Chief Warrant Officer Sarah Benson warned her two combat medics and air crew chief, who sat in the back of her Black Hawk medevac helicopter. Up ahead in dusk light, Sarah could see explosions caused by RPGs, rocket propelled grenades, fired by the Taliban into the Army forward operating base. Her heart rate picked up, her Nomex-gloved hands steady on the cyclic and collective of the helicopter. She used the rudders beneath her flight boots to maneuver it downward. This was a nine-line flight. Men on the ground were wounded and critical. “This is going to be dicey,” Pascal, the medic, warned via the ICS, inter-cabin radio system. Evans, the other medic in the rear of the cabin, nodded. Sarah snorted. “What else is new?” Her whole focus was on the landing. The FOB, forward operating base, was on a hill at eighty-five hundred feet. It protected one hundred Army soldiers. With the FOB three miles from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, this was one of the most dangerous areas to fly in.
