Hey, folks, I just want to take a minute to ask you to
go in rate this podcast, let the Team House know how you think we're
doing. Go and rate us on whatever platform you're listening to this on,
whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever else. Those ratings really help us out
and we really appreciate the feedback to let us know what you like and what
you don't like. And if you do like the Team House and you'd like
to support us, go check out our Patreon page and you can actually support
the stream and well as get access to our bonus segments and bonus episodes.
Yeah, if you're going to give us a great review, please do.
And if you're going to give us a NOTT secret, if you why don't
you just send us an email. We'll talk about Special Operations, Colbert,
ask me the Team House with your hopes, Jack Burphy and David Park,
Hey, guys, welcome to episode two hundred and thirty nine of the Team
House. We are here today with our guest Daniel. Daniel served as a
crew chief with one hundred and sixtieth Special Operations Aviation Regiment, mostly or entirely
on the MH forty seven platform, also deployed with a previous guest of ours,
Alan Mack, so we're really happy to have him on the show tonight.
Quick shout out to Augusta Precious Metals for supporting the show and being a
sponsor. We really appreciate having them and Daniel. You know, without further
Ado, Man, thank you for coming on the show tonight. Thank you
very much for having me on board. Yeah, man, so tell us
a little bit about you know, your upbringing and sort of what led you
towards military service. My dislike for school pretty much sent me in the military
away. I grew up in a little small town in Missouri, o Sage
Beach, Missouri, down the Lake of the Ozarks. I'm not the Ozarks
north of there. That's fight Morgan if you call me from the Ozarks.
But yeah, I was just uh, middle of the road school kid.
I was always well behaved, but when it came to homework and study habits,
it was not my cup of tea. So my best friend at the
time that I didn't know till after I had already joined the army, is
the guy that sent the Army recruited to my door. Came and talked with
him and told me, you want to travel the world and do fun stuff
and get some money for college. And I was like, yeah, sure,
why not. My parents were maybe back during the Vietnam era and my
grandparents and all that. My brother served in the army in the late eighties
early nineties, so I thought, yeah, sure, why not. Let's
let's give it a try. So off I went and went up to the
MET station up in Saint Louis, Missouri, and watched the little video.
I'd always been in love with tanks. You know, it's cool they drive
around and blows awesome. I've always had a love for helicopters. I don't
know, I don't know where that came from. It was pretty cool.
So I was sitting in the lobby at the MET station and I remember a
show called The Firepower on Discovery Channel came on. It showed a tank rolling
through the desert blowing up stuff. I was like, yep, that's it,
And the very next screen showed a helicopter finer missile and blowing up the
tank. So I walked the while I was sitting there and said, Hey,
that helicopter job. I'll take it. Sounds cool. Off over,
So you didn't really know too much about what you volunteered for. You just
knew you want to be in rotary wing aviation somewhere. Oh yeah, and
it's I mean, it's even it's even worse than that. My official MOS
at the time sixty seven uniform and then you know they changed the moss around
and became fifteen uniform. But my ls, they need help repairer. I
signed it the Helicopter Mechanics, And when I showed up at Fort Eusta's,
Virginia in August of two thousand. In the ninety four, you know,
I thought I was gonna be just a general helicopter mechanic. That's that's the
laser disc. Aging ourselves a little bit, but that's the laser disc.
They showed me at the met station was fixing all you know, Apaches cobra
a few weeks. This was great. And all of a sudden we walked
through the hangar on our first day and I'm like, uh, what is
this? But what is this school less dumpster looking thing? And they're like,
oh, yeah, this this is your life for the next and for
our job. It was six years. The initial listener was six years.
Wow. So well, I'll just I'll be a helicopter mechanic and see how
it goes. And I had at the time, I had no idea that,
you know, being a crew chief on anything flying was was an option.
I didn't realize that until I got Tanama and I was like, who's
the who's the cool guys in the flight seats that are never at pet in
the morning, those that's a flightful team? Said I want it? How
do I do that? I spent six months in maintenance and the rest of
my career, the last nineteen years flying on the back was uh was the
enlistment six years because the initial training was so long. Yeah, I mean
I think it's you know some of those mss where they you know, the
training's cut along and it's technical, and you know, if they're gonna they're
gonna do that. They want they want something with some longevity, right.
I initially kind of asked about, you know, what's a medic or whatever,
you know, something someone to give me a good job on the outside.
But yeah, so T school up at Fort Eustas, Virginia was so
I got there and let's see August September, actually got there in October.
It was about six months about six months long. Yeah, and so if
you're if you're going from scratch, like you know, you didn't happen to
have a helicopter in your garage, so you're know your hands on for the
first time. What it what is six months of you know, helicopter maintenance,
Like yeah, I mean it's the first three weeks stick the front load,
and it's all learning the manuals, the maintenance mangals, you know,
because every I mean, the helicopter is big. You guys have been in
the back of you see how big those things are. Lots of lots of
systems, subsystems. So the first three weeks is learning the maintenance manuals and
it's like, you know, it's about ten books, you know, that's
you know, two inches thick. And then you've got troubleshooting manuals that are
you know, four of which are huge. So it's learning the the you
know, the maintenance, the manuals, the the record system because I mean,
it's it's still a helicopter that flies, so you've still got to follow
you know, FAA guidance and civilian pieces and parts as well, so you
know, learning the kind of some of the aspects on that some of the
inspection techniques and procedures, you know, not just you know, part broke
take off the new part of but you take that part off cleanected. You
know, the helicopter goes through periodic period you know, every so many flight
hours that go through little expections, and then you know, every couple of
hundred hours we tear the thing apart. So that's the first few weeks,
and then the rest of it is just each individual system. You go through
the the engine systems and the hydraus and then electrical systems and then cargo handling.
So it just breaks that thing down into pieces and you get to kind
of know, and then you get to kind of know that engineers are very
weird people and how they put stuff together does not make sense. So when
everybody's really working on their cars, you know, it's a simple thing like
changing the spark plug. Now imagine doing that on turbine engines that you know,
sitting on top of the helicopter twenty feet up in the one hundred and
twenty degree after any sun. Yeah, makes things go sporty, but yeah,
it's just it's just a whole lot of technical you know, learning and
some of us also the basic concepts of not just learning in parts, but
how they work, right. I mean, you guys, you just sit
inside. You look up and you see all those pipes and two beams and
all that stuff, and we know what every piece is, what everything does
sudden. This is pretty long and for twenty years I was still learning.
I mean even up until the point I retired, I was still learning stuff.
Do uh do the do the do different parts of the helicopter evolve at
different times? And so how does that create challenges for you guys? Yeah?
I mean, uh, you know when I when I retired, I
was teaching at the maintenance Test Pilot course down at for Recker, Alabama for
Big Army guys. And the Big Army had the Fox model shnooks near the
F models, which was kind of like a slim down version of the G
model that we had in the regiment. And then part of that was the
echo. So you know, with every model change, it's basics are the
same, but it's a new helicopter. And then individual pieces and parts can
sometimes update, you know, the engines go through upgrades. It was very
common in the one sixtieth you know, we had we had a little cell
down at the end of the runway. That their sole purpose in life was,
Yeah, take a piece, how can we make it bigger and better?
How can we fit it on the helicopter? And then we got to
learn it? Yea, So it was yeah, I mean, it was
just about the time you think of the smartest guy's world to come out with
new stuff. You're like, shit, okay, I'm starting over. Yeah
yeah, so you yeah. I mean, in my in my twenty years,
you know, I went from you know, the big Army Delta models
to the regimental echoes, and then we replaced the echoes with the golfs,
and I went from golf to bit Hermie on the Fox model. So I
went through four four models of the forty seven. Yeah, and so four
years down in Panama you were able to make that switch from mechanic over to
crew chief. What what? And what was it like? Uh? Down
in Panama at that time. That's I mean, people who were stationed down
there back in the day speak very highly of it. I found it was
the it was the Army's little hidden secret. I got there in March of
March April of ninety five. I remember leaving, leaving Virginia. I said,
you know, blue jeans, you know, flannel shirt jacket. I
get off the airplane and uh, you know in Panama Takuma Airport, and
I thought I was dying and I was like, what, where, where
am I? What did I just do? But yeah, that place was
amazing. As far as us, we had just one little aviation battalion,
you know, some big army Blackhawks, and then the forty seven side of
the house we only had eight. We had eight ships and we supported everything
you know, from Mexico down to the tip of South America. But the
thing that really kind of ignited my my fire for what I wanted to do
in the future was we had a small little detachment from the one Safety of
Guys at the time was called the sixth seventeenth so AD and then you know,
they later became part of the Therbitine Guys here, but we were fortunate
enough that we got to do some work with them. You know, sometimes
we was doing you know pasmic training, I mean over the jungle school,
or you know, doing fat cow missions, you know, flying out to
an island and setting up a fark site. So just kind of getting exposed
to that and then the other thing that kind of made me decide that I
wanted to special someday was I'm getting to work with the seals that were rotating
through. We had Charlie Company, third of the Seventh, which was down
there on Fort Clayton, Panama. Those guys were awesome, you know,
super super great group of guys with such a good relationship. You know,
we do a lot of you know, static line jumps with them, We
do their halo drops, We go down in the canal and do their you
know helo cast operations. You know, there were boats. We got to
do ladders, ladders with them repelling. So it was almost like kind of
being a little you know, miniature Special Operations unit without all the fancy toys.
So when I set up and you know, I go to the maintenance
platoon and I'm like scrubbing the cracks the hangar floor and you know, cleaning
out the butt cans, I was like, this sucks. I want to
I want to go do the things that I hear those stories about the guys
at the bar talking about. So about six months into it, they held
a flight platoon board, you know, just promotion board, a selection board
basically, and uh. One of the books that we had that were given
and a I T was called the Dash ten. It's the operators man,
it's the Bible. It is the forty seven Bible that tells you how everything
works, not details, but the overall basics. You know, nomen plays
stuff and you point at it and you know what's this. It's a red
solo cup full of rum and coach great awesome, so you know, you
knew what it was, what it's called, how it works, aircraft limitations,
emergency procedures, basically everything the pat knows about the cocker stuff. Every
back study. Had a couple of flightful tune guys helping me out. And
I went to the board and I mean, I'm just a you know,
I think at the time, maybe one year in the army. I'm an
E two, got my little mosquito wings and it's one of the you know,
E four, E five even had a couple of sixes that had been
in the army ten twelve years and never flown and wanted to do it,
and they picked me. I never stopped. So I've been for about three
and a half years in Panama as a crew chief there. Progressed up so
you know, in the forty seven well, it's a touchy subjects, so
I'll kind of let this one slide for a guy because nobody knows better.
But in the forty seven world, being called a crew chief's kind of almost
a degrading thing because that's what that's what we start off as. But in
the in the big world is whatever you notice is. But you progress up
from being a crew chief to a flight engineer, and then from flight eginer
up to standards. So I started off, you know, as a crew
chief is everybody else, and then got really good at working on the airplane
fixing minute started getting good reputation with the pilots that you know, hey,
and the other guy I worked with. His name was Randy. Nickname was
Stubby, just a little short guy. Our airplane was always perfect, it
was clean, you know, there was no issues. We took it,
babed it like it was our car, and uh, I just kept working
up became a flagstuers. Basically, when we become a flight engineer, you
get your own It's kind of like, you know, you get to put
your name on the side that's mine, so you know, when people are
talking about you know, one oh five or one, three, five numbers.
It's Dan the airplane, Randy airplane. So it starts, it takes
on your own, your own persona, and so yeah, we started doing
that, Ken and Daniel before jumping onto the next thing. Could you take
just a moment to explain to the people out there who are not familiar what
a crew chief does, what a flight engineer does, how they interact with
the pilots, and really what that job entails. Yeah, you know,
starting off, you have big army has two people. You have two people
assigned to each aircraft and it's theirs. I mean, it depends on it.
It's your plane. The flight engineer is the senior crew member that's basically
in charge. It's his He signs the hand receipt for all the equipment.
It's it's his responsibility to make sure that thing is you know, fully mission
capable all the time. And an assigned to him is a crew chief,
which is usually a new flight guy. So they're coming from a maintenance platoon.
You know, we're coming from another duty station. And then they're yours.
So the two of you you take you off stuff and then as you
progress, as you learn, because you know, there is no there's no
school for being a crewchie. It's literally on the job training. You know,
they give you a give you a couple of books, give you a
checklift, they give you what's called a call and response because every if you
guys have ever been on the airplane plugged in, you hear a lot of
talk back and forth between the front end and the back end, especially when
you're starting up, shutting down, and performing flight news. It's it's an
orchestrated event. So you know, every time the pilot says something, he
calls it out and you respond. He calls it out and you respond.
So yeah, the first few months is just learning that, you know,
where do I stand when we start an engine, where do I stand when
we start the auxiliary, Where do we stand when I'm doing whatever? So
that's kind of that flight engineer's job is to make sure the aircraft is up
and running all the time, and to train that new crew chief to become
a flight engineer someday as well, and then he'll move over and get his
own airplane. And then when it comes to the side of the house,
it's the mission planning bigger. I mean, we didn't really do much.
Everything was done by the pilots. They you know, we just went out
of the aircraft, got it ready, and we just sat there waiting for
a way to show up. And then you know, the teams would show
up, the passengers or whatever, we'd load the cargo. We might do
a quick little you know, safety brief. You know, don't touch this,
don't touch that, sit down, bulk your seat belt, shut up
and get off, and I tell you to you I probably heard some of
those. And then when it came to the mission stuff was you know,
executing whatever fast it was. When I got to the regiment, it was
a very eye opening experience on how involved and it got a lot more involved
as time went on, as the guat went on on, how much more
involved we became in the mission planning cycle of it. You know, sitting
in Afghanistan, the planning centers, I had a desk right there at the
head devil. You know, you had the pilots on one it is kind
of a U shaping. Had pilots ran down one side head of the table.
You had the air mission commander, you had the flight lead, and
then right next to him was me. That's you know where that's where al
Matt comes into play, drag me around the globe. A couple of times
you're in there to kind of take the load off of them because the you
know, the mission sets were very detailed and sometimes very complex that they didn't
need to worry about that stuff. You know, there was the mission they
met with the ground forced guys. They come and say, hey, Dan,
here's how much weight we have? Can we do it? Where we
got to put this stuff? Can we load this? And then a lot
of times it was meeting up with the various kats, you know, doing
face to face with them, and you know, especially as time went on,
it was very understanding, you know, because they look at a helicopter
and go, what do you mean I can only take six people? You're
a flying school bus. Well, yeah, but we're going to twenty thousand
feet. Helicopters have limitations too, So we became an integral part of that
mission planning. We're called in the Lifted Planner was our official official title,
and that's what I eventually did a lot of. But yeah, that's kind
of the role of the crew chief versus flat engineers. The crew chiefs is
just a young new crew member that's that's learning the ropes and working his way
up and then he gets qualified the basic mission fully mission, and then they'll
take a flightage in your check ride, get signed off on that and then
hey, you know, here's your aircraft and here's your crew. You know,
don't screw it up and get fired. Well I don't know why he
doesn't like you, but he demoted you in the title to to Uh yeah,
he demoted you to cru chief and the title of the video the interview.
