FORWARD OPERATING BASE SALERNO, Afghanistan – Chief Warrant Officers Keith Lacy and David Fleckenstein were hunting an insurgent mortar team from the sky when news came over the radio: troops under fire.

Two men, posing as maintenance workers for a mountaintop cell tower outside the Afghan village of Musa Khel, had shaken hands and shared a meal with the First Platoon of Charlie Company, 1/26th Infantry. But as the soldiers began winding their way downhill the night of Aug. 1, the repairmen started tossing grenades down the mountain after them. At least four troops were wounded. One U.S. staff sergeant, Lani Abalama, was riddled with shrapnel in one arm and both his legs. The Americans were pinned to the side of a ridge with a bad angle for return fire. They needed air support. Now.

Lacy and Fleckenstein, flying a pair of OH-58 Kiowa Warriors, small armed-reconnaissance helicopters, raced to the site of the attack. It wasn't hard to find – they already had a nearby observation post mapped out, and the tower was "isolated on a hilltop," explained Lacy. "There are no other villages or qalats [residential compounds] around it, and we would have been able to [see] anybody else outside that compound really easily."

>The soldiers were being pelted with grenades. The pilot had to attack.

Fleckenstein quickly shot two rockets at the south side of the cellphone tower to suppress the insurgents. The platoon on the ground was "danger close" to the helicopter's fire. The soldiers were hunkered down on the north side of the ridge, only about 150 feet down the slope and another 50 feet to the side of the crest.

This proximity called for especially careful aim from the pilots. But the soldiers were being pelted with grenades. Fleckenstein had to attack.

"I was a little bit nervous," explained Fleckenstein, a youthful-looking 28-year-old with a sober demeanor. "But the strobes [markers visible with night-vision gear] that we had them put down immediately to identify their position helped, as well as having been in that area numerous times and just knowing the aircraft, knowing where you can put rounds."

Lacy called back to his headquarters at Forward Operating Base Salerno, about 15 miles to the southeast, in the heart of Khost province: time to "spool up" medevac helicopters for the wounded. After Fleckenstein's rocket pass, Lacy swooped in from the north side of the ridge, unleashing a spray of bullets from his .50-caliber machine gun.

With their night-vision goggles, pilots could see ghostly green infrared-targeting beams – emanating from the weapons of the soldiers on the ground – crisscross the structure, as well as the spark and twinkle of bullets bouncing off of the cellphone tower's walls.

The pair of helicopters took turns shooting at the insurgents. One aircraft would fire as the other maneuvered for a weapons run on opposite direction of approach to the ridge.

When Fleckenstein was out of position for a rocket shot, his "left seater," Bravo Troop commander Capt. Joshua Simpson, fired his M-4 rifle out of the open side of the aircraft to maintain suppression. As soon as they cleared the target, Lacy swooped in and fired more .50-caliber machine-gun rounds, followed by another two rockets from Fleckenstein.

The flurry of explosions and bullets had the intended effect. First Platoon was no longer taking contact from the two insurgents, and the medevac helicopters had some breathing room to fly in and get the wounded.

The recent downing of a Chinook helicopter in Wardak province that killed 38 Afghan and American troops, including 19 Navy SEALs, has refocused attention on the danger of flying helicopters in Afghanistan. Recently, I got a chance to see those dangers close-up: not just the Taliban, but eastern Afghanistan's unforgiving climate and terrain, which many pilots argue are their greatest opponents.

I also got to experience firsthand just how crucial the copters are to the war effort here. The helo crews of Task Force Tigershark didn't just come to the rescue of those wounded soldiers on that mountaintop outside of Musa Khel. A few days later, they saved my neck, too.

'The Most God-Awful Environment I've Ever Seen' ———————————————–

Ten years ago, the average U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter was flying roughly 160 hours per year, per aircraft. In contrast, each Apache with Task Force Tigershark is flying more than a thousand hours annually, on airframes that are a decade older, in the harshest rotary-aviation environment in the world. This has created unprecedented maintenance demands – in terms of human capital, replacement parts and technological innovation – to keep aircraft operating at this blistering pace.

