
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Shawn Ryan Show- 147 views
- 9 Dec 2024
Alan C. Mack is a retired U.S. Army Master Aviator and veteran of over 35 years of service. He spent 17 years with the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the "Night Stalkers," flying MH-47 Chinook helicopters on missions such as the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the rescue of Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell during Operation Red Wings. Mack's career included roles as a Flight Lead, Instructor, and Commander at West Point, amassing over 6,700 flight hours and earning accolades like the Distinguished Flying Cross and Legion of Merit.
In his book, Razor 03: A Night Stalker’s Wars, Mack shares gripping accounts of his combat experiences and personal challenges, including the toll of frequent deployments on his family. Now serving as a Deputy Commissioner of Emergency Services in New York, he continues to inspire audiences with stories of resilience and leadership.
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Alan C. Mack Links:
Website - https://alancmack.com
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Alan Mack, welcome to the show, man.
Thanks for having me.
It's, my pleasure. So first first helicopter pilot on the on the show from Night Stalker TF 160. Man, I've been wanting to get 1 of you guys for a long time, and then, we connected, what, about 2 years ago?
About a year and a half. And a
year and a half ago, and then and then, for whatever reason, the conversation kinda fell off. And but now you're here, and, man, I'm
I'm glad to be.
We've had a ton of requests for TF 160th, guys. So thank you for thank you for making the trip.
Glad to be here. That's all I can say.
But, yeah. So everybody starts off with an intro. So, man, you've been a part of, like, so much history, high profile missions in the g wad. I can't I just can't wait to get another perspective. We've interviewed a lot of guys that you've a lot of guys that have been on ops that you've been a part of, and and very apparent, we have a lot of mutual friends.
It's, like, I've blown up. Hey. You gotta get this guy on the show. But, I just I can't wait to get another perspective, and I wanna dig into your training and all all that stuff and get get the life of a night stalker documented. But quick rundown of your intro.
You've served more than 35 years, 17 of which were served in army special operations as a combat and instructor pilot, entrusted with the United States Military Academy flight detachment at West Point, New York, logged more than 6 1,700 flying hours, 32 100 with night vision goggles. Taking part in Operation Desert Steel Shield, Desert Storm, and was a major factor in the global war on terror, flew mh 40 sevens while assigned to 1 sixtieth SOAR, the army's only special operations aviation regiment. Your crew was 1 of the first into Afghanistan and the first into Mazar Sharif as part of America's response to the attacks on 911. Highly decorated, receiving the Legion of Merit, 2 distinguished flying crosses, 3 Bronze Star medals, 3 meritorious service medals, 10 air medals, 1 with valor combat action badge, and the army broken wing award. Now you serve your local government as deputy commissioner of emergency services for Orange County, New York.
You're the author of RAGER 3, a nightstalker's wars. And you have another book coming out, from my understanding, but we were spoke at breakfast. Do you have a title for that 1 yet?
The working title is Chinooks in the Dark, and I'm not sure what the subtitle is.
Nice. And you're a husband, a father, a stepdad, and a grandfather, and a man of faith.
And a pet parent. And a pet parent.
What kind of what kind of pet?
He's got a Jacoby, a Jack Russell Beagle mix.
Nice. Nice. But, quite the career, man. And then just going through the outline, wow. Just some of the stuff you've been a part of.
I'm just gonna read some of the stuff, man. But horse soldier infill, ODA 595, shot down during Operation Anaconda. You're on the rescue op for Marcus Littrell's, lone survivor, also known as, for military folks, Operation Red Wing, and tons more. But, man, just, we got a lot to talk about, man. So before we get too in the weeds, though, everybody gets a gift.
Maybe this is the only reason you're here, I don't know.
But, well, let's see.
I wouldn't blame it. I wouldn't blame you if it was. Ah, the Vigilance Elite Gummies. Vigilance Elite Gummies.
These are great. I I did trade you a book a year and a half ago for some of these, and I'm glad. That's why I came down here, was just for the gummies.
You did. They're still legal in all 50 states, and they're still made here in the USA. And then those are just some stickers for whatever. But
And, you know, like any good house guest, you know, I gotta bring a, you know, housewarming gift. I don't have gummies, but what I've got is a coin. And, it's, I had that bait when the book came out. The the front of that's an attitude indicator because I believe everything in life is about attitude. And, that's a positive attitude by the way there.
Man, thank you. That'll go great right there Cool. With, with all the coins. Thank you, man. I appreciate that.
And 1 last thing, so before we get into the interview, I have a Patreon account. They're our top supporters. They've been with us since the beginning. They're the reason I get to do this, and you get to be here. And, and, part of the thing that that, I promise them is they get to the opportunity to ask a guest a question.
And so this is from Steven Casey. And this they know about you. So Okay. This won't make sense to a lot of people until later on in the interview, but I thought it was a good question. How did you gain the perspective to serve your family while in service, and what helped you do that?
That's actually a tough question. Yeah. You know, family's always been a big part of my life. And as we get into the interview, you you'll find out that, you know, it wasn't always the priority. And, you know, I had to make some adjustments to that.
And, you know, part of what made us stronger, like, especially my relationship with my sons was spending time together and prioritizing that for sure. But sometimes the job took priority over even that. Yep. Yeah. Yep.
How did you find a way? What was your cue?
You know, really it was my wife. So she had her own problems, but she made sure that my sons and I had a good relationship. So whether it was and I remember when my kids were young, there was no Internet, you know, to speak of unless you were on AOL or CompuServe, so it wasn't like just pulling your phone out. So she would shove us out the door and say, you know, it's like you do to your kids, but she included me in it. It was, go spend time with your boys, and we would just go do whatever we felt like doing.
You know, whether it was taking the boat out or hiking or, you know, some kind of sports or something like that. So really putting that effort into my sons was was the key to everything.
You and your sons still pretty close?
Very close. Yeah.
That's good to hear, man. Yeah. That's good to hear. Well, you're ready to dig in?
I'm ready. Let's go.
Alright, man. So we're gonna do we're gonna do the typical military life story. And, so we'll go through childhood, get into your military career, get into this, transition stuff, and then that'll be it. Alright. But, so where did you grow up?
So I was born in New Hampshire, coastal New Hampshire. So I grew up in Portsmouth, which is right by the, the navy base there. There's a submarine base right in the end of the river. And, I'd like to consider myself sort of a a free range teenager at the time, you know, because once again there's no Internet, no cell phones. So, you know, my parents would open the door, I'd go out with my friends, we'd jump on our 10 speeds and ride.
I think we had a range of operations about 20 miles. And, you know, we'd go to the beach, we'd go to, you know, out in the woods, whatever trouble you can get into in coastal New England. I was not a bad kid by any means. Never got in trouble. You know, nothing, you know, nothing bad nothing bad.
But, yeah, we could, you know, toilet paper houses, that kind of thing, you know, at night. That was the extent of our, you know, life of crime, if you will.
Close with your parents?
Yeah. Yeah. My dad passed away in 06. He went to sleep, sat down in his recliner, went to sleep, didn't wake up the next day. And, I kind of think if you're not gonna go out in a ball of flame, you know, like instantly, then and you're sleeping in your favorite chair, you know, not a bad way to go.
Yeah. Yeah. My mother's still, up in New Hampshire. She's a a local artist. You know, she paints, does some wonderful work.
My brother's up there, and, that's kind of the extent of my family, really. My grandparents are all gone.
Right on. But, I mean, what kind of stuff were you into as a kid?
Well, as, really high school is the first I could think of something I could talk about, and it's really cross country and track were my big things. Right? So I did, you know, cross country in the fall, winter track, which, you know, in New England, you know, you're doing indoors. Right? We did that at the University of New Hampshire, and then in the spring, you had spring track.
And, I was generally a miler. Wasn't very fast. I ran about 445, 440, for a mile, and
You don't think 445 is a fast mile?
Well, there were guys that were way faster than me, so that's, pretty good. And I tried my hand at the hurdles, but I really didn't have the speed, you know, in the short term, so I could do like the 3:30 intermediates, you know, which is a long grueling race, you know. But, at the very end when I was a senior, I trained for the decathlete, decathlon. And, I learned to pole vault for the discus, you know, stuff like that. And I actually jumped, I don't know, like 12 feet, something like that, in my my training jumps, and the coach is looking at me like, I think we missed you in some events.
You know, I was like, I don't know. But it was a lot of fun. You know, life revolved around my friends, you know, in track, and,
Good childhood, it sounds like.
Yeah. Yeah. It was good.
What got you interested in flying?
So believe it or not, the Vietnam war was going on. Right? And so I must have been 6, 7 years old or so, and it was on the evening news. Right? You didn't have the 24 hour news cycle.
You had, you know, the 5 o'clock news, 10 o'clock news, or whatever it was, in any time zone. And they always had Huey's zipping across, you know, the screen. And I was like, I wanna do that. Right? To remember the TV Guide when you were a kid?
Oh, yeah. You had the the little paper magazine Yep. You know, the what's on TV? And in it was an insert for the army recruiting. Right?
So I filled it out, and I sent it in, you know, I want to be a pilot, and I must have been, I don't know, 10, maybe 11. And the recruiter sends me a handwritten letter back, a bag full of stickers, and you know stuff like that. He's like hey look I see by your birthday, you're not quite old enough to talk to me, but, you know keep that thought alive, and, you know call me back when you're 18. Fast forward a number of years. I'm in high school.
I'd forgotten about the army thing. My senior year I'm planning on following on to college, in New Hampshire, and I've got a guy, he's gonna be a roommate, the whole thing, and I start thinking, you know, this is in the fall of 1980, and I'm thinking, if I go to school, I'm just gonna party, you know. I'm not gonna study. You know, I wasn't a bad student, but I wasn't a good student. You know what I mean?
I just never did my homework kind of thing. I knew I should, but I didn't, and I knew the college would be the same thing. So I'm worried about what I'm gonna do, and another friend had just been to the army recruiter, And he he comes in, oh, is it the army can do all this stuff, you can go to Germany, you know, which was West Germany at the time, and, I was like, you know, I always wanted to fly helicopters, and I saw a commercial. Remember those BLU can be commercials?
Oh, yeah.
Well, there's like 2, even 3 of them helicopters are involved in, and 1 of them is like a w 1, you know, the the warrant officer ranks are 1 through 5 now, and, he's in a cobra helicopter zipping around, you know, and they finish up, and the senior guys are like not bad for a rookie, you know, and I'm like that's what I want to do. So I go into the army recruiter that my friend had been to, I'm like I want to fly helicopters, and he's like, woah hold on now, and I saw it on TV, you can go from high school to flight school, and he's like, pump the brakes turbo, It doesn't really work like that. And he's like, you know, you gotta have something going for you for that to happen, you know, and I was like, well, like what? And he said, tell you what, why don't you join the army in aviation like an aircraft mechanic, you know, do 2, 3 years, learn the the culture, the lingo, learn about the aircraft, you know, the all that kind of stuff, and then put it for flight school and it's much easier to get in.
Now that statement is is twofold. 1, the recruiter doesn't get credit for officer candidates at all. Right? So even if he got me, he gets no credit for it. May or may not have been able to do it, who knows?
But he did put me into army aviation as a, aircraft mechanic, worked on Huey's, Cobras, 50 eights, and, turns out it was good advice, you know, and I did 9 years. I I reached the rank of staff sergeant E6 in the army. I was in Germany, West Germany at the time, and, I decided I was gonna get out of the army, but I really wanted to fly. So I Really? Really pack it.
Yep. So I had 2 kids, little kids, and my wife was a, Linda at the time was a, a medical assistant, and I thought, you know, they're just going to send me back to Fort Bliss, El Paso, which I didn't want to do, and so I said, you know what? Why don't we get out, but I'll put in for flight school first. If I get picked up, we stay. If not, we get out.
And so I got picked up, which was, was amazing, you know. So I did almost 4 years in in West Germany, and, off to Fort Rucker, Alabama. But that's how I I got interested really was the be all you can be commercials and, the the evening news.
What took you so long to I mean, if you joined to fly Mhmm. Why did it take you 9 years to put your package in?
Because, so my first assignment was to South Korea, which is a whole another story, we might get into later because that was a military junta ran it then, it wasn't a democracy. And I went back many years later, it was a big improvement. But, so a year on a company there, I go to Fort Bliss, Texas where I meet my future b wife, Linda, Do 3, 3 and a half years there, and then, go to Germany on a 3 year accompanied assignment. So we get there, have our 2 sons, and now, you know, the timing is, you know, that. And then flight school's almost a year long, so I count that in the 9 years.
And, that's why.
Right on. Right on. Did you know what you wanted to fly when you put the package in?
I wanted to fly Hueys. Huey's. Because it what I wanted to do was assault. Right? Think of, you know, you know, back then it was the air cav, you know, doing the big big, you know, multi ship assaults, and so that's what I wanted to do.
And the Blackhawk was just coming out. As a matter of fact, in my class, we had like, 72 students, I think, to start with, and, 20, like 30 of us got Hueys. 10 of us got Cobras, and then most of the others got 15. There were only 6 Blackhawks slots. So that's how new the Blackhawks were, you know, showing my age.
But, yeah. So I I wanted to fly Huey's.
So what did you Alright. So so what did you get to fly?
Well, I I learned in 1 Huey's. By the end of class So you know what's happening to the airlines right now where the pilots are aging out? Right? They're hitting age 65 and they can't by law fly. Well in the army, Chinook pilots, a Chinook transition is considered a reward.
Right? So remember the Vietnam war had been going on, guys were flying Huey's, doing the assault work. If you survived it and got back, and then they wanted to send you back, the reward was you could transition to a Chinook. Right? So now you're not necessarily doing assault work, you're still flying around Vietnam, you know, carrying artillery and supplies and all that kind of stuff, but you're not really doing assault work.
So it's cons and it's an advanced aircraft. So it's considered a reward. So if you think of like that Vietnam time frame, these guys on their second tour So about the time I'm in flight school, these guys are all reaching 60, 65 years old, and they're all retiring in droves. Right? So it's very senior heavy rank.
Mhmm. And, the army realized they had to generate from the bottom up, so they're gonna take w ones. Right? And once again, you go w o 1, c w 2, c w 3, c w 4, and now c w 5, which is a relatively new rank. But at the time it was CW 4, it was the senior senior guys.
So how are you gonna replace those guys? The army's plan was to take w ones out of flight school and inject them in while you still had senior people to to mentor them, But who do you take? Right? I mean, it's supposed to be an advanced aircraft, supposed to be a reward, so you want the cream of the crop, if you will. The only way to do that, the metric that they have is grade point average.
Right? So, you know, I have the high school
grade point? No, no,
flight school.
Flight okay.
Flight school grade point average. So you get graded on your academics, your, you know, your participation, your, your flying. Each each flight gets a a grade slip, you know, with a numerical grade, and they they end up with this grade point average. There was a rumor, and it was sort of true, it depended on the class, was that if you were in the top 5 of the class, right, there's 72 of us, but if you're in the top 5, when it when it got to aircraft assignments, you could pick what you wanted. Right?