But it just simplifies stuff because everybody knows. When everybody says, you
know, the flightage and you're like, oh, so you flew, I
was like no, because they think of a guy sitting behind the pilots and
and a jet you know, doing stuff. So yeah, crew Chief,
it's good. But yeah, I mean you go out to the hangars at
poor Cam and you say, are you creuchie? They say it's the wrong
guy, and you know you're gonna get taken to a chair and taking up
to the bird bath. Do you want to do? Uh? Yeah?
Sure. So our first sponsor for tonight is Fume. That's f you with
an M. Fume. Look, Jack, you know what sucks? What
sucks? Dave Cold Turkey and it doesn't matter if you're eating it or using
it as a method. As you can see, I don't know much about
that. Well. I mean, there's a reason they call quitting cold turkey
cold turkey because cold turkey is the worst meat you could ever put on a
sandwich. But there's a better way to break your bad habits. And you
know we're not talking about standing naked in front of them. You're cursing yourself
out, as Jack and I have both done together self criticism sessions. But
uh, we're talking about our sponsor, Fume. Uh. They look at
a problem in a different way. Not everything in a bad habit is wrong.
So instead of a drastic uncomfort will change, why not just remove the
bad from your habit. Fume is an innovative, award winning flavored air device
I lost my spot. Instead of vapor, fume uses flavored air instead of
electronics. Fume is completely natural. It uses your lungs and instead of harmful
chemicals, fume uses delicious flavors. You get it instead of bad. Fume
is good. It's a habit you're free to enjoy and makes replacing your bad
habit easy. Your Fume comes with an adjustable airflow, so it spins and
you know, you can adjust the draw in a flow dial and is designed
with movable parts and magnets for fidgeing. I have been using this as a
fidget spinner. So the way this works is it just comes out like that.
It's magnetized at a certain magnetized a certain point, so it uses these
really cool little tubes. I like the maple pepper. It's it's like standing
in a Moroccan spice mart good in the Canadian forest and taking a deep breath
in. Now it might be a little bold for some of you, that's
okay. They've got you covered orange vanilla, raspberry, lemon. You know,
breathe at your own level. But it tastes great. It's uh,
it's a lot of fun. Yeah, So stopping is something we all put
off because it's hard, but switching to Fume is easy, enjoyable, and
even fun. Fum is served over one hundred and fifty thousand customers and has
thousands of success stories. And there's no reason that can't be you. And
even if you're not trying to, you know, kick a bad habit,
it's a good habit to have joined human in accelerating humanities breakup from destructive habits
by picking up the Journey Pack today. Head to try Fume that's FM dot
com. Try fume dot com and use teamhouse to save ten percent off when
you get the Journey Pack today, that's try Fume, t r y fum
dot com and use teamhouse. And our second sponsor tonight is Augusta Precious Metals.
So if you're like me, you've wanted to buy gold for years,
There's lots of commercials out there, but who can you really trust. I
didn't want a bad investment, but I didn't want to miss the boat either.
Sound familiar. Fortunately, we've got great news. If you have an
IRA or four oh one K and want to buy physical gold, eliminate fear
and uncertainty from the process using new gold IRA Company Integrity checklists. It helps
you evaluate and choose the best gold IRA company. I use it to personally
vet Augusta Precious Metals and they are absolutely phenomenal. Use this checklist to choose
the best gold IRA company. To get your free gold IRA Company Integrity checklist
today, text team to six eight five nine to two Again text t E
A M two six eight five nine two. That's team two six eight five
nine two or go to Augusta Precious Metals dot Com and you know what else
is precious Our guest Daniel back to you. When you became a crew chief,
did is there a engineer no for the crew chief? Is there a
formal training for that you go to school or is it all on the job
to in the in the conventional army, it is, it's all off.
On the DUBT train, they'll do kind of of a like a ground school,
but it's internal. You know, it's your You have, you know,
kind of like Al Mac with the Regimental forty seven game. Right next
to him, you have the non rated crew member that's the official thing,
the non reaty crew member guy otherwise known as an SI, who's the standardization
and structure. So also from you know, the grade you brigade, the
town all way down to the company has their own and so you kind of
do a ground school with them where they kind of go through some basic academics.
You go through aero medical, you know, so you learn, you
know, the effects of hypoxia because we do fly it out and sometimes we
don't always have oxygen, and sometimes the oxygen doesn't always last to you know,
even some smoke different any next and you to have that the fund because
you definitely don't want to do that when you're you know, on helicopters,
whether you're flying in the front room, you know, watching the system in
the back. So it's kind of just an in house thing. And then
he has that, SI has a couple of guys that are qualified as a
as an FI A flight infrastructure. Those guys actually go to a formal school
down in Fort Ruckers. It's about it's about right around two months long,
and that's where we actually learn the method of instruction, how to be how
to be an instructor. Heat the regiment. We had our own we had
our own schoolhouse for for pretty much everybody's so acty for now. I think
it's so at B because it's turned into a battalion used to be coming but
a special Operations Deviation training company. So when you were selected, you may
or may not go to that that school if you came from big Army and
you have had training like me, I already had experience. I had a
couple of hundred flat hours, had done a lot of non standard mission stuff
that most big Army people didn't so when I got there, you're just going
to go through. Uh we call it Eco model school. It was two
weeks learn the differences between a delta and echo, you know, because suddenly
you're going from old ste engages to you know, a cockpit, a lot
of electronics stuff, a lot of a lot of systems. You know that
they keep that aircraft alive. So the so ats, the you know,
the training company that was the official school house for those and it was it
was eighty eighty five days, stuff like that. And we basically to the
guy that had no very limited experience, and we trained them up on what
we called the Big three, so you you would learn the basics, you
know, here's where to stand, here's what to say, and then you
would get trained up on in flight, refueling, rescue, hoist and many
guns. So the hoist, guns and fuel because I can put a guy
up a right fish and then the left or right gun. If they can
do those three, they can do any mission's out there. So if we've
got a refuel they know how to read the checklist, they know how to
put the switches open, the valves the airplane. Get qualified on any guns.
It's your bread and butter and then rescue hoistcause it's right during the door,
and then as you would progress up from there, the rest of it
is done in the house. So when it goes to the you know,
the the advanced mission fast roping vehicles far you know, all that kind of
stuff that was trained in house by our unit trainers. So when you went
from being a mechanic to uh to part of the flight crew, were you
were you like better than everybody else? I mean, did you like kind
of kick all all of your old like uh, like grease monkeys, you
know, all the wrench turners, to the to the curb. I would
like to think so now. I mean it's one of things where I knew,
you know, I wasn't I wasn't the smartest guy because I'd been around
forever. But I was pretty I was pretty shit hot, I mean you
could. But my hardest thing that some of the old guys begin me a
lot of crap is I would have a hard time remembering what the proper nomenclature
was for something. You know, what's what's that thing called? And I'd
be like, uh, the uh it's a cop Like no, that's a
drinking receptacle. Device. You know, we all army. Anybody in fancy
ship up. So I was in the Hickey, the what you might call
it, whatever it is, but if you want to know what it does,
tell you does I'll tell you how it works to take it off,
take the hunt. So that was kind of even at my little selection board.
The guy that was on the board was the standards guy at the time.
He passed away a few years ago. Was awesome. It was one
of my one of my first mentors that really inspired me and lit that fire
to become, you know, the best crew chief that I could. He's
good on the board. I got a question and you know the part I
don't know what it was called, and I just started laughing. I was
like, oh man, I'm done. He's got me. But yeah,
I mean when it came to the mechanics stuff, I was just always the
guy that was there. You know, I didn't smoke, so you know
when all the smoker's going to smoke, break out working doing stuff. You
know, the slight guy came in and said, hey, I got I
got some maintenance needs to be done. I need I need support. Any
two guys, ok. You know a lot of the mainest guys didn't want
to do that. They just wanted to do the lazy stuff, like and
you know, it's hot up there, and it's Panama where it rains six
months out of the year. So I said, I don't give a shit,
I'm going. So that's where I got to get on the real good
side of the flight guys and showed them that hey, this is cool.
I want to beat you when I grow up. So now when that opportunity
prison itself, I jumped on it and I was like, I'll be damned
if any of these guys are gonna beat me out. That's my job.
I'm taking it for the rest of my That's awesome. I'm Dana. We
lost you on that last part. You broke up a bit. Can you
repeat that. You might want to make sure you're speaking directly at the computer.
Oh yeah, Now, I was just saying that, you know,
I wasn't gonna let anything jeopardize that that job, that that opportunity because it's
and hearing from some of the other guys that had come from other Army units,
from Big Army was it's a very coveted position, you know. It's
it's where everybody wants to be you know, it was kind of looking back.
It got it gets people out of a lot of stuff. You know,
there's a division run, Oh I got a flight. You know,
Hey we got a whatever in the morning. Oh sorry, crew rets,
I flew last night. So a lot of people wanted it for that,
but I just wanted it because there was also wanted to go out there and
do it. So I wouldn't let anything take it. I wasn't less with
the other guys. And I think that's what I was saying whenever I got
cut off. Was that montatity kind of me Even my career, I saw
an opportunity, said hey, I want that, and I'll do what I
need to do. I'll learn what I need to learn. I'm going to
get that because it's mine. I want it. And so how did you
make the jump over to one sixtieth? Like, how did that come about
to We had a We had two guys that came that pus from Fort Campbell
and came out of h two guys each one came from second time out of
Fort Campbell, but they came from both companies. We had. The flight
companies were amb the outcomeany rob a company and at the time, you know,
pre g Watt. They were very different. You know, a company
work with these guys becoming to work with those guys. There were a we
shared the same but there were a law to ability. When the guys came
down. One guy had been with the regiment for I know, maybe ten
years. The other guy had been there for a long time. He had
he was one of the original instructors of that soase department. So they're the
ones that kind of kind of dropping that head. And then you're just hearing
stories of what they were telling me. I was like, that's pretty cool.
That's not we had. The recruiter came down. We met at the
movie theater put on this pretty awesome video. I think I think they're still
showing it. I mean, it's it's pretty awesome, but yeah, And
the thing with it is that recruiting video, the majority of it is little
birds, blackhawks, and then you see a little bit of forty seven and
a land like a student motor run out of it. They're flying over a
river with a boat, you slingloading a boat. That was enough for me
to see and go, hmm, that's cool. And that Eco model is
a big sexy you know, what and I want that. I've never heard
anyone use the word sexy to describe it before. Oh, got big hits
on it. Yeah, a big beautiful woman, got some trunk. Yeah,
those guys kind of in one of them, I was had gotten pressed
up. I was a fairly new flat engineer, and so there was two
guys up there in the regiment when their last name in it and either Big
Ski and Little Ski. So Little Ski came down and he was the guy
and he actually got to signed in the same aircraft as me. So we
were both flat engineers. But I've learned a lot more from him going out
and doing some fun stuff, and because he had come from the regiment when
it came time to do some stuff that we hadn't been familiar with, you
know, we're kind of like, we're like, hey, you know Charlie
Company, you know, third or seventh over there. They want to do
they want to do some repelling and it's not something that people really do.
So he's like, I did that, I've done faster, but I'm shit,
I got all that. So these some of the old checklists that they
had brought with them, you know, had their their stuff in it.
So you know, I got to go out and do you know, do
some you're repelling with them, which is not common at the time in the
four or seventh world. So when we came time that you know, Panama
was shutting down, they said, all right, December of nineteen ninety nine,
we're done. You know, they didn't renew the treaty. You're leaving,
but the forty seventh Community, we're going to give you two options.
Number One, you can move and at the time we'd shrunk down, so
we went from eight helicopters to six. So they said, you can either
move with those helicopters to Sodocno Honduras and you can finish out your your term
there. So if you had six months of year whatever it was left on
your your assignment, you'll finish it out, they said, or you can
go back to wherever you can dice. Leave it up to DA to see
where they're going to cut your orders to. I said, well, I
initially came down to Panama on two years and I loved it, so I
signed up to two more. So I did four years and I'm kind of
kind of ready to go back to the States. And i'd been up to
Honduras a couple of times TDY, and I was like, yeah, that's
cool, little place that sucks. So I'm I'm ready. So the other
guy that came from the regimen of the guy that came from Brava company,
he had been around for a long time, was very well respected to a
lot of people. I became pretty good friends with him and his family.
So I was talking with him and he said, hey, you know,
what, what do you think? What do you think about me trying out?
You know, assessing is I think it? I think you'd be a
set. You get the big personality for it. You're pretty laid back,
you kind of roll with the punches. You're you know, always eager to
go out and do stuff, and you know you have a good passion for
it. So yeah, go for it. And then he asked me,
he goes, but here's the big question, where do you want to go?
I said, uh, do I have a choice? You know?
Well with me? You do? You know you would you would not as
formal, you would fill out a packet, you'd send it in you know,
the enlisted crewiers take a look at it and go, yeah, you're
in. I'm on the US Inside, I can show it up and I'm
like, hey, cool, you're a it's not you're a fairly new E
five. So you're gonna take a squad and maintenance. You know, you're
gonna run a maintenance squad or something like. Nope, no, I'm not
so him. What's what's the difference. What's the difference between eight Company and
be coming. I mean, I know there's different stream the two guys that
I knew. Mentality wise, it goes well, the easiest way to put
it was A company works with the people. B company goes to all the
cool locations. And I was like, well, well, what do you
mean he does Well, if you want to go work with the you know,
the the Field guys out of Virginia Beach, you want to go work
with the Delta guys, you're gonna have a good time, but you better
get used to sleeping in tents and cots and you're gonna get very familiar with
you know, there's a new Mexico and Arizona. I said, okay,
what is the other one. He goes, well, if you want to
work with the other company, and you'll get to work with the you know,
the s F guys, the fields maybe the Rangers on occasion, but
you're gonna stay in a very nice hotel on the beach in Virginia Beach.
We go down to destin Fort Walden, we love to stay at the four
point Shard on the beach. When we go to Colorado, we stay in
the hotels and condos. I was like, yep, so cool people.
