On the tail ramp of Knife 04, Burns was listening in on the radio while treating three critical patients. The most serious was Mike, whose blood oxygen level had remained low at 70 percent; his blood pressure had also dropped, and he was now shivering constantly. Reexamining Mike’s bandages, Burns found that his chest wound was seeping blood.
To combat Mike’s severe shock symptoms, Burns connected him to his entire fifteen-liter supply of oxygen via a rebreather mask. Then he added new packing to his chest wound, along with two bandages to apply more pressure. Rechecking oxygen levels, he found that Mike still had not improved, and his shivering had intensified.
Fuck, Burns thought, putting another wool blanket on top of Mike. He glanced to the other side of the cargo hold, where fellow PJ Brent Scott was packing Alex’s gaping shoulder wound with more gauze, while in the litter below, Mag was desperately giving him the sign for water—as if tipping a glass with his hand. “No water,” Scott told Mag, who began to belligerently hit the underside of Alex’s litter with his right fist. Noting Mag’s extensive cranial bandaging, Burns thought, Brain injury—guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Looking toward the front of the helicopter, Burns saw Doc Frank alternating between Ronnie and Fathi, both of whom were hypothermic and in shock. He couldn’t believe these guys were still alive. Then Burns heard Gregg, on Knife 03, ask Fronk, “Can you guys carry any more wounded?”
Burns yelled forward, so loudly they could hear him clearly in the cockpit even without a radio: “No! We cannot get anybody else on this aircraft! We gotta go! We gotta go now!”
From behind his machine gun, Diekman watched warily as the first two trucks filled with Afghans drove up and parked at the rear of Knife 03. Immediately, more than a dozen armed men jumped out and stood in a group between the trucks, which were carrying two wounded Afghans apiece. Another truck pulled up, and a couple of the Afghans walked toward the ramp and peered into the cargo hold, where a few of the less seriously wounded Americans were sitting.
Moments before, the crew had been alerted that Afghan casualties were on the way, but Diekman’s duty was to protect this aircraft, and both training and instinct told him that having these men so close wasn’t safe. No Americans were with them, and he couldn’t discount the possibility that they could be saboteurs, using the rescue operation to get in close and lob a grenade into a helicopter.
“Permission to leave the aircraft,” Diekman said over his radio. “We’ve got a cluster fuck in progress back here.”
A gunner was never supposed to leave his helicopter, but when Gregg looked over his shoulder and saw the number of Afghans near the ramp, he said, “Go.”
A few strides beyond the ramp, Diekman realized that he only had his M9 pistol, which to a machine gunner was about as worthless as a peashooter. He turned back to grab his M16 or shotgun and saw that the side door gunner had shifted to the tail gun position and the engineer up front had shifted to the side gun, keeping defenses at 100 percent.
Feeling amply covered from the Pave Low, Diekman didn’t bother with his shotgun. He had started to push the crowd back from the ramp when a PJ from the triage area ran up. “Are these our guys?” asked Diekman. “Are we loading them?”
“Yes,” yelled the PJ, who bent over a wounded Afghan.
One of the Afghans stood fully upright in the bed of a truck, his head inches from the helicopter’s tail rotor, spinning so fast it was invisible. Diekman yanked the man down, pointed out the danger, and indicated that the truck should be parked farther away. He then began to help Knife 03’s PJs direct “traffic”—loading the critically wounded Afghans onto the aircraft and placing the worst-off by the tail ramp exit.
From the cockpit, Gregg watched as Knife 04 took off, leaving a trail of dust in its wake as it headed north, then banked and picked up speed heading southwest around Kandahar. One of Gregg’s flight engineers came over the radio. “Here comes an American KIA.”
“How can you tell?” asked Gregg.
“You need to look to the rear, sir.”
Lifting up in his seat, Gregg stared over his shoulder and out of the cavernous cargo hold, where a truck was backing up to the tail ramp. In its bed was a body in what looked like a sleeping bag and covered with an American flag.
Gregg could not fathom how somebody had had the presence of mind to actually pause in the middle of what must have been confusion and chaos in order to wrap the fallen soldier in a flag. That is patriotism, he thought, feeling a renewed sense of responsibility to return this American home to his family.
