Original subtitles

: I'm gonna cut to my left a little bit

and pick up Texas and head up Texas.

: Looking for their aircraft too. : Roger.

All right,

we're going two up, one back.

-That means-- Yeah. I've got it.

We'll take left and long, he'll take right and short.

Roger.

16. We're going to way-point four.

Okay, can you get me direction in, please?

Let's go, a little bit further north.

We're ready to roll, baby.

We'll be all right. Okay.

Command, I'm flying with a master gunner,

Desert Storm veteran. You think I'm worried?

We are south of Karbala, heading 2-0-0.

All right, missiles are powered back up.

I've got you inside. I'm going out your right rear.

Roger that.

Sure have a lot of people out

driving around this late at night,

especially when they know an attack is coming.

Apache pilots are a unique breed

of human beings.

Technically proficient, tactically proficient.

Most of us have some serious IQ levels.

I'm pulling 0-5-3 position confidence

on INU 1 and 2 check and no satellites.

Speed up a little bit more, 1-9.

You're in a big hurry to get to this battle, aren't ya?

6-0-6, roger--

What the heck was that?

I don't know.

Maybe a bird.

There are no birds out here.

How many birds have you seen?

But we ask an awful lot of our young officers

when we say we need you to go to this location

and do this and come back.

We've lost all the satellites,

so just maintain-- make sure we're on the route good.

Roger. Continue on, uh, move to contact zone.

All right. Up there to the left is way-point 2-7.

That's where we're gonna initiate the battle handover.

Hey, 1-9. I'm gonna go in

and start slowing up here, slow left-hand turn.

See you at the red rally point.

All right, here's the, uh, battle handover.

Hey, 1-6 and 1-9. You still back there?

Hey, this is 1-6. We're still back here.

We just don't like the fact we have to fly over a goddamn city.

In a perfect world, you go in, you do your mission,

and you get your objective, and you come home.

In a perfect world.

And lights just went out to your left, low.

What'd you say, lights?

Yeah, the city lights to your left went out.

It's back on.

The hell's happening here?

Taking heavy enemy fire.

We need to haul ass out of here, brother.

Okay, we got hit in the fucking tail.

Whoa! That was overhead!

Taking fire. We're taking fire.

We've been hit multiple times, but we're still trying--

I'm hit.

Break. Break. 0-6, 1-9 has been hit.

His front seater has been hit.

But this ain't a perfect world.

The thing about the Apache is

it's a mission, not an aircraft.

Attack is a mindset,

it's about supporting the soldier on the ground.

For that 18-year-old kid on the ground

with a rifle in his hand...

we are there for him.

We knew we were valuable asset to the guys on the ground.

And our role is to go up

and protect them from that attack.

-2-3 Alpha. This is 2-6.

We're gonna need some suppression...

Whenever your ready, you're clear.

Firing. Roger.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

It is the most sophisticated

attack helicopter in the world.

And there's a lot of people that don't wanna be

on the receiving end of it.

There's no room for error

when you're putting missiles, rockets, and 30s in close proximity

to soldiers that are maneuvering on the ground.

It means that you got to be a damn good pilot.

...our guys a little bit

and shoot into it.

Once you pull that weapon's trigger

and it goes into a target, that target will die.

And I'm gonna shoot right there.

You have to be prepared to make that decision.

Kill something every day just to maintain proficiency.

Sitting in a Apache helicopter,

it's what we call a tandem configuration.

Front seater's primary goal

is to fire the weapons systems.

Uh, the back seater is the primary pilot

who keeps the aircraft in flight.

You have got to be able to manage everything as a crew.

And you only have nanoseconds in some cases to make it happen.

We try to assign an aircraft to two pilots and a crew chief.

Crew chiefs are some of the hardest working soldiers,

and they have a lot of pressure and stress on them

because they are essentially responsible for making sure

that the aircraft that you and this other pilot

are getting into is gonna come back safe.

It equates to, you know, long days

and hot days.

And the most important thing to us

is making sure that we can put safe aircraft in the air.

It shapes who you are, right there,

the first time you hear everything going on.

When you see it launch, and you're like, "Wow!

That was me!"

Exhilarating and scary at the same time

because you start to think to yourself...

"Did I tighten that pole?

Did I use the torque wrench? Did I drop the torque wrench?

Oh, my God. Was the TI on point that day?

Oh, the pilots are-- Oh, that looks so cool. That looks--

Hope the blades don't fall off."

Udairi was somewhat austere when we got there.

It was obviously still under construction.

Think they had the runway down.

They were still working on the apron.

There was couple of hangars up, and the food was good there.

Until the chow hall burned down.

And there's just black smoke rolling up.

And it's the chow hall. And we're all laughing,

then we realize that's the fucking chow hall.

Waking up to go eat breakfast

and seeing smoke billowing from one of the tents

and it's like, "Well, I'll just go to the other one."

And all of the sudden, that one went up

and it's like, "Uh-oh,

we're not gonna eat anymore."

There were tears shed when the chow hall burned down.

The wind is blowing from my right to my left,

in a westerly direction.

All three chow hall tents burned down

in less than fifteen minutes.

