Clip 028 | Operation Lexington | CH-47 Down | MARSOC JTAC Ryan Stevens

0:00 I can get into that offering now. That was Operation Lexington in October. So we did that was a DA fast teams in the one sixtieth Sore guys brought us in on that mission and we went to darry Boom, Afghanistan, which was it was about thirty or forty quicks north of Harat. It's ended up being my next following department is where I got put there for a v SP. But on this mission, you know, we were we were going specifically after a drug drug bizarre. So this bizarre was like it was oriented basically you know east west in this kind of this ah north south like running valley, and it was surrounded by mountains. So like the bizarre was like right at the base of a mountain, which made it very very interesting for

1:07 getting helicopters in there. There's quite a few LZ's to the south of it that we worked. So we came in, We did a three hundred meter offset with the one six states and landed and went in. We took you know, we had guys squirting immediately off the objective and then you know we had known fighting positions from Intel that these guys would probably go up that mountain and there was a couple of spots where they actually had you know, machine gun and placements. So immediately we were already engaging guys. We've got a couple of guys with AC one thirties right off the bat, and then you know, once we got into clearance, we got through that, and then we had a couple a couple of our teams that had set in fighting positions,

1:53 just blocking positions while we did the clearance and stuff, and those guys got lit up by a couple of different squads of guys. We you know, we were estimating that you know, anywhere from like twenty five to thirty enemy fighters came up and actually started attacking our positions to overwhelm us. And the intel reports at the time for that for that off was that they those guys had the ability to surge fifty to one hundred fighters into that valley, so it was it was a no joke, and they did. They surged at least thirty into that valley, and they had more guys come in.

2:27 So we we lit those guys up with you know AC one thirties and and the A tens and clean those guys up pretty good. And then we you know, blew up all the We got a ton of drugs and like weapons, RPGs, uh you know, remote Debton Iets and this. It was I mean the Bizaar was full of stuff. So we blew that stuff up and then we went on went to Xville and I was in the lead bird on Xville. Uh yeah, so I was. I was in the lead bird on Exo and then uh we took off and you know on Exo, you know I got on I t s in the aircraft, so I was, you know, the last man in get on headset and we take off and we keep circling and you know, I'm trying to like figure out what the heck's going on. On the radio. They're they're saying aircraft down,

3:28 but it's like is it down on the deck or has it taken off? Like and then you know, finally it was like, you know, the one sixties bird crashed, so we made the decision right there to reinsert. So the they put our bird back in three hundred meters south of the crash site. So you know, when we when we took off, we actually called it a closer n LC. It was actually a pre planned but it was our Kazavak els which was like probably ten feet from the Bizarre. It was really close, but it was it was our best exil for that mission, just because of how much enemy fire we had taken. So we made that decision and it ended up being a really bad Elsie. It was just full of really just that fine sand. And you know from what we can

4:24 tell, so everybody, you know, it browned out the second bird. You know, Chief worn Officer Montgomery and Lyons were in the second bird, and you know from what we we we gather, I don't I don't know. I didn't see the follow on reports from from the one sixties, but it looked like that maybe they browned out, they got disoriented, and from what we see in the crash site, it looks like that maybe they they were going towards the mountains and then they overcorrected and lost power and basically they lost power. They crashed the aircraft into one of the buildings, into the Bizarre. So that's got real. That's got to be so surreal when you hear that. I mean, you're listening to the colms on the radio and

5:12 stuff, and then now you know you're going back into something like that. Yeah, and it was yeah, I mean it was it was like supposed to be a three hour mission. And so like we're we're literally carrying what we could carry on our persons. You know, we weren't ready. You I mean, we had like one water bottle, you know, one of those you you crush the water bottle before you get off the aircraft and leave your your cool weather gear on the aircraft and jump off, you know.

