The Warfighters (2016) s01e11 Episode Script
Objective Berlin
1 MAN: We want to fight the enemy.
That's why we joined the Ranger Battalion.
MAN: Every mission you understand the risks, and those risks definitely were amplified the minute that we stepped off that aircraft.
It was crazy.
I mean, it was chaotic.
This was a very different type of objective for all of us.
MAN: It was just a series of chaotic events.
MAN: You could be the most well-trained bad-ass in the world.
Doesn't matter if you have no training or all that training.
If it's your time, there's nothing you can do about it if you're gonna die.
I think everyone in special operations community, has a sense of invincibility.
We're untouchable.
Every 19-year-old kid already has that.
And then you give him the best training in the world, the best gear, surrounded by the best people, and now you truly believe it.
MAN: The First Ranger Battalion deployed in the beginning of August of 2009.
Our platoon was pretty excited to get the chance to go to Afghanistan.
We knew we had a big opportunity there to really bring the fight to the enemy.
MAN: We were operating out of Fob Salerno, and it was basically at capacity.
It was very crowded.
They were packing us into these tiny little tents.
You could literally touch the guy to your left and to your right.
We're working out together.
We're eating together.
Everything we're doing, we're doing as a team.
I remember being a little nervous.
I think that's normal for everyone's first deployment.
But knowing that you are surrounded by the best people that the Special Operations community has to offer, and knowing that I have their back and at the same time they have mine, that's a really good feeling.
Jason Dahlke was one of the best that we had in Ranger Battalion as far as being physically fit, mentally strong.
JORDAN: Everybody looked up to him.
And instead of just being the best, he wanted to make everybody else the best.
MICHAEL: He had a way of teaching that was unlike anything I'd ever experienced since being in the military.
When he's teaching his guys, it's not just to teach that one person, but it's to benefit the group, and he was very, very adamant about that.
He just really wanted people to succeed.
I mean, he really, he really did.
And from what I hear from the guys, he was a great teacher and a great leader to them.
I met Jason in middle school.
We were, like, 12 or 13, probably.
He was in one of my Spanish classes, and I remember him being the crazy redhead who was talking all the time.
He was always on the go.
He was really active, really adventurous.
Jason just loved to be outside.
I remember once he called me and told me, "I think I'm gonna enter into a triathlon that's on base.
" I'm like, "Okay.
When?" "Today.
I'm gonna do it this afternoon.
" He ended up doing it with his mountain bike that he just happened to have in his truck.
He had his MICH his military helmet, not a biker's helmet and he ended up winning the race.
I mean, it was absurd.
I've never met anybody like him.
Even his walk was this bounce and this, like, shoulders back, chest forward, and he was bouncing when he came in the room.
His presence was just there, and he was going to make everybody there happy.
Even deployed, I never felt alone.
I always knew he was there and thinking about me.
He'd been on three deployments to Iraq and this would be his third deployment to Afghanistan.
And there was something about this last deployment which made me very nervous.
We begin this hour with Afghanistan and some very hard facts.
Taliban forces are on the rise again.
Al-Qaeda training camps on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border are said to be full.
NEWSCASTER: Militants continue to train and launch terror attacks into Afghanistan.
And once feuding Taliban commanders have pulled together for the common goal of fighting the U.
S.
In 2009, in terms of the broad scheme of Afghanistan, you had the Haqqani and you had the Taliban, and they were able to still be a problem for the U.
S.
eight years after we entered Afghanistan.
JORDAN: There was lots of fire fights.
It wasn't just doing nightly raids.
It was night raids and then getting in big fights with an actual an enemy that knew what they were actually doing.
MICHAEL: The Americans and the Taliban had almost become good at fighting each other.
So we knew that it was gonna be a rough a rough deployment.
JORDAN: Objective Berlin came down.
I think we had been in country about a month or so.
Third Battalion had found that there were a number of training camps near the Pakistan border, and they basically requested a company from First Battalion to help them hit all of these camps.
MICHAEL: Our intelligence analysts had begun monitoring it.
A lot of enemy movement in the area.
GREG: We could see that there was a large set of bunkers and a bunker system built into the side of this mountain.
And we could see these tent systems, and there was reports of possibly enemy weapons caches and anti-aircraft guns.
JORDAN: The camp is very important to the Taliban.
We thought us hitting the mountain would definitely disrupt their leadership network because there had to be somebody important in there with everything that they had.
- MAN: Roger, I copy.
- MAN 2: Impact.
Impact.
GREG: We'd gotten word that they were gonna be doing a kinetic strike before we were gonna land.
MAN ON RADIO: Good missile.
Good missile.
A kinetic strike, basically, is dropping large amounts of bombs or ordinance on the area in efforts to eliminate the bad guys.
MICHAEL: They were gonna send us in to just make sure that the air strikes had done their job.
GREG: We were supposed to land at 8,000 feet.
And then our objective at the top of this mountain was right around 9,500 to 10,000 feet.
One private was taken from each squad four privates total.
I was selected from weapons and Eric Hario ended up being selected from third squad.
Eric Hario and I, we met back in the training cycle.
I had just gotten to Alpha Company, First Ranger Battalion, and he had been there for a month prior.
When you looked at Eric, you had this big bulky guy.
Huge forearms.
He reminded me of Popeye.
Just these giant forearms sticking out from his T-shirt.
And he had tattoos.
He looked mean.
I remember when I first met him.
The team leaders would start to get a little bored, and so they would send all of our privates from weapon squad over to another squad to try and wrestle.
I drew the unlucky straw of having to try and wrestle with Eric who came from a background of wrestling and football.
Here I am this little I was 150 pounds.
And so we entered the cage, and the last thing I remember is Eric having me in this headlock and my head bouncing off the concrete and me thinking in the back of my mind, "This is a really bad situation.
" I drew the wrong kid to mess with.
And we were laughing later on.
I believe he said something to the effect of, "Hey, man, I'll help you work on those wrestling skills," or something like that.
As it led up to the planning for Objective Berlin, the final manifest call came out and our names were on it.
We were super excited that we had been selected.
As we took off, I mean, this is my second mission.
This is Eric's very first mission.
We were just both looking forward to the opportunity to go out and do our job.
[RADIO CHATTER.]
MICHAEL: I took a look out the window of the helicopter, and the terrain, it's so vast, and it's just emptiness out there.
