While the battle at Keating was over, it seemed as though it was never-ending. From the time Ross Lewallen launched with his team of Apaches to support COP Keating until the Kamdesh was completely closed it seemed like one long, strung-out fight. The lift crews didn’t have much to say to me. They just seemed to walk around with their heads down, dreading what was inevitably coming.
Everyone knew what was next, but no one spoke about it. No one wanted to think about it. We had to go back in. We had to close COP Lowell. Our original plan was to close Keating, Fritsche, and Lowell. The attack took care of Fritsche and Keating, but Lowell remained and everyone knew it would not be easy. COP Lowell was the largest outpost in the Kamdesh Valley. It would take us at least five or six days of all-night turns to close it. It would be an incredibly dangerous operation. We would make turn after turn only a few kilometers from Keating, but it had to be done.
Colonel George told me to plan for the next red-illumination cycle, so we began preparing. One of my Chinook instructor pilots, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Mike Maggio, had been an infantryman in a Pathfinder unit before he became a pilot. Pathfinders are infantrymen with unique, specialized skills, one of which is sling-load operations. We expected to have to rig several nonstandard slings, so we sent Mike forward to take a look at all the slings and ensure that they were rigged properly and ready for operations to begin.
Once we began making turns with our Chinooks we wanted to fly to Lowell, hook up a load, and depart immediately, with no delays.
Mike spent four days at Lowell, then returned, angry. “Mike is pissed off,” Jack told me.
“Why?”
“They plan to bring everything out of Lowell, including weight sets, shower trailers, everything,” he said. “That is why it’s going to take forty-seven turns to get it all out. He’s got the Chinook guys worked up. They are all on edge because of Keating. You’re going to have to go talk to them.”
“Okay. Tell Joe McCarthy to get them all together. Whenever it’s best for them. I’ll go talk to them.” Joe commanded both the Black Hawks and Chinooks.
“Okay,” he said.
Talking to Joe’s men was one of the more challenging things I had to do in command. It wasn’t that they were scared to go. Certainly, there was a degree of fear, particularly after Keating, but that wasn’t the primary issue. They were willing to go in, but they didn’t want to risk their lives for gym equipment and shower trailers. They were fine with going to get the soldiers but not the equipment.
Initially, I struggled with it myself, so I went to see Colonel George. Mike had brought a list of all the loads back from Lowell. It was an itemized list of the composition of each load. I showed the list to Colonel George and explained my dilemma.
“Jimmy, these guys have been living in that valley all year,” he told me. “They get attacked every day; we haven’t been able to get them mail or supplies. Now we are going to move them out of the valley. They will be happy just getting out of the Kamdesh, but they are going to have to live in the Kunar, build a new home, and we have nothing to give them. Their life support systems are at Lowell, and if we don’t bring it all out then they will have nothing.”
“I get it, sir; I’ve just got to help my guys understand it. With each load they bring out, they are literally asking if each load is worth their life. They hook up a shower unit and they ask, ‘So is this shower unit worth risking my life?’”
He smiled at me, knowing that I would figure it out. I walked back to my headquarters trying to find the words to say. I sensed that there was more to the decision than Colonel George had shared with me. My gut told me that he had been directed to remove everything from Lowell so that it could not be used against us as propaganda. I recalled Major General Schloesser telling us to bury every piece of the Chinook that was shot down in the Korengal Valley. He feared that the enemy would use it against us, and ultimately he had been right. If we left equipment at Lowell on the heels of the very deadly battle at Keating, the enemy could, perhaps credibly, say that they had run us out of the Kamdesh Valley. I sensed that Colonel George had been told to remove every piece of equipment on the outpost, so being the leader he was, he did not pin the decision on his higher headquarters. He owned it.
