4
ON FINAL APPROACH TO TAKUR GHAR, CALVERT brought the Chinook in too slow, and his copilot, Chief Warrent Officer Chuck Gant, told him, “Keep your speed up. Keep your speed up. A little bit more.”
The cockpit crew was looking out, front and sides, and the crew in the back watched on both sides and to the rear in the dawning light. That they could see no enemy soldiers on the peak indicated that Turner's gunship had killed those who were still alive after the firefight with Slab and his team. Calvert came up on the peak from the south, over the saddle. He picked out a landing direction for a level place below the crest. He swung out to the left and came back around down the mountain, and now he was moving up the spur, so the nose of the Chinook would stay out of a line of fire that he thought could come from the peak. He executed a swift “pop at the top” at 90 mph, and right before the top, he flared, leveled, and came straight down, like dropping on the deck of a ship. Over the snowy shelf, he bled off airspeed and started a cyclic climb by pulling off the stick but keeping the power on; the Chinook was now maxed out on power with the weight of the passengers at 10,240 feet. He was holding power, bleeding off airspeed. He could feel his copilot join him on the controls, just in case.
Fifty feet above the ground, as soon as Calvert flared the Chinook, bullets crashed through the chin bubble. In the right seat, he watched as holes pinged through the windshield glass. Two bullets hit his helmet and jerked his head left, as if a hammer had slammed his skull. In the same spray of fire, he was shot eight times across his chest, one bullet lodging in the Kevlar armor while seven flecked off.
On the controls, he increased the Chinook's speed; he was aborting the landing. He pulled power and was nosing the bird up when he heard the tortured shredding of the right engine's turbine blades. The left engine surged to pick up the load left by the disintegrating engine. Calvert had to gain airspeed if he wanted to get out of there. He nosed the helo over. Only seconds had gone by since the first shots. He was not going to make it over the ridge. The shelf that overlooked the valley stood too high. To his right, the enemy was pounding the helo with machine-gun and RPG fire.
He was going through a decision process—whether to attempt a go-around or make the landing. The smartest course of action now was to land.
A bullet hit copilot Chuck Gant in the right thigh. He was holding the controls with Calvert, who said only, “Not going to make it. Got to land.” He threw the helo in a flare, careful not to raise the thrust, to bleed off any inertia in the blades. He nosed the Chinook over and pulled it back. As they went down, he held the cyclic neutral. “Oh, shit, this's going to hurt,” he shouted. The heat from continuous blast of the right door mini gun warmed his cheek through the open side window. The helo hit the ground at 500 feet per minute into a 20-degree slope. He pushed the controls to the left and pulled thrust left in the engine. Calvert thought it “was the best goddamned landing I have ever done in my life.”
Phil Svitak, the right mini gunner, yelled, “Troops firing two o'clock, engaging.”
“Guy at three o'clock,” Calvert called out to him.
The helo was taking rounds from both ends and sides. The left door gunner, Dave Dube, was hit in the leg with a round that shattered his knife, piercing his flesh with metal shards. Svitak's mini gun went silent. A boot flew past Calvert's face and brushed his helmet. The air mission commander in the jump seat, Don Tabron, rolled out the back of the helo. Gant had pulled the engines' stop switches, and he slapped Calvert's shoulder before he popped the left emergency panel door and dropped out onto the snow. Bullets shredded the cockpit's plastic and metal, glass and insulation. The back ramp would be down and the Rangers would be running off, Calvert thought. If he failed to hold the helo into the slope now, the Chinook would roll over on the Rangers, whom he presumed were already out and would be huddling by the aircraft.
Calvert held his hands on the controls until the helo stabilized on the incline. As the blades churned down, the aircraft wobbled dangerously, but because of Calvert, it did not roll over. The aircraft settled, and with the rotor brake on, the blades stopped. Calvert said to himself, “OK, it's down, it's stable.”
He peered through the blown-out windshield. An enemy stared at him over the low rock outcrop, the same low formation on which earlier Brett had been shot in the legs. Calvert held the stick with his knees and brought up his M-4 rifle, in which he already had chambered a round. He flipped off the safety without thinking and fired two bursts out the Dairy Queen, the side slide window. He reached up for the emergency handle with his left hand as he fired another burst from his M-4. He kicked out the bottom of the door, and suddenly, when he reached back to get his weapon, his hand was on fire. Three bullets had hit him—one of them an orange tracer coated with burning phosphorous. He was also hit in the left leg. Two bullets had lodged in the muscle of the web between his thumb and forefinger. A single tendon and ulna held his hand to his arm. With his radial artery severed, deep red blood pulsed three feet in the air, spraying the cockpit consoles with a curtain of blood. In disbelief, he stared at his glowing, smoking hand. His glove covered his fingers, but the impact somehow had turned the glove inside out.
In the gunfire, an electrical fire burst from the cockpit's right side panels. Reaching up with his good hand, Calvert felt where his face was burned and blistering from the heat. Acting out of purely primitive survival instinct, he put his M-4 on the center console between the pilots' seats and rolled over to protect himself. He tried to stop the bleeding in his hand by holding a pressure point, but he was losing blood too fast. At this rate of loss, he had less than four minutes before he would bleed out. The jump seat was set in an up position where Tabron had left it blocking the companionway to the cabin, and Calvert crawled over the center console and the seat. The bat belt on his flight jumpsuit snagged on a toggle switch. He could not move. He kicked against the panel and when the snag broke suddenly, he flew out of the cockpit back into the cabin like he'd been expelled. He was thinking, Now what?