SERE: Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. Be as good as you can be at the first two our instructors used to say, and you won’t need the second pair. Turned out to be good advice for CWO2′s Steven Cianfrini and Mark Burrows as their OH-58 Kiowa was shot down by insurgents south of Baghdad.
The WaPo has the story:
“The whole world just opened up on us, it seemed like,” Cianfrini said in a telephone interview from Iraq. “We zigzagged, whatever we could do, to get out of the guns’ target line. Then we started taking rounds from behind. That . . . took the aircraft down…”
As it lost altitude, the Kiowa started to shake violently, its main rotor damaged. Burrows said he decided to head into the field but the aircraft began to spin uncontrollably, and at about 20 feet above the ground he had to cut the power. The helicopter hit the ground tail first, bounced over an irrigation canal, crashed nose down and slid into a ditch beside a dirt road.
Cianfrini climbed out one door and Burrows got out the other. They met at the nose and discovered that they had suffered only scratches, they said. The Kiowa was by then on fire, its engine blowing up inside. Insurgents were shooting from across the field, and the pilots could hear rounds hitting the burning helicopter.
“Where’s your weapon?” Burrows yelled to Cianfrini.
To paraphrase Kipling, it’s a gripping narrative of aerial warriors suddenly thrown from their element filling “the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.”
Cap’n,
Strapping one’s self onto the skids of an attack copter and flying at 120 mph sounds almost as scary as waiting in that ditch.
Yikes!
I particularly like the part about the bad guys getting greased when they went to inspect the damaged chopper and it was destroyed by 2 500# bombs. Brings to mind a question: How come we don’t get to hear about the numbers of baddies that assume room temperature very often? For me at least, this lacking detail makes it seem that our guys are the only ones paying a price.
STEVEC … about that ‘failure to communicate’ you mention in your post above. As an “old bold” journalist myself I have become increasingly disgusted with the supposedly hard news stories presented to us by most of the MSM in the world news sections of our daily newspapers. Where did these supposedly ‘trained journalists’ come from? No journalists trained by my college [Columbia University, 1951] would ever have gotten a passing grade from a professor if they didn’t give the classic Who-What-Where-When-Why in the first para of a hard news story. Now they’re so busy spinning the facts, that most of the facts never do turn up until the run-over. Which is why so many of us have cancelled our subscriptions.
Marianne Matthews
[...] Lex has the story, while the Dawn Patrol has some impressive video: Apache pilots escaping and evading and being rescued with some courageous derring-do. [...]
Perception…
…
Funny, isn’t it, how Hollywood made a movie about getting shot down in Bosnia, but won’t lift a finger to OK a movie about this. You know, I hear tell they used to make movies where there were bad guys, heroes, and such like that.
I also hear tell about the days when newspapers reported facts and television had actual journalists on the news desk.
But then, those old folks, they sure can spin a yarn…
– Max