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

[Music] Alan Mack welcome to the show man oh thanks for having me it's uh my pleasure so first first helicopter pilot on the on the show from nightstalker tf60 man I've been wanting to get one of you guys for a long time and then uh we connected what about two years ago about a year and a half and year and a half ago and then and then uh for whatever reason the conversation kind of fell off And but now you're here and uh man I'm we've had a ton of requests for TF 160th guys so

thank you for thank you for making the trip oh glad to be here that's all I can say but uh yeah so everybody starts off with an intro so man you've been a part of like so much history uh high-profile missions in the gwad 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 uh very apparent we have a lot of mutual friends as I got blown up hey you got to

get this guy on the show but um I just I can't wait to get another perspective and I want to dig into your training and all all that stuff and get get the life of a nightstalker 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 ACA Academy flight Detachment at West Point New York logged more than 6,700 flying hours 3200 with night vision goggles taking part in Operation Desert Ste Shield desert

storm and was a major factor in the global war on terror flew MH 47s while assigned to 160th sore the Army's only Special Operations Aviation regiment your crew was one of the first into Afghanistan in the first into Mazar Sharif is part of America's response to the attacks on 911 highly decorated receiving the Legion of Merit two distinguished flying crosses three Bronze Star medals three meritorious service medals 10 air medals one with Valor Combat Action Badge and the Army broken wing award now you serve your local government is Deputy Commissioner of emergency services for Orange

County New York you're the author of Razor 03 a Nightstalkers Wars and you have another book coming out uh for my understanding when we were spoke at breakfast do you have a title for that one yet uh the working title is Chinooks in the dark 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 got and a pet parent what kind of what kind of pet he's got a jackaby a Jack Russell Beagle mix nice Nice but uh

quite the career man and then just going through the outline um wow just some of the stuff you've been a part of I'm just going to read some of the stuff man but horse Soldier infill Oda 595 shot down during operation andaconda you're on the rescue up for Marcus latrell's uh Lone Survivor also known as for military folks operation Redwing and tons more but man just uh we got a lot to talk about man so before we Get two in the week though everybody gets a gift maybe this is the only reason you're here I

don't know 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 got to bring a you know

housewarming gift I don't have gummies but what I've got is a coin let right way and uh it's a I had that made when the book came out the the front of that's an attitude indicator because I believe everything in life is about Attitude and uh that's a positive attitude by the way there man thank you that'll go great right there cool with uh with all the coins thank you man I appreciate that and one last thing so before we get into the interview I have a patreon account there are 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 uh and uh 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 Stephen Casey Miss they know about you so okay um 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 um 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 uh 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 y yeah y how did you find a way what was your cue uh 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 I remember when my kids were young there was no internet you know to speak of unless you were on AOL or comp serve so it wasn't like just pulling your phone out so she would shove us out the door and say uh you know it's like you do to your kids but she included me in 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 son's was was the key to everything you and your son's still pretty close very close yeah that's good to hear man yeah that's good to hear well you ready to dig in I'm ready let's go all right man so we're going to do we're going to do the typical military LIF story and um so we'll go through Childhood get into your military career get into

some uh transition stuff and then that'll be it all right but uh so where did you grow up so I was born in New Hampshire uh Coastal New Hampshire so I grew up in Portsmouth which is right by the uh the Navy base there there a submarine base right in the end of the river and uh I'd like to consider myself sort of a a freerange teenager at the time you know cuz 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

jump on our 10p speeds and ride I think we had a range of operations about 20 miles and you know we go to the beach we go to um you know out in the woods whatever trouble you can get into in coastal New England uh I was not a bad kid by any means never got in trouble you know nothing you know nothing bad nothing bad but uh yeah we' go you know toilet paper houses that kind of thing you know at night That was the extent of our uh you know life of crime if

you will close with their parents yeah yeah my dad passed away in ' 06 and he went to sleep uh sat down in his recliner went to sleep didn't wake up the next day and uh I kind of think if you're not going to go out in a ball of flame you know like instantly then and your sleep in your favorite chair you know not a bad way to go yeah yeah my mother's still uh Up in New Hampshire she's a a local artist you know she paints uh does some wonderful work my brother's up

there and uh that's kind of the extent of my family really my grandparents are all gone right on what uh I mean what kind of stuff were you into as a kid well as uh really high school is the first I could think of something I could talk about and that'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 spring he

had Spring Track and uh I was generally a Miler uh wasn't very fast I ran about 445 440 uh 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 then 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 330 intermediates you know it was just a long grueling race you know but uh at the very end when I was a senior uh I trained

for the decathlete uh de cathlon and uh I learned a pull Vault throw the discus you know stuff like that and I actually jumped I like 12 feet something like that uh in my my training jumps and the coach is looking at me like I think we missed you and some events 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 uh 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 six seven 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 Depending on your time zone and they always had huies zipping across you know the screen and I was like I'm going to do that right to remember the TV Guide when you were a kid you had the little paper magazine 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 a handwritten Letter back a bag full of stickers and you know stuff like that he's like hey look I see BU your birthday uh you're not quite old enough to talk to me but uh you know keep that thought alive and uh you know call me back when you're 18 I fast forward a

number of years I'm in high school I'd forgotten about the Army thing uh my senior year I'm planning on following on to college uh in New Hampshire and I've got a guy he's going to be a roommate uh the whole Thing and then I started thinking you know this is in the fall of 1980 and I'm thinking if I go to school I'm just going to party you know I'm not going to 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 um I knew I should but I didn't and I knew that college would be the same thing so I'm worried about what I'm going to do and another friend had just been to the Army recruiter and he He comes in oh the Army can do all this stuff you can go to Germany you know which was West Germany at the time and uh I was like you know I always wanted to fly helicopters I saw a commercial remember those be all you can be commercials oh yeah well there's like two even

three of them that helicopters are involved in and one of them is like a a W1 here the warrant officer ranks are one through five now and uh he's in a Cobra helicopter zipping around you Know and they finish up and the senior guys 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 of recruiter that my friend had been to I'm like I want to fly helicopters and he's like uh well hold on now and I I saw it on TV you

can go from high school to flight school and he's like well pump the brakes turbo it doesn't really work like that you and he's like uh you know you got to 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 uh you know do two three 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 one 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 I was a a aircraft mechanic worked on hu's cobras 58s and uh turns out it was good advice you know and I did nine years I I reached the rank of Staff Sergeant E6 in the Army um I was in Germany

West Germany at the time and uh I decided I was going to get out of the army uh but I really wanted to fly So I put in a packet yep so you know I had two kids little kids and my wife was a uh Linda at the time was a um uh 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 uh so I said you know what why don't we get out but I'll put him for flight school

first if I get picked up we stay if not we get out and so I got picked up which was uh was amazing you know so I Did almost four years in in West Germany and uh off to Fort Rucker Alabama but that's how I I got interested really was the be all you be Comm be all you can be commercials and uh the Evening News Donald Trump is officially the next president of the United States of America while millions of Americans are celebrating the victory thousands of others are still concerned about their savings the

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small and scale up upgrade your business and get the same checkout we use with Shopify sign up for your $1 per month trial it's shopify.com SRS that's all lowercase go to shopify.com SRS to upgrade your selling today shopify.com SRS what took you so long to I mean if you joined a fly mhm why did it take you N9 years to put your package in because uh so my first assignment was to South Korea which is a whole another story uh we might get into later because that was a military hun ran it then it wasn't

a democracy and I went back many years later and it was a big Improvement but so a year un accompanied there I go to Fort Bliss Texas where I meet my future To be wife Linda do three three and a half years there and then uh go to Germany on a three-year accompanied assignment so we get there have our two sons now you know the timing is you know that and then flight school is almost a year long so I count that in the nine years and uh that's why right on right on did you

know what you wanted to fly when you put the package in uh I wanted to fly huys huies because what I wanted to do was Assault right think of you know uh you know back then it was the air Cav you know doing the big big you know multi assaults and stuff that's what I wanted to do and the Blackhawk was just coming out uh as a matter of fact in my class we had like uh 72 students I think to start with and um 20 like 30 of us got huies 10 of us got

cobras and then most of the others got 50 there were only six Blackhawk slots So that's how new the Blackhawks were you showing my age but uh yeah so I want to fly hwis so what did you all right so so what did you get to fly well I I learned in uh1 Hues 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 shinook Pilots a shuk transition is considered a

reward right so remember The Vietnam War had been going on guys were flying Hues 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 shinuk 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 consider 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 and uh the Army realized they had to generate from the bottom up so they're going to take w1s right and once again you go W1 cw2 cw3 cw4 and now cw5 which is a relatively New rank but at the time it was cw4 was the senior senior guys so how you going to replace those guys the Army's plan was to take w1s

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 high school grade point uh flight school flight okay flight school grade point average so you get graded on your academics your you know your participation your uh your flying each

each flake 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 five of the class right there's 72 of us but if You're in the top five when 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 Five Guys so there were a bunch of

us that were you know there were probably 10 of us that were all within you know hundreds of a point you know 98.2 98.3 you know that kind of thing and we're we're competing right every time you got your your exams back be 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 one in the class and a and a good story here about never quitting is that one of the guys I was competing with if you will uh

when the assignments came out they did not give us choice and you know I got sh we all got shoved off in Hues uh all those top guys and uh 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 a 98 point something to you know 88 Point something right so instead of going from an A went to a b kind of thing and then toward the end and what I

just talked about the shinook thing uh the Army said okay we're going to do two slots from your class get Chinooks right so two two pilots will get Chinooks and we're going to take the number one and two guy and I happen to be number one and my stick buddy was number two and This guy probably would have been one or two had he kept going but he gave up and now he's like throwing stuff around the you know the class room he's like damn it I shouldn't have quit you know and 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 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 you know so you Wanted a shinook I didn't I was actually mad that I got it really yeah because remember I said I wanted to be yeah salt work right and I'm like a shook that's bull you know it's going to be like you know flying from

airport to airport that's going to suck and uh the inst instructors you know all retired warant officers all older guys they like SL back then slap me in the back of the head right they're like you idiot just shut your mouth and Take the slot right and I'm like but I want to fly Hue's and they're like Hue are going away trust me take the shinook right so I did you know grudgingly and as soon as I flew that thing I was like this is amazing it's one of the fastest helicopters in the planet let

alone in the US Army it's uh it's very powerful and uh it's no harder to fly than a than a huey but uh it you know there's a whole now conversation on on that but that's how I ended up you know flying Shinu learned on huis transitioned into ch47 Deltas you know just before desert desert shield and then you know I flew in there and then you know I ended up instructing in those and then you know we get into the 160th you know later Wow Wow Let's go to I mean so what was it

like for you walking into Flight School so you start out so it's different now uh but at the time what you did is you first went to walk school we an officer candidate School and that was like eight weeks of uh we start out with you know you did hell week we had like hell day you know and uh it was tough and I remember the little head game they played was a uh you know they came in you beat to hell and they'd say okay uh somebody yells in the room you know 20% got

it and they're 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 going to do H hell Day every day until 20% of 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 there was like one guy got up and walked out so it worked you know I like all right he didn't want to be here what does hell day consist of it

you know it's like uh you know uh crawling through the mud pits and push-ups and mountain climbers and just burning you out physically just a beat down yeah it's big it's a beat Down and uh it it is not pleasant to say the least especially for Army aviators and or guys that want to be and these guys you know the tack officers are walking around just like the guys at buds you know uh you know except back then 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 we'll just put you on your way look you're you're an E7 you know There guys that were E7 there it's like you're s you had a good life why do you want to 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 four or five guys uh quit during it and that one guy in the meeting and uh you know they they do that to you not to that extent but for the

next eight weeks because you're not flying so you're doing uh 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 your your uh your coat hangers to be exact you know you know the deal like any NCO School you been to and uh you know you get outside obviously you're not fast enough you're not straight enough whatever they'd 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 it's a the head game it's a little bit of hazing really but you know it kind of it does go to show Who Army warrant officers are in my age group you know why I we such [ __ ] uh but anyway so you so

you do that and uh then when you when you're done you move on to so That's a company then you move on to B company and that's primary flight right which is where you learn to fly so you know depending on what they call the bubble you know where uh the schedule is for classes you know based on aircraft maintenance weather that kind of stuff so you know um you might you might roll right through you might go from a company to B company and roll right into C company you know seven months later or

you could have you know two 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 to 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 uh one of the facilities on post you know as a like a think of like a detailer

you know Giving you like a temporary assignment like I actually worked at the Museum uh for a couple of weeks which was pretty good because I was an aircraft mechanic I helped them with some uh 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 does it take let's say there's no weather delays or anything How long does it take from day One of flight school before you're in the

air maneuvering a helicopter I say six weeks maybe seven six 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 th55 which was a little two-seater a little bug looking thing that uh it just you and your instructor and uh when you picked up to a hover when you pull power The nose wants to uh to go to the right and you have to give it left pedal to to keep

it in heading and and uh 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 hueys as the primary trainer which I want fly anyway so I get into this thing And you know they take you out to the stage field there's there's huies all over the place you know just flying around hovering doing their thing and the

instructor's like all right 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 and whatever dire I mean you can't hover right and that's the very first it's insane because you 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 you there for your flight period but you're in the back going up

and down and left and right I me just your your inner ear is getting all you know discombobulated right so at night when you went to bed you 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 I found the hover button you know which means you can just you know maintain

a stationary you know 3ot hover you know you don't drifting and then you know as individuals in the class learn right it takes about five hours really to learn to hover right so in each each flight periods about an hour and a half so 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 pilot right and then you just one day you find yourself hovering you know they like hey you the I have girls hey you're

hovering wow I'm hovering right and once you learn it's like 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 they say you know the so literally the first thing you do is just try to learn how to hover y 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 you could go there that has to look

hilarious every stage field has a set of bleachers right and people uh locals would just pull up there was no fences You just pull up get on the bleacher you know your hot cocoa whatever depend 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 is very difficult the fly and you have to kind of run it on to land

uh you have uh 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 a 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 uh 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 want to keep it you know at 100% because when you get to the bottom the last like 75 ft you flare now you pull in the power you put the pitch in the Blades and you're using one chance to Cushing 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 um in the th55 you really did solo it was just you now you're going out with your stick buddy and he ain't 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 uh yeah so you you you solo you do a Couple of traffic patterns I think it was five traffic patterns by yourself the

instructor you know gets back in and you're like all right you're solo the last guy to solo of the class is like you know it's uh there was a name for it I can't remember but you you had to ride we had the ceremony it was like uh pictures of beer and everybody lined the in front of the building the barracks you know and it 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 was a bicycle that somebody had engineered you know it had rotor blades and when you drove it you know when you pedal the blades spun right and you had you had to ride this bicycle I don't have a picture of thatmore wish but uh 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 uh had a baseball cap we were royal blue and you had that sewn on so you

could see who you know was a real p pilot now sort of you know within the context of Flight School nice and uh so yeah so then you move on from that you move up uh 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 uh this is where you I call it the bus driver move right where you're trying to make the map

meet the terrain you get lost it's like oh there's a stream over there uh 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 learned to do that and fly and that's a lot of fun actually and uh you finish that up with a uh great big exercise where like the cobras come In and the hueys and it's a big they called an avac I don't remember what that stood for but it was a big big event it was really cool and

then you moved into Knights what's the I mean what's the what's the field EX what's the it was like uh we we all flew out to an assembly area right and we went in and got a briefing uh from you know the Cadre plan the mission so it was uh you know 20 hueys flying in one big ass formation like something out of Apocalypse Now uh you know and the cobras would roll in and do the gun runs and the O 58s would do you know calling the spot reports and all that stuff and we

would all do this and we're a bunch of we're not even w1s yet we're still walks we're an 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 and one little area synchronized I mean this is this is advanced stuff yeah and uh they allowed us to do that

how far in to training is that that's several months in that's that's got to be five six 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 um the Army had just transition from what we call full face fives right so anvas fives or PVS fives whatever they were and they they used to

be like a are you talking about the mono no no these are they're they're binoculars but they are like a a a rectangle oh 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 tubes 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 uh a saw you know and you cut one half of

the mvg away the plastic housing turned it upside down you could stick the lip of it without the foam up into your your helmet uh where the where the with 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 way out here like this and you had to when you did auto rotation when you when you drop the power the uh 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 two big needles right there's a big needles needles like gauges okay right and uh so one of them is the rotor and one of them is the engine okay so whenever you pull or reduced 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 sprag clutch it's a one-way clutch and if the engine rolls Off it's supposed to Freewheel 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 going to survive if you don't do something about it so you've got to uh Focus one 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 uh like there was no mvg Lighting in the cockpit like it was red lighting 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 maybe an inch inch and a Half long You' break

those and you tape them into place over key instruments uh 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 terain 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

first 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 want to 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 uh unad nights as well they Call it Nighthawk so we'd you'd fly at you know whatever 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 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 oh that's the LZ 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 uh chem lights you know in the uh in the LZ 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 and until you Could see it again and you go in and it's funny because that's kind of a lost art Now with uh everybody being so used to goggles interesting yeah interesting and that finishes up flight schol what what did you find to

be the most challenging portion of flight school night vision hovering uh because you had to maintain a 3ot and you did that you didn't have a radar altimeter right that 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 uh like it would be sort of fuzzy which me you were higher than 3T 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 uh you can and 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 irn 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 uh 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 inter tough yeah but I found the hardest part of that was the they call it the OG 360 hover so

you get out of ground effect so it's about 80 ft and H I guess about 60 ft 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 got to start on one heading and on that heading and be at the exact same altitude when you finish and you got to 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 like ah dude you drifted 20 ft 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 one y y so I've got a you know distinguish onrad uh but the Army you know unlike the Air Force there's a process for a warrant officer it's like a three-day process like the first thing they want to they want to emphasize is that you are a soldier it's 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 your bars right and then the next day they did a wing ceremony you get your wings right so it was 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 yeah to be you know yeah how did it feel for you I mean you wanted to fly

