I landed back at Fenty at 3:30 A.M. It had only been two days since the battles at Ganjgal village and in the Shuryak Valley, yet it seemed as though the fighting had gone on forever. By this time there was a significant fight somewhere every day. That night a recovery team was ambushed as they tried to tow a truck to FOB Bostic. They were just north of OP Bari Ali when they were ambushed.
I was exhausted after it was all over, but it had perhaps taken more of an emotional toll than anything else. I threw my flight gear in my office and walked over to the command post to talk to Jack. I entered the building through Jillian’s and Staff Sergeant Karvaski’s office. When I opened the door I saw Jillian sitting at her desk, staring at the computer screen. She was rolling a lock of her hair with her left thumb and forefinger. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m looking at all the pilot debriefs from today and bouncing it off other collection assets,” she said.
She read my face. She could tell I was irritated. “How many ended up getting shot?” she asked. Like everyone else in the TOC, she had heard that several of the 3-61 Cavalry guys had been shot, but you only get bits and pieces trying to follow the battles on the radio. It’s hard to tell what really happened until you talk to the folks that were actually there.
“Four,” I said. “It was horrible! We lost a lieutenant, and two NCOs and a specialist were shot in the legs. The three of them should be okay.”
I continued through her workspace. She followed me to Jack’s office.
“Hey, sir. Not a good night,” Jack said, as I walked in and sat down.
“No doubt.”
“It sounded like they went up the ridge after the enemy. It was hard to keep up with exactly what was happening, other than the part about the wounded guys that you couldn’t get to until dark. What happened?” he asked.
“They got hammered trying to recover that truck with the ammo,” I said.
The night prior, on September 9, we had sent a resupply convoy from FOB Fenty to FOB Bostic. We actually didn’t get hit during the resupply mission, but later, just north of OP Bari Ali, an Afghan Jingle truck broke down. The truck had fifty 155-mm artillery rounds in it, rounds they desperately needed at FOB Bostic. Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown sent a recovery team out the next day to tow the truck to Bostic. They were ambushed as they tried to conduct the recovery operation. Apparently, the enemy knew we would come back for the truck.
“The Apache team at FOB Bostic immediately launched to support them,” I told them. “They had been fighting for a long time, and then they were sent to escort a medevac to Barg-e Matal, then came back and fought more in the draw. It was a busy day for the medevac and the Apache team. When I heard them on the radio I took my Kiowa team up there as well. The ground guys were already up the draw, pinned down when I got there, and the platoon leader, Lieutenant Tyler Parten, had been shot.”
“How did they get up that draw?” Jack asked.
“C Troop drove down with some Afghan soldiers to recover the truck. When they got there they were ambushed immediately. You know the steep draw directly across the road from COP Pirtle-King, the one called Zangerbosha?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” Jack replied.
“That is right across the river from the Saw Valley,” Jillian interjected, recalling the recent events in that area that put the Saw and Helgal prominently on the map as two more hellish places to add to the growing list.
“Yes, it is,” I confirmed. “Well, about twenty to thirty men attacked them with AK-47s and PKMs from that draw.” The AK-47 was the standard Soviet rifle carried by most insurgents. The PKM is a 7.62-mm machine gun with a rapid rate of fire.
“That draw forces the road to make a sharp curve, and the road is really narrow right there. That’s where the truck was broken down, and it was in the middle of the kill zone, so when the shooting started the Afghan truck driver got out and ran. The truck then blocked the road,” I continued.
“So they were stuck,” Jack said, shaking his head.
“Yes. The Afghan soldiers were in a mix of HMMWVs and Ford Ranger pickups. The soldiers in the Ranger jumped out as soon as the shooting started, but they were right in the middle of the kill zone. Several of them just fell dead in the road. Sergeant First Class Stephen Laroque and his medic, Specialist Aamed Noormohamed, ran into the kill zone to pull the wounded Afghans out and both of them were shot in the legs.”
Sergeant Laroque and Specialist Noormohamed never hesitated. It didn’t matter that they were risking their lives for Afghans versus Americans. Soldiers were injured and they needed help. That was all that mattered. So, without wavering they ran into gunfire and pulled them to safety, and got shot doing it.
