Not a Good Day to Die (63 page)

Worried that the enemy would get lucky, hit the aircraft in a vulnerable point and blow it up, Don recommended moving the casualties from the helicopter to a little depression in the rocky slope at about the Chinook’s 5 o’clock position, close to Self’s command post. Cory countered that the helicopter had already withstood RPGs and machine-gun fire, and moving the casualties outside could induce hypothermia. But Cory changed his mind when another mortar round fell far too close for comfort. Don, Cory, Cunningham and Brian carried the patients over one by one, Chuck and Greg on regular stretchers and Dave on a Skedco. The distance was little more than twenty meters, but the movement was extremely hard, even with four men carrying each casualty. By now the altitude had sapped their reserves of energy. They were exhausted. As they prepared to move Dave, Cunningham tripped and lost his grip. The Skedco, designed to move fast on snowy terrain, skidded away. “Dave was on a toboggan ride,” Don recalled. Fortunately for all concerned, Dave’s Skedco ran into Chuck’s stretcher, allowing Brian and Don to grab it before it slid another 800 meters down the mountainside. “Sorry, are you alright?” Dave said to Chuck. “Yeah, as soon as you get off my leg,” Chuck replied dryly.

Greg decided to do what little he could to make himself more comfortable and used his good arm to cut the chest straps and loosen the leg straps on his litter. Lying on his back he looked up to see a Predator high in the sky circling the mountaintop.
If only that were an AC-130,
he thought.

11.

ONCE they left the LZ, the consistency of the snow under the feet of Canon’s men turned from hard-packed to dry powder, and it was no longer “underfoot,” but knee-to-mid-thigh-deep. So much for the easy hike the squad leader had anticipated. His mens’ route required them to move 800 meters laterally and to ascend 2,000 feet up a 70-degree slope. The loose rock under the snow only added to their problems. Slipping, falling and stumbling, they were soon spitting up blood from the effort demanded of their lungs. The Rangers had dressed in preparation for a static mission—securing a downed helicopter—not mountaineering. Many were wearing light or medium-weight thermal long johns and tops under their fatigues. With their body armor weighing them down, the men were overheating in the sun. Within fifteen minutes Canon stopped the climb and told the men to remove some clothing. But he still wasn’t optimistic about their rate of progress.
There’s gotta be something else we can download,
he thought to himself. He called Self and asked for permission to get rid of the back plates in the troops’ bulletproof vests. The captain, impatient for his reinforcements, readily agreed. Canon told the men to dump the plates. They hurled them onto rocks below in an attempt to break them. “Have fun,” the squad leader joked. “It’s the most expensive Frisbee you’re ever gonna throw.”

WE
just can’t sit here and take mortar rounds,
was the thought going around and around in Self’s mind.
We’ve got to assault.
He called DePouli over to his position. Then he told DePouli, Vance, and Walker that the four of them were going to assault the enemy position at the top of the mountain, which Self thought was little more than a couple of guys hiding behind the Bonsai tree. None of the Americans had realized they were up against a well-entrenched bunker. With Brian, the left rear crew chief, serving as his assistant gunner Gilliam hammered the enemy position with 240 fire. But from that angle the machinegun could do little damage. The bunker’s aperture was facing down the slope towards where Self and the others were assaulting. They didn’t realize it, because they couldn’t see how the enemy had built up the position under the Bonsai tree, but the 240 was aimed right at the bunker’s thick wooden wall. The Al Qaida fighters had constructed the bunker by digging away at the base of the tree, and then surrounding and reinforcing the pit with logs, with more branches covering the roof of the bunker. It was undetectable from the air and almost impenetrable from the ground. The four men in Self’s little assault team struggled manfully up the slope, with their weapons up and firing as they went. Even if they hadn’t been tired out from the altitude and their exertions so far, the knee-deep snow would have made it impossible to run. DePouli was ready with a hand grenade clutched in one fist while he shot his M4 with his other hand. One of the enemy fighters emerged from behind the tree and fired his AK at the Americans, then ducked back down. Only thirty meters away and closing, Self saw the guerrilla was standing in a waist high fighting position. The captain realized the extent of the fortifications he was assaulting. He knew there was a machine-gun in there somewhere. In training, it always took a full platoon of more than thirty men to take down a machine-gun nest. Here he was trying to do it with four guys at 10,000 feet stumbling uphill in the snow. “Bunker! Bunker!” the captain yelled. “It’s a bunker! Get back!” The four turned and staggered back down the slope to their original positions in the rocks.

