Secrets of the Night Stalkers, and Rescuing Marcus Luttrell, with Army Master Aviator Alan C. Mack | Ep. 1324

26:17And for good reason. Now we're seeing sort of the building blocks of what makes you you and why you would become so special and so important to them. And Stone Cold, too. Can you speak of the nerves? Like, was there a career as an air traffic controller? It's not like, how are... No, those guys have a job that's stressful. That's extremely stressful. That's like the height of stress. But this is very stressful too. Surface to air missiles or whatever. Man pads are coming at me. What, was there something in your background? Did you meditate? How did you handle that? It's the training, you know?

26:48Well, it's selection, who the unit takes. And then, you know, there's certain personalities that work in this situation and others that don't. and then they just train you and then you train very realistic. And, you know, it's funny. I was talking to Jerry Bruckheimer at the premiere for 12 Strong and he's like, ah, you know, I hope you like the movie. And I said, well, as long as you didn't make us look like I've seen in every other movie, which is you get the badass special operations guys coming in and they're flying low and all of a sudden someone shoots a pistol at them and they all run into each other and, oh my God, they're shooting at us.

27:24And he goes, no, no, I think you're going to like it. And my point to that is the general and his staff heard us talking on the internal comms, and they didn't know we were being shot at because the conversational tone is, you know, missile two o 'clock evading, you know, descending, speeding up. I think even I would know. That's okay. I understood enough. Yeah. But, you know, what happens is you do the mission, and then you come back. and when you've done the after action review and you kind of sit down at the mess hall and you're eating, that's when it dawns on you, oh crap, we almost died. Yeah.

28:04And I remember about that in the book that in the first week or two, the other flight lead, there was two of us flying out of Task Force Dagger in K-2, Garshikannabad. We snuck off to discuss how we thought we were going to... With the liquor? Yeah, the CIA brought us a bottle of Jack. Yeah. And we each had a little - This humanized you. They each had a little snort. So set the scene, you were about to go off on a mission. Well, so we're back now. So we've done a couple of missions into Afghanistan. And really, I talked about the environment being one of the most dangerous parts of flying. We're flying into the mountains of Northern Afghanistan.

28:47This is now post - Post 9-11. 9-11, yeah. and we're flying using equipment that we've never been allowed to use for real. You know, you could train with it, but you couldn't go in the mountains in the clouds. And it was Donald Rumsfeld that actually called us and said, you know, you will get those teams in tonight, period. And that's a whole story on its own. But so, you know, we get through these first, like, you know, two, three missions, and each of them was, like, by the skin of our teeth, like both the other flight lead and me. You know, took the aircraft right to its limit. I mean, they were up at 22 ,000 feet.

29:24Oh. You know. How high can the aircraft go? About 25. Oh, jeez. You're on oxygen. The doors are open, you know, because you've got miniguns hanging out. Aren't you a little worried about a big wind or something? I mean, like, that's so close to tops. Yeah, the wind sucks. Yeah. Coming off the mountains, a lot of turbulence. But we came back, and both of us had near misses on all the missions where we just didn't think our luck was going to hold out, and we sat in the back room there with a little shot of Jack. And I didn't remember who initiated the conversation, but it was like, hey, what do you think?

29:57I was like, I think we're going to die in the next mission or two. And he said, yeah, I agree. And they were like, what do we do? Fill her up. Well, the answer was we do the missions because who else is going to do it? It's right after 9-11. I mean, I've talked to so many of you guys, and that's the attitude. It's shocking to hear, but it's actually not because you all seem to feel that way. You know, it's like Rob O 'Neill told me when they were flying over to Abbottabad in those helicopters and they all thought, you know, probably gonna die doing this. This is going in to get bin Laden in the middle of the night.

30:28He's probably pretty well protected and we're taking a lot of risks. And he tells an amazing story, one of my favorite ever, of how one guy sort of said, not like he was chickening out, but basically like, so what are we, why are we doing this again? Because like it's near a certain death. and they had a discussion about a woman who was on, I think, the South World Trade Center and was holding her dress down for modesty. I remember watching that. You know, it's funny as you tell the story, I'm getting a little teared up here. Yeah. I was at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana. We were doing a training exercise and I heard guys in the hallway making a bunch of noise like holy crap did you see that you know they were watching the news they saw the first plane hit yeah so i turn on the tv started making a pot of coffee and you know i watched the second plane hit i was like okay this is no this is an attack it's definitely an attack so i'm gonna run around getting everybody you know together and we ended up driving back to fort campbell because they wouldn't let anything fly right that was like a 12-hour drive and then the next day i was in tampa you know another 15-hour drive you know just to plan what was initially called infinite response or something like that.

31:49I can't remember the exact name. Indefinite? Indefinite. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, Donald Rumsfeld came out. They read us the right act. Do not talk about this at all. What is it? Infinite justice. Infinite justice. That's what it was, yeah. And so they're like, don't you talk about this at all? And we're driving back to Campbell, listening to NPR. It's the only radio station we could get like all the way up reliably. I forgive you. That's right. You got to do something. No satellite radio at the time. No cell phones. That's right. We had pagers. But it was just, oh, he comes on for the press conference and he says, we're starting Infinite Justice.

32:22Like, well, so much for OPSEC. And then they changed the name. Yeah, like thanks to Rumsfeld. Yeah. Okay. You knew right away you were going someplace. Oh, yeah. Did you know right away it was bin Laden? I didn't know. I didn't know that right away. A lot of the military guys had guessed, you know, people who were tuned in. We were going after him. I might have even put it in the book, in 99, 2000, you know when they did the big tea lamp strike, the tomahawks? Yeah, you did put it in the book, and Bill Clinton did not authorize the strike. Right, so the Clintons wouldn't authorize it. In hindsight, I write that...

32:58You thought it was an okay call. The equipment and the techniques at the time were brand new that we ended up using in Afghanistan. But I don't know that it would have gone well. In 99. Yeah, but it might've been okay. When you think about what might've been, you know, my gosh, good gracious to have thought, to have gotten him if we could have in 99 and spared the world everything that would happen. Trust me, I was at Tora Bora in 2001. I saw you did an interview with McPhee. Yeah, so fun. Right, so he was one of the guys I was carrying in and they did that crazy ceasefire for some reason and he got away.

33:40I mean, we had him on the ropes. He was injured.

33:45But when they got him, I remember just thinking, finally. Yeah. That was such a moment. It was crazy. And I know in the SEAL community, it's controversial. You bring up Rob's name, and I adore him because they're all like, you don't take credit. But meanwhile, it's like, okay, that happened through a series of events. And it was such a historical mission. I think it's much better that we know. I really think there's so much value to him in particular because he's an incredible storyteller and communicator to have come forward and said, this is what we did. And he didn't make it all about himself.

34:20He talked about his role, but he talked about everybody's role. I just think he did us all such a service because it only increased our respect for the steel community exponentially. If you never tell any of the story, right? This is what I struggled with writing this book. And, you know, I sent it to the Pentagon. They did their little cuts on it. But essentially, they didn't really change the story. But when I was talking to the public affairs at the 160th, they're like, we're quiet professionals, which is true. But you can't be what they call a silent professional. I mean, you don't tell anything because where's your tax dollar?

34:55So quiet professional is one thing. Silent is a different. Yeah, yeah. So I'm probably one of the more vocal for the Night Stalkers. Mike Durant did something after Mogadishu. He had two books. You know, Rob, you know, he always speaks highly of me, so I got nothing bad to say about him. That's good. I will not have Rob besmirched in my presence because I just adore the guy. I think he's so great and he's done so much for our country. But I understand that within the SEAL community and I'm sure beyond, there is some consternation about talking, you know, about the missions or anything. You know, most military guys are so against anything that would sound self-aggrandizing, which is why, you know, we love them and we admire that.

35:37We're an all-volunteer force. So if you don't have somebody want to join you because they just don't know anything about you, they're not going to join. Yes, exactly. What better way of recruiting is there than to tell at least a few of the stories or what you can tell around the stories? Okay, so let's go back. So 9-11 happens. You mentioned you're in Louisiana. You're watching it. You know you're going to get deployed. And you do get deployed. and tell us about the horse soldiers, horse soldiers. Right. So ODA 595, Operational Detachment Alpha 595. They're our fifth group, which is at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

36:18And ironically, they were a Marriops team, maritime operations. And the mission I was doing at Fort Polk when the towers came down was maritime operations, which is kind of funny. They end up in the desert. But we get to K2, Karshikanabad. Where? Karshikanabad. So it's Uzbekistan. So it's just to the north of Afghanistan. And we've got this old Soviet air base that turns out had radioactive materials left behind. So my arm's a little shorter now. But our mission at the time is personnel recovery, or PR. The idea is we're going to go bomb the heck out of the Taliban and a little bit of retribution.

