A10 Warthog Turns Taliban into Pink Mist Combat Footage (Graphic) | Royal Marine Reacts

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]What's up everybody? And today we're checking out some more A10 Warthog footage. Listen, I could watch this stuff all day. The A10 is a magical artistic expression of the American military-industrial complex.

[00:00:16]This is by Battle Log. Um we watched one of their videos a week or two ago and um they're a relatively small up andcoming channel and they're really really good.

[00:00:25]Like I I was really impressed with the last video and so I figured we'd watch another one, show them some support.

[00:00:30]They're at 12.1,000 subscribers. Let's bump them numbers up. Let's get them that uh YouTube plaque because they definitely deserve it with the quality of content they've been putting out and I'm quite impressed. This one is particularly called A10 Warhog turns Taliban into Pink Mist Combat Footage.

[00:00:45]Link down below to the original video.

[00:00:48]Make sure you go to the original video and go and show them some support.

[00:00:51]Before we get started though, as always, check out Chug. 10% off link down below for the best drinking vessel in the world. It's getting hot. Summer's almost here.

[00:01:01]Keep your beer cold for a long time. Get your initial on it so you look cool in front of your mates. You can protect your wood by taking the insert out and putting it in your dishwasher so that this nice, sustainable, beautiful wood is being looked after.

[00:01:17]10% off. Link down below. Chips to America. Also, next weekend I'm going to be at the British Wild Food Festival selling morale, so be there. Also, I'm going to try and make this quick. Um, I made a vlog of me at the Bushcraft Show last weekend, and YouTube hates it when I do anything outside of these reaction videos. So, please go and support it.

[00:01:41]Now, I was looking at the stats because I really want to do more vlogs and that particular vlog the amount of so there's like a little statistic of how many people stay and watch the video after 30 seconds of starting the video basically to show how engaged people are. And that's the highest engagement on a video I've had in the past year. So, even though it didn't get many views, the people who clicked on that video actually stayed and watched it, which goes to show that uh people do enjoy them vlogs when they watch them. And so, maybe it's just me not advertising it well enough. At the end of this video, you will see it. It's a vlog. It says Bushcraft Show 2026 um on the thumbnail.

[00:02:21]It's got a big picture of me Ed. And go watch it. It's a really good vlog. Other than that, let's shut up. Let's pull this up. Let's see what's going on.

[00:02:28]Are we going to get the burp? Yep. There we go. April 23rd, 2011, 4:00 in the morning. Two American pair of rescue men are pinned in a ravine alone in the dark. A burning helicopter behind them.

[00:02:42]>> Holy [ __ ] >> 80 Taliban fighters closing through the rocks. The rescue birds have already been driven off. They have minutes.

[00:02:51]20,000 ft above them. One A-10 pilot hears the emergency call. What he is about to do over the next 6 hours will dodge nine surfaceto-air missiles, save more than 30 American lives, and become one of the most decorated single missions of the entire Afghan war.

[00:03:08]>> What?

[00:03:09]>> This is one of three nights the Taliban learned what pink mist really means.

[00:03:15]>> Oh my god. Battle log.

[00:03:22]the machine to anyone who fought in Afghanistan, Coringal Valley, Helmond, Kandahar, anywhere the radio started screaming troops in contact, they will all tell you the same thing about the A10 Warthog.

[00:03:36]>> I haven't seen an A10 in person. I wonder where I could see one. If people have seen an A-10 in like a M cuz they'll have them in museums and stuff in the US, let me know cuz when I go back over to the US at some point, which will happen, um I'd love to go see some.

[00:03:49]It's sound because it's a low vibrating thunder that you feel in your chest before your ears even register it. The A10's seven barrel cannon. The General Electric GA U8 division.

[00:04:01]>> Is that true? Would you feel it in your chest before you hear it? I don't know.

[00:04:06]Is the soundwave? No, it's not a sound wave. The impact wave. Is that faster than the soundwave?

