EIGHT

In July 2009, about halfway through my five-month deployment, I heard a familiar voice as I walked into the morning brief. I’d know that mellow Caribbean accent anywhere. When I turned the corner, I saw the broad shoulders and big smile of TieJie “TJ” Jones, my buddy from California. Our commander, Lieutenant Colonel Rhys Hunt, started to address the group, welcoming our comrades who had just arrived. TJ stood next to Colonel Hunt, wearing his signature troublemaker’s smirk. On the colonel’s other side was a new guy I’d never met before. He was only an inch or two taller than me, a little older, and had an air of serenity around him that seemed to balance out the restless energy in the room.

Midway through any deployment, some of us would go home and a few of us who had been left behind would come in to replace them. I was losing my Gunner and my Aircraft Commander, and I was eager to hear who my new crew would be. I was of course hoping that Steve and I would stay together, though it wasn’t a given. They could and often did change up crews at the drop of a hat, but I didn’t particularly want to fly with anyone except Steve. Anything we did together took half as long. After our time running drug missions in California that previous summer, we could almost read each other’s minds through the call-and-response dance of Co-Pilots and Flight Engineers.

Colonel Hunt looked over at me. “MJ and Steve, Teej is your new Gunner.” YES! This was going to be great—TJ was a top-notch Gunner. Now, who would be sitting in the seat next to me?

“I want you all to welcome to our squadron Major George Dona. He’s coming to us from active duty, and this is his first time in country. MJ, take good care of him.”

The new guy. I looked my new Aircraft Commander over and gave him a nod. For his first time in Afghanistan, he didn’t look very worried. George smiled, showing sun-worn wrinkles around his eyes. Even standing ramrod straight, hair high and tight in the same short cut all of the guys wore, his vibe still screamed Hawaiian surfer dude. George Dona. We’d heard about him. None of us had ever flown with him before, but his reputation from active duty was stellar. When not required to be in a flight suit, George was known to immediately change into his natural uniform of flip-flops and board shorts. He and TJ were going to fit right into our Kandahar gazebo team, I thought.

When the brief ended, we gathered around the recent arrivals.

“Teej!” I said, and he grabbed my hand and pulled me in to bump shoulders—even though his shoulder hit the top of my head.

“Welcome aboard, George—the men you’ll fly with here are top-notch,” I heard Doug Sherry say, around the unlit cigar in his mouth. It was seven a.m.—seriously, did he sleep with that thing in his mouth? George wore a smile at all times, so I couldn’t tell if he’d caught the men comment. I was pretty sure Sherry didn’t mean it as a pointed jab in my direction, but it just solidified for me once again how utterly invisible I was to him. He never missed an opportunity to show me—intentionally or not—that he didn’t think of me as a part of his team.

Later that day, we walked out to our Pave Hawk with the new team for a dry run, George caught in the crossfire of our banter.

“You haven’t flown with MJ before,” Steve informed him jokingly. “Please don’t judge all of Team Hawk by our one weak link.” On cue, he deftly stepped out of the way before I could slug him. Experience had taught him well.

TJ waved a dismissive hand. “You sure about that, Steve? I hear that it’s the Flight Engineer who is the weak link on Hawk.”

“Shut up and go oil your barrel, Gunner,” Steve shot back, laughing.

George smiled and nodded, not saying much. Clearly he took the quiet approach. I could tell he was waiting to see if all this cockiness bore out when we got in the air. And it did. As soon as we got the bird up in the air and crossed the fence out of Kandahar, we all sat a little straighter and looked around a little more intently. Within a few days, it felt like the best crew I’d ever flown with. Steve, TJ, George, and me. We had our rhythms coordinated, and we quickly trusted each other’s instincts. It felt like a true team.

It was a damn good thing the team managed to gel so quickly. Only two weeks after George arrived, I would experience the longest day of my life with them.

—

In the early afternoon of July 29, 2009, I was sitting in the left-side pilot’s seat of our Pave Hawk, Pedro 15 (or “Pedro one five”). My crew had just come on shift, so I was checking the radios and had the main power spun up. Rows of other helos sat waiting on the bone-dry taxiway, heat shimmering off it in waves. Even in my flight suit, the temperature didn’t get to me anymore, but I tied the arms around my waist to help me cool off. The heat could fatigue a crew pretty quickly, but it could wreak more havoc with the aircraft, decreasing the power of our engines and slowing us down. In this kind of climate, we flew with both pilots’ doors off, in order to ventilate the cabin and help us to see the ground when the dust clouds engulfed the helicopters.

I reached down to align the navigation system with the GPS satellites. When I looked back up, I saw George and the team jogging toward me across the hot tarmac.

When George reached the aircraft, he flung a piece of paper across the seat to me. I slapped it down on the console with my gloved hand before the wind snatched it. As George hauled himself up into the chest-high cockpit and strapped himself in, I scrutinized the paper, plugging in the coordinates off it. By the time Steve and TJ jumped in the back and put on their helmets, we were just about ready to fly.

“Battery on, APU on,” Steve read over the intercom, going through the scramble checklist.

I had already spun those up, so we were ahead of the game.

“Fuel selectors on, number one engine, number two engine.”

My fingers found the switches before Steve finished reading them off.

