AIR FORCE MAGAZINE - Once More Unto the Breach SSgt. Robert Gutierrez stuck with the mission despite taking a bullet, his lung collapsing, busted eardrums, and losing more than five pints of blood.                                                                                                     By Amy McCullough
	SSgt. Robert Gutierrez, a joint terminal attack controller assigned to Hurlburt Field, Fla., has been nominated for the Air Force Cross—the service's second highest award for valor. As of Sept. 2, 2011, the award was still pending the signature of Air Force Secretary Michael Donley. Here, Gutierrez poses for a photo, less than two months before the Afghanistan operation on Oct. 5, 2009, for which he has been nominated. The target was a “brutal” man living outside Herat city in a “highly sympathetic village” in the western portion of Afghanistan, said Gutierrez. The Taliban forces were well aware they were being hunted and were well protected. Armed insurgents manned the rooftops inside their compound, surrounded by a 20-foot wall. The narrow, improvised explosive device-laden roads made it almost impossible to enter the village by vehicle, forcing the US team and about a dozen Afghan soldiers to finish the last two-and-a-half miles on foot. The team moved fast, “because speed in the night is what favors you there,” said Gutierrez, the lone joint terminal attack controller on the ground that day. At the time, he was assigned to the 21st Special Tactics Squadron at Pope AFB, N.C. Two F-16s and an MQ-1 Predator remotely piloted aircraft orbited the area high above, giving those on the ground a heads up on the insurgents’ locations. The two teams started taking fire almost immediately after the initial breach of the wall surrounding the target compound. The first team pushed through. Gutierrez, who was in the second stack, paused to take out a group of insurgents who were laying down heavy fire from behind an adjacent alley before he took cover inside the targeted building. Once inside, he radioed the aircraft to let them know they were in contact with the enemy. The team leader already had been shot in the calf and was having trouble walking, and the medics were busy tending to other members of the team struck by fragmentation.
He’s Hit As the battle raged inside the compound, an additional support team was moving in from the west, but insurgents unleashed more heavy fire on them before they could breach the wall, rendering their own firepower useless. The additional support team was forced to break contact, leaving those inside to rely on airpower to keep them from being overrun—a real possibility considering they were outnumbered and some of the Afghan national forces had already fled. Gutierrez hovered in a doorway dodging bullets and returning fire when the soldier next to him had his gun jam, then was struck by fragmentation. Gutierrez called a medic and took over his buddy’s position, where he had a better line of sight on two insurgents shooting at them from the rooftop next door. Just as one of the insurgents fell, Gutierrez was hit. “I knew something was wrong, but you don’t really have time to sit there and think about things,” Gutierrez told Air Force Magazine during a July interview from Hurlburt Field, Fla., where he is stationed now. “You just do what you need to do. You return fire and eliminate the threat.” He did return fire until the pain in his side and arms overwhelmed him. Gutierrez fell to the ground gasping for air, realizing for the first time that he had been shot. “I know I’m wounded [and] I’m trying to think of how severe it is,” he said. “Time has virtually stopped. ... I’m on my hands and knees ... trying to talk, but every time I tried to talk, I had blood coming out of my mouth and out of my nose, so I knew that I had been wounded pretty bad.” Gutierrez was an experienced air commando and he had seen similar wounds before. He knew he was probably going to die, but he was determined not to let his guys down. He needed to get back on the radio, so he called for the medic. Gutierrez had no idea where the bullet entered his body. Although he was suffering from a sucking chest wound, he tried to shout commands to his comrades to cover the door and attempted to connect with the aircraft overhead to tell them he had been shot. But as the medic stripped off his gear, Gutierrez was quickly losing his breath, making that impossible. The round had entered through his upper shoulder, traveled down his scapula, pierced his lung, and then exited out his back. “The whole trajectory of it and the way it came through just ripped apart everything all the way down,” he said. Gutierrez would later acknowledge just how lucky he was, because the bullet took a “weird” turn and narrowly missed his heart. No Time For the Pain High above, the pilots assumed Gutierrez had been injured when they couldn’t get him on the radio. They weren’t sure how bad it was so they continued to relay insurgent locations and requested permission to strike. “I couldn’t talk. I could hear it, but it was so unfortunate [because] I couldn’t talk,” he said. The enemy was no more than 50 feet away, and air support was debating whether the aircraft should fire a Hellfire missile. “I had to get back on the net, call it off, abort the pass,” recalled Gutierrez. The sheer power of the Hellfire would probably have killed them all, he said. But he still couldn’t breathe. The medic held up a needle—“a good seven inches long,” Gutierrez recalled—and told him his lung had collapsed. He needed to jam the needle into Gutierrez’s chest to relieve the pressure in his chest cavity so his lungs could inflate. It was going to hurt, but “GZ” just nodded. He wanted to get it over with so he could get back to his job. He didn’t have time to focus on pain. Gutierrez said he was “in the middle of the fight and we are starting to take heavy grenades. … An RPG has gone off on the side of the wall, and he gives me the needle decompression.” Seconds later, he was back on the radio. He called off the Hellfire strike and requested that the F-16s conduct a show of force.                                                                         