[00:04:14]You have to let me know. I don't know.

[00:04:15]Is it?

[00:04:17]does not fire individual shots. It fires 65 rounds every single second. So fast the human ear cannot pick out the gaps between them. Troops on the ground gave it a name. They called it the BERT. For US infantry, that sound meant the cavalry had arrived. For Taliban fighters caught in the open, it meant they were already dead. They just didn't know it yet because the rounds were already on the way before the noise even reached them. That's not a metaphor. The A10's 30 mm shells leave the barrel at over 1,000 m/ second, more than three times the speed of sound.

[00:04:54]>> The bullets arrive at the target before the noise of the gun does. By the time anyone on the receiving end hears the sound, the impacts are already happening. They cannot duck and run. The first >> What a sight it would be to like be in combat and see an A10 come and help protect you. Like there's only few people that have experienced that. And I'm sure it is something that sticks with you forever, isn't it?

[00:05:19]>> Warning is also the last. And here is the part that makes it worse. Each of those 30 mm rounds is over 11 in long, weighs more than a pound and a half, and is built around a depleted uranium core that is 68% denser than lead.

[00:05:35]>> Than lead.

[00:05:36]>> It doesn't >> denser than lead. He's probably got like a AI voice over for this and wrote the script. Uh, denser than lead, not lead.

[00:05:47]>> Just punch a hole. It ignites on contact with the air, spraying anything inside the target with burning metal at temperatures over 3,000° F. The Taliban were about to find out exactly what that meant.

[00:06:04]>> Okay. Is this a story?

[00:06:06]>> April 23rd, 2011. Story time. Sit back, guys. I love a bit of a story.

[00:06:11]>> Captain Mike Vego Hilkert and his wingman. Captain Rustin Trombone Trainham are overwatch on a se >> trombone. There's no way.

[00:06:19]>> Ground patrol. When the guard call comes in, they form up with Lieutenant Colonel David Seymour Howorth into a flight using the call sign Sandy One, a designation used since the Vietnam War for aircraft running close air support on combat search and rescue missions.

[00:06:35]They push to Capisa at full throttle.

[00:06:37]What they find when they arrive is chaos. A burning Kyoa wreckage. Two pair of rescue men pinned in a shallow ravine. An exhausted Apache running dry.

[00:06:47]Pedo 84 limping back to Bram with a wounded flight engineer. Pedo 83 forced to cut its hoist cable and pull off to refuel and spread across two ridge lines surrounding the crash site. Over 80 Taliban fighters closing the noose.

[00:07:02]Kilbert takes over the airspace. For the next six hours, he runs what is effectively an entire combined arms operation by himself.

[00:07:10]>> Damn.

[00:07:10]>> He coordinates 21 different aircraft, A10s, Apaches, Pave Hawks.

[00:07:16]>> He coordinates 21 different aircraft and telling them what to do. You've got to be so switched on to do something like that, haven't you? Like all them moving parts. You've really got to be aware of everything going on. Iowa's observation planes and aerial refueling tankers across 37 separate radio frequencies. He sets up airspace restrictions on the fly with the air support operation center, the combined air operation center, and the joint personnel recovery center. He fires unguided rockets into the Taliban positions to give Klein and SA breathing room. When heavy machine gun fire pins them down again at 50 meters, the width of a basketball court, Ikurt locates the threat while simultaneously hooking up to a refueling tanker and marks the target for his wingmen to shred the position with 30 mm cannon fire in less than two seconds. Then the situation gets worse. A 32 soldier Army quick reaction force inserts at two landing zones to push the threat back. They walk into a second ambush. One soldier is killed. Several are wounded. The Pavehawks coming back to evacuate the wounded take fire from every direction.

[00:08:25]So Hooker does something the official citation actually documents. He repeatedly flies his A10 between the helicopters and the enemy gun positions using his own 25,000lb aircraft as a physical shield to draw rounds away from the rescue birds over.

