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

Episode Date: December 9, 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. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://shopify.com/srs https://helixsleep.com/srs https://betterhelp.com/srs https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Alan C. Mack Links: Website - https://alancmack.com Book - https://alancmack.com/razor-03-a-night-stalkers-wars X - https://x.com/alancmack2015 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/alancmack2015 Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/AlanCMackAuthor LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-c-mack Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Nightstalker TF 160. Man, I've been wanting to get one of you guys for a long time. And then we connected what about two years ago? About a year and a half. A year and a half ago, and then for whatever reason,

the conversation kind of fell off. But now you're here, and man, I'm pumped. And glad to be. We've had a ton of requests for TF160th guys, so thank you for making the trip. Glad to be here, that's all I can say but yeah, so everybody Starts off with an intro so man you've been a part of like so much history High profile missions and the GWOD. 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 very apparent. We have a lot of mutual friends. That's like how blown up, hey, you gotta get this guy on the show. But I just, I can't wait to get another perspective and I want to dig into your training and all that stuff

and get the life of a night stalker documented but Quick rundown of your intro. You've served more than 35 years 17 of which were served in Army Special Operations as a combat and instructor pilot special operations as a combat and instructor pilot entrusted with the United States Military Academy flight detachment at West Point, New York, logged more than 6,700 flying hours, 3,200 with night vision goggles. Taken part in Operation Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and was a major factor in the global war on terror, flew MH-47s while assigned to 160th

Soar, the Army's only special operations aviation regiment. Your crew was one of the first into Afghanistan and the first into Mazar Sharif as part of America's response to the attacks on 9-11. Highly decorated, receiving the Legion of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Star medals, three Meritorious Service medals, ten Air medals, one with Valor, Combat Action Badge, and the Army Broken Wing Award. Now you serve your local government as Deputy Commissioner of Emergency Services for Orange County, New York. You're the author of Razor 03, A Night Stalker's Wars. And you have another book coming out,

from my understanding, from where you spoke at breakfast. Do you have a title for that one yet? The working title is Chinooks in the Dark, and I'm not sure what the subtitle is. Nice. And you're a husband, a father, a stepdad, and a grandfather, and a man of faith. And a pet parent.

And a pet parent. What kind of pet? He's a Jacobi, 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 this stuff man, but horse soldier infill

Oda 595 Shot down during operation and a conda you're on the rescue up for Marcus Luttrell's lone survivor also known as for military folks operation Red Wing and Tons more but man just to we got a lot to talk about man So before we get to in the weeds though, everybody gets a gift. Maybe this is the only reason you're here. I don't know. But, 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 did trade you a book a year and a half ago for some of these and I am glad, that's why I came down here, it was just for the gummies. You did. They're still legal in all 50 states and they're still made here in the USA USA And then those are just some stickers for whatever but And you know

like any Good house guests, you know, I got to bring a you know housewarming gift I don't have gummies, but but I've got is a coin And that It's a head that made when the book came out the front of that's an attitude indicator because I believe everything in life is about attitude and That's a positive attitude by the way there then thank you. That'll go Great right there. Cool.

With all the coins. Thank you, man, I appreciate that. And one last thing. So before we get in the interview, I have a Patreon account. They're our top supporters. They've been with us since the beginning. They're the reason I get to do this

and you get to be here. And part of the thing that I promised them is they get the opportunity to ask a guest a question. And so this is from Steven Casey. And this, they know about you. So this won't make sense to a lot of people until later on in the interview, but I thought it was a good question.

How did you gain the perspective to serve your family while on service? And what helped you do that? That's actually a tough question. You know, family's always been a big part of my life. And as we get into the interview, you'll find out that, you know, it wasn't always the priority

and I had to make some adjustments to that and part of what made us stronger, especially my relationship with my sons, was spending time together and prioritizing that for sure. But sometimes the job took priority over even that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

How did you find a way? What was your cue? You know, really it was my wife. So she had her own problems, but she made sure that my sons and I had a good relationship. So whether it was, now remember, when my kids were young, there was no internet to speak of,

unless you were on AOL or CompuServe, so it wasn't like just pulling your phone out. So she would shove us out the door and say, it's like you do to your kids, but she included me in it, was go spend time with your boys. And we would just go do whatever we felt like doing, whether it was taking the boat out or hiking or, 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 son still pretty close? Very close, yeah. That's good to hear, man. Yeah. That's good to hear. Well, you ready to dig in?

I'm ready, let's go. All right, man. so we're gonna do the typical military life story. And so we'll go through childhood, get into your military career, get into transition stuff, and then that'll be it. All right. But, so where did you grow up?

So I was born in New Hampshire, coastal New Hampshire, so I grew up in Portsmouth, which is right by the Navy base there, there's a submarine base right on the end of the river. And I like to consider myself sort of a free-range teenager at the time, you know? Because once again, there's no internet, no cell phones. So, you know, my parents would open the door,

I'd go out with my friends, we'd jump on our 10 speeds and ride, I think we had a range of operations about 20 miles. And we'd go to the beach, we'd go to 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, nothing bad.

He was not a bad kid by any means. Never got in trouble. Nothing bad. But yeah, we'd go to toilet paper houses, that kind of thing. That was the extent of our 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 going to go out in a ball of flame, you know, like instantly, then you're asleep in your favorite chair. Not a bad way to go. Yeah, my mother's still up in New Hampshire. She's a local artist.

She paints, does some wonderful work. My brother's up there. And that's kind of the extent of my family, really. My grandparents are all gone. Right on. What kind of stuff were you into as a kid? Well, really high school's the first I could think of something I could talk about and that's really cross country and track were my big things, right? So I

did cross country in the fall, winter track, which in New England you're doing indoors, right? We did that at the University of New Hampshire and then in the spring, you had spring track. And I was generally a miler. Wasn't very fast, I ran about 4.45, 4.40 for a mile. And- You don't think 4.45 is a fast mile? Well, there were guys that were way faster than me, so that's pretty good. And then I tried my hand at the hurdles, but I really didn't have the speed in the short term,

so I could do like the 330 intermediates, which is a long grueling race. But at the very end, when I was a senior, I trained for the decathalon. And I learned to pole vault for the discus, stuff like that. And I actually jumped like 12 feet, something like that, in my training jumps, and the coach is looking at me like,

I think we missed you in some events. And I was like, I don't know. But it was a lot of fun. Life revolved around my friends in track. Good childhood, it sounds like. Yeah, yeah, it was good. What got you interested in flying? So believe it or not, the Vietnam War was going on, right?

And so I must have been six, seven years old or so, and it was on the evening news, right? You didn't have the 24 hour news cycle, you had the five o'clock news, 10 o'clock news, or whatever it was, depending on your time zone, and they always had Hueys zipping across the screen. And I was like, I want to do that. Remember the TV Guide when you were a kid?

You had the little paper magazine with what's on TV. And in it was an insert for the Army recruiting. So I filled it out and I sent it in. I want to be a pilot and I must have been 10, maybe 11. And the recruiter sends me a handwritten letter back, a bag full of stickers and stuff like that and he's like, hey look, I see by your birthday, you're not quite old enough to talk to me,

but keep that thought alive and call me back when you're 18. Fast forward a number of years, I'm in high school, I'd forgotten about the army thing. My senior year, I'm planning on following on to college in New Hampshire, and I've got a guy, he's gonna be a roommate, the whole thing, and then I start thinking, you know,

this is in the fall of 1980, and I'm thinking, if I go to school, I'm just going to party, you know? I'm not going to study. You know, I wasn't a bad student, but I wasn't a good student. You know what I mean? I just never did my homework kind of thing. I knew I should, but I didn't.

And I knew that college would be the same thing. So I'm worried about what I'm going to do, and another friend had just been be the same thing. So I'm worried about what I'm going to do, and another friend had just been to the Army recruiter, and he comes in, oh, is it the Army can do all this stuff? You can go to Germany, 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 BLE Can Be commercials? Oh yeah. Well, there's like two, even three of them that helicopters are involved in. And one of them is like a W-1, the warrant officer ranks are one through five now. And he's in a Cobra helicopter zipping around, and they finish up, and the senior guy's like,

not bad for a rookie. 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, whoa, hold on now. I saw it on TV You can go from high school to flight school and he's like pump the brakes turbo. It doesn't really work like that And he's like, you know, you got something going for you for that to happen, you know, and I was like well like what? He's tell you what?

Why don't you join the Army in aviation, like an aircraft mechanic, do two, three years, learn the culture, the lingo, learn about the aircraft, all that kind of stuff, and then put it for flight school, and it's much easier to get in. Now, that statement is twofold. One, the recruiter doesn't get credit

for officer candidates at all, right? So even if he got 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 Hueys, Cobras, 58s, and turns out it was good advice. You know, and I did nine years. I reached the rank of Staff Sergeant, E6, in the Army. and it turns out it was good advice. I did nine years, I reached the rank of staff sergeant,

E-6, in the Army. I was in Germany, West Germany at the time, and I decided I was going to get out of the Army, but I really wanted to fly. So I printed a packet. Yep. So I had two kids, little kids, and my wife, Linda at the time,

was a medical assistant. They're just going to send me back to Fort Bliss, El Paso, which I didn't want to do. So I said, you know what? Why don't we get out? But I'll put in for flight school first. If I get picked up, we stay, if not, we get out. And so I got picked up, which was amazing.

So I did almost four years in West Germany and off to Fort Rucker, Alabama. But that's how I got interested really was the Be All You Can Be commercials and the evening news. Be all you can be commercials and the evening news. What took you so long to, I mean if you joined to fly, why did it take you nine years to put your package in? Because, so my first assignment was to South Korea, which is a whole other story we might get into later

because that was, a military junta ran it then. It wasn't a democracy. And I went back many years later, and it was a big improvement. But, so a year on a company there, I go to Fort Bliss, Texas, where I meet my future-to-be wife, Linda. Do three, three and a half years there,

and then go to Germany on a three-year accompanied assignment. So we get there, have our two sons, and now the timing is that, and then flight school's almost a year long, so I count that in the nine years, and that's why. Right on, right on. Did you know what you wanted to fly

when you put the package in? I wanted to fly Hueys. Hueys. Because what I wanted to do was assault, right? Think of, you know, back then it was the Air Cav, doing the big, big 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 58, and there were only six Blackhawks slots. So that's how new the Blackhawks were, showing my age. So I wanted to fly Hueys.

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

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

but you're not really doing assault work. And it's an advanced aircraft. So it's considered a reward. So if you think of like that Vietnam timeframe, these guys on their second tour, so about the time I'm in flight school, these guys are all reaching 60, 65 years old, and they're all retiring in droves, right?

So it's very senior heavy rank, and the Army realized they had to generate from the bottom up, so they're going to take W1s, right? And once again again you go W01 CW 2 CW 3 CW 4 and now CW 5 which is a relatively new rank But at the time it was CW 4 was the senior 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 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. And the only way to do that, the metric that they have is grade point average, right? So, you know, I have to be- Like high school grade point? No, no, flight school.

Flight school grade point average. So you get graded on your academics, your participation, your flying. Each flight gets a grade slip with a numerical grade. And they end up with this grade point average. There was a rumor, and it was sort of true, it depended on the class, was that if you were in the top five of the class,

and there's 72 of us, but if you're in the top five, when it got to aircraft assignments, you could pick what you wanted. So if you wanted to pick what you wanted, you wanted to be in the top five guys. So there were a bunch of us that were, there were probably 10 of us that were all within hundreds of a point, 98.2, 98.3, you know, that kind of thing.

And we're competing, right? And every time you get your exams back, you're like, oh man, that guy, he got like 0.1 above me, you know, he just moved up. And so it turned out that I was number one in the class. And a good story here about never quitting is that one of the guys I was competing with, if you will, when the assignments came out, they did not give us choice.

And we all got shoved off in Hueys, all us top guys, and he got mad and he, I wouldn't say he quit, but he stopped trying. Right, so he studied enough, he did what he had to do, but he quit, he dropped from being a 98 point something to 88 point something, right? So instead of going from an A, he went to a B kind of thing. And then toward the end, what I just talked about,

the Chinook thing, the Army said, okay, we're gonna do two slots from your class, get Chinooks, right? So two pilots will get Chinooks. And we're going to take the number one and two guy. And I happened to be number one, and my stick buddy was number two, and this guy probably would have been one or two had he kept going, but he gave up.

