The Warfighters (2016) s01e09 Episode Script

(BELL RINGS) Decision-making in these environments is all it's all instinct.
We decided to assault enemy positions.
And when we got to the top, I could see what the enemy had up there.
It was a hard bunker.
We didn't know how many enemy were in there.
So we couldn't continue to assault it.
MAN: They were prepared and waiting for us, so most of our advantage was gone.
MAN #2: We were just kind of pinned down This is what you raise your right hand for.
You want to be a ranger? It's time.
My name is Nathan Self.
I'm from originally from, Waco, Texas.
A little town outside of Waco, called China Spring.
A real simple life.
Hunt birds and fish, and do pretty much anything that we wanted to do, as kids growing up.
Played a lot of sports, and, uh, went to church a lot.
Just small town Texas stuff.
I went to the Academy at West Point, It's a four-year college.
It's all military.
I chose to join the Infantry coming out of there, and so I was commissioned as Lieutenant.
But when I read the book "Black Hawk Down" I really was drawn to wanting to serve in that unit.
The Army Rangers.
My first impressions of the rangers were that they were all really fit.
There were several guys in the platoon that ran their two miles in under nine and a half minutes.
I thought I was a decent runner, at around 11 minutes, and I was in my old unit, when I got there it wasn't even close.
So, I was a bit intimidated by the physical abilities of some of these guys.
And then, from a tactical perspective, they had been doing things that I'd never done before.
That was tough for me, kind of on the inside, to know how to get by, in that environment and and gain respect.
(SIRENS WAILING) SELF: I remember on September 11th, I was listening to the radio, and there was this news bulletin that an aircraft had flown into the World Trade Center.
When I got to the platoon, they were watching stuff on TV, and then we watched together, uh, the second aircraft fly into the second tower.
I was actually on CQ, basically a guy sitting at a desk, outside the barracks.
And it was just like, "Wow, what is going on here?" And I remember everybody else went to the range, and I said there and watched everything, and when everybody came back, I remember giving them updates.
(SIRENS WAILING IN THE DISTANCE) I remember one guy called, and said, "Hey guys, I know what you're getting ready to go do.
He says, "I just want to say, 'Hey, get some.
I'm with ya.
'" FEMALE REPORTER: As America's offensive in Afghanistan pounds Taliban targets from the air, some U.
S.
troops have already been sent in on the ground, And not just any troops.
The U.
S.
Army Rangers.
FEMALE REPORTER #2: Rangers conduct raids (EXPLOSION) search and rescue missions, they are fast and elusive.
They are often the first ones in and out.
We can go anywhere in the world, at any given time, any given day, and accomplish any mission given to us.
MAN: Our Special Operations Community are a very tight-knit group, that when you ask us to do a mission, you know, we're gonna do it.
We're gonna take it out, you're gonna carry on to the best of our ability.
(HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING) SELF: From the moment we stepped foot on the ground there, in Afghanistan, I just remember seeing all the mountains around, all the wreckage of the tanks, and the MiG fighters, and it was just, uh, kinda eerie.
You know, the terrain mixed with these skeletons of you know, the previous war.
VELA: We get off the bird, Third Range Battalion gets on the bird, takes off, and they're greeted us very kindly saying, "Make sure you don't get off the tiles and stuff," because there were still a lot of, uh, mines that were in the area, trying to mess with us and say like, "You get off, you're gonna get blown up by all the Russian mines that we had left that they had left behind back when the, uh, the Russians had invaded Afghanistan, so that's how we were greeted, so (LAUGHS) MICELI: We built a little makeshift gym in the basement of, uh, a building.
Path going out to there, path going to a little place to lay out and get some sun, and you know, make things as normal as possible.
SELF: The mission that were were given, that was a nonstop mission, was to be a quick Reaction Force for our task force.
That's kind of like the First Responders here on call all the time.
MICELI: We were assigned to the Special Op teams over there, and if something happened, or went down, something went bad, we would be recalled quickly to go in and pull guys out you know, add security on the ground.
Whatever it may be, just to have a jack-of-all-trades.
