At 10:30 P.M. on November 13, the silence of another moonless Afghan night was disturbed by the thrumming of a single Combat Talon’s four turboprops 800 feet above the desert about fifty miles southwest of Kandahar. From the plane tumbled forty dark shapes that floated to earth in a matter of seconds after parachute canopies blossomed above them, barely visible against the night sky.
The parachutes belonged to thirty-two Rangers from 3rd Battalion’s B Company and an eight-man 24th STS element. Their mission was to seize a desert landing strip named Bastogne and prepare it to receive two Combat Talons, each loaded with a pair of AH-6 Little Bird gunships, a mobile forward arming and refueling point, and the pilots and other personnel to man them. The Little Birds were then to fly off to attack preplanned targets. Bastogne was the Rangers’ second combat parachute assault of the war,1 but unlike the seizure of Objective Rhino, this mission was most certainly not a propaganda exercise. There would be no Pentagon press briefing about it, ever. Rather, the Bastogne mission was the latest step in a campaign of deception and destruction Task Force Sword had decided to wage across southern Afghanistan.
The details of that campaign would remain secret for years, but even the broad brushstrokes had not been imagined when, with the Gecko and Rhino raids finally out of the way, the staff on Masirah pondered Sword’s next move. There was no long-term plan. Everything was a seat-of-the-pants decision. “After we did this first mission, we went, ‘All right, what are we going to do now?’” said the retired special ops officer.
The first days after the October 19 missions saw a flurry of administrative activity as the task force conducted after-action reviews and prepared for the arrival of Franks, who secretly visited Masirah and the Kitty Hawk October 22. The Delta elements on the Kitty Hawk quickly returned to Masirah, but Brown, Team 6, and Ranger elements remained on the ship. Possibly as a result of meeting with Franks, Dailey issued new guidance October 22 instructing Sword planners to draft “a campaign plan” with missions centered on Kandahar.2 Operators and planners on Masirah brainstormed. Delta personnel resurrected their 1998 plan to ambush bin Laden as a basis for planning new missions. Key to the original scheme had been landing Combat Talons on one or more dry lake beds around Kandahar. “We determined that we could land large fixed-wing aircraft (C-130s) on these dry lakebeds in the middle of the night without anyone seeing or hearing us,” Blaber wrote of the 1998 effort.
Before Sword could launch any such missions, Dailey apparently had a change of heart. In the first week of November, he ordered the task force to start planning immediately for redeployment to the United States. By then it was clear that, enabled by 5th Special Forces Group, the CIA, and U.S. airpower, the Northern Alliance’s campaign against the Taliban was gaining traction, leaving JSOC, supposedly the United States’ premier special operations organization, on the sidelines. Aghast that JSOC might leave the theater with the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders—and thousands of their forces—still at large, Blaber and others of like mind put together a few concepts on the fly and forwarded them up the chain. Somehow they persuaded those at the top, Dailey included, to allow them to proceed. “Only because they were so beaten down and in such dire straits with … CENTCOM did JSOC headquarters go, ‘Okay, we’re willing to try anything’ and turned the whole thing over to us for those next few days,” said a Delta source. “At this point, the staff of our higher headquarters was ready to approve just about anything we brought to them—and they did,” according to Blaber.3 “Anything we wanted to try for years, we finally got carte blanche to do it,” said another Delta source.
For once, JSOC unleashed the power of its operators’ imaginations. In short order, they produced concepts with two aims: to “develop the situation”—in other words, to gain a deeper understanding of the situation on the ground—in southern Afghanistan, and to convince the Taliban that there was a greater U.S. presence along the southern stretch of Highway 1 (the ring road that connects most major Afghan cities, including Kabul and Kandahar) than there actually was. The latter aim meshed perfectly with Dailey’s penchant for deception operations. Unlike the unconventional warfare campaign being waged by Special Forces and the CIA in northern Afghanistan, which involved tight coordination with the Northern Alliance, Sword’s operations in the south were unilateral missions. Rather than taking and holding territory, the intent was to distract the Taliban and prevent them from concentrating their forces in Kabul and Herat.4
Although the ultimate goal was to clandestinely infiltrate teams of operators, the first fruits of the brainstorming sessions required no boots on the ground. A couple of nights after Dailey announced that Sword would be going home, a series of parachutes dropped from a Combat Talon flying over the hills outside Kandahar. Attached to the parachutes were large blocks of ice. The idea was that once the parachutes landed the ice would melt and the chutes would blow across the landscape until someone found and reported them, sowing seeds of paranoia in the Taliban’s minds as they wondered where the paratroopers might be. “We later learned that the phantom parachute drops not only confused the enemy, they also terrorized the enemy,” Blaber wrote.5
Within a few days of the ice block deception, the dark shadows drifting to earth were real operators, conducting some of the most daring missions JSOC had executed in years: high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) freefall jumps.
