The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (12 page)

Totten’s handpicked crew included flight engineer Staff Sergeant Christopher Howick, crew chief Sergeant Bryan Brewster, crew member/door gunner Sergeant Jeffery Wiekamp, and observer/door gunner Sergeant John Griffith.

The Chinook itself seemed to be in good shape. Earlier that day, a separate crew had conducted a maintenance inspection on the bird, flown it for more than six hours, and then conducted a second, postflight inspection. Everything had checked out. It had also just gone through its mandatory two-hundred-hour cycle service inspection. But in the crew’s haste to get it back in the air, numerous required forms and records had not been completed correctly, including many items on the maintenance test flight check and the aircraft power check.

Totten was regarded as a strong pilot, though on a previous flight, during an April 11 troop insertion for Operation Mountain Lion, his aircraft had sustained major damage to its undercarriage. No postflight evaluation had been administered on that occasion, however, since Totten’s commander believed that it was just a simple matter of a rock’s having poked a hole in the chopper floor during a difficult night mission.

Prior to departure, Totten, Donaldson, and the crew attended a go/no-go briefing. The enemy threat, flying conditions, and other matters were assessed. A weather warning was in effect—winds in the area where they would be flying were gusting anywhere from thirty-five to forty-four knots—but that would expire at 6:30 p.m. local time, just when Totten and his team were set to take off.

Joe Fenty tried to call Kristen twice before the mission, which was out of character for him. She had long ago reconciled herself to an important rule that governed the behavior of many military spouses: a husband or wife was far likelier to get back alive and in one piece if he or she focused entirely on the task at hand. When Fenty finally got through to her, the questions he asked were, for him, unusual.

“What does Lauren look like?” he asked.

“She has red hair,” Kristen said.

At that point, Lauren let out a wail.

Fenty chuckled. “Is that her?” he asked. “She has some lungs on her.” Fenty told his wife that he was going on a mission that would be dangerous. It was quite unlike him to do that. He never wanted to alarm her.

At 6:38 p.m., the Chinook, accompanied by two Apaches, took off from Bagram, headed for Jalalabad, where Totten and his crew refueled and picked up Fenty. At 7:36 p.m., the three aircraft set out for PZ Reds to extract the men of Able Troop. The Chinook flew slower than planned: Totten was supposed to keep the bird going at 110 knots, but for some reason he flew at seventy to ninety knots instead. Totten did not answer radio calls asking him why that was. On entering the Kunar River Valley, the first Apache hit several pockets of moderate turbulence.

“I’m glad I don’t have to land in the LZ”—the landing zone—one of the Apache pilots said. The pilots in the first Apache discussed the wind speed and direction and the turbulence. It might not be a bad idea to call the mission off if conditions got much worse, they agreed. Once the three birds were above PZ Reds, the first Apache flew up and to the southwest to watch over the operation. The other flew low and to the east. “I’m getting my butt kicked up here,” said the main pilot at the higher elevation.

Sears, on the ground, made radio contact with Totten, in the Chinook. He told the pilot to land west to east, aiming at the large chemical lights. At 10:02 p.m., the Chinook instead approached PZ Reds from the south. “That part of the LZ’s no good for landing,” Sears said. Totten didn’t respond. The bird landed briefly, but it started to slide, and Totten, clearly aware he couldn’t hold it there on the ledge, pulled it up. Sears thought to himself, This is going to be a clusterfuck. The pilot does not seem to be in full control of the Chinook.

At 10:06, Totten managed a two-wheel landing by backing the Chinook in from the east. As Sears had ordered, three of the troops—O’Donohoe, Moquin, and Timmons—sprinted onto the bird with cargo. Others started running the rest of the gear to them: the LRAS system, six or seven duffel bags, ammunition, weapons. They were all wearing their night-vision goggles. It was dark inside the chopper, except for the light coming from the cabin.

One of the Chinook crewmen got off the back ramp of the bird. Sears was surprised to see that he wasn’t wearing his night-vision goggles. What the fuck? Sears thought. How could he see the infrared chemical-light markings on the trees and rocks and other hazards on the pickup zone without his goggles on?