Compounding the challenge is the fact that many of the helicopters are ancient. One of the task force's Chinook heavy lift helicopters served in President Gerald Ford's air detail in 1974, and possesses an airframe manufactured in 1961.

All of which would create problems, even if Tigershark were flying back in the United States. But this is Afghanistan: "The most God-awful environment I've ever seen helicopters placed," said Lt. Col. David Kramer, commander of Task Force Tigershark.

Afghanistan's environmental challenges to flight are based on the maxim of "hot, high and heavy." It's shorthand for how elevation and temperature interact to impact an aircraft's power and lift at a given weight.

As altitude and temperature increase, the density of the semi-tangible bed of molecules pushing off of the rotors and airframe lessens, causing the engines to generate less and less lift from larger and larger amounts of power. Inversely, colder temperatures and lower altitude enable greater power efficiency and overall lift.

>'This is like living in a prairie storm half the time over here.'

As pilots transit the mountainous, thin air of Afghanistan, they constantly monitor two metrics: "density altitude" is the aircraft's effective altitude when factoring in the temperature. For example, while the aircraft may be physically at 5,000 feet above sea level, the density altitude may be 7,000 feet when factoring in a hot temperature.

The other metric is "tab data," a measure that calculates what the helicopter's maximum power is at any given combination of altitude and temperature. When this max power is cross-referenced against the weight of the aircraft at the time, pilots can determine whether they have enough lift to sustain a given flight maneuver or mission in a given area. That helps them avoid an unplanned landing or crash. But even with due diligence, Afghanistan presents unique challenges.

"Afghanistan is weird," explains Black Hawk pilot Chief Warrant Officer 2 Steve Atencio. "Temperature change doesn't occur the same as it does back home, for some reason. There is usually a standard lapse rate [in temperature]. You gain or lose 2 degrees [as you descend or ascend a certain altitude], but for some reason here, it's more dramatic. We're continually looking at that tab data to ensure you won't have a mishap."

The danger of thin air was starkly illustrated a couple of weeks ago, when a Tigershark Apache helicopter crash-landed at about 11,000 feet. Though the incident is still under investigation, early reports suggest the pilot banked too hard for the thin air, and lost sufficient lift under the rotors. He successfully crash landed on a mild slope –- no easy feat among the jagged ridges in the area of the crash –- but the aircraft was eventually destroyed after several failed attempts to airlift it out of the mountains with twin rotor Chinooks.

And if the ad hoc calculations regarding heat and thin air weren't complicated enough, helicopter pilots must also pay attention to Afghanistan's fickle mountain winds. When an aircraft flies into a head wind, it loses speed but gains performance; the rushing wind acts as an air foil that grants the helicopter maneuverability. If the pilot makes a sudden turn perpendicular to or opposite the wind, the aircraft quickly loses this extra performance, and a pilot's failure to compensate – for example, starting to pull up from a dive too late – could precipitate a crash into a mountainside.

Eastern Afghanistan's sudden onsets of harsh weather present a real danger to aviators.

"It's not just high, hot and heavy mountain flying, it's the weather that you throw on top of it," said Kramer. "This is like living in a prairie storm half the time over here. You can't put airframes out in this stuff. Am I afraid of enemy fire? Sure I am, like everybody. But I'm most afraid of the weather and how it will sneak up on you, and consume you."

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Sitting Ducks ————-

The threats from the human enemy include small-arms fire, ubiquitous rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, very rare leftover Russian antiaircraft guns like the Zsu-23-4 and guided shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, or SAMs. The latter weapons system had been used to great effect by the mujahedeen in their war with the Soviet Union 30 years ago, and the insurgents' ability to shoot down helicopters decisively impacted the course of the Afghan rebels' war against a foreign force.

Western aviators have so far avoided significant contact with guided missiles in Afghanistan. According to documents released by Wikileaks, there have been approximately 10 suspected guided missile shots by insurgents, with only one successful downing of an aircraft, the ill-fated "Flipper 75." The U.S. Army Chinook was hit in the left engine by a probable first-generation Man-portable air-defense system, or ManPad, in Helmand province, downing the aircraft and killing seven NATO personnel.