I was like, yeah, that sounds great. Brought the company that that
sounds like a good fit for me. So I don't know who that guy
knew. I don't know later on who is who is good friends were.
About a month later, I got little we called it Little Candy Gram that
little green Purse Graham. You know, you rip off the edge like an
envelope. It's like, congratulations, you're on assignment to Fort Kentucky to the
one fifty. Wow. I didn't have to fill out a package. I
didn't have to interview. But you know, looking back, I think I
kind of did that interview for about two years working with those guys in Panama.
They they vouched for me and said, yeah, this is the dude
you want. Showed up to Fort Campbell and March aprilish of ninety nine,
and then you know, Green ptuon assessment all that stuff and off and running.
So what was h what was that like assessment? Like, I mean,
it sounds like there was some sort of like breaking in period. Oh
yeah, they break it in pretty good, all right. Yeah, so
that is a that's the big difference between the officer and the lifted side of
the house. While the pilots go up, you know, the officers,
you know, they get called up, they go to Fort Campbell and they
get their actual assessment, which later on in my regimental career actually kind of
got to take part in a couple of those, especially being you know,
joined there at the hit Wow on the you know, and by get in
Trouble for Satans, but I actually got involved in the board. That was
great. But the assessment for the pilots and the officers, it's a pretty
I mean, man, I've seen some pretty big, badass dudes break down
in tears because it's just emotionally they're a wreck for the and then they still
do through you they get assessed, they get selected, they come up,
they go through Green Platoon, but there is more of a gentleman's course.
You know, they'll pretty hard, but it's physically not really it's kind of
a gentleman course, but they're you know, their pieces the aircraft. It's
commission planning flight stuff. That's that's where it matters for us. We show
up and we're with everybody. There's no difference. If you were an enlisted
person going to the regiment, you're there. We were talking to you before
we came on the show about you know, the logistics guys, supply maintenance,
avionics, you know the S one PA. Everybody that's enlisted. You
will go through Green platoons. You know, we've even had guys that wretches
and the new people in Greenpleton with us. So can you show up?
Yeah, we we missed that. You broke up again, can you We
didn't hear who who was there with you? But he enlisted m os,
the medics personnel, you name it. You're all going through Green platoon.
The senior listed guys with the seven and very few will show up unless they
know somebody that kind of been hand picked. You're all going through Green platoon.
So when you show up, you go out to the time over at
the bunkers out of Campbell's, you know, Orksville basically least to store the
nukes the p one you up, you kind of you're assessed both last we
dare we completely lost that part of it. I'm really sorry. Yeah,
I don't know what it is with the audio, but it's it's like you're
underwater at certain points. Yeah, welcome, Welcome to the Lovely Orlando.
Uh, you know, at and t it is delightful. But we'll try
this again. So anybuddy, everybody, when you show up, you're you're
called, you're in snowbird status. You're just doing you're doing this work until
it comes on for a class. When I showed up my planning the fans,
I got to build the parking lot for the obstit. Of course,
it was beautiful, nice, very nice parking lot. So I showed up
and got to poor Campbell. When you show up to Fort Cample, you
go through you know, big Army hundred and first Airboard Division replacements. At
that was that really reinforced the idea that I did not want to have any
part of that right, no, thank you. But at the five showing
up, you're you just show up in the morning, you do pta and
cut loose. There's no babysitting. That was the only good part of about
it, so I will show up, do pt come back, sign in
it like nine o'clock. Then I'd go do my appointments and I go out
to the compound and i'd meet with my future work miss you know, one
of my platoons aren't, so there're some of the guys were gone at the
time because that's when shit, what was it called. That's when I had
the no fly zone stuff going on in Iraq. So that was my future
unit, my company. So there was a small skeleton crew there, but
I got to notice guys, which was great. But where I got screwed
was one of the guys called down to the schoolhouse and said, Hey,
when does the next Green platoon start? And I said, oh, it
starts on starts on Tuesday. Awesome, So Dan, meet me here.
I'll take you down there on Monday. Follow me down there, I'll show
you where it's at and we'll get you signed in. Great. So I
showed up down there Monday around noon, and I realized that something big mistake
had happened. That was the office of greenpletoon that started on Tuesday, and
pushing started in the morning. So I got to spend about eight weeks as
a Snowbird, which looking back hind twenty twenty ended up being probably the thing
that happened because then you know doing you know, night stalker pizt every morning,
you know, getting very intimate with bogs, telephone poles. Yeah,
you even learn there's techniques to push humbies. It helped me get ready so
that way when actual true assessment day showed up, man, it was I
wouldn't say it was easy, but it was. It was much easier.
Yeah, So for us, the actual assessment, until you had orders and
you were out of the compounds doing your thing, it didn't mean that you
were in. You still have to go through greenpletoon and you had to pass
that assessment to get in the class. We had maybe sixty seventy five people
that were there, and you know, it didn't matter if you were an
MS that was needed or if you were picked. If you didn't pass the
PT test, you didn't pass whatever they need to pass, well you get
recycled and then you still didn't and they could send you and pack you across
the street. Welcome to the hundred and first. We start off on a
fifty lot and uh when we finished, there was I think thirty five or
forty of us that we're in the class. And then that's when that's when
the ship got real. That's when suddenly you're you had a couple like the
junior Knight, Bogers, you know, Sergeant Knight, the butcher. They
were mean, but okay, because they didn't want to piss you up with
a bunch you quit and left already. But they had a job to do.
But that first day when you made it in, you realized real quick
that okay, these guys are serious. They got a job to do and
they're going to do it really well. And it was a perfect that were
pretty intense. And I want to move forward a little bit because you had
a long career and I want to make sure that we get to some of
the interesting deployments as well. But you know, of course you made it
into one sixty. If I spent a little bit of time there, I
mean, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, kind
of your early years and the run up to nine to eleven and then sort
of how that changed things for both for the unit and for you personally.
Yeah, it was man, it was a good time, you know,
going to Bravo Company, I think it was a great decision. It was
a great place to be my very first trip. Exactly what that dude said.
We went to Virginia Beach. We stayed in the hotel right there on
the beach, and it was awesome, like this has happened, This is
where I want to be. I'm never going to leave this place. So
I also left the real quick because gonna be gone a lot, especially you're
new, because you know that's the fact of life of you know, being
the Special Operations Community is which we learned later on, is you never know,
And kind of almost seems like we're learning that right now with some stuff
going on. But you never know when the ship's going to you know,
the flag is going to go up, and in page your cell phone's going
to go off. It's time to get it on. So you're very interested
being You trained up real quick. So I showed up, got my physical
everything done, ready to go, and I think within the first week of
being in the company, I had taken what's called a command out. You
basically go out with you know, one of the instructor guys, and if
you go out and do some traffic pattern stuff, you know, one of
the pilots, one of the newer pilots getting trained. So we went out
and the guy that actually gave me my commander see val became a you know,
toking that videause in Panama with became my first you know bit during the
regiment of that is the that's the face, that's the poster boy of what
it's like to be a crew member on a forty seven in the regiment.
And al Mac knows them, knew him very well. Mentioned that his name
was Trey Ponder, but he was his He ended up becoming Al's forty seven
standards guy for the regiment. He was the regimental forty seven crew member and
he was subsequently killed when that when the aircraft got shot down in northern Afghanistan
looking for Marcus wa Trump. When when that he got compromised. So the
amazing, amazing guy. So we went out and we did the commanders vow
and he goes hey, So, you know, Mitch, the guys referring
to early He goes hey. So he told me you're Mark that was doing
and somebody set me up ready to go. Hes all right, so you
used to do rescue wife stuff and today we can take the internal lynch,
rig up the bullies and drop it doas to the center cargo hole. He
is, well, we have our own, so just go out here and
just just make your calls. Just call it like you did when you were
in Panama, you know, you know, dumping guys down and the canw
some one out there and I way stuff and you're right, you did that
pretty good. We're gonna change up some terminology, but you had it.
And then we went back and we did a couple of little things and he
said, hey, you're gonna You're gonna move up pretty quick. So I
started going on every trip, you know, with the Virginia Beach, went
down to Hurlbert, you know, down in Desk in Florida for some overwater
ops and refueling. And then while we were there, actually she is where
I did my first iteration of many trends. So I had been trained up
from the M sixty, you know, the big armies got the M sixty
at the time. So suddenly I'm you know, sitting here behind the you
know, the the machine gun that's got six of them attached, six girls.
So going through big training to get the stuff, and you know,
when did some overhorse the or kim light some bottles out in the ocean and
you got to shoot them up. That was my first exposure to the mini
gun, and that's that's when I fell madly loved. I was like,
yeah, grew up with b beguns and I don't know that's from my anti
coordination. You know, played baseball as a kid, but I always had
a be begun always. So suddenly I was like this, this is pretty
amazing. You know, you know, everybody in the regiment. When you
first start shooting the minigun, you want to become Jesse the Body, Ventura
and Predator, right, you know, you just want to hit that button
and just let that ship rip and just start cutting down trees. And then
you really quickly realize that you are going to get smacked out side of the
head with a mag light real fast. It's the best training. Aid who
started doing minigun training headed down to Florida. It's more down there. I'm
shooting on the range the whole thing. That remember very funny from that exercise
with your first guy, and that was kind of the really first you know
what a mission could be like very good with not doing stuff here in bath
it was okay, but we didn't really do mission scenarios. That was important
training, but that down aircraft recovery training we did in Hurlbert to see really
what some really cool stuff can do in pj's and it was like, you
know, it was my first exposure to you know, I'm living in a
movie. This is awesome. So yeah, tons of training gone, you
know, you're gone more. Home changed much. One thing that changed was
after the GY kicked off, we started kind of you know, there there
became no different flight companies. You know, A and B company wasn't us
versus. Then it was we don't care. Everything's going to get done.
Everything became standardized across what were a theurbattalion guy in the Washington. One big
thing that was really the biggest thing pre g Y the massive amounts of training.
We did a lot of it, even at home, and I've told
us and there's times I was home and I didn't see my wife and kids
for three days in the same bed, but she'd take the kids out,
I'd crash, wake up, leave, go to work, and she'd come
home with the kids. And then after g WID, it just became it
was the same thing. But now you throw deployments you know every time in
the middle of it, and in those early days you actually ended up in
Panama, right, I'm sorry, in the Philippines. Yeah. So the
Air Force and there WITHSDOM decided that the three three retired, So they're going
to retire fifty threes and they were going to replace the fifty threes with the
ospreys, the tilt rotor stuff. I don't know politician who was greeting up
palms. But suddenly they went, oh, maybe we jumped the gun on
retire to fifty three because the are killing people and it's not a fair craft.
So there was such a void in the Peyton Pacific Theater, so they
decided they were going to chop a chunk of the regiment. Here we lost.
Yeah, yeah, it's like it's something wrong with it. Was like
some kind of reverberation on the audio. So I just gotta ask you to
like be close to the computer and try to speak directly into it. I
think I think that will help a little bit. Yeah, we can scoot
some stuff around here and had that any better? Yeah? Yeah, better
for now? All right? So yeah, so Korea, we moved six
forty sevens to Korea to take over that fifty three mission, you know,
when they were retiring to fifty three and replacement. So they came out and
they put a sign on the board in the office one day and this was
Braba Company was to do the main slice of that. And uh, they
said, hey, here's the deal. You know, we're gonna go to
create It's gonna be a one year deal, and it's you know, you're
gonna come right back. It's not like, you know, big arm,
You're gonna go there and then who knows where you're gonna end up. So
there's a few of us. I thought, you know, that's pretty cool.
I enjoyed Panama, and you know, we're staying with the you know,
not a you know, not changing units, we're just building one and
moving it. So I put my name on the list, and you know,
it was one of the I don't know, however, nearly went down
and drew the lines that all right, anybody above this line, you're going.
So that was it was one of the most painful experiences. One of
the most fun experiences was before we left, we broke out. We moved
out of our office in the Brava Company office and we literally moved into a
trailer in the parking lot like a single wide. They parked it in the
parking lot. Half of it was the maintenance and shops guys to the other
half of the flight platoons. But that became such a good time because we
had such a small group of pe people that we became very very close,
still very good friends to many of them this day. So we left.
We trained up for almost about a year as a group, you know,
from and we took people from a little bit of both some a company guys,
even some thurbitime guys came up and joined it. So we moved to
We moved to Korea in June of two thousand and one. So we thought,
this is going to be the best year ever. We're going to go
on the big trainings to the Philippines and to Japan, you know all you
know, Thailand, Balance Piston, all those fancy exercises. They shipped all
the aircraft over. You know. When we got there, our barracks weren't
even ready, so we had to build our own beds. We had to
put our furniture together, So the first couple weeks was painful, but once
we got it now we started flying our ass off because we still had to
understand all the flight rules there. So you've heard al talking about having to
fly the note fly line up and you know, border the DMZ, so
we had to do the same thing. We had to go up there.
You had to learn the rings, you know, the rings around sold the
no fly zone, and you had to be able to fly and navigate it
without a map. So being one of the first guys over there, I
was one of the first guys that got qualified because we brought two aircraft over
at a time, so we brought two over a couple weeks later, two
a couple weeks later. More So, being one of the initial guys,
I was one of the first people who get qualified on it. So when
you're taking the new people, you have to have a qualified crew to train
the non qualified crew, you know, in case something goes on. So
we did that, and then of course nine to eleven kicked off. That's
a whole nother story in itself. I had the fortunate pleasure of being on
staff duty that night. That was crazy. We'll get into that in a
minute. But yeah, so suddenly nine to eleven kicks off, and you
know, we know that our guys back home are hitting the road, hitting
it fast, you know, broad the companies going up north out of the
Company's going out on the Kiddihawks, and then here we are Eco Company,
you know, sitting on the rocks. There's a lot of rumors where we
were going to go, but they kind of squashed. We did a tduy
to Japan that November, but then the Philippines turned into something. So January
of two they decided that they were going to continue on with what was the
normal annual you know, balance piston training exercise. We had kimeron what group
was, but we had a guy's got a Guam that came down. So
they kind of changed things around a little bit. They said, you know,
this is not really a TDY, this is more of a train up
because we're going to go down. We're going to train up with the real
guys that we're going to work with, and then we're going to move south,
you know, further down into the southern Philippines because we got some stuff
we're going to do. So they changed around the cruise, the assigned cruise,
and one of those guys that was supposed to go originally was me,
So they pulled me and one of the crew chiefs on my airplane, they
pulled us off, and then the other guys, Carrie Frith and Bruce Rushforth,
my senior flight engineer on the plane, and then one of the other
crew chiefs, they went with it. So we got to stay back home
and watch our airplane fly away. Fast forward a month, they're doing their
training stuff. They moved down from the northern Philippines down to the island of
Sebu, which is about halfway It's the halfway point down the Philippine Islands.
