A Disappearing Act

Look carefully and spot the difference between Photos 1 and 2.  Have you spotted it? Yes, insurgents successfully take out one of our helicopters with a red-smoke trailing missile.
OK, not really.  That was the smoke flare to help guide the helicopters in.  But we did lose one of the helicopters like this, a Russian Mi-8, to mechanical difficulties.  Not the one I was in, though.  We flew around in circles for 20 minutes waiting for the smaller escort helicopters to go down and pick up the passengers before we were able to proceed to the next district.  It did mean that I got to ride one of the escorts back to Kabul - photos from that later.