The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (11 page)

Netzel was about to call in corrections to the rounds when on the radio he heard his lieutenant calling for a grid correction that would have dropped the rounds right on top of him and his men. Few officers had much confidence in this lieutenant.

“Stay the fuck off the radio!” Netzel barked, then offered the correct adjustments. The mortars fired again. The Dushka went silent, though other enemy fire continued.

Night fell on the Chowkay. Two Apache helicopter pilots checked in with Jorgensen and Kraig Hill, who gave them the relevant grid. Almost simultaneously, a call came in over the radio instructing all friendly positions to turn on their infrared strobe lights so that the

Apaches would know which spots to avoid. Netzel and his four troops didn’t have a strobe, so he told his men to get behind cover, and he stood, exposed, pointing his rifle at the ground and hitting the button on its laser in a strobe pattern, hoping that this would be visible to the pilots. His heart was pounding out of his chest. Ultimately, whether the idea worked or they just got lucky, the Apaches avoided them, opening fire on the Dushka position and the enemy shelter.

Low clouds slid into the area, restricting what the crews of the Apaches could see and where they could safely fly. The last thing they needed was to have a helicopter plow into a hillside, so the Apaches left. The troops on the ledge, using an LRAS to track the heat signatures of the insurgents, reported that some of the enemy fighters were still moving in and out of the cave, while others were heading down the back side of the parallel ridgeline.

Now the A-10 Warthogs rolled in. The Warthog is a single-seat straight-wing jet aircraft with superior maneuverability at low speeds and low altitudes. It was designed specifically to provide close air support for troops on the ground. Jorgensen had one crew put a five-hundred-pound bomb right into the enemy’s cave. Then came another American plane with a two-thousand-pound bomb aimed at the same spot.

The fight was over.

Jorgensen suddenly realized he was freezing. He looked down and saw that under his gear, he was wearing only an undershirt. The enemy had caught him in midchange.

“We were lucky,” said Brooks to his men. During that four-hour firefight, the Barbarians had not sustained even a single injury. If the enemy had hit them earlier, when they were on their way down to Chalas, or if they had come back from the village using the same route, things would have gone down quite differently.

The next day, a Barbarian patrol cleared that parallel ridgeline and found blood trails, bits of bone and flesh, and bloody bandages. The insurgents’ refuge, whatever it had been—shelter or cave—no longer existed. Intelligence would later report that radio intercepts of the enemy’s communications from that day indicated that the fighters were foreign, possibly Chechen, based on a voice analysis.
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Brooks and his crew returned to the village days later, wanting to know why the elders hadn’t warned them of the attack. The villagers insisted they hadn’t known a thing about it. Gooding then went down to meet with the Chalas elders a third time. He wanted to explain to them that the Americans were there to help, but that they could rid the area of the extremists only with the aid of the village. The men served Gooding rice and goat. There were more black flies than grains of rice on the plates. Gooding left the meeting with food poisoning and not much else.

In early May, Colonel Nicholson directed Fenty to begin extracting his troops from the Korangal and Chowkay Valleys. Operation Mountain Lion was complete; now 3-71 Cav’s mission to push into Nuristan was to begin. On May 3, Fenty ordered his staff to come up with a plan for Operation Deep Strike, comprising five helicopter extractions of his troops from the Chowkay: eighty-two soldiers waiting with their equipment to be picked up at five different makeshift landing zones by one large helicopter, accompanied by two Apaches, making several trips and dropping off troops and equipment at the temporary base Timmons had set up. The mission would be a go on May 5; the troops were already running out of water and food.

The presence of the Dushka machine gun in the Chowkay Valley had unsettled Fenty, Berkoff, and others at headquarters. Because the Chowkay was so remote, Berkoff had anticipated that the Taliban fighters there would be armed at most with assault rifles, RPG launchers, and a few light machine guns—certainly not with a seventy-five-pound heavy machine gun that could take down a Chinook. In addition to the Dushka attack in the Chowkay Valley, insurgents had shot at three Black Hawk helicopters in the same area just days earlier with small-arms fire and RPGs. Fenty decided that this level of enemy aggression dictated that the Americans should fly only after sundown, since U.S. troops and their night-vision goggles still owned the night. But nighttime flight in the mountains, of course, carried its own set of significant risks.

