The Final Mission of Extortion 17

by Ed Darack

  “He signed my waiver on the spot without examining my knee or even checking my ID,” Buddy said. “He didn’t even ask me which knee had the problem.” As fires smoldered in lower Manhattan and at the Pentagon, Buddy returned to his Army advisor’s office, waiver in hand, the next day and signed a contract to become a CH-47 Chinook pilot in the Army Reserve’s 7th Battalion, 158th Aviation Regiment, the same battalion to which Kirk Kuykendall belonged and which Spencer would join four years later.

  Alpha Company was where Buddy initially served, one of two Chinook companies—along with Bravo—in the 7th Battalion at that time. Army Reserve battalions place their individual companies throughout the United States, and Alpha was based at Fort Hood, 90 miles northwest of College Station, Texas, A&M’s home. Buddy chose Alpha due to his familiarity with it and the relationship he had forged with its commander, Major Steve Harris. Harris had once invited Buddy to ride along during a training flight in a Chinook’s jumpseat (a fold-down third seat behind those of the two pilots). And, like Spencer years later, experiencing the Chinook and meeting the aircraft’s pilots and crews hooked Buddy.

  In the days just after Buddy joined Alpha (which has since transitioned to flying UH-60 Black Hawks), senior U.S. government officials directed intelligence, military, and domestic agencies to identify those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. No credible individual, group, or country had yet claimed responsibility for the strike, and the 19 hijackers had left virtually no details about their backgrounds that investigators could find during those first few days. Speculation flourished in U.S. and international media, but with no solid, actionable intelligence, Buddy, others in the military, and the nation as a whole could only speculate about what would happen next.

  Nine days after the hijackings, on the evening of September 20, President George W. Bush addressed the U.S. Congress with a prepared speech broadcast live to the United States and the world. Buddy and his roommate watched in their dorm room at Texas A&M as the commander-in-chief explained what intelligence agencies had discovered about the attackers and provided insight into his administration’s planned course of action. According to Buddy, neither student said a word during the address. A journalist asked, “Who did this?” Bush answered with the names of that enemy and its leader, which were already known to Buddy: al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden. Bush noted that the 9/11 act had not been their first strike against the United States, citing the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden. Buddy immediately realized what he and other service members would face.

  Bush then answered the natural second question: “How will America respond?” The president outlined the “war on terror,” using that phrase for the first time and noting that the campaign would span years, unfolding unlike any conflict the nation had fought before. The ultimate goal was the “defeat of the global terror network,” meaning that America would pursue all terrorist organizations, not just al-Qaeda. Then the president delivered what Buddy, and perhaps all members of the U.S. military, felt to be the most moving and compelling passage of the address: “And tonight, a few miles from the damaged Pentagon, I have a message for our military: Be ready. I’ve called the armed forces to alert, and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud.”

  “I’ll never forget those lines,” Buddy said. “Just thinking about them makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”

  As 2001 turned to 2002, and as U.S. forces relentlessly hunted terrorists, waged a counterinsurgency campaign throughout the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan, and then invaded Iraq, Buddy completed both his academic curriculum and his officer training, wondering at times if the wars would be over before he had the opportunity to serve. Buddy graduated with a bachelor of science degree in political science and was commissioned a second lieutenant on May 15, 2004. He and Christy married exactly one week later.

  Less than a month after their wedding, Buddy dove into the world of Army aviation at Fort Rucker, where all Army pilots begin their flying careers. Some call it “Mother Rucker” because the base is where their careers as aviators are born. Like Dave Carter before him and Bryan Nichols afterward, Buddy would not only learn all the fundamentals of rotary-wing aviation but also enter Army aviation culture there.

