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Patreon etcter. So thank you guys, We love you. Special Operations Cobert
SB and I the Teamhouse with your hope, Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Afghanistan targeting was you know, still in its infancy. Is still a lot
of human based at that point in time in Afghanistan, so they're really wasn't
a great targeting platform to go on. As you know, we've looked for
you know, legacy targets and plan out some of that stuff, and as
far as what the Rangers were doing a lot of it, we were just
on TSTs time Sensitive Target manning for one platoon and then the other was on
CESAR Combat Search and Rescue. It was a STEO basic standard UH Ranger taskings
at that point in time, and we had just rotated off of the CSAR
tasking onto the time of Sensitive Target tasking. So we had just finished all
the stand ups for you know, running through timelines and and checks on all
that stuff, and got the the word that you know, marcins Treill's team
was was going to go out and do this Operation Red Wings. And you
know, as Rangers always do, you know, we get enough information to
have a conversation about it at chow hall table, and so it started talking
with some of the REKI guys and you know they're you know, they're briefing
us because they've been following this a lot closer than like a riflele teon has
that wasn't kind of in our in our wheelhouse as far as targets we were
looking at, but stuff that REKI had been looking at in areas to do
to do some of their stuff, and they were like, we wouldn't do
it this way. Not four guys, No, we'd take a whole reckie
section, you know, twelve guys and then but we wouldn't do it without
a rifle team and support, you know, even if it was a you
know, five k standoff between the two, because they can fight to us
and we can fight to them, and it's a bigger footprint on the ground.
Yeah, do we run the risk of spoiling the target, yes,
but you know, on the other side of it, you know, we
as rangers, you know, we're always going to bring everything in the kitchen
sink to bear on an objective to turn the you know, the odds in
our favor. And you know, did they do anything wrong in the way
they did it? No, they made judgment calls along the way. And
you know, we can armchair quarterback this right. You know, here's years
later and say, well, I wouldn't have done that, and I wouldn't
have done this, but you know, they did what they do and right,
so you know that led us into you know, you know, them
losing calms and them getting in the fight, and you know, as the
as the movie portrays it out, and you know, and then we've got
to go in and and do the combat search and rescue on the Turbine three
three crash site and then figure out what the question mark is. What was
going on on your base with your platoon. I mean, are you getting
worried that this team is compromised? There are guys who are m I A,
we might have to go look for them. Then you find out a
bird went down, I mean, can you take us through a little bit
of that. So so that morning, so June twenty eight, that morning,
you know, we we got up and we just did what rangers do.
You know? We got up, did pt, went nate, breakfast,
going on with our training cycle. We were going to go out to
East River Range, which is just outside of Bograam, the little town of
Bogram. So we left the base, got outside there. We're going to
go do some shooting drills and just you know, have a good session on
the range. And we get out there and start throwing the target stands off
the trucks and that's about the time that you know, we we find out
that the bird's been shot down, and you know it was Hey, don't
don't worry about what you've thrown off the trucks, get back on the trucks.
We got to get back, and you know, there was a lot
of guys are like, what are we doing? And you know, we
didn't have any of the answers at the leadership level of what was going on.
We just knew that, you know, we had to be back for
something that was going to going to get briefed, you know, to us.
And as the situation was developing, and and so then as we're rolling
back in, you know, we find out that the aircraft has been shot
down, that team's in the fight, and you know, we're just stand
by at that point. So I wouldn't really kind of understand the whole situation
for you know, probably another six years as I progressed through through leadership.
But you know, as I tell people, it's, you know, it's
as a young guy, you know, it's not that we're not going to
get in there and we're not going to be a part of this and we're
not going to We're going to turn the tables so that way, when we
do recommit forces into this area, we've got so many assets to bear on
the objective that nobody would be in their right mind to want to play so
you know, it was probably you know, about ten hours or so after
the initial shootdown that you know, that night as we're getting ready to launch
and you finally got the green light that we're gonna go, and we load
up everybody that's gonna fit on the aircraft at altitude and launch and then we
hit the mountain weather on that night and have to divert infill and go sit
at Dawlabad for a day and then wait to get infilled the next night.
What what was your understanding at that time of the situation on the ground.
So the understanding was that the forty seven had been shot down. There was
no movement on that, you know. ISR feeds were terrible at the time.
I you know, I don't even understand how people could understand, you
know, what they're seeing on that screen. It was such a bad quality
feed even then, you know. And so we knew that the aircraft's been
shot down. We're going in to do combat search and rescue on the craft.
You know, Murphy's team was still a question mark as to what's going
on because there had been no radio comes with them since Murphy's SAP phone call.
So the priority tasking was to recover the crash because we knew where it
was, and then after that it would just be to figure it out,
if you will. So we interviewed Tony Brooks on the show before. Was
he in your platoon? Tony was in one Charlie, so he was the
other half of the element that went up. So it was a third platoon
led the way because we weren't on the CSAR, so we didn't have all
the recovery and crash actses and all the stuff to do that, so we
kind of plowed the way, if you will, and we were there to
kind of take the brunt of any contact that was going to be made because
we were just there to add security to what they were going to come in
and do. As far as recovery, that was you know, one Charlie's
tasking at the time, So that was that was where Tony was And okay,
cool, you know, yeah, no, it's cool to get like
some different perspectives on it. So then what was your platoon? You know,
I mean you just explained what your platoon's role was, but then walk
us through infill and getting on the ground. So infil we infilled somewhere about
probably about eight thousand feet and you know, it was what we could get
to with the package size that we had on the aircraft. And so there
we knew there wasn't a way to land anywhere up there. So we knew
it was going to be a rope and it was going to be at least
a minimum of forty footer, and it ended up forty and then as the
rope drifts, you know, it kind of goes forty to sixty to you
know, as it works out. And then when one Charlie came in,
I know, their rope started at sixty and it ended somewhere around eighty.
Tony said they just roped down into fog with like no idea of where the
bottom was. Yeah, yeah, it was well, I mean the fog
came in after we were already on the ground. I know what he's talking
about, because you know, it is just the way the weather was working,
and you know, it's just it was. It was, you know,
one of those points where I never really you know, after a private
I never roped with with leather gloves, you know, fast fast rope,
you know, the working work gloves anymore. I always did it in no
max shooting glow hamburger helpers run. Yeah, I never tried like trying to
take those gloves off and always felt like my hands got so much hotter.
And you know, had a teen starts said, hey, just just rope
in your shooting gloves because you don't have to grip the rope is tight.
You this pace the heat just as well. And he said just try it
on the fast rope tower. So I did, and that's that's a forty
foot rope, and you know, it wasn't terrible. And then I was
watching guys carrying two forties and stuff roping in and they've got the big thick
gloves on and their he's an extra tight just to have a feeling on the
rope, right, And so then they're burning in, you know, and
their hands are getting so hot that you know they're blistering at you know,
still ten or fifteen feet above ground, and they're just letting go. They're
like, I'll just deal with it when it hit the ground. And you
know, when one Charlie came in, you know, they had the same
problem, and guys were falling off and then they were just ending up in
the big pile and I know their rto had had his arm broken because he
got stepped on. Yeah, that's and so you know he got guys that
need to getting meted back, but you ain't getting met of backed. Yeah.
Yeah. So what was it like for your platoon roping in and getting
on the ground. Uh, it wasn't. We didn't have any contact or
anything, and it was it was quiet, you know. And then when
you when the brown out cleared and all the you know, the wash of
everything, and you know, you kind of look up the mountain. You
know, you you can see the crash because it's still on fire still,
and it's just kind of one of those ominous moments, if you will,
just kind of you know, the gravity of what you're doing has finally set
in because you're seeing it with your own eyes and not on a TV screen.
And then you know, it just becomes the all night walk up hill
through the nettles and you know the Scotch Burn or not the Scotch Burn,
but you know the pines and all the groundcover that's up there in the mountains,
and it's just were you guys, Was there any intelligence that there were
enemies on the objective or around the objective? We had, you know,
any eyes around the area. But it wasn't anything like on on the objective.
There wasn't any movement on there, you know, throughout the day or
or anything. And there wasn't there wasn't any you know, people coming and
going from it. I think, you know, looking back at it now,
is they realized what they had done and what was about to happen,
and so they would just kind of got a little bit of standoff and they
really were it was to observe how we were going to take care of it.
Yeah, and so you know as the the that day turned into you
know a week to two weeks, you know, at night, you know
you see little fires on the mountain and you know, get eyes on it,
especially can and then ac one thirties dropping, you know, one O
five's on it. Yeah, So what was that first movement that first night?
What was the movement like for you guys? How long did it take?
It took all night. We didn't get to the top until about an
hour before you know, sunrise, and then were sitting there on it and
then kind of listening to one Charlie, you know, suck their way up
the mountain and then one Bravo was still about halfway up the mountain because they
had driven in from Jalalabad the night or the morning that it happened. They
drove up the ninety k in their trucks and then they started walking from the
base of the mountain up and they didn't make it until the next day.
And you know, only about half the guys that started to climb up the
mountain made it up and the rest of them had to go back down and
get picked up by the trucks. And you know because they just either heat,
heat, exhaustion or you know, twisted ankles and whatnot. Yeah,
yeah, And so what did that what was the next like week to how
what did that set in motion for you guys in particular? So what I
said emotion for us was, you know, the priority tasking was to accountability
and recovery of all you know, members of that aircraft crew and then the
QRF team that was on there. So that totaled sixteen and so we got
those numbers, you know, kind of early afternoon and there was a small
clearing on top of the mountain. You could put a small helicopter like little
bird on it, but it was you know, CDs drops for demolitions and
uh, you know, basically had to create an hl Z to be able
to get everybody off that mountain that you know, the remains for those guys,
and so it was kind of a it was a good distraction, if
you will, to do timber charges and clear that space to be able to
make enough room to bring you know, helicopter in and and so we just
finished our regimental breachers course and uh so all that old stuff, you know
that that timber stuff was still fresh in everybody's mind. So it was,
uh, you know, we're all sitting there trying to do the math and
the first art, so like use the ped method. Yeah, so we're
sending tree stumps and everything up, you know, like Roman candles. It
was you know, just packing as much explosives in these little burrow holes in
or knees and launch it. And so that was fun. We cleared that,
and then we got to tasking for you know, what would turn out
to be, go down the mountain and find Marcus. And so that that
started the fun of the mountain. Weather moved in that night and dumped on
us, and we're trying to walk down hill and you know, the trails
a little stream bed at the time, and so guys are slipping and falling,
and guys are trying to not fall off the ridge, and then we
end up just for safety reasons, you know, we end up spending the
last few hours kind of a under pine trees waiting for the sun to come
up so that we don't lose anybody. How many guys did you have left
in your platoon at this point? We had split the four so we had
two squads in the PLS package, So you know, the platoon leader rt.
O FO were with us, and then the team servant had his you
know, uh one squad two machine guns you know, on still on the
top and okay, on the on the top of the mountain, and we
knew what we were. Yeah, they were still up there with with one
Charlie and and reinforcing them, and we're just kind of the the maneuver element,
if you will, going down and trying to confirm or deny what this
push to talk signal was that that we were getting being triangulated down in this
I always forget the name of the village, so I can't even remember it.
So you guys have you guys had to kind of like hide that hide
out not hide out, but you know, take cover under the pine trees
until dawn and then continue to move down to where this you know, ostensibly
there was a sicket hit that you had to go investigate, right, And
so that was basically confirmer deny. You know, was it in me recovered
American equipment or was it actually in fact you know, Murphy's team or you
know what what the question mark was still for that And that was kind of
where we were at for the tasking. You know, the crash had been
accounted for us, and now we're just trying to figure out, you know,
the fate of you know, this format seal team. And so you'll
finally push down in there was signal that you guys were going off of or
was it just like a single a couple of hits and they're like, okay
around this general area. No, it was It wasn't like a consistent but
you know it's like somebody just ken the key and the push to talk,
you know, intermittently enough to get a you know, an orbital transmission to
triangulate uh, you know where it was. And so it was kind of
confirm or deny what that was. And so you know, there was an
s F team that was walking up that we tied in with, okay,
and then pushed back down into this this little village. And then you know,
as we're doing the rangers smash through all the doors and clearing the village,
you know, here comes Marcus, you know, from up from where
they had him hidden and kind of stashed, and so you know, confirm
that and then start you know, doing the So so they actually brought Marcus
out to meet you guys, right, and they knew why we were there,
and they knew what we were lying for, and so it was to
you know, hand him over and then do the you know the kind of
the whole s F thing where they do the you know, let's drink some
tea and talk and you know, well, what was that moment like,
what was that moment like when you first got face to face with Marcus and
confirmed this guy's alive? And what what was your your perception of all that?