And I remember thinking, "They want us to climb up this.
" These mountains are straight up.
JORDAN: We'd only been in country for a month, living and training at sea level, and this mission was going to be over 9,000 feet elevation.
So not only walking up a mountain, but doing it while fighting was gonna be a huge challenge.
I've heard that this was an area in the world that Alexander the Great couldn't even conquer because the terrain was just so challenging.
I vaguely remember someone saying we just got radio chatter that the enemy knew that we were coming just because of the bombs that had been dropped.
You know, "The Americans are coming.
" Get your guns ready.
"Get ready to fight.
" JORDAN: As we were coming in and started taking fire, the pilots made an assessment on the spot that they could actually land the aircraft.
MICHAEL: When you land aircraft in an area like that, they are the biggest target on the battlefield.
Every enemy combatant that's in that area, they know that somebody's coming, especially when it's at night.
GREG: We de-clipped.
I run off to the right.
I take a knee, and my team leader and I are pulling security.
The shooting is going on.
My team leader grabs me and pulls me down.
Come on.
There's a bunker right There's an enemy bunker built into the side of the mountain.
It was so well camouflaged that we didn't even see it.
Clear.
JORDAN: I'm hearing reports that there's just enemy coming in from every direction.
There's so much that they call off the next wave of helicopters because they want to use the air support to shoot the guys that are coming over the ridge lines at us.
The enemy was quickly eliminated.
GREG: I was, like, a 19-year-old kid, second mission, first deployment.
To step off into a valley in which the enemy was prepared and precise and ready to attack, it was very eye-opening.
My name is Greg Buechner.
I am originally from a small town called Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
From an early age, I knew that I was destined for the military.
I just remember going to all these old yard sales, getting these old uniforms, and I'd lay in the bushes and practice my ambush techniques.
Me and all my friends from the neighborhood would just sit there and recon certain people in our neighborhood and write notes about them, like, "This person left their house at this time.
" Yeah, we definitely kept the place safe.
I learned about the Rangers and their capabilities.
I knew that was going to be my route.
I signed up at 18, and then I left two weeks after high school graduation.
As a private coming in, you've read all the books and you've watched all the movies.
This is the first time you've ever been out of the country, and you're shipped to a warzone.
And it's good to know that you have brothers who care about your well-being.
Once the contact ceased and it got a little quiet, almost eerily quiet MICHAEL: that's when the guys started getting on the radio, saying, "We got friendly wounded in action.
" GREG: Once you hear that one of your buddies got hit, you start to run scenarios through your head.
Who is it? Is it bad? Are they gonna make it? [WHISPERING.]
Yes, sir.
GREG: I wasn't very seasoned yet with operating under night vision.
You have no depth perception.
You can see the rocks down there, but you don't really know how far they are away.
So I tripped and fell two or three times as I was running over.
I was able to reach this large amount of people that were taking a knee.
It looked like they were working.
I remember just kneeling over closer and closer, and that's when I was able to look, and I could tell at that point that it was Eric.
They had his helmet off, they had his body armor off, and they were trying to assess his wounds.
Ten minutes prior, we're seated across from each other in the aircraft.
An hour before that, we were talking about the things that every 19-year-old talks about girls and war.
And now all of a sudden, we found ourselves on this battlefield and he's laying there with multiple wounds.
And that's when it hit me really hard.
I look at his situation in his late teens, six months of Ranger experience, from the Midwest, and then I looked at myself 19, six months of experience, and from the Midwest.
Our stories paralleled each other, and that's when it became extremely real to me the possibility that it could be me.
Given the fact that they were working on him so frantically, that told me that that was a good sign.
JORDAN: It came over the radio that he's stable.
What happened to Hario was that he stepped off the aircraft and was shot within the first 30 seconds, hit in the neck, collar bone area.
MICHAEL: When I first found out about it, it was almost like this shield of invincibility is gone.
GREG: They loaded him into the aircraft and we sent a great medic with him.
That was a big stumbling block, but we're gonna make it through this, you know? And so will Eric.
But it was crazy to think that it happened so quick when we ran off the back of that aircraft.
And I had a feeling that we were gonna be in for a fight.
CASTER: The U.
S.
is sending tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, but right now it seems the Taliban have never been stronger.
Part of landing, the beginning of any mission, is to dominate the terrain and establish control.
MICHAEL: We had mountains on either side of us, really vast ridge lines that almost circled our entire position.
My fire team began moving to the north, which was gonna bring us to the base of the mountain that our target was on top of.
My squad was a lead element for this target.
As a lead element, you're gonna be the guys that are in the front.
My name is Michael Ross.
I'm 29 years old.
I grew up in Syracuse, New York.
I didn't grow up in a big military family.
I didn't have the typical childhood that you hear a lot of guys in the military you know, they grew up hunting.
I didn't shoot a gun till I went to Basic.
I grew up skate boarding and snow boarding.
I didn't play football.
I think everyone changed after September 11.
Our whole country, obviously, had almost a facelift to it.
Something sparked inside of me when that happened.
There was some sort of, almost an anger or a rage, you could almost call it.
I felt like something needed to be done.
And so I had tattoos and the Marine Corps, they hated tattoos just as much as the Army does now.
I had them below the elbow, and that kind of funneled me into the Army.
I enlisted in May of 2007.
I knew that I wanted to fight.
I had that desire in me.
I wanted to be the tip of the spear, the guys that go in first.
GREG: Ross was definitely one of those guys that you kind of look up to.
He's a super humble guy, so he won't tell you this, but he was actually awarded the Silver Star for something he did later in his career, which is a true testament to the Ranger that he was and the man that he is.
He was definitely one of the guys, when you're moving through that difficult terrain, he'd look around to see how everyone else is acting, especially as a younger private.
Him and a couple other guys, they were still doing everything right.
I had taken a quick pause when we heard contact from behind us.
[GUNFIRE.]
GREG: I was worried that enemy movers may be coming from multiple directions.
[GUNFIRE.]
JORDAN: I moved to the eastern side of the landing zone, because they said there were guys coming from the west.
Jason Dahlke was sitting a few feet from me.
12 o'clock.
I'm gonna paint the targets.
Light 'em up.
He was using his laser to illuminate the ridge line.
- [GUNSHOTS.]
- Lift to left.
- [GUNSHOT.]
- Tango down.
Dahlke, go.
Let's go.
