The Team House - 160th Special Ops Aviator, MH-47 Pilot | Alex Bertelli | Ep. 154

Episode Date: July 16, 2022

Alex Bertelli flew MH-47 Chinook helicopters for the Army including the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), known as the Night Stalkers. After getting out of the military in 2014, he went to work in the Aerospace industry. Check out Alex's business here: Commercial: https://havenlockdown.com/ Residential: https://havenlock.com/ Today's Sponsors: SAP Gear (Stately Asset Protection) https://SAPGEAR.com Veteran-owned company, Stately Asset Protection’s retail store specializes in handmade and unique survivability products. Use the code “TEAM” for 15% off your order! https://SAPGEAR.com For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed 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 #specialoperations #jsocBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. 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 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 hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to episode 154 of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy here with my co-host, David Park. Tonight on the show, we're super excited to have Alex Bertelli here with us tonight. Alex served in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. He was an MH47 Chinook pilot,

We'll get much deeper into that. We've never had a 47 pilot on the show before. That's obviously the twin rotor aircraft, the big one speaking, without military jargon, for those of you who are wondering what an MH-47 is. Alex, welcome to the show. Thank you for spending some time with us tonight. Hey, guys. I really appreciate having me and allowing me to come on and tell the story of my good times in the unit

and my time's after getting out of the Army being an entrepreneur. So thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely, dude. So on the show, we usually jump right into the guest's origin story. Like, what was your upbringing like? Where did you grow up? And what was sort of that path that took you towards military aviation? Yeah, I had an interesting childhood.

My dad was a corporate executive. And so we had the opportunity to move around the country a lot, as my dad did 20 years first at Ralston Purine and Ever Ready Battery and then moved up into executive management and bounced around the country every couple years. And so we had a more of a traditional kind of corporate family upbringing. And my mom was also working professional. She was a day trader and traded options on a Bloomberg terminal before day trading was a thing. And so my dad was able to retire early when we were living up in Rochester, New York. He worked as the senior vice president for sales at a company called Crosman, which was an air rifle company.

And so I spent my four years of high school up in Rochester, and that's kind of how I landed on finding my way to the Army once I went to college. So I moved 11 or 12 times, and Nashville, Tennessee has been the place where I've planted roots for the longest. I've been here for about 16 or 17 years, so I've been pretty fortunate to have stayed in Nashville for this long. When did you start thinking about the billetary and then when did you start thinking about becoming a helicopter pilot? Yeah, I always knew I wanted to fly. I traveled a lot as a kid. My parents sent me abroad to France for two summers when I was 11 and 12.

And so I really just like the aspect of flying. I love the adventure of it. But I found my way to the Army and I think a much different path than some other high schoolers may have found their way. when the stock market crash in 2001, my parents, because of my mom's profession, were leveraged in the stock market and we kind of lost everything. It was a hard time in our family. And I had two jobs during high school because my parents really believed in work ethic and, you know, building, building, you know, your character through hard work. And I found out my junior year that my parents had kind of lost pretty much most of my college savings. and we're working to keep the house together, keep the roof above. And so my dad had to go back to work. My mom worked in a department store, and I had to find a way to put myself through school.

And so I work with my mom, and she helped me apply to ROTC scholarships all over the country. And I eventually got accepted to the University of Dayton in Ohio, which their motto or their mascot is the Dayton Flyer. So it was kind of unique that I had the opportunity to go there, and I studied finance. I was on the investing team when I was a senior. So I kind of followed my mom's footsteps, but I always wanted to be a pilot. Love flying, and RRTC was probably the best thing that ever happened. Had a great opportunity to go to UD.

I didn't get a full scholarship right off the get-go, so I kind of had to work my way into it. And I was pretty fortunate at UD to have some of the best cadre that you could ever have in RRTC. I mean, I remember some of the Major Wormack, several others who just helped me get into into the program. And then I had a really awesome mentor as our ROTC, PMS, Colonel Washington, who, who, you know, really helped me form the character that I had being a leader and

helped me excel to get to the point where I was offered an opportunity to go into Army Aviation. And so I don't know, and maybe some of our younger audience, would like this information. but when you go into ROTC, do you pick the branch then? Is it branch specific? No, it's not. I mean, most people don't realize this, but when you get to school, the assessment starts. So you're graded on everything from your physical fitness,

the curriculars that you, you know, enjoy after academic hours. You're graded on your leadership. If you do things like Ranger Challenge or go and help the community, or you have a job. All those things kind of shape what your overall score is at the end of your junior summer, which culminates in a trip to Fort Lewis, or at least for me, it was Fort Lewis Washington where they put you through a month of kind of mini basic officer camp. And at the end of that,

you get kind of your final grade, and then your entire packet from start to finish goes up to cadet, cadet command, and they grade you. They rank you through one through four thousand. And I was very fortunate, you know, to leave, leave advance camp with a rank of 11 in the country. And so the 10 other people before me, all the way to spot number one, didn't pick aviation. And so I garnered the top spot as an Army Aviation second lieutenant and left with kind of that somewhat badge of honor, but a heavy weight to bear as I went to flight school. And so that kind of gave me the, you know, the ability to say, hey, if I can accomplish this, I can at least give this a shot from where I'm at and go and just be a sponge at the 160th. And that was my, that was my goal was to go to

flight school and, and go right to the unit. And, you know, I could tell a little bit more about that story, but that doesn't happen very often. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do that. How did you know about the unit at that point? I think it was 2001. Maybe it was October. I was a freshman and the ROTC department sponsored us. They're paid for our tickets to go see Black Hawk down. And so I saw that movie with all my classmates and I just sat there and I was like, I know I want to be a pilot and I know I want to be in that unit. And I dedicated myself to do everything I could to get to that unit right from that point. And so the amazing thing is you see, you see that movie and you see the people in it. And, you know, obviously there's some movie magic

there. But when I got to the unit, all of the guys who trained me in the very early courses of becoming a night stalker were, you know, more or less veteran. ends of that war. Yeah. Yeah. Some great, amazing patriots who taught basic navigation and taught ground combat skills. And then, you know, you move on to the next generation of nightstockers who, you know, we're on Roberts Ridge, the first invasion of Iraq, some amazing missions.

And you're just, you're kind of living the dream at that point. And it's a very high performing organization to be a part of. Yeah. Not necessarily zero defect, but it's, it's a very highly tuned performance machine from the individual all the way to the crew. Before we get to 160th, can you tell us a little bit about flight school for a Army aviator, Army helicopter pilot? Like what airframe was you trained on? Like, what was that process sort of like as you kind of moved in that direction? Yeah, I mean, you get to flight school. You're a second lieutenant, you're a butter bar. You follow the orders that are given to you on that

piece of paper and you show up to that building. And obviously there's no one there when you check in and you have no idea what you're doing. And you finally find your way to the class you're supposed to be in in the formation. And again, the assessment starts. So right from the first day of flight school, you're being graded all the way to aircraft selection day. And so when I went to flight school, there wasn't a lot of advanced airframes that were more or less based around attack and heavy cargo. Most of the airframes that were available or the slots were mostly Black Hawk availability. And so I think when I went to advanced aircraft selection, we had three Kiwas, two Chinooks and one Apache, and the rest were Blackhawks out of the 40 or 50 person class.

So you had to be at the top of your class to get what you wanted. And so I just, again, dedicated myself to trying to get to the OH-50 AD Cai Warrior course. And I was lucky enough to do that too. And I had some great enlisted guys who became warrant officers that really mentored me throughout the course. or some that eventually ended up at Fort Campbell with me in the unit, some who ended up going with me from flight school and ended up in my platoon. And I was a platoon leader. We went to the flight school together.

And so it was really neat. I was surrounded by a lot of rangers in my company. Two or three from RRD, you had special forces guys. You had some of the original gangsters of the 2001 invasion who were on the way into Gecko from the south. And then you had legends who left Uzbekistan, like Al-Mack, who's putting his book and story out, who led from Uzbek all the way in to Mazurie Sharif and further that you see in some of the new movies that are out there. And so you're just completely surrounded by these amazing people, not only through flight school, because they've transitioned from being an enlisted man to a warrant officer.

And so I had good mentors around me all the time. And, you know, I wasn't without mistake. I made stupid lieutenant mistakes and captain mistakes, but they were always there to pick me up and, you know, set me on the right course. For anybody in our audience is interesting to becoming an Army aviator, like what advice can you give them to get there and to be successful at it? Yeah, there's a couple ways you can do it. Certainly the enlisted route is an amazing way to see how the customer, the ground force, the guy that you're actually supporting on the field, gets his support, gets his supplies, gets transported. And so I think that that's very admirable. You find a lot of people who actually make it to the 160th. A lot of times they're not high school to flight school. There are customers. They come from

the Ranger Regiment. They're from group. Or simply they've done, you know, some transition path through a different enlisted route to get there. So that's one way. You can put in a packet when you're enlisted and get to a to Warren Officer candidate school or go to OCS. And then there's a, there's more of like an 18 x-ray program for Army Aviation, which is high school to flight school. And so you can put a packet in whether you have a college degree or not. And that's a route to go right to walk and come to the unit. Or you can go through ROTC or West Point, become an officer and go to flight school and, you know, take the path of going to the regular Army first and then the 160th after that.

Yeah, it's fantastic. So you already had this idea from kind of from the get-go that you wanted to be, you know, a gangster air pirate flying around in a little bird zipping, stitching bad guys up with a minigone and everything. Can you tell us that story about how you kind of set yourself up? You set this goal early on going into flight school that you wanted to go to 1-6th, and kind of like how you jammed yourself into that role, how you made that happen. Yeah, I mean, I put a lot of pressure on myself in flight school.

I don't remember a lot of flight school. I remember sitting in chair reading a lot and studying for tests. I don't remember the beach. I don't remember Pensacola. I remember going out too much. I mean, I had my moments. But I just said, look, I want to be in that unit. So the only way I can ensure that I at least get a shot is to be at the top of my class.

And so that wasn't an individual effort. You know, I had a lot of study partners and I had a lot of enlisted guys who really taught me the way to, or enlisted guys who were worn officers, who kind of taught me the way to get. set up for success. So I just dedicated myself to being the best. I volunteered for every leadership position that you could have and, you know, call that corny. But, you know, that just kind of set me up. And when I went up for my assessment, I wasn't given any, any free rides. I flew with some amazing pilots on my assessment. One, one who was a little bird lift pilot, who was about six foot two or three and barely fit in a little bird, but I'm sure he's transported some of the year the guys who are listening

who are in some of the tears. And, you know, he didn't hold any punches. Can't hold your airspeed. You can't hold your altitude. Your rate of closure is terrible. You can't land properly. He's like, I don't even know why you're here. And so I wasn't given any special moments.