Although glamorized in video games and movies, actual combat HALO missions—in which operators jump from as high as 34,900 feet and freefall for as long as roughly two and a half minutes before opening their parachutes just a few thousand feet aboveground in order to minimize the chance of being observed—are rare. When a reinforced team from Delta’s B3 troop (B Squadron’s reconnaissance troop) led by Major Brad Taylor HALO’d in northeast of Kandahar to call in air strikes against Taliban and/or Al Qaeda targets fleeing southwest from Kabul, Tom Greer, at the time a major in Delta and commander of A1 Troop, called it “the first nighttime combat HALO … parachute jump since the Vietnam War.” The “death-defying” jump was “one of the riskiest missions” of the war, said a Delta source. “It had everything: cold, night, the unknown, high winds, all that stuff,” he said.
The team’s mission was to establish an observation post in some high ground near the road. But it immediately went awry when Christopher Kurinec, nicknamed “CK,” was badly hurt as he landed. Kurinec had “jumped the bundle,”6 meaning that in addition to his own gear he had the team’s “bundle” of supplies (usually water, ammunition, and medical kit) strapped to him when he jumped. Because the extra weight increases the speed at which the operator hits the ground, the bundle makes an already difficult task that much more awkward. For that reason, the operator with the bundle is usually one of the team’s most experienced freefall jumpers.7 Despite Kurinec’s injury, the team drove on with the mission, climbing to the place they had picked out for their observation post and in the process discovering an operator from a previous generation had apparently shared their assessment of the spot’s usefulness. “They got up into the side of the mountain there, set up their OP in a little cave overhang, and they found a can from a Soviet K-ration, which at the time we imagined very likely was a Spetsnaz [Soviet special operations] guy who had been in that same cave, same [observation post],” said a Delta source.
Team 6’s Blue Team and the Rangers’ Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment also got in on the freefall act (with a SEAL badly injuring his knee in a jump to secure a landing strip),8 but the unit that did the most HALO jumping during this period was 24th STS, whose mission was to validate each desert landing strip using a tool called a penetrometer to ensure the soil could support the weight of the Combat Talons. “The STS was clearing every one of those and they loved that mission. That was their heyday right there,” said a Delta operator closely involved with the operations. “I would estimate they probably did at least ten separate jumps in.”
All these jumps were done to enable the arrival of Combat Talons bearing a mobile ground force or Little Bird gunships. These missions followed Delta’s rough operational concept for 1998’s canceled bin Laden raid: Talons would land on dry lake beds, then offload wheeled vehicles, operators, and AH-6 and MH-6 Little Birds. Such was the case with the Bastogne mission. Special mission unit operators (almost certainly from 24th STS) had scouted the landing strip ahead of the Rangers’ jump, while the Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment HALO’d in ahead of the main Ranger body and stayed until the B Company paratroops landed, according to Rakow. “That was the first HALO operation in a combat environment that they had done,” he said.
Some HALO missions were a precursor to mounted Delta operations. “They’d set up the landing zones, make sure they were straight, make sure they were good,” said a JSOC staff officer. “Then you brought the Talons in to bring the mobility guys in.” The “mobility guys” were operators manning Delta’s Pinzgauer six-wheel-drive combat vehicles. These rugged machines could carry a payload of almost 3,300 pounds cross-country, had a range of about 435 miles, and featured a variety of weapons on forward, center, and rear mounts. Delta had been using Pinzgauers for years and was constantly working with the manufacturer to upgrade them.9
The Pinzgauer missions “weren’t raids, they were insertions,” the JSOC staffer said. “They spent a week on the ground then we pulled them out” using Combat Talons or Chinooks. The operators’ primary mission was not blowing things up, but reconnaissance—getting the lay of the land and locating Taliban or Al Qaeda forces.
