Fifteen Minutes to Kill

Diyala Province, Iraq, July 2006. “Attack 34, we have troops in contact and need your help. Are you available? Over.” Attack 34 was Lt. Bryan Fitzpatrick, twenty-four-year-old pilot of an AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter. “Troops in contact” meant boots on the ground were in trouble, a mission of the highest priority. And yes, he was available, even though it meant dropping out of a formation escorting a general and racing across the desert and into the fight. War was seldom fought by the book in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the spirit of classic helicopter memoirs such as Chickenhawk and Low Level Hell, Apache Storm is a raw, visceral account of a helicopter pilot’s journey through the startling reality of modern warfare. For two and a half years, from his first deployment in Iraq to his final flight in Afghanistan, Fitzpatrick hunted and destroyed Al Qaeda and the Taliban from the cockpit of an AH-64D Apache Longbow, a multimillion-dollar war machine equipped with an array of Hellfire missiles and an M230 chain gun that fired 600 rounds per minute.

Fitzpatrick fought during the deadly civil war in Iraq, was at the forefront of the search for Bowe Bergdahl after the controversial soldier disappeared in Afghanistan in 2009, and led a company during the surge against the Taliban. He hunted snipers, helped protect and sometimes rescue downed airmen, escorted convoys, and tracked crashed drones. During one operation he flew into an epic scene straight out of a Hollywood war movie as eight helicopters, two fighter jets, dozens of artillery rounds, and thousands of small-arms rounds filled the sky above an area the size of Central Park.

Fitzpatrick has an eye for how war looked from an Apache cockpit and an ear for how pilots talked in the heat of battle. His narrative makes helicopter fighting feel like close-quarter combat, which it all too often was. More than just a high-adrenaline war memoir of thirty months of flying, killing, winning, and losing in Iraq and Afghanistan, Apache Storm is a soldier’s personal reckoning with the violence he witnessed and the violence he caused.