The Team House - 160th SOAR "Night Stalkers" Crew Chief & Door Gunner | Daniel Devine | Ep. 239

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Daniel spent 12 years in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment as a Crew Chief and Door Gunner in the Chinook. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Today's Sponsors:Fum ⬇️https://tryfum.comUse the code “TEAMHOUSE” for 10% off!Augusta Precious Metals⬇️https://www.augustapreciousmetals.com/Text "TEAM" to 68592 or go to https://www.augustapreciousmetals.com/---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#160thsoar #specialoperations #nightstalkersBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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And if you're going to give us a not so good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, guys, welcome to episode 239 of the Team House. We are here today. with our guest, Daniel. Daniel served as a crew chief with 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, mostly or entirely on the MH47 platform, also deployed with a previous guest of ours, Alan Mack. So we're really happy to have him on the show tonight.

Quick shout out to Augusta Precious Metals for supporting the show and being a sponsor. We'd really appreciate having them. And Daniel, you know, without further ado, man, Thank you for coming on the show tonight. Thank you very much for having me on board. Yeah, man. So tell us a little bit about your upbringing and sort of what led you towards military service. My dislike for school pretty much sent me in the military way.

I grew up in a little small town in Missouri, O'Sage Beach, Missouri down the Lake of the Ozarks. Not the Ozarks north of there. That's fight north of the Ozarks. they call me from the Ozarks. But yeah, I was just a middle-of-the-road school kid. I was always well-behaved, but when it came to homework and study habits, it was not my cup of tea. So my best friend at the time that I didn't know until after,

I'd already joined the Army as the guy that sent the Army recruiter to my door. So came and talked with him and told me, hey, you want to travel the world and do fun stuff and get some money for college. And I was like, yeah, sure, why not? I, my parents were all the Navy back during the Vietnam era and my grandparents and all that. My brother served in the Army in the late 80s, early 90s. So I thought, yeah, sure, why not? Let's give it a try.

So off I went and went up to the MEP station up in St. Louis, Missouri, and watched a little video. I'd always been in love with tanks. They're cool. They drive around and blow the truck. That's awesome. I've always had a love for helicopters. I don't know where that came from. It was pretty cool.

So I was sitting in the lobby at the MEP station, and I remember a show called Firepower on Discovery Channel came on. It showed a tank rolling through the desert, blowing up stuff. I was like, yep, that's it. And the very next screen showed a helicopter, finder missile, and blowing up the tank. So I walked through a while I sitting there and said, hey, that helicopter job, I'll take it.

Sounds cool. Off I went. So you didn't really know too much about what you volunteered for. you just knew you want to be in rotary wing aviation somewhere. Oh, yeah. And it's, I mean, it's even, it's even worse than that. My official MOS at the time, 67 uniform, and then, you know, they changed the MOSs around and became 15 uniform. But my LOS is a new helicopter repairer.

I signed it in a helicopter mechanic. And when I showed up at Fort Eustis, Virginia in August of 2000, or in 94, you know, I thought I was going to be just, General helicopter mechanic. That's the laser disc, aging ourselves a little bit. But that's the laser disc. They showed me at the MEP station was fixing all, you know, Apaches, cobra, and Hueys. That is it was great.

And all of a sudden, we walked through the hangar on our first day, and I'm like, what is this? What is this school-less dumpster-looking thing? They're like, oh, yeah, this is your life for the next. And for our job, it was six years. The initial enlistment was six years. Wow. So, well, I'll just, I'll be helpful.

helicopter mechanic and see how it goes. And in time I had no idea that, you know, being a crew chief on anything flying was an option. I didn't realize that until I got Panama. And I was like, who's the cool guys in flight suits that are never at PT in the morning? So that was a flight lieutenant. He said, I want it. How do I do that? Spent six months in maintenance and the rest of my career, the last 19 years flying on the back.

Was the enlistment six years because the initial training was so long? Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you know, some of those MLS is where they, you know, the training's kind of long and it's technical. And, you know, if they're going to, they're going to do that, they want, they want somebody with some longevity. Right. I initially kind of asked about, you know, what's a medic or whatever, you know, someone to give me a good job on the outside. But, yeah. So, T-school up at Fort Eustis, Virginia was, to see.

I got there in, let's see, August, September. Actually, I got there in October. It was about six months, about six months long. Yeah. And so if you're going from scratch, like, you know, you didn't happen to have a helicopter in your garage. So you're, you know, your hands on for the first time, what is six months of, you know, helicopter maintenance? Yeah. I mean, it's the first three weeks, it's the front load, and it's all learning the manuals, the maintenance manuals.

You know, because every, I mean, the helicopter's big. You guys have been in the back of me seeing how big those things are. Lots of, lots of systems, subsystem. So the first three weeks is learning the maintenance manuals. And it's like, you know, it's about 10 books, you know, that's, you know, two inches thick. and then you got troubleshooting manuals that are, you know, four of those which are huge. So it's learning the maintenance, the manuals, the record system because, I mean,

it's still a helicopter that flies, so you still got to follow, you know, FAA guidance and civilian pieces and parts as well. So, you know, learning kind of some of the aspects on that, some of the inspection techniques and procedures, you know, not just, you know, part broke, take off the new part on, but you take that part off, clean it and connect it. You know, the helicopter goes through periodic maintenance, you know, every so many flight hours that goes through little infections, and then, you know, every couple hundred hours, we tear the thing apart. So that's the first few weeks, and then the rest of it is just each individual system, you go through the, you know, the engine systems and the hydraulics and then electrical systems and then cargo handling. So it just breaks that thing down into pieces, and you get to kind of know.

And then you get to kind of know that engineers are very weird people and how they put stuff together does not make sense. So, I mean, everybody's familiar working on their cars. You know, it's a simple thing like changing a spark plug. Now imagine doing that on turbine engines that, you know, sitting on top of a helicopter 20 feet up in the 120 degree Afghani sun. Yeah. Makes things a little sporty. But yeah, it's just a whole lot of technical, you know, learning. And sometimes it's also the basic concepts of not just learning.

the parts, but how they work. Right. I mean, if you guys see, you just sit inside and you look up and you see all those pipes and tubing and all that stuff. Yeah, we know what every piece is, what everything does. So, yeah, so it's pretty long. And for 20 years, I was still learning. I mean, even up until the point I retired, I was still learning stuff.

Do, uh, do the, do the, do different parts of the helicopter evolve at different times? And so how does that create challenges for you guys? Yeah, I mean, you know, when I, when I retired, I was teaching at the maintenance test pilot course down at Full Rucker, Alabama, for big army guys. And the big army had the Fox model Chinooks, you know, the F models, which was kind of like a slim down version of the G model that we had in the regiment. And then prior to that was the echo.

So, you know, with every model change, it's basics are the same, but it's a new helicopter, and then individual pieces in parts can sometimes update. You know, the engines go through upgrades. It was very common in the 160th. You know, we had a little sell down at the end of the runway that their sole purpose in life was, you know, take a piece. How can we make it bigger and better? How can we fit it on the helicopter?

And then we got to learn it. Yeah. So it was, yeah, I mean, it was just about the time you think you're the smartest guy. world they come out with new stuff and you're like shit okay I'm starting over yeah so yeah so you in my in my 20 years you know I went from you know the big army delta models to the regimental echoes and then we replaced the echoes with the golfs and I went from golf to bit army on the Fox models so I went through four four models of the 47 yeah and so four years down in Panama, you were able to make that switch from mechanic over to crew chief.

And what was it like down in Panama at that time? I mean, people who were stationed down there back in the day speak very highly of it. I found. It was the Army's little hidden secret. I got there in March of March, April of 95. I remember leaving, you know, leaving Virginia. I said, you know, blue jeans, you know, flannel shirt, jacket. I get off the airplane in Panama at Tacuman Airport, and I thought I was dying.

I was like, where, where am I? What did I just do? But, yeah, that place was amazing. As far as us, we had just one little aviation battalion, you know, some big Army Blackhawks. And then the 47 side of the house, we only had eight. We had eight ships, and we supported everything, you know, from Mexico down to the tip of South America. America. But the thing that really kind of ignited my fire for what I want to do in the future was we had a small little detachment from the 160th guys. At the time, it was called the 617 SOAD, and then they later became part of the Thurbitine guys here. But we were fortunate enough that we got to do some work with them. You know, sometimes we was doing, you know, having Hazaback training. over the jungle school or, you know, doing fat cow missions, you know, flying out to an island and, you know, setting up a FARP site.

So just kind of getting exposed to that. And then the other thing that kind of made me decide that I wanted a special someday was getting to work with the seals that were rotating through. We had Charlie Company third of the seventh, which was down there on Fort Clayton, Panama. Those guys were awesome. You know, super great group of guys. We had such a good relationship. You know, we do a lot of, you know, static line jumps with them. We do their halo drops.

We go down in the canal and do their, you know, helicast operations, you know, their boats. We got to do ladders. Ladders were with them repelling. So it was almost like kind of being a little, you know, miniature special operations unit without all the fancy toys. So when I step and, you know, I go to the maintenance platoon and I'm like scrubbing the cracks at the hangar floor and, you know, cleaning out the butt cans.

I was like, this sucks. I want to go do the things that I hear those stories about the guys at the bar talking about. So about six months into it, they held a flight platoon board, you know, just a promotion board, a selection board, basically. And one of the books that we had that were given in AITU was called the dash 10, it's the operator's manual. It's the Bible. It is the 47 Bible. It tells you how everything works, not details, but the overall basics. You know, nomenclature stuff, you point at it and you have, what's this?

It's a red solo cup full of rum and coke. Great, awesome. So, you know, you knew what it was, what it's called, how it works, aircraft limitations, emergency procedures. Basically, everything that knows about the contractor stuff, everything in the back. studied it, had a couple flight platoon guys helping me out, and went to the board. And I mean, I'm just a, you know, I think at the time

maybe one year in the Army, I'm an E2, got my little mosquito wings. And I've gone to, you know, E4s, E5. I've even had a couple eight of sixes that had been in the Army 10, 12 years, never flown and wanted to do it. And they picked me. I never stopped.

So I'd, I spent for about three and a half years in Panama as a crew chief there progressed up to, you know, In the 47 world, it's a touchy subject, so I'll kind of let this one slide for a guy because nobody knows better. But in the 47 world, being called a crew chief, it's kind of almost degrading thing because that's what we start off as. But in the big world, it's whatever knows of that. But you progress up from being a crew chief to a flight engineer and then from flight engineer up to standards. So I started off, you know, as a crew chief as everybody else, and then got really good.

it working on the airplane six minutes started getting good reputation with the pilots that you know hey and the the other guy I worked with his name was Randy nickname was stubby just a little short guy our airplane was always perfect it was clean and there was no issues we took it babyed it like it was our car and I just kept working up became a flight engineer space when we become a flight engineer you get your own it's kind of like you know you get you put your name on the side that's mine so you know when people are talking about, you know, 105 or 135 of the tail numbers, it's Dan's airplane, Randy's airplane. So it starts to take on your own persona.

So, yeah, we started doing that. Can, Daniel, before jumping on to the next thing, could you take just a moment to explain to the people out there who are not familiar what a crew chief does, what a flight engineer does, how they interact with the pilots and really what that job entails? Yeah. You know, starting off, you have, Big Army has two people. You have two people assigned to each aircraft, and it's theirs. I mean, it's James on it. It's your airplane. The flight engineer is the senior crew member that's basically in charge.

It's his. He signs the hand receipt. He signs for all the equipment. It's his responsibility to make sure that thing is, you know, fully mission capable all the time. And then assigned to him is a crew chief, which is usually a new flight guy. So they're coming from a maintenance platoon. You know, we're coming from another duty station.

and then they're yours. So the two of you can take and do all the stuff. And then as you progress, as you learn, because, you know, there is no, there's no school for being a crew chief. It's literally on the job training. You know, they give you a couple books, give you a checklist. They give you what's called a calling response. Because every, if you guys ever been on the airplane plugged in,

you hear a lot of talks back and forth between the front end and the back end, especially when you're starting up, shutting down, and performing flight news. It's an orchestrated event. So every time the pilot says something, he calls it out and you respond. He calls it out and respond. So, you know, the first few months is just learning that. You know, where do I stand when we start an engine?

Where do I stand when we start the auxiliary? Where do we stand when I'm doing whatever? So that's kind of that flight engineer's job is to make sure the aircraft is up and running all the time and to train that new crew chiefs to become a flight engineer someday as well. And then he'll move over and get his own airplane. And then when it comes to the mission side of the house, it's the mission planning. Big Army, we didn't really do much.

Everything was done by the pilots. We just went out to the aircraft, got it ready. We just sat there waiting for everybody to show up. And then the teams would show up, the passengers, whoever, we'd load the cargo. We might do a quick little safety brief. Don't touch this, don't touch this, sit down and buckle your seatbelt shut up and get off when I tell you to. You know, probably heard some of those. and then when it came to the mission stuff was you know executing whatever facet it was

when I got to the regiment it was a very eye-opening experience on how involved and it got a lot more involved as time went on as the GWAT went on on how much more involved we became in the mission planning cycle of it you know sitting in Afghanistan the planning centers I had a desk right there at the head double. You know, you had the pilots on one. It's kind of a U-shaped thing. And pilots ran down one side. At the head of the table, you had the air mission commander.

You had the flight lead, and then right next to him was me. That's where Al Mack comes into play. He dragged me around the globe a couple times. You're in there to kind of take the load off of them because the mission sets were very detailed. and sometimes very complex that they didn't need to worry about that stuff. You know, there was the mission. They met with the ground force guys.

They come and say, hey, Dan, here's how much weight we have. Can we do it? Where are we got to put this stuff? Can we load this? And then a lot of times it was meeting up with the various kids, you know, doing face-to-face with them. And, you know, especially if time went on, it was very understanding, you know, because they look at a helicopter and go, what do you mean? I can only take six people.

