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AF Cross recipient called a hero

When Staff Sgt. Zachary Rhyner woke up on that day almost a year ago, on his first deployment to Afghanistan, he thought it would be another round of hurry up and wait.

Twice, Rhyner’s joint special operations unit had been ready for an air assault into Shok Valley, an isolated, dead-end gorge that terrorists had turned into a sanctuary. And twice, the combat controller and the team’s dozen or so other members had been called back on short notice.

Less than six hours later, though, Rhyner, 22, would be in the fight of his life, calling in bomb strikes within 100 yards of his own position while firing his M4 rifle. By day’s end, he would take a bullet in the leg, see half the 40 U.S. troops beside him wounded and watch two of their Afghan allies die. Their only consolation would be that the Taliban losses were much greater — upward of 150 killed and their haven destroyed.

For his heroism on that day, April 6, 2008, Rhyner will receive the Air Force Cross, the service’s highest distinction for valor except for the Medal of Honor. He becomes just the third airmen — the other two died in battle — to receive the honor since 2001 and only the 25th enlisted airman since enlisted airmen became eligible in 1960.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz will present Rhyner with his medal at a ceremony Tuesday before his home unit, the 21st Special Operations Squadron at Pope Air Force Base. N.C.

In a March 2 telephone interview with Air Force Times, Rhyner recounted the attack that pushed him to his physical and mental limits.

Rhyner had spent months with the 21st at Pope preparing for his first combat deployment. And before that, he had trained two years to be a combat controller.

A career in special operations was all Rhyner ever wanted. An Army recruiter offered him a direct Special Forces enlistment as a high school senior in 2004, but the Wisconsin native went with the Air Force when it promised him diver’s school and the special operations freefall parachute course.

In Afghanistan, Rhyner became a member of Special Operational Detachment 3336. His job as joint terminal air controller was to coordinate the team’s actions with aircrews, direct air strikes and organize other air support efforts such medical evacuations and airdrops.

For the April 6 assault, Rhyner would be the lead combat controller, keeping close to mission commander Army Capt. Kyle Walton.

“My job is to stay in the commander’s hip pocket,” Rhyner explained.

The mission

Early that morning, 40 U.S. troops and about 100 members of the 201st Afghan Commando Battalion took off from Jalalabad Airfield in a mix of CH-47 Chinook and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, an Army narrative of the mission said.

Their target was Hezeb Islamic al Gulbadin, a terrorist group aligned with al-Qaida and the Taliban that had laid claim to Shok Valley in Nuristan province. Once on the ground, the troops planned to move north up the gorge and capture three groups of buildings sprawled more than a mile part.

The valley floor was about 8,500 feet high. A river swollen by melting snow twisted through the valley, leaving rocky terraces and cliffs on either side.

Rhyner rode in the back of a CH-47. He looked down. The terrain below was so rough that the helicopter couldn’t land. The troops had to jump out of the hovering Chinook. The drop was about 10 feet.

“We landed on big boulders,” he recalled. “It was cold ... there was snow and ice.”

Rhyner carried about 80 pounds of gear, a little less than half the weight on his 5-foot 9-inch frame, as the team maneuvered its way toward the compounds. Twice the airman waded across the chest-deep river. Although the air temperature was 40 degrees, the sunshine and hard going took the sting out of the river’s cold.

Several thousand feet above the valley, two F-15E Strike Eagles orbited. The weapons systems officer in the lead fighter, Capt. Prichard Keely, was in radio contact with Rhyner as he watched the team’s progress on his cockpit’s video display screen.

The immediate concern was finding a way through the jumble of ledges and narrow terraces. If the team headed toward a dead end, Keely suggested a different way.

“I’d talk them to the location,” Keely recalled in a telephone interview from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C., where he flies with the 335th Fighter Squadron.

The buildings stood far above the ravine, at the top of several terracing cliffs. To get to the buildings, the team had to pass directly below them.

“That’s when we started taking fire,” Rhyner said.

A sniper’s bullet struck an Afghan interpreter in the head. The translator, standing next to Walton, the commander, died instantly.

A round ripped through Rhyner’s left pants leg, grazing his thigh, before hitting a soldier’s foot.

Another bullet tore into the leg of a soldier.