SELF
asked Brown whether any strike aircraft were on station. A pair of F-16s was available, but they only had “dumb” 500-pound bombs, not JDAMs, Brown said. Self told him to have the jets drop the first bombs on the other side of the mountaintop, and then walk them up the slope onto the bunker. This worked, up to a point. The first bomb landed close enough to shower the bunker with debris. The next hit closer to the bunker. The fire from the bunker stopped briefly, and then restarted. But Self did not feel comfortable having unguided bombs dropped any closer. Then more mortar rounds fell. Canon reported that the Chalk 2 soldiers climbing the mountain were also receiving ineffective mortar fire. Miceli, covering the eastern side of the Chalk 1 position, spotted a couple of men walking around the valley to the east, pointing up at the Americans on the peak of Takur Ghar. Self concluded they were enemy observers calling in the mortar fire. They were beyond the effective range of any of the weapons the Rangers had at their disposal. Miceli harassed them with his SAW fire, trying to push them away, but they continued advancing slowly toward him.

Again, Self felt he had to take action to hasten his men’s departure. He knew Brown had been talking to Wildfire, the call sign for the CIA’s Predator, for much of the morning. He asked Brown to find out if the Predator was armed. Brown didn’t know what he was talking about. “Armed?” he said. He had no idea there was such a thing as an armed Predator. “Yes, some of the Predators have Hellfires on them,” Self said. Brown queried the Predator operator. “Yep, it’s got two,” he reported to Self. “Get ready to use it,” the platoon leader told him. But Vance was nervous. “No sir, we’re too close,” he told Self. “Don’t use the Hellfires.” Yielding to his ETAC’s advice, Self decided to hold off. But thirty minutes later more mortar rounds landed. Self pulled a little card out of his pocket that told him the “minimum safe distance” ranges for every indirect fire weapon system. Nothing he read suggested that the Hellfire would pose an inordinate risk. “We’re good,” he said, knowing his men enjoyed the protection of a defilade position, with the rocks sheltering them from any blast. He told Brown to call in the Predator strike. “Put it in the bunker,” the captain said. But Brown told the Predator to do the same thing he’d done with the bombs: to fire the first one a safe distance away. That’s exactly what the Predator did. Self was surprised to see the missile explode “way off” target to the north. Canon, on the other hand, immediately got on the radio. “Hey, whatever that was, don’t do that again, you almost hit us,” he said. “We’re a lot closer to it than you are,” Self told him. Then he turned to Brown. “Look, there’s only one [Hellfire] left,” he said. “Put it right in it.” The men put their heads down. The second Hellfire shot was perfect. Rocks, dirt and branches flew over the Rangers’ heads. They cheered. When the smoke had cleared from the top of Takur Ghar, the bunker had collapsed and part of the tree was missing. They took no more fire from there.

AFTER
forty-five minutes had passed since he had spoken with Canon, Self called the squad leader again. “What’s your ETA?” he asked Canon. Another forty-five minutes, was the answer. When that time elapsed with no sign of Chalk 2, Self’s patience was wearing thin.
I’ve only got so much time before the enemy decides to counterattack,
he thought.
I’ve gotta get these guys off the side of the mountain.
He called Canon back. “Look, you’ve gotta move faster,” he said. “We’re moving as fast as we can,” Canon replied.

They marched on in single file, Staff Sergeant Harper Wilmoth and Staff Sergeant Eric Stebner leading the way. They received ineffective mortar fire, almost certainly from the same enemy 82mm tubes that were bracketing the Rangers on the mountaintop. Canon could hear the air strikes going in up ahead.
What in the hell is at the top of this hill that is requiring us to bring this much firepower to bear?
he wondered.