I don't know the big question you know that we you know, the
first thing that we asked was once you know, we went through the whole
challenge and and kind of confirmed that it is him, you know, through
the whole you know, m I pow m I A cards, you know,
we all fill out, and going through that, it was, you
know, dude, where's everybody else? You know, and then you know
it's like they're dead. Well okay, great, not great, but you
know it's like, okay, but where they're on the mountain. That's it.
You know, it's kind of that you can't give me anything more.
The city has just started kind of a frustration thing. And I get it,
you know that he's been you know, I wasn't. It probably wouldn't
have been fun to come down that mountain the way he says he came down
that mountain. But you know, I I would like to hope to think
that, you know, my friends were dead on that mountain. I can
at least remember some kind of terrain feature that I could at least tell somebody
that they're you know, they're up here in this area. And so what
was the next step after that initial you had that initial questioning of Marcus,
what what happened next? So then what happened next was, you know,
we just kind of secured the little village that we were at and you know,
confirmed that it was him passed up, you know, oversap that you
know, we had him, and then we were in control of him,
and then we just had to sit and wait for nightfall to come so that
we could bring in the middle of backburg and get him out. And then
it just started, you know, days and days and days of sweeping and
searching this mountain side for the rest of the team. For the rest of
the team. I mean, did you guys eventually find the remains of those
three other guys? Yeah, we expelled Marcus and the next day, you
know, we're sweeping the lower portion of this of this spur, and the
other half of our ple team was coming from the top of the ridge down
we're just kind of eating in the middle. And so after we had met
in the middle and you know, kind of traded information, they got a
break, you know, they started to climb back up for the night,
and we turned around and started coming back down to finish our suite. They
stumbled on on two of the remains, just by half instance. Somebody lost
their footing and slipped into a little wash and ended up, you know,
face first with with two of them. Do you want to talk about because
I think you it sounds like you're somewhat involved or on the periphery of it
of the operation Red Wings when that bird went down. Yeah, So in
Afghanistan there basically there were basically three different types emissions for APACHE pilots, and
so the first is ring route security. And as we were talking before,
pretty much everything in Afghanistan, or much of everything moved by helicopter, and
so when the Blackhawks or Chinooks would transport people or equipment, you'd always have
Apaches with them that were escorting them, and that that mission was usually long
and fairly boring for the most part, because again, the Talaban a pretty
smart They're not going to pick a fight with an Apache or a black Hawk
that has an Apache, and so it's long hours of flying and not really
doing much. On the other extreme, you would have the direct action missions
where you're you know, a customer on the ground is going to go hit
a compound and so you're going to provide covering as they're flying in, You're
going to escort them, you're going to clear the landing zone, and then
you're going to transition to providing over the shoulder support for the folks on the
ground as they're kicking indoors and doing what they do. And so that was.
Those types of missions were usually planned weeks in advance. You do a
lot of rehearsals, most of them all, I think almost all of the
ones I was slotted on were canceled. It wasn't uncommon. You know,
you'd get through, you do the rehearsal, something would change, the guy
would be there and you wouldn't do it. And so those were the opposite,
usually very shortened duration, but had a tendency to be very exciting.
And then the middle of those, which was red wings for me, are
the QRF or the quick reactionary force missions. And so the way that that
worked is that you would do a shift usually from four in the morning I
think it was till four in the afternoon, or the reverse of that.
If you were on the night shift and you would come in in the morning,
you'd run the bird up. You'd get the brief from at the talk
the Tactical Operations Center for the day, and they would tell you if there
were any scheduled missions, and those missions were usually you know, some vip
escorts or things like that, or maybe if there had been if there was
an ongoing fight, you'd say, hey, there's a tick of troops in
contact right now you might get released authority for that, so be ready for
it. And then you would go about your day with a walkie talkie and
if the walkie talkie went off, you had thirty minutes to be airborne.
And so most of the time, like I said, those were either metavac
escorts or VIPs score, but every now and then it would be a tick
and it was part of our squadron was in Salerno, and those folks did
a whole lot more on QRF than we did because we were the bogram QRFs.
So to get release authority for the apaches it was hard because the powers
that be were always weighing if we we let the apaches go and something bad
happens, what do we do Right where the folks in Sellerno, we're much
didn't have the flagpole there with them were co located with the customer. It
was much easier for them to get release authority. And so for me on
June twenty eight, two thousand and five, I knew that Red Wings was
an operation that was getting planned. It was not one that I was slotted
to be on, and it was originally a conventional mission that the Marines were
going to do, and for a bunch of different reasons, they ended up
pulling in the seals who then that night, so June twenty seventh, of
four man colteam was inserted. And so when I came on duty that morning,
I remember the battle Captain or whatever saying, hey, there was a
seal team that was inserted last night. We've lost comms with them. There
might be something going on today. Just kind of be ready. And that
wasn't all that much different from a lot of briefs during the day, right,
not usually that intense where we've lost contact, but there were a lot
of kind of just be ready, something might go on. And so a
couple hours later something my radio went off. And the way it worked is
that my front seater I flew with quite a bit, you kind of your
battle crewed with another pilot a lot of the times, and he would run
for the talk and get the update, and I would jump in the back
and get the engines run up and the bird ready to go. And so
he came running back and jumped in the front seat and said, it's the
seal team. They're in contact. And we basically had a call sign,
radio frequency and a last known grid and that was about it, and so
I took off. My wingman, who was my EXO, was in the
front seat, and then the maintenance test pilot and we flew from Bogren down
to Jelalabad because there was there were a pair of black Hawks in Jelalabad that
had the Marine Infantry Battalion QRF loaded up, and so we were going to
link up with them and then go to literally just the last known grid that
we had and see if we could raise these seals. And so as I
was coming into land at Jelalabad, I remember seeing chinook taken off and I
knew it was a one sixties Chinook because it had that big old fuel boot
them on it, and they're the only ones that have those, the refueling
probe and so you know, I remember thinking, I wonder where he's going,
and then I did the air mission brief, got ready, we took
off towards that last known location. And so at the time, the apaches
we didn't have satcom and so there was no way to talk back to our
higher headquarters and everything. It was literally just go there, see if you
can raise the seals, and then start doing what apaches are supposed to do.
And so as we're flying to this, it's really really high in the
mountains and weather's starting to come down a little bit. There's an A ten
that's overhead that's trying to provide a little bit of situational awareness that we don't
have because we're so underpowered that it's taken a lot to be able to get
to the altitude where that little grid coordinate was. And as I'm flying,
traditionally, what you would do, like I said, the Blackhawks would stay
in front of you until you'd hit what's called the release point, which was
I don't know, like maybe eight or nine kilometers maybe more than that away
from the landing zone. You would pass them. At that point, the
apaches would go to the landing zone first, do an LZ reconnaissance, and
then call it either cherry or I say, the landings are cold, you
can come in. The landing zone's hot, and you're going to continue to
work it. And so as I was trying to pass them, I had
to call the black Hawks and say, you got to slow down. You're
leaving me. I'm so power limited, I can't maintain the air speed.
You got to slow down. And so as we did that, I saw
two Chinooks come in and join the flight ahead of us, and I can't
remember, Like I said, it was a long time ago, and so
I can't remember if we could talk to them directly or we had to talk
to him through the A ten because the one sixtieth operated with slightly different fills
than we did, and so so for your users, the fill is the
portion that makes the radio secure the crypto, thank you, and so you
reload it every day. And so if you're not on the same crypto as
the person, even if you're on the same frequency, you can't talk to
them. Or it was close enough that was kind of intermittent. And so
I saw them, and we either got from the A ten's or got from
them that they were the one sixtieth Chinooks and they had the rest of that
seal team as their quick reactionary force in there. And so I remember calling
to either the Chinook or the A ten and saying, Hey, you got
to tell that Chinook to wait for me to clear the landing zone because I'm
so power limited, you know, I'm barely edging past the black Hawk right
now. And I remember the Chinook responding back saying, you know negative,
we're going to the LZ. You can clear it once you get here.
And then the next thing I remember is the A ten, either the A
ten or one of the Blackhawks that was ahead of me, because I was
trying to pass the black Hawk at that time, saying the MH is down,
the MH is down, the MH is down. And so what it
happened is the Chinook had come to a hover, the seals were about to
fast rope, and a Taliban hit him with the RPG. Chinook kind of
tried to fly away and then ended up going down and tumbling down the side
of the mountain. But from my perspective the way it worked, I was
just passing the Blackhawks as it happened. So they turned away from the landing
zone, which turned them into my flight of two helicopters, and it was
just grace of God that we didn't have a mid air It was kind of
the starburst of hiloics flying everywhere. And to make things a little more interesting,
as the Chinook went into the ground, the A ten turned and started
firing white phosphish rockets on either side of it, and when I talked to
him later saw the deep brief. In his mind, what he was trying
to do is keep people off the crash site. But from my perspective,
alls I could see was stuff burning everywhere and blowing up everywhere. And so
for the first couple minutes I couldn't I had turned down one blind draw,
my wingman had turned down another, and I couldn't even find him, and
so it took a while for us to link back together. And then when
we turned inbound, all that I could see was everything on fire everywhere,
And I remember arguing with the A ten, I'm like, this can't be
the crash site, like there were at the wrong spot, And so he
literally had to talk us onto the crash site where he's saying start turn stop,
turn, start turned until we flew over and there wasn't anything there that
looked like a helicopter anymore, just look like sheets of fire between what he
had shot up the what the schnook did. And so we just did a
whole bunch of low passes over and over again, because we and there were
at one point I had my wingman was an incredibly brave guy and would fly
super low over the crash site and I would fly above him with the thought
processes of if he can draw fire, I can at least see where it's
going and try and shoot back at it, because we were definitely afraid of
hitting an American that the four Seals were somewhere around there there, that we
would accidentally cause fractricide. And every time we got shot at during one of
the points, it was so high that, like I told you before,
if you're going one hundred and ten knots or one hundred and twenty knots,
it's really hard to hit a helicopter. We were barely doing fifty or forty.
As we're coming to the top of this ridge line in my front seater
yelled at you know, we're taking fire. It's an RPG, and he
had the gun slave to his eye, and so we turned to shoot.
But what happens is the gun will only turn so far and then it's limited
so you don't accidentally hit the helicopter, and so he we couldn't. We
couldn't shoot, and then when I came back around, we still couldn't figure
out where it was coming from, and so it was awful. It was
you know, I'd spent my entire career training for that moment to come.
You know, if there's a mission for the cavalry, it's that one.
Your job is to come over to hill to save the good guys. And
we not only did we not save the good guys, but until the Extortion
shoot down years later, the most Seals in the history of the Seals were
killed on that day. And it happened in my watch, and I couldn't
stop it. And so, you you know, the not to trivialize it,
but for somebody who isn't in the military, the closest analogy I could
think of is that if you're a professional foot and you spend your entire career
trying to get to the Super Bowl, and you get to that moment and
then you walk on the field and the first play of the game you fumble,
and that's it. That's it. And that's what it felt like,
because when we flew over that crash site over and over again, trying to
draw fire, trying to find survivors, until we ran out of gas and
had to leave, and the only thing I could think of is if anybody's
still alive there watching us leave us on that mountain right now, and there's
nothing that we can do about it, and it was. It was awful.
And it took me a long time to come to terms with that because
it wasn't it wasn't how, it wasn't how it was supposed to happen,
right, it wasn't the way that you trained for it to happen. And
it was and I couldn't stop it. And so yeah, that is that
is my version of the lone survivor's story. And you see yourself, as
everyone else does, out there as somebody who can put their hands on the
situation and take action. And I mean that must have been such a feeling
of like powerlessness at that moment. Yep, it was. And when when
I met Marcus Latrell once briefly, I met and got to be better friends
with Mike Murphy, who was awarded them posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor,
and I met his mom and dad and his brother and his dad. His
whole family is great, but his dad was a Vietnam era infantry platoon leader,
Purple heart guy, and so he knew what the deal was like.
He knew and they He ended up inviting my wife and I to come to
the christening for the Michael Murphy's ship when it was done. But it was
you know, when I read Marcus and so I met Marcus once but never
really talked to him or whatever. And when I read his book and the
part where he talks about watching the apaches fly away, it just gutted me.
