Heroes 2011
'It just totally broke loose'
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Off a major highway here that the Taliban largely controlled in August 2009, insurgents had a small group of soldiers pinned down for nearly six hours.
During that time, with soldiers at times armed with only M4s, it was Lt. Col. Mike Morgan’s Kiowa helicopter scout team that kept them alive — sometimes flying at a height just above the tree line and shooting at insurgents close enough to see their faces.
This was before the surge when violent districts in the province like Zhari and Arghandab were manned by battalions instead of brigades and forces were spread thin and often hemmed in. Without a lot of combat power on the ground and with the entire province as his task force’s responsibility, Morgan, now a colonel, spent most of his yearlong deployment “getting shot at or shooting someone.”
“We were living for the ground force,” he said.
During his deployment, the 1st Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment commander was commended with two Distinguished Flying Crosses and an Army Commendation Medal with “V.” And on August 24, 2009, he earned the Silver Star.
Soldiers with an engineer battalion were doing a routine route-clearance patrol, hit a roadside bomb and started taking sporadic fire from the south. They decided this had happened too many times; this they would chase the insurgents south of the highway into what had been an uncontested area.
Two of the convoy vehicles pursued the fighters south of Highway 1 towards Sangsar, the hometown of the Taliban’s founder. The insurgents, too, decided to be more aggressive. Rather than slink away after their initial attack, they set up an ambush about half a mile south of the highway.
“All of sudden it just totally broke loose because the insurgents thought they had the tactical advantage,” Morgan said.
The insurgents shot rocket-propelled grenades and sprayed automatic fire. The soldiers, isolated from the rest of the convoy and nearly surrounded, radioed for a scout weapons team.
“The ground forces were taking a beating,” Morgan said.
Seizing the initiative, the insurgents kept calling in reinforcements from their stronghold south, and over the course of the fight their group grew from about 20 to more than 100.
Morgan and three helicopters flew in, countering with rockets and a .50-caliber machine gun.
“We could not get the insurgents to break contact,” he said. “Normally when we have overwhelming firepower they do, but not this day.”
The soldiers’ lead vehicle took withering fire.
On the radio with one of those soldiers, Morgan said he could “hear the distress in his voice, the rounds bouncing of the MRAPs and into the mud around them.”
He had them use a grenade launcher to mark the location of the insurgents’ belt-fed machine gun. As Morgan swooped in shooting at the machine gun, the insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the helicopter. Morgan banked sharply and narrowly avoided the grenade.
“All you can do is come back around,” he said.
For hours, the insurgents alternated between shooting at Morgan and his scout weapons team and at the soldiers on the ground.
“It had a rhythm like a sporting game,” Morgan said. “It was the same thing again and again and again until we were out of ordnance.”
Before twice flying back to the base to refuel and reload, Morgan would make another pass, diving onto the target at a 300-foot altitude right above the tree line so his co-pilot could shoot his M4 rifle at the enemy fighters.
“That’s blatantly dangerous,” Morgan said. “There’s a lot of risk. But...you have no choice. If you don’t do it, they’re going to die.”
They shot hundreds upon hundreds of rounds, and Morgan was able to take out the insurgents’ machine gun with a rocket, even though it was very close to the soldiers.
When Morgan’s two teams of three helicopters had chased the insurgents off almost six hours later, they had helicopters riddled with bullet holes. His helicopter had grenade fragments in the tail wing.
“We tore up a lot of bad people that day,” he said. “And none of our boys died.”
mccloskeym@stripes.osd.mil
Twitter: @MegMcCloskey
