“Miller is one hundred percent checked out—I need a replacement,” I radioed to Bundermann. “And whoever you send, have him bring an IV with him. We need to get Miller rehydrated.”
A minute or two later, Raz crouched down next to me. We were no longer taking direct fire from the mosque, but we were still getting hit from every other direction. The walls continued to shake, and every minute or two another bullet drilled through the ceiling and buried itself in the floor, creating yet another pencil-sized beam of light.
“We’re not gonna make it outta here, are we?” asked Raz, looking me straight in the face.
I met his stare.
“We’re doin’ all right,” I replied.
To be honest, I’m not sure that I believed that, but it seemed like the right thing to say. And perhaps it was, because right about then the east door swung open and Miller’s replacement burst inside carrying an IV bag, along with a radio strapped to his back, a notebook in his hand, and sticking out of the breast pocket on his uniform, a fistful of colored pens.
Bundermann had just done us a solid.
Armando Avalos, who we called “Red Bull,” was our best forward observer. Nobody at Keating was better at identifying target grids, running the necessary calculations, and calling in artillery and air strikes where we most needed them.
Avalos lost no time in getting down to business. Taking my position along the far wall with its view through the west door, he spread out his maps, keyed up his radio, and swiftly called in a fire mission from Fritsche, were the gun crew had finally secured access to their mortar pit and was now ready to start laying 120-mm rounds anywhere we needed.
Unfortunately, that didn’t last long.
Armando Avalos on the Putting Green
During the initial attack on Fritsche, the ballistics computer in its mortar pit had been knocked out. After regaining control of the pit, the gun crew had attempted to jury-rig a fix to that problem. But the very first round that Avalos called in missed its intended target—the village of Urmul—by such a huge margin that Avalos wasn’t even certain the shell had come from Fritsche. It landed less than thirty yards in front of the Shura Building.
“Repeat,” he said, calling for another round.
When the second round exploded in exactly the same spot, he concluded that it was too dangerous to keep calling in fire missions from Fritsche: the odds of a mortar round landing on top of us were simply too high. So Avalos—who had unzipped his pants and was now attending to some important personal business by squatting on top of an empty box of .50-caliber machine-gun ammo while continuing to work his radio—turned to a weapons system that was quite a bit more complicated than a single 120-mm mortar tube, but potentially far more devastating.
Ever since the start of the attack on Keating, army and air force aviation units at Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Bagram had been scrambling to respond. Over the past several hours, the commanders of those units had been assembling an airborne armada in the skies high above Keating—a dizzying array of fixed-wing attack and surveillance planes, each carrying an assortment of either weapons and bombs or cameras, video feeds, and electronic-jamming technology.
The sheer range and number of aircraft up there was matched only by the complexity of coordinating this mess and keeping its moving parts from smashing into one another. That task, which would directly affect whether we could continue holding out, was now being performed by a twin-tailed fighter jet that was never intended to serve as a flying air-traffic control tower—and which was being flown by two guys whose nicknames were Ox and Finch.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ox and Finch
AT SIX FIFTEEN THAT MORNING, a pair of F-15E fighter jets on the tarmac at Bagram Airfield, just outside of Kabul, were ordered to get into the air and fly to the relief of Keating. In the cockpit of one of those planes was a captain named Michal Polidor, whose call sign was “Ox.” Sitting directly behind Polidor and serving as the plane’s weapons systems officer or WSO (pronounced “wizzo”) was first lieutenant Aaron Dove, whose call sign was “Finch.” He was responsible for navigation and targeting from the back seat of the jet’s cockpit. Their aircraft, which was identified as “Dude 01,” was armed with a 20-mm machine gun and five five-hundred-pound smart bombs (two laser-guided and three GPS-guided), plus one two-thousand-pound bomb, all of which could be guided onto their targets from up to ten miles away.