37:02Because the idea is to get through the Taliban to bin Laden. So first you have to soften them up a little bit. So our job was if somebody were to go down in Afghanistan or what we call denied territory, we would go rescue them. That lasted a couple of weeks. Just other pilots? Yeah, other pilots, the bombers. And at the time you had B-52s, B-1s, B-2s, and F-14s off the carriers. That's all it was flying over. B-2s aren't the... The stealth fighters. The stealth bombers. You have the big wing. Yes. Isn't that what we used in Iran? In the first... Yeah. In June. Yeah. The B-2 bomber? Yeah. That stealthy looking scary spaceship kind of thing?

37:40They were taken off out of the U.S. and coming to bomb. Right. Not stopping for refueling? Right. So anyway, we were going to rescue them if they were to go down. Oh, wow. And what we did not know was that there was a, what they call a UW campaign, unconventional warfare. with the Green Berets, and they're going to come in, link up with the Northern Alliance factions, and fight the Taliban. Our NATO allies. Well, I wouldn't call them NATO. Well, the NATO allies came in to the fight, but the Northern Alliance is Afghan forces. Oh, the Afghanis, okay. General Dostum, Fahim Khan, you know, those guys.

38:14As a matter of fact, what's his name? Masoud, I can't think of his nickname. It was like the Wolf of the Mountains or something crazy like that. But the Al-Qaeda assassinated him a day or two before 9-11 because they didn't want us to have an ally to fight them in Afghanistan. They knew it was coming. So they killed him with a fake film crew. They blew up the camera and killed him. And there was no clear successor. It's diabolical. And there was a problem. There was no clear successor for us to deal with, which is, so their plan sort of works. Yeah. But not really. Because the CIA had been embedded around the country.

38:49and they hooked us up with four or five different warlords. General Dostum was the one that we had at Mazar-e-Sharif in that area. So the horse soldiers, if you will, they didn't get that name until they infilled, and I'll tell you why in a minute. So my job was to take them in. This was October 19th they took them in. And there was another set of Chinooks. As in 2001. 2001, right? So we typically operate in teams of two helicopters, right? you know shock one shock two and they were going up to the big mountains the 22 ,000 foot mountains i was going to like 12 or 14 ,000 so i could carry the entire team which is 12 guys in their equipment as opposed to normally we would split them up for redundancy and just more performance for the aircraft in the mountains and so they ended up what's his name fahim was the other warlord and he said if he didn't get his green berets first he would not only not cooperate with us but he would attack, dose them, you know, and then throw our plan.

39:50These are our friends? Yeah. It's great. He ended up being like the defense minister or something when they formed the government. But anyway, so they go over, they turn around the first night for weather. They can't get through the mountains. Next night, they go back again. Same thing happens. And that morning, you know, I'm all pissed off at my buddies because they can't get the guys in. I wasn't very supportive. And these guys, the ones who were trying to drop, are meant to be taking on the Taliban in an effort to get one step closer to bin Laden. This isn't the 595 guys. They're working with me.

40:22This is triple nickel, 555, out of the same battalion. But the mission is take out Taliban, get closer to bin Laden. Yes. Okay. And so Donald Rumsfeld, personally, well, actually his secretary, calls the planning area. We're all asleep in the day. and uh this major we call major mark uh answers the phone and he hears you know is this the you know dagger ops and he's like yes who's this and he said please hold for the secretary he's like secretary he's like this is donald rumsfeld who am i talking to you know and he's like like the scariest man in washington by the way he goes you tell mulholland who was our colonel at the time now in general because uh you tell him to get those teams in tonight you've been given a lot lot of equipment, a lot of training, a lot of money spent.

41:05You do it. And he hung up. That game changed from there forward. Why hadn't you gone? Why was the plan not to do it that night? Well, this was in the day, and it would have been a repeat of the next night, and I wouldn't have brought the 595 guys in because we were always trying to leave an aircraft as a spare, and we don't like to fly a single ship. So I had to give one of my Chinooks to the other team to carry what they needed over the big mountains. Oh, that's why you had everybody. So now the game changed. I'm gonna fly a single ship, so by myself, with all 12 guys in their gear, and I'm not gonna have enough gas to do it.

41:45So we do air refueling, but we, at the time, never planned on air refueling being an only way to get gas. You always had a spare gas somewhere. In this case, you didn't. Oh, gosh. You either got your tank or you didn't. That's life or death. Yeah. So what they did is they gave me a couple of armed Blackhawks. They're called DAPs, direct action penetrators. Fantastic aircraft. Very, very deadly. But it doesn't have the performance to go into the mountains where I have to take these guys. So he's going to take me as far as he can. And you have to go alone. And I like to describe this as like I was reading a book on World War II, the bombers.

42:21And it's like the fighter cover would go only so far. and then either turn around or wait for you to come back out. What was left would come out. So that was the goal. We're going to go in. He'll hang out wherever he can. And that started the night. So we took off. Oh, and by the way, the country of Uzbekistan, their military didn't agree with us being there. So they threatened to shoot us down. And so they had all these radar-guided missiles, I mean, really nasty things. Why did it have to be done that night? Why was he so hasty? We were in Afghanistan for 20 years. Well, we were supposed to be there a couple of weeks.

43:03Yeah, at the beginning. We were told. That old chestnut. Yeah. That's raised its ugly head again recently. Get bin Laden and get out. That was our plan. and um so we uh you know we take off and uh you get the jammers running you know so if they they lock onto me i can jam them with the radar jammers and i'm flying down low on the train in friendly territory but not so friendly yeah frenemy right so then i get across the first set of mountains i meet my tanker i get my first air refueling and then i go across the border the Amodari is a river on the northern border. And I remember saying, all right, it's 10 minutes to cross the border, and my heart was just jumping out of my chest.

43:48I mean, externally, we talk about sounding and being calm. So the teams are hearing 10 minutes to border crossing, but in my mind, it's something much more insane. And can I just jump in and say, how do you know where to go? Is there a GPS? Is there an actual GPS that's telling you where to go? It was like, is cartography important for a pilot? Like you've got to understand the maps and that's what would kill me. I might be able to fly an airplane if I were on like some sort of a drug that calms you down. But - Well, then you just let the, you press the button, let her fly you. I just can't, I can't have no sense of direction.

44:23I would definitely have been in North Korea when I was doing that in North Korea. So I'm like, hi, hi, sorry, my bad. Well, night stalkers are known for their navigation skills as part of the - I admire that. I deeply admire that. It must be wonderful when you go to the mall and you can't remember where you parked. Well, I can't. It doesn't happen to you. Talk to my wife about that. I can't get out of a parking lot. Save my life. But I can get there. Right. And if anybody locks on you with a man pad, you're good. You know what to do. Get that flare in the back of the car. But I'm still stuck in a parking lot.

44:52Okay. So back to you. And your heart is racing, but you're projecting calm and cool. You got 12 night horses. Well, they're Green Berets, right? Okay. That group. And they're going to be called horse soldiers because after I get them in, they end up riding horses and cavalry charges with the Northern Alliance. So they're doing GPS and laser-guided munitions while riding horses. That's next level sophistication. That's what they make their movie about. It's pretty insane. And old school as well, all at once. So when you actually drop these guys off, are you so relieved? I mean, do you have the moment of like, dear God, thank you.

45:36Yeah, but before that, we're flying along. My DAP's with me, right? They're at my five and eight o 'clock. We're part of it anyway. But you can't see out the window. Like it's dark. I mean, it's really dark. And it's like, wow, I don't see the mountains anymore. So I turn the searchlight on. And there's a saying in flying that if you don't like what you see in the searchlight, turn it off. Because what we saw was dust. What do you mean? You were in a dust storm? We were in a dust storm. So I've got the radars up, and I can see the terrain with the radar. And the daps are tucked in as tight as they can on me because their night vision goggles can see the heat from my engines.