“Were you there when the ambush started?” Jillian asked.
“No. We were still down by Asadabad. Brad Brown sent some military police with a ten-ton wrecker, and he sent Lieutenant Tyler Parten’s platoon as well. The Apache team covered them. They had just come back from being up at OP Mace, in the Kamdesh.”
“That is tough terrain to fight in,” Jack said, his normally placid features twisting into a grimace as he recalled the area. “They must have been attacked from straight above them.”
“Well, their plan was to have Tyler’s platoon dismount on the north side of the draw and walk up that ridge. The platoon from C Troop would go up the south side of the draw. Once they got up the ridge and quieted the enemy, the military police would evacuate the wounded and recover the vehicle out of the kill zone.
“Tyler had led his platoon up the ridge. They actually got a good ways up there, but got caught in an open area and he was shot. Tyler had been killed instantly, and Sergeant Jonathan Russ was wounded. I had shown up right as they were hit.
“Then they were in a fix. Their lieutenant was dead, and they needed to get Sergeant Russ down the mountain,” I said.
“How bad was Sergeant Russ?” Jillian asked.
“He was shot through the hamstring. They put a tourniquet on him, but they had a worse problem. There was a sniper in the village up above them. They used the huge rocks for cover, but every time one of them so much as peeked out they got shot at, and he barely missed them each time. He had them pinned down.”
“What happed to your lead Kiowa?” Jack asked.
“Right after we got there we shot everything we had at the base of the village, just in front of it, to try and suppress the enemy. Once we were out of ammo, we headed to the FARP at Bostic, but on the way there my wingman said he had tail rotor chips. They would not burn off, so he shut down, and I went back single ship.”
There are several chip lights on the engine, transmission, and tail rotor of a helicopter. Chip detectors are simple magnets that pick up pieces of metal in the fluid lines. If it’s a tiny, microscopic piece of metal the chip detector burns it off. If you get multiple chips it means you have a lot of metal in your fluids, so you need to land and have the aircraft inspected by maintenance personnel. If the piece of metal is big then it won’t burn off, and you have to shut down and get the aircraft inspected. They serve as an indicator that the engine or transmission could be eating itself and are never taken lightly.
I continued describing the battle to Jack and Jillian. “The Apaches and I shot everything we had, all our ammunition, several times, but the ground force was stuck on the side of that mountain. Every time they tried to move, the sniper was on them. I knew he was in one of the houses, but I couldn’t figure out which one. It sucked! Obviously, I couldn’t level the village, and I had no idea where he was hiding. I flew in fast and close several times trying to draw his fire so I could figure out where he was, but I couldn’t find him.”
“That village is straight up that draw too, so he could see the guys on the ground perfectly below them,” Jack said.
“Yep. So I thought maybe we could build a smokescreen with Willie Pete. I told the NCO on the radio that I was going to get seven white phosphorus rockets and that when I came back he needed to be ready to move. I told him I’d shoot them in front of the village, and when the smoke built up he could try and get back down the mountain. He agreed.”
“Were they shooting artillery from Bostic?” Jillian asked.
“Yeah, but mostly above the village. Just behind it. I flew back to Bostic and got seven rockets. When I returned I told the NCO to get ready. He got back to me in a few seconds and said that they were ready. I flew right at that village. I wanted to shoot the rockets as close to the houses as I could.”
“Didn’t you think the sniper would shoot you?” Jillian asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I figured he would shoot at us, coming straight at them like that, but we had to mass the rockets right in front of the village. I kept waiting to hear the popping of his bullets, but I never heard them. Several times the ground guys said that the enemy was shooting at us, but they never hit us. Anyway, I shot the entire pod of rockets right at the doorsteps and told the NCO, ‘Go!’
“It built a pretty good wall of smoke, but he called me on the radio within a minute or two and said, ‘It’s no good. They are too heavy to move in these rocks. We can’t carry them out.’”
I then explained that I had flown back to Bostic, and while my copilot got fuel and more rockets, I went inside the command post. Sergeant Whorton was there.