I went to Jack’s office to talk to him about what Colonel George and I had discussed. When I walked through the door I could tell he was frustrated about something. The small tuft of jet black hair on his head was sticking straight up, as if he’d been rubbing his head in frustration.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Joe,” he said, referring to Joe McCarthy. “You just missed him. He’s all pissed off about the plan as well. He understands why we have to go in, but he doesn’t like the number of turns we’ve planned each night. He’ll be fine—I told him we’re working on ways to mitigate the risk—but he was hot when he was in here.”
“I’m not worried about Joe. It’s his Chinook crews I’m worried about. I’ve got to go talk to them.”
Later that evening, Joe came to my office and we walked down to his troop area together. When I walked through the door the first sergeant called the room to attention. They all stood and I told them to “carry on.” They sat down and their eyes went straight to the floor. Most of them didn’t even want to look at me. I knew it was because they knew what I was going to tell them.
I explained that the men at COP Lowell had been there fighting for their lives ever since they arrived in Afghanistan. “They can’t walk out. They’d never make it out of the Kamdesh. We’ve got to go get them, and we are going to get them. I know you’re pissed about their life support and gym equipment, but here’s the deal. They won’t have anything in Kunar. Everything they have is at Lowell, and we can’t get life support up to Bostic. You’ve seen what happens to the logistics convoys we try to push up to Bostic. They get blown up and burned. We have to bring what’s at Lowell out,” I said.
“Sir,” one of them spoke up. “That’s a lot of turns, and you know the enemy will try and shoot us down.”
“Yes, it’s forty-seven total turns, and we want to do as much of it as possible during the red-illumination cycle, so you’re right, it’s a lot of turns each night. We are working on some options to mitigate it. Lieutenant Wisniewski is producing a product like she did for Barg-e Matal. Her team is working to try and determine where the enemy will try and engage us. We’ll have the Apaches shoot those locations as we go in. Also, we are going to request pre-assault fires. It will take General McChrystal to approve it, but I think he will after Keating. We are going to ask to drop bombs on those grids and shoot artillery at them right in front of you as you fly in. We’ll have full-motion video on the area for hours before you fly in. If anyone is in there we’ll see them and kill them. We’ll listen to the enemy and make a decision after each turn if it’s safe enough to go back in. Once we feel that the enemy might be in place and ready to shoot at you, we’ll stop. That will be our last turn for the night,” I told them.
I don’t know how I expected them to react, but my little speech didn’t seem to move them either way. They would certainly go, but they were not happy about it. I guess it was good enough. It had to be.
On the afternoon of October 13, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Mike Maggio walked into the TOC to see what his crew’s mission would be that night. He stopped by the planner’s desk first and saw that he was to fly twelve turns between COP Lowell and FOB Bostic. He was pissed.
“Are you kidding? Twelve turns!” he said to Jack Murphy as he walked into Jack’s office. “This is bullshit! You’re going to get us killed.”
In his ever-calm manner Jack said, “Mike, we’ve been through this. Lieutenant Colonel Blackmon has made the decision. He spoke with Colonel George and we’ve reduced the list some, but the turns have to be made. You will have a huge stack of enablers above you. If the enemy gets active we’ll stop making turns.”
“We’re going to get shot down,” he said.
“We’ve got close air support, Apaches, bombers, and artillery. We have permission to shoot pre-assault fires. That’s unobserved fires, Mike.”
“I know what it is, sir. Still…”
“We’ve never been able to do that. We’ll hit all the likely spots the enemy would be, shoot right in front of you as you go in.”
Mike walked out, still upset. He went back to his troop area and briefed his crew.
Jillian had developed the same terrain-analysis products that she had created for Barg-e Matal. General. McChrystal gave us permission to drop bombs and shoot artillery on those historical enemy positions right in front of the Chinooks as they went in. We would listen to the enemy. If it sounded like they were in position to shoot at our helicopters, we’d stop for the night.
It was a very tough time as a commander. I could empathize. I understood the troops’ position, but it had to be done, and we were going to do it. We were still fighting every few nights to get resupply convoys from FOB Fenty up to FOB Bostic. I flew the escort missions every few nights myself, and we fought to try and get the crews through almost every mission. They had no idea how hard I was praying for their safety.
