A video was posted recently by WikiLeaks. It’s gun camera footage from an Apache engagement on 12 July 2007.

The video begins with ground forces requesting support from Crazyhorse, the Apache flight. They mention a group of people, one of whom has a weapon.

It’s hard to see, because we’re looking at a low-resolution version of a low-resolution video looking at a distant target, but the guy does appear to be carrying an AK. It looks like the Apache’s found the group that the ground forces were talking about.

After identifying further members of the group, the Apaches requested and received permission to engage. Only after receiving permission did they first fire weapons. Once they had downed all targets, they stopped firing. They did not fire on the wounded. When a van arrived to evacuate the targets, they requested and received permission to engage. Only then did they disable the van.

Wikileaks is consistently referring to these men as ‘civilians.’ They may not have been uniformed military personnel, but they were definitely combatants; they may not have been currently actively engaged in a firefight, but there had been small arms fire from that area since before dawn that day. The mission of both the Apache element and the ground forces was to eliminate any insurgents and/or weapons caches from the area.

After the fact, it was discovered that two of the people killed were in fact Reuters employees, and that in the van were two children injured by the attack. Coverage of the video has focused on this. It’s tragic, but the newspeople were in the company of armed insurgents and appeared to be part of that group. As for the children, they were simply not detectable from the Apache.

It’s worth looking at the official report. (Local Cache) The results findings begin on page 11 of the PDF. The report contains necessary background information, such as the fact that the infantry less than 200 yards away had been receiving small-arms fire all morning.

There are plenty of people out there calling this a war crime, murder, and worse. That is simply not the case. There are people out there who recognize this (1, 2, 3), but they are too few.

War is a terrible thing, but this was not a crime. This was professional pilots reacting appropriately to a hostile situation. I feel sympathy for the noncombatants in the group, but they brought it upon themselves.

I think I have a legitimate claim to being busy.

Due to the extreme urgency of the program, everything is compressed. We are told to expect 11 to 12 hour working days containing five hours of flight on a daily basis, plus homework. It’s been hard to take that completely seriously; the first three days of introduction and acclimatization took a pretty regular eight hours apiece. Today we even got let out early. As we left, the instructor had a reminder: we had a takehome test due tomorrow.

Six hours of work later, that test is complete.

One of the basic pieces of equipment of an army pilot is a dash ten. Formally known as TM 1-1520-237-10, Operator’s Manual for UH-60 Helicopter, it’s a three inch binder full of procedures, warnings, limitations, charts, and other information necessary for the correct operation of this machine. The test was simple: answer 50 fill-in-the blank type questions, most of which we’d memorized the answers to long ago in flight school. The trick is that you only get credit if you can reference the correct page and paragraph number to back up your answer.

It’s one thing to know that with asymmetric fuel loading, lateral control margin will be reduced in the direction opposite the heavy side. That’s simple logic, once you get past the jargon. However, it is quite a different matter to be able to find that the manual says so on page 9-25, paragraph 9.35. The difference can easily turn into fifteen minutes of searching.

Remember, this manual is three inches thick.

The test honestly wasn’t all that bad. If I hadn’t been so scatterbrained, I could have spread it over three nights instead of concentrating it all tonight. Still, they’ve shown us the hourly schedule for the rest of the time, once this introductory week is over, and it’s very easy to see myself spending twelve hours daily getting everything done.

Despite that, though, I’m having more fun than I have since I got to Korea. Having just spent years in flight school gaining the somewhat exotic skill of flying a helicopter, it was hard to stay enthusiastic when my working days here were a search for army-related things to fill the time with. Somehow, when that idleness was noticed and I got assigned a bunch of additional duties I’m only tangentially qualified for, the new work wasn’t much fun either.

Now, finally, I’m getting back into the swing of being a pilot. It’s mission planning, weather contingency planning, and execution: flight. Even flight in the sims under the tutelage of a good instructor is enough to make me remember that this job was worth joining the Army to do.

It also doesn’t hurt that, when compared with peers of similar experience, I’m not bad at this at all.

Pros of switching: I get guns. I get a more interesting mission.

Cons of switching: I class up a month later–enough to be annoying; not enough to take the JLPT. I get fewer and worse duty stations. Higher risk. Lower toque. (Torque is all-important for helicopter flight.)

At this point, I feel like I might as well flip a coin. It all seems implausibly evenly balanced. What do you think?

(poll closes at noon tomorrow so I can deliver my answer on time)