Operation Red Wings: The Untold Story Behind Lone Survivor (Kindle Single) (SOFREP) (2 page)

It was only about a 65-kilometer flight from Jalalabad to Sawtalo Sar, but they only made it about halfway before the storms building up in the mountains made it too dangerous to fly. The pilots told the SEALs that they had to return to base and turned around for Jalalabad once more. Once again, the SEALs had to wait, knowing their comrades—those still alive—were in deadly jeopardy on the mountain slopes.

Shortly after returning to Jalalabad, the SEALs were ordered back to Bagram Airfield, to reconstitute a new rescue force. The effort would now be completely coordinated out of Bagram.

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It was after the second attempt to rescue the downed SEALs and the SR team that CJSOTF called off the organic rescue effort and called for dedicated Air Force Rescue to come in and take over. The initial effort had been according to standard operating procedure, but with the situation getting more complex, especially with Turbine 33 down, the commander wanted expert rescue personnel involved. There were no Combat Rescue personnel or plans in that AO at the time.

The call was answered by U.S. Air Force Combat Rescue personnel of the 59th Expeditionary Rescue Squadron from Kandahar. The combat rescue officer, or CRO, had been in Kunar only a week before, working out of Camp Blessing to attempt to find and rescue a marine who had been lost in the Pech River. While on an evening patrol, marines in a Humvee had been moving down the road next to the river when the Humvee hit a washout and began to tip toward the water. Two marines were in the back of the vehicle, and when the truck started to slide, one went out to the left, the other to the right, into the water. The driver managed to right the vehicle, but the marine had been swept away by the current. The Combat Rescue personnel, along with more marines and their attached Afghan National Army counterparts, searched for several days, but the lost marine was never found. Neither was any of his equipment.

The CRO, six Pararescue Jumpers, or PJs, and three HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters, two of which were from the 920th Rescue Wing, a reserve unit, flown by “Skinny” and “Spanky,” flew from Kandahar to Bagram Airfield in the afternoon of June 28. The CRO went straight to the JOC to get a handle on the situation, while the other rescue personnel got ready to head out as soon as possible.

The 920th Rescue Wing pilots and crews were reservists, and as such encountered a fair amount of tension with the 160th SOAR personnel. The Night Stalkers had lost eight of their own and felt that it should be their responsibility to go rescue them. They didn’t necessarily trust the training and expertise of reservists, who didn’t train constantly for the job, as they saw it. In fact, the reserve pilots and crews did spend a great deal of their time either training or deployed; the 920th is the only Reserve Combat Rescue Wing in the U.S. Air Force, and with the Global War on Terror in full swing, they had quite a few operational commitments. Spanky had been flying Combat Rescue for ten years.

The 920th pilots and crews had actually been scheduled to return home within days; several of them already had plans for the Fourth of July. The disaster on Sawtalo Sar deferred those plans.

Getting up to speed and ready to go wasn’t as easy as it might sound. The CRO was the only one cleared to enter the JOC in the first place, which put a crimp in getting the rest up to speed. They had to get clearance paperwork done and get the necessary briefs on what was going on. The concerns about possibly losing another helicopter on the mountain were still very fresh, which meant there was not a lot of hurry to send the HH-60s back up. There was required maintenance on the helicopters after the flight from Kandahar, as well as required crew rest before they could fly again.

In the JOC, the CRO sat down with the special tactics officer, the air force SOF officer on-site, and got the full briefing on what they knew had gone down. There were already Rangers, Special Forces, and some PJs heading for Turbine 33’s crash site, so the primary effort became about finding the four-man SEAL team that had come under fire, then dropped off comms (slang for communications). They had to figure out what they would do next, where they would go, so that they could get rescue assets there to pick them up.