And now he's like throwing stuff around the classroom. He's like, damn it, I shouldn't have quit, you know? And it's like, good point, buddy. And I remember to this day, I use that lesson on my kids and tell them, it's like, don't get mad you didn't get the job you wanted. Don't get mad that you didn't get this or that. Things always work out, they just do.

Don't give up. So you wanted a Chinook. I didn't. I was actually mad that I got it. Really? Yeah, because remember I said I wanted to be in assault work, right? And I'm like, shanuck, that's bull.

It's going to be like flying from airport to airport, that's going to suck. And the instructors, all retired warrant officers, all the other guys, they're like, they slap me in the back of the head, right? They're like, you idiot, shut your mouth and take the slot, right? And I'm like, but I want to fly Hueys. And they're like, Hueys are going away. Trust me. Take the Chinook, right? Are you tired of scrolling through social media and binge watching TV? There's a better way to

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or financial professional before making an investment decision. So I did, you know, grudgingly. And as soon as I flew that thing, I may vary, consult with your tax attorney or financial professional before making an investment decision. So I did, grudgingly. And as soon as I flew that thing, I was like, this is amazing. It's one of the fastest helicopters on the planet, let alone in the US Army. It's very powerful and it's no harder to fly than a Huey. But there's a whole now conversation on that. But that's how I ended up flying Chinooks,

learned on Hueys, transitioned into CH-47 Deltas just before Desert Shield. And then I flew in there, and then I ended up instructing in those, and then we get into the 160th. Wow, wow. Let's go to, I mean, so what was it like for you walking into flight school? So you start out.

You had your dream. So it's different now, but at the time, what you did is you first went to walk school, Warrant Officer Candidate School, and that was like eight weeks of, we start out with, you did Hell Week, we had like Hell Day, and it was tough. And I remember the little head game they played was,

they came in, you're beat to hell, and they'd say, okay, somebody yells in the room, you know, 20%, got it. And then like, we just got off the phone with the secretary of the army, you know, we have to lose 20% of you because of budget cuts. So we're just gonna do hell day every to lose 20% of you because of budget cuts. So we're just going to do hell day every day until 20% of you quit, right?

And I'm like, well, I'm not quitting. You're going to have to throw me out of here. And there were guys, there was like one guy who got up and walked out, so it worked. I was like, all right, he didn't want to be here. What does hell day consist of? It's like crawling through the mud pits and push-ups and mountain climbers and just burning you out physically.

Just a beat down. Yeah, it's a beat down. And it is not pleasant, to say the least, especially for Army aviators or guys that want to be. And these guys, you know, the TAC officers are walking around, just like the guys at Budge, except back then, you're smoking a cigarette. Come on, let's go upstairs, we'll get some donuts

and some coffee, it's warm, it's comfortable, you get a shower, we'll just put you on your way. Look, you're an E7, the guys at E7s are, it's like, you're an E7, you had a good life, why do you want to do this? Yeah, right, screw it, I quit. And guys would just do that. And there were, I don't know, four or five guys quit during it and that one guy in the meeting.

And they do that to you, not to that extent, but for the next eight weeks, because you're not flying. So you're doing what we call cubing, right? So you have a cubicle, you have your bunk, a desk, a locker, and every morning when you get up, you have 10 minutes to have your bunk with a white collar on it, your coat hangers to be exact. You know the deal, like any NCO school you've been to.

And you get outside, obviously you're not fast enough, you're not straight enough, whatever, they 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 a little bit of hazing really but you know it kind of it does go to show who army warrant officers are In my age group, you know why I wear such assholes but it does go to show who Army Warrant Officers are

in my age group, why I wear such assholes. But anyway, so you do that, and then when you're done, you move on to, so that's A company, then you move on to B company, and that's primary flight, right, which is where you learn to fly. So, 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 roll right through. You might go from A company to B company and roll right into C company, you know, seven months later. Or you could have, you could have two weeks of rain that you can't fly in or something, and it just sets you back. Well, what that does is that ripple effect

is it sets back all the other classes. So in the meantime, while you're waiting to get to flight, you're polishing brass and you're doing just things to keep you busy, paint rocks, that kind of stuff. Or you might be working at one of the facilities on post, you know, as a, like a, think of like a detailer, you know, giving you like a temporary assignment.

Like I actually worked at the museum for a couple of weeks, which was pretty good, because I was an aircraft mechanic, I helped them with some of the displays, you know, getting the, you know, as they were setting them up. But that's how you get into the flying. And then when you're in.

Just real quick, how long does it take, let's say there's no weather delays or anything, how long does it take from day one of flight school before you're in the air maneuvering a helicopter? I'd say six weeks, maybe seven. Six weeks? Yeah. That's quick.

Yeah, that's if everything rolls right along. And you start out in primary learning to fly. Right now, just before I got there, they switched over, the Army switched over from the TH-55, which was a little two-seater, a little bug looking thing that it was just you and your instructor, and when you picked up to a hover, when you pull power, the nose wants to go to the right

and you have to give it left pedal to keep it in heading. And in a modern helicopter, the engines keep pace with the rotors, and back then in this thing, you had to control the throttle at the same time, so it was an additional thing. I got lucky in that it went away and they had just transitioned into Hueys

as the primary trainer, which I won't fly anyway. So I get into this thing and they take you out to the stage field, there's Hueys all over the place, just flying around, hovering, doing their thing, and the instructor's like, all right, here's what you do, right? You have the controls, I have the controls.

And then you just, you go off in go off and whatever, 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's flying, you're in the back. And when you're flying, he's in the back, right? So not only are you there for your flight period,

but you're in the back going up and down and left and right. And just your inner ear is getting all discombobulated. So at night when you went to bed, it's like being on a ship 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 the first person in the class learns to hover.

He comes back and he's like, I found the hover button, which means you can just maintain a stationary, three foot hover, you don't have to drift in. And then as individuals in the class learn, it takes about five hours really to learn to hover. So in each flight period is about an hour and a half. So it takes a couple of flights.

And 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 don't know how to pilot, right? And then you just, one day you find yourself hovering. You know, they're like, hey, you have the controls, I have the controls. Hey, you're hovering.

Wow, I'm hovering, right? And once you learn, it's like riding a bike, you don't forget. And so that transitions into traffic pattern flight. So you're going up and around the pattern, you're coming in, you're landing, they'll say, you know. So literally the first thing you do is just try to learn how to hover.

For like, I don't know, three, four days, five days maybe if you're late. How many helicopters are up at once trying to hover? 20. Oh my gosh. It's insane. You could go there. That has to look hilarious.

Every stage field has a set of bleachers, right? And people, locals, would just pull up, there was no fences, you just pull up, get on the bleacher, your hot cocoa, whatever, depending on the time of year, and iced tea, and just watch the students going nuts. And then what happens though, with the traffic pattern and stuff, is you start including emergency procedures.

Now these are, in the Huey, hydraulics out, so the aircraft's very difficult to fly, and you have to kind of run it on to land. You have tail rotor malfunctions, where you have to control the yaw of the aircraft as you're coming in. As you change power you have to adjust the throttle to keep the nose straight as you touch down. Auto rotations, right? So it's a single-engine aircraft, the Huey. So the instructor will roll the throttle off on you. You're just flying along, you know, and he rolls the throttle off to

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

But you want to keep it at 100%, because when you get to the bottom, last like 75 feet, you have flair. Now you're pulling the power, you put the pitch in the blades, and you're using one chance to cushion that baby on. And we call them crash bangs, right? You're doing that all day long, right?

And then eventually they deem you safe enough to solo, right? So back in the, in the TH55, you really did solo, it was just you. Now you're going out with your stick buddy and he ain't been saving you, right? So you're still solo but you have somebody next to you in case you die, he'll go with you. But yeah, so you solo, you do a couple of traffic patterns.

I think it was five traffic patterns by yourself and the instructor gets back in and you're like, all right, you soloed. The last guy to solo of the class is like, there was a name for it, I can't remember, but you had to ride, we had this ceremony, it was like pitchers of beer and everybody lined in front of the building,

the barracks, you know? And it looked like a stage field, the markings were like painted on, just as if it were a stage field. And that guy would ride a thing called the solo cycle. So it was a bicycle that somebody had engineered, it had rotor blades. And when you drove it, when you pedaled,

the blades spun, right? And you had to ride this bicycle. I don't have a picture of that anymore. And I wish I did. 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 on so you could see who, you know, a real pilot now, sort of, you know, within the context of flight school. 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, where you're trying to make the map meet the terrain because you get lost and it's like, oh there's a stream over there. No wait, that's a stream and you move,

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 the Cobras come in and the Hueys, and it's a big, they call it an Avtac, I don't remember what that stood for, but it was a big, big event, it was really cool.

And then you moved into nights. What's the, I mean, what's the field exercise? What's the? It was like, we all flew out to an assembly area, right? And we went in and got a briefing from the cadre playing the mission. So it was 20 Hueys flying in one big ass formation, like something out of Apocalypse Now.

And the Cobras would roll in and do the gun runs and the OH-58s would 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-1s yet, we're still walks, we're not actually candidates. And the instructors are obviously having fun because they're showing off, their students can do this and that, and it was a lot of fun.

I don't think they do that anymore. It's probably very risky when you think about what they were doing. All these aircraft in one little area synchronized. I mean, this is advanced stuff. And they allowed us to do that. How far into training is that? That's several months in.

That's got to be five, six months in. Okay. 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, Anvis fives, or PVS fives, whatever they were. And they used to be like a, like, Are you talking about the mono? No, no, they're binoculars,

but they are like a rectangle. Oh, these are like the thing that the eyeglass doctor used. Put them on your face, right? Like a diving mask. Think of a diving mask where it's just got toilet paper tubes sticking out of it, right? And everything diving mask. Think of a diving mask where it's just got toilet paper tubes sticking out of it, right, and everything else is black. That's what they started with, and I got there,

somebody in the Army had figured out that if you took a saw, you know, and you cut one half of the MBG away, the plastic housing, turned it upside down, you could stick the lip of it without the foam up into your helmet where the visor is, and then with surgical tubing, you wrapped the surgical tubing around in Velcro and you sucked this thing to your head, right?

And you had to have a weight bag, because it's way out here like this, and you had to, when you did it on a rotation, when you drop the power, the engines split off, like the rotor and the engine split, the needles. But if it doesn't, you're going to fall out of the sky. So you have to make sure it happens because sometimes it doesn't.

Right, and so. Wait, what do you mean? So there's two big needles, right? There's a. Big needles? Needles, like gauges, right? Okay. And so one of them is the rotor, and one of them is the engine.

Okay. So whenever you pull or reduce power, they should work together, right? So that means the engine is driving the rotors, which is good. But if for some reason there's a clutch, it's called a sprag clutch, it's a one way clutch, and if the engine rolls off, it's supposed to free wheel,

allowing the rotors to spin. So you should have a split in the needle. So if you drop the power, roll the throttles off, it should split, right? But if you don't get a split, that means you've got a clutch failure, and you've got to recover because you're not gonna survive if you don't do something about it.

So you've got to focus one tube inside of the instruments while the other one's outside and determine that okay that's good then you can focus it back out and then finish the maneuver. It was insane, right? The Army at the time was going, we own the night. We learned we kind of were renting it. We don't really own it yet. But there was no NVG lighting in the cockpit.

It was red lighting. And so you had to turn off all the lights. So what we did is we had these little tiny chemlights. They looked like maybe an inch, inch and a half long. You'd break those and you'd tape them into place over key instruments. And you had what was called blind cockpit drill. So every switch in the cockpit you had to be able to find

without looking at it, because you've got these things on your face. And so you do that, and then you go do terrain flight that way, and terrain flight navigation, and so you're doing this whole progression. And what's interesting is the students from my timeframe were kind of like the first ones to do this,

not literally the first, but that first year. And so when you get to your unit, all the old guys don't want to do it. Like they're qualified to do it, but they're not proficient at it, and they don't want to do it, right? And that's the whole story I'll get into with Desert Shield, Desert Storm.

But so that's how flight school kind of get into with Desert Shield, Desert Storm. But, so that's how flight school kinda 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 at, you know, whatever safe altitude was, 300 feet, something like that. You knew how tall the tallest obstacle was,

and you flew at least 200 feet higher than that. And you'd fly around, and this is what the guys in Vietnam used to do. You'd fly in the dark without being able to see. You'd get to your fix or maybe a Sandy would put a rocket down for you and you'd go, ah, that's the LZ, right? And you'd go in there with a white searchlight on.