Mike’s copilot was Chief Warrant Officer 2 Tom Young. In the back of the aircraft he had Sergeant Mike Pettit, who manned the back ramp, Sergeant Ryan Rybolt, who manned the cabin door on the right side of the Chinook, and Specialist Carlos Hernandez, who served as a door gunner on the left side of the aircraft.
A team of Apaches flanked them on either side as they flew over Bostic and continued north toward COP Lowell. As they entered the Kamdesh Valley they saw explosions ahead of them—artillery and bombs dropped from jets overhead. In the TOC, Jack and I sat glued to the digital map. Jillian’s analyst on duty watched the computer screen for SIGINT traffic. The Apaches flanked them all the way in. Tom Young flew the helicopter and Mike called out their altitude and airspeed during the approach to Lowell. It was dark in the Kamdesh, but for the crew it wasn’t dark enough. Still, it gave them some degree of comfort knowing that the enemy would have a difficult time seeing them.
On the first turn, they landed and picked up twenty-seven soldiers. They flew them to Bostic, where they dropped them off, and prepared for turn number two. It was comforting to get that first turn in with no enemy contact. In fact, it had been very quiet. We watched the UAV feed in our TOC. Everything seemed calm. And it remained so on the second, third, fourth, and fifth turns. It seemed as though the night would go very smoothly. It certainly had thus far.
“One more turn and we’re halfway done for the night,” I told Jack.
“Let’s just hope it remains this smooth,” he said.
On the sixth turn Tom was on the controls again. Mike called out their altitude and airspeed. At two minutes out from landing, the Apaches fired a burst of thirty-millimeter into historical fighting positions. At one minute out Mike made the radio call to the men at Lowell.
“Apache X-Ray, this is Flex 6-3, one minute out, over,” he called to let the sling-load teams in the pickup zone know that he was one minute out. They were going to pick up two slings of equipment.
“Roger.”
Tom began his descent and slowed the aircraft. “One hundred, fifty feet, forty knots, point-four miles out,” Mike called out.
Specialist Hernandez leaned out of the left gunner’s hatch to scan the area below the helicopter. Through the monochromatic green night vision googles he could see pretty well. At first, he didn’t see anything suspicious, then suddenly he saw “a bright flash, almost as if someone had taken a picture with a flash inside a dark theater during a movie,”1 he said.
A shockwave went through the Chinook, and the whole helicopter pitched forward. The concussion momentarily dazed Mike Maggio, but he quickly recovered and grabbed the controls. “I have the controls,” he told Tom, but there had been an electrical failure, so Tom could not hear him. They were both flying the aircraft at that point.
Specialist Hernandez was thrown backward, into the center of the Chinook. His world went from green to black, so he knew that his night vision goggles had been ripped off of his head. He could not feel anything below his waist. He could move his hands, so he immediately found his goggles and put them back on.
“Left gunner is hit! Left gunner is hit!” Specialist Hernandez said, but no one could hear him. “All I could hear was the sound of the engines and the blades popping,” he later told me.
Mike looked at Tom, who was staring at him. The controls were stiff and smoke was quickly filling the cockpit. Mike could see the LZ at Lowell to his front. With him and Tom both on the controls they continued the descent toward the LZ.
Specialist Hernandez tried to get up, but it was as though his legs were not there. He was burning, but there were no flames.
“I looked around the inside of the bird. I saw Sergeant Rybolt frantically strapping himself down, securing himself with a seatbelt. I looked for the flight engineer, in the back of the bird, but I could not find him. I prayed that he had not been thrown out of the aircraft, that he was strapped to a seat. I knew what was coming, and I feared the worst. I could hear the engines screaming. I had heard that sound before during heavy sling-load operations. I knew the engines were straining. We were about to crash. I felt helpless lying there. I grabbed what I could to hold on to and waited for it.”2
Mike and Tom planted the Chinook in the LZ. The aircraft was stable on the ground, but smoke began to build fast. Mike opened his window to try and clear it out of the cockpit. Because they had no power they had no idea what was going on in the back of the helicopter.
