Walk in My Combat Boots Read online

  I take him out. I don’t even think about it.

  The F-18s push the enemy back. When I get to the top of the hill, I get an aircraft on station, and together we get a clearer picture of the area. Dropping a bomb is out—the area is too densely populated to handle that—so the team uses an MK-19 grenade launcher to take out the rest of the rocket cell.

  We’re only six klicks away from the Forward Operating Base, or FOB, so we bring in an armored vehicle that can tow our damaged vehicle. I have an AC-130 overhead for support. Nobody is going to mess with us now.

  An 18 Delta medic on my team took a 7.62-round right below the base of his skull. It cleanly passed through his neck, just underneath his jawline. He barely even bled.

  The fact that he survived is pretty remarkable.

  When I arrive back at the base after the firefight, it takes me a while to figure out that I need to stop, take a knee, and talk to a psych doc, chaplain, whomever. I need to get over what I did to that kid. I wish it hadn’t happened, but those men were trying to kill me—kill us.

  In 1994, when I was a young airman stationed in Turkey, two Black Hawk helicopters carrying twenty-six people were shot down in a friendly fire incident in northern Iraq. I was part of a team that had to deal with handling the remains.

  About 50 percent were in body bags. The rest were charred parts and pieces. We had to recover them, these body parts of people I knew—people I had been playing cards with the night before. It was my traumatic PTSD-type experience.

  These days, formations are staffed with clinical psychologists and clinical social workers. Proximity to danger and violence affects different people in different ways. The sight of a 105-round exploding a hundred meters away might scar one person for life. Other people can simply move on. And there are others who can’t—or won’t—talk about it.

  The Air Force hasn’t lost as many as the Army or other forces. I can’t imagine coming back from a deployment and finding out half your guys are gone. On the other hand, the Air Force is a lot smaller, so any loss is huge to us.

  Two guys I know from the Air Force are killed in action. One guy, Tim Davis, gets blown up by an IED while I’m in Afghanistan. I help load Timmy’s body onto the plane for dignified transfer back to the States.

  During my next rotation, I train guys at home, at the Special Tactics Training Squadron, to get them ready for combat. I work with a kid named Danny Sanchez. We do everything we can to get him ready.

  I end up deploying with him and the rest of the guys to Afghanistan. When I redeploy back home, I find out that on his first mission, Danny was shot in the back of the head as he got off the helicopter.

  The next of kin haven’t been notified. I get on a tiny plane, along with a chaplain, the commander, and another officer, and fly to El Paso, Texas, so we can tell Danny’s mom and little brother that he isn’t coming home.

  When we land, we get to the Suburban and change into our blues. My heart is pounding. Man, I don’t want to do this.

  It’s evening when we pull into Danny’s neighborhood. As we get out of the vehicle, we can see his neighbors looking out their doors, wondering what the hell is going on. They’re a tight-knit community. They know Danny is a combat controller and that he’s deployed overseas.

  I rap on the door. A little boy answers it. He turns his head back inside the house and says, “Mommy, there are soldiers outside.”

  You can hear the oxygen just leave the house. And a gasp. Just a gasp, as the mom comes to the door to learn the fate of her son.

  MARIO COSTAGLIOLA

  Mario Costagliola was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Staten Island. Mario was attending a Memorial Day parade as a high school senior in 1981, at the peak of the Iran hostage crisis, when the sight of a tank from the local Staten Island National Guard Battalion made him want to enlist. He joined the National Guard and did ROTC while attending college. He later served in the Army. After nearly thirty years of service, Mario retired in May of 2006 with the rank of colonel.

  My two-year-old daughter wakes up crying. She’s sick.

  I turn on the TV so she can watch cartoons. I’m debating whether I should go to work or take her to the doctor when the house phone rings. My brother Tommy is on the other end of the line.

  “They’re bombing us,” he says, his voice filled with terror. “They’re bombing us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I heard a jet go right over the building. I think it hit us with a rocket.”

  My brother works at the World Trade Center. He was there during the terrorist attack in 1993, when a truck bomb detonated below the North Tower.

  “Where are you now?” I ask.

  “Inside. I heard the jet and the explosion, but I can’t see anything and—”

  “Get the hell out of there right now.”

  I hang up my phone, about to go to the TV when I get another phone call, this one from one of the noncommissioned officers (NCOs) leading my Staten Island training unit.

  “Hey, boss,” he says. “You better put on the news.”

  I hang up and see that the news is on every channel.

  One of the towers is burning, just like in a story I heard when I was a kid of the B-25 bomber plane that crashed into the Empire State Building during the early forties.

  Has to be an accident. That’s the only explanation.

  A second plane slams into the building.

  Then I find out the Pentagon is burning.

  Oh, my God, this is it.

  We’re at war.

  I put on my uniform. I grab my two 1911 45s and just start loading every magazine I have. Then I use the phone to call up my guys in the unit.

  I can’t get through to anyone. All the phone lines are down.

  The buildings fall.

  I know deep in my soul that my brother is dead.

