Service: A Navy SEAL at War (27 page)

Though I could see the back of the pilot’s helmet as he passed through the narrow slice of sky a few hundred feet above me, I couldn’t talk to him without a radio, and he had no way of seeing me, wedged down there in that crevice. This aircraft was part of
an airborne armada that had been specially trained to locate and rescue missing personnel on the ground. The discipline of Air Force CSAR was first established in Vietnam. Pilots who undergo advanced training can earn the special designation “Sandy.” That call sign reflects their incredible skill and dedication to a unique mission and carries a lot of weight in their community.

The CSAR team was focused on Turbine 33’s crash site when commanders realized that somebody needed to search for the four-man SEAL recon team whose bad day on a mountaintop started the whole mess in the first place.

On the run in the hornet’s nest, I was what combat search and rescue guys call an evader—the focal-point objective of everyone on the CSAR team. In such circumstances, the rescuers will do whatever it takes to find and save that man. If he can manage it, the evader can do a few things to make their job easier. Standard procedure is to turn on an emergency beacon that pilots can see and triangulate a position on with their direction-finding gear. An evader can also signal them by toggling his radio button, revealing his presence to friendly forces in a way that doesn’t betray him to the enemy, as voice comms would.

As I later learned, in addition to the A-10s, there were several Air Force HH-60 helos out there that night looking for signs of me, as well as a Navy command and control plane. “This is Air Force rescue,” they announced on the emergency frequency, which all our radios monitored. “Please show yourself.” Hiding deep in a crevice, with enemy all around, I had a radio but was unable to speak because my mouth was so dry and full of dirt. In any event, the enemy was so close it would have been crazy to try. That would have been like putting a big neon sign above my head: B
USTED-UP REDNECK LYING HERE WITH A ROCK JAMMED
UP HIS WAYHOO.
I settled for turning on my survival beacon—and praying extra hard.

In spite of bad weather and low cloud deck, one of the A-10 pilots, Captain Barry “Sluf” Coggins, spotted an infrared strobe north of Turbine 33’s crash site while moving away from it along a ridgeline. Technicians in an AC-130 Spectre gunship, using better sensors, verified that they had heard radio clicks. The pilot flying in the lead position that night, the rescue mission commander, was Captain Brett “Zero” Waring. He directed Sluf to return to Bagram to refuel while he explored whether the helicopters could make a pickup in the event that the mysterious signal could be authenticated. Finally, the worsening weather—a huge towering thunderstorm, dragging cloud cover along with it—got in the way. As a result, the helos that were standing by to grab me couldn’t search the coordinates that had been given to them. All aircraft were soon forced to return to base. The SOF ground commander wasn’t at all happy that everybody had to go home. It was a frustrating first night for the Air Force, too.

Turning in for the night at Bagram, Zero went to the cramped phone booth in the ops center and called his wife. “How are you?” she asked. When he failed to answer with enough positive energy, she followed up. “Are you all right? What happened?”

He couldn’t give her any details; he just needed to hear her voice. All he could say was, “Today was a bad day. A really bad day. Something bad happened. A lot of good men died today.”

“Will it be on the news?”

“I’m sure it will be. You’ll know it when you see it.”

It’s incredible, the power of the sound of a loved one’s voice when times really get tough. I’ve seen the hardest of men break down in tears over it. It bothered Zero that everyone who needed
him most was so far away. More than anything else, though, he wanted to scream to the heavens,
Why couldn’t we get a helicopter in there?

“Be safe,” his wife told him.

“I will,” he said, by which he meant,
I’m sorry, I can’t.
A dangerous job awaited him over enemy-controlled territory. He thought about the Taliban who were out there, competing to be the first to find us and maybe bring down another aircraft or two along the way. Zero vowed,
I’ll be back out there shortly. Make me a liar to my wife. Let’s dance, assholes.

I know now that it was Zero who banked that A-10 Warthog right over my hidey-hole on Sawtalo Sar that afternoon. Visible for only a moment, he offered me a thread of hope before dashing out of my line of sight. He was just one cog in the huge combat search and rescue operation the Air Force was to carry out in the coming days.

