Sheriff Sandra Hutchens, center, with "TIP Champion" Award
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Costa Mesa Fire Captain Bruce Pulgencio is back with his wife and colleagues after second California National Guard deployment.
By SEAN GREENE / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
It was pitch black in the Iraqi desert. No moonlight and zero illumination.
Bruce Pulgencio only had night vision goggles to see the landing zone and set down his 10-ton Black Hawk helicopter. A dust cloud began to form behind the aircraft 100 feet above ground, and before too long it caught up to the tight formation.
Then: brown out.
Pulgencio was flying blind. He entered into a “controlled crash landing” to deliver a group of 11 special forces soldiers to their mission.
He would fly air assault missions just like this 15 times on his second year-long tour in Iraq. Last week, California National Guard 140th Aviation Regiment unit returned to home base at Los Alamitos Air Force Base, and now Chief Warrant Officer Bruce Pulgencio is ready to switch roles back to Fire Captain Bruce Pulgencio of the Costa Mesa Fire Department.
But what it’s like being back is difficult to put into words. Life’s little things have become a heightened experience. Seeing green trees. Standing on grass. Having a kitchen and an indoor bathroom.
Mostly though, he’s just glad to be back with Kathy, his wife of 30 years. Read the rest of this entry
In the deadliest day for U.S. forces in the nearly decadelong war in Afghanistan, insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter Saturday, killing 30 Americans — including Navy SEAL commandos from the broader unit that killed Osama bin Laden — and eight Afghans, U.S. and Afghan officials said.
By RAY RIVERA, ALISSA J. RUBIN and THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
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The helicopter, on a night-raid mission in the Tangi Valley of Wardak province, west of Kabul, was most likely brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade, one coalition official said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, and they could hardly have found a more valuable target: U.S. officials said 22 of the dead were Navy SEAL commandos from two different special teams, including SEAL Team 6.
Other commandos from that team conducted the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed bin Laden in May.
The officials said that those who were killed Saturday were not involved in the Pakistan mission.
That so many of the military’s most elite forces could be killed shook troops around the world.
It takes years to train a Navy SEAL unit and it will have reverberations across the force.
Saturday’s deaths bring to 365 the number of coalition troops killed this year in Afghanistan and 42 this month.
The attack came during a surge of violence that has accompanied the beginning of a drawdown of U.S. and NATO troops, and it showed how entrenched the insurgency remains even far from its main strongholds in southern Afghanistan and along the Afghan-Pakistan border in the east. U.S. soldiers recently had turned over the sole combat outpost in the Tangi Valley to Afghans.
When the 4th Brigade Combat Team handed over its only combat outpost in the Tangi Valley to Afghan security forces in April, the U.S. commander for the area said that as troops began to withdraw, he wanted to focus his forces on troubled areas that had larger populations.
But he pledged coalition forces would continue to carry out raids there to stem insurgent activity. Read the rest of this entry
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