Behind me, I heard TJ pop open an ammunition box, feeding the belt into his door gun and slapping the cover down with a clap. He and Steve hooked into a lanyard so they could move around the cabin and—if they had to survey the landscape below—safely hang out the doors while we flew. Instinctively, I reached a hand back and touched my rifle, making sure it was right where it belonged behind my seat.

The mission sheet said we were on our way to rescue three critical American soldiers. Their convoy had hit an IED-complex ambush about twenty-five minutes out from Kandahar—well inside that “golden hour” when our medics could save almost anyone.

Our helo was nearly ready to go, and just in time, three PJs climbed on board. Short and muscle-bound, they looked like G.I. Joe action figures, with all the high-speed gear laced into the webbing of their body armor and short GUA-5 assault rifles pinned to their chests. The PJs are the most unsung heroes of the war. Few people back home have heard of Air Force Special Ops, but every grunt on the ground has. Besides making the medical decisions, the PJs take charge in the unlikely event that we end up in ground combat.

Today I recognized one of the three—Technical Sergeant ***** ******—a rock-solid airman I’d flown with before. He was the PJ team lead, and his team was ready to go. The soldiers we were going to rescue didn’t even know how lucky they were that he was on board.

Once the PJs were strapped in, we were off. We cleared our takeoff with the radio tower and flew out across the fence in a gale of dust. We flew over Kandahar’s civilian airport, where, despite the war going on all around them, you could see Afghans stepping down airplane gangways, wearing suits or robes or light blue burkas. Once we had passed over the one straight paved highway, all we could see ahead were imposing rocky hills.

After we flew north over the hills, the landscape started to turn green—a seemingly pretty change from the dusty dry brown that surrounds the base and most of central Kandahar. But after three tours, I’d learned the downside of a fertile landscape. In Helmand at Bastion, it would have been poppy fields, but here in Kandahar, they were more likely to be pomegranate orchards and lush grapevines trailing over tall mud-brick walls. It looked idyllic, sure, until a man in cheap shades and a turban pops out of the scenery with a rocket-propelled grenade to shoot down your helicopter.

I saw a cluster of farmhouses ahead—another thing I’d learned to avoid.

“Come right thirty,” I said.

George acknowledged with a sharp bank of the aircraft, changing our heading to thirty degrees right of our course. He had more years as a pilot than me, but no ego to prevent him from responding to my input. He and I had gotten along well from the start, and I knew what an enormous responsibility I had to him as the combat-seasoned veteran on board. He would be depending on me to help him make decisions, and I wasn’t planning to let him down.

Behind us our sister ship, Pedro 16, followed a course skewed off to one side and behind us, both of us flying low and fast. Like us, Pedro 16 carried a handful of PJs and a crew of four. If one helo went down, the other should be able to rescue the entire second crew and the patients in need. Pedro 15 was lead ship this time—so Pedro 16 was our backup and would hang back and cover us with their door guns while we got the wounded out.

“Threat suppressed for now, over.”

The radio traffic from two Army choppers supporting the hobbled convoy from the air was reporting that the firefight we were heading into was over, at least for the moment. The Army choppers were OH-58 “Kiowa Warriors”—nimble two-pilot helicopters with a giant bug’s eye of a surveillance camera sitting on top of the rotors. They packed a punch, too—rocket launchers above one skid and a large-caliber machine gun over the other. It sounded like the Kiowas had pushed back the Taliban enough that we could make it in to grab the wounded without taking too much fire.

I got on the radio to Shamus 34, the Kiowa.

“Shamus three four, Pedro copies.”

There was a silence. Our sister ship broke through the static: “Pedro fifteen, did you catch that? Shamus three four reported they have suppressed the threat to the convoy for now, but there may still be enemy forces to the south.”

Of course we’d caught it. That’s why I’d responded to the Kiowa! I was confused, but very quickly it dawned on us: No one had heard our reply.

George looked at me and rolled his eyes. Our own radio jammers, put in place to scramble the enemy’s communication efforts, sometimes left our aircraft deaf and dumb. It was possible we had a malfunction, but we had tested the radios before we left. Regardless, now we’d have to relay all our communication through our sister ship. And when you’re flying into hot enemy territory, it’s not really the best time to play “telephone.”

A high-pitched voice came across the FM receiver. “I . . . pickup . . . out of here . . . wounded . . . now . . .” Even with the broken-up transmission, we could all hear that the soldier was scared.

“Fox-Mike bent,” I said to my crew, meaning the FM radio wouldn’t be reliable today.

“Yeah, comms are shit.” George nodded, saying aloud what I’d been thinking.

Before I could worry much about the radios, our helo cleared a ridge, and the broken-down convoy appeared in the valley below us, like gladiators in a Roman arena. From our vantage point on high, the line of drab US Army trucks looked like a toy train, blocked in by a scorched crater. Taliban gunmen who were hiding in the village to the south had the whole squad pinned down.

“Contact,” George said. “I have them three o’clock low.”

“Roger, contact,” Steve confirmed.

“Pedro one six. One five in the blind. We’re coming right two seven zero landing north of the convoy,” reported George, telling our sister ship we would be doing a right turn all the way around to face west.

