Not a Good Day to Die (39 page)

Hearing the calls for help, the two Apaches in the northern part of the valley broke from their racetrack pattern and flew up the west side of the Whale. Spotting the mortar pit’s location using the vague directions they had received seemed an impossible task. At that hour the Whale’s west side was still bathed in shadow. “It was like trying to see fleas on a dog,” Hurley said. But there it was, in a wadi at the base of the southwest side of the Whale, manned by eight enemy fighters wearing traditional Afghan brown woolen pakhul hats, with brown scarves around their necks. After one pass over the enemy position to positively identify it, the Apaches wheeled around and came diving in. Chenault took the lead, struggling to keep his crosshairs on the mortar as his helicopter closed on the target at a speed of about 115 miles per hour. At 1,000 meters from the tube, his left index finger squeezed the trigger and the pods on his aircraft’s stubby wings spat a pair of high-explosive rounds at the target. The rockets sped toward the target, short yellow flames trailing from their motors. Chenault squeezed again and again, each pull on the trigger firing another two rockets, walking them closer and closer to the mortar pit. At 200 meters from the enemy position, he yanked on the controls and broke to the left. Five rotor discs behind him, Hurley flew in firing three rocket bursts to suppress any enemy to the right of Chenault’s target area. Then he also broke left. Out of the shadows leaped two streams of tracers, arcing under the nose of Hurley’s aircraft. Making a mental note of the spot where the tracers had been fired, Chenault and Hurley turned and barreled toward the target yet again. Both pilots put their rockets right where they remembered the tracers coming from. Bull’s-eye. The mortar position blew apart in a cloud of dust.

That at least persuaded the enemy fighters on the Whale’s western slopes to keep their heads down long enough for McHale and his colleagues to get back in their vehicles and beat a retreat north to the security perimeter that the remainder of the column had established just south of the defile. One of the Afghan drivers returned to his truck, but most of the Afghans chose to walk back in ones and twos. “There was nothing organized about it,” McHale recalled. Over the cacophonous din of incoming mortar rounds, men shouting in two languages, and the static bursts from several radios, McHale’s ears caught another sound drifting over the Whale from the Shahikot valley: automatic weapons fire, and lots of it.

6.

SERGEANT Scotty Mendenhall’s feet hit the ground and he peeled left to take up position at the Chinook’s three o’clock. Behind him the rest of 2
^nd
Platoon fanned out and formed a perimeter around the battalion and company command post personnel as the helicopter took off. Raising their heads as they lay on the scrubby grass and hard-packed dirt, some soldiers were stunned to see a walled compound just 150 meters to the north. Frank Baltazar, commander of 2-187 Infantry’s C Company, wasn’t surprised. In the days leading up to D-Day he’d seen overhead photos of the compound that indicated it was empty, nothing to worry about. He’d told his battalion commander, Chip Preysler, he’d clear the compound—run his troops through it to check it out—before moving into the blocking positions. Staff Sergeant Chris Harry, one of Baltazar’s squad leaders, knew his first mission was to clear the compound. Within three minutes of landing, seven of his men were “stacked” to the left of the doorway along the outside wall. Sergeant David Dedo approached the door-way from the right and peered into the courtyard. “One American dead!” Harry heard him shout. The soldiers had been briefed that TF 11 troops—the AFO recon teams—would be in the valley. They feared the worst. “One American dead?!?” Harry exclaimed. “No, one American TENT!” Dedo replied, explaining he’d spotted a U.S. military-style tent in the courtyard. Relieved, the troops surged through the doorway.