When Dude 01 reached Keating, Polidor and his wingman—Captain Justin Elliot, who was piloting the second F-15—were briefed by the pilots of another pair of F-15s who were already in the air and just coming off of a night mission when they’d been summoned to Keating. Having arrived a few minutes earlier, those two planes had already dropped most of their smart bombs along the Switchbacks. Running low on fuel, they returned to Bagram while Polidor and Elliot saturated the Switchbacks with additional bombs and conducted strafing runs with their cannons.
As Elliot was dropping his first bomb, his fighter experienced a severe hydraulic failure, which meant that he too was forced to return to base. It was then that Ox and Finch began to grasp the magnitude and severity of the assault on Keating.
From his position in the rear of the cockpit, Dove stared into his targeting pod and counted as many as eight separate fires burning inside the compound, as well as dozens of rocket explosions. Along the surrounding hillsides and ridgelines there were too many muzzle flashes for him to tally, but they formed a 360-degree ring of fire around the outpost. From Polidor’s vantage in the front of the aircraft, it looked like the Fourth of July.
As bad as the situation appeared to be on the ground, the two pilots were no less struck by the confusion in the air around them. On the cockpit’s radio, operators were simultaneously flooding them with information, questions, and requests on three separate channels.
Meanwhile, additional aircraft were approaching from all directions. Lewallen and his team of Apache pilots were on their way from Jalalabad. Taking off from Kandahar were several A-10 Thunderbolts, a relatively slow-flying, twin-engine fighter known as a “Warthog” that is designed to provide close air support against tanks and other armored vehicles. More F-15s would soon be joining the fight from Bagram, along with a hodgepodge of drones and other aircraft. In short, a host of planes from the army, the air force, and even the navy was in the sky—and not all of these aviators could speak, either to one another or to their counterparts on the ground. Moreover, there was no one on hand to coordinate their movements.
In the vernacular used by pilots, the section of a battle zone to which the aircraft providing close air support are assigned is known as the “kill box.” Inside this box, even minor communications glitches can result in bombs that are dropped in the wrong place, gun runs that target friendly forces, or midair collisions.
The process of choreographing the midair dance within the kill box is called deconflicting the airspace, and that job usually falls to one aircraft that is responsible for operating the airborne warning and control system, or AWACS. That plane, which is larger than a Boeing 707, is readily identified by the distinctive radar dome that is mounted above its fuselage and has a crew that specializes in the complex and potentially deadly task of providing air-traffic control in a combat environment.
Needless to say, this isn’t the sort of endeavor that can easily be taken on by the crew of an aircraft that’s not specially equipped to coordinate an areal battle scene. A plane like, say, Michal Polidor’s F-15 Strike Eagle, which, apart from its avionics and its electronic gadgetry, basically consists of a couple of fuel tanks and some horrifically deadly armaments strapped to a pair of Pratt & Whitney afterburning turbofan jet engines. What’s more, stepping into this role on the fly (both literally and figuratively) wasn’t something that either Polidor or Dove had specifically trained for.
Nevertheless, someone had to do it—and despite the fact that this sort of thing wasn’t ex
actly in his wheelhouse, there were a few elements that helped to stack the odds in Polidor’s favor.
The cockpit of an F-15 features a shockingly complex array of aeronautics sensors that are capable of delivering multiple streams of information about not only the fighter jet itself but also its surrounding environment: enemy aircraft, targets, and weather, along with a host of other variables. Directly in front of both the pilot and the wizzo, and also stacked on both sides, are rows of screens that are aglow with incoming radar signals. Inside their helmets there are three separate radio links, plus an intercom that they use to speak to each other. The multiple streams of data spew out with a speed and density that makes it feel like the informational equivalent of being hit in the face by a fire hydrant. It’s far more than most ordinary people have the bandwidth to handle.