And I was like, that was exactly what I was afraid of,
Like that dude sat on the mountain and watched us leave him, and and
you know, and and and we couldn't stop it, you know, and
we couldn't And so it was. It was bad. Did a bad day?
Did you guys have fuel up? And they sent you back out there
looking for people? I mean, was the next No, that's the worst
part is that you came to the first. One of the first things you
learn as a young cavalry officers the fundamental fundamentals of reconnaissances. In the fundamentals
of the cavalry, the first one is to gain and maintain contact with the
enemy. Right, And so we were the only ones who knew what that
crash site looked like. The A ten that was overhead had to break station
and come back. So a new guy was on. We went back to
Sadabad to refuel with the intention of going back there, and that was the
first time we could talk with our higher headquarters because the Sadabad had satcom and
they came back and said, no, you guys can't go back in,
and you're like, what are you talking about? Like what are you were
the only ones, and then like the weather's too bad, you can't go
back in the mountains, and the weather was coming down. It was starting
to cloud over and we were kind of dodging clouds as we were trying to
find that guy. But then that made it even worse. It's like,
not only did I not stop it, not only did I not fire a
single shot and anger, but now you're telling me I got to go home.
And that was how it ended for me. It was awful. You'd
rotate and we're in the Sadabd and dude, I'm on my way home,
which is beautiful, all my kids packed up. I'm sitting on the porch
and the side of bod our of our house. We have rocking chairs,
don't like you know Charlotte Airport, you know the rocket chair. Well,
I don't know how we got the rocking chairs. I'm sitting there in the
rocking chair, and I'm like this, I'm going home. This is great.
Family had this huge uh vacation plan to go to France. My mother
had just gotten through about of cancer. We were gonna have this beautiful family
thing. And I'm like, you know, I'm checked out, right,
man, I'm done, shit's loaded, ready to go home. All I'm
waiting to do is to get on the helicopter that night fly back to where
we were in Afghanistan. So I'm flying back to Cobble, right, yeah,
and then flying home and I see there's a Special Forces a team across
the street from him from us that we was running another force like I forgot
what they called kandak. Yeah, I wanted one of those things. And
I knew the team leader, and I just see this frantic activity going on.
This is probably like four o'clock, trying to get four o'clock in the
afternoon. And I go down there and I talk to the team leader,
Christian Systems, Like what's going on? Crucial? Can I tell you Southern
guy? Great guy. He's like, no problem, If you need anything,
let me know, because something bad really happened. It's like we're here
for you. Go back and sit down I'm just watching. Finally, I
can't stand it anymore. So I just walked over and went into their team
room and realized that special connaissance team that the Navy Seals put in had been
compromised. The reaction force had been shot down. I think they lost one.
Helicopter had crashed, and nobody knows what's going on. And I was
like, oh shit, okay, you know, selfish voice is like I
really want to go home. That's one of this kind of that's kind of
one of those weird ones. And I'm just a normal dude, So don't
like take this like egotistical. But I had to do some thinking on that
one, because we talk about like no one left behind, right right,
Like we have an obligation if there is an American soldier or American service member
in need, like you don't bail on him. But I got to tell
you I might have thought about it, like because I know how this ends.
You know, in the movie how's the movie end? The guy who
is on his way home right goes on one final movie? Yeah, and
yeah, you know how it is. It's a recovery. It's not a
rescue. Well yeah, but the thing is, it's like the cop who
is on his last day before he retired, who answers the call. The
soldier who just had a baby. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Because
I have a hyperactive imagination. Man, I'm like, this is like,
this is I know how this ends. And I walk back and I tell
the head Afghan that was my partner. I said, get everybody up,
get everything out in the street, get all our trucks lined up, get
ready, we're going to move out on an operation. I can't tell you
what it is. You know what they do. They're getting paid, mister
Chris fucking shit gets fired. Yeah. Man, what a great bunch of
people. You know this trucks we had, We're just oh my god.
I went in and this was I'm finally now older and mature and had a
lot a lot of lessons, learned a lot of scar tissue from doing things
wrong, and that a team is doing the best they can. But I
can just see that it's disjointed, and I said it's frantic, and so
I just said I didn't say anything. I pulled out a Butcher blockboard because
you know where I'm going with this. Let's just do mission planning right the
way we've been trained. So I just put that butcher block up and I
said, let's do mission analysis. Step one is what's the enemy situation?
And everybody just snapped in. At that point, I was like, my
job here is done. You know, I'm not. I'm not. I'm
being a little facetious. And then the biggest thing we talked about escaping evasion
earlier, and the warrant officer is always in charge of escape and invasion planning.
And I don't know about Jack, You're better than I'm You probably paid
attention. I hated that shit. Like Chief would be like, hey,
you know, like we gotta do this, this, this, and you
like leave it alone. And they would always talk about command and control and
I would just like, Chief, leave it alone. We don't give it,
we don't care. The problem was it was it was the Navy Seals
were in there. Seventh Group was in charge of Special Forces Special operations.
They were being ripped, they were being relief in place by third group was
coming in. It was the worst possible moment anything could ever happen to Who's
in charge? Who's in charge? And we finally get that worked out and
let's be on counter terrorist and task Force took over. Jaysack just said,
we got this, but that took a long long time, and so we
decide they put in a restricted what's a rise restricted airspace where they shut down
the airspace forgot them where you can't fly anything, because they thought that the
the Taliban, they weren't Taliban, but the insurgence. The enemy had shot
down the helicopter with surfs to aramis right, and you've had some of those
guys, you've had on there's a lot more coming out about this. So
we couldn't fly in like the most powerful military in the world, all this
extra high end equipment, and you know what we're gonna do. We're gonna
walk our ass up there. And you've been to Colorado Springs. You look
up at Pike's Peak, Yeah, it was like that. You're like,
holy shit, we got to get up there. But this isn't Pike's Peak,
like very the weather rails and roads built into it. So we all
move out that morning and we just like any that wants to show up be
the vehicle drop off point at the base of this mountain. And dude,
you're just looking up there. We're like, like, we can see the
crest, but they're not there, they're behind it. And it's like what
I remember most was the sun came up really really early, Like I could
swear it was like five o'clock suns out. Dude. It's like, I'd
like to look at the weather. It seemed like it was eighty degrees fahrenheit
at the time and just going up, no clouds. And have you ever
seen those pictures of a like World War two in going over the hamp or
you'd see people going where they're walking up these hills and you have these switch
backs. Yeah, like that, that's what we're doing. Yeah, And
it's a combined force. It's CTPTS Special Forces and you guys had an RRD
team with you. RRD shows up. I didn't even know what RRD was.
Man. Those are the the toughest dudes I have ever met in my
life, the most professional soldiers. I was so in awe. We had
a Ranger platoon, so you got this like first Lieutenant he was great with
his forty rangers. You guys appreciate this. You got RD. Then the
Navy Seals like anybody that could get there showed up. We had two special
Forces, a teams, we had a Special Forces B team, a company
headquarters, and then I got fifty. I didn't take all of our force.
I just took fifty of our counter terrorism pursuit team, our mercenary force.
It was like, here's the plan. Movement to contact, which is
we all know is not all the technology. Why would you ever do a
movement to contact? Movement to contact? For those that don't know, this
is like you just walk until you run into the end they start shooting at
you. Yeah, you're like, we found him, right. I was
like, oh man, this is gonna suck. This is going to suck
so bad. It's funny because I think it was I think it was Tony
Brooks who said, like they were the guys that roped in from the forty
sevens the range at night, and he was like, we ran into an
r r D team up in the mountains and it was just like one of
the mystique around them, like, how did you guys get up here?
We want to know how that got there? Yeah, so we walk our
ass up there. People are falling out like green berets because they're wearing one
hundred and forty pounds. You know what. I took an lsee basically to
ammunition. Yeah, Rangers were great, you'll love this U two Rangers.
I was leaving, so I forgot to take money. Thank goodness, there
was a Green Beret that had money and they rented like every donkey or yeah
they could find. And the Carl Gustaf Gunner from the Rangers. How much
is that thing weigh? It's a big fucking It's like that was my first
job. I think it's like twenty seven pounds, yeah, plus the round.
Yeah, he's got that thing. And I'm like, hey, I
didn't call him son, that would have been like, you know, I
felt like son. I said, hey, man, why did you put
your Carl Gustav on the donkey? And he's like, because his platoons are
squad. Later he's like, you will never be be on one stuff,
but right, and it was so cute. Right. I was like,
oh man, poor guy. By the time we got going, that thing
was on the donkey. Here's what happens. It's so hot that donkeys quit.
I didn't know they were allowed to quit when they're done. They're not.
We're not, Yeah, they're not. I was like, like,
like, there's a reason they say stubborn as a mule, right that I
didn't believe that. Yeah, I didn't even know. I didn't even know
that happened. You know. So now we're just walking, we walk up,
we run out of water right away because from bad to worse, we're
just combat and effective. And the decision is made to put together what's called
the Flying Column of the Ranger r D. Because these guys are these are
like this isn't even this is easier than PT. Yeah what you get?
And the endage who grew up there and don't Yeah right RD and a couple
stellar green berets can't sol him and some other people, uh, decide pool
all the water. We're gonna give all our water to like these twenty dudes
and they're gonna haul ass. And can I talk about me in a second?
Indeed, it was like I so want to be part of that,
Like I'm I've been training for this moment all my life, a desperate mission,
right you know where it is success, cataclysmic success or cataclysmic failure.
And I was like, I am the leader of the mercenary force. I
have to stay with them and do my job. Were they doing all right?
Or were they? And did just doing fine because we didn't carry body
arm. Yeah, everybody else is wearing body armor. I was like,
we're all dead. And they got over their shoulder by the barrel, run
and shoes and uh basic gloak and that's it. And then uh so we
we they take off, the flying column takes off. I was like,
envious tears. We keep moving for the night. Uh the endage out of
nowhere, there's a village and they like and we get all this food and
ship comes up to us and that's at that night is when the Rangers fast
ripped in. And the reason I know this is because we're on this like
knife edge, uh you know, the classic knife's edge Ridgeline. I knew
that we were quite expendable. When the green Beret major said Chris, I
said, he didn't know I was a lieutenant colonel. He found out later,
but I was just Chris at the time, and I was trying to
be helpful because his show, he's the he's the officer in charge, the
ground force commander. He goes, why don't you take the Afghans out?
And you know, pulls the purity closest to the enemy. I was like,
oh, I know how this is gonna work. We're just cannon fire,
fine, whatever, And that was I made a mental decision that if
the Rangers got in to the crash site successfully, we would I would take
the mercenary force out because I knew we were like, we were beyond fourth
class citizens, like like the Rangers still were like, we gotta have cans
with us. We ought to kill them all, not you know, Rangers.
That changed later in the war, but at this point it's still that
way. And I just remember, uh, trying to sleep and uh,
it was so humid, your clothes went and dry. But you know how
it is at elevation, it plummeted the temperature. I'm just lying there freezing,
and I hear we needed watery supply. So when the MH four sevens
brought in the Rangers, they brought in a resupply bird and started kicking five
gallon cans and mr boxes off the back because the good idea of air dropping
stuff didn't work. Long story won't bore you with that. What the fuck
were they thinking about? Uh? And there's the surrealistic moment of the MH
forty seven hovering directly over me, lying there in the fetal position in some
sort of like feverish dream and five gallon water cans and then on the boxes
start like landing around me. I'm like, this is ironic that I'm going
to be killed by my own side with five gallon kids dropping on me.
Uh. Rangers got in that night, fast roped in, patrolled in,
got the crash site. At this point, I'm like, the major comes
up with this great idea that we're going to leap frog forces far we're blah
blah blah, and I'm like, oh, we're going to be the last
to move. Oh, yes you are. It's like, I have an
idea. We're going to reposition the reaction force, the mercenary force I was
in charge of, back to a side of bad so we can more rapidly
respond. You could just see him like, oh thank God. But now
I'm concerned because I'm abandoning the Americans right right. So I try to call
back. I get on Satcom, doesn't work. I get on Iridium to
call back to base, to my higher headquarters to get permission. Can't talk
to anybody. So that's another one of those moments where you're like, Okay,
here we go back to the end diage. They were absolutely smoked by
the end of this. Yeah, because there's this legend like, oh my
god, they can walk on the mountain forever. No they can't. They
got done and they were absolutely gassed. It was hilarious. It was hilarious.