Sergeant Whorton was our flight medic. He was the same flight medic who had hoisted into the Shuryak two days prior when Adam and Patrick were shot. He had already picked up patients under fire at OP Pirtle-King and Barg-e Matal.
“He was itching to go in,” I told Jack and Jillian. “He wanted to hoist into the draw and get them out right then. I pulled him aside and told him that if we tried to hoist him in during daylight the medevac would almost certainly get shot down, and he’d probably be killed. There was no way we could get in until dark.”
It was going to be a very dark night. There was no moon, so as soon as it got dark I knew it would be pitch black up there. The mountains in northern Kunar and Nuristan had almost no ambient light.
He didn’t like it. He didn’t say it, but I could read it in his body language and in the expression on his face. He wanted to go then, but I didn’t believe there was any way to pull it off without getting that medevac shot down, so we waited until dark.
“Did they recover the 155-mm rounds? What happened to that Jingle truck?” Jack asked.
“While we were fighting up the draw,” I explained, “trying to get the platoons down the mountain, the military police picked up the wounded from the original ambush, and then they pushed that friggin’ truck into the Kunar River!”
“With all the artillery rounds on it?” Jack asked.
“Yes! They badly needed those rounds at Bostic, and they pushed them into the river. I just about broke down and cried. The truck kind of flipped as it rolled in, and some of the rounds spilled out, but the river snatched that truck and pulled it under. It was getting dark, and they had a hard time finding it. I flew up and down the river right on the water and finally found a corner of the bed sticking up out of the water. I shined a laser pointer on it, so they could find it. They picked up as many rounds as they could find on the bank.”
“When did Sergeant Whorton go in?” Jack asked.
“As soon as it was dark,” I explained, “I flew back to the FARP and walked over to talk to Gary Heine face-to-face. He was flying the medevac bird.”
Gary Heine was the pilot who had flown Sergeant Whorton in the Shuryak when Adam and Patrick were shot only two days prior. I explained to him everything that had gone on and where the casualties were located. After I finished talking to Gary Heine they cranked and took off. The Apaches covered the medevac as they went in, and I hung back behind them. They had a better sight than me with just my goggles, so I figured I’d watch where they shot, and I’d pound it when they broke off.
At first it was extremely dark because the moon had not risen above the mountain, but by the time we were ready to go in, it was up and it was bright out, so bright we could have flown without our night vision goggles. We were worried because the enemy was going to be able to see the wounded men. The draw was so steep that the helicopter would be very close to the mountain. Since Sergeant Whorton would be hanging one hundred feet below the helicopter, the bird would actually be closer to eye level with the village. I didn’t like it, but it had to be done.
On the first approach they took small-arms fire and an RPG. Gary broke off and came back around again with Sergeant Whorton hanging from the cable. The second time, Gary put him in, and then he moved back out over the valley while Sergeant Whorton prepared Lieutenant Parten to be hoisted out.
After taking fire the first time I was really worried. I knew the enemy was smart enough to know that he was going to come back and pick them up, and I knew he had to make two trips. Sergeant Whorton called over the radio and said he was ready, so Gary went back in, this time taking fire immediately. He broke off and circled back around. The second time, they shot an RPG at him. The Apaches pounded the side of the ridge with thirty-millimeter and rockets. Gary came back around a third time and was able to get Lieutenant Parten’s body on the hoist. They pulled him up, then had to go back again to pick up Sergeant Whorton.
“Holy crap, sir,” Jack exclaimed as I related the harrowing series of events.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Gary got back in and picked the other two up. He flew them all to FOB Bostic. In the meantime we covered the ground guys as they moved back down the mountain. They made it down pretty quickly without casualties.”1
“That medevac crew has had a rough couple of days,” Jillian said.
I agreed. “You’re not kidding. They had the Shuryak two days ago, and today they did three medevacs under fire including the hoist, and they did one to Barg-e Matal,” I said. “It wasn’t long before the surgeon wanted Gary to fly the wounded from Bostic to FOB Fenty, so the Apaches escorted them back. My wingman had his Kiowa back up by then so we covered the ground guys until they were back inside the wire at Bostic. I made it back at three A.M.
