Crafted by Valor

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. I joked that being the number two in Al Qaeda was the most dangerous job on the planet. I’m not sure if there is a celebration at home for the newly promoted number two. Their life expectancy was just a few weeks.

Eventually the long slog of this 15 month deployment was getting set to roll it up and go home. We had an inbound unit coming to being our RIP and then turn the mission over to the folks in the assault unit of 10^th Mountain Combat Aviation Brigade. I don’t want to tarnish anyone in that unit, I didn’t have the proper chance to really know anyone. Yet, I knew their Battalion Commander was someone to watch. This was no duplicate of our boss, not even in the same hemisphere. Yet this dude thought highly of himself. He had completed a tour in Afghanistan with the majority of this unit in a lesser role and as a Major. He didn’t let anyone in hearing distance forget about his tall tales. 

My personal take on someone that constantly needs patted on the back and talks highly of their skills is actually projecting what they want to be the case, not what truly is the case. This person knows they are scared and puts out a much different front, but doesn’t back any bravado with skill. I was assigned to fly with him on several “Iron Strike” missions in order to turn that set over for the new teams to support. Not only did I need to show him the hands on flying skills to precisely land in support of the ground force, smack in front of the target building if able, but I needed to demonstrate the role of AMC, Air Mission Commander. This is the decision maker for all activities in the air, the direct contact to the Ground Force Commander, the one overall in charge. 

The guy was severely arrogant and equally poor on the controls. His decision making abilities under pressure were suspect at best. He deferred to being a cowboy and wanting to kill everyone around. Well, I am probably exaggerating a tad, but not really. Through several mission sets lasting 12 hours, I had endured as much of this jerk as I really wanted to swallow, but more was needed. We had one more night of missions and if I gave the nod, this Lieutenant Colonel would be mission ready, again if I said so. Now think of this: if we don’t sign this crew off as ready, then we just need to fly them again. Our goal is to go home. We had been there for 15 months already. Enough is enough. But my conscious won’t let someone not truly ready take over for my selfish reasons. Reasons like getting home to my little family and my life.

As luck would have it, this last mission fell on the evening of my 39^th birthday. It got confusing on the date and time for missions because we would take off on one calendar date and fly through until the next calendar date and we would land before the sun came up. To us it was the same day as we took off. So we called these times POD or Period of Darkness. I took off on my birthday, had enemy contact sometime during that POD, my birthday anyway you slice it. 

The mission was a larger scale air assault that involved six CH47 Chinooks that were carrying a much larger payload of soldiers than our Blackhawks. That put them as the major push. My mission was to run an outer ring encasing the entire battle space so as to catch anyone departing the area, especially in a big hurry. Our crews are also mixed in the back with our crew chief door gunners. On one side I had their guy and one side I had my guy, I had Hank, one of the best of my guys. I had hardened special forces men on board the 2 Blackhawks is was commanding. I was also assigned two AH64D Apache attack helicopters to assist my team. They were from the 10^th Mountain and had already been signed off as mission capable and were running missions on their own for the first time that night. I was used to two Kiowa Warriors instead of Apaches. Trust me that Apaches are much more capable than a KW, they have much more fire power, more time on station, more munitions, much better sensors and cameras. However, their pilots just don’t match the Kiowa Warrior scout pilots. It is attack mindsets versus scout mindsets and how they interact with the ground force. 

Our part of the mission was super boring if everything went to plan. Nothing ever goes to plan. This was no different. The big assault went off extremely well, all the Chinooks hit their target landing zones exactly at the time they committed to hit. They unloaded fast and got airborne and out of the way of the ground mission. They loitered near enough in the event tragedy struck and the ground force was being taken apart, those crews would roar back in and pick up the infantry. Nothing of that sort was needed this night. 