You're a flying school bus. Well, yeah. But we're going to 20,000 feet. Helic factors have limitations, too. So we became an integral part of that mission planning. We were called Enlisted Planner, was our official title. And that's what I eventually did a lot of. But, yeah, that's kind of the role of the crew chief versus flight engineers.

The crew chiefs is just a young new crew member that's learning the ropes and working his way up. And then he gets qualified, the basic mission, fully mission. And then he'll take a flight engineer check ride, get signed off on that. And then, hey, you know, here's your aircraft and here's your crew. You know, don't screw it up and get fired. Well, I don't know why Dee doesn't like you, but he demoted you in the title to, yeah, he demoted you to crew chief in the title of the video, the interview. It just simplifies stuff because everybody knows, you know, when everybody says, you know, on the flight engine, you're like, oh, so you flew. I was like, no, because they think of a guy sitting behind the pilots and a jet, you know, doing stuff.

So, yeah, crew chief, it's good. But, yeah, I mean, you go out to the hangers at Fort Cam, and you say, are you a crew chief? They say it's the wrong guy. You know, you're going to get taped to a chair and taken out to the bird baths. Do you want to do this ad advency here real quick? So our first sponsor for tonight is fume.

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checklist today, text Team to 68592. Again, text T.E.A.m. to 68592. That's team to 68592 or go to augusta preciousmetals.com. And you know what else is precious? Our guest, Daniel, back to you. When you became a crew chief, is there a flight engineer? No, for the crew chief, is there a formal training for that? Do you go to school? Is it all on the job? So in the conventional army, it is, it's all on the doubt training.

They'll do kind of a like a ground school, but it's internal. You know, it's your, you have, you know, kind of like Al Mack was the, the, the Regimental 47, right next to him, you have the non-rated crew member. That's the official thing, the non-rated crew member guy, otherwise known as an SI, who's the standardization instructor. So all the way from, you know, brigade, battalion, all the way down to the company as their own. And so you kind of do a ground school with them where they kind of go through some basic academics. You go through aeromedical, you know, so you learn, you know, the effects of hypoxia.

You know, because we do fly it out to them. And sometimes we don't always have oxygen, and sometimes the oxygen doesn't always last. To, you know, even some silly. What's the effect on? They smoke or death. I don't. I see any next to have bad performance because you definitely don't want to do that when you're, you know, on helicopters. Whether you're flying in the front or, you know, watching the system in the back.

So it's kind of just an in-house thing. And then he has, that SI has a couple of guys that are qualified as a, as an FBI. flight engine instructor. Those guys actually go to a formal school down in Fort Rocker. It's about right around two months long. And that's where we actually learn methods of instruction, how to be an instructor. How to teach. The regiment, we had our own. We had our own schoolhouse for pretty much everybody. So at sea. For now I think it's so at B because it's turned into a battalion. He used to be coming with the Special Operations Aviation Training company. So when you were selected, you may or may not go to that school. If you came from

Big Army and you had training like me. I already had experience. I had a couple hundred flat hours, had done a lot of non-standard mission stuff that most Big Army people didn't. So when I got there, they're just going to go through, we call it Echo Model School. It was two weeks. Learn the differences between the Delta and an Echo, you know, because suddenly you're going from old speed gauges to, you know, a cockpit, a lot of electronic stuff, a lot of systems, you know, that keep that aircraft alive. So the SOATSE, you know, the training company, that was the official schoolhouse for those. And it was, I think it was 85 days, something like that. And we basically took a guy that had no or very limited experience, and we trained them up on what we called the Big Three.

So you would learn the basics. Here's where to stand. Here's what to say. And then you would get trained up on in-flight refueling, rescue hoist, and mini guns. So hoist guns and fuel. Because I can put a guy up to the right position and the left or right gun, if they can do those three, they can do any mission that's out there.

So if we've got to refuel, they know how to read the checklist, they know how to flip the switches. open the valves, the airplane, you know, it's qualified on any gun, it's your bread and butter, and then rescue hoist because it's right during the door.

And then as you would progress up from there, the rest of it is done in-house. So when it goes to the, you know, the advanced mission, fast-roping vehicles, FAR, you know, all that kind of stuff, that will train in-house

by our unit trainers. So when you went from being a mechanic to, to part of the flight crew, were you, like, better than everybody else? I mean, did you, like, kind of kick all of your old, like, like, grease monkeys, you know, all the wrench turners to the curb?

I would like to think so. I mean, it was one that's where I knew, you know, I wasn't the smartest guy, because I had been around forever, but I was pretty shit-hot. I mean, you could, my hardest thing that some of the old guys used to get me a lot of crap for is I would have a hard time remembering what the proper nomenclature was for something. You know, what's that thing called? And I'd be like, uh, that's a, it's a cup.

They're like, no, that's a drinking receptacle device. You know, we all have to army anybody in the fancy shit up. Right. So I was, it's the do me hickie, the whatcha macaulet, whatever it is. But if you want to know what it does, I can tell you what it does. I'll tell you how it works. I'll take it off, take the unexpected. So that was kind of, even at my little selection board,

the guy that was on the board was the standards guy at the time, he passed away a few years ago, was awesome. It was one of my first mentors that really inspired me and lit that fire to become, you know, the best crew chief that I could. He's been on the board. I got a question for it. And he held up a part. I don't know what it was called.

And I just started laughing. And I was like, oh, man, I'm done. He's got me. But, yeah, I mean, when it came to the mechanic stuff, I was just always the guy that was there. You know, I didn't smoke. So, you know, when all the smokers are going to smoke break, I was out working, you know, doing stuff.

You know, the flight guys came in and said, hey, I got some maintenance needs to be done. I need support. I need two guys. I go, a lot of maintenance guys, they didn't want to do that. They just wanted to do lazy stuff. Like, you know, it's hot out there, and it's Panama where it rains, you know, six months out of the year. So I said, I don't give a shit. I'm going.

So that's where I got to get on the real good side of the flight guys and show them that, hey, this is cool. I want to be you when I grow up. So now when that opportunity to present itself, I jumped on it and I was like, I'll be damned if any of these guys are going to beat me out. That's my job. I'm taking it. So what was it? Mentality for the rest of my. That's awesome.

That's not. Daniel, we lost you on that last part. You broke up a bit. Can you repeat that, please? You might want to make sure you're speaking directly at the computer. Oh, yeah. Now I was just saying that, you know, I wasn't going to let anything jeopardize that job, that, that opportunity. Because it's, and hearing from some of the other guys that had come from other Army units from Big Army was it's a very coveted position.

You know, it's where everybody wants to be. you know, the, it was kind of looking back. It got, it gets people out of a lot of stuff. You know, there's a division run. Oh, I got a flight. You know, hey, we got a whatever in the morning. Oh, sorry. Crew rest.

I flew last night. A lot of people wanted it for that, but I just wanted it. It was an awesome time to go out there and do it. So I wouldn't want anything take it. I wasn't to let some of the other guys. I think that's what I was saying whenever I got cut off was that mentality. kind of kept me even the rest of my career was I saw an

opportunity and I saw an opportunity and I'll do what I need to do I'll learn what I need to do I'll learn I'm going to get that because it's mine I want it and so how did you make the jump over to 160th like how did that come about we had a

we had two guys that came that PES from we're careful and came two guys each one came from second of Fort Campbell, but they came from both companies. The flight companies were A&B, the out-companied Bravo company. And at the time, you know, pre-GWAT, they were very different.

You know, a company work with these guys, B company work with those guys. We shared the same building, but there was a law 10, 6 mill of that building. When the guys came down, one guy had been with the regiment for, I don't know, maybe 10 years. the other guy had been there for a long time he was one of the original instructors of that SOATSE department so they're the ones that kind of

dropped that hint and then you just hear in stories of what they were telling me I was like that's pretty cool that sounds awesome and we had a recruiter came down we met at the movie theater put on this pretty awesome video

I think they're still showing it. I mean, it's pretty awesome. But yeah, and the thing with it is, that recruiting video, the majority of it is Little Virgin Blackhawks, and then you see a little bit of 47th, and they land in like a Dune B motorcycle has come run out of it. They're flying over a river with a boat,

you know, sling load in a boat. That was enough for me to see and go, hmm, that's cool. And that echo model is a big, sexy, you know what, and I won. I've never heard anyone use the word sexy to describe it before. Oh, yeah. Got those nice big hips on it.

Yeah. He's a big, beautiful woman. He's got some junk in its trunk. Yeah. Yeah, those guys kind of, and one of them, I was, had gotten dressed up. I was a fairly new flight engineer. And so there was two guys up there in the regiment when their last name ended in either big ski and little ski. So little ski came down and he was a guy and he actually got assigned to the same aircraft as me.

So we were both flat engineers, but I learned a lot more from him going out and doing some fun stuff. And because he had come from the regiment, when it came time to do some stuff that we hadn't been familiar with, you know, we're kind of like we'd exposed to that. They're like, hey, you know, Charlie Company, you know, third of the sergeant, the seventh over there, they want to do, they want to do some repelling. And it's not something that people really do. So he's like, I did that. I've done fast-trip and I'm, shit, I got all that. So they've some of the old checklist that they brought with them, you know, had their stuff in it. So, you know, I got to go out and do, you know, do some, you're rappelling with

them, which is not common at the time in the 47 world. So when it became time that, you know, Panama was shutting down. They said, all right, you know, December of 1919. 99, we're done. You know, they didn't renew the treaty. You're leaving. But the 47 community, we're going to give you two options. Number one, you can move. And at the time, we'd shrunk down, so we went from eight helicopters to six.

So they said, you can either move with those helicopters to Sotomano, Honduras. And you can finish out your term there. So if you had six months a year, whatever it was left on your, your assignment, you'll finish it out on us. They said, or. You can go back to wherever. You can go a dice, leave it up to a DA to see where they're going to cut your orders to. I said, well, I initially came down to Panama in two years, and I loved it.

So I signed up to two more. So I did four years. I'm kind of ready to go back to the States. I'd been up to Honduras a couple times, TDI. And I thought, yeah, it's a cool little place, but that sucks. So I'm ready. So the other guy that came from the regiment, the guy that came from Bravo Company, had been around for a long time, was very well respected and knew a lot of people.

I became pretty good friends with him and his family. So I was talking with him and said, hey, you know, what do you think? What do you think about me trying out, you know, assessing? I think it would, I think you'd be a good fit. You've got the big personality for it. You're pretty laid back. You've got to roll with the punches. You're, you know, always eager.

here to go out and do stuff and you have a good passion for it so yeah go for it and then he asked me goes but here's the big question where do you want to go i said uh do i have a choice he goes well with me you do you know you would you would kind of costume not as formal um you would fill out a packet you'd send it in you know the enlisted cruders take a look at it and go yeah you're in i'm on the list inside i can show it up and and like hey cool you're a fairly new E5, so you're going to take a squad and maintenance. You're going to run a maintenance

squad or something like, nope. No, I'm not. So what's the difference? What's the difference between A company and B company? I mean, I know there's a difference between the two guys that I knew mentality-wise. He goes, well, the easiest way to put it was

a company works with people. B company goes to all the cool locations. And I was like, well, what do you mean? as well. If you want to go work with the, you know, the field guys out of Virginia Beach, you want to go work with the Delta guys. You're going to have a good time, but you better get used to sleeping in tents and cots, and you're going to get very familiar with, you know, the defense of New Mexico and Arizona. I said, okay, what about the other one? He goes, well,

if you want to work with the other company, and you'll get to work with the, you know, the SF guys and the fields, maybe the Rangers on occasion, but you're going to stay in a very nice hotel on the beach in Virginia Beach. We go down to Destin, Fort Walden. We love to stay at the Four Point Sheridan on the beach. When we go to Colorado, we stay in the hotels and condos. I was like, mm, yep. So people have that exposure.

I was like, yeah, that sounds great. So a bravo company, that sounds like a good fit for me. So I don't know who that guy knew. I don't know later on who his good friends were. about a month later I got that little we call it a little candy gram that little green purse gram

you rip off the edge like an envelope and it's like congratulations you're on assignment to Fort Campbell, Kentucky to the 160 I was like wow I didn't have to fill out a packet I didn't have to interview but you're looking back

I think I kind of did that interview for about two years working with those guys in Panama they vouched for me and said yeah this is a dude you want so showed up to Fort Campbell and March April issue of 99.

And then, you know, great platoon, assessment, all that stuff and off and running. So what was, uh, what was that like assessment like? I mean, it sounds like there was some sort of like breaking in period. Oh, yeah, they break you in pretty good. All right. Yeah. So that is a, that's the big difference between the officer and enlisted side of the house. While the pilots go up, you know, the officers, you know, they get called up.

They go to Fort Campbell and they go to their actual assessment, which later on in my Reginald career, I actually kind of got to take part in a couple of those, especially being, you know, joined there at the hit for a while. On the, you know, I'm getting trouble for saying this, but I actually got involved in a board. That was great. But the assessment for the pilots and the officers,

it's a pretty, I mean, man, I've seen some pretty, pretty big, badass dudes break down in tears because it's just emotionally, they're a wreck. And then they still go through. And if they get a set, they get selected, they come up, they go through Green Platoon. But there's as more of a gentleman's course. You know, they'll say that's pretty hard, but it's physically not really. It's kind of a gentleman course. But their piece is the aircraft.

It's the mission planning and the flight stuff. That's where it matters. For us, we show up. And we're with everybody. There's no difference. If you were an enlisted person going to the regiment, you're there. We were talking before we came on the show about, you know, the logistics guys, supply, maintenance, avionics, you know, the S1 path where everybody that's enlisted, you will go through Greenfieldune. You know, we've even had guys that show, arrest, and he hates.

They're in Greenfieldton with us. So when you show up. Yeah. We missed that. You broke up again. Can you, we didn't hear who, who was there with you? Well, you, anybody, any enlisted MOS, the medics, personnel, you name it. You're all going through Green Platoon.