“So what’s the plan on Barg-e Matal? Did you guys finish planning?” I asked Jack, changing the subject.
Jack shook his head. “We will keep chipping away this month. If all goes well we’ll have it done by the end of the month. Every time we take a load in, we bring out TF Chosin soldiers.”
“How many turns will it take to winterize the Afghans with supplies?” I asked.
“Fifty-one,” he told me. “We’ll get it done, and then we can turn our focus to Keating and Lowell.”
I could hardly believe it. “Man, that’s a lot of turns. We’ve got to maximize every night. If the enemy isn’t affecting us then we have to keep turning and get this done as quickly as possible,” I said.
“We will, sir.”
“But the enemy is going to affect us sooner or later,” Jillian broke in. “They are watching all these turns. It’s just a matter of time before they try to shoot a Chinook or Apache down. We have to fly over that ridge, the BK pass, on every turn, so it’s predictable.”
“I know, but there aren’t many alternatives. The Chinooks have to wait on the Apaches to get over that pass as it is. It’s either over the top or through the Kamdesh, up the gut, and that is a shoot-down waiting to happen.
“We’ve just got to pay attention to the enemy. If their discussions get credible, if we think they are in position and will shoot at us, then we stop the turns. If not, then we keep on going—situation-based turns,” I said.
Both of them just looked at me and neither spoke. They knew we had to get it done, but it was painful to watch the turns every night, praying they wouldn’t get shot down. I knew most of all. Most nights I would lie in my bed, half in and out of sleep, praying, until I heard the sound of Chinook rotors coming back in. It was painful to endure.
“When can we start bringing stuff out of Keating?” I asked.
“As soon as we get a new-moon cycle in October—middle of the month,” Jack said.
“Okay, so we finish up Barg-e Matal this month, close Keating in October, and close Lowell in November.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I assume you’ve gone over all of this with Mountain Warrior, and they are good with it, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, good. I’m heading to bed,” I said.
“See you in the morning, sir,” Jack said.
I took my pistol from my body armor, holstered it on my side, and left the office. I used the back door to get to my living quarters. As I turned onto the walkway, just outside the berm of Hesco barriers, I saw Doc McCriskin. He was walking in the dark with his head down. “Hey, Brendan,” I said.
Brendan mumbled something I could not understand. “Brendan,” I said, as I stopped and looked back at him.
“Oh, hey, sir. Sorry about that.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. I’m fine,” he said, but I wasn’t convinced.
“You seem like you’re not. What’s on your mind?” I asked.
“Well, honestly, sir, I’ve been better,” he confessed. “I had a rough one the other night.”
I leaned against the wall of Hescos. “Tell me about it.”
As our flight surgeon, Brendan McCriskin remained on medevac call all the time. He chose which missions he actually went on based on the incident, how bad the trauma was, and if it was a U.S. casualty or not. Otherwise, a flight medic went on the mission as the sole provider.
Late one evening, just after dark, we received a medevac request for several Afghan soldiers. They had been traveling on a dirt road south of Jalalabad when they struck an IED. The damage to their small pickup truck was devastating. The report said that one soldier had lost both legs and the other was severely burned. Brendan took the mission.
When the helicopter landed at the site Brendan got off and helped carry the patients to the aircraft. The burn victim was loaded first. His skin was melted and he was nonresponsive. The man who’d lost his legs was placed beside him. They laid him down flat on the floor of the Black Hawk and placed both of his legs below him as if they were still attached to his body. He was screaming out in pain and asking Brendan to help him. “His screams were a good sign,” Brendan said. “The fact that he felt pain and could yell was a very encouraging sign.”
The other man, however, concerned him. The burn victim was not responsive, yet he had vital signs. Brendan began to work on him. He wanted to look him over carefully to ensure that something wasn’t missed on the initial examination in the field. A small pin light taped to his helmet helped Brendan to see in the dark cabin of the Black Hawk. He cut the man’s clothes and looked over his body to try and determine the extent of his injuries. The smell of sweat and dirt mixed with blood and burned flesh was horrid.