A far more common threat is the unguided Rocket-Propelled Grenade-7, the weapon system that is believed responsible for shooting down the Chinook carrying special operations forces two weeks ago. It's difficult for insurgents to take out a helicopter with an RPG, but by no means impossible.

Many NATO aircraft are hardy targets, with redundant flight systems that force insurgents to hit very specific spots in order to be effective. But the real key to an aircraft's security is fast movement. It is extremely hard to hit a moving target with the unguided rockets commonly possessed by insurgents.

Unfortunately, that advantage disintegrates when a helicopter hovers.

"We don't hover. It just makes us a target," explained Lacy, whose Kiowa had made a series of looping passes over the insurgent position on the night of Aug. 1.

"Sitting ducks," added another Kiowa pilot.

Black Hawk pilots responsible for medevac'ing the wounded don't always have the option to keep moving, however.

The casualties from the firefight in Musa Khel were "urgent litter patients" requiring a "hoist mission." There was no landing zone among the jagged ridges in mountains 6,500 feet above sea level. The Black Hawks would have to hover over the soldiers and lift the wounded off the steep hillside by cable, on a "red illum" (no moon, starlit) night. They would be targets.

Mr. Mustache and Top Model ————————–

Pilots with Task Force Tigershark typically work a hectic schedule of nine days on for missions, one day off. Flying time can also fluctuate significantly on a given day –- as little as 15 minutes, or as much as nine hours.

Pilots do more than just fly: All personnel also conduct administrative tasks, like planning operations, writing up awards, setting schedules, even public affairs.

But beyond that, there is time to kill. Some play video games. Others chat with their families back home. (Black Hawk platoon leader Capt/ Jen Bales' preferred hobby: downloading episodes of America's Next Top Model. "Sometimes I need a little girl time, you know?") The Task Force has a basketball game every Friday, though after watching them play, I can say that they're far better at flying than they are at hoops.

And much like every class of soldier, blowing off steam involves countless hours of hatching inventive ways to insult each other.

>Six of 30 pilots have been killed during the unit's recent deployments.

"A good thing about being so close is you know what can aggravate people," explained Fleckenstein. "If you don't have thick skin, you're probably not in the right place, and if you do anything subpar, you're going to get destroyed for it. And they know exactly what’s going to irritate you. A lot of guys will say, 'You can talk about my family, you can talk about my dog, you can talk about anything, just don’t talk about my flying.'"

The medevac pilots have zeroed in on Chief Warrant Officer Steve Atencio's thick black "deployment mustache," which they claim he can grow in "about four hours." Insults include "Mr. Mustache," "Mr. Pringles" and comparisons of the facial hair to some sort of "mutant woolly worm" perched atop his lip. The 32-year-old Wyoming native is unfazed.

"They’re just jealous they can’t grow one like this," he shrugged.

Even for this tightknit group, Fleckenstein and the other pilots of "Bounty Hunter," the Kiowa attack-reconnaissance element of the task force, are unusually close. Maybe that's because they've been unusually hard-hit. Three of the pilots hail from the same home town of Huntsville, Alabama. One man used to be an Air Force pilot, another jumped ship from the Navy. Seven used to be "11-Bravos" (ground-pounders, infantry), two of them in the same squad, before learning to fly, and one man was even a Florida real estate agent little more than a year ago.

Chief Warrant Officer John Guffey, one of the former infantryman, remembers the exact moment he decided he would become a pilot. In 2002, he was a passenger in a Chinook transport helicopter that crashed in the Central Valley of Afghanistan, just north of Kandahar. His platoon had taken casualties, and they had been assigned to guard the downed aircraft while waiting for evacuation.

"I'm sitting there, and this Apache [attack helicopter] comes over, and he's flying real slow," recalls Guffey. "It's 120 degrees. My commander walks over and says, 'I bet you wish you were flying that thing. That's the only aircraft in the Army inventory that has an air conditioner. It's probably 70 degrees inside that cockpit.' I looked up at the Apache pilot and flipped him off … and he puts his arms around himself like he's cold. Right then, I decided I was gonna be a pilot one day."

