The Final Mission of Extortion 17

by Ed Darack

  The United States had lost a total of 19 special operations personnel within a day of Turbine 31’s fast-rope first whipping against the ground high on the slopes of Sawtalo Sar: 8 Night Stalkers—all close friends of Matt’s—and 11 SEALs. Only one of the four-man reconnaissance and surveillance team members had survived, Marcus Luttrell. The incident powerfully illustrated a vital consideration that all helicopter pilots and crew ponder prior to entering an active, or potentially active, LZ: chance is always part of the battlefield.

  The enemy in Afghanistan tried to shoot helicopters out of the sky at every opportunity, so regardless of crew and pilot vigilance, some enemy fighters could remain hidden until a helicopter was within shooting range. The shoot-down also proved an uncanny foreshadowing of an Extortion Company Chinook downing that would occur at an LZ just 15 miles northwest of the Turbine 33 incident, a Chinook that Bryan Nichols and Buddy Lee would pilot six weeks prior to Extortion 17’s tense wait at FOB Shank on the night of August 5–6.

  All five members of Extortion 17, deeply familiar with the downings of Razor 01 and 03 and particularly that of Turbine 33, knew that they might suffer a similar fate after they made their next Alpha call. Should a fighter emerge as they closed on the next LZ, looking for yet another downed Chinook, the full burden of their effort to survive would fall on the door gunners, Alex and Spencer, the aircraft’s sole line of active defense. “The door gunner is absolutely vital,” explained Kirk Kuykendall. “A good door gunner can, and has, made the difference between a successful infil or exfil and disaster.” Most vulnerable near the ground during landing or launching, door gunners sweep back and forth, looking for threats, and if one emerges, they can either fire on him or alert the pilots so they can speed away.

  Kirk explained the evolution of door gunner training, which Spencer undertook before leaving for Afghanistan. It began for Spencer at California’s Fort Hunter Liggett, where door gunners gain knowledge of an M240 machine gun and basic Army infantry weapons, including the M16 rifle and M4 carbine. After Hunter Liggett, Spencer and other crewmembers of Bravo Company, 7-158 AVN, traveled to Fort Hood for more advanced training. “Spencer learned to be part of a team,” Kirk said. “He learned aircrew coordination and standard terms, so that as a team the aircraft functioned smoothly, fluidly. They do what are called ‘tables,’ where each stage, or table, increases in difficulty. It’s a crawl-walk-run progression.”

  The first time Spencer and other crewmembers fired a weapon from inside a Chinook, the aircraft was sitting firmly on the ground with its rotors motionless. He then shot from a hover and then while in forward flight. At the highest level, Spencer participated in the “K Pattern,” in which a group of aircraft approaches a landing and a mock threat emerges. The gunner communicates the location of the enemy to the pilots, who abort the landing and increase speed while he fires on the target. The Chinooks’ gunners also shoot as they pass the threat. The group of aircraft then circle around and land safely. “It’s a great exercise in teamwork,” Kirk said, explaining that in the first stage of the K Pattern the crew fires blanks. In the next stage, they use live rounds, giving them invaluable experience and preparation for the kind of undertakings that Spencer and Extortion Company would support in Afghanistan with SOF troops.

  One of the most important aspects of Spencer’s training as a door gunner was maintenance of his aircraft’s weapons. Once in Afghanistan, he and the other door gunners and crewmen would maintain weapons every day. “They need to be [perfect], as you never know when the lives of those around you will depend on that gun,” Kirk said. “They can never jam. Ever.”

  As the men of Extortion 17 waited at FOB Shank, they knew that despite enemy threats, their complex helicopter statistically faced a much greater likelihood of being downed by environmental factors or human error than by attackers. In an internal Army study conducted at Fort Rucker, researchers found that the Army had removed a total of 208 helicopters from the service’s inventory between October 2002 and December 2010. Of the aircraft lost, enemy action accounted for 44, or 21.2 percent—roughly one in five. In terms of lives lost, of the 329 fatalities due to Army helicopter incidents, hostile action accounted for 121, or 36.8 percent.