And it can be tough. And we did stuff without the searchlight and they'd have chemlights in the LZ or maybe strobe lights or something like that. And as you came in on your approach, if you got any kind of blinking, that meant there was foliage between you and the object and you would hold off on the descent until you could see it again and you go in.

It's funny because that's kind of a lost art now with everybody being so used to goggles. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. And that finishes up Flight School. What did you find to be the most challenging portion of Flight School?

Night vision hovering. Because you had to maintain a three foot hover night vision hovering, because you had to maintain a three foot hover, and you did that, you didn't have a radar altimeter, a digital readout in the cockpit. You looked out through the chin bubble or the side door, and if you saw individual blades of grass, like it would be sort of fuzzy, which meant you were higher than three feet,

and you wanted to get down just enough so the individual blades of grass stood out and that's like three 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. 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 well, Saudi's got those smooth Beautiful dunes like you see on Lawrence of Arabia in Iraq It's kind of you know flattish with some. 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 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 tough. Interesting.

Yeah. But I found the hardest part of that was the, they call it the OGE 360 hover. So you get an out of ground effect, so it's about 80 feet, 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 the aircraft will pivot, and you gotta start on one heading, end on that heading,

and be at the exact same altitude 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 one. 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 like a three day process. First thing 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 the next day, you got pinned, your bars, right? And then the next day, they did a wing ceremony, you got your wings, right? So they wanted to emphasize, you were a soldier,

an officer, and a pilot, you know? The rest of us were like, no, we're pilots. But that's what the Army wanted us to be, you know? Yeah, how did it feel for you? I mean, you wanted to fly since, but I think you said six years old. Yeah. You put your package into enlist as a pilot at age 10, and now you're graduating honor grad.

It was awesome. I loved it. And then I left that, so two weeks later I was in the Chinook transition, and I learned how to fly a Chinook. That was six to eight weeks. I mean, how hard is it to learn from, to go from a Huey to a Chinook? It wasn't that hard.

Like flying, so, you know, we joke about the Chinook being the double-headed dumpster, right? It's like a dumpster with two palm trees having a fight, or a Greyhound bus,hound bus kind of thing. Actually the SEALs used to call us the black school bus of death when we were going to the X. But even though the aerodynamics are different, I'm not going to go into it here

because it's fairly complex 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 does what it does, right? And so all you're really doing in that six to eight weeks is learning the emergency procedures for the aircraft. Okay.

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

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

how to do sling loads. And then you do nights there as well with the Chinooks, doing external loads, you have to learn how to do sling loads. And it was fun. What's the first thing you noticed maneuverability-wise that was different from the Huey to the 47? I can tell you that the 47 is, it surprised me. And remember I said I didn't want Chinooks, and then when I flew it the first time or two, it was like, hey, this is awesome,

because it's just as maneuverable. It has all the same aerodynamic limitations, and it's faster and stronger. We routinely outraced Cobras and Apaches coming back at the end of the day. They'd be like, we'd converge on the corridor that brought us to the home stage field, and we just clicked the power a little bit

with your thumb and the cyclic could move forward and the aircraft could just accelerate and just leave them in the dust. The Apaches couldn't keep up, the Cobras couldn't keep up, and they always thought they were fast. So it was fun. My instructor was like, speed up. I'm like, wow, they're right,

they're kind of in front of us. Nah, speed up. He liked showing that. Very cool. So were you one of the first 47 pilots in the Army? No, one of the first W-1s to fly Chinooks. So. How long had they been around?

W-1s? Chinooks. Oh, Chinooks. They, I want to say 1958 for the A model, and that's what the 101st Airborne was originally the 11th air assault test, right? And what they had to do is prove the air assault concept, air mobility, was a feasible concept.

And they needed the Shnook to make that happen. So in order to move, 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 needed the Chinook. You needed the actual capability of the Chinook, which is funny, because the A model, a Blackhawk today can lift more than an A model Chinook. So you could have done the 101st with Blackhawks had they existed 30 years earlier. Yeah, so there was a poster that Boeing put out when the Delta model came out, right? So there's A, B, C, D, there's an F and a G.

And it said, 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 transmission, the drivetrain, the avionics, you know, so all of the computers and the electronics, you know, just improved with each version. So like a D model, which is what I flew in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, was about 18.5 a copy, 18 million a copy.

And when I flew the G model, which was the last version I flew, those were 62 million a piece. That's more than a fighter jet, you know, like an F-16. And it's because of the advanced capabilities, is all I can say. Do you think that being a flight mechanic helped you with flight school? Oh yeah, especially because I worked on Hueys.

So the reason I had such a high grade point average I think is because when my peers had to study aircraft systems, I already knew them. I just had to touch over what kind of data they probably wanted for the answers for the test. And I could study things like aeromed, you know, hypoxia, spatial disorientation, that kind of stuff,

aviation regulations. So I got to study all this stuff, the other guys had to split that time, so it helped a lot. What did you say, spatial what? Spatial disorientation. What is that? So there are illusions, right,

and now you're testing my aeromed, right, vestibular illusions, which I believe are up in your ear, right, so you can feel like, a lot of times what happens is if an airplane gets in a spin, right, they call it a graveyard spiral, you get in a spin, and when you go to pull out of the spin, you turn into it, you feel like you've spun in the other direction direction because inside your ears

are these little hairs, right, in your semicircular canals. That's where your balance comes from. And so sometimes when you have an ear infection, that's why you might lose your balance a little bit. And there's those. And then there's visual illusions. Things like, you ever been in a stoplight in your car

and you think you're rolling but it's the guy beside you, backing up, probably going forward? That's one of the illusions, right? Reverse perspective illusion. And then, you know, over the water is where it's really dangerous. If you don't have a horizon, you know, you get, I can't remember all of it.

It was like 20 different illusions you can get. But you have to learn them and how to get out of them. Like to recognize that you've got it or that somebody else has it and then correct for it. Man, so that would scare the shit out of me. So they put you in these situations where you actually feel the illusion? Yeah, they have like a chair.

I don't know how to describe chair. You know, 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 kind of, they, first they get it spinning in your 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 panel, is like little cables. I mean, this is very primitive, but it worked. And you'd have to center 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 you stop and you're like whoa, right? It's just like that. And so you have to learn. And there were many times in my career, we might even end up touching on some of those

where either me or somebody else got into one of those illusions that almost killed us. You know, and it did, you know, it did kill some friends. And it was a conventional unit, a Chinook that was in Afghanistan, and it did kill some friends. Oh man. And it was a conventional unit, a Chinook that was in Afghanistan, had to be in 2002, 2003, and they were flying daylight,

ran into a sandstorm, couldn't see out the window, so they climbed up to what they considered a safe altitude, and they got spatial disorientation, and they literally rolled that aircraft upside down, pulled the blades off essentially, and fell to their deaths head first. Holy shit. So it's very dangerous and it's one of those things

that everybody pays very close attention to. Yeah, I can imagine. Do they simulate it in the bird? They try to, it's hard. They do? Or in the simulator. They'll put you in situations where the aircraft gets into an unusual attitude.

So it's called unusual attitude recovery. So they'll put the aircraft in some weird situation. It might be in the aircraft what they'll do is they'll say, close your eyes, put your arms up like this, put your head down. And then the pilot will say what he's not doing. He'll say, I'm turning to the right, and then he'll turn left.

And then he'll say, I'm rolling out. He'll roll a little bit, but not enough. And by the time you're done, open your eyes. You open your eyes, take the controls, and what you see out the window is not what you had in your mind, right? Sometimes it makes people puke. You know, it's like.

So, you have to learn to do that because the basics will kill you. Yeah. Yeah, we talk about the ground. Let's talk about, I mean, since we're on the subject, let's talk about one of the instances where you'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 so Eastern Afghanistan and we're coming back from a mission and it's late we're exhausted we've been putting the Rangers up in the KG pass and the weather rolled, 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, and a shenok will go to maybe 20, 25 if we're stripped down, but you're not getting to 60.

So we're flying through the mountain. We got terrain on both sides. Rain comes down. It's not raining when we enter the mountains. And then just down it comes, right? And my buddy's flying rich and he says, Al, I'm getting vertigo. And I'm like, well, you know, suck it up, dude.

You know, we still got another 10 minutes here in the mountains, you know. You got to hang on, right? And he's like, ah, you know, we can barely see the terrain through 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 compass rose with a course line, like you might see in Waze, really, but you get the compass on there. And he's like, I can't do it, and the aircraft starts to veer toward the rock wall. So I take the controls, and I'm like, I have the controls. He's like, all right, thanks. And we're flying, and the rain is just terrible.

And now I'm getting the same sensation. 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 different instrumentation, right? So we have an old standby, right? Something from 1950s in the center console, right? And it's saying I'm going to turn. The other thing says I'm level. So now I got to figure out which one to follow. It's an old standby, something from the 1950s in the center console. The other thing says I'm level. So now I've got to figure out which one to follow.

You've got to look at the compass rose itself, if it's moving and the attitude indicator is different. So you got to look at what we call your secondary instruments. So the primaries, the attitude indicator, like that coin I gave you, that's a primary instrument. And all the secondaries just kind of confirm or deny what you're seeing. And you can fly with just secondary instruments.

It's not fun, but you can do it. So here we are, maybe I'm on the controls maybe a minute, and I'm getting ready to throw up. It's like I'm losing my balance. Nothing's making right. We are climbing now because we can't see out the window. So we get all power in. We're climbing at about 3,000 foot a minute,

which is pretty fast for a helicopter that's heavy. And we did have the benefit of height above terrain. So remember I said that you get the compass rows, 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 a minute because we're going up the mountain. And I'm like, dude, I can't do it. You got to take the controls. And we're climbing at 3,000 foot a minute because we're going up the mountain. And I'm like, dude, I can't do it. You got to take the controls. And Rich takes the controls. I got it, I got the controls. And now I'm just trying to, you know, it's like, trying to get my head straight.

And, cause I know he's not going to last. And same thing about it, 45 seconds later, he's like, Al, I can't do it. Like, come on, you got to do it. I can't do it. And he's like, back and forth. So I took the controls now. Now, come on, you got to do it, I can't do it. And he's like, back and forth. So I took the controls now.

Now, that red terrain presence I told you about is starting to part from the course line, right? So now there's a little bit of black, you know? So that means what's right along the course line is below me. Could be 100 feet, which isn't much, but the terrain's still out my left and right door. If we don't stay right on the course,

we are going to crash, and we say that cumulogranite has 100% kill ratio, so you got to do it. And then so, we passed the controls back and forth for I don't know, five minutes, and we popped out of the clouds, like the rain stopped, it was solid clouds over the valley in Gardez, and we pop 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 almost died, right? And that kind of thing has happened a couple of times, but that's the easiest one to explain. And then we get back, and I'm telling the maintenance pilot, we'd actually been complaining about that helicopter

for a couple of flights, saying that it made us feel funny when we flew it, and that we didn't want to fly it in the clouds. So when it happened, we get back, and the poor maintenance guy, 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 going to kick his ass, right? We just survived this, right? And he was like, oh, it's fine, it's fine. And so he did take it out to fly, and he's like, oh yeah, there's a problem with, you know, whatever it was, you know,

something that was working backwards essentially, one of the little sensors. And they sent it home. Like they got a C-17 that week, brought a new aircraft in, sent that one home. And that kind of stuff, it'll get you. You know, there's guys. Are you worried about getting shot down

while all this is going on too? I mean, it's possible, yeah. At that stage of the game, I wasn't ever worried about getting shot down. I mean, we'll address why when we talk about Anaconda, but yeah, I wasn't, I mean, I just, this was a good example of why I kind of figured I was going to die on every deployment.

