The Team House - 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment At War | Alan Mack | Ep. 199

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Alan C. Mack joined the Army upon graduating High School. His desire to see the world as a US Army helicopter mechanic took him to the Republic of Korea, West Texas, and the Federal Republic of Germany before attending Warrant Officer flight school at Fort Rucker, Alabama. The nearly year-long flight school yielded a UH-1H, Huey, and CH-47D, Chinook, aircraft qualification before his first pilot assignment in Savannah, Georgia. Timing is everything, as he arrived in time to progress with his new unit as a copilot in Operation Desert Shield. Then, several months later, he flew combat missions in the lead aircraft penetrating deep into Iraq. Upon his return to the United States, he quickly achieved the status of Pilot-in-command and eventually assumed the coveted role of Night Vision Goggle Unit Trainer. The NVG UT position is a precursor to flying as an Instructor Pilot (IP). Another assignment to the Republic of Korea was in store for Alan before attending the CH-47 Instructor Pilot course at Fort Rucker, Alabama. The call to adventure was persuasive, drawing Alan into the special operations community as an MH-47 pilot. Hard work and relentless training vaulted him to the top of his peer group as a Flight Lead and standardization instructor pilot. His experience and leadership traits put him at the forefront of several clandestine special operations, some still too classified to discuss in an open forum. Not many Warrant Officers have the opportunity to command a unit, but Alan was entrusted with the United States Military Academy Flight Detachment at West Point, New York. With his military career approaching thirty-six years, he elected to retire and join public service. CW5 Alan C. Mack is a Master Aviator with more than 6700 hours of flight time, of which over 3200 hours were flown with Night Vision Goggles. Grab Alan's book here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Razor-03-Night-Stalkers-Wars/dp/1399018698/ref=asc_df_1399018698/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=564776326262&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10726636791783122097&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9004356&hvtargid=pla-1638283415039&psc=1 Find Alan here:⬇️ Today's Sponsors: BetterHelp ⬇️ ● If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. ● Visit https://BetterHelp.com/TEAMHOUSE today to get 10% off your first month. SLNT (Silent) ⬇️ https://SLNT.com/?rfsn=7107485.9bde8d SLNT® sleeves, bags, cases and wallets are all exquisitely designed to ensure your devices become invisible, untrackable and silent. Get 10% off your order by using this link or using the promo code "teamhouse" at checkout! https://SLNT.com/?rfsn=7107485.9bde8d Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show ! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ 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/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #160thSOAR #nightstalkers #robertsridgeBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're doing, go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out, and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our team house. the team house and you'd like to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes. Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do. 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 hosts, Jack Murphy,

and David Park. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 199 of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy. Here today with the author of Razor Zero 3, Alan Mack.

35 years in the Army, most of it behind the controls of MH47 or CH47 before that. Yeah. Flew all kinds of operations throughout the war on terror and even before as well.

Really long, extensive career and I'm really excited to have you on today to talk about your book and your experiences and your career. Well, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. Yeah, I mean, appreciate you guys driving in doing this tonight on a Friday evening. Yeah, no, that's good. It gives this chance to get in the city. Yeah, you said you had a nice dinner by the water before coming in. Yeah, we've never eaten over here in Brooklyn. We usually are Manhattan or Queens. Any local Italian establishment you want to shout out? Yeah.

Lano. Is that how you say that? Yeah. It was good? Yeah, it was really good. Okay, awesome. No, I'm glad you liked it. So, Alan, I'm going to go ahead and just jump right into it with you and start at the, we ask all of our guests really to tell us their origin story, sort of like, what was

your upbringing like? How did you grow up and sort of how did that take you towards military service? Okay. Well, I grew up in coastal New Hampshire, Ports, So New Hampshire has a whole 16 miles of coastline, you know, sandwich between Maine and Massachusetts. And, you know, I grew up just an average kid. You know, I ran track in high school, cross country in the fall, that kind of thing. And when it came time to go to college, you know, at a high school there, I just, I didn't think I was ready for it.

I knew I wasn't ready for it in that I would just party. So a friend of mine had just been to the Army recruiter And he said hey, you know, if you go to the Army recruiter We can join together Go to basic training together Be assigned at our first assignment together And I said, oh, that sounds cool Maybe we can fly helicopters, right?

So I go in there and you know When I was little, you know, the Vietnam War was going on And you always saw Huey's flying around in the news, right? So that's why I wanted to do I wanted to fly assault with UH-1s The Blackhawks weren't really a thing at the time and yeah, join the Army. And I walked in the recruiter.

I'm like, hey, I want to fly helicopters. I saw a commercial. You guys do it right out of high school. He's like, woo-hoo, you know, pump the brakes turbo. You know, it doesn't work that way. But he goes, yeah, it's possible, but it's unlikely. He goes, what you need to do is join as an enlisted guy, be a mechanic, you know, an aircraft mechanic. You learn the lingo, you know, the culture, the environment, that kind of stuff.

And really it was because he didn't get credit for officers. He only got credit for enlisted guys, right? But it turns out it was good advice. You know, I did nine years as an aircraft mechanic working on Hueys, Cobras, O'H 58s. I was in Korea, Texas, and West Germany, you know, which is cool. You used to say that right, West Germany. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you got tons of experience, you know, in working on engines and stuff like that on these aircraft before I before.

Yeah. And it was great. Because, you know, I worked on UH-1s, the Hueys, and that's what I learned on in flight school. They were transitioning between what was called the TH-55, this little toy helicopter that they used to teach you on, and the TH-67, which is like a bell jet ranger. So in between that, they just used UH-1 Hueys. So I learned in the aircraft that I really wanted to fly anyway, and it was a lot of fun. That's super cool. And, you know, so tell us then about, like, making that transition from mechanics.

to flight school like you're putting in your flight packet and did you have to go to OCS did you have to go to warrant no so I went to warrant officer flight school so it's all kind of condent it's all together but you know the one thing I will tell you and you may have listeners out there that want to put in for you know Army flight school and I got to tell you nothing has changed because my my stepson's trying to do it right now he's an infantryman at Fort Campbell and he's like no one will help you and I go it's part of the process dude if you can't be motivated enough to do it yourself they don't want you as a pilot you know and that's not the real reason why but it really is true you know so he's he's on it you know hopefully we'll get him in there but um that's the thing is no one will help you uh my first packet was rejected you know uh and i looked at it after i had a recruiter look at it and he's like well this is no wonder you get rejected you're missing you know all these things right so he helped me put the stuff together i resubmitted and i got picked up like the next month and then so I left Germany for Fort Rucker Alabama what we call UCLA the upper corner of lower Alabama it's not like

like Forrest Gump with a greenbow Alabama but it's it's UCLA but there's nothing but cotton and peanuts out there but so you know that was an easy transition you know just going from being a list of guy you know it was a lot like the leadership schools you know PLDC BNock I'm sure were the schools at the time. I'm not sure what they are now. But, you know, you get in there and they treat you like crap for the first couple, well, for the first two months.

Actually, the whole eight months, they treat you like crap, but they really, it's like a little mini, you know, little, I was going to say, there's a little mini buds, you know, but it's nothing like that, obviously. Yeah, but there's a little, there's a little, hazing. You have, well, you have, you know, it's not hell week, but you have start day, they call it. And they, I mean, it's tough, you know, and they, they, you know, and they, they, you know, and they play with your head a little bit because at the end they go, you know,

hey, we just got told the Army's cutting out a percentage of pilots. We have to lose like 40 of you. And there's like 75, 80 of us. So we're going to do start date every day until we get down to this number. You will quit. Right. And everybody's like, oh, my God. This is going to be terrible.

It's like, I can't do this again. And then they come in, they go, stress. this is called stress you're going to learn how to deal with stress i was like oh hoohoo but uh that's kind of you know so that first and when i was um when i was in flight school you were a candidate the whole time a warrant officer candidate a walk so the only privilege you had is as a senior you know the other candidates would salute you and you could go to the oak club which was a big deal because it was a dry county oh wow you're on federal land so yeah so they did that and then you know later they what they did really is a much better program

is you get through the first couple of weeks and they just promote you to W1 and you do the rest of flight school as a W1 which really is the way to go. I mean everybody from my time frame is like, no way. You know, they need to be screwed with it. You know, they need to be fucked with the whole time.

But yeah, I think it's a better program now. So you're a warning on the trainer initially. What was the point where you, you either chose or were assigned the CH-47 as your platform. Yeah. So back then, and so this is 1989, there was no Chinook track. So this was, flight school at the time was called multi-track. So you would, you'd come in, you'd learn on the UH1,

and then you would switch to whatever your aircraft was going to be. So I got lucky I stayed in UH-1, which is what I wanted. You know, it was like six guys, went to Cobras. I think we had nine guys in Blackhawks. It was a brand new program. And then the rest were all on OH-58s. So what happened was that the Army and its infinite wisdom didn't plan for the retirement of all of their Chinook pilots from the Vietnam era.

Think of the airlines today, right? They get the same problem. Just everybody at once going to retire and there's nobody to backfill them. So they decided, well, we're going to let W-1s fly Chinooks, which was unheard of. I mean, that was a, you got Chinooks if you did something. You know, like you went to Vietnam three or four times. The reward was, you're going back to Vietnam, but you're going to fly Chinooks.

You know, not, you know, assault or whatever. Right, right. So they go, okay, we're going to take, you know, two people out of this class, you know, of 70-something people. And the only metric they had to pick anybody was grade point average. So there were like five of us that were, you know, like 97.1, 97.1. 97.2, 97.3. So we were all kind of like, you know, really close. And I got selected for one of the two.

I was the honor grad, so I got selected for it. And I was mad. I didn't want to fly shillis. Because you want to be a Huey guy. I wanted to fly a Huey, so I wanted to fly assault. And I remember the instructors just looking at me like, you, moron. You know, just take the Chinook. That's what you want.

And I'm like, no, I want to do hughies. And you're like, no. I'm like, I don't want to go from airport to airport carrying cargo. That's bullshit. And it turns out that's not what Chinooks do. I mean, they do that, but they do a lot of other really cool things that we saw in Desert Storm. Yeah, well, I want to talk about Desert Storm, but before I get to that, could you explain for John Q. Public out there that doesn't really have any, necessarily have any military experience?

What is the Chinook? What is this aircraft? What makes it special? What makes it different than everything else we have in the inventory? Yeah, so the Chinook, right? It's like the size of a recreational vehicle. or a greyhound bus. The nose is a little bit more pointy,

instead of like a greyhound be all flat. And then you have two massive rotors, one on the front and one of the back. So it's called a tandem rotor. And one spins one way and the other spins the other. So there's no tail rotor to rob power from the engines, right? It's all going to lift. So it's very stable.

It's very strong, very fast. It's one of the fastest helicopters in the world. Do about 198 miles an hour. you just call it 200. It's nice. Super powerful. You can put here in the United States, anything you can put inside,

you can probably lift without any trouble. We found that to be different in Afghanistan, but we can talk about that later. But, you know, the joke is that it's, it looks like two palm trees in a dumpster mating, you know, when it's flying. Or the seals call it the black school bus of death, you know, because we take them in on assaults, you know,

And, yeah, so that's a Chinook. And yeah, they use them for a logging out in like the Pacific Northwest, don't they? Columbia helicopters, yeah. That's the civilian company. They use what's called the Boeing 234, which is a shunuch. I did a story years ago about how the contractor company actually took those aircraft to Afghanistan. And it had something to do with the bubble that they use with the lanyard that goes. down so that because they can look out and they can carefully do these like

resupplies yeah the pilots have that so in a regular Chinook you've got a bubble window in the back right crew chief will stick his head in it but the Columbia helicopters they'll have the pilot and the right seat will have a big bubble on his his side door down by his leg in a mirror so he can look at it and do what he's doing you know but we actually we had a couple of aircraft shot up in the first part of the war and we needed what was called an an Iphus bar, right? So the fuel tanks on the MH47 Chinooks sit on these big giant steel rods that,

uh, in front and the back of the aircraft and they sit and they coat on, they're not like bolted to the side. They kind of ride on it like counterweights. And we took a couple of, uh, 14.5 millimeter disqualms and a couple of them. And you can't fix them, you know, and you can't get them.

So Columbia was kind enough to like donate some to, us. Oh, really? Yeah. So we were able to put some aircraft back in service back in the, because in the early days, you know, we had two task forces. We'll talk about this more, but you had dagger and sword. And in the beginning, sword got all shot up. They had like five aircraft out of commission for a little while. And then we were doing really well until Anaconda, and then we had three of them taken out of service. So we needed airframes. Well, yeah, before we get there, you served in Desert Storm in the conventional army.

Yeah. So, you know, I say in my book, you know, timing is everything. I got out of flight school. I took leave. I showed up in Savannah, Georgia, at the second of one-five-ninth, Hercules, and Saddam invaded Kuwait. I mean, like, within two weeks of me, I just didn't process. I'm like, ah, we're going to Kuwait. So they had to train me up really quick because I was the only, there's a progression you do when you get to a unit, right? You have to be trained up been evaluated and taught how the unit does business. And that usually takes six to eight months, you know, for a new co-pilot out of flight school. And they had like a month to get me up.

So what they did, they actually used the 160th third of a time. It was next door to us. And they lent us an aircraft for me to get trained in, which is kind of irony. Interesting, yeah. It wasn't a MH-47. It was a CH-47D Warbird, they called them. All it had was, you know, it had mini guns and had like an oxygen system and an INS navigation, so a laser ring gyro. And that was it.

It didn't have any other special equipment, right? So it was no big deal for me to fly that. And so I got up to what they call RL1, readiness progression level one. And we flew literally the next day up to the port of Wilmington. And they disassembled all of our aircraft. We flew up two at a time. And, you know, a funny story there is that, you know, I'd never flown off a military reservation, right? I've been on a one over 50 map, you know, flying along at train flight.

I was like, how hard can this be? You're up at altitude. And the lead aircraft on us had a maintenance problem, and he had land. And that left us to continue on without him. And the pilot in command hands me the map, says, here you go, Al, get us there. And I'm like, all right, how hard can this be, right? There's the Atlantic Ocean. There's some power lines.

Yeah. And then he goes, hey, this big airport up ahead. What's the frequency? I'm like, start spinning my map as if I'm driving a bus, you know? Because you're trying to, you're trying to match the map to the terrain. And it's like, there's a road over there. If I put the map this way, and then the ocean's up here, it should be over here. He's getting nervous as you pull your compass out. Well, and he's like, ow, come on, we got to, we got to call these guys. And I'm like, I don't know where we are. And he knew the whole time. He's like, yeah, it's this frequency. He turned it up from memory. He made the call and he's like, look, you're going to have to learn to navigate, right? Which is funny because then I am put a special operations flight lead being the primary navigator,

you know, on these strategic level missions. You know, my very first flight, I was like driving the bus. You know, I can't find myself. But, yeah, so we go up there and we put our, all of our aircraft, we had 16 ships. They tore them down, they put them on an old-fashioned boat. You know, it wasn't one of those nice roll-on roll-off. It was, you know, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, wrapped them in bubble wrap or shrink wrap, put them on the top of a ship that traveled, I think, nine or ten knots. So it was like a month and a half to get there, maybe two months. So we just went back to our base and waited.

We did some training on what Iraq would be like or Saudi Arabia, you know, that kind of stuff. Because really what we were doing is going to protect the Saudi Arabian kingdom. That's what Desert Shield was. was a defensive operation. And it worked, you know, Saddam didn't invade. And then they transitioned into desert storm. And what was cool about all of that for me was none of the old guys wanted to fly in the desert. You know, it's tough to fly over there, right?

And we started flying at night because the army was claiming, we own the night. And our old guys would be like, we rent it. We lease it. We don't own it. Which was kind of true because, you know, they were. ripping landing gear off aircraft. It was Huey's ripping their skids off. I mean, in 1980, the problems that we had with Desert One

and the aircraft going through the sandstorms and everything, were some of these things like in the back of their mind that none of us want to go through that again? Yeah, well, they wouldn't. So the Desert One, the Eagle Claw storm, right? So I've flown through my very first mission in Afghanistan was just those very same conditions. But in Desert Storm, excuse me, we wouldn't fly in the bad weather.

So there was no worry about the storms. It was the landings, you know, because once you get down into, you know, your own rotor wash, it all roils up and you can't see anything. Nowadays we have, you know, a symbology in the cockpit that helps you play a little video game to keep the aircraft doing what it's supposed to do.

