by Ed Darack
After months of flying all types of troops and supplies day and night, Buddy, Rich, and some of the company’s other pilots and crew forward deployed to Tarin Kowt, just north of Kandahar in Afghanistan’s Urozgan Province, to support a series of operations in the surrounding mountains in June and July 2006. Buddy said that he definitely locked his shoulder harness early one morning during a flight to pick up Navy SEALs and attached Afghan commandos during Operation Mountain Thrust, meant to quell ongoing Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan. Buddy piloted the Chinook, call sign Patriot 22, with Rich. The flight also included three UH-60 Black Hawks and two AH-64 Apache gunships. As they approached an LZ on a riverbank in a steep valley, a fighter jumped out from behind a tree, aimed his AK-47, and fired at one of the Black Hawks. “I saw the tracer fire from the Black Hawk’s gunner when he returned fire,” Buddy said. “He got the guy.”
But the fighter was not alone. Just as Buddy locked his harness, the valley erupted in gunfire, with tracers zipping toward the helicopters from a half-dozen positions. The two Chinook door gunners began firing back at the Taliban shooters as Rich and Buddy continued on their course. Two of the air crew also fired from Patriot 22’s rear ramp with their personal M4 rifles. “Rich was trying to figure out who in the back was firing,” Buddy recalled, “and one of them keyed his mic and said, ‘We’re all shooting!’ ” The Apaches immediately engaged a number of targets with 30mm high-explosive rounds and rocket attacks. As the two Chinook pilots sped their aircraft to a safe orbit, an AC-130 gunship arrived, pounding the Taliban for 20 minutes and clearing the valley. Rich and Buddy then raced back into the valley, loaded the SEALs and Afghan commandos, and took them back to their base at Tarin Kowt. Buddy locked his shoulder harness a number of other times during the remainder of his first deployment, but he never again experienced enemy fire as sustained and intense as that of Operation Mountain Thrust.
Buddy’s experiences during that tour would be an important foundation for his leadership as Extortion Company commander years later, notably his decisions about which pilots and crew would fly the most demanding missions. With this knowledge, he decided who would support the vital JSOC mission set. Dave Carter, Bryan Nichols, Pat Hamburger, Alex Bennett, and Spencer Duncan stood at the top of his list.
The pilots and crew of Extortion 17 belonged to a military unit that enjoyed both the bonds of a family and an efficient structure born and synergized through decades of military lessons. Members of Extortion Company shared professional and personal threads common throughout the modern, unified U.S. military. The men of Extortion 17, three of whom had children and wives, and all of whom had extensive networks of friends and loved ones awaiting their return, counted not only operational commonalities with others of Extortion Company but deeply personal ones as well.
Christy Lee gave birth to her and Buddy’s first son, Sam, on April 26, 2011. The 29-year-old father departed for his second year-long combat deployment, bound for Afghanistan, less than a week later. “We knew a year in advance that Justin was going to leave for Afghanistan,” Christy recalled, “and they allowed him to come home for Sam’s birth.” Something wildly unexpected had happened the night before he returned to his unit: Buddy, sitting on the couch, holding his son and watching the television, heard the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Despite global celebration, the news caused Christy not to rejoice but to worry, feeling that the terrorist mastermind’s death would only spur enemy leaders to seek revenge. She was not alone among the anxious relatives and friends of deployed and soon-to-be deployed U.S. service personnel fighting in OEF. “We’d just had a baby,” she said. “It just didn’t seem real that he was leaving. I don’t even remember who took him to the airport. He left the house, and that was it.”
As with Buddy’s first tour, Christy played a vital role in her husband’s life as a deployed warfighter during his second Afghan rotation. She sent daily updates on Sam’s growth milestones and the goings-on at home, which ranged from the funny to the frustrating. Yet while Christy kept Buddy apprised of the details of stateside life, her husband told her little of his day-to-day experiences. A critical component of U.S. military operations security (OPSEC) is that deployed members of the military can speak only vaguely of their duties and functions, and only after events, in order to maintain the highest level of secrecy and ensure the warfighters’ safety.