And that's because if the enemy didn't scare me, it was the terrain and weather that did. Because we would, you know, the problem with Afghanistan in particular, Iraq is so much simpler. But Afghanistan, there's no weather reporting that's reliable. And the area is so vast, right? I mean, you got these big mountains, you got the plains, the dunes, and the weather patterns, and simple things like temperature can make all the difference whether you have enough power

at the top of a mountain versus at the bottom, right? Because there's supposed to be a two degree drop off in Celsius for every thousand 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 a, let's just say 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 90s, we made the mistake at sea level

of teaching the Rangers, the SEALs, the Delta guys, we had a saying, there's always room for one more Ranger. Right, so if I tell you as a team leader, all right, you can have 25 guys on board and we'll give you two hours of flight for that. And you go, okay. And then we're just about to take off,

you go, hey, I got five more guys, is that okay? Yeah, put them on. And then guys come running from the other, hey, we got three more guys Can we take up? Yeah. Well Afghanistan you couldn't do that if you gave a number, you know, that was it You know, so if somebody said can you take one more Ranger? No, I can't you know And if you did you would not have enough power for whatever was you were gonna do and you would pay the price now

That wasn't always fatal. It wasn't always damaged to hardware, but you always came home going, damn, I'm not doing that again. You learn that lesson again and again and again. Damn. Well, Al, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll get to where you went after flight school. Sure. We all know a good night's sleep is essential to our overall health and wellness. I mean if you're exhausted from lack of sleep, you're not good for anybody. You can't concentrate, you don't have the energy you need to get through the day.

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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SRS today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-e-l-p.com slash s-r-s. All right, Al, we're back from the break. We just kind of wrapped up your initial flight training. And so where are you going after this? My assignment as a Chinook pilot at that point is Savannah, Georgia, going to Hunter Army Airfield, Fort Stewart, Georgia. And so I finish up the Shenwick 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 Army Airfield. So I get there, I sign in, and then what happens when a new aviator gets to a unit is you undergo what's called a Commander's Eval and progression, RL progression, readiness level. So you start out as RL3, readiness level three,

and that means you can only fly with an instructor, and then they say, okay, you're safe, you're good, you're RL2, right? So once you're in RL2 level, you can now fly with other pilots in command that aren't instructors and you go, but you're not really qualified to do everything and then you make RL1, readiness level one, you can do everything because your progression

is where it's supposed to be. So anyway, I get to the unit, I get my Commander's eval, I get RL3, RL2, and then Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. And very, very shortly, we are notified that we're going to deploy, now I'm in the 18th Airborne Corps, right? Our headquarters is at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and our battalion headquarters is also there.

So there's our sister company, A company, and we're in B company, second on 159. We're the Hercules guys, it's a pretty cool nickname. And what we ended up doing was we flew all of our aircraft, we had 16 Chinooks in our company, so you had 30 Chinooks total in the battalion, and we flew from Savannah to Wilmington, North Carolina, to put the aircraft, we're going to tear them down,

bubble wrap them, shrink wrap them, and they're going to put them on top of an old ship, right? They didn't even have the old Roros, you know, the roll-and-roll-off, these are like, you crane it up to the top, and it's going to ride, you know, five miles an hour from Wilmington to Saudi Arabia. So we fly up there and there's a whole funny story to that

but we take a bus back and now it's going to take a month and a half I think for our aircraft to get there. So they've got to finish up my training. For me to fly in combat, I've got to be readiness level one, not RL2, because you're still technically in training. So the 160th of the 3rd battalion was right next door, and our instructor pilots knew those instructor pilots,

they were all friends, and they're like, hey, can we borrow one of your helicopters to train up the Woj, which is Warn 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 Woege. Let the Woege do it. But anyway, they took me out, and at the time,

the 3rd Battalion aircraft were kind of enhanced Delta models, so they had like some special radios. I think they had what's called an OBOGs, onboard oxygen generating system or something like that for high altitude, and they had mini guns for defensive armament, and that was it. So that was called a warbird, right? So there's no air refueling, no terrain falling radar,

no special aircraft survivability, it's just basically the same thing I've been flying with a couple more radios. So I finished my progression, which is kind of poetic, in a 1.60th aircraft, and then we end up flying across, we were on a Boeing 707, right, you know, chartered, you know, Trans World Air or something like that, and we had to get gas like every two, three hours. So imagine going from Savannah, Georgia,

up to Newfoundland and across to Europe and then back in through Egypt into Saudi Arabia and stopping every two, three hours. And they wouldn't let us off the plane, you know, because they didn't have customs clearance. So we'd get there and whatever country it was, they'd be like, you can't us off the plane, you know, because they didn't have customs clearance. So we'd get there and whatever country it was, they'd be like, you can't get off the plane, you know, the damn, the toilets were full of urine, you know,

the stink was terrible, 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 going to fly, the possibility that you're going to be flying combat. Pretty close, yeah, within a couple of weeks. I mean, how did that feel for you?

You're getting right what you wanted immediately. At least I think that's what you wanted. Yeah, but you know, what we didn't talk about earlier is, so I grew up in the Cold War, right? And I served in the Cold War. I went to West Germany. I've been to East Germany, East Berlin, right? Through Checkpoint Charlie.

And I was always scared we'd really go to war with the Soviet Union, right? Or Korea, you know, when I was in Korea the first time. And it's hard to describe, but I was in Korea the first time. It's hard to describe, but I did not want that. I didn't think being at war would be a good thing for me. So now here we are, I'm very excited to go. But this is a little different attitude than I had in the 160th.

The 160th is like, I'm taking the fight to you and you are going to die if you're a bad guy. At this time, it was sort of a transition period. It was like, I'm making a change now from being scared to be in war to, okay, we're in war, this is all right. It's very pragmatic, I guess. Desert Shield was like, I don't know, six months long, so I had some time to really adjust

to the idea so that when we did go across the border, you know, it was no big deal. It was very exhilarating actually, very exciting. So you did go across the border. Yeah, well when Desert Storm happened, right, so Desert, this is the funny thing, right, it's all in a name, because we had guys,, this is the funny thing, right? It's all in a name. Because we had guys,

remember this is a conventional unit, some of these guys had been in Vietnam, others hadn't. And there was a couple 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, oh, you're going to go deep, right? Because they're going to do operating base Cobra, right? Because you've got to have the fuel and ammunition and supplies for the Cobras and the Apaches and the artillery to do their thing. And so there was two guys that were very, very upset

that we were gonna do that. And I remember thinking, dude, what do you want? Where, I remember I wanted to do assault. So to me, this is like, this is kinda, it is where I wanna be. And when, so Desert Shield, right? this is kind of, it is where I want to be. So Desert Shield, right? Remember I said the army would claim we own the night.

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

you just lost your landing gear, right? And the Army lost a couple, and then they put some rules into effect. You couldn't fly any lower than 150 feet. So we did that for that seven months. And I was moving supplies, tank transmissions, tank treads, I mean, whatever you can fit in the back of a Chinook or sling, we were doing, and we were doing it at night.

And the old guys, so there were two W1s in the company, me and a guy named Tim. and he had got there before me, and he was really sharp, so I didn't walk into a show where they're like, oh, you know, these stupid wojies were going to these junior guys, they're no good. Instead, they welcomed me because the other guy, who was only a couple classes ahead of me, was such a success.

So he and I were the guys that prepared all the maps for everybody, did some of the basic planning, the nug work, the math and the ciphering. And every night flight, he and I were on them, not together, we were with other pilots. And they put us with an instructor when we fly at night. And the other old guys, the senior guys, did not want to fly at night,

because we still didn't have all the aircraft with night vision lighting, so you still had to turn off the lights, put the little chemlights around, that kind of stuff, so it still was very unpleasant to fly. Now at this point, we've got what's called Anvis 6, and the goggles are just two binoculars that slip down in front of your face.

They hinge up and down. And the crew chiefs were one of the ones I talked about earlier, the fives, right? But I got experience at night, a couple hundred hours, flying in the desert, that the older guys didn't get, because they didn't want it, right? So when desert storm happened, the 18th Airborne Corps was pretty smart.

They decided not to do it at night because Cobra, like the initial assault on Cobra, or the infill, the taking of it, we had I think 100 Chinooks involved, flights of five, and we were separated by only a couple of minutes. Like so you'd be in the hot refueling pit, and it was the most impressive hot refueling I'd ever seen, 101st, that 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 one through five. They'd be like, Silver one, your grid coordinates are blah. You didn't care what you were carrying.

It was going to be 18,000 pounds, which is about the max you're going to carry for this. Silver two, here's your grid, right? We all had different grids, and we'd pick up, we'd fly over, we'd just hover over the loads that were already set up for us, and the guys were the most aggressive hookup men I've ever seen.

I mean, you just got over it, and they hooked it, it was a tandem load, so a four and a half hook to keep it from spinning. Once everybody's hooked up, off we go at 120 knots, up into Afghanistan, and 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 meant Iraq. I meant Iraq, yeah. So this is that famous, the Schwarzkopf, the left hook.

That was us. So moving all the equipment and the people out west of Kuwait. Wow. So some of the loads were Humvees internal with a Toad 105 Howitzer. So the gun tube would be up in the cockpit, so you had the overhead panel

and you had the engine condition levers that do the power on the engines and the gun tube was right up inside. It was pretty cool. Did you guys take any fire or anything like that? No. No? No, it was all, I think we caught them by surprise.

We were in the middle of nowhere. And, but because of that, and all of the lessons learned up until that point, the Army decided, all right, we didn't, and maybe we didn't own the night, we just lease it now, you know? We rented it and now we're leasing, lease to own, you to own kind of thing.

But what sucked about that mission is, remember I said that me and the other W1 were the guys they always sent out with the senior guys. The other older guys didn't even fly goggles, didn't even have them on board because they thought it was safer to fly without NVGs than with. So one night, so the surrender has happened.

I mean we're 100 hours in. The surrender has happened and we take five Chinooks up into Iraq and we're gonna bring back prisoners. 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 40, 50 Iraqi prisoners on the back and I had a 38 with five bullets in it. Right, the hammer was on an empty chamber because that was what they made us do.

We had two M60s, but those were pointed out. These guys were all on inside. We didn't have any guards, no nothing. But these guys luckily were very compliant. It was just pilots and prisoners. Two pilots, a flight engineer and a crew chief. That's it. A guy up front, guy in the back, we all had 38s.

Holy shit. Of the five bullets. Yeah, and so funny thing, so we're coming back before we run out of gas, and you could smoke in an army aircraft back then, right? And the crew chief in the back lights up a cigarette, and one of the Iraqis is like, you know, gives a signal for, hey, let me have a smoke, right? So he hands him the cigarette and he puffs it,

passes it to the next guy, it passes all the way up to the front of the aircraft, all the way down, and by the time it gets to him, it's a soggy lump of, you know, paper really. And then 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 looks at it, kind of disgusted and they're like, like you know, have it right?

And he's like, sir they want me to smoke this thing, it's all dripping with drool. And I'm like, well, better keep them happy because they could take us easy, right? He's like, all right fine. So he's like, I'm going to get hepatitis. He smokes a cigarette and they're all, yay! They cheer and they stayed compliant the whole time.

Until we ran out of gas, and an MP unit eventually drove up and took them away. 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 were just in the middle of the desert. And we're nowhere near where we should have been because we've been hopping around looking for gas. Holy shit. So we come back, we get gas, we come back into Saudi Arabia and we had to go, we still had some prisoners and we dropped them off.

And now we're gonna fly back to Assembly Area Palm, which is where we were based, down the Tapline Road. And so of the flight of five, three of the crews had MVGs. So we sent the crews had MVGs. So we sent the two without MVGs back first. Five minute separation. So one takes off, climbs up to 3,000 feet, well above any terrain, you know, obstacles. They fly back and they just do the old fashioned.

They get there, they spiral down, they land all good, right? Next one goes and now it's my turn. We're the first MVG aircraft to go back. So we're flying at 250, 300 feet. Got goggles, I'm navigating, and I'm looking at the antennas down the road. Right there, about every five, six miles or so, and I got them on my map, right?

And I look, and I'm looking out there, and I'm like, I see two of the three antennas I should see. Come right, let's offset a mile, right? So we kinda came right, kinda paralleled the course, I'm 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 land, next aircraft comes in behind us with goggles, and then the last aircraft with the commander and the chief pilot on board, they have goggles, but they've elected not to wear them because it's easier to fly unaided they think, right? And this is that mindset back then. They come back at 250, 300 feet, they run into it,

that unlit antenna that we had all avoided, except they ran right into it and killed all the air crew. The door gunner was an infantryman, he actually lived. He said the last words were, oh hell would that come from. Damn man. So, very valuable lesson, learn there 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 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 it helped, I mean, it made a big deal,

but because I was a high time goggle guy in the unit, even as a junior pilot, I had 200 hours of NVG time when the senior guys had like 25. 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 mission. And that started my whole trend toward where I would end up in the 160th.