Mike pointed out the door. “Get the hell out!” he screamed to Tom, who could not hear him over the engines.
“Cut the engines,” Tom yelled back, but Mike had been trying to cut the engines since they landed. The systems were not responding. The blades were still turning and the big turbine engines continued to churn at full RPM.
“Get out!” Mike yelled again and pointed to the back of the helicopter.
Tom crawled between their seats, jumped over Specialist Hernandez without seeing him, and headed out the back. With the engines still at full throttle, Mike followed. As soon as he hopped into the crew area he saw Specialist Hernandez lying on the floor.
Rybolt and Pettit ran to Hernandez, whose foot was barely attached to his leg. Hernandez looked at Rybolt and motioned to get his attention. Then he pointed to his tourniquet. Rybolt grabbed the tourniquet that was attached to Hernandez’s gear and slipped it over his leg. “Two inches below the knee,” Pettit yelled over the engines.
“What?” Rybolt couldn’t hear him.
“Two inches below his knee. Put the tourniquet two inches below his knee!”
“Okay.”
Then Pettit leaned down over Hernandez’s head. “Are you in any pain?” he screamed.
Hernandez wasn’t in any pain, but “he was pasty white and clearly going into shock,” Pettit later told me.
Meanwhile, Mike had run off the back ramp, screaming, “Medic! We need a medic!”
The first person he saw was Sergeant First Class Wood, our Pathfinder senior noncommissioned officer. We had sent him to Lowell with a few of his men just before the mission began to assist with the loads. Sergeant First Class Wood turned and ran to get a medic. Mike realized that the engines still had not stopped, so he went back onto the aircraft and cut the fuel to the engines using the emergency system. Within a few seconds the fuel-starved engines began to slow, and eventually stopped.
Back at FOB Fenty my heart stopped beating for a moment. The first report was from the Apaches. “Flex 6-3 is hit. They are going down.”
Then the call came: “They are down in the LZ at Lowell. It was an RPG.” That report gave me some level of comfort. At least they were inside the security of the COP. The medevac, which was stationed at FOB Bostic for the mission, immediately launched.
After everything was under control Mike Maggio called our TOC, and I spoke with him. “Hernandez is hit, sir. We got shot down. He’s hurt.”
“Mike, is anyone else hurt? Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m okay. Hernandez, his leg, he’s hurt.” Mike was clearly in shock. As he spoke it was difficult to hear him due to the fifty-caliber in the background firing away. I am not sure what they were shooting at, but they were certainly letting it rip. The Apaches had seen the RPG when it was fired and had immediately shot the gunner.
“Mike, how bad is Hernandez?” I asked.
“His leg. They put a tourniquet on his leg. He’s going to lose his leg.”
“Okay, how bad is the aircraft? Will it fly?”
“We were hit by an RPG. I don’t know. No. It hit us right in the gunners’ hatch. It exploded inside the aircraft. We didn’t have cockpit readings. The multifunctional displays had power, but they were blank.” I could almost feel him shaking through the phone.
“Okay, Mike, I need you to stay near the phone. I’ll call you back.” And I hung up.
Colonel Lewis was standing by in his TOC. He had been tracking the mission just like everyone else. He was giving me time to figure it all out, but he wanted a report as soon as possible. I called him. “Sir, it’s Jimmy.”
“Jimmy, what’s the damage?”
“Hernandez, the left door gunner, was hit. Sounds like an RPG came right in his hatch on short final. They were just about to land.”
“Is he the only one hurt?”
“Yes, sir, but Mike, and I’m sure the others, are pretty shook up.”
“I imagine so. How bad is the helicopter?”
“Well, it’s hard to tell. They flew it in and landed it, so it had power. The engines seem to work, but the electrical systems may be shot. I am going to need a very good maintenance guy to take a look at it. We’ve got to get that airplane out before daylight or every enemy fighter within a hundred miles will converge on it and our guys will get hammered at daylight.”
