The Only Thing Worth Dying For (48 page)

“We’ve got all we need,” said Fronk, and the fuel tanker retracted its hose and climbed steeply into a banked turn toward the north.

In Knife 03, Schweim was alternating between glancing at the map and out the cockpit window of the Pave Low, which was cruising at fifty feet AGL. According to the map, they should have been skirting the edge of Kandahar, but instead they were flying over neighborhoods of single-story houses.

“What’s the date on that map?” Gregg asked.

“I can’t find a date,” said Schweim, “but Kandahar has grown since it was printed.”

“That’s unfortunate.” Looking out the two side windows of the cockpit, Gregg could see that these suburbs spread out for miles in all directions. The helicopter was above the most dangerous enemy-held city in the country.
This really, really sucks,
he thought. But with critical patients and critically low on fuel, staying the course was the only option.
The shortest path through a storm is straight ahead.

He dropped to twenty feet AGL—as low as he could bear to go—and prayed that there wasn’t an Afghan in a backyard with a surface-to-air missile.

Diekman gripped his machine gun and watched residents scatter in the Pave Low’s wake. Atop one building, a woman was hanging laundry; her mouth opened in a scream as they ripped past.

“Be advised, we are skimming rooftops,” Diekman warned the pilots over the radio. “I’m seeing antennas and clotheslines.”

Aboard Knife 04 five minutes out from Camp Rhino, Mike regained consciousness and tried to speak. “My feet are cold,” he was finally able to whisper to Burns, who realized he’d forgotten to put Mike’s socks back on after checking his feet for an IV site. He also realized that Mike’s complaining of cold feet was a good sign. Checking his blood oxygen level, Burns found that it had risen to 90 percent.
We just bought you a little time, pal,
he thought.

Fronk announced their arrival to the controller at Camp Rhino, a fellow Air Force CCT who had been assigned to run air traffic with the Marines. Even through the dust, the Pave Low crew could see the two JMAUs parked at an angle off the far end of the dirt runway, but the controller denied Fronk’s request to land next to the aircraft. Instead, he was directed five hundred yards away, near the Marine helicopters.

“We will send some trucks to transfer your patients,” said the CCT.

“Roger,” said Fronk. “Cease all operations while we transfer the casualties.”

On the other side of the ramp, PJ Brent Scott had been forced to restrain Mag, who was becoming increasingly disoriented and combative, using a Kerlix bandage to tie the wrist of his uninjured hand to the forearm above his wounded hand. But while Scott tended to Alex, Mag slid the restraint over what remained of his left hand and was using his good hand to continue hitting Alex in the litter above.

As the Pave Low descended, Mag got the strap holding him down unbuckled and tried to rip the bandage off his head, then heaved himself off the litter and onto the deck. There, Scott held him down with both arms on Mag’s shoulders and a knee on his stomach while the helicopter flared for landing, then touched down in the dust still floating in the air from the recently arrived JMAUs.

The rescue crew waited, expecting trucks and Marines to come streaming over.

For two minutes they sat in the dust storm, Fronk repeatedly trying to reach the tower. Finally, the CCT responded with “Stand by.”

“I’m going to get us closer to the JMAUs,” said Fronk. He began to back-taxi the Pave Low, but the dust it kicked up forced him to stop.

Another three minutes passed. “We’re wasting time here,” Fronk told the crew. “Let’s start running bodies ourselves.”

Doc Frank and Scott immediately grabbed Mike’s litter, ran it down the ramp, and set a pace jogging along the edge of the runway. Fifty yards away, a CH-53 Marine transport helicopter powered up its engine, its rotor stirring up the flourlike dust the men were running through. It lifted off and angled toward them, creating a wind blast that knocked the men down when it passed overhead. Struggling to hold on to the stretcher, which acted like a sail in the rotor wash, they got it to the ground and threw themselves over Mike, whose entire body was pelted with gravel and dust.

Watching from the cockpit of Knife 04, copilot Alexander said, “Are you shitting me?!” He radioed the control tower: “I repeat, cease all operations immediately! This is a medical evacuation. We need assistance. Stop launching aircraft!”

“Is this the fucking Twilight Zone?” Alexander said to Fronk. “Did he not hear what we just said? Did anybody tell him this is a mass casualty evacuation?”

