Those who have experienced intense combat, where fear verges on sheer panic, often speak later of a moment of clarity that comes once they’ve accepted death. Only when they reconcile with the fact that life is over—that they are, in a sense, already dead—does the paralyzing terror subside. Then they are able to do what they need to do.
Kyle White, who turned twenty the previous spring, reached this point as he stared out at the direly wounded Sergeant Phillip Bocks who, although just several yards from him, might as well have been a mile away for all the enemy gunfire raking the dirt between them. From where he lay in the open, with wounds to his upper body and his right thigh, Bocks called for White to come get him.
“Hey, you got to use all your strength,” White yelled back. “Get to me.”
Bocks shifted himself and tried to crawl. But it was no use. He didn’t have the strength to move. White knew he had to go out there. Bocks had a good fifty pounds and four or more inches on him, not to mention the body armor. Pulling him back to the relative safety of the tree would almost certainly kill them both.
I’m not going to make it through this.
With that thought, White got to his feet and sprinted toward the wounded Marine. It was exactly what the militant snipers were waiting for. Enemy fire pelted the ground White covered. Schilling, who was also badly wounded and depending on White to get him through this nightmare, watched from beneath the canopy of tree leaves. He saw sparks where bullets were hitting rocks. Even the air seemed to turn hot and hostile. White could feel rounds snagging at his clothes. He grabbed the handle attached to the back of Bocks’s body armor and began dragging the big man. But the gunfire escalated, and White was convinced the next shot would hit one of them or the other. He let go and ran back toward Schilling, hoping to draw fire away from Bocks. Schilling watched in amazement from under the tree cover as White moved through this open ground without a scratch.
Don’t die.
White waited for a lull, then sprinted out a second time, grabbing and pulling the Marine that much closer. He repeated this once or twice more, until he finally had Bocks under the tree.
The first order of business was applying a combat tourniquet to Bocks’s right thigh. Each of the paratroopers was equipped with a specially designed tourniquet with Velcro and a plastic windless that could be applied with one hand. White’s own tourniquet had been used on Schilling’s arm. Now he took a tourniquet from Bocks’s med kit, applied it to the Marine’s leg, and stopped the bleeding there. He could see Bocks had a second wound—a small entry hole—on his upper left shoulder. He bandaged that. But White knew there had to be more. All the paratroopers were trained in a high level of combat emergency medicine. He pulled off Bocks’s body armor and ammo harness and ripped open his shirt. Sure enough, there it was—a gaping exit wound on his right side near his rib cage. The Marine was losing a lot of blood, and White guessed there was probably serious internal damage. He said nothing of this to Bocks, who stared back at him with a glassy look.
“I don’t think I’m going to make it through this one,” Bocks said.
Down below in the streambed Takes was still multitasking as he straddled Albert on the valley floor, using one hand to apply a tourniquet to Albert’s right leg just above his bloody knee and firing his M4 with the other. By this time Albert was bleeding from wounds all over his body. In addition to the searing pain coming from his right kneecap, which the Army specialist hadn’t yet brought himself to look at, he had a through-and-through wound to his left thigh. That leg had gone numb and was unresponsive. There was also shrapnel to his right leg, and a bullet or piece of shrapnel had passed through the triceps of his right arm.
Amidst the dust and debris clouding the air, Takes’s M4 rifle jammed, and he worked to clear it. There’s a protocol for this, and just like everything in the Army, it’s rendered into an acronym, S.P.O.R.T.S.: Slap the magazine to make sure it’s seated, Pull the charging handle all the way back, Observe ejection of shell or round, Release the charging handle to feed in a new bullet, Tap the forward assist, Shoot.
As Takes began to work the procedure, Albert looked up at him from the ground and started yelling. “Sports! Sports!” The admonishment was maybe the last thing Takes needed to hear. He shot Albert a look just as an enemy bullet caught his upper right arm through the bicep, burning as it tore through. Albert watched his squad leader as if in slow motion, like a car wreck, as his expression turned from pissed off to stunned.
“Gosh, they still see us,” Takes said, shot now through both arms.
The sun was starting to drop below the mountains, and a merciful dusk and eventual darkness was minutes away. Takes looked around and knew what he needed to do: get them both over to a small tree at the edge of the cliff that might offer some cover.
He dragged Albert with his left arm and kept firing his M4 with his right. Albert tried to help by pushing himself along with his right leg. Gradually they moved up an embankment to the tree.
Takes connected with Begaye, who was several yards higher on the rock face. “I’m good. But Albert, I just put a tourniquet on him because he got another gunshot on the other leg. We could use some fucking air support, dude.”
Back at Bella they were beginning to grasp the gravity of what was going on at the ambush. Staff Sergeant David Dzwik pulled an all-nighter Thursday monitoring radio traffic, while Ferrara and his team headed out to Aranas; Dzwik stayed on duty Friday too, and by early afternoon he looked exhausted. Once they got word that the patrol was heading home, the platoon sergeant, Shane Stockard, told him to get some sleep. Dzwik headed for his bunk, relieved that the worst was over. Before he even closed his eyes someone burst in with word of the ambush. He raced back to the tactical operations center and resumed his vigil at the radio. Stockard was in overall command of the base with Ferrara gone, and he ordered that the 120mm mortar start firing onto the high ground above the ambush site.
Chris Choay had moved his scouts from their hide over Aranas to a point where they could track Ferrara and his men heading down the Waigal Valley. They could hear the ambush gunfire erupt just north of them and beyond a ridge from their new position. He set off with his men on the fastest route into the Waigal to join the fight.
At Blessing the Chosen Company commander, Captain Matt Myer, was in his office when word of the attack came. He rushed to the TOC. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ostlund had just entered battalion headquarters when he heard and started monitoring the radio traffic.
But for the moment, because of the geography of mountains and valleys, it was the soldiers far up in the OP1 outpost on a ledge overlooking Bella who were best positioned to communicate by radio with the men under fire. The senior enlisted officer there was Staff Sergeant Joshua Salazar. They had already heard briefly from Kyle White when he initially reported the ambush. Takes now was in contact. OP1 was in near-continuous, if sometimes broken communication with Begaye. Reports of heavy casualties were coming in fast, and the men at OP1, huddled around the radio, reacted with shock, anger, and expletives.
What followed was a cumbersome bucket-brigade of electronic communication: Dzwik, at the command center in Bella, feeding Salazar up at OP1 questions and commands to relay to Begaye and White at the ambush site. Responses from the field followed the same arduous path in reverse back to Dzwik, who was both briefing and, in turn, taking orders from Myer and Ostlund by radio or telephone from Blessing. In the communication center at OP1 was a receiver dedicated to intercepting enemy radio conversations. There were almost constant verbal exchanges in a foreign language coming from the receiver. It added a disturbing element to the drama playing out at OP1: hearing the voices of the men trying to kill their friends even as the paratroopers at the outpost were trying to save them.
Mortar rounds out of Bella started to hit the high ground around the ambush, but it was basically blind firing because they couldn’t tell precisely where the enemy was yet. Artillery rounds from a pair of 155mm cannons at Blessing were soon employed. Under Dzwik’s direction, Salazar, at OP1, pushed Begaye for his GPS location, or grid, so command would at least know where the paratroopers were located and could adjust their fire.
“Hey, are you guys good on the 120s? You still need 120s? I need a grid where you’re at so we don’t blow you up, over,” Salazar radioed.
