Is it braggadocio? Or does he mean it? Either way, his elucidation on the subject caused a severe case of twitching in the Air Force PAO who was monitoring the conversation, ostensibly to protect the airman from exploitation by the media person asking the questions. The PAO warned Barrington that his answers were being recorded, implying that perhaps he didn’t want to be so forthcoming. He thanked her for her concern, and indicated that the questioning should continue.
“What rule did you break today?” It was already nearing midnight, and presumably he’d had an opportunity to fill his daily quota. He laughed.
“You want the whole list or just one? Well, let’s see, starting out, didn’t blouse my pants, didn’t wear a hat from the vehicle to the hangar, didn’t wear a seat belt when I was driving, exceeded the speed limit in the Humvee. Hmm, I know I could think of some more. I probably broke a bunch on the quads [four-wheel ATVs the PJs have rigged for parachute deployment], considering I crashed that one. Not wearing a helmet or shoes or gloves. No, I was wearing a helmet but no eye protection, no gloves, and no shoes. Yeah, I broke a bunch of rules today. But it’s stupid. . . .
“We don’t get in trouble. I hear a lot of people say that in other shops. I’m sort of like a liaison between PJs and the rest of the Air Force. That’s my own personal thing, ’cause I’m not the typical PJ. They all confide in me that if they did the same thing, they’d get in trouble. It’s not that we’re intentionally misfits. It’s that we’ve got much more important things to think about, to worry about than whether or not your boots are bloused or your hat is on. It’s like, if somebody comes up to me and tells me, ‘Hey, where’s your reflective belt?’ I’m thinking, ‘All right, the war must be over here, ’cause you’re worried about me having a reflective belt on.’ There’s many more things you could worry about than me having a reflective belt on, or something stupid like standing up in the back of the truck when you’re driving to a brief or whatever. To me, my job is dangerous. Riding around in the back of a truck at fifteen miles an hour is not dangerous. Even if I fell out at fifteen miles an hour, it would be less dangerous than my job on a day-to-day basis.”
And then he sums it up with the essence of the situation. “I don’t really belong in the military, but I kind of fit in pararescue. I didn’t know what we’d be doing when I was back as a civilian, obviously, but I read the little brochure and I watched a little clip. And I was thinking, ‘Oooh, mountain climbing.’ And in my mind’s eye, I pictured a pilot in a foreign country, hanging from his parachute by a root on the side of a mountain. That’s what I was picturing. He’s stuck hanging on the side of the mountain, no way for him to do anything, and then what he sees is my hand reaching in and me saying, ‘Hi, my name’s Terra. I’m gonna save your life now. Are you ready?’ That’s what attracted me, because that’s the essence of good. It doesn’t get any more real than one man to another man, ‘I will save your life now.’
“It’s just an old idea of nobility. Yes, firefighter’s also another very noble job. The stuff that little kids make into heroes. When I was going through the school, what we were supposed to carry with us is ‘silent professional.’ Not the Navy SEAL image where you tell everybody that you’re a Navy SEAL and then you prove it by getting in a bar fight. We’re supposed to sneak in, do our thing, and go out. So we’ll go into the burning building and then not try to get on the news about it. But we’re changing our image from ‘silent professional’ to ‘how come nobody knows who we are?’ ”
The “nobody knows who we are” complaint has nothing to do with getting his picture in the paper for a spectacular rescue. What he’s leading up to is a plug to expand the pararescue corps so that there’s less burnout, fewer destroyed marriages, and more time for additional training. Until recently, the Air Force never mounted a recruiting effort for PJs. But Barrington and others say it desperately needs to be done.
“We need to get the word out, because this is my fifth month over here in this little dwelling. Got two more to go. And that’s this year. I was home for about two months, half of which I was at emergency medical service advanced training, which left a month at home between then and now, which is completely the way I like it. However, I would like more freedom to go to other schools. I don’t just want to deploy; I’d like to go to jumpmaster school, dive-master school, static line, free fall, structural collapse school, tactical lead climbing schools. It’s endless, the places you can go. Having more PJs would allow the flexibility and maybe save some marriages. The deployment schedule is hard on a lot of women and a lot of marriages. That might be the number one reason for the high divorce rate. Just the sheer fact that it’s hard to be married to a guy who’s gone most of the year, every year, year after year. It just finally falls apart. If we got more PJs, and I would say we need about double what we’ve got, we could allow the flexibility for married guys to just be asked, ‘Hey, would you like to go on these two deployments back-to-back? And they could say, ‘Well, I’ve got a baby coming. I’d like to spend some time with my family.’ Having more PJs would allow them to do that. But that’s never going to happen; that’s just my little pipe dream.”
