Call Sign Extortion 17 (2 page)

Chapter 1

Forward Operating Base “Shank”

logar province, eastern afghanistan

august 5, 2011

late evening hours

The crescent moon hung low over the horizon, dipping below the mountains off in the distance to the west.

It was 10:00 p.m. local time, and the night was not yet half gone. But soon, the moonless sky would yield to the faint blinking of the stars against the jet-­black canopy of space, a placid contrast to the bloody jihad raging in the dark hills and valleys and riverbeds beyond the mountains.

Down below the starry firmament, in this forward-­deployed military base occupied by Western forces in the ten-­year-­old “War on Terror,” a buzz of activity arose from units of several US Special Forces, namely from US Army Rangers and the elite US Navy SEALs.

Here, in the midst of the Afghan night, they called this place “Base Shank,” or officially, “Forward Operating Base Shank.” And at first glance, with its wooden buildings and Quonset tents, concrete barriers and big green and sand-­colored jeeps and dirt graders, FOB Shank could pass for 1950s-­vintage from the Korean War—perhaps even the backstage of a Hollywood set constructed in the foothills of snow-­capped mountains.

But technologically, and militarily, there was nothing Fifties-­vintage about this place, nor was there anything about it that was Hollywood.

At this remote outpost 46 miles south of the Afghan capital at Kabul, and 100 miles west of the Pakistani border, the SEALs and the Rangers were deployed to the tip of the American military spear, poised to
use their superior training and weaponry to take the fight straight to the Taliban in rugged and treacherous mountain peaks, in crags, and in rocks and valleys and remote riverbeds. Much of the SEAL unit was from the prestigious SEAL Team Six, the unit that ninety days earlier had killed the world's most notorious terrorist, Osama Bin Laden.

Their mission was to kill Taliban, and they were deadly effective at it.

On this night, as the SEALs and Rangers prepared their weapons of war, two US Army National Guard Chinook helicopters, call signs Extortion 16 and Extortion 17, prepared to transport two platoons of Army Rangers to the edge of the battle front, in this case in the Tangi River Valley in the mountainous Wardak Province a few miles to the west. Their job —to engage Taliban forces and hunt down a Taliban terrorist leader named Qari Tahir, whose code name was Lefty Grove.

Between ten and eleven o'clock, two platoons of Army Rangers, weapons loaded and in full combat gear, moved single-­file toward the giant helicopters, their running lights blinking on the heliport, their twin engines shrieking loudly into the night.

As they boarded the choppers, the Rangers ducked their heads under twin rotary blades whirling in a wind-­filled roar. Some probably covered their ears to block the noise and the wind. Within minutes, they had strapped themselves into their jump seats, and they were cleared for takeoff.

Like two giant locusts, with twin-­engines spinning, the lumbering war birds lifted into the dark skies, dipped their noses, and set a course for the northwest.

Their destination—an area approximately 2 kilometers outside the battle zone in the Tangi River Valley in neighboring Wardak Province. The Tangi Valley cut across the border between Wardak and Logar Provinces and was an area where security had deteriorated over the past two years, bringing the insurgency closer to the capital, Kabul. It was a largely inaccessible area that had become a haven for insurgents.

In command of Extortion 17 was thirty-­year-­old CW2 Bryan J. Nichols, a member of the Kansas Air National Guard.

Bryan Nichols enlisted in the Army in 1996 as a ground soldier. He was deployed as an infantryman twice in Iraq, once in 2002 and again
in 2003, and once in Kosovo in 2004, all of which occurred before he became an Army pilot.

Following his dream to become a US Army aviator, Bryan graduated from flight school in 2008; most of his flight training had taken place back in the United States.

But tonight marked a first for Bryan.

Base Shank, Afghanistan, marked his very first tour as a pilot in combat. For although he was experienced as a combat soldier, he had no experience as a combat pilot. Not yet, anyway. The dark, deadly skies of Afghanistan were about to change all that.

Bryan was on his second marriage when he deployed to Afghanistan, and left behind a ten-­year-­old son named Braydon. Braydon lived with his mother, Jessica Nichols, in Kansas City.