Begaye delivered the coordinates, certain that the enemy was firing down on them from the Afghan security guard outpost high up on the ridge above, the place they called Lone Ranger.
“They’re moving right above us,” he told OP1. He wanted artillery fire concentrated there.
Salazar asked Begaye if he could spot where the 120mm mortar rounds were landing and let him know how to adjust that fire so the enemy could be more effectively targeted.
“I can’t,” Begaye said. “They got us pinned down. I got hit in the arm.”
The frustration at the mountain outpost was palpable as the soldiers heard the 120mm mortar firing from down below in Bella, sending rounds someplace they prayed was near the jihadist gunmen.
“I hope you fucking die, bastards,” one soldier muttered under his breath.
In all of the chaos of the moment there was one piece of information commanders wanted to know more than any other: What had they lost? How many dead and how many wounded? The Rock Battalion had seen a total of ten men killed in combat up to that point. On two occasions—in the Korengal Valley when Sal Giunta’s heroism was on display October 25 and in the Watapor Valley to the east on July 5—the battalion had lost two soldiers in one event. That was the most at any single time.
So how bad is this?
Dzwik relayed the request through OP1. He knew the men out there were in the middle of a gunfight, but he wanted a casualty report now.
“It doesn’t have to be in so many sad details. Just quick.”
Begaye was the first to respond, sounding impatient and out of breath, still trying to fire his weapon and brace the wounded Kalenits up in the little cave.
“There’s a fucking KIA,” he said, meaning Langevin. “I don’t know about the rest of us. We got knocked down. We’re at the bottom of the fucking river.”
From where he sat with Kalenits, Begaye put out a call for anyone else on the patrol to respond, specifically Mersman or Roque.
“Anybody copy, over?”
Kyle White answered. The fact that he was on the air at all was a small miracle. His own radio had been shot up, and it turned out Kain Schilling’s was too. White had found Bocks’s radio and was just about ready to key the handset when a bullet came through the canopy on the hand mic, knocking it out of his hand.
Really? Come on.
Somehow in all the chaos White caught sight of some of Matt Ferrara’s gear just down the trail at the end of the spur. He could see his platoon leader’s helmet and his assault pack. Once again White ventured out from under the thin canopy of leaves where he and Schilling and now Bocks had some concealment, and he low-crawled about fifteen feet to find the lieutenant face down in a pool of blood, his rifle still cradled in his arms.
He checked Matt’s pulse. Nothing. He headed back. Schilling had always been paranoid about a neck wound and was lying there with his helmet pushed back to cover the back of his neck when an enemy round came through the canopy of leaves and tore through the back of his leg, shattering the large femur bone and exiting out of his knee. He cried out in pain.
“I’m shot again!”
“I know, I saw it,” White yelled back and made his way over. He had seen Schilling’s pants rip and flare open when the bullet hit. Out of tourniquets, he pulled out his belt and wrapped it around Schilling’s leg above the wound as blood poured out.
“Hey, this is going to hurt.”
“Whatever, just do it.”
White tightened it down hard, which seemed to stem the bleeding. He turned back to Bocks’s radio and finally managed to get it to work without the hand mic, and when Begaye called out for anyone to respond, White gave his casualty report.
“We got one KIA. Three wounded.”
Begaye told him to take charge at his location. “What you need to do is assess casualties, roger?”
“Roger.”
Dzwik, on the radio from Bella, wanted to know if the dead and wounded were all American. He was told that they were, and radio communications fell silent for a few seconds.
“Who is controlling the fight, over?” Dzwik asked.
Salazar up at OP1 said that was not entirely clear. He was in contact with Begaye and White but was not at all certain where they were in relation to each other. And there was no word at all yet from Sergeant Jeff Mersman.
It had become starkly evident to commanders just how out of control the situation was. In a half hour the sun would set, and they did not know where all their people were, who was missing, and who was alive.
“They need to find out what the situation is. You need to keep trying to get coms with 1-1 Bravo,” Dzwik told OP1, referring to Mersman’s call sign.
Begaye said he had no communication with Mersman, adding that the sergeant had been nearest to White in the column when the fighting broke out.
Up on the goat trail, under the canopy of leaves, Marine Sergeant Bocks lost consciousness. Within minutes his breathing stopped. Schilling, through the pain of his own two wounds, watched Bocks slip away, the first time he had seen someone die.
Ten minutes after sunset Navy F18 fighters from an aircraft carrier out in the Indian Ocean showed up, and Dzwik, at the Bella headquarters, was working with the soldiers up at OP1, trying to provide the jets some targets. Begaye was in contact, doing his best to assist while also complaining that he couldn’t stop the bleeding from Kalenits’s wound.
“I’m trying to apply pressure on it!”
White came up on the radio, saying he couldn’t see where Mersman was, couldn’t really move anywhere, and his GPS has been destroyed in the fighting.
There was still chaos even as the sun was setting. The enemy suddenly broadened its attack. Teams of gunmen were high on the eastern ridgeline opposite Bella. Anticipating the Americans would try to rush reinforcements to the ambush, other jihadist fighters had pinned down Staff Sergeant Choay and his scout team as they tried to make their way into the Waigal Valley. More were shooting down across the valley at OP1.
“Hey, they’re up there on that fuckin’ mountain over there!” Juan Diaz, one of the paratroopers at the outpost, yelled out. The mountaintop observation post was bristling with weaponry, and in seconds soldiers were firing every major weapon at any enemy fighters they could see. Stephen Johnson, an Army specialist, blasted away with the MK19 automatic grenade launcher. Private First Class Ken Turner weighed in with a light machine gun. Specialists Juan Diaz and Tom Hanna took the M240. And Gabriel Green manned the .50 caliber. The outpost erupted in a cacophony of weapons fire. Over in a corner Peanut the puppy cowered and squealed in a high-pitched yowl.
Gabe Green had taken over communications with the ambushed patrol and Bella.
“We’re trying to get the Mark-19 rocking, over,” he radioed Dzwik.
Dzwik gave Green his orders: keep engaging the enemy to kill or force them away. But above all, Dzwik said, maintain contact with the wounded at the ambush site.
“You are the lifeline for that patrol out there.”
Word reached Begaye that OP1 was under attack. He could hear machine guns and the grenade launcher firing in the background over the radio transmission. His first thought was that the ambushers would use the opportunity to reload, reorganize, and then sweep back through the battlefield to kill or capture anyone they found.
“We need that fucking air support,” Begaye told his comrade over the radio.
Up at OP1 Specialist Stephen Johnson spotted enemy fighters behind the outpost, and Green opened up for seven seconds with the .50 caliber.
“There ain’t nobody there no more,” he hollered out with a note of triumph, then cut loose for another nine seconds for good measure.
For eighteen minutes this collateral battle raged around Bella. The paratroopers at OP1 focused on targets along the ridge across the Waigal Valley—at an enemy fighter spotted carrying RPGs or at muzzle flashes in the trees—and tore loose with machine guns or the MK19, its rhythmic BOOM-BOOM-BOOM followed by an echo of explosions as the grenades detonated on distant impact. Shouted commands punctuated the combat: “Light that place up where they were shooting before!… Ammo! Ammo! Ammo!… Shoot that motherfucker!”
Salazar, Green, and OP1 could see that soldiers manning their guard posts down at Bella were firing toward Afghan National Army soldiers making their way along another trail on the opposite ridge.
