The Final Mission of Extortion 17

by Ed Darack

  “LZ is ice,” responded Scott in Pitch Black 70, indicating that there was no enemy or potential enemy activity anywhere around the LZ. Dave Carter guided the gently descending Chinook into its last five miles of the infil flight, banking left into the narrow western Tangi.

  “Slasher 02. Extortion 17. Request sparkle,” Bryan said, asking Slasher to illuminate the LZ, hidden in the pitch darkness of the moonless night, with the AC-130’s bank of powerful infrared floodlights.

  “Extortion 17. Slasher 02. Burn is on,” one of the AC-130’s pilots responded after illuminating the LZ.

  As he eyed the football field’s worth of light centered on the small LZ, Bryan responded, “Burn in sight.” (While some pilots use the terms interchangeably, “sparkle” typically references a laser pointer, while “burn” indicates battlefield floodlight illumination.)

  As Sievers flew Pitch Black 45 and continued to scan the area around the IRF LZ with the Apache’s TADS/PNVS, Randell searched for Extortion 17’s infrared strobe through his NVGs. Their Apache crossed over the northern edge of the Green Zone and passed above the toe of the Peninsula. As Randell scanned for the inbound Chinook, others of Pitch Black 45 and 70 scanned the area of the Green Zone and adjacent valley walls to the southeast of the IRF LZ, as that swath of the Tangi included the positions of the only known and suspected enemy fighters.

  “Pitch Black, this is Extortion 17. One minute—one minute,” Bryan transmitted at 2:38:34 as Dave guided Extortion 17 through the Tangi Valley 250 feet over the Logar River at 69 mph. The IRF unbuckled their seat belts and prepared to storm down the helicopter’s loading ramp that Patrick Hamburger was ready to lower as soon as the CH-47’s wheels came to rest on the ground. The strike force would then push to the southeast. As they approached the tiny village of Khan Khel, the IRF LZ shone brighter and larger in the pilots’ fields of view with each passing second, with Slasher burning the ground from more than a mile aloft. Fully aware that in seconds they would enter the most dangerous leg of the flight, Alex Bennett and Spencer Duncan, each manning an M240 machine gun, scanned for signs of enemy fighters from their respective sides of the Chinook. Patrick also searched for threats, ready to return fire with his M4 carbine from the ramp.

  “Copy. One minute. Burn is still on,” responded Quiros to Bryan at 2:38:37. (Specific times in this chapter, along with direct quotes from those on Extortion 17, are drawn from the Colt Report, the official after-incident investigation.) The men of Extortion 17, given the rural setting and moonless night, could likely detect only a few dim lights in the villages they approached through their NVGs; the valley probably appeared nearly deserted and placid. Quiros, Robertson, and Sievers, however, continued to scan for possible enemy activity in the area.

  “Extortion, Black 1 [Pitch Black 45]. LZ is still ice,” Quiros transmitted at 2:38:56. At that point, Randell still had not detected Extortion 17’s strobe. Seconds later, at 2:39:12, with Pitch Black 45 at a due-north heading along its circular path above the top of the Peninsula, Randell found the inbound Chinook’s navigation light exactly two miles northwest of the Apache as the CH-47 passed Khan Khel.

  “All right, I got Extortion in sight,” Randell said to Sievers over Pitch Black 45’s ICS. Just seconds later, Extortion 17 would fly over the narrowest transect of the Tangi’s Green Zone, which separates the villages of Juy Zarin on the valley’s north side from Hasan Khel on its south, a span of just a 10th of a mile.

  “OK. Where they at? I don’t have them,” Sievers responded.

  “They’re a…coming—,” responded Randell.

  “Extortion 17. Black 2,” Quiros in Pitch Black 70 said, and transmitted the LZ’s conditions to Bryan and Dave: “Mild, light dust and winds are currently out of the north.”

  “I got ’em,” Sievers said to Randell as he spotted the inbound Chinook a few seconds into Quiros’s transmission to Extortion 17. The Apache pilots were listening to radio traffic on a number of nets as they tended to their tasks.

  “All right, good copy,” responded Bryan to Quiros at 2:39:34 as Extortion 17 closed on the RP and the slightly more distant LZ, the infil flight’s destination just over a half mile to the southeast at the moment of Bryan’s transmission to Pitch Black 70.