Someone comes over the radio and asks me to move where more guys are coming over.
Some guy that got had been dead earlier sat up and shot at Jason from pretty close range.
Talk to me.
We take off his helmet and start taking off his body armor and our hands are covered in his blood.
We realize he's pretty seriously wounded.
He was shot in the side a couple of times.
And I remember standing over him and looking down after we'd taken his kit off, and I remember standing over him and refocusing my NODs on his face.
It was the first time I had a surreal experience, where I kind of just like denied who it was.
At this point there wasn't really anything more for me to do besides sit there and watch.
I grabbed my shooter and we moved back over to where we were walking.
As we were sitting there pulling security basically wiping the blood off of our hands, I was like, "That was Dahlke, wasn't it?" And he said, "Yeah.
" They packaged him up and the next two helicopters came in for the rest of the ground force.
When you have a friendly killed in action, when the helicopter's coming in they say, "Hey, we have X amount of people coming in on aircraft and we're loading one angel on an aircraft.
" And, I mean, everybody knew that Dahlke was dead right away.
MICHAEL: Looking around, you could see on our guys faces we had just gotten kicked in the chest pretty hard.
GREG: Jason, who was arguably one of the most respected Rangers in our group, for someone that had his skill set, and his knowledge, and his physical ability, and his mental ability if he can be killed, we all have a target on our back.
MICHAEL: Our mission was to go and deal with this training camp on this mountain.
So, yes, we get these casualties out of the gate, but we haven't even started.
As the sun started coming up, you started being able to see these peaks around us.
That kind of put everything back into perspective of just how small we were in this vast area.
GREG: I think all of us kind of came to the realization that this could be our night.
This could be our time to go.
And I saw that sunrise, and it was a very iconic moment, how in the middle of a really dark time you can still find beauty.
JORDAN: We started moving up, and the terrain was terrible.
It was some of the harshest terrain I've ever seen.
MICHAEL: It was hands and knees.
This slate rock that they have there, it crumbles underneath your feet.
You're holding onto roots and limbs.
There was a tree at one point, and I remember thinking, "I can take a break for five seconds if I can get to this tree.
" That was my mini-objective.
"I need to get to this tree.
" JORDAN: It's hard to describe it, but I've never been on any mountain similar to that.
A lot of jagged rocks, sharp edges that could actually tear your clothing.
Very few places suitable to even sit down on.
With the weight our guys have on their backs, they've cracked these rocks in half and it makes them tumble backwards.
I think I was 160 pounds at the time my body weight.
I think I weighed 240 with all of our gear on.
And that's not even the heaviest.
There were guys that carried much more than that.
JORDAN: Within the first 30 minutes or so of making our way up, we see a dead Taliban with a backpack full of RPGs.
We have the dog handler bring his dog up just to sniff around and see if there's anything booby-trapped.
[BARKING.]
He sets up to shoot an RPG at us.
We all shoot him at the same time, basically.
One of the bullets strikes in the backpack full of rockets.
I remember feeling a giant heat wave come off of it.
I was close enough to feel the heat from it.
GREG: It was crazy.
It was chaotic.
The dog ended up getting a decent wound to the face and the dog handler was seriously wounded.
He needed to be medivac'd, that was clear, and we knew we had to continue moving on.
So we start booking it up the side of this mountain the best we can with the difficult terrain that we're given.
We reach a point on which we're able to hit a plateau.
We set up a makeshift patrol base.
JORDAN: Everybody's face has been covered in dirt.
They're extremely winded trying to carry all this weight up the mountain.
GREG: Generally, you want to stay silent.
You're trying to conceal yourself.
And all of a sudden, we hear this yelling.
[MAN SHOUTING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE.]
JORDAN: At this point, everybody shuts up immediately so they can hear him.
We realize it's some voice just echoing across between the ridge lines.
I start scanning immediately and I see a head pop up.
GREG: There he was right in front of us on this adjacent mountaintop dressed in white.
He was waving his arms and screaming and yelling.
And what it seemed like he was doing was calling to the enemy, spotting for them, maybe telling them where our position was.
By this time, we can hear him.
We think he's saying, "Stupid Americans!" I had already basically ranged out all of the key terrain features around us.
I'd estimated it to be between six and 700 meters.
It was a tough shot, mountaintop to mountaintop.
There's no telling what the wind was doing in the middle of it, and at elevation.
Jordan Whitlow, in Ranger Battalion, is a sniper legend.
I became a sniper after this deployment, and a lot of it has to do with seeing Jordan on this mission.
JORDAN: I grew up in Iowa and Indiana.
I guess you could say I had a normal Midwestern childhood.
I was also the Dennis the Menace type that would be running around with a frog in my pocket trying to catch snakes out in the middle of nowhere in Iowa.
When I was six years old, before the Internet was a big thing for us, my mom would take us to the public library, and instead of going to the children's book section, I would go and check out the books about military history, and I was pretty fascinated with snipers as a kid growing up.
I knew that the Rangers was an elite unit, and so in October of 2003, when I was 17 years old, that's when I signed up.
It just so happened that in 2005 they needed more snipers in the Battalion, and so they opened it up to some of the junior guys.
I went through the assessment process, and I was one of three other guys to get selected to join the sniper platoon.
I was the youngest guy by probably five years.
GREG: Definitely admired him from afar, yeah.
I'd heard that he'd grown up in the sniper section, which was extremely rare, and he was obviously good at his job.
He proved it that day.
- [GUNSHOT.]
- Nice.
The squad leader yelled, "Holy [BLEEP.]
, you hit him.
" MICHAEL: From 700 yards, that type of engagement, across from ridge line to ridge line it's virtually impossible to gauge your wind.
Couldn't have been placed any better.
It's just one of the most impressive things I've ever seen.
I'd like to say it was pure talent, but I think it was mostly luck.
MICHAEL: After these casualties that we had, to see that we were still capable of putting the boot on the enemy was a very uplifting thing.
[RADIO CHATTER.]
JORDAN: The radio that our linguist was carrying, listening to their radio traffic, he said, "They came over the radio and said, 'Hey, don't move.
They can hit us from there.
'" It was kind of like a giant middle finger to the Taliban.
We're here and we're gonna move up this mountain.
We had just walked probably 20 hours, fighting through the valley, up the mountain.
MICHAEL: Initially, we started seeing tents.