US forces started taking contact with exactly the dudes they were looking to wrap up with kill or capture as the mission. Because things were calm and enough time had elapsed, my team needed to get to a refuel area as planned and return to our mission. We could tell departing for fuel was the right plan and we headed to a base called Warhorse and landed at our FARP, our gas station if you will. We conduct what is known as “hot fuel” because we keep the helicopter operating at 100%. We unload everyone but the two pilots, refuelers plug into our special fuel connector with their special hose connection and they pump fuel while we are burning fuel. At this time we are vulnerable to fire and one reason is static electricity. So we do not transmit on our radios, we can hear but we can’t talk. What we were hearing is that things were going a different direction suddenly and my call sign was hitting the airwaves; “NightMare 1 this is Eagle 06”.  This transmission was repeated multiple times, me wishing he would remember I was in hot fuel and just couldn’t answer. The minute my fuel was unplugged I made the call back to discover they needed us to run down some “squirters” heading from the objective town, down an irrigation canal toward a second small village. This means armed bad guys are on the move and our special ops dudes were getting called into the game. First things first; I am in charge and I will ultimately decide if and when we insert our ground force once I get more information and eyes on the scene, whether those eyes were mine or the Apache pilots eyes and sensors. 

I did have a small problem that eventually jumped up to bite me. The pilot in command of the second Blackhawk with me is also a total problem child, a bitter fuck that kept getting passed over for promotion because of his dirty past filled with an inability to not fuck other officer’s wives. He was reprimanded, ordered to stay far away from one officer, but to show his loyalty they ran off to Denmark and got married instead. He is the one in charge as my wingman. I on the other hand kept my zipper where it was intended and my promotions came on schedule. For some reason that made me his enemy because he was jealous as fuck, let’s be honest. 

As we departed Warhorse back to the objective area, I made a quick brief on how we would execute and we would finalize the landing as we got closer and more data. I did not receive acknowledgment from my wingman. As we got to the area, I made a call to the Apache team for an assessment of the enemy situation and potential landing sites for us as well as hazards. They seemed absofuckinglutely clueless. I got that there were two military aged males making their way down a canal in a military manner. Clearly this was new legal language they have been learning and rehearsing. What I needed to know was did they have weapons, most importantly; were they wearing suicide vests?! As I was waiting for a new and improved picture from the crew with eyes on the two moving down this ditch. I see the ditch, I see the village they are moving toward, oh shit, there are the two dudes. Fuck! 

Even a bigger FUCK was that my wingman is in the middle of landing pretty much right next to the two armed assholes and now I can see they are wearing heavy vests. This fucking asshole cowboy is landing right in the fucking middle of this shit, I am going to kick his ass if he lives. All of this is occurring in lightning speed as I notice one asshole in the ditch raise his AK47 directly toward the landed hawk and the dudes getting off, they are about to get a hail of bullets. I grabbed the controls out of the hands of my copilot while yelling over the intercom to Hank on my side of the aircraft that I was spinning around to take out this fuck with intent to kill our guys, we had all we needed to smoke this guy and we needed to do it fast. I could see the infrared laser of Hank’s M240H moving toward his target. Just then I see a trail of green tracer rounds coming in an arcing pattern toward us. I jammed the cyclic forward to dodge the visible stream of rounds headed toward us. Each one of those illuminated rounds has multiple dark rounds in between. In other words, there were a lot of bullets coming at us and fast. I could see that I was dodging the rounds but suddenly the cockpit was filled with shattering fragments, smoke, and the smell of phosphorous from the tracer rounds. Hank was standing in his window pounding rounds back at that asshole, when suddenly my leg is hit with what felt like a cattle prod, a huge wave of sharp electricity followed by an intense stinging. My leg was just hit with a burning baseball bat, I think I am fucking shot. Simultaneously, I see that fucker that shot me blow into pieces as Hank hit him center of mass in his suicide vest. I let the crew know I was hit and LTC Shithead took the controls

My copilot made a sharp right turn away, I am assuming so he could see our sister ship on the ground. I was trying to find any blood that should be coming from my upper right thigh, but under the Night Vision Goggles I am unable to make out any blood. Then the night sky lights up and the brightness shuts my NVGs down for just a few seconds. We believe it to be the other asshole using his suicide vest to not become a POW. 

