Not a Good Day to Die (40 page)

A dozen bullets hit the helicopter’s fuselage, but Hurley didn’t hear or feel them. “What got my attention was the bullet that came through the cockpit,” he said. “I’m hit, but I’m okay!” he yelled to Contant. Momentarily confused, he wondered how the impact of one small bullet could make the aircraft rock so much. Leaning forward and peering out of the cockpit to his left, he saw a Hellfire’s seeker head hanging down from the pylon. The rest of the missile was missing. It began to dawn on him that he’d been hit by something larger than a bullet. As he straightened the helicopter out, he heard the
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!
of an alarm in his headphones. The master caution light—a big light on the left of the dashboard designed to draw attention to smaller warning lights that indicate problems with individual systems—flashed an ominous red. Hurley scanned the array of sixty caution lights to see which were on. The first to flash was the fail light for the helicopter’s back-up control system, a flyby-wire system for use in case of problems with the main controls. One of two main transmission oil lights was flickering, as if hesitant to announce bad news, and the helicopter was handling sluggishly. Hurley’s gut told him he wasn’t going to be able to keep the Apache aloft for much longer.

He keyed his mike. “Hey, Rich, I’m hit,” he said to his wingman. “I need to know, where do you guys want me to put this?” But Chenault was now on the northeastern side of the Whale, putting the ridgeline’s rocky bulk directly between the two helicopters. The Apaches’ radios operate on a line-of-sight principle. Chenault might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. All Hurley heard was the hiss of static. As he reached the southern tip of the Whale, both transmissions’ oil pressure lights flashed on. Low on ammo, the weapons stores on his left wing destroyed, and with oil and smoke pouring from his aircraft over enemy territory, he figured now was a good time to call his maintenance god.

At that moment Hardy and Pebsworth were dealing with a few problems of their own. Unable to shoot, Hardy fell back on a game he had learned as a young AH-1 Cobra pilot. Back then it involved sending an unarmed OH-58 Kiowa scout helicopter out ahead of his Cobra. The idea was that the Kiowa would draw fire by offering such an inviting target that the enemy was compelled to engage it as it flew by. The enemy having revealed his position, the Cobra, following close behind, would move in for the kill. The game was called “hound and hare,” and it involved an obvious risk to the crew of the Kiowa. Now Hardy was putting himself and Pebsworth in that unenviable position. With the damage his helicopter had sustained, no one would have questioned his right to withdraw immediately to Texaco to get his aircraft patched up. But he chose to remain on the battlefield, drawing fire for his colleagues as the Apaches circled the valley.

Drawing fire was easy. Avoiding it was tough.

The pilots were for the most part blissfully unaware of the DShK and Kalashnikov bullets peppering their aircraft. The RPGs were harder to ignore. The guerrillas were firing them at a rate of about one every minute, and each round’s relatively slow velocity and short smoke trail meant the pilots could visually track the grenades as they flew through the air and exploded with a puff of black smoke that reminded Hamilton of World War II flak. “They’re shooting RPGs at you,” Hamilton told Hardy as the two helicopters flew along the ridgeline. “I don’t want to hear about it. Just shoot them!” Hardy replied. Then Hurley called. He read off the cockpit warnings. Hardy listened with growing alarm. Hurley and Contant had to leave the battle and return to the FARP immediately. That much was clear. Normal practice called for the damaged Apache’s wingman to leave with him. But Hurley’s wingman was Rich Chenault, whose Apache was holding up relatively well in the maelstrom of RPG and DShK fire. “We need to go with that aircraft, because we can’t shoot anyway,” Pebsworth told Hardy. “It doesn’t make any sense to send a good aircraft out of the fight.”

His backseater agreed. “I’ve gotta go back to the FARP,” Hardy told Hurley over the radio. “Fall in trail and follow me, and we’ve got to go quick.” But first the two helicopters had to find each other—usually no easy task when all Apaches look alike and four of them were swarming like bees in a one kilometer by three kilometer slice of sky. The risk of a fiery midair collision was high. “Somehow we stayed away from each other,” Pebsworth said. “That was amazing to me.”