Full standing to nothing, just ash.

And that's kind of like a unifying factor

the original invasion force has,

is anybody was there during those days, you just say,

"Remember when chow hall burned down?"

I think morale took a hit that day.

We knew what it was that we were gonna do

on our first two or three missions.

Some of that was even planned all the way back in Germany

before we even deployed.

And we were busy rehearsing

our-our first mission.

Our plan was to execute a maximum destruction mission.

In other words, we were gonna have all three troops

attack simultaneously.

A lot of our training was derived

from the types of combat operations

that came from the 1991 Desert Storm deep attack.

Our training scenarios, the types of targets.

Party at ten.

Okay, little bit left pedal.

This one's for you, Saddam.

Yes!

I see people running around now.

Burn it.

Go to a certain area,

hover, scan the area,

and shoot some hellfire at it, turn back around and come back.

They lined up. They saw the enemy. They fired on the tanks.

Whoo-hoo. This is all great. We turned around, went back.

Hold her steady.

That mission is solidified, going in deep,

it solidified some of the theories

in how to go in

beyond the forward line of troops

and take the fight to them

without them knowing you're even there

until things start blowing up.

That was all very much

a part of the scenario,

a part of the construct of how you do a deep attack.

So it, it created the framework that we used

in our understanding of how that was done.

We flew it, we rehearsed it.

Uh, we did it during the day

and then we were doing it at night.

We would set up these huge terrain boards

and go through these very in-depth rehearsals.

Um, and they would even include,

you know, the radio communications.

"Hey, you, I'm here." "I've got left. You've got right"

We would go through the entire mission

as we saw it would unfold.

Probably need to turn right.

Break right.

Go around, deviate to the east.

It's probably the most rehearsed mission

I've ever participated in in my 28 years in the Army.

I don't think I was ever more prepared to go on a mission

than we were at that point in time.

There was a sense as we were going through the training,

we're gonna be the ones at the tip of the spear.

It just kind of had a sense of destiny

that we were gonna be called upon

to go do something important.

My fellow citizens,

at this hour, American and coalition forces

are in the early stages of military operations

to disarm Iraq, to free its people,

and to defend the world from grave danger.

Now that conflict has come,

the only way to limit its duration

is to apply decisive force.

And I assure you,

this will not be a campaign of half measures,

and we will accept no outcome but victory.

May God bless our country...

and all who defend her.

The very first mission that we had

was an attack near Tallil.

And our job was to basically conduct

an attack, destroy everything defending that airfield

so that it couldn't threaten the highway,

threaten 3 ID as they moved north in the march to Baghdad.

And in order to make it back--

We didn't have enough fuel to go in and attack the target...

and be able to make it back to our base at Udairi.

So the key part of this

was that Chinook helicopters were gonna be used

with fuel tanks loaded in the back

and a forward arming and refueling point

would be set up with these Chinook aircraft

that would allow the Apaches to come in,

get just enough fuel quickly

to get them out of Iraq.

The 19th rolls around,

and we did not have the weather minimums

we needed to execute the mission.

The Chinook aircraft

that were our get-home plan

were not able to go.

That was a mission abort criteria.

So we had to turn around the aircraft.

There was a real sense...

that we had let our soldiers on the ground down.

And the idea that they might be taking fire

as they went by Tallil-- and they did--

because we hadn't been able to accomplish our mission,

that really bothered us.

I don't care what happens, by God,

we're not gonna allow that to happen a second time.

It affected the decisions that we made,

you know, a couple of days later.

Next morning, they were saying,

"Hey, we've got another mission."

Initially, we thought, all right...

we'll plan it, rehearse it, and execute it

the way we had done for the 19th,

and then we found out, "Hey, this one's going off on the 23rd,"

um, and our resources that we had available to us

for planning and rehearsing for the 19th weren't there.

We were very, very focused

on the planning of that next mission.

Very different scenario,

'cause now we're gonna fly over a populated area,

and we're gonna fly over an area that is defended.

This is gonna require some brute force.

It was gonna be a attack

against the Medina Division artillery

and armory in and around the city of Karbala.

The corps commander was very concerned

about 3 ID getting bogged down right there

in the potential kill zone,

and so he wanted to destroy any forces

that could contribute to that happening to 3 ID.

There's a lot of planning

that goes into a successful deep attack.

You have to have a logistics package

that is pushed as far forward as possible

so that you can stop,

hit a forward arming and refuel point or a FARP.

The convoy would leave ahead of us,

and they'd go out and they'd get the field site all set up,

and then the Apaches would fly in

and we would land, and we would set up camp there basically.

The absolute key part of this

was the fuel and our communications.

Two things that had to come together

in this assembly area

so that we could get the latest intelligence,

help us understand where the enemy forces had maneuvered to,

and of course we'd flown all the way across to Iraq

to get to this assembly area.

We had aircraft that would need a lot of fuel.

Lot of things had to happen in exactly the right order,

synchronized, so you could get the combined effects

of all those things.

Because if those things didn't align...

bad things were gonna happen.

As we were getting ready to go launch our attack,

I remember thinking about

what incredible diversity of talent and experience we had.

We had a Vietnam veteran.