“Bella, cease fire!… All battle stations, cease fire!” Green shouted over the radio.
With the fight around Bella finally winding down, headquarters was asking again who was alive and accounted for out at the ambush site.
“I need a good status on casualties, over. I need a really good status on casualties, over. I need a really good sit-rep,” Dzwik told OP1.
Begaye gave what numbers he had. But his biggest concern, as he sat in the dark at the ambush site, was the fact that they couldn’t get up and move. Too many of the wounded were hit in the legs. He worried the enemy would walk up on them and kill any Americans they could find. Jets could not maneuver in this narrow canyon, and Begaye couldn’t help wondering why they hadn’t sent in attack helicopters yet—the Apaches.
In the meantime he started sending through possible target locations for GPS-guided bombing missions for a B1 orbiting above. All of the bombs had to be dropped several hundred yards away to make sure the wounded paratroopers weren’t hit. OP1 relayed the targets, and the jets responded in seconds. The night sky erupted in explosions of white light from the bombs, and the Chosen Few at the outpost sent up a cheer.
Fifty miles south at a large US airbase in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, the crew of a pair of Blackhawk medevac helicopters had just finished a brisk game of whiffle ball on the tarmac when an alert came in for a rescue mission in the Waigal Valley.
The crews from the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade were veteran combat flyers, medics, and crew chiefs who had spent nearly a year in Afghanistan plucking wounded American and coalition troops off battlefields and delivering them to field hospitals. They flew the Skull and Crossbones over their headquarters at Jalalabad. Their most experienced pilot, Chris Ryan, a thoughtful, easygoing chief warrant officer there, was marking his thirty-fifth birthday. He was a true child of military flight: his father was a retired airman, and Chris was born in a military hospital on the grounds of Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, DC.
They were led by twenty-seven-year-old Army Captain Clayton Horney (pronounced Hore-NAY), who grew up in Tucson, Arizona, fell in love with helicopters and the adrenalin rush of air rescue when he was a high school senior, and got an internship as a tag-along with a state police helicopter crew. While his classmates were earthbound, Horney was flying several times a week on observation and rescue missions.
The senior flight medic was Staff Sergeant Peter Rohrs, who, at thirty-one, was older by a decade than many of the men he worked to keep alive during his third combat deployment. Like others in the Army who grew up knowing they wanted one day to be a soldier or a pilot, Rohrs always wanted to be a medic. Whereas others drew inspiration from cinematic portrayals of fighting men, Rohrs liked the tough, ever-caring “Doc,” consumed with ensuring the wounded came home—if not entirely in one piece, at least alive.
He had treated hundreds of casualties airlifted off the battlefields of Afghanistan. Not only had he been deposited on battlefields under dangerous conditions to treat wounded soldiers and prepare them to be hoisted and evacuated, he also took considerable pains to teach other medics what he had learned.
But nothing that he or Horney or Ryan or any of the others on their team had done before—or would do again—would match the harrowing experience they faced that night over the Waigal Valley.
When Clayton Horney arrived for his tour of duty he pulled data on medevac missions across Afghanistan, using as a metric the frequency of hoist missions. These are often the most hazardous assignments because they are, by definition, the rescue means of last resort when the wounded are so inaccessible in the mountains that the only way of collecting them is to pull them up by cable.
He found that medevac missions flown into mountainous Kunar and Nuristan provinces out of the Jalalabad Air Base had the largest number of hoist missions, and Horney requested his platoon be assigned there. No sooner did they arrive in January to replace crews attached to the 10th Mountain Division than they learned just how treacherous the missions could be. During the transition between the crews, when Horney and his men flew some missions with the 10th Mountain medevac crews, they saw how pilots would dodge and jink their way through narrow valleys to be hard targets for enemy gunmen.
Horney pushed for his teams to conduct hoist-training missions in the valleys near Jalalabad during their down time. Over and over they would practice lowering and raising the hoist cable next to cliffs or in narrow valleys in the day or night, using night-vision goggles, all so they could grow increasingly confident in steadying their seven-ton aircraft and using the hoist even when rotary blades were only several feet from a rock face.
But the mission on this night was shaping up to be even tougher than what they had practiced. During the preflight briefing Horney and Ryan recognized the location. Ryan, working with Rohrs, had pulled casualties out of Ranch House after the battle in August, and he knew well those knife-edged ridges and narrow canyons.
Even worse, it would be a moonless night. Their NODs were a real asset, but the goggles operated by amplifying ambient light. Without even a sliver of moon in the sky and with high mountains obscuring many of the stars, the view through their NODs would be scintillated like a snowy image on a television screen. By the time they were wheels-up in Jalalabad heading out on the mission, the sun had already set.
As darkness approached at the ambush site, enemy fire had finally started to dwindle off, and the cluster of casualties around Staff Sergeant Begaye was huddling more tightly together. Derry and Johnson worked their way down the steep slope, startling Takes, who was pulling security in that direction and almost shot them. Johnson was growing weaker, and they got to a place where Derry could administer saline solution through a needle into Johnson’s arm. Derry had been assigned to carry a medical bag with additional supplies, except that after all the gunfire and shrapnel, the bag was riddled. All but one of the IV bags was drained empty. As the liquid dripped into the sergeant’s right arm, he almost immediately began to feel a little better. He eventually wound up near the creek at the bottom of the valley next to Albert. It was getting cold, and both of them were covered up with ponchos. Albert thought it was the coldest night of his life.
The wounded men were growing thirsty. Takes had given Albert his single IV bag, and the soldier drank it down. As night fell, Begaye pulled Kalenits out of the small cave and passed him down to Takes. The two men sat awkwardly on a steep section, their backs against a large rock. Kalenits had his right hand braced on Takes’s wounded left shoulder for support and was pleading for water.
“I’m so thirsty.”
From where Takes was braced against the mountain, he couldn’t stretch the spout of his CamelBak far enough to reach Kalenits. So he improvised. He sucked in a mouthful of water and then, through pursed lips, launched a stream of it in a small arc through the air toward Kalenits’s open, waiting mouth. Kalenits lapped it up. Some of it spilled onto his face.
Takes, his mind always drifting toward dry humor, couldn’t decide whether the whole thing looked like a mother bird feeding her hatchling or a gay porn scene.
Derry, nearby, cracked up. Kalenits was loving it.
“Oh, thank you. This is the best water ever. I appreciate it, bud.”
They were a wrecked bunch. Derry had a bullet graze to his right shoulder and shrapnel up and down his left side, with a chunk of steel embedded in his left triceps—and he was the least damaged. Begaye was shot in his right arm, Takes in both arms. The three of them were the only ones still capable of fighting. Both of Johnson’s legs had been hit by bullets and shrapnel. Albert had four wounds in three limbs and couldn’t walk. And Kalenits had the gaping gunshot hole to his backside along with a shattered pelvis and considerable loss of blood.
They were all getting cold, but Kalenits was freezing and kept telling Takes, “I’m going to die. I’m going to die.” Each time Takes told him to shut up. He pulled a poncho out of his assault bag and wrapped Kalenits up in it.
“You’re not going to die. You’re fine.”
Some six hundred feet above them, up on the goat trail, where Kyle White and Kain Schilling were hunkered down, a night of interminable waiting had only begun. Schilling’s greatest fear was losing consciousness and then losing his life, as he had just seen happen to Bocks. His plan to stay awake and stay alive was unorthodox—he kept bumming cigarettes from White.
