The Final Mission of Extortion 17

by Ed Darack

  Bryan Nichols and his son Braydon in the cockpit of a CH-47D Chinook at Bryan’s graduation from flight school, 2008. Credit 16

  Bryan graduated with distinction on April 30, 2008, having thoroughly impressed his instructors during his time at Rucker. Bryan’s mother, his father, Mary, and his son Braydon (from a previous marriage) all attended his graduation ceremony, along with one of Bryan’s brothers, Mary’s brother, and her parents. Bryan’s father and son pinned Bryan’s wings onto his uniform. “It was such a proud moment, and so great to have so much family there for it,” Mary said. “It really was a dream of his. He loved to fly, and he loved to fly the Chinook. I felt so proud of my husband.”

  Returning to Kansas, Bryan took a full-time job at 7-158 AVN as the unit administrator. As a full-time Reservist, he could fly more than a part-timer. In April 2010, Bryan learned that he would deploy to Afghanistan with Bravo Company, meaning he would get many hours of flight training in preparation for the rotation. His regimen included a HAATS course. “Bryan was my student,” said CW5 Pat Gates, chief instructor pilot at HAATS. “I remember that he was a tremendously gifted pilot. Very focused, confident, and in control. Not only did he grasp all of our concepts, but he flew with precision. He was meant for that type of flying.”

  Bryan Nichols riding his Harley Davidson motorcycle across Kansas en route to the Sturgis Motorcycle rally in the Black Hills of South Dakota, August 2009. Credit 17

  In 2010, Buddy, too, attended HAATS, where Major Tom Renfroe instructed him. “About 80 percent of the guys in Extortion Company had been through HAATS training prior to deploying to Afghanistan,” Buddy said, “and that was very, very good for us.”

  For Bryan, that deployment came in May 2011. He had trained at Fort Hood for his tour from March through May. Just prior to departing, the Army gave Bryan and the others headed overseas a four-day pass. Bryan’s family threw a big reunion for him in Houston, and then he, Mary, and Braydon traveled to Tucson to visit another of his brothers.

  Mary said that afterward she “saw Bryan off at the Tucson airport. He hugged and kissed me and Braydon, telling us how much he loved us and how much he’d miss us, and we told him the same, that we loved him so much and would miss him so much. Then he said goodbye.” Her husband walked away, disappearing onto his flight back to Texas. Just a few days later, following in the footsteps of his father and his father’s siblings decades earlier, Bryan Nichols would face war head-on.

  When Jeremy Collins, the pilot-in-command of Extortion 16 on the night of August 6, 2011, arrived at FOB Shank along with Buddy Lee and the others who would become part of Extortion Company, the fresh unit immediately integrated itself into the operational mix. In a pattern called left seat–right seat relieving-in-place, each flight included one newly arrived pilot and a 50 percent crew split. On Buddy’s first flight, he sat in the right seat, with the pilot-in-command on the left; hence the name of the arrangement. Hearing about the region and its threats from those who had flown there for a year, the fresh pilots and crew also studied the ground with their own eyes and quickly built a deep familiarity with it. Arriving two weeks after Buddy, Bryan Nichols, like the other Extortion Company pilots and crew, flew every type of mission, day and night, including portaging cargo, passengers, and supporting “deliberate operations,” which delivered ground personnel during combat operations.

  “Bryan was so good that despite this being his first time to Afghanistan, he jumped right into mission flying, no problems at all,” Buddy said. Buddy and Bryan had become friends in January 2010, when the two roomed together during the short-lived Haiti earthquake relief mission. Buddy identified Bryan as impressively talented and flew with him to help further his piloting skills. “I genuinely trusted him with my life.” So did others, such as Kirk Kuykendall. After a few weeks at Shank, Buddy, Bryan, Kirk, and the others of Extortion Company had smoothly and fully integrated into their roles in the war effort, and the pilots and crew became closer friends as well. A few weeks later, however, events unfolded that would test them as a company, try them individually, and push them to the edge of disaster.

