The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (42 page)

We and the Danes got ourselves loaded up in two Chinook helicopters, Razor 01 and Razor 02—and then sat there on the tarmac. Nothing happened. Minutes ticked by, and still nothing happened. Cassidy was going back and forth on the radio. Why the hell weren’t we taking off? Finally we saw some Army Rangers running out toward us. Cassidy sighed and said, “C’mon, guys, we’re getting off.”

We climbed out of the two birds, and the Rangers got on. Obviously there had been some kind of pissing match between Task Force K-Bar and Task Force Dagger over who was responsible for whom. We sat down on the tarmac and waited for a while to see what would happen next. The Rangers took off. We waited. Finally we went back to our tent and waited there on standby.

Soon we heard people scrambling everywhere. Something heavy had happened, but at first we didn’t know what. Then we heard that the Rangers who had replaced us in the two Chinooks were in trouble.

Eventually we got the whole story.

Two teams of SEALs had gone out to insert high up on a nearby mountain called Takur Ghar. Originally they were supposed to insert in the dead of night at two different points in the valley, to provide observation support for an op there, much the way those six marines and four of us had done that day in Zhawar Kili when Doug failed to black out our vehicle. Delays and mechanical problems had forced a change in plans, though, and they were ordered instead to insert closer up toward the peak itself at close to dawn.

A daytime landing in the mountains—not a good idea in Afghanistan. The Taliban knew how to shoot down helicopters. In fact, they’d learned it from us back in the days of the Soviet occupation, using our ground-to-air Stinger missiles. Fortunately the Stingers were no longer operational, but the Taliban were well equipped with RPGs and knew how to use them.

Sure enough, an RPG ripped into one of the SEALs’ helos as it went in to land, and one of the team, Neil Roberts—a totally solid guy, a bad-ass who was ready to rock on insert and be first out and on the ground—was hurled through the chopper’s open door. The bird was shot to shit and crash-landed a short distance away, where its occupants immediately came under fire. The second helo, carrying the other SEAL team, came in to pick up the remaining personnel from the first chopper and also came under immediate fire. An Air Force Combat Controller was killed. That helo was forced off the peak and requested backup.

That was when a QRF team was dispatched to come get them—which was us, until interbranch political squabbles intervened and we had to exit the helo. The Army Rangers took our place and took off for the ridge, but when they tried to put down they, too, came under fire, killing their door gunner. Moments later their chopper, Razor 01, was shot down by another RPG and crash-landed, just as the previous helo had done, killing three more of their crew. The surviving crew members and the Rangers who made up the QRF took cover, now also under heavy enemy fire.

Back at Bagram they now put us on another set of helicopters and flew us to a refueling station they had set up in the middle of nowhere, maybe fifteen minutes by air from Takur Ghar. We sat there with the Danish Frogman Corps, listening to everything unfold over our comms. Gunfire, screams, guys dying, pleading for help, and no help arriving. It was brutal.

We heard the Ranger captain, Nate Self, on the radio, begging for reinforcements, but the air force general in charge of the task force, General Gregory Trebon, wouldn’t send anyone in. They didn’t want to lose another helicopter. “Sorry,” the guy on the radio passed the word, “the general says nobody else is going in there, not in daylight.”

We begged to get inserted up there, even anywhere close by, so we could go help these guys out. “Go in with F-18s or whatever you have,” we said, “and pound the place if you have to first—but put us on the ground.”

But it wasn’t going to happen.

When you have guys ready and willing to risk their lives to go in there and get their fellow soldiers out of that hell they’re in, you let them go do it. If it were me out there, I would want to know that our guys were doing everything in their power to come get me, and come get me
now.
Going into battle you
have
to know that will happen, that your guys will come after you no matter what. That’s the psychology you have to have in order to be able to function effectively on the battlefield. “No man left behind” isn’t just a catchy slogan, it’s the nonnegotiable bedrock of a fighting force’s existence.

Do I think it was a bad call? Yes I do. No question in my mind, and morale suffered for sure.