Yeah. Yeah. So at that point, rangers secure the crash site
start leaping forward. Marcus Latrell's on the run. We don't know this now.
Remember this area of was the most all of our intelligence assets from satellites
on down. We're focused on that piece of train and it wasn't that big,
and we had no idea where Marcus Latrell was. Anybody that says differently
is full of shit. Yeah, And that was another eye opener, Jack,
where I'm like, oh gosh, we've been promised all this stuff and
this comes down to hard. Yeah. Hard only people physically fit that are
willing to close with and engage the enemy and won't quit. And that was
like one of those eye opening moments. It's so it's so like, no,
duh, you know, it's so obvious, but we had been trained
to think that we're gonna have all these assets available, like, but it
just came down to being really, really tough. Was my takeaway and then
you know, you know the rest of the story. Mark. I was
on the other end when they when Marcus was recovered. But we don't want
to bore everybody with that. There's a there's a great story that hasn't been
told about that. Okay, well you can, you can. You can
slide into my inbox with that story. Yeah, and uh, we'll work
on that. That's where we got ready, and we got back and we
got word that the helicopter had gone down and that was the Navy Seals that
had been shot down. So this was Operation Red Wings and I didn't know
it. I'm just some dumb private time. You know. My my job
was a Gustaf gunner, So thankfully I was lucky enough to be chosen to
go on this mission. So we gear up and all that stuff, get
all of our stuff ready and got the called Gustaf and some rounds and all
that. We fly out. We get kanked the first night we go out.
We land in jbed and we stay in some like airport and then we
go downstairs till I the jail cell or something like that, and we're all
just kind of hanging out in the jail cell, sleeping there waiting, and
so we go in the next period of darkness, and so yeah, that
was pretty sketch. So going out, you know, my first mission in
the army, so it's like, you know, what the fuck is going
on right now? Pretty scared, you know, pretty freaking scared. And
not to mention, I got a lot of weight in our fast rope site
I don't know, sixty eighty whatever, ninety feet long, and that bitch
is like barely touched in the ground. And so thankfully we all make it
to the ground off of these you know, sixty plus ropes, sixtylus plus
foot ropes, and so we're actually not on a flat part of the mountain.
We're kind of, you know, on a hill. Basically, did
you rope in with Tony Brooks or with Nick Morris platoon? Uh? We
were, we were in. Uh we ended up at the same spot.
I don't I want to say I was in, probably in Nick Moore's.
I honestly don't remember which, because I man, I may have been with
Tony. I just remember going down the rope in it taking forever, and
I actually had both my gloves were the same ones, so I didn't have
I think I've had two left handed gloves. Yeah. Yeah, So I
had to like wrench that on there and put the strength of a tiger you
know on there and just slide down that rope and pray that that Jesus take
the wheel at some point. But I didn't die. John Kelly, my
squad leader at the time, had put his foot on me as I was
rolling down the mountain, so that that helped a little bit from dying.
But we had one guy, the r t O uh. He ended up
breaking his arm. A dude came in and smashed his arm, and I
think like two days later they came and got him. But strong he was.
That dude was hardest woodpecker dick. And so he was helping you know,
drag bodies up the hill that night when they were putting them in the
body bags and everything. And our job was, since I was in the
weapon squad, we were all just you know, plump security. We were
you know, setting up basically a big patrol base around there, yeah,
or as best as we could. And because it was just a shit situation
and we just you know posted up the best where we could, and so
we built some little shacks try to you know have some some sort of concealment,
not much cover because that dot dread dead dry wood right there doesn't really
provide a whole lot of cover. Bullets will run right through that, so
it's more for concealment and some shade. But uh yeah, we roped in
and it was really cold that night, because it was like, I don't
know, ten ten two or something like that, ten thousand feet and even
though it's July, it's it's fucking cold. It's not it's not warm,
and we didn't bring it. We brought stuff for a twelve hour mission,
not for twelve days, because that's how long I was there, and so
I barely had I thankfully had a T shirt on. Most guys didn't have
a T shirt on or nothing like. And we're up there nut to butt,
like trying to crawl inside of each other because it's so damn cold and
it's raining on us, and so we break protocol and we're just like,
you know what, fuck it, we're burning the stump right here. So
we just sat there and whatever we could find we burned, and we were
burning the stump and just huddling close to it because nobody's moving in that there's
no way nobody's going to maneuver on you. It's not happening. And so
you, i mean, your your combat ineffective at that point, right,
and so you had to stay warm. Thankfully, we stayed warm enough to
make it through the night and everything. And then but yeah, we had
zero basically zero rations and I had like two bottles of water. So they
quickly realized that we were going to be there for a minute. And so
you know, we had to start a establish you know, some sort of
like I said, concealment of some sort, because we had many nights where
we had because we had constant air presence. So whether it be a tens
f fifteen's apaches, whatever, fast movers, whatever you want to call it,
it was there constantly and you could cond like just NonStop around like a
round because they're you know, trying to come up and they're trying to find
Latrelle and whatnot. And thankfully they we we never had anything crazy happen up
up top on us because we had so much eyes on us because that was
you know, we were part of the main show there. Yeah, that
was that was twelve days of just like you know, your first you're you're
just kind of wondering, like is this what is this what we always do?
Because there you see different units coming through. We saw some r r
D guys coming up. I remember turning around and seeing uh like a you
know, four or five of them walking up and they were gonna go look
for Latreil as well, and so you know, it's it was all hands
on deck, and so it was just like this is crazy. I thought
we were gonna do raids and ambushes and like ranger school stuff and like,
you know, all this crazy stuff. I was learning before we came out
here, so now we're out here looking for our own. But it was
a good it was a good learning experience. Uh, you know, kind
of went hungry there for a little while. I had to run up and
down the mountains and chasing pallettes that had broken, because you know, when
you try to drop a palette on something like this, it's kind of hard.
And so it's like do you just get it stuck in the tree and
say fuck it, let's try to get it down from the tree and you
know, figure it out when it comes down, or so, yeah,
we chased a lot of bundles down and we made a lot of little canopies
and shelters with those canvases and parachutes and all that stuff. So yeah,
we still had a good time out there, even though you know you're sitting
they're just kind of wondering what the fuck is going on? And so but
no, it was cool our first aren't. You know. He's known for
blowing up stumps and whatnot. He's pulling apart C four claim More, you
know, Claymore is pulling the Sea four out and everything and packing them under
the stumps and whatnot and blowing these stumps sky high and just laughing his ass
off. And and so that way we can get more forty seven's in there
to x fill us to relieve us, because we were actually on the end
of our deployment, and so three seven five comes in and relieves us,
and uh so, yeah, that was that was number one. And so
you know, that was kind of significant to me, I guess, just
because it's it's a very significant time in history. And thank thankfully at least
we had one guy survived, so and we were able to find him.
And this was the time. You know, you're the squadron commander. You
had told me earlier when Operation Red Wings happened and you were the ground force
commander, uh for for the squadron when that happened. Yeah, in one
of the deployments, we were over there. And again we you know in
the in the as you guys know, but there were multiple change of command,
right the White side guys worked for Siegsota, who worked for the two
star or three star army guy that was you know the overall battlespace on our
we worked for a different chain of command. So we were kind of watched
the planning going on for for Red Wings and they needed some helicopters, so
they came over and you know, requested permission to use the helicopter. So
I kind of watched the planning going on, but we weren't directly involved,
so you know, we had zero skin in the game besides you know,
giving them advice on where not to go, what not to do, which
is what they did. But like they so we watched the planning and I
remember, you know, they like I didn't think of it, anything of
it. And we were working nights, so we'd wake up around lunchtime and
uh remember the day June twenty eighth, two thousand and five, like we
were still using pagers. The beepers went off, you know, right before
lunch, like hey, you know, report to the jock immediately, and
we mustering the jock and like, what's going on and like they a bird
has just been shot down one of our task force assts, but like not
tracking any of it, Like holy shit, like how does that happen?
You know, And come to realize that they had inserted the night before they
got compromised, big firefight and this is the four four man Reki team,
which is a pretty light Wreki team, and uh, and then they had
launched a QRF in the middle of the day, and uh, that's when
we kind of got notified because although we were all one task force, you
know that the aviators were tracking what was going on, but the C two
was over at Siege of Soda and so like we just weren't tracking. So
then it became okay, we need to send a QRF up there. And
it became a fairly interesting thing to watch for me because we could have gone
right away, but after having a siege Asota QRF launched in the middle of
the day and get shot down, nobody was really keen on sending anybody else
right back in there, especially during the day, and so we waited a
long time. So the seat in time, the task Force and seed Asota
were both those sixes, and then you went straight to the you know,
either sitcom or or the conventional battlespace owner and so there was a lot of
fighting and politics going on there. We waited around for quite a while and
finally my boss said, hey, how long we'll it take for you guys
to get up there? And we had prepositioned them an entity up closer earlier
in the day, and it's like, wait, we can be born in
forty five minutes. It's like Roger that you're you're now the ground force commander,
go and so are really what we wanted to do the first night was
just get a smaller element of rangers. So we had this joint strikeforce Hensteen.
It was most of my squadron and a company minus of rangers from two
seven to five. And so Mike, you know, I had a troop
basically plus company commander with most of his company whatever birds we needed, and
you know, pre stage get closer and get to the craft site. And
it's pretty cool because you know, you talk about operating with commanders in ten
Like the mission brief was they rescue any survivors, recover any remains, fill
as many bad guys as you can. Any questions, No, Sarah,
we can work with that. So, you know, we flew up to
Jabad and sent the first guys up got weathered out, so they had to
come back. So now we're on the ground, like what do we do.
We had everybody coming out of the woodwork, we had assets along the
border, other guys hats assets. We basically said, hey, can anybody
get there on foot? And so you know it was you know, where
the crash site was was in a valley. But to get there, like
if we drove north from Jabad to a Sadabad to get to the crash site,
you'd have to cross like two ridge lines. So it wasn't an easy
traverse. And so but we we said, hey, we're gonna we got
to figure this out, like hedge our bets. So we will send entities
to walk uh and then we will fly in the next night. And so
they started the journey. A lot of guys had turned back because it was
so mankey. They all ran out of a bunch of them ran out of
water, and then we flew in the next day about five clicks south,
uh, you know, kind of back into the same area, but not
the exact area. And we had I don't know, we had about sixty
guys, seventy guys combined force of rangers and seals, and we had brought
a couple of the guys from the troop, the White Side troop with us
because they were itching to get into the fight and we needed some more manpower.
So we had about a ninety foot fast trope. You know, I
think it was I I think Si Sierra Nevada's you know, high tall pine
trees, beautiful country, but some people with some nerves, Like it was
the highest rope I've ever done in my life. Yeah, and I just
remember, like, you know, I was up near the cockpit talking to
the pilots, and so I'm the second to last guy to come out of
the bird. I had a dog guy behind me. You know, it
was faster with his dog, and man, it just kept going and going
and going, just going faster, faster and faster. I remember hitting like
the sack of shit and just like a little days remembering, oh god,
the dog guys right behind me, so rolling out of the way and he
comes fucking plowing in and then we had to you know, walk about,
kind of linked up every buddy did this monster patrol up to the crash site
and sent the the pj's and some some other guys from the Ranger entity down
there to secure the crash site. We set up C two No and started
looking for survivors, and you know, they they did a really good job,
and it was really significant terrain and steep and so we probably set up
our CT note around probably nine thousand feet when the crass sight was probably a
thousand feet below us, because I think the way it happened, the RPG
had hit the back of it and it kind of rolled down this h this
hill that didn't look like much on video, but when you get there,
you're like, oh my god, Like just getting there and back is going
to be significant. But the guys got down there to the crash site while
we were sending out patrols trying to find the REKI team is at the time
we had no idea where they were, you know, kind of doing the
forensic analysis of like, okay, a firefight happened here. We can see
all those shells from both sides which way did they go, but couldn't really
determine that, And a lot of singing and other things are coming in indicating
that maybe they were over in Pakistan at the time, because several of the
radios had from the had been taken some people. What I think happened is
people are like clicking the mic and things like that, and we weren't exactly
sure where it was coming from. But you know, first order of business,
get the guys. Unfortunately, there were no survivors from the helicopter.
You know, sixteen of the there were eight crewmen in eight seals had perished.
We couldn't determine one guy because his remains were pretty burned and mangled.
There was a fire down at the crash site, but got all their remains.
