#259 Mike Durant - 160th SOAR Pilot Who Survived Black Hawk Down and 11 Days as a POW

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Mike Durant, welcome to the show. Thank you.
Pleasure to be here. It's an honor to have you here.
It's an honor to have you here. And just like I was telling you on the EDC segment,

your name has been percolating around the studio, studios

for a couple of years now.

Do I owe somebody some money or something?

No, actually,

after we interviewed Tom Satterly, your name kept coming up, kept coming up. And so I just

really is, man. It's an honor to have you here.
And I think this is

obviously a very important piece of American history that

I'm honored to be able to document. So,

and

you know, I don't know if this means much, but, you know,

for me,

joining the SEAL teams and,

you know, that whole other life that I did,

you know, that was, it was the Vietnam generation and you guys that motivated me to do that. It was the movies and the stories.
And,

man.

Well, I've heard that a lot, actually. You know.

I mean, I think the one universal emotion when people either watch Black Hawk Down or know what happened is anger, just frustration and wanting to do something about it.

And I think that was really what motivated a lot of people to say, look, you know, I want to get out there and try to help fix this, you know,

get into these organizations and

go

right these wrongs, I guess, because there were some wrongs here that,

you know, it's pretty tough to get over. And

I appreciate your service as well. Thank you.
Thank you. Well, everybody starts with an introduction here.

Mike Durant, retired Chief Warrant Officer 4 and U.S. Army helicopter pilot who survived captivity in the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident during Operation Gothic Serpent in Mogadishu, Somalia.

Although doctors said you would never fly again, you proved them wrong returning to duty after recovery.

Removed a leg rod in 1995 to run the Marine Corps Marathon. Retired in 2001.
Your awards include Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, and Distinguished Service Medal.

Author of In Company of Heroes. Tried your hand at politics and ran as a Republican candidate for the U.S.
Senate seat in Alabama in 2022.

You're a husband to Lisa, and you have been, you have a blended family with six children. And more, most importantly, out of everything,

we just found out you're a Christian. So once again, welcome to the show.

And,

you know, this is, for those that don't know and haven't put it together yet,

Mike,

your helicopter went down in Somalia in 93, and

the famous incident, Blackhawk Down, and we are going to get a full account of what happened

in that timeframe. And so,

once again, it's an honor.

And then a little side note here, just before we get into the interview, I don't know if you've seen this, but it's kind of relevant right now. Have you seen Minnesota?

this happened in Minnesota, Somalis who are defrauding the government to fund terrorism, more specifically al-Shabaab?

Once again, this is in Minnesota, and they are using housing stabilization funds to do this. And according to Polymarket,

They only have a 24% chance of ever being deported from this country. I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on that? Well, this whole

immigration, I'll call it, of Somalis into our country has been bizarre. There is a large concentration near Minneapolis.
I know that. And there is also a large concentration in Maine.

One of my crew chiefs was from Lisbon, Maine, and very close to his hometown. And I never quite understood that to begin with.
And I actually did a law enforcement event a year or so ago for

undercover drug agents in Minnesota. And they shared with me the challenges they have dealing with that particular community because a lot of them share the same name.

So they can't figure out who's who. There's no record of them really in terms of, you know, this person was born here.
They're this old.

No means of really easily identifying them. And they are involved in a lot of criminal activity.

And unfortunately, because of, you know, some of the policies of previous administrations and state and local governments, in some cases,

they're given the opportunity to do the kind of things you just described.

And to think that within our own border, there are people supporting al-Shabaab is, I mean, it's really unimaginable for us as a country. And

I can't understand

how people on the left think that that kind of thing is just the price of doing business for having, you know, hey, come, you know, like Joe Biden said infamously, come, come, the borders are open.

You know, I mean, it's it's ridiculous it's insane man i'm with you i mean

it's surprising but it doesn't surprise me in fact that flag right there i don't know if you told the guys told you where that's from but you know that this isn't just a left thing unfortunately um you know the government has been funding the taliban 40 to 87 million dollars a week in cash And the person that broke that is a friend of mine, legend.

He's an Afghan American, was Army intelligence, and brought that flag back when

he broke that

story and recovered that flag from the fucking Taliban burning that in Kabul, Afghanistan.

And that's still going on. That was going on since since the withdrawal, maybe before the withdrawal, if I remember correctly.
And I mean, it's just been passed from one administration to the next.

And I mean, we just had the fucking this, did you see the Syrian terrorist who's the fucking president now at the White House They hosted him.

They hosted somebody that's fucking cutting our heads off at the White House

Anyways

Chris Rufo says the largest funder of al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer Unfortunately.

I believe it based on you know what I've seen there in my discussions with like I said the law enforcement folks up in that area. Man.
But well, we got a couple of, let's move into some better shit.

But I got you a gift.

Here you go.

Thank you.

Vigilance League gummy bears made in the USA,

still legal in all 50 states. Well, I like the story about the guy that told you he ate three bags and he still didn't feel anything.

Yeah. We'll get some good emails.
And then one last thing to get through. Mike, I have a Patreon account.
It's a subscription network that we've turned into

one hell of a community. And these

guys and women were, they were with me at the very beginning when I was doing this with just my wife in the attic of my house.

And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask every guest a question.

And this is from Heather

Henschenwood. Henshelwood, excuse me.

Speaking to your time as a POW, what wisdom, courage, resolve did you draw from during that experience? What gave you the courage or hope in the middle of the darkest moments?

I would say family and faith are the things that gave me the courage to press on.

My first son had turned one the day. day after we left for Somalia.
My parents were actually flying in for his birthday when my pager went off. And I don't think I ever even

encountered them. I think I left before they got to my house, and they were there for his birthday.
And so I thought about him,

and he's the one we spoke about earlier, by the way.

You know,

what would he do without me? And what kind of person would he become? And

my wife at the time, you know, I mean, raising children alone is tough. And I felt like I needed to survive

for them.

The philosophy that helped me get through it, and I think this is true for any challenge. I mean, yeah, okay, this is unique, but we all have challenges.

I mean, you know, whether it's a health issue, a marital issue, an issue with your kids, job, whatever, everyone faces challenges.

And there are times when things are going to get really, really, really rough. And it was really, really, really rough when I first got captured for sure.

And all you can do is say, I just just need to take one step forward. I don't have to worry about, man, those guys in Vietnam, they were in captivity for seven years.
There's no way I could do that.

You can't think that way. You just got to think,

I need a milestone I can get to. And for me, it was,

I got to make it like during during the overrun, I mean, it's literally, I got to make it through the next 30 seconds.

And then, you know, as things calm down, you can start to put more deliberate milestones in place to help you move forward. But, you you know, you don't eat the elephant in one bite.

You just find something you can do to feel good about. I mean, it's not really any different than a sports team that's getting their butt kicked, right?

They come out in the second half and they just need something, complete a pass, you know, something to make them feel like there's some possibility they can win here.

And it helps, it makes you feel better about it because you've accomplished something, you're moving in a positive direction.

And ultimately, if you keep doing that, you will overcome whatever that major obstacle is.

Man, I mean,

did you ever think you would make it out of that alive? Well, you know, I never gave up.

Again, I thought when they overrun the site, I thought I was dead. I mean, they had overrun other people and killed them all.
I mean,

they didn't have a track record of taking prisoners. There was one Nigerian prisoner, but I didn't know about him.
I didn't know about him until I got released and they brought him into my room.

So

from my perspective, everybody that they overrun gets killed. And

they had

beheaded some of the Pakistanis back in June, which by the way is the catalyst that gets Task Force Ranger involved

and

played soccer in the street with the heads of these Pakistanis.

And it's terrorist-like mentality. What you're trying to do is you're trying to strike so much fear into your adversary that your adversary says, I'm not messing with these guys.

And it doesn't work for us. I mean, we, you know, we understand, yeah, okay, there's bad guys out there that they're going to do bad shit.

But for other members of the coalition that come from country X or Y or Z,

they don't want us, they're not going to, they're not in it for that. You know what I mean? They want to be part of us flag-waving thing where we're supporting the effort and here we are.

But when it gets really bad, they don't want to be part of that. So it's effective against those kind of

countries or entities but anyhow when when that overrun occurred

i i still remember looking up at the clouds and seeing that cloud go by and saying this is it i mean it's it's over and you know when i wrote my book one of the things my co-writer and i

disagreed about you know it was it was not long after 9-11 when i wrote the book and i said the only thing i can think of that is similar to this feeling is if you were above the impact site in the World Trade Center and you knew you couldn't get down and you knew you're done.

I mean, it's over. It's the same sort of process in your mind.
Your life is about to end. And that's what I felt.

He thought it was too close to 9-11 to even make any reference to it, so he didn't ever put it in there. But that was how I was trying to explain what this feeling was like.
You know,

I'm screwed. I mean, I am

literally,

it's over, you know,

and

that was the most

dynamic. And then when they're carrying me through the streets, that was just a whole nother,

you know, it kind of happened again. I just thought, there's no freaking way I can survive this, and

somehow did. Man.

Well, I'm glad you did.

Well, I am too. You know, and I know my life is a gift.

I had an uncle, and I have a couple of friends that call me

on the day I got released anniversary, not the day I got captured

to say happy birthday. Because in their mind,

my second life begins then. And

I know how lucky I am. I am lucky.

Damn, Mike. Well, we'll get to all this stuff.
But first, let's just start at the very beginning. Where did you grow up?

So I'm from New Hampshire. I grew up in a pretty small town.
It was a paper mill town.

Blue-collar folks, you know.

Just

obviously for me, it's normal, right? It's like the way everybody else grew up, but it's probably not normal.

I have great memories of it.

You You don't know what you don't know.

I mean, to you, this is the same life that every other kid is experiencing. And, you know,

I had great opportunities to, I did, we did all, and when I think about it, all the things we did, I mean, you know, we went hunting. We spent a lot of time camping in the summer.
I played hockey.

I played football. I've had a very brief and horrible career as a baseball player.

Skied a lot.

you know, just all these amazing activities

that,

again, to me, this is just what everybody does, right? And it was,

I look back very fondly on my time there. Most of our family lived around.
So, you know, holidays, there'd be quite a few folks present. And

a lot of

smartassery, I guess I would call it, which is part of where part of my personality comes from is

you're almost, at least the way my brain works, is I'm almost always constantly trying to figure out how to make a joke out of something. How can I get a one-liner in here and there?

I'm not a good joke teller. Don't ask me to tell a joke because

I'm okay. There's maybe, you know, one or two I could pull off, but, you know, like some people, it's like a different one every day.
They just keep firing them.

But I'm, and it's just because of the people I was around. You know, they, they were always trying to outdo each other with this one-liner.
And I mean, laughter is great, right?

I mean, it's one of the things that makes life enjoyable. So I always appreciated being around them and it certainly had an effect on who I became.
I did pretty good in school when I was young,

but then I kind of lost motivation when I entered high school. Again, I don't know why, you know, I don't know what affected me.
I mean, I was still capable. I just didn't put the work in.

I mean, I would just go to school and do the minimum. We had divisions at the time: A division, B division, C division.

I was in A division, but you know, just barely because I just wasn't putting the work in. I didn't want to go to college because I just didn't like school that much, you know.
And

I didn't want to work in the mill, which is, you know, the main employer in the town I grew up in, is a paper mill. Not there anymore.
Thank you, unions.

But I knew I didn't want to work there. And what else could I do? And then this guy who was a neighbor of ours in a place we went camping, he was an Army helicopter pilot, warrant officer.

He also is in the guard, though. And he had his own business where he owned a few airplanes and a couple helicopters.
And I think I'm 14 at the time.

And he asks if I'd like to work with him one summer.

And so I go work with him and get to go flying on a helicopter with him. He's since passed away.
Joe Brigham's his name.

We're over Mount Washington, which is the highest mountain in the Northeast. It's 6,280 feet.

Feels like we're hovering. We're probably not hovering, but flying slowly enough where it feels like we're hovering.
And we're in a glass bubble. It's sort of an old school helicopter, you know.

And I mean, I could just see it all around me.

I'm just in awe of it. Wait, what's the glass bubble? It's the cockpit of the aircraft.
You know, that's that vintage aircraft. You're talking about an air pocket or something.

Wait a minute. How do I not know this? Now I feel like it's this technology we're working on.

So,

you know, we're over this mountain and I'm looking at him like, and he starts talking about how, yeah, you know, I learned how to fly in the army and, you know, this is, this is my job.

And you could do it too if you wanted to. And I'm like, hell yeah, I want to.
This is absolutely what I want to do. So I worked with him that summer.

And even though, you know, we, we did one mission where there'd been a small private plane that crashed into the mountains and we had to recover the remains of the aircraft.

There's blood all over the cockpit. You know, I had hiked in and we took the airplane apart and he came in and slung it out.

Even, you know, seeing sort of the worst of aviation where there's a fatality didn't really discourage me. I just thought, you know, that'll never, that would never happen to me.

That was, you know, just not even thinkable that that would ever occur.

You actually did a mission?

Yeah. I mean, we we hiked in on the ground, we were supporting him, took the plane apart so he could sling it out.
And he came in with his helicopter.

We hooked up the cable and he pulled the part because it was in the national forest and they don't like to leave stuff like that out there.

So it was those kind of jobs that we were doing. He did all sorts of miscellaneous stuff with his aircraft.

And the most bizarre one, not to get too far off track, was he would harvest cranberries out of a cranberry bog with his helicopter. So they put a net down.
The cranberries float when they're ready.

The net comes up. They tie the corners together.
He flies into his helicopter, hooks it on, slings him over, throws him on the truck, comes back out, gets another load.

Right up just all kinds of crazy stuff you can do with helicopters. So anyway,

from that point forward, I'm like,

all right, this is my plan. I'm going to try to figure out how to do this.
So I go and I talk to the recruiter. And of course,

apparently he had a quota. And part of his quota quota was not to get somebody to sign up to want to go to flight school.
So he told me, sorry, that's not available.

And, you know, the old story is, you know, a recruiter's lying because their lips are moving. And

I said, okay, well, is there something else I could do? He said, yeah, you're a fairly smart kid. You did, you know, you did pretty good on the test.

We can send you to language school, which is pretty good. And you'll be in military intelligence.
Okay.

So I signed up, joined, was enlisted, went to DLI, Defense Language Institute in California, which again, I mean, that's a great school.

I didn't know you could join just to go to that. Well, if you have an MI

MOS. So I was a Spanish voice intercept operator, 98 Golf was my MOS.

So my job is going to be after learning Spanish and then going and learning the technical part in Texas, I go to Panama and I'm listening to broadcasts mostly from Central America, Nicaragua, other places.

At the time, heavy use of high frequency radio. So HF, just the way the signals work on HF is they can go, I mean, they can go around the world.
So you can pick them up from a great distance.

So we're listening basically every night, scanning, scanning. You hear this conversation.
Okay, that sounds military. Start the recorder, write up a summary.

Give it to the analysts, and then they go back and do a full translation. So my job was just sort of front end, try to find it, summarize it, and see if it's got any value.

Sounds kind of cool, but it was kind of boring, actually.

They were actually at the time still Morse code people.

Believe it or not, they were still using Morse code in Central America. Oh, shit.
And they're sitting next to me. Now, can you imagine all freaking night long, listening?

Can you imagine?

Every single one of them smoked like a freaking chimney. I mean, just non-stop,

sucking down the butts.

So I said, okay,

language school was cool. Going to Panama was cool, which is where I was stationed.
And,

oh, I forgot somewhere in there. I was going to, I wanted to go to airborne school.
So I filled out the paperwork. I took the test.

And then I get my assignment at Panama, which was the strategic intelligence facility down there, the 470th Military Intelligence Group, which, so.

When you're a young enlisted dude, you don't know the Army. You don't know, you know, what's the right thing to do.

So I went and talked to my NCO and I said, hey, I want to go to airborne school, but I got this assignment. What do you think? He said, that's a cherry assignment.
Go to, take the assignment.

So I took the assignment. I didn't go to airborne school.
So I go down there and I'm sitting on the beach one day and this freaking flight of Hueys goes over

with the grunts in the back and their legs hanging out, low level over the jungle. And I'm like, why did I lose sight of that goal? That's what I want to freaking do.
Because, I mean,

does anyone ever hear a helicopter and not look up? I mean, it's just, there's something magical about them, you know?

And so I said, all right, I got to get off my ass and get back to figuring out how to get to flight school. So I applied for flight school from Panama.

Somehow got accepted, even though this is back in the day where you're actually putting paper in an envelope and sending it on its merry way to some black hole somewhere, you know,

in Washington, D.C. And believe it or not, I actually was advised, make a copy, because if they lose it, you know, you have to do it all over again.
I made a copy. They lost it.

I sent the copy in and got accepted.

If I hadn't been accepted, I would have left the Army.

And it wasn't because I was really dissatisfied, but I just couldn't see myself. you know, listening to radio broadcasts in Spanish for the rest of my life.

But I got accepted. And you think about your life and where does it make these dramatic turns.
Obviously, flying with Joe initially, getting motivated to do it was a huge signal.

And then getting to flight school was the next one. And I would say my mindset changed in flight school.
And

I realized, you know what, this is going to be what I make of it.

And

Joe had told me this, you know, you're responsible for the safety of your aircraft and everybody in it. And I took that seriously and I worked my ass off.

I studied hard.

I tried hard. And I would have been number one in the class except for on one particular check ride.
And I didn't fail the check ride, but

the guy said I drifted out of the lane, which was a major safety.

Maybe I did. I didn't remember doing it.

Either way, he docked me five points on the most important check ride in flight school, and it put me at number two in the class.

But number one guy got Chinooks. I didn't want Chinooks.
Number two guy got the only Blackhawk slot in the class. No shit.
I'm number two guy. And you wanted a Blackhawk.

Yes, because Blackhawks were brand new. I mean, I had seen one, and I'm like, man, that's the sexiest freaking machine I've ever seen.
And I still think that. I mean,

it's an amazing machine. And

I got the slot, the only one. And turnaround, meaning as soon as I finish flight school, I wait a little bit longer and then start Blackhawk transition at Fort Rocker.

And I mean, I'm young. I'm early 20s, you know, and then I get my assignment, which again, you know,

I think about, and that's why I said earlier, I feel so lucky.

Not only am I lucky to be alive, but I'm lucky that these various things happened to me along the way that Some of them, like being number two instead of number one, I was disappointed in.

But in the end, it really achieved what I most wanted, you know? And it's just, I guess it comes down to you make the best of it, right? I mean, not everything's going to go your way.

I don't care who you are. And you know, you just got to make the best of it.
Anyway, I got an assignment in Korea to fly.

Did you find flight school challenging?

Yeah, I mean, it's challenging. Not everybody makes it.
You know, it,

I mean, we're, first of all, we're soloing with six hours.

And my roommate had a mid-air

in flight school with six hours. Holy shit.

So we're coming around, and the stage fields, they call them, are basically, most of them, are six parallel runways. And they're in opposite traffic.
So

the aircraft are flying opposite, you know, right-hand turns on one side, left-hand turns on the other. You're landing in the same direction, but you're making opposite.

So these two guys come around and they both overshot.

And then when they tried to level out to the right altitude, the bottom helicopter, not seeing the top helicopter, crashed into the belly of the second helicopter, cut the landing gear off, cut the antennas off the tailboom.

Of course, they got six hours. Neither one of them knew what in the world happened.
One of them thought he had an engine failure.

He didn't have an engine failure, but he treated it like it was an engine failure. They both got the aircraft on the ground and

both continued on with

our class, I think. Wow.
Yeah. But the point being, six hours, is not a lot of time.
So,

but pretty much everybody figures out the hardest thing is hovering because hovering is, you know, you're having to do things with your feet

and both of your hands, and they're all doing opposite things. And it's just, it's just a coordination drill that you have to sort out.
And most people get it.

I would say more people probably have trouble with instruments than they do moving the sticks. The instruments is

you can't see outside and you're flying based on indicators in the cockpit and bars and needles and it requires a lot of, I would call, you know, situational awareness, spatial awareness.

And I would say if I had to compare the two, I think more people have trouble with instruments.

But our class started with 80.

We were cut in half.

And that was purely a throughput issue. It wasn't that half got thrown out, but we got cut to 40.

And then, you know, I don't know what percentage ended up dropping out, but I would say most make it through. Um,

and then so then I ended up going to Korea. And again, I didn't really want to go to medivacia.
That's kind of lame, right?

I want to go to air assault battalion or something like that where we're going to do multi-ship missions and support customers.

I don't want to go fly patients around, but again, in the end, it's the freaking greatest assignment I could ever could have got because I'm having to learn how to operate on my own.

I was the first Blackhawk guy to get to that unit, and they still had Hueys.

So I'm the most experienced freaking guy in the company with Blackhawks, and I'm 22 years old. And,

you know, we flew, in the end, I flew 150 actual missions in Korea. And the only reason I know that number is because you'd get a little award every time you reached a milestone.

And getting 150 was a lot. And I actually extended my time there in Korea because I liked it so much once I got there and I was flying so much.
The key to a brand new aviator is logging time.

And it's hard now because helicopters are expensive, all platforms are expensive. So getting flight time is

tougher and tougher.

But to be really good and develop as a pilot, you just got to get time in the seat. I mean, it's just, that's just a fundamental truth.

And so flying, you know, I think I almost got 500 hours in my first year there, which is quite a bit for somebody right out of flight school.

And they made me a unit trainer, which means I'm teaching people how to fly along the demilitarized zone. You had to memorize it.

You couldn't use a map because the idea here is if you get misoriented, you got to know, you know, burned in your memory where the line is. Because if you fly over it, they're going to shoot you down.

I mean, it's just, it happened. I don't know if you remember this, but it happened in the

late or mid 80s.

A Kiowa, I think he was flying a Kiowa, a guy named Robert Hall overflew the border and the North Korean shot him down. And that was basically, you know, what you were

doing everything you could to avoid. But you would get medevac missions up near the border.
So you had to know where it was. And because I was the first Blackhawk guy there, I'm the unit trainer.

So that's where I got a lot of my hours, just flying and flying and flying.

One other thing that was cool is the Koreans were big on building this Korean-U.S. relationship, so they sponsored a program to bring family members over.

So my parents got to come over and spend some time traveling around, visiting the DMZ.

But my commander let me take my father up in the Blackhawk along the DMZ. Oh, man, that's cool.
It might have been the high point of his life. I don't know.
I mean, he was beaming when that was over.

And,

of course, I did some slightly aggressive stuff for the aircraft.

But, you know, in the end, we all got on. You scare the shit out of your old man.
Oh, hell yeah. Wouldn't you?

If I could have made him throw up, I would have,

which is actually not that hard. But

anyway, so awesome experience, lots of missions, really cool missions, you know, and

come out of there experienced and feeling good about who I was as a pilot. And then heard about this special unit.

And, you know, how'd you hear about it?

So it literally is in a bar i mean there's a guy there whispering about yeah well they just formed this unit at fort campbell counterterrorist uh you know they they were they were going to go in and rescue the hostages in iran because not everybody knows this but there was a second attempt that was going to happen everybody knows about eagle claw not everybody but people that follow the military but not everyone knows that there was a second attempt going to be made and that's the birth of the 160th the 160th was put together and conducting rehearsals and modifying aircraft

in order to be better prepared for the second go-around. Because the reason IUCLA didn't work as well as it should have is

it was just clujed together. It was

not treated like

a joint readiness train-up. It was grab these helicopters here and these pilots here and stick them on this ship and they're just going to all meet in the desert and go hit us off the target.

There's not an adequate train up or preparation, and the results were catastrophic. So anyway,

so this unit's form, and the best decision that could have ever been made with regard

once the hostages got released, I'm sure, you know, most people may not remember this, but when Ronald Reagan took office within days, the hostages all got released.

And so now you got this task force that has been created to go do a rescue that doesn't need to be done. What do you do? Well, somebody went to the hill and said, we got to maintain this.

I mean, you just don't know where it's going to happen next. And if you try to throw together assets at the 11th hour,

the outcome is probably going to be the same as it was in Eagle Claw. So

there was a decision made to maintain the unit, and that was the birth of the 160th. So TF160, no shit.
What year was that?

Early 80s. I mean, probably

83, 82, 83. Because I'm in Korea

in 85, 86. So was the unit already, was TF-160 already stood up? Or were you one of the initial pilots? No, I'm not one of the plankholders.

I wasn't too far behind, but some of the plank holders obviously were still there.

But no, I was not. Okay.
So I find out about the unit and I'm thinking, you know, I read Tom Clancy books. This sounds pretty freaking cool.
And it did, you know, I was like, I'd love to do that.

And I go to Fort Campbell.

I'm assigned to the 101st. What year is this? 88.

Shit. So they've only been around for five years? Yeah.
Fuck, man. That's cool.
Yeah.

I mean, it was still

in its early stages of development. Yeah.

And

again, I don't know how this works. So I sign in when I get to Fort Campbell, sign in 101st, and then I go to the bunker.

You know, it's this clandestine looking place that no one would know was even there. And

I go talk to the recruiter for the 160th and said, hey, I'd like to assess. And he says,

okay, so what's your status? And I said, well, I just signed in 101st. He said,

I mean, we could go to bat for you and try to get you out of that. But to us, you're not that valuable because, yeah, you got a fair amount of flight time.

You know, I think I had 800 hours, but you haven't done a lot of multi-ship. you haven't, you don't have a ton of night vision goggle time.
Why don't you do some time in 101st,

build up that experience, and then come back? And I'm like, all right.

So I went and did two years in the 101st, went to instructor pilot course, built a lot of multi-ship formation time, night vision goggle time, and then I went back.

And

it's a

pretty robust selection process and training process. And

I'm fortunate in that

I'm not a great athlete. I'm a decent scholar.
I'm not all that good looking. I can't run all that fast, but I can fly a freaking blackhawk.
I mean,

it was like it was an extension of me.

That is how it felt. When I strapped that thing on, it's like I just felt part of it and had enough

intellectual capacity to be able to manage all the systems.

And then another another part of flying that I don't think most people appreciate, certainly those kind of missions, is you have to have a perspective that is larger than just yourself.

You have to, you know, where's the ground force? Where's the other aircraft? Where's the threat? Where's the weather? Where's the terrain? You know, all those things you're constantly,

they're changing, they're dynamic, and you've got to keep track of all that in addition to doing all this.

So, and I was good at all that. I mean, I'm not suggesting I was the goat, but I was pretty damn good.
And so

I didn't really struggle with assessment or the training at all. I mean, the washout rate is fairly high, but I got through it pretty well.

And it's, you know, it's physical fitness, it's a psychoval, it's a swim test, it's LAN nav, it's, you know, life-saving, it's all that stuff, you know. And

it was so early on in the development of the unit that we didn't have what is now Special Operations Aviation Training Battalion. We didn't have anything.