Since what I think you said 6 years old you put your package into en list as a pilot at age 10 and now now you're graduating honor grad it was awesome you know I me I loved it and uh then I left that so two weeks later I was in the shinook transition and I learned how to fly shinook that was six to8 weeks I mean how hard is it to learn from to go from a huie to a shinook or it wasn't that hard uh like flying so you know we joke about the shinook

being the the Double-headed dumpster right it's like a dumpster with two 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 ax but um even though the aerodynamics are different I'm not going to go into it here because it's fairly complex 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 freaking

magic you know it just it just does what it does right and so all you're really doing in that six to eight weeks is learning the emergency procedures for the aircraft okay so you know you practice you know generator failures engine failures right and this has got a a twin engine right so it's two 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 have you just have to learn you get proficient at it and you start out

with rot 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 uh you know oh the rotor is low I know I have to lower the thrust or the collective you know the power and um you just you just learn all that and then You do kns there as well with the Shino doing external loads you have to learn how to do sling loads and uh 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 surprised me and remember I said I didn't want Shinu and then when I flew at the first time or two it was like hey this is awesome because it's just as maneuverable it'll Do it has all the same aerodynamic limitations um and it's faster and stronger you know we routinely outraced cobras and Apaches coming back back at the end of the day you know they'd be like you know we'd Converge on

the quor that brought us to the the home stage field and uh you know we just click the power a little bit with your thumb and the cyc could move forward and the aircraft to just accelerate you know and just leave them in the dust you know and Uh the Apaches couldn't keep up cobras couldn't keep up and they always thought they were fast you know so it was fun you know my instructor 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 very cool but uh so were you one of the first 47 pilots in the Army no one of the first w1s okay to fly shinuk so uh how long had they been around w1s shinuk Sh oh shinuk uh they I want to say 1958 for the for the a model and that's what uh the1st Airborne was originally the 11th air Air Assault test right and what they had to do is prove the air assault concept air Mobility was a feasible concept and uh they needed the shinook to make that happen so in order

to move you know all these troops around Vietnam not only do you need the huis but you need You know gunship support which was Hues that were armed and then you had to move the artillery and supplies and things like that so you needed the shanuk you need the actual capability of the shanuk which is funny because the a model uh a Blackhawk today can lift more than an a model shinook you know so you could have you know done the 101st with Blackhawks had they you know existed 30 years earlier but uh yeah so

the the there was a poster that boing put out when the Delta model came out right so there's a b c d uh there's a f and a g and um 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 drivetrain uh 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 uh was about 185 a copy 18 million a copy and when I flew the G model which was the last version I flew those were 62 million a piece that's more than a fighter jet you know like an F-16 wow and uh it's because of the the advanced the capabilities all I can say do you think that being a flight mechanic helped you with flight school oh yeah especially because I worked on hueys 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 tou over what what kind of data they probably wanted for the answers for the test and I could study things like aromed you know hypoxia you know spatial disorientation that kind of stuff uh 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 uh spatial what spatial disorientation what is that so there are uh there are Illusions right and now you're testing my aromed right

uh 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 of 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 uh and and there's those and then there's visual Illusions uh things like you ever been at a stoplight in your car and you think you're rolling but it's the guy beside you back up or going forward that's one of the Illusions right reverse Perspective illusion and then um you know over the water is where it's really dangerous if you don't have a horizon you know you get uh I can't remember all there's like 20 different Illusions you can get but you have to learn them and how to get out of

them like to recog that you've got it or that somebody else has it and then you know correct for it so man so you that would scare the [ __ ] 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 uh I don't know how to describe it you sit in this chair you strap in and it's like a gyroscope and they kind of they they first they get it spinning and you're sitting there and then they

engage it and the chair goes around then you spin up 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 uh maybe a marble or something like that is in this flat uh a flat panel there's like little cables I mean this is very primitive but it worked and you you'd have to Center the the the panel so 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 around around and you stop and you're like whoa 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 one of those illusions that almost killed us you know and it did you know uh it did kill some friends oh man and it was a conventional Unit A shinook that was in Afghanistan had to be in uh 2002 2003

and they were flying daylight ran into a sandstorm couldn't see out the windows so they climbed up To what they considered a safe altitude and they got spatial disorientation and they literally rolled that aircraft upside down pulled the blades off essentially and fell to their deaths you know head first holy [ __ ] so it's very dangerous and it's one of those things that everybody pays very close attention to yeah I could imagine do they simulate it in the bird they try to it's hard they do you know uh or in the simulator you know

they'll put you in situations Where um 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 have to learn to do that because the basics will kill you yeah you know you we talk about the ground let's talk about uh I mean since we're on the subject let's talk about one of the instances where you've you Felt the Illusion in real world so I'm in Afghanistan been there a couple years this is

probably 05 and we're out a place called Sala right say Eastern Afghanistan uh and we're coming back from a mission and uh it's late we're exhausted we'd been uh putting the Rangers up in the kg pass and uh the weather rolled in and it was raining really hard as we're crossing back over The mountains to get back to bogram you know the rain is just coming down 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 ft you're not doing that in a shinook we'll go to maybe 20 25 if we're stripped down but you're not getting you know to 60 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 and uh he says Al I'm I'm getting vertigo and I'm like well you know suck it up dude

you we we still got another you know 10 minutes here in the mountains you know you got to hang on right and he's like um you know we can barely see the terrain through the through the bottom Plexiglass and I'm like you got to just and we're following we've got a 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 uh uh in ways really but you get the compass on there and he's like I can't I

can't do it you know and the aircraft starts to Veer toward the toward the the rock wall right so I take the controls right and I'm like I have the controls He's like all right 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 uh there was something there was a component that was bad and some of the this is where these automated systems sometimes can bite you um 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 the 1950s in the center console right and it's it's saying I'm going to turn the other thing says I'm level so now I got to figure out which one to follow and then how do you figure that out you got to look at all the other secondary instruments so there's a there's a there's a wet compass you know 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 rows itself if it's moving and the attitude indicator is different so you you got to look at all what we call your secondary instruments right so the primaries the attitude indicator like that coin I gave you uh that's a primary instrument and all the secondaries just kind of 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 uh

so here we are maybe I'm on controls maybe a minute and I'm getting ready to throw up it's like I'm losing my balance this 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 uh we did have the benefit of height above terrain so remember I said that you get the compass rows you get The course line and then if there's terrain around you that's at your altitude

or above the 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 a minute cuz we're going up the mountain and I'm like dude I can't do it you got to take the controls and Rich takes the controls he's like 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 uh because I know he's not going to last and same thing about it 45 seconds later

he's like yeah I can't do it like come on you got to do it I can't do it and he's like it 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 100 ft which isn't much but the Terrain is 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 cumo Granite you know has a 100% kill ratio so you got to do it and then so with 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 uh 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 reregister 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 uh that kind of thing has happened you know a couple of times but that's the most the easiest one to explain and then we get back and I'm telling the uh the maintenance pilot we' 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 want to 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 son's coming up and I'm looking for him and me and and Rich are going to kick his ass right 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 uh something that was working backwards essentially

one of those little sensors and uh they sent it home like they said they got a c17 that week brought a new aircraft in sent that one home and uh that kind of stuff it'll catch you you know there's guys are you worried about getting shot down 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 you know I mean we we'll address why when we when we talk about Anaconda but uh yeah it 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 at Afghanistan there's no weather reporting that's reliable you know uh 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 a mountain versus at the bottom right because there's supposed to be a 2° drop off in Celsius for every th000 ft you go Except in Afghanistan it's pretty much much the same at 20,000 ft as it is at 10,000 ft 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 want to go there there's a let's just say there's a there's a very famous mission where somebody wished away about

15 degrees of Celsius and I I'm not going to talk about it but uh yeah that's how important you know and you know the Funny thing with that is that uh in training in the '90s 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 one more ranger right so if I tell you as a team leader all right you can have 25 guys on board and we'll give you you know two hours of of flight you know for that and you

go okay and we're just about to take off you go hey I got five more guys is that okay yeah put them on And then you know guys come running from the other hey we got three 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 one more ranger no I can't you know and if you did you would not have enough power for whatever was you were going to do and you would pay

the price now that wasn't always fatal it wasn't always damaged to Hardware but you always came home going Damn I'm not doing that again you know and you learn that lesson again and again and again damn well well let's uh let's take a quick break yeah when we come back we'll uh get to where he went after flight school sure we all know a good night's sleep is essential to our overall health and wellness I mean if you're exhausted from lack of sleep you're not good for anybody you can't concentrate you don't Have the energy

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wrapped up your Initial Flight Training and uh so where are you going after this my assignment as a shnook pilot at that point is Savannah Georgia going to Hunter Army Airfield uh Fort Stewart Georgia and uh so I I finish up the shinook transition flight school's done it's behind me and I take 30 days a leave up in New Hampshire and I'm down to um sign in at Hunter Army 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

of Val and progression RL progression Readiness level so you start out as rl3 Radiance level three and that means you can only fly with an instructor and then and they say okay you're safe you're good you're rl2 right so once you're in rl2 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 rl1 Readiness level one you can do Everything because your your progression is where it's supposed to be so anyway I get to the unit I get

my commanders of Al I get rl3 rl2 and then Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait and very very shortly uh we are notified that we're going to deploy uh now I'm in the 18th Airborne Corps right our headquarters is at Fort Brag North Carolina and our Battalion headquarters is also there so there's our sister company um a company and we're in B Company second 159 uh we're the Hercules guys it's a pretty cool nickname and uh what we ended up doing was we flew all of our aircraft we had 16 Chinooks in our company so you had

30 Shooks total in the Battalion and we flew from savan to Wilmington uh North Carolina to put the aircraft they're going to tear them down bubble wrap them shrink wrap them and they're going to put them on the top of an Old Ship right they didn't have the Old roros you know they roll and roll off these are like you crane it up to the top and it's going to ride at 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 of

that but um we uh we take a bus back and now it's going to take a month and a half I think for our aircraft to get there so they've got to finish up my training right for me to fly in combat I've got to be ridus Level one not or L2 because you're still technically in training so the 160th of the Third Battalion was right next door and our instructor Pilots knew those instructor Pilots they were all friends you know and uh they're like hey can we borrow one of your helicopters to train up

you know the wge which is waren Officer Junior right it's kind of a uh back in the day I think that was a actually considered the rank now it's considered a slight to say the wge let The W do it you know uh but anyway they took me out in uh at the time the Third Battalion aircraft were uh kind of enhanced Delta models so they had like some special radios I think they had what's called obogs onboard oxygen generating system or something like that for high altitude and they had uh Min guns for defensive

arm 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 160th aircraft and then uh we end up flying across we went on a Boeing 707 right you know chartered you know trans world air or something like that and we had to get gas like every 2 three hours so imagine going from Savannah Georgia up to New Finland

and across to Europe and then back in through Egypt Into you know Saudi Arabia and stopping every two three 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 and whatever country it was we like 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 uh but we got there and uh that began Operation Desert Shield how I mean so you went straight from flight

school to the unit knowing that you're going to fly the possibility that you're going to be flying within a couple of weeks I mean how did that feel for you you're getting right what you wanted yeah immediately um at least I think that's what you want 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 um 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 uh Korea the first time and it's hard to describe but I did did not want that I didn't think you know being at War would be a good thing you know for me and uh 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 going to die

if you're a bad guy you know and uh at this time it was sort of a transition period was like I'm I'm making it a change now from being scared to be in war to okay we're in war this is all right very PR pragmatic I guess and uh I mean Desert Shield was like I don't know 6 months long so I had some time to really adjust to the idea so that when We did go across the border yeah it was no big deal you know it was very exhilarating actually very exciting so you

did go across the border yeah 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 uh remember this is a conventional unit some of these guys had been in Vietnam others hadn't and there was a couple guys that were Really upset that we were probably going to take the shinuk into Iraq and they were of the mindset that shinuk would fly from the port to the Ford line of troops and that would be it you wouldn't go past the Ford line of

troops and we were being told no no you're going to go deep right because they're going to do uh operating base Cobra right cuz 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 two guys that were very very upset that we were going to do that and I remember thinking dude you know what do you want we're you know I want remember I wanted to do assault so to me this is like this is kind of it

is where I want to be and uh when so so Desert Shield right remember I said the Army would claim we own the knigh mhm well there were helicopters ripping their landing gear Off on Sand Dunes because the sand dunes in Saudi Arabia they kind of 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 120 M 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 150 ft you know and um so we did that for that seven months and I was moving supplies uh tank Transmissions tank treads I mean whatever you can fit in the back of a shinook or sling we were doing and we were doing it at night and the old guys so there were two w1s in the company 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 ah You know these stupid Wes 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 uh did the you know some of the basic planning uh the nug work you know the the math and the and the and the ciphering

and uh 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 cuz you know we still didn't have all the aircraft with night vision um uh lighting so you still had to turn off the lights put the little cam lights around that kind of stuff so it still was very unpleasant to fly now at this point we've got what's called anas 6 and the goggles

are just two binoculars that slip down in front of your face they They hinge up and down and the crew were one of the ones I talked about earlier the uh the fives right and uh but I got experience at night a couple hundred 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 Arbor core was pretty smart they decided not to do it at night because because Cobra like the initial assault on COBRA or the Infill The Taking of

it we had I think 100 Chinooks involved flights of five and we were separated by only a couple of minutes like so you you'd be in the you'd be in the 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 Shooks and then it was Blackhawks and you were plugged in getting gas while you're running and then they'd uh call over the Radio and we were you know like let's say I was in a

silver flight right silver one through five they like silver one your grid coordinates are you didn't care what you were carrying it was going to be 18,000 lbs which is about the max you're going to carry for this silver two here's your grid right we all had different grids and we'd we'd pick up we'd fly over 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 the it was

a tandem uh load so four and a half hook to keep it from spinning once everybody's hooked up off we go at 120 knots up into Afghanistan and 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

and Thena yeah so this is that famous the Schwarz cof the left hook you know uh this that was us so moving all uh the equipment the people out out west of Kuwait wow so some of the loads were uh Humvees internal with a toad 105 Howitzer 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 conditional levers that do the the power on the engines and uh the gun tube was right up inside and it was pretty cool yeah

did you guys did you guys take any fire or anything like that no no no it was all uh I think we caught him by surprise we were out in the middle of nowhere and uh but because of that and all of the Lessons Learned up until that point the Army decided all right we didn't and Maybe we didn't own the night we just lease it now you know we rented it now we're leasing lease to own you know kind of thing but uh what sucked about that mission is remember I said that you know

me and the other W1 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 mvgs than with right so wow so one night so the surrender has happened Right I me we're 100 hours in the surrender has happened and uh we take five Chinooks up into Iraq and we're going to bring back prisoners right prisoner War the Iraqis had surrendered in droves and um we go up there it's daylight uh 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 4050 Iraqi prisoners on on the back and I had a 38 with bullets in it right the hammer was on the empty chamber cuz that was what they made us do we had two m6s 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 two pilots a flight engineer and a crew Chief a guy up front guy in the back we well we all had 38s holy five bullets sh yeah and so funny thing so we're coming back before we run out of gas and um the you could smoke an army aircraft back then right and the crew chief in the back lights up a cigarette and one

