Danger Close

My Epic Journey as a Combat Helicopter Pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan

Amber Smith

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781501116391
• eBook ISBN: 9781501116407
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

Inspiring and "riveting…vivid and harrowing" (Sean Parnell, author of Outlaw Platoon ), Danger Close is the first memoir of active combat by a female helicopter pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan. New York Times bestselling author Brad Thor raves, "Men and women alike will love this incredible tale of heroism, humility, and high-octane feats of bravery." Amber Smith flew into enemy fire in some of the most dangerous combat zones in the world. One of only a few women to fly the Kiowa Warrior helicopter—whose mission, armed reconnaissance, required its pilots to stay low and fly fast, perilously close to the fight—Smith deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and rose to Pilot-in-Command and Air Mission Commander in the premier Kiowa unit in the Army. She learned how to perform and survive under extreme pressure, both in action against an implacable enemy and within the elite "boy's club" of Army aviation.In Danger Close, Smith "covers each mission with edge-of-your-seat detail and a coolness that demonstrates how she gained the respect of fellow pilots and soldiers on the ground" ( Library Journal ). Smith's unrelenting fight for both mastery and respect delivers universal life-lessons that will be useful to any civilian, from "earning your spurs" as a newbie to "embracing the suck" through setbacks that challenge your self-confidence to learning to trust your gut as a veteran of your profession.Intensely personal, cinematic, poignant, and inspiring, Danger Close is "the captivating story of one woman's fight to serve her country in the direct line of danger" (Dana Perino, co-host of The Five on Fox News).

1

THIS IS WHAT WAR FEELS LIKE

January 26, 2006

Near FOB Normandy, outside Baqubah, Iraq

The helicopter blades stuttered over the palm groves twenty miles east of our home base of LSA Anaconda, also known as Balad Air Base. An LSA—logistics support area— is similar to a FOB, but much larger. As one of the largest military bases in Iraq, Anaconda was one of the main air hubs for supplies, troops, and equipment into and out of the country, which made it a very busy airfield—and a natural target for enemy rockets and mortars.

In the doorless cockpit of our Kiowa, the frigid night air swept in, making our faces feel frozen and brittle. On the outskirts of Baqubah, the lights of civilization gave way to a velvet-black desolation, a flat, vast desert peppered with primitive mud huts clustered in small villages.

Through my night vision goggles—NVGs—I could see the grainy, green outlines of trees, dirt roads, and open fields. At night, we always flew fully blacked out during missions, cutting any lights on the aircraft that might make us visible targets. In the darkness, the constellation Orion shone brighter than I had ever seen it before.

I was flying right seat in our OH-58D Kiowa Warrior, trailing above the leader of our usual team of two helicopters. Small and nimble, Kiowas operate like an airborne extension of the infantry. We fly low and fast, within eyesight of friendly ground forces—and the enemy.

FOB Normandy—a tiny base on the eastern side of our area of operations toward the Iranian border—had been pummeled with rockets and mortar rounds in recent days. We were flying a reconnaissance and security mission to investigate the source of the attacks, looking for any suspicious activity—rockets set on timers, people placing them, any signs of movement—but the lush, impenetrable canopies of the palm groves gave the insurgents protective cover.

Then the lead pilot found something, a possible bunker, maybe a cache of weapons. He wanted to take a closer look. My left seater, CW3 Chris Rowley—the pilot in command (PC) and the air mission commander (AMC) for our flight—told lead to pick up an outer security pattern, to fly above us to overwatch our position while we dipped down for a closer look. Through our NVGs, we could see the something was nothing but trash. The other Kiowa resumed the lead flight position. But just as we were falling back in as trail, a blinding flash of light erupted under our aircraft.

The aircraft lurched forward with a sudden, violent kick.

“Taking fire! Taking fire!” yelled Chris.

I immediately dropped a waypoint, a digital marker that records in the navigation system the grid coordinates where we were hit. Chris broke right, away from the road, and began jinking, darting erratically to become an unpredictable target.

“You good?” Chris asked. “It’s one hell of a rush, isn’t it?”

I wasn’t scared. I was pissed. Someone had just tried to kill me. We suspected small-arms fire—AK-47 rounds—but the concussion indicated it could have been something larger.

“Hey, Ambrosia,” radioed Blane Hepfner, the pilot in the lead aircraft. “Hopefully there’s not a UXO rolling around somewhere in the back of your aircraft right now.” He was referring to an unexploded ordnance.

Thanks, jackass, I thought. He might have been messing with us, but he had a point. A concussion-type blast hit our aircraft, so it was possible that an RPG—rocket-propelled grenade—warhead had entered but not detonated. It was unlikely, but we had no way of knowing until we landed.

If we landed.

Even though neither Chris nor I was hit with a bullet, the aircraft may have sustained damage that could affect our flight between now and the time we were able to get the aircraft on the ground.

Chris and I looked at each other.

Shit!

