The Team House - Going After Death Cults in Iraq w/ an Apache Attack Helicopter | Dan McClinton | Ep. 279

Episode Date: May 26, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Dan spent over 20 years as a helicopter and Apache attack helicopter pilot. He spent over 3 years in Iraq supporting ground troops with the Apache. Grab Dan’s book here: ⬇️https://a.co/d/eV48tw3“The Longest Month” documentary ⬇️https://www.primevideo.com/detail/The-Longest-Month/0RJYB64ZQB647Z257DIR6NSNL4Or here ⬇️https://youtu.be/7HxtVSgxILc?si=MufLZ8Hy0GaZIXK4——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#apache #iraqBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to and we really appreciate that so go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house special operations covert ops espionage the team house with your host jack murphy and david park 279 of the team house i'm d'nard park with jack murphy uh d back there and the magic happen. Tonight, we'd like to welcome Dan McClinton, Warren Officer McClinton, served in the Army as a helicopter pilot, flew Hueys in Honduras and El Salvador during the not really covert actions, right, but kind of COVID actions. The insurgency down there. And then Apaches and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Welcome. Thank you for joining us tonight, Dan. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Do you want to do the Patreon thing real quick? Yeah, guys. I just want to tell you up front about our Patreon. If you're not subscribed to us already, there's a link down in the description, and you will get access to all of these episodes ad-free and support the channel and help us continue to do what we do here and pay the bills.

We really appreciate that. It starts at just $5 a month. So if you can check out the link in the description, we'd really appreciate it. So, Dan, you're just... You know, I would also want to mention that you made the documentary the longest month about your time in OIF, and not just your time, but, you know, the time that you were there and what you guys experienced. And then also wrote the book Crazy Horse. And you are the recipient of seven air medals, is that correct? Yeah.

So what we like to do is start out the show with asking you your origin. How did you grow up to be this superhero? What was your childhood like? And what led you into the military? Well, I was born in Waco, Texas. My dad was a letter carrier, and my mom was a homemaker. And I had a pretty normal childhood, you know, little league, Kiwi football, that sort of thing.

my dad was a World War II vet and I think a lot of his experience influenced me throughout my life still it is because like anytime when I was a kid anytime a World War II movie came on my dad was watching it I remember sitting there watching to hell and back with him And I actually talk about that in the documentary because it, that whole experience came back to me later on, you know, in 2007. Because at the end, if you recall at the end of the hell and back, Audie Murphy, he's getting the Medal of Honor. And I remember sitting there and after watching the whole movie, turned to my dad. And I go, you know, that's, that's pretty great, dad, you know, and he's like, for every day. one of Audie Murphy, there's 10 people that you'll never hear about. And like when I was a kid,

I didn't understand that. And in a way, I thought my dad was kind of like full of it, you know, because I couldn't understand why the Army wouldn't give, you know, somebody who deserved a medal and it only took about 30 years for me to see, you know, the actual, you know, the actual to come to full understanding when I saw it with my own eyes down range. Yeah. But just growing up,

you know, back then, you know, because we didn't have video games, we're out in the yard and the street out there playing Army and stuff. I had my, you know, toilet guns and we're out there throwing mud clods at each other and stuff like that.

Because I, lived because Waco is in close proximity to Fort Hood, I was exposed at an early age because they would, at that time, they would bring to the, to the fair and rodeo every year. They'd bring tanks and helicopters and so I've got pictures of me from a very young age, like sitting on top of a M60 tank or sitting in the cockpit of a, of a cobra. And as time went on, I, To be honest, I wanted to fly F-16s in the Air Force. And when I got into college, I was in Air Force ROTC. I was actually in Civil Air Patrol prior to that.

So I was doing everything I could to go to flight school in the Air Force, except when I got in the college, actually study. I tended to like the social aspects of college more than actually going to college. And at that time, you weren't going to get a pilot slot if you didn't have really good grades and weren't like towards the top of the class. And actually the Air Force ROTC, the officer in charge actually took me aside and said out, you know, what do you want to, what do you want out of this? And I said, I want to fly. And he actually, and I'd heard of it before, but he actually talked. me about the warrant officer program in the Army.

And at that time, I didn't really give it much heat. I actually ended up getting an associate's degree in drafting and design, got a job up in the Dallas Fort Worth area as a draftsman. And I think after about a year of nine to five and sitting behind a drafting board, I said, like, I don't want to do this all my whole life. So I went down on the Army recruiter and at least I was small enough at that time to know that's the only time that I wield any power in the Army. And I went down there and told a recruiter if they couldn't give me a flight school, I wouldn't join in the Army. Because I knew that you could go in there and like it's called Street to Seed or High School to Flight School.

I went down there and said, look, I want to go to flight school as a one officer candidate. And after I made them aware of how bad I wanted to do that, you know, that I wasn't going to go be a crew chief first or, you know, something that was easier for them. Yeah, we actually did the paperwork. It took about a year in 86, raised my right hand. I went to Fort Sill for Basic and then turned around, went to Fort Rucker, did Warren Officer Candid School. and then October 87, I graduated flight school as a UH1 pilot. I don't think that's something that even that I was aware of that you could go straight in to the warrant program. Yeah, it seems like, I mean, is that like a typical pathway to being a warrant officer?

At the time, I would say when I went through about half the class was off the street, and half the class was prior service or from another service to be honest I think that's a really that was a good mix and for a while there during the global war on terror the army was skewed doing towards prior service people and what happens when you do that

is somebody comes in and goes to flight school would say they had seven years in the amount of time they can spend as a pilot, well, it's the same as if you came off the street, but the amount of time that they're likely to spend goes down, you know, because after 20 years of doing anything in the Army, people are usually, I'm pretty much done with this. Yeah. So they kind of set themselves up, I think, for right now they've got an experience problem,

you know, like all the people with experience are getting out. Yeah. And I think that's a direct result of them assessing too many people that had too much time already in the service. What would it like going to Warrant School? Because Warrant is like the kind of the sweet spot in the military where, right? Where you're an officer, but you're still, you're like the boss, like, you're kind of King Kong or the enlisted, but you're still an officer. Right. It's like this sweet spot. Well, there were times that they called us specialists with a club card.

Because, you know, technically a warrant officer is supposed to be a technical expert in his field. So as a pilot, you're supposed to be the guy that knows everything about the aircraft and how to employ it and all that stuff. Yeah. I used to say, you know, we're officers when they want us to be officers, like when they want us to pull staff duty or, you know, you need somebody to do a collateral one. investigation or stuff like that. Warren officer candidate school has changed from when I, I was in it. And I'm not going to be the guy that says it was harder when I went through. But honestly, it was different.

Let's let's put it that way because when I went through it was more physical. They would punish you through physical, uh, PT. and they would intentionally overload you with tasks to see how you could task manage. And you always had to keep your area inspection ready. And it took me a really long time to understand why that was happening. But the whole purpose behind it is to develop attention to detail, which as you might imagine is important if you're a pilot. when you pre-flight the aircraft and stuff like that.

But it was the bane of our existence, you know, that they would come in and, you know, your uniforms aren't spaced correctly in your locker. So now you're out marching punishment tours on the street when you should be studying and all this other stuff. It took me almost until I retired to actually. appreciate what they were trying to do. And they since changed it.

They don't do all that stuff anymore. And I obviously, I haven't been in since 2011, so I couldn't tell you the efficacy of what they're doing now, if it's better or worse. But it is what it is. So when you went, because when you go to the Warren Officer Canada school, that's not just pilots or helicopter pilots, but it's any, it might be MI warrants.

It might be anybody in the warrant field, correct? Yeah, so that first six weeks, it's, it's anybody that's going to be a warrant officer. I want to say, not in my class, but the class after mine, they had like bandmasters. And, you know, there was an FSEF dude. You know, I remember hearing stories about, you know, there were a couple of guys going through to BSF warrants. and obviously the physical punishment wasn't

didn't matter to them as much as guys like coming right out of base or train or something or right off the street and so there there was like people button heads because they would intentionally like do things to piss off the attack officer

because they didn't care if they had to do push-ups or flutter kicks or all that kind of stuff and so it started pissing off the other folks like the CID warrants or you know the so any you're right anybody anybody who could be a warrant officer would go through that school so it wasn't just guys that were guys and gals that were trying to go to flight school yeah so when you were done with that the next step for you was was it flight school or how does the warrant pilot progress? Well, yeah, technically the next step is flight school itself, which at that time, you had to go

through the warrant officer candidate. You would be appointed a warrant officer the day before you got your wings and the whole point behind that was to make you aware that you were an officer before you were an officer before you were an aviator. But in mine and a bunch of other people's particular cases, because the Army was so good at personnel management, we were on hold for four months before I started flight school. So I had the pleasure of picking up trash and painting stuff all around Fort Rucker. A bunch of us signed up to go to Air Assault School just so we would have something to do.

other than pick up trash and paint things. But that was, there was actually, there was a guy that was an ex or a former Navy SEAL that was in our little group there that was on Oval. And it actually made him so upset having to do all that stuff that he resigned out of that program and went over to special forces. Wow.

