Photo By Carolyn Herrick | U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Jorge Henry and his wife, Holly, embrace at the Honolulu...... read more read more
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JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii – A 25th Air Support Operations Squadron Joint Terminal Attack Controller returned to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, Oct. 31 following a six-month deployment to Afghanistan where he was shot by enemy forces.
Senior Airman Jorge Henry, Jr., was shot in the right hand by a Taliban sniper during a nine-hour fire fight in northern Kunar province, Afghanistan, Aug. 12. The fact that he subsequently received a Purple Heart was secondary, however, to what his 25th ASOS superintendent called the real interest of the story: the fact that Henry continued to call in close-air support and drop bombs on target, some in very close proximity to his own position, after sustaining the injury.
“That’s the heart of the mission,” said Senior Master Sgt. Matt Nugent, an 18-year veteran of the career field who has deployed seven times to Afghanistan and three times to Iraq since 9/11. “The fact that we have people get injured is unfortunate, but it’s the nature of the business.”
Henry had just joined the 2-27th Infantry Battalion, Charlie Company, in Kunar province, following three months working with an Army brigade further south. While deployed, Henry and his fellow Tactical Air Control Party airmen are direct liaisons to the Army and all their battle staff on air power – the experts on close-air support. Any time the base or troops on the ground are in direct contact with enemy fire, TACPs get aircraft on station, find the target and execute the ground commander’s guidance to drop bombs, he explained. He knew when he got there that this was a “kinetic” area – an area of operations close to the now-famous Observation Post Restrepo.
The team of 33 – Henry, 31 soldiers and an interpreter – hiked 4,000 meters up a mountain throughout the night Aug. 11 and created defensive fighting positions (DFPs), anticipating some contact with the enemy. By morning, the 24-year-old airman and his comrades began exploring the area by daylight. Some roving Apaches let Henry know there were Taliban about 100 meters to the north, in terrain that was impossible for them to approach.
“We started getting tactical reporting that some people in the village had noticed we were up there,” he said. “About 45 minutes later, we started getting contact.”
Soon, they were being attacked from 360 degrees – from the valleys to the east and west, from the ridgeline to the north and from the village below.
“We got some information on where we were getting shot from, and I put down a couple GBU-38s to take out those targets,” Henry recalled. “At first, I was controlling all the aircraft. We had Apaches, Kiowas, and F-15s on station, and I was completely task-saturated.”
By then, the forward operating base they had come from was aware of the fact that they were taking fire and were also shooting 120 mm mortars at the enemy positions. They were in the thick of it, with heavy enemy contact coming from only 100 meters away.
“The bullets were coming everywhere. There was nowhere we could go,” said the New York native.
They decided to move 50 meters south, back to the DFPs. Simultaneously, tactical reporting came down that the enemy had realized Henry was the one calling in the air strikes.
“Shoot the big guy,” was what they said, and Henry, at six-foot-three and 240 pounds, knew he had to get somewhere safe. He sprinted for cover, with bullets whizzing past his head and pinging the earth next to his feet. But ducking behind a bush wasn’t quite sufficient, the Taliban sniper found him and fired, hitting him in his dominant hand.
This was only an hour and a half after the fighting began. Running for a DFP, Henry dropped his pack and ducked inside, happy to discover the soldier in there happened to a medic. Enduring the searing pain of quick clot powder – used to cauterize the open wound – and using his left hand to operate, Henry continued calling in air strikes for seven and a half hours.
He and the soldiers with him had run out of water earlier in the morning. The fighters above him were running out of gas and had to return to the FOB. For about 20 minutes, they had no close-air support and relied entirely on their own ammunition and bullets from a couple of rotary aircraft to suppress the enemy. They were getting hit heavily, and he and the medic were a lone target for the sniper.
“During that time, I was able to figure out where [the sniper] was,” said Henry. “I didn’t have any of my maps – they were in the pack I’d dropped – but I had a pretty good idea where I was, so as soon as CAS returned, I walked a couple bombs in on the sniper until we got the exact position, and then we put a GBU-31 airburst over him, which is a 2,000-pound bomb.”