Big you know. It's called mac Tan Airbase. So from there they were
launching the flights down around Philippines Sea all the way down south to a little
place called Zambawanga, Philippines. There was the main base camp. That's where
we had everything based out of the supply of the refuel stuff. We would
fly in there. See one thirties would roll in, they would jump off
the group guys. We would pick them up and then fly We basically had
to fly out over the ocean, do our test fires, do anything with
we need to do something like that, and then come back and then we
drop them off on a little bitty island called Basilon. Basilon island. If
you look at it looks like a little ahead with two ears sticking off the
side of it. But the problem was is it's a long flight. So
when you leave Sabu, you had the inflight refuel. On the way down,
you would land, pick up your guys, dump them off to your
thing. A lot of slingloads, which in the in the regiment a slingload
to us as a boat humbies, you know, shotgun umbies or something you
never did, like, you know, we're gonna slingload cargo nets and we're
gonna slingload contacts. So that's big army stuff. That's not what we do.
That's what we're doing because you're slingloading some stuff for the s F guys
onto an island with a whole bunch of bad terrorist guys in the middle of
the night where it's you know, asshole dark. So it turned out to
be pretty pretty sporty stuff. But unfortunately, on one of those trips on
the way home, our chalk to aircraft was transferrent was crossing over. The
weather deteriorated. You know, it's hard to tell horizons. Guys were getting
tired, they didn't fly in a long time, and they went to do
a crossover and in the process of doing so, the trail aircraft burned in
so it nosed over because at the time, and that was a big thing
that changed in the regiment because of that incident, was we used to fly
one hundred feet you know, one hundred feet over the water, you know,
one hundred and ten to twenty one hundred and thirty ninths. Whatever you
want to do over the water. Your reaction time you don't have much.
I mean by the time you see you know, your anti collision light flashing
off the water, by the time you reach up, grab your button,
scream into it, climb, climb, climb too late, And that's what
happened to them, so they got disoriented during the crossover manewer. I mean,
it's very simple maneuver, but kind of complicated if things go wrong and
they overflew a little bit, got a little disco you know, uncoordinated drop
back and then went to accelerate and just you know noticed it then so we
lost And because of a passenger swap that they did when they got down to
the down to Zambawanga. At the time, they had the the sock packs.
Commander Brigador General Worcester, you know, lovely guy now that I'm retired,
not a fan, but he wanted to ride along, you know,
so they put him in the jump seat of the lead aircraft, which caused
our air mission commander, who was Major Kirk Feisner, to ride and chalk
to So when they got back landed, kicked everybody off. He just said,
hey, I'll just stay here. We're just on the way home,
you know, just get us home. So when we lost Wild War two
with the call sign, we lost our platoon leader, our company commander,
the most senior flight engineer in the company, Kerry Frist, who is my
senior fe on my airplane. But total we lost guys. We also lost
to Air Force pjs that we're riding along as well. So that was that
was my first experience of oh shit, this is real. You know.
Up until then, you know, we had and in the forty seven that
I'd never experienced anything. You know, I've heard of it, you know,
there was other people out there that had incidentals, but and that was
never you know, I was like, man, that that's sucks. It
was never never touched me. And then all of a sudden, my airplane
with two of my crew members just you know, crashed and killed everybody on
board. And we found out because we were watching the news that morning waking
up. Who another person, another delightful little person that I have no shame
in putting her name out there. Cynthia Taramy was the PO and the public
affairs officer. She had an uncanny way of have a news cruise waiting in
the LG while we were landing. That was That was fun. But yeah,
we were waking up for a pt that morning and you're back of the
house and you know, good old a FN. You know, you had
like three stations. So all of a sudden you start hearing the doors and
the hallways open up and people banging on doors. You know, crew,
we didn't have pagers. We had some you know, little little Nokia cell
phones, and you start hearing the cell phones going off, and somebody was
banging on my doors like, hey, wake up man, he said,
jem I'm awake. What's uthing? You turn on the news, and on
the news, you know, like Fox News or whatever, so you know,
it's got a little ticker at the bottom and it said the US Army
helicopter crashes and the Philippines killed ten. Well, there's only one helicopter the
US AD that carries that many, that's us. So very quickly we got
the word, you know, go to the hanger, you know, put
on your put on your uniforms, go to the hanger. And we got
there. We still didn't know details, but we get there. We're in
the hanger standing around and another Panama buddy of mine who was a pilot that
also went to the regiment, was in echold company with us. He comes
to get me. He goes, hey, damn, I need to I
need to talk to you real quick. I was like, yeah, man,
what's going on? So he pulls me into one little side office and
he goes, hey, I just want you to be the first to know
that it was yours. We lost your airplane. And I was I mean,
I just I buckled. It was just absolutely the most horrible experience.
So we sat there for a few minutes, kind of got my my wits
about me, and uh, he goes, hey, you wanna do you
want to go out and tell everybody? I said, yeah, I'll break
the news. So we walked out and as soon as I walked out,
I think everybody realized what what happened, because I was, you know,
not in a good way. So we met up, everybody had them circle
around and we broke the news to him. We had a great memorial,
you know, that night everybody just got absolutely obliterated. Ship faced had a
bonfire because the way our barracks were in cream we had three buildings with a
hooch in the middle and that was the bar. You know, the air
Force ran the bar. It was you know, everybody paid for the alcohol
out of pocket with our ration cards. That we just got absolutely obliterated.
But the the awesome thing was in Korea. We were like celebrities in Korea,
especially care we were down in South We're in South Korea, but way
down south in Tavu where there was it was all support stuff, you know,
this contingency, and all of a sudden, here comes the special operations
guy. They literally had the red carpet rolled out for us when we when
we walked off the airplanes. It was pretty awesome. But when that happened,
everybody, I mean everybody came out in massive support because even at that
time, you know, Afghanistan was going on. They had suffered some losses,
but suddenly they went, wait, you mean there's something else beside Afghanistan
going on, right, Sure, So we had a memoral there. I
was going to do a eulogy for one of the other guys that was there.
Uh, but then they called and said, hey, we have to
replace that crew. You know, we're we're still in the game. We
got to go. So I said, well, I'm I'm going. So
they took three of us, stuck us on a bus. We took a
bus from Tegu, Korea up north to Osan Air Base and then we took
a medical like a medavack Air Force Medavack seven twenty seven or something from Ocean
Air Base to Okay now with Japan. And that was my really first experience
of how stupid the military can be sometimes. So we're deploying, you know,
in our world, we're deploying the war. I mean, because we're
we're down there, we're you know. The big thing the Philippines was,
yeah, there's the ABUSIAF group. It's super duper very, you know,
it's a hotspot. But they also had two American hostages and Martin so Martin
Graysia Burnhamore missionaries from Kansas and that was kind of one of the one of
the underlying things was we're trying to find them. So when we deploy,
we're I mean, we got our impores, nine mils, we got our
heaps are breathing, our oxygen bottles that we carried with in case we did
have to ditch. So we got all this stuff that suddenly this flight crew
go, you can't bring that on this airplane. And they went, well,
we're deploying to the Philippines for combat operations, and they said, well,
this is a metaback flight. You can't bring guns on here. Shit,
Okay, what do we do? So luckily we were able to talk
to the fly per and said, look, you know what if we tear
these guns down. So we took our impores, We took all the bolts
out, and we put them in a zip lock bag and the pilot kept
them in the cockpit. We took the lower receivers, stuffed him in a
check baggage and put him in the cargo hold. We took the upper receivers
and put them in our carry on bags upstairs with us. Yeah, and
it didn't stop there. We get to open out, we land, we
meet up with our flight dock we had a civilian flight surgeon that also worked
with us, so he had already been forward stage to Okinawa to receive some
of the bodies because the night of the crash they actually recovered three they recovered
three bodies on site from that from that incident, so he was receiving the
bodies and be ready to do all the transfer stuffs. So he met us
up, met up with us. We went back to the hotel that he
had there on base. Took about a two hour nap, and then we
had to get up and meet up with an Air Force C one thirty along
with a whole bunch of Air Force people because they were all going to Sabu
for the memorial service. So we've got the three twentieth sts guys, the
special Taxics, couadrons, and you know, a bunch of VI T dignitaries
that are going and then we had to go through security. So there was
no difference of us trying to get on that air that to get on that
C one thirty than it was when my wife and I just flew to Chicago
last weekend going through TSA welcome to the Air Force. Yeah, that's ridiculous.
So basically the same thing. I mean, they like even our little
heats bottles, our oxygen bottles, it's empty, there's nothing in it.
It sit the cylinder with a you know, like a breathing device, but
it's not charged, there's nothing in it. We got our weapons, everything.
So Luckily, while we're sitting there and we're about ready to start fighting
with some Air Force security people because I'm carrying the guide on, you know,
we just lost our commander, platine leader. We are not in a
good place. Luckily, one of the C one thirty crew chief see this
going on and comes over and says, hey, grab all your stuff,
come with me. So they sneak us out of the front door, around
the side, stuff us in a van, smuggle us out on the flight
line, and then we get on the Sea one thirty and go. I
was like, this is just absolutely fucking ridiculous. Yeah. Yes, we
got to the Philippines. When we got there, they were literally waiting on
us. The formation was there, the Air Force guys, the army dudes.
We get off, put the guide on together, pass it off to
our you know, our new you know, acting commander, and we did
the memorial service right then there I mean ten minutes after walking off to see
one thirty, we're all we're all there, and then you know, the
next day we're front page Army Times. Yeah, I mean right there was
the picture of a bunch of you know, Army and Air Force due crying
of the memorial service with you know, you know, ten service people lost.
Well, I mean one day and then we went right back at it
started flying mission two days later. Thank you. I want to just want
to say thank you for telling that story, Daniel, because it's one of
these things that I feel really got lost in the news with everything else that
was going on after nine to eleven in the Wars, that this is something
that I feel like just kind of not intentionally, there's no malice behind it,
but it just got forgotten. It got buried by all the other news.
And I'm really glad to hear you, you know, tell the story
and talk about your buddies and your teammates a little bit and kind of keep
that memory alive, because I mean, it's I just think it's a shame
that, you know, it kind of got forgotten about by a lot of
people unless you're from a very small, specific community that you come from.
I feel like it got forgotten about. Yeah, and and that was that
was kind of a four touchy thing. You know. We got back,
which the Philippines ended up going all the way up through I think July or
August of that year. I mean even after I got there, I spent
almost four months there, So it was a it was a non stop thing,
and we were flying every night. We had no off time. We
had three crews and we only flew two crews a night. But every night
you're taking off, you're going out and because the island was only there's five
minutes with like I said, we'd have to fly out to the ocean,
do the test fires, make sure the guns are working before we could even
come back inland. But yeah, I mean it was you know, four
months of non stop you know, the whole hostage situation got taken care of.
We got spun up for it, but it happened so quick and by
accident that before we could even get there, it was already done. So
that was done. And then we got a hit on a Boosabaya who was
the terrorist leader down there. That is quite That's the whole funny story in
itself, how that ship went down so they launched us. You know,
they caught one of his his in Afghanistan, you know Ben Laden. Everybody
had the driver, well he had the driver too, but he drove a
super canoe. It was a like a twenty foot long canoe with a big
engine on the back, and that's how they were transporting around the island.
So we had we had kind of messed around a little bit with the Instead
of a vehicle interdiction, there was a vessel interdiction that they tagged the boat
with a little ir strobe and then we're going to go, you know,
interdict the boat. But it was kind of cool because we had we had
a field team that was there, Special boat Unit guys that were down there
with us. Super good dudes. One of them actually ended up being a
pilot in the regiment. I don't know if you guys have interviewed him,
Mike Rutledge. He got yeah, as the at the commander up there at
West Point, the flight Detachment. Awesome dude. So that night they found
that dude. They tracked his boat. We had a we had a fixed
wing asset that was there with us that was doing overhead you know, see
two stuff. So they launched us. In the back we had we had
a couple of field teams with two zodiacs, and then on the water they
had a huge, massive wooden boat that had five outboard engines on the back
with a platoon of Filipino Marines and then like feels as liaisons. The guy
in the front of the boat is wearing goggles, the driver was not,
and they were communicating from the front of the boat to the back via radio.
You know, turn left, turn right, slowed down, we're orbiting,
and then you know, waiting for the call because it was you know,
it took you know, spec death President approval something like that to get
this thing approved because we weren't allowed to be in combat operations. We were
in a training role. So finally we hear over the satcom and it was
like, you know, set up approved of whatever, you know, go
go go. So we roll out, we go out, we extend,
we roll out, and as we're setting up to come in to do the
infill, that damn wooden boat ran right over the top of that canoe and
it turned into literally shooting ducks in a barrel. The video of that is
absolutely amazing. But that big wooden boat landed right on top of it.
The four or five guys in the boat bailed out, and the knee Filipino
Marines just went to town just launching everything they could shoot. They were launching,
you know, two of three rounds into the water from ten feet away,
and we're just watching this shit from about a half mile quarter mile out
like what the hell and eat air be screaming on the radios. So what
our mission end up being that night was about two hours of flying overhead with
the searchlights so they could pluck out the bodies and find But Olympic Olympic style
swimming took place that night the way in a half minutes trying to get the
land so we'd fly out, we'd hit our white light cover over the top
of him and try to not drown them, but get him to stop,
and then the boats come over and pick him up. I have the target.
Over the years, I have probably heard three to five different stories about
how Abu Zabaya died. One of my favorites is how he gets knocked off
the boat and apparently he was in full kit with a colash and the clow
treading water while firing on the Filipino Marines. Leaving them with no choice but
return fire, and his kit dragged him down to Davy Jones Locker. Was
he riding a narwhell at the time. There are some questions that that's just
between Abu Sabayah and God. But he did not make it through that.
