TAKUR GHAR

1.

AS dawn cast faint shadows across the Gardez safe house courtyard on March 3, the AFO headquarters personnel went to sleep for the first time in over two days. They awoke two hours later to be greeted by a sea of new faces. A slew of Task Force Blue operators had arrived via road and helicopter while the AFO men were asleep. The new arrivals included two SEAL teams code-named Mako 30 and Mako 21, a Gray Fox operator named Thor, and in charge of them all, a TF Blue officer named Lieutenant Commander Vic Hyder.

The selection of Hyder to command and control the SEAL elements in Gardez was a strange decision on the part of Captain Joe Kernan, the Task Force Blue commander. Hyder had already been involved in two incidents in which he had displayed, in the view of many people familiar with them, extremely poor judgment. On New Year’s Eve he had been the senior man in a group of SEALs who had “violated instructions,” according to a TF 11 officer, by taking an armored SUV that belonged to TF Bowie and driving it down the Bagram to Jalalabad road on what Hyder described as an “area familiarization” reconnaissance outing. The TF 11 officer said it could also be described as “a joyride.” Against the advice of the others in the vehicle, Hyder, who hadn’t been in country long, had the driver blow through a couple of checkpoints manned by Afghan militiamen loosely allied with the U.S. forces. When they tried the trick a third time the militia fighters fired at them. The SEALs must have thought they were safe in their armored cocoon, but a bullet pierced the rubber seal between the bulletproof glass and the armor at the back of the SUV, went through the backseat and the driver’s seat before striking the driver. He was not badly wounded, but had to pull over. The SEALs were traveling with their rifles stashed in the back of the vehicle, rather than on their persons. So rather than fight their attackers off, they meekly surrendered to the tribesmen, who took whatever they wanted from the vehicle. (The joke around the rest of TF 11 was the episode resembled the scene in the movie Stripes in which Bill Murray’s hapless American troops surrender their weapons to the Czech police.) The only long-range communications system the SEALs had was an Iridium satellite telephone. But they had neglected to bring the number for the TF Blue TOC in Bagram. Hyder was left with little choice but to call the SEAL Team 6 headquarters in Dam Neck, Virginia, and ask them to call Bagram for help. Pulling the SEALs out of that sort of jam would usually be a job for the Ranger quick reaction force. But Hyder had picked the very evening that one Ranger force was departing Bagram and another arriving, and the gear for both elements was stowed on pallets when the plea for help came in. In the end a British force stationed at Bagram sent one of its helicopters down to pull the SEALs’ chestnuts out of the fire. The SUV episode reflected “bad judgment” on Hyder’s part and alerted JSOC commander Dell Dailey to a potential problem with the SEAL lieutenant commander, according to a senior Army officer. But other than being “counseled” by his chain of command, no further action was taken against Hyder.

The second of what came to be known in Joint Special Operations Command as “Vic Hyder’s three strikes” occurred on a dark Afghan night when he had led TF Blue troops on what turned out to be a “dry hole” mission. While they were waiting, hidden, in the dark, Hyder and his men saw an unarmed old man approaching through their vision goggles. The man was unable to see them in their hiding positions. Hyder ordered him—in English—to stop. When he failed to do so immediately, Hyder shot him through the eye and killed him. An investigation apparently cleared Hyder of criminal wrongdoing in the matter, but the incident left a very sour taste in the mouths of many of his TF 11 comrades. The senior Army officer, who was familiar with the repercussions from Hyder’s actions, defended Kernan’s decision to keep giving Hyder missions that carried huge responsibilities, adding that SEAL Team 6 handled their internal discipline issues “at least as well” as Delta. “Hyder got as much of a fair hand as any other person would who ultimately showed, probably, not the right judgment,” the general said. “You can’t pick out a lousy judgment type guy right off the bat.”

So Hyder was still around to take charge of the SEAL force in Gardez. His third “strike” was yet to come.

THE AFO operators in Gardez were stunned to see the new arrivals. It was the first time any TF 11 personnel had shown up at Gardez without first giving them a heads-up. “What are you doing here?” they asked Hyder. The SEAL officer told them he was there “to C2 [command and control] the Blue guys,” and had orders to infiltrate the two SEAL teams into the Shahikot as soon as possible to support the fight. Blaber and Glenn P. assumed that Trebon had acted upon Blaber’s suggestion to place a TF Blue officer under his command at Gardez to help integrate more SEAL elements into the battle. But the SEALs’ first priority appeared to be establishing their own communications with TF Blue at Bagram and TF 11 in Masirah. It was becoming clear that Blaber would have no say in which teams were inserted into the valley, and that his strong recommendation that the Blue teams take time to familiarize themselves with the region was being ignored. Someone—AFO—had finally found the enemy, and now everyone wanted a piece of the action, especially TF Blue, which had seen almost none so far. “Once Blue realized there was a fight going on they were gonna get their guys in the fight come hell or high water,” said another TF 11 operator.

In Bagram a satellite call came in for Trebon. On the other end of the line was Blaber. “What’s going on, sir?” “Same thing I told you,” Trebon replied. “I want these guys in the fight. Vic is in charge of the Blue guys, you just stay in charge of the AFO guys, and when do you think you can turn them over to TF Blue?” Trebon was telling Blaber he would no longer even be in command of the non-Blue AFO teams—India and Juliet—and perhaps not even the other AFO personnel at Gardez. Blaber said he didn’t know when he could turn everything over to TF Blue. He was planning to accompany Chris Haas and the rest of TF Hammer as they tried to get Zia Lodin back to the Shahikot that night. To Blaber, the Zia mission was the most important thing going in the next twenty-four hours. He, Chris Haas, and Spider all planned to accompany Zia, for two reasons: to reduce the risk of friendly-fire incidents, and because they thought from the ferocity of Al Qaida’s resistance that there might be a high value target trapped on the Whale. “I can’t give you a time,” Blaber told Trebon. But the general was insistent. “I want you to come back to me when the exact time is that you’re transitioning this to Blue,” he said.

Blaber and the other AFO personnel assumed that until he officially “transitioned” command of TF 11 forces in the Shahikot to Hyder, he remained in charge. But as the day wore on, the Delta operators in the safe house didn’t realize that from the tent the SEALs had erected in the courtyard, Hyder was communicating directly back to the Blue TOC at Bagram. Command and control of what had been the most successful part of Operation Anaconda was now starting to fray.

In the TOC a small crowd of SEALs, AFO operators, and TF Dagger troops began scrutinizing maps looking for the best places to put observation posts that night. Among the men scanning the maps and overhead photos was the Mako 30 leader, a skinny senior chief petty officer with reddish blond hair and beard nicknamed “Slab.” Blaber had worked closely with Slab on missions in Bosnia and considered him one of the most proficient operators he’d ever known. The Delta officer took Slab aside. “I’m really uncomfortable with you guys going right in,” he told the NCO. “I want to make sure you get all the advantages that the other guys had.” “I totally agree,” Slab replied. “But I do what I’m told, and we’re being told to go in tonight.” Blaber didn’t understand the urgency. The prospect of a couple of nights without as many AFO/TF Blue recon teams in the valley didn’t overly worry him, because TF K-Bar was planning on inserting over twenty recon teams around the Shahikot. Trebon’s phone in Bagram rang again. Blaber was calling. Were the SEALs to go in that night? he asked. They were, Trebon replied. The Air Force general, who had never commanded a ground combat operation before, was now making tactical reconnaissance decisions. “Back here it looks like you need guys up on the mountains. Those other guys need to be replaced…. You’ve got to pull them out.” This time, Trebon spoke as if to leave Blaber in no doubt. He was to put both SEAL teams straight into the fight that night. That was an order.

2.

WHILE the SEALs began planning their infiltrations, the rest of the safe house’s residents were consumed with trying to get Zia’s Afghan force back into the fight. Task Force Hammer’s retreat had left the CIA and Special Forces men involved—both in Bagram and Gardez—by turns angry and despondent. Blaber was determined to fix that. He had gathered them around him the previous night when they got back to the safe house and told them they had accomplished their mission by sealing the western avenue of escape from the Shahikot and forcing the enemy fighters to expose themselves by firing at the Hammer column. This in turn had allowed the AFO teams to identify the enemy positions and call in air strikes on them. He had told them to get some rest and then get ready to go back out. A plan was in the works to send TF Hammer back down the same route with the aim of resealing the western approaches to the valley.

That plan evolved throughout March 3. In its final form it involved Task Force Hammer, which now included a third A-team, ODA 394, bringing a smaller Afghan force under Zia back toward the Shahikot. But this time, instead of moving south past Carwazi, Gwad Kala, and the Whale and then east through the Fishhook, they would move north and seize the Guppy. In essence, the plan was a variation of what Harriman’s mission had been: to establish a blocking position and observation post near the Guppy. The plan was dubbed “Operation Payback.”

Mulholland flew in to the safe house to talk to the SF guys, instantly earning their respect. “He was the only guy to ever come talk to our guys,” McHale said. Sad and somber over Harriman’s death, the Dagger commander was the first to tell McHale that Casenhiser and Wadsworth were going to be okay. He listened to his troops’ assessment of the situation and was briefed on Operation Payback. He also told them the folks at Bagram were not “talking bad” about them. “That was important and good to hear,” McHale said. Meanwhile, Brigadier General Mike Jones, the military liaison to the CIA also serving as one of Hagenbeck’s deputies, and Rich, the CIA Kabul station chief, each visited Spider and his men. The lack of close air support for Hammer on D-Day had left Spider as angry as the other leaders in the convoy. “He was pissed because the Agency thought they got left out to dry, too,” Haas said.

McHale, the ODA 372 leader, decided he had to return to the States to represent the team at Harriman’s funeral. He flew back to Bagram with Mulholland. During a quiet moment in Bagram, the captain spoke with the colonel, obtaining the Dagger commander’s approval to put Harriman in for a Silver Star. McHale also obtained the colonel’s commitment to keep the remainder of his team in the fight. McHale knew anything other than a return to battle would cripple their morale. “My analogy was, you can’t let the guys feel like they lost the last game of the season,” McHale said. His men’s attitude was “We need to see this through to the end now, let’s get back in there,” said one of them. “We don’t run from anybody.”

But the Americans had to persuade the Afghans to step back into the furnace with them. As it turned out, the AMF fighters were more willing to follow the Americans into combat than they were many of their own leaders. A senior CIA interpreter at the safe house spoke to Haas. “I want to let you know that all the [Afghan] troops are talking about the bravery and the courage of the Americans during the battle,” he told the officer. “They don’t trust their leadership, because they all freaked out, but the Americans were calm and cool and came and picked them up when their vehicles left them. They’re all talking about it around the campfire, that they will follow the Americans anywhere they want them to go.” The SF troops built on this goodwill by holding a ceremony for the AMF fighters that day in Gardez, both to hand out individual medals and to commemorate the Afghan fighters who had been killed. The awards, which the Special Forces guys had designed and ordered ahead of the operation, included the Afghanistan Order of the Wounded Lion (the equivalent of the U.S. Purple Heart, for those wounded or killed in combat), the Afghanistan Commendation Medal, the Afghanistan Legion of Merit, and the Afghanistan Meritorious Service Medal. When the ceremony was over, the SF troops had a message for the militiamen: “We’re going back in, tonight.”

WITH Trebon and Kernan insisting that Mako 21 and Mako 30 go into the Shahikot that night, the only issues remaining to be settled were how the teams would be infiltrated and where they should establish their observation posts. Hyder asked the AFO guys for their recommendations. The AFO planning cell in Gardez received no guidance from the Blue TOC in Bagram, so Glenn P. put together folders on possible reconnaissance targets. By 3 p.m. Blaber and the other TF 11 personnel in Gardez had decided Mako 21’s six operators would fly to LZ 15 at the north end of the valley—the same LZ into which Butler’s troops had air assaulted at midnight—and from there move east to link up with and resupply Juliet. After receiving a situation update from Juliet, they were to move farther east to establish an observation post overlooking the Upper Shahikot Valley. The plan for Mako 30 was more ambitious. Unlike Mako 21 and 22, which were assault teams that specialized in direct action, Mako 30 was a SEAL Team 6 reconnaissance outfit. Its leader, Slab, was the most experienced SEAL sent from Bagram, and his team, with six SEALs and one Air Force combat controller, was the larger of the two. Blaber wanted to get Slab’s team onto the most dominant piece of terrain in the valley: the peak of Takur Ghar. Anyone on top of the 10,469-foot mountain would enjoy a commanding view of the entire valley, as well as the Upper Shahikot Valley to the east. That was where the AFO commander had intended Juliet to establish their observation post, until the snowfall had forced them to remain in their position to the north. Along with the other U.S. commanders in Anaconda, including Hagenbeck, Blaber was keen to get an observation post on the mountain. But he didn’t feel a need to do it that night. He didn’t want to break his “no helicopter” rule, and there was no way to infiltrate the team overland in time to get them to the top of the mountain before dawn. But the decision was out of his hands. Trebon, Kernan and Hyder had decided Mako 30 was going in tonight, and if that were the case, they were going to have to fly in. (Despite repeated requests, Trebon, Kernan, and Hyder were not made available for interview for this book by U.S. Special Operations Command.)

An examination of maps and overhead imagery in Gardez revealed what looked like a suitable LZ on a spur about 1,300 meters east of Takur Ghar’s peak. The operators in Gardez called it “LZ 1” (ignoring the fact that the Rakkasans had already named another patch of the Shahikot “LZ 1”). There had been no enemy activity reported at the spot. Mako 30 was to be ready on the rough airstrip by the safe house at 10:30 p.m., with insertion planned for 11:30 p.m. The SEALs knew it was important to give themselves plenty of time to scale the mountain and set up their observation post before first light. They thought the climb would take about four hours.

Glenn P. gave the SEALs a detailed briefing on what to expect in the Shahikot. For Mako 30 he could refer to extensive, detailed overhead photographs of Takur Ghar, which he had ordered when it looked like Juliet would end up on top of the mountain. His briefing should have been a red flag to the Navy men. The intel NCO told Mako 30 and Vic Hyder that there was a high likelihood that the enemy already occupied the top of Takur Ghar. He based this conclusion on several factors: human intelligence reports had indicated the enemy was there; an overhead photo appeared to show a man-made trench or fighting position on the peak with what appeared to be a DShK; and the enemy had already demonstrated a determination to occupy the other high ground around the valley, such as the DShK position Goody’s team had discovered on the Finger and the numerous mortar and DShK positions on the Whale. There was no reason to suppose the enemy’s approach to Takur Ghar—the valley’s most desirable terrain—would be any different.

In and of itself, this information should not necessarily have dissuaded Mako 30 from launching on their mission. By landing at the base of Takur Ghar at night and climbing up the mountain, Slab’s team could ensure that any contact they made with the enemy would be in the form of a “meeting engagement”—an unexpected meeting between two opposing forces—and not an ambush. In a meeting engagement, the SEALs’ night-vision goggles, superior marksmanship and the air power they could call upon would likely enable them to break contact and get away.

But already the SEALs were thinking of avoiding the tiring slog up the mountain that a landing at LZ 1 would entail. During the afternoon Slab proposed a couple of alternatives to Blaber, one of which was to land halfway up the mountain. Blaber tried to steer Slab back to the original logic of landing at the offset LZ, and believed he had dissuaded the SEAL from doing anything other than that. Then at 10 p.m. Hyder approached Blaber in the busy AFO TOC and asked the Army officer what he thought of having Mako 30 land on top of Takur Ghar instead of at LZ 1. Any Ranger or Special Forces soldier would have been able to tell Hyder that he was proposing a huge tactical blunder. It is a reconnaissance axiom that a recce team should never infiltrate by helicopter directly onto its observation post, because doing so essentially signals the team’s location to the enemy. But this apparently had not occurred to Hyder. Blaber told him he didn’t think the 160^th pilots flying the mission would go for it. But Hyder said that he lived next to the pilots at Bagram, and he thought he’d be able to persuade them. Shortly thereafter, both SEAL teams moved to the airstrip.

IN Bagram, Hagenbeck greeted TF 11’s decision to put a recce team on top of Takur Ghar enthusiastically. Because TF 11 worked directly for Central Command, Hagenbeck had no authority to task any of its operators, including AFO, to do anything, and he was not part of the discussions that led to Trebon ordering Blaber to transition command and control of the recce missions in the valley to TF Blue. But the Mountain commander had made his desire for more information about the southeast corner of the valley clear to Jimmy and Blaber, the two TF 11 operators with whom he worked most closely. The Halfpipe battle had revealed the area south of Takur Ghar to contain perhaps the heaviest concentration of Al Qaida forces in the Shahikot, while the deep gorge—now dubbed “Ginger Pass”—that ran along Takur Ghar’s southern edge was likely a major supply route. That evening Jimmy passed the plan to get Mako 30 into position on top of Takur Ghar to Hagenbeck. “Hey sir, we think we can put guys right there,” the bearded special operator told the general. “Jimmy, if you can do that, you’re the man,” Hagenbeck replied. Outside, two 160^th—or Task Force Brown, as the 160th was known in TF 11—MH-47E helicopters, call signs Razor 03 and Razor 04, lifted off at 10:20 p.m. bound for Gardez where a dozen men waited by a dirt airstrip, shivering in the night air that retained an Afghan winter bite.

3.

THE two Chinooks touched down in Gardez at 11:23 p.m., picked up the SEALs and flew off again. But six minutes later, as they approached the Shahikot, word came that the infil for each team would now be delayed fifteen minutes in order to allow an AC-130U gunship to get into position. The 160^th pilots wanted the gunship crew to use their high-tech optical systems to search the landing zones and, in the case of Razor 03 and Mako 30, the top of Takur Ghar for signs of enemy activity. This was not unusual. To an alarming degree, special operators had become psychologically dependent on the presence of aircraft like the AC-130 “clearing” their landing zones and objectives. “The special ops community has gotten so that we can’t go in now unless a UAV is looking at it or an AC-130 is looking at it,” an operator in Afghanistan said. The Task Force Brown pilots considered the AC-130U, call sign Nail 21, essential to the mission. At 11:41 p.m., with the Chinooks finally inbound to their respective LZs, Nail 21 reported that it could not get “eyes on” Mako 30’s LZ because of an ongoing B-52 strike. The senior Chinook pilot, a chief warrant officer 4 called Al, Slab, and the Mako 21 leader decided to return to Gardez. The air strike would not have stopped the Chinooks from flying to their LZs. Only the AC-130 was affected, because of its wide turning radius. However, so firm was the pilots’ conviction that AC-130 coverage was a sine qua non, that despite Mako 21 and Mako 30 being only six and nine minutes out respectively from LZs at which no enemy activity had been spotted, they aborted the mission.

Their plan was to sit on the ground at Gardez for a few minutes and then fly back to the valley as soon as the B-52 strike was over. By then Nail 21 would have left the area and they would have to work with a new AC-130U, Nail 22. Once they had landed at Gardez, however, Razor 03, which was due to fly Slab’s team to the foot of Takur Ghar, developed an engine problem. Al, the flight lead (the pilot in charge of getting both helicopters to their destinations), called Bagram to request a replacement helicopter. The 160^th always flew in pairs in Afghanistan, so the TF Brown TOC’s solution was to dispatch a pair of MH-47Es from Bagram to replace the two on the ground at Gardez. The two helicopters duly arrived. Razor 04 was low on fuel by this point, so the air mission commander (a 160th captain) and the pilots from Razor 03 and Razor 04 got into the new aircraft (the Razor call signs transferred with the pilots), with the incoming pilots taking their places in the helicopters that had been sitting on the ground in Gardez. (The new pilots included a maintenance pilot for Al’s original aircraft. After checking it out he flew it back to Bagram alongside the original Razor 04.) The crew chiefs in the back all remained on the helicopters on which they’d flown to Gardez. But the repeated delays were eating into the precious hours of darkness. As Razor 03 and Razor 04 were about to launch, the pilots were told they would have to wait a little longer while a 101^st helicopter mission went into the valley. This final delay slammed Mako 30’s window of opportunity shut. The pilots told Slab the earliest they could land him at LZ 1 was 2:30 a.m., too late to allow the team to climb to the mountaintop in darkness.

