#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot

Summary

Shawn Ryan Show Episode #148: Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot

Host: Shawn Ryan
Guest: Alan C. Mack
Release Date: December 9, 2024

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1. Introduction

In episode #148 of the Shawn Ryan Show, former U.S. Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Alan C. Mack shares his harrowing experiences as a pilot with the prestigious Nightstalker TF160 unit. With over 35 years of military service, Mack provides an intimate look into high-stakes combat missions, personal struggles, and the resilience required to survive both in and out of the battlefield.

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2. Early Life and Motivation

[08:43] Al Mack:
"I grew up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a free-range teenager without the distractions of the internet or cell phones. Riding my bike with friends, exploring the coastal wilderness, and building toilet paper houses at night were my adventures."

Mack's fascination with helicopters began at a young age, inspired by Vietnam War news footage featuring Hueys. This early interest propelled him to pursue a career in military aviation.

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3. Joining the Army and Flight School

[13:42] Al Mack:
"I filled out an Army recruiting form at age 10, dreaming of flying helicopters. It wasn't an overnight journey—I served nine years as an aircraft mechanic before being selected for flight school."

Mack's dedication paid off when he excelled in flight school, eventually becoming the honor graduate of his class.

[21:59] Sean Ryan:
"Mack was determined not to let setbacks keep him down, embodying the Night Stalker creed of perseverance."

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4. Combat Deployments: Desert Shield and Desert Storm

Mack played a crucial role in operations during the Gulf War, flying MH47s with the 160th SOAR regiment. His expertise in night vision operations and Chinook maneuvering made him an invaluable asset in the global war on terror.

[25:19] Al Mack:
"Flying Chinooks was a game-changer. Their power and maneuverability allowed us to outperform Cobras and Apaches, securing air superiority during missions."

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5. Operation Anaconda and Operation Red Wings

Mack recounts the intense experiences during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, highlighting the chaos of combat, the challenges of terrain, and the emotional toll of losing comrades.

[53:41] Al Mack:
"We were navigating through a sandstorm with minimal visibility. Spatial disorientation nearly cost us our lives, but teamwork and quick thinking saved us that night."
[54:07] Sean Ryan:
"Holy shit."

During Operation Red Wings, Mack faced one of his most challenging missions, where friendly fire and operational miscommunications led to tragic losses.

[78:03] Sean Ryan:
"How did you handle being in a mission where miscommunication almost led to disaster?"
[78:43] Al Mack:
"We had to rely on instinct and quick decision-making. Protecting our team while navigating hostile environments was paramount."

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6. Personal Struggles and Resilience

Beyond the battlefield, Mack shares the profound personal challenges he faced, including his wife's struggle with addiction and the strain it put on their family.

[267:05] Sean Ryan:
"Do you regret not calling her?"
[267:06] Al Mack:
"No. It was the right thing to do. I had to prioritize the mission and the safety of my team."

Mack emphasizes the importance of seeking help and the support systems that aided him in overcoming personal turmoil.

[271:12] Sean Ryan:
"We skipped over, you want to cover?"
[271:21] Al Mack:
"My faith was tested many times, but reconnecting with it and finding support through family and comrades helped me persevere."

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7. Transition to Post-Military Life

After retiring from active duty, Mack reflects on his military career's impact on his personal life and relationships. He highlights the camaraderie within the 160th SOAR and the lasting bonds formed during service.

[322:35] Sean Ryan:
"It was an honor to work with you guys, and it's an honor to have you here."
[322:38] Al Mack:
"Thank you for having me. The Night Stalkers are an amazing organization that supports some of the best ground forces in the world."

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8. Lessons Learned and Closing Thoughts

Alan C. Mack concludes with powerful insights on leadership, resilience, and the importance of mental health support for veterans.

[323:33] Sean Ryan:
"Do you think that being a flight mechanic helped you with flight school?"
[50:38] Al Mack:
"Yes, especially because I worked on Hueys. Understanding the aircraft's systems gave me a significant advantage during training."

Mack's story is a testament to the enduring spirit of those who serve, the sacrifices made, and the personal battles fought long after deployment ends.

[327:12] Al Mack:
"The Night Stalker creed reminds us to fight to win and die rather than quit. It's about serving with the memory of those who came before us."

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Notable Quotes

• Al Mack [08:43]:
  "Growing up without the internet allowed me to develop a deep connection with nature and a strong sense of independence."

• Al Mack [21:59]:
  "The Night Stalker creed of perseverance kept me pushing forward, no matter the obstacles."

• Al Mack [53:41]:
  "Spatial disorientation nearly cost us our lives, but teamwork and quick thinking saved us that night."

• Al Mack [267:05]:
  "No. It was the right thing to do. I had to prioritize the mission and the safety of my team."

• Al Mack [327:12]:
  "The Night Stalker creed reminds us to fight to win and die rather than quit. It's about serving with the memory of those who came before us."

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Conclusion

Episode #148 of the Shawn Ryan Show offers an unflinching look into the life of a seasoned Nightstalker pilot. Alan C. Mack's narratives blend intense combat operations with personal battles, underscoring the multifaceted challenges faced by military personnel. His journey exemplifies courage, leadership, and the relentless pursuit of excellence, both in service and in personal life.

For those interested in military aviation, combat strategy, and personal resilience, this episode serves as a compelling and insightful listen.

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Note: This summary excludes advertisements, intros, outros, and non-content sections to focus solely on the substantive discussions and narratives shared by Alan C. Mack.

Transcript

[Al Mack]

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[Sean Ryan]

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[Al Mack]

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[Sean Ryan]

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[Al Mack]

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[Sean Ryan]

Alan Mack, welcome to the show, man.

[Al Mack]

Oh, thanks for having me.

[Sean Ryan]

It's my pleasure. So, first helicopter pilot on the show from Nightstalker TF160. Man, I've been wanting to get one of you guys for a long time. And then we connected. What about two years ago?

[Al Mack]

About a year and a half.

[Sean Ryan]

And a year and a half ago. And then. And then for whatever reason, the conversation kind of fell off and. But now you're here and man, I'm glad to be. We've had a ton of requests for TF160 guys. So thank you for. Thank you for making the trip.

[Al Mack]

Glad to be here. That's all I can say.

[Sean Ryan]

But yeah. So everybody starts off with an intro. So, man, you've been a part of, like so much history, high profile missions in the gwod. I can't. I just can't wait to get another perspective. We've interviewed a lot of guys that you've. A lot of guys that have been on ops that you've been a part of and very apparent. We have a lot of mutual friends. It's like I've blown up. Hey, you gotta get this guy on the show. But I just, I can't wait to get another perspective and I want to dig into your training and all that stuff and get the life of a night stalker. Documented but quick rundown of your intro. You've served more than 35 years, 17 of which were served in army special operations as a combat and instructor pilot entrusted with the United States Military Academy Flight Detachment at West Point, N.Y. logged more than 6,700 flying hours, 3,200 with night vision goggles, taking part in Operation Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and was a major factor in the global war on terror. Flew MH47s while assigned to 1 60th soar, the Army's only special operations aviation regiment. Your crew was one of the first into Afghanistan and the first into Mazar Sharif as part of America's response to the attacks on nine. Eleven highly decorated. Receiving the Legion of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Star Medals, three Meritorious Service Medals, ten Air Medals, one with Valor Combat Action Badge, and the Army Broken Wing Award. Now you serve your local government as Deputy Commissioner of Emergency Services for Orange County, New York. You're the author of Razor 03, A Night Stalker's wars, and you have another book coming out, from my understanding when we spoke at breakfast. Do you have a title for that one yet?

[Al Mack]

The working title is Chinooks in the Dark, and I'm not sure what the subtitle is.

[Sean Ryan]

Nice. And you're a husband, a father, a stepdad and a grandfather. And a man of faith.

[Al Mack]

And a pet parent. And a pet parent.

[Sean Ryan]

What kind of. What kind of pet?

[Al Mack]

He's a Jacoby. A Jack Russell beagle mix.

[Sean Ryan]

Nice. Nice. But quite the career, man. And then just going through the outline.

[Al Mack]

Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

Just some of the stuff you've been a part of. I'm just going to read some of this stuff, man, but. Horse soldier infill, ODA, 595. Shot down during Operation Anaconda. You're on the rescue op for Marcus Luttrell's lone survivor, also known as for military folks, Operation Red Wing and tons more. But, man, just. We got a lot to talk about, man. So. Before we get two in the weeds, though, everybody gets a gift. Maybe this is the only reason you're here.

[Al Mack]

I don't know.

[Sean Ryan]

I wouldn't blame it. I wouldn't blame you if it was.

[Al Mack]

Ah, the Vigilance Elite Gummies.

[Sean Ryan]

Vigilance Elite Gummies.

[Al Mack]

These are great. I did trade you a book a year and a half ago for some of these, and I'm glad. That's why I came down here. It was just for the gummies.

[Sean Ryan]

You did. They're still legal in all 50 states and they're still made here in the USA. And then those are just some stickers for whatever, but.

[Al Mack]

And you know, like any good house guest, you know, I gotta bring a housewarming gift. I don't have gummies, but what I've got is a coin. And that's. I had that made when the book Came out the front of. That's an attitude indicator, because I believe everything in life is about attitude. And that's a positive attitude.

[Sean Ryan]

By the way there, man. Thank you. That'll go great right there. Cool with all the coins. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. And one last thing. So before we get into the interview, I have a Patreon account. They're our top supporters. They've been with us since the beginning. They're the reason I get to do this and you get to be here. And part of the thing that I promised them is they get the opportunity to ask a guest a question. And so this is from Stephen Casey. They know about you. So.

[Al Mack]

Okay.

[Sean Ryan]

This won't make sense to a lot of people until later on in the interview, but I thought it was a good question. How did you gain the perspective to serve your family while in service, and what helped you do that?

[Al Mack]

That's actually a tough question. You know, family's always been a big part of my life. And as we get into the interview, you'll find out that, you know, it wasn't always the priority. And, you know, I had to make some adjustments to that. And, you know, part of what made us stronger, like, especially my relationship with my sons, was spending time together and prioritizing that, for sure. But sometimes the job took priority over even that.

[Sean Ryan]

Yep.

[Al Mack]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. How did you find a way? What was your cue?

[Al Mack]

Uh, you know, really, it was my wife, so she had her own problems, but she made sure that my sons and I had a good relationship. So whether it was now. Remember when my kids were young, there was no Internet, you know, to speak of unless you were on AOL or CompuServe. So it wasn't like just pulling your phone out. So she would shove us out the door and say, you know, it's like, you do your kids. But she included me in. It was, go spend time with your boys, and we would just go do whatever we felt like doing, you know, whether it was taking the boat out or hiking or, you know, some kind of sports or something like that. So really putting that effort into my sons was. Was the key to everything.

[Sean Ryan]

You and your son still pretty close?

[Al Mack]

Very close. Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

That's good to hear, man. Yeah, that's good to hear. Well, you ready to dig in?

[Al Mack]

I'm ready. Let's go.

[Sean Ryan]

All right, man. So we're gonna do. We're gonna do the typical military life story, and so we'll go through childhood, get into your military career, get into transition stuff, and then that'll be it. All right, but. So where did you grow up?

[Al Mack]

So I was born in New Hampshire, coastal New Hampshire. So I grew up in Portsmouth, which is right by the Navy base there. There's a submarine base right in the end of the river. And I'd like to consider myself sort of a free range teenager at the time, you know, because once again, there's no Internet, no cell phones. So, you know, my parents would open the door, I'd go out with my friends, we jump on our 10 speeds and ride. I think we had a range of operations about 20 miles. And, you know, we'd go to the beach, we'd go to, you know, out in the woods, whatever trouble you can get into in coastal New England. I was not a bad kid by any means. Never got in trouble, you know, nothing, you know, nothing bad. Nothing bad. But yeah, we'd go, you know, toilet paper houses, that kind of thing, you know, at night, that was the extent of our, you know, life of crime. If you will close with your parents. Yeah, yeah. My dad passed away in 06. He went to sleep, sat down in his recliner, went to sleep, didn't wake up the next day. And I kind of think if you're not going to go out in a ball of flame, you know, like instantly then, and you're asleep in your favorite chair, you know, not a bad way to go. Yeah, yeah. My mother's still up in New Hampshire. She's a local artist. You know, she paints, does some wonderful work. My brother's up there, and that's kind of the extent of my family, really. My grandparents are all gone.

[Sean Ryan]

Right on what. I mean, what kind of stuff were you into as a kid?

[Al Mack]

Well, as really high school is the first I could think of something I could talk about. And it's really cross country and track were my big things. Right. So I did, you know, cross country in the fall, winter track, which, you know, in New England, you know, you're doing indoors. Right. We did that at the University of New Hampshire. And then the spring, you had spring track, and I was generally a miler, wasn't very fast. I ran about 445, 440 for a mile.

[Sean Ryan]

You don't think 445 is a fast mile?

[Al Mack]

Well, there were guys that were way faster than me, so that's pretty good. And then I tried my hand at the hurdles, but I really didn't have the speed, you know, in the short term, so I could do like the 330intermediates, you know, which is a long, grueling race. You know, but at the very end, when I was a senior, I trained for the decathlete decathlon and I learned a pole vault throw, the discus, you know, stuff like that. And I actually jumped, I don't know, like 12ft, something like that, in my training jumps. And the coach is looking at me like, I think we missed you in some events. I was like, I don't know. But it was a lot of fun. You know, life revolved around my friends, you know, in track and.

[Sean Ryan]

Good childhood, it sounds like.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, yeah, it was good.

[Sean Ryan]

What got you interested in flying?

[Al Mack]

So believe it or not, the Vietnam War was going on, right? And so I must have been 6, 7 years old or so. And it was on the evening news, right? You didn't have the 24 hour news cycle. You had, you know, the 5:00 news, 10:00 news or whatever it was, depending on your time zone. And they always had Hueys zipping across, you know, the screen. And I was like, I want to do that, right? Remember the TV Guide when you were a kid? You had the little paper magazine, you know, with what's on tv, and in it was an insert for the army recruiting, right? So I filled it out and I sent it in. You know, I want to be a pilot. And I must have been 10, maybe 11. And the recruiter sends me a handwritten letter back, a bag full of stickers and, you know, stuff like that. And he's like, hey, look, I see by your birthday you're not quite old enough to talk to me, but, you know, keep that thought alive and, you know, call me back when you're 18. Fast forward a number of years. I'm in high school, I'd forgotten about the army thing. My senior year, I'm planning on following on to college in New Hampshire. And I've got a guy, he's going to be a roommate, the whole thing. And then I start thinking, you know, this is in the fall of 1980, and I'm thinking, if I go to school, I'm just going to party, you know, I'm not going to study. You know, I wasn't a bad student, but I wasn't a good student, you know what I mean? I just never did my homework kind of thing. I knew I should, but I didn't. And I knew that college would be the same thing. So I'm worried about what I'm going to do. And another friend had just been to the army recruiter and he comes in, oh, is that the army can do all this stuff you can go to Germany, you know, which was West Germany at the time. And I was like, you know, I always wanted to fly helicopters. And I saw a commercial. Remember those be all you can be commercials?

[Sean Ryan]

Oh, yeah.

[Al Mack]

Well, there's like two, even three of them that helicopters are involved in. And one of them is like a W1. You know, the warrant officer ranks are 1 through 5 now. And he's in a Cobra helicopter, zipping around, you know, and they finish up, and the senior guy is like, not bad for a rookie, you know, And I'm like, that's what I want to do. So I go into the army recruiter that my friend had been to. I'm like, I want to fly helicopters. And he's like, whoa, hold on now. And I saw it on tv. You can go from high school to flight school. And he's like, pump the brakes, turbo. It doesn't really work like that. And he's like, you know, you gotta have something going for you for that to happen, you know? And I was like, well, like what? And he said, tell you what, why don't you join the army in aviation like an aircraft mechanic? You know, do two, three years, learn the. The culture, the lingo, learn about the aircraft, you know, the. All that kind of stuff, and then put it for flight school, and it's much easier to get in. Now, that statement is twofold. One, the recruiter doesn't get credit for officer candidates at all, right? So even if he got me, he gets no credit for it. May or may not have been able to do it. Who knows? But he did put me into army aviation as a aircraft mechanic. Worked on Hueys, Cobras, 58s, and turns out, it was good advice, you know, and I did nine years. I reached the rank of staff sergeant, E6 in the army. I was in Germany, West Germany at the time. And I decided I was going to get out of the army, but I really wanted to fly, so I printed a packet. Yep. So, you know, I had two kids, little kids, and my wife was a. Linda at the time was a medical assistant. And I thought, you know, they're just going to send me back to Fort Bliss, El Paso, which I didn't want to do. And so I said, you know what? Why don't we get out, But I'll put in for flight school first. If I get picked up, we stay. If not, we get out. And so I got picked up, which was. Was amazing, you know. So I did almost four years in West Germany and off to Fort Rucker, Alabama, but That's how I got interested really was the be all you can be commercials and the evening news.

[Sean Ryan]

What took you so long to. I mean, if you joined a Fly, why did it take you nine years to put your package in?

[Al Mack]

Because. So my first assignment was to South Korea, which is a whole other story we might get into later because that was a military junta ran it then, it wasn't a democracy. And I went back many years later and it was a big improvement. But so a year on a company there, I go to Fort Bliss, Texas, where I meet my future to be wife Linda, do three, three and a half years there. And then I go to Germany on a three year accompanied assignment. So we get there, have our two sons and now, you know, the timing is, you know that. And then flight school is almost a year long. So I count that in the nine years. And that's why.

[Sean Ryan]

Right on, right on. Did you know what you wanted to fly when you put the package in?

[Al Mack]

I wanted to fly Huey's, Huey's, because what I wanted to do was assault. Think of, you know, back then it was the Air Cav, you know, doing the big multi ship assaults. And so that's what I wanted to do. And the Blackhawk was just coming out. As a matter of fact, in my class we had like 72 students I think to start with and 20, like 30 of us got Hueys, 10 of us got Cobras, and then most of the others got 58. And there were only six Blackhawk slots. So that's how new the Blackhawks were. Showing my age, but yeah, so I wanted to fly Hueys.

[Sean Ryan]

So what did you. All right, so what did you get to fly?

[Al Mack]

Well, I learned in uh, one Hueys by the end of class. So you know what's happening to the airlines right now where the pilots are aging out, right? They're hitting age 65 and they can't by law fly. Well, in the Army Chinook pilots, a Chinook transition is considered a reward, right? So remember the Vietnam War had been going on, guys were flying Hueys doing the assault work. If you survived it and got back and then they wanted to send you back, the reward was you could transition to a Chinook, right? So now you're not necessarily doing assault work. You're still flying around Vietnam, you know, carrying artillery and supplies and all that kind of stuff, but you're not really doing assault work. So it's considered, and it's an advanced aircraft, so it's considered a reward. So if you think of like that Vietnam time frame, These guys on their second tour. So about the time I'm in flight school, these guys are all reaching 60, 65 years old, and they're all retiring in droves, right? So it's very senior heavy rank. And the army realized they had to generate from the bottom up. So they're going to take W1s, right? And once again, you go W01, CW2, CW3, CW4, and now CW5, which is a relatively new rank. But at the time, it was CW4 was the senior guys. So how are you going to replace those guys? The Army's plan was to take W1s out of flight school and inject them in while you still had senior people that. To mentor them. But who do you take, right? I mean, it's supposed to be an advanced aircraft, supposed to be a reward. So you want the cream of the crop, if you will. The only way to do that, the metric that they have is grade point average, right? So, you know, I have high school grade point average. No, no, flight school.

[Sean Ryan]

Flight.

[Al Mack]

Okay, flight school grade point average. So you get graded on your academics, your, you know, your participation, your flying. Each. Each flight gets a grade slip, you know, with a numerical grade, and they end up with this grade point average. There was a rumor, and it was sort of true, it depended on the class, was that if you were in the top five of the class, right, there's 72 of us. But if you're in the top five, when it got to aircraft assignments, you could pick what you wanted, right? So if you wanted to pick what you wanted, you wanted to be in the top five guys. So there were a bunch of us that were, you know, there were probably 10 of us that were all within, you know, hundredths of a point, you know, 98.2, 98.3, you know, that kind of thing. And we're competing, right? And every time you get your exams back, you'd be like, oh, man, that guy, he got like 0.1 above me, and he just moved up. And so it turned out that I was number one in the class. And a good story here about never quitting is that one of the guys I was competing with, if you will. When the assignments came out, they did not give us choice. And, you know, I got shoved. We all got shoved off in Hueys, all us top guys. And he got mad and he. I want to say he quit, but he stopped trying, right? So he studied enough, he did what he had to do, but he quit. He dropped from being in 98 point something to, you know, 88 point something, right? So instead of going from an A into a B kind of thing, and then toward the end, what I just talked about, the Chinook thing, the army said, okay, we're going to do two slots from your class. Get Chinooks, right? So two, two pilots will get Chinooks. And we're going to take the number one and two guy. And I happened to be number one and my stick buddy was number two, and this guy probably would have been one or two. Teddy kept going, but he gave up. And now he's like throwing stuff around the classroom. He's like, damn it, I shouldn't have quit. And it's like, good point, buddy. And I remember to this day I use that lesson on my kids and tell them, it's like, don't get mad you didn't get the job you wanted. Don't get mad that you didn't get this or that. Things always work out. They just do. Don't give up.

[Sean Ryan]

So you wanted a Chinook?

[Al Mack]

I didn't. I was actually mad that I got it. Really? Yeah, because remember I said I wanted to be salt work, right? And I'm like, a Chinook. That's bull. You know, it's gonna be like, you know, flying from airport to airport, that's gonna suck. And the instructors, you know, all retired warrant officers, all older guys, they're like, back then, slap me in the back of the head, right? And they're like, you idiot, shut your mouth and take the slot, right? And I'm like, but I want to fly Huey's. And they're like, hueys are going away. Trust me. Take the Chinook, right?

[Sean Ryan]

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[Al Mack]

And as soon as I flew that thing, I was like, this is amazing. It's one of the fastest helicopters on the planet, let alone in the U.S. army. It's. It's very powerful, and it's no harder to fly than a Huey. But it, you know, there's a whole now conversation on. On that. But that's how I ended up, you know, flying Chinooks, learned on hueys, transitioned into CH47 Deltas, you know, just before desert. Desert Shield. And then, you know, I flew in there, and then, you know, I ended up instructing in those. And then, you know, we get into the 1 60th, you know, wow, wow.

[Sean Ryan]

Let's go to. I mean, so what was it like for you walking into flight school?

[Al Mack]

So you start out, so it's different now, but at the time, what you did is you first went to walk school, Warren Officer Candidate School. And that was like eight weeks of. We start out with, you know, you did hell Week. We had, like, hell day, you know, and it was tough. And I remember the little head game they played was they, you know, they came in, you're beat to hell, and they'd say, okay, somebody yells in the room, you know, 20% got it. And then they're like, we just got off the phone with the Secretary of the Army. You know, we have to lose 20% of you because of budget cuts. So we're just going to do hell day every day until 20% of you quit, Right? And I'm like, well, I'm not Quitting, you know, you could have to throw me out of here. And there were guys. It was like one guy got up and walked out. So it worked, you know, I was like, all right. He didn't want to be here.

[Sean Ryan]

What does hell day consist of?

[Al Mack]

You know, it's like, you know, crawling through the mud pits and push ups and mountain climbers and just burning you out physically.

[Sean Ryan]

Just a beat down.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, it's a big. It's a beat down. And it is not pleasant to say the least, especially for army aviators and. Or guys that want to be. And these guys, you know, the TAC officers, are walking around just like the guys at Budge, you know, you know, except back then, smoking a cigarette. Come on, let's go upstairs. We'll get some donuts and some coffee. It's warm, you know, it's comfortable. You get a shower. We'll just put you on your way. Look, you're. You're an E7. You know, there were guys that were E7s there. It's like, you're an E7, you had a good life. Why do you want to do this? You know, and they, yeah, you're right. Screw it, you know, I quit. You know, and guys would just do that. I don't know, four or five guys quit during it. And that one guy in the meeting and, you know, they. They do that to you. Not to that extent, but for the next eight weeks because you're not flying. So you're doing what we call cubing, right? So you have a cubicle, right? You have your bunk, you know, a desk, a locker. And every morning when you get up, you have, I don't know, 10 minutes to have your bunk with a white collar on it, your coat hangers, to be exact. You know, you know the deal. Like any NCO school you've been to. And you know, you get outside, obviously you're not fast enough. You're not straight enough, whatever. They'd come into the barracks and throw the stuff out of your locker onto the floor so that when you came back at the end of the day, you know, you got like an hour. That was personal time. Now you're repairing the damage they did as opposed to just adjusting things. And it's a, you know, it's a head game. It's a little bit of hazing, really, but, you know, it kind of. It does go to show who army warrant officers are in my age group, you know, why we're such assholes. But anyway, so you do that, and then when you're done you move on to. So that's A company and you move on to B company and that's primary flight, which is where you learn to fly. So depending on what they call the bubble, where the schedule is for classes based on aircraft maintenance, weather, that kind of stuff. So, you know, you might roll right through, you might go from A company to B company and roll right into C company seven months later. Or you could have two weeks of rain that you can't fly in or something and it just sets you back. Well, what that does is that ripple effect is it sets back all the other classes. So in the meantime, while you're waiting to get to flight, you're polishing brass and you're doing just things to keep you busy, painting rocks, that kind of stuff. Or you might be working at one of the facilities on post, you know, as a, like a think of like a detailer, you know, giving you like a temporary assignment. Like I actually worked at the museum for a couple of weeks, which was pretty good because I was an aircraft mechanic. I helped them with some of the displays, you know, getting the, you know, as they were setting them up. But that's how you get into the flying. And then when you're in, how, just.

[Sean Ryan]

Real quick, how long does it take? Let's say there's no weather delays or anything. How long does it take from day one of flight school before you're in the air maneuvering a helicopter?

[Al Mack]

I would say six weeks, maybe seven.

[Sean Ryan]

Six weeks?

[Al Mack]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

That's quick.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, that's if everything rolls right along and you start out in primary learning to fly. Right now just before I got there, they switched over. The army switched over from the TH55, which was a little two seater, a little bug looking thing that it was just you and your instructor. And when you picked up to a hover, when you pull power, the nose wants to go to the right and you have to give it left pedal to keep it in heading. And in a modern helicopter, the engines keep pace with the rotors. And back then in this thing you had to control the throttle at the same time. So it was an additional thing. I got lucky in that it went away. And they had just transitioned into Huey's as the primary trainer, which I wouldn't fly anyway. So I get into this thing and you know, they take you out to the stage field. There's, there's Hueys all over the place, you know, just flying around, hovering, doing their thing. And the instructor's like, all right, you know, here's what you do right you have the controls, I have the controls. And then you just, you know, you go off in whatever direction. I mean, you can't hover, right? And that's the very first. It's insane because. But when you go to bed at night, so you have a stick buddy. So when a partner, so when he's flying, you're in the back. And when you're flying, he's in the back, right? So not only are you there for your flight period, but you're in the back going up and down and left and right. And just your inner ear is getting all, you know, discombobulated, right? So at night when you went to bed, you felt yourself. It's like being on a ship, right, For a while. And you go lay in a regular bed and you feel like you're moving, but you're not. And that's what it's like. And then the first person in the class learns to hover. He comes back and he's like, I found the hover button. Which means you can just maintain a stationary three foot hover. You don't drift in. And then as individuals in the class learn, it takes about five hours really to learn to hover. Each flight period is about an hour and a half. So it takes a couple of flights. And you know, when you're like the last guy, you're feeling like, what am I, incompetent? I can't do this. Maybe I'm not, you know, pilot, right? And then you just, one day you find yourself hovering. You know, they're like, hey, you have the controls, I have the girls. Hey, you're hovering. Wow, I'm hovering, right? And once you learn, it's like riding a bike. You don't, you don't forget, you know, and so that transitions into traffic pattern flight. So you're going up and around the pattern, you're coming in, you're landing. They'll say, you know, the.

[Sean Ryan]

So literally the first thing you do is just try to learn how to.

[Al Mack]

Hover for like, I don't know, three, four days, five days maybe if you're late.

[Sean Ryan]

How many helicopters are up at once trying to hover?

[Al Mack]

20. Oh my gosh, it's insane. You could go there.

[Sean Ryan]

That has to look hilarious.

[Al Mack]

Every stage field has a set of bleachers, right? And people, locals would just pull up. There was no fences. You just pull up, get on a bleacher, you know, your hot cocoa, whatever, depending on the time of year, and iced tea, and just watch the students, you know, going nuts. And then what happens? Though with the traffic pattern and stuff, is you start including emergency procedures. Now, these are like in the Huey, you know, hydraulics out. So the aircraft's very difficult to fly, and you have to kind of run it on to land. You have tail rotor malfunctions where you have to control the yaw of the aircraft as you're coming in. As you change power, you have to adjust the throttle to keep the nose straight as you touch down. Auto rotations, right? So it's a single engine aircraft, the Huey. So the instructor will roll the throttle off on you. You're just flying along, and he rolls the throttle off to idle, and you no longer have lift, right? So now you lower the collective takes all the pitch out of the blades, and you descend like a rock, right? But the rotors are still spinning, right? And you have to keep the rotor RPM between 97, 101% in order to do that. You play with the collective, which changes the pitch in the blades. So the more pitch you put in, the more drag you get, right? But you want to keep it at 100% because when you get to the bottom last, like 75ft, you flare. Now you pull in the power, you put the pitch in the blades, and you're using one chance to cushion that baby on. And we call them crash bangs. You're doing that all day long, right? And then eventually they deem you safe enough to solo, right? So back in the. In the TH55, you really did solo. It was just you. Now you're going out with your stick buddy and he ain't saving you, right? So you're still solo, but you have somebody, you know, next to you in case you die, he'll go with you. But, yeah, so you solo, you do a couple of traffic patterns. I think it was five traffic patterns by yourself. And instructor, you know, gets back in and you're like, all right, you soloed. The last guy to solo of the class is like, you know, it's. There was a name for it, I can't remember, but you. You had to ride. We had this ceremony. It was like pictures of beer. And everybody lined the. In front of the building at the barracks, you know, and it looked like a stage field. The markings were like, you know, painted on just as if it were stage field. And that guy would ride a thing called the solo cycle. So it was a bicycle that somebody had engineered. You know, it had rotor blades, and when you drove it, you know, when you pedaled, the blades spun, right, and you had to ride this bicycle. I Don't have a picture of that.

[Sean Ryan]

Oh, man, that's awesome.

[Al Mack]

I wish I did, but. And then you get your solo wings, which is like these cloth wings that get sewn on your hat. Each class has a color and back then they don't do it anymore. But each class had a baseball cap. We were royal blue. And you had that sewn on so you could see who, you know, was a real pilot now sort of, you know, within the context of flight school.

[Sean Ryan]

Nice.

[Al Mack]

So, yeah, so then you move on from that. You move up, you take your final checkride in primary and you move on to advanced skills, which is Charlie Company. And there. This was a lot of fun actually. Now you're doing terrain flight navigation. You know, you got a handheld map, right? And this is where you, I call it the bus driver move right where you're trying to make the map meet the terrain. Because you get lost. It's like, oh, there's a stream over there. No, wait, that's the stream. And you move, you know, so it's like a guy driving a big bus, you know. And so you learn to do that and fly. And that's a lot of fun actually. And you finish that up with a great big exercise where like the Cobras come in and the Hueys and it's a big, they called an avtac. I don't remember what that stood for, but it was a big, big event. It was really cool. And then you moved into knights.

[Sean Ryan]

What's the, I mean, what's the, what's the field exercise? What's the.

[Al Mack]

It was like we all flew out to an assembly area, right? And we went in and got a briefing from, you know, the cadre planned the mission. So it was, you know, 20 Hueys flying in one big ass formation, like something out of Apocalypse now, you know. And the Cobras would roll in and do the gun runs and the, oh, 58s would do, you know, calling the spot reports, all that stuff. And we would all do this. And we're a bunch of, we're not even W1s yet. We're still walks. We're not officer candidates. You know, the instructors are obviously having fun because they're showing off, you know, their students can do this and that. And it was, it was a lot of fun. You know, I don't think they do that anymore. It's probably very risky when you think about what they were doing. You know, all these aircraft in one little area, synchronized. I mean, this is, this is advanced stuff.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Al Mack]

And they allowed us to do that.