As a fighter pilot, Polidor had been trained not only to process this sort of overload but also to channel it into crisp decisions and responses. It also probably helped that while maintaining a 3.9 GPA as a cadet majoring in astronautical engineering at the Air Force Academy, he’d played as starting goaltender on the school’s hockey team. But more than anything else, what may have bolstered his resolve to step into an unfamiliar role had less to do with his skills and training and more to do with an idea.
Back at Bagram Airfield, the 335th Fighter Squadron had a little sign hanging next to a door leading out to the flight deck that read as follows: THE MISSION IS AN EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD WITH A RIFLE. EVERYTHING ELSE IS SUPPORT.
Those words, which Polidor and his colleagues had to pass by every time they headed out to the tarmac, reminded them that they were a small—albeit vitally important—piece in an intricate machine. It was also an affirmation of a core principle: the notion that an aviator’s sense of purpose lay in serving the soldiers who performed the dirtiest job in the military and who, by dint of that, embodied the purest essence of war. An airman’s highest duty lay in doing whatever was necessary to buttress the men with boots on the ground.
That philosophy, more than anything else, helps explain why Polidor, after using up almost every armament and munition on board his fighter to pound the Taliban fighters on the Switchbacks, immediately set about turning his Strike Eagle into a miniature version of an AWACS.
• • •
POLIDOR’S FIRST TASK was to start deconflicting the planes that were arriving on station to ensure that none of them were attempting to fly through the same section of sky at the same time. So after setting himself up as a command-and-control nexus for radio communications, he started separating out the aircraft and assigning them to different sectors. The key to this lay in what’s called the “stack,” a concept best grasped by imagining a massive cyclone spinning in the air near Keating. The top of that vortex was thirty thousand feet high, and each thousand-foot layer or “window” beneath was reserved for a particular type of aircraft.
The highest levels of the stack were slated for the surveillance drones and unmanned aerial vehicles: MQ-9 Reapers and MQ-1 Predators that had started arriving from the airfields at Kandahar and Bagram as early as 7:20 a.m., and which Polidor placed by directing their operations teams, members of which were posted as far away as Creech Air Force Base just north of Las Vegas, Nevada—to establish orbits between twenty-five thousand and twenty-three thousand feet.
Below the drones but roughly fifty miles away from the main stack were three KC-135 Stratotankers and a KC-10 Extender—flying gas stations that would enable the fleet to stay aloft for many hours. Directly inside the stack there was also an RC-135, a plane as large as a tanker whose crew had electronic warfare countermeasures that included the ability to selectively monitor and jam the cell phones that the Taliban were using to communicate.
This hodgepodge, which arrived from airfields as far north as Kyrgyzstan and as far east as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, would eventually grow to include a U-28A surveillance plane that would later provide reconnaissance for a special forces team that was set to be flown into the area shortly after nightfall, along with an AC-130H Spectre gunship (also known as “Spooky”) that was armed with—among many other features—a five-barrel rotary cannon that can fire eighteen hundred rounds per minute.
Underneath all of this were the strikers, the F-15s and the A-10 Warthogs that would conduct strafing runs and bomb drops. Finally, the very bottom layer—anything below three thousand feet—was reserved for rotary: the Apaches that were conducting their gun runs and missile strikes, as well as the Black Hawks that were poised to swoop in to medevac our wounded the moment that we were able to regain control of our LZ.
Communications were so tangled that it was twenty minutes before Polidor and Dove were able to figure out who was talking over the radio, where they were transmitting from, and what they were trying to say. Straightening out the mess and getting the stack sorted took the better part of an hour. (One of the biggest challenges arose because the mountainous terrain blocked radio transmissions from the ground to any aircraft that did not have a direct line of sight with either Keating or Bostick.) But even before they had everything under control, Polidor and Dove were grappling with the second part of their job, which involved coordinating air strikes.
This was every bit as complicated as building and managing the stack, and it involved plugging into the tail end of a jury-rigged chain of communication that started inside Keating’s command post, where Bundermann was putting together a running list of targets that needed to be destroyed:
I need for the A-10s to hit the entire North Face . . .