  The news is advising everyone to stay inside. Cell phones and landlines are basically down. All roads and bridges are closed. Screw that. My daughter can stay home with my wife. I’m going to try to get into the city. It’s almost 10:00 a.m. when I hop into my little red BMW.

  When I hit the road, all the traffic is pulled aside to make room for first responders. I follow, doing 120 mph.

  Cops have set up a barricade. As soon as they see me in my uniform, they wave me through. When I get to the bridge, the toll guy says, “It’s about time they called you guys up.”

  I’m on my way to my unit when I remember that my brother’s wife also works at the World Trade Center, at Cantor Fitzgerald on the one-hundred-something floor. I don’t have a cell phone, so I can’t call her—and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to get through.

  She’s dead, too, I think. She’s a workaholic, never takes a day off. There’s no way she made it out of there alive.

  I veer off the road and drive to my brother’s house.

  I’m frantically ringing the doorbell when the door opens.

  I feel like I’ve just seen a ghost.

  Tommy’s wife is standing there. She knows what I’m thinking and says, “It’s the kids’ first day of school, so I took it off. Tommy’s all right. He got away. As soon as the first plane hit, he took off. He wasn’t up high, so he was able to get out. He’s on his way to the ferry.”

  Back in my car and driving to my unit, I’m wondering how I’m going to call everyone in.

  When I get there, I realize it doesn’t matter that the phones aren’t working. I didn’t have to make a single call. My unit has already arrived—and they’re not alone. Military guys from all services home on leave, veterans—everyone has shown up, ready to help.

  September is a big time for people to go on leave because, until the end of the month, it’s use your time or lose it. A lot of key players are at a global training conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. My division, the 42nd, is at a conference at Fort Leavenworth for Warfighter, our major training event. The headquarters is in Albany, New York. A lot of those people are out of town�
�and now they can’t call in.

  We wind up getting limited communication with some of the higher-ups. Each one says the exact same thing:

  “Don’t do anything.”

  The two battalion commanders and I say the opposite: “Hell, no, we’re going.” It’s been a long time since there was a major National Guard event, and the senior leadership is afraid of making a decision.

  We end up losing communication with higher headquarters.

  It’s the best thing that can happen. It allows us to focus on search and rescue. These buildings fell, there’s a bunch of people alive in all that rubble, and we’ve got to dig them out. We muster supplies and then head out to the local Home Depot.

  The manager comes over to us and says, “What do you guys need?”

  “Listen,” I say, “I don’t have the authority to authorize purchases—”

  “We’re donating. Just tell us what you need.”

  The Home Depot guys empty the store of gloves, rope, eye protection, chain saws, pry bars—everything we could possibly want. They load up two box trucks full of supplies.

  “God bless you all,” the manager says. “Go do great things.”

  Two firemen walk in the front of the store.

  During fire season, these guys have to deal with their fire trucks getting stuck or sinking when they go off-road to fight brush fires on Staten Island. We’ve helped them out using our HEMTT wreckers and an M88, which in civilian-speak is a tank recovery vehicle. We’ve developed a good relationship with these guys.

  The two firefighters are distraught. All their buddies are missing, and as I listen to them talk, it’s the first time I realize the magnitude of the loss we’re dealing with.

  “Here’s the plan,” one of the firemen tells us. “The ice-skating rink on Staten Island is located right next to the ferry terminal. We’re going to set up a morgue there and we’ll do triage at the baseball field next door. Can you give us all your medics, anyone with any medical training?”

  Our unit has a medical platoon, and we have guys with civilian jobs as nurses and EMTs. We round them all up and send them down to the baseball field.

  We were expecting to head into the city, to dig people out of rubble. What we end up doing is organizing first responders—firemen and cops—to help deal with the people coming off the ferry. We set up a field-expedient morgue to collect the remains.

  By early afternoon, the fire department puts out a call for generators because lower Manhattan has no power, and darkness is coming. When the ferries and volunteer boats drop people off at Staten Island, we put the generators on the boats to be brought back into the city.

  I’m still trying to figure out what higher command wants me and the other units to do when I get a call from Brigadier General Ed Klein.

  “Get your guys and get in there,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going on down there. But if you do nothing, I’ll fire you.”

  That’s all I need to hear.

  Our vehicles are already loaded up and the whole battalion is ready to roll.

  A few hours earlier, one of my guys sent forward a captain to the city. He comes back and gives me a full report on the crash site. “There are body parts everywhere, people dead,” he tells us, “and the fires are still raging.”

  Less than twenty-four hours later, at first light on the morning of September 12, we roll in a convoy into the city.

  The rumor mill is saying that what happened yesterday is just the opening salvo. The cops are telling us that twenty EMT uniforms were stolen from Brooklyn and that they found an ambulance on the Verrazzano Bridge that was loaded with explosives. I’ve got everyone armed with weapons. The Humvees we’re driving have mounted machine guns.

  Growing up in New York, I remember watching the World Trade Center—we called it the skeleton building—getting built. When I drive over the Verrazzano Bridge in the lead Humvee, all I see is a burning crater and black smoke.

  That’s when it really hits me: the World Trade Center is gone.

  I break down crying.

