The Final Mission of Extortion 17
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Instinctively, as he had done upside down and submerged inside the helo-dunker at Rucker, he ran through his escape drill and executed it even though he could not see clearly. He first released his restraint system. “In dunker training, it’s all about muscle memory. If you’re in the right seat like I was, you take your right hand and smack the right side of your helmet.” Then, just as he’d practiced and been instructed, he rotated his palm 180 degrees and reached out to the side of the cockpit, grabbed the handle that he really hoped he would feel, as he had the six times in the dunker, “and then I yanked it as hard as I could.” The door released and crashed to the ground next to the smoldering rear pylon. But before jumping out, he looked toward Bryan, seeing his blurry figure releasing his own restraint. He would get out as well.
Flames shot higher into the night sky as Buddy rolled out of Extortion 17’s cockpit onto the ground. His vision regained clarity just in time for him to search for some place to run—he was surrounded by a wall of burning wreckage. Finding a hole in the debris, he sprinted past the nose of the aircraft, squeezing between the flames and the Chinook, and continued for about 40 feet. “Then I stopped and turned to look to make sure Bryan made it out.” Seeing Bryan’s outline running toward him, Buddy breathed a sigh of relief. Bryan had even already pulled his flight helmet off his head. “Mine was still on, so I couldn’t hear much of anything at that point.”
The two grabbed each other, each yelling, “Are you OK?” and “Yes!” back and forth for a few seconds.
“We gotta check on the others!” Buddy and Bryan both shouted, feeling the heat from the flames as their eyes adjusted to the flickering yellow light of the fire. The two then ran to the back of the helicopter to render aid to other survivors. As noted, Extortion 17 carried three crewmembers and 33 U.S. Army personnel and Afghan soldiers. “And I feared that I’d see a lot of dead bodies,” Buddy recalled. “As hard as we impacted, I just knew there’d be KIA [killed in action] inside the Chinook and possibly some thrown outside.” He ran to the back of the CH-47 and heard yelling, then saw Zeke sprawled atop the Chinook’s ramp. “I thought he was dead, dead for sure, by the way he was just lying there.”
Buddy then looked into the hold of the Chinook. When he’d pushed the cyclic forward, the aircraft had actually rotated just beyond a level attitude to go slightly nose-down, which gave the CH-47 a bit of forward airspeed. Although he intended to come down level, the over-rotation saved all onboard. “Everyone flew forward.” When the rear pylon tore off the aircraft, heavy chunks of metal plummeted into the helicopter’s rear, which could have killed or seriously injured anyone they struck. Zeke was the only exception: he was hurled forward with the others, but his monkey harness slung him back. “So by the light of the fire I see that Zeke is probably dead,” Buddy recalled.
Bryan knelt down next to 27-year-old Zeke to check his vitals as Buddy checked on the others in the hold of the CH-47. “Zeke’s alive!” Bryan yelled. “He’s breathing!” Buddy heard groaning and swearing coming from those thrust against the aircraft’s bulkhead and one another. Learning that one of the soldiers was a medic, Buddy directed him to help Zeke. The passengers stumbled out of the wreckage, helped by one another and by soldiers already on the ground. “There were some broken arms, broken legs, a lot of bruises, contusions, probably a dozen guys wounded, but all the passengers survived,” Buddy said. “Zeke was in bad shape but alive, and Bryan found Sergeant John Brooks, who was relatively unscathed.” Although tasked in Extortion Company as a door gunner, John had an avionics background, so Bryan directed him to “zeroize” the fills on the radios, essentially blanking them, one of the priorities during a helicopter downing.
Despite all the passengers’ survival, danger still lurked, as the jagged terrain of the LZ stopped the fuel tanks from rolling to a safe distance from the Chinook. One stopped near the wreckage, still smoldering. Then Buddy heard hissing; the fuel tanks were pressurizing from the heat. By that time, most of those in or near the aircraft had moved to safe positions. The medic, however, remained on the ramp with Zeke, awaiting a litter; he did not want to move Zeke, as the blood leaking from his nose and ears indicated a serious brain injury. “I told the medic that the tanks were full of fuel and pressurizing, and that they could blow any second.”