Long before Sam’s birth and Buddy’s departure for Afghanistan, Buddy had learned, during predeployment training, that his second tour would prove far more dangerous than his first due to the types of missions that he and his fellow Army aviators would support. He and others of Bravo, however, discussed these risks exclusively among themselves. At home, details and magnitudes of risks never surfaced in conversation. “I was naïve the first time around because I was new enough that I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” Buddy explained. “The second time around, there weren’t any illusions. I fully appreciated how dangerous it would be,” noting that his company commander, Chris Ruff, often discussed their unit’s luck in not losing a single soldier during their 2005–06 deployment. “We talked very specifically among ourselves how we feared the worst for this next deployment—that we might lose an aircraft and crew.”
Four and a half years had passed between Buddy’s October 2006 departure from Afghanistan and his May 2011 return. By the time he’d arrived home from that initial tour, the first lieutenant had amassed 600 hours of flight time between Rucker, the Pakistani humanitarian aid mission, and combat operations in Afghanistan. His flight tempo did not slow much back in the States, as he supported the Army’s 10th Special Forces Group, which at that time had no organic Chinook companies, in training exercises at Fort Carson, Colorado. Commanders of units training at Fort Carson, however, frequently requested Chinook support due to the aircraft’s versatility, high performance, and capaciousness, drawing upon CH-47 helicopters and crew from units of the Colorado Army National Guard and Bravo Company, out of Olathe. These training exercises would forge professional and personal relationships among SOF units and the Kansas and Colorado Chinook aviators that spanned years.
After returning to Fort Rucker in 2010, qualifying as a Chinook instructor pilot, then undergoing subsequent predeployment training and mobilization, Buddy arrived in Afghanistan as a seasoned captain with 1,200 hours of flight time. And, as Kirk had predicted since his first days of working with Buddy in Pakistan, Buddy had grown into an exceptional military officer. Weeks before Bravo departed the United States to rejoin the OEF fight, Buddy’s commander, Captain Chris Ruff, and Army aviation commanders in Afghanistan decided that Buddy was a natural choice to head a Chinook company due to his proven leadership and combat experience.
While the entirety of Bravo traveled to Afghanistan for the 2011–12 deployment, the CH-47 company that commanders chose Buddy to lead did not consist of aircraft, pilots, and crew exclusively from his Olathe Reserve unit. Rather, it fell under the umbrella of Task Force Falcon, the forward-deployed segment of the Army’s 10th Combat Aviation Brigade (10th AVN), based out of Fort Drum, New York. A component of the famed 10th Mountain Division, Task Force Falcon maintained a long heritage of supporting U.S. ground forces as well as aiding in humanitarian crises around the globe. Falcon had been relieving-in-place a sister brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division for months in the spring of 2011 and needed to move equipment and personnel to a host of locations to maintain a consistent operational tempo during the transition. Thus Bravo Company helicopters and personnel were scattered to three forward operating bases: Bagram Airfield; FOB Salerno, near the city of Khost in eastern Afghanistan’s Khost Province; and FOB Shank.
Over the years since they had met at Qasim Airbase in Pakistan, Buddy and Kirk had built a strong friendship and working relationship. Buddy both admired and leaned on Kirk’s experience, which included five combat deployments dating back to Operation Desert Storm in 1990–91. Kirk was the company first sergeant, and one of his key roles would be to provide Bud
dy with counsel and input on a host of important matters.