When did the 160th kind of pop up on your radar? Well, because they were next door to us in Savannah, and I said everybody knew each other, our commander was actually married to a warrant officer over there, right? So when we were in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield, they would come visit, 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 him already. I'd listened to the war stories, what they were doing. They were going up into Iraq, while we were still doing the Saudi stuff. I said, what's it like in Iraq? He said, oh, it's dark.

Okay, a little more than that, buddy. But so I already kind of knew about that. But that other W-1 that I talked about, Tim, he had assessed. Like we got back, he's like, you know what, I want to go to the 160th. So he put it in his packet, he assessed, and for whatever reason he was not selected.

I considered him a better pilot than me. And I figured, well crap, if they're not going to take him, there's no way they're taking me, right? He's way better than me. And I figured, well crap, if they're not going to take him, there's no way they're taking me, right? He's way better than me. And once again, that's very subjective. And later 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 get assigned. Before we go any farther, can you give us a little history under the 160th? Yeah. So, in Iran, the Shah of Iran is in charge, he leaves, he's pushed out really. And I can't remember if he was in France or the US,

but we were supporting him. And so a group of student protestors protested outside the US Embassy in Tehran, and they ended up taking it, right? Now, 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, I was like 354 days or something like that. But, so there they are. And then President Carter at the time, you know, the military options were very few, right? JSOC didn't exist. All the special operations community had sort of disbanded after Vietnam,

and Charlie Beckwith had just essentially stood up Delta Force, right? But they needed, so they were gonna send Delta Force in to rescue the American hostages. The problem was they gotta get there. How they gonna get there? Helicopters, all right. Well, what do we wanna use use to get their Chinooks?

The problem is you're getting by a Navy ship, right? Chinooks do not fold up Handily like a Navy Aircraft well, right so they were afraid opsec was a big concern. This is operation Eagle Claw, right? So they don't want to put Chinooks on top of a ship because that'll raise questions, you know, why are there Chinooks on top of an aircraft carrier? You know, that's not normal. So instead they decided to use CH-53s

and they wanted to use the Minesweepers which were flown by Navy pilots. And they figured flying off a ship was the hardest part of the mission, right? Which in hindsight, that's the easiest part. But so they do these rehearsals with Delta. And back then, they didn't have this one location where they did rehearsals and we sit face to face

and we say, Sean, I don't like how you did this. Well, Al, I don't like how you did this. All right, let's adjust. It was all done, you're probably old enough to remember the teletype format. Like you get, like if you ever get like a ship's position, the overhead message all comes like in a teletype. That's how they did their AARs,

the after action reviews, right, was through teletype. So there wasn't really plain English, it was kind of like, you know, pilots sucked, pilots sucked, but you can't really explain why, right? So these guys are flying into the dust with night vision goggles, and it's super dark, and there's no reference, right? And there's no looking at blades of grass. So they came up with this, it's called a pink light,

an infrared filter on top of a searchlight. So you extend your light out, it's a white light with 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 you see with an AC 130 when they got the burn on, right? You can only see it with your night vision goggles.

Problem is if you leave it on too long, it will burn through, and it will now be a white light. So you learn to use it very sparingly, which is funny because years later, we were still like turn the light on, turn it back off, even though it was a glass thing. But the Delta guys were unhappy with the pilots. They crashed every single time, you know what I mean,

controlled crash, and so they wanted new pilots. So now they're like, all right, who else can fly a Navy aircraft and the primary thing is landing in the dust? The Marines, because the Marines do the ship to beach, right? The Navy guys do ship to ship, essentially. They're no better because they have no experience and they have the same limitations.

So they want to change the pilots again, but it's go time, right? So they gotta go what they got, right? So they execute, they fly the Delta guys in on 130s, they land at desert one, right? Designated desert landing area. And those 130s 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 130. So they'll do that, they'll get gas, they'll take the operators, they'll go to Desert 2, spend the day, and then do the mission, right? That's the plan. Eight helicopters take off and 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, you know, they're five minutes apart, so they don't run into each other. I think a couple of them turned around for maintenance problems related to the dust. And the men force for the mission, I think, was six. maintenance problems related to the dust.

The min force for the mission I think was six, and they showed up with six except one was broken. They were down to five, or may have been five and four, I can't remember. It's irrelevant. So they abort. We don't have enough helicopters to get them there. We have to abort. So the helicopters are gonna go back to the ship.

The Delta operator's gonna get back on the 130s. They're gonna go back, they're gonna reset, and 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, you get the guys with the colored wands, the lead wands, and they're like, you know,

doing this kind of thing for the pilots to see to direct them into the parking. But you do that with helicopters, right? You get the winds and you kind of 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 and the helicopter, followed him right into it. Impacted the C-130 full of 5,000 gallons of gas and a bunch of Delta operators that were kind of just hanging out. Aircraft explodes, helicopter explodes, it's mayhem. They all load up on the remaining 130s

and they head back. Utter failure, national embarrassment, and so JSOC is born, right? Because the problem that they found was that because there was no mutual, not mutual, habitual relationship between the air crews, the 130s, the ships and the operators,

you had all these problems. And so they created a unit, Task Force 160, out of Task Force 158 and some other things. So it was a National Guard unit with OH-6s, helicopters from the 101st, Chinooks and Hueys initially, then Blackhawks, and they planned to do Operation Honey Badger, which was the second rescue attempt, right? So they're ready to do it.

President Reagan gets in office. The Iranians release the hostages. No more mission for the JSOC operators. General Meyer, I believe it was, was the chief of staff, or maybe the chairman, and he said, you know what? You keep that unit together. So, JSOC formed, the 160th became the 160th SOAG,

Special Operations Aviation Group, and they stuck together. And then you had this habitual relationship that lasts today. And we can do things now that they never dreamed, that could be done. But that's really where the 160th came from. And then as it grew, out of the group, it became a regiment.

And when I got there, there were only 300 guys in the regiment. There's like 4,000 now. Wow, really? Because you have three battalions and then some special mission units. Just, it's big. So when someone goes, hey, oh, you were in the 160th,

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 160th? So all three battalions, I take that back, all three locations, Fort Lewis, Washington, or JBLM now, Joint Base, Lewis-McChord,

they have Chinooks and Blackhawks. Savannah, Georgia has Chinooks and Blackhawks. And then Campbell is the anomaly. It's got Chinooks and Blackhawks, but it also has little, which have two variants. It's an OH-6, has an armed version and a assault version. So the MH is modified and H attack. And then the Blackhawks have a assault version

and what's called a DAP, direct action penetrator. So it's an armed Blackhawks, got a 30 millimeter chain gun. It can carry Hellfires, 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 DAPs,

we'll probably touch on them a little bit. But that's the regiment. Very cool, wow. Thank you for that history. So, all right, so back to, what do you call it, selection? Assessment. Assessment. Yeah.

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 to, it's like incremental, right? It just builds on each other. And so I get there and I end up as a night vision goggle trainer, a no-fly line trainer. So you had to fly the border between North and South Korea to learn all the corridors and all the landmarks

that if you were operating in what they call the 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 OH-58 straight across was shot down. They killed one of the pilots, they held the other guy, Bobby Hall, for, I don't know, a couple weeks or months,

I can't really remember, and then they let him go after they thoroughly embarrassed him and us, right? So that's the importance of the job 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's called the 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 seen it in the news, it's the, where the peace table is between North and South Korea, right? So you've got this piece of property,

there's a building on it, half in South Korea, half in North Korea, and there's a table in there, and that's where they sit and they discuss things. And 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 I was like, all right, you right, stay at or below 100 feet, consistent with safety, left and right of course,

200 meters, blah, blah, blah. And I talked to him, and he's like, who taught you how to talk like that? It's like a, they call it MOI, method of instruction. And I said, I don't know, I read the regulation and came up with it. He's like, you need to be an instructor. So he actually called some friends at DA,

Department of the Army, HRC if you will, and got me a slot to go to the instructor pilot course, but I had to go and stay at Fort Rocker and teach at the schoolhouse if I did that. Which turned out, it's a whole other story we're definitely going gonna get to. So how'd you get into 160th? All right, so now we're back at Fort Rucker.

So I'm a young chief warrant officer too. So Army aviators, they're wings. You start out with a set of wings and then you get a star when you're a senior aviator and it's like, you know, I don't know, four or five years and so many hours and they give get a star when you're a senior aviator, and it's like, I don't know, four or five years and so many hours and they give you a star. So I didn't have a star yet, so I'm a very junior aviator. And then when you're a master aviator,

you get a wreath around that star, right? So you can look at an Army Warrant Officer and see where is he in his experience level, just based on his wings. And so I get there, and my first two set of students were great, a lot of fun because they were also. So wait, hold on, so you're a junior pilot but they want to put you as an instructor?

Yeah, because of my skill level. So I'm good enough to be an instructor, just not a senior guy. Now remember now, all these old guys are retiring, right? That's why they brought us young guys in, is because they had to backfill essentially to meet their requirements. So now what's starting to be in all the key positions

is young CW2s and W3s, right? So junior to mid-grade warrant officers. And this is where it ties in because, so my first two set of students were great because they were W1s right out of flight school, and they listened to me and I had a good time. Then the Alabama National Guard, which was flying CH-54 Skycranes,

which is this grasshopper looking thing that they flew in Vietnam and they had that in Birmingham, they retired it and gave them Chinooks. So now they all have to come down and take a Chinook transition. Well, these guys all have way more, they're all Vietnam vets,

they're all way more experienced in flying than me and they don't want to fly Chinooks. They don't have a choice, but they act like I personally brought them down. They did not like listening to a snot-nosed W-2 telling them what to do, and it was miserable teaching them. So they didn't want to listen.

They did what they had to do to get through. Every flight was misery. Every sitting at the table, we'd 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, from 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 were okay to fly with. They were very nice, very polite. They pretended to pay attention to me. They listened, they made eye contact kind of thing. But I knew I wasn't teaching them anything, right? I mean, they knew far more than me. Just by reading the manual,

they knew more than I could teach them. That's how good these foreign students were. So it was unrewarding. And I needed something. I was probably still a little too 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, Ali, you're miserable. to 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, Ali, you're miserable. You know, we're out for a drink or dinner or whatever. And he throws a application packet on the table. He's like, fill that out. You need to come to the 160th. And I still had that mindset that I wasn't good enough. And you didn't fill it out on a laptop or on a computer

because they didn't really exist in quantity back then. It was a stubby pencil, number two pencil filling out the application. It was like half inch thick. And I'd fill it out a couple pages at a time, a couple days ago in between. And eventually it was done. It was like, oh.

So I sent it in. To my surprise, like two weeks later, like Mr. Mack, we'd like you to come assess. Like, me? Really? Okay, right, so I go up, I assess. I didn't think I did that well. As a matter of fact, I got lost on my navigation route.

Which everybody does for the most part, you're not passing the flight, just so you know, they will do something so you don't fly, you're not going to hit your target on time. It's made sure that you're not going to achieve success. And the reason for that is they want to see how you behave under duress in the cockpit.

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 got to get to your, you know, unlit target plus or minus 30 seconds and you have to be within, you know, I think it's plus or minus two minutes at every checkpoint and within 100 meters of the checkpoint, right?

So I mean, you have to be, so you're going to be outside the parameters in some sort or fashion. And so when you get under that pressure, how do you do? Do you fold or do you do what you you gotta do and keep trying, you know? And they can tell, because they're gonna teach you how to navigate their way anyway, so they don't care 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 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 they'll be like,

hey, is that bridge over there? Is that on your map? Oh, and you kind of re-cage them, you know? But it's all based on how they're behaving. If they're giving up, I'm not going to help them. You know, it's like, right? Yeah. So, but that's how you start the process.

The, well, I take that back. First thing you do is a PT test, standard army PT test, with pull-ups, which the army didn't do, and a swim test, which the army didn't do. The funny thing is, is I got there. Now, keep in mind, the 160th was formed in 1980, right after that Eagle Claw, right?

I'm there, this is 1995. So the unit really is still pretty new. A lot of people don't know much about it. They're still very cloaked in darkness and secrecy. So I get there and I'm like, should I wear an Army PT, shorts and shirt, or should I be in civilian PTs? I mean, it sounds absurd, but it went through my mind, right? So I showed up wearing civilians, right?