Mako 30 and its chain of command faced a choice. They had two good options: They could abort, and delay the mission until the next night; or they could fly to LZ 1, go to ground in a hide site until it got dark the next evening, and then move up to the mountaintop. Slab’s recommendation was to “bump” the mission twenty-four hours. But the lack of clear guidance about who was in charge of the recce missions being launched from Gardez now began to reap disastrous results. In theory Blaber was still in charge, because no firm time had been set for turning the mission over to Hyder and Task Force Blue. But from the moment they arrived at Gardez that morning, Hyder and the two SEAL teams had behaved as if the transition of authority had already occurred. This critical moment in Operation Anaconda was to be no exception. Just 1,000 meters away at the safe house, helping coordinate the preparations for Operation Payback (not scheduled to launch until 2:20 a.m.), was Pete Blaber, a man whose entire career had prepared him to make the sort of decision Hyder now faced, a decision upon which would hang the fates not just of Hyder’s men, but of others as well. Blaber had spent weeks immersing himself in the tactical situation that confronted recce teams in the Shahikot. He was also still—officially—the officer commanding the reconnaissance effort in the valley. But Hyder chose to ignore him and instead seek guidance from the Blue TOC, which was almost 100 miles away and staffed with Navy personnel who had never been anywhere near the Shahikot. He used Razor 03 to relay his message on the TF Blue satellite frequency, which he knew Blaber would not be monitoring. “The earliest infil time possible is now 2215Z to 2230Z [2:45 a.m. local to 3 a.m. local],” the Blue TOC was told. “Mako 30 requests to bump twenty-four hours. What would you like to tell the team?” The message back to Razor 03, Hyder and Slab from the Blue TOC was clear and unequivocal: “We really need you to get in there tonight.” (Task Force Blue officers tried to pin this decision on an enlisted man who had been manning the radio at the time, but the call sign used, according to the TF 11 Joint Operations Center log, was that of the TF Blue operations officer.)

With explicit orders from Kernan’s headquarters (where Trebon had established temporary residency) to continue with the mission, Hyder revisited the idea of flying to the top of the mountain. Again he chose not to consult with Blaber. Instead he spoke with Razor 03’s pilot-in-command, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Al, and the air mission commander, about whether it was technically possible to land the team directly on their observation post. Al calculated the effect of flying a couple of thousand of feet higher than the original LZ. “I can get you there, but I don’t know that there’s a suitable LZ at your OP,” the pilot told the Navy officer. “It should be no problem,” Hyder replied. “I’ve seen imagery.” The pilots, Hyder and Slab, then decided among themselves to change the LZ at which Mako 30 would be dropped off from LZ 1 to the top of Takur Ghar. They relayed their change of LZ back to Bagram, but not down the road to the AFO TOC, where it would certainly have been countermanded. “The problem was no one was talking to AFO,” said a special operator. “They were making all these calls back to the Blue TOC and Trebon. They weren’t telling the guys they were fighting for.”

Of course, not only would the SEALs’ decision force them to break a cardinal rule of reconnaissance by infiltrating directly onto their observation post, it also would require them to fly straight onto a mountaintop that Glenn P. had told them not a few hours previously was likely occupied by the enemy. Slab would imply to the official U.S. Special Operations Command investigator that Glenn P. never included this in his briefing to Mako 30. “There were no significant indicators that the mountain was occupied,” he told Colonel Andrew Milani. “…[I]t is incredulous that anyone would believe that we would have gone up to the mountain had our intelligence analysis indicated the presence of enemy personnel.” Other sources flatly contradicted Slab’s version of events. (However, in one respect at least, Slab was speaking accurately. After being informed of the SEALs’ decision to head straight to the mountaintop, Nail 22, the AC-130 working for the Blue teams, flew over Mako 21’s and Mako 30’s LZs. Its fire control officer and navigator scanned both landing zones with their sensors and pronounced each LZ secure. That apparently satisfied Slab that the risks his team was being ordered to take were minimal.)

But the realization that the enemy, with weeks to prepare, had likely occupied the Shahikot’s most dominant piece of terrain wasn’t confined to Gardez. Earlier that day Jimmy and one or two other TF 11 personnel visited the TF Mountain military intelligence staff and asked where good landing zones might be found for the night’s missions. In response an intelligence officer pointed to the top of Takur Ghar. “Anywhere but here,” the officer said. Then, less than an hour before the two Chinooks lifted off from Gardez for the second time en route to the Shahikot, a report came into the Mountain TOC from the intel staff that enemy fighters were on the top of Takur Ghar. “They’d seen ’em,” said a Mountain TOC source who saw the report. “They’d gotten some sort of IMINT [imagery intelligence], probably from the Predator, that there were bad guys running around that hilltop.” When a battle captain passed the report to Jimmy, whose job it was to keep the AFO TOC apprised of this sort of intel, Jimmy’s response was along the lines of we’ve got it under control, according to a source in the TOC. Of course, what Jimmy didn’t know, because Hyder and Slab had stopped communicating on the AFO satellite net that Jimmy monitored from his desk in Bagram, was that the SEALs had decided to fly straight to the mountaintop. Neither the TF Blue TOC in Bagram nor the TF 11 operations center in Masirah bothered to call Blaber and Jimmy on the AFO satellite net to keep them abreast of the decisions. Yet again in Anaconda, senior leaders’ failure to establish a tight, unified chain of command was adding unnecessary friction to that which is inevitable in any combat operation.

AT 2:20 a.m. on March 4 the Task Force Hammer convoy pulled out of Gardez and drove down the Zermat road headed for the Guppy. The convoy included about a dozen vehicles the CIA had acquired that were more suited to the mission than the jinga trucks had been: old Soviet gun jeeps and newer (but not brand-new) Toyota pickups and Mitsubishi trucks. Blaber was in AFO’s command and control pickup, equipped with an x-wing satellite antenna that allowed him to talk to any U.S. military headquarters, anywhere. Hyder was now the only officer left in Gardez. When India and Mako 31 returned aboard the three trucks driven by John B., Al Y., and Hans, one of the operators was surprised to find Hyder in charge. “I got the feeling Hyder was now running the show on the ground,” he said. “Of course, he was out of his league.”

As the trucks drove out of the compound, Razor 03 and Razor 04 took off from the Gardez airfield, also headed toward the Shahikot. Razor 04’s mission was still to fly Mako 21 into LZ 15 in the north of the valley. Razor 03 would fly Mako 30 to the top of Takur Ghar. Razor 03’s crew included two pilots, an air mission commander sitting in the “jump seat” just behind the pilots, two door gunners at the side of the helicopter, and two gunners at the back. Mako 30 apparently consisted of eight personnel: six SEALs, led by Slab; Thor, the Gray Fox operator; and Technical Sergeant John Chapman, the combat controller from the 24^th Special Tactics Squadron. As the helicopters approached the Shahikot, Nail 22 was no longer on station to cover their infil, having been called away a few minutes earlier to cover U.S. troops in combat elsewhere. In an ironic twist, the faith the SEALs had placed in the AC-130’s ability to confirm or deny the presence of enemy fighters on the mountaintop with its sensors meant they did not consider the gunship’s presence overhead necessary when they actually landed there.

At 2:38 a.m. Razor 04 landed at LZ 15. Within three minutes it had dropped off Mako 21 and was airborne again, flying back to a holding point over Gardez, where it was to wait for Razor 03 if the latter helicopter hadn’t already caught up with it after dropping off Mako 30. Razor 03 flew on, the black helicopter gaining altitude as it got closer to Takur Ghar. The proposed LZ was a saddle on the southwestern side of the snow-covered mountaintop. As the helicopter made its final approach, with Al’s copilot at the controls, the crew noticed footprints in the snow. This was not uncommon, even at that altitude, and since the AC-130 had already declared the site to be enemy free, Al wasn’t that worried. He told Slab about the footprints. The Mako 30 leader raised no objections so the pilots brought the aircraft down carefully. The team got ready to jump off as soon as the ramp came down. Closest to the ramp was Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts, a thirty-two-year-old SEAL with a wife and eighteen-month-old son at home in Virginia. But as the Chinook settled onto three feet of snow, its rotors furiously churning the thin mountain air, Al’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Team leader, you’ve got a DShK, unmanned, 1 o’clock.” (This was exactly where Glenn P. had predicted a DShK would be.) “Yeah, roger,” Slab replied. Then, with the ramp starting to fall, another crewman reported a donkey tied to a tree at 3 o’clock, and the left door gunner, Jeremy, saw a figure duck behind a knoll at the Chinook’s 9 o’clock. Skinned goat or lamb carcasses hung from nearby trees. Nail 22’s high-tech sensors had picked up none of this. The right rear crew chief, Dan, held his arm up, signaling the SEALs to stay put while Al discussed the situation with Slab over the intercom. “You’ve got a guy at 9 o’clock, stuck his head up, and disappeared,” Al told Slab. “Is he armed?” Slab asked. “I don’t know,” Al replied. With his SEALs poised at the ramp hinge, Slab paused for a moment, then said, “Roger, we’re taking the LZ.” As Dan dropped his arm and stepped aside, Jeremy saw a bright orange flash to the left of the Chinook.

4.

IN Bagram, Hagenbeck had retired to the cot in his office less than an hour previously for his first sleep in three days and nights, leaving Harrell and Jones in charge. As Razor 03 flew south toward Takur Ghar, Jimmy was kneeling beside the generals’ desk, talking to them about the next stage of the operation. The AFO radios were crackling in the background, but because he was unaware that the SEAL teams were communicating only on the Blue frequency, Jimmy still had no clue that Mako 30 had decided to land on the mountaintop. However, his RTO was sitting just a few feet away monitoring a radio conversation between the crew of Razor 03 and the Brown TOC in Bagram. “Hey, sir, they’re one minute out,” the RTO called out. “Roger that,” Jimmy replied. As the AFO second-in-command continued chatting with Harrell and Jones, his RTO typed the grid that Razor 03 crew had just broadcast for their landing zone into a laptop computer, which instantly plotted it on a digital map of the Shahikot. The RTO did a double take. He didn’t like what he saw. “Hey, boss, boss, isn’t this the OP?” he said, pointing at the screen. “Hey, I’ll be right with you,” Jimmy replied over his shoulder. The Delta major concluded his chat, stood up, and turned around. His RTO pointed again to the top of the mountain on the digital map. “Here’s where their LZ is plotted,” the RTO said. Almost a hundred miles to the south, the black Chinook slowed to a hover over the top of Takur Ghar. “What?!” Jimmy said. “That’s where their LZ is plotted,” the RTO repeated. “There’s no way, redo it,” Jimmy said. As the RTO hurriedly reentered the numbers into the computer, Razor 03’s wheels sank into the snow on the mountaintop. Again the computer told Jimmy something he had hoped it wouldn’t. The grid Razor 03 had given was not for LZ 1, the off-set location where he had been told they were going. It was for the very top of Takur Ghar, where no one in their right mind would ask a helicopter to land. Alarmed, he grabbed the radio hand mike to call the helicopter off. Too late. At that moment an Al Qaida fighter at the highest point of the Shahikot Valley raised his RPG launcher to his shoulder and took aim at the big, juicy target that had landed virtually in his lap. He couldn’t miss.

The RPG slammed into the electrical compartment in the left side of the helicopter, the only place in the aircraft where all the otherwise redundant electrical systems came together, before plowing through the left ammo can and exploding, punching a hole in the Chinook’s right side, hitting the right side electrical compartment, wounding Jeremy in the right leg and blowing his M4 rifle in half. The helicopter instantly lost all AC electrical power, knocking out the M134 miniguns that were its principal means of self-defense and jamming the ramp in the down position. Also out of action were the pilots’ multifunctional displays, navigation and automatic flight control systems, as well as all the radios except part of the intercom. A moment later another RPG fired from the same area hit the ground in front of the aircraft, showering the multimode radar pod with shrapnel as bullets peppered the aircraft, slicing through hoses to send hydraulic fluid spraying across the floor. Acrid smoke filled the cabin. The door gunners had lost their intercom connection, but those in the rear could still talk to the pilots. The SEALs were still on the aircraft. “Get us out of here!” yelled Slab over the intercom. “Fire in the cabin! Rear ready!” shouted Dan to Al, also over the intercom. “Pick it up! Pick it up! Go! Go! Go!” As he finished yelling at Al that it was okay to take off, Dan, the senior crew chief, fired a bust from his M60 machine-gun mounted in the right aft cabin window.

Al’s copilot had been flying the helicopter, but he wasn’t moving fast enough. Al could see men off to his left with guns and wasn’t prepared to wait a second longer. He took the controls and prepared to take off. In the back, Dan felt a jolt and thought another RPG had hit the aircraft, but in fact what he’d felt was a bullet slamming into his helmet. The Chinook had been on the ground no more than forty-five seconds when Al lifted it off the ground. With almost all his instruments blacked out the veteran pilot was flying by feel. But not everyone in the back had got the message that they were leaving the mountaintop. As the helicopter lurched from side to side, Roberts, who was closest to the ramp and, like the rest of his team except Slab, not plugged into the intercom, made as if to jump out the back. (Al speculated that Roberts, who was standing beside Dan, may have misinterpreted the senior crew chief’s shout of “Go! Go! Go!” as a directive to get off the Chinook.) Noticing Roberts’s movement, Dan tried to stop him, but was restrained by his safety harness. It’s unclear whether Roberts realized that he wasn’t supposed to get off, but slipped in the oil and hydraulic fluid coating the floor as he tried to stop himself, or whether he never got the message. Whichever is the case, he went flying toward the back of the ramp, which the power loss had stuck at about a fifteen-degree slope. Realizing what was about to happen, the left rear gunner, Alexander, tackled Roberts in a desperate attempt to prevent him falling out of the aircraft. He caught the SEAL by the ankle, but had no hope of holding on to Roberts, who was a beefy six feet two wearing a 150-pound ruck and carrying a SAW. The helicopter shuddered again, breaking Dan’s hold. Alexander slid off the end of the ramp and fell about three feet before his safety harness jerked taut, leaving him dangling under the ramp. Roberts flew ten feet and landed in the snow.

The impetus of the takeoff carried the helicopter over the edge of the peak. Beneath the aircraft the mountain fell away in a 3,000-foot drop, over which Alexander was now dangling in his tether as tracer rounds from the Al Qaida positions chased the helicopter. In the cockpit Al was unaware that Roberts had been left on the mountainside and that one of his crew was swinging helplessly underneath the Chinook, but he knew he was in a life-and-death struggle to keep his aircraft aloft. The helicopter was already shaking violently when someone in the back yelled over the intercom, “We lost an engine! We lost an engine!” That was very bad news. Al knew he couldn’t fly the helicopter at that altitude on a single engine, and immediately lowered the thrust to begin autorotation to the valley floor. In the back the severed hydraulic hose had filled the air with a red mist. Everyone was lying on the wet floor. Dan got on the intercom to report that both engines were in fact running, then got down on the ramp and pulled Alexander back on board. Al leveled the helicopter, which he said was “shaking and shimmying like a washing machine out of balance.” Then an even worse report came in from the back: one of their own was still on the LZ. Al felt sick, thinking one of the team must have deliberately gotten out of the helicopter and been left behind in the rush to get off the mountain. “No, he fell out, he fell out!” his crew corrected him. “Where is he?” Al asked. “He’s back on the hill,” one of the crew chiefs said. “Okay, we’re going back, any objections?” Al replied. There were no dissenting voices. Never leave a fallen comrade.

As Al banked to the right, he felt the flight controls vibrating so strongly they were becoming difficult to move. He was losing cyclic control, losing the ability to turn the aircraft. Dan, returning fire with his M60, also felt the helicopter shaking and saw hydraulic fluid continuing to spray the cabin. He realized the hydraulics system was failing. When it completely ran dry, the helicopter would drop from the sky like a twin-rotored stone. He looked at the three hydraulics gauges by his crew station. All three were at zero. Dan kept four spare cans of hydraulic fluid in the back. Using a can opener dangling on a string, he began opening them and pouring the contents into the hydraulic fill module, a device that allowed crew chiefs to replenish the hydraulics system in flight. As soon as he had emptied each can, he grabbed a hand pump and began manually pumping the fluid into the system. Al felt the cyclic controls return. “Okay, we’re still going back,” he announced. But as soon as Dan stopped pumping to open a new can, the controls locked up again. It was a simple race. To give Al a chance of keeping them all alive, Dan had to pour and pump hydraulic fluid into the system faster than it was spraying out of the shredded hose. Even with Dan pumping vigorously, however, Al was unable to gain enough cyclic control to turn the helicopter all the way back toward Takur Ghar. There would be no going back for Roberts aboard Razor 03. Al knew he had to put the helicopter down very soon. “I aborted the rescue in order to save the aircraft,” he said. He leveled the helicopter and descended, aiming for LZ 15. Meanwhile his copilot monitored the backup attitude indicator, which was the only working flight instrument, and called out the helicopter’s airspeed, altitude and direction to Al. “You’re at 90 knots, 700 foot a minute,” he said. Al may not have realized it, but he was flying over Kevin Butler’s command post at the northern end of the valley. He couldn’t descend fast enough to put the helicopter down at LZ 15, so he picked out a spot about 1,000 meters to its north. Al coaxed and cajoled the Chinook into an acceptable landing attitude and steadied it over a gently sloping smooth piece of terrain. As he brought the helicopter down, the crewmen called out how far they were from the ground. At ten feet Al felt the controls lock up. They were out of hydraulics fluid. The helicopter fell to earth with a bump. It settled at a precarious angle, but to the crew’s surprise and relief didn’t roll over. The time was 2:58 a.m. They had flown just over seven kilometers from Takur Ghar.

The landing had been hard, but no one was hurt. Al shut the engines down. Slab had his men drop their rucks, exit the aircraft and position themselves on nearby knolls. He counted heads to confirm what he already knew: Roberts was missing. The pilots collected their maps and other classified materials and jumped out, while the crew chiefs stripped 7.62mm ammo from the miniguns for their two M60s, which they carried out of the helicopter to join the SEALs. The air mission commander, an officer new to the 160^th, turned on an infrared red strobe light to mark their position. Despite their superb performance in avoiding what could easily have been a catastrophic crash, the crew members were feeling down about having to crash land the helicopter, until Chapman piped up. “Aw, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ve felt harder PLFs [parachute landing falls].” Then Chapman set up his radio beside the Chinook and went to work.

About fifty miles to the east, in Pakistani airspace, Grim 32, an AC-130H, was just turning back toward Afghanistan after an air-to-air refueling when it received a frantic call: “Any Grim, any Nail, this is Mako 30. We’ve just had a crash landing and need some perimeter security.” Grim 32’s crew was the same one involved in the Harriman incident less than forty-eight hours previously. Now fate had cast them in a key role at another critical juncture in Operation Anaconda. But they would have a steep learning curve to climb. The delays to the SEAL teams’ infil meant the AC-130s that had been briefed on Mako 30’s mission—Nail 21 and Nail 22—had left the area by now. Grim 32 was just arriving on station. Through no fault of their own the crew members knew nothing of Mako 30’s mission and lacked the coordinates for Takur Ghar. Chapman’s call was the first inkling that pilot D. J. Turner and his crew had that anything had gone awry that night in the Shahikot. Grim 32’s crew noted Mako 30’s location and flew straight there, a flight that took about fifteen minutes. The crew saw no sign of any enemy within 2,000–3,000 meters of the downed Chinook. “It looks like we lost somebody at the LZ,” Chapman told Grim 32. “Which LZ?” someone on the aircraft replied. Chapman passed the grid coordinates of the Takur Ghar peak, as well as a description of the LZ, told them Roberts would have an infrared strobe and an MBITR radio, and gave them his call sign and the frequency he was probably using. “They asked us if we could go and check on him and see if we could locate him,” Turner recalled. “We were all in a CSAR [combat search and rescue] mode at that time…Everybody still thought the odds were, he was alive.”

