This sequence terrifies me.
A hunk of metal, high above the ground, completely out of control.
The pilot’s dead and you know you’re going down.
You have to try to do something but at this point there’s really nothing to be done.
The way the world swirls through the windshield – spinning and spinning – is sickening.
The alert sounds. You don’t know what it means, but you know it isn’t good.
Pulling on the stick, trying to make it do something.
Rapidly changing gravity makes every movement a challenge.
When I first joined the Army, there was an older guy in my basic training course. He was 29 and I was 19. We got along well enough and he said he thought I should try to become a helicopter pilot. I don’t know why, but that stuck with me.
I’ve always been fascinated with helicopters. As a kid, I used to play ‘HIND‘ on an old Mac and loved trying to pilot the hulking mass low to the ground to a landing zone to drop off Soviet Spetznaz under fire.
I never seriously considered trying to fly.
Being in an aircraft as a military person is a special experience.
There is the thrill of the infil.
But there’s also the terror of the portal. Looking out the door of a Blackhawk into the night, down the ramp of a CASA at the hazy ground as it passes by slowly, or through the round porthole of a C-130 as it corkscrews for a landing under threat of attack, the world spinning and spinning.
It is a reminder of how out of control you are. You’re a passenger. You are completely at the mercy of the pilot, the crew, and the machine.
At least the pilot and the crew have something to do.
Rewatching the above clip reminded me of this horror story, about a helicopter that was shot down in Iraq in 2005. The helicopter was carrying Blackwater contractors who all died after the helicopter was struck with a missile. Miraculously, the pilot somehow survived both the missile strike, the fall to Earth, and the subsequent crash.
The insurgents who shot down the helicopter found the pilot near the wreckage and shot him. The whole thing was captured on video and released.
It’s easy to forget that these kinds of things were happening on a regular basis in those days.
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Carrying the Gun 