  When we come through the Battery Tunnel, it looks like it’s snowing. A gray ash is raining down, covering everything.

  It’s nuclear winter.

  I link up with a police command post. They give us the perimeter of Ground Zero. We relieve the artillery guys who were there the night before, the medics, everyone. I’ve got a 113 tank parked in front of New York City Hall and a guy on a .50 caliber watching the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The area around Ground Zero…it’s like time stopped. All the people are gone, and everything is covered with that gray ash. There are shoes on the road and cars and taxis with their doors hanging open. Everybody got out and just ran.

  The next shock comes when I see several blocks of twisted, destroyed fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances. The technique to fight a high-rise fire is to set up a command post at the base of a tower. All the cops—specialized high-building rescue, command post guys, all that talent in the fire department—they prepared their whole lives for the day when they’d respond to such a fire, and they were there at the base of the towers when the buildings collapsed.

  Everyone loves the military presence. Mayor Giuliani does not. He goes berserk about the tank parked in front of city hall and sends down one of his guys.

  “What is this, The Siege? Get that tank out of here!”

  I move the tank to Battery Park, where no one can see it.

  As far as search and rescue, it starts to become a bucket brigade of tiny little body parts: a foot, a rib cage, or a hand, a piece of meat you can’t identify. That’s all that’s left.

  Every night, we sleep in Battery Park. Every night, my last conscious thoughts are of my daughter, wondering what news she might have accidentally seen or overheard. We’re in this little isolated bubble—no newspapers or TV, limited phones. It feels like the whole world is coming apart around us, and mentally, that preys on a lot of guys.

  In the beginning I’d thought, Hey, we’re going to find these people buried in the rubble. We’re going to get them out. It takes about a week for me to realize that nobody is coming out of this thing.

  My fellow battalion commander says to me, “You know, we’re lucky that we’re in the right place at the right time. Everybody in America wants to be here helping, and we’re here actually doing it.”

  I realize he’s right.

  It also gets me thinking about two guys in my unit: a first sergeant and a mortarman named Tommy Jergens. They work together at the state courts office. When the planes hit, they ran down to the World Trade Center.

  Tommy went down into a subterranean level of the World Trade Center to help some people get out. The building collapsed and he was killed, never seen again. The first sergeant got buried in some rubble. He dug himself out, drove home, took a shower, put on his army uniform, and reported to the unit.

  JILLIAN O’HARA

  Born and raised in San Jose, California, Jillian O’Hara knew at an early age that she wanted to fly helicopters. She attended Norwich, a private military college in New England, and after graduating in 2013, she went on to flight school. Jillian is an aeromedical evacuation officer as well as a pilot. She’s stationed at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia.

  I bolt awake to the crackle of the radio inside our shack. It’s dark, unbearably hot, and I’m already jumping off my cot before a voice belonging to one of our night-ops guys is yelling over the radio, “Medevac! Medevac! Medevac!”

  My bunkmates are up and scrambling. I went to sleep in my uniform, so I don’t have to waste precious time getting dressed, and my vest and equipment are close by. When the call comes in for medevac, you know someone is in extreme pain, possibly dying, and you can’t waste a single second.

  Then I’m told we’re about to launch on a Category Alpha mission. That takes the adrenaline to a whole other level.

  Alpha is the highest category. A Cat Alpha means a dire emergency. Life, limb, or eyesight.

  It�
�s just before dawn here in Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan. I sprint across the uneven ground full of fist-size boulders, heading for the airfield. My gear is weighing me down, and I’m carrying my weapons. In the crushing August heat, the temperature is already well above ninety degrees, climbing to upwards of 120 degrees by noon.

  I’m the pilot of what’s essentially a flying ambulance. But I’m not in this alone. I have my Dustoff crew with me: my copilot, crew chief, and medic. We’ve been training together for the past year. We have each other’s backs. This is our first real mission.

  And we’re going into actual combat.

  I take the left seat in the HH-60 Mike—a Sikorsky Black Hawk medevac-outfitted helicopter with a litter system, hoist, and forward-looking infrared (FLIR) cameras. It’s a marvelous piece of machinery: swift, efficient, and fast.

  I turn knobs and flick switches as I run through a mental checklist. The Black Hawk sat all day yesterday baking in the desert sun, and the cockpit is sweltering.

  The twin turbine engines fire.

  The rotor blades begin to chop the air. Moments later, the sound is nearly deafening. The only voices I can hear are the radio calls over my headset.

  “Dustoff 609,” Tower radios, “you are clear to launch.”

  Wheels up. I grab the stick.

  As my bird climbs along with our two escorts, a pair of Apache attack helicopters, I look to the nearby mountain range housing Tora Bora, the cave complex where Osama bin Laden hatched his terrorist plans. The month after 9/11, bin Laden returned here and then managed to escape US forces. Tora Bora is always in my line of sight, even on the ground.

  Bin Laden is the reason I’m here—why we’re all here.

  Our destination is on the other side of the mountains. When I reach our maximum speed, I radio the ground commander: “This is Dustoff 609. We are en route. ETA six minutes.”