Thinking the Chinook had only flown to the foot of Takur Ghar before crash-landing, Slab began planning to march up the mountain to rescue Roberts. Chapman contacted Jimmy in Bagram at 3:06 a.m. and relayed a message to that effect. (Unlike Army special ops units, SEALs routinely use their Air Force attachments as their primary communicators.) Although Slab quickly realized his error and abandoned the plan, that 3:06 a.m. transmission, monitored by Grim 32 and several headquarters, created a false impression that Roberts was within walking distance of friendly forces.

At this time another AC-130H, Grim 33, arrived over the Shahikot, with even less awareness than Grim 32 of what had transpired. The Grim 32 crew coordinated with Grim 33 for the latter to take up position over the downed helicopter while Grim 32 went to search for Roberts. As they turned south, the Grim 32 crew easily identified the peak of Takur Ghar. Not only was it the highest point around, but at that moment it was also marked by an infrared light winking at them through the darkness. They could see a person holding the strobe, and several individuals around him. The crew kept their eyes on the flashing strobe as they flew south, reporting what they saw to K-mart (the CAOC), Bossman (the AWACS), and Mako 30.

ONCE Slab understood how far they’d flown he knew his team’s only hope of getting back to the top of Takur Ghar in time to save Roberts was to jump on another helicopter. The quickest way to do that was calling Razor 04 back to pick them up. Hearing Grim 32’s report of a strobe on Takur Ghar only heightened Slab’s impatience to return to the mountaintop. He asked Razor 03’s crew if they could remain by the downed helicopter while the SEALs returned to Takur Ghar on Razor 04 to look for Roberts. Al told him he felt comfortable doing that so long as Slab left one SEAL to help in their defense. But when that plan was relayed to Jimmy, the Delta officer recommended everyone fly back to Gardez on Razor 04 and come up with a plan before returning to an LZ where they’d already had one helicopter shot up. (Much of this conversation occurred between Jimmy and Al. Slab seemed reluctant to get on the radio.)

Slab called Blaber, his old battle buddy from Bosnia. The AFO commander was on the Zermat road, about to turn off toward the Guppy when Slab’s first call came through. Blaber stopped, talked for a moment with Slab, digesting the info that one of Slab’s men had fallen out of the helicopter “at the LZ,” and drove on. A short while later, as the convoy passed a little ruined fort near the Guppy, Blaber pulled the convoy over again. With Zia, Haas, and Spider standing around him, Blaber got a more detailed update from Slab. It was only when Slab told Blaber that he wanted to go back “up” to get Roberts that the awful reality of what had transpired sank in with the AFO commander. Fuck, they tried to land on top of the mountain, he thought.

As they soared closer to Takur Ghar, the Grim 32 crew kept their high-tech “eyes” fixed on the infrared strobe light flashing on the mountain peak. Whoever the personnel surrounding the individual holding the strobe were, the fact that it was on at all gave everyone hope. But after thirty seconds it disappeared forever.

5.

BATTLEFIELD friction was now swamping headquarters from Gardez to Bagram to Masirah. As each TOC tried to figure out what had happened, officers drowned each other out on the satellite nets and misinterpreted the messages they were getting. The official Special Operations Command investigator summed the situation up thus:

As each of the separate headquarters attempted to sort out exactly what was happening, there was considerable confusion as to: 1) where Roberts had fallen off the helicopter, 2) where Razor 03 actually had set down in relation to Takur Ghar, 3) on which landing zone Razor 03 had attempted to insert Mako 30, 4) what the enemy and friendly situations were near Razor 03, 5) what the friendly and enemy situation was in Roberts’ vicinity, and 6) whether the IR strobe light with personnel around it was at the Razor 03 site, at Mako 21’s linkup point [with Juliet], or on top of the mountain.

Other than Slab’s men and the Razor 03 crew, the individuals with the clearest picture of what was happening were Pete Blaber and Jimmy. Blaber had excellent line-of-sight communications with the men from the downed helicopter as well as Grim 32 overhead, while his satellite radio allowed Jimmy to feed him any information from the Predator feeds. Both Jimmy and Blaber understood that Roberts had fallen out on top of Takur Ghar, that there were no friendly forces near him, and that Razor 03 had landed in the far north of the valley, only a couple of thousand meters north of Chip Preysler’s command post. Blaber also knew from his deep reading on the behavior of the various enemy forces, especially the Uzbeks and the Chechens, that unless action to rescue him was taken immediately, Roberts would soon be dead, if he wasn’t already. By contrast, in the Blue TOC just down the road from the Mountain headquarters and in the TF 11 Joint Operations Center off the coast of Oman, confusion reigned. In those headquarters officers still believed that the individuals Grim 32 had spotted on the top of the mountain around the person holding the strobe were friendly troops rescuing Roberts. The TF 11 and TF Blue operations centers also appear to have mistaken Chip Preysler’s men for an enemy force moving toward the little knot of aviators and SEALs.

BLABER and Slab put a plan together on the fly. Blaber knew the personnel that Grim 32 reported walking towards the strobe on Takur Ghar could not possibly be friendly. He told Grim 32 that as soon as they were over the mountain, they were to fire as close to the group around the strobe light as possible without hitting them. Then, if the AC-130 crew saw someone break away from the group, to assume that was the missing American and use their fires to protect him. Meanwhile, Mako 30 would get on Razor 04 and fly back to the top of the mountain immediately. That was also what Slab recommended, and Blaber believed in trusting the guy on the ground. Razor 04, reached at its holding station over Gardez, was inbound.

Colonel Joe Smith, the Mountain chief of staff, walked into Hagenbeck’s office and gently shook the general awake with words no commander ever wants to hear: “Sir, we’ve had a helicopter shot down.” Hagenbeck quickly walked the few yards to the tent housing the Mountain TOC, which was becoming filled to capacity as word spread that another crisis was brewing in the Shahikot. Staffers and hangers-on strained to see the Predator screens as other officers and NCOs focused their attention on the radio traffic. Few of these people were in a position to make any difference to the events unfolding before them. Because this was a TF 11 mission that had gone sour, only folks in TF 11’s chain of command were authorized to fix it. This was the inevitable result of the bifurcated chain of command the Pentagon and CENTCOM had imposed on U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The only guy inside the Mountain TOC whose job entitled him to issue orders to the men in the Shahikot was Jimmy. He was standing on his bench with a radio mike to his face, towering above the crowd in an effort to make himself heard and to keep his eye on the Predator screens as he coordinated events on the battlefield.

Suddenly another voice came on the radio, that of Brigadier General Gregory Trebon, the TF 11 commander, who was a few hundred meters away in the TF Blue TOC. “We don’t need you getting all worked up on the radio,” the Air Force officer told Jimmy condescendingly. “Get off the net, we’ve got it.” “Goddamn!” said Jimmy, stunned and furious, as he ripped his headset off in bitter frustration and hurled it—with the cord still attached—in the direction of the generals a few feet away. It hit the bench between Jones and Hagenbeck, narrowly missing the latter. “Jimmy!?” Harrell exclaimed, turning around in his seat. “Sir, he just took me out of the fight,” Jimmy explained. “What!?” the one-star replied in amazement. “Sir, he says they’re going to fight it from there,” Jimmy said. Harrell, who did not enjoy a good relationship with Trebon, fumed. In deciding to remove command and control of events in the Shahikot from the AFO leadership—Blaber and Jimmy—and manage it himself, Trebon was making a decision he would come to regret. He was taking the two men whose professional backgrounds and current situational awareness best qualified them to organize the rescue operation in the Shahikot out of the loop, and replacing them with staff officers in the TF Blue and TF 11 TOCs, roughly 100 miles and 1,100 miles away from the battlefield respectively. Trebon took this action in the belief that simply having access to the satellite radio nets and, especially, the Predator feeds gave the officers in Masirah as much understanding of events in the Shahikot Valley as they needed to run things from there. His faith in the power of technology trumped the principle of trusting the guy on the ground.

Perhaps acknowledging that his own background hardly qualified him for the situation in which he had placed himself, Trebon told his staff in Masirah, “I have command, you have control.” JSOC officers would debate the meaning of these words long after Anaconda had ended. Command and control usually go together in military operations, but a Trebon supporter said the Air Force general’s decision to separate them made perfect sense. “Command is the decision-making, control is the mechanism that supports the decision-making,” this officer said. Few others agreed. In the space of a few seconds, Trebon had ensured that what was about to bubble into the fiercest close-range firefight U.S. troops had waged since Mogadishu, a close quarters, take-no-prisoners battle fought on a frozen Afghan mountaintop, would be “controlled” by officers watching video screens on a desert island and “commanded” by a man who had made his name flying transport aircraft.

IT took Razor 04 about half an hour to fly to Razor 03’s position at the north end of the Shahikot. The Chinook landed 60 meters from its stricken sister aircraft at about 3:45 a.m. Shortly thereafter a signals intelligence element aboard Grim 32 intercepted an Al Qaida transmission that suggested enemy forces were aware a helicopter had crashed and were preparing to assault it. Grim 32 passed the intelligence to Grim 33, which was still circling over the two helicopters. Grim 33 in turn relayed the message to the men on the ground and scanned the area around the Chinooks for any sign of the enemy. When its crew saw a couple of mortar tubes and about forty personnel an estimated 1200 meters from the helicopters, they were convinced this was the enemy force getting ready to assault the small group of Americans by the helicopters, and they called down to the air crewmen and SEALs to warn them. Of course, what Grim 33’s crew was looking at was Kevin Butler’s A Company, 2-187 Infantry, including the mortar section that had performed so magnificently the previous day. Fortunately for those 101^st infantrymen, the confusion in Bagram and Masirah meant Grim 33 was not given permission to open fire. But the combination of the radio intercept and the erroneous report about enemy troops on the ground spelled doom for the plan formulated by Slab and Blaber to leave the Razor 03 crew on the ground while Mako 30 flew back to Takur Ghar to find Roberts. With enemy fighters apparently closing in, the priority became getting everyone away from the crash site on Razor 04. Instead of flying them to the Rakkasan position just to the south, Razor 04’s pilot wanted to get out of the area altogether. The extra seven men from Razor 03’s crew would make the helicopter too heavy to fly to the mountaintop. There was no option but to fly them back to Gardez before setting off for Takur Ghar with Mako 30. Razor 03’s crew set about stripping all the sensitive items—such as the miniguns—from their helicopter and loading them aboard Razor 04. Grim 33’s message about enemy troops approaching caused a moment of panic as Razor 04 flashed its lights in a failed attempt to alert two crewmen making a final sweep of Razor03. Finally Razor 04 took off and flew over to land right beside the downed Chinook in order to get their attention. The two men climbed aboard and at 4:10 a.m. the helicopter lifted off and flew north, away from Takur Ghar. Had the TF 11 personnel in Masirah and the Blue TOC been more closely tied in with TF Mountain, they could easily have put together a plan in which the Rakkasan troops with Preysler and Butler secured Razor 03 and its crew, allowing Razor 04 to pick up Mako 30 and fly back to Takur Ghar immediately, as Blaber had urged. Instead, the confused staffers and the Razor 04 pilot unwittingly scratched the last, best chance they had of saving Neil Roberts.

Razor 04 landed at Gardez about 4:34 a.m. The helicopter had lost radio contact with Bagram and Masirah and was relaying messages through Grim 32. (The satellite radios on all MH-47Es were notoriously unreliable. This problem would plague TF 11 for the rest of the Takur Ghar fight.) Hyder drove out to meet Razor 04. The Razor 03 crew got off, as did Thor, the Gray Fox operator. The air mission commander and the remaining six members of Mako 30 remained aboard. At 4:45 a.m. Razor 04 took off, headed at last to Takur Ghar.

It took Grim 32 only a couple of minutes to get on station over Takur Ghar. The strobe had disappeared, but between five and ten people were visible on the mountaintop. From the north of the valley, Mako 30 inundated Grim 32 with questions: What can you see? Can you tell if he’s alive? Can you tell if they’ve got him? Grim 32 told the SEALs that they couldn’t answer most of their questions. Mako 30 told the aircrew they were going to go back to the top of Takur Ghar. At 4:10 a.m. Blaber asked Jimmy if he could identify Roberts on the top of the mountain from the Predator feed. Jimmy said he could not. Ten minutes later Blaber, who by now was in sight of Takur Ghar himself, asked Grim 32 what they were seeing on the peak. They told him they couldn’t see any strobe light or glint tape that would identify Roberts, but they could see about eight personnel who were almost certainly enemy fighters. Blaber decided a variant of the plan he’d drawn up hastily with Slab was still the only chance of saving Roberts. He told Grim 32 to fire into the middle of the group of eight enemy personnel when Razor 04 was between one and three minutes out from landing Mako 30 (i.e., before the enemy fighters heard the inbound helicopter and took cover). If one person broke away from the group, the AC-130 crew should use their judgment and if they decided he was Roberts, to continue to fire on the others. The AFO commander emphasized the importance of killing as many enemy fighters as possible while they were in the open and vulnerable. Razor 04 made a similar request to Grim 32, asking the AC-130 to put prep fires on the LZ when the helicopter was a couple of minutes out.

But unbeknownst to Blaber, Trebon’s insistence on taking command and control away from him and Jimmy meant the satellite radio frequency on which much of the operation was being managed had also changed. Blaber was talking on and listening to the AFO satellite net, up to that point the frequency on which all TF 11-related action in the Shahikot had been discussed. But now the TF 11 operations center in Masirah and the TF Blue TOC in Bagram were trying to run things on their frequency (known as SAT-A or Tier-net), which Blaber wasn’t monitoring, because TF 11 didn’t bother telling him of the change. As a result, he was powerless to provide corrective guidance when interference from Masirah, based on the TF 11 staff’s misreading of the situation, put paid to his plan. Instead of going ahead with Blaber’s suggestion, Grim 32’s crew received a welter of contradictory directions from Masirah, where Marine Corps Major Chris Naler, the TF 11 fire support officer, had been placed in charge of events in the Shahikot. Naler’s directions veered between telling Grim 32 to “waste” everyone on the top of the mountain, then seconds later ordering them not to fire, telling the crew, “Don’t worry, our good guy has been picked up by a friendly team,” and informing Turner, Grim 32’s pilot, that he, Turner, was now the on-scene commander (a message contradicted minutes later). This was maddening for the AC-130 crew. From their vantage point they could see the group on the peak getting larger and larger. Somewhere below them an American might be fighting for his life. Of all U.S. elements in the area, only they had the ability to help him and yet no one was giving them clear guidance on how to do that.

(Turner expressed sympathy for the TF 11 staff officers with whom he was speaking. “They had a lot of heat, a lot of general officers and colonels pumping them for information and offering advice, and they had the least SA [situational awareness] down there in their cave,” he said. At this point the TF 11 staff in Masirah still thought Roberts had fallen out somewhere near where Razor 03 had crash landed. It would be hours before they realized this was not so.)

When Razor 04 was about five miles out, Masirah refused Grim 32 permission to fire on the mountaintop. Razor 04 moved into an orbit waiting for the prep fires to begin, only to be called by Grim 32 with the news that Masirah had denied the request for prep fires because the gunship crew couldn’t positively identify Roberts. The men on Razor 04 decided to risk landing on the mountaintop anyway. Masirah asked Grim 32 to “glint” the mountaintop instead of killing the personnel the gunship crew could see gathered there. But “glinting” a snow-covered landing zone only blinds pilots flying with night-vision goggles, and Razor 04’s pilots told the AC-130 crew to stop it as they neared the peak.

6.

ROBERTS hit the snow with a thump. He must have realized instantly that he was in mortal danger. Alone and heavily outnumbered, he had landed in the middle of an enemy command post whose occupants had almost certainly seen him tumble from the helicopter. The SEALs’ decision to proceed with their infil without AC-130 coverage deprived him of the protective fires from the sky he would otherwise have enjoyed in the first minutes after his fall. He would have to fight the enemy by himself, armed only with a SAW and a pistol. He also had an MBITR radio, but it wasn’t powerful enough to communicate with his teammates 7,000 meters away. Grim 32, flying toward him, did not have his frequency. TF Green (Delta Force) and the recce AFO recce teams always loaded the line-of-sight frequency to Bossman, the AWACS, for just such emergencies, in case they needed the command-and-control aircraft to arrange immediate close air support. It was the sort of step the SEALs might have taken had they had the time in Gardez to fully integrate themselves into the AFO operation. But in the haste to push the teams into the Shahikot, it was apparently overlooked. Roberts’s radio was therefore useless. He activated his infrared strobe, but the enemy had seen him. Within minutes they were firing at him. He fought back fiercely, returning fire with his SAW, trying desperately to buy himself some time. But while his would-be saviors were being held back by the confusion that paralyzed the TF 11 command setup, an enemy bullet to his right upper thigh struck him down. Bleeding in the snow, he continued firing, his blood dripping onto the bullets as they were fed into the weapon until it jammed. Within about thirty-five minutes of falling out of the helicopter, his wound had weakened him to the point where he was probably too weak to fire the heavy SAW anyway. Al Qaida fighters walked over to him, dragged him to his feet, and moved him up the slope to a tree and bunker complex. No one knows exactly what transpired between the American warrior and his captors, but at 4:27 a.m., the enemy fighters clearly decided Roberts was of no more use to them. One of them raised a gun to Roberts’s head and fired a single round, killing him instantly. An Al Qaida fighter straddled his body for a couple of minutes, probably stripping it of any useful gear, and then walked to a nearby bunker. About an hour and a half after falling from Razor 03, Neil Roberts was dead.

RAZOR 04 was a minute out from Takur Ghar. The men on board braced for what would surely be a hot LZ. In Masirah, the TF 11 staff was desperately trying to get through to the helicopter with orders not to land on the mountaintop, but to set down at an offset location and wait for the Ranger quick reaction force, which was getting ready to launch from Bagram. This directive was based on the recommendation of Grim 32, which was looking directly at the peak, and could see it was “crawling with people.” But again the decision to control the operation from Masirah exacted a toll. The message never got through on the satellite frequency (or, according to Turner, the Grim 32 pilot, the message got through but was disregarded by the SEALs because landing at the alternate LZ would have left them with too much of a climb). Anyway, from the SEALs’ point of view, they had no option but to land at the top. If Roberts was still alive now, he was unlikely to survive the two hours it would take his teammates to climb up the mountain. Landing on top of Takur Ghar again “was not the smartest idea, but it was all we had,” Slab said. But the staff at Masirah thought their message had gotten through, and told Grim 32 to start “glinting” the offset LZ. The AC-130 crew members did as requested and became confused when neither Razor 04 nor Mako 30 checked in as they approached the mountain, which was standard procedure in that situation. Those aboard Grim 32 were further confused when no helicopter appeared over the LZ, about 800 meters to the south of the peak. Then one of Turner’s sensor operators glimpsed a Chinook approaching the top of the mountain. “Holy shit,” the crewman said. “They’re going back to the original LZ.” Razor 04 was descending over the southwestern portion of the snow-covered peak. The time was 4:55 a.m.

Before the helicopter’s wheels had touched the ground the pilots saw a DShK spitting flame and lead at them about 100 meters off their nose. Oh, thisis going to hurt, thought the lead pilot. “Forward and down! Forward and down!” the air mission commander told the pilot. They nudged the aircraft a little farther forward to find a more level spot in the snow. There was a machine-gun about fifty meters to their front left, behind a rise. Both pilots pushed the thrust down together to lower the helicopter and keep the terrain between the machine-gun and the aircraft. “We’re taking fire from eleven o’clock,” the left door gunner yelled as the aircraft was forty feet above the ground. “Is it effective fire?” one of the pilots asked. “Hell yes!” the door gunner replied as bullets pinged against the left side of the aircraft. “Then return fire,” the pilot said as he saw more muzzle flashes at the top of a nearby knoll.