As the medevac helicopters lifted off from the US airbase in Jalalabad, each aircraft had four men aboard. Chris Ryan’s copilot was Chief Warrant Officer 2 Christopher Carson. They were the “two Chrises.” Carson was born and raised in Frederick, Maryland, and liked to fly with a 99-cent Ricky Bobby Novelty Slogan Car Air Freshener from the movie Talladega Nights hanging inside the cockpit. Ryan had Peter Rohrs in the back as his medic, and the crew chief was Specialist Timothy “Matt” Johns, a native of South Dakota. Horney was flying with First Lieutenant Eric Doe, a New Yorker who was the novice pilot on the mission and deployed shortly after the birth of his son, Gavin. In the back of their aircraft was the medic, Sergeant Shon Crowley, and the crew chief, Sergeant Isaac Johnson.
From Jalalabad the most direct route for Horney and his medevac helicopters was straight north. But that would require flying over soaring mountains and through the deadly Korengal Valley, so they headed northeast up the Kunar Valley along the Pakistan border and then west through the Pech to Blessing at the base of the Waigal. It was a forty-five-minute trip.
Both helicopters touched down temporarily at Blessing, keeping their engines running, as a pair of Apache helicopters flew ahead to attack any enemy fighters they spotted in the dark with their night vision and to prepare the ambush site for medevac helicopters. Just shy of two hours after the ambush began, the rotary attack aircraft that Begaye had been begging for finally arrived.
“As soon as we can clear the enemy off that high ground we can get the medevacs in. They’re just waiting for that,” Dzwik told OP1.
In minutes the Apaches, each with a two-member crew, were firing at suspected enemy positions high on the southern ridgeline across from the ambush site. The weapons operator used a heavy “chain” gun slung on a swiveling mount under the cockpit that could be aimed merely by the gunner turning his head in the direction of the target. The chain is a broad belt that feeds 30mm cannon rounds into the gun. The rounds don’t hit as hard as those fired by Air Force A10 jets, but they can still churn the landscape into a cauldron of atomized rock and earth.
It was 6:05 P.M., and the moonless sky was in full, oily blackness. The wounded paratroopers had been waiting a long time for deliverance.
“We need those medevacs over here,” a weary Begaye radioed Specialist Ken Turner up at OP1. “I got guys bleeding to death.”
They told him it would be five more minutes, and he passed that along to White by radio. The young Army specialist wanted some direction. As the shooting died down, Afghan Army soldiers from farther back on the trail had been making their way into his position. By now he had ten of them gathered there, half of them were wounded. Close by was an eleventh Afghan soldier who’d been killed. At Begaye’s urging, White had formed the Afghans into a defensive perimeter around their location. When the helicopters arrived, he asked Begaye who should get on.
There would be limited space on the Blackhawk. The staff sergeant told White to get his wounded and himself on the copter and make sure the bodies of the dead Americans went too.
“We’re not leaving anybody behind, roger?”
Down in the creek bed Begaye and Takes had set up their own defense. There wasn’t much to work with, so the plan was simple: Takes would keep watch toward the west, Derry toward the south across the valley, and Begaye to the east.
At Blessing the medevac crews took on two more medical personnel from Rock Battalion—a physician’s assistant and a medic, one for each helicopter. They would need the extra hands in what was shaping up to be a complex mission.
Two and a quarter hours after the fighting started, the medevac helicopters finally arrived over the wounded Chosen Few. The biggest problem was finding people. And fuel. The Blackhawks hold about two and half hours of fuel. Pilots usually give themselves a thirty-minute buffer, so they try to ensure a pit stop after two hours. It took forty-five minutes to an hour just to reach the casualties on this night. From there the nearest refueling base was about twenty minutes away. That would give them maybe forty-five minutes over the rescue zone before they would have to leave.
They zeroed in on Begaye and his casualties thanks to the staff sergeant providing Bella his exact coordinates. But White’s GPS device was broken, so his location could only be guessed at.
As Ryan flew his Blackhawk down toward Begaye, his crew spotted the casualties. The rescue effort got an unexpected break in the darkness: a burning bush near the goat trail, evidently set fire in the attack, could be used as a landmark and also provide some ambient light for Ryan’s night-vision goggles. Rohrs was quickly lowered down to a spot on the creek bed near Albert, who watched him materialize out of the blackness and touch down nearby, like some angel of mercy.
Thank God this guy is here.
Horney, in the other helicopter, orbited for about twenty minutes. The airspace was getting crowded in and over the narrow canyon, with Ryan’s medevac helicopter hovering low over the first group of casualties and two Apache helicopters on the prowl for any enemy fighters. When Horney finally began his search for White and Schilling, he used some rough coordinates Chosen Company had provided. But he and his crew couldn’t see them. They continued their search, moving up the canyon, but eventually they realized they had gone too far. They simply couldn’t find the second group of wounded.
Rohrs finally solved the mystery from the ground. Working with Begaye, he got a better understanding of where White and the second group of casualties were located up on the goat trail and passed along more explicit directions using the burning bush, which was slightly west, as a reference. Chief Warrant Officer Chris Ryan, in the helicopter above, relayed to Horney, “Hey, if you find the burning bush, look up and to the right about two hundred meters or so, and that’s where the next casualties are supposed to be.”
Horney and his crew finally spotted White, Schilling, and the bodies of Marine Sergeant Bocks and Lieutenant Ferrara along with the Afghan soldiers huddled there. They noted the precise coordinates. But both aircraft were already running low on fuel, and before they could take on all of the casualities—a slow, methodical process that eats up a lot of time—they would need to refill their tanks. The nearest place for that was a US base in Asadabad at the far east end of the Pech Valley, about twenty minutes away.
Word of another delay was relayed to the paratroopers, who were stunned.
The medevacs have only just arrived, and they’re already leaving—and without the casualties?
On the goat trail above, Schilling was listless from the cold and the loss of blood. It was getting harder for him to focus his eyes, and he was starting to fade in and out of consciousness. The first hour or so after he was wounded he had assured himself that help would arrive soon. They were so badly shot up that he was confident commanders would waste no time getting them out of there. The thought helped keep him calm at first after the shooting died off. But as time wore on without rescue and he grew weaker, the delay made less and less sense.
Down below, where Rohrs was already on the ground, there was time to take one patient, and the decision was made to hoist out Kalenits. The medic prepared the soldier to be lifted out using a rescue strop, a kind of upside-down horse collar that extended under Kalenits’s arms. Rohrs had given him a shot of pain killer, fentanyl, and by the time the paratrooper was on his way up he was in a genial mood.
“I love you guys! I’ll be back!” Kalenits called to the other wounded soldiers as he dangled from the horse collar and a crew chief reeled him up. “I’ll be back! I promise! I love you!”
The bonhomie didn’t last. When the hoist reached the open door of the Blackhawk, Kalenits had to be pulled inside, and with his shattered pelvis, the effort to grab ahold and drag him into the aircraft was excruciating. Even over the roar of the engine and through his flight helmet, Chris Ryan, in the cockpit, could hear Kalenits screaming.