But we didn't have that. So you had to kind of come in, staying ahead of the dust cloud, and then basically a controlled crash. A little belly flop. Oh, it was terrible. You come in and you're, you know, and you just hope you didn't land,

you know, hit a ditch or something. That's how you lose your landing gear. So, but nobody wanted to fly. So they, you know, what they call the W1 in the Army is a woge, a warrant officer junior grade. And they're like, they took the junior instructor pilot, said, here, take the Woge out and get them trained up. So we flew every day, sometimes twice a day. Sometimes we fly in the afternoon, come back for chow, and go back out at night and fly unaided. because the guys thought that unaided was safer than NVGs at the time. Just flying by moonlight? Or not. Could be zero alum.

Flying by instrument. Yep. And they just felt that it was safer. You know, I mean, the goggles at the time were not very good. But they were good enough, you know. And that was really the culture of the Army. You know, they were like, you know, we're going to fly at night. But not with NVGs, you know, that's dangerous, you know.

Which is fun. So anyway, they had me doing all the flying. And, you know, there were nights I'd do with somebody, and they'd say, all right, we're going to fly back. And it's dark. And they, can we put our goggles on? Are like, wow, are you kidding me? This is much safer. I don't think so.

You know, and we actually lost our commander to an unlit antenna. They had MVGs on board, and they decided not to wear them because they felt it was safer. That was during like a routine training flight. Well, we were coming up. We just moved a bunch of POWs up in Iraq. So this was Desert Storm. And there was this road called the Tapline Road, right? So it's sort of an east-west running road, roughly,

between, you know, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. And everything was on that thing. You know, this famous left hook that we did. You know, all the logistics moved out west and then came in to what we call the objective of Cobra and then came into Kuwait from the west instead of from the coast. But, so we moved all these prisoners, and they decided, there was a flight of five of us. Two of them did not have MVGs, and they flew back, you know, ahead of it. We sent them on ahead because they didn't have goggles.

And then the other three crews that were remaining had goggles. Me, our crew, and the one behind us put the goggles on, and the commander decided not to do it. You say that was a cultural thing in the Army. Is that just because the technology was newish and we just did, the pilots did not trust the technology at the time? That's exactly what it was. Yeah. And, you know, the training hadn't really come up because, you know,

there's no depth perception with MBGs. It's all, we call monocular cues, right? You've got to learn to learn to look at different objects and compare the size. And there's all these little techniques for doing that. But they still had to figure it out. You know, I mean, flying with MBGs, like binocular MBGs, really the 160th pioneered that, you know, when they formed in 1980. And, you know, when you look at Eagle Claw, the interesting thing with that, you know, the 53 pilots, right? So they started with Navy pilots thinking that taking off from a ship was the hardest part of the mission.

Turns out that's the easiest part. They wanted to use Chinooks, but the blades didn't fold. Right, right. They couldn't fit them on the aircraft. And they were afraid that if they put them on the deck, it would be an OPSEC spike. Right. Why are there Shonks on a aircraft carrier?

Right, right. So they went with these, the Navy pilots. The Delta guys hated them, right? Now, granted, they were dealing with what they knew, which was these crappy MBGs. They'd never done this before. They're basically vert rep guys. So they fly from ship to ship, you know, delivering supplies.

And they don't wear goggles doing that. And they were using the technology at the time. the landing lights, they're, you know, a white searchlight. And what they did is they had this brown paper, think like a shopping bag, right? The brown paper shopping bags coated in some kind of like oily substance. And the OSS devised this in World War II, you know, for those flights. And the thing was this. You could see, you could barely see it with the naked eye and you could see it with the night vision goggles.

The problem was it's paper and it's a hot light bulb. so you were limited to how long it would stay on before it just burned through, and then you didn't have a covert light. So they used it very, very sparingly, which is, it's hell without that kind of light. And the Delta guys got rid of them, went with marine pilots, thinking, all right, well, these guys are at least flying to the beach, and they didn't like them either. Because they had the same constraints.

Right. And there's a whole thing about Eagle Claw. But when it came down to it, it was hard to do they weren't trained they didn't have the the skills that we have now and i've got you know i have more goggle time than many army pilots have total time you know but i was a night stalker you know so that's what you're going to do but and so the the rest of desert storm was that pretty much what you were doing funnel uh ferrying po w's uh back to back to the rear areas so we so our main function they i want to say they had 150 schnuchx in theater

might have been $125.15s in my mind. And we would fly in flights of five from Saudi Arabia up to a forward operating base, Cobra, which was the staging base for the Apaches, right? We had cobras protecting us on the way up and down, but the Apaches were going into, you know, that whole highway of death kind of thing. I had a lot of artillery there. So we were doing that. Resupply them, bring them in, and then just keep them supplied.

And then, you know, the war lasted like 100 hours. the actual shooting war. So then we transitioned into going up to wherever they set up the, uh, the, uh, the ceasefire tent, right?

So Schwartzcoff's going to meet with whoever the representative is from Iraq. And we flew the tables and the tents and all that kind of stuff up there. And, uh, and that was kind of it. And then we did battlefield recovery because we left stuff all over the place. I mean, there was a,

there was a M-1-13, uh, personnel carrier that was stuck in the middle of nowhere. We're flying up. And hey, there's a one-one-three over there. It looks like the track came off. And it was SOS written in like shaving cream. You know?

And we go land over there. Like, are you guys okay? And like, yeah. No one's coming to get us. Like, well, where do you think you are? And they showed us the grid. They were like, you know, the wrong grid square designator. I mean, everybody was looking for them like 100,000 meters away.

And they would have just died. You know, sort of like, get your stuff. We collected their Madduce and their Comsec and all their sensitive items. Threw them in the aircraft, took them with us, wherever it was in Kuwait, I don't remember, and kind of just dropped them on. Get out, you know. It's like the Pauly Shore movie, you know. Yes.

Was it in the Army now? Yeah, the water unit. Water purification specialists. What are we going to fling them with water balloons? Yeah, that's what it was like. I want to ask you about, you know, when 160th came up on your radar and assessing for that, First, I want to give a shout out to the sponsors of tonight's show. The first one is silent.

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So thank you for both of the sponsors for tonight's show. And Alan, get back to you and your book, Razor Zero3. I hope that people out there will go and check this book out. Alan's got an incredible story. let's jump into when did once well you said that you had trained on a 160th bird before during this time frame like after Desert Storm what what is 160th in your mind is that like something you're already like kind of like striving for like you had this idea this is where I want to go no the so our company commander the one that died running into the tower she was married

to a warrant officer in third battalion a shunk pilot and so he would come visit a case occasionally and tell us, you know, what they do. You know, like, oh, we were up in Iraq. I'm like, you were in Iraq, you know, because we haven't been up there yet. And when we got back, the other W-1, there was two of us, he had just made CW2. Good guy. We'll call him Tim. And I don't think he wants his whole name out there.

But he assessed, did not get accepted. And I thought he's way better than me. If he didn't get picked up, there's no way they're taking me. So I just totally ruled it out. And then I went on, remember I said the Army wanted to fly at night. Yes. Right. So we own the night.

We've got to get there. So the way to get there is all of the training after Desert Storm involved night flying. So every exercise, every operation that happened, you know, JRTC, you know, Joint Reddiness Training Center, the National Training Center, we used to these other big exercises called Sand Eagle out in Louisiana. They all involved night crews. Well, out of 16 crews,

we only were able to maintain, I think, six crews. And I was one of them, you know, as a co-pilot still. And then I made pilot in command pretty quick because I just kept, they sent me on every mission. And I got good at it. You know, the whole six of us, you know, got really good at it. And the other older guys just flew at night,

unaided, and they didn't want anything to do with goggles. So that time was very valuable for me when it came to go to the 160. So my next assignment was in Korea. I'd done one as an enlisted guy, and this was now as a warrant officer. And while I was there, I learned what they call the no-fly line, which is the border of North and South Korea. And what you would do is you had to, from memory, fly, you know, east coast to west coast and back and up and down certain corridors. and sectors. You had to be able to determine them from memory.

So that if, because remember, GPS didn't exist really. And you just had the old Mark I hand-held map. And after I left, Bobby Hall flew up into North Korea and a 58 doing the same thing. Except there's a whole bunch of his story. He kind of got screwed. But they crossed the border. And when he tried to go back, the North Korean shot him down. and they killed the other pilot and held him for a while and then let him go.

It was a big news. Yeah. I met him a couple years later. He got, he got hosed. But anyway, you had to do this. And then so I became a unit trainer for the no-fly line, meaning you couldn't fly over the line. And all the new pilots had to do it.

And then you had to do it every quarter or something like that. And you had to fly with a unit trainer. Was this intended as like a show of force, like a presence patrol? I don't know if it was I mean they never briefed it to us that way I think it was just a matter of you know we're practicing the war plan got right and our job

at the time was to move rock special forces into certain areas and then they would go do whatever they're going to do and we weren't a special option but that's what they had so the along with that once I kind of established myself as being good at that the instructor pilots

are like hey you know what you could be a a goggle unit trainer, which is like an instructor, but not, like, they would teach them, you know, what they had to do, and then they hand them off to me, and I would, like, let them practice, you know, and maybe help them refine their techniques. And so that happened, and that's a year-long tour. And some of the senior guys liked me enough. They called the Department of the Army. He said, hey, look, this guy needs to be an instructor, you know, get him the IP course.

So they sent me to Fort Rucker, Alabama, to the instructor pilot course, and then I was assigned there as an instructor, you know, teaching people how to fly Chinooks. I absolutely hated it. You know, I was a young CW2. I still wanted to fly assault. Right, right. And, you know, the first couple students were great. I think I had four students that I loved.

And then they gave me all these National Guard guys. Nothing bad against the National Guard. But the issue there was they were flying CH-54 Skycranes, and their unit got rid of those. and the only next logical choice is the Chinook, right? And they didn't want to fly the Chinook. They wanted to fly Skycrans. So they come to Fort Rucker, and they were just bitching the whole time,

but the Skycrane would do this. Why can't the Chinook do that? I'm a, I'm a CW2, you know. And they didn't want to learn from me. I was two junior. These guys were all very, very senior. Had flown in Vietnam, probably a couple of tours. And they just sucked.

They just sucked the life out of you, you know, these guys that I had. And I didn't want to be around people that didn't want to be there. It's like I wanted to be where people want to be doing what you're doing, which is what the 160th is. You know, it's an all volunteer force. You can't get direct assigned there. And so what happened was a couple of friends of mine in the instructor pilot course were a 160th guys.

And they came down for some other course and they're like, Al, you don't like it here. Come up, you know, come to the dark side, you know, kind of thing. And I'm like, uh, come fly the black helicopters. They're not going to take me. You know, I still had that same thing. It's like, I'm not good enough. And they gave me a packet, which was like, you know, this thick. And I filled it out with a number two pencil.

You know, it wasn't now. It's all, you know, online. But when I finished filling it out, which I, because I didn't really expect to do it, I just one day it was like it was all the blocks are filled out. And like, oh, what the hell, right? And mail it up there. I get a call like the next week. And it's the battalion commander for a second battalion of the one-sexieth.

And he's like, we'd like you to come assess. I'm like, okay. I go up there and I do the assessment. It's a week-long process. And, you know, they took me. And I was really kind of surprised. You know, and you'll see this. Guys will come assess and they either won't get accepted for various reasons

that nobody outside that group knows. Right, right. Right. So you'll get some guy. He looks like a stud. But what you don't know is his finances are in shambles. His family life sucks. He's got, you know, a bad back that he didn't.

tell anybody about and they don't take them and then you get these other guys who people think that guy's a loser how did he get in they'll take anybody right and it's like maybe he nailed it you know i mean it's essentially a job interview on steroids you hear people say the same thing about some of the other selection programs a guy who's like a marathon runner looks like captain america and doesn't get selected but a dude who's you know five feet tall ends up making it through and looks like a A lot of that's, you know, will, attitude and just the ability to thank on your feet. And, you know, the 160th is the same way. And so I went back to Fort Rucker and they told me it would be like a year before I got orders.

So the commander there was happy. And then I got orders like for like a month. And they're like, what do you mean? You're leaving in a month. We just, you know, got you in nights. and I don't know what to tell you. So this is still like early to mid-1990s. This is 1995.

The amount of time you had flying under goggles must have been like a pretty big deal at that time. I imagine like 160th was like looking for people just like that. Yeah. So they used to require a thousand hours of goggle time, which I didn't have. I probably had five or six hundred, which still is a lot for a conventional guy, but not for a Nightstocker. Yeah. But same thing.

They needed Chinook pilots. And it takes about a year to make you, like to get in and go through what they call basic skills, which is shooting in combatives. And then you go into basic nav, which is flying a little bird, navigating with a clock and the compass. That's, you know, a month and a half or something like that. You learn how to brief the way they do, do products. And then you get to Chinook Green Patoon or Black Hawk Green Patoon.

And then you learn, number one, the particular. of that airframe, you learn to use that airframe in environments. So you go to Albuquerque, New Mexico for Desert Mountain, you do air refueling, terrain falling radar out in Knoxville, you go land on ships out of vague apes. And so you do all this stuff. It's eight to 12 months, depending, right? So they're short now. And they're like, he can't wait a year. He's got to come now. So they let me go and moved up to Fort Campbell, and I was there 17 years. I loved it. So, I mean, you laid out some of the training that you had to go through. Can you tell us a little bit of the difference between the CH-47 and the MH-47,

the cool guy version of the Chinook? Oh, yeah. No. So, you know, the CH-47 Chinook is an amazing machine. It really is. The airframe, it was the late 60s. They developed it, and that's what allowed the 101st to go to Vietnam was that. the first airframes were dogs.

They're A models. They couldn't, you know, Black Hawk can lift more than that now. But they made some improvements to it. And the silhouette has remained the same the whole time, right? So a Chinook today looks like a Chinook from late 60s. But what's changed is the hydraulic, you know, that Chinooks are known for leaking hydraulic fluid.

And, you know, like the 53 is the same way. And it's like, you know, if it's not leaking, something's wrong, you know, because you're out of fluid. But nowadays, that isn't quite the same. But so that Chinook, you know, it's designed for internal external cargo loads. You know, in Desert Storm, we put a Humvee with a towed 105 howitzer on it. And they back it in, and the gun tube was up in the cockpit, right? So you'd be sitting there, and the cannon tube would be like right here, right up against the ECLs.

Oh, man. And, you know, when you landed, they'd just drive off and they had towed artillery right there. And so you can do that. We did these things called one-nine or eight gun raids, right? So a one-nine or eight is a one-five howitzer. It's huge. It's a super dense load. It actually is a lot of fun.

But you would fly to where they want to shoot it. You'd set it down on the gun target line, release the slings, go off to the side. The gun crew would get out. You'd get out of their way. They'd pump, you know, five, ten, 15 rounds down range. Then you'd come back over. They'd slap the slings on there, and they'd climb up through the hole,

and you'd fly away before counter-battery fire. Oh wow. Would come in on you, right? I mean, that was the theory. I mean, I think gun target radar, I think, improved, which is why they don't do that anymore. That's why, like, toad artillery isn't really a thing anymore, right? Yeah. Well, unless you're in Ukraine, I guess.

Yeah. So you're not moving around like that, doing a gun raid because, I mean, you know, hell, I was in Iraq and the outhouse, you know, and a rocket or a mortar would come in and you'd hear the, you know, the phalanx go off, you know. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, I'm crying. And then whew. I was like, not now. I'm on the sugar. Yeah.

So anyway, that's the shimok, right? And they, they originally had one cargo hook under the belly, right? And they had a big, there's a door about the size of this table that they open up and the crew chief lays on his stomach. And he calls the load to the pile.

He's like, all right, come forward, you know, 15 feet, 10, 90, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You know, you know, come down 3. You know, sling is on the hook, you know, clear to come up, right? and you go fly it. In order to do these gun raids, you needed a forward and aft cargo hook

so that the, because the gun tube doesn't lay horizontal, it's kind of at a little bit of angle. So you had to have these two hooks instead of the one to do it properly. And so they did that. And then it also didn't spin, you know, because it was stuck to the forward and aft cargo hook. So that's the CH-47 shun up, right?