  As he immersed himself in basic aerodynamics, turboshaft engine function, flight control and diagnostic systems, and the many other aspects of the CH-47, he began to adopt the personal demeanor that characterizes virtually all Army pilots and crew, and aviation culture as a whole. During Primary Phase at flight school, Buddy’s initial instructor, Richard Girdner, a Vietnam-era pilot influenced and instructed by those who had flown in that war, sat with him in the cockpit of a TH-67 helicopter trainer, the Army’s version of a Bell 206 JetRanger. “I’ll never forget the first words Mr. Girdner spoke to me,” Buddy said. “They stuck with me forever: ‘Never stop flying the aircraft. Never, ever stop flying the aircraft.’ ”

  Girdner, a former Chinook pilot, recounted to Buddy the story of a friend who had crashed but continued to try to fly the aircraft even on the ground, still working the sticks. The “never stop flying” maxim drives Army pilots and crew—of all aircraft types—to adopt a calm, focused disposition regardless of the situation. Army pilots naturally instill this temperament into members of air crews, Buddy said, particularly during insertions and relaunches at active LZs such as Extortion 17’s in the Tangi Valley. “Everyone works quickly, accurately, and with a profound sense of purpose, yet everyone maintains a calm, relaxed face, always ready to make a joke or smile and laugh at someone else’s joke.” Instructors at Rucker instill more than technical capability and common-sense flying; they also imbue their trainees with an attitude of dedication to other pilots and crew of all services and a will to support ground personnel and operations. That attitude, Buddy emphasized, binds a crew and a unit together as a culture, part of an enduring Rucker family.

  In 2005, with his flight wings pinned on, yet with no stick time save for training and evaluation flights at Rucker, Buddy packed to return to Texas. The young lieutenant looked forward to predeployment training with Alpha Company, which was scheduled to leave for Afghanistan the following year, in 2006. Their predeployment program and mobilization schedule would include rigorous training from the time he returned from flight school until 72 hours before Alpha’s send-off. This intensive preparation, lasting roughly one year, would ready Buddy and other unit members for all the types of missions they would undertake in Afghanistan.

  However, Alpha’s sibling company, Bravo—members of which were preparing to depart for southern Afghanistan in early 2006—needed pilots, so Alpha’s command “cross-leveled” Buddy, transferring him to Bravo in Olathe immediately after he returned from flight school. Bravo’s members, including Kirk, had been preparing for months for the forthcoming tour. Buddy would join Bravo in their own predeployment training, his program accelerated.

  The October 8, 2005, the earthquake at Muzaffarabad in Kashmir changed those plans, however. Less than a month after returning to Texas, Buddy landed at Bagram Airfield with Bravo. Bagram, 30 miles north of Kabul, had served as the primary aviation logistical hub for U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan since just after the beginning of the war, and commanders viewed it as an ideal staging point for the earthquake relief effort due to its facilities and proximity to Pakistan. (Five years later, Spencer would experience a similar surprise deployment after the 2010 Haiti earthquake.)

  While Bravo formed the core of the Pakistan-bound unit, pilots and even some of the 12 Chinooks came from other companies, including one aircraft from the Washington State National Guard. Transported first to Spain aboard C-5 Galaxy cargo aircraft by pilots and crew of the USAF Air Mobility Command, the Chinooks, partly disassembled for transit, were then taken to Bagram in C-17 Globemaster III transports. At Bagram, members of the unit, including Kirk, reassembled the Chinooks and flew them 230
air miles to Qasim Airbase on the southern edge of Rawalpindi, 10 miles south of Islamabad. “Pakistan is where I really learned to fly,” Buddy recalled. “It remains some of the most difficult, challenging flying that I’ve ever done, including everything since that deployment.”

  On a cool, cloudless morning in late October 2005, Buddy and CW3 Rich Bovey climbed into the cockpit of their reassembled, test-flown, and fully fueled Chinook and spun up its engines to fly to Pakistan. With clearance to launch granted by Bagram’s air traffic control, the pilots ran through the last of their preflight systems checks of the CH-47, call sign Ghaznavi 23 (the Pakistani military assigned the call sign). With just 150 total hours of stick time, which included only 30 in a Chinook, Buddy raised the thrust control off its base, bringing the helicopter into a low hover. Maintaining the aircraft’s aerodynamic equilibrium with continuous pedal, thrust, and cyclic inputs, he aimed the Chinook on an eastward heading and eased it into forward flight as he continued to “pull power” to gain altitude. Buddy, joined by an escort AH-64 Apache gunship (call sign Shock 21) because the Pakistan-bound Chinooks carried no weapons, was now in the first moments of his operational career as an Army aviator.

