—Field Marshal Alexdandr V. Suvorov (1729-1800)
Lt. Col. Vincent Savino at Arlington National Cemetery (USAF photo by T.Sgt. Mark D. Smith)
PROLOGUE
THE WORST DAY OF HIS LIFE
MARCH 5, 2002
It was barely six-thirty in the morning and it was already the worst day of Maj. Vincent Savino’s life.
An hour earlier, the Brooklyn-born commander of the Air Force’s relatively new, all-PJ 38th Rescue Squadron had reported to the wing commander’s office at Moody Air Force Base near Valdosta, Georgia, wearing his dress blue uniform for the first time in months.
The Casualty Assistance Team was already there, ready to brief Savino; Brig. Gen. John H. Folkerts, commanding general of the 347th Rescue Wing; Protestant chaplain (Lt. Col.) Jerry Pitts; and flight surgeon Maj. Mary Brueggemeyer on the protocol for notifying an airman’s wife that her husband would not be coming home alive from the war on terrorism.
It was still dark when they left the base on the twenty-minute drive to the apartment complex where the young pararescueman had lived with his family. The general had unexpectedly chosen not only to make the onerous trip with the major, but had also chosen to drive. That was just as well, because Savino couldn’t keep his mind from racing. Yesterday morning he’d been down at the headquarters of AFSOC, the Air Force Special Operations Command, at Hurlburt Field, Florida, when word came that a combat controller (CCT) and a pararescueman (PJ) had been killed in Operation Anaconda. By early afternoon, one of his lieutenants had called from the Rescue Coordination Center in Uzbekistan with word that one of the dead was a PJ from the 38th. Savino immediately returned to Moody to await official word, and General Folkerts had received a confirming call from the commanding general of joint special operations forces at Bagram.
The 38th had been lending pararescuemen to AFSOC since December. The career field has always been undermanned; with a war being fought, that shortage had become acute, and AFSOC was begging, borrowing, and stealing PJs from the Air Force Reserve, the Air National Guard, as well as from active-duty rescue units like the 38th that technically weren’t “special tactics” outfits.
Savino recalled that months earlier he’d sat down in the unit’s conference room with the PJs chosen to go on the next deployment to Afghanistan. Their wives sat at their sides, listening intently.
“Okay, this is for real,” he remembers telling them. “This isn’t the Northern Watch or the Southern Watch.” Many of his guys had been detailed to units based in Kuwait or at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, ready to rescue the jet pilots who were patrolling the northern and southern no-fly zones in Iraq. It was stultifying, mind-numbing duty. In a dozen years of standing watch, no pilot had ever gone down and required rescuing.
“This is combat,” Savino had lectured. “There’s stuff going on right now. Make sure your wills are up-to-date. Make sure we know who to notify if something happens.” He knew that when husbands get sent overseas, wives often pack up the kids and go home to their parents or in-laws. He wanted to make sure the unit knew how to find the families if something untoward should happen. Savino wasn’t being dramatic; he wasn’t being an alarmist. He was merely acknowledging that he knew his men would do their jobs, would uphold their credo, and that the consequences of that level of dedication to duty could be dire.
Even as Savino and the general had been working the phones to try to confirm the reports, wives of unit PJs in Operation Enduring Freedom were calling the base. They’d seen news of the battle on CNN, knew that Americans had died, and wanted to be sure their husbands were still alive. They were told that there was no information available yet. Until the name came through channels, no one was about to tell a wife that her husband was dead. Mistakes happen in combat. Messages get garbled in transmission. It’s a mistake Savino wasn’t ready to risk. Besides, he was still in a state of personal disbelief. It couldn’t be one of his guys. In the past, he had lost men in training accidents and during civilian rescues. Theirs was a dangerous business and risks were routinely accepted. But it never got any easier. The PJ community is a small one where every loss is personal. But this was more so.
