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Part 2: In midst of ambush, deadly errors

By Steve Coll
The Washington Post

MIKE HASKEY / COLUMBUS LEDGER-ENQUIRER Army Spc. Pat Tillman during graduation ceremonies Oct. 25, 2002, at Fort Benning, Ga. Eighteen months later, the former NFL player was killed in action in Afghanistan.

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Related stories New investigation is now under way Part 1: The errors that killed Pat Tillman Part 3: Managing a "friendly-fire" death Other links Field of battle

When he heard the first explosion, the platoon sergeant thought one of his vehicles had struck a land mine or a roadside bomb.

They had been in the canyon only a minute. In his machine-gun-laden truck, Greg Baker also thought somebody had hit a mine. He and his men jumped out of their vehicle. Baker looked up at the sheer canyon walls. The canyon was five to 10 yards across at its narrowest.

"I noticed rocks falling," he said in a statement, "then I saw the second and third mortar rounds hit." He could hear, too, the rattle of enemy small-arms fire.

It was not a bomb — it was an ambush. Baker and his comrades thought they could see their attackers moving high above them. They began to return fire.

Separated from the other half, or serial, of their platoon, they were trapped in the worst possible place: the kill zone of an ambush. The best way to beat a canyon ambush is to flee the kill zone as fast as possible. But Baker and his men had dismounted their vehicles. Worse, when they scrambled back and tried to move, they discovered that the lumbering Afghan tow truck in their serial was stalled, blocking their exit.

Scrambling to survive

Baker "ran up and grabbed" the truck driver and his Afghan interpreter and "threw them in the truck and started to move," as he recalled. He fired up the canyon walls until he ran out of ammunition. Then he jumped from the tow truck, ran back to his vehicle and reloaded. When the tow truck stopped again, Baker shouted at his own driver to move around it.

Finally freed, Baker's heavily armed Humvee raced out of the ambush canyon, its machine guns pounding fire, its inexperienced shooters coursing with adrenaline.

Ahead of them, parked outside a small village near Manah, Lt. David Uthlaut heard an explosion. From his position, he "could not see the enemy or make an adequate assessment of the situation," so he ordered his men to move toward the firing.

Uthlaut designated Spc. Pat Tillman as one of three fire-team leaders and ordered him to join other Rangers "to press the fight," as Uthlaut put it, against an uncertain adversary.

Uthlaut tried to raise Serial 2 on his radio. He wanted to find out where the Rangers were and to tell them where his serial had set up. But he couldn't get through; the high canyon walls blocked radio signals.

Tillman and other Rangers moved up a rocky north-south ridge that faced the ambush canyon on a roughly perpendicular angle.

The light was dimming. A sergeant with Tillman on the ridge recalled he "could actually see the enemy from the high northern ridge line. I could see their muzzle flashes." The presumed Taliban guerrillas were about half a mile away, he estimated.

Tillman approached the sergeant and said "that he saw the enemy on the southern ridge line," as the sergeant recalled. Tillman asked whether he could drop his heavy body armor. "No," the sergeant ordered.

Two companions

On the sergeant's instructions, Tillman moved down the slope with other Rangers. With him were a young Ranger and a bearded Afghan militia fighter who was part of the 2nd Platoon's traveling party.

A Ranger nearby watched Tillman take cover. "I remember not liking his position," he recalled. "I had just seen a red tracer come up over us ... which immediately struck me as being a M240 tracer. ... At that time, the issue of friendly fire began turning over in my mind."

Tillman and his team fired toward the canyon to suppress the ambush. His brother Kevin was in the canyon.

Several of Serial 2's Rangers said later that as they shot their way out of the canyon, they had no idea where their comrades in Serial 1 might be.

"Contact right!" one gunner in Baker's truck remembered hearing as they rolled from the ambush canyon.

As he fired, Baker "noticed muzzle flashes" coming from a ridge to the right of the village they were approaching. Everyone in his vehicle poured fire at the flashes in a deafening roar.

"I saw a figure holding an AK-47, his muzzle was flashing, he wasn't wearing a helmet and he was prone," Baker recalled in a statement. "I focused only on him. I got tunnel vision."

Baker was aiming at the bearded Afghan militia soldier in Pat Tillman's fire team. He died in a fusillade from Baker's Humvee.

A gunner in Baker's light truck later guessed they were "only about 100 meters" from their new targets on the ridge, but they were "driving pretty fast towards them."

Rangers are trained to shoot only after they have clearly identified specific targets as enemy forces. Gunners working together are supposed to follow orders from their vehicle's commander — in this case, Baker. If there is no chance for orderly talk, gunners are supposed to watch their commander's aim and shoot in the same direction.

As they pulled alongside the ridge, the gunners poured an undisciplined barrage of hundreds of rounds into the area Tillman and other members of Serial 1 had taken up positions, Army investigators later concluded. The gunner of the M-2 .50-caliber machine gun in Baker's truck fired every round he had.