46:14So there's two circular orbs in the back, the engine exhaust. And as we increase power, obviously they get hotter, and they can tell we're on a climb. So they just sort of climb and stay with it. Well, one of them couldn't see us anymore, so he had to break off. And then the other one turned around as well. and then the colonel, the battalion commander, is in my jump seat. So the jump seat is like I'm sitting in the left seat. There's a right seat pilot right about here, and I could hit him. And right between us and just behind us is the air mission commander. So he's the guy really responsible for the decisions that are being made.

46:48And he goes, Al, what are we going to do? And I said, sir, I think we just TF, terrain following radar. What terrain following radar? I'll tell you in a minute. I thought it was turn the fuck around. This is terrifying. We're all going to die. We're going to TF. And he goes, okay, execute. And I'm thinking, holy crap. I didn't know the SECDEF had just called and said, get those in no matter what. So I'm like, all right, Jethro, my co-pilot from West Virginia, I said, press the button, the cues come up, and the cues for the radar keep you 300 feet above the terrain. So it'll descend you, climb you in the mountains, fly in between the mountains.

47:25But it's all a little video game. He's moving the controls based on the cues that he's seeing. So it's not automatic pilot. It is nowadays, but it wasn't then. It was all what we call commanded. So he's flying this thing. And the reason we weren't allowed to use this at the time for real in training was because your iPhone ever bricked up on you, like just sort of locked up and you had to do a hard reset, or maybe a laptop, a little delete. The radar would do that just out of the blue. Oh, my. So here you are in the clouds, in the mountains at 300 feet. And you're like, rainbow wheel, rainbow wheel.

48:01And so all you can do, and we trained for this, but once again, not for real. And the pilot slows back to what we call the best climb airspeed, pulls in all the power you got, and you climb like your life depends on it because it does, you know? And because, remember I told you about the PK, the probable kill? Yep. So a missile may have, you know, 10, 20%, you know, with countermeasures. The ground has a PK of 100%. Yeah. So you run into the mountain, you've never even got to know. Yeah. And the mission has failed. And our goal is to succeed. So he's climbing. I'm pulling circuit breakers and resetting things.

48:42And we get it back. And then I figure out what the problem was. And we kind of do some things to get around it. Control, I'll delete. Pretty much. Yeah. And we end up going over the last ridgeline with these guys. We're going to meet up with the Northern Alliance soldiers, if you want to call them that, fighters. And what's interesting is there's a ZPU-23-4. That's a four-barreled, 23-millimeter anti-aircraft gun on the other side of a small hill. So we had done the— This is what's waiting for you? If I don't—if I screw this up, that's what's waiting for me. So there's a group of guys and then the gun.

49:21and in between them is a small hill that as long as they can't see me, they can hear me all they want, but if they can't see me, they can't shoot me. And the idea, I did the math and the navigation route specifically so that when I came across the final ridge, they wouldn't have a line of sight on me, so they couldn't shoot me. But we've got to descend 4 ,000 or 5 ,000 feet in about a mile, which is really difficult to do. And if you go long, which you normally would, that gun's going to tear us to pieces. so instead we do these like we call them s turns right and you just s turn it back and forth so you're losing your altitude laterally instead of going long and so my co-pilot is i'm doing it and then we get to the bottom and i'm on a left hand turn i know he's out to the right but i'm at like 100 feet now and i should be what we call in short final set up with all the controls kind of centered up and you press these little buttons that the magnets will keep the controls where are supposed to be.

50:18So you just fight the springs as opposed to moving the hydraulics. And I go, Jethro, can you see the LZ? And he's like, yeah. What's the LZ? Landing zone. Oh. Right. So this is where we're supposed to land. And I said, all right, you have the controls. And I just screwed him. Because now he's got to take the controls after I just whip this thing around. And he's got to get us lined up, set up the thing. He's like, I've got him? You sure? You're doing so well. But I will tell you, he was one of the best dust landing pilots I've ever met. So he's better than me. Well, maybe. But no, he probably is better than me.

50:56So he does it. And as we come in, it's like a talcum powder dust. And I'm convinced, I'm looking at the display, and I'm like, we're going backwards. We're going to crash. So the idea would be that. I'm getting JFK Jr. vibes here. Yeah, it's along those lines. You don't know whether you're up or down. Just like it. Oh, wow. Except I feel the aft landing gear touch the ground. Oh. You know? And I just told him to go around. So he's starting to pull a power, and we're going to take off again and try to come around. Hopefully the gun doesn't get us. And now I'm pushing on the controls to make it go down.

51:34To land, right? Because you realize you are landing? It's like, he got us on the ground. I just got to get the forward gear down. So he realizes at some point what I'm doing. and he lets it go. And then the dust kind of settles and we're surrounded by Afghan fighters in traditional Afghan. So now what? Well, now I got to wonder, is it the right guys? Because there's no, so the team leader gets off. It's impossible. And 12 Strong, they get off and I all hug and stuff. He gets off, they go talk. We're all on guard. We're ready to defend ourselves. And he looks back at me and just gives me a thumbs up.

52:13that that's a ballsy guy who went out to have a little chat not knowing yeah those what if it's not friendly those guys are amazing but uh so we took off we went back repeated the same thing back got air refueling again from my air force tanker and then he came back and i remember uh landing at karshi kanabad when you went out and came back on those first days everybody came out to see you off you know the the base commander the chaplain you know the all the people wanted to see you. And we come back and everybody's like a big, you know, but we're just so like spent from the adrenaline dump. Are you feeling sluggish, bloated, not quite like yourself?

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54:50my references are so weird forgive me yeah alan but all i'm thinking about is little house on the prairie and mary ingalls she married adam they were blind and she was leaving and he said i'll be waving as you drive away that's what they're saying to you it's a dust storm you can't see them they can't see you but they want you to know they're rooting for you they're there i love that they show up you know as a matter of fact when we left on the mission they they had to tug the aircraft out from parking right so they have a track aircraft tractor called a tug and they pull it out with a tow bar and they put it where you um have a clear you know spin up your rotors and stuff and i'm walking along with my hand on the fuel tank it's dark uh i'm looking up at the stars it's crisp night and i can see orion so orion is my favorite constellation because every time i saw it life went good you know so it's got to be my lucky thing you know but as i'm walking out but everybody's watching me walk by in the mud.

55:48The taxiway was all mud. It's that thick clay. You must have felt like a badass. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is right after 9-11. We're going to take the fight to the enemy. F &A. And it felt good. Yes, I'm sure it did. It really did. Can I ask you, when you were in school, were you really good at math? Did you take physics? No, I was terrible at math. Really? Yeah. Because I feel like while you're up there, you are doing calculations by the millisecond. You do. I mean, I can save my life with it, but no, I'm not any good at math. So, but I think you are good at math. I was more into history and, you know.

56:21You're good at it. Maybe you just, you weren't taught right or, you know. Well, I was good at the math that mattered. Yeah. You know. Yeah, yeah, because that clearly seems to have been. Basically trigonometry and geometry. That was kicking in for you up there. Yeah. So, so how does that conclude? So the, so they go do their thing, the ODA. and a couple of days later they take Mazar-e-Sharif which is the key to the north and the Taliban withdrew to Kabul and then a couple of weeks later, now in the meantime we're still doing, you know in the movie it's like one ODA out there one team of Green Berets but I think we put 21 teams in total over the course of like the first two, three weeks and then General Dostum decided to take Kabul So everybody back in our command is telling the Green Beret captain, tell him no, advise him no, we're not ready to do that.

57:17Maybe in the spring, right? And this is a November, December timeframe of 2001. And he goes, we can't stop him. And so all we can do now is support him. And he took Kabul in like a week. Wow. And they were expecting a year or so, but the Taliban just fled. And that's how we got the embassy back in Kabul. Okay. And then we just kept doing, I told you we did 21 teams total between the two flights of two. And we just kept doing it night after night, pushing the aircraft. The aircraft crews kept those things up. When you think about the fact that it would be another 10 years before we actually did get bin Laden.

57:56It's like we were pushing pedal to the metal. We weren't wasting time. We were getting the job done. But the big gorilla. So it was November of 2001. We get told, hey, send two aircraft to Bagram Air Force Base down in Afghanistan. We get this thing called Tora Bora. We think we got bin Laden, right? So they start that. This is when we actually did get them? No, this is when we got away. 10 years earlier, okay. Yeah. So this is 2001. And while those guys go down there, my job is to fly around Afghanistan and move all of the Green Berets to C-130 capable airstrips, meaning they can be resupplied now by air force airplanes instead of us meaning we're going home this is november like thanksgiving 2001 we're going to go home as soon as the toroborah campaign is done and then uh the guys that were down there only packed like a three-day bag they stayed for about five days and then they're like hey we got to swap out so i took my flight down there with the better supplied group, you know, to stay longer.