Every enemy combatant that's in that area, they're very mobile.
These guys don't live in houses.
We cleared through the tents and then we pushed forward into what I would consider the primary objective, the bunker complex at the peak of the mountain.
Coming up was the objective area, which is where the majority pre-assault fires had occurred.
The trees were literally nothing more than splintered stumps.
Trees that had been once 30 or 40 feet were now reduced to four-foot stumps.
It smelled like a pine tree air freshener.
So at this point we found enemy weapons caches, large amount of machine guns and grenades.
There were just fighting positions and weapons scattered everywhere.
One of the initial things we found was a ZPU an old Russian anti-aircraft gun, and it was pointing directly at our helicopter landing zone.
It's designed to bring down an aircraft.
JORDAN: We inventoried any actual serviceable weapons that we found, and made this giant cache of weapons, blew it up.
MICHAEL: We had done it.
We had gotten up there.
We had cleared the objective and completed the mission.
To do that after being dealt such a blow in the beginning with Dahlke, and then to see it through to its fruition, it just reinstilled how I viewed these guys.
It was a very proud moment to be a part of that.
JORDAN: As we're sitting up there pulling security, I remember thinking we got updates about all the guys that were wounded, and we knew that we lost Jason Dahlke, but we didn't know about Hario.
I walked to the middle of the patrol base and I asked the platoon sergeant what happened to Hario.
He just looked at me with a blank stare and said, "He didn't make it.
" And I didn't know him well, but I knew he was a good guy.
I knew he was only 19 years old, his first mission ever, died, basically, stepping off the aircraft.
MICHAEL: Initially we were told on the ground that there were some complications on the medivac bird with Hario, but that they were able to work through them.
They were able to revitalize him a few times.
You hold onto that glimmer of hope, and then when you get told otherwise, you know, I mean you know, so.
It was a it was a challenging moment for me trying to grasp what just happened.
MICHAEL: You'll never stop wondering could I have done more? Could we have done something differently? That never leaves.
You have a quick second to think about the family which I, um you try not to do, but it's you know that there's gonna be someone that comes to their door and tells them that their son was just killed.
My name is Becky Hario, and I'm Eric Hario's mother.
Eric was born and grew up in Monroe, Michigan.
He was very popular there.
He played every sport you can imagine football, baseball, wrestling.
He was a handful.
He was we have three sons, my wife and I, and Eric was the most athletic.
He had a weight set outside our front door.
Every time he'd go out somewhere, he'd do a couple reps, and always competed with his friends to see who could lift the most amount of weight.
JIM: Eric was an honest, hard-working person.
He wanted to earn things as opposed to be given things.
I told him, "Do what you want to do.
It's your life.
" And he wanted to be in the military.
He really loved his country, and he wanted to fight for his country.
I actually talked to him the night before the battle.
He knew he was going to a battle, but he couldn't really tell me that, but I know at this point that he had to have known.
It was a very beautiful phone call.
He says, "I love you all very much", and, Mom, you're always in my heart.
" And then the phone line went dead, so that's the last I heard from him.
JIM: I was in Minnesota, and the phone my cell phone rang.
It was my son Mark.
Just yeah, my brain shut down for a little bit trying to figure out what to do next.
He got home later in the day and we kind of fell apart together.
Just a lot of talking, a lot of hugging, a lot of crying, but honor, too.
Eric was honored to serve for his country, and I think he was honored to die for his country.
When you become a Ranger, you've got to be ready to fight, but you've gotta be ready to die, because it might happen.
We had a memorial two days later on our compound, and they have their guns set up with their boots and their dog tags and their helmet.
We all knew that symbol.
You know, that stuff has to be cleaned, and that's something that you really don't think about.
Our platoon made the call.
"Hey, we're gonna do it.
" I remember all of us privates sitting around in silence.
MICHAEL: You're asking kids that were friends with the deceased to clean blood off of their gear.
You can't be trained for that.
You can't teach a guy how to lose a friend, or how to lose what we consider a brother.
MAN: We gather this evening to honor the memories of Private First Class Hario and Staff Sergeant Dahlke, who sacrificed their lives so that others did not have to sacrifice.
They were true patriots and comrades who gave of themselves willingly.
They fought and destroyed an incredibly determined, tenacious, and evil enemy that night.
When the dust settled that day, Alpha Company 175 had destroyed the enemy on the objective and owned the training camp, thus eliminating his ability to terrorize others.
Unfortunately, this victory came at a tremendous cost, a cost that we are all struggling to put into perspective.
I saw a lot of hard men who I'd never seen show emotion before show emotion.
That's a true testament to what these men meant to us.
JORDAN: You know, when a guy dies, you got to inventory his things and send them home.
My cot was in one corner and Dahlke's cot was in the other corner.
All I remember is they started inventorying his stuff and basically creating a checklist of all of his items, and I just turned around on my cot, and that's when I let it go.
And, hey, I remember not wanting anybody to hear me crying or anything, so I didn't sniffle.
I just had tears and snot running down my face.
I don't remember how long, but I just sat there for hours like that.
One f the last conversations, I remember him saying, "I'm with the best guys I can be with.
They're gonna bring me home.
" I specifically said that time, "You have to come back to me.
" He was just very, very confident that I mean, he was coming home.
I don't think Jason ever thought something would happen to him.
GREG: One thing that I took away was that bullets don't discriminate.
You can be on your very first mission or you can be on your 500th mission, and you can be among the most highly-trained warriors that our military has to offer, but at the end of the day, if it's your time, it's your time.
And that night, I took a right off the bird and Eric took a left.
It really is luck.
From Berlin on, when our guys would get their boots on the ground, we knew what the possibilities were now.
More than anyone, we knew this is what could happen.
We'd seen it.
JASON: It's because of guys like Jason and Eric who aren't able to be here anymore that I put my best foot forward in everything that I do.
It's very moving to see this many lives that he has touched.
His spirit, really, what we learned from Jason, it's never going to end.
Eric kind of emulated Jason.
They worked out together.
And the gymnasium that was named after them just proves they're going to live on.
It's called the Dahlke/Hario CRTF Combat Readiness Training Facility.
It's a gym.
They have to name it something complicated.
It's a nice room, and by the front door is a big display case and it talks about Jason and Eric and why it's called the Dahlke/Hario room.
It's a building where the Rangers can go and work out, and they can look up to the two guys who their picture's on the wall and try to walk in their footsteps.