Firing at "shapes"

The shooters saw only "shapes," a Ranger-appointed investigator wrote, and all of them directed bursts of machine-gun fire "without positively identifying the shapes."

Yet not everyone in Baker's convoy was confused. The driver of Baker's vehicle or the one behind him — the records are not clear — pulled free of the ambush canyon and quickly recognized the parked U.S. Army vehicles of Serial 1 ahead of him.

He looked to his right and saw a bearded Afghan firing an AK-47, "which confused me for a split second," but he then quickly saw the rest of Serial 1 on top of the ridge.

The driver shouted twice: "We have friendlies on top!" Then he screamed "No!" Then he yelled several more times to cease fire, he recalled. "No one heard me."

Up on the ridge, Tillman and Rangers around him began to wave their arms and shout. But they only attracted more fire from Baker's vehicle.

"I saw three to four arms pop up," one of the gunners with Baker recalled. "They did not look like the cease-fire hand-and-arm signal because they were waving side to side." When he and the other gunners spotted the waving arms, their "rate of fire increased."

The young Ranger nearest Tillman on the ridge, whose full name could not be confirmed, saw a Humvee coming down the road. "They made eye contact with us," then began firing, he remembered. Baker's heavily armed vehicle "rolled into our sight and started to unload on top of us. They would work in bursts."

Tillman and nearly a dozen other Rangers on the ridge tried everything they could: They shouted, they waved their arms, and they screamed some more.

"Ranger! Ranger! Cease fire!" one soldier on the ridge remembered shouting.

"But they couldn't hear us," recalled the soldier nearest Tillman. Then Tillman "came up with the idea to let a smoke grenade go." As its thick smoke unfurled, "this stopped the friendly contact for a few moments," the Ranger recalled.

"We thought the battle was over, so we were relieved, getting up and stretching out and talking with one another."

The final blow

Suddenly he saw the attacking Humvee move into "a better position to fire on us." He heard a new machine-gun burst and hit the ground, praying, as Pat Tillman fell.

A sergeant farther up the ridge from Tillman fired a flare — an even clearer signal than Tillman's smoke grenade that these were friendly forces.

By now Baker's truck had pulled past the ridge and had come into plain sight of Serial 1's U.S. vehicles. Baker said later that he looked down the road, then back up to the ridge. He saw the flare and identified Rangers even as he continued to shoot at the Afghan he believed to be a Taliban fighter. Finally he began to call for a cease-fire.

In the village behind Tillman's ridge, Uthlaut and his radio operator had been pinned down by the streams of fire pouring from Baker's vehicle. Both were eventually hit by what they assumed was machine-gun fire.

The last of Serial 2's vehicles pulled up in the village. All the firing had stopped.

The platoon sergeant jumped out and began searching for Uthlaut, angry that nobody seemed to know what was happening. He found the lieutenant sitting near a wall of the village, dropped down beside him and demanded to know what he was doing.

"At that point I spotted the blood around his mouth" and realized there were casualties — and that Uthlaut was one of them, wounded but still conscious.

On the ridge, the young Ranger nearest Pat Tillman screamed, "Oh my (expletive) God!" again and again, as one of his comrades recalled. The Ranger beside Tillman had been lying flat as Tillman initially called out for a cease-fire, yelling out his name. Then Tillman went silent as the firing continued.

Now the young Ranger saw a "river of blood" coming from Tillman's position. He got up, looked at Tillman and saw that "his head was gone."

"I started screaming. ... I was scared to death and didn't know what to do."

The smoke clears

A sergeant on the ridge took charge. He called for a medic, ordered Rangers to stake out a perimeter picket in case Taliban guerrillas attacked again and opened a radio channel to the 75th Ranger Regiment's operations center at Bagram.

Seventeen minutes after Serial 2 had entered the canyon, 2nd Platoon reported that its forces "were no longer in contact," as a Ranger-appointed investigator later put it. It was not clear then or later who the Afghan attackers spotted by half a dozen Rangers in both serials had been, how many guerrillas were there or whether any were killed.

Nine minutes later, a regiment log shows, the platoon requested a medevac helicopter and reported two soldiers killed in action. One was the Afghan militia soldier. The other was Pat Tillman.

His brother Kevin arrived on the scene in Serial 2's trailing vehicle.

According to sources familiar with the investigation, Kevin was initially asked to take up guard duty on the outskirts of the shooting scene. He learned his brother was dead only when a platoon mate mentioned it to him casually, according to these sources. Kevin Tillman declined to be interviewed for this series.

It would take almost five more weeks — after a flag-draped coffin ceremony, a Silver Star award and a news release, and a public memorial attended by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Jake Plummer and newswoman Maria Shriver — for the Rangers or the Army to acknowledge to Kevin Tillman, his family or the public that Pat Tillman was killed by his own men.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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