Birthday Mission
I’m thrilled to have just celebrated my 56th spin around the sun this November. It isn’t a banner year, one that deserves a large party, but understanding the things I have withstood and predicaments I have dug myself out of, standing here at 56 is a major accomplishment. I am not one to pat myself on the back, but it is worthy to give some gratitude and feel lucky to be alive and happy.
I really didn’t want to bring it up to my conscience but a birthday evening I spent in the northern section of Iraq in 2008 was nearly my last. I know now that going out on a combat mission on your birthday is just bad fucking luck. It is just tempting fate, if you believe in that kind of shit. If you have zero choice and are going out on a combat mission on your birthday, one might just turn it into dark humor to make it easier, kind of lube the old sphincter kind of a scenario. I just told the crew it would save my family money if I got killed on my birthday because the grave stone could just reuse the month and day already carved in, bonus.
I was in such a predicament. We were getting ready to roll up our gear and go home after an arduous 15 month deployment. This was a part of the war that we all called the “surge” because President Bush threw all we had at the enemy by slowing down efforts in Afghanistan and really concentrating efforts in Iraq. We were at the height of our troop strength and we were sky high in our aggression to win this damn war.
This turn in the sandbox was by far the most intense and combat heavy experience I ever had. As a Black Hawk pilot, I shouldn’t normally have been in so much contact with an enemy force as during this period. I was at the best point in my career, I see that purely from the crystal sharp focus of hindsight. I was an US Army Chief Warrant Officer 3 (CW3), UH60 Black Hawk helicopter Pilot in command, Standardization Instructor Pilot, and Air Mission Commander. I was in charge of a company of Black Hawk pilots and crew chiefs in terms of enforcing that they met the requirements and standards from the plethora of regulations, manuals, procedures, and policies that kept us making the mission happen over and over successfully.
Our company, The Charlie company “Black Sheep” belonged to the bigger organization, 3-1 Assault Helicopter Battalion. We had three flight companies to fulfill our mission of getting the ground force commander and troops anywhere on the battle field within 50 meters and 30 seconds of when they demanded. We were designed to bring large numbers of ground forces to the area of the battle to swiftly and with stealth overwhelm the enemy. The problem is with that neat idea is that operating in the open flat desert in that manner wasn’t really useful, it was much better over wooded, hilly or mountainous terrain. We had to do things with some tactics that reside outside of the normal thought pattern.
When a new unit starts arriving into country, there is a very detailed plan to hand over the mission from the outgoing experienced and potentially haggard crews to the fresh faced, eager to get the mission going and the clock started toward getting back home. We call this period RIP, or Relief in Place. It is two weeks long if not longer. The first week the FNGs (flipping new guys) are just along for the ride, no command responsibility or accountability is handed over. Everything is done under the guise of the outgoing command, all procedures and policies are in effect of the ones leaving. It will be different than what the incoming unit has trained for and expects, this causes clashes right off the bat. I haven’t experienced a RIP that drama didn’t reign supreme. “They” do shit all wrong, we aren’t going to do that shit…..are we?!
The second week has the new unit in a faux sense of command, but still conducting all business under the style of the outgoing team. This is the phase in which everyone thinks we can hold on for a week and then go to what we want to do and how we planned to do things. Then the Theater wide policy is found that states that the incoming unit will continue operations in the manner as the outgoing command for one month after assuming full command responsibility. By the time that month comes and goes, no one wants to change a thing back to our original plan. Change is the enemy. People are ultimately lazy.
We entered this deployment, termed OIF 07-09, a planned 15 month mission with headquarters in COB Speicher, a huge airfield complex in the north of Iraq near Sadam’s home town of Tikrit. We were replacing the air assault battalion of 25th Combat Aviation Brigade and they had been involved in a high level of action, especially in the Diyala River Valley, an area just north of Baghdad.
During our RIP, we are required to fly with mixed unit crews. This means that half the crew is from the outgoing unit and the other half is the incoming unit. For two weeks we fly like this as we get the hang of the different mission sets. They had a new landing technique for the huge dust clouds from the desert environment. I found it laughable that they were going to teach me something new about landing in the dust. I had already completed a 15 month all Baghdad tour not long ago. Not only that, but they had some fresh Pilot in command CW2 that was going to show me the ropes. I admit, I was a dick.
