Making a Night Stalker with Army Veteran David Burnett

Published: Feb. 4, 2019, 7 a.m.

b"David Burnett was born and raised in Parker, Colorado. After a few semesters of college he decided it wasn't for him and he enlisted in the Army in 2008. He was stationed with 563rd ASB as a 15U (Chinook Helicopter repairer). After realizing his job in the regular Army wasn\\u2019t as fulfilling as he had hoped, he applied for 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment SOAR. Making it through the unit's five week selection process he began his journey as a Special Operations crew chief. He went through countless years of training and deployed with the unit five times before deciding he wasn't going to reenlist. David currently has written and published a best selling book about his time in Special Operations titled Making a Night Stalker. He also founded a company, Tac-Clamp, which is based on a quick reaction clamp he invented and patented to be used to aid soldiers on the battlefield\\n\\nDavid Burnett- Early Days in the Army\\n\\nDavid was \\xa0a struggling \\xa0college student studying \\xa0aviation technology in Denver \\xa0and wanted to \\xa0pursue something \\xa0in the rotary wing \\xa0industry. He joined the \\xa0army in the hopes of flying \\xa0helicopters. David wasn't actually \\xa0a pilot but did end up working on maintaining \\xa0the CH-47 Fox model Chinook. He then transitioned \\xa0over into the special operations community and was \\xa0a crew chief on the MH-47 Gulf Chinook with 160th shore. \\xa0David finished off his military career was with 160th and that's \\xa0primarily what his new book is about. \\nHow The Book Came To Be\\nWhile David was transitioning out of the service ran into some issues and ended up going to the VA to mitigate the issues through counseling. \\xa0The counselor said to write stuff down, so at the onset this wasn't going to be a book. As he started writing things down his paragraphs turned into chapters and then the chapters manifested into about 30,000 words. \\n\\n\\u201cAnd at that point, you \\xa0know, everything was chronologically laid out and I said, \\xa0well this is kind of taking on the shape of a book, so I'll \\xa0just, I'll just write a book. So that was in 2014.\\xa0 Fast forward to the end of \\xa02017, I finished the book December 2017 and then submitted it to the Pentagon in January 2018. \\xa0And at that point I knew I was going to self publish, so I needed a, I needed funding to cover costs of cover art, formatting, editing and everything that goes into self publishing a book. So I launched a crowdfunding campaign on the kickstarter platform and a failed miserably.\\u201d - David Burnett\\n\\nRaising Funds\\n\\nThe majority of the funds were raised from David\\u2019s instagram audience and he was able to track where the backers come from on instagram. \\xa0David had built his instagram following from just around 500 to a thousand followers to 10,000 followers after the second launch. \\n\\n\\u201cAnd that was a main contributing \\xa0factor - building your audience around an idea \\xa0before you actually launch the campaign. I would fathom that was largely contributed to the success of the second go around.\\u201d \\u2013 David Burnett\\n\\nAuthor and Inventor\\n\\nWhen David got out of the army he started thinking about a time on the flight line from Afghanistan. \\xa0They would have guys come on board and attempt to hang their gear weapons system from the seat rails in the Chinook. \\xa0Of course that works under the flight line floodlights, \\xa0but when they go to land on a target where the inside of the helicopters all blacked out, they would see guys struggling to unhook what they had just hook hooked up to the seat rails.\\n\\n\\u201cSo \\xa0I said \\xa0I'm going to invent something to where you can clamp it on the inside of the Chinook, whether it's vertical or horizontal or where however you want to annotate it and hang whatever \\xa0you need to hang from it.\\xa0 And then have a quick release pull tab that whatever's hanging from it when you pull that tab drops whatever's hanging from it and the user can exit the aircraft.\\xa0 And so that was the concept, the idea and the solution to this problem.\\u201d \\u2013 David Burnett"