So if you wanted to pick what you wanted, you wanted to be in the top 5 guys. So there were a bunch of us that were, you know, there were probably 10 of us that were all within, you know, 100 of a point, you know, 98.2, 98.3, you know, that kind of thing. And we're competing. Right? Every time you get your your exams back, you'd be like, oh man, that guy, he got like 0.1 above me, and he's he just moved up.
And so it turned out that I was I was number 1 in the class. And a and a good story here about never quitting is that 1 of the guys I was competing with, if you will, when the assignments came out they did not give us choice. And you know, I got shut we all got shut off in Huey's, all us top guys, and, he got mad, and he I want to say he quit, but he he stopped trying. Right? So he studied enough.
He did what he had to do, but he quit. He he dropped from being in 98 point something to, you know, 88 point something, right? So instead of going from an A into a B kind of thing. And then toward the end, what I just talked about, the Chinook thing, the army said okay we're gonna do 2 slots from your class, get Chinooks. Right?
So 2 2 pilots would get Chinooks, and we're gonna take number 1 and 2 guy. And I happen to be number 1, and my stick buddy was number 2, and this guy probably would have been 1 or 2 had he kept going, but he gave up. And now he's like throwing stuff around the, you know, the classroom. He's like, damn it. I shouldn't have quit.
You know, it's like, good point buddy. And I remember to this day. I I use that lesson on my kids, and tell them it's like, don't get mad that you didn't get the job you wanted, don't get mad that you didn't get this or that. Things always work out. They just do.
Don't give up.
Get out. So you wanted a chinook?
I didn't. I was actually mad that I got it. Really? Yeah. Because remember I said I wanted to be Yeah.
That's why.
Salt work. Right? And I'm like, a Chinook? That's bull, you know? It's gonna be like, you know, flying from airport to airport, that's gonna suck.
And, the instructors, you know, all retired warrant officers, all older guys, they like, back then, slap me in the back of the head. Right? And they're like, you idiot. Shut your mouth and take the slot. Right?
And I'm like, but I want to fly Huey's. And they're like, Huey's are going away. Trust me. Take the Chinook. Right?
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So I did, you know, grudgingly. And as soon as I flew that thing, I was like, this is amazing. It's 1 of the fastest helicopters in the planet, let alone the US army. It's, it's very powerful and it's no harder to fly than a than a Huey, but, it, you know, there's a whole now conversation on on that. But that's how I ended up, you know, flying Chinooks.
Learned on Hueys, transitioned into CH 47 Deltas, you know, just before Desert Desert Shield. And then, you know, I flew them there, and then, you know, I ended up instructing in those, and then let you know, we get into the 160th, you know, like Wow.
Wow. Let's go to I mean, so what was it like for you walking into flight school?
So you start out dream. So it's different now, but at the time, what you did is you first went to walk school, Warren Officer Candidate School. And that was like 8 weeks of, we start out with, you know, you did hell week, we had like hell day, you know, and, it was tough. And I remember the little head game they played was they, you know, they came in, you beat the hell, and they'd say okay, somebody yells in the room, you know 20%, got it. And then like we just got off the phone with the secretary of the army, you know, we have to lose 20% of you because of budget cuts, so we're just gonna do hell hell day every day until 20% you quit.
Right? And I'm like, well I'm not quitting, you know. You could have to throw me out of here. And there were guys, it was like 1 guy got up and walked out, so it worked. You know, I was like, alright, he didn't wanna be here.
What does hell day consist of?
It you know, it's like, you know, crawling through the mud pits, and push ups, and mountain climbers, and just burning out physically.
Just a beat down.
Yeah. It's a big it's a beat down. And, it it is not pleasant, to say the least, especially for army aviators, and, or guys that wanna be. And these guys, you know, the TAC officers are walking around just like the guys at Budge, you know, you know, except back then, you know, smoking a cigarette. Come on, let's go upstairs.
We'll get some donuts and some coffee, it's warm. You know, it's comfortable. You get a shower, and we'll just put you on your way. Look, you're you're an E7. You know, there were guys that were E7s there.
It's like you're an E7, you had a good life. Why do you wanna do this? You know, and they yeah. Right? Screw it.
You know, I quit. You know, and guys would just do that. There were I don't know, 4 or 5 guys, quit during it, and that 1 guy in the meeting. And, you know, they they do that to you, not to that extent, but for the next 8 weeks because you're not flying. So you're doing, what we call cubing.
Right? So you have a cubicle. Right? You have your your bunk, you know, a desk, a locker, and every morning when you get up you have, I don't know, 10 minutes to have your bunk with a white collar on it, and your your, your coat hangers to be exact, you know, you know the big deal, like any NCO school you have been to. And, you know, you get outside obviously, you're not fast enough, you're not straight enough, whatever, they come into the barracks and throw the stuff out of your locker onto the floor, so that when you came back at the end of the day, you know, you got like an hour to that was personal time, now you're repairing the damage they did as opposed to just adjusting things.
And it's a, you know, it's a head game. It's a little bit of hazing really, but you know, it kinda it does go to show who army warrant officers are in my age group, you know, why we're such assholes. But anyway, so you so you do that, and, then when you when you're done, you move on to so that's a company, and you move on to b company, and that's primary flight. Alright? Which is where you learn to fly.
So, you know, depending on what they call the bubble, you know, where, the schedule is for classes, you know, based on aircraft maintenance, weather, that kind of stuff. So, you know, you might you might roll right through, you might go from a company to b company and roll right into c company, you know, 7 months later. Or you could have, you know, 2 weeks of rain that's, you know, you can't fly in or something, and it just sets you back. Well what that does is that ripple effect is it sets back all the other classes. So in the meantime while you're waiting to get the flight, you're, you know, you're polishing brass and you're doing, you know, just things to keep you busy, painting rocks, you know, that kind of stuff.
Or you might be working at, 1 of the facilities on post, you know, as a, like a well, think of it like a detailer. Mhmm. You know, giving you like a temporary assignment. Like I actually worked at the museum, for a couple of weeks, which was pretty good because I was aircraft mechanic. I helped them with some, some of the displays, you know, getting the you know, as they were setting them up.
But that's how you get into the the flying, and then when you're
in how just real quick, how long does it take, let's say there's no weather delays or anything, how long does it take from day 1 of flight school before you're in the air,
offering
a helicopter?
I'd say 6 weeks, maybe 7.
6 weeks. Yeah. That's quick.
Yeah. That's if everything rolls right along. And you start out in primary learning to fly right now. Just before I got there, they switched over, the army switched over from the TH 55, which was a little 2 seater, a little bug looking thing that, it was just you and your instructor, and when you picked up to a hover when you pull power the nose wants to, to go to the right and you have to give it left pedal to to keep it in heading. And and, in a modern helicopter the engines keep pace with the the rotors, and back then in this thing you had to like control the throttle at the same time, so it was an additional thing.
I got lucky in that it went away and they had just transitioned into Huey's as the primary trainer, which I wouldn't fly. Anyway, so I get into this thing and, you know, they take you out to the stage field, there's there's Huey's all over the place, you know just flying around hovering doing their thing, and the instructor's like, alright. You know, here's what you do. Right? You have the controls.
I have the controls, and then you just, you know, you go off in whatever direction. I mean you can't hover. Right? And that's the very first, it's insane because when you go to bed at night, so you have a stick buddy, right? So when a partner, right?
So when he when he's flying you're in the back, and when you're flying he's in the back, right? So not only are you there for your flight period, but you're in the back going up and down and left and right, and just your your inner ear is getting all, you know, discombobulated. Right? So at night when you went to bed, you're you felt yourself it's like being on a ship, right, for a while and you go lay in a regular bed, and you feel like you're moving, but you're not, and that's what it's like. And then, you know, the first person in the class learns to hover, you know, he comes back and he's like, you know, I found the hover button.
You know, which means you can just, you know, maintain a stationary, you know, 3 foot hover, you know, you don't drift in, and then, you know, as individuals in the class learn, right? It takes about 5 hours really to learn to hover, right? So in each each flight period's about an hour and a half, so it takes a couple of flights, and you know when you're like the last guy, you're feeling like, what am I incompetent, I can't do this, maybe I'm not, you know, a pilot. Right? And then you just 1 day you find yourself hovering, you know, they're like, hey, you have the controls, I have the girls.
Hey, you're hovering. Wow. I'm hovering. Right? And once you learn, say, riding a bike, you don't you don't forget.
You know? And so that transitions into traffic pattern flight, so you're going up and around the pattern, you're coming in, you're landing, let's say, you know, the
So literally the first thing you do is just try to learn how to hover.
Yep. For, like, I don't know, 3, 4 days, 5 days maybe, if you're if you're late.
How many helicopters are up at once trying to hover? 20.
Oh my gosh.
You could go there. That has to look hilarious.
Every stage field has a set of bleachers. Right? And people, locals, would just pull up, there was no fences, you just pull up, get them a bleacher, you know, your hot cocoa, whatever, depending on the time of year, and iced tea, and just watch the students, you know, go nuts. And then what happens though with the traffic pattern stuff is you start including emergency procedures. Now these are like in the Huey, you know, hydraulics out, so the aircraft's very difficult to fly and you have to kind of run it on to land.
You have, tail rotor malfunctions where you have to control the yaw of the aircraft as you're coming in, as you change power, you have to adjust the throttle to keep the nose straight as you touch down. Auto rotations. Right? So it's a single engine aircraft, the Huey. So the instructor will roll the throttle off on you.
You're just flying along, and he rolls the throttle off to idle, and you no longer have lift, right? So now you lower the collective, takes all the pitch out of the blades, and you descend like a rock, right? But the rotors are still spinning, right? And you have to, keep the rotor RPM between 97 and 101%. In order to do that, you you play with the collective which changes the pitch in the blades, so the more pitch you put in, the more drag you get.
Right? But you wanna keep it, you know, at a 100% because when you get to the bottom, it lasts like 75 feet, you flare, now you pull in the power, you put the pitch in the blades, and you're using 1 chance to cushion that baby on, and we call them crash bangs. Right? You're doing that all day long. Right?
And then eventually they deem you safe enough to solo. Right? So back in the, in the t h 55, you really did solo. It was just you. Now you're going out with your stick buddy, and he ain't been saving you.
Right? So you're still solo, but you have somebody, you know, next to you in case you die. He'll go with you. But, yeah. So you you solo, you do a couple of traffic patterns.
I think it was 5 traffic patterns by yourself, and the instructor, you know, gets back in, and you're like, alright, you soloed. The last guy to solo of the class is like, you know, it's, there was a name for it, I can't remember, but you you had to ride we had the ceremony, it was like, pitchers of beer, and everybody lined the in front of the building at the barracks, you know, and it looked like a stage field. The markings were like, you know, painted on just as if it were stage field, and that guy would ride a thing called the solo cycle. So it's a bicycle that somebody had engineered, you know, it had rotor blades, and when you drove it, you know, when you pedaled, the blades spun. Right?
Oh, man.
And you
had a ride this bicycle. I don't have a picture of it. Oh, man. That's awesome. But, and then you get your solo wings, which is like these cloth wings that get sewn on your hat.
Each class has a color, and back then they don't do it anymore, but each class, had a baseball cap, and we were royal blue. And you had that sewn on so you could see who, you know, we're a real pilot now, sort of, you know, within the context of flight school.
Nice. And, so yeah.
So then you move on from that, you move up, you take your final check ride in primary, and you move on to advanced skills, which is Charlie Company, and there, this was a lot of fun actually, now you're doing terrain flight navigation, you know, you got a handheld map, Right? And, this is where you I call it the bus driver move. Right? Where you're trying to make the map meet the terrain, because you get lost. It's like, oh, there's a stream over there.
No wait, that's a stream, and you move, you know, so it's like a guy driving a big bus, you know. And, so you learn to do that, and fly, and that's a lot of fun actually, and, you finish that up with a, great big exercise where like the cobras come in, and the Huey's, and it's a big, they call it an avtac. I don't remember what that stood for, but it was a big big event. It was really cool.
And then you moved into nights. What's the, I mean, what's the what's the field exercise? What's the
it was like, we we all flew out to an assembly area. Right? And we went in and got a briefing, from, you know, the CADRE plan, the mission. So it was, you know, 20 Hueys flying in 1 big ass formation like something out of Apocalypse Now, you know, and the Cobras would roll in and do the gun runs, and the o h 50 eights would do, you know, call in the spot reports, all that stuff, and we would all do this. And we're a bunch of we're not even w ones yet, we're still walks.
We're not officer candidates. You know, the instructors are obviously having fun because they're showing off, you know, their students can do this and that, and it was it was a lot of fun. You know, I don't think they do that anymore. It's it's probably very risky when you think about what they were doing, you know? All these aircraft in 1 little area, synchronized.
I mean, this is this is advanced stuff. Yeah. And, they allowed us to do that.
How far in to training is that?
That's several months in. That's that's gotta be like, 5, 6 months in.
Okay.
And and then because when you finish that, now you move to night. And when you go to night, you do all the same stuff. You do stage field, right, traffic patterns, you do auto rotations, emergency procedures, all that stuff with goggles. And when I was in there, we had, the army had just transitioned from what we call full face fives. Right?
So ANVES fives or PVS fives, whatever they were. And they they used to be like, like Are you
talking about the mono? No.
No. These are they're they're binoculars, but they are like a a rectangle.
Oh, these are like the thing that the eyeglass doctor used.
Put them on your face. Right? Like a diving mask. Think of a diving mask where it's just got toilet paper tube sticking out of it. Right?
Everything else is black. That's what they started with, and and I got there, somebody in the army had figured out that if you took a, a saw, you know, and you cut 1 half of the mbg away, the plastic housing, turned it upside down, you could stick the lip of it without the foam up into your helmet, where the where the visor is, and then with surgical tubing, you wrap the surgical tubing around in velcro and you suck this thing to your head. Right? And you had to have a weight bag because, you know, it's way out here like this, and you had to when you did it on a rotation, when you when you drop the power the, the engines split off, like the rotor and the engine split, the needles. But if it doesn't, you're going to fall out of the sky, so you have to make sure it happens because sometimes it doesn't.
Right? And so
Wait, what do you mean?
So there's 2 big needles. Right? There's a Big needles? Needles, like gages.
Okay.
Right? And and, so 1 of them is the rotor, and 1 of them is the engine.
Okay.
So whenever you pull or reduce power, they should work together. Right? So that means the engine is driving the rotors, which is good. But if for some reason there's a clutch, it's called a Sprague clutch, it's a 1 way clutch, and if the engine rolls off, it's supposed to free wheel, allowing the rotors to spin. If so you should have a split in the needle.