Buddy then realized that he had accounted for all passengers and flight crew except Kirk. He instructed Bryan to remain with Zeke and the medic as he sprinted to find Kirk. He thought that Kirk had possibly moved with the mass of passengers to a safer position, but he could not recall seeing or hearing him during the frenzy. “I started yelling for Kirk. There was nobody I was closer to than Kirk. He was my friend, in many ways a mentor. He was my consigliere. He was the guy I relied on more than anyone in Extortion Company.”
Buddy sprinted around the wreckage, yelling Kirk’s name, but he could not find even a trace of him or his passage to safer ground. Prior to the crash, Kirk had stood next to the right cabin door, just behind Buddy, the two separated by the Chinook’s bulkhead. Buddy approached the right side of the helicopter and saw that the crash had ripped the right door off the fuselage, hurling it next to the rear pylon. Buddy recalled thinking, “He’s dead, dead for sure, crushed under the aft pylon,” which housed the rear transmission and rotor head, weighing thousands of pounds.
Buddy began to think of Kirk’s close friends from his family’s perspective—it was Kirk’s wife’s husband he had to find; Kirk’s son’s and daughter’s father. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled around the pylon, trying to find anything to wedge under it to move it even slightly to find Kirk. He felt desperate and irrational. Then Buddy looked up in the waning light of the fires and saw a dim figure wearing a flight helmet limping slowly toward him. “Kirk! Kirk!” Buddy shouted. Kirk recalled the moment, too: “Buddy was yelling my name.” Buddy sprinted to him and hugged him, asking him repeatedly if he was OK. Relieved that everyone onboard had survived, Buddy now learned that the force of the impact had crushed Kirk’s right foot and torn ligaments in his right knee.
The force of the impact had knocked most onboard temporarily unconscious. When Kirk had regained consciousness, he felt a weight crushing him and a blinding light: the pylon tearing away from the Chinook. Hearing yells, Kirk worked to clear a way for the passengers to escape the wreckage, but jabs of pain shot from his foot and knee, forcing him to crawl from the debris, seeing fuel throughout the crash site.
After Buddy learned that Kirk had survived the crash, he bolted off to move Zeke away from the fireball that could erupt any second. Following the medic’s instructions, Buddy and John Brooks removed Zeke’s flight gear. As they checked him for wounds, Zeke moaning and twitching, the Big Apple Chinook that Bryan had hailed arrived. Buddy, John, and the medic carried Zeke a few hundred feet to the idling Chinook. Buddy grabbed John and pointed to Zeke, yelling over the whine of the aircraft’s engines, “No matter what, stay with him!” Kirk, too, climbed inside the Chinook with John and Zeke. Medics removed Zeke’s uniform and immediately began to check his condition as they worked to stabilize him. They flew to FOB Wright, and then an Air Force Pave Hawk flew them to Jalalabad despite dangerous weather conditions. “The ceilings were really low, too low for them to fly, but they flew us anyway. They really wanted to get Zeke on his way to Germany for the very best medical care,” Kirk said. “So they flew like just 20 feet over the river and got us back.”
Wreckage of the CH-47D Chinook, serial number 92-00306, mission call sign Extortion 17, at LZ Honey Eater. The craft was downed on the night of June 25, 2011, during Operation Hammer Down in the Watapor Valley region of Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar Province, near the border with Pakistan. Credit 20
After Kirk, Zeke, and John departed, Bryan and Buddy returned to Honey Eater, where the commander of the infantry unit they had been carrying met them. The three briefly discussed the incident and its cause. While mechanical failure was a possibility, enemy action had almost certainly caused the crash, given the a
ctive firefight in the area. A soldier already on the ground when they’d hit said that the enemy had been engaging them from close range throughout the day. Thanks to Buddy’s quick actions, however, everyone had survived. Had he not rotated the Chinook forward, they all would have died in a fireball. Regardless, as the pilot, Buddy felt responsible and apologized profusely.
