I enjoy keeping up with the blog of Paul Phillips, a dot-com millionaire and professional poker player who usually has something interesting to say.
Often he writes about mundane topics like poker, Scrabble, or his adorable little daughter, but he also offers blunt and interesting political commentary from a libertarian perspective. And just recently he posted a story from Iraq that I really felt deserved a wider audience. I'll tease it with a picture...
My wife's cousin's husband (hereafter just brent) about whom I have written before when he shipped out to iraq and when he sent me some stuff is back from iraq in one piece, but it was no sure thing...
It was brent's last day as a scheduled pilot: in two more days he'd be on his way home. He was in the midst of authoring an email to his wife when the medevac call came in. An iraqi policeman with a serious head wound needed to be evacuated to baghdad, and the medics said he would die without prompt treatment. There were five of them in the chopper: brent, his co-pilot (who was also his superior officer), two medics, and the wounded iraqi.
Weather is a huge factor when piloting a helicopter in iraq. There are several levels of visibility, and when it's under a certain threshold nobody is supposed to fly. As the visibility gets lower, they have to fly slower and lower to the ground, both of which make them easier targets for ground fire. Helicopters fly in pairs with one trailing the other, and the enemy takes advantage of this by using the path of the lead chopper to lock onto the trailing chopper. The visibility was low and brent argued against taking off in the bad weather, but he was overruled.
Almost immediately the weather got worse. It quickly became apparent they weren't going to make it to baghdad, and they radioed for authorization to reroute to another hospital. (Sorry I don't recall where they originated or where they were rerouted.) They rerouted but the weather did not improve. They were crawling along almost blind when finally it was agreed that they had to give up and head back. The lead pilot said "I'm turning around" but didn't follow the protocol fully, so when he turned it surprised brent, who was following very closely because of the poor visibility. He had to pull some kind of undesirable maneuver to avoid hitting him, and it left him directionally disoriented, which he says kills a lot of pilots.
So he yielded the controls to the copilot. They were about four minutes out from the base when his copilot said "Hey, isn't this about where we got shot at last time?" And there it was. The windshield spiderwebbed and brent suddenly felt as if he'd been punched in the face. He heard one of the medics screaming "I'm hit, I'm hit!" and then fall ominously silent. When brent tried to communicate with the other helicopter, he found his radio no longer functioning. The copilot turned to ask brent something, but his face showed that dreadful reaction people have to sudden gore: brent put his hand to his face and took it away covered in blood.
When you're flying in the simulator, the way they indicate you've managed to kill yourself is the windshield spiderweb. So brent is disoriented, not sure if he's been shot, his face covered in blood, his ears ringing. He can't communicate because of his busted radio, and they're still taking ground fire. And now the other medic says with increasing panic "We're on fire. We're on fire!" But the copilot is in communication with the other helicopter, and the other pilot is telling him "We can see you, you're not on fire." This determination is rather important - if you're on fire you had better land immediately. They were on fire, but it was inside the cabin where the other pilots couldn't see it.
The medic ended up getting to the (two!) fires with the extinguisher and they made it back to the base. Fortunately brent had only taken shrapnel, but the pictures he has of his helicopter show how close he came to taking a direct hit from a .50 caliber. Really freaking close.
Three punchlines:
A) The screaming medic took minor shrapnel. He was fine. Apparently he just panicked.
B) The characterization of the iraqi's head wound as imminently life-threatening was way off - it definitely didn't warrant flying in that weather.
And the iraq war in a nutshell: are you ready for this?
C) The wounded iraqi wasn't a policeman, he was an insurgent. The guy and his cohorts were laying an IED and fell into a gun battle with the police. Grievously wounded, our star iraqi stripped the clothes and possessions off one of the dead policeman and came to the base for the free health care. Say what you will about the enemy in iraq, but that took balls the size of elephants.
So fear not - the insurgent lived to bomb another day.
Paul wraps it up:
So as I follow the pathetic faux-debate as to how many more decades we ought to stay in iraq, whether it's yet time to entertain a 5% drawdown in troop levels, and exactly when and with what level of firepower we should proceed with bombing iran, this is part of my context. Nobody should need additional reasons to oppose this senseless war (or the other senseless wars which loom) but I do wish everyone knew at least one individual whose life may hang in the balance. How exactly did waging war reach the level of abstract policy decision, just one option among many? It sucks.
He's receiving a purple heart and I think he's under consideration for other medals.
Oh, and when he was able to call his wife he let her go on about something unimportant for ten minutes before he said "oh, by the way... I got a purple heart yesterday."