BY MATT FARWELL
When, recently, I asked a helicopter pilot friend of mine what he thought about Brian Williams, the venerable NBC nightly news anchor, suspended after an apparent lie about his helicopter being forced down by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq, he couldn't believe it.
“Why would you freaking lie about something like that?” the pilot asked.
He liked Brian Williams, even nodded off to sleep on his last deployment to Afghanistan while listening to the NBC nightly news podcast. I was more cynical. In 2003, who wasn’t lying about the war, and why wouldn’t you? There were no real consequences for the liars—then or now—and so I kept thinking about it.
There is one R.P.G. story I know that is incredible and all true. I first heard about it as a soldier in Afghanistan in 2006, when this happened to another company in my battalion. There’s some lying in this tale. Not all soldiers are saints. But the lying here is done to save a life, rather than aggrandize or pad a life story. It’s been reported before, but I thought it worth revisiting in the weeks after the Williams scandal.
On March 16, 2006, five years after the invasion of Afghanistan and three years after the invasion of Iraq, a platoon from Alpha Company, 2-87 Infantry set out from Forward Operating Base Tillman in eastern Afghanistan. About an hour into the patrol, the five armored Humvees and a soft-skin Afghan National Army pickup truck stuffed with about 10 local soldiers that composed it took fire. There was lots of shooting from both small-arms fire and R.P.G.s. One Afghan soldier died almost immediately when the pickup truck exploded.
An R.P.G. is a simple weapon—a launcher and a rocket with a shaped charge of explosives. At 1,300 feet, it can punch a hole two inches in diameter through more than 11 inches of armor, according to the official assessment of the R.P.G.-7 by the U.S. Army. Designed as an anti-armor weapon for infantry use in the event of World War III, it has become the warzone equivalent of a prescription drug with multiple off-label possibilities. As such, it’s been a reliable battlefield presence in almost every war and conflict since World War II.
On March 16, 2006, attackers fired on the Alpha Company platoon from a ridgeline 300 meters away. One such R.P.G. first hit a Humvee, turning shards of the vehicle’s protective armor into sharp shrapnel. As I revisited the story last week, I spoke to Staff Sergeant Eric Wynn, who himself suffered devastating injuries in the attack when an R.P.G. sliced past his face.
“My nose was sheared off,” Wynn told me. “When I opened up my eyes I could feel blood pouring down my lips. I turned to Moss to get him to return fire. That’s when I noticed the R.P.G.’s tail sticking out of Moss.”
Flying further, the R.P.G. had come to rest sticking out of the abdomen of Private Channing Moss, a 23-year-old turret gunner from Georgia. Despite his own injury, Wynn had the presence of mind to call the patrol’s commander, Lieutenant Billy Mariani.
This was extraordinarily bad. Moss was still alive, but he appeared to have an unexploded grenade inside him, with enough power to kill everybody inside the Humvee, should it explode. Its tail, sticking out of a smoking wound, left no indication of how much explosive—if any— was left in the warhead or in its detonator. The round could have been a dud, or a warhead that failed to arm but that still could explode. Unexploded ordnance in Afghanistan, especially old Soviet technology or Chinese knockoffs, wasn’t known for its stability.
At this moment, Moss was either the luckiest or unluckiest soldier in the entire U.S. Army, and no one knew for sure—and his platoon was still under heavy fire. Lieutenant Mariani, who still finds this all hard to talk about sometimes, told me he was confused by Wynn’s initial report. Moss’s abdominal wound didn’t make sense. “It sounded strange to me because we were all wearing [body armor],” he said. As it turned out, the R.P.G. had ripped in through a gap in the body armor’s ceramic plates and lodged in Moss’s hip.
Wynn told me Moss saw the tail, and tried to stand up, before falling backwards and lying down. As the platoon’s medic, Sergeant “Doc” Jared Angell, bandaged around the R.P.G., he tried to stabilize three things: any remaining explosive charges, the wound itself, and Moss’s psyche. This wasn’t exactly part of standard medic training, so he improvised. He limited the grenade’s ability to move, and to immobilize both his patient and the ordnance within him. He talked to Moss to prevent both clinical shock and the shock that would come from his looking down again at his stomach.
Mariani called in a 9 Line MEDEVAC, the Army’s version of 911. As per standard operating procedure, he explained the location of the pickup site. Then he outlined the communications plan, the number of injured and their wound severity, any special equipment required, how many of the injured were ambulatory, whether there were hostile forces, how the landing zone would be marked, the nationalities and statuses of the injured, and whether there were any nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons in the area.
It is a thorough checklist by design. On March 16, 2006, Mariani purposefully withheld one critical truth of his situation from the list’s comprehensive grasp: that one of his soldiers had an R.P.G. sticking out of his body. The MEDEVAC wouldn’t come if they knew this, Mariani said; it would have been too dangerous for everyone involved.
After more than an hour of fighting, the platoon and its Afghan allies secured enough area, for a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter to land on-site. An AH-64 Apache attack helicopter buzzed overhead for protection. While Angell and the rest moved Moss into the helicopter, the flight medic noticed that his patient had an R.P.G. tail sticking out of him. There were, he knew, no guarantees that all its explosives were done blowing up. The flight crew decided that neither Army regulations nor pure mutual self-interest trumped Moss’s chance to live. They flew to the nearest advanced medical facility, a large plywood shack near the airstrip at the dining facility at Forward Operating Base Orgun-E.
Moss’s surgeons began cutting away his clothing, but upon viewing the R.P.G. stem protruding from his patient, Major John Oh, the army doctor in charge, ordered the room cleared. The regular Joes and medics hustled out. Another Army doctor, Major Kevin Kirk, and an explosive ordnance disposal tech, Sergeant First Class Dan Brown, remained. Oh later told the Military Times in 2010 that he was “scared shitless,” but as he looked at the ad-hoc surgical team he barely knew, he managed a joke: “If this thing goes off, it’s been great working with you guys,” he recalled in the later interview. (Oh, now a lieutenant colonel, is preparing for another deployment and was unavailable when I tried him last week.)
Brown, the explosives tech, determined that the only explosives left in the R.P.G. were in its detonator. It was good news, but only relatively. There was still enough to definitely kill Moss and maybe the others. Army policy and common sense gave Oh an easy out that no one would have blamed him for taking—“military recommendations include initially triaging such patients as non-emergent, isolating them from others, and operating on them last,” reads a passage in a Department of the Army medical textbook.
Oh chose to operate.
“Channing Moss was looking at me,” Oh said in the videotaped interview with Military Times, before tearing up. “Talking and breathing. That’s why I did it.”
In 2006, the story ends well. Brown prodded and tugged on the R.P.G. like a combustible Jenga piece until it slid out. Moss stabilized, and everyone in the chain that brought him in, risking themselves and others along the way, could breathe easy. Eventually nearly all personnel involved were written up for medals, but this was as much for the rest of the soldiers’ morale as it was for their own. When interviewed, they all shunned credit or glory.
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Still, no war story is as rosy as it seems. Moss went on the record about all this in years immediately following the attack, but he wasn’t particularly easy to track down in 2015. When I eventually heard back from him, through intermediaries, he said he wasn’t interested in an interview.
He didn’t want to talk about the R.P.G., or its aftermath, anymore.
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