The deafening roar of the jet fighters as they passed by partially caused the buildings to crumble, yet the insurgents kept firing. Gutierrez requested another flyby, this time with flares. The insurgents didn’t back down, and now the F-16s were running low on fuel. By the time Capt. Ethan Sabin, an A-10 pilot based at Kandahar Airfield, arrived the situation was grim. Gutierrez was wounded and Sabin said he “could hear the severity of the situation in his voice.” However, Sabin said Gutierrez’ words remained crystal clear. “He saved the lives of all of his men,” Sabin said. “As dire as the situation was, had he not been there to talk me on to the target and provide controls for strikes, the team would have likely suffered more casualties.” Lt. Col. Parks Hughes, at the time Gutierrez’s commander, called his performance on the battlefield that day “extraordinary,” but said “his actions were completely consistent with his character as warrior and an airman.” When Sabin arrived, only the Predator and one F-16 remained on the scene; the other fighter had run out of fuel and had flown back. Sabin sent his wingman to fetch the tanker, which was roughly 170 miles away. He didn’t want to leave the guys stranded and no one knew how long the battle would last. It was critical for aircraft to get back into the fight as quickly as possible. Sabin descended below the Predator’s altitude and asked the F-16 pilot to mark the target with the laser on his targeting pod. This enabled him to “instantly get eyes and sensors on the target,” said Sabin, who now serves as the chief of weapons and tactics with the 354th Fighter Squadron from Davis-Monthan AFB, Ariz. Down below, Gutierrez and his team leader, both suffering from gunshot wounds, discussed their options. The shows of force had not worked, and the insurgents had them covered on three sides. They needed a gun run, even if it was “danger close.” Gutierrez requested the first strafing shortly after the Hogs arrived, while the medics were still packing his side with combat gauze and trying to stitch up his wounds. Sabin said he had some reservations about strafing less than 65 feet from friendly forces, but his attack proved to be “spot on.” The attack was so close, Gutierrez’s right eardrum burst and his left eardrum was severely damaged from the noise. “Perhaps [what is] most impressive was the exceptionally high degree of technical proficiency with which he directed the air strikes, despite such dire circumstances and great physical pain,” said Hughes, the former commander of the 21st STS. “Ultimately, his actions helped to suppress the enemy force and enabled his team to escape the kill zone with no additional casualties.” In fact, despite the intensity of the close-quarters battle, there were no US fatalities in the engagement. The shooting halted for a short time, then picked back up again. Gutierrez called in another strafing run. “It came through, was on target, also danger close,” he said. Time was running out. Buildings were catching fire and the soldiers were standing inside a ticking time bomb. The target building was filled with a “high amount of ammonium nitrate,” a highly flammable fertilizer used to make improvised explosive devices, he said. Bleeding Out   Over the next day-and-a-half he would be treated at Herat Airfield, at the Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram Airfield—both in Afghanistan—then Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, before finally arriving at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “We decided that we were combat air effective,” and the high-value target was dead, so “we were going to use one more pass as a cover for us to exit,” Gutierrez said. “I put my kit back on, put my helmet back on, ... [and] gave instructions to the A-10 pilot. He fully obliged [and] came back through. As [he] struck, we pushed out and left the compound.” Determined not to be a burden on his team, Gutierrez got to his feet, with the medic holding his bag and supporting his shoulder. “Since my ears were out, my balance was completely off. I couldn’t really stand up straight,” he said. “I kind of would veer off everywhere.” Gutierrez called in a medical evacuation for himself, the captain, and two other wounded troops, but he was initially denied. It was too dangerous; they had to leave the area, he was told. Sporadic gunfire followed them as they stumbled away from the village. After struggling for about two miles, Gutierrez’s lung collapsed for a second time. The medic did another needle decompression by the side of a four-way intersection as the A-10s continued to provide close air support and ISR assets fed them vital information from above. When he got his breath back, Gutierrez requested an immediate medevac. The troops found a muddy, square vegetation field, roughly 300 feet by 300 feet, which had just enough room for one helicopter to land. They secured the site and waited for the medevac, a joint Spanish and Italian team from Herat Airfield, to arrive. Wet and weak from the loss of blood, Gutierrez waited for an hour-and-a-half. His uniform became soaked and stuck to his arm. At first he thought it was sweat from the difficult trek to the landing zone, or maybe muddy water from the canal he stumbled in as they pushed out. He had no idea he had lost five-and-a-half pints of blood. “You just go. I don’t have time to be a hindrance,” he said. “If I’m dead, I’m just dead weight. Everybody has their own push, their own internal fortitude, and I don’t have time to let anyone down.” When the medevac bird finally arrived, Gutierrez asked the pilot to follow the rest of the team as they hiked back to their vehicles, where an International Security Assistance Force convoy was waiting to escort them back. Then he passed out. Over the next day-and-a-half he would be treated at Herat Airfield, at the Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram Airfield—both in Afghanistan—then Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, before finally arriving at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. It took him about 19 months to recover. Today Gutierrez is back on duty and now serves as an instructor at the Air Force Special Operations Training Center at Hurlburt. He is about 98 percent recovered, although he still has limited movement in his arm. That’s “just the nature of the beast,” said Gutierrez. “I probably won’t get it back, but it’s fine. I’m full up. I’m fully deployable. I’m good to go.” And, if a bullet wound, a collapsed lung, and busted eardrums didn’t make him quit, a minor loss of mobility won’t keep him from deploying again. “Oh, I assure you I will,” said Gutierrez with the same dogged determination that helped save his life and the lives of his team members two years ago. To read the article in PDF, click here.