Hardy and Pebsworth easily identified Hurley’s aircraft by the smoke streaming from the burning oil, and flew up beside the stricken Apache. “I’m dipping my nose so you can identify me,” Hardy said over the radio. “I’ve got you,” Hurley replied. The two Apaches flew out of the valley’s southwest corner at high speed, turned north toward the FARP and scooted along the western side of the Whale. Hardy had Hurley take the lead, so that if the latter’s Apache caught fire, the pilots in the trailing aircraft would be able to spot it and alert Hurley and Contant instantly. But no more than two kilometers northwest of the Whale more lights started blinking insistently in Hurley’s cockpit. Their message was blunt: You have no oil left in your transmission. Hurley called off the lights to Hardy as they flashed on. The maintenance pilot knew there was no choice about what had to be done. He needed to assess the aircraft’s condition immediately. “You’ve got to land, and you’ve got to land now,” he told Hurley.

Spotting a wadi below them that might offer a little protection from any enemy in the area, the pilots steered their helicopters toward it and landed almost simultaneously on a dirt road that ran through the middle of the creek bed. It was a rough landing for Hurley. He had lost the system that stabilizes the aircraft as it lands, and the helicopter rocked forward and backward as he brought it in. As soon as he set the helicopter down in the 100-foot-wide river bed, the extent of the damage it had sustained became vividly apparent. “It was like a hunter when he guts a deer,” Pebsworth said. “He set it down and all this stuff falls out from underneath it. Transmission fluid was leaking from that aircraft from nose to tail.”

Although the pilots’ position was perilous—they were within sight and weapons range of Al Qaida positions on the Whale, and they could still hear the din of the battle raging in the Shahikot—Pebsworth hadn’t lost his sense of humor. “I think he’s got a transmission fluid leak,” he told his backseater with more than a hint of sarcasm.

Jumping out of his cockpit, Hardy told Hurley to shut his engine down. As the rotors slowed, the maintenance pilot opened the cowlings and began to inspect the engine, much like a doctor conducting a triage examination of a patient. The damage to the Apache was shocking. In addition to the torn and dented rocket pod and the mangled Hellfires, the Apache had a cracked rotor blade and almost three dozen bullet holes, out of which the last of its transmission fluid was leaking. It was a testament to the helicopter’s sturdy design that it was still flying at all, and that neither pilot had been hit.

Hardy had a tough decision to make. It was a decision that could prove fatal if he chose wrong, and he had to make it fast. One option was to try to fly the helicopter back to Texaco, about thirty minutes’ flying time away. Thanks to engine bearings that have a felt wicking designed to collect and hold oil, helping to lubricate an otherwise dry engine, the Apache is supposed to be able to fly for thirty minutes with no oil. That, at least, was the manufacturers’ claim. But it had never been done before, and this was a hell of a time to put the theory to the test. The alternative was to fly back to Texaco with Hurley and Contant strapped to the wings of his helicopter. This was not quite as dangerous as it sounds, and—although never done in training—is an approved method for evacuating downed pilots in such situations. Each Apache carries nylon ropes with a metal D-ring attached for just such a purpose. However, it would mean abandoning Hurley’s damaged Apache. Such an outcome held no appeal for Hardy, a plainspoken man who had grown up on a farm in Alabama and now raised cattle for market on a farm of his own.

“It would have been a superior victory for these guys to shoot down one of those Apaches, and that was something we couldn’t let happen, something I wasn’t going to let happen,” he said. As A Company’s maintenance test pilot, Hardy viewed all the aircraft as “his.” Of the four pilots in the wadi, his maintenance background, and long years of flying gave him the best “feel” for the Apache, a fingertip sense of the nuances required when flying a badly damaged bird to safety. His thoughts drifted back to a promise he had made Jim Marye the previous evening. “I told Lieutenant Colonel Marye that if an aircraft went down, instead of sending more guys out there to get shot at, if it could crank, I’d fly it out of there.”

Hardy told Hurley to trade seats with him, and that he was flying the leaking Apache back to the FARP. The distinctive sound of the other Apaches’ 30mm fire could be heard over the roar of his own aircraft’s engine as he announced the decision—a reminder of how close to the enemy they were. “There wasn’t time for a committee decision,” Hardy said. “The bad guys were just on the other side of the hill.” Hardy set a clock in the dashboard so he could keep track of exactly how long he had been in the air. “Don’t dick around,” he told Hurley. “When I get it started, I’m going.”