But what I do remember is, you know, my time coming through the upbringing that my parents taught me about having, you know, the value of work ethic and working hard. And then going through school and flight school. when I, at the end of my assessment, I just said, look, I don't care what job you put me in. I'll mop the floors as a lieutenant back in the motor pool or back in the supply warehouse. If you want me to, I just want to be on the compound. And, you know, I think that left an impression. They didn't say no.

So when I got to the, when I got into the board and I was surrounded by, you know, senior officers and Warren officers and was asked to come to the unit, I certainly was shocked and said yes. But yeah, I came up and I'm off the floors and I did, you know, every single thing you could think of that a junior officer would do. And I didn't get to the flight line or near the advanced our craft as much as I would have liked. But I flew with a lot of senior guys right off the get. And you were there. Wow. When you were in flight school, were you making it known that that's where you wanted to go?

Were you like? I mean, there was a small group of us who wanted to do that. I went up and assessed with someone from my advanced aircraft course, and he and I both got accepted. Now, his background is he was a former Westphorner. He was an officer. He actually went into the infantry. He went to Ranger Regiment. He was a platoon leader.

So he was seasoned. He was wiser. He had wisdom. And so Craig and I went up at the same time and assessed. And I got asked to join the unit, and I packed up all my stuff and forgot to. to turn half of my gear and I left the compound. I didn't want them to say no. And I saw Craig on the way into his assessment board and I passed off half my stuff and

said, just turn this in. I don't want him to change their mind. So yeah, I just, I was surrounded by great people and Craig was one of those. And so was, so a few others. Yeah, it's, I think our audience would, it's kind of humorous to find out how many Rangers do go and want to become helicopter pilots. And I think one, it's, it's the Pogi Birds in Rangers School. It's your first time when you've been out.

their second ass for, you know, two months and somebody hands you as Snickers. And then the other thing is flying with those guys, it's like, these guys are amazing. Like, this is incredible. And they don't have to walk five clicks. You know, it's its own thing. But it's like the top of the game just in a different, in a different way. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, almost every single line company in that organization has a pot of rangers that are in it.

And so, you know, that's always fun to see. I mean, the difference I think between, you know, most of the warrant officers and obviously the commission officers or the RLOs, the platoon leaders, the company commanders is those warrant officers are the main pilots. You know, unfortunate to be able to get on the controls and to be trained as an aviator. But, you know, we focus on the other stuff that officers do and we're not the main pilots of the regimen. We're just not. I sat in the jump seat of a 47 for a rotation and a half, never touched the controls. All I did was make radio calls. Yeah.

Which is different, right? Everyone has a different job. And because the war was getting extended in so many fronts, you had, you know, different, you had customers in multiple locations, two, three, four theaters or three different AOs at a time. And so, you know, the time that I went into the line company, the crazy horse, we were starting to put commission officers more up in the front seat. Yeah. into flying rolls. And so I think out of nine rotations, I flew probably seven of them from the cockpit, a right seat or a left seat. My last three were in the right seat. And, you know, I was more advanced at time, but I still flew with very senior aviators who made sure I didn't mess up. Can you tell us a little bit about the 160th? What is it and why is it so special for the people who might not know? Yeah, I think that the most important thing about the 160th and what makes it special is it's people. it's its culture. There's a rigorous assessment process to get into that unit, everything from

a written test, oral knowledge, flight training, swim test, all the way down to psychological assessments and evaluations. I mean, they really pick the right type of person from all of these variables. And so you have this group of people who are very closely related in how they think and how they operate. And that's been crafted over 30 years. And so they take that type of person, whether it's a pilot, a crew member, a fueler, a maintainer, an ammo guy, et cetera. And we put them on the toughest missions, the no-fail missions. And so our roles were to take customers to a target plus or minus 30 seconds. Sometimes it was, you know, two or three aircraft.

Sometimes it was nine aircraft to a target. You know, think about having four Chinooks, two Blackhawks, two little birds above, and you're going and deconflicting all those assets to a target, and they've got to be properly loaded, properly fueled, the comma has to be right, the deconfliction amount of the target has to be right. The assets have to be synchronized. And so it all comes down to just having that common way of thinking. It's not necessarily group think or zero defect policy.

But the last thing I think you wanted to do in that unit was the failure buddy. And the stakes are pretty high when you're in aviation. You land improperly. We'll talk about some rural admissions that went to plan and some that didn't. But you make a mistake in the cockpit or you call down the, the aircraft in an improper way, crash, you'd kill someone. At the same point, you know, you've got these highly trained operators in this aircraft who are capable of landing on a potion stamp in the middle of the night, zero loom.

And I'll tell you many times, I landed when I was on the controls. I couldn't see. I listened to the enlisted band on the right side. Right gun. It's amazing. Target, and I couldn't see anything, even with the systems. And tell you what, it gets pretty hairy in a Chinat because you don't, I mean, the blades generate are a lot of dust.

And so you have to have this like team mentality. And so that bond is unbreakable even to this day. Yeah. You know, and I know that you'll tell us a little bit more about the training, but, you know, for people who are unaware of the capabilities of the 160th, like we're talking about guys who can land a, the, uh, the, uh, the skid on on a wall. Oh, on a rooftop. You know, on, on the side of a wall, you know, like you, the things that 160th pilot,

can do it's like I didn't know a helicopter could do that it's magic it's magic I mean it really yeah not to like fanboy a little bit but yeah I remember flying with like mh 60 pilots from 160th and like seeing them maneuver within a few feet of the high tension wires on either side of the road yeah it just put us down on a street in the middle of Missoule it's like that's unreal it looks like you said it looks like magic but I know it's not Alex it's that these guys are highly highly trained there's very good at what they do And yeah, I can see why there's a lot of guys from like Ranger Regiment that are like, like, yeah, I want to do that.

Yeah, I mean, you're down, you know, doing room clearing and you have an eaten in six hours. And then you look up and you see the aircraft. You're like, man, I should want to go to try. It's not, it's not just that. They're very good at what they do. Yeah, they just joined the Air Force. It's like, look at you guys and seeing just how good you are at your job. That's a very professional unit.

Yeah. Yeah, I think the thing you notice when you see the unit, is every single thing is detail-oriented from the way they count the customer onto the aircraft, how the radio calls are made. And if you're, you know, for those of you that have been on an aircraft or been part of the ground force, you know, think back to when the aircraft cranked up. They all crank on time almost to the second. And so if the aircraft, I mean, I remember times where you would set all the radios,

get ready to crank the aircraft, and I would look down as, you know, the less seaters starting the engines. And I'm like, chalk one, two, three, four, are we all starting on time? And if not, you know, immediately the lower maintenance light comes on. And you've got all these guys who come out to fix the aircraft. And if it's not fixing a certain time, guess what we've got a spare that's backed up and ready to go. Fuel has got the ammo. And we can still make the mission happen on timeline.

Yeah. Alex, I got to give a quick shout out to the sponsor for this show. It's SAP gear. And I just want to show you guys this real quick. It plays into a little bit of what we're talking about and a little bit of sear training. This is the advanced personal escape kit from SAP Gear. And this is designed, you know, if you're a soldier, you can wear this underneath your uniform, underneath your flight suit, whatever it is. These are designed to be escape and evasion items to worst case scenario, even if your other kit is stripped from you and you're captured, that you have this concealed against your skin.

And it has a bunch of tools inside to help you escape captivity. the actual line of it is designed to be used as kind of a saw to cut through duct tape, 100 mile an hour tape, or even flex cuffs if you're secured. Then there's some items linked on here, like a mini chemstick, so you can actually see what you're doing. There's a little shim in here if you need to shim a padlock or a pair of handcuffs. And then there is also a universal handcuff key right here that can help you escape from different types of handcuffs. So I played around with this a little bit over the last couple weeks,

and I think SAP Gear makes a lot of really good, useful items. I hope none of you ever need to actually use one of these, but it's something that you can wear in concealment, deep concealment underneath a uniform, and no one will ever know it's there. And again, hopefully you never need to use it. But if you do, you can pick this up at sapgear.com. At sapgear.com, the promo code is team you'll get 15% off on your order so again that's team as a promo code to get 15% off they have a series of books too that are really good yeah they do um and we'll talk about them on another another promo but the books are the literature is very good too yeah teach you how to escape some of those situations being a parent can be really challenging child and family resource network

focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey everyone is there of someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and family resource network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today.

So Alex, kicking it back over to you. It sounds like when you first got the 160th, you did kind of, you were basically the private of 160th from what you made. it sound like. What was that like getting to this incredibly elite unit? I mean, it is what it is. You are a very junior pilot at that point. It's so rare, too. I mean, it's so rare to get that right out of flight school. Yeah, I mean, I was definitely fortunate to go. And, you know, the officer that kind of sponsored me had every single nickname you could think, squirt, sparky, junior. And so you just pulled me aside and say, look, go be a sponge. Go down to the motor pool today, change out an engine or do an

oil change on a hemat. Go down to the flight line today and learn how to do maintenance by the book or go down to the S1 shop and learn how to figure out how soldiers need their pay fixed. So that's what I did for two years. And I just learned how to be an officer. I learned everything about the Army as much as I could from all of those people. And so if you could imagine you've got the best S1 and you've got the best maintainers and you got the best XYZ. And so I learned a lot. I learned a lot from that. And when I finally got to be the line company, I certainly was drinking from another fire hose, but I was in the best Chinook unit in the regiment, the crazy horse, and are involved in every single major mission you could think of every notable mission. So it prepared me

for as much as possible. But any minute, I wasn't being in the field with soldiers or doing some type of officer-related task, whether that was paperwork or awards or whatever. I was in the simulator. And so before I actually got down to the line company, I think I had racked up 40, 50, 60 simulator hours, which is not impressive when you're around these guys who have thousands of hours. But the G model, Chinook at that time, was very new. And the line company hadn't been fielded yet. And so I was in the simulator two, three, four times a week. And when I wasn't in the sim, I was out flying with senior warrant officers in our old kind of lunch aircraft, the V-Tel Little Bird, flying out and learning how to fly in the national airspace. So I didn't get very much sleep during that time.

I mean, take that with a grand assault. But I did everything I could. They get as much experience before I went down there because it was definitely very elite tonal on. So how do they take you from a standard Army aviator? And I don't mean that any kind of insulting way, but somebody out of, you know, flight school and turn you into a 160th pilot. Is there a formal training program? Is it informal? How does that work?