And it's got about a thousand gallons of gas, right, Jet A. and so you're fly two, two and a half hours maybe, you know, with a decent load. The MH47, I remember when I went up to Fort Campbell to assess, they let me fly it because I was already a Chinook guy. Everybody else assessed him, Littlebirds. And I remember the board, they said, well, Mr. Mack, what did you think of the 47 echo? And I was like, that thing's all business. You know, a Delta model is like a toy, you know, because the fuel tanks are twice the size.

you know, there's 2,000 gallons, and you can put an internal tank inside. You can be air refueling. The whole cockpit was glass, which was novel at the time. You know, the Chinooks still... It was all digital. Every aircraft. Well, the Black Hawk had tapes, right? The digital tapes, but still, it's basically an analog gauge.

And so now we had these TV screens called MFDs, multifunction displays, and it was just really cool. You know, and I love it. So the difference is, the nose is more pointy because like the 234 they would put a weather radar in there so in a regular Chinook

there's no room in the rounded nose to put a weather radar so they don't have any of that kind of cool stuff and then later on they hung on the Echo and the golf model Chinooks MH47s they had a multi-mode radar on the side like next to the left seat pilot and that would do terrain following

so you could fly in the mountains without being able to see out the window at all Wow. With that thing. So that's kind of what the biggest difference. Other than that, that's how you fly like nape of the earth. Yeah. Yeah.

So you can use that. I mean, you can do that, you know, just by looking out the window. But if it's bad weather, like we found in Afghanistan, you know,

and those missions in Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld basically was approving these. Because you couldn't fly in the clouds, in the states, without a general officer approval. Really? I don't know that. Yeah.

So the radar, was like the goggles were in the early days. It's a new technology. We don't know. And we found one of the problems that it had, and the reason that it was so risky to use is, has your iPhone ever locked up on you or your laptop and you had to reset it? Well, this thing's got a computer.

Right. And occasionally, when you're TFing, as we call it, train following, the damn computer would lock up. System update. Oh, shit. Yeah, basically. And so you had to figure out what was wrong. deal with it, reboot it.

In the meantime, you're blind. You're in the mountains. Yeah. You know, you can't see out the window. So there's some procedures to deal with that. But the fact of the matter is it was, you know, kind of unforgiving if that goes bad. You know, we developed some procedures as we went along the way. But that's the biggest difference in the airframes.

So after you, you assessed for 160th get picked up, you go through all that training, and then you get assigned to a 47 platoon in the unit. Yeah. Yeah. So, and the, um, what was interesting is I was in a transition from what we called the 47D AWC adverse weather cockpit, which was a combination of what we call steam gauges, analog gauges, and a little bit of glass. They ended up sending those to Fort Stewart or Savannah, Hunter-Rome Airfield.

Got you. Got. And the 47E's, which were the new things, they kept in two companies at, um, second battalion at Fort Campbell. and they were still trying to figure the damn things out. I mean, they were new. When I got there, they had only had them a year. And so they were still trying to figure out,

you know, how could you use the hover symbology to land in the dust? And nobody was really doing it. They were all kind of, like, scared. Nobody wanted to damage these brand-new aircraft, you know. So it's like, the first guy that screws this up is going to be, you know, hung out to dry. So what it took is new guys, like me. You know, in my, you know, five or six guys that all came in at the same time, you know, it was us going, well, we got this.

Why can't we use that? I don't know. No one's ever used that before, you know. They told us how it works, but no one dares use it. And it's like my car has got like an automatic parking feature. Yeah, you don't want to use that thing. I'm scared to touch it. Yeah.

I don't know how fast it'll whip into the spot. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's like, maybe one of these days I'll put some cones out and see if it'll work. Yeah. So that's what was going on. there and actually it wasn't until we went to Kuwait in 99 and 2000 for Desert Thunder and Desert Fox which was when Saddam kicked the inspectors out so we went there we were going to go invade or whatever the hell we were going to do I heard at one point that they had you guys

standing by in case you had to go rescue the inspectors yep yep we did that and then when that didn't happen he basically let them back in so then we became you know they didn't didn't want us to go home. So we stayed there for seven months with the Air Force the first year. They had MH-53s, which ended up going away, and we had the 47s. And we did air refueling every night, which was amazing because air refueling assets are tough to come by. And it's a C-130, you fly up behind it, it's got a hose dragging out. Was that at KC-130? The Marines had KC-130s. The Air Force had MC-130s. He had T-1-1-Tal-1. and Papa models.

So there's different variants of them. But we got really good at air refueling. And our standardization instructor pilot, Chuck, came over, and he had developed three new landing procedures for the dust, how you would use the hover symbology. You called him the alpha, the bravo, and the trolley. The alpha, you came to a hover above the dust cloud. Once you were stable, you zeroed up the crosshairs,

and you just descended into the dust, right? Very controlled, very easy, but it takes a long time. And it's tough to do in the dust with several aircraft. So it's kind of like a single ship deal. The Bravo was like a normal approach, except when you got to about 80 feet, you kept what's called the velocity vectors,

this little video game straight. As long as that was straight, and the rate of descent was good. And then you slowed down like half your speed for your altitude. So 80 feet, 40 knots, you know, 40 feet, 20 knots, 20 feet, 10 knots, that kind of thing. Oh, I see. the problem is it was tough to repeat that so out of every 10 landings like seven of them would be like yes you know and then the other three would be like holy crap do we still have our landing gear you know and then the Charlie which was just the old fashioned you know stay ahead of the dust and slam it on the ground you know so he did that and that coupled with us training to go to the andy's mountains for the seventh group and all the shooting we did and all the air refueling we had we had we had we had we had to the air refueling we had to go to the Andy's mountains for the seventh group and um we had the

essentially trained ourselves for Afghanistan without knowing it. Well, tell me, tell me about that about Bravo projects when you were flying down in South America, like before 9-11. Yeah, so we didn't actually get to South America because 9-11 happened, but we were, it was kind of funny. We had 11 Chinooks in our company, right? Bravo Company, Second Battalion. And they took half of our company away to form another company in Korea, right?

So they would service the Philippines, Thailand. I end, you know, that kind of stuff. So it left us with five helicopters, which isn't enough to do the big mission that we used to do. So they talked about putting us, like integrating us into the other company and just making a bigger company, which is what it was originally. They had one big company and then they split it. So I told the commander, I said, hey, and if he's watching, he's going to dispute this.

He's going to say it was his idea. Bullshit. It was mine. Anyway. So I go in and I said, hey, we got to. South or Central America will go with seventh group we'll do you know counter drug

FID you know foreign internal defense that kind of stuff they don't ever get enough support all they have is D-160s the Blackhawks out of what was Panama and then Puerto Rico and he's like that's a stupidest idea I ever heard right next day he comes in he's like man

we're going to do this thing right that's a great idea Alan I'm glad I thought of it yeah that's exactly So we, you know, for beers, he and I will, you know, fight about who came up with it. And I said, and we're going to call it the Bravo Project because we're B Company and, you know, why not call it that? You know, it just sounds swoopy, you know, Bravo Project, you know. And so we went with it.

And the, what was funny is the S3, so the battalion operations officer said that I could go out to Fort Bragg and talk to seventh group and see if we could get them to, you know, work with us. And they were like, hell yeah. right so we you know we talked to him for a little bit we come back i'm like all right here's the the sipper address you know to to get us on the terms of terms of reference for going and the ops guy was like no you're not going like what do you mean you said we could go and he's like i didn't think you'd be successful and being the other guy are pissed off like we're flight leads that's our job is to convince the ground forces yeah what they we can do for them how to utilize us And to plan that, and he's like, yeah, but I didn't really think you'd make it happen.

He goes, I'll tell you what. He goes, you can go to Central America because there's already Chinooks there, and it won't spike, you know, obsec as much. You know, they're done in Sotomo, I think it was where it was. And, no, thank you. I don't remember where it was. But so we're training up for that. And then we're also really trained to go to the Andes Mountains, right,

which are higher than the Afghanistan Mountains. by some measure. And so we're used to using, you know, supplemental oxygen. We're, you know, the performance for going up that high. We're doing a lot of shooting. We're doing downed aircraft drills. You know, we used to call them Garst games. You know, the commander's name is Garst, or his last name.

And you'd be flying. One time I flew up to Pricking Cleveland in back in one night, right? Air refueling both ways, a long flight. And I get a radio call. Hey, go to Vagel DZ. It's a drop zone on the, far northwestern side of Fort Campbell. And I land there and there's a pickup truck.

Guy comes out with an envelope, hands it to me and it says, you have been shot down. You know, go to these coordinates to be recovered. Bullshit, right? So we shut down. Another pilot comes out of the woods. He jumps in to fly the aircraft away. And then we're doing, you know, ground guy stuff.

You know, we're in our evasion corridor and we're like four days. We're out in the freaking woods with just what we had on, right? So when I actually got shot down on Anaconda, I remember when I figured out I was alive still, I was like, ah, not another freaking Garst game, you know, another shoot-down. Well, I'm glad that, so 160th plays those Ranger games too. It wasn't just us. Yeah, and sometimes we'd send them out with the Rangers, right? So you fly them with the Rangers, and they would tell you, hey, on the way back, you know,

from the operation, just land at these coordinates. We'll get off, we're going to walk 20 miles back or whatever hell it is. And we'd be like, okay, can you take two crew chiefs with you? And they're like, no problem. And they get out and just bitch the whole way and say, stop giving us the crew chiefs. They're just, you know, turn out of for that stuff. So then you're doing all this training, I mean, looking for missions too. And then what goes on?

Where are you when 9-11 happens? Yeah, 9-11. So we're at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana, which is. a National Guard base down for JRTC. That's where a fifth group goes. And we were actually doing Marroops. Right. So we're doing Zodiac infills.

Cool. And we're actually linking up with seal special boat units. What they call us? They used to be cacks. Now they're sock ours. Yeah, the special boat teams. Yep. So they were out of, you know, Redstone or Slidell.

I think it was where it was. But anyway, they had all these big canals down there. So we would come in with the Chinooks, come to a 10-foot hover with a little bit of forward motion. You throw the zodiacs out and then the guys all jump in. And then once we get it, you know, 12 thumbs up, we just fly away. They jump in the boats. They go meet up with the seals. Then they go do whatever they're going to do.

Which is funny because if you ever saw that movie 12 Strong, ODA 595, the horse soldiers, who I brought in, we're doing the very same mission up at Fort Campbell at the lane between the lakes. Oh, because they were the dive team. Yeah, they were Merrop's team. And so I just thought, I always find that very funny that, you know, the two teams, you know, the helicopters and the team that were doing Mar-Ops

ended up in the first in the mountains of Afghanistan. But, yeah. So anyway, we're out flying them in. We come back that night, so this is September 10th. Come back, get a nice shower. It's one of those cinder block buildings, you know, with hard tile floors that you buff, you know, the floor wax and stuff. And so every noise echoes, right?

So if somebody is at the other end of the building and they drop a freaking pencil, you wake up. And it's like, be quiet out there. And so what happened was the first tower had been hit. And like one guy was up, you know, because we're flying at night. So daytime stuff, we're asleep. And he's like, everybody, turn your TV. he's on. Watch the news. You got to see the news. And I remember being mad.

It's like, come on. Right. So I go turn on the TV. I was like, wow, the building's been hit, right? And I'd known that the Empire State building had been hit before back in the, like in the 30s, you know, by a little plane. And I'm like, that's a big hole to be a little plane. Somebody's in trouble. And all of a sudden, you know, in comes another one. It's like, okay, we're under attack. That's not a coincidence. And so I went and I woke everybody up. They're all mad at me because I'm kind of known for making jokes. Not so much practical jokes, but I tell stories that, you know, have some sense of truth.

And you have to, you know, it's like your dad telling you something like, well, there's elves in the woods. And you're like. And you go look for the elves for 45 minutes before you realize someone's screwing with you. That's me. So they wouldn't get up, you know, like two of the guys had been out doing an escape and evasion, you know, the Garst game stuff. And they're like, you know, like, screw you, you know, like, come on, open the door. and they're like, no.

I got to open the door. I'm like, come out of my room. Check out of the news, right? So we look and there's people jumping out of the buildings and, you know, then they come down. You know, it's just a terrible, terrible feeling. And so I had just moved up from Bravo Company. So I was the chief pilot, which is called the SIP,

the standardization instructor pilot. He is the chief pilot. That was me. And I just got sucked up, as we say, sucked across the street. to the battalion headcores to be the battalion SIP. So now we'd be the chief pilot for both companies. You know, they would have their chief and they would answer to me and I would answer to the guy at regiment. So we all kind of moved up.

So I'm with the battalion commander and we drive up to Fort Campbell because there's no aircraft all had to fly at all, right? I mean, you've got fighter jets and that's it. Oh, you guys couldn't even fly your own aircraft? No one knew what was going on yet. So they did like nothing. So just every hold. So we drive up, we rent their car, drove up, you know, and once we got there, we finally got into the skiff and we could find out what was going on. And like the next day, we got a brief about Al-Qaeda and bin Laden and how Massoud had been assassinated, you know, to keep us from coordinating with the North Alliance.

And we drove down to Tampa to Soxent Special Operations Command, Central Command, down at McDill. And we planned to do downed aircraft recovery, or personnel recovery, for the bombing campaign that was about to happen. That's as far as they got in the plan, was we're going to go bomb the shit out of these guys. And if somebody goes down, we need someone to go get them. So that's us, right? And they didn't even know where we're going to go.

So they figured out, you know, it was Uzbekistan, K-K-2, and October 19th was our first infills that actually succeeded. So the guy that took my place had the privilege of being the first to go. So he had ODA triple nickel, my 555. And I remember being pissed. It's like, this was my company two weeks ago. You know, now you got it. And he's like, no, screw you.

You know, I got it. I got mine is what we used to say. So he goes out, runs into bad weather, has to come back. So we have borts. Are we getting ahead of ourselves here? I don't think so. I mean, is there something else you wanted to flesh out before we got there? Well, really, the big thing,

that's important is we start looking at Afghanistan now as a target as a target where we're going to go, how we're going to get there, and the performance numbers for the helicopters is terrible. Because of the altitude. The altitude, right? I mean, some of the mountains were over 20,000 feet tall. And the Taliban is in all the low ground. So if we try to go through it and they have surface air missiles, they had a very robust air defense at the time until the Air Force gave them a little number. but we had 16 man pads fired at us confirmed and we had a couple others that may have been man pads they might have been

oh wow something big but it wasn't and uh you know we had flares that would come out but anyway so here we are at campbell you know with a calculator and our performance charts and we're trying to figure out holy crap you know here in the states we normally carry 30 40 guys we can carry like five wow and there were places that if a if a guy got shot down on one of the bigger plateaus we can carry a p.m. And maybe a second one. And so the PJs have this team. It's two PJs and a CCTV, a radio operator. And they work together.

And they do not want to be separated. And I'm like, you can't go. The three of you cannot go. You know, I can take two. And you've got to have us, you know, and we got in big fights. And then later on when we started infilling the SF teams, the Green Berets, same thing. They're used to whatever you can put inside you can take.

Right. And I'm like, you can have 4,500 pounds or 6,500 pounds, right? And they'd be, no, how many people is that? I don't care how many people that is. Here's the weight, right? And so we would weigh them. So we had a liaison, L&O, would, we had these 4-63L pallets, the big Air Force aluminum pallets that they put on the C-17.

So we put those on the aircraft scales, like there's four scales. You put them one in each corner, and the team would get on with all their equipment, right? supposedly at the weight we told them and the guy would go around on the clipboarding and be like you know they average out the weights and it's like now you're too heavy well by how much?

Like 2,000 pounds. Get rid of some shit. And they were pissed. You know what I mean? They're like getting rid of batteries and ammo and water and yeah, yeah. I mean what are you what are you? Yeah, water ammo batteries

I mean how much of this. And they're like, but we got to have this stuff and it's like well you're not getting there if you carry it. Figure it out. Or you know you start leaving guys behind or split teams or something. What are you going to do, right?