The flight controls felt fine. There was no restricted movement or feedback indicating that the rotor head, engine, or transmission had received any battle damage, but you can never be too sure. We decided to fly to the nearest U.S. base to set our bird down and do a damage assessment.

Getting shot at is almost in the job description for a Kiowa Warrior pilot. When you are at war, it’s not a matter of if you get shot at, it’s when, and whether you’ll walk away from it. Unfortunately, not everyone does.

I’d never been shot at before. Now I was in combat, and the reality of war hit home.

Someone is trying to kill me.

“Warhorse Base, Annihilator One-One, inbound for immediate landing to the FARP.”

The FARP—forward arming and refueling point—was where helicopters landed to refuel and to rearm weapons systems, usually within the confines of a FOB or combat outpost.

We made a short final descent into FOB Warhorse, a tiny U.S. base in Baqubah, which was about halfway between where we had taken fire and our home base at Balad. Baqubah was only about ten minutes and a couple of miles from where we’d gotten shot at, but it felt like a lifetime.

Once we were safely on the ground inside the wire of a U.S. base, I lifted up my NVG and turned on the blue light inside the cockpit to give our eyes a break. I tightened my grip on the flight controls as Chris got out of the helicopter to do a walk-around to see if we’d been hit. The temperature and pressure levels on the instrument panel were still all in the green zone, indicating that a bullet hadn’t severed a critical oil or hydraulic line.

Chris was only gone for a minute before he came back and plugged his helmet cord back into the aircraft radio.

“Yeah, we got hit a couple of times with small-arms fire,” he said. “We have some damage in the aft electrical compartment, and I found an entry bullet hole on your side by the fuel cell.” Luckily, there was no indication of an RPG—or anything larger than small-arms fire.

There was only one problem—we still had to make it back to Balad. Should we fly home or should we shut down there on the refuel pad? If we did the latter, our crew chiefs and maintenance personnel would have to come out to Warhorse and either fix the Kiowa there or put it on a low-boy flatbed semi truck and convoy it back to Balad. But driving in Iraq is a very dangerous thing to do. IEDs—improvised explosive devices—are everywhere. IEDs were often the weapon of choice against U.S. ground troops and usually litter their travel routes.

“I think we can fly it back,” Chris said. “What do you think?”

I trusted Chris. An instructor pilot, my pilot in command of this flight, he was my stick buddy and had been to Iraq three years earlier, during the invasion in 2003. He always asked me—since I was still a newbie pilot—what I thought about different combat scenarios or emergency or procedural situations and what decision I would make. This was why he was so good. He was constantly trying to get me to think for myself and not just blindly agree with my PC. We were a crew, and crews made decisions together.

“I agree,” I said. “I think we can fly it back.”

And so we did.

As our aircraft skids touched down at Anaconda and eased the helicopter’s weight onto the parking pad at Balad, I let out a huge sigh of relief. We had made it. Someone was looking out for us that day.

Our maintenance personnel assessed the aircraft and confirmed that we’d taken two direct hits. One 7.62mm AK-47 round had gone through the aft electrical compartment, where we kept our flight bags. The round had exploded on entry into the aircraft, sending shrapnel flying. I found a bullet hole that went through my flight bag, and I found shrapnel in our extra ammo magazines and flight gloves.

Another 7.62mm bullet had entered on the right side of the aircraft. It had pierced the fuel cell and continued its trajectory toward the cockpit until the armament control unit—the 12x12 computer box that controls the weapons system on the aircraft—finally stopped it about twelve inches behind my back. That was close.

After our damage assessments, Chris and I packed up our flight gear and called it a night. But I couldn’t sleep much. I was still riding high from knowing that we had cheated death. I’d never felt that kind of rush before.

But the deployment was still young, and the enemy was out there, waiting for us. And I’d be back, looking for them.

2

BORN TO FLY

March 2003

Fort Jackson, South Carolina

You could say that flying is in my blood. My family’s military and aviation legacy dates back three generations. My great-grandfather was an infantryman in World War I in Verdun, France. My grandfather flew an array of fixed-wing aircraft and was a test pilot on helicopter prototypes in the Army Air Corps (the predecessor to the Air Force) during World War II. My father was a paratrooper in the Army 82nd Airborne Division from 1960 to 1963. My mother was a gorgeous civilian pilot instructor who taught people to fly many types of aircraft in addition to being a Pan Am stewardess and purser. Female pilots were rare back in the 1960s, but my mom was fearless and wanted to fly. My father flew commercial jets for Pan Am, but he could pilot just about anything with fixed wings. He was also an instructor pilot and taught my two sisters and me to fly.