The training was done by operational unit guys. So your instructor is a flight line guy who just got assigned to go provide flight instruction for these new guys.
There was no...

It's like a extra duty. Right.
Now, my class was actually the first Green Platoon class. So it's just coming to life.
They, they, uh, what does that mean, green platoon class?

It's the, it's the training.

It's like green team, right? It's, it's, it's the curriculum and, and the. So you're the first one that actually went through a pipeline.
In green platoon, yes. It was the first class.

Now, they're training before, obviously, but it was all sort of ad hoc, right? Yeah. Uh, but we were the first ones to actually go through green platoon.
Wow. So you're damn near a plank.

You're a plank owner of the training platoon. I guess so.
I guess you could say that.

And I'm a world record holder. And you're a world record holder.

So

like I said,

it wasn't a huge challenge for me. Navigation's hard.
You know, when you're in the MVGs and there's not a lot of terrain to deal with, which is pretty much the case in this part of the country.

I mean, there's hills, but when you're up at a couple hundred feet, the hills don't pop out like they do when you're on the ground. The navigation is a bit of a challenge.

If there's anything I'm not great at, I would say it's land navigation.

But we were getting technology in the cockpit that was a huge help. You know, we had

Omega systems at the time, which are rudimentary versions of GPS. They're not using satellites, but

it's basically a digital navigation capability. Now, we were not allowed to rely on that.
We had to use the map and planning and time and speed and figure all that out.

I did a good enough to pass is all I can say. But everything else I was really good at.
And got through Green Platoon,

got the beret put on by another fellow, New Hampshire boy,

the coach, we call him, now general, retired daily.

Great American, just a great, been shot down seven times in Vietnam. Holy shit.
Just, just, anyway, I have a, there's a special place in all our, our hearts who know him for him. And

he's still with us. But anyhow, he put my bray on me.
And now I'm feeling really good, right?

I'm a member. I'm a card-carrying member of this organization.

And right out of the gate, the first training mission,

we're going to Thailand

with ST-6

all on one bird. And they arrive, two fast boats on the aircraft.
We put two helicopters on the aircraft and fly over there for a training mission.

We had been given what we called relaxed grooming standards, meaning we could grow our hair long. That doesn't happen all that often in the Army, right?

So I'm thinking, this really is a Tom Clancy book, you know?

And,

you know, who are we fooling? Nobody. But anyway, we land over there in the middle of the night.

We offload all this stuff, stick it in a hangar, and we went about just doing everything under the sun for the next three weeks. Live fire.
I mean, what amazed me is that these are not ranges. Okay.

The Thai special forces went out and basically told the people that live there, we're going to shoot the shit out of this area and you need to clear out. You can come back on Saturday.
That's a range.

That's a range. Okay.

And we're out there firing miniguns, I mean, everything else. And I mean, we slept in the jungle one night,

you know, because it was a, it was a bylaw between the six guys and the and the Thai special forces.

And uh

anyhow, we they we did some jumping with them. We

I mean, just everything. I mean, it was it was everything I imagined it would be.
And

that's got to be a staunch difference from the 101st to working with SIAL Team Six right off of that. Yeah, I mean, where you couldn't afford freaking pens and pencils to do your mission planning.

Now, you know, now it's like, what do you need? Yeah, golden Connex box. Absolutely.
I will say that the six guys, some of them partied a little too much at the end. No.

I know it comes in a shock.

And they actually had to be dropped off in Hawaii because they were in that bad a shape. They were so dehydrated.

Maybe it was from their time in the jungle. I'm not sure.

I'm sure.

But I always love working with them. We work with them quite a bit.
And,

you know, this whole who's six or delta irrelevant to me, I'm honored to say I trained and flew both organizations fairly regularly and have tremendous respect for both communities. And

anyway, you know, that that's out of the game. And then within a year, within six months, I deploy on my first real world op, Operation Prime Chance.

It also goes by the name Ernest Will.

The Iranians and the Iraqis were having a skirmish, and the Iranians, as part of this, were mining the Persian Gulf, and they were hitting oil tankers. And I think it was Reagan, reflagged some

foreign ships under U.S. flag

to justify using our military. to defend these ships.

That may not be exactly right, but I believe that was the rationale behind the reflagging. It's easier to sell if you say, these are U.S.

ships transitioning to the Persian Gulf at risk of being blown up by the Iranians. That's why we got special ops units

on oil

derricks in the Persian Gulf, blasting the boats, the Iranian boats that they catch laying mines.

It was winding down by the time I got there. Before I got there, was the first ever engagement using night vision goggles.
It was one of our unit guys, Little Bird Gun.

They've stone cold caught the Iranians dropping the tail on this

bog hammer, I think they were called,

on video.

And there's a mine, and they're pushing it off. And of course, you got to get friggin permission from the head shed all the way back in DC, you know, like, are you sure? Yeah, we're sure.

It's Iranian. They're putting a mine in the ocean.
Okay, take them out. And they, they, it's, it was the Iran Ajar was the name of the boat.

And that, the, the steering wheel for the Arana Jar is still hanging in the regimental headquarters at the unit. And they,

there were survivors. And one of the survivors, uh, so one, one of the rockets configurations for our 2.75-inch rockets is a flashette.
It has 2,000 little darts in it, basically.

And it, it flies out, I don't remember what distance, maybe 400 meters. The nose cone opens and these darts go out and you hit a much broader area.

Obviously, Obviously, you're not going to take out, you know, an armored vehicle with it, but if you're trying to take out

troops in the open or whatever, it's a very effective weapon. And one of the guys, one of the Iranians, had a flashette in his face when he got captured.

And I don't remember which SEAL team it was, but they were on

the oil

derrick with us.

So they boarded the ship, captured these guys,

put them on the helicopters, brought them back. Again, this is before I got there.
But it was the first night vision goggle engagement in history.

I will say this about that mission.

It was the hardest flying I think I've ever done

because the sandstorms blow through there just like they do in the desert, but you're over the water and you can't see shit. I mean,

we would describe it as flying inside a ping pong ball. I mean, imagine what you could see inside a ping pong ball.
Nothing, right?

And you're 30 feet over the water and, you know, flying 100 plus miles an hour, 110 knots usually is what we flew. And

I mean, it was tough. And then we're landing on this very tight oil platform.
It was not designed for helicopters.

And we're putting little birds, blackhawks, the customers, us, sport people, all on this thing. As I was coming up here, I was trying to think of what's the best way to describe this.

And the thing that came to mind, never thought of before, was Thunderdome. I don't know if you remember the Mad Max movie where they're out over the water.

That was kind of what it was like. I mean, it's just, it's coming out of the water in the middle of the Persian Gulf, and we're putting all these assets on it and launching these missions from

this place.

Our forward operating location was in Bahrain, and we would fly out to the oil platform from Bahrain, you know, when we did a cruise swap or bring the customers out or back or whatever.

But like I said, it was winding down by the time I got there.

So flying inside the ping pong ball, I mean, this is where the,

this is where you're using your instruments really comes in handy, correct? Yes. Now,

it's a combination. You know,

the good thing is at this point with the night vision goggles, Somebody finally had the idea.

We need to cut the bottoms off of these because in the early days of night vision goggles it was a full face goggle meaning it's a box you put over your face and then the two tubes stick out the front of the box so you can't see underneath the tubes at all

when i got trained on goggles in flight school we wore full face goggles and you would fly them in the daytime with filters over the tubes that replicated getting the right amount of light into the tubes so it seemed like it was at night.

That was freaking hard.

Somebody figured out, well, this is, we're making this way harder it needs to be. Let's get rid of the box.

And then we ultimately put, you know, a mount on there where they, where they flip up instead of being sitting right on your face. And now you can see underneath.

So

you, when you're down low over the water, unless it's perfectly calm, there's usually a little ripple. And you could kind of see that out of your periphery.

But, I mean, it's the margin of error is very, very, very small.

And I, you know, I try to explain to people part of why

one pilot is on the controls, meaning you're responsible to keep the machine out of the water.

The other guy does the radios and putting the navigation information in and all that stuff that distracts away and gets you inside the cockpit. And for people to understand

how quickly that can go to shit, think about all the texting and driving problems we have. It's because people

change their focus from looking outside the car and controlling the vehicle to their phone, and all of a sudden they're drifting over the center line.

Well, if that's you in that helicopter at 30 feet, you're in the water. I mean, because it happens that fast.

So, you know, very disciplined about who's on the controls, who's doing the mission management. And we also had infrared

lights on the aircraft that you can't see without goggles on. And once you get down to 30 feet, you can start to see those lights reflecting off the water.
So, that's another.

So, you got the radar altimeter, which is giving you your absolute elevation above the water, which was 30 feet. You're trying to maintain that.

And then you got this sort of peripheral where you can see your lights reflecting, and then you can see, in some cases, the ripple of the water.

But you got, I mean, you got to be hyper-focused to make sure you don't.

And

we've lost birds. I mean, we lost a bird last year in the water.

Not really the same scenario, but I mean, overwater flying, low level, is

to be taken seriously. And again, you know,

I said earlier, I think it was the hardest flying I may have ever done, but you get better, right? You survive it, you learn, you gain new experiences, and you move on.

You guys do some wild shit, man.

Do you happen to know Alan Mack? Yeah.

Yeah.

I listened to his podcast. Yeah.
He's also a New Hampshire boy. Is he? I think so.
Man,

I love that guy. Yeah.
Yeah. A lot of good shit comes out of New Hampshire.

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All right, Mike, we're back from the break, and I think we just wrapped up Operation Prime Chance.

Just one more thing.

I think it's important to note: we didn't lose anybody on that op.

And that will be the only one that I was on where we didn't lose somebody.

And

again, just

great, great execution and great training and great assets. And just everything about it was,

again, the unit lived up to my every wildest expectation and beyond. How fast was the unit growing back then? We were really small.

And that's, again, you think about how fortunate I was is, you know, to get there at that point in history, it was very small.

You know, in terms of numbers of helicopters,

this is a guess. I might say

50. I don't know.
50 pilots? No, helicopters, you know, maybe a couple hundred pilots. Shit.
Those are really rough. I could be off by order of magnitude there.
I don't know.

But it was much smaller than it is now. Tight community.

What's the camaraderie like? I mean,

I

pretty much grew up as a SEAL, you know, interviewed lots of Delta guys, lots of Green Berets, SEALs, Force Recon, Marsock, Rangers. Lots of ground guys.
I've only done a couple of pilots.

And I don't think

when I interviewed Alan Mack, uh, who are, I think we were talking about that offline.

Um, you know, I don't, I don't think we really got into the kind of like the team life camaraderie. What is that like?

Super tight. It is.
Oh, absolutely. A lot of competition among the platforms, right? I'll bet.
Yeah, they're all idiots. You know, probably a lot of competition within the platform.

Yeah, yeah, to a certain extent, yeah, between the companies and that sort of thing. But it was all to me

to try to get us to strive to be better. You know, our sole focus was meeting or exceeding the customer's expectations.
We knew more than any organization I'd ever been a part of in my life.

And of course, I was still fairly young, but the focus was on the mission and on the customer's mission. And we would do anything to make sure we were going to fill.
that need for that customer.

Who was your customer? Delta, SEAL Team 6, Rangers, Air Force Special Tactics. Marsock didn't exist at the time,

and that was pretty much it. I mean, we rotate among those three entities.
How do you rotate?

Is it like a, I don't know, is it like a cycle where

Mike Durant's team is with Delta, then it goes to... Dev Group, then it goes to Rangers.
I mean, is it like a rotation or?

Well, I think it was primarily driven by the customer's training requirements. You know, we'd have our own where we would do things just for us, but let's say,

you know, ST6 needs to do a ship takedown with a half, you know, Hilo Assault Force and a BAF.

Then they're going to reach out to us and say, we need whatever, four, six Blackhawks,

four little birds for this training period at this time. And then, you know, we always had a standby mission, so we've got to keep that

intact because there's a rapid response standby capability that is there 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. So that's the priority,

even if it's a real world. You've got to maintain that.
So, whatever assets are left, and sometimes you'd have to cross-load between companies because, you know, whatever the requirements were.

So, I think it's really, again, I wasn't involved in the ops side all that much. I just kind of, hey, we're going to vacate and we're going to go, you know, support ST6 to

ship takedowns.

But it was, again, to me, for us, that's the ideal situation. And, you know, one day you're with this amazing group of people doing this crazy thing.

And the next day you're over here with these guys doing that crazy thing. And they're all freaking awesome.
And, you know, it was just, it was,

I mean,

I miss it bad, but, you know,

you.

You,

I don't want to say you grow out of it. You reach a point where, you know, this, I can't do this anymore.

This is somebody else's job.

So anyway, Prime Chance, by the way, Prime Chance is the first combat action by U.S. SOCOM.
So U.S. SOCOM is formed just before Prime Chance and in their history.

I remember I didn't know this until I read about it in the last couple of years where they talked about that was the first

real world. combat action by this newly formed U.S.
Special Operations Command. Wow.
Yeah.

That unit had been been in Grenada, the 160th, and that was their baptism by fire. But SOCOM hadn't been formed yet.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

All right. So

we do all that. And then not shortly after that,

this incredible guy named Cliff Walcott sort of enters my world.

Cliff was a Cobra guy that had been in the unit a little bit longer than me.

And he had this idea where he wanted to turn our Blackhawks into attack helicopters. And any other place in the world, they would have said, you know,

go have your fantasy somewhere else. Meanwhile, just go do your job.
But it was the 160th, and

he had an ability to convince people of things that I could never do. We used to say he could sell coolers to Eskimos.
I mean, he was,

it makes perfect sense, but

that's a leap. I mean, to create a new, this is a dramatically different mission, training,

capability. And it's coming from a, you know,

the ground up, right?

And

I was in the right place at the right time. I was pretty good at what I did.
He and I got along and I kind of became his, not necessarily his right-hand man, but pretty darn close.

And so got to be part of the development of the Armed Blackhawk from the moment we said, man, wouldn't this be cool, all the way to two conflicts later, shooting it in combat for the first time. Wow.

And I mean,

again, remember, this is 90-ish.

We're designing this thing with pencil and paper. I mean, I actually went to Walmart and bought,

you know, you buy them for kids. You can draw like squares and triangles with this little plastic template thing.
Yeah. I went to Walmart and bought one of those so I could draw.

It's basically an engineering diagram of how we wanted to manage the rockets and manage the guns through the system in the aircraft to provide to the engineers at Rockwell Collins who are actually going to write the software to do it.

So, I mean, this is how primitive we are. Holy shit.
We're handwriting this stuff. You know, I want to press on this button and it's going to take me to this page.

And then I'll get to pick from these different types of rockets. Because

in a tube, like for us, we usually carry 19-shot rocket pods. You could could put flachettes in there, He in there, flares in there.
I mean, you got to mix.

And you got to know where they are so that you can pick the one you want when you pull the trigger. So that's basically, you know, very basics on mission management.
So we're designing that.

We're designing what we wanted the cyclic to look like because we need a different grip.

We can't use the grip, standard grip from a Blackhawk because it doesn't have enough buttons on it. So

we're like hand-drawing that. And

what are we going to use to as a site? Now, the Littleberg guys were still using grease pencils.

I mean, basically, you would put your seat in a certain spot in the aircraft, and then you would count the number of screws over and the number of screws down, and you'd put a pipper right there, and that's your aim point.

No way. Yes.

Holy shit. And we did the same thing.

And

the difference with us is Cliff was the only guy who had gotten formal attack helicopter helicopter training. The rest of us, we're just learning how to fly.
I mean,

I never went to a single formal training course on how to fly an attack helicopter.

And within a year, I'm going to be cut loose flying for these units, danger close, live fire, and then ultimately in combat. And

again, I think about the timing and how fortunate I was to be at that place at that time and be a part of all that. I mean, it just doesn't happen to be able to do that sort of thing.

So, anyway, we're starting to develop this. And early on, we sort of stuck to the basics.
Miniguns fixed forward, which they'd always been capable of doing that.

When they first put the miniguns on there, they thought, well, in case we ever need to use them this way, let's come up with a way that we can fix them forward with some pins and then the pilots can shoot

with diving fire. So that was already there,

but it had not really been done much. And Cliff then sort sort of gave it a new life.
And we put, the first thing was rocket pods.

So we could put, actually we could have put four rocket pods on there, two on each side, 19 rockets apiece. So that's a lot of, that's a lot of rockets and miniguns.
And the bird's kind of ready,

but it's not really been signed off by anyone.

And just cause happens.

Now, just cause

before the op went down was called Blue Spoon. And we've been practicing this thing.

I just kind of read up on it before

we got together today.

According to this book, we've been practicing it for two years. I knew it was years, but that's about when I got to the unit.
It was two years before that.

So, my whole time in the unit, we've been talking about Blue Spoon, which is take down Panama.

And

just before Christmas, 1989,

all the criteria are met and we get to go.

And

it was, again,

just

that mission, I would argue, one of the most successful we've ever done as a nation. I mean, 26 targets at HR.

SEAL Team 6 had multiple targets. Delta rescued Kurt Muse out of Modelo prison.
I was at Riojada where we had the largest airborne drop since Vietnam.

And

like 21 other targets. And it was conventional forces, there was Marines, Army, Special Ops, all simultaneous.
First time the F-117s had ever been used. That was at Riojato.
I saw the bombs go off.

And within a couple of days,

we took the place down. I mean, it was incredible.
Damn. And I'm flying with Donovan Briley.
By the way, I mentioned Cliff a couple of times. Cliff's the first loss in Somalia.

He's flying with Donovan in Somalia. So they're the first two combat losses in Somalia.

Donovan and I are flying in just cause and our mission is not glamorous. We're going to fly with two Apaches and at least two little birds, maybe four.

Little birds are the H6s and these are gun birds and we're going to go take out be part of the force to take out Riojado. So

the airfield seizure is going to be done by the Rangers that are on all these C-130s coming out of Fort Benning.

And I think it was 17 C-130s.

17? Yeah, low-level drop. I think they dropped somewhere around 800 feet.
I mean, there's just rangers falling out of the sky like rain. And we're right underneath it.
I mean, it was unbelievable.

Again, I said our mission wasn't glamorous. We were a FARP bird, which is forward area refueling and rearming point.

So we had developed this capability where the Blackhawks or Chinooks could fly in, land, put out pumps, connect a hose to our fuel tanks, and provide fuel, ammunition, and rockets to the little birds.

So we're like a mobile gas station. And then they continue to do their mission.
So that was, you know, they don't have a long range like we do.

We got a lot greater range than they do because of the fuel that we can carry.

I think it's the first combat FARP we ever did as a unit, I think, because I know we didn't do one in Grenada. We didn't do one in Prime Chance.
We're out in the ocean.

So might have been not necessarily anything that anyone ever takes note of, but I think it was the first combat FARP we ever did. And, you know, Donovan and I,

we take off. We're, were we leading?

I don't know. We were ahead of the Apaches, but I can't remember if the little birds were ahead of us.
I think they probably were. Anyway,

our bird is so laden with rockets. I mean, we're floor to ceiling in the back, full of rockets, full of miniguns.
We were way over gross. I mean, meaning our aircraft's too heavy.

But it's combat, right? And And it's, and yeah, I'd been a prime chance. I'd qualified as combat, but it really didn't feel like combat.
This was combat. We're going to go punch somebody hard.

And I'm like, I don't give a shit how much this thing weighs. We're taking it down there.
So we're skipping off the freaking runway.

We had to take off like an airplane because the aircraft was so heavy, it wouldn't fly.

And I mean, I think we broke the wire strikes off, which are these little devices that hang down from the landing gear

in case you hit a wire, it'll cut the wire.

I think we broke them off but i mean i don't know what we weighed but we were freaking heavy and we skipped down the runway skipped down and finally took off start flying get out of the ocean

we get down there and there's a i think it's a zpu4 it was an anti-aircraft gun on the end of the airfield

and i've read different accounts here but I think it was the Apaches that were supposed to neutralize that gun.

So we get there at H-Hour, one o'clock in the morning.

Now, HR got moved up on a couple of

elements of this mission because, you know, once certain things started happening, this Panamanians knew this shit's going down. And Kurt Muse was probably the most time-sensitive thing.

So I think they launched a little early and ultimately rescued him. And that's a whole nother story.
I think you had one of the Delta guys on here talk about Vickers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Vickers.

So you've covered that already. But anyway, that was our little birds that were flying that mission.

We're down literally at 1 a.m. And

I'm in the cockpit with Donovan. I'm saying, I don't think it's going to happen.
We always sort of saber rattle and then, you know, everything winds down. And all of a sudden,

boom, 2,000-pounder goes off right in front of us. And it was the F-117.
They were brand new. No one even knew they existed.
They dropped two of those birds, dropped two 2,000-pounders right there,

right near the barracks. Again, Again, there's some controversy here.

They claim their mission was to just scare the shit out of the PDF, the Panamanian Defense Force, not kill them because

the theory is we get Manuel Noria out, they'll all convert and they'll support the new military and the new leadership. And we don't want to kill them all.
We need them, right?

I think that's generally the idea. There's other theories that, well, the F-117 couldn't hit the freaking backside of a freaking

barn, you know, but I don't know what the right answer is. All I know is those freaking bombs went off at 1 a.m.
on the nose.

And that's when this AAA gun starts shooting because obviously they know they're being attacked. So it's firing into the night sky.
And so we're over the ocean.

We're not far over the ocean, but we're right there watching. And I'm like, okay, when's the Apache going to take this freaking guy out? Because these 130s are coming in.

And, you know, it's just

firing into the air. And the Apache comes on the radio and says, we're returned to base.
We got mechanical problems.

And 60 Minutes actually did a show on this. The Apache was brand new.
It's a great helicopter. I'm not bashing the aircraft.

Anytime you feel new capability, you're going to encounter stuff that just didn't get tested thoroughly enough or the requirements were slightly off.

I think primarily it was a humidity issue with the Apaches because obviously very humid in Panama.

But I know there was also a vibration issue where when they turned the turret gun, which is a 30 millimeter, it was creating vibration that was popping breakers, I think.

Again, I don't know 100% sure, but all I can tell you is they mission aborted like right after we got there.

And I have one regret. I actually have a couple.

We should have just maneuvered our Blackhawk in and shot the shit out of that AAA gun because it's mechanically driven.

It's not a ZSU-234 that's got electric motors that could just, you know, and then take us out. It's a guy cranking this freaking thing.

And it only has so much down angle that it could get, we could have come in right over the water and just hose the shit out of those guys and taken them out. And we talked about it.

And I got talked out of it.

And

I really wish we had. I don't think there were any fatalities on the 130s, but they got hit.
I mean, there were Rangers that got hit and didn't lose any birds. But still, you know,

it was an opportunity where

I wish I would have gone with my gut, which was, if they're not going to take care of this thing, we need to. So, then what talked you out of it? There was a guy on board from the Ranger Battalion.

He got thrown on the aircraft at the last minute. And he said, No, no, you know, I don't remember exactly what he said, but there was also an AC-130 there.

There were little bird guns there, and arguably that's their primary mission is to take out shit like this. You know, that really shouldn't be our mission, but they weren't doing it.

And the book I read said the AC-130 took it out.

I don't know if that's actually what happened. It ultimately stopped, but shit, I thought they ran out of ammo.
That's how much they freaking fired.

And so at this point, the airdrop started. So our job now is to go land where we're supposed to and set up this forward area remote arming and refueling point.
And we're close to the airfield.

So I'm thinking all these freaking PDF guys. that are vacating the barracks and hightailing it are going to overrun us if we stay here too long.

So, when we had to shut the bird down because we're burning a lot of gas sitting there with the blades running, so we shut the bird down.

We still got the auxiliary power unit running because that powers the pumps.

And, you know, that lets us get off the ground fairly quickly, but it's going to take two or three minutes if we got to crank the engines.

So, we're obviously, you know,

we got a crew chief on the guns. We got our weapons out because we're still in the cockpit.
We're not, we're not getting out of the cockpit.

And we put the rockets all out there and the little birds come in and they land and we refuel them. But they hadn't fired yet.
So they don't need any ammo.

So they drain us. I mean, we basically got only enough fuel to get back.

And

I'm like, okay, do we just leave these rockets laying here or do we just put them back on the bird and take them back?

And I think, you know, we put them back on the bird and took them back. So we had refueled them, which basically gave them one ammo load and two bags of gas to work with.

I know they did engage targets. I know they supported the airfield seizure.
Somewhere in there, a chip light comes on.

So this is like in your car where you get a check engine light, which means there's a piece of metal that has been detected within the main transmission, which now I'm thinking, oh, shit, we overstretched the transmission.

and it's starting to come apart.

But I'm like, we can't shut this thing down here. I mean, we're we're going to, the PDF is,

some of them have got to come this way. And, you know, they're going to stumble upon us or we're going to be in a firefight on the ground.
And so I decided we're going to fly this back.

So we crank it up,

fly back, land it on the airfield. Turns out the transmission wasn't trashed.
It was just probably,

you know, like if you run a

transmission in a vehicle in a gear that's never been used much. Maybe there's a metal shard or something that

wears off and ends up in the oil. Well, that's what these chip detectors are designed to detect.
And it's got a magnet in there and it'll attract it. That's probably what happened.

We put this thing in a mode that it hadn't been in. It's not a gear, but the weight of the aircraft put it in

such demand on it that

it caused the chip to come loose. So anyway, we make it back.

land on the airfield, find out about all the other shit that went down, find out about the Kurt Muse mission, how that went, which I think was also the first rescue of an American that Delta did.

I'm not 100% sure on that, but I think it was.

And,

you know, it's all good news. High fives all around.

And then we rack out for the night. And then, you know, obviously leadership's got to figure out where do we go from here? What's next? Well, Nori Aig is not caught, right? He's on the loose.

And so we're going to split up into two primary elements. SEAL Team 6 is going to go on the other end of the canal, Cologne,

and Delta is going to stay on this side of the canal. And we're going to conduct ops when we get good intel.
So I go to the cologne side with six.

And we probably did, I don't know, four direct action missions where we are, you know, taking down targets. It was really bizarre for me.

is that when I was enlisted in military intelligence, I lived in Cologne. So we're flying all around places I used to go to, now taking down targets.
I mean, there's where I used to live.

That's the bar we used to go to and all that. It was just crazy weird

to

be doing all that.

And I got to tell you one story

about a mission that

the circumstances are somewhat similar to what ends up happening on the bin Laden mission, which obviously I was not part of.

So we're coming in. We got, you know,

dudes in the back, the SEAL Team 6 guys, we're taking down a target.

I don't know if, I don't remember if the weather changed or we came in from a different direction, but the wind direction was not what we thought it was going to be.