He had arrived in Afghanistan less than a week earlier, and as his chopper thundered to the northwest, full of elite US Army Rangers, perhaps his mind returned for a moment to Braydon. Bryan and Braydon were close, and though Bryan remarried, he and Braydon remained thick as thieves. When Bryan remarried and exchanged his vows with Mary in his service dress blue Army uniform, he had a miniature version of the uniform tailored for Braydon, who stood proudly beside his father during the ceremony. In the days since Bryan left Kansas, he and Braydon had frequently communicated by Skype and could not wait to see each other again.

In a few weeks, when he returned home, he planned to fulfill a promise to Braydon to take him to a Royals game. As his chopper sliced through the dark of the deadly night, perhaps his thoughts, for a flickering moment, turned to home, and to baseball, and to his boy.

Theirs was a reunion that would never take place.

As Extortions 16 and 17 flew over the rugged, snow-­capped Hindu-­Kush mountain ranges, jagged peaks stretching from central Afghanistan to northern Pakistan, the American pilots charted their route to the initial drop-­off point.

The battle for military control of these mountains, and the crags and valleys and riverbeds around them, had been wrapped in a long and
ancient history of warfare. Darius the Great, the great king of Persia, once maintained an army here. Later, Alexander the Great explored these mountains.

But the exploits of Darius and the explorations of Alexander had come hundreds of years before the birth of a man named Muhammad, whose life and death would mark a geopolitical shift in the world. In the hundred years following Muhammad's death in AD 632, Islam would sweep by military conquest from the Arabian Peninsula to the west, all the way across the rim of North Africa and crossing Gibraltar into all of Spain. At the same time, the meteoric expansion of the Muslim empire stretched to the north and east, with Islamic warriors from Arabia capturing the cities of Damascus, Baghdad, and Kabul, and all the lands around them.

By the end of the Umayyad Caliphate in AD 750, the great Muslim empire had grown by military conquest into the largest empire in the history of the world. The land and mountains below these helicopters had been under Islamic control for twelve hundred years.

The ghosts of ten thousand fallen sons of a former superpower haunted the frozen snowcaps, crags, and cliffs of the harsh mountain terrain. Some had been shot. Others had been chopped apart or brutally decapitated. All spilled their blood for the lost cause of Soviet communism the last time a great power tried invading Afghanistan.

The Russians had defeated Napoleon, and the Soviets defeated the Nazis. But at the zenith of their strength as a nuclear superpower, with missiles and MIG jets and arsenals of sophisticated weaponry, the great Red Bear of the uttermost north could not defeat the Islamic mujahideen lurking behind the rocks of these unforgiving mountains. Afghanistan became the most humiliating defeat in the history of the Soviet Union.

Now, as two American helicopters closed in on their landing zone just two clicks (kilometers) from the battle zone, the sons of another superpower would try their hands at war in this harsh terrain that belonged to Islam. Perhaps if the ghosts of the Russians could speak, they would cry loudly into the night to warn the Rangers and the pilots of the danger lurking ahead. Perhaps that warning would have come out of respect for an old ally, a former ally that once joined Mother Russia in her fight
against Nazism. Or perhaps their voices would have remained silent, content to hope that radical Islam would bring down their bitter-­rival superpower, the Americans, just as their defeat in Afghanistan had jumpstarted the downward spiral of the Soviet Union.

Even if the Russian ghosts could have warned him with their loudest voices, Bryan Nichols was too focused on the task at hand to hear anything they would have said.

Using GPS instrumentation and night-­vision goggles, Nichols slowed the Chinook over the landing zone and brought it down to a feathery landing just outside the Tangi River Valley, outside the “hot” combat area, in Afghanistan's Wardak Province.

Off to the side, his sister chopper, Extortion 16, also had set down. From the load area of both Chinooks, flight engineers and crews stepped out under the whirling rotary blades to open the cargo ramps. Rangers, wearing flak jackets and night-­vision goggles, and carrying automatic rifles, began filing out in quick precision. The chopper had landed outside the fire zone, as Nichols and his crew had been trained to do, for the Chinooks were big and slow and unable to effectively defend themselves against any kind of sustained antiaircraft fire. Under the battle plan, the Rangers would depart the choppers and move by foot into the battle zone, to attack Taliban and capture or kill the target, Qari Tahir.

Having once been a ground soldier himself long before he became a pilot, Nichols could identify with the mission of the Rangers.

So far, so good.

In a few minutes, Nichols got an “all clear,” most likely from his friend, Staff Sergeant Pat Hamburger, another National Guardsman who was from Nebraska, and served as the helicopter's flight engineer and gunner. The “all clear” meant that all the Rangers had cleared the cargo bay.

