Rescue on Roberts Ridge

The calm on Takur Ghar had lasted only a few minutes.  Al Qaeda guns once again had the rangers in their sights.

Specialist Oscar Escano: And I remember turning around and there’s tracer rounds just coming past me and just hitting the snow all around us... shew, shew ,shew... it was chaotic.

The most intense fire, focused on the most vulnerable: the wounded.

Escano:  They knew we weren’t gonna leave our buddies out there. So if they would try to pick off these guys to lure us out, they could get more kills.

Medics Cory Lameraux and Jason Cunningham were with the casualties—treating their wounds and trying to get them out of the line of fire. 

Escano: Jason Cunningham, he was out there completely disregarding the fact that that he was naked to any enemy contact.  He just stayed out there.  He was just doing his job.

Stone Phillips, Dateline anchor: So did you see rounds going close to the men who were out there?

Escano: Just very precise, I saw the tracers going right around where Cunningham was. And then somewhere in the middle of that burst, I heard him cry out.

Cory Lameraux, medic: Jason and I were hit—pretty much at exactly the same time. 

Though the medics were wearing body armor, both were hit just below their bullet proof vests.

Lamereaux: I immediately went into fetal position.  And and I couldn’t move. So I thought that I was paralyzed.

Lamereaux’s bullet wound was critical. Cunningham, a 26-year-old father of two, was in worse shape.

Escano: I think everybody felt his pain at that moment.  When they heard him cry out everybody felt like, they themselves, had been hit.

With two medics down, and all of the wounded exposed, rangers tried to pull as many as possible to cover.  Oscar returned fire and called out to one stricken soldier lying in the snow: 

Escano: Listen, just stay still.  Don’t move.  Just play dead.  Maybe they’ll think they hit you and they won’t target you.  Just play dead.  And he said, ok, ok, ok. 

Minutes later, the enemy fire was gone.  American fighter jets, targetting the al Qaeda position, struck with devastating effect.

Escano: When the bombs were dropped and we felt that we were safe, we kind of—we came out from behind our cover.  And—we just resumed what we were doing.  We grabbed the causalities.  And sadly now Jason was one of those casualties. He even told me, he said—“I don’t think it’s bleeding anymore.  I think—I think I’m good.  I think—let’s get out of here.”

With at least five soldiers critical,  airlifting the wounded off the mountain was now the priority.  Captain Nate Self radioed an urgent request to headquarters.

Capt. Nate Self: We were very clear that we believed that it could be done. And also the gravity of the consequences if it was not done.

Phillips: What made you think you could get a chopper in there during daylight?

Self:  Since we had killed the enemy that was on top of the mountain, we had access to the reverse slope away from the enemy, you could land a Chinook on the side of that slope and not expose the helicopter, where the counter-attacks were coming from.

But commanders back in Bagram thought it was too risky to send any more helicopters during daylight. Darkness was at least 6 hours away.

Phillips: How excruciating was it to wait?

Escano: We knew we were gonna have to wait until the sun went down to get extracted. 

Phillips: That you had people whose lives might be depending on somebody getting in there before nightfall.

Escano: And for that reason we held out hope.  For that reason, maybe they would bend the rules a little bit.

With the wounded battling shock, blood loss, and exposure, and one of them slipping away, all the rangers could do was wait.  

Self: My heart sank. I still had hope that our guys could keep them alive.

Don Tabron: Just before nightfall, Jason took a turn for the worse.  And called over to the two medics.  And they came rushing over.

Escano: The commotion that I heard was not so much the medic doing CPR, but more so, the guys around him calling out to Cunningham. 

Phillips: Somehow will him to live?

Escano: Just to will him to hang in there.  “Hang in there Jason.”  Y’know?  “Don’t leave us. Just stay with us.  Hang in there.”  Y’know, “Help is coming.”  You don’t know if he can hear you or not.  But by God, you have to do something.

Self: I’ll never forget, my medic who I was talking to most about the condition of the casualties came over to me and said, “You can tell ‘em our KIA count is now seven.”

Phillips: Cunningham had died?

Self: Yeah.

Phillips: Because they had waited?

Self: Yeah.

Jason Cunningham bled to death on the moutain.  Like so many others, this had been his first time in combat.  His life saving efforts, performing triage and blood transfusions under fire made his death all the more painful to Nate and his men.

It was 8:30 p.m. when the choppers finally landed to extract the rangers, their dead and wounded.

Self:  I was on the last helicopter to leave with our force on it.  And it also contained all of our bodies.  And I think it took us over two hours to get back to Bagram. And to sit there with—our dead brothers was not easy to do.

Escano: The bird was really packed.  We had just had our dead friends just kind of piled onto the bird.  And we got on with them. I just remember nodding off sitting on the deck of this helicopter. With my friends dead, right there in front of me.

Juanita Jenyons, Oscar's mother: I remember the next day, in the evening, a call from Oscar came.  And he described to me the scene. And you know, everybody here was crying.  We were all on the phone. And he was very thankful to be, also alive.

When we sat down with Nate self three years after the rescue on “Roberts Ridge”, he still had only shared bits and pieces of his story with his wife Julie, then nine months pregnant.

During our interview they watched the predator video together for the first time.

Phillips: Julie, you’ve never seen it.

Self: I’ve never seen it.

Nate took her through it moment by moment.

Self: Yeah, you can see the gunshots.

Phillips: This is you right here?

Self: I’m the second one back.

Self: That was an RPG shot.

Self: The left side door gunner had been shot in the leg. Both pilots had been shot.

Julie Self: I can’t imagine what he even went through.[CRIES] I’m just grateful that he’s sitting here next to me.

But with seven men who didn’t make it off the mountain alive, questions remain.

Phillips: In your estimation, what was it that brought on the events up on Takur Ghar?

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