[Sean Ryan]

How far in to training is that?

[Al Mack]

That's several months in. That's, that's got to be like five, six months in.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Al Mack]

And, and then. Because when you finish that now you move to night. And when you go to night, you do all the same stuff. You do stage field, right? Traffic patterns, you do auto rotations, emergency procedures, all that stuff with goggles. And when I was in there, we had, the army had just transitioned from what we call full face fives, right. So Anvis fives or PVS fives, whatever they were. And they, they used to be like a.

[Sean Ryan]

Are you talking about the mono.

[Al Mack]

No, no, these are, they're, they're binoculars, but they are like a rectangle.

[Sean Ryan]

Oh, these are like the thing that the eyeglass doctor use.

[Al Mack]

Put them on your face, right? Like a diving mask. Think of a diving mask where it's just got toilet paper tubes sticking out of it, right. And everything else is black. That's what they started with. And I got there, somebody in the army had figured out that if you took a saw and you cut one half of the MVG away, the plastic housing, turned it upside down, you could stick the lip of it without the foam up into your helmet where the visor is. And then with surgical tubing, you wrapped a surgical tubing around in Velcro and you suck this thing to your head, right. And you had to have a weight bag because it's way out here like this. And you had to. When you did auto rotation, when you, when you drop the power, the engines split off like the rotor and the engine split the needles. But if it doesn't, you're going to fall out of the sky. So you have to make sure it happens because sometimes it doesn't. Right. And so.

[Sean Ryan]

Wait, what do you mean?

[Al Mack]

So there's two big needles, right? There's a big needles. Needles like gauges.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Al Mack]

Right. And so one of them is the rotor and one of them is the engine.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Al Mack]

So whenever you pull or reduce power, they should work together, right? So that means the engine is driving the rotors, which is good. But if for some reason there's a clutch, it's called a sprag clutch. It's a one way clutch. And if the engine rolls off, it's supposed to freewheel, allowing the rotors to spin. So you should have a split in the needle. So if you drop the power, roll the throttles off, it should split. Right. But if you don't get a split, that means you've got a clutch failure and you've got to recover because you're not going to survive if you don't do something about it. So you've got to focus one tube inside at the instruments while the other one's outside and determine that, okay, that's good. Then you can focus it back out and then finish the maneuver. It was insane, right? And the army at the time was going, we own the night. We learned we kind of were renting it. You know, we don't really own it yet, but, like, there was no MVG lighting in the cockpit. Like, it was red light, and so you had to turn off all the lights. So what we did is we had these little tiny chem lights. They look like maybe an inch, inch and a half long. You break those and you tape them into place over key instruments. And you had what was called blind cockpit drill. So every switch in the cockpit you had to be able to find without looking at it, because you've got these things on your face. And so you do that, and then you go do terrain flight that way and train flight navigation. And so you're doing this whole progression. And what's interesting is the students from my timeframe were kind of like the first ones to do this. Not literally the first, but, you know, that first year. And so when you get to your unit, all the old guys don't want to do it. Like, they're qualified to do it, but they're not proficient at it, and they don't want to do it. Right. And that's a whole story I'll get into with Desert Shield, Desert Storm, but so that's how flight school kind of goes. And when you finish up nights, and we used to fly unaided nights as well, they call it Nighthawk. So we'd. You'd fly it, you know, whatever a safe altitude was, 300ft, something like that, you knew where the. How tall the tallest obstacle was. And you flew at least 200ft higher than that. And you'd fly around. And this is what the guys in Vietnam used to do. You know, you'd fly in the dark without being able to see. You'd get to your fix or, you know, maybe, you know, a Sandy would put a rocket down for you, and, you know, that's the lz, right? And you go in there with a white searchlight on, and it can be tough. And we did stuff without the searchlight, and they'd have chem lights in the LZ or maybe strobe lights or something like that. And as you came in on your approach, if you got any kind of blinking that meant there was foliage between you and the object and you would hold off on the descent until you could see it again and you go in. And it's funny because that's kind of a lost art now with everybody being so used to goggles.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting. Yeah, interesting.

[Al Mack]

And that finishes up flight school.

[Sean Ryan]

What did you find to be the most challenging portion of flight school?

[Al Mack]

Night vision. Hovering. Because you had to maintain a three foot hover and you did that. You didn't have a radar altimeter, Right. That took a digital readout in the cockpit. You looked out through the chin bubble or the side door and if you saw individual blades of grass, like it would be sort of fuzzy, which meant you were higher than three feet and you wanted to get down just enough so the individual blades of grass stood out. And that's like three feet. But how the.

[Sean Ryan]

Hold on. How the hell do you see individual blades of grass when the rotors are.

[Al Mack]

Oh, they're blowing all over the place, you know, but you can. But with that being said, this is why flying in the desert is so tough, because there's no texture. Well, I take that back. The NTC National Training center out of Fort Irwin, California is a different kind of desert. It's not like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and Iraq are very. Saudi's got those smooth, beautiful dunes like you see in Lawrence of Arabia. In Iraq, it's kind of flattish with some rocks occasionally, but it's not scrubby like the ntc. Right. So the army kind of gave itself a false sense of security and how. Well, we could fly in the desert, right, because, oh, it's not that hard. Right. And then you get over to the Saudi desert, it's like flying in snow, you know, when you come into a hover because you look out, you can't see individual grains of sand, you know, so it's interesting. It's tough. Yeah. But I found the hardest part of that was the. They call it the OGE 360 Hover. So you get out of ground effect. So it's about 80ft and I guess about 60ft. So you're higher than the trees, it's dark, there's no moon. And you have to do a 360 degree turn, a pedal turn, right. So the aircraft will pivot and you got to start on one heading, end on that heading and be at the exact same altitude when you finish. And you got to be over the same spot of ground. Right. And the instructor, who's very experienced at this, can tell you can't. You're Like I think I did the goodness. Ah, dude, you drifted 20ft. So that was tough. I had a hard time with that.

[Sean Ryan]

I'll bet, I'll bet. Let's go into, I mean graduation. So you graduated the number one.

[Al Mack]

Yep, yep. So I've got a distinguished honor grad. But the army, unlike the Air force, there's a process for a warrant officer, it's like a three day process. Like the first thing they want to emphasize is that you are a soldier. Not that you're a pilot. Not that you're an officer. You're a soldier. And then I can't remember what ceremony they did for that, but it was specific to being a soldier. And then the next day you got pinned your bars. And then the next day they did a wing ceremony. You got your wings, right? So it was, they wanted to emphasize you were a soldier, an officer and a pilot. You know, the rest of us are like, no, we're pilots. But that's what the army wanted us.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Al Mack]

To be, you know.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. How did it feel for you? I mean you wanted to fly since what I think you said six years old.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, six years old.

[Sean Ryan]

You put your package in to enlist as a pilot at age 10 and now you're graduating honor grad.

[Al Mack]

It was awesome, you know, I mean I love, loved it. And then I left that. So two weeks later I was in the Chinook transition and I learned how to fly Chinook. That was six to eight weeks.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean how hard is it to learn from, to go from a Huey to a Chinook or.

[Al Mack]

It wasn't that hard like flying. So you know, we joke about the Chinook being the double headed dumpster, right? It's like a dumpster with two palm trees having a fight or you know, a Greyhound bus, you know, kind of thing. Actually the seals used to call us the black school bus of death when we're going to the acts. But even though the aerodynamics are different, I'm not going to go into it here because it's fairly complex. I don't think I could explain it at this age. But the control movements that the pilot does are the same. What happens over your head is pure friggin magic. It just does what it does. And so all you're really doing in that six to eight weeks is learning the emergency procedures for the aircraft.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Al Mack]

So you know that you practice, you know, generator failures, engine failures. Right. And this has got a twin engine, right. So it's two engines. And you have to practice with losing an engine. And then there's Other malfunctions, you know, high side, low side, you know, things like that that you just have to learn. You get proficient at it, and you start out with rote memory, right? So you. You memorize the steps in a checklist, and when something happens, you. You literally go down the steps, and as you get through the course, you start responding to the indications versus, you know, oh, the rotor's low. I know I have to lower the thrust or the collective, you know, the power. And you just. You just learn all that. And then you do nights there as well with the Chinooks doing external loads. You have to learn how to do sling loads. And it was fun.

[Sean Ryan]

What's the first thing you noticed, maneuverability wise? That was different from the huey to the 47.

[Al Mack]

I can tell you that. The 47 is. It surprised me. And remember I said I didn't want Chinooks, and then when I flew it the first time or two, it was like, hey, this is awesome. Because it's just as maneuverable, it has all the same aerodynamic limitations, and it's faster and stronger. You know, we routinely outraced Cobras and Apaches coming back at the end of the day, you know, they'd be like, you know, we'd converge on the corridor that brought us to the home stage field, and, you know, we just click the power a little bit with your thumb, and the cycle could move forward, and the aircraft would just accelerate, you know, and just leave them in the dust, you know, and the Apaches couldn't keep up. Cobras couldn't keep up. And they always thought they were fast, you know, so it was fun. You know, my instructor, like, speed up. I'm like, well, they're right. They're kind of in front of us. Nah, speed up. You know, he liked, you know, showing. Very cool. But.

[Sean Ryan]

So were you one of the first 47 pilots in the Army?

[Al Mack]

No, one of the first W ones.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Al Mack]

To fly Chinooks. So how long had they been around W1s?

[Sean Ryan]

Chinooks?

[Al Mack]

Oh, Chinooks, they. I want to say 1958 for the A model. And that's what the 101st Airborne was originally. The 11th Air Assault Test. Right. And what they had to do is prove the air assault concept, air mobility, was a feasible concept. And they needed the Chinook to make that happen. So in order to move, you know, all these troops around Vietnam, not only do you need the Hueys, but you need gunship support, which was Hueys that were armed. And then you had to move the artillery and supplies and Things like that. So you needed the Chinook, you needed the actual capability of the Chinook, which is funny because the A model, a Blackhawk today can lift more than an A model Chinook. So you could have done the 101st with Blackhawks had they existed 30 years earlier. But yeah, so the, there was a poster that Boeing put out when the Delta model came out, right? So there's a B, C, D, F and a G. And it said the silhouette, only the silhouette remains the same, right? So you get that the double headed dumpster on the outside, but the engines are beefed up, the transmissions, the drivetrain, the avionics, you know, so all of the computers and the electronics, you know, just improved with each, each version, you know. So like a D model, which is what I flew in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, was about 18,5 a copy, 18 million a copy. And when I flew the G model, which was the last version I flew, those were 62 million apiece. That's more than a fighter jet, you know, like on F16.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Al Mack]

And it's because of the advanced, the capabilities.

[Sean Ryan]

Gotcha. I can say, do you think that being a flight mechanic helped you with flight school?

[Al Mack]

Oh, yeah. Especially because I worked on Hueys. So when my, the reason I had such a high grade point average, I think is because when my peers had to study aircraft systems, I already knew them. I just had to touch over what, what kind of data they probably wanted for the answers for the test. And I could study things like aeromed hypoxia, spatial disorientation, that kind of stuff, aviation regulations. So I got to study all this stuff. The other guys had to split that time, so it helped a lot.

[Sean Ryan]

What did you say? Spatial what?

[Al Mack]

Spatial disorientation.

[Sean Ryan]

What is that?

[Al Mack]

So there are illusions. And now you're testing my aeromed. Right. Vestibular illusions, which I believe are up in your ear, right? So you can feel like a lot of times what happens is if an airplane gets in a spin, right, they call it a graveyard spiral. You get in a spin and when you go to pull out of the spin, you turn into it. You feel like you've spun in the other direction. Because inside your ears are these little hairs, right? That in your semicircular canals, that's where your balance comes from. And so sometimes when you have an ear infection, that's why you might lose your balance a little bit. And there's those and then there's visual illusions. Things like, you ever been on a stoplight in your car and you think you're rolling, but it's the guy beside you backing up or going forward. That's one of the illusions. Right. Reverse perspective illusion. And then over the water is where it's really dangerous if you don't have a horizon, you know, you get. I can't remember all the names, like, 20 different illusions you can get, but you have to learn them and how to get out of them. Like to recognize that you've got it or that somebody else has it, and then, you know, correct for it. So. Man.

[Sean Ryan]

So that would scare the shit out of me. So they put you in these situations where you actually feel the illusion.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, yeah. They have chair. Like a chair, you know, they. I don't know how to describe it. You sit in this chair, you strap in, and it's like a gyroscope. And they kind of. They. They first they get it spinning and you're sitting there, and then they engage it, and the chair goes around. Then you spin upside down and all this other stuff. And then they stop you, and you have a set of controls, and you're supposed to move the controls to make some indication, like a. Maybe a marble or something like that is in this flat. A flat panel is like little cables. I mean, this is very primitive, but it worked. And you'd have to center the panels so the ball, the marble, would be in the middle. Using aircraft controls. And when you first did it, it's just like when you're a kid and you're spinning around and you stop and you're like, whoa. Right? It's just like that. And so you have to learn. And there were many times in my career we might even end up touching on some of those where either me or somebody else got into one of those illusions and it almost killed us, you know, and it did, you know, it did kill some friends.

[Sean Ryan]

Oh, man.

[Al Mack]

And it was a conventional unit, a Chinook that was in Afghanistan. Had to be in 2002, 2003. And they were flying daylight, ran into a sandstorm, couldn't see out the window. So they climbed up to what they considered a safe altitude, and they got spatial disorientation, and they literally rolled that aircraft upside down, pulled the blades off, essentially, and fell to their deaths, you know, headfirst.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy shit.

[Al Mack]

So it's very dangerous, and it's one of those things that everybody pays very close attention to.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, I can imagine. Do they simulate it in the bird?

[Al Mack]

They try to. It's hard. They do. Or in the simulator, you know, they'll put you in situations where you Know, the aircraft gets into an unusual attitude, right? So it's called unusual attitude recovery. So they'll put the aircraft in some weird situation like it might be in the aircraft. What they'll do is they'll say, close your eyes. Put your arms up like this. Put your head down. Right? And then the pilot will say what he's not doing. He'll say, I'm turning to the right, and then he'll turn left, and then he'll say, I'm rolling out. He'll roll out a little bit, but not enough. And by the time you're done, open your eyes. You open your eyes, take the controls, and what you see out the window is not what you had in your mind, Right. Sometimes it makes people puke. You know, it's like. So, yeah, you have to learn to do that, because the basics will kill you.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Al Mack]

You know, we talk about the graphics.

[Sean Ryan]

Let's talk about. I mean, since we're on the subject, let's talk about one of the instances where you felt the illusion in real world.

[Al Mack]

So I'm in Afghanistan, been there a couple years. This is probably 05. And we're at a place called Salerno, right? Say, eastern Afghanistan. And we're coming back from a mission, and it's late. We're exhausted. We'd been putting the rangers up in the KG pass, and the weather rolled in, and it was raining really hard. As we're crossing back over the mountains to get back to Bagram, you know, the rain is just coming down. You can't see out the window. Now we've got a terrain following radar, but the radar has limitations when it comes to rain. Precipitation, right? If it's too dense, it sees it as an obstacle and tries to climb you over it. Well, a rainstorm might be 60,000ft, and you're not doing that. And a Chinook will go to maybe 20, 25 if we're stripped down. But you're not getting, you know, 60. So we're flying through the mountain. We got terrain on both sides. Rain comes down like it's not raining when we enter the mountains. And then just down it comes, right? And my buddy's flying rich, and he says, al, I'm getting vertigo. And I'm like, well, you know, suck it up, dude. We still got another 10 minutes here in the mountains. You got to hang on. And he's like, we can barely see the terrain through the bottom plexiglass. And I'm like, you got to just. And we're following. We've got what we call the hsd. It's a horizontal situation display. So it's like a compass rose with a coarse line like you might see in Waze, really, But you get the compass on there. And he's like, I can't. I can't do it, you know? And the aircraft starts to veer toward the. Toward the rock wall, right? So I take the controls, right? And I'm like, I have the controls. He's like, all right, thanks. And we're flying, and the rain is just terrible. And now I'm getting the same sensation, right? What's happening is the aircraft. We didn't know this. The aircraft is inducing. There was something. There was a component that was bad. And some of the. This is where these automated systems sometimes can bite you. And the aircraft's trying to put us. It says, we're level, but it doesn't feel like we're level, and we weren't, you know, And I could see that. So I had differing instrumentation, right? So we have an old standby, right? Something from the 1950s in the center of console, right? And it's. It's saying, I'm in a turn. And the other thing says I'm level. So now I got to figure out which one to follow.

[Sean Ryan]

And then how do you figure that out?

[Al Mack]

You got to look at all the other secondary instruments. So there's wet compass, you know, is it moving? You know, because if it's. If you're in a turn, it's moving, you know? And you can also look at the. At the compass rose itself if it's moving. And the attitude indicator is different. So you got to look at what we call your secondary instruments, right? So the primaries, the attitude indicator, like that coin I gave you, that's a primary instrument. And all the secondaries just kind of confirm or deny what you're seeing, right? And you can fly with just secondary instruments. It's. It's not fun, but you can do it. So here we are. Maybe I'm on the controls maybe a minute, and I'm getting ready to throw up. It's like I'm losing my balance. There's none. Nothing's making. Right. We are climbing now because we can't see out the window. So we get all power in. We're climbing at about 3,000 foot a minute, which is pretty fast for a helicopter. That's heavy. And we did have the benefit of height above terrain. So, remember, I said that you get the compass rows, you get the course line, and then if there's terrain around you, that's at your altitude or above. The screen is red, right? You can see where it is, right? And it was all red in the screen. And we're climbing at 3,000 foot a minute because we're going up the mountain. And I'm like, dude, I can't do it. You got to take the controls. And Rich takes controls. I got it, I got the controls. And now I'm just trying to, you know, it's like trying to get my, my head straight and. Because I know he's not going to last and same thing about it, 45 seconds later he's like, al, I can't do it. Like, come on, you got to do it. I can't do it. And he's like back and forth. So I took the controls now, now that red terrain presence I told you about is starting to part from the course line, right? So now there's a little bit of black, you know, so that means what's right along the course line is below me, could be 100ft, which isn't much, but the terrain's still out my left and right door. If we don't stay right on the course, we are going to crash. And you know, we say that cumulo granite, you know, has 100% kill ratio, so you gotta do it. And then, so we passed the controls back and forth for, I don't know, five minutes. And we popped out of the clouds. Like the rain stopped. It was solid clouds over the valley in gardes. And we pop out of the clouds and now we can see, right? So we can see the mountains off in the distance. And now your brain can re register what you're doing. You can ignore all of the instrumentation. And so we're like, oh my God, we almost died, right? And that kind of thing has happened a couple of times, but that's the most, the easiest one to explain. And then we get back and I'm telling the maintenance pilot actually been complaining about that helicopter for a couple of days, a couple of flights, saying that it made us feel funny when we flew it and that we didn't want to fly it in the clouds. So when it happened, we get back and the poor maintenance guy, you know, he's. We're on night schedule, he's on a day schedule. And I'm like, I'm looking for him. He should be up by now, right? We're getting back, sun's coming up and I'm looking for him. And me and Rich are going to kick his ass, right? We just survived this, right? And he was like, yeah, it's fine, it's fine. And so he did take it out to fly and he's like, oh, yeah, there's a problem with, you know, whatever it was, you know, something that was working backwards, essentially one of the little sensors, and they sent it home. Like, they said they got a C17 that week, brought a new aircraft in, sent that one home and that kind of stuff. It'll catch you. You know, there's.

[Sean Ryan]

Guys, are you worried about getting shot down while all this is going on, too?

[Al Mack]

I mean, it could. It's possible, yeah. At that stage of the game, I wasn't ever worried about getting shot down. I mean, we'll address why when we talk about Anaconda, but, yeah, I wasn't. I mean, I just. This was a good example of why I kind of figured I was going to die on every deployment. And that's because if the enemy didn't scare me, it was the terrain and weather that did, because we would. You know, the problem with Afghanistan in particular Iraq, is so much simpler, but Afghanistan, there's no weather reporting that's reliable, you know, and the area is so vast, right? I mean, you got these big mountains, you got the plains, the dunes, and the weather patterns and simple things like temperature can make all the difference whether you have enough power at the top of a mountain versus at the bottom, right? Because there's supposed to be a 2 degree drop off in Celsius for every thousand feet you go. Except in Afghanistan, it's pretty much the same at 20,000ft as it is at 10,000ft. So if you're expecting to have a certain amount of power at the top of the hill, the mountain, it might not be there. And there's. I don't want to go there. There's. Let's just say there's a. There's a very famous mission where somebody wished away about 15 degrees of Celsius. I'm not going to talk about it, but yeah, that's how important, you know. And, you know, the funny thing with that is that in training in the 90s, we made the mistake at C level of teaching the Rangers, the SEALs, the Delta guys. We had a saying, there's always room for one more Ranger, right? So if I tell you as a team leader, all right, you can have 25 guys on board and we'll give you two hours of flight, you know, for that. And you go, okay, and we're just about to take off and you go, hey, I got five more guys. Is that okay? Yeah, put them on and then, you know, guys come running from the other hey, we got three more guys. Can we take them? Yeah, well, Afghanistan, you couldn't do that if you gave a number, you know, that was it, you know. So if somebody said, can you take one more Ranger? No, I can't, you know, and if you did, you would not have enough power for whatever was you were going to do, and you would pay the price. Now, that wasn't always fatal. It wasn't always damage to hardware, but you always came home going, damn, I'm not doing that again. You know, and you learn that lesson again and again and again.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn. Well, Al, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll get to where he went after flight school.

[Al Mack]

Sure.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Al Mack]

We all know.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Al Mack]

My assignment as a Chinook pilot at that point is Savannah, Georgia, going to Hunter Army Airfield, Fort Stewart, Georgia. And so I finish up the Chinook transition, Flight school's done, it's behind me, and I take 30 days of leave up in New Hampshire, and I'm down to sign in at Hunter Army Airfield. So I get there, I sign in, and then what happens when a new aviator gets to a unit is you undergo what's called a commander's eval and progression. RL progression readiness level. So you start out as RL3 readiness level three. And that means you can only fly with an instructor. And then they say, okay, you're safe, you're good, you're RL2, right? So once you're in RL2 level, you can now fly with other pilots in command that aren't instructors. And you go, but you're not really qualified to do everything. And then you make RL1 readiness level one. And you could do everything because your, your progression is where it's supposed to be. So anyway, I get to the unit, I get my commanders of Al, I get RL3, RL2, and then Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. And very, very shortly, we are notified that we're going to deploy. Now, I'm in the 18th Airborne Corps, right? Our headquarters at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and our battalion headquarters is also there. So there's our sister company, A Company, and we're in B company, second of 159. We're the Hercules guys. It's a pretty cool nickname. And what we ended up doing was we flew all of our aircraft. We had 16 chinooks in our company. So you had 30 chinooks total in the battalion. And we flew from Savannah to Wilmington, North Carolina, to put. The aircraft are going to tear them down, bubble wrap them, shrink wrap them, and they're going to put them on the top of an old ship. Right. They didn't even have the old Roros. You know, the roll and roll off these are like, you crane it up to the top and it's going to ride at, you know, five miles an hour from, you know, Wilmington to Saudi Arabia. So we fly up there, and there's a whole funny story to that, but we, we take A bus back. And now it's going to take a month and a half, I think, for our aircraft to get there. So they've got to finish up my training, right? For me to fly in combat, I've got to be readiness level one, not or L2, because you're still technically in training. So the 1 60th of the 3rd Battalion was right next door. And our instructor pilots knew those instructor pilots. They were all friends, you know, and they're like, hey, can we borrow one of your helicopters to train up? You know, the woj, which is Warrant Officer Junior. Right. It's kind of a. Back in the day, I think that was a. Actually considered the rank. Now it's considered a slight to say the woj. Let the WOJ do it, you know. But anyway, they took me out in. At the time, the 3rd Battalion aircraft were kind of Enhanced Delta models. So they had like some special radios. I think they had what's called an obogs, onboard oxygen generating system or something like that for high altitude, and they had miniguns for a defensive army. And that was it. So that was called a warbird. Right. So there's no air refueling, no terrain falling radar, no special aircraft survivability. It's just basically the same thing. I've been flying with a couple more radios, so I finish my progression, which is kind of poetic, in a 1/60 aircraft, and then we end up flying across. We went on a Boeing 707, right. You know, chartered, you know, Trans World Air or something like that. And we had to get gas, like every two, three hours. So imagine going from Savannah, Georgia, up to Newfoundland and across to Europe and then back in through Egypt into, you know, Saudi Arabia, and stopping every two, three hours. And they wouldn't let us off the plane, you know, because they didn't have customs clearance. So we'd get there in whatever country it was, but you can't get off the plane. You know, the damn. The toilets were full of urine. You know, the stink was terrible. It was terrible. You know, and. But we got there and that began Operation Desert Shield.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, so you went straight from flight school to the unit knowing that you're going to fly, the possibility that.

[Al Mack]

You'Re going to pretty close within a couple of weeks.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, how did that feel for you? You're getting, right, what you wanted.

[Al Mack]

Yeah. Immediately.

[Sean Ryan]

At least I think that's what you want.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, but, you know, what we didn't talk about earlier is. So I grew up in the Cold War, right? And I served in the Cold War, I went to West Germany. I've been to East Germany, East Berlin, right through Checkpoint Charlie. And I was always scared we'd really go to war with the Soviet Union, right. Or Korea, you know, when I was in Korea the first time, and it's hard to describe, but I did not want that. I didn't think, you know, being at war would be a good thing, you know, for me. And so now, here we are. I'm very excited to go, but I'm, you know, this is a little different attitude than I had in the 160th. The 100th is like, I'm taking the fight. You, and you are going to die if you're a bad guy, you know. And at this time, it was sort of a transition period. It's like, I'm making a change now from being scared to be in war to, okay, we're in war. This is all right. It's very pragmatic, I guess. And, I mean, Desert Shield was like, I don't know, six months long. So I had some time to really adjust to the idea. So that when we did go across the border, you know, it's no big deal, you know, it was very exhilarating, actually. Very exciting.

[Sean Ryan]

So you did go across the border?

[Al Mack]

Yeah. Well, when Desert Storm happened, right. So desert. This is the funny thing, right? It's all in a name, because we had guys, remember, this is a conventional unit. Some of these guys had been in Vietnam, others hadn't. And there was a couple of guys that were really upset that we were probably going to take the Chinooks into Iraq. And they were of the mindset that Chinooks would fly from the port to the forward line of troops, and that would be it. You wouldn't go past the forward line of troops. And we were being told, no, no, you're going to go deep, right? Because they're going to do Operating Base Cobra, right? Because you've got to have fuel and ammunition and supplies for the Cobras and the Apaches and the artillery to do their thing. And so there was. There was two guys that were very, very upset that we were going to do that. And I remember thinking, dude, you know, what do you want? We're, you know, I want. Remember, I wanted to do assault. So to me, this is like. This is kind of. It is where I want to be and when. So. So Desert Shield, right? Remember I said the army would claim we own the night? Well, there were helicopters ripping their landing gear off on sand dunes because the sand dunes In Saudi Arabia, they kind of, they go up, they, they plateau and they go up again. And in the dark with the goggles, you could see that first top off and you don't see the setback in the second lip, right? So. And you're traveling 120 miles an hour. By the time you see it, it's too late. You just lost your landing gear, right? And the army lost a couple. And then they, they put some rules into effect. You couldn't fly any lower than 150ft, you know, and so we did that for that seven months. And I was moving supplies, tank transmissions, tank treads, I mean, whatever you can fit in the back of a Chinook or sling, we were doing, and we were doing it at night. And the old guys. So there were two W1s in the company, me and a guy named Tim. And he had got there before me and he was really sharp. So, you know, I didn't walk into a show where they're like, oh, you know, these stupid wojes, you know, we're going to these junior guys, they're no good. Instead, they welcomed me because the other guy, who was only a couple classes ahead of me, was such a success. So he and I were the guys that prepared all the maps for everybody, you know, did some of the basic planning, the nug work, you know, the math and the ciphering. And every night flight, he and I were on them, not together. We were with other pilots and they put us with an instructor. We fly at night. And the other old guys, the senior guys, did not want to fly at night because, you know, we still didn't have all the aircraft with night vision lighting. So you still had to turn off the lights, put the little cam lights around, that kind of stuff. So it still was very unpleasant to fly. Now at this point we've got what's called Anvis 6. And the goggles are just two binoculars that slip down in front of your face. They hinge up and down. And the crew chiefs were wearing the ones I talked about earlier, the fives, right? But I got experience at night, a couple hundred hours flying in the desert that the older guys didn't get because they didn't want it, right? So when Desert storm happened, the 18th Airborne Corps was pretty smart. They decided not to do it at night because Cobra, like the initial assault on Cobra or the infill, the taking of it. We had, I think, 100 Chinooks involved flights of five. And we were separated by only a couple of minutes. Like, so you'd you'd be in the. You'd be in the hot refueling pit. And it was the most impressive refueling, hot refueling, I've ever seen. 101st that it was, like a mile long. Just helicopters, you know, it was all Chinooks, and then it was Blackhawks. And you were plugged in getting gas while you're running. And then they'd call over the radio, and we were, you know, like. Let's say I was in Silver flight, right? Silver one through five, maybe. Like, Silver one, your grid coordinates are you didn't care what you were carrying. It was going to be £18,000, which is about the max you're going to carry for this. Silver 2, here's your grid, right? We all had different grids, and we'd. We'd pick up. We'd fly over and just hover over the loads that were already set up for us. And the guys were the most aggressive hookup men I've ever seen. I mean, you didn't. You just got over it. And they, like, hooked. It was a tandem load, so a forward and a half hook to keep it from spinning. Once everybody's hooked up, off we go at 120 knots up into Afghanistan, and you hit a release point, everybody went their separate way to their landing zones. And keep in mind, there's flights in front of you and flights behind you. So as you're coming in, guys are coming out, guys are right behind you. And it's just. It looks like a hornet's nest. And if we had done that at night, we'd have killed.

[Sean Ryan]

You said Afghanistan.

[Al Mack]

I meant Iraq. I meant Iraq. Yeah. So this is that famous. The Schwarzkopf, the left hook, you know, that was us. So moving all the equipment and the people out west of Kuwait.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Al Mack]

So some of the loads were Humvees, internal. With a towed 105 howitzer. Yeah. So the gun tube. The gun tube would be up in the cockpit, right? So you have the overhead panel, and you had the engine conditional levers that do the power on the engines. And the gun tube was right up inside. Wow. It was pretty cool. Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Did you guys. Did you guys take any fire or anything like that?

[Al Mack]

No, it was all. I think we caught them by surprise. We were out in the middle of nowhere, and. But because of that and all of the lessons learned up until that point, the army decided, all right, we didn't. And maybe we didn't own the night. We just lease it now, you know, we rented it. Now we're leasing, lease to own, you know, kind of thing. But what sucked about that mission is, remember I said that, you know, me and the other W1 were the guys they always sent out with the senior guys. The other older guys didn't even fly goggles, didn't even have them on board, because they thought it was safer to fly without MVGs than with. Right? So.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Al Mack]

So one night. So the surrender has happened. I mean, we're 100 hours in. The surrender has happened. And we take five Chinooks up into Iraq and we're going to bring back prisoners, right? Prisoner war. The Iraqis had surrendered in droves. And we go up there, it's daylight. We pick up these prisoners, we're moving back, but we don't have any gas. All the places we were supposed to get gas had already moved, right? So we kept hopping from place to place, and there was no gas. And we eventually ran out of gas. Like, we had to land in the middle of the desert, each of us with, you know, 40, 50 Iraqi prisoners on the back. And I had a.38 with five bullets in it, right? The hammer was on an empty chamber because that was what they made us do. We had two M60s, but those were pointed out. These guys are all inside. We didn't have any guards, no nothing. But these guys, luckily, were very compelling. It was just.