The medevac helicopters peeled away and flew out of the valley. Rohrs stayed on the ground with the wounded. As the sounds of the engines grew distant, the canyon was plunged into an eerie silence. The flight medic had been dropped into battle zones before, but he had not experienced anything like this. He pulled off his helmet after getting on the ground and, using his night goggles, worked his way from one casualty to the next, checking tourniquets, examining wounds, assessing and trying to understand what he was dealing with. His presence was reassuring to the wounded men.
“You’re doing good, man,” Rohrs said to Albert as he inspected his wounds and tightened his tourniquets, gently adding, “I’m going to go up and check these other guys.”
The gnawing realization back at headquarters that some of Ferrara’s men were still unaccounted for sent tremors through the command. This was already shaping up to be the deadliest combat the battalion had waged, worse than any of the gun fights, skirmishes, or battles fought by any other company; worse than any single event in the Korengal Valley ten miles to the south—and the outside world was beginning to believe that was the most dangerous place in Afghanistan.
Ostlund and Myer both knew that a missing American soldier would bring an entirely new level of gravity to the situation. Back at Blessing, Ostlund began entertaining dark thoughts of his soldiers now in the hands of the enemy. He could see their faces, knew their names, and understood they must be scared to death. If he had dead and wounded on the battlefield, as horrible as that was, he could do something about it. He could send in reinforcements and call in air support. But a paratrooper in enemy hands was utterly out of his control. A captured American soldier would be unprecedented. Although several American service members had been abducted and released or killed in Iraq, nothing like that had so far happened in the Afghanistan war.
Dzwik, over the radio, kept pushing for the walking wounded to do something about this—go out and search for Jeff Mersman or anyone else they hadn’t yet seen. Begaye and Takes, down at the creek bed, and White, up on the goat trail, were getting pissed. Headquarters just didn’t seem to get it: every last one of them was wounded. They had dead comrades nearby. They were out of ammunition—black on ammo, as soldiers called it—and they were separated by six hundred feet of vertical cliff. Organizing some kind of search party was ludicrous.
Dzwik then asked if they’d thought about policing up spare ammo from the dead. The guys at OP1 relaying the messages felt caught in the middle. Green passed back the response to Dzwik—they were in no condition to go search for anyone.
Dzwik said he understood, but he tried once more, this time with White, asking the radioman if he could have the Afghan National soldiers who were with him help carry Schilling down to join up with Begaye and Takes. But White had already tried that on his own. Earlier he attempted to hoist Schilling onto his shoulders to see if he could carry his wounded buddy down the slope to the creek bed. But Schilling had cried out in pain, so White gave up on the idea. Later he moved out on his own just to see if he might find any missing Americans. But again, Schilling called out for him in the dark and he dutifully returned.
Schilling “is doing badly. He needs to get out of here now,” White told OP1. Moreover, half the Afghan soldiers were wounded too.
Dzwik, now sufficiently chastised, finally dropped it.
“Just thought I’d ask. Just trying to paint a picture of it…”
With most of the Afghan troops accounted for at White’s position, the thought occurred to Bella: What about their US Marine mentor, Sergeant Phil Bocks? What happened to him? Dzwik decided to ask directly, using Bocks’s call sign, Joker 2-2.
“He’s KIA,” White said.
This news took a few minutes for everyone at Bella and back at Blessing to absorb—the very first confirmed name linked to a dead US service member. With the uncomfortable topic finally broached, the command decided to find out all the names of those Americans known to be killed.
“Go ahead and send the names of our KIAs,” Dzwik said.
Takes was first to respond.
“Specialist Langevin.”
The paratroopers at OP1 were stunned and reacted privately with each other, off the radio.
The night before the patrol left, most of the men fighting for their lives had been up at OP1 playing poker—Langevin, Lancour, Mersman, and Derry. Now Langevin was gone.
“He has a daughter on the way,” one of them said.
“Why the fuck did they have to do this stupid-ass, fucking mission, man?” Juan Diaz said in disgust.
“Hey, what the fuck, dude. A fuckin’ shura could have been held down here, dog. There’s no fuckin’ reason why we had to go up there,” said Green.
White reported the dead Americans at his location using the call sign for his platoon commander and the acronym for Embedded Training Team, Bocks’s assignment as a mentor to the Afghan Troops.
“Chosen 1-6, Lieutenant Ferrara. Second one is the ETT, Joker 2-2. Not sure of his name,” White said.
Back at Blessing the news confirmed what Matt Myer suspected from the start: if Ferrara had been alive, it would have been his voice coming in over the radio all these long hours.
A flurry of communications from headquarters followed to nail down who was alive and who was missing. The call signs for those unaccounted for came in absent any names, but it was clear that among the missing were Sergeant Jeff Mersman, Private First Class Joe Lancour, and a medic. The commanders might have known which medic was assigned to this patrol, but the guys up at OP1—relaying and listening to the radio traffic—weren’t sure and started guessing. Which medic went out on this screwed-up mission? Was it Roque?
The fact that there were missing soldiers complicated air support. The Apache helicopters and an Air Force AC130 gunship that would soon follow were equipped with heat sensors that could detect human forms and wreak havoc on anything moving in the dark. But given the possibility that Mersman, Roque, and Lancour might be out there alive and together, the pilots couldn’t take the chance of killing their own men. Shane Stockard raised this concern over the radio. Unless Begaye and his men could provide explicit directions on where renewed enemy fire was coming from, air crews would be advised not to shoot at figures moving through the canyon.
“The three MIAs could be walking around as a group right now,” the platoon sergeant warned.
As the medevac helicopters headed back to refuel, Begaye’s worst fear seemed to be unfolding. Ever since sundown he had worried that the enemy might come sweeping through to finish them off. Earlier, when the copters were overhead, he spotted a figure armed with an AK47 approaching from the east. He summoned Rohrs, but the gunman receded back into the darkness. Then when the aircraft departed, the armed figure approached again, this time waving a flashlight, and Begaye could see he wasn’t stopping.
Oh crap, here we go.…
The paratrooper called over to Rohrs a second time. “Hey man, there’s this dude coming.”
Begaye yelled out a warning. The man was answering something back, but they couldn’t understand him. More importantly, he wouldn’t drop his rifle as he walked up on them, despite their commands.
“If he comes any closer, shoot him,” Rohrs told Begaye.
“Get down! Get down!” Begaye yelled at the gunman.
From where Albert was lying nearby, he could barely see Begaye pointing his rifle at someone and heard the man answering in his foreign tongue. Albert couldn’t see much of anything and didn’t want Begaye to take any chances.
“Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” Albert yelled.
Begaye fired a round. Rohrs thought he actually shot the man, but Begaye was certain he only fired over his head. The Afghan dropped onto the ground in a sitting position.
Rohrs moved out to him, took away his rifle, searched him, and checked him for wounds. He had a gunshot in the lower abdomen. Rohrs worked to control the bleeding and then dragged the man back into the perimeter, where they put flex cuffs on him.
At White’s location up on the trail they had their own intruder—an old man with a full white beard and a bald head had climbed to their position. Wearing a vest full of ammunition and armed with a rifle, he proceeded back down the trail toward Aranas, literally stepping over Schilling, who was certain the old man would execute him with a few shots. The radio operator closed his eyes, tried to appear dead, and hoped for the best. Within seconds Ferrara’s interpreter, Alex Drany, who was huddled nearby with some Afghan soldiers, shot the insurgent to death with his AK47.