Each Apache carried three spare one-quart cans of oil for emergencies. Well, this qualified as an emergency under anybody’s definition, so Hardy grabbed all six cans and emptied them into the leaking transmission, then hoisted himself up to the cockpit. When he saw Hardy climbing into 203’s backseat and realized what that meant, Contant, who had stayed in the aircraft, was alarmed. “He didn’t want to go at first,” Hardy said. “I was called ‘stupid’ along with some other adjectives to go along with it. But the airplane wasn’t going to be left there. I was flying with him or without him. He sucked it up, and we took off.” Pebsworth, who had also remained in his aircraft, with the engine running and rotors spinning, was just glad to be leaving. “I was scared,” he said. “I was paranoid.” The only Al Qaida-held position from which the helicopters could be seen was the top of the Whale. Pebsworth’s eyes were glued to that ridgeline, watching for any enemy fire or movement.
We’re sitting ducks if they come over the top,
he thought. But the guerrillas failed to notice that two of their most highly prized targets were located so vulnerably just two kilometers away, and less than ten minutes after the Apaches landed, they were airborne again.

Any margin for error that might have existed evaporated when the helicopters took off and immediately flew in the wrong direction. One of the three dozen bullets that hit 203 had lodged in the computer that took Doppler and GPS information and put it into the navigation system, with the result that the electronic compass had stuck on a heading of due north—the direction they needed to fly in. Not realizing this, Hardy, flying lead, thought he was heading north toward the FARP when he had actually pointed the aircraft east-northeast toward Pakistan. In the trailing aircraft Pebsworth’s navigational equipment was also barely functional. Information that should have been flowing into the system was being held up at the severed wire harness, like a vital of convoy of supplies stuck on one side of a collapsed bridge. Dispensing with the high-tech approach, Pebsworth got out his map and spread it on his lap, using the basics of time flown, distance covered and heading to navigate. He quickly realized they needed to turn around, and relayed the information over the radio to Hardy, who reversed course.

Now it was a race against time. Hardy was flying four or five rotor discs ahead of the Apache now flown by Hurley, so that the pilots in the rear helicopter would be able to warn him early if his engine caught fire or any other visible problem developed. But visibility was proving tricky for Hurley and Pebsworth. The oil Hardy had poured into 203’s transmission was spraying out through the bullet holes and coating the Plexiglas canopy of their cockpit. The 140-mile-per-hour flight was the ultimate white knuckle ride. Pebsworth had plotted a flight back to the FARP that took them over the lowest ground he could find, in case Hardy had to put the helicopter down. But the initial wrong turn out of the wadi put paid to that plan. Now the pilots counted down the minutes as the refigured route took them over snow-covered mountain passes in which, were 203’s engines to fail, there was nowhere to make an emergency landing.

After twenty minutes the Apaches crested a 7,000-foot mountain range. Spread before them was a flat brown plain. By Pebsworth’s reckoning, somewhere ahead in that dun expanse of semi-desert lay the FARP and salvation. After several increasingly tense minutes the pilots spotted the green hulk of a Chinook sitting on the ground less than two miles ahead. It was Texaco—nothing more than a patch of sand dotted with a few helicopters and tents, and soldiers nervously scanning the sky. Hardy eased his aircraft down to the ground, no easy task with the flying dirt and sand creating “brown out” conditions that can disorient a pilot. With immense relief, he shut down the engines. It was twenty-six minutes since he had taken off from the wadi. Then Jim Hardy jumped out of the cockpit, and into Army aviation history.

“There are not a lot of folks out there who would have taken that aircraft off the ground,” Ryan said. “It was an incredible action by Mr. Hardy.”

AS
sounds of battle echoed around the compound, the 2-187 leaders conferred. They were with C Company’s 2
^nd
Platoon. Baltazar’s other two platoons had landed in other LZs along the eastern ridge and were also taking fire.
Today is not going to be like it was planned,
Nielsen thought. Preysler also realized everything had changed. It didn’t look like anyone was trying to escape the valley. The enemy was trying to kill Americans, not run away from them. But over the radio he heard that Task Force Hammer was still on its way, so his mission remained to establish the blocking positions as soon as possible. The fire his troops were taking from enemy positions all around the compound only heightened his sense of urgency.
We need to get out of this area,
he thought.
It’s too hot. We need to fight our way up to the high ground, to our original blocking positions.