4 March
APPROX. 0300 HOURS
While the gunships and CCT in the Shahi Khot were making short work of Al Qaeda,22 Staff Sergeant Gabe Brown was sound asleep in his rack at Bagram Airfield, when he was shaken by the shoulder. From the depths of a sound sleep, Gabe couldn’t comprehend who it was, merely a voice as though from far away, “They need you.” Bleary eyed, he shook off the cobwebs, tumbled into a semblance of uniform, and stumbled to the JOC. Another false alarm, no doubt. He’d never had a combat search and rescue notification turn out to be anything other than false.
The twenty-nine-year-old Combat Controller had been in Afghanistan for only a couple weeks and felt lucky to be in-country at all. To be on alert with TF-160 for CSAR along with two PJs—team leader Keary Miller and Jason Cunningham, who like Gabe was part of a “pickup” game of augmentees from other assignments for roles such as this—was good fortune indeed.
That’s not to say that combat search and rescue duty provided real opportunities. It was known among the CCT that, while CSAR was potentially stimulating, the odds of a real crash in which you engaged the enemy and killed them with airstrikes while saving fellow Americans were slim. The last time Special Tactics had conducted a CSAR of any note was in Somalia in 1993, during the battle infamously known as Black Hawk Down. There, the 24 STS package of two PJs and a CCT saved the lives of multiple Rangers and Delta Force operators over the grueling and deadly eighteen-hour battle. Gabe had pulled CSAR enough to know these things.
The CSAR package and its associated Quick Reaction Force (QRF) of Rangers were pre-staged at Bagram Airfield for contingencies, on alert twenty-four hours a day. Comprising a Ranger platoon and a three-man Air Force Special Tactics team tailored to CSAR, it had one Combat Controller and two PJs. Their job was to fly into the worst fight or crash site and take control, providing relief, fire support, and recovery all in one package. The Rangers provided the relief, the CCT the fire support, and the PJs the recovery.
A quietly determined and confident man, Gabe is stocky at five foot nine, thick in every direction, with a full head of auburn hair and calm features. He smiles often, with or without a beer in hand. He’s not built like the typical image of a Controller, but if told he needed to walk from the Yukon Territory to Hudson Bay unsupported and starting tomorrow morning, he would shrug his shoulders as if to say “yeah, okay,” pack a rucksack, and set off without so much as a question, to reappear four months later on the other side of the continent, looking for a beer.
In the fall of 2001, seven years into his Combat Control career, he was midway through what he considered an administrative assignment: supporting the C-130 pilot school at Little Rock AFB in Arkansas. He’d taken the assignment to focus on his goal of finishing a degree, an endeavor he was diligently pursuing along with raising a young family. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he hadn’t chosen to pursue an assignment at the 24. “I was never one of those guys that was setting myself up for the two-four: doing extra workouts at night, focusing on operational academic excellence. I’d rather drink a beer in the evening.” But when the 9/11 terror strikes hit, he felt left out in the backwater eddy of Arkansas, so he volunteered to deploy with the 23rd STS out of Hurlburt Field, Florida.
His big break came when he joined Keary Miller’s CSAR team in Afghanistan in February of 2002. He liked Keary—a giant of a man at six foot four, with a mop of brown hair—who had a down-to-earth personality and didn’t mind bending a few rules. He was well respected throughout the Special Tactics community, and particularly at the 24, for his calm demeanor and expertise with trauma medicine.
The second PJ, Jason Cunningham, was a twenty-six-year-old golden boy on a thin, five-eleven frame—boyish smile and talkative personality. As a senior airman, he was the lowest ranking and least experienced of the three-man team. Like Gabe, he had a young family. Two little girls waited at home with his wife, Theresa: Kyla, age four, and Hannah, barely one. He and Gabe talked about family a lot together.
When Gabe arrived at the JOC, he was told, “There’s a missing aircrew member down south, beginning self SAR.” That was all the information they had. “Self SAR” indicated the individual was separated from the rest of his crew and friendly forces, but didn’t add any details of value to the Combat Controller. It also didn’t make a great deal of sense. “I didn’t think much of it. Likely just another spin up for no reason, and I expected to go back to bed.”
However, on the flight line where the helicopters were staged, Gabe, Keary, and Jason ran into a sister CSAR team from the 24—CCT Greg Pittman, PJ Scott Duffman, and another PJ. Greg’s team was just coming off another mission. All highly experienced in their jobs, the two CCT and four PJs huddled to discuss which team would take the now very real mission. Of the six men standing on the ramp in Bagram on that frigid March morning, bristling with gear and weapons in the scant illumination, two would die in Afghanistan—one killed in the next few hours, the other less than four years later.
On the ramp, with the MH-47 blades spinning, things were developing fast. A Ranger QRF was also assigned to the mission. Consisting of a dozen young Rangers and led by Captain Nate Self, they were clearly going to launch. The question: Which package of CCT and PJ experts in trauma medicine, aircraft recovery, and close air support was going to take the mission?
“Greg Pittman and Scott Duffman were just coming off a mission. I think it was airborne support for the Anaconda insertions for AFO. Anyway, Keary, as a two-four member and our team leader, ended up having a bit of a debate with them but must have come out on top because he said [to Gabe and Jason], ‘We’re going,’ and that was it. So I went and found the Rangers and their team leader, Captain Self, who I didn’t know, to sort out fires,” recalls Gabe.23
Furious activity swirled around the designated CSAR helicopter, another TF-160 MH-47E, call sign Razor-01, piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Greg Calvert, the pilot who’d flown down to swap out the helo with the runaway engine at Gardez just an hour before, and who was therefore somewhat familiar with the area. Furthermore, Calvert and the other pilots (the CSAR bird flew with three—one riding jump seat at the rear of the cockpit) had practiced rescue scenarios with the 24 teams and other forces in preparation for just such a crisis. Gabe, Jason, and Keary dashed for their nearby gear and returned to the spinning rotors of Razor-01, clambering aboard along with the Rangers.
Gabe recalls, “We launched without any additional information. On the hour flight toward [Shahi Khot], Self passed around a grease board with some coordinates on it, which didn’t mean shit to me. Might as well put me in space and point at the earth for all the good it would do.” He’d have to go in blind.
For Calvert, the situation was frustrating. He may not have known the details, but he certainly knew the men flying with him. In the cockpit, they discussed the grid coordinates they’d received with the sketchy information on the ground situation. “We could see on the moving map that the objective was the pinnacle of a tall mountain we had been flying around, twice I believe. There was some confusion as to whether this was ‘the place.’ We still had the idea the isolated person and Razor-03 may have been colocated (or close). [The other two pilots] and I did discuss that something just did not feel right, and the fact that we all had that ‘hair on the back of my neck standing up’ feeling. Don [the most senior pilot, riding in the jump seat], to lighten the mood, said that it was just his fingers on the back of my neck.”
But the aircrew’s instincts were telling them more than TF-11 could. Things were happening on Takur Ghar, and none of the pilots or QRF whirling their way to the mountain knew what the outcome was going to be.