[00:08:38]>> And you can do that because the A10's got that special cockpit, hasn't it? So like here's the pilot right here. All the way around here is like this bulletproof metal shell underneath him to prevent any rounds from hitting it.

[00:08:53]And that's why it's able to get so close to the ground. Well, it's one of the reasons that they're comfortable getting so close so slow to the ground because they've got that protection. It's really impress. It's such an impressive bit of kit. I do wonder are they going to replace it with something similar? Are they going to do that or they just going to get rid of it? Apparently, it's staying until like what 2030 now, but are they going to replace it? because it's obviously got a use case if it's being used out in Iran right now.

[00:09:16]>> The course of that single fight, Hilker visually observes nine separate surfaceto-air missiles fired at his own jet. Nine. He flies through every one of them. By sunrise, four fresh day shift A-10s relieve the exhausted night flight and Pedro 84 returns to perform a dramatic 180 foot hoist far higher than usual to recover Klein, SA, and the dead Kyoa pilot. Klein and Senna insist on sending the body up first. The final tally from that one mission, two landing zones secured, two pair rescue men rescued, one fallen pilot recovered, 32 CRF soldiers evacuated, more than 30 American lives saved. The sing >> That's really impressive.

[00:10:01]That is very very impressive. I get the thing is though like these types of stories they're actually even though how you're listening to this it's remarkable isn't it like it is legitimately remarkable that they were able to achieve this but it is common place like this is this is something that happens all the time with the American military-industrial complex like they are so effective the American military are so effective at doing what they do that these type of stories are quite commonplace don't get me wrong this is still magnificent and there's a lot stories that go unsaid.

[00:10:35]So many stories of insane, you know, military feats that just disappear in time and you'll never hear him again.

[00:10:45]>> 6-hour fight produced four silver stars, three distinguished flying crosses with Valor and Hilkurt's own DFC. Wow.

[00:10:52]>> Which he did not receive until 10 years later in 2021. When asked about the medal ceremony, Hilkurt's answer was short. He said several people lost their lives that day. It wasn't all high fives when they got home. We flew back to Kandahar in silence. Yeah, >> that is what an A-10 pilot sounds like.

[00:11:11]And Vego is not even the most experienced one in this video.

[00:11:17]>> KL Marx and Jaguar.

[00:11:19]>> Lieutenant Colonel John Carl Marx. By the time he retired from the Air Force in August 2024, he had logged more than 7,500 hours behind the stick of an A10.

[00:11:31]358 of those hours were combat sorties across 13 separate combat deployments.

[00:11:38]>> He destroyed 23 Iraqi tanks in a single day during Desert Storm in 199 with Captain Eric Fish Salammanson, a record that has never been broken. He is by every measurement the most experienced A-10 pilot who has ever lived.

[00:11:54]>> What an absolute legend. Wow.

[00:11:57]>> When Carl Marx tells you a mission was difficult, you listen. In 2014, Markx was deployed to Bagram with the 303rd Fighter Squadron. The same squadron Vego Hilker flew in. One night, his radio came alive with a call from a coalition special forces team operating deep in Afghanistan's Kunar Valley, the deadliest pocket of the entire Afghan war. The same valley that swallowed Operation Red Wings in 2005. The team's call sign was Jaguar 20. They were a small element of US and Afghan operators conducting a direct action mission against a Taliban network. Something had gone badly wrong. Jack, >> it's insane. Like imagine being imagine being one of the lads boots on the ground and [ __ ] shit's hit the fan, right? Like it's inevitable. Things have gone bad. You've got to call in support.

[00:12:52]You get on comms and they're like, "Yeah, we're sending an A10 over."

[00:12:56]Can you imagine telling the lads, "Don't worry, lads, an A-10's coming." Could you imagine the relief that these lads probably feel when your boots on the ground, shit's hit the fan and comms comes across and says, "An A10's on its way. It's on route."

[00:13:16]>> Could you imagine the people's the lad's faces?

