Rescue on Roberts Ridge

The battle on Takur Ghar mountain had been raging for more than three hours.  An enemy bunker housing a powerful machine gun had to be taken out. It was too close to bomb, and with the second group of rangers still scaling the mountain, captain Nate Self had too few men for a ground assault.  That’s when he remembered something that could turn the tide in his favor.

Capt. Nate Self: It hit me that we had another option to bring firepower in on the bunker.  And I thought about Predator.

Stone Phillips, Dateline anchor: One of the unmanned drones flying around.

Self: Yes.

Nate recalled that the CIA’s predator drones were often armed with precision-guided missiles.  A radio call confirmed it.

Phillips: So you had two Hellfire missiles at your disposal?

Self: Correct.

Nate talked it over with his tactical air controller, Kevin Vance.   

Self:  Initially I looked at Kevin Vance and I said, “What do you think, should we use it?”  And he said, “No, y’know, it’s not safe enough.”

Nate decided to take the risk. At about 9:45 a.m., the predator was cleared to fire.

The first missile landed wide of the mark.  The blast shook the mountaintop and the other rangers climbing up. Their squad leader got on the radio.

Self: He called me and said, “Whatever you’re doing you need to stop that, because it came pretty close to us.” And I think my reply was along the lines of, “It’s not as close to you as it is to us, just keep moving.”

Phillips: And the second one?

Self: The second one had to have been right into the bunker.  When it hit. There were pieces of the tree flying everywhere.

The machine gun—hidden just beneath this tree—was destroyed.   But al qaeda gunmen continued to fire on them from a trenchline nearby.

At around 10:30 a.m., Oscar and the other rangers finally reached Nate’s position.

Specialist Oscar Escano: I just remember taking those last few steps, and the scene just kind of revealed itself. There was the downed Chinook that looked so out of place. And I remember seeing some specks in the snow. mean, I could make them out to be bodies.

When Oscar spotted his captain, he could see battle was far from over.   

Escano: When I first saw him he had a first aid dressing on his leg. And it was red, it was soaked with blood. And he was still fighting.

With ten more rangers joining the fight, Nate now had enough men to launch an assault.  But more than two hours of climbing had taken its toll.

Self: They were totally spent physically when they got to me, and I said, “Take a couple of minutes, get everyone to catch their breath,” orient themselves. But once everyone told me we were ready to assault, I said “Okay, let’s go.”

Self: The squad began to move as two fire teams and cover each other.  And just a vast amount of fire power as they moved.

Escano: I remember being so tunnel-visioned that I didn’t even see anything that was outside my sector.  I was just concentrating on my sector, scanning it.

Phillips: And if it moved, you were gonna kill it?

Escano: It was gonna get obliterated, that’s how I felt. We had to keep the pressure on.  We had to retake the initiative.

With superior force and numbers, the rangers overwhelmed the remaining al Qaeda fighters and, without taking any more casualties, secured the mountaintop. 

Self: Now we controlled the ground that had controlled us for so long.

For the first time in more than five hours, the rangers felt relieved.  But there was no celebration.  A search of the enemy bunkers turned up more than the remains of al Qaeda fighters.  Among the dead, were the bodies of two Americans.

Self: One guy was in the Air Force, one guy was a Navy SEAL.

Phillips: In the bunker that had just been up the ridge from you.

Self: Yeah, the bunker that we had just shot a Hellfire into, and that we’d been shooting at all day.

A horrible question entered Nate’s mind: had the missile attack he ordered cost two more American lives?

Self: I thought to myself, “I’ve just killed a couple of Americans today.” I don’t know who they are, but something’s gone wrong. I don’t know why they were there, I don’t know if they were hostage, I don’t know if they were trying to assault at the same time from different directions and they got caught in the middle.

The identities of the fallen soldiers were soon confirmed: Special Op’s Airman John Chapman and the man he’d gone to rescue, Navy Seal Neil Roberts, the soldier whose name would be attached to the ridge and rescue mission—whose fall from the helicopter had set in motion the entire chain of events.

Self: Then it all began to come together for me. And how they got up there. They said, “Yeah, Roberts is the one that had fallen out.” At that point, I understood what was going on.

Phillips: That they had been killed and taken to the bunker?  Your assault had not killed them?

Self: Yeah.

Nate was told that Roberts,  a husband and father from California, had been captured and executed.

John Chapman, a native of Connecticut, married with two daughters, had been killed in the firefight during the first rescue attempt.  

In the quiet that followed, the rangers started moving the wounded.

Among the casualties, a grateful Greg Calvert, the chopper pilot whose hand had been nearly blown off.

Greg Calvert, chopper pilot: It’s amazing what the Rangers did that day. It just shows the dedication, their proficiency, the kind of soldiers they are. And they had a fine officer leading them that day in Nate Self.

It was now 11 a.m. Though they had paid a terrible price, the rangers had recovered the bodies of two fallen soldiers and were bringing their mission to a close.  As they gathered the wounded, all that remained was a chopper flight off Takur Ghar.

Escano: And here we are on this ridge, going back and forth, with a casualty, moving at a snail’s pace through the snow.  No cover whatsoever.  And we just get opened up on by multiple machine guns and RPGs at the same time.

Self: It was coming from the ridge that was just below us, maybe 250 meters away.

Escano:   Just a volley of fire.

Self:   And when it came in it was all we could do to find cover.

Escano: And then they did something that I really, I really detested. What they did was they started to try and pick off our wounded guys who were lying in the snow.

Self: They centered their attack right on our casualty collection point, which was completely exposed.

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