That's why we joined the Ranger Battalion.
MAN: Every mission you understand the risks, and those risks definitely were amplified the minute that we stepped off that aircraft.
It was crazy.
I mean, it was chaotic.
This was a very different type of objective for all of us.
MAN: It was just a series of chaotic events.
MAN: You could be the most well-trained bad-ass in the world.
Doesn't matter if you have no training or all that training.
If it's your time, there's nothing you can do about it if you're gonna die.
I think everyone in special operations community, has a sense of invincibility.
We're untouchable.
Every 19-year-old kid already has that.
And then you give him the best training in the world, the best gear, surrounded by the best people, and now you truly believe it.
MAN: The First Ranger Battalion deployed in the beginning of August of 2009.
Our platoon was pretty excited to get the chance to go to Afghanistan.
We knew we had a big opportunity there to really bring the fight to the enemy.
MAN: We were operating out of Fob Salerno, and it was basically at capacity.
It was very crowded.
They were packing us into these tiny little tents.
You could literally touch the guy to your left and to your right.
We're working out together.
We're eating together.
Everything we're doing, we're doing as a team.
I remember being a little nervous.
I think that's normal for everyone's first deployment.
But knowing that you are surrounded by the best people that the Special Operations community has to offer, and knowing that I have their back and at the same time they have mine, that's a really good feeling.
Jason Dahlke was one of the best that we had in Ranger Battalion as far as being physically fit, mentally strong.
JORDAN: Everybody looked up to him.
And instead of just being the best, he wanted to make everybody else the best.
MICHAEL: He had a way of teaching that was unlike anything I'd ever experienced since being in the military.
When he's teaching his guys, it's not just to teach that one person, but it's to benefit the group, and he was very, very adamant about that.
He just really wanted people to succeed.
I mean, he really, he really did.
And from what I hear from the guys, he was a great teacher and a great leader to them.
I met Jason in middle school.
We were, like, 12 or 13, probably.
He was in one of my Spanish classes, and I remember him being the crazy redhead who was talking all the time.
He was always on the go.
He was really active, really adventurous.
Jason just loved to be outside.
I remember once he called me and told me, "I think I'm gonna enter into a triathlon that's on base.
" I'm like, "Okay.
When?" "Today.
I'm gonna do it this afternoon.
" He ended up doing it with his mountain bike that he just happened to have in his truck.
He had his MICH his military helmet, not a biker's helmet and he ended up winning the race.
I mean, it was absurd.
I've never met anybody like him.
Even his walk was this bounce and this, like, shoulders back, chest forward, and he was bouncing when he came in the room.
His presence was just there, and he was going to make everybody there happy.
Even deployed, I never felt alone.
I always knew he was there and thinking about me.
He'd been on three deployments to Iraq and this would be his third deployment to Afghanistan.
And there was something about this last deployment which made me very nervous.
We begin this hour with Afghanistan and some very hard facts.
Taliban forces are on the rise again.
Al-Qaeda training camps on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border are said to be full.
NEWSCASTER: Militants continue to train and launch terror attacks into Afghanistan.
And once feuding Taliban commanders have pulled together for the common goal of fighting the U.
S.
In 2009, in terms of the broad scheme of Afghanistan, you had the Haqqani and you had the Taliban, and they were able to still be a problem for the U.
S.
eight years after we entered Afghanistan.
JORDAN: There was lots of fire fights.
It wasn't just doing nightly raids.
It was night raids and then getting in big fights with an actual an enemy that knew what they were actually doing.
MICHAEL: The Americans and the Taliban had almost become good at fighting each other.
So we knew that it was gonna be a rough a rough deployment.
JORDAN: Objective Berlin came down.
I think we had been in country about a month or so.
Third Battalion had found that there were a number of training camps near the Pakistan border, and they basically requested a company from First Battalion to help them hit all of these camps.
MICHAEL: Our intelligence analysts had begun monitoring it.
A lot of enemy movement in the area.
GREG: We could see that there was a large set of bunkers and a bunker system built into the side of this mountain.
And we could see these tent systems, and there was reports of possibly enemy weapons caches and anti-aircraft guns.
JORDAN: The camp is very important to the Taliban.
We thought us hitting the mountain would definitely disrupt their leadership network because there had to be somebody important in there with everything that they had.
- MAN: Roger, I copy.
- MAN 2: Impact.
Impact.
GREG: We'd gotten word that they were gonna be doing a kinetic strike before we were gonna land.
MAN ON RADIO: Good missile.
Good missile.
A kinetic strike, basically, is dropping large amounts of bombs or ordinance on the area in efforts to eliminate the bad guys.
MICHAEL: They were gonna send us in to just make sure that the air strikes had done their job.
GREG: We were supposed to land at 8,000 feet.
And then our objective at the top of this mountain was right around 9,500 to 10,000 feet.
One private was taken from each squad four privates total.
I was selected from weapons and Eric Hario ended up being selected from third squad.
Eric Hario and I, we met back in the training cycle.
I had just gotten to Alpha Company, First Ranger Battalion, and he had been there for a month prior.
When you looked at Eric, you had this big bulky guy.
Huge forearms.
He reminded me of Popeye.
Just these giant forearms sticking out from his T-shirt.
And he had tattoos.
He looked mean.
I remember when I first met him.
The team leaders would start to get a little bored, and so they would send all of our privates from weapon squad over to another squad to try and wrestle.
I drew the unlucky straw of having to try and wrestle with Eric who came from a background of wrestling and football.
Here I am this little I was 150 pounds.
And so we entered the cage, and the last thing I remember is Eric having me in this headlock and my head bouncing off the concrete and me thinking in the back of my mind, "This is a really bad situation.
" I drew the wrong kid to mess with.
And we were laughing later on.
I believe he said something to the effect of, "Hey, man, I'll help you work on those wrestling skills," or something like that.
As it led up to the planning for Objective Berlin, the final manifest call came out and our names were on it.
We were super excited that we had been selected.
As we took off, I mean, this is my second mission.
This is Eric's very first mission.
We were just both looking forward to the opportunity to go out and do our job.
[RADIO CHATTER.]
MICHAEL: I took a look out the window of the helicopter, and the terrain, it's so vast, and it's just emptiness out there.
And I remember thinking, "They want us to climb up this.
" These mountains are straight up.