I grew up in the cockpit of my dad’s planes, a Cessna 150 and an L-19 Bird Dog. It was a family tradition to “fly to breakfast” on the weekends. I loved taking off from the little grass airstrip on our family farm in White Salmon, a small town on the edge of the Columbia River in southern Washington State. We’d fly to nearby Trout Lake, Dallesport, or Hood River. The Cessna could seat only two people, so whichever kid got to fly with our dad always felt special. My sisters and I got our first flight lessons on those trips to breakfast, when Dad would let us talk on the radio, tiny voices announcing over the airspace frequency, “Cessna Three-Five-Zero Delta Echo, taking off to the south. Climbing one thousand feet.”

My mom would load up the rest of the kids and the dog in the Suburban and drive to the airport. Once the whole family was reunited at the airport for breakfast, our conversation turned into a ground school lesson.

“What are the three most important words in aviation?” my dad would ask us.

“AIRSPEED, AIRSPEED, AIRSPEED,” we three daughters would say in unison.

Listening to my dad’s stories about the 82nd Airborne really kept us hanging from our seats. It was like watching a movie with our ears. It sounded exciting to jump out of airplanes, talk the way the Army guys talked (“pass the fucking salt, please”), and be an overall badass paratrooper. He jumped out of airplanes, shot machine guns, and “camped” in the woods. It all sounded like an incredible adventure. I was awestruck by my dad’s experiences and told myself that someday I’d join the Army just like he had.

We spent so much time at those local airports that we knew the pilots and the maintenance guys. We learned the pilot lingo. My father instilled a “look but don’t touch” policy whenever we were around airplanes and runways. This basic respect for aircraft and aviation paid off immensely when we actually became pilots.

When I was about six years old, Dad dropped me and my eleven-year-old sister Kelly off at the dock at Lake Chelan, in central Washington State, where our family often spent summer vacations. The area we were staying in was only accessible by boat or floatplane. It was windy that day and, as he flew to the south end of the lake to pick up my mom and five-year-old sister Lacey, the lake grew dangerously rough with swells so large they could swallow the plane. Oblivious to the danger, Kelly and I cheered and waved when he touched down and motored over. Only years later would we learn what skill and luck it had taken Dad to land a floatplane in such dangerous waters with his wife and youngest daughter and our black Lab, Lizzie, as passengers.

Kelly, Lacey, and I—my dad called us his piglets—grew up thinking it was perfectly normal to have an airstrip in the backyard. Ours was a 2,100-foot strip of closely trimmed grass on my family’s 175-acre farm, where my parents grew and harvested alfalfa to sell as horse and cattle feed.

Our driveway was half a mile long, and we couldn’t see a neighbor or hear any sign of civilization except the occasional log truck slamming on its jake brakes to go around a curve on the highway. It was our very own wilderness playground, and my sisters and I took advantage of it every day. I don’t think the words “we’re bored” ever came out of our mouths. We were outside causing havoc all over the farm from right after breakfast until dinnertime, which Mom would signal by ringing a huge bell on our deck.

My mom and dad taught Lacey and me how to ride four-wheelers when we were about seven and eight years old, giving us the freedom to explore the farm. Only eighteen months apart, Lacey and I were frequent partners in crime. When we got just a few years older, we rode the four-wheelers through the backwoods all over other people’s property, stirring up dust and generally creating chaos wherever we went. Every once in a while a neighbor would come out on the porch and yell at us to get off their property. We would go extra fast for those drive-bys.

Aside from the freedom and the fun, we actually did work on the farm. One of our jobs was to flip hay bales. We would drive the four-wheelers behind the tractor my dad was baling hay in. We’d jump off and flip the bale right side up so it could be picked up properly by the bale wagon. The fields were huge and there were thousands of bales to flip. Lacey and I had it down to a science: the first half I drove, she flipped; the second half we swapped.

We would much rather have been running around the farm, swimming in our pond, hiking, exploring, or getting into trouble, but helping is how we pulled our weight around the farm. One of my favorite times was when my mom would come out to meet us with a picnic lunch and we would all sit around together in the middle of the woods. We would often make a campfire and toast marshmallows.

Kelly was five years older than I was, which usually meant that I was trying to be just like her and, as a result, driving her crazy. Lacey and I idolized Kelly. We were the typical little sisters who mimicked everything their cool older sister did. In my eyes, Kelly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• 1. This Is What War Feels Like
• 2. Born to Fly
• 3. Mother Rucker
• 4. Sink or Swim
• 5. Hurry Up and Wait
• 6. Welcome to Iraq
• 7. Better Safe Than Sorry
• 8. Bingo
• 9. Troops in Contact
• 10. Friendly Fire
• 11. What Lies Beneath
• 12. Annihilator 24
• 13. Flying Blind
• 14. One Last Mission
• 15. Screaming Eagles
• 16. The Crash
• 17. A New War
• 18. Cleared Hot
• 19. Shooting to Kill
• 20. Cheating Death
• 21. War Tests You
• 22. Good-bye
• 23. Lucky Strike
• 24. KIA
• 25. The Tagab
• 26. Handing Off the War
• Epilogue: Alive
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Glossary
• Index
• Copyright