  The report included losses of four types of airframes: the AH-64 Apache, the UH-60 Black Hawk (and the 160th’s MH-60 special operations variant), the CH-47 Chinook (and the Night Stalker’s MH-47 version), and the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior. An airframe-by-airframe analysis grants a bit more operational wisdom. Of the 65 AH-64 Apache gunships lost during this timeframe, 31.3 percent of the 2002–10 total, hostile fire accounted for 11 losses, or 16.9 percent. Of the 51 UH-60s and MH-60s lost (24.5 percent of the total), the enemy claimed 10, or 19.6 percent. Of the 60 OH-58D Kiowa Warriors lost (28.8 percent of the total), hostile action took 13 of them, or 21.6 percent. The CH-47 and MH-47 Chinook airframe accounted for the lowest number of losses—32, or 15.4 percent of those lost. Of these 32, enemy action accounted for 10, or 31.3 percent—the highest percentage of loss attributable to enemy fire of all four airframes, but still a rate lower than one in three. Military helicopter aviation during combat ranks as objectively perilous, but statistics reveal that the danger results from more than RPG-wielding fighters.

  “You’ve got five different ways to bring down a helicopter in combat,” said U.S. Marine Colonel Anthony “Buddy” Bianca, a former CH-53E Super Stallion pilot who also flew the CH-46E Sea Knight, a helicopter that Marines nicknamed the “Phrog,” which is similar in appearance but smaller and less powerful than the CH-47. Colonel Bianca pointed out that the first cause, loss to enemy fire, requires no elaboration. However, the other four—mechanical failure, maintenance failure, pilot error, and external factors such as weather—are more complex. Mechanical failure occurs when a part is not designed or manufactured well enough for its task and disintegrates, requiring engineers to redesign it or the manufacturer to improve quality control. External factors can also cause a part or parts to break, as when a clump of dirt gets sucked into an engine intake and causes a flameout. Poor maintenance or maintenance errors can lead to disaster as well. However, according to Bianca, “pilot error is the one that makes us pilots cringe. Nobody wants to be the guy who messed up and caused a perfectly functional aircraft to come crashing down, but it happens, and it can happen for a host of reasons. Crews have to manage risk, to know their procedures cold, and know when to continue with a degraded system, in bad weather, or in changing mission conditions—or to turn around or to not launch at all.”

  One of the most dangerous aspects of operations at night or in the early morning is the necessity of wearing NVGs, as the crew of Extortion 17 did. In addition, environmental threats that could have posed challenges to the Ranger-led assault force, such as rain or dust, can also present substantial threats to pilots and crew. These two risks have led to disaster on multiple occasions.

  Late on the night of January 25, 2005, five months before the downing of Turbine 33, two Marine Corps three-engine CH-53E Super Stallions, the largest and most powerful helicopter used by the U.S. military, lifted into the air from Al Asad Airfield in western Iraq’s Al Anbar Province. Call signs Sampson 21 and Sampson 22 belonged to Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 361, the “Flying Tigers.” The pilots flew the Super Stallions past the city of Ramadi, then landed at Al Taqaddum Air Base, a logistical hub 70 miles southeast of Al Asad and 40 miles west of Baghdad, near the city of Fallujah. At Al Taqaddum, which U.S. forces called Camp TQ or just TQ, members of Task Force Naha loaded into the aircraft. “They were Marines and attached Navy Hospital Corpsmen [medics] from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, based out of Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii,” explained Regan Turner, who as a second lieutenant had commanded 1st Platoon of Charlie Company.

  A component of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, the task force was retasked to go to Iraq to aid with security for upcoming elections. Inside Sampson 22 were seated two squads of Marines, one from 3rd Platoon and the other from 1st Platoon,
a total of 27 Marines. Sampson 21, the lead helicopter, lifted off just before midnight, and Sampson 22 followed seconds later. They headed toward Camp Korean Village, a military outpost near the western tail of Iraq’s Freeway 1, the longest highway in the country and one of its most important both for legitimate commerce and for insurgents moving personnel, money, and weapons into restive Al Anbar Province from neighboring countries.