SSgt Rob Gutierrez selected as Outstanding Airman of the Year, 2010

War Story: Combat Controller's actions epitomize the ethos of Special Tactics

Citation To Accompany the Award of the Bronze Star Medal (With Valor) to Robert Gutierrez, Jr. Staff Sergeant Robert Gutierrez, Jr., distinguished himself by heroism as a Special Tactics Combat Controller, 21st Expeditionary Special Tactics Squadron, Combined Joint Special Operations Air Component while engaged in ground combat against an enemy of the United States in Afghanistan on 6 April 2008. On that day, Sergeant Gutierrez was attached to Army Special Forces Operational Detachment-Alpha 3312 as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller, in support of Operation COMMANDO WRATH. He provided critical Airmanship skills during a violent 6 and a half hour battle against heavily armed and entrenched enemy fighters. While approaching the objective, while climbing near-vertical terrain, the assault force was ambushed by anti-Coalition forces which pinned down the lead team on a 60-foot high rock cliff and produced several friendly casualties. Sergeant Gutierrez coordinated with the engaged element and directed lethal gun, missile, and bomb attacks from AH-64s and F-15Es. Despite these strikes, the attack intensified onto his team's position. Despite being struck twice by 7.62 millimeter bullets in the helmet, Sergeant Gutierrez maintained his calm demeanor and continued to prosecute targets. As the fight continued, the insurgents shifted their efforts toward arriving helicopters and engaged them with heavy fire. Sergeant Gutierrez coordinated with the ground force commander to delay friendly force extraction until the enemy positions could be suppressed. Enabled his systematic control of air power during the fight, all 17 friendly casualties were safely evacuated and 40 enemy fighters were killed. By his heroic actions and unselfish dedication to duty, Sergeant Gutierrez has reflected great credit upon himself and the United States Air Force.

