1
THE LONG DAY WAS WEARING DOWN. IT WAS around 1700, and blue shadows were closing over the valley. Canon ordered the Rangers from both chalks to pull back to the peak along the ridge running east to west behind the bunker and overlooking the Shah-i-Kot.
Self was thinking about the counterattack. There is a tendency to become extremely relaxed in combat, because there are very sporadic, intense bouts of gunfire, followed by lulls of nothingness where everything seems completely peaceful and calm. Al-Qaeda guys, if they had experienced combat before, would have a tendency to become comfortable. They were not even looking down at us. They were not going to get up until they heard bullets cracking over their heads. The same happened to us a couple of times. We'd eliminated the threat, we thought, and then bang! It started again. It was not yet time to relax.
The men uneasily had accepted that they were not leaving the mountain until after nightfall. They had been on Takur Ghar now for more than twelve hours. They had survived an ambush, climbed a mountain, assaulted a peak, and repulsed a counterattack, but killers still were present around them. These now were the wind and cold and the clock. Lamereaux, Calvert, and most urgently Cunningham waited for dark to fall, too.
Every twenty minutes, Self reminded Masirah—and everyone else on the net—of the urgent need for medevac. After a while, Masirah stopped responding to each call. He had to remind them and would not let the issue go. He was afraid that Masirah was avoiding a decision.
Far from avoidance, commanders at Bagram, especially General Trebon, whose decision it was to make, struggled with an impossible choice, the hardest any person could ever make. He had to take seriously reports that more enemy fighters were entering the southern draw and, worse still, were trying to reach the peak from the north. Of all things, Trebon did not want another helo shot down. He wanted to rescue Cunningham and the other wounded Americans, but he did not want to make an already bad situation worse.
Everyone on the peak understood that. But they did not like it. For one, Self was adamant about the medevac. He told commanders that the LZ was cold. Sure, a counterattack had surprised them earlier, and there was sporadic gunfire coming from the south, but the LZ was cold enough. And with close air support overhead, a medevac could swoop in and fly out safely. Self reported his conversation with Tabron about an LZ. A Chinook had room to put down on an angle a few yards from the casualties, and the enemy would only be able to see the helo's rotor blades. He said, “We'll put a couple of guys on the back and the helo will be gone.”
With the lowering of the sun, the temperatures were dropping, freezing the melted snow. The sweat and blood that soaked the men's clothing and boots now was starting to harden to ice. A stiff wind blew up from the valley. Self notified Masirah that all his men, not just the wounded, risked hypothermia; now that the shooting had stopped and the men were inactive, their muscles were starting to cramp. They were dizzy and throwing up. The wounded were bleeding out and in terrible pain. Self hoped he did not need to remind his commanders that an HH-60 helo, called a Jayhawk, like a Black Hawk modified for combat search and rescue, was flying in the area. He had seen it. And this helo could land and take out their casualties in seconds. Maybe the HH-60 was not designed to perform at 10,240 feet, but Self had seen one flying over the valley, only 2,000 feet below.
Professional was not a word that Self would have used at that moment to describe the standoff between him and his commanders. He was proud of his men for accepting the inevitable. After the first hour, they no longer complained; the men understood that if a third helo was shot down, everyone on the peak was doomed. Self had made his points. After the medic LaFrenz briefed Masirah on the wounded, Self was told, “We're going to give you the order and brief the plan for the extraction with all players at this time,” and they gave Self a time: after dark.
Self asked himself, Why are they waiting? Why, if it was the creed to never leave anybody behind—why, if the SEALs went back for Roberts and the QRF went for the SEALs—why wasn't anybody coming for them? Self knew he risked insubordination, but he had gone past such distinctions. He called Masirah a final time to say, “Look, you got to understand. I may lose three guys up here if you do not get them out now.”
“We understand the nature of your casualties. It's going to happen on the timeline.”