of the Iraqis is like you know gives a signal for hey let me have a smoke right so he hands him the cigarette and he Puffs it passes to the next guy 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 all right fine so he's like I'm GNA get a hepatitis you know he smokes a Cigarette and they're all yeah they cheer and they stayed they stayed compliant the whole time until you know we ran out of gas and um an MP unit eventually drove up and took them away like they found us took them away and we ended up spending the night in aack um 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 cuz we had satcom we didn't have radio communications with anybody we're just in the middle of the desert and uh we're nowhere near where we should have been CU we've been hopping around looking for gas holy [ __ ] so we we come back we get gas we come back into Saudi Arabia and and we we had to go we still had

some prisoners and we dropped them off and now we're going to fly back to assembly area Palm which is where we Were based out of down the tapline road and um so of the flight of five three of the crews had mvgs so we sent the two without mvgs back first five minute separation so one takes off climbs up to 3,000 ft well above any trrain 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 one goes and now it's my

turn we're the ne we're the first mvg aircraft to go back so we're flying at 250 300 Ft got goggles I'm navigating and I'm looking at the antennas down the road right they're about every five six miles or so and I got them on my map right and I look and like looking out there and I'm like I see two of the three 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 a 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 land 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 they've elected not to wear them because it's easier to fly uned they think right this is that mindset back then they come back at 250 300 Ft they run into an that unlit antenna that I we had all avoided except they ran right into

it and uh killed all the air crew the door gunner was an instrum and he actually lived he said the last words where uh oh hell would that come from you know damn man uh so you know a very valuable lesson you know learn there you know and 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 KN 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 mvg 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 uh so everything we

did uh 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 kind of pop up on your radar well because they were next door to us and Savannah uh and I said everybody knew each other um 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 uh so I kind of knew him already I 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 I what's It like in Iraq you know oh it's dark you know okay a little more than that buddy but uh so I already kind of knew about that but that other W1 that I talked about uh Tim he had a cessed like we got back he's like you know what I want

to go to the 160 so he put in his packet he assessed and for whatever reason he was not selected I considered him a better pilot to me and I figured well crap if they're not going to take him there's no way They're taking me right he's way better than me and once again that'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 uh so anyway that's the start of it and then I get before

we go any further can you give us a little history into the 160th yeah so the uh in Iran the uh the Sha 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 uh Pro protested outside the US Embassy in tan 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 uh kept for was like 354 days or something like that Um but so there they are and then President Carter at the time you know they uh the military options were very few right J so 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 going to send Delta Force in to rescue the American hostages the problem was they got to get There how they going to get there

helicopters all right well what do we want to use to get there Shooks the problem is you're getting by a Navy ship right Shooks do not fold up handily like a Navy aircraft well right so they were afraid opsc was a big concern this is Operation eagleclaw right so they don't want to put Chinooks on top of a ship because that'll raise questions you know why are there Shooks on top of an aircraft carrier you know That's not normal um so instead they decided to use uh CH 53s and they wanted to use the mine

sweepers uh 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 one 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 well Al I don't like how you did this all right let's adjust it was all done um you're probably old enough to remember the uh the

teletype format like you get uh like if you ever get like a a ship's position the overhead message all comes like in a teletype you know uh that's how they did their a ARS the after Action reviews right was through teletype so there wasn't really plain English it was kind of like you know Pilots sucked you know Uh but you can't really expl why right 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 Uh you could only see that light so it's like like you see with an ac130 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 and turn it back off even though it was a you know a glass thing but um 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 all right 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 got to go what they got right so they they execute they fly the uh Delta guys in on 130s they land at Desert 1 right designated desert landing area and those 130s are going to 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 on the 130 so they'll do that they'll get gas they'll take the operators they'll go to Desert 2 spend The day and then do the mission right that's the plan eight helicopters take off encounter a a sandstorm that's like 4,000 ft High you can't see in it so they separate right so they now they're like all right you know they're 5 minutes apart so they don't run into each other I think uh a couple of them turned around for maintenance problems related to the Dust and uh the

Min Force for the mission I think was six and they showed up with six except one was broken they were down to five or it may have been five and four 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 going to go back to the ship the Delta operator is going to get back on the 130s they're going to go back they're going to reset they'll try again another night problem is because they can't see the helicopter Pilots you have

uh you've been to an airport on a jet airliner you come into the gate you get the guys with the colored wands you the lighted wands and they like you know doing this kind of thing for the the pilots to see to direct them into the the parking you do that with helicopters right you you you get the wines and you kind of 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 the helicopters

crank up they pick up to a hover the guy with the wands is bringing them up and tells him 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 followed them and the guy walked right into the C130 and the helicopter follow him right into it impacted the C130 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 uh 13 and they they had back utter failure National embarrassment and So jck is born right because the problem that they found was that because there was no Mutual 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 uh out of task force8 and some other things so it was a national guardit with o6s uh helicopters from the 101st shinuk and uh and

hu's initially then Blackhawks and they plan to do operation Honeybadger which was the second rescue attempt right so they're ready to do it President Reagan gets an office the Iranians release the hostages no more mission for The jck 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 jok formed the 160th became the 160th 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 uh could be done but that's really where the 160th came from and then you know as it grew out of the group 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 three battalions and then some special Mission units uh just it's big So when someone goes hey oh you were in the 160 do you know you know Bilbo baggin I'm like uh what does he fly uh I don't know uh

okay so what kind of birds do they fly in the 160th so all three battalions I take that back all three locations uh Fort Lewis Washington or JBLM now Joint Base Le McCord they have shinook and Blackhawks Savannah Georgia has shinook and Blackhawks and then Campbell is the anomaly it's got shinuk and Blackhawks but it also has little Birds which have two variants right o6 has a armed version and a assault version so the mh's modified ah attack and then the Blackhawk have a assault version and a what's called a Dap uh direct action penetrator

so it's an armed Blackhawk it's got a 30 mm chain gun you know it can carry hellfires Rockets Min guns sometimes all at the same time other times they have to make selections you know based on weight you know what they're going to carry I have Beautiful stories about daps 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 all right so back to what do you call it selection uh assessment assessment yeah so so your buddy Tim he doesn't make it yeah

and now you're thinking well if he can't make it I'm not going I'm not going to make it so I get assigned to Korea for my second tour um and while there because I had a Lot of night vision goggle time because the old guys didn't want to it's it's like incremental right it just Builds on each other and so I get there and I end up as a Vision goggle trainer uh 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 what they call the the tax Zone Popa 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 a an o58 straight across was shot down uh they killed one of the pilots they held the other guy uh Bobby Hall for I don't know 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 a cw5 that came over he'd been a Vietnam pilot he everybody knew him in the community in the shinook community and he flew with me up there and I was just flying along the what what's called the corridor up to you know where Pam mjam is you know that you get the uh or you've seen it in the news it's the uh 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 uh dignitaries but there's very specific rules and I would you know fly him up there and like all right you know uh stay at or below 100 feet you know consistent with safety you know left and right of course 200 meters blah blah Blah and I talk through 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 uh called some friends at at da Department of the army HRC if you will and uh got me a slot to go to the instructor Pilot Course but I had to go and stay at uh Fort Rucker and teach at the at the schoolhouse if I did That which turned

out you know that's a it's a whole other story we're definitely going to get to so how'd you get into 160th all right so now we're back at Fort Rucker so I'm a young chief warant 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 it's like you know I don't know four four five 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 got to 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 uh so I get there and uh my first two set of students were great a lot of fun because they were also so wait hold on you so you're a junior yeah but they want to put you as an Instructor yeah because of my skill level mhm 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 c2s and w3s right so Junior to mid-grade warrant officers and and this is where it ties In because so my first two set of students were great because they were w1s 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 shanuk so now they all have to come down and take a shanuk 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 want to fly Shucks they don't have a choice but they act like I personally brought them down right they did not like listening to a snot W2 telling them what to do and it was

miserable teaching them so they didn't want to listen they did 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 Shooks you know from um you know the Dutch the Singapore

guys the Aussies uh the Brits uh these are not dirt bags these are not guys that are there because they don't Want to fly the aircraft they're there they're all aerospace engineers and 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 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 them that's how how good these foreign Students were so it was unrewarding and I needed something and 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 Al 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 160th 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 two pencil filling out the application it was like you know/ inch thick and I'd fill it out you know a couple p at a time you know a couple days ago in between and eventually it was done he like well so I sent it in to my surprise like two weeks later Like Mr Mac we'd like you to

come assess like me really okay right so I go up I assess um I didn't think I did that well as a matter of fact I got lost on my uh navigation route um 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 you don't you just you're not going to hit your Target on time it's made sure that you're not going to uh achieve success and the reason for That is they want to see how you behave under duress and

the cockpit you know and 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 got to 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 100 meters of the checkpoint right so I mean you have to be so you're going to 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 got to do and keep trying you know and they can tell because they're going to 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 guy 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 cuz sometimes we'll be like hey is that bridge over there is that on your map oh and you kind of reage him you know but it's all based on how they're behaving if they're giving up I'm not going to help them you know it's like all right yeah 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 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 is I got there now keep in mind the 160th was formed in 1980 right after that you know eagleclaw right I'm there this is 1995 so the unit really is still pretty new 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 um you know they don't want me because of this you know screw them right I drive up on the parking lot and I made sure I had my Army PTs in case in case they're like Mr Mack uh I thought You were going to be in your but they didn't say anything right and then you do your your PT test they 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 that stuff your pull-ups and uh then you go over to the pool you put a flight suit on flight gear helmet you jump in you do uh I want to 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 can't touch the pool and you got to swim underwater a designated amount of

distance you don't know what that is right so I do it I'm out of breath and 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 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 he's like Mr Mac did you get to go

twice I like did did I get to go twice no he's like I can 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 can feel the the Styrofoam of 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 going to let me die

shallow water blackout whatever right I get down there I feel a top of my helmet I'd made it to the end you know and I get out and that was that you know and then uh you go from there to the psychology you you you take a test it's like a 600 test not 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 U specific air air defense system you know the sa7 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 RW gear

if it shows up you know sa8 but you didn't expect them to have sa8 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 going to use this against you later on oh you only scored a you know a 30 on the general aviation Knowledge Test you consider yourself a pilot you know but uh 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 um 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 ah 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 cuz 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 going to put you through hell on that board and then not take you right those are the guys that go out and badmouth Us in the regular army oh those guys are jerks you know uh 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 got to handle critique right I mean you know what it's

Like in the in the teams right I mean you guys uh we do not you know take it easy on each other you got to have some Thin some thick skin right you got a can of thick skin you spray it on you know I think the worst is uh 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 uh 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 and in the end you did not meet the standard you failed the flight okay then the recruiter says all right PT you know physical training you know you did this many push-ups this many situps this many run and like in my case so like you did way more you scored way higher than the one you submitted why is that I mean I don't know maybe I tried Harder wrong words right and I like

oh so you don't try hard at your unit H 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 well 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 test you know uh 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 uh my wife had had a suicide attempt when I was in Korea and I thought you know that was all kind of resol 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 I didn't want any secrets here and I thought you know that's going To torpedo me they're going to they're going to treat me nice and

they're going to 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 it 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 two minutes they've decided and the rest 15 they're making you sweat and uh you come back in and they're like welcome to the 160th Mr Mack and then uh like you know we'll see you in about a year right cuz I got to go back to my unit that's The agreement we had with the army is they wouldn't poach uh skills without giving you a heads up and then the psychiatrist

took me out he's like all right 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 ever [ __ ] so they knew the whole time yeah yeah all damn and they they just never brought it out so they probably Would have used that if they didn't want me to drop yeah they drop me like that you know if it was going to be a problem so I get

back to my unit hold on hold on yeah how many people how many aviators are trying out for this uh I mean it varies uh in my assessment week there were probably you know 20 guys you know how many are there today uh depends it just depends cuz you said when you went in there was about 300 aviators correct oh right right there's about 355 3500 yeah about 4,000 depending so what's the let me ask what's the what's the attrition rate it's not it's usually done in the pre-selection 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 schnooks you're there for the little bird and the black H so you get this whole poper of of uh 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 something that so

when you get there and this has changed by the way so when I got there because I was a shook pilot I Did my uh all my training flights in a shinook I did my navigation flight in a shinook and a couple of years lat actually uh I was in sear school when uh one 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 shinuk pilot but everybody Considered I I could take any pilot put him in a shinook and as long as there's no emergencies they're going to be able to fly it uh I can get the blackhaw 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 shinook guy you could do uh the assessment in the shinook you do what I did if you were not a shinook guy you would do a

simulator period with The instructor uh and and sort of uh like what I would do is see if guys could learn the aircraft right so it's a glass cockpit there 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 um 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 going to 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 uh a couple of my best friends in the 160 are schnook Pilots were Cobra Pilots um 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 in green platoon which is where they teach you how to navigate brief and and plan like a nightstalker you go out and you fly in a little you know little egg-shaped thing you know it's being a Shu 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 and you Know the doors are off so you have to put your map under your leg and it's uh it's unpleasant to fly that thing you

didn't like flying the little birds no no [ __ ] has a pain in the ass yeah but uh what is the most what is the what do you think the most what what do most guys want to fly at 160th it depends what they did first right so if they're already a guy they want to flash Nu if they're a ranger they want to flash shck if they did something else or they're Already a blackhaw guy you know what do you mean if they're a ranger I can tell you that a high like an

82nd like an US Army R I'm sorry 75th guy yep so 75th guys 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 E5 E6 their knees are aen they want to be a pilot they put In for it they get accepted and then they might go to a regular unit first do two three 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 um you know a good friend of mine Mike rutage I don't know if you know him uh he was a E7 teaching a buds when the towers came down transfer with Army put him for the 160th and because of his background we took him as a as a W1 so As a very very Junior shook pilot so I will say hold on hold on so sorry yeah so so you guys so the 160th will take basically ground operators and turn

them into aviators y very few without any Aviation very very few very select so typically a guy would let's say he's a a ranger right Army Ranger EAS E5 he goes to his first unit like I did in Savannah Georgia right and and they'll try to get somewhere like uh you know Fort Campbell so they can be in the 101st they're just Across the ramp from us uh and then when their time comes up like get two years three 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 R former Army Rangers that fly Shooks on the 160th and a lot of that now you can't take a lot of them at one time right you can take one of these Junior guys like we we said we could take two a year you know and be Able to task force babies we call them and we can bring how how do they how do they get through assessment they just do you know they they're good enough you know they're going to fail the

the navigation flight anyway do good in the PT test the you know psych psych assessment they did well if you can make if you can make E7 in the seals you know or in Delta yeah you've got some we have your evaluation reports and All you you have a history that we can look at and go so these guys have had some flight they they obviously gone to flight school might not some guys have well yeah they gone to flight school but you can take two a year of guys that were you know like I

said you know Mike was an E7 in the seals you know and 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 uh it turns out good because you got 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 CU it's like I can shoot I'm good with my rifle but I don't know

much about you know how somebody might flank me or put the ground stuff but yet the guys that were former Rangers or SF guys had a lot of Green Berets um You know they knew that kind of stuff so you always kind of like if you could have a co-pilot that was once a a former action guy you know yeah be nice yeah so hold on let me so these so so like Mike rutage for example I I've I've met him uh so he he went from the SEAL Teams to what a Navy flight school

nope and to Army flight school so he did an in 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 y holy [ __ ] 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 kind of determine two guys a year we could handle you know and does the does the unit like that yeah yep uh because it it gives you some

diversity in uh well understanding the mission right and the idea here is that They understand the ground force mindset they you know if they're 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 the entire mindset and the personalities you know often times you know with Mike for example I was uh in in Afghanistan one time with him and uh 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 uh red Squadron cuz he knew uh we'd actually flown a mission one year where probably 20 of the 30 guys on board were at his wedding when he was a seale and they took turns coming to the cockpit you know it was just a you know a reposition them from fob to fob and they came up and they look in a cockpit and they like slap him 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 uh Bon of fees you know that uh 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 sh my age but uh but uh 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 uh I mean what do you think about that it's tough you know I mean uh I think back to you know several years ago the original drone operat so to show my age you know the original drones were not armed except for the agency one right so the OG 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 uh other than that cuz they're back at

I don't know back in Vegas or something flying the 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

