The Only Thing Worth Dying For (44 page)

“I’m all for that,” said Leithead, and the two hurried to the Marine command post some twenty minutes after Mattis had declined Cairnes’s request. Inside, the expressions on the faces of Mattis’s staff showed their frustration and embarrassment. One Marine glanced away as they walked past, unable to meet their eyes.

Mattis greeted the two Green Berets at the heavy wood door that led into his spartan concrete-floored office. He held a military-issue canteen cup filled with coffee in his left hand and gestured them inside with the other. After closing the door to a crack, he sat down at a small writing desk where a map was laid out.

“Let’s hear it,” said Mattis.

“Sir,” said Lee, “we’ve got reports of mass casualties, and word is they expect the numbers to continue to rise. You are the closest American with the ability to respond.”

“Do you have an update on how they got all scuffed up? Are they still in contact?”

“With all due respect,” said Leithead, “we think that’s irrelevant.”

“I hear you, but no, I’m not sending a rescue mission,” Mattis said. “We. Don’t. Know. The situation.”

“The situation, sir,” said Lee, “is that Americans are dying. And they need your help.”

“Look, when I have fighters over the scene so that I’ve got air superiority, then I’ll send choppers. That, or we wait till nightfall.”

Exchanging a look with Leithead, Lee said, “That’s not good enough, sir.”

Standing up, the general cleared his throat. “Sergeant,” Mattis called to his sergeant at arms, positioned outside the office. “We’re done. Escort these men out of here.”

Without another word, Lee and Leithead walked out of the office toward the door to the command post, again passing Marines who wouldn’t make eye contact. Behind them, they heard Mattis say, “
Nobody
gets into my office.”

Back outside, Lee said, “Who’s going to get our guys out of there?”

“Besides here, the only helicopters are at K2 and J-Bad. Uzbekistan and Pakistan. They’re at least three hours away, and that’s if they’re ready to launch.”

They looked to their left, at the rows of Marine helicopters parked along the desert airstrip.

“What a joke,” said Lee.

Meanwhile, the Air Force at J-Bad was scrambling to launch a rescue mission. All of AFSOC’s 16th Special Operations Wing pilots and some of their flight engineers, aerial gunners, para-rescue jumpers (PJs),
*
and combat controllers convened at the operations center, where Commander Kingsley and Lieutenant Colonel Hadley were frantically putting together the flight plan for a rescue, even though every one of their helicopter crews had just returned from the mission to Shawali Kowt the night before. According to Air Force safety regulations, none of these pilots could legally fly until they’d had twelve hours of “crew rest,” including eight hours of sleep.

Hadley broke away from the planning to check on the gathering crew members. They looked like men who had been awake for twenty-four hours straight, which they had. “Mike,” he whispered to Kingsley, “they’re all fucking exhausted. We have an MC-130
**
crew that hasn’t flown, but we don’t have a single helicopter crew that is rested.”

Both men considered their options in silence, concluding separately that the only solution was to ignore regulations—which could endanger the rescuers
and
end their own careers in the Air Force.

“We’re fucked,” said Kingsley.

“I know,” said Hadley. “But we
have
to figure out a way to make this happen.”

“Sirs!” Major Shawn Silverman, the acting commander of the 20th Special Operations Squadron, burst into the command center. “I heard what’s going on. There are two MH-53 crews that just got in for the first rotation of flight crews out of the combat theater.”

“They’re here already?” said Hadley, who knew that crews would be rotating out over the coming week, but wasn’t aware that their replacements had arrived. “What’s their story?”

“One arrived day before yesterday. The other got in last night and hasn’t gotten an intel brief or an area brief. Neither knows the routes, procedures, nothing for flying combat missions across the border. They aren’t clear to fly into Afghanistan, but I’m certain they are up for anything. Just say the word.”

“Where are they now?” asked Kingsley.

“Asleep.”

“Wake them up.”

Silverman went out the door.

“The PJs’ squadron commander is chomping at the bit,” Hadley said to the on-call operations officer, Major Reynolds. “Tell him to put together two CSAR [combat search-and-rescue] teams and get them out to the 53s. The aircrews will meet them there.”

Reynolds went out the door.