[00:13:19]>> 20 was now nearly surrounded. Taliban fighters were closing from three sides through dense terrain that made aerial spotting almost impossible. The team did not have enough ammunition to fight their way out. Marks rolled in. What followed was, in his own later words, the moment when he had to use every skill I ever learned as an A10 pilot.

[00:13:41]>> The airspace over the valley turned into a nightmare. F16s arrived. Then AC130 gunships.

[00:13:49]>> Then Apache attack helicopters.

[00:13:52]>> Basically the allstar lineup. Is it?

[00:13:55]That's like the allstar. That's like getting like all of the goats from every single sport around the world and putting them in one place at one time.

[00:14:03]>> Then little bird helicopters carrying the quick reaction force.

[00:14:06]>> The only thing is missing F22 on the same narrow slice of sky. All of them needing targets. All of them at risk of hitting friendlies or each other in terrain so steep that line of sight kept breaking down.

[00:14:18]>> Yeah.

[00:14:19]>> Markx ended up running three jobs at once. He was the pilot flying his own gun runs at 250 knots through valley walls that funneled the geometry into a killbox. He was the airborne air traffic controller, stacking and deconlicting every single platform in the valley. And he was the joint terminal attack controller, clearing every weapon release onto enemy positions that were sometimes only yards from Jaguar 20's actual location.

[00:14:46]>> Holy [ __ ] he's spinning so many plates in in one go here.

[00:14:51]Like it's think about how good you've got to be at multitasking but also having that like shortterm that shortterm ability to hold on to vast amount of information. It's like RAM, isn't it? Like you're going to be able to hold on to a vast amount of things going on at the same time.

[00:15:13]Obviously it's within short term because it's on one mission. It's not like over months you've got to remember these things, but like you're remembering so many different things happening at once and you've got to move all these moving pieces. Insane skills.

[00:15:27]>> His wingman later said he spent the entire mission just trying to hang on because he had no idea how Markx was tracking everything simultaneously. Wow.

[00:15:36]>> Every special forces operator on the ground made it out. Every Afghan operator made it out. The only casualties were minor. Markx received the distinguished flying cross for that night. He has said publicly that the Jaguar 20 mission is tied with destroying 23 tanks in one day during Desert Storm as the highlight of his entire career. When he retired three decades later and was asked what he was proudest of, he didn't talk about the tanks. He said this, "I'm very proud.

[00:16:04]Our biggest cheerleaders are the guys on the ground who say this thing saved my life. That's the proudest part of flying the airplane." That >> Yeah. like this these lads who are sat at home right now chilling with their families because one of these individuals in an A10's come and basically dug them out of the [ __ ] That's the truth. Like there's there's lads alive right now that are alive because of this bit of kit.

[00:16:30]And you don't think about that sometimes, do you think about the pilots and the skills and all this other stuff, but if it wasn't for this A10, there would be lives not around right now.

[00:16:39]There would be kids not born. Do you know what I mean?

[00:16:43]>> That is the A10 community in one sentence. The most brutally effective close air support pilots on the planet quietly telling you the other guy's story is more impressive than their own.

[00:16:55]But there is one more pilot and what he did made even Marks shake his head.

[00:17:01]>> Humble.

[00:17:03]August 2019, an urban area in Afghanistan that the Air Force has not publicly named. A coalition unit is in a fight that is bad even by Afghan war standards. The enemy is inside the buildings. Friendly forces are inside the same buildings.

[00:17:18]>> Oh my gosh.

[00:17:19]>> Are in the airspace. So are drones. Two close air support.

[00:17:24]>> So this was in relatively recent. You're talking seven years ago. Specialists on the ground are calling targets simultaneously when different radio frequencies, sometimes meters apart on the map. There is grenade fire being exchanged through windows. The geometry is impossible. The pilot who flew into that mess was Major Kyometric Aison of the 59th Test and Evaluation Squadron.