Had to blow an HLZ so they could come in. So you know,
we had had to get resupplied. It was another issue. So we
fast roped in with like minimal kit because we thought we were kind of get
going to get into it, and we were at nine thousand feet. So
your weigh mobility versus like security, right, and if you were kitted down
with body armor and things like that, you would you would have been spent
before he even got there, so we most of us didn't have body armor
on fact, some of the guys. It was pretty funny on the rope.
Thought they were going to do a typical like pen foot rope onto the
you know, a roof of a building, and when they did a ninety
foot rope, wearing just like flight gloves or batter's gloves. I saw a
young ranger his entire hand was double the size the next day and it was
just a blister, and but he pressed on. Another kid had a broken
arm. He you know, hit real hard. He pressed on. Nobody
nobody asked to get meta actent that they could have anyways, But we got
everybody out, I think all the remains out the next day and continued looking
for you know that whoever was you know, still a lot. We didn't
know if any of them were alive, of the four wreckie elements, and
we didn't know where they were, so we looked and looked and looked and
going on wild chases for several days. And then you probably read the story
that a guy who was housing Marcus Schotraev walked to a Sadabad and basically said,
hey, I have this American in uh, in my home in whatever
village it was. And so you know, that was like day seven or
eight, I forget exactly what it was and uh. And that lined up
with some other intel that we were receiving, and so then we had a
pretty idea that, yeah, he's probably there and we need to go rescue
him now. And again we don't know what's going on. We had seen
goat herters, you know, and not a lot of enemy contacts, some
harassing fire things like that that we would just kind of suppressed with AC one
thirties or mortars and uh. And so we launched to rescue and it was,
you know, a little interesting. The way it went down is we
had a small small team of SF guys and in Afghans had it in the
area a couple of clicks away, like, hey, this is the grid
of where we need to go. Can you can you go do this?
And they said no, Like, we have five Americans, five Afghanians who
were wearing like four frams and you know, you know, pajamas and they
have one magazine piece like okay, and so we took a pause, sent
a ranger element up there. They went up, took charge and led the
rescue into the ground while we kind of set up a suppression of enemy air
defense, you know, kind of planned to precede the rescue helicopter that came
in there. So they went in there, they secured Marcus, we knew
he was there. Then we launched everybody else in to get him and did
that whole uh suppressive suppressive fire which was pretty pretty cool, and they could
only take out like two people, you know, Marcus and like one another,
because we wanted to bring the guy's family that they were going to get
killed, and they're like, sorry, you can't do it, but you
can walk out with with our our elements. So once Marcus got back in
you know, debrief, then we started figuring out, hey, this is
what happened, here's where we were. And right away we went out and
found two of the other guys, Murphy and Danny deaths, but we couldn't
find the last of the recu element I think is Matt Axelson. So we
actually had been up there for eight or nine days and we're supposed to go
home, not that that is going to drive anything, but we did a
relief in place because we could not find the last of that four men recky
element. So we did a relief in place with another squadron and some other
rangers came in, and by that time we had some other conventional forces helping
us out too. So uh, they found him I think two days later
and then Xfield and we were mission complete, and yeah, it was a
I'll tell you what. A couple of the guys that walked in, like
from from the Battalian Reconnaissance Detachment of two seventy five, like those guys or
some tough, tough dudes. We had a lot of people quit on that
hump, including some of you know, some some some people from my community,
a lot of the Afghans quit. But those guys showed up. I
think like two days after we were there, out of water, out of
food, stumbling in. I'm like, oh my god, you guys are
the biggest bad asses on the planet. It was. It was pretty cool
and I gained a lot of respect or you know, again, there was
always this stupid kind of rivalry even when we're working together, like mutual respect.
But you know, after that, it's like we truly are the same,
Like these guys are awesome. Yeah, yeah, our guys are awesome.
Also one of those moments where was all these different units working together,
working together to repatriate Americans. You know, I mean it's kind of an
incredible moment in that sense. It was you know, it's always we're gonna
just dominate and it's going to be done, but sometimes it's not that way.
Yeah, we didn't do a dang thing until Operation Red Wings hit.
We were close to going home with you know, I called it pitching a
shutout on that deployment. So tell us then about the run up to Red
Wings, Like, did you guys were you designated as a QRF for that
mission? Did you even know that mission was going on? I mean,
how did this come up on your radar initially? Yeah, we actually didn't
know anything about the mission. About two weeks prior my squad was designated as
primary Combat Search and Recovery for the entire country of Afghanistan. They were trying
to find jobs for us that were combat related because they weren't going to send
a ranger pill tune out to win hearts and minds. That's like the dumbest
thing ever. Thankfully they got that right. But yeah, that was one
of our jobs and we trained up for it. And we never really thought
we would actually do anything. I think it was one of those like just
go through the motions, learn the job. We know how to dismantle a
helicopter, we know how to work with the PJS and lo and behold,
two weeks later, right after that training, we get the call that a
Chinook helicopter just went down and you guys are going to go recover it.
And that's basically all we knew. We later found out was a one sixtieth
bird, which we were all confused because it was middle of the day,
and come to find out, yeah, it was the middle of the day,
and that might have been one of the reasons why it ended the way
it did. It was. I mean, obviously it was a lucky shot.
I mean I was right out the crash site and there's not many places
they could have shot from to get a good view. So whoever it was
got really lucky. Now, granted, those guys have a lot of fighting
skills. I mean, I don't want to discount their skills because I mean,
look at right now, they are taking over a country in weeks well,
I mean waring helicopters into valley systems and shooting them down is something that
the Afghans excel at, right, Yeah, well this was at the peak.
This was at the top of the mountain, so a little bit different
than their usual mo of getting them into a place where they could shoot down
at them. This guy had to shoot up, There's no doubt about it.
So you guys hear about this gets spun up for this bird that went
down. What's the process like then for is it just your squad or is
it the entire platoon that is designated to go in? Uh? Yeah,
our whole platoon got spun up on that one. You know, we were
getting word that this is like similar to Robert's Ridge. So obviously Robert's Ridge
happened a couple of years prior to that, and we knew all about it.
We had learned, you know, we had some lessons learned from that.
So we were we thought we were going into the same thing again.
So that was our mindset going into it, was this is going to be
hillacious firefight when we get there. You know, we're putting our gear together
and rangers being rangers, we don't need water, we don't need food more
AMMO, Right, so we just loaded up on AMMO and we were ready
to go. We had basically no intel. We didn't know anything about the
seals on the ground. All we knew was that there was a Chinook helicopter
down. It was a one sixtieth bird. It had some seals on board,
and we were going to get it, and you know, they sent
us out with that intel. That was so for the people who might not
be familiar with this story, this actually all started with latrelle Beats right,
Murphy and Axelsson, a four man seal team Wreckie team UH, a seal
recky team that went out. I believe it was for Ahmed Shah to to
like find his ID factories or to do the WRECKI on those they got compromised
by a shepherd or a goat goat herder or you know, somebody. They
let him go. He reported on them, and then they and then UH
forces converged on them, and so they called, you know, they called
for a quick reaction force and that's why the Chinook, the one launched during
the day with the seals on it was as UH as you know, forced
to save these and then the vert get shot down. Do you do they
know what it was shot down by? We didn't at the time, we
had suspicions that it was a stinger, is what we initially thought. The
evidence is still not one d percent on it, but I think what we've
come to the conclusion was probably an RPG seven and you know it was.
If you've ever shot an RPG, you know they're not super accurate. So
he hit the the directly at the rotor mass and it just went spinning out
of control at that point. So at this point, do you guys know
anything about Latrell and his team or do you only know about the down show?
Do you know that there are other Americans out there? Yeah, we
knew there was someone out there, but we didn't know it was Seal Team.
We didn't know it was a recon team. We just knew that it
was a quick reaction for us going to help somebody. Okay, we didn't
find out about the recon team until we were on the ground, at least
at my level. I was a private so I had to do a lot
of interviews to kind of get all this information. But yeah, we didn't
we didn't get that trickled down to us. Yeah, so it talked to
us about the infiltration. Then, Yeah, that was that was a fun
one. The initial one was the night after the bird was shot down,
and the weather was just absolutely awful. It was, you know, raining,
and it was windy, and we were flying up into the mountains and
you couldn't see a thing out of the bird, not one thing, and
it was having it was struggling to get up into the mountains. So by
the time we got pretty close to the mountain, we were starting to head
up the mountain, they actually pulled us out. They they they were worried
about losing another bird. So we went to Jabad or Jalalabad, and we
stayed the night and we were going to try again the next night. And
as you can imagine, you know, a platoon full of rangers who was
told that you're going to help your buddies, but we're going to pull you
because of weather. There was a little bit of anger in that bird.
All of us were pissed off, like, are you kidding me? Weather?
Drop us here, we'll walk in. But you know, commanders do
what commanders do, and they were not willing to lose our bird. I
mean, at this point, you don't know if Americans survived the crash,
if they're fighting off hostels like you have no idea what's going on the ground
right now with this bird in the people on it? Is that correct?
No, not at all. We did get some word that there was a
strobe on the crash site and that it was moving around, So you know,
they could be a couple of things. That could be someone who survived,
That could be the enemy gathering gear, there could be a lot of
so we didn't really think much of it other than, hey, we might
have some people alive on the crash site. So the next night is when
we actually did our actual infill, and that was something that it's tough to
explain. I mean I wrote about it, and I tried to explain as
best I could. But we did one hundred and ten foot rope through some
fog and trees to the point where when we were going to get on the
rope and you looked down, there were no chem lights. So normally you
would look down, you'd see kim lights. Right, it was so foggy
and we were so high up you couldn't see a thing, so I didn't
even know how high we were. I got on the rope and just held
on for dear life and was waiting to hit the ground rating some of the
civilians out there. This is a fast rope. We're talking about, like
a braided nylon rope that you can grip like a fire hose, sort of
coming off of one of those back of one of the forty seven's that you
can see behind Tony there on his screen. And you're saying the rope was
one hundred and ten feet long, which is much longer than we usually we
use, and that rope is just descending into the fog below and disappearing.
You have no idea where the where the bottom is. No, no one
did, I mean even even the rope master when he when he got to
the rope, you know they go and they give us the thumbs up.
He looked at us and did one of these oh my god. No one
knew what that meant. We're like, what do you mean? No,
and then he went so wow balls. Yeah, yeah, that's amazing,
because again, you don't you don't know, you can't see it. You
have no idea what's at the end of that rope. If it's a big
hole, if it's a late I mean, you just don't wear it.
Just an empty space. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The side the edge
of a cliff wherever. He's like, what what? What was at the
bottom when you got down there? It was logged. It was a logged
area. So there were a bunch of trees laying down on their sides.
Because when I landed, I you know, there was nothing to put my
feet on, so I flopped over. I was laying on the ground in
between trees that were down because you know, the Afghans do a lot of
logging up in those parts, and you know obviously that had recently been logged
because we were tree stumps and everything else down there. But yeah, you
get to remember it's foggy, and you have your night vision up right out
of the way. You don't flip it down until you get to the bottom.
So we couldn't. I couldn't see a thing. It was black.
If there's timber or logs down there. I mean, was there a pile
up because guys, obviously if you're falling, you can't get out of the
way, and guys just start stacking. Yeah, it was like nothing.
I mean, it would be like watching a circus. I mean, I'm
rolling around and I hear guys trying to get up next to me and people
trying to run to the perimeter, and obviously got senior guys like running up
there and grabbing people out of the way because they were just coming down,
one after the other, the other, landing on each other. And and
we actually did have one. We had one guy, our radio operator who
was you know, came burning in like sure only imagine with his radio and
I don't know if he was unconscious or not. But the next guy landed
right on him and compound fracture to his arm. Oh my god, thank
god, you guys didn't have a mortar team with you, you know,
Yeah, thank god we did have mortars out there, but I don't know
if they I don't think they may have had their sixty to be honest,
imagine. But you know, we were we were loaded. We were loaded
down. They I mean, our chinook was at weight with like twenty five
guys. And if you've you've ever been on a chinook, you can get
a lot more than twenty five guys on one and still fly easily. Yeah,
Well, we were at weight partly because the elevation was so high,
right, but also because we had I mean, we had to carry enough
body bags and I don't know if you ever carried a body bag, a
military body bag, but they weighed about twenty pounds. They're not light.
