a couple of hundred yards to the south, set the Chinooks down, and shut off their two main turboshaft engines. There they waited at readiness condition 2, or REDCON 2, with each helicopter’s auxiliary power unit (APU) running to keep critical systems, notably their array of radios, operating. If they needed to speed more JSOC personnel to the insert point to bolster the assault force, they could relight the main engines and race back within three minutes. Most likely, however, they would return in the next three to four hours, depending on how the ground operation evolved 14 air miles due west, to extract the Ranger-led team and any captured enemy and materials at the completion of the operation.

  As they waited, the pilots and crew of both Chinooks closely monitored a number of networks (“nets”) on their radios, including those used by the ground force and those of the gunships and ISR aircraft, to determine the nature of their next flight. They would soon stand again at the tip of the operational spear, working at the forefront of not only the mission at hand but also the continually developing U.S. war in Afghanistan.

  By midnight that evening, 3,590 days—nearly 10 years—had passed since the initial invasion of Afghanistan by U.S. and coalition partner forces at the opening of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). The war, which would become the longest in U.S. history, varied in character throughout its evolution, with the military continuously improving its potency and ensuring the safety of its members by gleaning knowledge from both its successes and its tragedies. Less than a month after the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, special operations teams such the one Extortion 16 and 17 delivered to the Tangi Valley began to smash the Taliban’s Afghanistan infrastructure. The war then progressed from a strictly direct-action, counterterror mission set to one of wide-ranging nation-building and counterinsurgency, a key priority being the security of the Afghan people. The ultimate goal of the developing campaign became to build a prosperous, self-sufficient country that would never again host forces hostile to the United States or its allies.

  As the United States and coalition countries poured billions into Afghanistan throughout the 2000s to drill clean water wells, construct schools, build roads and power distribution infrastructure, engender growth in agriculture, telecommunications, and other sectors of the nascent economy, and train its security forces, the “neo-Taliban” rose in Pakistan out of the ashes of the old guard. The fledgling Afghan government, with U.S. and coalition support, struggl
ed to nurture national growth as diverse interests—many wholly or in part backed by the resurgent Taliban and other groups—unleashed coordinated violence against the Afghan government and U.S. and allied forces. Virtually all Afghans sought a peaceful, prosperous existence, but the destructive conflict fomented and executed by outside destabilizing forces—essentially a shadow invasion—tried to bend the nation’s positive trajectory into one that could end in ruin.

  Overview of Afghanistan, depicting terrain, location of major cities, bordering nations, the Hindu Kush range, and Noshaq, Afghanistan’s highest mountain. Credit 2

  By the summer of 2011, a critical time in the nation’s ongoing growth and with U.S. and coalition forces’ departure on the horizon, regions key to the Taliban were roiling with increasingly frequent violence. These outbursts stymied counterinsurgency and nation-building progress, campaigns typically conducted by conventional Army and Marine Corps units. Dismantling the terrorist networks required “cutting the head off the snake”: undertaking direct-action, “hard-hit,” capture-or-kill counterterror raids against regional Taliban leaders. These operations were primarily conducted by personnel in highly specialized units, including the Rangers of the JSOC operation 14 miles west of the waiting pilots and crewmen of Extortion 16 and 17.

  To bolster the prospects of success and mitigate pitfalls, special operations raids require aviation support that can transport troops to and extract them from locations often measuring just a few dozen yards in length and even less in width within a time window that is sometimes measured in seconds. These “infil” and “exfil” (infiltration and exfiltration) missions, almost always undertaken at night, must be closely integrated with other aviation assets, including fixed-wing and helicopter ground-attack aircraft and an array of ISR platforms operating in a “stack” above them, each asset type flying within a tightly controlled altitude range. In short, supporting raids like that of Extortion 16 and 17 requires both equipment maintained to the highest standards and crews with skill, confidence, precision, and courage—all working raid after raid and period-of-darkness (from dusk one day till dawn the next) after period-of-darkness for months on end.

  In the early 1980s, after the dawn of modern U.S. special operations, the U.S. Department of Defense established a rotary-wing aviation unit to meet these demands: the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), or 160th SOAR(A), the personnel of which gave themselves the moniker “Night Stalkers.” Nearly always operating in the dark, and trained specifically for the spectrum of special operations ground unit requirements, the 160th flies a fleet of attack and assault support helicopters. While the 160th played important roles in a number of operations in the years soon after their inception, including Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada and Operation Just Cause in Panama, the Night Stalkers’ operational tempo had never reached a high or sustained rate for more than a few months at a time before al-Qaeda declared war on the United States on September 11, 2001.

  Due to the asymmetrical nature of battling loosely coordinated, disaggregated bands of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, the Defense Department designated the Special Operations Forces as the “supported” combatant type, with conventional forces subordinate to SOF, a first in the history of the nation’s major military campaigns. In this command construct, Army Special Forces and Rangers, Navy SEALs, and a host of other special operations primary and support personnel took the lead in the war effort, with conventional forces as a supporting echelon. The 160th, however, simply did not have the numbers of aircraft and personnel required to assist the myriad raids that SOF units conducted throughout Afghanistan. The March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq, a campaign in which senior U.S. military leadership relied heavily on SOF, further taxed the Night Stalkers. For operations in which aviation support was critical to mission success, SOF planners needed to find means other than the 160th for infil and exfil.

