Chief Warrant Officers Kevin Purtee and his co-pilot Allen Crist, members of the Bravo Company of the First Battalion of the 149th Air Regiment, were flying one of the Apache helicopters above the scene. For the two men, who had been in combat duty for the past 11 months, the night at Donkey Island was their longest work shift in Iraq.
Purtee and Crist were listening in on the radio communications coming from the ground troops, and they heard Sergeant Nicola's call for help. It wasn't the first time that a man lay bleeding to death on the ground while they flew their pirouettes in the sky. But this time they had had enough. They began discussing the situation. Purtee, 46, has been a helicopter pilot for 25 years. He served in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as well as in Bosnia. He comes from Kansas City, wears glasses and talks and thinks like a cowboy.
Using his radio he said to Crist, who was sitting in front of him and more than a meter lower down in the Apache's double-seated cockpit: "What do you think? We could get him out…"
Crist, 26, is a man of few words. "Yes, sir," he said.
Purtee replied: "But then you'd have to get out. You'd have to hang on outside, do you understand?"
"Yes, sir," said Crist.
Purtee changed his radio frequency and called Nicola. He said: "Give us a place to land and we'll get your man out of there."
Jamaleldine was lying in the dust, next to thorny bushes, his life slipping away as he lost large quantities of blood. The men lifted him into a Humvee and slowly drove away, cross-country, until they were a good distance south of the battlefield, where there was no enemy fire. They shouted at Jamaleldine not to fall asleep. They drove up and down hills, their headlights switched off, for at least a kilometer. Then they got out, lit flares in the sand for the helicopter and stepped back from the makeshift landing site.
There are no official rules on landing an Apache helicopter outside a secured US airbase, and landing one in the desert at night is a dangerous proposition. Setting it down on the edge of a battlefield is sheer lunacy. At that moment, it wasn't clear to Purtee and Crist whether they would be fired or congratulated. No general would risk a $16-million helicopter for a single man, but that was exactly what Purtee and Crist had decided to do.
During the landing, the helicopter disappeared in a cloud of sand and dust, completely obscuring the ground below. Purtee would later say that he flew "by smell." The slightest mistake would have been enough to destroy the Apache and kill its crew. But he managed to land the chopper safely.
Crist climbed out of the cockpit to make room for Jamaleldine. When Nicola and a soldier named Brijil brought him to the helicopter, "he wasn't exactly looking great," Crist recalls. In fact, he had the waxy and glassy-eyed look of a dying man.
Crist wrapped a wide strip of nylon around his body, a ridiculous excuse for a safety belt, and hooked it to a handle on the helicopter using a carabiner. Crouched on the AH-64's narrow left stub wing, he rocked his body back and forth to check his stability, and then he gave Purtee, in the roar of the turning rotors, the signal to take off.
It was a short flight, but it saved Jamaleldine's life. For the next 15 or 20 minutes, as Purtee flew the Apache slowly and at a low altitude over the desert, the wind whipped at Crist's body and his hands cramped up from the exertion of holding on. Jamaleldine remembers how he felt himself losing consciousness and how he kept biting into his own flesh to stay awake. He fell asleep nonetheless.
