Categories
Category: Soldiering
Helicopters offer military commanders unprecedented capabilities. In the down
and dirty places where they operate, however, they can be fairly dangerous.
Every military aviator is the best military aviator since Wilbur and Orville first slipped Earth’s surly bonds back in 1903. We typically have very attractive, exceptionally long-suffering spouses. Personally, I wouldn’t trust a 22-year-old unsupervised with glue, much less a $26 million combat aircraft. Alas, Uncle Sam felt otherwise.
All man-children are bulletproof and immortal until about age 25. That’s why 19-year-olds make the best soldiers. We’re never going to die. This curious affliction untethers the human male to do some of the most remarkable stuff.
I was out turning and burning with a friend in the jump seat. My buddy was a veteran of numerous real-world special operations missions. He and I had worked together for nearly a year. On this particular day we were in the desert. I planted my sleek expensive machine after an hour or so of transforming jet fuel into chaos, and we all disembarked. My pal promptly threw up all over the place. I felt genuinely terrible.
As a pilot, making someone sick who is a jerk is darkly satisfying. By contrast, this was just the nicest guy in the world. If nothing else I didn’t want him embarrassed in front of his troops. I made my way to his side and quietly apologized. He smiled and explained no apologies were necessary. He simply had a fear of flying — once he swished a little water from his Camelbak around to clean out his piehole — he explained
All military aviators are confident — making complex machines do amazing things is just part of the job.
Almost Always Do As You’re Told
When my friend was an ROTC cadet, he attended Air Assault school. Air Assault is a miserable two-week course teaching one what is required to work in and around combat helicopters. The Air Assault graduate in my day developed proficiency rigging sling loads and rappelling out of helicopters. He also did a great deal of forced marching, running and pushups.
My buddy was about to board a UH-1H Huey for some rappelling training. The crew chief rendered the requisite safety briefing. My friend and his comrade were going to sit in the gunner’s well on the side of the aircraft. With the doors pinned back, this offered an unparalleled view. However, it was critically important they not unfasten their seatbelts until directed specifically to do so at the other end of the trip. Failure to do this could result in a long drop followed by a sudden stop. The two young soldiers strapped in while the crew spooled up the airplane.
With everything shipshape, the pilot lifted the 9,000-lb. aircraft to a tidy three-foot hover and executed a quick pedal turn in anticipation of takeoff. In so doing he inadvertently pushed the tail rotor into a tree. The tail rotor assembly exploded and separated from the aircraft along with its 90-degree gearbox.
With all those rotating parts, helicopters can be fairly unforgiving of inattention.
Fortunately, this horrific scene was just a training exercise.
Everything Is Physics
The sudden loss of tail rotor authority would itself have been a fairly big deal. However, the loss of the associated mass of these components turned out to be far worse. Now the center of gravity of the aircraft shifted catastrophically forward.
The pilot did what he was trained to do and initiated a hovering autorotation by dropping power precipitously. This caused the aircraft to settle hard as the center-of-gravity shift now also translated the aircraft forward in an uncommanded fashion. The helicopter settled heavily and rolled frontward on its skids from butt to nose. It hit with sufficient vigor to splay the skids out.
All this happened very quickly. My pal could tell something was amiss as the aircraft was now shaking badly. The violent loss of the tail rotor assembly had also been fairly loud. My buddy could feel the aircraft pitching forward. For one tiny pregnant moment the Huey was motionless on the ground.
My friend looked at his battle buddy sitting next to him, and the guy looked back. They spoke not a word, but both of them yanked open their seatbelts and just stepped out of the aircraft as though they were strolling through a park. The doomed Huey then rolled forward and bounced back into the air. The helicopter went butt over nose and came down inverted onto its own rotor system. The aircraft proceeded to eat itself, killing everybody else onboard.
Denouement
My pal had actually been in three helicopter crashes. You’ll likely hear about the other two eventually someday as well. His willful failure to follow instructions that fateful day at Air Assault school was the sole reason he still drew breath.
God’s will is crystal clear in the rearview mirror. It’s just frequently a bit fuzzier through the windshield. My friend was hardly a coward. Quite the contrary, he was one of the bravest men I ever knew. It was simple — he was justifiably afraid of flying.
The views are that of the Author (Not Me, lol) but it does track with my experiences, and what I have seen of 3rd world armies it does track.
by
Roland Bartetzko
I’ll probably make some enemies with this answer, but who cares?
Let’s start with the worst foreign fighters (and why they perform so poorly):
Colombians. It’s not that they lack experience or knowledge, but every foreigner who comes here needs to learn additional skills their home country’s military likely didn’t teach them.
These skills are mostly in the areas of drone and electronic warfare, adaptation to the battlefield environment, and TCCC (Tactical Combat Casualty Care). Even training from “richer” Western armies isn’t enough to survive on the Ukrainian frontlines.
Even if you’been serving in your home country’s best army unit before you came to Ukraine, there’s some machinery here you haven’t learned to operate. (Picture: all rights by the author of this post)
Fortunately, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will teach you most of this—if (and that’s a big “if”) you’re willing to learn.
Unfortunately, with the Colombians (and other South Americans as well), the motivation to train and acquire new skills is rather low. Some might say they’re a bit lazy. As a result, they suffer a high number of casualties.
That said, this problem isn’t limited to South Americans. Some combat veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq came here thinking they were untouchable—that their sh*t didn’t stink and they didn’t need any “stupid” training. They quickly learned otherwise—the hard way.
