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

Alan Mack, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me.
It's my pleasure. So, first helicopter pilot on the show from Night Stalker TF-160.
Man, I've been wanting to get one of you guys for a long time, and then we connected, what, about two years ago? About a year and a half. a year and a half ago

and then

for whatever reason, the conversation kind of fell off. But now you're here.
And, man, I'm pumped. And glad to be.
We've had a ton of requests for TF160th, guys. So thank you for making the trip.
Glad to be here. That's all I can say.
But yeah, so everybody starts off with an intro. So, man, you've been a part of like so much history, high profile missions in the GWAT.
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 very apparent we have a lot of mutual friends.

It's like I've blown up.

Hey, you got to get this guy on the show.

But I just, I can't wait to get another perspective

and I want to dig into your training and all that stuff

and get the life of a Night Stalker documented. But quick rundown of your intro.
You've served more than 35 years, 17 of which were served in Army Special Operations as a combat and instructor pilot, entrusted with the United States Military Academy Flight Detachment at West Point, New York, logged more than 6,700 flying hours, 3,200 with night vision goggles. Taken part in Operation Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and was a major factor in the global war on terror.
Flew MH-47s while assigned to 160th SOAR, the Army's only special operations aviation regiment. Your crew was one of the first into Afghanistan and the first into Mazar Sharif as part of America's response to the attacks on 9-11.
Highly decorated, receiving the Legion of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Star Medals, three Meritorious Service Medals, ten Air Medals, one with Valor, Combat Action Badge, and the Army Broken Wing Award. Now you serve your local government as Deputy Commissioner of Emergency Services for Orange County, New York.
You're the author of Razor 03, A Night Stalker's Wars. And you have another book coming out, from my understanding, from We're Spoken Breakfast.
Do you have a title for that one yet? The working title is Chinooks in the Dark, and I'm not sure what the subtitle is. Nice.
And you're a husband, a father, a stepdad, and a grandfather, and a man of faith. And a pet parent.
And a pet parent. What kind of pet? He's a Jacoby, a Jack Russell Beagle mix.
Nice. Nice.
But quite the career, man. And then just going through the outline.

Wow.

Just some of the stuff you've been a part of.

I'm just going to read some of the stuff, man.

But horse soldier infill, ODA 595, shot down during Operation Anticonda.

You're on the rescue op for Marcus Luttrell's loneone Survivor, also known as for Military Folks, Operation Red Wing, and tons more.

But man, we got a lot to talk about, man.

So before we get too in the weeds, though, everybody gets a gift.

Maybe this is the only reason you're here.

I don't know.

I wouldn't blame you if it was. Ah, the Vigilance Elite Gummies.
Vigilance Elite Gummies. These are great.
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.
It 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.
And, you know, like any good house guest, you know, I got to bring a housewarming gift. I don't have gummies, but what I've got is a coin.
And I had that made when the book came out.

The front of that's an attitude indicator

because I believe everything in life is about attitude.

And that's a positive attitude, by the way, there.

Man, thank you.

That'll go great right there.

Cool.

With 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. They're our top supporters.
They've been with us since the beginning. They're the reason I get to do this and you get to be here.
and part of the thing that I promised them

is they get the opportunity to ask a guest a question. And so this is from Steven Casey.
They know about you. So 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. You know, family's always been a big part of my life.
And as we get into the interview, you'll find out that, you know, it wasn't always the priority. And, you know, I had to make some adjustments to that.
And, you know, part of what made us stronger, like especially my relationship with my sons, was spending time together and prioritizing that for sure. But sometimes the job took priority over even that.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. How did you find a way? What was your cue? You know, really it was my wife.
So she had her own problems, but she made sure that my sons and I had a good relationship. So whether it was, and I remember when my kids were young, there was no internet to speak of, unless you were on AOL or CompuServe.
So it wasn't like just pulling your phone out. So she would shove us out the door and say, 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, whether it was taking the boat out or hiking or some kind of sports or something like that. So really putting that effort into my sons was the key to everything.
You and your sons still pretty close? Very close, yeah. That's good to hear, man.
Yeah. That's good to hear.
Well, you ready to dig in? I'm ready. Let's go.
All right, man. So we're going to do the typical military life story.
And so we'll go through childhood, get into your military career, get into some transition stuff, and then that'll be it. All right.
But so where did you grow up? So I was born in New Hampshire, coastal New Hampshire. So I grew up in Portsmouth, which is right by the Navy base there.
There's a submarine base right on the end of the river. And I like to consider myself sort of a free-range teenager at the time, you know, because once again, there's no internet, no cell phones.
So, you know, my parents would open the door. I'd go out with my friends.

We'd jump on our 10 speeds and ride.

I think we had a range of operations, about 20 miles.

And, you know, we'd go to the beach.

We'd go to, you know, out in the woods,

whatever trouble you can get into in coastal New England.

I was not a bad kid by any means.

Never got in trouble.

You know, nothing, you know, nothing bad.

But, yeah, we'd go to, you know, toilet paper houses. not a bad kid by any means.
Never got in trouble. Nothing bad.
But

we'd go to toilet paper houses,

that kind of thing at night. That was the extent

of our

life of crime, if you will.

Close with your parents?

Yeah. My dad passed away

in 06.

He went to sleep.

Sat down in his recliner. Went to sleep.
Didn't wake up the next day. And I kind of think if you're not going to go out in a ball of flame instantly then in your sleep in your favorite chair, not a bad way to go.
Yeah. Yeah, my mother's still up in New Hampshire.

She's a local artist.

You know, she paints, does some wonderful work.

My brother's up there.

And that's kind of the extent of my family, really.

My grandparents are all gone.

Right on.

What kind of stuff were you into as a kid?

Well, as really high school is the first I could think of something I could talk about, and that's really cross country and track were my big things, right? So I did cross country in the fall, winter track, which in New England, you're doing indoors, right? We did that at the University of New Hampshire. And then in the spring, you had spring track.
And I was generally a miler. Wasn't very fast.
I ran about 445, 440 for a mile. You don't think 445 is a fast mile? Well, there were guys that were way faster than me.
So that's pretty good. And I tried my hand at the hurdles, but I really didn't have the speed in the short term.
So I could do like the 330 intermediates, which is a long, grueling race.

But at the very end, when I was a senior, I trained for the decathlon.

And I learned to pull vault for the discus, stuff like that.

And I actually jumped, I don't know, like 12 feet, something like that, in my training jumps. And the coach is looking at me like, I think we missed you in some events.
I was like, I don't know. But it was a lot of fun.
Life revolved around my friends in track. 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 Hueys zipping across the screen.
And I was like, I want to do that. Remember the TV guide when you were a kid? You had the little paper magazine, what's on TV? And in it was an insert for the Army recruiting.
So I filled it out, and I sent it in., I want to be a pilot and I must have been 10, maybe 11. And the recruiter sends me a handwritten letter back, a bag full of stickers and stuff like that.
And he's like, hey, look, I see by your birthday, you're not quite old enough to talk to me, but keep that thought alive and call me back when you're 18. Fast forward a number of years.
I'm in high school. I'd forgotten about the Army thing.
My senior year, I'm planning on following on to college in New Hampshire. And I've got a guy who's going to be a roommate, the whole thing.
And I start thinking, you know, this is in the fall of 1980. And I'm thinking, if I go to school, I'm just 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. 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 comes in, oh, is it the Army can do all this stuff? You can go to Germany, you know, which was West Germany at the time.
And I was like, you know, I always wanted to fly helicopters. And I saw a commercial.
Remember those 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 W-1. The warrant officer ranks are one through five now.
And he's in a Cobra helicopter zipping around, you know, and they finish up. And the senior guy is like, not bad for a rookie, you know.
And I'm like, that's what I want to do. So I go into the Army recruiter that my friend had been to.
I'm like, I want to fly helicopters. And he's like, hold on now.
And I saw it on TV. You can go from high school to flight school.
And he's like, pump the brakes turbo. It doesn't really work like that.
And he's like, you know, you 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,

you know,

do two, three years, learn the culture, the lingo, learn about the aircraft,

you know, all that kind of stuff,

and then put it for flight school,

and it's much easier to get in. Now,

that statement is

twofold. One, the recruiter

doesn't get credit for officer

candidates at all, right? So even if he got meiter doesn't get credit for officer candidates at all.

So even if he got me, he gets no credit for it.

May or may not have been able to do it, who knows.

But he did put me into Army Aviation

as an aircraft mechanic,

worked on Hueys, Cobras, 58s.

And it turns out it was good advice.

And I did nine years. I reached the rank of

Staff Sergeant E6 in the Army. I was in Germany, West Germany at the time.
And I decided I was

going to get out of the Army, but I really wanted to fly. So I put in a packet.

Yep. So I had two kids, little kids.
And my wife, Linda at the time, was a medical assistant. And I thought, you know, they're just going to send me back to Fort Bliss, El Paso, which I didn't want to do.
And so I said, you know what? Why don't we get out? But I'll put in for flight school first. If I get picked up, we stay.
If not, we get out. And so I got picked up, which was amazing.
So I did almost four years in West Germany and off to Fort Rucker, Alabama. But that's how I got interested, really, was the be all you can be commercials and the evening news.

What took you so long to, I mean, if you joined a fly,

why did it take you nine years to put your package in?

Because, so my first assignment was to South Korea,

which is a whole other story we might get into later

because that was a military junta ran it then. It wasn't a democracy.
And I went back many years later and it was a big improvement. But so a year on a company there, I go to Fort Bliss, Texas, where I meet my future B-wife, Linda, do three, three and a half years there.
And then I go to Germany on a three-year accompanied assignment. So we get there, have our two sons, and now the timing is that, and then flight school is almost a year long, so I count that in the nine years, and that's why.
Right on, right on. Did you know what you wanted to fly when you put the package in? I wanted to fly Hueys.
Hueys. Because what I wanted to do was assault, right? Think of, you know, back then it was the Air Cav, you know, doing the big, big, you know, multi-ship assaults.
And so that's what I wanted to do. And the Black Hawk was just coming out.
As a matter of fact, in my class, we had like 72 students, I think, to start with. And 20, like 30 of us got Hueys.
10 of us got Cobras. And then most of the others got 50.
And there were only six Blackhawk slots. So that's how new the Blackhawks were, showing my age.
But, yeah, so I learned to fly Hueys. So what did you, all right, so what did you get to fly? Well, I learned in UH-1 Hueys, by the end of class, so you know what's happening to the airlines right now where the pilots are aging out, right? They're hitting age 65 and they can't by law fly.
Well, in the Army, Chinook pilots, a Chinook transition is considered a reward, right? So remember the Vietnam War had been going on. Guys were flying Hueys, doing the assault work.
If you survived it and got back and then they wanted to send you back, the reward was you could transition to a Chinook, right? So now you're not necessarily doing assault work. You're still flying around Vietnam, you know, carrying artillery and supplies and all that kind of stuff, but you're not really doing assault work.
So it's considered, and it's an advanced aircraft. So it's considered a reward.
So if you think of like that Vietnam timeframe, 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.

It's very senior heavy rank.

The Army realized they had to generate from the bottom up,

so they're going to take W-1s.

Once again, you go W-01, CW-2, CW-3, CW-4, and now CW-5,

which is a relatively new rank. But at the time, it was CW-4 was the senior guys.
So how are you going to replace those guys? The Army's plan was to take W-1s out of flight school and inject them in while you still had senior people to mentor them. But who do you take? 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. Like high school, grade point? No, no, flight school.
Flight school, grade point average. So you get graded on your academics, your participation, your flying.
Each flight gets a grade slip with a numerical grade, and 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, and there's 72 of us, but if you're in the top five, 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.3, that kind of thing. And we're competing, right? And every time you get your exams back, you're like, oh, man, that guy, he got like 0.1 above me.
He just moved up. And so it turned out that I was number one in the class.
And a good story here about never quitting is that one of the guys I was competing with, if you will, when the assignments came out, they did not give us choice. And we all got shoved off in Huey's, all those top guys.
And he got mad. And I want to say he quit, but he stopped trying, right?

So he studied enough.

He did what he had to do, but he quit.

He dropped from being in 98-point something to, you know, 88-point something, right?

So instead of going from an A, he went to a B kind of thing.

And then toward the end, what I just talked about, the Chinook thing,

the Army said, okay, we're going to do two slots from your class, get Chinooks.

So two pilots will get Chinooks.

And we're going to take the number one and two guy.

And I happened 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 classroom.

He's like, damn it, I shouldn't have quit.

And it's like, good point, buddy.

And I remember to this day, I use that lesson on my kids and tell them, it's like, don't get mad

that you didn't get the job you wanted.

Don't get mad that you didn't get this or that.

Things always work out.

They just do.

Don't give up.

So you wanted a Chinook?

I didn't.

I was actually mad that I got it.

Really? Yeah, because remember I said I wanted to be salt work, right? And I'm like, a Chinook? That's bull. It's going to be like flying from airport to airport.
That's going to suck. And the instructors, all retired warrant officers, all older guys, they're like, slap me in the back of the head, right? They're like, you idiot.
Shut your mouth and take the slot, right? And I'm like, but I want to fly Hueys.

And they're like, Hueys are going away. Trust me, take the Chinook, right?

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Make sure you do everything in your power to help protect what's yours. 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 on the planet, let alone the U.S.
Army. It's very powerful, and it's no harder to fly than a Huey.
But, you, but there's a whole now conversation on that.

But that's how I ended up flying Chinooks, learned on Hueys, transitioned into CH-47 Deltas just before Desert Shield. And then I flew in there, and then I ended up instructing in those, and then we get into the 160th 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.
But at the time, what you did is you first went to walk school, Warn Officer Candidate School. And that was like eight weeks of, we start out with, you know, you did Hell Week.
We had like Hell Day, you know, and it was tough. And I remember the little head game they played was they, you know, they came in, you beat to hell and they'd say, okay, somebody yells in the room, you know, 20%, got it.
And then like, we just got off the phone with the secretary of the army. You know, we have to lose 20% of you because of budget cuts.
So we're just going to do Hell Day every day until 20% of you quit, right? And I'm like, well, I'm not quitting. You're going to have to throw me out of here.
And there were guys. It was like one guy got up and walked out.
So it worked. I was like, all right, he didn't want to be here.
What does Hell Day consist of? It's like crawling through the mud pits and push-ups and mountain climbers and just burning you out physically.

Just a beat down.

Yeah, it's a beat down.

And it is not pleasant, to say the least, especially for Army aviators

or guys that want to be.

And these guys, the TAC officers, are walking around,

just like the guys at Budge. Except you know, they're 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 an E7.
You know, there were guys that were E7s there. It's like, you're an E7.
You had a good life. Why do you want to do this, you know? And they right, screw it.
I quit. And guys would just do that.
And I don't know, four or five guys quit during it and that one guy in the meeting. And they do that to you, not to that extent, but for the next eight weeks because you're not flying.
So you're doing what we call cubing, right? So you have a cubicle, right? You have your bunk, a desk, a locker. And every morning when you get up, you have, I don't know, 10 minutes to have your bunk with a white collar on it and your coat hangers to be exact.
You know the deal, like any NCO school you've been to. And 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 got like an hour that was personal time.

Now you're repairing the damage they did as opposed to just adjusting things.

And it's a head game.

It's a little bit of hazing, really.

But it does go to show who Army warrant officers are in my age group, you know, why we're such assholes. But anyway, so you do that.
And then when you're done, you move on to, so that's A company. And you move on to B company.
And that's primary flight, which is where you learn to fly.

Depending on what they call the bubble,

where the schedule is for classes

based on aircraft maintenance, weather, that kind of stuff.

You might roll right through.

You might go from A company to B company

and roll right into C company seven months later.

Or you could have two weeks of rain that 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 polishing brass, and you're doing just things to keep you busy, painting rocks, that kind of stuff. Or you might be working at one of the facilities on post.

Think of it like a detailer, giving you a temporary assignment. I actually worked at the museum for a couple of weeks, which was pretty good.
Because I was an aircraft mechanic, I helped them with some of the displays as they were setting them up. But that's how you get into the flying.
And then when you're in... How, just real quick, how long does it take, let's say there's no weather delays or anything, how long does it take from day one of flight school before you're in the air during a helicopter? I'd 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 TH-55, which was a little two-seater, a little bug-looking thing that it was just you and your instructor. And when you picked up to a hover, when you pull power, the nose wants to go to the right and you have to give it left pedal to keep it in heading.
And in a modern helicopter, the engines keep pace with the rotors. And back then in this thing, you had to like control the throttle at the same time.
So it was an additional thing. I got lucky in that it went away and they had just transitioned into Huey's as the primary trainer, which I weren't fly anyway.
So I get into this thing, and they take you out to the stage field. There's Hueys all over the place, just flying around, hovering, doing their thing.
And the instructor's like, all right, here's what you do. You have the controls.
I have the controls. And then you just, you know, you go off and whatever, right? I mean, you can't hover, right? And that's the very first, it's insane because, you know, when you go to bed at night, so you have a stick buddy, right? So when, a partner, right? So when he's flying, you're in the back.
And when you're flying, he's in the back, right? So not only are you there for your flight period, but you're in the back going up and down and left and right. And just your inner ear is getting all, you know, discombobulated, right? So at night when you went to bed, 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, three foot hover, you know, you don't drift in.
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 period is about an hour and a half. So it takes a couple of flights.
And, you know, when you're like the last guy, you're feeling like, what, am I incompetent? I can't do this. Maybe I'm not, you know, a pilot, right? And then you just, one day you find yourself hovering.
You know, they're like, hey, you have the controls. I have the controls.
Hey, you're hovering. Wow, I'm hovering, right? And once you learn, it's like riding a bike.
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'll say, you know, the.
So literally the first thing you do is just try to learn how to hover. For like, I don't know, three, four days, five days maybe if you're late.
How many helicopters are up at once trying to hover? 20. Oh my gosh.
It's insane. You could go there.
That has to look hilarious. Every stage field has a set of bleachers, right? And people, locals, would just pull up.
There was no fences. You just pull up, get on the bleacher, you know, your hot cocoa, whatever, depending on the time of year, and iced tea, and just watch the students, you know, going nuts.
And then what happens, though, with the traffic pattern and stuff is you start including emergency procedures. Now, these are, like, in the Huey, you know, hydraulics out, so the aircraft's very difficult to fly, and you have to kind of run it on to land.
You have tail rotor malfunctions where you have to control the yaw of the aircraft as you're coming in. As you change power, you have to adjust the throttle to keep the nose straight as you touch down.
Auto rotations, right? So it's a single engine aircraft, the Huey. So the instructor will roll the throttle off on you.
You're just flying along, you know, and he rolls throttle off to idle, and you no longer have lift, right? So now you lower the collective, takes all the pitch out of the blades, and you descend like a rock, right? But the rotors are still spinning, right? And you have to keep the rotor RPM between 97% and 101%. In order to do that, you 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, last like 75 feet, you flare. Now you pull in the power, you put the pitch in the blades, and you're using one chance to cushion that baby on.
And we call them crash bangs, right? You're doing that all day long, right? And then eventually they deem you safe enough to solo, right? So back in the, in the 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 yeah, so you, you You do a couple of traffic patterns. I think it was five traffic patterns by yourself.
The instructor gets back in, and you're like, all right, you soloed. The last guy to solo of the class is like, you know, it's, there was a name for it, I can't remember.
But you had to ride. We had this ceremony.
It was like pitch pictures of beer, and everybody lined in front of the building, the barracks, you know, and it looked like a stage field, the markings were like, you know, painted on just as if it were stage field, and that guy would ride a thing called the solo cycle, so it was a bicycle that somebody had engineered, you know, it had rotor blades, and when you drove it, you know, when you pedaled, the blades spun, right? Oh, man. Do you have a picture of this? I don't have a picture of that anymore.
Oh, man. That's awesome.
And then you get your solo wings, which is like these cloth wings that get sewn on your hat. Each class has a color.
And back then, they don't do it anymore, but each class had a baseball cap. We were royal blue.
And you had that sewn on so you could see who was a real pilot now, sort of, within the context of flight school. Nice.
And so, yeah, so then you move on from that. You move up, you take your final check ride in primary, and you move on to advanced skills, which is Charlie Company.
And there, this was a lot of fun, actually. Now you're doing terrain flight navigation.
You've got a handheld map, right? And this is where you, I call it the bus driver move, right, where you're trying to make the map meet the terrain because you get lost. And it's like, oh, there's a stream over there.
No, wait, that's a stream. And you move, you know, it's like a guy driving a big bus, you know.
And so you learn to do that and to fly, and that's a lot of fun, actually. And you finish that up with a great big exercise where, like, the Cobras come in and the Hueys, and it's a big, they call it an AVTAC.
I don't remember what that stood for, but it was a big, big event. It was really cool.
And then you moved into Knights. What's the, I mean, what's the field exercise? What's the? It was like we all flew out to an assembly area, right? And we went in and got a briefing from, you know, the cadre playing the mission.
So it was, you know, 20 Hueys flying in one big-ass formation, like something out of Apocalypse Now, you know, and the Cobras would roll in and do the gun runs, and the OH-58s would do, you know, call in the spot reports and all that stuff, and we would all do this. And we're a bunch of, we're not even W-1s yet, we're still walks, we're officer candidates.
You know, and the instructors are obviously having fun because they're showing off, you know, their students can do this and that. And it was a lot of fun.
I don't think they do that anymore. It's probably very risky when you think about what they were doing.
All these aircraft in one little area, synchronized. I mean, this is advanced stuff.
Yeah. And they allowed us to do that.
How far into training is that? That's several months in. That's got to be five, six months in.

Okay.

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, traffic patterns, you do auto rotations,

emergency procedures, all that stuff with goggles.

