Not a Good Day to Die (59 page)

As they flew through the mountains north of Gardez, the helicopters lost radio contact with each other. Aboard Razor 01, Don was talking to the EP-3, which was trying to pass the grid coordinates for the Chinooks’ LZ. Don made the EP-3 repeat the numbers three times before he was sure he and the others listening on Razor 01 had heard them right. “We almost wrote down the wrong grid,” Self recalled. Given what followed, he acknowledged, such a mistake “might have been good.” Self was doing his best to follow along and keep his men in the loop. He took a lightboard (a piece of Plexiglas taped on one side to give a white background and illuminated with a chem light) from his pocket and using a grease pencil wrote down the basics of what he could make out from the garbled radio transmissions, then passed it around. He wrote that “SEAL snipers” were near the man who’d fallen out of the aircraft, that they were “possibly in contact” and were requesting the QRF. It became increasingly clear the Chinooks weren’t going to stop in Gardez. One of the few orders that got through from Masirah and Bagram was to head straight into the valley to help the SEALs.

It was almost three hours since Razor 03 had been shot down, but the commander of the quick reaction force en route to the Shahikot still had no appreciation of the SEALs’ location relative to the downed helicopter and continued to believe that the helicopter crash-landing because of enemy fire or a maintenance problem (he still didn’t know which) and the serviceman falling out of a helicopter were unrelated incidents. On Razor 02, Canon had heard nothing about the change in plans. He was familiar with Gardez from a previous mission and as the helicopter soared overhead he looked out of the window, recognized the town below and realized they weren’t landing.
Something has obviously changed,
he thought.

The helicopters entered the north end of the Shahikot. The night had faded and the crews were flying aggressive nap-of-the-earth techniques, hugging the ground to avoid presenting a target to any Al Qaida gunners. Glancing out, they were surprised to see they were flying over the dark form of Razor 03. Until that moment they had all assumed that they were flying to that crash site. Don asked the EP-3 if they were sure of the LZ coordinates, because they’d just flown over the crashed helicopter. “No, this is a different location,” the man on the EP-3 said. “It’s on top of a 10,000-foot mountain.” “Are there friendlies or enemy there?” The EP-3 told Don there would be friendly troops on top of the mountain. “Are they stationary, moving, what?” Don asked. “They’re moving,” the EP-3 replied. By now the two Chinooks had flown back out of the valley and were in a holding pattern while Don, Self, and the pilots tried to get the details straight.

Meanwhile, in Bagram and Masirah, at 6:08 a.m., staff officers were trying to get through to Razor 01 and Razor 02 with no success. The satellite communications were failing them just when the special operators sitting beside banks of radios in the operations centers and behind controls in the Chinooks needed them most. The message the TF 11 staff was trying to deliver was a simple, important, lifesaving message: do not land on the mountaintop, where Razor 03 and Razor 04 had already taken fire; land at an offset LZ farther down the slopes of Takur Ghar. These instructions were never received on the helicopters, who were still acting on the orders they’d received via the EP-3. Again, the decision to take Blaber out of the command chain was revealed to be a terrible mistake. As the official Special Operations Command investigator wrote:
“Here the [AFO] commander on the scene would clearly have made a difference. At the least he would have insisted that Razor 01 use an offset landing zone. He would also have been in a position to give this direction personally, using the more reliable line of sight radios, which would have significantly reduced the chances of misunderstanding.”

As Razor 01 bucked and swerved, the men in the back held on. There were no seats in the cargo area, so they were sitting on the floor, trying not to get tossed around. Bracing himself, Nate Self scrutinized his map by flashlight, trying to figure it all out. He was still confused, but somehow he managed to deduce—and tell his men via the lightboard—three things: they were going to land “in the vicinity of the enemy”; the SEALs were in contact with that same enemy; and the SEALs were also not far from the man who’d fallen out of the helicopter. Self wrote his troops that they were going to do “a hot extraction on a possible hot LZ” (something the pilots had failed to pick up on). Speaking to each other over their MBITR radios, Self and DePouli established a game plan, the essence of which was that they were going to run off the back of the helicopter, secure the immediate area, link up with the SEALs and, maybe, the guy who’d fallen off the helicopter, get them onto their Chinook and fly away as quickly as possible. “Watch your fires coming off, there’s friendlies in the area,” Self wrote on the lightboard. At the very least he wanted his men to understand that there was a high likelihood of combat on the LZ and that the SEALs they were picking up would be breaking contact with the enemy as they ran toward the helicopter. He refocused his attention on the radio. The call signs were all from Bagram. Then he heard Blaber’s voice, urgent now. Everyone seemed to be talking about the AC-130.