Once they neutralized the sniper, they moved positions and continued to engage with their M4s. At that point, they were just doing whatever they could to survive.
“It was so kinetic,” he said. “During the heart of it, a bomb was going off every three to four minutes.”
Meanwhile, Senior Airman Chris Tamblyn and Staff Sgt. Salim Charania, two 25th ASOS JTACs from JBPHH, were back at the FOB, keeping the battle staff informed of the situation. Henry had confirmed he was shot early on, and everyone was waiting with baited breath, hoping they would all make it out ok.
There was not an identifiable moment when the fight was over, he said. All together, Henry dropped 17 bombs, 14,500 pounds of munitions, and they killed at least eight Taliban, possibly as many as 20.
Darkness fell. The Taliban had quit firing for a while, because they had so many casualties, and under the cover of the night they “beat feet” back down the mountain. A hike that had taken four hours going up took only an hour and a half coming down.
“I only got shot in the hand. My legs were fine,” he said with a laugh, acknowledging that running down the side of a mountain, while injured, after a nine-hour firefight without food or water was quite a feat. “When you want to stay alive, your body will do some amazing things.”
He was medically evacuated to Bagram Air Base for surgery, and then to a base in Southwest Asia, where he received a Purple Heart and two and a half weeks of physical therapy. He then returned to Kunar province to finish his tour of duty.
“I wanted to go back,” he said. “I wouldn’t have returned [to the United States] even if they had told me I could go back. I wanted to go back to the fight. We did some awesome things – I dropped more, and we killed more bad dudes.”
That mission – killing “bad guys” as a TACP – is what he joined the Air Force to do, not quite four years ago.
“We’re pretty much the bringers of death. It’s awesome,” he said. “My skill set makes a difference, and having a JTAC can make or break a situation. That’s the most gratifying thing in the world. You never hope to get shot, but it’s something that you sort of just come to terms with and accept – that if you go outside the wire enough, if you play with fire enough, eventually it’s going to happen. But you don’t think about that. You just go out and you do your job, and if it happens, it happens. You push forward, and you go back out there, and you do it again.”
Henry acknowledged that he and his team were lucky.
“A lot of good guys lost their lives this tour.” he said. “CAS was the game-changer that day. If we did not have close-air support, a lot of guys would have died. I also give a lot of credit to Charlie Company, who was out there with me that day, for continuously feeding me information on where we were taking fire from and doing their jobs flawlessly, allowing me to focus on the task at hand: getting bombs on target and neutralizing the enemy.”
He also credited his home unit giving him good training for the fact that he was able to continue to do his job, essentially saving the men on his team, in spite of an injury and in an environment that was so chaotic.
“If you train enough, and you take your training seriously, it becomes second nature,” he said. “Once the bullets started flying, I immediately fell back to my training, and I knew exactly what I had to do. You don’t hesitate – you just start giving grids, you get aircraft, and you go to work.”
Doing that job, as they’re trained to do it, is the essence of being a TACP.
“As an Air Force, it takes a lot to put bombs on target,” Nugent said. “But when you get down to where the rubber meets the road, we’re right there on the seam between blue and green with the Army. That seam, often times, is the front line. So, while it takes a lot of behind-the-scenes support to deliver a bomb on target, it’s the TACP that provides the final clearance authority and says ‘cleared hot’ and the next thing that happens, seconds later, is big booms, explosions and bad guys going away. We’re right there, watching it happen. When we talk about the significance of every airman that is supported in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation New Dawn, it’s important to remember the level of sacrifice that airmen contribute.”
| Date Taken: | 11.04.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 11.04.2011 23:19 |
| Story ID: | 79598 |
| Location: | JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, HI, US |
| Web Views: | 930 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Air Force JTAC shot by Taliban, returns with Purple Heart, by Carolyn Herrick, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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