10
GABE BROWN WAS WORKING HIS END OF THE FIGHT.
With his radio, he was vainly searching for gunships. He next went looking for AWACs. He had line-of-sight communications and SATCOM with which to reach Bagram. Finally, someone answered. It was Masirah, relaying through the AWACS. Brown said, “Hey, this is Slick Zero One, part of the Razor 01 flight.” Brown reported what was happening, and the numbers of their KIAs and wounded. Masirah wanted to know what had happened to the SEALs, and if the QRF had contacted them. Brown had no idea what they were talking about. Men dead and dying up here, and they want to know about the SEALs? It made no sense to Brown, who was still trying to connect the dots. Masirah passed him the SEALs' line-of-sight frequency and asked him to contact them.
Brown was kneeling in a shallow defilade. Bullets popped and snapped over his head and past his ears. He was scared. But after a few moments he realized, It's just pops and bangs. I'm not hit. Just keep on going.
With his calm demeanor, Brown felt almost comfortable in an atmosphere of chaos. When things sucked, he felt, if not the best, then very fine. He admitted to being strung high, but once he'd entered the cone of chaos, something strange came over him. Time slowed down, like it had the time he'd flipped his mom's car on a hairpin turn, and while the car was still rolling, he slowed down the motion in his mind to figure out how to position his body so that he would not fly through the windshield. As a CCT, he loved working on dirt strips with aircraft whipping around and C-130s on short finals and men crossing the runway and the radio quitting on him.
Soon after he'd arrived in Afghanistan he'd been on the very same mission that Slab was on when he rescued the C-130 crewman. Gabe was riding a Chinook over the high Kush, with snowy peaks below. The Chinook was refueling on a tanker, taking gas in midair, and the sun was so bright its reflection off the snow confused the helo's anti-aircraft warning system into thinking the sunlight was a missile and the system automatically popped out defensive flares. He was being thrown around in the mountain turbulence when suddenly he smelled gas. He jumped up, thinking, Holy shit. The tanker to which the helo was connected by a refueling boom had plowed into the mountain, with his Chinook still connected. The helo pilot popped rivets in a very tight turn to avoid the tanker's fate.
On the ground, Brown jumped out, up to his crotch in snow. He looked down a steep incline toward the tanker's crash site, dizzy from the altitude and winded. With his radio, he called in help. Seven out of seven crew members survived. On his way back, Brown said, “That was a pretty good mission, for my first one.”
His steadiness came from his father, Billy Duane, who died of cancer when Gabe was twelve. The father had flown B-25s and F-86s in Korea, and retired in '71 as an Air Force major. His last six years, fighting cancer, he devoted to being with Gabe, his youngest son. They had fished and hunted and gone camping.
Living in the sticks outside Rolla, Missouri, in a house with six bedrooms and two bathrooms on 31⁄2 acres that backed onto 40 acres of woods, Gabe became the man of the family after his father died. He was clever with his hands. He did not have the toys that other kids played with; he built his own toys. In school, his grades reflected a lack of interest, and he struggled with math. His teacher said he knew the math principles in his head; he could work out problems without knowing he was using algebra. Frankly, his teachers did not understand him. He never wrote a single book report, and was proud of it. He read instruction books that told him how to do real things, like learning magic as “Gabe the Great.” He had utter self-confidence. There was nothing he felt that he couldn't do. His mother said, “Most people fail because they don't try. Gabe always tried.”
He was a state champion wrestler in high school, despite a tendency to let go at the end of matches. He told his mother, Marie, about a dream that worried him. “Mom, I'm climbing and I'm on a stairs, and I'm climbing and climbing and I get to the top, and I can't push the door open.” Marie said, “Gabe, whatever you do, when you get there, get that door open.”
He pushed hard. It led him into fistfights at school. He earned a reputation for standing up for himself, no matter how uneven the match. He wrecked three cars, raised endless hell, and, with no father to discipline him, walked the edge of trouble. But he seemed to know “where he could go, how far he could go, and he always stopped.” Instead of falling in with a bad crowd, he fell upon an obsession when a friend of his father's gave him a radio-controlled model airplane. He learned to fly from the ground, and he built airplanes from scratch, creating order out of the chaos of a thousand different parts. For an F-15 model, he constructed a working fan jet engine from scratch and singed his eyebrows in its heated exhaust blast. Over time, he flew his creations with skill and daring. He could judge speeds and distances expertly. He knew flight approaches and angles in three dimensions, and he understood how to describe with words what he directed the model airplanes to do. He often awoke early to go out flying before school. He carried a lawn mower battery in a box across the frosted ground to start the airplane's engine, whacking his thumb until it bled. After he flew, he went back to the house, put the airplane away, and waited for the school bus out by the road.