And in a helicopter, if you happen to be downwind of your buddy's rotor wash, that's not a good place to be if you're trying to hover because the air is already disturbed and it's already, you know, wants to suck you down, basically.

If you're ingesting all of that, especially if they're higher than you and you're getting all that downflow, your your blades can't bite, I guess is the simplest way to think about it.

So we're supposed to fast rope our seals into a tennis court. So I come to a hover, I was flying, and I don't have enough power.

I mean, again, I don't know if it's because now we got a tailwind, we thought we'd have a headwind, but I just don't have enough power.

And there's nothing I can do except the things going to the ground, whether we like it or not. And

the crew chiefs are our eyes and ears in the back.

And they're calling me down, you know, tail right, tail left, meaning, you know, if there's something back there that I can't see, they're the ones that are guiding me around this stuff.

And I'm pretty sure we landed right on the net because the net obviously is going to squash. And I know the operators are like, I thought we were open.

And all of a sudden, we're just elevatoring down to the ground. But somehow.
The blades fit inside the fence around the tennis court. Again, I credit the crew chiefs.
I mean, they're the ones.

I'm doing what they're telling me to do. I can see in front, but I can't see very well to the sides and I definitely can't see the back.
And they guided me all the way down, got it on the ground.

Guys got out. Now I got plenty of power because all the weights out and we took off.
You know, again, when you think about your career in military aviation, it's those moments that

by a hair,

you're still here, or you could have been another name on the wall. You know, I mean, just

it's not necessarily skill. It's fate.
It's luck. It's timing.
It's you name it.

It's somewhat random. You know, and there were many, many, many times in that career flying where one variable was different and I'm on the wall.
And

I'm fortunate that I'm not. Wow.

So we don't have Menuel Noriega yet. And a commander says, hey, Green Platoon's starting.
Again,

we hadn't reached the point where we have permanent staff in Green Platoon. So I got to go back and be an instructor to teach this class because we got students ready to go.

And I'm like, all right, I missed Christmas already. Things are kind of winding down.
We don't know where the hell, we call them Elvis to. Every time we've chased somebody, we've called them Elvis.

And, you know, we're getting Elvis sightings all over the place. But

I don't remember. I don't think we found out he was in the Papo Nuncia yet.
But either way, you know, this thing is kind of wrapping up. So I'm going to go.
And I mentioned fatalities.

We lost a little bird doing a gun run.

Sonny Owens and Hunter was his last name. And again, you knew it was small.
So even though they're little bird gun guys, we knew them well. And

they got shot down, crashed, and both died. Damn.

And,

you know, all that happened in those first few days. So I fly back, make it back for New Year's, not for Christmas, and watch it on the news when Manuel Noriega gives up.

And oh, by the way, Cliff Walcott is the one who flew Noriega from the Papal Nuncia with his Delta escort to the tail of the C-130 on Howard Air Force Base.

And he's in custody and spends the rest of his days in prison. He was a bad dude.
He was a very bad dude. I mean, if Maduro's as bad as Noriega, then he needs to go because Noriega was really bad.

I mean, like cult kind of stuff. What was going on down there?

Well, I mean, he took control of the country. I mean, he, you know, he was actually an MI.

When I was there as a lowly NCO in the 470th Military Intelligence Group, Noriega came and had a meeting at our facility when he was a colonel in the MI in the Panamanian Defense Force.

So I had seen him. I mean, he kind of looked the same.
I mean, you know, he's a little short dude, you know, pineapple face with,

you know, this same stature he had when he somehow took over.

But Torrijos died when I was actually in Panama, and that's actually the only highest priority message we could send as an intel unit that went out during my time there when Torrijos was killed.

I don't know if there was speculation that Noriega had anything to do with Torrijos' death. It wouldn't surprise me because, I mean, he aspired to take over.

And then, you know, he, he was just, he was running drugs. I mean, we found boxes of shit marked drilling equipment that was weapons.

I mean, he had bundles and bundles of cash with little address labels on there, Manuel Noriega personally sent to him.

Wow.

He had,

I mean, he's a heavy drinker. He was into drug trafficking.

I didn't read this in this latest book I read, but I was told in one of his offices, he had pictures on the wall of his adversaries and red X's through the ones that were dead.

I mean, that kind of guy,

bad dude.

There was an attempted coup before just cause. So again, you draw comparisons to what's going on in Nicaragua today.

That would be ideal is, you know, have a coup occur that takes Maduro out.

Venezuela. I'm sorry.
Yeah, Venezuela. You're right.
Yikes.

My geography test for the day.

But

there was a coup, an attempted coup, and he squashed it. He figured it out.
He's got his loyalists involved. It was close.
I mean, so I understand it. It almost worked.

And then the people that were most loyal to him made their last stand, captured the people that were leading the coup. I think they killed him.
Pretty sure they killed him.

And then obviously

he survived that. And that's when we he declared war against the U.S.
I know it's all sorts of stuff that happened. And then he killed some American service personnel.

And all those things together were like, okay, we've had enough of this. We're going to go do it.
And we were ready. And I mean, we've been practicing for two years.

And that's why I say I think

if I had to pick what I would be most proud of, that's probably it, even though my role was pretty minor.

So, back home,

teaching Green Platoon,

furthering the DAP program, defense.

We had to change the name. We wanted to call it the direct action penetrator, but

there's something about fielding new attack aircraft that you got to call it something else. So, we had to change the name to defensive armed penetrator, which is what it's called now.

But everybody knows it as a DAP.

And now.

We want to get more sophisticated. We're going to put a 30 millimeter on here, same one that's on the Apache, exact same gun, but we're going to put it in a fixed forward mode.
So it's not turreted.

It's hanging on the wing. I don't know, by the way, we can put two.
So we can put one on each side with 30 millimeter magazines inside the cabin.

Awesome weapon. I mean, that thing,

625 rounds a minute, I think, a 30 millimeter.

And what's weird is the sound.

I mean, it's still a distinct variant. I mean, the minigun is,

but the 30 is more like,

which doesn't sound like 625 rounds a minute, but that's what it sounded like.

You could hear it. And it has either

inert rounds or high explosive dual penetrator rounds.

And the HEDP would, you know, explode, obviously, when it hit the ground. And then we put hellfires on there.
And Cliff Walcott and I were the first ones to shoot a hellfire off a Blackhawk.

And I still remember he let me push the button and we're out west somewhere.

We got a customer lasing the target and, you know, kind of amped up because a hellfire, pretty famous, first ones to get to do it. And I pushed the button and nothing happened.

And it's because it takes a second for the hellfire to leave the rail, but I didn't know it. You know, I'm thinking it's going to be like a rocket.
As soon as you hit the button,

it's gone. And I must have hit that button like eight times in one second trying to get it to shoot.
And finally, it left the rail and goes up and because a hellfire comes up

there's two modes lock on before launch lock on after launch lock on before launch it's it's it's getting it's identifying the coded laser first which to me is lowest risk because if you throw it up there and somebody put the wrong code in it's going to just go nowhere so we did a lock on before launch and it but it's still going to climb and then it's going to do its final trajectory down into the target and boom big explosion like yes you know that was freaking awesome.

And then, you know, we got to shoot them in training and, and I get to teach people on them. So this thing is a badass now.
I mean, we got

every weapon you could ever want. And then the crew chief said, you know what? When we're covering the break, because the way we fired these things is we're in a diving fire mode.

And you get, we're supposed to stay 200 meters or more from the target, which sounds like a long ways, but when you're diving at a target, 200 meters is not very far.

And we break, which causes you to mush through a little bit because i mean you got a lot of inertia going here and they said you know we need a way to cover ourselves in the brake so let's put some m60s in the doors that because the miniguns are fixed forward and that way when you're on the brake i can you know after you've

and then you're in the brake and the crew chief's like bang bang take that too you know it's like uh

but We let them do it. I don't know if they still do it because it's pretty sporty to be back there standing in the cabin while we're in a break, you know, trying to shoot at a target.

But anyway, it was, it was the wild west. It was so freaking awesome.
And, you know, we had to shoot a ton.

I don't remember what the rounds were, but it's like,

I don't know. I'll throw some numbers out there.
12,000 rounds of mini

72 rockets and 1,000 rounds of

30. per month.
Nice.

And I'm an instructor. So I get to do mine and I get to go with you and you do yours because you got to show me that you can do what you're supposed to be able to do with this stuff.

So I mean, literally thousands and thousands and thousands of rounds. And I found that I could shoot pretty good too.
I mean, with

an aircraft. Now,

regular shooting, I'm okay.

Shooting with a Blackhawk, I could hit the freaking target. And

then Desert Storm rolls around. And now we're freaking ready.
We got this. No, actually, I'm ahead of myself.
We did not have Hellfire and we did not have 30 for Desert Storm.

But the Rockets and Mini, we're good to go. We're ready.
We fielded. Cliff and I took the first check rides as brand new DAP pilots for the unit.

We took them on the same night because, again, this is brand new capability. We got to somehow validate that we can do this for the customers.

So first night, we got Little Bird pilots in the front seat with us.

So

there's a lot going on in the cockpit.

So I'm now basically single pilot, gunnery, customers on the ground, flight of two, night vision goggle with a little bird guy who doesn't know shit about a blackhawk in the other seat.

It all goes okay, but when we get back to the debrief, and they're both little bird gun SIPs, standardization instructor pilots, like in head, the head instructors,

they said, this is not safe. I mean, we're not value adding the cockpit.
So let's put another Blackhawk guy in the front seat. We'll sit in the jump seat.

So second night, it's a two-night check ride. They're in the jump seat.

And I'm just telling this story because it goes back to my statement about the difference between still walking and talking and being on a wall. I'm shocked too.

We roll in,

we hit the target, we break off, and we could do it a couple different ways.

We could do what we call welded wing, where both birds are flying in formation, we're both shooting at the same time, or we stagger, lead shoots, and then you roll in, you shoot, and then you join up.

We were staggered.

So the guy in the other seat, who shall remain nameless, he's no longer with us, so there's no point in telling anybody who he is,

he was

fucked up. I mean, all I can say.
He just,

and this is my check ride. And I got a little bird guy that isn't all that interested in seeing another platform sort of hone in on their turf.

So it'd be real easy to bust me if these two guys weren't really good dudes.

And

it's Fred Horsley and Randy Jones. They're the two Little Bird guys.
Randy's a legend. Fred, unfortunately, passed a few years ago, but both legends in the Little Bird community.

So they're giving us our check rides. And

we shoot and break, and I'm in the break, and I'm joining back up on Cliff,

and a fucking rocket goes off of my bird,

and it goes right underneath the belly of Cliff's aircraft.

Whoa. Now I'm flying, right? So I'm like, what the fuck was that?

And this other guy says,

my bad.

Yeah, you're fucking bad. You almost shot down our fucking lead aircraft on a training mission.
I said, all right, we'll talk about it later.

So

we hadn't put those new cyclic grips in yet. And we're using buttons on the cyclic that were already there.
We just rewired them to control the weapons.

And a lot of guys, and it's stupid,

would talk on the intercom by putting their hand. First of all, you got a floor mic.
So if you're not on the controls, you should be using the floor mic. You push on the button.
It's like the old uh

high beam switch in an old car yeah basically that same kind of switch you should be using that not touching the controls but some guys

put their hand on top of the cyclic and then the the the microphone triggers are on the front and would squeeze it like this to talk even not on the controls

so he did that and his palm pushed the rocket button because that's what under was underneath his palm.

So he not only did he not save the freaking weapons, he pushed the fire trigger off for the rockets. And I'm like, okay, my freaking check right is toast.

It's not my fault, but there's no way I'm going to get signed off. Anyway, we finished the mission.
Everything else goes okay. We go back and land.

And, you know,

I'm not sure I would have been that much of a professional. knowing that we're about to kind of hone in on their territory.
I mean, they own the gunbird world for the soft community.

And now we're introducing this competitive player here. And they're probably not all that thrilled about it.
I know they were. They told us, but they signed me off anyway.

And they should have because it wasn't my fault, but it gave them every reason to not, you know, for something like that to happen. So now I'm a full mission qualified gun pilot in the unit.

Cliff is too

first time.

And we're ready to rock and roll and start providing fire support for customers.

So Desert Storm rolls around. Whoa, hold on, hold hold on.
What happened to the guy that fucking AD'd a rocket? Nothing. I mean, nothing? No.
They didn't kick him out? No, we should have.

Holy shit. Because actually, back to Panama, one of the Delta guys had an AD in the hangar and he was gone.

And I use that example sometimes when I talk to people about having standards and then maintaining those standards. I mean, the standard is you have an AD in this unit, you're gone.

And I saw it. I mean, it freaking happened.
And, you know, it's a lot of money and time invested in a quality guy, but that's the standard. And if that's the standard,

you know, I agree with you. We should have.
Wow.

You know, everybody knew it happened.

And I guess nobody felt like it was worthy of expulsion from the unit, but I agree with you. Probably should have.

So then Desert Storm happens. So

we are going to rescue the hostages. so they were hostages being held

when kuwait was overrun they're being held in kuwait city and our mission called java man

is going to be to assault these this target in kuwait city and rescue the hostages

and we train and trained and prepped i mean we launched off ships we had

mock-up targets on shore. We trained down off the coast of Florida.
We simulated the targets at Bragg. I mean,

we were freaking ready. And, you know, Desert Storm had not kicked off yet.
And so we're thinking,

I was literally going to be the number two bird over the beach in Desert Storm. And Cliff was going to be number one.
So again, there's this theme here. Same guys, event after event after event.
And

what I remember most about that mission is we got briefed afterward that we're probably going to see a 50% casualty rate. And not a single freaking person said,

I'm out.

You know, everybody just sort of

accepted the fact that, you know, that's why I came to this unit to do this kind of shit. And we're,

we're going to, it's not going to be us. And that's, you know, you have to look at it that way.
You have to look at it like.

Yeah, there's going to be some losses taken, but it won't be me.

You know, I just, we call a big sky a little bullet theory, meaning, you know, they can shoot at you all day long, but the odds of them hitting you is low enough where I'm going to just take this risk.

So anyway, we're ready to go. We did the final demo.

Trying to remember who was there. There's at least a three-star, if not a four-star, was there to basically give us the thumbs up.
Yep, you guys look ready.

Because, I mean, we had mock-ups of where the barracks were. That was my target, where the barracks were for these reinforcements.

And I went in there and laid down a whole bunch of rockets and blew the shit out of it. I don't remember what Cliff was hitting.
And then the assault force came in right behind us, you know, and

liberated the hostages. Well, they freaking let him go.

So it's like, shit, there goes our mission, you know? And, you know, this happens over and over in the world of soft. But it's like, son of a gun, you know,

good news is these people are all going to be fine. Bad news is we don't get to do this freaking amazing mission.
We thought we were going to do it. Put it back in there.
Yeah.

And then to to make it worse, Desert Storm kicks off and we're still home. It's like, you know, we were like

besides ourselves.

And what does any good soft unit do in that scenario? Find a freaking mission, right? Figure out how you can contribute and get your ass over there. And that's obviously what Delta did.

What happened is

Saddam Hussein started using scuds and he was launching scuds.

The real threat was he was launching them into Israel.

And the concern was if the Israelis join the fight in retaliation, the coalition is going to fall apart because the coalition, I mean, we're basing out of Saudi Arabia.

So, you know, at the time, the Saudis today are much more willing to sign the Abraham Accords and, you know,

and reach some sort of peaceful arrangement with the Israelis. But back then, it wasn't there yet, right?

And that was the concern. I mean, our whole freaking force is based in Saudi Arabia.
And if the Israelis get involved and this thing unravels, what the hell is going to happen?

So this becomes a major concern that these Scud missiles are, and that's why he was doing it. He wanted to draw the Israelis into the fight.

So Delta's mission was neutralize the Scuds in Western Iraq.

And we were putting them in on the ground. And

I'm flying a DAP at this point, attack version of the Black Hawk. The Chinooks are doing the infills because they need to bring their vehicles in.

You know, there's too much that needs to go in for a Blackhawk to carry. So we're escorting the Chinooks and we did several missions.
It was cool. I mean, we, you know, we put them in.

We're in these attack helicopters. So we're orbiting, providing security, making sure there's nobody around while they offload the vehicles and get loaded up and go find their hide site.

And

on one night,

I have an operational SATCOM radio.

so I can talk to the jock with these missions were long range we were flying long ways into western Iraq

and Colonel Brown at the time Doug Brown is talking directly to me and he's telling me that they have a new mission for us but we're in this orbit and I'm getting like half of his transmission And I wasn't the lead, but I had the working SATCOM.

So I called the other bird and I said, hey, we're getting a mission change.

Let me take the lead because I'm getting all the information roger so i'm writing this down this coordinate and then he's he's he's saying something at the end and i i don't know what he's saying and i said can you spell that phonetically and he's sierra charlie uniform delta and when he got to uniform i'm like holy

we're gonna go shoot some scuds and cliff Walcott, who's back in the jock, he's on the other team that's not flying that night.

He must have been so pissed because it was his idea to arm this thing, right? And the first time it's going to get used in combat, he's not there. And I don't blame him.
I would have been pissed too.

But I'm like, sorry. You know, it's like

so. I put the coordinates in, and we're flying out through the desert.
The Chinooks have finished their mission. They're heading back.

We go up over this power line. It's probably 200 feet tall.
Start coming down the other side. And freaking right there is a Scud tail launcher, like right in front of me.
Oh, shit.

And

I'm like, weapons armed, rolled in,

minigun on it.

And I'm too close to shoot rockets. You know, it's one of the phenomena that, you know, we learned enough about aerial gunnery to be familiar with is called target fixation.

You know, you're diving at this target and you want to hit it more than anything in the world, right?

But you got to remember at some point, you got to break it off because you'll fly right into the freaking target if you don't. And again, you're going to mush through probably a little bit.

So you got to be disciplined. And, you know, I mean, adrenaline is flowing like crazy here.
And this is a big deal, you know, and

somehow had

enough situational awareness to realize I'm too close to shoot rockets and I broke it off.

As it turns out, that picture in my FLIR, which is an infrared sensor, ends up on the SOCOM calendar a few years later. I have a picture of it that I uploaded.

And you can see the minigun rounds in the dirt. There's little black dots.
And the picture has the crosshairs of the FLIR dead center on the scud.

And then the min and basically what's happening is when I first started shooting, the rounds are low and left. So I'm walking them in to the target.

And the way it would normally work is, okay, once the miniguns are on the target, you might have to do a nose adjustment because rocket ballistics are different than minigun ballistics.

And you just, you learn that through training, you know, nose up nose down depending on where you are

but in this case i'm too close for rockets so i don't shoot them but you can see the miniguns around are closing in on the target and then some of them start to hit the target and then i break off

i think we're at 62 feet is what it shows on the image which is not very high over the desert

and come see this picture come around yeah it's pretty cool it's a pretty cool photo and and I mean, if you look at this picture and you think about you encounter this in the dark in the middle of the night in the desert,

that's a scud. I mean, there's no question.
The road wheels are hot. You know, I mean, it's got thermal characteristics of a real, it's not a balloon, I can tell you that.
So we come around,

line up again. Now I'm ready, right? We know exactly where it is.
We're going to shoot rockets at this sunbitch this time.

I come around, line up.

My co-pilot, Lance Hill, who was killed in a crash later on,

arms the gun.

I hit the trigger, nothing.

Lance, it's one fucking switch. Throw it.
And he says, you're armed.

So I look down. All right, I'm armed.
You know, my first instinct was, Lance fucked up, right? But

I was armed. Hit the button again, nothing.

What? Tried the rocket button, nothing. Come around.

Let's try it again.

Go to safe, go back to arm.

Nothing. Meanwhile, Chalk 2 is...

you know, I'm doing rockets and mini.

And

really sharp guy, but not as good a shot as me. I mean, he just wasn't and

never blows the thing up.

I'm so pissed. So we break off and I said, look, we got a gun problem.
We're going to go figure this out. We're actually pulling control heads out of the aircraft in flight and

loosening and re-tightening the cannon cannon plugs on the back because all I can figure is there's just a loose connection.

Pull it, reconnect, pull it, reconnect it, put the freaking box back in, roll back around, come back in, nothing.

I was livid. I mean, I was livid, right?

And the other guy now is technically lead because he was lead to begin with. So he says, hey, we've been here a long time.
We got to get out of here.

Like, son of a bitch. So here's the other regret, kind of like in Panama.

I wanted to just hover up and

record this thing all around, you know, basically slow hovering, getting amazing video of the whole thing.

And same thing, you know, it was a discussion. No, we need to get out of here.
This is, we've been here too long. And we didn't do it.
Now, we had great imagery of it.

You'll see the picture, and it's, it's, it's pretty obvious what, what it is. Um, but uh, we fly south.

Next day,

crew chiefs go out, avionics goes out, testing the bird. Everything looks okay.

I don't believe you. I want to go shoot this.
So we load it up, go out into this place in the desert.

Everything works fine. All right.
I don't know what changed overnight. They didn't do anything.

Park it.

Wait a night, because that's not our night to fly. That's going to be the other team's night.
Next night we go out.

We had a fire mission.

Same freaking thing. No way.
Same thing. It won't shoot.

This time I was so pissed. I actually said, I'm going to crash this fucking aircraft in the desert.
I mean, that's how upset I was.

We're going Comic-Con. I mean, one of the Cruccies who didn't know me that well because I was flying with the other company or platoon at least, and I think he's the other company.

didn't really know me and is this guy going to kill me you know

and

went back.

And this is why I love the crew chiefs.

If they respect you, which I like to think most of the crew chiefs respected me, they're going to try to help you out, figure out what the hell is going on here.

And without anybody telling them, one crew chief thought of, okay, here's the only variable in this equation, time.

When we went to the range, we only had the bird running for like 15 minutes. But on these long range missions, the bird's running for like two hours.

I want to put power to the aircraft for two hours and see if anything happens.

And sure enough, a component in the freaking gun control box, powered up for a long period of time, was overheating and failing. And then it would cool off and it would work.

And I don't know what electronic component that is, if it's a resistor or a die or what the hell it is. So they went to freaking radio shack in Saudi Arabia.

It's not really a radio shack, but a place like that, bought a new component, came back, put it in, fixed the problem. No way.
And then the war's over. I never got to shoot shoot again.
Damn.

But I did fire miniguns on a scud. And it was the first rounds in anger of the defensive arm penetrator.
Well, that's pretty bad.

I got that to say. My last ordinance, by the way, that I did drop was a piss bottle I threw out of the aircraft before we crossed the border.
Out of scud. Yeah.

Before we crossed the border. So anyway, that's my

life leading up to Somalia.

And this is peacetime peacetime army, you know,

in all in a five-year period. Just

crazy. You know, if you think about it, overwater combat, jungle combat, desert combat, and now urban combat in Somalia.
Yeah. I want one more war story because,

again,

back to the you could be on the wall in a second.

Again, me and Donovan flying.

We're, again, this is a new aircraft.

So we're, we're developing task condition standards for various things that we do with it so that they will be something to evaluate people by in the future when the pilots come.

And we did various things like, you know, simulate, you just got taken off a C5, you got to put the aircraft back together, put all the weapons on, load them up and shoot as fast as you can.

Click, how long did that take? Okay, let's put a little fudge factor on there, margin for error. Let's just say it's 40 minutes.
I don't remember what it was.

Well, this time we're going to do a hide site and we're going to go, which is essentially, you know, you fly in at night, camo everything up sleep during the day when it gets dark take the camo off and then you go fly to hit the target

so we do this and we're gonna go shoot at Fort Knox which is about a two-hour flight

so I'm in the left seat this time Donovan's in the right

and we got approval to roll in hot no uh we didn't have to clear the range because we had eyes on the range before we got there which is unusual usually they you know range safety is going to want you to do a drive pass but they let us live fire right out of the gate.

So we roll in. Again, there's two daps.

We're about to shoot. I'm flying.
I pull the minigun trigger.

And these freaking miniguns, the tracers are doing this in front of the aircraft. And I'm like, as soon as I saw it, I let off.

I never even got close to shooting rockets. And I said, That's the worst bore sight I've ever seen in my life.
Because you have this little device that you

set an aim point like on a hanger door out in front, and then you, because these weapons come on and off, right?

And rocket pods, and you, and you have to adjust them to where they're going to point at least close to what you're trying to shoot at. It's not an exact science, at least it wasn't then, but this is

way

out of range here.

And Donovan comes on there again. We're on night vision goggles.

He says in his typical deadpan, Donovan Briley way, Mike, we got a problem.

And I'm like, what's up?

And I start to feel something in my eyes.

And he puts his finger light up.

So a finger light is just this little green LED light that we have. So you can read stuff in the cockpit under your goggles and still, you know, maintain light discipline.
And he puts it up there.

And there's bullet holes all through his cockpit.

So the minigun, the bolt that's supposed to keep it from turning left and right, fell out on the way up.

And when I pulled the trigger, holy shit. You would think the gun's going to go this way because of the wind, but the barrel rotation caused it to go in.

And we have these armor panels on the side of the cockpit. And we always put them forward because you just don't know.
You're going to have some kind of weapon malfunction.

Shit's going to go flying and take you out. So he had his armor panel forward.

i think the gun hit the armor panel and stopped but it went in enough where bullet holes all through the cockpit through his windshield i mean there's there's probably 10 bullet holes through the windshield missed his knee wow by like two inches holy

2 000 rounds a minute so

so we land we check the bird out We had a medic with us because we live firing. We had a medic with us.
He's rinsing our eyes out because it was grat.

What I felt in my eyes was shrapnel from the windshield and dust in the air, you know, just shards of glass. And everything felt okay.

I don't think I got any real, you know, shards of glass in my eyes. And

so I'm thinking, do we leave the bird here or can we fly it back?

And I'm thinking about

what's in the regulation. And there's nothing in the regulation that says you can't have holes in the windshield.
So I said, fuck it.

Let's put some duct tape on the windshield over the holes and all my instruments work fine we're done shooting that's for damn sure and we'll take this bird back and we flew it back and they repaired it and we put a better pin in the minigun

holy

man wow

okay how many how many aircraft are under

tf-160 aircraft total yeah how many i mean would no not total but how many different models okay so you got gun little birds and assault little birds and then you got assault blackhawks and armed blackhawks, and there's 10 armed blackhawks

now. I mean, back then we only had a couple.
And then Chinooks, and the Chinook battalion is, and again, they reorg, so maybe they've changed this.

But the

quantities don't really matter, but then there's a Chinook battalion. with Chinooks in A Company, at least when I was there, were part of the

tier one support. Gotcha.

But then we had a battalion in Savannah, which had Chinooks and Blackhawks also. And we have a battalion at Fort Lewis, which had Chinooks and Blackhawks also.
Lewis is new.