We had Desert Storm veterans.

But we also had brand-new,

just-out-of-flight school aviators.

Think I was 22 or 23 at the time.

I never had any aspirations to join the military.

And I did a four-year ROTC scholarship at UCLA.

And upon graduation, I owed the military four years

for four years of college essentially.

I wanted to go to medical school.

Took the MCAT, didn't think I did well enough on it

to actually get in.

So I said, what does the military want for me to do?

I applied for medical service corps, MI, and aviation.

And I applied for aviation because they told me

if it's not your first choice, you'll never get it.

I said, this will guarantee me other choices,

you know, kinda like a wasted choice.

And we had an Apache pilot that was one of our instructors,

and he put a letter in without me knowing

saying you should really get her into aviation.

This is a good fit. Which I didn't know he had done.

And I got branched to aviation. That's a six-year commitment.

That commitment doesn't start

until you graduate from flight school

which takes a year to 18 months.

And at that point, I'm just like, "Oh, my God.

Eight years of my life.

How could I have possibly gotten myself into this?"

Attack Princess Extraordinaire.

That was her nickname.

You can see the little tiara

that says "Attack Princess" in the red, white, and blue.

C ommand, I'm flying with a master gunner,

Desert Storm veteran. You think I'm worried?

No, you're flying with the squadron SP.

- But thanks anyway.

Brian Stewmon, he was in the first Gulf War

and is probably one of the best pilots the Army could have had.

If he were afraid on any of our missions,

I would not have known.

You know? He was very confident,

very comfortable in the aircraft.

How you doing up there, LT?

I'm good. How are you doing?

Not bad. All right.

Still gotta fucking do a dirt landing though.

I joined the military because I wanted to do something in aviation.

Father was a crop duster.

That's where my love for aviation kinda came from.

I didn't particularly want to be a crop duster though.

You have two types of pilots.

Your commission officer pilots, the captains, the majors,

who are the company commanders.

Then you have the warrant officer pilots.

They're very, very different. The culture's very different.

Warrant officer pilots are... They're your primary pilots.

Your instructor pilots, the ones that train you.

They have some fantastic mustaches,

they've got great attitudes and personalities.

So while I was a lieutenant and a captain in charge,

I'm flying with a warrant officer

with so much more experience.

He's the one that's training you

and getting you where you need to be.

Captain Mace came to us

before we actually went to Iraq,

which was a weird transition for all of us.

We thought, if you get the word to go for combat,

you're thinking you're gonna bring the same commander you've been training with.

So when they changed right before we go to Iraq,

we're all, "What the hell are they doing?"

We hadn't trained with this guy at all.

He doesn't know how we operate.

Captain Mace had a rough road to hoe.

He's brand-new. No one knows the guy.

We know he's a West Pointer.

There's a certain amount of reputation

that comes with that, some good, some bad.

He had to show everybody that, A, he cared about them,

all equally, and that he was proficient at his job

and that he understood how to take care of people.

I think before we went across the burm,

he had made his footprint

that he had, he had sewn,

uh, his standard into the troop

and the troop knew what he expected

and that he was in fact the troop commander, no doubt.

We're ready to roll, baby.

Me and Bob Duffney,

we were the lead aircraft for the whole regiment.

Neal was one of our new aviators

He had the right kind of mentality,

kind of a bravado

that really was the kind of guy that you wanna have

leaning forward in the front seat of an Apache

with their hands on the weapons system.

It was a pretty hard transition. I can't lie to you.

From being in the Marine Corps, with that, that mentality.

But then going into WOC school where you had

a little bit more relaxed atmosphere.

And that it was just being full of that Marine gusto.

And Bob Duffney, his pilot,

is a larger-than-life figure.

And the two of them together in a cockpit

was a winning combination.

My grandfather was also an aviator.

My uncle was an aviator

I actually joined to get my college paid for.

I defaulted on the agreement my dad and I had

about getting good grades.

Before I even went home and told my dad

what my grade point average was working out to be,

I went and talked to the recruiter.

I had started out thinking I was gonna fly Black Hawks.

My wife and I had talked a couple of times.

She's like, "Fly the Apache, it's sexy."

I'm like, "Okay."

Jason King was actually my liaison officer

in my S3 section of the squadron

before he went down with Bryon Mace

to take over as a platoon leader.

He was in the 75th Ranger Regiment.

He brought that mindset and that sense of...

responsibility that you have as an Apache pilot

to supporting the soldier on the ground.

The convoy pushed us to the limit.

I think it was four days non-stop driving.

We were always in a kill zone.

Our convoys were constantly getting probed.

We would drive at breakneck pace and then stop.

And we would be stopped for hours.

And you never knew how long you were gonna be stopped for.

I didn't change my socks for four days.

I didn't change my underwear for four days.

It pushed you to the brink of insanity,

trying to stay awake because you're frightened.

It's a hundred and plus degrees outside.

It's miserable,

I basically passed out in the back of the Humvee.

Wake up. Curf, wake up.

I wake up and I look, and we are in a town.

I don't think it was a hand grenade.

Everybody in that town had come out to see us.

And so we are now surrounded by people.