[Sean Ryan]

It was just pilots and prisoners.

[Al Mack]

Two pilots, a flight engineer and a crew chief. A guy up front, guy in the back. We all had.38s.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy.

[Al Mack]

With five bullets. Yeah. And so, funny thing. So we're coming back before we run out of gas. And you could smoke an army aircraft back then, right? And the crew chief in the back lights up a cigarette, and one of the Iraqis is like, you know, gives a signal for, hey, let me have a smoke, right? So he hands him the cigarette and he puffs it passes the next guy, it passes all the way up to the front of the aircraft, all the way down. And by the time it gets to him, it's a soggy lump of, you know, paper, really. And then they hand it to him, and he looks at it kind of disgusted, and they're like. Like, you know, have it, right? And he's like, sir, they want me to smoke this thing. It's all dripping with drool. And I'm like, well, better keep them happy, because, you know, they could take us easy, right? He's like, all right, fine. So he's like, I'm going to get hepatitis. He smokes a cigarette and they're all, yeah, they cheer and they stayed compliant the whole time until we ran out of gas. And an MP unit eventually drove up and took them away. Like they found us, took them away. And we ended up spending the night in Iraq until a convoy went by. And that convoy had fuel trucks in it, and we waved them down. And they put gas in the aircraft, and we didn't have any. Our command had no idea where we were, you know, because we had satcom. We didn't have radio communications with anybody. We were just in the middle of the desert and we're nowhere near where we should have been because we've been hopping around looking for gas.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy shit.

[Al Mack]

So we, we come back, we get gas, we come back into Saudi Arabia and we, we had to go. We still had some prisoners and we dropped them off. And now we're going to fly back to assembly area Palm, which is where we were based out of, down the Tap line road. And so of the flight of five, three of the crews had MVGs, so we sent the two without MVGs back. First five minute separation. So one takes off, climbs up to 3,000ft, well above any terrain, you know, obstacles. They fly back and they just do the old fashioned. They get there, they spiral down, they land. All good, right? Next one goes. And now it's my turn. We're the first MVG aircraft to go back. So we're flying at 250, 300ft. Got goggles. I'm navigating and I'm looking at the antennas down the road right there about every five, six miles or so. And I got them on my map, right? And I look and looking out there, and I'm like, I see two of the three antennas I should see come, right, let's offset a mile, right? So we kind of came right, kind of paralleled the course. I'm about a mile, right? Of course. Never saw the antenna. I'm like, I don't see the antenna. I don't know where it is, right? Maybe I'm just not navigating, right? And we get back to our assembly area, we land. Next aircraft comes in behind us with goggles. And then the last aircraft with the commander and the chief pilot on board, they have goggles, but they've elected not to wear them because it's easier to fly unaided. They think, right, this is that mindset back. Then they come back at 250, 300ft. They run into that unlit antenna that we had all avoided, except they ran right into it and killed all the air crew. The door gunner was an infantryman. He actually lived. He said, the last Words were, oh, hell, where'd that come from? You know, damn, man. So, you know, a very valuable lesson, you know, learned there, you know, in what an obstacle will do to you, you know, whether it's the ground or an antenna or wires, you know, or the enemy. But that was. So when we got back from that, so that was essentially the end of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. So we redeployed back to Savannah, and when the aircraft got there, the army was now going to own the night, right? So everything we did, everything, every exercise, every drill, every practice involved night vision goggles. So. And it. And it helped. I mean, it made a big deal. But because I was a high time goggle guy in the unit, even as a junior pilot, I had 200 hours of MVG time when the, you know, the senior guys had like 25, you know, they got their qualification time, and that's it because they never flew it. And so everything we did, I was on that, you know, mission. And that started my whole trend toward where I would end up, you know, in the 160th.

[Sean Ryan]

When did the 160th kind of pop up on your radar?

[Al Mack]

Well, because they were next door to us in Savannah. And I said, everybody knew each other. Our commander was actually married to a warrant officer over there, right. So when we were in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield, they would come visit. You know, they'd fly down for official purposes, but they'd have the time to do, you know, a conjugal visit or something like that, I guess. And so I kind of knew him already. I'd listened to the war stories, what they were doing. Oh, they were going up into Iraq while we were still doing the Saudi stuff. I said, what's it like in Iraq? It's dark. Okay, A little more than that, buddy. So I already kind of knew about that. But that other W1 that I talked about, Tim, he had assessed like we got back, he's like, you know what? I want to go to the 160th. So he put in his packet, he assessed, and for whatever reason, he was not selected. I considered him a better pilot than me. And I figured, crap, if they're not going to take him, there's no way they're taking me. Right? He's way better than me. And once again, that's very subjective. And later on in life, having given the selection evaluations, I understand there's a lot involved there. It's not just how good a pilot you are. But. So anyway, that's the start of it. And Then I get a sign.

[Sean Ryan]

Before we go any farther, can you give us a little history under the 160th?

[Al Mack]

Yeah. So the. In Iran, the Shah of Iran is in charge. He leaves. He's pushed out, really. And I can't remember if he was in France or the U.S. but we were supporting him. And so a group of student protesters protested outside the US Embassy in Tehran, and they ended up taking it. Right? Now, they. From my understanding, they've done something like that before, but then they gave it back. In this case, they didn't give it back. So we had American hostages, Marines, embassy personnel kept for. It was like 354 days or something like that. But so there they are. And then President Carter, at the time, you know, they. The military options were very few, right. JSOC didn't exist. All the special operations community had sort of disbanded after Vietnam, and Charlie Beckwith had just essentially stood up Delta Force. Right. But they needed. So they were going to send Delta Force in to rescue the American hostages. The problem was they got to get there. How are they going to get there? Helicopters. All right, well, what do we want to use to get there? Chinooks. The problem is you're getting by a Navy ship, right? Chinooks do not fold up handily like a Navy aircraft will. Right. So they were afraid. OPSEC was a big concern. This is Operation Eagle Claw, right. So they don't want to put Chinooks on top of a ship because that'll raise questions, you know, why are there Chinooks on top of an aircraft carrier? You know, that's not normal. So instead they decided to use CH53s and they wanted to use the minesweepers, which were flown by Navy pilots. And they figured flying off a ship was the hardest part of the mission, right? Which in hindsight, that's the easiest part. But so they do these rehearsals with Delta, and back then, they didn't have this, like, one location where they did rehearsals, and we sit face to face and we say, you know, Sean, I don't like how you did this. Well, Al, I don't like how you did this. All right, let's adjust. It was all done. You're probably old enough to remember the teletype format. Like, you get, like, if you ever get, like a ship's position, the overhead message all comes, like, in a teletype, you know, that's how they did their AARs. The after action reviews, right. Was through Teletype. So there wasn't really plain English. It was kind of like, you Know, pilots sucked, you know, but you can't really explain why, right?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Al Mack]

So these guys are flying into the dust with night vision goggles, and it's super dark and there's no reference, right? And there's no, like, looking at blades of grass. So they came up with this. It's called a pink light, an infrared filter on top of a searchlight. So you extend your light out, it's a white light with a piece of. Basically a piece of brown waxed paper over it, held on with a little frame. And the problem was you could only see that light. So it's like you see with an AC130 when they get the burn on, right? You can only see it with your night vision goggles. The problem is if you leave it on too long, it will burn through and it will now be a white light. So you, you learn to use it very sparingly, which is funny because years later we were still like, turn the light on, turn it back off, even though it was a glass thing. But the Delta guys were unhappy with the pilots. They crashed every single time. I mean, controlled crash. And so they wanted new pilots. So now they're like, all right, who else can fly a Navy aircraft? And the primary thing is landing in the dust? The Marines. Because the Marines do the ship to beach, right? The Navy guys do ship to ship. Essentially, they're no better because they have no experience and they have the same limitations. So they want to change the pilots again. But it's go time, right? So they got to go what they got, right? So they, they execute. They fly the Delta guys in on 130s. They land at Desert One, right? Designated desert landing area. And those 130s are going to transfer the Delta operators to the helicopters when they get there, right? Because the helicopters couldn't carry them that far and do the gas. So they came on the 130, so they'll do that. They'll get gas, they'll take the operators, they'll go to Desert 2, spend the day, and then do the mission, right? That's the plan. Eight helicopters take off, encounter a sandstorm that's like 4,000ft high. You can't see in it, so they separate, right? So they now they're like, all right, you know, they're five minutes apart, so they don't run into each other. I think a couple of them turned around from maintenance problems related to the dust and the min Force for the mission, I think was six. And they showed up with six, except one was broken. They were down to Five or may have been five and four, I can't remember. It's irrelevant. So they abort. We don't have enough helicopters to get them there. We have to abort. So the helicopters are going to go back to the ship. The Delta operator is going to get back on the 130s. They're going to go back, they're going to reset, they'll try again another night. Problem is because they can't see the helicopter pilots. You have. You've been to an airport on a jet airliner. You come into the gate and you get the guys with the colored wands, you know, the lighted wands, and like, you know, doing this kind of thing for the pilots to see, to direct them into the parking. But you do that with helicopters, right? You get the wines and you kind of like come up to a hover, stationary, you know, come left, come right, go. That kind of thing. You see that on ships all the time. So the guy that's doing that. So the helicopters crank up, they pick up to a hover. The guy with the wands is bringing them up and tells him to go. And then he walks toward the aircraft. And as I'm told, he put the wands in his pocket and they were still on. The only thing the pilots can see is the wands, the lighted wands. And they follow them. And the guy walked right into the C130 in the helicopter, follow them right into it. Impacted the C130 full of 5,000 gallons of gas, and a bunch of Delta operators that were kind of just hanging out. Aircraft explodes, helicopter explodes. It's mayhem. They all load up on the remaining 130s, and they head back. Utter failure, national embarrassment. And so JSOC is born, right? Because the problem that they found was that because there was no mutual, not mutual habitual relationship between the air crews, the 130s, you know, the ships and the operators. You had all these problems. And so they created a Unit, Task Force 160, out of Task Force 158, and some other things. So it was a National Guard unit with oh, six S helicopters from the 101st, Chinooks and Hueys initially, then Blackhawks, and they planned to do Operation Honey Badger, which was the second rescue attempt, right? So they're ready to do it. President Reagan gets in office, the Iranians release the hostages. No more mission for the JSOC operators. General Meyer, I believe it was, was the chief of staff or maybe the chairman, and he said, you know what? You keep that unit together. So JSOC formed the 1 60th became the 1 60th. So AG, Special Operations Aviation Group, and they stuck together. And then you had this habitual relationship that lasts today. And you know, we can do things now that they never dreamed, you know, that could be done. But that's really where the 160th came from. And then, you know, as it grew out of the group, it became a regiment. And like when I got there, there were only 300 guys in the regiment. There's like 4,000 now.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Al Mack]

Because you have three battalions and then some special mission units. Just, it's big. So when someone goes, hey, oh, you were on the 160th, you know, you know, Bilbo Baggins. I'm like, what does he fly? I don't know.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay, so what kind of birds do they fly in the 160th?

[Al Mack]

So all three battalions. I take that back. All three locations. Fort Lewis, Washington, or JBLM now, Joint Base Lewis McChord. They have Chinooks and Blackhawks. Savannah, Georgia has Chinooks and Blackhawks. And then Campbell is the anomaly. It's got Chinooks and Blackhawks. But it also has little birds which have two variants. Right. It's an OH6 has an armed version and a assault version. So the MHS modified and ah, attack. And then the Blackhawks have a assault version and a what's called a dap, Direct Action Penetrator. So it's an armed Blackhawks. It's got a 30 millimeter chain gun. You know, it can carry Hellfires, rockets, Miniguns, sometimes all at the same time. Other times they have to make selections, you know, based on weight, you know, what they're going to carry. I have beautiful stories about daps. We'll probably touch on them a little bit. But that's the, that's the regiment.

[Sean Ryan]

Very cool. Wow. Thank you for that history. So, all right, so back to. What do you call it?

[Al Mack]

Selection assessment.

[Sean Ryan]

Assessment, yeah. So. So your buddy Tim, he doesn't make it.

[Al Mack]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

And now you're thinking, well, if he can't make it, I'm not, I'm not.

[Al Mack]

Going to make it. So I get assigned to Korea for my second tour. And while there because I had a lot of night vision goggle time because the old guys didn't want to. It's like incremental, right. It just builds on each other. And so I get there and I end up as a night vision goggle trainer, a no fly line trainer. So you had to fly the border between north and South Korea to Learn all the corridors and all the. The landmarks that if you were operating in what they call the tax zone, Papa 518, that if you were approaching the border, you could recognize geographic features and turn around. So, like, after I left that next year, an OH58 straight across was shot down. They killed one of the pilots. They held the other guy, Bobby hall, for, I don't know, a couple weeks or months. I can't really remember. And then they let him go after they, you know, thoroughly embarrassed him and us, right? So that's the importance of the job, is that. And because I did that and I showed, like some of the senior guys, like there was a CW5 that came over. He'd been a Vietnam pilot. Everybody knew him in the community and the Chinook community. And he flew with me up there. And I was just flying along the. What's called a corridor up to, you know, where Panmunjom is. You know that you get the. Or you've seen it in the news. It's where the peace table is between north and South Korea, right? So you've got this piece of property. There's a building on it, half in South Korea, half in North Korea, and there's a table in there, and that's where they sit and they discuss things. And we would fly people up there, usually dignitaries, but there's very specific rules. And I would, you know, fly him up there. And I was like, all right, you know, stay at or below 100ft, you know, consistent with safety, you know, left and right, of course, 200 meters, blah, blah, blah. And I talked to it, and he's like, who taught you how to. How to talk like that, right? It's like a. They call it MOI method of instruction. And I said, I don't know. I read the regulation and came up with it. He's like, you need to be an instructor. So he actually called some friends at DA Department of the army hrc, if you will, and got me a slot to go to the instructor pilot course. But I had to go and stay at Fort Rucker and teach at the schoolhouse if I did that, which turned out it's whole other story we're definitely going to get to.

[Sean Ryan]

So how'd you get into 160th?

[Al Mack]

All right, so now we're back at Fort Rucker. So I'm a young chief warrant officer, too. So army aviators, their wings. You start out with a set of wings, and then you get a star when you're a senior aviator. It's like, I don't know, four or five years and so many hours, and they give you a star. So I didn't have a star yet. So I'm a very junior aviator. And then when you're a master aviator, you got a wreath around that star so you can look at an army warrant officer and see where is he in his experience level, just based on his wings. And so I get there and my first two set of students were great, a lot of fun because they were also.

[Sean Ryan]

So wait, hold on. So you're a junior pilot but they want to put you as an instructor?

[Al Mack]

Yeah, because of my skill level. So I'm good enough to be an instructor, just not a senior guy. Now remember now all these old guys are retiring, right? That's why they brought us young guys in, is because they had to backfill essentially to meet their requirements. So now what's starting to be in all the key positions is young CW2s and W3s, right? So junior to mid grade warrant officers. And this is where it ties in because. So my first two set of students were great because they were W1s right out of flight school and they listened to me and I had a good time. Then the Alabama National Guard, which was flying CH54 Sky Cranes, which is this grasshopper looking thing that they flew in Vietnam and they had that in Birmingham, they retired it and gave them Chinook. So now they all have to come down and take a Chinook transition. Well, these guys all have way more. They're all Vietnam vets. They're all way more experienced in flying than me and they don't want to fly Chinooks. They don't have a choice. But they act like I personally brought them down, right? They did not like listening to a snot nosed W2 telling them what to do. And it was miserable teaching them. So they didn't want to listen. They did what they had to do to get through. Every flight was misery. Every sitting at the table, you know, we do what we call table talk, talking about emergency procedures and all this aerodynamics, because they didn't want to listen to me. And I hated it. And there was a couple of classes of that and then they went and then they gave me foreign students. Now foreign students are different in that the ones that come to fly Chinooks, you know, from, you know, the Dutch, the Singapore guys, the Aussies, the Brits, these are not dirtbags. These are not guys that are there because they don't want to fly the aircraft. They're there. They're all aerospace engineers and Their own military. They're, you know, they were okay to fly with. They were very nice, very polite. They pretended to pay attention to me. They, you know, they. They listened, they made eye contact kind of thing. But I knew I wasn't teaching them anything, right? I mean, they knew far more than me just. Just by reading the manual. They. They knew more than I could teach. And that's how. How good these foreign students were. So it was un. And I needed something. And I was probably still a little too junior to get away from that assault stuff I wanted to do. And a buddy of mine who I went through the instructor pilot course came through for another school. And he's like, ali, you're miserable. You know, we're out for a drink or dinner or whatever, and he throws an application packet on the table. He's like, fill that out. You need to come to the 160th. And I still had that mindset that I wasn't good enough. And you didn't fill it out on a laptop or on a computer because they didn't really exist, you know, in quantity back then. It was a stubby pencil, number two pencil, filling out the application. It was like, you know, half inch thick. And I'd fill it out, you know, a couple pages at a time, you know, a couple days ago in between, and eventually it was done. He's like, oh. So I sent it in, to my surprise, like, two weeks later, like, Mr. Mac, we'd like you to come assess. Like me. Really? Okay. Right. So I go up, I assess. I didn't think I did that well. As a matter of fact, I got lost on my navigation route, which everybody does for the most part. You're not passing the flight, just so you know they will do something. So you don't fly. You don't. You just. You're not going to hit your target on time.

[Sean Ryan]

It's made sure that you're not going to achieve success rates.

[Al Mack]

And the reason for that is they want to see how you behave under duress in the cockpit, you know, when all of a sudden you're not where you're supposed to be and you don't know where you are. And, you know, you've still got to get to your, you know, unlit target, plus or minus 30 seconds, and you have to be within, you know, I think it's plus or minus two minutes at every checkpoint and within 100 meters of the checkpoint, right? So, I mean, you have to be. So you're going to be outside the parameters in some sort or Fashion. And so when you get under that pressure, how do you do? Do you fold or do you do what you gotta do and keep trying, you know, and they can tell because they're gonna teach you how to navigate their way anyway. So they don't care if you get lost, you know, but it's. How do you behave? And there are guys, I've seen guys melt down and start crying in the cockpit when they got lost. They just knew. They. It's like that guy with the grade point average that gave up, you know, before he got. You don't know. I mean, who knows? I might help you out later on and say, hey, because sometimes we'll be like, hey, is that bridge over there? Is that on your map? Oh, and you kind of re. Cage them, you know, but it's all based on how they're behaving. If they're giving up, I'm not going to help them. You know, it's like, all right, yeah, so. But that's. That's how you start the process is the. Well, I take that back. The first thing you do is a PT test. Standard Army PT test with pull ups, which the army didn't do, and a swim test, which the army didn't do. The funny thing is, as I got there. Now keep in mind the 160th was formed in 1980, right after that Eagle Claw, right? I'm there. This is 1995. So the unit really is still pretty new. A lot of people don't know much about it. They're still very, you know, cloaked in darkness and secrecy. So I get there and I'm like, should I wear an army pt, you know, shorts and shirt or should I be in civilian, you know, pts? I mean, it sounds absurd, but it went through my mind, right? So I showed up wearing civilians, right? And I'm like, if they don't want me, you know, tough, you know, they don't want me because of this, you know, screw them, right? I drive up in the parking lot and I made sure I had my army PTS in case. In case they're like, Mr. Mack, I thought you were going to be in your. But they didn't say anything, right? And then you do your PT test. They don't tell you how you're doing, right? That's all at the end. So they don't count your pushups, so you don't know how many you're doing or your sit ups or any of that stuff, your pull ups. And then you go over to the pool, you put a Flight suit on, flight gear helmet, you jump in, you do. I want to say it's 15 minutes of treading water with just your feet. 15 minutes with just your hands. 15 minutes regular. And then like a minute dead man's float, right? And then you do a deep water entry. Can't touch the pool. And you gotta swim underwater a designated amount of distance. And you don't know what that is, right? So I do it. I'm out of breath and I'm comfortable in the pool, but I'm not a strong swimmer, you know, with gear on. I mean, I've never done this. And so I jump in and I'm trying, very easy to swim. And I run out of air and I come up, up, and I get out and I'm like, I don't know if that was far enough, you know? And the recruiter comes up with a clipboard and he taps it and he's like, Mr. Mack, did you get to go twice? I was like, did I get to go twice? No. He's like, get back in line. So I'm like, obviously I didn't pass, right? So now I get in, and instead of trying to take it easy, I'm pounding it, right? I get my head down, I'm pounding. I can feel the. The styrofoam on my helmet's dragging me to the surface, and I'm not. As long as you don't take your face out of the water, you can keep going like that. And I'm like, you know what? They're not going to let me die. Shallow water, blackout, whatever, right? I get down there, I feel a tap on my helmet. I'd made it to the end, you know, and I get out, and that was that, you know. And then you go from there to the psychology. You take a test. It's like a 600 test, not a 300 question test. All psychology. Would you rather pick your nose or pick your buddy's blister? You know, would you rather work on a Friday? Or, you know, weird stuff that doesn't make sense. And then you take a general aviation knowledge test, which nobody can pass because they're asking the parameters of specific air. Air defense systems. You know, the SA7 radar system, you know, has a minimum engagement range of what out to what distance and stuff like that. And that's the kind of stuff, if you're going into a theater that has it, you bone up on it. But there's too many systems around the world to know everything, like, to that extent, right?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Al Mack]

So you have Rules of thumb, if you didn't know, like, if the. What we call the raw gear, if it shows up, you know, SA8, but you didn't expect them to have SA8s, it still might be a Roland or something. These are defense systems, right? So they all have different distances and parameters. But anyway, you take this test and they're going to use this against you later on. Oh, you only scored a, you know, a 30 on the general aviation knowledge test. And you consider yourself a pilot, you know, but you do that and you get your. Your mission, which is your navigation route. You brief it, you fly it, you come back, and then the next day you do your board, right? So you're in your dress uniform, you sit in front of a panel of officers.

[Sean Ryan]

This is the navigation route that everybody fails.

[Al Mack]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Al Mack]

Yeah. So now, I mean, even if you make your target on time, you will have been out of parameter somewhere.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay?

[Al Mack]

So, you know, they're like, oh, you failed. And some people, when they get told they failed even though they made it to the target on time, they get mad. Right? And so the goal of the panel is to. Well, let's put it this way. First of all, there's guys that get to get that far. And we know we don't want you because you're just a jerk, right? And we know you won't fit in. You know, you were good enough to get this far, but you're. You don't fit the profile and you're a jerk. We're gonna put you through hell on that board and then not take you. Right? Those are the guys that go out and badmouth us in the regular army. Oh, those guys are jerks. You know, Then you get the guys who. We know we don't want you, but you're a sincere person. You come in, you're in there 20, 30 minutes max, and we let you down easy and we put you out, maybe even give you some guidance to come back, right? But we take it easy on you. Those guys typically treat us nice in the gossip world. Then you get the guys, the majority of them, that it's yes, no, maybe we don't know. Let's see how this guy handles pressure, right? So now you gotta handle critique, right? I mean, you notice, like in the. In the teams, right? I mean, you guys, we do not, you know, take it easy on each other. You gotta have some thick skin, right? You got a can of thick skin, you spray it on, you know, I.

[Sean Ryan]

Think the worst is pure critiques.

[Al Mack]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Do you guys have those?

[Al Mack]

We did Them in flight school. But we didn't have to do. Yeah, we didn't have to do them in the. In the regular unit. But so, you know, the instructor will tell you what you did wrong, maybe even tell you what you did right. But, you know, it's criticism, hey, you did this wrong. You did this wrong. And in the end, you did not meet the standard. You failed the flight. Okay, Then the recruiter says, all right, pt, you know, physical training, you know, you did this many push ups, this many setups, this may run. And like, in my case, like, you did way more. You scored way higher than the one you submitted. Why is that? I mean, I don't know. Maybe I tried harder. Wrong words right now, like, oh, so you don't try hard at your unit. You know, I don't know what to tell you. I didn't know. Right. So I just tried as hard as I could. You should be trying as hard as you can all the time. Yeah. Point taken. Right. And I just. Instead of getting upset. Point taken. Got it. I'll do that. Thank you for that professional critique. And then they start asking you why you scored so low in the general aviation tests. Why do you think you should be a night stalker? Questions like that. Family situation. And in my case, as I talk about my book, my wife had had a suicide attempt when I was in Korea. And I thought that was all resolved, but I thought that would stop me from getting in. So. And I told the psychologist about it. You know, they knew there was no. I didn't want any secrets here. And I thought, you know, that's going to torpedo me. They're going to. They're going to treat me nice and they're going to let me go. They thought they were being mean to me, you know, the asking questions that should make me upset. And all I could think of, every time they asked me a question that they thought would make me upset is they didn't ask about my wife. They didn't ask about my family situation. And for me, the board, the hardest part was the anticipation that they would ask that question, then kick me out. And they never did. And they accepted me.

[Sean Ryan]

Do they accept you right there?

[Al Mack]

They kick you out of the room. They deliberate five, 10 minutes, which I've been on the other end of that in the first two minutes they've decided, and then the rest 15, they're making you sweat, and you come back in and they're like, welcome to the 1 60th, Mr. Mack. And then we'll see you in about a year. Because I gotta go back to my unit. And that's the agreement we had with the army is they wouldn't poach skills without giving you a heads up. And then the psychiatrist took me out and he's like, all right, look, I know you were probably worried about the family situation. We see it all the time. We can handle it. Sounds like you got it under control. We'll work with you on this if you have shit.

[Sean Ryan]

So they knew the whole time.

[Al Mack]

Yeah. And they. They just never brought it up.

[Sean Ryan]

So they probably would have used that.

[Al Mack]

If they didn't want me to drop you. Yeah, they didn't drop me like that, you know.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting.

[Al Mack]

If it was going to be a problem. So I get back to my unit.

[Sean Ryan]

Hold on. Hold on.

[Al Mack]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

How many people, how many aviators are trying out for this?

[Al Mack]

I mean, it varies. In my assessment week, there were probably, you know, 20 guys.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, how many are there today?

[Al Mack]

Depends. It just depends.

[Sean Ryan]

Because you said when you went in there was about 300 aviators.

[Al Mack]

Oh, right, right. There's about 335,000. 3,500. Yeah, about 4,000, depending.

[Sean Ryan]

So what's the. Let me ask this. What's the. What's the attrition rate?

[Al Mack]

It's not. It's usually done in the pre selection. So at that time, it was roughly 25% of the people that applied just were rejected outright. You never got to Fort Campbell. Then when you got there, it was probably about 10, 15% didn't make it. So most of the guys that get there make it. But you're not just there for Chinooks, you're there for the little birds and the Blackhawks. So you get this whole potpourri of aviators there. So, you know, they weed out really the guys.

[Sean Ryan]

And is everybody flying their specified aircraft or are you all.

[Al Mack]

No.

[Sean Ryan]

Are you all flying something that.

[Al Mack]

So when you get there. And this has changed, by the way. So when I got there, because I was a Chinook pilot, I did all my training flights in a Chinook. I did my navigation flight in a Chinook, and a couple of years later, actually I was in sear school when one of our aircraft was out doing an assessment just like what I just told you, and they encountered weather and we still don't know what happened. It rolled inverted and came out of the sky. And they all were killed instantly. So that pilot was not a Chinook pilot. But everybody considered. I mean, I could take any pilot, put him in a Chinook, and as long as there's no emergencies, they're Going to be able to fly it. I can get in the Blackhawk and fly it, you know, or anything else, but if something bad happens, I don't know what to do. So anyway, they made a new rule that if you were a Chinook guy, you could do the assessment in the Chinook. You could do what I did. If you were not a Chinook guy, you would do a simulator period with the instructor and sort of like what I would do is see if guys could learn the aircraft. So it's a glass cockpit, there's these little TV screens, buttons all over the place, and that's how you see what's going on and then you fly it. And I would say, okay, do this, do this. Here's a hover page. Do this. And I would see if they could mimic what I asked them to do. If they did, I kind of view it as, this guy is trainable, I can train him. If you get a guy that can't remember what button to do, he's not trainable, probably. Right. And so for us to take him, he's going to need some other things. But anyway, they took all the other guys that came from other airframes. Let's say you had a Cobra guy because they were still flying at the time. A couple of my best friends in the 160 that are Chinook pilots were Cobra pilots before they got there. And they fly everything in the little bird, right? And that's where you do all your navigation training, by the way, in Green Platoon, which is where they teach you how to navigate, brief and plan. Like a night stalker. You go out and you fly in a little, you know, little egg shaped thing, you know, being a Chinook guy with a nice big cockpit and you get in that little egg and it's like, you know, your shoulders are up against the guy. You know, the doors are off, so you have to put your map under your leg. Leg. And it's. It's unpleasant to fly that thing.

[Sean Ryan]

You didn't like flying the little birds? No, no.

[Al Mack]

It was a pain in the ass. Yeah. But what is the most.

[Sean Ryan]

What is the. What do you think the most? What. What do most guys want to fly at 1/60th?

[Al Mack]

It depends what they did first. Right. So if they're already a Chinook guy, they want to fly Chinooks. If they're a Ranger, they want to fly Chinooks. If they did something else or they're already a Blackhawk guy, you know.

[Sean Ryan]

What do you mean, if they're a.

[Al Mack]

Ranger, I can tell you that A high.

[Sean Ryan]

Like an 82nd.

[Al Mack]

Like a US Army Rangers.

[Sean Ryan]

I'm sorry, a 75th guy.

[Al Mack]

Yep.

[Sean Ryan]

So 75th guys, just wait a minute.

[Al Mack]

Here's what they do. So you get all these Rangers, right? We do a lot of work with them, and they usually end up in the Chinooks because of the quantity of people. They reach the rank of E5, E6, their knees are aching. They want to be a pilot. They put in for it. They get accepted. And then they might go to a regular unit first, do two, three years, then come to us. Or if you have a background, like, you know, we had some seals, we had some Delta guys, a lot of Delta guys. You know, a good friend of mine, Mike Rutledge, I don't know if you know him, he was at E7, teaching at Buds when the towers came down. Transfer over the army put him for the 160th. And because of his background, we took him as a, as a W1. So as a very, very junior Chuck pilot.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Al Mack]

I will say that.

[Sean Ryan]

Hold on. So sorry. Yeah, so you guys. So the 1/60th will take basically ground operators and turn them into aviators.

[Al Mack]

Yep. Very few.

[Sean Ryan]

Without any aviation.

[Al Mack]

Very, very few. Very select. So typically a guy would say he's a Ranger, Army Ranger, he's E5. He goes to his first unit, like I did in Savannah, Georgia. Right. And they'll try to get somewhere like Fort Campbell. So they can be in the 101st. They're just across the ramp from us. And then when their time comes up, like at two years, three years, when they think they've got enough experience, they'll submit a packet. If they get accepted, they come over. And I can tell you there's a high number of former Army Rangers that fly chinooks on the 160th and a lot of that. Now you can't take a lot of them at one time. You can take one of these junior guys. We said we could take two a year, you know, and be able to Task force babies we call them, and we can bring.

[Sean Ryan]

How do they get through assessment?

[Al Mack]

They just do, you know, they're good enough, you know, they're going to fail the navigation flight anyway, do good in the PT test, the, you know, psych assessment they did. Well, you can make, if you can make E7 in the seals, you know, or in Delta. Yeah, you've got some. We have your evaluation reports and all that. You have a history that we can look at and go through.

[Sean Ryan]

So these guys have had some flight. They've obviously gone to flight school.

[Al Mack]

Some guys have. Well, yeah, they've gone to flight school, but you can take two a year of guys that were, you know, like I said, you know, Mike was an E7 in the SEALs, you know, and a couple of Rangers. You take them in and then you teach them from the ground up how to be a night stalker. We call them task force babies. And it turns out good because you get plenty of other guys. You know, I was pure pilot, you know, so I don't have, you know, the ground guy experience, which when I got shot down was a, was a thing I worried about because it's like, I can shoot, I'm good with my rifle, but I don't know much about, you know, how somebody might flank me or ground stuff. But yet the guys that were former Rangers or SF guys had a lot of Green Berets, you know, they knew that kind of stuff. So you always kind of like, if you could have a co pilot that was once a former action guy, you know. Yeah, be nice.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. So hold on, let me. So these. So, so like Mike Rutledge, for example, I've met him. So he, he went from the SEAL teams to what, a Navy flight school?

