Alan C. Mack
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
They're hitting age 65 and they can't by law fly. Well, in the army, Chinook pilots, a Chinook transition is considered a reward, right? So remember the Vietnam War had been going on, guys were flying Hueys, doing the assault work. If you survived it and got back and then they wanted to send you back, the reward was you could transition to a Chinook, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So now you're not necessarily doing assault work. You're still flying around Vietnam, you know, carrying artillery and supplies and all that kind of stuff, but you're not really doing assault work. And it's an advanced aircraft. So it's considered a reward. So if you think of like that Vietnam timeframe, these guys on their second tour.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So about the time I'm in flight school, these guys are all reaching 60, 65 years old, and they're all retiring in droves, right? So it's very senior heavy rank. And the Army realized they had to generate from the bottom up. So they're going to take W1s, right? And once again, you go W01, CW2, CW3, CW4, and now CW5, which is a relatively new rank. But at the time, it was CW4 was the senior guys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So how are you going to replace those guys? The Army's plan was to take W-1s out of flight school and inject them in while you still had senior people to mentor them. But who do you take, right? I mean, it's supposed to be an advanced aircraft, supposed to be a reward. So you want the cream of the crop, if you will.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And the only way to do that, the metric that they have is grade point average, right? So, you know, I happen to be- Like high school grade point? No, no, flight school. Okay. Flight school grade point average. So you get graded on your academics, your participation, your flying. Each flight gets a grade slip, you know, with a numerical grade. And they end up with this grade point average.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
There was a rumor, and it was sort of true, it depended on the class, was that if you were in the top five classes of the class, right? There's 72 of us. But if you're in the top five, when it got to aircraft assignments, you could pick what you wanted, right? So if you wanted to pick what you wanted, you wanted to be in the top five guys. So there were a bunch of us that were,
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
you know, there were probably 10 of us that were all within, you know, hundreds of a point, you know, 98.2, 98.3, you know, that kind of thing. And we're competing, right? And every time you get your exams back, you're like, oh man, that guy, he got like 0.1 above me and he just moved up. And so it turned out that I was number one in the class.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And a good story here about never quitting is that one of the guys I was competing with, if you will, when the assignments came out, they did not give us choice. And, you know, we all got shoved off in Huey's, all those top guys. And he got mad and he, I wouldn't say he quit, but he stopped trying, right? So he studied enough. He did what he had to do, but he quit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
He dropped from being in 98 point something to, you know, 88 point something, right? So instead of going from an A, he went to a B kind of thing. And then toward the end, what I just talked about, the Chinook thing, the Army said, okay, we're going to do two slots from your class, get Chinooks, right? So two pilots will get Chinooks, and we're going to take the number one and two guy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And I happened to be number one, and my stick buddy was number two, and this guy probably would have been one or two had he kept going, but he gave up. And now he's like throwing stuff around the classroom. He's like, damn it, I shouldn't have quit, you know, and it's like, Good point, buddy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And I remember to this day, I use that lesson on my kids and tell them, it's like, don't get mad you didn't get the job you wanted. Don't get mad that you didn't get this or that. Things always work out. They just do. Don't give up. So you wanted a Chinook. I didn't. I was actually mad that I got it. Really? Yeah, because remember I said I wanted to be salt work, right? And I'm like, a Chinook?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
That's bull. It's going to be like flying from airport to airport. That's going to suck. And the instructors, all retired warrant officers, all older guys, they slapped me in the back of the head, right? They're like, you idiot. Shut your mouth and take the slot, right? And I'm like, but I want to fly Hueys. And they're like... Hueys are going away. Trust me. Take the Chinook, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So I did, you know, grudgingly. And as soon as I flew that thing, I was like, this is amazing. It's one of the fastest helicopters on the planet, let alone the U.S. Army. It's very powerful, and it's no harder to fly than a Huey. But there's a whole now conversation on that. But that's how I ended up flying Chinooks. Learned on Hueys, transitioned into CH-47 Deltas just before Desert Shield.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And then I flew them there. And then I ended up instructing in those, and then we get into the 160th later.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So you start out, so it's different now. But at the time, what you did is you first went to WOC school, Warrant Officer Candidate School. And that was like eight weeks of, we start out with, you know, you did Hell Week. We had like Hell Day, you know, and it was tough. And I remember the little head game they played was a, You know, they came in, you're beat to hell. And they'd say, okay.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Somebody yells in the room, you know, 20%, got it. And then they're like, we just got off the phone with the Secretary of the Army. You know, we have to lose 20% of you because of budget cuts. So we're just going to do hell day every day until 20% of you quit, right? And I'm like, well, I'm not quitting. You know, you're going to have to throw me out of here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And there were guys, it was like one guy got up and walked out. So it worked. You know, I was like, all right, he didn't want to be here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
You know, it's like, you know, crawling through the mud pits and push-ups and mountain climbers and just burning you out physically.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Yeah, it's a big, it's a beat down. And it is not pleasant, to say the least, especially for Army aviators. or guys that want to be. And these guys, you know, the TAC officers are walking around, just like the guys at Bud's, you know, except back then, you know, smoking a cigarette. Come on, let's go upstairs. We'll get some donuts and some coffee. It's warm. You know, it's comfortable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
You get a shower. We'll just put you on your way. Look, you're an E7. You know, there were guys that were E7s there. It's like, you're an E7. You had a good life. Why do you want to do this? You know, and they, yeah, right, screw it. You know, I quit. You know, and guys would just do that. There were, I don't know, four or five guys. during it and that one guy in the meeting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And, you know, they do that to you, not to that extent, but for the next eight weeks because you're not flying. So you're doing what we call cubing, right? So you have a cubicle, right? You have your bunk, you know, a desk, a locker. And every morning when you get up, you have, I don't know, 10 minutes to have your bunk with a white collar on it and your coat hangers to be exact.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
You know, you know the deal. Like any NCO school you've been to, And, you know, you get outside, obviously you're not fast enough, you're not straight enough, whatever, they'd come into the barracks and throw the stuff out of your locker onto the floor so that when you came back at the end of the day, You know, you got like an hour that was personal time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Now you're repairing the damage they did as opposed to just adjusting things. And it's a head game. It's a little bit of hazing, really. But, you know, it kind of, it does go to show who Army warrant officers are in my age group, you know, why we're such assholes. But...
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Anyway, so you do that, and then when you're done, you move on to, so that's A company, and you move on to B company, and that's primary flight, which is where you learn to fly. So, you know, depending on what they call the bubble, you know, where the schedule is for classes, you know, based on aircraft maintenance, weather, that kind of stuff. So, you know, you might...
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
you might roll right through. You might go from A company to B company and roll right into C company seven months later. Or you could have two weeks of rain that you can't fly in or something, and it just sets you back. Well, what that does is that ripple effect is it sets back all the other classes. So in the meantime, while you're waiting to get to flight, you're, you know,
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
You're polishing brass and you're doing just things to keep you busy, paint rocks, that kind of stuff. Or you might be working at one of the facilities on post. Think of it like a detailer giving you a temporary assignment. I actually worked at the museum for a couple of weeks, which was pretty good because I was an aircraft mechanic.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
I helped them with some of the displays as they were setting them up. But
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Yeah. That's if everything rolls right along. And you start out in primary learning to fly right now. Just before I got there, they switched over, the Army switched over from the TH-55, which was a little two-seater, a little bug-looking thing that it was just you and your instructor.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And when you picked up to a hover, when you pull power, the nose wants to go to the right, and you have to give it left pedal to keep it heading. And in a modern helicopter, the engines keep pace with the rotors. And back then, in this thing, you had to control the throttle at the same time, so it was an additional thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
