Authors: Sean Naylor
Meehan let loose with a burst of .50 cal, then added a rocket for good measure, before breaking off and coming back around. Hosey and Pepin in the Dash-2 followed up with a similar attack. The target was large enough that during the planning, the teams had divided it between themselves by drawing a “line of death” (officially, a “restricted fire line”) through the middle using overhead imagery, so each team now attacked its own half of the target independent of the other team. All four helicopters made several strafing runs, or turns, over the target, their stubby wings spitting rockets and streams of heavy machine gun fire that destroyed the compound and the gear therein. The Little Birds took no return fire and saw nobody on the target, but they later learned that a signals intelligence platform (probably a Navy EP-3 Aries aircraft flying over Pakistan) overheard a Talib on the objective saying: “I don't know where they're coming from, [but] I can hear them and they're killing us.”
With the target in smoking ruins and little ordnance left on their wings, the Little Birds returned to Bastogne, where the toughest part of the mission awaited. After locating their individual landing points marked by infrared chemical lights, the pilots again had to delicately negotiate another nerve-racking brownout, this time in reverse as they tried to land. Much to the relief of all concerned, the pilots nailed the landings.
With each team of two Little Birds having its own FARP manned by an armament specialist, a fuel handler plus a crew chief for any maintenance issues, all moving with the smooth, well-rehearsed choreography of a Formula One pit crew, it took less than ten minutes to refuel and rearm the helicopters and get them on their way to the next target: a Taliban compound they had named Objective Raptor.
After another white-knuckle flight across the high desert, the four AH-6s found the target, which was also filled with vehicles and other gear. Again the pilots strafed the target several times, this time striking a fuel dump that exploded. The glow of the burning fuel “washed out” the pilots' night vision goggles, forcing them to call the mission quits a little early and head back to the landing strip with Raptor in flames behind them. They landed, again with great difficulty, at 3:15
A.M.
With help from the crew chiefs and armament soldiers, the pilots quickly folded the rotor blades up and pushed the small helicopters up the ramps onto the Combat Talons, which had conducted a midair refueling while the Little Birds were away. Within about forty-five minutes, the Talons were headed back to Masirah, leaving the desert to its cold, dry silence.
11
Less than three days later, Task Force Sword launched another series of missions in southern Afghanistan. These differed from the raids on Wolverine and Raptor in that while those were direct action missions against assigned targets, the next set of missions were considered “armed reconnaissance,” or, to the gun pilots, “search and destroy.” In a touch of irony, the collective name Task Force Sword assigned to the missions did not quite reflect the episodic nature of JSOC's efforts at this stage of the conflict, but within a few years would define the command's approach to warfare. The missions were called Operation Relentless Strike.
After Sword reconnaissance elements found a patch of desert that could support the weight of heavily laden Combat Talons, the operation began on the nights of November 16 and 17 when MC-130s touched down on that desert landing stripânow named Anzioâand dropped off forty-eight Rangers and 24th STS personnel plus six Desert Mobility Vehicles (modified Humvees armed with an M240 machine gun and an M2 .50 cal machine gun).
12
Another two MC-130s dropped off the AH-6 package. The Six Guns' mission that night was to patrol along Highway 1 looking for targets of opportunity. The two teams split up, but flew roughly the same flight paths, with the second team never more than about twenty miles from the other, so that either team could quickly come to the aid of the other if necessary. This time Meehan was in the lead bird's right seat and Linfoot in the left. They soon came across a Taliban motor pool full of armored personnel carriers and T-55 tanks. “We just start making run after run, and John, he's smacking the hell out of these tanks, hitting them with the .50, hitting them with the rockets, he's having a great time,” recalled Linfoot. “As he's coming in, I look over and say, âHey, are you going to let me have any of this action?' He just kind of chuckled and went and made a few more passes, hit some more stuff.” After firing all seven of his rockets, Meehan decided to leave the target and press on with just the small amount of .50 cal ammunition they had left.