  At 1:18 a.m. on January 26, near the end of the 200-mile flight from TQ, the pilots of Sampson 21 and 22 each started losing clarity in their NVGs. Soon visibility dropped to less than a half mile, then to virtually nothing. They were flying essentially blind. The pilots had not experienced simultaneous malfunctions of their NVGs, but rather had flown into a haboob, a type of dust storm. At 1:20 a.m., having passed north of the town of Ar-Rutbah and with just under 19 miles remaining to their destination, Sampson 21 lost contact with Sampson 22. Pilots of the lead aircraft radioed Korean Village, explaining that 22 might have landed to wait for the haboob to clear. The lead ship, however, did not have enough fuel to circle back to check on the other Super Stallion.

  After refueling at Korean Village and offloading the aircraft’s Marines, the pilots and crew of Sampson 21 sought to fly to the last known position of 22 with another CH-53, Tycoon 53, but the haboob had enveloped the base by that point, choking visibility to less than a half mile. Thirty minutes after losing contact with the aircraft, a Marine Mobile Air Traffic Control Team radioed the disposition of the Super Stallion. “They were flying at 500 feet AGL [above ground level] when they went into the haboob,” explained a Marine aviator familiar with the events of that early morning. “Those dust clouds don’t show up on any weather radar, and they’re very difficult to see with NVGs, so they just flew into it, and there they were, visibility dropping like crazy as they sped deeper into the dust. You can easily see a haboob and turn around or fly over it during the day, but at night, on goggles, they’re practically invisible—till you’re inside of one.”

  After flying into the dust storm, the pilots of Sampson 22 had experienced one of the greatest threats to operators of aircraft of all types: spatial disorientation. It caused them to unknowingly put the helicopter into a steep bank, ultimately flying the Super Stallion into the open desert at more than 100 mph. “They most likely never realized what happened. They literally didn’t see the crash coming, even in the final fraction of a second of flight, as haboobs are densest at ground level,” said the Marine aviator. All 31 onboard—27 passengers, 2 pilots, and 2 crewmembers—died in the crash, the greatest single-incident loss of American life in the global war on terror since 9/11.

  “We call it spatial D,” said Colonel Bianca, speaking generally of the phenomenon, explaining that it can lead to CFIT, or controlled flight into terrain. “You’re flying along, become disoriented because of a cloud or a dust storm. You think you’re piloting straight and level. You are controlling the aircraft, just not straight and level like you think—and boom! Never saw it coming.” Bianca emphasized disorientation’s effects on the human sensory system, noting that the sense of balance, the perception of up and down and left and right, degrades, requiring pilots to rely entirely on their cockpit instruments. “Flying at night, on goggles, greatly accelerates the development of spatial D.”

  “Until you’ve flown a helicopter using NVGs, you just don’t realize how difficult it is,” said Kurt “Thor” Thormahlen, a former pilot of a CH-53D, the two-engine progenitor of the more powerful CH-53E. Thormahlen served as the night systems instructor in his unit, Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 363, the “Lucky Red Lions.” Humans naturally have a 180-degree field of view, he explained, and goggles close that down by almost four-fifths, to just 40 degrees. “It’s like looking through two toilet paper tubes,” he said, noting that pilots must move their heads back and forth and up and down to compensate for the limitation.

  Adding to the operational hurdles posed by NVGs, pilots using them see the world in shades of green. “It’s like staring at two small green TV screens 25mm from your eyes,” Thormahlen explained, adding that the monochrome view degrades depth perception. A red light seen through NVGs will look much closer than a green light at the same distance, leading to disorientation. Using them effectively, as demonstrated by Bryan and Dave during their insert of the assault force, requires in-depth training and experience, as flying on goggles at night ranks as the most difficult type of helicopter operation. To deliver troops at night as quickly and safely as they would during daylight hours, pilots must constantly scan the world around them through their goggles while consistently checking their cockpit gauges, consulting maps and information on kneeboards, and adjusting radios. Thus they must flip back and forth from NVGs to naked-eye views, sometimes two or three times per second.