So if you drop the power, roll the throttles off, it should split. Right? But if you don't get a split, that means you've got a a clutch failure, and you've got to recover because you're not gonna survive if you don't do something about it. So you've got to, focus 1 tube inside at the instruments while the other one's outside, and determine that, okay, that's good, then you can focus it back out and then finish the maneuver. It was insane.
Right? And the army at the time was going, we own the night. We learned we kind of were renting it, you know, we don't really own it yet. But, it's like there was no m v g lighting in the cockpit, like it was red light, and so you had to turn off all the lights. So what we did is we had these little tiny chem lights.
Right? They look like maybe an inch, inch and a half long. You break those, and you tape them into place over key instruments, and you had what was called blind cockpit drill. So every switch in the cockpit, you had to be able to find without looking at it because you've got these things on your face. And so you do that, and then you go do terrain flight that way, and terrain flight navigation, and so you're doing this this whole progression.
And what's interesting is the the students from my time frame were kind of like the first ones to do this, not literally the first, but you know that 1st year. And so when you get to your unit, all the old guys don't want to do it, like they're qualified to do it, but they're not proficient at it, and they don't wanna do it. Right? And that's the whole story I'll get into with Desert Shield, Desert Storm. But So that's how flight school kind of goes, and when you finish up nights, and we used to fly, unaided nights as well, they call it, Nighthawk.
So we'd you'd fly it, you know, wherever safe altitude was, 300 feet, something like that. You knew where the how tall the tallest obstacle was, and you flew at least 200 feet higher than that. And you'd fly around, and this is what the guys in Vietnam used to do. You know? You fly in the dark without being able to see, you get to your your fix or you know maybe you know a Sandy would put a rocket down for you and you know that's the l z, right?
And you go in there with a white search light on, and it can be tough, you know, and we did stuff without the search light and they'd have, chem lights, you know, in the, in the l z or maybe strobe lights or something like that. And as you came in on your approach, if you got any kind of blinking, that meant there was foliage between you and the and the object, and you would hold off on the descent, you know, until you could see it again. And you go in, and it's funny because that's kind of a lost art now, with, everybody being so used to goggles. Interesting.
Yeah. Interesting.
And that finishes up flight school? What what
what did you find to be the most challenging portion of flight school?
Night vision hovering, because you had to maintain a 3 foot hover, and you did that, you didn't have a radar altimeter. Right? A digital readout in the cockpit. You looked out through the chin bubble to the side door, and if you saw individual blades of grass, like, it would be sort of fuzzy, which meant you were higher than 3 feet, and you wanted to get down just enough so the individual blades of grass stood out, and that's like 3 feet. But
How the hold on. How the hell do you see individual blades of grass when the rotors are
Oh, they're blowing all over the place, you know, but, you can. Damn. But, you know, with that being said, this is why flying in the desert is so tough because there's no texture. Well, I take that back. The NTC, National Training Center out of Fort Irwin, California is a different kind of desert.
It's not like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and Iraq are very, you know, Saudi's got those smooth beautiful dunes like you see in Lawrence of Arabia. In Iraq, it's kind of, you know, flattish with some rocks occasionally, but it's not scrubby like the NTC, right? So the army kind of, gave itself a false sense of security and how well we could fly in the desert. Right?
Because, oh, it's not that hard. Right? Then you get over to the Saudi desert, it's like flying in snow. You know, when you come into a hover because you look out, you can't see individual grains of sand, you know, so it's Interesting. It's tough.
Yeah. But I found the hardest part of that was the they called the OGE 360 hover. So you get a book out of ground effect, so it's about 80 feet, and I guess about 60 feet. So you're higher than the trees, it's dark, there's no moon, and you have to do a 360 degree turn, a pedal turn. Right?
So you the aircraft will pivot, and you gotta start on 1 heading, end on that heading, and be at the exact same altitude when when you finish, and you gotta be over the same spot of ground. Right? And the instructor, who's very experienced at this, can tell, you know, you can't. You're like, I think I did the good news. Like, ah, dude, you drifted 20 feet.
So that was tough. I had a hard time with that. I'll bet.
I'll bet. Let's go into, I mean, graduation. So you graduated the number 1.
Yep. Yep. So I've got a, you know, distinguished honor grad. But the army, you know, unlike the air force, there's a process for a warrant officer. It's a, like, a 3 day process.
Like the first thing they want us they wanna emphasize is that you are a soldier. Not that you're a pilot, not that you're an officer, you're a soldier. Right? And then, I can't remember what ceremony they did for that, but it was specific to being a soldier. And then like the next day, you got pinned to your bars.
Right? And then the next day, they did a wing ceremony, you got your wings. Right? So it was a they wanted to emphasize, you were a soldier, an officer, and a pilot. You know?
The rest of us are, like, no, we're pilots. But that's what the army wanted us Yep. To be. You know?
Yep. How did it feel for you? I mean, you wanted to fly since, what, I think you said 6 years old. Yeah.
6 years old.
Package in to enlist as a pilot at age 10, and now now you're graduating honor grad.
It was awesome. You know, I mean, I loved it. And, then I left that. So 2 weeks later, I was in the Chinook transition, and I learned how to fly Chinook. That was 6 to 8 weeks.
I mean, how hard is it to learn from to go from a Huey to a Chanel Gerbil?
It wasn't that hard. Like flying so, you know, we joke about the Chinook being the the double headed dumpster. Right? It's like a dumpster with 2 palm trees having a fight, or, you know, a Greyhound bus, you know, kind of thing. You know, actually the seals used to call us the black school bus of death, you know, when we're going to the acts.
But, even though the aerodynamics are different, I'm not gonna go into it here because it's fairly complex, and I don't think I could explain it at this age. But the control movements that the pilot does are the same. What happens over your head is pure friggin' magic. You know, it just it just does what it does. Right?
And so all you're really doing in that 6 to 8 weeks is learning the emergency procedures for the aircraft.
Okay.
So, you know, that you practice, you know, generator failures, engine failures. Right? And this has got a a twin engine, right? So it's 2 engines and you have to practice with losing an engine, and then there's other malfunctions, you know, high side, low side, you know, things like that that you you just have to learn. You get proficient at it, and you start out with rote memory, right?
So you you memorize the steps in a checklist, and when something happens you you literally go down the steps. And as you get through the course, you start responding to the indications versus, you know, oh the rotor's low, I know I have to lower the thrust to the collective, you know, the power. And, you just you just learn all that. And then you do nights there as well with the Chinooks, doing external loads. You have to learn how to do sling loads.
And, it was fun.
What's what's the first thing you noticed maneuverability wise that was different from the Huey to the 47?
I can tell you that the 47 is it it surprised me. Remember I said I didn't want Chinooks, and then when I flew it the first time or 2, it was like, hey, this is awesome. Because it's just as maneuverable. It'll do it has all the same aerodynamic limitations, and it's faster and stronger. You know we routinely outrace Cobras and Apaches coming back at the end of the day, you know, they'd be like, you know, we converge on the corridor that brought us to the the home stage field, and, you know we just click the power a little bit in the end with your thumb and the cyclic could move forward in the aircraft to just accelerate, you know, and just leave them in the dust, you know, and, the Apaches couldn't keep up, Cobras couldn't keep up, and I always thought they were fast, you know, so it was fun.
You know, my instructor's, like, speed up. I'm, like, well, they're right. They're kind of in front of us. Nah. Speed up.
You know, he liked, you know, showing. That's very cool.
But, so were you 1 of the first 47 pilots in the army?
No. 1 of the first w ones Okay. To fly Shonaks. So, how long had they been around?
W ones? Shunuchs.
Oh, Shunuchs. They I wanna say 1958 for the Okay. For the a model, and that's what, the 101st airborne was originally the 11th air assault test. Right? And what they had to do was prove the air assault concept, air mobility, was a feasible concept.
And, they needed the Chinook to make that happen. So in order to move, you know, all these troops around Vietnam, not only do you need the Hueys, but you need, you know, gunship support which was Hueys that were armed, and then you had to move the artillery and supplies and things like that, so you need the Chinook. You need the actual capability of the Chinook, which is funny because the a model, a Blackhawk today can lift more than an a model Chinook, you know, so you could have, you know, done the 101st with Blackhawks had they, you know, existed 30 years earlier. But, yeah, so the there was a poster that Boeing put out when the Delta model came out, right? So there's a, b, c, d, there's a f and a g, and it said the silhouette only the silhouette remains the same.
Right? So you get that the double headed dumpster on the outside, but the engines are beefed up, the transmissions, the drive train, the avionics, you know, so all of the computers and the electronics, you know, just improved with each each version, you know. So like a d model, which is what I flew in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, was about 185 a copy, 18,000,000 copy. And when I flew the g model, which was the last version I flew, those were 62,000,000 apiece. And that's more than a a fighter jet, you know, like, an f 16.
Wow.
And, it's because of the the advanced, the capabilities.
That's all I can say. Do you think that being a flight mechanic helped you with flight school?
Oh, yeah. Especially because I worked on Huey's. So when my the reason I had such a high grade point average, I think, is because when my peers had to study aircraft systems, I already knew them. I just had to touch over what what kind of data they probably wanted for the answers for the test, and I could study things like AeroMed, you know, hypoxia, you know, spatial aviation regulations. So I got to study all this stuff the other guys had to split that time, you know, so it helped a lot.
Yeah. What did you say? Spatial what?
Spatial disorientation. What is that? So there are, there are illusions, right? And now you're testing my AROMED. Right?
Vestibular illusions, which I believe are up in your ear. Right? So you can feel like a lot of times what happens is if an airplane gets in a spin, right? They call it a graveyard spiral. You get in a spin, and when you go to pull out of the spin, you turn into it, you feel like you've spun in the other direction because inside your ears are these little hairs, right?
That in your semicircular canals, that's where your balance comes from. And so sometimes when you have an ear infection, that's why you might lose your balance a little bit, and and there's those. And then there's visual illusions, things like, you ever been on a stoplight in your car and you think you're rolling, but it's the guy beside you back Yeah. Or going forward? That's 1 of the illusions, right?
Reverse perspective illusion. And then, you know, over the water is where it's really dangerous. If you don't have a horizon, you know, you get, I can't remember all the news, like, 20 different illusions you can get. But you have to learn them, and how to get out of them. Like, to recognize that you've got it, or that somebody else has it, and then, you know, correct for it.
So
Man, so the that would scare the shit out of me. So so they they put you in these situations where you actually feel the illusion?
Yeah. Yeah. They have chair like a chair, you know, they they, I don't know how to describe it. You sit in this chair, you strap in, and it's like a gyroscope, and they kinda they they first they get it spinning, and you're sitting there, and then they engage it, and the chair goes around, and then you spin upside down, and all this other stuff. And then they stop you, and you have a set of controls, and you're supposed to move the controls to make some indication like a, maybe a marble or something like that is in this flat, a flat panel.
It's like little cables. I mean, this is very primitive, but it worked, and you'd you'd have to center the the panel so that the ball, the marble would be in the middle using aircraft controls. And when you first did it, it's just like when you're a kid and you're spinning around and around and around, and you stop, and you're like, woah. Right? Yeah.
It's just like that. And so you have to learn, and there were many times in my career we might even end up touching on some of those where either me or somebody else got into 1 of those illusions there. It almost killed us, you know, and it did, you know, it did kill some friends.
Oh, man.
And it was a conventional unit, a Chinook that was in Afghanistan, had to be in, 2002, 2003, and they were flying daylight, ran into a sandstorm, couldn't see out the window, so they climbed up to what they considered a safe altitude, and they got spatial disorientation. They literally rolled that aircraft upside down, pulled the blades off essentially, and fell to their deaths, you know, head first.
Holy shit.
So it's very dangerous, and it's 1 of those things that everybody pays very close attention to.
Yeah. I can imagine. Do they simulate it in the bird?
They try to. It's hard.
They do?
You know, or in the simulator. You know, they'll put you in situations where, you know, the aircraft gets into an unusual attitude. Right? So it's called unusual attitude recovery. So they'll put the aircraft in some weird situation, like it might be in the aircraft what they'll do is they'll say close your eyes, put your arms up like this, put your head down.
Right? And then the pilot will say what he's not doing. He'll say, I'm turning to the right, and then he'll turn left, and then he'll say, I'm I'm rolling out. He'll roll a little bit, but not enough, and by the time you're done, open your eyes. You open your eyes, take the controls, and what you see out the window is not what you had in your mind.
Right? Sometimes it makes people puke, you know, it's like, so, yeah, you you have to learn to do that because the basics will kill you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
We talk about the ground.
Let's talk about, I mean, since we're on the subject, let's talk about 1 of the instances where you've you've felt the illusion in real world.
So I'm in Afghanistan. Been there a couple years. This is probably 05. And we're at a place called Salerno. Right?
It's in Eastern Afghanistan. And we're coming back from a mission, and, it's late. We're exhausted. We'd been, putting the Rangers up in the KG Pass, and, the weather rolled in, and it was raining really hard as we're crossing back over the mountains to get back to Bagram. You know the rain is just coming down and you can't see out the window.
Now we've got a terrain following radar, but the radar has limitations when it comes to rain, precipitation. Right? If it's too dense, it sees it as an obstacle and tries to climb you over it. Well, a rainstorm might be 60,000 feet, and you're not doing that in a Chinook. We'll go to maybe 20, 25 if we're stripped down, but you're not getting getting to 60.
Mhmm. So we're flying through the mountain. We got terrain on both sides. Rain comes down, like, it's not raining when we enter the mountains, and then just down it comes. Right?
And my buddy's flying, Rich, and, he says, Alan, I'm getting vertigo. And I'm like, well, you know, suck it up dude. You know, we we still got another, you know, 10 minutes here in the mountains, you know. You gotta hang on. Right?
And he's like, you know, we can barely see the terrain, to the to the bottom plexiglass, and I'm like, you gotta just and we're following we've got, what we call the HSD. Right? It's a horizontal situation display. So it's like a a compass rose with a with a course line, like you might see in, in Waze really, but you get the compass on there. And he's like, Al, I can't I can't do it, you know, and the aircraft starts to veer toward the toward the the the rock wall.
Right? So I take the controls. Right? And I'm like, I have the controls. He's like, alright.
Thanks. And we're flying, and the rain is just terrible. And now I'm getting the same sensation. Right? What's happening is the aircraft, we didn't know this, the aircraft is inducing, there was something, there was a component that was bad, and some of the this is where these automated systems sometimes can bite you, and the aircraft's trying to put us it says we're level, but it doesn't feel like we're level, and we weren't.
You know? And I could see that so I had differing instrumentation. Right? So we have an old standby. Right?
Something from 19 fifties in the center console. Right? And it's it's saying I'm gonna turn, and the other thing says I'm level. So now I gotta figure out which 1 to follow, and then
How do you figure that out?
