What to Do If You're Shot 3X During Maduro Operation? If You're This Chinook Pilot, You Finish Mission

Operation Absolute Resolve was a stunning military success. In the wee hours of January 3, American military forces stealthily entered the South American country of Venezuela by air, lowered boots to the ground, and successfully captured the dictator and illegitimate president Nicolás Maduro. He was spirited off to New York City, where he awaits his reckoning from the U.S. Justice system.

No U.S. troops were killed, nor was any of our military hardware captured or destroyed.

But that doesn’t mean there weren’t multiple deaths among the Venezuelans and their protectors, the Cubans, and it doesn’t mean there were no injuries on the American team. In fact, one helicopter pilot, who was the team leader and one of the planners of the mission, was hit three times.

That didn’t stop him, according to multiple reports:

In the early hours of Saturday morning, U.S. Army helicopters skimmed 100 feet above the sea and then over Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, racing toward their target. Their stealthy pathway had been cleared by an American cyberattack that darkened the city, and by radar-evading U.S. fighter jets that pounded Venezuela’s Russian-built air defenses.

Initially, the helicopters, carrying dozens of Army Delta Force commandos, flew undetected.

But as they approached Mr. Maduro’s lair, the aircraft came under fire and shot back. The first helicopter in the assault, a giant twin-rotor MH-47 Chinook, was hit but remained flyable. The flight leader, who also planned the mission and was piloting the Chinook, was struck three times in the leg, said current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

---

TAKEN DOWN:  Trump Announces Venezuelan Leader Nicolas Maduro and His Wife Captured Following ‘Large Scale’ US Strike

Casualty Toll in Venezuela Shows What President Trump Meant When He Said 'Very Violent' 

---

Although the pilot survived the shots, the drama was far from over:

As the damaged helicopter struggled to stay aloft and deliver its troops to their target, the success of the entire operation, called Absolute Resolve, involving more than 150 aircraft launched from 20 different land and sea bases in the region, hung in the balance.

The entire operation was in jeopardy:

Would these operators from the Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment adjust and prevail, as members of the SEAL Team 6 raid to capture Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 did after one of their helicopters clipped a wall and crashed?

Or would the Chinook plummet into a hostile city and become a deadly echo of the Black Hawk helicopter that was shot down in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 and ignited a fierce battle in which 18 U.S. troops died and 73 were wounded, at the time the deadliest single engagement for American troops since the Vietnam War?

Spoiler alert: the helicopter did not crash, we didn’t witness the second coming of Black Hawk Down, the brave pilot was able to disgorge the soldiers on his craft to go capture Maduro, and he was able to later get the chopper back to the warship Iwo Jima. Although he was seriously injured, he is being treated at a Texas hospital along with another soldier.

And that, my friends, is yet another reason why the U.S. military is feared and respected. In this operation, as in so many others throughout our history, they didn’t come to play games.