The Only Thing Worth Dying For (45 page)

The team knew that there was one KIA, one MIA presumed KIA, and numerous casualties, and Cubby Wojciehowski was spending the bumpy flight envisioning trauma scenarios in order to prepare himself to treat his former teammates, whom he’d last seen at the back door of the ISOFAC at Fort Campbell a month and a half earlier. As they approached the Afghan border, Lloyd Allard walked back from the front of the cargo hold and squeezed in next to Cubby on the bench. He shook his head a couple of times and mouthed the word
fuck
, then leaned in and with his hand on Cubby’s shoulder, yelled over the sound of the engines, “Dan is dead! So is JD!”

Cubby never thought words could pummel a man physically, but that was how he felt—instantly beat down.

“You’re sure?” he asked Allard.

“They wouldn’t tell us unless they were certain. We gotta just shove this news in a hole, and we’ll deal with it later. Right now we need to get in there and see how we can help.”

Nodding robotically, Cubby thought about how Dan had tried to cheer him up as ODA 574 planned for the mission without him: “Don’t worry, Cub. You don’t want to go on this one anyway. We aren’t doing anything big. It’s going to be boring.” Those had been the last words Dan would ever speak to him. JD’s final words, he remembered, had been “We’ll probably link up with you guys in-country.”

Still sitting quietly next to Cubby, Allard also dwelled on that good-bye at the ISOFAC, haunted by the note he’d written on the brown grocery bag with the beer and whiskey he and Cubby had brought the team as a sendoff: “If you find yourself alone, riding through green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled, for there is beer.”

The actual quote, which Allard had heard with most of the guys on ODA 574 when they’d gone out to see the movie
Gladiator
in 2000, ended: “…do not be troubled, for you are in Elysium and you are already dead.”

It was 9:30
A.M.,
one hour after the explosion. The northeast wall of the medical clinic had become the forty-foot-long backstop of the CCP, where the wounded lay on blankets, litters, sleeping bags, and doors that had been ripped off their hinges. Casualties fanned out from the clinic, covering a space roughly the size of a basketball court. The most critical were located toward the center, close to the wall, where they were sheltered from the occasional breeze but still warmed by the sun. The walking wounded had been paired up with critical patients to help the medics monitor their vital signs and keep them talking.

Victor and Brent were sitting between Mike—who was unconscious—and Ronnie, for whom they were feigning a no-worries attitude in spite of their own shrapnel and burn injuries. When Mike woke up, he was barely coherent from the mix of shock, blood loss, and morphine, and struggled to keep his eyes open. “Something’s not right,” he whispered to Victor. “What happened?”

“We’re going home, buddy,” said Victor. “We’re just waiting for our ride.”

Mike passed out again, only to wake up fifteen minutes later and repeat, “What happened?”

Just down from Ronnie, Alex was covered up to his neck by a sleeping bag, his head resting on some wadded clothes. He was pale, his teeth chattered, and his eyes, when he opened them, appeared clouded and faraway. On the other side of Alex, Price kept watch over him, one hand resting on the wounded man’s chest.

“How’s he doing?” Amerine asked, walking over to Price.

“He’s cold. Won’t stop shivering. But Doc said his pulse is pretty strong, and they stopped the worst of the bleeding. I’m warming up his next IV.” Price lifted up his shirt to reveal the IV bag he was holding against his stomach.

A few feet away from Alex, Mag began to thrash and kick. He ripped out his IV with his good hand while Captain Jeff Leopold, the headquarters intelligence officer, attempted to keep him down by lying over him as he held Mag’s head bandage in place. Brent helped by grabbing Mag’s legs, and soon Mag relaxed and passed out.

“You just need to rest,” Leopold said to Mag, reinserting the IV. “Help is on the way.”

Leaning away from Alex so that only Amerine could hear, Price said, “I’m so sorry. I can’t figure out what happened, but something got fucked up.”

Amerine had worked with Price before and remembered him to be a confident and competent controller. Price was described in a recent evaluation as “a master of his trade, a shining example.” But now, an hour after Price had called in the JDAM, Amerine saw only a broken man.

“You did your best,” Amerine said.

Tears welled up in Price’s eyes. “I thought I did everything right, but…I’m so sorry.”

