Part 1. – The Friendship

I have often wondered what I was doing at the moment Extortion 17 went down. Pretty sure I was at home, curtains drawn, under the blankets, hiding from the thunderstorms happening that Summer evening. Never been wild about thunderstorms, have to say.

Back in 2011, I was working a corporate IT job here in the UK, designing scientific systems. Flying into hostile airspace under rocket fire was a long way from my life, which tended to involve rather more typing into a laptop, perhaps accompanied by a cup of tea and a sticky bun.

The job involved working long hours, and to unwind from the pressure of the day I enjoyed spending time in the evenings on the Xbox, playing the game “Halo.”

If you are unacquainted with the game, it involves teams of players running around in brightly coloured science fiction settings, trying to blow each other up with comedy space weapons.

It was through playing Halo that I got to know several of the Navy people on the Extortion flight.

The first thing to say about them is they were going through a bit of a time.

Life at war, at home

By 2011, the US and UK were in the tenth year of the “Global War on Terror”.

For those in Special Operations billets, the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq had led to a round of continuing deployment cycles: five or six months or more “downrange” (in a hostile country where you get shot at, hence the term), followed by roughly six months in the US, followed by another deployment. Once training was factored in, perhaps parachuting in Arizona, or diving in Florida, people in these units were typically gone from home 300 days a year.

This takes a toll on social and family life. There is pressure from spouses and partners to spend time on home matters: to work through the “honey, do” list on the house, carry out childcare, to be a husband, or father.

So there was a need to blow off steam, to connect with buddies in the same line of work. They were young men, in their twenties or early thirties, and for their generation video games provided a way to relax and get together. So, Halo it was.

They had been through a lot. Stress and trauma bonds a group together but may become toxic when turned on outsiders.

I should say that because of this, a mutual friend warned me off – but they need not have worried. The boys turned out to be gigantic goofballs: hilarious, sharp, caring, and the time I spent with them would turn out to be an absolute joy. A few tears. But mostly there was shooting… with comedy space weapons.

With friends like these

In the first half of 2011, I’d play with the gang one or two evenings a week, work allowing. Login late evening, get an invite after a bit, join whatever was happening in Halo. It might be ‘King of the Hill’, where we all ran around blowing each other up; or ‘Infection’ where we were trying to stab each other, “New Zombie! Sword, sword, sword!”. Usually it was one of the many team modes.

T. was my regular “battle buddy.” Caring, supportive, solid. I adored him. Although we often partnered up, we used to delight in “red teaming” each other: joining the opposing side to hunt each other down, laughing uproariously over the voice comms as we threw space-grenades at each other.

D. was the hub: encouraging, funny, and technically brilliant. He was a communications expert – an “IT guy” – and true to form, he ran the group like a network. Sometimes as himself, sometimes as Spotswoode from Team America or Agent Smith from The Matrix. He was excellent company. The tech in 2011 was scratchy, but D. kept the channel open.

N. was the “Dad” of the group. A relaxed, phlegmatic EOD (bomb disposal) tech, which explained his calm in the chaos. I would stay up into the small hours just to catch him online; he was simply lovely to be around. We would chat about family camping spots in his home state, which he made sound like heaven. “Oh, like the song?” “Like the song.”

S. was the “Mathlete”. A cryptologist – an intel specialist; very funny, but always kind, insightful, and measured. He was also a runner. I used to joke that he and D. ran further each morning than I had run in my entire life. He was the warm heart of our little group, albeit one fuelled by the high-calorie comfort food of his hometown. We would sometimes be kept waiting while a particularly delicious meal or call to his family was completed. “Where is he? It’s game time.” “Oh, he’s getting chow.” Priorities. (I think we came in fifth, just behind the Phillies).

When we teamed up, the personalities bled into the gameplay:

T. would prefer to get on the sniper rifle, dropping into the backline to provide overwatch. He was part of the “external security” team in the real world, keeping eyes and ears open for incoming trouble. Not much got past him. I always felt protected when he was around. “Right behind you… in a good way!”

D. would aggressively charge the front, looking for trouble and calling out targets with enthusiastic control. “Two on the left! High!” He relied on the team to clear the way. “Get some fire on that guy!” “Little help!” “I cherish our friendship!”