[Al Mack]

Nope, went to army flight school. So he did an inter service transfer.

[Sean Ryan]

In a regular unit.

[Al Mack]

He went straight to flight school, straight to army flight school.

[Sean Ryan]

So SEAL teams to. Straight to army flight school.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, straight to assessment Yep.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy shit.

[Al Mack]

Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. And, you know, it's not common, but it does happen. You know, like I said, we kind of determine two guys a year we could handle.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, does the unit like that?

[Al Mack]

Yeah. Yep. Because it gives you some diversity in, well, understanding the mission. Right. And the idea here is that they understand the ground force mindset. They, you know, if they're. They know what the Rangers want, they know what the SEALs want, they know what the Delta guys want, and not just by what they want. I know that. You know, just by working with them, but they understand the entire mindset and the personalities. You know, oftentimes, you know, with Mike, for example, I was in Afghanistan one time with him, and I was already there, or I just got there, and he rolled in about a week later, and I took him with me over to Red Squadron because he knew we'd actually flown a mission one year where probably 20 of the 30 guys on board were at his wedding when he was a seal. And they took turns coming to the cockpit. It was just a reposition them from FOB to fob. And they came up and they look in the cockpit, and they're like, slap him on the shoulder. He's like, oh, that was my best, man. That was my. And it was really cool. So it gave you a little bit of the bonafides, you know, some good camaraderie. Yeah, it was good.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. You know, that's something. I know we're getting off topic here a little bit, but that's something, you know, that I've always. Ever since drones started coming on, you know, the scene, man, I'm showing my age. But, you know, it said I always. Something that we always worried about was losing that personal connection with whoever's got us up top, you know? And, I mean, what do you think about that?

[Al Mack]

It's tough, you know, I mean, think back to, you know, several years ago. The original drone operates. So to show my age, you know, the original drones were not armed, except for the agency one. Right. So the OGA drone was armed with a Hellfire. And all the other ISR was unarmed. Right. And to be able to talk to them, line of sight was a big deal. Right. Cause it was a repeater. Other than that. Cause they're back at, I don't know, back in Vegas or something, flying these things. And so when they started arming these things and we started doing kinetic strikes with these, they were claiming ptsd. And a lot of guys were getting mad, saying there's no way they could do that. Why are they mad or upset? You know, that they're killing people from a distance. And I remember thinking there were certain times of the first part of the war where in Afghanistan in particular, we did not shoot back. If somebody shot at us with the intention of using darkness, like if the miniguns fire, you're going to see for sure where we are. So maybe they don't see us. Right. Because night vision goggles weren't as prolific back then. And I remember getting shot at a lot and feeling very vulnerable, right. Because, I mean, I've got a soft armor, I've got a little plate that's about this big. And we took all the armor out of the aircraft in the early days, so we go to the higher elevations because it was too heavy. And then one year must have been, I don't know, late 2002, maybe 2003. I said, screw it, somebody shoots at me, he's going to eat lead. And I instructed the gunners, that's a hostile act. Somebody shoots at us, you kill them. And I made a big distinction. You don't engage, you kill them. You engage them, they duck their head, you kill them. They can't. He's dead. And so I realized at some point I felt better being able to defend myself. Right. So there's this like this equal thing. It's, you know, them against me. You take a shot at me, I'm going to take a shot back at you. And it's kind of like we both have an equal chance of dying. But the guy flying the drone, it's one way. It's very godlike. You know, you have the opportunity to kill somebody and he doesn't have the chance to reciprocate. It's kind of, I view that as maybe that is part of the. That post traumatic stress is like they feel guilty, you know, that they can't die doing it, you know, but they can kill people. And I don't know if that's true. That's just how I interpret it, you know, but that personal connection is very important. Like the 160th now has a drone unit that they didn't have when I was there. And once again, that's to create, number one, a capability, number two, that personal relationship.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. You know, I mean, it's just meeting you guys before operations and other pilots, I mean, it just, it creates this personal connection where it's like, I know those guys down there, or I know those guys up there. Like they just dropped me off, you know, and it. That was Always in our minds, you know, when that. When that. When we started working with. With ISR and stuff like that.

[Al Mack]

But anyways, with it, with the. With the air breathers, you know, the Draco guys, right, the U21s or whatever, they were flying C12s, I guess, that had all the ISR platforms, and they would, you know, do all the collection. They do all the, you know, as you're coming into the target, they give you a sitrep, you know, you got, you know, two sleepers on the roof, you know, three guys laying on the ground, on the. On the green side, you know, whatever, and you come in. And in the early days, they did a terrible job. Like, I'd be out in the Kandahar area, and we'd go land out in the middle doing offset infill. And we're going to land in the middle of this poppy field. And the ISR comes back with, all good, nobody's there. And they're zoomed in on my coordinates where I'm going to land. And I'd land and there'd be, like, guys with guns just standing around. You know, they were guards for the poppy fields. They weren't. They didn't shoot at us, but they were armed. And I remember sitting down with these guys afterwards, the ISR guys, and saying, hey, look. Look at your video. And so when you scaled out and you saw me, did you see the guys with the guns? Well, yeah, but they didn't shoot at you. I'm like, but I don't want to land there if they're there, right? So we had to teach them what to do. And because they were at Bagram, you know, we'd start meeting with them a little more. And once I had that relationship with them, they knew what I wanted, you know, I knew what they wanted, I knew what they needed, you know, and it works great and that, you know, we were talking offline, and I'm sure we'll get to it during Red Wings, you know, when I plan that whole operation, the fires plan was successful because I sat down with the actual pilots and the, you know, the sensor operators, you know, in the AC130, and said, here's what I'm trying to accomplish. How can you help me do that? As opposed to me saying, you know, hey, I want this kind of ordinance here, this here, you know, they know what their stuff does, you know, but that's that relationship that you get.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. All right. Where were we back to? We were in the middle of. You just got done with assessment I believe.

[Al Mack]

Yeah. All right. Yeah. So I go back to my unit for a year, right? Except when I got there a week later, the battalion commander from 2nd Battalion 160th calls me and he's like, hey, Al, how would you like to come up in six weeks? And I'm like, well, sir, you guys told my commander it would be like a year. And he goes, yeah, well, we need you now because it takes eight months to put a guy through the Chinook pipeline. Can you do it? So I went and talked to my wife. Now, keep in mind, I lived in on post housing at the time, so it was pretty easy to get out of there. But now I gotta get a house up in Campbell. So I took leave, went up there house hunting for a week and bought a house or put a bid on the house, whatever. And I came back and I remember the battalion commander at Fort Rucker was pissed. And he tried to call in all kinds of markers from generals and stuff that he knew to stop me from leaving because he couldn't stop it. And I thought, for sure he's going to stop me. And now he's mad at me. And the 160 said, Nah, we need him. So they just sucked me up there. Six weeks later, I'm in basic skills, learning hand to hand. You know, we're doing. So that's the part I forgot. When you start in the training, you know, it's basic skills. So it's, you know, first aid, hand to hand, you know, CQB kind of stuff. Shooting. At the time, we still had MP5s. We were just transitioning to the M Fours like the next year. But because of Mogadishu, you know, they had MP5s and they found out that was insufficient for what we need. Right. It's one thing to clear a room with it, but it's, you know, if you're going to defend a downed aircraft, you don't want to pistol round and. But we were still learning on that, which was pretty cool for me, you know, shooting silenced MP5s. And you do that. And then the enlisted guys at that point go on to log PT and ground navigation stuff like that, and the pilots move on to the. The air navigation stuff. But, yeah, so I get up there and we start that and it's a lot of fun. And I really.

[Sean Ryan]

What do you mean, the enlisted guys? The.

[Al Mack]

The crew chiefs.

[Sean Ryan]

The crew chiefs.

[Al Mack]

Well, I take that back. Any night stalker who's not a pilot, you could be the clerk. No.

[Sean Ryan]

So you guys train together? Yeah, the pilots and the crew. That's. That's pretty cool.

[Al Mack]

And same thing with the. I think when it was hand to hand, it was pilots and pilots and list of guys and list of guys. But, like, I had a guy, he played in the NFL, was my. I was the next biggest guy, right? But this guy was like a freaking. And, you know, he's like a mountain, you know. And so we're doing, like, you know, practicing brachial stuns, you know, and so, you know, he's hitting me on the side of the neck, you know, boom. And I'm like, oh. And I don't go down. And the instructor comes and goes, hit him harder. I said, well, I don't want to hit him harder. He's like, hit him harder or I will, right? So the guy hits me harder, and of course, I drop. And he goes harder than that. And he's like, if I hit him harder than that, I'm going to knock his head across the room and he's going to be seriously hurt. We're not doing it, you know, because there's that whole mentality of, come on, you got to be tougher, you know, we're night stalkers, you know. But this guy, you know, he knew his own strength. This guy, Mike was his name. He was actually out at the range. He was a little bird guy, attack guy, barely. I don't know how he fit in the aircraft. And he got out and the rotor blade hit him in the head and it damaged the aircraft and his helmet. And he walked away going, wow. Like Mungo, you know, and saddles. But that was my cqb, or not cqb, my hand to hand guy. But, yeah, so you do that and then you go down to the dunker, which was in Jacksonville at the time. They have their own now. It's an amazing. So it's like a. Imagine being in a. In a. In a minivan and they drop you in a pool and you're strapped in and the thing rolls over and sinks, and then you've got to get out. You know, they do this training progression. First it's get out any exit. Then it's, you have to go out second behind the guy next to you, or you have to cross over and they create some chaos in there, which, if you use their training, not a big deal. You know, you just. You wait till the violent motion ceases, you get a reference, you unbuckle yourself. You know, you go out or you jettison the door, you're still buckled in, and then you put your hand outside, release the thing and just pull yourself out. So if you do the training, it all works really well. But when you don't, the guys panic and they get stuck inside and the divers have to pull them out.

[Sean Ryan]

Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the crew chief and the pilots?

[Al Mack]

Yeah, so in the Chinooks in particular, and the Black Hawks are very similar, the relationship with the crew chiefs, you get to know them quite well because they. You fly a lot together in a Chinook. The minimum crew to fly a Chinook, a regular Chinook, is two pilots and a flight engineer. So the flight engineer is the senior crew chief in the back. In the 160th, a minimum crew is two pilots and two. Two crew chiefs, a flight engineer and a crew chief, this guy in the back. And then when we're in combat, it's four. So you have a crew of six, two pilots, four guys in the back because you got two guys, man in the miniguns up front and two guys on the M240s in the back. And then they have other duties that they do. And you know, you spend long, long hours together, whether it's training, you know, it could be a cross country flight flying from Campbell to California, you know, doing air refueling on the way. And you know, it's a eight hour flight without landing. You're gonna talk and talk and talk and you get to know each other. The other thing is, I always like to say that a good crew chief in the back can compensate for a bad pilot up front. So let's say you're gonna land on a spur, a mountain spur, right, with a aft gear, you know, doing a little wheelie or landed with one wheel or something like that. If the pilot can't see anything, like you're looking down several thousand feet and there's nothing there. There's no reference to know that you're moving a foot or two, right, to keep the wheels on the terrain. But the crew chief's looking right at it and if he is good, he can talk you through doing it. You know, it's like, hold what you got. You're starting to slide to the left a couple inches, you know, and you just, you just little subtle movements to the controls and you listen to him. As long as he stays calm, you stay calm. If you get a crew chief who gets kind of wound up really quick, you know, it translates in the voice and then the pilot gets kind of stiff on the controls because he's essentially following those instructions. So I like to say a guy who's up front who maybe isn't as good at doing that kind of maneuver. For example, if the crew chief's good, you know, he's got the right voice, the right technique, they'll keep you right there. And the customer at the Ground force has no idea that, you know, this guy's having a tough night. Because the crew chiefs compensate. Sometimes a really good pilot can compensate for a crew chief in the back that isn't as good, you know, but there are limitations. You know, like I said, if you're a thousand feet out over the terrain and you got nothing to look at, all you can do is listen to him, you know, or maybe the other pilot can see something. So that relationship is very, very important.

[Sean Ryan]

How. How long do you guys spend with each other?

[Al Mack]

Well, I mean, years. But, you know, when we go on the road for training, for example, junior guys, junior pilots will room together. Right. If you're a flight lead or officer in charge, you get your own room. The crew chiefs, same thing. If you're a senior nco, you'll get your own room. If not, you'll share. But after flying, we'll spend time together, you know, in the. In the bar or picnic table or something. We get to know each other quite well.

[Sean Ryan]

Is there a. Can you talk about a little bit about who's. Man, I don't know how to say this, but who's. Is it the pilot that's ultimately in charge of the aircraft, or is it the crew chief or how are they.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, so the. So the pilot. You have a pilot in charge. Pilot in command. Right. In the Army. Air Force calls him aircraft commander ac. He's in charge of everything about that aircraft. So you might. I could be the pilot in command as a warrant officer, and I could have a colonel in the other seat. I'm in charge. Right. He's doing what I tell him to do because that's the way it works. It's different if he's the air mission commander, he could be the overall air mission commander, and he happens to be in my cockpit. So now we're in a little bit of a gray area because I'm telling him what to do in the aircraft, but he's maybe telling me what to do in the overall mission. So it's kind of a. A blend there. But where are we going with that? I said it went around.

[Sean Ryan]

Relationship between. Well, no, not relationship. Response. Basically responsibility.

[Al Mack]

Responsibility for the aircraft. Right. So when I was a junior pilot, there's a red line on the floor and a Chinook, it's like Station 95, they call it, right? So every inch of an airframe is assigned a station, you know, 1 inches. Station 1 or 001 or something like that, right? And as you go back and that way you can say, you know, I've got a sheet metal crack at Station 350, you know, butt line, whatever. And you can, you can tell just by markings on the floor where this crack could be, right? So with a junior pilot and a senior crew chief, sometimes they'll say, you might mention something about the back, and they'll go, sir, you know, you're in front of Station 95. Just, you know, keep your business up there. Right? Yeah, whatever, you know, so there's that relationship where it can be. I mean, we're always busting each other's butts, you know, but if you're a guy like me, right? And I had, you know, I do a lot of talking about, you know, I did this, I did this. There's always a crew involved, and in many cases, as an aircraft, two or three behind me doing the same thing, right? So you got to keep that in mind. But the responsibility of the aircraft commander, the pic, is absolute. He is responsible for it. So whether he's divided some authorities up to the crew chief in the back, you know, it's based on, you know, what's going on, right? So, for example, fast roping, right? So we'll, you know, the pilot will find the target, he'll come in, he'll start his approach. Approach. You get 50, 60ft out laterally from it. And it's like the crew Chief and the Dora will say, you know, Target in sight, forward 30, you know, and you come in, you start listening to them, they talk you in. And then when you get over the target, the crew chief and the Friesmasters will look down, identify the landing area, kick the ropes, and that guy is pretty much in charge until he's done doing his thing. You know, I'm listening to him, he's like, you know, come left, come right, come up, come down, you know, stop, stick, you know, whatever is going on. And they have a lot of responsibility in the back, you know, and, you know, get the utmost respect for those guys, especially because they got no control of the aircraft ultimately, because I do have the ultimate responsibility and what happens. And they're going with me wherever I go.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, I would imagine that relationship has to be pretty tight with a lot of mutual respect, and if there's.

[Al Mack]

Not, there can be a problem. So when I was in the conventional unit, In Savannah, I had a friend. He had a terrible relationship with all the crew chiefs. Like, he just looked down on them, you know, and no matter who talked to him, he just. He treated them like crap. And they hated flying with him. And we were coming back from California one time, we were getting gas and we taxied in. And the way a Chinook drives on the ground is you get a little steering wheel back like this, and one of the wheels has a power steering actuator. And the aircraft will drive like a car on the ground. And when you come into a parking area at an airport, depending on if you're close to airplanes or a hangar, buildings, light poles, that kind of stuff, it's very important for the crew chief to say, sir, we're close to this. Let me dismount. And somebody will get out and they'll look at the rotor tips and make sure you are not going to hit whatever it is. Right. The crew chief will always suggest that. I mean, the pilot might say, hey, this is going to be tight. Can you get out? Crew chief will do it. But in this case, the crew chiefs knew he was too tight, did not offer to get out and let him drive the aircraft right into a hangar right now. Everybody was okay. The aircraft was severely damaged. The hangar was damaged. The accident board gets involved, the collateral board, and they find that the pilot had created such a toxic relationship with the crew that they let him damage the aircraft on purpose. They didn't make him damage on purpose. They let it happen. And so that's the extreme. And I've never seen that in the 160th. The 160 is so professional that I really. I do miss it, you know, I don't miss flying so much. I miss the people.

[Sean Ryan]

You don't miss flying?

[Al Mack]

Not in the way you'd think. I mean, every once in a while, I'll cross the George Washington Bridge in New York City, and it's the same view I would get when I was flying at West Point. And I come down the river and on a nice day, I kind of be like, I kind of miss flying. What I really miss is the people and the mission. You know, as I like to say, you know, taking a bunch of pipe swingers to a bad guy's front door, that's rewarding, you know, I like doing that.

[Sean Ryan]

I'll bet. I'll bet. What's the longest amount of time you've been paired with a. With a crew chief?

[Al Mack]

A couple of months. Probably eight months.

[Sean Ryan]

That's it?

[Al Mack]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

No shit.

[Al Mack]

So what will happen is you'll go on a deployment like say overseas, right. When you're back in the States, you just get who you get, right. Unless you're on a trip like, you know, going out to the mountains or something, whatever duration of that trip is. But when you go to combat, you get assigned a pilot, your co pilot and your crew and an aircraft, an airframe. Right. And however that deployment is, it might be a 60 day deployment, it might be a year long deployment. You're with that crew and that aircraft the entire time.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay, yeah.

[Al Mack]

So it's, you know, so the first couple of flights can be rough, you know, as you're feeling each other out. Like, I flew because I was the, what's called an sip, the standardization instructor pilot. So I was essentially the chief pilot for chinooks in the 160. And I would fly with the different battalions, right. Because I had to fly. And the idea was to always be evaluating them to make sure they are holding the standard, you know, so if you're out at, you know, Savannah, are you doing things the same way as you're doing at Campbell? Because you better be. That's the standardization program. That way the customer knows he's getting the same support every single time. Right. So I would deploy with them as well. And so I go with this 3rd Battalion crew, we got G models now, which is the latest version of the aircraft. And we're at a far forward arming and refueling point. And we're going to send Assadabad Afghanistan. We're going to, we're going to come in, we're going to hover up to the point, we're going to set down next to it, and they're going to unplug a hose, plug it into the aircraft while we're running, and take gas called hot fuel. So we come in, I'm at a 10 foot hover and Kruci says, all right, sir, come straight down. I come straight down. He goes, sir, can you move? Pick it up again. Sure, I pick it up. He goes, move forward three. Move three. He's like, all right, go ahead and set it straight down. So I set it straight down. He's like, sir, can you pick it up again? I'm like, what the hell? He's like, I'm sorry. Everybody always drifts forward when they descend. You actually come straight down. And I'm like, that's what they're supposed to be doing. But you know, I'm a high. I am the chief. Chen Rupal. I should be the best or of the best. I have peers, obviously, but I'm good, you know, and these guys had never flown with me before, and they were just anticipating that I would drift forward like all other guys did. And so as time went by, they just compensate for how I fly.

[Sean Ryan]

Gotcha.

[Al Mack]

And so maybe I don't come straight down. Maybe I am the drift guy. I drift forward. As I come down, they just compensate for that. They just bring you in three feet short. Have you come down, they know you're going to drift in and you land. So there's that relation, that habitual relationship and that, you know, understanding each other's capabilities.

[Sean Ryan]

Gotcha.

[Al Mack]

Yeah. Very, very important.

[Sean Ryan]

Gotcha. All right. Let's get back to training.

[Al Mack]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

So I don't. Where were we?

[Al Mack]

Where were we in training? So we were doing Green Platoon.

[Sean Ryan]

What is Green Platoon?

[Al Mack]

Oh, so Green Platoon is where it's the training platoon for the 160th, okay. You have green team and. And OTC, you know, for the other Special Mission units. And it came about because. So at the 160th compound, there's a wall, a memorial wall with a lot of names on it. And I don't know the number. I should. Most of the early days, 1980s, early 80s, those are all training deaths, for the most part, because they're developing tactics, techniques and procedures that the army later adopted. You know, how to use, like air mission night vision goggles. What are the limitations? When should you. When shouldn't you kind of thing. And those. Those names are on the wall, you know, and so there was a. There was too many in one year. I can't remember which year it was. And they. Congress shut down the unit, right? They're like, you guys are killing people, like, every week, you know, kind of thing. And they did a blue ribbon panel that evaluated the 1/60 and the way it worked. And they said, you know, the problem is not only are you developing new tactics and techniques, but you're training new guys that are coming into the unit, right? So they said, you've got to have a dedicated part of your unit that only does training for the new guys. Or if people are transitioning new equipment, that's what they'll do. And so they created Green Platoon. And it was a, you know, a godsend. It really is an amazing, you know, whoever really thought that through did a good job, you know, way back when. But that's what it's for.

[Sean Ryan]

Right on. So it's an eight month.

[Al Mack]

It's different for every airframe. It takes eight Months to get a Chinook guy through. Okay, so that's basic skills, you know, hand to hand shooting, that kind of stuff. Basic nav or bnav, that's where you learn to fly and navigate in the little bird to do things like a night stalker. And then you go to your specific aircraft. So even if you're a Chinook guy and you end up in Chinooks, there's so much expansion of what the aircraft can do because of the additional equipment that's in, embedded into the airframe. Right. And you have to learn how to use all of that stuff and how to compensate when it doesn't work.

[Sean Ryan]

So there's. So, okay, so you have totally different aircraft that's specific for 1/60. What would be some of the things that are different between a conventional 47 versus a TF160?

[Al Mack]

So when I talked earlier about the MH6s or the MH47. So army aircraft are designated by what they do, right? Ch. Ch 47. Right. Cargo helicopter model 47, version Delta. Right. In this case, it's modified helicopter 47, you know, echo at that time. And some of the equipment that's different. Well, big differences is the fuel tanks. On the special ops version, the MH is twice the capacity. So instead of a thousand gallons, you're carrying 2,000 gallons. There's internal fuel tanks that can fit inside that are crash worthy and ballistically tolerant. There is an air refueling probe that sticks out the front. Like if you look on the front of my book there, you get this big pipe that sticks out the front. You can fly up behind an Air Force C130. They drag a hose out the back while you're flying. And it's got this donut shaped parachute that you plug into and get gas in the air. So you have to learn all that. The crew chiefs have to learn gunnery. So you got these M134 miniguns, 7.626 barrel Gatling gun, shoots 4,000 rounds a minute. They have to learn that how to, how to do it, how to deal with malfunctions. You've got terrain following radar, which is key after 9, 11. Without that, we could not have done even half, even a fraction of what we did in those infills. Getting the, you know, the horse soldiers and other green braid teams and the OGA teams, because every SF team had to be brought in to an OGA team that was there the day before or two days before. So that's what all this equipment does. And everything is a TV Screen. There's. There's four TV screens and an echo, and there's five in a Golf. And those five are splittable, like you can. You can divide them up so there's really 10 displays. And you have to learn how to use those and when to use them. Flying the helicopter itself is pretty much the same, but using all of the tools of the trade. So you have to learn, number one, make sure you can fly the aircraft okay. The way we want you to interact with the crew because you're also training the enlisted crew. Then we go into the special mission tasks, like terrain following radar. We go to Knoxville, fly in the mountains in the dark. The pilot will flip his MVGs up so he can't really see out the window. It's no moon out, it's dark. And he's following the terrain, following radar cues. And the other pilot, as a safety pilot, if you will, the instructor has his goggles down. So if the guy misinterprets the cues and is going to fly into something, you know, he can just take the controls. I have the controls. It's just that simple. I have the controls. And then you say, what's wrong? But you get that air refueling, you got to teach the guy how to do that high adventure sometimes. And so once they learn to do the aircraft, the equipment, now we have to learn how to utilize it in the environment. And the cool thing with the 1/60 is that that a conventional unit doesn't do is we've got money for tdy, right? So you take the students from Campbell, like, so we go to Knoxville for the train flight. Then you, you know, wherever the tankers are, you're going to go there for the air refueling. So sometimes the Air Force Force or the Marines will send a tanker to us, and sometimes you got to go to them, which might be Dallas or the Houston area, that kind of stuff. Or you travel somewhere and they'll come. You know, you hit a tanker in route, and then once you've done those things, you go desert mountain. We go to Albuquerque, and you, you're out there for, like, three weeks learning to just land in the dust for real. And then learn how to fly in the mountains, power management, how to read the wind in the mountains and how to come in from a certain direction. It's like parachute jumping. You have to learn how to land in a certain way. And then everything we did before, we did it in the aircraft, we did it in the flight simulator, which was very realistic. So you would teach them how to do the Hover page. There's this on the little TV screen. There's a little video game you play. There's a crosshair in the middle. There's an open circle and a line. And you try to keep the open circle over the crosshairs. And if you're moving, that line gets longer in the direction of movement. Right? And so you've got to look at that and interpret it to keep the aircraft in whatever, let's say a stationary hover. You got to keep all of those little cues on top of that little crosshair so you can't see out the window at all. You're either in the dust and snow, whatever it is, and you move the cyclic stick to keep that where it is, like a little video game. And then the crew chief might be able to see straight down, right? He might be able to see it, not be able to see out. But oftentimes they can see the ground right below you, depending on your altitude. And they'll be like, all right, sir, you're 10ft off, and you're confirming that up front with the instrumentation. You get it steady and come down, and you just come down, and. And it can be a challenge, you know, to say the least, to land in the dust.

[Sean Ryan]

I'll bet. I'll bet. So you graduate, obviously?

[Al Mack]

Yep. Yep. So we did that. You graduate when you graduate Green platoon, you are probably well back during the height of the OEF and oaf. You are going to deploy probably in two weeks, maybe less.

[Sean Ryan]

When did you graduate? What year?

[Al Mack]

So I graduated in 95, and there was nothing going on. Right. So it was all training back then and training trips. People ask me, you know, what was it like pre 9, 11 and the 160th? Oh, it was great, you know, because everywhere we went was, you know, four or five star. You know, you go to Colorado to do mountain flying. We're staying in condos, you know, or at least a nice hotel, you know, the Doubletree. We didn't have any tents, you know, so we were destined one time, working with AC130s, we had three aircraft there. Two of them flew per night. And we were flying guys in, they would call for fire, and then we come pick them up, that kind of stuff. And the other crew was really a spare. So you have to keep the flight hours within a certain parameter to keep the aircraft flying. So it's like an oil change, you know, that. Well, another 100 miles, I'm going to have to do an oil change, except you're going to have to do It, Right. They're going to make you do it by regulation, right? So you keep track of the oil changes, if you will. And every hour you fly ticks off on this, your oil change, if you will. And so, you know, if you've got one down for the night doing maintenance schedule, what we call scheduled maintenance, the oil change, the other two can go fly. And if you're not working on it and one of them breaks, that's a spare. You just take it and do your thing. And now we have not affected the ground force in any way, Right? That's the goal. But anyway, we're out to show you. This is pre 9 11. So two of us are out flying. The aircraft breaks and they fly back to Hurlburt field to. They're done for the night, right? Ah, we can't fix this tonight. We go back, they hook up. We're in Destin is our hotel, is at the Sheraton on the beach. And the person not flying, that crew is responsible for getting, you know, beverages, bait. Like we had gotten some Zebco fishing reels at the PX or the bx and you had everything ready and guys would come back from flying and we'd spend the night on the beach fishing, off in the surf, right? Drinking beer. That's pre 9 11. If you weren't actually doing some missions. I come back one night that night I'm talking about. And because it's two crews now, they're all drunk. And I come up, I'm like the only. I'm like the adult leader in the group. They're out in the water. The pilots, they're out to their neck with fishing rods, right? Surf casting. And the waves had slowly walked them out, you know, like they started waist high and end up neck. And I was like a boy Scout leader. I was like, all right, everybody buddy up. Like what? I said, hold hands with the guy next to you. I want to count heads, right? So I kind of like get in here, right? And they're like, all right, we're coming. You know, but that was pre 9 11. 911 happened. You know, you still get some nice trips, but it's not like that. Yeah, you know, but the. Where I really was going with that is the ability to take the guys to the actual environment. So we're going to go learn to land in the dust for real. Usually when you get there, the lake beds are dry crust, you know, and there's no dust. So I remember I took these guys out one time and I start driving the aircraft around on four wheels and I'm breaking up the crust. What are you doing? It's going to get dusty. I'm like, that's the point of this. We're not out here to pretend we're dust landing. We're going to dust land. And then you go up to the mountains, you wear an oxygen, which turned out to be important in Afghanistan, things like that. And that's what we do. So when you get back From Green Platoon pre 9 11, you would go places, Fort Bragg. You would enter Fort Benning, work with the Rangers, go out to Coronado, work with the seals, out to Little Creek, and you just do whatever they needed. You know, oil platform takedowns, you know, VBSs, something like that. And once the war started, you know, that training became less and less because we needed airframes overseas, right? So it was tougher to get that realistic training in, or you had to learn to mix it in. You know, it's like, if you're gonna go out to the compound at Bragg, you know, what can you do on the way out? You know, we would link up with the. The A10s out of Pope when they were still there, and on the way in, we'd link up with them and do a personnel recovery mission, which I got a good one in the book there, where I dusted out some farmer, you know, that they. You know, the pilot. The downed pilot was there, and the A10s are doing their. There were passes, and the farmer had just limed the field with his tractor, and he's just sitting there watching. The eight tends to do their thing. And I come in with a Chinook, and I land right next to him, and it's a big cloud of dust and farm talc. I don't know, poison, I guess. I don't know, fertilizer. I thought I was in trouble. We get to brag. I talked to the Air Force guy. He gives me the farmer's phone number. I call him. I'm like, hey, I apologize. I'm so sorry. He's like, are you kidding me? He goes, that was amazing. He goes, you do that anytime you want. He says, but make sure I'm out there because I want to watch it. He's like, all right, that's awesome, man. But anyway, the training is very realistic, and the margin for safety is interesting because the 160th, because we killed so many people in the early days, had a reputation of being Cowboys. Oh, the 160th guys, they're gonna just ignore all the rules and do whatever. Well, now we're inventing new rules, you know, and it's how you progress, you know, and unfortunately it was progressed in the blood of night stalkers. But that reputation is still there, you know, And I remember teaching a couple of green platoon classes where guys would come in and I would say, okay, we're not gonna do this tonight because, because maybe the weather is such and such or we've got some parameter that's kind of iffy. And I actually, a couple occasions have had guys say, well, I thought we would just do whatever it took. And it's like, well, maybe on a combat mission, you know, or national. Something of strategic importance. National importance. But we're training. We're not going to kill somebody, you know, just to go out. We'll just do it tomorrow night, you know, kind of thing. So the rules are very important to us as well.

[Sean Ryan]

What did it feel like when you graduated?

[Al Mack]

It felt good. I'll bet, you know, you felt you really, you've really done something, you know, and it's what I want to do. You do that.

[Sean Ryan]

And when you graduate, you're one of the best helicopter pilots in the world.