An Army UH-60 air ambulance “dustoff” helicopter landed minutes later. As they lifted off, Buddy and Bryan wondered how anyone but themselves had survived; the cockpit remained intact, but the crash had eviscerated the rear of the Chinook. Bryan leaned toward Buddy and yelled, “At least we fixed the parking problem at Shank!”
The helicopter brought them to FOB Joyce, across the Kunar River from FOB Wright, where doctors checked their conditions. While they had sustained some scratches and bruising and inhaled some smoke and fumes, Bryan and Buddy were relatively unscathed. Knowing that a helicopter crash would make big news back home, Buddy and Bryan made sure to get messages to Christy and Mary. “It was the first time I ever saw Bryan’s eyes get watery,” Buddy recalled. “He was really concerned that Mary would be worried about him.”
A few hours later, at roughly three in the morning, Buddy and Bryan boarded an Army UH-60 Black Hawk that took them to J-Bad. There, Buddy and Bryan walked directly to the hospital to check on Kirk and Zeke. “I told them that I was Zeke’s commander, so they let me see him,” Buddy said. “He was unconscious, had dried blood in his ears, and wore a massive neck brace, and that was when they told me he was in a coma and might not make it.” Buddy and Bryan sat with Kirk and discussed the events at Honey Eater and those that followed. At roughly 2 p.m., an ambulance arrived for Kirk. Buddy had sent Bryan to get some sleep, but the commander wanted to wait with his “consigliere” until he departed. As medics wheeled Kirk’s gurney to an ambulance that would take him to a C-130 to fly him to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest military hospital outside the United States, Buddy told his good friend: “Don’t come back. Don’t do it anymore. Your first deployment was 22 years ago. You’ve done more than enough.”
Medics shut the ambulance door and sped away to the waiting cargo aircraft. “Kirk was gone,” Buddy recalled. “That moment was the lowest I’ve ever felt in my entire life, the absolute lowest.”
“I’ll never forget saying goodbye to Bryan, and then to Buddy,” remembered Kirk. “They put me in the ambulance, closed the back flap, and they took me to the C-130. At the moment that flap closed, I was separated from my unit. I never got to say goodbye to Spencer or Alex.” Kirk noted that after the downing, the soldiers on Honey Eater continued to engage in intense, sustained firefights. “They used the M240s from Extortion 17, and they functioned flawlessly, just like they’re supposed to work, because guys like Spencer had maintained them to top form. The soldiers used them for two confirmed kills.”
Kirk was flown to Landstuhl, then continued to recover at Fort Riley, Kansas. Kirk visited Zeke in Minnesota in early August after he had come out of his coma. During that visit, Alex Bennett sent Kirk a text message. “But because I was with Zeke, I didn’t respond.”
Because Extortion 17 had crashed at such a high altitude, military commanders in Afghanistan ordered it bombed because it was not viable to try to recover the wreckage. After Task Force Cacti withdrew from the Watapur Valley, an Air Force F-16 dropped two Joint Defense Attack Munitions (JDAMs) on LZ Honey Eater, completely obliterating what remained of the downed Chinook.
Two investigations into the cause of the downing followed: a safety investigation and a legal inquiry to determine fault, according to an anonymous Army senior warrant officer and Chinook pilot who is an expert on aircraft crash investigations and very familiar with the events of the night of June 25. Both investigations determined that the cause was “inconclusive.” “But in my opinion, they were shot down,” the expert stated, noting the active firefight and multiple reports of pops and bright flashes. Both investigations considered a number of possibilities, but because commanders had ordered the remains destroyed, no physical evidence existed; hence the inconclusive determination.
“Buddy Lee’s a hero,” said Kirk. “His leveling the aircraft saved everyone onboard that night. We all owe our lives to him.”
Buddy had his own perspective. “I didn’t do anything exceptional. I just kept flying the aircraft. Just like Mr. Girdner taught me at Fort Rucker.”