My best chance at making it came, ironically enough, with my capture. A pair of Afghan men found me. One of them was a medicine man named Sarawa, from the nearby village of Sabray, which was where I met Gulab.

Without a working radio, I was hard-pressed to make contact with American forces. Now and then, when I suspected planes were up there, I’d struggle to my feet and start swinging, like a lasso, a radio wire to which I’d tied a bunch of infrared ChemLights, trying to get their attention. An A-10 pilot reported seeing my covert signal, but couldn’t lock his sensors onto it through the broken layer of low clouds. His fix on my position was accurate only to within a mile, and the hour quickly got late.

It was finally the pride of the Pashtun villagers that saved me. Shortly after my arrival in their custody, the elder from the village, Gulab’s father, walked several miles to a Marine Corps firebase near the town of Nangalam in the Pech River Valley, carrying a note I had written explaining my location. In spite of all the airpower overhead, it still took an individual act of bravery to give the Air Force the location they needed to recover me. In delivering that information, as required by his culture’s ancient tradition, the old man was living up to his own notion of service, and it helped save me.

On the night of July 1, I felt and heard massive explosions in the valley surrounding the village. In
Lone Survivor,
I mentioned that the Air Force “had had it up to their eyeballs” with Ben Sharmak and his militia. After drones provided detailed overhead imagery of the Taliban leader’s compound in the Korengal Valley, a B-52 Stratofortress was vectored in from Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, an island base far away in the Indian Ocean. After the huge bomber unloaded six short tons of iron onto that little patch of earth, not much was left standing of the Taliban’s local HQ. On a tough night, here was reason for celebration. A small cheer went up on the TOC back at Bagram. I felt a nice rush a few ridgelines away in Sabray, too.

For the CSAR team, the first definitive word that I was alive reached them around dawn on July 2. A twenty-man team of Army Rangers and Green Berets was quickly dispatched on a fast march to the village. I wouldn’t have gotten out of there had it not been for their never-say-quit attitude, skill, and courage—or that of those dedicated Air Force rescue pilots and their crews.

CSAR pilots have a legacy that goes all the way back to World War I. It was during Vietnam that the dangerous rescue and casevac missions got the nickname “dustoff” flights—I guess for all the dust those Hueys tossed around when they reached a landing zone full of wounded men. Today the pilots are more capable than ever—network-linked, satellite-guided, flying better aircraft, and trained to an unheard-of level of skill. Even with all this technology, the character and preparation of the man in the cockpit is still the key to everything.

Major Jeff Peterson, with the call sign Spanky, flew with the 305th Rescue Squadron, part of the 943rd Rescue Group, based at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. When it was my turn to get off that mountain, I was lucky that the call went out to an outfit like them.

Spanky was thirty-eight at the time, married to a woman named Penny, raising four sons back home in Tucson. Originally from Utah, he attended Brigham Young University for a year before leaving to serve for two years as a Mormon missionary—white shirt, dark tie, engraved black name tag, the whole nine yards. Afterward, he transferred to Arizona State University, where he entered the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program. He took his commission as an Air Force second lieutenant in 1991. A reservist, Spanky had an expert touch flying a Sikorsky HH-60G Pave Hawk (basically a souped-up Black Hawk). Most reservists are older guys who’ve logged a lot of hours in the air. By the time he came looking for me, he had fourteen years in uniform and had flown more than a hundred missions in Afghanistan, not to mention quite a few here in the
States, rescuing stranded mountain climbers, sailors, firefighters, and victims of different types of accidents. He’s helped save scores of people, and his squadron as a whole has saved thousands. He had worked with special operations forces before, too. On the night of July 2–3, 2005, I became one more notch on his harness.

For Spanky, it was a long journey to a small rocky ledge high in the Hindu Kush that would serve as his landing zone. Shortly after Turbine 33 went down, with the search and rescue plan in its earliest stages, he was summoned with his team to the flight line at Bagram Airfield, north of Kabul. His copilot, Dave Gonzales, who had flown with the Border Patrol and the U.S. Customs Service, had more than four thousand hours in helicopters. Spanky’s flight engineer had done two tours in. These men weren’t “weekend warriors”—the term often used to describe reservists. They were full-time, experienced professionals. Their talent far exceeded their reputations. Nevertheless, when two crews from the 305th were summoned to Bagram from Kandahar and invited to submit a rescue plan to the Joint Special Operations Command leadership, they saw that a bias in the special operations community against reservists remained.