[Al Mack]

I'd like to think so, you know, and as the time goes by when you get better in the unit, like, I mean, you could be a senior guy, like a CW4, but a junior pilot, you're taking out the trash, you're emptying, you're filling the fridge, that kind of stuff, you got to pay your penance because someone's got to do it. And the other guys are doing important things. You know, I lived my life watching the news like the 24 hour news cycle. Something came on CNN back when it was reliable. You look at it and go, oh, something's happening in Khartoum, that's happening in Belize. The ambassador in this place might be trouble. And I would go into work, I'd get into the high side stuff. I'd research the situation, I'd research the country and I'd start preliminary plans for how to operate there. Because there were many times I got called in trying to think. The country in South America. Every year I'd get called to go get the ambassador and they'd smooth things over and we didn't have to. But you live your life on the news because you could be going somewhere. I mean, look what happened on October 7th, right, with Israel. Those guys were on the road within hours.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Al Mack]

You know.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Al Mack]

Not that I know anything about that, but, you know.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. Well, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll start getting into similar combat operations.

[Al Mack]

Sure.

[Sean Ryan]

Perfect. Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to itunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. I'd like to invite you to gain access to an exclusive experience on Vigilance Elite. Patreon. Our patrons are the driving force behind the success of this show, and their support allows us to keep doing what we do. Depending on the tier you choose, you'll get access to benefits like behind the scenes footage before each interview, early access to episodes, end of the month live zoom calls with me, exclusive merch and more. Join us and become a patron starting at just $5 a month by visiting patreon.com vigilance elite. That's patreon.com vigilance elite. All right, Alan, we're back from the break. We've covered your childhood, we've covered the beginning of your military career, your assessment into TF160, and now we're getting into your combat operations. Let's move into post 9 11.

[Al Mack]

All right.

[Sean Ryan]

Actually, let's move. Let's just go into 9 11.

[Al Mack]

All right.

[Sean Ryan]

What were you doing when that happened?

[Al Mack]

So 9 11, I was in. I was doing a mission in JRTC, right? The Joint Readiness Training center down in Fort Polk, Louisiana. Right. I was actually infilling a MAROPS team, right? A Maritime team from 5th group. And they would put them in a riverine operation. They linked up with a special boat unit out of the Navy, and they go do their thing, right? So I come back, take a shower, go to bed. Sun comes up, and I hear guys in the barracks. Now, the barracks, it's one of those National Guard buildings. You know, it's cinder block walls, hard tile floors, you know, that kind of stuff. So every noise at one end gets all the way down to the other end, right? So even if you try to be quiet, these guys were like, holy crap, look at that. Did you see that? And I'm like. And I knew that the, our other company, a company, was on their way to Europe to do a joint readiness exercise. And we always said that, you know, one of those flights is going to be real, and when it happens, it's going to be spectacular, right? The, the whole operation, I'm like, damn it, those guys did something. You know, like, you always want to be on the big operation. I thought, you know, the other company had just done it. So I get up and I turn on the tv, and that's not what I saw at all. What I saw was one of the, you know, Trade center towers was burning. And I remember thinking, oh, somebody's in trouble. You know, safety, wise, aviation safety. You know, you got LaGuardia, JFK, Newark there. Somebody screwed up. And so I got it on, brew up a pot of coffee in my room, and I'm looking at it, have my first, you know, sip of coffee and incomes in a plane. I was like, this is not an accident, this is an attack. And I remember getting everybody up, you know, hey, we're going to be doing something. I mean, not like we were going to jump in the helicopters and do something, but we were going to have to get back to Fort Campbell. And it was something because I go down to the end of the hall and there's two guys that have been out, you know, they were shot down. All right, they're doing an E that night. Escape, invasion. And so they just come in, they were miserable from walking around in the swamps, you know, until they got rescued. And I'm like, get up. We're under attack. And they're like, screw you. They wouldn't open their doors. I was like, no, really, I'm not talking about, like the opfor. I'm talking about somebody is attacking us. They opened the door, showed them the tv, and I go, wow. So I had just taken a position. So I was a flight lead, right? So what that is in the 160th is you are one of very few tracked actually by the Secretary of Defense's office on how many there are of us. And in our company, there's two. And I just got promoted, if you will, out of the company level, where I was the chief pilot, the flight lead, and moved to battalion. So across the street, right? They always talk about, you know, oh, you're going to go across the street to the headquarters, right? Because it's literally across the road. And what stunk about it is now when B Company goes, technically I don't have to go because I work for the battalion commander now, not the company commander. Luckily, they needed a second flight lead and I ended up with them. But with that being said, the entire national airspace system was shut down after 9 11, right? So you had fighters overhead, AWACs, that kind of stuff, but no commercial air travel, no military travel other than fighters. And so we rented our car, the battalion commander and I, and we drove back to Fort Campbell. I think it was a 1011 hour drive and we're just hungry for information because remember cell phones back then were real phones, right? They weren't smartphones. So we were finding radio stations on the AM radio, radio and we're listening to the press briefings and stuff and it's like, wow, this is, this is something. And so we get back to Fort Campbell, we get a, you know, now we can get down to the skiff, find out what is going on. And the next day we were headed to Tampa, you know, in a 15 passenger van. Me and a couple planners didn't really know what was going to happen. And I don't know, that's a 15 hour drive or something like that. And we drove down, the guys were still stuck at, you know, JRTC waiting to come back up. So we get to Tampa and a funny story there, right? So now the base is locked down. McDill, right? And we got to get to Sauk, sent headquarters and the line to get in the gate has got to be five, six miles long, right? We can't, no one's going to let you in. So we drive around and there's a gate with nobody at it, but it's open, there's a guard there and we pull up and say, hey, we need to get in. And they're like, sorry, sir, emergencies only, you know, official, whatever. So we start driving back and I happened to have a guy, our intel officer was also a CIA officer and he had a badge. And that badge had a little placard with it that said something like, you know, if the bearer of this badge is doing or whatever, national security, you know, afford him all courtesies or something along those lines, right? I said, jerry, get your badge out. He's like, al, I'm not, I can't. They'll take my badge away if I use it for something. I'm like, dude, you just got attacked. So we drive back through, he flashes the badge, he let us right in, right? And that was always a funny story with, with, with he and I is that he was afraid to use his badge for 9 11. So anyway, we get in there and we're not really sure what is going to happen. We know we're going to Afghanistan like that the target is in Afghanistan, but we're bouncing between the 3rd Battalion and the 2nd Battalion going because B Company, 2nd Battalion had just divided in two and sent six of its Chinooks to Korea to work in Paycom. So that company really wasn't big enough to do anything anymore, right? And they were always talking about integrating it with the other company and just making it a bigger company. But our area of expertise was the Middle East. All of the other units didn't have the same expertise that we had because we had done two years before that, two years in a row. We'd been to Kuwait with the intention of going into Iraq. During desert. Operation Desert Thunder and Desert Fox, they're separate things. He kicked the UN inspectors out. So we were there seven months at a popular flying every night, doing air refueling, dust landings. So we were really good at operating in the dust and air refueling in the desert. But now we're shrunk down a little bit and we don't know if we're going to be able to do anything. So they're going to send us, like me and my guys, to Egypt for Operation Bright Star, which is a big training exercise in Egypt. Right. And 3rd Battalion will go to Uzbekistan and go into Afghanistan. Except things keep going around a little bit. It's like, you know what? 3rd Battalion would be better off going to Egypt. We'll take the Echo models up to Uzbekistan because of the terrain falling, radar and some other things that the older aircraft that third Battan had didn't have installed. They had air refueling capability. The aircraft looks the same on the outside, but it's not nearly the same aircraft. So we. We end up getting the mission. So I plan it. I'm on the phone, and this is so secret, even on the secure line, I'm not allowed to talk about it because the phone's not a high enough classification. So the guys had just got back from grtc. They got to fly back. And I'm calling up there going, hey, you need to pull. We're like talking around this on a secure phone, you know, hey, I need you to pull, you know, digital maps for, you know, maybe. Remember that movie Spies Like Us? You know, kind of that area, you know, Dushanbe. And so he understood and he got those maps pulled and we started planning it. And then we end up back at Campbell, which is funny because Operation Enduring Freedom was actually started as Operation Infinite justice, and we got rid of the riot act. You don't tell anybody about this. Nothing. No talking about it. You. So we're going home. And on the way home, Donald Rumsfeld is doing a press conference and he says, Operation Infinite justice is in motion. We're like, what the hell? So they changed the name. But so we get back, and here's where the real challenge is, right? Remember I said earlier that there's always room for one more Ranger at sea level, in a Chinook, if you can put something inside it, you can fly with it. You just can. When you start doing external loads, you get stuff that's too heavy. But now we're talking about flying to these mountains that are 20, 22,000ft. And it isn't just the altitude, it's the distance, right? So in order to get over a mountain, you might have to be a certain weight. So let's say I can carry 20 guys, right? And the gas that. So I cut the gas down to make weight, if you will, to get over the mountain, but then I don't have enough gas to get where I'm going or to get home, right? So it's always this big math problem of how many people you can take versus how much gas, how much time you can give them on the objective before you can pick them up, you know, all that kind of stuff. So we're doing this in. The math isn't working out. We're like, we can't get where we've got to go with what we should be carrying. And what we didn't know was that 5th Group, 5th Special Forces Group, was in a room right next to me in Tampa planning what they call a UW campaign on conventional warfare. That's the whole horse soldier thing, right? Except they thought I could just take them anywhere they wanted to go, and I didn't know they were doing that. I was just planning for personnel recovery. So if the bombers got shot down, a fighter, I would go rescue them, that kind of thing. So the other company comes in, they're the lead planner. And he looks at our whiteboard of essentially a table of what we could remove from the aircraft with weight to try to compensate for this. We took all the armor out, we took extra equipment out that was extra fire extinguishers, things like that, gone. And they had the same calculations, and we're all like, oh, it's nice to see that we. We separately came up with the same conclusion. You almost can't go anywhere, right, without some major concessions. So then we end up going to Uzbekistan, a place called K2 Kanabad. Uzbekistan is just to the north of Afghanistan, and that it's a former Soviet republic. And we're going to operate out of that base with four Chinooks and two DAPs. The DAPs I talked about earlier, direct action penetrators, the Armed Blackhawks, they're going to be our gun support, if you will. We don't have anything else. This is early in the game, right? I mean, when you consider a battle now. You know, you get battle tracking and beacons. You know where everybody is and you can see everything, and you've got a stack above you of support. There was nothing. And so here we are. As soon as we built up the first two Chinooks, the bombing campaign started. And originally we wanted all four built up because we wanted two teams of two, because if something happens to the first team of two, the other two has got to either help them or help whatever they were doing. And SecDev said, Nope, as soon as the first two are done, start right? So they started bombing right away. And then we got the other two built up. Luckily, we didn't have anybody go down. And that went on for about two weeks. And then fifth group rolls in, and we changed over from an Air Force colonel being in charge of us to a Green Beret colonel. The fifth group commander, John Mulholland, great guy, by the way. And he. He comes in, he's like, can you give me a brief on what you can do with the helicopters? And we kind of show him, and he's kind of perplexed. He said, what's the matter, sir? And he's like, so you mean you can't just take an oda, you know, team from here to here? No, sir, not happening. You can't get over these mountains with that weight, or if you do, you're going to run out of gas halfway there or something like that. And he's like, oh, I wish somebody had told me this, you know, like three weeks ago. And I was like, what do you mean? And then we found out we were all in the same planning area. It's like, because they were falling under the old isolation rules, I think Cold War ISO fac, you know, don't tell the pilots where you're going because if they're captured, they'll tell. And it's like, well, in this case, you kind of. You're counting on me to be able to even do it.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Al Mack]

And so we figured it out. We had to make some concessions on weight. Like I. I said I can only carry like half a team, so I can carry six guys and their equipment, and their equipment's limited to like £3,000. So we made the ODAs put their gear, all their personal gear, all their team gear on a 463L pallet on aircraft scales, and if it was over, it's like, get rid of £30. Oh, come on, £30. Get rid of her. You're not going. Fine. They'd lose batteries or water or Something they could resupply later. But that's how strict we were on the Mafia. And then we had this political problem when Ahmet Massoud died, right? He was the head of the Northern Alliance. He was assassinated the day before 9, 11, I believe, right, by Al Qaeda. So that we would not have a reliable ally, right? And he was very charismatic. Everybody loved him. He was in charge of all the other warlords. They were subservient to him. And Al Qaeda blows him up with a fake film crew. His second in command is a guy named Fahim Khan. He's a jerk. Nobody likes him, but he's in charge of the thing now. And the third guy is General Rashid Dostum, who. Those two hate each other, right? They're in different locations. So Fahim says to the US Government, if I don't get my Green Berets first, I will attack Dostum, and you can throw your alliance out the window. So we are in two teams of two. My buddy Arlo has to take one of my aircraft, actually. So he's a team of three. I'm a team of one. So I can't go anywhere. We're not going anywhere. A single ship, and they take off. They reach the border. The weather is terrible. The mountains are 21,000ft tall. And they got a turnaround. They go to abort, right? They can't get through, so they come back, which means that my mission, which is the next night, just rolled 24 hours, right? And I was afraid. I was a terrible teammate, by the way, because I was afraid that Arlo would get his guys in, and then the sec def would go, you know what? It's too hard. It's not worth the risk. No more infills. And then, you know, I'd have to listen for 30 years for this guy talking about his mission. Like, he has to listen now to me. And so he goes. The next night, same thing happens. Turns around, except Now I'm rolled 24 again, right? Another 24 hours before I can take my guys in. And I'm pissed. And I meet him in the. In the planning area, where he comes in the door, he's like, white. They almost died, right? They're at 20,000ft, can't see out the windows, and they're doing a pedal turn on the hover page. And, I mean, lucky they did it. And I'm like, what the hell, man? And he's like, dude, you have no idea what the weather was like. I'm like, you know, use this, use that. What are you doing? You know, and we got in a shoving match. Like, I'm calling him, you know, all kinds of bad words, and he's, you know, reciprocating and that. Now, Arlo's a little bit bigger than me. We're about the same height, but he's bigger than. I mean, he would kick my butt and. But I'm mad, and I'm pushing him, and somebody gets in the middle of us and, like, gentlemen, no fighting in the war room. You know, it's a line from Dr. Strangelove movie. But anyway, all right, we're gonna roll again, go to bed. Daytime phone rings, unbeknownst to me, in the planning area. And the major that's on the day shift answers the phone, and a woman on the other end says, is this the TF Dagger Opsan? And he's like, yes. And she goes, please hold for the secretary. He's like, secretary, this is Donald Rumsfeld. Who am I talking to? And this major. We'll call him Mark. The Major. Mark. He's like, what can I do for you, sir? And he's like, you tell Mulholland you get those teams in tonight or else both of them clicked. We don't know about this until the next day. So we get up, come in and have our coffee. I'm expecting to see Arlo go do his thing, and I'm just going to sit here and wonder if he's going to make it. And I say, oh, you're going tonight, but what do you mean? I go, he's got my other helicopter. He's like, you're going to have to take everybody in one. But I can't take everybody in one. He goes, yeah, you can if you do air refueling. In and out. Okay. Right. The only caveat is you can't touch down before the other flight. Like, Fahim has to get his guys so he can say, I got the first Americans and Dostum can have his 30 minutes later. So we had to coordinate timing. So even though I took off and was making a time, if these guys got delayed, I had to back off to make sure that Fahim got his guys first. Right? So this is me with the entire ODA 595 in my aircraft. I have very little fuel now because I've got to hit a tanker on the way in. I'll do my mission, I'll come back out, I gotta hit a tanker again to get gas and air to make it home. And they didn't want me to fly a single ship because there's nothing overhead. The sat at the time, the satellite communications was a low angle bird and the mountains blocked it. So unless you were above the mountains or had a certain angle, you couldn't talk. So I would be alone in Afghanistan, right? So they sent the daps with me that aren't Blackhawks. Problem is they can go most of the way, you know, and then the mountains are going to get too big and they're going to have to hang out. It's like the B17 bombers going into Germany in the early days, and the fighters could only go so far. And it's like, see, we'll see you when you come back, you know? And so we're flying along and I've got the battalion commander on my jump seat. So the jump seat, I sit in the left seat, my co pilot's in the right seat, and the jump seat is just between and behind us a little bit, like I could tap his knee kind of thing. And we're flying along. The weather is terrible. We get our gas, we cross the border. My heart's about to jump out of my chest. I'm like, you know, we're in Afghanistan. And my heart's like, boom, boom, boom. And we run into a sandstorm several thousand feet thick, just like the Eagle Claw mission, actually. And you can't see out past the probe, the refuel probe. There's like St. Elmo's fire on it, you know, like little sparks. And the daps are in tight. We're at about 200ft above the ground, flying across the northern dunes. And they're tucked in tight. And they can't see me, they can't see the helicopter. What they can see with their night vision goggles is the glow of my engines, right? So there's two engines. As I pull in power, my co pilot pulls in power. The engine gets hotter, so the glow gets bigger. And they know they're climbing. The glow gets smaller. They know we're descending. Brave men to be able to do that. Highly capable to even come close to doing it as long as they did. And they eventually they cried uncle. They turn around like, hey, we got to abort. We cannot do this. All right? Because we always say, you know, with surface to air missiles and other anti aircraft weapons, every munition has a PK, a probable kill ratio. So if you fire a SA7 at an aircraft, you have a PK of 75%, right? I'm just pulling that out of my butt. So, 75% chance of a lethal kill. We say the ground has a PK of 100%. So here we are in the mountains, in the clouds, and they just, they can't see. They can't see the mountains. They can't see me now other than the glow of my engines, which is insane. And though they've got big balls falls, it's not going to keep them alive if they hit the mountain. So they turn around. So now I'm thinking, oh, there's no way they're going to let me continue by myself. But I didn't know about the Rumsfeld phone call. And the Colonel says, al, what do you think? And I said, sir, I think we just tf, which is terrain following radar. Never been done before in our aircraft. For real. We train with it. I think I talked about it earlier with the green platoon stuff. He goes, execute, push the button. It's like, Jethro, follow your cue. 300 foot clearance altitude. Off we go. And we are using the terrain following radar for the first time in real life. Now we've done it in the simulator and we've practiced it, but we've never done it where you couldn't see out. No kidding. Really couldn't see out the window.

[Sean Ryan]

No shit. So you're the first one.

[Al Mack]

It took a general officer in training like the USASAK commander had to approve flying without being able to see, and it had to be on what's called a military training route. So in order to get the training route reserved, the two star general to approve. And bad enough weather to go, but not so bad you can't go. It just never lined up right so we couldn't do it. So here we are doing it and we make our first turn and we get what's called a full climb command. So the aircraft sees something ahead of us that it can't climb over because we didn't plan to do this. I'm planning on going around everything but the aircraft. The radar doesn't know that. And then the damn thing reboots, right? So you ever had your computer, you had to control, alt, delete, or your phone had to be rebooted because it's a computer. Well, the radar is a computer. And part of the reason there was all that, you know, the two star General is because the damn thing would do that the darndest times. It would just go into its reboot cycle and you'd have to figure out what was wrong and get it back, right? In the meantime, all you can do is climb like your life depends on it, because it does. And so my co pilot, he slows back to best climb air speeds about 80 knots. He's got the power pulled into his armpits. We are climbing at about 4,000ft a minute. I mean, we are just climbing like a rape date. And I have no idea what's in front of us. The radar isn't showing me, right? So it's actually. The radar will show you about 10 miles out. And it was something that was about 20 miles out. It was a mountain that was too big for us to go over. And I figured that out by scrolling through the maps, like if digital map on the. On the little TV screens, the mfds. So I'm scrolling through, trying to find a map scale that will be useful to me. And I find one and it's like, ah, it's a mountain right here. I get the radar back, so there's different ways to give direction cues to the pilot. So I give him a heading cue. I say, follow that cue, he does it. We descend because the mountain's now off to the side. We get around it and we rejoin the course and we're on our way. Right. First lesson learned. Every flight in Afghanistan, every flight is planned so that in a pinch you can tf. So if you run into bad weather, you can do it. But in doing so, now you're giving up. Now you've, you've got a capability, but you're giving up. In order to do that capability, you need performance, which means you either have less gas on board or less customers, less cargo, right? So there's a give and take to everything. We get to Iraq, you know, whatever you want in there. But anyway, this is Afghanistan. So we're going along. We're still in the clouds. There's nobody to talk to. My aircraft is all alone. This is the stuff you make movies about. And they did 12 strong, right? But they highlighted the Green Berets. But anyway, we come to the last ridgeline and we're still in the clouds. And the colonel's like, oh, what are you going to do? And so we got this, you know, and so I lower. There's a lower altitude that it'll fly, which is like really 100ft. So I do that and we pop out of the clouds. We're like, I don't know, three, maybe 4,000ft, this ridge line. And then the LZ is about a half mile to go. And then there's a little hill north of that because we'd come around. And on the other side of that's a ZPU 23 4, right? And it's Taliban so a 23 millimeter four barreled anti aircraft cannon, right. If he sees me, gets a line of sight of me, he will tear me up. That'll be Swiss cheese. We will not survive. The aircraft's not going to do it. So I've got to keep that little hill. That's all it is, a little nub. As long as I can keep the line of sight from him seeing me, he can't shoot me, right? So, but I've got to lose 3 to 4,000ft in about a half miles distance. So the only way to do that is s turns, right? So we're losing our altitude. We're dropping 4,000 foot a minute. I mean we were just screaming. We put the aircraft out of trim a little bit to put some drag. We're dropping and we're doing this and my co pilot isn't as experienced with me and I'm like, I have the controls, right? So I'm doing this and I'm basically standing the aircraft on the side as we're dropping, right? I mean we are dropping fast. I didn't time it right because as we get to the bottom, I'm turning this way. The LZ is over here, so it's out the other side of the aircraft and I can't see it, but I'm at about 150ft now and I'm like, jethro, you got the LZ inside? He's like, yeah, you have the controls. So now he has to take the controls, he turns inbound to the lz. But I screwed him. Because to do a dust landing in a Chinook, typically you get set up about a half mile out, you know, and now we're much closer than that now. And the controls have little buttons on them, right? And those buttons are for a little magnetic brake. So you can move the controls wherever you want them. Let go of the switch and the control will stay right there. And then you can just sort a little pressure, you can fight against the springs, right? Because when you get in a dust cloud, you want to be able to just sort of relax your grip and let the aircraft go where you set it up. If you go into it without doing that, if you tighten up at all, you know, get in that fetal position at all, your arm tends to move and you will drift, which is what happened to him because I didn't give him time to get set up. And so he comes in there and he's a great dust lander, actually probably better than me. And he's coming in and I can Feel the aircraft going backwards in the dust, right? We're Aft gear's gotta be like 10ft off the ground. If we hit going backwards, we're gonna crash. It's gonna be spectacular and spectacular failure. And so I said, go around, go around, go around. Which means, you know, pull power. Let's come up out of the dust, we'll come back around, we'll try it again. Except I feel the aft gear touch the ground. Well, I'm not gonna go back up in the dust cloud with a 23 millimeter gun there if I can, if I'm already on the ground. But Jethro from West Virginia, he's a big man, right? And I mean, like, all muscle, and there's no difference in the controls. So I have no advantage over him. And he's starting to pull power, and I don't have time. And so I lay on the. On the thrust, trying to keep him from pulling up. And he's pulling harder, and I can feel myself getting pulled out of my seat. And finally he realizes what I'm trying to do, and he stops. And we land. Dust kind of settles, and we are surrounded by Afghan men wearing Pekols. And I don't remember what the scarf is called. They all got AK47s. Could be Taliban, could be Northern Alliance, I don't know, Right? There's an OGA guy supposedly there, but he didn't have an Irish strobe, so he might be dead, as far as I know. And the team leader gets out, Mark Nooch, the leader of Finite Five, and they do a little hug. He comes up by my window, gives me a thumbs up. I'm like, see ya. So we took off, repeated the thing, went back, got air refueling, back to Bagram. We sit there. So we shut the aircraft down, and I had nothing left. Like, the adrenaline of that night, the stress of that night. I remember just sitting there as they towed the aircraft into parking, you know, and we were just. Jason, Jethro and I were just kind of sitting there, and we did that night after night after night. And a couple of those nights, Arlo, the other flight lead, and I. There was a. There was a. An Oga pilot named Ned. He flew Mi17s out of Dushanbe into Afghanistan, Pierre Valley and stuff. So he stopped in, gave us a bottle of Jack Daniel. And so Arlo had the bottle, and we snuck off in a bunker, had a little snort, and we're like, what do you think? And I said, dude, I don't think we're gonna live another mission. And he said, yeah, I agree. And what do we do? It's a little emotional. We're just gonna do it. And there's nobody else who's going to do it other than us. So we didn't tell anybody that we had these doubts. You know, I'm sure they had it, but, you know, as a leader, you've got to lead. And so we did. We did. I don't know, we put 21 teams in, I think, you know, in the movie 12 strongest one team, you know, for simplicity. But it was 21 teams.

[Sean Ryan]

21 teams.

[Al Mack]

21 teams, yeah. All over Afghanistan. I mean, we were. I mean, other than, you know, Kabul. I mean, Kabul was Taliban help. But I was all the way down the west side of. I was at Farah, and I can't think of the further south I went, but, you know, a long way. I took the OGA guys in, and then the next night I'd bring the SF guys in, and then later on, they might need resupply, you know, if they weren't near C130 or someplace, they could do an airdrop, you know, that kind of thing. But we did that. I had to rescue one of the ODAs. Got in between a green on green engagement. You know, the Afghan north alliance fought each other, and the ODA had to leave. And when they did, you know, they were under fire, they left under fire. And so they're in their EE corridor in their vehicles, the Hilux trucks, and they're headed south. And I get told, go get them right now. You know, they're under fire. So I take off with the daps. Except what do we run into again? The mountains obscured by clouds and a sandstorm. So the daps are like, it's just me. I can't remember what the other aircraft were doing, but it was just my aircraft. And I was like, all right, you guys pick me up when I come out. And we sped up to like 160, which is fast for a helicopter. And I activated the TF and we went right into the. Right into the cloud in the mountains. And the radar just took us right over, let us down on the other side. And then I picked the road because I knew where they started. And it's like, all right, there's only two roads. They parallel each other. If I follow one, the most likely one, and hopefully I'll get in comms with him because an AC130 overhead as a U boat, he couldn't see anything. It was all cloud cover. But he did have line of Sight communications with him. So it was Cobra Tutu and I'm hauling ass and a 23 ZPU. 23 2. Same as that other gun, but only two barrels. Opens up on us. And the AC can't do anything because he can't see anything. And he's a little too far away from my miniguns. You know, we can shoot at about 1500 meters and this thing shoots about 2,300. And so he could reach us, I couldn't reach him. So I was like, all we can do is maneuver a little bit and keep going, right. And so eventually we get into radio contact with Cobra 22, arrange a link up, figure out what road they're on. We actually picked the right road and we land, pick them up, head back into the cloudy mess, link up with the daps and go home. And what's cool the daps is they weren't going to let that time go un like not have a purpose. So they started trolling in areas where they thought we might get shot at, hoping to draw a fire so they could kill it. And I remember the co pilot for the lead dap, Mike, he told me afterwards, he's like, damn. He said we were literally flying in a profile where we were going to get shot down. And the flight leader is Ross. And he's like, we're not going to let those Chinooks get shot down. If there's anybody out here, if they're going to shoot at anybody, they're going to shoot at us.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn, man.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, so anyway, how long, how long.

[Sean Ryan]

Did it take you to insert 21 teams? Was it one a night?

[Al Mack]

One a night, sometimes two a night, you know, depending on where we were going. Like I put over in. So those guys were on Polycom re. There was kao, not Kaust. I can't think of the name of it. But yeah, we're all over the place. Sometimes two a night. So it took two, three weeks. The campaign, you know, in the movie it's like, you know, two, three days. But in real life it took a couple weeks. We thought it would take it till the spring, except dosed them. You know, funny thing. So he's getting encircled, nobody knows it. Arlo and his flight are inserting a team nearby and they fly across this big open bowl. They're at, you know, 12,000ft. The bowl is probably 6,000. And they're in the clouds pretty much. And they pop out, they're out of the clouds and there's anti aircraft guns, RPGs, you know, disk. And it's like something out of, you know, Battle of Britain, you know, shooting at the Germans or something. He's like, stuff's coming up. RPGs flying under the rotor surface. Air missiles, MANPADS. And what we had decided was there's nothing you can do if you run into an engagement like that. You let the aircraft countermeasures work. You know, the flares, you see them in the movies, and you just treat it what we like, a thunderstorm. You just kind of keep going forward and try to get out of the kill zone. But if you try to maneuver, you're just kind of dancing in their sights. So it doesn't feel good to just fly out of it because they're shooting at you still. And they come back that night, they all know aircraft damage whatsoever. They could smell the propellant from the RPGs and all that kind of stuff in the aircraft, and they're like, oh, my God, we were going to die. If this is what life is going to be like, we are. We're definitely not going to make it. And so we just keep going. But what that did is, it let us know that a major force was engulfing General Dostum's force and helped the horse soldiers drop bombs on the right area. Because they had been focusing over here, for example. And now we knew, because those guys, had they not shot at the Chinooks, they would have wiped them out. You know, 595 would have been gone. So it's, you know, luck plays part of the game.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn.

[Al Mack]

And we did that for about, you know, seven months or so. Tora Bora is in there, right? So we end up, we think we're going home. We get told, you put all those teams in, Chinooks are going home. Right? No need to have them here. We'll resupply with C130s. All right? And I actually moved the last team from a field site to a place that had a 130 strip. And we're like, yes, we're going home next week, right? And Arlo's team gets sent to Bagram. First Americans down there for this place called Tora Bora, right? Because we had to get through the Taliban to get to bin Laden. We know where he is, right? We know he's in the Tora Bor Mountains. They know where he is. Exactly. And so they got out. They take the Delta guys down there, they got two Chinooks, and they are dropping bombs like nobody's business, right? Those mountains glowed for a week after that. And, you know, the guys Went down with three day rucks. Yeah, go down, you know, this thing will be over in two, three days. All right? They get down there, obviously it's going to take longer than that. So we got better supplied. My team, I was in Silver team, they were gold team. We go down and replace them. They come back up. I can stay there for a couple of weeks. Now I'm like, hey, give us three, four weeks, we're fine down here. You guys stay up at K2 and support the teams we'll do, we'll support this Tora Bora mission. So we're doing that and then, you know, he disappears off the radio. Bin Laden, because he's, he's severely injured. And you did the whole thing where he's apologizing to the brothers, you know, I'm sorry I let you down. The Americans are going to get us. And we stopped bombing him because he was off the net for a night and CENTCOM thought he was dead. No, we're all sitting there going, you gotta keep up the pressure, you know. You know, you can lift and shift the bombs as we move into where we think he is, but don't stop, stopped, ceasefire. And he got into Pakistan. And you probably, I don't know if you ever read the book by Dalton Fury was actually a guy named Tom Greer. That name, you know, is out there now. But he was the Delta commander who had bin Laden within small arms range and they were going to kill him. And the Afghans that led them to Bin Laden didn't realize they were going to kill him. And they switched sides and they end up in a little Mexican standoff, you know, where they're all pointing guns at each other. And the Delta guys had to withdraw and Bin Laden got away. And they were pissed. You know, it's all in his book. But so, you know, we continued for a while going into the caves. You know, we did a thing where I had a robot, I lowered out of the aircraft or somebody lowered it while I came to a hover and they controlled the robot up into the caves to see if he was there, but he had slipped away. And you know, interestingly, I can tell you that the aircraft we flew down there on that mission, where he got away was later in life, the aircraft that carried his body out of Pakistan.

[Sean Ryan]

No shit?

[Al Mack]

Yeah. So it's like bookends, I call it. And the funny thing is, is the young captain who was the air mission commander with me in Tora Bora was now a lieutenant colonel and the air mission commander on the one that got him. So he's like, almost like a Forrest Gump. He's in both areas, you know, the same aircraft and kind of a nice, a nice tie in, you know, and.

[Sean Ryan]

But anyway, this is all one deployment.

[Al Mack]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy shit, man.