He remembered the session he’d had the day before six of his PJs were to leave for Afghanistan. It was just with their wives. “She was sitting right there in that chair and she looked at me and said, ‘Everything’s going to be okay, right?’ And I said, ‘They’ll be fine. We’ll take care of the guys.’ And that just kept playing through my mind, y’know, here I am, sitting here telling everybody that everything’s going to be all right, and then you got to go back and knock on their door the next morning and tell her, ‘Hey, your husband’s not coming home.’ ”
By early evening, they knew unofficially who had been killed. Still, it was not good enough to make a formal notification. General Folkerts’s concern was that someone in the unit would hear through the grapevine who had died and, unaware that formal notification had not been made, would with the best of intentions call the widow. By midnight they’d received official word, including details about the circumstances of the young man’s death, and had been given authorization to make the notification, but Savino and Folkerts agreed that it would be best not to awaken the young woman now. Both agreed that they’d have to do it very early in the morning. They couldn’t risk having the wife wake up and learn about it from CNN.
That’s why the phone rang in Dr. Brueggemeyer’s home at three in the morning, ordering her to report at 0400, wearing dress blues, to the base personnel center for a briefing, and then to go to the commanding general’s office. During the phone call, all they told her was that there was a casualty on base. At personnel, she learned a bit more from the chaplain and the mortuary affairs officer. The casualty had occurred in the war overseas, but no details were available about what had actually caused the death.
The doctor was given information about the family of the deceased, his wife and children, and since she had never done this before, was told that the reason for taking a flight surgeon along as part of the notification team was to be ready in the event any urgent situation might arise, such as a complete hysteria-type reaction where sedatives or some type of resuscitation might be needed.
An hour later, when the entire team, including Major Savino, assembled in General Folkerts’s office, they double-checked their information about the family, where they lived, how to get there, and most important of all, made sure everybody knew what their role was going to be when they got there. Emotions were to be kept in check; only limited information could be passed along, such as where the airman’s body was at that time, when his body would be coming home, where he would be taken.
The mood, as would be expected, was somber. But it was also tense. This was not an everyday occurrence, and everyone wanted to do it right. The general made it clear that he would lead the team, that he would do the talking. He’d made his first casualty notification as a young captain; he’d watched a video the Air Force provided on how to do it, what to say, and, more important, what not to say. But neither experience nor training drains the emotion from a moment like this.
At about 0610 they left in the general’s official car, out the main gate, made a left turn onto Bemis Highway for several miles, then made a right turn down a two-lane road past a series of apartment complexes. In the backseat, watching the sun begin to rise on this clear late-winter morning, sat Vinnie Savino, Air Force Academy graduate, special tactics officer, combat control officer, and now a pioneering combat rescue officer in command of his own rescue squadron, embarked on the most painful duty of his career.
Seated next to him, the chaplain quietly voiced a prayer, beseeching the Lord to help this woman and her two young children, and an added plea on their own behalf, that the kids would still be asleep when they arrived at their apartment.
Savino never felt the chill in the still, subfreezing air as he walked with the others from the car, casting a brief backward glance at the second vehicle in this poignant pro
cession, where his own wife, Maria, the wife of the unit’s chief master sergeant, as well as the wife of another PJ, waited to take over the job of providing comfort and support once the official notification team departed. In the Air Force, dealing with life and death is a family affair.
As they got out of the car at 0630, the four high-ranking officers in dress blues shocked a young airman who lived upstairs—above the PJ’s family—and who was just leaving for work.
Up the concrete walkway they strode, Brigadier General Folkerts in the lead, each of them struggling to find the impossible—words capable of cushioning the blow. How do you tell a thirty-year-old mother of two preschoolers, even one who happens to be a Navy veteran, and is, herself, in the Air Force ROTC program at Valdosta State University, that her husband has the distinction of becoming the first pararescueman to die in combat since Vietnam?
As the general knocked on the apartment door, running through his mind was the thought that his country was truly at war, his men were at war, and he had the prescient notion that this death might just be number one in a series. At that moment, they all knew that the pararescue credo, “That Others May Live,” would be tested time and again before the war was won.