The senior listed guys with the T.7s and a very few XEH will show up unless they know somebody and it kind of been hand-picked. You're all going through Green Platoon. So when you show up, you go out to, you know, the time over at the bunkers. not Campbell's, you know, Orchville base where he used to store the nukes. The penal one, when you go up, you kind of, your assessment, we both last. We, we, Dan, we completely lost that part of it. I'm really sorry. Yeah, I don't know what it is with the audio, but it's, it's like you're underwater at certain points.

Yeah. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the lovely Orlando, you know, AT&T. It's delightful. But we'll try this again. So anybody and everybody, when you show up, you're called, you're in snowbird status. You're just doing work until it comes time for class. When I showed up, my claim to fame is I got to build the parking lot for the obstacle course. It was beautiful.

Nice. Very nice parking lot. So I showed up and got to Fort Campbell. When you show up to Fort Campbell, you go through, you know, big army, 101st Airborne Division replacement, attachment. That was the, it really reinforced the idea that I did not want to have any part of that. Right.

No, thank you. But as me five showing up, you're, you just show up in the morning. You do PT and cut loose. There's no babysit. That was the only good part about it. So I would show up, do PT, come back, sign in at like 9 o'clock, then I'd go do my appointments. and I'd go out to the compound.

And I'd meet with my future workmates. You know, one of my platoon starts there. Some of the guys were gone at the time because that's when, oh, shit, what was it called? That's when I had the no-fly zone stuff going on in Iraq. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was my future unit, my company. So there was a small skeleton crew there.

But I got to know that, which was great. But where I got screwed, was one of the guys called down to the schoolhouse and said, hey, when does the next green platoon start? And I said, oh, it starts on Tuesday. Awesome. So Dan, meet me here. I'll take you down there on Monday. Follow me down there.

I'll show you where it's at and we'll get you signed in. Great. So I showed up down there Monday around noon. And I realized that something big mistake had happened. That was the officer green platoon. and started on Tuesday. And lifting and the platoon started

the morning. So I got to spend about eight weeks as a snowbird, which looking back, hindsight 2020, ended up being probably the thing

that happened. Because then, you know, doing, you know, nightstocker PC every morning, you know, getting very intimate with logs,

telephone poles, you know, you even learn there's techniques to push Humvees. It's, it's, It helped me get ready.

So that way when actual true assessment day showed up, man, it was, I wouldn't say it was easy, but it was much easier. Yeah. So for us, the actual assessment, because if you had orders and you were out of the compound doing your thing, it didn't mean that you were in. You still have to go through Greenfield, and you had to pass that assessment to get in the class. So we had, I don't know, maybe 60, 75 people that were there. And, you know, it didn't matter. if you were an MOS that was needed or if you were picked, if you didn't pass the PT test,

you didn't pass whatever they need you pass. Well, you get recycled, and then you still didn't, and they could send you and pack you across the street. Welcome to the 101st. We start off on a 50-7 gets a good lot, and when we finished, there was, I think, 40, 35 or 40 of us that were in the class.

And then that's when the shit got real. That's when suddenly you were, you had a couple like the junior, your night thoggers, you know, Sergeant Knight's, you know, Sergeant Knight's Buccher. They were mean, but okay, because they didn't want to piss you out of this once you quit and left already, but they had a job to do. But that first day, when you made it in, you realized real quick that, okay, these guys are serious. They got a job to do, and they're going to do it really well. And it was four weeks that were pretty intense.

And I want to move forward a little bit because you had a long career. And I want to make sure that we get to some of the interesting deployments as well. But, you know, of course, you made it into 160th. I spent a little bit of time there. I mean, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, kind of your early years of the run-up to 9-11 and then sort of how that changed things for both for the unit and for you personally? Yeah, it was a good time. You know, going to Bravo Company, I think, was a great decision.

It was a great place to be. my very first trip was 100% exactly what that dude said we went to Virginia beach and we stayed in a hotel right there on the beach and it was awesome I was like yeah this is heaven this is where I want to be I'm never going to leave this place so I also learned real quick because you can be gone a lot especially you're new because you know that's the fact of life of being the special operations community is which we'll learn later on is you never know. And kind of almost seems like we're learning that right now with some stuff that's going on. But you never know when the shit's going to, you know, the flag's going to go up. And in pagers, cell phone's going to go up. And it's time to get it on.

So you're very interested in being you trained up real quick. So I showed up, got physical everything done, ready to go. And I think within the first week of being in the company, I had taken what's called a command of now. You basically go out with one of the instructor guys, and they're going to go out and do some traffic pattern stuff. You know, one of the pilots, one of the newer pilots getting trained. So we went out. And the guy that actually gave me my commander C-Val became a, you know,

took him that in Panama with became my first, you know, mentor in the regiment of that is the, that's the face. That's the poster boy of what it's like to be a crew member. on a 47 of the regiment. And Al Mack knows him, knew him very well. He mentioned that his name was Trey Ponder. But he was his, he ended up becoming Al's 47 standards guy for the regiment. He was the regimental 47 crew member.

And he was subsequently killed when the aircraft got shot down in northern Afghanistan looking for Marcus LaTrell when that he got compromised. So amazing, amazing guy. So we went out, you know, we did the commander's eval, and he goes, hey, so, you know, Mitch, the guy who's referring to early, he goes, hey, so he told me, you're being smart. He said, no, somebody set me up, ready to go. He goes, all right, so you used to do rescue like stuff. And I said, yeah, we'd take the internal linch, rig up the bullies, and drop it down through the center cargo hole. And he goes, well, we have our own.

So just go out here and just make your calls. Just call it like you did when you were in Panama, you know, dumping guys down in the canal. I went out there and I just went out there and I just went that pretty good. We're going to change up some terminology, but you had it. And then we went back and we did a couple of little things. They said, hey, you're going to move up pretty quick. So I started going on every trip. You know, Virginia Beach went down to Hurlbert, you know, down in Destin, Florida for some overwater ops and refueling.

and then while we were there, actually is where I did my first iteration of mini-gun training. So I had been trained up in the M-60. You know, the big army got the M-60 at the time. So suddenly I'm, you know, sitting here behind the, you know, the machine gun that's got six of them attached, you know, six minerals. So going through specific training, big guns stuff. And, you know, when did some overworked,

they were chemlights and bottles out in the ocean. you know, got to shoot them up. So that was my first exposure to the minigone, and that's when I felt madly loved. I was like, yeah, grew up with BB guns, and I don't know. That's my anti-coordination. I played baseball as a kid,

but I always had a BB gun, always. So suddenly I was like, this, this is pretty amazing. You know, everybody in the regiment, when you first start shooting a minigone, you want to become Jesse the Body Ventura and predator. Right. You know, you just want to hit that button

and just let that shit rip and just start cutting down trees. And then you really quickly realize that you are going to get smacked upside the head with a maglight real fast. That's the best training aide. So started doing mini gun training, headed down to Florida. Did some more down there. I'm shooting on the range. A cool thing that, remember, very funny from that, the aircraft's recovery exercise with the Air Force got.

And that was kind of a really first one of the, you know, what a mission could be like. Virginia was just going out doing stuff here in the past. It was okay, but we didn't really do mission scenarios. That was more of the training, but that downed aircraft recovery training we did in Hurlberg to see really what some really cool stuff can do in PJs. I mean, it was like, you know,

it was my first exposure to, you know, I'm living in a movie. This is awesome. So, yeah, tons of training gone. You know, you're gone. more home and definitely changed much. The only thing that changed was after the GWAT kicked off,

we started kind of there became no different flight companies. You know, A and B company wasn't us versus them. It was, we don't care. Everything's going to get done. Everything became standardized across the board. I'm not a third battalion guy.

In Washington one flight thing. That was really the biggest thing. That was really the biggest thing. the massive amounts of training we did, a lot of it, even at home. And I've told people, I said, you know, there's times I was home. And I didn't see my wife and kids for three days in the same bed. But she'd come up, take the kids out.

I'd crash, wake up, leave, go to work, and she'd come on with the kids. And then after GYIDA just became, it was the same thing. But now you throw deployments, you know, every kind of happens in the middle of it. And in those early days, you actually ended up in Panama, right? Or I'm sorry, in the Philippines. Pardon? Yeah, so the Air Force, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the 53s for it retired. So they were going to retire our 53s, and they were going to replace the 53s with the Ospreys, the tilt rotor stuff.

I don't know what politician who was greasing what palms, but suddenly they went, oh, maybe we jumped the gun on to return to 53s because the ospies are killing people and it's not a aircraft. So there was a sudden void in the PECOM, you know, Pacific Theater. So they decided they were going to chop a chunk of reverberation. So we lost you again. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's something wrong with it. It's like some kind of reverberation on the audio.

So I was going to ask you to like be close to the computer and try to speak directly into it. I think I think that will help a little bit. Yeah, let me see if I can scoot some stuff around here. All right, and how's that? Any better? Yeah, yeah. Better for now? All right. So, yeah, so Korea, we moved 647s to Korea to take over that 53 mission, you know, when they were retiring the 53's replacement.

So they came out and they put a sign on the board in the office one day, and this was, Bravo company was going to do the main slice of that. And they said, hey, here's the deal. you know, we're going to go to Korea. It's going to be a one-year deal, and it's, you know, you're going to come right back. It's not like, you know, big arm, you're going to go there and then who knows where you're going to end up. So, yeah, there's a few of us. I thought, you know, that's pretty cool.

I enjoyed Panama and, you know, we're staying with the, you know, we're not changing units. We're just building one and moving it. So I put my name on the list. And, you know, it was one of the, I don't know, however many, they went down and drew the line, said, all right, anybody above this line, you're going. So that was It was one of the most painful experiences One of the most fun experiences was

Before we left We broke out We moved out of our office in the Bravo company office We literally moved into a trailer In the parking lot Like a single wide They parked it in the parking lot Half of it was the maintenance and shops

Guys together half of the flight platoon But that became such a good time Because we had such a small group of people that we became very, very close. Still very good friends to many of them this day. So we left. We trained up for almost about a year as a group. We took people from a little bit of both.

Some A company guys, even some Thurbiton guys came up and joined it. So we moved to Korea in June of 2001. So we thought this is going to be the best year ever. We're going to go on the big trainings to the Philippines to the Philippines. Philippines and to Japan, you know, Thailand, balanced piston, all those big fancy exercises. They shipped all the aircraft over. You know, when we got there, our barracks weren't even ready. So we had to build our own beds.

We had to put our furniture together. So the first couple weeks was painful. But once we got it, now we started flying our ass off because we still had to understand all the flight rules there. So you've heard Al talking about having to fly the no fly line up in, you know, border the DMZ. So we had to do the same thing. We had to go up there. We had to learn the rings. You know, the rings around Seoul, the no-fly zone.

And you had to be able to fly it and navigate it without a map. So being one of the first guys over there, I was one of the first guys that got qualified because we brought two aircraft over at a time. So we brought two over a couple weeks later to you, a couple weeks later more. So being one of the initial guys, that was one of the first people to get qualified on it. So when you're taking the new people, you have to have a qualified crew to train the non-qualified crew, you know, in case something goes on. So we did that. And then, of course, 9-11 kicked off.

That's a whole other story in itself. I had the fortunate pleasure of being on staff duty that night. That was crazy. We'll get into that in a minute. But, yeah, so suddenly 9-11 kicks off, and, you know, we know that our guys back home are hitting the road, hitting it fast. You know, Bravo Company's going up north, alpha company's going out on the Kitty Hawk,

and then here we are Echo Company, you know, sitting on the rock. There's a lot of rumors. where we were going to go, but it kind of squashed. We did a TDI to Japan that November, but then the Philippines turned into something. So January of 2002, they decided that they were going to continue on with what was the normal annual, you know, balanced piston training exercise. We had, I can't remember what group was, but we had a, guys out of Guam that came down.

So they kind of changed things around a little bit. They said, you know, this is not really a TDI. This is more of a train-up because we're going to go down. We're going to train up with the real guys that we're going to work with. And then we're going to move south, you know, further down into the southern Philippines because we've got some stuff we're going to do. So they changed around the cruise, the assigned cruise. And one of those guys that was supposed to go originally was me.

So they pulled me. and one of the crew chiefs on my airplane, they pulled us off, and then the other guys, Carrie Frith and Bruce Rushforth, my senior flight engineer on the plane and then one of the other crew chiefs, they went with it. So we got to stay back home and watch our airplane fly away. Fast forward a month, they're doing their training stuff. They moved down from the Northern Philippines down to the island of Cebu,

which is about halfway. It's the halfway point down to Philippine Islands. big, you know, it's called MacTan Air Base. So from there, they were launching the flights down around Philippine Sea all the way down south to a little place called Zamboanga Philippines. There was the main base camp. That's where we had everything based out of, the supply, the refuel stuff. We would fly in there, C-130s would roll in.

They would dump off the group guys. We would pick them up and then fly. We basically had to fly out over the ocean, do our test fires, do anything with we need to do something like that and then come back. And then we dropped them off on a little bitty island called Baselon, Baselan Island. If you look at, it looks like a little head with two ears sticking off the side of it. But the problem was is it's a long flight. So when you would leave Cebu, you had the in-flight refuel on the way down. You would land, pick up your guys, dump them off, do your thing.

A lot of sling loads, which in the... the regiment, a sling load to us is a boat, humvees, you know, shotgun humbys or something, you never did, like, you know, we're going to sling load cargo nets and we're going to sling load connexes. That's big Army stuff. That's not what we do. That's what we are doing because you're sling loading some stuff for the SF guys onto an island with a whole bunch of bad terrorist guys in the middle of the night where it's, you know,

ass all dark. So it turned out to be pretty sporty stuff. But unfortunately, on one of those trips on the way home, our Chalk 2 aircraft was transferring, was crossing over. The weather deteriorated. It was hard to tell horizons. Guys were getting tired. They've been flying a long time, and they went to do a crossover, and in the process of doing so, the trail aircraft burned in. So it nosed over.