And I'm 21 years old at the time,

and we are scared shitless.

Because all it takes is one dude in that crowd

that doesn't want us to be there

to open up.

And we're-we're-- There's nothing we could do.

Turns out, we were sitting and waiting

for the armored vehicles to roll past us

because we had gotten ahead of them somehow.

Then here come the Apaches.

We'd flown all the way across Iraq

to get to this assembly area, and there was nothing.

We were the first to get there. It was just dirt.

We landed and it was

like talcum powder dust.

But from my perspective, it's pretty evident

that we wasn't gonna take off that night.

There was five abort criteria.

If this happens, we're not gonna go on the mission.

If one of them doesn't go, you don't go.

Every one of those five things happened.

A HEMTT tanker came over

and started refueling the aircraft for the mission that night.

And at some point in time, he was out of gas.

All the trucks with the fuel are still back at a convoy,

still waiting to come up.

So right off the bat, an entire third of the combat power

of our unit was gone.

We didn't have any communication with our headquarters.

We didn't have current intel.

We posed for some pictures with our 9 mms

like we were pulling security

because we were the only ones out there at that time.

In reality, that was probably not that funny.

You know, we were already well behind

our planned timeline for executing the mission.

The moon was at its zenith that night,

and I think it was 98 percent.

So anybody that was standing on the ground looking up

could see the helicopters.

There was a picture of all the pilots sitting around

and chairs and everything,

and we're all like this.

And the caption was gonna be, you know,

"Here we are at war." We were pretty much asleep

because we knew we wasn't gonna fly

because of all the stuff that happened.

But regardless, it was an important mission.

We got to set conditions so that 3 ID can roll through that Karbala gap.

A short time later, here comes Captain Mace,

out of breath with maps and drawings,

and he laid everything out.

The decision was made to go.

Thing I remember the most

is that there really wasn't a place

where you could say,

"Where's our central rally point?

Where are we gonna be?"

There was one pile of rocks and dirt.

This mound.

And we kinda likened that to the ant mound,

and we were soldiers once and young.

So on top of this pile of rocks

we put up a single ChemLight,

and that was our rally point.

And we got everybody around, and we said a prayer.

Almighty God, you are the God of Abraham,

Isaac, and Jacob,

the omnipotent God.

Lord, I thank you for what you've blessed us

to achieve thus far.

God calls us to reign in victory tonight.

Defeat the enemy victoriously.

And then bring each pilot and aircraft back safely.

This I ask of you...

Amen.

I was flying with the FLIR,

and I had Jason King in the front seat with goggles.

So I'm pulling the power to get the aircraft off the ground,

and we're totally browned out.

And I couldn't see through it at all.

Finally get up out of the cloud,

and there is a huge sense of relief.

It's like, "The most dangerous part

of the mission is done now."

So...

The first troop to take off was Bravo Troop.

Okay now, from here where do we go?

Let's go a little bit further north.

Okay.

And then myself with our Black Hawk helicopter.

I also had another Black Hawk helicopter with me

that was in trail that had our flight surgeon in there.

Slow up the bird like 65 knots.

Roger. Thanks. Roger.

We called the airfield clear

and started to go north.

When we flew up the route,

it was eerily quiet.

It was almost as if we were on a training mission.

I was a month away

from my 20th year in the Army.

I had never been in combat before.

And I thought, "Wow, is this what combat really is?"

I'm pulling 0-5-3

position confidence on INU 1 and 2 check and no satellites.

Hey, 0-6, check your position confidence.

Okay.

Want me to pull out the map?

Uh, not right now. Okay.

When you do a deep attack, you're supposed to know

exactly where the enemy is.

In this case, we did not have grid locations of the enemy.

So we ended up planning a movement to contact.

And we wanted to establish contact and find the enemy

with the minimum force necessary.

And that was gonna be Bravo Troop.

Bravo Troop with the leadership

that was in the troop

was known from our training

to be the best at doing the maneuver to contact.

The cavalry mission, uh, suited Captain Mace and the leaders

and the warrant officers in that troop very well.

Then I was gonna bring in Charlie in the north

and Alpha in the south.

They were gonna receive a battle handover from Bravo

and continue that movement to contact

and destroy everything in zone.

All right, missiles are powered back up.

Had we all gotten refueled,

we would have been a flight of seven.

We didn't get enough refuel,

so we were down to a flight of five.

One breaks on crank, one crashes on takeoff,

so now we're down to three,

is the attack force coming in

to get the enemy that

the first company was supposed to locate.

I bet Bravo Troop's real excited

that we're only coming up with three aircrafts.

I was the platoon leader.

We've got to quickly revamp who's taking care of this job

'cause we all had individual responsibilities.

So you have to really quickly come up with a new plan.

All right, up there to the left is way-point 2-7,

where we're gonna initiate battle handover.

I got vehicles on the road up there.

Is that helicopters? What is that?

Which way? Left. Eleven o'clock.

We'd always envisioned that

we would come in over the lake,

but, uh, the plan changed.

and the 101st Airborne Division came in,

and they suddenly owned the area

that we had originally envisioned

that we were gonna maneuver in.