And so we were originally, with 595, I was supposed to use two Chinooks, right? We were in two teams of two. And I was silver team and it was gold team. And we were using the Razor call signs. We had Razor 1 through 4. And I ended up using, for the most part, Razor 03, which is what the book title is. And so I had 3 and 4, and 1 and 2 were the other team. And so they turned around two nights in a row because of bad weather.

and every time they did that, my mission got rolled under 24 hours, like I was supposed to be the next night. And so, you know, the guys were mad about the wait. Now they're mad about getting a delay. And then so the flight lead from the other flight comes in, and I'm pissed, right? I mean, I should not have been pissed. I mean, I had no idea what he was going through, but I'm like, you know, I don't know, say it.

but, you know, derogatory stuff, you know, and we start shoving each other. I mean, like, we're about to fight. It's getting tense. And the joke is we're fighting in the war room, you know, from like Dr. Strangelove. And it's like, man, no fighting in the war room. But so the next, you know, the next day we're sleep

because we're day sleepers and daywalkers, you don't want to be around them. And your helicopters turn into pumpkins when the sun comes up. So there's a major working in, the operations area, right? The planning area. The phone rings, picks it up.

He's like, you know, task force dagger. And he's like, please hold for the secretary. Secretary, who? This is Donald Rumsfeld. Who am I talking to?

He's like, ah, you know, major, you know, and he says, you tell Mo Holland, who was our colonel, he goes,

you tell him to get those teams in tonight, both of them. He says, you got too many assets to not make this happen. Like, damn. The whole thing changed, right?

So now, and see, the issue is that Fahim Khan and General Dostom, right? So they're both Northern Alliance. Fahim was Massoud's, like, deputy. But he's an asshole. Nobody likes him. Hussud was a very charismatic leader. Everybody loved him, right? He gets assassinated.

Now you get the VP, if you will. You know, he's like, oh, man, nobody likes him, you know. But so he's trying to be strong. So he says, if I don't get my Americans first, I will attack those them. Right? So that's why he had this big thing of, the other team had to go in first. So now Rumsfeld's like, no, you get them both in. But the problem was they were going to bigger mountains.

They were going to 22,000 feet. I was going to maybe 14. So they had to take my other helicopter to bring extra fuel for them if they couldn't get it on the tanker. They would land in the desert. So that leaves me alone. And set up a FARP? Yeah. And so I got to now take the entire team.

It was supposed to be six guys per aircraft. Now I got the entire team. So now I got to get rid of gas. So now I have to air refuel on the way in and in the way out, which we did not want to do. Right. We just didn't. A few more exposed over enemy territory doing that. Well, the air refueling can be fun.

And air refueling can be hell. Yeah. If you're in the mountains and it's turbulent, it's hell. right? It's really, it can be difficult and maybe not even doable. So we didn't want to do that. And back then, you know, like nowadays, you go into a country, there's a stack above you, you know, whether it's ISR, fighters, bombers, it doesn't matter.

There's stuff up there. And you can talk to them, line of sight, you don't have to be satcom. And I was alone. My aircraft, you know, and they did give me two daps, and that's the armed Blackhawks. direct action penetrators. Now, these guys don't have the same equipment that I have, right? So if there's bad weather, they can't hang with me. And they don't have the power to get over the mountains anyway, you know,

with all of the stuff that they had hanging on it, you know, the armament. You know, it's got a 30-millimeter chain gun or freaking hellfire to rockets and many. You know, I mean, they could D-DAP and get up in the mountain, which they actually did. But, you know, with me, they couldn't. And we, so we, we, we, we, the only guidance I was given was you have to be there 30 minutes after triple nickel, right? So triple nickel gets in at say, 9 p.m. I can be there at 9.30, but I can't, if I get any earlier and Fahim finds out Dostom got his guys early, you know, we, we got a problem. So anyway, we go do that. So gold flight, they're dealing with this altitude problem, you know, 20,000 feet or so. And I'm dealing with enemy forces. So as I put in a, book. It's like he was likely to die running into a mountain and I'm going to die with, you know, any aircraft artillery kind of stuff.

I didn't, obviously, we're here. And, but so we take off, we get air refueling, we cross the border into Afghanistan and there's a sandstorm just like in Eagle Claw. Several thousand feet high. You could look up and see the stars, but you could not see in front of you. And we know the mountains are there. I'm looking at the map going, there's mountains right there. So the daps are sucked in tight on. me on my wing.

And with the night vision goggles, they see an element of heat, right? It's not quite a forward-looking infrared, but it does see elements of heat, right? So it sees the exhaust of the engines. So when you pull power, the engines glow. And when you decrease power of the engines, decrease in glow. So they were sucked as closest to me as they felt safe, watching the glow of the engine. And if the glow got better, they'd climb. If the glow got smaller, they'd descend.

And those guys hit some balls. Yeah, that's nuts. And I don't even how they did it as long as they did. And eventually they cried uncle and they turn back. So now it's just me. And the colonel is in my jump seat, which is the seat just behind me in between the other pilot. And he's like, Al, what are we going to do? I'm like, I say we just TF.

You know, the train falling radar. And he's like, do it. Now, I have no idea that Rumsfeld had called. So this is a calculus. I don't know. I'm like, okay, right? So I pushed the button to my co-pilot. I'm like, all right, Jason, you get, you know, 300-foot clearance, altitude, follow your queue.

He's like, all right, I'm inside, and he follows the queue. And we end up having some issues, you know, because we weren't planning on doing it. So the very first big turn we had, we pointed the radar at this mountain that we couldn't climb over. But we weren't supposed to. We were going to turn before it. But I don't know that. All I know is we have what's called a full climb command, and we're climbing as fast as we can, like our lives depend on it because they do.

And I'm scrolling through the maps on the multifunction display until I finally find one that it's easy to read and go, ah, there's a 12,000 foot mountain there. So I just turned them off to the right a little bit. The radar points away from it. We descend, we go around it, and we return to our course and we do our thing. And then we get, we break out of the clouds somewhere on the last ridge line.

So you got to go in, you put these guys in. And it's like several thousand foot drop from the ridge line, but it's only a mile, maybe half mile. And if you go past a hill that's to the north, there's a ZPU 234, right, which is anti-aircraft on 23mm with four barrels. If they get a line aside on me, they are just going to eat my lunch, right? So I can't go past the hill and come back around. I've got to lose the altitude that we've got. So my co-pilot was kind of new. And I'm like, all right, do a stern.

I don't know what you mean. right so okay I got the controls so I'm descending like this and even that wasn't enough so now I'm kicking the thing out of trim so that the drag is increasing and we are dropping you know the the gauges are pegged out we are just dropping like a skydiver and we get to the bottom and on the on the final turn that the landing area is over here but I'm in the left seat I can't see it and we're at like 75 feet and I'm like you got the landing area inside he says yep I go you have the control which so he's not ready for this. He takes them and he he lines up, but he's not set. Like normally you get these buttons that they have like a magnetic break in springs that will hold the controls where you leave them.

So normally what you do is you set up on the dust landing and you set the controls and you kind of, you don't take your hands off, but you just go really easy on them. And the aircraft kind of maintains that. Well, he didn't have that opportunity, so he's on it. And, you know, like,

you ever driven in your car and you're like two hands as opposed to one and you kind of overdrive a little bit, you know, well, that's what he's doing. And then he descends into the dust cloud. And the crew chief can see straight down, but we can't see in the cockpit. And he's trying to do one of these Bravo approaches, but we weren't really set up for it. So we start getting like these illusions that I feel like we're going backwards, and I'm not even sure we were.

And I called a go-round. I mean, let's come out of the dust. We'll come around and try it again, right? We'll set up right. I go around, go around, go around, and he's like, okay. And he starts to pull power and the aft gear touches the ground. Oh, shit. And I'm like, I'm not going around.

So I jump on the thrust right now. There's no advantage to either side of the controls. They're exactly the same. And my co-pilot is from West Virginia. He's freaking huge, right? I mean, he's got shoulders like this, you know, and he's just pulling up. And I can feel myself getting pushed out of my seat, you know, I'm like, pushing down. I'm like, no, abort, abort, abort.

And he's like, oh, I got what you did. Yeah, and he brings a forward gear down and we're there. So is there any knowledge of how many members of Marks Odeated you make vomit in the back during that infill? Nobody. They were so cold, right? Like in the movie 12th strong, they showed snow coming in the cockpit. It was cold, but it wasn't that bad.

Sissies in the back there, you know. So this is really interesting how this, like, sort of like, a lot of the interviews we've done on this show Connect, because we talked to Gary Harrington recently, who was helping to set up that staging area in Kashakana Bad. We have not had Mark Neuch on the show. I'm going to have to try to arrange that. I told you I just met him a few weeks ago, a really cool guy. We've interviewed J.R. Seeger, who was the leader of Alpha Team, the CIA paramilitary team, that 595 linked up with it. And that's the, we don't really talk about it, but that's what the Black Hawk did when they

dedapped. So Mike Span and those guys, they went in on the Black Hawk and they almost crashed. They didn't have enough power, which is why they never did the D-DAP thing again. But, yeah. So you get the ODA on the ground

and then you had to get out of there and do another aerial refuel on the way back to Uzbekistan. And I remember getting back. And one of the things I didn't talk about was when I went out to the aircraft, they used to have to tug them, so they had a tractor and a tug, aircraft tug. And they would pull them from where we had them parked to the, like a taxiway,

like the runway. And we would get out there and everybody would watch you, you know, because it was, you know, there was like this mud, like Grafenvere, Germany, if you ever been there. It's like this thick, thick mud, right? And a taxiway was covered in it. And so they're tugging the aircraft. I'm walking along. I look up.

I can see my breath. I see the stars are just fantastic. and I see the constellation Orion, which, you know, I get this coin that I had made, and there's like the three stars for Orion's belt because every time I saw it, the mission went well where I kind of knew it was going to go well because, very frankly,

I think the weather was good enough to see it. But, yeah, so we come back, and in those very first missions, everybody would come out and wish you well because they didn't expect us to come home. And it'd be like, you know, hey, good look guys, the chaplain would come out, Colonel. Oh, boy.

Yeah. And we come back. And I remember just sitting in the aircraft, they tugged us back in. We didn't even get out of the seats. You know, we were just sitting there. I was like, dude, we're a tight spot. You know, it was a line from, oh, brother, where out thou,

with George Clooney. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Damn, we're in a tight spot. So when we're in that terrain falling radar, when it had that full climb, you know, and everybody's like, you know, super nervous. Like, what's going on? You know, has Al got this?

And I'm like, damn, we're in a tight spot. You know, it's like, gallous humor, you know, trying to break the ice, you know, trying to, you know, break the tension. And then Jason did the same thing. He's like, yeah, damn, we're in a tight spot, you know. And so we get back, you know, we're just sitting there. Like, no more adrenaline left. We're just, yeah, done. We're exhausted.

I'm like, damn, we're in a tight spot. And we got to do it again tomorrow night. You know, and then we just kept doing it. And, you know, the other flight lead, Arlo and I would, he got a bottle of, uh, he got a bottle of, uh, He was Jack Daniels from, we had an agency pilot named Ned. A lot of people know Ned. They're telling what his real name is, but Ned brought us Jack Daniels. And so we slipped off in a back room, you know, had a little snort.

I know exactly the pilot you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as I do, what do you think? And he's like, we're not going to last two missions. And I'm like, I agree. You know, I mean, we're pushing the aircraft beyond. anything we've ever done before. Beyond factory specifications.

Beyond factory specs, anything we've ever done, we're doing stuff. They're letting us do things they've never let us do. And we just didn't think we'd survive. You know, and I remember telling General Mulholl in that when we unveiled that America's response statute in New York City. We had some time in between events and he said, hey, chief, you know, whenever you got to talk about those first couple missions,

what did you think? And I said, I didn't expect to make it past three or four missions. and he's like, what? No one ever told me that. I was like, would have made a difference? We got to go. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, this is right after 9-11, right?

It's a dark moment. He's like, well, yeah, you're right. You were still going. So after you got 595 in, was it you were inserting other ODAs doing resupplies? Yeah, so we were, you know, in the movie, you know, it's just, just 595, right? And eventually, I think they put somebody in with, I can't remember the guys in Ata, I think. We put guys in in Baymian down south on the Iranian border, Farah and Harat, and some, is it, Polly Comrie, Kaus, I mean, no, not Kast.

I can't think of the name, but just south. But eventually getting down to Kandahar and Kowast and Muzer. So they did bring in the task force down south on the aircraft carrier brought in Karsai to Kandahar. That was Clay's mission, right, that he was on? Yes. I remember him talking about it. And they did Gecko, which was on CNN. So Objective Gecko was Omar's compound, right?

And what's funny about that one is we knew it was a dry hole, right? So what the mission really was was a distraction, a diversion for us doing stuff the same night up north. I was like, oh, look over here. Look what we're doing, right? It's on CNN. It's kind of like the do a little raid, really ineffectual, but it means a lot to the American public. Right. Look, we're doing something.

And so the joke was that there was going to be a Delta guy that would, he'd run into Omar's bedroom and, you know, on his pillow. And they said, they're on the ship right now, practicing every night. They don't like to hear that. That's what I guess. But, yeah, you know, it was what it is. But, yeah, so we just kept bringing people in. And then, so when Dostom took Mazary Sharif, that was the key to Kabul, right? They didn't think he'd take that till the spring.

Right, right. And he took it like two weeks. So, you know, after he takes it, like two days later, Noch writes in, we're going to Kabul. And everybody's like, no, no, we're not ready for Kabul. And it's like, too late. Dostom's driving his gator that we brought in. He's John Deere Gator.

He's going into Kabul, and the Taliban just left. And that's how we got Bogram. You know what I mean? Triple Knuckle came down from the panchervat. Valley. Yep. Yep. Took Bogram.

And we joined in. That's when Torabora kicked off because now with the Taliban out of the way, we can get at, you know, bin Laden, which was the whole goal. Talk to us about that about Torabora. Yeah. So the Torabura Mountains are down along the Pakistan, Afghanistan border, probably 40 minutes from Bogram. And so he's down there.

He's on the radio several times a day, right, handheld radio. You always saw pictures of him with his little. It looked like a survival radio. And so they start with a bombing campaign. And this is a bombing campaign. I can tell you that the mountains glowed at night. I mean, you need goggles in the mountains glowed because, you know, whether it's because they were on, you know,

a head down on fire, most other stuff. And with goggles, you could see those mountains from, you know, miles away. You see the same kind of thing out west when they have the wildfires. You can fly. If you fly at night, you'll see. even where the fire isn't where it was. It stays hot for days. So anyway, the Delta Force guys go down there.

There's a book, I can't remember the... Kill bin Laden. With Dalton Fury. Dalton Fury is Tom Greer. Yeah. So Tom, so we bring him in there, and then we're just constantly resupplying him and bringing more people in, right?

Because bin Laden has moved a little bit. So we got to figure out where he is, right? And so you have these cave complexes, and you have to search the cave complexes one at a time, so you need teams to do that. So we're just bringing them in constantly, every night, a couple of teams, and then, you know, also resupplying them.

And they got within, like, shooting range of him, and the Afghans that brought him in didn't realize they were there to kill him, right? So when the Delta guys were like, all right, you know, let's take out target number one. and they had a little standoff. You know, the guys that brought them in pointed weapons at them

to the point where they had to withdraw. The Delta guys had to withdraw. And I remember picking them up that night. They were so pissed. I can't even imagine. And they had low crawled up this mountain to get in a position to get a sniper shot on them. And when they, like I said, when the Afghan realized they were going to take out the shake, he shot his AK in the air

right which was you know holy crap what's going on you know someone shooting so yeah that was bad but you know so he was injured you know and sentcom did a ceasefire which we were all screaming about don't ceasefire you know he's still there yeah because we didn't have like

BP's up on the Pakistan side right and so he you know he got away but so we still aren't sure he got away he just now is not on the radio so he might be dead and that's why they did the ceasefire. So we start bringing all these people in to the cave complexes even more,

and now we're lowering robots. So this guy shows up, and he's got these tracked robots that, about half the size of this table. Johnny 5. And they had been using them in Ground Zero, looking in the rubble.

Oh, wow, really? And so he brings them over, and they've never been used from a helicopter. So we lower them using the fast rope bars. Like we used 550 cord, and I'd never heard this story before. You put a pulley on the end of the fries bar and we just lower it down from like 200 feet.

And when it hit the ground, the guy's in the back with a console and he'd look out. We had to keep the tail pointed toward the cave, right? And he could drive to the cave and go in and then the 550 cord would drag behind him. So if he lost signal, we could go down and just pull the damn thing back out with the cord. And we did that for a couple missions and then I have no idea.

how effective it was. I mean, we obviously didn't get him, so maybe not. I mean, he was able to effectively, like, drive them into caves and see what was going on in there. I don't know how far he penetrated. They never told us that. But, you know, I could go as far as about a mile and a half away from the cave as long as I kept the rear end pointed at the cave.

