Neither of us expected to get out ... alive’

In the clear skies north of Baghdad, a single word — “Mayday!” — turned a special operations mission on its head, diverting some of America’s most elite forces from their mission to kill or capture a known terrorist to a desperate fight for their lives, pinned down, outnumbered and outgunned. In the brutal hours that followed that Mayday transmission on Nov. 27, 2006, Chief Warrant Officer 5 David Cooper of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment — the “Night Stalkers” — would earn a Distinguished Service Cross for his heroic actions to relieve his beleaguered colleagues, while an Air Force F-16 pilot would lose his life.
Cooper received his award — the highest ever for a Night Stalker — from Adm. Eric Olson, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, July 11 at the 160th’s home post of Fort Campbell, Ky.
In the early afternoon of Nov. 27, 2006, Cooper was the pilot in command of an AH-6 Little Bird attack helicopter, flying lead pilot in a flight of six helicopters: two AH-6s, two MH-6 troop-carrying Little Birds and two MH-60 Black Hawks, also with special ops ground troops aboard. Their mission was to kill or capture a “foreign fighter facilitator,” according to a summary of the action released by the 160th.
The weather was perfect — “Clear, blue and 22,” in aviator-speak. But as the six helicopters flew between “logger” sites about 50 kilometers northwest of Baghdad, Cooper’s wingman suddenly transmitted “Mayday!”
An insurgent had hit the aircraft with a rocket-propelled grenade, but no one had realized that at first because it didn’t explode. “I looked out the window there and saw that he didn’t have a tail rotor, and if you know anything about helicopters, that’s an important piece,” Cooper said in a July 10 interview.
Cooper’s wingman had to land the aircraft quickly, while simultaneously keeping its speed up so that the wind would keep the helicopter straight. Fortunately, the landscape below was mostly flat, open desert.
“He did an excellent job of doing a running landing in the desert, where he hit the desert floor at about 60 miles per hour,” Cooper said. “The pilots had only superficial injuries, but certainly that event changed the center of gravity of the mission that day.”
The four troop-carrying helicopters landed beside the crippled helicopter immediately. The special operators jumped off, checked on the pilots of the crashed aircraft and then set up a perimeter.
The Black Hawks quickly evacuated the pilots of the stricken aircraft, leaving 18 to 20 ground troops, plus the two MH-6s and their four pilots. Cooper declined to identify which unit the troops came from, beyond calling them “friendly special operations forces,” but the 160th forms part of the Joint Special Operations Command task force in Iraq, where it typically flies special operators from Delta Force, Naval Special Warfare Development Group and the 75th Ranger Regiment.
Cooper and his co-pilot stayed airborne for several minutes to make sure the position was safe, then, seeing no enemy forces, he landed.
After about 40 minutes, several trucks with anti-aircraft machine guns approached their location. Unsure whether these belonged to Iraqi police, a local militia or enemy fighters, the senior ground force non-commissioned officer asked Cooper to get airborne and check them out. The question was answered when the gun trucks opened fire on the small special ops force.
Cooper took off and quickly realized the full extent of the threat: there were six to eight gun trucks mounted with double-barreled ZPU-2 14.5mm anti-aircraft machine guns about 1,400 to 1,600 meters away. Each gun truck was crewed by four or five men, “so there were probably about 40 fighters out there,” he said.
Meanwhile, another two trucks had appeared and disgorged at least 20 enemy fighters. They occupied a house about 800 meters from the grounded helicopter and took the U.S. force under fire with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, RPK machine guns and AK-series assault rifles.
The U.S. troops were armed with infantry weapons that could reach the enemy fighters in the house, but not those in the gun trucks.
To make matters worse, the desert offered no cover to escape the gun trucks’ murderous fire. “It was flat like a tabletop, so we really had no defilade to get to,” Cooper said. “The ground forces were pinned down immediately … It was kind of a one-sided deal.”
As soon as Cooper was aloft, the enemy fighters directed all their fire to his aircraft. “That’s OK — until you get hit — because if they’re shooting at me, they’re not shooting at the ground forces,” he said.