You gotta look at all the other secondary instruments. So there's a there's a there's a wet compass, you know, and is it moving, you know, because if it's if you're in a turn, it's moving, you know, and you can also look at the at the the compass rose itself if it's moving, and the attitude indicator is different. So you you gotta look at all what we call your secondary instruments. Right? So the primaries, the the attitude indicator like that coin I gave you, that's a primary instrument.
And all the secondaries just kinda confirm or deny what you're seeing. Right? And you can fly with just secondary instruments. It's it's not fun, but you can do it. So here we are, maybe I'm on the controls maybe a minute, and I'm getting ready to throw up.
It's like I'm losing my balance, there's none nothing's making right. We are climbing now because we can't see out the window. So we get all power in, we're climbing at about 3,000 foot a minute, which is pretty fast for a helicopter that's heavy. And, we did have the benefit of height above terrain. So remember I said that you get the compass rose, you get the course line, and then if there's terrain around you that's at your altitude or above, the screen is red.
Right? You can see where it is. Right? And it was all red in the screen, and we're climbing at 3,000 foot, because we're going up the mountain. And I'm like, dude, I can't do it.
You've got to take the controls. And Rich takes the controls, and I got it, I got the controls. And now I'm just trying to, you know, it's like trying to get my my head straight, and, because I know he's not gonna last. And same thing about it, 45 seconds later, he's like, Al, I can't do it. Like come on, you gotta do it.
I can't do it. And he's like get back and forth, so I took the controls now. Now that red terrain presence I told you about is starting to part from the the course line. Right? So now there's a little bit of black, you know, so that means what's right along the course line is below me.
Could be a 100 feet, which isn't much, but the terrain's still out my left and right door. If we if we don't stay right on the course, we are going to crash, and you know, we we say that cumulogranite, you know, has a 100% kill ratio, so you gotta do it. And then so we passed the controls back and forth for for, I don't know, 5 minutes, and we popped out of the clouds. Like the rain stopped, it was solid clouds over the valley in Gardez, and, we pop out of the clouds, and now we can see. Right?
So we can see the mountains off in the distance, and now your brain can re register what you're doing. You can ignore all of the instrumentation. And so we're like, oh my god. We we almost died. Right?
And, that kind of thing has happened, you know, a couple of times, but that's the most the easiest 1 to explain. Man. And then we get back, and I'm telling the, the maintenance pilot, we'd actually been complaining about that helicopter for a couple of day a couple of flights, saying that it made us feel funny when we flew it, and that we didn't wanna fly it in the clouds. So when it happened, we get back, and the the poor maintenance guy, you know, he's we're on night schedule, he's on a day schedule, and I'm like, I'm looking for him. He should be up by now.
Right? We're getting back, sun's coming up. And I'm looking for him, and me and Rich are gonna kick his ass. Right? We we just survived this, right?
And he was like, yeah, it's fine, it's fine. And so he did take it out to fly, and he's like, oh yeah. There's a problem with, you know, whatever it was, you know, something that was working backwards essentially, 1 of the little sensors. And, they sent it home. Like they said, they got a c 17 that week, brought a new aircraft in, sent that 1 home.
And, that kind of stuff, it'll catch you. You know, there's guys
Are you worried about getting shot down while all this is going on too?
I mean, it could it's possible. Yeah. At that stage of the game, I wasn't ever worried about getting shot down. Okay. You know, I mean, we'll we'll address why when we when we talk about anaconda, but, yeah.
I wasn't I mean, I just this was a good example of why I kind of figured I was going to die on every deployment.
Okay.
And that's because if the enemy didn't scare me, it was the terrain and weather that did. Because we would, you know, the the problem with Afghanistan in particular, Iraq is so much simpler. But Afghanistan, there's no weather reporting that's reliable. You know, and the area is so vast. Right?
I mean you got these big mountains, you got the plains, the dunes, and the weather patterns, and simple things like temperature can make all the difference whether you have enough power at the top of mountain versus at the bottom. Right? Because there's supposed to be a 2 degree drop off in Celsius for every 1,000 feet you go, except in Afghanistan it's pretty much the same at 20,000 feet as it is at 10,000 feet. So if you're expecting to have a certain amount of power at the top of the hill, the mountain, it might not be there, and there's I don't wanna go there. There's, let's just say there's a there's a very famous mission where somebody wished away about 15 degrees of Celsius, and I'm not gonna talk about it.
But, Yeah. That's how important, you know. And you know the funny thing with that is that, in training in the nineties, we made the mistake at sea level of teaching the Rangers, the Seals, the Delta guys. We had a saying, there's always room for 1 more ranger. Right?
So if I tell you as a team leader, alright you can have 25 guys on board and we'll give you, you know, 2 hours of of flight, you know, for that, and you go okay. And we're just about to take off you, hey, I got 5 more guys, is that okay? Yeah. Put them on. And then, you know, guys come running from the other, hey, we got 3 more guys, can we take them?
Yeah. Well Afghanistan, you couldn't do that. If you gave a number, you know, that was it. You know, so if somebody said, can you take 1 more Ranger? No, I can't.
You know, and if you did, you would not have enough power for whatever it was you were gonna do, and you would pay the price. Now, that wasn't always fatal. It wasn't always damage to hardware, but you always came home going, damn. I'm not doing that again. You know?
And you learned that lesson again and again and again.
Damn. Well, let's, let's take a quick break. Yeah. When we come back, we'll, get to where he went after flight school.
Sure.
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Alright, Al. We're back from the break. We just kinda wrapped up your initial flight training. And, so where are
you going after this? My assignment as a Chinook pilot at that point is Savannah, Georgia, going to Hunter Army Airfield, Fort Stewart, Georgia. And, so I I finish up the Chinook transition, flight school's done, it's behind me, and I take 30 days of leave up in New Hampshire, and I'm down to, sign in at Hunter Arm Airfield. So I get there, I sign in, and then what happens when a new aviator gets to a unit is you undergo what's called a commander's eval and progression. RL progression, readiness level.
So you start out as RL 3, readiness level 3, and that means you can only fly with an instructor, and then they say okay, you're safe, you're good, you're RL 2. Right? So once you're in RL 2 level, you can now fly with other pilots in command that aren't instructors, and you go, but you're not really qualified to do everything, and then you make rl 1, readiness level 1, you could do everything because your your progression is where it's supposed to be. So anyway, I get to the unit, I get my commander's eval, I get RL 3, RL 2, and then Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. And very very shortly, we are notified that we're going to deploy, now I'm in the 18th airborne corps.
Right? Our headquarters is at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and our battalion headquarters is also there. So there's our sister company, a company, we're a b company, 2nd on 159. We're the Hercules guys. It's a pretty cool nickname.
And, what we ended up doing was we flew all of our aircraft. We had 16 Chinooks in our company, so you had 30 Chinooks total in the battalion, and we flew from Savannah to Wilmington, North Carolina to put the aircraft, you're gonna tear them down, bubble wrap them, you shrink-wrap them, and you're gonna put them on the top of an old ship. Right? But they didn't have the old RoRo's, you know, the roll and roll off. These are like you crane it up to the top and it's gonna ride it, you know, 5 miles an hour from, you know, Wilmington to Saudi Arabia.
So we fly up there and there's a whole funny story to that, but we, we take a bus back, and now it's gonna take a month and a half, I think, for our aircraft to get there.
Mhmm.
So they've got to finish up my training. Right? For me to fly in combat, I've got to be readiness level 1, not RL 2, because you're still technically in training. So the 160th of the 3rd battalion was right next door, and our instructor pilots knew those instructor pilots. They were all friends, you know, and, they're like, hey, can we borrow on your helicopters to train up, you know, the WOGE, which is Warrant Officer Junior.
Right? It's kind of a, back in the day, I think that was actually considered the rank. Now it's considered a slight to say, the WOGE. Let the WOGE do it. Yeah.
But anyway they took me out in, at the time the 3rd battalion aircraft were, kind of enhanced delta models, so they had like some special radios. I think they had what's called them OBOGS, onboard oxygen generating system or something like that for high altitude, and they had, miniguns for defensive armament. That was it. So that was called a warbird. Right?
So there's no air refueling, no terrain falling radar, no special aircraft survivability. It's just basically the same thing I've been flying with a couple more radios. So I finished my progression, which is kind of poetic, in a 1 sixtieth aircraft, and then, we end up flying across. We went on a Boeing 707. Right?
You know chartered, you know, Transworld Air or something like that, and we had to get gas like every 2, 3 hours. So imagine going from Savannah, Georgia up to Newfoundland and across to Europe, and then back in through Egypt into, you know, Saudi Arabia, and stopping every 2, 3 hours, and and they wouldn't let us off the plane, you know, because they didn't have customs clearance. So we'd get there in whatever country it was, but you can't get off the plane, you know, the the damn the toilets were full of of urine, you know, the stink was ter it was terrible, you know. And, but we got there, and, that began Operation Desert Shield.
How I mean, so you went straight from flight school to the unit, knowing that you're gonna fly the possibility that you're gonna
be flying in combat. Pretty close, yeah. Within a couple of weeks.
I mean, how did that feel for you? You're getting right what you wanted
Yeah. Immediately.
At least I think that's what you
Yeah. But, you know, what we didn't talk about earlier is, you know, so I grew up in the Cold War. Right? And I was I served in the Cold War. I went to West Germany.
I've been to East Germany, East Berlin, right through Checkpoint Charlie, and, I was always scared we'd really go to war with the the Soviet Union. Right? Or the or Korea, you know, when I was in, Korea the first time. And it's hard to describe, but I did not want that. I didn't think, you know, being at war would be a good thing, you know, for me.
And, so now here we are, I'm very excited to go, but I'm, you know, this is a little different attitude than I had in the 160th. The 160th is like I'm taking the fight to you and you are gonna die if you're a bad guy, you know. And, at this time it was sort of a transition period. It's like I'm I'm making a a change now from being scared to be in war to okay we're in war this is alright. It's very pragmatic, I guess.
And, I mean Desert Shield was like, I don't know, 6 months long, so I had some time to really adjust to the idea. Mhmm. So that when we did go across the border, you know, it was no big deal. You know, it was it was very exhilarating actually. Very exciting.
So you did go across the border?
Yep. Well, when, desert storm happened. Right? So desert this is the funny thing. Right?
It's it's all in a name. Because we had guys, I remember this is a conventional unit. Some of these guys had been in Vietnam, others hadn't, and there was a couple of guys that were really upset that we were probably gonna take the Chinooks into Iraq. And they were of the mindset that Chinooks would fly from the port to the forward line of troops and that would be it. You wouldn't go past the forward line of troops.
And we were being told, I don't know, you're gonna go deep. Right? Because they're gonna do, operating base Cobra. Right? Because you've got to have fuel and ammunition and supplies for the Cobras and the Apaches and the artillery to do their thing.
And so there was there was 2 guys that were very very upset that we were gonna do that, and I remember thinking, dude, what, you know, what do you want? We're, you know, I wanna remember I wanted to do assault, so to me this is like, this is kinda it is where I wanna be. And, when so so Desert Shield. Right? Remember I said the army would claim, we own the night.
Mhmm. Well, there were helicopters ripping their landing gear off on sand dunes because the sand dunes in Saudi Arabia, they kinda, they go up, they they plateau, and they go up again. And in the dark with the goggles, you could see that first top off, and you don't see the setback in the second lip. Right? So, and you're traveling a 120 miles an hour, by the time you see it, it's too late.
You just lost your landing gear. Right? And the army lost a couple, and then they they put some rules into effect. You couldn't fly any lower than 150 feet, you know. And, so we did that for that 7 months.
And I was moving supplies, tank transmissions, tank treads, I mean whatever you can fit in the back of a Chinook or sling, we were doing, and we were doing it at night. And the old guys so there were 2 w ones in the companies, me and a guy named Tim. And we were he had got there before me and he was really sharp, so you know, I didn't walk into a a show where they're like, oh you know, these stupid Wojes, you know, we're going to these junior guys are no good. Instead, they welcomed me because the other guy who was only a couple classes ahead of me, was such a success. So he and I were the guys that prepared all the maps for everybody, you know, did you know some of the basic planning, the nug work, you know, the the math and the and the and the ciphering.
And, every night flight, he and I were on them, not together, we were with other pilots, and they put us with an instructor, we fly at night. And the other old guys, the senior guys, did not want to fly at night. Because, you know, we still didn't have all the aircraft with night vision, lighting, so you still had to turn off the lights, put the little chem lights around, that kind of stuff. So it still was very unpleasant to fly. Now at this point we've got what's called the ANVUS 6, and the goggles are just 2 binoculars that slip down in front of your face.
They they hinge up and down. And the crew chiefs were 1 of the ones I talked about earlier, the, the fives. Right? And, but I got experience at night a couple 100 hours flying in the desert that the older guys didn't get because they didn't want it. Right?
So when Desert Storm happened, there were the 18th airborne corps was pretty smart. They decided not to do it at night because Cobra, like the initial assault on Cobra, or the infill, the the taking of it, we had I think a 100 Chinooks involved, flights of 5, and we were separated by only a couple of minutes. Actually you'd you'd be in that you'd be in a hot refilling pit, and it was the most impressive refilling pot refilling I've ever seen. The 101st did it. It was like a mile long, just helicopters, you know, it was all Chinooks and then it was Blackhawks, and you were plugged in getting gas while you're running, and then they'd, call over the radio, and we were, you know, like let's say I was in a silver flight, right?
Silver 1 through 5. Maybe a silver 1, your grid coordinates are, you didn't care what you were carrying, it was gonna be £18,000 which is about the max you're gonna carry for this. Silver 2, here's your grid, right? We all had different grids and we'd we'd pick up, we'd fly over, and just hover over the loads that were already set up for us, and the guys were the most aggressive hookup men I've ever seen. I mean you didn't you you just got over it and they like hooked it.
It was a tandem, load so a 4 and a half hook to keep it from spinning. Once everybody's hooked up, off we go at a 120 knots, up into Afghanistan, and when you hit a release point, everybody went their separate way to their landing zones, and keep in mind there's flights in front of you, and flights behind you, so as you're coming in, guys are coming out, guys are right behind you, and it's just it looks like a hornet's nest. And if we had done that at night, we'd have killed.
You said Afghanistan. I I meant
I meant Iraq. I meant Iraq. Yeah. So this is that famous, Schwartzkopf, the left hook. Mhmm.
You know, this that was us. So moving all, the equipment and the people out out west of Kuwait. Wow. So some of the loads were, Humvees internal with a towed 105 howitzer. Wow.
Yeah. So the gun tube the gun tube would be up in the cockpit, right, so you have the overhead panel, and you have the engine condition levers that do the the power on the engines, and, the the gun tube was right up inside, and Wow. It was pretty cool. Yeah.
Did you guys did you guys take any fire or anything like that? No. No?
No. No. It was all, I think we caught them by surprise. We're out in the middle of nowhere, And, but because of that, and all of the lessons learned up until that point, the army decided, alright, we didn't maybe we didn't own the night, we just lease it now. You know, we rented it, and we're leasing lease to own, you know, kind of thing.