And he'd be back there looking at the... That's pretty cool. I didn't know we did that. Yeah, that was cool. I don't know what company that was or anything. It was just one of those. Here's Bill. You know, he's got a robot.

Yeah, yeah. What do you want, Bill? I want you to do this. And we were really vulnerable while that's happening, right? Just hovering. Just hovering it, you know, 200 feet. But, and that's kind of what Torabora really was. It was kind of anticlimactic because the, you know,

the bombing campaign was amazing. If we'd have kept it up, I'm confident we would have got him. I mean, we did injure him. But they just, you know, sent com. Sentcom didn't understand the battlefield, right? So the Taliban falls. we've got an aircraft flying on the on the um Uzbek um

Tajikistan border in afghanistan right so they're flying along there and these afghan forces are shooting at the helicopter RPGs and heavy machine gun and you know our guys report it they send it up to phahim and phahim says if they're shooting at you kill them they're not mine yeah yeah and if they are mine they're not really mine yeah you know how the afghan

Afghans can be, you know, they're very pragmatic. They'll work with whoever, you know, they have to. And so CENTCOM didn't understand that dynamic. I don't think we did either. That, okay, they're friendly. You know, we had DAPs attack a 23-millimeter in an aircraft gun that was enemy, but they had switched sides that day. So now it's a fractricide event, right?

Or at least it was investigated as one. And, you know, it finally came out that, no, no, no. They were Taliban like this morning. Yeah, and then they saw the DAPs going to like, all right, we'll be, we'll be America's allies.

Today. You know, today, right? And then they would change. So he had that to deal with. And so, like, we got the embassy back,

right? It had been closed down when the Soviets invaded. There was some little Afghan guy was like from, like he used to work there as the gardener or something. He kept it up.

You know, not like pristine, but he kept the, He repaired doors and windows and he kept it. It looked pretty good, actually. So we go in there. I'm flying General Franks, his wife, General Harold, and an entourage of strap hangers.

And they want to go in there in the daylight. And I'm raising the hell. I go, no, we're going to get shot at. They're like, no, no, no, the Taliban fell. Afghanistan is secure. I'm like, no, it's not secure. I go outside the wire every day. And I get shot at every day.

And I'm talking, you know, big stuff. And if that hits the general, you know, we're screwed. And in the daytime, and they're like, no, no, no, that's good. All right, fine, right? So we fly down there and it's a daylight mission. And sure enough, a man pad gets fired at us. It goes right between lead, mintmire aircraft and the other one. Oh, my God.

The flares decoy it. So now I'm like, okay. So we drop down to like 10 feet. And just little tiny changes in terrain can make all the difference in somebody being able to get a line of sight on you and get a lock. and I speed up to like 160 and I'm moving out right and you know because I'm doing that

because I'm going so fast now I have to fly more aggressive right and chalk two is doing the same thing when it comes time to land into the embassy it took me about a mile to slow down you know I was going so fast and I come across drop in as soon as they get past the wall there's no press there's no reception

party the general's like where do I go like that way where's the buffet line yeah so they get out you know I mean, this is a big deal to get the embassy back. Right. And so I take off and what's the one thing the Taliban outlawed that is a big deal, right? They made books about it.

Cites. Oh, yeah. Right? Kites of all things, right? So I come out of the embassy. I nose it over and I am hauling ass. Like just like I'm dragging the wheels through the TV antennas on the roofs of these little places. And there's kites.

Hundreds of kites in front of me. higher than me, right? And I'm dodging them like a, you know, like a, a swallow-skear. And it was like barrage balloons on D-Day, you know, trying to keep the aircraft away from the beaches. That's crazy. And, you know, I like joking around.

It's like, you know, that kid with the red kite, it got caught in a forward landing gear. I swear he kept up for a mile, you know, and I go, now, I'm just kidding. It was like a quarter mile. But, yeah, it was something. And then so we get back to Bogram and my wingman is named Willie.

He's a Puerto Rican. And I talked about it in the book. He always plays up his accent. He got a very, very thick accent. And he's like, you know, what the fuck? And we had just watched the movie Flight of the Intruder. Oh, yeah.

So they go, you know, Sam City and Vietnam. And they don't drop their bombs, right? Because they forgot to pull a pin or something. And they're like, the whole mission was a waste. And the guy says, they'd never expect us to go back twice. So I tell Willie, you're like, hey, man, we got to go back and get the general, right? And he's like, freaking out.

Because they had fired two. So while I'm dodging the kites, and the reason I was dodging the kites is because another man pad had been thrown at me. So one was it, they found the grip stock. It was HN5, which is a Chinese. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And then the other one they think was, I don't know, one of those off-brand, you know, Soviet block things. SA-7s?

Nah, it wasn't even an SA-7. Like, you know, like an Astra-a or something like that. Oh, yeah. But anyway, you know, so I'm like, we got to go back. They'd never expect this twice, and he hadn't seen the movie. So he's like, crazy, you're fucking crazy, right? And so I said, Willie, it's from a movie, man. We're not going back.

You know, we'll wait till dark, you know, and he saw the movie like a month later. And he says, how, I saw the movie. That's good. That's good. You know? He's like, yeah. Yeah. So we, you know, then comes Christmas.

This is funny, right? So Christmas Eve, I get asked to bring Christmas presents to a SFODA that's out in the middle of nowhere, right? That's his name, Glenn. I can't remember his last name off the top of my head. So I met this guy at an event. She brought him like belts of 556. No, no.

We brought him a TV, a VCR, you know, boxes from home, you know. That's cool. And some supplies, right? But they met us out in the middle of nowhere. They gave him this stuff. And it was, we used the terrain falling radar. to do it. I mean, we used all the toys that the aircraft had to get there and we give it to them and we come back and we come back to the barracks and all of our Christmas stuff is there.

Same C-130 that brought theirs in, brought ours in. We just didn't know it. So we come back after doing this for these guys and, you know, they've given me the choice. You don't have to go flying Christmas, but what else are I going to do? Right? It's Afghanistan. Yeah. But I met that guy. We were at an event on a panel and he was sitting next to me and he goes, hey, do you know who was flying Christmas Eve. I'm like, yeah, it's me. Why? And he goes, I was the one you brought that stuff. He goes, I've always wanted to meet you. It is a nice feel good story. Yeah, so surreal. So you get these, the small world thing. Yeah, yeah. You know, people ask all the time, you know, oh, you're in the army. Do you know my brother-in-law? Yeah. What's he do? Well, I don't know.

Well, where's he stationed? Uh, I don't know. My cousins and the Marines, what's his name, right? And then, It turns like you know the guy. It's Bilbo Baggins. I know him. You know, so, yeah. Small world. So after Christmas, did you finally get a chance to rotate back home for a little bit? Yeah, but not Christmas.

It wasn't until Operation Inaconda, which was March 3rd and 4th. Okay. So we had three aircraft shot down over the course of those two days. One of them, I was the first one. Navy SEAL, Neil Roberts fell out of the aircraft when we got hit. it and he was left on the top of a mountain. Like he fell out of the back. We went down and crashed in the valley floor.

My wingman razor four came and picked us up. We repositioned the seals went back in. And that's where CCT Chapman was injured and left behind. But, you know, there's a lot to that story. You know, I hate even saying it the way I just said that. You know, the seal study was dead. it turns out if you look at the pred feed the body they thought was Chapman

was Roberts and he was dead but they mixed them up yeah but you know at the same time they're getting shot up by a PKM machine gun at night and their guys got you know turbo I think it was got hit in the leg and they had to push down and once they moved over

the the lip of the hill they slid down they were stuck on a ledge and they were stuck there the whole time so there's no going back you know people they could have gone back no they could It couldn't go back. They actually got rescued from that spot by one of the guys. But anyway, that's a whole big story there. I outlined that in the book. Yeah, it's the whole story of Anacondos in there.

Yeah. At least my part of the story. You're part of it. You know, so like the stuff that Nate Self wrote, you know, the Ranger-Potel leader and some of the other stuff. You know, Britt Slavinsky, the other metal barn. I went to the White House for his thing. and that was pretty neat actually. That was like the first time President Trump actually used the teleprompter. And he made a big deal of it. He's like, wow, how about that? You know, the cameras all turn off and he goes, huh, I use the teleprompter.

How about that? It actually works. That was pretty funny. Yeah, you have Britt and Chapman both received the Medal of Honor for the actions that day. Right. And so we got to go home like the next week. We were supposed to go home three weeks earlier than that, but they said we had to stay for anaconda,

which was delayed because of weather. So we were doing a rip, right? Relief in place with our sister company. But they hadn't been there, so they didn't want them to do anaconda. So once we did that, we got to go home, and then I was back in Afghanistan in August, I think. And then it's just the ride was on, you know,

for 10 years. We were just constantly there and back, there and back, there and back. Yeah, I mean, what was that like coming back, to Afghanistan and I mean now we're getting into what 2000 to 2003 did things slow down quiet down a little bit during that time frame for Afghanistan not until right when when Iraq the Iraq invasion happened they essentially took all our assets away right all the intel gathering you know they left us a my handful of things but you know you had one one drako and one you know

pred and it wasn't the armed one you know and so we really weren't very effective I mean I think we could have, if they just left everything in place, we could have got the Haqani's out of there and, you know, all the other stuff. But instead, we were just sort of fighting with one hand time behind our back. So it did slow down for a little bit there, and Iraq picked up. And I didn't go to Iraq until, I don't know, 0506 time frame.

Like, I was happy in Afghanistan because I had it memorized. Right, right. And I knew the, I knew the weather patterns. I knew, you know, where I was going. I didn't even need the map, you know. And they're like, one time they're like, yeah, you're going to Iraq. I don't want to go to Iraq. I like Afghanistan.

I'm like, no, we need to go to Iraq. So my first trip to Iraq was actually in Al-Assad out west, just east of Al-Qaeda on the Syrian border there. And then the next ones I just kept going to Blod, you know, and we operated out of the mission support site, MSS, down the green zone. And that's where, you know, Delta and the SIF from, I'm not sure which group was done. down there. Yeah, TF Central down there. So what was it like flying ops and were you flying a lot of like HVT like time sensitive target strikes at that time frame? Yeah. So in Afghanistan, the flash to bang, the time for planning to execution was based on external assets. So you might have four or five hours because your aircraft were coming from Diego Garcia, right? Oh, right. So

you had to wait till you had a B1 bomber overhead, you know, and or a B2, and that's kind of what we had in a B-52s. And so the planning wasn't nearly as fast. When we got to Iraq, you know, from the time they had a high-confidence hit, we had to be in the air in 20 minutes, right? Now, Chinook doesn't run up in 20 minutes, right? It's usually about a 40-minute process. So what we had to do to keep up with the Blackhawks is we'd get up, you know, at, you know, three in the afternoon, go to the gym, get a shower, go to the aircraft, do what we call a pre-flight, pre-flight inspection. And then we would get in and we'd run it up and we'd hover it and we'd do all these checks that take time, you know, engine health checks and things like that.

We'd set it down. And then when it came time to run out there and go, you only had to do like half the steps because you'd already done them for the day. So that's how I could keep up with the Blackhawks. So you were flying the rotors off those helicopters. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was, you know, we'd go every night.

The follow-ons would happen. We got the briefing process down. So we used to have like a flight packet that was throwing your kneeboard like the size of this book, right, like this thick. And we got it down to one piece of paper. It was a PowerPoint slide. And the GRGs. Yes. Yeah.

Yep. You'd have a GRG and you might have a Comgrid or a sheet that had some other things on it. And you just went essentially. to the coordinate, you know, and you went to the X. So that was very exciting. It was a lot of fun, actually. And, you know, obviously the enemy started to figure out what was going on, and they changed their tactics a little bit, and we'd adjust.

Still, it was a lot of fun. Tell us about that a little bit? I mean, I was in Iraq in 2005 with Ranger Battalion, and I'm always fascinated to hear perspectives from people like you, because you know a whole other side of the battle that I don't know about. Well, I'm afraid that I'd get me in trouble if I talk. about how they how they electronically determine where somebody is oh the bad guys yeah they were they were doing that i didn't know that see that's the thing i didn't know they were well let's put it

this way you ever you ever gone into a secure area and they make you leave your phone outside there's a reason for that yeah yeah you know we used to pull the batteries out that doesn't matter you know so you just can't have your cell phone with you so they would do some things would you know the nsa is pretty good at what they do and those ferrida bags yeah would have come in handy for the and they figured out how to protect you guys in the task force and stop that sort of thing from happening yeah well the big thing for us was just you know the old fashion you know surprise speed and violence of action so we would come in you know it would be like you know two chinooks and five blackhawks full of operators right and we would land you know typically

i had the rangers because you know i could put you know interact i could carry whole platoon 50 60 guys right and uh you know they would they would come in and essentially usually do blocking positions so they might get a couple of buildings assigned to them. And then, you know, the CAG guys would go be the primary. And then they would always also have little birds, right? So it was, you know, two Chinooks, five black ox, two little birds, two AHS, right? So the little birds had planks on the side, right? Yeah.

Right. Like a little picnic table bench. Yeah. And see, MHs and AHs. So the MHs would go to the top of the building, right? And then everybody else would kind of go around. And, you know, the overhead asset would be, looking, right? And we would always complain. There's no video of the Chinook's landing on the

objectives because they'd be, you know, panned out, zoomed out, and you'd see the whole objective. Here comes the task force. We're coming in. You see the first set of rotor blades. Oh, look, there's a Chinook. Yes. And they'd zoom in on the, on the cupola on top of the building, the Littlebird, you know, and the rest of the task force be damned, you know, we don't care what happens to them. We just, it looks cool, right? It would be so mad. You know, it's like, can't you guys get us on a couple of shots? You know what I mean? Everybody's got these you know, post-deployment videos of, look at the cool stuff we did.

Yeah, yeah. All you see is like the dust cloud from the Shnuch come off camera. I was like, yeah, that was me. Really? Yeah, yeah, not quite the same as the little bird like landing on the rooftop and like the laundry line goes flying.

Oh, yeah, you know, I got a friend, his Billy Cook did that, and a mattress came up and hit the rotor blade and took him down right down. I saw the video of that where it got sucked up into the rotor and the whole bird like spins out and the operators get thrown to the side. You know how everybody had the lanyard on their belt?

They had the stretchy ones. And they stopped doing the stretchy ones after that because... They snapped? No, they didn't strap, but they got stretched. So they didn't stay on the pod. They, like, the damn thing stretched like this instead of just staying like this. So they didn't stay on the aircraft. They kind of were out kind of flailing around.

So they're like, you know, like the next day, they were getting new lanyards. And after, as I recall from that video, the, the tail rotor gets kind of like sheared off and you see the operators like getting up and like dusting themselves off like oh my god jesus that's a little bird it's like a toy you know i mean no those guys are awesome and they do some really cool stuff but it is a toy you know compared to a shenot yeah yeah i mean it's yeah there's a reason we're called little birds anywhere near the power behind it um any like notable operations from that time frame that kind of stand out in your mind it's kind of running rolling out the task force and yeah uh one of my favorites really is i was working with the rangers out of uh ramadi

uh l z stork and we would go there every night and uh they'd have a target that they were looking at and we'd go hit it right usually an offset infill so an offset what's kind of cool about that is i mean it's hard to get close to a target without distraction without them hearing a helicopter right especially as chinook so you might hear us two three minutes out and it depending on the wind conditions and how quiet it is and all that kind of stuff. So what they do is we would land, say, six to ten kilometers away, just nice, easy landing, the rangers get out or the seals or wherever it was, and they just start walking slow, right? And you could watch the ISR feed, the bad guy target, you know, the primary building, they'd all be up on the roof with their guns and, you know,

they're doing, they're ready for the Americans, right? And as time goes by, you know, they, now they're sling arms, now they're smoking a cigarette. Now the gun is. on the, you know, stack arms. And about the time they go to sleep, the assault force has cordoned to the target. And depending on what the rules of engagement are for that target, they're either doing a callout, a soft knock, a breach, you know, whatever they're doing.