Crews and STS teams of MH-53 helos Knife 03 and Knife 04. Captain Frank is standing, fourth from left; Capt. Keith Nicholas is eighth from left; Maj. Peter Forrest is twelfth from left. (USAF photo)
CHAPTER 1
“HEY, WE GOT COMPANY”
NOVEMBER 2-3, 2001
If you could ask Genghis Khan, Queen Victoria, or Leonid Brezhnev, they’d all tell you the same thing: Afghanistan is an especially rotten place to fight a war. The climate is inhospitable, the topography brutal, and the indigenous tribes won’t run from a good fight.
Just consider the terrain. The southern third of the country is an unforgiving, desertlike plateau. Nomads and the occasional gaggle of Taliban flowing unhampered across the Pakistani border in both directions populate it. In the central two-thirds of the country are the Hindu Kush mountains, a chain nearly a thousand miles long and two hundred miles wide, running from the northeast out of northern Pakistan to the southwest into Iran. The range has more than two dozen peaks above twenty-three thousand feet and alternates between high ridges and deep valleys. That pretty much explains why the entire country, which is about the size of Texas, has only sixteen miles of railroad track and the roads aren’t good enough to be considered deplorable. And then there are the millions of land mines strewn across the countryside to think about, a capricious reminder of what’s been going on since the late seventies.
Flying over the Hindu Kush in daylight, the mountains appear bare, rocky, and devoid of life—either plant or human, which is why it’s a shock to aircrews crossing the Kush at night when they see campfires burning above the ten-thousand-foot level. Living at that altitude is difficult to contemplate; fighting at that altitude is beyond difficult, but routinely contemplated. Altitude sickness can strike even the fittest warrior who is unaccustomed to the elevation, and the only cure is to descend to lower levels.
In the opening of the war, American air support for special operations, both rotary and fixed-wing, flew primarily from Karshi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan, in the north, and from Jacobabad, Pakistan, in the south. It was one of the northern-based helicopter units, flying MH-47 Chinooks, that got the call to evacuate an American special operation forces (SOF) soldier whose high-altitude sickness had apparently advanced to the potentially fatal condition known as High-Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE).
The onset of HACE usually doesn’t occur until the individual has been at high altitude for more than half a day, which is why it wouldn’t be expected to affect helicopter crews on relatively short missions. And HACE doesn’t strike everyone; some people get it, others don’t, irrespective of their physical conditioning.
The symptoms of HACE include loss of coordination, weakness, decreasing levels of consciousness including disorientation, loss of memory, hallucinations, psychotic behavior, and ultimately coma. What happens in HACE is that fluid leaks out of capillaries, resulting in swelling of brain tissue. According to Princeton University’s Outdoor Action Center, immediate descent of two thousand to four thousand feet is a necessary lifesaving measure, followed by evacuation to a medical facility for proper follow-up treatment.
Very little in Operation Enduring Freedom happens in a communications vacuum. Between SATCOM (satellite communications), assorted radio channels, the classified version of mIRC (Military Internet Relay Chat), CIPRNet (Classified IP Router Network, which is the command and control version of the Internet), and NIPRNet (Nonclassified IP Router Network, the unclassified e-mail system that gives deployed military forces Internet access), it’s difficult for the duty officer in any operations center in the theater of operations not to know what’s going on.
This is why folks at the Air Force’s 20th Special Operations Squadron, based at Jacobabad, were aware of the drama some 350 to 400 miles to the north. They were ready to help when the Army rescue helicopters from the north had to turn back after devoting a couple of hours trying to pierce impenetrable weather in order to reach the soldier.