  Buddy and Rich took turns on the controls during the flight over rolling badlands, passing remnants of abandoned mud-brick villages dug into mountain faces, flying above mosaics of green and yellow fields stitched together by meandering canals, and soaring over knife-edged peaks of bare, twisted rock in a palette of tones from brown to yellow to black. “It seemed to me at the time like another planet,” Buddy recalled. Flying 1,000 feet over the Afghan countryside, they sped above the Kabul River toward Jalalabad, the on-again, off-again home of Osama bin Laden from the mid-1990s until the U.S. invasion in 2001. Coursing over al-Qaeda’s former base of operations, where the terrorist leader likely had conceived, planned, and ordered the 9/11 attacks, Buddy and Rich maintained a southeasterly heading as they slid across the opening of the Kunar Valley and over the confluence of the Kunar and Kabul rivers.

  Sheer rock faces periodically flicked glints of bright sunlight into the pilots’ eyes as they guided Ghaznavi 23 on its final miles in Afghanistan. Rich contacted Pakistani military air traffic control and requested permission to enter their airspace as the Chinook approached the bare desert frontier and circled over Torkham Gate. The busiest port of entry into Afghanistan, Torkham Gate lies 3 miles west of and 1,000 feet lower than the 3,500-foot-high Khyber Pass, a major landmark both historically and for Ghaznavi 23’s journey that morning. Convoys of “jingle trucks,” gaudily adorned transport lorries, idled below, waiting to pass over the border on the highway connecting Islamabad and Kabul. Shock 21 turned away and sped back toward Bagram as the Chinook pilots continued to circle above the waiting drivers.

  Pop! Pop! Pop! echoed through the Chinook. Streamers of white smoke, each headed by a blindingly bright yellow ball, snaked from the sides of the CH-47. Flashes of sunlight, reflected off the bare desert landscape, likely had activated the helicopter’s anti-heat-seeking-missile countermeasures, convincing the system that an SA-7 or similar antiaircraft missile was headed their way. The automatically jettisoned flares would have snared the electro-optical attention of the missile’s guidance head, tricking it into a trajectory away from the Chinook and saving the helicopter. “There of course was no missile, but it got my attention—that’s for sure,” Buddy said. A few minutes after the false alarm, the Pakistani military granted Ghaznavi 23 permission to enter Pakistani airspace. Buddy and Rich leveled the Chinook and aimed its nose toward Rawalpindi.

  Less than 10 minutes after they had passed the Khyber—the cleft in the Safēd Kōh mountains of the Hindu Kush through which Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had led their invading troops centuries earlier—the pilots and crew flew over the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan. The capital of the restive, tribal Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (formerly the North-West Frontier Province) and home to numerous counterfeit-weapons manufacturers and dealers, Peshawar holds the distinction of having served as the base for a number of mujahideen factions during the Soviet-Afghan war. It also served as the base for a range of contemporary fundamentalist groups and was the birthplace of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

  After passing over Peshawar, Buddy and Rich approached Rawalpindi, welcomed by views of distant snowcapped mountains and thousands of kites flown by children. Landing at the airbase, Buddy and Rich soon acquainted themselves with members of the hurriedly deployed Chinook unit. Buddy, recalled Kirk, “was this hilarious young lieutenant, fresh out of flight school, doing perfect movie impressions and making everyone laugh.” Buddy, who had by far the lowest number of hours of cockpit time in the company, didn’t know that the unit’s senior pilots had carefully scrutinized his flight school record before asking him to come to Pakistan. Kirk noted that Buddy’s affability proved particularly important to the unit for many reasons. “We definitely appreciated good senses of humor,” he said, because they would live in austere conditions for months. “We set up tents in this old hangar that had no electricity, so no phones, no Internet.”

  Buddy started his real-world education within a day of checking into Qasim, flying his first mission with Kirk as one of his FEs. Landing, relaunching, hovering at altitudes upward of 15,000 feet, and putting a Chinook’s wheels down on “postage-stamp” LZs, such as playgrounds, courtyards, and soccer fields, Buddy quickly learned how to maneuver the Chinook in the most demanding and dangerous type of helicopter flight: high-altitude mountain operations. Buddy quickly learned from Kirk and the other FEs as well as the seasoned pilots of the unit, gaining invaluable insight into preflighting aircraft and identifying potential problems. The earliest days of the Pakistan deployment also marked the beginning of a professional and personal relationship that would have wide-ranging positive ramifications for the soldiers of Extortion Company years later.