And then and then there's the whole story about how the Filipinos got Abu Sabaiah's
nineteen eleven and it was a war trophy. And I'm trying to think he
was in the water, treading water, shooting at you. You shot him,
he sank to would this gun come from? It's between Abu Sabaya and
God at this point, I don't know it was. Obviously the buoyancy compensator
device is a k There are some interesting questions about some of that. But
and if if any of our listeners are interested in hearing the actually the c
I a side of the story. Uh. We've interviewed Kent Clusby and Ron
Moehler, who are both out there might be interesting just to go and hear
hear that. I think I think they and maybe you know, Daniel,
did the agency have a drone up that night? Uh, there was a
fixed wing asset in the air that night. Okay, yeah, yeah,
Now who belonged to and this purpose and owners I don't know. That's also
between Abu Sabaya and God, that's right. But yeah, he did not
make it. He didn't make it, Fisher darn it. Yeah, sorry
for his loss. Yeah yeah, yeah, once he was no longer with
us, and then Martin Gray should Burnham, you know, in that rescue
attempt. Martin died in the attempt, ye, And the best reports that
we read out there was he was shot in the back while laying on top
and protecting his wife. But as we were spooling up to take off the
UH and at that time, they had brought in some Air Force h H
sixties to take over some Ceesar role because up in that point in time,
it was it was the three of us, and then we'd get a P
three O'Ryan that would come out of Okinawa or out of Saboo and a C
one thirty tanker that was it, and of course our little fixed wing buddy.
But yeah, there was nothing like, oh shit, what happens is
we lose another one? You know, So they brought those guys down and
as we were spooling up to take off that's when the as we call them,
the tail draggers, they landed and offloaded the casualties. And uh Burnham,
yes, actually have pictures of that from from Kent. I mean,
it's it's wild and I mean that was a huge thing at the time,
and there was h It was when we were spinning up the Light Reaction Regiment.
There was probably a White Reaction Battalion at that time of the Filipinos and
a lot of consternation about where Americans are allowed to be on some of these
operations. Yeah, I remember there was a big, big stink because you
know that little island we were flying out to Bocelon. There was a even
on our maps in our planning center on the southeast corner, there's like a
little you know, like a quarter of it that's in that corner with big
yellow hash marks and says like you know, do not go here, or
even the Filipino military and the Filipino aircraft were like you don't go there.
That's that's like an off limits place you go in there. On that south
side. It was a pretty steep incline to some pretty good islands. And
I remember we're going in the planning center one day for our mission brief and
there a flight lead at the time. He looks up and he goes,
hey, you know that spot, we're going there. And they're like,
oh, that's great, and we're uh, and we're slingloading some supplies to
the base camp there, the s F guy and stuff. They're in there.
So we're like, this sucks. So we always went with two.
We had the third aircraft that was always on standby on the island or up
on the main base, and then when we would go in, we would
have one aircraft that would go in and the other one would perform a cap
you know overhead, you know, with you know, guns ready to go,
so in case something happened. But yeah, that was that was a
pretty good pucker factor right there, knowing that you're going into this little valve
depth where even the Filipinos say you don't go there. Yeah, and I'm
carrying a you know, fuel bladders, you know, fifty five gallon drums
of fuel on the on it razor wire and we're just chucking right along it,
you know, five ten knots, you know, like, oh man,
we can We're going to take a shot right up the ass for this
one. So we got in as soon as that thing, you know,
and a lot of it. I was doing the slingload calls. So I'm
laying on the on the floor staring, you know, hanging out that hole
looking down with my dog was on. And as soon as I saw the
least bit of slack in those slings, I didn't wait for a call.
I didn't wait for the pilot. I hit that button, open that hook,
and it's like loads of release, clear to re position, let's go.
And they ripped the guts and off we went. And then we'd performed
the cap and then chalked you would come in and do the same thing.
So what after after the Philippines, you did eleven deployments to Afghanistan And so
now now you're really we're the special operations comedy in general, it's getting into
that rotation of that schedule, going back and forth. And can you tell
us about you know, that experience for you from your perspective. Yeah,
so you know, originally we went to Korea, we were gonna go right
back to where we came from. You so you leave brob a company,
you go to Korea, you're coming right back. After we lost you know,
wild War two, there was suddenly a big void. You know,
we're down one helicopter and we just lost and we lost five criminals. We
had a fifth guy that we usually don't have, but they put a fifth
down there to help with all the cargo stuff. So we keep all four
sets of eyes outside one guy in the hole. So I was approached and
said, hey, would you mind extending for six months get us get us
through this. We need an old timer. You know, at the time
consider an old timer been in Korea, so you know, would you mind
staying for six months? I said sure, but can I go home?
I want to go home on leave. I need to go. You know,
my wife I had just met her two months, you know, I
met her in April of O two, and I left for Korea in June
because we were supposed to go to Crea till later that year. We're actually
on a TV white trip out in North Carolina and they said, hey,
we got a quick little meeting. I need you and you and you you're
going home like the first thing tomorrow. Because they just accelerated the timeline.
It's not six months sixty days. I was like, oh shit, okay,
So I said, can I can I at least go home, take
some leaves, you know, clear my head. I got to I got
to get through this stuff. So they said, yeah, go home.
You know how much leave he got saved up? I said, I got
a lot. Good Take thirty days. Take thirty days, go home,
have a good time, come back, and then we'll finish it up.
So so when I came home around July, I guess July August of two
thousand and two. You know, by then we've almost been at a year
of going to town and doing business in Afghanistan, where you know, all
my buddies that I had left previously that were doing that. So he even
talked to some guys there. I said, yeah, you know, it
was great. And spent four months in the Philippines and some of the guys
like, what were you doing there? Like what I said, Yeah,
that's you know, oh yeah OHEF P OHEF operation during Freedom Philippines. It's
a thing. And uh, oh is that where we lost that's where we
lost that, that's where we lost aircraft, right, And that's kind of
going back to what you're saying earlier. Even at that time, you know,
even some of our own people didn't really fully understand what's going on.
So had a great time. We had a family reunion down here in Orlando,
Florida and at a resort. So my girlfriend picked me up and I
said, hey, you want to go to Orlando for the week and hang
out and meet the family. She's like sure. So we came down here,
had a great time, had such a great time that the day that
I'm flying back to Korea, now there's little tears going on. I'm getting
ready to go back. Now war's going on. It's become real for me,
it's become real for her, so you know, the emotions are going
high and so like it was like two o'clock in the morning or something.
She said, hey, I really got something I need to tell you.
I said, sure, what's going on? She was pregnant. I was
like great, whatever, going back to sleep. It was like, what
did you just say? Yeah? So, yeah, that family reunion,
we started our own. So I called my my buddy back in Korea,
who actually my roommate in Korea at the time, was the guy that introduced
me to my wife. He was dating one of her sort of kind of
friends at the time. So I called back and said, hey, you
know, I got a little family thing that popped up, and he hung
up the phone. Before I could say anything, he hung up the phone,
ran across to the huge we're up on the third floor the barracks ran
down again. Olympic sprinter hurdler. Ten minutes later. I've got about twenty
people in my barracks room and my acting platoons under the time. Who's in
between because they're rotating through real called Me's like, hey, Dan, what's
going on? What can I What do you need? What? What do
you need from us? I said, no, man, nobody's dead,
I said, we're what he said, Man, Gerald came running in.
He's freaking out, like Dan's on the phone. We got to go.
He's got a problem. I said, no, man, a family situation
is popped up. I can't just leave. Because she had just recently gotten
out of the Air Force. She was living at home with her parents.
You can get raised to oart school and stuff. So I'm like, man,
her parents barely even know who this guy is other than some army dude
that just you know, mocked up with his daughter. I can't leave her
here. So they said, yeah, I take a couple more days.
So the next day, you know, I think it might have been later
day. We brought the news of their parents and we're like, hey,
congratulations grandma and grandpa. But I went back to Korea and then I ended
up doing another year. So to kind of segue into life back at the
house, we were married with a four month old. We've been married like
a year and a half or four month well before we ever actually lived together.
Yeah. Yeah, my little one year stint in Korea ended up turning
into two and a half because at that time, after the six months,
they said, hey, we want to send you back and we'd like to
stay, you know, if you could stay another year. You know you're
here, you're a senior dude. You know you're moving up the flight side
of the house. So we want to send you to at high school if
you'll do another year. That's that course of rough And I said, cow
man, I said, she's going to kill me for this. I said,
all right, I said, how he got another drug deal for you.
I got to go home and make things right. I got to fix
this problem, not fix a problem that goddamn that sounded pretty bad, but
I need to fix this and make it right. So they said all right,
go home. So I said, all right, I'm gonna because the
previous Christmas I stayed. You know, we're in Korea for you. I'm
like, I'll stay here for Christmas. You got to go home and have
families. At the time, I'm just a single dude with a girlfriend.
So I got to go home. Went home at Christmas time. We woke
up one morning and said, hey, what do you want to do today.
There's still there's still a conversation on how that worked out, but basically
the conversation was what you want to do today. I said, let's go
get married. So we didn't. We went and got married. The Justice
of the Peace was busy, so we met a family friend whose dad was
a preacher who also worked at the Toyted dealership in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. So
we called her parents and her best friend and her husband said meet us at
the dealership at eight o'clock. And they're all like, why you buying a
car? And said, nah, something like that. You show up.
So we literally got married on the showroom floor of the Toytt Dealership Kentucky with
a little rebate signed behind it, and it called to get your rebate yeah,
and then I went back to Korea, and then I came home again
in April when my son was born, got to spend three weeks with him,
went back to Korea, came home a few months later for the FI
course. Played with me at Fort Rutgers for a month and a half,
and I went back to Korea, finished it off, and then I came
home, got home in December of three, signed in after leave in January,
and in April, I was on my first deployment Afghanistan. They're like,
we'll give you sixty days. You're on the first team, seventeen out
of here. Yep, welcome to regiment in combat life. Oh boy,
hang on. But yeah, Korea, Korea was a great time. And
then, uh, you know, I looked back at it that it worked
out pretty well. And then regiment kicked off and then it was just go,
go go, And so what was it like running operations? You know?
And now is flight engineer in Afghanistan with one sixtieth Yeah, crazy,
crazy, but awesome. So by the time I got to UH and and
because I did that two and a half year thing, I was supposed to
originally go back to Brava Company. I didn't. I went to Alpha Company.
I'm thinking, oh my god, you know, here we go.
I'm we go hang out with these Prima Donna guys. But it was cool
because by that time Trey Potter, who was you know, really leading at
the time. At that time, he was the Battalion standard guy who he
had come over to Korea and we kind of helped work on this thing for
a little bit. And it was called the forty seven Delta Echo Non Rated
crew Member so op. So it took the Delta model guys from Third Batown,
the Eco model guys from Alfa Brava Company, and standardized everything across the
board. So it wasn't oh we use green chem lights, Oh well we
use red kim lights. We used blue. It was we don't care who
you are, what you are, what company you're in, you're using this.
You're going to say it this way. Because now Echo Company became the
melting pot. So suddenly we're getting people there going And that second year,
when that second rotation of people started showing up, it was ugly. There
was almost fights on the aircraft in flight in the office. Well, this
is how we did in Echo Company, this is how we did an African
this, so we do a Bravo company and then at the time some of
us who stayed were still pretty emotional about losing that airplane in February, so
we're like, look, this is why we do things. We're not going
to lose another one. And you know, of course, right after we
lost wild War two in February March, it's two weeks later. We're actually
sitting in the planning area in the Philippine getting ready to do a mission when
they walked in and said, hey, we need to tell everybody that there's
been an incident in Afghanistan and we currently have you know, one British down,
another one or two are limping back to home, which turned out that
was anaconda. So you know, we lost, we lost a gunner,
we lost phil feed Tack, a crew chief on that one as well,
So the tempers were flaring. You know, emotions are pretty high. But
going to Alpha Company, it was actually pretty cool the guys there, since
I had known some of them and I was smart enough to sit back and
bite my tongue and go, hey, this is my first trip to Afghanistan.
Some of these guys are already on their third and fourth so this is
not the time for me to say, hey, I'm more senior to you,
I have more flight hours than you. It's sit down, shut up,
watch what's going on. Soak it up, be the sponge, and
learn what it's like to fly combat missions in Afghanistan, because it's not the
same as flying combat missions in the Philippines. So, and the Philippines was
very quiet. I mean it was stress, you know, you didn't know.
And we used to fly around and throw fruit and stuff out the windows
just to try to get somebody to shoot at us. And we're bored.
But suddenly in Afghanistan, my very first mission there, we flew down from
Bagram down to the we flew down to Kandahar, picked up guys, and
we headed west. And that very first mission, we took fire. We
didn't hit get do, didn't hit anything. Our aircraft right in front of
us took a couple of rounds. But that was suddenly like, whoa,
this is different. The really yeah, that's first time I've ever sat before.
Interesting, you know, it doesn't doesn't look like it does in the
movies. I want to ask you about because one about through one sixtieth transition
into Afghanistan, and then about yours because for people who don't know Afghanistan,
like the Shinook's, American helicopters were not really made to fly in a place
like Afghanistan, especially during the summer when there's not as much done to do
the air you're flying at altitude, How did how did the one sixtieth like
adapt to that? And then for you, what were some of the lessons
that you learned when you when during your first deployment there. Yeah, I
mean, uh, you know, and we've done high house to do training.
I mean we go out to Colorado and you fly up on the mountains.
We would fly out, we'd go east into the uh you know,
the smoky mountains, and we'd do radar multi mode radar stuff. And I
tell people, I said, there's two times when it's okay to throw up
on an aircraft. One is when you're doing in flight refeeling, and one
is when you're doing MMR flights multi mode radars, because it's just it's the
bouncy the pilots are flying stuff and it just gets airsickness kind of gets ahold
of it. So one of the great things that I loved about the regiment
was the way you trained at home was real life, no ship, this
is the way it goes. I mean aside from little you know, you
know, when you're flying around for campl Kentucky, there are people shooting,
so you take that. But the mission stuff, we we literally did train
like you fight. So in Afghanistan, you know, the pilots are absolutely
amazing. I mean it's I still be glad. I said I'd rather take
I'd take the worst regimental forty seven pilot over the best Big Army pilot any
day, just because that level of training those guys go through. So there
was always a comfort to know that I've literally got the best upfront. You
know, if something happens, I'm happy with that. So for the backside,
a lot of it was really learning how to to see and breathe while
landing in falcon Powder. That was the biggest shock to me was the first
time we came into an FB and I was like, what in God's name
is this stuff. The closest I've ever come to it is out out in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. We had a little slice of heaven out there,
and the kind became a second home to me for a while that had the
closest consistency, you know, the grit, but that Afghanistan dirt is something
special, the powder it makes when you hit it. Yeah, so you
know you've heard if you've ever had any pilot and you guys flying in the
back of know that when you come in that brown out condition, there's only
one person. There's only one person that can see the ground, and it's
maybe about a five to ten foot diameter piece of ground. And that's me,
that's whoever the guy is that's standing at the front right cabin door,
the gunner. So you know, the pilots got the flear you know,
so it kind of helps you a little bit. But even when the dust
hits that you can't see. So, you know, I'm hanging out,
you know, leaning over the gun arm, you know, got my left
arm up on the mini gun, my right arms hanging up on the struts
for the hoist, and I'm looking straight down and you see this little piece
of dirt, you know, this big and one thing. I And it
just occurred to me one day on a mission. And this was now it
was maybe a couple of deployments into it. He was maybe checkond to third
deployment. We had an imagery guy and he looks up and he goes,
hey, whoever's on And I think it was like Chalk two or three at
the time, whatever airplane I was on. He goes, hey, when
you come in, you're going to cross three walls before you can land.
