anything and everything to anyone who needed it.
We called it “beer, bullets, and beans.” With that
done, with fuel burned down, we’d go into more
specialized movements of really heavy loads like
the 155mm howitzer. We could only lift that with
a lot of fuel burned down. The heaviest loads we
typically carried were bulldozers, which we could
only lift if we were just about out of fuel. We’d
latch onto the bulldozer, fly it to its location, then
immediately fly to the closest refueling location as
we were flying on vapors at that point.“THE COOLEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN!”
Pat Kinser, Passenger, CH-47D
All of us grunts loved the Chinooks in Afghanistan.
They’re powerful and can hold a ton of people and
gear. I saw them carry everything from mail to
water, to howitzers to humanitarian and medical
supplies, to goats and chickens for our attached
Afghan security forces to eat during the combat
operations we did with them. With the altitude
and the heat, and the necessity for heavy loads,
it’s what you had to use over there. There was
no other option.
I’ll never forget this one insert. We were going to
a remote village near the border with Pakistan that
was over 9,000 feet in altitude, and it was summer,
so it was hot and the air was thin. We had an entire
platoon with food and water for over a week. The
village was on the side of a really steep mountain
and the pilots brought the Chinook in and then the
ramp went down and everyone went out. When
I stepped off the ramp onto the ground I heard,
“That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!”—one of
the Marines was yelling over the screaming of the
engines. I looked up to see that the Chinook’s front
wheels were a good 20 feet above the steep moun-
tainside, and its rear ramp was just a few inches
off of it. But the pilots and crew kept it dead-still,
as if it were sitting on flat earth. The crew on the
back were just so nonchalant and dead-calm as they
helpedusoffloadallourfoodandwater.Thenthe
beastspunupandroaredaway.SPECIALOPERATIONS
TonyBrooks,Passenger,MH-47D
[Operation]RedWingswasuniquebecauseof
theterrainandconditions.Itwasathighalti-
tude—nearly10,000feetabovesealevel—andthe
terrainwasincrediblysteepandrugged.It wasalso
duringthesummer,andtheregionwaspoundedTwo-wheel “pinnacle landings” are a standard CH-47
method of inserting troops at precarious landing
zones. This Royal Air Force Chinook has just dropped
40 Royal Marines on a Mojave, California peak.September 2019 AIR&SPACE 45
MINISTRY OF DEFENCE/SAC NICHOLAS EGAN