When Sarson looked out of the cockpit, he saw two members of the ground crew watching the aircraft they had so tenderly cared for prepare to lift off. For the first time in his life the Guardsman wished that he was out there on the sideline instead of sitting in an attack helicopter preparing to depart on a mission. After drawing in a deep breath Sarson gave his pilot the go ahead. “Okay, Keith, let’s do it.”

Slowly, Peters brought the helicopter off the ground a few feet and began to build forward speed. A lot of effort had been expended hiding this aircraft and its lone sister ship. After the Air Force attack both surviving Guard AH-64s had been hidden away in hangars. When it came time to take them to where the State Adjutant General expected the fight to take place, the pair of Apaches were loaded up on flatbed trucks, covered with tarps, and moved by road. Everything was done to protect them until they were needed.

From the small airfield the two Apaches would follow Little Canyon Creek south about fifty kilometers until they reached Glenns Ferry. There they would be dispatched to whatever part of the thin Guard line needed to be plugged. Sarson compared their mission to throwing a sponge below decks on the Titanic to sop up the water rushing in. Peters, an easygoing copier repairman who usually laughed even when Sarson’s jokes were pathetic, could not find it in himself to muster a chuckle in response to his comrade’s attempt at graveyard humor. Besides the ground crew, Peters was leaving his wife of eight years and their two children behind.

Two hundred kilometers south of Glenns Ferry aboard an E-3A Sentinel cruising at thirty thousand feet, a radar operator picked up Sarson’s and Peters’s Apache almost as soon as it left the ground. For a moment he watched the unknown contact as it snaked its way south through the canyon. Once the radar operator was convinced that he had a valid target, he initiated the alert. All pertinent data concerning the Guard Apache and its consort was passed on to the 4th Armored Division via a downlink from the E-3A. Within the 4th Armored Division word was passed to units scattered throughout the division, alerting them to the new threat. Out on the ground, air defense artillery teams armed with missiles and small caliber rapid fire cannons prepared to engage.