Not a Good Day to Die (36 page)

To be survivable on the battlefield, a weapons system must combine lethality with mobility and survivability. The Apache possessed the latter qualities in spades. It could perform all manner of acrobatic maneuvers that could enthrall air show audiences at air shows and confound enemies in combat, but it had also been designed by the McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Company to take a lot of punishment. It had dual redundant engines and hydraulics systems, and its critical systems, such as the rotors and driveshaft, were built to be “ballistic tolerant,” meaning they could be hit—even shot through—by anything up to a 23mm round without causing the helicopter to crash. The pilots themselves were protected by the Kevlar sidings fitted to their seats and by the flak vests each had to wear. But when the Army fielded the Apache in the mid-to late-1980s, its advertisement of these capabilities seemed only to whet the appetite of some in the media and Congress eager to find fault with a weapons system they correctly identified as part of the Reagan defense buildup.

The limited but successful role played by the Apache in the December 1989 Panama invasion was canceled out by stories claiming the helicopter couldn’t operate in the rain. A 1990 General Accounting Office report cast further doubt on the helicopter’s reliability and maintainability, and formed the basis for a November 18, 1990, CBS Television
60 Minutes
report highly critical of the Apache, as well as newspaper articles that followed a similar theme. Many issues identified in the reports were teething problems of the type that often occur shortly after weapons systems have been fielded. But to critics, they implied that the helicopter could not bear up to the strain of combat.

Much of the criticism dried up after the Apache’s superlative performance in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The Apache units deployed for that conflict achieved good operational ready rates despite the additional wear and tear the sandy conditions imposed on the helicopters, and the aircraft was credited with destroying many Iraqi tanks and other armored vehicles. In one famous encounter Iraqi soldiers actually surrendered to a hovering Apache.

But the Gulf War marked the last time that the Apache had seen combat. The U.S. military spent much of the 1990s deployed in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. Of these, the Apaches had deployed only to the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, where they were never called on to engage an enemy. This pattern was reflected in the experience levels of the pilots flying on March 2. Of the twelve pilots penciled in for the mission, only three—Carr, Hardy, and Hurley—had flown in combat. All were Desert Storm veterans, but in that war each flew a different aircraft. The dozen pilots on the mission varied in experience from Marriott, who had only about 350 flight hours, to Carr, who had over 5,000. But all shared one thing in common: None had ever flown an Apache in combat.

Each pilot placed his faith in the Apache’s combination of high-tech weapons, maneuverability, and ruggedness. But so much capability came at a high price, not only in dollars, but in the man-hours needed to keep each bird mission capable. The Apache’s maintenance-intensive profile continued to earn it a reputation as an expensive yet unreliable weapons system. In 1999 that reputation sunk to a new low when General Wesley Clark, NATO’s supreme military commander, wanted to use Apaches to attack Serb targets in the Kosovo war. In response to his request, the Pentagon deployed Task Force Hawk, an ad-hoc outfit designed around twenty-four Apaches, from Germany to Albania, but withheld permission from Clark to use it in combat. Diplomatic problems held the helicopters up in Italy for ten days, but to outside observers it seemed the helicopters themselves were at fault. That view gained strength when two Apaches crashed in the Albanian mountains during mission rehearsals, causing the deaths of two pilots. To the immense frustration of Task Force Hawk’s pilots and commanders, not to mention Clark himself, the Pentagon never allowed them to be sent into battle.

The damage to the reputations of the Apache and the Army itself was significant. Within six months the Army reacted by announcing its high-profile “Transformation” effort to design new combat units that are easier to deploy, yet no less lethal and mobile than the tank-heavy force that was victorious in the 1991 Gulf War. But the Apache could not “transform.” It was what it was, and had to stand or fall on its own merits. To many in the media, the Task Force Hawk experience raised new doubts about the helicopter.
THE APACHE: AERIAL KILLING MACHINE OR “HANGAR QUEEN”?
asked
USA Today
in a headline. The negative press—and the Pentagon brass’s implicit lack of faith in the aircraft—stung the tight-knit Apache community, which felt the helicopter had been unfairly maligned by people ignorant of the facts regarding the Task Force Hawk fiasco. It may not have been uppermost in the minds of Bill Ryan and his Apache drivers as they climbed into their cockpits and cranked their engines on that chilly March morning, but the reputation of a weapons system was riding on their performance.