[Al Mack]

So we get, you know, all these exciting things, very high adventure. We start getting better at what we're doing. The Taliban is, you know, they're starting to hide now. And as a matter of fact, I flew into the guy gave us the embassy back when we went to Kabul. When fifth Group got into Kabul, this little Afghan fellow comes up and he's like, excuse me, would you like your embassy back? What? Come with me. He took him over. The US Embassy that had been abandoned when the Soviets invaded was still there, untouched by the Taliban. There were still copies of Life magazine and newspapers, cigarette ashtrays back in the day. And he'd been taking care of it, you know, a little coat of dust. But he'd been, you know, gardening and doing whatever he did. And the Taliban left it alone for some reason. So he presented Fifth Group with the United States Embassy. And so we're going to reopen it, right? This is December of 2001. Big ceremony, right? General Franks comes in, the CENTCOM commander. So I'm going to fly him, his wife, General Harrell, who was the Afghan overall commander, and you know, a bunch of strap hangers. I'm going to fly them into the embassy. They're going to big ceremony, reopened the embassy officially. Put an ambassador in there. Except I get told, take him in at like 10 in the morning, daylight, right? I'm a night stalker. We fly at night. Why? Because it's safer, you know, if the enemy can't see you. And goggle MVGs weren't prevalent at the time. I prefer to fly at night. And the CENTCOM guys said to my request to fly them at night. I said, let me take them in the night before. Oh, no, no, no, you got to take them in 10 o'clock, you know, scheduled. I said, you're putting a four star general and his wife and a one star at risk. And I no, no, no, the Taliban's gone. I'm like, do you realize I get shot at whenever I leave the wire? I get shot at and it's all big stuff, you know, it's 14.5, 12.7, sometimes bigger, sometimes man pads. And they're like, no, no, no, it's fine, right? And as we saw two years ago, the Taliban is not gone. But so I take off, head into the embassy and I Don't have a choice. And flight of two. And we've got everybody on a headset. So the generals listening in, you know, we're talking, all right, coming left, coming right. You know, speeding up, slowing down, and all of a sudden, my flares go off automatically, right? Because, you know, in the movies, you get a surface air missile fired at you. It's a heat seeker. You know, it's like, oh, a missile. Two o'clock. I'm evading. I'm cutting my heat signature. No, it's more like it goes by and you go, holy crap. It didn't hit us right. So the flares had decoyed it. It went right between me and Chalk Two. So I'm like, hey, was that an inadvertent launch? Because sometimes they go off, you know, for no reason, and it's not a missile. And it's like, oh, yes, sir. It went right between us. Damn it. So the conversation is, all right, missile fired, coming down left. I kind of dropped down. I'm in, like, a creek bed. And I had been doing 120. I speed up to 165, so that's almost 200 miles an hour, about 10ft off the deck. Because what I'm trying to do is put just enough of the subtle terrain between me and any potential follow on shots. Because you have to hyper elevate the thing, get, you know, lock on, get the battery coolant thing going and launch it, right? So I'm trying to do that, and I come into the embassy. I'm doing about 150 as I cross the wall, and I gotta stand this thing up on its end and drop it in. Choc 2 comes in behind me. You know, General's like, oh, thanks for the flight, guys. And like, sir, get out. There's nobody out there yet. I said, sorry, get out. Go to the building to the left. All right, well, have a good day, you know. And he had no idea we had been. I mean, he just didn't know, right? So we take off, and this is actually a funny story. I tell something. So we take off.

[Sean Ryan]

He was on the headset. He didn't.

[Al Mack]

He's on the headset the whole time. Because in the movies, if a helicopter gets shot at, everybody freaks out and they run into each other, right? Which is why I told Jerry Bruckheimer at the 12 strong primary. I said, I hope you didn't do that. Because we are very calm under pressure. He's like, ah, I'd be right. But anyway, so we take off, and I'm over The city of Kabul, right? It's very sprawling, right? It's very densely packed. There's TV antennas everywhere, those old fashioned ones. And I get another surface air missile fired at me. So now I drop down again to do the same thing. I'm like dragging my wheels through the TV antennas. And what do I see in front of me? Hundreds and hundreds of kites. The Taliban, remember, had banned kites. You know, music, you had to have a beard, that kind of stuff. So everybody shaved. When the Taliban fell, kids were flying kites. And the problem with a kite is they like to use fishing line so they wouldn't lose their kite, right? If that gets wrapped around the rotor system and the push pull tubes that move the blades, you lose control of the aircraft and you could crash, right? So you don't want to do that. And there's hundreds of kites above me, right? So there's string and, you know, they're off like this. And I'm trying to see the string. And I'm doing about 150, 160 miles an hour at this point. And I see that. I like to say that there's this one kite, a red kite. It's moving this way. So I move this way. It moves in front of me. I moved this way. And then it wraps around the landing gear as I go by. And I look down and I see this little kid hanging on. And he hangs on for about two miles. What? I'm kidding.

[Sean Ryan]

I was like, what?

[Al Mack]

I'm kidding. That's like a half mile. But so we left. You know, we go up there and. Did you ever see Flight of the Intruder? No, the movie. So the story, it's Vietnam. These guys do a rogue bombing mission in North Vietnam with an A6 intruder. And they fly over what they call Sam City. It's all these surface air missiles they get in there secretly. Except the bombs don't drop, right? They'd forgotten to do something in the cockpit. Oh, I forgot this. And bombs didn't drop. What do we do? And now they're getting shot at like crazy. And the Willem Dafoe says, well, they'd never expect us twice. So they go around, they do it again, right? So here we are, we're back at Bagram. I do pass the word, hey, we should wait till dark before we pick them up. And they're like, no, no, you gotta go get him. I said, then they might wanna drive out. And I told reporter what happened. So my Wayman comes up, got him, Willie. He's Puerto Rican. He's Very, very, very, very thick accent. When he gets excited and he's very animated, he's like, ow, oh my God. Oh wow. Two missiles. Oh my God. And I go, you know, we gotta go back and get the general, right? And he's like, no way. No way are we doing that, right? In that thick accent. And I go, willie, they'd never expect us twice. And he hadn't seen the movie and he said, what? You're nuts. So a couple months later, he saw the movie and called me. He's like, oh, I saw the movie, I got it, I got the line. But that's kind of how it makes sense now. That's how things were, you know, up until really, Operation Anaconda. And that's its own conversation. We can go there if you want.

[Sean Ryan]

Let's go into it.

[Al Mack]

All right, so we've been there seven months. Special operations units, typically, especially the Soar Special operations Aviation regiment is designed to go do a mission and go home, right? You're there long enough to do the mission, get back and reset for the next mission. Well, in this case, we've been dragged out for seven months in a way that we've never been tested before, right? And we're exhausted. I mean, we are absolutely emotionally, mentally, physically exhausted from this whole thing. So the other company's gonna come in A company, I'm with the B company guys right now, and we're gonna do a rip, right? Relief in place. But because we've been operating there, they want us to stay through this conventional operation called anaconda, right? So 82nd Airborne and 101st and they're going to go. They think bin Laden and Zawhiri are down in the Gardes area. So they're going to go in with a big air assault. And the plan is that they're going to put special forces, coalition special forces, not the tier one guys up in the mountains and the key passes for high speed avenues of approach or escape, if you will. And if bin Laden's there and tries to go, they'll be able to call for fire from the overhead platforms to kill him. Right? Well, in the meantime, the Taliban will be in the bottom area and it's Al Qaeda and Taliban elements, right? This is nothing but nasty bad guys. And what's going to happen whether Bin Laden's there or not is there's. So the mountains are considered the anvil, right? And the hammer, if you will. The hammer and the anvil is a special forces group from fifth group, a guy named, I think it was a W3 Harriman was his name. He's leading a convoy of General Zia's forces. Zia's forces are considered some of the best in the country. Afghans. And he's going to lead them down and push the Al Qaeda and the Taliban forces out into the open where the, you know, the coalition guys, you know, so it's the Germans, the French, the, you know, the Norwegians, all these different coalitions are up there in the mountains going to call for fire. The problem is Herriman's identified as an enemy and the AC130 engages him and kills him. 40 millimeter, I believe. I saw the vehicle. It was pretty messed up. There was a lot of stuff going on in Anaconda that was later corrected. No unity of command. The comms were bad. Communications fratricide. Everybody's jamming everything so nobody can talk. So we're jamming our own stuff. And by the way, there was a weather delay of two weeks. So we, the Americans, being the wonderful people, we are, told all of the other organizations, you know, the un, Red Cross, Red Crescent, whatever, other aid organizations, hey, two weeks from now, we're going to come in here with a big battle. You don't want to be here. So of course they tell the locals and the locals now know, and they're all, you know, Taliban or Al Qaeda. And the Russians did a big operation there. At one point, the Soviets. And there was a place called the Whale. It was this big terrain feature, had like mole hills, you know, guys, fighting positions made of stone. And they had all of the potential landing areas for helicopters, essentially range guarded. So you could put a mortar in, you know, dial it in, whatever angle, and you could hit a certain spot and you'd know you'd hit it, right? So anyway, that's for later in the day. But anyway, so Harriman gets killed, Zia's forces turn and flee. Because if the Taliban can kill the American SF guys, because they don't know the AC130 did it, they just know that his vehicle erupted, you know, with 40 millimeter. So now there's no hammer on the anvil. And when the air assault comes in and I just told you, they range carted all the LCs, the 101st is getting their ass handed to them, right? Through no fault of their own. I mean, there's just, there's no. The main focus of the battle hasn't happened. It just disappeared. So they're getting their ass handed to them, you know, the helicopters. Luckily nobody got shot down. You know, Big, big air assault. They go back to Bagram. The infantry is down there, you know, on their heels. There's talk of pulling them out because they're getting their ass handed to them. And my job at that time, we weren't part of it really, other than I had two Chinooks and a group of seals from Devgru and we were the HVT team. So if bin Laden or Zawahiri does show up, it's our job to go schwack them, right? Two Chinooks full of seals. We're going to go kill bin Laden and Zawahiri. After a couple of days, it's obvious that they're not there. So if only we could get eyes on this one big mountain, Tarkugar, that would make up for what the friendly forces didn't accomplish. They'd be able to see terrain now that they could not have seen otherwise. Who could do that? We don't have anybody. They got two Chinooks and a bunch of seals, right? All right, so we're going to do two infills at one time, right? So my wingman's got one group and I've got the other group. So we fly together, we separate at a release point, he drops his guys off. I go to the top of the mountain, Takugar, and I'm gonna. Oh, I should back up. We're supposed to take them to the base of the mountain and they're gonna walk up, right? That's the plan. We split up, we do our thing. They walk up under the COVID of darkness. Except there's B52 strikes coming in on the whale because they're trying to protect all these 101st guys because we still don't have eyes on the key terrain. So every time they're doing the bombing run, I gotta turn back and I'm running out of gas. There is no gas to be had down there. Once I run out of fuel, the aircraft is staying where it is. It's not getting back to Bagram. So go back to Gardes. I shut the aircraft down. And unfortunately, this particular helicopter, which by the way, was the one that got bin Laden's body out of there, when it finally was time to go, you know, they sent me a spare from Bagram and there's a whole story of how that happens. The Razor 01, 0203, that kind of thing. So Razor 01 brings me a spare and he's the QRF. That's his job, right? So he's quick, right? He's gonna come Down. Give me my aircraft. He'll take mine back. The maintenance pilot will fly the damaged aircraft back and they'll fix it and return it to the fight. But now it's 40 minutes to get down from Bagram. And so I say to the team later, I'm like, hey, I'm going to be putting you in at this time at the base of the hill. He's like, al, I can't get up there under the COVID of darkness. You got to take me to the top. And I said, I haven't seen any imagery for the top. I don't even know if there's a place to land. And the troop commander happened to be on the ics and he's like, there's a place up there, it's all open. You should be able to get up there. All right, so Brit Slavinsky is the team leader and he requests a 24 hour bump. He's like, listen, I don't want to go to the top of the hill. I want to do the original plan, but we got to roll 24 to do it right. He gets told, you really need to get up there tonight. He's not told no, but the push is on. I mean, you know what it's like. So he's like, what do you think, Al? I said, all right, I'll give it a try, you know. So we take off as a flight of two, Razor 04 drops off his team and then he goes to a link up area where I'm going to rejoin him. And I tell him, if I don't show up or you don't show up, I'm going to start the clock. Or you start the clock, wait 15 minutes, do a radio search and then leave because you won't have enough gas to get home. Well, you know, you don't know where I am if I don't show up. So get home, we'll find me later. So anyway, we get to the top of the mountain and we land up there and there's nothing happening. And I look off to my right and there's a donkey tied to a tree and a dishka. So it's a 14.5 millimeter anti aircraft machine gun, right? Heavy machine gun. And it's sitting there, nobody's touching it, no people and Slab back then. And this has all changed now. In order to talk to me, he had to be on the aircraft headset to talk to his guys. He had to take off the headset, put his helmet back on with his pelters, and communicate by embitter. Or whatever they were using. Or we passed information with a clipboard that had, like, a glow stick behind it. And you write with a grease pencil and you pass that back and forth. So he was in this transition period, taking his headset off. And I said, hey, tell the team leader keep his headset on. I gotta talk to him. What's up? I said, you got a donkey to the right, you got a machine gun. And then somebody pops up to the left, a guy. And my left gunner sees him and says, sir, we got a guy to the left. I said, is he armed? He said, I don't think so. Because of the Harriman incident the day before, the rules of engagement had changed because the friendly Afghans were everywhere. Now I had to have a hostile act. I've got to be shot at before I can return fire. But there's a caveat to that hostile intent, which is you gotta. That's very subjective. And I said, listen, if he pops up again, kill him. Because if he's friendly, there's no way he's popping up again while we're sitting here. And so Slab says, okay, we're going right. So he takes the headset off, puts his helmet on. While he's doing that, that guy pops up again from a different position. And I watch as an RPG slowly comes at me. It's like in that movie Black Hawk down, they show the RPG sort of like a lava lamp kind of sparking at you coming in. And it was like slow motion, and it exploded just behind me. If the guy had aimed a little bit more to the right, he'd hit the left fuel tank, and we probably would have exploded on the spot. If he'd aimed just a little bit forward, he would have got me, in which case we're not going anywhere. But he hit right at the minigun, and it went through the ammo can and out the other side and exploded in the aircraft. And because the doors were all open, there's not that overpressure. And everybody was just sort of stunned. It's like stars going around, little tweety birds. And all of the electric dies. So there's three electric systems in a Chinook. They're all geographically separated so that you can't one bit of damage can't hit them all. And with the machine gun fire and the rpg, all three lines got hit and all the electrical went out. And the problem with that is the miniguns at that time were AC powered, electric, meaning they run off the aircraft power. Now they run on batteries. They're done.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy shit.

[Al Mack]

You can't shoot, right? So we're now defensive. Everybody's still on board. But I'm wondering, did the seals start getting out? We never talked about that in this particular instance, because usually they'd be, oh, if we start getting off, you gotta stay till we're all off or we get back on. I didn't know what they wanted. And Slab was unconnected, so I couldn't talk to him. And the crew chief in the back way, at the back of the ramp, you know, we're getting hit, and you can hear like, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink. You know, as the bullets are hitting the aircraft, and he's like, you know, fire in a cabin. In a cabin. Go, go, go. And we start. I mean, all right, so I take the controls, and the aircraft still runs. There's just no electricity, right? And we can still talk. That's on the battery. So I rotate and take off. And because the engines are on, like a backup reversion, they call it, they droop a little bit at that altitude. It's like 12,000ft. And so I can hear the droop, meaning I probably lost an engine. So now I know I can't hover with one engine. With only one engine, we're going to drop like a rock back to the thing. So I rotate over and I dive down the mountain, right? 30 degrees, nose load, dive down. What I don't know is that Navy SEAL Neil Roberts is headed toward the back as we're rotating. And the crew chief in the back grabs him like, I got you. And out they go. Neil falls about 12ft to the about hip deep snow. And the crew chief is on a tether, and he's hanging beneath the aircraft. I don't know that, but I'm diving. I'm literally on the treetops because the Dish kid is shooting at us. And so I'm trying to get down below his potential for elevating the gun down. And I don't know, this guy's feet are tickling the fricking trees. And the other crew chief in the back sees him, pulls him up, right? And there's hydraulic fluid everywhere. So it's very slippery back there because the bullets that hit the transmissions and some other things. And the crew chief's telling me, sir, we're okay. The engine's running. You can level off. So now instead of crashing at the base of the hill, I level off about 9,000ft. And they say, sir, we lost a man. Like, what do you mean? You lost a guy. I'm in total denial. I'm like, give me a headcount. Sir, we don't have to give you a headcount. We just watched him fall out the back. Is he alive? Yeah, he looked like he was alive when we left. All right? And like, sir, the guns don't work. I said, test fire the guns like they know the guns don't work. So we're going back to get him. So we circle back around, we start climbing back up 12,000ft, and we get lined up, and we're starting to get lined up in. The controls lock up. We lost all our hydraulic fluid. And you can't move the controls without hydraulic fluid. We're trying to move. My co pilot's trying to move it. And we are just flying it 12,000ft over the battle in the valley below at the whale. I can see tracer fire going both ways. I see explosions and I can't do anything. I can see stars up above. And I was like, hey, guys, I'm sorry, we're done. I can't move the controls. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm not in control. And the guy in the back, the crew chief, there's a little fill port, right? And he opens it up and he pours a can of hydraulic fluid in it. And it's got a little T handle. And he's like pumping this thing like nobody's business. And all of a sudden the controls come alive in my hand. I can feel the thing go. I was like, I have control. And so I turn the aircraft back inbound and we're lined up to land on the top of the ridge. And the controls lock up again. You get about 50 seconds per can of hydraulic fluid. And now I know we're just going to impact on the top of Robert's Ridge. That's the name now. And he puts another can of fluid in there. And I know that there's no way we're going to be able to land there with no guns. And I still got Razor04 out there, right? So he's fully capable. So I'm like, you know what, we're going to turn left. We're going to try to land where RZR04 put the other Mako team. And it's far enough away that the angle of descent, if we lock up again, maybe we'll survive, maybe we won't. I mean, it just depends. But that, that was the intent. So we flew down. We actually went way over them. I Couldn't shorten up the descent. And we ended up coming into this kind of a hilly area, except I couldn't see that in the goggles until I got closer. I just saw flat as far as I could tell. And as we get a little bit closer, you know, he'd put that other, that last can in, and we get down to the bottom. I'm thinking we're going to run out of fluid any minute now. And I can't move the controls. The cyclic, right, the one between my legs, that's the directional control. And we start sliding uncommanded to the right, and I can't stop it. So there's a saying in aviation. Never, never quit flying the aircraft. So I look at where we're headed, and I jam on the right pedal and the nose swings around in the direction of the drift. And now we're going to hit straight on. So at least we got a chance. If we hit this way, we're going to roll over. Boom movie stuff. So we, we hit the ground. I got one more push on this axis and I do it. And we settle on a slope that's about, I don't know, 15, 20 degrees right side high and about 15 degrees nose high. So the aircraft's kind of sitting up like this. Pull the engines offline, hit the rotor brake, stop them in one revolution. And I actually. So our commander at the time is an ex Delta guy that went to flight school, ended up as our commander, and we'll call him Joe Gorst. Not his real name, but it's close. And he used to do these things called Gorst games. And he would have us in training do shoot downs. So you'd go do some mission. I'd fly up to Cleveland from Fort Campbell, air refueling on the way up. On the way back, I'd come back and I'd say, hey, go land at Fagl DZ out on the range, right? So I go land out there. And they'd have to shut down the aircraft. They'd give me a little envelope. You've been shot down, you're in enemy territory, go to these coordinates to link up with, you know, whatever. And then there were guys there to fly the aircraft back so that we'd be out there three or four days walking in the woods, doing escape, invasion, survival, that kind of stuff. So we called these things the gore schemes. So we hit the ground, rotor brake stop. And I'm like, holy crap, we're alive. You know, there's a couple points there I didn't think we were Going to survive. And I say, not another fricking gorst game, right? And I hit all the switches that destroy the computers and. Which is funny, I got a coin from the NSA for doing that. I kind of joke. I should have left it because it was such a mess, the software that we could let the Chinese re engineer it and they'd set them back 20 years. But anyway, I did. I, you know, I zeroed my com sac and destroyed the mission computers and all that kind of stuff. So get out. Slabinsky, Chapman, you know, the cct, they're out there, they're already talking, they've set up a perimeter. We've got an M60 machine gun still and you know, he's talking to the AC130. He goes, Razor 04 is on the way. You know, they know where we are now and they're headed our way. I was on the ground about 45 minutes and they're like, hey, we're gonna, you know, I get my GPS out, I plot the map where we are. And Slab's like, all right, you guys stay here, we're going. I'm like, where are you going? The top of the hill. I'm like, we're a good 10km away. You're not getting up there right now. He's like, no, it's right there. I'm like, no, it's that one. Because we'd flown a good three minutes at 100 miles an hour, we got a pretty good distance away. So he's like, oh, what about Razor 4? Can they take us up there? And I said, I don't know what he's got for gas. I don't know his lift capability. So he gets there and he says, listen, I can't take all of you at once. Like as in my air crew and the seals back to the top. So Slab's like, can you guys just stay here and we'll come back and get you? And I said, yeah, but you know, we're all air crew here. And though I am good with my weapon, I don't know what's going on ground guy wise, right? And so I said, can you spare somebody? Don't if you can't. And he looks around and he was going to give us Chapman because, you know, CCT guy would be good to defend our position, except they got in a fight. You know, John doesn't want to be left behind. He wants to go. So now I'm embarrassed that I even asked. I'm like, just go, go, go. We'll be all right. You know, so like, all right, but higher command says you're not leaving the air crew there. There's enemy combatants headed that way. The ACN 30 was supposed to engage them, except we got out of there before they had to. They go back to Gardes, they download all their and they head back to the top of the mountain. Meantime, I'm at the FOB waiting for them to do it. So they, you know, Jethro re infills them. And there's a whole problem with the AC130, you know, at the time, you know, these guys, I love them later on in life, but this particular time frame, I got nothing nice to say about them. Because they'd killed Harriman and because they had the fratricide, they wouldn't shoot on top of Robert's Ridge. So when Jethro is trying to put them in and Razor04, they're supposed to be pre assault fire, but they know there's a friendly up there. But we also know where the bad guys are and we're like, hit the bad guy position. It's like, well, there's a friendly up there, we're not gonna shoot. And then they agreed to shoot, but they didn't. So when Jethro comes in, he's taking heavy fire from the dishka.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn.

[Al Mack]

And so he breaks off and he comes around the mountain and he's like, you've got to put fires down on that or I'm not going to get out of there. And the guy's like, yep, yep, approved. And they come in and they fly up the mountain, like almost like a go plat kind of thing. They kind of come in, they drop up and they drop in and the AC doesn't shoot. There's. I know now they were fighting in the aircraft about whether they should support or not, but the aircraft commander, because they killed the friendly the day before, just wasn't having it. And so they get him in, they do their thing and I'm not going to tell their story because that's their story to tell. But Jethro comes back to Gardes, the aircraft flames out, he has no gas left at all. The engines quit when he lands. He lands and it's like that aircraft's not going anywhere and it's full of holes, right? There's computers and wire bundles and parts of aircraft that have holes in them that shouldn't have holes. And it's. It took a couple days actually to repair it, to get it even flyable back to Bagram. But the people at Bagram don't know that. They just think it's out of gas. So there's some confusion at Bagram as they try to put an internal tank on to fly it down to us to put gas in it to return it to the fight. And then I get on the phone and I call back to the talk and I'm like, hey, that aircraft's out of fight. Oh, all right, pull the refuel tank back off. Right? So now there's all this confusion of what's going on. And so Razor01, who had brought me the spare, has just arrived back at Bagram and he's told, qrf's got a launch, we got guys on the mountain. Al has been shot down. So the Rangers, Nate Self and his guys get on Razor 01 and 02 and they head right back, except they think they're coming to me at the Chinook where I crashed, right? And they actually flew by me. Isn't that Al's aircraft? Why are we going this way? Why are these coordinates somewhere else? And they don't really know what's going on yet because we haven't been able to talk. So the flight lead decides that he doesn't know what's going on, he's getting conflicting information. So he sends Razor 02 to Gardes to just sort of let him sort things out and maybe talk to me in person. So they come in, I go run over the aircraft, fill them in, and right about the time Razor 01 gets there, the AC130 leaves and he takes an RPG to the right engine. So if you imagine the mountain like this, I was on this side of the mountain and was able to take off and dive down. He's on this side of the mountain, starting to flare for landing. He loses his engine and he pancakes on this side, so he doesn't have the distance to dive over. He's on the objective. Heavy machine gun fire. The Rangers take heavy casualties and the air crew is all shot to pieces. Our friend Phil Svitak, the flight engineer, is shot just below the body armor and he dies on his gun defending the aircraft. The co pilot, after the fact, turns out he had like, I don't know, five or six rounds in his armor right at his heart. Didn't penetrate. He got shot in the hand like he went. He got his M4 out of the mount and he goes like this to fight with it. And his hand is limp. And once again, that's their story to tell. But. So in the meantime, I'm down at Gardes and we're building speed balls for them like ammunition, rocks, water, that kind of stuff. And the idea is they're going to fly over with a good Chinook and they're going to just kick the stuff out, at least resupply them because they don't have a lot of stuff. It's only half of a Ranger squad. The other half's in Razor 02. And four of them were killed on impact, right? And the crew is all injured. Every one of them except one has been shot. You know, only one died, but the rest of them are seriously injured. And it turns out everything on top of the mountain kind of settles down. And we're gonna go. The guys are gonna go get him, not me. I'm down at the FOB and they're gonna go get him in the daylight. And then somebody comes up around the backside, shoots them up with a machine gun from further than they can shoot their M4s. And that's when Cunningham is hit the PJs and Nate Self tune commander is on the radio and is like, we have another one hit. You gotta get Kazovak here or we're gonna lose a guy right now. And I remember when that happened, I looked over at the CIA guys and I said, they looked at me like I knew what was going to go on. And I said, they're not going to launch another aircraft. We just lost three aircraft in the same lz. They're not going back till dark. And like, but that guy's going to die. And I said, another aircraft, seven crew members on board, maybe Rangers. They're going to wait till dark. And that's what they did. They told him no, he couldn't have an aircraft and know Cunningham did die on the mountain there. So we also had intercepts that the Taliban knew that the air crew were at gardes and that all of the shooters had left with the British Chinooks and they're getting ready to do a rescue, right? That's the daylight rescue that we're thinking is going to happen. And so here's this convoy coming and the guy that was in charge of the FOB it was an alias. He called himself Hal, who he met. It was like, hal, Hal, Hal, Hal. And he's like, what kind of weapons do you have? I said, well, we all got long guns. We all have, you know, six, seven magazines of ammo. We have ammo ruck on each aircraft with, you know, 10, 15 magazines in there. We had AT4s, each aircraft had one and we each had at least an M60 so he's like, all right, we can put up a 400 bolt defense, let's go. So he, like something out of a movie almost, he walks me around and tells me how we're going to do the defense, right? So I go out to the aircraft with my GPS and I mark the distance so we can do a range card and we're prepared to defend the Alamo, essentially. And they rigged the back wall to blow out because they figured they'll attack the front gate. And we had the, you know, Hilux trucks and stuff and there was a big pit with all the ammunition and explosives for the FOB under a tarp. And he's like, all right, here's when we decide to leave. This guy's going to blow the wall. He says, I need you to climb under the tarp and here's the trigger. You pull that, it's a time delay and you come, run, get in here. And we're going to drive as fast and as far as we can go. And I'm like, oh man, I'm not cut out for this. And luckily for us, the AC130 did engage them and the convoy turned back. So we never had to find out if I could do that or not. But here's the next part of the story. They do the nighttime X fill, they pull the kias off. So we've got Rangers, Neil Roberts, they found, you know, the 160th crew member and they've put them as respectfully as they can on the floor. They've been, you know, rigor mortis and freezing up there, so it's hard to place them nicely. And they take up a lot of space. And that aircraft is sent to pick me and my crew up. And the crew of razors are four, I'm told, be at 8 o'clock, be on HLZ, Gavin, right? The problem is a reporter is driving through gardes or a car full of reporters and they go through a checkpoint and a guy throws a hand grenade into the car and it explodes. Doesn't kill anybody. But the journalist, the woman who I've since talked to is she's going to die, right? So they drive her to the fob. Just so happens they come up before, you know, about 7:00, maybe 7:30. And the weatherman comes in and he's like, sir, sir, we got the journalist. You know, grenade. You know, I got it, I got it. You know, get the medic, right? So I had one of our medics with us and 1/60 medic and he's working on her. And I get another phone call, make sure you're out there, you know, in the landing zone. They are going to be low on gas, and I mean low. Right. Okay. Usually we exaggerate the gas thing a little bit, but he's working on her, and I mean, her thigh is shredded. She's in bad shape, and he's working on her. And I was like, all right, guys, look, if he can't stabilize her in time, you go, I'll stay here with him, so at least he's not alone. And then I'm on him. What do you think, Doc? He's like, I'm working on it, sir. You know, I'm like, I just need to know, you know, I mean, do we go here? Are we going to be here? They need to know. And he's like, I think I almost got her. You know? So he does stabilize her. The other guys are out in the lz. We jump in a Hilux truck. There's a minefield. You know, luckily, the driver kind of knows where it is, or he thinks he does, and he's kind of weaving through it, you know, at like five miles an hour in the dark. And we get there as the helicopter lands, and I've got all of the miniguns, the comsec, all the sensitive items, that kind of stuff, code books or whatever you want to call it. And everybody's getting on board, and I'm the last one, and I'm feeding equipment up the ramp, right? And the crew chief is yelling at me, sir, we've gotta go. We've gotta go. We're out of gas. I'm like, you're running. You're not out of gas? And he's like, no, come now. And I got the last minigun on board. I climbed on, and there was nowhere to go because my flight engineer had gone on board, tripped on one of the bodies, fell on top of his good friend, face to face, you know, and realized who that was. And he. He would go no further. He got up, he snapped his vest into the side of the aircraft, you know, where you can snap in and nobody could go any further forward. So now I had nowhere to go. So I. I see one little spot, and I kind of shimmy myself in next to one of the guys. Ramp comes up, they take off, off. And as I'm sitting there, I realize that's Neil Roberts, and I wear thigh to thigh, you know, in the back on the floor. And I look at him, and I was like, the luminescent Dots on his watch. His watch was kind of going like this. And I was like, is he alive? I mean, he was obviously dead. But my mind was playing tricks in the blue light, you know, that was in the aircraft. And then we almost did. We did run out of gas, actually. We were landing at A. The 101st had set up a fart for us, except it was super dusty where they set it up and the guys did it, went in, did a go round, did a go around, did a go round. And I'm thinking, we're going to run out of gas. I'm going to be in the middle of the desert, you know, with all the Kias and you know, out of the frying pan into the fire. And they get on the ground and the number one engine flames out. That's the one on the left, just like the other RZR did. They get plugged in, the other engine's still running. They have different amounts of fuel in them intentionally so that one will quit before the other. And they got it going, they restarted the engine. We flew back to Bagram and we got off. Now Bagram, we always used to joke was so dark. It was Bagram dark, you know, if you. Because you didn't have a real good light because you afraid of getting shot because there was no fences and stuff back then. And so you had like a little LED light, you know, and you'd actually lose your balance because you didn't have enough reference. But we get there and we're at this well lit airfield and everybody's looking at me like, sir, where are we? I have no idea. I've never been here before. I think we're in to Kabul, right? And finally, you know, they take all the KI's off, take them to the hospital or wherever. They took a morgue. And I asked somebody, hey, where are we? And they're like, where at Bagram? I'm like, where at Bagram? The airfield? That's the tower. I just never seen the lights on before. They turned on the lights to make it easy for everybody. So I'm like, guys, we're at Bagram. So we grabbed all our stuff, threw all the heavy equipment in a truck, and walk back what they call Disney Highway. It's this dirt road now. It's like an eight lane highway that the Taliban's using. And we get to the compound and we're walking into the ops tent first to check in, let him know we're back. And it was just so surreal to walk in. Like everybody stopped. There was no Talking, you know, you could hear the fans of the computers, and that was it. And I was like, I'm, you know, back. You know, he gets them a couple of hugs, and then we got a debrief and that kind of stuff. And then what sucked is the next day the guys went out to do a vehicle interdiction. They thought everybody was telling you about FOB Shkin, right? They think this has bin Laden, and it ends up not be. But the guys had just flown the entire package except me and one of the other aircraft had flown and like, hey, Al, there's a blizzard coming. Weather just told us it's going to be here for a couple of days. If we don't get the SF teams out of the mountains, they will die from exposure because there's no way down. They were put in places where they couldn't get down. Can't somebody else do it? The other guys had flown that day. There's you and the other aircraft, right? I was like, all right, I'll do it, right? And I did not want to go back out there again.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy shit.

