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AIR FORCE LIEUTENANT COLONEL BURT “DIVOT” Bartley had pulled off a midair refueling from a tanker, taking on 6,000 pounds of avgas. He was the commander of the Air Force's 18th Fighter Squadron, attached to the Iraqi Southern Watch since December 17, flying out of al-Jabr, Kuwait, three hours' commuting time to Afghanistan on a good night.
Bartley and his wingman, Air Force Captain Andrew “Rip” Lipina, flying single-seat F-16 Vipers, carried the radio code names Clash 71 and Clash 72. Under each Viper's wing that night hung four laser-guided bombs, and 500 rounds of internal 20 mm ammunition lay stacked inside the fuselage. A 500-pound GBU-12 bomb loaded with 250 pounds of tritonal, a mixture of TNT and aluminum powder, surrounded by a 250-pound forged steel casing, had a blast pattern that shot hot steel fragments 3,000 feet in every lateral direction. Bartley and Lipina could release all 500 rounds of 20 mm ammunition with a single quick flick of the gun button on the joystick. All this firepower did not come without risks to the men it was meant to support. With the jets moving at speeds of 900 feet per second over the ground, targeting errors were a great danger when only a few feet separated friendly and enemy forces.
Earlier that night, Bartley and Lipina had been briefed just after midnight local time in Kuwait. Aware that a helo was down in the Shah-i-Kot but unaware what their tasks would be over Afghanistan, they took off about 0300 local time, flying across the Arabian Sea and southwestern Pakistan before reaching Afghanistan. They refueled another time and crossed into their area of operation around southeastern Afghanistan. An AWACS told them to “frag”—go to their orbit point and hold. That meant the night looked like it was going to be business as usual, with the expectation that they would fly on station until somebody called them.
A voice from an AWACS came up in Bartley's flight helmet. Troops needed his help at the downed helicopter. He and Lipina started to prepare. A check of their maps told them that Takur Ghar was 200 miles away. Even at a speed of 9.5 miles a minute, Bartley estimated twenty-two minutes to the mountain. He pushed the throttles up to military power against the Vipers' Q, or aerodynamic limit. He overheard the call sign Slick 01, Gabe Brown's, relaying through AWACS. The casualty figures that Brown reported struck Bartley in his heart. Without his bombs and bullets, the Rangers on the mountain could not hope to evacuate their wounded. The emotion and the stress bore down on him, unlike any other time in his twenty years in aviation.
This would be his first use of the aircraft's weapons for real; Lipina's, too. Lipina was excited. Something big was about to happen. He was thinking, This is the first time from the get-go of a pretty good chance of using bombs and guns. To an Air Force fighter pilot, this felt like a dream was coming true.
On previous missions, Bartley had dropped bombs on enemy positions without friendly troops anywhere near the points of impact. He had only trained at close air support, but he had worked CAS with live ammunition and troops in training more than any F-16 pilot in the combat air forces. He had spent three and a half years with the 549th Combat Training Squadron at the National Training Center. At Nellis AFB, he flew CAS on a nearly daily basis, ten exercises a year, each exercise lasting about two and a half weeks, with as many as ten “battles.” To him, fate had put him on this course.
Bartley knew enough to know that CAS was the most inefficient way for air forces to engage the enemy. He preferred dropping thousands of pounds of bombs well clear of friendly forces. It was like a mantra. If you can kill someone with a rifle at a hundred meters, why wait for him to come at you with a pistol or a spear or knife?
Bartley saw the peak of Takur Ghar out his bubble. He linked with Gabe Brown, who articulated exactly what he wanted Bartley to do. He gave the pilot an attack axis on the mountain to run in on, looking up toward the bunkers over his right shoulder. In a clear, calm voice, Brown described where he wanted the bullets to strafe: two helicopter lengths to the right, at the one o'clock position of the downed helo. Bartley calculated the Chinook's length at 50 feet; therefore, 100 feet separated the enemy bunker from the broken helo. The Rangers, at the helicopter's four o'clock position one helicopter length away, were even closer than danger close.
Bartley's “pepper track,” or aiming reference across the ground, was moving at 9 miles a minute. He would be shooting at a target zone 500 feet long and no-room-for-error wide.
He lined up the downed Chinook in his targeting pod. He was off NVGs. It was daylight, around eight o'clock in the morning, and the sun was low on the horizon. He turned 150 degrees to get on the attack axis and rolled down the chute on final for the run. At this altitude, in the mid-20s, he could not make out people on the ground from two or three miles out. He was engaging a position on the ground, diving at 30 degrees. He planned to pull out of the dive at 1,500 feet above the mountain. As he came in the Viper screamed with a sound that curled the air.
At that closer-than-danger-close range, Bartley needed a final clearance before he could shoot. Brown gave him the initials of his name, in essence saying that he accepted the risk of being hit by friendly fire. Bartley would strafe and drop bombs wherever he was told, but he knew that fingers would point at him if there was fratricide.
