The Only Thing Worth Dying For (47 page)

Alex responded with a slight nod and some mumbling.

For an instant, Burns experienced an emotional surge akin to adrenaline, an overwhelming desire to remain by his friend’s side, but then he looked down the line of vehicles.

“Hang tight—we’ll get you out of here,” Burns told Alex before moving on to another truck, which held Mike, wrapped in blankets and unconscious. He did not respond to verbal or painful stimuli—such as a pinch—his skin was cool to the touch, and the oxygen level in his blood was dangerously low. A quick glance at Mike’s wounds reminded Burns of photos he’d seen of great white shark attacks.

This guy is circling the drain
, he thought.

When his truck reached the triage area, Amerine staggered out, shouldered his go-to-hell pack, and, holding his carbine at the ready, stepped aside to watch the newly arrived rescue medics work, their clean uniforms in stark contrast to their surroundings. A few hundred yards off each side of the road, the spinning rotors of the two Pave Lows were a blur. Men were running up from the helicopters, carrying casualty litters. He glanced back at the truck behind his, assuring himself that Dan was still there, then hobbled toward the front of the vehicles.

Noticing Amerine, Hadley walked briskly over, pulling the captain into a brief hug.

“It sure is good to see you,” said Amerine. “Thanks for coming to get us.”

“It’s what we do.” Hadley skimmed Amerine’s casualty card and pointed at Knife 03. “You’ll be with me, on that Pave Low.”

“I’ll wait here—I need to make sure my guys get on. And Dan,” he said, motioning toward Dan’s body.

“I’m really sorry. He’s with us, too. Make sure he gets over to my helo. You feeling all right? Dizzy or anything?”

“I’m fine.”

Nobody here is fine
, Hadley thought. “What hit you guys?” he asked. “This couldn’t have been a mortar attack.”

“Friendly fire,” said Amerine. “Our own bomb.”

“Christ.”

The Pinzgauer to the east opened up with a long burst of fire as some PJs and two uninjured headquarters staff began carrying the first vehicle’s patients toward Knife 04 three hundred yards away. Hadley ran toward them, shouting, “Go back—get in the fucking vehicles, and
drive
to the back of the helos!”

“Is it safe to drive near the tail rotors, sir?” yelled a PJ.

“Safer than getting shot at!” As far as Hadley was concerned, this was a hot LZ.

“Sir, we’ve got a slew of Afghan casualties coming up the road in trucks,” shouted another PJ. “They’re with a bunch of armed men, RPGs and shit. What’s the call?”

Hadley grabbed Charlie, who was walking by with a litter, and asked, “Any of those guys coming our way bad guys?”

Setting the litter down, Charlie sprinted down the road with the PJ for a closer look and quickly returned. “I recognize them; they’re Karzai’s men.”

“Are we loading the Afghans?” the PJ asked.

Shit
, thought Hadley. Nobody had given him any guidance about that.

In fact, Fox
had
received permission from Colonel Mulholland to medevac Karzai’s men, but nobody had told Hadley and he didn’t have clearance to take anyone but Americans on board. “Yeah,” Hadley decided on the spot. “We’ll take everybody we can carry. Get through the Americans and then triage the Afghans.”

It took almost twenty minutes to re-triage the nineteen wounded Americans and the most critically wounded Afghans and to transport them and Dan to their respective helicopters.

On Knife 04, the critical patients—Alex, Mike, Mag, and Ronnie, along with four headquarters personnel including Reed and Fathi—were placed in eight of the nine hanging litters, stacked like bunk beds along the sides of the Pave Low’s cargo hold. Six walking wounded,
including Brent and Victor, sat down between the side gunners on the deck toward the front of the aircraft. Price and Leopold flanked Cody Prosser, who was put on a litter in the center front of the hold.

“How close are you to liftoff?” Fronk radioed Gregg in Knife 03. Although they had been given the go-ahead to fly a single-ship mission, none of the pilots liked the idea. It was far safer, especially over bad-guy country, to fly tandem.

“We’re going to be a while,” said Gregg. “We’re loading Afghans. They keep on coming.”

On the tail ramp of Knife 04, Burns was listening in on the radio while treating three critical patients. The most serious was Mike, whose blood oxygen level had remained low at 70 percent; his blood pressure had also dropped, and he was now shivering constantly. Reexamining Mike’s bandages, Burns found that his chest wound was seeping blood.

