Transcript of #148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot

Alan Mack, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me.

It's, my pleasure. So first first helicopter pilot on the on the show from Night Stalker TF 160. Man, I've been wanting to get 1 of you guys for a long time, and then, we connected, what, about 2 years ago?

About a year and a half. And a

year and a half ago, and then and then, for whatever reason, the conversation kinda fell off. And but now you're here, and, man, I'm

I'm glad to be.

We've had a ton of requests for TF 160th, guys. So thank you for thank you for making the trip.

Glad to be here. That's all I can say.

But, yeah. So everybody starts off with an intro. So, man, you've been a part of, like, so much history, high profile missions in the g wad. I can't I just can't wait to get another perspective. We've interviewed a lot of guys that you've a lot of guys that have been on ops that you've been a part of, and and very apparent, we have a lot of mutual friends.

It's, like, I've blown up. Hey. You gotta get this guy on the show. But, I just I can't wait to get another perspective, and I wanna dig into your training and all all that stuff and get get the life of a night stalker documented. But quick rundown of your intro.

You've served more than 35 years, 17 of which were served in army special operations as a combat and instructor pilot, entrusted with the United States Military Academy flight detachment at West Point, New York, logged more than 6 1,700 flying hours, 32 100 with night vision goggles. Taking part in Operation Desert Steel Shield, Desert Storm, and was a major factor in the global war on terror, flew mh 40 sevens while assigned to 1 sixtieth SOAR, the army's only special operations aviation regiment. Your crew was 1 of the first into Afghanistan and the first into Mazar Sharif as part of America's response to the attacks on 911. Highly decorated, receiving the Legion of Merit, 2 distinguished flying crosses, 3 Bronze Star medals, 3 meritorious service medals, 10 air medals, 1 with valor combat action badge, and the army broken wing award. Now you serve your local government as deputy commissioner of emergency services for Orange County, New York.

You're the author of RAGER 3, a nightstalker's wars. And you have another book coming out, from my understanding, but we were spoke at breakfast. Do you have a title for that 1 yet?

The working title is Chinooks in the Dark, and I'm not sure what the subtitle is.

Nice. And you're a husband, a father, a stepdad, and a grandfather, and a man of faith.

And a pet parent. And a pet parent.

What kind of what kind of pet?

He's got a Jacoby, a Jack Russell Beagle mix.

Nice. Nice. But, quite the career, man. And then just going through the outline, wow. Just some of the stuff you've been a part of.

I'm just gonna read some of the stuff, man. But horse soldier infill, ODA 595, shot down during Operation Anaconda. You're on the rescue op for Marcus Littrell's, lone survivor, also known as, for military folks, Operation Red Wing, and tons more. But, man, just, we got a lot to talk about, man. So before we get too in the weeds, though, everybody gets a gift.

Maybe this is the only reason you're here, I don't know.

But, well, let's see.

I wouldn't blame it. I wouldn't blame you if it was. Ah, the Vigilance Elite Gummies. Vigilance Elite Gummies.

These are great. I I did trade you a book a year and a half ago for some of these, and I'm glad. That's why I came down here, was just for the gummies.

You did. They're still legal in all 50 states, and they're still made here in the USA. And then those are just some stickers for whatever. But

And, you know, like any good house guest, you know, I gotta bring a, you know, housewarming gift. I don't have gummies, but what I've got is a coin. And, it's, I had that bait when the book came out. The the front of that's an attitude indicator because I believe everything in life is about attitude. And, that's a positive attitude by the way there.

Man, thank you. That'll go great right there Cool. With, with all the coins. Thank you, man. I appreciate that.

And 1 last thing, so before we get into the interview, I have a Patreon account. They're our top supporters. They've been with us since the beginning. They're the reason I get to do this, and you get to be here. And, and, part of the thing that that, I promise them is they get to the opportunity to ask a guest a question.

And so this is from Steven Casey. And this they know about you. So Okay. This won't make sense to a lot of people until later on in the interview, but I thought it was a good question. How did you gain the perspective to serve your family while in service, and what helped you do that?

That's actually a tough question. Yeah. You know, family's always been a big part of my life. And as we get into the interview, you you'll find out that, you know, it wasn't always the priority. And, you know, I had to make some adjustments to that.

And, you know, part of what made us stronger, like, especially my relationship with my sons was spending time together and prioritizing that for sure. But sometimes the job took priority over even that. Yep. Yeah. Yep.

How did you find a way? What was your cue?

You know, really it was my wife. So she had her own problems, but she made sure that my sons and I had a good relationship. So whether it was and I remember when my kids were young, there was no Internet, you know, to speak of unless you were on AOL or CompuServe, so it wasn't like just pulling your phone out. So she would shove us out the door and say, you know, it's like you do to your kids, but she included me in it. It was, go spend time with your boys, and we would just go do whatever we felt like doing.

You know, whether it was taking the boat out or hiking or, you know, some kind of sports or something like that. So really putting that effort into my sons was was the key to everything.

You and your sons still pretty close?

Very close. Yeah.

That's good to hear, man. Yeah. That's good to hear. Well, you're ready to dig in?

I'm ready. Let's go.

Alright, man. So we're gonna do we're gonna do the typical military life story. And, so we'll go through childhood, get into your military career, get into this, transition stuff, and then that'll be it. Alright. But, so where did you grow up?

So I was born in New Hampshire, coastal New Hampshire. So I grew up in Portsmouth, which is right by the, the navy base there. There's a submarine base right in the end of the river. And, I'd like to consider myself sort of a a free range teenager at the time, you know, because once again there's no Internet, no cell phones. So, you know, my parents would open the door, I'd go out with my friends, we'd jump on our 10 speeds and ride.

I think we had a range of operations about 20 miles. And, you know, we'd go to the beach, we'd go to, you know, out in the woods, whatever trouble you can get into in coastal New England. I was not a bad kid by any means. Never got in trouble. You know, nothing, you know, nothing bad nothing bad.

But, yeah, we could, you know, toilet paper houses, that kind of thing, you know, at night. That was the extent of our, you know, life of crime, if you will.

Close with your parents?

Yeah. Yeah. My dad passed away in 06. He went to sleep, sat down in his recliner, went to sleep, didn't wake up the next day. And, I kind of think if you're not gonna go out in a ball of flame, you know, like instantly, then and you're sleeping in your favorite chair, you know, not a bad way to go.

Yeah. Yeah. My mother's still, up in New Hampshire. She's a a local artist. You know, she paints, does some wonderful work.

My brother's up there, and, that's kind of the extent of my family, really. My grandparents are all gone.

Right on. But, I mean, what kind of stuff were you into as a kid?

Well, as, really high school is the first I could think of something I could talk about, and it's really cross country and track were my big things. Right? So I did, you know, cross country in the fall, winter track, which, you know, in New England, you know, you're doing indoors. Right? We did that at the University of New Hampshire, and then in the spring, you had spring track.

And, I was generally a miler. Wasn't very fast. I ran about 445, 440, for a mile, and

You don't think 445 is a fast mile?

Well, there were guys that were way faster than me, so that's, pretty good. And I tried my hand at the hurdles, but I really didn't have the speed, you know, in the short term, so I could do like the 3:30 intermediates, you know, which is a long grueling race, you know. But, at the very end when I was a senior, I trained for the decathlete, decathlon. And, I learned to pole vault for the discus, you know, stuff like that. And I actually jumped, I don't know, like 12 feet, something like that, in my my training jumps, and the coach is looking at me like, I think we missed you in some events.

You know, I was like, I don't know. But it was a lot of fun. You know, life revolved around my friends, you know, in track, and,

Good childhood, it sounds like.

Yeah. Yeah. It was good.

What got you interested in flying?

So believe it or not, the Vietnam war was going on. Right? And so I must have been 6, 7 years old or so, and it was on the evening news. Right? You didn't have the 24 hour news cycle.

You had, you know, the 5 o'clock news, 10 o'clock news, or whatever it was, in any time zone. And they always had Huey's zipping across, you know, the screen. And I was like, I wanna do that. Right? To remember the TV Guide when you were a kid?

Oh, yeah. You had the the little paper magazine Yep. You know, the what's on TV? And in it was an insert for the army recruiting. Right?

So I filled it out, and I sent it in, you know, I want to be a pilot, and I must have been, I don't know, 10, maybe 11. And the recruiter sends me a handwritten letter back, a bag full of stickers, and you know stuff like that. He's like hey look I see by your birthday, you're not quite old enough to talk to me, but, you know keep that thought alive, and, you know call me back when you're 18. Fast forward a number of years. I'm in high school.

I'd forgotten about the army thing. My senior year I'm planning on following on to college, in New Hampshire, and I've got a guy, he's gonna be a roommate, the whole thing, and I start thinking, you know, this is in the fall of 1980, and I'm thinking, if I go to school, I'm just gonna party, you know. I'm not gonna study. You know, I wasn't a bad student, but I wasn't a good student. You know what I mean?

I just never did my homework kind of thing. I knew I should, but I didn't, and I knew the college would be the same thing. So I'm worried about what I'm gonna do, and another friend had just been to the army recruiter, And he he comes in, oh, is it the army can do all this stuff, you can go to Germany, you know, which was West Germany at the time, and, I was like, you know, I always wanted to fly helicopters, and I saw a commercial. Remember those BLU can be commercials?

Oh, yeah.

Well, there's like 2, even 3 of them helicopters are involved in, and 1 of them is like a w 1, you know, the the warrant officer ranks are 1 through 5 now, and, he's in a cobra helicopter zipping around, you know, and they finish up, and the senior guys are like not bad for a rookie, you know, and I'm like that's what I want to do. So I go into the army recruiter that my friend had been to, I'm like I want to fly helicopters, and he's like, woah hold on now, and I saw it on TV, you can go from high school to flight school, and he's like, pump the brakes turbo, It doesn't really work like that. And he's like, you know, you gotta have something going for you for that to happen, you know, and I was like, well, like what? And he said, tell you what, why don't you join the army in aviation like an aircraft mechanic, you know, do 2, 3 years, learn the the culture, the lingo, learn about the aircraft, you know, the all that kind of stuff, and then put it for flight school and it's much easier to get in.

Now that statement is is twofold. 1, the recruiter doesn't get credit for officer candidates at all. Right? So even if he got me, he gets no credit for it. May or may not have been able to do it, who knows?

But he did put me into army aviation as a, aircraft mechanic, worked on Huey's, Cobras, 50 eights, and, turns out it was good advice, you know, and I did 9 years. I I reached the rank of staff sergeant E6 in the army. I was in Germany, West Germany at the time, and, I decided I was gonna get out of the army, but I really wanted to fly. So I Really? Really pack it.

Yep. So I had 2 kids, little kids, and my wife was a, Linda at the time was a, a medical assistant, and I thought, you know, they're just going to send me back to Fort Bliss, El Paso, which I didn't want to do, and so I said, you know what? Why don't we get out, but I'll put in for flight school first. If I get picked up, we stay. If not, we get out.

And so I got picked up, which was, was amazing, you know. So I did almost 4 years in in West Germany, and, off to Fort Rucker, Alabama. But that's how I I got interested really was the be all you can be commercials and, the the evening news.

What took you so long to I mean, if you joined to fly Mhmm. Why did it take you 9 years to put your package in?

Because, so my first assignment was to South Korea, which is a whole another story, we might get into later because that was a military junta ran it then, it wasn't a democracy. And I went back many years later, it was a big improvement. But, so a year on a company there, I go to Fort Bliss, Texas where I meet my future b wife, Linda, Do 3, 3 and a half years there, and then, go to Germany on a 3 year accompanied assignment. So we get there, have our 2 sons, and now, you know, the timing is, you know, that. And then flight school's almost a year long, so I count that in the 9 years.

And, that's why.

Right on. Right on. Did you know what you wanted to fly when you put the package in?

I wanted to fly Hueys. Huey's. Because it what I wanted to do was assault. Right? Think of, you know, you know, back then it was the air cav, you know, doing the big big, you know, multi ship assaults, and so that's what I wanted to do.

And the Blackhawk was just coming out. As a matter of fact, in my class, we had like, 72 students, I think, to start with, and, 20, like 30 of us got Hueys. 10 of us got Cobras, and then most of the others got 15. There were only 6 Blackhawks slots. So that's how new the Blackhawks were, you know, showing my age.

But, yeah. So I I wanted to fly Huey's.

So what did you Alright. So so what did you get to fly?

Well, I I learned in 1 Huey's. By the end of class So you know what's happening to the airlines right now where the pilots are aging out? Right? They're hitting age 65 and they can't by law fly. Well in the army, Chinook pilots, a Chinook transition is considered a reward.

Right? So remember the Vietnam war had been going on, guys were flying Huey's, doing the assault work. If you survived it and got back, and then they wanted to send you back, the reward was you could transition to a Chinook. Right? So now you're not necessarily doing assault work, you're still flying around Vietnam, you know, carrying artillery and supplies and all that kind of stuff, but you're not really doing assault work.

So it's cons and it's an advanced aircraft. So it's considered a reward. So if you think of like that Vietnam time frame, these guys on their second tour So about the time I'm in flight school, these guys are all reaching 60, 65 years old, and they're all retiring in droves. Right? So it's very senior heavy rank.

Mhmm. And, the army realized they had to generate from the bottom up, so they're gonna take w ones. Right? And once again, you go w o 1, c w 2, c w 3, c w 4, and now c w 5, which is a relatively new rank. But at the time it was CW 4, it was the senior senior guys.

So how are you gonna replace those guys? The army's plan was to take w ones out of flight school and inject them in while you still had senior people to to mentor them, But who do you take? Right? I mean, it's supposed to be an advanced aircraft, supposed to be a reward, so you want the cream of the crop, if you will. The only way to do that, the metric that they have is grade point average.

Right? So, you know, I have the high school

grade point? No, no,

flight school.

Flight okay.

Flight school grade point average. So you get graded on your academics, your, you know, your participation, your, your flying. Each each flight gets a a grade slip, you know, with a numerical grade, and they they end up with this grade point average. There was a rumor, and it was sort of true, it depended on the class, was that if you were in the top 5 of the class, right, there's 72 of us, but if you're in the top 5, when it when it got to aircraft assignments, you could pick what you wanted. Right?

So if you wanted to pick what you wanted, you wanted to be in the top 5 guys. So there were a bunch of us that were, you know, there were probably 10 of us that were all within, you know, 100 of a point, you know, 98.2, 98.3, you know, that kind of thing. And we're competing. Right? Every time you get your your exams back, you'd be like, oh man, that guy, he got like 0.1 above me, and he's he just moved up.

And so it turned out that I was I was number 1 in the class. And a and a good story here about never quitting is that 1 of the guys I was competing with, if you will, when the assignments came out they did not give us choice. And you know, I got shut we all got shut off in Huey's, all us top guys, and, he got mad, and he I want to say he quit, but he he stopped trying. Right? So he studied enough.

He did what he had to do, but he quit. He he dropped from being in 98 point something to, you know, 88 point something, right? So instead of going from an A into a B kind of thing. And then toward the end, what I just talked about, the Chinook thing, the army said okay we're gonna do 2 slots from your class, get Chinooks. Right?

So 2 2 pilots would get Chinooks, and we're gonna take number 1 and 2 guy. And I happen to be number 1, and my stick buddy was number 2, and this guy probably would have been 1 or 2 had he kept going, but he gave up. And now he's like throwing stuff around the, you know, the classroom. He's like, damn it. I shouldn't have quit.

You know, it's like, good point buddy. And I remember to this day. I I use that lesson on my kids, and tell them it's like, don't get mad that you didn't get the job you wanted, don't get mad that you didn't get this or that. Things always work out. They just do.

Don't give up.

Get out. So you wanted a chinook?

I didn't. I was actually mad that I got it. Really? Yeah. Because remember I said I wanted to be Yeah.

That's why.

Salt work. Right? And I'm like, a Chinook? That's bull, you know? It's gonna be like, you know, flying from airport to airport, that's gonna suck.

And, the instructors, you know, all retired warrant officers, all older guys, they like, back then, slap me in the back of the head. Right? And they're like, you idiot. Shut your mouth and take the slot. Right?

And I'm like, but I want to fly Huey's. And they're like, Huey's are going away. Trust me. Take the Chinook. Right?

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So I did, you know, grudgingly. And as soon as I flew that thing, I was like, this is amazing. It's 1 of the fastest helicopters in the planet, let alone the US army. It's, it's very powerful and it's no harder to fly than a than a Huey, but, it, you know, there's a whole now conversation on on that. But that's how I ended up, you know, flying Chinooks.

Learned on Hueys, transitioned into CH 47 Deltas, you know, just before Desert Desert Shield. And then, you know, I flew them there, and then, you know, I ended up instructing in those, and then let you know, we get into the 160th, you know, like Wow.

Wow. Let's go to I mean, so what was it like for you walking into flight school?

So you start out dream. So it's different now, but at the time, what you did is you first went to walk school, Warren Officer Candidate School. And that was like 8 weeks of, we start out with, you know, you did hell week, we had like hell day, you know, and, it was tough. And I remember the little head game they played was they, you know, they came in, you beat the hell, and they'd say okay, somebody yells in the room, you know 20%, got it. And then like we just got off the phone with the secretary of the army, you know, we have to lose 20% of you because of budget cuts, so we're just gonna do hell hell day every day until 20% you quit.

Right? And I'm like, well I'm not quitting, you know. You could have to throw me out of here. And there were guys, it was like 1 guy got up and walked out, so it worked. You know, I was like, alright, he didn't wanna be here.

What does hell day consist of?

It you know, it's like, you know, crawling through the mud pits, and push ups, and mountain climbers, and just burning out physically.

Just a beat down.

Yeah. It's a big it's a beat down. And, it it is not pleasant, to say the least, especially for army aviators, and, or guys that wanna be. And these guys, you know, the TAC officers are walking around just like the guys at Budge, you know, you know, except back then, you know, smoking a cigarette. Come on, let's go upstairs.

We'll get some donuts and some coffee, it's warm. You know, it's comfortable. You get a shower, and we'll just put you on your way. Look, you're you're an E7. You know, there were guys that were E7s there.

It's like you're an E7, you had a good life. Why do you wanna do this? You know, and they yeah. Right? Screw it.

You know, I quit. You know, and guys would just do that. There were I don't know, 4 or 5 guys, quit during it, and that 1 guy in the meeting. And, you know, they they do that to you, not to that extent, but for the next 8 weeks because you're not flying. So you're doing, what we call cubing.

Right? So you have a cubicle. Right? You have your your bunk, you know, a desk, a locker, and every morning when you get up you have, I don't know, 10 minutes to have your bunk with a white collar on it, and your your, your coat hangers to be exact, you know, you know the big deal, like any NCO school you have been to. And, you know, you get outside obviously, you're not fast enough, you're not straight enough, whatever, they come into the barracks and throw the stuff out of your locker onto the floor, so that when you came back at the end of the day, you know, you got like an hour to that was personal time, now you're repairing the damage they did as opposed to just adjusting things.

And it's a, you know, it's a head game. It's a little bit of hazing really, but you know, it kinda it does go to show who army warrant officers are in my age group, you know, why we're such assholes. But anyway, so you so you do that, and, then when you when you're done, you move on to so that's a company, and you move on to b company, and that's primary flight. Alright? Which is where you learn to fly.

So, you know, depending on what they call the bubble, you know, where, the schedule is for classes, you know, based on aircraft maintenance, weather, that kind of stuff. So, you know, you might you might roll right through, you might go from a company to b company and roll right into c company, you know, 7 months later. Or you could have, you know, 2 weeks of rain that's, you know, you can't fly in or something, and it just sets you back. Well what that does is that ripple effect is it sets back all the other classes. So in the meantime while you're waiting to get the flight, you're, you know, you're polishing brass and you're doing, you know, just things to keep you busy, painting rocks, you know, that kind of stuff.

Or you might be working at, 1 of the facilities on post, you know, as a, like a well, think of it like a detailer. Mhmm. You know, giving you like a temporary assignment. Like I actually worked at the museum, for a couple of weeks, which was pretty good because I was aircraft mechanic. I helped them with some, some of the displays, you know, getting the you know, as they were setting them up.

But that's how you get into the the flying, and then when you're

in how just real quick, how long does it take, let's say there's no weather delays or anything, how long does it take from day 1 of flight school before you're in the air,

offering

a helicopter?

I'd say 6 weeks, maybe 7.

6 weeks. Yeah. That's quick.

Yeah. That's if everything rolls right along. And you start out in primary learning to fly right now. Just before I got there, they switched over, the army switched over from the TH 55, which was a little 2 seater, a little bug looking thing that, it was just you and your instructor, and when you picked up to a hover when you pull power the nose wants to, to go to the right and you have to give it left pedal to to keep it in heading. And and, in a modern helicopter the engines keep pace with the the rotors, and back then in this thing you had to like control the throttle at the same time, so it was an additional thing.

I got lucky in that it went away and they had just transitioned into Huey's as the primary trainer, which I wouldn't fly. Anyway, so I get into this thing and, you know, they take you out to the stage field, there's there's Huey's all over the place, you know just flying around hovering doing their thing, and the instructor's like, alright. You know, here's what you do. Right? You have the controls.

I have the controls, and then you just, you know, you go off in whatever direction. I mean you can't hover. Right? And that's the very first, it's insane because when you go to bed at night, so you have a stick buddy, right? So when a partner, right?

So when he when he's flying you're in the back, and when you're flying he's in the back, right? So not only are you there for your flight period, but you're in the back going up and down and left and right, and just your your inner ear is getting all, you know, discombobulated. Right? So at night when you went to bed, you're you felt yourself it's like being on a ship, right, for a while and you go lay in a regular bed, and you feel like you're moving, but you're not, and that's what it's like. And then, you know, the first person in the class learns to hover, you know, he comes back and he's like, you know, I found the hover button.

You know, which means you can just, you know, maintain a stationary, you know, 3 foot hover, you know, you don't drift in, and then, you know, as individuals in the class learn, right? It takes about 5 hours really to learn to hover, right? So in each each flight period's about an hour and a half, so it takes a couple of flights, and you know when you're like the last guy, you're feeling like, what am I incompetent, I can't do this, maybe I'm not, you know, a pilot. Right? And then you just 1 day you find yourself hovering, you know, they're like, hey, you have the controls, I have the girls.

Hey, you're hovering. Wow. I'm hovering. Right? And once you learn, say, riding a bike, you don't you don't forget.

You know? And so that transitions into traffic pattern flight, so you're going up and around the pattern, you're coming in, you're landing, let's say, you know, the

So literally the first thing you do is just try to learn how to hover.

Yep. For, like, I don't know, 3, 4 days, 5 days maybe, if you're if you're late.

How many helicopters are up at once trying to hover? 20.

Oh my gosh.

You could go there. That has to look hilarious.

Every stage field has a set of bleachers. Right? And people, locals, would just pull up, there was no fences, you just pull up, get them a bleacher, you know, your hot cocoa, whatever, depending on the time of year, and iced tea, and just watch the students, you know, go nuts. And then what happens though with the traffic pattern stuff is you start including emergency procedures. Now these are like in the Huey, you know, hydraulics out, so the aircraft's very difficult to fly and you have to kind of run it on to land.

You have, tail rotor malfunctions where you have to control the yaw of the aircraft as you're coming in, as you change power, you have to adjust the throttle to keep the nose straight as you touch down. Auto rotations. Right? So it's a single engine aircraft, the Huey. So the instructor will roll the throttle off on you.

You're just flying along, and he rolls the throttle off to idle, and you no longer have lift, right? So now you lower the collective, takes all the pitch out of the blades, and you descend like a rock, right? But the rotors are still spinning, right? And you have to, keep the rotor RPM between 97 and 101%. In order to do that, you you play with the collective which changes the pitch in the blades, so the more pitch you put in, the more drag you get.

Right? But you wanna keep it, you know, at a 100% because when you get to the bottom, it lasts like 75 feet, you flare, now you pull in the power, you put the pitch in the blades, and you're using 1 chance to cushion that baby on, and we call them crash bangs. Right? You're doing that all day long. Right?

And then eventually they deem you safe enough to solo. Right? So back in the, in the t h 55, you really did solo. It was just you. Now you're going out with your stick buddy, and he ain't been saving you.

Right? So you're still solo, but you have somebody, you know, next to you in case you die. He'll go with you. But, yeah. So you you solo, you do a couple of traffic patterns.

I think it was 5 traffic patterns by yourself, and the instructor, you know, gets back in, and you're like, alright, you soloed. The last guy to solo of the class is like, you know, it's, there was a name for it, I can't remember, but you you had to ride we had the ceremony, it was like, pitchers of beer, and everybody lined the in front of the building at the barracks, you know, and it looked like a stage field. The markings were like, you know, painted on just as if it were stage field, and that guy would ride a thing called the solo cycle. So it's a bicycle that somebody had engineered, you know, it had rotor blades, and when you drove it, you know, when you pedaled, the blades spun. Right?

Oh, man.

And you

had a ride this bicycle. I don't have a picture of it. Oh, man. That's awesome. But, and then you get your solo wings, which is like these cloth wings that get sewn on your hat.

Each class has a color, and back then they don't do it anymore, but each class, had a baseball cap, and we were royal blue. And you had that sewn on so you could see who, you know, we're a real pilot now, sort of, you know, within the context of flight school.

Nice. And, so yeah.

So then you move on from that, you move up, you take your final check ride in primary, and you move on to advanced skills, which is Charlie Company, and there, this was a lot of fun actually, now you're doing terrain flight navigation, you know, you got a handheld map, Right? And, this is where you I call it the bus driver move. Right? Where you're trying to make the map meet the terrain, because you get lost. It's like, oh, there's a stream over there.

No wait, that's a stream, and you move, you know, so it's like a guy driving a big bus, you know. And, so you learn to do that, and fly, and that's a lot of fun actually, and, you finish that up with a, great big exercise where like the cobras come in, and the Huey's, and it's a big, they call it an avtac. I don't remember what that stood for, but it was a big big event. It was really cool.

And then you moved into nights. What's the, I mean, what's the what's the field exercise? What's the

it was like, we we all flew out to an assembly area. Right? And we went in and got a briefing, from, you know, the CADRE plan, the mission. So it was, you know, 20 Hueys flying in 1 big ass formation like something out of Apocalypse Now, you know, and the Cobras would roll in and do the gun runs, and the o h 50 eights would do, you know, call in the spot reports, all that stuff, and we would all do this. And we're a bunch of we're not even w ones yet, we're still walks.

We're not officer candidates. You know, the instructors are obviously having fun because they're showing off, you know, their students can do this and that, and it was it was a lot of fun. You know, I don't think they do that anymore. It's it's probably very risky when you think about what they were doing, you know? All these aircraft in 1 little area, synchronized.

I mean, this is this is advanced stuff. Yeah. And, they allowed us to do that.

How far in to training is that?

That's several months in. That's that's gotta be like, 5, 6 months in.

Okay.

And and then because when you finish that, now you move to night. And when you go to night, you do all the same stuff. You do stage field, right, traffic patterns, you do auto rotations, emergency procedures, all that stuff with goggles. And when I was in there, we had, the army had just transitioned from what we call full face fives. Right?

So ANVES fives or PVS fives, whatever they were. And they they used to be like, like Are you

talking about the mono? No.

No. These are they're they're binoculars, but they are like a a rectangle.

Oh, these are like the thing that the eyeglass doctor used.

Put them on your face. Right? Like a diving mask. Think of a diving mask where it's just got toilet paper tube sticking out of it. Right?

Everything else is black. That's what they started with, and and I got there, somebody in the army had figured out that if you took a, a saw, you know, and you cut 1 half of the mbg away, the plastic housing, turned it upside down, you could stick the lip of it without the foam up into your helmet, where the where the visor is, and then with surgical tubing, you wrap the surgical tubing around in velcro and you suck this thing to your head. Right? And you had to have a weight bag because, you know, it's way out here like this, and you had to when you did it on a rotation, when you when you drop the power the, the engines split off, like the rotor and the engine split, the needles. But if it doesn't, you're going to fall out of the sky, so you have to make sure it happens because sometimes it doesn't.

Right? And so

Wait, what do you mean?

So there's 2 big needles. Right? There's a Big needles? Needles, like gages.

Okay.

Right? And and, so 1 of them is the rotor, and 1 of them is the engine.

Okay.

So whenever you pull or reduce power, they should work together. Right? So that means the engine is driving the rotors, which is good. But if for some reason there's a clutch, it's called a Sprague clutch, it's a 1 way clutch, and if the engine rolls off, it's supposed to free wheel, allowing the rotors to spin. If so you should have a split in the needle.

So if you drop the power, roll the throttles off, it should split. Right? But if you don't get a split, that means you've got a a clutch failure, and you've got to recover because you're not gonna survive if you don't do something about it. So you've got to, focus 1 tube inside at the instruments while the other one's outside, and determine that, okay, that's good, then you can focus it back out and then finish the maneuver. It was insane.

Right? And the army at the time was going, we own the night. We learned we kind of were renting it, you know, we don't really own it yet. But, it's like there was no m v g lighting in the cockpit, like it was red light, and so you had to turn off all the lights. So what we did is we had these little tiny chem lights.

Right? They look like maybe an inch, inch and a half long. You break those, and you tape them into place over key instruments, and you had what was called blind cockpit drill. So every switch in the cockpit, you had to be able to find without looking at it because you've got these things on your face. And so you do that, and then you go do terrain flight that way, and terrain flight navigation, and so you're doing this this whole progression.

And what's interesting is the the students from my time frame were kind of like the first ones to do this, not literally the first, but you know that 1st year. And so when you get to your unit, all the old guys don't want to do it, like they're qualified to do it, but they're not proficient at it, and they don't wanna do it. Right? And that's the whole story I'll get into with Desert Shield, Desert Storm. But So that's how flight school kind of goes, and when you finish up nights, and we used to fly, unaided nights as well, they call it, Nighthawk.

So we'd you'd fly it, you know, wherever safe altitude was, 300 feet, something like that. You knew where the how tall the tallest obstacle was, and you flew at least 200 feet higher than that. And you'd fly around, and this is what the guys in Vietnam used to do. You know? You fly in the dark without being able to see, you get to your your fix or you know maybe you know a Sandy would put a rocket down for you and you know that's the l z, right?

And you go in there with a white search light on, and it can be tough, you know, and we did stuff without the search light and they'd have, chem lights, you know, in the, in the l z or maybe strobe lights or something like that. And as you came in on your approach, if you got any kind of blinking, that meant there was foliage between you and the and the object, and you would hold off on the descent, you know, until you could see it again. And you go in, and it's funny because that's kind of a lost art now, with, everybody being so used to goggles. Interesting.

Yeah. Interesting.

And that finishes up flight school? What what

what did you find to be the most challenging portion of flight school?

Night vision hovering, because you had to maintain a 3 foot hover, and you did that, you didn't have a radar altimeter. Right? A digital readout in the cockpit. You looked out through the chin bubble to the side door, and if you saw individual blades of grass, like, it would be sort of fuzzy, which meant you were higher than 3 feet, and you wanted to get down just enough so the individual blades of grass stood out, and that's like 3 feet. But

How the hold on. How the hell do you see individual blades of grass when the rotors are

Oh, they're blowing all over the place, you know, but, you can. Damn. But, you know, with that being said, this is why flying in the desert is so tough because there's no texture. Well, I take that back. The NTC, National Training Center out of Fort Irwin, California is a different kind of desert.

It's not like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and Iraq are very, you know, Saudi's got those smooth beautiful dunes like you see in Lawrence of Arabia. In Iraq, it's kind of, you know, flattish with some rocks occasionally, but it's not scrubby like the NTC, right? So the army kind of, gave itself a false sense of security and how well we could fly in the desert. Right?

Because, oh, it's not that hard. Right? Then you get over to the Saudi desert, it's like flying in snow. You know, when you come into a hover because you look out, you can't see individual grains of sand, you know, so it's Interesting. It's tough.