On the other hand, there are many professional soldiers who recognize their limitations and are eager to learn. These individuals make up the majority of foreign volunteer fighters.
Especially among the Americans (many of them former Marines) and the Brits, the mantra is always: “Training, training, training!”
That’s the right attitude. It doesn’t matter where you’re from—an enemy artillery shell or drone doesn’t care about your passport. If you’re too lazy or too arrogant to learn new things, you’ll quickly perish.
Colonel Charles Young – Soldier, Educator, Diplomat, & Civil Rights Advocate
“An unheralded military hero, Charles Young (1864–1922) was the third black graduate of West Point, the first African American national park superintendent, the first black U.S. military attaché, the first African American officer to command a Regular Army regiment, and the highest-ranking black officer in the Regular Army until his death.
Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment tells the story of the man who—willingly or not—served as a standard-bearer for his race in the officer corps for nearly thirty years, and who, if not for racial prejudice, would have become the first African American general.” — Brian G. Shellum, Author of Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment: The Military Career of Charles Young.
The 4th British Hussars around 1820
I sure would NOT want to be on the receiving side of that! Grumpy
Tube artillery is breathtaking to behold up close.
A military CALFEX is like Christmas for gun nerds. The guns are huge,
the noise is deafening and the spectacle is epic.
It’s called a CALFEX — the mil-speak term for a Combined Arms Live Fire Exercise. Think of it like a machinegun shoot on steroids.
Armor, Artillery, rotary-wing Aviation, Close Air Support and Mechanized Infantry all coordinated to shoot up the range facility at my sprawling military post. We always wrapped it up with a massive B1 or B52 strike. We rehearsed everything on one day and then opened the event to the public the next day. It was a twice-a-year spectacle, and the taxpayers loved it.
I had flown in this thing several times, but never got to watch it. As such, I put another crew on the mission and a Warrant Officer buddy and I resolved to sneak out for the rehearsal and watch the spectacle. The rehearsal shot all the same ordnance as the real deal, so the show would be the same.
The MPs had blocked off all the roads leading to the range to keep idiots like us from doing what we planned on doing. However, as an Army aviator, I was intimately familiar with all the goat trails crossing the range facility. Circumventing the MP roadblocks was not a challenge.
My buddy and I ditched my little pickup truck in some thick woods and progressed on foot. We pressed through the tangled underbrush until we came out on a bulldozer the engineers had used to prep the range for the event. Climbing on top of the earthmover, my pal and I had a ringside seat to some serious military chaos.
The event had an announcer who explained the choreography of the exercise to the spectators. The PA system could literally be heard above an artillery strike, so we could follow the action from our perch atop the dozer despite being unable to see the bleachers. As the CALFEX began in earnest, it became apparent we really had a great vantage point. The artillery was especially spectacular from our perch.
The 105mm, 155mm and Multiple Launch Rocket Systems rent the earth asunder to the delight of my buddy and me. The detonations were close enough for us to feel the shockwaves, and the MLRS seemed to punch holes through the sky. We were young, bulletproof and immortal, and this was as good as it got.
Helicopters are the only military machines cooler than tanks.
Suddenly the announcer declared the next event would be an armored unit in full assault. An M1 tank weighs 130,000 lbs. and could violate most of the nation’s posted speed limits. Second only to helicopters, tanks are just stupid cool. My pal and I anxiously searched downrange trying to pick out the tanks as they sprang from their camouflaged fighting positions.
The M1 is a turbine-powered beast, and it makes a distinctive sort of racket. The noise is a cacophonous harmony of a jet engine combined with the metallic clanking of tank tracks. There really is no other sound quite like it. We heard the distinctive sound all right, but not where we had expected it.
To our horror, we looked back and realized we had inadvertently slipped past the tanks while trying to secure a proper perch. The tanks leapt out of their fighting positions behind us and opened up with their coax guns and cupola-mounted fifties. The bulldozer wasn’t a piece of parked engineering equipment. The bulldozer was a target.
Friends, they say tracers as big as basketballs will come at you. I’d say it’s a profound understatement. We dove off the bulldozer and clambered down between the tracks as machinegun bullets streaked all around us. Flattening ourselves as much as possible, I was praying audibly, hoping the tanks wouldn’t shoot the bulldozer with their cannons.
An M1 tank shooting at you will make all your other problems pale in comparison.
We always wrapped up a CALFEX with a B1 or B52 laying out a veritable carpet of 500-lb. bombs.
As the tanks approached, they tore around the abused dozer and slid to a halt before enthusiastically throwing main gun rounds downrange at distant targets. Seeing an opportunity, my friend and I leapt up, now coated in mud, and tore back toward the pickup truck as fast as our legs would carry us. Once it became apparent I was not going to die, my mind occupied itself with other things.
Aviators are recognized minorities on most large Army posts, and I was wearing a flight suit. If somebody spotted me scuttling about the impact area during a CALFEX, it would have likely been a simple thing to discern my identity. I wasn’t sure what such idiocy would do to a commissioned officer’s career but my suspicions were it would not be anything good.
We made it back to the truck terrified but intact, and swore each other to secrecy. It was literally years before I breathed a word to anybody but now I share it with you. After nearly three decades the statute of limitations has surely expired.
After a few brief minutes living in the bull’s-eye, my guardian angel had clearly earned a vacation.