To combat Mike’s severe shock symptoms, Burns connected him to his entire fifteen-liter supply of oxygen via a rebreather mask. Then he added new packing to his chest wound, along with two bandages to apply more pressure. Rechecking oxygen levels, he found that Mike still had not improved, and his shivering had intensified.

Fuck
, Burns thought, putting another wool blanket on top of Mike. He glanced to the other side of the cargo hold, where fellow PJ Brent Scott was packing Alex’s gaping shoulder wound with more gauze, while in the litter below, Mag was desperately giving him the sign for water—as if tipping a glass with his hand. “No water,” Scott told Mag, who began to belligerently hit the underside of Alex’s litter with his right fist. Noting Mag’s extensive cranial bandaging, Burns thought,
Brain injury—guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Looking toward the front of the helicopter, Burns saw Doc Frank alternating between Ronnie and Fathi, both of whom were hypothermic and in shock. He couldn’t believe these guys were still alive. Then Burns heard Gregg, on Knife 03, ask Fronk, “Can you guys carry any more wounded?”

Burns yelled forward, so loudly they could hear him clearly in the cockpit even without a radio: “No! We cannot get anybody else on this aircraft! We gotta go! We gotta go
now
!”

From behind his machine gun, Diekman watched warily as the first two trucks filled with Afghans drove up and parked at the rear of Knife 03. Immediately, more than a dozen armed men jumped out and stood in a group between the trucks, which were carrying two wounded Afghans apiece. Another truck pulled up, and a couple of the Afghans walked toward the ramp and peered into the cargo hold, where a few of the less seriously wounded Americans were sitting.

Moments before, the crew had been alerted that Afghan casualties were on the way, but Diekman’s duty was to protect this aircraft, and both training and instinct told him that having these men so close wasn’t safe. No Americans were with them, and he couldn’t discount the possibility that they could be saboteurs, using the rescue operation to get in close and lob a grenade into a helicopter.

“Permission to leave the aircraft,” Diekman said over his radio. “We’ve got a cluster fuck in progress back here.”

A gunner was never supposed to leave his helicopter, but when Gregg looked over his shoulder and saw the number of Afghans near the ramp, he said, “Go.”

A few strides beyond the ramp, Diekman realized that he only had his M9 pistol, which to a machine gunner was about as worthless as a peashooter. He turned back to grab his M16 or shotgun and saw that the side door gunner had shifted to the tail gun position and the engineer up front had shifted to the side gun, keeping defenses at 100 percent.

Feeling amply covered from the Pave Low, Diekman didn’t bother with his shotgun. He had started to push the crowd back from the ramp when a PJ from the triage area ran up. “Are these our guys?” asked Diekman. “Are we loading them?”

“Yes,” yelled the PJ, who bent over a wounded Afghan.

One of the Afghans stood fully upright in the bed of a truck, his head inches from the helicopter’s tail rotor, spinning so fast it was invisible. Diekman yanked the man down, pointed out the danger, and indicated that the truck should be parked farther away. He then
began to help Knife 03’s PJs direct “traffic”—loading the critically wounded Afghans onto the aircraft and placing the worst-off by the tail ramp exit.

From the cockpit, Gregg watched as Knife 04 took off, leaving a trail of dust in its wake as it headed north, then banked and picked up speed heading southwest around Kandahar. One of Gregg’s flight engineers came over the radio. “Here comes an American KIA.”

“How can you tell?” asked Gregg.

“You need to look to the rear, sir.”

Lifting up in his seat, Gregg stared over his shoulder and out of the cavernous cargo hold, where a truck was backing up to the tail ramp. In its bed was a body in what looked like a sleeping bag and covered with an American flag.

Gregg could not fathom how somebody had had the presence of mind to actually pause in the middle of what must have been confusion and chaos in order to wrap the fallen soldier in a flag.
That is patriotism
, he thought, feeling a renewed sense of responsibility to return this American home to his family.

It was 12:25 in the afternoon when Knife 04 rose above the desert, and Mike started to throw up. Burns pulled away the oxygen mask he’d placed over Mike’s face and turned his head sideways so he wouldn’t choke on the vomit.

Having been unable to locate a suitable vein for an IV, Burns proceeded to slather the center of Mike’s chest—just to the side of the bandage—with Betadine. Picking up a large spring-loaded needle, he punched it directly into Mike’s sternum and pumped a saline solution directly into his bone marrow.