  While the aircraft was visually undetectable to anyone in the villages of Khan Khel, Juy Zarin, and Hasan Khel, no system or tactic could muffle the din sent in all directions by the approaching six 30-foot-long airfoils, which spun at 225 rpm, spiked by the roaring whine of two Lycoming T55 turboshaft engines that together produced nearly 10,000 horsepower to turn the rotors more than four times per second.

  Possibly on guard from the eruptive blasts of the distant engagements hours earlier at Lefty Grove’s target complex—two and a half miles to the southeast—or stirred by Extortion 17’s acoustic announcement of its ingress from the northwest, two militants, “Chupan” and “Ayubi,” then completely unknown to U.S. forces, emerged from a well-entrenched, undetectable hide near the edge of the Green Zone in Hasan Khel as the Chinook approached. As Dave and Bryan eyed the LZ and Bryan prepared to make the 30-second inbound call at the flight’s RP, the fighters readied three RPG-7 launchers, each loaded with Bulgarian-manufactured OG-7V 40mm fragmentation antipersonnel rounds. Extortion 17 flew on at 46 mph at about 100 feet above the Logar River, just under a half mile and a little more than 30 seconds from the LZ.

  Statistics were not on the side of the RPG-wielding duo. Over the course of the war in Afghanistan, pilots filed hundreds of reports of RPG shots fired at American and coalition helicopters, but only a few actually connected with aircraft. Furthermore, those attacks likely represent just a fraction of the RPGs actually fired. They are unguided ballistic weapons, subject to factors such as wind, air temperature, and dust, as well as manufacturing variations. Even steadily aimed shots fired at stationary targets at close range during the day could easily miss.

  Chance, however, had interdicted a few times prior to that early August morning, most notably with the downing of Turbine 33 during Operation Red Wings and, less famously, in July 2010 in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province with the downing of a Marine Corps AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter. The little-known Helmand incident proved that an immense level of luck was needed for a successful downing and demonstrated how serendipitous conditions must coalesce at an exact point in time for an attacker to hit a moving helicopter with an RPG. The fighter who hit the Cobra did so while the helicopter’s pilots flew at 500 feet above the ground. The rocket also impacted the Cobra’s tail boom, which was less than a foot wide. Immense luck, indeed. The subsequent crash killed both aviators.

  Over the years, however, the enemy developed tactics and techniques to stack the odds a bit more in their favor, most notably by volley firing, in which small groups of fighters shot as many rockets as possible in the general direction of a helicopter, statistically increasing their chances of a hit despite their inaccuracy. With the U.S. military having honed the nation’s warfighting capability—including survivability—to such a great extent following Operation Eagle Claw, enemy fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan had few options for large, attention-grabbing strikes. Their two notable tactics were IED attacks and helicopter downings, both of which they pursued with vehemence. Despite the risks of emerging from cover to shoot, and despite the low probability of success, Taliban and other insurgent and terrorist fighters felt that the reward of media attention made the danger worthwhile, and they took every chance to shoot a U.S. helicopter out of the sky using inexpensive, unguided RPG rounds.

  Each fighter took aim at the dim silhouette of the forward right quarter of the approaching Chinook, its form backlit just enough by starlight that their well-adjusted eyes could identify its general location and target it. Despite the Chinook’s overall length of 99 feet from rotor tip to rotor tip, the shooters did not have a sideward “barn door” view of the swift aircraft. Rather, they saw it from an angle of roughly 60 degrees, meaning that the CH-47 spanned an effective 70 feet side to
side. More important, the aircraft occupied just six degrees of arc (space in the sky) from their distance of just over 200 yards. This compares to a roughly tennis-ball-sized object held at slightly over two feet from an observer’s eyes. Although a Chinook seems large when you are standing next to one, it becomes a tiny target for a weapon such as an RPG at the two shooters’ range. Furthermore, that six-degrees-of-arc target was moving, and this was the darkest night of the month. The shot really required a virtually unimaginable level of chance to connect.

  At 2:39:45, the fighters each fired a shot in quick succession as the helicopter flew past a point almost due north of them. Flying 1.29 miles east of Extortion 17, Randell saw an explosive flash of light as powerful charges dispatched each of the rockets. Alex Bennett, manning the right-door gun, saw both flashes, and he immediately aimed and fired his M240. A stream of brass casings fell onto the Green Zone below as Alex loosed dozens of 7.62mm rounds per second into the location where he saw the bursts through his NVGs. The first rocket, fired by Ayubi, screamed toward the Chinook at 262 mph. “I saw a bright flash, followed by a comet-like stream of sparks leaving the RPG shot,” Slasher 02’s aircraft commander said, the explosive launch pulling his attention away from the IRF LZ. The rocket flew harmlessly past Extortion 17 and crashed into the Green Zone after traveling 350 to 400 meters.