And I'm like, if they don't want me, tough. If they don't want me because of this, screw them, right? I drive up in the parking lot and I made sure I had my Army PT's. In case they're like, Mr. Mac, I thought you were going to be in your, but they didn't say anything, right? And then you do your PT test,

they don't tell you how you're doing, right? That's all at the end. So they don't count your pushups, 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 want to say it's 15 minutes

of treading water with just your feet, 15 minutes with just your hands, 15 minutes regular, and then like a minute dead man's float, right? And then you do a deep water entry, can't touch the pool, and you got to swim under water a designated amount of distance, and you got to swim underwater a designated amount of distance and you don't know what that is, right? So I do it, I'm out of breath,

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

did you get to go twice? I was like, did I get to go twice? No, he's like, get back in line. So I'm like, obviously I didn't pass, right? So now I get in and instead of trying to take it easy, I'm pounding it, right? I got take it easy, I'm pounding it, right? I got my head down, I'm pounding it. I can feel the start of foam on my helmet

is dragging me to the surface. As long as you don't take your face out of the water, you can keep going like that. And I'm like, you know what? They're not 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, 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? Or 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 defense systems. The SA-7 radar system has a minimum engagement range of what, out to what distance, and stuff like that. And that's the kind of stuff, if you're going into a theater that has it, you bone up on it, but there's too many systems around the world to know everything to that extent.

So you have rules of thumb if you didn't know. What we call the raw gear, if it shows up, SA8, but you didn't expect them to have SA8s, it still might be a Roland or something. These are defense systems, right? So they all have different distances and parameters. But anyway, you take this test, and they're going to use this against you later on.

Oh, you only scored a 30 on the general aviation knowledge test and you consider yourself a pilot? But you do that and you get your mission, which is your navigation route. You brief it, you fly 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 I mean, even if you make your target on time, you will have been out of parameter somewhere. So, you know, they're like, oh, you failed. And some people, when they get told they failed, even though they made it to the target on time, they get mad, right? And so, the goal of the panel is to, well, let's put it this way, first of all,

there's guys that get that far, and we know we don't want you, because you're just a jerk, right? And we know you won't fit in. You know, you were good enough to get this far, but 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 and bad mouth 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 in the gossip world. Then you get the guys, the majority of them, that it's, yes, no, maybe, we don't know. Let's see how this guy handles pressure, right? So now you got to handle critique, right? I mean, you notice like in the teams, right? I mean, you guys, we do not take it easy on each other. You got to have some things there's some thick skin, right?

You got a can of thick skin you spray it on you know, I thought the worst is pure critiques Yeah You guys have those? We didn't mean flight school, but we didn't have to do yeah We didn't have to do him in that in the regular unit, but so you know the instructor will Tell you what you did wrong, maybe even tell you what you did right, but it's criticism, hey, you did this wrong,

you did this wrong, and in the end, you did not meet the standard, you failed the flight. Okay, then the recruiter says, all right, PT, physical training, you did this many pushups, this many sit-ups, this many runs, and in my case, you did way more, you scored run. And like in my case, so like you did way more, you scored way higher than the one you submitted, why is that?

I mean, I don't know, maybe I tried harder. Wrong words right now, like oh, so you don't try hard at your unit? You know, I don't know what to tell you. I didn't know, right, so I just tried as hard as I could. You should be trying as hard as you can all the time. Yeah, point taken, right? And I just, instead of getting upset,

point taken, got it, I'll do that. Thank you for that professional critique. And then they start asking you why you scored so low in the general aviation tests, why do you think you should be a night stalker, questions like that, family situation. And in my case, as I talk about in my book, my wife had had a suicide attempt when I was in Korea.

And I thought, that was all kind of resolved, but I thought that would stop me from getting in. So, and I told the psychologist about it, they knew, there was no, I didn't want any secrets here. And I thought, that's gonna torpedo me, they're gonna treat me nice, and they're gonna let me go. They thought they were being mean to me, you know, 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 board, the hardest part was the anticipation that they would ask that question and then kick me out and they never did and they accepted me.

Do they accept you right there? They kick you out of the room, they deliberate, five, 10 minutes, which I've been on the other end of that, in the first two minutes they've decided and then the rest 15 they're making you sweat and you come back in and they're like, welcome to the 160th mr. Mack and then Thank you. We'll see you in about a year, right? Because I got to 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 all right, look I Know you were probably worried about the family situation. We see it all the time. We can handle it. Sounds like you got it under control. We'll work with you on this. If you have any problems. Oh shit, so they knew the whole time. Yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah. And they just never brought it out. So they probably would have used that to drop you. Yeah, they didn't drop me like that. Interesting. If it was going to be a problem. So I get back to my unit. Hold on, hold on.

Yeah. How many people, how many aviators are trying out for this? I mean it varies. In my assessment week there were probably 20 guys. How many are there today? Depends, it just depends. Because you said when you went in there was about 300 aviators. Oh right, right. There's about 3,000, 3,500, about 4,000 depending.

So what's the, let me ask this, what's the attrition rate? It's not, it's usually done in the pre-selection. So at that time, it was roughly 25% of the people that applied just were rejected outright. You never got to Fort Campbell. Then when you got there, it was probably about 10, 15%, didn't make it. So most of the guys that get there make it. But you're not just there for schnucks,

you're there for the little birds and the blackhawks, so you get this whole potpourri of aviators there. So they weed out really the guys. Is everybody flying their specified aircraft, or are you all flying something? No, 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 all my training flights in a Chinook.

I did my navigation flight in a Chinook. And a couple of years later, actually I was in Sears School when one of our aircraft was out doing an assessment, just like what I just told you, and they encountered weather, and we still don't know what happened. It rolled inverted and came out of the sky, and they all were killed instantly. So that pilot was not a Chinook pilot, but everybody considered,

I could take any pilot, put him in a Chinook, and as long as there's no emergencies, they're going to be able to fly it. I can get in the Black Hawk and fly it, 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 sort of, like what I would do is see if guys could learn the aircraft. So it's a glass cockpit, there's these little TV screens, buttons all over the place, and that's how you see what's going on.

And then you fly it, and I would say, okay, do this, do this, here's a hover page, do this. And I would see if they could mimic what I asked them to do. If they did, I kind of view it as this guy is trainable, I can train him. If you got a guy that can't remember what button to do, he's not trainable probably, right? And so for us to take him, he's going to need some other things.

But anyway, they took all the other guys that came from other airframes. 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 160s or Schnuck pilots were Cobra pilots before they got there. And they fly everything in the Little Bird, right? And that's where you do all your navigation training,

by the way, in Green Platoon, which is where they teach you how to navigate, brief, and plan like a night stalker. You go out and you fly in a little egg-shaped thing. Being a Chinook guy with a nice big cockpit, and you get in that little egg and it's like, your shoulders are up against the guy, the doors are off, so you have to put your map under your leg and it's unpleasant to fly that thing.

You didn't like flying the little birds? No. No shit. That was a pain in the ass. What is the most, what do you think the most, what do most guys want to fly, in 160th? It depends what they did first, right? So if they're already a Chinook guy,

they want to fly Chinooks. If they'reook 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 guys is, wait a minute, hold on. Here's what they do. So, you got all these Rangers, right? We do a lot of work with them, and they usually end up in the Chinooks because of the quantity of people.

They reach the rank E5, E6, their knees are aching, they want to be a pilot, they put in for it, they get accepted, and then they might go to a regular unit first, do two, three years, then come to us, or if you have a background, like we had some SEALs, we had some Delta guys, a lot of Delta guys, a good friend of mine, Mike Rutledge, I don't know if you know him,

he was at E7 teaching at Buds when the towers came down, transfer over the Army, put in for the 160th, and because of his background, we took him 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 you guys, so the 160th will take basically

ground operators and turn them into aviators? Yep, very few. Without any aviation experience? Very, very few, very select. So typically a guy would, let's say he's a Ranger, an Army Ranger, he's E5, he goes to his first unit like I did in Savannah, Georgia, right? And they'll try to get somewhere like Fort Campbell

so they can be in the 101st. They're just across the ramp from us. And then when their time comes up, like at two years, three years, when they think they've got enough experience, they'll submit a packet. If they get accepted, they come over. And I can tell you, there's a high number of former Army Rangers that fly Chinooks on the 160th.

And a lot of that, now you can't take a lot of them at one time, right? You can take one of these junior guys, like we said we could take two a year, you know, and be able to, task force babies we call them. How do they get through assessment? They just do, you know, they're good enough, you know, they're going to fail the navigation flight anyway.

Do good in the PT test, the psych assessment. They did well. If you can make E7 in the SEALs or in Delta, you've got some, we have your evaluation reports and all that. You have a history that we can look at and go, okay. So these guys have had some flight They've obviously gone they might not some guys have well Yeah, they got a flight school, but you can take to a year of guys that were

You know like I said you know Mike was a an e7 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 night stalker. We call them task force babies. And it turns out good. Because you get plenty of other guys, you know I was pure pilot, you know, so I don't have the ground guy experience,

which when I got shot down was a thing I worried about because it's like I can shoot, I'm good with my rifle, but I don't know much about how somebody might flank me or ground stuff, but yet, the guys that were former Rangers or SF guys, they had a lot of green berets, they knew that kind of stuff. So you always, kind of like, if you could have a co-pilot that was once a former action guy, it'd be nice.

Yeah, so hold on, let me, so these, so like Mike Rutledge, for example, I've met him. So he went from the SEAL teams to what, a Navy flight school? Nope, to Army flight school. So he did an inter-service transfer. In a regular unit. He went straight to flight school,

straight to Army flight school. So SEAL teams to straight to Army flight school. Straight to the 160th. Holy shit. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and it's not common, but it does happen. Like I said, we kind of determine two guys a year we could handle.

Does the unit like that? Yeah, yep. Because it gives you some diversity in, well, understanding the mission, right? And the idea here is that they understand the ground force mindset. They know what the Rangers want, they know what the SEALs want,

they know what the Delta guys want. And not just by what they want, I know that, just by working with them. But they understand the entire mindset and the personalities. Oftentimes, with Mike, for example, I was in Afghanistan one time with him and I was already there, or I just got there

and he rolled in about a week later and I took him with me over to Red Squadron, because he knew, we'd actually flown a mission one year where probably 20 of the 30 guys on board were at his wedding when he was a CO. And they took turns coming to the cockpit. It was just a repositioning them from fob to fob, and they came up and they look in the cockpit

and they're like, slap him on the shoulder. He's like, oh, that was my best man. And it was really cool. So it gave you a little bit of the Bonifides. Some good camaraderie. Yeah, it was good. Yeah, you know, that's something, I know we're getting off topic here a little bit,

but that's something that I've always, ever since drones started coming on the scene, man, I'm showing my age. But it said, something that we always worried about was losing that personal connection with whoever's got us up top. What do you think about that?

It's tough, you know what I mean? Think back to several years ago, the original drone operators, so to show my age, the original drones were not armed, except for the agency one, 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. 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 soft armor, I've got a little plate that's about this big, you know, and we took all the armor out of the aircraft

in the early days so we could go to the higher elevations because it was too heavy. And then one year, must have been, I don't know, late 2002, maybe 2003, I said, screw it. Somebody shoots at me, he's going to eat lead. And I instructed the gunners, that's a hostile act. Somebody shoots at us, you kill them. And I made a big distinction, you don't engage,

you kill them, you engage them, they duck their head, you kill them, they can't, he's dead. And so I realized at some point, I felt better being able to defend myself, right? So there's this like this equal thing, it's 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 you take a shot at me, I'm going to take a shot back at you.

And it's kind of like we both have an equal chance of dying, but the guy flying the drone, it's one way. It's very godlike. You have the opportunity to kill somebody and he doesn't have the chance to reciprocate. It's kind of, I view that as maybe that is part of the, that post-traumatic stress is like they feel guilty It's kind of, 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 one, a capability, number two, that personal relationship.

Yeah, you know, I mean, it's just meeting you guys before operations and other pilots, I mean, it creates this personal connection where it's like, I know those guys down there, or I know those guys up there. They just drop me off. That was always in our minds, when we started working with ISR and stuff like that.