George didn’t even know if our sister ship could hear him, but going “in the blind” meant that he would continue to transmit just in case Pedro 16 could hear us. He was going to swing around in a horseshoe pattern and land to the right of the convoy, putting the reported enemy activity to the south, out our left door. That way the armored trucks between us and the enemy guns would provide cover for the PJs and the wounded while we loaded up the helo. We’d drop in to allow two of the three PJs to jump off. Then we’d pull pitch, heading back above the ridgeline, allowing the PJs to work on the wounded without having to scream over our rotor wash. When they were ready, they’d call the third PJ, still on board our aircraft, on their inter-team radio to bring us back.

It was a good plan. George’s confidence, when he was only a few weeks in this hostile country, continued to impress me.

Then he did something spectacular.

A normal helo approach is a forty-five-degree-angle glide into the landing zone, slowly bleeding off airspeed on the way down. Normal means predictable, though, and with Taliban guns ready to take target practice on us, predictable just means an easy way to die. Instead, George flew full-speed at the last truck in the convoy. It felt almost like an autorotation. I’ll admit I was holding my breath the entire time. I had full faith in him, but given the fact that we had just started flying together, I hovered my hands over the controls, ready to take over if he was going to plant us into the ground.

“George?” I said, just about at my limit for comfort.

“I got it . . .” he said, reading my mind. And he did have everything under control. Just forty feet before impact, he suddenly pulled the nose up, bleeding off the airspeed in an instant, flying alongside the convoy, rotors pitched back like a falcon pumping its wings to land in a treetop. I’d never seen anything like it. You can feel in your body when a helo is out of control, and George never came anywhere close to that. He wasn’t macho hotdogging, like I’d seen with Top Gun wannabes in flight school; George knew the limits of the aircraft and pushed against them to do what needed to be done. He flew like I tried to—using the aircraft as an extension of his body rather than a vehicle in which to sit.

The PJs jumped out and ran toward the convoy, one after another. Tech Sergeant ***** ******, the PJ I’d flown with before, was still on board. And thank goodness he was, because that was about when the day started to go very, very wrong.

—

I heard a crack like a baseball bat hitting a home run, and then the helo’s windshield shattered right in front of my eyes. Through the web of splintered glass, the Kandahar desert hills stretched out for miles in front of me. But all I saw was the perfectly round little hole in the middle of the windshield, where the hot desert air was whistling in from outside.

My right arm felt warm and wet, but I ignored it. I was thinking only about the wrecked windshield. It was brand-new—our maintainers had just spent hours in the searing heat replacing it the day before. I’d joked with the crew chiefs that we should just kick the old glass out instead of going by the book and painstakingly removing it in one piece. All their work was ruined now.

Maybe they’ll kick this one out?

One look at George’s horrified face reeled me back to the present tense. His lips moved, and I knew the whole crew was shouting at me over the intercom, but for an instant all I could hear was the high whine of the engine and the deep comforting thunder of the rotor blades. I followed George’s gaze to the blood spreading over my exposed arm and the leg of my flight suit. I had the strangest split-second moment of relief that I had tied my sleeves around my waist in an attempt not to overheat. Now I wouldn’t have to patch a bullet hole in the arm of my uniform.

How can I be hit in two places if there’s only one hole in the windscreen?

Snap out of it, I told myself. I quickly assessed my situation.

“I’m hit, but . . . I can still fly,” I told them, fully confident that I was telling the truth. “I’m hit, but I’m okay!”

“Are you really okay?” There were four voices shouting all at once in my headset.

George pulled the helo up in the air and out of rifle range as *****, the PJ team lead, squeezed over the console to look at my injuries. With his bulk and all his medical gear, he barely fit, and it probably didn’t help that I was trying to swat him away so I could get back to the mission at hand.

Shrapnel peppered my right forearm and right thigh. The arm wounds were superficial. I couldn’t see the leg wound, but the spreading bloodstain was worrying—first it was the size of a grapefruit, and then it grew larger and larger until it was the size of a basketball. But after a few minutes the stain stopped spreading, and I began to breathe easier. I’d never been shot before, but I’d flown so many wounded troops that I could tell a serious wound from a paper cut. No reason to call off the mission.

In the back, TJ was doing just that. “I repeat . . . Pedro one five Co-Pilot hit . . . We’re RTB . . .” Return to base!

I didn’t blame him—I was covered in blood, but I was in no way ready to head back to base.

“Gunner—hold that,” I said. I could sense the look he was giving me without even having to turn around. They were all looking at me in disbelief. Even George had started to look a little pale through his dark Hawaiian complexion.

“Look, guys, I swear!” I reached my arm up over my head and moved it side to side. “I have full range of motion, and my leg has already stopped bleeding. We’ve got three cat-A soldiers down there. Let’s get back to it.”

After all, we had to give them “brave inspirations,” right? Category A meant urgent, and I wasn’t going to be the reason they bled out. I had lost enough soldiers to this war already, and I knew that if we lost them I would never forgive myself for heading back to KAF.

Steve was the only one who didn’t seem to object. After so much time together flying on drug eradication missions in California, he knew me well enough: If I said I was good, I was good. He knew I would never endanger my own crew out of some sense of bravado.

After a moment of silence, George piped up to the guys in back.

“You guys okay with going back in?”

He got affirmative answers from everyone, so he began to turn the aircraft back toward the convoy. Steve broke in that if we were going back in, we should enable the contingency power switch, a switch that would give us extra power if we needed it, but is used only in dire circumstances as it can burn up your engines if you’re not careful. I flipped it on, and we headed back toward the convoy.