It was 12:25 in the afternoon when Knife 04 rose above the desert, and Mike started to throw up. Burns pulled away the oxygen mask he’d placed over Mike’s face and turned his head sideways so he wouldn’t choke on the vomit.
Having been unable to locate a suitable vein for an IV, Burns proceeded to slather the center of Mike’s chest—just to the side of the bandage—with Betadine. Picking up a large spring-loaded needle, he punched it directly into Mike’s sternum and pumped a saline solution directly into his bone marrow.
Over the radio, Alexander announced that the flight to Camp Rhino would take forty minutes. Forty minutes, thought Burns, shifting his attention to Reed. An eternity. For the next twenty minutes, Burns, Doc Frank, and the PJs continued to monitor vitals and check the airways of their patients, but they didn’t remove any bandages on the extensive wounds for fear they’d dislodge a blood clot or disturb whatever it was that had been done by the ground medics to keep these men from bleeding to death for the past four hours.
They were halfway to Rhino when Fronk called Ditka 04 to request their planned aerial refueling. Only a couple of minutes had passed before the tail gunner announced the arrival of the MC-130, a mile out and closing in. “Tally-ho,” he said. “I have the tanker.”
Amerine waited outside the Pave Low with Dan’s body, which had been placed at the bottom of the ramp while the rescue crew loaded wounded Afghans. He had never seen a group of men work so quickly or efficiently, and it appeared that Knife 03 couldn’t hold another patient—every hanging litter and almost every inch of floor space was full.
Followed closely by Amerine, two crew members carried Dan up the ramp. As they passed Diekman—who had been tightening the belt on his machine gun’s ammo boxes—the tail gunner turned suddenly and bumped into the litter. Immediately, he saw what he’d done and looked at Amerine, who was following them up the ramp.
Meeting his eyes, Amerine quietly said, “Show some respect.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Diekman.
With a nod, Amerine stepped forward into the helicopter, where the crew had made space for Dan on the floor and were securing him to the hull with webbing. Carefully, Amerine moved among the wounded to stand in the front of the hold, just behind the cockpit.
Knife 03’s internal guidance system had behaved strangely during the infiltration the previous night and had stopped working altogether during the medevac ground operations. Now copilot Marty Schweim was figuring out a route the old-fashioned way, on the map covering his lap.
The original route would have taken them west from Shawali Kowt, then well beyond the outskirts of Kandahar, where the Pave Low would turn south to Camp Rhino. It seemed straightforward enough: There were few major roads, the population centers were easy to avoid, and they intended to stay between twenty-five and fifty feet AGL the entire way. They didn’t have the exact coordinates for Camp Rhino but knew it was southwest of Kandahar.
The most pressing concern was fuel.
While Schweim studied the map, Gregg radioed the MC-130 that was on its way to refuel Knife 04. “Ditka Zero Four, this is Knife Zero Three. Copy?”
“I have you, Knife Zero Three. What is your status?”
“I’m loaded and will require a Texaco northeast of the planned IP [initial point]. Approaching fuel critical. Will radio our present coordinates as we approach—stand by.”
Standing in the center of the hold, Hadley plugged into
the helicopter’s internal comms in time to hear Gregg say “Texaco,” the code word for an emergency aerial refueling at an unassigned location. This surprised Hadley. “How are we that low?” he asked Gregg.
“Sir, remember we dumped fuel on approach to accommodate the extra wounded. We calculated for fifteen minutes on the ground, but we’ve been here for forty-five.”
Hadley had either missed or misunderstood this decision during the flight in. “How critical are we?”
“Eight hundred pounds of fuel,” said Gregg. “Fifteen minutes till we flame out.”*
Eighteen dirty, bandaged, bleeding casualties surrounded Hadley. All the Americans aboard—Amerine, Ken, Pickett, Musselman, and another TACP from headquarters—were stable. Seven of the thirteen Afghans, however, were critical, and the aircraft was so full that the PJs were kneeling on the hinge of the tail ramp, working on men whose feet were just inches from hanging off the end of the ramp.
