That summer, I left Fairchild confident that I could handle anything I might encounter when I was eventually deployed overseas to a war zone. The skills and lessons I had learned in SERE were truly life-changing, and in the coming months, I would credit the course and the instructors there for my ability to maintain my composure during the tight spots I would soon find myself in while flying in combat.
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The final phase of my training before being considered a fully operational pilot would be at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, my second time in Albuquerque. I hadn’t returned since I’d been there for the Aircraft Mishap Investigation Course and the 9/11 attacks.
During this last phase, we would be introduced to the beautiful HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter. Flying the UH-1 Hueys at Mother Rucker was like driving a classic muscle car—all rich history and no modern technological conveniences. Stepping into the Pave Hawk, or the “60” as we called it, was like sliding into the seat of a Ferrari. The multitude of systems, radios, and other gadgets was overwhelming at first glance, but it would all eventually become second nature to us.
Lucky for me, it became apparent early on that I was an excellent multitasker. I could be navigating, running checklists, and flipping switches and still be the only one who caught a faint radio call amid the background noise in our helmets. Many studies have shown that this is an attribute that women tend to possess more than men, and in this male-dominated culture, I’d take any advantage I could get.
The missions we simulated in the Pave Hawks were more complex than anything we had done before, and the gun patterns were exhilarating. We would toss out a glow stick to mark the simulated position of our survivor, identify a tank or something that would serve as our simulated bad guy, and then roll into incredibly fast-paced, tight patterns where we would always have a gun firing on the enemy position. The idea was that, between you and your sister ship, someone always had to be raining hate down on the bad guys who were trying to get to our survivor before we could. The whir of the minigun just outside my door always got my blood pumping. I could barely wait to get back home and start flying actual real-world missions.
In January 2007, I reported back to my unit in New York. At that time, casualties were really starting to mount in Afghanistan, and the Air National Guard had been called up to run medevac in Kandahar, the hottest part of the theater. The New York Guard was heavily populated by tough firefighters and cops who were all ready to serve—and I was finally one of them. Deployment day loomed just two months away; I was thrilled and ready to rumble. Then they told me I’d have to sit this tour out because I was so new. I was devastated.
But then they saw me fly. I suppose I had an advantage over the type of pilot they were used to getting right out of training. I had spent some hard years on active duty, and the challenges I overcame, both personally and professionally, had helped me develop a sense of calm under pressure, a maturity, and a level of composure that most new pilots don’t have.
I was just shy of thirty-one years old and had gotten a little banged up along the way, but I was finally where I belonged. My chain of command all agreed: I was ready for combat. They would take me with them despite my lack of experience.
The day I got my deployment orders, I called home, excited to tell my mom. When she picked up the phone, we chatted for a few minutes about the usual stuff, and then I gave her the news. There was a long silence, but instead of pushing for a response, I just waited.
Finally, she told me that she was both proud and scared.
“I wish David were here to share the news,” she told me quietly. “He’d have been so proud, MJ.”
I nodded, blinking back tears. I had been thinking the same thing, of course, wishing I could just say, “Can you put David on?” Part of me still needed my dad’s guidance, to just have him tell me I was going to be okay, not just good but great. I was about to fly into the mouth of the cat, as the Vietnam-era vets like David would have said. I could have used some wise words from a brave, seasoned veteran before heading off into the unknown.
But my dad was always there with me; I knew he was watching, somewhere up there playing fetch with Jäger. I carried them with me in my heart as I boarded the airplane out of Baltimore that would take me into my first real combat zone. I could hear David’s voice in my head as I took one last look over my shoulder at American soil.
“Knock ’em dead, sweet pea.”
FIVE
When I showed up to my squadron building in New York in April 2007, I was dressed for the first time in a desert tan flight suit, feeling strange not wearing my normal olive green. We threw our bags onto the six-by-six square baggage pallet waiting to be cargo netted and forklifted into the C-130. All I had with me for the next several months was a duffel I would carry with me through Kyrgyzstan and into Afghanistan.
I was excited to be deploying with my unit, but I was also a little apprehensive about going into combat with people I barely knew. But by the time I threw my bag on the baggage pallet, I was feeling ready. I had just finished cramming ninety days’ worth of local orientation training into about forty-five and rolled right into our deployment spin-up training, which took place on and around our base on Long Island.
The spin-up training had consisted of a refresh of some skills that we would use in Afghanistan but didn’t have much use for in the United States. For example, we practiced what we called “brownout landings.” When a landing is made on unimproved surfaces covered with dust and sand, a cloud develops around the aircraft that will blind the crew just as they near the landing pad. It’s incredibly dangerous; practicing this critical skill was one way we could prepare ourselves for the conditions we were about to face in Afghanistan. I enjoyed the training and got high marks, but in the rushed run-up to deployment, I didn’t have a lot of time to bond with my sisters- and brothers-in-arms before heading off to war.
The first part of our journey to Afghanistan would be a bus from the base to a commercial airport. We would then take a short flight from New York to Baltimore, then hop a plane to Frankfurt, Germany, before ending up in Manas, Kyrgyzstan.
