“If any of you screw up and get a Marine killed tonight,” he said without preamble, “I will personally put a bullet in your head.”
I caught Patrick’s eye and we mustered a quiet “Aye-aye, sir.” Captain Whitmer walked off. The hangar bay was too crowded to talk privately with Patrick, so I returned to my place in the line of Marines waiting on the ramp. Whitmer’s comment gnawed at me. Did he not trust us? Did he think we weren’t taking the mission seriously? If it had been an attempt to motivate us, it failed. I tried to put it out of my mind and focus on getting ready to go.
I fitted a rubber life preserver around my neck and pulled on a pair of green Nomex shooting gloves. The life preserver had a carbon dioxide cartridge and a strobe light that would activate upon hitting the water. The gloves would keep my hands from being burned in a fire and allow me to grab weapons hot from shooting.
After all the training, all the classes at Quantico and patrols at Camp Pendleton, I had a picture in my mind of how it would be. Momentous, significant, high drama. But grandiose phrases such as “in harm’s way” and “Godspeed” just didn’t fit. Around me sat a few dozen Marines waiting to launch. I saw ordinary guys doing a job. I didn’t think about the sweep of history, about the Afghan people or protecting America. My mind was on call signs and radio frequencies and the satellite pictures of the Black Hawk. Any fear or reservation disappeared in the task at hand. Sitting there in the dark with my rifle suddenly seemed to be the most natural thing in the world.
Staff Sergeant Marine snapped me back to the hangar bay. “You’ll regret not bringing the mortars, sir, about the time the hajis are overrunning your perimeter.” He was walking along the line of troops, talking to the Marines waiting to leave.
His tone was joking, but I knew he wished he was joining us. I did, too. Before I could answer, the intercom announced, “Call away, call away!” — our signal to board the helos.
Marine clapped my shoulder. “Stay safe tonight.”
We shuffled to the flight deck and turned our heads against the deafening roar of three Super Stallions, snorting jet exhaust and tossing us sideways with their rotor wash. The Marines around me shone dimly blue in the subdued lighting. I led a column to the lead helicopter, painted with the name “Creeping Death,” and counted thirty men aboard before taking the last seat near the tail ramp. Two other CH-53s roared farther down the flight deck. One would carry thirty more Marines, while the third would fly empty to lift the crashed Black Hawk and ferry it back to the Kitty Hawk.
I donned a helmet attached to the helo’s internal radio and got a comm check with the pilots. The Marines squeezed onto webbed nylon seats around a pallet of spare ammunition and a pallet of medical supplies. Across from me, Staff Sergeant Law flashed a slight smile. My platoon and Patrick’s were mixed up, spread-loaded between the two CH-53s in case one of them crashed. Patrick’s first squad leader, Sergeant Tony Espera, sat next to Law. Espera had joined the Corps after working as a repo man in L.A. He looked unfazed and smiled when our eyes met.
The engine noise increased, and we lurched sideways off the Peleliu’s deck. Climbing over the ocean, I listened to the pilots’ routine chatter — fuel, power, altitude, and navigation. The other two helicopters were dimly visible to our rear through my night vision goggles. The pilot called “Feet dry” over the intercom to let us know we’d crossed the Pakistani coast. I gave a hand signal that was relayed through the helicopter, and we took off our life preservers. The bird dropped to low altitude. Beyond the tail ramp, the ground flashed past almost within reach, but I saw no lights. Below us was Baluchistan, one of the least hospitable parts of the earth. With nothing to see and too much noise to talk, each man was alone with his thoughts.
All through my training, I’d heard sports analogies. OCS was a game. Taking advantage of unrealistic details on field exercises at TBS was “gaming the game.” Winning. Losing. Code words like “touchdown” and “foul ball.” But sitting in that CH-53, racing north into Pakistan, it didn’t feel like a game. It felt like the most serious thing I’d ever done.
The pilot passed the five-minute warning over the radio — five minutes to touchdown in the landing zone. I turned my backpack radio to high power and rechecked all my gear. Night vision goggles adjusted, seat belt unbuckled, last sip of water. The engine pitch changed as the pilots wrenched the big helicopter through a series of evasive turns approaching the landing zone. The landing gear thumped down, and the ramp dropped. I ran out, turning left to avoid the spinning tail rotor, and crouched at the edge of the runway to get a radio check as the helo thundered away in a cloud of dust. Staff Sergeant Law and his machine gunners disappeared to the north without a word. They would secure a perimeter around the crashed Black Hawk.
I jogged across the runway to the spot we’d picked to set up a command post, passing the hulk of the helicopter. Over my headset radio, one of Patrick’s teams reported muzzle flashes in the distance. The lights of a Navy P-3 communications relay aircraft winked high overhead — too high even to hear.
A group of Marines clustered in the darkness, and I ran toward them. Captain Whitmer stood with a Pakistani officer. They were laughing, standing lightly as if at a cocktail party. I felt rude approaching them with my rifle, crouched under a heavy pack.
“Lieutenant Fick, this is Major Magid.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir.” I shot a glance at Captain Whitmer, who smiled placidly.
The major was slight, bedecked with ribbons and huge braided epaulets. His orderly stood nearby with a silver tea tray.
“Do not be afraid. We have three layers of defense and you are in very good hands,” the major said, bowing slightly. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”
The orderly poured into a chipped china cup. The tea was dark and sweetened with goat’s milk. My gloved hand was clumsy, so I cupped it like a softball. I drank the tea quickly so that I could get back to work without offending the major. My first two missions couldn’t be delivering ThighMasters and drinking tea. An unearthly wail broke the silence as a muezzin called the faithful to morning prayer. Panjgur wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t quite friendly either. We were a long way from the Peleliu wardroom.
Staff Sergeant Law had his Marines in place, and Patrick’s platoon manned positions all around us. The teams on the perimeter called back and forth on the radio, pointing out Pakistani army positions. I scanned the horizon through my night vision goggles, looking for the telltale flashes of firing rifles. Nothing. I spoke to the Cobra gunship pilots who orbited farther out past the airfield fence. They, too, saw nothing amiss.
With Bravo Company’s perimeter in place, an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team moved cautiously to the Black Hawk, dropping red chem lights behind them to mark a safe path of retreat. After they checked the helicopter for booby traps, a specially trained suspension team got the wreck ready to move. They wrapped long nylon straps around the fuselage, joining them at the top with a loop and a hook. If the Black Hawk couldn’t be lifted out, we planned to use incendiary grenades to burn holes in the cockpit and transmission, then blow the tail boom off with a strip of explosives. But the straps were attached without trouble, and the empty Super Stallion came in for the pickup.
The pilot slowed to a hover over the Black Hawk, and a cloud of talcum-like dust engulfed the CH-53 — the same sort of brownout that had caused the initial crash. Every few seconds, a rotor or piece of fuselage would peek from the cloud to reassure us that it was still flying. After a tense minute in a hover, the CH-53 went around while Marines untangled the sling, which had been twisted by the rotor wash. On his second pass, the pilot lifted the CH-53 out of the dust cloud with the Black Hawk hanging beneath it and lumbered off to the south. The eastern sky was just beginning to lighten.