JORDAN: We'd only been in country for a month, living and training at sea level, and this mission was going to be over 9,000 feet elevation.
So not only walking up a mountain, but doing it while fighting was gonna be a huge challenge.
I've heard that this was an area in the world that Alexander the Great couldn't even conquer because the terrain was just so challenging.
I vaguely remember someone saying we just got radio chatter that the enemy knew that we were coming just because of the bombs that had been dropped.
You know, "The Americans are coming.
" Get your guns ready.
"Get ready to fight.
" JORDAN: As we were coming in and started taking fire, the pilots made an assessment on the spot that they could actually land the aircraft.
MICHAEL: When you land aircraft in an area like that, they are the biggest target on the battlefield.
Every enemy combatant that's in that area, they know that somebody's coming, especially when it's at night.
GREG: We de-clipped.
I run off to the right.
I take a knee, and my team leader and I are pulling security.
The shooting is going on.
My team leader grabs me and pulls me down.
Come on.
There's a bunker right There's an enemy bunker built into the side of the mountain.
It was so well camouflaged that we didn't even see it.
Clear.
JORDAN: I'm hearing reports that there's just enemy coming in from every direction.
There's so much that they call off the next wave of helicopters because they want to use the air support to shoot the guys that are coming over the ridge lines at us.
The enemy was quickly eliminated.
GREG: I was, like, a 19-year-old kid, second mission, first deployment.
To step off into a valley in which the enemy was prepared and precise and ready to attack, it was very eye-opening.
My name is Greg Buechner.
I am originally from a small town called Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
From an early age, I knew that I was destined for the military.
I just remember going to all these old yard sales, getting these old uniforms, and I'd lay in the bushes and practice my ambush techniques.
Me and all my friends from the neighborhood would just sit there and recon certain people in our neighborhood and write notes about them, like, "This person left their house at this time.
" Yeah, we definitely kept the place safe.
I learned about the Rangers and their capabilities.
I knew that was going to be my route.
I signed up at 18, and then I left two weeks after high school graduation.
As a private coming in, you've read all the books and you've watched all the movies.
This is the first time you've ever been out of the country, and you're shipped to a warzone.
And it's good to know that you have brothers who care about your well-being.
Once the contact ceased and it got a little quiet, almost eerily quiet MICHAEL: that's when the guys started getting on the radio, saying, "We got friendly wounded in action.
" GREG: Once you hear that one of your buddies got hit, you start to run scenarios through your head.
Who is it? Is it bad? Are they gonna make it? [WHISPERING.]
Yes, sir.
GREG: I wasn't very seasoned yet with operating under night vision.
You have no depth perception.
You can see the rocks down there, but you don't really know how far they are away.
So I tripped and fell two or three times as I was running over.
I was able to reach this large amount of people that were taking a knee.
It looked like they were working.
I remember just kneeling over closer and closer, and that's when I was able to look, and I could tell at that point that it was Eric.
They had his helmet off, they had his body armor off, and they were trying to assess his wounds.
Ten minutes prior, we're seated across from each other in the aircraft.
An hour before that, we were talking about the things that every 19-year-old talks about girls and war.
And now all of a sudden, we found ourselves on this battlefield and he's laying there with multiple wounds.
And that's when it hit me really hard.
I look at his situation in his late teens, six months of Ranger experience, from the Midwest, and then I looked at myself 19, six months of experience, and from the Midwest.
Our stories paralleled each other, and that's when it became extremely real to me the possibility that it could be me.
Given the fact that they were working on him so frantically, that told me that that was a good sign.
JORDAN: It came over the radio that he's stable.
What happened to Hario was that he stepped off the aircraft and was shot within the first 30 seconds, hit in the neck, collar bone area.
MICHAEL: When I first found out about it, it was almost like this shield of invincibility is gone.
GREG: They loaded him into the aircraft and we sent a great medic with him.
That was a big stumbling block, but we're gonna make it through this, you know? And so will Eric.
But it was crazy to think that it happened so quick when we ran off the back of that aircraft.
And I had a feeling that we were gonna be in for a fight.
CASTER: The U.
S.
is sending tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, but right now it seems the Taliban have never been stronger.
Part of landing, the beginning of any mission, is to dominate the terrain and establish control.
MICHAEL: We had mountains on either side of us, really vast ridge lines that almost circled our entire position.
My fire team began moving to the north, which was gonna bring us to the base of the mountain that our target was on top of.
My squad was a lead element for this target.
As a lead element, you're gonna be the guys that are in the front.
My name is Michael Ross.
I'm 29 years old.
I grew up in Syracuse, New York.
I didn't grow up in a big military family.
I didn't have the typical childhood that you hear a lot of guys in the military you know, they grew up hunting.
I didn't shoot a gun till I went to Basic.
I grew up skate boarding and snow boarding.
I didn't play football.
I think everyone changed after September 11.
Our whole country, obviously, had almost a facelift to it.
Something sparked inside of me when that happened.
There was some sort of, almost an anger or a rage, you could almost call it.
I felt like something needed to be done.
And so I had tattoos and the Marine Corps, they hated tattoos just as much as the Army does now.
I had them below the elbow, and that kind of funneled me into the Army.
I enlisted in May of 2007.
I knew that I wanted to fight.
I had that desire in me.
I wanted to be the tip of the spear, the guys that go in first.
GREG: Ross was definitely one of those guys that you kind of look up to.
He's a super humble guy, so he won't tell you this, but he was actually awarded the Silver Star for something he did later in his career, which is a true testament to the Ranger that he was and the man that he is.
He was definitely one of the guys, when you're moving through that difficult terrain, he'd look around to see how everyone else is acting, especially as a younger private.
Him and a couple other guys, they were still doing everything right.
I had taken a quick pause when we heard contact from behind us.
[GUNFIRE.]
GREG: I was worried that enemy movers may be coming from multiple directions.
[GUNFIRE.]
JORDAN: I moved to the eastern side of the landing zone, because they said there were guys coming from the west.
Jason Dahlke was sitting a few feet from me.
12 o'clock.
I'm gonna paint the targets.
Light 'em up.
He was using his laser to illuminate the ridge line.
- [GUNSHOTS.]
- Lift to left.
- [GUNSHOT.]
- Tango down.
Dahlke, go.
Let's go.
Someone comes over the radio and asks me to move where more guys are coming over.
