# Is the "Lone Survivor" Story an Accurate Portrayal of Operation Red Wings?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8oEwJJmb5k

[00:00] You're cleared hot.
[00:01] Can't be cleared hot.
[00:04] So, speaking of Chinooks, I swear to God every year, and you'll understand your direct tie into this, this narrative comes around about Extortion 17.
[00:15] Mhm.
[00:16] Where it was a sacrifice operation where Obama sold out Gold Squadron because of Red Squadron uh actioning Neptune Spear.
[00:30] Mhm.
[00:30] And unfortunately, there is at least one that I know of, family member that helps perpetuate this.
[00:37] Right.
[00:38] And correct me if I'm wrong, but you were the investigating officer for that accident or what event?
[00:46] No, I wasn't; I was involved, but not as the...
[00:49] Okay.
[00:50] So, you may not have been the person who actually bottom lined it, but I am hoping that we could walk through that a little bit and one, I have tried to explain to people.
[01:00] The complete and utter unrealistic nature.
[01:04] Mhm.
[01:04] That I don't even know how you would coordinate that, by the way.
[01:09] No, you couldn't.
[01:10] And because...
[01:11] Yeah.
[01:11] You know, Extortion.
[01:13] First of all, it was a 47D, right?
[01:16] So, it was a conventional aircraft.
[01:18] That family member you're talking about, I think is the one that was saying, "Why don't they give us the black box?"
[01:21] That would tell us everything.
[01:23] Well, there was no voice data recorder on those things.
[01:26] Only the Echoes and the Gulf 7.
[01:28] Also, from my understanding, that thing burned for hours.
[01:32] Yeah.
[01:32] So, I mean, magnesium and fuel, just fuel.
[01:35] But, the other thing with that aircraft is it wasn't, you know, the problem.
[01:41] The easiest way to boil it down is that when CAG left Iraq and then went to Afghanistan, they now had priority on the rotor wing platforms, the soft platforms.
[01:53] So, everybody else had to gaff.
[01:54] So, that's the SEALs doing the ground assault force, and then you could have what they call opportune air.
[01:59] Mhm.
[01:59] Right?
[01:59] So, you get somebody that's not.
[02:01] Busy and they come help you.
[02:02] Yeah.
[02:03] It's a scheduling issue for people listening.
[02:04] If if it's available, you could ask.
[02:06] Right.
[02:06] But, here's the thing.
[02:08] In order for a conventional aircraft to fly a tier one unit, you had to meet certain criteria.
[02:13] And like you had to be in country for a period of time, you had to pilots had to have so many hours, all that stuff.
[02:18] So, the extortion guys did, right?
[02:22] And so, they could do what's called an offset infil.
[02:25] You know, they they weren't even supposed to do what we call to the Y, which is 300 m from the target, or to the X, because they don't have the same defensive armament and a bunch of other things.
[02:33] So, anyway, they can only do an offset infil.
[02:38] So, that unit was ripping out, right?
[02:40] They were relief in place, and the new unit was coming in, and they were out doing a local area orientation, right?
[02:48] So, what that encompasses is, you know, so you're the new pilot coming in, I'm the old guy going out.
[02:53] Mhm.
[02:53] We get in the cockpit together, and we fly around to all the forward operating bases, and I show you this is how you get in and out of this farp.
[03:00] This is where you can Watch out.
[03:02] Over here, there's a big balloon on a tether, you know?
[03:04] You come at this base from this side.
[03:06] The same thing on the ground force.
[03:06] We do the left seat, right seat.
[03:07] We leave a headquarters contingent, or we send one over early.
[03:12] Right.
[03:12] You get atmospherics on the ground, operational tempo.
[03:15] Are these guys doing that, and their blue force tracker, right?
[03:17] The beacon that tells people back in the talk, it was screens like this up on the wall.
[03:23] Yeah.
[03:23] Oh, we need a helicopter take, you know, gold squad or not to reinforce the Rangers, you know, they're under fire.
[03:28] Okay.
[03:28] Oh, look, Extortion 17 is certified to move tier one forces.
[03:35] Send them.
[03:35] Well, these guys, that wasn't in their mission brief, it wasn't anything they analyzed.
[03:39] They're out checking out, you know, fobs and farps.
[03:43] And they have never flown together.
[03:45] The two the two pilots and half the crew in the back is also different units.
[03:48] Mhm.