And I remember hearing that. So we're coming in, you know, we're
calling the dust, you know dust the rotor blade, you know, probe
tip, roator blade knows poof we're in it. And I remember looking straight
down, going one wall, two walls, three walls, You're clear down
left and right. Yeah, And as soon as we passed that wall,
they slammed it down. I look up, left settles and you know forty
seven the probe tip is actually four feet under, you know, inside the
rotor disc. So the dust settles. Guys run out the back and I
lean up and I hear a pilot go, oh shit, and I look
up. The four rotor blades are right over the last, like wall number
four, the one they forgot tell us about, and the probe tip and
kinting, king king tinks just rubbing on the edge thing, this little rocks
crumbling off of it. And I was like I said, learned count roads,
count ditches, count burns, count walls. And I used to tell
my guys that, you know, hey, when you're coming in, everybody
looks at the imagery. You know, where's the fighting positions, where's the
target building, where's the other stuff? I said, who gives a shit
about that? Yeah, fighting positions are great, You're going to see all
that stuff, But what are you landing on? What are you crossing over?
What is the train? Is it upslope? Is it you know,
lean to the right, to the left. That's the stuff you need to
look at. That's you know that you're going to tell that pile to plant
it down. Hopefully they're looking the same thing. And that really, to
kind of fast forward many years, that really saved I think kind of saved
our ass. Was number one, and I know he's watching the night is
al MACKI is one of the piles that ever lived. And number two,
not to be humble, but he had one of the best in his right
gun. So I remember looking in and you know he tells that story about
Hey, y'all, remember remember hearing that Sante raid And he tells the story
in the book, and that's when I walked in and told my wife,
I said, oh my god, do you ever hear me tell that story
about, you know, the intentional crash landing in the helicopter in Vietnam.
She goes, yeah, she goes, here it is. You can read
it from from his mouth. And that was the same thing I remember crossing,
like you're going to cross a couple of little ditches, little burm And
you know, we didn't know how bad it was until Al made that come.
And I leaned out the window and again, and then I looked between
the two pilot's heads and I looked through the center console. I was like,
my god. And I remember looking in and seeing his eyes in the
mirror actually if we had a rear view mirror in the cockpit, so I
looked in that thing, and I looked over and there he is with that
big shit eat and grin in that big caterpillar mustache. And but just seeing
that and kind of seeing him laugh about it in the way he said,
he goes, hey, y'all never ever heard of that sane raid? Yeah,
yeah, they yep. So here's what I do, Like, oh
my god, But yeah, that was some of the stuff was, you
know, the missions itself. Probably one of the biggest things was fast paced.
You know, even when you're training and you're going out and doing by
lass and stuff, you know, it's the crawl, walk, run,
but the run and combat is really fast, yeah, and really out.
You know, when you've got a lot of stuff going on, the radios
are going insane, especially on the aircraft. You know, we've got four
or five radios kind of depend on what's going on. You got some you
know, are panders sitting in the jump seat. They can't figure out how
to flip the switches and which button to talk to you and which radio to
talk to. You know, sometimes the captain ocasionally get an experienced major.
We'd get the battalion commander to fly with us, and then in the back
you've got the ground force commander. You know, give a grunt mic switch
and you never know what's gonna happen. So everybody wants to be on the
radios. And then you know, if you're shooting, you got many guns
one off. It's just mass controlled chaos that moves super super fast. Yeah,
So it was. It took me a couple It took me a couple
of missions to kind of get that frame of mind of going, oh boy,
I don't really have time to go back there and sit on the ramp
and get my butt right and you know, wiggle the fast rope, because
you guys have seen me on the on the forty seven. We're outside,
we swing around, we're standing on the outside, standing up on the you
know, the stubby winging the wheel, you know, exposed to the world.
So you have to learn that, you know, while you're sitting on
the ramp, rehearse it, you know, get your monkey tail right,
tape it off, you know, get that little strap that we hang on
to make sure it's the right distance and tightness. So because when you're in
combat, you don't get off that gun till the very last second. Yeah,
and when you get out there, you better make ships in order because
if not, it's going to get bad real fast. So just that fast
paced and just the mass controlled chaos that was that was new speak. Speaking
of controlled chaos. Can you tell us a little bit about the hunt for
bo burn do all on how you got involved in that? Yeah, so
a lot of emotions on that one. You know, that's kind of one
of those where you know, wish I could left that guy there, you
know, left in the rock, you know, but he's an American,
so that was the initial thing. We'd come back, you know, from
flying a mission and U Usually we'd come back, guys, you know,
we'd go to you know, go to breakfast, you know, dinner,
and then we come back, shower, go to the gym, do whatever,
go to the talk and you know, debrief stuff, play some call
of duty, you know that kind of stuff, and then you know,
go to bed. I'd run out the SAP phone and call my wife,
check on her and the kids. So boy, then I think when I
think when Bob burged all happened, my kids were like six and four.
I think, so, you know, he get to hear their little voices
kind of give you some happy, you know, happy stuff, and then
go to bed. And all of a sudden, I remember getting kicked,
Hey, wake up. Uh they need you to talk fast, like oh,
so I ran in and uh, you know, things are coming alive
and happening real quick, and uh al al Mac again, it's like a
common denominator. You Me and al Mac were like, you know, and
I was talking to him the other day and man, I think we talked
like five hours probably the first time we talked in twelve or thirteen years,
and we talked like five hours as we live and stuff. And one thing
I forgot about my very first re enlistment was on the ramp, We're getting
ready to go to Colorado to stay, and we were literally staying on the
ski lodge. You know. I was like, yep, this is it
and I had to re enlist on the ramp. And he was actually the
officer that re enlisted me from my very first re enlistment school. I had
been in the regiment less than a year at that time. So yeah,
it's like we were we were destined for greatness right off the bat. Yeah.
So he's like, hey, send everybody the airplane, get him all
up and run and get him up the engine. Start. We got to
go like, okay, we get everybody, all the crew chiefs, everybody
runs down, start getting the airplanes are ready. I stay up there to
talk, you know, sitting there with them. We had like a little
flight simulator and like just a little, you know, little lap like a
little joystick. They could kind of plug the routes into it, and a
real fancy version of Google Earth. And they said, you know, we
don't really know where this guy that, but we're going to go do some
stuff. We're just gonna fly around. We're getting a little bit of you
know, singing off of them, you know, picking up some translation stuff,
and we're just gonna go fly around and see if we can strow up
on the steps and find this kid. So we launch and we fly all
night, and then we went into you know, overflying vehicles, you know,
seeing if we can get anybody to shoot at us, hitting some villages,
dumping off the guys. They'd come back. So well he was here,
but you know it was thirty minutes ago. We just missed. And
then we went back to went back to the airfield. We had to refuel,
get some food. They brought out some breakfast and that was my first
experience kick and speed. They gave us the old or they the decks,
the decks or whatever it's called. Yeah, the yellow yellow blue bombers.
I don'tmber what color was. Now yeah, yeah, we're we're we're pretty
pretty fucking tired. So because we're good, take one of these. I
was like, oh, we get to you know, we've heard it,
we've heard about it. It wasn't taking them for step in the past,
but previous missions and deployments had been on we'd ask for it because we've been
out for sixteen eighteen hours and we had a commander is like, no,
you'll be fine. That was one of the hardest flights home, two hours
from south you know, from south of Kandahar, back of the Bogram.
Yeah. I've found out that you can take the pack of the kick and
Low Maine, Mr. E. You can take that little packet noodles and
you can see on that for two hours, just nibbling like a little rat.
That was kept me away for two hours. There was one little noodle
just at a time. So we took that decks and we went back out
and uh, that's where we had the infamous sante But we yeah, we
flew and we planted that thing down there. Well he did, and I
mean I seriously I remember kind of bracing myself up against the heater close and
the gun kind of like all right, you know, if I'm going to
hit, I don't want to bounce. You know, it's gonna it's gonna
hurt, and kind of squatting a little bit, you know, thinking that
okay, you know, Ben, my knees you know, feet, knees,
all that kind of stuff, and uh leaned out started calling him in.
You know, he took the controls over and he planted that sucker on
a dime, just like he was born to do. It. Probably still
one of the best landings I've ever ever got the experience. And uh,
we didn't break anything, didn't crack anything, got the ramp down far enough,
dudes jump off. We took off, and I think that's one that
is. I believe it was that one I talked to him about the other
day. I couldnt remember if it was that one or another one. But
we went up it was like the flat plateau that was running by the village
cup miles away, and we went up there and we sat down. We
didn't shut down, but we just landed. Let the guys do their thing,
and you know, we're listening to the radios and waiting for the expill
call. And it was like something out of an old Wild West movie where
the you know, you see the calvalry down in the valley and you look
up and there's a little Indian sitting up on a little old flat plateau.
That's what it was like. It was beautiful daytime, absolutely hate flying in
the daytime in Afghanistan. You can't and so people weird people are why because
you can't see anything, Like but it's daytime. I said, yeah,
but you can't see what you want to see, right them. Yeah,
So yeah, it became another eye hole and we left and I rotated back,
you know, a couple of days later, Andy, is what it
is? What about the U You said, there's a vehicle in adiction that
you guys did at one point my favorite. It's actually two of them.
So we did, you know, we had, like earlier, were talking
about the vessel vessel in addiction that we were talking about in now in the
Philippines. And our flight lead at the time in Korea was an Alpha Company
guy. He was an Alpha Company flight lead, so he he'd done a
lot of training stuff with the super cool dudes. He was a prior SF
guy, prior ranger, you know, so he knew the ground stuff.
Pretty awesome, pretty shit hot dude. So when we got to Afghanistan and
stuff, we had been talking about doing the vehicle in addiction things, and
that was another thing that you know, al been talking about because you know,
we kept having guys run you know, we'd have squorters on the target,
and we always had one aircraft that was the quarter control. So when
you had guys run, I either wanted to be on the lead aircraft because
if I was on lead, I knew everything. I knew everything that was
going on because I hated not knowing stuff, or I wanted to be on
the squarter burden because that was the fun stuff. Well, everybody hits the
target and goes off and hits the farm and goes and chills out. We
stay on target chasing dudes, you know, So that that was exciting.
So we kept having guys and you start leaving the vehicles. So that night
and and the the great thing about that night that made it even more special
to me was before that mission, we had a little memorial service for and
I believe at the time that was for the guys that we lost on the
whole Blane Survivor Red Wings. We had a little yeah, yep, So
we had a little a little memorial service there for the guys, and uh,
you know, the rangers are out there with us, so we did
a little moral service. Wiped our eyes all right, you know, it's
time to strap it on and get busy. So we went down and at
the time when we took off, we were going to interdict a little toilet
station whack and Toyla Corolla state wagon. So we've got got games in the
back. I'm on the Leenberg hit gun and uh, maybe five minutes or
so, five or ten minutes before we got there, the car pulled off
the road. Pulled off the road, went and hitting a little tree line
and they start unloading stuff and they're walking down the tree line and they're dumping
it in a little cache as like a little well, dumping it down the
well. So we come in and you know, our I SR platform,
everybody's given us, you know what's going on. We got a couple of
a tens overhead and a C one thirty, you know, the typical Afghani
package. And so we're we're coming in and ground Force commander clears is hot,
Hey man, do your thing light it up. I was like,
oh yeah, it's like it's like instant, you know, instant hard on.
Let's do this. So yeah, we roll in and you know,
same thing. Alt in the left seat doing the flight lead stuff up in
the right gun, and we had it was kind of interesting that it wasn't.
We weren't a solid Bravo company. So at the time I had gone
back to Bravo Company. After I did my first deployment, went back to
Brava Counties. We crossed leveled that the company, so I'm back in Brava
Company. And our other aircraft that was with us was actually an aircraft from
fourth Battalion because we'd stood up Pourtatian Lewis and they were doing rotation. So
we had a fourth Battalion crew. So when we come in, we're gonna
split off. They're gonna turn right and kind of plant it in a like
an L shape formation, so they're going to break right with their left gun
and everything facing the well and the tree line, which is all the way
down at the end. We're going to keep going straight planet it down looking
straight down that tree line, right up the ass into that station wagon.
So as soon as we come in, you know, the ground force commanders
cleared as hot air mission commander everyboy. So we're on short final. I
flipped the switch, you know, I flipped the guard and hit that switch.
My little light comes on, which is number one the first thing you
want to see, and then you're sitting there thinking in a split second and
thinking, man, I better not ship the bet on this, because if
I do, I might as well, you know, write my letter and
leave. So you know, that's the one thing you never want to hear
is the infamous burp. You know, you guys might have even heard it
right in there, that little wan and in silence. It's like a real
like a real fast spin. U. We come in. We crossed that
little tree line and I see that car and I just hit the button and
just let into it and uh, kind of the same thing. You know,
we're browning out. So now it's the it's that orchestrated you know,
screaming into microphone, you know, counting them down, clearing them down,
and then firing. So it's you know, you burp it, you know
one two seconds off, ten, burpe it off, five burpot three two
one contact burpet. So it's like a wow, wah why you know,
just coming in and then we landed. I stopped for a second. Guys
in the ramp, you know, ramp, ramp, ramp, they're coming
down. They're running off to the ground. Guys, they running off and
turn it up like they're gonna run that way and I lay on the gun
and I just start ripping into the back of this this little station wagon and
whatever I see move and then all of a sudden, the dust is kicking
up, so and I'm Michael, shit, I don't know where anything that
anymore. I'm gonna sweep it. So it's great. The Fleur video from
it was the well, the A ten video is pretty awesome because you get
the A ten pilot's version and they're like, holy shit it, you know,
just watching stuff heeling off of this car. It's three thousand rounds of
minutes, you know, fifty fifty bullets a second are hitting this thing.
The Fleer video out got the Fleer turned to the right, so you know
you can just see just partch flying from the gun, the dust coming out,
and I just laid into this thing for a good couple of seconds,
and then the guys in the back rams up. I stopped shooting for a
second. Hey, you're clear up left right, you know, coming up,
And as soon as we cleared it, I hit it again and kept
laying on it till he was out of sight. And you know, the
interesting thing is when we got back, you know, we screwed. We
then we lit that place up so bad that the ground force started getting some
So we lit up the station wagging and the guys were that the other aircraft
started kind of shooting into the well area. The ground force didn't do anything.