“You’re in for a long year,” the outgoing Chinook Company commander at Shank told Buddy just minutes after the rotor blades of his CH-47 came to a drooping standstill. Bulldozed and built on a sunbaked, wind-scoured desert plain 6,600 feet above sea level, Shank sat 38 air miles south of Kabul and slightly more road miles via the Kabul-Gardez Highway. It is high desert, with torrid summers, frigid winters, and dust year-round, and water had to be trucked into the base, limiting showers. Nevertheless, Buddy pledged to consistently maintain a positive outlook, a key component of effective military leadership. “I always look at the bright side. Our living conditions weren’t like home, but they were 10 times better than what most infantry guys had—the guys we as aviators pledged to support,” he said. “None of us in my company ever had any complaints.”
After a brief introduction to Shank, Buddy and Kirk jumped into their leadership roles within the Chinook company. Task Force Falcon had integrated them into the 2nd Battalion, 10th Combat Aviation Regiment (2-10 AVN), known as Task Force Knighthawk, which comprised an AH-64 Apache gunship company, a UH-60 Black Hawk Company, a number of support elements, and a Chinook company.
Roughly 40 percent of Knighthawk’s Chinook company hailed from the Army Reserve, 40 percent were National Guard, and 20 percent were active-duty Army, with personnel and helicopters rotating in and out throughout the deployment. As many as 14 Chinooks, all CH-47D models, composed the assault support helicopter component. Buddy explained that despite some common misconceptions about Army Reserve and Army National Guard personnel and equipment (confusion characterized by misnomers including “Reserve Guardsman” and “Guard Reserve”), members of active-duty, Guard, and Reserve units train to exactly the same high standards and maintain their aircraft to identically rigorous thresholds and tolerances. “In the modern Army, everyone and all equipment are interchangeable: active, Guard, and Reserve,” he said. “That’s why we can have an apparent mix, because it’s not a mix at all. We all go to Rucker to begin our careers, and then we all have to hit the same exact standards and flight-hour requirements during our career progressions.” However, because many personnel join Guard and Reserve units after fulfilling a contract in the active component of the Army, and because once there they remain at these units for decades in a specific job, or “billet,” Guard and Reserve personnel often have much higher levels of experience than their active-duty counterparts. A key example was CW4 Dave Carter of Extortion 17, a Colorado National Guardsman with more than 4,000 hours of cockpit time.
The level of intra-Army integration also reflected the tenor of not just the Afghan war effort, but the design of the entire Defense Department and the way that the modern U.S. military wages conflict. Gone are the days when the Army and Navy fought over which service would lead a campaign in a specific theater. Today each service is responsible solely for organizing, training, equipping, and integrating their forces into combatant commands as outlined by the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Combatant commands, which can be geographic, such as the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), or functional, such as the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), oversee military operations without influence by the services themselves.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility and surrounding areas (shaded) as of 2011, with Afghanistan highlighted. Although this map was created in December 2015, it shows the CENTCOM region as it has appeared for years, and it likely will continue to exist in this form in the future. Credit 7
The modern joint U.S. military now functions with the greatest efficiency in its history, with commanders attending schools with unified curricula and with combatant commands seamlessly integrating the most appropriate personnel, units, and equipment into warfighting efforts. This structure mitigates parochialism and vastly improves the military’s potency while increasing safety and survivability. Today the Defense Department’s Unified Command Plan comprises six geographic combatant commands and three functional commands, each led by a four-star general or admiral. Of all the unified combatant commands, the general public most frequently hears about Central Command, as it includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Qatar, Egypt, Turkey, and seven other countries—all frequently covered in the media because of regional armed conflict, particularly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.
Despite the overall unity and cohesion of effort and purpose engendered by the modern Defense Department, individual units continue to seek their own unique set of related traits, perhaps the most important element of which is the name they use as a call sign—a trademark, if you will. Fans of The Sopranos and similarly themed television shows, books, and movies, Kirk and Buddy chose a reference to the American Mafia. When they arrived at Shank, the Chinook company’s call sign had been Barbarian, an apt moniker for a Chinook company, as it evokes the ferocity and large size of the helicopter. “At first we threw out Bada Bing, the name of the strip club in The Sopranos,” Kirk explained, “but that’s too much of a mouthful in operational usage—Bada Bing 11 and Bada Bing 12, you know. Too many syllables.”
