Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (22 page)

Some HALO missions were a precursor to mounted Delta operations. “They'd set up the landing zones, make sure they were straight, make sure they were good,” said a JSOC staff officer. “Then you brought the Talons in to bring the mobility guys in.” The “mobility guys” were operators manning Delta's Pinzgauer six-wheel-drive combat vehicles. These rugged machines could carry a payload of almost 3,300 pounds cross-country, had a range of about 435 miles, and featured a variety of weapons on forward, center, and rear mounts. Delta had been using Pinzgauers for years and was constantly working with the manufacturer to upgrade them.
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The Pinzgauer missions “weren't raids, they were insertions,” the JSOC staffer said. “They spent a week on the ground then we pulled them out” using Combat Talons or Chinooks. The operators' primary mission was not blowing things up, but reconnaissance—getting the lay of the land and locating Taliban or Al Qaeda forces.

But despite the emphasis on understanding the environment, there was still plenty of direct action, much of the intelligence for which came from the CIA. “In the beginning, I remember particularly in southern Afghanistan, we didn't have the reach,” said the Agency's Hank Crumpton. Only “tiny numbers of CIA officers” were operating in that part of the country, he said. So the Agency turned to JSOC. “I remember us identifying targets with Predators, with human sources, with satellites, and just funneling this to JSOC and saying, ‘Go get 'em.' So they weren't under our control, we were just identifying targets and they were putting the packages together. And it was their authorities, their command and control.” But Sword also coordinated with the CIA to use the Agency's armed Predators (the military had none of its own) to strike an average of one or two moving vehicles a night in late October and early November. “The [Predator] missions were unbelievable,” said a source who monitored the strikes from the JOC. “Every night there were Taliban guys or [or other enemy] guys trying to get out being hunted down and destroyed.”

*   *   *

The mid-November missions came as a blessed relief for one Sword element in particular: the Little Bird crews, for whom the post–September 11 period had been a two-month exercise in frustration. Like their Delta counterparts, they had been surprised at how long they had to wait before finally departing for Masirah on October 6. “I thought something as big as 9/11, within a day or two we would have been wheels up going somewhere to go whack some bad guys, but that's not how it ended up working out,” said a Little Bird pilot. By the time TF Brown deployed, Dailey had cut the Little Bird element down to two pairs of AH-6 gunships and crews, plus a spare airframe, and the same number of MH-6 assault Little Birds. The 160th had seen no combat since Somalia in 1993, so for those picked to deploy, “there was the excitement and anticipation of actually going out and doing something … and getting revenge for what had just happened,” the Little Bird pilot said. “You could see how disappointed the others were that they were staying behind.”

Once at Masirah, the Little Bird crews watched their Black Hawk and Chinook colleagues depart for the
Kitty Hawk.
When planners cut the AH-6s from the airfield seizure mission, the Little Bird pilots began to wonder if their chance for action was evaporating.

After the October 19 missions, the Little Bird contingent became more proactive in their effort to find themselves a mission. Schiller, the Brown operations officer, again tried to persuade Dailey to seize Bagram as a base from which to stage Little Bird missions. The proposal met with no more success than it had before the deployment.

Every day Chief Warrant Officer 3 Rob Rainier and CW4 John Meehan, the AH-6 flight leads, would discuss possible targets with the Task Force Brown intelligence director, plan an operation to attack those targets, then brief that plan to Mangum and Dailey. Each time, Dailey vetoed the plan because it involved not only landing MC-130s at a desert landing strip, but parachuting a fuel blivet, ammunition, and a detachment of soldiers to establish an even more distant forward arming and refueling point. “Basically, after about the third or fourth one, he said, ‘We are not putting any FARPs in—FARPs are dangerous,'” said a Little Bird pilot.

Dailey's refusal to countenance any mission that involved jumping a FARP into the desert disappointed the pilots, for whom the tactic was second nature. The regiment had a jump-qualified airborne support detachment for just such occasions. “We've trained hundreds and hundreds of times for it,” an AH-6 pilot said. The ability to perform such missions was why the Night Stalkers' full name is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne). But Dailey was having none of it, citing the risk of having a force of fewer than twenty soldiers stuck out in the desert, reliant on TF Brown's MH-60s and 47s to pick them up.