I was working on route planning, or planning zones, or something like that, and I heard over the radio some traffic about one of our aircrafts.
I heard them say that they were going down, or that they had just gone down and crashed.
Hearing that an aircraft that had flown out of our compound was down, there was no denying, there was no escape, there was no one else that would would respond to that call.
Someone had the predator feed on the big screen of the downed aircraft.
There were men walking around the aircraft, the aircraft was in the snow.
So, you could see, like, where you were going, and it was a weird feeling.
And then, there was this other mission that came in at the same time, which was we have a missing American somewhere.
It was really confusing at that point, we have our mission, that's our aircraft on the ground, but there's a missing person somewhere.
Don't know if it's related to this, if it's completely unrelated, but it's really important if we have somebody that's missing in action.
I really didn't like the idea of having two missions that were potentially divergent, but I was told, specifically that, "You've got to plan for both of these missions.
" So, I just left the Joint Operations Center, and ran down to where our tents are, and I told them, "Hey get up, we have a mission.
" I mean, this is what we did, we trained all the time, beat ourselves up constantly for it, and we get to do what we do.
It's only a matter of time.
VELA: I was pulling guard with my gunner, that's when we noticed all the vehicles moving, and then another Ranger coming to get us.
The only thing we knew is that we had men down, And we have to get up there to help them.
SELF: Right before we were gonna load to fly away, someone walked up and said, "I need one of these two Chinooks, because we gotta get fuel down to the battlefield.
" I didn't like that.
I was planning on 25 Rangers, or something, to secure this aircraft, that we would get cut down to 10 or 12.
Talk to Arin Canon, who was my second-in-command at the time, and said, "Try to see if you need another Chinook, and get down there with us.
" And he said he would.
Before we flew away, I heard Arin Canon call me on the radio and said, "Hey, we found another Chinook, we're on board.
We're coming with you.
" So, I felt great.
(HELICOPTERS WHIRRING) SELF: As we're going down from Bagram to this battlefield, I'm talking on the radio from the aircraft, back to our job, trying to figure out what the real mission is.
He said, "We don't know yet, we're still trying to sort it out.
Just fly down to the area.
" MICELI: There would have been more information had we had more information at certain times.
You get what you need to do your job.
I mean, the big picture, that's up to Nate.
He he takes care of the big picture, and that's just the way it's set up.
SELF: We lost radio contact with our trail aircraft, which had Arin Canon, and the other half the Rangers.
We couldn't talk to them, they didn't respond, couldn't see them behind us anymore, which is very dangerous if you're flying that low in between the mountains.
Thirty seconds! MICELI: More information's already coming in that maybe the mission was gonna change.
SELF: The pilots started to circle this mountain.
Kinda leveled off, and nose up flared, it went right into this mountain peak.
Probably 20 feet off the ground.
You could feel the rotorwash coming up into the aircraft, and the kind of the grainy, snowy air come flushing through the aircraft.
And then, immediately I hear, the right door gunner start shooting.
(ALL SHOUTING) There was so much commotion.
You could feel the the bullets going by.
SELF: You could feel the helicopter kind of jolt to the left, and then just, um (LOUD CRASH) (GUNSHOTS) SELF: I was on my back and I could see tracer rounds coming through both sides of the aircraft.
I didn't know what was going on at the time because I didn't see out before that.
But I did roll to my stomach, and I looked out from the front of the aircraft all the way down the Chinook and out the ramp, and I just saw most of our Rangers were just in a pile.
Marc Anderson on my right was already dead.
The door gunner across from me on the left was already dead.
The door gunner touching me on my left side, had his leg broken with a machine gun round.
And I wasn't hit in the middle of these three guys.
Two of them were killed.
And, so It's hard to make sense of that kind of stuff.
You know, even years beyond, um There were two Rangers dead on the ramp.
Brad Gross and Matt Collins.
Brad was faced down in the snow, his arms were to his side.
His feet were still in the ramp.
And then Matt was lying across the ramp face up.