Yeah. But I found the hardest part of that was the they called the OGE 360 hover. So you get a book out of ground effect, so it's about 80 feet, and I guess about 60 feet. So you're higher than the trees, it's dark, there's no moon, and you have to do a 360 degree turn, a pedal turn. Right?

So you the aircraft will pivot, and you gotta start on 1 heading, end on that heading, and be at the exact same altitude when when you finish, and you gotta be over the same spot of ground. Right? And the instructor, who's very experienced at this, can tell, you know, you can't. You're like, I think I did the good news. Like, ah, dude, you drifted 20 feet.

So that was tough. I had a hard time with that. I'll bet.

I'll bet. Let's go into, I mean, graduation. So you graduated the number 1.

Yep. Yep. So I've got a, you know, distinguished honor grad. But the army, you know, unlike the air force, there's a process for a warrant officer. It's a, like, a 3 day process.

Like the first thing they want us they wanna emphasize is that you are a soldier. Not that you're a pilot, not that you're an officer, you're a soldier. Right? And then, I can't remember what ceremony they did for that, but it was specific to being a soldier. And then like the next day, you got pinned to your bars.

Right? And then the next day, they did a wing ceremony, you got your wings. Right? So it was a they wanted to emphasize, you were a soldier, an officer, and a pilot. You know?

The rest of us are, like, no, we're pilots. But that's what the army wanted us Yep. To be. You know?

Yep. How did it feel for you? I mean, you wanted to fly since, what, I think you said 6 years old. Yeah.

6 years old.

Package in to enlist as a pilot at age 10, and now now you're graduating honor grad.

It was awesome. You know, I mean, I loved it. And, then I left that. So 2 weeks later, I was in the Chinook transition, and I learned how to fly Chinook. That was 6 to 8 weeks.

I mean, how hard is it to learn from to go from a Huey to a Chanel Gerbil?

It wasn't that hard. Like flying so, you know, we joke about the Chinook being the the double headed dumpster. Right? It's like a dumpster with 2 palm trees having a fight, or, you know, a Greyhound bus, you know, kind of thing. You know, actually the seals used to call us the black school bus of death, you know, when we're going to the acts.

But, even though the aerodynamics are different, I'm not gonna go into it here because it's fairly complex, and I don't think I could explain it at this age. But the control movements that the pilot does are the same. What happens over your head is pure friggin' magic. You know, it just it just does what it does. Right?

And so all you're really doing in that 6 to 8 weeks is learning the emergency procedures for the aircraft.

Okay.

So, you know, that you practice, you know, generator failures, engine failures. Right? And this has got a a twin engine, right? So it's 2 engines and you have to practice with losing an engine, and then there's other malfunctions, you know, high side, low side, you know, things like that that you you just have to learn. You get proficient at it, and you start out with rote memory, right?

So you you memorize the steps in a checklist, and when something happens you you literally go down the steps. And as you get through the course, you start responding to the indications versus, you know, oh the rotor's low, I know I have to lower the thrust to the collective, you know, the power. And, you just you just learn all that. And then you do nights there as well with the Chinooks, doing external loads. You have to learn how to do sling loads.

And, it was fun.

What's what's the first thing you noticed maneuverability wise that was different from the Huey to the 47?

I can tell you that the 47 is it it surprised me. Remember I said I didn't want Chinooks, and then when I flew it the first time or 2, it was like, hey, this is awesome. Because it's just as maneuverable. It'll do it has all the same aerodynamic limitations, and it's faster and stronger. You know we routinely outrace Cobras and Apaches coming back at the end of the day, you know, they'd be like, you know, we converge on the corridor that brought us to the the home stage field, and, you know we just click the power a little bit in the end with your thumb and the cyclic could move forward in the aircraft to just accelerate, you know, and just leave them in the dust, you know, and, the Apaches couldn't keep up, Cobras couldn't keep up, and I always thought they were fast, you know, so it was fun.

You know, my instructor's, like, speed up. I'm, like, well, they're right. They're kind of in front of us. Nah. Speed up.

You know, he liked, you know, showing. That's very cool.

But, so were you 1 of the first 47 pilots in the army?

No. 1 of the first w ones Okay. To fly Shonaks. So, how long had they been around?

W ones? Shunuchs.

Oh, Shunuchs. They I wanna say 1958 for the Okay. For the a model, and that's what, the 101st airborne was originally the 11th air assault test. Right? And what they had to do was prove the air assault concept, air mobility, was a feasible concept.

And, they needed the Chinook to make that happen. So in order to move, you know, all these troops around Vietnam, not only do you need the Hueys, but you need, you know, gunship support which was Hueys that were armed, and then you had to move the artillery and supplies and things like that, so you need the Chinook. You need the actual capability of the Chinook, which is funny because the a model, a Blackhawk today can lift more than an a model Chinook, you know, so you could have, you know, done the 101st with Blackhawks had they, you know, existed 30 years earlier. But, yeah, so the there was a poster that Boeing put out when the Delta model came out, right? So there's a, b, c, d, there's a f and a g, and it said the silhouette only the silhouette remains the same.

Right? So you get that the double headed dumpster on the outside, but the engines are beefed up, the transmissions, the drive train, the avionics, you know, so all of the computers and the electronics, you know, just improved with each each version, you know. So like a d model, which is what I flew in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, was about 185 a copy, 18,000,000 copy. And when I flew the g model, which was the last version I flew, those were 62,000,000 apiece. And that's more than a a fighter jet, you know, like, an f 16.

Wow.

And, it's because of the the advanced, the capabilities.

That's all I can say. Do you think that being a flight mechanic helped you with flight school?

Oh, yeah. Especially because I worked on Huey's. So when my the reason I had such a high grade point average, I think, is because when my peers had to study aircraft systems, I already knew them. I just had to touch over what what kind of data they probably wanted for the answers for the test, and I could study things like AeroMed, you know, hypoxia, you know, spatial aviation regulations. So I got to study all this stuff the other guys had to split that time, you know, so it helped a lot.

Yeah. What did you say? Spatial what?

Spatial disorientation. What is that? So there are, there are illusions, right? And now you're testing my AROMED. Right?

Vestibular illusions, which I believe are up in your ear. Right? So you can feel like a lot of times what happens is if an airplane gets in a spin, right? They call it a graveyard spiral. You get in a spin, and when you go to pull out of the spin, you turn into it, you feel like you've spun in the other direction because inside your ears are these little hairs, right?

That in your semicircular canals, that's where your balance comes from. And so sometimes when you have an ear infection, that's why you might lose your balance a little bit, and and there's those. And then there's visual illusions, things like, you ever been on a stoplight in your car and you think you're rolling, but it's the guy beside you back Yeah. Or going forward? That's 1 of the illusions, right?

Reverse perspective illusion. And then, you know, over the water is where it's really dangerous. If you don't have a horizon, you know, you get, I can't remember all the news, like, 20 different illusions you can get. But you have to learn them, and how to get out of them. Like, to recognize that you've got it, or that somebody else has it, and then, you know, correct for it.

So

Man, so the that would scare the shit out of me. So so they they put you in these situations where you actually feel the illusion?

Yeah. Yeah. They have chair like a chair, you know, they they, I don't know how to describe it. You sit in this chair, you strap in, and it's like a gyroscope, and they kinda they they first they get it spinning, and you're sitting there, and then they engage it, and the chair goes around, and then you spin upside down, and all this other stuff. And then they stop you, and you have a set of controls, and you're supposed to move the controls to make some indication like a, maybe a marble or something like that is in this flat, a flat panel.

It's like little cables. I mean, this is very primitive, but it worked, and you'd you'd have to center the the panel so that the ball, the marble would be in the middle using aircraft controls. And when you first did it, it's just like when you're a kid and you're spinning around and around and around, and you stop, and you're like, woah. Right? Yeah.

It's just like that. And so you have to learn, and there were many times in my career we might even end up touching on some of those where either me or somebody else got into 1 of those illusions there. It almost killed us, you know, and it did, you know, it did kill some friends.

Oh, man.

And it was a conventional unit, a Chinook that was in Afghanistan, had to be in, 2002, 2003, and they were flying daylight, ran into a sandstorm, couldn't see out the window, so they climbed up to what they considered a safe altitude, and they got spatial disorientation. They literally rolled that aircraft upside down, pulled the blades off essentially, and fell to their deaths, you know, head first.

Holy shit.

So it's very dangerous, and it's 1 of those things that everybody pays very close attention to.

Yeah. I can imagine. Do they simulate it in the bird?

They try to. It's hard.

They do?

You know, or in the simulator. You know, they'll put you in situations where, you know, the aircraft gets into an unusual attitude. Right? So it's called unusual attitude recovery. So they'll put the aircraft in some weird situation, like it might be in the aircraft what they'll do is they'll say close your eyes, put your arms up like this, put your head down.

Right? And then the pilot will say what he's not doing. He'll say, I'm turning to the right, and then he'll turn left, and then he'll say, I'm I'm rolling out. He'll roll a little bit, but not enough, and by the time you're done, open your eyes. You open your eyes, take the controls, and what you see out the window is not what you had in your mind.

Right? Sometimes it makes people puke, you know, it's like, so, yeah, you you have to learn to do that because the basics will kill you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We talk about the ground.

Let's talk about, I mean, since we're on the subject, let's talk about 1 of the instances where you've you've felt the illusion in real world.

So I'm in Afghanistan. Been there a couple years. This is probably 05. And we're at a place called Salerno. Right?

It's in Eastern Afghanistan. And we're coming back from a mission, and, it's late. We're exhausted. We'd been, putting the Rangers up in the KG Pass, and, the weather rolled in, and it was raining really hard as we're crossing back over the mountains to get back to Bagram. You know the rain is just coming down and you can't see out the window.

Now we've got a terrain following radar, but the radar has limitations when it comes to rain, precipitation. Right? If it's too dense, it sees it as an obstacle and tries to climb you over it. Well, a rainstorm might be 60,000 feet, and you're not doing that in a Chinook. We'll go to maybe 20, 25 if we're stripped down, but you're not getting getting to 60.

Mhmm. So we're flying through the mountain. We got terrain on both sides. Rain comes down, like, it's not raining when we enter the mountains, and then just down it comes. Right?

And my buddy's flying, Rich, and, he says, Alan, I'm getting vertigo. And I'm like, well, you know, suck it up dude. You know, we we still got another, you know, 10 minutes here in the mountains, you know. You gotta hang on. Right?

And he's like, you know, we can barely see the terrain, to the to the bottom plexiglass, and I'm like, you gotta just and we're following we've got, what we call the HSD. Right? It's a horizontal situation display. So it's like a a compass rose with a with a course line, like you might see in, in Waze really, but you get the compass on there. And he's like, Al, I can't I can't do it, you know, and the aircraft starts to veer toward the toward the the the rock wall.

Right? So I take the controls. Right? And I'm like, I have the controls. He's like, alright.

Thanks. And we're flying, and the rain is just terrible. And now I'm getting the same sensation. Right? What's happening is the aircraft, we didn't know this, the aircraft is inducing, there was something, there was a component that was bad, and some of the this is where these automated systems sometimes can bite you, and the aircraft's trying to put us it says we're level, but it doesn't feel like we're level, and we weren't.

You know? And I could see that so I had differing instrumentation. Right? So we have an old standby. Right?

Something from 19 fifties in the center console. Right? And it's it's saying I'm gonna turn, and the other thing says I'm level. So now I gotta figure out which 1 to follow, and then

How do you figure that out?

You gotta look at all the other secondary instruments. So there's a there's a there's a wet compass, you know, and is it moving, you know, because if it's if you're in a turn, it's moving, you know, and you can also look at the at the the compass rose itself if it's moving, and the attitude indicator is different. So you you gotta look at all what we call your secondary instruments. Right? So the primaries, the the attitude indicator like that coin I gave you, that's a primary instrument.

And all the secondaries just kinda confirm or deny what you're seeing. Right? And you can fly with just secondary instruments. It's it's not fun, but you can do it. So here we are, maybe I'm on the controls maybe a minute, and I'm getting ready to throw up.

It's like I'm losing my balance, there's none nothing's making right. We are climbing now because we can't see out the window. So we get all power in, we're climbing at about 3,000 foot a minute, which is pretty fast for a helicopter that's heavy. And, we did have the benefit of height above terrain. So remember I said that you get the compass rose, you get the course line, and then if there's terrain around you that's at your altitude or above, the screen is red.

Right? You can see where it is. Right? And it was all red in the screen, and we're climbing at 3,000 foot, because we're going up the mountain. And I'm like, dude, I can't do it.

You've got to take the controls. And Rich takes the controls, and I got it, I got the controls. And now I'm just trying to, you know, it's like trying to get my my head straight, and, because I know he's not gonna last. And same thing about it, 45 seconds later, he's like, Al, I can't do it. Like come on, you gotta do it.

I can't do it. And he's like get back and forth, so I took the controls now. Now that red terrain presence I told you about is starting to part from the the course line. Right? So now there's a little bit of black, you know, so that means what's right along the course line is below me.

Could be a 100 feet, which isn't much, but the terrain's still out my left and right door. If we if we don't stay right on the course, we are going to crash, and you know, we we say that cumulogranite, you know, has a 100% kill ratio, so you gotta do it. And then so we passed the controls back and forth for for, I don't know, 5 minutes, and we popped out of the clouds. Like the rain stopped, it was solid clouds over the valley in Gardez, and, we pop out of the clouds, and now we can see. Right?

So we can see the mountains off in the distance, and now your brain can re register what you're doing. You can ignore all of the instrumentation. And so we're like, oh my god. We we almost died. Right?

And, that kind of thing has happened, you know, a couple of times, but that's the most the easiest 1 to explain. Man. And then we get back, and I'm telling the, the maintenance pilot, we'd actually been complaining about that helicopter for a couple of day a couple of flights, saying that it made us feel funny when we flew it, and that we didn't wanna fly it in the clouds. So when it happened, we get back, and the the poor maintenance guy, you know, he's we're on night schedule, he's on a day schedule, and I'm like, I'm looking for him. He should be up by now.

Right? We're getting back, sun's coming up. And I'm looking for him, and me and Rich are gonna kick his ass. Right? We we just survived this, right?

And he was like, yeah, it's fine, it's fine. And so he did take it out to fly, and he's like, oh yeah. There's a problem with, you know, whatever it was, you know, something that was working backwards essentially, 1 of the little sensors. And, they sent it home. Like they said, they got a c 17 that week, brought a new aircraft in, sent that 1 home.

And, that kind of stuff, it'll catch you. You know, there's guys

Are you worried about getting shot down while all this is going on too?

I mean, it could it's possible. Yeah. At that stage of the game, I wasn't ever worried about getting shot down. Okay. You know, I mean, we'll we'll address why when we when we talk about anaconda, but, yeah.

I wasn't I mean, I just this was a good example of why I kind of figured I was going to die on every deployment.

Okay.

And that's because if the enemy didn't scare me, it was the terrain and weather that did. Because we would, you know, the the problem with Afghanistan in particular, Iraq is so much simpler. But Afghanistan, there's no weather reporting that's reliable. You know, and the area is so vast. Right?

I mean you got these big mountains, you got the plains, the dunes, and the weather patterns, and simple things like temperature can make all the difference whether you have enough power at the top of mountain versus at the bottom. Right? Because there's supposed to be a 2 degree drop off in Celsius for every 1,000 feet you go, except in Afghanistan it's pretty much the same at 20,000 feet as it is at 10,000 feet. So if you're expecting to have a certain amount of power at the top of the hill, the mountain, it might not be there, and there's I don't wanna go there. There's, let's just say there's a there's a very famous mission where somebody wished away about 15 degrees of Celsius, and I'm not gonna talk about it.

But, Yeah. That's how important, you know. And you know the funny thing with that is that, in training in the nineties, we made the mistake at sea level of teaching the Rangers, the Seals, the Delta guys. We had a saying, there's always room for 1 more ranger. Right?

So if I tell you as a team leader, alright you can have 25 guys on board and we'll give you, you know, 2 hours of of flight, you know, for that, and you go okay. And we're just about to take off you, hey, I got 5 more guys, is that okay? Yeah. Put them on. And then, you know, guys come running from the other, hey, we got 3 more guys, can we take them?

Yeah. Well Afghanistan, you couldn't do that. If you gave a number, you know, that was it. You know, so if somebody said, can you take 1 more Ranger? No, I can't.

You know, and if you did, you would not have enough power for whatever it was you were gonna do, and you would pay the price. Now, that wasn't always fatal. It wasn't always damage to hardware, but you always came home going, damn. I'm not doing that again. You know?

And you learned that lesson again and again and again.

Damn. Well, let's, let's take a quick break. Yeah. When we come back, we'll, get to where he went after flight school.

Sure.

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Alright, Al. We're back from the break. We just kinda wrapped up your initial flight training. And, so where are

you going after this? My assignment as a Chinook pilot at that point is Savannah, Georgia, going to Hunter Army Airfield, Fort Stewart, Georgia. And, so I I finish up the Chinook transition, flight school's done, it's behind me, and I take 30 days of leave up in New Hampshire, and I'm down to, sign in at Hunter Arm Airfield. So I get there, I sign in, and then what happens when a new aviator gets to a unit is you undergo what's called a commander's eval and progression. RL progression, readiness level.

So you start out as RL 3, readiness level 3, and that means you can only fly with an instructor, and then they say okay, you're safe, you're good, you're RL 2. Right? So once you're in RL 2 level, you can now fly with other pilots in command that aren't instructors, and you go, but you're not really qualified to do everything, and then you make rl 1, readiness level 1, you could do everything because your your progression is where it's supposed to be. So anyway, I get to the unit, I get my commander's eval, I get RL 3, RL 2, and then Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. And very very shortly, we are notified that we're going to deploy, now I'm in the 18th airborne corps.

Right? Our headquarters is at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and our battalion headquarters is also there. So there's our sister company, a company, we're a b company, 2nd on 159. We're the Hercules guys. It's a pretty cool nickname.

And, what we ended up doing was we flew all of our aircraft. We had 16 Chinooks in our company, so you had 30 Chinooks total in the battalion, and we flew from Savannah to Wilmington, North Carolina to put the aircraft, you're gonna tear them down, bubble wrap them, you shrink-wrap them, and you're gonna put them on the top of an old ship. Right? But they didn't have the old RoRo's, you know, the roll and roll off. These are like you crane it up to the top and it's gonna ride it, you know, 5 miles an hour from, you know, Wilmington to Saudi Arabia.

So we fly up there and there's a whole funny story to that, but we, we take a bus back, and now it's gonna take a month and a half, I think, for our aircraft to get there.

Mhmm.

So they've got to finish up my training. Right? For me to fly in combat, I've got to be readiness level 1, not RL 2, because you're still technically in training. So the 160th of the 3rd battalion was right next door, and our instructor pilots knew those instructor pilots. They were all friends, you know, and, they're like, hey, can we borrow on your helicopters to train up, you know, the WOGE, which is Warrant Officer Junior.

Right? It's kind of a, back in the day, I think that was actually considered the rank. Now it's considered a slight to say, the WOGE. Let the WOGE do it. Yeah.

But anyway they took me out in, at the time the 3rd battalion aircraft were, kind of enhanced delta models, so they had like some special radios. I think they had what's called them OBOGS, onboard oxygen generating system or something like that for high altitude, and they had, miniguns for defensive armament. That was it. So that was called a warbird. Right?

So there's no air refueling, no terrain falling radar, no special aircraft survivability. It's just basically the same thing I've been flying with a couple more radios. So I finished my progression, which is kind of poetic, in a 1 sixtieth aircraft, and then, we end up flying across. We went on a Boeing 707. Right?

You know chartered, you know, Transworld Air or something like that, and we had to get gas like every 2, 3 hours. So imagine going from Savannah, Georgia up to Newfoundland and across to Europe, and then back in through Egypt into, you know, Saudi Arabia, and stopping every 2, 3 hours, and and they wouldn't let us off the plane, you know, because they didn't have customs clearance. So we'd get there in whatever country it was, but you can't get off the plane, you know, the the damn the toilets were full of of urine, you know, the stink was ter it was terrible, you know. And, but we got there, and, that began Operation Desert Shield.

How I mean, so you went straight from flight school to the unit, knowing that you're gonna fly the possibility that you're gonna

be flying in combat. Pretty close, yeah. Within a couple of weeks.

I mean, how did that feel for you? You're getting right what you wanted

Yeah. Immediately.

At least I think that's what you

Yeah. But, you know, what we didn't talk about earlier is, you know, so I grew up in the Cold War. Right? And I was I served in the Cold War. I went to West Germany.

I've been to East Germany, East Berlin, right through Checkpoint Charlie, and, I was always scared we'd really go to war with the the Soviet Union. Right? Or the or Korea, you know, when I was in, Korea the first time. And it's hard to describe, but I did not want that. I didn't think, you know, being at war would be a good thing, you know, for me.

And, so now here we are, I'm very excited to go, but I'm, you know, this is a little different attitude than I had in the 160th. The 160th is like I'm taking the fight to you and you are gonna die if you're a bad guy, you know. And, at this time it was sort of a transition period. It's like I'm I'm making a a change now from being scared to be in war to okay we're in war this is alright. It's very pragmatic, I guess.

And, I mean Desert Shield was like, I don't know, 6 months long, so I had some time to really adjust to the idea. Mhmm. So that when we did go across the border, you know, it was no big deal. You know, it was it was very exhilarating actually. Very exciting.

So you did go across the border?

Yep. Well, when, desert storm happened. Right? So desert this is the funny thing. Right?

It's it's all in a name. Because we had guys, I remember this is a conventional unit. Some of these guys had been in Vietnam, others hadn't, and there was a couple of guys that were really upset that we were probably gonna take the Chinooks into Iraq. And they were of the mindset that Chinooks would fly from the port to the forward line of troops and that would be it. You wouldn't go past the forward line of troops.

And we were being told, I don't know, you're gonna go deep. Right? Because they're gonna do, operating base Cobra. Right? Because you've got to have fuel and ammunition and supplies for the Cobras and the Apaches and the artillery to do their thing.

And so there was there was 2 guys that were very very upset that we were gonna do that, and I remember thinking, dude, what, you know, what do you want? We're, you know, I wanna remember I wanted to do assault, so to me this is like, this is kinda it is where I wanna be. And, when so so Desert Shield. Right? Remember I said the army would claim, we own the night.

Mhmm. Well, there were helicopters ripping their landing gear off on sand dunes because the sand dunes in Saudi Arabia, they kinda, they go up, they they plateau, and they go up again. And in the dark with the goggles, you could see that first top off, and you don't see the setback in the second lip. Right? So, and you're traveling a 120 miles an hour, by the time you see it, it's too late.

You just lost your landing gear. Right? And the army lost a couple, and then they they put some rules into effect. You couldn't fly any lower than 150 feet, you know. And, so we did that for that 7 months.

And I was moving supplies, tank transmissions, tank treads, I mean whatever you can fit in the back of a Chinook or sling, we were doing, and we were doing it at night. And the old guys so there were 2 w ones in the companies, me and a guy named Tim. And we were he had got there before me and he was really sharp, so you know, I didn't walk into a a show where they're like, oh you know, these stupid Wojes, you know, we're going to these junior guys are no good. Instead, they welcomed me because the other guy who was only a couple classes ahead of me, was such a success. So he and I were the guys that prepared all the maps for everybody, you know, did you know some of the basic planning, the nug work, you know, the the math and the and the and the ciphering.

And, every night flight, he and I were on them, not together, we were with other pilots, and they put us with an instructor, we fly at night. And the other old guys, the senior guys, did not want to fly at night. Because, you know, we still didn't have all the aircraft with night vision, lighting, so you still had to turn off the lights, put the little chem lights around, that kind of stuff. So it still was very unpleasant to fly. Now at this point we've got what's called the ANVUS 6, and the goggles are just 2 binoculars that slip down in front of your face.

They they hinge up and down. And the crew chiefs were 1 of the ones I talked about earlier, the, the fives. Right? And, but I got experience at night a couple 100 hours flying in the desert that the older guys didn't get because they didn't want it. Right?

So when Desert Storm happened, there were the 18th airborne corps was pretty smart. They decided not to do it at night because Cobra, like the initial assault on Cobra, or the infill, the the taking of it, we had I think a 100 Chinooks involved, flights of 5, and we were separated by only a couple of minutes. Actually you'd you'd be in that you'd be in a hot refilling pit, and it was the most impressive refilling pot refilling I've ever seen. The 101st did it. It was like a mile long, just helicopters, you know, it was all Chinooks and then it was Blackhawks, and you were plugged in getting gas while you're running, and then they'd, call over the radio, and we were, you know, like let's say I was in a silver flight, right?

Silver 1 through 5. Maybe a silver 1, your grid coordinates are, you didn't care what you were carrying, it was gonna be £18,000 which is about the max you're gonna carry for this. Silver 2, here's your grid, right? We all had different grids and we'd we'd pick up, we'd fly over, and just hover over the loads that were already set up for us, and the guys were the most aggressive hookup men I've ever seen. I mean you didn't you you just got over it and they like hooked it.

It was a tandem, load so a 4 and a half hook to keep it from spinning. Once everybody's hooked up, off we go at a 120 knots, up into Afghanistan, and when you hit a release point, everybody went their separate way to their landing zones, and keep in mind there's flights in front of you, and flights behind you, so as you're coming in, guys are coming out, guys are right behind you, and it's just it looks like a hornet's nest. And if we had done that at night, we'd have killed.

You said Afghanistan. I I meant

I meant Iraq. I meant Iraq. Yeah. So this is that famous, Schwartzkopf, the left hook. Mhmm.

You know, this that was us. So moving all, the equipment and the people out out west of Kuwait. Wow. So some of the loads were, Humvees internal with a towed 105 howitzer. Wow.

Yeah. So the gun tube the gun tube would be up in the cockpit, right, so you have the overhead panel, and you have the engine condition levers that do the the power on the engines, and, the the gun tube was right up inside, and Wow. It was pretty cool. Yeah.

Did you guys did you guys take any fire or anything like that? No. No?

No. No. It was all, I think we caught them by surprise. We're out in the middle of nowhere, And, but because of that, and all of the lessons learned up until that point, the army decided, alright, we didn't maybe we didn't own the night, we just lease it now. You know, we rented it, and we're leasing lease to own, you know, kind of thing.

But, what sucked about that mission is remember I said that, you know, me and the other w 1 were the guys they always sent out with the the senior guys. The other older guys didn't even fly goggles. Didn't even have them on board because they thought it was safer to fly without MEGs than with. Right? So

Oh, wow.

So 1 night so the surrender has happened. Right? I mean we're a 100 hours in. The surrender has happened and, we take 5 Chinooks up into Iraq, and we're gonna bring back prisoners. Right?

Prisoner of war, the Iraqis had surrendered in droves, and, we go up there, it's daylight, we pick up these prisoners, we're moving back, but we don't have any gas. All the places we were supposed to get gas had already moved. Right? So we kept hopping from place to place and there was no gas, and we eventually ran out of gas. Like we had to land in the middle of the desert, each of us with, you know, 40, 50 Iraqi prisoners on on the back, and I had a 38 with 5 bullets in it.

Right? The hammer was on the empty chamber because that was what they made us do. We had 2 m sixties, but those were pointed out. These guys are all in inside. We didn't have any guards.

No nothing. But these guys luckily were very compliant. It was

just it was just pilots and prisoners.

2 pilots, a flight engineer, and a crew chief.

That's exactly right.

A guy up front, guy in the back. We we all had 30 eights. Holy shit. The 5 bullets. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, funny thing, so we're coming back before we run out of gas, and, the you could smoke an army aircraft back then. Right? And, the crew chief in the back lights up a cigarette, and 1 of the Iraqis is like, you know, gives a signal for, hey, let me throw the smoke. Right?

So he hands him the cigarette, and he puffs it, passes the next day, it passes all the way up to the front of the aircraft, all the way down, and by the time it gets to him, it's a soggy lump of, you know, paper really. And then he they hand it to him, and he looks at it, kind of disgusted, and they're like like, you know, have it. Right? And he's like, sir, they want me to smoke this thing, it's all dripping with drool. And I'm like, well, better keep them happy because, you know, they could take us easy.

Right? He's like, alright fine. So he's like, I'm gonna get hepatitis, you know. He smokes a cigarette, and now they're all, yeah. They cheer.

And they stayed they stayed compliant the whole time, until you know, we ran out of gas, and an MP unit eventually drove up and took them away. You know, like they found us, took them away, and we ended up spending the night in Iraq, until a convoy went by, and that convoy had fuel trucks in it. And we waved them down, and they put gas in the aircraft, and we didn't have any our command had no idea where we were, you know, because we didn't have satcom, we didn't have radio communications or anybody, we're just in the middle of the desert. And, we're nowhere near where we should have been because we've been hopping around looking for gas.

Holy shit.

So we we come back, we get gas, we come back into Saudi Arabia, and we we had to go we still had some prisoners, and we dropped them off. And now we're gonna fly back to assembly area Palm, which is where we were based out of, down the Tapline Road, and, so of the flight of 5, 3 of the crews had m b g's. So we sent the 2 without m b g's back first. 5 minute separation, so 1 takes off, climbs up to 3,000 feet, well above any terrain, you know, obstacles. They fly back, and they just do the old fashioned, they get there, they spiral down, they land, all good.

Right? Next 1 goes, and now it's my turn. We're the net we're the first m b g aircraft to go back. So we're flying it 250, 300 feet. Got goggles.

I'm navigating. And I'm looking at the antennas down the road right there about every 5, 6 miles or so, and I got them on my map. Right? And I'm looking, like, looking out there, and I'm like, I see 2 of the 3 antennas I should see. Come right, let's offset a mile.

Right? So we kind of came right, kind of paralleled the course, about a mile right of course. Never saw the antenna, I'm like I don't see the antenna, I don't know where it is. Right? Maybe I'm just not navigating right.

And we get back to our assembly area, we lay in, next aircraft comes in behind us with goggles, and then the last aircraft with the commander and the chief pilot on board, they have goggles, but but they've elected not to wear them because it's easier to fly unaided they think. Right? This is that mindset back then. They come back at 250, 300 feet. They run into an unlit antenna that I we had all avoided, except they ran right into it.

And, killed all the aircrew. The door gunner was an infantryman, he actually lived. He said the last words were, oh hell, where'd that come from? You know? Damn, man.

So, you know, a very valuable lesson, you know, learned there, you know, in what an obstacle will do to you, you know, whether it's the ground or an antenna or wires, you know, or the enemy. But Damn. That was so when we got back from that, so that was essentially the end of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. So we redeployed back to Savannah, and when the aircraft got there, the army was now going to own the night. Right?

So everything we did, everything, every exercise, every drill, every practice involved night vision goggles. So and and it and it helped, I mean it made a big deal. But because I was a high time goggle guy in the unit, even as a junior pilot, I had 200 hours of m v g time when the, you know, the senior guys had, like, 25. You know, they got their qualification time, and that's it because they never flew it. And, so everything we did, I was on that, you know, mission, and that started my whole trend toward where I would end up, you know, in the 160th.

When did the 160th kinda pop up on your radar?

Well, because they were next door to us in Savannah, and I said everybody knew each other, our commander was actually married to a warrant officer over there. Right? So when we were in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield, they would come visit, you know, they'd fly down for official purposes, but they'd have the time to do, you know, a conjugal visit or something like that, I guess. And, so I kind of knew them already. I'd listened to the war stories, what they were doing.

Oh, they were going up into Iraq, you know, while we were still doing the the Saudi stuff. What's it like in Iraq? You know? I said, oh, it's dark. You know?

Okay. A little more than that, buddy. But, so I already kind of knew about that. But that other w 1 that I talked about, Tim, he had assessed. Like we got back, he's like, you know what?

I wanna go to the 160th. So he put in his packet, he assessed, and for whatever reason he was not selected. I considered him a better pilot than me, and I figured, well, crap. If they're not gonna take him, there's no way they're taking me. Right?

He's way better than me. And once again, it's very subjective. And later in on in life, having given the selection evaluations, I understand there's a lot involved there. It's not just how good a pilot you are. But, so anyway, that's the start of it.

And then I

can Can can Before we go any farther, can you give us a little history into the 160th?

Yeah. So the, in Iran, the, the shah of Iran is in charge. He leaves. He's pushed out really, and I can't remember if he was in France or the US, but we were supporting him, and so a group of student protesters, protested outside the US Embassy in Tehran, and they ended up taking it. Right?

Now they from my understanding, they've done something like that before, but then they gave it back. In this case, they didn't give it back. Right? So we had American hostages, marines, embassy personnel, kept for it was like 354 days or something like that. But So there they are, and then President Carter at the time, you know, they, the military options were very few.

Right? JSOC didn't exist. All the special operations community had sort of disbanded after Vietnam, and Charlie Beckwith had just essentially stood up Delta Force. Right? But they needed So they were gonna send Delta Force in to rescue the American hostages.

The problem was they gotta get there. How they gonna get there? Helicopters. Alright. Well what do we wanna use to get there?

Chinooks. The problem is you're getting by a navy ship. Right? Chinooks do not fold up handily like a navy aircraft will. Right?

So they were afraid OPSEC was a big concern. This is Operation Eagle Claw. Right? So they don't want to put Chinooks on top of a ship because that'll raise questions, you know, why are there Chinooks on top of an aircraft carrier? You know, that's not normal.

So instead they decided to use, CH 50 Threes, and they wanted to use the minesweepers, which were flown by navy pilots. And they figured flying off a ship was the hardest part of the mission. Right? Which in hindsight that's the easiest part. But so they they do these rehearsals with with Delta, and back then they didn't have this like 1 location where they did rehearsals and we sit face to face and we say, you know Sean I don't like how you did this, or Al I don't like how you did this.

Alright let's adjust. It was all done, you're probably old enough to remember the, the teletype format. Like you get, like you ever get like a a ship's position, the overhead message all comes like in a teletype. And, that's how they did their aars, the after action reviews. Right?

Was to teletype. So there wasn't really plain English. It was kinda like, you know, pilots sucked, you know, but you can't really explain why. Right? Yeah.

So these guys are flying into the dust with night vision goggles, and it's super dark and there's no reference. Right? And there's no, like, looking at blades of grass. So they came up with this, it's called a pink light, an infrared filter on top of a a search light. So you extend your light out.

It's a white light with a piece of basically a piece of brown waxed paper over it, you know, held on with a little frame. And the problem was, you could only see that light. So it's like like you see with an AC 130 when they get the burn on. Right? You can only see it with your night vision goggles.

The problem is if you leave it on too long it will burn through, and it would now be a white light. Right? So you you learn to use it very sparingly, which is funny because years later we were still like turn the light on turn it back off even though it was a you know a glass thing, but, the Delta guys were unhappy with the pilots. They crashed every single time, you know I mean controlled crash, and so they wanted new pilots. So now they're like, alright.

Who else can fly a navy aircraft and the primary thing is landing in the dust? The marines. Because the marines do the ship to beach. Right? The navy guys do ship to ship essentially.

They're no better because they have no experience, and they have the same limitations. So they want to change the pilots again, but it's go time. Right? So they gotta go what they got. Right?

So they they execute, they fly the, the Delta guys in on 1 thirties, they land at desert 1. Right? Designated desert landing area, and those 1 thirties are gonna transfer the Delta operators to the helicopters when they get there. Right? Because the helicopters couldn't carry them that far and do the gas, so they came in the 1:30.

So they'll do that. They'll get gas, they'll take the operators to go to desert 2, spend the day, and then do the mission. Right? That's the plan. 8 helicopters take off, encounter a sandstorm that's like 4,000 feet high.

You can't see in it, so they separate. Right? So they now they're like, alright, you know, they're 5 minutes apart, so they don't run into each other. I think, a couple of them turned around for maintenance problems related to the dust, and, the min force for the mission, I think, was 6, and they showed up with 6 except 1 was broken. They were down to 5 or may have been 5 or 4.

I can't remember. It's irrelevant. So they abort. We don't have enough helicopters to get them there. We have to abort.

So the helicopters are gonna go back to the ship, the Delta operator is gonna get back on the 1 thirties, they're gonna go back, they're gonna reset, they'll try again another night. Problem is because they can't see the helicopter pilots, you have, you've been to an airport on a jet airliner. You come into the gate, and you get the guys with the colored wands, you know, the light wands, and they're, like, you know, doing this kind of thing for the the pilots to see to direct them into the the parking. Yeah. We do it with helicopters.

Right? You you you you get the winds and you kinda, like, come up to a hover, stationary, you know, come left, come right, go, that kind of thing. You see that on ships all the time. So the guy that's doing that, so the helicopters crank up, they pick up to a hover, the guy with the wands is bringing them up, and tells them to go, and then he walks toward the aircraft, and as I'm told, he put the wands in his pocket and they were still on. The only thing the pilots can see is the wands, the lighted wands, and they follow them.

And the guy walked right into the c 130 in the helicopter. Followed him right into it. Impacted the c 130 full of 5,000 gallons of gas and a bunch of Delta operators that were kind of just hanging out. Aircraft explodes, helicopter explodes, it's mayhem. They all load up on the the remaining, 130s and they they head back.

Utter failure, national embarrassment, and so JSAOC is born. Right? Because the problem that they found was that because there was no mutual, not mutual, habitual relationship between the air crews, the 130s, you know, the ships, and the operators, you had all these problems. And so they created a unit, task force 160, out of task force 158 and some other things. It was a National Guard unit with 0 h sixes, helicopters from the 101st, Chinooks, and, and Huey's initially, then Blackhawks, and they plan to do Operation Honey Badger, which was the second rescue attempt.

Right? So they're ready to do it. President Reagan gets in office. The Iranians release the hostages. No more mission for the JSOC operators.

General Meyer, I believe it was, was the chief of staff, or maybe the chairman, and he said, you know what? You keep that unit together. So JSOC formed the 1 60th became the 1 60th SOAG, special operations aviation group, and they stuck together. And then you had this habitual relationship that lasts today, and you know we can do things now that they never dreamed, you know, that, could be done, but that's really where the 160th came from. And then, you know, as it grew out of the group, it it became a regiment, and, like, when I got there, there were only 300 guys in the regiment.

There's, like, 4,000 now. Wow. Because you have 3 battalions, and then some special mission units, just it's big. So when someone goes, hey, oh, you were in the 1 60th. You know, you know, Bilbo Baggins?

I'm like, what does he fly? I don't know. Okay. So What

kind of birds do they fly in the 1 60th?

So all 3 battalions, I take that back, all 3 locations, Fort Lewis, Washington or JBLM now, Joint Base Lewis McChord, they have Chinooks and Blackhawks. Savannah, Georgia has Chinooks and Blackhawks, and then Campbell is the anomaly. It's got Chinooks and Blackhawks, but it also has little birds which have 2 variants, right? It's a o h 6, has an armed version and a assault version, so the MHs modified, and age attack, and then the Blackhawks have a assault version and a what's called a DAP, direct action penetrator. So it's an armed Blackhawks, got a 30 millimeter chain gun, you know, it can carry hellfire's rockets, mini guns, sometimes all at the same time, other times they have to make selections, you know, based on weight, you know, what they're gonna carry.

I have beautiful stories about dApps, we'll probably touch on them a little bit, but that's the that's the regiment.

Very cool. Wow. Thank you for that history. So, alright, so back to what do you call it? Selection?

Assessment. Assessment. Yep. So so your buddy, Tim, he doesn't make it. No.

And now you're thinking, well, if he can't make it, I'm not gonna

make it. I'm not gonna make it. So I get assigned to Korea for my second tour, and while there, because I had a lot of night vision goggle time, because the old guys didn't want it's it's like incremental, right? It just builds on each other. And so I get there, and I end up as a night vision goggle trainer, a no fly line trainer, so you had to fly the border between North and South Korea to learn all the corridors and all the the landmarks that if you were operating in the in the what they call the the tax zone, Papa 518, that if you were approaching the border you could recognize geographic features and turn around.

Right? So like after I left that next year, an 0H 58 straight across was shot down. They killed 1 of the pilots, they held the other guy, Bobby Hall for a couple weeks or or months, I can't really remember. And then they let him go after they, you know, thoroughly embarrassed him and and us. Right?

So that's the importance of the job is is that. And because I did that, and I showed like some of the senior guys, like there was a CW 5 that came over, he'd been a Vietnam pilot, everybody knew him in the community, in the Chinook community, and he flew with me up there, and I was just flying along the what was called a corridor up to you know where Panmunjom is? You know that you get the, or you've seen it in the news? It's the, where the peace table is between North and South Korea. Right?

So you've got this this piece of property, there's a building on it, half in South Korea, half in North Korea, and there's a table in there, and that's where they sit and they discuss things. And I would we would fly people up there, usually, dignitaries. But there's very specific rules, and I would, you know, fly him up there and was like, alright, you know, stay at or below a 100 feet, you know, consistent with safety, you know, left and right of course, 200 meters, blah blah blah, and I talked to it, and he's like, who taught you how to how to talk like that? Right? It's like a they call it MOI, method of instruction.

And I said, I don't know. I read the regulation and came up with it. He's like, you need to be an instructor. So he actually, called some friends at at d a, department of the army, HRC, if you will, and, got me a slot to go to the instructor pilot course, but I had to go and stay at, Fort Rucker and teach at the at the schoolhouse if I did that, which turned out, you know, it's a it's a whole another story we're definitely gonna get to.

So how'd you get into 1 60th?

Alright. So now we're back at Fort Rucker. So I'm a young chief warrant officer too. So army aviators, their wings, you start out with a set of wings, and then you get a star when you're a senior aviator, and you it's like, you know, I don't know, 4 or 5 years and so many hours, and they give you a star. So I didn't have a star yet, so I'm very junior aviator.

And then when you're a master aviator, you get a wreath around that star. Right? So you can look at a an army warrant officer and see, you know, where is he in his experience level just based on his wings. And, so I get there, and, my first 2 set of students were great, a lot of fun, because they were also

So wait, hold on. Do you so you're a junior pilot

Yeah.

But they want to put you as an instructor.

Yeah. Because of my skill level.

Mhmm.

So I'm good enough to be an instructor, just not a senior guy. Now, remember now, all these old guys are retiring. Right? That's why they brought us young guys in, is because they had to backfill essentially to to meet their, you know, requirements. So now what's starting to be in all the key positions is young c w twos and w threes.

Right? So junior to mid grade warrant officers. And and this is where it ties in because So my first 2 set of students were great because they were w ones right out of flight school, and they listened to me, and I had a good time. Then the Alabama National Guard, which was flying CH 54 Sky Cranes, which is this grasshopper looking thing that they flew in Vietnam and they had that in Birmingham. They retired it and gave them Chinooks, so now they all have to come down and take a Chinook transition.

Well, these guys all have way more they're all Vietnam vets, they're all way more experienced in flying than me, and they don't wanna fly Chinooks. They don't have a choice, but they act like I personally brought them down. Right? They did not like listening to a snot nose w 2 telling them what to do, and it was miserable teaching them. So they didn't wanna listen.

They do what they had to do to get through. Every flight was misery. Every sitting at the table, you know, we do what we call table talk, talking about emergency procedures and all this aerodynamics. They didn't want to listen to me, and I hated it. And there was a couple of classes of that, and then they went, and then they gave me foreign students.

Now foreign students are different in that the ones that come to fly Chinooks, you know from, you know, the Dutch, the Singapore guys, the Aussies, the Brits, these are not dirtbags. These are not guys that are there because they don't want to fly the aircraft. They're there. They're all aerospace engineers in their own military. They're, you know, they were okay to fly with.

They were very nice, very polite. They pretended to pay attention to me. They're, you know, they they listened, they made eye contact kind of thing, but I knew I wasn't teaching them anything. Right? I mean they knew far more than me.

Just just by reading the manual, they they knew more than I could teach and that's how how good these foreign students were. So it was unrewarding, and I needed something. I was probably still a little too junior to get away from that assault stuff I wanted to do. And a buddy of mine who I went through the instructor pilot course came through for another school, and he's like, Ally, you're miserable. You know, we're out for a drink or dinner or whatever.

And he throws a application packet on the table. He's like, fill that out. You need to come to the 1 sixtieth. And I still had that mindset that I wasn't good enough, and you didn't fill it out on a laptop or on a computer because they didn't really exist. You know, in quantity back then.

It was a stubby pencil, you know, number 2 pencil filling out the application. It was like, you know, half inch thick, and I'd fill it out, you know, a couple pages at a time, you know, a couple days ago in between, and eventually it was done. It's like, oh. So I sent it in. To my surprise, like 2 weeks later, like, mister Mac, we'd like you to come assess.

Like, me? Really? Okay. Right? So I go up, I assess.

I didn't think I did that well. As a matter of fact, I got lost on my, navigation route, which everybody does for the most part. You're not passing the flight, just so you know. It they will do something so you don't fly it. You don't, you just you're not gonna hit your target on time.

It's made sure that you're not gonna, achieve success.

Right. And the reason for that is they want to see how you behave under duress in the cockpit. You know, when all of a sudden you're not where you're supposed to be, and you don't know where you are, and you know you've still gotta get to your, you know, unlit target plus or minus 30 seconds, and you have to be within, you know, I think it's plus or minus 2 minutes at every checkpoint, and within a 100 meters of the checkpoint. Right? So I mean you have to be, so you're gonna be outside the parameters in some sort or fashion, and so when you get under that pressure, how do you do?

Do you fold? Or do you do what you gotta do and keep trying, you know? And and they can tell, because they're gonna teach you how to navigate their way anyway. So they don't care if if you get lost, you know, but it's how do you behave. And there are guys I've seen guys melt down and start crying in the cockpit when they got lost.

They just knew they it's like it's like that guy with the grade point average that gave up, you know, before he got You don't know, I mean who knows I might help you out later on and say hey, because sometimes we'll be like, hey, is that bridge over there? Is that on your map? Oh. And you kind of recage them, you know? But it's all based on how they're behaving.

If they're giving up, I'm not gonna help them. You know? It's like, great.

Yep.

So but that's that's how you start the process is the well, I take that back. The first thing you do is a PT test, standard army PT test, with pull ups which the army didn't do, and a swim test, which the army didn't do. The funny thing is as I got there, now keep in mind the 160th was formed in 1980, right after that, you know, eagle claw. Right? I'm there, this is 1995, so the unit really is still pretty new.

Mhmm. A lot of people don't know much about it. They're still very, you know, cloaked in darkness and secrecy. So I get there and I'm like, should I wear an army PT, You know, shorts and shirt? Or should I be in civilian, you know, PTs?

I mean it sounds absurd, but it it went through my mind. Right? So I showed up wearing civilians. Right? And I'm like, if they don't want me, you know, tough.

You know, if they don't want me because of this, you know, screw them. Right? I drive up in the parking lot, and I made sure I had my army PTs. In case in case they're like, mister Mac, I thought you were gonna be in your, but they didn't say anything. Right?

And then you do your PT test, they they don't tell you how you're doing. Right? That's all at the end. So they don't count your push ups, so you don't know how many you're doing, or your sit ups, or any of that stuff, or your pull ups. And, then you go over to the pool, you put a flight suit on, flight gear, helmet, you jump in, you do, I wanna say it's 15 minutes of treading water with just your feet, 15 minutes with just your hands, 15 minutes regular, and then like a minute dead man's float.

Right? And then you do a deep water entry, you can't touch the pool, and you gotta swim underwater a designated amount of distance, and you don't know what that is. Right? So I do it. I'm out of breath.

I'm comfortable in the pool, but I'm not a strong swimmer, you know, with gear on. I mean I've never done this. And so I jump in, and I'm trying very easy to swim, and I run out of air, and I come up, and I get out, and I'm like, I don't know if that was far enough, you know? And the recruiter comes up with a clipboard, and he taps it, and he's like, mister Mac, did you get to go twice? I was like, did did I get to go twice?

No. He's like, get back in line. So I'm like, obviously I didn't pass. Right? So now I get in, and instead of trying to take it easy, I'm I'm pounding it.

Right? I get my head down. I'm pounding. I could feel the the Styrofoam on my helmet's dragging me to the surface, and I'm not as long as you don't take your face out of the water, you can keep going like that. And I'm like, you know what?

They're not gonna let me die. Shallow water, blackout, whatever. Right? I get down there, I feel a tap on my helmet, I had made it to the end, you know, and I get out, and that was that. You know?

And then, you go from there to the psychology. It's you you take a test. It's like a 600 test, then a 300 question test, all psychology. Would you rather pick your nose or pick your buddy's blister? You know, would you rather work on a Friday?

Or, you know, weird stuff that doesn't make sense. And then you take a general aviation knowledge test, which nobody can pass because they're asking the parameters of, specific air air defense systems. You know, the s a 7 radar system, you know, has a minimum engagement range of what out to what distance and stuff like that. That's the kind of stuff, if you're going into a theater that has it, you bone up on it, but there's too many systems around the world to to know everything, like to that extent. Right?

Yeah. So you have rules of thumb if you didn't know. Like if if the if the if the, what we call the raw gear, if it shows up, you know, s a 8, but you didn't expect them to have s a eights, it still might be a Roland or something. These are defense systems. Right?

So they all have different distances and parameters. But anyway, you take this test, and they're gonna use this against you later on. Oh, you only scored up, you know, a 30 on the general aviation knowledge test, and you consider yourself a pilot? Yeah. But, you do that and you get your your mission, which is your navigation route.

You brief it, you fly it, you come back, and then the next day you do your board. Right? So you're in your dress uniform, you sit in front of a panel of officers.

This is the navigation route that everybody fails?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. So now, I mean, even if you make your target on time, you will have been out of parameter somewhere. Okay. So, you know, they're like, oh, you you failed. And some people, when they get told they failed, even though they made it to the target on time, they get mad.

Right? And so the goal of the panel is to well, let's put it this way. First of all, there's guys that get to get that far, and we know we don't want you because you're just a jerk. Right? And we know you won't fit in.

You know, you were good enough to get this far, but you're you don't fit the profile, and you're a jerk, we're gonna put you through hell on that board and then not take you. Right? Those are the guys that go out badmouth us in the regular army. Oh, those guys are jerks, you know? Then you get the guys who we know we don't want you, but you're a sincere person.

You come in, you're in there 20:30 minutes max, and we let you down easy, and we put you out. Maybe even give you some guidance to come back. Right? But we take it easy on you. Those guys typically treat us nice, you know, in the gossip world.

Then you get the guys, the majority of them, that it's, yes, no, maybe, we don't know. Let's see how this guy handles pressure. Right? So now you gotta handle critique. Right?

I mean, you notice like in the in the teams. Right? I mean, you guys, we do not, you know, take it easy on each other. You gotta have some thin or some thick skin. Right?

You got a can of thick skin, and you just spray it on. You know?

But I think the worst is, pure critiques.

Yeah. Yeah. Do

you guys have those?

We did them in flight school, but we didn't have to do yeah. We didn't have to do them, in the in the regular unit. But so, you know, the the instructor will tell you what you did wrong, maybe even tell you what you did right, but, you know, it's criticism. Hey, you did this wrong, you did this wrong, in the end you did not meet the standard, you failed the flight. Okay.

Then the recruiter says, alright, PT, you know, physical training, you know, you did this many push ups, this many sit ups, this many run, and like in my case, so like you did way more, you scored way higher than the 1 you submitted. Why is that? I mean, I don't know, like maybe I tried harder. Wrong words right now. Like oh, so you don't try hard at your unit?

You know, I don't know what to tell you. I I didn't know. Right? So I just tried as hard as I could. But you should be trying as hard as you can all the time.

Yeah. Point taken. Right? And I just instead of getting upset, I just point taken. Got it.

I'll do that. Thank you for that professional, you know, critique. And then they start asking you, you know, why why you scored so low in the general aviation tests, you know, why do you think you should be a nightstalker? You know, questions like that family situation. And in my case, you know, as I talk about my book, my wife had had a suicide attempt when I was in Korea, and I thought, you know, that was all kind of resolved, but I thought that would stop me from getting in so, And I told the the psychologist about it, you know, they knew there was no see I didn't want any secrets here, and I thought, you know, that's gonna torpedo me.

They're gonna they're gonna treat me nice, and they're gonna let me go. They thought they were being mean to me, you know, the the asking questions that should make me upset, and all I could think of every time they asked me a question that they thought would make me upset is they didn't ask about my wife. They didn't ask about my family situation. And for me, the the board, the hardest part was the anticipation that they would ask that question and then kick me out, and they never did. And they accepted me.

And Do they accept you right there?

They kick you out of the room. They deliberate, you know, 5, 10 minutes, which I've been on the other end of that, you know, in the first 2 minutes they've decided, and then the rest 15 they're making you sweat. And, you come back in, and they're like, you know, welcome to the 160th mister Mac, and then, like, you know, We'll see you in about a year. Right? Because I gotta go back to my unit, and that's the agreement we had with the army is they wouldn't poach, skills without giving you a heads up.

And then the psychiatrist took me out, he said, alright look, I know you were probably worried about the family situation. We see it all the time. We can handle it. Sounds like you got it under control. You know?

We'll work with you on this if you have

any problems. So they knew the whole time.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, damn. And they they just never brought it up.

So they probably would've used that

If they didn't want me to do that. Yeah. They didn't drop me like that, you know, if it if it was gonna be a problem. So I get back to my unit. Hold on.

Hold on. Yep.

How many people how many aviators are trying out for this?

I mean, it varies. In the my assessment week, there were probably, you know, 20 guys, you know, in the draw there today? Depends. It just depends.

Because you said when you went in, there was about 300 aviators.

Oh, wait. Right. There's about 35353535100. Yeah. About 4,000 depending.

So what's the let me ask this. What's the what's the attrition rate?

It's not It's usually done in the preselection. So at that time, it was roughly 25% of the people that applied just were rejected outright. You never got to Fort Campbell. Then when you got there, it was probably about 10, 15% didn't make it. You know, so most of the guys that get there make it.

But you're not just there for Chinook, you're there for the little birds and the black hawks. You get this whole potpourri of of, aviators there. So, you know, the they weed out really the guys, and

Is everybody flying their specified aircraft, or are you all No. Are you all flying some No. So Something that

So when you get there, and this has changed by the way, so when I got there, because I was a Chinook pilot, I did my, all my training flights in a Chinook. I did my navigation flight in a Chinook, and a couple of years late actually, I was in seer school when, 1 of our aircraft was out doing an assessment just like what I just told you, and they encountered weather and we still don't know what happened. It rolled inverted and came out of the sky and they all were Damn. Killed instantly. So that pilot was not a Chinook pilot, but everybody considered, I'm actually take any pilot put him in a Chinook, and as long as there's no emergencies they're gonna be able to fly it.

I can get into Blackhawk and fly it, you know, or anything else, but if something bad happens I don't know what to do. So anyway they made a new rule that if you were a Chinook guy, you could do, the assessment in the Chinook. You could do what I did. If you were not a Chinook guy, you would do a simulator period with the instructor, and and sort of, like what I would do is see if guys could learn the aircraft. Like, so it's a glass cockpit.

There's these little TV screens, buttons all over the place, and that's how you you see what's going on. And then you fly it, and I would say, okay, do this, do this, here's a hover page, do this. And I would see if they could mimic what I asked them to do. If they did, I kind of view it as this guy is trainable. I can train him.

If you get a guy that can't remember, you know, what button to do, he's not trainable probably. Right? And so, you know, he's for us to take him, he's gonna need some other things. But anyway, they took all the other guys that came from other airframes. You know, let's say you had a Cobra guy because they were still flying at the time.

A couple of my best friends in the 160 that are Chinook pilots were Cobra pilots, before they got there. And they fly everything in the little bird. Right? And that's where you do all your navigation training, by the way, in Green Platoon, which is where they teach you how to navigate, brief, and and plan like a night stalker. You go out and you fly in a little, you know, little egg shaped thing, you know, and it's being a Chinook guy with a nice big cockpit, and you get in that little egg, it's like, you know, your shoulders are up against the guy, you know, the doors are off, so you have to put your map under your leg, and it's, it's unpleasant to fly that thing.

You didn't like flying the little birds? Yeah. Oh, shit. That was a pain in the ass. Yeah.

But, what is the most what is the what do you think the most what do what do most guys want to fly at 1 60th?

It depends what they did first. Right? So if they're already a Chinook guy, they want to fly Chinooks. If they're a Ranger, they want to fly Chinooks. If they did something else, or they're already a Blackhawk guy, you know, What do

you mean if they're a Ranger?

I can tell you that a

high Like an 82nd? Like a US army ranger. I'm sorry. 75th guy? Yep.

So 75th guy is just wait a minute.

Here's what they do. So you get all these rangers, right, we do a lot of work with them, and they usually end up in the Chinooks because of the quantity of people. They reach the rank at E5, E6, their knees are aching, they wanna be a pilot, they put in for it, they get accepted, and then they might go to a regular unit first, do 2, 3 years, then come to us, or if you have a background, like, you know, we had some SEALs, we had some Delta guys, a lot of Delta guys. You know, a good friend of mine, Mike Rutledge, I don't know if you know him, he was at e 7, teaching at BUDS when the towers came down, transfer over the army, put him for the 160th, and because of his background, we took him as a as a w 1. So as a very, very junior Chinook pilot.

So I will say

that Hold on. Hold on. So sorry. Yeah. Yeah.

So so you guys so the 160th will take basically, ground operators and turn them into aviators?

Yep. Very

few. Without any aviation activity.

Very, very few, very select. So typically, a guy would let's say he's a ranger, an army ranger, he's e 5. He goes to his 1st unit, like I did in Savannah, Georgia. Right? And and they'll try to get somewhere like, you know Fort Campbell so they can be in the 101st.

They're just across the ramp from us, and then when their time comes up, like at 2 years, 3 years, when they think they've got enough experience, they'll submit a packet. If they get accepted, they come over, and I can tell you there's a high number of army range, former army rangers that fly Chinooks on the 1 60th. And a lot of that, now you can't take a lot of them at 1 time. Right? You can take 1 of these junior guys, like we we said we could take 2 a year, you know, and be able to task force babies we call them.

And we can bring How how

how do they how do they get through assessment?

They just do. You know, they they're good enough, you know, they're gonna fail the the navigation flight anyway. Do good in the PT test, the, you know, psych psych assessment, they did well to Oh, okay. All of them. If you can make Oh, okay.

All of them. If you can make e 7 in the seals, you know, or in Delta Yeah. You've got some we have your evaluation reports and all that. You know, you have a history that we can look at and go So

these guys have had some flight They might have gone to flight school.

Some guys have. Well, yeah, they've gone to flight school. But you can take 2 a year of guys that were, you know, like I said, you know, Mike was, an e 7 in the seals, you know, and a couple of rangers. You take them in, and then you teach them from the ground up how to be a nightstalker. We call them task force babies.

And, it turns out good because you get plenty of other guys, you know, I was pure pilot, you know, so I don't have, you know, the ground guy experience, which when I got shot down was a was a thing I worried about because it's like I could shoot, I'm good with my rifle, but I don't know much about, you know, how somebody might flank me or Yeah. Bring the ground stuff. But yet, the guys that were former Rangers or SF guys, had a lot of Green Berets, you know, they knew that kind of stuff. So you always kinda like if you could have a copilot that was once a a former action guy, you know what I mean? Yeah.

It'd be nice.

Yeah. So hold on. Let me so these so select Mike Rutledge, for example. I I've I've met him. So he he went from the SEAL teams to what?

A navy flight school? Nope. To army flight school. So he did an inter service transfer. In a regular unit.

He he went straight to flight school. Straight to army flight school.

So so seal teams to straight to army flight school.

Yeah. Straight to assessment.

Yep. Holy shit.

Yeah. And That's pretty cool. Yeah. And, you know, it's not common, but it does happen. You know, like I said, we we kinda determine 2 guys a year we could handle, you know, and

Does the does the unit like that?

Yeah. Yep. Because it it gives you some diversity in, well, understanding the mission. Right? And the idea here is that they understand the ground force mindset.

They, you know, if they're a rain, they know what the Rangers want, they know what the Seals want, they know what the Delta guys want, and not just by what they want. I I know that, you know, just by working with them, but they understand the entire mindset and the personalities. You know, oftentimes, you know, with Mike, for example, I was, in in Afghanistan 1 time with him, and, I was already there, or I just got there, and he rolled in about a week later, and I took him with me over to, Red Squadron because he knew, we'd actually flown a mission 1 year where probably 20 of the 30 guys on board were at his wedding when he was a CO. And they took turns coming to the cockpit. You know, it was just a, you know, a repositioning them from fob to fob.

And they came up, and they look in the cockpit, and they're like slap them on the shoulder. He's like, oh, that was my best man, you know, that was my, you know, and it was really cool. So it gave you a little bit of the, the bona fides, you know, that Yeah.

Some good camaraderie. Yeah.

Yeah. It was good.

Yeah. You know, that's some I know we're getting off topic here a little bit, but that's something, you know, that I've always ever since drones started coming on, you know, the scene, man, I'm showing my age. But, but, you know, it said, I always something that we always worried about was losing that personal connection with with whoever's got us up top. You know? And, I mean, what do you think about that?

It's tough. You know, I mean, I think back to, you know, several years ago, the original drone operator so to show my age, you know, the original drones were not armed, except the agency 1. Right? So the OGA drone was armed with a hellfire, and all the other ISR was unarmed. Right?

And to be able to talk to them line of sight was a big deal. Right? Because it was a repeater, other than because they're back at, I don't know, back in Vegas or something flying these things. And so when they started arming these things and we started doing kinetic strikes with these, they were claiming PTSD. And a lot of guys were getting mad saying there's no way they could do that.

Why are they mad or upset? You know, that they're killing people from a distance? And I remember thinking, there were certain times of the first part of the war where, in Afghanistan in particular, we did not shoot back if somebody shot at us with the intention of using darkness. Like if the mini guns fire, you're going to see for sure where we are. So maybe they don't see us.

Right? Because night vision goggles weren't as prolific back then. And I remember getting shot at a lot and feeling very vulnerable, right? Because I mean I've got a you know soft armor, I've got a little plate that's about this big, you know, and the air we took all the armor out of the aircraft in the early days so we could go to the higher elevations because it was too heavy. And, then 1 year, must have been, I don't know, late 2002, maybe 2003.

I said screw it. Somebody shoots at me, he's gonna eat lead. And I instructed the gunners, that's a hostile act. Somebody shoots it at us, you kill them. And I made a big distinction, you don't engage, you kill them.

You engage them, they duck their head. You kill them, they can't, he's dead. And so, I realized at some point I felt better being able to to defend myself. Right? So there's this, like, this equal thing.

It's, you know, them against me. You take a shot at me, I'm gonna take a shot back at you, and it's kind of like we both have an equal chance of dying, but the guy flying the drone, it's 1 way. Mhmm. It's very godlike. You know, you you're you have the opportunity to kill somebody, and he doesn't have the chance to reciprocate.

It's kinda I view that as, maybe that is part of the that post traumatic stress is, like, they feel guilty, you know, that they can't die doing it.

You know?

But they can kill people. And I don't know if that's true. That's just how I interpret it. You know? But, that personal connection is very important.

Like, the 160th now has a drone unit, that they didn't have when I was there. And once again, that's to create, number 1, a capability. Number 2, that that personal relationship.

Yeah. You know, I mean, it's just meeting you guys before operations and and and other pilots. I mean, I it just it creates this personal connection where it's like, I know those guys down there, or I know those guys up there. Right? They just drop me off.

You know? And, it that was always on our minds, you know, when that when the when we started working with with ISR and stuff like that. Yeah. Anyways

With the with the with the the air breathers, you know, the the Draco guys. Right? The the u 20 ones or whatever they were flying, c twelves, I guess, that had all the the the ISR platforms, and they would, you know, do all the collection, they do all the, you know as you're coming into the target they give you a sit rep. You know you got, you know 2 sleepers on the roof, you know 3 guys laying on the ground on the green side, you know whatever. And you come in, and in the early days they did a terrible job.

Like I'd be out in the Kandahar area, and we'd go land out in the middle doing an offset infill, and we're gonna land in the middle of this poppy field, and the, ISR comes back with, all good, nobody's there, and they're zoomed in on my coordinates where I'm going to land. And I had to land and there'd be like guys with guns just standing around, you know, they were guards for the poppy fields, they weren't they didn't shoot at us, but they are armed. And And I remember sitting down with these guys afterwards, the the the ISR guys and say, hey look, look at your video. I said when you scaled out and you saw me, did you see the guys with the guns? Well yeah, but they didn't shoot at you.

I'm like, but I don't want to land there if they're there. Right? So we had to teach them what to do, and because they were at Bagram, you know, we'd start meeting with them a little more. And once I had that relationship with them, they knew what I wanted. Yeah.

I knew what they wanted. I knew what they needed, you know, and it it works great. And that, you know, we were talking offline, and I'm sure we'll get to it during the Red Wings, you know, when I I planned that whole operation. The fires plan was successful because I sat down with the actual pilots and the, you know, the the sensor operators, you know, in the AC 130, and said, here's what I'm trying to accomplish. How can you help me do that?

As opposed to me saying, you know, hey, I want this kind of ordinance here, this here, you know, they know what their stuff does, you know, but that's that relationship that you get.

Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Where were we? Back to we were in the middle of you just got done with assessment, I believe.

Yeah. Alright. Yeah. So I go back to my Right? Except when I got there, a week later, the, battalion commander from 2nd battalion 160th calls me, and he's like, hey, Al, how would you like to come up in 6 weeks?

And I'm like, well sir, I you guys told my commander it would be like a year. And he goes, yeah, well, we need you now, because it takes, you know, 8 months to put a guy through the Shnuck pipeline. Can you do it? So I went and talked to my wife, and keep in mind I lived in, on post housing at the time, so it was pretty easy to get out of there. But now I gotta get a house up in Campbell.

So I took leave, went up there house hunting for a week, and, bought a house, and or put a bid on the house, whatever, and I came back. And I remember the, the battalion commander at Fort Rucker was pissed. And he tried to call in all kinds of markers from generals and stuff that he knew to stop me from leaving, like, because he couldn't stop it. And I thought for sure he's gonna stop me, and now he's mad at me. And, the 1 sick just said, no.

We need him. So they just sucked me up there. 6 weeks later, I'm in, basic skills learning hand to hand. You know, we're doing so that's the part I forgot. When you start into training, you know, it's basic skills.

So it's, you know, first aid, hand to hand, you know, CQB kind of stuff, shooting. At the time, we still had MP fives. We were just transitioning to the M4s like the next year, but because of Mogadishu, you know, they had MP fives and they found out that was insufficient for what we need. Right? It's 1 thing to clear a room with it, but it's, you know, if you're gonna defend a downed aircraft, you don't want to pistol around.

And, but we were still learning on that, which was pretty cool for me, you know, shooting silenced MP fives. And, you do that, and then, the enlisted guys at that point go on to log PT and ground navigation, stuff like that. And the pilots move on to the the air navigation stuff. But, yeah. So I get up there and we start that, and, it's a lot of fun.

And I really

What do you mean the enlisted guys? The The

crew chiefs.

Crew chiefs?

Well, I take it back. Any nightstalker who's not a pilot, so you could be the clerk.

No. She could. So you guys train together? Yeah. The pilots and the crew Yep.

That's that's pretty cool.

And same thing with the I think when it was, hand to hand, it was pilots and pilots, and list of guys, and list of guys, but, like, I had a guy, he played in the NFL, was my I was the next biggest guy. Right? But this guy was like a freaking, you know Mhmm. He's like a mountain. You know?

And, so we're doing, like, you know, practicing brachial stunts, you know? And, so, you know, he's hitting me on the side of the neck, and boom. And I'm like, oh, and I don't go down, and the instructor comes, he says, hit him harder. So why don't I want to hit him harder? He's like, hit him harder or I will.

Right? So the guy hits me harder, and I of course I drop, and he goes harder than that. He's like, if I hit him harder than that, I'm gonna knock his head across the room, and he's gonna be seriously hurt. We're not doing it, you know, because there's that whole mentality of, come on you gotta be tougher, you know, we're night stalkers, you know, but this guy, you know, he knew his own strength. This guy, Mike was his name.

He was actually out at the range. He was a little bird guy, attack guy. Barely, I don't know how he fit in the aircraft. And he got out, and the rotor blade hit him in the head, and it damaged the aircraft and his helmet, and he walked away going, duh. Wow.

Like Mungo, you know

what I mean? Oh, yeah.

Put it on the saddle, so I was like, alright. But, that was my CQB. Or not CQB, my hand to hand guy. But, yeah. So you do that, and then you get out of the dunker, which was in Jacksonville at the time.

They have their own now. It's an amazing, so it's like a imagine being in a in a minivan, and they drop you in a pool, and you're strapped in, and the thing rolls over and sinks, and then you've gotta get out. You know, they they do this training progression. First, it's get out any exit. Then it's, you have to go out second behind the guy next to you, or you have to cross over, and they create some some chaos in there, which if you use their training, not a big deal.

You know, you just you wait till the violent motion ceases, you get a reference, you unbuckle yourself, and then you go out or you jettison the door, you're still buckled in, and then you put your hand outside, release the thing, and just pull yourself out. So if you do the training, it all works really well. But when you don't, the guys panic, and they, they get stuck inside, and the divers have to pull them out.

Can you talk a bit a little bit about the relationship between the crew chief and the pilots?

Yeah. So in the Chinooks in particular, and the Blackhawks are very similar, the relationship with the crew chiefs, you get to know them quite well because, they you fly a lot together. In a Chinook, the minimum crew to fly a Chinook, a regular Chinook, is 2 pilots and a flight engineer. So the flight engineer is the senior crew chief in the back. In the 1 60th, a minimum crew is 2 pilots and 2 2 crew chiefs.

A flight engineer and a crew chief is the guy in the back, and then when we're in combat it's 4. So you have a crew of 6. 2 pilots, 4 guys in the back, because you get 2 guys manning the many guns up front, and 2 guys on the m 240s in the back. And then they have other duties that they do. And, you know you spend long long hours together whether it's training, you know it could be a cross country flight flying from Campbell to California, you know, doing air refueling on the way, and you know it's a 8 hour flight without landing.

You're gonna talk and talk and talk and you get to know each other. The other thing is I always like to say that a good crew chief in the back can compensate for a bad pilot up front. So let's say you're gonna land on a spur, a mountain spur. Right? With the with the aft gear, you know, doing a little wheelie or or landing with 1 wheel or something like that.

If the pilot can't see anything, like you're looking down several 1000 feet, there's nothing there, there's no reference to know that you're moving a foot or 2. Right? To keep the wheels on the terrain, but the crew chief's looking right at it. And if he is good, he can talk you through doing it. You know, it's like, oh, what you got?

You're you're starting to slide to the left a couple inches, you know, and you just you just little subtle movements in the controls, and you listen to him. As long as he stays calm, you stay calm. If you get a crew chief who gets kind of warmed up really quick, you know, it translates in the voice, and then the pilot gets kind of stiff on the controls because he's essentially following those instructions. So I like to say a guy who's up front who maybe isn't as good at doing that kind of maneuver for example, if the crew chief's good, you know, he's got the right voice, the right technique, he'll keep you right there, and, the customer or the ground force has no idea that, you know, this guy's having a tough night because the crew chiefs compensate. Sometimes a a really good pilot can compensate for a crew chief in the back that isn't as good, you know, but there are limitations, you know.

Like I said, if you're a 1000 feet out over the terrain and you got nothing to look at, all you can do is listen to them, you know, or maybe the other pilot can see something. So that relationship is very very important.

How how long do you guys spend with each other?

Well, I mean, years, but, you know, when we go on the road for training, for example, junior guys, junior pilots will room together. Right? If you're a flight lead or, officer in charge, you get your own room. The crew chiefs, same thing if you're a senior NCO, you'll get your own room. If not, you'll share, but after flying, we'll spend time together, you know in the in the bar, or at a picnic table or something.

We get to know each other quite well.

Is there a can you talk about a little bit about who's man, I don't know how to say this, but who's is it the pilot that's ultimately in charge of the aircraft, or is it the crew chief, or how are they

Yeah. So the so the pilot you have a pilot in charge, pilot in command, right, in the army? Air force calls them aircraft commander, AC. He's in charge of everything about that aircraft. So you might I could be the pilot in command as a warrant officer, and I could have a colonel in the other seat.

I'm in charge. Right? He's doing what I tell him to do because that's the way it works. Mhmm. It's different if he's the air mission commander.

He could be the overall air mission commander, and he happens to be in my cockpit. So I'm now we're in a little bit of a a gray area because I'm telling him what to do in the aircraft, but he's maybe telling me what to do in the overall mission. Right? So it's a kind of a a blend there, but where are we going with that? I said I went around in a wrong

way. Relationship between well, now now relationship, respond basically responsibility.

Yeah. Responsibility for the aircraft. Right? So, when I was a junior pilot, there's a red line on the floor in a Chinook. It's like, station 95, they call it.

Right? So every inch of an airframe is assigned a station, you know, 1 inch is station 1 or 1 or something like that. Right? And as you go back, and that way you can say, you know, I've got a sheet metal crack at station 350, you know, butt line whatever, and you can you can tell just by markings on the floor where this crack could be. Right?

So with a junior pilot and a senior crew chief, sometimes they'll say, you might mention something about the back and they'll go, sir, you know, you're in front of station 95. Just, you know, keep your business up there. Right? Yeah. Whatever.

You know? So there's that relationship where it it it can be, I mean, we're always busting each other's butts, you know, but, if you're a guy like me, right, and I had pure you know, I do a lot of talking about, you know, I did this, I did this. There's always a crew involved, and in many cases, there's an aircraft or 2 or 3 behind me doing the same thing. Right? So you gotta keep that in mind.

But the, the responsibility of the aircraft commander, the PIC is absolute. He is responsible for it. So whether he's divided some some, authorities up to the crew chief in the back, You know, it's based on, you know, what's going on. Right? So for example, fast roping.

Right? So we'll, you know, the pilot will find the target, he'll come in, he'll start his approach, you get, you know, 50, 60 feet out laterally from it, and it's like the crew chief in the door will say, you know, target in sight, forward 30. You know, you come in, you start listening to them, they talk you in, and then when you get over the target, the crew chief and the prize masters will look down, identify the landing area, kick the ropes, and that guy is pretty much in charge until he's done doing his thing. You know, I'm listening to him. He's like, you know, come left, come right, come up, come down, you know, stop stick, you know, whatever is going on.

And they have a lot of responsibility in the back, you know, and, you know, get the utmost respect for those guys, especially because they got no control of the aircraft, ultimately, because I do have the ultimate responsibility in what happens, and they're going with me wherever I go.

I mean, I would imagine that relationship has to be pretty tight Yeah. With a lot of mutual respect.

And if there's not, there can be a problem. So when I was in the conventional unit in Savannah, I had a friend, he had a terrible relationship with all the crew chiefs. Like, he just looked down on them, you know? And no matter who talked to him, he just he treated them like crap. And they hated flying with him.

And we were coming back from California 1 time, we were getting gas and we taxied in and in the way a Chinook drives on the ground is you get a little steering wheel by your back like this, and 1 of the wheels has a power steering actuator and the aircraft will drive like a car. Right? On the ground. And when you come into a parking area at an airport, depending on if you're close to airplanes or a hangar, you know, buildings, light poles, that kind of stuff, it's very important for the crew chief to say, sir we're close to this. Let me dismount, and somebody will get out, and they'll look at the rotor tips and make sure you are not gonna hit whatever it is.

Right? The crew chief will always suggest that. I mean the pilot might say, hey this is gonna be tight, can you get out? Crew chief will do it, but in this case the crew chiefs knew he was too tight, did not offer to get out, and let him drive the aircraft right into a hangar. Right?

Now, everybody was okay. The aircraft was severely damaged. The hangar was damaged. The, accident board gets involved, the collateral board, and they find that the pilot had created such an, a toxic relationship with the crew that they let him damage the aircraft on purpose. If they didn't make him damage on purpose, they let it happen.

And so that's the extreme, and I've never seen that like in the 160th. The 160th is so professional that, then I really I do miss it. You know, I don't miss flying so much. I miss the people. You don't miss flying?

Not in the way you'd think. I mean every once in a while I'll cross the George Washington Bridge in New York city, and it's the same view I would get when I was flying at West Point and come down the river, and on a nice day I kind of like, I kind of miss flying. What I really miss is the people and the mission, You know? As I like to say, you know, taking a bunch of pipe swingers to a bad guy's front door, that's rewarding. You know?

I like doing that. All bad. All bad.

What's the longest amount of time you've been paired with a with a crew chief?

A couple of months. Probably, 8 months.

That's it. Yeah. Oh, shit.

So what'll happen is you'll go on a deployment, like, say, overseas. Right? When you're back in the states, you just get who you get. Right? Unless you're on a trip, like, you know, going out the mountains or something Okay.

Whatever the duration of that trip is. But when you go to combat, you get assigned a pilot, your co pilot, and your crew in an aircraft, an air frame. Right? And however that deployment is, it might be a 60 day deployment, it might be a year long deployment, you're with that crew and that aircraft the entire time.

Okay.

Yeah. So it's, you know, so the first couple of flights can be rough, you know, as you're feeling each other out. Like I flew because I was the, what's called an SIP, the standardization instructor pilot. So I was essentially the chief pilot for Chinooks and the 160. And I would fly with the different battalions.

Right? Because I had to fly, and the idea was to always be evaluating them to make sure they are holding the standard. You know, so if you're out at, you know, Savannah, are you doing things the same way as you're doing at Campbell? Because you better be, That's the standardization program. That way the customer knows he's getting the same support every single time.

Right? So I would deploy with them as well. And, so I go with this 3rd tank crew, we got g models now, which is the latest version of the aircraft, and we're at a FARP, forward arming and refueling point, and we're gonna, it's in Asadabad, Afghanistan. We're gonna we're gonna come in, we're gonna hover up to the point, we're gonna set down next to it, and we're gonna unplug a hose, plug it into the aircraft while we're running, and take gas. It's called hot fuel.

So we come in, I'm at a 10 foot hover, and cruci says, alright sir, come straight down. I come straight down. He goes, sir can you move pick it up again? Sure. I pick it up.

He goes move forward 3. Move 3. He's, like, alright. Go ahead and set it straight down. So I set it straight down.

He's, like, sir, can you pick it up again? I'm, like, what the hell? He's, like, I'm sorry. Everybody always drifts forward when they descend. You actually come straight down.

And I'm like, that's what they're supposed to be doing, but, you know, I'm a high I'm I am the chief, Shanok Bai. I should be the best, or of the best. I have peers obviously, but I'm good. You know? And these guys had never flown with me before, and they were just anticipating that I would drift forward like all other guys did.

And so, as time went by, they just compensate, you know, for how I fly.

Gotcha.

And so, maybe I don't come straight down. Maybe I am the drift guy, you know, I drift forward as I come down. They just compensate for that. They just bring you in 3 feet short. Have you come down?

They know you're gonna drift in, and you land. So there's that relation that habitual relationship and that, you know, understanding each other's capabilities. Gotcha. You know, very very important. Gotcha.

Alright. Let's get back to training. Yeah. So I don't where were we?

Where were we in training? So we were doing green platoon,

being What is green platoon?

Oh, so green platoon is where it's the training platoon for the 1 sixtieth. Okay. So we have green team and, OTC, you know, for the other other, special mission units. And it came about because so at at the 1 sixtieth compound is a wall, a memorial wall with a lot of names on it. I don't know the number, I should.

Most of the early days, 19 eighties, early eighties, those are all training deaths for the most part.

Yeah.

Because they're developing tactics, techniques, and procedures that the army later adopted. You know, how to use, like, air night vision goggles, what are the limitations, when should you, when shouldn't you, kind of thing. And those those names are are on the wall, you know, and, so there was, there was too many in 1 year. I can't remember which year it was, and they, congress shut down the unit. Right?

They're like, you guys are killing people like every week, you know, kind of thing. And, they did a blue ribbon panel that evaluated the 1 60th the way it worked, and they said, you know the problem is not only are you developing new tactics and techniques, but you're training new guys that are coming into the unit. Right? So they said, you've got to have a dedicated part of your unit that only does training for the new guys, or if people are transitioning new equipment, that's what they'll do. And so they created green patoon, and it was a, you know, a godsend.

It really is an amazing, you know, whoever really thought that through, you did a good job, you know, way back when. But that's what it's for.

Right on. So so it's an 8 month?

It's different for every airframe. It takes 8 months to get a Chinook guy through.

Okay.

So that's, basic skills, you know, hand to hand shooting, that kind of stuff. Basic nav or bnav. That's where you learn to to fly and navigate in the little bird, to do things like a like a night stalker, and then you go to your specific aircraft. So even if you're a Chinook guy, and you end up in Chinooks, there's so much expansion of what the aircraft can do because of the additional equipment that's embedded into the airframe. Right?

And, you have to learn how to use all of that stuff, and how to compensate when it doesn't work.

So there's so okay. So there so you have totally different aircraft that's specific for 1 60th. Yeah. What would be some of the things that are different between a conventional 47 versus a TF 1 6?

So, when I talked earlier about the MH sixes or the, MH 47, so army aircraft are designated by what they do. Right? C h, c h 47. Right? Cargo helicopter, model 47, version delta.

Right? In this case, it's modified helicopter 47, you know, echo at that time. And, some of the equipment that's diff well, big differences is the, the fuel tanks on on the special ops version, the MH, is twice the capacity. So instead of a 1000 gallons, you're carrying 2,000 gallons. There's internal fuel tanks that can fit inside that are crash worthy and ballistically tolerant.

There is an air refueling probe that sticks out the front. Think if you look on the on the front of my book there, you get this big pipe that sticks out the front. You can fly up behind it, Air Force, C 130. They drag a hose out the back while you're flying, and it's got this donut shaped parachute that you plug into and get gas in the air, so you have to learn all that. The crew chiefs have to learn gunnery, so you got these m134 minuteiguns, 762, 6 barrel Gatling gun, shoots 4,000 rounds a minute.

They have to learn that, how to how to do it, how to deal with malfunctions. You've got terrain following radar, which is key. After 911 without that, we could not have done even half, even fraction of what we did in those infills getting the, you know, the horse soldiers and other greenbrae teams in the s the OGA teams. Because every SF team had to be brought in to an OGA, the team that was there the day before or 2 days before. So that that's what all this equipment does.

And everything, is a TV screen. There's there's 4 TV screens and an echo, and there's 5 in a in a golf, and those 5 are splittable, like you can you can divide them up, so there's really 10 displays. And you have to learn how to use those and when to use them. Flying the helicopter itself is pretty much the same.

Okay.

But using all of the tools of the trade, so you have to learn, number 1, make sure you can fly the aircraft okay, the way we want you to, interact with the crew because you're also training the enlisted crew, Then we go into the special mission tasks, like terrain falling radar. We go to Knoxville, fly in the mountains, in the dark. The pilot will flip his MBGs up, so he can't really see out the window. It's no moon out, it's dark, and he's following the the terrain following radar cues, and the other pilot, as a safety pilot, if you will, the instructor, has his goggles down, so if if the guy misinterprets the cues and is gonna fly into something, you know, he can just take the controls. I have the controls.

It's just that simple. Gotcha. I have the controls. And then you say what what's wrong? But you get that, air refueling, gotta teach the guy how to do that, that's high adventure sometimes.

And so, once they learn to do the aircraft, the equipment, now we have to learn how to utilize it in the environment. And the cool thing with the 1 sixtieth is that that a conventional unit doesn't do, is we've got money for TDY. Right? So you take the students from Campbell, like so we go to Knoxville for the the train flight, then you, you know, wherever the tankers are you're gonna go there for the air refueling. So sometimes the air force or the marines will send a tanker to us, and sometimes you got to go to them, which might be Dallas or, in the Houston area, that kind of stuff.

Or you travel somewhere and they'll come, you know, you hit a tanker en route. And then once you've done those things, you go Desert Mountain, we go to Albuquerque, and you you're out there for like 3 weeks learning to just land in the dust for real, and then learn how to fly in the mountains, power management, how to how to read the wind in the mountains, and how to come in from a certain grade. It's like parachute jumping, you have to learn, you know, how to land in a in a certain way, and then, everything we did before we did it in the aircraft, we did it in the flight simulator, which was very realistic. Right? So you would teach them how to do, the hover page, right?

So there's this on the little TV screen, there's a little video game you play, there's a a crosshair in the middle, there's a open circle and a line, and you try to keep the open circle over the crosshairs. And if you're moving, that line gets longer in the direction of movement. Right? And so you've got to look at that and interpret it to keep the aircraft in whatever, let's say a stationary hover, you gotta keep all of those little cues on top of that little crosshair, So you can't see out the window at all, you're either in the dust and snow, whatever it is, and you you you move the the cyclic stick to keep that where it is like a little little video game. And then the crew chief might be able to see straight down.

Right? He might be able to see it, not be able to see out, but oftentimes they can see the ground right below you depending on your altitude, and they, you know, they'll be like, alright sir, you know, you're 10 feet off and you're confirming that up front with the instrumentation. You've got it steady, like, you know, come down. You know, and you you just come down, and, it can be a challenge, you know, to say the least, to land in the dust. All but.

All but.

So you graduate. Yep. Obviously.

Yep. Yep. So we did that. You graduate. When you graduate green platoon, you are probably, well, back during the height of the OEF and OIF, you are going to deploy probably in 2 weeks, maybe less.

When did you graduate? What year?

So I graduated in 95. And, there was nothing going on. Right? So it was all training back then. And training trips, people ask me, you know, what was it like pre 9 11 and the 1 60th?

I thought, it was great. You know, because everywhere we went was, you know, 4 4 5 star. You know, you you go to Colorado to do mountain flying, we're staying in condos. You know, or at least a nice hotel. You know, the DoubleTree.

We didn't have any tents. You know, so, we were destined 1 time working with AC 1 thirties. We had 3 aircraft there. 2 of them flew per night, and we were we were flying, you know, guys in, they would call for fire, and then we'd come pick them up, that kind of stuff. And the other crew was really a spare, you know, so we you you have to keep the flight hours within a certain parameter to keep the aircraft flying.

Right? So it's like an oil change. You know that, well, you know, another 100 miles, I'm gonna have to do an oil change, except you're gonna have to do it. Right? They're gonna make you do it by regulation.

Right? So you keep track of the oil changes, if you will, and every hour you fly ticks off on this, your oil change, if you will. And so, you know, if you got 1 down for the night doing maintenance, the schedule what we call scheduled maintenance, the oil change, the other 2 can go fly. And if you're not working on it and 1 of them breaks, that's a spare. You just take it, do your thing, and now we have not affected the ground force in any way.

Right? That's the goal. But anyway, we're out to to show you this is pre 911. So 2 of us are out flying, the aircraft breaks, and they fly back to Hurlburt Field to they're done for the night. Right?

We can't fix this tonight. We go back. They hook up. We're in Destin, is our hotel, is at the Sheraton on the beach, and the person not flying, that crew is responsible for getting, you know, beverages, bait, like we had gotten some Zebco fishing reels at the b x or the the b x, and, you had everything ready and guys would come back from flying, and we'd spend the night on the beach fishing off in the surf. Right?

Drinking beer. That's pre 911 if you weren't actually doing some missions. And I come back 1 night, that night I'm talking about, and because it's 2 crews now, they're all drunk. And I come up, I'm like the only I'm like the adult leader in the group. They're out in the water, the pilots, they're out to their neck with fishing rods.

Right? Surf casting, and the waves had slowly walked them out. You know, like they started waist high and they ended up at the neck, and I was like a Boy Scout leader. I was like, alright. Everybody buddy up.

Like what? I said hold hands with the guy next to you. I want to count heads. Right? So I kinda was like, get in here.

Right? And they're like, alright. We're coming. You know? But that was pre 911.

911 happens, you know, you still get some some nice trips, but it's not like that. Yep. You know? But the where I really was going with that is the ability to take the guys to the actual environment. So we're gonna go learn to land in the dust for real.

Usually when you get there the the lake beds are dry crushed, you know, and there's no dust. So I remember I took these guys out 1 time and I start driving the aircraft around on 4 wheels, and I'm breaking up the crust. Now what are you doing? It's gonna get dusty. I'm like, that's the point of this.

We're not out here to pretend we're dust landing. We're gonna dust land. And then you go up to the mountains, you wear an oxygen, which turned out to be important in Afghanistan. Things like that, you know, and that's what we do. So when you get back from Green Platoon, pre 911, you would go places, you know Fort Bragg, you'd end at Fort Benning, work with the Rangers, go out to Coronado, work with the Seals, out to Little Creek, and, you just do whatever they needed.

You know, oil platform takedowns, you know, VBSS, something like that. And once the war started, you know, that training became less and less because we needed airframes overseas. Right? So it was tougher to get that realistic training in, or you had to learn to mix it in. You know, it's like if you're Yeah.

Gonna go out to the compound at, at Bragg, you know, what can you do on the way out? You know, we would link up with the the a tens out of Pope when they were still there, and on the way in, we'd link up with them and do a personnel recovery mission, which I I got a good 1 in the book there where, I dusted out some farmer. You know, that they, you know, the pilot, the down pilot was there, and you know the A10s are doing their their passes, and, the farmer had just lined the field with his tractor. And he's just sitting there watching, you know, the A10s do their thing. And I come over with a Chinook, and I land right next to him, and it's a big cloud of dust and farm talc, I don't know, poison I guess, I don't know, fertilizer.

I thought I was in trouble. We get to to brag. I talked to the air force guy, he gives me the farmers phone number. I call him, I'm like, hey, I apologize. I'm I'm so sorry.

You know, he's like, are you kidding me? He goes, that was amazing. He goes, you do that anytime you want. He says, but make sure I'm out there, because I want to watch it. Like, alright.

That's awesome.

But anyway, that's the the training is very realistic, and, the margin for safety is interesting because, you know, the 160th, because we killed so many people in the early days, had a reputation of being cowboys. Oh the 160th guys are gonna just ignore all the rules and do whatever. Well, now we're inventing new rules, you know, and it's how you progress, you know? And unfortunately it was progressed in the blood of of night stockers. But that reputation is still there, you know, and I remember teaching a couple of green platoon classes where guys would come in and I would say, okay we're not gonna do this tonight because, you know, maybe the weather is such and such, or we've got I don't know, some parameter that's kind of iffy.

And I actually, a couple occasions, have had guys say, well, I thought we would just do whatever it took. And it's like, well, maybe on a combat mission, you know, or national something of strategic importance, national importance, but we're training. We're not gonna kill somebody, you know, just to go out. We'll just do it tomorrow night, you know, kind of thing. So the rules are very important to us as well.

What did it feel like when you graduated? It felt good. I'll bet.

You know, you felt you really you've really done something. You know? And it it's what I wanna do. You do that.

And When you you graduate, you're 1 of the best helicopter pilots in the world. I'd like to think so.

You know? And as the time goes by, when you get better in the unit, like, I mean, you could be a a senior guy, like a CW 4, but a junior pilot. You're taking out the trash, you're emptying, you're filling the fridge, that kind of stuff. You gotta pay your pennies because someone's gotta do it, and the other guys are doing important things, you know. You know, I lived my life watching the news, like the 24 hour news cycle.

Something came on CNN back when it was reliable, you look at it and go, oh, something's happening in Khartoum, that's happening in Belize, you know. The ambassador in this place might be trouble. And I would go into work, I'd get into the high side stuff, I'd research the situation, I'd research the country, and I'd start preliminary plans for how to operate there. Because there are many times I get called in, trying to think of the country, in South America every year I get called to go get the ambassador and they'd smooth things over and we didn't have to. But you live your life on the news because you could be going somewhere.

I mean look what happened on October 7th. Right? With Israel. Those guys were on the road, you know, within hours.

Yeah. You

know? Yeah. Not that I know anything about that, but yeah. Yeah.

Well, let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll start getting into similar combat operations. Sure. Perfect. Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to Itunes, and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review.

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elite.

Alright, Alan. We're back from the break. We've covered your childhood. We've covered the beginning of your military career, your assessment into TF 160, and now we're getting into your combat operations. Let's move into post 911.

Alright. Actually, let's move let's just go into 911. Alright. What were you doing when that happened?

So 911, I was in, I was doing a mission in, JRTC, right, the Joint Readiness Training Center down in Fort Polk, Louisiana. Right? I was actually in filling a MAROPS team, right, a maritime team from 5th group, and they would, put them in a riverine operation. They linked up with a special boat unit out of the navy, and they go do their thing. Right?

So I come back, take a shower, go to bed. Sun comes up, and I hear guys in the barracks. Now the barracks, it's 1 of those national guard buildings. You know? It's, cinder block walls, hard tile floors, you know, that kind of stuff.

So every noise at 1 end gets all the way down to the other end. Right? So even if you're trying to be quiet, these guys were like, holy crap. Look at that. Did you see that?

And I'm like, and I knew that the our other company, a company, was on their way to Europe to do a, joint readiness exercise. And we always said that, you know, 1 of those flights is gonna be real, and when it happens it's gonna be spectacular. Right? The the whole operation. I'm like, damn it.

Those guys did something. You know, like you always wanna be on the big operation. I thought, you know, the other company had just done it. So I get up, I turn on the TV, and that's not what I saw at all. What I saw was 1 of the, you know, trade center towers was burning.

And I remember thinking, oh, somebody's in trouble. You know, safety wise, aviation safety. You know, you got LaGuardia, JFK, Newark there. Somebody screwed up. And, so now I got it on, brew up a pot of coffee in my room, and, I'm looking at it.

I have my first, you know, sip of coffee, and incomes out of the plane. I was like, this is no accident. This is an attack. And I remember getting everybody up, you know, and, hey. We're gonna be doing something.

I mean, not like we're gonna, you know, put in the helicopters and do something, but we're gonna have to get back to Fort Campbell. And, it was it was something because I I got out of the end of the hall, and there's 2 guys that have been out, you know, they were shot down. Alright? They're doing an E and E that night, escape and invasion. And so they just come in, They were miserable from walking around the swamps, you know, until they got rescued.

And, I'm like, get up. We're under attack. And they're like, screw you, you know. They wouldn't open their doors. I was like, no really.

I'm not talking about like the opt for. I'm talking about somebody is attacking us. They open the door, showed them the TV, and I go, wow. So I had just taken a position. So I was a a flight lead.

Right? So that what that is in the 160th is you are on a very few tracked actually by the secretary of defense's office, on how many there are of us. And, in our company there's 2. And I just got promoted if you will out of the company level where I was the chief pilot, the flight lead, and moved to battalion, so across the street. Right?

They always talk about, you know, you're gonna go across the street to the headquarters. Right? Because it's literally across the road. And what snunk about it is now when b company goes, technically I don't have to go because I work for the battalion commander now and not the company commander. Luckily they needed a second plate lead and I ended up with them, but with that being said, the entire National Airspace System was shut down after 911.

Right? So you had fighters overhead, AWACs, that kind of stuff, but no commercial air travel, no military travel other than fighters, and so we rented our car, the battalion commander and I, and we drove back to Fort Campbell. I think it was a 10, 11 hour drive, and we're just hungry for information because remember cell phones back then were real Yeah. Phones. Right?

They weren't smartphones. So we were finding radio stations on the AM radio, and we're listening to the press briefings and stuff. And it's like, wow. This is this is something. And so we get back to Fort Campbell.

We get a you know, now we can get down to the skiff, find out what is going on. And the next day, we were headed to Tampa, you know, in a 15 passenger van, me and a couple planners. Didn't really know what was gonna happen, and I don't know. That's a 15 hour drive or something like that, and we drove down. The guys were still stuck at, you know, JRTC waiting to come back up.

So we went to Tampa, and a funny story there. Right? So now the base is is locked down, McDill. Right? And we gotta get to Saksent headquarters, and the line to get in the gate is gotta be 5, 6 miles long.

Right? And we can't no one's gonna let you in. So we drive around and there's a gate with nobody at it, but it's open. There's a guard there, and we pull up and then, hey, we need to get in and they're like, sorry, sir. Emergencies only, you know, official bit whatever.

So so we start driving back, and I happen to have a guy. Our intel officer was also a CI officer, and he had a badge. And that badge had a little placard with it that said something like, you know, if the bearer of this badge is doing or whatever national security, you know, afford him all courtesies or something along those lines. Right? I said, Jerry, get your badge out.

He's like, Alan, I'm not I can't. They'll take my badge away if I use it for something. I'm like, dude, you just got attacked. So we drive back through. He flashes the badge.

It litters right in. Right? And that was always a funny story with with with he and I is that he was afraid to use his badge for 911. So anyway, we get in there, and, we're not really sure what is gonna happen. We know we're going to Afghanistan, like, that the target is in Afghanistan.

But we're bouncing between the 3rd battalion and the 2nd battalion going because b company second battalion had just divided in 2 and sent 6 of its Chinooks to Korea to work in PACOM. So that company really wasn't big enough to do anything anymore. Right? And they were always talking about integrating it with the other company, just making it a bigger company. But our area of expertise was the Middle East.

All the other units didn't have the same expertise that we had because we had done, 2 years before that, 2 years in a row, we'd been to Kuwait with the intention of going into Iraq, during desert Operation Desert Thunder and Desert, Fox. Right? They're separate things. He he kicked the UN inspectors out. So we were there 7 months at a pop, flying every night, doing air refueling, dust landings, so we were really good at operating in the dust and air refueling in the in the desert.

So, but now we're shrunk down a little bit, and we don't know if we're gonna be able to to do anything, so they're gonna send us, like me and my guys, to Egypt for operation Bright Star, which is a big training exercise in Egypt. Right? And 3rd battalion will go to Uzbekistan and go into Afghanistan. Except things keep going around a little bit. It's like, you know what?

3rd battalion would be better off going to Egypt. We'll take the echo models up to Uzbekistan because of the terrain falling radar and some other things that the older aircraft that 3rd battalion had didn't didn't have installed. You know, they had airy feeling capability. The aircraft looks the same on the outside, but it's not nearly the same aircraft. So we, we end up getting the the mission, so I I plan it.

I'm on the phone, and this is so secret even on the secure line I'm not allowed to talk about it because the phone's not a high enough classification. So the guys had just got back from, GRTC, they got to fly back, and I'm calling up there going, hey, you need to pull we're like talking around this on a secure phone. You know, hey, I need you to pull, you know, digital maps for, you know, maybe remember that movie, Spies Like Us? You know, kind of that area, you know, Dushon Bay. And, so he he understood and he he got those maps pulled and we started planning it, and then we end up back at Campbell, which is funny because Operation Enduring Freedom was actually started as Operation Infinite Justice, and we got rid of the riot act.

You don't tell anybody about this, nothing, no talking about it. So we're going home, and on the way home, Donald Rumsfeld is doing a press conference, and he says, Operation Infinite Justice is in motion. We're like, what the hell? So they changed the name, but, so we get back and here's where the the real challenge is. Right?

Remember I said earlier that there's always room for 1 more ranger. Mhmm. At sea level, in a Chinook, if you can put something inside it, you can fly with it. Right? You just can.

When you start doing external loads, you get stuff that's too heavy. But now we're talking about flying to these mountains that are 20, 22,000 feet, and it isn't just the altitude. It's the distance. Right? So in order to get over a mountain, you might have to be a certain weight.

So let's say I can carry 20 guys. Right? And the gas that so I cut the gas down to make weight, if you will, to get over the mountain, but then I don't have enough gas to get where I'm going or to get home. Right? So it's always this big math problem of how many people you can take versus how much gas, how much time you can give them on the objective before you can pick them up, you know, all that kind of stuff.

So we're doing this, and the math isn't working out. We're like, we can't get where we've got to go with what we should be carrying, And what we didn't know was that 5th group, 5th special forces group, was in a room right next to me in Tampa planning what they call a UW campaign on conventional warfare. That's the whole horse soldier thing. Right? Except they thought I could just take them anywhere they wanted to go, and I didn't know they were doing that.

I was just planning for personnel recovery. So if the bombers got shot down, a fighter, I would go rescue them, that kind of thing. So the other company comes in, you know, they're lead planner, and he looks at our our whiteboard of of of essentially a table of of what we could remove from the aircraft with weight to try to compensate for this. We took all the armor out, we took extra equipment out that was, you know, extra fire extinguishers, things like that, gone. And they had the same calculations, and we're all, like, it's nice to see that we we separately came up with the same conclusion.

You almost can't go anywhere, right, without some major concessions. So then we end up going to, Uzbekistan, a place called k 2, Kharshi Khanabad. Uzbekistan is just to the north of Afghanistan, and that it's a former Soviet Republic, and we're gonna operate out of that base, with 4 Chinooks and 2 DAPs. The DAPs I talked about earlier, direct action penetrators, the armed Blackhawks. They're gonna be our gun support, if you will.

We don't have anything else. This is early in the game. Right? I mean, when you consider a a battle now, you know, you get battle tracking and, beacons, you know where everybody is, and you can see everything, and you've got a stack above you of support. There was nothing.

Yeah. And so here we are, as soon as we built up the first 2 Chinooks, the bombing campaign started. And originally, we wanted all 4 built up because we wanted, you know, 2 teams of 2, because if something happens to the first team of 2, the other 2's got to either help them or help whatever they were doing. And the SecDef said, nope, as soon as the first 2 are done, start. Right?

So they started bombing right away, and then we got the other 2 built up. Luckily we didn't have anybody go down, and, that went on for about 2 weeks, and then 5th group rolls in. And we changed over from an air force colonel being in charge of us to a green beret colonel, the 5th group commander, John Mulholland. Great guy by the way. And he, he comes in, he's like, can you give me a brief on what you can do with the helicopters?

And we kind of show him and he's kind of perplexed. He said, what's the matter, sir? And he's like, so you mean you can't just take an ODA, you know, team from here to here? No, sir. Not happening.

You can't get over these mountains without weight, or if you do you're gonna run out of gas halfway there or something like that. And he's like, oh, I wish somebody had told me this, you know, like 3 weeks ago. And I was like, what do you mean? And then we found out we were all in the same planning area. It's like because they were falling under the old isolation rules.

Like cold war Mhmm. ISOFAC, you know, don't tell the pilots where you're going because if they're captured, they'll tell. And it's, like, well, in this case, you kinda you're counting on me to be able to even do it. Yeah. You know?

And so we figured it out. We had to make some concessions on weight. Like, I I said I can only carry like half a team, so I can carry 6 guys and their equipment, and their equipment's limited to like £3,000. So we made the ODAs put their gear, all their personal gear, all their team gear on a 4 6 3 l pallet on aircraft scales, and if it was over, it's like, get rid of £30. Oh, come on.

£30? Get rid of her. You're not going. Fine. They'd lose batteries or water or something.

And they could be supplied later, but that's how strict we were on the math. And then we had this political problem. When Ahmed Masood died. Right? He was the head of the Northern Alliance.

He was assassinated the day before 911, I believe. Right? By Al Qaeda, so that we would not have a reliable, ally. Right? And he was very charismatic, everybody loved him.

He was in charge of all the other warlords. They they were subservient to him, and they get Al Qaeda blows him up with a fake film crew. His second in command is a guy named Faheem Khan. He's a jerk. Nobody likes him, but he's in charge of this the thing now, and the third guy is general Rashid Dostum, who those 2 hate each other.

Right? They're in different locations. So Fahim says to the US government, if I don't get my green berets first, I will attack Dostum, and you can, you know, throw your alliance out the window. So we are in 2 teams of 2. My buddy Arlo has to take 1 of my aircraft actually, so he's a team of 3, I'm a team of 1.

So I can't go anywhere. We're not going anywhere, single ship. And, they take off. They reach the border, the weather is terrible, the mountains are 21,000 feet tall, and they got a turnaround. They got to abort.

Right? They can't get through. So they come back, which means that my mission, which is the next night, just rolled 24 hours. Right? And I was afraid, I was a terrible teammate by the way, because I was afraid that Arlo would get his guys in and then the SecDef would go, you know what it's too hard, it's not worth the risk, no more infills.

And then, you know, I have to listen for 30 years for this guy talking about his mission, like he has to listen now to me. And, so he goes the next night. Same thing happens, turns around, except now I'm rolled 24 again. Right now 24 hours before I can take my guys in, and I'm pissed. And I meet him in the in the planning area where he comes in the door.

He's, like, white. He they almost died. Right? They're 20,000 feet, can't see out the windows, and they're doing a pedal turn on the hover page, and I mean, they're lucky they did it. And I'm like, what the hell, man?

And he's like, dude, you have no idea what the weather was like. I'm like, you know, use this, use that. What are you doing? You know? And we got in a shoving match.

Like I'm calling him, you know, all kinds of bad words, and he's, you know, reciprocating and that. Now Arlo's a little bit bigger than me. We're about the same height, but he's bigger than I mean, he would kick my butt. And but I'm mad, and I'm pushing him, and somebody gets in the middle of us and like, gentlemen no fighting in the war room. You know?

It's a line from Doctor. Strangelove, movie. But, anyway. Alright. We're gonna roll again.

Go to bed, daytime. Phone rings unbeknownst to me in the planning area, and the major that's on the day shift answers the phone, and a woman on the other end says, is this the TFDAG or ops end? And he's, like, yes. And she goes, please hold for the secretary. He's like, secretary?

This is Donald Rumsfeld. Who am I talking to? It's this this major, we'll call him Mark, the major Mark. He's like, what can I do for you, sir? And he's like, you tell Mulholland you get those teams in tonight or else.

Both of them. Clicked. We don't know about this until, like, the next day. So we get up, come in and have our coffee. I'm expecting to see Arlo go do his thing, and I'm just gonna sit here and wonder if he's gonna make it, And they say, oh, you're going tonight.

Like, what do you mean? I go, he's got my other helicopter. He's like, you're gonna have to take everybody on 1, but I can't take everybody on 1. He goes, yeah, you can if you if you do air refueling in and out. Okay.

Right? This the only the only, caveat is you can't touch down before the other flight. Like, Fahim has to get his guys, so he can say, I got the first Americans, and dosed him can have his 30 minutes later. So we had to coordinate timing. So even though I took off and was making a time, if these guys got delayed, I had to back off to make sure that Fahim got his guys first.

Right? So this is me with the with the entire ODA 595 in my aircraft. I have very little fuel now, because I've got to hit a tanker on the way in. I'll do my mission, I'll come back out, I gotta hit a tanker again to get gas and air to make it home. And, they didn't want me to fly a single ship because there's nothing overhead.

The sat at the time, the satellite communications was a low angle bird, and the mountains blocked it. So unless you were above the mountains or had a certain angle, you couldn't talk. So I would be alone in Afghanistan. Right? So they sent the Daps with me that aren't Black Hawks.

Problem is they can go most of the way, you know, and then the mountains are gonna get too big, and they're gonna have to hang up. It's like the the b 17 bombers going into Germany in the early days, and the fighters could only go so far. It's like, see you. You know, we'll see you when you come back. You know?

And, so we're flying along, and I've got the battalion commander on my jump seat. So the jump seat, I sit in the left seat, my co pilot's in the right seat, and the jump seat is just between and behind us a little bit, like I could tap his knee kinda thing. And, we're flying along, the weather is terrible. And we get our gas, we cross the border, my heart's about to jump out of my chest, I'm like, you know, we're in Afghanistan, and my heart's like bump bump bump, And, we run into a sandstone several 1000 feet thick, just like the Eagle Claw mission, actually. And you can't see out past the probe, the refuel probe.

There's like Saint Elmo's fire on it, you know, like little sparks. And, the daps are in tight. We're at about 200 feet above the ground, flying across the northern dunes, and they're tucked in tight, and they can't see me. They can't see the helicopter. What they can see with their night vision goggles is the glow of my engines.

Right? So there's 2 engines. As I pull in power, my copilot pulls in power, the engine gets hotter so the glow gets bigger, and they know they're climbing. The glow gets smaller, they know we're descending. Brave men to be able to do that, highly capable to even come close to doing it as long as they did, and they eventually they cried on call, they turn around, okay we gotta abort, we cannot do this.

Alright. Because we always say, you know, with surface to air missiles and other anti aircraft weapons, every munition has a p k, a a probable kill ratio. So if you fire a s a 7 on an aircraft, you have a p k of 75%. Right? I'm just pulling that out of my butt.

So 75% chance of a a lethal kill. We say the ground has a p k of a 100%. So here we are in the mountains, in the clouds, and they just they can't see. They can't see the mountains. They can't see me now other than the glow of my engines, which is insane.

And though they've got big balls, it's not gonna keep them alive if they hit the mountain. So they turn around. So now I'm thinking, oh, there's no way they're gonna let me continue by myself, but I didn't know about the Rumsfeld phone call. And the colonel says, Al what do you think? And I said, sir I think we just TF, which is terrain falling radar.

Never been done before in our aircraft for real. We train with it. I think I talked about it earlier with the green platoon stuff. He goes, execute. Push the button.

It's like, Jethro, follow your cue, 300 foot clearance altitude. Off we go, and we are using the train following radar for the first time in real life, and we've done it in the simulator, and we've practiced it, but we've never done it where you couldn't see out no kidding, really couldn't see out the window.

No shit, sir.

It took the first 1. It took a general officer in training, like the USAA commander had to approve flying without being able to see, and had to be on what's called a military training route. So in order to get the training route reserved, the 2 star general to approve, and bad enough weather to go, but not so bad you can't go, it just never lined up. Right? So we couldn't do it.

So here we are doing it, and, we make our first turn, and we get what's called a full climb command. So the, the aircraft sees something ahead of us that it can't climb over because we didn't plan to do this. I'm planning on going around everything, but the aircraft, the radar doesn't know that. And then the damn thing reboots. Right?

So you ever had your computer, you had to do a control alt delete or Mhmm.

You know,

your phone had to be rebooted because it's a computer. Well the radar is a computer and part of the reason there was all that, you know, the 2 star general is because the damn thing would do that. The darnest times it would just go into its reboot cycle, and you'd have to figure out what's wrong and get it back. Right? In the meantime, all you can do is climb like your life depends on it because it does.

And so my copilot, he slows back to best climb air speeds about 80 knots. He's got the power pulled into his armpits. We are climbing at about 4,000 feet a minute. I mean we are just climbing like a rape date, and I have no idea what's in front of us. The radar isn't showing me.

Right? So it's actually the radar will show you about 10 miles out, and it was something that was about 20 miles out. It was a mountain that was too big for us to go over, and I figured that out by scrolling through the maps, like a digital map on the on the little TV screens, the MFDs. So I'm scrolling through trying to find a a map scale that would be useful to me, and I find 1, and it's like, ah, it's a mountain right here. I get the radar back, so there's different ways to give direction cues to the pilot.

So I give him a heading cue, I say follow that cue, he does it, we descend because the mountains now off to the side, we get around it, and we rejoin the course, and we're on our way. Right? First lesson learned, every flight in Afghanistan, every flight is planned so that in a pinch you can TF. So if you run into bad weather, you can do it. But in doing so, now you're giving up.

Now you've you've got a capability, but you're giving up. In order to have to do that capability, you need performance, which means you either have less gas on board or less customers, less cargo. Right? So there's a give and take to everything. We get to Iraq, you know, whatever you want there, and, but anyway this is Afghanistan.

So we're going along, we're still in the clouds, there's nobody to talk to, my aircraft is all alone. This is the stuff you make movies about, and what they did 12 trunk. Right? But they highlighted the green berets. But anyway we come to the last ridgeline, and we're still in the clouds, and the colonel's like, Al, what are you gonna do?

And I said, I'm really sure we got this, you know, and so I lower that there's a lower altitude that it'll fly which is like really a 100 feet. So I do that and we pop out of the clouds. We're like, I don't know, 3, maybe 4000 feet, this ridgeline, and then the LZ is about a half mile to go, and then there's a little hill north of that because we'd come around, and on the other side of that's a ZPU 234. Right? And it's Taliban.

So a 23 millimeter, 4 barreled, anti aircraft cannon. Right? If he sees me, it's a line of sight of me, he will tear me up. I'll be Swiss cheese. We will not survive.

The aircraft's not gonna do it. So I've got to keep that little hill, that's all it is, a little nub. As long as I can keep the line of sight from him seeing me, he can't shoot me. Right? So, but I've got to lose 3 to 4000 feet in about a half miles distance, so the only way to do that is s turns.

Right? So we're losing our altitude, we're we're dropping 4,000 foot a minute. I mean, we're just screaming. We put the aircraft out of trim a little bit to put some drag, we're dropping, and we're doing this, and, my copilot isn't as experienced with me, and I'm like, I have the controls. Right?

So I'm doing this, and I'm basically standing the aircraft on the side as we're dropping. Right? I mean, we are dropping fast. I didn't time it right because as we get to the bottom, I'm turning this way. The l z's over here, so it's out the other side of the aircraft, and I can't see it.

But I'm at about a 150 feet now, and I'm like, Jethro, you got the l z inside? He's like, yeah. You have the controls. So now he has to take the controls. He turns inbound to the l z, but I screwed him because to do a dust landing in a Chinook, typically you get set up about a half mile out, you know, and now we're much closer to that now, and you the controls had little buttons on them.

Right? And those buttons are for a little magnetic brake, So you can move the controls wherever you want them, let go of the switch, and the control will stay right there, and then you can just sort of little pressure, you can fight against the springs. Right? Because when you get in a dust cloud, you want to be able to just sort of relax your grip and let the aircraft go where you set it up. If you go into it without doing that, if you tighten up at all, you know, get in that fetal position at all, your arm tends to move and you will drift, which is what happened to him because I didn't give him a time to get set up.

And so he he comes in there, and he's a great dustlander, actually probably better than me, and, he's coming in and I could feel the aircraft going backwards in the dust. Right? We're aft gear is gonna be like 10 feet off the ground. If we hit going backwards, we're gonna crash. It's gonna be spectacular, and spectacular failure.

And so I said go around, go around, go around, which means, you know, pull power, let's come up out of the dust, we'll come back around, we'll try it again. Except I feel the aft gear touch the ground. Well, I'm not gonna go back up in the dust cloud with a 23 millimeter gun there if I can if I'm already on the ground, but Jethro is from West Virginia. He's a big man. Right?

And I mean, like all muscle, and there's no difference in the controls, so I have no advantage over him. And he's starting to pull power, and I don't have time, and so I lay on the on the thrust trying to keep him from pulling up, and he's pulling harder, and I can feel myself getting pulled out of my seat, And finally, he realizes what I'm trying to do, and he stops and we we land, dust kind of settles, and we are surrounded by Afghan men wearing pakoles, and I don't remember what the scarf is called. They all got AK 40 sevens. It Could be Taliban, could be Northern Lions. I don't know.

Right? There's there's an OGA guy supposedly there, but he didn't have an OIRA strobe, so he might be dead as far as I know. And, the team leader gets out, Mark Nootch. Right? The leader of finite 5, And, they do a little hug.

He comes up by my, my window. Gives me a thumbs up. I'm like, see you. So we took off, repeated the thing, went back, got air refueling, back to Bagram. We sit there.

So we shut the aircraft down, and I had nothing left. Like the adrenaline of that night, the stress of that night. I remember just sitting there as they towed the aircraft into parking, you know, and we were just Jethro and I were just kind of sitting there, and, we did that night after night after night. And a couple of those nights, Arlo, the other flight lead and I, there was a there was a an OGA pilot named Ned. He flew Mi seventeens out of, Dushanbe into Afghanistan, Prancer Valley, and stuff.

So he stopped in and gave us a bottle of Jack Daniels. And so, Arlo had the bottle, and we snuck off in a bunker, Had a little snort, and we're like, what do you think? And I said, dude, I don't think we're gonna live another mission. And he said, yeah, I agree. And what do we do?

It's a little emotional. We're just gonna do it. You know, there's nobody else who's gonna do it other than us. So, we didn't tell anybody that we had these doubts. You know, they I'm sure they had it.

But you know, as a leader, you've gotta lead. And so we did. We did, I know we put 21 teams in, I think. You know, in the movie 12 Strong, it's 1 team, you know, for simplicity, but it was 21 teams.

21 teams?

21 teams. Yeah. All over Afghanistan. I mean, we were I mean, other than, you know, Kabul. I mean, Kabul was Taliban to hell, but I was all the way down the the west side of, was it Farah, and, I can't think of the further south I went, but, you know, a long way.

I took the the OGA guys in, and then the next night I'd bring the SF guys in. And then later on, they might need resupply. You know, if they weren't near, c 130 or or someplace they could do an air drop, you know, that kind of thing. But we did that, I had to rescue, 1 of the ODAs got in between a green on green engagement. You know, the the Afghan, those alliance fought each other, and the, ODA had to leave, and when they did, you know, they were under fire, they left under fire.

And so they're in their E and E quarter and their vehicles, the Hilux trucks, and they're they're headed south, and, I get told go get them right now. You know, they're under fire. So I take off with the DAPs, except what do we run into again? The mountains obscured by clouds and a sandstorm. So the DAPs are like it's just me.

I can't remember what the other aircraft were doing, but it was just my aircraft. And, I was like, alright. You guys pick me up when I come out, and we sped up to, like, a 160, which is fast for a helicopter. And I activated the TF, and we went right into the right into the, the cloud in the mountains, and the and the radar just took us right over, let us down the other side, and then I picked the road because I knew where they started, and it's like alright there's only 2 roads, they parallel each other, if I follow 1, the most likely 1, and hopefully I'll get in comms with him because an AC 130 overhead is a u boat, he couldn't see anything, it was all cloud cover, but he did have line of sight communications with him. So, I'm it was Cobra 22, and I'm, I'm hauling ass in a a 23, ZPU 20 32, same as that other gun, but only 2 barrels, opens up on us, and the AC can't do anything because he can't see anything.

And he's a little too far away from my miniguns. You know, we can shoot about 1500 meters, and this thing shoots about 23100. And so he could reach us, but I couldn't reach him. So I was like, alright. All we can do is maneuver a little bit and keep going.

Right? And so eventually we get into radio contact with Cobra 22, arrange a link up, figure out what road they're on, we actually pick the right road, and we land, pick them up, head back into the cloudy mess, link up with the DAPS and go home. And what's cool, the daps is, they weren't gonna let that time go on, like not have a purpose. Mhmm. So they started trolling in areas where they thought we might get shot at, hoping to draw a fire so they could kill it.

And I remember the co pilot for the lead DAP, Mike, he said he told me afterwards, he's like, damn. He said we were literally flying in a profile where, you know, we were gonna get shot down, and they, you know, the flight lead is Ross, and he's like, we're not gonna let those Chinooks get shot down if there's anybody out here. If we're gonna shoot at anybody, they're gonna shoot at us.

So Damn, man.

Yeah. So, anyway

How long how long did it take you to insert 21 teams? Was it 1 a night?

1 a night. Sometimes 2 a night. You know, depending on where we were going. Like, I put over in, so those guys were in Polycomry. There was a cow, not cow, I can't think of the name of it.

But yeah, we're all over the place sometimes 2 a night. So it took 2, 3 weeks. The the campaign, you know in the movie it's like you know 2, 3 days, but in real life it took a couple weeks. We thought it would take it to the spring, except dosed them. You know funny thing, so he's getting encircled nobody knows it.

Arlo and his flight are inserting a team nearby, and they fly across this big open bowl. They're at, you know, 12,000 feet. The bowl's probably 6,000, and they're in the clouds pretty much, and they pop out. They're out of the clouds, and there's anti aircraft guns, RPGs, you know, dish, and it's like something out of, you know, Battle of Britain, you know shooting at the Germans or something is like, stuff's coming up RPGs flying under the rotor, surface air missiles, man pads, and the what we had decided was there's nothing you can do if you run into an engagement like that. You let the aircraft countermeasures work, you know the flares, you see them in the movies, and you just treat it what we like a thunderstorm.

You just kind of keep going forward and try to get out of the kill zone, but if you try to maneuver, you're just kind of dancing in their sights. So it doesn't feel good to to just fly out of it because they're shooting at you still, and they come back that night. They all no aircraft damage whatsoever. They could smell the the propellant from the RPG's, and all that kind of stuff in the in the aircraft, and they're like, oh my God. You know, we we were gonna die.

You know, if this is what life is gonna be like, we are we're definitely not gonna make it. And, so we just keep going, you know, but what that did is it let us know that a major force was engulfing general Dostum's force and helped the horse soldiers drop bombs on the right area, because they had been focusing over here for example, and now we knew because those guys had they not shot at the Chinooks, they would have wiped them out. You know? Yeah. 595 would have been gone.

So it's, you know, luck plays part of the game.

Damn it.

You know? And we did that for about, you know, 7 months or so. Toro Bora's in there. Right? So we end up we think we're going home.

We get told you put all those teams in, Chinooks are going home. Right? No need to have them here, we'll resupply with c 1 thirties. Alright? And I actually moved the last team from a field site to a place that had a 130 strip, and we're like, yes.

We're going home next week. Right? And, Arlo's team gets sent to Bagram, first Americans down there, for this place called Torah Bora. Right? Because we had to get through the Taliban to get to Bin Laden.

We know where he is. Right? We know he's in the Torah Bora mountains. They know where he is exactly, and, so they got a they take the Delta guys down there. They got 2 Chinooks, and they are dropping bombs like nobody's business.

Right? Those mountains glowed for a week after that, and you know, the guys went down with 3 day rucks. Yeah. Go down. You know, this thing will be over in 2, 3 days.

Alright. They get down there, obviously, it's gonna take longer than that. So we got better supply of my team. I was in silver team, they were gold team. We go down and replace them, they come back up.

I can stay there for a couple of weeks now. I'm like, hey, give us 3, 4 weeks. We're we're fine down here. You guys stay up at k 2 and support the teams. We'll do we'll support the Torah Bora mission.

So we're doing that, and then, you know, he disappears off the radio, Bin Laden, because he's he's severely injured. And he did the whole thing where he's apologizing to the brothers, you know, I'm sorry I let you down. The Americans are gonna get us. And, we stopped bombing because he was off the net for for a night, and sent calm thought he was dead.

No shit. We're

all sitting there going, you gotta keep up the pressure. You know? You know, you can lift and shift the bombs as we move into where we think he is, but don't stop. Stopped. Cease fire.

And he got into Pakistan. And you probably I don't know if you ever read the book, by Dalton Fury. It was actually a guy named Tom Greer. That name, you know, is out there now, but he was the Delta commander who had Bin Laden within small arms range, and they were going to kill him. And the Afghans that led them to Bin Laden didn't realize they were gonna kill him, and they switched sides.

And they end up in a little Mexican standoff, you know, where they're all pointing guns at each other, and the Delta guys had to withdraw, and Bin Laden got away. And, they were pissed. You know? It's all in his book. But, so, you know, we continued for a while going into the caves.

You know, we did a thing where I I had a robot I lowered out of the aircraft or somebody lowered it while I came to a hover, and they controlled the robot up into the the caves to see if he was there, but he had slipped away. And, you know, interestingly, I can tell you that the aircraft we flew down there on that mission where he got away, was later in life the aircraft that carried his body out of Pakistan.

No shit.

Yeah. So it's like bookends I call it. And the funny thing is is the young captain who was the air mission commander with me in Tora Bora was now a lieutenant colonel and the air mission commander on the 1 that they got him. So he's like like almost like a Forrest Gump. He's in both areas, you know, the same aircraft, and, kind of a nice nice tie in, you know, and, but anyway

This is all 1 deployment? Yeah. Holy shit, man.

So so we get, you know, all these exciting things, a very high adventure. We start to get we start getting better at what we're doing. The Taliban is, you know, they're starting to hide now. And, as a matter of fact I flew into a guy gave us the embassy back. When we went to Kabul, when 5th group got into Kabul, this little Afghan fellow comes up and he's like, you know, excuse me, would you like your embassy back?

What? He come with me. You know, he took him over the US embassy that had been abandoned when the Soviets invaded was still there, untouched by the Taliban. There were still, like, you know, copies of life magazine, and newspapers, cigarette ashtrays, you know back in the day, and, he'd been taking care of it. You know a little coat of dust, but he'd been, you know, gardening, and doing everything he did, and the Taliban left it alone for some reason.

So he presented 5th group with the United States Embassy, and so we're gonna reopen it. Right? This is December of 2001. Big ceremony. Right?

General Franks comes in, the CENTCOM commander. So I'm gonna fly him, his wife, General Harrell, who was the Afghan overall commander, and you know a bunch of strap hangers. I'm gonna fly them into the embassy. They're gonna be a big ceremony, reopen the embassy officially. Put an ambassador in there.

Except I get told, take them in at like 10 in the morning, daylight. Right? I'm a night stalker. We fly at night. Why?

Because it's safer. You know, the enemy can't see you, and goggle, MBGs weren't prevalent at the time. I prefer to fly at night, and the CENTCOM guys said, to my request to fly them at night. I said, let me take them in the night before. Oh, no.

No. No. You gotta take them in 10 o'clock. Good, you know, schedule. I said, you're putting a 4 star general and his wife, and a and a 1 star at risk.

And, like, no. No. No. The Taliban's gone. I'm, like, do you realize I get shot at whenever I leave the wire, I get shot at, and it's all big stuff.

You know, it's 14.5, 12.7, sometimes bigger, sometimes manpads, and they're, like, no. No. No. It's fine. Right?

And as we saw 2 years ago, the Taliban is not gone. But, so I take off heading to the embassy, and I don't have a choice. And, flight of 2, and we've got everybody on a headset. So the generals listening in, you know, we're talking, alright coming left coming right, you know, speeding up slowing down, and all of a sudden my flares go off automatically. Right?

Because you know in the movies, you get a surface air missile fired at you. It's a heatseeker. You know it's like, oh, a missile 2 o'clock. I'm evading. I'm cutting my heat signature.

No. It's more like it goes by and you go, holy crap. It didn't hit us. Right? So the flares had decoyed it.

It went right between me and Chalk 2, so, I'm like, hey, was that an inadvertent launch? Because sometimes they go off, you you know, for no reason, and it's not a missile. It's, like, oh, yes, sir. It went right between us. So, like, damn it.

So the conversation is, alright. Missile fired coming down left. I kinda dropped down. I'm in, like, a I could creek bed, and and I had been doing a 120. I sleep I speed up to a 165, so it's almost 200 miles an hour, about 10 feet off the deck.

Because what I'm trying to do is put just enough of the subtle terrain between me and any potential, follow on shots because you have to hyper elevate the thing, get, you know, lock on, get the battery coolant thing going, and then and launch it. Right? So I'm trying to do that, and I come into the MCM, I'm doing about a 150 as I cross the wall, and I gotta stand this thing up on its end, and then drop it in. Chalk 2 comes in behind me. Yeah.

General's like, oh, thanks for the flight guys, and like, sir, get out. And then, well, there's nobody out there yet. I said, sir, get out. Go to the building to the left. Alright.

Well have a good day, you know? And he get out. He had no idea we had been I mean, he just didn't know. Right? So we take off, and this is actually a funny story I tell someone.

So we take off, we control He was

on the headset? They didn't know.

He was on the headset the whole time, because in the movies, if a helicopter gets shot at, everybody freaks out and they run into each other. Right? Which is why I told Jerry Bruckheimer at the 12 strong premiere, I said, I hope you didn't do that because we are very calm under pressure. He's like, I'm alright. But anyway, so we take off and I'm over the city of Kabul.

Right? It's it's very sprawling. Right? It's very densely packed. There's TV antennas everywhere, those old fashioned ones.

And I get another surface air missile fired at me. So now I drop down again to do the same thing, I'm like dragging my wheels through the TV antennas, and what do I see in front of me? Hundreds and hundreds of kites. The Taliban remember had banned kites. You know music, you had to have a beard, that kind of stuff, so everybody shaved when the Taliban fell.

Kids were flying kites, and the problem with a kite is they like to use, fishing line, so they wouldn't lose their kite. Right? If that gets wrapped around the rotor system and the push pull tubes that move the blades, you lose control of the aircraft and you could crash. Right? So you don't want to do that, and there's hundreds of kites above me.

Right? So there's string and then you know there's they're off like this and I'm trying to see the string, and, I'm doing about a 150, 160 miles an hour at this point. And, I see that I I like to say that there's this 1 kite, a red kite. It's moving this way, so I move this way. It moves in front of me, I move this way.

And then it wraps around the landing gear as I go by, and I look down and I see this little kid hanging on, and he hangs on for about 2 miles. What?

I'm kidding. I was like, what?

I'm kidding. That's like a half mile. He could know. But, so we left, you know, we go up there, and did you ever see Flight of the Intruder? No.

The movie? So the story, it's Vietnam, these guys do a rogue bombing mission in North Vietnam, with an A6 Intruder, and they fly over what they call Sam City. It's all these surface air missiles, they they get in there secretly, except the bombs don't drop. Right? They'd forgotten to do something in the cockpit.

Oh, I forgot this, and bombs didn't drop. What do we do? You know, and now they're getting shot at like crazy, and the Willem Dafoe says, well they'd never expect us twice. So they go around, they do it again. Right?

So here we are, we're back at Bagram. I do pass the word, hey, we should wait till dark before we pick them up, you know, and, they're like, no no you gotta go get them. I said then they might want to drive out, and I told the reporter what happened. So my way man comes up, got him Willie. He's Puerto Rican.

He's very very very thick accent when he gets excited, and, he's very animated. He's like, oh, 0 my god. Oh, wow. 2 missiles. Oh my god.

And I go, oh, don't you know we gotta go back and get the general. Right? He's like, no way. No way. Are we doing that?

Right? In that thick accent. And, I go, Willie. They'd never expect us twice. And he hadn't seen the movie.

He said, what? You're nuts. So a couple months later, he saw the movie and called me. He's like, oh, I saw the movie. I got it.

I got the line. But, that's kinda how things It makes

sense now.

That's how things were, you know, up until, really, Operation Anaconda. And that's its own conversation. We can go there if you want.

Let's go into it.

Alright. So we've been there 7 months. Special operations units typically, especially the SOAR, special operations aviation regiment, is designed to go do a mission and go home. Right? You you're there long enough to do the mission, get back, and reset for the next mission.

Well in this case we've been dragged out for 7 months in a way that we've never been tested before. Right? And, we're exhausted. I mean, we are absolutely emotionally, mentally, physically exhausted from this whole thing. So the other company is gonna come in.

Right? A company. I mean, with the b company guys right now, and and we're gonna do a rip. Right? Relief in place.

But because we've been operating there, they want us to stay through this conventional operation called Anaconda. Right? So 82nd, airborne, and 101st. And they're gonna go they think Bin Laden and Zawahiri are down in the Gardez area. So they're gonna go in with a big aerosol, and, the plan is that they're gonna put special forces, coalition special forces, not the tier 1 guys, up in the mountains, and the key passes for high speed avenues of approach or escape, if you will.

And if Bin Laden's there and tries to go, they'll be able to call for fire, from the overhead platforms to kill him. Right? Well in the meantime, the Taliban will be in the in the in the bottom area, and it's Al Qaeda and Taliban elements. Right? This is nothing but nasty bad guys.

And what's gonna happen, whether Bin Laden's there or not, is there's, so that the mountains are considered the anvil. Right? And the hammer if you will, the hammer in the anvil is a special forces group from 5th group. A guy named, I think it was a w 3, Harriman was his name. He's leading a convoy of General Zia's forces.

Zia's forces are considered the some of the best in the country, Afghans, and he's gonna lead them down and push the Al Qaeda and the Taliban forces out into the open where the, you know, the coalition guys, you know, so it's the Germans, the French, the you know the Norwegians, all these different coalitions are up there in the mountains gonna call for fire. The problem is, Harriman's identified as an enemy, and the a c 130 engages him and kills him. 40 mm, I believe. I saw the vehicle. It was pretty messed up.

There's a lot of stuff going on in Anaconda, you know, that was later corrected. No unity of command, the comms were bad, communication's fratricide. Everybody's jamming everything, so so nobody can talk, so we're jamming our own stuff. And, and by the way there was a weather delay of 2 weeks, so we, the Americans being the wonderful people we are, told all that the, the other organizations, you know the UN, Red Cross, Red Crescent, whatever other aid organizations. Hey, 2 weeks from now we're gonna come in here with a big battle.

You don't want to be here. So of course they tell, you know, the locals, and the locals now know, and, they're all, you know, Taliban or or Al Qaeda, and the Russians did a big operation there at 1 point, the Soviets, and there was a place called the whale. It's this big terrain feature, had like mole hills, you know guys fighting positions made of stone, and they had all of the potential landing areas for helicopters, essentially range carded. So you could put a mortar in, you know dial it in, whatever angle, and you could hit a certain spot and you'd know you'd hit it. Right?

So anyway that's for later in the day, but anyway so Harriman gets killed, Zia's forces turn and flee. Because if the Taliban can kill the American s f guys, because they don't know the AC 130 did it, they just know that his vehicle erupted, you know, with 40 millimeter. So now there's no hammer on the anvil, and when the air assault comes in, and I just told you they range carded all the LC's, the 101st is getting their ass handed to them. Right? Through no fault of their own.

I mean there's just there's no the the main focus of the battle hasn't happened. It just disappeared. So they're getting their ass handed to them. You know, the helicopters, luckily nobody got shot down, you know, big big aerosol. They go back to Bagram, the infantry is down there, you know, on their heels.

There's talk of pulling them out because they're getting their ass handed to them. And my job at that time, we weren't part of it really, other than I had 2 chinooks and a group of seals from Dev Guru, and we were the HVT team. So if Bin Laden or Zaraheri does show up, it's our job to go shwack them. Right? 2 2 chinooks full of seals, we're gonna go kill Bin Laden and Zawahiri.

After a couple of days, it's obvious that they're not there. So if only we could get eyes on this 1 big mountain, Tarkagar, that would make up for what, you know, the friendly forces didn't accomplish. They'd be able to see train now that they could not have seen otherwise. Well who could do that? We don't have anybody.

We got 2 Chinooks and a bunch of seals. Right? Alright. So we're gonna do 2 infills at 1 time. Right?

So my wingman's got 1 group and I've got the other group. So we fly together, we separate at a release point, he drops his guys off, I go to the top of the mountain, Taku Gar, and I'm gonna Oh, I should back up. We're supposed to take them to the base of the mountain, and they're gonna walk up. Right? That's the plan.

We split up, we do our thing, and they walk up under the cover of darkness, except there's b 52 strikes coming in on the well because they're trying to protect all these 101st guys, because we still don't have eyes on the key terrain. So every time they're doing the bombing run, I gotta turn back, and I'm running out of gas. There is no gas to be had down there. Once I run out of fuel, the aircraft is staying where it is. It's not getting back to Bagram.

So go back to Gardez, I shut the aircraft down, and unfortunately this particular helicopter, which by the way was the 1 that got Bin Laden's body out of there. When it finally was time to go, you know, they sent me a spare from Bagram, and there's a whole, story of how that happens. The razor 1, 2, 3, that kind of thing. So razor 1 brings me a spare, and he's the QRF. That's his job.

Right? So he's quick, right? He's gonna come down. Give me my aircraft. He'll take mine back.

The maintenance pilot will fly the damaged aircraft back, and they'll fix it and return it to the fight. But now it's 40 minutes to get down from Bagram, and so I say, to the team leader, I'm like, hey, I'm gonna be putting you in at this time at the base of the hill. He's like, Al, I can't get up there under the cover of darkness. You gotta take me to the top. And I said, I haven't seen any imagery for the top.

I don't even know if there's a place to land. And the troop commander happened to be on the ICS, and he's like, there's a place up there. It's all open. You should be able to get up there. Alright.

So, Brit Slovinski is the the team leader. He requests a 24 hour bump. He's like, listen. I don't wanna go to the top of the hill. I wanna do the original plan, but we gotta roll 24 to do it right.

He gets told, you really need to get up there tonight. He's not told no, but the push is on. I mean, you know what it's like. So he's like, what do you think, Al? I said, alright.

I'll I'll give it a try. You know? So we we take off as a flight of 2, razor 0, 4 drops off his team, and then he goes to a link up area where I'm going to rejoin him. And I tell him, if I don't show up or you don't show up, I'm gonna start the clock or you start the clock, wait 15 minutes, do a radio search, and then leave because you won't have enough gas to get home. Well, you know, you don't know where I am if I don't show up.

So get home, we'll find me later. So anyway we get to the top of the mountain, and we land up there, and there's nothing happening, and I look off to my right, and there's a donkey tied to a tree, and a dishka, so it's a 14.5 millimeter in aircraft machine gun, or heavy machine gun, and it's sitting there. Nobody's touching it. No people. And Slab back then, and this is all changed now, in order to talk to me he had to be on the aircraft headset.

To talk to his guys, he had to take off the headset, put his helmet back on with his pelters, and communicate by emitter or whatever they were using. Or we passed information with a a clipboard that had like a glow stick behind it, and you write with a grease pencil, and you pass that back and forth. So he was in this transition period taking his headset off, and I said, hey, tell the team leader keep his headset on. I gotta talk to him. What's up?

I said, you got a donkey to the right, you got a, machine gun, and then somebody pops up to the left, a guy, and my left gunner sees him and says, sir we got a guy to the left. I said, is he armed? He said, I don't think so. Because of the Harriman incident the day before, the rules of engagement had changed, because the a you know friendly Afghans were everywhere. Now I had to have a hostile act.

I've got to be shot at before I can return fire. But there's a caveat to that, hostile intent which is you gotta that's very subjective, and I said listen, if he pops up again kill him, because if he's friendly there's no way he's popping up again while we're sitting here. And so Slab says, okay we're going. Right? So he takes the headset off, puts his helmet on.

While he's doing that, that guy pops up again from a different position, and I watch as an RPG slowly comes at me. It's like in that movie Black Hawk Down, they show the RPG sort of like a lava lamp kind of Yeah. Sparking at you coming in, and it was like slow motion and it exploded just behind me. If the guy had aimed a little bit more to the right, he'd hit the the left fuel tank and we probably would have exploded on the spot. If he'd aimed just a little bit forward he would have got me, in which case we're not going anywhere.

But he hit right at the minigun, and it went through the ammo can and out the other side and exploded in the aircraft, and because the doors were all open there's not that over pressure, and everybody was just sort of, you know, stunned. You know it's like you know stars going around little tweedy birds, and all of the electric dies. Right? So the there's 3 electric systems in a Chinook, they're all geographically separated so that you can't 1 bit of damage can't hit them all, and with the with the machine gun fire and the RPG, all 3 lines got hit, and all the electrical went out. And the problem with that is, the mini guns at that time were AC powered electric, meaning they run off the aircraft power.

Now they're running batteries. They're done. Holy shit. You can't get it. Right?

So we're now defensive. Everybody's still on board, but I'm wondering, did the did the SEALs start getting out? Are they back on? We never talked about that, in this particular instance because usually they're off, we start getting off, you gotta stay to roll off, or we get back on. I didn't know what they wanted, and Slab was unconnected so I couldn't talk to him.

And the crew chief in the back, and the way at the back of the ramp, it's like, you know, we're getting hit, and you can hear like a tink tink tink, you know, as the bullets are hitting the aircraft and he's like, you know, fire in the cabin, fire in the cabin. Go go go. And we start I mean, alright. So I take the controls and the aircraft still runs. There's just no electricity.

Right? And we can still talk, that's on the battery. So I I rotate and take off, and because the engines are on like a backup reversion, they call it, they droop a little bit at that altitude. It's like 12,000 feet. And so I can hear the droop, meaning I probably lost an engine.

So now I know I can't hover with 1 engine. With only 1 engine we're gonna drop like a rock back to the thing. So I I rotate over and I dive down the mountain. Right? 30 degrees nose load, dive down.

What I don't know is that Navy Seal, Neil Roberts, is headed toward the back as we're rotating, and the crew chief in the back grabs him. You know, like I got you, and out they go. Neil falls about 12 feet to the about hip deep snow, and the crew chief is on a tether, and he's hanging beneath the aircraft. I don't know that. But I'm diving, I'm literally on the treetops because the dish kid is shooting at us, and so I'm trying to get down below his potential for, you know, elevating the gun down, and, I don't know.

I'm this guy's feet are tickling the freaking trees, and the other crew chief in the back sees him, pulls him up. Right? There's hydraulic fluid everywhere, you know, so it's very slippery back there because the bullets that hit the transmissions and some other things. And, the crew chief's telling me, sir, we're we're okay. The engine's running.

You can level off. So now instead of crashing at the base of the hill, I level off. We're about 9,000 feet, and, they say, sir, we lost a man. Like, what do you mean you lost a guy? I'm in total denial.

I'm like, give me a head count. And like, sir, we don't have to give you a head count, we just watched him fall out the back. Is he alive? He yeah. He looked like he was alive when we, when we left.

Alright? And, like, sir, the guns don't work. I said, test fire the guns. Like, they know the guns don't work. So I go, hey.

We're we're going back to get them. So we circle back around. We start climbing back up 12,000 feet, and we get lined up, and we're starting to get lined up in the controls lock up. We lost all our hydraulic fluid, and you can't move the controls without hydraulic fluid. We're trying to move my copilot's trying to move it, and we are just flying it 12,000 feet over the battle in the in the valley below at the whale.

I can see tracer fire going both ways. I see explosions, and I can't do anything. I can see stars up above, and I was like, hey guys I'm, I'm sorry we're done. I can't move the controls. You know, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I'm not in control.

And the guy in the back, the crew chief, there's a little fill port. Right? And he he opens it up, and he pours a can of hydraulic fluid in it, and it's got a little t handle. He's like pumping this thing like like nobody's business. And all of a sudden the controls come alive in my hand.

I can feel that thing go, I was like, I have control. And so I turn the aircraft back inbound, and we're lined up to land on the top of the ridge, and the controls lock up again. We get about 50 seconds per can of hydraulic fluid. And now I know we're just gonna impact on the top of Roberts Ridge, that's the name now, and, he puts another can of fluid in there, and I know that there's no way we're gonna be able to land there with no guns, and and I still got razor 4 out there. Right?

So he's fully capable. So I'm like, you know what? We're gonna turn left, we're gonna try to land where razor 4 put the other Mako team, and it's far enough away that the angle of descent, if we lock up again maybe we'll survive, maybe we won't. I mean it just depends, but that that was the intent. So we flew down, we actually went way over them.

I couldn't shorten up the the descent, and we ended up, coming into this this kind of a hilly area, except I couldn't see that in the goggles until I got closer, I just saw flat as far as I could tell. And as we get a little bit closer, you know he put that other that last can in, and we get down to the bottom, I'm thinking we're gonna run out of fluid any minute now, and I can't move the controls, the cycling. Right? To the 1 between my legs, that's the directional control. And we start sliding uncommanded to the right and I can't stop it.

So there's a saying in aviation, never never quit flying the aircraft. So I look at where we're headed and I jam on the right pedal and the nose swings around in the direction of the drift, and now we're going to hit straight on. So at least we got a chance. If we hit this way we're gonna roll over, boom. Movie stuff.

So we we hit the ground, I get 1 more push on this axis, and I I do it and we settle on a slope that's about, 15 20 degrees, right side high, and about 15 degrees nose high. So the aircraft's kind of sitting up like this. Pull the engines offline, hit the rotor brake, stop them in 1 revolution, and I actually so our commander at the time is an ex delta guy that went to flight school, end up as our commander, and, we'll call him, Joe Gorst. Not his real name, but it's close. And he used to do these things called Gorst games, and he would have us in training do shoot downs.

So you'd go do some mission. I'd fly to Cleveland from, Fort Campbell, air refueling on the way up on the way back. I come back and I say, hey go land at Bagel d z out on the the rain train. So I go land out there, and they have to shut down the aircraft. They give me a little envelope.

You've been shot down. You're in enemy territory. Go to these coordinates, you know, to link up with, you know, whatever. And then there were guys there to fly the aircraft back so that we'd be out there 3, 4 days walking in the woods doing escape and evasion, survival, that kind of stuff. So we called these things the gore scams.

So we hit the ground, rotor brakes stop, and I'm like, holy crap, we're alive. You know? There's a couple points there I didn't think we were gonna survive. And I say not another freaking course game. Right?

And I I hit all the switches that destroy the computers, and, which is funny. I got a coin from the NSA for doing that. I kinda joke I should have left it because it was such a mess, the software, that we could let the Chinese reengineer it, and they'd set them back 20 years. But, anyway, I didn't I, you know, I'd zeroed my COMSAC and destroyed the the mission computers and all that kind of stuff. So get out.

Slobinski, Chapman, you know, the, CCT, they're out there. They're already talking. They've set up a perimeter. We've got an m 60 machine gun still, and, you know he's talking to the AC 130, he goes razor 4 is on the way, you know they know where we are now, and they're headed our way. I was on the ground about 45 minutes, and, they're like hey we're gonna, you know I I get my GPS out, I plot the map where we are, and Slab's like, alright.

You guys stay here. We're going. I'm like, where are you going? To the top of the hill. I'm like, we're a good 10 kilometers away.

You're not getting up there right now. He's like, no, it's right there. I'm like, no. It's that 1. Because we'd flown, you know, a good 3 minutes, you know, at a 100 miles an hour.

We've got a pretty good distance away. So he's like, oh, what about razor 4? Can they take us up there? And I said, I don't know what he's got for gas. I don't know his lift capability.

So So he gets there and he says, listen. I can't take all of you at once, like, as in my aircrew and the SEALs back to the top. So Slab's like, can you guys just stay here and we'll come back and get you? And I said, yeah, but you know, we're all aircrew here, and though I am good with my weapon, I don't know what's going on ground guy wise. Right?

And so I said, can you spare somebody? Don't if you can't, and he looks around and he was gonna give us Chapman, because you know, CCT guy would be good to defend our position, except they got in a fight. You know, John doesn't want to be left behind. He wants to go. So now I'm embarrassed that I even asked.

I'm like, just go go go. We'll be alright. You know? So like, alright. But higher command says, you're not leaving the aircrew there.

There's enemy combatants headed that way. The a c n 30 was supposed to engage them, except we got out of there before they had to. They go back to Gardez, they download all their shit, and they head back to the top of the mountain. Meantime, I'm at the fob, waiting for them to do it. So they, you know, Jethro reinfills them.

And there's a whole problem with the AC 130, you know, at the time, you know. And these guys, I love them later on in life, but this particular time frame, I got nothing nice to say about them, because they killed Harriman, and because they had the fracture side, they wouldn't shoot on top of Roberts Ridge. So when Jethro is trying to put them in in ratio 4, there's supposed to be pre assault fire, but they know there's a friendly up there, but we also know where the bad guys are. And we're like, hit the bad guy positions, like, well, there's a friendly up there, we're not gonna shoot. And then they agreed to shoot, but they didn't.

So when Jethro comes in, he's taking heavy fire from the Dischka. Damn. And so he breaks off, and he comes around the mountain, and he's like you've got to put fires down on that or I'm not gonna get out of there. And the guy's like, yep yep. Approved.

And they come in and they fly up the mountain like almost like a a go plat kind of thing. They kind of come in, they drop up, and they drop in, and the AC doesn't shoot. There's I I know now they were fighting in the aircraft about whether they should support or not, but the aircraft commander because they killed the friendly the day before just wasn't having it. And, so they get him in, They do their thing. I'm not gonna tell their story because that's their story to tell, but, Jethro comes back to Gardez.

The aircraft flames out. He has no gas left at all. The engines quit when he lands. He lands and it's like, that aircraft's not going anywhere, and it's full of holes. Right?

There's computers and wire bundles and parts of aircraft that have holes in them that shouldn't have holes, and it's it took a couple days actually to repair it to get it even flyable back to to Bagram. But the people at Bagram don't know that. They just think it's out of gas. So there's some confusion at Bagram as they try to put an internal tank on to fly it down to us to put gas in it to return to the fight, and then I get on the phone and I call back to the talk, and I'm like, hey, that aircraft's out of the fight. Oh, alright.

Pull the pull the refill tank back off. Right? So now there's all this confusion of what's going on, and so razer 1 who had brought me the spare has just arrived back at Bagram, and he's told QRF's got a launch, we got guys on the mountain, Al's been shot down. So the rangers, Nate Self and his guys get on razor 0102, and they head right back. Except they think they're coming to me at the Chinook where I crashed.

Right? And they actually flew by me. Isn't that Al's aircraft? Why are we going this way? Why are these coordinates somewhere else?

And they don't really know what's going on yet because we haven't been able to talk. And, so the flight lead decides that, he doesn't know what's going on, he's getting conflicting information. So he sends razor 2 to Gardez to just sort of let him sort things out, maybe talk to me in person. So they come in, I go run over the aircraft to fill them in, and right about the time razor 1 gets there, the AC 130 leaves, and he takes an RPG to the right engine. So if you imagine the mountain like this, I was on this side of the mountain and was able to take off and dive down.

He's on this side of the mountain starting to flare for landing. He loses his engine, and he pancakes on this side, so he doesn't have the distance to dive over. He's on the objective. Heavy machine gun fire, the Rangers take heavy casualties, and the aircrews all shot to pieces. Our friend Phil Svetak, the flight engineer, shot just below the the body armor, and he dies on his gun defending the aircraft.

The co pilot after the fact turns out he had like I don't know 5 or 6 rounds in his armor right at his heart, Didn't penetrate. He got shot in the hand, like he went, he got his m 4 out of the mount, and he goes like this to to fight with it, and his hand is is limp, and once again that's their story to tell, but so in the meantime, I'm down at Gardez, and we're, we're building speedballs for them like, ammunition rocks, water, that kind of stuff. And, the idea is they're gonna fly over with with a good chinook, and they're gonna just kick the stout stuff out, and at least resupply them. Because, you know, they don't have a lot of stuff. It's only half of a a ranger squad.

Right? The other half's in rangers are a 2. And like 4 of them were killed Damn. On impact. Right?

And the crew chief the crew is all injured. Every 1 of them except 1 has been shot. You know? Only 1 died, but the rest of them are seriously injured. And it turns out everything on top of the mountain kind of settles down, and we're gonna go the guys are gonna go get them, not me, I'm down at the the fob, and they're gonna go get them in the daylight, and then somebody comes up around the backside, shoots them up with a machine gun from further than they can shoot, their m fours.

And, that's when Cunningham is hit, the p the, pj's. And Nate Self, tune commander, is on the radio. He was like, we had another 1 hit. You gotta get Kazovac here or we're gonna lose a guy right now. And I remember when that happened, I looked over at the CIA guys, and I said, they they looked at me like I knew what was gonna go on.

And I said, they're not gonna launch another aircraft. We just lost 3 aircraft in the same LZ. They're not going back till dark. They're like, but that guy's gonna die. And I said, another aircraft, 7 crew members on board, maybe rangers.

They're gonna wait till dark. And that's what they did. They told him no. He couldn't, couldn't have an aircraft. And, you know, Cunningham did die on the mountain there.

So, we also had intercepts that, the Taliban knew that the aircrew were at Gardez, and that all of the shooters had left with the British Chinooks, and they're getting ready to do a rescue. Right? That's the day the daylight rescue that we're thinking is gonna happen. And, so here's this convoy coming, and the guy that was in charge of the fob, there's an alias, he called himself Hal. We met, he's like Hal, Hal, Hal, Hal, and, he's like, what kind of weapons do you have?

I said, well we all got long guns. We all have, you know, 6, 7 magazines of ammo. We have ammo rock on each aircraft with, you know, 10, 15 magazines in there. We had a t fours, each aircraft had 1, and we each had at least an m 60. So he's like, alright.

We can put up a formidable defense. Let's go. So he, like something out of a movie almost, he walks me around and tells me how we're gonna do the defense. Right? So I go out to the aircraft within my GPS, I mark the the distance so we can do a range card, and, we're prepared to defend the Alamo essentially.

And, they rig the back wall to blow out because they figured they'll attack the front gate, and we had the, you know, Hilux trucks and stuff. And there was a big pit with, all the ammunition and explosives for the for the fob under a tarp. He's like, alright. Here's When we decide to leave, you know, the this guy's gonna blow the wall. He says, I need you to climb under the the tarp, and here's the trigger.

You pull that, it's a time delay, and you come run getting here, and we're gonna drive as fast and as far as we can go. And I'm like, oh, man. I'm not I'm not cut out for this. And, luckily for us the AC 130 did engage them, and the and the convoy turned back. So we never had to find out if I could do that or not.

But, so but here's the next part of the story is, they do the nighttime ex fill. They pull the the KIA's off. So we've got, you know, rangers, Neil Roberts, they found, you know the the 160th crew member, and they've put them as respectfully as they can on the floor. They've been, you know rigor mortis and freezing up there, so it's hard to place them nicely, and they take up a lot of space. And that aircraft is sent to pick me and my crew up and the crew of razors earth Thor.

I'm told be at 8 o'clock beyond h l z Gavin. Right? Problem is, a reporter is driving through Gardez or a car full of reporters, and they go through a checkpoint, and a guy throws a hand grenade into the car and it explodes. Doesn't kill anybody, but the journalist, the woman, who I've since talked to, is she's going to die. Right?

So they drive her to the fob, just so happens they come up before, you know, about 7 o'clock, maybe 7:30, And, the weatherman comes in, and he's like, sir,

sir,

we got the journalist, you know, the grenade, you know, I got it, I got it, you know, get the medic. Right? So I had 1 of our medics with us, 1 60th medic, and he's working on her. And I get another phone call, make sure you're out there, you know, in the landing zone. They are gonna be low on gas, and I mean low.

Right? Okay. Usually we exaggerate the gas thing a little bit, but he's working on her. And I mean her thigh is shredded. She's in bad shape, and he's working on her.

And I was like, alright guys look, if he can't stabilize her in time, you go. I'll stay here with him, so at least he's not alone. And, then I'm on him. What do you think doc? He's like, I'm working on it sir.

You know, I'm like I just need to know, you know, I mean do we go here? Are we gonna be here? They need to know. And he's like, I I think I almost got her, you know? So he does stabilize her.

The other guys are out on the LZ, we jump on a Hilux truck, there's a minefield. You know, luckily the driver kind of knows where it is or he thinks he does, and he's kind of weaving through it, you know, at like 5 miles an hour in the dark, and we get there as the helicopter lands, and I've got all of the miniguns, the comm sec, all the sensitive items, that kind of stuff, and codebooks or whatever you want to call it, and, everybody's getting on board, and I'm the last 1, and I'm feeding equipment up the ramp. Right? And the crew chief is yelling at me, sir we've got to go. We've got to go.

We're out of gas. I'm like, you're running, you're not out of gas. And he's like, no. Come now. And I got the last minigun on board, I climbed on, and there was nowhere to go, because my flight engineer had gone on board, tripped on 1 of the bodies, fell on top of, his good friend face to face, you know, and realized who that was, and he he would go no further.

He got up, he snapped his vest into the side of the aircraft, you know where you can snap in, and nobody could go any further forward. So now I had nowhere to go, so I I see 1 little spot and I kind of shimmy myself in next to 1 of the guys. Ramp comes up, they take off. And as I'm sitting there, I realize, that's Neil Roberts. And, Fuck.

We're thigh to thigh, you know, in the back on the floor. And I look at him, and I was like, the luminescent dots on his watch, his watch was kinda going like this. And I was, like, is he alive? I mean, he was obviously dead, but my mind was playing tricks in the blue light, you know, that was in the aircraft. And, then we almost did we did run out of gas, actually.

We were landing at a the 101st had set up a farp for us, except it was super dusty where they set it up, and the guys did it, went in, did a go round, did a go round, did a go round, and I'm I'm thinking we're gonna run out of gas, I'm gonna be in the middle of the desert, you know with all the the KIA's, and you know out of the frying pan into the fire, and they get on the ground, and the number 1 engine flames out. That's the 1 on the left. Just like, the other razor did. They get plugged in, the other engine still running. They have different amounts of fuel in them and intentionally so that 1 will quit before the other, and they got it going, they restarted the engine, we flew back to Bagram, and we got off.

Now Bagram, we always used to joke, was so dark, you know, it was Bagram dark, you know, if you because you didn't have a real good light because you're afraid of getting shot because there was no fences and stuff back then, and so you had like a little LED light, you know, and you'd actually lose your balance because you didn't have enough reference. But we get there and we're at this well lit airfield, and everybody's looking at me, like, sir, where are we? Like, I have no idea. I've never been here before. I think we're in in Kabul.

Right? And, finally, you know, they take all the KIs off, take them to the hospital or where they took a morgue, and I asked somebody, hey, where where are we? And then we're at Bagram. I'm like, I where at Bagram? At the airfield.

That's the tower. I just never seen the lights on before, and they turn on the lights to make it easy for everybody. So I'm like, hey guys, we're at Bagram. So we grabbed all our stuff, threw all the the heavy equipment in a truck, and walked back what they call Disney highway. It says dirt road.

Now it's like a 8 lane highway that the Taliban is using. And, we get to the the compound, and we're walking into the the the ops tent first to check-in and let them know we're back. And it was just so surreal to walk in, like, everybody stopped. There was no talking, and you could hear the fans of the computers, and that was it. And I was like, I'm, you know, back.

You know, he gets a couple of hugs, and, then we got a debrief and and that kind of stuff. And then, what sucked is the next day, the guys went out to do a vehicle interdiction. They thought everybody was telling you about fob skin. Right? This they think this is Bin Laden, and it ends up not be, but the guys had just flown the entire package except me and 1 of the other aircraft had flown.

And like, hey Al, there's a blizzard coming, weather just told us, it's gonna be here for a couple of days. If we don't get the SF teams out of the mountains, they will die from exposure, because there's no way down. They were put in places where they couldn't get down. But why can't somebody else do it? And all the other guys had flown that day.

There's you and the other aircraft. Right? So, alright. Yeah. I'll do it.

Right? And, I did not wanna go back out there again.

Holy shit.

Here's the worst part. So there's all these teams. Right?

The last team to come out. You just landed. Yeah. And, like

Yeah. Back out. Well, it was the next morning. Right? So this so I got a little bit of sleep.

It's it's daytime when they do the vi, so really I got maybe 2 hours of sleep. And the, we gotta get these guys out, and the other guys had flown. And I said, alright. So we there's a plan on how we're gonna get them out of sequence, because we'll take the lightest teams out first, and we will have burned off gas each time, or or it may not be that, maybe the elevation that makes a difference. So we we had this plan.

The very last team to come out was gonna be the German team, and here we are getting ready to launch, and the intel guy comes in and says, sir, the German team says they have armed Taliban on the perimeter with RPG's. And so the AC 130 planner's there, the colonel, and I said, sir, you need to kill them. He said, well, I can't. I'm like, you can't. I said, tell the team to mark their position with strobes, and anything within 200 meters, you kill it.

It's not hard. And they're like, I can't, you know, how do we know that, you know, they're armed? And I said, they they have eyes on them, right? So I'm at this guy's throat, and everybody's just in shock as I, you know, this I think I was a CW3 at the time. I get this guy in his heels, I'm pushing him back like you will kill them, you're gonna do this, you know, and, the commander steps in between us, he's like, Al, Al it's okay.

It's gonna be okay. I was like, oh it's easy for you to say it back here, I just did this and got shot down. And you want me to go back to the same situation with the same AC 130, and you won't kill the bad guys? And he was all pissed. I said, I'll go with you, I'll go with you.

I'll go. You know? Screw you. Right? So we we take off, and, the Germans never get engaged, but we're headed toward them, and here's the part that really pisses me off.

We're like 6 minutes out. Call the C130, you know, hey, you know, raise is 3, 6 minutes. Roger 6 minutes. Hey listen we're, we're gonna RTB. Go back to Mesura.

What? Yeah. We have to be back on the ground by sun up. I'm like, I'm 6 minutes out. You mean you tell me you can't hang out for 10 minutes?

You know? I'm I'm sure you can get back to Mesura, you know, 10 minutes after the sun comes up, and like nope, gotta go. Same thing they did for Takogar. And I these conflicting emotions, and I didn't know what to do. And my, my co pilot was another flight lead, Ahmed is his nickname because of his how he looks, you know, in that part of the world.

What an amazing guy, and, he did what no 1 else could do. He shamed them into Stan. And, we picked up the Germans, the, the Taliban had moved away when they heard the helicopters. They didn't wanna get engaged, and, we brought them back uneventful. And then the next night, the new company came in.

We did a little handshake. We flew back to Bagram, they took or, back to k2. They took over, and we went back home. And, I was back again in July, for another rotation. Damn, Al.

Holy shit. And this the story is important in that the rest of my special operations career, and what I put in the book here is a family situation that developed. Right? So while I'm at Gardez, the CIA guys that are running the thing go, hey, here's a sat phone, you need to call your wife because this is about to hit CNN. You know, they've got word about to air this.

I'm like, I can't. You know? Because it's Here's here's the headline. 2 Chinooks shot down, 8 killed. Each crew of 4 on 2 Chinooks, there's only 2 teams of 2.

I'm the primary flight lead, it's likely to be me by my wife's math. And, I said, I can't. That's not how notification works. And all the wives kinda knew something was up, and they were hanging out at the commander's house, just like they did during Black Hawk Down. And if think about it.

If I called her, even if she didn't tell anybody that I was okay, they would know. You know, because everybody else is like on pins and needles. Maybe it's my husband. Maybe it's my husband. And I had been in Desert Storm.

Remember I talked about the the aircraft that hit the antenna? 1 of the captains called back to his wife to say, it wasn't me, and he might have even said who it was. And, that word got out in the wives network, and families were notified unofficially before the actual official notification could occur. So I took 1 for the team, if you will, and, did what I was supposed to do. I didn't call my wife.

And, so for roughly 2 days, she thought I was dead, because they didn't know who it was and she was convinced it was me. And when I finally get back to Bagram after the debrief, I call her on the landline, and she's like, you mean, why didn't you call me? And I was like, I can't. You know I can't. She never forgave me for that, and it tied into all of the family problems we had after that.

Damn, man. You know? Do you regret not calling her?

No. It was the right thing to do. I mean, could you imagine being the family that does get notified? You know? It definitely is your husband.

You know?

What kind of family problems?

Well, over the course of, 17 deployments, so roughly 10 years, my wife, Linda, had a prescription opioid addiction. Right? So remember she had a suicide attempt when I was in Korea years before. She was doing really well. She was being a great sport with the whole 911 thing, not knowing where I was, and not get hearing from me, that kind of stuff.

But then, you know, we have this thing where she she thinks I'm dead, and I don't call her, so she takes it personal that I don't call her. And, you know, it's not like this terrible thing that happens, but it's underlying for the entire 10 years. Right? As she gets worse with her prescription and doctor shopping, you know, so I'm deploying because I'm a flight lead. I'm deploying a lot.

And like I said, I was back, that summer, and then I was I did like a 3 month deployment, came back for a month, went for Christmas. And then so she's dealing with all this, and we're shorthanded. You know? And, the aircraft are few and far between because, you know, in TF sword, task force sword, in the very beginning, they got, like, 3 aircraft shot to pieces, and, you know, we had ours damaged. So things are challenging and I'm still doing it.

Because I'm the flight lead, the senior flight lead at that matter, I've got to continue deploying. And she's she's pretending she's okay. She's trying to be okay. She's trying to support me. I kinda know maybe things aren't right, but I'm choosing to believe that she can do it.

Right? And there were deployments where she did well and other ones that were a little tougher, and then as we lost friends, I lost 23 friends over the course of 10 years, that are on the wall. And it's hard, you You know? Because you lose 1 Chinook, that's, you know, potentially 4, 5, 6 guys. You know?

Red Wings, my good friend, Trey Ponder, you know, was killed. And that 1 kinda pushed her over the edge because she knew him personally. You know? The other guys, she knew who they were, but she didn't know him personally. You know?

He he was killed trying to rescue, the 4 man team, but, her problem just got worse over time, and, you know, it got to the point where I like to say that, so when Bo Bergall walked off his his fob, we did everything we could just to save him. Right? I mean, we were you know, I remember the the ground force was pissed, and this guy's a traitor or whatever, but he's an American citizen, and it's gonna be a problem if he gets into Pakistan. Right? So we're gonna go rescue him.

We're doing all this stuff. I get some pretty amazing stories actually. Asante's story, I can tell tell you about later if we have time, but we're we're flying every night. We're just missing him, like the intel is just a half step behind. So we're showing up at buildings he's been in.

We find his t shirt, 1 place we find his underwear, his socks, you know, some DNA if you will, and, we're just a little bit behind. And the Taliban is going old school, they're not, they're not using phones, it's couriers. It's all courier network. And so we're doing vehicle interdict. We're blowing these motorcycles up with the mini guns, trying to stop these guys.

But it's time for me to go home. My replacement gets there, and I kinda wanna stay, but I know I gotta get home. I've been a long deployment, and, so I fly down to Kandahar. We're in customs. Very insulting.

I hate that that I have to go through customs, but every once in a while I get some jerk puts a grenade in his suitcase, thinks he's gonna sneak it home. So we all have to now get our bags searched. So I'm down there, the MPs are walking through my stuff, customs officer, and there's a phone call. Is there a CW 5 Mac in the room? What?

Chief Mac, you out there? Yeah. Right right here. Right? So I'm thinking it's my wife having a meltdown like just as I'm coming home, and I get on the phone, and I see op the, officer in charge at Sharana at our task force, and he's like Al, Chad, my replacement had a heart attack and he died.

He, you know Sharana's at like 6,000 feet MSL. This guy used to be a ranger. 1 of those guys. Right? He's a marathoner.

He's in great shape, crossfitter. He goes to the gym right there at Sharana, as I'm leaving. He comes back just before the duty day begins. He sits down on the couch in the planning area in front of a couple guys. Has a little seizure, foams at the mouth, and his heart stops, falls onto the ground.

He does it in front of our flight medic, and 2 pilots who also were rangers when they were younger that were medics, and, they do CPR on them. And right next door to us by the way is what we call the SRT, the surgical resuscitation team. This is 4 high speed emergency room doctors that can augment anything. They can do they can crack your chest in the helicopter. Right?

That's Mhmm. That's what these guys are for. So they're working on them. They throw them in the back of a truck. They're, you know, working on them.

They're hitting them. Boosh. You know, clear. He codes 4 times. He actually lives.

To this day, he's running marathons on what's left of his heart. Wow. But I had to come back, so they send a helicopter to get me. They bring me back. I do that night's mission, and now there's no replacement for me.

He was it. Right? We're we're wearing thin. So now I gotta call my wife and say, I know you expected to see me tomorrow. I gotta stay another 120 days.

And so in the book, there's a title there. I call it, Bergdahl tips the scales. That's literally, if you could put a mark on the wall, that's when she, you know, she may have been having some trouble maybe swirling the bowl a little bit. That picked up the pace, you know, and life got to be hell for her and my family at that point. And, so I did the rotation.

The unit did the best they could to help her. Like, she, started cutting herself intentionally.

Shit.

And the unit commander would take come over, take her to the hospital. The chaplain was involved, but they

didn't tell me. They didn't tell you?

They didn't tell me. She didn't want them to. This is the the the the power she had. She was able to convince you that it's gonna be okay. You know, let him do his thing.

We know that, you know, there's no 1 else to do it. Who's gonna do it? You know, that seems to be the case, and a lot of things I do is, well, who's gonna do it? Might as well be me. Right?

And, so once again, in order to save someone else's family from going through the same thing, you know, being gone that much longer, I did it. That was probably a mistake in hindsight. But, you know I get back, and now, we'd also been in Yemen. We did a couple of things. So, like that year I was gone like 300 days that year, on multiple operations around the globe.

And, like, 2 year was this? Well, mostly Afghanistan, but, we did some stuff in Africa and in Yemen I can't talk about. What year? Oh, what year? I guess, maybe 2009, maybe?

I have to look I have to look in the book. Might have been 2009 ish, maybe 10.

And you did stuff in Yemen and Africa and Afghanistan.

Yeah. So I'd go from 1 to the other to the other, and, and then that was over a holiday. So, you know, my poor wife, you know, she, she told me she's okay. You know? And I could tell she wasn't, but I I had to think that she could pull through.

And there was, like, 1 night, I'm on the Iridium phone. I'm talking to her, and it's like we're having a separate conversation. She's at my mom's house. I said, alright. She went to my mom's house up in New Hampshire.

Everything's gonna be okay. She's with family, and I call her just to check-in, and she starts having a conversation. She's, like, in front of my mother. I can hear her side of the conversation. She's talking to me.

She's, like, oh, baby, don't cry. About what? She's having a conversation that isn't happening. Like, in her mind, this is what's happening to her head at this point with the alcohol and the meds. Right?

She was withdrawing from methadone, and she had hallucinations. And she could have conversations and and experiences that didn't actually occur. So I was pissed, because I'm fine. I want my mother thinking there's things worse going than they are. And so I hang up on her, and I walk back into the planning area.

And 1 of the guys says something stupid to me, has nothing to do with this, but something he shouldn't have said, and I let off on everybody. I was like, this place, we weren't flying that night. I was like, this place is a pigsty, the plane area. I said, get those TVs up on the wall. We had the big monitors that we hadn't put up yet, and I said, sweep the floor.

It's all dirty. You know? And I'm, you do this, and you do this, and you do this, and everybody's just kind of looking at him. What happened to him? Right?

And so the the major, the OAC comes up and says, Al, are you okay? I'm like, no. I'm not okay. And he goes, well let's talk outside. So we start heading outside, and as we go out the door, you know how all the doors had like the sandbags on the string to bring them back closed?

So I go out and the damn thing catches as I'm opening it, and I'm sort of turning around as I'm doing it, and I step on the the lower step, and I fly backwards onto my back, onto the the crushed rock on the ground. Right? And I hit with a thud like a sack of potatoes. And the majors like, Al, are you okay? I'm like, no I'm not okay.

I just flew 12 feet and landed on my back, you know, and luckily that was enough to kind of expend the situation, but I still didn't tell him what was wrong. And so by the time I got back from that, the colonel already kind of knew the battalion commander that something was wrong with me. You know, maybe PTSD, maybe I was just worn out, so he assigned me to the training company, green platoon, and and I became the platoon leader for the Chinook section, and here's where my life turned to hell. So here I I get this, now I'm home and I can see what my wife Linda is doing. And I tell her you're drinking too much, you're driving while you're drunk, you're going to AA.

Right? I'm gonna fix this. I'm home now, we're gonna fix this. And she says, okay. And so she drives off to AA, and she doesn't come home.

So I'm calling her phone. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Finally, 2 in the morning, the phone gets answered. It's a deputy sheriff. He's like, I'm not supposed to be answering this. Who's this? I'm like, this is Alan Mack.

Who are you? Right? And he said, well, I'm a sheriff's deputy at the jail. Your wife was arrested for, driving while intoxicated. So she had been drinking at the AA meeting, and she was too drunk to drive, and they called the cops on her.

And, she got arrested at the AA meeting and left her car behind. So I took it to Cabot, got her car, brought her back, and, you know, at that point, I was like, you're going to rehab. You know? We're gonna fix this. And there's a whole, you know, it's about 2 years really worth, maybe a year and a half of this insanity of dealing with somebody you love, and thinking you can you can cure it, you know, thinking you can control it.

But if I left the house, she had vodka hidden everywhere. Could be, like, in the in the cushions of the thing, and she was augmenting her opioid medications, which were prescription, and her behavior was becoming more and more radical. Radical as in, begin a fight 1 time, and she's like, go ahead. Hit me again. No, I never hit her ever.

And she's like, hit me again. I'm like, what? And she's like, you know like last time, except this time my doctor has pitch, or my lawyer has pictures from last time. I'm like, what are you talking about? It was like something out of a law and order episode.

Damn man. And she's like, remember the last time you beat me? You know, my lawyer took pictures, or the doctor took pictures, gave me the lawyer, and they're in a safe. We don't have a lawyer. You know, we don't even have a regular doctor.

It's TRICARE, and, we definitely don't have a safe. So, I end up calling 911 on her, and she calls it on me. Right? And they show up, and I they asked where to send her. I said, send her to the on post hospital.

We've been doing the off post hospital. Maybe these guys can do something different. You know, different set of eyes. So they go, they convince her to go to you know rehab. She does, and, it works for a little bit, about 2 weeks I think when she got out.

And she went to rehab some form of it, I don't know, 6 or 7 times to the point where the final time she did it and got drunk again after that, I went to TRICARE and said, hey. We don't have any benefits. We've used them up. And they said, yeah. You TRICARE is not gonna pay for this.

I said, if you don't get her into the hospital, she'll be dead in less than a month. And, like, sorry, sir. We can't we can't do anything. And, I got in a big fight with her where I saw her driving. Like, I came home early for lunch or something, and she drove up, and I saw her at the stoplight.

You know, eyes are open, lights out. You know? She's just sitting there and, didn't see me, And, you know, she turns down the road. I follow her. I get to the house.

We have it out. You know? But you can't argue with a drunk, and, it just doesn't work out. And I'm like, stop drinking. When I get home tonight, you know, we'll we'll talk.

Right? And, I said, if you're drunk again, there's gonna be a problem. And I don't know what that meant, but I was mad. Go back to work. I head home.

She's passed out on the bed, and as I walk in the door, the phone rings, and it's my company commander. I was, like, Al, where are you? Like, well, you called my house, I'm obviously at home. He's, like, how's your wife? You You know, he thinks I've gone on and dumped something to her.

I said, well, she's passed out on the bed. She had taken my alert roster and called all down the alert roster telling people to tell me not to come home because it wouldn't be a good idea.

Holy shit.

So now it's in the open. Right? It is no kidding. I mean a couple people knew before, but now it is wide open. So I grab my dog, I grab a bunch of stuff, changed clothes, grabbed my 2 bicycles, you know, my guns, put them in the truck, and I go get a hotel, and I move out.

And I end up staying out of the house for about 2 weeks. Now, in the meantime what did help, I kind of skipped ahead here is I went to the regiment psychologist to ask for help, which I didn't do soon enough. I don't think they were very helpful, but I didn't do it nearly early enough. And, they steered me toward the Al Anon family group. So it's like AA, but for the family members.

Right? And they teach you you didn't cause it, you can't cure it, you can't control it. And the idea is to get your own feelings under control, so that you if you can help the other person, great. But if you're a wreck, you're not helping them. It's like trying to help a drowning swimmer when you're drowning.

Yeah.

You know? You gotta gotta get ready first. So they were very helpful, and they all convinced me, look, you gotta move out of the house. You can't stay there and enable it. So I did, and, Where

are your sons at?

So they're deployed. My, my son of the navy is, actually vacates Virginia Beach, and my younger son was a Chinook crew chief in the 1 60th, and he's in Afghanistan. Already? Yeah. Yeah.

So he'd already done a couple of deployments, by this time. So this is 2012 on this finally

So then so your so your sons didn't have to it wasn't like a rough home life for them.

What I didn't know, they kind of bailed out before it was. Like, they knew what was going on before I did. Right? And she made them promise not to tell me because she'll get under control, and, you know, they'll bring, you know, him home, and then someone else will have to do it. You know, all this big circle of events.

Like they tried And I'm not gonna I don't want to tell about a certain story, but, they tried like hell to get her help. And then when they couldn't, they moved out. Damn. My youngest My oldest son joined the navy and, you know, flies f eighteens. He's a wizzo.

And then the other 1, you know, joined, chem crew chief. I actually helped get him into the 160th because I didn't want him flying in a conventional unit. It's because even though we're, you know, maybe facing the enemy more often, we're much better prepared and equipped for it. So I if he was gonna be doing it, I want him to be with us. You know?

And the, you know, the the chaplain and the, the psychologists were very helpful. The command was very supportive once they knew what was going on. And once again, I should have told them sooner, but I didn't. I thought I could hide it. I thought I could fix it.

And I hear this. I get this I get emails from guys. I'll read my book or listen to it on the, you know, audible, and they'll find my email address on the website, and they'll write me these wonderful emails about, you know, I had the same problem. I thought I was alone. You know, thank you for sharing that.

And, you know, it doesn't make things any easier, but, you know, if we can help somebody in the process, which is why I'm okay with talking about it now. I mean, it's hard to talk about, but it is important.

Sorry. I had to go through that, man.

Yeah. No. Thank you. Me too. But, you know, how is steel made, you know, in the forge of the fires.

Right? So the command was very, very supportive, you know, and they sent me off, they said, you have whatever job you want. They even were gonna create a job where I would be, essentially a goodwill ambassador. I could represent the the the unit with all of the supported units, I could go hang out with them, I could deploy if I wanted, I could fly with them if I want or not. I mean that's how supportive they were, and I was like I just gotta get out of here.

You know, and, there were really 2 jobs that I was interested in. 1 was at Fort Rucker, Alabama, the, ASDAT, the, aviation shoot down assessment team. So if somebody gets shot down, a team goes there like when an airliner crashes like the NTSB, and you figure out what happened, you do the forensics on it, you figure out what could have maybe been different, and then recommend, you know, fixes or changes in tactics or whatever. So that was I would have been the chief of that division. Or there was this job at West Point, the flight detachment commander.

But that's nominative, like you have to throw an amen, the superintendent gets to pick. And, there was an opportunity to go up to Manhattan to unveil the horse soldier statue on ground 0, and because I had flown them, they asked for me to come up and help unveil the statue, which is a know, horse back on his legs with a green beret on it with an m 4. It's pretty pretty neat statue. It's there now if you ever get down there or up there. And, but I get there I'm thinking, hey, New York's not too bad.

It's pretty. You know, it was a good time of year, September. And, I threw my name in the hat. The superintendent picked me. I got the assignment at Gilder on how to fly Lakota helicopters, uh70 twos, and then I end up up there.

But, and that in itself takes me to a good, like, the good place that I am now. But, yeah, there's a lot of other stories in the middle of that, and then you can find them in the book. I know we've gone a long time, so I mean, I can keep talking, or or you can go to the next phase here, or whatever you wanna do.

How did it go with your wife?

Well, she, so I move out of the out of the house. I'm in a hotel with the dog, and, which I still have. I had dogs. 16 years old. Jacoby, dog.

And she makes 1 final call to me. She says, I want you to come home. And I said, I can't. The commander tells me I can't go home. The psychologist says I shouldn't.

I said, if you don't come home, I'm gonna kill myself. And I said, you don't have anything lethal in the house because I was dropping by every day to check the mail and just she was always passed out, so she didn't even know I was there. And, next morning I was out looking for a house, a new apartment, so I didn't have to stay in a hotel. I called called called, and she'd been texting me and calling me every day 3 or 4 times a day, come home come home come home. Not until you're sober, you know?

And, she said I need help. I said call 911, let them take you to the hospital, and I'll come support you, but I'm not doing it till you do that. And she didn't, and then so I went back to the house 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon. I dialed up my oldest son. I said, hey, I don't know what's going on here, but I want, you know, she says things about me, so I'm gonna put you on speaker, I'm gonna put you in my pocket.

I'm gonna, you know, you just listen in. Right? So I walk in, he's on the phone listening. House is quiet. Nothing going on.

I walk back to the room, the bedroom. I don't see her. Air condition's on full, and, then I see she's on the floor under a blanket. So I'm like, alright. She's on the floor here.

So I pull the blanket up, and she is her skin color is gray and blackish, and she's dead. And so I called in and I say, you know, Steven, I'm I'm sorry to tell you that your mom's not alive. I got a call 911. So he hung up. I have a crappy way to go there on the phone, and I called 911, and the operator says, are you sure?

She's dead. I'm like, look, I'm I've done a lot of combat deployments. I know what a dead person looks like. Are you sure? Can you roll her over?

So rigor was in her arms or out like this, and I had to, like they're like outriggers. You know? And I try to no. She's dead. Alright.

We'll go up front, wait for the police. Right? So they were there in, like, a minute because they'd been waiting for her trying to catch her car because they knew she was out driving around drunk, and they were trying to catch her in the act. So the cops were actually, like, set up an ambush, if you will, on both ends of the road. And, they got there and, did their thing.

And, you know, the medical examiner came, you know, they bagged her up, brought her out in a stokes, you know, the neighbors were all around. And it was it was kinda it was heart wrenching to hear these neighbors because they thought they could fix her. Right? So they knew we were having problems because when I was gone, she was bizarre behavior, and they were sworn to secrecy. They told me about this all afterwards.

Oh, she made us promise not to tell because you were doing combat missions and and such, and, they're like, we take all the alcohol out of the house, we come back 4 or 5 hours later, after watching the house, and she'd be drunker than when we left her. I'm like, I don't know what to say. She's got hidden in the attic, in the basement, I mean wherever. You know? She'd call a cab, and say, you know, hey, I'm not actually going anywhere.

Just bring me a bottle of vodka, you know, or a bag of vodka. You know? And, like, when I got there, there were a couple of 1 gallon jugs and a bunch of little flasks laying around. She drank it all, and she basically drank herself to death.

Holy shit. Man.

So I moved back into the house. You know, we have the the memorial and all that stuff. And, I knew I needed that change of venue, which is why, you know, I told the regiment, hey. Thanks for the offer for the job, but I'm gonna go 1 of these other places. And, so I put the house up for sale, you know, ended up in New York.

And, the cool thing about that was I was probably about the most family friendly commander my guys at the detachment have ever experienced, and they told me that. And I told the wives, like, the 1st week I was there, I had the wives come in for breakfast. We had a full kitchen, you know, the hangar was beautiful. And, I was like, come on in. Don't talk to me.

Husbands can't come, And I say, here's here's my background. You know, I told them about my wife, and, you know, they were all they were all tearing up. I I told the story, and I said, listen. If your husband ever tells you he can't do some event you wanna do, and you gotta go visit your parents, or you wanna go on a trip, or you have a birthday party, and he says, the commander says I gotta fly. I said, you call me.

I said, because he's gonna know after I tell you this not to lie to you, that I will never take them away from that if I can. If I need them, if I must use them, I'm sorry. You can call me, I'll tell you. It's Yep. It's me.

I gotta have them, and I'll give them back as soon as, you know, and it was great. And we were there. This, this hangar facility, in the winter, we'd move the aircraft to the other side, and so it's an empty hangar, and we'd bring in inflatables for the kids, and everybody had kids. I mean, you know, you know what it's like. And, in a better weather, we'd have a bonfire out back.

We actually had a a big fire ring that we built, picnic tables, and, we had permission because it was really army property on the airport, so we could do that. I had the state police in my hangar, and, how I knew I was being successful with the the camaraderie and the morale, that they weren't faking it, you know, like mandatory fun, was in the middle of the week, they'd be like, hey, sir. Here's the list of guys. Sir, it's, it's good weather today. We got nothing going on tomorrow.

What do you think we do a family party tonight? Sure. So potluck, everybody come in. We have our time, and, it was good. We also had a bunk room in the in the in the hangar, so I could just stay there.

I didn't have to drive. But I met my wife, Patty, my current wife, and she is a bundle of sunshine. She'll see this, and she's gonna be, oh, you don't stop. But everybody that meets Patty loves Patty. And, when we were recording, if you will, on the phone, she's, like, so where were you on 911?

Which is a very New York question to ask, and I told her. And I said, you know, a couple weeks later I was in Afghanistan. I was the tip of America's response. And she's like, what? And she didn't know anything about it.

So, we talk about it. It turns out her stepbrother died in the, North Tower. So, kind of a nice mesh there, you know. You know, actually I was at I told you earlier, at breakfast, I was at, a tunnels to tower event. I met the Sillars.

They her their son died running from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to the tower and it died. And I do this run every year. And, so we're talking, and they'd met the the horse soldiers if you will. They'd never met me, and, they were really really nice people, you know, and very grateful, nice organization, all that kind of stuff. That's the kind of thing I do now is that so, alright.

So I did the the army thing, so I'm flying the superintendent around, and I'm flying to DC, flying to see the secretary of, army, You know the cadets get in a fight with the pillowcases, and have batteries in them I guess. Gets on Twitter, and he gets called down. You know what the hell? Kaslan, you know, and he's like, so I gotta fly him down there. And I befriend some firsties, that's seniors right at West Point.

So my very first support mission, we fly the Lakota out to West Point, we land, we shut down, it's parachute season in in, in August. And these 2 cadets seniors, they know about me because 1 of the guys that was ahead of me was my 1 of my instructors, you know, that worked for me. And, so they know who I am, I get there, and as I'm walking toward the group for the safety brief for the season, they're like, hey sir, you know, connect Dave and Chris, you know, I'm not going to use your last names. We want you to be our leadership mentor. I'm like, sure.

And they run off. Alright. Hey. I'm looking at this other guy, I'm like, what what did I just sign up for? He's I had no idea.

Right? So essentially I I was, you you know, they would ask you, you know, come to the house on Friday nights, you know, and and talk about their career in the military. How do you deal with a platoon sergeant? How do you deal with a warrant officer? How do you deal with, you know, troubled soldiers or whatever it is, leadership questions.

And in doing so, they're like, oh, sir, you you gotta you gotta do a tandem with us. And I'm like, no, I'm a pilot, but I'm scared of heights. Right? And I'm like, there's no way I'm gonna skydive on purpose. Right?

And they're like, oh, come on. Right? So we get through the season, it's almost graduation, and I've had a great time with these kids. And, the the the OIC of the team is this, he's a lieutenant colonel at Green Beret. He comes up, he's like, Al, why don't you do the tandem?

The guys really, it would mean a lot. You know, they'll jump with you. Like you'll jump on coach Falzone, he's the the parachute team coach. I'll jump with you with a camera, we get all these other guys, and they'll jump with you. They'll be right in front of you.

It'd be great, and we'll drop right on the plane which is the parade field at West Point. And I'm like, I don't wanna do this, but I will. It's another 1 of those, I don't want to do this, but someone's got to do it. And in this case, I have to because it's me that they want to jump with. So I do it, and I remember flying up, sitting on the floor of the Lakota.

There's no seats in it. We're climbing up to altitude. We're gonna jump from 13,000 feet, and, you know, Tom fell zones. He's hooking me in. He's like, alright.

I'm like, yeah. You know, yeah. And the crew chiefs are all looking at me. They got their GoPros on. They're waiting for me to to show some fear, and I am scared to death.

You know, but I'm not showing it. And it comes time and we kind of scoot to the door, and I gotta sit up basically on the skid, you know, leaned up against the aircraft. He said, look up. Look up. And we just tip out head first, and I'm now a licensed skydiver because I loved it.

You know, and so I got the the cadets the next year, the next season, taught me how to skydive. Like the the coach did. He did a f f. We, I got to the point where the cadets could coach me, and then, I got my a license, and then, moved on to my b license, and I retired so I didn't go any further. But the cadets were a big part of my emotional rejuvenation, so I meet Patty.

She's wonderful. You know, we're like sickeningly in love. I mean, we gotta touch each other. We gotta hold hands. It's that whole thing.

Right? And, and she has kids. You know, her son, is in the infantry in the 101st, and he's already done a combat tour. And, he's trying to put him for flight school. We'll see see how that goes.

And then, my stepdaughter lives with us, and, my oldest stepson lives in Manhattan. You know, working down there. So great big family. They all get along. You know, my kids, the grandkids, I got, you know, 3 grandkids with the first son, you know, 2 girls and a boy, and my youngest son just, you know, gave me a granddaughter since 4, and it's just amazing.

Yeah. Good for you, man.

Yeah. But it it does go to to show you, you know, you know, we didn't talk about it in this, in this sitting, but my faith was tested, you know, many times during this process. And, you know, I told you that there was a point where it was so bad I shook my fist at God, and I was like, you know you know, damn you God, you know. Excuse me. And I swear things got worse.

And it wasn't till I turned back, and turned back into that faith that it it started getting better, and did get better, and I, you know, very grateful for that.

How did they get worse?

The behavior of Linda, because, you know, she got 3 DWI's. Right? Only 1 of them was she convicted, the other 2 kept getting extended, and she did another 1. And so just when I thought maybe maybe we're gonna be okay, you know, I could leave town. I'd go out of town on a training trip, I'd go to New Mexico, and she wouldn't answer the phone, and I'd have to go home.

You know, I mean it was obvious something was going on. And so I'd go back, so I couldn't even make a training trip in, you know, in its entirety. Right? And guys were starting to notice that, gee, Al shows up, but he doesn't stay. You know?

And, my close friends

Damn, man.

We're good with it. You know, they were like, Al, just do what you gotta do. And there was 1 guy, 1 of my my peers, if you will, had no sympathy for me whatsoever. He's like, well, well, gee, you know, if his his wife's gonna be a problem, he needs to just get out. You know?

And I remember, you know, hearing that thinking, dude, I hope this never happens to you, you know, kind of thing. But, you know, the, the church family was was very helpful. You know, there was a point where when I when I did that shake my fist at God, they were not as helpful. You know, there's a faction of the church, you know, the physical congregation that was kind of knew what was going on. You know, we were trying to hide it, but they knew, and they sort of instead of helping her, you know, kind of turned against her, turned her backs on her Yeah.

Which was hurtful to her, which then was acted out with, you know, more alcohol, you know. So that's kind of how it got worse. I mean, it just got to that point where I had to move out of the house. Yeah. And then, you know, once I was away from it, you know, enough physically away from it where I didn't have to look at it constantly, you know, my mind and my and my soul really got quiet.

And I get to that quiet place where I could kinda think, And that's why when she she gave me the ultimatum to come home now or else, I was finally in a strong enough place, that I could say, no. The enabling is done. You know, you're either gonna get better or you're not. And, in our case, it was not. You know?

And there's a whole there's really a lot more to that. I mean, we you know, you can't cover it in the time we have, here. And there's some other very interesting things that happen, and there'll be we kind of skipped over, but in the interest of time, you know, people can read the book. It's in there. But,

is there anything in particular that we skipped over you wanna cover?

I gotta tell you 1 fun story. Right? It's a it's Bo Berg Dahl story.

We're not done yet. We're not I'm we're gonna go back and

Okay.

Cover a couple of events.

Okay.

Alright. I was talking about with with your

Yeah. With with with Linda. Yeah. And, yeah. You know, she just she I was married 26 years to her, and, she gave it her best.

You know, she came from a a rough childhood. There there was a whole background to this. But, you know, the alcohol and the drug, the big thing I wanna emphasize to your listeners is that you don't have to handle it alone. You know, whether it's somebody's drug and alcohol problem or, you know, somebody's PTSD or suicide, you know, I mean, look at the the veteran suicide rate, especially with the soft guys. Right?

If you got a problem, find somebody to talk to, somebody that can relate is what I would suggest. You know, somebody who can't relate may just be like, you know, hey pull your bootstraps up. But somebody who may have already been there, you know, or knows what you're going through, can be helpful. You know, and the interesting thing, so I wanna go way back to Anaconda. Right?

And this this is reference to, to getting help. So remember I said I was I was rescued, came back on the KIA bird next to Neil Roberts. Well, I was back in the states, you know that week, and I had nightmares, terrible terrible nightmares. Reliving that night, and you know could I have done something different? You know the RPG coming at me, and then Neil Roberts would be sitting about that far away from me in his kit, with the damage that was done to him, just looking at me.