We stole all their thunder about that. Yeah, now I'm sure they're
Jay Tax and their fire support guys were loving it because they broke They broke
off. They peeled back, maybe I don't know, a half a mile
to a little compound and they just watched the show over the wall. Yeah,
they called in the A ten So it was kind of good. You
know, the air guy's got to get some match in that night. So
A ten plug away some people that you know, the se one thirties got
to you know, shoot their cannons and you pretend like their boy scouts.
But yeah, we got back to the to the shop. You know,
we picked everybody up. Left didn't really know, you know, we just
knew, hey, yeah there's station wagging stuff. And I get back and
we going break the same thing. Billy Brex would ever come back and I
log into my laptop and somebody I do know, the it guy, whoever,
I don't know who it was, still to this day, I have
no idea who did it, but I fire up my laptop of my screen
saver is two pictures of the station wagon and then like four pictures of you
know with little little cards, you know, k number one, next two
station wagons number two. I was like, that's like the best non Christmas
present ever. So yeah, but that was that was a great one.
And that's the thing that you know, as crazy as the sounds, that
is, is probably one of the most special missions to me. Was you
know, I got back that night and you know, I was always told
my wife like, I was a good night. It was a quiet night,
you know, it was busy, but not bad. She I think
she picked up on the code word stuff and I said, yeah, I
said, it was a it was a great night. And we even the
score tonight, you know, so you know, we lost we lost the
crew and you know some good dudes a few years earlier, and we didn't
break even. But yeah, we got a whole lot closer and then there
was real yea. So I'm really sorry. I just want to make a
point of order. You you refer to these uh, these nebulous beings called
squirters. I I think that that the idea that the term maneuver element is
uh apropos. This is back before I got so PC Yeah, or you
know, they're they're they're the ones that die a little bit more tired.
Yeah, but yeah, you their way to the cash. Yeah. Yeah.
So the the other one is we did that station wagon and then it
was about and and and a big thing and I kind of remember I'll talk
about this in One of the things was it was kind of a thing that
some of the commanders weren't really excited about. You. They're kind of like,
hey, you know, yeah, little birds, blackhawks are doing this,
but this is the are these are forty sevens man, They're they're not
the most maneuverable helicopters. They're not the most sneakiest. You know, we're
we're you know, you can hear us coming. But that is the absolutely
shockingly surprising thing that a lot of people don't realize until they fly on one
of just how maneuverable and crazy while these things can be, and how we
can actually sneak up on you. I mean to kind of segue into a
completely off topic. We were at four Campbell training one day and my wife
and kids and a couple of other friends were at a water parks right there
in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and we're just out burning gas, you know,
just doing doing training, just you know, logging hours, and I said,
hey, uh, think you can fly over the water on the way
home. So yeah, Well what I didn't know is they were going to
buzz this water park at like one hundred feet. And I've said, hey,
you know, we're we're three minutes out. I'm giving her calls,
you know, ten minutes, ten, six, three one, And all
of a sudden, you know, we break out over the tree and they
dump it down over this park and there are umbrellas and towels flunt everywhere.
Everybody's screaming, who the hell did that? My daughter's like, that's my
daddy. So yeah, surprisingly we can, we can sneak up on You're
pretty good. So the vehicle interdiction thing, I just don't think that they
didn't think that we could do it. But we've gone out and done some
training with it, and then you know, I mean, we snuck up
on that station wagon pretty damn good. But the second one is absolutely to
me, is one hundred percent proof that forty sevens can can do vehicle interdiction
stuff, So the same type of deal. And this one we're in Sharana,
you know, little little bitty camp. I'm kind of out on the
east side, and they launched and say, hey, we're going to go
motorcycle. We got two dudes on a motorcycle that are you know, playing
IDEs are digging in the dirt. And that was kind of the thing is,
you know, they're not digging in the dirt in a road that's outside
of fob. They're not on a main road. This is a little dirt
road in the middle of their own damn villages. And I'm like, you
know, what the hell this is. This is where you're kind of like,
yeah, there's some bad people here that need to go away, and
I'm gonna help do that. So we launch. You know, the idea
is the lead aircraft. We're gonna try to get that vehicle to stop.
You know. Number one, We're gonna plant this big ash milk out their
left window and go hi, you might want to pull over, you know,
tap on the window, and if they still don't get their attention,
we're gonna shoot in front of them, kind of walk the bullets back and
then take out the engine stuff. But this time this little guy, two
little dudes on a motorcycles like a little you know, I don't know,
like a little Honda, you know, one hundred and fifty cc little goat
part thing and the same type of deal. As we're coming up on them,
we've got two or three aircraft, you know, in trail. These
guys are oblivious. They have no idea that we're sneaking up on them,
and we're we're not that far, We're quarter mile away, and they're just
being ring. Then they stop. They stop on the side of the road
to get off. Dude in the back takes off his backpack, takes with
me, starts digging, and we're creeping. You know, we've we've kind
of twisted it sideways, so we're sliding, you know, we're sliding right
into him. And again al left siet. I'm in the right gun,
and they're like, what is this dude doing. It is like digging in
the dirt and that ground force. The sitting right next to me looks up
at me and taps me on the arm, puts the big thumbs up in
front of my face. Du right top right guns engaging and you know again,
I think it goes back to my days of being eight years old with
a bb gun. I hit that button, hit that laser, and initially,
you know, you get about a split second of gotam before you just
can't see anything. It's best. So I nailed the dude. Turns out
and nailed him right in the head, you know, because half half his
fast is gone. So he drops right then and there the second dude Olympic
marathon runner man. He takes off at a sprint, running down the street,
runs down the street, around the compound, takes a right into a
little cultivated field and things, Ah, they can't see me, and lays
down and like the prone with his arms out front him laying down in between
the little cultivated rows. So we break off, you know, we shoot
him up, break left, second aircraft lands, dump the dudes off.
They're going to do their you know s SC. It's crazy. Nine years,
ten years, and I'm still remember the damn terms that should ever happening,
Like the stuff just magically comes back to you, guys. Yeah,
but yeah, they've took all the s S stuff. And we roll back
around for like lot's let's go find his dude. And sure ship there is.
He's laying there. And uh so we had we had a sniper in
the back and we had a big rectangle cut out window on the back.
They've got a sniper for the team. He's back there, you know,
with this nice fancy rig. You know, we've got the two forties in
the back of the bars. So he's got a sniper rifle set up.
He's taking shots. He sucks. Can't get it, he can't, I'm
he I don't even know if he was even like around the team that next
day, like you got one job night, people, and you can't do
it. So he said, I can't get him. You take him out,
And so the ground force dude comes to me on the arm again says,
hey take him. So I flipped that switch, hit that gun a
second time, lit him up right in the back and blew up his ied.
I took out his best and everything. So yeah, I mean it
was not expecting that. We didn't know he had on any kind of vest
or explosives or whatever the hell he had. I don't know, but whatever
I hit, there wasn't much left of him. And then, uh,
you know, it was blasted so big. We didn't you know, didn't
get anything of it, but the flash knocked out my goggles for about two
or three seconds. He just went all black and like, oh shit,
and then light came back. I'll never forget my I think it was the
the air mission commander in the Jevsy awesome. Awesome dude, one of my
one of my most favorite commission officers in the history of my military career.
It's that smell, like, that's dude, that's what blown up dead guys
smells like. But yeah, we got back from and I'll tell the joke.
You know, people are like, you know what you guys doing,
Like I were looking picking off body parts off the airplane. You know,
we were that close. But yeah, those were those were two of my
favorites. Taking out that station wagon just made more special being that that station
wagon and then the motorcycles and then taking that that dude with the best and
that's another one that you know, makes it special because they're it's like they
were doing to their own people. Yeah, just playing id in their own
dam village. You know the hell of that. Yeah, we have questions
for Daniel. Uh let me say we do. I mean mm hmm,
And so I mean you did eleven pumps to Afghanistan, and as things wind
down, uh twenty ten, went over to Fort Rucker to do some instructor
time. Yeah, you know, I did a couple of deployments, you
know, a few more. I think after the boat Burgdal thing, I
think I did one more. And then, you know, at the time,
at that point in time, I've only got you know, fifteen sixteen
years in the arms with and the life of crew members is rare. Most
of us get promoted, we move into you know, flying a desk,
we call it, you know, platoon stard and stuff. I didn't want
anything to do with that. I was like, no, my life is
on that flight line. I'm I'm a crew guy. You know, when
I when I left the regiment in twenty ten at that time, and I'd
be curious to know I had the most pretty much the most flight time and
hours of anybody of any forty seven crew member at that time. You know,
It's some people look at and achievement something to brag about. I'm like,
I don't know, it's just you know, probably to stop that a
long time ago and said, you know, kind of take a knee and
do something easy, because I was starting to feel it, you know,
the back was hurting, the hips, the shoulders, and of course I
wasn't saying anything. You know, go to the flight docs, take my
annual flight physical. How you doing, how's the pain level? My saying
fucking tactic, you know, because I took three motor in thirty minutes before
I showed a So you know, things are starting to kind of regress on
the physical side. I think my wife was picking up on signs of it,
but I don't think she wanted to say anything. You know, I
was never a fast runner. That was never a thing of mine. I
was never the strongest, the fastest, but I was one of those guys
that could go forever. You know, you need me to fly fifteen eighteen
hours, stay up for three days, I can do it, no problem.
So starting to have that conversation of I think it's time. I think
it's time to start taking a knee. Mentally, still still ready to go,
but I am in those thoughts of I've been pushing my luck. You
know this is you know, I've lost a crew in the Philippines. I
lost a couple of crews in Bravo Company, and a lot of those you
know, it's not a survivor guilt thing, but it's like, damn.
You know, they pulled me off because they were swapping out cruisy training stuff,
so I missed that one. I just rotated out, and the crew
that just replaced me just lost it. So you know, you start kind
of looking at going, damn, you know, how long is it going
to be before my numbers up? You know, I mean I'm when I
when I left, I think I was the only guy in the company that
was a pre nine to eleven crewchie. Wow, you know, everybody else
had started and there were some older old timer guys, but yeah, it
was it was you know, the flight side. And the reason is a
lot of flight people, the crew chiefs and flight engineers, they promote pretty
quick. Yeah, you know, because they're getting into IC time. They're
they're in charge of trips, you know, so you're checking the blocks,
you're getting all the school so and when we get promoted, it's not like
you know, the SF teams who have the you know, the eighteen series
or whoever it's. You know, I'm a fifteen uniform, just like the
guy that's at for Campbell one hundred and first or wherever. So we're all
promoting against the same people, right, So the lifespan of the crew chief
and the flight engine of the regiment is actually not really that long. The
pilots stay there forever, you know, they show up and you are there
for life unless you unless you quit, you get fired. For you,
you retire and leave, you're there forever for the For the crew members,
it's not that way. You can be depending on how you're you're doing in
life, but you usually tend to move up and move on and do things.
So and I'm sort of thinking, all right, I'm at about,
you know, eleven twelve years physically, it's starting to take a toll.
My first sergeant at the time, Billy amazing, amazing dude, one of
my probably one of my shit over twenty years, one of my top five,
it's not top three first arms I've ever had, and we went out
for a run. It didn't go well. Came in, talked to him
and said, yeah, I'm just not I don't I don't know how much
longer I can do this before it's really going to start taking a toll on
my future career. So I think it's I think it's best that I that
I go, and he was like, hey, dude, what do you
want to do. Where do you want to go? I said, Well,
as cheesy as it is, I think I'd like to go to Rutger.
It's non deployable, you know. And it's not that I'm running away,
obviously, I've been doing that. I've been doing it forever. But
I think it's time to go home, settle down, you know, make
sure my my kids know who I am, because those last couple of deployments,
my kids started getting older. You know, when we left for Campbell
in twenty ten, my kids were seven and five. So the last couple
of times and my son's sitting there playing video games and I'm like, hey
dude, I'm I'm leaving and just trying to buy you know, like it
was just nothing. I'm like, Okay. My daughter suddenly realizing that dad's
going away for a long time, and you know, she's wrapped around my
ankle, dragging her to the door, you know, screaming bloody murder and
crying all over place. So I was like, I'm done with this,
I gotta go. So yeah, we transitioned out, went down to Port
Rutger, and UH had a wonderful time. You know, most people hate
port Rutger. Loved it, love, loved it, loved it. The
unit I was in was great because we were dealing with test pilots. You
know, so these are old season guys. You know a lot of people
I worked with are you know, senior maintenance guys, flight guys older.
Even one of the guys from my Panama days was a retired dack flying for
the test pilot course. So I'm like, this is great. It's like
a family reunion, you know. So got to get involved with boy Scouts,
you know, helping raise my kids. You know, my wife,
she's she's a superhero. I mean, I don't know everybody wouldey, you
know, thank you for your service year here. No, I did it
because it was fun and I love doing it. But that lady sitting next
to me, Yeah, she's the superhero. She kept the house going,
the cats alive, the kids alive. I don't know how she did it.
You know, it's like my parents people atch me. What do you
think if your kids were going to join the military, Like, no,
same thing. I don't know how she did, especially, you know,
knowing that some of her friends and some one of our bestest friends in the
world, Julie Quinnlon. She was just down here with one of her daughters.
We start doing family vacations every year. We'd come down to Orlando in
October for the Disney Halloween stuff. Her husband died in Afghanistan and one of
our aircraft that crashed over there as well, so you know, with her
being surrounded by it, knowing that any day she could get that call.
Her parents lived right up the road, so she spent a lot of time
there. So she said, if I'm there at home, they don't know
where to find me. So I didn't. I didn't want to put them
through any more of that. So we moved to Rutger. Had a great
time. My you know, the military life goes, you know, you
you have best friends everywhere you go. So my my newest best friend was
a great guy there at Rutger. You know, it's been uh you know,
he's actually coming down here to Orlando for a Veterans Day weekend. We
have a little four guys just getting away for the weekend, going to play
a lot of golf. But yeah, I met a great, wonderful group
of people. Matter of fact, that's went to Chicago literally last weekend to
become a godfather to his a new son. That's awesome. So yeah,
the people we've met, But Rutger was great. It was you know,
getting my feet back on the ground, still flying. It was all daytime,
you know. Yeah. I flew one goggle flight that thought they might
need it. Like, great, Dan, you got like three thousand hours
in goggle time. One should go out and do it. Man, after
not flying goggles for like a year and a half, I had the biggest
scream in the headache. Mat hurt and was like to help with it.
