160th SOAR | Reflexive Fire

Tag Archives: 160th SOAR

14/Feb/2012 · 17:26

What Brought Down 160th SOAR’s Stealth Black Hawk?

Bin Laden gets face-shot

When the Osama Bin Laden raid went down, there was a flurry of news reporting, many initial reports stumbling over themselves as both the media and the White House struggled to get their stories straight. Who executed the raid? How was Bin Laden killed? Who is Seal Team Six? Our readers already knew the answer to that last one, but you get the idea. From what I gather, and we don’t have the whole story even today, is that the actions on the objective were fairly straight forward. Maybe there were one or two terrorists who had armed themselves, but it doesn’t sound like that slowed ST6 down much, if at all. Everything was kosher until they began to exfil off the objective.

What happened next would reveal a previously classified aviation program to the world and potentially create an international crisis.

View from a Little Bird Helicopter

Every Special Operations soldiers wants three things, to be a HALO jumper, to get a bayonet kill, and to ride on a MH-6 Little Bird. I got to do two of the three. I’m still holding out for the zombie apocalypse for my bayonet kill. Above is a picture of me when I was a sniper in 2005 during a training exercise.

This is the view of what it looks like while sitting on the pod of the aircraft that I am leaning on in the first picture from the air.

I was trying to take a picture of a deer I had seen in the forest below…yeah, good luck doing that with a disposable camera while in flight on one of these things.