Fenty had other misgivings about this mission. The air-support group Task Force Talon, based at Jalalabad, was the most familiar with Kunar Province, but it had been scheduled for a safety stand-down day—a mandated twenty-four-hour period on the ground, to be spent reviewing policy and procedures and conducting safety training or briefings. Task Force Centaur, headquartered at Bagram Airfield, had been assigned to Operation Deep Strike instead. The fact that its personnel didn’t know the area worried Fenty. Some within Task Force Centaur had their own doubts as well. One officer felt that the Army had done Centaur’s men “an injustice by sending them to war before they were ready,” adding that the “proficiency of crew members is not up to standards.” Task Force Centaur, the same officer concluded, was “at best marginally prepared to conduct air operations” in Afghanistan.

The commander of Task Force Centaur, a forty-one-year-old lieutenant colonel named William Metheny, disagreed, though he did suggest that Chief Warrant Officer Third Class Eric Totten and Chief Warrant Officer Second Class Christopher Donaldson, the command pilot and copilot, respectively, take along an extra pilot to sit in the jump seat, to help reduce their workload and enable them to focus their attention outside the aircraft. He also recommended that an additional crew member accompany them to spot through the center cargo door and shout directions. It wasn’t as if Chinooks had rearview mirrors, and backing the aircraft onto the improvised landing zones would be tough. The strip for Able Troop, for example—designated PZ (for “pickup zone”) Reds—was so small and so perilous that Gooding had nicknamed it Heart-Attack Ridge. Not only would the Chinook likely manage to land only one or two wheels there, but the general area was crowded with trees and other obstacles. Plus, they would be flying at night, wearing night-vision goggles.

Totten considered Metheny’s advice and opted to bring along another crew member but not a third pilot. With that decision made, he and Donaldson went through the checklist and assessed the mission as posing a moderate risk. Totten was a seasoned pilot, Donaldson was on track to becoming a pilot in command himself, and the two worked well together. The planning, preparation, crew selection, and training for this mission were all good. It was true that the pilots were unfamiliar with the area, and these would be some of the tighter landing zones they’d seen, but they could handle them, Metheny thought.

In the meantime, Fenty flew to Jalalabad Airfield to talk with Colonel Nicholson about where 3-71 Cav would go after all of its troops were back at the base at Naray. The next day, the lieutenant colonel, Timmons, Berkoff, and other officers huddled in a small brigade operations center to brief their commanders on the plans to extract their men from the Chowkay Valley. Online, Brigadier General James Terry, deputy commander of the 10th Mountain Division, participated from Bagram, as did the leadership of the aviation brigade.

It was just a few hours before the Chinook and two accompanying Apaches were scheduled to take off, and Terry said that Operation Deep Strike looked like a high-risk mission to him. “Who’s going to be in charge of this?” he asked Fenty.

“We’ve got Frank Brooks, the troop commander, on the ground out there,” Fenty said.

“What are your concerns about the risks?” Terry asked.

“Sir,” Fenty said, “I believe the real enemy out there will be the terrain.”

Staff Sergeant Adam Sears, of Able Troop, had missed most of the action during Operation Mountain Lion, having caught a wicked stomach bug that—combined with the thin air atop the mountain—required him to be evacuated back to a temporary logistical base that Timmons had rented for this mission, an empty compound surrounded by twelve-foot walls, just south of the Chowkay Valley.

On May 5, after recuperating for a few weeks, Sears was transported by a resupply chopper to the landing zone where Brooks and the Barbarians were set up. Moquin and a couple of others met him there and accompanied him back on a goat trail around the mountain ridge to PZ Reds, where Sergeant First Class Yagel directed him to prepare the pickup zone for the helicopter that would be arriving that night.