Because he didn't want to have to. to put up with that to go to flight school. Yeah. I mean, I had to remind myself all the time that, you know, the goal is to go to flight school that this is all just, you got to do this just to get there. Yeah. It wasn't any fun, but there could be worse. I mean, I was getting paid.

Yeah. So, so then you start flight school and how long is that? If you go straight through without any eruptions, I start. I started in January of 07, and we finished in October of 2007. Okay. So about 10 months. Okay. And we went straight through.

I didn't get set back or anything. So it's kind of changed a little bit since then, because now when you go through flight school, they give you, like, your aircraft you're going to fly in combat. So you do all the basic stuff and then they send you to the Apache course or the Black Rock course or the Chinook course before you get your wings back then You went through either through UH ones or oh H 58s and at the end you got your wings and then you went on to whatever your next aircraft was gonna be or if you were gonna go to the fields just to fly 58s or fly hughies you'd left and went up to your gig in it then Yeah. And then how did they determine what platform you were going to fly?

Class rank. Yeah. And what was available at that time? So when my class finished up, I think there was one Apache and two Blackhawks or something, and I just, I wasn't high enough. That's how I ended up being a dewey guy. Yeah. And so.

Which, you know, look at back. on it. That was the best thing that ever happened to me because I, it's, it's a not very complicated aircraft and you learn how to do everything by hand with no help. And I ended up going to a VIP unit. So time, being on time and being where you're supposed to be, flying people to where they're exactly supposed to be is very important. Yeah. So I learned how to be very precise and be on time and all that stuff, which it's important to matter where you go, but obviously it's more

important when you're flying the CG to show up when you're supposed to be there and that kind of stuff. Yeah. And then how did you end up in Latin America? So that was just a PCS move like any other

assignment in the Army. Actually, I was at Fort Hood when Desert Shields started. and all these units were deploying and because I was in the flight company that did VIP stuff for Fort Hood. And I was technically the co-pilot for the Corps commander. I was tied to him and he wasn't going anywhere. So I was going to be afforded until whenever. Yeah.

So I called up DA because at that time I'd been at Fort Hood for about three years. and I learned this later, but if you call up DA, you know, if you're not on their list, as soon as you call them, you are on their list. So they needed some pilots down in Central America. I was a pilot in command, night vision gogg qualified, so go bang. Got orders, and Desert Storm started, and actually I was on a plane going because our brigade, our parent brigade for Honduras was in Panama. So I went on a plane to Panama, got in process there.

They put me on a C-130, flew up to Honduras. And that was in, I want to say February and 91. So like right when desert storms going on. Yeah. And so at this point, I mean, if you could give us kind of the lay

of the land, because if I'm not mistaken, in Nicaragua, Daniel Orteco was voted out by this point. Things are starting to change in Central America. Yeah, we had a, well, the unit in, it was based at Sotocano Air Base Honduras. And there wasn't really, like most aviation units are attached to some ground unit somewhere. This unit was just there and it belonged to that brigade in Panama. This is, is it, is it task force Bravo?

Yeah, at that time it was joint task force Bravo and owned the airport airport there. We would just do missions that were tasked to us. Like we'd fly like a veterinary team around Honduras to give shot to animals. half our half of my company was in El Salvador at any particular time and their job over there was to support U.S. Mill Group El Salvador, which was basically the advisors that were advising the El Salvadoran military in their fight against the Soviet-backed guerrillas. So what we would do over there is get missions from the mill group to fly people to places and one of the regular missions we would do is fly the comms guy around to update the fills for their secure radios.

But we would get missions probably three or four days out of the week and the rest of the time we've just spent in our little house chilling. I mean, to be honest, up until OIF, that was probably the most rewarding job I've had in the Army client because we were doing real world stuff. Yeah. I mean, it took the government a long time to recognize the guys who were down there, like mixing it up in terms of awards, Purple Hearts, everything. Because since it wasn't a designated combat zone, there was just, like a lot of our country was unaware. of what was going on.

Would, how, like, did the big Army know, like, what you were doing down there? I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean, I was getting combat pay, I mean, or imminent danger pay. Okay. Actually, I think it was about five years after the fact that I saw something in the Army times or something where we were actually finally authorized to wear a combat patch for that. Yeah. We never put ourselves in for any awards because we knew they, well, I don't know that they

would have been approved or nobody even really talked about it. We just went about our jobs and did them. But nobody was ever submitted for, you know, normally if you fly on a combat zone you're going to get an air metal at the end of your tour because that's just how they recognize that you flew missions in a combat zone and that wasn't even nobody got those yeah and i know that the guys on the ground i never saw anybody getting anything for what they for what they did and i know they were coming under fire i don't know how often i know that they were yeah because we were flying around with loaded door guns and Our aircraft had special modifications after the battalion commander that was down there, he got shot down and killed, murdered because he survived the shootdown.

And then the guerrillas actually murdered him. So they modified our aircraft, put extra armor in the aircraft. We had countermeasures installed that weren't on normal UH1s so we could fly out of the range of small arms. So there were people that understood what was going on down there. I don't think it was widely known. Yeah. So do you have any, like I don't know how heated it was for you guys. Obviously, it was dangerous for you.

But were you guys going into hot LZs or PZs at all and things like that? I mean, we assumed that we were being shot at. Obviously, if you don't see the muzzle flash, because we did all our ops in the daylight. So if you don't see the muzzle flash or they aren't hitting the aircraft, you don't really know one way or another. I mean, I made every approach into every LZ with the assumption that I was going to get shot at. And we wore chicken plates and, you know, put the armor plates forward on the seats. And we always assumed that we were going to be shot at. But my aircraft was never hit.

I never saw. So, you know, Vietnam hot LZ, no, we weren't doing that kind of thing. Right. But there was an inherent game. We had a standby mission in case, like, the advisors needed to be pulled out of, like, some location. like we were prepared to do that and never had to do it. Right. And what was that like for you?

You know, you had been flying VPs, which, or VIPs, which you mentioned, you know, you need to be on time and things like that. But you probably landed on like nice HLZs when you were picking them up, when you're dropping them off. And now you're in this jungle environment. Was there a learning curve for you guys? Well, I wouldn't you'd think there would be, but you know, this is where I go back to my flight school experience and the way flight school was structured back then. I think we were trained to a standard where it didn't require a different mindset. And I think, you know, when you got in country, they just didn't, even though I was a positive. and command and I was signed off to be a pilot in command.

I flew with somebody that had been there for a while, like for a little bit, just to see how things were done. So it wasn't like, here you go, go, you know, have at it. Right. So there was, there were people helping you along in case you didn't understand the seriousness of the situation. Yeah. So how long were you in Central Island?

America. So I ended up being down there because I ended up extending a month because I asked to go to the maintenance test pilot course when when I returned to the states. So to line up those class dates, I ended up staying with that unit for 13 months. It was supposed to be a 12 month assignment, but I was down there for 13. And we, they structured the changeouts with El Salis. where it was like in the middle of the month because you to get your combat pay you only had to be there i think 10 days so we structured the change out where everybody could pretty much get combat paid for the whole year so uh i think my last time over there was like probably 15 20 days before i pcs okay And then you said that after that you went to a test pilot.

Well, the Army, it's kind of fancy sounding, but it's called the maintenance. Maintenance test pilot, which means, like, when they do maintenance on the aircraft, you're the first person that gets in there and make sure everything was done correctly. So you take the aircraft up and you do certain maneuvers to make sure it still works the way it's supposed to do. So I ended up being a maintenance platoon leader back at Fort Hood because they didn't have a lieutenant to be the maintenance platoon leader. So I ended up being the maintenance platoon leader for a while. I flew Huey's till about 96. I got passed over for CW3 because, well, they could never tell me wife. It was during the Clinton drawdown. And so I took the money and got out and I ended up

actually coming back in 98 because the Army figured out that they let too many people go. So I came back and part of the deal when I came back is I had to be an Apache pilot. So which to be honest, when I first went to flight school, I wanted to fly cobras. So I wasn't. You want to be in gunship. Yeah. Yeah. So then what was that like for you transitioning from a Huey to the Apache?

Well, just flying it is not that hard because on the outside, I had a flying job. So I've been flying. So flying a helicopter, they actually make an Apache. I'm not going to say it's easy to. helicopter is kind of difficult to fly, but it's easier to fly because you've got all this stuff that you're trying to do. But that being said, they have this, I don't know if you've ever heard of a thing called The Bag.