I am nervous suddenly that our wingman is going to take off from his position and we might be crossing his path and close to a midair during all the chaos. I see that they are still pinned to the ground with the infantry dudes just standing there. I recognize that my copilot is setting up an approach to land. I tell him not to land yet but he continues. I aggressively tell him not to fucking land yet. Now he openly tells me he is landing and I realize he is going to do some crazy dust landing technique from the old school days where we would use a bunch of forward airspeed and then hit the brakes really hard. We know that was just breaking aircraft landing gear and much more. I repeated to not land, in fact I told him to give me back the controls. This fucker tells me NO, he is a LTC and he is landing. This is what made me snap, it was the final straw for this cocky fuck to say to me. I fully knew that I had the backing of my boss, I knew he would do exactly what I was doing, we would never commit our ground force with that minimal of information. Look what happened when my wingman did what he wanted, not what was correct. His landing and timing set it up for those two assholes to get shots at us. I was in no mood, I was certain I had a bullet in my ass and I was fucking fire. 

When that LTC didn’t give me the controls again after I told him to give me the fucking controls. He defied me again. Before his words could finish breaching his lips, my fist was crashing into the side of his helmet. I put some serious juice on that punch too. He was knocked off the controls and unable to speak for some unknown amount of time. I didn’t let there be silence. I was pounding out my displeasure with this fuck with a deep booming voice filled with rage and lacking any give a fuck about his rank. I might have had less rank, but in that aircraft and on that mission, my CW3 rank was in charge. I was the Air Mission Commander and the Pilot In Command of the aircraft. Once we get on the ground, his fucking rank matters, but until then he needs to shut the fuck up and do what I tell him or I am going to fuck him up again. That was my message. I aborted the landing just as the Apaches were filling our intended landing spot with 40mm high explosive rounds, for what reason I don’t know, but the fog and stress of combat at the speeds of helicopters at night in a 3D chess game, that isn’t for just everyone. People figure out who they really are in these type of conditions. 

After we got some altitude and out of the way, I was able to get all types of aircraft back into their pre-arranged altitudes so we stay separated and safe. We stayed in the area to keep our ground force safe as they exploited the area and the mess we just made. We kept flying with them in our sight until the sun came up and we were almost out of fuel again. The teams on the ground had gathered what they needed and asked for an EXFIL. I was super happy to comply. We discovered that there were two dead, both wearing suicide vests. Their report had my door gunner hitting and exploding the first guy, the second self-detonated soon after when he saw the demise of his pal. 

I made it back to Warhorse where I landed out of the way and shut down as I knew this bird was toast for a while and in need of a special maintenance pickup. Upon shutdown, Hank climbed out of the aircraft, removed his helmet and threw it across the flight line, he then retreated far away and didn’t want to be approached. LTC Shitface decided it was his time to let me know that punching him was going to be a mistake. He was about to turn me in. My response: Make sure you spell this fucking name correct, I hate when people forget that last S in Hastings. Oh and when you talk to my Colonel, you might want to drop the Joe Cool act because they are going to back me without a doubt”. I escorted this fuck to a phone so he could make the call. I witnessed him telling the story with the arrogance that I was sure he would bring. Suddenly, he stands at attention as if a higher ranking officer walked in, he suddenly was all official with his, “yes sir” and much more military demeanor. 

First there were forensics from our TACOPS specialists. Ultimately there were 22 rounds in my aircraft, my rotor blades had taken the bulk of them, I had multiple rounds hit under my seat and destroy some radio equipment held in a bay there. My bullet proof seat did its job in protecting me. A AK47 round was found sticking out of the rail attached to the bottom of the seat responsible for setting the position fore and aft. The round was headed for my femur but lodged there instead. I received shrapnel from that as well as the burning phosphorous from the round. My injury was minimal and actually embarrassing. Now that close to 20 years has passed, the scar is a cool story.

We flew out of there two nights later south to Kuwait and ultimately home. As each birthday passes, I recognize that I could have been denied any future ones that night. That always reminds me that the future is not guaranteed, it could be snuffed out at any moment. Yet, one doesn’t need to push their luck by doing combat missions, especially on their birthday. I am super happy that is all in the past for me.