Min 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 cuz it was too heavy and uh then one year must have been I

don't know late 2002 maybe 2003 I said screw it somebody shoots at me he's going to eat lead and I instructed the Gunners that's a hostile Act somebody shoots 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 him 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 uh you know them against me you take a shot at me I'm going

to 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 one way MH 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 kind of I view that as uh 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 I interpret

it you know but uh that personal connection is very important like the 160th now has a drone unit uh that they didn't have when I was there and once again that's to create Number one a capability number two 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 dropped me off you know and uh it that was

always in our minds you know when that when that when we started Working with with ISR and stuff like that but anyways way that with the with the the air breathers you know the the Draco guys right the the u21s or whatever they were flying c12s I guess that had all the the the ISR platforms and they would you know do all the collection they do all the uh you know as you're coming into the target they give you a sitrep you know you got you know two sleepers on the roof you know three guys

laying On the ground on the 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 do an offset infill and we're going to land in the middle of this poppy field and the uh 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'd 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 were armed and I remember sitting down with these guys afterwards that the uh 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 we had to teach them what to do and because They were at bogam 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 Red Wings you know when I I planed that whole operation the fires plan was successful because I sat down with the actual pilots and the uh you know the the Sensor operators you know the b130 and said here's what I'm trying to accomplish how can you help me

do that as opposed to mean you know hey uh 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 all right where were we back to we were in the middle of you just got done with a sessment I believe yeah all right yeah so I go back to my right except when I Got there a week later the uh batan Commander from second Battalion 160th calls me and he's like hey uh 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 eight months to put a guy through the shook pipeline uh can you do it so I went to talk to my wife now keep in mind I lived in uh on poost housing at the time so it Was pretty easy to get get out of there but now I got to get a house up in Campbell so I took leave went

up there house hunting for a week and uh bought a house and or put a bid on the house whatever and I came back and I remember the uh 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 was going to Stop me now he's mad at me and uh the one6 just said n we need them so they just suck me up there six

weeks later I'm in uh basic skills learning hand to hand you know we're doing so I that's the part I forgot when you start in the training you know uh it's basic skills so it's you know first aid hand to hand you know CQB kind of stuff uh shooting at the time we still had mp5s uh we were just transitioning to the m4s like the next year but because Of Mogadishu you know they had mp5s and they found out that was insufficient for what we need right it's one thing to clear a room with it

but it's you know if you're going to defend a downed aircraft you don't want a pistol around and um but we were still learning on that which was pretty cool for me you know shooting silenced mp5s and uh you do that and then uh 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 uh yeah so I get up there and we start that and uh it's a lot of fun I mean I really enoy what do

you mean the inis guys the like cre crew chiefs well I take that back any nightstalker who's not a pilot so you could be the clerk no [ __ ] so you guys train together the pilots and the crew that's that's pretty cool and same thing with the I think when it was uh hand toand it was pilots and pilots and list Of guys and list of guys but um 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 like Mountain you know and uh so we're doing like you know practicing brachial stuns you know and uh so you know he's hitting me on the side of the neck you boom and I'm like uh and I don't go down and the instructor comes go hit him harder like well I don't want to hit him harder he's like hit him harder or I will right so The guy hits me harder and of course I drop and he goes harder than that and 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 got to be tougher you know we're nightstalkers you know but this guy you know he knew his own strength this guy uh Mike was his name he was actually out at the range he was a little bird guy Attack guy bar 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 wow like [ __ ] you know and Saddles like but uh that was my CQB or not CQB my hand to hand guy but uh yeah so you do that and then you get down to the dunker which was in Jacksonville at the time they have their own now it's an amazing uh so it's like a imagine being In a 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 got to get out you know they they

do this training progression first it's get out any exit then it's uh you have to go out second behind the guy next to 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 you know you go out or you jet Us in the door you're still buckled in and then you put your hand outside release the thing 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 uh they get stuck inside and the divers have to pull them out can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the crew chief and the pilots Yeah so in the shinuk in particular and the Blackhawks are very similar the relationship with the crew chiefs you get to know them quite well because um they you fly a lot together um in a shinook the minimum crew to fly a shinook a regular shook is two pilots and a flight engineer

so the flight engineer is the Senior Crew Chief in the back in the 160th a minimum crew is two Pilots and two two crew chiefs a flight engineer and a crew chief is guy in the back and then when we're in combat it's four so you have a crew of six two pilots four guys in the back because you got two guys man in the Min guns up front and two guys on the m240s 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 uh 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 going to 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 going to land on a a Spur a mountain spur right with the with a f gear you know doing a

little wheelie or or land with one wheel or something Like that if the pilot can't see anything like you're looking down several thousand feet and there's nothing there there's no reference to know that you're moving a foot or two 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 of 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 wound up really quick you know uh 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 the

customer the ground force has no idea that you know this guy's having a tough night because the crew chiefs compensate sometimes 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 thousand 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 uh years but um you know when we go on the road for training for example um 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 do get your own room if not you'll share but after Flying we'll spend time together you know in the in the bar 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 the yeah so the so the pilot you have a pilot in charge pilot in command right In the Army Air Force calls him aircraft command or AC he's in charge of everything about that aircraft so you might I could be the pilot in command as a waren 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 MH 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 we going with that I said it went around the wrong way relationship between well no not relationship respon basically

responsibility responsibility for the aircraft right so when I was a junior pilot there's a red line on the Floor and a shinook it's like uh station 95 they call it right so every inch of an airframe is assigned a station you know one in is station one one or 001 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 uh sir you know you're in front of station 95 just uh you know keep your business up there right yeah whatever you know so there's that relationship where it it can be I mean we're always busting each other's butts you know but um if you're a guy like me right and I had per 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 an aircrafter two or three behind me doing the same thing right so you got to keep that in mind but the uh the responsibility of the aircraft Commander the pic is Absol abolute he is responsible for it so whether he's divided some some uh 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 uh 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 uh Target in sight forward 30 you 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 fries 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 uh 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 on 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 a conventional unit in Savannah I had a

friend he had a terrible relationship with all the crew chief 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 one time we were getting Gas and we taxied in in a way of shanuk drives on the ground is you got a little steering wheel by your back like this and one 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 it depending on if you're close to airplanes or a hanger 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 going to hit whatever it is right the crew chief will always suggest that I mean the pilot might say hey this is going to 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 hanger right now everybody was okay the aircraft was severely damaged the was Damaged the uh accident Board gets involved the collateral board and they find that the pilot had created such an u a toxic relationship with the crew that they let him damage the aircraft on purpose you 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 uh I 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 into 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'll kind of be like I kind of miss flying what I really misses the people in 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 I miss my bad what's the longest amount of time you've been paired with a with a crew chief uh a couple of months probably uh eight months that's it yeah oh [ __ ] so what'll happen is you'll go into a deployment like say overseas right when you're back in the States you just get who you get right uh unless you're on a trip like a you

going out to the mountains or something whatever the duration of that trip is but when you go To combat you get assigned a pilot your co-pilot and your crew and an aircraft an airframe 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 shinuk in the 160th 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 um so I

go with this turban crew we got G models now uh 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 going to we're going to come in we're going to hover up to the point we're going to sit down next to it and they're going to unplug a hose plug it into the aircraft While we're running and take gas called hot fuel so we come in I'm at a 10-ft hover and krui says all right sir come straight down I

come straight down he goes uh sir can you move pick it up again sure I pick it up he goes move forward three move three he's like all right 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 sh I am 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 the 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 three feot short have you come down they know you're going

to 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 all right let's get back to training yeah so I don't where were we Where were we in training uh so we done green platoon uh be what is green platoon oh so green platoon is where uh it's the training platoon for the 160th so you have Green Team and uh OTC you know for the other other uh special Mission units and it came about because so at at the

160th compound there's a wall a memorial wall with a lot of names on it I don't know the number right should most of the early days 1980s Early ' 80s 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 uh air um night vision goggles where 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 um so there was a there was too many one

year I can't remember which year it was and they uh Congress shut down the unit right they're like you guys are killing people like every week you know kind of thing and uh they did a blue ribbon panel that evaluated the 160th and 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 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 platoon and it was a you know a godsend it really is an amazing you know whoever really thought that through did a good job you know way back when but that's what it's for right on so it's an eight-month it's different for every airframe it takes eight months to get a shinook guy through okay so that's uh basic skills you know hand to hand Shooting that kind of stuff uh basic nav or B naav that's where you learn to to

fly and navigate in the little bird to do things like a like a nightstalker and then you go to your specific aircraft so even if you're a shinuk 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 uh 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 160th what would be some of the

things that are different between a conventional yeah 47 versus a tf16 so um when I talked earlier about the mh6 or the uh mh-47 so Army aircraft are designated by what they do right uh ch ch47 right Cargo Helicopter model 47 version Delta Right in this case it's modified helicopter 47 you know uh Echo at that time and um some of the equipment that's different well big differences is the uh the fuel tanks on on the special ops version the MH is twice the capacity so instead of 1,000 gallons you're carrying 2,000 gallons uh there's

internal fuel tanks that can fit inside that are crashworthy 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 uh you get the this big pipe that sticks out the front you can fly up behind it uh air force uh C130 they drag a hose out the back while you're flying and it's got this doughnut shaped parachute that you plug into and get gas in the air so you have to learn all that um uh the crew chiefs have

to learn Gunnery so you got these M m134 miniguns 762 six barrel Gatling gun shoots 4,000 rounds a Minute uh they have to learn that how to how to do it how to deal with malfunctions um you've got terrain following radar which is key uh after 911 without that we could not have done even half even a fraction of what we did in those infills getting the you know the horse soldiers and other green braid teams and the S the OG teams uh cuz every SF team had to be brought in uh to an OG

team that was there the day before or two days before so that that's what All this equipment does and everything uh is a TV screen there's there's four TV screens in an echo and there's five and and a golf and those five are splitable 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 uh 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 one

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 flying the mountains uh in the dark um the pilot will flip his mvgs 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 falling 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 going to fly into something you know he can just take the controls I have the controls it's just that simple got I controls and then you say what what's wrong but you get that air refueling you got to 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 160th is that that a conventional unit doesn't do is we've got money for

TDY right so you take the students um from Campbell like so we go to Knoxville for the the train flight then you you know wherever the tankers are you're going to 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 uh the Houston area that kind of stuff or you travel Somewhere and they'll come you know you hit a tanker and roundout 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 it's like parachute jumping you have to learn you know how to land in a in a certain way And then uh everything we did before we did in the aircraft we did it in the flight simulator which was very realistic right so you would teach them how to

do uh 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 a open circle in 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 air craft and whatever let's say a stationary hover you got to 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 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 not be able to see out but often times they can see the ground right below you depending on your altitude and they you know they'll be like all right sir you know uh you're 10 ft off and you're confirming that up

front with the mentation you got it steady like you know come down you know and you you just come down and uh it can be a challenge you know to say the least to land in the dust all bet all bet so you graduate y obviously yep yep so we did that you Graduate when you graduate green platoon you are probably well back during the height of the OE F and O you are going to deploy probably in two weeks maybe less when did you grab graduated what year so I graduated in '95 and uh

there was nothing going on right so it was all training back then and the training trips people ask me you know what was it like pre 911 and the 160 it was great you know because everywhere we went was You know four four or five star you know you you go to Colorado to do mountain flying we're staying in condos you know uh or at least a nice hotel you know the Double Tree we didn't have any tents you know so uh we were at Destin one time working with ac130s we had three aircraft there

two of them flew per night and we were we were flying you know guys in they would call for fire and then we come pick them up that kind of stuff and The other crew was really a spare you know so we you have to keep the flight hours within a 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 going to have to do an oil change except you're going to have to do it right they're going to 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 one down for the night doing maintenance schedu what we call scheduled maintenance the oil change uh the other two can go fly and if you're not working on it and one of them breaks that's a spare you just take it you go 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 um so two of us are out flying the aircraft break And they fly back to Herbert field to they're done for the night right ah we can't fix this tonight we go back they hook up we're in Destin is our hotel is at the Sheran on the beach and the person not flying that crew is responsible for getting you know beverages uh bait like we had gotten some Zebco fishing reels at the PX or the the BX and uh 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 I come back one night that night I'm talking about and because it's two 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 waste high

and They end up neck and I was like a Boy Scout leader I was like all right everybody buddy up like what I said hold hands with the guy next to you I want to count heads right so I kind like get in here right and they're like all right we're coming you know but that was pretty 911 911 happens you know you still get some some nice trips but it's not like that yeah 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 going to go learn to land in the dust for real usually when you get there the the lake beds are dry crust you know and there's no dust so I remember I took these guys out one time and I start driving the aircraft around on four wheels and I'm breaking up the crust what are you doing it's going to get Dusty I'm like that's the point of this we're not out here to Pretend We're Dust Landing we're going to dust land and then you go up to the mountains you wear an oxygen which

turned out to be important in Afghanistan uh things like that you know and that's what we do so when you get back from Green platoon uh pre 911 you would go places you know Fort Brag You' ENT Fort Benning work with the Rangers go out to Coronado work with the seals out to Little Creek and uh you just do whatever They needed you know oil platform takedowns you know vbss something like that and uh 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 going to out to the compound at at Brag you know what can you do on the Way out you know we would link up with the the a10s out of Pope when they were still there and on the way in we'd link up with them and do a personal recovery Mission which I I got a good one in the book there where uh I dusted out some farmer you know the they you know the pilot

the down pilot was there and you the a10s are doing their there were passes and uh the farmer had just limed the field with his tractor and he's just sitting there watching you know the a10s Do their thing and I come in with the shinook and I land right next to him and it's a big cloud of dust and farm T I don't know poison I guess I don't know fertilizer I thought I was in trouble we get to to brag I talk to the Air Force guy he gives me the farmer's phone number I

call him I'm like hey I apologize 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 want he says but make sure I'm out There cuz I want to watch it like all right here we go that's awesome but anyway that's the the training is very realistic and uh the margin for safety is interesting because you know the the 160th because we killed so many people in the early days had a reputation of being Cowboys oh the 160th guys they're going to

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 unfor it was progressed in The blood of UPN nightstalkers but that reputation is still there you know and I remember teaching a couple of grand patoon classes where guys would come in and I would say okay we're not going to do this tonight because you know maybe the weather is such and such or we've got I 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 National something of strategic importance National importance but we're training we're not going to 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 all bet you know you felt you really you've really done something you know and it's what I want To do you do that and when

you you graduated you're one 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 cw4 but a junior pilot you're taking out the trash you're emptying you're filling the fridge that kind of stuff you got to pay your penants because someone's got to 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 uh you look at it and go oh something's happening in cartoon that's happening in Biz 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 uh trying to think the country in South America every year i' get called to go get the Ambassador and they smooth things over

and we didn't have to um but you live your life on the news because you could be going somewhere I mean look what happened on October 7th right uh 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 back we'll start getting into sere combat operations sure perfect join me and my special guest for the next behindth scenes experience exclusively available on vigilance Elite patreon the behind thes scenes footage is

raw and uncut this is as close to the set as you can possibly get you can expect anything from off-topic conversations Studio tours the final Moments before the interview starts and everything in between the behind thes scenes content is constantly evolving and will continue to bring you more as we grow you can gain access for just $15 a month exclusively at vigilance Elite patreon all right Alan we're back from the break we've covered your childhood we've covered the beginning of your military career your assessment into tf60 and um now we're getting into your combat Operations

let's move into post 911 all right actually let's move let's just go into 911 all right what were you doing when that happened so 911 I was in um I was doing a mission in uh jrtc right The Joint read Training Center down in Fort P Louisiana right I was actually infilling a marops team right a maritime team from fifth group uh and they would I 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 one as National Guard buildings you know it's uh cinder block walls hard tile floors you know that kind of stuff so every noise at one 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 uh joint redness

exercise and we always said that you know one of those flights is going to be real and when it happens it's going to be spectacular right the the whole operation I'm like damn it those guys did something you know like you always want to be on the big operation I thought you know the other company had just done it so I get up and I turn on The TV and that's not what I saw at all what I saw was one 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 Loria JFK newwork there somebody screwed up and uh so yeah I got it on Brew up a of coffee in my room and uh I'm looking at it have my first you know sip of coffee and in comes in another plane and I like this is not an accident this is an attack and I remember getting everybody up you know hey we're going to be doing something I mean not like we're going to jump in the helicopters and do something but we're going to

have to get back to Fort Campbell and uh it was it was something because I I go down to the end of the hall and there's two guys that have been out you know they were shot down right they're doing an E&E that night escape innovasion 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 op

four I'm talking about somebody is attacking us they open the door showed them the TV and I oh 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 one of very few tracked actually by the Secretary of defense's office uh on how many there are of us and um in our company there's two 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 you always talk about you know oh you got to go across the street to the headquarters right because it's literally across the road And what's stunk about it is now when B company goes technically I don't have to go because I work for the Battalion Commander now not the company Commander luckily they needed a second flight 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 know had Fighters overhead awax that kind of stuff but no commercial

air travel no military travel other than Fighters and so we rented our car the battan 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 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

on 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 going to 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 had to Tampa and a funny story there right so now the Bas is is locked down mcdill right and we got to get to Soent headquarters and the

line to get in the gate is got to be five six miles long right we can't no one's going to 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 like 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 that said something like you know if the bearer of this badge is doing you 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 Al I'm not I can't they'll take my badge away if I use it for something I'm like dude he just GNA attacked so we drive back through he flashes the badge he let us right in right and that was always a Funny story with with with he and I he was afraid to use his badge for 911

so anyway we get in there and and uh we're not really sure what is going to happen we know we're going to Afghanistan like that the target is in Afghanistan but we're bouncing between the Third Battalion and the second Battalion going because B company second Battalion had just divided in two and sent six of its Chinooks to Korea to work in Paccom 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 uh two years before that two years in a row we'd been to Kuwait with the intention of going into Iraq uh during Desert Operation Desert Thunder and desert U 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 refuel 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 going to be able to to do anything so they're going to send us like me and my guys to Egypt for operation bright star which is a big Training exercise in Egypt right and Third Battalion will go to usbekistan and go into Afghanistan except things keep going around a little bit it's like you know what thir ban would be better off going to Egypt we'll take the echo models up to usbekistan because of the terrain falling radar and some other things that the older

aircraft that theran had didn't didn't have installed you know they had airing capability aircraft looks the same in the outside But it's not nearly the same aircraft so we uh 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 cuz the phone's not a high enough uh classification so the guys had just got back from um jrtc they got to fly back and I'm calling up there going hey uh 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 uh you know maybe remember that movie Spies Like Us you know kind of that area you know duch bay and uh so he understood and he got those Maps pulled and we started planning it and then we end up back at Campbell which is funny cuz 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 so we're

going home and on the way home uh Donald Rumsfeld is doing a press conference and he says uh operation infinite Justice is in motion we're like what the hell so they changed the name but um so we get back and here's where the the real challenge is Right remember I said earlier that there's always room for one more ranger M right if at sea level in a shinook if you can put something inside it you can fly with it right you just can uh 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 ft 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 fifth group Fifth Special Forces Group was in a room right next to me in Tampa Planning what they call a u campaign unconventional 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 the 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 oh 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 uh usbekistan a place called K2 Ki canibad uh usbekistan is just to the north of Afghanistan and that it's a former Soviet Republic and we're going to operate out of that base um with four shins and two daps the daps I talked about earlier direct action penetrators the armed Blackhawks they're going to