Guffey hasn't regretted the decision, despite the fact that his unit has taken some of the heaviest casualties of any helicopter troop in America's two major wars. Six pilots, one-fifth of his Kiowa troop out of Fort Drum, New York, have been killed during the unit's most recent deployments.

On Jan. 25, 2009, two Kiowas crashed into each other after taking heavy ground fire south of Kirkuk, Iraq. All four pilots – Chief Warrant Officers Phil Windorski, Josh Tillery, Matt Kelley and Ben Todd – were killed. And just recently, on June 5, a Kiowa failed to pull out of a dive through Afghanistan's thin air while engaging the enemy, and crashed in Sabari district, killing Chief Warrant Officers Ken White and Brad Gaudet. These losses, plus the fact that the troop has been together for four years straight, have created an unusual closeness among the soldiers.

Guffey is a short, stocky 29-year-old with a thick Alabaman drawl. Fleckenstein is a tall, wiry Ohioan. But the two swear they are brothers.

"Dave and I spend every day together, finish each others' sentences," explains Guffey. " I know his favorite foods, he knows mine, our wives and families hang out together. We've been together four years straight, and after this deployment, we're all splitting up. I have absolutely no idea how we're going to handle that."

"We’ve been away from our families the last two out of three years, so the guys around here become your family," added Fleckenstein. "Having gone through losses of six aviators in the troop alone … you can't get any closer than that, I think."

Rescue by Rope ————–

The wounded soldiers on that mountaintop outside Musa Khel were waiting. A pair of UH-60 Lima Black Hawks lifted off from Salerno base's pitch-black airfield at about 8 p.m.

"Dust Off One-Five" led the way as the incongruously named "chase bird," responsible for scouting the path and managing all radio communications. "Dust Off One-Six" was the "medical bird," responsible for both deploying a ground medic and evacuating the priority casualties. One-Six was piloted by "Mr. Mustache" Atencio and Justin Study. They carried crew chief Spc. Philip Buettner and two flight medics: Sfc. John Kowlok and Staff Sgt. Russell Graham.

Graham, a lean blond with a calm demeanor, would be the man who roped down to the stricken platoon and prepared the patients for evacuation. Atencio eased the medical bird to a hover about 70 feet above the "point of injury."

He held the aircraft steady as Graham, sitting with his legs hanging out of the door, hooked a cable to the front of his extraction vest. Crew chief Buettner, also sitting with his legs dangling in the air, then extended the long boom of the aircraft's Goodrich external hoist and rapidly lowered the flight medic down to the ground at a pace of about 4 feet per second.

The pitch black descent was "creepy" for Graham, who slipped into the darkness toward a 5½-foot-wide footpath sandwiched between the unforgiving rock face of the ridge and a sheer drop off to the valley below. The landing was "difficult." Graham flipped in the air and impacted the rocky pathway on his belly, burying his goggles and helmet into gravel before picking himself up and unhooking the cable.

>The guy with shrapnel in his groin didn't seem all that hurt. Then the adrenaline wore off.

The flight medic hurried to the infantrymen, assessed the patients and prepped them for one of two carriages he'd carried down to the ground: the "sked," a compact litter that unwraps, to full size before rewrapping the patient into a protective "human burrito," and a "jungle penetrator," a seated harness attached to the cable that pulls the patient up into the helicopter.

Staff Sgt. Lani Abalama – the guy who caught shrapnel in three of his four limbs – was the clearly most seriously injured man. Graham prepped him for a sked, while Abalama screamed. Despite having been administered morphine, Abalama shouted at the flight medic, "Stay off my legs!" Jolts of pain wracked the injured man as he was stuffed into the sked.

Graham looked over the wounded soldiers. Three more needed to be evacuated, including one man with shrapnel injuries to the groin, who didn't seem all that hurt earlier in the evening. But that was before the adrenaline wore off and before Graham could take a closer look.

All told, the flight medic used a sked for two patients and the jungle penetrator for two others, one of the latter by necessity after a sked came loose from the hoist and spun into the darkness at the bottom of the ravine. During each extraction, Graham tightly gripped a "tag line," a 250-foot strand of rope tangentially attached to the extraction cable. The flight medic's pull on the rope applied stabilizing torsion that prevented the patients from spinning in rapid circles as they were hoisted to the bird.