N. held the centre. The calm EOD tech put up a chaotic wall of fire with machine guns or rockets, suppressing the enemy to support the fighters up front. “Get some! Ha! Get some! There you go!” “He’s in cover! Flank him!”

And S. was our flanker, slipping past the enemy like a shadow, cunningly using the power ups in the game to turn invisible or create distractions. While N. and D. were giving the enemy something to think about, he would move up and take them out. An absolute monster with the Magnum pistol, always in just the right spot. “He’s low! He’s done!” Clinical, precise, lethal.

They were terrific players. I could never really keep up, so my strategy was simple: keep the boys alive. If anyone comes near my friends, I shoot them in the head. It was a running gag.

Them: “If you ever make it over here, we’d introduce you as the woman who shoots everyone in the head.”
Me: “Or, you could just introduce me as your friend from England… like normal people.”
Them: “Of course, you’d have to promise not to actually shoot anyone.”
Me: “You know I can’t promise that.”

Sometimes the games would involve battling “dreaded rivals”. On one occasion this included the US Army Rangers – the finest Halo players in all the land – who were skilled and determined foes.

I joined them (not knowing who they were) to “red team” my guys. Always a good time.
Me: “So are you guys sailors too?”
Them: “Army. Rangers.”
Me: “I don’t know what that is.”
Them: “Ever seen… (they named a film)?”
Me: “No. Not a fan of war movies.”
Them: “…”
Me: “…”
Me: “Let’s shoot some sailors!”
Them: “Now that we can do!”

After their inevitable victory over the boys (during which I did virtually nothing by the way, other than shoot T. a few times, which hardly counts), the Rangers were characteristically magnanimous, “Just leading the way, man, just leading the way.”

This is why Rangers have no friends. Well, maybe one friend: they were good fun. A little intense. But fun.

My guys were rather more, “Go Navy” and left it at that.

Call it

In many ways the games were like long group phone calls. We would shoot the breeze about anything: favourite foods (“chow”) and beverages; favourite/disliked movies (Team America, Mean Girls, Full Metal Jacket were canonical but we all agreed “Iron Man 2 never happened”); camping trip plans; sports stuff (“Go Packers”, “Go Hawks”); musings on the existence of aliens, whatever was in our heads. All under our agreed Vegas Rules: what we say in Halo stays in Halo.

Voice calls were never a 1:1 affair – a security mitigation, I later realised, rather than just propriety as I thought at the time. But T. and I would often trade 1:1 texts, via the game chat. I was going through a tough time in my personal life, and he was very supportive via the keypad. We kept it intensely practical: WiFi / VPN troubleshooting, engine maintenance, or how to eat better. Just the stuff of day-to-day life. He was not above telling me off. I once mentioned picking up food at a well-known fast food chain and got a blast back: I don’t think I went there again in over a decade.

Sometimes we’d be in a larger group game, and they’d bring in other buddies, mostly from the Navy, who I also grew really fond of. It was like spending time with a big, extended family. In that life, they say, your friends are either from work, or the bartender. Or, I guess, your gamer pals.

While they were never unkind, I did not escape the gentle hazing the boys enjoyed among each other.

There had been rumours that playable members of the game’s “Noble Team” would be in future updates. I logged in to find the boys assigning roles.

T. was going to be Jun, the sniper. Made sense.

And of course N. was going to be Jorge, with the big machine gun. How could it be anyone else?

Interestingly, they decided, S. (who was running late) was going to be Carter, the team leader. “He’s going to be in charge of the Navy someday, so.” Good choice.

Two Noble Team members were left. At this point, I should have known it was a trap. “Hey, that must mean I am Kat!” I said. She was the sardonic technical wizard, the only woman, and definitely the coolest member.”Um no. That’s D., he’s the IT guy.” D. was like, “I am. Definitely that.”

I started listing out the members, trying to remember who was left. Then one of the boys was like, “Here it comes…” The trap was sprung. “Oh, so I am Emile. The knife guy. The psychopath. Oh that is just peachy! Oh thank you so much!”