The other man kept asking about his legs. It was apparent that he did not realize that they had been blown off. His fellow soldiers had applied tourniquets to both legs, so he felt the pressure, and when he looked down he could see his legs and boots, but could not move them. He continued to yell out, so Brendan decided to sedate him more so he could focus his attention on the other patient. He turned to prepare drugs for him, and when he did, the burn patient suddenly sat up and grabbed him by his shirt. He pulled Brendan in close to his badly burned face and said, in a feeble, raspy voice, “Help me. Please, help me.”
It was an eerie moment. The image of that man’s face was indelibly burned into Brendan’s memory. He managed to get both patients back to FOB Fenty alive. Both made it into surgery alive, but both later passed. They realized that the burn victim had suffered internal injuries, so it was necessary to open him up to determine the extent of the injuries. As soon as they opened his chest cavity he bled out. The blood had been contained inside his chest. There was nothing they could have done.
Doc McCriskin’s emotions had not been extracted at medical school. He cared. He cared that two Afghan men whom he did not know had died despite his best efforts to save them. The things he saw—that all of our medics saw—are things no one should have to witness, yet once you see them, it’s hard to erase the images. Brendan McCriskin’s dreams had transformed into nightmares.
One dream began with his medevac helicopter landing in the Watapur Valley. As it neared touchdown they experienced a brown-out. A brown-out is a huge cloud of dust created by the rotors. It engulfs the helicopter as it nears the ground, and it’s almost impossible to see through when landing. In his dream Brendan’s medevac hit the ground hard, harder than expected, due to the pilot’s inability to see the ground clearly.
The flight medic, Sergeant Marc Dragony, a massive, baldheaded man who had played tight end at Brigham Young University, leapt from the aircraft to try to find the wounded. Brendan started to follow him off the helicopter, but Dragony turned and yelled over the turbine engines, telling him to remain on the aircraft. Just as Brendan climbed back aboard soldiers appeared out of the thick dust carrying their buddies. They threw seven or eight wounded soldiers onto the aircraft. The casualties were piled up on top of one another, forcing Brendan to try frantically to sort through them so he could treat the most urgent first. The stress began to build.
Outside the helicopter the dust cloud never dissipated, which was strange. Brown-outs usually cleared once the aircraft was on the ground, but this time it remained, a thick, churning, brown whirlwind. The American soldiers disappeared back into the cloud and within seconds enemy fighters emerged. They walked out of the dust like ghosts and began spraying the helicopter with bullets. Brendan grabbed his machine gun and tried to shoot back, but his rifle jammed. He attempted to clear the jam, but it jammed again. Bullets were hitting his patients and there was nothing he could do to protect them. Suddenly, the pilot pulled in power and began to fly away. “No!” Doc screamed. “Dragony is still on the ground!” But it was too late, and he jolted awake, scared to return to sleep.
Most of us had one recurring dream—Brendan had two.
Brendan’s second dream, the one that haunted his sleep most frequently, was of a nighttime medevac mission to the Korengal Outpost. A child, no more than a year old, had been hit with shrapnel in a blast. Brendan’s mission was to pick the child up at the Korengal Outpost and provide en-route care as they transferred the child to Bagram Airbase. For some reason he didn’t have a flight medic with him on the mission. The pilots landed, and Brendan went inside the aid station to assess the child before transporting him to the helicopter.
The injured child was tiny, a pitiful sight. Brendan checked the IV and the endotracheal tube in his throat. He appeared to be as stable as could be expected, so Brendan transported him to the helicopter and they departed.
Due to the enemy threat in the Korengal and Pech valleys, we always kept the lights off in the helicopter. Brendan used a small pin light, taped to his helmet, to provide just enough light to work on his patient. He was giving the child some medications to keep him sedated when he noticed the child’s oxygen saturation level decreasing. His oxygen level had been in the high nineties when they departed. It then dropped into the eighties, then seventies.
Usually, when this happened, it meant that the oxygen tank was running out, or that the ventilator had stopped working. Both of those things were easy fixes, so Brendan didn’t panic. He quickly checked to ensure that everything was working properly—it was.