“Steve, we don’t know what the situation is,” Kingsley told Hadley, “but we’ll figure it out on the way. You’ve been in intel briefs for the past seventy days. You know the routes. You know the missions. You’ve flown them all. I need you as a doctor and air mission commander.”

Though Hadley would have helped any American who needed it, his familiarity with ODA 574 gave him an emotional stake in this mission. Hadley and a few other AFSOC personnel at J-Bad had been involved in every step of the planning for Karzai’s insurgency: He’d been Karzai’s personal physician at J-Bad; he had treated Karzai’s tribal leaders for everything from acid reflux to high blood pressure. And he had shared meals with every member of ODA 574, spending the most time with Amerine, a fellow graduate of West Point. Three weeks earlier, as Amerine left on his mission, Hadley had said, “We’ve got your back.”

“Yes sir,” Hadley said to Kingsley. “I’m in. Let’s get them out of there.”

Air Force Captain Steve Gregg had been in Pakistan only twelve hours when he felt someone kicking his cot. “Sir, wake up!” said First
Lieutenant Paul Alexander. “There are wounded Americans who need our help. We’ve got a mission right now!”

In five minutes, Gregg, Captain Pat Fronk, and their copilots, Second Lieutenant Marty Schweim and Alexander, were dressed in their tan flight suits with aviator bulletproof vests and running to the command center inside the hangar. There, Kingsley quickly shook each of their hands and introduced them to Hadley, their mission commander, before moving to stand beside a map of Afghanistan tacked to the wall.

“Welcome to the war, gentlemen—here’s the situation,” Kingsley said. “Americans are requesting emergency medevac north of Kandahar, at the same location our squadron flew into last night. We’ve got the routes, we know where they are, but that’s about it. I know you haven’t been briefed on intel, routes, or procedures, and I wouldn’t be asking you to fly if you weren’t our only option. Lieutenant Colonel Hadley has been in on every intel brief since we got here, and he has flown dozens of missions into Afghanistan. He will brief you en route. Flight time is just shy of three hours.

“From the moment you cross the border, you’ll be flying through bad-guy country all the way. This was a mortar attack on an American position; we don’t know if our guys are still in contact, but we’re assuming it will be hot. As I learn more, I’ll relay it to Lieutenant Colonel Hadley. Ground crews are turning around two of the 53s that flew last night; they’re already refueled. CSAR teams are getting their gear and will meet you at your aircraft. Godspeed.”

Following the briefing, Hadley went directly to the medical unit to request “the most qualified doctor on the base” to be the lead physician in an emergency medical evacuation behind enemy lines that was leaving immediately.

Within moments, he was shaking hands with Doc Frank, a family practice physician. When they left the aid station, each man had with him a basic lifesaving bag that included airways, tourniquets, IVs, chest tubes, a laryngoscope, and various surgical instruments. In ad
dition, they each carried two trauma bags and six units of O-negative blood.

Pointing Frank in the direction of the helicopters, Hadley went in search of Charlie the spook, who had arrived at J-Bad early that morning from Shawali Kowt. He located him in the mess hall. “Got some bad news,” Hadley told Charlie. “Your team’s position north of Kandahar is requesting emergency medevac.”

Charlie stood up, dropped his fork on the plate of a half-eaten meal, and hurried for the door with Hadley. “What the hell happened?” he asked.

“We’re not sure, but initial reports say it was a mortar attack. We’re going in to pull them out. I know you need to get home, but you’re familiar with the layout on the ground. I am asking you as a friend and a soldier to go back in there with me.”

“Just let me grab some equipment,” said Charlie, leading the way to the spooks’ private armory behind the building that had acted as the safe house for ODA 574 and the CIA during the planning of Karzai’s insurgency. On a chain around his neck, Hadley kept a key to the cement-walled storage facility; he had standing orders to divvy up the weapons to his staff if the base was ever overrun. He unlocked the metal door.

Loaded carbines and shotguns lined one wall. Crates of exotic weapons, including shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles, were stacked in a corner. In another corner were boxes of grenades and claymore mines, as well as body armor, load-bearing vests, and ammo pouches. Hadley was already carrying his Air Force–issued Beretta M9 sidearm and compact Colt Commando carbine with seven fully loaded thirty-round magazines for each. Charlie selected the same weapons for himself, then added six fragmentation grenades and an extra case of 1,000 rounds of ammo for both men. On the way out, Hadley grabbed three additional boxes of ten hand grenades each for the two helicopter crews.