He rolled in, but Brown did not see him on his first pass in time to give him final clearance, and Bartley did not put bullets on the target. He pulled off, made an immediate turn, and came back around on the same axis in an arc the shape of a kidney bean. On the pass, Bartley had not seen the enemy on the peak. He knew where Brown told him they could be found, but the shattering sound of his engine had almost certainly sent them burrowing into the bottom of their bunkers. He and Brown talked over corrections. On this roll in, Bartley would pop out a couple of self-protection flares to allow Brown to see where he had lined up and was coming from. The two men understood one another; each understood, even this quickly, how the other one thought. In training, some pilots' voices had actually frightened Brown into wishing they would not drop their bombs anywhere near him. But Bartley's was a calm, reassuring tone. Brown was staying easy with an effort, and on the next run, he cleared Bartley hot on final.
Bartley laid a good solid pattern of 250 rounds across the peak, shredding what was left of the fir trees, bullets cracking off the rocks. A 20 mm bullet is about the same length as a man's thumb and about an inch in diameter. The sound of the gun was like popping plastic packing bubbles. Brown ducked down. Snow flew up across the peak, and he smelled the pine scent as the trees splintered. He was watching the Rangers not get hit.
With the Viper in a tight turn, Brown yelled to Self, “Hey, where did those bullets go?”
“I don't know. We can't see.”
DePouli was down low to the ground. When the guns came in, he shouted, “Holy shit. That was pretty fucking close.”
On his second pass, Bartley emptied his guns. He lagged his turn, and Lipina cut inside, now ready to take the lead.
Self needed to know the effect of the bullets. He wanted to make a quick assault, uphill toward the bunkers, after the strafing runs. On Bartley's gun passes, the Viper had approached the hill over Self's right shoulder; he had turned around to watch a cloud of the Viper's 20 mm brass casings drop to earth. The rounds had exploded in front of the Rangers and uphill. Self smelled the same essence of pine from the shattered trees as Brown had.
Vance conferred with Self, then shouted down at Brown. Self wanted the pilots to make another run.
Brown replied, “They're cleared to come in again.”
Lining up, “Rip” Lipina recalled that a thousand yards was as close as he'd ever strafed to friendly troops. When he rolled in, his cockpit's “pepper track”—the gaming dots pilots use to put down bullets—was touching the helicopter, and he was still trying to line up his shot when he rolled out. Things were moving too fast. If he had pulled the trigger on that run, his bullets would have hit the helo. He was feeling nervous. He came around for a second run.
“Clash 71 in, in thirty seconds,” he radioed to Brown. He popped a single flare with a thumb-activated switch on the stick. “Clash 71 in.”
Brown satisfied himself that the Viper's nose was pointed in the right direction. He told him, “Clash 71, you are cleared hot.”
Lipina was in the weeds at 2,000 feet over the peak to give the Rangers “good bullets.” He was flying lower than his rules of engagement authorized, but he worked with the caveat to do what he needed to save lives. He emptied his guns.
As the jet screamed off to the west, the al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters on the peak rose from their hiding places and fired down on the Rangers, almost as if the strafing runs had not made a difference to them.
A half hour or longer went by, with Self waiting for an assessment of the runs. Then Brown heard from Masirah that the Predator was showing movement in the bunker. “They still see those guys,” he said.
More time went by. Self checked back. “They still see 'em?”
“Yeah, they're there sitting behind the tree.”
The 20 mm rounds had hit close to the target. What was happening up there? They could only guess at the resourcefulness—or the extraordinary luck—of the enemy that had enabled them to survive the runs. Maybe they had fled the peak, leaving behind only a rear-guard security element of two or three gunners, or maybe their installation included deep bunkers.
Vance asked Self about using bombs. Self replied, “No, we're not doing that.”
This was a small but remarkable moment. In a sense, it defined the fight on the peak. Soldiers worked with age-old fundamentals—map reading, shooting weapons accurately, team tactics, endurance, channeling of aggression, and so on; these were elements that soldiers had carried onto battlefields since well before Homer. But in the twenty-first-century military, F-16 Vipers, Predators, AC-130 gunships, and other fantastic machines multiplied the soldier's power to an extreme only dreamed of before. On Takur Ghar, however, the close proximity between friendly and enemy fighters rendered these force multipliers useless. In a certain sense that Self appreciated, his QRF might as well have been fighting in Achilles' day. For instance, Vance and Brown were trained to a fine point to operate sophisticated computer/radios. On Takur Ghar, Vance was pulling a trigger. Self wasn't about to leverage two pieces of sophisticated communications equipment that early in the fight, when he needed trigger pullers. The fight from Self's perspective was simple, lethal, and harrowing. The enemy was in front of him up a hill looking down. It could have been a castle keep. It was daylight. The scale of the engagement was tiny by comparison to what was happening in the valley below. Takur Ghar had become a “paradoxical mix of simplicity and complexity.”
Bartley was on the radio to Brown. “OK, what's next?” he asked him. Bartley was trained as a forward air controller, which meant he was good at hitting intended targets with bombs. He told Brown about his GBU-12s, and, leading Brown, he asked, “What can we do to help?”
Self had already said he did not want bombs. He had not worked with Brown, who would be calling them in. He knew nothing about Bartley. And Vance, whom he did trust, did not have a SATCOM radio. Self could not put the lives of his men in the hands of a combat controller he did not know, unless he had no other choice.