59:03And we're going to finish this up. And then he hits the ceasefire, he gets away, and we just keep going. We didn't stop for 10 years. I did 10 years worth of deployments. Really? Yeah. Back at home, you had some troubles in your personal life with your wife, your first wife, Linda. Yeah. Was this the period that you write about in the book where she started to deteriorate? Yeah. It started not at the end of that deployment. So March 2002, I was shot down during Operation Anaconda. Yes, right. That's where the two medals of honor were issued for Brett Zielinski and John Chapman. So it was interesting because I get shot down.

59:53I get rescued. I'm brought back to a forward operating base. And one of the CIA personnel comes up and hands me a satellite phone. He says, Mr. Mack, you probably want to call your wife. This is going to hit CNN in five minutes. And I can't because if I let her know I'm okay, because here's what the report was. we had uh was uh two chinooks shot down eight killed was what cnn reported what year uh 2002 yeah march 2002 and the odds are that's me because i'm the senior flight lead and my wife is going to hear that but the problem is if she knows that i'm okay and all the wives are hanging out at the commander's house watching the news coverage and waiting for news if she's calm they know it's not me so i can't i can't do it right this is my professional because the odds go up it's one of their guys yeah and and there's a process to notifying somebody that they have a killed in action and um we get out of there and we're coming home and she found out that i had an opportunity to call her oh and it did not go well and she never never forgave me never forgave me and so after that she was addicted to prescription opioids you know pink methadone was her her thing and then that wasn't enough so she augmented it with alcohol and this is all you know taking place over years you know but it's it's slowly getting worse and had ups and downs and i'm still deploying and coming home and deploying and coming home and even when you come home you're not really home you're out in what we call the environments training you're out on the Atlantic landing on ships you're in the mountains of Colorado getting good there you're flying in the cities in LA New York so you're always gone anyway you know and so she you know a good example when people thank me for my service it feels a little odd because I feel like I don't really deserve that thanks because I did it because I wanted to the families kind of got dragged into it you know I mean they had a vote to an extent but you know they're the ones that really need the the thanks i mean the spouses generally enter into it willingly the children get dragged along yeah um so you're dealing with that like your wife's not doing well and the marriage is not doing well can we should we should back up and talk about operation anaconda okay um because the the little radars the flares did not work no but okay so there are different threats to an aircraft you have um ir threats infrared and that's the heat seekers you have radar threats which is radar guided equipment both of those you have countermeasures for right you you can tend to mitigate or even defeat those systems most often then you have a ballistic threat which is machine guns rifles uh rocket propelled grenades right those are not guided if somebody shoots at you depending on how good they are how good their guess was how far you are you're going to get hit you know and uh that's what happened to me it was a rocket propelled grenade came through the side of the aircraft while the seals were getting off on the top of this mountain tucker gar now called roberts ridge to many people um yeah it was uh there wasn't anything i do about it once it hit how many were on board uh let's see so my crew of uh uh seven and then seven seals yeah so 14 people on board and so it hit not your side yeah on my side i watched oh yeah i watched it come in and uh it came in slow motion almost you know like that time compression you could see it see it i could see it coming at me sparks coming out of the back and it hit you know um about two feet behind me now behind me is what's called the flight control closet it's this uh closet full of actuators and hydraulics that when you move the controls they go through this series of bell cranks and gizmos they go to the top call this pfm right pure magic uh you know is how the chinook flies but um it missed that if it had hit it we'd have been done if they had shot forward they would have hit the cockpit we would just died yeah that would have been done and if they'd got another foot backwards they would hit the main fuel tank and we probably wouldn't be here so they they ran it right through the one spot they could do the minimum danger and it came through the aircraft exploded inside now typically you know when these things hit armor the overpressure is what kills everybody inside but the doors are all open right and so there's no real overpressure so it came through this side hits the ammo can, metal and bullets are flying everywhere, and it goes out the other side, put a couple big holes in the rotor blades, and it took out three separate electrical systems as it all went through.

1:05:02They're geographically placed so that you have redundancy, and battle damage can be kept to a minimum. In this case, they got it. It was like a shotgun blast. Had them all? All three of them gone. So the cockpit of an MH47E model, an Echo, is four television screens for multifunction displays, MFDs. And all of the information for the flight, the engine operations, the rotor RPM, all the things that are important are displayed on that. And the guns, we have these things called mini guns. It's a six-barreled electric Gatling gun. That's our self-defense. Those are AC-powered. They run off the generators.

1:05:41They shoot 4 ,000 rounds a minute. So, I mean, they're deadly when they work, but with no electricity, they don't work. Now, since then, we've put them on batteries instead of the aircraft power. But anyway, so now I'm sitting in the cockpit, and it's nighttime. This thing comes through. The screens all go blank. And you know how your desktop computer, especially your older ones, you can hear the fan, the cooling fan? Yeah. Well, all these black boxes have cooling fans, so they make a lot of noise. And all of a sudden, they're just spooling down. you know and i'm like oh that's even worse but the rotor blades are still spinning so the engines will run in what's called reversionary mode it's a backup mode so i could still fly so we're in the middle of a engagement here where we can't defend ourselves so we go to take off and that's when neil roberts uh who was getting out of the aircraft at the time he was not plugged into the communication system uh and he fell out on top of it with with my crew chief so the crew chief fell out but he had a tether so oh my gosh he was able to be retrieved uh so we dove down the mountain trying to get out of the enemy fire regain rotor rpm and my intention is to crash on the floor below you know a controlled crash because i got one engine i think yeah and the crew chiefs are telling me sir we've both engines are running you can level off like are you sure because i have no indications in the cockpit and they're yeah yeah we hear both engines so i pull in the power we level off and now they tell me you know neil fell out the back so all right we got to go back so we turn around to go back into the top of this mountain and uh the controls stop moving i can't move any of the controls uh oh right so i always give the example of uh your car when you still had a key in the ignition yeah you pull the key out you can't move the steering wheel yeah no hydraulics no move controls so uh i'm like guys i'm sorry we're done i can't do anything so for a minute there it's very surreal i've kind of looked up at the stars i look down and i can see the battle down below me the big the 101st is down there fighting taliban and uh i can see tracer fire going back and forth and it's kind of cool thinking this is my last view and then all of a sudden the controls work again so one of the crew chiefs in the back had a can of hydraulic fluid which is you know not much bigger than this glass and he's pouring it into a fill module which is meant to top it off not to service it and he's got this little handle and he's like pumping it like feverishly and he's getting hydraulic fluid back into the system now i can fly and i'm like all right here we go we're back in the game guys and i turn back toward the hill again.

1:08:22For how long? 50 seconds. Whoa. So 50 seconds goes by. I can't move it again. He puts another can in. Are there a lot of cans? He's got three cans. Holy cow. So now I realize I can't reasonably land on top of the hill and get everybody back off. And I'm still responsible for the other SEALs and my crew. I can't just go down there and hit the meat grinder. So my second aircraft, Razor 04, is still out there. So I'm hoping he can go do the rescue. I can't do it. I'm going to need to be rescued. So instead, I turn now back to battle. And the idea is to identify a friendly position and land near it.

1:09:06So I set up a rated descent. And I'm sorry for being a technical error, but about 300 foot a minute, about 70 knots. And the idea is that maybe if I lose the controls again when we get to the bottom maybe that's a survivable impact you know I mean it's going to be ugly but maybe somebody lives and we get down to the he puts the fluid in the last time and we get down to the bottom and what looked like nice smooth terrain as I got about 75 feet off the ground turned into these hills you know rolling so now I've got my landing area in sight but the aircraft is now sliding to the right and i cannot move the the control that would stop that so there's a saying we have in aviation never quit flying the aircraft so what else have i got i have other controls so now i push on the pedals and the aircraft swings in the direction that we're sliding so now i'm straight on to the hill and then i can't move those anymore and we hit the ground at a reasonable speed and rate of descent and i pushed the last control down we settled on a slope and we lived i remember I'm thinking a little bit of an expletive.