Down at the river bottom Rohrs kept caring for his wounded, moving from one to the other, listening and lending comfort. In many ways it was the purest combat medicine he’d ever practiced. He was the only medic—in fact, the only man on the battlefield who wasn’t wounded. They were all exhausted, bleeding, and cut off from the world, more than aware that the medevac helicopters had come and gone. Rohrs realized his job was not only to care for their wounds but also to keep reassuring them that help would return.
Rohrs asked Takes if he was in good enough shape to lend a hand.
“Yeah, I’m good.”
It wasn’t until later that Rohrs spotted the blood on Takes’s shirt and, stopping to examine him, was shocked by what he saw.
“Dude, you’re shot twice.”
“Yeah, I kind of figured that.”
The hardest part for Rohrs was denying the wounded the painkillers they kept asking for. Rohrs had given Kalenits that shot of fentanyl, but that was because he was about to be airlifted. There on the battlefield nothing was settled, and if they came under attack before the medevac copters returned, every one of them would need to be alert enough to fight. Rohrs did the next best thing: he pulled out a can of mouth tobacco his wife had sent him. He could see their eyes light up. He passed it around and they all took a dip.
Then gunshots rang out from the mountains above. Begaye was certain it was the enemy trying to goad them into firing back so their muzzle flashes would reveal their position. He made sure his men held their fire. The shots seemed to be coming from the old Afghan security post known as Lone Ranger, tucked high on the ridge over their heads.
Back at Bella they were starting to zero in on the security post with 120mm mortar rounds. At about 7:15 P.M. a single shell arced across the valley and landed short, just below the cliff-side trail where White and Schilling were holed up. It hit about one hundred yards away from where Begaye and his wounded team were huddled down on the stream bed. It was so close that White could hear the hiss of the round just before it detonated in a massive explosion against the mountain. The rock face of the cliff below White absorbed most of the impact, but he could still see shards from the splintered shell, the size of his hand and red hot, shooting through the blackness right past him.
Neither he nor Schilling were hit, but the explosion was so close that the concussive wave knocked White to the ground and left him feeling dizzy and sick to his stomach, symptomatic of a brain concussion—potentially his second of the day after losing consciousness early in the fight from the too-close blast of an RPG.
Begaye felt it too. His first thought was for White—he knew it had to have been close and tried to make contact by radio. Several disturbing seconds passed before White’s voice came online. He sounded shaky. Forty seconds after the explosion Begaye was the first to notify headquarters.
“Somebody just dropped a fucking round on us! You just hit 1-6 Romeo!” he screamed, referring to White’s radio call sign.
The paratroopers at OP1 immediately called on the mortar crew to cease fire and radioed White, asking if everyone was okay. White reported no one was hit, just woozy. Snatches of his radio transmission at times carried as far as Blessing, where Ostlund and his officers listened, riveted. How does the twenty-year-old paratrooper sound? Is he still with us? Can he manage this crisis all by himself?
At 8 P.M., more than four hours after the start of the ambush that left every American on the patrol dead, wounded, or missing, the refueled medevac helicopters, which had already delivered Kalenits to a field hospital, closed in to try to retrieve the remaining casualties. Kain Schilling was sliding in and out of consciousness, his breathing labored. When he was awake he begged to know how much longer before the medevacs arrived.
Salazar, back on the radio up at OP1, heard the aircraft fly past Bella and put out a call to the men at the ambush site.
“Birds just passed me. Hang on just a little bit more.”
For the medevac crews the fiercest enemy was the clock. By now the pilots knew the precise location of the two groups of casualties and the burning bush would help guide them in. The problem was that White’s group up on the cliff was almost directly above where Begaye’s group was waiting on the valley floor below. What separated them was about six hundred feet of sheer vertical rock face.
Routine procedure would have been for one medevac Blackhawk to go in and collect all the casualties from one location and then have the other aircraft do the same for the second location, operating consecutively. But conducting multiple hoist missions at two locations one helicopter at a time would have made an already awful night go on forever. By the time the first aircraft finished its work, so much time would have passed that both aircraft would again be required to refuel. That would mean leaving the second group of casualties to wait even longer before being rescued, which was unthinkable.
The only other alternative seemed more like a movie stunt than a strategy—do both missions simultaneously, with the Blackhawks literally stacked one on top of the other. Nothing like it had ever been imagined, much less tried—the crews had no training for that kind of rescue. The hazards were legion. The helicopters might collide. The one on the bottom would have to hold steady for an hour or more, hoisting casualties while relentlessly buffeted by rotor wash from the Blackhawk hovering above. Both pilots would need to stay right up against the mountain, their rotor blades mere feet from boulders and rocks. Any uncontrolled drift would be catastrophic.
And all of it would have to be done in a hot zone under the threat of enemy fire, with Apache helicopters circling above, looking for targets. The pilots—Horney, Ryan, Carson, and Doe—weighed their options as they headed back to the Waigal Valley after refueling.
“What’s the plan, boss?” Ryan asked over the radio as they flew.
The captain was the first to broach the idea of simultaneous hoists. He couldn’t see any other way if the wounded were to have a chance.
“How would you feel if I let you go in first to get set up at the bottom, and then I’m going to go get set up above you?” Horney asked Ryan.
Chief Christopher Ryan was the most experienced pilot among them, with more than two thousand hours of flight time. Clayton Horney and Chris Carson had several hundred hours each. And Eric Doe was the least experienced, with only a few hundred hours. The logical choice to handle the more difficult lower hoist, the one that would be tossed by rotor wash, was the Blackhawk piloted by the two Chrises—Carson and Ryan.
Ryan thought it best for Horney to go in first and take the high position, and then he and Carson would follow and position underneath. Once there, Ryan would have to hold the aircraft steady in a constant downdraft. Allowing it to drift even five or six feet in any direction would be dangerous.
As they re-entered the narrow valley, Clayton Horney was the first to fly into position, hovering over Kyle White on the goat trail, the rotors of the helicopter no more than five feet from the side of the mountain.
“Hey Chris, okay, I’m set,” he told Ryan over the radio.
“Okay, I’m coming in.”
With crew chief Johns guiding him from the back of the aircraft, Chris Ryan very slowly moved—“snuck in” was how he characterized it—the seven-ton Blackhawk until it was hovering directly over the creek-bed casualties. Right away the aircraft started to vibrate, and he knew what he was in for. It was pitching like an airliner in turbulence.
The wind shear coming off the blades of Horney’s Blackhawk, buffeted by the uneven surface of the mountain and the winds coming down the valley, created an erratic pattern of turbulence that would ebb and spike, but never subside. Still, after several seconds Ryan felt he had enough control to hold it steady.
“Okay, I think I can do this,” he said out loud.
Recovering casualties is slow and methodical work under the best conditions. For Rohrs, working in the creek bed, and medic Shon Crowley, up on the trail site, each wounded man or body had to be “packaged,” prepared with the horse collar, and then carefully hoisted into the waiting aircraft. The lift collar then had to be removed and lowered back down. Each extraction could take fifteen minutes. With the number of dead and wounded, the process would easily run two hours.
Both medevac crews were so absorbed in their strange, double-decker hoists that they were utterly oblivious to what was happening in the black skies above them, where Apache helicopters and an Air Force AC130 Spectre gunship orbited like sentries, picking out targets in the darkness and blasting away.