But, what sucked about that mission is remember I said that, you know, me and the other w 1 were the guys they always sent out with the the senior guys. The other older guys didn't even fly goggles. Didn't even have them on board because they thought it was safer to fly without MEGs than with. Right? So
Oh, wow.
So 1 night so the surrender has happened. Right? I mean we're a 100 hours in. The surrender has happened and, we take 5 Chinooks up into Iraq, and we're gonna bring back prisoners. Right?
Prisoner of war, the Iraqis had surrendered in droves, and, we go up there, it's daylight, we pick up these prisoners, we're moving back, but we don't have any gas. All the places we were supposed to get gas had already moved. Right? So we kept hopping from place to place and there was no gas, and we eventually ran out of gas. Like we had to land in the middle of the desert, each of us with, you know, 40, 50 Iraqi prisoners on on the back, and I had a 38 with 5 bullets in it.
Right? The hammer was on the empty chamber because that was what they made us do. We had 2 m sixties, but those were pointed out. These guys are all in inside. We didn't have any guards.
No nothing. But these guys luckily were very compliant. It was
just it was just pilots and prisoners.
2 pilots, a flight engineer, and a crew chief.
That's exactly right.
A guy up front, guy in the back. We we all had 30 eights. Holy shit. The 5 bullets. Yeah.
Yeah. And so, funny thing, so we're coming back before we run out of gas, and, the you could smoke an army aircraft back then. Right? And, the crew chief in the back lights up a cigarette, and 1 of the Iraqis is like, you know, gives a signal for, hey, let me throw the smoke. Right?
So he hands him the cigarette, and he puffs it, passes the next day, it passes all the way up to the front of the aircraft, all the way down, and by the time it gets to him, it's a soggy lump of, you know, paper really. And then he they hand it to him, and he looks at it, kind of disgusted, and they're like like, you know, have it. Right? And he's like, sir, they want me to smoke this thing, it's all dripping with drool. And I'm like, well, better keep them happy because, you know, they could take us easy.
Right? He's like, alright fine. So he's like, I'm gonna get hepatitis, you know. He smokes a cigarette, and now they're all, yeah. They cheer.
And they stayed they stayed compliant the whole time, until you know, we ran out of gas, and an MP unit eventually drove up and took them away. You know, like they found us, took them away, and we ended up spending the night in Iraq, until a convoy went by, and that convoy had fuel trucks in it. And we waved them down, and they put gas in the aircraft, and we didn't have any our command had no idea where we were, you know, because we didn't have satcom, we didn't have radio communications or anybody, we're just in the middle of the desert. And, we're nowhere near where we should have been because we've been hopping around looking for gas.
Holy shit.
So we we come back, we get gas, we come back into Saudi Arabia, and we we had to go we still had some prisoners, and we dropped them off. And now we're gonna fly back to assembly area Palm, which is where we were based out of, down the Tapline Road, and, so of the flight of 5, 3 of the crews had m b g's. So we sent the 2 without m b g's back first. 5 minute separation, so 1 takes off, climbs up to 3,000 feet, well above any terrain, you know, obstacles. They fly back, and they just do the old fashioned, they get there, they spiral down, they land, all good.
Right? Next 1 goes, and now it's my turn. We're the net we're the first m b g aircraft to go back. So we're flying it 250, 300 feet. Got goggles.
I'm navigating. And I'm looking at the antennas down the road right there about every 5, 6 miles or so, and I got them on my map. Right? And I'm looking, like, looking out there, and I'm like, I see 2 of the 3 antennas I should see. Come right, let's offset a mile.
Right? So we kind of came right, kind of paralleled the course, about a mile right of course. Never saw the antenna, I'm like I don't see the antenna, I don't know where it is. Right? Maybe I'm just not navigating right.
And we get back to our assembly area, we lay in, next aircraft comes in behind us with goggles, and then the last aircraft with the commander and the chief pilot on board, they have goggles, but but they've elected not to wear them because it's easier to fly unaided they think. Right? This is that mindset back then. They come back at 250, 300 feet. They run into an unlit antenna that I we had all avoided, except they ran right into it.
And, killed all the aircrew. The door gunner was an infantryman, he actually lived. He said the last words were, oh hell, where'd that come from? You know? Damn, man.
So, you know, a very valuable lesson, you know, learned there, you know, in what an obstacle will do to you, you know, whether it's the ground or an antenna or wires, you know, or the enemy. But Damn. That was so when we got back from that, so that was essentially the end of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. So we redeployed back to Savannah, and when the aircraft got there, the army was now going to own the night. Right?
So everything we did, everything, every exercise, every drill, every practice involved night vision goggles. So and and it and it helped, I mean it made a big deal. But because I was a high time goggle guy in the unit, even as a junior pilot, I had 200 hours of m v g time when the, you know, the senior guys had, like, 25. You know, they got their qualification time, and that's it because they never flew it. And, so everything we did, I was on that, you know, mission, and that started my whole trend toward where I would end up, you know, in the 160th.
When did the 160th kinda pop up on your radar?
Well, because they were next door to us in Savannah, and I said everybody knew each other, our commander was actually married to a warrant officer over there. Right? So when we were in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield, they would come visit, you know, they'd fly down for official purposes, but they'd have the time to do, you know, a conjugal visit or something like that, I guess. And, so I kind of knew them already. I'd listened to the war stories, what they were doing.
Oh, they were going up into Iraq, you know, while we were still doing the the Saudi stuff. What's it like in Iraq? You know? I said, oh, it's dark. You know?
Okay. A little more than that, buddy. But, so I already kind of knew about that. But that other w 1 that I talked about, Tim, he had assessed. Like we got back, he's like, you know what?
I wanna go to the 160th. So he put in his packet, he assessed, and for whatever reason he was not selected. I considered him a better pilot than me, and I figured, well, crap. If they're not gonna take him, there's no way they're taking me. Right?
He's way better than me. And once again, it's very subjective. And later in on in life, having given the selection evaluations, I understand there's a lot involved there. It's not just how good a pilot you are. But, so anyway, that's the start of it.
And then I
can Can can Before we go any farther, can you give us a little history into the 160th?
Yeah. So the, in Iran, the, the shah of Iran is in charge. He leaves. He's pushed out really, and I can't remember if he was in France or the US, but we were supporting him, and so a group of student protesters, protested outside the US Embassy in Tehran, and they ended up taking it. Right?
Now they from my understanding, they've done something like that before, but then they gave it back. In this case, they didn't give it back. Right? So we had American hostages, marines, embassy personnel, kept for it was like 354 days or something like that. But So there they are, and then President Carter at the time, you know, they, the military options were very few.
Right? JSOC didn't exist. All the special operations community had sort of disbanded after Vietnam, and Charlie Beckwith had just essentially stood up Delta Force. Right? But they needed So they were gonna send Delta Force in to rescue the American hostages.
The problem was they gotta get there. How they gonna get there? Helicopters. Alright. Well what do we wanna use to get there?
Chinooks. The problem is you're getting by a navy ship. Right? Chinooks do not fold up handily like a navy aircraft will. Right?
So they were afraid OPSEC was a big concern. This is Operation Eagle Claw. Right? So they don't want to put Chinooks on top of a ship because that'll raise questions, you know, why are there Chinooks on top of an aircraft carrier? You know, that's not normal.
So instead they decided to use, CH 50 Threes, and they wanted to use the minesweepers, which were flown by navy pilots. And they figured flying off a ship was the hardest part of the mission. Right? Which in hindsight that's the easiest part. But so they they do these rehearsals with with Delta, and back then they didn't have this like 1 location where they did rehearsals and we sit face to face and we say, you know Sean I don't like how you did this, or Al I don't like how you did this.
Alright let's adjust. It was all done, you're probably old enough to remember the, the teletype format. Like you get, like you ever get like a a ship's position, the overhead message all comes like in a teletype. And, that's how they did their aars, the after action reviews. Right?
Was to teletype. So there wasn't really plain English. It was kinda like, you know, pilots sucked, you know, but you can't really explain why. Right? Yeah.
So these guys are flying into the dust with night vision goggles, and it's super dark and there's no reference. Right? And there's no, like, looking at blades of grass. So they came up with this, it's called a pink light, an infrared filter on top of a a search light. So you extend your light out.
It's a white light with a piece of basically a piece of brown waxed paper over it, you know, held on with a little frame. And the problem was, you could only see that light. So it's like like you see with an AC 130 when they get the burn on. Right? You can only see it with your night vision goggles.
The problem is if you leave it on too long it will burn through, and it would now be a white light. Right? So you you learn to use it very sparingly, which is funny because years later we were still like turn the light on turn it back off even though it was a you know a glass thing, but, the Delta guys were unhappy with the pilots. They crashed every single time, you know I mean controlled crash, and so they wanted new pilots. So now they're like, alright.
Who else can fly a navy aircraft and the primary thing is landing in the dust? The marines. Because the marines do the ship to beach. Right? The navy guys do ship to ship essentially.
They're no better because they have no experience, and they have the same limitations. So they want to change the pilots again, but it's go time. Right? So they gotta go what they got. Right?
So they they execute, they fly the, the Delta guys in on 1 thirties, they land at desert 1. Right? Designated desert landing area, and those 1 thirties are gonna transfer the Delta operators to the helicopters when they get there. Right? Because the helicopters couldn't carry them that far and do the gas, so they came in the 1:30.
So they'll do that. They'll get gas, they'll take the operators to go to desert 2, spend the day, and then do the mission. Right? That's the plan. 8 helicopters take off, encounter a sandstorm that's like 4,000 feet high.
You can't see in it, so they separate. Right? So they now they're like, alright, you know, they're 5 minutes apart, so they don't run into each other. I think, a couple of them turned around for maintenance problems related to the dust, and, the min force for the mission, I think, was 6, and they showed up with 6 except 1 was broken. They were down to 5 or may have been 5 or 4.
I can't remember. It's irrelevant. So they abort. We don't have enough helicopters to get them there. We have to abort.
So the helicopters are gonna go back to the ship, the Delta operator is gonna get back on the 1 thirties, they're gonna go back, they're gonna reset, they'll try again another night. Problem is because they can't see the helicopter pilots, you have, you've been to an airport on a jet airliner. You come into the gate, and you get the guys with the colored wands, you know, the light wands, and they're, like, you know, doing this kind of thing for the the pilots to see to direct them into the the parking. Yeah. We do it with helicopters.
Right? You you you you get the winds and you kinda, like, come up to a hover, stationary, you know, come left, come right, go, that kind of thing. You see that on ships all the time. So the guy that's doing that, so the helicopters crank up, they pick up to a hover, the guy with the wands is bringing them up, and tells them to go, and then he walks toward the aircraft, and as I'm told, he put the wands in his pocket and they were still on. The only thing the pilots can see is the wands, the lighted wands, and they follow them.
And the guy walked right into the c 130 in the helicopter. Followed him right into it. Impacted the c 130 full of 5,000 gallons of gas and a bunch of Delta operators that were kind of just hanging out. Aircraft explodes, helicopter explodes, it's mayhem. They all load up on the the remaining, 130s and they they head back.
Utter failure, national embarrassment, and so JSAOC is born. Right? Because the problem that they found was that because there was no mutual, not mutual, habitual relationship between the air crews, the 130s, you know, the ships, and the operators, you had all these problems. And so they created a unit, task force 160, out of task force 158 and some other things. It was a National Guard unit with 0 h sixes, helicopters from the 101st, Chinooks, and, and Huey's initially, then Blackhawks, and they plan to do Operation Honey Badger, which was the second rescue attempt.
Right? So they're ready to do it. President Reagan gets in office. The Iranians release the hostages. No more mission for the JSOC operators.
General Meyer, I believe it was, was the chief of staff, or maybe the chairman, and he said, you know what? You keep that unit together. So JSOC formed the 1 60th became the 1 60th SOAG, special operations aviation group, and they stuck together. And then you had this habitual relationship that lasts today, and you know we can do things now that they never dreamed, you know, that, could be done, but that's really where the 160th came from. And then, you know, as it grew out of the group, it it became a regiment, and, like, when I got there, there were only 300 guys in the regiment.
There's, like, 4,000 now. Wow. Because you have 3 battalions, and then some special mission units, just it's big. So when someone goes, hey, oh, you were in the 1 60th. You know, you know, Bilbo Baggins?
I'm like, what does he fly? I don't know. Okay. So What
kind of birds do they fly in the 1 60th?
So all 3 battalions, I take that back, all 3 locations, Fort Lewis, Washington or JBLM now, Joint Base Lewis McChord, they have Chinooks and Blackhawks. Savannah, Georgia has Chinooks and Blackhawks, and then Campbell is the anomaly. It's got Chinooks and Blackhawks, but it also has little birds which have 2 variants, right? It's a o h 6, has an armed version and a assault version, so the MHs modified, and age attack, and then the Blackhawks have a assault version and a what's called a DAP, direct action penetrator. So it's an armed Blackhawks, got a 30 millimeter chain gun, you know, it can carry hellfire's rockets, mini guns, sometimes all at the same time, other times they have to make selections, you know, based on weight, you know, what they're gonna carry.
I have beautiful stories about dApps, we'll probably touch on them a little bit, but that's the that's the regiment.
Very cool. Wow. Thank you for that history. So, alright, so back to what do you call it? Selection?
Assessment. Assessment. Yep. So so your buddy, Tim, he doesn't make it. No.
And now you're thinking, well, if he can't make it, I'm not gonna
make it. I'm not gonna make it. So I get assigned to Korea for my second tour, and while there, because I had a lot of night vision goggle time, because the old guys didn't want it's it's like incremental, right? It just builds on each other. And so I get there, and I end up as a night vision goggle trainer, a no fly line trainer, so you had to fly the border between North and South Korea to learn all the corridors and all the the landmarks that if you were operating in the in the what they call the the tax zone, Papa 518, that if you were approaching the border you could recognize geographic features and turn around.
Right? So like after I left that next year, an 0H 58 straight across was shot down. They killed 1 of the pilots, they held the other guy, Bobby Hall for a couple weeks or or months, I can't really remember. And then they let him go after they, you know, thoroughly embarrassed him and and us. Right?
So that's the importance of the job is is that. And because I did that, and I showed like some of the senior guys, like there was a CW 5 that came over, he'd been a Vietnam pilot, everybody knew him in the community, in the Chinook community, and he flew with me up there, and I was just flying along the what was called a corridor up to you know where Panmunjom is? You know that you get the, or you've seen it in the news? It's the, where the peace table is between North and South Korea. Right?
So you've got this this piece of property, there's a building on it, half in South Korea, half in North Korea, and there's a table in there, and that's where they sit and they discuss things. And I would we would fly people up there, usually, dignitaries. But there's very specific rules, and I would, you know, fly him up there and was like, alright, you know, stay at or below a 100 feet, you know, consistent with safety, you know, left and right of course, 200 meters, blah blah blah, and I talked to it, and he's like, who taught you how to how to talk like that? Right? It's like a they call it MOI, method of instruction.