All year we had listened to the enemy talk about shooting down an aircraft. We knew that the enemy fighter who shot Flex 6-4 down in the Korengal in January was generously rewarded by Taliban leadership. Shooting a helicopter down would give them an information operation victory. If Flex 6-3 was sitting at COP Lowell once it was daylight, the enemy would surge forces to destroy it and film it. Just like Flex 6-4, we’d see the aircraft being destroyed later on Al Jazeera.
“Okay, let me call Rob Dickerson; maybe Rob Devlin can take a look at it. I’ll call you back.”
“Roger, sir.” I hung up. Chief Warrant Officer 4 Rob Devlin was a maintenance examiner in Task Force Lift. He was a very experienced Chinook maintenance test pilot. If anyone could get it cranked and flying, it was Rob.
I called COP Lowell on the secure phone. I knew it was not going to be a pleasant conversation. Mike Maggio answered.
“Mike, Lieutenant Colonel Blackmon.”
“Yes, sir.” He still sounded shaken up, but much calmer than the first time I spoke to him.
“Mike, I need you and the crew to remain there. We’re going to fly a maintenance guy up there in a Black Hawk, and he’ll need you guys to crew the bird with him when he flies it out.”
“Sir, we’ve got a medevac about to land and pick us up. It’s here to get us! We just got shot down.” If there was an ounce of his fiber that wasn’t infuriated at me for sending him in to haul out all of that equipment, then it was surely infuriated now.
“Mike, we have to get that bird out of there or it will become the biggest target in Afghanistan by daybreak. I think we are going to send Rob Devlin up there. He will call you and ask you what’s working on the aircraft and what’s not, so he’ll know what tools and parts to bring with him.”
“Okay, sir,” he said with no emotion at all. I knew he and his crew had been pushed to the limit, and I knew that I was asking a lot of them, but I also knew that Mike Maggio would ultimately make it happen.
“Mike, you did a great job; now I need you to hang in there.”
Rob Devlin called Mike and asked him questions about what systems worked and what didn’t work. When he was satisfied he said, “I’ll see you in a few hours,” and hung up.
Devlin packed all the tools and equipment he thought he would need, loaded everything onto a Black Hawk at Bagram, and departed for COP Lowell. Several hours after Flex 6-3 had been shot down by an RPG, Rob Devlin began trying to wire it back together, at least well enough to start the engines. “If we bypass the electrical compartment and get power to the PDP, then we’ve got a shot at starting the auxiliary power unit and getting the engines going,” he had told Mike on the phone, which made me nervous, but not nearly as nervous as the thought of a Chinook sitting on the LZ at COP Lowell once it was daylight.
After about three hours of work, Rob was able to rewire the electrical system to connect the battery directly to the essential battery buss and start the auxiliary power unit, which was all he needed to start the engines. He walked to the command post and called me. “Sir, we’ve got one good electrical system, and most of the systems we’ll need to fly it.”
“Can you safely fly it out, Rob?” I asked. “Just tell me straight up.”
“Well, I don’t want to die, so I’d tell you if I didn’t think I could. The bottom line is, I think I can crank it, and if I can get both engines up to one hundred percent, then, yes. It will fly. I don’t know if we’ll be able to talk to one another, and we’ll be missing some flight systems, but I can fly it out.”
“Okay, let’s do it,” I said.
Mike gathered up his crew. He joined Rob Devlin in the cockpit, and Tom Young rode in back with the crew. Rob cranked it, and got both engines online and up to one hundred percent RPM. The intercom system did not work so the crew could not talk to one another. The only person who could talk on a radio outside the aircraft, to an FOB or another helicopter, was Mike. Rob and Mike agreed to a series of hand-and-arm signals, and notes passed back and forth, to communicate. They used hand-and-arm signals to communicate with the men in the back of the aircraft as well.