But despite the emphasis on understanding the environment, there was still plenty of direct action, much of the intelligence for which came from the CIA. “In the beginning, I remember particularly in southern Afghanistan, we didn’t have the reach,” said the Agency’s Hank Crumpton. Only “tiny numbers of CIA officers” were operating in that part of the country, he said. So the Agency turned to JSOC. “I remember us identifying targets with Predators, with human sources, with satellites, and just funneling this to JSOC and saying, ‘Go get ’em.’ So they weren’t under our control, we were just identifying targets and they were putting the packages together. And it was their authorities, their command and control.” But Sword also coordinated with the CIA to use the Agency’s armed Predators (the military had none of its own) to strike an average of one or two moving vehicles a night in late October and early November. “The [Predator] missions were unbelievable,” said a source who monitored the strikes from the JOC. “Every night there were Taliban guys or [or other enemy] guys trying to get out being hunted down and destroyed.”
* * *
The mid-November missions came as a blessed relief for one Sword element in particular: the Little Bird crews, for whom the post–September 11 period had been a two-month exercise in frustration. Like their Delta counterparts, they had been surprised at how long they had to wait before finally departing for Masirah on October 6. “I thought something as big as 9/11, within a day or two we would have been wheels up going somewhere to go whack some bad guys, but that’s not how it ended up working out,” said a Little Bird pilot. By the time TF Brown deployed, Dailey had cut the Little Bird element down to two pairs of AH-6 gunships and crews, plus a spare airframe, and the same number of MH-6 assault Little Birds. The 160th had seen no combat since Somalia in 1993, so for those picked to deploy, “there was the excitement and anticipation of actually going out and doing something … and getting revenge for what had just happened,” the Little Bird pilot said. “You could see how disappointed the others were that they were staying behind.”
Once at Masirah, the Little Bird crews watched their Black Hawk and Chinook colleagues depart for the Kitty Hawk. When planners cut the AH-6s from the airfield seizure mission, the Little Bird pilots began to wonder if their chance for action was evaporating.
After the October 19 missions, the Little Bird contingent became more proactive in their effort to find themselves a mission. Schiller, the Brown operations officer, again tried to persuade Dailey to seize Bagram as a base from which to stage Little Bird missions. The proposal met with no more success than it had before the deployment.
Every day Chief Warrant Officer 3 Rob Rainier and CW4 John Meehan, the AH-6 flight leads, would discuss possible targets with the Task Force Brown intelligence director, plan an operation to attack those targets, then brief that plan to Mangum and Dailey. Each time, Dailey vetoed the plan because it involved not only landing MC-130s at a desert landing strip, but parachuting a fuel blivet, ammunition, and a detachment of soldiers to establish an even more distant forward arming and refueling point. “Basically, after about the third or fourth one, he said, ‘We are not putting any FARPs in—FARPs are dangerous,’” said a Little Bird pilot.
Dailey’s refusal to countenance any mission that involved jumping a FARP into the desert disappointed the pilots, for whom the tactic was second nature. The regiment had a jump-qualified airborne support detachment for just such occasions. “We’ve trained hundreds and hundreds of times for it,” an AH-6 pilot said. The ability to perform such missions was why the Night Stalkers’ full name is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne). But Dailey was having none of it, citing the risk of having a force of fewer than twenty soldiers stuck out in the desert, reliant on TF Brown’s MH-60s and 47s to pick them up.
In the second week of November Meehan and Rainier finally arrived at a winning formula. They found a couple of viable targets: military installations that still appeared active but which had yet to be bombed and were on nobody else’s target list. Instead of jumping the FARP in, they would have MC-130s land in a dry lake bed and refuel them. Ironically, while the Night Stalkers frequently trained to parachute a FARP into a combat zone, the Little Bird pilots had never practiced operating from a dry lake bed. But the MC-130 pilots assured them the planes could handle the surface, so the TF Brown men presented the plan to Dailey.
The JSOC commander approved it, but with an attitude that he was “throwing the guys a bone,” a TF Brown source said. The mission, Dailey told the Little Bird crews in a meeting, was “just one step above Range 29,” a reference to the range the AH-6s used for gunnery practice at Campbell. When the experienced AH-6 flight leads pushed to get the quick reaction force for the mission staged closer to the target than Masirah, Dailey pushed back, saying, “Hey, look, do you guys want to go on a mission or not?”
