Word: chinooks
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After spreading out his company, Turner receives new orders from headquarters. Two Chinook helicopters are due to ferry 50 of his troops up to a mountain ridge to keep the fleeing Taliban from outflanking the coalition special forces, who have set up an ambush for their prey in a deep canyon. But the Afghan commander, angry that a medevac chopper is late to arrive for his two soldiers who were injured when the pickup overturned, refuses to let his men join the mission. "Look at these Afghans. Why the hell should we be fighting their war?" says a U.S. sergeant...
After a night in the cold, Delta Company is still stuck on the mountain. Word comes by radio that no choppers are flying over southern Afghanistan because a Chinook has gone down elsewhere. The soldiers are stranded for at least another day. A bearlike Afghan guide named Siddiq is asked if he thinks the Taliban are gone. "They'll come back for their dead," he says. Several hours later, a soldier spies an insurgent observing the U.S. position from a ridge about 1,500 yds. away. A gunner opens up with a Mark-19, which fires grenades that tattoo...
...afternoon, an Apache returns to blast away with missiles at the canyon again, but the surviving Taliban have disappeared. Eventually a Chinook arrives, first picking up the coalition special-forces unit and then the soldiers from Delta Company. Back at Kandahar air base, the operations commander, Colonel Bertrand Jes, is satisfied with the mission. It isn't clear yet whether Hannan, the prime target, was killed in the bombardment. But as Jes says, "The Taliban had safe havens up in the mountains. They were cocky at first. Not anymore. We've destroyed their support structure." Yet many U.S. officers...
...triaging and getting the special needs in one section," a technician recalls, but his team was overwhelmed by the hungry crowd and retreated with armed guards to Army trucks outside. When a 4th Infantry Division helicopter arrived, all but three of the evacuees had to be wheeled onto the Chinook, the elderly panting like animals suffering heatstroke, their mouths sagging and their tongues heavy and swollen. One paraplegic woman looked as if she had been broiled, her motionless legs beet red on the front and ghostly white on her calves. The evacuees were frightened, of both their plight...
...what had become an impromptu staging area, radioing out for water and helicopters to get these folks to better-equipped triage areas - like New Orleans International Airport where tents and medicine were available and busses could deliver them to shelters in Texas and northern Louisiana. Large, twin-blade Chinook helicopters had been able to ferry about 400 off the strip. But more people just kept coming and coming, more than can be accommodated with so few personnel, no rations and one port-a-potty...