Just then, sparks started flying out of the burn pit, perhaps reignited by the air currents from the spinning rotors. The glowing cinders looked a bit like tracer fire. On the radio, Sears tried to explain that it was just ash—nothing to get excited about, he said, though he himself sounded excited. The men in the choppers couldn’t understand him and thought he sounded highly agitated.

Seconds later, the Chinook rolled forward off the landing zone.

“I’m having trouble keeping it on the LZ,” Totten said.

Sears’s voice got higher and even more agitated-sounding. What the fuck was this guy doing? he wondered.

Nick Pilozzi was now inside the bird, having just dropped off a bag filled with a hundred pounds’ worth of LRAS batteries. He felt the helicopter lurch forward, and suddenly it was ten feet off the ground. Pilozzi dove out the back of the aircraft, smashing his face when he hit the ground.

Totten yelled excitedly, “Is everyone all right?” He told Sears over the radio, “Just get your rucks and get on.”

“We can’t do that with our remaining gear,” Sears replied, annoyed. It was becoming increasingly difficult for the chopper pilots to understand what he was telling them in his fast-talking Indiana twang. “Do it west to east!” he instructed Totten again. The Chinook took off, with Moquin, O’Donohoe, and Timmons still aboard.

At 10:09, Totten tried to stick a landing for the third time from south to north. As he lowered the aircraft, the Chinook’s tail swung to the left, and the rear rotor hit that gnarled tree that the men from 3-71 Cav had worked so hard—but to such little effect—to cut down.

The back blade exploded and came off the chopper. The soldiers at PZ Reds started diving for cover as thousands of pieces of shrapnel sprayed all around them. Sears grabbed Young and dove off the cliff onto a ledge a few feet down. The Chinook’s engines started spooling up, building up power, vibrating. Tree-branch parts flew. Totten throttled the engine, and as he did, the exhaust turned from a dull ochre to a hellish crimson. The turbine jet engines on the back of the bird grew red-hot. The Chinook pitched forward and up, its nose rising.

“Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck,” cried Pilozzi. “What the fuck do we do?”

The Chinook started falling down the cliff. It hit the ground about 150 feet down and exploded, and then it kept on rolling, clearing all the trees in its path. It finally stopped 150 feet farther down and ignited into a huge fireball.

“Holy shit,” said the pilot of one of the Apaches. “The Chinook is down.”

At PZ Reds, the troops started yelling into the valley below:

“If you can hear us, we’re coming to get you!”

There were secondary explosions as the fire found ammunition and fuel in the belly of the bird.

Sears, Pilozzi, and others from 3-71 Cav began sliding down into the valley. The fire was throwing off so much light that their night-vision goggles were rendered useless.

They could smell flesh burning.

At the Jalalabad operations center, Berkoff had been monitoring mIRC chat, the military’s version of Instant Messenger, transmitted over secured networks. In a special Operation Mountain Lion chat room, the words suddenly popped up: “Chinook Down PZ Reds.”

The message came from the logistics base Timmons had set up at the mouth of the Chowkay. At first Berkoff thought it meant that Fenty’s chopper had landed safely on PZ Reds. But then he saw a second message: “Chinook Down, Chinook Down. Near PZ Reds.” A third one made it clearer still what had happened to the helicopter: “Crashed near PZ Reds.”

Berkoff got up and rushed out toward the joint operations center in an adjacent room. Before he even entered, from the hallway, he heard Brooks’s familiar, high-pitched southern Virginia drawl, delivering garbled status reports over the radio.

“Give us a BDA”—a battle-damage assessment—“of the crash site,” Major Timmons asked Brooks.

“It’s bad,” came the reply. “There’s no way we can even get near the wreckage. It’s just too hot down there.”

Other staff officers started weighing in: Did Brooks want a pair of rescue jumpers to look for survivors? Could he use a C-130 plane with a giant spotlight to help in the search? There were other offers made, too, to fight the enemy, since back at Jalalabad they thought the chopper might have been shot down, though Brooks and those who’d been there knew that wasn’t the case.

