Victory Point - Ed Darack [77]
“Roger.” Bambey, feeling insanely piqued, burned to argue with his company commander—to plead to get back into the air, to race back to Sawtalo Sar, to hit the ground and rescue any survivors. But he quickly realized that Capuzzi felt just as bewildered, just as frustrated, just as sucker-punched as he, and he figured that the order originated from a level far, far above even the highest ranks of ⅔. We were right there—right fuckin’ there! Twenty-four Marines. Four SEALs. Two Apaches to rip the shit out of an LZ for us to insert onto! his thoughts screamed. The lieutenant shook his head, trying to wake himself out of the surreal nightmare he was living, then motioned for the Marines in the Blackhawk to move out of the bird. “We’re convoying back to the PRT base!” he yelled over the drone of the idling engines.
“WHAT?!” the Marines bellowed in near unison before releasing their spiderweb restraints and jumping out of the helicopter. But once the MH-47 went down, returning to JAF was really the Golf Company Marines’ only feasible option, as the downed Chinook carried not only the QRF’s on-site ground commander, Kristensen, but its on-site air-element commander, Reich, leaving the rescue team literally with no leadership. With no contact with the four recon SEALs on the ground, and an insert zone made deadly to unknown proportions by Shah and his men, rolling in was out of the question. The Blackhawks and over-watching Apaches had actually been orbiting at a position well away from the destruction on Sawtalo Sar: Task Force Brown had requested that Pigeon hold back the three UH-60s and their escorting AH-64s when the MH-47s pulled ahead of the group of five helicopters during the initial push to the mountain; the five birds waited in their holding pattern over the Narang Valley region, seven miles to the south of Sawtalo Sar. Pigeon, his imagination full of nightmarish scenes the instant he learned the horrifying news of the MH-47’s downing—scenes ranging from slow, choking deaths inside the burning craft, to Shah and his men torturing and then beheading survivors—at that point acted solely to mitigate further bloodshed. He’d been outraged upon learning that the Shock aviators had been waved off when they requested to prep the insert zone for the now-downed craft, and felt adamant that not another mistake, of even the slightest consequence, would be made. When he learned from the aviators of the second MH-47, after they made a fast flyby high above the crash scene (again taking small-arms fire), that nobody could have survived the explosive downing, and with no comms with the recon team, Pigeon made a quick analysis of the QRF’s options. Since the “invisible” enemy had just proven it could melt into the very geography of the peak, rendering a thorough SEAD prep virtually impossible (with the exception of a massive artillery bombardment on the entire upper chunk of Sawtalo Sar, possibly killing any surviving Americans and innocent Afghan civilians), the skilled aviator realized he could make only one decision: he called the three Skillful Blackhawks and their two Apache escorts back to JAF. The second MH-47 lingered in the area to try to gain visual contact with the recon team, but was unsuccessful. In addition, they were low on fuel, and with violent weather closing in fast, the crew had no choice but to return to their base at Bagram.
Inside the JAF COC, MacMannis, Rob Scott, and Tom Wood literally watched from a corner as planners from an array of SOF units—ODAs, ODBs, and SEALs—heatedly argued about the next move in the operation, an operation now called Red Wings II (the primary intent of part two being the rescue of the recon team and the recovery of the bodies from the crashed MH-47). If the command and control situation had been convoluted just a few hours prior, it became indecipherable to the Marines once the various SOF teams of CJSOTF-A started planning Red Wings II. But the C2 would morph into even more