That young pilot was a very decent human, a quality officer, and a damn good stick. I wasn’t sure I liked what they were showing us, but I went through the motions. They were staying higher and faster than usual during a normal dust approach. They held altitude and put on the brakes (the helicopter will stand up tall on its tail) and then level the fuselage, then begin a vertical descent. This is something that air assault pilots would never dare to think to try, if they wanted to live. That was an enemy situation though. That vertical descent left the aircraft inside of the eye of a dust hurricane, it is full clear vision inside of a bubble in that vertical column of air, the touch down point always in sight.
There was lots of discussion, sometimes heated, sometimes boiling, sometimes things were said that couldn’t be taken back. There was a particular mission set that was much more advanced than even a full blown air assault. It was a team of two Black Hawks and two OH58D Kiowa Warriors out together in a specific sector, hunting for some bad dudes using some top notch technology. This was a mission set we hadn’t thought of, hadn’t trained for, and really only had a handful of pilots and full crews capable of pulling off this nonstandard mission.
We would fly our motley crews an hour to the south at a familiar base, Taji. We linked up there with our ground force and got briefed on what they hoped would happen that night. They had lists of dudes they wanted to kill or capture and where they thought they were at that exact moment. There was some magic stuff already high above doing what it does to help hunt. Suddenly, one of these known thugs would trigger his location and we would get the alert to get our 2 hawks and 2 Kiowa Warriors in the air and on the ground within 30 minutes of being handed what was called, a high confidence grid. We could look on a digital map and even had access to very recent satellite pictures covering that area. We made a hasty yet detailed plan centered around the target building, we called it X. The hawks would land to the X, so we picked the spots we knew we could put it down without becoming a new crash on the battlefield. As it turns out, this new vertical landing thing was the exact technique that made this mission possible. We put our birds in some tight spots to capture many bad dudes.
We saw some wild action in the first few missions in our RIP. We recognized we were going to assume this mission, but we were going to have to make some changes or emplace some controls so we can do this without killing flight crews. Our buds from the 25th were just a little more cavalier than what our boss wanted. He was from the special aviation unit, the 160th and we would create mission templates and have exactly the correct crews sitting in the exact correct seat. We took this mission set and absorbed all that greatness we found from the studs of the 25th and we improved so we could fit our forces and experience levels. We formed crews, trained hard, developed a training plan to increase our crew members available, we developed quick templates and actions we could call out like football plays, allowing less radio talk and more detailed levels of planning that were pre-conducted. We made the mission more our personality while serving the same customer seamlessly. They just wanted to get to the X and roll up the Jackpot. We called this mission set, “Iron Strike”.
Our battalion had a huge mission to run logistics all across the country. It was basically Army Airlines. A soldier would basically book a ticket, go the nearest airfield passenger terminal, get on the correct manifest, wait around like most airports only this one is filled with soldiers and is in a combat zone, get filed out and onto a helicopter and flown to the next stop. They will be grabbed when it is time to get off because it is so damn loud they won’t hear a thing, everything is confusing and no one tells you what the fuck is happening. Suddenly it is time to get off and move off into the terminal. Our crews crisscross Iraq moving soldiers and cargo, ass and trash is what we call it. We did these routes all day and all night long. It took the majority of our forces to pull off the crewing, the launching, and the maintenance of these aircraft.
Then we had the special missions which were at least two ten ship air assaults per week and the nightly Iron Strike team. As the tour went along we eventually grew the Iron Strike into four teams operating independently around our battle space. To pull off all these different missions types and styles, we really had to juggle crews around. We had night shift and day shift. Most of the combat stuff that wasn’t Army Airlines happened on the night shift. All the heavy hitters were on the night shift. Except that wasn’t the case because I needed competent leaders on the day shift keeping everyone in check and to the standard. I had to pick someone, but I stayed on nights. I lived on the Iron Strike teams, pulling that mission set 5-7 nights a week for months on end. They forced a 48 hour reset every 30 days unless a higher level commander signed off on more hours, which mine always wanted more out of me so I just stayed on duty all the months all the days.
Our teams were pulling in big names on the lists. It seemed liked we caught the Al Qaeda in Iraq number 2 at least a dozen times. We were there when we got Al Baghdadi (not that anyone remembers or cares who that is), I have video of him charging one of our aircraft that had landed. As he got closer he exploded his suicide vest sending a clear picture of his severed leg flying through the air. Our pilot saw what was happening and quickly picked it up off the ground and saved the crew and craft from that suicide run.
To be continued.
Crafted by Valor 
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