Ahead on Highway 1, they spotted two vehicles: a flatbed truck with something on the back and a pickup carrying about ten men. “Let's see what those jackasses are up to,” Meehan said, pulling the helicopter parallel to the mini-convoy with the vehicles off to the left. Linfoot had a clear view of the trucks, and told his copilot the object in the bed of the lead vehicle was a double-barreled 23mm antiaircraft gun. Meehan came back around, went into the bump, and then attacked, getting a direct hit on the antiaircraft gun with his last .50 cal rounds. Sparks flew from the flatbed, followed by secondary explosions as the 23mm rounds cooked off. As for the pickup, “they came to a screeching halt, all the dudes bailed out of that thing and they started hightailing it to the high ground out there to the left side,” Linfoot recounted.
But Meehan and Linfoot were now “Winchester”âthe universal aircraft code meaning out of ammunitionâon both rockets and .50 cal, as were Hosey and Pepin in the Dash-2. The only weapons the pilots had at their disposal were their personal M4 assault rifles and a few hand grenades. But keen to finally engage Taliban they could actually see, Linfoot grabbed his M4 and began shooting at the running figures. The scene was not quite as bizarre as it might appear. Little Bird pilots often trained to engage foes from the helicopter with their personal weapons. Since Mogadishu, the regiment had replaced the 9mm Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun with the 5.56mm M4 as the pilots' personal weapon, but had yet to equip the rifles with the laser sights used by other special ops units. Linfoot was thus reduced to firing short bursts and trying to track his rounds by the sparks they'd make as they hit the ground.
The dozen or so Taliban began to scatter, so to keep them corraled in a killing zone, the two helicopters set up a “wagon wheel,” flying in a counterclockwise circle with the left-seaters firing at the enemy fighters. Soon the left-seaters were running low on M4 ammunition. There was only one option left if they wanted to keep up the attack. “We pull out the hand grenades and start dropping these hand grenades,” Linfoot recalled. “It was kind of funny because the guys, they tried to split up, we'd drop the hand grenades and that would kind of force them back into the kill zone and we'd shoot some more, pull out some more hand grenades and do the same thing.”
At that point, Rainier, who was about twenty miles to the east, came up on the teams' internal radio network to report that his team hadn't seen anything left to shoot and were done. “We're about 50 percent [on ammo] and returning back to the FARP,” he said. “How's it going where you're at?” Flying in the Dash-2, Pepin, the company commander, got on the radio, but accidentally transmitted his reply over satellite, so it came in loud and clear in the JOC on Masirah. “We're currently Winchester on [.50 cal] and rockets, engaging with M4 and hand grenades,” he said. Eyebrows went up in the JOC. Irritated, Dailey turned to Mangum. (The two officers, both graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and both Black Hawk pilots, were very close.) “Kevin, why are your AHs dropping hand grenades on these guys?” Instead of answering, Mangum, known as “the Bulldog,” turned to Schiller, who had recently given up command of B Company, and asked him the same question. “I guess that's because they're out of .50 cal and rocket,” Schiller replied. The answer did little to mollify Dailey and Mangum, who displayed “huge angst” over the AH-6 pilots' decision to press home their attack with the only weapons remaining at their disposal, said a source in the JOC.
Back on the “wagon wheel,” the pilots were having fun. The Taliban on the ground were focused only on survival, not firing back at their unseen tormentors. “They were just trying to get the hell out of there,” said Linfoot. “They couldn't see us. They heard the AHs and shooting but they had no idea what was going on.⦠We were giggling our asses off.”
After Linfoot had seen several Taliban drop, and with secondary explosions from the flatbed truck still illuminating the desert, the crews decided to return to the FARP. They were still due to make one more sortie. As the FARP team gassed up and rearmed the helicopters, Linfoot grabbed an armament soldier. “Bring me more M4 magazines and grenades because we're all out,” he said. The soldier gave him a
What the hell are you guys getting into out there?
look, then ran off, returning with every magazine he could scrounge.