In the second week of November Meehan and Rainier finally arrived at a winning formula. They found a couple of viable targets: military installations that still appeared active but which had yet to be bombed and were on nobody else's target list. Instead of jumping the FARP in, they would have MC-130s land in a dry lake bed and refuel them. Ironically, while the Night Stalkers frequently trained to parachute a FARP into a combat zone, the Little Bird pilots had never practiced operating from a dry lake bed. But the MC-130 pilots assured them the planes could handle the surface, so the TF Brown men presented the plan to Dailey.

The JSOC commander approved it, but with an attitude that he was “throwing the guys a bone,” a TF Brown source said. The mission, Dailey told the Little Bird crews in a meeting, was “just one step above Range 29,” a reference to the range the AH-6s used for gunnery practice at Campbell. When the experienced AH-6 flight leads pushed to get the quick reaction force for the mission staged closer to the target than Masirah, Dailey pushed back, saying, “Hey, look, do you guys want to go on a mission or not?”

As with all helicopter missions, the aviators were required to brief a combat search and rescue (CSAR) plan and an evasion and recovery (E and R) plan to Mangum. It was a very short brief. “We had no CSAR,” recalled one of the pilots. “When we briefed the E and R plan, that was E and E [escape and evade] back to the dry lake bed—that's your [only] choice, and if you get there after sunrise, there's nothing going to be there.”

The AH-6 crews knew their targets were of no great strategic importance and could have been struck with much less risk by jets or AC-130 gunships, but desperate to get into the fight, they willingly accepted the hazards. Not only had they yet to see action in Afghanistan, only one of the eight Little Bird gun pilots in Masirah had any combat experience at all, “so this is busting everybody's cherry,” one pilot said. Because JSOC had never disclosed the AH-6s' presence to the Omani government, TF Brown had kept the tiny attack helicopters hidden behind cheesecloth sheets in their hangar. Now they were finally being unleashed. The 160th had a famous motto:
Night Stalkers Don't Quit,
often shortened to
NSDQ
. But the AH-6 crews had their own saying—
Six Guns Don't Miss
—and they were itching to prove it.
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*   *   *

As the first Rangers hit the ground at Bastogne, a little more than an hour behind them another two MC-130s were following the same route. Each carried a pair of AH-6s and crews, a Ranger security element plus the fuel, munitions, and troops for a mobile FARP. A TF Brown medic and a maintenance test pilot were also on the aircraft.

On the lead Talon, the AH-6 company commander Major Al Pepin walked around shaking everyone's hand and wishing them good luck. Otherwise, each man was alone with his thoughts. Meehan's copilot, CW3 Gary Linfoot, was surprised at how routine the flight felt, just like a training mission.
This is the first combat mission, I should be a little more nervous,
he thought. That sense of normalcy vanished at 11:45
P.M
. as the plane descended out of the night sky on its final approach to the lake bed. The special tactics team had ensured the landing strip could handle the Talons and marked it with infrared landing lights, but when the pilot of the Talon carrying Linfoot landed, “he hit so hard it seemed like that AH bounced off the deck even though it was strapped down,” the AH-6 driver recalled. Within moments the air in the plane was thick with the lake bed's talcum-powder-like dust.
This is definitely going to be a little bit more exciting than I thought it was going to be,
Linfoot realized. The Talon slowed to a halt and the troops swiftly unloaded the helicopters and FARP, before guiding the plane off the runway to clear space for the second MC-130E, which landed at midnight, disgorging its cargo just as quickly.

Within fifteen minutes of the second Talon landing, the four Little Birds were ready to take off. But as each helicopter's five rotor blades began to turn, the challenges of using the lake bed as an airstrip became immediately apparent. The whirling rotors whipped the powdery dust into clouds that enveloped the helicopters. Such brownouts are extraordinarily dangerous during takeoffs and landings. If the pilot becomes just slightly disoriented and tilts his helicopter, the rotor blades may strike the ground, shearing off and flying through the air, destroying the helicopter and anything—or anyone—else they encounter. The pilots had trained for brownouts, but never for the sort of towering dust clouds with which they had to deal that night.