Snipers are up there watching. And so it's really a pretty pleasant assault, really. I mean, I always, I didn't like them because it's not cool for me, you know. But the Rangers and the downforce liked it because they, you know, the problem of going to the X is, It's all violent. Right. It's got to happen.

Right. So, but what happens in this particular case is, uh, it turns out to an al-Qaeda, uh, in Iraq, you know, Zarqawi was the guy back then. Mm-hmm. They eventually became ISIS, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we get it.

And one of the bad guys is like, hey, hey, don't hurt me. Uh, I'll tell you where there's hostages. They're being tortured. And like, a couple of them are going to get their heads cut off tomorrow. And we're like, really? Where? He's like, oh, just down the, uh, just down the rest of them. a road here. All right. So we take these guys in. We don't go hit the follow on target. We decided

we're going to wait until the next cycle of darkness. So we take them back. They do some, you know, pattern of life assessment on there with the ISR. And we go back with the intention to hit this to the X, right? So now we go back. I still get the Rangers. And Dave Taylor was the commander. And what a great guy he is. And he's like, Al, I need to be as close as possible because they're going to hear us coming. And when you hit the ground, I want the ramp pointed at the building. I want to be able to run right off, right? I'm like, you got it.

Right? So I told the crew what we're doing. We come through there. And once again, I'm dragging the landing gear through the TV antennas on the roof. Yeah. And I come across the compound and I deceled and dropped it in over the wall. And the rotor blades were like, you know, two, three feet from the building. Ramp comes down and Rangers come off.

They're doing their thing. And, you know, I take off. and I'm not even in the holding area yet, and they're like, you know, target secure SSE in progress, right? So they're doing sensitive site exploitation. They already taken it. Anybody that fought, they just killed them. And they all fought.

It was all Al-Qaeda people. And I want to say there were 23 Iraqi citizens in this building. They were being detained. Like one was the village mayor and one was the police chief. And they were very influential Iraqi citizens. Five of them had been severely tortured. like a power drill. Holy shit.

The kneecap. One guy had a blow torch on his ear. They'd been sticking like, you know, clothes ironing, you know, on their chest, stuff like that. And these guys were going to get their heads cut off that night, at least that they were told. So we, the Rangers come out.

They're calling for Exville. I come in, I lay in. The Rangers are bringing the guys out. And, you know, you always watch them come around to the back of the aircraft. They usually go down my side. And they get these Iraqis are just hugging these Rangers. You know, they're so happy, it's like, you don't see this real.

Yeah, yeah. You know, usually they got a hood on their head and they're like walking like this. And these guys are like hugging them and, you know, it was good. That, when was the last time you heard of Rangers doing a hostage rescue mission? Who blessed off on that kind of? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's funny. Well, because there was nobody else in Ville because the, the CAG guys were doing stuff down in Sautic City.

Sure, sure. They're super busy. And these guys were out in Ramadi, you know, so it's like. That's awesome. I never heard about that opera. Oh, it was awesome. That's cool. Yeah.

Those guys were good. We did a bunch of stuff that, yeah, it was fun. So, I mean, and that's the cool thing with Iraq was the dust wasn't so bad. You know, there's a lot of, a lot of missions were done around the rivers. So you have all these, you know, tall grass and palm trees and stuff like that. I could land in areas that a black hawk could generally land in now because there's no dust to worry about, you know. And so we could do, you know, all kinds of stuff. that you couldn't do in Afghanistan, especially with the flat terrain.

The other one that was really good is there was a dust one event. I think there were three American soldiers that were taken, right? I remember this. It was that duty status undetermined or something like that. So anyway, I get told to go up to Mosul, and there's this big fat guy who end up in the news later on like in the last couple of years. big guy. I mean like something out of a movie fat.

You know, his thighs were like the size of this table. And they're like, you got to go get him. This guy knows where they are. And I'm like, okay, how fast you want me to go? And they're like, as fast as that thing will go. Right? So we take off. We're doing 170. And it was as fast as a shnuch. It's going to get 170 knots. We fly up there. We grab them. We come back. They debrief him. And we go out to hit these guys, right? Same package. You know, five Blackhawks, two Chinooks, four little birds. we get out there it's in a place called Eusefia

and a big fight going on right big firefight there's a dust storm brewing and a thunderstorm comes in big thunderstorms right and so when thunderstorms collapse they tend to bring the dust up in the area and all of the overhead assets left

everything AC130 Draco the Preds nothing could fly in that stuff right so we're all sitting back at the MSS you know whether are still fighting and the LNO comes in he's like, Al, the commander wants to talk to you, right? So the troop commander is there, he's like, Al, they tell me you can get my guys.

You know, the weather's terrible, right? You can't see the wall, right, because it's all fog now and dust. And I'm like, well, what do you mean? The hawks can do the same thing. They have the same radar, but they never trained with it. You know, and I have practical application in Afghanistan using the damn thing, right? So I'm like, all right, tell you what? give me 30 minutes

we'll plan it we'll go get your guys right and think about once again five blackhawks two shenooks you know and so the two shenooks

took off with two minutes separation went up to about 2,000 feet did what we call a self-generated approach like you punch some coordinates in some angles and directions and the aircraft does a little geometry and it flies itself

down to 40 feet and then you get on the hover symbology a little video game and you come straight down and about 20 feet off the ground we come out of the clouds and fog and there's all the Kag guys and the rangers and we put everybody on two aircraft and then took off same way went back to the MSS look down and you can see the MSS so we spiraled down in put the guys in and that was a

pretty cool mission that's wild I mean did you ever have situations either in Afghanistan or Iraq where you got stranded out somewhere because of the weather or or other conditions yeah one time so we had the Remember I said the MC130s, there's KC130s, MC130s. Well, the Papa models that we had, it's an older aircraft, but it holds more gas. That's what we had. But they brought them to Pakistan to fly the Air Force rotary half, you know, helicopter assault force. And they gave us, in their place, combat talents, right?

Now, it's basically the same aircraft, but it's better equipped, right, with radar and things like that. but these guys fancy themselves as combat aviators, not refuelers, right? Now, I'm giving them a little shit here, but they, their big thing was they wanted to drop parachute supplies to the, you know, teams, right? So the very first night we go out, we're air refueling dependent, like we always are, right? So I got to have a tanker on the way out and the way back. So I hit the tanker on the way out, on the way back, there is no tanker. He's a no-show.

he's dropping a fricking couple pallets to some SFODA somewhere he prioritized that over my gas so I'm like I can't go anywhere I'm out of gas

it's on empty so we landed in the middle of the desert you know got out pulled security called back on the satcom said hey tanker's a no show so they sent the Chinook with the internal tank out to give us enough gas to get back to get back

and you know let me tell you they didn't ever miss a what we call a control time again yeah yeah yeah so I was stuck out there for a while yeah uh but then there were other deployments you were going back to afghanistan at the same time yeah and uh like one uh i was looking through um you had some overlap with operation red wings red wings so you know i i talk about the horse soldier mission as being the most fulfilling right because it's right after 9-11 We got to use all these toys that we never had been able to use. One of the most exhilarating was the hostage rescue I just talked about,

and the most difficult was Red Wings. So Red Wings was a Marine Corps mission, right? We weren't even part of it, really. But then they decided that the only way they were going to get the Marines in after this guy named Ahmed Shah in the Kunaar province, Kornadoa Valley, was for us to bring them in a fast rope. all these Marines, right? So the difference at the time,

so we had two MH-47 echo models, right? Those are the ones with the terrain falling radar. And I think seven Delta model AWCs, right? So they're pretty fancy. They've got air refueling on stuff, but they don't have some of the toys. But because they don't have these toys, this mission equipment,

they can lift 2,000 pounds more than me per aircraft, right? That's a lot of guys. So they were the primary mission for Red Wings, and I became the quick reaction force. QRF. So the handover was supposed to start the morning that Red Wings just kicks off, right? And

the four seals that have been in place to watch the pattern of life try to identify a mudshaws bed down location. The recon team. Marcus LaTrell, right? And the guys. And they get compromised, they get overrun, and they launched the quick reaction first.

Well, by all rights, it was my team, but the other team was Steve Reich and guys were already up because they were getting ready for Red Wings. And so they launched, they were probably in the air, you know, 15 minutes quicker than I would have been because I was still in bed. And so I come in, you get a cup of coffee in the planning area and everybody's intently watching, you know, the big TV screens, right?

And I'm like, what's going on? I'm like, oh, we launched the QRF. I look at my watch. I'm like, I'm like, I'm the QRF. You know, like, no, Reich was already up, you know, he said it would be quicker. And I was like, well, obviously, he's, he's approaching the target now. Right, right. So I'm watching as he comes in, and there's only one place to go,

a place we called HLZ Thresher, which was like a little logging area in the trees, 12,500 foot road line. We talked to some of the rangers who roped in, and they talked about, like, a 90-foot fast rope into the fog and landing on all these, like, down trees. Not deadfall, but down trees. Because it was logging. And so the, they go up there, a guy steps out with an RPG,

shoots it straight up into the AF transmission area. It compromises the power train, you know, the drive train, so the transmission and drive shaft, which synced the two rotors together. The aircraft kind of limps away. The rotors hit each other because they're not synchronized any longer,

and the aircraft just comes apart in flight and just is littering the side of the mountain and super steep. It's the toughest train I've ever seen. And so I'm worried, watching this, you know, and Chalk 2 for him is watching this. And he's like, ah, you know, Turban 33 has been shot down. You know, we know, you are not to go in there. And, you know, they're like, but we got to go. And it's like, no, we just watched what happened. You're not,

you know, they're just going to be waiting for you. Right. So go back to Jbad with your seals and we'll do something. In the meantime, I get launched with the actual, the new QRF. And I'm supposed to be taken. So this is the Dev grew seals. And I'm taking, and I'm taking them. straight there and I'm not going to go to Thresher. I've picked out a spot a little bit further away. Offset. Where they're going to rope in. But I'm still not sure where the bad guys are and that kind of stuff.

And I'm hauling it. I'm doing about 150. And, you know, it's broad daylight. They know we're coming. The bad guys, right? And I'm just sitting there thinking, what, what am I going to do when I get there? I mean, I don't really know there's even a place, right?

And it ends up, they diverted us to Jbad, Jalabad. And they wanted to come up with a better plan. and bring more seals in. And so we, you know, we're down there and then they decide, the command decides they're going to execute Red Wings early. So they bring the Third Battalion Chinooks down. The weather is total shit right now. It's raining.

It's thunderstorms. There's no way they're going to get there. My aircraft, my two aircraft can get there, right? We've got equipment that can do it. And I'm arguing with the Colonel, you know, he's like, we're going to let, you know, Third Battalion do it. I'm like, they got balls this big. got it, you know, and it's their guys, but there's no way they're going to get past

Abad, right, Assadabad. And we said, well, that's what we're doing. We're just going to start Red Wings early. So they come down, they pick up my seals, and they go down there, they run into the weather, they turn around, they come back. They just, they had no choice. So now we have time to come up with a little better plan. So the next day happens.

We don't go up there in the day. and we stayed there at Jalalabad. And what we're going to do now is we're going to take as many seals and rangers as we can in, right, with four Chinooks, two teams of two. Each team will be led by an echo model Chinook, the newer ones, right? So, you know, we come in and we tell the guys, you're going to rope from 120 feet, you know, the trees are that tall. And so we come in and we're separate on top of this ridge line. and my Chok-2 aircraft comes to like a hundred-foot hover, and the guys rope out from like 100 feet, right?

Every one of them burn their freaking hands, right? My aircraft, we come in, and the guy in the right seat's flying, and he's like, Al, I can't, I got no references. And I look out and I can see a tree out my left door. I'm like, well, pretty close. I can see, I have a reference. I have the controls, right? So now I can hold the hover steady, right?

And the crew she says, sir, come down. Just start coming down. And so I start descending, descending, descending, descending, is you are 50, off 40, off 30, off 10, hold you down, roping in progress. So my guys are roping from 10. Okay. So, and while we're halfway through, he goes, sir, I think you can get the half gear on the ground and do a two-wheel landing.

I was like, I don't know. Stop now. It's quicker just to finish. Yeah, yeah. And so two weeks later, when we pull everybody out, the SEAL commander, the troop commander comes and finds me, he's like, ow, why did half my guys burn their hands and on your aircraft they didn't? you know and I came up with this bullshit about well you know

depends on the angle you came in and stuff like that it's not their fault what I wanted to say and I told him years later actually we were at the White House for Slabs thing and he brought that story up and I said I was just better than them I mean I'm a pilot I you don't expect me to say anything different you know whether it's true or not it doesn't matter I'm better you know so

yeah I remember who do we have on here Tony Brooks and Nick, Nick, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, he's, uh, Nicholas Moore. Thank you, Dee. And Tony, his bird, he said the fastrope just disappeared into the fog. And they go and see, oh, I, the weather was horrible. Yeah. For two weeks, it's the worst conditions I've ever flown in intentionally. It was the toughest, uh, when we left, so a couple weeks later, we left, we did, when we got

all the bodies out and Marcus Luttrell. I planned his rescue, by the way. The Air Force picked him up, the H.A. 60, but all the fires, the synchronization, all that stuff was a piece of art that I did. You know, working with the AC130s and the A10 guys and the Air Force guys took direction wonderfully. Super guys.

After the, well, it was the Rangers that found him in that village. And then you guys flew in and to get them out. Yeah, so they secured them. So the Taliban was in that. house a couple of times and the guy that I don't remember what they call that when you ask for help that they have to help you patch tune wali yeah yeah and the guy did it right so uh he's protecting the letrell against the uh the taliban and they're like you know we're gonna kill you and he's like i got to do what i got to do so it was actually an sf oda got there first with a bunch of afghans

right it was like something like a think of vietnam with a mutton yards right right right and they get there and they secure him and then that I think the Rangers came in, made a bigger perimeter. And then, you know, what we essentially did was, we got in a big fight because the, the PJ that was in charge, got him. I've got him. Okay. He goes, all right, so the H.H.60 is going to go in and pick him up?

And I was like, no, fucking way. Is he going in there? I say, he doesn't have the power. First of all, I know that. It's too high. I can fit there. It's a terrorist field. It's no big deal.

And it's our guy. No way they're coming in and doing that. Everybody's just sitting there like this, and Tom played it cool. He's like, all right, Al, you can pick him up. He goes, but he goes, you know that we only have about 20 minute window of weather every night. So we got one time in and one time out. And the 60 can't bring more rangers to the top of the hill. We still have three men missing.

All right. You know, there's no choice. All right, fine. He can pick him up, but I'm planning on the freaking mission. And everybody's like, yes, you got it, right? So I went with the AC130 and the 810s, and we couldn't just shoot whoever we wanted, right? There's still rules of engagement,

and you still have friendlies out there. So what we essentially did was I created denial of terrain. So key terrain that people would potentially shoot me down or the 60 down. You know, I hit it with the AC130 with 105. And then so when the 60 came in, they were like a minute out, and they'd call, you know, one minute out, ACU would put last round in the air. You call that last round in the air.

You see the explosion. 60 comes in. And then they would shift fire over to my LZ and do the same thing. Right? So I'm literally five minutes behind them. So by the time they get in, pick him up and come back out, they've shifted fire again. And then as I come in, you know,

I want the A10s to drop the biggest, as I say 500 powders on a ridge line that was kind of off to the side, but like you could see it from no matter where you were. I said, I want to see the biggest explosions you can probably get. I want that whoever's down there to look up and go, what the hell is that? And I'm going to come in and they're going to go, oh, shit, did that Shonuk just get by? And that's what we did. And it was good.

And I've been trying to meet that guy for years, have not met him. I met him. This was like 10 years ago now. And the story that really stands out in my mind, he said the White House was calling him off the hook, calling down to their talk. And kept asking them if the Taliban had committed. committed war crimes on RKIAs if their bodies had been mutilated and he said the calls were so off the hook that he had to like assign like a private like you will just sit there and answer the phone it's a no no status update no nothing and when the the remains were recovered

the wounds were consistent with normal battlefield you know wounds that you would expect this is what he explained to me they were they were shot full of holes what like egregiously is what you're saying it was you know brass everywhere i mean the first guys on scene were we're really pissed you know and uh you know the rangers push the rules of engagement a little bit to uh you know make sure that wasn't going to happen to any of us as we were trying to bring them more guys in and we supply them they were expanding thresher you know they were chopping the trees down with like claymores like you see some pictures of these things these trees are huge right and they're you know they got chainsaws they get

explosives and they're bringing these trees down but now the they can't get them off the landing zone so when you come in to land you know the aircraft doesn't just land on the ground you're on these trees that are unstable and if you drift at all the rotor blade's gonna hit the trees and then you get another aircraft down you know on the objective you know which would suck so that was tough yeah Tony's Tony's Brooks stories were pretty pretty hardcore I mean no reason really to get too gruesome about it but recovering the remains of your teammates. That's about as bad as it gets, you know. Yeah. You know, one time, so somebody brought back some pieces of the aircraft, you know, that we could give to some of the family members, like, hey, here's a piece of the aircraft. You know, you have something tangible. And somebody gave me this little bracket, you know, a little sheet metal bracket, kind of a little bend to it.

