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Hey everybody welcome to the buck sexton show this episode we have Amber Smith with us. She's phenomenal amazing lady. She was a kaiwa helicopter pilot in Afghanistan and Iraq. So combat tours in both war zones.

She was also a deputy secretary of defense for public affairs under the Trump administration the author of the phenomenal book during about her time as a kaiwa pilot danger close and Amber you gotta tell everybody what do they need to know about the kaiwa platform right because people people give a lot of a lot of hoopla a lot of attention to the Apache and the black Hawk but tell everybody about what it what it is to be in a car

kaiwa and what kind of stuff you were doing.

Well I was grateful enough to get to fly the most amazing badass helicopter in the army's inventory at the time. It's a light attack reconnaissance helicopter. It's a two cedar at the co pilot. We have a fitting gun.

We have a rocket pod that carries high explosive rockets and then we can carry hellfire missiles as well but the best part of our job was who we work for we work for ground force.

So infantry marine special forces NATO forces in country forces like the Iraqi army or the Afghan.

National army and we fly extremely low level just anywhere from 50 to 150 feet off of the ground.

So well within range of the enemy weapons systems and it's definitely down in the fight every day we go out on a mission.

So I mean there's there's flying close to the ground.

You know like like Maverick in the recent Maverick where he's all you know doing the obstacle course thing or whatever.

And I spoke to an F 18 pilot who said you got to stand at that speed.

You're in that you're in the dirt in like two seconds if you mess up.

But you were flying.

Not much time for mistakes. Yeah.

Right. You were flying at a level where I mean you could basically see like someone's you know you see the color of someone's hair right there.

I mean 50 or 100 feet off the ground.

I got that high off the ground.

We're very low.

The ground intent behind that is that we do hunt for IEDs on the road ahead of convoys and we do like I said get into these close combat attacks when often we get called in to an enemy firefight with friendly ground forces.

So based off the range of our weapons systems just by nature we have to be very close to the ground.

And that does mean that it is an intense light.

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