I couldn't believe it. The first time I held it. I'm like,
what the heck is this lead? But it's a really thick canvas, very
large bag. I didn't know. So, yeah, it was news to
me. And we had to carry these things. Yeah, that's morbid,
man, And you know what, I'm sorry you guys had to deal with
all of that. I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit. How
far was your route position from the crash site? You know, I've been
able to look at it on a map and I actually laughed because it was
like two miles, but it was two miles on the map. With elevation
change, it was about six miles, and it it felt like twenty yeah,
because you know, you walk one hundred meters and you've only on the
map on ten right, because you're going after yeah, yeah, going straight
up. Yeah. And another issue with this whole mission was the area we
were. We didn't even have proper maps. We were using satellite imagery to
get to our location. And you know, obviously the point man is trying
to make a route because they didn't tell us where exactly where they were going
to land. It was we're going to get as close to this point as
we can get, but we're going to put you where we find an opening
or where something looks safe, and we're just going to put you down.
And they didn't put us on exactly where they said they were going to put
us. So it took us a little bit to get oriented. And thank
goodness we had a good point man because he led us directly to the crash
site right like spot on well, and I imagine that they were worried about
another ambush, just like, hey, we were down one burden, there
will be another one coming. So you know, they've got to put you
on the y or even you know further out you know the Terran feature or
two away, so it's two miles straight line distance on the map. You
guys start moving during the day, or you could start moving at night,
middle of the night. So it was it was you know, around midnight
that we hit the ground and your your squad leader or team leader that was
the point man was Johnny on the spot and took you right to the crash
site. Yeah, there were two point guys that basically worked together. One
of them was Stargan Kandy of third Platoon that we linked up with, and
he's just known for his line nab skills. So thank you Kandy for putting
us on point. I know you're probably going to watch us at some point.
So yeah, it's unbelievable that. I mean, I learned land now.
Obviously I went to ranger school and I was a team leader, so
I'm pretty good at land now, but I this was something, something else.
This is a different world out there. And how long did it take
you to move? There's two miles you know, we hit the crash site
at sunrise, so you can imagine that that's a lot of several hours,
five to six hours walking. Yeah. No, Afghanistan is brutal, terrain,
brutal and carrying all that gear, I mean the ever present question where
you guys were in body armor on top of all that we were, Ye,
so that was another kind of lesson learned about that is you don't bring
your plates. Yeah, so we had body armor, which is uh,
we did drop our body armor the next day when we after we recovered the
Chinook and they came in for the recovery, we dropped our plates because we
were only wearing the front plate. We were wearing the back one, thankfully,
So let's uh, let's get into that. Then you know, bond
coms, you find yourselves at the crash site, Ranger platoon arrives, what
ended up happening that morning, So the first thing was to determine, Well,
the pjs were the first ones exactly on the crash site, and they've
kind of led the charge on the recovery. But they basically quickly came back
after they saw the crash site and said, you know, there's no one
alive, so this is not a rescue anymore. It's now a recovery.
And that was like you might you might as well have just taken a you
know, a k bar and slammed it in the side of my sidewall of
my car, you know, let out the let out the air for sure.
And then basically from there it was we need to recover everybody and find
all their equipment. So we kind of staged and started that little sweep and
you found there were sixteen sixteen personnel and you found fifteen of them like fairly
quickly, right correct, And then it was I'd say within the first hour
or so, we had fifteen of the sixteen accounted for, but we were
having a really tough time finding that last person. Right, And I remember
how big a chinook is, right, you see it behind me? Yeah,
those are I mean those are bigger than a city school bus or a
city bus. Right. And on the ground there wasn't much left. And
there's a good photo in my book that shows a few of the guys at
the remnants of turbine thirty three, and the three guys covered the amount of
bird that was left. Yeah, so it was definitely a site that you
just couldn't believe it, Like, how is this Shanook? How is this
is Shanook? Unbelievable? It looked like the whole side of the mountain was
basically burned up. Correct, Yeah, it was a huge fire. Obviously
a huge forest fire had occurred, and yeah, everything was burned. And
you're not for the people who might not be familiar with like a ceasart,
Like, you're not just looking for the body in the sense that you don't
know if this person is out there trying to escape in a vain right now.
You don't know if they've been captured. You have no, like,
if you can't find the body, then it changes the entire equation for what
the next steps are. Yeah, we were definitely worried that someone was on
the run, and so we're just like, he's not here. Where is
he? Did they capture him? Is he you know? Ian e ing
right now in the mountains. So they said, all right, guys,
this is this is it. We've gone on much more time. We got
to find the sixteenth guy. Yea. And it took it took some new
eyes from from the third platoon of Charlie Company. And I'll be damned if
within like thirty minutes one of the guys finds them in one of the burnt
areas. It was actually a down tree that obviously fell after the forest fire,
and it was he was hidden kind of under the tree. Yeah.
And I don't want to get too gruesome or like yeah you know or anything,
you know, make the gory, but it must have been an experience
for you guys, you know, recovering these people that had been in a
schnip crash with a fire like it much not have been easy for for everybody
involved. I mean no, I would say you'd be surprised at how well
you would perform when you know these are your buddies. You're moving pretty fast,
and you know you don't have time to process your emotions really, so
you're really just working, work and working. Now, after it's all done,
that's a different story. But in the moment, actually, you know,
I think we were so motivated to find these guys and get them home
that yeah, it's it's it's hard to explain how you just get into this
robot mode, but I think a lot of combat veterans watching understand, But
for the civilians, it's it's it's one of those things that you you try
really hard to not show your emotions when you're on the battlefield because you know
how it affects your buddies, and then if everyone around you, so the
harder you work, the less chance you have for any emotions to come out.
So I think that's kind of how a lot of the spec Ops guys
operate. If you just keep working, there's nothing to think about. But
I mean, and also as hard as difficult as that is, I mean,
you guys did the honorable thing and recovered all sixteen of those personnel and
got back home. And you know, I don't think you or any of
the other guys out there. As hard as that is to deal with,
you know, you all did the right thing. Yeah, and I think
a lot what made it really easy, at least for me, was you
know, looking at these guys and they were not much different than myself.
Right, there were most special operators right there in front of us. And
what I kept telling myself was if this was me, they'd be out doing
the same damn thing, right, They'd be out there helping us, getting
us home to our family. So I made it easy. And plus you
think about the families back home, like they deserve their loved one to come
home, right, so there's a lot of motivation, like to get them
home now during this time, do you guys have sufficient like ISR and coverage
to make sure that you're not attacked while while you're doing this. Yeah,
I don't think I've ever been on a mission with more assets in the air.
You got to remember, and a lot of people don't recognize this or
know this, but this was the largest search and recovery operations since Vietnam,
and I think it's still to this day. Is I think it was larger
than extortion. So we had multiple air assets. I mean, I think
we had three at one point, and that's unheard of. I mean,
you're lucky to have one thing on station most of the time, but having
three different I mean, plus we had fighters in the sky. I mean
it was intense. You knew it was a big deal when you could pick
and choose which air asset you wanted to use. Yeah, and you guys
had I guess the A tens were kind of smacking dudes down as they were
trying to move towards you, so they didn't even basically have a chance.
Correct. Yeah, we were actually, you know, recovering the crash site.
We had removed all of our gear, had our weapons set on the
ground, because when you're you know, we're doing a recovery, you don't
really you can't have any other extra weight on you. You know, people
are heavy. So we had all that stuff down and we hear cracking of
an AK and an airburst of an RPG and we're like, up here we
go, they're here. So all of us run over to our gear,
throw it on and get ready, like getting ready to maneuver. And it
was looking back on it, it happened so fast, like within minutes you
hear the a tens, you hear them fire their rockets, and then you
hear over the radio, Yeah, they're gone go back to work. They're
not going to be a problem. You guys are gonna Yeah those eight tens.
When you hear that, Burt, that's one of the greatest sounds in
the world. Yeah. I mean they were using not only their their cannons,
but they were using rockets. They were had the two seventy five millimeter
and those things are you know, the flaschet rounds are They're huge. And
yeah, they basically littered that side of the mountain. And I don't know
why these guys were firing at us, to be honest, They were like
a mile away, so we probably wouldn't have seen them if they didn't start
shooting from too far. So you get the remains of the seals and the
pilots recovered. What's the next step to evact the bodies the remains the remains
out When do you start hearing about this other patrol that's out there, an
American that's m I a kind of what's what's the next step for your platoon
out there? It was almost immediately when we finished recovery that we were told
we need to investigate some transponder hits that were not you know, a few
like a mile away. So we quickly got our gear on and headed out
on patrol. But you know, we didn't know exactly still at that point,
we knew there were seals, but we didn't know that they were the
recon element that was out there prior. We eventually learned that, I think
the next morning. We learned that on our next patrol. But this is
Vietnam style patrolling that we joked that we trained this way, you know,
during the Global War on Terror, and then we actually did it. Now
we had had a we had a Ranger School patrol base on my very first
mission, on my first deployment, and so when I got to Ranger School,
It's actually kind of funny. When I got to Ranger School, I
was like, oh, so this is why we did this? Yeah,
you know, but yeah, we we quickly right after recovery, we were
out moving again. So for the recovery, did a bird? Did a
bird come in to do the recovery? How did you guys manage that?
Yeah? Essentially, the first sergeant created an HLZ with a bunch of closest
and we waited until nightfall to bring in a back another chinook to x fill
them that night. And and you and you guys are like, well,
they get like, you're not getting on the bird. You have a follow
on mission to go check out these transponders. Yeah, we knew we weren't
leaving because we knew that there were We hit the transponder patrol before the X
PHIL Actually oh really okay, Yeah, so it was right after we basically
lined them up for X pill and it was still daytime. It was middle
of the day. So then we did our follow on patrol shortly thereafter,
and we were beat We were beat up. I couldn't believe it when they
sid ustart going on patrol. I was thinking to myself, I don't know
about this. You know, all of us are dehydrated and we're exhausted.
We walked all night, we you know, recovered bodies all day and now
we're going on patrol. Yeah, and so you guys are fanning out through
the mountains and the forest looking for transponders. You initiated movement that night,
Yeah, it was actually middle of the day, right after the recovery.
We headed out on this patrol and UH Seal Team ten joined us. They
linked up with us and we patrolled together. And when I say patrol,
uh, this this was not your traditional type patrol. It was like,
you know, we had two guys on the side of a goat trail and
we were booking it. We were just running basically. It wasn't there was
no tactical movement here. Yeah, we were asking for it essentially, and
we were told, you know, the way we're moving, pretty likely we're
going to get in some bad firefight. So be ready because we're we're moving
fast and we're moving loud, and we're not you know, in a proper
where this is not how you shouldn't move. But speed was our our tool
at the time because we thought we might have guys that are alive still right,
you're you're moving to potentially rescue other Americans that are out. Yeah,
so we were I mean, it's crazy. I mean, we don't we
don't even do this in a training environment. This was like an old road
march where you're on the side of the road and you're just booking down,
but it's a goat trail, and yeah, the security was you know,
you did the best you could write. But really, for me, I
was trying to keep up the guy in front of me. Yeah, so
if they start shooting at us, we'll fight. How far did you have
to move to that first transponder hit? It was about a little over a
mile, but it was like straight downhill into a valley, and so the
movement down wasn't too bad. Yeah. Yeah, coming back that that's a
different story. And was the transfer are still there when you arrived? Nothing?
There was nothing we found nothing we got to Yeah, it was just
an empty space where obviously they probably made a radio transmission from that spot or
near it, or a SAT phone. We don't know exactly what caused this
intel but but no bootprints, no bootprints in the mud, no expended brass,
nothing, nothing. We came up completely empty. Then it was obviously
a huge disappointment. You know, we just walked for nothing. We didn't
find our guys, so we were told hurry up and get back. We
got to x fill these guys and Sealt ten is going to go with them,
so they got to get back before the bird does. So obviously at
that point, you know, we were again basically running up the mountain.
At that point that was beat. I was carrying the litter the sched cooat
and it's not that heavy, but it is when you're going up a mountain.
Well, yeah, everything adds up. And you guys, I mean,
how are you doing on water by this point in time, because even
where I'm like, what is it a the two gallon or five gallons?
The camelbacks, I don't know how even like I would have burned it through
that on the first movement to the site and then working all day recovering bodies.
Do you guys have water left? No, we were most I think
almost everyone was out of water. I had like a little bit just to
wet my mouth, and it was freaking me out because you know, the
one thing that you don't want to happen is to run out of water.