They laughed together, heartily enjoying my discomfort at the mild betrayal.

For all the gentle ribbing, I found them a real antidote to the sweary, sexist / racist / homophobic lobbies so prevalent in gaming at that time.

On one occasion I logged into the game to discover game call-outs and battle-cries were being made in the Hawaiian language. Why this should be, I genuinely didn’t know. D., who was somewhat frustrated with the whole thing, looked to me for maturity, “See, Kirsten is rising above it!” “Imua!” I replied, as I charged into the fight.

And if you have not heard D. and (I later inferred) a Team Leader in the Command acting out the phone calls from “Mean Girls”, you have not heard Shakespeare as it is meant to be played.

When sleep eventually overtook me, I would typically leave them to it with a regular phrase, “wrap up warm, don’t eat junk, call your mums!”

“Who are these guys?”

I should say, although I knew some of the fields they worked in or “rates” and that they “did infantry stuff”, I didn’t know anything about their real work, or which unit they were in. At that time, I genuinely had no idea what a SEAL was, nor would I have cared.

There were some clues.

We took several weeks off while some of the boys headed out west for “jump school”. This made me reflect a bit.

By this time, I’d convinced myself that the group was a security team for the U.S. Navy, which was technically true: but in my head that involved staying on a Naval base – not doing high-altitude freefall jumps. And I knew N.’s EOD work also involved diving. It is fair to say the combination boggled my mind.

“So,” I asked him, “to get on a ship at sea, wouldn’t you have to parachute into the ocean?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And then you dive under the ship and disarm bombs?”
“Hopefully not underwater.”

After the training finished, there was much joy in their triumphant return. As well as relief on my part that they had avoided crashing into the Sonoran Desert at 120 mph.

Gradually we came to know each other pretty well over time, at least outside the secret areas of their work. As the phrase has it, we held each other up.

The “Men Don’t Suck” Party

One evening, toward the end of our time, I logged on in bits. A relationship had finally imploded and I was so downhearted about it. The boys quickly realised something was up – I think my morose, “Ugh. Men suck!” comment as I came online gave it away.

They prised the details out of me, and within a few minutes they had arranged an online, “Men Don’t Suck” party.

There was music, (D. set up a feed of Irish rebel songs), there were shenanigans, there was maxed-out charm and humour. Pals on the various teams in the Command got invited in: it was always a good time when the whole gang could join us. I felt surrounded by love. A dozen or so guys stayed in full-on clown mode until I cheered up – which I did.

They made a point of checking in afterwards too. After that, they were family.

How could they not be?

Two Minutes Out

Not long after, in mid to late June 2011, I got a message from T:
Him: “Can you make time for us on Thursday?”
Me: “ ‘Make time?’ Are we making appointments now?”
Him: “Are you available?”
Me: “Looking at my not-so-packed schedule… sure. What’s up?”

They were about to deploy.

When we got together, I immediately picked up the change in their voices.

There was no joking or goofing around. For this group to be so subdued was… uncharacteristic. They were sober, focused. Professional.

They could not tell me where they were going or exactly when they’d be back, or what they’d be doing while away.

They were clear about the potential for visibility from the deployment. If a bad thing were to happen, they said, “it would be on the news.” And that if it did, they expected me to keep a low profile.

“Well, I am not going on the TV with my mascara running.”
I replied, “So you better save all our blushes by coming home safe.”

I refused to say goodbye, only “cheerio”. Quoting the musical ‘Oliver’, “I love you, that’s why I say cheerio, and not goodbye.”

And that was that. The last word I said to them was, “Cheerio.”
I turned the XBox off, and sat for a moment in the darkness and silence.

I was never to hear from any of them again.

Off Comms

The weeks of summer that followed the boys’ departure were hot, bright, sweltering.

My time was spent volunteering, organising peace protests, in the run up to the arrival of a gigantic arms fair in London that September.

I had stopped being a local councillor the previous May, and time had been weighing heavily. So I went back to grassroots activism. I found myself sitting in small groups in Friends House in Euston, writing on flip charts in Finsbury Park, handing out leaflets in Trafalgar Square.