Working alone, crouched over his patient, with a pin light in his teeth, Brendan decided to bag the child to see if that would help. He glanced at the monitor displaying the child’s oxygen saturation: sixty, then fifty and dropping. He put a bag over the child’s mouth and nose to provide more oxygen—no improvement. He searched for the Broselow bag, a pediatric resuscitation kit. Everything was organized on the medevac helicopter so that the medical provider could quickly access what they needed, yet at that point in Doc’s dream, time slowed down. No matter how hard he tried, he could not move fast enough, as in those childhood dreams when you wanted to run but couldn’t. Menial tasks became incredibly difficult. He checked the vent tube again, and it appeared to be in the right place. Everything seemed okay, yet the child’s oxygen saturation level continued to drop. Fully understanding that there was no way he would be able to put it back in again, Brendan decided to pull the vent tube. He thought the child’s lungs must have collapsed. He could stick a needle through the child’s ribs and into his lung, but he’d never seen a child that young decompressed with a needle. He tried an oxygen bag once again with no improvement. The stress began to mount. He didn’t want to lose the child.
“We’ve got to get to Asadabad,” Brendan told the pilot.
“We’re ten minutes away,” came the reply.
That was too long. The child would certainly have brain damage, that is, if he lived. The last option was to make an incision in the child’s throat to try and restore the airway. He would have to do it alone, on a child, in the dark, on a helicopter. He knew it wasn’t a smart procedure on a child that small, but he felt helpless, hopeless. He made the incision, but he didn’t find the soft spot he was looking for in the child’s throat. He struggled to see clearly. The child’s throat turned dark with blood. Suddenly his oxygen saturation hit zero and his heart stopped beating. Brendan sat bolt upright in bed, drenched in sweat. His heart was racing, and all he could think was that he had killed a child.
It was so real, so vivid. He was there, in the helicopter. The sights, the sounds, the feel, were so realistic. When he awoke he was relieved that he hadn’t actually killed a child, but somehow felt guilty “for lying in a clean bed, with air-conditioning, while there were probably young medics struggling through just such a mission, somewhere in the world”2 at that very minute.
Professional counselors say that the underlying emotions associated with these types of nightmares are guilt and a sense of helplessness or inadequacy. Brendan McCriskin did not disagree, but I think he more poignantly described it as, “subconscious scars that I am certain pale in comparison to those sustained by the injured guys we picked up.”3 On the surface that seemed to help Brendan, to think that it had to be worse for those he tried to help, but the reality is that Brendan and countless others have suffered in varying degrees from wounds not visible on the surface. War is in no way natural, and thus its effects are devastating. War wounds all of its participants to some degree.
My hope was that I had, in some small way, helped Brendan just by listening. I told him that we were all feeling the effects of the war. The stress of combat does not know rank, age, sex, or socioeconomic background. It affects us all. If it didn’t I’d be even more concerned. Brendan shook my hand and continued to his room.
* * *
The rest of September we focused on Barg-e Matal winterization and retrograde, all the while struggling with a very effective sniper positioned in the mountains above. He killed or wounded Afghan and American soldiers literally every couple of days, which forced us to fly a medevac, escorted by Apaches up there and back, thus patterning ourselves more and more with each trip.
Jillian produced a superb targeting packet to narrow the search down for the sniper team. Jack then used Jillian’s product to make a list of targets—target areas of interest (TAI). We told the Apache pilots that they were free to shoot into those areas to deny the terrain to the enemy (terrain denial fires) as the Chinooks flew into the valley to land. Furthermore, when TF Chosin reported sniper fire our Apaches immediately knew where to begin looking for the enemy. We ended up killing multiple sniper teams. Her analysis was spot-on.
With each successive trip to Barg-e Matal we brought out TF Chosin soldiers and equipment. By late September, almost unnoticed, we were finally out of Barg-e Matal. Our complete focus then turned to the Kamdesh. We had only October and November left before our mission was over, and we still had to figure out a way to get out of COPs Keating and Lowell.