I didn't know it at the time, but there was someone on the left side of the aircraft that was shooting right across the ramp, and so they had a a perfect position to hit every person as they came out of there, and I just happened to fall under the burst.
(LOUD EXPLOSION) As I stepped off, it was probably knee-deep snow.
My first step, I hit the ground.
I just tumbled face-forward.
Went to fire my weapon, and it didn't work.
I noticed part of my laser was hanging off.
And then it was like, "Oh, my SAW got shot.
" RPG came by.
Took my rifle before I could touch it.
Ditched the SAW, couldn't use it.
And went back up, and got one of the causalities weapons.
SELF: I remember just thinking, "The sun hasn't even come up, and we are gonna be here all day.
" And I think the reason why I thought that was because I didn't feel like there was any reason why anyone would bring an aircraft in there to support us during the daytime.
It's just too dangerous.
At that point, we were just kind of pinned down.
You can't get up and run because they're still shooting at you, and there's nowhere to run to anyway.
SELF: And then one of the pilots kind of dropped out of the cockpit, said he couldn't feel his leg, thought his leg was blown off.
We told him put your leg in the snow, and he had a rifle, he'd just protect that part of the aircraft.
MICELI: Some time had gone by.
Not sure exactly how much.
There was no cover around the bird, everything was, uh, was pushed off to the sides on the ridgelines that were surrounding us, and at that point, you couldn't have assault those ridgelines because you didn't know what was on the other side of them.
But to see the bullets tumbling after they would hit the rocks around me, and I'm like, "This isn't gonna work, I'm dropping down into this depression.
" And stayed there.
I was a lot more protected at that point.
SELF: Miceli at this point, essentially covered the whole rear side of the aircraft and the left side of the aircraft from his one position.
I didn't worry about it.
I just felt confidence in knowing that if there's one guy that's gonna take care of all that for us, then that's fine.
That's him.
Tony's a guy that, when I came to know him, seemed to get hurt a lot.
And so you take him coming off the aircraft, and his weapon, getting shot up all in his hands, and he doesn't get wounded, and the motto was, "No one can kill Miceli but Miceli.
" VELA: Well, the guy belly flopped off of a fast-moving boat at one point, and belly flopped into the to the river, and he had to get a spleen operation 'cause he ruptured it.
He was just an accident-prone guy, 'cause he's such a nut.
MICELI: I had a reputation of getting into everything.
If something was gonna happen, it was gonna happen to me.
My old man laughs about it now.
He's like, "I just didn't think you were gonna make it out, man.
" (LAUGHS) I grew up in St.
Louis, Missouri.
Three older sisters, tortured.
I wore dresses, I wore makeup, it was, uh, it was awful.
I wrestled for a while until I found booze.
And then it was pretty much partying, and the rest of that.
I wasn't bad, I just did stupid things, and I think that kind of fits the reputation that everybody else knows of me.
I just run through life, face-first.
I joined the army while I was in high school.
And my recruiter in the Army actually was a Ranger who was in Desert Storm, and we got to talking about that, and as soon as we started getting into the details I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's what I want to do.
" That's what I want that just fits me perfect.
I remember showing up.
You're a brand new private.
And you get crushed.
The whole Ranger experience just basically getting the crap knocked out of you.
It makes you harder in a better way, you know? There's there's a reason for it, that you don't understand until later.
SELF: I really felt like the mission of the downed aircraft, the mission of the missing American, those missions were irrelevant.
I just kind of felt like were were alone, and we were getting shot at.
Meanwhile, a couple guys were talking to aircraft overhead, and within a few minutes, he told me that he had a pair of F15's that had bombs, and they were ready to drop bombs.
Well, the enemy was really close to us, I mean, we were 50-75 meters from each other.
You don't drop 500-pound bombs that close to yourself, so I said, "None of that right now.
We don't want that.
" And he said, "Well, what about guns?" And I said, "That sounds good.
" I'd been to a few air shows growing up, you know, as a child, and sometimes the Blue Angels will do these low flyovers.
That's kind of what it felt like.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking, "Where's where's that other aircraft with 10 more Rangers on it? Where's Arin Canon and that other squad?" We haven't heard from them.
