Six pilots and crew from a New York National Guard helicopter unit made a pair of flights into an active firefight in 2023 to rescue a team of French special forces soldiers who had been ambushed by Islamic State fighters. The mission received almost no public attention in the U.S until last weekend, when all six received valor awards from the French army.
The six guardsmen received the French National Defense Gold Medal, an award roughly equivalent to the U.S. military’s Bronze Star Medal with a “V” device for valor. Deployed to Erbil, Iraq, as a CH-47 Chinook unit, the crews flew through a full night, once nearly running out of fuel, as they first inserted French special forces troops into the fight to reinforce the ambushed team, then made a return flight to collect the full force.
Two of the soldiers on the mission, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jared Twigg, a pilot, and Sgt. Samuel Sacco, a crew chief, spoke to Task & Purpose about the mission.
‘There’s a light!’
Soldiers from B Company, 3rd Battalion, 126th General Support Aviation Battalion, which includes elements from five state guards, deployed to the Middle East in January 2023. The unit’s five crews flew on a rotating schedule: two flew routine daily cargo missions on what they called a “ring route” to outposts in Syria and the Tower 22 outpost in Jordan. Two other crews would sit as the alert ships for middle-of-the-night missions, while a fifth crew would get some days off. Many of the soldiers were veterans of Afghanistan, but they hadn’t seen combat on the deployment, Twigg said.
It was close to 10 p.m., Aug. 28, when the call came in. Within minutes, Twigg realized the mission would be serious.
As crews rushed to prep the aircraft and the pilots gathered intel, American infantrymen boarded the Chinooks and buckled up, ready to go. But minutes later, under orders the aircrew never heard, the American soldiers stood and filed off as French special forces soldiers took their place.
“So there was a bit of a wake-up call for me when I realized French commandos were coming out and something was really going on,” Twigg said.
There was more: during the firefight, one of the French commandos in the field had become separated and was missing.
“The TOC radioed to us that [a surveillance aircraft] had located a signature in a ditch they believed to be their MIA soldier,” Twigg said. “So we relayed those coordinates to the French that were on the aircraft, and then we launched.”
Above the village of Hawija, two Apache helicopters, an AC-130 gunship, and a F-16 fighter jet were providing aerial support for the French. But as the Chinooks flew in, Sacco said, they couldn’t see the combat in the darkness. The two Chinooks were “giant targets,” as he put it, but they didn’t take fire.
As they drew close, there was no sign of life. Then an infrared strobe started flashing.
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“There’s a light! There’s a light!” Sacco recalled shouting.
The two helicopters landed just feet from a soldier holding the strobe and the French commandos ran down the helicopter’s rear ramp towards the ambushed unit.
The two Chinooks flew the 70 miles to Baghdad to refuel. As the crews sat in their helicopters for five hours, sirens sounded. The airfield was under attack, but the crews could not leave their running helicopters to seek shelter.
“We were just sitting there hoping it wasn’t our day,” Twigg said.
And while they were waiting on the airfield, they were burning fuel they would later need.
Finally, the signal came. The crew flew back to Hawija, where the French had recovered the body of their missing soldier. As they took off, an F-16 dropped a JDAM bomb onto the site.
“We didn’t know exactly when, but we knew they were preparing to drop it,” Sacco, who was looking backwards from the Chinook’s rear. “And then my goggles washed out for one to two seconds.”
Flying home with ‘one fuel light’
There was one last snag. Rather than return to Erbil, the Chinooks were told to drop half of the French force near Balad, beyond at the edge of their fuel’s range.
“As we dropped off those guys, we lost a considerable amount of weight,” Twigg said. “We got back to Erbil with maybe only one fuel light on.”
According to French media, the five-hour firefight killed one French commando, Sgt. Nicolas Mazier, of Air Parachute Commando No. 10, and wounded several more French and Iraqi soldiers. French authorities said more than 30 Islamic State fighters had been killed. France’s Then-Chief of National Defense Staff, Gen. Thierry Burkhard, authorized the medals for the six National Guard soldiers in March 2024 — though the guardsmen heard nothing about it.
“I found out about the award when a certificate showed up in my [personnel] file,” Twigg said.