And when I was in there, we had,

the Army had just transitioned from what we call full-face fives, right? So Anvus fives or PVS fives, whatever they were. And they used to be like a- Are you talking about the mono? No, no, they're binoculars, but they are like a rectangle.
Oh, these are like the thing that the eyeglass doctor used. Put them on your face, right? Like a diving mask.
Think of a diving mask where it's just got toilet paper tubes sticking out of it, right? And everything else is black. That's what they started with.
And I got there. Somebody in the Army had figured out that if you took a saw, you know, and you cut one half of the MBG away, the plastic housing, turned it upside down.
You could stick the lip of it without the foam up into your helmet where the 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 it's way out here like this.
And you had to, when you did it on a rotation, when you dropped the power, 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.
Wait, what do you mean? So there's two big needles, right? Big needles? Needles, like gauges. Okay.
Right? So one of them is the rotor, and one of them is the engine. Okay.
So whenever you pull or reduce power, they should work together, right? So that means the engine is driving the rotors, which is good. But if for some reason there's a clutch, it's called a Sprag clutch.
It's a one-way clutch. And if the engine rolls off, it's supposed to freewheel, allowing the rotors to spin.
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 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 focus one tube inside of 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 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 an inch, inch and a half long. You'd break those and you'd tape them into place over key instruments.
And you had what was called blind cockpit drill. So every switch in the cockpit, you had to be able to find without looking at it because you've got these things on your face.
And so you do that. And then you go do terrain flight that way and terrain flight navigation.
And so you're doing this whole progression. And what's interesting is the students from my timeframe were kind of like the first ones to do this, not literally the first, but that first year.
And so when you get to your unit, all the old guys don't want to do it. They're qualified to do it, but they're not proficient at it and they don't want to do it.
And that's a 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 unaided nights as well they call it nighthawk so we'd you'd fly it in 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, and this is what the guys in Vietnam used to do.
You'd fly in the dark without being able to see. You'd get to your fix, or maybe a Sandy would put a rocket down for you, and you'd go, ah, that's the LZ, right? And you'd go in there with a white searchlight on.
And it can be tough. And we did stuff without the searchlight.
And they'd have chem lights 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 object.
And you would hold off on the descent until you could see it again, and you go in. And it's funny, because that's kind of a lost art now with everybody being so used to goggles.
Interesting. Yeah.
Interesting. And that finishes up flight school.
What did you find to be the most challenging portion of flight school? Night vision hovering. Because you had to maintain a three-foot hover and you did that you didn't have a radar altimeter right that took 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 meant you were higher than three feet feet and you wanted to get down just enough so the individual blades of grass stood out and that's like three feet.
How the, hold on, how the hell do you see individual blades of grass when the rotors are? Oh, they're blowing all over the place, you know, but you can. Damn.
But, you know, with that being said, this is why flying in the desert is so tough because there's no texture. Well, I take that back.
The NTC, National Training Center out of Fort Irwin, California, is a different kind of desert. It's not like Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia and Iraq are very, you know, Saudi's got those smooth, beautiful dunes like you see in Lawrence of Arabia. In Iraq, it's of flattish with some rocks occasionally but it's not scrubby like the NTC, right? So the army kind of gave itself a false sense of security and how well we could fly in the desert because, oh, it's not that hard, right? Then you get over to the Saudi desert it's like flying in snow when you come into a hover because you look out, you can't see individual grains of sand.
So it's tough. But I found the hardest part of that was the, they call it the OGE 360 hover.
So you get an out-of-ground effect. So it's about 80 feet.
I guess about 60 feet. So you're higher than the trees.
It's dark. There's no moon.
And you have to do a 360-degree turn, a pedal turn, right? So the aircraft will pivot and you've got to start on one heading, end on that heading, and be at the exact same altitude when you finish. And you've 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.

And he's like, ah, dude, you drifted 20 feet. So that was tough.
I had a hard time with that. I'll bet.
I'll bet. Let's go into, I mean, graduation.
So you graduated the number one. Yep.
Yep. So I've got a distinguished undergrad 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 emphasize is that you are a soldier.
Not that you're a pilot, not that you're an officer, you're a soldier, right? And then I can't remember what ceremony they did for that, but it was specific to being a soldier. And then like the next day, you got pinned, your bars, right? And then the next day, they did a wing ceremony.
You got your wings, right? So they wanted to emphasize you were a soldier, an officer, and a pilot. The rest of us were like, no, we're pilots.
But that's what the Army wanted us to be. Yeah.

How did it feel for you?

I mean, you wanted to fly since, I think you said six years old.

Yeah, six. You put your package in to enlist as a pilot at age 10,

and now you're graduating Honor Grad.

It was awesome.

I mean, I loved it.

And then I left that.

So two weeks later, I was in the Chinook transition

and I learned how to fly a Chinook.

That was six to eight weeks.

I mean, how hard is it to learn

to go from a Huey to

a Chinook? It wasn't that hard.

Like flying,

so, you know, we joke about the

Chinook being 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.

Actually, the SEALs used to call us

Thank you. Chinook being the double-headed dumpster, right? It's like a dumpster with two palm trees having a fight or a Greyhound bus kind of thing.
Actually, the SEALs used to call us the black school bus of death when we were going to the X. But 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 frigging magic. You know, 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 twin engine.
So it's two engines and you have to practice with losing an engine. And then there's other malfunctions, high side, low side, things like that that you just have to learn.
You get proficient at it and you start out with rote memory. So you memorize the steps in a checklist and when something happens you literally go down the steps.
And as you get through the course, you start responding to the indications versus, oh, the rotor's low. I know I have to lower the thrust or the collective, the power.
And you just learn all that. And then you do nights there as well with the Chinooks doing external loads.
You have to learn how to do sling loads. And it was fun.
What's 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 Chinooks, and then when I flew it the first time or two, it was like, hey, this is awesome.
Because it's just as maneuverable. It has all the same aerodynamic limitations.
And it's faster and stronger. We routinely outraced Cobras and Apaches coming back at the end of the day.
They'd be like, we'd converge on the corridor that brought us to the home stage field. And, you know, we just click the power a little bit with your thumb and the cyclic would move forward.
And the aircraft would just accelerate, you know, and just leave them in the dust, you know. And the Apaches couldn't keep up.
The Cobras couldn't keep up. And they always thought they were fast, you know.
So it was fun. You know, my instructor was 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 showing.
Very cool. But.
So were you one of the first 47 pilots in the Army? No. One of the first W-1s.
Okay. To fly Chinooks.
So. How long had they been around? W-1s? Chinooks.
Oh, Chinooks. They, I want to say 1958 for the A model.
And that's what the 101st Airborne was originally the 11th air assault test. And what they had to do was prove the air assault concept, air mobility, was a feasible concept.
And they needed the Chinook to make that happen. So in order to move all these troops around Vietnam, not only do you need the Hueys, but you need gunship support, which was Hueys that were armed.
And then you had to move the artillery and supplies and things like that. So you needed the Chinook.
You needed the actual capability of the Chinook, which is funny because the A model, a Blackhawk today can lift more than an A model Chinook. So you could have done the 101st with Blackhawks had they existed 30 years earlier.
But yeah, so there was a poster that Boeing put out when the Delta model came out, right? So there's A, B, C, D, there's an F and a G. And it said the silhouette, only the silhouette remains the same, right? So you get that, the double-headed dumpster on the outside, but the engines are beefed up, the transmissions, the drivetrain, the avionics, you know, so all and the electronics just improved with each version.
So a D model, which is what I flew in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, was about $18.5 a copy, $18 million a copy. And when I flew the G model, which was the last version I flew, those were $62 million apiece.
That's more than a fighter jet, like an F-16. Wow.
It's because of the advanced capabilities. Gotcha.
Do you think that being a flight mechanic helped you with flight school? Oh, yeah. Especially because I worked on Hueys.
So the reason I had such a high grade point average, I think, is because when my peers had to study aircraft systems, I already knew them. I just had to touch over what kind of data they probably wanted for the answers for the test.
And I could study things like aeromed, hypoxia, spatial disorientation, that kind of stuff, aviation regulations. So I got to study all this stuff.
The other guys had to split that time, so it helped a lot. What did you say? Spatial what? Spatial disorientation.
What is that? So there are illusions, right?

And now you're testing my AeroMed, right?

Vestibular illusions, which I believe are up in your ear, right? So you can feel like a lot of times what happens is if an airplane gets in a spin, right?

They call it a graveyard spiral.

You get in a spin, and when you go to pull out of the spin, you turn into it.

You feel like you've spun in the other direction because inside your ears are these little hairs, right?

Thank you. You get in the spin, and when you go to pull out of the spin, you turn into it, you feel like you've spun in the other direction because inside your ears are these little hairs, right, in your semicircular canals.
That's where your balance comes from. And so sometimes when you have an ear infection, that's why you might lose your balance a little bit, and there's those.
And then there's visual illusions, things like, have you ever been on a stoplight in your car, and you think you're rolling, but it's the guy beside you backing up or going forward? That's one of the illusions, right? Reverse perspective illusion. And then, you know, over the water is where it's really dangerous.
If you don't have a horizon, you know, you get, I can't remember all that. It was like 20 different illusions you can get.
But you have to learn them and how to get out of them, like to recognize that you've got it or that somebody else has it and then correct for it. Man, so that would scare the shit out of me.
So they put you in these situations where you actually feel the illusion? Yeah. Yeah, they have a chair, like a chair.
I don't know how to describe it. You sit in this chair, you strap in, and it's like a gyroscope.
Okay. First they get it spinning, and you're sitting there, and then they engage it, and the chair goes around, and then you spin upside down and all this other stuff.
And then they stop you, and you have a set of controls, and you're supposed to move the controls to make some indication, like maybe a marble or something like that is in this flat panel. There's like little cables.
I mean, this is very primitive, but it worked. And you'd have to center 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 and around and around and 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 it almost killed us.
And it did kill some friends. Oh, man.
And it was a conventional unit, a Chinook that was in Afghanistan, had to be in 2002, 2003, and they were flying daylight, ran into a sandstorm, couldn't see out the window, so they climbed up to what they considered a safe altitude, and they got spatial disorientation, and they literally rolled that aircraft upside down, pulled the blades off, essentially, and fell to their deaths, you know, head first. Holy shit.
So it's very dangerous, and it's one of those things that everybody pays very close attention to. Yeah, I can imagine.
Do they simulate it in the bird? They try to. It's hard.
They do? Or in the simulator. They'll put you in situations where the aircraft gets into an unusual attitude.

So it's called unusual attitude recovery.

So they'll put the aircraft in some weird situation.

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. 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 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 people puke. It's like...
So you have to learn to do that because the basics will kill you. Yeah.
We talk about the ground. Let's talk about, I mean, since we're on the subject, let's talk about one of the instances where you felt the illusion in the real world.
So I'm in Afghanistan. I've been there a couple of years.
This is probably 05. And we're at a place called Salerna, right? It's Eastern Afghanistan.
And we're coming back from a mission. And it's late.
We're exhausted. We'd been putting the Rangers up in the KG Pass.
And the weather rolled in, and it was raining really hard. As we're crossing back over the mountains to get back to Bagram, you know, the rain is just coming down, and you can't see out the window.
Now, we've got a terrain-following radar, but the radar has limitations when it comes to rain, precipitation, right? If it's too dense, it sees it as an obstacle and tries to climb you over it. Well, a rainstorm might be 60,000 feet and you're not doing that in a Chinook.
We'll go to maybe 20, 25 if we're stripped down, but you're not getting to 60. So we're flying through the mountain.
We've got terrain on both sides. Rain comes down.
Like it's not raining when we enter the mountains. And then just down it comes, right? And my buddy's flying, Rich, and he says, Al, I'm getting vertigo.
And I'm like, well, you know, suck it up, dude. We still got another 10 minutes here in the mountains.
You got to hang on, right? And he's like, we can barely see the terrain through the bottom plexiglass. And I'm like, you got to just, and we're following, we've got what we call the HSD, right? It's a horizontal situation display.
So it's like a compass rose with a course line, like you might see in Waze, really, but you get the compass on there. And he's like, oh, I can't do it.
And the aircraft starts to veer toward 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, there was something, there was a component that was bad.
And some of the, this is where these automated systems sometimes can bite you. And the aircraft's trying to put us, it says we're level, but it doesn't feel like we're level.
And we weren't, you know, and I could see that. So I had differing instrumentation, right? So we have an old standby, right? Something from the 1950s in the center console, right? And it's saying I'm going to turn.
The other thing says I'm level. So now I've got to figure out which one to follow.
And then... How do you figure that out? You've got to look at all the other secondary instruments.
So there's a wet compass, you know, and is it moving? You know, because if you're in a turn, it's moving. And you can also look at the compass rows itself, if it's moving and the attitude indicator is different.
So you've got to look at what we call your secondary instruments. So the primaries, the attitude indicator, like that coin I gave you, that's a primary instrument.
And all the secondaries just kind of confirm or deny what you're seeing. And you can fly with just secondary instruments.
It's not fun, but you can do it. So here we are.
Maybe I'm on the controls maybe a minute, and I'm getting ready to throw up. It's like I'm losing my balance.
Nothing's making right. We are climbing now because we can't see out the window.
So we get all power in. We're climbing at about 3,000 foot a minute, which is pretty fast for a helicopter that's heavy.
And we did have the benefit of height above terrain. So remember I said that you get the compass rose, you get the course line.
And then if there's terrain around you that's at your altitude or above, the screen is red, right? You can see where it is, right? And it was all red in the screen. And we're climbing at three thousand foot a minute because we're going up the mountain.
And I'm like, dude, I can't do it. You've got to take the controls.
And Rich takes the controls. He's like, I got it.
I got the controls. And now I'm just trying to, you know, trying to get my head straight.
And because I know he's not going to last. And same thing about it.
45 seconds later, he's like, Al, I can't do it. Like, come on, you've got to do it.
I can't't do it. And he's like, back and forth.
So I took the controls now. Now, that red terrain presence I told you about is starting to part from the course line, right? So now there's a little bit of black.
So that means what's right along the course line is below me. It could be 100 feet, which isn't much, but the terrain is still out my left and right door.
If we don't stay right on the course, we are going to crash. And we say that cumulo granite has 100% kill ratio, so you got to do it.
And then so we passed the controls back and forth for, I don't know, five minutes, and we popped out of the clouds. The rain stopped.
It was solid clouds over the valley in Gardez. And we pop out of the clouds and now we can see.
So we can see the mountains off in the distance. And now your brain can re-register what you're doing.
You can ignore all of the instrumentation. And so we're like, oh my God, we almost died, right? And that kind of thing has happened a couple of times.
But that's the easiest one to explain. Man.
And then we get back, and I'm telling the maintenance pilot, we'd actually been complaining about that helicopter for 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 poor maintenance guy, you know, he's, we're on night schedule.
He's on a day schedule. And I'm like, I'm looking for him.
He should be up by now, right? We're getting back, sun's coming up and I'm looking for him and me and Richard 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, something that was working backwards,

essentially, one of the little sensors.

And they sent it home.

Like, they got a C-17 that week,

brought a new aircraft in, sent that one home.

And that kind of stuff, it'll catch you. You know, there's guys.
Are you worried about getting shot down while all this is going on too? I mean, it's possible, yeah. At that stage of the game, I wasn't ever worried about getting shot down.
Okay. I mean, we'll address why when we talk about Anaconda.
But, yeah, I wasn't. I mean, I just, this was a good example of why I kind of figured I was going to die on every deployment.
Okay. And that's because if the enemy didn't scare me, it was the terrain and weather that did.
Because we would, you know, the problem with Afghanistan in particular, Iraq is so much simpler. But Afghanistan, there's no weather reporting that's reliable, you know, is so vast.
I mean, you've got these big mountains. You've 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. Because there's supposed to be a two-degree drop-off in Celsius for every 1, feet you go, except in Afghanistan, it's pretty much the same at 20,000 feet as it is at 10,000 feet.
So if you're expecting to have a certain amount of power at the top of the hill, the mountain, it might not be there. And there's, I don't 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 Celsius. I'm not going to talk about it.
But yeah, that's how important, you know. And you know, the funny thing with that is that in training in the 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 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 way.
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 it was you were going to do, and you would pay the price.
Now, that wasn't always fatal. It wasn't always damage to hardware, but you always came home going, damn, I'm not doing that again.
And you learn that lesson again and again and again. Damn.
Well, Al, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll get to where you went after flight school.
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All right, Al, we're back from the break. We just kind of wrapped up your initial flight training.
And so where are you going after this? My assignment as a Chinook pilot at that point is Savannah, Georgia, going to Hunter Army Airfield, Fort Stewart, Georgia. And so I finish up the Chinook transition, flight school's done, it's behind me, and I take 30 days of leave up in New Hampshire, and I'm down to sign in at Hunter Arm Airfield.
So I get there, I sign in, and then what happens when a new aviator gets to a unit is you undergo what's called a commander's eval and progression, RL progression, readiness level. So you start out as RL3, readiness level three, and that means you can only fly with an instructor.
And then 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, and you can do everything because your progression is where it's supposed to be. So anyway, I get to the unit.
I get my commander's avowal. I get RL3, RL2, and then Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait.

And very, very shortly, we are notified that we're going to deploy.

Now, I'm in the 18th Airborne Corps, right?

Our headquarters is at Fort Bragg, North Carolina,

and our battalion headquarters is also there.

So there's our sister company, A company, and we're in B company,

second on 159. We're the Hercules guys.
It's a pretty cool nickname. And what we ended up doing was we flew all of our aircraft.
We had 16 Chinooks in our company. So you had 30 Chinooks total in the battalion.
And we flew from Savannah to Wilmington, North Carolina to put the aircraft, we're going to tear them down, bubble wrap them, shrink wrap them, and they're going to put them on top of an old ship, right? They didn't even have the old Roros, you know, the roll-on, roll-off. These are like you crane it up to the top, and it's going to ride it, you know, five miles an hour from, you know, Wilmington to Saudi Arabia.
So we fly up there, and there's a whole funny story to that. But we 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. For me to fly in combat, I've got to be readiness level one, not RL2, because you're still technically in training.
So the 160th, the 3rd Battalion, was right next door, and our instructor pilots knew those instructor pilots. They were all friends.
And they're like, hey, can we borrow one of your helicopters to train up the WOGE, which is Weren't Officer, right? It's kind of a, back in the day,

I think that was actually considered the rank.

Now it's considered a slight to say the Woj.

Let the Woj do it.

But anyway, they took me out.

At the time, the 3rd Battalion aircraft

were kind of enhanced Delta models.

So they had like some special radios.

I think they had what's called an OBOG's, onboard oxygen generating system or something like that for high altitude. And they had miniguns for defensive armament.
And 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 we end up flying across. We went on a Boeing 707, right, you know, chartered, you know, Transworld Air or something like that.
And we had to get gas like every two, three hours. So imagine going from Savannah, Georgia, up to Newfoundland and across to Europe and then back in through Egypt into Saudi Arabia and stopping every two, three hours.
And they wouldn't let us off the plane because they didn't have customs clearance. So we'd get there and whatever country it was, they'd be like, you can't get off the plane.
The toilets were full of urine. The stink was terrible.
But we got there. And that began Operation Desert Shield.
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 in combat. Pretty close, yeah, within a couple of weeks.
I mean, how did that feel for you? You're getting right what you wanted immediately. At least I think that's what you wanted.
Yeah, but what we didn't talk about earlier is, so I grew up in the Cold War, right? And I served in the Cold War. I went to West Germany.
I've been to East Germany, East Berlin, right? Through Checkpoint Charlie. And I was always scared we'd really go to war with the Soviet Union, right? Or Korea, you know, when I was in Korea the first time.
And it's hard to describe, but I did not want that. I didn't think being at war would be a good thing for me.
And so now here we are. I'm very excited to go.
But 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.
And at this time, it was sort of a transition period.

It was like, I'm making a change now

from being scared to be in war to, okay, we're in war.

This is all right.

Very pragmatic, I guess.

And I mean, Desert Shield was like, I don't know,

six months long.

So I had some time to really adjust to the idea so that when we did go across the border, it was no big deal. 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 all in a name.
Because we had guys, remember, this is a conventional unit. Some of these guys had been in Vietnam, others hadn't.
And there was a couple of guys that were really upset that we were probably going to take the Chinooks into Iraq. And they were of the mindset that Chinooks would fly from the port to the forward line of troops and that would be it.
You wouldn't go past the forward line of troops. And we were being told, oh, you're going to go deep, right, because they're going to do operating base Cobra, right, because you've got to have fuel and ammunition and supplies for the Cobras and the Apaches and the artillery to do their thing.
And so there was two guys that were very, very upset that we were going to do that. And I remember thinking, dude, what do you want? I remember I wanted to do assault.
So to me, this is kind of where I want to be. And so Desert Shield, right? Remember I said the army would claim we own the night.
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 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 miles an hour. By the time you see it, it's too late.
You just lost your landing gear, right? And the army lost a couple and then they put some rules into effect. You couldn't fly any lower than 150 feet, you know

and

so we did that

for that seven months

and I was moving

supplies

tanks 150 feet, you know, and so we did that for that seven months. And I was moving supplies, tank transmissions, tank treads, I mean, whatever you can fit in the back of a Chinook or sling, we were doing, and we were doing it at night.
And the old guys, so there were two W-1s in the company, me and a guy named Tim. And he had got there before me, and he was really sharp.
So I didn't walk into a show where they were like, ah, these stupid woges, we're going to these junior guys, they're no good. Instead, they welcomed me because the other guy, who was only a couple classes ahead of me, was such a success.
So he and I were the guys that prepared all the maps for everybody, you know, did some of the basic planning, the nug work, you know, the math and the ciphering. And every night flight, he and I were on them, not together.
We were with other pilots. And they put us with an instructor.
We fly at night. And the other old guys, the senior guys, did not want to fly at night.
Because, you know, we still didn't have all the aircraft with night vision lighting. So you still had to turn off the lights, put the little chem lights around, that kind of stuff.
So it still was very unpleasant to fly. Now, at this point, we've got what's called Anvus 6.
And the goggles are just two binoculars that slip down in front of your face.

They hinge up and down.

And the crew chiefs were one of the ones I talked about earlier, the fives, right? 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, the 18th Airborne Corps was pretty smart. They decided not to do it at night because Cobra, like the initial assault on Cobra, or the infill, the taking of it, we had, I think, 100 Chinooks involved, flights of five, and we were separated by only a couple of minutes.
So you'd be in a hot refueling pit, and it was the most impressive hot refueling I've ever seen, 101st. It was like a mile long, just helicopters.
It was all Chinooks, and then it was Blackhawks, and you were plugged in getting gas while you're running, and then they'd call over the radio, and we were, let's say I was in Silver Flight, Silver 1 through 5. They'd be like, Silver 1, your grid coordinates are blah.
You didn't care what you were carrying. It was going to be 18,000 pounds, which is about the max you're going to carry for this.
Silver 2, here's your grid. We all had different grids.
And we'd pick up. We'd fly over.
We'd 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 just got over it and they like hooked, it was a tandem load, so a forward and aft 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 meant Iraq.
I meant Iraq. Yeah.
So this is that famous, the Schwarzkopf, the left hook, you know, that was us. So moving all the equipment and the people out west of Kuwait.
Wow. So some of the loads were Humvees internal with a towed 105 howitzer.
Yeah, so the gun tube would be up in the cockpit, right? So you had the overhead panel, and you had the engine condition levers that do the power on the engines, and the gun tube was right up inside. Wow.
It was pretty cool, yeah. Did you guys take any fire or anything like that? No? No, it was all, I think we caught them by surprise.
We were out in the middle of nowhere. 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. We rented it and now we're leasing, lease to own, you know, kind of thing.
But what sucked about that mission is remember i said that you know me and the other w1 were the guys they always sent out with 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 mean, we're 100 hours in. The surrender has happened, and we take five Chinooks up into Iraq, and we're going to bring back prisoners, right? Prisoner of war.
The Iraqis had surrendered in droves, and we go up there. It's daylight.
We pick up these prisoners. We're moving back, but we don't have any gas.
All the places we were supposed to get gas had already moved, right? So we kept hopping from place to place, and there was no gas. And we eventually ran out of gas.
We had to land in the middle of the desert, each of us with 40, 50 Iraqi prisoners on the back. And I had a .38 with five bullets in it, right? The hammer was on the empty chamber because that was what they made us do.
We had two M60s, but those were pointed out. These guys are all inside.
We didn't have any guards, no nothing. But these guys, luckily, were very compliant.
It was just pilots and prisoners. Two pilots, a flight engineer, and a crew chief.
That's it. A guy up front, a guy in the back.
We all had .38s.

Holy shit. With five bullets.

Yeah.

And so, funny thing.

So we're coming back before we run out of gas.