8.

ON the side of Takur Ghar, Mako 30 was in trouble. Slab and his four teammates who had made it off the mountaintop had managed to hustle and hobble down to a hiding place beneath a rock overhang that protected them from the fire that had chased them off the peak. But the only thing preventing the guerrillas up top from coming to look for them was Grim 32’s presence overhead. Every time either the SEALs or the gunship crew saw the enemy trying to outflank Mako 30’s position, the AC-130 would open up with a few of its trademark 105mm rounds. (“We felt like the 40s just weren’t making a big enough boom to keep heads down,” Turner said.)

But there was a limit to how long Mako 30 would be able to count on Grim 32’s support. Air Force rules required the AC-130 to be out of the combat zone by dawn, less than an hour away. In the gunship’s cockpit, Turner looked at his watch and then called Bossman to make sure there were some fast-movers available to support the SEALs once he had to break station. At the same time Grim 32 called back to its higher headquarters, the Dagger air component at K2. “We are in a firefight with these guys [i.e., Mako 30] for their lives,” Turner told K2. “We’re requesting permission to stay later.” Dagger’s answer was: “No, you will return to base.” This sat well with neither the gunship crew nor a host of other officers monitoring the call. Radio and phone calls flew between Bagram, Masirah, K2, Bossman (the AWACS), and the Shahikot as these officers engaged in a high-level tussle with a few Air Force officials over who “owned” the AC-130. An unclear chain of command was again playing havoc with the effective control of the operation.

On the side of those arguing to keep Grim 32 on station were Blaber, Harrell, Mulholland, and Trebon. Putting up stubborn resistance, however, was Frank Kisner, who wore two hats as Mulholland’s deputy at Task Force Dagger and the commander of Joint Special Operations Air Component (North). Kisner was apparently gripped by the fear of a daylight shootdown that has haunted the AC-130 community since Spirit 03’s demise over Khafji. The dispute led to some fierce telephone arguments with Mulholland.

The folks most worried when they heard the radio calls about the Grim 32 being pulled off station were the SEALs of Mako 30. “Hey, guys, don’t leave me,” Slab said to the gunship crew. “If you leave, we’re dead.” Grim 32 told Slab not to worry. “Until you have somebody else that can take care of you, we’re staying,” one of the aircrew told him. “We’re just trying to work through this ROE [rules of engagement] crap.” They continued shooting. To the SEALs and the crew of Grim 32, the argument for keeping the gunship on station beyond dawn was straightforward: the SEALs needed its firepower to keep the enemy off their backs. But to the others arguing in favor of keeping the AC-130 on station, its importance to the inbound quick reaction force was at least as important. One of the loudest advocates for holding Grim 32 over Takur Ghar was Pete Blaber. As soon as he heard Turner talk about breaking station, Blaber came up on the net. “Negative,” he said. “I am ordering you to remain on station and support these guys. You’re going to be the fire support when the QRF comes in.”

This argument would have made perfect sense to Turner and his crewmates, except that they were running out of fuel as well as darkness and no one seemed to be able to tell them when Razor 01 and Razor 02 were going to show up. The best estimate Turner got from Task Force 11 was “within the hour.” The pilot knew he didn’t have an hour’s worth of fuel left, if he was to make it back to K2. Then, from a ridgeline about five miles to his south, a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile arced upward toward his aircraft. Through Turner’s night-vision goggles it looked like the space shuttle was zooming toward him. The missile fell well short of Grim 32, but it was a wake-up call that reinforced their fears of their own vulnerability once the sun rose. “In daylight an AC-130 looks like a blimp overhead at a football game,” Turner said. At least the base back at K2 wasn’t bothering them any more with calls to return to K2. In fact, K2 had been surprisingly quiet. Turner called back to his electronic warfare officer, who controlled the radio channels that the aircraft listened to. “Hey, I haven’t heard anything from Dagger for a while now,” Turner said. “What’s going on with them?” “Boss, it’s just too busy up there, you guys are making the right decisions, I turned them off,” the officer replied. He had a strong relationship with Turner and knew the pilot would remain on station until he ran out of gas or someone arrived to replace them, whichever came first. Under those conditions, there was no point listening to the increasingly frantic calls from K2 for them to return to base. “He turned them off so we couldn’t hear them ordering us to come home anymore,” Turner said.