And I didn't know what it was. I'm just like, oh, that's something from the aircraft, right? And then, like, two nights later, I'm sitting in the aircraft and I look down at my feet, and there's like these skid plates so your heels can move and they're held together by these brackets and I looked down and I almost puked because that's what it was.

It was the bracket and held the guy's foot there and I was like fine because the aircraft was just shattered. It like disintegrated in the air. Well it did that and then it went hit the ground. Of course. And the other thing that happened was all of the survival radios and the IR strobes were

taken. So they were taken from the bodies and spread around the valley. And They knew enough to do that. And they would come up on the survival radios, and the A10s would come in during the day while we were sleeping, and they would try the SAR frequencies, and they would do all the isoprep questions, and whoever was on the other end would start to answer and then break up,

so that question is no good anymore. Right? And so they had to call back. It was like something out of a movie. They would call back to the SEAL unit and say, hey, give us some information that we can ask that only this guy would know. And so they were doing that. And one night, we were flying along.

And I said, if we see an IR strobe and we see a guy, right place, right time, right uniform, we are landing and we're going to pick them up no matter what. Well, we're flying along the crew chiefs see an IR strobe. And they're like, hey, we see an IR strobe. You know, at 7 o'clock, I don't see it. It's behind me. Sometimes they see things that aren't quite IR strobes. They're like foliage flickering on a light, you know, kind of thing.

But I stored the coordinates, you know, a little butt. new store and uh i kind of came back around but i didn't see the light i'm like nah i don't think so guys so we go back and uh i don't report it and uh i go to bed and my conscience is eating me it's like what if it's now yeah yeah so i had somebody drive me to the flight line like i wasn't allowed to drive and they drive me to the flight line i go to the aircraft i pulled the coordinates out of this computer i bring them back to the s2 i'm like hey man And we think we saw an Irish strobe here. I don't think it was.

But, you know, check it out. So they sent an SF team to it. It was an ambush. There was an air strobe there. There were Taliban fighters with RPGs. And they were hiding under a waterfall of all things. So you can get no thermal off them either. So they were waiting for a helicopter to come in to rescue.

I mean, the same thing that used to happen like in the SOG. Yeah, you know. Going to get a helicopter, right? And so, you know, the SF guys took care of them. you know i had never heard this before and i mean the uh the thing i guess you know we should not ever underestimated that about the taliban and the muja haddin before them is they became very adept at warring helicopters into valley systems and then taking them out right yeah whether it's dropping rocks or channeling fences on them from above these are all

things we were you know one of the things that was cool uh d ia before we deployed we used to go up to DC twice a year, talked to all the three-letter agencies. You want me to get you another beer? Please. I'm sure it's a little dry. But thank you. So we would go up there and DIA would host this, right? So they take you to CIA, they take it to NSA, they take you to the JPRA, right,

personal recovery agency. And they would show you. No, I'm fine. They would show you all the latest tools of the trade and Intel and, you know, things like that. and what was cool is so now we know we're going to Afghanistan but we don't know why they're thank you why the Russians did what they did you know why did they fight the way they fought was it an equipment limitation was it a tactic was it you know what right because they would lose 20 helicopters in a day like over an organee one one fight 20 aircraft gone

it's crazy and so we're like can you help us out so they remember there's a book the barrel went over the mountain yeah yeah so there was a The guy, I don't know, was the guy that wrote it or a guy that helped with it. West Grau. Well, they brought us this Russian, the Soviet officer, right? And we would ask him through the translator, you know, why did you do this and why did you do that? And how come this happened to you? And it was all power, you know, aircraft power.

And they, you know, the same problems that we were having. And so we came up with some ideas that we had planned like for the Andes, you know, We were worried about mines, helicopter mines in particular, you know, little propellers. When you come into land. Yeah. Yeah, the FARC were messing with those at the time. Yes, exactly. They'd put those up on the helipads and the landing zones.

So we were doing all this stuff. And what we did is we were able to go into our flight simulator, which had, when you look out the window of the flight simulator, it was fairly realistic. I mean, nowadays, you know, it's, you know, far as a subpoena. It's probably photo realistic at this point. Yeah, your video games now are, you know, insanely better. But this was good enough. And the terrain data of elevation of D-Ted was accurate. So you could go, what we did is we went to the northernmost mountain range.

And we looked where we thought we would come through from Uzbekistan. And we'd look and see where we thought we could hide. Like the helicopters. Like, okay, that hill over there doesn't really show up on a map. It's like a contour line. But that, we could hide behind that. You know, and we mark that as a way to come in so that if the Taliban were watching from these positions that we were templating, essentially.

The terrain masking. Yeah, we were able to do that. And that was DIA helped us with all that. It was really... That's pretty cool. Yeah, good guys. I was really happy working with them. So there was all kinds of cool stuff that, you know, as time went by, you know, the equipment, the techniques, the tactics all changed.

And, I mean, the stuff they do now, you know, I wish we read some of that stuff, right? Because some of the stuff that, you know, only our best guys, only our best pilots, could physically do, now can be done by, you know, the guy that's not the best, because the equipment will do it for you. I mean, you still have to do all, you have to know what you're doing, you've got to get all the tactics, you've still got to operate the damn thing. But, you know, when it comes to staying steady over, you know, a moving object, like a boat or a train or, you know, something like that, the aircraft will do it for you now.

Cruise control. Pretty much. You get, you know, altitude, you know, you always had altitude to hold, but you've got one now. It's like a laser ring gyro, so you don't need external sources. And, you know, let's say you're over a train. You could be cocked off to the side of the train. The aircraft will fly along. It'll keep pace with the car you're over.

Do you ever do that with a 47? Yeah, guys can rope out. Did you ever fly, do one of those? Yeah. It's cool. That's pretty badass. That's fun. You know, we used to, one of the famous pictures is a submarine. They did that.

I never got to do that. But Third Battain did that, actually, with one of their warbirds. but yeah you get some cool stuff to do that's pretty cool yeah and then you know the mini guns one of the big chain one of the big um advantages of for us was the

M134 mini gun right so it's a six barrel gatling guns electric in the early days it was AC powered and it was prone to malfunction so we just call them muskets you know right gun engaging pop right gun you can just manually move

it and yeah you can yeah you just rotate it it'll but uh we ended up with these guns by dylan yeah yeah they're battery powered now and man these things are i think i have one malfunction in like you know eight years after we got those things that's how good they really were but you throw but so the older ones had two rates of fire low and high so you'd hear them go and now it just goes but it's reliable and you got two on each side of one one on each side of Yep, one on each side, and then in the back you get M240s. So, and they're designed so that one battery can pull four cans. So there's two cans on either side if you go dual can configuration.

And then you could pull four cans with one battery and like two reloads, right? And then the idea behind that was that as the batteries got older or you on cold weather, you wanted to make sure you could at least get two reloads out of it. You know, so it was good. You know, we had our own, they call it Simo, systems integration maintenance office. And they would, like, it's like the skunk works. You know, they would find a need, you know, pilots or the crucius said,

we need this. And they'd sit around and think about it, you know, how are we going to make this happen? Oh, let's ask our industry partners. You know, how could you do this? Oh, well, we'll just use a laser and do that, you know, and they would come up with stuff and they'd field it, you know, in a matter of months or even a year, you know, Regular army takes, you know, 10 years.

What do you think was the weirdest thing you ever hold in the back of your aircraft or slung mode under it? I was going to say jet skis maybe. Like, we had these rails inside and they put jet skis on them. You come down at 10 feet and they just, you know, ride them out the back. Okay. I want to be on the jet ski team. Who did that? That was Dev Groot.

The other, you know, we would put two high-lux trucks in the back of it. one aircraft. I mean, two. That's something, or there might be a series of motorcycles. You know, with 10th group, we used to use snowmobiles. That was actually really cool, except like 10 minutes out, they wanted to start them up, so they were definitely going, and the fumes would be terrible. Oh, yeah. Right. So you're flying in, you'd open

the right side window, kick it out of trim to the left, and the wind would come through and blow all the air out the back. It's called smoke and fume elimination. But you froze your ass off for 10, minutes while they're doing it's like it's getting three minutes out and they're like no it might not start you know i i rode an at tv off the back of a mh 47 once on a training exercise and the crew chief told me he's like you better remember to put this in reverse because if you don't and you run me over i'll be waiting for you with an axe handle when you get back and we have had guys do that we've had uh guys run over the crew chiefs yeah yeah i uh yeah i uh yeah i almost got the axe handled

Not quite. And then you also had some crossover with the Boberg doll incident. Yeah. So I was at Sharana in Afghanistan, right? So that's just, what was that? It's shank, right? So you had this big, people call it different thing. We call it the horses.

It's called it the elephant trunk. It was just big piece of terrain. And so we were just south of that. And the thing is this. We used to do this thing called vehicle interdiction. Right? And, you know, you see it in the movies. It's usually a little bird.

A guy with a bear, you know, shoots one bullet into the engine block and it, you know, stops. Right. Well, you know, in theory, I suppose. So then they decided, well, we're going to do that with the Black Hawk, right? And in Iraq, they had, you know, a whole team that would do that. In Afghanistan, they couldn't fly there at that elevation. So you had to do it with Chinooks, which would piss off the little bird guy and especially the Black Hawk guy.

Why is Chinooks do that? doing this. That's an archer-knock mission. It's like, oh, you do it. Well, we can't fly there. Well, then I'm going to do it. Right. So we're out there doing this. And then Bergdahl walks off his base. He was only like 10 miles away from Sharana. And that's where he was walking to. And he got picked up. So we went looking for him, you know, initially. And obviously he was gone. So we start, you know, the intel picks up quick. And we start doing hits to the X. And he's not there. each time but his stuff is right so the Intel was good it was just not timely

so I think we found his underwear one time a pair of socks you know that kind of stuff but so we're doing this and we're intercepting the courier network so they're on motorcycles and we're going after them with vehicle interdiction and we're you know these guys are fighting there's there's no getting Intel off these guys other than maybe what they're carrying or interrupting the flow of communications to make them go electronic so we still found them after a couple missions and it's my time to leave so my replacement comes in we high five you know all i'll see you and i go to candahar i'm in customs right which i always hated you know i can be trusted to steal nuclear weapons from a foreign country

but i can't be trusted with my suitcase so um i'm standing here and the customs guy comes in he's like Like, is there a CW5, Alan Mack in here? That's me, and that can't be good. Yeah. And so I got a phone, and it's the captain from Sharon, and he's like, Al, you've got to come back. Your replacement had a heart attack and died. Oh, man. So you went to the gym.

I mean, Sharana's high elevation, right? He goes to the gym, comes back, sits down on the couch we had in the planning area, foams at the mouth and falls over dead on the floor, right? Now, there's good news to this. He does it in front of two pilots who were former Rangers, their EMTs. the flight medic is standing in her as well and right next door is the surgical resuscitation team the SRT is five high-speed trauma doctors right so they get working on him they fly him to bogrum he codes I don't know four or five times on the way up he's alive today he actually got back on flight status

but but so you know they put me on an MH 47 fly me back to Sharon because now they think they got they think they got Bergdoll and this is a big one And so I come back and we go out and the seal team chief comes up. I got to go, this isn't kill capture. This is hostage rescue. You've got to put me right at the door. Right. And their imagery analyst pulls out this image is like, look, there's an empty spot right there.

Just put me there. Right. And I go, you know, my experience in Afghanistan, when you get in the hilly areas, is that anywhere that's not got something built on it is either a graveyard, in which case they've got those poles all over them or it's too steep to build on i said i don't know he's like oh you got to take me there all right so i'm walking out the door and the image my imagery analyst meets me at the door and he's like mr mack you can't go there that's like a 25 degree slope and it's talcum potter dust there's no way you can go there so i turned to the seals and i'm like

guys i'm going to put you down here down the bottom of the hill and they're like you can't he's going to die i'm like all right i'll i'll think of something right right So we take off and it's like a 40-minute flight. And I'm just thinking, what am I going to do? I can't put them there. I know that. And so I round the corner of the final ridgeline and there's the target. There's a laser coming down, pointing at the landing area.

And sure enough, it's like a freaking vertical drop. And I'm like, by right-sea pilot who's flying at the time, he goes, Al, we can't land there. It's too steep. And the seals are listening in. They get headsets on. And I'm like, I look at it. There's a trail kind of winding up to it.

And I know what I'm going to do. do and I go I have the controls I know what we're going to do set the brakes and I go what are you going to do I guess you guys ever heard of Sante which is for those that don't know it is a prisoner war camp in Vietnam that they intentionally crashed a helicopter on the objective because they didn't have enough room to land a helicopter and they and the crew chief on the right door goes yeah hey wait a minute didn't they crash a helicopter on purpose I'm like you get the idea hang on and so we flew in there and the way I can't in I landed on a trail that was leading up to the front door and where they wanted to go was just at the right door.

And the desal itself put me on the same slope as the hill. And as I entered the dust, we just pancaked into the ground. I have no idea. I have no idea how close the rotor was to the sides of the thing. And the seals run off and guys were going to take off backwards in the dust. And same thing, I just kind of took off backwards with a pedal turn and flew out of the dust. probably the best planning I ever did and the seals

are on the radio going you know they think I put them down the hill like I said I was going to do and they're like you know Drakeo lays building 10 and boom hits him and they're like we're here he put us right at the front door you know and they go in and this is where we found

his underwear and I ended up having to do the guy that had his heart attack I had to do his four month deployment in addition to the four-month appointment I just did, my wife had a... Not happy. That's why I call it in here,

Brogdahl tips to scales, because that's the point where my wife really went downhill, you know. But, yeah, so we never did get him. We came close a couple times. A lot of really good effort went into getting him, and the intel was good. I mean, we just were just that much behind him, you know?

And then, of course, he gets let loose on three or four years later. Right, right. but you know we think because you know we had his isoprep and his platoon leader talked to us he said they thought that the Afghan guards talked him into going out you need to go to Sharana you know and tell you tell your boss you know something along those lines and he's like yeah you know he didn't even bring his weapon with him he brought like a knife and I brought a lot of compass yeah yeah I talked to I talked to a couple guys one or two guys on Bergdahl's platoon and And my buddy Michael Ames is really the person to talk to about the Bergdahl story because he spent so much time working on that book.

But it's a, yeah, it's a wild story. Yeah. Oh, you know, it's funny. So you've done work with Sean Naylor. Yeah. So I know Sean from Not a Good Day to Die. Mm-hmm. Right?

So I've got him on the cover of the book on the back for a blurb. Right. So I sent him in the manuscript so he could look at it. and he had just written something on Bergdahl, probably for Army Times or something. And he goes, maybe your editor will catch us, maybe he won't,

but you spelled his name wrong. It's not Bo like Bo Biden. It's Bo, B-O-W-E. So I was like, thanks for the catch a half. It's like, hey, him, you know. Yeah, yeah, me and Sean are,

we're working on a news outlet together now. I'm called the High Side. And so we're both hard at war. churning away on stories for that, doing a lot of research. What, I mean, what year did after, you know, 35 years in the Army, I mean, we're about what year were you starting to, like, get into retirement and transitioning out of the Army? Well, I really wasn't. So here's what happened in a nutshell. My wife at the time had suffered from depression.