And you could smoke in 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 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 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 they can take us easy, right? He's like, all right, fine.
So he's like, I'm going to get hepatitis. He smokes a cigarette.
And they're all, yay, they cheer. And they stayed compliant the whole time until we ran out of gas.
And an MP unit eventually drove up and took them away. They found us, took them away.
And we ended up spending the night in Iraq until a convoy went by. And that convoy had fuel trucks in it.
And we waved them down, and they put gas in the aircraft. And we didn't have any.
Our command had no idea where we were because we didn't have SATCOM. We didn't have radio communications with anybody.
We were just in the middle of the desert. And we're nowhere near where we should have been because we've been hopping around looking for gas.
Holy shit. So we come back, we get gas, we come back into Saudi Arabia.
And 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 so of the flight of five, three of the crews had MVGs. So we sent the two without MVGs back first.
Five minute separation. one takes off climbs up to 3 000 feet well above any terrain you know obstacles they fly back and they just do the old-fashioned they get there they spiral down they land all good right next one goes and now it's my turn we're the net we're the first mbg aircraft to go back so we're flying at 250, 300 feet.

Got goggles, I'm navigating.

And I'm looking at the antennas down the road right there,

about every five, six miles or so.

And I got them on my map, right?

And I'm looking, I'm 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, read 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 unaided, they think. This is that mindset back then.
They come back at 250, 300 feet. They run into that unlit antenna that we had all avoided, except they ran right into it and killed all the air crew.
The door gunner was an infantryman. He actually lived.
He said the last words were, oh, hell would that come from, you know. Damn, man.
So, you know, a very valuable lesson, you know, learned there, you know, in what an obstacle will do to you, you know, whether it's the ground or an antenna or wires,

or the enemy.

Damn.

So when we got back from that,

so that was essentially the end of Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

So we redeployed back to Savannah,

and when the aircraft got there,

the Army was now going to own the night.

So everything we did, everything, every exercise, every drill, every practice involved night vision goggles. So, 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 NVG time when the senior guys had like 25.
They got their qualification time and that's it because they never flew it. And so everything we did, I was on that mission.
And that started my whole trend toward where I would end up in the 160th. When did the 160th kind of pop up on your radar? Well, because they were next door to us in Savannah and I said everybody knew each other, our commander was actually married to a warrant officer over there, right? So when we were in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield, they would come visit.
They'd fly down for official purposes, but they'd have the time to do a conjugal visit or something like that, I guess. And so I kind of knew them already.
I'd listened to the war stories, what they were doing. Oh, they were going up into Iraq, you know, while we were still doing the Saudi stuff.
I said, what's it like in Iraq, you know? I said, oh, it's dark, you know? Okay, a little more than that, buddy. But so I already kind of knew about that.
But that other W-1 that I talked about, Tim, he had assessed. Like, we got back.
He's like, you know what? I 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 than me. And I figured, well, crap.
If they're not going to take him, there's no way they're taking me. He's way better than me.
And once again, that's very subjective. And later 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. So anyway, that's the start of it.
And then I get assigned. Before we go any farther, can you give us a little history under the 160th? Yeah.
So in Iran, the Shah of Iran is in charge. He leaves.
He's pushed out, really. And I can't remember if he was in France or the U.S., but we were supporting him.
And so a group of student protesters protested outside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and they ended up taking it.
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.
So we had American hostages, Marines, embassy it was like 354 days or something like that. But so there they are.
And then President Carter at the time, you know, the military options were very few, right? JSOC didn't exist. All the special operations community had sort of disbanded after Vietnam.
And Charlie Beckwith had just essentially stood up Delta Force, right? But they needed, so they were going to send Delta Force in to rescue the American hostages. The problem was they got to get there.
How are they going to get there? Helicopters. All right.
Well, what do we want to use to get there? Chinooks. The problem is you're getting by a Navy ship, right? Chinooks do not fold up handily like a Navy aircraft will, right? So they were afraid OPSEC was a big concern.
This is Operation Eagle Claw, right? So they don't want to put Chinooks on top of a ship because that'll raise questions, you know, why are there Chinooks on top of an aircraft carrier? You know, that's not normal. So instead they decided to use CH-53s and they wanted to use the minesweepers, which were flown by Navy pilots.
And they figured flying off a ship was the hardest part of the mission, right? Which in hindsight, that's the easiest part. But so they do these rehearsals with Delta.

And back then, they didn't have this one location

where they did rehearsals and we sit face-to-face

and we say, 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, you're probably old enough

to remember the teletype format.

Like you get, like if you ever get like a ship's position, the overhead message

all comes like

and I tell it

it's like

I'm like

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I'm like

I'm like

I'm like

I'm like

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I'm like

I'm like

I'm like

I'm like

I'm like

I'm like

I'm like

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I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like I'm like you're probably old enough to remember the teletype format. Like you get, like if you ever get like a ship's position, the overhead message all comes like in a teletype.
That's how they did their AARs, the after action reviews, right? It was through teletype. So there wasn't really plain English.
It was kind of like, you know, pilots sucked, you know, but you can't really explain why, right? So these guys are flying into the dust with night vision goggles and it's super dark and there's no reference and there's no looking at blades of grass. So they came up with this, it's called a pink light, an infrared filter on top of a searchlight.
So you extend your light out. It's a white light with basically a piece of brown a piece of brown waxed paper over it, you know, held on with a little frame.
And the problem was, you can only see that light. So it's like you see with an AC-130 when they get the burn on, right? You can only see it with your night vision goggles.
The problem is if you leave it on too long, it will burn through, and it will now be a white light, right? So you learn to use it very sparingly, which is funny because years later we were still like, turn the light on, turn it back off, even though it was a glass thing. But the Delta guys were unhappy with the pilots.
They crashed every single time, you know what 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 execute. They fly the Delta guys in on 130s.
They land at Desert 1, 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 gassed.
They'll take the operators. They'll go to Desert II, spend the day, and then do the mission, right? That's the plan.
Eight helicopters take off and counter a sandstorm that's like 4,000 feet high. You can't see in it, so they separate, right?

So now they're like, all right, you know,

they're five minutes apart,

so they don't run into each other.

I think a couple of them turned around

for maintenance problems related to the dust.

And the min force for the mission, I think, was 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.
The problem is because they can't see the helicopter pilots, you've been to an airport on a jet airliner. You come into the gate and you get the guys with the colored wands, the light wands, and they're doing this kind of thing for the pilots to see to direct them into the parking.

We do that with helicopters, right? You get the wands and you kind of come up to a hover, stationary, come left, come right, go, that kind of thing. You see that on ships all the time.
So the guy that's doing that, so the helicopters crank up, they pick up to a hover. the guy with the wands is bringing them up

and

tells them to go. And then he walks toward the aircraft.
And as I'm told, he put the wands in his pocket and they were still on. The only thing the pilots can see is the wands, the lighted wands, and they follow them.
And the guy walked right into the C-130 and the helicopter followed him right into it. Impacted the C-130 full of 5,000 gallons of gas and a bunch of Delta operators that were kind of just hanging out.
Aircraft explodes, helicopter explodes. It's mayhem.
They all load up on the remaining 130s and they head back. Utter failure, national embarrassment.
And so JSOC is born. You all know what speed dating is, right? Well, if you're the owner of a growing business, what if there was a feature like speed dating, but only for hiring? In other words, you could meet several interested, qualified candidates all at once.
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Because the problem that they found was that because there was no mutual, not mutual, habitual relationship between the air crews, the 130s, the ships, and the operators, you had all these problems. And so they created a unit, Task Force 160, out of Task Force 158 and some other things.
So it was a National Guard unit with OH-6s, helicopters from the 101st, Chinooks and Hueys initially, then Blackhawks. And they planned to do Operation Honey Badger, which was the second rescue attempt, right? So they're ready to do it.
President Reagan gets in office. The Iranians release the hostages.
No more mission for the JSOC operators. General Meyer, I believe it was, was the chief of staff or maybe the chairman.
And he said, you know what? You keep that unit together. So JSOC formed the 160th, became the 160th SOAG, Special Operations Aviation Group, and they stuck together.
And then you had this habitual relationship that lasts today. And we can do things now that they never dreamed that could be done.
But that's really where the 160th came from. And then as it grew, out of the group, it became a regiment.
And 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.
Just, it's big. So when someone goes, hey, oh, you were in the 160th.
Do you know Bilbo Baggins? I'm like, what does he fly? I don't know. Okay, so.
What kind of birds do they fly on the 160th? So all three battalions, I take that back, all three locations, Fort Lewis, Washington, or JBLM now, Joint Base, Lewis-McChord, they have Chinooks and Blackhawks. Savannah, Georgia has Chinooks and Blackhawks.
And then Campbell is the anomaly. It's got Chinooks and Blackhawks, but it also has Little Birds, which have two variants.
So it's an OH-6, has an armed version and an assault version. So the MH is modified, AH, attack.
And then the Blackhawks have an assault version and what's called a DAP, direct action penetrator. So it it's an armed Blackhawks, got a 30-millimeter chain gun.
You know, it can carry Hellfires, rockets, miniguns, 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 regiment. Very cool.
Wow. Thank you for that history.
Alright, so back to what do you call it? Selection? Assessment. Assessment.
So your buddy Tim, he doesn't make it. And now you're thinking well if he can't make it, I'm not going to make it.
So I get assigned to Korea for my second tour. And while there, because I had a lot of night vision goggle time, because the old guys didn't want to, it's like incremental, right? It just builds on each other.
And so I get there, and I end up as a night vision goggle trainer, a no-fly line trainer. So you had to fly the border between North and South Korea to learn all the corridors and all the landmarks that if you were operating in what they call the attack zone, Papa 518, that if you were approaching the border, you could recognize geographic features and turn around.
So after I left that next year, an OH-58 straight across was shot down. They killed one of the pilots.
They held the other guy, Bobby Hall, for, I don't know, a couple weeks or months. I can't really remember.
And then they let him go after they, you know, thoroughly embarrassed him and us, right? So that's the importance of the job is that. And because I did that and I showed some of the senior guys, there was a CW-5 that came over.
He'd been a Vietnam pilot. Everybody knew him in the community, in the Chinook community.
And he flew with me up there, and I was just flying along what's called a corridor up to, you know where Panmunjom is? Or you've seen it in the news. It's where the peace table is between North and South Korea, right? So you've got 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 we would fly people up there, usually dignitaries.
But there's very specific rules. And I would fly him up there and I was like, all right, stay at or below 100 feet, consistent with safety, left and right of course, 200 meters, blah, blah, blah.
And I talked to him and he's like, who taught you how to talk like that? It's like a, they call it MOI, method of instruction. And I said, I don't know, I read the regulation and came up with it.

He's like, you need to be an instructor.

So he actually called some friends at DA, Department of the Army, HRC, if you will,

and got me a slot to go to the instructor pilot course,

but I had to go and stay at Fort Rucker and teach at the schoolhouse if I did that, which turned out, you know, it's a whole other story we're definitely going to get to. So how did you get into 160th? All right.
So now we're back at Fort Rucker. So I'm a young chief warrant officer, too.
So Army aviators, they're wings. You start out with a set of wings, and then you get a star when you're a senior aviator.
It's like, I don't know, four or five years and so many hours, and they give you a star. So I didn't even have a star yet, so I'm a very junior aviator.
And then when you're a master aviator, you get a wreath around that star. So you can look at an Army warrant officer and see where is he in his experience level just based on his wings.
And so I get there, and my first two set of students were great, a lot of fun, because they were also— So wait, hold on. So you're a junior pilot, but they want to put you as an instructor.
Yeah, because of my skill level. 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 meet their requirements. So now what's starting to be in all the key positions is young CW2s and-3s, right? So junior to mid-grade warrant officers.
And this is where it ties in because, so my first two set of students were great because they were W-1s right out of flight school and they listened to me and I had a good time. Then the Alabama National Guard, which was flying CH-54 Sky Cranes, which is this grasshopper-looking thing that they flew in Vietnam and they had that in Birmingham, they retired it and gave them Chinooks.
So now they all have to come down and take a Chinook transition. Well, these guys all have way more, they're all Vietnam vets, they're all way more experienced in flying than me, and they don't want to fly Chinooks.

They don't have a choice,

but they act like I personally brought them down.

They did not like listening to a snot-nosed W-2

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,

doing what we call table talk, talking about emergency procedures and all this aerodynamics. They didn't want to listen to me and I hated it.
And there was a couple of classes of that. And then they went and then they gave me foreign students.
Now, foreign students are different in that the ones that come to fly Chinooks, you know, from, you know, the Dutch, the Singapore guys, the Aussies, the Brits. These are not dirtbags.
These are not guys that are there because they don't want to fly the aircraft. They're there.
They're all aerospace engineers in their own military. They're, you know, they were okay to fly with.
They were very nice, very polite. They pretended to pay attention to me.
They were, you know, 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 by reading the manual, they knew more than I could teach them. That's how good these foreign students were.
So it was unrewarding. And I needed something.
I was probably still a little too Jr. 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, Ali, you're miserable. We're out for a drink or dinner or whatever.
And he throws an 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, half inch thick. And I'd fill it out, you know, a couple pages at a time, you know, a couple days ago in between.
And eventually, It was done.

He's like, oh, so I sent it in.

To my surprise, like two weeks later, like, Mr. Mack, we'd like you to come assess.
Like, me? Really? Okay. Right.
So I go up. I assess.
I didn't think I did that well. As a matter of fact, I got lost on my navigation route, which everybody does for the most part.
You're not passing the flight, just so you know. They will do something so you don't fly.
You're not going to hit your target on time. It's made sure that you're not going to achieve success.
And the reason for that is they want to see how you behave under duress in the cockpit. When all of a sudden, you're not where you're supposed to be, and you don't know where you are, and you know you've still got to get to your unlit target, plus or minus 30 seconds, and you have to be within, I think it's plus or minus two minutes at every checkpoint and within 100 meters of the checkpoint, right? 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? And they can tell because they're going to teach you how to navigate their way anyway. So they don't care if you get lost, but it's how do you behave? And there are guys, I've seen guys melt down and start crying in the cockpit when they got lost.
just knew it's like that guy with the grade point average that gave up you know before he got you don't know I mean who knows I might help you out later on and say hey because sometimes we'll be like hey see that bridge over there is that on your map oh and you kind of re-cage them you know 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.

But that's how you start the process.

Well, I take that back.

The first thing you do is a PT test,

standard Army PT test,

with pull-ups, which the Army didn't do,

and a swim test, which the Army didn't do.

The funny thing is, is I got there. Now, keep in mind, the 160th was formed in 1980, right after that Eagle Claw, 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 cloaked in darkness and secrecy. So I get there, and I like, should I wear an Army PT shorts and shirt or should I be in civilian PTs? I mean, it sounds absurd, but it went through my mind, right? So I showed up wearing civilians, right? And I'm like, if they don't want me, tough.
If they don't want this, you know, screw them, right? I drive up in the parking lot and I made sure I had my Army PTs in case they're like, Mr. Mack, I thought you were going to be in your, but they didn't say anything, right? And then you do your PT test.
They don't tell you how you're doing, right? That's all at the end. So they don't count your push-ups.
So you don't know how many you're doing or your sit-ups or any of that stuff, your pull-ups. And then you go over to the pool, you put a flight suit on, flight gear, helmet.
You jump in, you do, I 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,

and 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 trying very easy to swim,

and I run out of air, and I come up, and I get out, and I'm like, I don't know if that was far enough, you know? And the recruiter comes up with a clipboard, and he taps it, and he's like, Mr. Mack, did you get to go twice? I was like, did I get to go twice? No.
He's like, get back in line. So I'm like, obviously I didn't pass, right? So now I get in, and instead of trying to take it easy, I'm pounding it, right? I get my head down, I'm pounding it.
I can feel the styrofoam on my helmet dragging me to the surface. 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 tap on my helmet.

I had made it to the end.

And I get out, and that was that.

And then you go from there to the psychology.

You take a test.

It's like a 600 test, and then a 300-question test, all psychology.

Would you rather pick your nose or pick your buddy's blister? Would you rather work on a Friday? Weird stuff that doesn't make sense. And then you take a general aviation knowledge test, which nobody can pass because they're asking the parameters of specific air defense systems.
The SA-7 radar system has a minimum engagement range of what, out to what distance, and stuff like that. And 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 know everything to that extent, right? Yeah. So you have rules of thumb if you didn't know.
If what we call the raw gear, if it shows up SA-8, but you didn't expect them to have SA-8s, 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, and you consider yourself a pilot, you know? But you do that, and you get 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. So you're in your dress uniform, you sit in front of a panel of officers.
This is the navigation route that everybody fails. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah.
So now, I mean, even if you make your target on time,

you will have been out of parameter somewhere.

Okay.

So, you know, they're like, oh, you 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 that far

and we know we don't want you

because you're just a jerk, right?

And we know you won't fit in.

You were good enough to get this far,

but 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.
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 teams, right? I mean, you guys, we do not, you know, take it easy on each other.
You've got to handle critique. You know what it's like in the teams.

We do not take it easy on each other.

You've got to have some thick skin.

You've got to spray it on.

I think the worst is pure critiques.

Do you guys have those?

We did them in flight school,

but we didn't have to do them in the regular unit. But so, you know, the instructor will tell you what you did wrong, maybe even tell you what you did right.
But, you know, it's criticism. Hey, you did this wrong, you did this wrong.
In the end, you did not meet the standard. You failed the flight.
Okay. Then the recruiter says, all right, PT, you know, physical training, you know, you did this many pushups, this many sit-ups, this many runs.
And in my case, you did way more. You scored way higher than the one you submitted.
Why is that? I don't know. Maybe I tried harder.
Wrong words right now. Oh, so you don't try hard at your unit? I don't know what to tell you.
I didn't know, right? So I just tried as hard as I could. 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 critique.
And then they start asking you why you scored so low in the general aviation tests. Why do you think you should be a night stalker? You know, questions like that family situation.
And in my case, you know, as I talk about my book, my wife had had a suicide attempt when I was in Korea. And I thought, you know, that was all kind of resolved.
But I thought that would stop me from getting in. So I told the psychologist about it, you know, they knew there was no, I didn't want any secrets here.
And I thought And I thought, that's going to torpedo me. They're going to treat me nice, and they're going to let me go.
They thought they were being mean to me, 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 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.

Do they accept you right there?

They kick you out of the room. They deliberate, you know, five, 10 minutes, which I've been

on the other end of that, you know, in the first two minutes they've decided and then

the rest, 15, they're making you sweat. And you come back in and they're like, you know,

Welcome to the show. five, ten minutes, which I've been on the other end of that.
In the first two minutes, they've decided, and then the rest, 15, they're making you sweat.

And you come back in, and they're like,

welcome to the 160th, Mr. Mack.

And then we'll see you in about a year, right,

because I've got to go back to my unit.

That's the agreement we had with the Army is they wouldn't poach skills without giving you a heads up.

And then the psychiatrist took me out, and 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.
We'll work with you on this if you have a problem. Oh, shit.
So they knew the whole time. Yeah, yeah.
All we did. And they just never brought it up.
So they probably would have used that to drop you. Yeah, they didn't drop me like that.
Interesting. 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? I mean, it varies.
My assessment week, there were probably, you know, 20 guys. How many are there today? Depends.
It just depends. Because you said when you went in, there was about 300 aviators.
Oh, right. There's about 3,500.
About 4,000, depending. Let me ask this.
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. So most of the guys that get there make it.
But you're not just there for Chinooks. You're there for the Little Birds and the Blackhawks.
So you get this whole potpourri of aviators there. So they weed out, really, the guys.
Is everybody flying their specified aircraft, or are you all flying something? So when you get there, and this has by the way. So when I got there because I was a Chinook pilot I did my all my training flights in a Chinook.
I did my navigation flight in a Chinook. And a couple of years later actually I was in SEER school when 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 killed instantly. So that pilot was not a Chinook pilot, but everybody considered, I'm not going to take any pilot and put him in a Chinook, and as long as there's no emergencies, they're going to be able to fly it.
I can get in the Black Hawk and fly it, you know, or anything else. But if something bad happens, I don't know what to do.
So anyway, they made a new rule that if you were a Chinook guy, you could do the assessment in the Chinook. You could do what I did.
If you are not a Chinook guy, you would do a simulator period with the instructor. And sort of, like what I would do is see if guys could learn the aircraft.
So it's a glass cockpit. There's these little TV screens, buttons all over the place, and that's how you see what's going on.
And then you fly it. And I would say, okay, do this, do this.
Here's a hover page, do this. And I would see if they could mimic what I asked them to do.
If they did, I kind of view it as, this guy is trainable. I can train him.
If you've got a guy that can't remember what button to do, he's not trainable probably. And so 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. Let's say you had a Cobra guy because they were still flying at the time.
A couple of my best friends in the 160s, their Chinook pilots, were Cobra pilots before they got there. And they fly everything in the Little Bird, right? And that's where you do all your navigation training, by the way, in Green Platoon, which is where they teach you how to navigate, brief, and plan like a night stalker.
You go out and you fly in a little egg-shaped thing. Being a Chinook guy with a nice big cockpit, you get in that little egg, and your shoulders are up against the guy.

The doors are off,

so you have to put your map under your leg.

It's unpleasant to fly that thing.

You didn't like flying the Little Birds?

Yeah.

No shit.

It was a pain in the ass.

What do you think the most,

what do most guys want to fly at 160th?

It depends what they did first.

So if they're already a Chinook guy, they want to fly Chinooks.

If they're a Ranger,

they want to fly Chinooks.

If they did something else, or they're already a Blackhawk

guy, you know.

What do you mean if they're a Ranger?

I can tell you that a high

Like an 82nd?

Like a U.S. Army Ranger.
I'm sorry, 75th guy?

Yep.

So 75th guy is just

Thank you. So I can tell you that a high— Like an 82nd? Like a U.S.
Army Ranger. I'm sorry, 75th guy? Yep, yep.
So 75th guy is just—wait a minute. Here's what they do.
So you get all these Rangers, right? We do a lot of work with them, and they usually end up in the Chinooks because of the quantity of people. They reach the rank E5, E6.
Their knees are aching. 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, and then come to us. Or if you have a background, like we had some SEALs.
We had some Delta guys, a lot of Delta guys. A good friend of mine, Mike Rutledge, I don't know if you know him, he was at E7 teaching at Buds when the towers came down, transferred over the army, put him for the 160th.
And because of his background, we took him as a W1. So as a very, very junior Shinnok pilot.
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Hold on, hold on, hold on. So, sorry.
Yeah. So, so you guys, so the 160th will take basically ground operators

and turn them into aviators?

Yeah.

Very few.

Without any aviation experience?

No, no, very, very few, very select.

So typically a guy would, let's say he's a ranger, an Army Ranger, he's E5.

He goes to his first unit like I did in Savannah, Georgia, right?

And they'll try to get somewhere like Fort Campbell so they can be in the 101st.

They're just across the ramp from us.

And then when their time comes up, like at 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 former Army Rangers

that fly Chinooks on the 160th. And a lot of that, you can't take a lot of them at one time.
You can take one of these junior guys. We said we could take two a year and be able to task force babies, we call them.
How do they get through assessment? They just do. They're good enough.
They're going to fail the navigation flight anyway. Do good in the PT test, psych assessment.
They did well. If you can make E7 in the SEALs or in Delta, we have your evaluation reports.
You have a history that we can look at.

So these guys have had some flight.

They've obviously gone to flight school.

Some guys have.

Yeah, they've gone to flight school.

But you can take two a year of guys that were, like I said,

Mike was an E7 in the SEALs and a couple of Rangers.