Some guy that got had been dead earlier sat up and shot at Jason from pretty close range.
Talk to me.
We take off his helmet and start taking off his body armor and our hands are covered in his blood.
We realize he's pretty seriously wounded.
He was shot in the side a couple of times.
And I remember standing over him and looking down after we'd taken his kit off, and I remember standing over him and refocusing my NODs on his face.
It was the first time I had a surreal experience, where I kind of just like denied who it was.
At this point there wasn't really anything more for me to do besides sit there and watch.
I grabbed my shooter and we moved back over to where we were walking.
As we were sitting there pulling security basically wiping the blood off of our hands, I was like, "That was Dahlke, wasn't it?" And he said, "Yeah.
" They packaged him up and the next two helicopters came in for the rest of the ground force.
When you have a friendly killed in action, when the helicopter's coming in they say, "Hey, we have X amount of people coming in on aircraft and we're loading one angel on an aircraft.
" And, I mean, everybody knew that Dahlke was dead right away.
MICHAEL: Looking around, you could see on our guys faces we had just gotten kicked in the chest pretty hard.
GREG: Jason, who was arguably one of the most respected Rangers in our group, for someone that had his skill set, and his knowledge, and his physical ability, and his mental ability if he can be killed, we all have a target on our back.
MICHAEL: Our mission was to go and deal with this training camp on this mountain.
So, yes, we get these casualties out of the gate, but we haven't even started.
As the sun started coming up, you started being able to see these peaks around us.
That kind of put everything back into perspective of just how small we were in this vast area.
GREG: I think all of us kind of came to the realization that this could be our night.
This could be our time to go.
And I saw that sunrise, and it was a very iconic moment, how in the middle of a really dark time you can still find beauty.
JORDAN: We started moving up, and the terrain was terrible.
It was some of the harshest terrain I've ever seen.
MICHAEL: It was hands and knees.
This slate rock that they have there, it crumbles underneath your feet.
You're holding onto roots and limbs.
There was a tree at one point, and I remember thinking, "I can take a break for five seconds if I can get to this tree.
" That was my mini-objective.
"I need to get to this tree.
" JORDAN: It's hard to describe it, but I've never been on any mountain similar to that.
A lot of jagged rocks, sharp edges that could actually tear your clothing.
Very few places suitable to even sit down on.
With the weight our guys have on their backs, they've cracked these rocks in half and it makes them tumble backwards.
I think I was 160 pounds at the time my body weight.
I think I weighed 240 with all of our gear on.
And that's not even the heaviest.
There were guys that carried much more than that.
JORDAN: Within the first 30 minutes or so of making our way up, we see a dead Taliban with a backpack full of RPGs.
We have the dog handler bring his dog up just to sniff around and see if there's anything booby-trapped.
[BARKING.]
He sets up to shoot an RPG at us.
We all shoot him at the same time, basically.
One of the bullets strikes in the backpack full of rockets.
I remember feeling a giant heat wave come off of it.
I was close enough to feel the heat from it.
GREG: It was crazy.
It was chaotic.
The dog ended up getting a decent wound to the face and the dog handler was seriously wounded.
He needed to be medivac'd, that was clear, and we knew we had to continue moving on.
So we start booking it up the side of this mountain the best we can with the difficult terrain that we're given.
We reach a point on which we're able to hit a plateau.
We set up a makeshift patrol base.
JORDAN: Everybody's face has been covered in dirt.
They're extremely winded trying to carry all this weight up the mountain.
GREG: Generally, you want to stay silent.
You're trying to conceal yourself.
And all of a sudden, we hear this yelling.
[MAN SHOUTING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE.]
JORDAN: At this point, everybody shuts up immediately so they can hear him.
We realize it's some voice just echoing across between the ridge lines.
I start scanning immediately and I see a head pop up.
GREG: There he was right in front of us on this adjacent mountaintop dressed in white.
He was waving his arms and screaming and yelling.
And what it seemed like he was doing was calling to the enemy, spotting for them, maybe telling them where our position was.
By this time, we can hear him.
We think he's saying, "Stupid Americans!" I had already basically ranged out all of the key terrain features around us.
I'd estimated it to be between six and 700 meters.
It was a tough shot, mountaintop to mountaintop.
There's no telling what the wind was doing in the middle of it, and at elevation.
Jordan Whitlow, in Ranger Battalion, is a sniper legend.
I became a sniper after this deployment, and a lot of it has to do with seeing Jordan on this mission.
JORDAN: I grew up in Iowa and Indiana.
I guess you could say I had a normal Midwestern childhood.
I was also the Dennis the Menace type that would be running around with a frog in my pocket trying to catch snakes out in the middle of nowhere in Iowa.
When I was six years old, before the Internet was a big thing for us, my mom would take us to the public library, and instead of going to the children's book section, I would go and check out the books about military history, and I was pretty fascinated with snipers as a kid growing up.
I knew that the Rangers was an elite unit, and so in October of 2003, when I was 17 years old, that's when I signed up.
It just so happened that in 2005 they needed more snipers in the Battalion, and so they opened it up to some of the junior guys.
I went through the assessment process, and I was one of three other guys to get selected to join the sniper platoon.
I was the youngest guy by probably five years.
GREG: Definitely admired him from afar, yeah.
I'd heard that he'd grown up in the sniper section, which was extremely rare, and he was obviously good at his job.
He proved it that day.
- [GUNSHOT.]
- Nice.
The squad leader yelled, "Holy [BLEEP.]
, you hit him.
" MICHAEL: From 700 yards, that type of engagement, across from ridge line to ridge line it's virtually impossible to gauge your wind.
Couldn't have been placed any better.
It's just one of the most impressive things I've ever seen.
I'd like to say it was pure talent, but I think it was mostly luck.
MICHAEL: After these casualties that we had, to see that we were still capable of putting the boot on the enemy was a very uplifting thing.
[RADIO CHATTER.]
JORDAN: The radio that our linguist was carrying, listening to their radio traffic, he said, "They came over the radio and said, 'Hey, don't move.
They can hit us from there.
'" It was kind of like a giant middle finger to the Taliban.
We're here and we're gonna move up this mountain.
We had just walked probably 20 hours, fighting through the valley, up the mountain.
MICHAEL: Initially, we started seeing tents.
Every enemy combatant that's in that area, they're very mobile.