“You did your best,” Amerine said again, looking down at Alex. “We’ll get through this. Concentrate on Alex and forget about that for now.”

Opening his eyes, Alex saw Amerine and began making a sound as if clearing his throat. Amerine reached over and held his hand. “You hear me okay?” he asked.

When Alex nodded, Amerine said, “You are going to be fine. I’m going to make sure you’re taken care of. Hold on and keep fighting the good fight. I’m grateful for all you did here, Alex.”

Alex smiled weakly and closed his eyes.

With Mag unconscious, Leopold kept an eye on another soldier, Cody Prosser, who was also passed out, lying on the other side of Mike with a severe head injury from shrapnel. Unlike the other critically wounded, each tended to by one person, Prosser had three people: a spook standing over him with an IV bag, a Green Beret sitting at his head giving him oxygen, and a Delta medic at his side checking vital signs constantly. Leopold had chosen Prosser, his best friend, for this mission when Fox had requested the best intelligence analyst in the battalion.

Now, as Pickett walked by, Leopold asked if he knew how Prosser was doing, and received the same response he’d already gotten from the other medics: “Not too well, Jeff. We just need to get him to a hospital.”

Leopold knew it was much worse than they were letting on. Cody, all of these critically injured guys, needed to get out of here soon or they were going to die.

Forty-five minutes after Kingsley had driven out to the runway to see the men off, both helicopters remained on the ground at J-Bad.

They were awaiting final clearance to fly because the encryption of their communications equipment, which was supposed to be changed for each mission, was still configured for the previous night’s infiltration. The senior para-rescue jumper, Master Sergeant Patrick Malone, sitting in the lead aircraft, Knife 03, voiced the chagrin of all on board both helicopters when he said, “This is bullshit! What’s wrong with the comms we pushed last night?”

The pilots agreed, one of them responding over the internal comms of both aircraft with “Fuck it.”

Almost immediately, the Pave Lows were airborne, with Knife 03, piloted by Captain Gregg, flying northwest at top speed three hundred feet above ground level (AGL), and Knife 04, piloted by Captain Fronk, trailing in a staggered-left formation at fifty feet AGL.

“Knife Zero Three,” Fronk radioed to Gregg while looking up at the lead aircraft’s belly. “Be advised, sir, shooting at American helicopters is a recreational sport here in Pakistan. You might want to drop altitude.”

“Roger,” said Gregg, bringing his Pave Low down to the same altitude as Knife 04.

Fifteen minutes after liftoff, a Delta combat controller in Shawali Kowt came on the radio asking for an update. “Confirming you are en route?” he asked.

“We are in flight,” Hadley responded.

“How long until you get here, sir?”

“Two plus four-five.” Two hours and forty-five minutes.

There was a pause, then the operator said, “Sir, Americans are dying. Please hurry. Please.”

Hadley leaned forward from where he was standing behind the
pilots. “Fly the most direct route we can, avoiding any towns,” he told them. “Pull the guts out of the aircraft.”

The pilots recalculated, upping the airspeed from the standard top cruising speed of 120 knots (138 miles per hour) to 130 knots (150 miles per hour) and following a route that would ignore much of the cautionary terrain masking built into the original flight plan.

“Sir,” Gregg said to Hadley, “we’ll have to play it by ear, but I think we can do it in two hours.”

“All right. Keep it low.”

Once they hit the Afghan border, the helicopters dropped to twenty-five feet AGL, a safer altitude in terms of surface-to-air missiles: By the time the enemy sees or hears the aircraft, there is no time to calibrate the trajectory on their weapons. They flew the fastest their Pave Lows could fly without risking damage to the airframe.

Thirty-one-year-old Staff Sergeant Scott Diekman had never flown so low or so fast. From his tail gunner position on the open ramp of Knife 03, he looked out the back of the helicopter, which blew up lines of sand as it ripped across the landscape. The pilots tried to avoid settlements but occasionally passed over a Bedouin camp, whose occupants flung themselves flat on the ground or dived into tents.

“Now this is something I never thought I’d see,” Hadley said to both crews on the interplane radio frequency. “Afghanistan in the daylight.”