Because at the time, and that was a big thing that changed in the regiment because of that incident was we used to fly 100 feet. you know, 100 feet over the water, you know, 110, 20, 130 knots, whatever you want to do. Over the water, your reaction time, you don't have much. I mean, by the time you see, you know, your anti-collision light flashing off the water, by the time you reach up, grab your button, scream into it, climb, climb, climb, too late. And that's what happened to them. So they got disoriented during the crossover manure. I mean, it's very simple maneuver, but kind of complicated.

if things go wrong. And they overfrew a little bit, got a little discord, you know, uncoordinated, drop back, and then went to accelerate and just, you know, noticed it in. So we lost. And because of a passenger swap that they did when they got down to the, down to Zamboanga, at the time, they had the sock pack commander, Brigitteer General Worcester, you know, lovely guy. Now that I'm retired, not a fan.

but he wanted to ride along, you know. So they put him in the jump seat of the lead aircraft, which caused our air mission commander, who was Major Kirk Feisner, to ride and chalk two. So when they got back, landed, kicked everybody off, he just said, hey, I'll just stay here. We're just on the way home, you know, just get us home. So when we lost Wild 4-2 with the call sign,

we lost our platoon leader, our company commander, the most senior flight engineer in the company, Kerry Frith, who is my senior epi on my airplane. But total, we lost 10 guys. We also lost two Air Force PJs that were riding along as well. So that was my first experience of, oh shit, this is real.

You know, up until then, you know, we had, in the 47, what I'd never experienced anything, you know, I've heard of it. know, there was other people out there had had incidents, but it was never, you know, I was like, man, that that sucks. It was never, never touched me. And then all of a sudden, my airplane with two of my crew members, just, you know, crashed and killed everybody on board. And we found out because we were watching the news that morning waking up. Who another person, another delightful little person that I have no shame in putting her name out there.

Cynthia Terramay was the PAO, the public affairs officer. her. She had an uncanny way of having news crews waiting in the LZ while we were landing. That was fun. But, yeah, we were waking up for PT that morning and, you know, back of the house. And, you know, good old AFN, you know, you had like three stations. So all of a sudden, you start hearing the doors and the hallways open up and people banging on doors. You know, in Cree, we didn't have pagers. We had some, you know, little Nokia cell phones. and you start hearing the cell phones going off and somebody's banging on my door and it's like, hey, wake up, man.

I said, yeah, I'm awake, what's up? You go, turn on the news. And on the news, you know, like Fox News or whatever, CUNA's got the little ticker at the bottom and it said, the U.S. Army helicopter crashes in the Philippines kills 10. Well, there's only one helicopter of the U.S. ad that carried that many, and that's us.

So very quickly, we got the word, you know, go to the hangar. You know, put on your, put on your uniforms, go to the hangar. and we got there. We still didn't know details, but we get there. We're in the hangar standing around. And another Panama buddy of mine,

who was a pilot that also went to the regiment, was an echo company with us. He comes to give me, he goes, hey, Dan, I need to talk to you real quick. I was like, yeah, man, what's going on? So he pulls me into one little side off and he goes, hey, I just want you be the first to know that it was yours.

We lost your airplane. And I was, I mean, I just, I buckled. It was just absolutely most horrible experience. So we sat there for a few minutes, kind of got my wits about me. And he goes, hey, you want to, do you want to go out and tell everybody? I said, yeah, I'll break the news. So we walked out. And as soon as I walked out, I think everybody realized what happened because I was, you know, not in a good way.

So we met up, everybody had them circling around. and we brought the news to them. We had a great memorial. You know, that night, everybody just got absolutely obliterated shit-based, had a bonfire. Because the way our barracks were in Korea, we had three buildings with a hooch in the middle, and that was the bar. You know, the Air Force ran the bar. It was, you know, everybody paid for the alcohol out of pocket with our ration cards. So we just got absolutely obliterated.

But the awesome thing was in Korea, we were like celebrities in Korea, especially if we were down in South. We're in South Korea, but way down south in Teague, where there was, it was all support stuff, you know, this contingency. And all of a sudden, here comes the Special Operations guy. They literally had the red carpet rolled out for us when we walked off the airplanes. It was pretty awesome. But when that happened, everybody, I mean, everybody came out in massive support. Because even at that time, you know, Afghanistan was going on. They had suffered some losses, but suddenly they went, wait a lot.

you mean there's something else besides Afghanistan going on? Right. Sure. So we had a memorial there. I was going to do a eulogy for one of the other guys that was there. But then they called and said, hey, we have to replace that crew. You know, we're still in the game. We've got to go.

So I said, well, I'm going. So they took three of us, stuck us on a bus. We took a bus from Tegu. Korea up north to Osan Air Base. And then we took a medical, like a Metaback Air Force Metaback 727 or something from Osan Air Base to Okinawa, Japan. And that was my really first experience of how stupid the military can be sometimes. So we're deploying.

You know, in our world, we're deploying to war. I mean, because we're down there. You know, a big thing in the Philippines was, yeah, there's the Abu F group, it's super duper, very, you know, it's a hot spot, but they also had two American hostages. And they're in the Philippines. They had Martin and Grasian. So Martin and Grasian were missionaries from Kansas, and that was kind of one of the, one of the underlying things was we're trying to find them. So when we deploy, we're, I mean, we got our M4s, 9 mils.

We got our heaves, our breathing, our oxygen bottles that we carried with it in case we did have to ditch. So we've got all this stuff that suddenly this flight crew goes, you can't bring that on this airplane. And I went, well, we're deploying to the Philippines for combat operations. And they said, well, this is a MEDAVAC flight. You can't bring guns on here. Oh, shit. Okay.

What do we do? So luckily, we were able to talk to the flight crew and said, look, you know, what if we tear these guns down? So we took our M-4s. We took all the bolts out and we put them in a Ziploc bag. And the pilot kept them in the cockpit. We took the lower receivers, stuffed him in a check baggage, and put him in the cargo hold. We took the upper receivers and put them in our carry-on bags upstairs with us.

Yeah. And it didn't stop there. We get to Okinawa. We land. We meet up with our flight dock. We had a civilian flight surgeon that also worked with us, so he had already been forward stage to Okinawa to receive some of the bodies. Because the night of the crash, they actually recovered three.

They recovered three bodies on site from. that from that incident. So he was receiving the bodies and the right do all the transfer stuff. So he met us up, met up with us. We went back to the hotel that he had there on base, took about a two-hour nap, and then we had to get up and meet up with an Air Force C-130, along with a whole bunch of Air Force people because they were, we're all going to Cebu for the memorial service.

So we've got the 320th STS guys, the special tactics squadrons, some, you know, a bunch of VIP dignitaries that are going. And then we had to go through security. So there was no difference of us trying to get on that air to get on that C-130 than it was when my wife and I just flew to Chicago last weekend going through TSA. It's ridiculous. Yes, ridiculous. So basically the same thing. I mean, like even our little heath bottles or oxygen bottles, it's empty.

There's nothing in it. It's just a cylinder with a, you know, like a breathing device, but it's not charged. There's nothing in it. We got our weapons, everything. So luckily, while we're sitting there and we're about ready to start fighting. with some Air Force security people because I'm carrying the guide on. You know, we just lost our commander, platoon leader. We are not in a good place.

Luckily, one of the C-130 crew chiefs see this going on and comes over and says, hey, grab all your stuff, come with me. So they sneak us out the front door, around the side, stuff us in a van, smuggle us out on the flight line, and then we get on the C-130 and go. I was like, this is just absolutely fucking ridiculous. Yeah. We got to the Philippines. When we got there, they were literally waiting on us.

The formation was there, the Air Force guys, the Army dudes. We get off, put the guide on together, pass it off to our new acting commander. And we did the memorial service right in there. I mean, 10 minutes after walking out to C-130, we were all there. And then, you know, the next day we were front-page Army Times. And right there was a picture of a bunch of Army and Air Force dudes crying at the memorial service with, you know, 10 service people lost. Well, I mean, we went on that day, and then we went right back out.

It started flying missions two days later. Thank you. I just want to say thank you for telling that story, Daniel, because it's one of these things that I feel really got lost in the news with everything else I was going on after 9-11 in the wars, that this is something that I feel like just kind of, not intentionally. There's no malice behind it, but it just got forgotten. It got buried by all the other news. And I'm really glad to hear you, you know, tell the story and talk about your buddies and your teammates a little bit and kind of keep that memory alive.

Because, I mean, I just think it's a shame that, you know, it kind of got forgotten about by a lot of people. Unless you're from a very small, specific community that you come from, I feel like it got forgotten about. Yeah. And that was kind of a sore, touchy thing. You know, we got back, which the Philippines ended up going all the way up through, I think, July or August. of that year. I mean, even after I got there, I spent almost four months there.

So it was a nonstop thing, and we were flying every night. We had no off time. We had three crews, and we only flew two crews a night, but every night, you're taking off, you're going out. And because the island was only

five minutes away, it's like I said, we'd have to fly out to the ocean, do the test fires, make sure the guns are working before we could even come back inland. But, yeah, I mean, it was, You know, four months of nonstop, you know, the whole hostage situation got taken care of.

We got spun up for it, but it happened so quick and by accident that before we could even get there, it was already done. So that was done. And then we got a hit on Abu Sabaya, who was the terrorist leader down there. That is quite a – that's a whole funny story in itself, how that shit went down. So they launched us. You know, they caught one of his, in Afghanistan, you know, bin Laden, everybody had the driver. Well, he had a driver too, but he drove a super canoe. It was a, like, a 20-foot-long canoe with a big engine on the back.

And that's how they were transporting them around the island. So we had kind of messed around a little bit with the, instead of a vehicle interdiction, there was a vessel interdiction. Yep. That they tagged the boat with a little IR strobe, and then we were going to go, you know, interdick the boat. But it was kind of cool because we had a field team that was there, special boat unit guys that were down there with us. Super good dudes. One of them actually ended up being a pilot in the regiment.

I don't know if you guys have interviewed him. Mike Rutledge. Know the name. Yeah, as the commander up there at West Point, the flight detachment. Awesome dude. So that night, they found that dude. They tracked his boat. We had a fixed-wing asset that was there with us that was doing overhead, you know, C-2 stuff.

So they launched us in the back. We had a couple field teams with two Zodiacs. And then on the water, they had a huge, massive wooden boat that had five outboard engines on the back with a platoon of Filipino Marines. And then, like, seals as liaisons. the guy in the front of the boat is wearing goggles the driver was not and they were communicating from the front of the boat to the back via radio of you know turn left turn right slow down we're orbiting and then you're waiting for the call because it was you know it took you know sec deaf presidential approval something like that to get this thing approved because we weren't allowed to be in combat operations we were in a training role so finally we hear over the satcom and it was like you know sect deaf approved the whatever you know, go, go, go. So we roll out.

We go out. We extend. We roll out. And as we're setting up to come in to do the infill, that damn wooden boat ran right over the top of that canoe. And it turned into literally shooting ducks in a barrel. The video of that is absolutely amazing. But that big wooden boat landed right on top of it.

The four or five guys in the boat bailed out. And the East Filipino Marines just went to town, just launching everything they could shoot. They were launching, you know, two or three rounds. into the water from 10 feet away. And we're just watching this shit from about a half mile, quarter mile out, like, what the hell? And you hear him be screaming on the radios. So what our mission ended up being that night was about two hours of flying overhead

with a searchlight so they could pluck out the bodies and find. But Olympic-style swimming took place that night. There was some dudes that swim a half a minute trying to get the land. So we'd fly out, we'd hit our white light, hover over the top of them, you know, try to not drown them, but get them to stop. And then the boats would come over and pick them up. over the years, I have probably heard three to five different stories about how Abu Zabaya died. One of my favorites is how he gets knocked off the boat.

And apparently he was in full kit with a Kalashnikov treading water while firing on the Filipino Marines, leaving them with no choice. But returned fire and his kit dragged him down to Davy Jones locker. Was he riding a narwhal at the time? There are some questions that that's just between Abu Zubu. Sabaya and God. But he did not make it through that. And then there's the whole story about how the Filipinos got Abu Sabaya's

1911, and it was a war trophy. And I'm trying to think he was in the water, treaded water shooting at you. You shot him. He sanked. Where did this gun come from? It's between Abu Sabia and God at this point. It was obviously the buoyancy compensator device he got on his AK.

There are some interesting questions about some of that. And if any of our listeners are interested in hearing the, actually the CIA side of the story, we've interviewed Kent Clisbee and Ron Mueller, who are both out there. Might be interesting just to go and hear that. I think they, and maybe you know, Daniel, did the agency have a drone up that night? There was a fixed-wing asset in the air that night. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, who would belong to and its purpose and owners? Don't know. That's also between Abu Sabaya and God. Yeah, that's right. But yeah, he did not make it. He didn't make it. Fish food. Darn it. Yeah. Sorry for his loss. Yeah. Thoughts and prayers. Yeah. Once he was no longer with us and then Martin and Gratia Burnham, you know, in that rescue attempt, Martin died in the attempt.

And the best reports that we read out there was he was shot in the back while laying on top and protecting his wife. But as we were spooling up to take off, and at that time they had brought in some Air Force H-H-60s to take over some C-SAR role. Because up in that point in time, it was the three of us, and then we'd get a P3 Orion that would come out of Okinaw or out of Cebu and a C-130 tanker. that was it and of course our little fixed wings buddy um but yeah there was nothing like oh shit what happens if we lose another one you know so they brought those guys down and uh as we were spooling up to take off uh that's when the uh as we call them the tail draggers um they landed and offloaded the casualties and uh gracia gracia burn them yes i actually i actually have pictures of that from from kent i mean it's it's wild and i mean that was a huge thing at the

And there's when we were spinning up the light reaction regiment. There was probably a light reaction battalion at that time, the Filipinos. And a lot of consternation about where Americans are allowed to be on some of these operations. Yeah. Yeah, I remember there was a big, a big stink because, you know, that little island we were flat out to Baselon, there was a, even on our maps in our planning center, on the southeast corner, there's like a little, you know, like a quarter of it. that's in that corner with big yellow hash marks that says like, you know, do not go here. Or even the Filipino military and the Filipino aircraft were like, you don't go there. That's like an off-limits place.

