3
DAN MADDEN HAD FELT A MOST UNCOMMON foreboding for most of the day. He ascribed it to an earthquake that morning, measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale. The quake had shaken his crew's shabby quarters at Bagram and rattled him on his canvas-bottomed cot. But nobody else took the quake as a sign of anything, good or bad, or even talked about it. He'd sought comfort watching his friend Phil Svitak, a door gunner and crew chief, slurp up most of a gallon can of butterscotch pudding for breakfast.
Madden, the helo's right rear crew chief, was a maverick and self-described “loudmouth pain in the ass” who busted people's chops and didn't care what they thought about him. He refused to play according to the Army's rules, like regulation haircuts and looking sharp. He did not hang out with the guys he flew with, and thought most of them did not like him. He relied on his professionalism—he was arguably the best ramp crewman in the service and had earned a Distinguished Flying Cross as proof.
His job, as he described it, was to take care of the customers in the back of his helicopter, monitor certain mechanical systems in flight, act as a spotter, call out altitudes on landing, work the ramp up and down during infils and exfils, and man an M-60 machine gun. Madden's counterpart on the helo's left side—that night it was roly-poly Alexander Pedrossa, “Prod” or “PD” to friends—controlled an M-60 plugged into a socket on the ramp. Called a “stinger,” the gun swiveled 90 degrees between Prod's legs, which he dangled over the ramp. In transit to cold landing zones, the M-60 was lashed down with bungee cords.
Madden enjoyed nearly everything about his job except the cold. The frigid winter air whipped back through the open front door gunners' windows and through the wide opening over the ramp where he stood. Nothing he wore made a difference. That day he had left his cold-weather gear behind, including his Belleville boots with the snowshoe tread pattern on the soles, expecting to fly only at lower altitudes in and around the valley. He wore regular Army boots, and his toes were numb with cold. At least it didn't matter that the soles of those boots were smoother than his Bellevilles. The Chinook's ramp was unforgiving with a slick metal surface and shiny steel ridges of raised pallet skids. No matter how he was shod, unless he was wearing his safety harness, an expandable tether that hooked to his waist in front on a belt, he would drop off the aircraft—there wasn't a single doubt in his mind. This night, Madden had anticipated “a quick down-and-dirty—put these guys in and go home.” Then crack a can of butterscotch pudding.
As a matter of routine, his customers came and went, and if he knew them by sight, he said hi and bye. He dealt with only the Tier 1 JSOC special operators like Slab and his team. He had his opinions about them, as did everybody else who worked with them on a regular basis. The SEALs were thought of as standoffish, tightly focused, good men beside you in a tight place but very different in their views. They just did things differently—like smashing out the windows on the Chinooks to see better, until there were no replacement windows left in Afghanistan, and refusing to snap in their safety harnesses like other troops were made to do. An opinion was shared of them as prima donnas, leading those who weren't SEALs to wonder if they had earned their vaunted reputation through actual exploits or if their glamour was not partly derived from the fictions of movies starring Chuck Norris, Charlie Sheen, and Demi Moore. The SEALs dismissed such talk as penis envy.
This night the SEALs were packing hefty rucksacks that weighed 80-plus pounds, with the food and water and warm gear they would need to live and work while remaining hidden on Takur Ghar for several days. Madden respected their endurance, but some of the other stuff about them went over the top, like what they wore and looked like. In Afghanistan they sported beards to fit in with the locals, wore shaggy hair, and looked studiedly raffish. Tonight, they dressed in Rhodesian-type vests with pouches for extra magazines and pockets for gear, and Army tricolored camo pants; some wore Pro-Tec skateboarding helmets. On the shoulders of their dun-colored shirts they wrote their blood types in black marker.
Like them or not, they were his customers, and right now Madden had other things to think about as he peered over the ramp while the helo came in on short final. He saw trenches he thought were like an ant farm, like people had walked back and forth along the same paths. He called it out to the cockpit.
“Roger,” Al Mack said.
Madden looked to the right. He saw chickens and a donkey that was tied to a tree. He fixed the location of the donkey in his mind. Another crew chief called out another machine gun. Madden saw “little bitty stuff” that made him wonder why the pilots were not hauling ass out of there. The earth came up at him, fifteen feet, ten feet, and the Chinook touched down, aft wheels first, blowing snow and ice that burned his face and clouded his NVGs. Now stationary, he worked a static reconnaissance, looking around. Impatient and nervous, he called Mack. “We've been on the ground fifteen seconds already. Am I ramp-clear down?”
“Yeah, ramp's clear,” Mack confirmed.
Madden pulled the lever.
The left front mini gunner, Jeremy Curran, called up. “I see somebody,” he reported.