VELA: Our main goal was to get to the top of the mountain.
So, whatever they're throwing at us right now, it's basically, "Hey, get up.
Get down.
Continue to move.
Move.
Move.
Continue.
We have to get up there.
" There is no easy way to do it.
Because under that snow is jagged rock.
SELF: When they landed, Arin Canon called me, and he got up on the radio, and said, "Hey, we're on the ground.
Where are you? We're gonna come to you.
" Right around that time, we also started hearing water rounds being fired off, in the distance.
And they started coming in on our position, which meant that there was a coordinated kind of enemy, uh, effort, and they were trying to bring an indirect fire on us, and put pressure on us.
(EXPLOSION) The first set of rounds didn't land on us, it landed, um, I think behind us, the next set went over us, and so, from an artillery perspective, that's how you do it.
I mean, you bracket to your enemy.
It's like shooting free throws.
If you're long, the next one needs to be short, and then the next one might be in the middle, and then you keep shooting there.
We decided to move all the causalities into the aircraft, so that the shrapnel blast wouldn't hit them.
We decided we would just hold what we had until the other group of Rangers got to us.
VELA: I was the assistant gunner.
And Ammo Bear.
So, I had not only my weapon, but over 500-600 rounds of the ammunition to supply for the gun.
Plus the body armor, I was probably carrying anywhere from 80-110 pounds of gear.
It definitely was slow-moving because of the terrain and because of the snow.
Me, Miceli, and Marc Anderson did a crazy leg workout the night before.
We were doing all these types of different you know, lots of reps on squats and we'd get down on the floor and do different elevated leg raises, flutter kicks.
So, we were just doing a circuit.
I remember Marc specifically saying, "Vela, are you trying to kill my legs? Or what the hell, man? I'm just this is my first workout I've done with these, come on.
" You know.
So what I thought climbing up, is, one, (SCOFFS).
"My legs are crazy smoked because of that workout.
Two, how are Marc's legs feeling right now? Because if mine are feeling sore, man, I wonder how the heck he does, cause he hadn't been working out with us during that time.
" MICELI: Omar and I are pretty good buddies.
He's one of those guys, that no matter what he's doing, he's gonna make you laugh.
Just listening to him talk about anything, the way he talks about it, makes you laugh.
He played football in high school.
Yeah, I was always looking at him.
Yeah, how do I get big? I wanna get big.
He'd give me tips and we'd work out together.
And that was kind of our routine there.
VELA: I went to Baylor University, and I graduated there with a B.
A.
in Biology, I was pre-medicine.
But a year before graduation, uh, I started wanting to push myself and challenge myself, physically and mentally.
Then I started looking at the different branches of the military, from the Navy, to the Army, to Special Operations.
What were the differences between them? I decided on the Army, I went right to the recruiter, and I said, "Hey, I wanna Ranger contract.
" You know, they really came at you hard, as far as trying to test your mental.
You know, test you "Do you realize that going into the Ranger Battalions is a way of life? Halfway through, Nate Self radioed back to our chop leader.
You know, the sense of urgency was really kicking in a little bit more.
Especially when, you know, we weren't making the time hacks.
SELF: I called Arin and said, "Where are you?" And he said, "We're in really deep snow, we're moving slowly.
" Forty-five minutes passed, and the more the fire started to increase.
You know they're coming, you can hear them come out to you.
(LOUD POP) (GUNFIRE) I remember just trying to make myself as small as possible.
Squeeze myself into the ground.
If I could have crawled under a penny, I could have crawled under a penny.
SELF: I kind of feel like, this is a position where if if the motor fire comes in on top of us , with a lot of volume we're gonna be in bad trouble.
And so, when that happened, I told three or four of the Rangers that were there with me to get ready to move and attack.
(GUNFIRE CONTINUES) MICELI: The things that were going through my mind were just not worry, not fear, just kind of like, all right, here we are.
Let's get this over with.
SELF: There was one big tree that we were calling the Bonsai tree at the time.