I understand the situation they were in, not wanting to lose another helicopter, but if it were me, I’d take a deep breath, let my guys come up with a solid plan, and execute it. Yes, those first few sorties were kind of fast and loose and got confused, and that’s when things can so easily go wrong. Yes, things had fallen apart up there, but that’s when you sit back and say, “Okay, time out, let’s take stock and plan this out.” Then you let the guys who are closest to the action and have a hands-on understanding of what’s happening out there make the plan—and then you
go.
That’s what should have happened there.

Instead, we sat there all day, the Danes and us, all geared up and ready to go, just a fifteen-minute hop from the spot where our brothers were fighting and dying. It was agonizing, listening to Captain Self’s pleas for help all day long, talking about his wounded. Every time he checked back in the casualties were worse—and he’d lose another guy. Ten to twelve hours of daylight went by with no support whatsoever. People died because of it.

Soon after we had relocated to the refueling station, another element of that Ranger QRF did successfully insert, but a good way farther down on the mountainside. We followed their progress on our comms as they struggled up the face of Takur Ghar to link up with the downed helo and Rangers on Roberts Ridge (as the site would come to be called in honor of the downed SEAL), because those guys were being hammered. It took them hours to get up that mountain.

There was also an Australian SAS force nearby, holed up in a reconnaissance outpost on the side of the mountain, observing with long-range optics, providing some situational awareness, and calling in air support. Hats off to the Aussies: They saved some lives that day.

That second Ranger force did eventually succeed in climbing up there with all their kit, fighting their way through, meeting up with the downed QRF group, assaulting that position, and taking it over. There was a huge Taliban force up there that mounted a counterattack, and the Rangers took more casualties, but in the end they got control of the ridge line.

After spending the day sitting on our hands and listening to this whole thing go down, we boarded the helo and flew back to camp. The mood at Bagram was pretty dark. We all felt these guys had died for what appeared to us to be no good reason.

I’ve thought about this a thousand times, ten thousand times. What would have happened if we had been allowed to leave on those two Chinooks? Would it have just been us who got shot down instead? Or if we had left ten minutes earlier, right when we first boarded the helos, would things have gone differently?

*   *   *

One of the SEALs who was in Neil Roberts’s team was a guy known as Turbo. A few years later Turbo and I got to be good friends when we worked as instructors together, and one night over some beers he told me the full story of what happened there on Roberts Ridge.

According to what I remember from Turbo’s account, when they were on approach to that ridge, they got the thirty-second call: ready to put down. He was standing right next to Neil. Turbo and Neil were close friends. “Neil was always squared away,” Turbo told me, “always had his pack on and ready to go. He was going to be the first one off that 47’s ramp.”

The ramp went down, they prepared to leap off, and Neil had just lifted one foot off the floor and was half a step out when
boom!
they took that RPG hit. The pilot yanked on the stick and banked the helo abruptly back in the other direction in a desperate bid to escape the volley of gunfire. Before Neil had a chance to catch himself, the inertia of their forward movement hurled him out through the chopper’s open door. Turbo reached out and just managed to catch hold of Neil’s ruck—but he didn’t have a firm enough grip on it to make the critical difference. The ruck tore out of his fingers, and Neil plummeted out of the helo and onto the ridge.

The helo took some further hits and crashed on the hillside, about 4 miles away from where Neil was left behind.

The other chopper swooped in, picked up Turbo and the other guys, and headed back to Bagram. Turbo and his teammates argued with the bird’s crew, insisting that they turn around and go back for Neil. The crew had their orders. The team kept arguing and insisting. Finally they practically put a gun to the pilot’s head. “Look,” they said, “we’re going back for our friend. You are going back there and putting this copter down.”

The pilot took them back to the same spot on the ridge where they’d lost Neil, and Turbo and his teammates jumped out.

Turbo told me it was the most intense firefight imaginable. “We shot so many of these guys,” he said, “and they just kept coming and coming.” At one point he was back to back with one of the other SEALs, and he could feel the burn of bullets whipping past. Later he found burn marks all over the sides of his body from the friction of the rounds. Firepower from the enemy was so overwhelming they eventually realized that if they had any hope of surviving, they had to get off the ridge. They stepped off the ridge line and started sliding down the slope.