[Al Mack]

Here's the worst part. So there's all these teams, right? The last team to come out, you.

[Sean Ryan]

Just landed and like, yeah, back out.

[Al Mack]

Well, it was the next morning, right? So I got a little bit of sleep. It's daytime when they do the vi, so really I got maybe two hours of sleep. And the. We got to get these guys out. And the other guys had flown, and I said, all right, so there's a plan on how we're going to get them out of sequence, because we'll take the lightest teams out first, and we will have burned off gas each time, or it may not be that. Maybe the elevation that makes a difference. So we had this plan. The very last team to come out was going to be the German team. And here we are getting ready to launch. And the intel guy comes in and says, sir, the German team says they have armed Taliban on the perimeter with RPGs. And so the AC130 planner is there, the colonel. And I said, sir, you need to kill them. He's like, well, I can't. I'm like, you can't? I said, tell the team to mark their position with strobes. Anything within 200 meters, you kill it. It's not hard. And they're like, we can't. You know, how do we know that you know they're armed? I said, they have eyes on them, right? So I'm at this guy's throat, and everybody's Just in shock. I think I was a CW3 at the time. I got this guy on his heels. I'm pushing him back, like, you will kill them. You're gonna do this. And the commander steps in between us. He's like, ow, Al, it's okay. It's going to be okay. I was like, oh, it's easy for you to say back here. I just did this and got shot down, and you want me to go back to the same situation with the same AC130 and you won't kill the bad guys? And he was all pissed off. I'll go with you. I'll go with you. I'll go. Screw you. So we take off, and the Germans never get engaged, but we're headed toward them. And here's the part that really pisses me off. We're like, six minutes out. Call the C130, you know, hey, you know, raiser 03. Six minutes. Roger. Six minutes. Hey, listen, we're. We're gonna RTB going back to Masira. What? Yeah, we have to be back on the ground by sunup. I'm like, I'm six minutes out. You mean, you tell me you can't hang out for 10 minutes? You know, I'm sure you can get back to Massira, you know, 10 minutes after the sun comes up. And, like, nope, gotta go. Same thing they did for Taka Gar and I, these conflicting emotions. And I didn't know what to do. And my. My co pilot was another flight lead. Ahmed is his nickname, because of his. How he looks, you know, in that part of the world. What an amazing guy. And he did what no one else could do. He shamed them into staying. And we picked up the Germans. The Taliban had moved away when they heard the helicopters, they didn't want to get engaged. And we brought them back uneventful. And then the next night, the new company came in, we did a little handshake. We flew back to Bagram, back to K2. They took over, and we went back home. And I was back again in July for another rotation.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn, Al. Holy shit.

[Al Mack]

And the story's important in that the rest of my special operations career and what I put in the book here is a family situation that developed, right? So while I'm at Gardes, the CIA guys that are running the thing go, hey, here's a sat phone. You need to call your wife, because this is about to hit cnn, you know, they've got word they're about to air this. I'm like, I can't. You Know, because it's. Here's. Here's the headline. Two Chinooks shot down, eight killed, each crew of four on two Chinooks. There's only two teams of two. I'm the primary flight lead. It's likely to be me by my wife's math. And I said, I can't. That's not how notification works. And all the wives kind of knew something was up and they were hanging out at the commander's house just like they did during Black Hawk Down. And think about it. If I called her, even if she didn't tell anybody that I was okay, they would know because everybody else is on pins and needles. Maybe it's my husband. Maybe it's my husband and I had been in a Desert Storm. Remember I talked about the aircraft that hit the antenna? One of the captains called back to his wife to say it wasn't me, and he might have even said who it was. And that word got out in the wives network and families were notified unofficially before the actual official notification could occur. So I took one for the team, if you will, and did what I was supposed to do. I didn't call my wife. And so for roughly two days, she thought I was dead because they didn't know who it was. And she was convinced it was me. And when I finally get back to Bagram after the debrief, I call her on the landline and she's like, you mean, why didn't you call me? And I was like, I can't. You know, I can't. She never forgave me for that. And it tied into all of the family problems we had after that.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn, man.

[Al Mack]

You know?

[Sean Ryan]

Do you regret not calling her?

[Al Mack]

No. It was the right thing to do. I mean, could you imagine being the family that does get notified, you know, it definitely is your husband, you know.

[Sean Ryan]

What kind of family problems?

[Al Mack]

Well, over the course of 17 deployments, so roughly 10 years, my wife Linda had a prescription opioid addiction, right? So remember she had a suicide attempt when I was in Korea years before. She was doing really well. She was being a great sport with the whole 911 thing, not knowing where I was and not hearing from me, that kind of stuff. But then, you know, we have this thing where she thinks I'm dead and I don't call her, so she takes it personal that I don't call her. And, you know, it's not like this terrible thing that happens, but it's underlying for the entire 10 years, right? As she gets worse with her prescription and doctor shopping so I'm deploying because I'm a flight lead, I'm deploying a lot. And like I said, I was back that summer and then I did like a three month deployment, came back for a month, went for Christmas. And then so she's dealing with all this and we're shorthanded, you know, and the aircraft are few and far between because, you know, on tf in the very beginning they got like three aircraft shot to pieces and you know, we had ours damaged. So things are challenging and I'm still doing it. And because I'm the flight lead, the senior flight lead at that matter, I've got to continue deploying. And she's, she's pretending she's okay, she's trying to be okay, she's trying to support me. I kind of know maybe things aren't right, but I'm choosing to believe that she can do it right. And there were deployments where she did well and other ones that were a little tougher. And then as we lost friends, I lost 23 friends over the course of 10 years that are on the wall. And it's hard, you know, because you lose one Chinook that's, you know, potentially four, five, six guys, you know, Red Wings. My good friend Trey Ponder, you know, was killed. And that one kind of pushed her over the edge because she knew him personally, you know, the other guys, she knew who they were, but she didn't know him personally. You know, he, he was killed trying to rescue the four man team. But her problem just got worse over time and, you know, it got to the point where I like to say that. So when Bo Burgall walked off his fob, we did everything we could to save him, right? I mean, we were, you know, I remember the ground force was pissed this guy's a traitor or whatever, but he's an American citizen and it's going to be a problem if he gets into Pakistan, right? So we're going to go rescue him. We're doing all this stuff. I get some pretty amazing stories actually. Asante's story I can tell you about later if we have time. But we're flying every night. We're just missing him. Like the intel is just a half step behind. So we're showing up at buildings he's been in. We find his T shirt one place, we find his underwear, his socks, you know, some DNA if you will. And we're just a little bit behind and the Taliban is going old school. They're not, they're not using phones. It's Couriers, it's all courier network. And so we're doing vehicle interdict, we're blowing these motorcycles up with the miniguns, trying to stop these guys. But it's time for me to go home. My replacement gets there and I kind of want to stay, but I know I got to get home. I've been long deployment and so I fly down to Kandahar, we're in customs. Very insulting. I hate that, that I have to go through customs. But every once in a while you get some jerk puts a grenade in his suitcase, thinks he's going to sneak at home. So we all have to now get our bags searched. So I'm down there, the MPs are walking through my stuff, the customs officer, and there's a phone call. Is there a CW5 Mac in the room? What? Chief Mac, you out there? Yeah, right here. Right. So I'm thinking it's my wife having a meltdown, like just as I'm coming home. And I get on the phone and it's the officer in charge at Sharana, at our task force. And he's like, al Chad, my replacement, had a heart attack and he died. He. You know, serana's at like 6,000ft MSL. This guy used to be a ranger. One of those guys, right? He's a marathoner. He's in great shape. Crossfitter. He goes to the gym right there at Sharana. As I'm leaving, he comes back just before the duty day begins. He sits down on the couch in the planning area in front of a couple guys, has a little seizure, foams at the mouth and his heart stops. Falls on the ground. He does it in front of our flight medic and two pilots who also were rangers when they were younger that were medics, and they do CPR on them. And right next door to us, by the way, is what we call the srt, the Surgical Resuscitation Team. This is four high speed emergency room doctors that can augment anything. They can crack your chest in the helicopter, right? That's what these guys are for. So they're working on them. They throw them in the back of a truck. They're working on him. They're hitting him. Boosh. Clear. He codes four times. He actually lives to this day. He's running marathons on what's left of his heart.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Al Mack]

But I have to come back. So they send a helicopter to get me. They bring me back. I do that night's mission. And now there's no replacement for me. He was it, right? We're wearing thin. So now I gotta call my wife and say, I know you expected to see me tomorrow. I gotta stay another 120 days. And so in the book, there's a title there. I call it Borgdahl Tips the Scales. That's literally if you could put a mark on the wall, that's when she, you know, she may have been having some trouble maybe swirling the bowl a little bit, that picked up the pace, you know, and life got to be hell for her and my family at that point. And so I did the rotation. The unit did the best they could to help her. Like, she started cutting herself intentionally. Shit. And the unit commander would take. Come over, take her to the hospital. The chaplain was involved, but they didn't tell me.

[Sean Ryan]

They didn't tell you.

[Al Mack]

They didn't tell me. She didn't want them to. This is the power she had. She was able to convince you that it's going to be okay. You know, let him do his thing. We know that, you know, there's no one else to do it. Who's going to do it? You know, that seems to be the case. And a lot of the things I do is, well, who's going to do it? Might as well be me, right? And so once again, in order to save someone else's family from going through the same thing, you know, being gone that much longer, I did it. That was probably a mistake in hindsight, but, you know, I get back, and now we'd also been in Yemen. We did a couple of things. So like, that year, I was gone, like 300 days that year on multiple operations around the globe. And, like, what year was this? Well, mostly Afghanistan, but we did some stuff in Africa and Yemen. I can't talk about what year. Oh, what year? I guess maybe 2009. Maybe. I'd have to look. I'd have to look in a book. Might have been 2009. Ish. Maybe 10.

[Sean Ryan]

And you did stuff in Yemen and Africa and Afghanistan?

[Al Mack]

Yeah. So I'd go from one to the other to the other, and then that was over a holiday. So, you know, my poor wife, you know, she told me she was okay, you know, and I could tell she wasn't, but I had to think that she could pull through. And there was, like, one night, I'm on the iridium phone, I'm talking to her, and it's like we're having a separate conversation. She's at my mom's house. I said, all right. She went to my mom's house up in New Hampshire. Everything's going to be okay. She's with family. And I call her just to check in, and she starts having a conversation. She's like, in front of my mother, I can hear her side of the conversation. She's talking to me. She's like, oh, baby, don't cry about what? She's having a conversation that isn't happening. Like, in her mind. This is what's happening to her head at this point, with the alcohol and the meds, she was withdrawing from methadone, and she'd have hallucinations, and she could have conversations and experiences that didn't actually occur. So I was pissed because I'm fine. I don't want my mother thinking there's things worse going than they are. And so I hang up on her. And I walk back into the planning area, and one of the guys says something stupid to me, has nothing to do with this, but something he shouldn't have said. And I let off on everybody. I was like, this place. We weren't flying that night. I was like, this place is a pigsty. The plan. I said, get those TVs up on the wall. We had the big monitors that we hadn't put up yet. And I said, sweep the floor. It's all dirty, you know, and you do this and you do this and you do this, and everybody's just kind of looking, what happened to him? Right? And so the major, the oac, comes up and says, al, are you okay? I'm like, no, I'm not okay. And he goes, well, let's talk outside. So we start heading outside, and as we go out the door, you know how all the doors had, like, the sandbags on the string to bring them back closed. So I go out, and the damn thing catches as I'm opening it, and I'm sort of turning around as I'm doing it, and I step on the lower step and I fly backwards onto my back, onto the crushed rock on the ground, right? And I hit with a thud like a sack of potatoes. And the major's like, al, are you okay? I'm like, no, I'm not okay. I just flew 12ft and landed on my back, you know? And luckily, that was enough to kind of expend the situation. But I still didn't tell him what was wrong. And so by the time I got back from that, the colonel already kind of knew the battalion commander that something was wrong with me, you know, maybe ptsd. Maybe I was just worn out. So he assigned me to the training company Green Platoon. And I became the platoon leader for the Chinook section. And here's where my life turned to hell. So here I get this. Now I'm home, and I can see what my wife Linda is doing. And I tell her, you're drinking too much. You're driving while you're drunk. You're going to aa, right? I'm going to fix this. I'm home now. We're going to fix this. And she says, okay. And so she drives off to aa and she doesn't come home. So I'm calling her phone. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Finally, two in the morning, the phone gets answered. It's a deputy sheriff. He's like, I'm not supposed to be answering this. Who's this? I'm like, this is Alan Mack. Who are you? Right? He said, well, I'm a sheriff's deputy at the jail. Your wife was arrested for driving while intoxicated. So she had been drinking at the AA meeting, and she was too drunk to drive, and they called the cops on her, and she got arrested at the AA meeting and left her car behind. So I took a cab out, got her car, brought it back. And, you know, at that point, I was like, you're going to rehab. You know, we're gonna fix this. And there's a whole, you know, it's about two years, really worth maybe a year and a half of this insanity of dealing with somebody you love and thinking you can. You can cure it, you know, thinking you can control it. But if I left the house, she had vodka hidden everywhere. Could be like in the. In the cushions of the thing. And she was augmenting her opioid medications, which were prescription. And her behavior was becoming more and more radical. Radical as in we get in a fight one time, and she's like, go ahead, hit me again. I never hit her. Ever. And she's like, hit me again. I'm like, what? And she's like, you know, like last time. Except this time my doctor has pitch or my lawyer has pictures from last time. I'm like, what are you talking about? It was like something out of a Law and Order episode.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn, man.

[Al Mack]

And she's like, remember the last time you beat me? You know, my lawyer took pictures, or the doctor took pictures, gave me the lawyer, and they're in a safe. We don't have a lawyer. You know, we don't even have a regular doctor. It's Tricare, and we definitely don't have a safe. So I end up calling 911 on her, and she calls it on me, right and they show up and I, they ask where to send her. And I said, send her to the on post hospital. We've been doing the off post hospital. Maybe these guys can do something different, you know, different set of eyes. So they go, they convince her to go to, you know, rehab. She does. And it works for a little bit, about two weeks, I think when she got out and she went to rehab, some form of it, I don't know, six or seven times to the point where the final time she did it and got drunk again. After that, I went to Tricare and said, hey, we don't have any benefits. We've used them up. And they said, yeah, Tricare's not gonna pay for this. I said, if you don't get her into the hospital, she'll be dead in less than a month. And like, sorry, sir, we can't, can't do anything. And I'd gotten a big fight with her where I saw her driving. Like I came home early for lunch or something. And she drove up and I saw her at the stoplight. You know, eyes are open, lights out, you know, she's just sitting there and didn't see me. And, you know, she turns down the road, I follow her, I get to the house, we have it out, you know, but you can't argue with a drunk. And it just doesn't work out. And I'm like, stop drinking. When I get home tonight, you know, we'll talk, right? And I said, if you're drunk again, there's going to be a problem. And I don't know what that meant, but I was mad. I go back to work, I head home. She's passed out on the bed. And as I walk in the door, the phone rings and it's my company commander. I was like, al, where are you? Like, well, you called my house, I'm obviously at home. He's like, how's your wife? You know, he thinks I've gone on and dumped something to her. I said, well, she's passed out on the bed. She had taken my alert roster and called all down the alert roster telling people to tell me not to come home because it wouldn't be a good idea.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy shit.

[Al Mack]

So now it's in the open, right? It is. No kidding. I mean, a couple people knew before, but now it is wide open. So I grabbed my dog, I grabbed a bunch of stuff, changed clothes, grabbed my two bicycles, you know, my guns, put them in the truck and I go get a hotel and I move out. And I end up staying out of the house for about two weeks now. In the meantime, what did help, I kind of skipped ahead. Here is I went to the regiment psychologist to ask for help, which I didn't do soon enough. I don't think they were very helpful, but I didn't do it nearly early enough. And they steered me toward the Al Anon family group. So it's like aa, but for the family members. Right. And they teach you, you didn't cause it, you can't cure it, you can't control it. And the idea is to get your own feelings under control so that you. If you can help the other person, great. But if you're a wreck, you're not helping them. It's like trying to help a drowning swimmer. When you're drowning.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Al Mack]

You know, you gotta. Gotta get ready first. So they were very helpful and they all convinced me, look, you gotta move out of the house. You can't stay there and enable it. So I did. And where are your sons at? So they're deployed. My son in the Navy is actually at Vacape, Virginia Beach. And my younger son was a Chinook crew Chief in the 160th. And he's in Afghanistan already. Yeah. Yeah. So he'd already done a couple of deployments by this time. So this is 2012. When this finally.

[Sean Ryan]

So they. So your sons didn't have to. It wasn't like a rough home life for them.

[Al Mack]

What I didn't know. They kind of bailed out before. It was like they knew what was going on before I did. Right. And she made them promise not to tell me because she'll get it under control and, you know, they'll bring, you know, him home, and then someone else will have to do it. You know, all this big circle of events, like, they tried. I'm not gonna talk. They don't want me to tell about a certain story. But they tried like hell to get her help, and then when they couldn't, they moved out. Damn. My youngest. My oldest son joined the Navy and, you know, flies F18s. He's a wizzo. And then the other one, you know, joined, became crew chief. And I actually helped get him into the 160th because I didn't want him flying in a conventional unit because even though we're, you know, maybe facing the enemy more often, we're much better prepared and equipped for it. So I. If he was going to be doing it, I wanted him to be with us, you know, and the, you know, the chaplain and the. The psychologists were very helpful. The command Was very supportive once they knew what was going on. And once again, I should have told them sooner, but I didn't. I thought I could hide it, I thought I could fix it. And I hear this, I get this. I get emails from guys. They'll read my book or listen to it on the audible and they'll find my email address on the website and they'll write me these wonderful emails about. I had the same problem. I thought I was alone, you know, thank you for sharing that. And you know, it doesn't make things any easier, but you know, if we can help somebody in the process. Which is why I'm okay with talking about it now. I mean, it's hard to talk about, but it is important.

[Sean Ryan]

I'm sorry you had to go through that, man.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, well, thank you. Me too. But you know, how is steel made? You know, in the forge of the fires. Right. So the command was very, very supportive, you know, and they sent me off. They said, you have whatever job you want. They even were going to create a job where I would be essentially a goodwill ambassador. I could represent the unit with all of the supported units. I could go hang out with them, I could deploy if I wanted. I could fly with them if I want or not. I mean, that's how support supportive they were. And I was like, I just got to get out of here, you know. And there were really two jobs that I was interested in. One was at Fort Rucker, Alabama, the asdat, the Aviation Shoot Down Assessment Team. So if somebody gets shot down, a team goes there. Like when an airliner crashes, like the ntsb, and you figure out what happened. You do the forensics on it. You figure out what could have maybe been different and then. And recommend fixes or changes in tactics or whatever. So that was. I would have been the chief of that division. Or there was this job at West Point, the flight attachment commander. But that's nominative. Like you have to throw your name in. The superintendent gets to pick. And there was an opportunity to go up to Manhattan to unveil the horse soldier statue on ground zero. And because I had flown them, they asked for me to come up and help unveil the statue, which is a horse back on his legs with a Green Beret on it with an M4. It's a pretty, pretty neat statue. It's there now if you ever get down there or up there. But I get there, I'm thinking, hey, New York's not too bad. It's pretty. It was a good time of year. September, and I threw my name in the hat. The superintendent picked me. I got the assignment at go learn how to fly Lakota helicopters, uh, 72s. And then I end up up there. But. And that in itself takes me to a good. The good place that I am now. But, yeah, there's a lot of other stories in the middle of that, you know, you can find them in the book. I know we've gone a long time, so, I mean, I can keep talking or you can go to the next phase here, or. What do you want to do?

[Sean Ryan]

How did it go with your wife?

[Al Mack]

Well, she. So I move out of the. Out of the house, in a hotel with the dog and. Which I still have. That dog's 16 years old. Little jacoby dog. And she makes one final call to me, says, I want you to come home. And I said, I can't. The commander tells me I can't go home. The psychologist says I shouldn't and said, if you don't come home, I'm going to kill myself. And I said, you don't have anything lethal in the house? Because I was dropping by every day to check the mail and just. She was always passed out, so she didn't even know I was there. And the next morning, I was out looking for a house, a new apartment, so I didn't have to stay in the hotel. I called, called and called, and. And she'd been texting me and calling me every day, three or four times a day. Come home, come home, come home. Not until you're sober, you know, and said, I need help. I said, Call 911. Let them take you to the hospital, and I'll come support you, but I'm not doing it until you do that. And she didn't. And then. So I went back to the house. 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon, I dialed up my oldest son. I said, hey, I don't know what's going on here, but I want. You know. She says things about me. So I'm gonna put you on speaker. I'm gonna put you in my pocket. I'm gonna. You know, you just listen in, right? So I walk in. He's on the phone, listening. House is quiet, nothing going on. I walk back to the room, the bedroom. I don't see her. Air conditioner's on full. And then I see she's on the floor under a blanket. So I'm like, all right, she's on the floor here. So I pull the blanket up, and she is. Her skin color is gray and blackish. She's dead. And so I call, I say, you know, Steven, I'm sorry to tell you this. Your mom's not alive. I gotta call 911. So he hung up. Kind of a crappy way to go there on the phone. And I called 911 and the operator says, are you sure she's dead? I'm like, look, I've done a lot of combat deployments. I know what a dead person looks like. Are you sure? Can you roll her over? So rigor was in her arms like this, and I had to, like, they were like outriggers, you know? And I tried to, no, she's dead. All right, we'll go out front, wait for the police, right? So they were there in, like, a minute because they'd been waiting for her, trying to catch her car because they knew she was out driving around drunk, and they were trying to catch her in the act. So the cops were actually, like, set up an ambush, if you will, on both ends of the road. And they got there and did their thing. And, you know, the medical examiner came and they bagged her up, brought her out into Stokes. You know, the neighbors were all around, and it was. It was kind of. It was heart wrenching to hear these neighbors because they thought they could fix her, right? So they knew we were having problems because when I was gone, she was bizarre behavior. And they were sworn to secrecy. They told me about this all afterwards. Oh, she made us promise not to tell because you were doing combat missions and such. And they're like, we'd take all the alcohol out of the house. We'd come back four or five hours later after watching the house, and she'd be drunker than when we left her. I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. She's got it hidden in the attic, in the basement. I mean, wherever. She'd call a cab and say, hey, I'm not actually going anywhere. Just bring me a bottle of vodka or a bag of vodka. And when I got there, there were a couple of one gallon jugs and a bunch of little flasks laying around. She drank it all, and she basically drank herself to death. Holy shit, man. So I moved back into the house. You know, we have the memorial and all that stuff. And I knew I needed that change of venue, which is why, you know, I told the regiment, hey, thanks for the offer for the job, but I'm gonna go one of these other places. And so I put the house up for sale, you know, ended up in New York, and The cool thing about that was I was probably about the most family friendly commander my guys at the detachment had ever experienced. And they told me that. And I told the wives. Like, the first week I was there, I had the wives come in for breakfast. We had a full kitchen. You know, the hangar was beautiful. And I was like, come on in, talk to me. Husbands can't come. And I say, here's. Here's my background. You know, I told them about my wife and, you know, they were all. They were all tearing up. I told a story and I said, listen, if your husband ever tells you he can't do some event you want to do and you got to go visit your parents or you want to go on a trip or you have a birthday party, and he says, oh, the commander says, I got to fly. I said, you call me, I said, because he's going to know after I tell you this, not to lie to you, that I will never take them away from that. If I can, if I need them, if I must use them, I'm sorry, you can call me. I'll tell you, Yep, it's me. I gotta have them and I'll give them back as soon as, you know. And it was great. We were there. This hangar facility in the winter, we'd move the aircraft to the other side, and so it's an empty hangar. And we'd bring in inflatables for the kids, and everybody had kids and they'd, you know, you know what it's like. And in a better weather, we'd have a bonfire out back. We actually had a big fire ring that we built, picnic tables, and we had permission because it was really army property on the airport so we could do that. I had the state police in my hangar and how I knew I was being successful with the camaraderie and the morale, that they weren't faking it. You know, like mandatory fun was in the middle of the week. They'd be like, hey, sir. Lista, guys. Sir. It's good weather today. We got nothing going on tomorrow. What do you think we do a family party tonight? Sure. So potluck everybody. Come in. We have our time and it was good. We also had a bunk room in the hangar so I could just stay there. I didn't have to drive. But I met my wife Patty, my current wife, and she has a bundle of sunshine. She'll see this and she's going to be. Oh, you don't stop. But everybody that meets Patty loves Patty. And when we were recording, if you will, on the phone. She's like, so where were you on 9 11? Which is a very New York question to ask. And I told her, and I said, you know, a couple weeks later, I was in Afghanistan. I was the tip of America's response. And she's like, what? And she didn't know anything about it. So we talk about it. Turns out her stepbrother died in the North Tower. So kind of a nice mesh there, you know, Actually, I was at. I told you earlier at breakfast, I was at a tunnels to tower event. I met the Sillers. They. Her son died running from the Brooklyn Battery tunnel to the tower and died. And they do this run every year. And so we're talking, and they'd met the horse soldiers, if you will. They'd never met me. And they were really, really nice people, you know, and very grateful. Nice organization, all that kind of stuff. And that's the kind of thing I do now. Is that so? All right. So I did the army thing. So I'm flying the superintendent around, you know, flying to D.C. flying to see the Secretary of Army. You know, the cadets get in a fight with the pillowcases, and. And they have batteries in them, I guess. Gets on Twitter and he gets called down, you know, what the hell, Kaslin? You know, and he's like, sir. So I gotta fly him down there. And I befriend some firsties. That's seniors, right, at West Point. So my very first support mission, we fly the Lakota out to West Point. We land, we shut down. It's parachute season in August, and these two cadets, seniors, they know about me because one of the guys that was ahead of me was my. One of my instructors, you know, that worked for me. And so they know who I am. I get there, and as I'm walking toward the group for the safety brief for the season, they're like, hey, sir. You know, Cadet Dave and Chris, you know, I'm not gonna use your last names. We want you to be our leadership mentor. I'm like, sure. And they run off, all right, Yay. I'm looking at this other guy. I'm like, what did I just sign up for? He's. I have no idea. Right? So essentially, I was. You know, they would ask, you come to the house on Friday nights, you know, and talk about their career in the military. How do you deal with a platoon sergeant? How do you deal with a warrant officer? How do you deal with, you know, troubled soldiers, whatever it is, leadership, questions. And in doing so, they're like, oh, sir, You. You gotta do a tandem with us. And I'm like, no, I'm a pilot, but I'm scared of heights, right? And I'm like, there's no way I'm gonna skydive on purpose, right? And they're like, oh, come on. Right? So we get through the season. It's almost graduation, and I've had a great time with these kids. And the OIC of the team is this. He's a lieutenant colonel, Green Beret. He comes up, he's like, al, why don't you do the tandem? The guy's really. It would mean a lot. You know, they'll jump with you. Like, you'll jump on Coach Falzone. He's the parachute team coach. I'll jump with you with a camera. We get all these other guys, and they'll jump with you. They'll be right in front of you. It'll be great. And we'll drop right on the plane, which is the parade field at West Point. And I'm like, I don't want to do this, but I will. It's another one of those, I don't want to do this, but someone's got to do it. And in this case, I have to, because it's me that they want to jump with. So I do it. And I remember flying up, sitting on the floor of the Lakota. There's no seats in it. We're climbing up to altitude. We're going to jump from 13,000ft. And you know, Tom Felzones, he's hooking me in. He's like, all right. I'm like, yeah. You know, the crew chiefs are all looking at me. They get their GoPros on. They're waiting for me to show some fear. And I am scared to death, but I'm not showing it. And it comes time, and we kind of scoot to the door, and I got to sit out basically on the skid, leaned up against the aircraft. He said, look up. Look up. And we just tip out head first. And I'm now a licensed skydiver because I loved it. So I got the cadets the next year, the next season. Taught me how to skydive like the coach did. He did aff we. I got to the point where the cadets could coach me. And then I got my A license and then moved on to my B license. And then I retired, so I didn't go any further. But the cadets were a big part of my emotional rejuvenation. So I meet Patty. She's wonderful. You know, we're like, sickeningly in love. I mean, we got to touch each other, we got to hold hand hands. It's that whole thing, right? And she has kids, you know, her son is in the infantry in the 101st, and he's already done a combat tour and he's trying to put in for flight school. We'll see how that goes. And then my stepdaughter lives with us, and my oldest stepson lives in Manhattan, you know, working down there. So great big family, they all get along. My kids, the grandkids, I got, you know, three grandkids with the first son, you know, two girls and a boy. And my youngest son just, you know, gave me a granddaughter since I was 4. And it's just amazing.

[Sean Ryan]

Good for you, man.

[Al Mack]

Yeah. But it does go to show you, you know. You know, we didn't talk about it in this. In this sitting, but my faith was tested, you know, many times during this process. And I told you that there was a point where it was so bad, I shook my fist at God and I was like, damn you, God. Excuse me. And I swear things got worse. And it wasn't till I turned back and turned back into that faith that it started getting better and did get better. Very grateful for that.

[Sean Ryan]

How did they get worse?

[Al Mack]

The behavior of Linda, because she got three DWIs, only one of them was she convicted. The other two kept getting extended and she'd get another one. And so just when I thought maybe we're going to be okay, I could leave town. I'd go out of town on a training trip. I'd go to New Mexico, and she wouldn't answer the phone, and I'd have to go home. It was obvious something was going on, and so I'd go back. So I couldn't even make a training trip in, you know, in its entirety, right? And guys were starting to notice that, gee, Al shows up, but he doesn't stay, you know. And my close friends, damn, were good with it. You know, they were like, al, just do what you gotta do. And there was one guy, one of my peers, if you will, had no sympathy for me whatsoever. He's like, well, gee, you know, if his wife's going to be a problem, he needs to just get out, you know. And I remember, you know, hearing that, thinking, dude, I hope this never happens to you, you know, kind of thing. But, you know, the church family was very helpful. You know, there was a point where when I did that shake my fist at God, they were not as helpful. You know, there was A faction of the church, you know, the physical congregation that was kind of knew what was going on. You know, we were trying to hide it, but they knew. And they sort of, instead of helping her, you know, kind of turned against her, turned her backs on her, which was hurtful to her, which then was acted out with, you know, more alcohol, you know, so that's kind of how it got worse. I mean, it just got to that point where I had to move out of the house. And then, you know, once I was away from it, you know, enough physically away from it, where I didn't have to look at it constantly, you know, my mind and my, you know, my soul really got quiet. And I get to that quiet place where I could kind of think. And that's why when she gave me the ultimatum to come home now or else, I was finally in a strong enough place that I could say, no, the enabling is done. You know, you're either going to get better or you're not. And in our case, it was not. You know, and there's a whole. There's really a lot more to that. I mean, we, you know, you can't cover it in the time we have here. And there's some other very interesting things that happen in there we kind of skipped over, but in the interest of time, you know, people can read the book. It's in there. But is there anything in particular that.

[Sean Ryan]

We skipped over, you want to cover?

[Al Mack]

I gotta tell you one fun story, right? It's a. It's Bo Berg doll story.

[Sean Ryan]

We're not done yet. We're not. I'm. We're gonna go back and.

[Al Mack]

Okay.

[Sean Ryan]

Cover a couple of events.

[Al Mack]

Okay. All right.

