Now an answer came. Just two clicks. He needed to hear five.
Zero wondered, Could he be hearing me wrong? He decided to dispense with numbers and get more personal. “Axe, we need to know that we’re talking to you—the enemy is listening and trying to keep us away from you.
“You’re going to hear a series of names. When you hear the name of your tan Labrador retriever, I want you to give me four to five distinct mike clicks. If you understand, give me two clicks now.”
When the radio returned two clicks, Zero thought he might be onto something. To his wingman, Clap, flying as Sandy 2, he said, “Here goes nothing.”
“Axe, here come the names. Hank… Hank…”—no reply.
“Bobby… Bobby…”—no reply.
Keep going. Give nothing away to the enemy.
“Boomhauer… Boomhauer…” This was the name of Axe’s dog—
Nothing.
The pilot’s heart sank, but he continued with one more name. “Redcorn… Redcorn…”
This returned a flurry of mike clicks. He asked Barnyard, a Navy command and control plane listening high above, for confirmation.
“Barnyard confirms, two clicks heard after Redcorn only.”
Zero suspected he was being fooled with—Redcorn did sound a little like the name of a dog—but he could also imagine that a badly wounded man, dehydrated and slipping in and out of consciousness, might not always respond reliably to prompts over a shaky radio link.
“Axe,” Zero continued, “I’m going to ask you yes-or-no questions. If the answer you want to give me is yes, give me two clicks. If it’s no, give me a quick four or five clicks. Do you understand?”
“Barnyard reports two clicks.”
The signals were too weak for even our best listening technologies to take a directional fix on, so Zero figured he’d see if Axe was well enough equipped to make it for a while. “Axe, I’m going to list items of survival equipment. If you have it and can use it, give me two clicks. If you do not have it, do not make any clicks.”
He started with a list of gear that Axe might be able to use to signal us: signal mirror. IR strobe. MRE heater. Wristwatch with illumination. Pen flares. Matches or other means to start a fire.
Barnyard reported receiving two clicks in response to both the strobe and the MRE heater.
“Axe, I want you to activate your IR strobe.”
“Barnyard has six clicks.”
Damn it, what on earth does that mean? Zero thought. Is Axe unable to activate the light? Or is the enemy spoofing me?
Zero checked his fuel. Very low. As he bingoed out to rendezvous with a tanker, he asked Barnyard to stay on scene and find a way to triangulate the evader’s position on the ground.
During the twenty-minute diversion to refuel, Zero reflected on his exchange with this phantom. He realized time was not his friend; he needed to be more overt with his covert instructions. If it was Axe, he needed to give him information more clearly, even though the enemy may be listening. When he had taken his fill from the tanker, he returned to the missing SEAL’s suspected location and picked up where he left off.
“Axe, buddy, go ahead and activate your strobe light.”
Immediately Clap’s voice was loud in Zero’s helmet: “Sandy Two has an IR strobe that just came on!”
And there it was, right below, a flashing light in a wavelength only detectable with NVGs. We’ve got something! Zero locked his targeting pod onto the strobe and studied the four-inch screen in his cockpit. Very clearly he saw two individuals on the ground, near the flashing infrared beacon.
“I have two individuals with an IR strobe, location north thirty-four, fifty-two point zero three… east zero-seven-zero, fifty-seven point niner-three,” Zero called. Clap turned his sensors to the same location and confirmed it.
Zero wondered why there would be two people down there—was it a pair of bad guys spoofing him, or could it be someone like Sarawa, offering assistance to an American? He passed the coordinates back to headquarters and waited. His soaring hopes made the eventual news even more shattering.
“Barnyard has word from higher up: that’s a U.S. Marine Corps sniper team. Coordinates and location confirmed.”
Zero’s helmet suddenly felt like it was made of lead. Even so, he kept thinking creatively.
What’s the one thing a SEAL would never be able to forget, even under severe duress? Then it hit him: as anyone who had gone through BUD/S would remember till his last days, all you had to do to end the brutal selection process was to walk over to a big dinner bell that the instructors always kept handy and give it three hard whacks. That’s how you quit—what they called a DOR, for “drop on request.” Nobody got through BUD/S without feeling the temptation to ring out. The path to freedom was always kept open, with fresh coffee and doughnuts standing by. By the time you made it through, you would have heard the bell ring for four out of five of the men who started with you. The sharp brass cadence of surrender—clang, clang, clang!—was something Axe would know even in extremis.