You take them in and then you teach them from the ground up how to be a night stalker. We call them task force babies.
And it turns out good because you get plenty of other guys. You know, I was pure pilot, you know, so I don't have, you know, the ground guy experience, which when I got shot down was a thing I worried about because 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 on the ground stuff. But yet the guys that were former Rangers or SF guys, had a lot of Green Berets, you know, they knew that kind of stuff.
So you always kind of like, if you could have a co-pilot that was once a former action guy, you know, it'd be nice. Yeah.
So hold on. Let me.
So like Mike Rutledge, for example. I've met him.
So he went from the SEAL teams to what, a Navy flight school? Nope, to Army flight school. So he did an inter-service transfer.
In a regular unit. He went straight to flight school, straight to Army flight school.

So SEAL teams to straight to Army flight school, straight to assessment.

Yep.

Holy shit.

Yeah.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's not common, but it does happen.

You know, like I said, we kind of determined two guys a year we could handle. Does the unit like that? Yeah.
Yep. Because it gives you some diversity in, well, understanding the mission.
And the idea here is that they understand the ground force mindset. 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 know that, you know, just by working with them.

But they understand the entire mindset and the personalities.

You know, oftentimes, you know, with Mike, for example,

I was in Afghanistan one time with him.

And I was already there, or I just got there. And he rolled in about a week later.
And I took him with me over to Red Squadron because he knew we'd actually flown a mission one year where probably 20 of the 30 guys on board were at his wedding when he was a CO. And they took turns coming to the cockpit.
It was just a repositioning them from fob to fob, and they came up, and they look in the cockpit, and they slap them on the shoulder. He's like, oh, that was my best man.
And it was really cool. So it gave you a little bit of the bona fides.
Some good camaraderie. Yeah, it was good.
Yeah, I know we're getting off topic here a little bit, but that's something

that I've always, ever

since drones started coming on

the scene,

man, I'm showing my age.

But

it said

something

that we always worried about was losing

that personal connection with

whoever's got us up top. And I mean, what do you think about that? It's tough.
I mean, think back to several years ago, the original drone operation. So to show my age, the original drones were not armed except for the agency one.
So the OGA drone was armed with a hellfire and all the other ISR was unarmed. And to be able to talk to them in line of sight was a big deal because it was a repeater.
Because they're back at, I don't know, back in Vegas or something flying these things. And so when they started arming these things and we started doing kinetic strikes with these, 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 many miniguns 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 soft armor. I've got a little plate that's about this big, you know.
And we took all the armor out of the aircraft in the early days so we could go to the higher elevations because it was too heavy. And then one year, must have been, I don't know, late 2002, maybe 2003, I said, screw it.
If 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 them, they can't, he's dead. And so I realized at some point I felt better being able to defend myself.
So there's this equal thing. It's 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. It's very godlike.
You have the opportunity to kill somebody and he doesn't have the chance to reciprocate. It's kind of, I view that as maybe that is part of that post-traumatic stress.
It's like they feel guilty that they can't die doing it, but they can kill people. And I don't know if that's true.
That's just how I interpret it. But that personal connection is very important.
Like the 160th now has a drone unit that they didn't have when I was there.

And once again, that's to create, number one, a capability.

Number two, that personal relationship.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, it's just meeting you guys before operations and other pilots.

I mean, it creates this personal connection where it's like, I know those guys down there, or I know those guys up there. They just dropped me off, you know? And that was always in our minds, you know, when we started working with ISR and stuff like that.
But anyways. With the air breathers, you know, the Draco guys, right, the U-21s or whatever they were flying, C-12s, I guess, that had all the ISR platforms, and they would, you know, do all the collection.
They'd do all the, you know, as you're coming into the target, they'd give you a sit-rep. You know, you got, you know, two sleep laying on the ground, on the green side, whatever.
And you'd come in. And in the early days, they did a terrible job.
I'd be out in the Kandahar area, and we'd go land out in the middle and do an offset infill, and we're going to land in the middle of this poppy field. And the ISR comes back with, all good.
Nobody's there. And they're zoomed in on my coordinates where I'm going to land.
And I'd land, and there'd be like guys with guns just standing around. You know, they were guards for the poppy fields.
They didn't shoot at us, but they were armed. And I remember sitting down with these guys afterwards, the ISR guys, and saying, hey, look, look at your video.

And so 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.

So we had to teach them what to do.

And because they were at Bagram,

we'd start meeting with them a little more.

And once I had that relationship with them,

they knew what I wanted.

I knew what they wanted.

I knew what they needed.

And it works great.

We were talking offline, and I'm sure we'll get to it, during Red Wings.

When I planned that whole operation, the fires plan was successful because I sat down with

the actual pilots and the sensor operators and the AC-130

and said, here's what I'm trying to accomplish.

How can you help me do that?

As opposed to me saying, hey,

I want this kind of ordinance here, this here.

They know what their stuff does.

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 assessment, I believe. Yeah.
All right. Yeah.
So I go back to my unit, right? Except when I got there a week later, the battalion commander from 2nd Battalion, 160th, calls me and he's like, hey, Al, how would you like to come up in six weeks? And I'm like, well, sir, 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 Chinook pipeline.
Can you do it? So I went and talked to my wife. Now, keep in mind, I lived in on-post housing at the time,

so it was pretty easy to get out of there.

But now I've got to get a house up in Campbell.

So I took leave, went up there house hunting for a week,

and bought a house or put a bid on the house, whatever, and I came back.

And I remember the battalion commander at Fort Rucker was pissed.

And he tried to call in all kinds of markers from generals and stuff that he knew to stop me from leaving, like, because he couldn't stop it. And I thought for sure he's going to stop me.
Now he's mad at me. And the one 60th said, no, we need him.
So they just sucked me up there. Six weeks later, I'm in basic skills, learning hand-to-hand, you know, we're doing, so that's the part I forgot.
When you start in a training, it's basic skills. So it's first aid, hand-to-hand, CQB kind of stuff, shooting.
At the time, we still had MP5s. We were just transitioning to the M4s the next year.
But because of Mogadishu, they had MP5s, and they found out that was insufficient was insufficient for what we need, right? And 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, but we were still learning on that, which was pretty cool for me, you know,

shooting silenced MP5s. And you do that.
And then the enlisted guys at that point go on to log PT

and ground navigation and stuff like that. And the pilots move on to the air navigation stuff.
But, yeah, so I get up there and we start that. And it was a lot of fun.
What do you mean the enlisted guys? The crew chiefs? The crew chiefs? Well, I take that back. Any night stalker who's not a pilot.
So you could be the clerk. No shit.
So you guys train together? Yeah. The pilots and the crew.
That's pretty cool. And same thing with, I think when it was hand to hand, it was pilots and pilots and list of guys and list of guys.
But I had a guy, he played in the NFL. I was the next biggest guy, but this guy was like a like a freaking, you know, he was like a mountain, you know? And so we're doing like, you know, practicing brachial stuns, you know? And so, you know, he's hitting me on the side of the neck, you know, boom.
And I'm like, oh. And I don't go down.
And the instructor comes to me, he goes, hit him harder. He said, 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 him harder he's like hit him harder or i will right so the guy hits me

harder and i of course i drop and he goes harder than that and he's like if i hit him harder than

that i'm going to knock his head across the room and he's going to 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 night stalkers 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 barely i don't

Thank you. We're night stalkers, but this guy, he knew his own strength.
This guy, Mike was his name. He was actually out at the range.
He was a little bird guy, attack guy. 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, ah.
Wow. Like Mongo, you know, and plays with saddles.
But that was my CQB, or not CQB, my hand-to-hand guy. But, yeah, so you do that, and then you go down to the Dunker, which was in Jacksonville at the time.
They have their own now. It's amazing.
So it's like imagine being in a minivan, and they drop you in a pool, and you're strapped in, and the thing 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 you or you have to cross over and they create some some chaos in there which if you use their training not a big deal you know you just you wait till ceases, you get a reference, you unbuckle yourself, and then you go out or you jettison the door, you're still buckled in, and then you put your hand outside, release the thing, and just pull yourself out. So if you do the training, it all works really well.
But when you don't, the guys panic and they 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 Chinooks in particular, and the Blackhawks are very similar, the relationship with the crew chiefs, you get to know them quite well because you fly a lot together. In a Chinook, the minimum crew to fly a Chinook, a regular Chinook, 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 crew chiefs, a flight engineer and a crew chief is the 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've got two guys manning the miniguns 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, you know, it could be a cross-country-country flight, flying from Campbell to California, doing air refueling on the way, and it's an eight-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 spur, a mountain spur, right,

with aft gear, you know, doing a little wheelie or landing 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 starting to slide to the left a couple inches, you know, and you just little subtle movements to the controls and you listen to him.
As long as he stays calm, you stay calm. If you've got a crew chief who gets kind of wound up really quick, it translates in the voice, and then the pilot gets kind of stiff on the controls because he's essentially following those instructions.
So I like to say a guy who's up front who maybe isn't as good at doing that kind of maneuver, for example, if the crew chief's good, you know, he's got the right voice, the right technique, he'll keep you right there. And the customer of 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 a 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 long do you guys spend with each other? Well, I mean, years, but, you know, when we go on the road for training, for example,

junior guys, junior pilots will room together.

If you're a flight lead or officer in charge, you get your own room.

The crew chiefs, same thing.

If you're a senior NCO, you'll get your own room.

If not, you'll share.

But after flying, we'll spend time together in the bar or at a picnic table or something. We get to know each other quite well.
Is there a—can you talk a little bit about who's—man, I don't know how to say this, but who's—is it the pilot that's ultimately in charge of the aircraft or is it the crew chief or how are they? Yeah, so the pilot, you have a pilot in charge, pilot in command, right, in the Army. Air Force calls him aircraft commander or AC.
He's in charge of everything about that aircraft. So you might, I could be the pilot in command as a warrant officer,

and I could have a colonel in the other seat. I'm in charge, right? He's doing what I tell him to do because that's the way it works.
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 now we're in a little bit of 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.

So it's kind of a blend there.

But where were we going with that?

I said I went around the wrong way. Relationship between, well, no, not relationship, basically responsibilities.
Yeah, responsibility for the aircraft, right? So when I was a junior pilot, there's a red line on the floor in a Chinook. It's like Station 95, they call it, right? So every inch of an airframe is assigned a station.
You know, one inch is station 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 tell just by markings on the floor where this crack could be, right? So with a junior pilot and a senior crew chief, sometimes they'll say, you might mention something about the back, and they'll go, sir, you're in front of Station 95, just keep your business up there, right? Yeah, whatever.
So there's that relationship where it can be, I mean, we're always busting each other's butts, but if you're a guy like me, right, and I had, you know, I do a lot of talking about, you know, I did this, I did this. There's always a crew involved, and in many cases, there's an aircraft or two or three behind me doing the same thing, right? So you've got to keep that in mind.
But the responsibility of the aircraft commander, the PIC, is absolute. He is responsible for it.
So whether he's divided some authorities up to the crew chief in the back, you know, it's based on, you know, what's going on, right? So, for example, fast roping, right? So we'll, you know, the pilot will find the target. He'll come in.
He'll start his approach. You get, you know, 50, 60 feet out laterally from it.
And it's like the crew chief in the door will say, you know, target in sight, forward 30. And you come in, you start listening to him.
They'll 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, 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 with a lot of mutual respect. And if there's not, there can be a problem.
So when I was in the conventional unit in Savannah, I had a friend, he had a terrible relationship with all the crew chiefs. Like he just looked down on them, you know, and no matter who talked to him, he just, he treated them like crap.
And they hated flying with him. And we were coming back from California one time, we were getting gas and we taxied in.
And the way a Chinook drives on the ground is you get 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 on the ground. And when you come into a parking area at an airport, depending on if you're close to airplanes or a hangar, 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? The crew chief will do it. But in this case, the crew chiefs knew he was too tight, did not offer to get out, and let him drive the aircraft right into a hangar.
Everybody was okay. The aircraft was severely damaged.
The hangar was damaged. The accident board gets involved, the collateral board, and they find that the pilot had created such a toxic relationship with the crew that

they let him damage the aircraft on purpose.

They didn't make him damage on purpose.

They let it happen.

And so that's the extreme.

I've never seen that like in the 160th.

The 160th is so professional that I really, I do miss it.

You know, I don't miss flying so much. I miss the people.
You don't miss flying? Not in the way you'd think. I mean, every once in a while, I'll cross the George Washington Bridge in New York City, and it's the same view I would get when I was flying at West Point and come down the river.
And on a nice day, I'll kind of be like, I kind of miss flying. What I really miss is the people and the mission.
You know, as I like to say, to say, taking a bunch of pipe swingers to a bad guy's front door, that's rewarding. I like doing that.
I miss that. I'll bet.
What's the longest amount of time you've been paired with a crew chief? A couple of months, probably eight months. That's it? Yeah.
Oh, shit. So what'll happen is you'll go on a deployment, like say overseas, right? When you're back in the States, you just get who you get, right? Unless you're on a trip, like 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 in 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 the first couple of flights can be rough, you know, as you're feeling each other out.
Like I flew because I was the, what's called an SIP, the standardization instructor pilot. So I was essentially the chief pilot for Chinooks 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 so I go with this 3rd Battalion crew.
We've got G models now, which is the latest version of the aircraft. And we're at a forward arming and refueling point,

and we're going to, it's in Asadabad, Afghanistan.

We're going to come in, we're going to hover up to the point,

we're going to set 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-foot hover,

and Cruci says, all right, sir, come straight down.

I come straight down. He goes, sir, can you move, pick it up again? Sure.
I pick it up. He goes, move forward 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 am the chief. I should be the best or of the best.
I have peers, obviously. But I'm good, you know.
And these guys had never flown with me before. And they were just anticipating that I would drift forward like all other guys did.
And so as time went by, they just compensate for how I fly. And so maybe I don't come straight down.
Maybe I am the drift guy. I drift forward as I come down.
They just compensate for that. They just bring you in three feet short.
Have you come down? They know you're going to drift in and you land. So there's that habitual relationship and that understanding each other's capabilities.
Gotcha. Very, very important.
Gotcha. All right, let's get back to training.
Yeah. So where were we? Where were we in training? So we were talking Green Platoon.
What is Green Platoon? So Green Platoon is where it's the training platoon for the 160th. So you have Green Team and OTC for the other special mission units.
And it came about because at the 160th compound, there's a wall, a memorial wall with a lot of names on it. I don't know the number.
I should. Most of the early days, 1980s, early 80s, those are all training deaths for the most part.
Because they're developing tactics, techniques, and procedures that the Army later adopted. You know, how to use like night vision goggles.
What are the limitations? When should you, when shouldn't you, kind of thing. And those names are on the wall.
So there was too many in one year. I can't remember which year it was.
And Congress shut down the unit. They're like, you guys are killing people every week, that kind of thing.
And they did a blue ribbon panel that evaluated the 160th and the way it worked. And they said, the problem is, not only are you developing new tactics and techniques, but you're training new guys that are coming into the unit.
So they said, you've got to have a dedicated part of your unit that only does training for the new guys, or if people are transitioning new equipment, that's what they'll do. And so they created Green Platoon, and it was 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 Chinook guy through. So that's basic skills, hand-to-hand shooting, that kind of stuff.
Basic nav, or BNAV, that's where you learn to fly and navigate in the Little Bird to do things like a night stalker. And then you go to your specific aircraft.
So even if you're a Chinook guy and you end up in Chinooks, there's so much expansion of what the aircraft can do because of the additional equipment that's embedded into the airframe. And you have to learn how to use all of that stuff and how to compensate when it doesn't work.
So you have totally different aircraft that's specific for 160th. What would be some of the things that are different between a conventional 47 versus a TF-160? So when I talked earlier about the MH-6s or the MH-47, so Army aircraft are designated by what they do, right? CH, CH-47, right? Cargo helicopter, model 47, version delta, right? In this case, it's modified helicopter 47, you know, Echo at that time.
And some of the equipment that's different, well, big differences is the fuel tanks on the special ops version, the MH, is twice the capacity. So Instead of 1,000 gallons, you're carrying 2,000 gallons.
There's internal fuel tanks that can fit inside that are crash-worthy and ballistically tolerant. There is an air-refueling probe that sticks out the front.
If you look on the front of my book there, you get this big pipe that sticks out the front. You can fly up behind an Air Force C-130.
They drag a hose out the back while you're flying, and it's got this donut-shaped parachute that you plug into and get gas in the air. So you have to learn all that.
The crew chiefs have to learn gunnery. So you got these M134 miniguns, 7.62, six-barrel Gatling gun, shoots 4,000 rounds a minute.

They have to learn that, how to do it, how to deal with malfunctions.

You've got terrain-following radar, which is key.

After 9-11, without that, we could not have done even half, even a fraction of what we did in those infills,

getting the horse soldiers and other Green B braid teams and the OGA teams. Because every SF team had to be brought in to an OGA team that was there the day before or two days before.
So that's what all this equipment does. And everything is a TV screen.
There's four TV screens and an Echo and there's five and and a Golf, and those five are splittable. You can divide them up, so there's really 10 displays, and you have to learn how to use those and when to use them.
Flying the helicopter itself is pretty much the same. Okay.
But using all of the tools of the trade, so you have to learn, number 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, fly in the mountains in the dark.
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 terrain-following radar cues.
And the other pilot as a safety pilot, if you will, the instructor, has his goggles down. So if the guy misinterprets the cues and is going to fly into something, he can just take the controls.
I have the controls. It's just that simple.
I have the controls. And then you say, 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 a conventional unit doesn't do is we've got money for TDY.
So you So you take the students from Campbell. Like, so we go to Knoxville for the train flight.
Then, 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 the Houston area, that kind of stuff.
Or you travel somewhere and they'll come, you know, you hit a tanker en route. And then once you've done those things, you go desert mountain.
We go to Albuquerque and you're out there for like three weeks learning to just land in the dust for real. And then learn how to fly in the mountains, power management, how to read the wind in the mountains and how to come in from a certain degree.
It's like parachute jumping. You have to learn how to land in a certain way.
And then everything we did before we did it in the aircraft, we did it in the flight simulator, which was very realistic, right? So you would teach them how to do the hover page, right? So So there's this, on the little TV screen, there's a little video game you play. There's a crosshair in the middle.
There's an open circle and a line. And you try to keep the open circle over the crosshairs.
And if you're moving, that line gets longer in the direction of movement. And so you've got to look at that and interpret it to keep the aircraft

in whatever, let's say a stationary hover.

You've 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 move the cyclic stick to keep that

where it is like a 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 oftentimes they can see the ground right below you,

depending on your altitude.

And they're like, all right, sir, you're 10 feet off,

and you're confirming that up front with the instrumentation.

You've got it steady.

And they're like, come down.

And you just come down.

And it can be a challenge, to say the least, to land in the dust.

All but. All but.
So you graduate. Yep.
Obviously. Yep, yep.
So we did that. You graduate.
When you graduate Green Platoon, you are probably, well, back during the height of the OEF and OIF, you are going to deploy probably in two weeks, maybe less. When did you graduate? What year? So I graduated in 95, and there was nothing going on, right? So it was all training back then.
And training trips, people ask me, you know, what was it like pre-911 and the 160th? Oh, it was great. You know, because everywhere we went was, you know, four or five-star.
You know, you go to Colorado to do mountain flying. We're staying in condos, or at least a nice hotel, the Doubletree.
We didn't have any tents. So we were at Destin one time working with AC-130s.
We had three aircraft there. Two of them flew per night.
And we were flying guys in. They would call for fire, and then we'd come pick them up, that kind of stuff.

And the other crew was really a spare.

So you have to keep the flight hours within a certain parameter to keep the aircraft flying.

So it's like an oil change.

You know that, well, another 100 miles,

I'm going to have to do an oil change.

Except you're going to have to do it.

They're going to make you do it by regulation.

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've got one down for the night doing maintenance, what we call scheduled maintenance, the oil change, 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 and do your thing. And now we have not affected the ground force in any way, right? That's the goal.
But anyway, we're out to show you this is pre-9-11. So two of us are out flying.
The aircraft breaks, and they fly back to Hurlburt Field. They're done for the night, right? Ah, we can't fix this tonight.
We go back. They hook up.
We're in Destin as our hotel is at the Sheraton on the beach.

And the person not flying, that crew, is responsible for getting beverages, bait,

like we had gotten some Zebco fishing reels at the BX.

And you had everything ready, and the 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-9-11 if you weren't actually doing some missions and 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 i'm like the only i'm like the adult leader in the group they're out in the water the pilots they're up to their neck with fishing rods right surf casting and the waves had had slowly walked them out. They started waist high and they ended up at the neck.
And I was like a Boy Scout leader. I was like, all right, everybody, buddy up.
They're like, what? I said, hold hands with the guy next to you. I want to count heads, right? So I was like, get in here, right? And they're like, all right, we're coming.
But that was pre-9-11. 9-11 happens.
You still get some nice trips, but it's not like that. Yeah.
Yeah. you know? But that was pre-911.
9-11 happens. You know, you still get some nice trips, but it's not like that.
Yeah. You know? But 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 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. Now, 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're wearing oxygen, which turned out to be important in Afghanistan.
Things like that, you know, and that's what we do. So when you get back from Green Platoon pre-911, you would go places, you know, Fort Bragg, you'd enter Fort Benning, work with the Rangers, go out to Coronado, work with the SEALs, out to Little Creek, and you'd just do whatever they needed, you know, oil platform takedownsedowns, VBSS, something like that.

And once the war started,

that training became less and less because we needed airframes overseas.

So it was tougher to get that realistic training in

or you had to learn to mix it in.

It's like if you're going to go out to the compound at Bragg, what can you do on the way out? We would link up with the A-10s out of Pope when they were still there, and on the way in, we'd link up with them and do a personnel recovery mission, which I got a good one in the book there where I dusted out some farmer. The pilot, the pilot, the downed pilot was there, and the A-10s are doing their passes, and the farmer had just limed the field with his tractor.
And he's just sitting there watching, you know, the A-10s do their thing. And I come in with the Chinook, and I land right next to him, and it's a big cloud of dust and farm talc, I don't know, poison I guess, I don't

know, fertilizer.

I thought I was in trouble.

We get to brag.

I talked 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.

And he's like, are you kidding me?

He goes, that was amazing.

He goes, you do that anytime you want. He says, but make sure I'm out there because I want to watch it.
He's like, all right. Here we go.
That's awesome. But anyway, the training is very realistic.
And the margin for safety is interesting because 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 unfortunately, it was progressed in the blood of Night Stalkers.
But that reputation is still there, you know. And I remember teaching a couple of Green Platoon classes

where guys would come in and I would say,

okay, we're not going to do this tonight

because maybe the weather is such and such

or we've got some parameter that's kind of iffy.

And I actually, a couple of occasions I've had guys say,

well, I thought we would just do whatever it took.

And it's like, well, maybe on a combat mission

or national, something of strategic importance,

national importance, but we're training.

We're not going to kill somebody just to go out. We'll just do it tomorrow night, kind of thing.
So the rules are very important to us as well. What did it feel like when you graduated? It felt good.
I'll bet. You felt you've really done something.
It's what I want to do. You do that.
When you graduate, you're one of the best helicopter pilots in the world. I'd like to think so.
As the time goes by, when you get better in I mean, you could be 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 penance because someone's got to do it.

And the other guys are doing important things.

You know, I lived my life watching the news,

like the 24-hour news cycle.

Something came on CNN back when it was reliable. You'd look at it and go, oh, something's happening in Khartoum.
That's happening in Belize. 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 were many times I got called in, trying to think of the country in South America, every year I'd get called to go get the ambassador and they'd smooth things over and we didn't have to. But you live your life on the news because you could be going somewhere.

I mean, look what happened on October 7th, right, with Israel.