So about half of the battle space went away on the west side.

And then to the east of us,

the battle space went away to the Air Force.

This narrow corridor became

the area that we had to operate in

to go up and attack the Medina Division.

Sure have a lot of people out

driving around this late at night,

especially when they know an attack is coming.

Right now, we got the Archers approaching,

uh, set point...

6

What the heck was that?

I don't know. Maybe a bird.

There are no birds out here.

How many birds have you seen?

Brian, I think someone took a potshot at us.

Well, it didn't hurt.

I can't feel my leg.

-What do you mean it didn't hurt?

Oh, my God.

You're killing me, Lieutenant.

This is not funny, Brian.

I can't feel anything below the waist.

Oh, it's probably just a bird.

You're in a big hurry to get to this battle, aren't ya?

When you have a mission

like a deep attack like that

and you encounter enemy en route,

generally you're just gonna bypass that enemy and go

because that's not as important as where you're going.

The first time I heard a round hit the cockpit,

I thought we were actually hitting bugs.

I'll tell you what it sounds like.

When you're driving down the highway,

you kick a rock up, hits your windshield,

that hard tap, like, tap!

That's exactly what it sounds like.

What's that? Break right. Get the fuck away from that.

And also Red Team is moving--

0-6, 1-9 We're taking fire to the south of our RP--

our rally point.

We're breaking north at this time.

Archer 2-6, Archer 6.

Be advised we took a tracer round about

one klick back, right over the nose of the aircraft, so keep your head in a swivel.

Roger.

Maybe it wasn't a bird.

Getting a little sporty, isn't it?

I'm not scared.

Ain't no reason to be scared.

You're flying with a master gunner.

All right, if I see tracer rounds,

I'll try and call out the direction.

Okay.

Should be able to see it under goggles.

I was on night vision goggles in the front seat,

and my back seater was on the FLIR, forward looking infared.

We thought that would maximize our ability to see the enemy.

I could see lights, he could see heat.

I'm seeing tracer rounds coming towards the aircraft, he's not seeing any of it.

Okay, we're getting shot at.

I don't see 'em. Goggles are picking 'em up.

Yeah, they're bright under the goggles.

Oh, you can see 'em. They're like red.

They're red, red--

The hell! I can' see 'em. I just said it.

Okay. I'm telling you what they look like.

So the front seater starts announcing

tracer fire off in the distance.

Well, back seater cannot see that tracer fire.

All right, LT. Don't tell me, "What is that?"

You tell me what you think it is.

Okay, I see bright white lights

shooting up from the ground about five to ten K out.

You do right now? Uh...

Nope, but they're to the left of us.

At this point, we were still fighting an active enemy

with all of his full capabilities,

so you wanna be as low as possible

to avoid the radar.

In that case, it puts you right down

in the small arms envelope.

So our routes, height-wise, when we were going in and out,

we were probably a hundred feet or below.

As we're flying over these towns,

I started to recognize what was shooting at us,

and it was literally people in the backs of pickup trucks.

It was people on the street.

We would see Iraqis with weapons in the backs of trucks with kids.

We had lot of speeches by, um, leadership that said,

you know, be careful what you fire at,

what you shoot at.

You know, positive identification is key.

Don't think you're gonna just start shooting

at anything that's shooting at you.

And it caused them some concern

over whether when a difficult situation were to come up,

would somebody be second-guessing

their actions?

You go and make decisions

off of information you're provided.

Sometimes your information's great.

Spot on, no hiccups.

You go in, you do your mission, come out...

...no harm, no foul.

Sometimes your information's not that great.

All right, they're coming from behind us.

It was more built up than I had expected it to be.

We were actually in an urban area.

There's lights, uh, all over the area.

The maps that we had

were very old at that point in time.

And I think it was dated 1992.

And just as we were turning to the west,

every light for as far as you could see

went out.

Became completely pitch black.

What'd you say, lights?

The hell's happening here?

When the lights came back on,

all hell broke loose.

That was the sign for everyone who had a gun

to walk outside and just start shooting in the air.

I think we probably need to turn right.

We're taking small arms fire at this time.

Taking heavy enemy fire.

Taking fire. We're taking fire. Coming right, Mikey.

Dammit! Oh, my...

I don't see 'em.

Keep coming right. Keep coming right.

Tracer rounds like fireworks.

It was unreal.

Roger. We're getting hammered.

We need to haul ass out of here, brother.

It was everywhere.

No matter which way you moved, it was all coming at you,

and so the best thing you could do was fly straight.

1-9, roger. We're seeing fire on the left also,

so we're gonna try to go right down the center.

-We got hit in the fucking tail. -Okay.

Shit! Fuck!

Dude, fuck!

Keep on going, dude. Keep on going straight.

Keep on going. Mike, you're taking fire.

We knew that there was the Medina Division.

What we didn't know

was that the Republican Guard Infantry Divisions

that were actually on the north side of Baghdad

had been moved and placed to the south.

Hundreds and thousands of soldiers

everywhere underneath us.

In corners of fields and tops of buildings

and at that point in time,

the hunter became hunted.

I can feel it under my feet.

We ain't giving up yet.