Yeah, I mean, once you make it through the assessment, you basically have a task list of things you have to go through. B-Nab or basic navigation is one. And you do even do that in flight school. And they give you a paper map, you got a pen or a pencil, and you plot your route to a target. And these targets are an hour and a half to two hours away, and you've got to hit it plus or minus 30 seconds. They stick you in the right seat of a little bird, and you go hit this target that you plan with a pencil and a protractor. and you've got to adjust for winds and time. And so that's very much so part of the initial kind of let into the unit.

If you don't pass BNAV, you get, you know, make it into the unit. You just get booted at that phase. Then they send you to CERC. I went to CERC at Bragg, and that was definitely interesting. The Army Aviation has its own version of CERC now at Rucker, but a bunch of warrant officers said, hey, don't go to Rucker. If you can go to Bra, go to Bragg.

And so I had that amazing experience. It was one of the best experience. experiences in my life. And then after that, you go into aircraft specifics. And so for me, I went in, I did again, the V-Tale Little Bird course. It was a very short course, standard aircraft transition. It didn't have any advanced mission equipment. And then I went down, I was, like I said, I was just an officer for a year or two, just doing HHC regiment, kind of ex-o type of duties. but after that, and which, you know, that not being typically standard, if you were to finish up Sierra BNAB, you'd go around on to advanced aircraft. Okay.

And so that could be an MH-60, it could be a DAP, it could be an H, MH, etc. And so after a year and a half, two years, I went to this CH-47D course at Fort Rucker. I did a month-long transition, which gives you the basis to flying a tandem rotor aircraft. You learn about all the properties of that aircraft. You get, you know, the stick handling qualities. And then you go back up to the unit and they put you through more or less kind of advanced aircraft qualification. So you can learn to fly the MH-47. You learn how to fly it in a traffic pattern, how to do slopes, how to load it, weight and balance, kind of basics, right?

And then from there, you just go on the road. You load the aircraft up. You fly out west to a location and you learn how to do mountainous desert terrain. You learn aerial refueling. You do advanced tasks. And so you're training in the front as a pilot and you're doing all button pushing. You're not really flying as much. You're in the left seat and you're a mission managing at this point, loading a flight plan,

finding your way to how to get to a target on time, adjusting a flight plan, dropping threats. You're making radio calls. You're doing all these role, kind of role-playing exercises. And the crew members in the back, they're learning too, and they're being assessed and evaluated. And so you go to these kind of different locations and you do things that replicate combat or replicate mission tasks so you do over water you'll do some boasting and other things and so they train you pretty much in this round robin of activities all over various locations in the country so that you can go down to the unit as a kind of a basic mission qualified pilot and so that process is about

four to six months oh wow at before we move on Alex real quick I was wondering if you could give our listeners and viewers the kind of MH47 fam for people who really just don't understand anything about this airframe. I mean, what is this aircraft? What makes it unique? Why does the special operations community place such an emphasis on this very unique helicopter? Yeah, it's a very versatile aircraft. And from the aircraft I've flown, it's my favorite. It's an all-glass cockpit, two pilot aircraft, four crew members in the back. Sometimes you'll have a medic or a flight surgeon. And you can load anywhere up to 55 people. So I think in Iraq, the record maybe 55. Certainly, it wasn't on one of my missions.

But over in Afghanistan, you can take maybe 27 guys to a target. But we don't weigh the customer. We don't really necessarily pick the number of bodies. We give the customers kind of a weight and they pick how much they want to take to the target. So it's very versatile. And the number of people and equipment it can carry. So you can put a high lux on there. You can put weapons, ammo, rockets, fuel.

We have ways to roll out kind of mobile fuel things. It's a very similar Army tasks that are out there for just the regular Chinook community, but our aircraft is just more advanced. It's got bigger fuel tanks, got an aerial refueling probe. It's got survivability equipment that's advanced for other areas that have integrated air defense systems. And so you get trained on each one of these advanced mission systems as a part of your training. And it's very different from the regular army. So, you know, think of taking, you know, 27 guys to a target and Chalk 1 and Chalk 2, and then Chalk 3 has a highlights in it.

Yeah. It has a heavy weapon system in it. It's doing Overwatch for the main element or the blocking force or whatever. And so you just got a lot of capability in that aircraft. And, you know, the customer, based on the terrain or the location of the mission set, relies heavily on that aircraft for QRF and for moving a lot of ass around the battlefield. And a high lucks, for those you don't know, is a Toyota pickup that they don't, I don't think they sell it in the States, but it's very, very common overseas. I think it's like a Ranger, right? Yeah, like a Toyota Tacoma, except it takes diesel.

Yeah. So. So what was it like when you finally got to the line, Alex? I mean, I was, I had a lot of, a lot of learning to do. my platoon had three guys from RRD in it, two or three guys from RRD. It had one very senior special forces guy, and it had all of the senior pilots from the initial raid into Afghanistan. And so, you know, as an early, early for a young platoon leader walking in, had glasses at the time. And I was very young.

I looked like I shouldn't be there. And, you know, they just, they took me under their wing. It was incredible to see. And, you know, they were coming and going. We were rotating. You'd see guys in the office one week. you wouldn't see him for three months. And so you just try to do your best to be the best leader you could and, you know,

not step on your crank. And I stepped on my crank a lot, but I learned. And, you know, I always, my big thing was just to take care of the guys. And that got me in trouble too when I, when I, you know, stood up to senior officers. But I certainly, it was certainly worth all of it. I mean, I'm friends with all those guys. I talk to them every single day. And so that's kind of the tribe you, the tribe you go into is the tribe that you stay

with forever and you know i wouldn't be anywhere without any of those guys so just incredible to see their experiences i think one of the guys in our team did the very first halo into uh into afghanistan he was on that team and you know to see that guy there in that room and he's now on your platoon and you're like am i really leading this guy or is he kind of just leading right right yeah it's a useful fiction no i'm just kidding no i mean but you know one thing that they always told me is like look if you're going to train your platoon leader, train him the right way because he's going to be your company commander or your battalion commander someday.

And if you don't train him and you treat him like crap or you don't put him under your wing, then you get what you kind of deserve. And so I've seen play out in the military. And I'm not saying, you know, God's gift to leadership, but I certainly was taken under the wing by a ton of guys and did the best I could with their mentorship. You mentioned earlier that even though the 160th is a very high-performing

unit, it's not a zero defect unit. And that makes sense because they're asking you guys to do very difficult things with very expensive equipment. And they can't just throw a guy out because, you know, he's doing, he's like landing between high tension wires for the first time or whatever and tilts a little bit. How do they handle that type of that transition from, you know, going from sort of, I want to say, going from kind of. of a generic thing to being a surgeon, so precise. Yeah, I mean, you have different levels of pilot qualification or crew member qualification, and you're graded.

And that's standard to Army Aviation. You've got this thing called a horse blanket, and they grade you in maneuvers, and you've got a flight records file, and they grade you on every flight, and they sit down and they debrief you. So before every mission, you have a brief in the unit for every one hour of flight. There's four hour planning. So think about sitting in front of a computer and a planning. for that long and you're putting all that work in. And then the debrief after you're sitting down with your co-pilot, you do a crew debrief,

then you do a debrief with the flight, and then you do an overall mission debrief. And so you're getting all this feedback and you're graded on your performance. And there's different levels of pilots. You can be a basic mission qualified pilot. You can be a fully mission qualified pilot or a flight lead. And each one of those tiers takes years to achieve. Wow. So think of, you know, a flight lead in the 160s probably have.

seven to nine years of being in the unit before he can be eligible to be a flight lead. And that's on top of his regular Army experience. So definitely got the best. But zero defect doesn't mean there's room for kind of being lazy. Right, right. People are weeded out of the unit. But it's, yeah, you make that kind of investment in someone. You've got to coach, teach, and mentor them.

And there's definitely a way that, you know, people are assessed and graded. and all those pilots and crew members put an immense amount of pressure on themselves, and so they kind of rise to the top because of their character. So what year was it then when you went to the line platoon? I went to the line platoon in 2008. Okay. August, September of 2008, and I rotated to Iraq in October of 2008, my very first deployment. And so I went over when we had our old aircraft.

We had a previous version, the Echo Model, and I sat in a jump seat. I basically made little to know radio calls, and I just watched for a while, but we did some incredible missions. I mean, really incredible missions, and they made it look easy, and I was confused half the time, but, I mean, look, you're thrown into a six aircraft flight with two DAPs overhead and three assets above. It's definitely an orchestra. Yeah.

But as you do these rotations and you're doing 30, 40, 50 of these missions are rotating, you become very trained to understand what the customer wants, what the stack needs above, how to report or brief a mission and how to properly think through risk management and contingencies. And so I got really good at doing that. Yeah. The team that I was almost really good at doing that. Could you tell us a little bit about, I mean, as far as you can, about some of those operations that you guys did at that time? You know, what was that like?

Now you're there kind of living out your dream, flying with 160, do you think combat? Yeah, I mean, there were sometimes. where we would just do regular missions to a target. And if you think back to the General McChrystal days, we did a lot of attrition on the battlefield and it didn't matter what the personality was, right? It was a strike to develop model. We would go in and we would just nav guys, pick them on, one, two, three, four. And so we did that a lot. We would just go in and pick guys off and, you know, kind of get the information that we could to go on to the next target. But the missions that I truly do remember were the ones where the aircraft operated as an amazing team together.

And the ones that were the most impactful is where we got to really fine-tune our actions with the ground force and with the customer. And so the most impactful mission I was ever on was actually, it wasn't necessarily a successful mission. It was actually a really dangerous mission that ended up in the loss of an aircraft. And I got the opportunity to work with two of the most amazing warriors that I'd ever met my life, which was John Brown and Annie Harville. They're part of the 24th STS, and they both passed away in extortion 117. And this particular rotation to Afghanistan, it was my third or fourth time over there. And I wouldn't say I was seasoned, but I was definitely trained and I could, you know, conduct my mission or my job properly. And the team that I was on

was just incredible. The crew members were incredible, all of them. The pilots were incredible. And we had already started to hit the ground running with this particular team. And so in the 160, you've got guys who ride with you sometimes who perform special tasks. And so John and Andy were on a team that was assigned to us in case aircraft crashed or someone went down and needed to be rescued. And, you know, the PJs and the combat controller. And so we kind of cut our teeth on this rotation when the Air Force's special operations wing had an Osprey crash north of Kandahar. And so it was a very kind of low illumination night. And we were sitting in the jock, you know, waiting on our target hit.