There was a guy that came out from around it, and fired at us and went back and I noticed that he was down into a pit at the base of this tree and that there were logs that had been latched together with rope, and that there was fresh foliage that was put over the top of it, so It was a hard position.
My instincts just told me this is not this isn't right.
So, I said, "Get back.
" The reaction of the Rangers that were with me was kind of like, "Are you kidding?" It felt a bit cowardly when it happened.
Decision-making in these environments is all it's all instinct.
It's it's not easy.
I remember at West Point, when we started there, they had this honor code where it was really black and white.
You don't lie, cheat, or steal.
Those kinds of things.
And it's really clear when someone's done something wrong, and so the cases they presented us with were pretty easy.
And that's not the kind of decision that that I'm talking about on the battlefield, and I can say that the experience that you have builds an intuition inside of you that you have to rely on in those situations because you you have to make decisions where you won't know for years if it was the right or wrong decision.
You might not know for your whole life if it was the right or wrong decision, but something has to push you one way or the other.
They were prepared and waiting for us, and they ambushed us and had us in a really bad position.
We are the elite, and we're essentially up against the ropes.
SELF: It definitely felt wrong that we were so highly trained, so well-equipped, and so cohesive as a unit to be in such a bad position.
This shouldn't be happening.
At that point I needed a different solution that I can't really assault again unless I get more firepower on the bunker.
So, I called the back to Arin and said, "How much longer?" "Probably another 45 minutes.
" Right? So, I'm getting pretty frustrated at that so, the only way I can get more firepower on the bunker is to drop bombs on the bunker? Which was the original offering from the aircraft, that we had 500 pounders that we can drop, but there wasn't 100 meters of you.
We typically in training would want that to be 750-1,000 meters out, so your likelihood of your own causalities is pretty high, even if they hit the target.
I heard the combat controller talking on the radio to the Predator, and I asked him to see if it's armed, and he called back and told me it's armed and has two hellfires, and I said, "Shoot them into the bunker.
" Fired the first hellfire.
It was a little off target.
Something in me said, "Hey, I want to look at this, I want to watch this explosion.
" And I I caught the brunt of it.
I just remember hot rocks just blasting all of my face.
It felt like they were sticking to me, so I had to brush them off, but it was it was something that I needed to see, I don't know.
And then fired the second hellfire, and it went right into the bunker that we were assaulting, and basically blew it up.
Then the guy that was up on the radio talking overhead, he called over to me and said, "Hey, I'm talking to a SEAL team there that's down the mountain from us.
They said, 'Don't shoot that way 'cause they're down there.
'" At that point I realized, that was probably the SEAL team that was asking for us to come in.
But I said, "Okay, got it.
We're down here, you're up there.
Let's make sure we don't shoot each other.
" And that was it.
At the same time, the mortar rounds that were landing around us, were shifting down toward the other Rangers, and so the pressure on us was a bit alleviated.
If they could get to us, then we could complete our assault.
VELA: I remember there was a point when the mortar rounds were coming, and I remember getting down at one point and looking and seeing a mortar round land it had to have been, about, you know, maybe 50 meters away, if that.
And it just went (THUMP) into the snow.
And it didn't do anything, and I was just like "Huh.
" And I just got back up and started moving.
MICELI: The linkup was uh, it was difficult.
You know, A, they were coming from a different direction than we thought they were coming from.
B, just the terrain, trying to you know, they're down here, there's rocks, we're in depression It came down to throwing a bunch of snow in the air, "Can you see us throwing snow in the air?" And then, finally, yeah, everybody just, you know, filed up, past our position first, and they just looked crushed.
It was a high mountain just walking from point to point up on top of it burned your lungs.
The altitude was killing us.
I almost felt bad because I'm sitting there, you know almost laying down in the borne leaning up against the rock relaxed almost.
And these guys just just killed it coming up.
VELA: Once we linkup, there was no rest.
It's time to go.
We just started laying down fire onto the bunker, while two squads came around to flank onto the bunker himself, and to try and sweep him through.
MICELI: It felt like a shooting gallery.
They'd go from the bunker to a tree.
