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Lyons is correct in that the Afghans were informed in advance of this mission, and, in fact, every mission that the SEALs and Rangers have flown in Afghanistan. Obviously this raises a huge concern about mission integrity and avoiding compromising the safety of US forces, a topic discussed with greater detail later.
    There still has been no satisfactory answer to the question of why all the SEALs were crammed onto one chopper when a second was available.
    Chronology for August 6, 2011: Day of Shoot-­Down
    The official United States military investigation of the shoot down of Extortion was conducted in Afghanistan by a team headed by Army Brigadier General Jeffrey Colt, who had been an Army helicopter pilot. Brigadier General Colt had a team of officers and experts working at his disposal, with a goal of producing a report explaining the reasons for the shoot down.
    More background on this report, referred to by the author as the “Colt report,” will be presented in later chapters of this book, with a full background on the Colt Report beginning at Chapter Six, below.
    For the time being, however, it is important to understand that the chronology of the shoot-down has been assembled from documentary evidence taken directly from the Colt Report.
    At 0200 a.m. local time in Afghanistan, per “Enclosure H” of the Colt Report, the Tactical Operations Center directed Extortion 17 to move to the staging area at Base Shank to pick up twenty-­five Special Operations personnel, including the US Navy SEALs. The SEALs are part of what is called an “Immediate Reaction Force.” They are a contingency unit,designed to back up the US Army Rangers already on the ground, if the Rangers find themselves in need of help.
    Seconds before Extortion 17 was directed to pick up the SEALs, a decision was made to increase the number of personnel in the Immediate Reaction Force from seventeen to twenty-five.
    Five minutes later, at 0205 a.m., despite the fact that two helicopters were available for the mission, all twenty-five Special Operations American personnel were ordered onto a single helicopter, cramming the chopper to its maximum capacity, and endangering all souls aboard in the event of a shoot-­down. The old chopper was about to be ordered to fly over an area heavily armed with Taliban, with RPGs and rockets capable of attacking allied helicopters, over a valley in which three Coalition helicopters had been attacked in the last ninety days.
    Based upon the order to board a single chopper, the SEALs, under Lieutenant Commander Kelsall, rushed to the tarmac where both choppers awaited. Operational prudence and safety considerations dictated that the SEAL team be split, with Kelsall taking twelve team members on one chopper and Langlais taking the rest on the other. Remember that five of the thirty Americans were flight crew members. The other twenty-­five were the SEAL team and its support crew.
    But that’s not the way it happened. Instead, every member of the American SEAL team, and every Navy and Air Force enlisted man, piled onto one of the choppers, Extortion 17. So all the risk was concentrated in one chopper at takeoff. But the strange decision to concentrate the entire SEAL team onto Extortion 17 was the first in a string of oddities that would plague the mission from start to finish.
    By 0209 a.m., the SEAL team was on the chopper. Pilot Bryan Nichols reported that the Immediate Reaction Force was composed not of thirty-­two, but of thirty-­three members, nearly doubling the originally planned contingency of seventeen. Extortion 17 was now fully loaded, in fact almost overloaded, sitting on the tarmac at REDCON level 1, awaiting the order to take off.
    Extortion 16, the other Chinook chopper that would fly this mission, and that earlier in the evening had infiltrated US Army Rangers into far less dangerous airspace alongside Extortion 17, was also ready for takeoff.
    But Extortion 16, this