  Captain Justin “Buddy” Lee (left), commanding officer of Extortion Company, and pilot CW2 Bryan Nichols, his close friend, enjoying cigars on a rooftop at FOB Shank in a photo taken on August 2, 2011, four days before the shoot-down of Extortion 17. Lee recalled that this photo was taken just after his last flight with Bryan. Credit 18

  In June 2011, U.S. forces unleashed Operation Hammer Down in and around the Watapur Valley of eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, just 13 miles from the border with northwest Pakistan. U.S. forces had never established a permanent presence in the area, as they had in the nearby Korangal and Pech valleys. To support the large Army-led operation to clear the region of heavily entrenched insurgents, commanders requested the support of two Chinooks from Extortion Company. Because of the high altitude and steep terrain in that part of the Hindu Kush, with LZs at up to 10,000 feet above sea level, Buddy needed to take the very best pilots and crew for the mission, and he put Kirk and Bryan at the top of his list.

  Commanders had identified a number of key insurgent strongholds in villages in the upper Watapur Valley and planned to insert a large force of soldiers above the enemy positions. Other forces were to move down toward individual strongholds, surround them, and force them out of the area. On June 23, Buddy, Bryan, Kirk, and two other Extortion pilots and five crewmembers, hand-chosen by Buddy and Kirk, lifted off from FOB Shank in two Chinooks. As they sped away from their base, Bryan mentioned to Buddy that their absence would temporarily solve a vexing problem at Shank. With 13 Chinooks in the company at the time but only 12 parking pads, the last Chinook to return to base usually had to be parked in the distant gravel fueling area, meaning a longer walk to the unit’s tents. With two aircraft temporarily based in Jalalabad, 85 miles northwest of Shank, no one would have to endure that annoyance during their forward deployment for Hammer Down. “Sounds trivial, but after long flights in a combat zone, those little things count,” said Buddy.

  The first leg of Extortion Company’s Hammer Down support mission, flying to Jalalabad Airfield, often referred to as “J-Bad,” took less than an hour to complete. The U.S. Special Operations Command had used J-Bad just weeks earlier to stage Operation Neptune Spear, which culminated in the killing of Osama bin Laden. At J-Bad, Buddy and others of the two-Chinook augment force integrated into Task Force Six Shooter, part of the 10th Mountain Division based out of Fort Drum, New York. Their Chinooks, CH-47F models, used the call sign Big Apple.

  The first night of the operation kept the pilots and crew of both the Big Apple and Extortion Chinooks busy. “We did four turns during the 24–25 June period-of-darkness,” recalled Kirk. On each turn, pilots and crew flew 40 miles from J-Bad to one of two pickup points, each just outside of the Kunar provincial capital of Asadabad: FOB Wright or FOB Joyce. At the FOBs, Extortion crewmembers loaded soldiers of Task Force Cacti, the forward-deployed designation of the 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment (2-135), a component of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division.

  From either of the FOBs, Extortion pilots flew another 10 miles up the history-steeped Pech River Valley, which had seen the beginnings of the Soviet-Afghan war, before banking north and flying 5 miles into the Watapur. During their first night, they touched down on an LZ designated Honey Eater at 9,835 feet above sea level. Located 1½ miles south of the summit of 10,436-foot-high Gambir Sar, which forms the eastern wall of the Watapur, the LZ was surrounded by trees, some taller than 100 feet, so it could accommodate just one Chinook. “It was eerie descending onto an LZ and looking around and seeing a wall of forest above you while you were still way off the ground. There wasn’t much room for error,” Kirk remembered. “Like none.”

  The LZ measured roughly the same size as that used by Matt Brady and the Night Stalkers of Turbine 31 to insert the SEALs of Operation Red Wings almost six years to the day earlier. “It was the toughest LZ I’ve ever b
een into,” recalled Buddy. Only 15 miles separated Honey Eater on Gambir Sar and the LZs on Sawtalo Sar identified for Red Wings, and both stood at similar altitudes, with Honey Eater 800 feet higher than those for Red Wings. The two mountains would share similarities beyond just physical characteristics as well.

  During the first period-of-darkness, Buddy landed at Honey Eater the first three times and Bryan landed there the fourth. “Bryan pulled it off flawlessly,” Buddy recalled of the toughest flying he had ever experienced, despite the clear, calm weather conditions and a lack of enemy activity through the night and early-morning hours. The following night, however, would hurl a vastly different set of circumstances at the Extortion pilots and crew. One aspect of the next night’s mission stood in their favor, however. They were not to return to LZ Honey Eater. The plan for the second night had the Extortion and Big Apple Chinooks flying into LZ Carolina, a full 3,000 feet lower than the treacherous Honey Eater, to reinforce troops and drop supplies.