Anyways. With the air breathers, the Draco guys, the U21s or whatever they were flying, C12s I guess, that had all the ISR platforms and they would do all the collection, they'd do all the, as you're coming into the target, they'd give you a sit rep. You got two sleepers on the roof, three guys laying on the ground on the green side,

whatever, and you'd come in. And in the early days, they did a terrible job. I'd be out in the Kandahar area, and we'd go land out in the middle, do an offset infill, and we're going to land in the middle of this poppy field. And the ISR comes back with, all good, nobody's there, and they're zoomed in on my coordinates where I'm going to land. And 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 land and it'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 I remember sitting down with these guys afterwards, the ISR guys and say, hey look, look at your video. And so when you scaled out and you saw me,

did you see the guys with the guns? Well yeah, but they didn't shoot at you. I'm like, but I don't want to land there if they're there. So we had to teach them what to do and because they were at Bagram, we'd start meeting with them a little more and once I had that relationship with them, they knew what I wanted, I knew what they wanted, I knew what I wanted.

I knew what they needed. We were talking offline, and I'm sure we'll get to it during the Red Wings, when I planned that whole operation, the FIRES plan was successful because I sat down and the sensor operators 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, hey, I want this kind of ordinance here, this here.

They know what their stuff does, but that's that relationship that you get. Yeah, yeah. All right, where were we? Back to, we were in the middle of, you just got done with assessment, I believe. Yeah, all right, yeah. Went back to the unit for a year.

So I go back to my unit, right? Except when I got there, a week later, the battalion commander from 2nd Battalion 160th calls me, and he's like, hey, Al, how would you like to come up in six weeks? And I'm like, well sir, you guys told my commander it would be like a year. And he goes, yeah, well, we need you now.

Because it takes eight months to put a guy through the Shnook pipeline. Can you do it? So I went and talked to my wife. Now keep in mind, I lived in on post housing at the time, so it was pretty easy to get out of there. But now I got to get a house up in Campbell. So I took leave, went up there house hunting for a week,

and bought a house, and it worked better bid on the house, whatever, and I came back, and I remember the battalion commander at Fort Rucker was pissed. And he tried to call in all kinds of markers from generals and stuff that he knew to stop me from leaving, like, because he couldn't stop it. And I thought from generals and stuff that he knew to stop me from leaving, like, because he couldn't stop it.

And I thought, for sure, he's going to stop me. Now he's mad at me. And the 160 said, no, we need him. So they just sucked me up there. Six weeks later, I'm in basic skills, learning hand-to-hand, you know, we're doing, that's the part I forgot. When you start in a training, you know,

it's basic skills. So it's, you know, first aid,, that's the part I forgot. When you start in the 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 MP5s. We were just transitioning to the M4s like the next year. But because of Mogadishu, you know, they had MP5s and they found out that was insufficient for what we need, right?

And it's one thing to clear a room with it, but if you're gonna defend a downed aircraft, you don't want a pistol round. And, but we were still learning on that, which was pretty cool for me, you know, shooting silenced MP5s. And you do that, and then the enlisted guys, at that point, go on to log PT and ground navigation,

stuff like that, and the pilots move on to the air navigation stuff. But yeah, so I get up there and we start that, and it was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed it. What do you mean the enlisted guys, the crew chiefs? Well, I take that back, any night stalker who's not a pilot, so you could be the clerk. No shit, so you guys train together?

The pilots and the crew. Yep. That's pretty cool. And same thing with, I think when it was hand to hand, it was pilots and pilots and list of guys and list of guys, but like I had a guy, he played in the NFL, I was the next biggest guy, right? But this guy was like a freaking,

he was like a mountain. So we're doing like practicing brachial stunts. He's hitting me on the side of the neck, boom, and I'm like, oh. And I don't go down, and the instructor comes in, he goes, hit him harder. I said, why do I want to hit him harder? He's like, hit him harder, or I will, right? So the guy hits me harder, and of course I drop.

He goes, harder than that. And he's like, if I hit him harder than that, I'm going to knock his head across the room and he's going to be seriously hurt. We're not doing it, you know? Because there's that whole mentality of, come on, you got to be tougher. You know, we're night stalkers, you know?

But this guy, you know, he knew his own strength. This guy, Mike was his name, he was actually out at the range. He was that little bird guy, attack guy. I don't know how he fit in the aircraft. And he got out and the rotor blade hit him in the head and it damaged the aircraft and his helmet. And he walked away going, yeah.

Wow. Like mongo, you know, and blazing saddles. I was like, oh. 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 amazing. So it's like imagine being in a minivan

and they drop you in a pool and you're strapped in and the thing rolls over and sinks and then you've got to get out, you know, 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 chaos in there which if you use their training, not a big deal.

You know, you just wait until the violent motion ceases, you get a reference, you unbuckle yourself You know you go out or you jettison the door You're still buckled in and then you put your hand outside release the thing and just pull yourself out So if you do the training it all works really well But when you don't the guys panic and they get stuck inside and the divers have to pull them out Can you talk a bit a little bit about the relationship between? that. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the crew chief and the pilots? Yeah, so in the Chinooks in particular and the Blackhawks are very similar, the relationship with the crew chiefs,

you get to know them quite well because they you fly a lot together. In a Chinook, the minimum crew to fly a Chinook, a regular Chinook, is two pilots and a flight engineer. So the flight engineer is the senior crew chief in the back. In the 160th, a minimum crew is two pilots and two, two crew chiefs, a flight engineer and a crew chief, this guy in the back. And then when we're in combat, it's four. So you have a crew of six, two pilots, this guy in the back. And then when we're in combat, it's four. So you have a crew of six, two pilots,

four guys in the back, because you've got two guys manning the miniguns up front, and two guys on the M240s in the back. And then they have other duties that they do. And you spend long, long hours together, whether it's training, it could be a cross-country flight, flying from Campbell to California, doing air refueling on the way

and you know, it's an eight hour flight without landing. You're going to talk and talk and talk and you get to know each other. The other thing is, I always like to say that a good crew chief in the back can compensate for a bad pilot up front. So let's say you're gonna land on a spur, a mountain spur, right, with a aft gear,

you know, doing a little wheelie, or landing with one wheel or something like that. If the pilot can't see anything, like you're looking down several thousand feet and there's nothing there, there's no reference to know that you're moving a foot or two, right, to keep the wheels on the terrain. But the crew chief's looking right at it.

And if he is good, he can talk you through doing it. You know, it's like, hold what you got, you're starting to slide to the left a couple inches, you know, and you just little subtle movements to the controls and you listen to him. As long as he stays calm, you stay calm. If you got a crew chief who gets wound 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 at the ground force has no idea that this guy's having a tough night because the crew chiefs compensate.

Sometimes a really good pilot can compensate for a crew chief in the back that isn't as good, you know, but there are limitations. You know, like I said, if you're a thousand feet out over the terrain and you got nothing to look at, all you can do is listen to him, you know, like I said, if you're a thousand feet out over the terrain and you got nothing to look at All you can do is listen to them, you know, or maybe the other pilot can see something. So that relationship is very very important how 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 When we go on the road for training, for example, junior guys, junior pilots will room together. If you're a flight lead or officer in charge, you get your own room. The crew chiefs, same thing. If you're a senior NCO, you'll get your own room. If not, you'll share. But after flying, we'll spend time together,

in the bar or 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 pilot, you have a pilot in charge,

pilot in command, right, in the Army. Air Force calls him 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. It's different if he's the air mission commander. He could be the overall air mission commander, and he happens to be in my cockpit. So now we're in a little bit of a gray area, because I'm telling him what to do in the aircraft, but he's maybe telling me what to do in the overall mission, right?

So it's a kind of a blend there, but. Where we going with that? I said I went around in the wrong way. Relationship between, well now not relationship, basically responsibilities. Yeah, responsibility for the aircraft, right? So when I was a junior pilot, there's a red line on the floor in a Chinook.

It's like station 95, they call it, right? So every inch of an airframe is assigned a station. One inch is station one, or 001, or something like that, right, and as you go back. And that way you can say, one inches, station one, or 001 or something like that, right? And as you go back, and that way you can say, I've got a sheet metal crack at station 350, butt line, whatever, and you can tell just by markings on the floor

where this crack could be, right? So with a junior pilot and a senior crew chief, sometimes they'll say, you might mention something about the back, and they'll say, you might mention something about the back and they'll go, sir, you're in front of station 95, just keep your business up there, right? Yeah, whatever. So there's that relationship where it can be, I mean, we're always busting each other's butts,

but if you're a guy like me, right, and I had, I do a lot of talking about, you know, I did this, I did this, there's always a crew involved, and in many cases there's an aircraft or two or three behind me doing the same thing, right, so you gotta keep that in mind. But the responsibility of the aircraft commander, the PIC, is absolute, he is responsible for it.

So whether he's divided some authorities up to the crew chief in the back, it's based on what's going on. For example, fast roping. The pilot will find the target, he'll come in, he'll start his approach. You get 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 come in, you start listening to him, they'll talk you in, and then when you get over the target, the crew chief and the fries masters will look down, identify the landing area, kick the ropes, and that guy is pretty much in charge until he's done doing his thing. I'm listening to him.

He's like, come left, come right, come up, come down. Stop, stick, whatever is going on. And they have a lot of responsibility in the back. And get the utmost respect for those guys. Especially because they got no control of the aircraft ultimately, because I do have the ultimate responsibility on what happens and they're going with me wherever I go.

I mean I would imagine that relationship has to be pretty tight with a lot of mutual respect. And if there's not, there can be a problem. So when I was in the conventional unit in Savannah, I had a friend, he had a terrible relationship with all the crew chiefs, like he just looked down on them, you know? And no matter who talked to him, he just, he treated them like crap.

And they hated flying with him. And we were coming back from California one time. We were getting gas and we were taxiing in and the way a Chinook drives on the ground is you got a little steering wheel by your back like this, and one of the wheels has a power steering actuator, and the aircraft will drive like a car, right, on the ground. And when you come into a parking area at an airport,

depending on if you're close to airplanes or a hangar, buildings, light poles, that kind of stuff, it's very important for the crew chief to say, sir, we're close to this, let me dismount, and somebody will get out, and they'll look at the rotor tips and make sure you are not 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 chief 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 a toxic relationship with the crew that they let him damage the aircraft on purpose. created such a toxic relationship with the crew that they let him damage the aircraft on purpose. They didn't make him damage it on purpose, they let it happen.

And so that's the extreme. I've never seen that in the 160th. The 160th is so professional that I really, I do miss it. 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 I'd come down the river, and on a nice day, I'd kind of be like, I kind of miss flying. What I really miss is the people and the mission.

As I like to say, taking a bunch of pipe swingers to a bad guy's front door, that's rewarding. I like to say, you know taking a bunch of pipe swingers to a bad guy's front door That's rewarding. You know, I like doing that. I'm 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 eight months. That's it. Yeah. Oh shit. So what'll happen is You'll go on a deployment like say overseas right when you're back in the States. You just get who you get right? Unless you're on a trip like a young going out the mountains or something whatever okay nation that trip is but when you go to

Combat you get assigned a pilot your co-pilot and your crew in an aircraft an airframe right and However, that deployment is it might be a 60-day deployment your co-pilot and your crew and an aircraft, an airframe. 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. So the first couple of flights can be rough as you're feeling each other out. I flew because I was what's called an SIP,

the Standardization Instructor Pilot. So I was essentially the Chief Pilot for Chinooks in the 160th. And I would fly with the different battalions, right, because I had to fly, and the idea was to always be evaluating them to make sure they are holding the standard. You know, so if you're out at, you know, Savannah,

are you doing things the same way as you're doing at Campbell, because you better be, that's the standardization program. That way the customer knows he's 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. So I would deploy with them as well. forward arming and refueling point, and we're gonna, it's in Asadabad, Afghanistan. We're gonna come in, we're gonna hover up to the point, we're gonna set down next to it,

and they're gonna unplug a hose, plug it into the aircraft while we're running, and take gas, called hot fuel. So we come in, I'm at a 10-foot hover, and Kruci says, all right, sir, come straight down. I come straight down. He goes, sir, can you move, pick it up again? Sure, I pick it up.

He goes, move forward three, move three. He's like, all right, go ahead and set it straight down. So I set it straight down. He's like, sir, can you pick it up again? I'm like, what the hell? He's like, I'm sorry, everybody always drifts forward when they descend, you actually come straight down. And I'm like, that's what they're supposed to be doing.

But I'm a high, I am the chief, I should be the best, or of the best. I have peers obviously, but I'm good. And these guys had never flown with me before, and they were just anticipating that I would drift forward like all other guys did. And so as time went by, they just compensate for how I fly. Gotcha. And so maybe I don't come straight down.

