ADVERTISEMENT
Three hundred and eighty-one Navy SEALs and support personnel from a Special Operations Task Force had been lured into a “kill box”—a narrow valley floor flanked by sheer cliffs occupied by an entrenched enemy force. The terrain was a tactical nightmare. The enemy held the high ground with anti-aircraft weaponry and heavy machine guns, while a sudden, low-hanging cloud deck had turned the valley into a bowl of gray soup. Command was paralyzed. Standard Air Force doctrine dictated that close air support (CAS) was impossible under these conditions. The risk of hitting friendly forces in such a confined space, combined with the zero-visibility ceiling, led the Joint Operations Center to a devastating conclusion: the 381 men were to be written off.
Delaney Thomas didn’t wait for the order that she knew was never coming. While Sanderson was arguing with high command about the “unacceptable risk” of a rescue mission, Delaney was already sprinting across the tarmac. She didn’t need a briefing; she had lived this exact scenario in the simulator for hundreds of unauthorized hours. She knew every rock, every thermal pocket, and every blind turn of the Korengal. She ignored the frantic shouts from the ground crew and the screaming commands from the tower. She brought the twin General Electric TF34 engines of her A-10 to a deafening roar and taxied onto the runway with a singular, “reckless” purpose.
As Delaney crested the ridgeline of the Korengal, the world vanished into a wall of gray mist. Her instruments screamed as enemy radar locked onto her. Most pilots would have pulled up to escape the mountain walls, but Delaney pushed the stick forward. She dropped into the soup, using her “emotional” intuition and obsessive study of the terrain to guide her through the narrow gaps. She was flying by memory and grit, her altimeter spinning as she descended to a suicidal two hundred feet above the valley floor.
On the ground, the SEALs were braced for the end. They heard the distinctive, low-pitched whine of the Warthog before they saw it. Suddenly, the gray clouds erupted as Delaney’s A-10 burst through the ceiling like a vengeful spirit. She didn’t just fire; she performed a surgical “danger close” strafe that defied the laws of physics. She banked the massive aircraft until her wingtips nearly scraped the canyon walls, bringing the GAU-8 to bear on the enemy ridgelines.
The sound that followed—a bone-shaking “BRRRRRT”—was the sound of the ridgeline being physically dismantled. Delaney wasn’t just suppressing the enemy; she was erasing the positions that held the SEALs pinned. She moved with a precision that silenced every critic back at base. She utilized a maneuver she had perfected in secret: the “Terrain-Masking Pop-up,” where she stayed below the cliff line to avoid missiles, only rising for a fraction of a second to deliver a devastating burst of lead before diving back into the shadows.
In three passes, Delaney Thomas expended 1,170 rounds of 30mm ammunition. She neutralized fourteen fortified bunkers and created a “corridor of fire” that allowed the 381 SEALs to break their encirclement and reach the extraction point. When her ammunition was spent and her fuel light was blinking red, she banked one last time over the valley, the gray clouds closing behind her like a curtain.
When she touched down back at Kandahar, her aircraft was riddled with over a hundred holes from small arms fire and shrapnel. Major Sanderson was waiting for her on the tarmac, his face a mask of fury and shock. He had the military police ready to arrest her for grand theft of an aircraft and violation of a direct order. But the arrest never happened. As the MPs moved in, a fleet of transport helicopters began to land. Out of the first bird stepped the SEAL Commander, caked in dust and blood. He walked past Sanderson without a word, approached Delaney’s cockpit as she climbed down, and snapped the sharpest salute anyone on that base had ever seen.
ADVERTISEMENT