1:10:14We're alive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Never quit flying. Yeah. And we shut it down. Razor 04 came, picked us up about 45 minutes later, uh, bringing the seals back in. You were a hero. They knew what you had done. Yeah. Well, it was funny because Brit Slavinsky, one of the medal of honor recipients, uh, he's rallying his guys. He's like, all right, we're going to go back up the hill. And I'm, I got our map out and I'm like, that's not the mountain that's the mountain and he's like no we were only flying for like three minutes i said yeah like you know 90 miles an hour yeah right for three minutes i said we we're like 10 miles away and he's like oh it's a good thing you knew that yeah back to the map knowledge yeah that would come in very handy yeah sure did so that was operation anaconda is the biggest mission you were ever part of the retrieval of marcus as far as what i can talk about yeah oh yeah there's you know yeah you can tell me you have to kill me yeah and all of my listeners too i'd get in trouble i don't want to do that you don't want that but um yeah that was a biggie i mean that's probably the toughest flying i've done in my entire life one of the most well-known and shocking incidents it was about two weeks of of hell you know flying into there because we were trying to find all the bodies because Well, the audience may not be familiar.

1:11:42So what's the first you heard about, is this guy missing? Or was it when the helicopter went down? Yeah, so it starts out Operation Red Wings, which is a conventional operation with the U.S. Marines. But in order to get our helicopters, the special operations helicopters, you have to have a special operations component in the mission. So they said, well, it would be great if we got some special forces guys up on the hill overlooking the village because what happens all the time when you come in with helicopter assaults is people hear you most of the time and they tend to run. So if you've got five different buildings where the bad guy could be and they run, now you've got to find these what we call squirters.

1:12:26So the idea was these four guys, tend to be SEALs, Marcus Luttrell was one of them, are going to establish what we call pattern of life. They're going to watch the village from a distance and see if they can identify our HVT, our high-value target, and decide which building he's actually in. So that when we come in, if somebody squirts from there, you kind of narrow down where to look. Okay. So they're going to do that. And we had two different types of Chinooks at the time. I was flying the MH-47 Echo, which had the terrain falling radar and all the stuff I talked about. And the 3rd Battalion out of Savannah, who was doing the mission, had MH-47D AWC, or Adverse Weather Cockpit.

1:13:10So it's a fairly capable aircraft, but it's on the way out. It's one of our original high-speed aircraft. But the difference is they don't have all the same equipment that I have for survivability, but that means the aircraft is lighter and has more lift capability. so they're going to take all these marines in while i sit on what they call qrf quick reaction force and so uh the team is compromised and marcus's team marcus's team is compromised during the daylight and i walk into the the tactile operations center and there's you know a lot of attention going to the big tv screens you know we call isr uh intelligence surveillance and I don't even know what the R stands for, reconnaissance.

1:13:56There we go. And I sit down next to the colonel who's in charge with my cup of coffee. I'm like, hey, sir, what's going on? He goes, oh, team's compromised. We launched the QRF, quick reaction force. Well, I'm the QRF starting it a couple hours ago. And I was like, hey, sir, that's me. Who's flying? Oh, it's Major Reich, the guys that were on it previously because they decided to launch part of Red Wings early and that's what they were going to do. So it made sense in their mind to do that. So they go running down there, and I'm just sitting there and watching my coffee, watching the tracker, showing their aircraft position.

1:14:32And as they come to a hover to kick ropes, they're going to fast rope. Fast rope is about a between 60 and 90-foot rope that's about this big, like the old-fashioned fire poles in a firehouse. And they're going to slide down that because there's no place to land. And when they come to a hover, I watch them kick ropes from the, there's an A-10 flying around with what they call lightning. You can see this how again? Through the, there's an airplane overhead with a FLIR, forward-looking infrared. So it's a, it's like night vision, but it sees differential in heat. It's like what we see sometimes.

1:15:10They show us the situation room video. It's like that, what that looks like. Okay. Yeah, so I'm watching that. I watched the aircraft come into a hover on the terrain. they're kicking ropes and all of a sudden i see uh what looks to be an rpg shot and the aircraft explodes and limps off uh off frame and it came apart oh my gosh all those those men down the slope the aircraft came apart in lots of little pieces and you knew yeah and so the chalk two the second aircraft calls us back on the satellite radio and he's like hey you know leads down you What do you want me to do? And so they told him to back off because he's got to assess the situation.

1:15:53And now they're going to launch my QRF, my quick reaction force, with the SEAL team out of Damnack. And so we run down to the aircraft. Crew chiefs have already got it up to engine start for me. I get in, strap in, start the engines. I don't have to go through any of the other processes. There's not like a big planning meeting prior to that? No. This is get there as fast as you can and respond, which is what they did. You're trying to save lives? You're trying to, I mean, that's why. You're trying to put shooters on target, you know, so they can use their weapons. But the thing is, you know, I'm hauling ass there now with these guys, like 21, you know, DevGru seals.

1:16:31But I'm thinking to myself, what am I going to do different than what they did? That was the only clearing on top of that mountain. Yeah. And I'm doing, you know, close to 200 miles an hour. You know, I'm doing 170 miles. Is that fast for a helicopter? I don't know. That's really fast for a helicopter. I'm shaking the rivets out of this thing. and I'm just thinking I'm going to be there in like 10 minutes. What am I going to do? And then I got called and got told to divert to a forward operating base at Jalalabad or JBAD, which is where they did the Bin Laden raid out of. But we got there, and the idea was to come up with a better plan, which I'm glad somebody thought that through.

1:17:07Yeah. Because we probably would have just done the same thing. Oh. So then what happened? You go to J. So over the course of the next two weeks, we continue to bring rangers and seals in and Green Berets to search the area for bodies and the original four seals. Yep. So what we don't know yet is that Marcus Luttrell has been taken care of by a local. Yep. He's being protected. Interestingly, about a night before that, we saw infrared strobes all over the valley. So each pilot has an IR strobe to identify yourself. And you can only see it with night vision goggles. And you have a survival radio at a certain frequency.

1:17:53And I remember telling my crew, if we see an IR strobe, we're going to go check it out. And if they give the right visual signals, we are going to land and pick them up. Okay, no one disagrees. We're flying along. The crew chiefs see what they think is an IR strobe. I fly around. I look. And I'm thinking, I don't see it. I'm not going to go to Analyst. I know for sure. So we go back. And I store the coordinates on the computer. You know, he's pressed a little button. It says, okay, here's what it is. We get back to Bagram. And I remember thinking, nah, that wasn't anything. So I don't retrieve the coordinates from the aircraft.

1:18:30So we go back. You know, we do an after-action review, take a shower, go to bed. And now I'm like, what if it is? So I had to go wake somebody else up because I wasn't allowed to drive on the flight line because I can't drive in a parking lot. And he drives me down. I pull the coordinates out. I give them to the intel guys. And I say, well, I don't know if this is anything. So they sent those coordinates to a team of Green Berets who went to check out the coordinates. And it turns out it was a trap for helicopters. The IR strobe was out in a small opening. Oh my gosh. And there were a group of Taliban underneath a waterfall of all things with a clear line to the landing zone.

1:19:09So had I landed they'd have blown us to pieces thank god you didn't do it yeah thank god you your instincts told you no yeah and but you know it's one of those things where you know had it been one of our guys and i landed you know all of a sudden yay yeah but in this case not so much do you are you a man of faith do you feel like there's any divine intervention yeah i mean i don't consider myself like overly religious but i believe in god and i believe in you know some kind of intervention And I think many times in my life I have been saved by some power beyond me, that's for sure. Yeah, it certainly sounds like that.

1:19:45So we've retrieved all of the bodies but one. From the Blackhawk? From the previous Chinook and the original team. So we're still missing somebody. And actually, we might have been missing two. But we're doing what's called a dignified transfer practice. practice so to send the bodies of our fallen home there's a you take a casket with a flag and you march it over to the c17 there's a ceremony that happens we've all seen that the receiving end over yeah so we're practicing this right and one of my good friends uh master sergeant trey ponder so i was the senior um mh-47 pilot in the entire regiment he was the senior non-commissioned officer.