4.

AFTER the chaos of the first hour, TF Hammer’s ragged convoy was back on track if not on schedule, driving east along a dirt trail toward the Whale, which they expected to see erupt in flame soon from the “fifty-five-minute” bombardment. About seven kilometers northwest of the Whale, Harriman’s four-vehicle mini-convoy split off and headed east-northeast. For about fifteen minutes the trucks carrying Harriman and the others bounced and rattled in a lazy arc that curved back southeast to connect with a wadi running northwest to southeast through the gap between the Whale and the Gawyani Ghar ridgeline. Leading the way was a small truck full of Afghans, followed by Ziabdullah, the untrustworthy militia leader, in a silver Toyota pickup. Next came Harriman’s pickup, which also contained Staff Sergeant Caleb Casenhiser, one of the A-team’s medics, and Staff Sergeant Larron “Larry” Wadsworth, one of the team’s engineers. The AFO pickup carrying Hans, Nelson, and Thor brought up the rear.

A quietly religious father of two, Harriman, thirty-four, had been sent to Kuwait in late 2001 to work in the office of Lieutenant Colonel Craig Bishop, the special operations coordinator on Mikolashek’s CFLCC staff. The warrant officer made an immediate, positive impact on those he worked with in Kuwait—” He was a super, super guy,” Bishop recalled—but he yearned to be closer to the action. When word came in January that McHale and the rest of ODA 372 were headed to Afghanistan, Harriman pleaded with Bishop to be allowed to rejoin them. The lieutenant colonel relented.

Now the short, serious warrant officer, a steadying influence on his team who enjoyed huge respect from the Afghans, was bouncing up and down in a Toyota pickup in a wadi en route to the biggest battle of the war, about as close to the action as it was possible to get. As they turned south toward the Whale, some Afghans dismounted and walked ahead of the trucks, scouting the route. The moon emerged from behind its veil of clouds to light their way. Harriman called in reports to the main body every five minutes in a matter-of-fact tone of voice: He wasn’t lost; there were no problems.

Both Harriman’s convoy and the main column were moving in a south-easterly direction toward Phase Line Emerald, a line planners had drawn from southwest to northeast about 1,500 meters west of and roughly parallel to the Whale. TF Hammer was to pause at Emerald while the air strikes went in against targets on the Whale and the eastern ridge. But soon the main column’s progress stalled again as several of Zia’s trucks got stuck in the sandy, desert-like terrain. The convoy was strung out along several kilometers west of the Whale, making it difficult for the U.S. officers and NCOs to keep track of everyone. As the Hammer troops struggled to free the vehicles, Thomas grew concerned about the threat of ambush in the Fishhook, where the convoy would have to pass through a narrow wadi between two rocky hillsides. Knowing Grim 31, the AC-130 that had just shot up the DShK position for Goody’s SEALs, was available overhead, Thomas asked the aircraft’s fourteen-man crew to check out the area and report what they saw. (Special operators of all branches placed great faith in the AC-130’s two sensors—televisionlike cameras, one geared to the infrared spectrum, the other working from the same image-intensification technology as night-vision goggles—and often used the lethal attack aircraft for reconnaissance.)

Grim 31 had arrived on station over the convoy at 2:04 a.m., taking over from another AC-130H in the first of a series of late night–early morning missions during Anaconda that would earn the crew its nickname of “The Dawn Patrol.” At first clouds had obscured the aircraft’s view of TF Hammer, but the sky cleared and the crew was able to track the convoy’s progress. However, when it flew south in response to the SEALs’ call for support during their assault on the DShK position, Grim 31 lost visual contact with the convoy. After shooting up the tent and its occupants, the AC-130 answered a call from Juliet to destroy an enemy observation post and bunker they had spotted on top of the Whale from their hideaway on the eastern ridge. Again, Grim 31 was more than equal to the task, scoring several direct hits on the positions at 4:44 a.m. Below them, the pilots saw the crude structures obliterated in bright yellow-orange flashes that blossomed and faded almost instantly.

