Got a new story for you guys. This one I am working as Light CAS in a AH-6 Little Bird. My baby bird is armed with 2 M134 7.62x51mm Mini-Guns and 14 2.75 cal LAU FFAR Rockets. My Job is to cover the insertion of the platoon onto a tiny ass dock on the Island of Capria. The Platoon's objective is to secure the town pictured and locate an HVT, kill him, then move for extract. In the way is a lot of pissed off militants, numerous Technicals, a few BRDMs and few 9K38 Igla troopers, or Manpads. Typical days work for a Little Bird. Mission starts with us taking off in Formation. I am flying the rear cover bird. My plan is to light up anything that dares to engage our blackhawks. On approach a Technical armed with a DshKM 12.7mm Heavy Machine gun fires at our birds from the right of the LZ. So I break and engage the fuc­­k out of it. Hit it with a rocket and break hard back away from hostile territory. Okay, before I go on. The Little bird is not armored, like at all. The Cockpit is open, and all that is protecting me from the howling wind is a thin sheet of aviation glass. I can quite literally be shot down by derka derkas firing AK-47s spastically into the air. So, I am going to do my best to not take fire at all in the first place. I will only follow an attack vector for so long before I break off back to 'friendly' sky. By friendly I mean less prone to small arms. HMG fire is pretty easy to avoid once you get some distance too. Back to the story. I'm doing these kind of runs time after time. Saving my precious rockets for harder targets while I am lighting up infantry with the gatling guns. Nothing quite like farting out 7.62x51 at 2000 rounds per minute at PKM fire only to see the PKM fire abruptly stop. By this time the other Littlebird had be nailed by a manpad and was dead and gone. Aside from the somewhat meager capabilities of the Blackhawks, I was the only form of CAS left. Good, now my airspace is clear to do what I want. The entire time though, I would get above a certain altitude or down far enough into the valley I would start taking HMG fire from the Ridge on the right of the picture. At this point I was really starting to piss me off. I would put minigun fire into where I think the fire was coming from. I was asking my ground handler to watch that area so I can kill whatever it was shooting at me. But no luck. What I didn't know was that it was 3 BRDM infantry support vehicles that got stuck in a village up on that ridge. But more on that later. Well, one of the Blackhawks takes major hits from an HMG. I have no clue how the f­u­c­k­ he managed it but he was able to auto-rotate a good 2km before finally landing. At a castle on the southern part of the island. I hear frantic cries for help over the radio and decide I am not working hard enough as it is, so I go save him and his crew chief. Well low and behold to me, the mission maker makes the entire island hostile. I didn't know this. I figured that the threats were only in the town we were assaulting. So I get to the castle with the downed blackhawk. The crew pops smoke and tells me just to pick up the pilot and take him back for another bird. As I am making my final approach I notice enemy infantry. A whole shit ton of them. I mean a platoon strength of enemy infantry was advancing on their position and they didn't even know. I waved off and started engaging the f­u­c­k out of those guys. The crew chief of the Blackhawk jumped on the gun that could traverse to the hostiles and started lighting them up too. My guns were probably about to melt and I expended most of my rockets but the baddies were all dead. I was circling, strafing, rolling, and doing all sorts of moves to avoid being shot down. All at an altitude of like 30 meters and moving at like 200km/h. That's what makes the Little Bird shine. Shit like that where you can work it that hard and come home alive. Well, I manage to grab the pilot and fly him back to base and then I returned to the AO. On the way back I was scanning around like normal when I noticed a soft topped transport truck with enemy infantry loading into it. This pleased the deathbird. Engaged it, and killed another 10 to 11 bad guys and prevented them from reaching my buddies on the ground. Well, I re-enter the AO and get into contact with my ground handler. He tells me they are mopping up and just to remain on overwatch. I decide to take a proactive position and go find those heavy guns that were shooting at me earlier. Since they would f­u­c­k­ up the extrac helos, they needed to die. After being shot at a few more times I manage to locate what it was. A lone BRDM wedged against a building. Since it's main gun is not 12.7mm but rather 15mm I decide I am going to swing wide right and low out of it's gun depression then come around from behind with some altitude and hit it. That's when I noticed I had a rocket left. "Well this'll be easy." I swing out, then gain altitude roll over towards the target and notice the TWO OTHER BRDMS SITTING THERE WAITING FOR ME. They light me up. Engine dead, instruments dead. Well, I am going down. I was cursing the whole way down by the way. I manage to do a text book autorotation onto flat land near the original LZ. I booked it over to the already landed blackhawk and mount up into the gunner's seat. Told him what's up with the BRDMs, advised staying on a low departure. He agreed with that assessment. Funny part is, it was the pilot I rescued a while before. Well, Infantry takes their god damn time getting to the LZ. Turns out the HVT glitched into building rubble. So they told me ground handler to get out of the helicopter. They shot him in the head, body bagged him, loaded it into the chopper and changed his name to the HVT's name. Bam, bagged us an HVT. The whole flight back to base the pilot of the Blackhawk was teasing me about being shot down, ignoring the fact that I saved his ass. Such is life of Little Bird Pilot. If any one is interested, I have a story about being the pilot of a HIND too. We did so good that mission that the leader of the group decided we were having too much fun and complained at us for killing everything that our FAC cleared us to kill. He threatened to no longer include CAS if it happens again.