There was little to keep me by the XBox, which sat unused in the corner of my flat, which was gradually filling up with banners, posters, a megaphone, all the paraphernalia of campaigning.

Then, on 4th August, Police stopped a minicab in Tottenham, and shot one of its occupants. Mark Duggan, a 29 year old man, died at the scene.

London exploded. Nearly twenty boroughs in the city saw large scale street disturbances and attacks on property. The uprisings spread to a dozen UK towns and cities that week, and it genuinely felt the country was spiralling out of control.

News from Afghanistan barely registered. At any other time, the images from the US of bridges festooned with American flags, hearses escorted by motorcycling Patriot Guards, a dog sat by his late master’s coffin, would have got some press attention. As it was, UK eyes, including mine, were focused on our burning cities.

September’s arms fair saw thousands of arms dealers and cops swarming East London. The National Gallery was hosting some of them for dinners, so that was where we were, draping its porticos with banners and signs.

October was Occupy London. St Paul’s churchyard filled with tents. I stopped by as often as I could with whatever goodies I could carry: flapjacks, first aid supplies, sticky tape.

All of which is to say that Christmas arrived quickly. But when I returned to the XBox, there was no sign of the boys. Their accounts had vanished.

Despite that, I was not alarmed. I had seen nothing on the news; people move on in gaming circles all the time. Perhaps they had bought Playstations. Perhaps they were still away, and XBox had quietly put their accounts on ice for their return from deployment, which happened a lot in those days.

Spring of the following year, I found myself watching the closing credits of The Hunger Games. Sitting in the dark, listening to Abraham’s Daughter by Arcade Fire; Safe and Sound by Taylor Swift. Kingdom Come, by the Civil Wars.

It dawned on me that this continuing absence was not normal. If something had happened, T. would have found a way to send word. If something had happened to T., the others would. There was a logical conclusion to this. I did not let myself reach it.

Sitting there in that cinema, I realised all I had was a patchwork of nicknames or first names; rates; home states; and which food, alcohol, and movies they liked. Enough to miss them, but not enough to find them.

They were gone.

On the news

Over the coming years, I would make different attempts to find them. I looked for big casualty events, IED blasts or helicopter crashes, but I naively assumed that being sailors these would be near an ocean or a port or a ship. Afghan incidents were not on my list.

What I did not do is take all the details I had and put them into a search engine. Vegas Rules.

At some point I reached the limit of the details I had available, and the rules I still felt bound by. So I was left with one thing to do. Every year, on St Patrick’s Day, I would raise a glass. “Absent friends.”

And so it was until August 2021.

In August 2021, the images from Kabul were inescapable. Aircraft leaving Bagram with people hanging from the outside. Taliban fighters photographed in vacant American bases, surrounded by billions of dollars of abandoned equipment.

By this point, I was working for Campaign Against Arms Trade, part of which involved writing and giving talks. And what everyone wanted to talk about was the war in Afghanistan, and that equipment. What was it, who made it, who profited?

As I researched a talk for a small peace group based just outside Oxford, the phrase “Extortion 17” kept coming up a lot. Extortion 17. Finally I gave in: “what is Extortion 17 and why am I hearing so much about it?”

When the file loaded from a memorial site, it listed the details of the fallen. It gave their names, their ranks, and the states they came from. I recognized many of the combinations immediately. The date matched the silence.
My heart sank. Even then, my reaction was denial: “No way. Not my guys…”

Within several hours it became increasingly clear that they were in fact my guys, though it would be a process of weeks to fully confirm all the facts.

S. was confirmed first, N. soon after. Biographical details matched what I knew; families revealed likes and dislikes; I knew N.’s deployments from early in the Iraq War. This was already my worst nightmare. I found a picture of S.’s grave in Arlington. I stared at it, not fully believing it.

D. was harder, but I found a video piece by his mum for the Library of Congress: the person she described was clearly him. His love of Marvel movies; his unbreakable positivity; the silly voices (noting he had wisely kept his Katherine Hepburn impression quiet).

T. was a challenge. In the end I brute forced it. I went to his Memorial page and went back over ten years of posts, all the comments. It took me a full month. Finally I came to a video posted by his family of his birthday in 2010. In it, he is interviewed by his brother in law, joking as his family make a fuss of him. A Hawkeyes design is shown on the cake.