And the Air Force guys had gone out and they were conducting a mission with a customer. And we more or less got the word that they had crashed. And so we had to launch in the middle of the night, zero illumination, really. bad weather, it was raining to a target. We had to fly the systems to the target, land without seeing the ground, which is, it's common. We're trained to do that. But that was my first introduction to that customer set, that level of personality. And so John and Andy went in there, and they saved people's lives. They got people out of that aircraft. And I had a newfound appreciation for those guys. And so I would hang out with them a lot. They're very professional. They

very, they were very tactful in the way that, you know, they operate with us because they're not necessarily a main assault effort, that unit. They do a lot of supporting activities, and sometimes they're attached to main effort. But they really showed their kind of true colors and their grit on another mission, which is the most amazing mission, I think, of cooperation have ever seen between different assets, ground forces, regular conventional army units that I ever had to participate in. It was a mission where we were flying from Kandahar out west to the Argonob River Valley, and it was to go grab some personality. Doesn't matter. I don't remember the guy's name.

And it was on a hot night in the middle of the summer. And we were going to go infill a blocking force. And so a blocking force typically will be infilled off. from the target away from the main location, then they'll maneuver in and they'll either surround it or provide a position that denies the enemy avenues of escape from the main target. So we infilled this force. They maneuvered into the target. And, you know, of course, every bad guy in Afghanistan lives near the water. So this target was on the river. And so we infill the main, we infill the main blocking force and went back to base. This is a two to infill mission to grab the main

effort to infill them right to the X. So blocking force is in position. We pick up the main effort. We're infilling them to the X. So literally the customer steps off the ramp and they're on the front door step going to the to the bad guys house to breach and clear grab them. And at this point, hopefully we're in holding and we're going to come back in and quickly land and we'll get the personality off the target. But inbound of the second infill, the illumination still wasn't great, but dust started to pick up. And the main HLZ that we were going into was very difficult to see for the lead aircraft. And so as we're short final to the target, typically we'll land very close to each other.

As a CHOP 2 pilot, you're looking at CHOC 1, kind of making sure you're landing off to his cues. And we always have alternate HLZs. And so when he was inbound to land, his main HLZ was failed, and he had to flex to the alternate. And so as he flexed to the alternate and came in and landed, he landed on a berm, and the wheels of that aircraft went up into the fuel tanks and completely disabled the aircraft. And so as Matt and I are landing in CHOP 2,

we download our customer, we're having our crew members look over to CHOP 1 to see if they're ready to take off, because usually it's take off and lead order, lead order or by exception, take off after X number of time or whatever the cases. And so he didn't take off and we took off and we looked back over our shoulders, swung our electro-optical sensor around to see what was going on. His blades are spinning down.

And we were like, oh, shit. We think he's shot down or something. I mean, we're on the X here. And so customers, you can see the customer running to the target. And I can't remember if they were shooting or not, but you could definitely see the blade spinning down. And so we kind of went into reaction mode. do what we do best. We did contingency management. My co-pilot, Matt, took control of the aircraft, started flying, and he was making radio calls down to the J-TAC on the ground, and I was making calls back up

to the tackle operations center to kind of see what they were seeing and try to figure it out. And what we found out is that they were completely disabled, had no comms. And so my co-pile and I, with the crew, made the decision to go back in, land and get them out as fast as possible, We'll load up any weapons, load up all the sensitive items. And so we kind of put ourselves between them and the other side of the river. So if you can imagine a river, a landing zone and then the target, while on the other side of the river, they're completely exposed from sniper fire or for some other type of may, you know, supporting effort that saw the crash or whatever to come in.

And so we landed, put ourselves between them and the river and the exposed side. We loaded them all up and we took off back to base. And so there was a 47 on the target. I think probably the first one since Robert's Ridge that we just left there. And a sliver of the support by fire element came over, put an element in front of the aircraft or surrounded the aircraft to protect it. And now we went back to base. And so my immediate efforts were, okay, we got to spare. Let's get the spare loaded.

Let's have maintenance get out there running up to level two. We'll make sure that the aircraft is ready. All the fills are loaded. The radios are good. It's got enough fuel. It's got continuously fuel in it. And so as we're coming back into base, maintenance is just standing by all these trucks. The birds ready to go.

The lights are on. The fills are loaded. The screens are on. And so we get back to base and we download all the crew. We get back into the talk. And at that same point, we had had, I mean, lightning struck twice that night. We had another down aircraft. Oh, wow.

And so we're in the talk. And the commander's looking at half leader number one. And the other half commander wasn't there. And so he was just kind of standing there. And it's like, we have two aircraft. down on a target. What are we going to do? And so I was with our lead maintenance pilot, who was a CW5 tricky, who's just this amazing kind of leader and maintainer and aviator and some senior enlisted guys. And I just said, look, we're going to go get it. We're going to go in. We're going to get

this aircraft. And no matter what it takes, we're going to get this thing back so that it doesn't fall into the hands of the enemy. And so at this point, John and Andy are on the ground on the target. and they have their kind of support team back at base. And we walk out to the aircraft and we load up saws and we load up water and a generator and an ag poo and literally every single thing you could think of to take out there. And we load it up and we flew to the target. And by the time we got to the target, as you could imagine, it's probably late in the evening and the sun was coming up. Yeah. And so I'm in kind of behind our two other pilots.

We're flying at the target. It's a full aircraft of just dudes, right? And they're not assaulters, they're trained, but they're ready to turn wrenches and do whatever is required to get that aircraft off the target. And so as we're landing into the target, the enemy just immediately opens up. All the mini guns start going. The ground force starts shooting across the river, and it turns into a gunfight for a little while. All these maintainers are on the ground with wrenches and saws and tools and their weapons by their side. And so we're just hunkered down in this kind of foxhole waiting, waiting for the fire to drop.

I mean, these guys aren't exposed to this all the time, right? Right. And so Annie and John are on the ground. They set up a perimeter. They've got comms with A10s who are the kind of the close air support aircraft. And also a 58D-Cawe warrior that's on station. So Andy and John are talking to these guys that were taking fire from across the river. And I look up and it's a 58-D Gulf War.

and I was like, I wonder who is in that 58D. And so the reason I remember this mission is because it was one of my college classmates. He was actually in that 58 Delta, his name was Nick. And I looked up and I was like, I bet you, because I knew Nick had just got into country. I met him like two days prior. And I bet you that's Nick because he was in the A-O. And so I see Nick coming up at a crest into a bump, and he is just diving, smoking the dog shit out of this fighting position.

And after that, I just know the fire stopped. And so, you know, I just remember that one moment. I looked to Andy, who is running the stack, and he is just a beast of a guy. He's running 50 ADs in. He's running 8-10s in. And so at this point, the enemy stops. We've got the ground force on the target. They've got the personality off.

They pull the guy off the target. They get him off. They land a DAP. And Dave and some of the guys from the assault unit coming to pick him up. And we're sitting there on this target with the 47. and we don't have like, I wouldn't say we didn't have a ton of experience, but we literally took saws to this aircraft, and you could see like the people at Boeing just crying.

We were cutting blades off. We cut engines off. We cut the probe off. We cut the ramp off. We cut the wheels off. I literally was like, get rid of it. Just cut it. Just cut it.

And so John Brown, who was the PJ at the time, is like, hey, sir, we can get these engines off. I can get them back. And I was like, nope, cut them and leave them. because we were trying to get this aircraft out and the only way to do that is what? Sling loaded, right? Yeah, yeah. So we're trying to eliminate this weight.

And at the same time, we're trying to make sure that the perimeter's secure. And so we set up this big perimeter of a regular army unit come in from the south to help us. And we're at this point where most of the stuff is out of the aircraft. And so if you think of the Chinook,

it's just got these two big pods on the side, these two big fuel bladders, right? And so I'm at this point where I'm like, what's the last thing we can do to reduce weight? Because it's really hot out. And so things that affect helicopters are weight and temperature and airspeed and altitude and all these things. And so I just said, all right, we got to drain the fuel out of the aircraft. And so, I mean, you're draining this fuel and it's basically like a firecracker ready to go off. And so I have Charlie, who's one of our maintainers, go over. He dumps the drain fuel on both of the fuel tanks

and the fuel starts to come out. And so I remember as he's taking the fuel out, I look over, and this dude pops up out of nowhere with an RPG and just clicks it off. Great tortoise. I'm like, I just saw my life flash before my eyes. All the guys, their eyes were really wide and they were looking, and this thing, you know, kind of went off into the distance, and I just ran over to the berm. I went safe to semi, everyone enmassed over on this berm. And I remember looking over at Andy Harville, who was, again, just this. beast of a guy and he was ready to walk over and just go down into this little kind of it was a

Kores system which is a cave cave system or like a tunnel system and this dude had came up clacked it off and went down the down the hole and so we almost ended the whole mission right there and he had come in through a cave system into the perimeter underneath the ford kind of they're uh they're underwater aqueducts right yeah i mean there there there's some type of like aqueduct system sometimes they dig them out themselves. And so if you're there for a century and you have, you know, everyone's coming to fight, you kind of have an escape route. And so, I mean, we're just, at this point, we're taking, we're taking fire from this location and then we take sniper fire from across the river. And so I go to Andy and I'm like, you need to bring everything that you have into the stack and start

having them do shows of force, low pass. So he called up an A10 and this A10 came down and literally was below our eye level in the river, just doing these low passes. And after that, for the next five or six hours, we didn't have any problems. So it's midday at this point. We've got all of the fuels outside of the aircraft, all the sensitive items,

and now our maintainers are starting to remove the blades at this aircraft. And so Charlie and George and these other guys are up on the top of the aircraft, and they're sawing a rotor blade off of the aircraft with this saw from Home Depot, And I think they went through seven or eight blades. Wow. And so Charlie and George are up there cutting these blades off and we start to take fire again. And they can't hear the fire. So they're still cutting the blades off while we're under fire.

And I'm trying to get him down and they're like, we're almost done, we're almost done. And so they saw these blades off. They fall to the ground and we get in this foxhole. And it's just like this continuous back and forth with the enemy for hours. So long story short is, you know, that was midday and we couldn't get extraction. And so we ended up remaining over, remaining over day through the rest of the night. And the next morning, a CH and MH53 Marine Corps aircraft comes in, lands next to the aircraft. And I remember we had these blue lines pulled up.

They were on the main rotor system, the rotorhead. And they were pulled up to a central point. And I walked in, and there was one crew chief and two pilots. And I walked up into the cockpit. And I looked over and it was a lieutenant colonel who was flying. And I looked down at his name tape, his little flight badge, and his call sign was, his call sign was the shit. That was his call sign. And so this dude, I go on there and I give him the thumbs up.

I give him we're hooked up. And so he's like, get the fuck out of. We've got to go. So he picks it up. And this 53 stresses to the max. And these guys take off. And when you take a sling load, if it starts to go in any direction, I mean, the first thing is just punch it. And so those guys didn't punch it.