Yeah, and being I was the new private, right, I'm the young
guy, and I'm about to run out of water, I'm like, oh
shit, yeah, I'm gonna have to ask my team leader or the tab
aspect for it for water now. And you don't know that everybody else is
already out too. Though just about everybody was out. I don't think anyone
had anything more than like half a bottle of water. Yeah, basically,
So, yeah, there was no water at that point, and yeah,
we were booking it up that hill. Thankfully, the one sixtieth guys when
they came in to recover the bodies. Once we got up to the mountain,
they restocked us for a little bit at least. Yeah. So now
it's snyeteime. So you guys have been on the move and working hard,
like expending massive amounts of energy for almost twenty four hours straight. Correct,
So it's time to go home. No, no, no. They put
us back at HLZ up there, and we created a patrol base and we
pulled security for the night because they put us down for the night because they're
like, we're going to kill these guys if we keep pushing them. Yeah,
they're basic out of water. They've got to recover. But they said
in the morning, we're heading out again. There's some other things we need
to do, and we're going to drop some ordinance on this uh this uh,
this village nearby which we almost were in the night before, and this
is apparently where Ahmasha had his ID factory and they suspected him to be there.
So they were going to drop three five hundred pound Jadams on this mud
hut. But it's weird. I mean, it's odd to me that they're
going to drop ordinance on anything when there's an American or at least you know
that there are possibly four Americans out there alive that they don't know where they
are. True. Yes, as I was in the patrol base that night,
me being the the young private I was, I was a smart ranger,
so I always had these questions and I always had, you know,
insight, and I was asking things some of my team leader. Thankfully,
I had a good team leader who actually answered them and didn't just yell at
me. But I said, I asked him, I said, isn't it
weird that we're dropping bombs when we don't know where our guys are? And
he just stared at me. Yeah, like no answer. He literally just
stared right through me, like I want to answer you, but you don't
want to hear my answer, right right? Well, I have an even
more obnoxious question, is why send the Wrekie out on this facility if you're
just going to drop some bombs on if you haven't heard from your Rekie team
and you don't need their input, Just why didn't you anyway? Just throwing
that out there, Hey, teach their own right, Yeah, well I'll
say this. You know, I don't know if they if they had intel
on that building or not. Our D was on the ground, so they
may very well have had eyes on but we didn't get that information, so
I I want to assume everything. But that was just my thoughts at the
moment, gotcha, Yeah, fair enough. I did not know the r
D was on the ground, so maybe they had confirmed so they were out
in another location. What were those dudes up to? You know, I
don't know. We did link up with them the next that day, so
that night we did link up with them, so I don't know when they
arrived or where they came from. They didn't come in with us. They
disappeared. I mean, Rekky doing what Reky does, or does what already
does, right, they disappear. So I wish I could get a hold
of some of those guys and find out where they came from. But they
were definitely on the ground for sure. So now we're getting into day three.
Yeah, this was three days post crash, but day two of us
on the ground, two of you on the ground. The second morning,
how much water and what how much water did did the bring you? Did
the recovery team bring you? Did they restock you? Guys? They had
like three or four cases of water like the Costco size basically, and we
burned through it right away. Oh sure, I didn't last very long.
We grabbed a couple of bottles and that's what we had. I drank one
during the night. I should have had another looking back on it, but
we all had a couple of bottles of water for the next day. That
when you say a bottle water, you're just talking about like the little bottle
of water twelve ounce polar not like a like the are the in a rack
the huge ones? Yeah, or or not even the bottle, but like
a you know, like the fuel can full of water. Nope, just
a little plastic bottles of water. Well, you gotta love arms life sometimes.
I mean, I have a one of my photos in the book is
actually shows you can see the trash on the hl's east we just piled all
up. You can see the water bottles sitting there. Yeah. What are
the temperatures like at this time you know of year, like at night,
during the day, hillacious, I mean during the day it's it's triple bidgets
and at night it gets into the sixties. So you know, it doesn't
sound cold, but I'll tell you what, when you've been sweating all day
and it gets down to sixty, it feels like twenty. It feels like
it's freezing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I was shivering.
I was like my teeth were chattering in the morning. Had you guys,
with your lack of water, in the temperature in the day and the work
in the moo, had you guys have any had any heat casualties at this
point. Surprisingly, no one had a keat casualty at that time, but
we did have guys that were near their dropping point shortly thereafter. Sure,
so we're getting in it. So that next morning, what was the what
was the next orders that you guys got over the net? What came next
for the for the patrol. The next was we are dropping ordinance and basically
you're going to chase the ordinance. So what they did is they you know,
we heard the ordinance drop, We felt it hit because it wasn't that
far away, and I mean it shook that whole mountain. Yeah, three
pound bombs, it's a lot more than I expected. I mean we were
about probably a mile a mile to a mile and a half away and you
could feel it under your feet. So as soon as they hit, we
were out chasing him because our job now at that point was we need to
confirm we got our guy. And at that point we still didn't know where
our seals were. We had no clue. We didn't even know we were
going to go next. They were just sending out patrols in different directions,
just trying to sweep the mountain as much as they could. Yeah, what
the hell are you going to confirm of the guy after you dropped three five
hundred pounders on him? You need to ask. You need to ask the
commanders above our level, I mean even our commander. When we got there,
he said, so what do you want us to do? Yeah?
Yeah, this was a building and now it's a field full of cement and
grass and dirt. And they said, b and behold, I need you
guys to s sc that site. So so SSC made sensitive sight exploitation.
And it means like if you go into a house, didn't you search everything
in the house, you take all the documents, you take a few They
are like you search everything, And basically they want you to do this to
to a pile of rubble, a pile of rebel. I mean, to
be honest, it didn't even look like a pile of rebel looked like to
me. It was like a farm field with some chunks of like rock and
cement and dirt and clay. Didn't seem like a building at all. Right,
were they doing this to target on that shot? Did they expect you?
I mean, did they send you in with a handy rapid DNA like
sniffer that could pull all the DNA odor from the now we had nothing,
like nothing of the sorts. I think they wanted us to find a body,
which really three five hundred pound bombs, come on. But you know,
before we even got to that, you know that patrolled down to that
location was Yeah, it was downhill, but it was some of the most
relacious train we saw. The whole time. We were sliding on our rear
ends down this mountain, you know, and it was wide open. I
mean, we're sliding on our butts on the hillside. Basically, if someone
had an RpK, they could have picked off a rangeable tune I mean easily.
Yeah, So to get down to that site. You know, we're
basically running, sliding on our butts, and then we get there we find
this this complete mess of a jade m site. That are our commander who
is now general work. He he basically said, are you sending us heavy
equipment? Because that's what it's gonna take we have we don't have gloves,
like, we don't have gloves to do this. We have shooting gloves.
Right, So what did what did your SSE consist of while you were there?
That is pretty awesome. Yeah, I was you see anything? No,
you don't, Okay, really there was no SSS. It was impossible.
There was nothing to s s. You know. We started moving rocks
around and it was a complete waste of time, but we did find actually
a hand. There was a hand and my one of my team leaders of
my squad was poking at it with a stick. Come look at this,
guys, look at what we got. Pretty horrific to see a hand,
especially when you get up to it and you look down and the hand looks
awfully small. You know, it was I would say, best case scenario
is a teenager or a little person. Maybe it was a little person,
you know, the the infamous bidget it's possible. Yeah, So I was
a little disheartening. You know, you don't go to war to see potential
civilian casualties. That's not what you want. No one wants that. So
that was my first thought actually, is like, oh man, we killed
some civilians. This is horrible. So we were all sitting around thinking,
uh, we just killed civilians. Great, right, that's freaking awesome.
But years later I found out from my platoon leader, who actually went back
to the same village as a company commander. Actually he left that he left
Red Wings and became company commander for the company that was in the documentary Restrepoh.
We watched that that was his next deployment, pretty unbelievable. And he
found out that actually that Jadam actually killed a bunch of insurgents, so it
wasn't it wasn't a civilian casualty like I thought. So that was a little
bit refreshing. But you know, I lived at like ten years of my
life thinking that I saw a bunch of civilians secular, right, And I
mean up to this point, like, you guys haven't been in combat,
so you haven't had that. I don't want to say release, but sort
of that active part you've had, you've recovered bodies, which was probably or
had some emotional you know weight, and then you go and you think,
you know, you feel as though we just jdamned civilians, which has emotional
weight. And I mean, is does this feel like a heavy op for
you, especially since you haven't been in combat yet? Yeah? For me,
it was like, I honestly, this was the moment. You know
Jack was mentioned earlier, is this you were living the dream? Right?
This is what you thought it would be? No, well, that's the
moment I had. It was basically right after that that night, after that
Jay Damn site, I was sitting there and you know, talking to one
of the team leaders and basically it was like, is this what you thought
war was going to be? Like? No, this is nothing. This
is this is nothing that I thought it was gonna be like. And it
it was. I mean, the whole mission was a complete failure, right,
Like we wouldn't even know about this mission if it was a success.
Right. So the whole point we're talking the reason the only reason we're talking
about this is because it was like one of the most epic failures in specop's
history. So you know, We're sitting there on the mountain and I'm just
thinking, okay, so we know sixteen guys are dead, we killed some
civilians. We still haven't found our navy seals, and I haven't eaten and
we're out of water. This fucking sucks, you know, this is like,
this is horrible, and so now where's the fighting? Where's the glory?
Right? And now it's time, of course, for you guys to
get on the bird and go home for hot sandwiches and soup, right,
you know, I wish you know, at that point, we were starting
to have heat casualties. People were starting to fall out and docks running around
with ivs and it was a mess. And I'm sitting there joking with one
of the guys, is about to be heat casualty. I asked him,
wouldn't be nice if they air dropped some pizza And he didn't like that because
he was about to come to find out, he was about to pass out.
So, you know, we finally got a resupply that night, but
that was another ship show. Was they went to go air drop us water
and food and they dropped it a valley over Oh god, oh shit.
And We're like you've got to be kidding me. Yeah, Like we've walked
for twenty four hours, like we're not going to get it. Yeah,
And the one that landed near us, the shoote never opened and it burned
in so half of the stuff that exploded. Yeah, So we were I'm
drinking out of these like broken water bottles that were half full and we're just
chugging these things, and they resplied us the next day. Finally we ended
up getting food and water. But it was on the way down to that
Jadam site that we heard that there was new intel. That's when we kind
of heard about the Seals. So three Charlie was on our way down was
sent to a village to search for what we were hurt. We heard was
an American. They had an American. They were kind of chattering on the
radio and someone had come into a local base and said, we have an
American in our village. So three Charlie basically started running to that village while
we were on our way down to that Jadam That was the only glimmer of
hope I think we had for the first two or three days there. But
we also heard shortly after the ssee that they found they found somebody. They
literally found a live American. And I can't even explain what that felt like.
After all that negativity and all that failure that we all felt, It's
like, holy shit, that someone survived all this. And yeah, it
was like a we were like partying and you guys got high five and yeah,
and and not only did they survive, you guys being out there having
gone through all that, you guys were on you know, close enough to
actually go and get him. Yeah he was. He was not that far,
I mean far considering all the injuries and stuff that he went through.
And I can't believe he made it that far, to be honest, but
I guess, you know, adrenaline douzzle crazy things to the human body.
Let's actually get to some questions before so it comes to answer to some questions
and then we'll get back into this. Okay, Jackson, thank you very
much for Tony, Jack and Dave. Where do you all see the future
of Ranger Ragiment headed in a perfect world? What would be the next evolution
of the seventy fifth Tony take it away. I mean, I think they've
kind of already molded into this counter terrorism type force that is new to them.
They went from you know, airfield seizures to to these direct action raids,
and I think that's the right path given there's so many urban centers in
the world. If we're going to Oregon, we're going to need that large
urban force to go door to door and fight. I mean, it's urban
warfare is the future. Yeah, I think the Ranger Regiment, you know,
they build themselves. They call themselves America's premier raid force, So that
kind of says it all right there what they see their future as. So
that's definitely not going away. I mean I was there, so I can't
speak to it so much now that I was there when it was you know,
airfield seizures, when it was patrol base, and when it was making
the change into the CQB and things like that, And there were a lot
of people at Ranger Battality that resisted that they didn't want them to go that
way. So we were, you know, kind of serving two masters.