Dawn broke over the Shahikot. From Masirah Chris Naler continued to urge Grim 32 to remain on station until the QRF arrived. But Turner still couldn’t get Naler to tell him when that would be. The reason for this was simple: Masirah had lost track of Razor 01 and Razor 02. In a further sign of how little situational awareness the TF 11 staff enjoyed, Naler, call sign Champ 20, told Grim 32 to “glint” the LZ to enhance the effects of the QRF’s night-vision goggles when the Chinooks arrived. “Hey, Champ, it’s daylight out here,” replied Turner, who was wearing sunglasses by that point.

Shortly after that, a nearby EP-3 with the call sign Toolbox asked Grim 32 if they’d seen the antiaircraft missile that had just been fired at them. They hadn’t. The missile had been launched from a similar location to the earlier one and had also fallen short, but Turner was much more worried this time, precisely because he hadn’t seen it. “If you look at all the aircraft that have been shot down since the invention of antiaircraft missiles, the vast majority of them were shot down by the missile they never saw,” he explained. Just then two F-15E Strike Eagles flew through Turner’s field of vision, letting him know that they were ready to take over the responsibility for close air support. The gunship pilot now knew that if he left, the SEALs wouldn’t be left defenseless, even though no other aircraft in the U.S. inventory came close to being able to replicate the constant, precise pounding that an AC-130 could deliver.

The sun was getting higher and Grim 32’s fuel gauge was getting lower. The Strike Eagles were on station and there was no sign of—or word from—the quick reaction force. Turner got on the radio to the F-15Es and filled them in on what he knew, orienting them to Mako 30 and passing them the frequencies for the SEAL team and the TF 11 operations center in Masirah. Then, at 6:01 a.m., Toolbox reported a third antiaircraft missile had been launched at Grim 32. Unlike the two previous launches, which gained so much altitude that there was no doubt they were missiles, Turner conceded that the EP-3 might have mistaken an RPG for a shoulder-launched air defense missile on the third occasion. Nevertheless, the incident helped make his mind up. The Strike Eagles, being much faster than the AC-130, needed more space to operate in; it was broad daylight; his chain of command had already ordered him home; he’d been shot at twice and maybe just now a third time; and no one seemed to know when the QRF was coming.
It may be time to get out of the way,
he thought. Grim 32 asked again when Razor 01 was due. “We’re figuring that out now,” was the response. No one even passed the Chinooks’ frequency to the AC-130. Grim 32 passed the Strike Eagle call signs to Mako 30, talked to Bossman, which had been telling the gunship to leave for at least thirteen minutes, and then turned for home. “There really was nothing else we felt like we could do,” Turner said. One of his last calls from the Shahikot was to Masirah on the subject of the QRF. “Whatever you do, don’t send them back to this same LZ,” he told Naler. “It is absolutely hot.” It was a message that was sent from Masirah, but never received.

Ten minutes later Razor 01 flew into the same hot LZ that Grim 32 had warned Masirah about. By now almost everyone in the TF 11 chain of command had belatedly realized that the top of Takur Ghar was not a good place to try to land a Chinook, except for the crews of Razor 01 and Razor 02. Had the men on board Grim 32 known that the two Chinooks were only 10 minutes out when they made the decision to leave, they would have stayed. “If we’d have known they were coming in, there is zero question in my mind we would have stayed there,” Turner said. “That is what we train for and that is the bond we have with those guys. We train with the Rangers daily for that kind of thing…. We’d disobeyed our orders for an hour. Another fifteen minutes wasn’t going to get me in any less hot water.” The AC-130 had less than thirty minutes’ worth of fuel left in the tank beyond what was required to get to K2. However, had they chosen to divert to Kandahar or to conduct an air-to-air refueling over Pakistan they could have circled Takur Ghar for another hour, more than enough time to destroy any enemy forces the Rangers might run into. Yet again, the problems inherent in trying to run a combat operation from over a thousand miles away based only on a couple of overcrowded satellite frequencies and the “soda-straw” view provided by the Predator were making themselves felt in the Shahikot.