[00:17:48]His wingman was Captain Aaron Fulham.

[00:17:51]For the next several hours, Ason did something that sounds like fiction. He simultaneously ran the two ground specialists on separate frequencies. He coordinated Apache helicopter attacks across three separate enemy assaults, served as airborne air traffic control for the entire engagement, and he put 30 mm rounds within 5 m of friendly troops.

[00:18:15]>> Holy [ __ ] >> Within 5 m. Imagine being on the ground and 5 m away, you're getting a burst from an A10.

[00:18:27]I couldn't even imagine. 5 meters away.

[00:18:30]That's like me to the door right there.

[00:18:32]An A10 hitting the ground right next to you. Holy [ __ ] That's blown my mind. That has >> of a small living room. Think about what that means physically for a moment.

[00:18:45]>> Yeah.

[00:18:46]>> The A10's cannon is accurate to within a 40ft circle from a kilometer away.

[00:18:51]Atkinson was placing rounds inside a circle smaller than that with friendly Americans on one side of the line and Taliban fighters on the other. Both moving at each other in tight urban terrain.

[00:19:04]>> That's like that's like sniping with an A-10.

[00:19:08]>> If it's accurate to 40 m and he's shooting within 5 m of friendlies, that's like being that's like being so accurate that you're basically a sniper in an A-10.

[00:19:17]>> Friendly fire. Miss Long. Enemy lives.

[00:19:21]miss at all. Somebody's son does not come home.

[00:19:24]>> Yeah, >> he didn't miss. Akinson disrupted a surprise grenade attack. He stopped with the official press release called an enemy onslaught.

[00:19:31]>> Wow.

[00:19:32]>> He coordinated three separate Apache attack runs in three different sectors of the same engagement, broke contact with the enemy force and saved every coalition soldier in that fight. He received the distinguished flying cross with combat device for that mission.

[00:19:48]about it afterward. He said something that should be carved into a wall somewhere. You don't have to go far in the A10 community to find someone with a similar story. Many of which have received no recognition.

[00:19:59]>> Exactly. Just like I was saying a minute ago, there's so many stories that have just faded in time. Like these are the ones that have been recognized. And I guarantee there's four or five to every one that's recognized. You know what happened to the audio?

[00:20:16]Did I press I must have pressed something.

[00:20:18]>> Hog. The mission that earned you the Air Force's seventh highest decoration in any other airframe is just a Tuesday in an A-10. By 2018, the Wartthog was back in Kandahar fulltime. 12 A-10s from the 303rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron landed at Kandahar airfield on January 19th, 2018. The first >> Wait, that last mission was 2019, right?

[00:20:43]before then.

[00:20:46]I could have sworn they said it was 2019.

[00:20:50]Maybe I'm wrong.

[00:20:52]>> Tins and Afghanistan in 3 years. 5 days later on January 24th, an A10 caught a Taliban truck fleeing the scene of an attack in Kandahar province. The footage released by the Department of Defense itself shows the truck in a flat desert run kicking up a long dust trail. The cannon opens up for less than two seconds. The dust trail simply ends.

[00:21:16]There is no truck. There are no fighters. There is a smear of dark debris and an expanding cloud where there used to be a moving target.

[00:21:25]>> That is what pink mist looks like at supersonic speed.

[00:21:28]>> Wow.

[00:21:28]>> The footage exists. The Department of Defense released it themselves.

[00:21:33]>> And it is the reason Taliban radio chatter from that period was full of pleas to break contact and disappear.

[00:21:40]One night that same year, Carl Marx and his wingman Brad Roodie Jones tracked down an entire unit of elite Taliban Red Unit fighters at night, identified the whole force in complete darkness, and eliminated every single one in a single coordinated sequence.

[00:21:57]>> That's terrifying. That is absolutely terrifying. These guys were just vibing.

[00:22:02]They were just chilling. They thought they were the SF of Taliban. And then A10 just wakes everyone up.