Extortion 17’s flight into the Tangi Valley on the night of August 5, 2011, could have turned harrowing or even deadly due to the altitude, the full load, the mountainous terrain, and, of course, the enemy. But the infil proceeded without a single glitch, as did the vast majority flown by Extortion Company and by Dave Carter throughout his decades-long career. Some missions, however, had forced Dave to demonstrate his mastery of the Chinook more than others. Just over a year prior to his infil in the Tangi, for example, Dave had piloted a CH-47D high over mountains on the other side of the world from Honey Eater when circumstances beyond his control struck and disaster seem assured, just as at LZ Honey Eater with Bryan Nichols and Buddy Lee. But like Buddy’s quick actions above the slopes of Gambir Sar, Dave’s quick work and calm focus kept everyone alive onboard on his craft as well.
Early in the afternoon of June 15, 2010, 18-year-old Kevin Hayne of Highlands Ranch, a Denver suburb, and a climbing partner edged up the west face of 14,043-foot-high Little Bear Peak, one of the most difficult of Colorado’s “Fourteeners,” mountains with summits higher than 14,000 feet above sea level. At 13,300 feet, at the base of the peak’s “Hourglass” section, Hayne and his friend found the route above them veneered in a sheet of thin, wet ice. Determined to reach the summit, they traversed to the north. Less than a minute later, Hayne, wearing a bright red jacket, lost his grip and tumbled hundreds of feet down the mountain. His partner called for help on his cell phone, and the Alamosa County Sheriff’s department began coordinating a search, with the Colorado Army National Guard providing aviation support.
Due to the peak’s terrain—sheer granite, house-sized boulders, and aprons of blocky talus—and its altitude—more than two vertical miles above sea level—Colorado Guard planners chose to use one of their CH-47D Chinooks, by far the best helicopter ever produced for virtually all high-mountain rescues, and chose the very best pilot to command and fly the mission: Dave Carter. “We knew it was going to be pretty sporty,” said Guard pilot CW3 Andy Bellotti, Dave’s copilot for the Little Bear mission. (Andy, an extremely experienced Chinook aviator with more than 2,000 hours of cockpit time, would himself join Extortion Company in the summer of 2011.)
Before it could lift off for the Little Bear Peak rescue, the operation required approval from the Colorado Guard adjutant, Major General H. Michael Edwards. “I knew this was a very risky mission,” he said, but he did not hesitate for a moment to grant final approval due to one reason: “Dave Carter was in the cockpit.”
Dave and Andy began the mission at roughly 3 p.m., launching from Fort Carson, outside Colorado Springs. Onboard were the normal crew of five, plus a hoist operator, two medics, and the company commander of the Colorado Army National Guard unit to which the Chinook and Dave and Andy belonged: Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 135th Aviation Regiment (2-135 AVN), based at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora. They planned to board four rescuers at Blanca, a small town nearby, for a total of 13 in the aircraft, then fly to Little Bear Peak.
Headed southwest, Dave, whom Andy called “Twitchy,” a nickname from years past, flew past Pikes Peak and crossed into the San Luis Valley. Minutes later, they landed the Chinook outside Blanca, where they loaded the search and rescue team. Back in the air, they headed for Little Bear Peak, which anchors the southwestern end of the Mount Blanca Massif, a 5-mile-long wall of 4 interconnected peaks, each with summits more than 14,000 feet above sea level. All the peaks present prospective climbers—and rescuers—with substantial difficulties and dangers, even more so than most Colorado peaks, due to their steep, difficult terrain.
Once over the search area, Dave brought the helicopter into a slow descent, carefully and precisely sweeping the Chinook left and right, allowing the pilots, crew, and rescuers to scan the entire face of the mountain. Ed Thompson, one of the crew, spotted Hayne’s red jacket. Unknown at that point to anyone in the helicopter, however, the youth already had succumbed to his injuries. “We were briefed to do a hoist operation, but the terrain was so steep that we couldn’t get close enough without a blade strike,” Andy said. At roughly 13,000 feet, one of the crew spotted a ledge possibly large enough to allow a two-wheel landing, which would allow them to let the rescuers head off the ramp to access the fallen climber. Just 10 feet from contacting the ledge, however, the two pilots realized it was unsuitable. After reconnoitering another ledge that also revealed itself to be unusable, they eyed a rock shelf at just over 13,000 feet. Dave brought the Chinook into a hover, then slowly descended toward it.