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 uh beacons you know where everybody is and you can see everything and you got a stack above you of support there was nothing yeah and so here we are as soon as we built up the first two Shinu the bombing campaign started and originally we wanted all four built up cuz we we wanted you know two teams of two because if something

happens to the first team of two the Other two's got to either help them or help whatever they were doing and seav said nope soon as the first two are done start right so they started bombing right away and then we got the other two built up luckily we didn't have anybody go down and uh that went on for about two weeks and then fifth group rolls in and we changed over from an Air Force Colonel being in charge of us to uh Green Beret Colonel the fifth group Commander John mahand Great guy by the

way and he uh he comes in he's like uh 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's said what's the matter sir and he's like uh so you mean you can't just take an Oda you know team from here to here no sir uh not happening you can't get over these mountains with that weight or if you do you're going to 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 cuz they were falling under the old isolation rules I think Cold War isofa 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 kind of 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 six guys and their equipment and their equipment's limited to like 3,000 lb so we made the odas put their gear all their personal gear all their team gear on a 463l pallet on aircraft scales and if it was over it's like get rid of 30 PBS oh come on 30 pounds get rid of it you're not going fine theyd lose batteries or water or something you they get resupply later But that's how strict we were on the and then we had

this political problem when Ahmed mud 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 uh 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 alqa blows him up with a fake film Crew his second in command is a guy named fahem 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 dosam who those two hate each other right they're in different locations so fim says to the US government if I don't get my Green Berets first I will attack do them and you can you know throw your alliance out the Window so we are in two teams of two my buddy Arlo has to take one of my aircraft actually so he's a team of three I'm a team of one so I can't go anywhere we're not going anywhere a single ship and um they take off they reach the border the

weather is terrible the mountains are 21,000 feet tall and they got to turn around 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 team mate by the way because I was afraid that Arlo would get his guys in and then the SE def would go you know what it's too hard it's not worth the risk no more infills and then you know I'd have to listen for 30 years for

this guy talking about his mission like he has to listen now to me and uh so he goes the next night same thing happens turns Around except now I'm rolled 24 again right another 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 at 20,000 ft can't see out the windows they're doing a pedal turn on the hover page and I mean 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 into a shoving match like I'm calling him you know all kinds of bad words and he's you know reciprocating and now now Arlo's a little bit bigger than me we're about to 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 Strange Love uh movie but uh Anyway all right we going to 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 TF dagger opson 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 and this this major we'll call him Mark the major Mark he's like

uh what can I do for you Sir and he's like you tell moholland you get those teams in tonight or else both of them click we don't know about this till like the next day so we get up come in have our coffee I'm expecting to see Arlo go do his thing and I'm just going to sit here and wonder if he's going to 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 going to have to take everybody in One but

I can't take everybody in one he goes yeah you can if you if you do air refueling in and out okay right uh they the only the only uh caveat is you can't touch down before the other flight like fim has to get his guys so he can say I got the first Americans and doam 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 fem 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 and get hit tanker again to get gas in the air to make it home and uh they didn't want me to fly a single ship cuz 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 the armed Blackhawks problem is they can go most of the way you know and then the mountains are going to get too big and they're going to have to hang out it's like the the B7 bombers going into Germany in the early days and the fighters could only go so far it's like see you know we'll see you when you come back you know and Um 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 kind of thing and uh we're flying along the weather is terrible 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 Bum bum bum and um we run into a sandstorm several thousand feet thick just like the eagleclaw mission actually and you can't see

out past the probe the refuel probe there's like St El almost fire on it you know like little Sparks and uh 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 two engines as I pull in power my co-pilot pulls in power the engine gets hotter so the glow gets bigger and they know they're climbing 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 CED uncle they turn around okay we got to aort we cannot do this all right because we always say you Know uh with surface to a missiles and other anti-aircraft weapons every munition has a PK a a probable kill ratio so if you fire a sa7 on an aircraft you have a PK 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 PK of 100% so here we are on 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 ball Falls uh it's not going to keep them alive if they hit the mountain so they turn around so now I'm thinking oh there's no way they're going to 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 Pon stuff he goes execute push the button so jro follow your Q 300t clearance altitude off we go and we are using the train falling radar for the first time in real life now 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 no kid really couldn't see out the window no [ __ ] it took first one it took a general officer in training Like the usaw commander had to approve flying without being able to see and it had to be on what's called a military training route so in order to get the training route resered D the two 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 you couldn't do it so here we are doing it and uh we make

our first turn and we get what's called a full climb command so the uh 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 control out the lead or 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 two

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 was 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 co-pilot he slows back to best climb a speed about 80 knots he's got the power pulled into his armpits We Are Climbing at about 4,000 ft a minute I mean we are just climbing like a rape ape 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 if digital map on the on the little TV screens the mfds so I'm scrolling through trying to find a map scale that will be use ful to me and I find one 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 que I say follow that Quee he does it we descend because the Mountain's 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're run into bad weather you 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 in there and but anyway this is Afghanistan so we're going along we're still in the clouds there's nobody to talk to um my aircraft is all alone this is the stuff you make movies about and but they did 12 strong Right but they highlighted the green beray uh but anyway we

come to the last ridgel line and uh we're still in the clouds and the Colonel's like oh what are you going to do he like I'm right sure we got this you know and so I lower there's a lower altitude that it'll fly which is like really you know 100 ft so I do that and we pop out of the clouds we're like I don't know three maybe 4,000 ft this ridgel line and then the LZ is about a half mile to go and then There's a little Hill north of that cuz we'd come around

and on the other side of that's zpu 234 right and it's Taliban so a 23mm four barreled anti-aircraft Cannon right if he sees me gets a line of sight of me he will tear me up that'll be swiss cheese we will not survive the aircraft's not going to do it so I've got to keep that little Hill that's all it is 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 three to 4,000 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 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 uh my co-pilot isn't as experienced with me and I'm like here 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 LZ over here so it's out the other side of the aircraft and I can't see it but I'm at about 150 ft now and I'm like Jethro you got the LZ inside he's like yeah you have the controls so now he has to take the controls he turns inbound to the LZ but I screwed him Because to do a Dust Landing in a shinook 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 have little buttons

on them right and those buttons are for little magnetic breake 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 happen happened to him cuz I didn't get him time to get set up and so he he comes in there and he's a great dust Lander actually probably better than me and uh he's coming in and I can feel the Aircraft going backwards in the dust right we're AF Gear's got to be like 10t off the ground if we hit going backwards we're going to crash it's going to 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 AF gear touch the ground well I'm not going to go back up in the dust cloud with a 23mm gun there if I can if I'm already on the ground but Jeth Row 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 land dust kind of settles and we are surrounded by Afghan men wearing PS and I don't remember what the scarf is called they all got AK-47s could be Taliban could be Northern Alliance I don't know right there's there's an OG guy supposedly there but he didn't have an IR strobe so he might be

dead as far as I know and uh the team leader gets out Mark n right uh the leader of f 5 and uh they do a Little hug he comes up by my uh 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 bogam 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 um I remember just sitting there as they towed the aircraft into parking you

know and we were just Jas Jethro and I were just kind of sitting there and um We did that night after night after night and a couple of those nights uh Arlo the other flight lead I there was a there was a an OG pilot named Ned he flew Mi 17s out of U uh duchan bay into Afghanistan P Valley and stuff so he stopped in gave us a bottle of Jack Daniels and so Arlo had the bottle We snuck off in the bunker had a little snort and we're like what do you think and

I said dude I don't think we're Going to live another mission and he said yeah I agree and what do we do uh it's a little emotional um we're just going to do it and there's nobody else who's going to do it other than us so um we didn't tell anybody that we had these doubts you know they I'm sure they had it but you you know as a leader you've got a lead and so we did we did uh I we put 21 teams in I think you know The movie 12 strong as one

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 hell but I was all the way down the the west side of uh was it Farah and um I can't think of the further south I went but you know a long way I took the the OG 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

uh C130 or or someplace they could do an air drop you know that kind of thing but we did that I had to rescue uh one of the odas got in between a green on green engagement you know the the Afghan nor Alliance fought each other and the the Oda had to leave and when they did you know they were under Fire they left under Fire and so they're in theire quarter and their vehicles the hux trucks and they they're headed south and uh 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 and it's just me I can't remember what the other aircraft were doing but it was just my aircraft and I was like all right you guys pick me up when I come out and we sped up to like 160 which is fast for a helicopter and I activated the TF and we went right into the right into the um The cloud in the mountains and the and the radar

just took us right over let us down on the other side and then I picked the road cuz I knew where they started and it's like all right there's only two roads they parallel each other if I follow one the most likely one and hopefully I'll get in comms with him because an ac130 overhead as a ubot he couldn't see anything it was all cloud cover but he did have line of sight Communications with him so uh um it was Cobra 22 and I'm uh I'm hauling ass in a a 23 uh zpu 232 same

as that other gun but only two barrels opens up on us and the AC can't do anything because you 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 2,300 and so he could reach us I couldn't reach him so I was like all right 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 picked

the right Road and we land pick them up head back into the the Cloudy mess link up with the daps and go home and what's cool the daps is uh they weren't going to let that time go un um like not have a purpose M 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 uh Mike he said he told me afterwards he's like damn he said we were literally flying in a profile

where you we were going to get shot down and they you know the flight lead is Ross and he's like we're not going to let those Shooks get shot down if there's anybody out here if they're going to shoot at anybody they're going to shoot at us so damn man yeah so anyway how long how long did it take you to insert 21 teams Uh was it one a night one a night sometimes two a night you know depending on where we were going like I put over in um uh so those guys were on

pocy there was a cow not cow uh I can't think of the name of it but yeah we're all over the place sometimes to a night so it took two three weeks the the campaign you know in the movie it's like you know two three days but in real life it took a couple weeks we thought it would take Till the spring except doam 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

ft the Bulls 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 you know Germans or something he's 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 uh you know the flares you see them

in the movies um 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 RP GS and all that kind of stuff in in the aircraft and they're like oh my God

you know we we were going to die you know if this is what life is going to be like we are We're definitely not going to make it and uh so we just keep going you know but what that did is it let us know that a major force was engulfing General dost's force and help 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 shanuk they would have wiped them out you know 595 would

have been gone so it's you know luck plays part of The game damn man you know and we did that for about uh you know seven months or so Tor Bora is in there right so we end up we think we're going home we get told you put all those teams in Shucks are going home right no need to have them here we'll resupply with c130s all right 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 uh Arlo's Team gets sent to bogram first Americans down there uh for this place called torab 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 toror mountains they know where he is exactly and uh so they got a they take the Delta guys down there they got two 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 Three-day rcks yeah go down you

know this thing will be over in two three days all right they get down there obviously it's going to take longer than that so we got better supplied my team I was a Sil silver team they were gold team we go down replace them they come back up I can stay there for a couple of weeks now I'm like hey give us 3 or four weeks we're fine down here you guys stay up at K2 and support the teams we'll do We'll support the tour Bora Mission so we're doing that and then uh you know

he disappears off the radio Bin Laden because he's he's severely injured and you did the whole thing where he's apologizing to the brothers you know I'm sorry I let you down the Americans going to get us and uh we stopped bombing him because he was off the net for for a night and centcom thought he was dead no [ __ ] we're all sitting there going you got to 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

ceasefire and he got into Pakistan and you probably I don't know if you ever read the book by Dalton Fury was actually a guy named Tom Greer that name you know is out there now but he was the Delta commander who had beenin 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 going to kill him and they switch 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 uh they were pissed you know it's all in his book but uh so you know we continued for a while going into the caves you know we did 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 uh you know interestingly I can tell you that the aircraft we flew down

there on that mission where he got away um was later in life the aircraft that carried his body out of uh Pakistan no [ __ ] 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 Tor Bora was now a lieutenant colonel and the air Mission commander on the one that they got him so he's like like almost like a Forest Gump he's in both areas you know the same aircraft and uh kind of a nice a nice tie-in you

know and um but anyway this is all one deployment yeah holy [ __ ] man so so we get you know all these exciting things very high Adventure we starting 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 fifth group got into Kabul this little Afghan fell comes up and he's like you know excuse me uh would you like your Embassy back what he come

with me he took him over the US Embassy that had been abandoned when the Soviets invaded was Still there Untouched by the Taliban they were still like you know copies of Life magazine and newspapers cigarette ashtrays you know back in the day and uh he'd been taken care of it you know a little coat of dust but he'd been you know gardening and doing whatever he did and the Taliban left it alone for some reason so he presented fifth group with the United States Embassy and so we're going to reopen it right this is December

of 2001 big Ceremony right General Franks comes in the sencom commander so I'm going to fly him his wife General Harold who was the Afghan overall commander and you know a bunch of strap hangers I'm going to fly them into the embassy they're big ceremony reopen the embassy officially put a put an ambassador in there except I get told take him in at like 10: in the morning daylight right I'm a nightstalker we fly at night why because it's safer You Know The Enemy can't see you and Gog mvgs weren't prevalent at the time uh

I prefer to fly at night and and the centcom guy said uh to my request to fly them at night I said let me take them in the night before oh no no no you got to take them in 10:00 got you know scheduled I said you're putting a four-star general and his wife and a and a one star at risk 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 man pads and they're like no no no it's fine right and as we saw two years ago the Taliban is not gone but uh so I take off heading to the Embassy and I don't have a choice and uh flight of two and we've got everybody on a headset so the General's listening in you know we're Talking all right 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 a surface missile fired at you

it's a heat seeker you it's like oh missile 2:00 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 to so uh I'm like hey was that an Inadvertent launch cuz sometimes they go off you know for no reason and it's not a missile and it's like oh yes sir it went right between us like damn it so the conversation is all right missile fired coming down left I kind

of drop down I'm in like a like a creek bed and I had been doing 120 I I speed up to 165 so it's almost 200 mes hour about 10 ft off the deck because what I'm trying to do is put just enough of the subtle terrain between me and any potential uh Follow on shots because you have to hyper Elevate the thing get you know lock on get the battery coolant thing going and and launch it right so I'm trying to do that and I come into the embassy I'm doing about 150 as I

cross the wall and I got to stand this thing up on its end and drop it in chalk 2 comes in behind me you know General's like oh thanks for the flight guys and I'm like sir get out he like what uh there's nobody out there Yet I say Sir get out go to the building to the left all right well have a good day you know and he get he had no idea we had been I mean just didn't know right so we take off and this is actually a funny story I tell some

so we take off on the headset they didn't he on the headset the whole time because in the movies if a helicopter gets shot at they everybody freaks out and they run into each other right which is what I told Jerry brookheimer at the 12 strong Prem I hope you didn't do that because we are very calm Under Pressure he's like ah i' be right but anyway uh so we take off and I'm over the city of kabo right it's it's very sprawling right it's very densely packed there's TV antennas everywhere those oldfashioned 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 banded kites you know music uh 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 um fishing line so they wouldn't lose their kite right if that gets wrapped around

the 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 you know there they're off like this and I'm trying to see the string and uh I'm doing about 150 160 miles hour at this point and uh I see that I like to say that there's this one 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 two miles what I'm kidding I was like what I'm kidding that's like a half mile he you know but uh so we left you know we go up there and did you ever see Flight of the Intruder no the movie so the it's Vietnam these guys do a rogue bombing mission in North Vietnam uh with an as6 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 Willam defo 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 bogam uh I do pass the word hey we should wait till dark before we pick them up you know

and uh they're Like no no you got to go get them I said then they might want to drive out and I told reporter what happen happen so my way man comes up got Willie he's Puerto Rican he's very very very very thick accent when he gets excited and uh he's very animated's like ow oh my God a wow two missiles oh my God and I go you know we got to go back and get the general right he's like no way no way are we doing that right in that thick accent and uh I

go Wily they'd never expect us Twice and he hadn't seen the movie he's like what H you're nuts so a couple months later he saw the movie and called me he's like yeah I saw the movie I got it I got the line but uh that's kind of how things now that's how things were you know up until really uh operation anaconda and that's its own conversation we can go there if you want let's go into it all right so we've been there seven months uh Special Operations units Typically especially the sore 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 um we're exhausted I mean we are absolutely emotionally mentally physically exhausted from this whole thing so the other company's going to Come in right a company I'm with the B company guys right now and we're going to do a rip right a relief in place but because

we've been operating there they want us to stay through this conventional operation called Anaconda right it's a 82nd Airborne and 101st and they're going to go they think Bin Laden and Ziri are down in the gardez area so they're going to go in with a Big aerosol and uh the plan is that they're going to put Special Forces Coalition Special Forces not the tier one guys up in the mountains on 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 uh from the overhead platforms to kill them 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 going to happen whether Bin Laden's there or not is there's a so that the mountains are considered the Anvil right and the hammer if you will the hammer and the Anvil is a Special Forces Group from fifth group a guy named uh I think it was a W3 Herman was his name he's leading

a convoy of General Z's forces Z's forces are considered the some of the best in the country Afghans and he's Going to 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 the Germans the the French the you know the Norwegians all these different coalitions are up there in the mountains going to call for fire the problem is Herman's identified as an enemy and the ac130 engages him and kills Him 40 mm I believe I saw the vehicle 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 fratricide everybody's jamming everything so nobody can talk so we're jamming our own stuff and um and by the way there was a weather delay of two weeks so we the Americans being the wonderful people we are told All of the U the other organizations you know the UN Red Cross red crescent whatever other Aid organizations hey two weeks from now we're going to 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 uh they're all you know Taliban or or Al-Qaeda and the Russians did a big operation there at one point the Soviets and there was a place called the whale 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 Herman gets killed Z's forces turn and flee because if the Taliban can kill the American SF guys Because they don't know the ac130 did it they just know that his vehicle erupted you know with 40 mm so now there's no hammer on the Anvil and when the AER 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 air assault they go back to bogam 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 two Chinooks and a group of seals from devg Gru and we were the hvt team

so if Ben Laden or Zari does show up it's our job to go Schwack them right two two Shooks full of seals we're going to go kill Bin Laden and sour Harry after a couple of days it's obvious they they're not there so if only we could get eyes on this one big mountain tar that would make up for what you know the friendly forces didn't accomplish they'd be able to see terrain now that they could not have seen otherwise well who could do that we don't have anybody ah we got two Chinooks and a

bunch of Seals right all right so we're going to do two infills at one time right so my wingman's got one 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 mountain takar and I'm going to oh I should back up we're supposed to take them to the base of the mountain and they're going to walk up right that's the plan we split up we do our thing they walk up under the cover of Darkness Except

there's B-52 strikes coming in on the whale 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 got to 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 bogam so I go back to gardez I shut the aircraft down and unfortunately this particular Helicopter which by the way was the one that got Bin

Laden's body out of there um when it finally was time to go you know they sent me a spare from bogam and there's a whole uh story of how that happens the Razer 010203 that kind of thing so Razer 01 brings me a spare and he's the qrf that's his job right so he's quick right going to come down give me my aircraft he'll take mine back the maintenance pilot will fly the damage Aircraft back and they'll fix it and return it to the fight but now it's 40 minutes to get down from bogram and

so I say uh to the team leader I'm like hey uh I'm going to 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 got to take me to the top and I said uh 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 IC and He's like there's a place up there it's all open you should be able to get up there

all right so uh britz slinsky is the the team leader and he requests a 24-hour bump he's like listen I don't want to go to the top of the hill I want to do the original plan but we got to roll 24 to do it right he gets told n you really need to get up there tonight he's not told but the push is on I mean you know what it's Like so he's like what do you think Al I said all right I'll give it a try you know so we we take off as

a flight of two razor Z four 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 going to 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 uh we land up there and there's nothing happening and I look off to my right and there's a dony tied to a tree and a diska so it's a 14.5 mm anti aircraft machine gun right heavy machine gun and it's sitting there nobody's touching it no people and uh slab back then and this has 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 init

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 was said hey tell the team leader keep his headset on I got to talk to him what's up I said you got a donkey to the Right you got a u 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 Herman 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 got to that's very subjective and 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 was like in that movie Blackhawk Down they show the RPG sort of like a lava lamp kind of 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' 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 Tweety Birds and uh all of the electric dies right so the there's three Electric

Systems in a shinook they're all geographically separated so you can't one bit of damage can't hit them all and with the with the machine gun fire and the RPG all three lines got hit And all the electrical went out and the problem with that is the Min guns at that time were AC powered electric meaning they run off the aircraft power now they running batteries they're done holy you can't shoot right so we're now defensive uh everybody's still on board but I'm wondering did the did the seals start getting out or they back on we

never talked about that uh in this particular instance because usually be oh if we Start getting off you got to stay till we're all 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 way at the back of the ramp it's like uh you know we're getting hit and you can hear like Tink Tink 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 all right 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 ft and so I can hear the droop meaning I probably lost an engine so now I know I can't hover with one engine with only one engine we're going to 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 benath the aircraft I don't know that but I'm diving I'm literally on the Treetops because the dishit is

shooting At us and so I'm trying to get down below his potential for uh you know elevating the gun down and uh I don't know I'm this guy's feet are tickle in 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 uh the crew chiefs 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 ft and uh they say sir we lost a man I'm like what do you mean you lost a guy I'm in total denial I'm like uh give me a head count I'm 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 uh when we left all right and like sir the guns don't work I Said testy the guns like they know the guns don't work so like

all right we're we're going back to get them so we Circle back around we start climbing back up 12,000 ft and we get lined up and or 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 co-pilot is trying to move it and we are just flying it 12,000 ft 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 uh I'm sorry we're done I can't move the controls you know I don't know what's going to 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 tea handle and 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 the thing go I was like I have control and so I turned the aircraft back in inbound and we're lined up to land on the top of the Ridge and the controls lock up again we got about 50 seconds per can of hydraulic fluid and now I know we're just going to impact on the top of Robert's Ridge That's the name now and uh he puts another can of fluid in there and I know that there's no way we're going to be able to land there with no guns and I still got Razer 04

out there right so he's fully capable so I'm like you know what we're going to turn left we're going to try to land where Razer 04 put the other moo 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 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 uh coming into this this kind of a a hilly area except I couldn't see that

in the goggles till I got closer I just saw flat as far as I could tell and as we get a little bit closer you know he'd put that other that last can in and we get down to the bottom I'm thinking we're going to run out of fluid any minute now and I can't Move the controls the cycling right the one 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 Jem 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 going to roll over Boom movie stuff so we we hit the ground I got one more push on this axis and I I do it and we settle on a slope that's about I 15 20° uh 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 rad breake stop them in one 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 uh Joe gor not his real name but his close and he used to do these things called gor games and he would have us in training do shootdowns so you'd go do some Mission I'd fly up to Cleveland from U Fort Campbell Air refueling on the way up on the way back I come back and I say

hey go land a fagel out on the range right so I go land out there and uh 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 four days walking in the woods doing escape and Invasion survival that kind of stuff so we called these things the gors games so we hit the ground rotter break

stop and I'm like holy crap we're alive you know there's a couple points there I Didn't think we were going to survive and I say not another freaking gor game right and I I hit all the switches that destroy the computers and uh which just funny I got a coin from the NSA for doing that uh I kind of joke I should have left it because it was such a mess the software that we could let the Chinese reengineer it and they set them back 20 years but uh anyway I did I you know I

zered my com saac and destroyed the the mission computers and All that kind of stuff so get out slinsky uh Chapman you know the CCT they're out there they're already talking uh they've set up a perimeter we've got an M60 machine gun still and um you know he's talking to the ac130 he goes Razer 04 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 uh they're like hey we're going to you know I I get my GPS out I

plot the map where we are and slab's Like all right you guys stay here we're going I'm like where you going 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 one CU we'd flown you know good three minutes you know 100 miles an hour we got a pretty good distance away so he like ah what about Razer 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 he gets there and he says uh listen I can't take all of you at once I as in my air crew 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 Air crew 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 going to give us Chapman because you know CCT guy would be a good 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 all right you know so like all right but higher command says you're not leaving the air crew there there's enemy combatants headed that way the ac30 was supposed to engage them except we got Out of there before they had to uh they go back to

gardez they download all their [ __ ] and they head back to the top of the mountain in meantime I met the fob uh waiting for them to do it so they you know Jethro rein fills them and there's a whole problem with the ac130 you know at the time you know now these guys I love them later on in life but this particular time frame I got nothing nice to say about them uh because they killed Herman and because they had the fratricide they wouldn't shoot on top of Robert's Ridge so when Jethro is

trying to put them in in razor 04 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 bad guy position like well there's a friendly up there we're not going to shoot and then they agreed to shoot but they didn't so when Jethro comes in he's taking heavy fire From the diska 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 going

to 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 um so they get him in they do their thing I'm not going to tell their

story because that's their story to tell but uh 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 is 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 bogram but the people at bogam don't know that they just think it's out of gas

so there's some confusion at bogram is they try to put an internal tank on to fly it down to us to put gas in it to return it 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 all right pull the pull the refuel tank back off right so now there's all this confusion of what's going on and so Razer 01 who had brought me the spare has just arrived back at bogam and he's told qf'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 01 and 02 and they Head right back except they think they're coming to me at the shinook 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 um so the flight lead decides that uh he doesn't know what's going on he's getting conflicting

Information so he sends Razer 02 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 fill him in and right about the time razor 01 gets there the ac130 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 air crew is all shot to Pieces uh our friend Phil speac flight engineer is shot just below the the body armor and he dies on his gun defending the aircraft um the Co-pilot after the fact turns out he had like I don't know five or six rounds in his armor right at his heart didn't penetrate he got shot in the hand like he went he got his M4 out

of the mount and he goes like this to to fight with it and his hand is has limp and once again that's their story to tell but so in the meantime I'm down at gardz and we're uh we're building speed balls for them like uh ammunition rocks water that kind of stuff and um the idea is they're Going to fly over with with a good shinook and they're going to just kick the stout stuff out at least resupply them uh because you know they don't have a lot of stuff it's only half of a a

ranger Squad right the other half and razor are two and like four of them were killed right on impact right and the crew cheat the crew is all injured every one of them except one has been shot you know only one died but the rest of them are Seriously injured and um it turns out everything on top of the mountain kind of settles down and we're going to go the guys are going to go get him not me I'm down at the the fob and they're goingon to go get him 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 m4s and uh that's when Cunningham is hit the the PJs and Um Nate self Tom Commander is on the radio he's like we got another one hit you got to get kazac here or we're going to lose a guy right now and I remember when that happened I looked over at the CIA guys and I said um they looked me like I knew what was going to go on and I said uh they're not going to

launch another aircraft we just lost three aircraft in the same LZ they're not going back till dark and like but that guy's G to die and I said Another aircraft seven crew members on board maybe Rangers they're going to wait till dark and that's what they did they told him no he couldn't uh couldn't have an aircraft and you know Cunningham did die on the mountain there so uh we also had intercepts that uh the Taliban knew that the air crew 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 going to happen and um so here's this Convoy coming and the guy that was in charge of the fob uh it was an alias he called himself Hal he met he like Hal Al Al Hal and uh he's like what kind of weapons do you have I said well we all got long guns we all have you know six seven magazines of ammo we have ammo Ruck on each aircraft With you know 1015 magazines in there we

had at-4s each aircraft had one and we each had at least an M60 so he's like all right 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 going to do the defense right so I go out to the aircraft with my GPS I Mark the the distance so we can do a range card and uh we're prepared to defend the Alamo essentially and uh they rigged the back Wall to blow out because they figured they'll attack the front

gate and we had the you know hux trucks and stuff and there was a big pit with uh all the ammunition and explosives for the for the fob under a tarp he's like all right here's when we decide to leave you know the this guy's GNA 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 get in here and we're going to drive as fast And as far as we can go and I'm like oh man I'm

not I'm going cut out for this and uh luckily for us the ac130 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 uh so but here's the next part of the story is um they do the nighttime xfill they pull the the k off so we've got you know Rangers Neil Roberts they found um 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 rig 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 Razor are four I'm told be at 8:00 beond a chel 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 uh who I've since talked to um is she's going to die

right so they drive her to the fob just so happens they come up before you know about 7:00 maybe 7:30 and the weatherman comes in and he's like sir sir we got the journalist uh you know grenade you know I got it I got it you know get the medic right so I had one of our Medics with us in 160th medic uh 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 going to be low on gas and I mean low

right okay usually we exaggerate the gas thing a little bit uh but he's working on her and I mean her thigh is shredded she's in bad shape and um he's working on her and I was like all right 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 uh 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 going

to be here they need to know and he's like I I think I almost got her you know so he does stabilizer the other guys are out on the LZ we jump on a high luux truck there's a Minefield you know luck 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 hour in the Dark and we get there as the helicopter lands and I've got all of the miniguns the comac uh all the sensitive items that kind of stuff

code books or whatever you want to call it and um everybody's getting on board and I'm the last one 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 yeah you're running and you're not out of gas and He's like no come now and I got the last Minun on board I climbed on and there was nowhere to go because my flight engineer had got on board tripped on one of the bodies fell on top

of uh 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 one little spot And I kind of shimmy myself in next to one of the guys ramp comes up they take off and as I'm sitting there I realize um that's Neil Roberts and uh [ __ ] I we

thigh to thigh you know the back on the floor and I look at him and I was like the luminescent dots on his watch his watch was kind of going like this and I was like is he Al I mean he was obviously dead but my mind was playing tricks in the blue light you Know that was in the aircraft and uh then we almost did we did run out of gas actually we were landing at a the 101st had set up a fart for us except it was super Dusty where they set it up

and the guys did a went in did a go round did a go round did a Go Round And I'm I'm thinking we're going to run out of gas I'm going to be in the middle of the desert you know with all the the Kia and you know out of The Frying Pan Into the Fire and they get on the ground and The number one engine Flames out that's the one on the left just just like uh the other Razer did they get plugged in the other engine still running they have different amounts of fuel

in themt intentionally so that one will quit before the other and um they got it going they restarted the engine we flew back to baram and we got off now barram we always used to joke was so dark it was BM dark you know uh if you CU you didn't have a real good Light because you 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 maybe Kabul right and uh finally you know they take all the kis off take them to the Hospital or where they took a morg and I asked somebody hey where where are we they're where at BAM I'm like I where at bogam the Airfield that's the tower I just never seen the lights on before they turn on the lights to make it easy for everybody so I'm like

hey guys we're at BM so we grabbed all our stuff through all the the heavy equipment in a truck and walk back what they call Disney Highway it says dirt road now it's like a eight Lane Highway that the Taliban's using and uh we get to the the compound I remember walking into the the the Ops tent first to check in let them know we're back and it was just so surreal to walk in like everybody stopped there was no talking you know you could hear the fans of the computers and that was it and