Three patients were plucked into Dust-Off One-Five and the fourth into Dust-Off One-Six. Total time for triage, medical stabilization, packaging and hoist of all patients: about 45 minutes. Total hovers lasting between one and five minutes: six (four wounded, two trips for the medic). Pilots and crew mentally compartmentalize these moments of extreme vulnerability as just another step in their routine.

"It's in the back of your mind," said Graham. "You go through ways you can use terrain to your advantage, try and put mountains between you and the enemy, or use trees to conceal you. Because of the Geneva Convention, [medical helicopters] don't fly with significant armament anyway, so we try and do things smarter instead of with weapons."

While the Black Hawks pulled up the wounded, the Kiowas readied themselves for more gun and rocket runs on the cellphone tower.

Fleckenstein maintained position to the north, eyes wide. "Any movement at that point would have been an immediate 'call the medevac off and start engaging again,'" he said.

The evacuation was completed without incident, however. All patients are expected to make a full recovery, though Abalama underwent immediate surgery to remove shrapnel from his joints, and will have to undergo "six months to a year" of rehabilitation before he reacquires full strength and motion.

After the helicopters left, the remainder of the infantry platoon returned up the hill and captured one of the insurgents. One of their Afghan army partners spotted the attacker hiding in some bushes. The insurgent was apparently so frightened by the barrage of fire from the Kiowas that he hadn't moved for hours.

Hissing Grenades —————-

Soon after interviewing Sergeant Abalama and the pilots who saved him, I came to appreciate the value of air support on an entirely different level. On Aug. 15, I was embedded with infantrymen who were patrolling the village of Majiles in volatile Sabari district.

The soldiers were searching for a recoilless-rifle team that had participated in an attack on Combat Outpost Sabari earlier that day. About five hours into the mission, near sunset, the American and Afghan soldiers had found nothing and decided to pack it in. It was time to head back to base.

As we moved to leave a qalat – a walled compound of narrow stone alleys linking closely packed residences – a pair of grenades hissed over a high wall, landing in the middle of eight Americans walking through a courtyard.

Two quick, successive explosions sprayed a cloud of shrapnel at the mass of diving men, followed by long bursts of machine-gun fire from American and Afghan soldiers shooting at a copse of trees that was the source of the grenades.

>'You know you're their lifeline and when you can't get there fast enough ... it's emotionally wrecking.'

The Americans took cover in a commandeered residence off a narrow stone alley to assess and treat the wounded. When the gunfire and explosions ceased, the platoon's leader took stock of a grim situation: Six Americans were injured, two seriously enough to require immediate treatment and three requiring subsequent medevac.

But that wasn't the worst of it. The Afghan soldiers who comprised half the patrol's strength had fled to their vehicles. They'd left only a squad of American soldiers – half of them wounded – stranded in the qalat. With barely enough men to post security and not enough soldiers to carry the slow-moving injured, the squad was trapped and vulnerable to more grenades. We needed air support, quickly.

At about that time, two Bounty Hunter Kiowas had been fruitlessly searching for an insurgent mortar team in a neighboring district to the west. A call came over the radio:

Troops in contact. Sabari district. Viper AO. Zanar area.

One of the pilots, Chief Warrant Office Michael Maj immediately turned his Kiowa toward Sabari as he began calculating the route. With troops in contact, it was always best to fly to the site directly. Unfortunately, a straight shot would have the Kiowas fighting a strong headwind and force them to traverse a 10,000 foot mountain range.

When the helicopters crested the summit in the exceptionally thin air, Maj and the other pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Adam Rickert, would have to monitor their tab data and balance competing power requirements. Too much throttle and there wouldn't be enough resources to cool the engine, resulting in a meltdown. Too little throttle and the Kiowa wouldn't get there in time.

Maj knew he would have to slow the bird down to about 70 painstaking knots over the mountains (max cruising speed is about 100 to 110) in order to get there in one piece. The trip would take 20 minutes, which is close to forever when troops are in contact. They began their ascent.

