Service: A Navy SEAL at War (28 page)

The JSOC commander, a SEAL captain, listened to Skinny make his case, then heard a different plan from the Night Stalkers. Reasoning that Skinny’s nimbler, smaller HH-60s had a greater chance of success than the Night Stalkers’ larger Chinooks, the commander decided that the 305th Rescue Squadron would make the pickup. One reason for his decision was the fact that some Rangers at Turbine 33’s crash site, preparing for a recovery, were in need of extract, too. Some of them fast-roped in too high and heavy, burning their hands on the rope and suffering broken ankles upon hitting the ground. Unfortunately, their needs contributed to the shortage of available rescue airlift.

The senior frog called a briefing at the ops center, and told all the pilots and crew, “The mission tonight is to bring home our men. Nothing else has priority, and we will not fail.” Without any further fanfare, the pilots were dismissed and jogged to the flight line. Skinny and Spanky, their copilots, and four-man crews boarded the two HH-60s, fully fueled and ready, and fastened their harnesses.

For the Rangers and Green Berets searching for me, marching across the Hindu Kush at nine thousand feet was much easier said than done. Though they were continuously overwatched by a pair of A-10s, they needed most of a day to get there, and by the time they arrived, some of them were totally smoke-checked from dehydration. Trust me, those mountains were brutal. Through hard terrain and thin air, these men never gave up.

Come to find out, the soldiers thought all along that I was being held hostage in that village. Thinking that heavily armed insurgents were holding me, they had spent much of the first day after their arrival in the area making a plan to rescue me via direct assault. Attacking a well-defended compound where a hostage’s exact location is unknown is tough work, even for our best operators. But they were ready to go in hard and fight for me, even knowing that some of them were likely to die in the effort. Damn good men.

That night a thunderstorm moved in, tossing monsoon-like rains. With the Taliban rattling their swords and making new threats, Gulab decided to move me to a neighboring village. We were set to go before midnight, but the rain didn’t quit. We scrubbed the plan. It was too dangerous to move. As Gulab stood watch over me, I settled in and rested for the first time in days.

When morning broke, the Taliban encircling Sabray were still in a tense standoff with the locals. The enemy leader had delivered an ultimatum to Gulab—“Hand over the American, or every member of your family will be killed.” With eight kids, Gulab had a lot to lose. But there was nothing about him that suggested he would back down.

I had no idea what was going to happen next. Lying around while Gulab and his men figured it out, I didn’t know what the plan was. I guess my new Afghan family had just made contact with U.S. forces, because they soon pointed me toward a steep forested escarpment. We hadn’t gone far when all of a sudden I saw an Afghan with a rifle standing in the distance. As we drew closer, I saw he was a government commando. He was wearing a cap that was printed with the slogan B
USH FOR
P
RESIDENT
. Of all the things I expected to see in the mountains of Afghanistan, believe me,
that
did not make my short list.

Before I knew it, Gulab was running toward a group of about twenty men, yelling, “Dr. Marcus, two-two-eight!” He was authenticating my identity with my BUD/S class number, which he had seen tattooed on my back. As the villagers took me to meet my rescuers, I got my first up-close look at friendly forces in more than five days.

“Marcus?” one of the Rangers asked.

Just hearing English spoken for the first time in almost a week felt liberating. I said, “Hey, bro. It’s good to see you.”

He turned his head to the rear and shouted, “We got him, down here!” I grabbed hold of that guy and hugged him as though we’d been friends our whole lives. (I’d never hugged a man that way before; I hope he didn’t think it was weird.)

The Rangers and Green Berets marched me to higher ground and put me in what I figured was a goat pen, judging by all the manure. Their medic, T.O., began dressing my wounds. We were far from out of the woods, of course. Outnumbered in an area crawling with the enemy, we were all in the same boat and the sea state was rough.

The soldiers set security around the settlement while T.O.
doctored me up. When they tried to post a watch outside my hut, the Afghans stepped in firmly and said they wouldn’t have Americans doing any such thing, not while their tribal law required them to protect my life with their own. The doctrine of
lokhay warkawal,
a precept of hospitality that is part of their ancient tribal code,
Pashtunwalai,
had gotten me this far. They weren’t about to be relieved of that ancient obligation now. It turned out pretty well for everyone—the soldiers got some rest while the villagers took the watch.