[03:48] So, there's a little bit of um, a disconnect, cuz, you know, the one thing about battle rostering in the 160th is you know the guy next to you.
[03:54] You know what he's going to do or not do.
[03:58] You know, a lot of times you don't even have to say it.
[04:01] It just it's it's just it's just known.
[04:04] And so, they get sent in there, you know, and they in a cycle of darkness as well, like the.
[04:11] Yeah.
[04:11] As I'm saying, so yeah, I mean, everything you're describing wasn't like a multi-day process.
[04:14] It was something probably called in troops in contact.
[04:17] Mhm.
[04:18] They looked at what they had available.
[04:20] Um, it's not it wouldn't be incredibly uncommon for a Tier 1 unit to be uh, response force like that.
[04:25] You're going to go.
[04:27] I mean, sometimes I mean, we would have other units doing the exact same thing for us on a contingency basis.
[04:32] Mhm.
[04:33] So, it sounds like they got the call.
[04:36] Got the bird there as fast as they could.
[04:37] I'd heard there was some decision about whether splitting into two helicopters and going a lower route or one helicopter and going over a piece of terrain, which is I believe what they chose, correct?
[04:47] They, as for what what I understand, they drove right up the the high speed avenue of approach.
[04:51] Cuz they they lumped everybody in one aircraft.
[04:54] Mhm.
[04:55] And so, now it's heavier.
[04:56] Now, it's not going up or around, it's going to go right up the road.
[04:59] And, you know, so think of a a V-shaped valley, right?
[05:02] Instead of
[05:04] You running at the bottom of the V, where it's the lowest, where you have the most uh, payload capacity, but you have no room to maneuver.
[05:11] And one of the problems with Army Aviation, well, military rotor wing aviation in general is when you get shot at, people have a tendency of trying to dive down away, right?
[05:24] Like I did on the on the hill.
[05:25] Yeah, but you were on a mountain top.
[05:27] But, but that's only good if you can put terrain between you and the guy shooting at you, right?
[05:30] So, what happens and I almost was the chief of the aviation shoot down assessment team, so that's how I know some of this stuff, is I watched some of the videos of like a Blackhawk, an Air Force Blackhawk getting shot at, and he's running down a valley just like what they did in Extortion, and he's getting shot at from all these different directions, and as they're talking on the ICS, you can hear the bullets hitting, and they're just zipping around.
[05:50] They can't go any lower, but they're doing this, and the only thing they didn't do was go up at all, right?
[05:56] And there's a there's a maneuver called the Wells maneuver, where you essentially when you get shot at instead of diving down and away or turning, you actually climb a little.
[06:04] Bit, and then you start to turn, and everything's done so that the gunner can't see you doing it.
[06:08] He doesn't know that you've just climbed up a little bit.
[06:12] He doesn't know that you've done that.
[06:13] The geometry.
[06:14] Every 9 seconds you're doing something different.
[06:17] So, the gunner can't anticipate what you're doing because they used to helicopters just diving down.
[06:23] Yeah.
[06:23] And trying to break contact.
[06:25] Well, there's nowhere to go if you're already flying at the bottom of the V.
[06:28] Yeah.
[06:29] You're just you you know, like if it had been me doing that based on my experiences, you know, I would have found a way to get around.
[06:35] I would not have gone up that main avenue of approach, you know?
[06:39] And that's kind of what happened on Red Wings, you know, with Turbine 3-3.
[06:41] You know, they went right up the spine of the ridge.
[06:45] Oh, are you talking about the one that got shot down?
[06:46] Yeah.
[06:47] That was Did the RPG actually go into the back of the helicopter on that one?
[06:52] Yeah, right up into the ramp area.
[06:54] We We believe it hit the aft transmission or the or the C-box or the command transmission.
[06:57] And you know, it's funny, you know, you talk about extortion, you know, uh Turbine 3-3, we still have people I I did an interview for an.
[07:06] Article.
[07:07] Uh, that's going to the Smithsonian sometime this summer, and they were talking about that, and a couple of SEALs, I don't know from who, said that they know that there's ISR footage of the battle of the four original guys, you know, Marcus and uh Marcus and Axe.
[07:23] Heard of that.
[07:24] Yeah, I've heard people saying I was going to say I've heard people saying that.
[07:27] Yeah.
[07:27] I've never met somebody who says they have seen it.
[07:30] Yeah, there's not.
[07:31] The only Yeah, cuz a platform And again, this is what people don't understand about ISR, which we're largely talking about Predators or What does it stand for?