She dealt with it. Operation Anaconda kind of was bad because she found out I had the opportunity to call her before CNN broadcast that, you know, Tushanooks had been shot down and all these guys, and she thinks it to me, right? So, and I'm not calling because I had to let the notification process play out, right? And so I wasn't going to do that. Well, she found out about it, and she did not forgive me. And for years, it just got, and I just, because I was a flight lead, you know, a low-density position,

and I was gone all the time, which is why I have so many stories because I was one of very few people. So as she got worse with prescription opioid addiction, oh, man, right? So, I mean, now that's fairly common, right? I mean, back then it wasn't. And then when she couldn't get enough of that,

she had fentanyl, methadone, that kind of stuff, she started augmenting with vodka. And it just got worse and worse to the point that she ended up, essentially, she overdosed and died, right? So this is, it's like 2012, and the regiment was really good to me.

You know, they said, Al, you can do whatever you want. You will help you get whatever job you want. You know, you want to go, you know, we'll even create a position for you.

I could be what they called the face of the regiment. I would just fly if I wanted to. I could deploy if I wanted to. I could stay home. Fly the Super Bowl game. But I would, yeah,

but I would go, you know, essentially on my schedule, go to all of the customers, all of our supported units, and just hang out and be a goodwill ambassador. Right? I mean, that's a big deal for them to just do that, right? Yeah, yeah.

And I was like, now, I can't stay here. Everywhere I looked was a bad memory, right? So things that made me happy normally, oh, this is a good memory. Well, now it's a bad memory because the circumstances. So at the same time, so this is when I get call up. So my wife died in September. in October, I go to New York City

to help unveil America's response, the horse soldier statue, right? With Mike Elmore. So we unveil this thing, and I find out that the West Point Flight Detachment has a position available, but it's a nominative position, right? So they have to nominate you,

and the superintendent has to pick you. So I'm like, I'm putting my name in. I mean, there's, I mean, New York City is just fantastic, you know, at the time. And, well, it still is, but I mean, it was really something something to see for somebody who's come from, you know, Clarksville, Tennessee. And so I put my name in the hat for that.

And I came up for a job interview with the superintendent. He liked me. And he picked me. So I come up to New York up at West Point. So I'm at Stewart Airport flying U872 Lakotas. And what's interesting about that is, so I've had this, you know, all these years of flying combat missions and just kind of keeping it. in check and um you know my wife dies my life is all in tatters and i come up here and the very first

mission i do other than the local area orientation is i fly out to the plane which is the big parade field and they're doing skydiving the the parachute team right and these two seniors come up when i shut down we're doing the the season beginning safety brief right they do one at the beginning of the season so we come out and they're like mr mac we've heard so much about you will you be our mentor and I'm like sure and they run all right cool and they run off and I go to my co-pot I'm like what did I just sign up for you I don't know right so what it is is you essentially you're sort of a they ask you questions about leadership and how you deal with a platoon sergeant you know as a lieutenant how do you deal with a warrant officer if you're in

aviation and you know have you and it was great and these guys I'm scared of heights right pilot scared of heights right you put me in a ladder I'm like a cat in a tree and these guys talked me into doing a tandem skydive with them. And like they weren't, the parachute team coach had me on his chest. And they came down and fist-bumped me and that kind of stuff. And I liked it. So the next season, so you had the summer in the next season, the parachute team taught me how to skydive and actually got my license.

And I would jump with the cadets and they would coach me. And what was kind of cool about it was, you know, I'd screw something up. Right. And they, how was that? And they would, you know, the cadet would say, well sir you know you probably could have done a little of this or that I'm like did I do it up well yeah well what did I do wrong said look you're gonna be a platoon leader yeah you got to give feedback I said maybe you just went to a school that

you're the only one in the whole platoon has been to this school or a new piece of equipment and you come in you get this platoon sergeant who you know he's a little salty he's experienced but you're a butterbar you know what's he got to listen to right you got to deal with you got to deal with these other guys. They said, so you tell me straight what I did because I could die. Oh, sorry, you fucked that up. You know, you should have done this and this and this. Thank you.

That's what I want, right? I said, that's how you deal with your platoon sergeant. That's how you deal with your warrant officers. And so I really, they recharge me, the cadets, you know. It was really, really good. I got goosebumps just talking about how happy those guys made me. But, yeah, so then, you know, time came. I met my current wife.

who's been patiently listening to all of this. She's heard all these stories. She's like, I again. You know, and, oh, it's funny, though, she's always been in New York. And, you know, the West Point Flight Detachment is a gig that is highly desirable, right? So CW5s want that job. And HRC, the Department of the Army, you know, personal people. Human resource.

Command. Yeah. Yeah. So they're like, hey, Al, it's time to leave. You've been there three years. you got to go. I'm like, well, where am I going? And I said, well, we thought you just go back to the community,

meaning special operations. And I'm like, ah, man, I'm a, I'm a CW5. You can't swing a dead cat at Fort Campbell without hitting a CW5 and on the compound. I go, they don't want me back. You know, they're trying to get the W5s to leave so that the guys that are getting promoted to W5 have a position. They said, they go, well, you can go to Fort Bragg.

I'm like, all right, I was going to be General Cleveland's senior warrant officer. So there was me and another guy We're in the running for it And my sons One was a Chinook crew chief In the 160th And one is currently in the Navy

He's a backseater in F-18 So Wizzo And so they called me together And they said, hey dad Don't do it You know She may say she wants to do it But she has no idea

What she's getting into You're going to take it from New York The Fayetteville, North Carolina Yeah Yeah And then you're going to be gone Right And I mean, no, no

No, no It's I'll be the general's guy, right? And he goes, yeah. And what does he do? He goes around and check on the troops. So I met the guy that got the job a year later. I retired and stayed local.

And he said, how's the job? Because I love it. Is there any downside? And he goes, yeah, I'm gone all the time. My wife hates it. I'm like, ooh, well, I dodged a bullet there. And so I stayed local in Orange County and I ended up in a job

I'm a deputy commissioner of emergency services. I run the division of emergency management. So I deal with storms and floods and COVID and all that kind of stuff. But it's a lot like being in J-Soc, you know, in that you're dealing with the law enforcement, the fire, and the EMS guys. Interagency. Yeah. And, you know, sometimes we all hate each other in the moment.

And then when something happens, we all come together. We drink beer afterwards. And then we go back to hating each other for, you know, mildly. So it's a lot like J-Soc. And how long has you been to do that? doing that now? Seven years. And when did the idea of doing a book creep up into the back of your mind?

Yeah. So when the movie 12 Strong came out, Mark Nuch from 595 was working with Jim DeFalise and Bob Pannington. And they were writing a book called Stores of Lightning, which is a good book, by the way. And they interviewed me for part of that book. And while they were doing the interview, Jim DeFalise, who wrote American Sniper, says to me, because, Al, you tell you.

a good story why don't you write a book and i'm like i can't the community will hate me right i mean it's just because the seals were coming out with books and everybody's like yeah yeah those guys won't shut up and i'm like i don't want to be that guy and uh so i held off but then the premier for 12 strong happened in new york city i was invited to it so i'm there i meet all the actors i meet you know the oda again and then jerry bruckheimer and the afghan ambassador and all the stuff is really cool and Doug Stanton is there. And so we see the movie, and we do the after party. And Jim Difflees, sorry, stand off of the corner,

and we're drinking bourbon. And he goes, what do you think? You really ought to do a book. And I'm like, ah, Jim, I can't read a book. I don't know how. And he's like, I'll help you. So I'm thinking like co-author, you know? Yeah, he was a mentor.

You know, he would be like, if I were you, I would do this, you know. But so that's how the book really kind of came about. I decided after that I could probably write a book. And it's been great. You know, the, the spec ops community has been fantastic in dealing with this. Because, you know, number one, I don't grind any axes with anybody, whether I had one or not. You know, whether it's a service or a person, you know, there's no reason to do that. It doesn't enhance my story.

Sure. You know, and, you know, the family drama that came with it, you know, that's a small part of the book. But, you know, people need to know that... It takes a toll. It takes a toll on you. You know, you're... What's it? BetterHelp.com, right?

Yeah. And, you know, here's the other thing. So people will tell me, thank you for your service, right? Okay. You're welcome. But I'm a volunteer. Yeah.

Number one, I volunteered to be in the Army. I volunteered to be in the 160. You know, in our motto, you know, it's like, you know, I volunteered to be where the fighting is hard, you know. Do missions. no one else will try. And so I enjoyed doing this, you know, for the most part.

I mean, I had some bad moments, but my family didn't. I mean, they didn't know what they were getting into. Sure. And it cost me, you know, time away from my kids. And, you know, my wife just couldn't handle it. You know, and so I think, you know, one of the Little Bird pilots from Mogadishu told me that he's one of the guys that landed in the middle of the alley, was MP5s. doing this thing as Carl.

And he said, you know, I told him about this. And he said, you know, my wife couldn't handle it after Mogadishu. And she just, every time I was gone, she thought I was being dragged through the streets and, you know, stuff like that. And that's just a toll that, you know, people don't really think about and what the family's... The not knowing that the spouses go through. Yeah, think about this, right? So everybody thinks when you're overseas, every second of the day, you're just, fight for your life, right? You got your knife in your teeth, you know, and you're shooting

your way to the breakfast. And really, if you're not doing a mission, you're playing call a duty. Right. Right. It's like, hey, quit stabbing me in the back, you know, and, uh, or watching movies or in the gym. So, I mean, most of the day, that's what's happening. And even a lot of the missions, you know, are, you know, not super dramatic. Yeah. I mean, every, every aviation mission has some element of danger in that we used to say that you know a training mission in an airplane or a helicopter is just as dangerous as a real mission because you're actually flying you're training to do something but you're flying you know there's no training to fly you're flying you know so you could die on a training flight or a training exercise you can drown you know

we've lost guys you know down in sharp dz down in key west you know doing swim training shit happens you know but so the one thing that that cost of doing business that cost of service really is I think the family and and guys don't own to quit I mean I didn't I would have kept going if my wife hadn't died I just kept going you know I didn't know how to stop I mean we've interviewed so many people on this show who yeah it like it took them really hitting that wall and I and I really admire the guys who realized when they hit that wall and they went in and which is a hard conversation for any like, you know, red-blooded special ops guy to go in and tell their boss, like,

I'm done, I can't do it anymore. Oh, let me tell you, there's a chapter in here I call, so my sons don't have to. They were coming of age. They wanted to join the military. I did not want them to. I felt like because of who I was and what I did, you know, in the position I held, that I could,

but I thought I could make a difference and finish the war, right? I mean, that's, you know, what that sounds like, but I thought I could. And there were guys, there were like three guys who dropped their retirement paperwork as soon as the stop loss ended. And they were at 20 years and they dropped their papers. And I was at like 22 years at the time. And I remember saying, hey, look, maybe it's time to stop. You know, they stuck because they knew it was time.

And I didn't because I wanted to, I was going to finish the war. Right. And then I ended up my freaking youngest son ends up a shook crew chief, his very first mission in Afghanistan he cuts a guy in half with a mini gun it's like ah what did I do and then the other one you know his very first deployment they dropped the first bombs on ISIS

in Syria that was on the news and he told me he's like yeah we would watch them they'd be all clustered up giving us the finger he goes and then the rules changed and we got to drop because they never clustered again but he told me he goes yeah we were Winchester so they're out of ammunition and

the SF team needed a show of force he said they came down you're like a hundred feet you know 500 knots or something I'm not sure to do that's how we described it you know he goes the RPGs didn't even come close and I'm like what the hell are you doing he goes that's what you would do like that's me not you not you I don't want you doing that stuff you know this is an F-18 yeah yeah so holy shit yeah so those guys you know they wanted to take the fight to ISIS you know but they were you know with

no ammunition, they're just going to scare them, you know, but they still got shot at, but they were going so fast. Right. They didn't have a chance at it. Yeah, yeah. You know, so. Man, it's a, it's a wild story, man. I'm really glad to hear that the book's been successful, that, you know, people are reading it, getting the story out. There's, I mean, there, there are, there are former nightstalkers out there who have spoken, you know, we're looking at Durant's book. He wrote a pretty nice history of the unit.

But there's still not, I feel like there's still not too many. It doesn't quite get the same sort of attention that like Marines and Rangers and seals get. And my publisher asked me to read another book because I've got plenty of more stories and I want to include some stories. Like you always hear about the pilots, right?

Pilots doing the books about Nistalkie Stalkers. But the crew chiefs have some really good stories. The flight medics and the 160, They were just amazing. You know, in the beginning of the war, they were giving out Motrin. And, you know, after Robert's Ridge, they were the premier medical force asked for. So, you know, I got to get those kind of stories in there. I just talked with General Daly and the flight lead from Mount Hope 3, which has been in the news lately, because it's like the anniversary.

And, you know, they went into Chad and stole a freaking hind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but you only know a part of that story. And I got to talk to these guys, the general, I spent. you know, a whole day at his home, you know, and he's telling me all this stuff. I'm like, wow, I never knew in his stuff. And that's got to be out there, you know. So I would do that.

And I just put in a request to Usasok today, actually, to, you know, give me some access to the, some of the guys I want to talk to, so, you know, who might talk to me on the side, but I just want to give them some top cover. Sure, sure. You know, and the regiment's happy enough with the book that they're like, okay, you can, you can write it on a little. Yeah, yeah, I'm super stoked to read it. And I mean, yeah, you're right.

There's so many stories out there about the unit that really just haven't been written. That's awesome, man. It's been fun. There's a fun time. The book, writing the book was a good experience. And now that I kind of know what I'm doing, you know, the next one should be a lot easier. Where can people find the book? Where can they find you if they want to reach out to you and get in touch with you?

Yeah, so, you know, my life. LinkedIn I have a Facebook Alan C-Mac author Instagram Twitter I have a website Alan C-Mac.com you get the book on Amazon you can get it from Barnes & Noble you know any of the places you can buy books I mean Amazon is probably the easiest you can go on my website and ask for a sign copy you know that's a little bit more money because I have to pay shipping and all that kind of stuff but yeah you can do that I mean

Orange County, New York. You ever wrote me at West Point? You just come on up, you know, find me on one of these platforms and DM me. And, you know, I don't mind hanging out. I met up with Nate Self's son, Caleb. You know, he's at West Point and took him and his buddies out to breakfast and signed some books for him. Fantastic. I just love West Point, you know.

I was never a big West Point fan, you know, until I, well, I met a guy named, you know, Steve Reich. a guy named Mark Kaplan, they were like buddies, if you will. And they were just so amazing that, you know, and one of them could cut hair, which is good. But that's where I kind of got my, like a different outlook. It's like, wow, these guys are actually really sharp. And then when I met the cadets on a parachute team, it was like, this is awesome. That's cool. These are the future.

I'm so glad that you kind of connected with people in that way and found like a sort of, you know, post-service life for yourself, which is like, I mean, sometimes that's the hardest part of all of this. And now I'm doing, you know, I volunteer for a couple of organizations and foundations, you know, for their fundraisers, you know, I'll speak at them. Rob and Eel and I did one down in Fort Lauderdale recently. I think we're doing another one together in Boca coming up in April and one in Tampa. And then I'm doing something at the, I don't know if you know, Don Bentley. he's an author.

He's coming on the show. Yes. Two, like two months from that. Oh, yeah, you introduced us. Yeah, thank you. But nice guy. He does Tom Clancy books. He just got the Mitch Rab books.

He's a former Apache pilot. Super nice guy. But he invited me to go out to the National Veterans Museum of Memorial in Columbus, Ohio. We're going to speak out there together. Really, I'm going to write his coattails. Cool, cool. Nice guy to give me that opportunity. but Alan uh you know thank you so much for coming out here on a Friday evening and

thank you to your wife for uh patiently listening on to all the all the guy talk about helicopters and combat all this other stuff. Oh, this has been a blast. Thank you. Man I'm super fat. I'm like endlessly fascinated which I mean it kind of explains what I do for a living today, but um, I can just listen to this stuff all night. But I really appreciate it.

I hope we'll have you back again sometime when the next book comes out. we'll have you back. Sure. Talk all about it. Local. For all folks out there, thank you for joining us tonight. And come back. Next Friday is our 200th episode.

So we're going to have a series of guests. The stream is going to start at 12 noon, and we think it'll go on to sometime around midnight. We're just going to have, there's going to be drinking, cigar smoking, a series of different people, guests coming in and out. And Dave and I will be, you know, playing video games and doing all kinds of stupid stuff so tune in anytime on Friday and we'll be here screw-the-the-thel-thon yeah we'll be here screwing around and doing stupid stuff and hopefully the cops don't get called because of us but yeah again Alan thank you hope everyone will check out the book Razor 03 links right down

below in the description and we'll see you all of you