I was talking with T.O., joking around a little to lighten the mood, when he leaned over and dosed me with a gunshot cocktail—basically a big shot of antibiotics with a morphine chaser. Preferring to keep my mind clear, I wanted to decline it. As a medic, though, I knew better than that, and the Ranger, sizing up my weakness and my wounds, gave me no choice. Soon afterward I started throwing up. I was seriously sick, infected with a parasitic bug of some kind that wouldn’t let go of my stomach. “This isn’t good, dude,” he said. “We have to get you out of here.”

Those helos needed to show up, and fast.

As I lay down to rest again, the commander and his platoon sergeant came in to say hello. They were followed by some of the Rangers. As they took turns walking over to shake my hand, I could see how rough they had had it. They were heavily loaded, with full body armor, kits, and weapons that seemed out of place in steep, high terrain. “Man, you look like hammered shit,” I said to one of them. “Did you come down the mountain the same way I did?”

I knew that if I were in their shoes, I’d be cussing the stump-headed Navy cowboy who’d gotten his ass stuck this far out on a
ledge. (They confirmed for me that, yes, they had done just that.) I apologized to each of them. They were at the limit of their endurance, and now their survival depended, as mine did, on the rescue helicopters getting in and taking us home. All that was left to do was recite our most heartfelt prayers that nothing would stand in their way.

A
s Skinny and Spanky flew through the night toward us, they were dismayed to see storms socking in the entire area. They had been praying that the monsoon weather would stand off to the east. No such luck. Clouds blanketed the earth and rains scoured it clean. Worse, the overcast blocked the sources of ambient light that their NVGs needed to work properly. Still, they pushed on.

Having studied their route using drone imagery, the pilots knew they would have to “lighten ship” to reach the LZ. This meant dumping precious fuel to reduce weight. Spanky hesitated to release the kerosene-based JP-8 jet fuel over a populated area, but knew he had no other choice. A short stretch outside Asadabad, he pulled the safety wire, saying quietly, “This is for Penny and the boys.” As his tanks opened, five hundred pounds of fuel showered the earth. With less fuel on board, he would have less margin of error maneuvering into and out of the landing zone, but at least with a lighter aircraft, he now stood a decent chance of reaching it in the first place. Dave Gonzales, the copilot, said over the intercom, “If you guys are praying guys, you might want to pray now.”

Finding the LZ was going to be their biggest problem. The coordinates they had put them in the ballpark, but to touch down safely they needed a good visual sense of the ground. And that required lights.

As I was led over mountain paths toward the LZ, we occasionally took fire from Taliban fighters sneaking around the surrounding mountains. Now and then I pitched in, lasing targets for the aircraft covering us using the laser designator the Afghans in the village had detached from my rifle. At one point, I saw one of the guys open a laptop computer. As the bright white light bathed his face in the dark, Gulab quickly conveyed the idea that he needed to shut it down. We were sitting ducks already, and any light could have given away our position. It was important to observe strict discipline regarding light. Just a few nights before, Gulab had torn me a new one for activating the light on my G-Shock watch, just to check the time.

It took us maybe twenty minutes to reach the landing zone. Hunkering down underneath a stucco-and-rock wall that bounded its cliffside edge, we sipped the dregs of our canteens and waited for salvation to descend from heaven.

It was just before midnight. Spanky Peterson and Skinny Macrander had turned away from the dry riverbed they had been tracking through the valley and began to climb. The chatter of a whole airborne cavalry filled their headsets on five frequencies. Tight and crisp, the voices announced their positions and confirmed their movements—and, as always, there were some (a few of them located more than a hemisphere away) that were constantly demanding to know the status of this and the status of that. Spanky could feel his own status through the soles of his boots. When his altitude reached seven thousand feet, his two
General Electric T701 turboshaft engines registered their distress by trembling and shaking, which Spanky picked up through vibration in the floor pedals.