They stuck with it. and they ended up getting that aircraft all the way back to base, and they set it down in some pallets. They saved it, rescued the aircraft. And right behind the 53 was our brothers who had had the other two aircraft back at base, came and loaded us up with the ground force and got us back to base safely. And so it was the highlight of my career, not just because we made it out, but because I had the best maintainers, we had the best pilots,

We had the best folks back in the talk helping us. But more importantly, that customer that we were serving, the customer that we had with us, John and Andy, who perish on extortion 1-7, I mean, they were just incredible. They did their job. They performed excellently. They were just shining examples of what a stellar operator should look like. And every August or so, we the unit cheers and toast to those guys

because those moments we had. That must have been. Long story, but that was my most impactful mission. And it wasn't just a one-person effort. was a team effort. And you had guys maintainers, you had medics, you did everyone. It was like this orchestra. And even though shit went wrong, like we still made it out of there and we turned it into a successful mission that that aircraft didn't fall into the hands of the enemy. And it was back in Afghanistan six months later. And that's a true testament to Boeing and Lockheed and the graybeard's

back at Fort Campbell who just built this thing back on a laser stand within three to four months. That's amazing. What was that experience like for you? having, you know, you're the pilot, but now you're experiencing everything that the customers experience from the extraction, the close air support, all of that. I mean, as an Army aviator, you, you, you're, it's hard to say you can, you can be a leader. There are aspects of you being a leader, but most of being an aviator is, is very upfront oriented. And when you get to lead from the front like that, I just, I don't know, something about it just felt natural to me and I wanted to rise to the challenge and prove my medal. And I just raised my hand

and said, send me. It's hard. I don't care what happens. This is important for the customer. We get this aircraft back. There's only so many of them. And that was the mission. And I just said, look, we've got to do it. We've got another aircraft down. That thing ain't making it out for sure. Yeah. And so I said, look, we got the right team and it's worth the risk. And we're not going to let those bastards on the ground take it and turn it into some kind of video. So we just want to do it. That's amazing. And at this point, it sounds like this was like what your fourth or fifth deployment. Like you were pretty salty at this point. Yeah, I was halfway through my time in the unit.

That was 2010, and then I left the line after that. Unfortunately, well, not unfortunately, but I had this kind of capstone event in my Army career. And then they were like, all right, you did really good at this now. You have to move on to your next job, which is characteristic of the Army. So I went to maintenance for a while. what I did when I was in the maintenance company is we established an entire training program to train people how to cut aircraft up and how to do that profile successfully. And so we got new equipment.

We got new training standards. We would pick cars up from the junkyard and take it out on the shock pad or the range on Fort Campbell. And we would do everything from cutting cars up to triage to sling loads everything. And believe it or not, we had another aircraft that got damaged three or four or five months later and they went in there and crushed it. Yeah. It learned all the mistakes we made. They went in there and they had all the training standards, had the right equipment.

And they shine and made it look easy. No more Home Depot plades? No. No. I mean, at the end of it, like, when you're an aviator, you don't get a lot of the ground force kit. So you kind of just got to figure it out. And so I had fashioned a aviator night vision mount to my helmet halfway through the mission it cracks.

And so I'm out there without MVGs. or they're crooked. And so I just took 100 mile an hour tape and wrapped it around my dome. And just saw I'm walking around like the biggest asshole you have ever seen. And it's like, are these my men? Is this Charlie Company? Yeah. They fixed all that.

And so I think, you know, success comes from failure. And that's how the entire, you know, formulation of J-Soc and special ops came to be. And the unit's done amazing in that task since then. And it's because the guys just ran with it. And it's rare in the military, particularly in the Army, to see support crew or support staff, whatever support they offer, that motivated and that professional. And I don't mean that always, but generally you're not going to get guys from the motor team. We're super motivated. Yeah, coming out to do a mission like that.

You know what I mean? It sounds like even your maintenance guys were just. just gung home. I mean, I think one officer, I think, said it best. And that was the RCO at the time was Colonel Mangum, who's now retired, I think he was a three star. And he said, your proximity to the target doesn't define your worth to the mission. Yeah. So they just always stuck with me. And he, he was a great leader and kind of inculcated that in the rest of the unit. And so if you had a pay problem, that guy attacked it like it was his number one priority. Or if you needed to get, fuel down to the range to go do gunnery.

Those guys were there on time, on target. Equipment was laid out, rolled up, ready to go. And that's how the unit operated. And that's what the customer expected. Yeah. Yeah. And to be fair, a lot of times, like, support people aren't treated the best either. But it sounds like for you guys, they were, they were the team.

They were part of the team. No matter who they were, was the S-1 or, you know, the motor pool, or not the motorpool, but the maintenance. I had a wise warrant officer, Pete. who used to be a former Major League Baseball player and just was called to like come into the army and he made his way to special ops, a physical specimen. And he said, look, we're going to beat you up in this unit.

He goes, but when it leaves this room, your family and we're all family together and when we're in front of the customer working. Yeah. So I just always remembered that. And, you know, again, not zero defect, but you just didn't want to let your family. Right.

You mentioned that. that they landed on the X, you know, and for people who don't know, like landing on the Y, the offset is generally a terrain feature away and walking to the target and then landing on the X is right on the target. Was it always the customer that decided that? Or would you guys ever say there's just like no place on the X to put you guys? I mean, I think we're there to support the customer's maneuver plan, but at the same time, Enmi has a boat.

And so I always took a keen interest in budding up to the entire. officer looking at the service to air fire threat reports looking at human reporting and we would go the flight lead would typically lays with the ground force and figure out how to best support the maneuver plan yeah sometimes it wasn't always the best plan to go to the go right to the target yeah maybe it was better to land 10 kilometers away and they walk in yeah catch the enemy by surprise and so not everything is as shock and awe as you think all the time I mean sometimes just good old fashion sneak up on them. Yeah. And I think a lot of people realize that in certain areas in Afghanistan, especially because they would have, they'd have posts, you know, throughout the mountains who would just

radio ahead whenever they'd hear a helicopter. So by the time you got to the target, yeah. Yeah, I remember on a particular mission, we had six ships, four Chinooks, two little birds, and we're inbound into this kind of more or less funnled, funnalled canyon area. And as you turn, you know, the last two check points in, the substation power just goes on and off. And it's like, all right, they know we're here. And then as soon as it comes back on, the entire skylights up. And you're like, that's 10 point, that's 15 points of origin. Now there's RPGs. Yeah. So they've got a sophisticated early warning system. I mean, they're not stupid, but they just don't have as advanced equipment. You know, unfortunately, sometimes, like in the case of extortion 17, they get a boat and they get

lucky and it happens. Charlie Kane said, hey, Alex, tell them what the guy said when we were sitting in the hole. He'll have to tell you about that one. I can't say that one on the air, but I mean, Charlie, Charlie was on the mission with me and he was that guy up top cutting the aircraft apart. And that aircraft wouldn't have made it out if it wasn't for Charlie. So Charlie, thanks for tuning in, man.

And I miss you. We need to catch up. and you're the reason that mission was a success, brother. What are some of the other, you know, missions that stand out in your mind, whether it's because they're particularly hairy or they're challenging, just dicey, ones that went down that you executed or once that you were part of the planning process for? What are some of the ones that stand out for you? Yeah, I think anytime you remove your element of surprise or your advantage due to technology,

your tactics. It becomes a level playing field. And so one of the things that we always had difficulty with was keeping to the TTPs that we knew were going to lead to a successful XFL. And the main one was do not X-Fill at dawn. Do not X-Fill during daylight hours. Like, come up. And the other one was, don't X-Fell from the same place you influx. And so sometimes there's just an easy button and people just got used to nightstockers being able to just kind of do it. And so that was very difficult. And there are missions that we shouldn't have returned from because we did daylight hot X-vills. And, you know, look, if the customer says X-Phil, X-ville, X-will, we're going to the target no matter what.

It doesn't matter the threat. We're going inbound. And you can kind of see that same type of rationale with Operation Red Wings. And we played that mission out all the time. And, you know, although it was frustrating, we don't leave the ground force behind. And we would have serious hot washes after the fact. And so those are typically hairy, right? everyone's up, there's early warning points, they can see you now, you don't have the element of surprise, your night vision isn't on, and now you're this big black school bus of death coming and mounted the target.

And so if you want to take a shot at it, go ahead, but it's got two mini guns up front and 2240 bravas in the back with almost 10,000 rounds of firepower on that beast. And so the only guys who saved us with two guys is our crew chiefs, left side and right side gunners. And then the 58 deltas, the Little Bird pilots, the DAPs, and the A10s. And on one particular mission, I mean, you want to talk about Harry, 50 ADs took fire, and the A10s took fire on the tub up front. So that's how close they were. And we were lucky to make it out and get the ground force out. But, yeah, it's taking away your element of surprise.

Your advantage usually leads to a level playing field. Yeah. So you did quite a few hot extractions, it sounds like. Yeah, we did a lot. A lot of night, a lot of day. Most of the time in Africa, well, I'm sure it's the same in Iraq. I didn't have as many experience hot exfil experiences in Iraq as I did in Afghanistan. But anytime you're near a water source, it's typically bad guy hangout lane, right? And so they got to the point where they were using some advanced, you know, techniques to kind of find us or at least they knew what our procedures were. And, So they would wait for us to land, load up. And then they were like maximum damage. And they didn't care where they were shooting. They would just fire into the air.

And there were some missions where you're literally in and out of this fire. RPGs and you're trying to just get around it, a flight of three. And at that point, it's just like, it doesn't matter. Multiple guns are Winchester. The crew chiefs are shooting their sidearms out of their M4s out the window. You got a medic shooting through the bubble. You got guys in the ramp shooting. And yeah, I mean, there are times like that where you're just.

just like, holy shit, it's whatever it takes to get out of you. Does the sky? That point, it's like, just head to the mountains was a radio call that was made famous in the unit. Take the wheels, Jesus. Does the sky feel really small when that's going on? Yeah, I remember a couple times where things just kind of slow down and you're like, man, there is no way out of these laser beams.

And we had a 21 points of origin one time, which is 21 different locations that are shooting at you. some of it was PKM, AK-47, heavy machine gun fire, Dishkas, which are flaming footballs. And so you're going through all of this. And I just remember one time a flaming football came in between my feet on the left side of the aircraft. And it shot up underneath my feet. It was an RPG. And I was just like, I looked up and I was just like, oh, there it goes. Everything slowed completely down.