[07:37] Intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance.
[07:39] Predator, Reaper, um it would have had to have been overhead to begin with for that to exist.
[07:44] They might have surged it there once they got the red star cluster like metaphorical red star cluster which is everybody come help me.
[07:52] Right.
[07:52] But they they didn't have that.
[07:53] They had an A-10 with a with a lightning pod.
[07:56] Yeah.
[07:56] So, what we call non-standard ISR, you know, so it's an A-10 overhead and that's after you know, the whole compromise had happened.
[08:03] So, there's none, but they insist.
[08:06] Yeah.
[08:06] And the guy I was talking that wrote the article is like he's seen all the classified materials and he's like there's no, you know, and the same thing is everybody thinks a man pad brought it down.
[08:15] It's like no, it's an RPG.
[08:17] I watched it on a feed, you know, from the A-10, you know, and you know, if it were a man pad the flares would have shot out and all of none of that happened.
[08:25] So.
[08:26] I don't know how to stop the rumor with uh extortion.
[08:29] It's rough to see and personally I'm biased on this one because I knew the vast majority of people on that.
[08:36] Right, you were gold, right?
[08:37] I was a gold and I was in two troop and that was two troop of gold.
[08:39] I'm not saying I would have been all the helicopter if I'd stayed there.
[08:41] I spent the minimum amount of time in that command.
[08:44] I'm just saying like a guy from my buds class, Jonas Kelsall, who was enlisted in buds and then went to college right after graduating buds before going into the SEAL teams was the
[08:55] What would he have been?
[08:55] Ground force commander?
[08:56] I don't know if he was the commanding officer of gold at that time, but he was at least the GFC that night.
[08:59] I mean it's rough and uh I just I don't understand why some of those things get so sticky and and why.
[09:08] Red Wings is a really touchy one in the community because externally it could be viewed as the makings of a great Hollywood movie.
[09:23] But internally it is full of lessons learned that didn't quite make it into the movie, and I don't even know if people would have understood those lessons learned, but it's taught as not a success.
[09:36] It's taught as a failure and a breakdown of so many things.
[09:43] But that to me doesn't—I don't understand why people get so, to use Michael's word, vehemently, which is not the way you say it, so now I always say it incorrectly because he demanded he just was like, "That's how you say it."
[09:58] [laughter]
[09:59] They won't let it go.
[10:00] Yeah.
[10:01] And what is it supposed to show?
[10:02] I mean, I know the argument because the discussion basically comes down to this.
[10:10] Did as the movie shows Marcus stay and fight until he was almost out of ammunition or did the opposite of that occur?
[10:18] Those are basically the two narratives.
[10:20] Right.
[10:22] Um and there's some real weird things in there like why were there two after actions that were written?
[10:27] Why was he asked to write another one?
[10:29] Why did the military essentially issue him an editor and a publisher?
[10:34] Right.
[10:34] I mean I know the answer to that because they knew they could turn it into a great recruiting piece and I very barely know Marcus.
[10:41] I've hung out with him two times um and I and I'm not trying to throw shade at him at any in any way because the guy has to live with whatever the reality on the ground is that man has to live with it for the rest of his life.
[10:51] So, I'm not trying to throw shade at it.
[10:53] But both sides of that conversation have these things that they have their talons in and they won't let them go.
[11:00] Yeah.
[11:01] It's the same thing with extortion like I I can't fathom what it would feel like to be a family member losing somebody in that situation.
[11:08] Mhm.
[11:09] Wanting and demanding answers that like.
[11:11] The black box, if they can't even give it to you, but you are convinced that it does exist and because you're not getting it, it's therefore a conspiracy.
[11:18] And then let's attach that to the president just waking up and going to the Oval Office one morning over his coffee and just saying, "You know what?"
[11:26] Let's just sacrifice Gold Squadron because that makes sense in any universe.
[11:29] Right.
[11:30] Just, you know, Occam's razor, right?
[11:31] The simplest, right?
[11:34] So, if you're a group of bad guys and you've got the Rangers, you know, under fire and you feel like you're outmaneuvering them and you may do some serious damage on them, what's going to come?
[11:46] You know that the Americans are going to send helicopters.
[11:50] Especially over a decade deep into that?
[11:51] Right.
[11:52] They know.
[11:52] It's, you know, what did Napoleon say?
[11:53] Don't fight your enemy too much or they'll know your ways, right?