  With SOF the designated lead in the early stages of OEF, and with conventional forces also operating in the same geographic area with a different mission, friction surfaced between the two force types. The command structure enhanced the efficacy of U.S. SOF teams’ removal of the Taliban early in OEF, but as the war progressed to a personnel-heavy counterinsurgency effort, commanders butted heads. Problems typically arose when special operations direct-action raids were conducted in areas of operations where conventional forces had been making counterinsurgency progress.

  Brigadier General Norman L. Cooling, U.S. Marine Corps, referencing his time as battalion commander (as a lieutenant colonel) of 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, which deployed to eastern Afghanistan in 2004 to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign, observed, “SOF’s mission was principally counterterrorism oriented at removing insurgent and terrorist leadership, and they were still operating under the paradigm that they had precedence over conventional forces because they had the strategic and operational level mandate. In the meantime, conventional forces commanders, who were conducting counterinsurgency operations to establish governmental structures and services and win public confidence, would wake up in the morning to find whole tribal populations infuriated with them because of SOF raids the night before that killed their members.”

  Cooling and his staff, however, saw the prospect of synergy through cooperation with SOF units. Working with them and utilizing their assets for joint operations enabled his battalion to continue their counterinsurgency progress while SOF commanders continued to take down targets by coordinating efforts and sharing intelligence and knowledge. By 2011, Cooling noted, cooperation between conventional forces and SOF had improved tremendously, a conclusion that he based on his observations and experiences during a subsequent deployment to Afghanistan. SOF and conventional-force missions and assets need not be mutually exclusive. To the contrary, by 2011, units of each type did not only combine capabilities for specific missions, as with Cooling’s battalion, but also carefully integrated each other’s assets for their own operations. By 2011, SOF had both gained trust in conventional aviation assets of all types in Afghanistan and Iraq and had seen that conventional aviation could regularly support them to their highest standards. Some SOF units actually requested to work almost exclusively with specific conventional aviation units.

  As OEF progressed, the tactics, techniques, and procedures of U.S. and coalition forces evolved and improved to adapt to the enemy’s fluidity. Many regions used by insurgents and terrorists remained volatile, however, despite U.S. military efforts and their ever-enhanced capabilities—notably the Tangi Valley. In 2011, insurgent and terrorist activity hit a crescendo in this cleft of rugged mountains, forcing the abandonment, that spring, of a small U.S. base, Combat Outpost Tangi, that was used by conventional Army units. With the high U.S. operating pace in the Tangi, FOB Shank—the base where Extortion 16 and 17 waited—ranked among the most important and hence most frequently attacked of the coalition’s facilities in 2011. Named in memory of Army Staff Sergeant Michael A. Shank, whom the Taliban had killed with an IED in the area in 2006, the compound sat just 10 miles from the eastern opening of the Tangi and 50 miles west of the border with Pakistan, just south of the village of Padkhvab-e Shanen in the Pul-e-Alam district of Logar Province.

  A number of units called Shank home for their deployments, including the Rangers of the assault force delivered by Extortion 16 and 17 and others from JSOC, who lived and operated out of a walled compound within the FOB. A number of other units that worked with and supported JSOC missions were based there as well, including Extortion Company, the unit to which CW4 Dave Carter, CW2 Bryan Nichols, Sergeants Pat Hamburger and Alex Bennett, and Specialist Spencer Duncan belonged. The Chinook helicopter unit, composed of roughly a dozen CH-47s and dozens of men (and, for a brief period of time, two women) who flew, maintained, and loved the aircraft, were not part of the 160th SOAR but rather consisted of personnel from a variety of conventional Reserve, National Guard, and active-duty battalions, including the Army Reserve’s 7th Battalion of the 158t
h Aviation Regiment and the National Guard’s 2nd Battalion of the 135th Aviation Regiment. The trend of conventional forces working with SOF units continued strongly out of FOB Shank in the summer of 2011.

  As the men of Extortion 16 and 17 waited at Shank and the clock ticked toward midnight, the Ranger-led assault force moved swiftly toward its target, meeting no enemy or other menaces during the first part of the push. Inside Chalk 2—Extortion 16—pilots CW3 Jeremy Collins and CW4 Rick Arnold, FEs Sergeant John Etuale and Staff Sergeant Brandon Robinson, and door gunner Sergeant John Brooks listened to the ground team’s progress, as did the five men in Extortion 17. Then, minutes into the operation, the helicopter gunships transmitted word of the first in a series of developments that would dramatically change the nature of the operation. While the pilots and crew of both helicopters stood ready to race back to the Tangi with reinforcements or to extract the ground assault force, the five men of Extortion 17 would soon find that the full weight of the next phase of the operation fell entirely on their shoulders.

  Of different ages, from different parts of the United States, and with different family backgrounds, the crewmen were all prepared to fight and were bound by common threads of devotion to the nation and its defense. Their willingness to sacrifice for one another and for those they supported on the ground reflected the history, core, and culture of Army aviation. On the left-side door gun was Spencer, the youngest of the five, who had overcome adversity even before he had seen the lights of the delivery room, and at a young age forged his life’s central mission: to aid and defend others, particularly those less fortunate than himself. Raised in a community where his friends, family, and neighbors held patriotism and duty among their highest values, Spencer gravitated toward Army aviation, specifically to the Chinook because of the aircraft’s speed, capaciousness, and history in theaters including the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm.