Call For Fire with Cobra Gunship in Afghanistan

Here is a picture of myself taking part in some Call For Fire (CFF) training in Afghanistan.  It was my first time and you can tell my virgin status because I’m holding the cheat sheet in my left hand and the hand mic in my right as I talk to the Cobra pilots.  Over all I thought the Marine Cobra pilots were impressive as hell, they certainly didn’t have many of the restrictions that regular Army pilots had.

Coming in on a gun run.  As the CFF mission comes in, the pilot heads towards the target while angling up into the air.

Next he comes hurling downwards like cresting the peak of a hill on a roller coaster.

Lined up with the target that has been pin pointed by ground troops the Cobra opens up with it’s minigun and hoses the target down.  In this instance, we are just training by calling in gun runs on some empty connex containers.

These pilots would fire on targets so close to us that we would get showered with hot brass as the helicopter flew overhead.  You could hear it dropping all around us like rain drops.

The real fun came during the night portion of this training.  We were pin pointing the targets down range with infrared lasers mounted on our rifles.  Because of the dust kicked up from previous gun runs, our lasers were blocked out by the cloud of debris about fifty yards in front of us.  The pilots thought that we were intentionally targeting something fifty yards to our front and went ahead and lit that area up, the minigun almost putting lead down in our laps.