Although he sounded calm, Hadley’s legs were shaking from nerves. He’d been on numerous missions across the border under the cover of darkness, but without that cloak of safety he felt dangerously exposed. During a lull in the radio chatter, Hadley thought about his girlfriend, Leslie, and wondered if he would ever get the chance to marry her. He thought about the 57 mm anti-aircraft cannons that his pilots had continued to identify on their flights between Pakistan and Kandahar—even after reports that they’d all been destroyed—and the hundreds of Stinger surface-to-air missiles that had not been accounted for since the war with the Soviets.

In the pilot seat in front of Hadley, Gregg looked at the desert landscape rushing toward him; he knew they were the sole aircraft over the entire country flying below 30,000 feet. The last time he’d
experienced anything like this had been on September 11, when his was one of only four military helicopters granted special FAA clearance to fly into New York City to help with the search-and-recovery efforts at the Twin Towers. The eastern seaboard had been eerily void of aircraft, the only blips on the radar representing the jet fighters that flew combat air patrols high overhead.

Gregg’s orders then had been vague but chilling, just like the one he’d received today: “Go help Americans.”

In Shawali Kowt, Amerine had a grim duty to perform: finding something of JD that he could bring home for his family to bury.

Leaving Price and Alex at the CCP, Amerine first stopped in front of the building where the Afghans had been lining up their dead. Adjacent to that was a mound of human remains, which he dug through in search of anything looking like it belonged to an American. He remembered the leg he’d seen, dressed in desert camouflage, but could find no trace of it.

Out beyond the western end of the Alamo, where he’d last seen JD and where he assumed his team sergeant had been at the time of the explosion, Amerine began to search the impact zone. On the southwest slope, no more than thirty yards from the wall surrounding the command post, he found the crater from the bomb. If he hadn’t known what he was looking at, he would have walked right past the ten-foot-wide, two-foot-deep gouge in the earth, distinct only because it was coated in white ash. This slope of the Alamo had been blasted clean: There were no body parts, not even any rocks—nothing but the smooth surface of the sandy soil.

But beyond the semicircular blast zone that extended roughly twenty yards in all directions, there were remnants of bodies that had been mostly vaporized. Amerine moved slowly outward from the crater as he scoured the ground—littered with blackened shreds of clothing, bits of sandals, and pieces of burnt or bloody flesh—looking for part of a dog tag, a wedding ring, a finger that might identify an individual. Along the way, he picked up scraps of paper contain
ing sensitive information and shoved them in his pockets. With the CCP two hundred yards to his back, the only sound was the constant, muffled whoosh of the wind through his blown eardrums.

Amid the gore, Amerine found some flecks of colored paper—orange, yellow, and pink—from Starburst candy wrappers. JD had stashed a pocketful after the Thanksgiving “turkey” drop to hand out to Afghan children, and Amerine thought that perhaps this confetti indicated the location of his team sergeant’s demise.

About seventy-five yards southwest of the crater, he saw what looked like a mask. Stepping closer, Amerine realized it was a man’s face, lightly coated with ash and lying on the ground as if it had been surgically removed.

“Bari Gul,” he said.

He stacked some rocks to mark the spot and continued his search.

“You’re in shock, Captain. You need to come back and sit down.”

Amerine turned to see Bolduc. From the medical clinic, the major had been watching as the captain wandered around the impact zone, staring at the ground.

“I’m not in shock,” Amerine snapped. “I’m looking for my team sergeant.”

In the lengthy pause that followed, Amerine and the major stared at each other. Until now, Amerine had been so focused on the welfare of his men that he had not contemplated the cause of the accident. Now he entertained the idea that Bolduc and Fox were largely responsible. Accidents happen in war and people are fallible, he knew, but this one had been avoidable: The air strikes ordered by the headquarters staff had led to this tragedy. Bolduc was a competent officer who had to have known it wasn’t the headquarters’ job to be calling in bombs; he had said as much in his speech when he and Fox arrived in Tarin Kowt: “We’re here to provide your team with top cover. We’re here to advise Karzai.”

He glared at Bolduc and realized that his right hand had tightened around the familiar pistol grip of his M4 carbine, his index finger pressing harder than it should against the trigger guard, his left hand gripping the barrel.

Remembering JD’s calming voice from the night before—
Take a walk, sir?
—he relaxed his grip. This was no time to cast blame.