Right on time, a familiar voice broke in over the radio: “Pedro one five, Guardian’s ready for pickup.” It was one of our PJs from the ground. They had no idea we’d been hit.

Unbeknownst to us, the PJs had gotten separated at the convoy and were not in communication with each other. The jammers had affected their inter-team radio, and only one of the PJs had made contact with the patients. He called us to land, hoping that the second PJ would see us touch down and run out to jump on board.

“Copy. Tell them we’re inbound,” George told the PJ team lead.

Then the headset crackled: “Pedro one five, one six . . . bent gun.”

Bent gun. Shit, they were having a weapons malfunction. Our sister ship was telling us they had a broken gun and would be able to support us out of only one side of their bird. The only thing worse than returning to the scene where you got shot is doing it when your support ship can’t fire one of its guns to defend you. What else could possibly go wrong?

“Roger. Grinder.” George, cool as a cucumber, was calling for the two ships to switch roles.

Protocol states that if your support ship is impaired, you become the support ship. We would cover Pedro 16 with our two working guns as they landed to pick up the PJs and the wounded.

“Negative. We don’t have the power,” came the reply from command in Pedro 16, fast and a little frantic. “We’re too heavy. We can’t do it.”

George and I exchanged a silent glance. I guess our radios were working again, because the other AC had clearly understood that we needed them to go in next but was refusing.

It was true that it was a lot of extra weight to ask Pedro 16 to lift with three patients on the ground, our two PJs, plus their own full crew on board, but there are always fixes to unforeseen problems. Instinctively, I ran through all the ways to do it. The easiest solution was for them to dump some fuel, then reroute after the pickup to a nearby refueling point. It could be done—but not without steady resolve by Pedro 16’s pilot.

He’s lost his nerve, I thought to myself. George nodded like he could read my mind. He kept quiet, too. We didn’t want to alarm the rest of our crew, but our silence didn’t fool anyone. They’d all heard the pilot’s voice. All of us who had done tours in Afghanistan had seen someone lose their courage. There was no coming back from that.

“Are you shitting me?” someone half shouted from the back of the bird. Now we’d have to stay lead, with Pedro 16 staying above, covering us with just one gun. At least the Kiowa Warriors had hung around and were still buzzing over the convoy. Their pods were about half full of rockets, which would give us some extra cover.

George quickly yanked and banked, about to execute the same heart-stopping dive-landing next to the convoy he had pulled off moments before, but he was now faced with a difficult choice. He could land to the same spot and be predictable to the enemy, or he could land somewhere else that hadn’t been cleared and risk landing on a mine or other improvised explosive device (IED). The convoy we were evac’ing the patient from had been disabled after they’d hit their own IED, so we knew there were likely more. George decided the lesser of two evils was to land on the same spot. However, while the small bullet that had splintered into my arm and thigh had been a dumb-luck shot from a rifle, we were about to find out that one of the enemy’s heavy belt-fed machine guns had since been trained on our landing zone.

As the wheels touched down, heavy slugs from their machine gun began to hit us hard, beating out a steady rhythm into our aircraft. I could feel more than hear the big rounds slamming into us. They shook my insides. As rounds impacted the tail and slowly started moving forward as the enemy maneuvered the heavy gun, our eight-ton aircraft rocked like a little rowboat on the ocean. The row of armored trucks gave us little protection from the barrage. The enemy was firing from the high ground at eleven o’clock.

The PJ who was off comm must have seen the hail of fire we were under and thought, F that . . . I’m not gonna get shot trying to run to an aircraft that isn’t taking off. While one of the PJs and patients came out to the bird, a second PJ stayed with the convoy. With our hands full responding to failing systems and boarding patients, no one on board stopped to ask where he was.

When the tail malfunctions, a warning horn can be heard over the intercom. Since our tail was being shot to shit, the horn was drowning out anything we were trying to say to one another. It was all happening so fast that none of us thought to silence the horn with our cutoff switch, but we were on the ground for what had to be less than fifteen seconds.

With the sirens blaring over our intercom, we couldn’t talk to one another in these crucial few seconds. However, from my vantage point closest to the convoy on the left side of the aircraft, I could see over my left shoulder that the patients were still being loaded. We couldn’t lift during transfer, because we’d hurt or kill someone. So I gave George the signal with my hand to hold and stay down on the ground, until I saw that the patients were safely on board.

This was an incredible show of steely nerves on George’s part, let alone faith in the judgment of his Co-Pilot. He had very little prior knowledge of me other than the fact that he knew I was experienced and that I had gone through the same training he had. A lesser pilot would have panicked at the aircraft being rocked by heavy fire and might have just bolted, causing injury or death to the patients and soldiers loading them onto our aircraft.

Our sister ship and the two Kiowas couldn’t help us. It was clear that the enemy had been planning this attack in the hopes of taking down a rescue helicopter. Insurgents were dug into the high ground with weapons aimed at the landing site. They had concealed their position to the extent that our cover ships could not determine a point of origin for the fire we were taking. We couldn’t fire back; nor could our support ships. We were on our own.

TJ couldn’t spot the enemy machine gun either, and he could hardly open fire while our patients were being loaded in. Not to mention, his gun was designed to fire down, not up. So he and his fifty-cal had to sit and wait, just taking the fire as the wounded soldiers were loaded into the left bay door.