On their second turn, the teams flew along a road that ran south from Highway 1 to Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. In the lead aircraft Linfoot was at the controls and Meehan was pointing out the airspeed, saying, “Make sure you keep it above 60 knots,” which Little Bird pilots regarded as their magic number because not only did the helicopter behave more efficiently above that speed, but it made it harder for someone on the ground to identify and fire at the aircraft's location from the sound alone. “This is bullshit, there's nothing out here,” Linfoot had just told Meehan when the cockpit lit up as tracers from another 23mm antiaircraft gun flashed underneath the aircraft. “I could hear and feel the gun going off right next to us, just loud,” Linfoot recalled. “Couldn't tell what was going on, I just knew somebody was shooting at us. I couldn't tell where from but they were right on us.” Linfoot continued straight for a split second, but Hosey in the Dash-2 had seen the weapon. “Break right, break right,” came his voice over the radio.
The Little Birds broke right, wheeled around, went into the bump and came hard at the gun, which was next to a mud building and represented a deadly threat. As they attacked with rockets and .50 cal, the pilots could see several Taliban around the gun, all firing back at them. More than one rocket-propelled grenade streaked past the AH-6s. The Little Birds made three or four turns flying and firing into the hail of bullets and RPGs before deciding discretion was the better part of valor in this instance. The team withdrew and contacted an AC-130 gunship in the area. They gave the gunship crew the grid and talked them onto the target, which the AC-130 obliterated with its 105mm howitzer. The Little Birds returned to the forward arming and refueling point, where the brownout conditions were almost as bad as at Bastogne, and the crews loaded the helicopters onto the Talons for the flight to Masirah.
13
While the AH-6s had been out hunting, the Rangers, from A Company, 3rd Battalion, patrolled for several hours to make sure no Taliban forces were reacting to their presence. They then drove across the desert to check another proposed landing strip, named Bulge. The Rangers established 360-degree security around Bulge as the 24th STS airmen assessed the suitability of the site. The airmen decided Bulge could also handle MC-130s, and was not nearly as dusty as Bastogne and Anzio. The Rangers moved the vehicles to a hide site from which they could observe the landing strip, covered them with camouflage netting, brushed away their tracks, established a watch, and awaited the morning.
The next day, November 18, TF Sword directed the Rangers to prepare for helicopter operations from Bulge that night. Once darkness fell, the Rangers secured the landing strip while the special tactics airmen laid infrared landing lights along the runway. At 8:30
P.M
., two Combat Talons landed with the same cargo of Little Birds, FARP, and personnel as at Bastogne and Anzio, along with a resupply package for the task force holding Bulge. Again, the Little Birds were airborne within minutes, this time without any brownout drama.
Rainier's team was the busier that night, hitting several fuel trucks and military vehicles along Highway 1, while Meehan's team took some small arms fire from a compound they then attacked. After two sorties, the AH-6s were loaded back onto the Combat Talons, which had returned from an aerial refueling, and flew off into the night. The Rangers and airmen collected the landing lights, removed any evidence of U.S. forces' presence, and settled in for the night at the hide site, sending out dismounted patrols.
The next night saw a repeat performance, the only difference being the routes flown by the Little Birds and the fact that the Rangers put their observation posts “farther out on higher ground to provide better early warning,” according to the official history. There was also a new target category. On previous missions, the AH-6 pilots had understood their rules of engagement to allow them to engage any military equipment or anyone shooting at them. For this mission, the TF Brown intelligence director told them that any tank or vehicle that could hold liquid was fair game. With that in mind, they destroyed fuel tanks at an airfield near Lashkar Gah as well as a fuel truck in the area. Once the Little Birds returned from their second turn, the Combat Talons started landing at 1:15
A.M.
The helicopters and FARP were taken out first, with the last Talon lifting off with the final load of Rangers and vehicles at 2:51
A.M
.
14
Not to be outdone, the MH-6 assault variants of the Little Bird also saw action that week, conducting a series of what a pilot called “hide site operations” with Delta's B Squadron. As with the Pinzgauers, the Little Birds would arrive with aircrews and Delta operators aboard Combat Talons that landed at desert landing stripsâoften the same strips used for the AH-6 missions. Between the Pinzgauers and the Little Birds, a JSOC staff officer estimated that Delta conducted four to six “search and destroy” missions.