And that was the mission that made famous head to the mountains. And so everyone was just pulling the guts out of the aircraft. Yeah. And so we land back at base and this was, this was like a Jackie Dam mission, which is just a giant shit hole. We get back to base and the only aircraft that took around was my aircraft. And it cracked, it cracked the equivalent of a taillight on the bottom part of the helicopter, which is like a cargo light, just chipped off the filament. I'm slightly standing there and I'm like, we fucking made it. How did that happen?

And so that was one of my earlier rotations and, you know, I was just excitable. I was junior and the enlisted guys looked at me and they were like, you want to get taped to the probe, sir? You want to get your head shaved. You know, it's funny, though, they're feeling it too. They're just not going to say it. Like, you know, when you're like the kind of the salty dog, like the shit gets to you too, you just like pretend it doesn't.

Yeah. You're going to fake it. Yeah, I flew that particular mission with Pete, the the MLB player and he just kind of looked at me and was like, Alex, it's just another mission. Maybe for you. So, yeah, I mean, you know, you go through rotations like that where you're doing a 45 to 50 day clip and you've got 15 or 20 in them. Sometimes there's none on rotations, but the majority of them when I was in Kandahar were like that. aircraft getting shot down on fire, crash landings, customers injured on the target,

multiple Kazavak, Mascal, doing hot ex-fills, and you don't have overhead air support, where you do have air support, and they go Winchester. I mean, that place like the Wild West, the only thing that got us out was the tribe and the training. Now, it's interesting. For people who think they know what a helicopter ride is like, you know, like a tour ride that you might take around New York or whatever. Flying, flying tactically is,

is completely different because they're flying, you know, close to the ground, they're flying, you know, between canyons and balls out. And Jack and I could tell you what it feels like to be in the bird. It's like the best roller coaster ride ever.

But what is it like flying like that? When, when you're under fire like that and you're hit, you know, you're just moving. Yeah, I mean, I think the first time I ever took fire,

I was, I was flying with, the CW5. And I was actually in Chalk 3. Chalk 1 and 2 were the main infill and exf birds, and I was in a QRF bird. So I had Rangers in the back in case the shit hit the fan. And, you know, so I was kind of the new guy, but I had a season W5, which is the highest level of worn-offs you can be.

And so I was more or less on probation as usual for the first couple of rotations. And Chalk 2 had some type of like maintenance issue. And so I became number two. came number three. And so my really good friend Art ended up bumping over to be the QRF pilot, who was a season special forces dude. And we go into X, X, Fyl this customer. And if you're ever on a helicopter and you hear Xville, Xville, XVil, that means get your ass to the target now. And so we are pulling the guts out of this Shunup to get to this target. I'm flying with this guy named Kevin, and he's just this old salty bastard, and he's pulling the guts out of it. And I'm, you know,

doing the best I can to, you know, to kind of keep up. And he's, we're trading off flying and making radio calls and arts behind. And he's kind of up in a way, much higher position. And as we come into land, the customers like, more or less we're surrounded, heavy machine gun fire, PKM, Dishka, RPG positions, located, like, we need to get out of her immediately. And so we land, and I'm in down to the target and I don't see anything. And I'm like, what's going on? This isn't that bad, right? I'm like, you know, junior at this point. So we land. We upload. the aircraft Chalk one takes off

and again Pete's in this aircraft and they just start to get smoked I mean PKM Dishka RPGs and so they're taking off and I'm over here just kind of pulling power and arts up over here and he's like oh shit I'm glad I'm out on that fucking aircraft

and so we pick up and we just dip her heads above the tree line and I'm in the right seat and I say I write down 1 o'clock engage and he just starts to rip in the mini into this fighting position and Kevin the season and the season pilot takes the stick, yanks it completely over.

We bank our aircraft and go into this tree top maneuver, like this roller coaster, right? And we're watching Pete up here, just get his bag smoked. And we join up outside of the RP, and we're like, Pete, you all right, man? He's like, yeah, we're fine. What's up? Dude, you did not see that show. I just saw. And art in the way above, like the circle cap over here is just like, we thought all of you guys were done. So yeah, I mean, there's moments where you're flying like that and you've got that experience. But most of the time, we try to provide a smooth ride to the customer.

It's all very well playing. Air speeds are playing down to the target. We try to land softly so that you guys don't land and your goggles don't fall off or you fall down. And, you know, we get it right 99% of the time. And so usually if you're in the back and you fuel that roller coaster, some shit's hitting the family. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any funny experiences with customers,

be they operators are more likely a bunch of rangers in the back of your helicopter, doing some silly stuff? Yeah, I mean, the crew members and the Rangers played a lot of jokes. One time I got zip tied to my chair and they left me in there for about five hours. So that was a lot of fun. The customer part took on that one. Sometimes they would tape their platoon leaders to stretchers and they would shave their head. So you'd see the new Ranger PL in his first deployment.

He'd be taped to a stretcher and they'd be shaving his head. And, you know, they'd come over and like, hey, sir, you want to, you want to shot at this? And I was like, fuck, yeah, I want to shot. So, I mean, you developed this kind of bond with the ground force. And, you know, we rotated a ton and we would see guys overseas a lot and they would rip in and rip out. And you became family with those guys too. And you knew everyone was kind of first name. It didn't matter what your rank is.

And so you just became this tribe. you know, that's the toughest part about leaving, leaving the community is you walk out that gate and you turn around and you're like, hey, I forgot something at my desk and they're like, who are you? So it's a very, it's a very unforgiving tribe once you leave and you keep not all, you keep some of the relationships, but not all of them. Yeah. Yeah. How did you guys maintain your, your mission status with sort of the high risk missions that you were flying. Did you just have enough parts, birds, and reserve? Did you ever have to borrow from the regular army?

Not really. The answer is no. I mean, we're the most well-funded aviation outfit in the military. And so it was never, it never really came down to not having parts. It came down to juggling the maintenance status. aircraft, right? And so let's say you're overseas and you have an aircraft that's crashed, right? Okay, all of a sudden we have to replace that with something that is back in the United States. And so there was always this kind of shuffle, right? I mean, these things don't grow on trees.

You just have five MH47s laying around. And so as this aircraft crashes on the target, and I see my sister company have one down on the target, I'm like, well, fuck, these things don't grow on trees. Like, this is a strategic asset. Right. And you got to get it out. And so there was a lot of like baseball card trading within the entire regiment like trading aircraft and parts intermingling of that and the maintenance guys between all the companies and the battalion are just amazing like you could it wasn't it wasn't us first them if you're in a company and you're like hey man we got to go out to do this mission and we need a bird can we borrow a bird and they're like yep and so they would give us a aircraft where if you're i don't know what the

regular army is like but i can guarantee you like company commander x who's trying to get a good OER you are, wouldn't do that for company commander why. Right. I'm just saying, I don't know like the, you know, necessarily the politics of that, but you could imagine if you're in an under, you know, you're not an especially selected and well-trained unit, what that could look like because these things do not grow in trees. Yeah.

Now, all that to say, we were very well funded and, you know, we weren't having to pinch, you know, pinch dollars for fuel points when we would go fly. Yeah. We had almost unlimited resources, but look, you've got that type of mission set. The customer needs to get to the target. Yeah, it's, I mean, helicopter pilots are a very special breed, I think. And I think, you know, even historically, like in Vietnam and whatnot, you know, it's one thing to be on the ground and be engaged in a fight. It's another thing to fly in a huge target into the middle of an active firefight and just have the stones to stay calm, you know,

and do the things that need to be done in those moments. Yeah, I mean, I think you know, just like the both of you know, when you get that 10, 6, 3, and one call inbound to a target, you get that three-minute call, your stomach starts to jump a little bit. And it's the same for us up front, except you guys can't see the shit inbound of the target. And so I'm like, oh, fuck, this is what's about to happen, especially on infill when they do the early warning signals.

And the city lights go on and off, and you're like, you know, I'll tell the ground force, hey, the enemy knows we're here. It looks like we've got several points of origin and amount of the target. Your main HLZ has got this. Look at the, you know, look at your technology feed or whatever and, you know, adjust. Yeah. I mean, in a firefight, you can, you know, presumably take cover. When you're flying into it, a hot LZ, you don't have that luxury.

Yeah, I never really, I never necessarily got afraid for getting shot at. just because I knew that the crew chiefs were the best in the business. What I was more afraid of was fucking up the landing. That's what really made. That's what I was scared of is I want to do my job right. I want to make sure I land this like a feather and I didn't do that all the time. But I want to make sure I hit my target on time and puts the customer in the best position, best position to prosecute the target.

And so that's really what I was nervous about. And yeah, sometimes when you're getting shot out or you see it flying, yeah, you're nervous about that too. but I just, I wanted to do my job right. Yeah. A couple viewer questions here. Ungato, thank you. Jerry, apart from SBS, S-B-S-A-S-S-D. Did you cooperate with any SF units from Europe?

We did a lot of multinational training exercises overseas. And those were some of the best times that I had in the unit outside of combat. And a part of projecting combat power from the United States is helping our partners. And the way that we do that is resource them, train them, and provide support to them. And so my most favorite mission that I ever did that was outside of combat was actually in Croatia. And we were there with Polish, Polish guys, Lithuanians, the Croatians were there, Romanians were there. And so we did just a lot of kind of FID type stuff, foreign internal defense, but utilizing SF units on the ground and teaching these guys how to kind of load aircraft. fast rope. And so we did some pretty cool stuff. I mean, we would, we launched to the coastline of

Croatia. It was absolutely beautiful. And, you know, it was just a different, it was a different month trip, right? You got to go over and you weren't getting shot at and you got to experience kind of the local economy. We went out and we had drinks and we had the local food. And, you know, when you're in the army, you don't always get to do that, right? It's like, you're lucky for getting a fucking MRI and, you know, maybe you'll get a hot shower and pilots aren't necessarily any, you know, you know, treated any differently, except for crew rest. But, you know, on this, this particular, this particular trip, it was kind of the Wild West. And so we had these Lithuanian guys there, and they didn't have any equipment. And so we're staged on the coastline. We're loading them up.

They've got, I think they had seal handlers on this particular mission. And we were going to do a BBSS, like a takedown of like a ship or something. And so we got these guys loaded up in the back and it's daytime and typically you'll do some rehearsals and you know before you go do a mission like in any army unit so we're flying out on the coastline and we've got this curation guy sitting in the jump seat and I'm like all right you know I can't remember his name what just call him Paulo Paulo where are we going he's like pick and I'm like what do you mean pick he's like pick a ship I'm like what do you can pick a ship he's like yeah pick one of these cruise liners out here we'll go take it down we're flying out and we see this this ferry boat with

people on it with cars on he's like yeah go ahead and take that so we come up and we land and the ship is going like this right and we're just hovering right over it and we're fast roping dudes onto this boat and the lithuanian guys get up there and they go to fastrope and guess what they don't have in their hands gloves we don't got gloves no way these boys these boys fast roped to this target without gloves on and they had boots and the boots they didn't with They weren't on the right boots and they didn't know how to fast rope. So literally, some of these guys just had their hands. They didn't have the footbreak or nothing.