5:40 And so yeah, they you know, they gave gave us the hey, we're putting the bird back in. They put us back in three hundred meters away from the crash site. And you know, how was the first one off. And I'm like, crash, this is gonna stuck. And I had the eighty one thirty mark the crash site, and I just started running for the crash site. You know, We're just kind of hey, everybody, just start moving towards the crash site. By the time I got to the crash site, everything was cooking off. Obviously, there were the rounds were on, the on, the gals were going off, and but from from what I can gather, the ODHT horn officer was able to help and get guys organized and they pulled everybody off the bird that they could get,

6:26 and they already had a casually collection point in one of the buildings near to the crash site already set up. So and then we started working getting guys to stretch on strutchers that couldn't can be that weren't mobile, and then started moving guys to the the first one sixties bird for for X Phil I think I think we X filled like twenty six to twenty eight guys for for that mission. Yeah, it was yeah, for for wounded guys. And then we lost ten guys in the chopper, So we lost two of the ODA guys on our team, David Metzger and Keith Bishop. They perished in the crash. And then we lost three of the DA Fast team guys we watched lost women Chad Michael and then Michael Weston. And then we lost the uh

7:28 you know, four or six of the one sixty A sore guys. We lost Sergeant Hernandez Chavez, staff Sergeant McNabb, Sergeant Mueller, and then Chief wi An Officer Montgomery and Chief Worn Officer Lions. They all perished on the crash. So at that time we were basically kind of get everybody that we could on the onto the first chopper because the one sixties guys were like, hey, we only got thirty minutes of gas, so we need to get as many people. You know, we're three hundred meters away. So I mean, if I'm sure you've done metowacs before, you know this. This is not a quick process. It doesn't matter how many guys you have, especially when you got guys that are litter and they can't move. I think we made two or three trips to the chopper carrying guys I was controlling,

8:20 helping. I think our you know d guy hub carry uh. You know these guys like you know, fireman carry and like uh like kind of like the two man carry one under the legs kind of thing. And you know, the enemy started coming in, creeping in. They knew something that happened, so they started probing. I ran a couple of eight ten gun runs on guys well the uh uh, I see what the h forty seven and sixties guys that were on the deck, they were matching rounds with their Dallas on guys off on the deck too that were trying to attack. So it was pretty dynamic. We you know, it took us I don't know how long to get them loaded. It took it. It had to take more than thirty minutes to get those guys loaded up. And you know, by

9:09 the grace of God, you know, he had enough gas to get back. I'm sure it was. It was real tight. And then we found out after after the one sixtieth bird took off and laft, we found out we had one more casualty. So by whoever thought it was a good idea to integrate Spanish Kazavac, they sent a Spanish burg uh and which was a goat rope. Can't talk to him. I mean, it was. It was a horrible experience. They came in no comms, they ran through.

9:48 I was attacking with a tens and they were they were running through basically when I was about to do some gun runs with us, I had to like abort the atens to get those guys on the deck. And it could have been it could have it was. Yeah, it was a nightmare. But you know, we didn't shoot the Spanish shoes out of the sky. But how did they miss a casualty or was it just someone that just didn't say anything until the Yeah, I think it was. Yeah, I don't know, to be honest with you, I mean it was so chaotic. Yeah, were they stacking aircraft? Were they stacking you with aircraft? When all this went down, I imagine they just started pushing you all kinds of stuff.

10:26 Yeah. They actually they called our team missing in action, which spun up the all the personal recovery guys and all the assets associated with a personal recovery. So I actually found out this later. I was going through an advanced here uh school when I was later on in my career, and a guy that was teaching the class was telling a story about his last like personal recovery mission that went fully you know, it went full, full tilt.

10:56 All the assets were called in and he's talking about them. I think that's my mission, and so it was good to see his perspective, you know, sitting a jock, and then how how they worked the whole mission from you know, Marshall and assets, Like I had two or three p three O'Ryan's overhead doing sigant stuff and their their whiz bang stuff overhead, and I had a couple of eight tens AC one thirties like you know, I had like, you know, ten to eleven aircraft in the stack for the majority of the time, so it was pretty pretty wild. And then you know, once once the Spanish bird got out of there, it kind of quieted down. We did, you know, a couple more engagements, but it kind of quieted down after that, and then we had to extract the bodies.

11:43 At that point, we had the rangers come in a little bit later with their PJS, so the pair of rescue guys came in. They came in on black hawks inserted helped us you know, mm hmm, plus up our our positions so we could we could we didn't have to look out forward, we could focus on recovering the Americans. So that took, i mean most of the day to get those guys out and and we extracted h