Byers grabbed a radio transmitter. “Hey, Barbarian-Six,” he said, using Brooks’s radio call sign, “I need you to tell me, no shit here, could anybody have survived?”

Everyone paused.

“No,” Brooks said. “There’s no way anyone could have survived.”

The whole room, filled with some thirty staff officers, fell silent. Everyone knew that Brooks was probably right. No one made eye contact with anyone else. Many officers looked down at the floor.

A few minutes later, Timmons and Berkoff went out into the hallway to get some air and compose themselves.

The brigade chaplain approached them, extending his arms and offering condolences. Berkoff wasn’t ready to believe they were all gone. He ran outside to a dark corner of the airfield, dropped to his knees, and wept.

Berkoff thought about one of his last conversations with Fenty. Two days before, he had seen him at Jalalabad, just returning from the field. Fenty had looked spent; his hair was long, he reeked, and a gray film covered his uniform—the result of four straight weeks’ worth of perspiration and Afghan dust. Regardless, upon seeing Berkoff, Fenty had immediately wanted to know about the Jewish chaplain he had arranged to bring to Jalalabad for Passover. “Ross, did you ever see that rabbi that I sent here for seder?” he asked. Even with everything that must have been going on in his head—the mission, his month-old baby girl, the killing of some ANA soldiers a few days earlier in an IED attack on a 3-71 Cav convoy—Fenty never missed a chance to inquire about one of his soldiers.

Now Berkoff got angry. He cursed God.

What the fuck, is this some sort of sick joke? he thought. The man just had his first baby only four weeks ago, and he’s never even met her.

Never would.

CHAPTER 6

Maybe That’s Just the Wind Blowing the Door

T
he wreckage of the helicopter, spread all over the side of an eight-thousand-foot-high mountain, was still smoldering the next morning, when Colonel Nicholson and other members of the brigade and squadron leadership arrived.

Thermal imaging had measured the temperature of the crash site at more than 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nicholson looked at his men, tirelessly combing over the hillside. They were filthy from weeks of combat and hours of rooting around in the residue of a burnt Chinook, covered with dirt and ash and the stink of aviation fuel, their eyes bloodshot, the black grime on their faces carved with streaks of sweat and tears.

It took hours before all ten body bags were laid out on the side of the hill, holding the remains of Joe Fenty, Brian Moquin, Jr., Justin O’Donohoe, and David Timmons, Jr., from 3-71 Cav, and Eric Totten, Christopher Donaldson, Christopher Howick, Bryan Brewster, John Griffith, and Jeffery Wiekamp from Task Force Centaur.

“Which one is Joe?” Nicholson asked.

Someone pointed to his friend. Nicholson put his hand on Fenty’s body, prayed, and cried.

From a nearby mountaintop, Timmons phoned his wife, Gretchen, on his Iridium satellite phone. He was choking up. Nicholson had given him permission to violate protocol and tell Gretchen about Joe Fenty’s death in order to get her to Kristen Fenty’s side as soon as possible. Military spouses were required to fill out “Family Readiness Group” forms on which they listed their closest friends. Gretchen Timmons, Andrea Bushey, and Christina Cavoli—the wife of the 1-32 Infantry commander—were Kristen’s contacts.

“We’ve had a terrible accident,” Timmons informed his wife, through tears. “Joe’s dead.” He told her that he needed her to be strong. He needed her help.

Gretchen was staying with their two small children at Timmons’s parents’ house in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania; they had just returned from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. It was the middle of the night.

Timmons told his wife that she needed get back home to Fort Drum as soon as possible. She had to be there for Kristen.

Early the next morning, Gretchen jumped into her car with her kids and her mother-in-law and drove the five hours to Fort Drum. After dropping off her family at home, she headed over to the Fentys’. She was shaking as she rang the doorbell.

Kristen answered the door cheerily, holding her month-old baby girl, Lauren. She was surprised to see Gretchen there; she knew she was supposed to be helping her in-laws with a yard sale in Pennsylvania, and then going to a wedding.