“I’m going to have my hands full back here with the wounded,” Hadley said to Gregg. “You continue as the air mission commander. I’ll be monitoring the radio.”
“Roger.”
“Okay, tie everybody down,” Hadley yelled into the hold as the engines powered up. “We’re getting out of here.”
Knife 04 was taking on fuel five hundred feet over the open desert far to the west of Kandahar when the crew heard Knife 03 radio the MC-130.
“Ditka Zero Four, we are airborne and coming around the northwest of the city—we are fuel critical. Texaco. I repeat, Texaco. We need you to turn around.”
“Knife Zero Four, I’m going to have to cut this short,” Ditka 04’s pilot radioed Fronk.
“We’ve got all we need,” said Fronk, and the fuel tanker retracted its hose and climbed steeply into a banked turn toward the north.
In Knife 03, Schweim was alternating between glancing at the map and out the cockpit window of the Pave Low, which was cruising at fifty feet AGL. According to the map, they should have been skirting the edge of Kandahar, but instead they were flying over neighborhoods of single-story houses.
“What’s the date on that map?” Gregg asked.
“I can’t find a date,” said Schweim, “but Kandahar has grown since it was printed.”
“That’s unfortunate.” Looking out the two side windows of the cockpit, Gregg could see that these suburbs spread out for miles in all directions. The helicopter was above the most dangerous enemy-held city in the country. This really, really sucks, he thought. But with critical patients and critically low on fuel, staying the course was the only option. The shortest path through a storm is straight ahead.
He dropped to twenty feet AGL—as low as he could bear to go—and prayed that there wasn’t an Afghan in a backyard with a surface-to-air missile.
Diekman gripped his machine gun and watched residents scatter in the Pave Low’s wake. Atop one building, a woman was hanging laundry; her mouth opened in a scream as they ripped past.
“Be advised, we are skimming rooftops,” Diekman warned the pilots over the radio. “I’m seeing antennas and clotheslines.”
Aboard Knife 04 five minutes out from Camp Rhino, Mike regained consciousness and tried to speak. “My feet are cold,” he was finally able to whisper to Burns, who realized he’d forgotten to put Mike’s socks back on after checking his feet for an IV site. He also realized that Mike’s complaining of cold feet was a good sign. Checking his blood oxygen level, Burns found that it had risen to 90 percent. We just bought you a little time, pal, he thought.
Fronk announced their arrival to the controller at Camp Rhino, a fellow Air Force CCT who had been assigned to run air traffic with the Marines. Even through the dust, the Pave Low crew could see the two JMAUs parked at an angle off the far end of the dirt runway, but the controller denied Fronk’s request to land next to the aircraft. Instead, he was directed five hundred yards away, near the Marine helicopters.
“We will send some trucks to transfer your patients,” said the CCT.
“Roger,” said Fronk. “Cease all operations while we transfer the casualties.”
On the other side of the ramp, PJ Brent Scott had been forced to restrain Mag, who was becoming increasingly disoriented and combative, using a Kerlix bandage to tie the wrist of his uninjured hand to the forearm above his wounded hand. But while Scott tended to Alex, Mag slid the restraint over what remained of his left hand and was using his good hand to continue hitting Alex in the litter above.
As the Pave Low descended, Mag got the strap holding him down unbuckled and tried to rip the bandage off his head, then heaved himself off the litter and onto the deck. There, Scott held him down with both arms on Mag’s shoulders and a knee on his stomach while the helicopter flared for landing, then touched down in the dust still floating in the air from the recently arrived JMAUs.
The rescue crew waited, expecting trucks and Marines to come streaming over.
For two minutes they sat in the dust storm, Fronk repeatedly trying to reach the tower. Finally, the CCT responded with “Stand by.”
“I’m going to get us closer to the JMAUs,” said Fronk. He began to back-taxi the Pave Low, but the dust it kicked up forced him to stop.
Another three minutes passed. “We’re wasting time here,” Fronk told the crew. “Let’s start running bodies ourselves.”