I was like I'm I'm back you know you get some couple of hugs and uh then we got a debrief and you know that kind of stuff and then Um what sucked is the next day uh the guys went out to do a vehicle interdiction they thought everybody was telling about fob skin right they think this is Bin Laden and it ends up not be but the guys had just flown the entire package except me and one of the other aircraft had flown and like hey Al um there's a blizzard coming with weather just told

us it's going to 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 I might can't somebody else it all the other guys had flown that day there's you and the other aircraft right I like all right I'll do it right and uh I did not want to go back out there again holy [ __ ] here's the worst part so there's all these teams right The last team

to come out you just landed and they're like yeah back out well it was the next morning right so the so I got a little bit of sleep it's it's daytime when they do the so really I got maybe two hours of sleep and the um we got to get these guys out and the other guys had flown and I said all right so there's a plan on how we're going to 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 going to be the German team and here we are getting ready to Launch and the Intel guy comes in and says sir uh the German team says they have armed Taliban on the perimeter with RPGs and so the ac130 planners there the Colonel and I said sir you need to kill them he's like I can't I'm like me you can't I said tell the team to mark their position with strobes anything

within 200 M you kill it it's not hard and like I we can't can't you know how do we know that you know they're armed I 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 it 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 going to do this you know and uh 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 back here I just did this and got shot down and you want me to go back to the same situation with the same ac130 and he won't kill the bad guys and he was all pissed I'll go with you I'll go with you I'll go you know Screw you right so we we take off and uh the Germans never Get engaged but we're headed toward them and here's the part that really pisses me off we're like six minutes out call the C130 you know hey you

know razor 03 6 minutes Roger 6 minutes um Hey listen we're uh we're going to rtb going back to mura what yeah we have to be back on the ground by Sun up I'm like I'm 6 minutes out you mean tell me you can't hang out for 10 minutes you know I'm sure you can get back to M you Know 10 minutes after the sun comes up and like nope got to go same thing they did for tagar and I these conflicting emotions I didn't know what to do and my uh my co-pilot was another

flight lead aked is his nickname because of his how he looks you know in that part of the world what an amazing guy and uh he did what no one else could do he shamed them into staying and uh we picked up the Germans the uh the Taliban had moved away when They heard the helicopters they didn't want to get engaged and uh we brought him back uneventful and then the next night the new company came in we did a little handshake we flew back to Bam they took or uh back to K2 they took

over and we went back home and uh I was back again in July uh for another rotation damn Al holy [ __ ] 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 C guys that are running the thing go um hey here's a SAT phone you need to call your wife because this is about to hit CNN you know they got word they're about to air this I'm like I

can't you know because it's here's here's the headline two shinook shot down eight killed well each crew of four on two Shooks there's only two teams of two I'm The primary flight lead it's likely to be me by my wife's math and [Music] um I said I can't that's not how notification works and all the wives kind of knew something was up and they were hanging out at the Commander's house just like they did during Blackhawk 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 one of the captains called back to his wife to say it wasn't me and he might have even said who it was and uh that word got out in the wives Network and families were notified unofficially before the actual official notification Could occur so I took one for the team if you will and uh did what I

was supposed to do I didn't call my wife and uh so for roughly two days she thought I was dead cuz they didn't know who it was and she was convinced it was me and when I finally get back to bogam after 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 well kind of family problems well uh over the course of uh uh 17 deployments so roughly 10 years uh 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 9911 thing not knowing where I was and not getting 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 uh 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 doc 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 uh that summer and then I was I did like a three-month deployment

came back for a month went for Christmas and then and so she's dealing with all this and we're short-handed you know and the aircraft are few and far between cuz uh You know a TF sword task force sword uh in the very beginning they got like three aircraft shot to pieces and uh you know we had ours you damag 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 kind of 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 uh I lost 23 friends over the course of 10 years uh that are on the wall and it's hard you know because you lose one Chinook that's you know potentially four five six guys you know Red Wings my good friend uh Trey Ponder you know was killed and that one kind of 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 uh the fourman team but uh her problem just got worse over time and uh you know it got to the point where I like to say that uh so when Bo bergdall 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 this guy's a traitor

or whatever but he's an American citizen and it's going to be a problem if he gets into Pakistan right so we're going to go rescue him we're doing all this stuff I get some pretty amazing Stories actually a Sante 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 one place we find his underwear his socks you know some DNA if you will

and um we're just a little bit behind and the Taliban is going old school they're not uh they're not using phones it's couriers it's all courier Network and so we're doing vehicle in we're blowing these motorcycles up with the miniguns uh trying to stop these guys but it's time for me to go home my replacement Gets there and I kind of want to stay but I know I got to get home I've been a long deployment and uh so I flyed on Kandahar we're in customs very insulting I hate that that I have to go

through customs but every once in a while he get some jerk puts a grenade in his suitcase thinks he's going to sneak at home so we all have to now get our bag searched so I'm down there the MPS are walking through my stuff the Customs officer and There's a phone call is there a cw5 Mac in the room what Chief Mack you out there yeah right right here right so I'm thinking it's my wife having a a meltdown like just as I'm coming home and I get on the phone and it's the op the

uh officer in charge at Shira at our task force and he's like Al uh Chad my replacement had a heart attack and he died he you know s is at like 6,000 feet MSL this guy used to be a ranger one of Those guys right he's a aroner he's in great shape crossfitter he goes to the gym right there at Chira 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 two pilots who also were Rangers when they were younger that were Medics and um 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 four high-speed emergency room doctors that can augment any they can do they can crack your chest in the helicopter right that's 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 him they're hitting him P you know clear He codes four times he actually lives to this day he's running Marathons on what's left of his heart wow but I have to come back so they sent 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 got to call my wife and say I know you expected to see me tomorrow I got to stay another 120 days and so in

the book there's a title there I call it uh BG doll 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 um so I did the rotation the unit did the best they could to help her like she uh started cutting herself intentionally [ __ ] 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 the this is the the the um the power she had she was able to convince you that it's going to be okay you know let him do his thing we know that you know there's no one else to do it who's going to do it you know that seems to be the case in a lot of the Things I do is well who's going to do it might as

well be me right and um so once again in order to save someone else's family from going through the same thing you know uh being gone that much longer I did it that was probably a mistake in hindsight but you know I get back and now um 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 What year was this uh well mostly Afghanistan but uh we did some stuff in Africa and Yemen I can't

talk about what year oh what year um I guess maybe 2009 maybe I have to look I'd have to look in a book might have been 2009 is maybe 10 um and you did stuff in Yemen and Africa and Afghanistan yeah so I'd go from one to the other to the other and uh and then that was over a Holiday so you know my poor wife you know she uh she told me she was 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 one night I'm on the aridium phone I'm talking to her and I like we're having a separate conversation she's at my mom's house I all right she went to my mom's house up in New Hampshire everything's going to be okay She's with family and I call her just to check in and she starts having a conversation she's like uh 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'd have Hallucinations and she could have conversations and and experiences that didn't actually occur so I was pissed cuz I'm fine I don't 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 one 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 pig sty the planet 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 me what happened to him right and so the the major the OIC comes up and say Al are you okay I'm like no I'm not

okay and he goes well 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 crush Rock on the ground right and I hit with a thud like a sack of potatoes and the Major's like ow

are you okay I'm like no I'm not okay I just flew 12 feet And landed on my back you know and uh 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 I became the platoon leader for the shinook 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 G to 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 uh I'm not supposed to be

answering this who's this I'm like this is Alan Mack um who are you right he said well I'm a sheriff's deputy at the jail uh your wife was arrested for uh 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 uh she got arrested at the AA meeting and left her car behind so I Took a cab out got her car brought it back and uh you know at that point I was like you're going to rehab you know

we're going to fix this this and there's a whole you know it's about two years really wor maybe 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 uh her behavior was becoming more more radical radical as in uh we get in a fight one time and

she's like go ahead hit me again I've 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 pit or my lawyer has pictures from last time I'm like what are you Talking about and it was like something out of a 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 give it the lawyer and they're in a safe we don't have a

lawyer we don't even have a regular doctor it's Tri care and uh we definitely don't have a safe so uh 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 and 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 re AB she does and uh it works for a little bit about two

weeks I think when she got out and she went to rehab some form of it I don't know six or seven times to the point where the final time she did it and got drunk again after that I went to Tr care and said hey we don't have any benefits we've used them up and they said yeah you tri care is not going to 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 can't do anything and uh I'd

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 uh you know eyes are open lights out you know she's just Sitting there and uh 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 um 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 U I said if you're drunk again there's going to 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 as I like Al where are you like well you called my house I'm obviously at home he's like how's your wife you know he thinks I've gone on and dumped something to her I like 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 cuz wouldn't be a good idea holy [ __ ] 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 grabb my dog I grab a bunch of stuff change clothes grab my two bicycles you know my guns put them in the truck and I go get a hotel and I move out and uh I ended up staying out of the

house For about two 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 um they steered me toward the allanon 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 got to got to get ready first so they were very helpful and they all convinced me look you got to move out of the house you can't can't stay there and enable it so I did and uh where are your sons At so they're deployed my uh my son of the Navy is uh actually at vacapes Virginia Beach and my younger son was a shanut

crew chief in the 160th and he's in Afghanistan already yeah yeah so he'd already done a couple of deployments uh by this time so this is 2012 when this finally so they so so your sons didn't have to it wasn't like a rough home life for him 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 I'm not going to talk they don't want me to tell about a certain story but uh they tried like hell to get her help and then when they couldn't they moved Out my younger my older son joined the Navy and you know flies f18s he's a wizo and then the other one you know joined became Crew Chief and I actually helped get him into the 160th because I didn't want him flying in a convention unit 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 going to be doing it I wanted him to be with us you know and the you know the the Chaplain and the uh uh 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 uh you know it doesn't make things any easier but uh 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 I'm sorry you had to go through that man well thank

you me too but you know uh how is steel made you know in the Forge of the fires right um So the command was very very supportive you know and they sent me off uh they said you have whatever job you want they even were going to create a job where I would be uh 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 got to get out of here You know and uh there were really two jobs that I was interested in one was at Fort Rucker Alabama the uh Asda St the uh Aviation shoot down assessment team so if somebody gets shot down a team goes there like when an ainer crashes like the ntsp 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 your name in the superintendent gets to pick and uh there was an opportunity to go up to Manhattan to unveil the horse Soldier statue on ground zero and because I had flown them they asked for me to come up and help unveil the statue which is a you know a horse back on his legs with a Green Beret on it with an M4 it's pretty pretty neat

statue it's there now if you ever get down there or up there and um but I get there I'm thinking hey New York's not too bad uh it's pretty it was a good time of year September and uh I threw my name in the Hat the superintendent picked me uh I got the assignment i' go learn how to fly Lakota helicopters uh 72s and then I end up up there but uh and that in itself takes me to a good the good Place that I am now but uh yeah there's a lot of other stories

in the middle of that and know you can find them in the book uh I know we've gone a long time so I I can keep talking or or you can go to the next phase here or what do you want to do how did it go with your wife well she uh so I move out of the out of the house I'm in a hotel with the dog and which I still have that dog's 16 years old little Jackaby uh dog and um she makes one final call to me says uh I want you

to come home and I said I can't the commander tells me I can't go home that the psychologist says I shouldn't I said if you don't come home I'm going to kill myself and I said uh you don't have anything lethal in the house cuz I was dropping by every day to check the mail and just she was always passed out uh so she didn't even know I was there and um The next morning I was out looking for a house a new apartment so I didn't have to stay in the hotel I called called

and called and she'd been texting me and calling me every day three or four times a day come home come home come home I not until you're sober you know and 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 Until you do that and she didn't and then so I went back to the house 4 5:00 in the afternoon I died up my oldest son I said hey I'm uh I don't know what's going on here but I want you

know she says things about me so I'm going to put you on speaker I'm going to 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 uh then I see she's on the floor under a blanket so I'm like all right she's on the floor here so I pull the blanket up and she is her skin color is gray and blackish

she's dead and so I call I say you know Stephen I'm I'm sorry to tell you this your mom's not alive uh I got a call 911 so he hung up kind of a crappy way to go There on the phone and I called 911 and the operator says uh 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 rigger was in her arms are out like this and I had to like they're

like Outriggers you know and I try to no she's dead all right we'll go out 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 uh they got there and uh did their thing and uh you know the uh medical examiner came you know

they bagged her up brought her out in the Stokes you know the neighbors were all around and it was it was kind of 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 uh they're like we'd take all the alcohol out of the house we'd come

back four or five hours later Wa 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 it hidden in the Attic in the basement I mean wherever you know she'd call a cab and say you know hey uh 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 one gallon jugs and a bunch of little flasks laying around she drank it all

and she basically drank Herself to death holy [ __ ] man so I moved back into the house you know we have the the memorial and all that stuff and uh 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 going to go one of these other places and uh so I put the house up for sale you know ended up in New York and uh the cool thing about that was I was probably about the most familyfriendly Commander

my guys at the Detachment have are experienced and they told me that and I told the wives like the first week I was there I had the wives come in for breakfast we had a full kitchen you know the hanger was beautiful and uh I like come on in talk to me husbands can't come and I said here's here's my background you know I told them about my wife and uh 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 want to do and you got to go visit your parents or you going to go on a trip or you have a birthday party and he says oh the commander says I got to fly I said you call me I said because he's going to 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 got to

have them and I'll give them back as soon as you know and uh it was great you know we were there this uh this hanger facility uh in the winter we'd move the aircraft to the other side and so it's an empty hanger and we'd bring in inflatables for the kids and everybody had kids and they you know you know what it's like and uh in the better weather we'd have a bonfire Out back we actually had a a big fire ring that we built picnic tables and uh we had permission because it was really

Army property on the airport so we could do that I had the State Police in my hanger and uh how I knew I was being successful was with the the camaraderie and the morale uh that they weren't faking it you know like mandatory fun was in the middle of the week they'd be like hey sir there the list of guys sir it's uh It's good weather today we got nothing going on tomorrow what do you think we do uh a family party tonight sure so pot luck everybody come in we have our time and uh

it was good we also had a bunk room in the in the in the hanger so I could just stay there I didn't have to drive but I met my wife Patty my my current wife and she is a bundle of sunshine she'll see this and she's going to be oh you know stop but everybody that meets Patty loves Patty and Um when we recording if you will on the phone uh 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 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 step brother died in the North Tower so um kind of a nice mesh there you know Um you know actually I was at I told you earlier at breakfast I was at uh a tunnels to Tower event I met the sillers they her their son died running from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to the Tower and died and they do this run every

year and uh so we're talking and they'd met the The Horse Soldiers if you will they' never met me and uh they were really really nice people you know and very grateful uh nice organization and all That kind of stuff and that's kind of thing I do now is that so all right so I did the the Army thing so I'm flying the superintendent around you know fly him to DC fly him to see the Secretary of army you know the cadet's get in a fight with pillowcases and they have batteries in them I guess

gets on Twitter and he gets called down you know what the hell caslin you know and he's like so I got to fly him down there and Uh 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 the uh in August and um these two cadetes seniors they know about me because one of the guys that was ahead of me was my one of my instructors you know that work for me and

um 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 uh you know kette Dave and Chris you know uh I'm not going to use your last names um we want you to be our leadership Mentor I'm like uh sure and they run off all right yay I'm looking at this other guy I'm like what what did I just sign up for he I have no idea right so essentially I I was uh you know they would ask you

you come to the house on Friday nights you know and talk about 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 trouble soldiers whatever it is leadership questions and in doing so they're like ah sir you you gota you got to do a tandem with us and I'm like and 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 uh 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 uh the the the OIC of the team is this uh he's Lieutenant Colonel at Green Beret he comes up he's like um Al why don't you do the tandem the guy is really it would mean a lot you know they'll jump with you like you'll jump on Coach felone 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'll be great and we'll Drop right on the plane which is the parade field at West Point and I'm like H I don't want to do this but I will it's another one 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 Lota there's no seats in it we're climbing up to altitude we're going to jump from 13,000 ft and

uh you know Tom Felon he's hooking me in he's like all right I'm like yeah you know and a crew for 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 got to sit out basically on the skid you know leaned up against the aircraft he's said look up look up and we just tip out head first and I'm now a licensed

skyver because I Loved it you know and uh so I got the the cadets the next year the next season uh taught me how to skydive like the the coach did he did AFF we I got to the point where the cadets could coach me and then got my a license and then uh 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 uh you know we're like sickeningly in love I mean we got

to Touch each other we got to hold hands it's that whole thing right and uh and she has kids you know uh uh her son uh 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 uh my stepdaughter lives with us and uh 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 three Grandkids with the first

son you know two girls and a boy and my youngest son just you know gave me a granddaughter so I was four and and it's just amazing you know good for you man yeah but it does go to to show you you know um you know we didn't talk about it in this in this sitting but um my faith was tested you know many times during this process and uh 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 uh and I swear things got worse and it wasn't until I turned back and turned back into that faith that it it started getting better and did get better and I very grateful for that how did they get worse uh the behavior of Linda because uh you know she got three DWI right only one of them was she Convicted the other two kept getting extended and she'd get another one and so just when I thought maybe maybe we're going to 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 uh my close friends damn were good with it you know they were like Al just do what you got to do and there

was one guy uh one of my my peers if you will had no sympathy for me whatsoever he's like uh well gee you know if his his wife's going to 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 um you know the uh 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 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 you my soul really got quiet and I get to that quiet place where I could Kind of 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 uh that I could say no the enabling is done you know you're either going to get better or you're not and uh in our case it was not you

know there's a there's really a lot more to that I mean we you know you can't cover it in the time we have uh here um and there's some other very interesting things that Happen in there we we kind of skipped over but in the interest of time you know people can read the book uh it's in there but um is there anything in particular that we skipped over you want to cover um I got to tell you one fun story right it's a it's boow Berg doll story we're not done yet we're not I'm

we're going to go back and okay cover a couple of events okay all right I was talking About with with your yeah with with with with Linda yeah and um yeah you know she just she I was married 26 years to her and uh 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 want to emphasize to your you know 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 uh can be helpful you know and Interesting thing so I want to go way back to Anaconda

right this this is referenced to uh 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 uh I had nightmare 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 J bean Makers 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 um 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 uh I said can you look at 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 nightstalker he looks at it he's like well this is an old test we don't really use this one anymore uh and it doesn't really select people it's more like a uh an elimination tool like if you you know um 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 uh 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 uh how you prioritize things and they categorized it right now I'm I'm butchering this but you get the idea this 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 four dots there's like this High one a low one and then you go high again you stay high like if you draw a line between it's check mark he said some of that's that's the uh what they found is you don't care about the rules 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 Toro to Loria 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 AR aircraft situations same thing um 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 nightstalkers 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 M60 he got on a brown out Landing there's a what we call bitching Betty is the voice warning System and she [ __ ] at you if you're you know too low or too much power low rotor and this guy was in a dust cloud in in a Blackhawk and he starts pulling power to get out of it and he's in surrounded by trees and