At about 10:00 a.m. the Chalk 1 Rangers fired another star cluster in the air. Canon and his men still didn’t see it.
How could they not see it if they’re as close as they think they are?
Self wondered. It was half an hour later, just past 10:30 a.m., when Canon finally spotted Miceli and DePouli, the two men closest to his approach. “I think I see you all,” Canon said over the radio. Miceli and DePouli weren’t sure. Canon told them to pick up snow and throw it. They did. “Yeah, that was you,” Canon said. “We’re moving into your location now.” It took another twenty minutes to make the linkup, but when it happened, Self’s tiny force on the top of the mountain had doubled.

(DePouli and Miceli made a grim discovery as they came down to meet Chalk 2: a helmet with a bullet hole in it. From the state of the inside, it was clear the last person to wear it had been shot in the head. That person was Neil Roberts.)

IT
took Hyder nearly an hour to link up with Mako 30. The first member of the team he encountered was gray-faced, shivering, and leaving a trail of blood behind him. Hyder gave him his coat and swapped his wool mittens for the bedraggled SEAL’s wet gloves. The wounded man told Hyder that Chapman was dead, Roberts had not been seen, and a third team member had been shot in the legs and was seriously wounded. This was the first time Hyder realized how serious Mako 30’s situation was. The terse radio conversations had barely hinted at it. There was no way to execute his initial plan, which had been to get the team to retrace the route he had just taken from the LZ. The upward climb was beyond the abilities of the SEALs, who would have to carry one man and help another. Instead Hyder decided to follow the draw downward toward a known LZ, in the hope that another potential LZ might offer itself up en route. They began the trek. Hyder and another SEAL carried the most seriously wounded man between them. The stricken operator was able to put weight on his right foot, but his left leg was shot clean through just above the ankle. The six men moved slowly, pausing every seventy-five meters. At one point Hyder moved up the slope to provide overwatch. He spied a bearded, dark haired man coming down the north face of the mountain into a draw parallel to the one the SEALs were traveling along. Hyder kept his eyes on the man for about five minutes, noting that he was wearing pants and a long jacket. The SEAL officer was waiting for a chance to shoot him. That chance came when, about 175 meters away, the target fell forward and then kneeled up. Hyder put his sight on the man’s torso and pulled the trigger. His first shot hit the man in the chest. The bearded figure dropped to his left side. Hyder shot him again in the chest and the man fell onto his back. Hyder fired again but probably missed. He watched the man lying there for several minutes.

MORTAL
combat doesn’t stop the body’s natural functions. As the reinforcements arrived, Walker realized he had to take a shit. He did so where he was lying, just pulling his pants down and rolling on his side. A moment after he was done. Eric Stebner and Sergeant Patrick George arrived beside him. George went to lie down where Walker had just taken a shit. Walker warned him just in time, but Stebner didn’t hear and dived straight on top of it, which resulted in George then having to try to clean the mess off his buddy with handfuls of snow.

When Chalk 2’s men had all made it up, Self walked down to the big rock outcropping and gave them a brief overview of events, then told them they would take the lead in assaulting the top of the mountain. DePouli’s squad was going to secure the flanks. He had Chalk 2’s machine-gun team of Specialists Randy Pazder and Omar Vela position their 240 next to the one manned by Gilliam and Brian (who also had 2,000 rounds of 7.62mm ammo retrieved from the Chinook). The platoon leader assembled his assault team: Walker, Stebner, George, Wilmoth, and Specialists Jonas Polson and Oscar Escano. He divided them into two three-man fire teams.

Now that he had extra manpower, Self decided neither he nor Vance were needed as riflemen. He told Vance to get his radio and start calling up the chain. The rest of the force, poised for the assault, gave Self a quizzical
What’s the signal?
look. “Just start shooting,” he told them. Both machine-guns opened up as the assault began. The two teams moved in “bounding overwatch” fashion, one team standing and shooting while the other fire team was moving and shooting. It only took them a couple of minutes to assault up the slope and then turn right toward the boulder and the tree. They shot a man on the back side of the bunker. Then Stebner noticed an American body laying facedown by the boulder. “Hey, we have a Blue casualty up here,” Canon told Self. Again, the captain was confused, thinking Canon was using the word “blue” as the U.S. military uses it to denote friendly forces, not realizing he meant Task Force Blue, the SEALs.
Not good,
Self thought.
We just shot one of our own guys.
“How do you know?” Self said. “It’s obvious,” Canon replied. “You need to come up here and look at this.”