Oh, is that when they black out the canopy? Yeah. So when you're going through Apache train, and if you've ever watched that movie, and I'm forbidden by law from saying the name of it. with Nicholas Cage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to learn how to use the monocle that goes over your right eye. So to do that, they seal up the backseat of the aircraft where you can't see out.

The only way you can see is through that monocle. So I'm left eye dominant, and that monocle, the only way to look through it is your right eye. So that was probably the hardest thing I've ever done flying wise in my life. When I got out of that, there were days I'd get out of that, and it was February when I went through that transition. And even February in Alabama is sometimes kind of cool. I'd get out of that aircraft just soaking wet with sweat because I was working my butt off. That's the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

flying. How do you, how do you adjust to being left-eye dominant and then, you know, because in shooting it's very hard for somebody to make that transition from left-eye dominance to, you know, or cross-eye dominance to, right, if they're left-eye dominant and right-hand dominant, that's an issue. Yeah, yeah. And left-handed, but I learned how to close my, uh, left eye a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. That's really, I mean, once you get out of the bag when you're flying at night, you're using a combination of unaided and the system. Yeah. And if you really, if I really had to look through the system, I mean, as time went on, I kind of learned how to use it better. But when I was first learning now, I had to close my right or my left aisle.

lot. It was difficult. And that probably led to why I said that's probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do, flying. Because, you know, my mind just didn't want to see what was coming through that radical. It was seeing everything that my left eye was seeing. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So what year were you fully qualified in in the Apache on the Apache and what was your first unit so that was 1998 and the first unit was imported was first battalion fourth aviation and before ID and I was flying A models and flew with them for a couple of years I ended up being the brigade tactical operations officer, which is a warrant officer that does a lot of mission planning and looks into threat, threat avoidance, that sort of thing. So that was my field of expertise for the entire time that I flew at age 64 was back then it was called tack ops.

So I was in 4-ID until just after 9-11, and 4-ID didn't deploy immediately after 9-11. So a new unit, back then, all A-S64D units that are being stood up went through forehead. So there was a new unit, third squadron, six-cav. and they needed attack ops officer, so I got orders for them and went through the train up at 3-6 cab, and went to the Longbow course at Fort Rucker, and that was like 2002. And what specifically is the Longbow? So it's the, if you've ever seen that picture of an Apache with the thing that looks like a wheel of cheese on top of the rotor system.

That's the Longbow radar. So the age 64D has a glass cockpit. It's more advanced avionics than the A model. The A model is kind of steam gauges. And it's just a major improvement of the aircraft. And it was planned from the moment they brought the original age 64 online. They knew that they wanted to improve it. And to be honest, like all these aircraft are designed.

to fight the tanks of the Warsaw Pact. It's an anti-armor system. Everything on it is designed to kill tanks. Now, what we did ended up doing with it, it's perfectly capable of taking out, you know, trucks, cars, people. So, you know, but everything on it is geared towards that fight. So, you know, there's, there was some,

When 9-11 happened, there was actually some, you know, rethinking of how we did business. But I ended up going over to Korea with 36-Cath for 10 months. And the reason it was 10 months and not 12, when they fielded a new unit over there, if they waited, if everybody left at 12, everybody leaves at the same time. So people who got to the unit first, only spent 10. months in Korea. And there were some people that spent 12 and then there's some people that spent 14. So I spent 10, came back to Fort Hood, was assigned to first half who was in Iraq at the time. So I spent like a month at Fort Hood getting all my desert gear and, you know, going to the

classes that you got to go to before you deploy and getting shots and stuff. Yeah. And then I met the unit over in Iraq and that was May of 04. Okay. So about just over a year after the initial push then, the initial invasion. Right. Were you concerned at all that, you know, you get into Apaches, 9-11 happens, you transfer to a new unit, they're like in the pipe to go to Korea. Were you worried at all that here you are in attack helicopter and you're going to miss the war?

No, because I remember the day after 9-11 sitting at the gate, like waiting to get on post, and it took me like two hours to get through the gate. I'm sure you had similar experience. I mean, at Fort Hood, there was an M1 tank sitting at the gate where the guy sitting behind a 50-cow, like, pointing down the road. But anyway, so I remember sitting in that line waiting. to get on post thinking I couldn't think of a way that this was going to end because I was trying to think through like how what's the in state going to be you know because everybody's all fired up to go kill the bad guys and I said okay I'm on I'm on board for that but what's the end state

like how do you get to say that we're done because you know even back then I was like there's no way you could kill enough of them where they would just say, okay, we're not, we're through. We're not going to, we're not going to go after the infidel anymore because it was so, you know, it's, it, it was their, their motivation wasn't something that you could just so easily break. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't, I'm not saying that I'm smarter than the average bear, but I distinctly remember sitting sitting, sitting in that line saying, I don't know how this is going to end. So. Yeah, I didn't think that I was going to miss anything. That being said, you know, the first time you get shot at is kind of an eye-opening experience.

I mean, the first time you realize that you're being shot at. And when I got over there and kind of going back to what I was saying about flying Hueys, I assumed that I was shot at a lot during the day than when we're flying around the daylight that I was. I was fortunate, like, the three times I went over there, my aircraft was only actually hit, like, twice. But I know for certain, you know, I was shot at a lot, but actually hit was only twice. But during the day, like, the first time over there, I never saw anybody, like, shooting at us or anything. But at night, the first time I saw somebody shooting at me, and I was wearing night vision goggles. so I could see

you can't see it with the clear which is like sometimes if you're the guy on the controls flying with the clear sometimes it's better that you don't see all the rounds that are coming your way because ignorance is bliss you know sometimes

but I remember like looking at it with the goggles and I could see the muzzle flashes and I could see the rounds come in and it was almost like an out-of-body experience. It was like I was watching a movie or something, you know? So, I mean, they didn't hit the aircraft. So it was like kind of surreal, you know,

and it took like a second to like, okay, and back then the ROE, like, even if I saw somebody with a gun during OIF 2, you could drop them. So, you know, it was go from that to in the mode to try and target. where these rounds are coming from. So your first trip, you're talking about your first trip to Iraq,

which was in 2004, where did you end up? What part of the country? I was at Camp Taji, which is just north of Baghdad. Okay. So we were responsible for Baghdad. And so were you doing,

were you guys primarily doing like base support operations? Were you supporting units on the ground? Was there a, a typical role for you? Well, here's how a typical day would work. Like, we would show up to

the talk about three hours prior to mission launch. Well, let me step back for a second. Our battalion had a policy. We were going to have a team of at least two in the air 24-7 for their permitting. So each

company's got eight aircraft. So, So each company had to launch two missions a day at the least. So the flight schedule was published and you knew, like, say, tomorrow I'm going to fly, I'm going to take off at three. So if I was taking off at three, I had to be at the talk at noon. And we go in there and we get a brief from the S3. Okay, here's your missions for today. They'd hand you a stack of papers.

You know, you're going to go support this cordon and search over here. at this time or you're going to do convoy security for this unit at this time there's here's the free this is where you're going to meet them at so you get a briefing when you went in there exactly the missions they expected you to do uh and the times you were expected to do them at but as soon as you launch all bets could be off you know like because you're monitoring the battalion net the whole time and they'd say hey there's a troops in contact this load this grid contact you know like blue 12 blue 1 2 on this free go there as fast as you could go to get there and because that was our number ticks were our number one priority and that was followed by if there was a

medevac to give them security medevac was a second priority and then the third priority is whatever you were previously tasked to do so that's that's how So we did a little bit of everything. That rotation, we ended up supporting the Marines on the second Battle of Fallujah, which was a bit of a trip out there from Taji. So we'd go out there, get gas, and then support whoever we were supposed to support out there, which was kind of different. Would you guys, would they generally set you guys out, like if you were going that far,

would you go to like someplace like al-Assad or would they set up farps for you out in the middle of the desert there was actually a barp at al-a-sod that we would go hit okay the aircraft had its own extra fuel cell in it so we'd get three hours of flight time okay uh because it took about 30 minutes to get out there. And to be honest, we didn't really and I kind of mentioned this to you when we were talking before the show

but a lot of times we didn't really have to shoot because if we got pushed to someplace, just the sound of us coming, the bad guys would disengage because they didn't want to deal with Apaches. I mean, there were people

that that's how you knew somebody was dedicated if they were still there by the time we showed up. Yeah. And what were you, you talked a little bit about rules of engagement, but what were your rules of engagement for that first trip? They kind of all blend together, but I'm pretty sure the first trip was like if you saw somebody that was armed, like if I was flying and we're looking out with the site, And I see somebody off in the distance and he's got an AK. And that we could engage. But I would tell you, because everywhere we flew, somebody owned that ground.

So before we engage, we would always talk to the ground unit because we never, you know, you're never sure unless somebody's shooting at you that they were bad guys. Right. So let's say I was flying over first BCT. A-O and they would usually push us down to the battalion that owned the particular piece of ground that we were operating in. We could call up that battalion and say, you know, hey, we're out here at this grid. We just saw two guys with what appeared to be AK-47s. What do you want us to do about it?