When we shifted from the comfort of commercial aircraft to the loud, cold jostling of the cargo bay of a C-130, the mood seemed to change. We were all a bit lost in our own heads, and there wasn’t much talking going on. I chitchatted with my new squadron a little bit, but for the most part, everyone on board spent the hours hiding behind headphones, sleeping, watching movies on iPads, or writing letters to loved ones. Seasoned deployment veterans bore glassy eyes and seemed like they were already tired, but I could barely contain my excitement. Trying not to display my rookie status by showing everyone how giddy I was to finally be deploying, I channeled my thoughts into scribbling in my journal.
Our time in Manas was typical of most who have experienced the Kyrgyzstan base. It’s a waypoint you have to go through on your trip into the Afghan theater. We were there for a few days, sleeping in a big bay on bunk beds, choking down the food, and trying to relax and pretend we weren’t about to go to war. It was disarming to see the über-tough PJs singing karaoke, but in a way it humanized them. These guys were some of the best of the best, the toughest of the tough, but beyond that, I would soon find out that they were, for the most part, incredible guys as well.
PJs are a unique group of people. I like to think of them as a mix between ***** *****, SEALs, Rangers, Coast Guard Rescue Swimmers, and Combat Medics. They’re the Air Force special operators, and they train to be able to kick ass in any environment (sea, desert, mountains), overpower an enemy who is trying to capture an isolated person (such as a pilot shot down over enemy lines), provide medical assistance to that person, and help get their ass out of the hornet’s nest. PJs parachute out of planes, fast-rope out of helicopters, and do hundreds of other amazing things on a daily basis.
For our medevac mission in Kandahar, we would be flying with regular flight medics, not PJs. B
ut our PJs were going to be assigned next door to us and would be flying with the squadron pulling CSAR alert. We would see them all the time, but we wouldn’t be flying with them. The higher-ups would soon decide that it was too dangerous and decree that we should be flying with a team of PJs instead of flight medics, but for this deployment we would have to settle for seeing them in passing as they came and went from the building next to ours.
The guys next door to us at KAF who would be standing on alert for CSAR would be lucky to have our PJs with them. And while medevac and CSAR may seem similar to the casual observer, the difference between the two missions was monumental.
CSAR is what happens when a good guy is down, hurt and alone. Usually it’s a downed aircraft or an ejected pilot. The person is isolated behind enemy lines with no cover or backup, and the enemy is usually trying to beat us there. We have to go in with guns blazing, find the survivor, protect them, pick them up, and keep them alive on the way to the hospital.
Medevac is when a person is injured and needs to be brought to a hospital, but they are also surrounded by some type of perimeter, like on an actual base or with a convoy providing cover. And while an actual CSAR mission would be more exciting than medevac, I knew we’d be flying more often, so I was happy.
Whether or not we were bringing our PJs was the only X factor. Other than that, the typical crew always has an Aircraft Commander (AC), who is the senior pilot on board, and a Co-Pilot (CP). Both are fully qualified pilots and can interchange duties, but the ultimate decision and responsibility lies with the Aircraft Commander. Normally the AC flies while the CP navigates, but during some of the less exciting times, the AC may let the CP get some flight time. For all three of my deployments, I was a CP. I would upgrade to AC in 2010 but ended up leaving the Air Force before deploying again.
In the back of the aircraft, you would find an Aerial Gunner (AG) and a Flight Engineer (FE). This distinction has since changed, and the career fields have been merged together. In 2007 through 2009, during my deployments, the “backenders,” as we called them, would sit in side-facing seats looking out windows over their aircraft-mounted machine guns. The FE was the systems expert who would assist the pilots with checklists, make decisions on how to handle system malfunctions, and other such tasks. The AG was the gun expert; he would mainly man his gun and assist the FE with his or hers if needed.
This is the standard crew that gets rounded out with a medic or a team of two or three PJs, consisting of a PJ team lead and one or two regular PJs. On any given day, you could fly with any mix of crew. However, we tried to keep crews together as much as possible to develop a rhythm. When you fly with the same people over and over, you run through checklists faster, you anticipate one another, and you form a bond with one another. People who are not used to flying together will still operate well, as we all know our duties, but being “hard crewed” with a group of people is preferable—especially in combat. I was looking forward to figuring out who I’d be crewed with and starting this adventure with some experienced, talented aviators on an aircraft I had completely fallen in love with.
The HH-60G Pave Hawk was truly a thing of beauty. Modified from the UH-60 Blackhawk Army troop carrier, the “60,” had upgraded avionics, which gave us the ability to fly into bad weather and nighttime conditions. After all, those are the perfect conditions under which to execute a rescue. We want to capitalize on our technological superiority over most of our enemies by operating in environments that make it difficult to see. In addition to the avionics, search-and-rescue platforms need the ability to fly long hours in order to loiter over a search area or fly out to the middle of the ocean. The Pave Hawk has auxiliary fuel tanks to increase our flight time to about four hours, plus a refueling probe, which gives us the ability to fly until we have to land for fatigue. It was an amazing piece of equipment, and I could hardly wait to start saving lives with it.