I got lucky in that it went away and they had just transitioned into Huey's as the primary trainer, which I won't fly anyway. So I get into this thing and they take you out to the stage field. There's Huey's all over the place, just flying around, hovering, doing her thing. And the instructor's like, all right, You know, here's what you do, right? You have the controls. I have the controls.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Do you have a title for that one yet? The working title is Chinooks in the Dark, and I'm not sure what the subtitle is.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And then you just, you know, you go off in whatever direction. I mean, you can't hover, right? And that's the very first – it's insane because, you know, when you go to bed at night – so you have a stick buddy, right? So when – a partner, right? So when he's flying, you're in the back. And when you're flying, he's in the back, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So not only are you there for your flight period, but you're in the back – going up and down and left and right. And just your inner ear is getting all, you know, discombobulated, right? So at night when you went to bed, it's like being on a ship, right, for a while. And you go lay in a regular bed and you feel like you're moving, but you're not. And that's what it's like.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And then, you know, the first person in the class learns to hover. You know, he comes back and he's like, you know, I found the hover button. You know, which means you can just –
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
you know maintain a stationary you know three foot hover you know you don't drift in and then you know as individuals in the class learn right it takes about five hours really to learn to hover right so in each each flight period is about an hour and a half so it takes a couple of flights and you know when you're like the last guy you're feeling like what am i incompetent i can't do this maybe i'm not you know a pilot right and then you just one day you find yourself hovering you know they're like hey you have the controls i have girls
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Hey, you're hovering. Wow, I'm hovering, right? And once you learn, it's like riding a bike. You don't forget. And so that transitions into traffic pattern flight. So you're going up and around the pattern. You're coming in, you're landing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
For like, I don't know, three, four days, five days maybe if you're late.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
It's insane. You could go there. That has to look hilarious. Every stage field has a set of bleachers, right? And people, locals, would just pull up. There was no fences. You just pull up, get on the bleacher, your hot cocoa, whatever, depending on the time of year, and iced tea, and just watch the students going nuts. And then what happens, though—
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And a pet parent.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
With the traffic pattern and stuff is you start including emergency procedures. Now these are like in the Huey, you know, hydraulics out. So the aircraft is very difficult to fly and you have to kind of run it on to land. You have tail rotor malfunctions where you have to control the yaw of the aircraft as you're coming in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
As you change power, you have to adjust the throttle to keep the nose straight as you touch down. Auto rotations, right? So it's a single-engine aircraft, the Huey. So the instructor will roll the throttle off on you. You're just flying along, and he rolls the throttle off to idle, and you no longer have lift, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
He's a Jacoby, a Jack Russell Beagle mix.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So now you lower the collective, takes all the pitch out of the blades, and you descend like a rock, right? But the rotors are still spinning, right? And you have to keep the rotor RPM between 97% and 101%. In order to do that, you... You play with the collective, which changes the pitch in the blades. So the more pitch you put in, the more drag you get, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
But you want to keep it at 100% because when you get to the bottom, the last like 75 feet, you flare. Now you pull in the power, you put the pitch in the blades, and you're using one chance to cushion that baby on. And we call them crash bangs, right? You're doing that all day long, right? And then eventually they deem you safe enough to solo, right? So back in the...
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
In the TH-55, you really did solo. It was just you. Now you're going out with your stick buddy, and he ain't been saving you, right? So you're still solo, but you have somebody, you know, next to you in case you die. He'll go with you. But, yeah, so you solo. You do a couple of traffic patterns. I think it was five traffic patterns by yourself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And the instructor, you know, gets back in, and you're like, all right, you soloed. The last guy to solo of the class is like, you know, it's – there was a name for it. I can't remember. But you – you had to ride, we had this ceremony. It was like pitchers of beer and everybody lined in front of the building, the barracks, you know, and it looked like a stage field.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
The markings were like, you know, painted on just as if it were a stage field. And that guy would ride a thing called the solo cycle. So it was a bicycle that somebody had engineered, you know, it had rotor blades. And when you drove it, you know, when you pedaled, the blades spun, right? And you had to ride this bicycle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
I don't have a picture of that anymore.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
I wish I did. And then you get your solo wings, which is like these cloth wings that get sewn on your hat. Each class has a color. And back then, they don't do it anymore, but each class had a baseball cap. We were royal blue. And you had that sewn on so you could see who was a real pilot now, sort of, within the context of flight school. Nice. Yeah, so then you move on from that. You move up...
