Letters From War: Of a Halo—and Fate

By Don Harward.

The helicopter we were looking for was white and huge—a giant Russian-built Mi-26 “Halo”, which had a cargo bay about the same size as that of a C130 Hercules. A couple of minutes ago, its pilot had called that he was five minutes out, so he should be in view. Jason saw him first, reporting on the intercom that he was almost overhead. I snapped my Huey into a bank to look upward and acquired the big aircraft almost instantly. We were orbiting just to the east of TK at about one thousand feet AGL and had just cleared the pass we thought the Halo would fly through.

Russian pilots definitely do not think like western and, more specifically, American crews. We are very tactically minded and operate as though someone is always just about to blast us out of the sky. The Russians just climb up into the wild blue yonder and turn on the cruise control. Later, they make long slow descents when they finally get to where they are going. This crew had been cruising at 13,000 ft, well beyond small arms range and probably out of sight for most potential threats, and that was OK with me. Today, my job was to get this big sucker safely to TK (which, at the time, was Taliban central) and safely home again.

The Russian captain flew to a point above TK airfield and started his painfully slow spiralling descent. I imagined the Taliban on the ground, who could surely see this monster approaching by now, would be calling all their Taliban buddies about the big fat juicy target descending into range of their weapons. The gun bird I was flying was equipped with two menacing multi-barrelled machine guns manned by a couple guys who really knew how to use them. I wasn’t worried about our safety; if anyone in our helicopter saw anyone shooting at us, we’d have them at the gates of paradise in less than ten seconds. However, I was concerned about those Russians and that big white helicopter.

Figuring that the most dangerous threat to them would possibly be a shoulder-fired, surface to air missile, I decided to climb up and tuck in behind them. We were equipped with devices that could conceivably defeat an unsophisticated missile, so I reasoned that if I tucked in close enough and the bad guys toggled one at us, hopefully my decoy devices would protect both of us.

I moved into a position about three to four disk lengths away at a forty-five degree angle from its right side and slightly above the bigger machine. From here, if it were hit and exploded, it would still be unpleasant for us—but it would be far worse if we dipped into the rotor wash of that monster.

From then on, the flying was easy and gradual; I guess a fifty-ton helicopter doesn’t do anything very quickly. Even as it turned onto final for the six thousand foot dirt runway below, we were still far from safe.

Just the night before, a major fight had broken out between the Taliban and the Tenth US Mountain Division right at the airfield’s front gate; that fight had ended when a five hundred pound GPS-guided bomb had found its mark.

Inside thick, bullet-proof dirt-filled HESCO barriers next to the runway was the refuel point or FARP. Parked alongside the FARP was a bullet-riddled AH-64 Apache helicopter; it had collected all the bullet holes in exactly the same airspace we were currently flying through, so no, this job wasn’t over by a long shot.

As the Halo dropped below one hundred feet, his massive seven bladed rotor system started to kick up a world-class dust cloud. It was time for me to bug out, which I did with a climbing right turn to cover his six; I was hoping we might catch some dude aiming a machine gun at that big white bulls-eye, but we saw nothing.

The SAR (search and rescue) bird, which was number two in our formation, had been covering me also, and we both continued in the turn and dropped into the FARP for a much needed sip of gas. To our right, a giant mile-long dust cloud that had been created by the Halo was drifting our way. “Great—just great—here comes a dirt shower,” I said over the intercom. The gunners, who had begun refuelling the Huey, turned their heads and zipped their flight suits up as high as they could as they saw the wall of approaching dirt.

There was nothing we could do in the front—we had been flying without doors, and the dust and dirt immediately swirled through the cockpit. I glanced over at Dick and saw him holding his hand below his helmet visor to avoid eating too much dirt. I was holding the controls, so all I could do was to wait it out as the grit filled my mouth and eyes. Thankfully, it passed as quickly as it had begun and life was good once more, except for the blanket of dust covering everything including the radio faces so that I could no longer see what frequency we were tuned to.