It wasn't there when I was in the unit. But the Little Birds only exist in 1st Battalion at Fort Campbell.
Gotcha. Gotcha.

Well, Mike, I think we're getting ready to get into Somalia, right?

More fun. Let's take a break before we do that.
Cool.

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All right, Mike, we're back from the break.

We're getting into the real heavy stuff now. So

let's start talking about Somalia.

Okay, I'd like to rewind and tell one more war story. Let's do it.
Because, again, it speaks to something you asked about earlier, and that is how close we all were.

I tell people I shot myself down five times. You just heard the story of the most dramatic where the minigun rounds are going through the cockpit.
The others were not quite that exciting.

But another one that is probably worth sharing.

So we're out at the range at night and we're shooting. And again, I was an instructor, so

I don't remember if I'm qualifying a guy or doing currency or whatever. But we're going to go out two nights in a row.
So we shoot, go back, park the bird, button it up, come back the next day.

We're pre-flighting, same aircraft.

And there's a hole in the engine inlet.

So, on a Blackhawk, up kind of over where the cabin doors are, there's these two inlets because it's got two engines that are basically on the upper outside portion of the airframe.

And it's got a big opening in the front where the air gets sucked in. And there's a hole, pretty good-sized hole.
So the crew chiefs pull the cowling off,

and inside, laying there in the front end of the engine is a 30-millimeter round, like the projectile,

not the shell casing.

And like, we're like, what the hell?

How did that happen?

So

it's got dirt on it, but it's not deformed. So

there's no way that that round hit the ground or hit a tank or whatever, because we had tank Hulks out there that were shooting

and flew up in the air and then we flew into it. There's just no way it would have been smashed, right? But it's got dirt on it.
So that's kind of weird. But

in the end, the conclusion was that we somehow sucked up enough dirt while flying that it got the round dirty. I don't know.
So anyway, the commander's pissed, right? He thinks,

Mike, you're shooting too close to the freaking target. If you're flying through your own

projectiles, that's less than 200 meters, okay?

And I'm like, I swear we didn't, you know? And Cliff, God bless him,

he comes up with this theory.

I'm like, run with it, brother. You know, you got it.
Go to bat for me. And he briefs the leadership on his theory that it was a squib round,

which means it doesn't have enough propellant in the jacket to fire it correctly. And what happened was it fired, but it was moving so slowly that it was in the air in front of us.

And we flew in and caught up to it.

Are you fucking kidding me? Do they buy that shit?

And I'm like,

I mean, when somebody's willing to go to bat for you with that story. Yeah, no kidding.
Yeah, that's love.

But we still can't explain it. If that wasn't it,

I don't know. I mean, is somebody down there throwing projectiles back at us?

I mean, this is at the range. We're at training, right?

Never, mystery never to be solved. But the bottom line is one of my other self-shootdowns

is written off because of the squid brown theory.

Thank you, Cliff.

So now we're getting ready to go to Somalia. And Somalia happens because

The Somalis ambush a group of Pakistanis back in June of 1993.

You know,

the initial invasion is in December of 92, where we're going in basically, when I say we, the U.S.

military is going in to provide security for the relief operations because the warlords are stealing all the food. So the initial invasion is conventional forces primarily.

There's some soft, but not a lot. Marines involved, amphibious landings, all goes very, very well.

As I know it, I've never spoken to a person who says they shot or fired around during that initial invasion. The Somalis are just backing off.

They know this is the U.S. military and we can't screw with them.
I mean, you think about it, we're right on the heels of Desert Storm.

And this is kind of how I explain this from a Somali perspective. And I mean, we kicked the shit out of Saddam Hussein in 100 hours, you know.

And

so the Somalis are looking at this as, we can't win this. This is...

We got to figure out some other way, turn it more into an insurgency, which is essentially what they did.

And the initial phase of this operation is, I don't want to say it's a cakewalk, it never is when you enter into a country like that, but it goes really well.

Security is provided, relief organizations got protection, food's getting to people who need it. Mission's over, right?

Well, we have an election back here, and we put a different administration in the White House, Bill Clinton, and They don't know shit about foreign policy. I mean, they just don't.

They're very naive in thinking that, well, you know, we went there to provide security, but maybe we could help them kind of turn things around and, you know, build their economy back and get a government put back in place and all those things that sound really great, but go try freaking doing it.

You know, I mean, it's very, very difficult to do.

But that's the mission.

The mission transitions from security only

to trying to gain control of the city so that a provisional government can be stood up into power. Because right now, it's just warlords and warring clans kind of ruling their roost.

And in any change scenario like this, the person who's got the most to lose is going to resist the most.

I mean, if you're Adid and you have 60% of the support of the people and the Haburgetta clan is controlling the majority of Mogadishu, you don't want to see change. You got what you want.

So he is logically most opposed to this change. Well, the tactical commanders, again, I'm not there yet.
I don't know anything about any of this decision-making, but

there is an effort to

disarm the population because

there's a lot of weapons and a lot of violence. And I guess the theory is if we gather up all these weapons, they won't be able to fire at us and they won't be able to fire at each other.

And that'll be step one toward our achieving our goal. Well, there's a UN force of Pakistanis in June.
How were we going to do that? How? Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Good friggin luck.

It's a city of 800,000 people. I mean,

that's why I say they were naive in thinking that this was something that could be done.

It could have been done with decades of effort and hundreds of thousands of troops, but not with the numbers of troops we had on the ground.

I mean, initially at our peak involvement, we had 38,000 U.S. troops involved.
That's during the initial phase.

By the time I personally get there, we have 1,500 left total in a city of 800,000 people.

But it's a coalition force. Now, coalition forces,

you know, certain partners are very capable.

Australians, Canadians, UK, a few others.

But some are, you know.

Yeah, they're probably the majority. Yeah, you know, it'll brief swell and they got your flag out there and all that, but you don't want to go to war with them.

The Pakistanis actually deserve some credit here because they're going to come back into play later.

But

there's a Pakistani under UN

command,

UN soldiers. I mean, they're Pakistanis, but they're wearing UN markings, and they're ambushed in the street.
And these are the ones who are slaughtered. and beheaded by the Somalis.

And so obviously the UN,

being ultimately responsible for these, the loss of these soldiers, issues a resolution.

They're going to find who's responsible and they put a reward on Adid's head because they say he's probably the one that was behind this. And he was.
So Adid is starving his people.

He's got 60% support.

We got a coalition force with roughly 1,000 troops. A thousand Americans.
1,000 Americans.

1,500 Americans.

Now, why does Adid Bobby?

How does he have 60% of...

okay? I knew you were going there. So, before Adid, there was this guy named Siad Barre who was the president.

And again, you know, you could put him in the category of Saddam Hussein, right? Ruthless dictator.

I don't know for sure. I'm not, you know, I don't have a PhD on Somalia.

All I can say is I know of him. And I know that at least what the Somalis told me when I was in captivity, he was bad news.
Well, you know, was he or wasn't he? I'm not sure.

But a deed led a coup to run him out of the country.

And that's how he became this sort of folk hero. And the Habergetter clan

got to the point where they were, you know, supported by a majority of the population. Okay.

You know, the Somali people don't know he's stealing the food. I mean, you know, there is no internet.
There is no TV.

The only thing

being broadcast is radio Mogadishu, which he controls. So this sounds familiar.
Yeah, doesn't it? Yeah.

Not any different than any other country. Nope.

So this is how he's basically positioned himself where he is.

So when the Packies are killed, the UN issues the resolution. Now we start to spin up.
And initially, Cliff is the flight lead. He goes to Bragg.
And they come up with a brilliant plan.

They're going to go in. We're not taking any helicopters.
We're going to borrow Blackhawks that are already on the ground in Somalia.

Shooters are going to come in. We're going to make some quick mods to these aircraft, like bolt some fast rope bars in or something.
I don't remember exactly, but not a whole lot.

Can't put miniguns because that's a big mod to the aircraft. But, you know, we'll get by with M60s, I think, is what they had at the time.
Maybe 240s, I'm not sure. I can't remember.

Low profile, clandestine force.

Adid is still making public appearances. I got a question.

Why would you not want to bring your own Blackhawks that you're training? Signature.

Is that what it is? Is it a signature? Yeah, they wanted to just get in low visibility because we're different color. We got different systems on.
They didn't want anything to stand out. No.

They just wanted it to be, hey, we've seen this helicopter a thousand fucking times.

And we don't really need a lot of the fancy shit we got on our aircraft. I mean, you know,

A basic blackhawk would probably do the job for that mission.

I mean, you know, we're navigating to a point in the city and putting the shooters on the ground, you know, and we don't really need a flare. We don't really need,

you know, just a lot of the stuff that we had on our aircraft.

Ideally, we would have it, but, you know, again, kind of like I'm sure you've heard over and over, the bad guys are inside the wire. I mean,

they're working for the contractors. They're emptying your port-a-potties.

They're all around. You don't know who they are.
Right.

So

keeping these black helicopters with all this fancy shit on it

under wraps,

you know. Not going to happen.
Well, it's hard. So

the president gets briefed.

And

the key point here is that Adid is still making public appearances. So it'd be like bin Laden,

you know, out in the open with two bodyguards during the day. That's freaking low-hanging fruit.
Very easy target. Very easy.
Yeah. Very few places in the world that we can't get that guy.

And

the president's brief, I have no idea why. I went in there.
What I've read is he was told the chance of success is one in four, 25%. Why? I don't know.
I think the success is 95%

based on what I know about that plan and what was happening with the deed at the time.

He doesn't want to be embarrassed. No politician does.
So he says, we're not doing it.

Missed the window of opportunity. Had that mission gone down as as planned initially, you never heard my name.
I mean, I never go to Somalia.

This thing goes down with two crews and a handful of shooters, and they apprehend the guy and turn him over to the UN, and it's game over. But that's not what happens.
We're told we're not going.

And,

okay, we're not going.

So

we continue on with all our various other things that we're doing. And

we

now 10th Mountain Division launches an attack on a suspected clan meeting place. Now they did what they're supposed to do.

Overwhelming firepower before they put troops on the ground, go in, clear the building, but everybody's dead. And unfortunately, about 80 of the people that are dead are women and children.

So now Adid has everything he needs to turn the Somalis against us. And I'm not pinning responsibility on the 10th Mountain.
I'm just telling you what happened.

They did a good job. I mean, they did the mission the way they were trained to do it.

But the fallout of it is: Adid now has information that he can share with his people to convince them that the Americans are not here to help you, they're here to kill our people and take over our country.

It's not exactly what he was saying, but essentially what he's trying to get the Somalis to believe. And proof of how effective that was.
President Bush went to Somalia after,

well, he was about to leave office,

and the people are in the streets celebrating viva president bush waving american flags this is i think in january of 1993 10 months later they're dragging the bodies of randy gary and my crew through the freaking streets now you talk about losing the hearts and minds of the people That's the best example I've ever heard of.

I mean, we lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. This went from fighting,

you know, die-hard supporters of a deed to essentially the whole population of the city because he was effectively convincing them of something that just wasn't true.

He had radicalized the entire population. Essentially.

Totally anti-now, we didn't help.

I mean, we were flying missions every day and every night. And it's a little thing, I guess, but you know, when you're flying...
10 freaking helicopters rooftop every day, every night.

Initially, you know, they're waving at us. Later on, they're throwing rocks at us, flipping us off.

You know, I mean, you could just tell it was just a change in how they viewed us over just the time period that we were there.

But the ultimate catalyst for

things changing on our end is Hobbiter blows up a Humvee.

Four U.S. soldiers, I think it's August 8th is when that happens.
They're all killed. So now you got the 10th Mountain attack, you got a direct attack against u.s military forces all killed

they're changing their tactics they're becoming more hostile

we need a different plan so we reassemble at brag and now we're going to go with the full meal deal we're going to go with company rangers from third of the 75th we're going to go with you know two teams of attack helicopters we're going to go with uh my you know almost a full uh deployment package so that we got everything we need to take this on.

Because you're home this whole time and all this intel is being passed to you guys. Well, we were sort of back and forth to brag, back and forth.

Actually, when I finally got the deployment order, we were in Texas. Not in Somali, what I mean home.
Not in Somalia. We hadn't deployed it.

So when that Humvee is blown up, we all go back to Brag. So you guys are.
I'm sorry. So you guys are stateside just bouncing around planning.
It's on, it's off, it's on, it's off.

This whole like how long is this going on well the packies are killed in june the uh 10th mountain attacks in july and the attack on the humve is august 8th so about a month okay month and month and a little more

and then after the humve explodes we're like oh boy now this is because that was the trigger in panama like when they when nori got killed those the i don't know if it's one or two i think it was one american service person that sort of put it at another level and so we're thinking all right now this is probably really going to happen.

So we all go back to Bragg. We're running rehearsals.
We had role players. We, and it's interesting, I brought actually.
Rehearsals for what?

For the scenarios that we were likely to encounter. What were the scenarios? Were they, was this assassination? So this was the birth.

We believe this was the, yeah, the capture a deed. But this, we believe this was the birth of these now used hundreds of times

scenarios where we were going to apprehend someone in a certain

scenario. So like I'll give you an example.

This is my knee board from Somalia. I mean, the reason I didn't have it the day I got shot down is the mission developed so fast, I never ran back to get it because I didn't have time.

But so that would have been what I carried on every other mission. And it's got all the crews, it's got the frequencies, it's got the concepts.

And the amazing thing to me is

people didn't have computers back then.

So we had one guy, we might have one guy, but one guy that I remember that was tech savvy enough where he produced this stuff in 1993 when the average person doesn't even own a computer.

And we're generating all this stuff.

And, you know, again, you can handwrite it, but it sure looks a lot better done that way.

And

we developed these various scenarios. And those knee board packages show each of those possible scenarios and what we're going to do in case we face A versus B, for example.

And

it worked like a charm. I mean,

it was brilliant. Again, I don't know who came up with it.
I don't know if the Delta guys did or, you know, it was a collaboration between the two of us.

But it allowed you to react quickly, which is what you got to do when you're after a person, right? You can't spend two days planning a mission if you're chasing a person.

So

we're, but we're rehearsing all this. So we had people driving vehicles around Fort Bragg, you know, simulating these various scenarios.

And

I would say we probably flew various versions of those profiles, I don't know, 20 times before we ever deployed. Wow.

And

I had reached a point where

that's why I didn't run back and get it. I didn't need it anymore.

Ray's got his, so I don't need to bring mine if it's going to cause me to run back and lose some time.

So

we're talking about the lead up. So we finally are told, okay, you're deploying.

And this is August 28th, I think.

Because

I said to you earlier in another conversation, I left one day before my first son's first birthday.

His birthday is August 18th, so I left on August 17th, and we're doing this bebop back and forth until we deploy. I think we deployed on the 24th, and we were mission ready on August 28th.

Now, that sounds like a long time, but mission ready was we had all the assets in place, and we've conducted a day rehearsal in country and a night rehearsal in country.

And the leadership has said, all right, we're 100% ready to roll.

And then the thing is broken into phases. Phase one, well, phase one was pre-deployment and deployment.
Phase two is capture Adid.

He's all we're going to go after.

I think there was two missions in phase two.

Took down a target. Supposedly he's where Adid is.
He wasn't there in either case. Missions went well.
I mean, you know, we still get the element of surprise. They don't know what we're doing.

They can't react fast enough. We're trying to keep time on target to maybe 40 minutes or less.
And, you know, some targets are big. They take longer to to clear.
Some are small.

You're in and out faster than that.

But again, all went well. No losses taken.
No aircraft damage, nothing.

I do have a memorable thing for me, which may not make it above the cutting room floor, depending on how interesting this is to the average person.

But, you know, as you probably saw on the frequency card, we got a lot of frequencies we're monitoring. And we have four, maybe five nets at the same time in the cockpit.

So when there's a lot going on,

we call it a helmet fire. There's, I mean, you got to sort through a lot of comms.
And sometimes, you know, the crew in the back sometimes will turn it off because they don't want to hear it.

Now, the guys who really wanted to stay situationally aware, they're the kind of crew chiefs you want because They recognize, you know, my role could become important at any point and I got to know what's going on, right?

So

they don't want it to be quiet. They want to be kept up to speed on all these.
So you might hear the the execution checklist.

You might hear the, you know, the air-to-air net where we're talking to each other. You might hear the ground force net.
You might hear the fire net.

And if you're listening to all of them, you got a pretty good picture of what's happening.

Well, we're coming into the target. It's the first mission, actually.

And it's a night mission. Everybody's blacked out.
This place is freaking dusty. And there's dust clouds everywhere.
And I can't see the building that we're going to. I just can't see it.
And

our guys wanted,

this is the level of precision they wanted.

There's an iron gate around the compound, small compound,

and they want to be roped on the path inside the gate so they don't have to breach the gate because they don't know what the gate's made of and they know whether it's locked.

And that's precision under night vision goggles.

And,

you know, again, it's a city. You got GPS, but it's not that accurate.
You've got to be able to to see the target. So

I called out on the air net. I said,

somebody put a laser on the target building. And one of the crew chiefs in the first Blackhawk in, which was 6'1, I think, might have been 6'2.
Anyway, they're the first two birds in.

So they're not dealing with the dust like we are. That crew chief's got his radio nets up.

He hears me and no delay, instantaneously, infrared laser right on the target building, and he makes this circle on it.

And that's, you know, I tell that story because everybody's got a role. And that one small act

could have been the difference.

If this had gone hot, it could have been the difference between my guys being in the right place and able to support or being a liability, put in the wrong place, or even worse, put in somebody else's field of fire because nobody knows where they are.

And all that shit matters, right? I mean, it all matters. And

as soon as I saw that laser swirl on the building, I'm like, oh, there it is. Hovered right on in there, saw the trail, saw the gate.
They talked me in, roped them in,

mission accomplished. And, you know,

it's just there's something like that that doesn't occur on every mission, but is the difference between success and failure when everybody knows their responsibility and their role, everybody's aware.

And everybody's engaged. And that's just a positive example of that so anyway

we're we only chased a deed for a couple missions and then we're kind of like okay this is an elvis scenario again you know we're we're he's not here we need to broaden the scope of this thing so goes up the chain of command let's go to phase three so phase three is to capture everybody in his infrastructure which is about 50 people

and now it's a target-rich environment. I mean, these guys are everywhere, right? And so the next missions are after all these guys.

And we we had some success.

I mean, from an execution perspective, it's 100% success, but didn't always have something to show for it. I mean, the intel was bad.
People were misidentified, whatever.

But we didn't lose any birds, didn't lose any guys. I don't even know that anybody got wounded.
I think maybe a couple people did, but nothing major.

And

we're starting to pile up some success here. In the end, we will have captured 27 people, I think, on the list and turned them over.

The most successful mission was mission number five, and we're chasing Osman Otto. He is the number two guy.

And if you've seen Black Hawk Down, he's the guy that's smoking the cigar, acting all cocky. He wasn't cocky.
Trust me.

I mean, when he got rolled up, he looked like a guy would look that's just been manhandled by Delta operators and thrown in the back of a helicopter.

You know, it's like Saddam looked when they pulled him out of the hole. You know, these guys don't look cocky.
They look humbled like they should. Well, this one proved you were on that, yeah.

We were all, I mean, we were all on it, yeah. So, can you describe it? Yeah, so initially, we're told,

well, first of all, we went after Otto on mission number four, no, five.

He had a piece of property called Otto's Garage. I mean, to think this is the richest guy in Somalia means he ain't all that rich, but I mean, it's a junkyard

daytime mission, we're rolling in,

and RPGs are going off around us.

Okay, first time we've seen that.

A threat, but not a huge threat because they're airbursting and they're not really all that close. They're not supposed to airburst, but they are.
So something's going on here. But

let's just call an alternate pickup zone. So we infilled right into the auto's garage.
And our guys cleared it, took it down, captured eight of his

people that worked for him. He was there.
The intel was good. And you can see it on video as we're coming in.

These guys are smart. They're not stupid.
He didn't run. He looked up, saw the Hilos and says, I'll be back in a bit.
And just casually walked out of the compound, down an alleyway.

I mean, you can see it. And we found out later that that was him.
But his guys are left there and we captured him.

And then, like I said, we did an alternate pickup zone, which means you go in to extract from another location because you're thinking if they were shooting RPGs on the way in, they're probably going to shoot a lot more if we go back in there.

So we pick up from an alternate location. The ground force just has to maneuver on the ground to the new pickup zone.
Didn't take any fire at all. Successful execution.

Just missed a really, really lucrative target by seconds.

Then we get a hit on him again a couple of days later. He's in a meeting place downtown.
All right, spool up, ready to rock. We launch.
Oh shit, he's in a vehicle. Well,

no problem. All we got to do is switch contingencies.
And that's the beauty of all that planning and all that rehearsal. We know exactly what to do now.

We just got to change, you know, how we act in the terminal area with the helicopters. But everybody knows.

All you got to do is tell the guys on board, everybody on the flight crews know this is where we're going now that it's a convoy.

As I understand it, the shooters shot so accurately, the belief is he's in the second vehicle.

So they

hit round in the engine block, round in the driver, but didn't hit the primary target. When his vehicle is disabled, he jumps out, runs into a building.

So now we don't have the assault force on the ground yet. This thing is switched back to what we call a strong point.
No problem. Just communicate to the guys.
They know.

We know where we're going to land. We didn't put my guys on the ground.

We closed on the target, but I'm 99% sure we did not put our guys on the ground. We just basically pulled off and held.

And I think, you know, it's been 30 freaking years, but

either way,

the Delta guys go in, they're clearing the building, they find him buried under a bunch of trash, pull him out. Photo,

bingo.

Execution checklist code word goes out.

We got the primary target. Man, that feels good.

When you're on an op like that and it all comes together, and you know how important this guy is to the mission. And then I, for some reason, ended up flying back with Cliff.

He ended up on Cliff's bird and we landed together. And that's what I say.
He sure didn't look cocky. You know, these freaking operators are taking him out of the back of the aircraft.

And we're like, yeah, buddy,

your day just turned dramatically from being the richest dude in Somalia to the richest dude in prison. And, you know, obviously he got interrogated.
They moved him to some holding facility somewhere.

And, you know, the experts said if we'd have stopped right there, Adid eventually would have lost all his ability to influence because he didn't have any money. And it all would have happened.

You know, it would have happened on its own, right?

Well, that wasn't our mission. Our mission was to keep going after him and his people.

Who are the experts? Who are the experts? Intel analysts. And I'm not criticizing Intel people.
It's a hard job. I mean, you try to predict the future, right? It's like

it's never going to be 100% right. It's a matter of how close to right can you be.

Is this coming out?

Immediately or is this all of retrospectives?

But plus everybody's 2020 vision and hindsight, right? Yeah.

So we've re-kit. We're ready to go.
You know, let's let's do the mission continues. So there was a mission six.
I'm trying to think of what mission six was. I can't remember.

I ended up on a mission to go extract some three-letter agency guys, I think. Nobody told me who they were, but they got compromised.
And

they picked me as lead and then another bird, night vision goggles. We had to fly to a location in the city.
We landed. They were all positioned there with some of their gear, loaded up on the birds.

We brought them back i don't know why we didn't do it with the ground vehicles honestly but uh i mean it was kind of cool to be to be part of that i remember my chalk too

speaks fondly of this story because he says you know i mean obviously he thinks a lot of me and i appreciate that but he he said uh you know mike made this great call on the way he said you know normally we'd go in as a flight of two but we didn't know mike didn't know if it was dusty so he said let me land alone and see what it looks like and then you come in after me because you know i mean if we went in there, we both browned out.

Yeah,

so anyway, I landed, it wasn't that bad, it was a soccer field or something, it was actually pretty good. And then he came in immediately, and

I didn't really get a reaction from the guys loading my bird, but he said those guys were like, Yes, you know, thank you.

I don't know what risk they were, but anyway, we got him on board, brought him back to the airfield, never saw him again.

And so, I had actually had a bonus mission somewhere in the middle of all that. And then, mission seven of the real, you know, direct action missions happens on October 3rd.

And,

you know,

we,

let me back up.

A few days prior, there was a Black Hawk from,

it had 101st airborne pilots on board, but I think the bird was actually an asset from 10th Mountain. I'm not sure if that's all right.
I know for sure the pilots were 101st airborne.

They're flying around at night.

They're

blacked out. They're on the move.
There's not much else you can do in a helicopter to prevent yourself from being shot down. And they get hit by an RPG.

It goes up through the belly of the bird, explodes in the back. Everybody in the back's killed instantly with the explosion.
The two pilots survive. Bird's on fire.
They crash land in the city.

It's Dale Schrader and Perry Alleman are their names. And

I think it's Dale that pulls Perry out. I don't know for sure, but one helps get the other one out.
Everybody in the back's a lost cause. The aircraft's on fire.

They get in an alleyway.

And,

you know, again, I'm secondhand telling this story. But bottom line is they're engaging the Somalis.
There's a reaction force, but it's a ground reaction force back at the airfield.

So it's going to be a few minutes before it gets to the the crash site. Burning Blackhawks tend to attract a lot of attention in the middle of a city of 800,000 people.

So, you know, they're fighting, they're shooting, they're evading. And again,

don't hold me accountable here. I only know what I've been told.
There's a Pakistani,

I believe, with an armed personnel carrier nearby that says, American boy, American boy.

And I think it's Dale that makes the decision. I mean, we can't hold these guys guys off.
They're going to overrun us. I got to trust this voice.

So he goes to the voice, turns out to be a friendly Pakistani. I don't know if it's an APC or some kind of ground vehicle, gets them out of there, gets them to safety.
They both recovered.

They both stayed in the army. They both kept flying.

You know, takes a look and keeps on ticking kind of thing.

What it meant to us was, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. You know,

I mean, again, we're going into all parts of the city, day, night, lots of aircraft, stationary.

you know when you're putting operators on the target if you're fast roping you're hovering up in the air i mean you're

you're you could be engaged by anybody within range

yeah absolutely and we recognize that and normally with the assets we had on hand we would if we lost the bird we have a search and rescue helicopter dedicated to recovering the crew getting you know security and medics on the site as soon as you can

but they're going to have to fast rope too. So if you do that, this guy just got shot down and you put another one right.
What do you think is going to happen to that bird? Same freaking thing, right?

Well,

I wish I could take credit for it. I can't.
I don't know whose idea it was, but somebody raised the flag and said, that's a dumbass contingency. We need another solution.

And we concluded, we, general term, not me, that we needed a tank because a tank could have gone from the airfield to any crash site in the city within five minutes, maybe 10.

Request goes all the way up the chain of command, gets to SecDeaf,

who says no.

Why?

Not because we're going to have tanks all over the world. I've talked to so many tankers since then because they were put on standby.

Somehow, they knew that there was a potential they were going to be called upon to to go.