10 Green Berets To Receive Silver Star for Afghan Battle

   After jumping out of helicopters at daybreak onto jagged, ice-covered rocks and into water at an altitude of 10,000 feet, the 12-man Special Forces team scrambled up the steep mountainside toward its target--an insurgent stronghold in northeast Afghanistan.

   ``Our plan,'' Capt. Kyle M. Walton recalled in an interview, ``was to fight downhill.''

   But as the soldiers maneuvered toward a cluster of thick-walled mud buildings constructed layer upon layer about 1,000 feet farther up the mountain, insurgents quickly manned fighting positions, readying a barrage of fire for the exposed Green Berets.

   A harrowing, nearly seven-hour battle unfolded on that mountainside in Afghanistan's Nuristan province on April 6, as Walton, his team and a few dozen Afghan commandos they had trained took fire from all directions. Outnumbered, the Green Berets fought on even after half of them were wounded--four critically--and managed to subdue an estimated 150 to 200 insurgents, according to interviews with several team members and official citations.

   Today, Walton and nine of his teammates from Operational Detachment Alpha 3336 of the 3rd Special Forces Group will receive the Silver Star for their heroism in that battle--the highest number of such awards given to the elite troops for a single engagement since the Vietnam War.

   That chilly morning, Walton's mind was on his team's mission: to capture or kill several members of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) militant group in their stronghold, a village perched in Nuristan's Shok Valley that was accessible only by pack mule and so remote that Walton said he believed that no U.S. troops, or Soviet ones before them, had ever been there.

   But as the soldiers, each carrying 60 to 80 pounds of gear, scaled the mountain, they could already spot insurgents running to and fro, they said. As the soldiers drew closer, they saw that many of the mud buildings had holes in the foot-thick walls for snipers. The U.S. troops had maintained an element of surprise until their helicopters turned into the valley, but by now the insurgent leaders entrenched above knew they were the targets, and had alerted their fighters to rally.

   Staff Sgt. Luis Morales of Fredericksburg was the first to see an armed insurgent and opened fire, killing him. But at that moment, the insurgents began blasting away at the American and Afghan troops with machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades--shooting down on each of the U.S. positions from virtually all sides.

   ``All elements were pinned down from extremely heavy fire from the get-go,'' Walton said. ``It was a coordinated attack.'' The insurgent Afghan fighters knew there was only one route up the valley and ``were able to wait until we were in the most vulnerable position to initiate the ambush,'' said Staff Sgt. Seth E. Howard, the team weapons sergeant.

   Almost immediately, exposed U.S. and Afghan troops were hit. An Afghan interpreter was killed, and Staff Sgt. Dillon Behr was shot in the hip.

   ``We were pretty much in the open, there were no trees to hide behind,'' said Morales, who with Walton pulled Behr back to their position. Morales cut open Behr's fatigues and applied pressure to his bleeding hip, even though Morales himself had been shot in the right thigh. A minute later, Morales was hit again, in the ankle, leaving him struggling to treat himself and his comrade, he said. Absent any cover, Walton moved the body of the dead Afghan interpreter to shield the wounded.

   Farther down the hill in the streambed, Master Sgt. Scott Ford, the team sergeant, was firing an M203 grenade launcher at the fighting positions, he recalled. An Afghan commando fired rocket-propelled grenades at the windows from which they were taking fire, while Howard shot rounds from a rocket launcher and recoilless rifle.