His “priding point” was a capacity to work hard even at a young age. On a haying crew in the summers, he bucked 1,000 and sometimes 1,600 bales in a day, and he'd work forty-eight hours straight. He actually sought out work that no one else his age would touch. He was struggling to find his way with dreams of college that his grades (Cs and Ds) did not support. When graduation came, he followed his father into the Air Force. A recruiter tried to interest him in avionics and spoke to Brown about combat controllers. He said that most young men could not make the grade. Gabe read a brochure about it and thought, I can do that. What appealed to him was that combat controllers worked in an independent atmosphere of freedom. That was how he had grown up, to do whatever he wanted without limits imposed by authority.
Awarded the CCT red beret in '94, he first went off to England and then served in Kosovo. He had met Gloria, who was valedictorian of her California high school class. Before agreeing to marry Gabe, she gave him “the speech” about life and the future. She was the stability he was searching for.
Afghanistan was his first combat experience. He listened to the special operators, the A team, as they came in from the field. They had it together, he thought. He learned from them about the practicalities, the stuff that wasn't taught, to tie the air to the ground with his radio. By the time Anaconda began, Brown was attached to Calvert's Chinook. He thought, Give me a team leader, give me a helicopter, and if it flies and there is a problem, I'll be there.
Earlier that night, he'd been awakened and told about a crewman who was missing from a helo. Brown had made his way to the flight line. When Calvert had spun up the helo, Brown kept quiet, chewing sunflower seeds and thinking, They'll probably fix the problem, and we'll turn around and come home. He tried to catch a nap. He was cold, but he knew the Chinook's “hot spots.” He carried an inflatable pad so he wouldn't have to sit on the cold, bare metal floor. He did not really care whether he was briefed on the mission. No matter where he went and what he would be doing, he knew his job. His radio was secure in his ruck. Reminding himself of a CCT mantra, The radio is your life, he was ready for chaos.
He had never been in combat, never had a shot fired at him in anger, never called in close air support on anything other than dummy targets on safe ranges where proximities were carefully guarded and maintained. But now, under fire, he calculated what facts he'd need when and if fighter jets came to help them. He would need to slow down chaos like he had never done before, as the consequences of a single small mistake were unthinkable. He wanted to be concise. He wanted to get the jets in on the targets quickly. He worried about his radio, which could simply lock up if he pushed too many buttons too fast. He was methodical and cautious. He worried about the effects of the extreme cold on his delicate electronic equipment. He carried a Garmin GPS, a civilian model about the size of a microcassette recorder. If its batteries got too cold, it malfunctioned. He switched out its batteries and warmed them against his body.
Minutes ago, he had run off the helo, stepping over the dead in the cabin and over Commons and Crose on the ramp. He ran with his radio to a flat rock where the sun had melted the snow. He shouted to Self, “Hey, Ranger, where is the enemy?”
“The tree,” Self shouted back.
“Right. What tree?”
“That tree.”
From a pocket, Brown whipped out a “J-Fire,” a reference for close air support that showed how close to friendly troops bombs could be safely dropped. Brown read in black and white that CAS wasn't going to happen with them sitting this close to the enemy.
AF combat controllers like Brown thought of themselves as different from the enlisted TACPs like Kevin Vance, although both jobs were similar, even if the training wasn't. Brown was not comfortable taking orders from Vance; only the team leader, the CO on the peak, had the authority to issue orders to bring in CAS, and Brown thought that Vance might be giving orders on his own. Every time Brown called up to Self, he got Vance, and he finally said to him, “If I yell ‘team leader,' you answer with what he tells you, and we'll go with it” on the assumption that Self had weighed the decision. Brown yelled, “I got fighters. Hey, Rangers! We've got bombs and guns. What do you want?” It was Self's choice, even if the J-Fire book said it was too close for bombs. Brown held up his compass. He had a good run-in heading for the jets.
Self replied, “Go with guns.”