And would just take them down as they'd go or they'd get to the tree, and we'd wait till they pop out.
You fire, I fire, You fire, I fire, You fire, I fire and that's when our guy swept through and eliminated the rest of the insurgents up there.
Regardless of how many hours we had been walking, it didn't matter, they were no match for us.
We overwhelmed them.
SELF: I got a call from Arin Canon, who had moved up with that squad, right at the edge of the bunker.
And he said, "Hey, sir, you need to get up here, we have a we have a blue causality.
" I'm thinking someone got hurt, somehow.
When I started walking up there to the top of the mountain I saw a pair of boots.
A guy was laying out in the snow right at the edge of that bunker that we had fought against the whole morning.
And when I got to him, I recognized he wasn't a part of our team, and he was an American, and he was dead.
And when I got to Arin, I said, "Where did this guy come from?" He goes, "I don't know.
" We weren't sure what was going on at that point.
And we found another American in the bunkers.
And he was in the bunker that we had hit with the hellfire so he was down under a bunch of brush and everything.
A lot of thoughts running through my head.
Like, I'm thinking, "These guys were captured, and brought here, and no one knew that.
Why are there two guys here that we didn't know were here? They were here before us.
Did we kill them when we were dropping bombs and shooting up in here?" Something sour went on here.
I don't know how this happened.
SELF: We start trying to find out who these two dead Americans are, that are in the midst of this position.
Arin and a couple other guys were able to pull personal effects, and find out the names of the two guys.
My combat controller called a SEAL team that was down on the low ground again and said, "Yeah, they came from our team.
" Everything came into clarity for me.
One of these guys was Neil Roberts, the man that was originally missing that was potentially part of our mission.
This is the SEAL team that was calling us in.
Now, it's kinda starting to make sense for me.
But, I mean, we're four or five hours into the fight, and I had no idea that those guys were up there.
So, it was very disruptive for me to know that we were shooting into that position and firing and dropping bombs into that position knowing that they were there.
We found out that, hey, all the enemy had been eliminated in the bunker, all enemy to the rear has been eliminated.
We're clear, we're good to go, to move openly, to move freely.
That's when the command comes out to start to collect the casualties.
Where they had set up a consolidation was brutal.
I mean, you just had to stop every couple you know, 10, 15, 20 feet to catch your breath.
There was even a point when we were consolidating, that the pastor said, he said, "Man, that look that's Anderson.
" He's like, "I can't believe that's Anderson.
" And I'm like, "Man, we can't think about that right now.
" There's time to think about that later.
My sister's joke about me being coldhearted, but I don't think it has anything to do with that.
You got to be able to turn your emotions off to do your job, because it's what we do.
I mean, it's not a pretty job sometimes.
VELA: They had tried to do a trauma attention to him.
But it was a direct shot to the side.
It went through his body armor and immediately hit his heart.
I remember looking at Marc, you know, called his name, you know, once but that was about it.
Then as were moving casualties up, I remember all this gunfire came up from behind the aircraft.
(EXPLOSION ROARS) Everyone just kind of hit the deck.
Well, another group had snuck up below us and had set in an ambush.
It was bad.
We called the Air Force again, and got bigger bombs and dropped them all around where the enemy was.
We tried to contract our position as tight as we could and dropped more ordnance around us to try to keep anyone from trying to get up that mountain.
That went on for a long time trying to move people to get them to safety.
That was a tough part of the fight.
I didn't know it at the time, but a pararescue jumper that was on my aircraft, Jason Cunningham, Corey Lambrow the flight medic were both shot in the abdomen as they were working on casualties.
So, we had two of our medical personnel down.
We started asking somehwere around noon or 1:00 for a medevac aircraft to get them out.
They did not want to do a daytime exfil.
They couldn't they didn't want to they didn't authorize it, so.
SELF: You've got guys that you think are gonna die if they don't get high level medical attention in the next two or three hours.
It's a really tough thing to come to grips with when they're right there next to you and they're still alive.
I was irritated, because, you know, it was cold and we were tired and lost guys and we had casualties and we had to get these guys out.