You go in there on that south side. It was a pretty steep incline to some pretty good islands. And I remember we were going to the planning center one day for our mission brief. And our flight lead at the time, he looks up and he goes, hey, you know that spot? We're going there. And we're like, oh, that's great. And we're slingloading some supplies to the base camp there. the SF guys and stuff that are in there.

So we're like, this sucks. So we always went with two. We had the third aircraft that was always on standby on the island, or up on the main base. And then when we would go in, we would have one aircraft that would go in and the other one would perform a cap, you know, overhead, you know, with, you know, guns ready to go. So in case something happened.

But, yeah, that was a pretty good pucker factor right there, knowing that you're going into this little valid death where even the Filipinos say you don't go there. and I'm carrying a, you know, fuel bladders, you know, 55-gallon drums, a fuel on it, razor wire. And we're just chucking right along at, you know, five, ten knots. You know, like, oh, man, we can, we're going to take a shot right up the ass for this one. So we got in as soon as that thing, you know, and a lot of it, I was doing the slingload calls. So I'm laying on the floor staring, you know, hanging out that hole looking down with my goggles on.

And as soon as I saw the least bit of slack in those slings, I didn't wait for a call. I didn't wait for the pilot. I hit that button, open that hook, and it's like, and loads release, clear to reposition, let's go. And they ripped the guts off we went. And then we performed the cap, and then chalk two would come in and do the same thing. So after the Philippines,

you did 11 deployments to Afghanistan. And so now you're real, where the special operations community in general is getting into that rotation of that schedule going back and forth. And can you tell us about, you know, that experience for you from your perspective? Yeah, so, you know, originally we went to Korea, we were going to go right back to where we came from. So you leave Bravo company, you go to Korea, you're coming right back.

After we lost, you know, Wild 4-2, there was suddenly a big void. You know, we're down in one helicopter, and we just lost, and we lost five criminals. We had a fifth guy that we usually don't have, but they put a fifth guy on there to help with all the cargo stuff. So we can keep all four sets of eyes outside, one guy in the hole. So I was approached and said, hey, we're going to be. Would you mind extending for six months? Get us through this. We need an old-timer, you know, at the time, consider an old-timer, been in Korea.

So, like, you know, would you mind staying for six months? I said, sure. But can I go home? I want to go home and leave. I need to go, you know, my wife, I had just met her two months. You know, I met her in April of 2002, and I left for Korea in June. Because we weren't supposed to go to Korea until later that year. We're actually on a TDITY trip out in North Carolina, and they said, hey, we got

a quick little meeting. I need you and you and you. You're going home like first thing tomorrow because they just accelerated the timeline. It's not six months, 60 days. So I was like, oh shit. Okay. So I said, can I at least go home, take some leaves, you know, clear my head. I got to get through this stuff.

So they said, yeah, go home. You know, how much leave you got saved up? I said, I got a lot. I good. Take 30 days. Take 30 days. Go home. Have a good time.

Come back. And then we'll finish it up. So when I came home around July, I guess July, August of 2002, you know, by then, we've almost been at a year of going to town and doing business in Afghanistan for, you know, all my buddies that I left previously that were doing that. So you've been talking to some guys there. I said, yeah, you know, it was great. I spent four months in the Philippines and some of the guys were like, what were you doing there? Like, what? I said, yeah, that's, you know, OEFP.

OEF operation during Freedom Philippines. It's a thing. And, oh, is that where we lost? That's where we lost aircraft, right? And that's kind of going back to what you're saying earlier. Even at that time, you know, even some of our own people did really fully understand what's going on. So had a great time.

We had a family reunion down here in Orlando, Florida at a resort. So my girlfriend picked me up and I said, hey, you want to go to Orlando for the week and hang out and meet the family? She's like, sure. So we came down here. I've had a great time. Had such a great time that the day that I'm flying back to Korea, you know, there's little tears going on.

I'm getting ready to go back. Now war's going on. It's become real for me. It's become real for her. So, you know, the emotions are going high. And so, like, I don't know, it's like 2 o'clock in the morning or something. She says, hey, I really got something I need to tell you. I said, sure.

What's going on? She was pregnant. I was like, hey, great. great, whatever, going back to sleep. It was like, what did you just say? Yeah, so, yeah, that family union, we started our own. So I called my buddy back in Korea, who actually my roommate in Korea at the time

was the guy that introduced me to my wife. He was dating one of her sort of kind of friends at the time. So I called back, and today, you know, I got a little family thing that popped up. And he hung up the phone before I could say anything. He hung up the phone, ran across the hooch. We're up on the third floor of the barracks. Ran down, again, Olympic sprinter, hurdler.

Ten minutes later, I've got about 20 people in my barracks room and my acting platoon starting at the time. It was in between because they're rotating through. Real call me like, hey, Dan, what's going on? What do you need? What do you need from us? I said, no, man, nobody's dead. I said, we're, what?

He said, man, Gerald came running in. He's freaking out. Like, Dan's on the phone. We've got to go. He's got a fancy problem. I said, my man. family situations popped up. I can't just leave.

She had just recently gotten out of the Air Force. She was living at home with her parents. You can get ready to start school and stuff. So I'm like, man, her parents barely even know who this guy is other than some Army dude that just, you know, knocked up his daughter. I can't leave her here. So they said, yeah, take a couple more days.

So the next day, you know, I think it might have been later today. We brought the news to their parents and were like, hey, congratulations. grandma grandpa but i went back to korea and then i ended up doing another year so to kind of segue into life back at the house um we were married with a four-month-old we've been married like a year and a half of the four-month-old before we ever actually lived together yeah yeah my little one-year stint in korea ended up turning into two and a half because at that time you after the six months, they said, hey, we want to send you back and we'd like to stay, you know, if you could stay another year.

You know, you're here. You're a senior dude. You know, you're moving up the flight side of the house. So we want to send you to FI school if you'll do another year. That's that course of Rucker. I said, oh, man, I said, she's going to kill me for this. I said, all right. I said, however, got another drug deal for you.

I got to go home and make things right. I got to fix this problem, not fix a problem. That sounds, goddamn, that sounded pretty bad. But I need to fix this and make it right. So they said, all right, because the previous Christmas I stayed, you know, we're in Korea for you. I'm like, I'll stay here for Christmas. You guys go home and have families. At the time, I'm just a single dude with a girlfriend.

So I got to go home. I went home at Christmas time. We woke up one morning and said, hey, what do you want to do today? There's still a conversation on how that worked out. But basically the conversation was what do you want to do today. I said, let's go get married. So we did. We went and got married.

The Justice of the Peace was busy. So we met a family friend whose dad was a preacher who also worked at the Toyota dealership in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. So we called her parents and her best friend and her husband said, meet us at the dealership at 8 o'clock. And they're all like, why, you're buying a car and said, nah, something like that, you show up. So we literally got married on the showroom floor of the Toyota dealership in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, with a little rebate sign behind us called to get you rebate. And then I went back to Korea.

And then I came home again in April when my son was born, got to spend three weeks with him, went back to Korea. Came home a few months later for the FI course. stayed with me at Fort Rucker for a month and a half. And I went back to Korea, finished it off, and then I came home. Got home in December of 2003, signed in after leave in January. And in April, I was on my first deployment to Afghanistan. They're like, we'll give you 60 days. you're on the first C-17 out of here.

Yep. Welcome to regiment and combat life. Yeah. Oh, boy. Park war. Hang on. But yeah, Korea, Korea was a great time. And then, you know, I looked back at it, that it worked out pretty well.

And then regiment kicked off. And then it was just go, go, go. And so what was it like running operations, you know, and now as flight engineer in Afghanistan with 160? yeah crazy crazy but awesome so by the time i got to and because i did that two and a half year thing i was supposed to originally go back to brava company i didn't i went to alpha company i'm thinking oh my god you know here we go i'm going to go hang out with these prima donna guys but it was cool because by that time treponder who was you know really

leading at the time at that time he was the battalion standard guy who he'd come over to korea and we kind of helped work on this thing for a little bit and it was called the 47 delta echo echo non-rated crew member SOP so it took the delta model guys from third battalion to echo model guys from alpha bravo company and standardized everything across the board so it wasn't oh we use green chem lights oh well we use red kim lights we use blue it was we don't care who you are what you are what company you're in you're using this you're going to say it this way because now echo company became the melting pot. So suddenly we're getting people there going, and that second year, when that second

rotation of people started showing up, it was ugly. There was almost fights on the aircraft, in flight, in the office. Well, this is how we did in an echo company. This is how we did an output company. This is how we do a Bravo company. And then at the time, some of us who stayed were still pretty emotional about losing that airplane in February. So we're like, look, this is why we do things.

We're not going to lose another one. And, you know, of course, right after we lost Wild 4-2 in February, March, two weeks later, we're actually sitting in the planning area in the Philippines getting ready to do a mission when they walked in and said, hey, we need to tell everybody that there's been an incident in Afghanistan, and we currently have, you know, one British shot down, another one or two are limping back to home, which turned out that was Anaconda. So, you know, we lost a gunner. We lost Phil Fetak, a crew chief on that one as well.

So the tempers were flaring. You know, emotions were pretty high. But going to Alpha Company, it was actually pretty cool. The guys there, since I had known some of them, and I was smart enough to sit back and bite my tongue and go, hey, this is my first trip to Afghanistan. Some of these guys are already on their third and fourth. So this is not the time for me to say,

hey, I'm more senior to you. I have more flight hours than you. It's sit down, shut up, watch what's going on, soak it up, be the sponge, and learn what it's like to fly combat missions in Afghanistan. Because it's not the same as flying combat missions in the Philippines. So, and the Philippines was very quiet. I mean, it was stressful. You know, you didn't know.

And we used to fly around and throw fruit and stuff out the windows just to try to get somebody to shoot at us. because we're bored. But suddenly in Afghanistan, my very first mission there, we flew down from Bagram down to the, we flew down to Kandahar, picked up guys, and we headed west. And that very first mission, we took fire. We didn't get anything. The aircraft right in front of us took a couple rounds. But that was suddenly like, whoa.

This is different. It really did. Yeah. That's first time I've ever seen that before. Interesting. You know, it doesn't look like it does in the movies. I want to ask you about, because what about the 160th transition into Afghanistan and then about yours? Because for people who don't know, Afghanistan, like the Chinooks, American helicopters were not really made to fly in a place like Afghanistan, especially during the summer when there's not as much density of the air.

you're flying at altitude. How did the 160th, like, adapt to that? And then for you, what were some of the lessons that you learned during your first deployment there? Yeah, I mean, you know, and we've done high-outitude training. We just got to Colorado and, you know, fly up on the mountains. We would fly out.

We'd go east into the, you know, the smoky mountains, and we'd do radar, you know, multi-mode radar stuff. And I used to tell people, I said, there's two times when it's okay to throw up on an aircraft. One is when you're doing in-flight refueling and one is when you're doing MMR flights, multimod radars. Because it's just, it's bouncy, the pilots are flying stuff, and it just gets,

air sickness kind of gets a hold of you. So one of the great things that I loved about the regiment was the way you trained at home was real life, no shit, this is the way it goes. I mean, aside from little, you know, when you're flying around Fort Campbell, Kentucky, there aren't people shooting at you. So you take that.

The mission stuff, we literally did train like you fight. So in Afghanistan, you know, the pilots are absolutely amazing. I mean, I still be glad. I said I'd rather take, I'd take the worst regimental 47 pilot over the best big Army pilot any day. Just because that level of training those guys go through. So there was always a comfort to know that I've literally got the best up front. You know, if something happens, I'm happy with that. So for the backside, a lot of it was really learning how to see and breathe while landing in talcum powder.

That was the biggest shock to me was the first time we came into an entity, and I was like, what in God's name is this stuff? The closest I've ever come to it is out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We found a little slice of heaven out there. That kind of became a second home to me for a while that had the closest consistency, the grit. But that Afghanistan dirt is something special. The powder it makes when you hit it. Yeah. So, you know, if you've ever had any pilot, and you guys flying the back of them know that when you come in, that brownout condition, there's only one person.

There's only one person that can see the ground, and it's maybe about a five to ten foot diameter piece of ground, and that's me. That's whoever the guy is that's standing at the front right cabin door, the gunner. So, you know, the pilot's got the fleer, you know, so it kind of helps you a little bit. But even when the dust hits that, you can't see. So, you know, I'm hanging out, you know, leaning over the gun arm, you know, got my left arm up on the mini gun. My right arm is hanging up on the struts of the hoist. And I'm looking straight down and you see this little piece of dirt, you know, this big. And one thing I, and it just occurred to me one day on a mission.

