Kindle Notes & Highlights
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October 5 - October 29, 2024
We cut corners when necessary, but we got up and gone in short order when lives were on the line.
It saved a lot of lives that might otherwise be lost, but it was a double-edged sword and all of us knew that. A lot more wounded soldiers lived because of the speed of medevac aircraft, but many of them, horribly torn up by IEDs or other modern weapons, faced long, difficult, and painful rehabilitation.
Once we were down on that little spot, it would be impossible to see the ground and that reminded me of how much I hate heights. That sounds silly coming from an aviator who spends most of his time in the air, but it was a weird quirk with me that I didn’t talk about much for obvious reasons.
He quickly learned that hovering a helicopter—one of the first tasks required—is a lot like riding a unicycle on top of a bowling ball while juggling three rabid raccoons and reciting the alphabet backwards while you’re half-drunk.
You’re essentially blinded by the dust raised by your rotor wash as you come into ground effect. You simply pick a spot and announce something like “commit, commit, commit” as you drive the helicopter and crew into a huge brown cloud. It’s a controlled crash. If you go too slowly, you brown-out with no way to tell if you’re right side up or wrong side down. If you go too fast, you’ll hammer the aircraft into the ground and break everything that should remain intact. There are no references or signals to help and the folks in the back can’t see any better than you can from the cockpit. You
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Somewhere, a True Believer is training to kill you. He is training with minimal food and water, in austere conditions, training day and night. The only thing clean on him is his weapon and he made his web gear. He doesn’t worry about what work-out to do. His ruck weighs what it weighs and his runs end when
the enemy stops chasing him. This True Believer is not concerned about how hard it is. He knows either he wins or he dies. He doesn’t go home at 1700. He is home. He knows only The Cause. Still want to quit?
The deadliest time is always at the beginning of a deployment or at the end of one. And we’d been deployed now for ten months.
Alex was from Argentina via Boston. He was short, stocky, and bald with a sarcastic aspect on life in general and the Army specifically. He was a former Marine Corps captain who left that service because they refused to train him to fly. The Marine Corps offered him promotion to major if he’d stick around, but Alex wanted something different so he joined the Army, qualified to become a warrant officer, went to Fort Rucker where he excelled, asked for Blackhawks, and then got his wings.
Stuck-wing pilots claim that a rotary-wing aircraft doesn’t really fly, as much as it beats the air into submission.
Too many accidents, losses, injuries, and deaths were due to exhausted flight crews.
If they lost the number one hydraulic system, they could lose control of the tail rotor, which could put them into a spin and crash. If they lost the second system, it would be like losing the power-steering in a car.
A high-speed roll-on landing was precisely the type of thing Alex and I had practiced back at J’bad a couple of weeks before we launched in support of this mission. I thought about another helicopters truism: Plenty of practice prevents poor performance.
Captain Wilson was the command pilot, but he was smart enough to let the more experienced aviator fly the emergency landing they had to make at J’bad.
You’re gonna have to lift your tail in between two trees.”
“Rrrrrroger,” Kenny said. He was maintaining the “façade of calm” like a master. Any twitch right or left and we would lose the tail rotor to one of those trees and ride our bird into the ground. I’d never seen anything like this. I just kept my mouth shut and trusted that he hadn’t reached the bottom of his bag of pilot tricks. If he bolo’ed this one, we were all dead.
The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter. This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot and why, in
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The venerable Chinook was once an endangered species, ready to be retired—but it was proving its worth in the mountains of Afghanistan and now had a long career ahead of it again.
In the cockpit, there were master caution lights flashing red on the dash panel and the pilot told his co-pilot to get on the controls with him in an attempt to muscle the Chinook back into control. “We’re in a downdraft—I need some help here!” They both fought to restore lift as the rogue wind drove them toward the ground out of control.
SGT Bringloe was in no mood for good-idea fairies.