   Ford, of Athens, Ohio, then moved up the mountain amid withering fire to aid Walton at his command position. The ferocity of the attack surprised him, as rounds ricocheted nearby every time he stuck his head out from behind a rock. ``Typically they run out of ammo or start to manage their ammo, but ..... they held a sustained rate of fire for about six hours,'' he said.

   As Ford and Staff Sgt. John Wayne Walding returned fire, Walding was hit below his right knee. Ford turned and saw that the bullet ``basically amputated his right leg right there on the battlefield.''

   Walding, of Groesbeck, Tex., recalled: ``I literally grabbed my boot and put it in my crotch, then got the boot laces and tied it to my thigh, so it would not flop around. There was about two inches of meat holding my leg on.'' He put on a tourniquet, watching the blood flow out the stump to see when it was tight enough.

   Then Walding tried to inject himself with morphine but accidentally used the wrong tip of the syringe and put the needle in his thumb, he later recalled. ``My thumb felt great,'' he said wryly, noting that throughout the incident he never lost consciousness. ``My name is John Wayne,'' he said.

   Soon afterward, a round hit Ford in the chest, knocking him back but not penetrating his body armor. A minute later, another bullet went through his left arm and shoulder, hitting the helmet of the medic, Staff Sgt. Ronald J. Shurer, who was behind him treating Behr. An insurgent sniper was zeroing in on them.

   Bleeding heavily from the arm, Ford put together a plan to begin removing the wounded, knowing they could hold out only for so long without being overrun. By this time, Air Force jets had begun dropping dozens of munitions on enemy positions precariously close to the Green Berets, including 2,000-pound bombs that fell within 350 yards.

   ``I was completely covered in a cloud of black smoke from the explosion,'' said Howard, and Behr was wounded in the intestine by a piece of shrapnel.

   The evacuation plan, Ford said, was that ``every time they dropped another bomb, we would move down another terrace until we basically leapfrogged down the mountain.'' Ford was able to move to lower ground after one bomb hit, but insurgent fire rained down again, pinning the soldiers left behind.

   ``If we went that way, we would have all died,'' said Howard, who was hiding behind 12-inch-high rocks with bullets bouncing off about every 10 seconds. Insurgents again nearly overran the U.S. position, firing down from 25 yards away--so near that the Americans said they could hear their voices. Another 2,000-pound bomb dropped ``danger close,'' Howard said, allowing the soldiers to get away.

   Finally, after hours of fighting, the troops made their way down to the streambed, with those who could still walk carrying the wounded. A medical evacuation helicopter flew in, but the rotors were immediately hit by bullets, so the pilot hovered just long enough to allow the in-flight medic to jump off, then flew away.

   A second helicopter came in but had to land in the middle of the icy, fast-moving stream. ``It took two to three guys to carry each casualty through the river,'' Ford said. ``It was a mad dash to the medevac.'' As they sat on the helicopter, it sustained several rounds of fire, and the pilot was grazed by a bullet.

   By the time the battle ended, the Green Berets and the commandos had suffered 15 wounded and two killed, both Afghans, while an estimated 150 to 200 insurgents were dead, according to an official Army account of the battle. The Special Forces soldiers had nearly run out of ammunition, with each having one to two magazines left, Ford said.

   ``We should not have lived,'' said Walding, reflecting on the battle in a phone interview from Fort Bragg, N.C., where he and the nine others are to receive the Silver Stars today. Nine more Green Berets from the 3rd Special Forces Group will also receive Silver Stars for other battles. About 200 U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have received the Silver Star, the U.S. military's third-highest combat award.

