Victory Point - Ed Darack [72]
“QRF ready to launch! Two MH-47s out of Bagram,” one of the SEALs yelled to the Marines in the JAF COC.
“Finally.” Wood was seething—the stocky OpsO shook his head. “Hours after it should have gone in,” he said, noting that the time was three in the afternoon. As Wood, Scott, and MacMannis looked to “build their SA” (situational awareness) on the rescue about to launch, Pigeon worked to mitigate any possible disaster involving air.
“We don’t know what the ground situation is like,” he glibly told Wood. “We haven’t heard from the recon team in hours,” the Hornet aviator, who graduated at the top of his class from flight school at Meridian, Mississippi, stated; he feared the worst about the four SEALs. As a Marine aviator, Pigeon pushed for a QRF flight plan based around a threat that he instinctively sought to avoid more than any other: antiaircraft guns, surface-to-air missiles, even lucky small-arms fire taking down the helicopters; “barn doors in the sky,” he called them. “Before any bird comes in zone [approaches a landing or fastrope-insert zone], they’re gonna have to get positive comms with the guys on the ground, or get positive visual on them—or both—and we need to prep the HLZ first, either with Doghouse or with Shock.” Pigeon referred to running a SEAD—Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses—package by bombarding the intended helicopter landing or insert zone with 105 mm high-explosive rounds from Doghouse, or by having Task Force Sabre’s AH-64s (call sign Shock) clear the area with 30 mm gun runs and 2.75-inch Hydra rocket attacks, to ensure that a bad guy couldn’t pop up from behind a tree or rock and nail the helicopters as they roared in to land or hovered to deploy fastropes.
“I agree with you one hundred percent,” Wood responded. “But it isn’t our call, Pigeon. SOF is the lead on the QRF.”
“With their MH-47s. But I’m going to do whatever I can to work with conventional air, to ensure that the aviators and the passengers—our Marines—keep out of harm’s way,” the captain snapped back to the OpsO. In short order, however, through one of the Task Force Brown liaisons at JAF, Pigeon got a handshake deal—among all the aviators, those of Brown, as well as Task Force Sabre, who would be flying the UH-60s packed with the Marine QRF element and a small number of SEALs. All agreed that they would either acquire visual confirmation of the recon SEALs on the ground, get positive comms with them, or both, before coming in zone. Otherwise, they wouldn’t insert, either by landing or by fastrope.
The aviators of the 160th, however, looked to fly without Shock escorts, aiming to move onto Sawtalo Sar alone. By culture and doctrine, the “Night Stalkers” sought to keep their aerial footprint as small as possible; in other words, the fewer aircraft, the better—giving the enemy less chance of catching wind of an impending attack. Operating in heavily armor-plated Chinooks defended by multiple .50-caliber machine guns, the pilots and crew of the 160th’s MH-47s felt that they didn’t need Shock escort. The MH-47s also could fly significantly faster than the Apaches and even the swift Blackhawks, due to 100 percent of the Chinook’s engines’ transmission power moving the two counterrotating blade assemblies that provided both lift and directional thrust, as opposed to conventional helicopter designs exemplified