And it was basically the ground guys. If we thought they met all the criteria, we had a right to self-defense. So if somebody shot it, as I could shoot back, I didn't have to call anybody. Right. But if I just saw somebody walking down the road, we would call them and let them decide what they wanted to do about that person. Yeah. Or people. And 2004 was also, we talked about it a little bit before the show.

Was that the whole death cult thing kind of popped off? No, that was actually February 2007. Okay. Those few years. I'm jumping ahead. So on this first deployment and, you know, like going up to Flusion and supporting troops in combat or contact, things like that, like you mentioned that a lot of times people would just kind of D.D. Mao whenever you'd show up. But were there, were you experiencing some pretty intense engagements or, you know, really like relieving, you know, riding in like the cavalry and relieving troops and contact at all? The honest, what we were doing most of the time out there was supporting the units that were basically the handle.

You know, because they were using it. And they were trying to push through Fallujah and push them into the handle. So we would go over there and support those guys and basically check in with the ground unit and say, what do you want us to look at? And it's kind of funny because that's not the way when we check in with Marines, they're not used to that because they use their cobras like Cass. So they would hold at a point until you got a target for them and then they would come in or if they had a task for them. They would task them that way. And we would just show up over their shoulder and we actually had got a, email that the colonel put up in the talk that a Marine officer said,

I would rather have you guys working for us than my own cobras, which I'm sure Marines out there would deny, but I'm here to tell you that it existed. Is that because you guys were more active, like more proactive in terms of, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we'd go out there and hunt. Yeah. You know, and some guys, I didn't, I didn't particularly, I didn't get into any engagement.

Some of our guys did. Yeah. But we're out there actually looking, trying to dig around, find bad guys. Yeah. So was that first trip then? Was it, I don't want to say, you know, mellow. But was there, like, you guys didn't necessarily take a lot of fire. You weren't engaged in a lot of ticks and things like that.

But is that accurate for the first trip or not really? It would depend on where you were at. Okay. When we would support people around Sauter City, that was you know you were in for a good time. Because they were not shy about shooting and our guys weren't shy about shooting back. And there was something always good.

going around that place. Yeah. You told us before the show about like one unit's idea of how to search for IEDs in Sauter City. Was that on this trip? Yeah. Yeah, they would, we would get requests to do, to shoot down the, down the road to try and either dead made IEDs or intimidate people or, you know, and, you know, it's, you know,

As long as there weren't anybody out there, we didn't really have a problem doing it, but I don't know how much good it did. Yeah. Yeah. So, but when you guys would go into Sardar City, I imagine that the neighborhoods would essentially come alive, and everybody would let you know that they were displeased that you were in the area. Oh, yeah. they um we got a request from one of the units to do what's called a uh uh show of course so uh basically got down

low level and flew down the street over the top of the the abrams and i noted that they were all buttoned up which uh you know an abrams has a lot more armor than an age 64 but anyway um we're going down the street and I had MBGs on and it looked like the death star scene from Star Wars with all the people shooting at us and I don't know how they missed but my aircraft didn't get hit our wingman got hit and we had an SOP like if if somebody got hit to you know take the aircraft and look it over and make sure you know because you never you never know it might hit something that's going to come apart on you. So took it back to the far at Taji, which is about a five-minute flight from Sauter City.

And he had a round through the tailroar drive shaft. I mean, it wasn't going to come apart, but, you know, that's something that you can't fly with. So that was the end of our night. But I don't know, somehow miraculously, our aircraft didn't get it. Yeah. Yeah. It was always a... What weaponry...

Because obviously, you know, you're an anti-tank aircraft, but do they change the armament for you guys when you started flying these operations, considering that you weren't going after tanks? Or was the weapon systems, was everything kind of... It's good regardless. Well, the cannon is the cannon.

and you can't really change that. It's a 30 millimeter, and it's got a ground that detonates when it contacts the ground or the target or whatever and creates a shrapnel for about a 5-meter radius. The Hellfires, they actually upgraded the Hellfires as the Global War on Terror went on. They put a blast flat, I'll be able to say this and say it. blast fragmentation sleeve on the hellfire because the warhead as they were made is made to penetrate armor. So when we'd shoot them at a bongo or a car or whatever, it would just go through and out the other side. And we actually saw they shot a car that had a mortar crew in it and saw a guy get out and start running.

you know, after we hit the car with a hellfire. So it wasn't lost on the people that, you know, take care of these weapons. So they put a blast fragmentation sleeve. There was also a hellfire developed that had a thermobaric warhead. So if you shot it into a building, into a closed space, it would use overpressure. Yeah. So we had those available to us. We started flying with flichette rockets, which they got like 50,000.

1500 steel dart sent them. I don't think we ever used them in the city much, but as far as collateral damage is concerned, like if there were only bad guys out in the street, that would probably be the best weapon to use if you were gonna shoot rockets. We still had the point detonating warhead rockets, and we also carried illumination rockets,

which some of these guys on patrol and I think really, Because we could put illumination out there that artillery tubes couldn't necessarily reach. Uh-huh. You know, because some of these guys would be on patrol out in the, you know, quite a ways from the fob. So they didn't want to shoot a loom rounds that far, you know, or they weren't available. Were they standard alum or IR loom? It was visible. Okay.

And then is the cannon on an Apache, is it forward-faced? or does it rotate? It's, uh, and don't start asking me what the limits on it are, but it, it moves. Okay. The front-seater or the backseater can use the cannon. Okay. So it can, it can, like, like if you're in Sauter City and there are people, there is an angle that the, that the cannon can kind of rotate to.

Right. Okay. So like what we would do, like, let's say I was supporting a, uh, let's say special forces team was taken down a house and we were supporting that we were in the stack we'd go into an orbit and we're like a little kind of a miniature AC130 because the gun would point out to the side oh that's badass yeah yeah um so are there any like other major stories from that for that first deployment that we've missed or failed to cover? Well, the, um, something that that happened towards the end of the tour that, uh,

it actually, uh, caused me to advocate for some training when we got back to the States. Um, we were out on a mission and I actually witnessed a, uh, Royal Air Force C-130 gets shot down with a rocket. It was flying low level. And it was just west of Taji. And we ended up, my team ended up being the people that control the whole search and rescue evolution. So we were out there for like the next four hours, like talking people on to the, well, our primary objective when we got out there was to keep the locals from rummaging through all the, because they just wanted to get out there and start picking up stuff. Right.

So for like the next four hours, we're out there controlling that, controlling assets. And frankly, that's not something that Army aviators are typically trained on. 160th dudes go to the FACA course. But it's not something the regular Army did. So when we got back to the states, I actually wrote a decision paper and we pushed it up through First Cav leadership and got them to pay to send us sends a pilots to the Ford Air Controller Airborne course that was run by the Marines. because I felt just having that knowledge how to leverage all these assets that are up above us, having seen the battlefield and knowing what's all flying above us over there, especially in Iraq, that could only be a good thing.

Sure. A lot of times, and I know people think the clear on the Apache is, you know, that we can see everything and everybody, but back then, it was a first generation Fleer and sometimes I'm fairly certain there were people that got away from us that we couldn't see with that

clear because of the quality of it. And if we could leverage some of those assets like an F-16 with a sniper pod. That you know we may be able to get some of these people that we weren't able to

see before. And so I'm kind of I'm kind of proud of the fact that I wrote this decision paper and I convinced these people to let us send people to get that training. And in hindsight, it really makes sense, too, because you guys are like a slow moving reconnaissance platform, or at least a lot of times the way you guys were using it. And you're out there ahead of the troops or looking things out. And it doesn't do you any good to, like, reach back to the JTAC or reach back to whomever and try to get them to talk to the other platforms who might be in the

It's part of adapting to a counterinsurgency campaign. Yeah. Yeah. And at that time, the J-TACs in First Cav, they were at the division headquarters. They weren't rolling out with the units. Yeah. The only people that had J-TACs and stuff were special ops. Yeah.

So I saw it as a way to leverage that assets. Now, once we got that training done and everything, when it came down to actually doing it, there were people within the Air Force that pushed back against us being able to actually do it. Yeah, that's not surprising. I still think that training was worthwhile because it gave people knowledge that they didn't previously have. Yeah. It's kind of weird with the Air Force because they pushed back against Army having its own J-Tax too. Like, you know, they really wanted that pie or the whole pie.

But they couldn't, they couldn't do everything. I can't fill all those slides. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. So, so then how was it for you? How long were you back off that first deployment? So we got back in, right after that first election in Iraq, we redeployed.

Okay. So we were back, that was 2005, and we redeployed in, the fall of 06. Okay. And how had the situation on the ground changed in that time?