And I said, I don't know. I read the regulation and came up with it. He's like, you need to be an instructor. So he actually, called some friends at at d a, department of the army, HRC, if you will, and, got me a slot to go to the instructor pilot course, but I had to go and stay at, Fort Rucker and teach at the at the schoolhouse if I did that, which turned out, you know, it's a it's a whole another story we're definitely gonna get to.
So how'd you get into 1 60th?
Alright. So now we're back at Fort Rucker. So I'm a young chief warrant officer too. So army aviators, their wings, you start out with a set of wings, and then you get a star when you're a senior aviator, and you it's like, you know, I don't know, 4 or 5 years and so many hours, and they give you a star. So I didn't have a star yet, so I'm very junior aviator.
And then when you're a master aviator, you get a wreath around that star. Right? So you can look at a an army warrant officer and see, you know, where is he in his experience level just based on his wings. And, so I get there, and, my first 2 set of students were great, a lot of fun, because they were also
So wait, hold on. Do you so you're a junior pilot
Yeah.
But they want to put you as an instructor.
Yeah. Because of my skill level.
Mhmm.
So I'm good enough to be an instructor, just not a senior guy. Now, remember now, all these old guys are retiring. Right? That's why they brought us young guys in, is because they had to backfill essentially to to meet their, you know, requirements. So now what's starting to be in all the key positions is young c w twos and w threes.
Right? So junior to mid grade warrant officers. And and this is where it ties in because So my first 2 set of students were great because they were w ones right out of flight school, and they listened to me, and I had a good time. Then the Alabama National Guard, which was flying CH 54 Sky Cranes, which is this grasshopper looking thing that they flew in Vietnam and they had that in Birmingham. They retired it and gave them Chinooks, so now they all have to come down and take a Chinook transition.
Well, these guys all have way more they're all Vietnam vets, they're all way more experienced in flying than me, and they don't wanna fly Chinooks. They don't have a choice, but they act like I personally brought them down. Right? They did not like listening to a snot nose w 2 telling them what to do, and it was miserable teaching them. So they didn't wanna listen.
They do what they had to do to get through. Every flight was misery. Every sitting at the table, you know, we do what we call table talk, talking about emergency procedures and all this aerodynamics. They didn't want to listen to me, and I hated it. And there was a couple of classes of that, and then they went, and then they gave me foreign students.
Now foreign students are different in that the ones that come to fly Chinooks, you know from, you know, the Dutch, the Singapore guys, the Aussies, the Brits, these are not dirtbags. These are not guys that are there because they don't want to fly the aircraft. They're there. They're all aerospace engineers in their own military. They're, you know, they were okay to fly with.
They were very nice, very polite. They pretended to pay attention to me. They're, you know, they they listened, they made eye contact kind of thing, but I knew I wasn't teaching them anything. Right? I mean they knew far more than me.
Just just by reading the manual, they they knew more than I could teach and that's how how good these foreign students were. So it was unrewarding, and I needed something. I was probably still a little too junior to get away from that assault stuff I wanted to do. And a buddy of mine who I went through the instructor pilot course came through for another school, and he's like, Ally, you're miserable. You know, we're out for a drink or dinner or whatever.
And he throws a application packet on the table. He's like, fill that out. You need to come to the 1 sixtieth. And I still had that mindset that I wasn't good enough, and you didn't fill it out on a laptop or on a computer because they didn't really exist. You know, in quantity back then.
It was a stubby pencil, you know, number 2 pencil filling out the application. It was like, you know, half inch thick, and I'd fill it out, you know, a couple pages at a time, you know, a couple days ago in between, and eventually it was done. It's like, oh. So I sent it in. To my surprise, like 2 weeks later, like, mister Mac, we'd like you to come assess.
Like, me? Really? Okay. Right? So I go up, I assess.
I didn't think I did that well. As a matter of fact, I got lost on my, navigation route, which everybody does for the most part. You're not passing the flight, just so you know. It they will do something so you don't fly it. You don't, you just you're not gonna hit your target on time.
It's made sure that you're not gonna, achieve success.
Right. And the reason for that is they want to see how you behave under duress in the cockpit. You know, when all of a sudden you're not where you're supposed to be, and you don't know where you are, and you know you've still gotta get to your, you know, unlit target plus or minus 30 seconds, and you have to be within, you know, I think it's plus or minus 2 minutes at every checkpoint, and within a 100 meters of the checkpoint. Right? So I mean you have to be, so you're gonna be outside the parameters in some sort or fashion, and so when you get under that pressure, how do you do?
Do you fold? Or do you do what you gotta do and keep trying, you know? And and they can tell, because they're gonna teach you how to navigate their way anyway. So they don't care if if you get lost, you know, but it's how do you behave. And there are guys I've seen guys melt down and start crying in the cockpit when they got lost.
They just knew they it's like it's like that guy with the grade point average that gave up, you know, before he got You don't know, I mean who knows I might help you out later on and say hey, because sometimes we'll be like, hey, is that bridge over there? Is that on your map? Oh. And you kind of recage them, you know? But it's all based on how they're behaving.
If they're giving up, I'm not gonna help them. You know? It's like, great.
Yep.
So but that's that's how you start the process is the well, I take that back. The first thing you do is a PT test, standard army PT test, with pull ups which the army didn't do, and a swim test, which the army didn't do. The funny thing is as I got there, now keep in mind the 160th was formed in 1980, right after that, you know, eagle claw. Right? I'm there, this is 1995, so the unit really is still pretty new.
Mhmm. A lot of people don't know much about it. They're still very, you know, cloaked in darkness and secrecy. So I get there and I'm like, should I wear an army PT, You know, shorts and shirt? Or should I be in civilian, you know, PTs?
I mean it sounds absurd, but it it went through my mind. Right? So I showed up wearing civilians. Right? And I'm like, if they don't want me, you know, tough.
You know, if they don't want me because of this, you know, screw them. Right? I drive up in the parking lot, and I made sure I had my army PTs. In case in case they're like, mister Mac, I thought you were gonna be in your, but they didn't say anything. Right?
And then you do your PT test, they they don't tell you how you're doing. Right? That's all at the end. So they don't count your push ups, so you don't know how many you're doing, or your sit ups, or any of that stuff, or your pull ups. And, then you go over to the pool, you put a flight suit on, flight gear, helmet, you jump in, you do, I wanna say it's 15 minutes of treading water with just your feet, 15 minutes with just your hands, 15 minutes regular, and then like a minute dead man's float.
Right? And then you do a deep water entry, you can't touch the pool, and you gotta swim underwater a designated amount of distance, and you don't know what that is. Right? So I do it. I'm out of breath.
I'm comfortable in the pool, but I'm not a strong swimmer, you know, with gear on. I mean I've never done this. And so I jump in, and I'm trying very easy to swim, and I run out of air, and I come up, and I get out, and I'm like, I don't know if that was far enough, you know? And the recruiter comes up with a clipboard, and he taps it, and he's like, mister Mac, did you get to go twice? I was like, did did I get to go twice?
No. He's like, get back in line. So I'm like, obviously I didn't pass. Right? So now I get in, and instead of trying to take it easy, I'm I'm pounding it.
Right? I get my head down. I'm pounding. I could feel the the Styrofoam on my helmet's dragging me to the surface, and I'm not as long as you don't take your face out of the water, you can keep going like that. And I'm like, you know what?
They're not gonna let me die. Shallow water, blackout, whatever. Right? I get down there, I feel a tap on my helmet, I had made it to the end, you know, and I get out, and that was that. You know?
And then, you go from there to the psychology. It's you you take a test. It's like a 600 test, then a 300 question test, all psychology. Would you rather pick your nose or pick your buddy's blister? You know, would you rather work on a Friday?
Or, you know, weird stuff that doesn't make sense. And then you take a general aviation knowledge test, which nobody can pass because they're asking the parameters of, specific air air defense systems. You know, the s a 7 radar system, you know, has a minimum engagement range of what out to what distance and stuff like that. That's the kind of stuff, if you're going into a theater that has it, you bone up on it, but there's too many systems around the world to to know everything, like to that extent. Right?
Yeah. So you have rules of thumb if you didn't know. Like if if the if the if the, what we call the raw gear, if it shows up, you know, s a 8, but you didn't expect them to have s a eights, it still might be a Roland or something. These are defense systems. Right?
So they all have different distances and parameters. But anyway, you take this test, and they're gonna use this against you later on. Oh, you only scored up, you know, a 30 on the general aviation knowledge test, and you consider yourself a pilot? Yeah. But, you do that and you get your your mission, which is your navigation route.
You brief it, you fly it, you come back, and then the next day you do your board. Right? So you're in your dress uniform, you sit in front of a panel of officers.
This is the navigation route that everybody fails?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah. So now, I mean, even if you make your target on time, you will have been out of parameter somewhere. Okay. So, you know, they're like, oh, you you failed. And some people, when they get told they failed, even though they made it to the target on time, they get mad.
Right? And so the goal of the panel is to well, let's put it this way. First of all, there's guys that get to get that far, and we know we don't want you because you're just a jerk. Right? And we know you won't fit in.
You know, you were good enough to get this far, but you're you don't fit the profile, and you're a jerk, we're gonna put you through hell on that board and then not take you. Right? Those are the guys that go out badmouth us in the regular army. Oh, those guys are jerks, you know? Then you get the guys who we know we don't want you, but you're a sincere person.
You come in, you're in there 20:30 minutes max, and we let you down easy, and we put you out. Maybe even give you some guidance to come back. Right? But we take it easy on you. Those guys typically treat us nice, you know, in the gossip world.
Then you get the guys, the majority of them, that it's, yes, no, maybe, we don't know. Let's see how this guy handles pressure. Right? So now you gotta handle critique. Right?
I mean, you notice like in the in the teams. Right? I mean, you guys, we do not, you know, take it easy on each other. You gotta have some thin or some thick skin. Right?
You got a can of thick skin, and you just spray it on. You know?
But I think the worst is, pure critiques.
Yeah. Yeah. Do
you guys have those?
We did them in flight school, but we didn't have to do yeah. We didn't have to do them, in the in the regular unit. But so, you know, the the instructor will tell you what you did wrong, maybe even tell you what you did right, but, you know, it's criticism. Hey, you did this wrong, you did this wrong, in the end you did not meet the standard, you failed the flight. Okay.
Then the recruiter says, alright, PT, you know, physical training, you know, you did this many push ups, this many sit ups, this many run, and like in my case, so like you did way more, you scored way higher than the 1 you submitted. Why is that? I mean, I don't know, like maybe I tried harder. Wrong words right now. Like oh, so you don't try hard at your unit?
You know, I don't know what to tell you. I I didn't know. Right? So I just tried as hard as I could. But you should be trying as hard as you can all the time.
Yeah. Point taken. Right? And I just instead of getting upset, I just point taken. Got it.
I'll do that. Thank you for that professional, you know, critique. And then they start asking you, you know, why why you scored so low in the general aviation tests, you know, why do you think you should be a nightstalker? You know, questions like that family situation. And in my case, you know, as I talk about my book, my wife had had a suicide attempt when I was in Korea, and I thought, you know, that was all kind of resolved, but I thought that would stop me from getting in so, And I told the the psychologist about it, you know, they knew there was no see I didn't want any secrets here, and I thought, you know, that's gonna torpedo me.
They're gonna they're gonna treat me nice, and they're gonna let me go. They thought they were being mean to me, you know, the the asking questions that should make me upset, and all I could think of every time they asked me a question that they thought would make me upset is they didn't ask about my wife. They didn't ask about my family situation. And for me, the the board, the hardest part was the anticipation that they would ask that question and then kick me out, and they never did. And they accepted me.
And Do they accept you right there?
They kick you out of the room. They deliberate, you know, 5, 10 minutes, which I've been on the other end of that, you know, in the first 2 minutes they've decided, and then the rest 15 they're making you sweat. And, you come back in, and they're like, you know, welcome to the 160th mister Mac, and then, like, you know, We'll see you in about a year. Right? Because I gotta go back to my unit, and that's the agreement we had with the army is they wouldn't poach, skills without giving you a heads up.
And then the psychiatrist took me out, he said, alright look, I know you were probably worried about the family situation. We see it all the time. We can handle it. Sounds like you got it under control. You know?
We'll work with you on this if you have
any problems. So they knew the whole time.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, damn. And they they just never brought it up.
So they probably would've used that
If they didn't want me to do that. Yeah. They didn't drop me like that, you know, if it if it was gonna be a problem. So I get back to my unit. Hold on.
Hold on. Yep.
How many people how many aviators are trying out for this?
I mean, it varies. In the my assessment week, there were probably, you know, 20 guys, you know, in the draw there today? Depends. It just depends.
Because you said when you went in, there was about 300 aviators.
Oh, wait. Right. There's about 35353535100. Yeah. About 4,000 depending.
So what's the let me ask this. What's the what's the attrition rate?
It's not It's usually done in the preselection. So at that time, it was roughly 25% of the people that applied just were rejected outright. You never got to Fort Campbell. Then when you got there, it was probably about 10, 15% didn't make it. You know, so most of the guys that get there make it.
But you're not just there for Chinook, you're there for the little birds and the black hawks. You get this whole potpourri of of, aviators there. So, you know, the they weed out really the guys, and
Is everybody flying their specified aircraft, or are you all No. Are you all flying some No. So Something that
So when you get there, and this has changed by the way, so when I got there, because I was a Chinook pilot, I did my, all my training flights in a Chinook. I did my navigation flight in a Chinook, and a couple of years late actually, I was in seer school when, 1 of our aircraft was out doing an assessment just like what I just told you, and they encountered weather and we still don't know what happened. It rolled inverted and came out of the sky and they all were Damn. Killed instantly. So that pilot was not a Chinook pilot, but everybody considered, I'm actually take any pilot put him in a Chinook, and as long as there's no emergencies they're gonna be able to fly it.
I can get into Blackhawk and fly it, you know, or anything else, but if something bad happens I don't know what to do. So anyway they made a new rule that if you were a Chinook guy, you could do, the assessment in the Chinook. You could do what I did. If you were not a Chinook guy, you would do a simulator period with the instructor, and and sort of, like what I would do is see if guys could learn the aircraft. Like, so it's a glass cockpit.
There's these little TV screens, buttons all over the place, and that's how you you see what's going on. And then you fly it, and I would say, okay, do this, do this, here's a hover page, do this. And I would see if they could mimic what I asked them to do. If they did, I kind of view it as this guy is trainable. I can train him.
If you get a guy that can't remember, you know, what button to do, he's not trainable probably. Right? And so, you know, he's for us to take him, he's gonna need some other things. But anyway, they took all the other guys that came from other airframes. You know, let's say you had a Cobra guy because they were still flying at the time.