And this was not, it was maybe a couple deployments into it. It was maybe second or third deployment. We had an imagery guy. And he looks up and he goes, hey, whoever is on, and I think it was like chalk two or three at the time, whatever airplane I was on, he goes, hey, when you come in, you're going to cross three walls before you can land. and I remember hearing that so we're coming in you know we're calling the dust you know dust of the rotor blade

you know probe tip rotor blade nose poof we're in it and I remember looking straight down going one wall two walls three walls you're clear down left and right yeah and as soon as they passed up wall they slammed it down I look up and that settles

and you know 47 the probe tip is actually four feet under you know inside the rotor disc so the dust settles guys run out the back and I lean up and I hear a pilot go oh shit and i look up the forward rotor blades are right over the last like wall number four the one they forgot to tell us about and the probe tip of and just tink ting ting ting ting just rubbing on the edge thing this little rocks crumbling off of it and i'm like nothing learned count

roads count ditches count berms count walls yeah and and i used to tell my guys that you know hey when you're coming in everybody looks at the imagery you know where's the fighting positions where's the target building where's the other stuff i said who gives a shit about that yeah fighting positions are great you're going to see all that stuff but what are you landing on what are you crossing over what is the train is it upslope is it you know lean to the right to the left that's the stuff you need to look at that's you know that you're going to tell that pilot to plant it down hopefully they're looking the same thing um and that really to kind of fast forward many years that really saved i think kind of saved our ass was number one

and I know he's watching the night is Al Mack is one of the good pilots that ever lived. And number two, not to be humble, but he had one of the best crucially in his right gun. So I remember looking at it, and, you know, he tells that story about, hey, y'all remember, remember you're not Sontay Ray? And he tells the story in the book, and that's when I walked in and told my wife, said, oh, my God, you ever hear me tell that story about, you know, the intentional crash lane in a helicopter in Vietnam? She goes, yeah, she goes, here it is. You can read it from his mouth. And that was the same thing.

I remember crossing like, you're going to cross a couple of little ditches, little berm. And, you know, we didn't know how bad it was until Al made that come. And I leaned out the window and again, and then I looked between the two pilots' heads, and I looked through the center console. I was like, my God.

And I remember looking in and seeing his eyes in the mirror. Actually, we had a rearview mirror in the cockpit. So I looked in that thing, and I looked over, and there he is with that big shit-eating grinning that big caterpillar mustache. But just seeing that and kind of, of seeing him laugh up at it and the way he said it goes hey y'all never ever heard of that santa raydon yeah i went yeah so here's what i do like oh my god but yeah um that was some of the stuff was you know the missions itself um probably one of the biggest things was fast-paced you know

even when you're training and you're going out and doing bi-lats and stuff you know it's the crawl walk run, but the run in combat is really fast. Yeah. And really out, you know, when you've got a lot of stuff going on, the radios are going insane, especially on the aircraft. You know, we've got four or five radios kind of depend on what's going on. You got some, you know, air mission commander sitting in the jump seat that can't figure out how to flip the switches and which button to talk to and which radio to talk to.

You know, sometimes the captain. Occasionally you can experience major. we'd get the battalion commander to fly with us. And then in the back you got the ground force commander, you know, give a grunt mic switch and you never know what's going to happen. So everybody wants to be on the radios. And then, you know, if you're shooting,

you've got mini guns going off. It's just mass-controlled chaos that moves super, super fast. Yeah. So it took me a couple, it took me a couple missions to kind of get that frame of mind of going, oh, boy, I don't really have time to go back there and sit on the ramp and get my butt right and wiggle the fastrope because you guys have seen me on the 47 we're using the fastrope we're outside we're swinging around or stand on the outside and standing up on the you know the stubby wing and the wheel you know exposed to the world so you have to learn that you know while you're sitting on the ramp rehearse it you know get your monkey tail right tape it off you know get that little strap that we hang on to make sure it's the right distance and tighten us so because when you're in combat you don't get off that gun until the very last second you know you're in And when you get out there, you better make shit in order because if not, it's going to get bad real fast.

So just that fast pace and just a mass controlled chaos, that was new. Speaking of controlled chaos, can you tell us a little bit about the hunt for Bo Bergdahl and how you got involved in that? Yeah. A lot of emotions on that one. That's kind of one of those where I wish we could left that guy there, you know, left into Iraq, you know. but he's in America, we can get him to get a barrel. So that was the initial thing. We'd come back, you know, from flying a mission, and usually we'd come back.

Guys, you know, we'd go to, you know, go to breakfast, you know, dinner. And then we'd come back, shower, go to the gym, do whatever, go to the talk, you know, debrief stuff, play some call of duty, you know, that kind of stuff. And then, you know, go to bed. I'd run out, grab the sap phone. I'd call my wife, check on her and the kids. Um, I mean, so by then,

I think when, I think when Bo Bergdahl happened, my kids were like six and four, I think. So, you know, they get to hear their little voices, kind of give you some happy,

you know, happy stuff. And then go to bed. And then all of a sudden, I remember getting kicked. Hey, wake up. Uh,

they need you in the talk fast. Like, uh-oh. So I ran in, and, uh, you know, things are coming alive and happening real quick.

And, uh, Al, Al Mack, again, it's like a common denominator. You know, me and Al Mack were like, you know, and I was talking to him the other day, and, man, I think we talked like five hours.

It's probably the first time we talked in 12 or 13 years, and we talked like five hours as we live and stuff. And one thing I forgot about, my very first reenlistment was on the ramp. We're getting ready to go to Colorado to stay in a, we were literally staying in a ski lodge. You know, I was like, yep, this is it. And I had to reenlist on the ramp, and he was actually the officer that reenlisted me for my very first reenlistment. That's cool. I had been in the regiment less than a year at that time. So, yeah, it's like we were destined for greatness right off the back.

Yeah, so he's like, hey, send everybody the airplane, get them all up and run and get them up to engine start. We've got to go. Like, okay. We get everybody, all the crew chiefs, everybody runs down, start getting the airplanes ready. I stay up there to talk, you know, sitting there with them. We had like a little flight simulator and like just a little, you know, a little lap, like a little joystick. They could kind of plug the routes into it and a real fancy version of Google Earth. And they said, you know, we don't really know where this guy is at, but we're going to go do some stuff.

We're just going to fly around. We're getting a little bit of, you know, figging off of them, you know, picking up some translation stuff. And we're just going to go fly around and see if we can stir up on the stuff and find this kid. So we launch and we fly all night. and we went into, you know, overflying vehicles, you know, seeing if we can get anybody to shoot at us, hitting some villages, dumping off the guys. They'd come back and say, well, he would hear a bit.

You know, it was 30 minutes ago. We just missed them. And then we went back to, we went back to the airfield. We had to refuel, get some food. They brought out some breakfast. And that was my first experience kicking speed. They gave us the old, or they, the decks, the deck of the, whatever it's called it.

Yeah, yeah. Was it the yellow, yellow, yellow blue bombers. I don't remember what color was now. I think the white bombers were the sleepers. Yeah. Yeah. We're pretty fucking tired. So it goes, we're good.

Take one of these. I was like, oh, we get to, you know, we've heard it. We've heard about it. I wasn't taking them for stuff in the past, but previous missions and deployments I'd been on, we'd ask for it because we'd been out for 16, 18 hours. And we had a commander was like, no, you'll be fine. That was one of the hardest flights home. two hours from south you know from south of kandahar back at the bogram yeah i found out that

you can take the pack of uh for the chicken lo main m re you can take that little pack of noodles and you can feel on that for two hours just nibbling like a little rat that was kept me away for two hours was one little noodle just at a time so we took that decks and um we went back out and uh that's where we had the infamous sante um but we yeah we flew in we played and we played planted that thing down there. Well, he did. And I mean, seriously, I remember kind of bracing myself up against the heater closet and the gun. Kind of like, all right, you know, if I'm going to hit, I don't want to bounce. You know, it's going to hurt and kind of squatting a little bit, you know, thinking that, okay, you know, bend my knees, you know, feet knees, all that kind of stuff.

And leaned out, started calling him in, you know, he took the controls over and he planted that sucker on a dime just like. He was born to do it. Probably still one of the best landings I've ever got to experience. And we didn't break anything, didn't crack anything. Got the ramp down far enough. The dude to jump off. We took off. And I think that was one.

I was talking to him about this the other day. I couldn't remember if it was that one or another one. But we went up. It was like the flat plateau that was running by the village a couple miles away. And we went up there and we sat down. We didn't shut down, but we just landed, let the guys do their thing. And, you know, we'll listen to the radios. to the Expo call.

And it was like something out of an old Wild West movie where the, you know, you see the Calvary down in the valley and you look up and there's a little Indian sitting up on the little flat plateau. That's what it was like. It was beautiful. Daytime, absolutely hate flying in the daytime in Afghanistan. You can't. And so weird, people are like, why?

I said, because you can't see anything. Like, but it's daytime. I said, yeah, but you can't see what you want to see. Right. They'll see you before you see them. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it became another dry hole, and we left.

And I rotated back a couple days later. And history is what it is. What about the, you said there's a vehicle interdiction that you guys did at one point? My favorite. It was actually two of them. So we did, you know, we had, like earlier we were talking about, the vessel, vessel interdiction that we were talking about in down in the Philippines. And our flight lead at the time in Korea was an alpha company guy.

He was an alpha company flight lead. So he'd done a lot of training stuff with the super cool dudes. He was a prior SF guy, prior ranger. So he knew the ground stuff. Pretty awesome, pretty shit hot dude. So when we got to Afghanistan and stuff, we had been talking about doing the vehicle interdiction things. And that was another thing that, you know, Al had been talking about because

you know, we kept having guys run. You know, we'd have squatters on the target. We always had one aircraft that was the squatter patrol. So when you had guys run, I either wanted to be on the lead aircraft, because if I was on lead, I knew everything. I knew everything that was going on because I hated not knowing stuff. Or I wanted to be on the squatter bird because that was the fun stuff. Well, everybody hits the target and goes off and hits the FARP and goes and chills out.

We stay on target chasing dudes, you know, so that was exciting. So we kept having guys and you start leaving in vehicles. So that night, and the great thing about that night that made it even more special to me was before that mission, we had a little memorial service for, and I believe at the time, that was for the guys that we lost on the whole lone survivor Red Wings. Turbine 33. We had a little Yeah, yeah. So we had a little Memorial Service there

for the guys and the, you know, the Rangers are out there with us. So we did a little memorial service, wiped her eyes, said, right, you know, it's time to strap it on and get busy. So we went down

and at the time when we took off, we were going to interdict a little Toyota station wagon. A little Toyota Corolla station wagon. So, you know, We've got teams in the back. I'm on the lead bird, right gun, and maybe five minutes or so, five or ten of us before we got there, the car pulled off the road.

Pulled off the road, went and hitting a little tree line, and they start unloading stuff, and they're walking down the tree line, and they're dumping it in a little cache side, like a little well, dumping it down a well. So we come in, and, you know, our ISR platform, everybody's giving us, you know, what's going on, we've got a couple of eight-tens overhead and AC-130, the typical Afghani package. And so we're coming in and ground force commander clears us hot.

You say, man, do your thing. Light it up. I was like, oh, yes. It's like instant hard on, let's do this. So, yeah, we roll in and, you know, same thing. Al in the left seat doing the flight lead stuff under the right gun. And we had, it was kind of interesting that it wasn't, we weren't a solid Bravo company. At the time, I'd gone back to Bravo Company.

After I did my first deployment, it went back to Bravo Company. We cross-leveled the company. So I'm back in Bravo Company. And our other aircraft that was with us was actually an aircraft from Fourth Battalion, because we'd stood up Fourth Battalion Lewis and they were doing rotation. So we had a Fourth Battalion crew. So when we come in, we're going to split off. They're going to turn right.

and kind of plant it in like an L-shaped formation. So they're going to break right with their left gun and everything facing the well in the tree line, which is all the way down the end. We're going to keep going straight, plant it down, looking straight down that tree line right up the ass into that station wagon.

So as soon as we come in, you know, the ground force commander's cleared us hot, air mission commander everybody. So we're on short final. I flip the switch. You know, I flip the guard and hit that switch.

My little light comes on, which is number one, the first thing you want to see. And then you're sitting there thinking in a split second, I'm thinking, man, I better not shit the bet on this. Because if I do, I might as well, you know, write my letter and leave. So, you know, that's the one thing you never want to hear is the infamous burp. You know, you guys might have even heard it right. And hear that little what and in silence.

It's like a real, like a real fast spina. We come in, we cross that little tree line, and I see that car. And I just hit the button and just lit into it. And kind of the same thing. You know, we're browning out. So now it's the, it's that orchestrated, you know, screaming into microphone, you know, counting them down, clearing them down, and then firing. So it's, you know, you burp it, you know, one, two seconds, off 10, burp it, off five, burp it,

three, two, one contact, burp it. So it's like a, wah, wah, wah, you know, just coming in. And then we landed. I stopped for a second guys on the ramp, you know, ramp, ramp, ramp, ramp, they're coming down, they're running off. the ground guys, they run off and turn left, like they're going to run that way. And I lay on the gun, and I just start ripping into the back of this, this little station wagon and whatever I see move. And then all of a sudden the dust is kicking up.

So now I'm like, well, shit, I don't know where anything's out anymore. Right. I'm going to sweep it. So it's great. The Fleer video from it was the A-10 video is pretty awesome because you get the A-10 pilots version. And they're like, holy shit. You know, just watching stuff, stealing off of this car. It's 3,000 rounds of minutes.

You know, 50, 50 bullets a second are hitting this thing. The flare video, Al got the fleer turned to the right. So, you know, you can just see just sparks flying from the gun, the dust coming out. And I just laid into this thing for a good couple seconds. And then the guys in the back ramps up. I stopped shooting for a second. Hey, you're clear up left, right, you know, coming up. And as soon as we cleared it, I hit it again and kept laying on it until he was out of sight.

And, you know, the interesting thing is when we leave. got back, you know, we screwed. We lit that place up so bad that the ground force started getting some, so we lit up the station wagging and the guys were that. The other aircraft started kind of shooting into the well area. The ground force didn't get to do anything. We stole all their thunder. Oh, they must have been but heard about that. Yeah. Now, I'm sure their J-TACs and their fire support guys were loving it because they broke, they broke off, they peeled back maybe, I don't know, a half a mile to a little compound, and they just watched the show over the wall.