[00:22:10]says, "Hey, this your time 810s are here."

[00:22:14]>> There were no survivors. The red unit element ceased to exist as an organization that night. This is what the Wartthog was always built to do.

[00:22:24]>> Jesus.

[00:22:26]>> Here is the part of the A-10 story almost no civilian knows. While the troops on the ground worship the airplane, the United States Air Force has spent most of its career trying to retire it. Multiple times since the early 1990s, they officially proposed sending the entire fleet to the boneyard. Multiple times, Congress stepped in and stopped it. In 2014, in the middle of the air war against ISIS, they tried again. By 2015, they had quietly given up. In 2023, Congress finally allowed a limited retirement to begin. And yet, the airplane refused to leave in late 2024.

[00:23:04]>> Yeah, now we're seeing it in Iran getting the rounds down again. USA 10s were still conducting combat strikes in Syria, taking out vehicles, mortars, and a T64 tank during the chaos surrounding the fall of the Assad regime.

[00:23:18]>> Wow.

[00:23:18]>> In March 2025, A10s redeployed to the Middle East as part of operations against Houthi forces in Yemen. The reason it keeps coming back is simple.

[00:23:28]>> It does something nothing else does. The >> It's a great bit of kit. That's the truth of it. It's a really effective bit of kit. And there isn't another vehic another aircraft that fits that bill it that has them same aspects that this does. And that's why I presume they're going to replace it with something similar.

[00:23:46]>> 35 cannot loiter for hours overhead at low altitude.

[00:23:49]>> No, >> it cannot soak up small arms fire and limp home. Its 25 mm cannon carries 182 rounds, about 3 seconds of firing time total. The A10's drum holds 1,174 rounds. When American or coalition troops are pinned down in a riverbed and the Taliban is on the high ground above them, what they want is not a stealth aircraft 30,000 ft above. What they want is the ugly twintailed monster cruising at 300 m an hour 200 ft above the deck.

[00:24:23]>> Yeah, fair exactly where the JTAC says to put them.

[00:24:26]>> Yeah, that makes sense. Terminal attack control.

[00:24:28]>> I mean, if I was boost on the ground, I was in trouble.

[00:24:32]And it was in that it was in a type of scenario where these enemies are are are getting on on you and you you have to be accurate. Don't get me wrong, an F-35 can be very very accurate.

[00:24:43]But if you can have an A10 come and rescue you, you're probably going to say yes to it, aren't you?

[00:24:48]>> Named Staff Sergeant Joseph Howser based out of forward operating base Scazny said it best. If you were to say there's a grunt in the sky, it'd be a hog pilot.

[00:24:58]That is the legacy. Every patrol that came home because Carl Marx made one more pass. Every pair rescueman who lived because Vego Hilker was on station. Every soldier who heard the sound and knew in that exact second that they were going to live to see mourning.

[00:25:15]That is the most intense Taliban combat footage ever recorded. And that is why every time a grunt on the ground hears the sound coming down the valley, he knows exactly who just showed up for him.

[00:25:28]>> Yeah. Like the video, subscribe to the channel.

[00:25:31]>> Absolutely fantastic video again by Battle Log. Again, I will leave a link down below to the OG video. Really, really impressive video that I like storytelling. You know me, I like hearing them stories. So, having three kind of mini stories throughout this whole thing. I'm really impressed with this channel Battlelog. So, head over there. There'll be a link down below to the original video. Head over to Battle.

[00:25:52]Give them a subscribe because they definitely deserve it. Check out Chug 10% off link down below and check out morale. I'll be at the uh British Wild Food Festival next weekend. And then you'll see a suggested video. Go check out my vlog, the um Bushcraft Show vlog.

[00:26:06]You'll see it like somewhere around here maybe or down here. I don't know. Maybe here. It's got my head on it. It says Bushcraft Show 2026. Check it out. Other than that, I love you all. Have a wonderful day. Goodbye.