Situation's deteriorating pretty quickly.

We're taking some intense fire.

But you have to remember, these are all people

who are absolutely focused

on getting to that objective.

There's no turning back.

You know, we'd turned back on the previous mission,

and nobody wants to turn back.

Roger, let's continue,

and we'll see what we got here.

What'd he say? We'll continue and see what we got.

Pretty heavily populated up there too,

but there's no way around it.

2-6, just come to the left just a little bit

and stay away from the lights off to the right-hand side.

As we were making our reconnaissance to the west,

somehow our wingman got in front of us,

being Mike Tomblin and Jason King.

-Oh shit.

-Come left. Left.

You just fucking dr-- You just shot the aircraft in front of us.

I didn't see where it was coming from.

All right, if you could speed up a little bit more, 1-9.

I'm taking a little bit more fire than I'm used to.

That's it. Way-point 4. Over.

Mike Tomblin returned fire,

and apparently this guy was sitting next to an LP gas tank.

So put the crosshairs on him, pulled the trigger,

aiming at the guy,

hit the gas tank, and the whole gas tank exploded.

Whoa! Oh, shit!

When we came out of the ball of fire essentially,

we were going backward and down,

and we were able to get the aircraft

back under control and move forward.

Goddammit.

Standby. Take it easy up there.

1-9, this is 1-6...

Oh shit! Taking fire to the right.

Break right. Break right.

We've been hit multiple times,

but we're still trying to make it.

We're taking more hits. -Mikey, we're taking fire.

More and more aircraft

are experiencing significant issues.

Loss of engines, hydraulics.

It occurred to me that

we were not gonna bring all the aircraft back.

Whoa!

1-6 is hurt.

1-6 was shot in the neck.

1

Palerider 1-6,

which is Lieutenant King.

It's hard to put your head around this thing

and really wrap your mind around it, but...

it now changed to a fight for survival.

All right, 1-9, you got to take us back.

-We have... Goddamn it!

Oh shit!

Utility hydraulic level.

Okay. Okay.

We realized, this isn't a question now

about whether or not we're going to accomplish the mission.

This is now a question of whether we're gonna get out of here.

The voices in my head

were getting really loud at this point,

and I just wanted to start talking on the radio,

but there was so much other anxiety,

uh, that I waited.

I reckon I'd say this...

this mission has changed.

From destroying armory and artillery,

which from everything I could see

wasn't there in the objective area

to preserving combat power

to live and fight another day.

And so at that point, I gave the order

to, to egress.

6-0-6, Archer 6. Significant ground fire.

Looking for your authorization

to go ahead and egress back to the AA.

Affirm. Affirm, Archer 6.

I concur.

Typically, you're gonna have multiple routes

in and out.

But for this particular mission,

we had one.

One route in, one route out

We navigated the gauntlet,

now we gotta go right back through it.

I don't know.

All right, how bad... Can you...

-You're talking to me. Roger.

All right, keep talking to me, okay?

Roger.

We are egress at this time.

Hey, 1-9, did you hear 0

Everybody's egressing at this time.

Keep your eyes out.

Jason, at that point, he wasn't talking.

When you're in the back of the Apache at night,

there's nothing, you can't see anything.

You're separated by a very thick blast shield.

So there was no way for me to be able to confirm

what was going on in his front seat.

You know, in my mind, his portion of the aircraft was gone.

Hey, what am I gonna do with this aircraft.

What I knew was that

he was not able to respond verbally with Mike Tomblin.

Now you have an incapacitated crew member in your front,

and at the same time, you're experiencing,

you know, intense fire coming at you from the ground,

rounds slamming through your cockpit,

decisions that you have to make continuously

evaluating what's the right thing to do,

how to keep fighting and flying the aircraft.

A real tribute to a man like him is that

that would be overwhelming for, for, for most people.

They were gonna fly to

a restricted operating zone, a ROZ,

and they were going to land a Medevac Black Hawk,

and then that Medevac aircraft would have took

Lieutenant King wherever he needed to go to get treatment.

And Major Christensen was gonna get in the front seat

of Mike Tomblin's aircraft, and then they were gonna go back.

And I thought that was probably the quickest way

to get Jason out of there and into surgery

or whatever it was he was gonna need at that point.

We get down closer to where we're gonna drop King off

and to pick up Major Christensen.

By the time we got down there, we were just getting hammered.

Taking heavy enemy fire.

This craft's not gonna fly very much longer.

Yeah. Now we're taking fire again.

-Okay. Oh!

Breaking left.

We're getting shot at here. Yikes.

I can feel it under my feet.

Can I shoot the gun if we start taking fire again?

You're damn skippy you can.

If you see where it's coming from...

As soon as the aircraft starts shooting,

they're gonna stop shooting at me.

We actually had an RPG coming at the aircraft.

I saw this white light coming at us.

And Mr. Stewmon didn't see it.

-Oh shit. What?

Break right. Break right.

We're taking fire.

Oh shit!

Hell, we just got hit.

Nice maneuvering.

Fucking them sons of bitches was close.

Oh my...

We're taking fire. Break left.

My gun has failed. My gun has failed.