As with all helicopter missions, the aviators were required to brief a combat search and rescue (CSAR) plan and an evasion and recovery (E and R) plan to Mangum. It was a very short brief. “We had no CSAR,” recalled one of the pilots. “When we briefed the E and R plan, that was E and E [escape and evade] back to the dry lake bed—that’s your [only] choice, and if you get there after sunrise, there’s nothing going to be there.”
The AH-6 crews knew their targets were of no great strategic importance and could have been struck with much less risk by jets or AC-130 gunships, but desperate to get into the fight, they willingly accepted the hazards. Not only had they yet to see action in Afghanistan, only one of the eight Little Bird gun pilots in Masirah had any combat experience at all, “so this is busting everybody’s cherry,” one pilot said. Because JSOC had never disclosed the AH-6s’ presence to the Omani government, TF Brown had kept the tiny attack helicopters hidden behind cheesecloth sheets in their hangar. Now they were finally being unleashed. The 160th had a famous motto: Night Stalkers Don’t Quit, often shortened to NSDQ. But the AH-6 crews had their own saying—Six Guns Don’t Miss—and they were itching to prove it.10
* * *
As the first Rangers hit the ground at Bastogne, a little more than an hour behind them another two MC-130s were following the same route. Each carried a pair of AH-6s and crews, a Ranger security element plus the fuel, munitions, and troops for a mobile FARP. A TF Brown medic and a maintenance test pilot were also on the aircraft.
On the lead Talon, the AH-6 company commander Major Al Pepin walked around shaking everyone’s hand and wishing them good luck. Otherwise, each man was alone with his thoughts. Meehan’s copilot, CW3 Gary Linfoot, was surprised at how routine the flight felt, just like a training mission. This is the first combat mission, I should be a little more nervous, he thought. That sense of normalcy vanished at 11:45 P.M. as the plane descended out of the night sky on its final approach to the lake bed. The special tactics team had ensured the landing strip could handle the Talons and marked it with infrared landing lights, but when the pilot of the Talon carrying Linfoot landed, “he hit so hard it seemed like that AH bounced off the deck even though it was strapped down,” the AH-6 driver recalled. Within moments the air in the plane was thick with the lake bed’s talcum-powder-like dust. This is definitely going to be a little bit more exciting than I thought it was going to be, Linfoot realized. The Talon slowed to a halt and the troops swiftly unloaded the helicopters and FARP, before guiding the plane off the runway to clear space for the second MC-130E, which landed at midnight, disgorging its cargo just as quickly.
Within fifteen minutes of the second Talon landing, the four Little Birds were ready to take off. But as each helicopter’s five rotor blades began to turn, the challenges of using the lake bed as an airstrip became immediately apparent. The whirling rotors whipped the powdery dust into clouds that enveloped the helicopters. Such brownouts are extraordinarily dangerous during takeoffs and landings. If the pilot becomes just slightly disoriented and tilts his helicopter, the rotor blades may strike the ground, shearing off and flying through the air, destroying the helicopter and anything—or anyone—else they encounter. The pilots had trained for brownouts, but never for the sort of towering dust clouds with which they had to deal that night.
Most Little Bird pilots prefer sitting in the right-hand seat, but despite being the pilot in command Meehan had allowed Linfoot, his copilot, to sit there for this mission. As Linfoot “pulled pitch”—pulling up on the collective lever, which increased the rotor blades’ pitch, creating lift and allowing the helicopter to take off—he immediately browned out. Unable to see the ground or the sky, he “went inside,” focusing on his instruments and relying on them to keep the Little Bird level as it lifted off the ground. “John’s calling out the altitude and I’m just pulling the guts out of it without over-torquing it, and when we cleared the cloud I was not facing the direction I started off,” Linfoot said. “I was 90 degrees to the left or something.”
Emerging from the cloud at an altitude of 200 to 300 feet, the pilots headed north to their first objective, briefly relieved to be out of the dust and flying toward the targets. But their struggles with the unforgiving Afghan environment were only just beginning.
Flying over the flat, featureless lake bed on any night would have challenged an experienced helicopter pilot. But TF Brown’s planners had chosen that particular night because Dailey, still fearful of the Taliban’s vaunted air defenses, insisted the Little Bird missions occur only on moonless nights; in aviator-speak, nights of “zero illum.” The total darkness compounded the pilots’ problems.