And so I'm sitting in the jump seat in this mission. I'm just looking down and these dudes are just burning it. And so, you know, later I find out that there's, you know, that there were actually role players on this ship and the Croatians were pulling our legs. And so it was just, it was a great all-round trip. I work with every single, you know, partner nation you could. And that's, that's very typical of, you know, the military. you've got regular army units in Europe doing that kind of training stuff right now.

So that was the most fun was Croatia. I would go back. It was an amazing place. And most of my funny stories and memories from being an army are from that trip. Brendan asks any Australian deployments. I never went to Australia and I never supported them as a customer. But they are badasses too. I mean, they go through, the SAS guys go through a rigorous selection and training process.

SAS and SPS guys. And so that wasn't necessarily a customer I ever really supported. But I've always wanted to go to Australia. Those guys are definitely top-notch. Jackson asks, did you ever work with FBI hostage rescue team? Not really going to address that one. We work with a variety of different customers, and we went to targets. And a lot of that included enablers that helped us perform the ground forces main

mission. Sure. I'll, I mean, I'll just say something that maybe, uh, for my own sake, like I was on operations in Iraq where we had HRT enablers, if that helps answer the question. Um, I also got to he said, cheers. Thank you very much, ma'am. Yeah, of course. Um, so how many trips, with the 47, how many trips did you, did you do in, over like how many yeah tours did you do it was nine or ten trips um that i did overseas um but that was pale in comparison to how much i was on the road back home um i don't remember nine 10 11 and 12th i don't remember my kid being born i remember one time feeding her at night which is kind of sad actually um and i'm working on you know repairing that kind of memory set as i think

most guys in the community are, but I was totally focused on the unit. Yeah. I volunteered for every mission. If there was a shortfall, I would go. And so I was on the road all the time, all over the United States. And that's because of the tribe. I mean, you just, you didn't want to be like left out. Right. I did a lot of, I did a lot of trips to the coast. I did a lot of mountain trips. And when I was in command, I just, I was, I tried to leap from the front. I tried to do everything hard that the men were doing. And so I tried to go on every trip. It didn't matter the aircraft or the location.

So I was gone a lot. And, you know, my family, you know, had to pick up the slack. Yeah. For that. Yeah. And then, yeah, I mean, there's something the Jack and I've talked about with other people, how, you know, people,

I want to say guys, but generally people in, in this profession and these communities, there's a, like, everybody will say, thank you for your service, but there's also a selfish desire that drives it. We love what we do. We're living out our dreams, and people get left behind when we do that. Yeah, I mean, I was pretty lucky that I didn't lose anyone under my command or when I was in the unit, but the John Brown and Annie Harville thing was just really tough. Yeah. It was tough for the crazy horse, I think, because we had spent a lot of time with those guys overseas. And I mustered up

the courage one year to call John's widow. And it was just a difficult conversation. And at least in my part, she was very thankful. But I just wanted to let her know that the best times of my life were spent with some of his last moments. Yeah. And that's really hard to think about sometimes. Yeah. And those guys weren't, they weren't Army guys.

I mean, right? They were in our, they were part of the big tribe, right? But, you know, you become so close with the customer that, man, mainly. it just hurts to hear that kind of shit. It's really striking. I mean, how many people were affected by the extortion 1-7 crash. And like I keep coming in my travels, keep coming across more and more people, just the collateral damage, all the people who were killed on that crash.

But then how it affected other guys, their friends, their teammates, the kind of dark paths that it led other people down after the fact. It was just really sad. And I mean, it's impossible to, like, like underscore or downplay, how big a event that was on the entire special operations community, I think is what I'm trying to get at. Yeah, I mean, that was definitely a tough day.

But, I mean, like I said before, the enemy gets a vote and sometimes they get lucky. And, you know, that RPG hit just in the right spot and that blade and it just sent it out of balance and it ate itself. Yeah. And something you think about as a Chinook pilot, that's probably the most least survivable aircraft. And so that's the weight that you carry, right? You got 45 to 40 operators in the back and you put them in the wrong spot.

And there's a lot of people who are devastated by that particular event. So I'm just fortunate I had to live, you know, personally one-to-one live through that or lose any guys. Yeah. So what was it like for you, Alex, then as you begin kind of like progressing in your career, now you're getting more senior and you're becoming in command, what was that experience like, some of those latter deployments? Yeah, I mean, once you leave the line company, you start taking different roles, the mission changes for you.

And so this machine that is the 160th has so many other cogs that you just don't see as a customer to keep it running. And so I left the maintenance company after being on the line for two and a half or so years. And I went over to the training battalion. And I was the very first company commander of this flight detachment or this company that turned into a battalion and then was reorganized to actually have captains as company commanders. And so I was a flight company commander and I had 48 aircraft assigned to me, which is a very large responsibility. But I had, again, back to kind of the roots of when I went to the unit, the guys who are in training and the civilians that are on the compound are a lot of guys who retired,

like early Afghanistan guys, Black Hawk Down guys, these legends, right? And so I kind of went back to back to my roots. And I wanted to, you know, pass on the lessons that I have learned, you know, from my time overseas back until, you know, know, to the aviators and the crew members that were coming in. So I was on the road as much as possible. And I did some pretty amazing thing with that company. We did shipboard operations. We did, we had an aircraft that crashed one time. We did a big sling load operation. And so you don't have the line company guys there to do these things with you. And so you're literally taking these new night stalkers and giving them this amazing on the job training. And it's because you have these people

there with you that are so experienced. And so your proximity from the target changes, but it doesn't change your worth to the mission. And so that's really what always stuck with me. And so again, I had a very different memory career. I was going up from my promotion to major and I hadn't gone through to the captain career course yet. Because I was like, I am not leaving this place. I'm not leaving the island. If I leave the island, I'm getting forgotten about. And so I stayed all the way to the last minute possible. And so I went to the career course. when I was being looked at for my board, and I didn't know if I was coming back to the island. And so that was a painful six months for me, just not knowing what, you know, the laydown

or the officer Manning roster looked like. And that was kind of my first, um, eye-opening experience to, hey, my life isn't at Fort Campbell forever as an officer. You hit the 10 year mark. You're floating out to other jobs that require staff time. And that was really a crossroads in my career. I was lucky enough to come back to the unit and I was a liaison officer to the Ranger Regiment for a year. And I was promoted early and I was basically told that I had to move to Savannah and to other locations. And my wife at the time was in the country music business. And I just couldn't afford to economically, number one, and to family wise. I hadn't seen them for literally years.

And so I made a difficult decision to get out of the unit and go pursue other endeavors. What was that like? I mean, obviously a hard decision, but what was your transition like into civilian life? Yeah, it was interesting. You know, you think people when they leave or when civilians, when you leave the military and they look at you, you know, they're like, man, you know, you, thank you for your service. But, you know, what skills do you really have to offer to the outside world? Like, you could probably march around with a rifle and a K-pot on your head and that's about it, right? Right. And you try to tell them these stories and a. tactful manner of what I've just kind of laid out here tonight in a way that's understandable and they just don't get it. Right. And so I owe a lot of my early success in finding a job to a seal who is actually in Nashville. His name is Judd. He's now, I think he was a West Coast seal. A great, a great kind of community guy who found my resume through kind of a friend. And I had a job.

before I left the unit. Wow. And he was an entrepreneur after he left the SEAL teams. He's very successful. I has many businesses now and is just a super awesome guy. And he made one phone call and I had a job or had an interview. And I went in and I interviewed for the governor's economic cabinet of Tennessee. And so I represented the governor in any aerospace endeavor that was focused on recruiting businesses of Tennessee.

So think about SpaceX moving to Texas or think about, you know, Blue Origin or Boeing, setting up headquarters in other locations. That became my mission. And so I transitioned to this job where I traded the uniform for a suit. And I was going to trade shows and meeting CEOs and having lunch with the CEO of Gulfstream. And it was just it was a different tribe at the time. And they were 18. I mean, the TNECD was the 18. And they were ranked, you know, number one, two, three.

always competing against these other amazing states for these kind of projects. And so I went from one tribe to another. And so I didn't have that kind of transition depression. Yeah. You see some guys have. Yeah. So I just said, look, I got to dedicate myself to this job, but I also know that I probably need to get educated again. And so I looked all over anywhere I could scour to find a way to get a graduate degree.

And I looked at a couple. I looked at full-time programs, I looked at executive programs. But the one I landed on was this global MBA program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And it was unbelievable. The state sponsored me to do this MBA, and I would travel summer in the world every quarter. And, you know, Zoom wasn't super popular at that time or kind of in use. But I was doing Zoom classes three, four times a week for two hours at a time. And I earned my MBA while I was working a full-time job.

And the state sponsored me to travel. So when I would go to the Farm Borough Air Show in the UK, my business school was in France doing a trip or in Budapest or in Buenos Aires or whatever. And so I had just amazing stories with that tribe all over the world. And it didn't kind of hit me until I had left TNECD and went into corporate America that I was like, oh, I really don't know kind of my identity. Right. I don't know what I'm supposed to. I don't know my mission. Right.

And so that was really difficult for me for a number of years. And that's how I kind of landed on entrepreneurship. And so when I got out of the military, I had this concept of starting a business to protect people in their homes from intrusions. And I was on a deployment in 2012 and we had just built a house in Nashville and my next door neighbor had a break. And I was like, we have got to stop. I mean, this is unreal. Like overseas, we have to breach and clear these houses. is like, why can't we fortify our homes?

Right. I just had this idea after going into so many compounds overseas and also going into, you know, to embassies and safe houses and on base, why can't we take that embassy barrier gate that pops up out of the ground and miniaturize it? And so that was my first invention. I invented this wedge-based locking mechanism that prevented break-ins. And now we have multiple product lines that are focused on preventing intrusions into homes. So think of a floor-based,

locking system that pops a little wedge up. You invented that? I've seen that. That's crazy. Yeah, I invented that. I was on Shark Tank. We took the idea of Shark Tank in 2018. But our real mission was to protect students in classrooms and schools. And so I knew nothing about manufacturing. I knew nothing about injection molding. Printed circuit boards, firmware, software, the app store, nothing. And so I just set out on this mission to make it my goal to build this product to protect people. And so, you know, for good or bad, sleepless nights, I poured myself into building this product.