It was incredibly steep, a 70-degree incline at some points. Predator drones were orbiting the area, and after it was all over I was able to watch this happening on the Predator video footage. It looked like a group of guys shooting down a mountainside on a frigging bobsled.

The moment Turbo stepped off the ledge he took a .762 mm round right through his leg. It blew out his calf, so now he was bleeding badly as he slid hundreds of feet down the hill along with his buddy. Once they came to a stop, he found he couldn’t walk. He asked his buddy to leave him there, and when he refused, Turbo insisted—he felt like a complete liability—but the guy would not do it. He put a tourniquet on Turbo’s leg and carried him a few miles.

Their OIC was an absolute maniac. The Taliban were pouring down the tree line after Turbo and the rest of them, and this guy held the whole scene together. He’d come back and check on them, then run out to the tree line and lay down a bunch of fire and kill a bunch of guys, then run back again—running back and forth, engaging the enemy and somehow managing to keep them at bay. “He saved all our lives,” Turbo said.

Their OIC finally was able to drag Turbo farther away from the firefight, and this was when they made the call for help. The nearby QRF was alerted and boarded a helo to come help them.

That was us. And you know what happened next.

The surviving SEALs spent a lot of time out there in the woods, and Turbo thought it was all over several different times, until he finally lost so much blood that he lost consciousness altogether. Miraculously, they were finally picked up, and Turbo survived.

Seven of our people died there on Takur Ghar: three Army Rangers, Corporal Matthew A. Commons, Sergeant Bradley S. Crose, and Specialist Marc A. Anderson; the two aircrew on Razor 01, Technical Sergeant John A. Chapman and Senior Airman Jason D. Cunningham; Sergeant Phillip Svitak of the Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR); and Petty Officer First Class Neil C. Roberts himself.

After the whole thing was over, the group that had picked up the surviving Rangers went back to survey the scene. There were hundreds of Taliban dead. “We found dozens and dozens of them lying there with multiple shots to the head,” they told us later. “That was the SEALs’ work.”

They could possibly save his leg, they told Turbo when they got him to a hospital, but he’d be crippled for life. Nah, he said, cut it off at the knee, and he would get a prosthetic lower leg. His rehab was unbelievable. What he does even to this day with that prosthetic is insane. You’d never know it was a fake leg.

Ten months from the day he first got back to the States, he was back in theater over in Afghanistan again with his new leg. Turbo is an amazing guy, a true patriot, and an absolute animal.

*   *   *

By late March we knew we were winding down. We had a stellar track record in Afghanistan, but we’d been in this theater of operations for close to six months, and soon it would be time to rotate back home. As it happened, the Germans were about to rotate in a new crew themselves, and the group that was getting ready to leave wanted to have us over for one last get-together before they were gone.

This time the party was held at our compound, around a raging bonfire.

That night the Taliban were shooting mortars at us. They were staged pretty far away and weren’t likely to score a hit. There was nothing for us to do about it, anyway; we weren’t responsible for camp security, and the army was dealing with it. So we just treated their firepower like fireworks. Every time another mortar went off the Germans would yell,
“Prost!”
and raise their beers in the air. We thought it was pretty hilarious.

Late that night, as we were enjoying ourselves, drinking, listening to the stereo, and laughing every time the Germans raised a toast to another futile Taliban mortar round, I heard a loud voice yell, “Turn that fucking music off!” I looked around and saw that someone’s head had popped up over the wall that separated our compound from the one next door.

Uh-oh.

At Kandahar there was a small camp where all the Air Force Combat Controllers hung out. We had Brad and Eric, our two CCTs, living with us, but there was a small contingent of CCTs who were piecemealed out to various other units. Among them were the two young Combat Controllers that Chief Dye had fired in Oman. Even though they were no longer with our platoon, they had still come over to Kandahar and were now living with the other Combat Controllers in this compound—which ironically enough, had ended up being moved right next door to us.