  “At the last minute, however, the ground forces commander changed his mind,” Buddy recalled. “We found out just before departing FOB Joyce for the infil that we were going back to Honey Eater, way up on the side of that mountain, to reinforce an element of Task Force Cacti called Team Bastard.” Bryan and Buddy double-checked their helicopter’s performance data from HAATS training to ensure they would have sufficient power. They had more than enough, with cooler temperatures giving them a better margin than the night before.

  Before launching on their first flight that night, Buddy assembled the others on the Chinook’s ramp for a group photograph. “I didn’t have any conscious reason. I just felt like it was a good time to take a photo of us.” Buddy sat in the middle of the ramp, flanked by Bryan, Kirk, door gunner Sergeant John Brooks, and FE Sergeant Ezekiel “Zeke” Crozier. After the photo, as they spun up the Chinook’s engines, Bryan joked to Buddy, as Buddy recalled, that they’d probably crash tonight, saying they were due for one. The two pilots, who, like others, would joke macabrely about a flight they knew would prove difficult and dangerous to ease their apprehension of what lay ahead, looked at each other and laughed.

  As Buddy and Bryan began their startup procedure, the rotors of the other Extortion Chinook supporting Hammer Down began to turn. Piloted by CW3 Chris Kerr and CW4 John Berezoski, their CH-47, with the mission call sign for the night Extortion 11, left the ground just seconds before Buddy and Bryan’s Extortion 17 Chinook rose into the sky, carrying the three crewmembers and 33 passengers: U.S. Army personnel and a few Afghan soldiers.

  Within the hour, Buddy and Bryan were orbiting in a holding pattern over the Pech Valley, waiting to approach the LZ after Extortion 11 completed its infil and sped away. With low, dense cloud cover, the night proved particularly dark. Then the two pilots saw flashes—machine gun fire—and tracers zipping toward American ground forces, plus a few toward them. “We hadn’t seen any firefights near Honey Eater the previous night, but on that second night we saw them within a few hundred meters of the LZ,” Buddy recalled. Army AH-64 Apache gunships, flying cover for both ground forces and the Chinooks, punched in and out of the deck of low clouds as violent gusts descended upon the LZ from a nearby line of thunderstorms, the winds slamming the helicopters.

  Buddy and Bryan locked their shoulder harnesses as they approached the point where they would begin their descent. Comparing their airspeed with their ground speed, they realized they were being gusted by a tailwind, so they flew away and approached from the opposite direction, wrestling the Chinook against the winds howling over the high mountain ridge. As they began their approach, they saw the trees below swirling under the press of wind and the Chinook’s powerful rotor systems. Under Kirk’s guidance, at roughly 150 feet above tree-top level, Buddy began a descent onto Honey Eater.

  Left to right: CW2 Bryan Nichols, Sergeant First Class Kirk Kuykendall, Captain Justin “Buddy” Lee, Sergeant John Brooks, and Sergeant Ezekiel Crozier sitting on the ramp of the Extortion 17 CH-47D Chinook in a photo taken just two hours prior to downing, June 25, 2011. Credit 19

  Pop! Pop! Pop! Three blinding yellow-blue flashes burst off the right rear of Extortion 17. Passengers inside heard what they thought was gunfire impacting the aircraft. Buddy felt both the cyclic and the thrust control jerk. “Like someone grabbed them and jolted them,” he recalled. The rear of Extortion pitched downward, just as Turbine 33’s had after the deadly RPG hit its rear transmission, blowing it apart.

  The helicopter entered a tail-first plunge, the cockpit view of mountains disappearing. “There was a blur through my NVGs, and in less than a half second I was staring straight up at the base of a dark sheet of clouds,” said Buddy. Extortion 17 had rotated down 20 to 25 degrees, and its tail continued to pitch toward the ground. Buddy shot a glance at his torque gauge, seeing a “torque split,” meaning one engine was producing less power than the other. He pulled thrust as he watched his engine rpms. They “remained at 100 percent, but the thrust control was at the max. I had no power left. And we were in a freefall toward the ground.” Buddy, Bryan, Kirk, Zeke, John, and their 33 passengers seemed to have mere seconds to live. If the Chinook continued to rotate, it would slam into the ground, imploding into itself, and then, less than a second after impact, as the Chinook’s fuel tanks burst, Extortion 17 would explode just as Turbine 33 had, killing everyone onboard.

