http://www.dailyherald.com/article/2014 ... 141119904/
They ripped across the sky just 15 feet above a vast grove of date palm trees near the Tigris River, wind rushing into the helicopter and the rotors screaming. They stayed low to the ground so they would appear to the enemy on the horizon only for an instant before they zipped past and were gone.
The flight wouldn't take long.
"We were almost home," Duckworth said.
Their sister helicopter was flying to Duckworth's right. On that second helicopter, Spc. Matt Backues was manning the machine gun on the left side.
He saw a trail of smoke rising from the trees toward Duckworth's helicopter.
It was a rocket-propelled grenade.
Backues saw the bottom of the right side of her cockpit explode.
On board, the impact was devastating.
"We were approximately 15 miles northeast of Taji airfield, when I heard what I recognized as gunfire underneath my aircraft," Milberg wrote in an account two days later. "It sounded like three rounds and I thought that I felt the impact from the gunfire. I immediately heard an explosion come from the right side of the cockpit. I felt heat and small particles of debris on my face."
Duckworth's right leg was gone in an instant, shredded in a flash of heat and a spray of shrapnel from a grenade. Her left leg was terribly injured, and her right arm was nearly severed.
The blast blew out the clear bubble at the bottom of the cockpit, destroyed the window above her head and severely damaged the helicopter's flight system stored behind her seat.
His helmet on and the helicopter noise deafening, Hannemann heard a pop. Seated behind Milberg, he looked to his right. There was shrapnel on the floor of the Black Hawk. Thick black smoke obstructed his view of the cockpit, and the radio in his flight helmet was silent. Hannemann could tell Duckworth was hurt, and he didn't know if anyone was still flying the helicopter.
Duckworth was trying.
She said she frantically tried to pull on the controls. She thinks she went in and out of consciousness, unaware she had lost her legs because she could still feel them. She tried to push on the pedals even though the sophisticated controls used to fly the 5-ton helicopter had failed. She tried to pull on the stick, which likely was no longer connected.
Behind her, Fierce had been hit by shrapnel that tore into his right leg below the knee.
The crew members could not speak to or hear one another.
Duckworth didn't realize that just to her left, Milberg was still flying the helicopter. Fighting for control using the cyclic, the control stick that governs pitch and direction, Milberg at first saw nowhere to land.
"It was a sea of trees," Milberg said. Then, "out of nowhere, here was this long, narrow opening in the trees."
"As I made the approach I started feeling more severe feedback in the cyclic and felt a lateral vibration in the aircraft," Milberg wrote in the days after. "I realized that there was a single tree in my flight path, so I used my cyclic to clear it and then continued the approach to the ground."
Backues describes that single tree as a major obstacle to a smooth landing, but Milberg's helicopter gymnastics gently set the crippled Black Hawk in a rutted field.
It all happened in a fury of smoke, heat and noise.
"Honestly, I didn't know if anybody landed it or if we just got lucky," Hannemann said.
As the haze settled over her, Duckworth noticed tall grass poking up through the helicopter. Why is that there, she remembers thinking, not understanding that part of the bottom of the cockpit was gone.
Milberg was unhurt. He immediately was consumed with the need to get everyone out of the helicopter in case of a fire or approaching enemies. He looked to his right.
"I looked over at CPT Duckworth and saw her slumped forward against the instrument panel," he wrote in his report. "I saw that she was unconscious and had black residue on her face." He thought she was dead.
LTC (R) Duckworth is more of a man than Trump can ever imagine himself to be.
- Doc