Those guys were on the road within hours.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Not that I know anything about that, but, you know.

Yeah.

Well, let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll start getting into similar combat operations. Sure.
Yeah. Well, let's take a break, and when we come back,

we'll start getting into some of your combat operations.

Sure.

Perfect.

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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 TF-160, and now we're getting into your combat operations. Let's move into post-9-11.
All right. Actually, let's just go into 9-11.
All right. What were you doing when that happened? So 9-11, I was doing a mission in JRTC,

the Joint Readiness Training Center down in Fort Polk, Louisiana.

I was actually infilling a MarriOps team, a maritime team from 5th Group,

and 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.

The sun comes up, and I hear guys in the barracks.

Now, the barracks, as well as National Guard buildings,

it's cinder block walls, hard tile floors, 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, ugh.
And I knew that our other company, a company, was on their way to Europe to do a joint readiness 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 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, I turn on the TV, and that's not what I saw at all.
What I saw was one of the trade center towers was burning. And I remember thinking, oh, somebody's in trouble.
Safety-wise, aviation safety, you've got LaGuardia, JFK, Newark there. Somebody screwed up.
And so I got it on, brew up a pot of coffee in my room, and I'm looking at it. I have my first sip of coffee, and in comes another plane.
And I was like, this is no 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 were going to open the helicopters and do something, but we were going to have to get back to Fort Campbell.
And it was something, because I go down to the end of the hall, and there's two guys that have been out. They were shot down.
They're doing an E&E that night, escape and evasion. And so they'd just come in.
They were miserable from walking around in the swamps 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 4. I'm talking about somebody is attacking us.
They opened the door, showed them the TV, and I go, wow. So I had just taken a position.
So I was a flight lead, right? So what that is in the 160th is you are one of very few, tracked actually by the Secretary of Defense's office on how many there are of us. And 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? They always talk about, you know, oh, you're going to go across the street to the headquarters, right? Because it's literally across the road. And what 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 9-11, right? So you had fighters overhead, AWACS, that kind of stuff, but no commercial air travel, no military travel other than fighters.
And so we rented a car, the battalion commander and I,

and we drove back to Fort Campbell.

I think it was a 10, 11-hour drive.

And we're just hungry for information because, remember,

cell phones back then were real 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 something.

And so we get back to Fort Campbell.

Now we can get down to the skiff, find out what is going on.

And the next day, we were headed to Tampa in a 15-passenger van,

me and a couple planners.

Didn't really know what was going to happen.

And that's a 15-hour drive or something like that. And we drove down.
The guys were still stuck at JRTC waiting to come back up. So we went to Tampa.
And a funny story there, right? So now the base is locked down, MacDill, right? And we got to get to Soxcent headquarters. And the line to get in the gate has got to be five, six miles long, right? And 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 I say, hey, we need to get in. And they're like, sorry, sir, emergencies only, you know, official bit, whatever.
So we start driving back, and I happen to have a guy, our intel officer was also a CI officer, and he had a badge. And that badge had a little placard with it that said something like, you know, if the bearer of this badge is doing 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 can't. They'll take my badge away if I use it for something.
I'm like, dude, we're just going to attack. So we drive back through.
He flashes the badge. He lets us right in, right? And that was always a funny story with he and I, that he was afraid to use his badge for 9-11.
So anyway, we get in there, and we're not really sure what is going to happen. We know we're going to Afghanistan, like the target is in Afghanistan.
But we're bouncing between the 3rd Battalion and the 2nd Battalion going because B Company's 2nd Battalion had just divided in two and sent six of its Chinooks to Korea to work in Paycom. 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 of the other units didn't have the same expertise that we had because we had done, two years before that, two years in a row, we'd been to Kuwait with the intention of going into Iraq during Operation Desert Thunder and Desert Fox.
They're separate things. He kicked the UN inspectors out.
So we were there seven months at a pop, flying every night, doing air refueling, dust landings. So we were really good at operating in the dust and air refueling in the desert.
But now we're shrunk down a little bit, and we don't know if we're going to be able 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 3rd Battalion will go to Uzbekistan and go into Afghanistan.
Except things keep going around a little bit. It's like, you know what? 3rd Battalion would be better off going to Egypt.
We'll take the ECHO models up to Uzbekistan because of the terrain falling radar and some other things that the older aircraft that 3rd Battalion had didn't have installed. They had air refueling capability.

The aircraft looks the same on the outside, but it's not nearly the same aircraft.

So we end up getting the mission.

So I plan it.

I'm on the phone, and this is so secret, even on the secure line,

I'm not allowed to talk about it because the phone's not a high enough classification.

So the guys had just got back from GRTC. They got to fly back.
And I'm calling up there going, hey, you need to pull. We're like talking around this on a secure phone.
You know, hey, I need you to pull digital maps for maybe, remember that movie, Spies Like Us? You know, kind of that area, Dush, Dushanbe. And 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 because Operation Enduring Freedom was actually started as Operation Infinite Justice. And we got rid of the riot act.
You don't tell anybody about this, nothing, no talking about it. So we're going home, and on the way home, Donald Rumsfeld is doing a press conference, and he says, Operation Infinite Justice is in motion.
We're like, what the hell? So they changed the name. But so we get back, and here's where the real challenge is, right? Remember I said earlier that there's always room for one more ranger.

At sea level in a Chinook, if you can put something inside it,

you can fly with it.

You just can.

When you start doing external loads, you can get stuff that's too heavy.

But now we're talking about flying to these mountains that are 20,000, 22,000 feet. And it isn't just the altitude, it's the distance, right? So in order to get over a mountain, you might have to be a certain weight.
So let's say I can carry 20 guys, right? And the gas that, so I cut the gas down to make weight, if you will, to get over the mountain. But then I don't have enough gas to get where I'm going or to get home.
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, 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 UW campaign on conventional warfare.
That's the whole horse soldier thing, right? Except they thought I could just take them anywhere they wanted to go. And I didn't know they were doing that.
I was just planning for personnel recovery. So if the bombers got shot down, a fighter, I would go rescue them, that kind of thing.
So the other company comes in, you know, their lead planner, and he looks at our whiteboard of essentially a table 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 separately came up with the same conclusion. You almost can't go anywhere, right, without some major concessions.
So then we end up going to Uzbekistan, a place called K2, Karshi, Kanabad. Uzbekistan is just to the north of Afghanistan.
And that's a former Soviet republic, and we're going to operate out of that base with four Chinooks 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 battle now, you know, you get battle tracking and beacons.

You know where everybody is, and you can see everything everything and you've got a stack above you of support. There was nothing.
And so here we are. As soon as we built up the first two Chinooks, the bombing campaign started.
And originally we wanted all four built up because we wanted 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 SecDef said, nope, as soon as the first two are done, start. So they started bombing right away.
And then we got the other two built up. Luckily, we didn't have anybody go down.
And 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 a Green Beret colonel, the fifth group commander, John Mulholland. Great guy, by the way.
And he comes in, he's like, can you give me a brief on what you can do with the helicopters? And we kind of show him, and he's kind of perplexed. He said, what's the matter, sir? And he's like, so you mean you can't just take an ODA team from here to here? No, sir.
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 three weeks ago.
And I was like, what do you mean mean? Then we found out we were all in the same planning area. They were falling under the old isolation rules.
Cold War, ISOFAC, don't tell the pilots where you're going because if they're captured, they'll tell. In this case, you're counting on me to be able to even do it.
We figured it out. We had to make some concessions on weight.
Like 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 pounds.
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 pounds.
Oh, come on, 30 pounds? Get rid of it, you're not going. Fine.
They'd lose batteries or water or something. You know, they could be supplied later.
But that's how strict we were on the math. And then we had this political problem.
When Ahmet Massoud died, right, he was the head of the Northern Alliance. He was assassinated the day before 9-11, I believe, right, by al-Qaeda so that we would not have a reliable ally, right? And he was very charismatic.
Everybody loved him. He was in charge of all the other warlords.
They were subservient to him, and Al-Qaeda blows him up with a fake film crew. His second in command is a guy named Fahim Khan.
He's a jerk. Nobody likes him, but he's in charge of the thing now.
And the third guy is General Rashid Doslam, who those two hate each other, right? They're in different locations. So Fahim says to the U.S.
government, if I don't get my Green Berets first, I will attack Dostum. And you can 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 single ship.
And 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 teammate, by the way,

because I was afraid that Arlo would get his guys in

and then the sec def would go,

you know what, it's too hard, it's not worth the risk,

no more infills.

And then I'd have to listen for 30 years for this guy

talking about his mission, like he has to listen now to me. And so he goes the next night.
Same thing happens. Turns around, except now I'm rolled 24 again, another 24 hours before I can take my guys in.
And I'm pissed. And I meet him in the planning area where he comes in the door.
He's like white. They almost died, right? They're 20,000 feet, can't see out the windows, and they're doing a pedal turn on the hover page.
And I mean, lucky they did it. And I'm like, what the hell, man? And he's like, dude, you have no idea what the weather was like.
I'm like, you know, use this, use that. What are you doing, you know? And we got in a shoving match.
Like, I'm calling him, you know, all of bad words and he's, you know, reciprocating and that. Now Arlo's a little bit bigger than me.
We're about the same height, but he's bigger than, I mean, he would kick my butt. And, but I'm mad and I'm pushing him and somebody gets in the middle of us and they're like, gentlemen, no fighting in the war room.
You know, it's a line from Dr. Strangelove movie.
But anyway, all right, we're 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 T.F. Dagger Opsen? And he's like, yes.
And she goes, please hold for the secretary. And he's like, secretary? This is Donald Rumsfeld.
Who am I talking to? And it's this major, we'll call him Mark, the major Mark. He's like, what can I do for you, sir? And he's like, you tell Mulholland you get those teams in tonight or else.
Both of them clicked.

We don't know about this until like the next day.

So we get up, come in and have our coffee.

I'm expecting to see Arlo go do his thing,

and I'm just going to sit here and wonder if he's going to make it.

And I say, oh, you're going tonight.

I'm 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 do air refueling in and out.
Okay. The only caveat is you can't touch down before the other flight.
Fahim has to get his guys so he can say, I got the first Americans, and Dostum can have his 30 minutes later. So we had to coordinate timing.
So even though I took off and was making a time, if these guys got delayed, I had to back off to make sure that Fahim got his guys first, right? So this is me with the 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 I've got to hit a tanker again to get gas and air to make it home.
And they didn't want me to fly a single ship because there's nothing overhead. The sat at the time, the satellite communications, was a low angle bird and the mountains blocked it.
So unless you were above the mountains or had a certain angle, you couldn't talk. So I would be alone in Afghanistan, right? So they sent the DAPs with me, 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 B-17 bombers going into Germany in the early days, and the fighters could only go so far.
It's like, see ya. We'll see you when you come back.
And so we're flying along, and I've got the battalion commander in 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 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, boom, boom, boom. And we run into a sandstorm, several thousand feet thick, just like the Eagle Claw mission, actually.
And you can't see out past the probe, the refuel probe. There's like St.
Elmo's fire on it, you know, like little sparks. And the daps are in tight.
We're at about 200 feet above the ground, flying across the northern dunes, and they're tucked in tight. And they can't see me.
They can't see the helicopter. What they can see with their night vision goggles is the glow of my engines, right? So there's 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. The glow gets smaller, they know we're descending.
Brave men to be able to do that, highly capable to even come close to doing it as long as they did, and they eventually, they cried, uncle, they turned around. They go, hey, we got to abort.
We cannot do this. Because we always say, you know, with surface-to-air missiles and other anti-aircraft weapons, every munition has a PK, a probable kill ratio.
So if you fire a SA-7 on an aircraft, you have a PK of 75%, right? And I'm just pulling that out of my butt. So 75% chance of a lethal kill.
We say the ground has a PK of 100%. So here we are in the mountains in the clouds and they just, they can't see.
They can't see the mountains. They can't see me now other than the glow of my engines, which is insane.
And though they've got big balls, it's not 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 following radar. Never been done before in our aircraft for real.
We train with it. I think I talked about it earlier with the green platoon stuff.
He goes, execute. Push the button.
Say, Jethro, follow your cue, 300-foot clearance altitude. Off we go.
And we're using the terrain-following 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 kidding, really couldn't see out the window. No shit, so you're the first one.
It took a general officer in training. Like the USASOC 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 reserved, 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 we couldn't do it. So here we are doing it, and we make our first turn, and we get what's called a full climb command.
So the 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 and everything.
But the aircraft, the radar doesn't know that. And then the damn thing reboots.
So you ever had your computer, you had to control all the lead or 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 two-star general is because the damn thing would do that.
The darndest 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 airspeed, about 80 knots.
He's got the power pulled into his armpits. We are climbing at about 4,000 feet a minute.
I mean, we are just climbing like a raped 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 a digital map on the little TV screens, the MFDs.
So I'm scrolling through, trying to find a map scale that would be useful 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 cue. I say, follow that cue.
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 running to bad weather, you can do it.

But in doing so, now you're giving up.

Now you've got a capability, but you're giving up. In order 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. But anyway, this is Afghanistan.
So we're going along. We're still in the clouds.
There's nobody to talk to. My aircraft is all alone.
This is the stuff you make movies about. And they did, 12 strong, right? But they highlighted the Green Berets.
But anyway, we come to the last ridgeline. And we're still in the clouds.
And the colon's like, Al, what are you going to do? And he's like, I'm really 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 feet. So I do that and we pop out of the clouds.
We're like, I don't know, three, maybe 4,000 feet, this ridgeline. And then the LZ is about a half mile to go.
And then there's a little hill north of that, because we'd come around. And on the other side of that, it's a ZPU-23-4, right? And it's Taliban.
So a 23 millimeter, four-barreled anti-aircraft cannon, right? If he sees me, get the 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, a little nub.
As long as I can keep the line of sight from him seeing me, he can't shoot me, right? But I've got to lose 3,000 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 my co-pilot isn't as experienced with me.

And I'm like, I have the controls, right?

So I'm doing this, and I'm basically standing the aircraft on the side

as we're dropping, right?

I mean, we are dropping fast.

I didn't time it right because as we get to the bottom,

I'm turning this way.

The LZ is over here, so it's out the other side of the aircraft,

and I can't see it.

But I'm at about 150 feet 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 Chinook, typically you get set up about a half mile out. Now, we're much closer than that now.
And the controls have little buttons on them, right? And those buttons are for a little magnetic break. 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 a little pressure, you can fight against the springs, right? Because when you get in a dust cloud, you want to be able to just sort of relax your grip and let the aircraft go where you set it up. If you go into it without doing that, if you tighten up at all, you know, get in that fetal position at all, your arm tends to move and you will drift, which is what happened to him because I didn't give him the time to get set up.
And so he comes in there,

and he's a great dust lander, actually probably better than me. And he's coming in, and I can

feel the aircraft going backwards in the dust, right? Aft gear is going to be like 10 feet 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 aft gear touch the ground.
Well, I'm not going to go back up in the dust cloud with a 23-millimeter gun there if I can, if I'm already on the ground. But Jethro 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 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, kind of settles, and we are surrounded by Afghan men wearing pukuls, and I don't remember what the scarf is called.
They all got AK-47s. It could be Taliban.
It could be Northern Alliance. I don't know, right? There's an OGA guy supposedly there, but he didn't have an Irish robe, so he might be dead, as far as I know.
And the team leader gets out, Mark Newch, right, the leader of F9-5.

And they do a little hug.

He comes up by my window, gives me a thumbs up.

I'm like, see ya.

So we took off, repeated the thing, went back, got air refueling, back to Bagram.

We sit there.

So we shut the aircraft down, and I had nothing left. Like the adrenaline of that night, the stress of that night.
I remember just sitting there as they towed the aircraft into parking, you know, and we were just, Jethro and I were just kind of sitting there. And we did that night after night after night.
And a couple of those nights, Arlo, the other flight lead, and I,

there was an OGA pilot named Ned.

He flew MI-17s out of Dushan Bay into Afghanistan,

Panachea Valley and stuff.

So he stopped in and gave us a bottle of Jack Daniels.

And so Arlo had the bottle, and we snuck off in 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?

It's a little emotional. We're just going to do it.
And there's nobody else who's going to do it other than us. So we didn't tell anybody that we had these doubts.
I'm sure they had it. But as a leader, you've got to lead.
And so we did. We put 21 teams in, I think.
In the movie 12 Strong, it's 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 help. But I was all the way down the west side of, was it Farah? And I can't think of the further south I went.
But, you know, a long way. I took the OGA guys in, and then the next night I'd bring the SF guys in.
And then later on, they might need resupply. If they weren't near C-130 or someplace, they could do an airdrop, that kind of thing.
But we did that. I had to rescue one of the ODAs, got in between a green-on-green engagement.
You know, the Afghan North Alliance fought each other,

and the ODA had to leave.

And when they did, you know, they were under fire.

They left under fire.

And so they're in their E&E corridor in their vehicles,

the Hilux trucks, and they're headed south.

And I get told, go get them right now.

You know, they're under fire.

So I take off with the daps,

except what are we running to 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 cloud in the mountains and the radar just took us right over, let us down on the other side. And then I picked the road because 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 them because an AC-130 overhead as a U-boat. He couldn't see anything.
It was all cloud cover, but he did have line of sight communications with him. So it was Cobra 22, and I'm hauling ass in a ZPU 23-2, same as that other gun but only two barrels, opens up on us, and the AC can't do anything because he can't see anything anything and he's a little too far away from my mini guns you know we can shoot about 1500 meters and this thing shoots about 2300 and so he could reach us i couldn't reach him so i was like 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 cloudy mess, link up with the DAPS and

go home.

And what's cool with the DAPS is they weren't going to let that time go on, like, not have

a purpose.

So they started trolling in areas

where they thought we might get shot at,

hoping to draw a fire so they could kill it.

And I remember the co-pilot for the lead DAP, Mike,

he told me afterwards, he's like,

damn, he said, we were literally flying in a profile

where we were going to get shot down.

And the flight lead is Ross, and he's like, we're not going to let those Chinooks get shot down if there's anybody out here. If they're going to shoot at anybody, they're going to shoot at us.
Damn, man. Yeah.
So anyway. How long did it take you to insert 21 teams? 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, so those guys were on Polycomry.
There was a cow, not cows, I can't think of the name of it. But, yeah, we're all over the place, sometimes two a night.
So it took two, three weeks. 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 it to the spring, except Dostum, 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 12,000 feet.
The bowl's probably 6,000, and they're in the clouds pretty much, and they pop out, they're out of the clouds, and there's anti-aircraft guns, RPGs, dishcures. And it's like something out of Battle of Britain, shooting at the Germans or something.
Stuff's coming up, RPGs flying under the rotor, surface air missiles, man pads. And what we had decided was there's nothing you can do if you run into an engagement like that.
You let the aircraft countermeasures work, you know, the flares, you see them in the movies, and you just treat it 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 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 propellant from the RPGs and all that kind of stuff in the aircraft.

And they're like, oh, my God.

You know, we were going to die. You know, if this is what life is going to be like, we're definitely not going to make it.
And so we just keep going. But what that did is it let us know that a major force was engulfing General Dostum's force and helped the horse soldiers drop bombs on the right area because they had been focusing over here, for example, and now we knew because those guys,

had they not shot at the Chinooks,

they would have wiped them out.

Yeah.

595 would have been gone.

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

Damn, man.

And we did that for about, you know, seven months or so.

Tora Bora's in there, right?

So we end up, we think we're going home.

We get told, you put all those teams in,

Thank you. you know, seven months or so.
Tora Bora's in there, right? So we end up, we think we're going home.

We get told, you put all those teams in,

Chinooks are going home, right?

No need to have them here.

We'll resupply with C-130s.

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 Arlo's team gets sent to Bagram, first Americans down there, for this place called Tora Bora, right? Because we had to get through the Taliban to get to Bin Laden, and we know where he is, right? We know he's in the Tora Bora Mountains. They know where he is exactly.
And so they take the Delta guys down there. They've got two Chinooks, and they are dropping bombs like nobody's business.
Those mountains glowed for a week after that. And the guys went down with three-day rucks.
Yeah, go down. This thing will be over in two, three days.
All right. They get down there.
Obviously, it's going to take longer than that. We got better supplied.
My team, I was a silver team. They were a gold team.
We go down and replace them. They come back up.
I can stay there for a couple of weeks now. I'm like, hey, give us three, four weeks.
We're fine down here. You guys stay up at K2 and support the teams.
We'll support the Tora Bora mission. So we're doing that.
And then he disappears off the radio, bin Laden, because he's severely injured. And the whole thing where he's apologizing to the brothers, I'm sorry I let you down.
The Americans are going to get us. And we stopped bombing because he was off the net for a night and CENTCOM thought he was dead.

No shit.

We're all sitting there going, you've got to keep up the pressure.

You know, you can lift and shift the bombs as we move into where we think he is,

but don't stop.

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

And they switched sides. And they ended up in a little Mexican standoff, you know, where they're all pointing guns at each other.
And the Delta guys had to withdraw. And bin Laden got away.
And they were pissed. You know, it's all in his book.
Damn. And so we continued for a while going into the caves.

We did a thing where 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 caves to see if he was there, but he had slipped away. And, you know, interestingly, I can tell you that the aircraft we flew down there on that mission where he got away was later in life the aircraft that carried his body out of Pakistan.
No shit. Yeah.
So it was like bookends, I call it. And the funny thing is, is the young captain who was the air mission commander with me in Tora Bora was now a lieutenant colonel and the air mission commander on the one night they got him.
So he's almost like a Forrest Gump. He's in both areas, the same aircraft, and kind of a nice tie-in.
But anyway. This is all one deployment? Yeah.
Holy shit, man. So we get all these exciting things, a very high adventure.
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 the, a guy gave us the embassy back. When we went to Kabul, when fifth group got into Kabul, this little Afghan fellow comes up and he's like, you know, excuse me, would you like your embassy back? What? Come with me.
And he took him over. The U.S.
embassy that had been abandoned when the Soviets invaded was still there, untouched by the Taliban. There were still like, you know, copies of Life magazine and newspapers, cigarette ashtrays, you know, back in the day.
And he'd been taking care of it. You know, a little coat of dust, but he'd been, you know, gardening and doing 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. This is December of 2001.
Big ceremony, right? General Franks comes in, the CENTCOM commander. So I'm

going to fly him, his wife, General Harrell, who was the Afghan overall commander, and a bunch of strap hangers. I'm going to fly them into the embassy.
They're going to do a big ceremony, reopen the embassy officially, put an ambassador in there. Except I get told, take him in at like 10 in the morning.
Daylight, right? I'm a night stalker. We fly at night.
Why? Because it's safer. You know, the enemy can't see you, and goggle, NVGs weren't prevalent at the time.
I prefer to fly at night. And the CENTCOM guys said to my request to fly them at night, I said, let me take him in the night before.
Oh, no, no, no. You got to take them in, 10 o'clock, you know, scheduled.
I said, you're putting a four-star general and his wife and a one-star at risk. They're 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, so I take off, head into the embassy, and I don't have a choice. And flight of two, and we've got everybody on a headset.
So the general's listening in we're talking, alright, coming left coming right, speeding up, slowing down and all of a sudden my flares go off automatically because in the movies you get a surface air missile fired at you, it's a heat seeker it's like, oh, a missile, 2 o'clock, I'm evading. I'm cutting my heat signature.
It's more like it goes by and you go, holy crap, it didn't hit us. So the flares had decoyed it.
It went right between me and Chalk 2. So I'm like, hey, was that an inadvertent launch? Because sometimes they go off for no reason and it's not a missile.
And it's like, oh, yes, sir, it went right between us. I was like, damn it.
So the conversation is, all right, missile fired, coming down left.