On the cliff Kain Schilling had just emerged from a state of wooziness when flight medic Crowley, working with Kyle White, wrapped the horse collar around him and under his arms. He felt flush with joy as the cable pulled him skyward. Down at the creek bed Rohrs fixed the horse collar on Takes, his last patient and “package,” then clipped himself onto the cable and the two rode up together.
Crammed with wounded and dead, along with bundles of weapons and gear that no one wanted to leave behind for the enemy, the two Blackhawks peeled off toward Asadabad, where they would deliver nearly all the casualties to a forward surgical hospital more than four hours after the battle began.
The Ambush, as it would come to be known, was over for them. But not for dozens of others. Jeff Mersman and Joe Lancour were still missing. Derry had not mentioned to anyone seeing Roque’s dead body. So the medic remained unaccounted for as well. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ostlund, waiting anxiously back at Blessing for word, would remember this as the longest night of his life.
The medevac crews turned right around and headed back to the Waigal Valley. Patrols from Bella were only just getting to the outskirts of the battlefield, where several of their allied Afghan soldiers were huddled somewhere waiting to be found. Staff Sergeant Christopher Choay and his scout team had by then joined up with Staff Sergeant Kyle Silvernale and his men, and their two teams started moving together up the same trail that Ferrara’s men had been walking when they were attacked. A key concern for Silvernale was whether they could find the Afghan soldiers in the darkness and make contact without being accidentally shot by them in the process.
But more than anything, Silvernale was angry at delays. He had been ready to lead a quick-reaction force out to reach his men hours earlier, but command kept him waiting, concerned about an enemy attack on Bella. By the time he was finally approaching the ambush site, he could hear over the radio that the last of the Americans had been evacuated. He knew he was getting close to the battlefield because Silvernale had heard about the burning bush over the radio, and there it was, off to the side, still refusing to extinguish, continuing to throw off light they needed for their night-vision goggles in a moonless world.
“We’re coming up onto friendlies. Make sure you know what you’re shooting at when you shoot,” Silvernale told his men.
As he and Choay and their teams made their way along the goat trail, they came across the first real evidence of what had happened there, an abandoned squad automatic weapon lay in the middle of their path. They would learn later that it was probably Langevin’s. They secured the gun and pushed on.
About another sixty-five yards down the trail they found Lester Roque’s body. The medic had been shot through the head. All his medical gear was still packed away. Silvernale left part of his team to watch over Roque’s remains and continued forward, intent on finding the rest of the missing.
Within another eighty yards they saw Joe Lancour. There was no doubt the lanky Michigan native had gone down fighting. Spent brass shells carpeted the ground around him. He had found a small bit of cover near a tree sprouting down off the trail, and from there he had blazed away with his beloved light machine gun, Reese Witherspoon. The enemy had tried mightily to silence him. The soldier was taking fire from at least two directions—from across the valley and from behind and above. A gunman shot Lancour through his left leg right below the knee. The paratrooper managed to apply a tourniquet to himself to stem the bleeding and keep fighting. But the enemy was relentless. He was shot through the left shoulder. An RPG exploded close enough to send shrapnel into Lancour’s face, and a third bullet grazed his neck. The twenty-one-year-old soldier, evidently ignoring his wounds, fired his weapon so furiously that it finally jammed and he couldn’t clear it. A fourth enemy round struck him in the right shoulder from above, and this one Lancour couldn’t ignore. The bullet drilled through his right lung and his heart. It was fatal.
Silvernale and his men carried their friend’s bullet-ridden body up to the goat trail to a broader area on the path where the medevac helicopter could reach him with a hoist.
Meanwhile paratroopers from Chosen Company’s 2nd Platoon had been flown in from Bella along with Captain Matt Myer and First Sergeant Scott Beeson. When the men up at OP1 got word, they couldn’t help rolling their eyes over the arrival of a company commander they sometimes saw as a bit too “Hooah,” too soldier-serious on missions.
When Specialist Turner asked who was leading the 2nd Platoon troopers, Specialist Tom Hanna, then manning the radio, sighed and said, “Take a guess?”
“Chosen 6?” Turner asked, using Myer’s radio call sign.
“Mr. Billy Badass himself,” Hanna replied
Myer set up a field headquarters at the bridge that crossed the Waigal River where the goat trail from Aranas ended. He sent out Staff Sergeant Jonathan Benton and his squad to assist Silvernale and Choay on the trail and then dispatched Staff Sergeant Sean Samaroo and his squad to work their way upstream along the creek bed at the bottom of the canyon.
By the time Horney and his medevac helicopter platoon landed at Asadabad and unloaded their casualties, they had already gone far beyond normal mission length for medevac crews. For Johns, treating or working with six casualties at once in the middle of a live war zone with mortar and RPGs exploding nearby and the enemy taking potshots, the experience was physically and emotionally draining. Once the helicopter touched down and the wounded and dead were unloaded, the veteran medic walked out behind the aircraft, took off his helmet, and took a knee on the tarmac. Shon Crowley, the medic from the other Blackhawk, soon joined him.
The reality was that they weren’t finished. There were still American dead on the battlefield who needed to be recovered, and Horney and his crew were best positioned to respond and most familiar with the terrain. The platoon had exhausted all usual extensions dictated by protocol. So the commanding general of US forces in eastern Afghanistan, Major General David Rodriguez, got on the radio.
“Okay, you’re extended,” the two-star told them. “Stay on mission until mission completes.”
For the third time the twin copters lifted off and turned toward the Waigal Valley. Chris Ryan’s aircraft took the initiative on recovering the dead paratroopers, while Clayton Horney and his crew concentrated on picking up bundles of abandoned equipment. As Ryan once again held his Blackhawk in a hover over the now-familiar battlefield, Peter Rohrs prepared Lester Roque’s body to be hoisted.
Rohrs was back on the ground minutes later doing the same for Joe Lancour. It was challenging because Lancour’s body had been found curled around a tree and rigor mortis had set in. His arms were frozen in awkward positions. His body was hoisted to the open door of the Blackhawk piloted by the Chrises, and Johns, the crew chief, could see that the remains were slipping out. He moved quickly to grab the handle on the back of Lancour’s body armor and caught it just in time, but the weight of his remains, coupled with the armor, was just too much for Johns, who was already exhausted.
“I can’t hold him! He keeps falling! He’s slipping! He’s slipping!” Johns yelled at the top of his lungs into his headset, but he lost his grip, and Lancour’s body disappeared into the darkness.
“Oh, God!”
The commotion startled Ryan and Carson, and over the intercom Ryan asked what was wrong.
“I had my hand on the strap on his body armor. But he just fell out, and I couldn’t hold him.”
Johns was devastated, aware of the pain it would cause the other soldiers, not to mention the difficulty of relocating the remains. The aircraft were running low on fuel, so they headed back to Asadabad. Ryan kept what happened to Lancour’s remains within his aircraft, not even notifying Horney in the other Blackhawk. He was nervous that soldiers on the ground might overhear the radio conversation—that kind of news would be hard for them to take. Back at Asadabad they discussed a fourth mission to recover the dropped body. Ryan felt strongly it was unfinished business. But the medevac teams were clearly played out, and Horney decided to let a fresh crew handle it later on. By the time they arrived back at Jalalabad, they had completed more than ten hours of flying.
Staff Sergeant Jonathan Benton from 2nd Platoon managed to push beyond where Roque and Lancour had been found. He linked up with the stranded Afghan National Army soldiers and Alex Drany, Ferrara’s wounded interpreter, who had killed the old man insurgent. Two Afghan soldiers had died in the ambush.