The whirling of the two giant sets of rotor blades created a mini-blizzard around the Chinook as it settled onto the snow, but the crew could still see tracers flashing over the aircraft. The six members of Mako 30 stormed down the ramp, fanning out and stopping just long enough for the helicopter to take off. Slab tripped and fell flat on his face, but immediately picked himself up. As Razor 04 rose above the team, the left door gunner fired a few rounds from his minigun before it jammed. The right rear gunner fired a long burst from his M60 at a DShK he’d spotted at the helicopter’s one o’clock position. Then, fearing that the SEALs had bitten off more than they could chew and might need immediate extraction, Razor 04’s pilots began flying an orbit around the mountaintop. Despite losing radio contact with the SEALs as soon as they ran down the ramp, Razor 04 stayed in orbit until its fuel level dropped below 1,000 pounds. Then the helicopter returned to Gardez. By the time it landed, the fuel gauge was at zero. When the crew climbed out they saw why: Bullets had holed the left fuel tank in several places. A bullet had also sliced through the cluster of wires that controlled the left engine. The damage rendered the helicopter nonmission-capable, and until it was refueled, the aircraft was also nonflyable.

As the helicopter lifted off, the six men of Mako 30 split into three pairs and began assaulting the high ground to the north, where a large rock formation and a tree offered the closest cover to their position. Unfortunately, and for the same reason, the enemy was already there. The next few moments were a blur of bloody, violent action. Slab and Chapman were closest to the tree. Chapman saw movement under its branches and fired his M4 instinctively. Within seconds Slab was next to him, shooting at two men the Mako 30 leader saw under the tree. By the time he had emptied his magazine, both guerrillas lay dead. But now Slab and Chapman were taking fire from both north and south. A hail of belt-fed PKM machine-gun bullets burst from another bunker under a tree twenty meters beyond the position they’d just silenced. Slab could see the sparks and hear the ricochets of the 7.62 slugs hitting off the rocks around him. Then, according to Slab, one of the bullets found a target. Five feet to Slab’s right, Chapman fell to the ground. As Slab and the two SEALs to his left kept firing at the position ahead of them, the team leader glanced down at Chapman. The Air Force man had fallen on his M4, Slab said. Slab could tell that his finger was jammed on the trigger, because he could see the aiming laser that shot from the rifle whenever the trigger was depressed. The laser wasn’t moving an inch, which Slab said he took to mean Chapman wasn’t breathing. “I realized at this point he was dead,” Slab said. “He would be moving if he were alive.” It was a decision made in an instant. Slab didn’t even reach down to take a pulse or otherwise physically confirm Chapman’s death. There was no time to dwell on it. He had four other men to lead, and the bullets and RPGs crisscrossing the mountaintop weren’t going to pause to let him collect his thoughts. Turning from Chapman, he fired two 40mm grenades from the M203 grenade launcher on the underside of his M4. One burst harmlessly in the trees, but the other detonated in the bunker.

To Grim 32, now orbiting overhead, the battle below was nothing but chaos—” the proverbial firefight in a phone booth, with laser pointers and tracers going in every direction,” Turner said. Even in such a close quarters battle, Grim 32 might have been able to help. But it had no way of knowing who was who down below. Masirah was supposed to have called the AC-130 crew back with the frequency that Mako 30 would be using. But Grim 32 never got the call. As they took up a new orbit over the mountain, the AC-130 crew tried three different frequencies they thought Mako 30 might be using, all to no avail. The team’s main radio was the one Chapman had carried in his rucksack, which was now lying useless in the snow beside him. But the SEALs also carried MBITRs. Perhaps because they spent so much time in the water, SEALs were not as obsessive about radio communications as Army special operators. This was a time when lack of attention to that particular detail would cost them. On the ground they were taking casualties. The best close air support aircraft in the world was circling overhead, yet they weren’t using it. On Grim 32 there was more excruciating frustration. “The hardest thing for us is to be zoomed in with a front-row picture of this event, watching good guys take bullets, and feel like you’re helpless to do anything about it,” Turner said.

Another SEAL climbed up on a rock beside the bunker and fired his M60 machine-gun into it at almost point-blank range. The fire from the bunker stopped. Slab turned and fired his last 40mm grenade at the bunker to the south. By now at least two SEALs were standing exposed up on the rock. Then more fire burst from the northern bunker. A SEAL threw two grenades into it. Each detonated and the fire stopped. The SEAL with the M60 kept pouring fire into the position regardless. But as the SEALs prepared to flank the bunker, a grenade flew out, wounding one of them in the left leg. The machine-gun in the bunker resumed firing, the bullets smacking off the rock on which the SEALs were standing. Then a bullet caught the SEAL who’d already been wounded, this time in his right leg. He rolled off the rock, trying to evade the wave of murderous fire coming from the bunker. By now an enemy position to the west had opened up on the SEALs as well. Having lost one man already, and with another seriously wounded, Slab decided to break contact. They were outnumbered and outgunned and there appeared to be no sign of Roberts. Slab wanted to put enough distance between him and the enemy that he could use Grim 32’s firepower. He ordered the two men with him on the rock to peel right, throwing two more grenades at the position under the tree as he did so. They almost certainly didn’t realize in the darkness and the chaos, but as they jumped off the rock to get away, the SEALs ran right over Neil Roberts’s corpse. Fifty meters away, the other two SEALs had been exchanging fire with a machine-gun position to their south, killing two Al Qaida men who had popped their heads over a knoll for a second too long. They realized Slab was disengaging.

Slab and another SEAL ran over to where Chapman had been hit. He was still lying there, in what Slab described as “an unnatural position.” By now another SEAL had been wounded. In Slab’s view, with a SEAL badly wounded in both legs and another less seriously hurt, he could not afford the manpower or the time to carry Chapman’s body off the mountain. More fire erupted from a bunker. It was time to get off the top of Takur Ghar. “One at a time we jumped, ran, and slid over the crest of the mountain,” Slab said. The two SEALs who had been separated from Slab’s trio of survivors provided covering fire and then launched themselves over the northeast side of the mountain themselves, with the first three hiding behind rocks and trees and covering them in turn. Then machine-gun fire from the northern bunker wounded another SEAL in the left leg. Once the Al Qaida men looking over the side of the mountain had lost track of them, Slab moved his men a little farther down, until they were about fifty meters from the top. Only then did he pull out his MBITR and ask Grim 32 to cover their retreat. “Grim, Grim, are you up?” Slab said, breathing heavily. “Yeah, we’ve been trying to contact you,” Grim 32’s navigator replied. “Where are your guys?” Slab turned on an infrared strobe to identify his position for the AC-130, and then had the aircraft fire its 105mm howitzer at the Al Qaida positions above him. The SEALs were still receiving machine-gun fire, but it was ineffective. However, the only radio on which they could talk to Bagram and Masirah was the satellite radio in Chapman’s rucksack, which was still up on the mountain. But Slab used his MBITR to contact Juliet at their observation post 4,000 meters to the north. At 5:23 a.m. Juliet relayed a message to Bagram from Slab: Mako 30 was requesting the quick reaction force.

7.

AT 3:45 a.m., as Razor 04 was landing beside the downed Razor 03, Gregory Trebon alerted the Task Force 11 quick reaction force. He didn’t fully understand what had happened in the Shahikot, but he wanted his quick reaction force ready to go. Responsibility for providing that force rotated between the three platoons of A Company, 1^st Ranger Battalion, which formed the core of Task Force Red. On the night of March 3-4, the QRF was 1^st Platoon, led by Captain Nathan Self.

Born and raised in Waco, Texas, Nate Self was an all-American kid who had realized his mother’s worst fears when he entered West Point as a cadet in 1994, seeking a challenge and a way to serve his country. Two weeks after graduating from the military academy in 1998 he married his high school sweetheart, whom he had known since elementary school. In October she had given birth to their first child, a son, but Self had only two months to get to know him before A Company deployed to Afghanistan. As with other echelons of command in the Ranger Regiment, platoon command was a second command for the officers who received it, making the lieutenants who became platoon leaders slightly older and more experienced than their counterparts in the rest of the Army, because they had already been platoon leaders elsewhere. Self was no exception. He was twenty-five and in December had been promoted to captain, a rank more often associated with company command. When Anaconda kicked off, Self had led 1^stPlatoon for almost seventeen months. He knew the men, their strengths, and their weaknesses.

By the time Trebon gave the order to alert the quick reaction force (QRF), Self had anticipated the move and was well ahead of him. The captain had been sitting in the Blue TOC, where the Rangers had a corner to themselves, when he heard a message come across the radio saying a TF Brown helicopter had gone down. It was unclear whether the helicopter had crashed due to enemy fire or a mechanical failure, but in either case, Self knew it probably meant his men would be getting the call. Securing a downed helicopter was on the list of missions for the QRF. He hustled down to the two GP Mediums that housed his platoon and told his troops to get up. At first, few took him too seriously. He’d already woken them up once that night when another possible mission had popped up—reinforcing the safe house in Khowst after a rocket attack. That had blown over, but here the captain was again getting his troops out of bed in the middle of the night. There was a sense of the boy crying wolf. “Yeah, sir, we got it last time,” said Staff Sergeant Arin Canon half-jokingly. “No, get up,” Self said, his voice turning serious. “One of our aircraft is down.” That was all he needed to say. In a heartbeat the men were out of their sleeping bags, pulling uniforms and combat gear on, reaching for and checking weapons. The Rangers’ standard was to be at the airfield ready to fly within thirty minutes of being alerted. They had rehearsed this over and over again, working through each possible contingency—What if there’s only one helicopter available? Will we need vehicles? In each case every man was assigned a role and had it down pat.

Since arriving in Bagram in the last week of December, portions of the platoon had launched on several missions, but none of the men had seen combat. However, they had kept themselves on a razor’s edge of readiness by training at Al Qaida’s enormous Tarnak Farms facility near Kandahar. Using live ammunition they had rehearsed combat scenarios all the way up to platoon-level assaults in what Self described as “the best training I’ve ever seen in the Army.” He and his men particularly relished the opportunity to “push the envelope” regarding safety restrictions further than they might have been allowed in the United States. “Bad for Al Qaida, lucky for us,” noted Canon, the platoon’s weapons squad leader. One of Self’s squads plus a machine-gun team, a medic and his platoon sergeant were still down there, leaving him with a little over half the platoon in Bagram: two line squads, two two-man machine-gun teams, and himself. When Canon realized that this time they were really launching, he ran over to 2^nd Platoon’s tents and grabbed their medic, Sergeant Matt LaFrenz, to accompany them on the mission.

Self returned to the TOC. Word was coming in that someone had fallen out of a Chinook. On the Predator screen he could see Razor 04 on the ground beside Razor 03, although he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at, or where it was. The captain assumed that his mission would be to secure the downed helicopter. He was confused by the references he kept hearing to a guy falling out of a helicopter. “Sir, what are we doing? Where are we going?” he said to his battalion operations officer, Major Jim Mingus. With Tony Thomas in Kandahar, Mingus was TF Red’s senior officer in Bagram. Mingus told Self to go to the helicopters and then call the TOC for guidance.

Self headed to the airfield, only to encounter more problems. The QRF mission always involved three or four-man Air Force special tactics team, made up of pararescuemen, or PJs, trained in emergency medical skills and the swift rescue and evacuation of casualties, and combat controllers, whose job it was to conduct air traffic control and coordinate close air support. When his platoon had first been assigned the QRF mission, Self had been given a special tactics (STS) team to whom he had explained the nuts and bolts of how the platoon conducted its missions—simple but essential things like who would run to what position off the back of the helicopter, and what everybody’s radio call signs were. But tonight that team was on another mission. When Self got to the airfield a four-man special tactics team he didn’t know was waiting for him. This troubled Self and Canon. Neither man was comfortable going into what could be a combat situation with a team they’d never even met before, but Self ran through the platoon’s standard operating procedures as clearly as possible with the airmen.

Then another issue reared its head: there were two TF Brown Chinooks on the tarmac, but only one was rigged to accommodate his men. The other was going to carry a fuel blivet to the airstrip in Gardez. Self couldn’t understand why fuel was taking a higher priority than getting his men to the downed helicopter. He had about twenty-five men at the airfield, and he wanted to take as many Rangers as he was allowed. He called Mingus and told him about the four-man special tactics team. The platoon leader told the major that he couldn’t take all four, especially as the 160^th pilots were telling him that only one aircraft was available to carry his troops. If this were the case, Self would be restricted to taking only thirteen men. “There’s no way I’m taking four of these [special tactics] guys and only nine of my own,” Self told Mingus. Self would definitely be taking his enlisted tactical air controller, Staff Sergeant Kevin Vance. If all four special tactics men came along as well, it would leave room for only a seven-man Ranger squad. If Self took a two-man machine-gun team, that squad would be cut to five men. Mingus told him he could cut one of the special tactics guys. “Why don’t we just not take ’em at all?” Self replied. “We know the aircraft is stable, we’re not going to have cut anybody out of it, there’s no casualties there. What are they going for? I’d just rather take thirteen of my own, so we can fight.” Mingus told Self he needed to take the special tactics men in case his helicopter went down. They debated the issue back and forth, but Self wasn’t getting anywhere. He was left with a load of ten Rangers and a three-man STS team. Self did some quick thinking about who he should take. He decided on Staff Sergeant Ray DePouli’s squad (“because it was the best squad in the platoon,” he said), scaled down to six men, plus himself, Vance, and a two-man machine-gun team. The six-man squad consisted of DePouli as the squad leader, a three-man fire team consisting of a team leader, a SAW gunner, and a 203 gunner, and a two-man fire team with a team leader and a SAW gunner. Calling back to Mingus, Self explained how limited his options would be with such a small force on the ground. “You’re just going to secure a downed bird,” Mingus responded. What about the guy who fell out of the helo? Self asked. “We’re still working on it,” Mingus said, an indication of just how little situational awareness the Blue and Red staffs in Bagram had.

A captain from the TF Red staff approached Self on the tarmac. “You’ve got launch authority, you can go,” he told the platoon leader. “What’s our mission?” Self asked for the umpteenth time. “We’ve got to get you guys in the air and get you down in that vicinity, fly you to Gardez and put you on the ground,” the battle captain said. “When you get down to Gardez come up on tacsat and we’ll give you further instructions. We just need to get you prepositioned and get you moved, because it’s about an hour’s flight.” As he was speaking another two Chinooks—the original Razor 03 and Razor 04 that had just flown up from Gardez—landed on the runway about 200 meters away. A crew chief for one of the helicopters Self had thought he’d be flying on gestured at the Chinooks that had just flown in and told him those were the helicopters he’d be going in on now. Before he headed over to them, Self turned back to the other Ranger captain. “Get me another aircraft,” he implored. “You’ve got to get some more people down there.” Just then the special tactics team that usually worked with Self’s platoon turned up, back from their mission. Self filled them in on what was going on and told the team he’d just met that he’d be taking the airmen he already knew. Then he and the rest of his chalk ran over to the helicopters that had just landed. When he got to the helicopter he was supposed to be riding on, a special tactics team was already onboard. “Who’s the team leader,” Self asked. “I am,” replied Technigal Sergeant Keary Miller, 31. “You’re off,” Self told Miller. “I got my own guys.” Then he moved forward, plugged into the intercom and spoke with the crew as the Chinook taxied down the runway to fuel up. When he turned around, he saw Miller and his teammates were still there. The two special tactics teams had run into each other on the ramp and agreed that the team already on the aircraft should stay, because their gear—specialized equipment for pulling people from helicopter wreckage—was already loaded on the helicopter. Self wasn’t happy to be stuck with a team that he’d never even seen before that night. He’d have preferred to go in with the first team from the evening. At least he’d had fifteen minutes with them to explain how his platoon did things. But there was nothing to do now but make the best of it.

“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” Self told them. “He’s gonna be my RTO,” he said, motioning towards Vance. “Who’s the combat controller?” The special tactics guys pointed at Staff Sergeant Gabe Brown. “You’re gonna control fires,” Self told Brown. Self wanted Vance as his RTO because he knew Vance knew all the call signs and frequencies for talking to the Blue TOC. Brown, with less experience than Vance, would be responsible for calling in close air support if necessary.

Meanwhile Canon had gone to the TOC in the hope of arranging another aircraft. When he got there Mingus told him there was another helicopter waiting and to go get on it. He went back down to the airfield, collected his men and got on the Chinook, call sign Razor 02. On Self’s aircraft, Razor 01, the platoon leader was on the intercom with the crew as they prepared to take off. He had no idea that the other half of his force was coming along until he heard the Razor 02 crew on the radio say they had Rangers on board. It was a huge relief to Self. Now he had the people he needed: nineteen Rangers, an ETAC, and a three-man special tactics team.

Shortly after 5 a.m. the helicopters took off. There were twenty-one men on Razor 01: two pilots, the air mission commander, four crew chiefs, one medic from the 160^th, three special tactics men, one enlisted tactical air controller, and nine Rangers. Razor 02 carried sixteen men: two pilots, four crew chiefs, and ten Rangers. No one on either aircraft had more than the vaguest idea of what awaited them at the other end of their flight. Self and Canon each believed they were going to land at Gardez, get a more detailed briefing and then fly in to the valley to secure the downed helicopter. Seated toward the front of his helicopter, Self had the aircraft intercom plugged into one ear—allowing him to listen to the radio transmissions being sent and received by the pilots—and his MBITR plugged into his other ear, so he could talk to DePouli at the other end of the aircraft. The crew was tuned in to the TF 11 satellite frequency, known as Tiersat. Self recognized some of the call signs, but the only voice with which he was familiar belonged to Pete Blaber. The captain tried to piece together what was happening from the disjointed radio calls. When he heard a Mako call sign mentioned, Self inferred that somehow the SEALs had managed to secure whoever it was that had fallen out of the helicopter. Two and a half hours after Roberts had dropped into the snow on top of Takur Ghar, Self was still laboring under the misconception that the man who’d fallen out was probably some unfortunate private from the 101^st. However, one thing was clear from listening to the radio chatter: Everyone wanted to know when the QRF was going to arrive. Self hoped they would all show some patience. We’ve got to stop in Gardez first and figure out what’s going on, he thought.

On Razor 01 the three 160^th warrant officers in charge of the flight—the air mission commander, a chief warrant officer 5 called Don, the pilot-in-command, a chief warrant officer 4 named Chuck, and the pilot, a chief warrant officer 3 called Greg, thirty-seven, from Louisville, Kentucky—were on their third mission of the night and having the devil of a time figuring out what was supposed to be happening. They divided up the radio responsibilities among them, with each monitoring different nets. Sitting in the jump seat, Don was trying with great difficulty to talk with Bagram. There wasn’t much getting through directly from the Blue and Brown TOCs. Most of what the air mission commander heard was coming from a Navy EP-3 aircraft, which was relaying messages to the inbound Chinooks from Masirah and Bagram.

As they flew through the mountains north of Gardez, the helicopters lost radio contact with each other. Aboard Razor 01, Don was talking to the EP-3, which was trying to pass the grid coordinates for the Chinooks’ LZ. Don made the EP-3 repeat the numbers three times before he was sure he and the others listening on Razor 01 had heard them right. “We almost wrote down the wrong grid,” Self recalled. Given what followed, he acknowledged, such a mistake “might have been good.” Self was doing his best to follow along and keep his men in the loop. He took a lightboard (a piece of Plexiglas taped on one side to give a white background and illuminated with a chem light) from his pocket and using a grease pencil wrote down the basics of what he could make out from the garbled radio transmissions, then passed it around. He wrote that “SEAL snipers” were near the man who’d fallen out of the aircraft, that they were “possibly in contact” and were requesting the QRF. It became increasingly clear the Chinooks weren’t going to stop in Gardez. One of the few orders that got through from Masirah and Bagram was to head straight into the valley to help the SEALs.