Over the radio, Alexander announced that the flight to Camp Rhino would take forty minutes.
Forty minutes
, thought Burns, shifting his attention to Reed.
An eternity.
For the next twenty minutes, Burns, Doc Frank, and the PJs continued to monitor vitals and check the airways of their patients, but they didn’t remove any bandages on the extensive wounds for fear they’d dislodge a blood clot or disturb
whatever it was that had been done by the ground medics to keep these men from bleeding to death for the past four hours.

They were halfway to Rhino when Fronk called Ditka 04 to request their planned aerial refueling. Only a couple of minutes had passed before the tail gunner announced the arrival of the MC-130, a mile out and closing in. “Tally-ho,” he said. “I have the tanker.”

Amerine waited outside the Pave Low with Dan’s body, which had been placed at the bottom of the ramp while the rescue crew loaded wounded Afghans. He had never seen a group of men work so quickly or efficiently, and it appeared that Knife 03 couldn’t hold another patient—every hanging litter and almost every inch of floor space was full.

Followed closely by Amerine, two crew members carried Dan up the ramp. As they passed Diekman—who had been tightening the belt on his machine gun’s ammo boxes—the tail gunner turned suddenly and bumped into the litter. Immediately, he saw what he’d done and looked at Amerine, who was following them up the ramp.

Meeting his eyes, Amerine quietly said, “Show some respect.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Diekman.

With a nod, Amerine stepped forward into the helicopter, where the crew had made space for Dan on the floor and were securing him to the hull with webbing. Carefully, Amerine moved among the wounded to stand in the front of the hold, just behind the cockpit.

Knife 03’s internal guidance system had behaved strangely during the infiltration the previous night and had stopped working altogether during the medevac ground operations. Now copilot Marty Schweim was figuring out a route the old-fashioned way, on the map covering his lap.

The original route would have taken them west from Shawali Kowt, then well beyond the outskirts of Kandahar, where the Pave Low would turn south to Camp Rhino. It seemed straightforward enough: There were few major roads, the population centers were easy to avoid, and they intended to stay between twenty-five and fifty feet AGL the entire way. They didn’t have the exact coordinates for Camp Rhino but knew it was southwest of Kandahar.

The most pressing concern was fuel.

While Schweim studied the map, Gregg radioed the MC-130 that was on its way to refuel Knife 04. “Ditka Zero Four, this is Knife Zero Three. Copy?”

“I have you, Knife Zero Three. What is your status?”

“I’m loaded and will require a Texaco northeast of the planned IP [initial point]. Approaching fuel critical. Will radio our present coordinates as we approach—stand by.”

Standing in the center of the hold, Hadley plugged into the helicopter’s internal comms in time to hear Gregg say “Texaco,” the code word for an emergency aerial refueling at an unassigned location. This surprised Hadley. “How are we that low?” he asked Gregg.

“Sir, remember we dumped fuel on approach to accommodate the extra wounded. We calculated for fifteen minutes on the ground, but we’ve been here for forty-five.”

Hadley had either missed or misunderstood this decision during the flight in. “How critical are we?”

“Eight hundred pounds of fuel,” said Gregg. “Fifteen minutes till we flame out.”
*

Eighteen dirty, bandaged, bleeding casualties surrounded Hadley. All the Americans aboard—Amerine, Ken, Pickett, Musselman, and another TACP from headquarters—were stable. Seven of the thirteen Afghans, however, were critical, and the aircraft was so full that the PJs were kneeling on the hinge of the tail ramp, working on men whose feet were just inches from hanging off the end of the ramp.

“I’m going to have my hands full back here with the wounded,” Hadley said to Gregg. “You continue as the air mission commander. I’ll be monitoring the radio.”

“Roger.”

“Okay, tie everybody down,” Hadley yelled into the hold as the engines powered up. “We’re getting out of here.”

Knife 04 was taking on fuel five hundred feet over the open desert far to the west of Kandahar when the crew heard Knife 03 radio the MC-130.

“Ditka Zero Four, we are airborne and coming around the northwest of the city—we are fuel critical. Texaco. I repeat, Texaco. We need you to turn around.”

“Knife Zero Four, I’m going to have to cut this short,” Ditka 04’s pilot radioed Fronk.