So Lindsey and I started dating each other, but it was a long distance relationship, as we did not live near each other. She graduated from college in the spring of 2008 and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia while I was finishing up at West Point. Upon graduating from West Point in 2009, I got my standard sixty days leave, and then went to Fort Benning, Georgia for BOLC B.
I was in the last class that was required to go there before going on to an OBC (Officer Basic Course) destination. I actually ended up doing BOLC B twice because when I showed up to my next station, Fort Rucker, nobody else had been there except me, and of course I had to do it along with everyone else. Lindsey ended up moving down to Fort Rucker to be with me in the spring of 2010. We realized just how crazy we were about each other and got engaged just six months later.
We set a date for our wedding and began making plans, but our marriage was made official much quicker than we expected at the county courthouse in Daleville, Alabama. I had PCS (Permanent Change of Station) orders for Fort Campbell, Kentucky and I thought I was going to end up in Afghanistan for our wedding. It was our desire to be married sooner than later, so that’s why we did it that way. We did end up having an actual wedding ceremony in May of 2011, so it all worked out. She is the love of my life, we’re best friends, we love being around each other, and she puts up with me, which is a really high bar. What more could I ask for?
Lindsey started a new job when we arrived in Fort Campbell so she was established in that way. All I wanted to do at this point was get on a plane to Afghanistan. I joined the Army and became an Apache Pilot for certain reasons, and I didn’t feel like I had gotten out of it what I was hoping for yet. It also had become very personal for me because my friend, Daren Hidalgo, who introduced me to Lindsey, had been killed in Kandahar by an IED in February of 2011. That was really hard to take. I finally got the opportunity to deploy into Afghanistan later that year and as I was in Manas, Kyrgyzstan about to get on a plane into Kandahar, my friend, Tim Steele was killed there by an IED also. So now this became a very personal mission for me- all I wanted to do was find and kill anyone who had thought it was a good idea to ever plant an IED in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The unit I was assigned to was “Blue Max,” which has a really long history going back to the Vietnam War. All the people in this company had been in Jalalabad, Afghanistan when everything got really intense in RC (Regional Command) East. They were there when the Battle of COP Keating and the Battle of Wanat happened. These guys had tons of combat experience and around 1200 flight hours, and I showed up as the new guy again. It was really great for me to be with soldiers who had that much experience though.
As a platoon leader, it was very challenging. I became the only platoon leader in the company, as one left right before I arrived, another left right after, and they took the other one out around three months later. Even in a unit that good, you have to find things to improve. The platoon leaders couldn’t fly more than fifty or sixty hours a month because they just couldn’t get their work done. I had to find a way to make things more efficient, so I tapped into my ORSA (Operations Research/ Systems Analysis) and Excel skills from the Academy to make flight scheduling easier by projecting flight hours. This improved operations immensely and allowed me fly more hours per month while making the pilots’ lives easier.
One day I’ll never forget from that deployment was Christmas 2011. I was in the front seat of the helicopter and we found an IED emplacer. While making sure that situation was resolved, my back seater hit the tether on a surveillance balloon, which sent it to the ground pretty quickly and broke the very expensive camera that was on it. When I got back, everyone was angry with me, and I wasn’t even the one who did it. With everything going on for the post accident, I was extremely busy, and I didn’t even call my family on Christmas Day. Lindsey knew that I had been out flying, didn’t hear from me at all, and there was no way for her to call me; she spent that day thinking I was dead. I feel so terrible about it now.
So because of this incident, I received a GOMOR (General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand) on the night I left Afghanistan. This was a very strange time for me because this was the greatest deployment of my life and so I was feeling high from that, but at the same time I had no idea if my career in the Army was over or not. I had to wait three very long weeks to find out my fate. Thankfully, the GOMOR had been filed in the restricted file instead of my performance file, so that’s why I’m sitting here talking to you today.
I learned a lot on that deployment. I finally won the respect of the other soldiers in the company after initially stepping on quite a few toes, but it took some time. I was only there for about a year, which is too bad because I would have liked the opportunity to have been a platoon leader for a longer period of time.
My third deployment was to Afghanistan again, this time to Jalalabad, during which I was Pilot in Command and became an Air Mission Commander. As the Assistant S3, I planned every single operation that battalion operated for nine months, and continued to be involved in the planning for a total of two years. I also got to fly some of the air assaults. This gave me really great experience and allowed me to not only see, but be involved in the operational side of things.
