The Costliest Day in SEAL Team Six History The Tangi Valley, located along the border between Afghanistan’s Wardak and Logar provinces some 80 miles southwest of Kabul, is a remote, inaccessible area known for its resistance to foreign invasion. Alexander the Great suffered heavy troop losses there during his campaign in Afghanistan in the fourth century B.C. In the 1980s, mujahideen fighters in Wardak and Logar provinces devastated an entire division of Soviet fighters.
In 2009, U.S. forces from the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army established a base in the Tangi Valley area after it became clear the Taliban had taken advantage of low coalition presence there to establish a stronghold within striking distance of the Afghan capital. As the United States and NATO allies began a drawdown of their troops in the spring of 2011, U.S. forces turned over the Tangi Valley outpost to their Afghan counterparts. They continued to run operations in the area, however, using helicopters and special operations forces to combat groups of insurgents in the region.
Under cover of darkness on the night of August 6, 2011, a special ops team that included a group of U.S. Army Rangers began an assault on a Taliban compound in the village of Jaw-e-Mekh Zareen in the Tangi Valley. The firefight at the house went on for at least two hours, and the ground team called in reinforcements. As the Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter (call sign: Extortion 17) carrying 30 U.S. troops, seven Afghan commandos, an Afghan civilian interpreter and a U.S. military dog approached, the insurgents fired on the helicopter and it crashed to the ground, killing all aboard.
Of the 30 Americans killed, 22 were Navy personnel, and 17 were SEALs. These included two bomb specialists and 15 operators in the Gold Squadron of DEVGRU, or Team Six, the highly classified unit that conducted the raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan the previous May. None of the operators killed in the Afghan helicopter crash had been involved in that mission, officials said. In addition to the SEALs, the others killed in the Chinook crash included five other Naval Special Warfare (NSW) personnel, three Air Force forward air controllers and five Army helicopter crewmembers.
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