Mike Durant

And so got to be part of the development of the armed Black Hawk from the moment we said, man, wouldn't this be cool?

All the way to two conflicts later, shooting it in combat for the first time.

Wow.

And I mean, again, remember, this is 90-ish.

We're designing this thing with pencil and paper.

I mean, I actually went to Walmart and bought...

You know, you buy them for kids.

You can draw squares and triangles with this little plastic template thing.

I went to Walmart and bought one of those so I could draw.

It's basically an engineering diagram of how we wanted to manage the rockets and manage the guns through the system in the aircraft to provide to the engineers at Rockwell Collins, who were actually going to write the software to do it.

So, I mean, this is how primitive we are.

We're handwriting this stuff.

You know, I want to press on this button, and it's going to take me to this page, and then I'll get to pick from these different types of rockets.

Because in a tube, like for us, we usually carry 19-shot rocket pods.

You could put flechettes in there, HE in there, flares in there.

I mean, you've got to mix.

And you got to know where they are so that you can pick the one you want when you pull the trigger.

So that's basically very basics on mission management.

So we're designing that.

We're designing what we wanted the cyclic to look like because we need a different grip.