  That moment would have marked the greatest single-incident loss of life in America’s modern wars, eclipsing that of the Sampson 22 crash and that of Turbine 33 by more than double. Fortunately, while the initial profile of Extortion 17’s motion toward the ground matched that of Turbine 33’s six years earlier, just over a dozen miles distant at an LZ identical in size and characteristics, Extortion 17’s rear transmission and rear rotor system remained intact, with only its right engine having failed to produce at full capacity. In contrast, the RPG fired by one of Ahmad Shah’s men had blown apart Turbine 33’s transmission and rear rotor assembly, immediately dooming the aircraft.

  Buddy recalled the words of his flight instructor at Rucker: “Never stop flying the aircraft.” As he pulled thrust to its maximum level, he also instinctively pushed forward the cyclic to try to level Extortion 17. He would be on the controls until the end, as Turbine 33’s pilots had, despite a seemingly unrecoverable situation. Buddy held the cyclic firmly with his right hand, conscious to keep his right index finger firmly locked and pointed forward, off the cyclic. “One of the lessons CW3 Rich Bovey taught me during my first combat flights in Afghanistan in 2006—one of those rules you won’t read in any book and no instructor at Rucker will ever teach you—was that if you’re going down, if you’re going to die, keep your index finger pointed straight, so nobody will hear you screaming.” The basic communication control mechanism for Chinook pilots is the trigger on the cyclic with two indents, the first activating the ICS and the second transmitting to other aircraft, including the Apaches, which record all radio traffic. Buddy did not want even a remote chance that his family and friends would one day have to hear him die. “It’s a morbid rule that I’ll never forget, and one that still haunts me.” But not like his memories of what occurred next at LZ Honey Eater would do.

  Buddy could not arrest the descent or even slow it. He had pushed the cyclic forward within a half second of the nose pitching up. But while he could not slow the aircraft’s fall, he could possibly save the lives of at least some onboard. Boeing-Vertol engineers designed the Chinook with survivability in mind, so as long as the aircraft is level when it contacts the ground, it can hit hard and still allow those onboard a chance at survival. They engineered the fuel tanks to break away from the CH-47 and the rear pylon to shear off the fuselage so that the rotor blades will not slice through the cabin.

  Even as the Chinook pitched forward toward a level attitude, however, Buddy doubted he or anyone else would survive, having begun their fall from 125 feet above the LZ. The two pilots watched the lower reaches of the trees surrounding Honey Eater streak past their c
ockpit. Their muscles tightened as they awaited their final moments, Buddy straining to keep his right index finger straight. His thoughts flashed to a Dylan Thomas work, his self-preservation instinct telling him to “rage against the dying of the light,” but he knew that the end was most likely seconds away. With “Never stop flying the aircraft!” blaring in his mind, Buddy muttered a three-word prayer, but “then we hit.”

  Extortion 17 smashed into the ground, the force of the impact slamming front and rear rotor blades into the ground, shredding them. “My goggles flew off and everything went black,” Buddy said. “My only sensation was shaking, violent shaking,” as g-forces due to impact and the gyroscopic forces of unbalanced, splintered rotors still spinning sent shock waves through the crumpling airframe. The rear rotor system hit a small field of rocks, smashing the blades, and the resulting imbalance tore the rear pylon off the Chinook, the entire rear roof shearing off like the lid of a sardine can. The pylon slammed into the ground just outside Buddy’s cockpit door.

  Within a couple of seconds, Buddy regained his vision, surprised that he had lived. What he saw, however, meant he might not live much longer: the bright yellow of a fire. “I had to escape and try to help other survivors escape—if there were any.” He could hear the waning scream of one of the CH-47’s powerful turboshaft engines and smell jet fuel, then fumes and smoke, and he felt heat on his face. At Rucker, Buddy’s instructors had taught him that he had only one priority during a ground fire—get out of the aircraft—and he screamed those words to himself in his head. As his vision clarified further, he saw that a ring of fire encircled the helicopter.