  The pilots and crew delivered food, clean water, and medical supplies to predetermined villages. They also loaded the aircraft with supplies and searched for damaged and destroyed villages from the air to drop in on. The Pakistani villagers soon learned the distinctive sound of the approaching Chinooks and what that sound meant, and the Chinooks and their pilots and crews quickly became a popular sight. Often the helicopters could not touch down, as too many people crowded the LZs. So the pilots hovered the Chinooks five or six feet off the ground while the crew handed out supplies to grateful, often elated villagers. “Some enterprising businessman started mass-producing a windup toy Chinook, complete with American flags on it,” Buddy recalled. “I heard that it was the top-selling toy in Pakistan by the time we left.”

  Another aspect of the deployment, one that Buddy (and virtually all the rest of the world) did not know about until years later, made his time in Pakistan wildly intriguing. “We flew all around northern Pakistan, but most of our flights went between Islamabad and Muzaffarabad, the city that suffered the most destruction,” he said. Lying near the midpoint of the flight path between Islamabad and Muzaffarabad is a city that was unknown to most of the world before early May 2011: Abbottabad, bin Laden’s home. “We flew right over the military academy adjacent to the bin Laden compound hundreds of times. Bin Laden definitely heard our rotors overhead,” he recalled, smiling.

  Thanks in part to the Chinook pilots and crews, the United States contributed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of aid, delivering much of it directly to people in need. Their work, however, held strategic significance as well, providing the Pakistani government—and the Pakistani electorate—with a robust taste of American generosity, changing and solidifying perceptions about the country embroiled in the throes of war inside the borders of their next-door neighbor.

  After three and a half months, with the Pakistan humanitarian aid mission complete, Buddy and his unit returned to Afghanistan. Buddy was now a fully mission-qualified Chinook pilot. “In those few months, he flew so much—all the pilots did—that he gained as much experience as a regular Reserve Chinook pilot w
ould have in 10 years of flying back in the States,” said Kirk. The experience would prove an important cornerstone for his future career as Extortion Company commander. Buddy, however, had yet to experience combat flying. That would come soon enough, as the company prepared not to depart for the United States but for combat operations in southern Afghanistan. They would be based out of Kandahar Airfield in the country’s low, arid Kandahar Province.

  Headed into the fight for the first time, Buddy recalled his mindset at Fort Rucker: he had wanted not just to learn to fly but to learn to fly in war. During his tenure at flight school, he never questioned whether he would fly in combat; he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he eventually would support active operations. As he prepared to depart for southern Afghanistan, he leaned on the sage advice given to him by his Vietnam-era instructors: always focus on supporting the ground forces, and do his best to understand their needs and expectations. Those lessons would aid him in sensing the mindset of the pilots and crew of Extortion 17 during their speedy infil of the Ranger-led assault force on August 6, 2011. “I wanted to be the best pilot I could be, not for accolades but because that was expected of me from the ground force commanders. As Army aviators, we’re supporting the ground guys—the guys patrolling, the guys taking the fight to the enemy.” Buddy emphasized that his attitude was not unique. It was shared by all Army pilots and crews.

  Buddy and Bravo Company spent nine months in Kandahar supporting all types of troops, both American and coalition, conventional and SOF. “We flew constantly,” said Kirk of that portion of their deployment, adding that they flew day and nighttime missions and worked frequently with Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. Buddy recalled of this time that he learned vital lessons that instructors do not teach at Rucker and are not in instruction manuals. One of the most important came from Rich Bovey: “He told me that if you think you’re going to get shot at, or might get shot at, or you see tracer rounds headed your way, to lock your shoulder harness. That way, if you get shot in the head and die, you don’t slump over and bash into the controls, which might keep the other pilot from being able to control the helicopter, forcing it to crash and killing everyone.” Like Dave and Bryan on Extortion 17 in the final, dangerous seconds of their assault force insertion flight, Buddy always locked his harness at questionable moments in flight for the protection of the other pilot, the crew, and the passengers.