Jumping into a Humvee, they drove to the two Pave Low helicopters being towed onto the runway.

Every other air mission into Afghanistan had taken several hours or even days to plan. Because helicopters are short-range aircraft, they
would need to be refueled in flight at a prearranged location. Since the MC-130s carrying the extra fuel would make easy targets at the low altitude necessary to fill up the helicopters—usually around five hundred feet above ground level—the refueling locations were always far from population centers.

The refueling crews at J-Bad, call sign Ditka 04, were given roughly ten seconds of guidance from Hadley. “We don’t know where, we don’t know when, and we don’t know how much, but we’re going to need gas,” he said. “Go anchor yourselves somewhere up near these coordinates, and we’ll call you when we need you.”

By streamlining every aspect of the planning, a cobbled-together rescue mission composed of twenty-four men—two pilots, two copilots, four flight engineers, four aerial gunners, six PJs, three combat controllers, a Special Ops physician, one Special Ops pilot/physician, and one spook—was ready for takeoff thirty minutes after the medevac request was received.

Now Kingsley did something he had never done on previous missions: He drove out to see the men off. Parking beside the lead helicopter, Knife 03, he got out of the Humvee and faced Hadley. They had already discussed the fact that there would be no quick reaction force if a Pave Low went down, and every member of the mission was aware that the Soviet occupation had bred in Afghans a particular contempt for helicopter crews. In addition, the Northern Alliance had assured the Americans that any airmen captured by the Taliban would be disposed of in “the Afghan way”: castration or disembowelment, followed by hanging or decapitation.

Kingsley and another Pave Low pilot had flown the first Operation Desert Storm air mission into Iraq shortly before 2
A.M.
on January 17, 1991, when Pave Lows were the only helicopter with GPS and terrain-following radar capabilities. The two pilots’ Pave Lows had guided four Apache gunships from Saudi Arabia nine miles into Iraq, where the gunships simultaneously destroyed Iraq’s two main early-warning radar and communications stations
.
Their successful mission allowed President George H. W. Bush to begin the air bombing campaign and earned Kingsley the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Kingsley knew, probably better than any other helicopter pilot or
commander in theater, the advantages of flying over enemy terrain at night. “This is just a reminder in case you hadn’t noticed that little yellow ball in the sky,” Kingsley told Hadley. “It’s daylight, and this is a no-shit very dangerous mission. Get the job done and bring everybody in my squadron home alive.”
*

At the same time, two Air Force Special Operations MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft—known as JMAU (Joint Medical Augmentation Unit), specially equipped for in-flight surgeries and advanced trauma care and with room for fifty litter patients—were cruising at 300 miles per hour toward Kandahar from their base at Masirah, just off the coast of Oman, eight hundred miles to the south. The closest runway to Shawali Kowt capable of accommodating the hundred-foot-long transport planes was at Camp Rhino.

The JMAUs had been requested by Colonel Mulholland immediately after Bolduc’s first estimate of the combined American and Afghan casualties in Shawali Kowt: more than twenty-two killed and around seventy wounded. Mulholland now understood the breakdown to be two Americans dead and nineteen wounded, six of whom were in critical condition and one expectant. Of the Afghans, twenty were dead and at least fifty wounded, nine of whom were critical and three expectant.

While the two aircraft were en route to Rhino, Major Miller and his B-team, ODB 570, now tasked as a quick reaction force with the call sign Rambo 70, had been joined by two ODAs plus a forward surgical team at K2 and were just a few minutes into their flight across Uzbekistan, also heading to Camp Rhino. They would then transfer onto what they assumed would be Marine helicopters for the flight to Shawali Kowt, where they would defend the site, assist the wounded, and evacuate them back to Camp Rhino. There the patients would be moved onto the surgical airships that would fly to Oman—the
closest military hospital equipped to receive the casualties. The ODAs would remain in Afghanistan under Fox’s command, while ODB 570 would return to K2, back in their tents “in time for dinner,” they’d been told.