Making a Night Stalker with Army Veteran David Burnett

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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’t 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

David Burnett- Early Days in the Army

David was  a struggling  college student studying  aviation technology in Denver  and wanted to  pursue something  in the rotary wing  industry. He joined the  army in the hopes of flying  helicopters. David wasn’t actually  a pilot but did end up working on maintaining  the CH-47 Fox model Chinook. He then transitioned  over into the special operations community and was  a crew chief on the MH-47 Gulf Chinook with 160th shore.  David finished off his military career was with 160th and that’s  primarily what his new book is about.

How The Book Came To Be

While David was transitioning out of the service ran into some issues and ended up going to the VA to mitigate the issues through counseling.  The 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.

“And at that point, you  know, everything was chronologically laid out and I said,  well this is kind of taking on the shape of a book, so I’ll  just, I’ll just write a book. So that was in 2014.  Fast forward to the end of  2017, I finished the book December 2017 and then submitted it to the Pentagon in January 2018.  And 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.” – David Burnett

Raising Funds

The majority of the funds were raised from David’s instagram audience and he was able to track where the backers come from on instagram.  David had built his instagram following from just around 500 to a thousand followers to 10,000 followers after the second launch.

“And that was a main contributing  factor – building your audience around an idea  before you actually launch the campaign. I would fathom that was largely contributed to the success of the second go around.” – David Burnett

Author and Inventor

When David got out of the army he started thinking about a time on the flight line from Afghanistan.  They would have guys come on board and attempt to hang their gear weapons system from the seat rails in the Chinook.  Of course that works under the flight line floodlights,  but 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.

“So  I said  I’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  you need to hang from it.  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.  And so that was the concept, the idea and the solution to this problem.” – David Burnett

To hear more from David Burnett and his journey as an author and an inventor, download this episode.

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David Burnett links:

LinkedIn

TAC CLAMP

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Sponsor

Bench Bookkeeping is this episodes sponsor.  Being an entrepreneur, bookkeeping is a necessary evil.  To put your bookkeeping needs on autopilot check out Bench Bookkeeping and get one month free at veteranonthemove.com/bench.

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