Most Little Bird pilots prefer sitting in the right-hand seat, but despite being the pilot in command Meehan had allowed Linfoot, his copilot, to sit there for this mission. As Linfoot “pulled pitch”—pulling up on the collective lever, which increased the rotor blades' pitch, creating lift and allowing the helicopter to take off—he immediately browned out. Unable to see the ground or the sky, he “went inside,” focusing on his instruments and relying on them to keep the Little Bird level as it lifted off the ground. “John's calling out the altitude and I'm just pulling the guts out of it without over-torquing it, and when we cleared the cloud I was not facing the direction I started off,” Linfoot said. “I was 90 degrees to the left or something.”

Emerging from the cloud at an altitude of 200 to 300 feet, the pilots headed north to their first objective, briefly relieved to be out of the dust and flying toward the targets. But their struggles with the unforgiving Afghan environment were only just beginning.

Flying over the flat, featureless lake bed on any night would have challenged an experienced helicopter pilot. But TF Brown's planners had chosen that particular night because Dailey, still fearful of the Taliban's vaunted air defenses, insisted the Little Bird missions occur only on moonless nights; in aviator-speak, nights of “zero illum.” The total darkness compounded the pilots' problems.

“I bet they invented darkness in Afghanistan,” Linfoot said. “Flying over that dry lake bed, I tell you, it was something.… It was flat as paper and so dark you can't really tell where earth ends and the sky begins. The horizon kind of becomes blurred, almost like you're flying inside of a golf ball.” Like all 160th pilots, the AH-6 crews were experts at flying in night vision goggles, which worked by magnifying ambient light. But by choosing the last night of a waning crescent moon, TF Brown had given the goggles almost none to work with, leading Linfoot to question whether they had really gained an edge by flying in such pitch blackness. “There comes a point where maybe you haven't stacked the deck in your favor any longer,” he said.

Once beyond the lake bed, Linfoot decided to cheat a little by turning his infrared “pink light” on for a second to illuminate the ground and reorient himself now that the previously featureless terrain was dotted with rocks and scrubby vegetation that showed up more clearly in the goggles. He did so just in time to see a rocky finger of land flash by only a couple of feet below his skids. A moment later, CW3 Jim Hosey flying the “Dash-2” (the trail aircraft or “wingman” in any two-aircraft formation) actually skimmed off the rocks, almost losing his skids to the unseen outcrop. The first combat AH-6 mission in eight years was only minutes old, not a round had been fired, and yet four pilots had just cheated death by a few feet.

Any Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters out there with access to their own night vision goggles would have been able to see the “pink light,” but Linfoot continued to flash it occasionally to help keep his bearings. He judged this a risk well worth taking. Unlike most future missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Little Birds were on their own. There was no stack of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft above them to warn them of trouble ahead, nor any jets or AC-130 gunships to protect them if enemy fire or maintenance issues forced a helicopter down. The “Six Guns” were hanging it out there a long, long way from home.

About twenty-five minutes after taking off, the helicopters approached the small town west of Kandahar where their first target—Objective Wolverine—was located.

With Linfoot still at the controls of the lead aircraft, flying at an altitude of 300 feet, Meehan navigated, using a small green map light mounted beside him to check the paper map on his lap while calling out what he was seeing around him. Meehan soon spotted Wolverine—a walled Taliban compound containing vehicles, radar equipment, and other gear. At that point he took the controls and went into the classic AH-6 attack profile, “bumping up” about 100 feet to dissipate the helicopter's forward airspeed and give the pilots a better view of the target before nosing over into a 45-degree angle, which is better for handling the aircraft and reducing the “beaten area” where the aircraft's munitions would hit. The 4,000-foot elevation, warmer than expected temperatures, and the amount of fuel the helicopters required to reach the target meant each Little Bird was limited to one rocket pod containing seven 70mm Hydra 70 rockets and one GAU-19 three-barreled .50 caliber Gatling gun with about 500 rounds of ammunition, set to fire at a rate of 1,000 rounds per minute. (When unconstrained, an AH-6 would typically fly with two rocket pods and two 7.62mm miniguns.)