By now, the Halo had already taxied off the runway and onto a pad of PSP (pierced steel planking) panels. His rotors were stopped and the ramp was down. With an “Up” call from Chalk-Two, I rolled the throttle up to flight and we re-positioned to a couple of small pads near the Halo. As we shut down, all manner of cargo was pouring out of the bowels of that monster, including a couple of F250 trucks, pallets, boxes, lengths of steel, pipe and plywood. Heck, it looked like they were setting up a Wal-Mart superstore.

Curious, I walked the short distance over to the Halo for a closer look. Inside the hold, the loadmaster was busy coordinating the unloading of his aircraft. I went up front and climbed the ladder to the flight deck. The flight crew—captain, first officer, navigator and flight engineer—were all sitting around eating fruit. “Looks good,” I said, breaking the ice as I leaned against a bulkhead near the door.

The navigator was the only English speaker, and he graciously offered me a smallish seat and some melon slices before he began to show me around the spacious cockpit. To me, it looked like something from the 1940s. The instruments were extra large and looked like they came from a steam locomotive. The flight performance computer was nothing more than a piece of paper under a glass panel, on which one could move mechanical horizontal and vertical lines! The navigation station looked like another cockpit display. I asked the young navigator what he used to navigate around the country. He smiled and tapped a Garmin GPS receiver, which was attached with Velcro to the top of his panel. I started laughing and the whole crew erupted in laughter right along with me.

I gestured with my hand. “I’m Don—what is your name?” The young man said, “I am Yuri.” He then pointed to the engineer and said, “He is Yuri also.” Next, he introduced the captain—also a Yuri. I couldn’t help asking somewhat sceptically, “Another Yuri?” The captain listened to the navigator translating and laughed and said in rough, broken English, “Yes, I am Yuri also!” OK, great, three Yuris in the same cockpit. “And you, sir; what is your name?” I asked the first officer. I am not making this up, and, as far as I know, they were not kidding me, but—you guessed it—all four men in the four-man cockpit were named Yuri!

The captain moved aside and motioned for me to take his seat at the front, which I did. Sitting there, I gazed over the “other team’s” approach to rotary wing design. It definitely lacked the fit, finish and technology I had grown accustomed to, but there was no denying what this beast could do as far as lifting massive loads. The Mi-26 is a rotary wing superstar; nothing else on earth can out-lift it.

We traded a couple stories and they asked about me and what I used to do. Of course, in my professional past, I had trained very hard to make large numbers of men like these cease to exist—and now they were our “friends”. The navigator mentioned that the captain once flew Mi-8 helicopters for the Russian military in Afghanistan. “You know, we Russians once fought here,” he said. I smiled and looked the captain directly in the eyes and said, “Yes, I know. You fought against the Afghanis—and the Americans.” You could have heard a pin drop after that one, but I held my stare as his face turned back into a smile and he said something in Russian that the red-faced young navigator did not translate. I guess that while all soldiers are probably the same in some ways and share much common ground, as far as politics go—at least from this old soldier’s point of view—the thing between the US of A and the Russian bear is far from over.

Unfortunately for the Russian crew, English is the primary language of the coalition forces, and is used by air traffic control and others. With the navigator being their only English speaker, these guys hadn’t adhered to a single clearance, and further, had not followed the route like they had been briefed. Again, the difference between the eastern and western minds was very apparent. We like to meticulously plan our routes based on weather, aircraft performance, the enemy situation, fuel and other factors. The Russians just blast off, head where they want and get there whenever they want to. Essentially, we had exposed ourselves to danger for nothing by reconnoitring and clearing a route that the Russian crew had just ignored; I wanted to make darned sure that they followed the rules going back up north on the return flight. They didn’t, of course, but that’s another story.

The youngest Yuri took a moment to visit my Huey crew, and he sat in my seat and put my helmet on. We showed him a couple of things up the front and then took him back to show him the GAU-17 mini guns. Those things just look bad; all those barrels and feed chutes choked with cartridges. It was the business end of the Huey gunship and he was impressed.