1:20:28So he and I were the guys that were responsible for making sure the air crews were always up to standard and always up to date in their techniques. And we did their evaluations and all that kind of stuff. And so I sat this far away from him for six years, you know, and he was the one kicking the ropes out the back and he was killed. So I'm carrying his casket. And our officer in charge comes running. I say, Al, someone's going to take your place like damn sir you know doing dignified transfer and he's like come on we got a survivor so somebody takes my place we come back we're in the the rescue operations center and we get presented with okay uh somebody walked into a little marine corps patrol base with a the correct information that we need that that it's likely to be him we uh had his beacon location from his radio You knew it was Marcus.

1:21:24Yeah. And not one of the other three. Yeah. Because it's a specific. Yeah. Each person in a threat theater like that gets what's called an ISO prep, isolated personnel report. And on it, you've got these little numbers. You know, let's call it a 10-digit number. And so you tear off the end or you write it down. You give it to somebody and say, hey, take this to somebody that can help me. And there's instructions on the back of the blood shit. you know not the isoprep blood shit i meant um isoprep is the questions you want to be asked right so they ask him those questions over the radio they verify so they've got him verified and um so now we got to go get him and the problem with where he was is there's you know mountains and there's essentially three ways in to where he is one of them has clouds on it all the time So the 3rd Battalion Chinooks, the D models, can't fly through that.

1:22:25They don't have the radar that I have. So I can do it, but I only have two helicopters. The other six are these older versions. And why is it bad to just have the two helicopters? Because it's not enough firepower. You can't carry enough people. So because you're trying to get actual shooters to go protect you, protect Marcus. They have to be substantial. You expect engagement when you get there. Right. Yeah, and it's not going to be you because you fly the plane. So I did end up one of the nights coming in that way with only two, and I had the other guys go the other way, and the idea was to have noise from different directions, which comes into the Latrell thing.

1:23:06So we're all talking about he's on this building on a terraced field at the bottom of the mountain. We're going to send the Blackhawks from the Air Force in there to get him, and I threw a fit, and I was like, no way. are they coming in to do that? Because I happen to know, you know, I can do math, you know, not very good, but I can do math. And I know that the aircraft are too heavy. They don't have the performance to get in there and get him out. The Blackhawks. The Blackhawks. And they said, well, they stripped him down. They took out the armor, the guns, the equipment, and they now technically, mathematically could fly in there, you know, totally undefended.

1:23:45and they go, Al, we're still missing somebody. We were missing one still. And we have to bring more people in to the top 12 ,000-foot mountain. And you know the Blackhawk can't do that. So if you don't let them pick it up, if you do the pickup of Luttrell, you're not bringing another 30 guys to the top of the mountain because the weather is bad. The weather is kind of coming in, waves, thunderstorms. And I said, okay. They can't do that. So these are your choice, Al. And this guy was smart. He appealed to my professionalism. I was like, okay, I'll buy off on that. But I'm planning the mission, and I'm leading the whole thing.

1:24:26They'll pick him up, but I'll lead the mission. And the Air Force guy was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So we came up with a very, what I consider one of my artistic pieces of work of deception, uh brute strength speed you know and uh everybody worked together it was a wonderful operation you know marcus puts in his book he's like you know i walk out the door and the taliban positions are blowing up and yeah i plan that you know and the air force delivered one of uh i love these interviews every year and we always do we love military and we one year did um marcus and his identical twin together.

1:25:08Morgan, right? Yeah, Morgan. And it was unforgettable exchange. Those two are incredible together as they talk about their experiences. But Marcus was telling us his piece of it. And then Morgan was telling us what was happening down in Texas at their ranch. And they were getting, everyone's there praying around the clock. And they didn't expect good news at all. And the moment when they got the call that he was okay, thanks to you and your guys on the other side of the world, everyone went crazy, like the family, the friends, like the steam down there. I talk about this all the time where I get asked, what's the most rewarding missions that I do?

1:25:54And does it feel good to take out a bad guy? Yes. But I like when I say like it's the most rewarding to do CASVAC casualty evacuation or personal recovery like in this case bring somebody back to their family that didn't think they were going to get them and what I write in the book there I talk about this is the kind of stuff you don't necessarily see in the movies with all the cool guy stuff is you know so I'm going in night after night what I consider the toughest flying I've ever done you know evading the threat evading the weather all at the same time and we get back we did a memorial service I walked off between two B huts B huts are like these plywood barracks that you stay in I was in the dark and I just sort of slumped down and cried and I didn't want anybody to see me and but so a couple of days later I'm flying back to the states and they send a crew chief with me, one of the very junior guys he's like, I'll go with Mr.

1:26:51Mack, you'll be alright so we stopped in the Netherlands on the way back and so I said, hey, let me buy you a beer So we're sitting there and he goes, hey, sir, I got to ask you, how come you weren't scared? He goes, when we went on that first mission, he goes, I was scared shitless. I was like, I was too. He's like, but it didn't seem that way. I was like, well, would it have been any better? He's like, no. The rest of it. I'm sorry, tear up a little bit. It's emotional. Why does that make you emotional? What is it? Well, I think, you know, when I talk about doing the mission, you know, It's always very objective, very sterile.

1:27:30It's like, well, you do it, the training. But it's people, right? And that's why Memorial Day is to honor them. Yeah. Oh, God bless you for saving so many. No, no, here, hold on. I've got to do it for you. No, but this is the side that— You're a hero with a heart. This is the side that, you know, once again, guys like me are out doing the mission. And now they're doing it, you know, I'm done. And there's guys rowing the boat without me. You know, and that's the thing. You never really want to leave. You know, you feel like I'm going to miss the next thing. You know, and like I ended up, I was in the training company, training new Chinook pilots when they got bin Laden and got by the very guy, the very flight lead that I always thought would get him.

1:28:20Really? Yeah. Because we would, all through the years, we kind of knew where he was, you know and i say that you know with understanding how intel works right you know we knew you know if you put your hand on a map he's in that area but you can't actually yeah right unless you know where he is so as you rotate out your replacement comes in you give him the intel and okay we're thinking you know here is where he is you know and uh it's like that guy's gonna get him and the guy that always followed me turned out to be the guy that actually got him. Oh, wow. So were you jealous or were you, yeah, a little bit.

1:28:58You know, I mean, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Of course you wanted to be you. Yeah. I wanted to be me. I want, I was just so glad they got him. Yeah. And. But it would have been thrilling to have been there. Yeah. Let's talk about an uncomfortable reality. What happens financially to our loved ones once we are no longer here. We put off thinking about it for obvious reasons, but the best thing we can do for our family is to ensure that they are not left with a financial burden of mortgage, tuition, medical bills, all of it. Fortunately, taking steps to financially protect your family is easier nowadays than it used to be.

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1:32:20We are Marines. We were made for this.

1:32:36channel on Sirius XM. It's called the Megan Kelly channel, and it is where you will hear the truth unfiltered with no agenda and no apologies. Along with the Megan Kelly show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Link Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Jashinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more. It's bold, no BS news only on the Megan Kelly channel, Sirius XM 111, and on the Sirius XM app.

1:33:04so my team actually pulled the sound bite that i was just talking about uh let's take a look master chief gothro was out there and he's the one that would answer the phone and by this time there's anywhere there's about 40 seals out there and we would all pile into my father's bedroom which was little bitty and shoulder to shoulder and master chief's on the phone he's like yes sir Roger that. Understood. Roger that. Yes, sir. And he dropped his head. And I mean, we lost it. Right. We were just like, oh, my God, you know, the worst case scenario. I'm sitting there staring at him. Everybody was crying around or staring at him.

1:33:36And he he he gives us a thumbs up. Anyhow, my parents came walking in and then some of my best friends came walking in. They saw everybody else crying. Mom loses it. Dad loses it. Like, no, no, no. They found him. He's rescued. I don't remember who it was. Walked out to the crowd and said they found him. It sounded like the Super Bowl. I could hear it from Afghanistan. The problem with that was all my friends and family were celebrating the fact that they found my brother, but all the SEALs that were out there and there were some Marines and Army and everybody just started to come out and spend time with us.

1:34:12We were still very stoic because we're down men.

1:34:18what a moment of like the greatest joy you can possibly feel but always as in with the military worry always concern always care for others yeah and you know that's the thing you know the families are back you know um there were nights where the weather was terrible and you couldn't fly right and the ground force couldn't go out because there's no stack overhead you know the uh the supporting you know the fighters the isr the drones all that stuff can't fly in this horrible weather so what we're doing is we're all playing call of duty right all the computers will link together playing call of duty and or watching movies on the server and just kind of a downtime like the notebook yep guys we're very we're very uh you know emotional sentimental sentimental is the right word but um oftentimes somebody will say hey guys do you realize right now our families think we are out getting a crap shot at us right now.