The twenty-four-year-old Sears had been to air-assault school, so he had some expertise when it came to helicopters. He’d assumed that the bird coming to pick up the troops would be a Black Hawk—a less imposing craft with a smaller rotor-blade span—and was stunned to learn that command was in fact sending a Chinook. Apart from the size differences between the two choppers, Sears’s view was that Black Hawk pilots were generally combat pilots, whereas Chinook pilots—while undoubtedly nice enough guys—were more the kind of soldiers who did supply runs from one safe landing zone to another.
This
landing zone, by way of contrast, was covered with dry, sandy soil and sloped 45 degrees downward to the edge of a cliff. And as if that weren’t challenging enough, command also wanted to do this at
night?

“This is crazy,” he told Yagel.

The Chinook’s larger rotor-blade span—two rotor systems, each with a sixty-foot diameter, compared to the Black Hawk’s one big rotor with a diameter of fifty-three feet eight inches—made Sears’s task that much more difficult: he would have to get rid of anything the blades might hit if a sudden gust of wind happened to come up. Just five feet from the area where the Chinook would hover stood a tree, a gnarled claw of wood about ten inches in diameter.

“That needs to come down,” Sears said. But the only tools they had were two KA-BAR knives. For the next several hours, therefore, they all tried to chop down the tree with the knives—Yagel, Sears, Pilozzi, Moquin, Justin O’Donohoe, Specialist David Timmons, Jr.,
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Sergeant Dave Young, and a new guy, Staff Sergeant Richard Rodriguez. Without any water to drink, the men had trouble building up the energy to keep going. They would razz one another as each took a turn trying to make a dent in the seemingly indestructible timber. Eventually, under the scorching sun, the group surrendered to the futility of the task.

Sears worked to make the zone as safe as possible in whatever other ways he could, setting up an infrared strobe light to indicate the landing area, close to the tire marks from where a Chinook had landed once before. He and Pilozzi added infrared chemical lights to flag hazards that the pilots should steer clear of. The lights would be visible only to the U.S. troops and pilots, all of whom would need to be wearing night-vision goggles.

The troops readied the cargo, including an LRAS, for rapid loading. They also began cleaning up their mess: it was Army procedure to sanitize the sites of observation posts before troops left them. There were two reasons for this. First, if insurgents were to find evidence of U.S. troops’ presence in a certain area, they might booby-trap the location or set up preemptive ambushes around it in the hope that the Americans might return to the same spot (as they in fact often did). And second, leaving this pristine landscape littered with American garbage was apt, understandably, to annoy the locals. Yagel ordered that all the trash be ignited and destroyed in a burn pit on a ledge just under the cliff.

For Sears, doubts remained. He radioed Brooks, who was at the Barbarians’ observation post across the valley: “This whole thing is a bad idea,” he said. Particularly idiotic, Sears thought, was the choice to send the large Chinook. The landing zone was too small for that bulky aircraft, and flying it at night in these jagged mountains, with their powerful winds, seemed an unnecessary risk. A Black Hawk, sure, but not a Chinook. It seemed like a decision made by someone who wasn’t on the ground, someone who hadn’t seen where the chopper would be flying.

It was the same argument Brooks had been making to Fenty, especially because the pilots themselves had never flown in the area. But Fenty, after consulting with his commanders, radioed back to tell Brooks that the mission was a go. “Roger,” said Brooks. Brooks passed word on to Sears, and he rogered, too.

At Bagram, Metheny once again urged Totten to take a third pilot in the jump seat, to help out.

“No,” Totten said. “Lieutenant Colonel Fenty’s going to be sitting there.”

Fenty had wanted to get closer to the mission, to the temporary base Timmons had set up, as opposed to being stuck in Jalalabad, but Timmons had told him the only way to make that happen was to put him in the jump seat of the Chinook. Fenty could then fly the first leg of the trip, stand by on board as the Chinook picked up as many troops and supplies as it could fit in its hold, and then get off with those men at the temporary base before the Chinook flew off on a second run to pick up more troops and gear at other landing zones. “Do it,” Fenty had said.