Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Bucksexton show this episode. We have Amber Smith with us. She's phenomenal. Amazing lady.

She was a Kayao 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 Kayao pilot danger close. And Amber, you got to tell

everybody what do they need to know about the Kayao platform right because people people give a lot of

a lot of hoopla a lot of attention to the Apache and to the black Hawk but tell everybody about what

what what it is to be in a Kaya 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-seater 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 worked for. We worked 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's 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 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'd be, I mean, 50, 100 feet off the ground.

Yeah. 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

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