What the CRO found as soon as he started working was that there was very little coordination going on. Between the army, the air force, Naval Special Warfare, and the marines, there were lots of units and groups trying to get in to help, but very few were talking to each other. The communications channels between the different chains of command simply weren’t there. Units in the field were setting up comms with their own headquarters, but all of the radio frequencies being utilized for the rescue effort were separate. So anything the Rangers found wasn’t necessarily being passed to the Special Forces, and thus wasn’t being passed to the air force personnel who were in charge of the overall effort. In fact, throughout the entire recovery operation, the Combat Rescue personnel were never entirely sure who was where on the ground, and when, due to the spotty nature of the communications channels.

He also found that, while the initial actions to launch the QRF on Turbine 32 and Turbine 33, and the follow-on attempt to get SEALs, PJs, and U.S. Air Force Combat Controllers to the crash site were the correct ones, there really wasn’t any further contingency planning in place. There was no plan beyond the initial attempt. While the CRO will today stress that everything they did was the right thing to do, the JSOTF in Kunar was winging it. That was what the CRO was there to fix.

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While all this was happening, in spite of the numbers of forces on the ground already, including elements of 2nd Ranger Battalion, Special Forces, and marines from 2/3 who were pushing into the Korengal and Merit valleys from Camp Blessing, more forces were deemed to be needed on the ground. To this end, elements of 3rd Ranger Battalion, still stateside in Georgia, were called in and told to get ready to deploy to Afghanistan. All the 3rd Battalion Rangers was told initially was that an MH-47 had gone down with sixteen men aboard, SEALs and Night Stalkers. They would not find out about the four-man SR team on the mountain until they arrived at Bagram.

The Rangers, most of whom were off duty, were simply paged to report to Battalion Headquarters. When they got to their company areas, they were told to pack their gear and get ready to go. Eighteen hours after receiving the first page, they were on the plane and heading for Afghanistan.

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With forces already preparing to move to the Turbine 33 crash site, and the site being known already, the CRO’s primary focus became finding the four-man SR team. While Turbine 33 was well localized, no one knew exactly where the team was, or whether they were alive or dead. The assumption, for the sake of the operation, was that they were alive; if they were alive, it made it all the more urgent to find them and get them out. They were alone, off comms, and in enemy territory, and quite likely one or more of them were wounded. The longer they stayed lost, the greater the likelihood that they would wind up dead. In fact, three of them already were dead, but the JOC didn’t know that for certain.

The first priority, in addition to getting air assets up to search and attempt to make contact over the SAR (search and rescue) frequency, was to get inside the SEALs’ heads and try to ascertain where they would go, assuming they were still alive. To that end, the CRO had to go through all of their operational plans and materials, as well as their personnel recovery materials, which would provide information that only they would know, in the event they were found and had to be identified on the ground.

What had to be determined was what direction the team would go, based on their E&E (escape and evasion) plan, what retrieval point they would make for, and what equipment they had with them they could signal with. What was their SAR frequency? What nonradio signaling devices did they have? Moreover, he had to get to know the men themselves. He had to get into their heads, figure out how they thought, to try to determine what each one of them would do when alone and cut off, with everything having gone to hell in a hand basket. A man in a team will react differently from a man alone. Even if they had a detailed team E&E plan, there was no guarantee that if cut off from each other, they would follow it exactly. Personality quirks became extremely important.

He immediately ran into some serious difficulty. The E&E plan the SR team had left was vague at best—in fact, there hardly was one. There was a possible retrieval area, but actual E&E routes, especially in the brutally steep terrain of Kunar, weren’t there. The team might well have had a detailed E&E plan worked up before going out; they just didn’t leave a copy of it with the JOC. This made the CRO’s job considerably harder, as the “probability of area,” the zone where the lost team might be found, couldn’t be narrowed down without that E&E plan, unless they actually made contact with the team.

Determining how they might make contact was made even harder by the fact that the team had apparently not left behind an Equipment Density List, or the list of all serialized gear (including comms and other signaling devices), when they left on the mission. At least it couldn’t be found when the CRO requested it at the JOC. Eventually, however, some photographs of the team, taken just before insertion, provided some idea of the equipment they’d taken with them.