Madden stretched on his tiptoes to his full 6-foot-2-inch height. He turned around and saw Slab throw off his ICS headset. Madden did not know why, but with his authority to decide if his passengers got off, he threw out his arm and stopped him. And in the same instant, the world seemed to dissolve. Slab went down on the floor. A ball of orange flame mushroomed in the forward cabin. Madden smelled burning cordite. The helicopter rocked. A flare went off in the cabin. Smoke and fire burned along the walls. The helo shuttered. Madden heard a boom over his head. The engines were screaming with the effort of lifting off. Bullets pierced the metal skin with the sound of hammers. He was slammed to the floor by what he thought was the concussion of an RPG exploding against the right engine. He had actually taken two AK-47 rounds to his head. One bullet skimmed along the side of his crew helmet and knocked off his visor mounts. His NVG goggles stayed attached. The other bullet came in over his right ear, followed the path of the Styrofoam in his helmet over the top, and went out the other side. His helmet was not ballistic, not bulletproof. After a few seconds, he jumped to his feet. The burning oil and fluids spraying out of the aft transmission, the bearings, and the hydraulic lines blurred his vision. In the dark, he was looking with NVGs through what seemed to him a goldfish bowl. The ramp floor, covered with oil and hydraulic fluid, was “slicker'n snot.”
Madden clutched his M-60; his machine gun worked (Prod's gun was lashed to the ramp and useless), but its field of fire was limited to the right side and behind the aircraft. He keyed the mike. “We're hit, we're taking fire. Pick it up. Go! Go! Go!”
Al Mack was already pulling power. The Chinook rocked sideways, back and forth, with the turbulence of its effort to become airborne. Madden reached over and yanked the ramp lever to the up position. But the ramp did not move. It could not operate without hydraulic pressure. Madden laid into his M-60, searching for targets. He shot at and missed the donkey. He heard two more explosions. The helicopter was shaking violently. Small arms fire was peppering the length of the fuselage. Madden glanced to his right. Someone—one of the customers—was falling down the ramp past the hinge in the dark. Or, he wondered, had the SEAL mistaken whom he thought Madden was telling to go? Prod was chasing him, trying to tackle him, desperately attempting to stop him. Madden glanced left. Ramp's down. He's going to fall out!
Madden lunged at the SEAL. Prod grabbed the SEAL by his ruck handle. The guy was carrying an M-249 machine gun that weighed 27 pounds and an 80-pound pack, and with this burden, he weighed 300 pounds or more. Stopping him was like holding back a bulldozer in a mudslide. The helicopter jerked. The SEAL was thrown further off balance and was almost running backward, trying to backpedal to stop himself from flying over the edge. Prod and the SEAL both twisted in an agony of desperation. They clutched at each other for stability. The SEAL snatched at the ramp combing. His foot flew in the air. Madden grabbed his boot and held on. The SEAL was halfway out of the bird. Neither Madden nor Prod could stop him now. Madden's restraining harness snapped tight. He held the SEAL's boot for three seconds. The three men edged a couple of feet from the lip. Mack pulled power, sucking the guts out of the Chinook, and the engines did not have the juice to respond. The floor angle was level. Mack pulled so much power that the engines could not keep up the RPMs, and the bird came back down and went up again. It jerked harder. The violence of the motion snatched the SEAL out of Madden's grip, and both Prod and the SEAL went out the back over the ramp. Gone in the night. That quick.
The SEAL landed on his back, falling about 10 feet straight down through the dark onto a waist-deep cushion of snow.
One of the pilots shouted in the ICS, “We lost an engine.”
Madden keyed his mike. “Both engines are humming. Power! Power!” He was scared, panicked, freaking out. “We lost one,” he shouted in the ICS. “We got a man on the ground. Break right! We got to go back in.”
Immediately, the bird pitched right. Madden went to the edge of the ramp to haul in Prod, who was dangling by a thread over a 2,000-foot void. Madden grabbed his jacket and heaved. Prod climbed up the M-60, but his weight ripped the gun out of its socket. He fell back in the open air and bobbed on his tether, the machine gun in his arms. Madden reached down for the weapon, threw it back in the cabin, then braced and reeled in Prod, who pulled up with his arms and hands on the ramp.
Now, with Prod in the aircraft, Madden moved forward. The bird tipped wildly in a hard right turn. About six seconds had elapsed since the SEAL fell out. Madden got on the ICS—the pilots were talking about losing an engine and landing. Madden told them that both engines had power. He repeated, “We lost one. Man out. Guy on the ground. Break right. Get back in there.”
Madden stepped to check the maintenance panel. The aircraft had lost electrical power. The mini guns were quiet, so Madden assumed that Curran and Mike Nutall were dead. He keyed the ICS. “Got a hydraulic leak,” he reported. “Maintenance panel's dead. No fluid.” The levels in the gauges worked off DC power. The fact that Madden was talking on the ICS, which also operated off DC, meant that the levels were accurate, locked on zero.
Mack ordered the crew to test-fire the guns.
Madden said, “No, the mini guns are down.”
Mack asked, “Can we get one anyway?”
“The mini guns are down. I got a 60. That's all we got.”