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As we crossed the border into Kandahar, our C-130 plane went dark to help protect us from any enemy ground troops in the area. The aircraft entered into a rapid descent to get us on the ground as quickly and safely as possible. We knew this kind of landing was standard and most of us expected it, but it also seemed like it completely unnerved everyone. It felt like it was the first time we were vulnerable to enemy fire, and all of us knew it was just the beginning. Welcome to Afghanistan.
As we stepped off the plane, I took a look around me. Dust covered everything and seemed to permeate every pore within seconds of our arrival. It was clear everyone was exhausted from the trip, but processing onto the base went quickly enough, and soon we had gathered our stuff and were checking out the base. We were surrounded by uniforms from other countries and by unfamiliar languages, but this comforted me and made me feel like we were really part of a coalition. We were all dying to investigate our sleeping quarters, ready to pass out, but there was no time for sleep.
Once we had dumped our stuff in the barracks, we met the guys we would be replacing. This unit had been pulling the medevac alert for the region over the last six months or so, and while the Air Force has shorter deployments than the Army, I could still see that these men and women were fatigued. The nonstop flying and constant state of readiness had taken its toll on them, and there was a tiredness in their eyes that foreshadowed what we were getting ourselves into. Needless to say, the unit was all too eager to get us ready to fly, so they were highly motivated to begin our orientation. The sooner we could take over the mission, the sooner they could head home to see their loved ones and knock back a few cold ones.
We were quickly brought up to speed on the local area through academic briefings and familiarization flights. The way “sitting alert” for medevac works is that every twelve hours, at each shift change, the incoming crew puts their gear on the aircraft and builds sort of a nest around their seat filled with anything they might need to grab, like checklists and equipment. I used to carry the standard equipment of survival gear, signal flare, and first aid kit, but I augmented my vest with things like a rescue knife, which you can use to break glass and cut seat belts, a push knife, a boot knife (I like knives—what can I say?), a handcuff key, extra water and ammo, a flashlight with red and UV interchangeable lenses, and a small metal tube that carried a single cigar.
The cigar was my promise to myself that I would get out of that country alive. I planned to smoke it after my last mission and before the flight home. The last nonstandard item I carried was a folded-up American flag. It made a triangle about eight inches long, and I kept it in a Ziploc bag to keep it relatively free from dust. I planned to carry that flag with me on every single combat mission I ever flew.
During shift change, the Co-Pilot will also power up the aircraft (not rotors turning, but power to the avionics and radios) to align the navigational system, check the radios, and make other such preparations. Then, once the aircraft is prepped, we get off the plane and go into the Tactical Operations Center or “TOC” (pronounced like “clock”). Here we would receive the daily brief, which is when we get all of the up-to-date info on threats and other classified information. We had to do it in this order in case shit hit the fan, more politely known as “a mission dropping” during the brief. No matter what happened while we were in the TOC, if we were on shift, we would have to be ready to go in an instant.
A typical medevac mission from Kandahar goes like this: The crew is relaxing, often in the TOC or somewhere nearby, usually having just come down off a recent mission. We sometimes flew as many as five missions in a single shift, so we were always eager for some downtime. We might be reading, playing Xbox, or heading to chow, but we were always alert and ready to scramble. The intel person is sitting at his or her computer, which is set to sound an audio alarm if the words “9-Line” come across the screen. A 9-Line is the list of information we get when a mission “drops” on us. It generally has information like the location, the nature of the patient’s injuries, and whether th
ere is any enemy activity in the area. There are occasionally false starts, missions that are aborted before we even get off the ground, where we end up standing down. But for the most part, when the alarm goes off, it means we’re about to fly.
Upon hearing the alarm, video games get paused, conversations are hushed, and all heads in the TOC turn toward the intel person, quietly anticipating what comes next. The intel person will look up at the Aircraft Commander or PJ team lead and nod, saying something like “We’re a go.” Then they reach for a handheld radio to declare, “REDCON ONE! REDCON ONE!”
Ready Condition One means approval to launch, which kicks us all into action. If we had heard REDCON 2 instead, that would only give us approval to spin up the aircraft and wait for launch authority. Upon hearing the radio call, the room explodes into motion as everyone heads out to man their position. The aircraft maintainer goes out to address any malfunctions and help the aircraft taxi out, the PJs grab extra gear in response to a unique injury, and the Co-Pilot and backenders hustle out to get the engines started. Meanwhile, the Aircraft Commander is getting as much info as possible from intel about the mission.
By the time the Aircraft Commander and the PJs get out to the aircraft, the rotors should already be turning on the 60, and the rest of the crew is just waiting for them to strap in for the expedited taxi out to the runway. The Aircraft Commander briefs the rest of the crew with as much info as possible about what they’re heading into. Then it’s wheels up.
A second aircraft, known as your “sister ship,” has been going through the exact same motions simultaneously, because in medevac missions we go everywhere “two ship.” This ensures that if one of us is shot down, the other can pick up the crew from the crash site, which is called “Self SAR”—in other words, Self–Search and Rescue. The second aircraft is interchangeable with the first, but the Aircraft Commander in the lead aircraft (called the Flight Lead) is responsible for the entire formation and directs the actions of both birds.
Shoot Like a Girl Page 11