  After flying for HMH-363, Thormahlen flew as a member of HMX-1, Marine Helicopter Squadron One, which flies the president of the United States and other senior executive officials. He flew President Obama and the first family, the vice president, and cabinet members on a number of occasions, often at night and occasionally in adverse weather conditions. He explained the progression of learning to fly using NVGs. “You start out at high light levels, then go to low levels. During this time you’re always a copilot, never a pilot-in-command,” he said. He said that once a pilot is proficient in low-light operations, he must then pass operational muster to be certified as night system qualified. Part of this requires flying in conditions like those Bryan and Dave flew in during the insert on the night of August 5—that is, zero lunar illumination. “When it gets super dark, you get honeycombing, where you see this honeycomb [pattern] in front of you,” he said. “And when it’s that dark, you can also get scintillation, where it looks like snow on an old-fashioned television screen.” While night-vision and systems training vary from service to service, all night-rated pilots meet uniform standards throughout the Defense Department. Factors other than difficulties posed by darkness also threaten helicopters in war zones—sometimes something as innocuous as a piece of ice or small chunk of rock.

  Iraq’s Soviet-designed Haditha Dam, 30 miles north of Al Asad Airbase, created Lake Qadisiyah in 1987 by blocking the Euphrates River at a point just north of the city of Haditha. It provides hydroelectricity as well as flood control and water for year-round irrigation. The structure also served as a multistory steel-reinforced concrete base for U.S. forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), including a makeshift helicopter pad at its crown. Marine Colonel James Donnellan will never forget a flight from that helipad on December 3, 2006, in a CH-46E from Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 165. At the time a lieutenant colonel and commander of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, Donnellan said that the aircraft “lost an engine immediately after takeoff. I can still hear the high-pitched whir of the engine right after the pilot pulled pitch and the helicopter nosed over.”

  With just one engine operational, the helicopter no longer maintained sufficient power to remain airborne. The engine had suffered foreign object damage (FOD), the bane of all forms of gas turbine and jet engines. If a piece of debris—even one as small as a paperclip—is ingested, it can cause catastrophic damage to the engine’s internal mechanisms, destroying it outright or causing it to power down. All military pilots and aviation crew participate in so-called FOD walks, in which a line of personnel pace slowly along an airfield, LZ, or aircraft carrier deck, heads down, carefully searching for and removing any debris that might find its way through an intake cowling into the guts of a spinning engine.

  But sometimes no amount of vigilance can mitigate the chance of FODing an engine, particularly in high-operational-tempo environments. In this case, the pilot pulled the nose of the helicopter up to clear the wall of the dam, then pushed the nose down to try to clear the rear landing gear, but he did not make it, crashing the rear wheels into the wall. The underpowered aircraft then plummeted nose-down toward the surface of the reservoir, about 50 feet below the top of the wall. The pilot was able to wring
enough power from the engine for a hard landing on the water, but tragedy followed nonetheless.

  “Because the crew chiefs thought that with just one engine the loaded helicopter might be too heavy to keep from sinking, they directed everybody to unbuckle and get out,” Donnellan recalled. Unsnapping from the Phrog’s bench seat, Donnellan quickly pondered whether to leave his heavy body armor in the aircraft—he knew neither the depth nor the temperature of the water. He did not want to lose his ammunition, camera, and other items strapped to his vest, but he might not be able to swim ashore with it on. He pulled it off and left it in the helicopter. “I ditched my gear there on the seat, nodded to [Major Joseph] Trane McCloud, who was sitting directly opposite me, and we both exited the crew chief’s door. Most of the passengers jumped out the back.” Donnellan remembers going into the water with just his rifle, pistol, and helmet. Clear of the rotor blades, he jettisoned his helmet and swam toward the base of the dam.

  McCloud, the battalion’s operations officer, leaped out of the CH-46E and closely trailed Donnellan, but he kept on his flak jacket. Within seconds, McCloud’s muscles must have seized up in the cold December water. Donnellan tried to ditch his rifle, but the weapon’s sling caught on his pistol. When he reached the concrete shore, pre-hypothermic and winded, he turned to gauge 39-year-old McCloud’s progress and render aid if needed. However, he could find no trace of the operations officer; he had drowned under the weight of his own gear. Also losing their lives that day were Corporal Joshua C. Sticklen, 24, a member of Donnellan’s battalion; 22-year-old Army Specialist Dustin M. Adkins of the 5th Special Forces Group; and Air Force Captain Kermit O. Evans, 31, from the 27th Civil Engineer Squadron.