Two Cobra attack helicopters lifted off and followed the CH-53. In the interim, Scott and Doc Frank had picked Mike up and carried him another hundred yards closer to the JMAUs, then lay back down on top of him in anticipation of the blast of air.

“We’re getting zero assistance here!” said Alexander.

“Assistance?” said Fronk. “They’re a goddamn hindrance.”

In back, Burns was choking on the thick dust that had filled Knife 04, but he could make out the silhouette of the airfield’s control tower a hundred yards away. Thirteen wounded were still on board, and some of them were facing limb amputations or death if they didn’t immediately get to the highly trained general surgeons waiting at operating tables inside the JMAUs a mere five hundred yards off. Five hundred yards of dust storm caused by what appeared to be Marines practicing touch-and-go landings.

He was feeling helpless and contemplating a burst of .50-caliber
machine-gun fire to get the controller’s attention when a group of men wearing black T-shirts and DCU pants appeared through the brown fog.

“We heard you might need some assistance over here,” said the first of sixteen Navy SEALs from SEAL Team 3 on standby at Rhino, where they had been monitoring the tower’s radio frequency.

Within three minutes, every casualty was being run over to the waiting surgical teams, even as three more Marine helicopters lifted off and shrouded them in dust.

With just over ten minutes’ worth of fuel remaining, Knife 03 was still flying over the southwest suburbs of Kandahar.

Amerine—like the other casualties on board—couldn’t hear what was being said over the radio and was oblivious to the dire fuel situation. It was too painful to bend his leg, so he had remained upright, leaning against the divider between the cargo area and the cockpit. Hadley was on his knees next to an unconscious Afghan whose foot was split open, the white metatarsal bones looking like a plastic skeleton that hangs on a door at Halloween. The man’s lower leg had been hit by shrapnel, and Hadley’s surgically gloved fingers were inside a gaping wound, his other hand digging around with a hemostat. Blood pooled on the colorful blanket beneath the Afghan. Finally, Hadley was able to grab hold of a severed vein with the scissors-like clamp and tie it off with silk suture thread.

There were four PJs on board, every one of whom was likewise too busy caring for three or four patients to give a second thought to the fuel situation. They were dealing with open skull fractures, arterial blood spray, and exposed organs. Every couple of minutes or so, whenever Hadley or one of the PJs felt he might fold under the stress, he would find the strength to carry on by glancing at the flag draped over the American soldier who had given his life.

Out the open back of the Pave Low, Amerine saw a hillside covered with tan buildings; a colorful dome that must have been a mosque; a tree-lined avenue. Just that morning, he had discussed with JD how
they would split the team up once they retook the ruins, crossed the bridge, and moved into Kandahar.

So this is Kandahar,
he thought sadly.
Wait a minute, why the fuck are we
over
Kandahar?

Meanwhile, Diekman scanned the ground for the enemy while glancing constantly up at the sky in search of their Texaco. As tail gunner, it was Diekman’s job to spot the fuel tanker as it closed in from the rear—usually at a mile out—and report its approach in increments to the pilots: a three-to five-minute process until the aircraft catches up to the helicopter and the pilot takes over.

As the Pave Low converged with the MH-130, copilot Schweim had been reading their coordinates off his handheld GPS. “We are in the vicinity of north three one, three zero, point four seven; east six five, zero six.”

“I see you, Knife Zero Three,” said Ditka 04. “I will come to you. Let’s keep it low, two hundred feet.”

“Did he say two hundred?” Gregg asked Schweim. “Two zero zero?” Schweim nodded.

Not only had the MH-130 slowed to a speed that barely kept it from stalling, if something were to go wrong while refueling, neither aircraft would have altitude in which to react and correct. Gregg generally refueled above one thousand feet, though he had refueled a few times at five hundred feet in training. He was also accustomed to doing it at night, invisible to those on the ground—not in broad daylight, directly above Kandahar, on his first mission in Afghanistan.

The helicopter ascended to two hundred feet, then Gregg suddenly announced to its crew, “I have the tanker—he’s coming right at us!”

Both pilots watched in amazement as the hulking MH-130 descended toward them in a shallow dive from a few thousand feet and began a wide arcing turn, at the same time dropping its wing flaps to reduce speed and deploying its fuel hoses.

“They’re coming from the
front
?” Diekman said over the radio.