I kind of drop down.

I'm in like a creek bed, and I had been doing 120.

I speed up to 165, so that's almost 200 miles an hour,

about 10 feet off the deck.

Because what I'm trying to do is put just enough of the subtle terrain

between me and any potential follow-on shots

because you have to hyper-elevate the thing,

lock on, get the battery coolant thing going,

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.
They're like, well, there's nobody out there yet. I said, sir, get out.
Go to the building to the left. All right, well, have a good day, you know.
And he had no idea. I mean, he just didn't know, right? So we take off, and this is actually a funny story I tell someone.
So we take off. He was on the headset? He was on the headset the whole time.
Because in the movies, if a helicopter gets shot at, everybody freaks out and they run into each other, right? Which is what I told Jerry Bruckheimer at the 12 Strong Company. I said, I hope you didn't do that because we are very calm under pressure.
He's like, ah, I'd be right. But anyway, so we take off and I'm over the city of Cab Kabul, right? It's very sprawling, right? It's very densely packed.
There's TV antennas everywhere, those old-fashioned ones. And I get another surface-air missile fired at me.
So now I drop down again to do the same thing. I'm, like, dragging my wheels through the TV antennas.
And what do I see in front of me? Hundreds and hundreds of kites. The Taliban, remember, had banned kites.
You know, music, you had to have a beard, that kind of stuff. So everybody shaved when the Taliban fell.
Kids were flying kites. And the problem with a kite is they like to use fishing line so they wouldn't lose their kite, right? If that gets wrapped around the rotor system and the push-pull tubes that move the blades, you lose control of the aircraft and you could crash, right? So you don't want to do that.
And there's hundreds of kites above me, right? So there's string and, you know, they're off like this and I'm trying to see the string and I'm doing about 150, 160 miles an hour at this point. And 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. So we left, we go up there.
Did you ever see Flight of the Intruder? No. The movie.
So it's Vietnam. These guys do a rogue bombing mission in North Vietnam with an A6 intruder.
And they fly over what they call Sam City. It's all these surface air missiles.
They get in there secretly, except the bombs don't drop. They'd forgotten to do something in the cockpit.
Oh, I forgot this, and bombs didn't drop. What do we do? And now they're getting shot at like crazy, and Willem Dafoe says, well, they'd never expect us twice.
So they go around, they do it again, right? So here we are, we're back at Bagram. I do pass the word, hey, we should wait till dark before we pick them up, you know? And they're like, no, no, you gotta go get them.
I said, then they might wanna drive out. And I told the reporter what happened.
So my way man comes up, got him Willie. He's Puerto Rican.
He's very, very, very, very thick accent when he gets excited. And he's very animated.
He's like, ow, oh my God. Oh, wow.
Two missiles. Oh my God.
And I go, well, don't you know, we got to go back and get the general, right? And he's like, no way. No way.
Are we doing that, right? In that thick accent. And I go, Willie, they'd never expect us twice.
And he hadn't seen the movie. He's like, what? You're nuts.
So a couple months later, he saw the movie and called me. He's like, oh, I saw the movie.
I got it. I got the line.
But that's kind of how things were. It makes sense now.
That's how things were, you know, up until really Operation Anaconda. And that's its own conversation.
We can go there if you want. Let's go into it.

All right.

So we've been there seven months.

Special operations units, typically,

especially the SOAR,

Special Operations Aviation Regiment,

is designed to go do a mission and go home.

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 seven months in a way that we've never been tested before, right? And we're exhausted. I mean, we are absolutely emotionally, mentally, physically exhausted from this whole thing.
So the other company is going to come in, right, A company, I'm with the B company guys right now. And we're going to do a RIP, a relief in place.
But because we've been operating there, they want us to stay through this conventional operation called Anaconda. It's 82nd, Airborne, and 101st.
And they're going to go, they think Bin Laden and Zahiri are down in the Gardez area. So they're going to go in with a big air assault.
And the plan is that they're going to put special forces, coalition special forces, not the tier one guys, up in the mountains. And the key passes for high speed avenues of approach or escape, if you will.
And if bin Laden's there and tries to go, they'll be able to call for fire from the overhead platforms to kill him, right? Well, in the meantime, the Taliban will be in the 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 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, I think it was a W3, Harriman was his name. He's leading a convoy of General Zia's forces.
Zia's forces are considered 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 coalition guys, so it's the Germans, the French, the Norwegians, all these different coalitions are up there in the mountains going to call for fire.
The problem is

Harriman's identified

as an enemy and the

AC-130 engages

him and kills him.

40 millimeter

I believe. I saw the vehicle

it was pretty messed up.

There was a lot

of stuff going on in Anaconda

that was later corrected. No unity

of command. The comms were

bad. Communications fratricide.

I didn't really know. there was a lot of stuff going on in Anaconda that was later corrected.
No unity of command. The comms were bad.
Communications fratricide. Everybody's jamming everything so nobody can talk.
So we're jamming our own stuff. 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 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 the locals, and the locals now know the locals now know, and they're all, you know, Taliban or Al-Qaeda, and the Russians did a big operation there at one point, the Soviets, and there was a place called the Whale. It was 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-guarded.
So you could put a mortar in, dial it in, whatever angle,

and you could hit a certain spot and you'd know you'd hit it, right?

So anyway, that's for later in the day.

But anyway, so Harriman gets killed.

Zia's forces turn and flee because if the Taliban can kill the American SF guys,

because they don't know the AC-130 did it. They just know that his vehicle erupted with 40 millimeter.
So now there's no hammer on the anvil. And when the air assault comes in, and I just told you they range carted all the LCs, 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 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 Bagram.
The infantry is down there, you know, on their heels. There's talk of pulling them out because they're getting their ass handed to them.
And my job at that time, we weren't part of it really, other than I had two Chinooks and a group of SEALs from DevGrew and we were the HVT team. So if Bin Laden or Zahra Hiri does show up, it's our job to go shwack them, right? Two Chinooks full of seals.

We're going to go kill Bin Laden and Zawahiri.

After a couple of days, it's obvious they're not there.

So if only we could get eyes on this one big mountain, Tarkagar,

that would make up for what 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, Takagar, 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 well because they're trying to protect all these 101st guys because we still don't have eyes on the key terrain. So every time they're doing the bombing run, I've 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 Bagram.
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, when it finally was time to go, they sent me a spare from Bagram. And there's a whole story of how that happens, the Razor Zero-1, Zero-2, Zero-3, that kind of kind of thing.
So Razor 01 brings me a spare. And he's the QRF.
That's his job, right? So he's quick, right? He's going to come down, give me my aircraft. He'll take mine back.
The maintenance pilot will fly the damaged aircraft back, and they'll fix it and return it to the fight. But now it's 40 minutes to get down from Bagram.
And so I say to the team leader,

I'm like, hey, I'm 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've got to take me to the top.

And I said, I haven't seen any imagery for the top.

I don't even know if there's a place to land.

And the troop commander happened to be on the ICS.

And he's like, there's a place up there.

It's all open.

You should be able to get up there.

All right.

So, Britt Slavinsky is 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, you really need to get up there tonight. He's not told no, but the push is on.
I mean, you know what it's like. So he's like, what do you think, Al? I said, all right, I'll give it a try.
So we take off as a flight of two, Razor 04 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 don't know where I am if I don't show up. So get home.
We'll find me later.

So anyway, we get to the top of the mountain, and we land up there.

And there's nothing happening.

And I look off to my right, and there's a donkey tied to a tree and a dishka.

So it's a 14.5-millimeter anti-aircraft machine gun, a heavy machine gun.

And it's sitting there.

Nobody's touching it.

No people. And slab back then, and this is all changed now, in order to talk to me, he had to be on the aircraft headset.
To talk to his guys, he had to take off the headset, put his helmet back on with his pelters, and communicate by embitter or whatever they were using. Or we passed information with a clipboard that had like a glow stick behind it, and you write with a grease pencil, and you pass that back and forth.
So he was in this transition period taking his headset off, and I said, hey, tell the team leader to 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 machine gun.
And then somebody pops up to the left, a guy, and my left gunner sees him and says, Sir, we've got a guy to the left. I said, Is he armed? He said, I don't think so.
Because of the Harriman incident the day before, the rules of engagement had changed because 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, that's very subjective.
And I said, listen, if he pops up again, kill him, because if he's friendly, there's no way he's popping up again while we're sitting here. And so Slab says, okay, we're going, right? So he takes the headset off, puts his helmet on.
While he's doing that, that guy pops up again from a different position, and I watch as an RPG slowly comes at me. It's like in that movie Black Hawk Down.
They show the RPG sort of like a lava lamp kind of 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 left fuel tank, and we probably would have exploded on the spot. If he'd aimed just a little bit forward, he would have got me, in which case, we're not going anywhere.
But he hit right at the minigun, and it went through the ammo can and out the other side, and it exploded in the aircraft. And because the doors were all open, there's not that overpressure, and everybody was just sort of, you know, stunned.
going around, little Tweety Birds. And all of the electric dies, right? So there's three electric systems in a Chinook.
They're all geographically separated so that one bit of damage can't hit them all. And 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 miniguns at that time were AC-powered electric, meaning they run off the aircraft power. Now they run on batteries.
They're done. Holy shit.
So we're now defensive. Everybody's still on board.
But I'm wondering, did the SEALs start getting out? Are they back on? We never talked about that in this particular instance, because usually they'd be, oh, if we start getting off, you've got to stay until 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 them. And the crew chief in the back, way at the back of the ramp, was like, 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, 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 rotate and take off,

and because the engines are on like a backup reversion,

they droop a little bit at that altitude.

It's like 12,000 feet. And so I can hear the droop, meaning I probably lost an engine.
So now I know I can't hover with one engine. With only one engine, we're going to drop like a rock back to the thing.
So I rotate over and I dive down the mountain. 30 degrees nose load, dive down.
What I don't know is that Navy SEAL Neil Roberts is headed toward the back as we're rotating, and the crew chief in the back grabs him, you know, like, I got you, and out they go. Neil falls about 12 feet to the about hip-deep snow, and the crew chief is on a tether, and he's hanging beneath the aircraft, and I don't know that, but I'm diving.
I'm literally

on the treetops because the dish kid is shooting at us. And so I'm trying to get down below his

potential for, uh, you know, elevating the gun down. And, uh, I don't know.
I'm,

this guy's feet are tickling the fricking trees and the other crew chief in the back

sees him, pulls him up, right? And there's hydraulic fluid everywhere. You know, so it's very slippery back there because the bullets that hit the transmissions and some other things.
And the crew chief's telling me, sir, we're okay. The engine's running.
You can level off. So now instead of crashing at the base of the hill, I level off.
We're about 9,000 feet. And they say, sir, we lost a man.
I'm like, what do you mean you lost a guy? I'm in total denial. I'm like, 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? Yeah, he looked like he was alive when we left. All right.
And they're like, sir, the guns don't work. I said,, test fire the guns.
Like, they know. The guns don't work.

So they're like, all right, we're going back to get them.

So we circle back around.

We start climbing back up 12,000 feet.

And we get lined up.

We're starting to get lined up in the controls lockup.

We lost all our hydraulic fluid.

And you can't move the controls without hydraulic fluid.

We're trying to move.

My co-pilot's trying to move it. And we are just flying it 12,000 feet over the battle 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 sorry, we're done. I can't move the controls.
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 opens it up, and he pours a can of hydraulic fluid in it,

and it's got a little T-handle, and he's pumping this thing 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 turn the aircraft back inbound, and we're lined up to land on the top of the ridge, and the controls lock up again.
We get about 50 seconds per can of hydraulic fluid. And now I know we're just going to impact on the top of Roberts Ridge.
That's the name now. And he puts another can of fluid in there.

And I know that there's no way we're going to be able to land there with no guns.

And I still got Razor 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 Razor 04 put the other Mako team.

And it's far enough away that the angle of descent, if we lock up again, maybe we'll survive. Maybe we won't.
I mean, it just depends. But that was the intent.
So we flew down. We actually went way over them.
I couldn't shorten up the descent. And we ended up coming into this kind of a hilly area, except I couldn't see that in the goggles until I got closer.
I just saw flat, as far as I could tell. And as we get a little bit closer, he'd put 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 cyclic, right? It's 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 quit flying the aircraft.
So I look at where we're headed, and I jam on the right pedal, and the nose swings around in the direction of the drift. And now we're going to hit straight on.
So at least we got a chance. If we hit this way, we're going to roll over, boom, movie stuff.
So we hit the ground. I got one more push on this axis, and I do it, and we settle on a slope that's about 15, 20 degrees right side high and about 15 degrees nose high.
So the aircraft's kind of sitting up like this. Pull the engines offline, hit the rotor brake, stop them in one revolution.
And I actually, so our commander at the time was an ex-Delta guy that went to flight school, ended up as our commander. And we'll call him Joe Gorst, not his real name, but it's close.
And he used to do these things called Gorst Games. And he would have us in training do shoot downs.
So you'd go do some mission. I'd fly to Cleveland from Fort Campbell, air refueling on the way up, on the way back.
I'd come back and I'd say, hey, go land at Fagel DZ out on the range, right? So I'd go land out there and they'd have to shut down the aircraft. They'd 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 three or four days walking in the woods

doing escape and evasion, survival, that kind of stuff.

So we called these things the Gore schemes.

So we hit the ground, rotor brake 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 GORST game, right? And I hit all the switches that destroy the computers, and it was just funny, I got a coin from the NSA for doing that.

I kind of joke I should have left it because it was such a mess, the software,

that we could let the Chinese re-engineer it

and they'd set them back 20 years.

But anyway, I deserved my commsack

and destroyed the mission computers

and all that kind of stuff.

So get out.

Slabinski, Chapman, the CCT, they're out there.

They're already talking. They've set up a perimeter.
We've got an M60 machine gun still. And, you know, he's talking to the AC-130.
He goes, Razor 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 they're like, hey, we're going to, you know, 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 are you going? To the top of the hill. I'm like, we're a good 10 kilometers away.
You're not getting up there right now. He's like, no, it's right there.
I'm like, no, it's that one. Because we'd flown, you know, a good three minutes, you know, 100 miles an hour.
We got a pretty good distance away.

So he was like, oh, what about Razor 4?

Can they take us up there?

And I said, I don't know what he's got for gas.

I don't know his lift capability.

So he gets there, and he says, listen, I can't take all of you at once,

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 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.
And so I said, can you spare somebody? If you can't. And he looks around and he was going to give us Chapman because, you know, a CCT guy would be good to defend our position, except they got in a fight.
You know, John doesn't want to be left behind. He wants to go.
So now I'm embarrassed that I even asked. I'm like, just go, go, go.
We'll be all right. You know, so like, all right.
But higher command says, you know, I'm leaving the air crew there. There's enemy combatants headed that way.
The ACN-30 was supposed to engage them, except we got out of there before they had to. They go back to Gardez.
They download all their shit, and they head back to the top of the mountain. In the meantime, I'm at the FOB waiting for them to do it.
So Jethro re-infills them. And there's a whole problem with the AC-130 at the time.
These guys, I love them later on in life. But this particular time frame, I got nothing nice to say about them.
Because they killed Harriman. And because they had the fratricide, they wouldn't shoot on top of Roberts Ridge.
So when Jethro's trying to put them in and raise the 04, they're supposed to be pre-assault fire, but they know there's a friendly up there. But we also know where the bad guys are.
And we're like, hit the bad guy positions. Like, well, there's a friendly up there.
We're not 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 dish guy. 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 go plat kind of thing.
They kind of come in, they drop up and they drop in and the AC doesn't shoot. I know now they were fighting in the aircraft about whether they should support or not, but the aircraft commander, because they killed the friendly the day before, just wasn't having it.
And so they get him in. They do their thing.
And I'm not going to tell their story because that's their story to tell. But Jethro comes back to Gardez.
The aircraft flames out. He has no gas left at all.
The engines quit when he lands. He lands and it's like, that aircraft's not going anywhere.
And it's full of holes, right? There's computers and wire bundles and parts of aircraft that have holes in them that shouldn't have holes. And it took a couple days, actually, to repair it, to get it even flyable back to Bagram.
But the people at Bagram don't know that. They just think it's out of gas.
So there's some confusion at Bagram as they try to put an internal tank on to fly it down to us, to put gas in it, to return it to the fight. And then I get on the phone and I call back to the talk.
I'm like, hey, that aircraft's out of the fight. Oh, all right, pull the refuel tank back off, right? So now there's all this confusion of what's going on.
And so Razor 01, who had brought me the spare,

has just arrived back at Bagram.

And he's told, QRF's got to launch.

We've 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 Chinook where I crashed, right? And they actually flew by me. Isn't that Al's aircraft? Why are we going this way? Why are these coordinates somewhere else? And they don't really know what's going on yet because we haven't been able to talk.
And so the flight lead decides that he doesn't know what's going on. He's getting conflicting information.
So he sends Razor Zero Two to Gardez to just sort of let him sort things out and maybe talk to me in person. So they come in.
I go running over the aircraft to fill them in. And right about the time Razor Zero One gets there, the AC-130 leaves.
And he takes an RPG to the right engine. So if you imagine the mountain like this, I was on this side of the mountain and was able to take off and dive down.
He's on this side of the mountain starting to flare for landing. He loses his engine, and he pancakes on this side.
So he doesn't have the distance to dive over.

He's on the objective.

Heavy machine gun fire.

The Rangers take heavy casualties.

And the air crew is all shot to pieces.

Our friend Phil Svitak, the flight engineer,

shot just below the body armor,

and he dies on his gun defending the aircraft.

The co-pilot, after the fact, turns out he had, like, I don't know, 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 fight with it, and his hand is limp.
And once again, that's their story to tell. But so in the meantime, I'm down at Gardez and we're building speed balls for them, like ammunition rocks, water, that kind of stuff.
And the idea is they're going to fly over with a good Chinook and they're going to just kick the stuff out and at least resupply them because they don't have a lot of stuff. It's only half of a Ranger squad.

The other half's in Razor Zero 2.

And four of them were killed on impact. And the crew is all injured.
Every one of them except one has been shot. Only one died, but the rest of them are seriously injured.
and it turns out everything on top of the mountain kind of settles down and we're going to go, the guys are going to go get them, not me, I'm down at the FOB, and they're going to go get them in the daylight. And then somebody comes up around the backside, shoots them up with a machine gun from further than they can shoot, their M4s.
And that's when Cunningham is hit, the PJs. And Nate Self, the platoon commander, is on the radio.
He's like, we had another one hit. You got to get a Kazevec 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, they looked at me like I knew what was going to go on. And I said, they're not going to launch another aircraft.
We just lost three aircraft in the same LZ. They're not going back till dark.
They're like, but that guy's going to die. And I said, another aircraft, seven crew members on board, maybe Rangers.
They're going to wait until dark. And that's what they did.
They told him, no, he couldn't have an aircraft. And Cunningham did die on the mountain there.
So we also had intercepts that 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. That's the daylight rescue that we're thinking is going to happen.
So here's this convoy coming and the guy that was in charge of the FOB, it was an alias, he called himself Hal, who he met. He was like, Hal, Hal, Hal, Hal.
And he's like, what kind of weapons do you have? I said, well, we all got long guns. We all have six, seven magazines of ammo.
We have ammo ruck on each aircraft with 10, 15 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, and I mark the distance so we can do a range card, and we're prepared to defend the Alamo, essentially. And they rig the back wall to blow out because they figured they'll attack the front gate.

And we had the Hilux trucks and stuff.

And there was a big pit with all the ammunition

and explosives for the FOB under a tarp.

And he's like, all right, here's, when we decide to leave,

this guy's going to blow the wall.

He says, I need you to climb under 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 going to cut out for this. And luckily for us, the AC-130 did engage them, and the convoy turned back, so we never had to find out if I could do that or not.
But here's the next part of the story. They do the nighttime exfil.
They pull the KIAs off. So we've got Rangers, Neil Roberts they found, the 160th crew member.
And they've put them as respectfully as they can on the floor. They've been in rigor mortis and freezing up there, so it's hard to place them nicely.
And they take up a lot of space. And that aircraft is sent to pick me and my crew up and the crew of Razor's Earth Thor.
I'm told be at eight o'clock, be on HLZ Gavin, right? The 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. It doesn't kill anybody, but the journalist, the woman who I've since talked to,

she's going to die, right? So they drive her to the FOB. Just so happens they come up before, you know, about seven o'clock, maybe 730, and the weatherman comes in and he's like, sir, sir, we get the journalist, you know, grenade, you know, I got it, I got it, you know, get the medic, So I had one of our medics with us, a 160th medic, and he's working on her.
And I get another phone call, make sure you're out there in the landing zone. They are going to be low on gas, and I mean low, right? Usually we exaggerate the gas thing a little bit, but he's working on her.
And I mean, her thigh is shredded. She's in bad shape.
And he's working on her. And I was like, 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 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 think I almost got her, you know? So he does stabilize her.
The other guys are out on the LZ. We jump in a Hilux truck.
It's a minefield. You know, luckily the driver kind of knows where it is or he thinks he does.
And he's kind of weaving through it, you know, at like five miles an hour in the dark. And we get there as the helicopter lands.
And I've got all of the miniguns, the comm sec, all the sensitive items, that kind of stuff, code books or whatever you want to call it. And 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, you're running.
You're not out of gas. And he's like, no, come now.
And I got the last minigun on board. I climbed on and there was nowhere to go because my flight engineer had gone on board, tripped on one of the bodies, fell on top of his good friend face to face, you know, and realized who that was,

and 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 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 that's Neil Roberts.
And I wear thigh to thigh, you know, 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 alive? I mean, he was obviously dead, but my mind was playing tricks in the blue light, you know, that was in the aircraft. And then we almost did, we did run out of gas.
Actually, we were landing at a, the 101st had set up a FARP for us, except it was super dusty where they set it up. And the guys did it, went in, did a go around, did a go around, did a go around.
And 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 KIAs 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 like the other Razor did.
They get plugged in. The other engine's still running.
They have different amounts of fuel in them intentionally so that one will quit before the other. And they got it going.
They restarted the engine. We flew back to Bagram, and we got off.
Now, Bagram, we always used to joke, was so dark, you know, it was Bagram dark, you know, because you didn't have a real good light because you're afraid of getting shot because there was no fences and stuff back then. And so you had like a little LED light, you know, and you'd actually lose your balance because you didn't have enough reference.
But we get there and we're at this well-lit airfield and everybody's looking at me like,

sir, where are we?

I'm like, I have no idea. I've never been here before.

I think we're in maybe Kabul.

Right? And finally they take all the KIs off, take them to the

hospital or where they took a morgue.

And I ask somebody, hey, where are we?

And they're like, we're at Bagram.

I'm like, where at Bagram?