They had gone light on comms, taking only PRC-148 MBITR radios and a satellite phone. The PRC-148 is a small, light, individual VHF/UHF radio. It is technically capable of satellite communications, but the MBITR can also be notoriously unreliable. While lightening the load, especially in the terrain they were operating in, is usually a good idea, comms is a reconnaissance team’s lifeline. All four men, Murphy, Luttrell, Dietz, and Axelson, were members of SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1, a SEAL team that specialized in reconnaissance. They would have known this. While the reasoning behind their choice not to take a heavier-duty radio isn’t known for sure, it does raise some eyebrows among those with reconnaissance experience. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, it could well be that they were familiar enough with and confident enough in the satellite-communications ability of the MBITR that they decided they could make do with it. The fact that comms failure contributed to their being cut off belies their confidence; in fact, at one point the only way they could make contact with the rear was with a Leatherman tool jammed into the antenna jack of a PRC-148.

To further expand his knowledge of the team, the CRO pulled all of their record files and began studying them. He interviewed other SEALs to try to understand the men’s personalities. By the time he was finished, he felt like he knew all four men personally. It only hardened his resolve to get them back. As a PJ before he was commissioned, he had always felt a kinship with the SOF operators out in the field that he might be called upon to go rescue in just such circumstances. He considered them his brothers just as much as teammates might consider each other brothers. It was more than an assignment to get these men back; it was now a personal mission. He had family up on that mountain.

Even before sundown on the twenty-eighth, another obstacle to making contact with the missing SEALs arose. At 1623Z, an AC-130 Spectre gunship orbiting Turbine 33’s crash site reported one individual on the ground with a strobe, a common identifying marker for Coalition forces. It was only the first of many false communication attempts by the enemy, attempting to draw the Combat Rescue forces into a trap.

Day 2: June 29

Rangers, Special Forces, and PJs were already moving up the mountain toward the crash site. It would take them until nearly midnight to reach it after the first attempt had been turned back by the weather, but the weather had eased up. There had also been the issue of theater command denying any further flights in the area. The loss of Turbine 33 had hit U.S. forces hard, and no one wanted to risk losing another bird on Sawtalo Sar. The CRO and the two 920
th
Rescue Wing pilots remained focused on the missing SR team.

Other Rangers and Special Forces were patrolling the surrounding valleys, looking for any sign of the missing SEALs. Marines from 2/3 were pushing down from the north, but 2/3’s chain of command had no contact with the JOC; while they were known to be operating in the area (it was their AO, after all), the CRO didn’t know exactly where the patrols were and had no contact with them. This disconnect would continue throughout the operation.

Throughout the day, there were more and more reports of attempted communication on the SAR frequencies, and aircraft were reporting visual signals as well. Few if any of these reports could be corroborated by satellite or national assets, and as the CRO mapped them out with pushpins on the map in the JOC, he saw increasingly clearly that the enemy was attempting to draw in the rescue forces. By the time the operation was over, there had been between fifty and sixty separate attempts at communication, either over the SAR frequencies or by visual signals, and spread over a radius of over 6 miles. It was frankly impossible that they were coming from the missing SEALs, as there were too many of them, spread too widely. While it was possible that some of the contacts were coming from one of the missing men, the rest of the white noise made it impossible to determine if such was the case, and if so, which one. As it was, the enemy’s spoofing tactics were never officially reported, although mention remains in the after-action review.

The CRO and the rest of the personnel in the JOC continued to attempt to nail down a workable probability of area. Unfortunately, with the terrain being as harsh as it is, the lack of verifiable contact with any of the SEALs, on top of the uncertainty as to their E&E plan, the task appeared hopeless. They didn’t even know which direction they might have gone—east into the Shuryek Valley, west into the Korengal (which was considerably more hostile to U.S. forces than the Shuryek), or even north or south along the ridge. They had to press on, hoping and praying that the SEALs were still alive, while constantly attempting to establish contact on every frequency on the team’s comms plan.