A Ranger medics story..docx The second leg of the flight would be far less restful as I begin to get information on what we are doing. Apparently there was a group of Navy Seals that were compromised in some remote province of Afghanistan and we were going in to act as a Combat Search and Rescue team (CSAR). I know what you are thinking; I thought the exact same thing. Why wouldn't they deploy a team that was already in Afghanistan? Well, they did. This became the next point of my great unrest. An MH-47 "Chinook" helicopter containing eight members of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) and eight U.S. Navy Seals was shot down en route to aid the compromised members of Seal Team 10 as a Quick Reaction Force (QRF). All of those men lost their lives in an effort to come to the aid of their brothers.
Upon landing at Bagram Air Field (BAF) our platoon has just enough time to grab ammo and MRE's and meet at the airfield. My stomach sinks as I find out that our Chinook will be following the identical flight path of the one that was recently shot down. We sit on the airfield waiting for darkness to fall over the distant mountains that will soon become the proving ground for our young platoon.