Samaroo and Sergeant Jacob Walker, working their way up the cliff from the creek, finally spotted Jeff Mersman’s body with the help of an infrared spotlight that the orbiting AC130 gunship shined down on the battlefield like some kind of midnight sun. The twenty-three-year-old Mersman, who had taken a bad fall during the outboard leg of the mission but soldiered on without a complaint, had apparently been blown off the goat trail during the ambush, possibly by an RPG, and tumbled several dozen yards down the steep cliff.
When he finally had come to a stop, the tough soldier—who had to have been badly beaten up by then and possibly wounded—appeared to have still been alive and took steps to help comrades find him. He’d pulled off his assault pack and cracked several chem lights to activate them, scattering them around his location. But no one came in time to save him, and he was shot to death by enemy gunmen. He managed to get off only three rounds from his M4.
When Samaroo and Walker scaled the cliff to reach Mersman, they were surprised by how peaceful he looked, with his eyes closed, as if he had simply laid down and gone to sleep. It was so deceptive that Samaroo called out to him. “Hey, Mersman, you all right?” And Walker moved closer, saying, “Hey, you okay?”
An Air Force Special Operations command helicopter arrived and dropped off two pararescuers, specially trained in medical and rescue operations, but they were lowered to the wrong location, the pilots mistaking a bundle of dropped ammo for Mersman’s remains. It was hours before they finally reached his body, prepared it to be hoisted, and pulled it up.
Meanwhile Ostlund was finally notified about Lancour’s body being dropped, and word reached the men in the field who had first found him. They all were stunned by the news. Shane Stockard, who had joined Silvernale up on the goat trail, was furious and exploded over the radio.
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” he raged, demanding to know why they hadn’t been told sooner. It was an unusual display for an otherwise stoic platoon sergeant, borne of frustration, exhaustion, and the loss of his men. Ostlund had to come up on the radio and tell him to calm down.
It was sunup before Chosen Company First Sergeant Scott Beeson finally spotted Lancour’s remains from a distance through a pair of binoculars, wedged between a couple of rocks. Beeson directed Silvernale and Stockard down the cliff so they could recover him. The body was coming apart from the beating it had taken. Silvernale’s heart sank at the sight of it. He was so overwhelmed that he had to take a knee, and it felt like he was suddenly out of breath. Lancour had held so much promise. Silvernale was certain he was destined for promotion and leadership. He was one of the staff sergeant’s “elites.”
Fuck, this is really what war is—right here.
Silvernale had to use his M4 carbine to pry the body free. They wrapped it in canvas and carried it up two hundred feet of mountain to get back to the goat trail. Lancour’s remains, along with those of two Afghan National Army soldiers, were finally airlifted off the battlefield in the daylight hours of November 10, and weary Chosen soldiers made their way back to Bella.
It still wasn’t over. In the hours ahead, Army and Marine Corps officers would fan out to homes across the United States notifying loved ones about the ultimate sacrifice made by their sons and husbands somewhere in northeastern Afghanistan. When two officers knocked at the home of Jessica Langevin’s parents back in Pittsburg, California, where Jessica was staying during her husband Sean’s deployment, she was cooking a spaghetti dinner. Before the officers told her anything, one of them, a female chaplain, noticed that Jessica was seven months along with Zoe.
“Oh my God, she’s pregnant,” the chaplain blurted out.
In each case where families were notified, there would be little or no detail about what had actually happened. Relatives were desperate to know more.
That was a task left to Matt Myer. Barely twenty-nine years old, he had never lost a man under his command. He knew—Ostlund had already instructed him on this—he was obliged to call each family and answer every question they might have. But it was very tough to be completely honest about some things. There was the sensitive issue of Lancour’s body being dropped. Even beyond that, Matt felt very uncomfortable about the responsibility. He had to keep telling himself their need to know was more important than any personal distress he might feel. As company commander, he served not only his men but their families as well.
Get over yourself. Buck up and do it.
One by one he made satellite phone calls, standing outside the TOC back at Bella, leaning up against a wall near the landing zone. Beeson insisted on being nearby, if for no other reason than to lend moral support. Matt Myer began each conversation the same way.
“I’m Captain Matt Myer. I was your son’s company commander. I’m just calling you to offer my condolences and answer any questions you might have about the circumstances of his death. I know it’s a lot to deal with. But I’m here to answer your questions until you don’t have any more questions to ask.”
He tried to brace himself for the question he dreaded most, the one they always asked: “Why did my husband die?” or “Why did my son die?” Myer knew no one could really explain why one person dies in combat and another survives. He decided to be straight with them: “I don’t know why this happened. I don’t understand either. It doesn’t make any sense.”
First he called the parents of Matt Ferrara. They were mercifully gracious. They even asked how he was dealing with it. It turned into almost a conversation. The father sounded slightly upset, the mother calm. They asked about the patrol: How many were on it? They wanted to know where on his body their son was wounded and if it was possible he died quickly. Myer assured them he believed it was nearly instantaneous. They talked about Ranch House, and Myer told them something they didn’t know—that Matt had been recommended for a Silver Star for that battle. The parents mentioned that their son’s grandfather had received a Silver Star and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Myer took notes. He wanted to pass the information along to Ostlund, who would also be calling each family. His boss would want to know what ground had been covered.
The calls continued. Jeff Mersman’s wife, Lynn, sounded at peace with what had happened. The conversation with Lester Roque’s family was tougher. Because they were from the Philippines, there was a language barrier, and Myer wasn’t on the phone for very long. Sean Langevin’s mother, Roxane, was worried about the state of his body and wanted to know where the bullets struck him. Sean’s pregnant wife, Jess, was teary, but understanding, and she wanted to extend condolences to the family of Joe Lancour.
But when it came time to call Lancour’s mother, Starla Owens, Myer couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth. She had heard from the casualty assistance officer that her son’s body was badly damaged. She wanted to know what happened and, most importantly, whether he suffered. Myer told her he thought Joe died quickly, but that his body had fallen. He neglected to mention, however, that the body was dropped from a helicopter. She said it was important that the family learn the details for closure.
“I wasn’t prepared to tell her,” Myer wrote in his notes for Ostlund. “But I believe it should be clarified for her.”
In the weeks before Matt Ferrara was killed on the goat trail he spoke with military historian Dave Hanson about bravery and the kind of men he served with in Afghanistan.
“One thing you never really realize until you get into a big fight is the human will,” the lieutenant had said. “Everything these guys learn in training—and when they apply it to something real and do things that are way beyond anything that’s expected of a human being, it is incredible.… It’s incredible to be with soldiers of this caliber.
“It’s a big part of history, just like World War II, the Greatest Generation. I think it’s not much different now, from what some of these guys go through. It’s extremely difficult to operate in this area. And they do it day in and day out across the battalion and the brigade.”
For his actions during the ambush Specialist Kyle White—in a 2014 White House ceremony—became only the seventh living recipient of the Medal of Honor from the Afghanistan War. A Distinguished Service Cross was awarded to Sergeant James Takes. Staff Sergeant Conrad Begaye and Staff Sergeant Peter Rohrs each received a Silver Star. A Bronze Star for valor was awarded to Staff Sergeant Christopher Choay and posthumously to Private First Class Joseph Lancour and Specialist Lester Roque.