And now we now we have multiple residential products. We've got a commercial product that will work in any commercially two-inch-trained room, classrooms, churches, synagogues, CEOs, and we're partnering with the world's largest security company delivering a product called IQ lockdown that prevents active shooters from getting into classrooms. That's amazing. What's the name of your company? You mind if we plug it? Yeah, the name of my company is Havenlock. Our website is Havenlockdown.com.

That's our commercial product website. And our biggest customer is Johnson Controls. And we are in 30 institutions, seven states now. We're on a Navy base. We're in a courthouse. We're in sheriff's offices. We're in multiple schools, classrooms, universities. It's just kind of multiplying at this point.

And we launched our flagship product with them in March of this year. And so if you think about preventing someone from getting into a room, that's not enough, right? We want to prevent, detect, and notify. And so in the case of, you know, an active shooter event, we want to prevent him from getting into that room. We want to detect it. And then we want to send a notification from that device to a main panel. And so my product does that. It will prevent him from getting in and then tell the first responders what room he's at based on vibrations being sensed in the locking mechanism.

That's amazing. Now, are you still doing any residential? stuff do you still have residential products yeah we sell residential products online um on our website but most of our efforts are focused on commercial it's it's a bigger market sure opportunity bigger mission set and you know when i go i do i still i'm on the road all the time i go out with my customers i was on the road this last week i went to uvaldi i went to del rio i went to comstocks in antonio and i just i sit with customers and i just listen to their problems and their lives have changed. You know, walking into Yuvaldi last week or three days ago, you know, you bump into,

you bump into a table and people are shell-shocked. And that's my mission now is to make sure that people have this peace of mind at work, church, home, school, or at the office. And technology can be a part of that. It's not everything. But, you know, that's our new mission. And technology has a role in that, and so does training. And if you don't have the training, the technology is worthless. And so there is a group of veterans from many companies out there. Zeroize is one of them, founded by a seal. They focus on kind of AI video weapons detection. You've got a company called ASR that does panic buttons that's centrally monitored. That's another seal, seal based and known company. You've got Haven that's certainly in that mix. And you've got

a whole host of other companies that are just focused on this problem set, veterans. and they want to change the world by making people safer back here in the United States. Yeah. So if any of you have any purchasing power or influence over those with purchasing power and any kind of commercial endeavor, make sure you check out Haven Lockdown. And you can buy some great stuff for your home, right? Also. Yeah.

Yeah, you can go to our residential website, Havenlock.com, and find that stuff there too. You know, that's our new mission, and that's what keeps me up at night, is making sure that we take care of those customers. So you take that mindset from the tribe and you take it over to this new mission, and that's what my team is focused on. It's interesting because, you know, we've talked about, you know, we've talked about these problems on previous shows. And, you know, it's what would be, what would you estimate it would cost

is somebody we're going to kid out of school with your equipment. Yeah, I mean, it depends on how many rooms they have and what their budget is, what their training philosophy is, how many SROs they have. You know, certainly hardening an entire location like you would a jock or a tactical operation center just isn't cost effective. And so we do needs-based assessments and we say, look, you should protect X number of rooms in this hallway with this type of technology and our lock. and we couple those together, and you should have a good training plan. But it's reasonably priced, and it's all based on the needs of the customer. And so you can't do nothing, right? So the big fault that schools and churches and office buildings fall into is this kind of all or nothing thing.

Right. If you just got to take this first step, like do something. Right. If you can't protect all 50 rooms, protect four. And then next year, protect eight. And then the next year, provide additional training. And so we're trying to focus on just preventing this guy from doing 20. 12 minutes of damage.

Right. Yeah. These things end in 12 minutes, right? And so we just got to take a step. One step, whether it's one lock or 20, you just got to take a step. That's fantastic. Yeah. And if it stops two thirds of these attacks, I mean, it's huge.

Yeah. And it's certainly worth whatever, you know, small amount of money it costs to Arden some of these locations, given the catastrophic results. Yeah, I think the thing that the industry faces, too, is that you, you have a lot of codes, compliance, and safety that is required to either be followed or contend with. And so if you build a product, let's just call it a regular piece of metal that sticks on the floor, right? How does someone from the outside get into safe people in the event of a fire? And so some of these products that are out there aren't safe. But on the other end of it, you know, compliance experts and government code officials are so risk-averse.

that they look for like this once, this like twice strike of lightning that's going to happen that, you know, the odds of it, of it happening are so low. And so it becomes all or nothing. It's like, well, you know, if this one event could happen where someone couldn't get out of this room in the event of a fire, then we're not going to approve this technology. And so that's why you don't see a mass adoption of entrepreneurs in this space going after these problems solved because the codes and the safety. curriculum that's out there is so kind of archaic's not the right word i mean it's served as well but

we've got to change right technology is good enough like we have electric cars we can have access control systems that are operated off batteries for two years that aren't going to randomly explode right and so that's the meant we're shifting the mentality of safety and security and it's it's it's not easy to do right now and then you can you contend with budgets and politics and there are two it just becomes more difficult. We shouldn't have another school shooting. We should throw a billion dollars at this problem and provide everyone with enough SROs

in every single school with enough video cameras and locking solutions. And that'll put a big dent in the problem, you know, alongside funding mental health and some other things. Well, I mean, we've sent $54 billion to Ukraine and not that that's not a worthy cause, but a small fraction of that would be sufficient to, you know, to help this problem, you know, to.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. It's like, you know, you can't contend with the numbers. You, we spend a lot of money on other nations when we have our own problems. I was on the border this week and I saw 20 people come across the border right next to a checkpoint. And so we've got a lot of work to do here at home and we tend to focus on taking care of other people's problems and we do that a lot. And I'm not saying that's not right, but we need to take care of home-based and some of the problems we face and put more effort into doing that and elect people who focus on America first.

Right. I absolutely agree. And I mean, even with our homeless problem, like we can work towards that. Yeah, absolutely. Affordable housing. We can solve homelessness. We can fix a ton of veterans issues. It's just about money.

It's about funding resources and willpower. and I think that, you know, our elected leaders get it wrong sometimes. And we're getting it wrong a lot lately. And I think that needs a change. Alex, what's next for you and for Haven? Well, what do you think the next step is? I think you kind of laid out sort of your vision of ideally what you'd like to see happen in America. But what are the next steps for you in the company specifically?

I mean, I think we're at this point of just getting mass adoption of not only kind of our protection of our protection of philosophy, but also our technology. We're just kind of at the starting point. It's taken us a really long time to get here. And it's not easy to create and invent something. COVID didn't help. Supply chain shortages don't help. But if there's someone who can find a way,

it's a team of community guys who have this don't, you know, nightstockers don't quit mentality. And that's what my team focuses on. That's awesome. So that's what we're focused on. We've got a couple other new kind of ideas and products in our pipeline. but, you know, the supply chain and the macroeconomics are real. And we're focused, very laser focused on delivering our commercial systems to as many people as our supply chain will allow us to do.

When you roll out new products, let us know. We'll give them a plug on the show. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to. And I'll send you guys some of our stuff so you can test it out and give it a crack. So as we kind of start to wrap up a little bit here, Alex, is there any final thoughts you have about your time, you know, in uniform? out of uniform transitioning and anything that you really want to impart on the audience? Yeah, I mean, I think the most important thing that I carried after I got out was

finding a sense of community that you have out after the military. And you can do that in many ways. You can serve your community. You can go back to school, which I highly, highly, highly recommend. Or you can go dedicate to some mission. And I think the best mission a veteran can take on as being an entrepreneur. You're great at leading. You're great at working with either limited resources or more or less like a direction in the five Ws to go after.

And so this world needs more entrepreneurs that are veterans. If you look at World War II, the numbers are staggering on the number of entrepreneurs that left service and started businesses. And now that number is really, really small. Yeah. And it just comes down to having the access to capital and having the ability to have a support network as a veteran to go start a business. Yeah. And there are quite a few. There are some VC companies out there that do focus on veterans, I think.

Yeah. I mean, there's one out there that's invested in us. It's veteran ventures out of Knoxville and they're fantastic guys. You know, they really focus on supporting the veteran entrepreneur and founder. There's others out there too, and they provide a great service and opportunity for veterans to take their idea to market. But, you know, I've found great success in veteran ventures in helping us not only raise capital, but also cut some of our strategic deals together. And so, again, it's like this community that you find outside of the military. But I think the best path for a veteran is to get educated and start a business.

And then you're in control of the destiny. You mentioned how much you were traveling while you were in and sort of, you know, coming back together with your family, particularly for veterans. What are, do you have any advice for that for like healing that sort of separation that happens? I mean, I wish I did, man, but I travel probably just as much now as I do when I was in. and I think it's because I miss that up-tempo. And so we've learned, we've figured out ways to kind of cope with that. You know, I've got to go on the road in two and a half weeks to go see a customer. So we're loading up the airstream and taking the family and the dogs with us and we'll stay at the beach while I'm working with the customer.

Cool. So, you know, there are ways that you can focus on healing that. But for people who are getting out of the military, you're always going to have that mission focus. and I think you just got to decide how you vector it. Is it towards the customer or is it towards your family? And, you know, this isn't like a zero-sum game where the customer always wins. That's the tough part, right? Like you get to pick at this point, whereas in the military it was, all right, you're going to be that guy who doesn't show up.

Fine, you're gone. Right, right. That habit is hard to kick. Yeah. So folks out there watching, I have an announcement to make here. This is the last episode of the Team House. in the studio. Tomorrow we're coming in.

We're breaking down all the cameras and mics and everything. And we're moving into our new studio. It's going to be pretty awesome once it's all put together. But this is it. This is the end of an arrow. We've been here for like three years or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, if you go on Twitch, you can see our horribly run, not run, but our horrible like

D&D games. You won't see that. You don't see that on Twitch. There's nothing on Twitch. Oh, there is. No, no, it's down. On YouTube, you can find that stuff, though. So, yeah, that'll be next week.

We'll be in the new studio. We'll be Doug Wise. We'll be back on the show for a second episode. And otherwise, thank you for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe to the channel. There's a link to our Patreon down in the description, get access to bonus episodes and add-free episodes also. Alex, again, thank you for doing this tonight.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, guys. Thanks for having me. and if there's anything I can ever do for you or your customers, let me know. Yeah, likewise. Please stay in touch. Check out Haven Lockdown. And what's the residential site or is it a different site?

Yeah, it's Havenlock.com and then Havenlockdown.com. And then our biggest customer, Johnson Control, also sells that product under the IQ lockdown. Yeah, the links are down the description. So check them out. Buy some stuff. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Nice, Stuckers don't quit.

Thank you, Alex. Thanks, Alex. Take care, everyone.