Fuck,” I said to Dan. “I think we’ve been hit.” My training kicked in, and although our GPS hadn’t been working that whole day — we’d been using old-fashioned printouts and paper maps — I instinctively reached forward to push “target store” on the GPS to record the exact location of enemy fire.
And then the world exploded.
A rocket-propelled grenade blew through the plexiglass “chin bubble” window at my feet and detonated in a violent fireball right in my lap. The explosion vaporized my right leg. It blew my left leg up into the bottom of the instrument panel, shearing off the shin below the knee and leaving my leg hanging by just a thin thread of flesh. And because I had leaned forward, reaching to activate the GPS, the explosion also tore through my right arm, violently shredding it into a bloody mess of muscle, sinew, and bone. In a single, shattering instant, my body was blown apart. My skin was burned and riddled with shrapnel, and blood began pumping out of my wounds.
I didn’t know any of this. At the moment of the explosion, my brain went into overdrive trying to figure out what to do next. Dan hadn’t responded when I said we’d been hit, so I thought he must be severely wounded. I called out to Chris and Kurt, but no one answered.
In shock and acting on pure instinct, I tried to fly the helicopter. Unaware that my legs were gone, and focused on finding a landing spot, I struggled to press the pedals. At the same time, I tried to pull on the cyclic stick between my legs, which controls the rotor and almost certainly had stopped functioning. The RPG had knocked out our avionics system, so we couldn’t hear or talk to each other, and the cockpit was quickly filling with black smoke.
We’re gonna get a compressor stall, I thought, knowing the No. 2 engine must have sucked in debris from the explosion.
We’re going to have a hydraulic failure. My mind was whirling, frantically trying to solve each new crisis.
In an exclusive excerpt from her new book, the U.S. senator from Illinois recounts the dramatic downing of her helicopter in Iraq — and the early stages of recovery from her devastating injuries.
www.chicagomag.com