“He’s coming around now,” said Gregg. “Stand by for a visual.”

“Tally-ho, I have the tanker!” Diekman shouted, staring up at the belly of Ditka 04, which slid into place less than one hundred feet
above and slightly behind the tail rotor of the helicopter, and immediately sped forward.

“Holy shit, tanker abeam,” called out the side gunner a second later.

“Ten minutes to flameout,” said Schweim.

At the moment Gregg began to guide Knife 03’s fuel boom toward the basket at the end of the tanker’s hose, the Pave Low encountered moderate turbulence, causing it to shake and drop. Monitoring the radio, Hadley listened as Gregg missed the first attempt to hit the hose, then again.

“Seven minutes to bingo,” said Schweim.

“If you miss again,” Hadley told Gregg over the radio, “I’m going to throw you out of the pilot seat and show you how to refuel a helo.”

“Got it!” Gregg announced. “We’re on.”

Thank God
, thought Diekman, who had been desperately searching the urban sprawl for some open ground on which to make an emergency landing.

The scent of jet fuel filled Knife 03. With the refueling complete, Ditka 04 pulled away from the Pave Low and climbed steeply. Simultaneously, Gregg descended sharply to the helicopter’s safety zone, skimming rooftops.

Amerine was feeling the steep descent in his stomach when he noticed a wounded guerrilla—who had joined the team back in Haji Badhur’s Cove—attempt to sit up from where he was lying on the open tail ramp. The man had a badly mutilated arm with a makeshift tourniquet, little more than a rag and stick above a gaping wound on his crushed lower arm. Bright red arterial blood was pulsing out of the wound and running down what was left of the Afghan’s forearm and onto the deck of the helicopter.

PJs Malone and Schultz, who were looking after the critical patients, stopped the Afghan when he tried to stand and laid him back down on the ramp. Malone applied a new tourniquet, but the blood continued to flow.

“Stop the fucking bleeding
now
!” shouted Hadley, seated between patients near the center of the hold some twelve feet away. Noting that the man did not have an IV, Hadley took an IV bag out of his trauma kit and tossed it to Malone, hitting him in the chest before it dropped to the floor. Malone picked it up and inserted an IV, then readjusted the tourniquet. Nothing was working; the arm was too severely crushed. He looked at Hadley again, shaking his head.

Hadley made a scissors motion with two fingers. “Cut it off!” he yelled. For a second Malone stared at him, puzzled, then Hadley made the motion again, this time against his arm, and pointed at the Afghan. Nodding, the PJ reached into his trauma bag.

At his gun, Diekman focused on the landscape below, trying not to think about what was going on around him. Every time he glanced left or right, he caught glimpses of what looked like a slaughterhouse. But it was impossible to ignore the thick stream of blood flowing down the tail ramp and spraying off into the wind.

He felt a tap on his shoulder.

When he turned his head, the first thing Diekman noticed was the American flag wrapped around the soldier’s body; the red and white stripes calmed him. Still gripping the handles of his weapon, he concentrated on what Malone was asking him to do.

After a moment, he realized what that was: The PJ was going to amputate the Afghan’s arm, right there on the ramp, and he needed Diekman’s help.

At Camp Rhino, Master Sergeant David Lee stepped out of ODB 540’s command tent and into the dust storm. He was amazed that all three MC-130s—the two JMAUs and one transport carrying Major Miller’s quick reaction force from K2—had arrived in quick succession, only minutes before the first helicopter full of casualties.

“They couldn’t have planned it better if they’d planned it,” he told Leithead, who, along with other members of ODB 540, was hurrying over to the JMAUs, where they would help transfer the wounded.

Lee didn’t know that the trucks the CCT in the control tower promised to transport the wounded had never arrived. The B-team’s tent was on the opposite side of the runway a couple hundred yards from the Marine helicopter parking area and Knife 04. Because of the brownout, they had lost visual contact with nearly everything on the base.

The Green Berets had been following the rescue operation via radio and, once Knife 04 was en route to Rhino, they passed the information along to General Mattis that the Air Force had evacuated the wounded—without taking any enemy fire. It was then that Mattis released his Marine pilots to fly: The helicopters that had just departed were headed to Shawali Kowt for the wounded Afghans unable to fit into Knife 03 and Knife 04.