The Membership Corner

摘要

One of our members, CW5 Dave Van Vechten, reached out to me with a story idea for this column. My jaw dropped when he told me what happened 10 years ago on a very dark night in Afghanistan and the resulting friendship. Not wanting to steal his thunder, here is the story… "Sir, we just hit that guy in the head with our rotor disk!" That was the call CW3 Dave Van Vechten heard from his left-rear crew-chief on March 29th, 2011. It was a "red-ilium" night mission landing to a non-standard HLZ on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to extract nine personnel from an OP. "Once I felt the initial impact and the aircraft started shaking and vibrating, I immediately came on the controls to see what was happening," Van Vechten recalls. The UH-60L Black Hawk they were flying had just hit a passenger in the head - he was approaching the aircraft on sloping terrain. Unable to hold a stable hover, and not knowing the full extent of the damage, they flew the rattling aircraft to FOB Joyce and performed a precautionary landing (PL) and emergency engine shutdown. The crew learned later the Soldier from the 101st who was struck had remarkably survived and was being MEDEVAC'ed out of country after chalk two was able to load him on board and fly him to FOB Wright.