Well, by the time we got back in 06, the insurgency was really starting to kick in. Like, when we did our left, sea, right C, with the unit, we were replacing. They had lost a couple of aircraft and they were, they had changed the way they had

done business for survivability reasons. because they were taking a lot of fire. And this goes into, like, right after we took over, like, December 06 and then the beginning of 2007, it's like the insurgency was making a point of trying to target coalition aircraft. And to be honest, it doesn't surprise. it didn't surprise me. I was I was frankly shocked that they didn't do it sooner.

Because and nothing against anybody on the ground or nothing against anybody in a convoy. But anytime an aircraft goes down, that's like a major event. Yeah. It's on the news. Right. And you can see what happened in Somalia. You know, we lost a blackawk and everything like turned different. Yeah.

So people who want to fight us, they know that's how to get at us. And it surprised me that it took them that long to start targeting helicopters. And what were the primary means that they were using? Were they using like Dishkas? Were they using manpads, RPGs? Like, was there a specific way? I'm sure they used all of them. But were there specific threats that you guys were really concerned about?

in the particular area that we were working in and around Baghdad mostly around they called it the belts the bag you know so around the outside of Baghdad they would employ and this was a tactic that the north of Vietnamese used so it's nothing new they used what's called a triangle-shaped ambush and they would mount Discas on the back of Bongo trucks Disca's in higher there were like 23 millimeters

that they had out there like ZPUs yeah yeah but they would set up these trucks in a in a triangle shape and and I'll be honest with you

we're creatures of habit everybody is human beings like consistency that today is going to be like yesterday yeah so and unfortunately you know we didn't recognize this fast enough if you flew like let's say from Balad down to Camp Taji

you would probably go the most direct route and if you were flying from Balad to Baghdad or the Baghdad International Airport, they probably went the same way every time. The people we were fighting are not stupid. We killed off all the stupid ones. So they're watching what's going on. And when they decided that they're going to take down a helicopter,

they picked areas to set up ambushes. And these aircraft that would repeat patterns, they'd end up engaging them. That's how we lost. one of our aircraft because we had the powers that be well let me go back real quick because every time we went out on a mission

we would test fire the gun because at the beginning we discovered that if you don't use that gun almost every time it's going to jam or it's going to fail so one of the

first things we did when we went out flying is find an empty place out in the desert, shoot off 10 rounds. Just to make sure everything's working the way it's supposed to. So the powers of B, because they were getting feedback from the people on the ground that we were scaring them. So, you know, and I understand, you know, in counterinsurgency warfare, you're trying to, you know, please locals, you know, you can't just go out there and piss them off.

So they designated a. spot for us to go out and shoot. So what started happening is the same time every day aircraft were going out to the same place in shooting. There are actually a couple of places, but people fell into this habit of going to the same place. And I don't know how many days in a row they went to the same place, but this particular day, the second of February, um, the trail aircraft,

and the team of two got hit and it was flown by a guy named Keith Yocum and his front cedar was named Jason DeFrin and they were able to keep flying but unbeknownst to them there was a fire in the rear of the aircraft where the hydraulics unit is so they they knew that these ambushes were going on and they decided that they were going to go after the guys that initiated this ambush. Because usually what happens is when they engage a helicopter, they all jump in the truck and they take off. Because they're not going to stick around for what's coming next.

So he decided, you know, we're going to go after these dudes. And they actually went in, started making a couple of gun runs. And I think after about the second or the third time through, leads calling Jason asking him, okay, where are you at? Because when you, when you're lead and you're pulling off the target, you're looking for your trail. And ideally, he's rolling in right behind you to cover your six. So when he pulls off the target, he doesn't see Jason. So he's calling, or he doesn't see, he doesn't see Keith. And he's, he's asking him, you know, Keith, where are you at? And then they say, he's, he doesn't see, he doesn't see Keith, he's asking him, you know,

saw like smoke on the ground and what had happened is the fire had eaten through like the tail boom tail boom came off the aircraft and they spawn in and they were killed but that's how those those ambushes went down is they would observe find some patterns of people repeating patterns and try and take advantage. Yeah. Yeah. And I did in an analysis and I said probably 75 to 80% of the shootdowns of helicopters over there was pattern setting. Just real quick for people who might not know when we talk about the different platforms, when we talk about DUSCA, it's basically an equivalent to like a 50-cal. It's about it's a little bit larger, a little bigger than a 50 caliber round. But it's a heavy machine gun around that's made for anti-material.

It's made for exactly this type of stuff. But yeah, it's the Russian or Soviet version. We've got you, your camera went all blurry real quick. Oh, crap. Yeah. Can you wave in front of it? See if that brings it back to you? Wave it where you are, right in front of you.

Still no. Yeah, if you want to unplug and plug back in real quick, we'll do a quick Patreon thing. Yeah, sorry everybody, but, you know, it's a new webcam form and we want to make sure that everybody can see his beautiful face. I don't know about that. Jack, you want to do the Patreon? Yeah, guys, if you can take a look at our Patreon, the links down in the description. Consider subscribing to the channel for $5 a month, and you will get it. get access to all these episodes ad-free and support what we do here. We really appreciate all

you guys. And also make sure you check out the documentary of the longest month and the book, Crazy Horse, and it's, I believe it's one word. Crazy Horse is one word when you're searching for it. Links are down in the description. So. Yeah, Crazy Horse is our call sign that second deployment. So the second deployment, now the insertion. she had kicked off. The one thing the insurgencies tend to be very good at is propaganda.

And had your, do you recall if your ROEs had changed at that time? Were they more lax or restrictive? I think thinking back on it, they were changed a bit. You could, you know, because

especially since we were sons of Iraq was a thing. And I don't know if you guys talked about that before, but they're basically engaging the local militias. So because Sons of Iraq were a thing, you couldn't just like shoot some guy walking down the street holding a gun just because he's got a gun. And I think the Iraqi government had approved like AK-47s for like home and everybody could have one. my understanding. But, you know, it's funny you're talking about, you know, the insurgency trying to, you know, trying to, what's the word I'm looking for, you know, trying to shape the battlefield, so to speak.

One of our teams went out, and this is near Sauter City, and part of what we would do every day when you get a mission was go check out. named areas of interest. So our S2 would say, we think there might be more teams setting up in the vicinity of this grid. And it was our job to go out there and look at it and, you know, make an assessment of what's going on or whatever. So they were looking at one of these NIs near Sauter City and they saw some kids with guns or what they thought were guns. And so they were And so they went into an orbit and they were calling the ground unit and asking, you know, if they had any militia activity in this area or what was going on, you know, if they had any ground patrols in this area. And they kept looking at these kids on with their site.

And it was daylight. And when it's daylight, you could sit a long ways away and use what's called day TUD. And it's it'd sit like six kilometers away. So they didn't really have any idea that the aircraft was looking at them. And they go, hey, you know, so flight lead goes, hey, let's push in a little closer and like, see if we can get a little more detail on, on what, what's going on here. Because they appeared to be either little people or children. Mm-hmm.

So they went in a little closer and it turned out, you know, after they did some more searching that it was children with, toy guns. So somebody obviously gave those kids toy guns hoping that we would kill them. Because who gives kids in a war zone?

Yeah. Boy guns. Right. Yeah. But, you know, we didn't, we called the ground unit and said, hey, there's some kids out here, you know, with toy guns.

And so I guess they were going to roll a patrol out there and, you know, like either take them away and say, tell the kids not to do that or whatever, but it's obvious they're trying to bait us. Yeah. Which goes into what you were saying. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And honestly, those kids have probably been given instructions. It's like, hey, when you see the American forces, like, play with them. Like, pointed at them. You know, kids not knowing any better. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, the,

both in Iraq and Afghanistan, like, the insurgency's got or the bad guy's got very good at the propaganda and setting those conditions and situations upright to get those propaganda wins. There were a lot of people on the battlefield with cameras, if I recall correctly. Yeah. Yeah. So during this trip, this was the trip with the trip with the suicide or was that the third truth uh 2007 the death cult the death cult yeah it is okay yeah so this is one of those bizarre mysteries of the war that i don't think anybody has ever solved yeah i mean it popped up in the news at the time and then kind of went away against the

background of all the other craziness yeah it's happening in iraq at the time yeah so um can you to your knowledge can you give us a background on on what this was So this was like 28 January 2007. And that day, I can tell you from my perspective what was going on. Sure. So that day we were working with some ground forces south of Baghdad, and we got a radio call from our talks, and you need to go down to on a job because an aircraft has just been shot down.

So we end up going down there getting gas. There was a FARP about halfway down there. So we stopped in there, got gas. We went down there, checked in on station with a J-TAC. It turns out it's special forces. I don't know if it was ODA or who, but they were working with the Iraqi police, and they got ambushed by this.