The Apaches circled overhead, waiting to escort them back to Asadabad, where another Chinook would meet them and accompany them the rest of the way to FOB Fenty. After handing them off to the other Chinook, the Apaches would return to COP Lowell and provide security for the men there.
Slowly, Rob pulled in power and brought the Chinook to a hover. The flight controls seemed to be working properly, so he took off. They had committed at that point. The Apaches fell in behind him, and they were on their way. They climbed up over the mountain, and the Chinook seemed to be doing great. Once they crested the mountain they began to descend down the backside toward the Kunar. As they descended the men in the back noticed that the aircraft began to vibrate badly. Suddenly, the floor of the helicopter began to shift like it was coming apart.
Tom Young ran to the cabin and screamed, “Stop descending so fast. The floor is shifting!”
Devlin had been descending at about one thousand feet per minute, so he pulled in some power and reduced the descent to five hundred feet per minute. “That’s better,” Tom yelled and gave a thumbs-up.
Everyone in the TOC was on the verge of an anxiety attack for the fifty minutes it took them to fly to FOB Fenty. Finally, I heard the familiar sound of rotor blades beating the air, a wonderful sound. I exhaled and felt instant relief. They landed safely at home. We were out of that fix, but we still had a significant problem at Lowell. We had to finish closing it. We were past the point of no return. We had to get back on the horse immediately.
Suddenly, a lesson learned long ago flashed into my mind. The mountain phase of Ranger school is conducted just outside Dahlonega, Georgia, primarily in the steep mountains of the Chattahoochee National Forest. Because I grew up hunting and camping in that area, and because I attended North Georgia College, my Ranger buddies asked me to lead their patrols. I knew where almost all of the objectives were located.
By the time we reached mountain phase, in November, we had completed the Ranger assessment phase, patrolled at Fort Benning, Georgia, and had walked countless miles in the deserts of New Mexico. I had begun the course weighing 185 pounds. By the time the parachute canopy opened over my head and my knees were in the breeze over Wimpy Airfield in rural northern Georgia, I weighed 158 pounds. We had begun the course with 352 men. We had added a few men who were recycled—men who’d failed to meet the standards and were required to repeat the phase—to our numbers at each phase, but of those original 352, fifty-three men remained. Each one of us was exhausted and starving.
One frigid December night a young Ranger student from 3rd Ranger Battalion crawled up beside me in the perimeter.
“Blackmon,” he whispered. “Will you walk point on my patrol?”
This young Ranger had been put in charge of our patrol, and he needed a “Go” to move on to jungle phase. He was asking me to make sure we made it to the object without getting lost, and just as important, on time. We had not slept more than four hours in three days. It had rained for days and the creeks were up. The temperature was in the mid-twenties, so the Ranger instructors (RI) had a choice. If they stopped us then they had to let us build warming fires, otherwise they had to keep walking us to ensure no one got hypothermia. To our dismay, they sadistically chose to keep walking us. Also, they could not put us in the creeks. We had to find crossing points. Some nights we walked several kilometers out of the way to find a log across the creeks to cross. The men had hit a wall.
“Sure. Give me the map and the grid,” I said.
He handed me the map, and lying beside each other under a canopy of mountain laurel, we threw a poncho over our heads. I pulled out a red-lens flashlight and plotted the grid to our objective.
“Dude. This is going to suck,” I told him. “We’ve gotta get to three forks, and to get there we’re gonna have to climb a monster mountain.”
“Can you get us there?” he asked.
I smiled at him. “I know that place well. I’ve used it as a base camp for hunting trips many times. My parents camped there when I was just a kid. Yes, I can get us there, but the hard part is going to be getting the guys over that mountain. We need to leave as quickly as we can. As soon as the RIs will let us begin movement we need to go. Put the support squad up front. They will be the slowest with their heavy machine guns. We’ll go as fast as they can move.”
“Okay. Thanks, man,” he said and smiled.
“No problem,” I said and smiled back, feeling good to be able to help.