For the 33-year-old former infantryman, it was one of the worst feelings in the world. The flight felt like it took "forever," he said.

"As you balance your temperature and pressure limits trying to get there as fast as possible," explained Maj. "You know you're their lifeline and when you're fighting the winds, you can't get enough airspeed, you can't get there fast enough … it's really emotionally wrecking."

The Bounty Hunter Kiowas carefully navigated over the mountain range as the platoon nervously held its position in the qalat. Armored vehicles with crew-served weapons had moved as close as 300 feet from our position, but we would have to cross open ground to get to them. With two men hobbled by shrapnel, it was prudent to wait for air cover before making the attempt.

Adding an edge of fear to the situation was the fact that we had insufficient men to set wide security. If the insurgents realized which home we were in, they could throw more grenades into the residence's open courtyard, almost certainly killing some of the men, and conceivably injuring everyone in the small space. The wait was tense.

Loud, Mean ... and Beautiful —————————-

Once the Kiowas had made it over the mountain, Maj and Rickert dropped altitude and opened the throttle, screaming over the countryside at about 110 knots. Within a few minutes, they spotted the vehicles, and the dismounted troops soon after.

Finally on scene, the Kiowas leapt into a carefully rehearsed pattern of close air support. Rickert’s lead scout ship immediately descended to make tight circular passes maybe 50 feet over the friendly troops.

The purpose was to both deter and draw ground fire: The looming bird would give any insurgents a more interesting target, or cow them into retreat. Meanwhile, Maj’s trail ship slipped into a counter-circular pattern 250 to 500 feet above the lower helicopter, effectively covering its rear as well as commanding a better view of the countryside around the troops on the ground.

As the jagged buzz of Kiowa rotors began to echo through the stone walls of the qalat, I wanted to cheer. We weren't alone. And the insurgents wouldn't dare take a shot with a Bell helicopter and Hydra rockets hanging over their heads.

Two of the most seriously wounded soldiers were stood up and leaned against others for the slow hobble to the vehicles. Other soldiers knelt and pointed their weapons down open alleys to guard their limping progress, as the lead Kiowa cut angry circles through the air. I could see the tilt of the pilot's head and the left-seater hanging out of the door with his M-4 rifle, searching for targets. The 100-meter [330-foot] movement seemed to take forever, but the reassuring hum of rotor blades was always there.

>The insurgents wouldn’t dare take a shot with Hydra rockets hanging over their heads.

After we made it to the vehicles, the drivers floored the gas. One Kiowa followed in a high, circular orbit, while the other bird led the way, scanning the road for IEDs with both thermal optics and the naked eye.

Once the route was deemed clear, the birds positioned themselves for a show of force: The pilots would make a series of passes with rockets and .50-caliber machine guns aimed into the countryside to further intimidate any potential attackers.

"What we try and do is get rockets out there and show that we're not afraid to shoot," said Maj. "Tricky part is finding a target area that best serves the purpose with sound effects, but gives you no collateral damage, no human bodies, no hurt flocks of sheep and total containment of shrapnel."

As the MRAP armored vehicles bounced their way along the hilly roads home, the Kiowa pilots chose to shoot at a mountainside framed by a half-mile gap between the third and fourth armored vehicles in our convoy. From the inside of a MaxxPro MRAP, we heard a pair of loud wooshes, followed by crackling explosions.

Some of the soldiers in the back shouted that we were being engaged with RPGs, until one of the men in the front seat explained that it was merely "a show of force" by air support. Fear and confidence switched places again.

After a few rockets and belching runs from the .50-caliber machine gun, the helicopters settled into a seesaw pattern over the convoy while "popping the rotor blades:" distorting the movement of the rotor so it makes the loudest, meanest sound possible. Barely five minutes from the base, with fuel reserves running low, the Kiowas finally pulled off station. They'd given us air cover, sure. But there was something more.

To this reporter, on that August evening, the angry thrum of popping rotors was simply the most beautiful sound in the world.

Photos: Bill Ardolino, Task Force Tigershark, U.S. Air Force

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