Not a Good Day to Die (57 page)

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, this
is 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.