[Sean Ryan]

I was talking about with. With your.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, with. With. With. With Linda. Yeah. And. Yeah. You know, she just. She. I was married 26 years to her, and she gave it her best. She came from a rough childhood. There was a whole background to this, but the alcohol and the drug. The big thing I want to emphasize to your listeners is that you don't have to handle it alone, whether it's somebody's drug and alcohol problem or somebody's PTSD or suicide. Look at the veteran's suicide rate, especially with the soft guys, right? If you got a problem, find somebody to talk to. Somebody that can relate is what I would suggest. You know, somebody who can't relate may just be like, you know, hey, pull your bootstraps up. But somebody who may have already been there, you know, or knows what you're going through can be helpful, you know, and the Interesting thing. So I want to go way back to Anaconda, right? And this. This is reference to getting help. So remember I said I was rescued, came back on the KIA bird next to Neil Roberts. Well, I was back in the States that week, and I had nightmares, Terrible, terrible nightmares, reliving that night. And could I have done something different? The RPG coming at me. And then Neil Roberts would be sitting about that far away from me in his kit with the damage that was done to him, just looking at me. And I could tell in the nightmare, I could tell that he was saying, why did you leave me? I'm dead. Why did you leave me? So the only way to get past that was alcohol for me, right? So I was Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Maker's Mark. You know, I love bourbon. And I had to do it to the point where I went to sleep, so it was a lot of whiskey. And there was a point where I knew that wasn't right. You can't. You can't put the nightmares away with alcohol. So I went to the shrink, the regimental psychologist, and I told him everything, everything. And I said, can you look at my assessment records, my psychological profile, and tell me if I did what you guys predicted? You know, am I what you want in a night stalker? He looks at it, he's like, well, this is an old test. We don't really use this one anymore. And it doesn't really select people. It's more like an elimination tool. Like, if you have a certain set of behaviors or thoughts that we don't want, we just won't take you. But they aren't necessarily, oh, this guy's the right mindset. We'll take him. But what he did say is that there's a series of data sets, data points, right? So think of these columns. It's like, you know, integrity, you know, here, you know, honesty here, bravery here, stupidity here, you know, whatever. How you prioritize things. And they categorized it, right? Now I'm butchering this, but you get the idea. There's different character traits. And he says, you have the classic night stalker checkmark. And I said, what's that? And he said, when you connect the first four dots, there's this high one, a low one, and then you go high again, you stay high. Like, if you draw a line between them, it's a checkmark. He said, some of that's. That's the. What they found is you don't care about the rules when someone's life is on the line. So, for example, what they found is that People that are in aircraft emergencies, like Sully, right. Miracle on the Hudson. This is the great example of it. They wanted him to turn in and go toward an airfield. They kept giving him headings to Teterboro to LaGuardia. And he's like, not happening. I'm going in the river. And they try to talk him out of it, but he knows and he just does it, right. And so in military aircraft situations, same thing. You can pull the guts out of the engines and tear it up and save the aircraft, but destroy the aircraft. Destroy the aircraft, but save the occupants. If you're this checkmark kind of guy, then we still had a couple of night stalkers that had most of the check mark, but that low point. And I can't remember what the category was, but it was like, basically, concern for getting in trouble was more up here. And we had a guy, for example, in a. In an MH60. He got on a brownout landing. There's a. What we call bitch. And Betty is the voice warning system. And she bitches at you if you're, you know, too low or too much power or low rotor. And this guy was in a dust cloud in a Blackhawk, and he starts pulling power to get out of it, and he's in surrounded by trees, and Bitch and Betty says, low rotor, low rotor, low rotor. And he jams the power down and he has a hard landing, and the aircraft is severely damaged. So they go back to the black box and they look at it and they find out Bitch and Betty was wrong. You know, the rotor was fine, but because he was worried about getting in trouble for, you know, maybe drooping the rotor and settling with power, he purposely put it down in a situation where he wasn't ready to do. And they said, that's the difference between the two. It's not that, you know, there's nothing wrong with that kind of guy. It's just that's who you are. And, you know, when it came time to get Roberts, you know, with no miniguns and all that stuff, you know, I turned back in and we're gonna. We're gonna go get him. It wasn't until I knew it was useless, it was untenable. I mean, we would. We could conceivably crash on top. And in my dreams, at least he doesn't die alone. But we all die. The rest of the seals die. My crew dies, you know, So I made a choice. One guy. We're going to go over here. Razor04 might be able to get him, but in doing that he kind of reinforced that I was normal. You know, these dreams, they're normal for somebody who experienced what you experienced. And I said, listen, I got to tell you, the guys across the street, the other pilots, they're in just as bad a shape, and they won't come here. I mean, I'm just at the point where I'm drinking myself to sleep. I don't know if they are, but I know they are all emotionally messed up from that whole thing. I said, you got to make it mandatory. And so I went. He said, I can't do that. So I went to the commander, the company commander. I said. I told him the whole situation, and I said, sir, you can make it mandatory. So he made it mandatory for everybody to go take their turn with a psychologist. And minimum 30 minutes. And in order to keep things going, they could go for an hour. Everybody stayed the full time, the whole hour. And many of them came back and they told me, you know, a week or two later, hey, thanks for doing that. I was mad at you for doing it, but it helped, man.

[Sean Ryan]

Good for you. Good for you, man.

[Al Mack]

So, once again, it's that whole, you know, you gotta ask for help. Knowing when to ask for help, I guess, is the issue. Right. Because you can't have everybody, you know, I'm stressed. I need help. Yeah, we're all under stress, you know, so there's. There's some, you know, some subjectivity to that, I guess. But you got to know when that is, and it needs to be available. So when you do decide you want to help, you do it, you know? And you can't have the stigma of. Oh, crap. Al went and talked to the shrink, you know, but I knew they were all messed up too.

[Sean Ryan]

Good for you, man. Let's go back to Red Wings. Yeah, can you talk about your experience with the recovery?

[Al Mack]

So first to know about Red Wings. It's a conventional operation. Again, we're not even part of it at all. And they decide they're going to bring Marines into the base of the Korengal Valley in the Kunar Province. They're going to go after a guy named Ahmed Shah. The problem is, well, twofold. One is you never know the pattern of life of who's. Where's the targeted individual? What building is he in? Right? Because when helicopters come, people run. They don't tend to stand and fight. They run. So they're squirters. They squirt off the objective. So we need eyes on the village to determine pattern of life and see if we can Identify where Amit Shah is. And then the Marine Corps helicopters are not capable of getting the Marines into the valley. Right? Because you got to go up over the 12,000 foot ridge lines and drop down. And even in the valley it's 8,000ft and the aircraft don't have the performance, not the pilots can't do it. The aircraft doesn't have the performance to do it from where they have to do it. Hey, the 160th is not doing anything right now. Maybe they could fast rope our guys in, right? The Marines are fast rope qualified so they send the mission up to us. Our battalion commander is not happy with it. Fast rope. You know, earlier in his career as a young lieutenant, he'd been on a fast rope mission as a pilot and a Ranger, got hung up at JRTC in his miles gear and died, you know, fast roping in the trees. So he was really against doing this. And so we're going to do it. So we do a rehearsal, you know, as far as we come elevators, right? We go out to Jalalabad and the Marines do, you know, up and down, they slide down the ropes a couple times. They're current, they do a tower, the whole thing. And so they're going to go in. That's the concept of Red Wings. And they're going to the eyes on are a four man SEAL team that's going to go in the night before. They're going to move into position and observe pattern of life. That's Marcus Luttrell and the boys. And so here's what happens. So there's two versions of Chinook there. I've kind of alluded to the E model, the D model and the G. And I was flying E models. So the E model is a much more capable aircraft. I can go places the other aircraft can't go. But that equipment has a weight factor to it, a penalty if you will. So the D models, the MHDs, right, they have a refueling probe, the whole deal, it looks just like us, but they can lift about 1500 pounds more at that altitude. No question. If you're going to move a bunch of Marines in, you want the D models. So they're currently on qrf Quick Reaction Force and we do it for like a week at a time and we do a little handover, you know, and then the other two guys, you know, are always around ready to go. They're not out on missions. They're just prepared for when somebody has a bad day to run, jump in the aircraft and go. So the D models Run right now, right? And they're going to do Red Wings and their flight lead is doing it and I'm the flight lead of the other two. So they go, okay, listen, we're going to change over. They're going to fly in the four man team, the D models are, and then they're going to come back and the next morning, next cycle of day, they'll observe and that night we'll do Red Wings, right? And that day at like say I'll call it 10:00 in the morning, we're going to switch over QRF. So I now will assume those duties. And the Delta models that had it will now become the entire Red Wing force. They had 7D models and two echo models. So we go to bed, it turns out team is compromised. That once again, that's their story to tell. But they, they call for help and they decide they're going to launch the qrf. So this has got to be. When we get the word, it's got to be about 9:30 in the morning and I'm showered, I got my uniform on, I walk over to the, you know, the planning area, the talk, the operations center to see, you know, how things are going on, you know, how's Red Wings going to go tonight? And everybody's looked at the big screen TVs, right? So I get my coffee, I come sit down next to the colonel. Everybody's quiet. No one's talking. I'm like, sir, what's going on? He goes, the SEAL team was compromised. They requested the qrf. I'm the QRF right now. I'm the qrf. He's like, yeah, Major Reich was already here. They were already still up. And as you can tell, they could get in the air sooner than you because they're about to get there. They're like two minutes out. Oh wow. Okay. So I'm drinking my coffee thinking this will be interesting because there's really nowhere to land up there on this ridgeline. And I watched the, there's like an A10 overhead and he's got a lightning pod. So you can see he's broadcasting them doing their thing. He's not really there for fires, he's more for isr. Chinook comes on screen, comes to a hover. You can see the engines getting hot because they're now at a hover. You can see they're kicking ropes for fast rope. And all of a sudden you know how flir is it blooms. There's been an explosion. Don't know what it is, but there's definitely been an explosion. All of a sudden, the aircraft kind of limps a little bit away off screen and comes apart in flight. The RPG was shot up into the aft transmission area, and it compromised either the transmission or the drive shaft. So it held together long enough to sort of limp away. And then the blades come together because they're no longer mechanically separated. And the seals, the Night Stalkers came apart, littered on the side of that mountain. Chalk Two was right there watching it. And he calls in, he's like, you know, turbine 33 is down. I didn't think this was going to be this tough. So I looked at the colonel and I was like, well, I'm the qrf, sir. I'll take the DEVGRU seals, right? Because the QRF was the typically the siege of Soda seals. And so Red Squadron meets me at the aircraft. We're driving down there. And, you know, Bagram at the time is this pit of admin, you know, we call them fobbits, right? Never leave the wire. You're not wearing your PT belt, reflective belt. You know, you're going to get a ticket. And we're in the back of the truck, loaded down, and we're headed to the aircraft. He's doing like 50 miles an hour on this little tiny road. And this guy's yelling at me, you know, slow down. Stop. You're getting a ticket. I'm like, you know, flipped on the bird. I'm like, not today, buddy. Not today, right? And we cut down there. The crew chiefs already had the aircraft up to engine start. I jump in, strap in, start the engines. Tower already knows I'm going, so they give me priority. And we are pulling in the power, sucking the guts out of the aircraft. I mean, I've got like. I don't know, I think it's 28 seals in the back. I know I can't take them to the top of the mountain because I know it's 12,500ft. It's hot out, there's no way I can get them there. But now what am I going to do, right? Nobody has any idea. And I'm hauling ass and I'm checking in. I give my eta. And now I'm thinking, I'm not saying this, but I'm thinking, I don't know what I'm going to do when I get there. You know, I can only go to the same place. Maybe I could come up the ridge a different way and fast rope the guys in. Not even a clearing, but sort of a lighter concentration of Trees, you know, And I don't know. And I get about 10 minutes out. I call the talk. 10 minutes. And like, abortion divert to a JBAD. We gotta have a better plan than this. I'm thinking, oh, yeah, it's probably a good idea. So we get over there, we shut down to apu, which is the Auxiliary Power Unit. So the aircraft's all ready to go. Everything's spun up. It's just not running. The aircraft engines aren't running. So I go inside, my crew stays at the aircraft. And I'm with. Frank is the troop commander. And he's like, I guess we're just going to have to go where they got shot down. We'll just rope, but we're going to wait till dark, right? And the day's starting to get, you know, it's getting on till night. And I'm like, all right, you know, we can do it, right? He goes, well, how many people? I know you can't take 28. Or they would have had 28 guys on the original QRF. All right? So I start doing a little mental math. I got a map out. I mean, I don't have my planning tools. It's just a paper map looking at spot elevations. I've got a little an operator's manual from the aircraft. So I flip to the performance graphs, and I'm 17 guys. And, like, 17. I'm like, 18. Against my better judgment, 18, right? And they're like, okay, so we're waiting for dark, and then I go out to the aircraft, brief the crews up, what we're going to. And then I get a call, somebody brings me back into the talk, and it's the Bagram. And they say, stand down on your infill. We're just going to start Red Wings right now. And we're going to start it with the Dev Gru seals, right? So you got the Delta models coming down. They can haul all those guys up there, and I can't. So they come down. But now it's summer, and the rainstorms in Afghanistan in the summer are brutal. And remember I said, these guys don't have the same equipment that I have. And I have this digital map, right? I can actually. Even if the radar's not working, remember I talked about the disorientation. I was able to make it where the terrain disappeared from the screen, meaning I was high enough I could still do that. And they didn't have that capability. I'm like, you gotta let me do this with my two aircraft, because there's no way they're going to even get past Asadabad, you know, from jbad. They're not going to make it. They're going to run into the weather and they're going to have to turn around. Nope, that's what we're doing. I was pissed. And they came, they picked up my seals, and off they went. And as I sat there looking, going, they're going to turn around maybe 10 minutes. They got about 10 minutes away. I turned back because they hit that weather. And I remember being just furious because I could have got those guys in. It would have made a difference, it turns out. But we don't know that, right? And I mean, in hindsight, they were already dead. Littrell was already down the hill. It wouldn't have made a difference other than in our own minds. So everybody eventually follows on. We're going to spend the day there, you know, get through the night, see if the weather improves. We get there, it's hot. I mean, miserable hot. And I tell the colonel, sir, if we're not going to go until night, let's go back to Bagram with everybody. And let me have all of my tools, the satellite imagery, all the stuff I need to properly plan this, and we'll put everybody in in force tonight. And he's like, no, no, the weather might clear. And I'm like, he's not going to clear. So eventually it's obvious those guys aren't going to work. So he does let me go back. We don't spend the night there. So I sleep on the gym floor because it's the only air conditioning, and use my body armor as a pillow. So eventually we get back to Bagram. I do a nice plan where we're going to take two flights of two. We're going to come at. There's three ways into the valley, into the corner, right? So there's the way that turbine three three went. They kind of went up the ridge, not the valley, but it was right there. There's another way around. I think it was Camp Blessing or something like that. It was a small fob and another one that went off to the west. The one to the west had high terrain and it was covered in clouds all the time. So you couldn't fly across it in a delta model, but you could in an echo. So I planned something where essentially the echoes would come across there while the delta mont. The two delta models would come up simultaneously from the other side and we'd land. There was like a fork shaped spur and we'd kind of Come up and simultaneously fast rope the guys on. And then we go our separate ways, right? And at least that would, you know, I could come from a different direction. So the enemy couldn't go. I mean, you know, you're reverse planning. The enemy knows they gotta come from there or they gotta come from there, which is how they got three. Three in the first place. They knew they had to come to that one spot. So we roped the guys in and we tell them, tall trees, gonna be a hundred foot rope, which is a long way, as you know. And so three of the four aircraft rope at 100ft. I come over and the guy. I'm not flying, my co pilot's flying in the right seat. And we come in, we're like 100ft. And he loses visual on the ground. He can't see to hold his position steady enough for them to rope. And he's like, al, I can't see anything. And I said, oh, I got a tree out my left door. I have the controls, so I have a good reference. I'll be able to hold the hover. And a crew chief in the back says, sir, start descending. Just lower the power, lower the power. He's like, you're off.75,50. I'm like, are you sure? He's like, keep coming, keep coming, sir. Ten foot hover. The guy's roped from 10ft. And the troop commander was pissed. Later on, he's like, how come everybody else didn't do that? That, you know. And I was like, well, I gave some nice answer of, you know. Well, you know, sometimes the angle you come in and I met him at the White House at Slab's Medal of Honor ceremony. And he brought that up. And I said, well, I didn't want to tell you at the time, but I'm just a better pilot, you know. He's like, I thought so. I was like, yeah, you know, I just had a better crew chief, you know, which once again, I told you that. That interaction, him knowing I could do that, and him saying, looking and going, we could do this. You know, there's no need to rope these guys from 100ft. I mean, they all had burned hands, you know, even with gloves. And then, so then Red, you know, we go back, thunderstorm comes in every night. There's a thunderstorm or two, and there's a gap in between, giving us time to bring more troops in to look for KIAs, right? So the Rangers and the SEALs, by the way, are trying to walk in, but the train is just. It's hell. And so we get to the top of the mountain ahead of anybody, most everybody turned back. I think that was walking. And so we just kept bringing guys in. Every night we brought more and more guys in, looking to expand more terrain. I flew away one night and I told the crew, I said, if you see a strobe light anywhere and we haven't found everybody, we're going to go take a look. Right place, right time, right markings, right radio call, we'll pick them up. So the crew chiefs who do sometimes imagine some lighting, right? So in Afghanistan, one of the things that happens is the Taliban uses an old fashioned method of letting people know where you are is they turn lights on and use Morse code or whatever code. They're, you know, Haji code of some sort. Right. But you can track a helicopter across a valley. If someone's over here, they just. You just watch the lights.

[Sean Ryan]

So sometimes did that shit make you nervous? I remember flying and seeing that.

[Al Mack]

I didn't like it, man.

[Sean Ryan]

It made me nervous.

[Al Mack]

I didn't like it. And earlier when I talked about not returning fire on these things, made me feel helpless, right, that they could be doing this. And the Green Berets, the SF guys told us that. Yeah, so the Afghans do, they did it to the Soviets. But occasionally you'll see a car driving around in maybe lower terrain or something, and his lights, maybe he's on a switchback or something. And from our position, it looks like it's a blinking light, but it's a car. And I could see it sometimes that's a car, you know. So when a crew chief says, you know, I got this blinking light, sometimes I take it with a grain of salt, depending on who said it. And other times I can trust it. So as we flew over, I stored the coordinates. I pressed the button. The coordinates are saved in the computer. Don't see anything, don't hear anything on the radio. So we go back to Bagram, we park, we go down for the day. I didn't bring it back because I didn't think it was somebody. And I take a shower, I go to bed and I can't sleep. What if it's somebody, right? So I wasn't allowed to drive on the flight line. I'm a flight lead, but I can't drive on the flight line, right? By the rules of Bagram because I'm not certified with a driver's license for Bagram. So I go wake a guy up, hey, you gotta take me to the aircraft. Why? I gotta pull something out of the system. So he drives me down there. I fire up the auxiliary power unit, I download the coordinates. I go back to the S2. Like, listen, last night at this time, I had these coordinates. I didn't think it was anything, but maybe someone should check it out. They sent an SFODA to check it out. It's an ambush. There's Taliban hiding kind of under a little waterfall with RPGs and an IR strobe. They have one of our strobe lights.

[Sean Ryan]

No shit.

[Al Mack]

And had I gone in to look for it, they'd have probably got me or at least got a good shot at me. I don't know if they'd hit us, but, you know, the SF guys kind of took care of business. But that's the kind of thing that's happening. And then, you know, the A10s are flying around all day trying the, you know, the ISO prep cards. You know, they're talk. Because the Taliban's got our survival radios and they're on their, you know, survival channels, you know, and they sort of would get your attention. And then the A10 guy would ask the, you know, question, challenge response kind of thing, and it would kind of get broken. That question's burned now, you know, and they used up all the questions, and it was like something out of a movie they had to call back to. I don't know if it was Little Creek or the guys that were out in Team One. And they talked to their friends, hey, what are. Something these guys would know that nobody else would know, you know, like, the Taliban couldn't know. So they. It was like in bat 21, you know. All right, what questions could this guy maybe know? But anyway, so this is all going on. This is over the course of two weeks. This is the toughest flying I've done in my career. I mean, I've done some really difficult missions, very difficult landings, but this is the most emotionally difficult because I know that the Taliban knows I gotta come in. I gotta come in one of these two ways, occasionally the third way, but mostly it's these ways. And the Delta model guys would run into the clouds. They'd climb up to 14,000ft to get out of it. And then, you know, they'd, you know, it's like, oh, my God, I can't see. Clear the mountains. And then they get on top, they look down, see a sucker hole, fly down through it, rejoin with me, and that's ballsy. You know, these guys got guts. And so we're. It's obvious there's no survivors at this Point. And we're gonna. We're practicing for a dignified transfer. So we're starting to bring the bodies out. We haven't found everybody yet, but we've got most of them. And Latrell's embitter beacon comes up. And we've been watching it, I guess, but, you know, like I said, the Taliban had taken our radios, our strobe lights, all this other stuff. But he sends somebody in with his. What's the bloodshed? Bloodshed, right. So he sends his number in with a guy. It might even been the guy that made. I don't remember the guy's name, but he walked in to the small fob about 10km away. He walked in that day. It's evening. We're practicing dignified transfer. We've got coffins full of cases of water to simulate weight. And I'm going to be a pallbearer from my ncoic, Trey Ponder, who was on the ramp when the RPG came up. And our captain comes around, Al, Al, you got to come inside. Come to the planning area. Area. I'm like, sir, we're practicing this thing, you know? And he's like, no, no, no. He leans over, he goes, we got a survivor. You know, somebody takes my place. We run into the planning area. They've figured out where he is. They've confirmed he's there. There's an oda, so an SF group of Green Berets. You don't ever hear about these guys. It's 361 or 362. I can't remember which one. They're actually who get to him to secure him, right? So, you know, the Rangers get credit for it. You know, I'm sure they got there, but it was an oda, you know, essentially with a couple of Afghans that defended his perimeter because the Taliban was still there. You know, they just kept them from coming in while we planned the rescue. So they're planning the HH 60s, the Jolly Greens came up from Kandahar, right? The Blackhawks, the Air Force SAR 60s. And so the guy that's in charge of the rescue operation is a pga. Major Tom is his name. And Tom says, all right, guys, we got a lone survivor here. We're gonna pick him up in this terrace field right outside this house. The 60s are gonna go get him. And I lost it. I was like, no way is the Air Force gonna traipse in here from Kandahar and fly in and pick up the guy that we lost our guys for. And by the way, there's no way they're flying at that altitude, right? And like, oh, we stripped it down. There's no guns, there's no equipment, it's empty, no armor. And I'm like, even so. And they're like, oh, Chinook won't fit on that field. I'm like, absolutely will. You know, and this guy Tom was smart, right? Because I'm as the flight lead, I got a lot of say so, right? And I have a lot of influence because of who I am and my experiences. And if I say no and I stick to my guns, I'm going to get to get them. And he says, al, we're still missing another body. We still need to bring more Rangers in. And you know, we're going to have about a 20 minute window of weather. The 60s can't take in Rangers, only you can. So this is all going to happen in between two storms, you know, rainstorms. I thought about it. He was right. There was no choice here. They had to pick him up. So I said, all right, I'll agree to that, but I'm planning the mission. And the 60 guys, hell yeah, right, you know, and so I had to plan this very, very extravagant fires mission to allow the 60s to get in unmolested. Because once again, they now knew that we knew where Littrell was, we were securing him, and they knew we were going to come. You know, there was intercepts, they knew we were coming. So I talked to the AC130 crew, you know, the pilot and the sensor operator and the A10 pilots. We sat down at a table, I laid out my map, I said, here's what I'm trying to do, right? I want to sequence in the 61st from this direction over here. He's going to come in, but before he gets there, before they even hear him, I want you to lay fire on these guys like they've never seen, right? On the enemy positions. And then two minutes out, he's going to call two minutes and you're going to lift and shift fire. And what I want is the biggest, baddest explosions on a ridge line having nothing to do with us. But that's observable, right? So it's a distraction. I want people to go, you know, they're over here. A little misdirection. What's going on over here? Holy crap, that's a big explosion. And that's what Luttrell talks about in his book. He's like, oh my God, the explosions were huge. And so the 60 comes in and once he's on the ground. They start shooting in behind him so that if he had got past somebody that now knows he's coming out their position, sort of templated positions. And then he calls, ready to depart. They shift fire, they blow up another freaking ridgeline. He goes out, I come in, they shift fires and lift fires for me. I put in the rangers. And this choreography was probably one of the most beautiful synchronizations I've ever done, you know, with the fires platforms, you know, and because they knew what I wanted and I didn't ask for a certain ordinance, which is what I wanted to do, I wanted to say I want 40 millimeter here in case there's, you know, tarps with dirt on it. And I just said, look, I need terrain denial. I need. You need detraction, whatever it is. And they said, oh, well, we'll just do, you know, 40 millimeter here, 25 millimeter here. We used a 105 on this. A 10 will drop a 500 pounder here. And they sequenced it all out for me, and it all worked out and we got them out of there, you know, and then, I don't know, a day or two later, we found the last body and then started to withdraw everybody and took two weeks. This is the hardest flying of my life. And so we go, we do a memorial service. Everybody does their eulogies, and we're at Bagram now. This whole time, mind you, I've been a machine, you know, externally, people are just, wow. Al's just doing it right, which is my goal. And when we're done now all the. All the bodies and the survivor out of there, I walked over between two B huts, right, these plywood buildings in the shadows. I put my back against it, slid down and just cried, you know, I finally was able to let it go. And what's funny, I don't know if it's funny, but a couple of weeks later, I'm headed home and it's me and one of the crew chiefs, one of the Junior E4, right? And we were stopped in Amsterdam for waiting a flight. I was like, hey, let me buy you. Buy you a beer, right? So we sit down and he's like, sir, I gotta tell you, I was scared. I was super scared. And I was like. He goes, I don't know how you did it. And I said, are you kidding me? I was scared out of my. Out of my skin. He's like, what, you didn't show it? I said, if I showed it, would you. Would you just, you know, been happy? He's like, no. All right, well, a leadership lesson for you. Sometimes you just gotta do, you know, you gotta put on that face and, you know, I was able to cry about it afterwards, but, man, that was tough. Toughest. Toughest flying I ever did.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn, Al.

[Al Mack]

Yeah. So luckily, you know, I mentioned I. For years, I've been trying to meet Marcus. We just haven't crossed paths. And I finally connected with him, and I'm gonna meet him next month. It might be before this podcast airs, but it'll be fun. I really wanna see him. I wanna give him a big hug.

[Sean Ryan]

I'm happy for you, man.

[Al Mack]

Thanks.

[Sean Ryan]

This seems like a really weird point to end it, but I just. I just want to show you something. And I've never brought this up before, but if you look back there at that flag, that is. I got that from my best friend, and his name was Gabe Accardi. And those were. Those were his teammates, the seals that went down in Turbine 33. And he was on part of that recovery op. And it's my understanding that the Rangers secured the crash site. Am I correct on that?

[Al Mack]

The crash site, yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

And he was good friends with one of those rangers. And if you look below Golf 12, there's a belt of 60ammo. And that came out of Turbine 3. 3. And that Ranger gave it to Gabe and told him that that was the only thing that wasn't burnt up in that crash.

[Al Mack]

Yeah, it was bad. So Trey, my good friend, he sat this far away from me, back at home at our desks. And his wife, Leslie, is great. She lives here in this area, and she asked me for a piece of the aircraft. So I asked somebody, and Rangers gave me a piece of this little bracket. I didn't know what it went to. Right. It just was a sheet metal bracket. It was burned. They gave it to her. And about a week later, I was flying, and I was just sitting there, you know, and you get these little, you know, the foot pedals and there's, like, little slides for you heels to go back and forth, and it's just not paying attention. And I looked down, and there's that bracket, you know, obviously for my aircraft. And I almost puked because to know what it took to get that bracket out on the mountainside was just. It just tore me up. I just looked at it, and as I grew it, Damn. I was like, hey, man, I'm incapacitated for a minute. He's like, what's up? I was like, I can't talk. You know, a couple minutes later, I Was able to say, yeah, that's that, you know, but, you know, it's the kind of. It's the risk we take, you know, I mean, look at extortion, you know, it's even worse, you know, but it's got its own set of circumstances, as does every situation. And the cool thing for me, since we're steering toward the end, is that though I have maybe a little regret here and there, I think regret is for the uncommitted. And I was committed to the job, to the lifestyle, to my air crew, to my customers. And, you know, maybe I didn't prioritize my family the way I should have, but we did what we had to do, which I'd probably do it all again. I might make some minor adjustments and see if I could fix some things here and there, but essentially all the big stuff, I would do the same. And the people I worked with, the ground forces, were amazing. The air crew, the strength of the families that did do well. Mine wasn't as strong as it could be, but the others did well, you know, and though they may have challenges that I don't know about, you know, we all did what we had to do, which is really, is what makes that damn fall of Afghanistan so difficult, you know, But I don't want to go down that path at this point. I'd like to end on a note of, you know, you know, the night stalker creed, you know, the very first thing, you know, it's like. Or the last creed part is, you know, I serve with a memory that those who have come before for they love to fight, fought to win, and rather die than quit. And that's it, man.

[Sean Ryan]

Al, you're a hell of a dude, man.

[Al Mack]

Well, this was fun, you know, it's too bad we gotta talk about the other thing first, but maybe another time I'll tell you the Sonte story, but it's a little bit light hearted.

[Sean Ryan]

But this is good, man. Thank you for being here, brother.

[Al Mack]

Thanks for having me.

[Sean Ryan]

And it's. Man, that was heavy. And man, I'm just really happy that we met and same. I'm honored and I hope to see you again, man.

[Al Mack]

I'm sure you will tomorrow even.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, you're right, we will. I will see you tomorrow at the All Secure foundation event. But, you know, for a guy that's been through so much, you seem to be in great spirits and I don't know, maybe.

[Al Mack]

No, and I am. And I attribute that, you know, once again, the cadets that kind of gave me that positive attitude again. And the wonderful wife that I have now and the friends and family, you know, and my kids are great grandkids. You know, I sit out at home and I've got a little 5 acre wooded area up in upstate New York, and I sit out on the deck and I watch the birds. I got bird feeders, and I watch a little pond, and I take great joy in nature, you know, watching the birds do their thing. And it's like, oh, the geese, they're like chinooks. Oh, watch them do their thing, you know? And then the wood ducks, they're like Blackhawks, you know? And I just imagine techniques that you could. You could take and use them against the enemy because it's like, oh, man, I was going to shoot that squirrel that keeps eating the bird food, but he keeps. He lasts just long enough, and before I can get the rifle up, you know, he. He's gone. All right, so you do that with the bad guys, right? The idea is, you know, don't give them a chance to shoot at you. But listen, I enjoyed it. I mean, 17 years in the 1 60th and finishing up the way it is now. And, you know, writing the book was really good. Put a lot of things in context. I don't know if it was. People ask me all the time if it was therapeutic. I don't know, I'd say it's therapeutic. But it did put things in context of timelines of when, you know, Linda had problems, when I should have known things, and when big events happened. But, you know, the Night Stalkers are an amazing organization, and they support some of the best ground forces in the world, and they pride themselves on that. Yeah, they do.

[Sean Ryan]

It was an honor to work with you guys, and it's an honor to have you here. And, man, dude, just tons of love to you. Thank you. Seriously.

[Al Mack]

There. Named one of the best personal finance podcasts, the Stacking Benjamin show with Joe.

[Sean Ryan]

And his friends makes financial literacy fun.

[Al Mack]

Dream On Green has a podcast. He was asking Mark Cuban why, at the beginning of 2024, Cuban sold a huge part of his company. He's like, did you see how much money I got? I'm sure there's a more graceful answer than that, but, dude, I bought it for 200 million and sold it for 6 billion.

[Sean Ryan]

Like, what the heck?

[Al Mack]

I don't think it was that much more graceful than that. Find out more by searching the Stacking Benjamin's podcast wherever you listen.