But the biggest thing that happened is when I got to Rutger and everything slowed
down and I went to my very first flight physical and when you get there
you got to go do the commander's ebau stuff and get you get your up
slip. I sat down and as soon as I sat down, the flights
are and goes, Man, have you ever there have been in a helicopter
crash? I went, that's funny, Yeah, sure, okay, And
she's like, no, seriously, just the way and it's kind of like
the way I'm sitting right now. I propped my arm up. It just
kind of loosened everything up. The next thing you know, I'm getting dragged
around to the orthopedics guy, the physical therapy guide. I'm getting X rays
because they're at poor Rutger of the hospital's tiny. Everything's right there. She
walked me in. Physical therapy. Yep, you're you've got an appointment.
X rays. Yep, we got x rays. We put a referral out
for an MRI. By the way, it's in the trailer in the parking
lot. So all of a sudden, I'm fine enough that it's not just
a mental thing. I really was broken. I had two shoulder surgeries.
You know. It's fun him like a half inch shorter than I was when
I when I joined the army. They have to a knee surger. But
that gave me this faint a little brace to keep my kneecap in the right
spot because apparently I hadn't torn one of my little pinons, but I'd ripped
like halfway through it and it had kind of healed itself the cricket, so
I was a little brace, was a little kind of a like a little
lump on the side of it to keep that thing straight. And now that
thing's working pretty good. But yeah, I mean all of a sudden,
it's like, holy shit, ye was broken up. Yeah, I was
gonna say when you when you said that, you know, it's a test
pilot and all these guys were salty, and you know, all all the
crew were salty. That is probably one of the reasons you guys all probably
got along is everybody there had compression fractures and uh and so you all just
hobbled along together. Yeah, it was kind of funny. I mean,
especially at Rutger there's a lot of dacks, a lot of civilian guys who
in our and our made the test pilot course. We only had one active
duty pilot and he was the track chief. Everybody else was retired, you
know, yeah, walking in and some of these guys were you know,
and a lot of pilots don't retire at twenty because by the time they're up
in the senior ranks, they're a W four W five. Yeah, they're
a myths of them. You see their name on an office, but you
never see them their part. Their parking spots always empty. So yeah,
it was a bunch of old farts rolling around in the wheelchairs. But that
was great And and the thing that I really enjoyed about that too, was
even though the regiment was flying at that time golf models, which is very
similar to the Fox model nowadays, their pilots would still have to roll through
the big Army instructor courses. So if they want to be an instructor pilot,
an IP or a maintenance test pilot, they still had to go to
Rutger take the big Army qualification course, and then they would go back to
you know, the regiment to get their more in depth specific so I still
got to see a lot of old buddies. A lot of the old pilots
would come down, so we've got to relive war stories and yeah, and
you know, and sometimes you know, I think a lot of people are
like, oh whatever, dance telling stories again, and then some guy would
run in and goes, heye, I was the right seat on that station
wagon. Yeah that's legit. So yeah, it was it was good.
You still got to stay. It's still kind of like being in the community
but detached. We still have guys rolled through. But yeah, it was
definitely we were all quite broken, miserable. Daniel. We only have one
I want to ask you one last question because this is uh, I'm curious
about it, having flown for everybody in Jaysack and probably you know in so
calm. No, I'm not talking about gear. I'm not talking about the
number of personnel. But when people got on that aircraft, could you tell
who they were by by just their posture in the aircraft, how they occupied
their aircraft, how they treated each other in the aircraft. You could you
kind of have me word from minute I thought you're gonna say, hey,
have all your customers, who do you like flying with the best? I
was like, no, that's obviously rangers. Yes, obviously Rangers. Like
how many Rangers can you fit on a all of them? One more?
Yeah? One more? One more? Now of course doubts We're like,
hey, one of you got to get off. There's only seven, right,
we can only take six? Yeah, you kind of could, you
know. I mean it was always keep because we didn't know who were getting
but you know, there wasn't of course obviously the Rangers. Yeah, we
we knew because they're like, you know, they're like sit shine, polish,
ready to go. They're they're like little robots, amazing, you know,
don't let your head get swelled up there a little bit, but yeah,
they're they were good to work because rangers. I never never had an
issue with rangers trying to be bossing because it's like they fully understood, Hey,
we're just hitching a ride, man, this is your plane. You
tell us what to do. So they were always like, you know,
and it's kind of funny. In the special ops world, rank didn't really
mean much. You know, it was who's the team leader, who's the
team started, who's the chief, who's the whatevers. Yeah, those guys
would bark, but the rangers were still like very you know, yes,
sergeant, no, sergeants, do this, do that. So, you
know, we we rolled up to be in there's you know, staff starting
divine standing on the edge of the ramp and all my kid like, hey
go here, do this, put your stuff there, hang that, don't
touch this. Rogers starting. I'm like, whoa, we don't. But
you know, the DEV Group guys and the CAG dudes. For the longest
time, DEV Group was our main customer in Afghanistan, you know, because
they couldn't get along in the early days. So it's kind of like all
right, tag dudes, you get Iraq Group, you're getting Afghanistan because we
can't even put you in the same theater without you know, jeopardizing each other's
stuff. And those guys were good too. I mean I really had a
good working relationship with them. It's funny and watching some of the podcasts I
see some of these guys, I'm like, man, I feel like I
know you, but you know, we all got you know, most of
them big beers now bigger than they were. But every one while you could
you can almost tell who the new guy was, like who the new team
chief was or new team leader, because like they try to come in and
truck their stuff. But overall they were pretty good dudes. And when towards
the end of my regimental career we swapped out, we actually rotated out the
Seal dudes with the with the CAG guys. And it was a little head
button the first because they wanted to roll in and we're like, you know,
we don't care what those guys did. This is how we do it.
We're like, well, they did it because that's how we told them
to do it. You're going to sit there, your mic cord is going
to be here, your green ken leiser in that flap, your blue ken
Leiser in that flap, don't move anything. So those guys, you know,
just big burley dudes with a whole lot of shit coming on board.
They were the same. The rangers were definitely you could tell how they're they
they were dressed right dress. Everybody looked the same, you know, they're
their ship was wired tight. The other dude you kind of like, hey,
whatever makes you comfortable, whatever you can carry. So wasn't a big,
you know, difference on what they had toys. You can tell by
some of the toys they had. Yeah, like oh, okay, you
know you got some pretty fancy stuff there. So yeah, that was kind
of some of the differences there. But they were all And I think that's
one thing I definitely loved being in the Special operations world for for those twelve
years was it really didn't matter everywhere you went that you knew that these are
the professionals. Whether and you know, there's a lot of talk about especially
in the early days, pre pre pre nine to eleven, you know,
with the oh you're white sauce, your black sauce or this. Yeah,
okay, I want you to go up and just tell a Green Beret from
seventh troup that oh you're just s f R. Yeah, say that,
run fast, run real fast, because he's gonna whoop your ass, you
know. So I think that was the cool thing was, you know,
when I'm growing up, early days of working with you know, just regular
Navy seals and Green berets. To me, those dudes are badass. You
know that that was I didn't know the difference. I'm like, these dudes
are pretty awesome. The shit they're doing is pretty crazy. And then when
I started working with the you know, the other side of the house is
like, man, I almost want to go back and with those guys because
y'all are like a bunch of little bitches running around. You're whining and crying
about every little thing. It's too hot? Can we get cushions on the
floor. We're in a forty seven at fifteen thousand feet in the mountains Afghanistan.
It's gonna be cold, and we're cranking up that heater to deal with
it. And I'm not closing the windows and pulling the guns in. So
yeah, they would, they would whine and cry a little bit, but
overall everybody was awesome. It was It was an amazing, amazing riding well,
I mean and Jack and vouch for this too. Like, I'll say
that anybody who's ever flung with a one six, yes, like you know
that that you are flying with the best of the best, and and not
just the pilots but the crew, like, like it is such a professional
organization and everybody is so shit hot that I like, I don't even know
how to like how to emphasize that without just like fan boing all over.
You know, It's okay, We're used to it. Yeah, got a
question here, DJ sneed thank you very much. What's the difference between the
one sixtieth SORE and Delta Forces Aviation Unit. I'm gonna say, if there
is such a unit, Uh, is there a selection process or is it
just a tasking? Oh? Yeah, there is a little thing out there,
so just kind of like you know, guys that want to assess and
go, you know, go work out at VAM neck or whatever. There
is a an aviation group that is a little bit more personalized and special that
there is an assessment for a selection. It's basically kind of the same thing
when you head out to West Virginia do your thing or West Virginia Virginia wherever
it is. But yeah, there there is a little thing up there,
but it's more learn a lot more about civilian helicopters because that's their thing where
ours, you know. For us, for the one sixty, it's it's
a special operations world. But we're you know, there is some little sneaky
stuff that guys do not so much necessarily for the forty seven, little birds
do a lot of that stuff. The black Hawks some. But you know,
our our bread and butter is we're going to go do the big,
nasty, dangerous stuff that that only stupid people would try, you know,
that's right. Yeah, I've never done this before, but let's give it
a shot. But that's because we have the resources. And that was the
thing when I got to Fort Rutger And and really kind of got to,
you know, meet some big army guys that had been flying a long time
and had done deployments with the big army stuff, and there was always a
lot of you know, a lot of shit talking between the conventional army guy
and the one sixty dudes, you know, the next stop dairy queen,
all that kind of stuff. I said, well, you know, the
number one, you didn't have the ball to strive, So shut your mouth,
you know. And number two is you tried it, you were horrible,
you sucked, you got fired. To shut your mouth, you know,
if you've never done it, don't talk shit, because there are times
where we would get back and you would just shut the engines down. You
just sit there, you know, for thirty seconds, and you just sit
there and just kind of go holy shit, yeah wow. Yeah. And
then the big army guys like, oh, I flew eight slingloads one night.
I'm like, great, super, why don't you go do that again?
We just flew from I mean even just like training stuff. I mean
to fly from Fort Campbell, Kentucky to Albuquerque, New Mexico without ever touching
the ground in the helicopter because you had the insight refuel You had to do
all kinds of stuff and for one to I mean just think about flying an
airplane in your seat on a seven thirty seven for twelve hours. Yeah.
Now you're wearing all your ships, you got your heads on, your helmet,
got your night vision goggles. Yeah, you're you're peeing, and gator
bottles. You had some soggy hamburgers from ten hours to hip maarkt stuff like,
so, yeah, it was there's a there's a difference between that little
bitty thing that they have in us because they're a more of an individualized you
know, you're just gonna go out and Onesie tuesdies and try to sneak in
and do something where we're going to take a bunch of helicopters try to buck
some ship up. Right. Yeah, And that was the only question.
I just want to say that Alan was in the chat quite a bit seeing
your prices and and I think you oh a drink and absolutely yeah, did
him many drinks. Thank thank you so much for coming on the show tonight.
And you know, kind of representing not just one sixtieth but representing like
crew chiefs. Like I said, we never had one engineers with you guys.
Why do you why why are you trying to demote him? It does
just a subtle, a subtle jab no, But but for representing, yeah,
the flight crews and the flight engineers because we've never had them on the
show before. And and I don't think there's too many podcasts out there that
have really interviewed you guys. And I mean, I think it's awesome that
you can come on here and kind of tell that a piece of that story,
and again, thank you for doing it. And uh, is there
anything else you want to tell people about, like what you're up to today
or where people can find you or anything. Yeah. Man, I'm just
down here in Orlando lov and life, you know, in between the hurricanes.
But yeah, it's just hanging out. You know, my kids now
are eighteen twenty, My daughter is eighteen, my son's twenty, so you
know, been out, you know, retired now for nine years, hanging
out and just having a great time. You know. Awesome. Anybody's ever
down here in Disney World too, include you guys if you ever make it
down here. It is Epcot International Food and Wine Festival right now, so
I may have in line free tickets because I've got a couple of kids in
the house and the wife that actually works for Disney and my daughter does two
So yeah, I mean it's just it's like, you know, catching up
on the nine ten years of missing my kids grow Yeah you made up.
Yeah, It's like it's you know, it sort of takes that moment it
self for reflection to say what I'm doing. I'm doing for me and there
are people in my life that depend on me and you know, and now
serve time. Yeah, and that's kind of what it was is, you
know, those those twenty years, especially those twelve in the regiment that you're
kind of looking back. It's like, man, that's pretty pretty selfish,
dude. You know. It's like, hey, it's I got to go
on a trip, I got to go on the point, but I gotta
do whatever. And then you have the families back home, they're like,
what about them? Like, yeah, they're taking care of us. Yeah,
don't worry about it. And then all of a sudden you slow down
and you look back in the rear of your mirror and you're like, holy
shit, what did I do to my family? You know? Why?
What did they ever do to deserve this? Yeah, but that's how it
is for everybody, tak Yeah, that's how it is for everything that's off.
Everybody's living their dream life and leaving, you know, leaving everybody behind
to do it. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, And guys,
give me call. We're coming down the three of us. You you you
already uh volunteered you know a lot of cats down there. And before before
we take off, I do want to tease out tonight. The next event
that Badger six is having. So it's Rock the River twenty twenty three and
the American Legion UH that I belonged to in Hoboken, New Jersey, is
hosting this event. Uh. Rock the River was created to support Badger six,
which provides humanitarian assistance to families of the Afghan Cavalry who fought alongside the
CIA's Team Alpha and the US Army Green Berets for ODA five nine five Join
us as we pay tribute and assist those who stood by our warriors in Afghanistan,
and you can find them at Hoboken Legion dot org slash Rock twenty three.
We've done, you know, some stuff with Badger six in the past.
Uh, justin, justin, Mike, Toby Shannon. Yeah. So,
uh, that's the next event that they have coming up. I hope
you guys will participate, you know, if you're local to the area.
Other than that, I just want to say our friends at Casa Carabello Cigars
Cosacarabeo dot com if you want to pick them up, they're outstanding. Other
than that, we'll see you guys next week with Mike Edwards, former former
teammate teammate of mine. Uh, he will be here in studio. Ranger
Battalion. Dude, you know it's good and Daniel again. Man, thank
you for doing the show. I wish you the best, man, hope
to see you down there. Yeah, guys, thanks for having me on.
Man. I love what y'all are doing, you know, getting the
yeah, getting that, getting those stories out to people that you know,
there's a real life element to it. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for
Yeah, thanks for spending Friday night to come on to share your story.
We really appreciate it absolutely. Thank you very much. Guys. You have
a wonderful night. It's been a pleasure you too. Man, have a
nice weekend and we'll see all you guys next Friday with Mike