So I need you whenever you see those tracers,

if you front-seater, or if you just put it on HMD,

at least put some suppressive fire out,

and that will keep them from shooting quite so much.

Fucking on!

All right, you little fuckers. Come on, shoot at me again.

-Bring it!

Dammit!

Three times we tried to get that Hawk landed

in a place where we could do the crew swap,

three times we took RPG and machine gun fire.

We never got that done.

I mean, I just couldn't lose,

you know, eleven folks on that Black Hawk

trying to make that happen.

Because, at that point, we didn't know

if Jason King was even alive.

All right, 1-9, go back to the assembly area.

Understand? Go back to the assembly area at the--

Location unknown at this time.

Okay, stay right to the route a little bit.

Mikey, you still with us?

1-6, this is 1-9 on uniform.

1-6, 1-9 on uniform.

1-6, this is 1-9 on uniform.

Shit!

Dammit!

All right up there? Yeah, I'm fine.

What can I do up here? It's like I--

You just hang tight. Okay.

Somebody let us know what's going on up there.

We'd taken a round

through the load maintenance panel,

and for some reason, our radios came offline.

There was a point in time where I lost

all the ability to communicate to any aircraft.

How you doing, Mike? You still back there?

We're still back here.

Just keep talking to me every couple minutes.

Making me nervous.

Roger. I'll keep an open line of communication.

What you found was just a lot of individual heroism

in terms of what those pilots were doing

to try to mutually support each other.

They would see something that would be attacking their lead aircraft.

They would try to suppress that.

It was just a fight all the way

to try to get ourselves back to our assembly area.

Roger. Roger.

At that point, I gave the order

to avoid urban areas.

That's where we were getting fire from.

Fly where you gotta fly to get safely back

to the assembly area.

It is like a lot longer back than it was out there.

Tracer fires out to left.

Coming right. We wanna get over that dead space.

Roger. Okay.

I wanna take you through this dark area.

Be coming left.

That's a lot of dark area.

Hey, Palerider 1-9.

This is 6-Shooter-6 on 4-3-8. Over.

This is 1-9. Go ahead.

Yeah, we had to move to the east.

I got hit again. I've got multiple problems with this aircraft.

...1-9. 1-6 is wounded in the neck.

We'll try to get medical attention when we get back.

Roger.

We'll get him medical attention.

You just hang with us.

I'm not sure. My guns failed twice,

but help me with suppression if you can.

Motherfucking...

Roger.

Oh shit. Taking fire.

Break right. Break right. Break right. Break right.

I tried to shoot. The gun's fucked up.

Oh shit. 0-6, there's somebody else.

Oh, shooting now from the left.

Get some, motherfucker!

You little fuckers.

Come on. Shoot at me again.

Baddest ass chick in a damn Apache, aren't you?

Yeah, right.

Hey, 0-6, I'm gonna cut right...

Speed up a little bit more, 1-9.

My front-seater is critical.

Okay.

A dog fight for an hour trying to get back.

It wasn't until about five or ten minutes before we actually got back to RAMS

that the firing had stopped.

Let's see, the SDR failed,

so they shot that.

The GPS failed, so they must have shot that.

Engine one is out. Backup control systems seem to be...

And they're continuing to work south.

A lot of blades were damaged,

you had a lot of vibrations in the aircraft.

Aircraft were leaking fuel.

Some didn't have sighting systems on them.

Can you just keep flying towards Germany?

That would be good. Thanks.

Half our combat power is destroyed.

One that crashed at takeoff,

we got three that are shot up pretty bad,

and the 1-9.

We'll be coming from the west,

looping back with a left turn, and landing to the north.

About ten minutes before getting back to RAMS,

we thought it was over.

But what had really happened

is everybody was coming back at the same time.

The way the mission was staged out,

we should have been coming back at different times.

Because of the chaos that occurred

and the mission being aborted,

we arrived back at the assembly area at the same time.

Meaning two and a half squadrons of Apaches coming back

to about a three-mile radius area.

There's some aircraft off the nose.

All right, I got them on the FLIR.

We have got an aircraft at twelve o'clock.

I'm looking at them through the system.

Through the system. I don't see them otherwise.

Yeah.

You break to the right.

Coming on the left.

There's an aircraft off my nose, passing left to right.

2-0-1-0, on guard.

0-6, that might be the wounded aircraft...

So I'm gonna slow back a little.

Palerider 6 is behind me by a couple of kilometers.

And we both got shot up aircraft pretty bad.

If you want us to hold short and allow the aircraft

that are really shot up bad

to get in first, you want us to get in to land?

No, I think we go ahead and get them on the ground.

Okay, 0-9, 0-6. Put the airplane down.

It doesn't have to be in your parking space.

Put it down where you got the space.

There's an aircraft in the air above me.

Whoa!

It is a mess. It is total chaos.

They had engines shot out. They had systems shot out.

They had to do roll-on landings.

They couldn't see anything.

They're just winging it.

If you did land, get there on the ground,

and we'll sort it out when daylight comes up.

This assembly area is a madhouse.

People are gonna die out here from hitting each other.

Get the aircraft on the ground, get it stopped,

get it shut down, get out and kiss the ground.