“I bet they invented darkness in Afghanistan,” Linfoot said. “Flying over that dry lake bed, I tell you, it was something.… It was flat as paper and so dark you can’t really tell where earth ends and the sky begins. The horizon kind of becomes blurred, almost like you’re flying inside of a golf ball.” Like all 160th pilots, the AH-6 crews were experts at flying in night vision goggles, which worked by magnifying ambient light. But by choosing the last night of a waning crescent moon, TF Brown had given the goggles almost none to work with, leading Linfoot to question whether they had really gained an edge by flying in such pitch blackness. “There comes a point where maybe you haven’t stacked the deck in your favor any longer,” he said.
Once beyond the lake bed, Linfoot decided to cheat a little by turning his infrared “pink light” on for a second to illuminate the ground and reorient himself now that the previously featureless terrain was dotted with rocks and scrubby vegetation that showed up more clearly in the goggles. He did so just in time to see a rocky finger of land flash by only a couple of feet below his skids. A moment later, CW3 Jim Hosey flying the “Dash-2” (the trail aircraft or “wingman” in any two-aircraft formation) actually skimmed off the rocks, almost losing his skids to the unseen outcrop. The first combat AH-6 mission in eight years was only minutes old, not a round had been fired, and yet four pilots had just cheated death by a few feet.
Any Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters out there with access to their own night vision goggles would have been able to see the “pink light,” but Linfoot continued to flash it occasionally to help keep his bearings. He judged this a risk well worth taking. Unlike most future missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Little Birds were on their own. There was no stack of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft above them to warn them of trouble ahead, nor any jets or AC-130 gunships to protect them if enemy fire or maintenance issues forced a helicopter down. The “Six Guns” were hanging it out there a long, long way from home.
About twenty-five minutes after taking off, the helicopters approached the small town west of Kandahar where their first target—Objective Wolverine—was located.
With Linfoot still at the controls of the lead aircraft, flying at an altitude of 300 feet, Meehan navigated, using a small green map light mounted beside him to check the paper map on his lap while calling out what he was seeing around him. Meehan soon spotted Wolverine—a walled Taliban compound containing vehicles, radar equipment, and other gear. At that point he took the controls and went into the classic AH-6 attack profile, “bumping up” about 100 feet to dissipate the helicopter’s forward airspeed and give the pilots a better view of the target before nosing over into a 45-degree angle, which is better for handling the aircraft and reducing the “beaten area” where the aircraft’s munitions would hit. The 4,000-foot elevation, warmer than expected temperatures, and the amount of fuel the helicopters required to reach the target meant each Little Bird was limited to one rocket pod containing seven 70mm Hydra 70 rockets and one GAU-19 three-barreled .50 caliber Gatling gun with about 500 rounds of ammunition, set to fire at a rate of 1,000 rounds per minute. (When unconstrained, an AH-6 would typically fly with two rocket pods and two 7.62mm miniguns.)
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 strip—now named Anzio—and 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, ‘Hey, 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”—the universal aircraft code meaning out of ammunition—on 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 strips—often 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.
The task force took no fatal casualties, but at least one B Squadron operation took a nasty turn when an MH-6 bringing a team of operators back to the desert landing strip browned out and rolled over. “A guy got his leg caught underneath the skid, it was kind of ugly,” said the staff officer. “Nobody died but there were some pretty serious injuries.” It could have been even worse, but for a stroke of luck. The pilot in command of the MH-6 was a maintenance test pilot and for no good reason at all had his maintenance test pilot checklist—“which is pretty thick,” as another Little Bird pilot put it—on the helicopter. “In the crash sequence, somehow that checklist became dislodged from the cockpit and actually ended up on the ground, between the ground and the skid, which prevented the skid from taking the guy’s leg off,” the Little Bird pilot said.15
Those mid-November missions represented the only action the Little Birds would see in Afghanistan for many years. The men who flew them would participate in hundreds of other perilous missions in Iraq during the coming decade of war, and some would pay a high price for the privilege of doing so, but they considered those first missions unique because of the autonomy the crews enjoyed, and the knowledge that they were very much alone above the Afghan desert.16 Comparing the Little Bird actions in November to later operations, Rainier described them simply as “the most dangerous mission that we did.”