1:35:16And they have no idea that it's not like that all the time. You always think that people overseas that they're, you know, it's terrible all the time. Every second they're in harm's way. You know, oftentimes it's unpleasant, you know, the heat, the cold, being away from your family, especially on holidays and, you know, birthdays and Christmas and stuff like that. I mean, it's just like the constant worry and the constant adrenaline you know that's what comes back to haunt so many of the guys upon return home you know like we talked about dakota myers struggle to reintegrate and how he almost ended it all he was gonna do it and an angel from heaven took the bullets out of his gun he had the gun he was gonna do it it's very hard for a lot of the guys and gals to reintegrate for all sorts of reasons and one of them is just with a constant like years of being worried about getting killed and that the anxiety that that can create in you and then also there's a different type that like needs the adrenaline hit and can't find it then you got guys like mcphee who are just stone cold he's like you know the sheriff of baghdad's like i'm good i was good there and i'm good here so where where did you fall where would you well you know the interesting thing is in that 10 years of combat deployment so i did 17 deployments by my count good gracious But right at the very beginning, I decided I was going to die doing what I was doing.

1:36:43Yeah. And so I just kept that mindset the whole way through. Now, that doesn't mean I wasn't scared, but I was often convinced that I just was not going to come home. And so what I tried to do, and my kids both served, one's still in the Navy, is I tried to create experiences and memories when I was home. so I tried to be present when I could be and and the cool thing for me is well unfortunately you know Linda died you know she overdosed and the regiment was super with me you know the 160th they were like all right look what job do you want you can deploy or not you can go here and two boys still at home well they know they're in the army oh they're this is what they were already grown yeah so so this was in 2012 okay but so one was a crew chief in the 160th a shino crew chief and the other one was a f-18 wizzo uh weapons systems officer wizzo yes i know the yeah he's basically a goose yeah right right but uh so you know they came back but so now i'm alone with my dog scooter you know who probably saved my life the fact that i could just talk with this little guy.

1:37:54But the regiment was great. They were like, hey, what do you want to do? And I really had two jobs that were interesting. One was the chief of the aviation shoot down assessment team, which is kind of like the NTSB, but for the army. So if somebody gets shot down, they send a team, they investigate the wreckage, they try to figure out what shot them down. That seems interesting for you. You know, it was the next best thing. But then I got offered to be the flight detachment commander at West Point. So that's essentially a VIP mission. You're flying the general around, you know, superintendent to, you know, college campuses, the Pentagon's his big thing, you know, and the skydiving team.

1:38:36Oh, that's right. Which turned out to be critical for me. So what I find interesting for this with the people that have trouble, you know, reintegrating, is I consider West Point assignment an off-ramp. it was if i had just stopped being a flight lead like just okay no more i don't know how well i would have done you know not well at all i don't think yeah but i went to west point as the commander i had enough responsibility to kind of keep me on my toes but yet it wasn't the same kind of life or death decisions i was making and i met the cadets the jump team my very first mission as a, you know, as the commander, we got to West Point, we land, you do the season beginning safety brief and all these two seniors come up to me, the firsties.

1:39:26And I'm like, hey, sir, we've heard all about you. Will you be our leadership mentor? I was like, sure. I had no idea what that entailed, right? And then he went, yay, they ran off. Turns out, you know, my responsibilities were to essentially be a mentor to them to what to expect when you get out because they were going to graduate. What's it like to deal with people you outrank, like sergeants who have a lot more experience? We're going to be in aviation. How do you deal with warrant officers who have all the experience? And they taught me how to skydive, which is funny. I got my B license with these guys.

1:40:06You're a thrill seeker. You don't care. You don't have the same fear factor as the rest of us. It was just amazing. but those guys both of them ended up flying chinooks on the 160th wow interesting oh yeah your unit yeah you know back on the subject of when you said i i just decided i was going to die you know and accepted that which is sort of how you were able to do all the risky things it reminded me of a conversation i had with the skier bode miller yeah he once told me that um you know because i asked him like what made you so good like how are you so much better than everybody else. And that's extremely risky too.

1:40:41I mean, extremely risky. And he said, like, I just decided, like, I was never going to fear falling. And he said, to this day, when I know, you know, when you're falling, I just relax my whole body and let it take me. Like, he didn't fight it. He didn't, you know, he didn't tighten up. And that's why he, you know, Of course, he did get hurt over the course of his career, but less so, he thought, than otherwise. And it was what, that sort of acceptance right up front is what allowed him to take these big risks in his field. And it sounds like you and yours. Right. And the guys that I served with were all pretty much the same thing.

1:41:23Do you ever get the nervous guy who's like, this is so dangerous? The missile, the flare, what? They wouldn't get, well, I take that back. so my wingman when we um the embassy story where i said we had the two man pads fired us in 2001 you know what i didn't tell you was the the story of the kites right so we we take off out of the um the the embassy yard uh missile comes at us we drop down and now i'm as low as i can get dragging my wheels through the uh the tv antennas and all that kind of stuff you know It wasn't satellite dishes back then. And to my front are hundreds, if not thousands of kites.

1:42:03The Taliban had banned kite flying, and these kids were flying kites. What? And the problem is they don't use kite string. They use fishing line to make sure that, because they fight the kites. You know, that's the kite runner. Okay. So now I'm dodging the damn kites, and my wife told me not to tell the story, but I'm going to tell it. Yeah. So there's this one red kite off to the front, and it turns this way. I go away. It goes over. And if this thing wraps around the rotor system, it could actually cut the rotor system off with this filament. We're not getting around here. So I couldn't quite get away from him, but it wrapped around the landing gear, and I'm dragging this kid like a mile.

1:42:46He's not letting go of that kite. He's getting a little joy rod off of your helicopter? Well, he lasted about 100 meters, I guess. Like lasted as in live? or he was fine? He's fine. Okay. But so we get back to Bagram and now we still got to go back and get the general. And my copot, not my copot, the pilot in command of the second aircraft is named Willie. He's from Puerto Rico. Now, Willie is known for being very animated and the more animated he gets, whether it's fun or anger or whatever, it doesn't matter, any emotion, his accent thickens up a little bit. Okay. And so he's yelling at me, you know, Al, I can't believe this.

1:43:28Oh, my God, it just missed us. And I was like, Willie, we still got to go back. And he's like, no way, no way. And he's just, you know, he's. Willie is the only sane one in this pairing. I just want you to know that. But so there's a movie, a book, really, Flight of the Intruder. and the main characters fly into North Vietnam in that conflict when they're not supposed to be there and they go to drop bombs except the bombs don't drop because there was a problem with the airplane. So they fly away and they get all this stuff shot at them. They almost don't make it. And the navigator, the bomber says, oh, I got it fixed.

1:44:11He goes, let's go back around and do it again. And the guy goes, what? Are you nuts? He goes, they'd never expect us twice. So I tell that to Willie. I'm like, Willie, they'll never expect us to come back. They'll never expect us twice. And he's like, oh, hell. And he hadn't seen the movie. I said, it's a movie, Willie. We'll figure out something. So there are some with the nerves. Yeah. But I say that that was that situation. But he went with me on many, many very dangerous missions. That's good. So he had to overcome it. And think about the crew chiefs, right? So the pilots are up front. And both of us have access to the controls, right?

1:44:48So if something happens to me, the co-pilot can do something. If something happens to the two of us, the guys in the back are screwed. Oh, my. They have no say-so. I mean, they can speak up, but, you know, they're going to be quiet. Yeah, they're not in charge. Yeah, they feel powerless, at least. That would be nerve-wracking. I mean, then you're jumping out of airplanes just to, like, find something that's close to the adrenaline you had over in Afghanistan.

1:45:16I mean, it doesn't sound like you and Linda had a happy marriage. No, it really was. It was happy. It was happy with moments of suck. Okay. You know, and... When she died by suicide, were you in love? Were you together? Was she still... No, I was pissed at her. I just moved out of the house because I caught her driving drunk. She had, I don't know, three drunk driving stops, and she had only been punished for one of them, and she was out still driving. And I came home at lunch and saw her at a stoplight, you know, lights out her eyes. There was nothing behind that. And so we got in a big fight and she called my unit commander and said, you know, maybe Alan shouldn't come home tonight.