I mean, all the way down there, we're getting updates. When we first got tasks to go down there, they're saying, okay, there's between 20 and 30 insurgents, like they shot down this aircraft and they're in a fight with our ground forces. So we need you go down there and support that. Five minutes goes by and the next radio call it's 50 to 75. and the next radio call, it's 100 to 200, you know, the closer we get, the more people we're hearing about.

And I'm talking to my front seat here and I'm just like, what the hell's going on? Like, I don't know, man. And we get down there and we check in with the J-TAC and we do a battle, what's called a battle handover with the team from our sister battalion that's leaving. And we're out to the west of where this fight is. and because we wanted to get the sun behind us. And we look in there, and as soon as we roll out, there's this earthen berm that's running east-west,

and it's oriented towards where the crashed aircraft is and where the SF dudes are. And on this berm are about 40 bad guys lined up just with RPGs, AKs, whatever. And it appears, you know, they're shooting. So we line up, you know, when we start wailing on them. But, and I didn't see it at the time. But when we went back and looked at the gun tape, there's just like hundreds of dudes like all in this, uh, because there was a trench line. And yeah, yeah. And later on at, after the AAR, they found like, because they, uh, sent the QRF down there in strikers. And when they ended up basically

winning the fight, they found like 300, over 300 dead bodies. These guys were shooting themselves up with atropine. Because when we started engaging, they didn't even, because I was telling my front seater, because based on my experience, like every time we had an engagement, they run. They would run. I mean, especially when you fired and it's hitting around them that they would run.

And we shot and the rounds, you know, probably didn't hit some of them because it was hitting in the sand. So when the shrapnel would come out is kind of getting, it's not, the rounds don't perform like they would. Right. If it was hitting Connacrit or something else or hard ground. So it wasn't getting, it wasn't hitting the bad guys. It was hitting around them and they just stayed there. I mean, I ended up shooting flichettes at him in those work. But it was just bizarre that the amount of,

we didn't understand why they were showing such discipline because they never showed that kind of discipline before. It turns out that they're all jacked up on either drugs or, you know, they got the spirit in them, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, during the AAR and everything, it's like this group, this suicide cult, they weren't attached to anybody. And I still don't fully understand what their motivations were or, you know, what this compound was or what, you know, AC130 when Winchester's shooting at them.

That's wild. That's wild. if this is the same event and i mean i i really have to try to find some of the fifth group guys who were involved but like i remember hearing stories about dudes like climbing up on the humvees and just like wild shit that happened out there that night it doesn't surprise me i was i ended up that mission i flew 10 hours that day i spent like about we went winchester went back to the park got more and i came back uh I didn't see any crazy stuff like that, but, you know, they weren't exactly giving up.

I can tell that. Yeah. Like Iraqi berserkers. It's how generally in a typical engagement, how long would, maybe how many passes, like how long would it take you guys to go Winchester? That's probably the only time I ever recall going Winchester. Yeah. because we would shoot, I'd say I'd have 200 rounds of 30, normally. So you'd shoot either a 10 or a 20 round burst.

Yeah. And the guns harmonized for it's pretty accurate. So it would usually only take at the most three bursts to take care of whatever we were trying to take out. Right. It was something bigger than that. You would use that hellfire. or rockets or whatever. But, you know, normally if you were using the gun,

it was no more than probably three bars to take care of whatever it was. Yeah. And you guys probably got it by context, but if you are not aware, Winchester is just simply an aircraft going out of ammo. Out of ammo. Yeah.

Yeah. Bingo on fuel. Same thing. Yeah. Yeah. And jackpot, if you find the guy, you're looking for on target after on your third or fourth house. I've spent a few nights like watching guys run from house to house wanting them to say jackpot

so I can go home. Yeah. We're making a technical correction here. Okay. Yeah. So on that trip, are there any other like big moments that you recall or that stand out? Well, it was during the surge, obviously. I ended up spending 15 months there,

and the real nut cruncher was when we went over there, we were only supposed to be there for 12. So I don't know if you're familiar with EML because weren't you guys, you weren't usually over there for 12 months. Yeah, no, no, no. We had the Gucci tours over there. Yeah, convention.

guys, if you're there for 12 months, they would give you two weeks a leave in the middle or sometime in the middle. So I had set my leave up to where when I came back there would be like five months left. So I had done my leave and I was on a bus at the Lod going to get on a Blackhawk to come back to Taji. and they had AFN on this bus and it was Rumsfeld announcing the surge and that units would be extended for 15 months. So I found out about that on the bus coming back from leave.

And I think everybody in the Army was trained to deal with changes from the time you started doing PT and they would run past the end point for, you know, another half mile and then come back and stop. But I don't think anything's going to prepare you for if you're prepared for 12 months and all of a sudden, no, you get to stay three more months. That was kind of a, that was not, you had to do some real mental gymnastics there to get your head straight.

Yeah. Because that's the long as 15 months of my life. I bet. My unit, and I made a point of saving a lot of historical documents and information, because I've always appreciated military history and whatnot, and I knew if somebody didn't kind of save some of the stuff that have probably lost to the ages. But during that deployment, we did 800 troops in contact. Wow. Wow. And I want to say there were over 300 direct fire engagements during that deployment. There was there was a period of time there for a couple of months that if you didn't shoot something while you were up, it was something, it was very unusual. That it was like between, I want to say, May and July, that if we weren't shooting something, it was an unusual.

day. Would you say that the, that the encounter you just described was one of the largest engagements you've been in? Or were there others that, was there ever anything that, where there were so many stacks or multiple stacks and so much going on that you were just like, holy shit? As far as sheer number of bad guys, that's the largest thing that I were in. I was involved, there was a Black Hawk helicopter, or Black Hawk, Blackwater helicopter that went down in January of 2007 in downtown Baghdad. And there were so many aircraft in that stack that some of us just had to get out of there. I mean, there were so many people looking. And what was weird about it is when it crashed, it slid like into an alleyway and you couldn't.

It wasn't until the ground guys got there that they actually found it. But that was like a... Everybody trying to help was almost like a cluster there. That was a experience. Yeah. Did you ever have any close calls with... Because you guys were obviously on the bottom part of that stack, generally, I imagine. Were there ever any, like, issues or close calls with aircraft that were.

above you in the stack? Not that, but I had operated, you know, because we had Baghdad, we had close calls with Lilburgs. So people on this. They didn't like to talk to anybody on the radio. So there were people in our, there were people in our time that would be rolling in on a target and had a little bird fly right in front of them. And I understand, I understand, I understand, understand that they had stuff that they needed to do and they didn't want to compromise what they had going on. But like, some of those guys don't know how close they came to catching some 30 millimeter rounds. Yeah. So it was always an adventure flying in downtown Baghdad because there was the cash was there.

Mm-hmm. So a lot of times you'd see aircraft from outside of the A.O. to come in to drop people off at the cash. So you had to kind of keep your... At night, it was more... It was more of a concern looking out for other aircraft than it was worrying about people shooting at you. Interesting.

None of our aircraft ever got shot down at night. Yeah. And I didn't really worry that much because we would get out out of a small arms range at night. You know, as long as you stay below the coordinating altitude, you didn't have to worry about other people in the stack. Right, right. But like downtown Baghdad,

you always have to keep your eye out for, like, the Marines or somebody coming in to the cash or the green zone. Yeah. When, you know, other helicopters would have issues with, like, little birds or whomever. Was it generally because you guys had the same target set and they weren't talking to people? Or like you guys were flying support? Or was it because they were just, they were prosecuting their own targets

and not letting other people know what targets were happening at night? So anytime you're familiar with OCFI? No. So other combat forces Iraq, those were those units that we can't talk about. Okay. So anytime they. were going to prosecute a target, they would set up a restricted operating zone, a ROAS. So when we walked out the door, we knew that there was a special forces ROAS in certain areas

that something was going to happen that night. But we didn't know is what aircraft were supporting them or where they were coming from or anything like that. So we would be out there supporting our. ground units, conventional ground units, and you know, you'd find a mortar crew or something. In that particular night, the guys that had the little bird fly in on in front of them, they were rolling in on a mortar crew. So two little birds, you know, with boards, so they were MHS, you know, because they had operators on the outside, or going into the X, so to speak. and they shoot right in front of the us,

there was a common frequency that aircraft operating in the Baghdad airspace were supposed to use, but these guys wouldn't use it because they were afraid they would compromise their operations. Because there were zones that we could identify, for instance, Sauter City was Zone 21. So if you're going to operate in Zone 21, you'd come up on that common frequency, say Crazy Orr's 0102, zone 21 for the next 30. Those guys didn't like to use that because they were afraid, you know, because it was a common freak and if anybody with a VHF radio could listen to it.

And I understand their concerns. I don't know if they didn't see us because I know sometimes in Apache because we flew completely blacked out and we had one iron strobe on the top of the tail. So they may not even seem our aircraft, especially if they're concentrating, because they're a short final going into their target area. Yeah. And our guys knew that they were in the vicinity of Arras, so that's why they probably saw them before they shot.