Doc Frank and Scott immediately grabbed Mike’s litter, ran it down the ramp, and set a pace jogging along the edge of the runway. Fifty yards away, a CH-53 Marine transport helicopter powered up its engine, its rotor stirring up the flourlike dust the men were running through. It lifted off and angled toward them, creating a wind blast that knocked the men down when it passed overhead. Struggling to hold on to the stretcher, which acted like a sail in the rotor wash, they got it to the ground and threw themselves over Mike, whose entire body was pelted with gravel and dust.
Watching from the cockpit of Knife 04, copilot Alexander said, “Are you shitting me?!” He radioed the control tower: “I repeat, cease all operations immediately! This is a medical evacuation. We need assistance. Stop launching aircraft!”
“Is this the fucking Twilight Zone?” Alexander said to Fronk. “Did he not hear what we just said? Did anybody tell him this is a mass casualty evacuation?”
Two Cobra attack helicopters lifted off and followed the CH-53. In the interim, Scott and Doc Frank had picked Mike up and carried him another hundred yards closer to the JMAUs, then lay back down on top of him in anticipation of the blast of air.
“We’re getting zero assistance here!” said Alexander.
“Assistance?” said Fronk. “They’re a goddamn hindrance.”
In back, Burns was choking on the thick dust that had filled Knife 04, but he could make out the silhouette of the airfield’s control tower a hundred yards away. Thirteen wounded were still on board, and some of them were facing limb amputations or death if they didn’t immediately get to the highly trained general surgeons waiting at operating tables inside the JMAUs a mere five hundred yards off. Five hundred yards of dust storm caused by what appeared to be Marines practicing touch-and-go landings.
He was feeling helpless and contemplating a burst of .50-caliber machine-gun fire to get the controller’s attention when a group of men wearing black T-shirts and DCU pants appeared through the brown fog.
“We heard you might need some assistance over here,” said the first of sixteen Navy SEALs from SEAL Team 3 on standby at Rhino, where they had been monitoring the tower’s radio frequency.
Within three minutes, every casualty was being run over to the waiting surgical teams, even as three more Marine helicopters lifted off and shrouded them in dust.
With just over ten minutes’ worth of fuel remaining, Knife 03 was still flying over the southwest suburbs of Kandahar.
Amerine—like the other casualties on board—couldn’t hear what was being said over the radio and was oblivious to the dire fuel situation. It was too painful to bend his leg, so he had remained upright, leaning ag
ainst the divider between the cargo area and the cockpit. Hadley was on his knees next to an unconscious Afghan whose foot was split open, the white metatarsal bones looking like a plastic skeleton that hangs on a door at Halloween. The man’s lower leg had been hit by shrapnel, and Hadley’s surgically gloved fingers were inside a gaping wound, his other hand digging around with a hemostat. Blood pooled on the colorful blanket beneath the Afghan. Finally, Hadley was able to grab hold of a severed vein with the scissors-like clamp and tie it off with silk suture thread.
There were four PJs on board, every one of whom was likewise too busy caring for three or four patients to give a second thought to the fuel situation. They were dealing with open skull fractures, arterial blood spray, and exposed organs. Every couple of minutes or so, whenever Hadley or one of the PJs felt he might fold under the stress, he would find the strength to carry on by glancing at the flag draped over the American soldier who had given his life.
Out the open back of the Pave Low, Amerine saw a hillside covered with tan buildings; a colorful dome that must have been a mosque; a tree-lined avenue. Just that morning, he had discussed with JD how they would split the team up once they retook the ruins, crossed the bridge, and moved into Kandahar.
So this is Kandahar, he thought sadly. Wait a minute, why the fuck are we over Kandahar?
Meanwhile, Diekman scanned the ground for the enemy while glancing constantly up at the sky in search of their Texaco. As tail gunner, it was Diekman’s job to spot the fuel tanker as it closed in from the rear—usually at a mile out—and report its approach in increments to the pilots: a three-to five-minute process until the aircraft catches up to the helicopter and the pilot takes over.
As the Pave Low converged with the MH-130, copilot Schweim had been reading their coordinates off his handheld GPS. “We are in the vicinity of north three one, three zero, point four seven; east six five, zero six.”