It was 11 p.m. local time.

“Thumbs ups” were exchanged, and the choppers' rotary blades, which had been spinning during the short drop-­off of the Rangers, revved up. From the cockpit of Extortion 17, Nichols pulled up on the collective, the stick controlling vertical ascent, causing the big helicopter, sometimes described as an “airborne school bus,” to lift off the ground. Using his cyclic to turn the chopper back to the southeast, Nichols set a course for
Base Shank and the Chinooks began their return journey through the air, over and around the mountains, back to the plains of Logar Province.

We will never know what was said by the five National Guardsmen on their return flight to Base Shank. Perhaps they discussed their families. Perhaps they discussed their mission. Perhaps they were buried in thought, silently contemplating their fate. Perhaps some had a premonition that they were about to die.

They knew they might be called back in a matter of hours to bring the Rangers back from the battle zone. Or, the Rangers might not be back for a day or more. Or the Rangers might never come back.

The only thing certain about war was the uncertainty.

They had no clue that shortly after returning to Base Shank, they would be called upon to fly another mission—this time with the super-­elite SEAL Team Six.

They never knew that their next mission would be the last mission they would ever fly.

Chapter 2

Aboard Extortion 17

somewhere over the hindu kush mountains heading southeast

destination: base shank

august 5, 2011

shortly after 11 p.m. local time

As the old Chinook helicopter flew through the night along a course heading back to Base Shank, thirty-­one-­year-­old Staff Sergeant Patrick “Pat” Hamburger, the chopper's flight engineer and gunner, sat strapped in his position at the back of the aircraft.

A well-­liked soldier with closely cropped hair and an infectious smile, as flight engineer, Pat was the senior enlisted member of the crew, or the “crew chief,” in military helicopter vernacular. This made him the most important crewmember behind the pilot and co-­pilot.

Pat, a National Guardsman from Nebraska, was in charge of all logistical aspects of the helicopter's operations, including loading and offloading cargo, and loading and offloading passengers—and was in charge of loading and unloading the Ranger team that had just deployed. From that standpoint, the most important of his tasks for this mission was over once that last Ranger stepped out the back of the helicopter.

But loading and unloading cargo and personnel wasn't Hamburger's only duty aboard Extortion 17. He also served as the gunner, putting him in charge of firing any of the three M-240 lightweight machine guns aboard the aircraft.

The M-240's effectiveness was limited to close range, against enemy ground forces firing light weapons. For the 240s to work, the Chinook
would need to be in a hover position, just above the ground, not much above treetop level, firing at enemy ground troops with rifles.

But against incoming rockets, antiaircraft fire, surface-­to-­air missiles, or rocket-­propelled grenades, the machine guns were as effective as a peashooter in a gunfight at the OK Corral, a reality of which Pat Hamburger was all too aware.

Hamburger had practice-­fired the weapons many times, but he had never fired the weapons in combat. Like his friend Bryan Nichols in the cockpit, this marked his first combat deployment to Afghanistan, his first foray into a war zone. Four of the five members of this Air National Guard flight crew were green from lack of experience.

The two young Air Guardsmen sitting with Hamburger in the cavernous cargo bay, twenty-­four-­year-­old Corporal Alexander Bennett of Tacoma, Washington, and twenty-­one-­year-­old Specialist Spencer C. Duncan of Olathe, Kansas, were also green when it came to combat.

Only the co-­pilot, Chief Warrant Officer David Carter of Denver, who sat in the cockpit alongside Bryan Nichols to help guide him on this first combat mission, had any type of substantial flight experience.

Thankfully the Army had the good sense to draft an initial flight plan for this young crew to keep this bird away from known enemy antiaircraft positions. The initial flight plan would keep the Chinook away from the Tangi River Valley, where the Rangers were headed by foot and that had been the site of three attacks on American helicopters within the last ninety days. US military intelligence reported that in the last three months, the Taliban had deployed over one hundred fighters, armed with rocket-­propelled grenades, solely for the purpose of shooting down a US helicopter.

Sending a Chinook over that valley, at least tonight, would be the equivalent of serving a sitting duck up at a point-­blank target in front of a double-­barrel twelve-­gauge for target practice with lottery proceeds rewarded to the winner for the kill.

