You know, in the span of a couple of minutes, we get clearance to fire.

And then between the two aircraft, we do some crosstalk to make sure, you know, we're not shooting the same thing.

And, you know, they decide

that they're going to take on the rocket launchers, we'll take the van.

There was an F-16 on station, and he spotted some of the people that were involved in this,

like running away and they were hiding

under the bleachers and so the F-16 did a remote designation underneath the bleachers for us

to put a hellfire missile in there and take care of those guys.

Hey, welcome to another episode of The Spear, a podcast by the Modern War Institute at Westbourne.

I'm John Amble, editorial director at MWI, and The Spear is our platform to explore the combat experience.

Each episode includes a single one-on-one interview with a guest who walks us through a particular event and their role in it.

A battle, a firefight, a mission.

It's a first-person account of combat.

This episode is our second from the Army Aviation community, and in it you'll hear my conversation with Dan McClinton,

a retired Chief Warren Officer 4 and former Apache pilot.

He told me about two missions from a 2007 deployment to Iraq, one in which everything largely went smoothly, and another in which they didn't go so smoothly.

Together, the two stories have some pretty powerful lessons about how military units learn,

how they improve, and how that improvement really requires service members and leaders to be

honest and sometimes self-critical.

Before we hear those stories, just a couple quick things.

First, if you're enjoying the spear, be sure you're subscribed to the podcast, and we'd love

it if you'd take a few seconds and give us a rating or leave a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

...