Chief Warrant Officer Matt Cole was seething. He did not want to eat. Sitting in the left-side seat of a Black Hawk helicopter on Thanksgiving Day in 2005, he announced he would skip the holiday meal.
Mr. Cole, a pilot in the Sixth Battalion of the 101st Aviation Brigade, had just landed behind another Black Hawk on Forward Operating Base MacKenzie, a forlorn and besieged airstrip near Samarra, Iraq, that militants frequently attacked with mortars and ground-to-ground rockets.
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