And

they were, every single one I've spoken to said, we couldn't freaking wait. I mean,

we wanted to go. We would have absolutely been able to go through those streets.
We would have got to you guys. We were ready to rock and roll.
And SekDev says no.

And it's for political reasons.

We had been,

we... Took the forces out.
We went from 38,000 to 1,500.

That appeases the American people who don't want to be in a conflict.

We took all the armor out.

We took all the AC-130s out.

And I've been argued by other people within our community that the AC-130s wouldn't have made a difference. Sorry, fellas.
You're freaking wrong. They wouldn't have made a difference.
Okay.

Because I was in captivity when they came back, and the Somalis were scared to death of them. And by the way, that's kind of what you want.

You want your enemy to be scared to death of the assets that you have. So anyway, we asked.

What was the political reason? Do you know? Well, because we had been pulling shit out. And Aspen's like, we're telling the American people we're cleaning this up.
We're about to finish.

We're not sending shit back in.

That was his rationale.

And there's a letter that just got released within the last two years from one of the generals on the ground in Somalia to the leadership in Washington saying,

we don't have control of the situation. Something bad's going to happen, and we need more assets, or we need to say, we're done.

I mean, which, you know, if the, if the priority wasn't high enough to give us more assets, then get us the hell out. You know, I mean, you can't have it both ways.

You can't, you can't give us a mission and then not give us the shit we need to be successful in that mission.

So there's three things, and I want to make sure I don't forget about this because to me, this is what motivates me to keep talking about this thing.

There are three, actually, there's four things that we got screwed over on. I haven't mentioned this yet, but we asked for an aircraft carrier.
Why do we want a carrier?

Two reasons. Force protection.
If you're at sea, the Somalis have nothing to touch us. Nothing.

I told you earlier Matt Ryerson would still be alive if one of these decisions had been made differently. That's the decision.
If Matt's on a carrier, that mortar

never comes anywhere close to him. But he dies after October 3rd, standing in the compound because we're right there.

The freaking bad guys are less than 100 yards from us because we're told no for the carrier. We got to live on the airfield.
AC-130, firepower. There's no such thing as too much firepower.

I mean, that's a fundamental truth.

Tanks

using another helicopter for search and rescue in an urban environment in the daytime is a bad idea. We wanted a tank.
We got told no.

And the last one, I don't really understand the technology, but it's counter-battery fire. Basically,

you can calculate the projectile that's inbound, calculate its location, and more effectively place counter-fire on that.

We asked for that too, because they've been mortaring us almost every day the whole time. And, you know, we're sandbagging the aircraft.

We're moving shit around, you know, but we're we're living in a freaking ripple. It's fucking crazy.
It is crazy.

How many times throughout history are politicians and bureaucrats have fucking abandoned commandos and left them to die? It is fucking asinine. It's very troubling.
And yet we keep going to do it.

And we always will. And God bless those who still serve and still do it.
But man, it pisses you off.

There's a quote.

There is never, ever any accountability for this shit.

There's no accountability for the fucking politicians in this country. There never fucking has been, and there probably never will be.
Well, it will come full circle on Les Aspen.

And, you know, I mean, he's another human being. I don't

wish him ill, but he ends up dying. And people that know him,

And we're getting ahead here, but I'll go ahead and finish this thought.

They flew me down to Bragg for the Delta Memorial.

And you've been there.

You've been there when the boots and the weapon and the helmet and the goggles are there representing the fallen and the families are there

and we're all there and Les Aspen walks in.

I don't think he was, well, I know he wasn't prepared. I mean, I don't think he'd ever seen anything light in his life.
I don't think he ever saw this as anything but a chess match and

a political chess match. And when he, you could see it.
I mean, you could see the look on his face when he walked in that room and he realized

we fucked this up. I mean, as soon as he was less aspiring.
He was a sec death.

And

why the hell Clinton picked him as a sec deaf is beyond me. He had a reputation as being anti-military, I think.

Again, I'm not a PhD on every politician that's ever worked in the administration, but I'm pretty sure that's right.

These people don't give a fuck about their slot. No.
They just want the power. I saw it in this last administration.
These people are so fucking hungry for power.

They don't give a fuck where they get placed. They just want in the admin.
They just want in the administration. You give them a fucking broom.

They would love it. I agree.

They know they're not the best place. It's disgusting.

It's another discussion. I want to pollute the interview.
It's garbage. No, then

you should be upset. We should all be upset that this is how it works.
But I will say that,

I mean, visibly, you could see something, some switch flipped in him. And there are friends of his that said,

and I don't know if it's true, but I've read this, that he, I mean, physically, it just, he died.

I mean, not long after, I don't remember, maybe it was years, but it was, he was supposedly never the same.

but anyway regardless died of what uh i don't know natural causes i'm not sure i mean he didn't like take his own life but uh he

they just don't get it i mean to your point no sympathy for these people to your point he he just didn't get it he didn't

He didn't understand that this is real. These are people with their lives on the line.
And your responsibility as a civilian leadership is to

make them give them everything they need to be successful. That's it.
That's the only job you have. Hey, you knew who else was never the same?

Them. Yeah,

everybody on the fucking ground who was doing the job. I don't give a fuck if that guy was ever the same.
Fuck him. In their favorite.
Fuck you. Yeah.

Fucking piece of shit.

Sorry.

So.

All those things we asked for, none of them we got.

So people say, well, why'd you go?

Because that's our freaking mission. That's why we went.

You know, when we were in Desert Storm, there was a crew who didn't want to go north of the border because they didn't feel like they had the right mission equipment on the aircraft.

And they were told, okay,

pack your bags. You're going home.
And two more guys came in and they flew the mission and nothing happened. So,

you know, again, unless it's unlawful,

you've sworn oath oath to do it and you want to do it. That's why you're in the freaking unit, right? If you didn't want to do it, you wouldn't be there.

And I wanted to go.

And on that day, as we looked at this thing, again, I'm a flight lead here, so I'm in the ops center with the leadership, and we're looking at this thing, and we all knew the risks.

I mean, there were four risks on this one: daytime. Don't have our

technology advantage. We've done it six times.
This is number seven. And they're changing their tactics with each evolution.

They now understand what we're doing pretty much as well as we do in terms of general concept. It's in the worst part of the city.
We're going in the Baccara market.

This is where all the bad guys are. I mean, we're in, you know, into the lion's den, and then you can't land the black hawks.

So that complicates extraction. Fast roping,

I mean, we're exposed exposed a little bit more, but we can do it pretty quick getting them in. But the only option to get them out is rooftop.
And that's a bad idea.

I mean, if they've been on a target 40 minutes and you come in with a Blackhawk and you're sitting on the roof long enough to load, you know, for me, I had 16 Rangers.

I'm exposed for way too long. That's a bad idea.
So we were going to extract by ground. And that's why the convoy is out there.
The mechanism to get everybody off the target is the convoy.

All good decisions.

And people said, you know, have asked me over the years, were you comfortable? Fuck no, I'm not comfortable. I mean, this is, you know, that this is each time

the threat ratchets up. And,

but I was comfortable enough. I mean, I wasn't to the point where it's like, man, we shouldn't be doing this.
No, that wasn't how I felt. I felt like,

you know, we got to get in, got to get out quick, we got to do our job. And, you know, we'll talk about it when it's over.
Well, that ain't how it goes. So, in the infill,

again, it's like 3:30 in the afternoon.

We're going to put my guys on the target. So, my guys are supposed to put a perimeter in.
I'm leading the Ranger element. So, the Delta guys are on the little birds, and the two lead Blackhawks.

And then I've got another element behind that's going to come in right behind them and seal it off because you don't want reinforcements coming in, and you don't want leakers going out.

Well, if you look at the video, it looks like we're crawling. Well, the reason we're crawling is on the initial infill, it's so dusty that a little bird does a go-around.

And if a little bird's got to do a go-around, you know it's dusty because they don't generate nearly as much dust as we do. And now I'm,

I can't go around because if I go around, it's like, you know, when you're flying commercially and ATC tells the aircraft, you know, hold.

That's a, I mean, you know, it just takes too much time to make a loop. So we just de-sell.

So I'm holding my flight off because I got to let that little bird come around, get back in, get his guys off and come out.

And until I see him break the dust cloud, I can't close on the same locations. So we're flying pretty slow at this point, but we're trying to get in right on his tail.

Doesn't matter other than it's, we're a little bit more vulnerable because we're flying fairly slowly, but they didn't get any shots off at us at that point that I know of.

Anyway, we get in our box formation.

Everybody's roping in. It was super dusty.
The only thing that I could see was a telephone pole out my chin bubble. And that's how I'm maintaining my position.
I'm flying again on this one.

You know, I keep talking about me flying. Ray and I, who is my co-pilot, we were rotating missions.
He would fly one, I would fly one. And this just happened to be the day that I was flying.

And so we get all our guys on the ground. We come out.
The whole flight comes out. We go north of the city.
And now I got them up there and we're holding.

We're essentially done because we're going to exfil by ground.

And we reached a point in the mission where we're going to consolidate, you know, count heads, get everybody on ground vehicles and get out of there when

all hell breaks loose. And 6-1, Cliff Walcott and Donovan Briley, the guys I've been talking about for the last two hours, they're in the first bird.
and they get shot down

and they're killed instantly. The aircraft, as far as I know, came down, hit a wall, and then rotated and basically crushed the cockpit.
And miraculously, guys in the back, I mean, not hurt bad.

Dan Bush, I don't think was hurt at all. I think he gets shot later.

Not 100% sure, but

I mean, it's on video. One of the guys comes out and sets up security to the tail of the aircraft.
The crew chiefs survive. One of them's not really hurt hardly at all.

I don't know how, because if you look at that crash, I mean, there's just, there's no survival space. I don't know how in the world they didn't all get killed.
But anyway, they didn't.

So now the commander's got target in contact, convoy in contact, crash site in contact. And we don't have the assets to handle one of these.
And now we got three.

So best idea they can come up with is consolidate on the crash site. Because they can't get Cliff and Donovan out.
They obviously need to provide security for the guys that are still alive.

So the idea is to get everybody to close on the crash site. We'll set up security, get the bodies out, load up on the vehicles, and get the hell out of here.
Meanwhile, I'm still holding.

And in my mind, Donovan and Brian, Donovan and Cliff are not dead. I mean, I'm like, okay, they got hit by an RPG.
They got it on the ground.

We'll all, you know, yak about it later and tell war stories later and all that other shit.

And

then

Carl Meyer, who's a flight lead of the Little Bird Assault Force, the MH6s that put the guys on the ground right around the building. You can see it in the video.

They make like an L-shaped landing right around the target building, gets on the radio and says, hey, I can land in the street. My aircraft's small enough.

Why don't you let me land near the crash site? And we'll get a couple of the operators that are most gravely wounded on board. Now, he doesn't have crew chiefs.
He just got two pilots.

Freaking brilliant idea. What, you know, why we never really talked too much about that as a contingency contingency before, I have no idea.
But Commander says, do it. So Carl and Keith Jones land.

Now, again, tremendous respect for Carl. He recently passed.
Tremendous loss for the whole aviation community.

Just freaking thinking on your feet. If I was landing that bird, I would land at an intersection.

But Carl is smart enough to realize if I land at the intersection, which gives me the most room, I got threats coming from four directions. Four, four, yeah, four fields of fire.

I'm not sure I would have thought of that.

He did. Well, Blackhawk wouldn't have fit anyway.
But anyway, so he goes beyond the intersection, lands. Keith jumps out.

Carl's the one that's talked about firing his MP5 down the alleyway as he's holding the controls with his knees and, you know, RPGs are exploding on the wall.

I mean, I thought he was borderline medal of honor, my personal opinion.

But

Keith jumps out and goes and gets one of the most gravely wounded Delta operators. And then I think they convince Dan Bush to get on that aircraft as well.
I think

Dan ultimately doesn't make it.

It may not have been Dan, but anyway, they end up with, I think, two guys, neither of which make it, I don't think. And they get them to medical

treatment.

It would have been hours otherwise. A day, actually, otherwise, had they not done that.
In the meantime, the commander says, send the search and rescue bird in.

Remember the bad idea we just talked about? But it's all he's got. I mean, there's nothing else he can do.

So they go in, they're roping their security and medical team near the crash site, and they get nailed by an RPG. Fuck.

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There's a picture of the blade on the aircraft. How the thing didn't fail,

I don't know. I mean, it looks like a giant took a bite out of the front end of this rotor blade.
And the rotor blades, really, the structure is all in the front.

They call it a titanium spar. It's shaped like a backwards D.
I guess if you look at it the right way, it's shaped like a frontwards D. But either way, and the rest is just aluminum.

Well, it looks like the whole spar is compromised, but somehow that blade held on. There's a hole in the fuselage.

I always thought they held their position. Dan Gelat, a good friend of mine, says no, they didn't.

They started to take off. Still got guys on the ropes.
The crew chief said, oh, oh, oh, we got guys on the ropes. They went back down, got them on the ground, cut the ropes, went back to the airfield.

That crew actually jumps in a spare helicopter. And there's a few things that has to happen first that need a test flight or something because they just changed an engine.
I don't remember.

And then they come back out. They end up flying 17 hours because they're the search and rescue bird.
So they're flying all night. And

now the commander says to me, hey, I want you to replace 6-1 over the target.

Hell yeah,

you know, but we don't have snipers on board. I mean, all we got is miniguns.
So we go in and we join the orbit.

This was a bad idea. I mean, you know, somebody should have realized before this happened that that just didn't make sense in the daytime.
You're giving the advantage to the bad guy.

I mean, you know, I got a 57, whatever foot long helicopter

that they can shoot at. Meanwhile, I'm trying to, you know, my guys are trying to hit a two foot wide target that has cover and we do not.

So all you got to do is wait for us to fly by, which is what they did, and then come out of the doorway and shoot the RPG at us. And I mean,

We can't shoot. I told the crew chiefs, I said, I'm arming you up, but I mean, we got friendlies all over the place here.
They've gone from the target to the crash site we don't know where they are

we gotta hold until we figure out where all the friendlies are and then once we're comfortable then we can start engaging targets

so they never fired around i mean we we've made it maybe around a target three times and i'm doing i'm again i'm flying i'm trying to do everything i can

i am Was it a right-hand turn? No, I'm in the right seat. So we're in a left-hand turn and we're in a bank.

So I'm actually looking through the cockpit to the open door on the other side, trying to figure out what the hell's happening as I'm making this orbit, trying to change my altitude, trying to speed up, slow down to make it hard for us to hit because we know they're going to shoot at us.

And,

you know, guy steps out with an RPG, never saw him, never saw an RPG coming.

And of course, you know, they hadn't shot enough at helicopters to realize how much they needed to lead us.

That's why Cliff gets hit in the tail, and that's why we get hit in the tail.

And I'm sure they were shooting at the main body of the aircraft, and just because, you know, they don't know enough to lead, it hits the tail, which in the end is worse damage than if they'd hit, you know, the main part of the fuselage.

Because if you lose a tail rotor on a Blackhawk at slow speed, you are fucked at low altitude. And that's the condition we were in.
So it hits, I tell people,

it feels like a speed bump going way too fast in a parking lot. I mean, if you hit a speed bump 40 miles an hour, that's what it felt like.
It jolted the fuselage, but I never saw it.

So I don't know where we're hit. I roll the aircraft level, looking at everything.
Everything looks okay. Controls are all working fine.

And the air mission commander calls on the radio and says,

you better put it on the ground. I'm like, hmm.

There's a freaking firefight going on down here. The airfield's right there.
I mean, I can see it.

No, I'm going for the airfield. And that's my prerogative.
I'm the pilot in command of the aircraft. I mean,

at that point, I am officially in charge of what we're doing. And it didn't matter if the president himself called me.
I have the authority to do what I think is right.

So

we start flying, and then I start to hear this whining, and it builds up very rapidly. And what had happened was the RPG hit the bottom of the, it's a transmission.

We call it a gearbox underneath the tail rotor that connects to the tail rotor. It blew part of it off.
And now it's got no oil.

So it's just gears that are probably damaged, turning at a super high rate of speed, and they just disintegrated. I mean, that was the whining that I heard.
And the guy that was behind us,

I believe what he said was, it looked like your tail rotor turned into vapor. I mean, he said it just completely disintegrated.
And when that happened, we're still fairly slow.

And that's the death sentence. Because if you lose your tail rotor and you're going fast,

the airflow over the fuselage is going to keep that tail from kicking around. The wind is going to basically push it like a weather van.

But if you're slow, there's not enough push from that wind to keep the torque of the engine from spinning you around.

So we start to spin. And initially, I mean, I've been flying these things for years.
I got a fair amount of flight time. I felt like they were part of me.

I'm looking at my feet like, am I doing the right thing here? Because it's the pedals that control this

left-right movement, basically, when you're at slow airspeed.

And I'm like having to convince myself, no, you're doing the right thing. The aircraft's not responding correctly.

And

Ray and I reached the conclusion instantaneously, we've lost the tail.

And now we're in a flat spin.

And

I know it's maybe getting into too much weeds here but oh no you're not what what happens is

center of gravity is a huge issue with helicopters and it's called the the moment of the of the weight so if you think about something balancing the further away from that balance point it takes less force to move so the tail is the furthest from the center of gravity of anything.

So losing that weight, losing the gearbox and the tail itself, now makes that tail super light, which causes the tail to want to go up.

Without changing anything else, the tail now is suddenly going to want to go up. Well, that's what happened.
So the tail's going up. So I decel.

What I'm actually trying to do is level the aircraft, but it's in fact deceling, decelerating the aircraft, which then causes the whale tail on a black hawk, as people might refer to it.

It's called a stabilator. It's an airfoil on the back right below the tail rudder that as you slow down it comes down and what that's designed to do when they first designed the aircraft

when you're decelerating to land if you didn't have the stabilator back there your nose would get too high and you'd have a hard time seeing where you're landing so they put that stabilator on there to basically give you a lift on the tail So that's making it even worse.

So now the stabilator is going down, the tail's coming up, and I got to pull back even more,

which is the opposite of what I'd like to be able to do, but I can't dive because I'm only at 70 feet. So we're in this impossible scenario where we're like, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo.

And all I could see is brown earth and blue sky, just the line. Everything else is a complete blur.

And I said to Ray, I guess we better pull him off. And he's already going.
I mean, he knows.

And the reason he has to do it is the power control levers on a Blackhawk are up overhead. They control the engines.
And the engines are what's creating this torque that's spinning the aircraft.

It's not a great thing to not have engines, but if you can cut the power to the engines, at least the spin will stop. But then you're going to fall from the sky.
So

he goes for them.

But we were spinning so violently, and we talked about this actually on the ground. We're both instructors.
So

why the hell would that be what you talk about on the ground? Because that's just what you do.

He said to me, he couldn't hold his arms up. That's how fast we're spinning.
The centrifugal force is driving his whole upper body to spin away from the axis of rotation.

So he gets one to idle and gets one about halfway off. So when we hit the ground, we're still spinning, but somehow, pure luck, amazing skill, pick your number, we crash on the wheels.

And that's the only reason I'm still, that's the only reason any of us survived.

If you crash on the the side, upside down, we're all dead for sure. But we crashed on the wheels, yet we're still spinning.
So there was some torque left in the airframe.

It ripped the right landing gear off. I remember laying there on the ground, looking back at it like, holy shit.
I mean, I didn't know there was enough force in the world to rip that off.

I mean, this gigantic metal attaching point that the upper portion of the strut on a landing gear, the front landing gear on a blackout, there's a picture of one right there, you know, has, and it's completely ripped off.

I mean, just, and, you know, when we hit, my seat, which has shock absorbers in it, went, you know, which helped, but it had enough vertical impact to crush my, my seat and everything underneath it.

And I'm sitting in a hole, basically, because my seat is completely collapsed. My right femur snapped in two on the edge of the seat.

The only explanation I have for that is I had my M9 and a low-slung

holster right there. So it added some weight to my leg.

I can't think of any other reason why my right femur would have broken off because there wasn't any bruising. Like the cyclic didn't hit my leg.
I don't know.

I mean, you can't explain everything in a crash.

And my vertebrae were crushed.

Not the discs, not the squishy things, the bones themselves.

One crushed 30%.

And because of the spin, they're crushed in a doorstop-like shape. So if you saw an x-ray in my back, which I have,

I mean, I don't know how I can do what I can do. I really don't.

They're disfigured and crushed, and I have what's called a kyphosis in my back. It turns 32 degrees at one point and then 13 degrees forward at another because when we hit, we're spinning.

So I go forward and sideways with enough force to smash the bones.

And I mean, that's what hurt.

I mean, when you have a femur fracture and you can't feel it, not because your nerves are severed, but because your back hurts so freaking bad, you can't feel it, that's freaking being in pain.

And it hurt.

I mean, I can't even describe it.

I can't even relate to it anymore because it's been 30 years, you know. But I regain consciousness.

And, you know, it takes a second to figure shit out, right? Like, where am I? What the hell happened? Don't remember hitting the ground.

Pushed some metal out of the front windshield. And we think that's what Randy Sugart and Gary Gordon saw.
We think they saw either me moving shit or Ray Frank struggling to get out of the aircraft.

And that's when they got on the radio and said, hey, we got survivors. Let us go in.

And initially, And I think this probably bubbles up to General Garrison. I'm not sure 100%.
I never asked him

if it was him or Colonel Harrell, Gary Harrell, who made the call, but they said, no,

there's no way. Why didn't you ask him?

I'm off comms.

I didn't know if you meant that you saw him later on. Oh, why didn't I ask?

You know, I don't know.

Does it matter at this point? Do you want to put him in an uncomfortable situation?

I can explain why I think they made their call from my perspective. It's triage.
I mean,

now you got four fights. You had three, now you got four.
And the only operators left on a bird are Randy and Gary.

Do you want to put them at an isolated crash site where they're surrounded? Or do you want to use them over here where the bulk of your force is? It's a command decision.

I'm never going to second guess it. Would I made the same one? I can't say, but that's my explanation for why they made that decision.
They didn't think it was possible to save us.

And they were right, if you think about it. I mean, they were right.

But Gary and Randy don't take the answer. They don't take no for an answer.

They continue to orbit. In the meantime, you know, Ray's getting out of the aircraft.
He had a lower leg fracture and a back injury, but not as incapacitated as I was.

I mean, with a femur fracture and a crushed spine. You're not going anywhere.
You're not going anywhere. I mean, it's hard to get out of a freaking Blackhawk healthy.

You know, you got to step over the controls and everything else. So I just decided I'm going to fight it out from the cockpit.
And but Ray gets himself out

and we never said another word. We talked about the spinning and what we did and the power control levers

and that was it. I mean, the last time I saw him, he was standing by the cockpit.
He had his MP5 and he's getting ready to go do his thing. I did some stuff that I still don't understand completely.

I mean, I obviously took my helmet off. It's a flight helmet.
It's not a

Kevlar or anything. And then I had my wedding band on my watch band.

And I took those off and I set it on the center console.

Can't explain it. No idea why I did that.

And then,

again, I settled on the fact that I'm going to do what I can from the cockpit here. And right about that time, Randy and Gary show up.
Now, what happened that I am oblivious is

they kept orbiting and they kept seeing the movement and they insisted.

And as I understand it, on the third request, they were speaking directly to either Colonel Harrell or General Garrison and said, Look, if you don't let us in, they're closing in and we're going to lose them all.

And

I think it's General Garrison. I think he said,

you know what you're asking me? And they said, yes, we understand.

And he said, put them in.

And so

Jim Yacone and Mike Gofina, who are flying this aircraft, Super 62,

put them in.

And

they are put in behind me. So I don't see the aircraft.
And I don't hear them until all of a sudden they're right there. And I'm like, holy shit, how did you get here?

You know, like, this is unbelievable. I knew Gary, not well, not a personal friend, but he'd been on my bird.

I recognized him and I'm like, damn,

freaking rescue force. God bless you, you know.
But we didn't talk. This is just happening in my head.
And they lifted me up, set me on the ground. How you lift a guy,

you know, I probably weighed 185 at the time with a broken femur and a broken back and not further injure him is beyond me in the middle of a firefight. But they did.
I mean, I don't remember.

really feeling any more pain at all or anything bad happening to my leg or anything. I told them, you know,

my leg broken. I knew it was broken at that point.
And I said, you know, and the movie has me saying my back's kind of weird. I think I said, you know, something wrong with my back.

You know, but anyway, they put me on a,

sitting with my back against what I think was a survival kit, which is a big box of shit that's in the back of the aircraft, and gave me my MP5.

And then they go around the other side. So I'm on the right side of the aircraft.
Bill Cleveland is behind me. He's hurt bad.
I mean, he's

moaning. I mean, he's probably dying.

Tommy, probably the same way, but I couldn't hear him. I think Tommy actually got hit by the minigun in his chest.
It's on a pintle mount.

And again, the spin and the crash was so violent that that gun smashed right into his chest. And I think, you know,

that's probably what killed him.

Not sure 100%.

And I'm taking shots here, taking shots there. But my gun, my MP5 keeps jamming.

Like, what the hell

clear around get another round in there clear around fire jams again clear around i mean now over the years i had to figure it's probably damaged because it was sitting on the magazine vertically and you know that vertical impact it's not designed to take that kind of force so the magazine was probably bent And or even maybe the rounds themselves were damaged.

I'm not sure. But either way, I mean, it was shooting, but it was shooting one, maybe two, and then I'd I'd have to clear a jam and I got rounds laying all over me.

And anyway, I end up Winchester in the thing. And

are you hitting? I think I was. I think I hit a couple of guys, but I mean, it's, it's hard to shoot sitting like that, period.
And, you know, that's not a long-range weapon.

It's almost a pistol with a long barrel, you know.

They didn't come back, which is the desired effect. So, you know, to me, it was effective fire.
It did. I was trying to hit him.
I just don't know if I did.

In the meantime, how long were you in the helicopter? Not long. Before they showed up.
Not long. I mean, in my mind, less than five minutes.

What was the conversation like with you and your co-pilot when he exited the

simply, we talked about the power controllers, and that was it. That's it?

Why did he exit? Where was he going? I think he was going to try to take cover somewhere behind a tree or something.

You guys didn't discuss it? Nope.

Nope.

When did you notice the Somalis closing in on the helicopter? Not yet. I hadn't seen any Somalis yet.
And that's one thing the movie misrepresents.

In the movie, they're showing me like killing half a Mogadishu from the cockpit. Never fired a round from the cockpit.
I mean, I fired plenty of rounds from the ground, but not from the cockpit.

So when they showed up, nobody was, they weren't closing in. Not yet.

At least I hadn't seen them. Afterwards.
I hadn't seen them. Afterwards.

I mean, almost immediately. Seconds.
Yeah. Yeah.