It was almost three hours since Razor 03 had been shot down, but the commander of the quick reaction force en route to the Shahikot still had no appreciation of the SEALs’ location relative to the downed helicopter and continued to believe that the helicopter crash-landing because of enemy fire or a maintenance problem (he still didn’t know which) and the serviceman falling out of a helicopter were unrelated incidents. On Razor 02, Canon had heard nothing about the change in plans. He was familiar with Gardez from a previous mission and as the helicopter soared overhead he looked out of the window, recognized the town below and realized they weren’t landing. Something has obviously changed, he thought.

The helicopters entered the north end of the Shahikot. The night had faded and the crews were flying aggressive nap-of-the-earth techniques, hugging the ground to avoid presenting a target to any Al Qaida gunners. Glancing out, they were surprised to see they were flying over the dark form of Razor 03. Until that moment they had all assumed that they were flying to that crash site. Don asked the EP-3 if they were sure of the LZ coordinates, because they’d just flown over the crashed helicopter. “No, this is a different location,” the man on the EP-3 said. “It’s on top of a 10,000-foot mountain.” “Are there friendlies or enemy there?” The EP-3 told Don there would be friendly troops on top of the mountain. “Are they stationary, moving, what?” Don asked. “They’re moving,” the EP-3 replied. By now the two Chinooks had flown back out of the valley and were in a holding pattern while Don, Self, and the pilots tried to get the details straight.

Meanwhile, in Bagram and Masirah, at 6:08 a.m., staff officers were trying to get through to Razor 01 and Razor 02 with no success. The satellite communications were failing them just when the special operators sitting beside banks of radios in the operations centers and behind controls in the Chinooks needed them most. The message the TF 11 staff was trying to deliver was a simple, important, lifesaving message: do not land on the mountaintop, where Razor 03 and Razor 04 had already taken fire; land at an offset LZ farther down the slopes of Takur Ghar. These instructions were never received on the helicopters, who were still acting on the orders they’d received via the EP-3. Again, the decision to take Blaber out of the command chain was revealed to be a terrible mistake. As the official Special Operations Command investigator wrote: “Here the [AFO] commander on the scene would clearly have made a difference. At the least he would have insisted that Razor 01 use an offset landing zone. He would also have been in a position to give this direction personally, using the more reliable line of sight radios, which would have significantly reduced the chances of misunderstanding.”

As Razor 01 bucked and swerved, the men in the back held on. There were no seats in the cargo area, so they were sitting on the floor, trying not to get tossed around. Bracing himself, Nate Self scrutinized his map by flashlight, trying to figure it all out. He was still confused, but somehow he managed to deduce—and tell his men via the lightboard—three things: they were going to land “in the vicinity of the enemy”; the SEALs were in contact with that same enemy; and the SEALs were also not far from the man who’d fallen out of the helicopter. Self wrote his troops that they were going to do “a hot extraction on a possible hot LZ” (something the pilots had failed to pick up on). Speaking to each other over their MBITR radios, Self and DePouli established a game plan, the essence of which was that they were going to run off the back of the helicopter, secure the immediate area, link up with the SEALs and, maybe, the guy who’d fallen off the helicopter, get them onto their Chinook and fly away as quickly as possible. “Watch your fires coming off, there’s friendlies in the area,” Self wrote on the lightboard. At the very least he wanted his men to understand that there was a high likelihood of combat on the LZ and that the SEALs they were picking up would be breaking contact with the enemy as they ran toward the helicopter. He refocused his attention on the radio. The call signs were all from Bagram. Then he heard Blaber’s voice, urgent now. Everyone seemed to be talking about the AC-130.

8.

ON the side of Takur Ghar, Mako 30 was in trouble. Slab and his four teammates who had made it off the mountaintop had managed to hustle and hobble down to a hiding place beneath a rock overhang that protected them from the fire that had chased them off the peak. But the only thing preventing the guerrillas up top from coming to look for them was Grim 32’s presence overhead. Every time either the SEALs or the gunship crew saw the enemy trying to outflank Mako 30’s position, the AC-130 would open up with a few of its trademark 105mm rounds. (“We felt like the 40s just weren’t making a big enough boom to keep heads down,” Turner said.)

But there was a limit to how long Mako 30 would be able to count on Grim 32’s support. Air Force rules required the AC-130 to be out of the combat zone by dawn, less than an hour away. In the gunship’s cockpit, Turner looked at his watch and then called Bossman to make sure there were some fast-movers available to support the SEALs once he had to break station. At the same time Grim 32 called back to its higher headquarters, the Dagger air component at K2. “We are in a firefight with these guys [i.e., Mako 30] for their lives,” Turner told K2. “We’re requesting permission to stay later.” Dagger’s answer was: “No, you will return to base.” This sat well with neither the gunship crew nor a host of other officers monitoring the call. Radio and phone calls flew between Bagram, Masirah, K2, Bossman (the AWACS), and the Shahikot as these officers engaged in a high-level tussle with a few Air Force officials over who “owned” the AC-130. An unclear chain of command was again playing havoc with the effective control of the operation.

On the side of those arguing to keep Grim 32 on station were Blaber, Harrell, Mulholland, and Trebon. Putting up stubborn resistance, however, was Frank Kisner, who wore two hats as Mulholland’s deputy at Task Force Dagger and the commander of Joint Special Operations Air Component (North). Kisner was apparently gripped by the fear of a daylight shootdown that has haunted the AC-130 community since Spirit 03’s demise over Khafji. The dispute led to some fierce telephone arguments with Mulholland.

The folks most worried when they heard the radio calls about the Grim 32 being pulled off station were the SEALs of Mako 30. “Hey, guys, don’t leave me,” Slab said to the gunship crew. “If you leave, we’re dead.” Grim 32 told Slab not to worry. “Until you have somebody else that can take care of you, we’re staying,” one of the aircrew told him. “We’re just trying to work through this ROE [rules of engagement] crap.” They continued shooting. To the SEALs and the crew of Grim 32, the argument for keeping the gunship on station beyond dawn was straightforward: the SEALs needed its firepower to keep the enemy off their backs. But to the others arguing in favor of keeping the AC-130 on station, its importance to the inbound quick reaction force was at least as important. One of the loudest advocates for holding Grim 32 over Takur Ghar was Pete Blaber. As soon as he heard Turner talk about breaking station, Blaber came up on the net. “Negative,” he said. “I am ordering you to remain on station and support these guys. You’re going to be the fire support when the QRF comes in.”

This argument would have made perfect sense to Turner and his crewmates, except that they were running out of fuel as well as darkness and no one seemed to be able to tell them when Razor 01 and Razor 02 were going to show up. The best estimate Turner got from Task Force 11 was “within the hour.” The pilot knew he didn’t have an hour’s worth of fuel left, if he was to make it back to K2. Then, from a ridgeline about five miles to his south, a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile arced upward toward his aircraft. Through Turner’s night-vision goggles it looked like the space shuttle was zooming toward him. The missile fell well short of Grim 32, but it was a wake-up call that reinforced their fears of their own vulnerability once the sun rose. “In daylight an AC-130 looks like a blimp overhead at a football game,” Turner said. At least the base back at K2 wasn’t bothering them any more with calls to return to K2. In fact, K2 had been surprisingly quiet. Turner called back to his electronic warfare officer, who controlled the radio channels that the aircraft listened to. “Hey, I haven’t heard anything from Dagger for a while now,” Turner said. “What’s going on with them?” “Boss, it’s just too busy up there, you guys are making the right decisions, I turned them off,” the officer replied. He had a strong relationship with Turner and knew the pilot would remain on station until he ran out of gas or someone arrived to replace them, whichever came first. Under those conditions, there was no point listening to the increasingly frantic calls from K2 for them to return to base. “He turned them off so we couldn’t hear them ordering us to come home anymore,” Turner said.

Dawn broke over the Shahikot. From Masirah Chris Naler continued to urge Grim 32 to remain on station until the QRF arrived. But Turner still couldn’t get Naler to tell him when that would be. The reason for this was simple: Masirah had lost track of Razor 01 and Razor 02. In a further sign of how little situational awareness the TF 11 staff enjoyed, Naler, call sign Champ 20, told Grim 32 to “glint” the LZ to enhance the effects of the QRF’s night-vision goggles when the Chinooks arrived. “Hey, Champ, it’s daylight out here,” replied Turner, who was wearing sunglasses by that point.

Shortly after that, a nearby EP-3 with the call sign Toolbox asked Grim 32 if they’d seen the antiaircraft missile that had just been fired at them. They hadn’t. The missile had been launched from a similar location to the earlier one and had also fallen short, but Turner was much more worried this time, precisely because he hadn’t seen it. “If you look at all the aircraft that have been shot down since the invention of antiaircraft missiles, the vast majority of them were shot down by the missile they never saw,” he explained. Just then two F-15E Strike Eagles flew through Turner’s field of vision, letting him know that they were ready to take over the responsibility for close air support. The gunship pilot now knew that if he left, the SEALs wouldn’t be left defenseless, even though no other aircraft in the U.S. inventory came close to being able to replicate the constant, precise pounding that an AC-130 could deliver.

The sun was getting higher and Grim 32’s fuel gauge was getting lower. The Strike Eagles were on station and there was no sign of—or word from—the quick reaction force. Turner got on the radio to the F-15Es and filled them in on what he knew, orienting them to Mako 30 and passing them the frequencies for the SEAL team and the TF 11 operations center in Masirah. Then, at 6:01 a.m., Toolbox reported a third antiaircraft missile had been launched at Grim 32. Unlike the two previous launches, which gained so much altitude that there was no doubt they were missiles, Turner conceded that the EP-3 might have mistaken an RPG for a shoulder-launched air defense missile on the third occasion. Nevertheless, the incident helped make his mind up. The Strike Eagles, being much faster than the AC-130, needed more space to operate in; it was broad daylight; his chain of command had already ordered him home; he’d been shot at twice and maybe just now a third time; and no one seemed to know when the QRF was coming. It may be time to get out of the way, he thought. Grim 32 asked again when Razor 01 was due. “We’re figuring that out now,” was the response. No one even passed the Chinooks’ frequency to the AC-130. Grim 32 passed the Strike Eagle call signs to Mako 30, talked to Bossman, which had been telling the gunship to leave for at least thirteen minutes, and then turned for home. “There really was nothing else we felt like we could do,” Turner said. One of his last calls from the Shahikot was to Masirah on the subject of the QRF. “Whatever you do, don’t send them back to this same LZ,” he told Naler. “It is absolutely hot.” It was a message that was sent from Masirah, but never received.

Ten minutes later Razor 01 flew into the same hot LZ that Grim 32 had warned Masirah about. By now almost everyone in the TF 11 chain of command had belatedly realized that the top of Takur Ghar was not a good place to try to land a Chinook, except for the crews of Razor 01 and Razor 02. Had the men on board Grim 32 known that the two Chinooks were only 10 minutes out when they made the decision to leave, they would have stayed. “If we’d have known they were coming in, there is zero question in my mind we would have stayed there,” Turner said. “That is what we train for and that is the bond we have with those guys. We train with the Rangers daily for that kind of thing…. We’d disobeyed our orders for an hour. Another fifteen minutes wasn’t going to get me in any less hot water.” The AC-130 had less than thirty minutes’ worth of fuel left in the tank beyond what was required to get to K2. However, had they chosen to divert to Kandahar or to conduct an air-to-air refueling over Pakistan they could have circled Takur Ghar for another hour, more than enough time to destroy any enemy forces the Rangers might run into. Yet again, the problems inherent in trying to run a combat operation from over a thousand miles away based only on a couple of overcrowded satellite frequencies and the “soda-straw” view provided by the Predator were making themselves felt in the Shahikot.

As the AC-130 flew away from the valley, Blaber made one last effort to persuade it to stay. “If you pull off station before the QRF come in,” he said, “we will have a helo knocked out of the sky.”

AT 6:07 a.m. Razors 01 and 02 were about to break from their holding patterns outside the Shahikot and fly toward Takur Ghar. Slab and four of his Mako 30 teammates were sheltering under a ledge on the side of the mountain. But on the peak something curious was happening. At a time when there were supposed to be no Americans alive up there, a fierce firefight was underway.

The fight, captured by a Predator, was vicious and brief. At 5:52 a.m., an Al Qaida guerrilla wearing a pair of desert camouflage Gore-Tex pants he had looted from Neil Roberts’s corpse or rucksack emerged from a concealed position and spent the next fifteen minutes slowly and methodically flanking the bunkers that Mako 30 had engaged at point blank range. As he moved, another fighter fired an RPG at one of the bunkers. Both guerrillas were clearly attacking someone in one of the bunkers. At 6:07 a.m. the Al Qaida fighter who had spent quarter of an hour maneuvering to the side of the bunker opened fire at it, only to be killed by rifle fire from the bunker. The fighter who had fired the RPG then assaulted the bunker, killing whoever was inside.

The burning question remains: Who was inside that bunker, putting up such fierce resistance? There are only two possibilities. The first is that an Al Qaida fighter reoccupied the bunker and then mistakenly fired upon his colleagues to the south, thinking them to be elements of Mako 30 who had remained on the mountaintop. Under this scenario, the Al Qaida fighters who had been fired upon returned fire and assaulted the bunker, thinking that the man inside was an American, when really he was one of their own. Colonel Andrew Milani, who conducted an exhaustive investigation of the entire Takur Ghar battle for U.S. Special Operations Command, noted two weaknesses with this explanation for the events seen on the Predator tape. The first is that there was already enough daylight at that hour for the enemy fighters to quickly realize their error. The second is that the AK-style assault rifles with which enemy fighters were armed sound distinctly different from the Americans’ M4 rifles, so much so that any experienced fighter would immediately recognize it if his assailant was using an AK-47 or one of its many variants.

The second possibility, one far more troubling for U.S. Special Operations Command, is that the man in the bunker, fighting on alone against insurmountable odds on a frozen Afghan mountaintop, was Air Force Technical Sergeant John Chapman, who had been left for dead by Mako 30 less than an hour previously. Slab had been convinced that Chapman was dead, but he never physically confirmed that by taking his pulse or otherwise examining his body. There had been no time for that in the heat of battle. Chapman’s body was not found where Slab said he left it, however, but twelve feet away in the bunker the two Al Qaida men had assaulted at 6:07 a.m. Slab said that before he and his men scrambled off the mountaintop, he’d briefly checked where he thought Chapman fell, and had seen Chapman’s corpse “in an unnatural position.” But the location cited by Slab is in fact the exact location at which Roberts’s body was later found. It is possible that Slab took his eyes away from Chapman when Chapman was shot, or shortly afterward, then looked back in that direction, noticed the body lying there, and assumed it to be Chapman’s, when it was in fact Roberts’s. Meanwhile, under this scenario, Chapman had climbed into the bunker to continue the fight.

Nate Self, who became very familiar with the top of the mountain and the Predator footage, said the video shows the person in the bunker firing at the enemy while the SEALs were still on the mountaintop. The SEALs then pop at least one smoke canister to cover their withdrawal, while the man in the bunker continues fighting. There is no break in the film, and the man can be seen in the bunker until the fight at 6:07 a.m., when several Al Qaida fighters assault the bunker from two different directions and he is killed. Self also noted that the rifle shot from the bunker that killed the enemy was a very difficult shot that he doubted an Al Qaida fighter could have made. (Many U.S. troops remarked on their enemies’ poor marksmanship during Anaconda.)

Chapman sustained wounds to his upper and lower body. The lower body wounds would not have killed him and might well have allowed him to fight on after coming to his senses and crawling into the bunker. The upper body wounds would have been almost immediately fatal. It goes without saying that someone standing and fighting from a bunker would be more likely to receive wounds to his upper body than his lower body. Counting against this theory, however, is the fact that no calls were recorded from either of Chapman’s radios (his big satellite radio and his MBITR) during this period. A man fighting for his life who was an expert radio operator might have been expected to use his communications know-how to call for help in that situation.

Milani was unable to reach a decision as to which of the two scenarios represented reality. But other sources who had seen the tape and were otherwise familiar with the events on Takur Ghar were sure the man fighting from the bunker was Chapman. An officer who watched the fuzzy Predator feed live in the Mountain TOC was convinced that Chapman fought on after the SEALs ran off the peak. “I remember clearly seeing that blob still shoot after the other two blobs broke contact,” he said.

If the man holding off Al Qaida from the bunker was Chapman, he held out almost long enough to give himself a fighting chance of survival. A mere forty-five seconds after his resistance was finally ended, the attention of every Al Qaida fighter on top of Takur Ghar was drawn to the rhythmic thunder of two giant sets of rotor blades as the dark shape of Razor 01 appeared over the mountaintop.

9.

THE Razor 01 pilots circled the mountain three times looking for a place to land. They saw footprints in the snow, but no SEALs. Chuck, Greg, and Don talked among themselves. None of them felt comfortable with this situation. Chuck called Razor 02 and told them to return to Gardez and wait. Better to have only one aircraft shot down, not two, Chuck thought. In the back Self paused his examination of the map for a moment to glance at his men. Their faces reflected a natural anxiety that any men in that situation would feel—” the fear of the unknown,” as Canon, on Razor 02, described it—but that fear was mingled with confidence. The training at Tarnak Farms had honed their skills to something close to perfection. Their weapons were zeroed. The more religious among them had attended a church service the previous day, which was a Sunday. They were combat ready. They were at the top of their game.

Dave, the staff sergeant who was the left door gunner, turned and gave a thumbs-up to Sergeant Phil Svitak, the right door gunner, then yelled at everyone in the back, “Get ready!” Self leaned over and squeezed the shoulder of Specialist Marc Anderson, a 240 gunner, and gave him a thumbs-up as a sign of assurance. Anderson turned to his assistant gunner, Private First Class David Gilliam, slapped him on the back and shouted in his ear, “Today I feel like a Ranger.”

After a brief discussion with the other pilot and Self over where they should land, Greg, the right seat pilot at the controls, picked out a spot on a gentle slope about seventy-five meters from the very top of the mountain peak and brought the helicopter in on a normal approach. Well, this is it, make it a good one, he thought. Below him at the 2 o’clock position he saw three men about sixty meters away aiming weapons at his helicopter. Before he had time to react the right windscreen shattered, his right multifunction display went out and two bullets hit him square in the chest, thudding against his body armor. Another bullet pushed his helmet to the left. “Taking fire at 2 o’clock!” he yelled.

Svitak also saw the men shooting at the helicopter. He turned to Cory, the sergeant first class who was the crew’s medic. “Doc, you’d better move back,” Svitak told him. Then he fired a one-second burst from his minigun—whiiirrrrrr!!!!!—and slumped over with two bullets in his stomach. He was dead within seconds. The right rear gunner, a sergeant called Shawn, fired four rounds from his M60 machine-gun—dum!dum!dum!dum! At that moment, as the Chinook slowed to a hover about eighty feet off the ground, one of the enemy fighters who had just killed the mystery figure in the bunker under the tree climbed up on a boulder and fired an RPG at the helicopter. It hit the right engine and exploded. Instantly there was a loud whine from the left engine as it picked up the load to compensate for the right engine being knocked out. Dave, the left gunner, was hit in the thigh as the Al Qaida fighters raked the helicopter with fire. The round struck his knife, shattering it and embedding pieces of it in his left leg. He felt as though a sledgehammer had hit his thigh, from which blood was now spraying. Angry, he swept his minigun from left to right, fighting fire with fire. Beside him Cory was hit by several rounds, none of which penetrated his body armor or his helmet.