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
You take your final check ride in primary and you move on to advanced skills, which is Charlie Company. And there, this was a lot of fun, actually. Now you're doing terrain flight navigation. You know, you got a handheld map, right? And this is where you, I call it the bus driver move, right? Where you're trying to make the map. meet the terrain because you get lost.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
It's like, oh, there's a stream over there. No, wait, that's the stream. It's like a guy driving a big bus, you know. And so you learn to do that and fly, and that's a lot of fun, actually. And you finish that up with a great big exercise where, like, the cobras come in and the Hueys, and it's a big, they call it an AVTAC. I don't remember what that stood for, but it was a big, big event.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
It was really cool. And then you moved into Knights.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
What's the... It was like we all flew out to an assembly area, right? And we went in and got a briefing from, you know, the cadre planning the mission. So it was, you know... 20 Hueys flying in one big-ass formation, like something out of Apocalypse Now. And the Cobras would roll in and do the gun runs, and the OH-58s would call in the spot reports, all that stuff. And we would all do this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And we're a bunch of, we're not even W-1s yet. We're still walks. We're not officer candidates. And the instructors are obviously having fun because they're showing off their students can do this and that. And it was a lot of fun. I don't think they do that anymore. It's probably very risky when you think about what they were doing. All these aircraft in one little area, synchronized.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
I mean, this is advanced stuff. And they allowed us to do that. How far into training is that? That's several months in. That's got to be... Like five, six months in. Okay. And then, because when you finish that, now you move to night. And when you go to night, you do all the same stuff. You do stage field, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Traffic patterns, you do auto rotations, emergency procedures, all that stuff with goggles. And when I was in there, we had... The Army had just transitioned from what we call full-face 5s, right? So Anvus 5s or PVS 5s, whatever they were. And they used to be like a— Are you talking about the mono? No, no. They're binoculars, but they are like a rectangle.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Oh, these are like the thing that the eyeglass doctor used. You put them on your face, right, like a diving mask. Think of a diving mask where it's just got toilet paper tubes sticking out of it, right, and everything else is black. That's what they started with.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And I got there, somebody in the army had figured out that if you took a saw, you know, and you cut one half of the MBG away, the plastic housing, turned it upside down, you could stick the lip of it without the foam up into your helmet where the visor is. And then with surgical tubing, you wrap the surgical tubing around in Velcro and you, suck this thing to your head, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And you had to have a weight bag because it's way out here like this. And you had to, when you did it on a rotation, when you drop the power, the engines split off. Like the rotor and the engine split the needles. But if it doesn't, you're going to fall out of the sky. So you have to make sure it happens because sometimes it doesn't, right? Wait, what do you mean? So...
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
There's two big needles, right? Big needles? Needles, like gauges.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And so one of them is the rotor and one of them is the engine. Okay. So whenever you pull or reduce power, they should work together, right? So that means the engine is driving the rotors, which is good. But if for some reason there's a clutch, it's called a sprag clutch. It's a one-way clutch. And if the engine rolls off, it's supposed to freewheel, allowing the rotors to spin.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So you should have a split in the needle. So if you drop the power, roll the throttles off, it should split, right? But if you don't get a split, that means you've got a clutch failure and you've got to recover because you're not going to survive if you don't do something about it. So you've got to focus one tube inside at the instruments while the other one's outside.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
and determine that, okay, that's good. Then you can focus it back out and then finish the maneuver. It was insane, right? And the army at the time was going, we own the night. We learned, we kind of were renting it. You know, we don't really own it yet, but... There was no NVG lighting in the cockpit. It was red lighting. And so you had to turn off all the lights.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So what we did is we had these little tiny chem lights, right? They look like maybe an inch, inch and a half long. You'd break those and you'd tape them into place over key instruments. And you had what was called blind cockpit drill. So every switch in the cockpit, you had to be able to find without looking at it because you've got these things on your face.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And so you do that, and then you go do terrain flight that way, and terrain flight navigation. And so you're doing this whole progression. And what's interesting is the students from my timeframe We're kind of like the first ones to do this, not literally the first, but you know, that first year. And so when you get to your unit, all the old guys don't want to do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Like they're qualified to do it, but they're not proficient at it and they don't want to do it, right? And that's a whole story I'll get into with Desert Shield, Desert Storm. But so that's how flight school kind of goes. And when you finish up nights, and we used to fly unaided nights as well, they call it Nighthawk. So you'd fly at whatever safe altitude was, 300 feet, something like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