And

gary goes down

you saw it no i heard it gary for whatever you know what what is it that you remember about people you know do do people remember how you look how you talk how you posture yourself i i can't explain it but i i remembered his voice because when when he had flown on my bird you know we did a pre-brief and he asked some questions or whatever and i just remembered his voice to me there was something unique about it and and i heard him say you know damn i'm hit or something like that it wasn't anything desperate it wasn't you know

i just thought he just took a round honestly as i understand it if it wasn't that round it was around soon after that just hit a gap in the body armor and became a border mortal wound

rainy comes around how long how long not long

man not long

So Randy comes around, I mean, they've been shooting the hell out of the Somalis, though. I mean, it was like being at the range.

I mean, was the Somalis say 27 Somalis were killed at Crash Site 2, and none of them by the aircraft. I mean, all gunfire.

So, that gives you some perspective when there's at most four of us, probably only three of us, shooting. And I would say 99.9% of that is Gary and Randy.

So, yeah, but you don't even know if you're hitting. Right, right.
Not 100% sure.

You know, I mean, I would see a head pop up and shoot at it. There was

some video of this corrugated tin wall, which was to my right. And I hear, I could hear movement behind there and I'm just shooting through the wall.

I mean, at this point, it's freaking survival, right?

And, you know, if it's an American, they're going to call out something, you know.

So I'm just shooting through the wall to get these people to stay away. At some point, and I had forgotten about this, but.

Now that I was reminded, what I think was a hand grenade got thrown in here, and I just heard heard it hit the ground and I'm freaking out. Like, holy shit, there's a freak.

And I remember swinging my weapon around because I couldn't see it and I'm hoping to just hit it, you know, and bang, it goes off.

Nothing hit me. But again, just adds to the man, you know, this is, this is just off the chart, right?

So Randy comes back asking, where's the crew chief's weapons? And I'm like, oh, shit.

You know, I went from feeling pretty good about this to, man, we are screwed.

And I told him where they were. You know, again, this is the importance of SOPs and standard operating procedures,

you know, doing things the way they're supposed to be done. Kruchies had their weapons exactly where they're supposed to be.
They're not buried under some shit.

Or there's this place we call the hell hole in the back. That's behind a panel that, you know, sometimes you throw stuff in.
No, they were right where they were supposed to be.

And I told him where they were. He went in and he's out in like 10 seconds.

Now he's got two M16s freshly loaded, full magazines, and he gives me what I've always thought and still think was Gary's weapon.

And at that point, I'm like, oh, shit, if this is Gary's weapon, he's down, like down hard. And now it's Randy and me.

And

he gets on the fire's net, which we had programmed in our survival radios, the fire net, because you pretty much know you're always going to be able to talk to somebody on that net.

That's just how we did it. You know, and there there was an A and a B channel.
I don't know if what the B channel was, maybe the SAR net or something.

But anyway, so he calls, and I hear a familiar voice from one of the little birds saying, a reaction force is en route.

All right, hold on a little bit longer.

It's going to be eight hours before somebody else gets to our crash site.

We don't know that. Randy goes around the bird, makes his last stand.

I mean, it's just a matter of time. They had all closed closed on us they knew we were lightly defended they you know they

had set up a matrix of the city just like us and they were sending out over handheld radios where the target was so that everybody would converge on it and they could overwhelm us with numbers which they dirt they definitely had numbers and and now this time they were all converging on our crash site uh and they all assaulted from the left side did you hear him make his last stand No.

I just heard the shooting stop.

And then I could hear the voices.

And it's Somali voices. And I'm like,

this is it.

There's nothing you can do. I'm out of rounds.
I've shot all the rounds out of Gary's weapon. Why I never thought of my pistol, I cannot explain.
I never thought of it. Never thought of it at all.

I to this day cannot explain why.

It probably saved my life. That's what I was just going to say.
It's probably a fucking good thing you didn't. But I never drew it because I just didn't think of it.
So I've got the MP5s laying there.

I got Gary's weapon across my chest. It's empty.

I'm looking at the sky. I can still remember the clouds.
And I'm just thinking, this is how it ends.

And that's how it was going to end because they were

the only thing I've ever seen in my life that I think is comparable was the SEALs and Fallujah on the bridge. Not the SEALs, but the contractors.
Contractors. Yeah.

That's, to me, is basically equivalent to what happened. It was pandemonium.
I mean, it was things.

I just, in my mind,

having the benefit of, you know,

growing up where I did and being an American and

a Christian and

what's right and wrong, I just couldn't imagine ever doing what they did. I just couldn't imagine it.

So initially, they're going to beat me to death.

So when I first told this story, I said I got butt stroked.

And it broke my nose, my cheekbone, and my eye socket.

If I had you put your finger and run your finger along the bottom part of my eye socket, you'll hit a spot where it goes up about a quarter of an inch because this whole part of my face got smashed in.

What

I was surprised no one ever questioned me on, though, is if you butt stroke somebody that hard with a rifle, butt, that's going to leave a mark. The shape of that butt.

Well, if you look at my interrogation video, there is no mark like that.

Why did I say that? Because

I guess in some respects,

I'm a protector.

If I had to describe myself, I'm a problem solver. I don't have a lot of patience for incompetence and dishonesty.
And I'm a protector. I didn't want the families to know what happened.

Somehow in my naive mind, they wouldn't know. No one would tell them.

And that would be better for them. What I didn't know is

bodies bodies are about to be dragged through the streets. Body parts are about to be turned over to the compound in bags.
I didn't know any of that.

But what they hit me with, I believe, was someone's arm because it was heavy and soft.

And when it obviously had enough weight that when it hit my face, it smashed the bones in my face, but it was soft enough that it didn't create a bruise.

And I remember looking at the guy that did it

in disbelief, like

humans can't do this, you know? Like one of,

yeah, one of our guys. One of your teammates' arms.
Yeah. I mean, I can't guarantee that's what it was, but I'm pretty sure that's what it was.

Man.

And I remember seeing movies when I was younger. about, you know, Vietnam and horrible shit that, but it's a movie, right? You know, and you don't,

you're horrified by it, maybe, if you're really drawn into it, but in the end, it's a movie, but

this is actually happening. And

I wasn't, I mean, it shocked me. I didn't say anything.
I just looked at the guy like,

holy shit, you know, and

somewhere in this sequence, and by the way,

they're split between people that are trying to take my shit and people that are trying to beat me to death. So they're trying to get my boots off.

And I think this is where my femur goes out the back side of my leg because

they don't take great care to really loosen your boot, right? I mean, they pull the bow and then pull, pull, pull it till it comes off.

Well, if your freaking femur is busted and somebody else is trying to get

your boot off,

it's going to create some havoc up here where the fracture is. Well, my femur goes out the back side of my leg.
I mean, punches right through a hole about the size of a half dollar.

You know, my son played hockey, and every time I pulled his skates off,

it reminded me of that. You know, try taking a kid's hockey skate off.
It's hard. You're pulling hard on his leg.
And that's what they were doing to get my boot off. And it was,

anyway.

Again, because my back hurts so bad, I don't remember it happening, and I don't remember the pain of it. All I can tell you is there's a big-ass hole there, and my femur was out the back.

So anyway, somebody realizes you have value as a prisoner.

Everyone else is dead, I think.

Did you see

them dragging the bodies through the streets? I did not know that happened.

I did not know.

When you say that originally you had said that it was a butt stock,

what were you protecting the families from? Knowing that that kind of carnage had occurred. Okay.

I mean,

I don't think it was a matter that I couldn't talk about it. Although it, you know, let me tell you, when I first talked about this, all of this, it was pretty tough.
I'll bet it was.

And it's just been a healing process over the years. And I don't think you're ever 100%

healed. It's grief.
I mean, you know, if you lose a loved one, car accident, whatever,

I mean, you're going to feel some emotion about that probably for the rest of your life. You know, you think about them, you think about they're not there anymore.
It's grief. And I think it's,

it lessens over time, but it, it never goes completely away.

For me, it's harder if I'm tired, if I've, you know, I've had a short night of sleep or whatever, and I'm vulnerable, I let my guard down a little bit.

It's a little more difficult, but I'm as healed as I'm going to be. I mean, I'm not going to be healed anymore.

I'm not saying I'm over it.

I mean, if your friends all die,

you shouldn't get over it. I mean, that's, you know, you should miss them.
You should grieve them. And I do, you know.
But anyway,

somebody realizes I have value as a prisoner. And Mark Bowden is the one who discovered this.
I didn't know. I don't remember this shot being fired.

He claims he fired shots in the air and got control of the mob. I mean, at that point, and the doctors told me, Mike, give yourself some slack here.
You're in freaking shock, okay?

You don't sustain injuries like that

and then be overrun and beaten and not be in shock. You know, he said,

your brain's probably not processing everything

like you normally would. And

I said, yeah, you know, Doc, you're probably right.

I never really thought of it that way, but you're probably right.

So anyway, the Somali claims he fired shots in the air, got the crowd to back off, and said, you know, we're taking you into captivity and we're going to turn you over to Adid.

Well, before they did, the only identifying...

They told you that?

No.

Did any of these guys speak English? No.

No. Mark Bowden told me.
So you have no fucking idea what these guys are saying? Nothing. No, or who they are.
I mean, I know they're pissed off, out-of-control Somalis.

There's just people ransacking your body

and trying to kill you.

Some, obviously, civilians.

some, I mean, they didn't wear uniforms like a traditional military person would, but I mean, you could tell they're, you know, SNA, Somali National Alliance people, the way just

AK-47, kind of militaristic looking, clothing.

Yeah, yeah.

So

the only identifying things I carried,

We had a green piece of cardboard that got us into the Task Force Ranger compound because it's secure, you know, and we have access points and we would leave like to go run pt we would run around the airfield i mean we carried our mp5s you know we had them slung on our backs when we'd run but the airfield i think it was like

maybe six miles around and we were actually training to go do the marine corps marathon again and

another

thing that I think helped me survive this is I was in pretty damn good shape. I mean, we were training to go run a marathon the following month.

But when we got back, we'd have to show our credentials. And it's nothing sophisticated.
It's a green freaking piece of cardboard with laminated.

All right, Task Force Ranger.

I also had my name tag on, which has a picture of a Blackhawk. It's got my rank on there, U.S.
Army,

wings,

and I think that's it.

When they were ripping all my shit off, one guy pulls this

green cardboard and he says, Ranger, Ranger, you die, Somalia. So I guess they did speak English.
My correction. Sorry, I forgot about that.

That tells you several things right there. They know what it takes to access the Task Force Ranger compound.
I mean, as soon as he sees the green card, that to him is, this is my access.

So this is why I said earlier, you don't know who the bad guys are when you're in these third world countries.

You're relying on locals to do different things, which we have to because we don't have the support a lot of times to do it all with

green suitors or blue suitors or

organic assets.

Anyway,

then they threw dirt in my face and then they wrapped a rag around my head so I can't see and they hoist me up in the air. Now, it's possible my femur goes out here.
Again, I don't know.

And at that point, I'm being paraded around through the

So I'm like the living version of what they do with the bodies. They're celebrating, they shot down an aircraft, they killed Americans, now they have an American, and they, I mean,

what are you hearing? I'm hearing screaming.

I always thought, and again, I can't see. So I felt like most of the loudest voices.
were female.

I don't know if that's an accurate

recollection, but that's what I recalled. And then I'm getting hit.
And, you know,

I know if you kill a male in their family, that that, you know, is something that the women seek retribution for, reparations for, and maybe that's part of why they're hitting me. I don't know, right?

But I know we kill a lot of people there. And rightfully so, they're attacking us.
I mean, we're not killing people just because we want to. They're attacking us.

I mean, we're essentially defending ourselves. So anyway,

I describe a moment, and I've said this from the beginning:

I left my body. I mean,

there's a

scientific explanation for that, and there's a spiritual explanation for that. All I can tell you is it happened.

I remember distinctly looking down and seeing myself being carried through the streets, and the pain went away. I mean, it was like,

wow,

that,

thank God that's not me, you know, because that looks like that really sucks. And it only lasted a few seconds.

And then, bam, it is me. And that, the scientific explanation being your brain has a lot of capabilities that you'll never use.

And one of them is it can, it can trick itself if it's dealing with significant trauma and try to figure out a way to tell tell you it's not real. That's the scientific explanation.

The spiritual explanation is: I'm about to die, and God

sent you back.

Don't know.

Yeah, you do.

I know I got a lot of people pulling for me that are up there.

Yeah, that's no shit.

My grandmother, in in particular.

And you can't say no to her.

So I'm back in the moment.

And they're carrying me through the streets. And then they throw me on the ground.

And

I'm trying to get sorted out.

Just a bizarre little trivial thing. My desert tan flight suit is a two-piece, which looks kind of like BDUs, not a traditional Air Force-looking flight suit.
And it's got really long pockets.

And what had happened was the pocket, I had a pocket knife in it, and the pocket flipped over.

So if you reached in, you thought you were getting to the bottom of my pocket, but you weren't, because it was flipped over.

And they reached in there, they searched me, but they didn't see the pocket knife. So I had a pocket knife.

What am I going to do with it? I don't freaking know.

But I have a knife, okay?

And I'm like looking at my situation. It's like, oh man, this is bad.

And they're arguing amongst themselves. They don't, you could tell they didn't know what to do.
They hadn't really planned this contingency. And they

suddenly come back in the room and they hoist me up again.

And they run me out to a flat, like a truck with a big flat surface on the back, throw me on the back of that, throw a tarp over me, and then get on the back of the truck.

Because, you know, in these third-world countries, right?

If you can fit 50 people, you can fit 51 on the back of the thing, and they all pile on.

And basically, they don't want anyone to know, obviously, American or Somali, that I am there.

Now, according to Mark's research, what actually happened here is that the people that overrun the site are not Hoburgetter.

They're some other clan.

And they reached a deal, probably a monetary deal, with Adid

to turn me over to him. And the group that comes to get me to move to the second location is Adid's people.
And that's why they moved me so quickly to another location.

I don't know any of this is going on. But that is apparently what happened.

So I moved by ground. I don't know where the hell we're going.

And they put me in a little octagonal room that had like some of the bricks higher up had like ventilation through them. So I could hear what's going on outside, but I couldn't see.

The lower parts of the wall are solid. It's like a dirt, pea gravel kind of floor.
No, it might have been concrete floor, but it's pea gravel outside, just like survival school, exactly the same way.

And

the beauty of it was I could hear them when they approached the door, just like survival school. I don't know, it's just a coincidence.
But

so during the night, they had chained me up. I call it a dog chain, just primarily to give you some sense of

the thickness of the chain. It was fairly light.

And I was sweating profusely. I mean, it's hot.
You can imagine with all these injuries and all the shits going on in my body. I was actually able to get out of the chain.

And I'm laying there. You know, I got the dirt out of my eyes.
I'm straightening my leg out a little bit. It's starting to swell.
I still have my trousers on, but they're very baggy.

Eventually, my leg is going to get big enough where they're skin tight. And And at that point, I'm like, there's no freaking way this leg is ever going to make it.

And

they're approaching the door.

And I re-wrap the chain around my wrist to make them think that I'm still chained up. And I look

and AK-47 through the crack in the door. Bang, round goes off towards me.
but the person didn't take time to aim. It hits the ground, maybe five feet away from me.

The round ends up in the, in my left arm, and the shrapnel from either the round or concrete floor ends up in the back of my fractured femur leg.

I'm like, Jesus Christ, you know, like I don't have enough going on here that they're shooting at me in captivity.

So I go to pull the round had decelerated to the point where it didn't go in that far. And I went to pull it out and I burned the shit out of my fingers.

And a little lesson learned: if you get shot and you try to pull the round out, it's probably going to be hot if you don't give it very much time because it's obviously gone through the barrel at a high velocity.

So I burned my fingers, got it out, threw it on the ground.

All right, what's next, troops? And somewhere in that night, I don't remember if it was before I got shot or after I got shot, but I start hearing the conboy

and I'm racing through my mind. You know, we had reconnaissance birds up.

Do you have any recollection of time? Yeah. You do? Yeah.

But I, you know, the sequence was one before the other. Sometimes, you know, it's been so long, I don't really recall.

But during the night, so probably it's before I get shot, I hear the convoy. It had to be the convoy.

Because, I mean, there's a lot of shooting

both ways, coming in and going out. I mean, obviously, the Somalis that are around where I'm being held are shooting.
And I hear round. I swear I can hear what were,

you know probably large caliber rounds flying and hitting the walls were those RPGs not sure I don't I hadn't heard a lot of hadn't heard RPGs flying before so I don't know it could have been that but either way it's coming and I'm like

man they know where I am this is a rescue because it's coming it's getting louder and louder and louder And I'm thinking, okay, a reconnaissance bird saw them capture me, followed me, kept eyes on the whole way.

Now they know right where I am, and they're coming to get me. Like, you know, is somebody else going to come in here and pop me?

And it gets louder and louder, and I'm surprised it didn't actually, because how close they got. But I don't, I think it's just a coincidence.

They were just on their way to either crash site one or they had been at crash site one and they were on their way to the Pakistani stadium.

I'm not sure timeline-wise, which explanation makes more sense, but it had to be them. I mean, it was a large volume of people.

And as soon as it apexed and started getting quieter, I was like, shit, they don't know where I am. They're just passing by.

And so

I woke up the next day. They came in, gave me a banana, which doctors later said that you shouldn't have eaten the banana.
I don't know, something about the potassium or something.

It's not good for something that was wrong with me. I don't know what it was.

You got all this shit going on that word about a fucking banana. I don't know if I should eat a banana.
You should never have eaten that fucking banana. Sorry, I'm on a diet.

Yeah.

And then they gave me a bowl of water. Nasty, nasty, but I knew I had to drink.
So I drank it.

And they gave me an MRE that looked like it had been there for a decade. I mean, it was sun bleached.

freaking i mean just like it'd been it had been laying in the sun for a thousand years but i knew i had to eat you know i mean you're gonna die if you don't drink water and eat something so i did what i could to try to eat it gave me a can of pepsi i think that was that first day

and

i remember you know spilling some of it and the ants were everywhere flies were everywhere freaking nasty nasty nasty

and made it through the first day

and that night

They said,

will you do a video?

And I said, Hell no, I'm not going to do a video.

And they said, They didn't seem to push the issue.

And then I started thinking, Well, I can't really stop them if they freaking come in here and start videoing me. What am I going to do?

Well, I started thinking about

blinking, you know, blinking something.

And

without getting into something that

could be considered sensitive, I couldn't remember how to do it.

So

I thought, all right, let me just do what they taught me to do in resistance training in survival school. Because I had been to Special Forces Call C-level Sear.

It's the same SER the SF guys go through. They go through with us and we were all together in the camp.

And

I was actually the first person to ever go through

SF C-level SER that used it in the real world. Wow.

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I gave them high marks. I mean, everything they did, although the scenario is probably different.

It was structured more around a Vietnam at the time, more a Vietnam scenario, which doesn't really happen anymore.

But all the fundamental stuff that they taught worked. And again, it's kind of sensitive, so we won't get too much into it.
But, you know, the resistance stuff is kind of common sense, right?

It's basically give them meaningless information. And

one thing that helped me was

they didn't have a clue what my rank was. They wanted to know.

And again, it's on my name tag, right? So there's no issue telling them what my rank is.

And it's the big four anyway, right? Even if you tried to be hardcore, it'd be big four, nothing more. You know,

rank is one of them. So I'm wasting a lot of time with these guys trying to explain what at the time I was a CW-3,

trying to explain what a CW-3 is. And I went like, I went private,

sergeant,

warrant officer,

lieutenant, capt, you know, basically that fundamental, right? Showing we sort of sit somewhere in the middle. And they're like,

I don't know what the heck you're talking about. We don't understand.
So they finally settled on, initially they thought I was lieutenant colonel, and then they settled on that I was a major.

And I'll show you something in a bit here that actually addressed to me from them. It says to Major Durant.

But, you know, if you can waste time with that kind of crap, you know,

that's a victory. So

they never figured it out.

And then without warning, this pretty big entourage shows up. And I always say, it's possible a deed was there.
I don't know.

If that was him, he just stayed in the background.

It was actually a CNN camera guy that the Somali National Alliance went out. and said, hey, you with the camera, come with us.
And he did.

And he filmed the interrogation and uh

you know initially i'm doing everything they taught me to do and time's a wasting and i'm having to hold my weight up because i'm sitting they had me propped against the wall and my freaking back is crushed and i'm getting this is very painful and i'm getting to the point where i can't hold myself up anymore And they threw a blanket on my right leg to cover the femur fracture up.

And they're asking me questions about this and that. And I, no,

I basically told them, I'm a Blackhawk pilot. Well, they captured me next to a freaking Blackhawk.
I have a Blackhawk on my name tag. It's probably okay to say that, you know.

And then they got into the political questions, which

you have to give them credit knowing. that to them, the most important thing was not, you know, how many people are in Task Force Ranger? You know, how many aircraft do you have?

They weren't asking that. They were asking the political questions.
They knew that if they could get me to say something politically significant, that it could affect policy. That was their theory.

DW-3,

Mike Durant,

U.S.

Army.

U.S. Army.

I mean black arc pilot

black arc pilot

I don't think this operation is good

I say that

this opportunity is

what how do you think it is aversion

I was sold right

you know computer people innocent

And that's the pressure you're under, right? It's like,

how do I get past this point and not do that?

So the two questions they asked me were, how do you think this mission in Somalia?

And I probably didn't answer it for a while or I didn't say anything. And then they kept asking.
And I finally said, I'm a soldier I do what I'm told

okay

and then they said you killed the people innocent obviously what they want me to say and I said innocent people being killed is not good

who's going to argue with that right

I don't think they knew what they had when when I answered that second question Pretty sure it ended right there.

And they ran out thinking, this is what we wanted.

Well, in the end the survival people will tell you it helped me it didn't help them because now they have proof of life i'm a prisoner they're accountable they don't care about the geneva convention but the rest of the world does and they're going to hold them accountable so it really helps improve my chance of survival not what they were thinking gave them nothing they uh you know they had damage control to do like beyond anything i've seen in my life because of what they did with the remains of everybody else from Crash Site 2.

So that was much more significant than,

you know, the morning about being accountable for me. And

it ended up helping me, not what it felt like. I mean, you know, you're being interrogated in captivity.

It ain't going to end with you feeling good. I mean, one way or the other.
You know, you either said something you weren't supposed to say or you're like,

like me, I thought I did what I was supposed to do, which I did, but you know, are they going to manipulate this into something that, you know, different? There's no way to know, right?

It's very, very difficult. And they train you and it was, the training was good.
I mean, it, it was effective. And I know they've used my video a million times since

to train other people on what you're supposed to do. And

it was over. And then They realized, whoa, way too much attention here.
Word's going to get out that Durant's here. We got to move him again.

So they packed me up, dragged me out. Now this time they stick me in the back seat of a car.
My leg is still,

no, the doctor came.

Sorry.

Dr. Kadia.

And

great that he was a U.S. med school trained doctor, spoke a little bit of English.
But he had nothing. I mean, he had aspirin and betadine solution and gauze.
That's it.

Because he'd been treating all of their people.

And they had, you know, estimates are anywhere from six to eight hundred killed and 2,000 wounded. Now that's the high end, but it's a lot of, it's a lot of casualties on their side.

And they got nothing left. I mean, they were, their supplies were exhausted.
He wanted to get me to dig for hospital because, you know, he wanted to see what's going on with my leg.

but and my back but the adid's people wouldn't let him do it and they said no he's not going there so he put a splint on my leg.

Did this, you know what? I'd have to go back and look at my notes. I may get this out of sequence.
It's not really that important anyway. But he puts a splint on my leg.

And it was basically like, you know, the wire shelving.

It's kind of like that.

But he splints me all the way down to my foot.

So my ankle can't turn, my knee can't bend, and my fracture is so high, he can't stabilize. There's not enough bone left for the fracture to actually stabilize.

There's, you know, maybe, I don't know, eight inches of femur in my upper femur, and then there's, you know, whatever, 12 inches, and then the rest of my leg.

So the only place it can pivot is the fracture. So he has stabilized everything else that's not messed up.

And now when they're moving me around, it's like, oh my God, I couldn't feel my femur before, but I freaking can now.

And I'm like,

there's no way my femoral artery is not going to get cut because my legs moving around and it's all pivoting right there at the fracture.

I think they moved me like that.

So they stick me in the back seat of this car, throw a tarp over me.

And then two guys get in the back seat on top of me.

At this point, I'm in so much pain. I'm hyperventilating.
I mean, the sweat is coming out of me like a cartoon character. And I mean,

I think I'm going to freaking die. I mean, it's just off the chart.
And we're driving through the city and we get to the next destination. We stop and everybody else gets out and they leave me there.

And I'm like, son of a bitch. They got the video.
And now they're just abandoning me in the city and they're letting the people do what they will with me was what I thought.

And I'm waiting and I'm waiting and there's nothing going on.

And then I kind of moved the tarp out of the way and I'm like,

could I possibly get in the front seat of this freaking thing and make a getaway here? I wonder if they left the keys in it. But I don't even know if it's, it's probably a standard shift.

I mean, I can't drive that with a, with one freaking broken leg, you know. But I'm thinking about it, which is a positive sign.

I mean, I'm thinking about how do I solve the problem, which is again my nature. And about that time, they all come back.

All they had been doing, I believe, is just going out and reconning and make sure, you know, it is what they thought it was in terms of presence of other people. There's nobody around.

So they come back, they get me out, they bring me in, and I call this the Hotel Nowhere. It was basically like a Motel 6, this row of doors down a balcony.

And there was a woman that sort of kind of ran the place.

And I saw her the next day. She showed up.
And it was just bizarre. There times when

people would come and they'd open the door and look in, like, come see the American, you know, and little kids, and not a huge volume of people, but I'm sure like maybe it's her relatives or something, or other people that live there

out of curiosity coming to look at me. And, you know, again, I'm just trying to tread water and stay alive here.

And nothing happened for a couple of days. And then

things started getting weird.

I was being visited by this propaganda minister named Abdi,

clean-dressed,

you know, obviously a person of stature, spoke pretty good English. And I described it as he would come and try to tell me bedtime stories.
And he was trying to indoctrinate me.

He was telling, this is where I learned about

Adid's role in ousting Siad Barre and how Adid was really a national hero. And I'm like, yeah, he's a freaking national hero.
All right.

And, you know, they're basically just trying to convince me to sympathize with them. Again, I've been trained on all this.
I know what's going on.

And I'm just, yep, okay, whatever you say, you know, sounds like a good story. You know, why don't you tell me,

you know, the old lady in the shoe next. You know what I mean? It's like, this is, this is just made-up shit.

And

that's happening. And

they asked me if I wanted anything.