  “There’s another explosion. There’s another explosion,” Randell said to Sievers in Pitch Black 45 at 2:39:46, just as the two flew past the top of the Peninsula.

  “I saw a flash. You see a flash?” Quiros asked Robertson in Pitch Black 70, also at 2:39:46.

  “They’re bein’ shot at!” Robertson replied. The second RPG, dispatched by Chupan less than a second after his partner fired, flew toward the approaching Chinook. As Bryan and Dave calmly piloted Extortion 17 toward their destination and as Alex returned fire against the attackers—the pilots and crew functioning seamlessly and, in the words of John Edgemon, “in the spirit of highest valor”—the rocket sailed harmlessly between the blades of the forward rotor system. It then entered the pathway of the aft system just as Ayubi fired a third round, but by the time that third rocket reached his target, the target was gone.

  At 2:39:47, after flying 217 meters in just under two seconds, the second round struck one of the clockwise-spinning aft rotor blades, the detonation blowing 122 inches—more than 10 feet—off the airfoil. Within one rotation—less than a quarter-second—the asymmetric gyroscopic forces generated by the imbalance ripped the rear pylon off Extortion 17. The forward rotor system then hurled the fuselage into a violent clockwise spin. The abrupt lurch generated 100-plus g-forces, painlessly knocking unconscious and killing all 39 onboard in less than half a second. Extortion 17 plummeted onto the Green Zone as its forward pylon tore away, the mass of wreckage erupting in a fireball just north of the Logar River. The third RPG round sailed into an orchard.

  “They’re down! They’re down!” Randell yelled to Sievers at 2:39:54. “Holy —! Get over to it!” Randell said.

  “You on it, Randell?!” CW3 Robertson transmitted to Randell from Pitch Black 70 as Randell and Sievers turned the TADS/PNVS system away from the IRF LZ and toward the village of Hasan Khel. At 2:40:10, Juy Zarin and Hasan Khel swept into view of Pitch Black 45’s sensor. Between the two villages on the pilots’ screens and in their monocles was a billowing white streamer rising into the night—flames and hot smoke from the burning wreckage of Extortion 17.

  “I’m on it!” Randell responded to Robertson in Pitch Black 70. “Extortion is down!”

  Inside Pitch Black 70, which flew 500 feet higher and to the rear of Pitch Black 45, maintaining a close watch on the IRF LZ, Quiros and Robertson slewed their Apache’s sensor onto the fireball at 2:40:12. “Coalition traffic! Coalition traffic! We have a fallen angel! Fallen angel! This is Pitch Black 70,” Quiros transmitted over the Common Traffic Advisory Frequency (CTAF), a radio net monitored by all military aircraft in Afghanistan. The term “fallen angel” strikes more fear into military aviators than any other. Quiros and Robertson zoomed their TADS/PNVS onto the burning wreckage, searching for survivors. But only flames and secondary explosions from weapons carried by members of Team Logar appeared on the scanner’s displays. The flames burned so hot that the scan whited out their screens.

  “Coalition traffic. Anybody out there. We have a fallen angel. Pitch Black 70. CTAF.”

  “Extortion 14, Hotel 17, say location,” responded Buddy Lee, the pilot-in-command of Extortion 14 over CTAF, noting his geographic reporting point, Hotel 17. Buddy had been supporting an operation in another part of Task Force Knighthawk’s area of operations.

  “Location Tangi Valley! Tangi Valley! And we’re up on 338.45, uniform, in the green, plain text,” Quiros responded, noting his communication net frequency as a flurry of traffic lit up all pilots’ radios. “Right now we’re currently at one Chinook down, how copy?”

  “That’s a good copy, we’ll relay to Knighthawk via SATCOM,” Buddy responded, then contacted Task Force Knighthawk’s senior command to trigger them to spin up their search and recovery elements to move toward the crash site. Hotel 17 referenced a point just 15 miles south of FOB Shank, giving a clear view into the Tangi Valley to the west. Headed northbound, returning to Shank from a flight to the south of the base, Buddy looked into the Tangi and saw the glow of the Extortion 17 conflagration through his NVGs.