But it's still, you know, got to be a better way. Yeah. I don't know that any mid-air's ever happened, and to be honest, I think it's only luck. Yeah, I think there was in Missouille. I think there's a collision. I could be mistaken, though. Well, I know that 258s ran into each other up north, and that was, they were being engaged by ground fire. That may have been it.

And I know that they ran into each other, unfortunately. So one or both took like evasive action ground fire and just lost situational awareness? Correct. Yeah. It's got to be, it's got to be tough. And especially in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where a lot of times, you know, the visible conditions or the visual, you know, it's, it can be not great, you know, when you get sand blowing and everything else. Well, that's funny you mentioned that because I distinctly recall being we got pushed to a, you familiar with a J-Lens?

It's a big, big blimp that they would fly over. Oh, yeah, yeah, the Zeppelin, yeah. Yeah, so it's called a J-Lens and it's got cameras on it and whatnot. And the J-Lens spotted a guy setting up rockets in the middle of a soccer field, and we got sent to that site. And at the same time, I was having a talk in my ear telling me that there's a dust storm coming in. So I'm constantly, you know, as we're closing in on this place, I'm constantly like looking out from the west because the weather's coming in from the west,

seeing the lights gradually disappear as the dust storm gets closer and closer going, okay, are we going to be able to get this done before we, because like flying in a dust cloud we can do it but that's not that's not fun at all and obviously the lower the visibility you know the harder it is to de-conflict and all that other so yeah so yeah when weather got sketchy that's that's adventure flying there i that's not fun at all yeah your documentary the longest month was that was that for you your second trip or was it for the third trip? No, that's for the second.

Yeah. To be honest, nothing really happened on that third tour. Can you tell us about the documentary about what it covers, why you did it? Yeah. Well, first of all, there's some events

that took place. One of them I described to you, the shootdown of Keith and Jason. The other one we go into detail about is the death cult, and then there's a couple of more that one of them involves gun trucks, and the other one involves a little town court Tarmia where a V-Bid basically tried to take out the cop one day up there, and ended up wounding everybody in the cop,

And it turned into a last stand scenario where they were fighting for their lives. And our guys went up there. And according to the guys on the ground, you know, if it wasn't for our guys showing up when they did, they would be dead. So I wanted to tell these stories because if we, the guys that were there, don't tell our stories. nobody's nobody's going to ever hear them

and these are stories that need to be told these are stories that need to be heard and I made every effort to try and include like the people who are on the ground too because their stories deserve to be told and

if you watch the documentary you'll see that everything that we did was for the guy in the ground I wasn't just flying for my own amusement, you know, to go out there and like find bad guys. I mean, that was part of it. But our whole reason for being up in the air was to support guys on the ground. And when we get new guys in the unit, I was one of the senior pilots in the unit.

When new guys would come into the unit, we made sure that they understood that our reason for being up there was to support that guy on the ground. Yeah. Yeah. And if you watch it, you'll see, like, these guys put themselves, put their aircraft into position. Aircraft absolutely got riddled with bullets. It was unflyable when they brought it back to put themselves between those guys on the ground and the guys that were trying to attack the cop. Around what year was that when you guys went down to support the cop being?

like overrunner attacked? That was 2007. Okay. February. Yeah, so that was, I mean, because, you know, it's interesting because like when we talk about Sada City, we're talking about a Shia militia, you know, you know, and the Shia militias were out there

heavily supported by Iran. And then you had the Sunni groups and you had AQI, you know, Al-Qaeda Iraq out there. And I think that, like Al-Tarmia, Tormillo was very much like Sunni and AQI, like fairly savvy organizations out there at the time. Yeah, and we talked to the captain that was in charge at that of the talk at the time. And he goes into great detail about how the insurgency IEDs and they knew that whole village was just. full of it. Yeah. And all the Iraqi police had quit because they'd been intimidated out of

out of their jobs. So we interviewed him because I wanted to make sure that people got as full of you full of picture as we could of what went down because it's not just us flying around with our cab hats, you know, coming in. Right. Loving the smell of napalm in the morning with your spurs. Yeah. Your Stetson. Yeah.

So then you guys wrap up that trip. You go back, how long are you back home after you guys were extended for that 15 months? So we got back in just after Christmas of 07, and I went back in the spring of 2009. Okay. And then you said that that was kind of the slowest trip for you guys? Yeah, we didn't have a single engagement. It was Baghdad again. We didn't have a single engagement that whole year.

And is that because, from your perspective, was that because things have slowed down? Is that because the ROEs have changed and troops aren't going out as much because you guys weren't allowed to engage as much? What was that? Well, we actually saw things starting to slow down at the end. the first deployment or the second deployment. And our commander did a good thing because he had during the brief pre-mission briefs we would get from the S2. They would tell us all the serious incidents reports of that day before we went out. So we'd have an idea where stuff was going on in Baghdad.

Towards the end of that tour, they would brief what the serious incident reports were. a year ago versus what they were right then. And when you put it up on the screen side by side, it was obvious. The Sigaxe, yeah. Yeah. That what we were doing was working. So when we got back in 2009, the only thing the ground units were doing were trying to keep Sunni and Shia apart.

Yeah. Because it was basically hot Iraqi on Iraqi action. Yeah. I mean, there were a couple of times where we, could have probably engaged but they had changed and ROE was a constantly evolving thing and they just changed

the way they wanted us to be employed so it was the Iraqi civil war but by that point we had kind of mitigated the organization we called AQI that was

kind of over at that point right I ended up being during that deployment, I ended up being the OIC. We had to support, we had a mission to support OCFI that I mentioned earlier and just SOTF missions, a joint special operations task force missions. So they made me the OIC. We had two teams that were dedicated to those missions. So every day I'd get on the, get on the phone, talk to the air liaison down there, and get what was going on,

we would escort them to and from the target, getting the stack over the target, just support them however they needed to be supported. But even doing that, we didn't have a single engagement. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, you know, I mean, Iraq was a lot different in a lot of ways than Afghanistan. And, you know, one of the ways we met

was talking about Sotter City. And the games that, like Mokhtal Satter used to play, where he would push, he would push as militias, you know, the Jaisal Mahi, was it Jashu Amadi? But the Madi, you know, the Madi army would, you know, they'd go out and they'd like get aggressive. And then units would go in and start hammering Sotter City. And he'd be like, hold on, I'm a holy man.

I'm a religious figure. Peace. And everybody like, okay. I heart, yeah, I love Sutterton. But he would play that role and he'd play it well. And then, and so U.S. forces go, okay. Well, not U.S. forces, but like the administration of order is making the decisions. Be like, okay, you're a holy man.

We'll back off. You'd back off. And all he was doing was waiting for J. Chalmati. He'd be built. He retreated back to Iran a few times. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

you know and it was very like solder city was a very interesting piece of the bagdad puzzle yeah there was my first deployment like i said we would support uh first cab units down there um first bccc was rolling towards the solder bureau and they got told to stop yeah and i don't know how many times after that, you know, in the intervening years, we were like, you should just let them go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I remember, and, you know, we talked about this too, and I've talked about these guys on the show before, but the Arkansas National Guard, man, I love those guys, and they, they were out there hooking and jabbing, like, they went Winchester a couple times there, and to the point where, you know, I remember one of the guys, like, asking me. if I had an extra ACOG because this ACOG got shot off his weapon. I'm like, yeah, I got an ACO for you, brother.

100% I got an ACG for you. But, you know, like so many units were involved in that fight over time. I mean, the last time I was over there, we had combat engineer units in their

building a wall, you know, to keep keep the two sides apart. Yeah. They're building a physical, you know, doing T-wall down route gold, which runs to the middle of Sauter City. So that's how I wouldn't say, well, it was actually kind of calm because it used to be a no fly through there.

I mean, if you were going to fly in there, you were shooting something. Yeah. But then it became like, okay, try not to. to go through there, but if you have to go through there, like, if you're a medevac and you've got to, that's the most direct way you can fly through there. I got somebody shot a laser at me out of there that came in the cockpit, but that tour, but I actually think it was some dumbass Iraqi army guy. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, in general, that was, we were just going around making noise that whole deployment, that last deployment.

And that's, that's, anytime I hear people talk about how we lost Iraq, I go, I don't know what you're talking about. I mean, it was pretty much one at that point. I can say that, okay, the fact that they wouldn't, the Iraqis wouldn't do a status of forces agreement with us. It's more on them than us. Right. Yeah, we really seized defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq in so many ways. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that our idea is victory is leaving behind a Jeffersonian democracy, you know, some sort of, you know, a republic. Even just a stable country would have been acceptable at that point. Yeah. But it's tough in places like that because we don't, you know, when you look at like Germany and Japan where we occupied and we waited in.

until the government's got built up. Like, we don't have that mentality anymore. Like, as soon as we took over Iraq, we were basically like, here you go. It was kind of. Like, here you go. You guys, we're going to hang out, but you guys fix it. That would have been like an 80-year project, not nine years. Yeah.