I had spent hours talking to T. while we fixed stubborn bits of technology (while a pal listened in, not saying much). He had a very distinctive way of speaking. I would know his voice anywhere. And he made no secret of his love for the Hawkeyes.

After I found the video, the air left the room. To feel better, I went to the kitchen and put the kettle on, to make a cup of tea. Coming back into the lounge, my knees buckled. I had heard of this, but never experienced it.

I came round on the floor.

The next few weeks went by in a bit of a blur. I felt slightly “punch drunk” by the revelations.

Winter arrived. Christmas was spent with old friends, New Year’s spent with new ones, both in old houses in Shropshire. The county is called “The End of Ambition” for a reason: it is so beautiful, people turn down promotions just to stay there. From memory, there was just enough ice and snow to be pretty, not enough to be inconvenient. It was the place I needed to be. I threw myself into all the festivities.

Once the year started again, work was busy, but satisfying. I worked most weekends but when I was free, I still enjoyed gaming with friends.

By this point, I had taken to playing Dungeons and Dragons and similar games at a local pub instead of going onto XBox. Paper, pencils, funny shaped dice, and the pub dog under the table – mostly watching the door, but always ready to hoover up the occasional dropped snack.

St Patrick’s Day came round. “Absent friends.” Except now, I knew where they were, and understood the reason for the silence. I took to lighting candles for the boys at the local church each week, two on a birthday.

It was when I approached the anniversary of the shootdown in 2022, in August, close to D.’s birthday, that I began feeling… unsatisfied.

To understand more about my friends’ lives, I had started watching podcast interviews – a world I had previously known nothing about. It put a lot of previously inexplicable remarks in context. But it also brought with it a thicket of theories about the shootdown – from families, from friends, from commentators. Plausible, implausible, angry, grieving. Nobody seemed to have a clear account of what had actually happened.

That August I did a ten mile hike on D.’s birthday, round the lake in Rutland, as part of a virtual memorial walk. As I cursed my lack of fitness, remembering T.’s scoldings about how my sedentary lifestyle would lead to bad things – and here we were – I realised I needed to look into the shootdown.

Pencil and Paper

I was determined to find out exactly what happened to my boys. Here is how I went about it.

First, I assembled all the sources I could find: all the published official reports (Colt, JCAT), all the books, including those by Ed Darack, Billy Vaughn, Charles Strange. The flight manual for the CH-47D Chinook. Plus reports on arms supplies in that period, local Pashtun culture, military doctrine, weapons specification sheets, and NGO reports on the Night Raids. If there was a podcast on the subject, I listened to it. If there was a film, I watched it.

Some material remains classified or redacted. Where that is the case, I have said so, and worked from what the redactions themselves tell us.

I took all the available data and, as far as I could, turned it into coordinates or vectors, assembled these into a machine readable dataset, and plotted them onto a map. Compared to 2011, we now have access to high quality terrain maps and satellite images.

With the timeline from the Colt and JCAT reports, this gives us the where and whens. What was needed then was the how – the mechanism.

First, I needed to work out how the Taliban fire team made the shot: this involved calculating where the helicopter was when the rocket was fired, and what that meant for how the RPG was aimed. I then needed to understand how the shooters knew the helicopter was coming, which meant understanding the role and capabilities (confirmed and potential) of the Taliban observer network. I then needed to look at the decision around loading the helicopter. And finally what that decision meant for the helicopter’s handling.

And I needed to put this into context. Why were the Americans there, why was the target important, what else was happening in the valley, where did the weapons come from, and how did those weapons, in the final moments, bring down the aircraft.

Based on the sources, the following narrative supported by the accompanying maps and dataset, is my best assessment on how Extortion 17 was shot down.

Told as accurately as possible, in memory of all those on board. This is, most of all, for them and their loved ones.

We remember.




Next, go to Part 2. – The Investigation: find out what happened to Extortion 17, and uncover the causes of the shootdown.

Or, go to Part 3. – Reflections, to consider the lasting impact of the Extortion 17 shootdown, and to remember the men.