In the cockpit a bullet caught Chuck’s left leg just above the knee. Another hit his helmet, knocking his head back. But Greg, unaware that his colleague was wounded, still had control of the helicopter. Greg’s first instinct was to repeat Razor 03’s exploits of a few hours earlier and try to nose the helicopter over the edge of the mountain and fly away, except he’d have to manage it on a single engine. But very quickly he realized that if he tried to gain airspeed he’d lose altitude and wouldn’t make it over the peak. He brought the nose back up into a landing attitude and slowed the helicopter to put it on the deck. His left seat pilot and flight lead, Chuck, reminded him that he was landing on a slope. He brought the helicopter down fast. The rear wheels hit first. Then the forward landing gear came down with bump. “It was probably the best damn landing I’ve ever made in my fourteen years of flying,” he said. Given the circumstances, that was almost certainly the case, but to Nate Self and his Rangers in the back, the Chinook seemed to just fall out of the sky.

As they hit the ground another RPG flew in through the right cabin door. It didn’t explode, but it hit an oxygen tank above the left window, sending sparks flying around the cargo area and starting a small fire. Bullets shredded the insulation and soundproofing material in the ceiling and it fluttered down like confetti. The bump when they fell to earth knocked everyone in the back to the floor. Now they were either still lying there or scrambling on their hands and knees to get out the back of helicopter. Self had been prepared for a hot LZ, but not this hot. He had no idea they’d just tried to land on an LZ at which two helicopters had already been shot up. Lying on the floor as machine-gun fire cut holes in both sides of the helicopter, he tried to make sense of the situation. Somebody screwed us big time, he thought. It was 6:10 a.m.

Shawn hurt his knee in the landing but got to his feet and dropped the ramp. The first Ranger to run down it was DePouli. As he got to the bottom a bullet hit him in the back, a fraction of an inch above the bottom of the rear bulletproof plate in his vest, spinning him around. Seeing an enemy fighter at the helicopter’s 8 o’clock position, he fired an entire magazine from his M4 at the guerrilla. Behind him two bullets hit Sergeant Joshua Walker’s helmet. He didn’t even notice the impact. Spotting a bunker to his right he too fired off a full clip at it then headed left. Specialist Aaron Totten-Lancaster followed him out, wading into the knee-deep snow and then diving into the prone position by the airframe’s lower right corner. Gilliam picked up Anderson’s 240 and crawled off the right of the ramp on his knees and elbows. Vance, the ETAC, dropped his rucksack, heavy from the weight of the big radio in it, off the ramp and jumped out. But as Self crawled across the floor and onto the ramp he realized that not all his men had been as lucky as DePouli and Walker. Specialist Matt Commons lay face up on the ramp, his eyes open but unseeing and a neat bullet hole in his head. His blood was dripping off the ramp, staining the snow red. Sergeant Brad Crose was lying dead facedown in the snow at the bottom of the ramp. Like their Ranger forefathers who landed on Omaha Beach, Crose and Commons had stormed down the ramp only to be cut down in a hail of machine-gun fire. Anderson, who only moments earlier had been telling Gilliam that he felt “like a Ranger,” didn’t even make it to the ramp. He was hit in mid-cabin and fell to the floor. Senior Airman Jason Cunningham, the PJ medic, crawled over and did his best but couldn’t save him.

Sitting in the companionway, Don saw bullet holes appearing in the windscreen. He’d been in the Army twenty-six years but this was the first time he’d been shot at. He unbuckled his seat belt, grabbed his rifle and ran a couple of steps toward the back, only to encounter a scene of devastation. It seemed as though everyone had been shot. The troops were either on the floor or already outside, so he ran out the back.

As soon as the helicopter was on the ground, the same men Greg had seen firing on the approach advanced toward the aircraft. Still holding the cyclic stick in his left hand he grabbed his M4 with his right and fired a couple of bursts at them out of his sliding side window, forcing them back behind the rock. Greg’s company commander had made his crews practice this exact scenario “ad nauseam,” the pilot said. “At the time, I thought, Oh my God, do we have to do these shootdown things again?” he said. “It was like he could see into the future and knew exactly what was going to happen. So everything I did was kind of muscle memory. I attribute it to training. I don’t attribute it to heroics or anything like that. It’s just what I was taught to do.”

Bullets flew into the cockpit, putting holes in and then shattering what was left of the windscreen and, in a couple of cases, skidding off Greg’s helmet. The circuitbreaker panel to his right front was smoking. Chuck leaned over and slapped Greg on the shoulder. “I’m outta here!” he yelled as he grabbed his M4. Then he reached up with his left hand, grabbed the yellow and black emergency exit handle at the top of his door, rotated it down, kicked the door out, and dived out into the snow. That seemed like a smart idea, so Greg did the same, reaching up with his left arm across his head to pull the handle while holding the grip of his M4 with his right. But the instant he kicked his door out into the snow, his left arm flew backward. Confused, he tried to move his left hand to grip the stock of his M4, and missed the weapon completely. He looked down to see his left hand hanging limply at almost a 90-degree angle from his forearm, spurting arterial blood across the cockpit. He pulled his hand up and examined it. The flesh seemed to be glowing and smoking. Greg immediately realized why. There was a tracer round stuck inside his hand, burning away. He pulled it out and put it in his sleeve pocket. A good 60 percent of the circumference of his wrist was gone. A couple of tendons and stick of bone were all that attached his hand to his arm. He fired one more burst from his M4 to cover himself, but diving out of his right-hand door no longer seemed an attractive proposition. He twisted around in his seat, laid his weapon on the center console and then wriggled through the companionway toward the rear of the helicopter, taking care to keep a pressure point below his wrist to stem the flow of blood somewhat. Part of his flight gear got caught on the jump seat as he tried to squirm through. Lying on his belly, his arms stretched in front of him, he kicked with his feet trying to free himself. Straight ahead he saw Cory working on a Ranger casualty. He yelled to Cory that he was stuck. Another explosion shook the aircraft as an RPG hit the nose, and Greg felt a “thumping” in his legs as shrapnel spattered them. The aircraft’s armor-plated seats protected his torso from getting hit. By now his head was sticking into the back of the helicopter and he got his first good view of the carnage there. He looked left to see Phil Svitak crumpled on the floor. Greg kept shouting at the top of his voice, forgetting that he still had his helmet on and earplugs in. Turning his head right, he saw Dave, pale and sitting down, wrapping the lanyard from his Beretta 9mm pistol around his leg as a tourniquet. Dave looked up to see what all the yelling was about. “Take your fucking helmet off!” he shouted. Greg reached back with his good hand and yanked it off.

Finally Cory came forward, grabbed Greg by his survival vest and, after a couple of attempts, pulled him into the back of the helicopter. There was still a “fusillade” of rounds puncturing holes in the side of the aircraft and whizzing over the heads of the men lying on the floor. The bullets made a tick, tick sound as they punctured the side of the aircraft. “It sounded like hail hitting your car,” Greg said, “but you’d see sunlight stream through the holes.” By now Greg, who spent his first six years in the Army as a medic, had his bleeding under control. “Go check on Phil, he’s not moving,” he told Cory as soon as the medic had pulled him through. “I don’t think Phil made it,” Dave said. “How are you doing?” Cory yelled to Dave. “Fine,” replied Dave. Cory and Jason Cunningham then went to work on Greg. Cory put on a tourniquet and stuffed bandages and curlix into the wound. When the medic held his arm up, it gave Greg his first opportunity to survey the damage the bullets had done. He stared at what remained of his wrist in disbelief, amazed at how much “stuff” Cory could pack into the hole in his arm. Then Cunningham applied an oximeter—a device that measures the oxygen in a patient’s blood—to Greg’s finger. It didn’t seem to be working. Frustrated, Cunningham held the device up and discovered why: A bullet had severed one of the wires, probably while it was still in his bag. “Has anybody seen Chuck?” Greg asked. He was still unaware that Chuck had been wounded before he dived into the snow. No one in the back of the helicopter knew where Chuck was. “He went out the left door,” Greg told them.

Greg was lying on his back in the rear of the aircraft, with his feet toward the cockpit. His M4 magazines, which he carried in the rear pockets of his survival vest, were sticking into his back. Cory was kneeling between his legs, Cunningham was on his right side. Since everyone else was fighting, he told the survivors in the back to pile the PRC-112 survival radios beside him and he’d use them to try to make contact with the outside. Greg grabbed the first one and spoke into it. “This is Razor 01, down, we are taking heavy fire, engaged, numerous casualties,” he said, and gave the latitude and longitude reading for the helicopter’s position. “Enemy engaging us from the 2 o’clock and 9 o’clock positions.” He repeated that transmission on every radio, left each radio on, and turned two of them to send out a beacon signal.

Then the pain kicked in. Fierce, excruciating pain.

10.

SELF rolled left off the ramp and quickly got his bearings. The helicopter had landed in a saddle with the ground rising up on both the left and right sides. An RPG gunner lay dead on the high ground fifteen meters to the helicopter’s right, killed either by Svitak’s minigun burst or Walker. Another RPG gunner occupied the rise thirty meters to the left, along with at least one other enemy fighter armed with an AK. Sixty meters ahead of the helicopter at about the 2 o’clock position guerrillas armed with a machine-gun and multiple RPGs held the same tree and bunker complex from which Mako 30 had taken so much fire. Enemy fighters there and on the high ground to the left and right were now pouring fire down on the Rangers as they came off the ramp and stumbled and slipped in the snow. Specialist Anthony Miceli’s SAW was hit in four or five places as he exited the helicopter. The gun was destroyed but Miceli was unharmed and headed up the left side of the helicopter.

DePouli fired at the enemy fighters on the high ground to the left, dropping at least one of them. Self told Totten-Lancaster to move farther up the Chinook’s right side toward the nose. The captain’s attention was now focused on the position under the tree. He had no idea it was a bunker, he just knew that a machinegun under that tree was firing a steady stream of bullets at the helicopter. We’re going to be here all day, he thought. No one’s gonna send a helicopter in here until it gets dark. Then an RPG flew out of the same position and over Self’s head before skipping of the ramp. Another RPG exploded about ten meters off the helicopter’s right side, spraying shrapnel into the platoon leader’s leg, Totten-Lancaster’s lower left calf, and Vance’s arm. Totten-Lancaster was virtually immobilized, no longer able to walk properly. Self kept quiet about his own wound. The shrapnel had hit his thigh at a steep angle and gone through and through. The wound was bleeding, but not enough to soak through his long underwear and combat pants. He could still move, and he worried that at this critical stage of the fight, with several men dead and several others wounded, his men might lose heart if they knew their platoon leader was hit.

But the RPG gunner was careless and allowed the top of his head to remain visible above the boulder as he reloaded. DePouli removed it with some well aimed fire. The semidecapitated gunner fell, leaving his RPG launcher on the top of the boulder. That ended the RPG threat for several hours.

Firing as they went, Walker, Self, Vance, and Totten-Lancaster moved behind a boulder off the right side of the helicopter, from where they exchanged fire with the guerrillas under the tree. Walker ran back toward the helicopter. Brian, the left rear crew chief, picked up Commons’ M203, the only one the Rangers aboard Razor 01 had brought, and carried it to Walker under fire. When Walker returned to the boulder he gave his M4 to Totten-Lancaster and fired several 40mm grenades at the enemy position. The first rounds shot over the hilltop because he was firing uphill. It took him a while to get his aim in. Self fired three or four rounds from his M4 before his extractor broke. He tried to use his cleaning rod to ram the stuck round out, only to have the rod break off in his weapon, rendering it temporarily worthless. He, too, ran back to the aircraft to retrieve Crose’s M4. When he looked through the optical sight to aim the weapon, trying to place the red dot on his target, he was momentarily confused. There was more than one red dot in the sight. The battle was only a few minutes old and already Walker and Self were firing weapons covered in the blood of their comrades.

Self and his men were functioning automatically now. The long hours of training paid off. They were shooting and moving without stopping to think. They knew how to do this. “We really turned the fight around in about a minute,” Self said.

Meanwhile, Gilliam and DePouli moved the 240 machine-gun to another boulder to the right and slightly behind Self’s position as the others laid down covering fire. When they got there they found a dead enemy fighter there. The fighter was wearing Neil Roberts’s jacket and had Roberts’s night-vision goggles around his neck. The goggles had been shot through. Gilliam, not recognizing either item, yelled down to Self that the enemy fighter had a pair of binoculars (because they weren’t the monocular type of night-vision goggle Gilliam was used to). He tossed them to the captain. Self recognized them as night-vision goggles, but didn’t make the connection to their mission. How does the enemy have NODs [night optical devices] like this? he thought, and wondered what other captured U.S. gear the enemy might be using. We must have landed in the wrong place, he thought. There’s no sign of the SEALs.

Self wanted to flank the enemy position under the tree. He sent Miceli and DePouli back down the slope with orders to double back around the right side and try to assault the enemy position from the side or the rear. They realized quickly that the plan was not practicable because the mountain fell away in a cliff on just the other side of the rock formation that Self and the others were on. But they found two enemy sleeping positions dug into the mountain about 130 meters behind the helicopter. DePouli called up to Self on the interteam radio. “Sir, I’ve found a sleeping position, I’m going to clear it.” “No, don’t clear it,” Self said. Then he heard gunfire from that direction. Oh, no, what’s going on? the platoon leader thought. But it was just the two Rangers shooting into the positions to make sure no one was there. When they searched the hideout, they found Roberts’s rucksack. It had been ransacked, with its contents laying everywhere, including a Nalgene water bottle and an MBITR radio. They brought the radio back to Self. What is going on? he wondered. Why does the enemy have an MBITR? This makes no sense. Self, still unaware that he was on the same mountaintop where the missing U.S. serviceman had fallen out of a helicopter, began to suspect that he was the victim of an elaborate enemy trick. They knew we were coming. Somebody speaks English here and was calling us in here on this radio, he thought. We got set up.

Then Gabe Brown, using his MBITR radio, made contact with Mako 30. “They’re down there on the right hand side,” he reported to Self. “Their batteries are low. They’ll call us back on the hour for radio checks.” At least that settled the question of where the SEALs were. But because their radio batteries were so low, and they needed to save what battery strength remained for the exfil or emergencies, the SEALs weren’t able to bring the Rangers up to speed with what had happened before Razor 01 landed on Takur Ghar.

When Don, the air mission commander, came out of the helicopter he hit the snow and rolled left, the way he’d seen the Rangers do it. Technically he was the second-highest ranking American on the helicopter, but once on the ground and in a fight, the seasoned pilot knew it would be better for everyone if he let the Rangers take control. “What do you guys want me to do?” he asked them. “Cover the left side of the helicopter,” they answered. He rolled a few feet until he was about five feet behind the Chinook’s lower left corner, lying perpendicular to the airframe, and scanned the left flank. He knew they’d received fire from that side, but he couldn’t see any enemy fighters. He thought Dave might have wounded the guerrillas who’d been firing at them when he swept his minigun back and forth as they landed.

The sun was rising, shining off the snow that Don was peeking over. He worried about getting snowblind. Because the flight had begun at night, he hadn’t brought any sunglasses. It wasn’t long before the cold began to bite. He was wearing a tan two-piece flight suit, a black fleece jacket, body armor with front and back plates, and a Gore-Tex jacket. He had taken his flight helmet off when he left his seat and was wearing just a black stocking cap on his head. Now the snow was soaking through his pants. Cory came back and asked how he was doing. Don told him he was doing fine. It was only then that Don noticed the tip of his gloved finger had been shot off by one of the bullets that had smashed into the cockpit. The same bullet had ripped several holes in his jacket sleeve. Cory grabbed some soundproofing and insulation from the helicopter and brought it out for Don to lie on.

On the left side of the helicopter Chuck lay where he’d fallen in the snow. He could see blood dripping onto the snow through the drain holes in the floor of the Chinook. He yelled to one of the Rangers that he needed a tourniquet for his leg. “Can you cover the left side for us right now?” the Ranger asked. “Yes,” Chuck replied. He improvised and used the strap from his kneeboard (a board that pilots use to write calculations and examine maps while flying) as a tourniquet. He wasn’t sure if his leg was going to make it. He imagined himself living the rest of his life without it. A Ranger shouted to Don that Chuck was still lying in the snow by the cockpit. Don and Keary Miller went up to the left-hand side of the helicopter and asked him if he was okay. He said his leg was hurt. Don and Miller grabbed him by the shoulders of his survival vest and dragged him to the rear of the ramp. To Chuck’s annoyance they strapped him into a litter and put his M4 on safe. Then Miller went to work on his leg wound.

Don and Brian were multitasking: covering the left side of the aircraft, occasionally firing when enemy fighters showed themselves, helping the medics and collecting ammo from the wounded and the dead. The two aviators piled most of the ammo by the ramp, but on several occasions they ran through the snow across the open ground ferrying belts of 7.62mm rounds from the miniguns to the Rangers, who needed it for the 240. “We tried to free up the Rangers to do other things,” Don said. He also tried to raise help using the PRC-112 survival radios, but with no success. After trying several, he threw one to the floor. “What’s the point of carrying these things if they don’t work?” he asked angrily.

INSIDE the helicopter Cory had set up a casualty collection point, where he treated the wounded with Miller and Cunningham, the two PJs. Shawn, the right rear crew chief who hurt his knee in the hard landing, also stayed inside to help the medics. It wasn’t a perfect location to be making life-and-death medical decisions. The enemy in the bunker under the tree could see through the right door into the helicopter and would shoot anytime they noticed movement inside. But if the men inside stayed less than two feet off the floor, the armor protection provided by the bulletproof fuel tanks on either side of the Chinook meant they were safe.

Cory, a veteran of the 1989 invasion of Panama and the 1991 Gulf War, was in his element working on the casualties. But the small fire burning had now ignited some of the rucksacks. Cory had to decide whether to stand up and risk getting shot in order to put the fire out, or just let it burn. Shawn tossed him a fire extinguisher and Cory stood up quickly and put out the fire without incident, much to his relief. He told Cunningham to start an IV on Greg, but Greg had lost so much blood that Cunningham had a hard time finding a vein. After several unsuccessful attempts, Cory took over and got it done.

Greg and Cory discussed the tactical situation, and in particular, whether they should leave the aircraft. Greg’s first suggestion was to get out of the helicopter. Anytime anyone moved or poked their head up, a burst of fire would come in. But no one was getting hit. The self-sealing fuel tanks protected them. Greg began to feel fuzzy and get tunnel vision as he fought to stay awake. Cory decided to stay in the helicopter for now.

The flight medic told Dave he was going to put a splint on his leg. “This is going to hurt,” he said to the crew chief. It did hurt, so much so that Dave asked for morphine. “No, not at this altitude,” Cory told him. “It’d slow your heart rate.” After they splinted his leg Cory and Cunningham put Dave on a Skedco. By now Greg was lapsing in and out of consciousness. Cory took one of the helicopter’s portable oxygen systems and put the mask over Greg’s mouth to keep him awake. Greg went into shock several times. On each occasion Cory’s response was cool, calm, and professional. “He’s the reason Greg is alive,” Don said.

HAVING staved off the immediate threat of the RPG gunner, Self began to worry about having his tiny force outflanked. Gilliam was focused on the tree bunker. DePouli was watching the right flank. Miceli had taken up position with Totten-Lancaster’s SAW about thirty meters behind him and was covering the entire rear area. Self, Walker, Vance, and Totten-Lancaster covered the helicopter’s frontal arc. Don and Chuck (until he was moved inside) watched the left flank. Self also was getting word from Cory and the PJs that they needed to get the casualties medevaced as soon as possible.

After the enemy fighters on the left and right high ground had been killed in the battle’s opening minutes, the only fire the Americans were taking came from the bunker under the tree (which soon became known as “the Bonsai tree”). The Al Qaida fighters would emerge from behind the tree, fire off an AK burst or hurl a grenade, and then pop back down. The Rangers behind the boulder with Self were protected from any direct fire unless they raised their heads to shoot. The enemy hurled grenades at them, but they all landed in the snow with a pathetic poof. Some Rangers carried their own grenades, but every time they tried to throw one up the hill at the bunker, it landed short. Walker’s 203 seemed a more logical weapon in that situation, and he fired grenade after grenade up at the bunker, trying—often successfully—to detonate the grenade off the tree so that the shrapnel blew down onto the enemy position. Usually DePouli’s squad carried bazookalike AT-4s, but they’d forgotten them on this occasion. Self cursed himself for neglecting to check for them on the tarmac at Bagram, but he knew that the upward angle of fire would have made it almost impossible to employ them from their current position.