But as Harry’s troops stormed in, bullets ripped over the men still sitting exposed on the LZ, fired from a position about 400 meters to their west on a low east-west ridgeline that ended just short of the compound. Machine gunners Mendenhall and Specialist James “Fred” Thompson returned fire as their buddies sought cover. A running battle ensued as soldiers maneuvered down and up the banks of a creek between the LZ and the compound, exchanging fire with a dozen enemy fighters. Preysler and Baltazar moved their command posts to a nearby bluff. “Look out!” Baltazar’s RTO yelled. Foolishly the captain raised his head to see an orange fireball hurtling straight at him. He slammed his head down as the RPG flew over and landed harmlessly fifty meters behind Preysler. The leaders waited the ten minutes it took Harry’s squad to clear the compound, then they and the rest of 2
^nd
Platoon went inside, where they encountered a scene reminiscent of an Al Qaida Marie Celeste. Someone had left in a hurry moments before the Americans burst in. The teapot was still warm, as were the half-eaten breakfasts of goat meat and the bedclothes for thirteen to fifteen men strewn on the floor of the compound’s one-story main building. The place was an arsenal that proved the guerrillas were better armed than the Americans had expected. They found several recoilless rifles, 82mm mortar tubes and rounds, dozens of AK-style assault rifles and RPGs, Dragunov sniper rifles, three sets of U.S. PVS-7 night-vision goggles, binoculars, and handheld ICOM radios that Sergeant First Class Anthony Koch, the troops’ platoon sergeant, said “were better than ours.” There was also a sports bag from a Nike store in Beaverton, Oregon, full of blasting caps and prayer beads, plus Middle Eastern currency and a notebook full of Arabic writing on military tactics, including a diagram on how to shoot down an aircraft. Fifty alarm clocks, a number of Casio watches, and books on digital electronics suggested a bomb-making operation. “These guys weren’t taking an electrical engineering exam in that compound,” Wiercinski said. Human hair lay on the floor, as if beards had been hurriedly shorn.

Outside, Baltazar’s troops were trading fire with Arab-looking fighters in the hills dressed in lightweight black garb and armed with AKs and RPGs. Thomson dropped two with his machine gun. Koch looked south and suddenly realized the extent of the combat. RPGs flew in all directions, all fired with the same goal: shooting down an Apache.

AS
Apache Team 1 obliterated the mortar position on the Whale, Team 2 was encountering enemy fire in the south of the valley. Hardy was making his first turn through the valley when he felt the helicopter “bounce.” “It sounded like somebody just took their bare hand and slapped the side of the aircraft,” his copilot-gunner Pebsworth remembered. Like most Apache pilots, he had never been shot at and failed to recognize the sound for what it was. “You’re always on the delivering end of a round, you’re never on the receiving end,” he said. “It just wasn’t in my mind, or any of our minds, really, that we were going to be getting shot at.”

“What was that?!?” the two pilots asked each other. Hardy was one of the few pilots who might have been expected to correctly identify the sound. With Bob Carr still back at Texaco getting his cannon fixed, Hardy’s 3,400 flight hours made him the “highest time” pilot over the battlefield. As A Company’s maintenance test pilot, the rangy forty-year-old was, in Hurley’s words, the unit’s “maintenance god,” responsible for the upkeep of the helicopters and for test-flying those that had been fixed. He knew all the Apache’s quirks yet had no idea what had just happened to his helicopter.

A few confused seconds after feeling the bump, Pebsworth realized his symbol generator—the electronic device that allowed him to read data such as compass heading, altitude, and air speed by converting it to graphics in his helmet-mounted display—had died. This made the pilots think the “pop” they’d heard was a fuse or some other electrical failure. Pebsworth started pulling the circuit breakers to reset the electronics. But as he did so, he realized other displays had also gone dark. Nothing connected to the electronics bay on the left side of the fuselage was working. Frantically flicking switches and pushing buttons, the pilots tried to isolate the problem’s source. Then reality dawned in the form of urgent radio traffic from the other Apaches. “We started to realize that we’re being shot at, all the aircraft are being shot at,” Pebsworth said.

The two pilots assumed an RPG had exploded close enough to shower the left electronics bay with shrapnel.
How in the world could one bullet cause that much damage?
Pebsworth thought. But in fact a single Al Qaida bullet was the cause of their difficulties. That bullet had entered the electronics bay and sliced neatly through sixty wires zip-tied together in a bundle as thick as a man’s wrist, knocking out the weapons and target acquisition systems. The pilots could still fly the aircraft, but were unable to shoot back at the enemy. The Apaches’ battle in the Shahikot was less than fifteen minutes old, and already the most experienced pilot in the fight had been rendered impotent.

Having recovered from the initial shock of a couple of hundred U.S. soldiers air assaulting into their stronghold, the Al Qaida fighters were directing a fusillade of RPG, machine gun and Kalashnikov fire at the helicopters. None of the pre-mission briefings had focused on the RPG threat to helicopters, even though it was no secret that Al Qaida and other Islamist guerrilla organizations had grown adept at using RPGs to down helicopters. An RPG gunner can set his weapon either to fire in a point-detonating mode, meaning the round explodes when it hits something, or in an air burst mode, meaning it detonates in midair after a preset distance. In the wars against the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Russians in Chechnya, the Al Qaida fighters had honed their expertise at using RPGs in the air burst mode to down helicopters, setting the rounds to explode close enough to an aircraft to shred its hydraulic and electrical innards—and, perhaps, its pilots—with a lethal shower of shrapnel. The pilots were not ignorant of the risk posed by the shoulder-fired weapons. “Every pilot in the tent talked about the RPGs and how they’ve been used in Somalia,” Hamilton said. “Everyone knew that potential might exist, even if it had not been briefed as part of the threat.”