Once I saw we were clear, I gave George the thumbs-up. With two pilots, one is always “outside” and the other “inside” the aircraft. George would watch the terrain and fly us back to the hospital at Kandahar Airfield. My job was to concentrate on the systems.

Many times, in a crisis, crews will make things worse by flipping the wrong switch in their haste. Pilots have been known to accidentally shut down a good engine while the other is on fire. As per our protocol, I was calling back to Steve to confirm all of the switches I was flipping, isolating hydraulics and such. While he was verbally confirming all of my actions, he actually had his hands full with manning his gun and trying to keep bad guys away long enough for us to get out of the landing zone (LZ). He wasn’t even watching me. Given our history, he trusted me completely to be doing the right thing and thought he would serve us better searching for a point of origin for the incoming fire.

We barely had enough power to clear the terrain ahead of us, but thanks to Steve, we had engaged our contingency power switch on the way in. He had known when we went back in that we’d be facing a firefight. That decision, at this second, was saving our lives. If he had not thought of that on our way in, we would be a scorch mark on the desert floor today.

—

In our line of work, there is simply no worse feeling in the world than leaving a PJ or patient behind. The first thing we would normally do in this situation is turn around and go back in to get our missing PJ. However, things were about to go from bad to worse for us, and the aircraft we were flying would only be making one more landing in its lifetime.

George kept us flying low and fast, so the enemy would have a harder time drawing a bead on us against the sky—more brilliant flying on his part. Seconds after takeoff, though—and just as ***** was realizing that for some reason, our third PJ wasn’t on board—Steve said something that turned my blood cold.

“We’ve got fuel back here . . .” From the smell, I knew he meant that it was spewing into the cabin. I immediately looked at the fuel gauge to see how fast it was leaking. The number one fuel tank on the left side of the aircraft wasn’t just leaking—it was already empty—and the number two tank wasn’t far behind.

The two gas tanks are heavily armored, so the Taliban’s machine gun rounds must have hit the tiny fuel line—for the second time today, a one-in-a-million shot. Each tank fed one of the Pave Hawk’s jet engines, so now one of our engines was running on fumes. With this load on board, one engine wouldn’t be able to keep us aloft. In an instant, I followed through a quick chain of logical events in my head. At the end of the chain, there was only one conclusion. Us flaming out and hitting the ground burning. Any second now.

I instinctively threw the fuel selector into cross-feed, buying us a few minutes as the left engine started receiving fuel from the right tank. The bird kept flying. We hadn’t planted into the terrain. Yet. Thank God. Here we are, about to crash on the desert floor, and instead of my life flashing before my eyes, I found myself imagining a crew recovering the wreckage. They’d load it all up into a Chinook and drag it back to Kandahar, and then the head of the investigation would say, “Hey, look—at least the Co-Pilot switched the number one fuel selector into cross-feed.”

Before I could breathe a sigh of relief, I looked at the fuel gauge. The needle for the right tank, now feeding both engines, was moving toward empty far too quickly.

There was only one option left.

“We need to land.”

“Yeah, we’re RTB,” George replied. It came as no surprise that he was so focused on flying and on the surrounding terrain, he was unaware that our problem was bigger than a little fuel smell in the cabin. He didn’t know about the empty tanks. We were RTB—returning to base, obviously. As in, umm, yeah, what the hell else would we be doing?

“We’re not going to make it back to Kandahar,” I stated, as clearly and calmly as I could. “We’re pissing gas.”

I saw the tiniest flicker of alarm on George’s face.

“We have to either land over there”—I pointed to a flat spot of rocky sand just over to our right—“or we’re going to crash . . . over there.”

I pointed to a different ridge five miles off.

George didn’t question a word I said. Without pause, he immediately pointed out a rocky spot where he planned to drop the helo. There? It was the right call. Harder to put land mines under rocks than sand. Our ordeal was far from over, and we weren’t going home just yet. George needed zero distractions so he could concentrate on flying and landing our failing aircraft at the site, so an eerie hush came over us as he dove toward the rocky terrain.

Everyone did their part to prepare, but very soon there was nothing left to do except hold on tight for the crash. I reached my left arm up to the top of the doorway, placed my bleeding right hand on the console, and took a deep breath.

The bird was without hydraulic assistance to the controls as George guided us down—I could feel the strain through my seat, like driving an 18-wheeler with no power steering. As we touched down, far faster than usual, we could hear the bird crunch on impact. I felt a jarring crack in my mid-back, but the pain wouldn’t slow me down, certainly not today. We had landed—a hard landing rather than a crash, thanks to George—all of us no worse for it. We were alive. George was an amazing pilot, and now his job was done. It was time for the PJs to take over.

The only thing to worry about now was the Taliban—and somehow figuring out how to get the hell out of there.

My hands moved quickly around the console, pulling levers and flipping switches, executing exactly as we’d been trained. I cut off the throttles and closed off the remaining fuel. The crew did the same, calmly and quickly running through the shutdown procedures we’d done hundreds of times.

Alongside that checklist, I tried to quiet my brain from playing out a script that I knew was no horror movie. It was our new reality: IEDs on the ground everywhere, no perimeter security, hills around us full of Taliban. I knew I’d fight to the death—far better that than being captured and marched through enemy territory with a bag over my head.

I reached around for my rifle, grabbed it, and slid out of the helo down to the rock-strewn terrain. After three tours in Afghanistan flying into countless combat zones, this was the first time I’d ever stepped outside the wire of an air base, on the ground in enemy territory.