Still have control, and I've got heavy vibration.

All right, I'm going to go around.

Actually, I'm gonna set up to the right here.

Brake for me, sir. Brake for me.

Altitude low...

6-0-6, Palerider 1-9.

Altitude low. Altitude low.

And 2-9 affirmative

that we're all down, but we need to get medical attention

to the northernmost aircraft

on the parking row.

All right, just stand fast, okay?

You sit right there.

You just stay right where you are...

I'm gonna be out in a minute, and I'll come up there.

There were probably two or three times

where they had had to stop and revive Jason.

You know, those Army docs did yeoman's work.

They saved Jason King's life that night.

And I got out...

I started surveying. I wasn't even sure

exactly where we had landed.

But off in the distance,

I could see the one red ChemLight.

So I gathered up my team,

and we all kinda walked in together in the dark,

and we met around the termite mound.

I started calling off names.

Mr. Stewmon, Lieutenant Bruhl.

Mr. Tomblin...

I then just checked everybody off.

And I gotta tell you, man...

When I got that last name checked off the list...

it was euphoric.

I've never been so happy as to have

all the men, uh, and women, uh,

safely back, uh, on the ground.

'Cause I gotta tell ya, it was not evident to me

that that's what was gonna happen at all.

And so in the dark, you know, as I'm calling off

all the names and they're responding,

it was a, it was a beautiful, beautiful moment,

and at that point, I knew that...

...we were gonna be forever linked as a, as a,

as a group of warriors that had just been through

a pretty intense situation

and that we were all so ecstatic

to see each other again.

And I think at the time, I said, you know,

it was only by the grace of God that we had managed to get everybody

back there in that assembly area together

'cause we had really been shot up pretty bad on that mission.

I woke up in the 86th cache

back in Camp Udairi.

So I think I'd been gone from Camp Udairi for...

less than 24 hours...

...on my first combat mission.

Not ideal. Not ideal.

I still have the shrapnel, um, which is kind of cool.

I think I might melt it down and mold it into something someday for my kids.

When people ask about the first few days of the war,

I-I don't get into any kind of detail.

But I tell them that...

the first time that you're shot at

and the first time that you have to pull the trigger,

your morality changes.

And I tell them about your mortality.

When you're shot at and not hit,

you can still think you're that youthful immortal,

but the first time you're hit, you realize...

you know, I'm not immortal.

There's a story about the pilots that flew it.

It's only half the story.

The other story is about the-the men and women

who fixed those airplanes.

We roll in,

and it looked like something out of Mad Max.

It looked like just post-apocalyptic destruction.

There was aircraft rolled over.

Everything was covered in dirt.

They were shot to shit.

We all wrote letters to Boeing.

Told them how much we appreciated the aircraft.

There were blades with 20 mm bullet holes through 'em

that came back,

driveshafts that had been shot clean through

that didn't fail.

And those aircraft,

as badly damaged as they were with bullet holes everywhere...

we're flying those aircraft ten days later

on another major mission.

We went on a deep attack the first night of the war.

We were told, "You guys need to go pick the fight

with the bully."

And we did that.

I look at it now, I don't consider it a failure.

The information that we brought back,

negative report of enemy armor,

was still the report that that ground forces commander needed.

Throughout the history of our armed forces,

and especially the US Army,

uh, one of the things that I think I'm most proud of

is the fact that even though we don't always succeed

in our, our missions,

we always learn from it.

We focus on being better.

And 2003, we were not successful in that combat mission

other than the fact that we were able to bring

all of our folks home from that mission.

What was successful about that mission

was that it was a forcing function of change that brought about

new tactics,

in some cases revisiting tactics

that we re-learned from experiences in Vietnam.

Had we had nothing but success,

and never faced any of the challenges and obstacles

from our initial combat operations,

we wouldn't have adapted and learned

and been successful later on.

Much of what our success is today in Afghanistan and Iraq

owes from the lessons learned early in combat.

And our Army has had experience after experience with that.

We're not always successful in our first outing in combat,

but the mark of a professional soldiering

is that you learn, you adapt,

come back, and fight the next day

better than you did the day before.

* Coming down is The same everywhere *

* What happens then Isn't always clear *

* Sun rose on a brand new day

* Tonight just seems A million miles away *

* I need to find My guiding star *

* Wherever you go There you are *

* Yeah there you are

* Flying high never keeps you Off the ground *

* Up above you just see Where you're coming down *

* You make a friend of the sky When you're in flight *

* Things change when you fall From flying high *

* My broken wings keep me up

* Lots of time It's just not enough *

* Seems years all been lost

* All this time At what cost *

* I don't leave Any shadow up here *

* No trace of me anywhere

* No trace of me That's clear *

* Flying high never keeps you Off the ground *

* Up above you just see Where you coming down *

* You make a friend of the sky When you're in flight *

* Things change when you fall From flying high *

* Yeah

You fall from flying high.

* Flying high never keeps you Off the ground *

* Up above you just see Where you coming down *

* You make a friend of the sky When you're in flight *

* Things change when you fall From flying high *

Whoo!

* Things change when you fall From flying high *

Whoo!