Mako 31 then asked the AC-130 to fly back around the Finger to ensure there were no enemy survivors from the DShK position lurking in the rocks. The Grim 31 crew spotted nothing, and it was then that they received Thomas’s request to reconnoiter the Fishhook. Onboard the aircraft, the crew members knew they were getting close to “bingo” fuel—the point at which they would have to turn for home. But even had they had a full tank, dawn was barely an hour away, and that meant their time over the battlefield was drawing short. The AC-130 was the vampire of the Air Force’s fleet of attack aircraft, extraordinarily lethal at night but incredibly vulnerable in daylight. The gunship community was haunted by the memory of
Spirit 03,
an AC-130 brought down by an Iraqi SA-7 antiaircraft missile during the January 1991 battle of Khafji.
Spirit 03
had stayed on station until 6:35 a.m. to help some embattled Marines, allowing an Iraqi air defender to use the early-morning light to line up the slow-flying aircraft in his sights. The AC-130 community was determined to never again lose a plane to daylight, and prior to Anaconda the rule was that all AC-130s had to be out of Afghan airspace by dawn. Those rules had been relaxed to give the troops on the ground more coverage during Anaconda, but Grim 31 was still required by the Task Force Dagger leadership to be clear of the Shahikot area before sunrise.

The crew of Grim 31 had other problems, the extent of which they were as yet unaware. The plane’s computer systems were acting up. Both had failed totally earlier in the flight. The crew thought they had solved the problems by rebooting the computers. But although the systems seemed to be up and running, hidden problems remained. Most seriously, the inertial navigation system, which told the navigator and pilots where they were flying, was giving incorrect readings. Believing they had fixed the trouble, Grim 31’s crew, one of the most experienced in the 16th Special Operations Squadron, based at Hurl-burt Field, Florida, did not raise them as a major issue with the TF Hammer personnel on the ground. (Although they did hint at it: When asked by Texas 14 to reconnoiter Serkhankhel, they sent possible target coordinates that were ten kilometers off to the convoy. When TF Hammer pointed this out, the aircrew replied that their “systems” had problems that evening.)

Investigators would later suggest that Grim 31’s inertial navigation system failed again before they turned back to perform the “cleanup” reconnaissance for the SEALs. Under this hypothesis, the AC-130 never actually returned to the Finger from the Whale, but instead unwittingly flew in a more easterly direction and reconnoitered a portion of the eastern ridgeline believing it was the Finger. Then, at the direction of the navigator, regarded by his fellow officers and airmen as the best in the squadron, the pilot flew about three kilometers northwest to a position which appeared to match the Fishhook’s terrain as it was depicted on his 1:100,000 map. It was now about ninety minutes since Grim 31 had left its station over Hammer to support Mako 31, and the crew no longer had a firm grasp of the location of the convoy, from which Harriman’s element had already split off. Instead of scanning the wadi that ran around the southern tip of the Whale, they were actually about eight kilometers off course, flying over a streambed that curled around the
northern
end of the Whale, just to the south of the Gawyani Ghar ridgeline. Looking down, the crew saw several vehicles driving in the wadi, including two with their headlights on, with twenty to thirty personnel walking ahead of them. Based on an examination of the map, Grim 31 passed what they thought was the location of the convoy to Glenn Thomas’s enlisted tactical air controller, Air Force Master Sergeant William “Buddy” McArthur, with the message that if Texas 14 wanted the target attacked, they had to speak up soon, because Grim 31 only had five minutes’ station time left.

McArthur told Grim 31 to stand by and passed the grid reference the crew gave him to Thomas and Haas to verify there were no friendly forces in that location. With McArthur present, Thomas read the grid to his driver, Sergeant First Class Charles “Todd” Browning. All three agreed there were no friendly vehicles at that grid, which was squarely in the Fishhook. Thomas figured the vehicles and personnel being reported were an enemy force trying to make their escape from the valley westward via the Fishhook. But whatever their purpose, they appeared to be on a collision course with Task Force Hammer and needed to be taken care of. Thomas called Mark Schwartz, Haas’s operations officer, seeking approval for Grim 31 to engage the target. Schwartz passed the information straight to Haas. Meanwhile, Harriman, by now heading south toward the Whale, was concerned. He had heard Grim 31’s radio call about the small truck convoy with dismounted personnel and was worried that it sounded a little too much like his. As a precaution he broadcast his grid coordinates over the radio. They were over six kilometers from where Grim 31 was saying they could see a possible target.