The word was that it was a life-or-death situation. A special operator with Northern Alliance forces, who were in the middle of the heaviest fighting in Afghanistan, had developed what was thought to be acute mountain sickness, which over the course of a few days had led to his being diagnosed with HACE. He had now become a burden to his small unit which was actively involved in combat operations. There was also fear that if he wasn’t evacuated soon, should he manage to survive the ordeal, he’d suffer permanent brain damage. This was before the fall of Kandahar, before the fall of Kabul, even before the Mazar-i-Sharif bombing incident. There were fewer than a hundred American soldiers in Afghanistan at the time, all of them special-operations types whose principal task was spotting targets for coalition bombers. The Taliban and Al Qaeda still owned the country, except where the Northern Alliance had pockets of control, high up in the mountains.
Captain Frank, a thirty-four-year-old Pave Low pilot with seven years of helicopter flying in the Army before coming to the Air Force, had done the planning for missions into this part of Afghanistan and knew they were high risk. “I’m not worrying about who’s going to shoot at me, I’m worrying about power and weather,” he told his commander at the premission brief-back. Frank was unhappy at being compelled to fly a high-altitude approach that nobody really wanted; his preference would have been to follow a route near Kabul, but the refueling tankers couldn’t support them there.
Aircraft commander Captain Frank, his copilot, Capt. Keith Nicholas, and Maj. Peter Forrest1, a mission commander who would be flying with them, say that their analysis indicated that if everything went perfectly, they could make it in from the south. The reason the Army helicopter couldn’t get through was that the entire northern half of Afghanistan was socked in with fog, rain, or snow, but the victim was actually south of the bad weather. They believed that weather wouldn’t be a factor for them, and if it became a factor, they could maneuver around it.
About fifteen minutes after sunset on what would become a bright, moonlit night, they took off as Chalk Lead on a two-ship mission, call signs Knife 03 and Knife 04, in MH-53 Pave Lows, the largest helicopter in the Air Force inventory, and the only model that’s outfitted with the most advanced terrain-following, terrain-avoidance radar. (“Chalk” is an identifying term for a load of troops and their transport. “Chalk Lead” would be the helicopter carrying the mission commander and a number of troops.) For flying into the twisting valleys and rising terrain they were going to encounter, it was the perfect aircraft. Just over an hour later they crossed the border into Afghanistan and were setting up to do the first of several aerial refuelings (AR) when their high-tech radar failed. Since the moon was bright and visibility—viz—was “forever,” they elected to press on.
Forrest explains that the radar is designed to help them in bad weather and low
-visibility situations. If the weather and viz weren’t going to be a problem, then proceeding without it would be safe. They’d also prepared a backup plan. “We knew Chalk Two had good radar, so if we had any problem along our route, we’d let Two go ahead and take a look into the weather, see how it was.”
Clearly, weather problems were not foremost in their minds at this point. They’d spent time on the ground getting intel on where the soldier had to be picked up. What was preeminent at this point was coordination for getting the refuelers in place, getting fast-movers in place should they need fire support, and making sure that when they finally did pick him up that they could take care of him medically. When they were launched, higher headquarters basically told them, “We don’t think this guy’s gonna make it.”
They were also worried about the altitude at which they’d be operating. The Pave Low’s manufacturer, Sikorsky Aircraft, says the operating ceiling of the $40 million helicopter is sixteen thousand feet. Listening to the men who fly it talk, one has to presume that the Sikorsky specification writer is the ultimate optimist. With eleven people on board, including a Special Tactics Squadron (STS) team consisting of PJs Jamie Clark and Kenny Curtis, and Combat Controller Jason Brooks, plus all their gear, a pair of miniguns poking out the side windows, plus a .50-caliber machine gun on the ramp, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and enough fuel in the tanks to get it to its next AR, the only way the 53 could get up to sixteen thousand feet would be in the belly of the transport plane that brought it to the war zone. Major Forrest is clear that once they reached the mountains, this mission was flown with no power to spare. “Throughout this whole sortie we were operating at the helo’s max capabilities. If you want to say ‘the edge of the flight envelope,’ we were on it and beyond it.”
None Braver Page 3