You knew how tall the tallest obstacle was, and you flew at least 200 feet higher than that. And you'd fly around, and this is what the guys in Vietnam used to do. You'd fly in the dark without being able to see. You'd get to your fix, or maybe a Sandy would put a rocket down for you, and you'd go, oh, that's the LZ, right? and you go in there with a white searchlight on. And it can be tough.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And we did stuff without the searchlight, and they'd have chem lights in the LZ or maybe strobe lights or something like that. And as you came in on your approach, if you got any kind of blinking, That meant there was foliage between you and the object, and you would hold off on the descent until you could see it again, and you'd go in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And it's funny because that's kind of a lost art now with everybody being so used to goggles.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Night vision hovering. Because you had to maintain a three-foot hover. And you did that, you didn't have a radar altimeter, right? A digital readout in the cockpit. You looked out through the chin bubble or the side door, and if you saw individual blades of grass,
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Like, it would be sort of fuzzy, which meant you were higher than three feet, and you wanted to get down just enough so the individual blades of grass stood out, and that's like three feet. But how the... Hold on.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Damn. But, you know, with that being said, this is why flying in the desert is so tough because there's no texture. Well, I take that back. The NTC, National Training Center out of Fort Irwin, California, is a different kind of desert. It's not like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and Iraq are very, you know, Saudi's got those smooth, beautiful dunes like you see in Lawrence of Arabia.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
In Iraq, it's kind of, you know, flattish with some rocks occasionally, but it's not scrubby like the NTC, right? So the Army kind of gave itself a false sense of, of security and how well we could fly in the desert, right? Because, oh, it's not that hard, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
These are great. I did trade you a book a year and a half ago for some of these, and I'm glad. That's why I came down here, was just for the gummies.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And then you get over to the Saudi desert, it's like flying in snow, you know, when you come into a hover, because you look out, you can't see individual grains of sand, you know, so it's tough, yeah. But I found the hardest part of that was the
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And, you know, like any... Good house guest. You know, I got to bring a housewarming gift. I don't have gummies, but what I've got is a coin. Let me get it the right way. And that. I had that made when the book came out. The front of that's an attitude indicator because I believe everything in life is about attitude. And that's a positive attitude, by the way, there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
That's actually a tough question. You know, family's always been a big part of my life. And as we get into the interview, you'll find out that, you know, it wasn't always the priority. And, you know, I had to make some adjustments to that. And, you know, part of what made us stronger, like especially my relationship with my sons, was spending time together and prioritizing that for sure.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
But sometimes the job took priority over even that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
You know, really it was my wife. So she had her own problems, but she made sure that my sons and I had a good relationship. So whether it was, and I remember when my kids were young, there was no internet, you know, to speak of, unless you were on AOL or CompuServe. So it wasn't like just pulling your phone out.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So she would shove us out the door and say, you know, it's like you do to your kids, but she included me in it, was go spend time with your boys. And we would just go do whatever we felt like doing, you know, whether it was taking the boat out or hiking or, you know, some kind of sports or something like that. So really putting that effort into my sons was the key to everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So I was born in New Hampshire, coastal New Hampshire. So I grew up in Portsmouth, which is right by the Navy base there. There's a submarine base right in the end of the river. And I like to consider myself sort of a free range teenager at the time, you know, because once again, there's no internet, no cell phones. So, you know, my parents would open the door. I'd go out with my friends.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
We'd jump on our 10 speeds and ride. I think we had a range of operations about 20 miles. And, you know, we'd go to the beach. We'd go to, you know, out in the woods, whatever trouble you can get into in coastal New England. I was not a bad kid by any means. Never got in trouble. You know, nothing, you know, nothing bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
But, yeah, we'd go to, you know, toilet paper houses, that kind of thing, you know, at night. That was the extent of our, you know, life of crime, if you will. Close with your parents? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, my dad passed away in 06. He went to sleep, sat down in his recliner, went to sleep, didn't wake up the next day. And I kind of think if you're
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Not going to go out in a ball of flame, you know, like instantly, then in your sleep in your favorite chair, you know, not a bad way to go. Yeah. Yeah, my mother's still up in New Hampshire. She's a local artist. You know, she paints, does some wonderful work. My brother's up there. And that's kind of the extent of my family, really. My grandparents are all gone.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Well, as a... Really high school's the first I could think of something I could talk about, and that's really cross country and track were my big things. So I did cross country in the fall, winter track, which in New England, you're doing indoors. We did that at the University of New Hampshire. And then in the spring, you had spring track. And I was generally a miler. Wasn't very fast.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