Thumbing through a list of officially approved call signs for U.S. military units of all types, Buddy found Extortion, which struck him as appropriately evocative of the Mafia. They also wanted a reference to the secrecy of the criminal organization, noting that its members never utter the word “Mafia,” calling it rather La Cosa Nostra, meaning “This thing of ours,” which carries connotations of mystery and brotherhood. “That’s why Kirk and I liked it as a tagline. It perfectly fit important aspects of our job—OPSEC and the camaraderie that we all had,” said Buddy.
Sergeant First Class Kirk Kuykendall at Bagram Air Base just after his arrival in Afghanistan in 2011. Credit 8
Jenette McEntire, a cousin of pilot CW2 Jeremy Collins, owned a graphic design company and offered to make a logo. Buddy explained to Collins that the logo should include a CH-47 and a hand pulling puppet strings, along the lines of Mario Puzo’s Godfather book cover motif. McEntire returned a design they unanimously felt to be incredible: a black background with a white Chinook sling-loading the word “Extortion” on puppet strings. She set the letters of “Extortion” in a font called Godfather and included “This thing of ours” in smaller type below it.
Collins offered the idea of assigning Mafia ranks to those in Extortion Company and printing them on T-shirts, including “Boss” for Buddy, “Underboss” for the company executive officer, and “Consigliere,” meaning “close advisor,” for Kirk, who provided professional counsel to Buddy. Enlisted members had “Soldato” printed on their shirts, a reference to a “soldier” in the Mafia, and warrant officers each got “Capo,” meaning “chief” or “boss,” on their shirts. “It was great for morale,” said Buddy. “Everybody in the company really loved it, and so did other units in Knighthawk.” He added that Extortion Company gave shirts with “Enforcer” emblazoned on them to pilots of Task Force Knighthawk’s Apache attack helicopter company, who escorted Extortion Company Chinooks during operations. They also provided Lieutenant Colonel Lars Wendt, Task Force Knighthawk’s commanding officer, with a shirt that read “Capo di Capi,” or “Boss of Bosses.”
All regional commands in Afghanistan as of 2011: Regional Command North, Regional Command Capital, Regional Command East or RC(E), Regional Command South, Regional Command Southwest, and Regional Command West. RC(E), where Extortion Company spent the majority of their time, includes the Tangi Valley region and Maidan Wardak and Logar provinces. Credit 9
During their deployment, Extortion Company would fly missions in some of the most critically important areas in Afghanistan. Just as the Defense Department demarks geographic areas of responsibility throughout the world, the International Security Assistance Force, the coalition in command of the Afghan war effort, outlined 6 Regional Commands defined by the borders of the nation’s 34 provinces. Two of the most important in
2011 included Regional Command Capital, or RC(C), the smallest regional command but also the one that included Kabul, and Regional Command East, or RC(E), composed of 14 provinces, including the restive Kunar, Maidan Wardak, and Logar and which surrounded RC(C). FOB Shank sat almost exactly in the middle of RC(E), and while many of Extortion Company’s missions called for them to insert and extract troops just a dozen or so miles from their base, they would fly through much of RC(E) during their deployment.
International Security Assistance Force Regional Command East (RC(E); highlighted); surrounding regional commands; Regional Command Capital, surrounded by RC(E); Pakistan; FOB Shank; and principal cities in the region, circa 2011. Credit 10
Some of the most violent and dangerous areas of Afghanistan were in RC(E), particularly those parts that Extortion flew into and out of. Buddy, Kirk, and other senior members of Extortion Company carefully selected who flew on the most demanding flights. All personnel in the company proved exceptional, but certain standouts, such as Spencer Duncan, crewed the most dangerous missions. “He was so good at what he did,” said Kirk. “Just a fantastic soldier, so professional as a door gunner and general crewmate. He was one of the very best.”