[ __ ] and 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 [ __ ] 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 two 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 um to get Roberts you know with no Min guns And all that stuff you know I turn back in and we're going to we're going to 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 um so I made a choice one guy we're gonna go over here razor 04 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 got to tell you the guys across the street the other Pilots they're in just as bad a 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 got to 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 uh minimum 30 minutes and to 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 two Later hey thanks for doing that um I was mad at you for doing it but it helped man good for you yeah good for you man so once again it's that whole you know you got to ask for help knowing when to ask for help I guess is the issue right because you can't have everybody you know oh 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 got to know when that is it needs to be Available so when you do decide you want help yeah you do it you know and you can't have the stigma of oh crap Al went and talked to the shrank 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 mhm so first to know about Red Wings it's a conventional operation again we're not even part of

it at all And they decid they're going to they're going to bring Marines into the base of the coral Valley right in the kunar province they're going to go after a guy named Ahmed sha the problem is well twofold one 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 there's 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 amichi is and then the Marine Corps helicopters are not capable of getting the Marines into the valley right because you got to go up over the you know 12,000 foot Ridge lines and drop down and even in the valley it's you know 8,000 ft and the aircraft don't have the Performance not that 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 160th is not doing anything right now maybe they could fast

rope our guys in right Marines are fast rope qualified so they send the mission up to us our batan 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 and his miles gear and died you know fast roping in the trees so he was really against doing this and uh so we're going to do it so we do a rehearsal you know as far as uh we we come elevat right

we we go out to jalalabad and uh 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 uh so they're going to go in that's that's the concept of Red Wings and they're going to the Eyes on are a four-man Seal Team that's going to go in the night before they're going to move into position and observe pattern of life that's uh Marcus Latrell and and the and the boys and um so here's here what happens so there's two versions

of shinook there I've kind of alluded to the the E model the D model and 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 look just like us but they can lift about 1,500 lbs more at that altitude no question if you're going to move a bunch of

Marines in you want the Dem models so they're currently on qf quick reaction force and we do it for like a week at a time and we do a little hand over you know and then the other two Guys you know 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 R right now right and they're going to do Red Wings and they're flight lead is is doing it and I'm the flight lead of

the other two so they go okay listen we're going to change over uh they're going to fly in the fourman team the Dem models are and then they're going to come back And the next morning next cycle of day they'll observe and that night we'll do Red Wings right and that day at like say I call it 10 o'clock in the morning we're going to switch over qrf so I now will assume those duties and the Delta models that had it will now become the entire Redwing Force they had seven D models and two Echo

models so we go to bed it turns out team is compromised that once again that's their story to tell but uh they they Call for help and they decide they're going to launch the qrf so this is got to be when we get get the word it's got to be about 9:30 in the morning and uh I'm showered I get my uniform on I walk over to the you know the planning area The Talk The Operation Center to see you know how things are going on you know how's Red Wings going to 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 uh 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 uh they were already still up uh uh 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 Ridge line and uh I watched the there's like an A10 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 sh not 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 Fleer 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 kind of limps a little bit away off screen and comes apart in Flight [ __ ] the the uh the RPG was shot up into the AF 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 uh the seals the nightstalkers 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 turb 33 is down think this was going to be this tough um so I look at the colonel and I was Like uh well I'm the qrf sir I'll take the dev grw seals right because the qrf was the typically the The sies Sod of seals and uh so red Squadron meets me at the aircraft we're driving down there and you know bam at the time is this pit of admin you know uh what do you call them fobbits

right never leave the wire you're not wearing your PT belt reflective belt you know you're going to 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 on this little tiny Road and this guy's yelling at me you know slow down stop you getting a ticket I'm like you know flipped on the bird I'm like not today buddy not today right and we could down there the crew chiefs 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 ft it's hot out there's no way I can get them there but now what am I going to do right nobody has any idea and I'm hauling ass and I'm checking in I give 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 going to 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 uh I get about 10 minutes out I call the talk 10 minutes and like abort divert to a jbad we got to we got to 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 uh Frank is the uh troop commander and he's like I guess we're just going to have to go where they got shot down we'll just we rope but we're going to wait till dark right the day is starting to get

you know getting it's Getting on until night and I'm like all right 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 all right 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 and like 17 my

18 against my better judgment 18 right and they're like uh okay right so we're waiting for dark and then I go out to the aircraft brief the crews up what we're going to do and then I get a call somebody brings me back into the talk and it's the BM and they say uh stand down on your infill we're just going to start Red Wings right now and we're going to start it with the dev grw 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's not working remember I talked about the um the disorientation I was able to make it with a Terrain disappeared from the Screen meaning I was high enough I could still do that and they didn't have that capability I'm like you got to let me do this with my two aircraft because

there's no way they're going to even get past aadat you know from jbat they're not going to make it they're going to run into the weather and they're going to have to turn around nope that's what we're doing and I was pissed and uh they came they picked up my seals and off they went and as I sat There looking going they're going to turn around maybe 10 minutes they got about 10 minutes away turn back because they hit that weather and uh I just remember being just furious because I could have got those guys

in it would have made a difference it turns out but we don't know that right and uh I mean in hindsight they were already dead Latrell 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 going to spend the day there you know get through the night see if the weather improves uh we get there it's hot I mean it's miserable hot and tell the colel sir if we're not going to go until night let's go back to bogam 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 and he's like no no the weather might Clear like it's not got to clear so uh eventually it's obvious those guys not going to 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 and I use my body armor as a pillow So eventually we get back to bogam I do a nice plan

where we're going to take two flights of two we're going to come at uh there's three ways into the valley into the cornal right so There's the way that turban 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 one that went off to the West the one 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 echo would come across There while the Delta the two Delta models would come up simultaneously from the other side and we'd land it 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 could go I mean you know you're reverse planning the enemy knows they got to come from

there or they got to come from there which is how they got 3 three in the first place they knew they had to come to that one spot so we rope the guys in and we tell them tall trees going to be 100 foot rope which is a long way as you know and uh so three of the four aircraft rope at 100 fet I come over and the guy I'm not flying I'm I'm the you my co-pilot's flying right heat and we come in we're like 100 ft 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 he's like Al I can't see anything and I 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 the crew chief in the back says sir uh start descending just lower the power lower the power he's like you're off 75 off 50 I'm like are you sure he's said keep coming keep coming sir 10ft hover the guy's rope from 10

feet you know and uh The troop Commander was pissed later on he's like how come everybody else didn't do that you know and I was like uh 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 uh at slabs Medal of Honor ceremony and he brought that up and I said uh well I didn't want to tell you at the time but I'm just a better pilot you know he's like I thought so he like yeah you know I just

had a better crew chief you know which once again I told 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 100 ft 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 two and there's a gap in between giving us time to bring more troops in to look For Kia right so the Rangers and the seals

by the way are trying to walk in but train is just it's hell and uh 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 one night and uh I told the crew I said if you see a strobe light Anywhere and we haven't found everybody we're going to 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 one of the things that happens is the Taliban uses an old-fashioned method of letting people know where you are they turn lights on and they use Morse code or whatever code they're you know [ __ ] 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 did that [ __ ] make you ner I remember flying and seeing that 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 and the Green Beret is the FSF guys told us that yeah that's what 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 switchb 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 that'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 uh and other times I can Trust it 100% so as we flew over I stored the coordinates I pressed the button coordinates are saved in the computer don't see anything don't hear anything in radio so we go back to Bam we park we go down for the day I didn't bring it back because I didn't think it was somebody and uh 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 bogam because I'm not certified with a driver's license for bogam so I go wake a guy up hey you got to take me to the aircraft why I I got to I got to 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 S2 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 IR strobe they one of our strobe lights no [ __ ] and had I gone in to look for it they probably got me or at least got a good shot at me I don't know if they' hit us but uh you know

the SF guys kind of took care of business but that's the kind of thing that's happening and then uh you know the a10s Are flying around all day trying the you know the iso prep cards you know they're talk because the talibans 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 A10 guy would ask the you know question challenge response kind of thing and it would kind of get broken ah questions burned now it 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 one uh and they talked to their friends hey what are something these guys would know that nobody else would know you know like the talaman would couldn't know so they it was like in Bat 21 you know all right what what questions could this guy maybe know but anyway so this is all going on this is over the course of two 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 cuz I know that the Taliban knows I got to come in I got to come in one of these two 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 ft to get out of it and then you know they'd uh 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 sucker hole fly down through it rejoin with me and that's ballsy you know these guys got got guts and um so we're it's obvious there's no survivors at this point and we're going to we're practicing for a um 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 uh lr's init 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 the sort

of stuff but he sends somebody in with his his um what's the uh you got blood Bloodshed right so he sends his number in with the guy it might even been that the guy that made item the guy's name but he walked in to the small fob about that's 10 kmers 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 going to be a Paul Bearer from my NC Tre Ponder who who was on the ramp when the RPG

came up and uh our our captain comes around Al Al you got to 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 grp group of green ra you don't ever hear about these guys it's 361 or 362 I can't remember which one 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 h60s the the Jolly greens came up from Kandahar right the Blackhawks the Air Force uh SAR 60s and um so the guy that's in charge of the rescue operation is a is a

PJ Major Tom is his name and Tom says all right guys we got a lone survivor here we're going to pick him up in this Terrace field right outside this house the 60s are going to go get him and I lost it I was like no Way is the Air Force going to traes 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 down there's no guns there's no equipment it's

empty no armor and I'm like even so and like oh shinook won't fit on that field I'm like absolutely will you know and uh 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 going to get to get them and uh he says Al we still missing another body we still need to bring more Rangers in and you know we're

going to have about a 20-minute window of weather the 60s can't take in Rangers only you can so this is all got to happen in between two storms you know rain Storms I thought about it he was right there was no choice here they had to pick come up so I said all right I'll agree to that but I'm planning the mission and the 60 guys like hell yeah right you know and so uh I had to plan this very very extravagant fires Mission to allow the the 60s to get in un molested because once

again they now knew that we knew where Latrell was we were securing him and they knew we were going to come you Know there was intercepts they knew we were coming so I talked to the ac130 crew you know the pilot and the sensor oper Ator and the uh A10 Pilots we sat down at a table I laid out my map I said here's what I'm trying to do right I want to sequence in the 61st from this direction over here he's going to 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 on the enemy Positions and then two minutes out he's going to call two minutes and you're going to lift and shift fire and what I want is the biggest baddest explosions on a ridgel line 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 Latrell talks about in his book He's oh my

God the explosions were Huge and um 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 temp PL positions and then he calls you know ready to depart they shift fire they blow up another freaking ridg line he goes out I come in they shift fires lift Fires for me I put in the Rangers and this choreography was probably one of the Most beautiful synchronizations I've ever done you know with

a 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 MIM here 25 mm Here we used a 105 on this A1 will drop a 500 pounder 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 two later we found the last body and then started to withdraw everybody and uh took two weeks this the hardest fly of my life and so we get we do a memorial service do are eulogies and uh we're a BM now 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 um when we're done now all the all

the buddies and the Survivor are out of there I walked over between two bee Huts right these plywood buildings in the shadows I put my back against it slid down [Music] and just Cried you know I finally was able to but let it go and uh 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 one of the crew chiefs one of the junior E4 right and we're stopped in Amsterdam for uh waiting a flight I like hey let me buy you a buy you a

beer right so we sit down and he's like sir I got to 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 uh 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 all right well a leadership lesson for you sometimes you just got to do you know you got to put on that

face and uh you know I was able to cry about it afterwards but uh man that was tough toughest tough fly I ever did damn Al yeah so luckily you know I mentioned I uh for years I've been trying to meet Marcus uh we just have cross paths and I finally connected with him and I'm going to meet him uh next month good for you it might be before this this podcast here but it'll be fun I really want to want to see him want to 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 but I Just I just want to show you something and uh I've never brought this up before but uh if you look back there at that flag that is um I got that from my best friend and uh his name was Gabe aardi and uh those were those were his teammates uh bals that went down in turban 33 and uh he was On part of that recovery op and uh it's my understanding that the Rangers secured the crash site

am I correct on that the crash yeah and he was good friends with one of those Rangers and um if you look below golf 12 there's a belt of 60 ammo mhm and that came out of turban 33 and uh that Ranger gave it to Gabe mhm and told him That um that was the only thing that wasn't burnt up in that crash yeah it was bad the um so Trey my good friend he sat you know this far away from me you know at back at home at our desks and uh his wife Leslie

is great she lives here in this area and um she asked me for a piece of the aircraft so I asked somebody and Rangers gave me a piece of uh this little Bracket I didn't know what it went to right it just was a a sheet metal bracket was burned 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 uh you know the foot pedals and there's like little slides for your heels to go back and forth and it's was

just not paying attention and I look 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 the mountain side was just it it just tore me up and I just looked at it and like damn I was like hey man I I'm I'm incapacitated for a minute he's like what's up I's like I can't talk you know a couple minutes later I was able to say yeah that's that you know but uh you know it's the kind Of it's

the risk we take you know I mean look at extortion you know yeah is 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 air crew 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 um the uh the people I worked with you know the ground forces were amazing the air crew uh 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 want to go down that path at this point I'd like to to end on a note of you know you know the nightstalker Creed you know the very first thing you know it's Like uh or the I'm sorry last Creed part is uh you know I serve with a memory that those who have come before for they love to fight fought to win and rather die than quit and That's it man Al you're

a hell of a dude man ah well this was fun you know it's too bad we get we got to talk about the the other thing first but uh maybe another time I'll tell you the Sante story but uh it's a little bit lighthearted but This is good man um thank you for being here brother thanks for having me and uh it's man that was heavy and um man I'm just really happy that we met and uh same I'm honored and uh I hope to see you again man I'm sure you will tomorrow even y

you're right we will I will see you tomorrow at the all secure Foundation event but um you know for a guy that's been through so Much you seem to be in great spirits and um I don't know maybe uh no and I am and and I tribute that 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 I'm watching the birds do their thing and it's like oh the geese they're like Shinu oh watch them do their thing you know and then the wood ducks they're like Blackhawks 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 going to 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 uh he's gone all right 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 uh listen I enjoyed it I mean 17 years in the 160th and uh finishing up the way it is now and uh 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 uh therapeutic I don't know I'd say It was 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 uh but you know the nightstalkers are an amaz amazing organization and they support some of the best ground forces in the world and they PR themselves on that they do it was an honor to uh 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 seriously [Music] no matter where you're watching Shan Ryan Show from if you get anything out of this please like comment subscribe and most importantly share this everywhere you possibly can and if you're feeling extra generous please leave us review on Apple and Spotify podcasts