Yeah. But if you look at Afghanistan and Iraq, Iraq was probably the more likely to actually develop a stable government. Yeah. Yeah. If we could have, like, successfully managed, like, Iran, you know, like local players, like, those were a lot of the challenges we had there. That we, I think early in the war, we recognized that and we went after it. And then later we were like, you know, politically, we just won it out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the Iranians were knee-deep in what was going on over there. And that's, I think that's what a lot of people. people don't recognize. Yeah. When we talk about Iraq. Yeah.

Well, you know, you had mentioned this, you know, about guys walking around outside our city with briefcases. And it's like, yeah, you know, these aren't business meetings they're going to. Like they're bringing in, you know, new weapons to test. You know, EFPs, you know, kind of EFPs came from Iran. And, you know, the idea that, you know, oh, look, we have this laboratory to test new weapon systems on American troops. You know, and I think that, you know, you talked about some of the man pads, the man

portable anti-aird, you know, systems and things like that, that they were maybe testing on you guys. Yeah, there were, you know, I want to say it's a rumor more than anything else because you take a lot of stuff you hear, even from the S2 with a grain of assault. Sure. You go out there and you get shot out of Sauter City, and, you know, it doesn't, it's not of a stretch to say it's probably somebody from, because I don't know too many people in Sauter City that have the knowledge to employ a man pad. Right, right, right. Or have a man pad. Right, right. Yeah. Like, you can, you understand where their AKs come from, like, they all have them.

Maybe even where they wind up with their RPKs or their Dishkas or. whatever else. But a man pad is like a whole nother level. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so then how much longer did you, what did you do after your last deployment? So we got back in 2010 because I'd done three deployments essentially back to back because, you know, we'd come back and you're training up to deploy again.

I go, I need a break. So I asked DA if I could go to the schoolhouse to teach tack ops, which is what I'd been doing. And I had orders, and then I was a CW4 at the time. And I'd been passed over for W5.

And W5 is kind of like, I don't know, like Sergeant Major, you know, everybody's not going to get that. Yeah. And I'm not the kind of person that they typically pick to be CW5, because to be honest, I'm too honest. I would tell commanders things that they didn't probably want to hear. Yeah. That I thought they needed to hear. And I understand it. I'm not bitter about it. But I was on

orders. The Army changed their policy about, uh, At that time, W-4s could stay for 30 if they wanted. But then the Army changed their policy to where you had to be boarded to, if you've been passed over twice, you had to go for a board to be retained. So I'm starting, I'm almost starting to out process to go to Port Rucker and I get a call from DA saying, you know, the policy's changed. I got to cancel your orders. So my unit was already on orders to go to Afghanistan. And I said, well, the whole purpose of me going to Fort Rucker is I didn't feel like I could deploy again. Well, I can't PCS you because you have to go before a retention board and the retention board's not until the fall.

And I said, well, if I stand for the retention board, I'm going to Afghanistan because the unit was supposed to deploy in like June. And he goes, well, I can't do anything about that. And I said, well, I'm going to drop my papers then. And he goes, what do you mean? I go, I'm retiring. And so as soon as I got off the phone with him, I went to my boss. I worked for the S3. And basically vented to him for a while about how I was getting out of the army

because I'm tired of him trying to screw me. And so October. 2011 I retired. It's interesting because, you know, you mentioned getting out when Clinton went through the whole downsizing thing. And the big thing with Clinton was up or out, right? Like, you either promote or you get out, which I think is a horrible, it's a horrible thing for the military, for, you know,

if you get somebody who's good at their job, let them stay in that job if they don't want to promote. but warrants were always weren't they always kind of protected because warrants were the technical experts that could extend that, could have that like 30 year career

how did that And I'm gonna use a phrase that the guys that worked down on the motor pool the warrants in the motor pool and the other warrants probably aren't going to like but pilots call these guys walking warrants and those guys generally don't have that up and out problem because they were NCOs before they became warrant officers. Okay.

So by the time they get to the point where you got to worry about up and out, you can retire if you want to. Okay. So, but aviators, especially somebody like me who came off the street, I had 10 years in, I got passed over for W3. and at that time the Clinton administration decided, okay, we're going to downsize. Right. So I could roll the dice and stay for a second look and they were offering, I want to say, $40,000 for anybody who would get out. But if I'd stayed for the second look, I wouldn't get that money.

Right, right. So I just said, I went up, I called D.A because I wanted to stay in the Army. I said, can you tell me why I got passed over and can I fix it? And when they said, we can't tell you why you got passed over, I said, okay, I'm taking the money. Because if you can't tell me what to fix, I said, okay, I'll take the money. And then, you know, about a year and a half later, as I said, oh, we let too many people go. Who wants to come back? And considering I didn't want to get out in the first place, that was an easy decision.

And I felt like I had 10 years in and I didn't want to just slow. like throw that investment away. Sure. Sure. Did they make you pay the money back or did, was that like a, no, that's a good thing. I didn't have, I didn't have to pay that back. And when I came back and got, and when I got qualified as an Apache pilot, they were given an Apache pilot bonus.

Nice. So I actually, money-wise, I made out, aggravation-wise, I wouldn't say so. As a matter of fact, when I came back, I had, if anything I would say before I got passed over, I was kind of naive about the Army and that, you know, they'll take care of you. You know, we're all on the same team, blah, blah, blah. You know, you're a teammate until you're not. Right. You know, we need to get rid.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you're a traitor if you want to leave the army, but you're an encumbrance if the army needs to downsize. Yeah, I mean, it's just one of those things that I mean, you can't really take it personally. Once you say you're done, they're like, they're washing their hands and they're moving on to the next thing. And none of us are so important to the army that they're not going to be able to move on without us. Yeah.

Well, I had a baseball coach in high school once that said, and I thought it, because we had a problem with a prima donna on the team, and he would say, if you think you're so important, you can't be replaced, and once you stick your hand in a bucket of water, and if you pull your hand out in the hole is still there, then you're replaced. Otherwise, we can find somebody to take your place.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I understand the Army's point of view. It's just, you know. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of aggravating. Yeah. So we've talked about your book, Crazy Horse.

Everybody, please check that out. And we would have read your book. It's just this was a very last minute fill in. And we deeply apologize for not having read it. The longest month. Where can people find the documentary? Is it streaming anywhere that you know of? Yeah, it's streaming on.

Amazon Prime for free. Okay. And it's also available on YouTube. I think it's Stash Films has it on there. Okay, great. So if you just get on YouTube and do a search for the longest month, or longest month's stash films, it comes up. And I also want to call attention to your website, danger pig.com,

and that is D-N-G-R-P-R-P. P-I-G-G-com. There's no A-N-G-R-P-G-R-Pig.com. And that was your call sign down in El Salvador for the birds. And then websites, a bunch of aviator swag. So if you want to stickers, patches, that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, we checked it out. You have some cool stuff.

We'll grab a couple of patches and stickers to add to our patch wall. So, but, Dan, is there anything that we missed or anything we left out? No, I think we're, I appreciate your time. No, we appreciate your time. We appreciate you like rogering up. We had a scheduling error and needed, you know, we had talked and I told you it wouldn't be for like three months and suddenly this opportunity came up. So we're glad that you could be here.

We're glad your webcam came in on time. Yeah. Well, you know, as you can see, there's a reason why I don't use the webcam a lot. I was actually going to disagree with you on that point. Whatever webcam you got, let me know because you look like, it looks good. I spent thousands on cameras trying to make me look better and none of them seem to work. So, but thank you so much for your time. We deeply appreciate it.

No, thank you. Appreciate it. And also to all our veterans out there, we wish you a great memorial day. You know. You're not supposed to wish him a great memorial day. Well, I know. It should be a great memorial day, though. It should be a time of fun, remembrance and, you know, and healing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would tell you the guys that I know that got, or KIA, they would want us to have a good time. Yeah. That's why I tell people go have a barbecue with your family. Yeah. Because that's what they would want for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Like, I know that having a great memorial day, think about the people that we've known and lost, and people who we didn't know and we've lost, it seems contraindicated, but I think that. No, none of them would want you sitting at an apple. bees crying into your beer on Memorial Day, believe me.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I hope you do have a great Memorial Day. Remember friends, remember the fallen, but spend time with loved ones. And do buddy checks. Please, do buddy checks. Anyway, next week, next Friday, Robert Young Peltin, conflict journalist, author of the world's most dangerous places,

amongst other works. We'll be here then. so that's it yeah thank you Dan we really appreciate it thanks ma'am thank y'all thank you everybody