I ran about 4.45, 4.40 for a mile. You don't think 4.45 is a fast mile? Well, there were guys that were way faster than me, so that's pretty good. And then I tried my hand at the hurdles, but I really didn't have the speed in the short term. So I could do like the 330 intermediates, which is a long, grueling race. But at the very end, when I was a senior, I trained for the decathlete, decathlon.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And I learned to pole vault for the discus, you know, stuff like that. And I actually jumped, I don't know, like 12 feet, something like that, in my training jumps. And the coach is looking at me like, I think we missed you in some events. And I was like, I don't know. But it was a lot of fun. You know, life revolved around my friends, you know, and track.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Yeah. Yeah, it was good. What got you interested in flying? So believe it or not, the Vietnam War was going on, right? And so I must have been six, seven years old or so, and it was on the evening news, right? You didn't have the 24-hour news cycle. You had, you know, the 5 o'clock news, 10 o'clock news, or whatever it was, depending on your time zone. And they always had Hueys zipping across,
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
You know, the screen. And I was like, I want to do that, right? Remember the TV Guide when you were a kid?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
You had the little paper magazine, you know, what's on TV. And in it was an insert for the Army recruiting, right? So I filled it out, and I sent it in. You know, I want to be a pilot, and I must have been – I don't know, 10, maybe 11. And the recruiter sends me a handwritten letter back, a bag full of stickers and stuff like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And he's like, hey, look, I see by your birthday, you're not quite old enough to talk to me, but keep that thought alive and call me back when you're 18. Fast forward a number of years. I'm in high school. I'd forgotten about the Army thing. My senior year, I'm planning on following on to college in New Hampshire. And I've got a guy who's going to be a roommate, the whole thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Oh, thanks for having me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And I start thinking, you know, this is in the fall of 1980. And I'm thinking... If I go to school, I'm just going to party. I'm not going to study. I wasn't a bad student, but I wasn't a good student. I just never did my homework kind of thing. I knew I should, but I didn't. And I knew that college would be the same thing. So I'm worried about what I'm going to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And another friend had just been to the Army recruiter. And he comes in, oh, is it the Army can do all this stuff? You can go to Germany, which was West Germany at the time. And I was like, you know... I always wanted to fly helicopters. And I saw a commercial. Remember those Be All You Can Be commercials? Oh, yeah. Well, there's like two, even three of them that helicopters are involved in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
And one of them is like a W-1. The warrant officer ranks are one through five now. And he's in a Cobra helicopter zipping around, you know, and they finish up. And the senior guy is like, not bad for a rookie, you know. And I'm like, that's what I want to do. So I go into the Army recruiter that my friend had been to. I'm like, I want to fly helicopters. And he's like, well, hold on now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
I saw it on TV. You can go from high school to flight school. And he's like, well, pump the brakes turbo. It doesn't really work like that. And he's like, you know, you got to have something going for you for that to happen. And I was like, well, like what? And he said, tell you what. Why don't you join the Army in aviation, like an aircraft mechanic?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
you know, do two, three years, learn the culture, the lingo, learn about the aircraft, you know, all that kind of stuff, and then put it for flight school, and it's much easier to get in. Now, that statement is twofold. One, the recruiter doesn't get credit for officer candidates at all, right? So even if he got me, he gets no credit for it. May or may not have been able to do it, who knows?
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
But he did put me into Army aviation as an aircraft mechanic, worked on Hueys, Cobras, 58s. And it turns out it was good advice. And I did nine years. I reached the rank of Staff Sergeant, E6, in the Army. I was in Germany, West Germany at the time. And I decided I was going to get out. of the army, but I really wanted to fly. So I put in a packet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So I had two kids, little kids, and my wife, Linda at the time, was a medical assistant. And I thought, you know, they're just going to send me back to Fort Bliss, El Paso, which I didn't want to do. And so I said, you know what, why don't we get out, but I'll put in for flight school first. If I get picked up, we stay. If not, we get out. And so I got picked up, which was amazing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So I did almost four years in West Germany and off to Fort Rucker, Alabama. But that's how I got interested, really, was the Be All You Can Be commercials and the evening news.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
So my first assignment was to South Korea, which is a whole other story we might get into later, because that was a military junta ran it then. It wasn't a democracy. And I went back many years later, and it was a big improvement. So a year unaccompanied there. I go to Fort Bliss, Texas, where I meet my future-to-be wife, Linda.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
do three, three and a half years there, and then go to Germany on a three-year accompanied assignment. So we get there, have our two sons, and now the timing is that, and then flight school's almost a year long, so I count that in the nine years, and that's why.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
Hueys. Because it... What I wanted to do was assault, right? Think of, you know, back then it was the Air Cav, you know, doing the big, big, you know, multi-ship assaults. And so that's what I wanted to do. And the Black Hawk was just coming out. As a matter of fact, in my class, we had like 72 students, I think, to start with. And 20, like 30 of us got Hueys.
Shawn Ryan Show
#148 Alan C. Mack - Flying Through Hell: Real Combat Stories from a Night Stalker Pilot
10 of us got Cobras, and then most of the others got 58, and there were only six Blackhawks slots. So that's how new the Blackhawks were, showing my age. But yeah, so I learned to fly Hueys. So what did you, all right, so what did you get to fly? Well, I learned in UH-1 Hueys. By the end of class, So you know what's happening to the airlines right now where the pilots are aging out, right?