I plotted a course and we moved out quietly, slipping through the forest. It was not overly difficult to navigate in the mountains. I used terrain association mostly. If I were in a valley or on a ridge I’d use my pace count to measure the distance, but primarily I just looked at the terrain features on the map, and even in the dark I could figure out where to go. I stopped the patrol at the base of the mountain and the patrol leader came forward. “What’s up?” he asked, praying I wasn’t lost.
“This is it. From here we’ve got a long climb, then it’s downhill to the objective. Tell the guys to stay tight and just keep walking,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, then passed the word to “keep it tight” as we climbed.
We walked uphill for what seemed like hours, then the complaints began to emerge. Initially, they were random complaints. I could hear the whispers behind me. The machine gunners were suffering under a much heavier load than everyone else. “Let’s take a break,” they said. “We need to take a knee for a few minutes.”
At first I acted like I didn’t hear them, but soon a chorus emerged behind me. They were begging me to stop and take a break. About two-thirds of the way up the mountain I gave the hand-and-arm signal to halt, and I took a knee.
Within seconds a Ranger instructor came scrambling up the mountain. He pushed Rangers out of his way to get to the front of the patrol. When he got to me he was breathing pretty heavily. He put his hand on my shoulder and then spit a big stream of black tobacco. “What are you doing, Ranger?” he asked.
“Rest halt, Sergeant,” I said. “The men need a break.”
“Ranger, don’t ever stop before you crest the mountain. If you stop now it will take an hour to get them moving again. It’s all in their heads. They’ll want to quit. Now get this patrol moving. Push them to the top and then you can conduct a rest halt,” he said, and walked away.
“Roger, Sergeant,” I said.
It had been seventeen years since I had learned that lesson, but it was so clear to me at that moment, it was like I’d experienced it the day prior. We’ve got to get back in the saddle, I thought. We can’t stop now. I told Jack, “Call COP Lowell and figure out what loads are left. We’ve got to go right back in there tomorrow night.”
I knew if I gave them a few days to think about how close they’d come to death it would be almost impossible to get them back in the saddle. I could not let them stop before we crested the mountain, so Jack, Jillian, the planners, and I began working the plan. I called Colonel George, Jack called Colonel George’s chief of operations, and Jillian went to work trying to figure out exactly where the RPG was shot from and how to counter such threats the following night.
As a leader, I failed four of my men that night. Mike, Tom, Sergeant Rybolt, and Sergeant Pettit landed and returned to their company area. In my mind, they were not physically injured, so I focused my attention on what we were going to do next. The mission was important, vitally important, but I should have stopped what I was doing and gone to see how they were doing.
Mike would later say, “It was the biggest disappointment in my fifteen years of service. Not a single person in the command, other than the executive officer, who wanted to make sure we had all of our equipment, was there when we landed at FOB Fenty. I felt like the unit had abandoned us.”
Those words rightfully stung. I realized that everyone responds to traumatic events in very different ways. I knew they were not physically hurt, and I had a mission to plan. I didn’t really think about it. In fact, I expected Mike to come busting through the door to tell everyone how he had pulled it off, but I was wrong.
In hindsight, I made a terrible mistake. The only way to know how a soldier is feeling, how he is coping, is to ask, to spend time talking to him. I should have known that. Throughout our deployment I had seen soldiers surprise me with their reaction to trauma and death. Men that I thought would handle death stoically broke down and needed consoling. Others, whom I thought would have a difficult time, never wavered. They just kept soldiering on. A soldier’s reaction to death is unpredictable, so leaders should always be prepared for the worst. Mike does not harbor ill feelings, but he and his crew have my apologies. I failed them that night, and I promised it would never happen again.
Over the following three nights we closed COP Lowell. The enemy did not interfere with our operation again. Finally, with a month left in our deployment, the Kamdesh was closed.
(Note: Specialist Juan Carlos Hernandez lost his right leg from the knee down. When we returned to Fort Campbell in December, he was already walking with a prosthetic and planning a ski trip.)