You know. One, you get in your RSAD, you know, your
Ranger whatever it was vehicle and go out and sit in a barasuit on a
cold ass airfield in the morning after you know whatever. And then you know
and then you'd go, do you know, updrills and you know, mozambiques
and stuff, you know, on the range or the shoe house. When
I worked with Rangers or you know, in Afghanistan, Iraq, they had
become later on, they'd become so professionalized where they could become dog hammers,
they could become you know, the interrogator. I mean, they just had
a lot more going on, which I think is fantastic. Now it's like
a little army within an army. Yeah. No, I think that's fantastic.
But you guys have is know a lot more than I do about that.
And then Jackson again, what was the most professional unit you worked with?
Rangers seem to always talk highly of Delta, Air Force, Special Operations
Command and HRT. Did you work with any of them? Yeah, I
personally worked with all of them. I mean I worked with Seal Team six,
HRT. I worked with the Delta, the PJS, the GUYSJS obviously.
Yeah. And I would say the two that stood out to me the
most one being Delta far and away I think the best counter terrorism force out
there, and the other one is the PJS. Those guys you talk about
knowing your job inside out, those guys are amazing, So I give a
lot of props to those guys. Jackson, thank you again. How critical
were other soft elements of this of the Seal? Oh? How critical as
in like critical were the other soft elements of the seals plans for the Rockie
of Ahmed Shah all due respect? Was their pushback on their planning ability?
No, I don't know the full details of that. I think this has
been written about. I think Ed Derek covered this in his book and it's
I think a lot of the soft community actually didn't want to do this mission,
and the only people that actually accepted it was the Seals. So I
think that that was the pushback was, now, this doesn't seem like a
good idea for our guys, so all it takes is one commander to say
yes, right, right right. I think there were some people that told
this pulled the Seals, that it wasn't a good idea. That you know,
that's one opinion, and the Seals had their opinion, so you know,
yeah, I think the marine the Marine commander is in particular advice that
they should have more more marines on the ground when nearby when they're doing this
recky mission. Because of the terrain, and I don't I think they said,
no, we're going and we're going by ourselves. Alejandra, thank you,
buddy. Hey Tony was talking to him mutual our ranger Beddy of ours.
He wanted me to ask you to tell stories of bush diving and bac
and rip ha ha ha too. That's uh yeah, that's I think I
know who who who asked that question. Felipe, I know that's you.
Essentially, we used to get a little rowdy on the weekends and I fell
into a bush on a walk back to a motel, and you know,
it tripped up your own feet because you had one too many and the bush
was the softest bush I had ever fell into. So so every time we
would go back to this motel on the weekend, we would jump into it,
and so we called it butsch divingers being rangers. Yeah, exactly.
Dicky's discords dailies. Thank you. Oh I didn't get a notification my malfunction.
Yeah, sorry about that. Hit the little bell icon and select all
notifications. Yeah, Tip and Alejandro, thanks again, buddy for afghan portion.
What was talking with Philippe? Was talking with Philippe p He mentioned during
the insertion almost fast roping off the side of a cliff. L He mentioned
you had a guy land on you while roping in injured your arm, and
Charlie Mike, Yeah, so I wasn't the one who was injured, but
yeah, I mean it was a bunch of trees. Yeah. And we
were very close to a to a cliff, thankfully, not super close,
but close enough. And Bert was the guy specialist Burt, a radio operator,
broke his arm. Uh. John Dugan, thank you very much.
No segue for ball trimmers, awkward. Next time, we'll get you.
We'll we got, we got you, don't worry about it. Uh uh
and then uh b p a is he thank you very much for the donation.
I don't see a question. And if so, let's uh, let's
talk about the recovery. Then you guys on the ground had gotten word that
an American has been found. What was the next step for for your platoon?
After you know, they found Marcus and that was three Charlie that found
Marcus. They but basically the next job was, you know, where's your
where's the rest of your team? You know, we know there's four of
you, so where's the rest of your team, and you know Marcus,
Marcus did his best and he basically gave us a decent area to go search,
and it took a took a quite quite a bit of time to find
the rest of his team. So our job then was we need to get
the rest of these guys. But he quickly told us that, you know,
they're dead, so he knew that it was there was no rescue,
it was, it was recovery. So so Marcus told three Charlie an area
to search. That got radioed over to your platoon, and then you went
searched the area. If I'm understanding right. No, it was really close
to where three Charlie was and they actually got it. Okay, gotcha.
But but we we were still doing you know, presence patrols, hoping to
dry out you know, a mud shot and his boys in case they were
still around. So that's what we were basically doing at that point. So
one of the things I noticed in your book was that La Troll was very
concerned about how many guys, uh, three Charlie had with them because,
you know, they he they had been under siege and he felt like that
they were gonna He was worried that you guys are going to be outgunned,
right, Yeah, I mean the element that he came in contact with was
pretty small that he saw. Now there were more guys, but they were
kind of hidden around the village. So his concern was, you know,
they've got a lot more guys than we do. You better have more,
Like he never really said that. He just kept asking, you know,
how many guys do you have? How many guys you have? And Lieutenant
English, who was the guy who was basically interviewing him, a former enlisted
guy and CAG and a green Beret, just an amazing guy, he suspected,
is what he told me. So I just want to say that,
you know, Lieutenant English has since passed from cancer, so this was interviews.
Yeah, I mean, what a great, amazing human. So I
just want to say that I interviewed him shortly before he died years ago,
and this was before I decided I was actually gonna write a book. And
he basically said he suspected that the handlers that were with Marcus were waiting to
know exactly how many men they had, waiting for English to say something so
that he could, you know, tell his buddies. So English never told
him how many guys they had. He just kept saying enough, we have
enough. So, you know, we were still skeptical that you know,
these villagers were protecting him, right right, I think rightfully? So yeah,
interesting, So what happened? So what happened in terms of the gears
turning above you when Pre Charlie calls back to command like Jack bought, like,
we we have one? I mean, was the whole world moving for
you at that point in terms of military logistics and everything you needed? Oh
yeah, I mean it was. Yeah, we had supplies at that point,
we had other units moving towards us. We had a marine unit that
was moving to us on foot, so reinforcements are on the way. And
then the next part of the mission was okay, we got to find the
rest of this team, and it was you know, we knew they weren't
alive, so it was it slowed down dramatically at that point. It was
like to a crawl. There's no more running around. Now. Now we're
doing legit like patrols where we're drawn to contact. We're trying to try to
make contact and assault the enemy. And of course they were long gone because
they're they're smarter than that. I mean, look, what's happening. I
think, what's happening right now? As soon as we left, what happened?
Yeah, Now at that time, are you are you guys out there
and basically a company size element? We were we were in a tuned minus
element at my my location. Well, I mean we split up, Okay,
That's what I mean. Is like with England, with with everybody,
if you would have consolidated about how many people did you have at that point?
There was about a company arrangers out there. I mean there were two
platoons from Charlie Company, one platoon from Bravo Company, and of course all
the other elements that were out there, you know Pj's, you had elements
of Seal Team ten, you had r D, we had Green Berets,
we had marines that were also in the area. So I would say total
probably two full companies of people. So you guys, you guys could definitely
lay some hate then if you needed to, like it wasn't you weren't at
risk of it becoming another like fighting retreat from from or n from sion.
I mean it sounds that way, but we were so spread out, you
know, you know, or a few miles apart. So in that terrain,
you have to be together in order to be effective. Right, we
were so spread out, we were you know, yeah, we were ready.
We were pretty exposed, I would say, each element. So what
happens next? So you they called Jack Potter, they have Latrell, They
find the guys were do they now is it time to go home? Now?
Do you get to go home? For some not quite? Not quite?
This was the point where we still need to find his team. Right,
So three Charlie has an idea where they are, but they weren't.
I mean, Latrell's description was not like this is the coordinates. It was
like this here, you're there. He like circled an area on the map,
and we we trusted him. So we sent three Charlie there, but
one Charlie My unit did patrols in other areas that we knew that they had
passed by, just to be sure that. You know, he just been
through severe trauma, so you can trust him, but you can only trust
him so much. I mean, we don't know how bad he's hurt at
that point. So we just kept patrolling and looking and crawling around in the
mountains known areas of where they had been and it was a few days later
before we found his buddies. So you can imagine that that train's that bad.
I mean, it takes days to search a little area on the map.
To me, the whole time I was out there, I just had
no appetite. I mean I was like snacking on things, but I never
ate a full meal. Really, yeah, a little bit on edge from
the days prior, so you weren't very hungry. So I mean I lost
like fifteen pounds in that week. So just out of curiosity, you went
to Range School. Like when you went to Range School after this, you're
probably like, this isn't shit, Like I get two to three hours nicely,
I get at least a meal or two a day, Like I'm cool
with this. No, Ranger School still sucks, but I would say that
that was still aul. But at the same time, I always had that
to fall back on, right right, you know, in the mountains.
I was in the mountains in winter. It sucked, and I just kept
thinking, well, at least I'm not in Afghanistan, right right, right,
at least I know I'm getting a meal today. So how long does
it take for three Charlie to recover the other three teals. It was a
total two days after Marcus to get everybody, and there's still there's still Matthew
Axleston was still not recovered at that point. It wasn't until we got you
know, reinforcements from Third Range of Battalion, who who basically deployed early because
of this mission. As soon as soon as this mission went down, Third
Range of Battalion was activated. I remember that, Oh really, Yeah.
It was Charlie Company. I believe was like a platoon or two from Charlie
Company that they got out there. I believe it was the sixth day or
six day. Yeah, it was like you know, an RF one recall
called everyone's cell phones, got them in there and rapidly deployed those guys.
Oh yeah, wow yeah. I mean, like I said, it was
the largest rescue and recover operations since Vietnam. So I think the military treated
this as we are not having another Robert's Ridge. This is already bad.
We're not going to get overwhelmed by firepower. It's not going to happen.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's amazing. So how were you guys doing?
Were people just pretty much sticking their urage, how are you doing battlespace deconfliction
at this point? There were so many moving elements that did not normally work
with each other. I don't know how to answer that, because I don't
know that it was that. I mean it was tough, obviously, there
were so many moving parts that and radio transmissions out there were just god awful.
I mean, half of the time nothing would go through. You'd have
to try satellite that wouldn't go through. So it was the line of sight,
you know. I mean, yeah, it was tough. The commanders
had their work cutout for him, for sure. Were there any blue on
blue incidents during that point in time or surprisingly? No? I mean,
I mean we linked up with units on a patrol, like we linked up
with r D in the middle of the patrol, and you know, so
I don't know how it all occurred, but it was very well done by
at least my leaders that I saw. I mean, I had I had
some of the best guys on the planet. I had, you know,
Lieutenant Colonel Howell, I had general work and you know Congden who is I
believe he retired to the sergeant major. These guys were cream of the crop.
So you know, impressive, let's put it that way. Yeah,
so how did this operation finally start winding down? I mean, after you're
out there five days, everyone's recovered, what was the next step. You
know, Axelson still wasn't recovered. But when three when Third Ranger Battalion arrived,
you know, they wanted to get us out of there. We were
just like a battered bunch of kids out there. I mean, I have
a picture I think you guys, I sent it to you, but it
was a picture right after the mission, and we looked like we had a
couple of pigs had rolled around in the mud. You know, we all
had beards. It was that's it want wound down. It's like, we
got to get these guys out of here and get them replaced because they're beat
to all. Hell. Yeah, that's that's amazing. It's what a three
seven five do. When they hit the ground, they immediately went after the
the area where they believed Axelson to be. And you know Axelson, you
know this this is not like it isn't common knowledge, but he was not
near his two buddies. He was a little bit a little bit away from
them. So you know, one can say that you know, he may
have survived much longer than we thought. He may have been eating himself,
so that's why it took so long. He's a stud, right, so
he may have. He may have, you know, made his way out
of there. What what was the estimated size of the force that they encountered?
You know, there's so many conflicting reports out there, but I have
seen videos the Taliban that the Taliban has put out or I'm much Cha's guys
have put out, and to my best estimation, I think it was no
more than about twelve twelve men. But you got to keep in mind,
and this is not to I'm not trying to like make Marcus a story not
true because that terrain, right, he could have put five guys against those
four seals, and that the superiority of position they had, it wouldn't have
mattered. It wouldn't mattered if they're a fifty or five you're shooting down down
on these guys and like just walking that train. I'll just say this,
I don't know how anyone could have survived if they're ambushed from above. I
just don't doesn't there's no cover and there's trees, but they're they're shooting,
plunging fire down on you like you have to aim, so our estimation is
about twelve. Yeah,