The plan called for the Rangers to toss an IR strobe into the middle of the LZ to mark it for the pilots. But that plan went south fast: once those Warthogs started strafing their targets, our troops were quick to make their positions known. Each man carried a strobe for just such a purpose, and quickly the entire mountainside came alive in a constellation of blinking IR. Speeding uphill at high speed, surveying the terrain ahead, Spanky had no idea which one of the dozens of flickering phosphorescent green lights was his landing zone. The place was like a 1970s disco. And, two minutes from touchdown, he had little fuel to waste on delays.

At this point, all hope rested in the AC-130 Spectre gunship orbiting the LZ. The mission plan called for the plane to shine its powerful infrared spotlight on the landing zone thirty seconds prior to landing. The IR device carried by the Spectres is huge, but its output is invisible to anyone not wearing NVGs. Properly equipped, however, what you see is a bright flood of light illuminating the LZ. The aviators refer to it as an artificial sun.

Throttles maxed, the two Sikorsky-built angels took on the ancient mountain, rising toward us, higher and higher, through thinning air. The twelve souls on board were soon to confront the most dangerous stage of their mission. The ultimate test of their training was almost upon them.

When Spanky was about ten minutes out, Mercury, the A-10 pilot flying as Sandy 1, the mission commander, announced, “All
players: execute, execute, execute.” The AC-130 Spectre rocked sideways as its belly-mounted 105mm howitzer opened up on suspected Taliban positions. The A-10s ripped out short bursts of 30mm cannon fire at a rate of seventy rounds a second, sounding across the ridges with a distinctive, throaty
urrrrp
. The gunship’s 40mm Bofors cannon joined in, too, and soon the mountains were a killing field. Anyone in the way would have been cut down by high explosives. The smallest of these shells had the hitting power of a hand grenade.

In the hills around my village, I had seen the fires of the Taliban encampments and the bobbing lights of their lanterns as they moved around. Now the enemy, if they had managed to survive, either had gone to ground or died. I felt my heart move to my throat.

Through his helmet-mounted night-vision goggles, Spanky could see the clouds saddling the mountain peaks flicker and flash with sudden pulses of light from all around. The A-10s made several strafing passes not far from us, and several additional runs on ridges farther away, to divert the enemy’s attention from the actual landing zone. The hellacious racket also masked the sound of rotors as the two helicopters approached.

Rushing upward over that stark terrain, Spanky still could not actually see the LZ. Less than a minute out, he was still counting on the AC-130 to bathe the landing zone in infrared light. He was wondering where his spotlight was when he heard a voice on his radio, cool and professional, slightly urgent, but scarcely betraying the desperation of the moment. It was the pilot of the AC-130 gunship high above.

“Halos: negative burn, negative burn.”

“Halos” was the call sign for the two helicopters. “Negative
burn” meant the AC-130 was unable to illuminate the landing zone. Cloud cover was total. When the technician in the plane turned on the IR spotlight, it couldn’t penetrate the vast blanket of white. Without it, there was no way Spanky would be able to land.

Sometimes you have to let a tough situation develop before you can finally find a way through. As I know from my career as a SEAL, the right solution never comes from panic or despair. And what happened next is a perfect example of how a professional handles adversity: he lets the situation develop.

After Spanky got the bad news from the AC-130, he radioed Skinny, and the pilots went back and forth:

“Which strobe is the LZ?”

“You got it?”

“I don’t see it….”

The A-10 flight lead, Mercury, must have heard the rapid-fire exchange. Like the rest of them, he was well aware that the weather was getting thick. The thunderstorms were swelling through every altitude. There had to be another way of illuminating the landing zone. There would be no second chances.

Mercury couldn’t do it himself. His armament control panel, which he used to operate the laser in his targeting pod, had had a system failure and was not working. This left him with no way to shine his targeting laser on the landing zone. But his number two might be in position to pull it off. Sandy 2 (Mercury’s exec, in effect) was a Warthog pilot known as Wookie for his unusual height and gentle nature. Seeing what might be the mission’s only chance, Mercury toggled his radio and said, “Sandy Two, mark the LZ.”