And my standard answer answer had become at some point along the way, I just want a plane ticket home. That's it.
I don't want anything else. And they liked that.

They respected that. They liked that.
They did. And I'll tell you how I found this out in a minute.
They, you know, I wasn't saying, you know,

I wasn't hostile. I wasn't disrespectful.
You know, they're Muslim. They would actually pray in the room.

And, you know, I was quiet and reverent when they were praying. And in the end, they're going to do the same for me when I get the Bible.

And

again, some of this I was just winging because it's common sense, right? But

I just listened to his stories and just sort of filed them away.

And then he said, Would you like a radio?

And I said,

shit, yeah. I mean,

one of the lessons I learned in survival school,

they offered me a candy bar and I said, no, not unless everybody in the class gets one. And in a debrief, they said, well, that's a bad call.
You need the candy bar.

We're not asking you to do anything to earn the candy bar. You know, just eat it.
So I'm like, okay, I'll take the radio. And they show up with a little transistor radio.

And from that point, I'm listening to the Armed Forces Network broadcast. I'm listening to BBC.
So I got it. Now I have a connection to the outside world.
Hugely important for morale, right?

And then something weird starts to happen. I think it was on the 8th, which is like five days later or five days after the shootdown.
They come in.

They start sweeping up all the dead flies in the room. They bring a mattress in.

It was a guy named Farimbi that had been introduced along the way. He was the head guard.
And as I found out later, he was basically charged by a deed with my well-being. Farimbi was responsible.

If I was killed, it was Farimbi's fault. If somebody else stole me, Farimbi's fault.
If I was captured, Farimbi's fault. So he was the man.

And most of the time, he spent in the room with me. But they're cleaning all this shit up.
They give me some pajamas, some clean pajamas. They bring a mattress in.
And I'm like, what the hell?

Am I going to get released? What's happening here? And again, all this stuff's going to help me survive. So,

okay, you know?

And then in walks a Caucasian woman, blonde hair

from the Red Cross,

Suzanne Hofstedter.

I'm like,

this is incredible. It's like, just hold my hand.
You're an angel, you know. You are the only non-hostile person I've seen in five days.
And

don't leave, you know.

And that's how I felt and what I said.

And she just wanted to check on me. She said, I have a box of stuff for you, but they wouldn't let me bring it.
They gave us no notice that we were going to get to visit you.

They came and asked, I volunteered. They stuck a bag on my head.
I have no idea where we are,

but we're doing everything we can to get you released. And she said, Would you like to write a letter home?

Yeah.

So I wrote a letter home. Always, again, trying to be that lighthearted, sarcastic guy, you know, saying, you know, I've been eating something, but unfortunately,

no pizza or something like that. And that set off a bit of a firestorm in the world.
I got pizzas from all over the world when I finally got released.

And

what, seriously, though, what

did you write?

Well, I did. I wrote,

I'm okay.

These are my injuries. You know, I told him I had fractured femur.
I thought I had a broken back. I was shot, probably broken bones in my face.
You know,

I've been eating okay,

you know, not sure what happened to everyone else, you know, that kind of stuff.

And

I spelled femur wrong.

I think I spelled it F-E-M-E-R.

I didn't go to med school.

Surprisingly, I I knew it was a femur.

That set off a bit of a, what is he trying to say, you know.

But I wasn't trying to say anything. I was just trying to explain what my injuries were.

And then I said, hey, can I write another letter? And they said, sure.

Who you want to write it to? I said, I want to write it to the guys at the compound.

So basically, did the same thing. I said, you know, these are my injuries.
Don't know where everyone else is.

And I signed it NSDQ. NSDQ

and

I was trying to tell them something and unfortunately the Red Cross with their commitment to neutrality thought it was a code so they scratched it out but you could still read it and it's our unit motto night stalkers don't quit and

basically

I'm trying to tell them my my state of mind, right? It's like, I'm still in it. You know, you guys come.

I'll do what I i can to try to help you with the rescue don't worry about that uh but there's not much else value i can add you know i didn't know where i was i didn't know if anyone else had survived i just i didn't know anything

they were dropping hints that no one else had survived but they didn't really come right out and say it

and uh

so that letter made it to the compound they knew it was NSDQ at the bottom. I'm told they put it on butcher paper, blew it up and posted it in the jock as

a way to motivate some pretty demoralized folks after the losses that we took in that battle. And,

you know, at least now they know, hey, at least he's got somewhat of a sense about him and we need to continue to try to figure out where he is.

Until recently, I never discussed this, but somebody put it in Stars and Stripes, so it's in the public domain.

They were broadcasting songs

from an aircraft because they found out I had the radio.

And the brilliant thing was they were broadcasting a different song in different parts of the city. So

if it comes back, hey, I heard ACDC, Hell's Bells. No shit.
Brilliant, right?

And I would have thought we wanted to protect that, but again, it was in Sergeant Stripes. That's pretty slick.
Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, there was all kinds of brilliant shit that came out of this, just all kinds.

Now, I didn't know that's what they're doing, but hopefully I will stumble into making some mention of the music that I'm hearing. And I did hear.

And then they started requesting songs for me when they found out I had the radio. And

the one I remember is a song called Seminole Wind that I think had come out

that summer.

And Donovan

was was Indian. And he would sing that song all the time because he was proud of his Indian heritage.
And they dedicated to me from him.

So I'm thinking, all right, Cliff and Donovan are okay.

Anyway, this goes on.

As soon as the Red Cross Suzanne leaves, they follow it up with two reporters from The Guardian, which is a paper I think out of Paris.

And

reporters. Man, I am freaking vulnerable at this point.
I just wrote a letter to home

and

I let my guard down a little bit. Were they smart enough to come up with that strategy? I don't know.

But I thought about, okay,

if I tell them what happened from the moment the RPG hits the aircraft, nothing wrong with that. That's intelligence that will help maybe solve some part of this puzzle for our guys.

So I said, all right, I'll tell you what happened from the moment the RPG hit the aircraft. So I go through it all.
And then at the end,

they said,

you know, I've been talking for a while and they said,

what do you think? What do you think is going on here? And I said, the only thing I said in captivity that I would take back if I could, and it isn't that big a deal.

You don't have to be a freaking rocket scientist. But I felt

if i screwed something up this was it i said something's gone wrong here yeah something had freaking gone wrong it was it was a train wreck but i i felt my standard was that shouldn't have been said and that's the quote they ran with i mean that was the money shot you know which

again is it that valuable no i mean there were already plenty of people saying hey this thing is way out of control and you know the movement toward we're pulling everybody out had started with the bodies being dragged i mean that that was really probably the shock that that for almost forced it shouldn't have forced but it but in a political person's mind

that's the rationale for saying we're coming out

we didn't want to come out i can tell you i didn't want to come out nobody else wanted to come out everybody else wanted to finish the job But

politically,

that I think is what caused it. That's my theory.

Not right. I'm not advocating that.
I'm just saying that's what caused it.

So anyway, now there's been all this activity again because you get the reporters, you got Suzanne, and then they think, okay, his location is probably going to be compromised. Let's move him again.

So stick me in another car, take me to another location. Never saw the mattress again.

I did keep the pajamas.

And now I'm in the final location. And I remember remember I'm laying next to a window.
It's just an opening.

There's no glass. But I started thinking, am I going to survive long term just laying here? I mean, no, I'm not.
I mean, I got to eat. I got to drink.

And I got to do something to keep my physical condition up. So I started doing pull-ups on the freaking windowsill just to get my heart rate up.
You know, thinking, again, that's all very positive.

That's showing you're optimistic you're going to live. You just got to figure out how do I help my condition?

What can I do? I came up with another idea, which was I asked them to wash my brown t-shirt, thinking,

let's, you know, if they wash it, they're going to have to hang it on the line to dry.

And maybe, again, this is a stretch, right? But I got pretty limited freaking resources here. And if they hang it on the line to dry, maybe when the helicopter flies over, they see a brown t-shirt.

You know, it's a stretch, right? But

they don't know where I am. That's the issue, right? If they know where I am, boom, they're launching an assault, no doubt.
And that's what they were prepping for.

And if you're going to get rescued, who the hell would you rather have come rescue than that? You know, they're already in country. They're there.
You were fighting with them.

Now, you know, C Squadron was augmented with A Squadron by that time, but it's still, you know, the guys, right?

That's who you want doing this mission. So anyway,

there was and you know again it was sensitive at the time now it's not sensitive because the technology is pretty commonplace but they were gonna try to give a deed a cane with a beacon in it somebody was gonna try to

ID his location so it wasn't for me it was for a deed

that was another thing that was going on that they were still trying to make happen and the the gift never got to him you know I doubt he would have thought through that and not used it.

So maybe they could have found him that way. So there's all kinds of shit that was going on to try to, again, keep this mission moving forward and accomplish what we were actually after.

And again, I'm listening to the radio. I'm hearing stuff.
And this guy's named Robert Oakley's name comes over

the broadcast, former ambassador.

Clinton now has sent Robert Oakley over to straighten things out.

If we had a thousand Robert Oakleys in this world, we'd have a thousand less problems. The guy was,

I mean, they trusted him. They called him a shoot straighter because they didn't speak very good English.
Obviously, they meant straight shooter.

But as soon as his name came across the wire, the whole mindset changed. Now, other things changed.
Again, A Squadron comes in. Carrier Battle Group comes back.
AC-130 is back.

Tanks are on the ground. All the shit we asked for now suddenly materializes because we have a fire that was preventable that now we have to put out politically,

which proves the shit was all available. You know, it wasn't a matter of that.
Obviously. Yeah, it wasn't available.

And I still remember when the first two jets flew over where I was being held, again, the Somalis are like,

you know, they mean business. And then

I had worked with AC-130s. I knew what a 105 round sounded like in flight.
And I can hear it. And it's, you know, whistling as it's coming down.

And boom, the 105 round blows up in a vacant lot in the city. And the freaking Somalis come in, and they're pointing at the sky.
They're all agitated. AC, AC, bad.

And I'm like, yeah, motherfucker, AC is bad. Bad for you.
And, you know, this is why my point is it would have made a difference. Could they have done danger close engagements across the street? No.

But outer perimeter, hell yeah. They could have smoked the interception, even just the presence, yes, even just the hundred percent.

But that was the whole point: just to get the presence, and they didn't have to light a fucking round off 100%.

So, I'm right, and the guys who don't agree with me are wrong. And apparently, you agree with me, so I appreciate that.

The guys on the ground had it right, the fucking assholes in DC didn't. Yeah, but I've heard this story

about a million fucking times.

so I'd love to slap those motherfuckers around

well it'll eventually motivate me to run for office but that didn't end well I guess it did end perfectly for me but not for the country I think that was a blessing

but anyway

went to Oakley and I he's since passed but I met with him a couple of times and so he's told me this personally he said look I met with him and I said you people have two choices you got serious damage control to do with what you did to the remains of the American soldiers.

Now,

you could

make that a little better by releasing Durant

or not.

And if you don't, eventually we're going to figure out where he is. And if you haven't paid attention, the carrier battle group's back.
The tanks are here. AC-130 is back.

We've plussed up the force to, I don't know, I don't know how many, 10,000 maybe?

And we're going to wipe out your Klan,

your call, within 48 hours. They let me go.
He said he didn't make a deal.

All I can tell you is what the man told me. I didn't want them to make a deal.
I honestly did not.

I wanted to live,

but I didn't want us to throw away everything we had accomplished to liberate me. And I really don't think that deal was made.
If it was, I'm not privy to it.

Again, I just think it was politically.

Once I was released, the administration didn't have the guts for a tough fight, and they said, we're out.

And I know every member of Tass Force Ranger still on the ground that was able to fight was pissed off because they wanted to finish it. And you know, the thing about it is, it's tough.

If you think about me personally,

I'm three and one, right? Prime Chance was a success.

Just cause was a success. Desert Storm was a success.
But what everybody ties me to is Somalia. And

I don't see me as 3-1. I'm 4-0.
We kicked the shit out of those guys. All right.

We would have stayed. We would have finished the job.
And we would have accomplished the mission had we been allowed to.

If the standard is you can't take losses, then don't send us downrange because we are going to take losses. I mean, this is not an easy task.

These people fight back, and we are going to lose people.

And I'm not saying it's okay to have 18, and if you count Matt, 19 casualties.

But if you just compare the numbers,

500, 700 to 18, that's not a loss. I mean, we captured the two guys we were after.
They were turned over to the UN. We took fucking losses.
I mean,

more than we wanted to.

And I know it's tough tough on the families, and I know it's tough on everybody in the unit that was friends with these people, but we didn't lose that fight. We kicked the shit out of those guys.

Our little birds alone, well, miniguns too, because they got the same guns, fired 175,000 rounds of ammunition.

That's how much shooting went on that night.

Now,

again, I wasn't there counting the ammo. That's what I'm told.
So if that's not right,

I need some slack there because that's what I was told. 175,000 rounds.
All right. One guy who I think is going to get inducted in the Aviation Hall of Fame this go-around, little bird guy,

awesome warrior.

He had blood on his windshield. Shit.

I mean, that's how close in they were providing fire support. for the guys fighting all night long.

And anybody you talk to that was on the ground at the target is going to say those little birds were just there all night you know providing fire support there was no other fire support i mean again no ac 130s no artillery no mortar positions nothing i mean it's whatever they had on their backs and the little birds that's it

and anyway

it's it's very very frustrating that it's viewed as

I hate to even use the F word, a failure.

I don't think it was a failure. I feel like a lot of people feel like it was, but it wasn't.

We got it done, but we took some heavy freaking shit because we weren't resourced. If we had been resourced, I mean, I gave you Matt as the example.

There's other examples of other people that probably would not have lost their lives if we had the tanks and we had the carrier and we had the...

AC-130 and the counter-battery fire and all that thing that we talked about. So it's very, very, very, very disturbing

that, you know, we go into harm's way and our hands are tied. We're set up for failure, whatever you want.
Now, in the end, General Garrison takes responsibility.

He handwrites a letter to Clinton saying,

it's on me.

I mean, I appreciate that he did that.

I don't know what else he could do. I mean, can you say, hey, you don't give me the shit I want.
We're not launching, maybe. I don't know.
But again, I think we all felt comfortable enough.

Nobody thought what happened on October 3rd would ever happen. Nobody thought that, based on our track record up to that point.

And

it is what it is. I'm truly sorry for the families that the hole will never be filled.
And you can't fill it. I mean, there's nothing you can do

other than remember them.

You know.

I like the philosophy, and I'm sure you've heard it, is a soldier dies two deaths, one when he stops breathing, and the second time the last name is ever said.

And we got to make sure that second time never happens. You know, we talk a lot about dealing with loss on the show, you know, through

stories like this. And I think the general consensus is,

you know,

you have to live how they would want you to live. And they would not want you to live miserable, depressed, feeling sorry for yourself, drowning yourself in a fucking bottle or in a bottle of pills.

And

they'd want you to live. Hell yeah.
You know, and

Stephanie Schugart's letter to me says it better than anyone ever could. And, you know, I can't quote it, but it's in my book.
And if you read it and you don't get choked up,

you're made of something different because it's pretty freaking heartfelt. And,

you know, and that's what I've tried to do. You know,

My wife's a gold star wife. Lisa is.

Her husband.

I told her that

I do pretty well until I get to this part.

Because it's her.

She was pregnant and her husband was in the unit. I didn't really know him.
We We had met.

I didn't really know him.

And he was flying on a Chinook, MH47.

He was in the jump seat because the guy in the front was doing an assessment for the unit.

And there was a material failure. We call it in the aviation world.

Water intrusion in the Chinook caused the aircraft to completely go out of control. And they were in the clouds, I think, and it spun out of control, and there was no surviving.

I mean, it was a hole in the ground.

And

she,

you know, she gets woken up the next day.

Your husband's not coming back.

And now she's got a baby to have, and he already had two.

And she's on her own. And,

you know, she's helped me a lot because I always have a hard time figuring out, like, what do you say? You know, and she said,

she said, it doesn't matter what you say.

Because they're not going to remember it anyway. She says, I can't remember a single thing anyone said to me after Pierre died,

but I knew they were there.

Fuck, ma'am.

And that,

every time I think about it, she's an amazing woman. You know, I told you earlier, she's also a helicopter pilot.
Outranks me.

Airborne qualified. But you'd never know.
And she's a great mom and a great wife.

And I'm lucky to have her.

I'm happy for you, Mike.

You okay? Yeah. It's just thinking about that moment, you know, when you love someone

and you think about

a situation when they were in unfathomable pain or sorrow. That hurts me worse than my own experience by far.
And I don't know.

I can't help it. It's the one thing that still really gets to me.

And that daughter who she was pregnant with just visited us in Alabama, expecting her third. They already have two

and just expecting her third. She's a great mom.
Kids are fantastic.

So you carry on. Just like you said, you know,

you carry on. What else would they want you to do? You know, they want you to carry on and remember them.

One of the most profound things that was sent to me, I couldn't possibly read all the letters, but I read a bunch of them. And it was a cancer survivor

who, during treatment, was in a group.

And in the end, she was the only survivor. And everybody talked to her about survivor guilt and survivor guilt.
And

I don't remember if she said she had it or didn't have it, but

she said,

look back, but don't stare.

Meaning,

you know, think about them.

When I think about them, I think about the positive. I mean, I think about

me and Donovan, you know, standing there together getting our air medals from just cause. And I have a picture of it.

He probably made some kind of stupid ass joke, and we're both smirking when the commander is putting the air medal on us. You know, that's the shit I remember.
Just all the, we had such good times.

We were such a good bunch of guys. I mean, we really were.
We loved what we were doing. We loved the mission.
And we would have been in no other place or time than where we were.

And I just feel fortunate to have done what I did.

I didn't mention the Bible. Holy cow.
So this is the Bible I got from Suzanne.

And it came to me in the box of stuff she said she had for me. Came later.
Some weird stuff in there. There was this,

and then a couple of paperbacks, which I never read. I did read this.

I don't even remember. A dog bowl.
It was very strange.

I don't know what they thought I was going to do with with the dog bowl. At least I thought it was a dog bowl.
But I read it, but I also kept a journal in here. The Somalis didn't know I was doing it.

They thought I was reading the Bible.

But I felt like I needed to capture everything that happened again from the moment the RPG hit the aircraft all the way through so that I would have a completely accurate account of every event. Wow.

And they,

I don't know if you want to take a look at it there, but whoops. They

let me leave with it. I had it in my hand.
And, you know, again, that goes back to

I was reverent when they were praying and they respected

my

reading the Bible and, again, used it as another tool, but it was valuable in the debrief for sure. Because I was able to go event by event right through the whole thing.

And what we're trying to do, obviously, is we're trying to figure out, okay, if this happens to somebody else, you know,

what might we learn from your experience? What do the doors look like? All that stuff, you know?

And

again,

positive sign that

problem solving, thinking about the future and

how to, you know, learn from this, leverage what I know.

Wow.

You wrote all this in there. Yeah, and no one else can read it.
I'm the only one. It's made up.
I made up symbols and abbreviations and stuff that only I can decipher.

So if they did discover that I was writing it, they wouldn't know what the heck it said.

And then the last thing I brought,

truth stranger than fiction,

is

I get a call from a guy who says that there's a Somali that wants to meet with me.

This is after I'm back and partially recovered.

And I'm like, hmm,

not sure I'm really up for that.

So I went and talked to our intel officer, still in the unit. I stayed in the unit eight more years.

And

I

asked him, I said, what do you think I ought to do? And he said,

your call. If you want to meet with him, go ahead.
Just, you know, you know what's classified, what's not. I'm like, man, that seems kind of loose, but okay.

So I told him I'd meet him in Nashville, actually. And,

you know, again, I'm not trained on this stuff, but

seems pretty logical I got there early got sort of where I could see what was going on

and I spotted the guy as soon as he came in I mean somales have just a

very unique look to them

and you know I knew it was him and you know making sure did did he come with three guys that you know split up and went you know a couple went somewhere else no he came by himself I don't see anything else going on here.

Let him sit for a few minutes. He's watching his watch.
I said, all right, I'll go down. So I walk up and he says, you know, with as cordial as he can be, he gives me a freaking t-shirt that has a

Somali hand and a Caucasian hand shaking hands. And it's got like

U.S. Somali National Alliance, like we've made peace with each other.
And he wants me to be an advocate for forgiving the Somalis.

Essentially, I'm summarizing here. And I'm like, no freaking way.
I mean,

you got the wrong guy.

There's wounds here that are not going to heal for a long time. Not mine, but you know, we lost people in a bad way.

And I am not going to get up front publicly and say, you know, we ought to forgive these guys. No way.

And

then he gave me some letters. So I brought the letters.
And one of them is from Adid himself.

Are you serious? Yeah.

With the official seal.

And then one is from Farimbi, the head guard.

And

there's a translation

in English. Farimbi's was in.
I don't know if it's Arabic. I don't know what it is.
Do you mind if I read this? No.

This is from Adid.

dear Major Dear Major Michael Durant,

8 November 1993.

I am sending you and your family my best greetings in that of the Somali people.

I and the Somali people who saved your life in the course of the unpleasant event on October 3rd, 1993 are hoping you a fast recovery and a good health.

This letter is to be delivered to you by our special envoy to the U.S., Mr. Ohamed Iman, and I hope

that you will one day visit Somalia, but in a different and happier circumstances, and that you will develop a sense of friendship with the Somali people.

I am confident that you will explain to the American people your real experience during your stay in Somalia by telling them the truth about the events in Somalia. Yours truly, Mohammed Farah Adid.

Wow.

I mean,

for saving my life, thank you very much. That's sarcasm if people are not picking up on that.

Wow. Yeah.

Fuck.

So

I didn't respond. And I told them no.
Now, I did take the opportunity to say,

I don't remember if it was Stephanie Stephanie or Carmen, which are Randy and Gary's wives. One of them, I think it was Stephanie, had asked if there's any way we could find Randy's wedding ring.

And,

you know, the odds are pretty slim. But I said, you know, if you want to try to

heal some wounds,

if you can find the wedding ring, one of the guys that was killed at Crash Site 2, I'll get it to his wife. But, you know, I'm not going to commit to doing anything.

Just, you know, it's your call if you want to make a gesture. And, you know, I'm sure they never found it.
And they never,

they certainly never reached out. Now, they did have my dog tags.
I know that. Adid's son had my dog tags, actually, because I did have those on.

And he was kind of proud of that, I guess. I'm told from people who met with him.
And then Adid gets killed. sometime later in some sort of skirmish.
So, you know, he got what he deserved.

Took a little bit longer than we would like to have seen, but he got killed. And then, you know, as I alluded to earlier, we were given the withdrawal order and everybody left.

And we turned over all the people we'd captured, all 27 of them, or 29, I don't remember exactly. And now, you know, you basically just

kicked us all in the nuts. You know, I mean,

how were you released?

Oh, well, Robert Oakley, and we'll have to read that. I'll call it a threat.
I mean, it was a threat.

Within 48 hours, they agreed to let me go. You said that, but how? Who came to get you? So they brought a Nigerian prisoner in, which I don't even think we knew they had.
He was really happy.

I don't know how long he'd been in their custody, but he was being released with me.

A Red Cross doctor comes in, and again, we're trained, you know, keep your guard up. Don't.
Don't believe everything you're trying to make you believe. So I'm like, is this guy real? Is he not?

morphine shot?

Okay, he's probably real.

You know, that feels really good.

Your legitimacy just went through for me. And then

this entourage,

it almost looked like the three wise men. I mean, they're all dressed in formal, traditional wear, drinking tea, all come in the room.

like to celebrate this momentous occasion that I'm being released. And I'm like, this is too weird, you know? And then they put me on a litter

and they're trying to take me down the hallway. They're trying to turn corners.
They can't turn a corner. They got to angle the thing.
I'm sliding off. They finally get me in the street.

I'm covered in this sheet because what shows up on the news is it looks like blood, but it's just a, it's just a sheet that has got a lot of red in it.

And they load me in the back of a van. And there's media in the street.
So they had told them, you know, where I was at that point and that I was being released

they stick me in the back of this van well the doors won't close because the litter is too long so two guys Farimbi's one of them is sitting on either side holding the door manually okay

with my litter sticking part way out well we get to a traffic intersection and there's traffic backed up and there's a truck next to us. I can see through the windows.

It's got like 25 somalis on the back and they're all looking down and they see me. And I think the concern is, oh shit, you know, these, these are potentially a threat.
We got to get out of here.

Jam on the gas. I go sliding halfway out the back before these two guys get a good grip on it.
I mean, it's like Keystone cops, it really was. And they finally get to the UN compound.

Farimbi goes through security at the UN compound. One of the guys, I don't know if he was on our list of 50, but he was pretty high up, has got credentials to get in.

I'm stunned, and then all hell breaks loose because they realize it's me.

And the next person I see from Task Force Ranger is actually the JAG, the attorney, who happened to be over at the UN compound for some reason and finds out that I just came through the gate, comes on over there.

I recognize him, and I'm like, okay, this is absolutely real for now. And in the mayhem, Farimbi disappears.
I don't know where he went. I don't know how long he stayed inside the wire, but he's gone.

And anyway, they take me over.

They put me under. I start having surgeries after surgery after surgery.

And then our company commander comes over with the guys, and I'm half unconscious, and I'm looking around, and I'm like.

Where the hell is Cliffin Donovan?

And Herb Rodriguez is our company commander, big heart, big guy, big heart, just breaks down. I mean, he's like, we lost him.
And I'm like, Jesus, you know,

there've been enough loss, you know, and now there's just two more close friends that are also gone. I was like, get me the hell out of here.
You know, this is just too much.

And then, and then right after that, I get a call from Clinton. And I'm like, you know, what the hell are you going to say, right? I'm, I don't know what to say.

Caught me off guard. I just have said, Yeah, I'm proud to be an American, you know, click.

And what did he say? I honestly don't remember. I think it was something, you know, like a politician would say, We're so proud, you know, to welcome you home and you know, hope you'll come visit me.

Well, I did get an invitation, can't remember who it came through to go to the White House. And let me tell you, and rightfully so, there's a lot of anger levied toward him and Aspen, both of them.

They're both responsible.

You know, I know

it was either Jamie Smith's father,

Jamie Smith is the one who bled out

at the target. He was on my aircraft.
And I don't know if it's his father or Randy's father, but one of them just chewed Clinton's ass. I mean, you know, you're responsible.

The blood is on your hands. And I knew that.
And I felt the same way. And I'm like, there is no freaking way I'm going to the White House for a photo op.
So I totally blew it off. I didn't go.

Good for you. Yeah, no way.
And I did go to the Medal of Honor ceremony, but that, you know, that included all the families. And

I felt like I shouldn't. Both those guys got the Medal of Honor.
Yep. And were found with empty magazines.