  The village of Hasan Khel, with locations significant to the downing of Extortion 17, in a photo taken in November 2011. (A) Location where CW2 Randell DeWitt saw, from 1.29 miles east of this location through NVGs, the RPG that downed Extortion 17 originate. He engaged this location with a 10-round burst of 30mm high-explosive rounds from Pitch Black 1, his AH-64 Apache gunship, and afterward fired six more 10-round bursts. (B) The Colt Report’s assessed point of origin site, based not on the testimony of Randell and other Apache pilots but on that of two night-vision sensor operators in an AC-130 gunship (who, like the Apache pilots, focused on the area surrounding the designated Extortion 17 LZ, which posed the greatest risk). The two said they believed the point of origin was a “turret” on the corner of a building in Hasan Khel. They were 8,000 feet (1.51 miles) above the village. (C) Point where RPG impacted Extortion 17’s rear rotor system blade, severing 122 inches and causing it to become catastrophically unbalanced; extreme g-forces killed all onboard in 0.1 to 0.2 seconds. (D) Impact site. Image taken looking east from 1,000 feet above ground level. Credit 30

  “Slasher 02. Contact,” the commander of the AC-130 gunship transmitted at 2:40:14, formally indicating enemy contact. At that point, all elements, ground and air, transitioned to a combat search and rescue (CSAR) stance.

  “I couldn’t tell exactly where the shots came from,” recalled Randell of the downing that he witnessed through his NVGs from 1.29 miles to the east. “But I had a pretty good idea.” Captain Sievers increased Pitch Black 45’s airspeed from 92 to 135 mph and put the Apache into an attack dive. Randell flipped up his NVGs, returned to the TADS system, and placed the crosshairs on the top of a small bluff just a few yards from the northern edge of Hasan Khel where he believed he had seen the enemy fire the fatal RPG round. Then, at 2:40:15, Randell responded to Slasher 02’s call of enemy contact.

  “Roger. WASing gun,” Two seconds later, as Sievers continued the attack dive through the northwestern quadrant of the aircraft’s orbit, an X appeared at the center of the TADS gun site. With the burning wreckage visible on the lower left of the TADS screen, Randell fired a burst of 10 high-explosive rounds from just under a half mile to the target, throwing deadly shrapnel in all directions throughout the 20-yard impact zone. Seconds later, with the Apache now flying at 140 mph at a nearly due west heading, Randell aimed the gun onto a location 50 feet west of the site of the first burst, then fired another volley from four-tenths of a mile. A 100-foot-long plume of dirt rose into the air. Over the next nine seconds, he fired five more 10-round bursts, all at locations surrounding the suspected shooter site
, but neither he nor Sievers detected any enemy fighters—dead or alive. He had fired 70 rounds, and the earth was peppered with glowing dots as seen through the TADS.

  Although it was not recorded due to a hardware malfunction, crew on Slasher 02 believed that they saw the shooters’ point-of-origin site: a turret atop a building about 90 yards southeast of the location Randell believed the shooters used. Continuing to monitor that site, the crew saw individuals passing “items” among themselves, although neither they nor any of the Pitch Black pilots could positively identify hostile intent and saw no weapons. “If I see anyone with a weapon, I’m firing,” Randell said, his voice strained by the magnitude of the loss as he and Sievers searched courtyards, houses, fields, orchards, and roads in the area.

  Area where a Taliban insurgent shot down Extortion 17 during its approach to its intended LZ in the Tangi Valley on August 6, 2011. Credit 31

  An RC-12 Guardrail aircraft that arrived later intercepted two-way radio transmissions indicating that fighters in the area intended to engage Americans who arrived to search for possible survivors. They planned to attempt to down more aircraft and to place IEDs on all roads leading into the area to kill or maim those aiding the recovery effort.

  As seconds turned into minutes and the gravity of the loss became apparent to the pilots on station and those on the ground at the Lefty Grove compound, more aircraft arrived to aid the CSAR effort. Over the following hours, aircraft that arrived on station to assist included an Air Force B-1B bomber, Air Force A-10s to undertake their “Sandy” CSAR roles—a mission set for which A-10 pilots train extensively—RC-12 Guardrails, MC-12 Liberties, a Predator, an EC-130 “Commando Solo” electronic warfare aircraft that included SIGINT capabilities, a Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare and SIGINT aircraft to remotely render any radio-controlled IED useless, Task Force Knighthawk AH-64 Apaches, UH-60 Blackhawks, Air Force AC-130 gunships, and 160th SOAR(A) MH-47 Chinooks.