Cooper and his co-pilot, a chief warrant officer 4 whom he declined to name because he’s still flying combat missions, were the only friendly force capable of attacking the gun trucks, which they did, using their two six-barreled 7.62mm miniguns that fire about 3,000 rounds per minute and a pair of 2.75-inch rocket pods loaded with a mixture of flechette, high explosive and smoke rounds. “We tried to put as much fire as we could on the gun trucks and on the fighters at the house,” Cooper said.
Air Force F-16s were on station to provide close air support, but from their high altitude they were unable to discern the friendly and enemy forces, Cooper said. “We realized quickly that we were the only fire support that we were going to get that day,” he added.
Flying anywhere from 5 to 50 feet off the ground, Cooper could feel his helicopter shuddering and hear the metal-on-metal sounds as enemy rounds struck the aircraft as it flew in again and again, firing at the insurgent positions.
He could also hear the enemy’s near misses. “When that round goes past the cockpit it sounds like the snap of someone’s fingers — a pop,” he said. “That day, it sounded more like popcorn.”
But as the minutes ticked by, Cooper and his wingman could tell they were gaining an edge. “The rate of [enemy] fire had diminished, so we knew we had hit either the guns or the crews of probably at least two of those trucks,” he said.
Even as he tried to kill them, Cooper was impressed with his enemies’ resilience. “They were not fleeing, they were hanging right in there,” he said. “They were disciplined fighters.”
After 12 to 15 minutes, Cooper was running low on ammunition, and landed back beside the crashed aircraft. He and his co-pilot stared at each other wide-eyed.
“Neither of us really expected to get out of this fight alive,” Cooper said.
He paid tribute to the four MH-6 pilots on the ground, who all later received Bronze Stars with “V” devices. “Those guys were off-loading unstable rockets off of the downed aircraft and loading them into my aircraft when I landed,” he said. “That’s not a recommended procedure in the book, [and] they were doing that all the time under fire and in plain view of the enemy.”
After no more than five minutes, Cooper and his copilot took off again. “We weren’t ordered to go back up,” he said. “I’m a gun pilot, and my duty is to support the ground forces.”
After another 15 minutes of fighting against a hail of insurgent fire, Cooper was running out of fuel and ammo and had to put down again. “I was going through ammunition at a fairly rapid clip,” he said.
The MH-6 pilots used a Leatherman tool to remove the crashed Little Bird’s auxiliary fuel tank and use it to refuel Cooper’s aircraft.
Then Cooper took off yet again, this time spending half an hour in the air. He got as close as 800 meters from the gun trucks and 200 from the house. “I was flying as erratically as I could to throw off the aim of the gunners,” he said.
Cooper and his wingman were slowly turning the tide of the battle. Most of the insurgents who had occupied the house a couple of hours before were now dead. Half of the gun trucks were out of action, with many insurgents killed and wounded in and around them.
No longer able to cope with the withering fire that the AH-6 was delivering, the surviving insurgents began to retreat. Then tragedy struck. Maj. Troy Gilbert, an F-16 pilot providing close-air support for the mission, was finally able to identify the moving enemy vehicles and was placing effective fire on them when his aircraft crashed about four or five miles away from the downed helicopter. He was killed. Gilbert was posthumously awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross with “V” device.
The actions of Cooper, 48, and his wingman were later credited with preventing further loss of friendly forces.
Cooper was “ordered off the battlefield” after he landed for the fourth time. “We were out of gas and out of bullets and they needed to get a new team of AH[-6]s in there,” he said.
The new team arrived, but the battle was over. The special operators remained on the ground until nightfall, when a downed aircraft recovery team flew in to extract the crashed helicopter and the troops.
“By the time I got that aircraft back to base I was pretty well spent,” Cooper said.
According to a summary of Cooper’s actions released by the 160th, “his aggressive actions, complete disregard for his personal safety and extreme courage under fire resulted in him single-handedly repelling the enemy attack … If not for CW5 Cooper’s actions, the ground force would have become decisively engaged and would certainly have taken heavy casualties.”
But Cooper is humble when discussing his role.
“I just happened to be the guy there that day,” he said. “Any one of the Night Stalkers that’s in this formation would have done the same thing I did.”