Self thought that if he could just suppress the enemy’s Bonsai tree position, perhaps with close air support, he and the other healthy Rangers could assault it, seize the hilltop, and then Razor 02 could come and pick them up. Although he had feared from the start of the fight that they wouldn’t be able to leave until night fell, he was coming under pressure from the medical personnel to bring a medevac in for the wounded.

Normally Vance would be trying to arrange close air support and talk to higher headquarters. But Vance had left his radio in his rucksack sitting in the snow beside the ramp. Even if he’d had it with him, it would have taken time to attach the satellite aerial and then figure out the correct azimuth in which to point it. “That wasn’t gonna happen anytime soon,” Self said. Anyway, with so few able-bodied men, Self felt he needed Vance’s help in holding off the enemy. As he had planned in Bagram, the captain used Gabe Brown, the Air Force combat controller, as his RTO and to call in close air support. Brown was sheltering behind a rock in a tiny, shallow depression twenty meters behind Self’s position. Self and one or two of the other Rangers yelled back at him to get on the radio and see what planes were available. Oddly, the Rangers had somehow gotten the impression that Brown’s first name was Jeremy, and that is what they called him until, about an hour and a half into the fight, between radio calls he told them, “That mission’ll be here in about five minutes, and oh, by the way, my name is Gabe.”

For this first mission of the day, a pair of F-15Es was inbound. Brown asked Self whether he wanted them to strafe the enemy position with their cannons or to drop bombs on it. Vance and Self talked. Vance yelled down to Brown to tell the planes to only use their cannons. It was just before 7 a.m. when the first F-15E came in on a dry run, popping flares. Vance, the more experienced coordinator of close air support, didn’t like the angle of approach and told the pilots to adjust it. They zoomed in on another dry run. “That’s good,” Vance said. “Bring them in, guns hot.” Every American put his head down. The jets swooped down firing their 20mm cannon into the tree position. To Don it sounded like someone stepping on bubble wrap. The tree branches flew apart. The planes went around and rolled back in. Somewhere an enemy antiaircraft gun opened up, and black clouds burst behind the jets. The gun run was accurate. The tree top was shredded. But after a couple of passes, the Strike Eagles were out of ammo. They tried to persuade the Americans on the mountain to allow them to drop JDAMs, but Self resisted. His impression was that fast-movers were always trying to “push” JDAMs on their close air support customers, but he wasn’t ready to take that risk just yet. Sitting about sixty meters from where the bombs would land, his position just about defined “danger close.”

THE Americans on the mountaintop were fighting for their lives, and dying, in large part because their satellite communications had let them down when they needed it most. Commo problems continued to hamper them throughout the day. Brown was having no luck on the frequencies TF 11 should have been monitoring. He tried using his own call sign—Slick 01—as well as those of Vance and Self. No one in TF 11 answered him, except for Juliet, the one AFO team left in the valley from the original three that had trekked in. From their OP Juliet had an excellent view of Takur Ghar. They told Self that they could see several enemy fighters milling on the back side of the mountain (i.e., just below and behind the bunker).

When Razor 02 landed at Gardez at 6:25 a.m., Canon went up to the cockpit to talk to the pilots. They told him they were awaiting instructions from higher headquarters. As calmly as he could, the NCO explained that his chalk accounted for half of the QRF, and the other half needed them to get back to the valley as soon as possible. Canon went back to the rear to tell the others what was happening, at which point Vic Hyder walked up. “Hey, I’m Vic Hyder,” he told Canon. “Those are my guys out there.” Together the SEAL and the Ranger NCO went forward to talk to the pilots. The aviators had a new set of grid coordinates for an offset LZ on the slopes of Takur Ghar and were cleared to return to the Shahikot. They also told Canon that Razor 01 had been shot down on its LZ and there were casualties. At 7 a.m. Razor 02 took off. The men oiled their weapons and got their game faces on. Halfway to the mountain Mako 30 called on UHF and told the aircrew the LZ was hot, a bombing run was beginning (the first F-15E dry run) and that Razor 02 needed to hold off. They flew to an adjacent valley and waited for the Strike Eagles to finish their gun runs. Then Mako 30 called back and vectored them in to an LZ close to the SEAL team. As they approached the LZ, together the Rangers in the back recited the Ranger Creed.

The landing was unopposed. The Rangers poured out of the back and assumed a security perimeter while the helicopter lifted off. Canon was pleased to find the snow hard-packed and firm underfoot. This isn’t gonna be that bad, he thought, pulling out his compass, his GPS and his map to figure out exactly where he was. The NCO could hear Self and DePouli talking on the platoon radio net. He grabbed his MBITR and told the captain he was on the ground. But he still didn’t grasp the scale of the mountain or the magnitude of the task ahead of him. Hyder pointed to where Mako 30 was sheltering several hundred meters away. “Let’s go over and get my guys and then we’ll go to the top.” Canon, who could hear the sound of automatic weapons fire from the valley, spoke to Self. “I’ve got Vic Hyder with me,” he said. “He wants us to go exfil his guys.” Self wasn’t surprised to hear that Hyder was with Chalk 2, but he was infuriated that the SEAL officer was trying to take the Ranger reinforcements away from the battle. “No, I need you up here,” Self told Canon. “He can go and get with his guys, they’re not in contact. We are in contact and have casualties. You’re coming here.” Canon told Hyder he was taking the Rangers up the mountain. The SEAL officer later said his impression was that the Rangers on the top of the mountain “had their situation under control” and that the “immediate need” was to assist the two badly wounded SEALs. He struck out alone in Mako 30’s direction. The spectacle of the senior ranking officer on the mountain—and a special mission unit member at that—not heading to the sound of the guns himself did not disappoint Self as much as might have been expected. “I didn’t want him to come up,” Self said, explaining that he thought a SEAL officer showing up in a Ranger gunfight might just have confused the situation. “They’re Navy. They do things differently. We knew that from working with them previously.”

With Hyder out of the picture Self and Canon spoke again. Self thought Chalk 2 had landed just southwest of the mountaintop. He told Canon that they should just assault up the mountaintop and through the bunker position while the men from Razor 01 suppressed the enemy. “You can just wipe right through them and we’ll be done,” he told Canon. He fired a star cluster to give Canon a fix on his position. Canon couldn’t see it. Only then did they realize Canon had landed much farther east, away from the mountaintop. Self told Canon to move south to a draw, and then walk up the draw toward the top, meaning Chalk 2 should crest the mountain immediately behind the Ranger position. The captain asked Canon how long he estimated it would take Chalk 2 to hike up the mountain. About forty-five minutes, Canon said.

WHILE he waited for Chalk 2, Self opted to just keep his men pulling security and not try any more gun runs from the fast-movers. They weren’t worth the risk, now that reinforcements were on the way, the captain reckoned. But his men were still taking sporadic fire from at least one enemy fighter under the Bonsai tree. Then mortar fire started raining in on them from the higher reaches of the mountains on the eastern side of the Upper Shahikot Valley, about 3,000 or 4,000 meters to the east. “Here we are on the side of a snowy mountain with a big, huge black helicopter on it—it’s kind of an easy target,” Self said later. The first mortar salvo landed about fifty meters off the nose of the helicopter, which was tremendously accurate for a first round. (The Al Qaida gunners clearly were not too worried about the risk of fratricide.) The next set landed behind the Rangers, farther down the mountain. The enemy had them bracketed. Self worried these opening salvos would be followed by rounds falling in between where the first two had landed; in other words, right on his men. We’re in trouble, he thought. He began to get extremely impatient about getting his men off the side of the mountain. The enemy might be firing these mortars in preparation for an assault, he thought. He had been on the ground less than two and a half hours.

Worried that the enemy would get lucky, hit the aircraft in a vulnerable point and blow it up, Don recommended moving the casualties from the helicopter to a little depression in the rocky slope at about the Chinook’s 5 o’clock position, close to Self’s command post. Cory countered that the helicopter had already withstood RPGs and machine-gun fire, and moving the casualties outside could induce hypothermia. But Cory changed his mind when another mortar round fell far too close for comfort. Don, Cory, Cunningham and Brian carried the patients over one by one, Chuck and Greg on regular stretchers and Dave on a Skedco. The distance was little more than twenty meters, but the movement was extremely hard, even with four men carrying each casualty. By now the altitude had sapped their reserves of energy. They were exhausted. As they prepared to move Dave, Cunningham tripped and lost his grip. The Skedco, designed to move fast on snowy terrain, skidded away. “Dave was on a toboggan ride,” Don recalled. Fortunately for all concerned, Dave’s Skedco ran into Chuck’s stretcher, allowing Brian and Don to grab it before it slid another 800 meters down the mountainside. “Sorry, are you alright?” Dave said to Chuck. “Yeah, as soon as you get off my leg,” Chuck replied dryly.

Greg decided to do what little he could to make himself more comfortable and used his good arm to cut the chest straps and loosen the leg straps on his litter. Lying on his back he looked up to see a Predator high in the sky circling the mountaintop. If only that were an AC-130, he thought.

11.

ONCE they left the LZ, the consistency of the snow under the feet of Canon’s men turned from hard-packed to dry powder, and it was no longer “underfoot,” but knee-to-mid-thigh-deep. So much for the easy hike the squad leader had anticipated. His mens’ route required them to move 800 meters laterally and to ascend 2,000 feet up a 70-degree slope. The loose rock under the snow only added to their problems. Slipping, falling and stumbling, they were soon spitting up blood from the effort demanded of their lungs. The Rangers had dressed in preparation for a static mission—securing a downed helicopter—not mountaineering. Many were wearing light or medium-weight thermal long johns and tops under their fatigues. With their body armor weighing them down, the men were overheating in the sun. Within fifteen minutes Canon stopped the climb and told the men to remove some clothing. But he still wasn’t optimistic about their rate of progress. There’s gotta be something else we can download, he thought to himself. He called Self and asked for permission to get rid of the back plates in the troops’ bulletproof vests. The captain, impatient for his reinforcements, readily agreed. Canon told the men to dump the plates. They hurled them onto rocks below in an attempt to break them. “Have fun,” the squad leader joked. “It’s the most expensive Frisbee you’re ever gonna throw.”

WEjust can’t sit here and take mortar rounds, was the thought going around and around in Self’s mind. We’ve got to assault. He called DePouli over to his position. Then he told DePouli, Vance, and Walker that the four of them were going to assault the enemy position at the top of the mountain, which Self thought was little more than a couple of guys hiding behind the Bonsai tree. None of the Americans had realized they were up against a well-entrenched bunker. With Brian, the left rear crew chief, serving as his assistant gunner Gilliam hammered the enemy position with 240 fire. But from that angle the machinegun could do little damage. The bunker’s aperture was facing down the slope towards where Self and the others were assaulting. They didn’t realize it, because they couldn’t see how the enemy had built up the position under the Bonsai tree, but the 240 was aimed right at the bunker’s thick wooden wall. The Al Qaida fighters had constructed the bunker by digging away at the base of the tree, and then surrounding and reinforcing the pit with logs, with more branches covering the roof of the bunker. It was undetectable from the air and almost impenetrable from the ground. The four men in Self’s little assault team struggled manfully up the slope, with their weapons up and firing as they went. Even if they hadn’t been tired out from the altitude and their exertions so far, the knee-deep snow would have made it impossible to run. DePouli was ready with a hand grenade clutched in one fist while he shot his M4 with his other hand. One of the enemy fighters emerged from behind the tree and fired his AK at the Americans, then ducked back down. Only thirty meters away and closing, Self saw the guerrilla was standing in a waist high fighting position. The captain realized the extent of the fortifications he was assaulting. He knew there was a machine-gun in there somewhere. In training, it always took a full platoon of more than thirty men to take down a machine-gun nest. Here he was trying to do it with four guys at 10,000 feet stumbling uphill in the snow. “Bunker! Bunker!” the captain yelled. “It’s a bunker! Get back!” The four turned and staggered back down the slope to their original positions in the rocks.

SELF asked Brown whether any strike aircraft were on station. A pair of F-16s was available, but they only had “dumb” 500-pound bombs, not JDAMs, Brown said. Self told him to have the jets drop the first bombs on the other side of the mountaintop, and then walk them up the slope onto the bunker. This worked, up to a point. The first bomb landed close enough to shower the bunker with debris. The next hit closer to the bunker. The fire from the bunker stopped briefly, and then restarted. But Self did not feel comfortable having unguided bombs dropped any closer. Then more mortar rounds fell. Canon reported that the Chalk 2 soldiers climbing the mountain were also receiving ineffective mortar fire. Miceli, covering the eastern side of the Chalk 1 position, spotted a couple of men walking around the valley to the east, pointing up at the Americans on the peak of Takur Ghar. Self concluded they were enemy observers calling in the mortar fire. They were beyond the effective range of any of the weapons the Rangers had at their disposal. Miceli harassed them with his SAW fire, trying to push them away, but they continued advancing slowly toward him.

Again, Self felt he had to take action to hasten his men’s departure. He knew Brown had been talking to Wildfire, the call sign for the CIA’s Predator, for much of the morning. He asked Brown to find out if the Predator was armed. Brown didn’t know what he was talking about. “Armed?” he said. He had no idea there was such a thing as an armed Predator. “Yes, some of the Predators have Hellfires on them,” Self said. Brown queried the Predator operator. “Yep, it’s got two,” he reported to Self. “Get ready to use it,” the platoon leader told him. But Vance was nervous. “No sir, we’re too close,” he told Self. “Don’t use the Hellfires.” Yielding to his ETAC’s advice, Self decided to hold off. But thirty minutes later more mortar rounds landed. Self pulled a little card out of his pocket that told him the “minimum safe distance” ranges for every indirect fire weapon system. Nothing he read suggested that the Hellfire would pose an inordinate risk. “We’re good,” he said, knowing his men enjoyed the protection of a defilade position, with the rocks sheltering them from any blast. He told Brown to call in the Predator strike. “Put it in the bunker,” the captain said. But Brown told the Predator to do the same thing he’d done with the bombs: to fire the first one a safe distance away. That’s exactly what the Predator did. Self was surprised to see the missile explode “way off” target to the north. Canon, on the other hand, immediately got on the radio. “Hey, whatever that was, don’t do that again, you almost hit us,” he said. “We’re a lot closer to it than you are,” Self told him. Then he turned to Brown. “Look, there’s only one [Hellfire] left,” he said. “Put it right in it.” The men put their heads down. The second Hellfire shot was perfect. Rocks, dirt and branches flew over the Rangers’ heads. They cheered. When the smoke had cleared from the top of Takur Ghar, the bunker had collapsed and part of the tree was missing. They took no more fire from there.

AFTER forty-five minutes had passed since he had spoken with Canon, Self called the squad leader again. “What’s your ETA?” he asked Canon. Another forty-five minutes, was the answer. When that time elapsed with no sign of Chalk 2, Self’s patience was wearing thin. I’ve only got so much time before the enemy decides to counterattack, he thought. I’ve gotta get these guys off the side of the mountain. He called Canon back. “Look, you’ve gotta move faster,” he said. “We’re moving as fast as we can,” Canon replied.

They marched on in single file, Staff Sergeant Harper Wilmoth and Staff Sergeant Eric Stebner leading the way. They received ineffective mortar fire, almost certainly from the same enemy 82mm tubes that were bracketing the Rangers on the mountaintop. Canon could hear the air strikes going in up ahead. What in the hell is at the top of this hill that is requiring us to bring this much firepower to bear? he wondered.

At about 10:00 a.m. the Chalk 1 Rangers fired another star cluster in the air. Canon and his men still didn’t see it. How could they not see it if they’re as close as they think they are? Self wondered. It was half an hour later, just past 10:30 a.m., when Canon finally spotted Miceli and DePouli, the two men closest to his approach. “I think I see you all,” Canon said over the radio. Miceli and DePouli weren’t sure. Canon told them to pick up snow and throw it. They did. “Yeah, that was you,” Canon said. “We’re moving into your location now.” It took another twenty minutes to make the linkup, but when it happened, Self’s tiny force on the top of the mountain had doubled.

(DePouli and Miceli made a grim discovery as they came down to meet Chalk 2: a helmet with a bullet hole in it. From the state of the inside, it was clear the last person to wear it had been shot in the head. That person was Neil Roberts.)

IT took Hyder nearly an hour to link up with Mako 30. The first member of the team he encountered was gray-faced, shivering, and leaving a trail of blood behind him. Hyder gave him his coat and swapped his wool mittens for the bedraggled SEAL’s wet gloves. The wounded man told Hyder that Chapman was dead, Roberts had not been seen, and a third team member had been shot in the legs and was seriously wounded. This was the first time Hyder realized how serious Mako 30’s situation was. The terse radio conversations had barely hinted at it. There was no way to execute his initial plan, which had been to get the team to retrace the route he had just taken from the LZ. The upward climb was beyond the abilities of the SEALs, who would have to carry one man and help another. Instead Hyder decided to follow the draw downward toward a known LZ, in the hope that another potential LZ might offer itself up en route. They began the trek. Hyder and another SEAL carried the most seriously wounded man between them. The stricken operator was able to put weight on his right foot, but his left leg was shot clean through just above the ankle. The six men moved slowly, pausing every seventy-five meters. At one point Hyder moved up the slope to provide overwatch. He spied a bearded, dark haired man coming down the north face of the mountain into a draw parallel to the one the SEALs were traveling along. Hyder kept his eyes on the man for about five minutes, noting that he was wearing pants and a long jacket. The SEAL officer was waiting for a chance to shoot him. That chance came when, about 175 meters away, the target fell forward and then kneeled up. Hyder put his sight on the man’s torso and pulled the trigger. His first shot hit the man in the chest. The bearded figure dropped to his left side. Hyder shot him again in the chest and the man fell onto his back. Hyder fired again but probably missed. He watched the man lying there for several minutes.

MORTAL combat doesn’t stop the body’s natural functions. As the reinforcements arrived, Walker realized he had to take a shit. He did so where he was lying, just pulling his pants down and rolling on his side. A moment after he was done. Eric Stebner and Sergeant Patrick George arrived beside him. George went to lie down where Walker had just taken a shit. Walker warned him just in time, but Stebner didn’t hear and dived straight on top of it, which resulted in George then having to try to clean the mess off his buddy with handfuls of snow.

When Chalk 2’s men had all made it up, Self walked down to the big rock outcropping and gave them a brief overview of events, then told them they would take the lead in assaulting the top of the mountain. DePouli’s squad was going to secure the flanks. He had Chalk 2’s machine-gun team of Specialists Randy Pazder and Omar Vela position their 240 next to the one manned by Gilliam and Brian (who also had 2,000 rounds of 7.62mm ammo retrieved from the Chinook). The platoon leader assembled his assault team: Walker, Stebner, George, Wilmoth, and Specialists Jonas Polson and Oscar Escano. He divided them into two three-man fire teams.

Now that he had extra manpower, Self decided neither he nor Vance were needed as riflemen. He told Vance to get his radio and start calling up the chain. The rest of the force, poised for the assault, gave Self a quizzical What’s the signal? look. “Just start shooting,” he told them. Both machine-guns opened up as the assault began. The two teams moved in “bounding overwatch” fashion, one team standing and shooting while the other fire team was moving and shooting. It only took them a couple of minutes to assault up the slope and then turn right toward the boulder and the tree. They shot a man on the back side of the bunker. Then Stebner noticed an American body laying facedown by the boulder. “Hey, we have a Blue casualty up here,” Canon told Self. Again, the captain was confused, thinking Canon was using the word “blue” as the U.S. military uses it to denote friendly forces, not realizing he meant Task Force Blue, the SEALs. Not good, Self thought. We just shot one of our own guys. “How do you know?” Self said. “It’s obvious,” Canon replied. “You need to come up here and look at this.”