With my back flat against the bird, I shuffled aft and looked in the cabin, finally getting a good look at the patients we’d rescued. An older-looking soldier with his arm in a sling wore a vacant expression as if he’d already checked out. Not so the guy on the stretcher next to him—he looked plain pissed off. Straps on his chest and legs held him immobile. He was likely a spinal injury, but his arm could move, so he calmly made a request.

“Give me a fucking gun.”

TJ handed the wounded soldier his sidearm and, despite the situation, we shared a smile. One more warrior on our side.

The third patient was another story. She looked young. I couldn’t tell the extent of her injuries, just that panic had her shivering, despite the overwhelming Afghan summer heat. As she sat still on her seat, her eyes darted wildly around the cabin and outside to the hills. I bent close.

“Hey . . . hey, look at me.” I locked on to her gaze.

“A rescue bird was just shot down in Afghanistan. Every aircraft in a one-hundred-mile radius just launched to come get us”—I got straight to the point—“so calm down. We’ll be out of here soon.”

As I stood up and turned back to TJ, I rolled my eyes.

He nodded in agreement. “Man, that’s why they shouldn’t let women on those convoys,” he said to me quietly.

Covered in my own blood and soaked with jet fuel, I stared him down hard for a tick, but he didn’t catch on.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

TJ looked bewildered for a second; then it clicked.

“Oh, not you, MJ! You kick ass . . .” he stammered.

I turned back to the bay door. I had no time to think about what it meant that TJ, who knew I was a warrior who would hold my own, somehow thought I was the exception. He still couldn’t accept the fact that some women were every bit as capable as a guy in uniform.

After all, the pilot in Pedro 16 was a guy, and his loss of nerve was still fresh in my mind. Speaking of which, where the hell were they? Why weren’t they landing next to us to get us out of Dodge? Not to mention, I was the one with blood all over my rifle arm, still ready to fight. Battle readiness had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with individual capability.

I shook it off and stepped in front of the open bay door. None of the patients had body armor, but I did, so I put myself between them and the hills. ***** stepped down next to me. He scanned the ridge off the tail of the helo, covering six to nine o’clock; I had nine to twelve o’clock off the nose. Standing shoulder to shoulder with a special-ops warrior like ***** felt good. This was what I was made for. I felt it in my gut. In the last hour, I’d been shot by the Taliban, had my aircraft riddled with bullets, and landed hard in enemy territory. I can do this. I’m not scared. At that moment, I wouldn’t have switched spots with anyone in the world, because I knew I was the best person for the job.

It was a dangerous place to be, though—circled around a fuel-soaked, flightless bird, as TJ transmitted our location over an emergency radio channel.

“Mayday. Mayday . . . Pedro one five needs exfiltration.”

Our sister ship, with the bent gun, stayed high overhead, showing no signs of being willing to land.

“Mayday. Mayday . . . Pedro one five needs exfil,” he said again. I thought about the fact that the whole point of traveling in twos is so that one ship can rescue the other in an emergency situation. Pedro 16 had already declined to get our patients due to fears about weight; now we were asking them to lift even more. It didn’t surprise me they were refusing to come down.

Still TJ kept shouting into the radio, as explicitly as possible.

“MAYDAY! Pedro one six, fucking land and pick us up!”

Then the shooting started in earnest.

—

I read intel reports later that had about one hundred fifty Taliban in the area. They had a clear plan: disable a convoy, injure a soldier, attract a medevac bird, and shoot it down. They never should have been able to pull it off, but there we sat, with more enemy fighters training their sights on us every minute. I was pretty sure that the significant enemy forces we had faced at the convoy minutes earlier were busy packing up their gear and heading our way to finish the job and kill or capture every last one of us. On the left side of the bird, bullets pinged off of the rocks at our feet.

“Let’s button up this side. We’re taking too much fire.” ***** pointed with his head toward the other side. “Safer to go through the cabin,” he added with a smile. “No need to get shot again.”

I smiled back and threw my leg up into the cabin—or tried. Wardrobe malfunction. My flight suit, now tied off with the sleeves around my waist, had sagged, catching my leg. We locked eyes for a split second, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the whole situation. ***** chuckled as he awkwardly grabbed the seat of my suit and pushed me over the edge of the bay door. Then he gave me another shove, and I half rolled across the floor, soaking up puddles of fuel. He clambered in behind me on the floor, both of us now laughing like idiots. TJ, holding guard from the front of the bird, turned around to see if we had cracked. Maybe we had a little, laughing that hard under these circumstances. It was just the tension breaker we needed, though.

Taliban fighters had now zeroed in on our big helicopter, and bullets were zipping across the rocks all around us. Despite the shots coming from all different directions, no one on our team had fired a weapon yet. Our rules of engagement said we needed positive identification. In this case, the rules made perfect sense. We might have let off some frustration firing wildly at the hills, only to waste ammunition we sorely needed to save for when the Taliban came for us in person. Without a clear point of origin for the enemy gunfire, there was no use in pulling the trigger, and we couldn’t endanger possible civilians. The helos overhead couldn’t see either—there were too many crags and caves up the hillside giving our enemy great cover.

Just then the radio crackled on the emergency channel. “Pedro one five, Shamus three four.” It was one of the Kiowas. “Pedro one five, be advised we’re RTB for refuel and rearm.”