1:45:57And then he tells me that. And so instead, well, I did come home with a escort, if you will, packed up all my stuff, grabbed the dog and left. She was passed out on the floor the whole time. And then she lasted about another week, two weeks, I think. before she just drank herself to death. You weren't surprised? No, no. Is there, what happens? I tried to get help for her from the insurance that they use in the military, it's TRICARE, and she had used up all her benefits. She went to rehab a couple of times, and I went in and said, hey, she's got to have rehab or she is not going to live another month.

1:46:40And the ladies were very nice, but they're like, we can't help her. Can't force her. And, yeah, she didn't last. So when she died, were you resentful? Like, what is the feeling then, given all that preceded it? Well, that was 2012, and I'm happily remarried to a wonderful woman, Patty. Today. Today. I've got a great life, and I'm still angry at her. You know, I try not to be. I try to come to peace with it. But, you know, just when I think, okay, I kind of come to terms with it, I'm still mad that she couldn't get better. Really? I mean, like, don't you see that it was clearly out of her control?

1:47:19Yep. You still feel the anger? Yeah. For your boys? Yeah. I mean, I have five grandkids. She only got to see one of them, you know, and, you know, it's amazing. Did you watch her become an alcoholic? Yeah. I've watched somebody I love become an alcoholic. not a family member, but it's terrible. It's like the slow moving car crash that you can't stop. No matter how hard you try, no matter how badly you want it to stop, you can't stop it. And even if you have endless conversations with the person, it seems like they can't stop it either. You know what movie best describes the situation I had? And I just saw it a couple months ago, was Hillbilly Elegy.

1:48:06Oh yeah, of course, our vice president. And the whole time he's trying to help her. She's promising. No, this time I'm going to do it. And you keep trying and eventually it doesn't work out. No, I know. It's fool's gold. And the promises too many times of I'll get help, I'll go to rehab. Because you want it to work. Of course. But it's fool's gold. I mean, for some. For some. Some actually are able to turn their lives around, thank God. But when you're on the losing end of it, as you were here, I can understand it. I hope for your own sake, you can get to the place where you let that go. So that's not haunting you any longer than it needs to be.

1:48:45So now you're living your life. You're at West Point. You're jumping out of airplanes. And we then leave Afghanistan under President Biden. And it's official. We've now lost that war and given up all of our positions there. We've betrayed the translators who helped us in the war. We've betrayed the Afghans who we made promises to that we didn't live up to. This is not we, the soldiers, but we are our leaders. Thanks to him, we have a humiliation, a humiliating departure with the people grabbing onto the airplanes trying to come. We lose 13 service personnel in the attack that happened. And so what, where does that leave us?

1:49:32Where does that leave you? I've talked to so many Afghanistan vets who have strong feelings about it. You know, it's a complex set of feelings. I mean, first of all, when they gave up Bagram Air Base before the whole thing even happened, you know, a couple weeks before, all I could think of is why would you give up the one piece of terrain? We took that first for a reason. And you could do what's called a NEO, noncombatant evacuation order, out of Bagram, screw any timelines that they agreed to. You know, the Taliban is not coordinating. You're going to, hey, we're going to get our people out.

1:50:05We're leaving. You can watch. but we're leaving from Bagram. It's got two runways. The whole valley is basically secure. And instead, they didn't give the mission to the military who plans and executes NEOs. They gave it to the State Department. And the problem with the State Department, as I understand it, is they viewed H-Kaya as essentially an embassy. What's inside the fence is like embassy. H-Kaya? Kabul Airport. That's the identifier for it. and you can't have multiple rings of of you know defensive positions like you could at bagram because they selected bad terrain you know i mean that's a story as old as warfare itself and they tried to stick to a timeline that was untenable and in doing so you know when the soviet union left afghanistan they left all of the forward operating bases fully stocked ready to go with people they considered capable of doing it.

1:51:04I want to say within a week, they were all ransacked and empty, which is what happened once we left. Because the Afghans were only doing as good as they did because they were working with us. We gave them intelligence. We gave them air assets. We gave them ISR platforms to see things. And they, you know, to whatever degree you can agree is their success, we took that all away. And now they're just like Taliban and they're going to just melt right back in. How's that feel now? I mean, you lost guys you cared about. I think, you know, I want to say I lost 21 friends in the course of that time. Two of them really good friends.

1:51:47And I feel like it's a waste for sure. We didn't get out of that what we thought we were going to. And had we left, you know, the hindsight part, you know, we were supposed to be gone November, December 2001. right and then we would do what what they call the over the horizon fight we'll just come back when we need to you know we've proven we can do it oh we're having this same talk right now yeah around around same same thing i've heard that same thing like we'll go back if we need to yeah but you know once you get your foot in the door you know it's uh it's much easier to do something once you've achieved the success of taking terrain and you know establishing a foothold, if you will.

1:52:28Life is so much easier. I mean, you have to resupply and all that kind of stuff. But if you turned Bagram into Rammstein, Germany, and just kept it and just support them, but without doing all the big combat operations, but just supporting the Afghan military, you probably could have, I don't know if they could have. Well, it would have been better than where we are now. Oh, it certainly would have been better than that. Do you look back thinking that was a waste? I still am not there. I know we were lied to, about the government, about how the war was going, and that there were inept leadership decisions.

1:53:01But as a civilian who was back here the whole time, I feel like you guys kept us safe. You did keep the enemy focused in a faraway remote region of the world and not on the homeland. People would ask me, in the military, you can retire at 20 years. And when the GWAT kicked off, I was at like 21 years. So I could have just retired. And a lot of my peers did when their families were, you know their wife had had enough they retired and they would say al why are you still doing it and i'm like so my sons don't have to right let's keep the fight going i felt like i was making a difference the whole time you know and maybe i did maybe i didn't but i i felt like i was and unfortunately for me my sons decided to follow in my footsteps anyway they both have deployed to combat uh numerous times i'd love them thank god and they're fine yeah yeah thank goodness good well you set an amazing example for them for your troops for the guys you mentored at west point for me for this audience i'm so so grateful to you and to your family and i'm thrilled that you did find love again you're not you're not back here succeeding as a civilian ish alone like you have oh no i got a great partner in life and this is awesome is she but she was wrong about that story it was okay to tell that story about the kid with the balloon yeah she hears it all you know there's certain stories.

1:54:24I do speak on occasion for some fundraisers at the Night Stalker Foundation, helps with the families. Does she know about the super secret mission that you're not allowed to tell us? No. She doesn't? She knows there are missions. But it's funny, we'll go years where she doesn't hear a story. She's never heard a story. And we'll be at a Night Stalker reunion or something. And we get talking, hey, remember that time? Oh, yeah. And she'll hit me in the arm and go, you never told me that. Oh, come on. Well, you never asked. You know what I mean? It just didn't come up in casual conversation. Will she have learned anything new from this interview?

1:54:58Okay. What's her name? Patty. Patty. Well, please send her our love. She sounds like a great person. I'm thrilled that she's in your life. You need that. Is the dog still around? No. Sadly, he passed this year. He was 18. What kind of dog was it? It was a Jack Russell Terrier Beagle Mix. They call him Jacobees. Very high energy. Oh, now would be a great time to get one from Ridgeland. Right? With the dogs? Yeah, to rescue a Ridgeland Beagle, since you're inclined anyway, just throwing it out there. Alan, thank you. Thanks for everything. It's an honor to meet you and to know you. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

1:55:32All the best to you. Thanks. Wow. Alan Mack, everybody. The name of his book, the last one, is Razor 03, A Night Stalker's Wars. And the new book is called, again? Chinooks in the Dark. And that comes out at the end of the summer. They can preorder on Amazon right now. Oh, good. Please do it. Chinooks in the Dark by Alan C. Mack. You've got to do it. Let's support Alan. My God, it's the least we can do. Please, I think everybody's feeling that right now. God bless you. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

1:56:08Hey, everyone. It's me, Morgan Stewart, and I have a new podcast called The Morgan Stewart Show. Join me each week as I talk about pop culture, fashion, my personal life, and just a warning, I'm going to be giving my opinion on everything. I'll also have some really fun guests to join in on the fun. The Morgan Stewart Show is out now. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts or watch full video on YouTube. Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in. And that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that. Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. We don't just alert. We stop crime before it starts.

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