 They come bowing by us in a fast boat and they had the audacity to run in between the two ships and give everybody the one-finger salute, you know, if they were doing 40 knots. The helicopters lifted off, but our fast boats went in. They're about to be the most surprised blood runners in the world. The primary goal of Hitron is stopping the flow of cocaine into the United States. Vice Admiral Ray Ryuta. During the stand-up of Hitron, I was a rear admiral. I was Chief of Operations for the U.S. Coast Guard. My role was the overall program manager for Chief of Operations. When we did the experiments and the training and developed the concept, in the 80s, we used to send our unarmed helicopters over their risings to prevent smuggling. Those of us that had time in Vietnam realized how dangerous that really was. You never knew whether they were going to pop up with a stinger missile or a machine gun and take one of our unarmed helicopters down. When they were out of sight, bring down a helo, the big cutter doesn't show up to catch you. Standing up at Hitron, some of the biggest challenges we faced was trying to overcome the reluctance that we could actually fire on gold fast boats. And it would be non-proliferation. Gunners had to be very, very accurate. We leaned on the Marine Corps to help us. We went to camp for June, I believe it was, where we trained. And we had to bring people from the Justice Department out and show them that we could fire into the ships without eating the hot. The most memorable mission for Hitron for me was, of course, the first one. Everybody was sitting around, well, will this work? Will this work? Most of us were convinced it would, but until you actually see it happen, you don't really know. And it was executed flawlessly. We break the seal of one of the ships. We knew we had something that was going to make a difference. The crews were ecstatic. I mean, you could see it in your face. They went down into the ship shore. Your crews were over the moon. The ship's crews were ecstatic. They knew they were able to do something as opposed to just watching them go faster and blow by them. In fact, we were able to stand up Hitron so quickly, with so little bureaucracy, speaks volumes to the types of things that we could do. It started out as something just to take down Gunsmother. Now, armed helicopters are a matter of course for this thing. It's an accepted practice that is trading into our missions at home now. This is probably one of the biggest changes that's happened. To be a part of the initial stand-up of Hitron is really satisfying. We're able to get together, see how far it's come since those days, to make some field with thrust with pride into what we were able to do with so little.