This Never Happened - Air Force PJ Rescues Russians with Brandon Daugherty | Mike Drop Clip #182

About this video

Ritland’s guest recounts a classified recovery mission in the mountains of Afghanistan where a six-man team was sent to locate and retrieve the bodies of Russian contractors whose MI-8 helicopter had crashed at 12,000 feet. The mission involved dangerous free-climbing, encountering frozen and burned remains in disturbing conditions, and a catastrophic failure when a body being hoisted became tangled in the helicopter’s wire cutter and fell. Despite the difficult recovery operation, the team received no recognition and were told the mission would remain quiet.

Key takeaways

• The guest describes a bizarre recovery mission involving Russian contractors whose helicopter crashed in Afghan mountains, undertaken at the request of the State Department with little explanation
• The team faced extreme challenges including high-altitude operations, free-climbing steep terrain with heavy gear, and gruesome recovery conditions in freezing temperatures
• A hoist malfunction caused one body to spin out of control and become entangled in the helicopter, falling 200 feet, forcing the team to improvise a new extraction plan over several additional hours

Episode details: published April 9, 2024 · 72.7K views · 11:19 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Stories told by Mike Ritland’s podcast guests are the guests’ own accounts, attributed to them — not independently verified. Commentary is Ritland’s, presented as his analysis.

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