Another War Story: Combat Controller's actions epitomize the ethos of Special Tactics

An Airman’s Tale; He was shorter than I expected. Rounder, too. In most of the photos I’d seen he’d worn the downrange beard, thick as otter fur, that marks a Special Operator. It lent him a kind of Santa Claus’s badass nephew mien. But when I met him last week at Hurlburt Field, home to the USAF’s Special Operations Command, he was clean-shaven, with a ready smile and a jaunt to his gait that belied the wounds he bore.

For your consideration: the tale of Staff Sergeant Robert Gutierrez Jr., Forward Combat Controller extraordinaire.

It was October, 2009. Early October. Herat Province, Afghanistan. Gutierrez was attached to a team of 30 Army Special Forces and Afghan National Army commandos tracking what the Pentagon refers to as “high-priority targets.” (Most warfighters in the field just go with “bad mofos.”) The combined team had entered a nondescript village where the target was said to be hiding. All hell broke loose. Ambush. They were waiting for them.

For over four hours rifle and RPG fire from the adjacent rooftops ripped into the American position. Surrounded, outgunned, and outmanned, Guterrez emptied clip after clip of his M4 carbine. Then he felt the sting. Armor piercing round. It entered through his left shoulder and corkscrewed into his torso, lodging finally in his chest after breaking two ribs and his scapula. His lungs collapsed, and he was bleeding out from a softball-sized hole in his back.

“I’ve seen those types of injuries,” he said. “Time isn’t your friend. I thought, ‘I have three minutes before I’m going to die.’”

This posed a problem not only for Gutierrez, but for the entire SF Team. For “The Goot” was the only radio operator in communication with the F-16s and A-10s vectoring overhead on strafing and bombing runs. Yet despite believing he was about to die, Gutierrez refused to allow the two Army medics to remove his kit and armor in order to treat him. His radio, you see, was attached to his kit. And without Gutierrez on the hand-held, the gunships providing close air support would have no “eyes on the ground.”

One of the A-10 pilots remembers Gutierrez’s voice throughout the ordeal, calm and cool as an FM deejay’s. It was only after returning to base that the pilot learned that the Combat Controller had been delivering coordinates and instructions as the life oozed out of him.

After the third strafing run, after the air power had decimated the insurgents to the point where the Army SF Team could make a run for it, Gutierrez finally allowed the medics to remove his battle rattle and insert a needle-nosed decompression tube into his lungs. Then he put the armor back on and continued calling in fire. When it came time to Di Di Mau (showing my age), Gutierrez, the tube still planted in his chest, ran about a mile with the rest of the team to the exfil LZ. Along the way he continued to guide the gunships as well as call in his own medevac.

Gutierrez obviously lived. From Walter Reed Hospital he transferred to Hurlburt, where he is still recuperating. Which is where I found him last week, attending a small graduation ceremony for another generation of Combat Controllers. He doesn’t like to talk much about the firefight. “Tell you the truth, I really don’t remember all that much about it,” he said. “Except for, at one point, thinking. ‘Okay, I’m gonna die. But unless I stay on this radio we’re all gonna die, not just me. And I’m not gonna let that happen.’ Plus, my wife was pregnant with our first at the time, and I was sad that I’d never get to see my baby.”

Gutierrez was there when his wife gave birth to a girl that December. The couple has since added a baby brother to the brood. And as we compared notes on our kids I thought once again of the wonder of ordinary men thrust into extraordinary circumstances. For his valor and courage Gutierrez was awarded the Air Force Cross, the service’s highest honor and the country second-highest military award, second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Gutierrez and I made more small talk for while before shaking hands goodbye. I lingered to watch him walk out the door into the bright Florida sunlight, don his Combat Controller’s scarlet beret, and head for another round of physical therapy. He was still shorter than I expected. Rounder, too.

My 14-year-old was in Stateside from Europe for the Holidays. Tells me when he grows up he wants to be a diplomat. (Of all things! What ever happened to a fireman or a cowboy?) Yet on one of our long, see-the-Mercun-cousins road trips my son and I got to talking about military service. He asked me if, should he go in that direction, which Special Forces would I recommend. Air Force, I answered without hesitation. They’ve got the coolest berets.