And I didn't know this, but, and I believe this is true still.

First time that award has ever been earned i use the word earned

by two people for the same act

didn't know that there's a there's a medal of honor uh museum in chattanooga actually

and uh they're they're they have efforts underway to build an exhibit for randy and gary and i they've been in touch with me a couple of times and i just found out that it's moving forward And that's where I learned that, that they said that that was the first time that had ever happened.

Damn.

It's right across from the aquarium for people that are familiar with Chattanooga. I'll check it out.
Yeah, it's right there, literally across the path. Pay my respects.
Yeah, yeah.

Mike, let's take a quick break. All right.

A lot of dark stuff going on in the world right now, and it's to the point where I don't even believe my own eyes anymore because I cannot verify what people are saying about all the political violence, the division.

I partner with this production company called Ironclad and we're doing an eight-part audio series on psyops, on why foreign countries, governments, maybe even our own government would conduct a psyop on its own people.

And I just think that this series is going to be extremely important because it's going to open the eyes of people on why these things happen. You can head over to psyopshow.com, order it today.

I think you're going to get a lot out of this. Who's pulling the strings?

Who's pulling them?

All right, Mike. We're back from the break.

Thank you for...

Going through all that. I know that was really tough.
So I just want to say thank you for digging deep and revisiting that. Well, it's it's my wife part that I struggle with, but

she's the anyway, she's doing doing great now.

Good.

Good.

Let's move into,

you know, there was a documentary made recently, and my friend Tom Satterly was

I think he was pretty excited to do it because when he came here he had said that this would be the last time that he talks about October 3rd 1993 ever again and then Netflix came around and he asked he said hey I know I told you this please don't fucking hate me I'm like dude

that is you and

but I know it wasn't

It didn't turn out the way that he had liked. And it sounded like anybody on the American side, at least, was extremely fucking pissed off, had the wool pulled over their eyes.
And

sounds like it felt a lot like a betrayal. 100%.

And I understand how Tom feels. I mean,

a lot of times

I'm like, I can't talk about this again. You know, I mean, it's been a long time.

Talked about it a hundred and hundred and hundreds of times. But I personally feel an obligation, and I do it because some of this stuff we can't lose sight of.
It's too important. And

I'll just do it. You know, on the documentary,

yeah, I was very upset when I saw it. They started out by saying, we're going to interview 80 people.

And I'm like, well, I have a unique perspective on a part of this story.

I'll participate because no one else can tell the story.

And as it turns out, they may have considered talking to 80 people, but they didn't talk to 80 people. And I thought by talking to that many people, they'd have a better handle on the big picture.

Like Adid is the villain. We're there to help feed the freaking people.

They kill our people and drag our soldiers through the streets. Pretty clear who the bad guys are.
They twisted it around to make it almost seem like we're the villains, which I was shocked at because

I liked the producer. I felt he was being straight with me.
What was his name? I honestly don't remember. I'd have to look it up.

You know, and I don't know whether ultimately he's calling the shots. I really don't.
I don't know who was wanting to put this angle on it, but it's dead freaking wrong.

You know, I will tell people that Blackhawk Down is accurate enough. The Netflix surviving Blackhawk Down

sucks. I mean,

I was glad to hear Tom's version of it. Glad to hear the Rangers' version of it.
But that asshole Somali they they talked to.

Anyway,

the villain in this story is a deed. I mean, did they put in the fact that they brought Tom's best friends back in fucking trash bags at the gate? Did they put that in there?

Did they put in there that you were being beat in the face with a fucking arm

from another service member who we don't even know who it was?

Who the fuck are these people? Man, I wish you knew that producer's there. I'm tempted to go get my phone and look it up right now.
Yeah, I can can find it. Fucking piece of shit.

Whoever chose to take that tack is, I don't know, fucking anti-American. It's like these assholes.
Everyone in Hollywood is fucking. Well, you know, I guess everyone in Hollywood is anti-American.

I guess that's true. That's unfortunate.
All of them. They're all fucking pieces of shit.
All of them.

Well, they didn't even, and one of the specific comments was, you didn't even mention Randy Sugar and Gary Gordon. Medal of Honor, okay?

Not even mentioned.

I mean, I was, I was shocked. I was fucking excited about this.

I was excited for everybody involved. And then Tom told me, don't fucking watch it.
So I'm not going to watch it.

But,

man, like, what the, it's not.

You know, I tried to convince them to course correct by doing sort of a follow-on with, you know, some additional footage or something because, I mean the can's open at that point but by the time i see it it's in the public domain i can't they didn't give us an opportunity to to provide comments edit nothing i mean they took what we said and then packaged it the way they wanted

i'm sorry dude there's like shit that just really makes me fucking angry and like

hollywood politics and fucking with little kids is at the top of the list. Well, that's a perfect segue to the next thing we're going to cover.
Politics. All right.
Let's get into your run for Senate.

So I had been thinking. Thank God you didn't get elected, by the way.

I wake up every day saying that.

For the past 30 years, it's not like it happened every day, but people would ask me, well, you should run for office, right? Because they think you got some notoriety.

And, you know, you could stand up in front of an audience and talk that, you know, that automatically makes you a candidate for politics.

And I would always say, When I had my own company, which we're not going to get into, but I had my own company for 15 years. And I always said, I don't like the politics of business.

I can assure you, I would despise the politics of politics. And that's why I didn't want to do it.
And then it occurred to me: well, you know what?

I'm the perfect person for it. Because if you don't like politics and you aren't a politician, that's the kind of person we want to elect.

So I allowed myself to believe naively, quite frankly, that you could make a difference. That I could make a difference.

That

it was a fair fight, which it's not,

I can't say it's never a fair fight, but it certainly wasn't a fair fight in my situation. And

I have, my personal credibility was impacted, which probably bothers me more than anything else because I've worked really hard and I think been fairly successful in portraying a positive image for the unit, for the people we supported, for the military in general, for myself, for my family.

That matters to me. I want people to think,

you know, people like him are squared away. They're patriots.
They're, I'm not going to say necessarily fearless, but

super squared away, which I said earlier is something, you know, that I... I admire and I respect.

And what happened to me in the campaign, I think, tainted that to a certain extent.

But it's almost like as soon as you say you're going to run for office, people are suspicious of you because they're so conditioned to being lied to, to people don't turn out to do what they said they were going to do.

And I kind of

understand

how difficult it is

to

stay on that track

as you learn more.

I'm not trying to be sympathetic, but man, it's a freaking difficult thing to do. I just can't, I just, man, it's just so fucking bad out there.
Like we were talking at breakfast.

We have a mutual friend.

He's running for Senator.

People ask all the time to come on the show, and I fell into this shit in the last presidential election of

giving people a fucking platform.

I don't know if I can do it anymore. You know, I got friends that are running for office and I'm like, I can't, I, I can't,

I can't fucking trust you anymore because you're telling me this. And every fucking time I have a politician, whether it's fucking Trump or some fucking congressman, they all fucking lie.

They lie right to your face, just like we are sitting across from each other, and it doesn't even fucking bother them.

And so I tell them now, I said, yep, you get, you get your ass elected, spend a couple of fucking years in there.

And if you're actually about what the fuck you're talking about, then I'll give you a chance on your next fucking run.

But fuck no, man. I've seen so many people go in there, and they do, it's like, it's like they never had any values to ever, even to begin with.
Yeah, they're just fucking trash. Yeah,

well, you know, sorry.

My,

I was very naive about how it would work. I mean, you have to do an assessment, right? Do you really think you can win? I mean, if you don't think you can win, why would you ever do it?

I mean, I thought I had a really good shot. I mean,

people are against career politicians. That's who there's really three primary candidates.
One's a career politician. One

has been working in politics or her whole life.

And me, who combat veteran, special ops guy, you know, business owner, and this was a successful business. This wasn't, you know, I just did some consulting work.

I mean, we had 700 people working for me from zero. Holy shit.
Yeah. So

I understand how to lead. I understand

what impacts business. I understand how the government works.
I understand.

the implications of foreign policy. I lived it.
I was on the point of the spear. You know, I felt I'm a slam dunk better qualified than anybody else here.

And the polls revealed that. I was ahead by double digits.
Now, polls are not always right, but

we came in with a splash. We made an amazing campaign video.
I'm flying a Blackhawk, which we rented, and I'm, you know,

saying various things in the cockpit. And

there was an amazing narrative that was going on in the background. In fact, I know President Trump saw it because, I mean, they had that kind of splash.
It was like, wow, this is good.

You know, this is the kind of thing you want to start your campaign with. And, you know, we really

came out of nowhere. And all of a sudden, I'm out front.
And that didn't happen immediately, but I was as we're getting close to the, and this is the primary we're talking about.

And

I

spoke. I'm just going to use names because, you know what? They didn't hesitate to fuck me.
So, why would I not use the names? I don't know why you would protect any fucking political prostitutes.

You're right.

That's what they are. They are fucking prostitutes.

The U.S. Capitol is the biggest, most elite whorehouse on the fucking planet.
That's the truth. So, the dynamics here is

Mo Brooks,

who was in the House, ran for this office against me and Katie Britt, who ultimately won. Katie Britt was

richard shelby's chief of staff

i don't know who that is richard shelby yeah longtime senator from alabama one of the most powerful senators to have served in recent history i mean he was in the senate for decades and uh

aren't they all very look at mitch mcconnell well he's coming up next very influential i mean very influential

and

because of what happened between mo Brooks and President Trump,

President Trump was really pissed off at Mo Brooks, and he did not want him to win.

So I get introduced into the process

because nobody thinks Katie can beat Mo.

So

I'm

again more qualified, arguably, and better chance to win.

And

when the poll came out that showed

I was ahead, Katie was second, and Mo was third,

leader McConnell, Mitch McConnell, called me and said, hey, we just saw the polls. Just want you to know,

Moe's in third, we're out. Meaning, we just, the most important thing to us is that he does not win.

Yes, sir. Okay, got it.

Within two days, The super PAC

that put out the shit that was not true about me received either five or ten million dollars from a fund that I believe he controls or controlled. Who's he? McConnell.

So somebody twisted his arm. It had to be Shelby.
Had to be

because he

really wanted

Katie, his chief of staff, to win.

I met with a surrogate of Senator Shelby.

And

it was

in an office sitting across from each other, richest man in Alabama, actually.

And he was nervous as if he were on trial. And I'm looking at my consultant like,

what's up here? And

he's not saying anything. I mean, he's like, rubbing his palms and sweating.

And he starts talking about when he ran for office, how they exposed a video of him from when he was in college, and how it totally trashed his reputation.

And then he talked about just weird stuff. This sounds like, this sounds like, you know, when they send somebody and they, it's like they're your fucking parent?

Like, I'm just, I'm just looking out for your best interest. Like, I just wouldn't want anything bad to happen to you.

It's going to be how about you get the fuck out of my office before I fuckstart your head on this parking curb. Get the fuck out of here.
I should have had you with me.

So

again, I'm new to all this, right? So

I'm not quite sure how this is, why this is playing out the way it is. But then he gets to the point after probably 45 minutes of going all over the place with all kind of weird shit.

I mean, he point blank says, we want you to drop out of the race.

And we want you to run from Mo Brooks' seat that he's vacating instead. and we'll support you.

And I'm not quite sure what to do here because

I don't want to do that. I don't want to be in the House of Representatives.
I mean, it's fucked up enough to be in the Senate.

But if you've got to deal with, you know, 450 other morons, some of which are incredible that these people got elected,

who they are, what they represent, what they stand for,

I could not work with those people. There's no way.
And

look at how weak these people are.

Look at them in the fucking face and look at how weak these people. Those motherfuckers are installed because they are so weak.

They are easily manipulated. They don't even know what the fuck is going on.

Which is probably, again, another part of why I get steamrolled here. But this meeting is about basically the warning, right? That if you proceed, we are going to bring you down.

Again,

was

i was naive i was shocked i didn't know quite what to do

so we leave and i'm like does this kind of happen all the time

no

he said i've never seen that happen before and i said well

and then they said my advisors all said well it's your call and i'm thinking well i mean i don't know of anything that they could bring up that would bring me down, you know?

And they said, well, then

we should press on.

And we decided to press on. Well,

I was doing a presentation on Somalia at the war college at Carlisle Barracks, which is Army War College in Pennsylvania.

A friend of mine, who was in 06 at the time, invited me to come up and do it. If you watch the whole presentation, this is the irony of it all.

If you watch the whole presentation, at the beginning, he says

this is non-attribution. Now, for those who aren't familiar with that, what it means is nothing said there should ever be attributed to the person speaking it officially, ever.

They put the fucking briefing on the internet.

I didn't say anything in the briefing, I wouldn't say again.

But what, and I said it to you during this podcast: I said, disarm the population. That's what

our

UN task force was doing in Somalia. And I was just explaining that this is what happened leading up to the Pakistani massacre.

They took that sound bite out of that presentation and said, he is anti-Second Amendment. He wants to, and then they have the video of me, disarm the population.

I mean, how

incredibly dishonest is that?

And I mean, pretty much, that alone pretty much tanked me. And then my sister got on there, and that's a complicated story.

But I mean, she should be thanking me, not doing what she did.

I don't know if they paid her, I don't know what, but she got on there and said some shit that just was not true.

And

it was at that point, it was over. And I came in third.
And, you know, I met with President Trump, met him for like an hour, and

he never endorsed anyone,

but in his mind,

I was another John McCain

because we're both military pilots, we're both POWs,

and he will never forgive John McCain for his vote on Obamacare.

And I think... He's only interested in yes men.
Yeah. That is Donald Trump, a...
person that surrounds himself with yes men.

And that's why I think serving in what I thought was a noble capacity to represent the state of Alabama and the interest of the citizens of the state

is not really what I ever envisioned it to be. It's, I mean, to be the kind of senator that they want right now, you just vote party.
I mean, just vote

whatever the leader wants you to vote, you vote. I mean, there's very few exceptions to that.
And, you know, most of the time you probably should, but not all the time. And I don't know.

I dodged a bullet. Honestly, I would have hated every moment of my life somebody asked me at a at a it wasn't really a fundraiser i hated doing fundraising uh

they this woman asked me why do you want to be a senator i said i don't want to be a senator i'm willing to do it because i think we need people like me doing it and it shocked her it's like you don't want to be a senator why are you running

Because I think people like me need to do it. You know, maybe we can make a difference.
It probably would have been a lost cause. I would have hated my life.
I don't know. You know, we'll never know.

I'm sure as hell not trying again because it cost me a lot of money. I mean, I put a lot of personal money into that race.
I mean, a lot.

You have to. I mean, it's a big, it's, Alabama is a big state.
And, you know, media is the king, although social media is a kind of a cost-effective way to do it these days.

But now there's so much AI out there that you don't know what you're reading. Is this AI generated? Is this real? You know, it's really, really fucked up right now.

That's where podcasts come in, Mike. There you go.
That's why I'm here. Establishment doesn't own podcasting yet.

So, actually, I'm sure they own a great portion of it, but they don't own, I don't think they own any of the top people. And,

and, you know, then podcasting is what really influenced this last election. Unfortunately, we had shit candidates, but in my opinion.
But

one more thing to add.

So, this jackass, Parker Griffith, who's a former member of the house, I think, also a doctor,

he gets on the radio

and says that I

have PTSD.

Never met the man. Who is this? His name is Parker Griffith.

He was a former member of the House from Alabama.

And again, he's just one of the cronies that they're trying to apply to discredit me.

General Flynn, again, I don't know where you stand on him, but he was supportive of me. You know, he was, you know, Alabama is a very pro-Trump state.
And I like most of what he's doing.

And getting support from anybody associated with President Trump helps you as a candidate in Alabama. And, you know, he came out this lambasting, this Parker Griffith for,

he didn't imply it. He came out and said it, that if you served in combat, you are damaged goods.
That's basically what he said.

And he said, we can't elect somebody to the Senate that is damaged goods and has PTSD. This is a doctor who's never seen me before, never met me, saying this publicly to discredit me.

I mean, I was so pissed off. And what really disappointed me, honestly,

is the veteran community didn't stand up.

If every veteran in the state would have said, that is fucked up. That guy should not be doing that.
That is wrong.

This is a guy who served the country and is willing to go serve six years, six more years. We should support him.
They did. I don't know why.
Man,

if I would have known about that, that would have gone everywhere. So hopefully

we just didn't hear about it. Yeah.
You know, but.

That would have been all over that motherfucker. Yeah.
So,

and I, you know, I hate these people, Mike. I fucking hate them.
I mean, I felt like I had grounds for a lawsuit. I really did.
I mean, this is stone-cold

lies,

misrepresentation, whatever you want to call it. But,

you know, legal battles, they're terrible. You know, I don't like attorneys much more than I like politicians.
I have some friends that are attorneys. Forgive me, guys.
But

I just,

I can't stand it. I mean, it's all just technicalities and loopholes and, you know, this little bit of language over here.
And it's not, you know, nothing's about what's right and wrong.

It's, I don't know, just very, very frustrating. So I just let it go.
And I just consider myself fortunate to not have won.

I regret doing it because I feel like there are some people who really do think I'm anti-Second Amendment, which is ridiculous. And

I spent a lot of money. Those two things I would like to undo, but can never be undone.
I mean, I shouldn't say can never be undone.

Well, you just accepted a new SIG MCX SCAR, or not SCAR, spear here.

And I think it seemed pretty pro-Second Amendment to me. We clarified where the comment came from.
I mean, so

unreal. Man, I'm sorry.
It's just.

I thought it was a fair fight, and it was absolutely nothing. like a fair fight.
It is, I mean, you're just dealing with people that are like more than willing to sell their fucking soul for.

They don't even know what they're getting. Walking into there.

They don't even know what the fuck they're getting, but they are overwhelmingly

willing to sell their fucking soul to get into that club. It is fucking wild.
Yep.

But.

Well, let's talk about some good stuff. All right.
Let's talk. Let's talk about, you know, we were talking at breakfast about

a couple of different nonprofits that you're affiliated with.

And so I'd like you to go ahead and I know you're sitting on the board of one. Would you like to talk about that?

Yeah, I'm on the board of a few, actually, but the one I'm most active in that I think, you know, resonates the most with our community is the Special Ops Warrior Foundation.

It was founded.

at Desert One. Most people are familiar with that term, but if you're not, this was the first attempt to rescue the hostages in Tehran back in the 80s.
And

there was an accident.

There were eight American fatalities, and 17 children left without a father. And

good on them.

I mean, the guys that were associated with it, I don't know if it actually happened, you know, right then and there, but at some point, immediately after this incident, they all got together, the survivors of the mission, and said, let's pass the hat and help fund college education for these 17 kids that are left fatherless.

And it eventually evolved into the Bull Simons Scholarship Fund, I think it was called. Bull Simons, legendary SF, led the Santa Raid, you know, I mean, his accolades go on and on.

And

now has become the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, not Wounded Warrior.

A lot of people that aren't associated with the community confuse the two, but it's special operations warrior foundation and specialops.org is the website specialops.org correct will be in the description all right and here's the charter

which i don't know how you could find a more

noble cause than this is that the the children of every fallen special operator or people who were supporting special ops missions so let's say you got operators on the ground and they got a fixed wing air support and

the crew goes in. Those kids would be covered because they're on this mission.
Now it has to go through a process to validate that this was part of a special operations mission.

And children of Medal of Honor recipients and now severely wounded.

Because a lot of the severely wounded, I mean, yeah, they're going to get disability, but there's a lot of gaps still for some of them.

So

they get financial support as well. I don't think you've talked about what exactly their financial support is.

Yeah, so the support is to send the children of these people who qualify or these families who qualify

to school from cradle to career. Meaning, if you're a three-year-old and you have special needs and you need a tutor, that qualifies.
100% funded. All you got to do is send in the bills as long as

your fallen parent was within the special office community or support in support of it. And it goes all the way to graduate school, 100% funded, along with stipends, computers.
I mean, everything.

I mean, this is

a heavy lift. I mean, right now, I think we have 284 students in the program currently.
So they're in school at some level.

And since inception, there's over 2,000 kids that have gone through the program and been been paid for and uh you know it's a commitment to them so for the organization not only do we have the counselors and you know administrators and i mean we do things like bring kids in the headquarters in tampa bring them in and let them experience the college life to see you know is this really what i want to do we also pay for

not everybody needs to go to college i mean you know i've been advocating that for years it's not right for everyone So let's encourage and support the trades as well. And same thing.

I mean, if you want to go learn how to be a welder, you want to learn how to be an electrician, you want to whatever, all you got to do is submit the paperwork.

And if you're, if you're a qualified, supported member, it gets paid for. And

again, I don't know of a more

worthy organization than this. You know, something you said at breakfast, too, that

obviously really stuck with me is that,

man I fucking hate saying it but

suicides are covered too and

I've lost way more friends to suicide than I have a battle that is

that is

That's a real problem.

It is it is

a shock to me to see the percentage of kids in the program that are in the program as a result of a suicide.

We got to fix the problem. I mean, we got to figure it out because these are great people that have already proven

their ability to do things that go far beyond what the average person can do. And, you know, there's something there.
And we just need to get to the bottom of it.

How many kids have been put through school?

Over 2,000. 2,000.
Yeah.

And because it is a commitment, there's a big fundraising requirement to this. I mean, obviously, college gets more expensive every year.
I mean, they can

go to Harvard. They can go anywhere they want.
And

we do an

actuarial that looks at, you know, statistically, here's the number of students you can expect in the future and what college is going to cost. And we don't have enough.
funds yet to cover that.

It's a big number.

And, you know, that's what we're working toward is to make sure that if things play out the way statistically they look like they probably will, plus or minus, then we're, we're driving toward getting to that number.

And so a lot of what we do is fundraising. And there's a lot of very generous people who support the organization.
That's awesome. Yeah.
Well, we'll be making a donation. So.
Wow.

Well, we appreciate that very much.

I love what you guys are doing. And it's getting the word out.
You know, I mean, the more people that know about it, I think once you realize what

we do, and I use the word we loosely, I'm on the board. I'm not, you know, I don't work in it day in and day out, but I'm proud of my association with the organization.
And

it's just

God's work. I mean, it's just really, really significant in the lives of families and people that are otherwise, you know, hurting.
That's awesome, man. I love it.
Love that.

Special operations.

Special ops. specialops.org dot org specialops.org.
Mike, if you had three guests to recommend for this show, who would they be?

So, you know, I've thought about this before coming up, and

there's a lot of military guys. I mean, you know, there's a lot, and they deserve the platform.

But thinking about, you know, things that I've encountered here recently in my life that either inspire me or I think showcase something

that deserves also deserves a broader audience. My daughter, who you met, a couple of years ago bought me a book for Christmas called Outlive.

And it's by Dr. Peter Atla or Attia.
Are you familiar with it at all? I've interviewed him. No, I got to send it to you.
You already checked the blog. He's fucking awesome, man.
Peter Attia.

I'm one for one. Okay.

And I'm trying to do it actually.

I'm sure your podcast covers it, but it's basically, you know, you can add five, 10 years to your life if you focus on fitness, weight, high-intensity,

cardio, which is kind of the rotation I'm in now. I hope it'll work because I kind of enjoy being around.
But

good deal. All right.
Well, we think alike then. So he was a good one.

So the other two I have

is,

I don't know if you read about this guy.

I would just be interested in hearing him talk for two hours. His name is Killian Journay.
Do you know who he is? No. he's an extreme ultra uh mountain climber he just did

all the 14 000 foot mountains in the united continental united states in 31 days without a car okay

he went from mountain to mountain with his bike okay

his cumulative

I think it's 61 14,000 foot peaks.

I don't have the bike mileage right. It might be something ridiculous like, well, it's thousands of miles on the bike.

400,000 vertical feet. I mean, he basically just went non-stop for 31 days, climbing mountains, back down, riding his bike, get the next one, climb, back down.
I mean, I've done 14ers.

They're hard. I mean, after I'd done even an easy one, I need a couple days, you know? And this guy's like, bang, bang, bang.
Rainier is how he finished. And with Rainier,

because I did it with this same daughter a few years ago, if you do it with a climbing company, you're going to start at, I think, I think 5,000 feet is where they bring you by car.

Well, he didn't start at 5,000 feet. He rode his bike up to 5,000 feet.
Damn. And then he climbed the rest.
I mean, this guy's unreal. He's a machine.

I mean, you know, you and I have been around a lot of physical freaks. But this guy, I don't understand how he, I really don't.

And I don't know if he'd do it, but I'm just in awe of his accomplishment. I'll check him out.
We'll look him up. And then the third guy

is this guy, Brian Stern. And he started Gray Bull Rescue.
Have you ever heard of Gray Bull Rescue? I think I have. Yeah.
I know someone else said they've mentioned him.

What they're doing is pretty amazing.

And actually, it's an opportunity, I think, for folks who have missed being part of the kind of missions we were all part of to get back involved in this kind of stuff.

So they basically, it's a non-profit, but wherever there's a crisis, they go. I mean,

you know, whether it's the fires in California or the hurricane in Jamaica or Israel when everything happened there, getting Americans out.

I mean, it's pretty insane. And they do some trafficking stuff too.
They do. Anti-trafficking stuff.
Yeah.

so brian who's sort of the the engine behind it all uh i think he'd be a good guest i you know i

you might have to rein him in i don't know if that's gonna be on the podcast but because he's very he's very very high energy and like going a million miles an hour but what they're doing is i'm impressed and i'm on an advisory board there but i told them I don't do a lot.

I mean, I see all the traffic on Signal of all the stuff they're doing. It's like, geez, I cannot believe what you guys are doing.

And it's they're helping a lot of people. I mean, thousands of people.
It's a lot of people.

We'll do a deep dive into that too. And it started in Afghanistan, actually, during the pull-out.
No shit. Where they were getting people out.
They were one of the groups in there. Yep.
Yep.

That's pretty cool. Yeah.

All right. We already had my first, but

well, Mike,

this is where we

ended. And

man, once again, I just want to say it was an honor. And thank you.
Thank you.

I appreciate getting to tell the story of these amazing people to such an audience that otherwise may sort of skip the wave tops and but not really understand what what these people sacrificed and and what

what their

what their true capabilities were. I mean, it's just it's incredible.

If you could recreate it in other sectors, you'd be unstoppable.

And I'm just proud to have been part of it. Yeah.

You're a hell of a human, man.

I'm just so fortunate to still be alive and wake up every day thanking the Lord and thanking Randy and Gary for their sacrifice and focusing all the positive things that I have in my life.

You know, I think if more of us did that, we'd probably be a lot happier overall. We got a hell of a lot to be happy about, and we tend to focus on the negative, and I don't get it.

I am definitely guilty of that.

But thank you, Mike. All right, you're welcome.
God bless, brother. Thank you.

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