Zero said, “Axe, if you had decided to DOR out of BUD/S, how many times would you have rung the bell?”
The reply was instantaneous, and so loud in his cockpit—CLICK, CLICK, CLICK—that he dropped his pencil and his flight log. The pilot queried his wingman and Barnyard: “How many clicks did you hear?” They all heard three clicks.
Holy shit, do we finally have him? Zero thought.
“Axe, brother, let’s keep this ball going. Let us know it’s you and we’ll bring you home tonight!”
Nothing but static filled his headset.
“Axe, let’s get a hack on your position. Give me a five-second hold-down.”
Zero hoped a transmission with a longer duration would be easier to triangulate. Sure enough, Barnyard confirmed a faint signal, a “squelch break,” lasting five seconds.
“Come on, guys, we’ve got to be able to triangulate that,” Zero said. But Barnyard reported the signal was too weak.
“Axe, give me a twenty-second hold-down.”
“Barnyard has two five-second holds, and two eight-second holds.”
Somebody down there was listening, and judging by the pattern, he might well be injured. Knowing there was little time left for games, Zero went for broke. No more beating around the Taliban’s bush.
We need to know if this is Axe and we need to know now, he thought.
“Axe, tell me your first name, and tell me now. I need to know who I’m talking to.”
Static.
“Axe, tell me your first or middle name.”
Static.
“Axe, give me mike clicks when you hear your initials: Juliet Papa Whiskey… Bravo Alpha Delta… Juliet Lima Sierra… Mike Golf Alpha… Sierra Mike Alpha… Juliet Charlie Tango…”
No reaction to any of it.
In a helpless rage at eight thousand feet, Zero pounded his fists against the bulletproof canopy. We had something! We were there! Now he was done. He noticed a new front of heavy electrical storms encroaching from the west. He saw that his fuel tanks were rapidly draining, too. Given no choice by these inescapable limitations, Zero instructed his primary players to return to base. As a new two-ship of A-10s and another AC-130 arrived to relieve him, he used the secure radio connection to give the newcomers a recap of the past five hours, including details of his transmissions and responses. He felt defeated, but refused to betray it when he toggled his mike again with a parting message to the evader on the ground.
“Axe, buddy, I’m heading back to fill this pig up. She’s about as thirsty as a sailor in the Big Apple during Fleet Week. But my brothers are here. They’ll keep talking to you. We aren’t going anywhere. You aren’t alone, and you’re coming home with us soon.”
Back at the air ops center at Bagram, for the benefit of skeptics, Zero played a recording of the exchange he had had with his mystery man on the ground.
“Somebody’s out there,” he said, “and we’re gonna keep authenticating him unt
il we know for sure one way or the other.”
Shortly thereafter, he learned of a news report on the American Forces Network that a Taliban spokesman in Pakistan was boasting of capturing an American serviceman in the mountains near Asadabad. Efforts to recover him would be useless, the Taliban said, and unless certain demands were met, the captive would be executed and left in the wilderness.
Zero’s spirits sank. He took a walk to the SOF command tent to see what the latest word was, and his morale took another hit. A contractor who worked as a signals analyst told him that, according to his advanced computer-based processing and analysis equipment, the radio clicks he had heard were just atmospheric noise.
Zero gaped. “Look, I may just be a dumb fighter pilot, but I know that atmospheric anomalies don’t respond to questions asked by human beings. Your computer tells you one thing, but my ears tell me another. I trust my ears.”
“No one was trying to signal you,” the analyst said. “We have a very unstable atmosphere out there tonight. Those thunderstorms are playing havoc with our frequencies.”
“You telling me we should give up?” Zero noticed that both his hands had clenched into fists. His hopes were threatening to cartwheel down a mountain, but he knew what he had heard and kept hope in his heart.
Leaving the SOF compound, he encountered an Air Force sergeant. “Hey, what the hell’s up with these shitheads out there, saying they’ve got Axe?”