A couple of my best friends in the 160 that are Chinook pilots were Cobra pilots, before they got there. And they fly everything in the little bird. Right? And that's where you do all your navigation training, by the way, in Green Platoon, which is where they teach you how to navigate, brief, and and plan like a night stalker. You go out and you fly in a little, you know, little egg shaped thing, you know, and it's being a Chinook guy with a nice big cockpit, and you get in that little egg, it's like, you know, your shoulders are up against the guy, you know, the doors are off, so you have to put your map under your leg, and it's, it's unpleasant to fly that thing.
You didn't like flying the little birds? Yeah. Oh, shit. That was a pain in the ass. Yeah.
But, what is the most what is the what do you think the most what do what do most guys want to fly at 1 60th?
It depends what they did first. Right? So if they're already a Chinook guy, they want to fly Chinooks. If they're a Ranger, they want to fly Chinooks. If they did something else, or they're already a Blackhawk guy, you know, What do
you mean if they're a Ranger?
I can tell you that a
high Like an 82nd? Like a US army ranger. I'm sorry. 75th guy? Yep.
So 75th guy is just wait a minute.
Here's what they do. So you get all these rangers, right, we do a lot of work with them, and they usually end up in the Chinooks because of the quantity of people. They reach the rank at E5, E6, their knees are aching, they wanna be a pilot, they put in for it, they get accepted, and then they might go to a regular unit first, do 2, 3 years, then come to us, or if you have a background, like, you know, we had some SEALs, we had some Delta guys, a lot of Delta guys. You know, a good friend of mine, Mike Rutledge, I don't know if you know him, he was at e 7, teaching at BUDS when the towers came down, transfer over the army, put him for the 160th, and because of his background, we took him as a as a w 1. So as a very, very junior Chinook pilot.
So I will say
that Hold on. Hold on. So sorry. Yeah. Yeah.
So so you guys so the 160th will take basically, ground operators and turn them into aviators?
Yep. Very
few. Without any aviation activity.
Very, very few, very select. So typically, a guy would let's say he's a ranger, an army ranger, he's e 5. He goes to his 1st unit, like I did in Savannah, Georgia. Right? And and they'll try to get somewhere like, you know Fort Campbell so they can be in the 101st.
They're just across the ramp from us, and then when their time comes up, like at 2 years, 3 years, when they think they've got enough experience, they'll submit a packet. If they get accepted, they come over, and I can tell you there's a high number of army range, former army rangers that fly Chinooks on the 1 60th. And a lot of that, now you can't take a lot of them at 1 time. Right? You can take 1 of these junior guys, like we we said we could take 2 a year, you know, and be able to task force babies we call them.
And we can bring How how
how do they how do they get through assessment?
They just do. You know, they they're good enough, you know, they're gonna fail the the navigation flight anyway. Do good in the PT test, the, you know, psych psych assessment, they did well to Oh, okay. All of them. If you can make Oh, okay.
All of them. If you can make e 7 in the seals, you know, or in Delta Yeah. You've got some we have your evaluation reports and all that. You know, you have a history that we can look at and go So
these guys have had some flight They might have gone to flight school.
Some guys have. Well, yeah, they've gone to flight school. But you can take 2 a year of guys that were, you know, like I said, you know, Mike was, an e 7 in the seals, you know, and a couple of rangers. You take them in, and then you teach them from the ground up how to be a nightstalker. We call them task force babies.
And, it turns out good because you get plenty of other guys, you know, I was pure pilot, you know, so I don't have, you know, the ground guy experience, which when I got shot down was a was a thing I worried about because it's like I could shoot, I'm good with my rifle, but I don't know much about, you know, how somebody might flank me or Yeah. Bring the ground stuff. But yet, the guys that were former Rangers or SF guys, had a lot of Green Berets, you know, they knew that kind of stuff. So you always kinda like if you could have a copilot that was once a a former action guy, you know what I mean? Yeah.
It'd be nice.
Yeah. So hold on. Let me so these so select Mike Rutledge, for example. I I've I've met him. So he he went from the SEAL teams to what?
A navy flight school? Nope. To army flight school. So he did an inter service transfer. In a regular unit.
He he went straight to flight school. Straight to army flight school.
So so seal teams to straight to army flight school.
Yeah. Straight to assessment.
Yep. Holy shit.
Yeah. And That's pretty cool. Yeah. And, you know, it's not common, but it does happen. You know, like I said, we we kinda determine 2 guys a year we could handle, you know, and
Does the does the unit like that?
Yeah. Yep. Because it it gives you some diversity in, well, understanding the mission. Right? And the idea here is that they understand the ground force mindset.
They, you know, if they're a rain, they know what the Rangers want, they know what the Seals want, they know what the Delta guys want, and not just by what they want. I I know that, you know, just by working with them, but they understand the entire mindset and the personalities. You know, oftentimes, you know, with Mike, for example, I was, in in Afghanistan 1 time with him, and, I was already there, or I just got there, and he rolled in about a week later, and I took him with me over to, Red Squadron because he knew, we'd actually flown a mission 1 year where probably 20 of the 30 guys on board were at his wedding when he was a CO. And they took turns coming to the cockpit. You know, it was just a, you know, a repositioning them from fob to fob.
And they came up, and they look in the cockpit, and they're like slap them on the shoulder. He's like, oh, that was my best man, you know, that was my, you know, and it was really cool. So it gave you a little bit of the, the bona fides, you know, that Yeah.
Some good camaraderie. Yeah.
Yeah. It was good.
Yeah. You know, that's some I know we're getting off topic here a little bit, but that's something, you know, that I've always ever since drones started coming on, you know, the scene, man, I'm showing my age. But, but, you know, it said, I always something that we always worried about was losing that personal connection with with whoever's got us up top. You know? And, I mean, what do you think about that?
It's tough. You know, I mean, I think back to, you know, several years ago, the original drone operator so to show my age, you know, the original drones were not armed, except the agency 1. Right? So the OGA drone was armed with a hellfire, and all the other ISR was unarmed. Right?
And to be able to talk to them line of sight was a big deal. Right? Because it was a repeater, other than because they're back at, I don't know, back in Vegas or something flying these things. And so when they started arming these things and we started doing kinetic strikes with these, they were claiming PTSD. And a lot of guys were getting mad saying there's no way they could do that.
Why are they mad or upset? You know, that they're killing people from a distance? And I remember thinking, there were certain times of the first part of the war where, in Afghanistan in particular, we did not shoot back if somebody shot at us with the intention of using darkness. Like if the mini guns fire, you're going to see for sure where we are. So maybe they don't see us.
Right? Because night vision goggles weren't as prolific back then. And I remember getting shot at a lot and feeling very vulnerable, right? Because I mean I've got a you know soft armor, I've got a little plate that's about this big, you know, and the air we took all the armor out of the aircraft in the early days so we could go to the higher elevations because it was too heavy. And, then 1 year, must have been, I don't know, late 2002, maybe 2003.
I said screw it. Somebody shoots at me, he's gonna eat lead. And I instructed the gunners, that's a hostile act. Somebody shoots it at us, you kill them. And I made a big distinction, you don't engage, you kill them.
You engage them, they duck their head. You kill them, they can't, he's dead. And so, I realized at some point I felt better being able to to defend myself. Right? So there's this, like, this equal thing.
It's, you know, them against me. You take a shot at me, I'm gonna take a shot back at you, and it's kind of like we both have an equal chance of dying, but the guy flying the drone, it's 1 way. Mhmm. It's very godlike. You know, you you're you have the opportunity to kill somebody, and he doesn't have the chance to reciprocate.
It's kinda I view that as, maybe that is part of the that post traumatic stress is, like, they feel guilty, you know, that they can't die doing it.
You know?
But they can kill people. And I don't know if that's true. That's just how I interpret it. You know? But, that personal connection is very important.
Like, the 160th now has a drone unit, that they didn't have when I was there. And once again, that's to create, number 1, a capability. Number 2, that that personal relationship.
Yeah. You know, I mean, it's just meeting you guys before operations and and and other pilots. I mean, I it just it creates this personal connection where it's like, I know those guys down there, or I know those guys up there. Right? They just drop me off.
You know? And, it that was always on our minds, you know, when that when the when we started working with with ISR and stuff like that. Yeah. Anyways
With the with the with the the air breathers, you know, the the Draco guys. Right? The the u 20 ones or whatever they were flying, c twelves, I guess, that had all the the the ISR platforms, and they would, you know, do all the collection, they do all the, you know as you're coming into the target they give you a sit rep. You know you got, you know 2 sleepers on the roof, you know 3 guys laying on the ground on the green side, you know whatever. And you come in, and in the early days they did a terrible job.
Like I'd be out in the Kandahar area, and we'd go land out in the middle doing an offset infill, and we're gonna land in the middle of this poppy field, and the, ISR comes back with, all good, nobody's there, and they're zoomed in on my coordinates where I'm going to land. And I had to land and there'd be like guys with guns just standing around, you know, they were guards for the poppy fields, they weren't they didn't shoot at us, but they are armed. And And I remember sitting down with these guys afterwards, the the the ISR guys and say, hey look, look at your video. I said when you scaled out and you saw me, did you see the guys with the guns? Well yeah, but they didn't shoot at you.
I'm like, but I don't want to land there if they're there. Right? So we had to teach them what to do, and because they were at Bagram, you know, we'd start meeting with them a little more. And once I had that relationship with them, they knew what I wanted. Yeah.
I knew what they wanted. I knew what they needed, you know, and it it works great. And that, you know, we were talking offline, and I'm sure we'll get to it during the Red Wings, you know, when I I planned that whole operation. The fires plan was successful because I sat down with the actual pilots and the, you know, the the sensor operators, you know, in the AC 130, and said, here's what I'm trying to accomplish. How can you help me do that?
As opposed to me saying, you know, hey, I want this kind of ordinance here, this here, you know, they know what their stuff does, you know, but that's that relationship that you get.
Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Where were we? Back to we were in the middle of you just got done with assessment, I believe.
Yeah. Alright. Yeah. So I go back to my Right? Except when I got there, a week later, the, battalion commander from 2nd battalion 160th calls me, and he's like, hey, Al, how would you like to come up in 6 weeks?
And I'm like, well sir, I you guys told my commander it would be like a year. And he goes, yeah, well, we need you now, because it takes, you know, 8 months to put a guy through the Shnuck pipeline. Can you do it? So I went and talked to my wife, and keep in mind I lived in, on post housing at the time, so it was pretty easy to get out of there. But now I gotta get a house up in Campbell.
So I took leave, went up there house hunting for a week, and, bought a house, and or put a bid on the house, whatever, and I came back. And I remember the, the battalion commander at Fort Rucker was pissed. And he tried to call in all kinds of markers from generals and stuff that he knew to stop me from leaving, like, because he couldn't stop it. And I thought for sure he's gonna stop me, and now he's mad at me. And, the 1 sick just said, no.
We need him. So they just sucked me up there. 6 weeks later, I'm in, basic skills learning hand to hand. You know, we're doing so that's the part I forgot. When you start into training, you know, it's basic skills.
So it's, you know, first aid, hand to hand, you know, CQB kind of stuff, shooting. At the time, we still had MP fives. We were just transitioning to the M4s like the next year, but because of Mogadishu, you know, they had MP fives and they found out that was insufficient for what we need. Right? It's 1 thing to clear a room with it, but it's, you know, if you're gonna defend a downed aircraft, you don't want to pistol around.
And, but we were still learning on that, which was pretty cool for me, you know, shooting silenced MP fives. And, you do that, and then, the enlisted guys at that point go on to log PT and ground navigation, stuff like that. And the pilots move on to the the air navigation stuff. But, yeah. So I get up there and we start that, and, it's a lot of fun.
And I really
What do you mean the enlisted guys? The The
crew chiefs.
Crew chiefs?
Well, I take it back. Any nightstalker who's not a pilot, so you could be the clerk.
No. She could. So you guys train together? Yeah. The pilots and the crew Yep.
That's that's pretty cool.
And same thing with the I think when it was, hand to hand, it was pilots and pilots, and list of guys, and list of guys, but, like, I had a guy, he played in the NFL, was my I was the next biggest guy. Right? But this guy was like a freaking, you know Mhmm. He's like a mountain. You know?
And, so we're doing, like, you know, practicing brachial stunts, you know? And, so, you know, he's hitting me on the side of the neck, and boom. And I'm like, oh, and I don't go down, and the instructor comes, he says, hit him harder. So why don't I want to hit him harder? He's like, hit him harder or I will.
Right? So the guy hits me harder, and I of course I drop, and he goes harder than that. He's like, if I hit him harder than that, I'm gonna knock his head across the room, and he's gonna be seriously hurt. We're not doing it, you know, because there's that whole mentality of, come on you gotta be tougher, you know, we're night stalkers, you know, but this guy, you know, he knew his own strength. This guy, Mike was his name.
He was actually out at the range. He was a little bird guy, attack guy. Barely, I don't know how he fit in the aircraft. And he got out, and the rotor blade hit him in the head, and it damaged the aircraft and his helmet, and he walked away going, duh. Wow.
Like Mungo, you know
what I mean? Oh, yeah.
Put it on the saddle, so I was like, alright. But, that was my CQB. Or not CQB, my hand to hand guy. But, yeah. So you do that, and then you get out of the dunker, which was in Jacksonville at the time.
They have their own now. It's an amazing, so it's like a imagine being in a in a minivan, and they drop you in a pool, and you're strapped in, and the thing rolls over and sinks, and then you've gotta get out. You know, they they do this training progression. First, it's get out any exit. Then it's, you have to go out second behind the guy next to you, or you have to cross over, and they create some some chaos in there, which if you use their training, not a big deal.
You know, you just you wait till the violent motion ceases, you get a reference, you unbuckle yourself, and then you go out or you jettison the door, you're still buckled in, and then you put your hand outside, release the thing, and just pull yourself out. So if you do the training, it all works really well. But when you don't, the guys panic, and they, they get stuck inside, and the divers have to pull them out.
Can you talk a bit a little bit about the relationship between the crew chief and the pilots?
Yeah. So in the Chinooks in particular, and the Blackhawks are very similar, the relationship with the crew chiefs, you get to know them quite well because, they you fly a lot together. In a Chinook, the minimum crew to fly a Chinook, a regular Chinook, is 2 pilots and a flight engineer. So the flight engineer is the senior crew chief in the back. In the 1 60th, a minimum crew is 2 pilots and 2 2 crew chiefs.
A flight engineer and a crew chief is the guy in the back, and then when we're in combat it's 4. So you have a crew of 6. 2 pilots, 4 guys in the back, because you get 2 guys manning the many guns up front, and 2 guys on the m 240s in the back. And then they have other duties that they do. And, you know you spend long long hours together whether it's training, you know it could be a cross country flight flying from Campbell to California, you know, doing air refueling on the way, and you know it's a 8 hour flight without landing.