Thus, the initial flight plan, when deploying the Rangers, kept them from flying over that valley. In contrast to the later flight involving US Navy SEALs, the choppers would initially take the Rangers to a relatively safe zone, which had been pre-­cleared of enemy insurgents. As will be seen, the second flight plan, involving members of SEAL Team Six, would
prove to be irresponsibly dangerous, and indeed foolish given the level of training of the National Guard flight crew, the antiquated equipment, and poor rules of engagement that were guaranteed to get all the Americans killed. If the Taliban knew or even suspected that the Chinook was transporting Special Forces, their helicopter would become a significant target.

At 96 feet in length, the Chinook, an older Vietnam-­era helicopter pawned off to the National Guard, had a maximum capacity of thirty-­three in the cargo bay. But on the way back to Base Shank, under the dimmed cabin lights and the sonorous roar of the choppers' twin engines, and the
thwock-­thwock-­thwock
of the sixty-­foot rotary blades slicing the night air, Hamburger and his young subordinates sat alone in the cavernous cargo bay, perhaps alone in their thoughts, perhaps wondering what would come next.

The guardsmen knew what they were getting into when they enlisted. America was at war. Her opponent in this “War on Terror” was a nebulous enemy, without conventional uniforms, without conventional tactics. The enemy was willing to kill, maim, and destroy without regard to any semblance of the civilized rules of war. The Geneva Conventions meant nothing to this enemy. These guardsmen knew this. None of them had been drafted. None had been forced to sign up.

Soldiers enlist in the Army for different reasons. Some enlist out of patriotic duty. Some enlist because they need jobs. Others join with a thirst for adventure.

The young guardsmen in the back of the chopper that night, Hamburger, Bennett, and Duncan, all knew that Afghanistan might one day call their names. From the relative safety of the Midwestern plains, or the foothills of the Rockies where their units trained, they all knew that from a faraway land, half a world away, American soldiers and sailors and marines were coming home in body bags.

Yet they were prepared to serve, voluntarily, every one of them.

Now they were here, in this war-­torn place that had been a theoretical figment of their collective imaginations for years, knowing that some of the Rangers they had dropped off might never come home, knowing that for their own flight crew, survival was no guarantee, and knowing that their own deaths lurked around the corner.

Perhaps the flight back to Base Shank was like a cold, wet washrag to the face, reminding them that Afghanistan was no longer a vague notion, but a sobering reality where even the smallest mistake could be your last.

It has been said that a man thinks of family as death approaches.

At some point during the flight from the landing zone back to Base Shank, it's likely that thoughts of family flashed through Pat Hamburger's mind.

Pat's brother, Chris, was back in Nebraska. Pat had telephoned Chris on July 26th, only eleven days before. His family members had been nervous about Pat leaving the safety of the corn-­plains of Nebraska for the deadly, war-­torn mountains of Afghanistan. Pat loved to joke around, reassuring his brother with humor, and didn't even mention anything about his mission, only telling Chris that he had “stuff to do.”

Anyone who knew Pat Hamburger knew of his loving kindness and tender heart as a father. As he flew in the back of the chopper through the dark passes of the Hindu Kush range, it is inconceivable to believe that he did not, at least for a moment, turn his thoughts to the two younger girls in his life. The tough National Guardsman had a marshmallow-­of-­a-heart for them both.

Thirteen-­year-­old Veronica, his girlfriend Candie's daughter, was not his daughter by birth. But Pat had for six years treated her as if she were his own. When he came home, she would hug him and squeeze him and kiss him as if he were her own daddy. And Pat was the principal father figure in Veronica's life. Then, two years earlier, in 2009, Candie had given birth to Pat's daughter Payton, and suddenly, Veronica had a baby stepsister. Oh how Veronica doted on her baby sister, and the thought of them together would bring a smile to Pat's face!

But it was Candie Reagan, the girl he'd met while he was working as a plumber at the Village Inn in Lincoln, who had changed Pat's life. Candie was “the girl behind the desk,” and the initial attraction was instant, although a few months would pass before they solidified their relationship. Candie was an all-­American girl, and she had made him a better man.

There can be little doubt that under the roar of those engines, Pat thought of Candie, for the last six years had been the sweetest of both
their lives. Pat had shared his secret with his brother Chris. When he returned home to Nebraska, he would ask Candie to marry him. They would live together as husband and wife, and raise their daughters in a loving home.

Now, on his very first deployment overseas, Pat had everything to live for.

But first, he would have to find a way to survive the night.