Goddammit—they’re leaving us, too? Without air cover, the Taliban would overrun our little team within minutes. Their rockets were the only thing keeping the enemy at bay. The Kiowa pilot had to know that, because what he said next was crazy.

“If you can move your asses—fast—we’ll swing by you first and take you out on our skids.”

I looked over at TJ, who was hunched over the radio, to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. On the skids? This was Afghanistan, not Hollywood. Kiowas do not land on the battlefield, and they do not carry pilots on their skids. Kiowas don’t have extra seats, and they don’t have enough power to handle the extra weight of passengers, especially not in this heat. But maybe if they’re light on fuel and ammo . . . And what about our patients?

“Negative—there’s too many of us—and we’ve got three patients.”

“Copy that, Pedro one five,” the Kiowa pilot said. “We’ll have Pedro one six land to get your patients and PJs.”

Finally. Our sister ship was going to land. The Kiowas would take four aircrew out on their skids first, and the rest would go with Pedro 16. This might just work.

“Aircrew out first,” ***** said. “MJ—you and the Gunner jump on the first Kiowa.”

“No way,” I protested. I didn’t want to leave the others behind. Then I bit my tongue. ***** was the PJ team leader. Technically, George was in command, but he would never second-guess ******* orders. Tactical lead had fallen to ***** as soon as we had stopped flying and started acting like ground troops. He didn’t need me second-guessing him just because I didn’t want to evac first.

As much as I hated to leave my team behind, the sight of those two elegant Army choppers fluttering down to get us made me swoon. It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. I turned to ***** and started stripping ammo magazines and water out of my survival vest. He needed it now more than I did.

“This is bullshit, man,” I couldn’t help noting. “I want to stay here with you guys until we can all get out.”

George and I locked eyes. I could see he felt the exact same way, but we also both knew that the PJs took tactical lead in a ground scenario, and the best thing I could do for the group would be to do as I was told—not really a skill I was known for.

***** laughed as he took my ammunition, nodding in appreciation of a fellow warrior.

“I’ll see you at KAF,” he said.

I swallowed my pride and turned toward the Army chopper, keeping one magazine on me just in case we had to make another unscheduled “landing” on the Kiowa. The other PJ clipped a lanyard into my belt with a carabiner so I could lash myself to the Kiowa’s skids. It was going to be a bumpy ride.

Despite my wounds, I wasn’t feeling any pain, just adrenaline coursing through my body. I jogged out to the Kiowa with TJ, nodding at him as he pointed to the side of the aircraft he planned to jump on.

I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but I had left some of my gear behind, including my flag. I was about to go on a combat flight without my lucky charm for the first time in my career, but TJ and I had to travel light. Despite leaving our beautiful helo behind, I was glad to have TJ with me as we boarded our new one. We hunched under the spinning rotor blades and headed for opposite skids to keep the bird balanced. I planted my right foot on the skid, swung my left leg over to sit on the metal mount that led from the fuselage to the rocket pod, and leaned my back against the helo, bracing my rifle across the pod.

I glanced back at our broken bird as we prepared to lift off. The PJs had two of our patients out, preparing to make for our sister ship. Pedro 16 had just touched down about a hundred yards away—an eternity over the rocky terrain while also under fire. I counted the two PJs and the three patients—and then, goddammit, Steve holding up one end of the litter. He should have been lashed onto the other Kiowa.

I knew him well enough to know exactly what must have happened: He’d seen the PJs struggling to get two patients and a litter across the ridiculous amount of terrain that Pedro 16 had put between them and the wrecked aircraft. Seeing this, Steve had given up his one sure ticket out to help the PJs move the wounded across the open ground under steady Taliban sniper fire. I was furious at him for putting himself in danger, but at the same time, admiration flooded over me. Admiration and worry. I was also jealous that he’d managed to convince the PJs to let him stay while I was being forced to bug out.

I looped my lanyard around the rocket pod mount, then clipped it back into my belt. I slapped the fuselage twice to say go, but the pilot was already beginning to lift the aircraft. Even a fearless chopper pilot like him didn’t want to stay more than a moment down here. I heard the difference in the rotors as the Kiowa struggled under the extra weight of two passengers it wasn’t designed for. I felt the lightening of the aircraft that meant we were about to take off.

Then all of my Christmases came at once. A tiny flame of light caught my attention from about seventy yards behind the crashed aircraft, at the Kiowa’s two o’clock position. Looking down the sight of my rifle, braced across the rocket pod, I watched a Taliban fighter’s muzzle flash, then flash again.

Finally. Point of origin! I wanted to scream victory into the rotor wash. It meant I finally had something to shoot at. I knew TJ couldn’t have seen it, though, hanging on to the other skid, with the fuselage blocking his vision. I managed to squeeze off a dozen rounds as the helo lifted off the ground. I doubted my shots could be lethal or even accurate at this range. All I could hope for was to get the enemy to duck to give us enough time to take off. If I kicked up enough dust, there was a chance the others might be able to see where my shots were aimed so they could identify a point of origin for their own weapons.

I had no radio contact with the Kiowa pilot, though, so after a few rounds, I knew I couldn’t keep firing. For all I knew, the other Kiowa was coming around or there were other friendly forces coming up. I had no choice but to save my remaining rounds in case I needed them again.