The airfield. That's the tower.
I'd just never seen the lights on before. They turn on the lights to make it easy for everybody.
So I'm like, guys, we're at Bagram. So we grabbed all our stuff, threw all the heavy equipment in our truck and walked back what they call Disney Highway.
It says Dirt Road. Now it's like an eight-lane highway that the Taliban's using.
And we get to the compound, and we're walking into 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 could hear the fans of the computers, and that was it.
And I was like, I'm back. You get a couple of hugs.
And then we got a debrief and that kind of stuff. And then what sucked is the next day, the guys went out to do a vehicle interdiction.
They thought, I was telling you about Fob Shkin, right? They think this is Bin Laden. And it ends up not being.
But the guys had just flown. The entire package except me and one of the other aircraft had flown.
I'm like, hey, Al, there's a blizzard coming. 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'm like, can't somebody else do it? Oh, the other guys had flown that day. There's you and the other aircraft, right? I was like, all right, I'll do it, right? And I did not want to go back out there again.
Holy shit. Here's the worst part.
So there's all these teams, right? The last team to come out. You just landed.
Yeah. And like, back out.
Well, it was the next morning, right? So I got a little bit of sleep. It's daytime when they do the VI.
So really, I got maybe two hours of sleep. And 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 it may not be that. It may be the elevation that makes a difference.
So 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, the German team says they have armed Taliban on the perimeter with RPGs.

And so the AC-130 planner's there, the colonel.

And I said, Sir, you need to kill them. He's like, well, I can't.
I'm like, you can't. I said, tell the team to mark their position with strobes.
Anything within 200 meters, you kill it. It's not hard.
And they're like, I can't. How do we know that they're armed? I said, they have eyes on them, right? So I'm at this guy's throat and everybody's just in shock.
I think I was a CW3 at the time. I got this guy in his heels.
I'm pushing him back. Like, you will kill them.
You're going to do this. And the commander steps in between us.
He's like, Al, Al, it's okay. It's going to 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 AC-130 and you won't kill the bad guys? And he was all pissed.
I said, I'll go with you. I'll go with you.
I'll go. Screw you.
So we take off and the Germans never get engaged, but we're headed toward them. And here's the part that really pisses me off.

We're like six minutes out.

Call the C-130.

Hey, Razor 0-3, six minutes.

Roger, six minutes.

Hey, listen, we're going to RTB.

Going back to Masura.

What?

Yeah, we have to be back on the ground by sunup.

I'm like, I'm six minutes out. You mean you tell me you can't hang out for 10 minutes? I'm sure you can get back to Masira 10 minutes after the sun comes up.
And they're like, nope, got to go. Same thing they did for Takogar.
And these conflicting emotions, I didn't know what to do. And my co-pilot was another flight lead.

Ahmed is his nickname because of how he looks

in that part of the world.

What an amazing guy.

And he did what no one else could do.

He shamed them into staying.

And we picked up the Germans.

The Taliban had moved away when they heard the helicopters.

They didn't want to get engaged. And we brought them back uneventful.
And then the next night, the new company came in. We did a little handshake.
We flew back to Bagram. They took, or back to K2.
They took over. And we went back home.
And I was back again in July for another rotation.

Damn, Al.

Holy shit.

And the story's important

in that

the rest of my special

operations career and what I put

in the book here is a family situation that developed,

right? So while I'm at

Gardez, the

CIA guys

that are running the thing go

I love't. Here's the headline.
Two Chinooks shot down, eight killed. each crew of four on two Chinooks.
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 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 Black Hawk Down.

And 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 aircraft that hit the antenna?

One of the captains called back to his wife to say,

it will be a good day. It's my husband.
And I had been in Desert Storm. Remember I talked about 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 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 did what I was supposed to do. I didn't call my wife.
And so for roughly two days, she thought I was dead because they didn't know who it was, and she was convinced it was me. And when I finally get back to Bagram, after the debrief, I call her on the landline, and she's like, you mean why didn't you call me? And I was like, I can't.
You know I can't. She never forgave me for that.
And it tied into all of the family problems we had after that. Damn, man.
You know? Do you regret not calling her? No. It was the right thing to do.
I mean, could you imagine being the family that does get notified? You know, it definitely is your husband. What kind of family problems? Well, over the course of 17 deployments, so roughly 10 years, my wife, Linda, had a prescription opioid addiction.
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 9-11 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 thinks I'm dead and I don't call her.
So she takes it personal that I don't call her. And, you know, it's not like this terrible thing that happens, but it's underlying for the entire 10 years, right, as she gets worse with her prescription and doctor shopping.
So I'm deploying because I'm a flight lead. I'm deploying a lot.
And like I said, I was back that summer, and then I did like a three-month deployment, came back for a month, went for Christmas. And then, so she's dealing with all this and we're shorthanded, you know, and, uh, the aircraft are few and far between.
Cause, uh, you know, on 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 damaged. So things are challenging and I'm still doing it.
And because I'm the flight lead, the senior flight lead at that matter, I've got to continue deploying. And 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, I lost 23 friends over the course of 10 years 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 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 was killed trying to rescue the four-man team. But her problem just got worse over time.
And, you know, it got to the point where I like to say that, so when Bo Bergdahl walked off his fob, we did everything we could just to save him, right? I mean, we were, you know, I remember 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 got some pretty amazing stories, actually.
A Sante story I can tell you about later if we have time. But 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 found his underwear, his socks, you know, some DNA, if you will. And we're just a little bit behind.
And the Taliban is going old school. They're not using phones.
It's couriers. It's all courier network.
And so we're doing vehicle internet. We're blowing these motorcycles up with the miniguns, 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've got to get home. I've been on a long deployment.
And so I fly down to Kandahar. We're in customs.
Very insulting. I hate that, that I have to go through customs, but every once in a while, you get some jerk, puts a grenade in his suitcase, thinks he's going to sneak it home, so we all have to now get our bags searched.
So I'm down there. The MPs are walking through my stuff, the customs officer, and there's a phone call.
Is there a CW5 Mac in the room? What?

Chief Mac, you out there?

Yeah, right here, right?

So I'm thinking it's my wife having a meltdown

like just as I'm coming home.

And I get on the phone,

and it's the officer in charge at Sharana

at our task force.

And he's like, Al, Chad, my replacement,

had a heart attack, and he died. You know's at like 6,000 feet, MSL.
This guy used to be a ranger, one of those guys, right? He's a marathoner. He's in great shape, crossfitter.
He goes to the gym right there at Serana 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 they do CPR on him. 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 anything. They can crack your chest in the helicopter, right? That's what these guys are for.
So they're working on them. They throw them in the back of a truck.
They're working on him. They're hitting him.
Boosh, 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 send a helicopter to get me.

They bring me back.

I do that night's mission.

And now there's no replacement for me.

He was it, right?

We're 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 Bergdahl tips the scales. That's literally, if you could put a mark on the wall, that's when she, you know, she may have been having some trouble maybe swirling the bowl a little bit.

That picked up the pace, you know, and life got to be hell for her and my family at that point.

And so I did the rotation.

The unit did the best they could to help her.

Like she started cutting herself intentionally.

Shit.

And the unit commander would come over, take her to the hospital. The chaplain was involved.
But they didn't tell me. They didn't tell you? They didn't tell me.
She didn't want them to. This is the power she had.
She was able to convince you that it's going to be okay. Let him do his thing.
We know that there's no one else to do it. Who's going to do it? That seems to be the case.

And a lot of the things I do is, well, who's going to do it? Might as well be me, right?

And so once again, in order to save someone else's family from going through the same thing,

being gone that much longer. I did it.

That was probably a mistake in hindsight.

But I get back, and now we'd also been to Yemen.

We did a couple of things. So that year I was gone, like 300 days that year,

on multiple operations around the globe.

What year was this? Well, mostly Afghanistan, but we did some stuff in Africa and Yemen I can't talk about. What year? Oh, what year? I guess maybe 2009 maybe.
I'd have to look in a book. Might have been 2009-ish, maybe 10.
And you did stuff in Yemen and Africa and Afghanistan. Yeah.
So I'd go from one to the other to the other. And then that was over a holiday.
So, you know, my poor wife, you know, she told me she was okay. You know, and I could tell she wasn't, but I had to think that she could pull through.
And it was like one night, I'm on the Iridium phone, I'm talking to her, and it's like we're having a separate conversation. She's at my mom's house.
I said, 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 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.
She was withdrawing from methadone, and she'd have hallucinations. And she could have conversations and experiences that didn't actually occur.
So I was pissed because 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. It was like, this place, we weren't flying that night.
I was like, this place is a pigsty, the planning 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 you do this.
And everybody's just kind of looking at him. What happened to him, right? And so the major, the OAC, comes up and says, Al, are you okay? I'm like, no, I'm not okay.
And he goes, well, let's talk outside. So we start heading outside.
And as we go out the door, you know how all the doors had like the sandbags on the string to bring them back closed? So I go out and the damn thing catches as I'm opening it. And I'm sort of turning around as I'm doing it.
And I step on the lower step and I fly backwards onto my back, onto the crushed rock on the ground, right? And I hit with a thud like a sack of potatoes. And the major's like, Al, are you okay? I'm like, no, I'm not okay.
I just flew 12 feet and landed on my back, you know. And luckily that was enough to kind of expend the situation, but I still didn't tell him what was wrong.
And so by the time I got back from that, the colonel already kind of knew, the battalion commander, that something was wrong with me. You know, maybe PTSD, maybe I was just worn out.
So he assigned me to the training company, Green Platoon, and I became the platoon leader for the Chinook section.

And here's where my life turned to hell.

So here 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.

I'm going to fix this.

I'm home now.

We're going to fix this. And she says, okay.
And so she drives off to AA, and she doesn't come home. So I'm calling her phone.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Finally, 2 in the morning, the phone gets answered.
It's a deputy sheriff. He's like, I'm not supposed to be answering this.
Who's this? I'm like, this is Alan Mack. Who are you? Right.
And he said, well, I'm a sheriff's deputy at the jail. Your wife was arrested for driving while intoxicated.
So she had been drinking at the AA meeting and she was too drunk to drive and they called the cops on her and she got arrested at the AA meeting and left her car behind. So I took a cab out, got her car, brought it back.
And, you know, at that point I was like, you're going to rehab, you know, we're going to fix this. And there's a whole, you know, it's about two years really worth, maybe a year and a half of this insanity of dealing with somebody you love and thinking you can cure it, thinking you can control it.
But if I left the house, she had vodka hidden everywhere. It could be like in the cushions of the thing.
And she was augmenting her opioid medications, which were prescription. And her behavior was becoming more and more radical.
Radical as in, we get in a fight one time and she's like, go ahead, hit me again. Now 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, or my lawyer has pictures from last time.
I'm like, what are you talking about?

It was like something out of a Law & Order episode.

Damn, man.

And she's like, remember the last time you beat me?

You know, my lawyer took pictures, or the doctor took pictures, gave me the lawyer,

and they're in a safe.

We don't have a lawyer.

You know, we don't even have a regular doctor.

It's Tricare.

And we definitely don't have a safe.

So I end up calling 911 on her, and she calls it on me. And they show up, and they ask 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 rehab. She does.
And 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 TRICARE and said, hey, we don't have any benefits.
We've used them up. And they said, yeah, TRICARE 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 they're like, sorry, sir, we can't do anything.
And I got in a big fight with her where I saw her driving. Like I came home early for lunch or something, and she drove up and I saw her at the stoplight.
You know, eyes are open, lights out. You know, she's just sitting there and didn't see me.
And, you know, she turns down the road, I follow her. I get to the house, we have it out, you know.
But you can't argue with a drunk. And it just doesn't

work out. And I'm like, stop drinking.
When I get home tonight, we'll talk, right? And 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. I go back to work.
I head home. She's passed out on the bed.
And as I walk in the door, the phone rings, and it's my company commander. I say, Al, where are you? I go, 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 say, well, she's passed out on the bed. She had taken my alert roster and called all down the alert roster telling people to tell me not to come home because it wouldn't be a good idea.
Holy shit. So now it's in the open, right? It is no kidding.
I mean, a couple people knew before, but now it is wide open. So I grabbed my dog.
I grabbed a bunch of stuff, changed clothes, grabbed my two bicycles, you know, my guns, put them in the truck, and I go get a hotel, and I move out. And 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 they steered me toward the Al-Anon family group. So it's like AA, but for the family members, right? And they teach you, you didn't cause it, you can't cure it, you can't control it.
And the idea is to get your own feelings under control so that 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 get ready first. So they were very helpful.
And they all convinced me, look, you've got to move out of the house. You can't stay there and enable it.

So I did.

Where are your sons at?

So they're deployed.

My son in the Navy is actually at Bay Capes, Virginia Beach.

And my younger son was a Chinook crew chief in the 160th,

and he's in Afghanistan.

Already?

Yeah. So he'd already done a couple of deployments by this time.
So this is 2012 when this finally— So your sons didn't have to—it wasn't like a rough home life for them. What I didn't know, they kind of bailed out before it was.
Like, they knew what was going on before I did, right? And she made them promise not to tell me because she'll get it under control and they'll bring him home and someone else will have to do it, all this big circle of events. They tried, I'm not going to talk, they don't want me to tell a certain story, but they tried like hell to get her help.
And then when they couldn't, they moved out. Damn, man.
My oldest son joined the Navy and flies F-18s. He's a Wizzow.
And then the other one joined, became a crew chief, and I actually helped get him into the 160th because I didn't want him flying in a conventional unit. Because even though we're maybe facing the enemy more often, we're much better prepared and equipped for it.
So if he was going to be doing it, I wanted him to be with us. You know, the chaplain and the psychologist 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 emails from guys.
They'll read my book or listen to it on the 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. And it doesn't make things any easier.
But if we can help somebody in the process, which is why I'm okay with talking about it now. I mean, it's hard to talk about.
But it is important. Sorry you had to go through that, man.
Thank you. Me too.
But, you know, how is steel made, you know, in the forge of the fires, right? So the command was very, very supportive. You know, and they sent me off.
They said, you have whatever job you want. They even were going to create a job where I would be essentially a goodwill ambassador.
I could represent 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.
And there were really two jobs that I was interested in. One was at Fort Rucker, Alabama, the ASDAT, the Aviation Shoot-Down Assessment Team.
So if somebody gets shot down, a team goes there like when an airliner crashes, like the NTSB, and you figure out what happened, you do the forensics on it, you figure out what could have maybe been different, and then recommend, you know, fixes or changes in tactics or whatever. So that was, I would have been the chief of that division.
Or there was this job at West Point, the flight detachment commander. But that's nominative.
Like you have to throw your name in, the superintendent gets to pick. And 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 horse back on his legs with a green beret on it with an M4. It's a pretty neat statue.
It's there now if you ever get down there or up there. But I get there, I'm thinking, hey, New York's not too bad.
It's pretty. It was a good time of year, September and I threw my name in the hat the superintendent picked me I got the assignment at Guildlearn how to fly Lakota helicopters, UH-72s and then I ended up up there and that in itself takes me to a good place that I am now.

But, yeah, there's a lot of other stories in the middle of that.

You know, you can find them in the book.

I know we've gone a long time, so I can keep talking or you can go to the next phase here or whatever you want to do.

How did it go with your wife?

Well, she, so I move out of the house.

I'm in a hotel with the dog, which I still have.

The dog's 16 years old, little Jacoby dog.

And she makes one final call to me.

She says, I want you to come home.

And I said, I can't.

The commander tells me I can't go home.

The psychologist says I shouldn't. I said, if you don't come home, I'm going to kill myself.
And I said, you don't have anything lethal in the house because I was dropping by every day to check the mail and just, she was always passed out. So she didn't even know I was there.
And 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 said, not until you're sober, you know.

And she said, I need help.

I said, call 911.

Let them take you to the hospital, and I'll come support you.

But I'm not doing it until you do that.

And she didn't. And then so I went back to the house, 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
I dialed up my oldest son. I said, hey, I don't know what's going on here, but I want, you know, she says things about me.
So I'm going to put you on speaker. I'm going to put you in my pocket.
I'm going to, you know, you're just listening, 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 conditions 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. And she's dead.
And so I call, and I say, you know, Stephen, I'm sorry to tell you this. Your mom's not alive.
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, are you sure she's dead?

I'm like, look, I've done a lot of combat deployments.

I know what a dead person looks like.

Are you sure?

Can you roll her over?

So rigor was in her arms, right, like this.

And I had to, like, they were, like, outriggers, you know, and I tried to, no, she's dead.

All right, we'll go out front and wait for the police, right? So 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 set up an ambush, if you will, on both ends of the road.
And they got there and did their thing. And the medical exam, the medical examiner came and they bagged her up, brought her out into Stokes.
You know, the neighbors were all around. And 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 such.

And they're like, we take all the alcohol out of the house.

We come back four or five hours later after watching the house,

and she'd be drunker than when we left her.

I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. She's got it hidden in the attic, in the basement, I mean, wherever.
She'd call a cab and say, hey, I'm not actually going anywhere. Just bring me a bottle of vodka or a bag of vodka.
When I got there, there were a couple ofallon jugs and a bunch of little flasks laying around.

She drank it all.

And she basically drank herself to death.

Holy shit, man.

So I moved back into the house.

You know, we have the memorial and all that stuff.

And I knew I needed that change of venue, which is why, you know,

I told the regiment, hey, thanks for the offer for the job,

but I'm going to go one of these other places. And so I put the house up for sale, ended up in New York.
And the cool thing about that was I was probably the most family-friendly commander my guys at the detachment had ever 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 hangar was beautiful. And I was like, come on in.
Talk to me. Husbands can't come.
And I said, here's my background. You know, I told them about my wife.
And, you know, they were all tearing up when I told the story. And I said, listen, if your husband ever tells you he can't do some event you want to do,

you've got to go visit your parents or you're going to go on a trip or you have a birthday party.

And he says, oh, the commander says I've 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 it was great.
You know, we were there. This hangar facility in the winter, we'd move the aircraft to the other side and so it's an empty hangar and we'd bring in inflatables for the kids and everybody had kids.
You know what it's like. And in a better weather, we'd have a bonfire out back.
We actually had a big fire ring that we built, picnic tables and we had permission permission because it was really army property on the airport. So we could do that.
I had the state police in my hangar. And how I knew I was being successful with the camaraderie and the morale that they weren't faking it, you know, like mandatory fun, was in the middle of the week, they'd be like, hey, sir, the list of guys.
Sir, it's good weather today. We got nothing going on tomorrow.
What do you think we do a family party tonight? Sure. So potluck, everybody come in.
We have our time. And it was good.
We also had a bunk room in the hangar so I could just stay there. I didn't have to drive.
But I met my wife, Patty, my current wife, and she has 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 when we were recording, if you will, on the phone, she's like, so where were you on 9-11? Which is a very New York question to ask.
And I told her and I I said, you know, a couple weeks later, I was in Afghanistan.

I was the tip of America's response. And she's like, what? And she didn't know anything about it.
So we talk about it. It turns out her stepbrother died in the North Tower.
So kind of a nice mesh there, you know. you know actually I was at

I told you earlier at breakfast I was at

a Tunnels to Tower event. I met the Sillars.
Their son died running from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to the tower and died. And they do this run every year.
And so we're talking, and they'd met the horse soldiers, if you will. They'd never met me, and they were really, really nice people, and very grateful, nice organization, all that kind of stuff.
And that's the kind of thing that I do now is that so, all right, so I did the Army thing, so I'm flying the superintendent around, flying to D.C., flying to see the Secretary of Army. You know, the cadets get in a fight with the pillowcases

and have batteries in them, I guess.

Gets on Twitter and he gets called down, you know,

what the hell, Caslin, you know?

And he's like, so I got to fly him down there.

And I befriend some firsties.

That's seniors, right, at West Point.

So my very first support mission,

we fly the Lakota out to West Point, we land. We shut down.
It's parachute season in August. And these two cadets, seniors, they know about me because one of the guys that was ahead of me was one of my instructors that worked for me.
And so they know who I am. I get there.
And as I'm walking toward the group for the safety brief for the season, they're like, hey, sir, you know, can I have Dave and Chris, you know, I'm not going to use your last names. We want you to be our leadership mentor.
I'm like, sure. And they run off.
All right, yay. I'm looking at this other guy.
I'm like, what did I just sign up for? He's, I have no idea. Right.
So essentially I, I was, you know, they would ask you, you know, come to the house on Friday nights, you know, and, and talk about their career in the military. How do you deal with a platoon sergeant? How do you deal with a warrant officer? How do you deal with, you know, trouble soldiers or whatever it is, leadership questions.
And in doing so, They're like, oh, sir, you got to do a tandem with us. And I'm like, I'm a pilot, but I'm scared of heights.
Right? And I'm like, there's no way I'm going to skydive on purpose, right? And they're like, oh, come on, right? So we get through the season. It's almost graduation.
And I've had a great time with these kids. And the OIC of the team, he's a lieutenant colonel at Green Beret.
He comes up. He's like, Al, why don't you do the tandem? The guys really, it would mean a lot.
They'll jump with you. Like, you'll jump on Coach Falzone.
He's 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, 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 and sitting on the floor of the Lakota. There's no seats in it.
We're climbing up to altitude. We're going to jump from 13,000 feet.
And Tom Falzones, he's hooking me in. He's like, all right.
I'm like, yeah. And the crew chiefs are all looking at me.
They got their GoPros on. They're waiting for me to show some fear.
And I am scared to death, but I'm not showing it. And it comes time and we kind of scoot to the door and I got to sit up basically on the skid, leaned up against the aircraft.
He said, look up, look up. And we just tip out head first.
And I'm now a licensed skydiver because I loved it. And so I got the cadets the next year, the next season, taught me how to skydive.
Like the coach did. He did AFF.
I got to the point where the cadets could coach me. And then I got my A license and then moved on to my B license and then I retired.
So I didn't go any further. But the cadets were a big part of my emotional rejuvenation.
So I meet Patty. She's wonderful.
You know, we're like sickeningly in love. I mean, we got to touch each other.
We got to hold hands. It's that whole thing, right? And she has kids.
You know, her son is in the infantry in the 101st, and he's already done a combat tour. And he's trying to put him for flight school.
We'll see how that goes. And then my stepdaughter lives with us, and my oldest stepson lives in Manhattan, you know, working down there.
So great big family. They all get along, you know, my kids, the grandkids.
grandkids with the first son, two girls and a boy. And my youngest son just gave me a granddaughter since I was four.
And it's just amazing. Good for you, man.
Yeah. But it does go to show you, you know, we didn't talk about it in this, in this sitting, but my faith was tested, you know, many times during this process.
And, you know, I told you that there was a point where it was so bad, I shook my fist at God, and I was like, you know, damn you, God, you know, excuse me. And I swear things got worse.
And it wasn't until I turned back and turned back into that faith that it started getting better and did get better. And I'm very grateful for that.
How did they get worse? The behavior of Linda, because, you know, she got three DWIs, 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 we're going to be okay, 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 home.
You know, I mean, it was obvious something was going on.

And so I'd go back. So I couldn't even make a training trip in, you know, in its entirety.
Right. And guys were starting to notice that, gee, Al shows up, but he doesn't stay.
You know, and my close friends were good with it. You know, they were like, Al, just do what you got to do.
And there was one guy, one of my peers, if you will, had no sympathy for me whatsoever. He's like, well, gee, you know, if 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, you know, the church family was very helpful.
You know, there was a point where when I did that shake my fist at God, they were not as helpful. You know, there was 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, kind of turned against her, turned her backs on her, which was hurtful to her, which then was acted out with more alcohol.
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 soul really got quiet.
And I got to that quiet place where I could kind of think. And that's why when she gave me the ultimatum to come home now or else, I was finally in a strong enough place that I could say, no, the enabling is done.
You're either going to get better or you're not. And in our case, it was not.
And there's really a lot more to that. I mean, you can't cover it in the time we have you know and 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 happened and 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 gotta tell you one fun story right it's a it a Beau Berg doll story. We're not done yet.
We're going to go back and cover a couple of events. Okay, all right.
I was talking about with your... Yeah, with Linda, yeah.
And yeah, you know, she just... I was married 26 years 26 years to her and she gave it her best.
You know, she came from a rough childhood. There was a whole background to this.
But, you know, the alcohol and the drug, the big thing I want to emphasize to your listeners is that you don't have to handle it alone. You know, whether it's somebody's drug and alcohol problem or, you know, somebody's PTSD or suicide, you know, I mean, look at the veteran suicide rate, especially with the soft guys, right? If you got a problem, find somebody to talk to.
Somebody that can relate is what I would suggest. You know, somebody who can't relate may just be like, you know, hey, pull your bootstraps up.
But somebody who may have already been there, you know, or knows what you're going through can be helpful, you know. And the interesting thing, so I want to go way back to Anaconda, right? And this is reference to getting help.
So remember I said I was rescued, came back on the KIA bird next to Neil Roberts.