These guys don't live in houses.
We cleared through the tents and then we pushed forward into what I would consider the primary objective, the bunker complex at the peak of the mountain.
Coming up was the objective area, which is where the majority pre-assault fires had occurred.
The trees were literally nothing more than splintered stumps.
Trees that had been once 30 or 40 feet were now reduced to four-foot stumps.
It smelled like a pine tree air freshener.
So at this point we found enemy weapons caches, large amount of machine guns and grenades.
There were just fighting positions and weapons scattered everywhere.
One of the initial things we found was a ZPU an old Russian anti-aircraft gun, and it was pointing directly at our helicopter landing zone.
It's designed to bring down an aircraft.
JORDAN: We inventoried any actual serviceable weapons that we found, and made this giant cache of weapons, blew it up.
MICHAEL: We had done it.
We had gotten up there.
We had cleared the objective and completed the mission.
To do that after being dealt such a blow in the beginning with Dahlke, and then to see it through to its fruition, it just reinstilled how I viewed these guys.
It was a very proud moment to be a part of that.
JORDAN: As we're sitting up there pulling security, I remember thinking we got updates about all the guys that were wounded, and we knew that we lost Jason Dahlke, but we didn't know about Hario.
I walked to the middle of the patrol base and I asked the platoon sergeant what happened to Hario.
He just looked at me with a blank stare and said, "He didn't make it.
" And I didn't know him well, but I knew he was a good guy.
I knew he was only 19 years old, his first mission ever, died, basically, stepping off the aircraft.
MICHAEL: Initially we were told on the ground that there were some complications on the medivac bird with Hario, but that they were able to work through them.
They were able to revitalize him a few times.
You hold onto that glimmer of hope, and then when you get told otherwise, you know, I mean you know, so.
It was a it was a challenging moment for me trying to grasp what just happened.
MICHAEL: You'll never stop wondering could I have done more? Could we have done something differently? That never leaves.
You have a quick second to think about the family which I, um you try not to do, but it's you know that there's gonna be someone that comes to their door and tells them that their son was just killed.
My name is Becky Hario, and I'm Eric Hario's mother.
Eric was born and grew up in Monroe, Michigan.
He was very popular there.
He played every sport you can imagine football, baseball, wrestling.
He was a handful.
He was we have three sons, my wife and I, and Eric was the most athletic.
He had a weight set outside our front door.
Every time he'd go out somewhere, he'd do a couple reps, and always competed with his friends to see who could lift the most amount of weight.
JIM: Eric was an honest, hard-working person.
He wanted to earn things as opposed to be given things.
I told him, "Do what you want to do.
It's your life.
" And he wanted to be in the military.
He really loved his country, and he wanted to fight for his country.
I actually talked to him the night before the battle.
He knew he was going to a battle, but he couldn't really tell me that, but I know at this point that he had to have known.
It was a very beautiful phone call.
He says, "I love you all very much", and, Mom, you're always in my heart.
" And then the phone line went dead, so that's the last I heard from him.
JIM: I was in Minnesota, and the phone my cell phone rang.
It was my son Mark.
Just yeah, my brain shut down for a little bit trying to figure out what to do next.
He got home later in the day and we kind of fell apart together.
Just a lot of talking, a lot of hugging, a lot of crying, but honor, too.
Eric was honored to serve for his country, and I think he was honored to die for his country.
When you become a Ranger, you've got to be ready to fight, but you've gotta be ready to die, because it might happen.
We had a memorial two days later on our compound, and they have their guns set up with their boots and their dog tags and their helmet.
We all knew that symbol.
You know, that stuff has to be cleaned, and that's something that you really don't think about.
Our platoon made the call.
"Hey, we're gonna do it.
" I remember all of us privates sitting around in silence.
MICHAEL: You're asking kids that were friends with the deceased to clean blood off of their gear.
You can't be trained for that.
You can't teach a guy how to lose a friend, or how to lose what we consider a brother.
MAN: We gather this evening to honor the memories of Private First Class Hario and Staff Sergeant Dahlke, who sacrificed their lives so that others did not have to sacrifice.
They were true patriots and comrades who gave of themselves willingly.
They fought and destroyed an incredibly determined, tenacious, and evil enemy that night.
When the dust settled that day, Alpha Company 175 had destroyed the enemy on the objective and owned the training camp, thus eliminating his ability to terrorize others.
Unfortunately, this victory came at a tremendous cost, a cost that we are all struggling to put into perspective.
I saw a lot of hard men who I'd never seen show emotion before show emotion.
That's a true testament to what these men meant to us.
JORDAN: You know, when a guy dies, you got to inventory his things and send them home.
My cot was in one corner and Dahlke's cot was in the other corner.
All I remember is they started inventorying his stuff and basically creating a checklist of all of his items, and I just turned around on my cot, and that's when I let it go.
And, hey, I remember not wanting anybody to hear me crying or anything, so I didn't sniffle.
I just had tears and snot running down my face.
I don't remember how long, but I just sat there for hours like that.
One f the last conversations, I remember him saying, "I'm with the best guys I can be with.
They're gonna bring me home.
" I specifically said that time, "You have to come back to me.
" He was just very, very confident that I mean, he was coming home.
I don't think Jason ever thought something would happen to him.
GREG: One thing that I took away was that bullets don't discriminate.
You can be on your very first mission or you can be on your 500th mission, and you can be among the most highly-trained warriors that our military has to offer, but at the end of the day, if it's your time, it's your time.
And that night, I took a right off the bird and Eric took a left.
It really is luck.
From Berlin on, when our guys would get their boots on the ground, we knew what the possibilities were now.
More than anyone, we knew this is what could happen.
We'd seen it.
JASON: It's because of guys like Jason and Eric who aren't able to be here anymore that I put my best foot forward in everything that I do.
It's very moving to see this many lives that he has touched.
His spirit, really, what we learned from Jason, it's never going to end.
Eric kind of emulated Jason.
They worked out together.
And the gymnasium that was named after them just proves they're going to live on.
It's called the Dahlke/Hario CRTF Combat Readiness Training Facility.
It's a gym.
They have to name it something complicated.
It's a nice room, and by the front door is a big display case and it talks about Jason and Eric and why it's called the Dahlke/Hario room.
It's a building where the Rangers can go and work out, and they can look up to the two guys who their picture's on the wall and try to walk in their footsteps.