But you also understood, you can't get more casualties.
I mean, to lose more guys would just make the situation so much more worse.
SELF: After a period of several hours, Jason Cunningham started to take a turn for the worse.
He started to slip away and then he died in our midst.
Then I called in and reported that we had lost one, and that was it.
SELF: I wonder if I did a good enough job of painting the picture as to what the situation on the ground was, because it was completely different once we took the mountain with them before.
And I feel at times a lot of guilt around whether I communicated well enough to get those guys out.
I've thought about whether I should have lied to manipulate the situation.
I'm still not sure if I had tried to manipulate that decision, if I could have manipulated that decision.
And I've been told that I couldn't have.
We paired up everyone, I didn't really want guys alone.
I didn't want their minds to do things to them.
You know, I wanted them to have someone to be with, the kind of Ranger buddy mentality.
VELA: Then came the waiting game to leave, but that's when you started to really, you know, feel it, as far as, man, we're getting pretty, pretty tired up here.
MICELI: There's MREs and we'd split them up.
Dropped some M&Ms in the dirt.
I'm like, "Oh, man, listen.
I don't care.
" So, I'm digging through the dirt just to get these things.
And somebody said, "You have no idea what's on this ground here.
" And I'm like, "I don't really care, either.
This M&Ms' going in my mouth.
" It's one of those things.
And the cold was just horrible.
We were spooning just to keep warm, and then wrapping up with, you know, a map to try to keep ourselves warm.
(HELICOPTER WHIRRING) The snow had started to freeze on top.
You would step on it, and feel secure, and you'd break through.
Whoever I was carrying, I dropped him like, three times.
And I remember the guy's like, "Hey, damn it man.
" I'm like, "I'm sorry, man.
I'm so sorry.
" He's like, "No, it's okay, I get it.
" I just remember dropping that guy and just feeling terrible, 'cause, you know, he was wounded and to make matters worse, I'm throwing him on the ground.
SELF: The first Chinook that went out had the guys that were wounded.
And the second Chinook that went out had the guys that were still able to walk around and were okay plus the killed in action.
So, when I got on that aircraft, I moved all the way up to the front, sat down next to Arin Canon.
We were just trying to make space, and I think I just sat down in between his legs and leaned back on him the same way.
And just went into a little daze as we flew off.
And I heard my platoon sergeant get on the radio and and he asked Arin where's the platoon leader.
And I keyed my mic and I said, "I'm in between his legs.
" And I didn't mean for that to be funny, but as soon as that came out of my mouth, I knew that probably was not sounding too good.
You know, I think that mission itself is emblematic of a creed.
If someone is in need that you're gonna go help him.
Neil Roberts was a SEAL that was missing and essentially the man that we went to get that we wouldn't leave behind.
And a lot of people kind of scratch their heads as to say "We had one missing and we lost six more?" But you have no way of knowing that you're going to lose six or 60 going to get one.
VELA: That day shaped me.
The going up the mountain, the stress that it put on your body.
There's nothing that will ever and after that, come on, you know, what else you got? The whole "I wanna get out and kill, I wanna get out and get these guys," at least for me, that was gone.
I slayed my dragons.
I always thought that, you know, guys that went out and did stuff and nothing bad happened always came away with a different attitude of "Yeah, that's awesome.
" Compared to, you know, hey, it's not always awesome.
You know, there's bad stuff that can happen.
The next day, I was cleaning my gun outside in the back, that's when it started to hit me.
These guys are gone.
SELF: I remember just sitting on the bunk, and probably some blood on my pants, the chaplain came in and told me to get out of those pants.
Put some clean clothes on and, you know, kind of get out of that state.
We went to Afganistan to kill or capture people.
I can say for the most part, my role in that wasn't significant.
But when given a mission to bring back one of our own, there's nothing more important than that.
There's several men that died there that have families.
You had young kids at the time that don't have their fathers and I think it's important that we tell these stories and that we remember that these men gave their lives for another man.
You know, I think that is a very special thing about about who we are that I don't want people to forget.