Maybe I am the drift guy. I drift forward as I come down. They just compensate for that. They just bring you in three feet short. Have you come down, they know you're gonna drift in and you land. So there's that relation, that habitual relationship and that 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 Training so we were done green platoon Being what is green platoon? Oh, so green platoon is where It's the training platoon for the 160th. So you have Green Team and OTC, you know, for the other special mission units.

And it came about because, so at the 160th 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, 1980s, early 80s, those are all training deaths for the most part. Because they're developing tactics, techniques, and procedures that the Army later adopted.

How to use night vision goggles, what are the limitations, when should you, when shouldn't you, kind of thing. And those names are on the wall, you know? And so there was too many in one 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 160th in 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 godsend. It really is an amazing, whoever really thought that through, you did a good job way back when. But that's what it's for.

Right on. So it's an eight month? It's different for every airframe. It takes eight months to get a Chinook guy through. So that's basic skills, hand to hand, shooting, that kind of stuff. Basic nav, or B-nav, that's where you learn to fly and navigate in the little bird,

to do things like a night stalker, and then you go to your specific aircraft. So even if you're a Chinook guy and you end up in Chinooks, there's so much expansion of what the aircraft can do because of the additional equipment that's embedded into the airframe, 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 they have totally different aircraft that's specific for 160th. What would be some of the things that are different between a conventional 47 versus a TF-160? So when I talked earlier about the MH-6s or the MH-47, so Army aircraft are designated by what they do, right? CH, CH-47, right? Cargo helicopter, Model 47, version Delta, right?

In this case, it's modified helicopter 47, you know, Echo at that time. And some of the equipment that's different, well, big differences is the fuel tanks on the special ops version, the MH, is twice the capacity. So instead of 1,000 gallons, you're carrying 2,000 gallons. There's internal fuel tanks that can fit inside that are crash-worthy and ballistically tolerant.

There is an air refueling probe that sticks out the front. I think if you look on the front of my book there, you get this big pipe that sticks out the front. You can fly up behind 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 miniguns, 7.62, six-barrel Gatlin gun, shoots 4,000 rounds a minute. They have to learn that, how to do it, how to deal with malfunctions. You've got terrain following radar, which is key. After 9-11, without that, we could not have done even half, even a fraction of what we did in those infills getting the, you know, the horse soldiers and other green braid teams and the OGA teams.

Because every SF team had to be brought in to an OGA team that was there the day before or two days before. So that's what all this equipment does. And everything is a TV screen. There's four TV screens and an Echo and there's five in a golf and those five are split-able. Like you can divide them up so there's five in a Golf,

and those five are split-able. You can divide them up, so there's really 10 displays. You have to learn how to use those and when to use them. Flying the helicopter itself is pretty much the same. One, make sure you can fly the aircraft okay, the way we want you to. Interact with the crew, because you're also training the enlisted crew. Then we go into the special mission tasks, like terrain following radar. We go to Knoxville, fly in the mountains, in the dark.

The pilot will flip his MVGs up, so he can't really see out the window. It's no moon out, it's dark, and he's following the terrain falling radar cues. And the other pilot, as a safety pilot, if you will, the instructor, has his goggles down. So if the guy misinterprets the cues and is going to fly into something,

he can just take the controls, I have the controls. It's just that simple. You just, I have the controls. And then you say, what's wrong? But you get that air refueling, you got to teach the guy how to do that. That's high adventure sometimes. And so once they learn to do the aircraft, the equipment, now we have to learn how to utilize it in the environment.

And the cool thing with the 160th is that a conventional unit doesn't do is we've got money for TDY, right? So you take the students from Campbell, you say we go to Knoxville for 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 gotta go to them, which might be Dallas or the Houston area, that kind of stuff. Or you travel somewhere and they'll come, you know, you hit a tanker and route. And then once you've done those things, you go desert mountain, we go to Albuquerque,

and you're out there for like three weeks learning to just land in the dust for real, and then learn how to fly in the mountains, power management, how to read the wind in the mountains, and how to come in from a certain direction. It's like parachute jumping, you have to learn, you know, how to land in wind in the mountains and how to come in from a certain direction. It's like parachute jumping. You have to learn how to land in a certain way. And then everything we did,

before we did it in the aircraft, we did it in the flight simulator, which was very realistic. So you would teach them how to do the hover page. So there's this, on the little TV screen, there's a little video game you play. There's a crosshair in the middle. There's an open circle and a line.

And you try to keep the open circle over the crosshairs. And if you're moving, that line gets longer in the direction of movement, 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've got to keep all of those little cues on top of that little crosshair.

So you can't see out the window at all. You're either in the dust and snow, whatever it is, and you move the cyclic stick to keep that where it is like a little video game. And then the crew chief might be able to see straight down, right? He might be able to see out, not be able to see out, but oftentimes they can see the ground right below you,

depending on your altitude. And they'll be like, all right, sir, you're 10 feet off and you're confirming that up front with the instrumentation. You've got it steady, and you come down. And you just come down and it can be a challenge, to say the least, to land in the dust. All bad, all bad. So you graduate, obviously.

Yep, yep. So we did that, you graduate. When you graduate Green Platoon, you are probably, well, back during the height of the OEF and OIF, you were going to deploy probably in two weeks, maybe less. When did you graduate, what year? So I graduated in 95.

And there was nothing going on. Right, so it was all training back then. And training trips, people ask me, what was it like pre-911 and the 160th? Oh, it was great. Because everywhere we went was four or five star. You go to Colorado to do mountain flying, we're standing in condos.

Or at least a nice hotel, you know, the Double Tree. We didn't have any tents, you know, so we were destined one time working with AC 130s. We had three aircraft there. Two of them flew per night, and we were flying guys in, they would call for fire, and then we'd come pick them up, that kind of stuff. And the other crew was really a spare, you know,

so we, you have to keep the flight hours and then we come pick them up, that kind of stuff. And the other crew was really a spare. You have to keep the flight hours within a certain parameter to keep the aircraft flying, right? So it's like an oil change. You know that, well, another 100 miles, I'm going to have to do an oil change, except you're going to have to do it, right? They're going to make you do it by regulation, right? So you keep track of the oil changes, if you will,

and every hour you fly ticks off on this, your oil change, if you will. And so, you know, if you've got one down for the night doing maintenance, what we call schedule maintenance, the oil change, the other two can go flying. And if you're not working on it and one of them breaks, that's a spare. You just take it, you can do your thing,

and now we have not affected the ground force in any way, right, that's the goal. But anyway, we're out to show you this is pre-9-11. So two of us are out flying, the aircraft breaks, and they fly back to Holbert Field to, they're done for the night, right? Ah, we can't fix this tonight, we go back. They hook up, we're in Destin, is our hotel,

is at the Sheraton on the beach. And the person not flying, that crew, is responsible for getting beverages, bait, like we had gotten some Zebco fishing reels at the PX, or the BX, and you had everything ready, and the guys would come back from flying, and we'd spend the night on the beach, fishing off in the surf, right, drinking beer.

That's pre-9-11, if you weren't actually doing some missions. And I come back one night, that night I'm talking about, and because it's two crews now, they're all drunk. And I come out, I'm like the only, I'm like the adult leader in the group. They're out in the water, the pilots, they're up to their neck with fishing rods, right, surf casting, and the waves had slowly walked them out.

You know, like they started waist high and they ended up at the neck. And I was like a Boy Scout leader. I was like, all right, everybody, buddy up. Like what? I said, hold hands with the guy next to you. I want to count heads, right? So I kind of was like, get in here, right?

And they're like, all right, we're coming, you know? But that was pre-9-11. 9-11 happens. You know, you still get some nice trips but it's not like that. Yeah. But where I really was going with that is the ability to take the guys to the actual environment.

So we're going to go learn to land in the dust, for real. Usually when you get there, the lake beds are dry crust, you know, and there's no dust. So I remember I took these guys out one time and I start driving the aircraft around on four wheels and I'm breaking up the crust. Now what are you doing? It's going to get dusty.

I'm like, that's the point of this. We're not out here to pretend we're dust landing. We're going to dust land. And then you go up to the mountains, you wear an oxygen, which turned out to be important in Afghanistan. Things like that, you know, and that's what we do. So when you get back from Green Patoon pre-911,

you would go places, you know, Fort Bragg, you would end up in Fort Benning, work with the Rangers, go out to Coronado, work with the Seals, out to Little Creek, and you just do whatever they needed. You know, oil platform take downs, you know, VBSS, something like that. And once the war started, you know, platform takedowns, VBSS, something like that. Once the war started, that training became less and less because we needed airframes overseas.

So it was tougher to get that realistic training in or you had to learn to mix it in. It's like if you're going to go out to the compound at Bragg, what can you do on the way out? We would link up with the A-10s out of Pope when they were still there. And on the way in, we'd link up with them and do a personnel recovery mission, which I got a good one in the book there

where I dusted out some farmer. The pilot, the downed pilot was there and the A-10s are doing their passes and the farmer had just lined the field with his tractor and he's just sitting there watching. You know, the ATENs do their thing and I come in with the Chinook and I land right next to him and it's a big cloud of dust and farm talc,

I don't know what, poison I guess, I don't know, fertilizer. I thought I was in trouble. We get to brag. I talk to the Air Force guy. He gives me the farmer's phone number. I call him. I'm like, hey, I apologize, I'm so sorry. He's like, are you kidding me?

He goes, that was amazing. He goes, you do that any time you want. He says, but make sure I'm out there because I want to watch it. He's like, all right. There we go. That's awesome. By the way, the training is very realistic.

And the margin for safety is interesting because the 160th, because we killed so many people in the early days, had a reputation of being cowboys. Oh, the 160th guys are going to just ignore all the rules and do whatever. Well, now we're inventing new rules, you know, and it's how you progress, you know? And unfortunately, it was progressed

in the blood of night stalkers. But that reputation is still there, you know? And I remember teaching a couple of Green Poutine classes where guys would come in and I would say, okay, we're not gonna do this tonight because, you know, maybe the weather is such and such or we've got some parameter that's kind of iffy. And I actually, a couple of occasions have had guys say,

well, I thought we would just do whatever it took. And it's like, well, maybe on a combat mission or national something of strategic importance, national importance, but we're training we're not gonna kill somebody You know just to go out. We'll just do it tomorrow night, you know kind of thing So the rules are very important us as well. What did it feel like when you graduated? Fuck good. I'll bet you know you felt you really You've really done something, you know, and it's what I want to do you do that

And then you graduate you're one of the best Helicopter pilots in the world I'd like to think so you know and as the time goes by When you get better in the unit like I mean you could be a senior guy like a cw4 But a junior pilot. You're taking out the trash, you're emptying, you're filling the fridge, that kind of stuff. You gotta pay your penance, because someone's gotta do it. And the other guys are doing important things.

You know, I lived my life watching the news, like the 24-hour news cycle. Something came on CNN back when it was reliable. You look at it and go, oh, something's happening in Khartoum. That's happening in Belize. You know, the ambassador in this place might be trouble. And I would go into work. I'd get into the high side stuff.

I'd research the situation. I'd research the country. And I'd start preliminary plans for how to operate there because there were many times I get called in, trying to think of the country in South America, every year I'd get called to go get the ambassador and they'd smooth things over and we didn't have to. But you live your life on the news

because you could be going somewhere. I mean, look what happened on October 7th, right, with Israel. Those guys were on the road within hours. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Not that I know anything about that, but, you know.

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

Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. I'd like to invite you to gain access to an exclusive experience on Vigilance Elite Patreon. Our patrons are the driving force behind the success of this show and their support allows us to keep doing what we do. Depending on the tier you choose, you'll get access to benefits like behind the scenes footage before each interview, early access to episodes,

end of the month live Zoom calls with me, exclusive merch and more. Join us and become a patron starting at just $5 a month by visiting patreon.com slash Vigilance Elite. That's patreon.com slash vigilance elite. That's patreon.com slash vigilance elite. All right, Alan, we're back from the break. We've covered your childhood. We've covered the beginning of your military

career, your assessment into TF 160. And now we're getting into your combat operations. Let's move into post-9-11. All right. Actually, let's move, let's just go into 9-11. All right. What were you doing when that happened? So 9-11, I was in, I was doing a mission in JRTC, right, the Joint Readiness Training Center down in Fort Polk, Louisiana, right.