Well, I was back in the States, you know, that week. And I had nightmares, terrible, terrible nightmares reliving that night.
And, you know, could I have done something different? You know, the RPG coming at me. and then Neil Roberts would be sitting about that far away from me

in his kit with the

damage that was done to him, just looking at me.

And I could tell in the nightmare, I could tell that he was saying, why did you leave

me?

I'm dead.

Why did you leave me?

So the only way to get past that was alcohol for me, right?

So I was, you know, Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Maker's Mark.

You know, I love bourbon.

And I had to do it to the point where I went to sleep.

So it was a lot of whiskey.

And there was a point where I knew that wasn't right.

You can't put the nightmares away with alcohol.

So I went to the shrink, the regimental psychologist, and I told him everything, everything. And I said, can you look in my assessment records, my psychological profile, and tell me if I did what you guys predicted? Am I what you want in a night stalker? And he looks at it.
He's like, well, this is an old test. We don't really use this one anymore.
And it doesn't really select people. It's more like an elimination tool.
Like if you 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 series of data sets, data points, right? So think of these columns. It's like, you know, integrity, you know, here, you know, honesty, here, bravery, here, stupidity, stupidity here, whatever, how you prioritize things.
And they categorized it. I'm butchering this, but you get the idea there's different character traits.
And he says, you have the classic Night Stalker checkmark. 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 them, it's a check mark. He said, 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 Teterboro, to LaGuardia, and he's like,

not happening. I'm going in the river.
And they try to talk him out of it. But he knows, and he just does it, right? And so in military aircraft situations, same thing.
You can 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 checkmark kind of guy.
Then we still had a couple of night stalkers that had most of the checkmark, 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 an MH-60, he got on a brownout landing.
There's what we call bitching Betty is the voice warning system. And she bitches at you if you're too low or too much power or low rotor.
And this guy was in a dust cloud in a Blackhawk. And he starts pulling power to get out of it.
And he's surrounded by trees. And bitching Betty he says, low rotor, low rotor, low rotor, and he jams the power down, and he has a hard landing, and the aircraft is severely damaged.
So they go back to the black box, and they look at it, and they find out Bitch and Betty was wrong, you know, the rotor was fine. But because he was worried about getting in trouble for, you know, maybe drooping the rotor and 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, to get Roberts, you know, with no miniguns and all that stuff, you know, I turned 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? So I made a choice.
One guy, we're going to go over here. Raise a zero four, might be able to get him.
But in doing that, he kind of reinforced that 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 are 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 minimum 30 minutes. And in order to keep things going, they could go for an hour.
Everybody stayed the full time, the whole hour, and many of them came back. And they told me, you know, a week or two later, hey, thanks for doing that.
I was mad at you for doing it, but it helped. Man, good for you.
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,

I'm stressed, I need help.

We're all under stress.

So there's some subjectivity to that, I guess.

But you got to know when that is.

And it needs to be available.

So when you do decide you want help, you do it.

And you can't have the stigma of, oh, crap, Al went and talked to the shrink. But I knew they were all messed up too.
Good for you, man. Let's go back to Red Wings.
Yeah. Can you talk about your experience with the recovery? Mm-hmm.
So first, to know about Red Wings, it's a conventional operation again. We're not even part of it at all.
And they decide they're going to bring Marines into the base of the Korengal Valley, right, in the Kunar province. They're going to go after a guy named Ahmed Shah.
The problem is, well, twofold. One is you never know the pattern of life of who's, where's the targeted individual? What building is he in, right? Because when helicopters come, people run.
You know, they don't tend to stand and fight, they run. So they're squirters.
They squirt off the objective. So we need eyes on the village to determine pattern of life and see if we can identify where Amit Shai is.
And then the Marine Corps helicopters are not capable of getting the Marines into the valley, right? Because you've got to go up over the 12,000-foot ridgelines and drop down, and even the valley, it's 8,000 feet. 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? The Marines are fast rope qualified.
So they send the mission up to us. Our battalion commander is not happy with it.
Fast rope, you know, earlier in his career as a young lieutenant, he'd been on a fast rope mission as a pilot,

and a ranger got hung up at JRTC in his miles gear

and died fast roping in the trees.

So he was really against doing this.

So we're going to do it.

So we do a rehearsal.

We become elevators.

We go out to Jalalabad, and Marines do, you know, up and down.

They slide down the ropes a couple times.

They're at current.

They do a tower, the whole thing.

And so they're going to go in.

And 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 Marcus Luttrell and the boys.
And so here's what happens. So there's two versions of Chinook there.
I mean, I've kind of alluded to the E model, the D model, and the G. And I was flying E models, right? So the E model is a much more capable aircraft.
I can go places the other aircraft can't go. But that equipment has a weight factor to it, a penalty, if you will.
So the D-models, the MHDs, right? They have a refueling probe, the whole deal. It looks just like us.
But they can lift about 1,500 pounds more at that altitude. No question, if you're going to move a bunch of Marines in, you want the D models.
So they're currently on QRF, Quick Reaction Force, and we do it for like a week at a time. And we do a little handover, you know, and then the other two guys, you know, are always around, ready to go.
They're not out on missions. They're just prepared for when somebody has a bad day to run, jump in the aircraft and go.
So the D models are on right now, right? And they're going to do Red Wings and their flight lead is doing it. And I'm the flight lead of the other two.
So they go, okay, listen, we're going to change over. They're going to fly in the four man team, the D models are, and then they're going to come back, and the next morning, next cycle of day, they'll observe, and at night, we'll do Red Wings, right? And that day at, like, say, I'll call it 10 o'clock in the morning, we're going to switch over to QRF.
So I now will assume those duties, and the Delta models that had it will now become the entire Red Wing force. They had seven D models and two Echo models.
So we go to bed. It turns out the team is compromised.
Once again, that's their story to tell. But they call for help, and they decide they're going to launch the QRF.
So this has got to be, when we get the word, it's got to be about 9.30 in the morning. And I'm showered, I've got my uniform on, I walk over to the planning area, the talk, the operations center to see how things are going on, 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, the SEAL team was compromised.

They requested the QRF.

I'm the QRF.

Right now, I'm the QRF.

He's like, yeah, Major Reich was already here.

They were already still up.

And as you can tell, they could get in the air sooner than you because they're about to get there.

They're like two 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 this ridgeline.

And I watched the, there's like an A-10 overhead,

and he's got a lightning pod.

So you can see he's broadcasting them, doing their thing. He's not really there for fires.
He's more for ISR. Chinook comes on screen, comes to a hover.
You can see the engine's getting hot because they're now at a hover. You can see they're kicking ropes for fast rope, and all of a sudden, you know how FLIR is, it blooms.
There's been an explosion. Don't know what it is, but there's definitely been an explosion.
All of a sudden, the aircraft kind of limps a little bit away off screen and comes apart in flight. Fuck.
The RPG was shot up into the aft transmission area, and it compromised either the transmission or the driveshaft. So it held together long enough to sort of limp away, and then the blades come together, you know, because they're no longer mechanically separated.
And the SEALs, the Night Stalkers, came apart, littered on the side of that mountain.

Chalk 2 was right there watching it,

and he calls in.

He's like, you know, Turban 3-3 is down.

I didn't think this was going to be this tough.

So I looked at the colonel, and I was like,

well, I'm the QRF, sir.

I'll take the DevGru seals, right, because the QRF was typically the Siege of Soda seals. And so Red Squadron meets me at the aircraft.
We're driving down there. And, you know, Bagram at the time is this pit of admin, you know, what do you call them, fobbits, right? Never leave the wire.
You're not wearing your PT belt, reflective belt.

You know, you're 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're 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 chief's already had the aircraft up to engine start.
I jump in, strap in, start the engines. Tower already knows I'm going, so they give me priority.
And we are pulling in the power, sucking the guts out of the aircraft. I mean, I've got like, I don't know, I think it's 28 SEALs in the back.
I know I can't take them to the top of the mountain because I know it's 12,500 feet. It's hot out.
There's no way I can get them there. But now what am I 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 saying this, but I'm thinking, I don't know what I'm going to do when I get there.

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 lighter concentration of trees.

And I don't know.

And I get about 10 minutes out.

I call the talk in 10 minutes.

And they're like, abort, divert to a J-BAD.

We've 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 Frank, is the 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'll rope. But we're going to wait till dark, right? And the day is starting to get, you know, it's getting on till 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 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 operator's manual from the aircraft.
So I flip to the performance graphs.

And I'm, 17 guys.

And they're like, 17?

I'm like, 18.

Against my better judgment, 18, right?

And they're like, okay, right?

So we're waiting for dark.

And then I go out to the aircraft,

brief the 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 Bagram,

and they say, 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 crew seals.

So you've 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 disorientation. I was able to make it where the 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 a Sadobat from J-Bat. 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.

I was pissed.

And 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.

I turned back because they hit that weather.

And I remember being just furious because I could have got those guys in. It wouldn't have made a difference, it turns out.
But we don't know that, right? And, I mean, in hindsight, they were already dead. 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, know get through the night see if the weather improves uh we get there it's hot i mean it's miserable hot and i tell the colonel sir if we're not going to go until night let's go back to bagram with everybody and let me have all of my tools the satellite imagery all the stuff i need to properly plan this and we'll put everybody in in force tonight. And he's like, no, no, the weather might clear.
And I'm like, it's not going to clear. So eventually it's obvious those guys aren't 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 I use my body armor as a pillow.
So eventually we get back to Bagram. I do a nice plan where we're going to take two flights of two.
We're going to come at, there's three ways into the valley, into the Khorungal, 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 Echoes would come across there the two Delta models would come up simultaneously from the other side, and we'd land there was like a fork-shaped spur, and we'd kind of come up and simultaneously fast rope the guys on, and then we'd go our separate ways, right? And at least that would, you know, I could come from a different direction, so the enemy couldn't go, I mean, you know, you're reverse planning.
The enemy knows. They've got to come from there, or they've got to come from there, which is how they got 3-3 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 a 100-foot rope, which is a long way, as you know.
And so three of the four aircraft rope at 100 feet. I come over and the guy, I'm not flying.
My co-pilot's flying in the right seat. And we come in, we're like 100 feet, and he loses visual on the ground.
He can't see to hold his position steady enough for them to rope. And he's like, Al, I can't see anything.
And I said, oh, I got a tree out my left door.

I have the controls.

So I have a good reference.

I'll be able to hold the hover.

And a crew chief in the back says, sir, start descending.

Just lower the power, lower the power.

He's like, you're off 75.

Off 50.

I'm like, are you sure?

He's like, keep coming, keep coming, sir.

10-foot hover.

The guy's roped from 10 feet.

And the troop commander was pissed later on. He's said, how come everybody else didn't do that? And I was like, well, I gave some nice answer of, well, sometimes the angle you come in.
And I met him at the White House at Slab's Medal of Honor ceremony. And he brought that up.
And I said, well, I didn't want to tell you at the time, but I'm just a better pilot. And he said, I thought so.
I was like, yeah. I just had a better crew chief.
You know, which, once again, I told you, 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 feet.
I mean, they all had burned hands, you know, even with gloves. And then, so then red, you know, we go back, thunderstorm comes in.
Every night there's a thunderstorm or two. And there's a gap in between giving us time to bring more troops in to look for KIAs, right? So the Rangers and the SEALs, by the way, are trying to walk in, but the train is just, it's hell.
And so we get to the top of the mountain ahead of anybody.

Most everybody turned back, I think, that was walking.

And so we just kept bringing guys in.

Every night, we brought more and more guys in,

looking to expand more terrain.

I flew away one night.

And 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, Haji code of some sort, right? But you can track a helicopter across a valley if someone's over here.
You just watch the lights. So sometimes— Did that shit make you nervous? I remember flying and seeing that.
I didn't like it. Man, it made me nervous.
I didn't like it. And earlier when I talked about not returning fire on these things, made me feel helpless, right, that they could be doing this.
And the Green Berets, the SF guys, told us that, yeah, so the Afghans do. They 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 switchback or something. And from our position, it looks like it's a blinking light, but it's a car.
And I could see it sometimes, it's a car. So when a crew chief says, you know, I got this blinking light, sometimes I take it with a grain of salt, depending on who said it.
And other times I can trust it 100%. So as we flew over, I stored the coordinates.
I pressed the button. The coordinates are saved in the computer.
Don't see anything, don't hear anything on the radio, so we go back to Bagram. We park.
We go down for the day. I didn't bring it back because I didn't think it was somebody.
And I take a shower. I go to bed.
And I can't sleep. What if it's somebody? Right? So I wasn't allowed to drive on the flight line.
I'm a flight lead, but I can't drive on the flight line, right, by the rules of Bagram because I'm not certified with a driver's license for Bagram. So I go wake

a guy up. Hey, you got to take me to the aircraft.
Why? I got to pull something out of the system.

So he drives me down there. I fire up the auxiliary power unit.
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 SF ODA 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 had one of our strobe lights. No shit.
And had I gone in to look for it, they'd probably got me, or at least got a good shot at me. I don't know if they'd hit us.
But, you know, the SF guys kind of took care of business. But that's the kind of thing that's happening.
And then, you know, the A-10s are flying around all day, trying the, you know, the ISO prep cards, you know, they're talking because the Taliban's got our survival radios and they're on their, you know, survival channels, you know, and they sort of would get your attention. And then the A-10 guy would ask a question, challenge, response kind of thing, and it would kind of get broken.
Ah, questions burned now. And they used up all the questions.
It was like something out of a movie. They had a call back to, I don't know if it was Little Creek or the guys that were out in Team 1, and they talked to their friends.
Hey, what are something these guys would know that nobody else would know? You know, like the Taliban couldn't know. So it was like in BAT-21, you know, all right, 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 because 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 Delta model guys would run into the clouds. They'd climb up to 14,000 feet to get out of it.
And then, you know, they'd, you know, it's like, oh my 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 guts.

And so we're, it's obvious there's no survivors at this point.

And we're practicing for a dignified transfer. So we're starting to bring the bodies out.
We haven't found everybody yet, but we've got most of them. And Latrell's in Bitterbeacon comes up, and we've been watching it, I guess.
But, you know, like I said, the Taliban had taken our radios, our strobe lights, all this other stuff. But he sends somebody in with his, what's the, you got one? Blood shit.
Blood shit, right? So he sends his number in with a guy. It might even been the guy that made, I don't remember the guy's name.
But he walked in to the small fob about 10 kilometers away. He walked in that day.
It's evening. We're practicing dignified transfer.

We've got coffins full of cases of water to simulate weight.

And I'm going to be a pallbearer for my NCOIC, Trey Ponder,

who was on the ramp when the RPG came up.

And our captain comes around.

Al, Al, you've got to come inside.

Come to the planning area.

I'm like, sir, we're practicing this thing.

And he's like, no, no, no. He leans over., sir, we're practicing this thing, you know?

And he's like, no, no, no.

He leans over.

He goes, we got a survivor.

You know, somebody takes my place.

We run into the planning area.

They've figured out where he is.

They've confirmed he's there.

There's an ODA, so an SF group of Green Berets.

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 the Rangers get credit for it.

I'm sure they got there, but it was an ODA,

essentially with a couple of Afghans that defended his perimeter

because the Taliban was still there.

They just kept them from coming in while we planned the rescue.

So they're planning the HH-60s. The Jolly Greens came up from Kandahar, the Blackhawks, Air Force, SARS-60s.
So the guy that's in charge of the rescue operation is a PGA major. Tom is his name.
And Tom says, all right, guys, we've 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 traipse in here from Kandahar and fly in and pick up the guy that we lost our guys for. And, by the way, there's no way they're flying at that altitude, right? And, like, oh, we stripped it down.
There's no guns. There's no equipment.
It's empty. No armor.
And I'm, like, even so? And, like, oh, Chinook won't fit in that field. I'm, like, absolutely will, you know? And this guy Tom was smart, right? Because I'm, as the flight lead, I got a lot of say-so, right?

And I have a lot of influence because of who I am and my experiences.

And if I say no and I stick to my guns, I'm going to get to get them.

And he says, Al, we're still missing another body.

We still need to bring more Rangers in.

And you know we're going to have about a 20-minute window of weather. The 60s can't take in Rangers.
Only you can. So this is all going to happen between two storms, you know, rainstorms.
I thought about it. He was right.
There was no choice here. They had to pick him up.
So I said, all right, I'll agree to that,

but I'm planning the mission.

And the 60 guys were like, hell yeah, right? And so I had to plan this very, very extravagant FHIRS mission

to allow the 60s to get in unmolested

because, once again, they now knew that we knew where Luttrell was.

We were securing him, and they knew we were going to come.

There was the intercepts. They knew we were coming.
So I talked to the AC-130 crew, the pilot and the sensor operator, and the A-10 pilots. We sat down at a table.
I laid out my map. I said, here's what I'm trying to do.
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 ridgeline having nothing to do with us, but that's observable, right? So it's a distraction.
I want people to go, you know, they're over here, a little misdirection. What's going on over here? Holy crap, that's a big explosion.
And that's what Latrell talks about in his book. He's like, oh, my God, the explosions were huge.
And so the 60 comes in, and once he's on the ground, they start shooting in behind him so that if he had got past somebody that now knows he's coming out, their position, sort of templated positions. And then he calls, you know, ready to depart.
They shift fire. They blow up another freaking ridgeline.
He goes out. I come in.
They shift fires and 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 the fires platforms. And because they knew what I wanted, and I didn't ask for a certain ordinance, which is what I wanted to do.
I wanted to say, I want 40 millimeter here in case there's, you know, tarps with dirt on it. And I just said, look, I need terrain denial.
I need, you need a detraction, whatever it is. And they said, oh, well, we'll just do, you know, 40 millimeter over here, 25 millimeter here.
We used a 105 on this. A10 will drop a 500 powder here.
And they sequenced it all out for me and it all worked out and we got them out of there, you know, and then, I don't know, a day or two later, we found the last body and then started to withdraw everybody and took two weeks. It was the hardest flying of my life.
And so we go, we do a memorial service because there's eulogies and we're at Bagram. And this whole time, mind you, I've been a machine.
Externally, people are just, wow, Al's just doing it, right? Which is my goal. And when we're done now, all the bodies and the survivor are out of there.
I walked over between two B huts, right, these plywood buildings in the shadows. I put my back against it, slid down, and just cried.
You know? I finally was able to let it go. And what's funny, I don't know if it's funny, but a couple of 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 waiting a flight.
I was like, hey, let me 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, are you kidding me? I was scared out of my skin.
He's like, what? You didn't show it. I said, if I showed it, would you have been happy?

He's like, no.

I said, all right, well, there's a leadership lesson for you.

Sometimes you just got to do, you know, get to put on that face.

And, you know, I was able to cry about it afterwards.

But, man, that was tough.

Toughest, toughest flying I ever did.

Damn, Al.

Yeah. So, luckily, you know, I mentioned, for years I've been trying to meet Marcus.
We just haven't crossed paths. And I finally connected with him, and I'm going to meet him next month.
Good for you. It might be before this podcast airs, but it'll be fun.
I really want to see him. I want to give him a big hug.
Yeah. I'm happy for you, man.
Thanks. This seems like a really weird point to end it, but I just want to show you something, and I've never brought this up before, but if you look back there at that flag,

that is, I got that from my best friend, and his name was Gabe McCarty,

and those were his teammates, the Seals that went down in Turban 3-3. And he was on part of that recovery op.
And it's my understanding that the Rangers secured the crash site. Am I correct on that? The crash site, yeah.
And he was good friends with one of those Rangers. And if you look below Gulf 12, there's a belt of 60 ammo.
And that came out of Turban 33, and that Ranger gave it to Gabe, and told him that that was the only thing that wasn't burnt up in that crash. Yeah, it was bad.
So Trey, my good friend, he sat this far away from me, back at home at our desks. And his wife, Leslie, is great.
She lives here in this area. And she asked me for a piece of the aircraft.
So I asked somebody, and Rangers gave me a piece of this little bracket. I didn't know what it went to, right?

It just was a sheet metal bracket.

It was burned.

They gave it to her.

And about a week later, I was flying,

and I was just sitting there, you know,

and you get these little, you know, the foot pedals,

and there's like little slides for your heels

to go back and forth.

And I was just not paying attention, and there's like little slides for your heels to go back and forth. And it's 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 mountainside was just, it just tore me up.
I mean, I just looked at it and I was like, damn. I was like, hey, man, I'm incapacitated for a minute.
He's like, what's up? I was like, I can't talk. You know, a couple minutes later I was able to say, yeah, that's that, you know.
But, you know, it's the kind of, it's the risk we take. You know, I mean, look at extortion, you know.
Yeah. It's even worse, you worse.
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 the people I worked with, you know, the ground forces were amazing, the air crew, the strength of the families that did do well.
You know, mine wasn't as strong as it could be, but the others, you know, did well, you know. And though they may have challenges that I don't know about, you know, we all did what we had to do, which 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 end on a note of, you know, the Night

Stalker Creed, you know, the very first thing, you know, it's like, or the last Creed part

is, 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.
that's it man Al

you're a hell of a dude man

well this was fun

you know it's too bad we got to talk about the

the other thing first but

maybe another time I'll tell you the Sante story

but it's a little bit light hearted

but this is good

man

thank you for being here, brother. Thanks for having me.
And it's, man, that was heavy. And I'm just really happy that we met.
Same. I'm honored.
And I hope to see you again, man. I'm sure you will.
Tomorrow. Yeah, you're right.
We will see you tomorrow at the All Secure Foundation event. But, you know, for a guy that's been through so much, you seem to be in great spirits.
And I don't know, maybe. No, and I am, and I attribute 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 five-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 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 Chinooks. Oh, watch them do their thing.
You know, and then the wood ducks, they're like Blackhawks. And I just imagine techniques that 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 lasts just long enough, and before I can get the rifle up, he's gone.
All right, so you do that with the bad guys, right? The idea is don't give them a chance to shoot at you. But listen, I enjoyed it.
I mean, 17 years in the 160th and finishing up the way it is now. And writing the book was really good.
Put a lot of things in context. I don't know if it was, people ask me all the time if it was therapeutic.
I don't know, I'd say it's therapeutic, but it did put things in context of timelines of when, you know, Linda had problems, when I should have known things, and when big events happened. But, you know, the Night Stalkers are an amazing organization, and they support some of the best ground forces in the world, and they pride themselves on that.
Yeah, they do.

It was an honor to work with you guys,

and it's an honor to have you here.

Man, dude, just tons of love to you.

Thank you.

Seriously. I'm excited to be on your podcast, man.

It's an honor.

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