Hey guys, just thought I'd pass along a funny, but true, story for all of you rotor-heads. I was out training at Camp MacKall doing a FTX which culminated with a platoon sized raid just west of the airfield. Well, we use star clusters to signal shift and lift fire. The platoon leader will pop off his star cluster to signal the machine gun teams to shift their fire off the objective. Once the fire is shifted, the squad leader over there sends up his star cluster to verify that the fire was shifted. Well, there was some confusion and the PL initated the assault about 5 minutes early and when he sent up his star cluster to signal the MG team, he sent it up into the path of an AH-64A Apache that was circling the airfield. As if dodging one flare wasn't enough, the pilot nearly ate the second as the weapons squad leader verified the shift fire with his own flare.
We caught hell for that from our TACs. I guess that's about all I can say about the incident.