Yeah. They called in the A-10s, the X-130. So it was kind of good. You know, the air guys got to get some action that night. So the A-10s plugged away some people that, you know, the C-130s got to, you know, shoot their cannons and, you know, pretend like their Boy Scouts. But, yeah, we got back to the shop. You know, we picked everybody out left.

Didn't really know. You know, we just knew, hey, yeah, there's station wagon and stuff. And I get back and we go eat breakfast. Same thing. Go eat breakfast to whatever. come back and I log into my laptop and somebody I know the IT guy whoever I don't know who it was still to this day I have no idea who did it but I fire up my laptop and my screensaver is two pictures of the station wagon and then like four pictures of you know with little little cards you know ECAA number one next two station wagon I was like nice that's like the best non-Christmas present ever so yeah but that was that was a great one and that's the thing that's that, you know, as crazy to sound, that is probably one of the most special missions to me was, you know, I got back that night.

And, you know, I always told my wife, like, I was a good night. It was a quiet night. You know, it was busy, but not bad. You know, she, I think she picked up on the code word stuff. And I said, yeah, I said, it was a great night, and we evened the score tonight. You know, so, yeah, we lost a, we lost a crew and, you know, some good dudes a few years earlier. and we didn't break even, but we got a whole lot closer. And then there was a second one.

Yeah, so. Dana, I'm really sorry. I just want to make a point of order. You refer to these nebulous beings called squatters. I think that the idea that the term maneuver element is apropos. This is back before I got all. PC. Yeah, or, you know, they're the, they're the ones that die a little bit more tired.

Yeah. But yeah, no. On their weight of the cash. Yeah. Yeah. So the, uh, the other one is we did that station wagon. And then, um, it was about and, and, and a big thing. And I kind of remember I'll talk about this and one of the things was it was, it was kind of a thing that

some of the commanders weren't really excited about. they're kind of like, hey, you know, little birds, Blackhawks are doing this, but these are 47s, man. They're not the most maneuverable helicopters. They're not the most sneakiest. You know, you can hear us coming. But that is the absolutely shockingly surprising thing that a lot of people

don't realize until they fly on one of just how maneuverable and crazy wild these things can be and how we can actually sneak up on you. I mean, to kind of segue into a completely off. topic. We were at Fort Campbell training one day, and my wife and kids and a couple of those friends were to water park right there in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and we were just out burning gas, you know, just doing training, just, you know, logging hours. And I said, hey, do you think we can fly over the water park on the way home?

So, yeah, sure. Oh, what I didn't know is they were going to buzz this water park at like 100 feet. And I said, hey, you know, we're three minutes out. I'm giving her calls, you know, 10, 6, 3, 1. And all of a sudden, you know, we break out over the trees and they dump it down over this park. And there are umbrellas and towel flying everywhere. Everybody's screaming. Who the hell did that?

My daughter's like, that's my daddy. So, yeah, surprisingly, we can sneak up on you pretty good. So the vehicle interdiction thing, I just don't think that they didn't think that we could do it. But we've gone out and done some training with it. And then, I mean, we snuck up on that station wagon pretty damn good. But the second one is absolutely, to me, is 100% proof that 47s can do vehicle interdiction stuff. So same type of deal. And this one, we're in Sharana, a little bitty camp.

I'm kind of on the east side. And they launch and say, hey, we're going to go motorcycle. We got two dudes on a motorcycle that are, you know, planting IEDs are digging in the dirt. And that was kind of the thing is They're not digging in the dirt in a road That's outside of Fobb They're not on a main road This is a little dirt road

In the middle of their own damn villages I'm like you know What the hell? This is where you're kind of like Yeah there's some bad people here That need to go away And I'm going to help to do that Yeah

So we launch You know the idea is the lead aircraft We're going to try to get that vehicle to stop You know number one We're going to plant this big as shit They've got their left window and go, hi, you might want to pull or tap on the window. And if they still don't get their attention, we're going to shoot in front of them, kind of walk the bullets back and then, you know, take out the engine stuff. But this time, this little guy and two little dudes on the motorcycle, you know, like a little, you know, like a little Honda, you know, 150-ccee little go-art thing.

And same type of deal as we're coming up on them. We've got two or three aircraft, you know, in trail. These guys are oblivious. They have no idea that we're sneaking up on them. And we're not that far. We're quarter mile away. And they're just being ring, ring, ring, gang. Then they stop.

They stop on the side of the road to get off. Dude in the back takes off his backpack, takes a knee, starts digging. And we're creeping. You know, we've kind of twisted it sideways, so we're sliding. You know, we're sliding right into them. And again, Alton left seat, I'm in the right gun. And they're like, what is this dude doing? It's like digging in the dirt.

And that ground force makes it right next to me, looks up me, taps me on the arm, puts a big thumbs up in front of my face. Do it. It's right. It's hot. Right guns engaging. And, you know, again, I think it goes back to my days of being, you know, eight years old with a BB gun. I hit that button, hit that laser. And initially, you know, you get about a split second of got them before you just can't see anything.

It's tough. So I nailed the dude. Turns out I nailed him right in the head. It took off half his face is gone. So he drops right then and there. The second dude, Olympic marathon runner, man, he takes off at a sprint running down the street. Runs down the street around the compound takes the right into a little cultivated field and things, they can't see me and lays down in like the prone with his arms out in front of him,

just laying down in between the little cultivated rows. So we break off. We shoot them up, break left, second aircraft. land, dump the dudes off, they're going to do their SSE. It's crazy. Nine years, ten years, I've still remember these damn terms. That's whatever happened to, like stuff just magically comes back to you guys. But yeah, they start with all the SSE

stuff, and we roll back around, we're like, well, let's go find this dude. And sure, shit, there he is, he's laying there. And so we had a sniper in the back, and we had a big rectangle cutout window in the back. They've got a sniper for the team. He's back there, you know, with this nice, fancy rig. We've got the 240s in the back with the bars. So he's got a sniper rifle set up. He's taking shots.

He sucks. Can't get it. He can't hit this, dude. I don't even know if he was even, like, around the team that next day. I'm like, you got one job to snite people, and you can't do it. So he says, I can't get him, take them out. And so the Ground Force dude comes to me on the arm again, says, hey, take him. So I flipped that switch.

Hit that gun a second time. Let him up right in the back and blew up his IED. I took out his vest and everything. So, yeah, I mean, it was not expecting that. We didn't know he had on any kind of vest or explosives or whatever the hell he had. I don't know. But whatever I hit, there wasn't much left of them. And then, you know, it was blasted so big.

We didn't get anything out of it. But the flash knocked out my goggles for about two or three seconds. You know, just went all black. I'm like, oh, shit. And then the light came back. I'll never forget my, I think it was the air mission commander in the job seat. Awesome, awesome, dude. One of my most favorite commission officers in the history of my military career.

That's that smell. I'm like, that's dude. That's what blowing up dead guy smells like. But yeah, we got back and Al tells the joke, you know, people are like, what are you guys doing? I'm like, I were, you know, looking, picking off body parts off the airplane, you know, we were that close. But yeah, those were those are two my favorites

Taking out that station wagon just made more special being that That station wagon and then the motorcycle And then taking out that dude with the best And that's another one that you know Makes it special because they're It's like they were doing to their own people Yeah He's playing IED in the own damn village

Yeah To hell of that Yeah Do we have questions for Daniel? Those are good Let me say We do Let me.

And so, I mean, you did 11 pumps to Afghanistan. And as things wind down, 2010, went over to Fort Rucker to do some instructor time. Yeah. You know, did a couple deployments, you know, a few more. I think after the boat bird doll thing, I think I did one more. And then, you know, at that point in time, I've only got, you know, six. 16 years in the arms, but in the life of crew members, it's rare. Most of us get promoted.

We move into, you know, flying a desk. We'd call it, you know, platoon sergeant stuff. I didn't want anything to do with that. I was like, no, my life is on that flight line. I'm a crew guy. You know, when I left the regiment in 2010 at that time, and I'd be curious to know, I had the most, pretty much the most flight time and hours of anybody,

of any 47 crew member at that time. you know it's some people look it at it and achieving some to brag about i'm like i don't know it's just you know probably should have stopped that a long time ago and said you know time to take a knee and do something easy um because i was starting to feel it um you know the back was hurting the hips the shoulders um and of course i wasn't saying anything you know go to the flight docks take my annual flight physical how you doing how's the pain level i'm like i'm saying fucking tactic you know because i took three motron 30 minutes before i showed up um so So, you know, things are starting to kind of regress on the physical side.

I think my wife was picking up on signs of, but I don't think she wanted to say anything. You know, I was never a fast runner. That was never a thing of mine. I was never the strongest, the fastest, but I was one of those guys that could go forever. You know, you need me to fly 15, 18 hours, stay up for three days, I can do it. No problem. So starting to have that conversation of, I think, it's time. I think it's time to start

taking a knee. Mentally, still ready to go, but I am having those thoughts of, I've been pushing my luck. You know, this is, you know, I've lost a crew in the Philippines. I lost a couple crews in Bravo Company. And a lot of those, you know, it's not

a survivor guilt thing, but it's like, damn, you know, they pulled me off because they were swapping out crews to do training stuff, so I missed that one. I just rotated out, and the crew that just replaced me just lost it. So, you know, you start kind of looking at going, damn, you know, how long is it going to be before my numbers up? You know, I mean, I'm, when I, when I left, I think I was the only guy in the company

that was a pre-9-11 crew chief. Wow. You know, everybody else has started. And there were some older, old-timer guys, but yeah, it was, it was, you know, the flight side. And the reason is a lot of flight people, though the crew chiefs, and flat engineers, they promote pretty quick. Yeah.

You know, because they're getting NCY-C time. They're in charge of trips. You know, so you're checking the blocks. You're getting all the school. And when we get promoted, it's not like, you know, the SF teams who has the, you know, the 18 series or whoever. It's, you know, I'm a 15 uniform just like the guy that's at 4 Campbell and 101st or wherever. So we're all promoting against the same people.

Right. So the lifespan of a crew chief and a flat engine and a regimen is actually not really that long. The pilots stay there forever. You know, they show up and you are there for life unless you quit. You get fired for you retire and leave. You're there forever. For the crew members, it's not that way. You can be depending on how you're doing in life, but you usually tend to move up and move on and do things.

So I'm sitting thinking, all right, I'm at about, you know, 11, 12 years. Physically, it's starting to take a toll. My first sergeant at the time, Billy, amazing, amazing dude. It's probably one of my shit over 20 years, one of my top five, if not top three first arms I've ever had. And we went out for a run.

It didn't go well. Came in, talked to him and said, yeah, I'm just not, I don't know how much longer I can do this before it's really going to start taking a toll on my future career. So I think it's best that I go. And he was like, hey, dude, what do you want to do? Where do you want to go? I said, well, as cheesy as it is, I think I'd like to go to Rucker.

It's non-deployable, you know, and it's not that I'm running away. Obviously, I haven't been doing that. I've been doing it forever. Right. But I think it's time to go home, settle down, you know, make sure my kids know who I am. Yeah. Because those last couple deployments, I didn't start to getting older. You know, when we left, Fort Campbell in 2010, my kids were seven and five.

So the last couple times, you know, my son's sitting there playing video games. I was like, hey, dude, I'm leaving. And you're just running by. You know, like, it was just nothing. I'm like, okay. Yeah. And my daughter suddenly realized my dad's going away for a long time. And, you know, she's wrapped around my ankle, dragging her to the door, you know, screaming, bloody murder and crying all over the place.

So I was like, I'm done with this. I've got to go. Yeah. So, yeah. We transitioned out, went down to Fort Rucker and had a wonderful time. You know, most people hate Fort Rucker. Loved, loved it, loved it, loved it, loved it. The unit I was in was great because we were dealing with test pilots.

You know, so these are old-season guys. You know, a lot of people I worked with are, you know, senior maintenance guys, flight guys. Even one of the guys from my Panama days was a retired DAC flying for the test pilot course. So I'm like, this is great. It's like a family reunion. You know, so got to get involved with Boy Scouts, you know, helping raise my kids. You know, my wife, she's a superhero. I mean, I don't know.

Everybody would say, you know, thank you for your service. You're here. I'm like, no. I did it because it was fun. I'm not doing it. But that lady said next to me, yeah, she's the superhero. Yeah. She kept the house going.

The cat's alive, the kids alive. I don't know how she did it. You know, it's like my parents. People ask me, what do you think if your kids were going to join the military? They were like, no. Same thing. I don't know how she did it, especially, you know, knowing that some of her friends, and one of our bestest friends in the world, Julie Quinn,

she was just down here with one of her daughters. We started doing family vacations every year. We'd come down to Orlando in October for the Disney Halloween stuff. Her husband died in Afghanistan and one of our aircraft that crashed over there as well. So, you know, with her being surrounded by it, knowing that any day she could get that call. Her parents live right up the road, so she spent a lot of time there. So she said, if I'm there and home, they don't know where to find me. So I didn't want to put them through any more of that.

So we moved to Rucker, had a great time. My, you know, if the military life goes, you know, you have best friends everywhere you go. So my, my newest best friend was a great guy there. at Rucker. You know, it's been, you know, he's actually coming down here to Orlando for a Veterans Day weekend. We're going to have a little four guys just getting away for the weekend, going to play a lot of golf. But, yeah, I met a great, wonderful group of people. Matter of fact, that's went to Chicago literally last weekend to become a godfather to his new son.

That's awesome. So, yeah, the people we've met. But Rucker was great. It was, you know, getting my feet back on the ground. Still flying. It was all daytime. Yeah. Yeah.