Let’s get the Apaches to put a Hellfire into the clinic to the east—here’s the grid location . . .
I want bombs on these two TCPs along the Switchbacks . . .
Those air-strike requests, which were based on information that Bundermann was getting mostly from me, Avalos, and Adams (who was Blue Platoon’s forward observer), were passed to Cason Shrode, who was with Bundermann inside the command post and whose responsibility included handling all communications concerning air support. The unspoken message from Bundermann that accompanied each here’s-what-I-want-and-where-I-want-it request was: I don’t give a shit how you make this work—just figure it out.
Part of Shrode’s training—and a big reason why he was good at his job—had involved mastering a highly specialized system of communicating with the air force operators who assign targets to the pilots conducting air strikes. These operators are known as joint terminal attack controllers, or JTACs, and during the battle for Keating, Shrode was communicating with two of these specialists—Senior Airman Angel Montes and Airman First Class Stephen Kellams—both of whom were inside the command post at Bostick. Once the JTACs received the target coordinates from Shrode, they would relay the information up to Polidor.
What all of this meant was that Polidor’s Strike Eagle was now serving as a flying relay station for three different army bases while simultaneously managing a multilayered armada of nineteen separate war planes, each moving into and out of a battle space spread across thirty thousand vertical feet of sky. Working together, Polidor and Dove had to lay out target coordinates and elevations, relay final clearance on air strikes, and set priorities on which planes were assigned to which targets. They had to move aircraft up and down within the stack whenever a new arrival came on station. Each time the Apaches returned to the battle space, they had to lift the floor of the stack and push everything inside it up another three thousand feet in order to allow the helicopters to move directly to their targets. And whenever a two-thousand-pound bomb was dropped from a fixed-wing aircraft inside the stack, the Apaches had to be moved a safe distance away so that they weren’t knocked out of the sky by the blasts from those enormous bombs. But there was much more.
They had to make sure that everyone was able to pay a visit to the tankers before running out of fuel, and they had to handle any emergencies that arose within the stack. (One plane’s cockpit depressurized, fo
rcing it to return to base.) They had to cope with spotty communications as the radio signals linking them to Bostick and to other aircraft—especially the Apaches—were degraded by the mountainous terrain. They had to monitor the cloud cover (which was getting ever more dense) and the weather, which was rapidly deteriorating as a series of massive thunderstorms began moving east across the Kunar Valley, impairing visibility and eventually causing dangerous levels of ice to build up on the wings of the aircraft at the top of the stack. (For jets that were jockeying to obtain fuel from the air tankers amid the worst parts of these storms, the rain and hail reduced visibility to as little as ten feet.) They had to double-check grid coordinates to confirm that bombs weren’t being mistakenly dropped inside Keating’s perimeter (Dove discovered two such errors and directed the attacks to be aborted before munitions were released). They had to make sure that none of the bombs that were plummeting through the kill box accidentally struck another American plane. And while they did all of those things, Polidor also had to keep an eye on his altitude, attitude, fuel level, and a litany of other details as he attended, not incidentally, to the business of flying one of the world’s most sophisticated jets.
It’s almost impossible for someone who hasn’t sat inside the cockpit of a fighter to imagine the mind-boggling complexity of what Polidor and Dove were doing. And yet all of this was unfolding without a single soldier down on the ground at Keating—with the possible exception of Cason Shrode—having the faintest clue of what was happening. But what amazes me most is that this superbly calibrated, exquisitely tuned, and unimaginably expensive war machine—this marvel of aeronautic engineering and communications wizardry and weapons technology—was at the beck and call of one man with a radio strapped to his back. A sergeant from Stockton, California, who called himself “Red Bull” and who, right now—more than four hours into the Battle for COP Keating—was calling fire missions through the western door of the Shura Building with his pants around his ankles while he squatted over an empty ammo box and took a dump.
Red Platoon Page 26