You're gonna talk and talk and talk and you get to know each other. The other thing is I always like to say that a good crew chief in the back can compensate for a bad pilot up front. So let's say you're gonna land on a spur, a mountain spur. Right? With the with the aft gear, you know, doing a little wheelie or or landing with 1 wheel or something like that.
If the pilot can't see anything, like you're looking down several 1000 feet, there's nothing there, there's no reference to know that you're moving a foot or 2. Right? To keep the wheels on the terrain, but the crew chief's looking right at it. And if he is good, he can talk you through doing it. You know, it's like, oh, what you got?
You're you're starting to slide to the left a couple inches, you know, and you just you just little subtle movements in the controls, and you listen to him. As long as he stays calm, you stay calm. If you get a crew chief who gets kind of warmed up really quick, you know, it translates in the voice, and then the pilot gets kind of stiff on the controls because he's essentially following those instructions. So I like to say a guy who's up front who maybe isn't as good at doing that kind of maneuver for example, if the crew chief's good, you know, he's got the right voice, the right technique, he'll keep you right there, and, the customer or the ground force has no idea that, you know, this guy's having a tough night because the crew chiefs compensate. Sometimes a a really good pilot can compensate for a crew chief in the back that isn't as good, you know, but there are limitations, you know.
Like I said, if you're a 1000 feet out over the terrain and you got nothing to look at, all you can do is listen to them, you know, or maybe the other pilot can see something. So that relationship is very very important.
How how long do you guys spend with each other?
Well, I mean, years, but, you know, when we go on the road for training, for example, junior guys, junior pilots will room together. Right? If you're a flight lead or, officer in charge, you get your own room. The crew chiefs, same thing if you're a senior NCO, you'll get your own room. If not, you'll share, but after flying, we'll spend time together, you know in the in the bar, or at a picnic table or something.
We get to know each other quite well.
Is there a can you talk about a little bit about who's man, I don't know how to say this, but who's is it the pilot that's ultimately in charge of the aircraft, or is it the crew chief, or how are they
Yeah. So the so the pilot you have a pilot in charge, pilot in command, right, in the army? Air force calls them aircraft commander, AC. He's in charge of everything about that aircraft. So you might I could be the pilot in command as a warrant officer, and I could have a colonel in the other seat.
I'm in charge. Right? He's doing what I tell him to do because that's the way it works. Mhmm. It's different if he's the air mission commander.
He could be the overall air mission commander, and he happens to be in my cockpit. So I'm now we're in a little bit of a a gray area because I'm telling him what to do in the aircraft, but he's maybe telling me what to do in the overall mission. Right? So it's a kind of a a blend there, but where are we going with that? I said I went around in a wrong
way. Relationship between well, now now relationship, respond basically responsibility.
Yeah. Responsibility for the aircraft. Right? So, when I was a junior pilot, there's a red line on the floor in a Chinook. It's like, station 95, they call it.
Right? So every inch of an airframe is assigned a station, you know, 1 inch is station 1 or 1 or something like that. Right? And as you go back, and that way you can say, you know, I've got a sheet metal crack at station 350, you know, butt line whatever, and you can you can tell just by markings on the floor where this crack could be. Right?
So with a junior pilot and a senior crew chief, sometimes they'll say, you might mention something about the back and they'll go, sir, you know, you're in front of station 95. Just, you know, keep your business up there. Right? Yeah. Whatever.
You know? So there's that relationship where it it it can be, I mean, we're always busting each other's butts, you know, but, if you're a guy like me, right, and I had pure you know, I do a lot of talking about, you know, I did this, I did this. There's always a crew involved, and in many cases, there's an aircraft or 2 or 3 behind me doing the same thing. Right? So you gotta keep that in mind.
But the, the responsibility of the aircraft commander, the PIC is absolute. He is responsible for it. So whether he's divided some some, authorities up to the crew chief in the back, You know, it's based on, you know, what's going on. Right? So for example, fast roping.
Right? So we'll, you know, the pilot will find the target, he'll come in, he'll start his approach, you get, you know, 50, 60 feet out laterally from it, and it's like the crew chief in the door will say, you know, target in sight, forward 30. You know, you come in, you start listening to them, they talk you in, and then when you get over the target, the crew chief and the prize masters will look down, identify the landing area, kick the ropes, and that guy is pretty much in charge until he's done doing his thing. You know, I'm listening to him. He's like, you know, come left, come right, come up, come down, you know, stop stick, you know, whatever is going on.
And they have a lot of responsibility in the back, you know, and, you know, get the utmost respect for those guys, especially because they got no control of the aircraft, ultimately, because I do have the ultimate responsibility in what happens, and they're going with me wherever I go.
I mean, I would imagine that relationship has to be pretty tight Yeah. With a lot of mutual respect.
And if there's not, there can be a problem. So when I was in the conventional unit in Savannah, I had a friend, he had a terrible relationship with all the crew chiefs. Like, he just looked down on them, you know? And no matter who talked to him, he just he treated them like crap. And they hated flying with him.
And we were coming back from California 1 time, we were getting gas and we taxied in and in the way a Chinook drives on the ground is you get a little steering wheel by your back like this, and 1 of the wheels has a power steering actuator and the aircraft will drive like a car. Right? On the ground. And when you come into a parking area at an airport, depending on if you're close to airplanes or a hangar, you know, buildings, light poles, that kind of stuff, it's very important for the crew chief to say, sir we're close to this. Let me dismount, and somebody will get out, and they'll look at the rotor tips and make sure you are not gonna hit whatever it is.
Right? The crew chief will always suggest that. I mean the pilot might say, hey this is gonna be tight, can you get out? Crew chief will do it, but in this case the crew chiefs knew he was too tight, did not offer to get out, and let him drive the aircraft right into a hangar. Right?
Now, everybody was okay. The aircraft was severely damaged. The hangar was damaged. The, accident board gets involved, the collateral board, and they find that the pilot had created such an, a toxic relationship with the crew that they let him damage the aircraft on purpose. If they didn't make him damage on purpose, they let it happen.
And so that's the extreme, and I've never seen that like in the 160th. The 160th is so professional that, then I really I do miss it. You know, I don't miss flying so much. I miss the people. You don't miss flying?
Not in the way you'd think. I mean every once in a while I'll cross the George Washington Bridge in New York city, and it's the same view I would get when I was flying at West Point and come down the river, and on a nice day I kind of like, I kind of miss flying. What I really miss is the people and the mission, You know? As I like to say, you know, taking a bunch of pipe swingers to a bad guy's front door, that's rewarding. You know?
I like doing that. All bad. All bad.
What's the longest amount of time you've been paired with a with a crew chief?
A couple of months. Probably, 8 months.
That's it. Yeah. Oh, shit.
So what'll happen is you'll go on a deployment, like, say, overseas. Right? When you're back in the states, you just get who you get. Right? Unless you're on a trip, like, you know, going out the mountains or something Okay.
Whatever the duration of that trip is. But when you go to combat, you get assigned a pilot, your co pilot, and your crew in an aircraft, an air frame. Right? And however that deployment is, it might be a 60 day deployment, it might be a year long deployment, you're with that crew and that aircraft the entire time.
Okay.
Yeah. So it's, you know, so the first couple of flights can be rough, you know, as you're feeling each other out. Like I flew because I was the, what's called an SIP, the standardization instructor pilot. So I was essentially the chief pilot for Chinooks and the 160. And I would fly with the different battalions.
Right? Because I had to fly, and the idea was to always be evaluating them to make sure they are holding the standard. You know, so if you're out at, you know, Savannah, are you doing things the same way as you're doing at Campbell? Because you better be, That's the standardization program. That way the customer knows he's getting the same support every single time.
Right? So I would deploy with them as well. And, so I go with this 3rd tank crew, we got g models now, which is the latest version of the aircraft, and we're at a FARP, forward arming and refueling point, and we're gonna, it's in Asadabad, Afghanistan. We're gonna we're gonna come in, we're gonna hover up to the point, we're gonna set down next to it, and we're gonna unplug a hose, plug it into the aircraft while we're running, and take gas. It's called hot fuel.
So we come in, I'm at a 10 foot hover, and cruci says, alright sir, come straight down. I come straight down. He goes, sir can you move pick it up again? Sure. I pick it up.
He goes move forward 3. Move 3. He's, like, alright. Go ahead and set it straight down. So I set it straight down.
He's, like, sir, can you pick it up again? I'm, like, what the hell? He's, like, I'm sorry. Everybody always drifts forward when they descend. You actually come straight down.
And I'm like, that's what they're supposed to be doing, but, you know, I'm a high I'm I am the chief, Shanok Bai. I should be the best, or of the best. I have peers obviously, but I'm good. You know? And these guys had never flown with me before, and they were just anticipating that I would drift forward like all other guys did.
And so, as time went by, they just compensate, you know, for how I fly.
Gotcha.
And so, maybe I don't come straight down. Maybe I am the drift guy, you know, I drift forward as I come down. They just compensate for that. They just bring you in 3 feet short. Have you come down?
They know you're gonna drift in, and you land. So there's that relation that habitual relationship and that, you know, understanding each other's capabilities. Gotcha. You know, very very important. Gotcha.
Alright. Let's get back to training. Yeah. So I don't where were we?
Where were we in training? So we were doing green platoon,
being What is green platoon?
Oh, so green platoon is where it's the training platoon for the 1 sixtieth. Okay. So we have green team and, OTC, you know, for the other other, special mission units. And it came about because so at at the 1 sixtieth compound is a wall, a memorial wall with a lot of names on it. I don't know the number, I should.
Most of the early days, 19 eighties, early eighties, those are all training deaths for the most part.
Yeah.
Because they're developing tactics, techniques, and procedures that the army later adopted. You know, how to use, like, air night vision goggles, what are the limitations, when should you, when shouldn't you, kind of thing. And those those names are are on the wall, you know, and, so there was, there was too many in 1 year. I can't remember which year it was, and they, congress shut down the unit. Right?
They're like, you guys are killing people like every week, you know, kind of thing. And, they did a blue ribbon panel that evaluated the 1 60th the way it worked, and they said, you know the problem is not only are you developing new tactics and techniques, but you're training new guys that are coming into the unit. Right? So they said, you've got to have a dedicated part of your unit that only does training for the new guys, or if people are transitioning new equipment, that's what they'll do. And so they created green patoon, and it was a, you know, a godsend.
It really is an amazing, you know, whoever really thought that through, you did a good job, you know, way back when. But that's what it's for.
Right on. So so it's an 8 month?
It's different for every airframe. It takes 8 months to get a Chinook guy through.
Okay.
So that's, basic skills, you know, hand to hand shooting, that kind of stuff. Basic nav or bnav. That's where you learn to to fly and navigate in the little bird, to do things like a like a night stalker, and then you go to your specific aircraft. So even if you're a Chinook guy, and you end up in Chinooks, there's so much expansion of what the aircraft can do because of the additional equipment that's embedded into the airframe. Right?
And, you have to learn how to use all of that stuff, and how to compensate when it doesn't work.
So there's so okay. So there so you have totally different aircraft that's specific for 1 60th. Yeah. What would be some of the things that are different between a conventional 47 versus a TF 1 6?
So, when I talked earlier about the MH sixes or the, MH 47, so army aircraft are designated by what they do. Right? C h, c h 47. Right? Cargo helicopter, model 47, version delta.
Right? In this case, it's modified helicopter 47, you know, echo at that time. And, some of the equipment that's diff well, big differences is the, the fuel tanks on on the special ops version, the MH, is twice the capacity. So instead of a 1000 gallons, you're carrying 2,000 gallons. There's internal fuel tanks that can fit inside that are crash worthy and ballistically tolerant.
There is an air refueling probe that sticks out the front. Think if you look on the on the front of my book there, you get this big pipe that sticks out the front. You can fly up behind it, Air Force, C 130. They drag a hose out the back while you're flying, and it's got this donut shaped parachute that you plug into and get gas in the air, so you have to learn all that. The crew chiefs have to learn gunnery, so you got these m134 minuteiguns, 762, 6 barrel Gatling gun, shoots 4,000 rounds a minute.
They have to learn that, how to how to do it, how to deal with malfunctions. You've got terrain following radar, which is key. After 911 without that, we could not have done even half, even fraction of what we did in those infills getting the, you know, the horse soldiers and other greenbrae teams in the s the OGA teams. Because every SF team had to be brought in to an OGA, the team that was there the day before or 2 days before. So that that's what all this equipment does.
And everything, is a TV screen. There's there's 4 TV screens and an echo, and there's 5 in a in a golf, and those 5 are splittable, like you can you can divide them up, so there's really 10 displays. And you have to learn how to use those and when to use them. Flying the helicopter itself is pretty much the same.
Okay.
But using all of the tools of the trade, so you have to learn, number 1, make sure you can fly the aircraft okay, the way we want you to, interact with the crew because you're also training the enlisted crew, Then we go into the special mission tasks, like terrain falling radar. We go to Knoxville, fly in the mountains, in the dark. The pilot will flip his MBGs up, so he can't really see out the window. It's no moon out, it's dark, and he's following the the terrain following radar cues, and the other pilot, as a safety pilot, if you will, the instructor, has his goggles down, so if if the guy misinterprets the cues and is gonna fly into something, you know, he can just take the controls. I have the controls.
It's just that simple. Gotcha. I have the controls. And then you say what what's wrong? But you get that, air refueling, gotta teach the guy how to do that, that's high adventure sometimes.
And so, once they learn to do the aircraft, the equipment, now we have to learn how to utilize it in the environment. And the cool thing with the 1 sixtieth is that that a conventional unit doesn't do, is we've got money for TDY. Right? So you take the students from Campbell, like so we go to Knoxville for the the train flight, then you, you know, wherever the tankers are you're gonna go there for the air refueling. So sometimes the air force or the marines will send a tanker to us, and sometimes you got to go to them, which might be Dallas or, in the Houston area, that kind of stuff.
Or you travel somewhere and they'll come, you know, you hit a tanker en route. And then once you've done those things, you go Desert Mountain, we go to Albuquerque, and you you're out there for like 3 weeks learning to just land in the dust for real, and then learn how to fly in the mountains, power management, how to how to read the wind in the mountains, and how to come in from a certain grade. It's like parachute jumping, you have to learn, you know, how to land in a in a certain way, and then, everything we did before we did it in the aircraft, we did it in the flight simulator, which was very realistic. Right? So you would teach them how to do, the hover page, right?
So there's this on the little TV screen, there's a little video game you play, there's a a crosshair in the middle, there's a open circle and a line, and you try to keep the open circle over the crosshairs. And if you're moving, that line gets longer in the direction of movement. Right? And so you've got to look at that and interpret it to keep the aircraft in whatever, let's say a stationary hover, you gotta keep all of those little cues on top of that little crosshair, So you can't see out the window at all, you're either in the dust and snow, whatever it is, and you you you move the the cyclic stick to keep that where it is like a little little video game. And then the crew chief might be able to see straight down.