“They don’t have Axe,” the sergeant said.
“Say again?”
“They don’t have him.”
“And we know this how?”
“Because we’ve got Axe.”
At this, Zero’s knees went wobbly. He was speechless.
“One of our patrols hit the canyons again based on Marcus’s debrief, and they found his body about an hour ago. Those assholes never got their hands on him.”
“We’re sure about that?”
“They never touched him after the battle. They’re just trying to jack around with us because they knew we were close to a recovery. We bring him home tomorrow night. You’re Sandy One, Zero. You’ve got the recovery.”
The men on the ground who finally located Axe were his own SEAL brothers. The rest of the guys from his troop in SDVT-1 had flown in from Iraq to join some operators from SEAL Team 10 in scouring the mountains. These guys stayed out there without a break for more than a week, tracing and retracing the likely routes leading away from the battlefield on Sawtalo Sar, and developing leads with the locals.
The reason the enemy never laid hands on Axe had a lot to do with what happened in the village where those frogs finally found him. The Afghans there were willing to talk, but seemed nervous about what had happened. Finally they admitted that they had taken Axe and buried him in order to keep his body out of the Taliban’s hands. They had done him this final honor out of respect for who he was: word had gotten around fast about the savage fight he had put up till the bitter end. They wanted to deprive the hated radicals of a war prize that they could use to boost their stature. Though the courageous villagers feared that the SEALs would be outraged that they had taken this liberty, they received nothing from them but gratitude.
On the night of July 10, a pair of Army MH-47 Chinooks took off from Bagram after sunset and turned east toward the Korengal Valley. Zero led the pair of A-10s covering them. As winds out of the south held the thunderstorms at bay, keeping the LZ clear, the recovery aircraft reached the slopes near that village. One Chinook lowered a pair of PJs from an Air Force reserve unit out of Florida. Fast-roping down to the slope, the pararescuemen linked up with the frogmen and went to Axe. Laying their hands gently on him, they took him aboard for the return flight to Bagram. As the second Chinook landed to pick up the SEALs, Zero thought how sadly common these missions had become. But when he landed at Bagram, he felt a strong sense of satisfaction that he’d made good on the promise he had made at the start of the operation. He had brought Axe home with every honor due him.
The flight line was full of personnel from all four service branches standing rigidly at attention. Joining the crowd, the A-10 pilots found themselves struggling to hold their composure and keep their shoulders square. And now, as a final ramp ceremony began, the chaplains and pallbearers approached the Chinook bearing Axe’s remains and reunited him with the eighteen other heroes of Operation Redwing.
In the center of the flight line, a C-17 Globemaster cargo plane was parked, its rear ramp open, with two ranks of men from the Night Stalkers and SEAL Team 10 standing on either side of the approach to the ramp.
Then they appeared. One by one, the nineteen dead, each in a separate truck, one following another in procession. Their steel caskets were each covered with an American flag. As the crowd snapped to attention, rendering salutes, a U.S. serviceman playing bagpipes groaned out “Amazing Grace.” The chaplains read scripture as pallbearers carried the caskets up the ramp and into the C-17’s hold. When the last one reached the top, the SEALs and Night Stalkers filed in behind it and the ramp closed. The plane would be airborne soon, but not until the men on board had time to conduct a private ceremony of their own.
The professionalism and care that the Air Force rescue team brought to the mission to recover my teammate still moves me deeply. It means as much to me as my own rescue did.
I’m telling this story here because stories like it fill warriors everywhere—from special operations and conventional forces alike—with gratitude and comfort. The rescue guys seldom get much attention, but what they do makes a huge difference to their brothers in uniform. The slogan of the PJ community is THESE THINGS WE DO THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE. Without exception, that selfless spirit applies to the whole lot of them. And, in a deep sense, that motto is lived out by all who serve with their lives on the line. Why do we do it? We do it for others, so that they may carry out their duties, serve their missions, serve their comrades, serve their nation, and go on to live the good lives they deserve. And along that path, some of our very best people lose their own lives. It’s the ultimate price that some pay to serve. And in serving in that way—laying everything they have on the line, live or die—all of them stand as heroes. Imagine our world if everyone lived by their creed.
