Dale Comstock

Off the deck of what?

Off the ground, I mean.

Off the ground, okay.

Yeah, above the ground, right?

So we're doing 50 feet, 60 feet AGL above the ground level.

probably doing maybe 50, 60 knots.

And the reason why we can't just zip right in and flare is because of the weight, right?

So the helicopters just couldn't flare in.

They had to come in really slow and then sink these things down on the roof.

And then on takeoff was even more problematic because you need forward speed to get the lift under the rotors to get up in the air, right?

So you need some running space too.

And it wasn't a lot of that, so...

Um, so as we're coming in, slow hover, you know, I remember I was on the, on the port side and it was just total chaos, man.

There were people running everywhere, people shooting, shooting at us, shooting at them.

If you could even discern who's who, um, you know, yeah, the lights went out, the whole city went blacked out.

Uh, we were taking fire from all the, uh,

uh, high rise apartments around us because they were housing Panamanian defense forces as well.

And they kept their weapons.

So we're literally taking plunging fire from above.

We're taking ground fire.