I flew one goggle flight I thought they might need it. It's like great. Dan, you got like 3,000 hours in goggles time. Why don't you go out and do it? Man, after not flying goggles for like a year and a half,

I had the biggest scream and a headache. My neck hurt and I was like, to hell with it. But the biggest thing that happened is when I got to Rucker and everything slowed down and I went to my very first flight physical, you know, when you get to go do the commander's eval stuff and get your upsflip. I sat down. And as soon as I sat down,

the flights are going to go, man, have you ever been in a helicopter crash? I went, that's funny. Yeah, sure, okay. And she's like, no, seriously. It's kind of like the way I'm sitting right now. I prop my arm up, you just kind of loosen everything up. The next thing you know, I'm getting dragged around to the orthopedics guy, the physical

therapy guy, I'm getting x-rays because they're at Port Rucker. The hospital's tiny. Everything's right there. She walked me in physical therapy. Yep, you've got an appointment. X-rays. Yep, we got x-rays. We put a referral out for an MRI.

By the way, it's in the trail in the parking lot. So all of a sudden, I'm finding out that it's not just a mental thing. I really was broken. I had two shoulder surgeries. You know, it's fun. I'm like a half inch shorter than I was when I joined the Army. Yeah. They have to have a knee surgery, but they gave me this fancy little brace to keep my kneecap in the right spot

because apparently I hadn't torn one of my little tendons, but I'd ripped like halfway through it and it had kind of healed itself but crooked. So I wore this little brace, was a little kind of a little lump on the side of it to keep that thing. straight and now that thing's working pretty good but yeah I mean all of a sudden it's like holy shit yeah yeah yeah it adds up it really was broken up yeah yeah I was gonna say when you when you said that you know it was a test pilot and all these guys were salty and you know all the crew were salty that it's probably one of the reasons you guys all probably got along is everybody there had compression fractures and and so you all just hobbled along together yeah it wasn't kind of

Funny, I mean, especially at Rucker, there's a lot of Dax, a lot of civilian guys. So in our maintenance test pilot course, we only had one active duty pilot, and he was the track chief. Everybody else was retired. So, you know, yeah, walking in. And some of these guys were, you know, and a lot of pilots don't retire at 20. Because by the time they're up in the senior ranks, they're at W4, W5, they're a miss. You hear of them, you see their name on an office, but you never see them. their parking spots always empty.

Right. So, yeah, it was a bunch of old farts rolling around in the wheelchairs. Yeah. But it was great. And the thing that I really enjoyed about that, too, was even though the regiment was flying at that golf models, which is very similar to the Fox model nowadays, their pilots would still have to roll through the big R&E instructor courses. So if they wanted to be an instructor pilot or an IP or a maintenance test pilot,

They still had to go to Rucker, take the big Army qualification course, and then they would go back to, you know, the regiment to get their more in-depth specific. So I still got to see a lot of old buddies. A lot of the old pilots would come down, so we got to, you know, relive war stories. Yeah. And, you know, and sometimes, you know, I don't think a lot of people are like, oh, whatever, Dan's telling stories again. And then some guy would run in and he goes, hey, I was the right seat on that station wagon.

Yeah, that's legit. So, yeah, it was good. you still got to stay. It's still kind of like being in the community, but detached. You still had guys roll through. But yeah, it was definitely, we were all broken, miserable. We only have one. But I want to ask you one last question because this is, I'm curious about it.

Having flown for everybody in J-Soc and probably, you know, everybody in Socom, I'm not talking about gear. I'm not talking about the number of personnel, but with. When people got on that aircraft, could you tell who they were by just their posture in the aircraft, how they occupied their aircraft, how they treated each other in the aircraft? You could. You kind of have me worried there for a minute. I thought you're going to say, hey, of all your customers, who do you like flying with the best? No, because that's obviously Rangers.

I mean, yeah, it's obviously Rangers. Like, how many Rangers can you fit on a Chinat? All of them. one more yeah one more one more now of course we're like hey one of you got to get off right well there's only seven right we can only take six um yeah you kind of could um you know i mean it was always cheating because we did know who we were getting but um you know there wasn't of course obviously the rangers yeah we we knew um because they're like on it's like it's shine polished ready to go um they're they're like little robots

Amazing. Don't let your head get swelled up there a little bit. But, yeah, they're... They were good to work with because Rangers, I never, never had an issue with Rangers trying to be bossy. Because it's like they fully understood, hey, we're just hitching a ride, man. This is your plane. You tell us what to do.

So they were always like, you know, it's kind of funny. You know, in the special ops world, rank didn't really mean much. You know, it was who's the team leader, who's the team start, who's the chief, who's the whatever's. Yeah, those guys would bark. But the Rangers were still like very, you know, yes, sergeant, no sergeant, do this, do that. So, you know, when they roll up to me in there, you're just, you know, staff Sergeant Devine standing on the edge of the ramp and all my kidding, like, hey, go here, do this, put your stuff there, hang that, don't touch this. Roger's and I'm like, whoa. We don't get them.

Right. But, you know, the dev group guys and the cab dudes, for the longest time, Dev Group was our main customer in Afghanistan, you know, because they couldn't get along in the early day. So it's kind of like, all right, tag dudes, you get Iraq, Deb group, you're getting Afghanistan. Because we can't even put you in the same theater without, you know, jeopardizing each other's stuff. And those guys were good, too. I mean, I really had a good working relationship with them. It's funny, you're watching some of the podcasts, I see some of these guys. I'm like, man, I feel like I know you.

But, you know, we all got, you know, most of them big beers now, bigger than they were. But every last wide, you can almost tell who the new guy was, like who the new team chief was or new team leader. Because it's like they try to come in and strut their stuff. But overall, they're pretty good dudes. And towards the end of my regimental career, we swapped out. We actually rotated out the seal dudes with the CAG guys. And it was a little headbutton at first because they wanted to roll in and were like, no, we don't care what those guys did. This is how we do it.

And we're like, well, they did it because that's how we told them to do it. You're going to sit there. your mic cord is going to be here. Your green chem lights are in that flap. Your blue chem lights are in that flap. Don't move anything. So those guys, you know, just big burly dudes of a whole lot of shit

coming on board. They were the same. The ranges were definitely, you could tell how they were dressed right dress. Everybody looked the same. You know, their shit was wired tight. The other dude, you kind of was like, hey, whatever makes you comfortable, whatever you can carry. So it wasn't a big

you know, difference on what they had. Toys, you can tell by some of the toys they had. Yeah. Like, oh, okay.

You know, you got some pretty fancy stuff there. So, yeah, that was kind of some of the differences there, but they were all. And I think that's one thing I definitely love being in the special operations world for those 12 years was it really didn't matter.

Everywhere you went that you knew that these are the professionals, whether, and, you know, there's a lot of talk about, Like, especially in the early days, pre-9-11, you know, with the, oh, you're white soft, you're black soft, you're this. Yeah, okay, I want you to go up and just tell a green beret from seventh group that, oh, you're just SF. Right.

Yeah. Say that, run fast, run real fast because he's going to whoop your ass. You know, so I think that was a cool thing was, you know, when I'm growing up early days of working with, you know, just regular Navy SEALs and Green Berets. to me, those dudes are badass. You know, that was, I didn't know the difference. I'm like, these dudes are pretty awesome. The shit they're doing is pretty crazy. And then when I started working with the other side of the house was like,

man, I almost want to go back and work with those guys because y'all are like a bunch of little bitches running around. You're whining and crying about every little thing. It's too hot. Can we get cushions on the floor? We're in a 47 at 15,000 feet in the mountains Afghanistan. It's going to be cold. And we're not cranking up that heater.

So deal with it. And I'm not closing the windows and pulling the gas. guns yet. So yeah, they would, they had won and cry a little bit. But overall, everybody was awesome. It was, it was an amazing, amazing ride. Well, I mean, and Jack can vouch for this too. Like, I'll, I'll say that anybody who's ever flown with the 160th, like, you know that, that you are flying with the best of the best. And, and not just the pilots, but the crew, like, like, it is such a professional organization. and everybody is so shit hot

that I don't even know how to like how to emphasize that without just like fanboying all over you know it's okay we're used to it yeah I got a question here

DJ Sneed thank you very much what's the difference between the 160th and Delta Force's AVA unit. I'm going to say if there is such a unit, is there a selection process or is it just a tasking? So, yeah, there is a little thing out there. So just kind of like, you know, guys that want to assess and go, you know, go work out at Bamneck or whatever, there is a aviation group that is a little bit more personalized and special that there is an assessment for and a selection.

It's basically kind of the same thing. When you head out to West Virginia and do your thing, or West Virginia, Virginia, wherever it is. But, yeah, there is a little thing up there, but it's more, learn a lot more about civilian helicopters, because that's their thing. For us, for the 160, it's the special operations world, but we're, you know, there is some little sneaky stuff that guys do.

Not so much necessarily for the 47. Littlebirds do a lot of that stuff. the Black Hawk some but you know our our bread and butter is we're going to go do the big nasty dangerous stuff that only stupid people would try right

we're like oh we never done this before but let's give it a shot but that's because we have the resources and that was the thing you know when I got to Fort Rucker and really got to you know meet some big army guys that had been flying a long time and had done deployments with the big army

stuff. And there was always a lot of a lot of shit talking between the conventional army guy and the 160 dudes, you know, the next stop, dairy queen, all that kind of stuff. I said, well, you know, the number one, you didn't have the ball to try. So shut your mouth. You know, and number two is

you tried it. You were horrible. You sucked. You got fired. So shut your mouth. You know, if you've never done it, don't talk shit. Because there are times where we would get back and you would just shut the engines down you just sit there, you know, for 30 seconds, and you just sit there and just kind of go,

holy shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. And then the big army guys like, ooh, I flew eight sling loads one night. I'm like, great, super. Why don't you go do that again? We just flew from, I mean, even just like training stuff.

I mean, to fly from Fort Campbell, Kentucky to Albuquerque, New Mexico without ever touching the ground in a helicopter because you had the inside refuel. You had to do all kinds of stuff. And for one, to, I mean, just think about flying in an airplane in your seat on a 737 for 12 hours. Yeah. Now you're wearing all your shoes. You've got your heads on, your helmet, got your night vision goggles. Yeah.

You know, your peeing and gator bottles. You had some soggy hamburgers from 10 hours. You could go ahead and stuff like. So, yeah, there's a difference between that little bitty thing that they have. and us because they're a more of an individualized, you know, you're just going to go out in one'sy, you can try to sneak in and do something where we're going to take a bunch of helicopters and try to fuck some shit up.

Right. Yeah. And that was the only question. I just want to say that Alan was in the chat quite a bit, singing your praises. And I think you owe him a drink. Absolutely. Yeah. I owe him many drinks.

Thank you. so much for coming on the show tonight and, you know, kind of representing not just 160th, but representing like crew chiefs. Like I said, we never had one. Flight engineers. What is it with you guys? Why are you trying to demote him? It does just a subtle, a subtle jab. No, but for representing, yeah, the flight crews and the flight engineers, because we've never had them on the show before. And I don't think there's too many podcasts out there that have really interviewed you guys. And I mean, I think it's awesome that you can come on here and kind of tell that, a piece of that story.

Again, thank you for doing it. And is there anything else you want to tell people about what you're up to today or where people can find you or anything? Yeah, man, I'm just down here in Orlando, loving life, you know, in between hurricanes. But, yeah, it's just hanging out. You know, my kids now are 18 and 20. My daughter's 18. My son's 20. So, you know, been out, you know, retired now for nine years, hanging out and just having a great

time you know awesome anybody's ever down here in Disney world to include you guys if you ever make it down here it is Epcot international food and wine festival right now so uh i may have in line free tickets because i got a couple kids in the house and a wife that actually works for disney and my daughter does too so yeah i mean it's just it's like you know catching up on the the nine 10 years of you know my kids grow up yeah yeah it's like it's You know, it sort of takes that moment of self-reflection to say what I'm doing, I'm doing for me. And there are people in my life that depend on me. And, you know, and now it's their time.

Yeah. And that's kind of what it was is, you know, those 20 years, especially those 12 in the regiment, that was kind of looking back, it's like, man, that's pretty selfish dude. You know, it's like, hey, it's, I got to go on a trip. I got to go on a plate, but I got to do whatever. and then you know the family's back home they're like what about them it's like yeah they're taking care of yeah don't worry about it and then all of a sudden you slow down and you look back in the rear of your mirror and you're like holy shit what did i do to my family you know why what did they ever do to deserve this yeah but that's how it is for everybody yeah that's how it is for everybody and stuff everybody's living their dream life and leaving

you know leaving everybody behind to do it yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah And guys, anybody's any of your staff? Give me call. We're coming down. The three of us, you already volunteered. You already know a lot of cats down there. And before we take off, I do want to tease out tonight the next event that Badger 6 is having. So it's Ruck the River, 2023.

And the American Legion that I belong to in Hoboken, New Jersey, is hosting this event. Ruck the River was created to support Badger 6, which provides humanitarian assistance to families of the Afghan cavalry who fought alongside the CIA's Team Alpha and the U.S. Army Green Berets for ODA 595. Join us as we pay tribute and assist those who stood by our warriors in Afghanistan. And you can find them at Hoboken Legion.org slash Ruck 23. We've done, you know, some stuff with Badger Six in the past. Justin and Toby.

Justin. Justin. Justin. Yeah. David Tyson. So that's the next event that they have coming up. I hope you guys will participate, you know, if you're local to the area. Other than that, I just want to say our friends at Casa Carabello Cigars,

casacarabello.com, if you want to pick them up, they're outstanding. Other than that, we'll see you guys next week with Mike Edwards, former former teammate of mine. He will be here in studio, Ranger Battalion Dude. So you know it's good. And Daniel, again, man, thank you for doing the show. Wish you the best, man. Hope to see you down there.

Yeah, guys, thanks for having me on, man. I love what you all are doing, you know, getting the, you know, getting those stories out to people that, you know, there's a real-life element to it. Yeah, hell of you know. It's not just, thanks for here. Yeah, thanks for spending a Friday night to come on to share your story. We really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you very much, guys.

Have a wonderful night. It's been a pleasure. You too, man. Have a nice weekend. And we'll see all you guys next Friday with Mike.