20
Stir-Crazy
Those who serve experience something that people who don’t wear a uniform seldom do: the feeling of being tightly part of something larger than themselves. In the company of those who set their priorities the same way, we form powerful bonds of fraternity. (And never forget: there are many devoted women in the military, too, from EOD techs to A-10 Warthog pilots to support elements of all sorts, including in the special operations community.) The relationships you build tend to be permanent. The bond I have with Morgan is a degree stronger than those I have with my other teammates only by virtue of blood. And when you wear a uniform, the way you think about your country changes a little, too.
But how do you come home from it? What do we do with the skills we’ve acquired and the stories we have? Who outside the fraternity will relate?
Among my goals in life now is to become one of the old men Morgan and I never thought we’d become. Our pledge to each other—“womb to the tomb”—was never very clear about duration. As I said earlier, we both had our doubts that we’d make it past forty. But now when we talk about it, we picture ourselves ending up like Robert Duvall in Secondhand Lions, or Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. We want to cut our lawns wearing sneakers and black socks, and holler at the neighbor’s kids when they hit baseballs into our yards, hiding smiles behind the backs of our hands. More than anything else, we want our experiences to grow into wisdom.
I would settle right now for becoming the kind of man R. V. Burgin is. I look at him, at home in that small town south of Dallas, and see honor, integrity, love, and peace. Any of us should be so fortunate. Though we met late in his life, I relate to him as though he were part of my own family because of the important, uncommon things that we share: we’ve taken he
avy fire and been wounded. We know the vacant feeling you get in the soul when you lose a great friend in action, and the feeling of awe you get in the presence of strong leadership. We know the thrill of having good air support; he thinks of Marine Corps F4U Corsairs much as I do A-10 Warthogs. We know the ache of thirst—the wringing-your-socks-out-in-your-mouth kind, so deep you can feel it in your feet. We have witnessed up close the finality of death as well as almost surreal moments of unexpected peace. In 2003, on a recon mission in the Shatt al-Arab waterway, my team was hunkered down in a ruined Iraqi bunker, keeping watch on the wreck of a big tanker that had run aground. The reports said that the enemy was running drugs out of it. On day six, a storm rolled in. It didn’t bother us, but it did stir up some hogs who were living in some brush nearby. It didn’t take long before one of our snipers put one on the ground, and about fifteen minutes later I was field-dressing it for dinner, skewering it on rebar and roasting it with hot sauce taken from our MRE kits. We were happy.
It’s exciting to chase the dragon. Combat is like a drug. There’s nothing like the rush of fast-roping out of a helo, or walking down a street that everyone knows might be planted with an IED. Down there on the ground, life can get so intense you simply don’t have time to be scared or impressed by anything. When I was out there alone during Operation Redwing, doing my best not to get killed, I always had an immediate goal to focus on. I’d pick out a big rock or a tree in the middle distance, and that would be my objective, my only concern—to traverse those hundred meters to reach that point. I always had a problem to work through. In fact, having been reared in the forests of East Texas, I found that there were a couple of times when I felt strangely at home up there. Bad as it was, part of me misses the hostile mountain, and the small rewards of surviving its challenges.
Master Chief retired from the teams in 2008, turning down a six-figure reenlistment bonus after twenty-one years. He had given the teams everything he had, and now it was enough. He had other plans. After he finished a graduate degree in global leadership, he took his special operations skill set to the corporate world. He’s doing some work for a top-line sports equipment and apparel company, advising them on product development—lightweight outdoor boots and other gear for serious athletes—and strategy. He still crosses paths with his teammates once in a while, but he’s a civilian now. The work isn’t demanding in the same way as combat, but he’s challenged and happy, and lucky to have some involvement with some of his brothers in the teams. I still can’t get over the stories he told me of meeting corporate human resources people who questioned his fitness for a job because of his lack of experience in their particular industry. Not enough people appreciate what a guy like that brings to the table in terms of leadership, adaptability, and a hundred other skills and intangibles. Industry skill sets can be taught. The capabilities you have after more than two decades in the teams almost can’t be measured. If a SEAL command master chief runs into that kind of nonsense, imagine how bad it can be for everyone else.