Self told him to finish the assault first. They had discovered several bunkers on the back side, and he wanted them cleared. The Rangers went through, tossing grenades and firing shots. Canon tossed a grenade into one, not realizing the position held a pile of RPG rounds, which cooked off, knocking him down. Then they went to the other side of the saddle, which had been cratered by Grim 32 earlier that morning. The Rangers shot and killed another guerrilla there.

Self walked over to look at Roberts (he still didn’t know his name). The dead SEAL was wearing a U.S. desert combat uniform, but had a big beard. Self continued to suspect trickery. He wondered if this operator had been on a joint observation post with Afghans who turned on him. The RPG gunner who DePouli had killed with a shot to the head was bizarrely still half standing, leaning backward but held up at the knees by the snow. His hat lay a meter behind him where DePouli’s bullet had carried it. Meanwhile Wilmoth’s team went into the bunker and found two more dead enemy fighters and another dead American—John Chapman. Mako 30 finally came up on the radio again and settled things. “No, those are our guys,” a SEAL told Self. “One of them’s the guy who fell out of the helicopter.” Still Self didn’t understand. Okay, he fell out of the helicopter down there in the valley. They captured him alive and forced him to call us in. They baited us and then they killed him anyway. It took one more radio call with Mako 30 for the Rangers to finally understand what had transpired on Takur Ghar. It was 11:15 a.m.

12.

AT 8.30 a.m. two more TF Brown Chinooks took off from Bagram bound for Gardez with 35 TF 11 commandos, mostly from TF Blue. After take off the helicopters got a message to rendezvous with Razor 02 at FARP Texaco. The helicopter force gathering at Texaco to insert the new quick reaction force to pull the Razors 01 and 02 personnel plus Mako 30 off the mountain included three MH-47s and two “Killer Spade” Apaches. The air mission commander, flight leads and SEAL officers huddled to plan the extraction. TF Rakkasan Chinooks landed, ferrying fuel to the FARP. Meanwhile, Commodore Bob Harward’s TF K-Bar caught wind of events on Takur Ghar and began planning to send reinforcements. In Kandahar, B Company of the 160^th’s 3^rd Battalion was alerted at 10:30 a.m. The company had only arrived in Afghanistan a week earlier and had yet to conduct a mission. As K-Bar officers planned, the 160^th officers in Kandahar woke their men up and prepared to fly the special ops troops to Bagram in four MH-47D Chinooks.

SELF brought Vance and Brown up to the crest and set up his command post behind a boulder. Brown finally got through to the TF 11 operations center and told them Takur Ghar was secure and the LZ was cold. Self’s next priority was to move the casualties up and over the crest onto the reverse slope, partly because the most obvious LZ was up there and partly to keep the casualties out of sight of whoever had been directing the mortar fire against them. But just as Shawn, Stebner, and two other Rangers had begun this process, dragging Dave halfway up the slope on the Skedco, Al Qaida counterattacked. Bullets flew across the hillside. “Take cover!” someone yelled. The four stretcher-bearers dropped Dave into the snow. He had to reach out and grab a small bush in order to keep himself from sliding away for a second time that morning. This is bad, he thought. “Don’t worry, Sergeant, we’re coming to get you!” Stebner yelled at him. “You don’t have to,” Dave replied. “You fight.” Despite Dave’s bravado, Stebner tried twice to run out into the open and pull Dave to cover, but on each occasion he was driven back by fierce enemy fire. “Just leave me alone!” Dave yelled. “Shut up, I’m not gonna leave you there!” Stebner shouted back. On his third attempt, Stebner made it all the way to Dave and pulled him back behind cover as bullets bit into the snow with a pffftt! pffftt! sound.

The enemy was hurling a furious barrage of RPG, machine gun, and AK fire at the Americans from positions high on a ridge 300 meters to the southeast. On maps the enemy’s location appeared part of the Takur Ghar peak, but in reality it was separated from the mountaintop by a saddle. Looking across, the Rangers could see what looked like a couple of cinder-block bunkers on the ridge.

Self watched an RPG fired from the opposite ridgeline skip on the lower part of the slope the helicopter was on and then soar up to the top of the mountain, close to where he was. It exploded harmlessly, but the enemy was really pouring it on. The captain could only see five or ten enemy fighters, but they were fighting as if they had several times that number. “That was some of the most intense gunfire that we had all day,” he said. Self ducked back behind a boulder as bullets chewed up the snow and dirt. “It was like in the movies,” he recalled. “The ground was just exploding around me.” The enemy was below them, which didn’t help in this situation, because the guerrillas’ fire was “grazing,” raking up the slope endangering everyone. Self and Canon repositioned their men to adjust to the new, potent threat. DePouli told Gilliam to turn his machine-gun around so he could take the enemy behind them under fire. Gilliam did so and began firing long bursts at the enemy fighters. The biggest problem was going to be the casualties. Greg and Chuck were still strapped into their stretchers on the rock face. With them were Cory, Don, and Cunningham. They were all directly in the line of fire. Self knew he had to get his wounded to the top of the hill fast.

It didn’t take Don and the others long to realize how exposed they were tending the casualties. Bullets snapped past their ears and cracked against the rocks. Don returned fire, the muzzle of his M4 barking its resistance just eighteen inches from Chuck’s head. For some reason, Don’s weapon seemed louder than the others, and Chuck let him know it. With his arms strapped to his sides, unable to cover his ears, he could only yell “Ow! Ow!” as Don leaned back against the rock face and fired round after round at the enemy fighters moving back and forth between boulders and bunkers. What do you want me to do, Chuck? Don thought. Quit firing?

The natural human instinct for Don and the others would have been to take cover behind nearby rocks. But that wouldn’t have helped Chuck and Greg. Everyone stayed. Cunningham had just started another IV on Greg. We’re not leaving these guys was the attitude. We’re gonna stay here and shoot it out. Cory was distinctly unimpressed with the enemy RPGs. They’re nothing compared to the 500-pounders, he thought. The three noncasualties tried to move Greg, but didn’t have the strength. After several minutes of fruitless effort, Don decided to go to the top of the hill to get the Rangers to help move the casualties. As he got up to run, the enemy opened up again. Within the space of two seconds, Cory and Jason were hit. “Uh! Uh!” each grunted as the bullets hit home. For the next few seconds they lay there moaning. Neither of them knew how badly they’d been wounded. Cory knew he’d been hit twice in the belly, just below the edge of his body armor. “It felt like somebody hit me as hard as they could with a sledgehammer,” he said. There are no good places to get shot, but the belly’s one of the worst. Cory had been married for ten years, with a seven-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. As he came to his senses he thought how unfair it was on them that he was going to die on that mountain. He was scared to reach down and feel where he’d been shot. This is really gonna suck, he thought. But when he put his hand down he could feel wetness but not too much bleeding. The bullet had torn up his bladder, but he didn’t know that at the time. He just hoped he wasn’t bleeding too badly internally. Cunningham was in worse shape. He’d been shot in the pelvis and suffered heavy internal bleeding. He was in a lot of pain. Cory checked his watch. It was 11:30 a.m.

THE ratio of healthy medical personnel to wounded troops was getting worse. With Cunningham and Cory out of action, that left only Miller and Matt LaFrenz, the Ranger medic who’d arrived with Chalk 2, to care for the casualties. LaFrenz crawled over to the casualty collection point and began treating Cory and Cunningham. Meanwhile, the Rangers, and particularly the machinegunners, kept up a murderous rate of fire to suppress the enemy. The Al Qaida men on the opposite ridge would pop up from behind cover, fire, and then drop down. But one of them exposed himself for a second too long. Pazder shot him. The Rangers saw more guerrillas maneuvering toward them. Canon told Vela to go back to the Chinook for more 7.62mm ammo. Vela sprinted as fast as he could in the snow towards the helicopter, 150 meters away, but on his way back came under fire and was forced to take cover with Stebner behind a rock. He crawled over to DePouli and put the ammo in a spare barrel bag that he then heaved halfway back to Canon. The squad leader ran out, grabbed the bag, and helped Pazder fire the 240 at the advancing Al Qaida troops. The Ranger 203 gunners kept up a rain of 40mm grenades. This was to be their fight for the rest of the day, keeping the enemy from moving closer or engaging them from the ridgeline. The Al Qaida forces broke into smaller and smaller teams in an effort to close with the Americans. Navy F-14s arrived carrying 500-pound bombs. Vance guided them in, but a bomb fell short and exploded seventy-five meters away from the Rangers, blowing DePouli’s helmet off and hitting Wilmoth’s helmet with shrapnel. Walker looked around with a What was that? expression for a moment and then resumed shooting. By that stage, little could have surprised the Rangers. Another JDAM hit the front slope of the enemy-held ridge and Self watched a three-foot long, eight-inch wide piece of shrapnel rotating through the air about thirty meters above him. The ridgeline they were aiming at had trees along the top. Brown called in more bombs—1,000-pound and 2,000-pound JDAMs. Soon the trees had gone. So had many of the enemy. The U.S. troops cheered as one bomb tossed three guerrillas’ broken bodies through the air like rag dolls. That all but ended the battle. From then on, the enemy was only able to offer intermittent, ineffective mortar and AK fire.

The effort to move the casualties continued. The loss of Cunningham and Cory as active participants forced Self to rotate two more men out of the perimeter to help out. It was a sign of how physically spent the men were that it would take four men in superb physical condition twenty minutes to move a man eighty meters, albeit under fire. Every time the teams reached the top of the slope, they had to rest for a couple of minutes.

When the casualties—six dead and six wounded—were collected at the top of the hill, Miller and LaFrenz redoubled their efforts to save those still alive. LaFrenz’s assessment was that both Cory and Cunningham were “urgent surgical” casualties—a phrase used to describe only the most extreme, life-threatening cases. He was particularly worried about Cunningham, whose condition was rapidly worsening. The Ranger medic had stopped the external bleeding, but he couldn’t discern the extent of the wounded PJ’s internal bleeding. At 1 p.m. Vance called Masirah and told them an urgent medevac was required. In the TF 1l operations center and the TF Blue TOC in Bagram, where the staffs suffered from the worst situational awareness of just about anyone involved in the operation, there was extreme reluctance to send any more helicopters to the top of Takur Ghar. As if to reinforce their fears, just as Vance answered their question about whether the LZ was hot or cold with the word “cold,” a mortar round landed nearby. The time was 1:30 p.m. and at Texaco the elaborate, massive rescue operation was ready to launch.

AFTER being wounded Cory could no longer work on casualties himself, but despite the pain he was in, he directed the others, in particular telling Don how he could help. The first thing he asked Don to do was run back through the field of fire to fetch his aid bag, which was still sitting on the rocks where he had been shot. Don was reluctant. “Look Cory, it’s too hot down there right now,” he told the flight medic. But a little later, when the enemy fire died down, Don grabbed another soldier and together they ran down to retrieve the bag. (The troops felt more secure moving across open ground in pairs.) Once he had returned, Cory’s directions continued: “Get in my first aid bag, get in the second pouch, reach down a third of the way, pull this out, and give it to ’em, they’re gonna need it.” LaFrenz renewed his pressure to get a medevac in for Cunningham and Cory. “These guys have to have surgery,” he told Self. “They’re urgent, a couple of them may die.” LaFrenz got on the radio and told whatever RTO or staff officer was on the other end, “We have three urgent-surgical casualties.” (In the TF 11 after-action review of the battle, someone said that no one in Masirah knew what “urgent-surgical” meant.) The platoon leader, who had been relaying most of his messages to Masirah and Bagram through Vance, got on the radio himself. He told the headquarters that he had three casualties who would lose limbs or die if they were not taken off the mountain immediately. The rest of his force could wait until after dark, Self added.

TF 11 told him a seventy-man enemy force was moving toward him but that TF 11 was dispatching seventy reinforcements to his position. “We don’t need the [seventy extra] bodies,” Self told them. “We’ve got no room for ’em. We just need aircraft to get out.” The platoon leader told Masirah there was an LZ on a reverse slope that offered good protection from enemy fire. “We’re working on that,” the staff officer in Masirah told him. Self sensed that the operation had changed, and that getting his casualties out was no longer TF 11’s highest priority. “I got the impression we were being patronized with the exfil,” he said.

IN Masirah and Bagram, Trebon, Kernan, and their staffs pondered their options. From their perspective, they were in a no-win situation. Listening to Self, LaFrenz, and Vance discuss the casualty status, knowing that if they chose to delay the medevac until nightfall at least one and maybe more of their men would die, must have been excruciating for Trebon and the other leaders. But the equally harrowing experience of watching four men die in a few seconds live on the Predator feed as Razor 01’s complement of Rangers ran off the back of the Chinook was also fresh in their minds. Trebon decided not to risk another helicopter flight to the top of Takur Ghar in daylight. He thought his decision would cost Cunningham and Cory their lives and he called back to JSOC headquarters in North Carolina to get some moral support from Dailey, who was tracking the operation closely. “Sir, I just need some moral confidence here,” Trebon told his boss. “Greg, I’ve monitored all this, you have made absolutely the right decision,” Dailey responded. “It will be tough. You’ve already identified who the guys are who will possibly die on that mountainside. But you’ve made the decision, it’s the right decision so drive on.” Meanwhile, Hagenbeck called Franks. He asked for and received command and control over TF 11 for the duration of Anaconda. This belatedly conferred unity of command of the operation.

At 2:30 p.m. all the medevac/QRF helicopters at Texaco, which were sitting with engines running ready to launch on the mission to Takur Ghar, received the order to stand down. Plans were made for an elaborate operation to exfil Mako 30 and the Rangers starting at 7:45 p.m. (later bumped to 8:15 p.m. due to the late arrival of aircraft). The plan involved A-10 ground attack aircraft, AC-130H and U model gunships, three MH-47E Chinooks, an MH-47D Chinook and two Apaches.

Self learned of the decision at 3:30 p.m., when he again pleaded his case for a medevac. “I need an aircraft for three urgent surgical casualties,” he told Masirah. “We understand the nature of your casualties,” a voice on the desert island replied. “The exfil will happen after dark.” The time they gave him was 8:15 p.m.

The platoon leader understood where his bosses were coming from. They had flown three helicopters to the top of that mountain in the previous eleven hours. Two had been shot down and a third badly shot up. From the perspective of Masirah or Bagram, it probably seemed a huge risk to fly another Chinook to the top of Takur Ghar, and in broad daylight at that. But Nate Self had better situational awareness than anyone in the TF 11 or TF Blue operations centers. The three helicopters that had flown up there before had all been shot at by enemy fighters on the peak of Takur Ghar itself. Now those fighters’ corpses littered the mountaintop, which was firmly in the control of Self and his men. They were only receiving poorly aimed, ineffective fire from one direction now, and he had an LZ that was protected from that. In addition the two helicopters that had been shot down had flown to the top of the mountain with no idea of the danger. A rescue operation now would be mounted by men with a full understanding of the risks. A few bombing runs by fast movers probably could have kept enemy heads down long enough to effect a successful medevac. This wasn’t just the view of those on Takur Ghar. Juliet Team, who watched and listened to the entire battle, also reported up the TF 11 chain of command that the LZ was secure and the casualties could be medevaced. But it was not to be. At least, not until it was too late for one more brave airman.

DOWN beneath the Rangers, Mako 30 and Hyder continued their torturous march. By now they could only drag the SEAL who had been shot in the legs by his arms. “[He] displayed incredible physical strength, determination, and sheer guts each time we asked him for his hands,” Hyder told the official Special Operations Command investigation. “He would ask how much farther, give a sigh, and grab our hands requiring all his concentration and energy. He was exhausted, near hypothermic, and falling into shock.” After six hours of movement the SEALs had traveled roughly 1,500 meters. They stopped where two draws intersected. Hyder saw day-old tracks along a trail he had intended to follow that led to the LZ. He decided to hold in place and hope that a 160^th Chinook could squeeze down to pick them up. His wounded men were in a bad way. The four less badly wounded moved the casualties under cover and then settled into positions from which they could watch all avenues of approach. The draw was wooded. Hyder cut branches from the evergreen trees around them and stripped bark in order to give one or two of the SEALs a place to sit insulated from the snow and frozen ground. In less than an hour both of the men he was worried about began to regain some color in their cheeks.

ON Takur Ghar, the shadows lengthened, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped. Soldiers stripped clothing from their buddies who’d been killed in action in order to keep the wounded warm. To supplement the clothing they went back to the helicopter in two-man teams and tore more sound-proofing and insulation from its sides to pile on top of the wounded. While there they scavenged among the rucksacks left inside looking for food and water. They also “sanitized” the aircraft, removing all the sensitive items, such as weapons and night-vision goggles. On the mountaintop they prepared the bodies of Chapman and Roberts for exfil. This involved the grim task of tying a rope around each man’s feet and pulling him to ensure the corpse wasn’t booby-trapped.

At the casualty collection point, LaFrenz and Miller were making fifteen-minute rounds among the six wounded, changing their dressings. “Hey, guys, they’re going to come get us,” LaFrenz repeated over and over to the casualties. “We’re going to be out of here soon.” He crammed IV bags under his shirt to keep the fluid warm. As darkness settled over the valley Jason Cunningham began to slip away. Don held a pressure bandage to him for forty-five minutes, during which time Cunningham pulled Don to him and whispered a last message to pass to his wife. For thirty minutes LaFrenz and Miller did nothing but work frantically on the dying PJ, inserting a breathing tube and performing CPR. It was no use. Shedding bitter tears, LaFrenz walked over to Self at 6 p.m. “You can tell them our KIA total is seven,” he said angrily.

A few minutes past 8 p.m., the troops at Kevin Butler’s command post in the wadi south of LZ 15 glanced skyward as helicopter after helicopter flew overhead. On the mountaintop there were cheers as the sound of rotors reached the ears of the men who’d been waiting to hear it all day. Self radioed that the LZ was secure, but that his exhausted men would need assistance moving the casualties to the helicopters. Razor 02 was the first helicopter to land. The pilot mistakenly put his nose toward the casualties. The QRF—almost all SEALs—got out and kneeled in a perimeter formation. To the Rangers’ anger no one who had just arrived made any attempt to assist them as they carried the eleven most seriously wounded men the forty meters to the helicopter. Loading the casualties aboard took nineteen minutes. When the first Chinook departed, another landed, this time facing the right way. Again the SEALs made no offer to assist as the Rangers, aviators and Air Force special operators carried their dead to the ramp and then climbed aboard themselves. A third Chinook landed and the SEAL QRF got on and flew away.

ANOTHER Chinook flew down the draw that Mako 30 had holed up in, searching for the men. The helicopter had no radio contact with the team and moved slowly down the valley from the east. The SEALs attracted their attention using a strobe light and a laser designator. Aware the SEALs were not able to move because of their wounded, the helicopter descended straight down in a hover beside them, blades spinning just feet away from granite walls on three sides of the aircraft. Only the rear wheels touched down as the SEALs limped aboard and the helicopter ascended into the night sky.

All the casualties were flown to Gardez, where an MC-130 Combat Talon specially equipped for in-flight surgeries waited. But the MC-130 got stuck in the dirt at the airfield, so the casualties were transferred to a pair of Chinooks, including a similarly outfitted British helicopter, and flown to Bagram, where they were delivered straight to the 274^th Forward Surgical Team. There, surgeons labored all night on the most seriously wounded. Everyone who left the mountain alive survived. One member of Mako 30 had to have his leg amputated below the knee. But Cory lived to see his kids and to return to duty, and Greg not only kept his hand (albeit fused to his forearm), but by the summer of 2004 was ready to fly Chinooks again.