Mike Durant

Well, it looks like the whole spar is compromised, but somehow that blade held on.

There's a hole in the fuselage.

I always thought they held their position.

Dan Gilotta, a good friend of mine, says, no, they didn't.

They started to take off.

Still got guys on the ropes.

The crew chief said, oh, oh, oh, we got guys on the ropes.

They went back down, got them on the ground, cut the ropes, went back to the airfield.

That crew actually jumps in a spare helicopter, and there's a few things that has to happen first.

They need a test flight or something because they just changed an engine.

I don't remember.

And then they come back out.

They end up flying 17 hours because they're the search and rescue birds, so they're flying all night.

And now the commander says to me, hey, I want you to replace 6-1 over the targets.

Hell yeah.

You know, but we don't have snipers on board.

I mean, all we got is miniguns.

So we go in and we join the orbit.

This was a bad idea.

I mean, you know, somebody should have realized before this happened that that just didn't make sense in the daytime.