Then I had a thought that chilled me to the bone. The fact that I could finally see muzzle flashes might mean the Taliban, emboldened by the exfiltration attempt, had decided to abandon their dug-in position and move in to finish off the rest of our rescue team on the ground.

The twenty-minute flight to the nearest forward operating base felt like hours. The wind nearly thrashed my clothes off my body as I clung to the rocket pod for dear life, but the hardest part was not knowing if Steve and the PJs had made it out. Pedro 16 blew by us moments later, too fast for me to see if my brothers were aboard.

As I glanced back down to the terrain below us, the gale-force winds slowly inched my sunglasses out of my cargo pocket, and I watched them drop off into the ether. Lashed to the outside of the bird, gasping hot desert air at 130 knots, I was struck by the absurdity and I laughed as my Oakleys whirled down to rest on Afghan earth. I pictured a peaceful ten-year-old Kandahari goat herder wearing them as he tended to his flock.

Twenty minutes later the Kiowa crossed back over the wire at a FOB called Frontenac. After dropping us there, the Kiowas would turn and burn, filling up on fuel and ammo, then head back to the crippled convoy. I had only one thing on my mind: the fate of those I’d left behind. Before the skids even touched the runway, I unhooked and jumped off. I’m ashamed to say I never even turned to salute the brave Kiowa pilots who had just saved us—I was too desperate to find out about Steve and the others.

—

I marched from the LZ onto the base, barely registering the horrified looks of the other soldiers milling around. I must have been a sight in my fuel-soaked body armor, blood crusted along my arm and down my leg, the arms of my flight suit still tied around my waist, rifle at the ready, helmet still on. Adrenaline still pumped through me even though I was back inside the wire.

A soldier stepped in my path. He had a square jaw covered with five-o’clock shadow.

“Move! I’ve got to get to the TOC,” I demanded. I was aiming for the Tactical Operations Center, marked by the telltale flagpoles, where satellite feeds and radios would tell me if our team had survived.

The soldier in front of me was opening a trauma kit. Then I saw his blue latex gloves: The Kiowa pilots must have radioed ahead that they had an injured pilot tied to their skids. I ignored him and kept walking. The medic, caught off guard, stumbled backward in front of me. Only then did I notice TJ at my side. Had he been walking along with me since the landing?

“Captain . . . Captain, sir, I have to check out these wounds. I can’t let you go until I take a look,” the medic insisted.

I ignored the “sir” and kept walking, but he continued to shuffle backward in front of me and TJ. Without breaking stride, I switched my rifle to my left hand and showed him my right arm.

“See? I’m fine. Little shrapnel, but it’s small, and I can get it out later.”

“Okay,” he persisted annoyingly, “but I’m going to have to take a look at that leg.”

Exasperated, I stopped. If the medic was going to get in my way, he’d better make it quick. I looked him in the eye and dropped my pants right there in the middle of the yard. A dozen or so soldiers had been watching our awkward dance toward the TOC, but until that moment I’m not sure they noticed I was a woman under all of that body armor and helmet. Now they stared openly—at my Hello Kitty panties.

TJ stepped up to the nearest soldier and nearly blew him down. “What the FUCK are YOU looking at?”

All of the men snapped out of their stasis and urgently rediscovered whatever activities they had been doing before my arrival. The medic dropped to his knees, seizing his chance to look at my leg wound.

“Okay—no more bleeding. You’re good to go . . . ma’am.”

Satisfied that I wasn’t in any immediate mortal danger, the medic let me keep walking, but still he danced alongside us while pulling out some pills.

“A painkiller and some antibiotics,” he said, thrusting the tablets out to me.

“No way. No dope. If our team isn’t out, I’m going back to get them.”

“I get that, ma’am, but at least take this antibiotic. You’ve got foreign body material embedded in your arm and leg. You don’t know what was on that bullet.”

Point taken. I grabbed the pill he handed to me, dry swallowing it with a quick gulp.

He sheepishly rubbed his stubbled chin, displayed a coy victory smile, and produced another tablet.

“Actually, this one’s the antibiotic.”

I nearly slugged him. I hadn’t needed a painkiller. The wounds didn’t hurt; the only pain came from not knowing about the others. If they hadn’t made it back to base, I needed to be alert enough to go back out to get them. Of course they had plenty of other crews and I wouldn’t be allowed to fly again until after the debrief, but that didn’t register with me at the time. I’d steal one of their trucks to get back out there if I had to.

I reached the plywood door to the TOC and threw it open. It squealed shut behind me and TJ. A few eyes glanced up at us, but then went straight back down to their work—they had a convoy under fire and a rescue bird down, after all. There were more important things to focus on than visitors.

“How can we help you, ma’am?” said the soldier closest to the door, without looking away from his screen.

“I only need a second, soldier. I’m Pedro one five, and I need to know the status of my patients and remaining crew.”

Everyone looked up at once in surprise, sizing up TJ and me with a stare. No one spoke, and I felt a shiver—what did they know that I didn’t? Had they been listening to our team radio for help as they were overrun by Taliban?

The door squealed again as George walked in behind us. He’d arrived on the other Kiowa skid and looked as anxious as I felt.

“Hey, did Steve and our PJs get out okay?” George asked.

A captain whose uniform looked a little too clean stood up from behind his plywood desk.

“Everyone made it,” he said.

Three beautiful words.

I couldn’t wait to hug Steve, and then I couldn’t wait to punch him.