And I could tell in the nightmare, I could tell that he was saying, why did you leave me? I'm dead. Why did you leave me? So the only way to get past that was alcohol for me. Right?

So I was, you know, Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Maker's Mark, you know, I love bourbon, and I had to do it to the point where I went to sleep, so it was a lot of whiskey. And, there was a point where I knew that wasn't right. You can't you can't put the nightmares away with alcohol. So I went to the shrink, the regimental psychologist, and I told him everything, everything. And, I said, can you look in my assessment records, my psychological profile, and tell me if I did what you guys predicted.

You know? Am I what you want in a night stalker? He looks at it, he's like well this is an old test, we don't really use this 1 anymore, and it doesn't really select people. It's more like a an elimination tool. Like if you, you know, have a certain set of behaviors or thoughts that we don't want, we just won't take you.

But they aren't necessarily, oh, this guy's the right mindset, we'll take him. But what he did say is that there's a a series of data sets, data points. Right? And, so think of these columns, it's like, you know, integrity, you know, here, You know, honesty, here. Bravery, here.

Stupidity, here. You know, whatever, how you prioritize things, and they categorized it. Right? And I'm butchering this, but you get the idea there's different character traits. And he says, you have the classic Nightstalker check mark.

And I said, what's that? And he said, when you connect, like the first 4 dots, there's like this high 1, a low 1, and then you go high again, you stay high. Like if you draw a line between this check mark. He said some of that's that's the, what they found is you don't care about the rules when when someone's life is on the line. So for example, what they found is that people that are in aircraft emergencies, like Sully.

Right? Miracle on the Hudson. This is the great example of it. They wanted him to turn in and go toward an airfield. They kept giving him headings to Teterboro, to LaGuardia, and he's like, not happening.

I'm going in the river. And they try to talk him out of it, but he knows, and he just does it. Right? And so in military aircraft situations, same thing. You can you can pull the guts out of the engines and tear it up and save the aircraft, but destroy the aircraft destroy the aircraft, but save the occupants if you're this check mark kind of guy.

Then we still had a couple of night stockers that had most of the check mark, but that low point, and I can't remember what the category was, but it was like basically concern for getting in trouble was more up here. And we had a guy for example in a in an MH 60, he got on a brownout landing. There's a what we call bitching Betty, is the voice warning system, and she bitches at you if you're, you know, too low or too much power or low rotor, and this guy was in a dust cloud in a Blackhawk, and he starts pulling power to get out of it, and he's in surrounded by trees, and bitchin Betty says, low rotor, low rotor, low rotor. And he jams the power down, and he has a hard landing, and the aircraft is severely damaged. So they go back to the black box, and they look at it and they find out Bitch and Betty was wrong.

You know? The rotor was fine. But because he was worried about getting in trouble for, you know maybe drooping the rotor and and settling with power, he purposely put it down in a situation where he wasn't ready to do. And they said that's the difference between the 2. It's not that, you know, there's nothing wrong with that kind of guy.

It's just that's who you are. And, you know, when it came time to, to get Roberts, you know, with with no miniguns and all that stuff, you know, I turned back in, and we're gonna we're gonna go get him. It wasn't until I knew it was useless, it was untenable. I mean we would we could conceivably crash on top, and in my dreams, at least he doesn't die alone. But we all die.

The rest of the SEALs die, my crew dies. You know? So I made a choice. 1 guy, we're gonna go over here, raise your 4, might be able to get him. But in in doing that, he kind of reinforced that I was I was normal.

You know, these dreams, they're normal for somebody who experienced what you experienced. And I said, listen I gotta tell you, the guys across the street, the other pilots, they're in just as bad of shape, and they won't come here. I mean I'm just to the point where I'm drinking myself to sleep. I don't know if they are, but I know they're all emotionally messed up from that whole thing. I said, you gotta make it mandatory.

And so I went he said, I can't do that. So I went to the commander, the company commander, I said, I told him the whole situation, and I said, sir, you can make it mandatory. So he made it mandatory for everybody to go take their turn with a psychologist, and, minimum 30 minutes, and took in order to keep things going, they could go for an hour. Everybody stayed the full time, the whole hour, and and many of them came back. And they told me, you know, a week or 2 later, hey, thanks for doing that.

I was mad at you for doing it, but it helped.

Man, good for you. Yeah. Good for

you, man. So so once again, it's that whole, you know, you gotta ask for help. Knowing when to ask for help, I guess, is the issue. Right? Because you can't have everybody, you know, I'm I'm stressed.

I need help. Yeah. We're all under stress. You know? So there's there's some, you know, some subjectivity to that, I guess.

But you gotta know when that isn't. It needs to be available. So when you do decide you wanna help Yeah. You do it. You know?

And you can't have the stigma of, oh, crap. Al went and talked to the shrink. You know? But I knew they were all messed up too.

Good for you, man. Let's let's go back to Red Wings. Yeah. Can you talk about your experience with the with the recovery? Mhmm.

So first, to know about Red Wings, it's a conventional operation again. We're not even part of it at all. And they decide they're gonna they're gonna bring marines into the base of the Korangal Valley. Right? In the Kunar province.

They're gonna go after a guy named Ahmed Shah. The problem is, well twofold. 1 is you never know the pattern of life of who's where is the where's the targeted individual? What building is he in? Right?

Because you know helicopters come people run. You know, they don't tend to stand and fight, they run. So they're squirters. They squirt off the objective. So we need eyes on the the village to determine pattern of life and see if we can identify where Amit Chha is, and then the marine corps helicopters are not capable of getting the marines into the valley.

Right? Because you gotta go up over the, you know, 12,000 foot ridgelines and drop down, and even in the valley, it's, you know, 8,000 feet. And the aircraft don't have the performance, not the pilots can't do it. The aircraft doesn't have the performance to do it from where they have to do it. Hey.

The 1 60th is not doing anything right now. Maybe they could fast rope our guys in. Right? The marines are fast rope qualified. So they send the mission up to us.

Our battalion commander is not happy with it. Fast rope, you know, earlier in his career as a young lieutenant, he'd been on a fast rope mission as a pilot, and a ranger got hung up at JRTC in his miles gear and died, you know, fast roping the trees. So he was really against doing this. And, so we're gonna do it. So we do a rehearsal, you know, as far as, we we come elevators.

Right? We we go out to Jalalabad, and, the Marines do, you know, up and down, they slide down the ropes a couple times, they're current, they do a tower, the whole thing, and, so they're gonna go in. That's that's the concept of Red Wings, and they're gonna the eyes on are a 4 man seal team that's gonna go in the night before. They're gonna move into position and observe pattern of life. That's, Marcus Littrell and and the and the boys.

And, so here's here's what happens. So there's 2 versions of Chinook there. I mean, I've kind of alluded to the the e model, the d model, and the g, and I was flying e models. Right? So the e model is a much more capable aircraft.

I can go places the other aircraft can't go, but that equipment has a weight factor to it, a penalty if you will. So the d models, the MHDs, right, they have a refueling probe, the whole deal it looks just like us, but they can lift about £1500 more at that altitude. No question, if you're gonna move a bunch of marines in, you want the D models. So they're currently on QRF, quick reaction force, and we do it for like a week at a time. And we do a little a handover, you know, and then the other 2 guys, you know, are always around ready to go, They're not out on missions.

They're just prepared for when somebody has a bad day to run jump in the aircraft and go. So the d models are on right now. Right? And they're gonna do Red Wings, and their flight lead is is doing it, and I'm the flight lead of the other 2. So they go, okay, listen we're gonna change over, they're gonna fly in the 4 man team, the d models are, and then they're gonna come back and the next morning, next cycle of day, they'll observe, and at night, we'll do red wings.

Right? And that day at like say, I'll call it 10 o'clock in the morning, we're gonna switch over QRF. So I now will assume those duties and the delta models that had it will now become the entire Red Wing force. They had 7 d models and 2 echo models. So we go to bed.

It turns out the team is compromised. That once again, that's their story to tell. But, they they call for help, and they decide to go launch the QRF. So this is gonna be, when we get get to work it's gotta be about 9:30 in the morning, and, I'm showered, I got my uniform on, I walk over to the, you know, the planning area of the talk, the operations center to see, you know, how things are going on, you know, how's Red Wings gonna go tonight, and everybody's looked at the big screen TVs. Right?

So I get my coffee, I come sit down next to the colonel, everybody's quiet, no one's talking. I'm like, sir, what's going on? He goes, the SEAL team was compromised. They requested the QRF. I'm the QRF.

Right now, I'm the QRF. He's like, yeah, major Reich was already here, they were already still up, and as you can tell they could get in the air sooner than you because they're about to get there. They're like 2 minutes out. Oh, wow. Okay.

So I'm drinking my coffee thinking this will be interesting because there's really nowhere to land up there on on this ridgeline, and I watched the there's like an a 10 overhead, and he's got a lightning pod, so you can see he's he he's broadcasting them, doing their thing. He's not really there for fires, he's more for ISR. Chinook comes on screen, Comes to a hover. You can see the engines getting hot because they're now at a hover. You can see they're kicking ropes for fast rope, and all of a sudden, you know how FLIR is, it blooms.

There's been an explosion. Don't know what it is, but there's definitely been an explosion. All of a sudden the aircraft kinda limps a little bit away off screen, and comes apart in flight. Fuck. The the, the RPG was shot up into the aft transmission area, and it compromised either the transmission or the drive shaft.

So it held together long enough to sort of limp away, and then the the blades come together, you know, because they're no longer mechanically separated. And, the seals, the night stalkers came apart, littered on the side of that mountain. Chalk 2 was right there watching it, and he calls in. He's like, you know, turbine 33 is down. This is gonna be this tough.

So I looked at colonel, and I was like, well, I'm the QRF, sir. I'll take the Dev Guru seals. Right? Because the QRF was the typically the, the siege of soda seals. And, so red squadron meets me at the aircraft.

We're driving down there, and you know, Bagram at the time is this pit of admin, you know, what do you call them? Fobbits. Right? Never leave the wire. You're not wearing your PT belt, reflective belt.

You know, you're gonna get a ticket. And we're in the back of the truck loaded down, and we're headed to the aircraft. He's doing like 50 miles an hour in this little tiny road, and this guy's yelling at me. You know, slow down. Stop.

You're getting a ticket. And I'm like, you know, flipped on the bird. I'm like, not today buddy. Not today. Right?

And we cut down there. The crew chief's already had the aircraft up to engine start. I jump in, strap in, start the engines. Tower already knows I'm going, so they give me priority, and we are pulling in the power, sucking the guts out of the aircraft. I mean, I've got like, I don't know.

I think it's 28 seals in the back. I know I can't take them to the top of the mountain because I know it's 12,500 feet. It's hot out. There's no way I can get them there, but now what am I gonna do. Right?

Nobody has any idea, and I'm hauling ass. And I'm I'm checking in, I get my ETA, and now I'm thinking I'm not I'm not saying this, but I'm thinking, I don't know what I'm gonna do when I get there. You know? I can only go to the same place. Maybe I could come up the ridge a different way and fast rope the guys, and not even a clearing, but sort of a a lighter concentration of trees.

You know? And I don't know. And, I get about 10 minutes out. I call to talk in 10 minutes, and like abort, divert to JBAD. We we gotta we gotta have a better plan than this.

I'm thinking, oh, yeah. It's probably a good idea. So we get over there. We shut down to APU, which is the auxiliary power unit. So the aircraft's all ready to go.

Everything's spun up, it's just not running. The aircraft engines aren't running. So I go inside, my crew stays at the aircraft, and I'm with, Frank is the, troop commander, and he's like I guess we're just gonna have to go where they got shot down. We'll just we'll rope, but we're gonna wait till dark. Right?

And the day is starting to get, you know, getting it's getting on till night. And I'm, like, alright. You know, we can do it. Right? He goes, well, how many people?

I know you can't take 28, or they would have had 28 guys on the original QRF. Alright. So I I start doing a little mental math. I got a map out. I mean, I don't have my planning tools.

It's just a paper map looking at spot elevations. I've got a little an operator's manual from the aircraft, so I flipped to the performance graphs, and 17 guys. They're like, 17. I'm like, 18. Against my better judgment, 18.

Right? And they're like, okay. Right? So we're waiting for dark, and then I go out to the aircraft, brief the cruise up what we're gonna do, and then I get a call. Somebody brings me back into the talk, and it's the Bagram, and they say, stand down on your infill.

We're just gonna start Red Wings right now, and we're gonna start it with the dev cruise seals. Right? So you got the Delta models coming down. They can haul all those guys up there, and I can't. So they come down, but now it's summer and the rainstorms in Afghanistan in the summer are brutal.

And remember I said these guys don't have the same equipment that I have, and I have this digital map. Right? I can actually even if the radar is not working, remember I talked about the, the disorientation. I was able to make it where the terrain disappeared from the screen, meaning I was high enough. I can still do that, and they didn't have that capability.

I'm, like, you gotta let me do this with my 2 aircraft because there's no way they're gonna even get past Asadabad, you know, from Jabad. They're not gonna make it. They're gonna run into the weather, and they're gonna have to turn around. Nope. That's what we're doing.

I was pissed. And, they came, they picked up my seals, and off they went. And as I sat there looking going, they're gonna turn around, maybe 10 minutes. They got about 10 minutes away, I turned back because they hit that weather, and, I wish I were being just furious because I could have got those guys in. It wouldn't have made a difference it turns out, but we don't know that.

Right? And, I mean in hindsight, they were already dead. Latrobe was already down the hill. It wouldn't have made a difference other than in our own minds. So everybody eventually follows on.

We're gonna spend the day there, you know, get through the night, see if the weather improves. We get there, it's hot, I mean miserable hot, and I tell the colonel, sir, if we're not gonna go until night, let's go back to Bagram with everybody, and let me have all of my tools, the satellite imagery, all the stuff I need to properly plan this, and we'll put everybody in in force tonight. He's, like, no. No. The weather might clear.

I'm like, it's not gonna clear. So, eventually, it's obvious those guys aren't gonna work. So he does let me go back. We don't spend the night there. So I sleep on the gym floor because it's the only air conditioning, and I use my body armor as a pillow.

So eventually we get back to Bagram. I do a nice plan where we're gonna take 2 flights of 2. We're gonna come at, there's 3 ways into the valley, into the Cornwall. Right? So there's the way that turbine 33 went.

They kind of went up the ridge, not the valley, but it was right there. There's another way around. I think it was Camp Blessing or something like that. It was a small fob, and another 1 that went off to the west. The 1 to the west had high terrain, and it was covered in clouds all the time, so you couldn't fly across it in a delta model, but you could in an echo.

So I planned something where essentially the echoes would come across there, while the delta mod the 2 delta models would come up simultaneously from the other side, and we'd land, there was like a fork shaped spur, and we'd kind of come up and simultaneously fast rope the guys on, and then we go our separate ways. Right? And at least that would, you know, I could come from a different direction, so the enemy couldn't go, I mean, you know, you're reverse planning. The enemy knows. They gotta come from there, or they gotta come from there, which is how they got 33 in the first place.

They knew they had to come that 1 spot. So we rope the guys in, and we tell them tall trees, gonna be a 100 foot rope, which is a long way as you know. And, so 3 of the 4 aircraft rope at a 100 feet. I come over, and the guy I'm not flying. I'm I'm the my copilot's flying on the race heat.

And we come in, we're like a 100 feet, and he he loses visual on, you know, the ground. He can't he can't see to hold his position steady enough for them to rope. And he's like, Al, I can't see anything, and he's, oh, I got a tree out my left door. I have the controls. You know?

So I have a good reference, I'll be able to hold the hover, and a crew chief in the back says, sir, start descending. Just lower the power, lower the power. He's like, you're off 35, off 50. I'm like, are you sure? He said, keep coming.

Keep coming, sir. 10 foot hover. The guy's rope from 10 feet. You know? And, the troop commander was pissed later on.

He said, how come everybody else didn't do that? You know? And I was like, well, I gave some nice answer of, you know, well, you know, sometimes the angle you come in, and I met him at the White House, at Slab's Medal of Honor ceremony, and he brought that up. And I said, well, I don't wanna tell you at the time, but I'm just a better pilot. You know?

He said, I thought so. I was like, yeah. You know? I just had a better crew chief. You know?

Which once again, I told you that that interaction, him knowing I could do that, and him saying looking and going, we could do this. You know? There's no need to rope these guys from a 100 feet. I mean, they all had burned hands, you know, even with gloves. And then so then red, you know, we go back, thunderstorm comes in.

Every night there's a thunderstorm or 2, and there's a gap in between giving us time to bring more troops in to look for KIA's. Right? So the rangers and the seals by the way are trying to walk in, but the train is just, it's hell. And, so we get to the top of the mountain ahead of anybody. Most everybody turned back I think that was walking, and so we just kept bringing guys in.

Every night we brought more and more guys in looking to expand more terrain. I flew away 1 night, and, I told the crew, I said if you see a strobe light anywhere, and we haven't found everybody, we're gonna go take a look. Right place, right time, right markings, right radio call, we'll pick them up. So the crew chiefs who do sometimes imagine some lighting. Right?

So in Afghanistan, 1 of the things that happens is the Taliban uses an old fashioned method of letting people know where you are as they turn lights on, and use Morse code or whatever code they're, you know, Haji code of some sort. Right? But you can track a helicopter across a valley if someone's over here. They just you just watch the lights. So sometimes Did

that did that shit make you nerve I remember flying and seeing that.

I didn't like it. Man, it made me nervous. I didn't like it. And earlier when I talked about not returning fire on these things, made me feel helpless. Right?

That they could be doing this. And the Green Berets, the SF guys told us that, yeah, so the Afghans do. They're They did it to the Soviets. But occasionally, you'll see a car driving around in maybe lower terrain or something, and his lights, maybe he's on a switch back or something, and from our position it looks like it's a blinking light, but it's a car. And I could see it sometimes, it's a car.

You know, so when a crew chief says, you know, I got this blinking light. Sometimes I take it with a grain of salt depending on who said it. And other times I can trust it a 100%. So as we flew over, I toward the coordinates, and I press button. The coordinates are saved in the computer.

Don't see anything, don't hear anything in radio, so we go back to Bagram. We park, we go down for the day. I didn't bring it back because I didn't think it was somebody, and, I take a shower, I go to bed, and I can't sleep. What if it's somebody? Right?

So I wasn't allowed to drive on the flight line. I'm a flight lead, but I can't drive on the flight line. Right? By the rules of Bagram, because I'm not certified with a driver's license for Bagram. So I go wake a guy up.

Hey, you gotta take me to the aircraft. Why? I I gotta I gotta pull something out of the system. So I he drives me down there, I fire up the auxiliary power unit. I I download the coordinates.

I go back to the s 2. Like listen, last night at this time, I had these coordinates. I didn't think it was anything, but maybe someone should check it out. They sent an SFODA to check it out. It's an ambush.

There's Taliban hiding kind of under a little waterfall with RPGs and an air strobe. They're 1 of our strobe lights.

No shit.

And had I gone in to look for it, they'd have probably got me or at least got a good shot at me. I don't know if they'd hit us. But, you know, the SF guys kinda took care of business. But that's the kind of thing that's happening. And then, you know, the a tens are flying around all day trying the, you know, the ISO prep cards.

You know? They're taught because the Taliban's got our survival radios, and they're on their, you know, survival channels, you know, and they sort of would get your attention. And then the a 10 guy would ask, you know, a question challenge response kind of thing, and it would kind of get broken. Questions burned now. You know, and and they used up all the questions.

It was like something out of a movie. They had to call back to I don't know if it was Little Creek or the guys that were out in team 1, and they talked to their friends. Hey, what are something these guys would know that nobody else would know? You know, like the Taliban would couldn't know. So they he was like in bat 21, you know, what what questions could this guy maybe know?

But anyways, this is all going on. This is over the course of 2 weeks. This is the toughest flying I've done in my career. I mean I've done some really difficult missions, very difficult landings, but this is the most emotionally difficult because I know that the Taliban knows I gotta come in. I gotta come in 1 of these 2 ways, occasionally the third way, but mostly it's these ways.

And the, the Delta model guys would run into the clouds, they'd climb up to 14,000 feet to get out of it, and then you know they'd, you know, it's like, oh my god I can't see clear the mountains, and then they get on top, they look down, see a soccer hole, fly down through it, rejoin with me, and that's ballsy. You know these guys got got guts. And, so we're it's obvious there's no survivors at this point, and we're gonna we're practicing for a dignified transfer. So we're starting to bring the bodies out. We haven't found everybody yet, but we've got most of them.

And, Latrell's in Bitter Beacon comes up, And we've been watching it, I guess, but, you know, like I said, the Taliban had taken our radios, our strobe lights, all this other stuff. But he sends somebody in with his his, what's the, you got 1 of the Bloodshed. Bloodshed. Right? So he sends his number in with a guy, it might even have been that the guy that made the I don't remember the guy's name, but he walked in to the small fob about, it's 10 kilometers away.

He walked in that day. It's evening. We're practicing dignified transfer. We've got coffins, you know, full of cases of water to simulate weight, and I'm gonna be a pallbearer for my, NCOIC, Trey Ponder, who who was on the ramp when, RPG came up. And, our our our captain comes around, Al.

Al, you gotta come inside. Come to the come to the planning area. I'm, like, sir, we're practicing this thing, you know? And he's, like, no no no. He leans over.

He goes, we got a survivor. You know, somebody takes my place, we run into the planning area, they've figured out where he is, they've confirmed he's there. There's an ODA, so an SF group group of green berets. You don't ever hear about these guys it's 361 or 362, I can't remember which 1. They're actually who get to him to secure him.

Right? So, you know, the Rangers get credit for it, you know, they I'm sure they they got there, but it was an ODA, you know, essentially with a couple of Afghans that defended his perimeter, because the Taliban was still there. You know? They just kept them from coming in while we plan the rescue. So they're planning the HH sixties, the the jolly greens came up from Kandahar.

Right? The Blackhawks, the air force, SARS sixties. And, so the guy that's in charge of the rescue operations, is a p j major, Tom is his name. And Tom says, alright guys, We got a lone survivor here. We're gonna pick him up in this terrace field right outside this house.

The sixties are gonna go get him, and I lost it. I was like no way is the air force gonna traipse in here from Kandahar, and fly in and pick up the guy that we lost our guys for, and by the way, there's no way they're flying at that altitude. Right? And like, oh we stripped it down, there's no guns, there's no equipment, it's empty. No armor, and I'm like, even so, and, like, oh, Chinook won't fit in that field.

I'm, like, absolutely will. You know? And, this guy Tom was smart. Right? Because I'm as the flight lead, I got a lot of say so.

Right? And I have a lot of influence because of who I am and my experiences. And if I say no, and I stick to my guns, I'm gonna get to get them. And, he says, Al, we're still missing another body. We still need to bring more rangers in, and you know we're gonna have about a 20 minute window of weather.

The sixties can't take in rangers, only you can. So this is all gonna happen in between 2 storms, you know, rainstorms. I thought about it. He was right. There was no choice here.

They had to pick him up. So I said, alright. I'll agree to that, but I'm planning the mission. And the 60 guys were, hell yeah. Right?

You know? And so, I had to plan this very very extravagant fires mission to allow the sixties to get in unmolested, because once again they now knew that we knew where Littrell was. We were securing him, and they knew we were gonna come. You know there was intercepts, they knew we were coming. So I talked to the AC 130 crew, you know the pilot and the sensor operator, and the, a 10 pilots.

We sat down at a table, I laid out my map. I said, here's what I'm trying to do. Right? I wanna sequence in the 61st from this direction over here. He's gonna come in, but before he gets there, before they even hear him, I want you to lay fire on these guys like they've never seen.

Right? In the enemy positions. And then, 2 minutes out, he's gonna call 2 minutes, and you're gonna lift and shift fire, and what I want is the biggest, baddest explosions on a ridgeline having nothing to do with us, but that's observable. Right? So it's a distraction.

I want people to go, you know, they're over here, a little misdirection. What's going on over here? Holy crap that's a big explosion, and that's what Littrell talks about in his book. He's, oh my god the explosions were huge. And, so the the 60 comes in, and once he's on the ground, they start shooting in behind him, so that if he had got past somebody that now knows he's coming out, their position sort of templated positions, and then he calls, you know, ready to depart.

They shift fire. They blow up another frickin' ridge line. He goes out. I come in. They shift fires, lift fires for me.

I put in the rangers, and this choreography was probably 1 of the most beautiful synchronizations I've ever done, you know, with the fires platforms, you know. And because they knew what I wanted, and I didn't ask for a certain ordinance, which is what I wanted to do. I wanted to say I want 40 millimeter here in case there's, you know, tarps with dirt on it, and I just said look, I need terrain denial, I need you need a detraction, whatever it is. And they said, oh well we'll just do, you know, 40 millimeter over here, 25 millimeter here, we used 105 on this, aten will drop a 500 powder here, and they sequenced it all out for me, and it all worked out. And we got them out of there.

You know, and then, I don't know, a day or 2 later we found the last body. And then started to withdraw everybody, and, took 2 weeks. This is the hardest line of my life. And so we go, we do a memorial service. Because they're eulogies, and, we're at Bagram.

And this whole time mind you I've been a machine, you know, externally people are just wow, Al's just doing it right? Which is my goal, and when we're done now, all the all the bodies and the survivor are out of there. I walked over between 2 b huts. Right? These plywood buildings in the shadows.

I put my back against it, slid down, and just cried. You know? I finally was able to to let it go. And, what's funny I don't know if it's funny, but a couple weeks later, I'm headed home, and it's me and 1 of the crew chiefs, 1 of the junior in e 4. Right?

And we're stopped in Amsterdam for, waiting a a flight. I was like, hey. Let me buy you a buy you a beer. Right? So we sit down, and he's like, sir, I gotta tell you, I was scared.

I was super scared. And I was like, he goes, I don't know how you did it. And I said, are you kidding me? I was scared out of my out of my skin. He's like, what?

You didn't show it. I said, if I showed it would you would you just, you know, been happy? He's like, no. Alright. Well, a leadership lesson for you.

Sometimes you just gotta do and I gotta put on that face, and, you know, I was able to cry about it afterwards, but, man, it was tough. Toughest toughest fly I ever did.

Damn, Al.

Yeah. So luckily, you know, I mentioned I, for years, I've been trying to meet Marcus. We just haven't crossed paths, and I finally connected with him, and I'm gonna meet him, next month. Good for you. This it might be before this this podcast airs, but it'll be fun.

I really wanna wanna see him. I wanna give him a big hug.

Yeah. You know? So I'm happy for you, man.

Yeah. Thanks.

This this seems like a really weird point to end it. Mhmm. But I just I just wanna show you something. And I've never brought this up before, but, if you look back there at that flag, that is, I got that from my best friend, and his name was Gabe O'Carty. And, those were those were his teammates, the seals that went down in Turban 33.

And, he was on part of that recovery op, and, it's my understanding that the Rangers secured the crash site.

Mhmm.

Am I

correct on that? The crash site. Yeah.

And he was good friends with 1 of those rangers, and, if you look below golf 12, there's a belt of 60 ammo. Mhmm. And that came out of turbine 33, and, that Ranger gave it to Gabe Mhmm. And told him that that was the only thing that wasn't burnt up in that crash.

Yeah. It was bad. The, so Trey, my good friend, he sat, you know, this far away from me, you know, at back at home at our desks. And, his wife Leslie is great. She lives here in this area, and, she asked me for a piece of the aircraft.

So I asked somebody, and Rangers gave me a piece of, this little bracket. I didn't know where it went to. Right? It just was a sheet metal bracket. It was burned, and I gave it to her.

And about a week later, I was flying, and I was just sitting there, you know, and you get these little, you know, the the foot pedals, and there's like little slides for your heels to go back and forth. And I was just not paying attention, and I looked down, and there's that bracket. You know, obviously, for my aircraft. And I almost puked because to know what it took to get that bracket out on mountainside was just it it just tore me up. And I just looked at it

and I was like, really? Damn.

I was like, hey, man. I'm I'm I'm incapacitated for a minute. He's like, what's up? I was like, I can't talk. You know?

A couple minutes later, I was able to say, yeah. That's that. You know? But, you know, it's the kind of it's the risk we take. You know, I mean, just look at extortion.

You know? Yeah. That's even worse. You know? But it's got its own set of circumstances, as does every situation.

And the cool thing for me, since we're steering toward the end, is that, though I have maybe a little regret here and there, I think regret is for the uncommitted. And I was committed to the job, to the lifestyle, to my aircrew, to my customers. And you know, maybe I didn't prioritize my family the way I should have, but we did what we had to do which I'd probably do it all again. I might make some minor adjustments and see if I could fix some things here and there, but essentially all the big stuff, I would do the same. And the the people I worked with, you know, the ground forces were amazing.

The air crew, the strength of the families that did do well, you know. Mine wasn't as strong as it could be, but the others, you know, did well, you know. And though they may have challenges that I don't know about, you know, we all did what we had to do, which is really is what makes that damn fall of Afghanistan so difficult. You know? But I don't wanna go down that path at this point.

I'd I'd like that to end on a note of, you know, you know, the nightstalker creed, you know, the very first thing, you know, it's like, or the I'm sorry, the last creed part is, you know, I serve with a memory that those who have come before, for they love to fight, fight to win and rather die than quit. And that's it.

Man. Al, you're a hell of a dude, man.

Jeez. Well, this was fun. You know? It's too bad we get we gotta talk about the the other thing first, but, maybe another time, I'll tell you the Sante story. But, it's a little bit lighthearted.

But, this is good. Man,

thank you for being here, brother. Thanks for having me. And, it's man, that was heavy. And, man, I'm just really happy that we met, And, I'm honored, and, I hope to see you again, man.

Sure you will. Tomorrow's good.

Yep. You're you're right. We will I will see you tomorrow at the All Secure Foundation event. But, you know, for a guy that's been through so much, you seem to be in great spirits. And, I don't know.

Maybe,

No. And I am, and and I attribute that, you you know, once again the cadets that kind of gave me that positive attitude again, and the wonderful wife that I have now, and the friends and family, you know, and my kids are great, grandkids, you know. I sit out at home, and I've got a little 5 acre wooded area up in upstate New York, and I sit out on the deck, and I watch the birds. I got bird feeders, and I I watch a little pond, and I take great joy in nature. You know, watching the birds do their thing, and it's like, oh, the geese, they're like chinooks.

I'll watch them do their thing. You know, and then the wood ducks, they're like black hawks. You know, and I just imagine techniques that you could you could take and use them against the enemy because it's like, oh man, I was gonna shoot that squirrel that keeps eating the bird food, but he keeps he lasts just long enough and before I can get the rifle up, you know, he, he's gone. Alright. So you do that with the bad guys.

Right? The idea is, you know, don't give them a chance to shoot at you. But, listen. I enjoyed it. I mean, 17 years in the 160th, and, finishing up the way it is now, and, you know, writing the book was really good.

Put a lot of things in context. I don't know if it was people ask me all the time if it was, therapeutic. I don't know. I'd say it's therapeutic, but it did put things in context of timelines of when, you know, Linda had problems, when I should have known things, and when big events happened. But, you know, the night stalkers are an amazing amazing organization and they support some of the best ground forces in the world and they pride themselves on that.

And it's good. To do. It was an honor to, to work with you guys, and and it's an honor to have you here. And, man, dude, just tons of love to you. Thank you.

Named 1 of the best personal finance podcasts, the Stacking Benjamin show with Joe and his friends makes financial literacy fun. Draymond Green has a podcast. He was asking Mark Cuban why at the beginning of 2024, Cuban sold a huge part of his company.

He's like, did you see how much money I got? I'm sure there's a more graceful answer than that, but, dude, I bought it for 200,000,000 and sold it for 6,000,000,000. Like, what's that?

I don't think it was that much more graceful than that.

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