Pleas and warnings from her crew to turn the Chinook back or cancel their mission went unheeded, she added.
“And the two personnel that initially fled ended up becoming a group of 12 people.” “They continued to essentially gain more and more force behind them because they just kept knocking on doors,” she said. She believes that had her team been allowed to fire, those deaths could have been prevented. “If we would’ve been allowed to engage that night, we would’ve taken out those two men immediately,” Marquez said. Months before, SEALs were made famous for the killing of Osama bin Laden. The crash killed all 38, including thirty Americans and eight Afghans. Central Command’s official investigation concluded that a rocket-launched grenade from a Taliban fighter hit the Chinook and sent the helicopter into a downward spin. Meanwhile, a CH-47 Chinook helicopter, with the call sign Extortion 17, was called into the hours-long firefight. She watched as the two moved tactically through the open field, making their way to a village where they began to rally more fighters. There was little left to do for Marquez and her team but simply track the two enemy insurgents with the surveillance equipment. “You have two enemy forces that are still alive,” she said. Monitoring the scene from above, she relayed the scene to the ground force commander. “We had seen two of them (insurgents) moving, crawling away from the area, as to not really make a whole lot of scene,” she recalled. That night it didn’t matter, because the gunship was not given permission to fire. Marquez was the fire control officer aboard the AC-130 gunship, making sure that the sensors and weapons were aligned and allowing the crew hone in on targets. “I had the sensor operators immediately shift to the eight insurgents the helicopters had taken out,” Marquez told Circa, in her first interview about the incident. The air weapons team fired on the Taliban fighters, but not all of the insurgents were killed as originally believed. The Rangers had called in for assault helicopters to engage the enemy hiding among the rocky valley. The gunship was ordered to fly close-in air support above Afghanistan’s dangerous Tangi Valley, in Wardak Province, assisting troops with the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment who were being fired on by eight heavily armed Taliban insurgents. Joni Marquez and her crew were working the dark morning hours aboard an AC-130 gunship after being summoned to a mission she describes “as almost like a 9-1-1 type of a situation.” Special Operations personnel killed were Navy SEALs, fifteen of whom were commandos from the Gold Squadron of the elite Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), better known as SEAL Team Six.Ī decorated retired Air Force officer who witnessed the downing of Extortion 17 broke her silence this week, telling Circa News that the government covered up evidence that showed the tragedy could have been prevented had it not been for the Obama administration’s restrictions on the military’s rules of engagement. Considered the worst loss of American lives in a single incident in the Afghanistan theater, the crash claimed 38 lives: 25 American special operations personnel, five United States Army National Guard and Army Reserve crewmen, seven Afghan commandos, and one Afghan interpreter-as well as a U.S.
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