“It was a 360-degree ambush,” Rhyner said.

Rhyner, Walton and several others were trapped on a terrace that measured no more than 6 yards end to end. A shallow hole in the rock face provided some cover.

To add more protection, Walton used the interpreter’s body to help shield their position.

“I’m not proud of that, but that’s what he would have wanted us to do, and I would hope my men would do that with me,” Walton told Air Force Times in an interview about the mission.

On the F-15E’s video screen, Keely saw the fight breaking out.

“I could see the gun flashes ...” Keely recalled. “You could see dust kicked up by bullets.”

As bullets and shrapnel snapped through the air, Rhyner both talked with Keely and defended the terrace.

“I was shooting and calling in close air support,” Rhyner said.

For three hours, Rhyner summoned in air strikes and took small arms fire from ledges above and to his sides. Bullets and shrapnel struck Rhyner two more times but didn’t pierce his body armor.

Now, the mission leaders decided, was the time to get off the terrace. The plan called for the other F-15E, Keely’s wingman, to drop a 2,000-pound bomb aimed at a target about 100 yards from Rhyner’s position. If the explosion didn’t kill the attackers, the hope was that the insurgents would be so dazed they couldn’t shoot, giving the troops enough time to scramble down the rock face. Cover fire would come from other troops who had fought their way to the ravine and were not trapped on the ledge.

The bomb found its target, raining rocks into the ravine. Rhyner and the soldiers jumped and slid down the 60-foot wall to the somewhat safer valley floor.

“We kind of fell down that cliff,” Rhyner said.

Overhead, two fully-loaded Strike Eagles replaced the two nearly ammo-less F-15Es.

From the valley floor, Army medical evacuation helicopters carried troops with the worst injuries to the hospital at Bagram Airfield. Then, much of the assault team regrouped in a stone-and-mud building that offered protection from sporadic gunfire.

There, the decision was made to head south, back down the valley, to a landing zone where the troops would be picked up by helicopters.

Still, there was one more strike to summon. As Rhyner sat in the back of a CH-47, he was on his radio with an F-15E calling in one last bomb drop to destroy a building the team hadn’t reached.

When there was finally time to count how much ammo was used during the 6½-hour battle, the Air Force calculated that four F-15Es, four A-10 Thunderbolts and several Army Apache AH-64 helicopters had fired off 4,570 rounds of cannon rounds, nine Hellfire missiles and 162 smaller rockets and released a dozen 500-pound bombs and one 2,000-pound bomb.

And Rhyner himself fired off three magazine loads — about 90 bullets — from his M4.

Back at his base in Afghanistan, Rhyner walked to the medical clinic where the staff treated his grazed left thigh.

“I got some pills — antibiotics — and was good to go,” he said.

Belated award

Immediately after the battle, the Defense Department released little information publicly. Word of the heroism didn’t emerge until December when the 10 soldiers, mostly members of the Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, N.C., received Silver Stars and another Air Force combat controller, Staff Sgt. Rob Gutierrez, received the Bronze Star for valor.

During interviews, the honorees cited Rhyner’s performance, but there was no medal — yet — for the airman. By mid-February, word circulated that Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz and Air Force Secretary Michael Donley agreed to recognize Rhyner with the Air Force Cross.

Schwartz, who spent most of his career as a special operations commander and pilot, announced the decision Feb. 26 in front of several hundred airmen and defense industry representatives at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare and Technology Symposium in Orlando, Fla.

The general called on Rhyner to stand and the airman slowly rose to his feet. Rhyner pulled his shoulders back and looked straight ahead as Schwartz described the Shok Valley raid.

“Those Special Forces soldiers live to tell the story today because of courage, tenacity and closely integrated teamwork, including the invaluable and selfless efforts of Zachary Rhyner,” Schwartz said.

Rhyner turned his head and smiled at the audience. His fellow airmen jumped to their feet and broke out into wild applause.

The second day of the symposium, Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force Rodney McKinley acknowledged Rhyner in his address.

“He’s a hero. He’s a flat-out hero,” said McKinley, the service’s top enlisted leader. “We would hope and pray that … we’d have the courage to be able to do what he did. He was faced with the difficult task ahead. He had the courage and he saved lives.”