Rescue on Roberts Ridge

Nate Self: Almost everyone inside the aircraft had been thrown to the floor on the impact, and we’re trying to get out. Crawling and scratching. Whatever we had to do get out of the aircraft.

Their downed helicopter had become a deathtrap. Nate Self knew they had to get out; the rangers closest to the rear door led the charge down the ramp.

Phillips: Looks like, what? Four or five rangers have gotten out.

Self: Yeah.

Phillips: But, some did not make it out.

Self: That’s right. When I got to the ramp I saw Sergeant Crose. And, I saw Matt Commons at the end of the ramp as well.

Phillips: Two Rangers down.

Self: Yeah.

Brad Crose was 22. Matt Commons 21. The attack on the U.S. chopper —  the third in as many hours in the same location had now claimed the lives of four soldiers, two others were seriously wounded, including a pilot whose escape from the front of the chopper can be seen in the predator video. 

Self: The pilot on the left side of the helicopter popped his door out, and grabbed his rifle and fell out into the snow and began fighting from the front of the aircraft.

Phillips: He had been hit with enemy fire.

Self: Yes.

Phillips: What did you know about casualties at this point?

Self: Well, I knew that we had several people that did not make it out of the helicopter. But I had no idea what the extent of it was. I could hear some people inside the helicopter in pain, so I mean, we always train that if we take a casualty the best thing you can do for that casualty is to kill the enemy.

Before they could mount a counter-attack, Nate and his fellow rangers had to find cover on the barren mountaintop. Their aircraft, as shown in pictures of that day, was exposed. 

Self: You see a couple of Rangers moving up the right side of the aircraft here. That was me and Specialist Lancaster. And we moved that direction because the gunfire was coming from the left side of the helicopter was so intense.

The chopper offered some protection, but Nate and Aaron Lancaster were still vulnerable. 

Self: We took fire from above, above us to our right. And an RPG was fired at us as well. It exploded somewhere on the right side of the helicopter and hit him in the calf and hit me in the thigh.

Phillips: Shrapnel?

Self:  Yes. It hits—you feel it to the bone, like maybe a ball pen hammer with the tip of a nail at the end of it.

Despite the leg wound, Nate was able to move and maintain focus.  Moments later, another problem stopped him in his tracks.

Self: As I started to shoot, my weapon jammed, the round didn’t extract. I knew that I’d seen casualties at the ramp, so I threw my weapon down and went back and grabbed Brad Crose’s weapon and moved back into the fight with his rifle.

Self: Real quickly here, you’re going to see a line of Rangers here. Everyone begins to fire, pickup their rates of fire. Rangers begin to move to this rock outcropping here. Which is what we thought was a better place to fight from.

The large dark areas on the video are clumps of rock and trees up the mountain from the chopper, where the enemy was dug-in. The dot moving on the screen is an al Qaeda fighter shuttling ammo from one bunker to another.  

By 6:30 a.m., 20 minutes into the fight, Nate’s men had managed to make radio contact with U.S. fighter jets overhead.  Nate requested a bombing run on a large calibre machine gun beneath a pine tree just sixty yards up the mountain.

Phillips: You and the enemy were so close.  I mean this was a dangerous proposition to be dropping bombs there.  I mean it could easily have hit you.

Self: Yeah, very easily could’ve.  We were lucky enough to have pilots overhead that were experienced enough and had the courage to do it when we asked them to.

As good as the pilots were, a test run quickly proved that the bombs were too big, the enemy too close, the risk too great.  Nate’s next option was a ground assault.

Self: The way I looked at it, obviously there’s three ways we could go at it: That we could go left, we could go right, we could up the middle.

With a ranger laying down covering fire, Nate and three other men advanced straight ahead toward the enemy position. They’d only moved a few yards when Nate realized how well-protected the al Qaeda machine gun was.

Self: I just said, Let’s get back.  So we had to scurry back down.

Phillips:  You yelled....

Self:  Bunker! Bunker!  Get back!  Get Back!

On and off for the next hour, the rangers and al Qaeda took turns hurling grenades at each other.

Self: Every grenade that was thrown didn’t even make but mabye halfway there. Right down in the snow. Dead thump. And they were throwing grenades down at us, same thing, but I was a little more fearful that they would be able to

Phillips:  Throw it down..

Self:  Get it to bounce down to us. So at that point, I began thinking about, “Where is our second aircraft?”

The chopper carrying Oscar Escano and the rest of the rangers was on its way.  After the radios failed, it had diverted to a nearby air base.

Now, on their way to Takur Ghar, they learned that fellow rangers had been killed up there. Above the roar of the helicopter, word was passed along from one man to the next—beginning with their squad leader.  

Escano: I remember he was kind of nodding and then his face just got tense. His face became hard. He yelled to the guy next to him for a few seconds, and then that guy, his face got hard too. And then, he in turn yelled to the next guy. So all you can go on is what you see. It’s almost like watching your TV on mute. So the message was passed back, it finally got to the guy in front of me, and I was like, “Oh my god. This was a war, we were going into harm’s way.”

Three helicopters had already been ambushed on top of Takur Ghar. That mistake would not be made again. Oscar’s chopper was sent to a safer landing zone, well below the summit. 

Phillips: So, at this point, you’ve heard that there are men dead—casualties. They’re under fire.

Escano: When you hear something like that you think to yourself: now our boys need us. “Let’s go kick some ass right now.”

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