TEAM
1 was breaking a cardinal rule of helicopter combat. The two Apaches were racing north up the Whale hunting another reported mortar position on the ridge’s northeast corner. Chenault was in the lead, almost 2,000 meters ahead of Hurley. Figuring “altitude was gonna help us,” as Hurley put it, both aircraft “rode the backbone of the Whale,” flying along the crest of the ridgeline for its entire length. The pilots were trying to put themselves between the enemy and the sun, to blind any Al Qaida fighters trying to track them with the naked eye. But this silhouetted the aircraft against the sky—a tactical no-no. Chenault reached the Whale’s northeast tip and began a wide right turn. Hurley was preparing to follow suit when from the front seat Stu Contant screamed a warning: “I have a man, 3 o’clock, RPG!” Looking down, Hurley spotted a brown-clad figure 400 feet below. He had an RPG launcher over his left shoulder and was aiming it at the tail of Chenault’s aircraft. Flying about 100 feet lower than Chenault, Hurley banked his Apache into a tighter right turn. He knew the danger was imminent, but his speed had carried him past the enemy. He needed to be facing a target to destroy it with rockets or Hellfires. The cannon could be more flexibly employed, by “slaving” it to the movements of the pilot’s helmet, but at this stage the small brown figure was too far behind them for Hurley to swivel the cannon around to fire at him, even by craning his neck. There was nothing to do but complete the turn. Then, facing the gunner at a range of 800 meters, he squeezed off a ten-round burst. It was too far away for such a small target. The rounds dispersed too widely. Hurley cursed the decision to set the burst limit at ten rounds.
Twenty would have been better,
he thought.
We’re not getting enough steel in the box.

Hurley flew farther east into the valley, then turned to make another run at the Whale, this time flying out of the sun. He could see five brown spots running from right to left across the ridgeline, all except the RPG gunner carrying AK-style assault rifles. Their brown woolly coats blended perfectly with the rocks and weeds.
No wonder these bastards are so hard to spot when they’re not moving,
Hurley thought. He fired three or four pairs of rockets at the elusive guerrillas, walking the rounds in toward the scattering brown figures. “We’re almost out of rockets,” Contant cautioned. Hurley switched back to cannon and fired two more bursts of high explosive 30mm rounds.
It’s time to switch tactics,
he thought.
We keep turning to the right. We’ve got to do something different.
He made a split-second decision to turn left and head south along the Whale, reasoning that they’d already cleared that route a couple of minutes earlier flying in the opposite direction. But “clearing” a 6,000-meter ridgeline by flying 400 feet above it at over 100 miles per hour is not an ideal method for ensuring it is free of enemy, as Hurley and Contant were about to discover. In the shadows of a crevice at what soldiers would call the Whale’s “military crest”—about twenty-five meters below the actual top of the ridge—an Al Qaida gunner shouldered his RPG launcher, sensing opportunity. He might even have been the same gunner they’d observed a couple of minutes previously. Although they’d seen him aiming at Chenault’s aircraft, they hadn’t seen him fire. Maybe he’d been waiting for a better chance. Having decelerated to ensure greater accuracy, Hurley was just low and slow enough to allow an expert RPG gunner to line the Apache up in his launcher’s metal sights. As Hurley turned left and pulled abreast of the Whale, the gunner pulled the trigger. Unseen by Hurley and Contant, a small puff of smoke marked the launch point as the rocket-assisted projectile hurtled toward their aircraft. It detonated as it struck the helicopter’s left Hellfire launcher, destroying all three missiles on the pylon. Shrapnel tore through the adjacent rocket pod. The helicopter bucked with the force of the explosion. Before Hurley had time to process what had happened, bullets were smacking against the airframe. One burst through the left side of the cockpit at the same moment that the RPG hit. Whizzing inches in front of Hurley’s knee and hand, the bullet lodged in the console. A small piece of metal debris hit him in the leg. For an awful moment he thought he’d been shot.