As I walked with him back to the Halo, he showed me a photo of his wife and daughter. They lived outside Moscow in a nice part of town. He had graduated from a military school and, like everyone else, had been thrown into the civil commercial flying world without much of a clue. Although his pay was just a fraction of what western guys get, he was doing well. To me, he reflected new hope for his country. This smart young man loved his family and was willing to make sacrifices to give them a decent lifestyle.

Soon after this visit, the crew and their Halo moved to Kandahar and I began to see them regularly around the base and in the dining facility. They parked their white behemoth not very far away from the Huey ramp, so—along with half of Kandahar airfield—we got to “enjoy” regular dustings whenever it landed at its gravel pad.

One day, during the winter of the following year, there was a nasty snowstorm with low ceilings and reduced visibility. We had just cancelled a planned mission because we did not have the minimum visibility required to fly when I saw the Halo starting its engines. Because the weather was so bad, I assumed it must be some kind of maintenance run-up but the rotors spun up and the beast taxied out of its parking bay and onto the main taxiway.

While “normal business” for the Russians is anything but normal, by now, I was watching with interest. To my surprise, and that of everyone else who was watching, that thing picked up to a hover. Then we realised it was not just a hover; the thing was still going up! Then, amazingly, the nose pitched forwards and away he went…that maniac just took off! I went inside to recheck the weather to see if I had misread something but, no, I had it right—one mile with moderate snow, five hundred foot ceilings with icing conditions, mountains obscured!

That was probably around eight or nine in the morning. That evening, while we were eating supper in the mess hall, someone came in to find us (we were on standby) and told us that the Halo had made it into TK (its destination), but had not been heard of since it departed there several hours earlier. I knew from having been there often that TK was only around forty minutes flight time away; it didn’t look promising. We finished up and went straight back to Operations. The news definitely wasn’t good. Still no one had heard from the Halo and—best case—even if it had made an emergency landing because of the weather, the chances were that the Taliban would probably already have found the crew.

We were directed to prepare for a search mission under night vision goggles. We had been up all day, but everyone was still ready to go anyway. Unfortunately, there were moderate to severe icing conditions and visibility was still less than a mile in snow. After some consideration, it was decided we would launch at dawn and follow a direct course, which we assumed the Russians would have probably done, as they loved to use their GPS with only one point—the destination!

The news got much worse shortly thereafter when the Taliban announced that they had just shot down a large helicopter, and there were reports from locals of an explosion and fire. The Army had sent a Special Forces (SF) team to the area to investigate and they were already in the vicinity of the reported explosion.

The following morning, we were briefed that the SF guys had indeed found what looked like parts of an aircraft scattered all over the side of an eight thousand foot mountain, although they couldn’t get all the way up the mountain because of the weather. The Halo was the only aircraft missing; it appeared that it had not landed to avoid the weather.

Before we launched at first light, I thought of my conversation with Yuri about his family. I hoped that if anyone had survived the crash, maybe—just maybe—they’d also survived the freezing night.

The crash site was little more than a black smudge a couple of hundred feet below a jagged ridgeline. There was no sign of life. There had obviously been a fire and helicopter parts of all sizes were scattered all over the place. Knowing what I know of flying, I can say they were probably not shot down. What probably happened was simply CFIT, or controlled flight into terrain. If only they had climbed another five hundred feet higher, they would have made it. Unfortunately, they found the highest point between Kandahar and TK, violently and suddenly.

Too many flying stories end like that. I heard a few from my dad, others from old warriors—I’ve read a few, and I’ve lived a few myself. They all reinforce the importance of grabbing onto life with both hands and holding on with all one’s strength, because for any us, there might just be a hard granite wall waiting inside a soft white cloud at some point when we least expect it.

I’m not going to dwell on it. I look at it like this: I woke up this morning and my name was not in the obituaries—it’s a good day already!