At their briefing, two helicopter crews, one led by Spanky Peterson and another led by Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Macrander, known as Skinny, were read into Operation Redwing—that is, they were given the details on everything that had taken place. With my note in hand, delivered by the village elder from Sabray, they had the name of the village I was in. As it turned out, one of my saving graces was the decision I had made, while things were heating up in the mountains, to activate my emergency radio beacon. Its battery was dying, but I turned it on and placed it on the windowsill of my hut. Drawing the last of the battery’s strength, the signal was heard by a pilot monitoring the emergency frequencies. He authenticated the survival code, and “interrogated” the unit electronically to provide a GPS location. That verified the information they had from my note and made those soldiers more determined than ever to reach my village.

Studying overhead imagery of the area, the rescuers identified an LZ that looked large enough for their aircraft to touch down on, then got busy with mission prep. The platoon of Rangers and Green Berets would secure the LZ and bring me to the village.

When Spanky and his team looked at the coordinates for my estimated position, they realized it was not far from where Turbine 33 had crashed a few days earlier. Clearly the pickup itself was the most dangerous part of the mission. They knew the area was full of Taliban fighters, and feared what every rescue pilot fears most: that the operation would reveal itself as a trap, one set by the enemy to lure another American aircraft to its doom. The enemy had proven its ability to take down our birds. (Hell, we later learned it was a twelve-year-old kid who had shot down Turbine 33.) Failure could easily mean putting another helicopter into the mountain, adding its pilots and crew to the roster of people needing rescue or recovery.

Seeing how the terrain offered cover for hostiles, Skinny proposed a maneuver known as a trailer spooky, a carefully choreographed dance that allows two helos to support each other at the landing zone. The lead bird flies in, buzzes the LZ, then climbs to orbit overhead, watching for threats. Then, as an AC-130 Spectre shines its powerful infrared spotlight down on the LZ from ten thousand feet, and as A-10 Warthogs strafe nearby
ridges, the second helo—the trailer—flies in, flares, lands, and makes the pickup.

When Skinny finished his proposal, Spanky felt his heart jump. Since he was flying trailer, it was his helicopter that would touch down to grab me off the ridge. He knew that Skinny, as his senior officer, could have saved that honor for himself. But Skinny thought the mission more important than the glory, and the odds of success would be better if his subordinate handled the touchdown and pickup while he flew lead.

As the helo pilots and crews worked through their part of it, the commanders of the Close Air Support (CAS) aircraft, including a pair of A-10s and an AC-130, drew up plans to use their heavy firepower to cover the pickup—or, as the Hog drivers say, to “put a bubble of lead” around the LZ. The skies over Sawtalo Sar were filling quickly—some twenty aircraft were on the case.

Then Skinny asked his PJs to design not only a rescue plan but an evasion plan for us in case the worst happened and we all ended up stranded and in need of rescue ourselves. The PJs prepped their kits, working with the flight engineer to make sure their gear didn’t exceed weight restrictions. For starters, they decided not to fly with their body armor on. This was a significant self-sacrifice—par for the course in the rescue community.

The seeds of a mission’s failure usually sprout from confident expectations that things will be simple. Before their deployment, the rescuers had rehearsed missions like this one in the mountains around Albuquerque and elsewhere in the Rockies in conditions far more severe than those they expected to find in a combat theater. But as they would soon discover, grabbing me off that mountain ledge was going to be no easy night’s work.

Skinny and Spanky had a few moments to collect their thoughts before gathering with their copilots and four-man flight crews—a flight engineer, a gunner, and two PJs—to go over the pending operation. For a while, they listened to the busy radio chatter, with A-10 and AC-130 pilots talking about their fire missions and sightings of suspected enemy forces in the area. The LZ was way too hot, and it became clear to many that the mission would have to be scrubbed. With one Chinook already down and sixteen men lost, it was thought reckless to risk another bird in the same area. But the crews also knew that the window for my rescue was bound to be short.