The senior pararescue leadership agrees that they need to do a better job of recruiting. Chief M.Sgt. Bob Holler says, “We just need to get more people in the front door, because I don’t want to change standards; I like who we are.” Holler’s implication is that the PJ school is not unhappy with the 85 percent washout rate at indoc, because they know that 99 percent of the candidates that indoc feeds into the training pipeline will graduate. That’s why he says the only way to fix their manpower shortage is to get more guys in the front door.
The pararescuemen are extraordinarily concerned about constantly upgrading their training, and guys like Barrington feel that the excessively heavy deployment schedule—whether or not there’s a war on—is problematic.
Medical skills need constant updating as new techniques and new equipment are integrated into their bag of tricks. And it’s not the sort of thing that can be learned on the job. Take the complicated medical procedure known as insertion of an interosseous catheter that the PJs learned how to do by practicing on each other during advanced medical training classes. The procedure allows IV fluids to be given to, for example, a burn victim who doesn’t have veins suitable for injection. It involves administering a local anesthetic, then using a device to punch a hole in mid-sternum, threading a tube into the bone marrow, locking it in place, and giving the IV injection directly into the bone. Doing it this way, they can give a liter of fluid in thirty seconds. In the training program, they had to perform it on their fellow trainees, and in turn have it done to them.
While preparing couscous on an electric burner in the HAS—Barrington is the unit’s only vegan at the moment, and their kitchen is supplied with four different kinds of olive oil and enough seasonings and spices to provision a gourmet restaurant—Terra described another medical procedure the PJs are prepared to perform that has amazed visiting doctors. “We can do pubic needle cystotomy. Maybe somebody stepped on a land mine and the part of their body that they need to urinate is either blown off or severely damaged, where they can’t pee voluntarily, and you can’t catheterize them, you still need to drain their bladder or it’s going to become a very serious problem, so you just take a big long needle, like you’d give as an IV, and you poke it right in above the pubic symphesis. Boom! Right into the bladder, ’cause the bladder, when it’s full, comes right up there. Poke it in, drain the bladder; then you can pull it out. Suddenly they’re your best friend, ’cause they had to pee really, really, really bad. Instant success. That’s something that these docs don’t even do here. I don’t know how many of them have training on it. There’s a lot of things that we do in the field that has them asking, ‘You do what? Now, how’s that go?’ I can do minor surgeries like suturing, for instance. No problem, hands down, no problem.”
The problem for Terra and the other Boyz ’N the HAS is that while they’re trainin
g to deal with medical problems that would cause an urban EMT in a fancy ambulance to just step on the gas a lot harder, they’re not getting very many missions. They all salivate at Bill Sine’s parachute jump to the minefield, which Barrington is quick to point out was a “jump to an injured patient. The minefield is just a bonus.”
And that’s the pararescue dilemma. “We’re waiting for somebody to have a really bad day. If we come away from this and that somebody didn’t have that really bad day, I don’t know, it’s kind of mixed feelings. We didn’t get to do what we do best, but then again, that guy’s probably all the happier for it, so that might be the only thing that keeps this from being a total disappointment. We got to do some minor stuff, like transloads, but there’s nothing cool about that. ‘Hey, you want some Skittles? Sure, all right. Thirsty? All right.’ I mean, the guy was sick with dengue fever, but what am I gonna do? Give him some Skittles. He was happy for them. He hadn’t had food in a couple of days.”
What Barrington and the others fail to acknowledge—or refuse to acknowledge—is that the environment in which they’re doing these “transload” missions on lumbering HC-130 aircraft is a dangerous one. Even though some of the aircrew refer to themselves as the 71st E-HMO instead of ERQS (expeditionary rescue squadron), they know the most benign mission can turn ugly in less than a second.
Sr.M.Sgt. Bill Sine, who was instrumental in getting the HAS at Jbad built to pararescue specifications, can personally testify to that PJ fact of life. He didn’t even need to be out on a mission for things to get ugly. The war on terrorism came to him. It happened six years earlier, on June 25, 1996, in Saudi Arabia. He was leaving his room in the Khobar Tower apartments to work out in the gym when a huge terrorist bomb blew the front off the building at Dharan Air Force Base, killing nineteen Americans and injuring 372, among them, Sine. The bombers struck at ten P.M., a time they chose by observing that most locals would have vacated the area adjacent to the huge apartment complex by then, and most of the American servicemen would be in their rooms. Their plan worked: almost no locals were injured, minimizing any potential political backlash, and maximizing casualties among the U.S. troops stationed there.
Sine had just stepped out the door of the room he shared with another PJ, S.Sgt. Eric Castor, and was waiting to catch the elevator to the gym, when he heard a muffled explosion. “Then it was like I got tackled from behind. I could feel my hand sting when it hit the marble floor, and then it was all dark and you could hear glass tinkling and falling.”
He thought he never lost consciousness, but later pieced together the facts and realized he’d been knocked out. When he came to, he freed himself from the debris that covered him and began yelling to see if any other people were around. He knew something bad had happened to one arm and one leg because they hurt, but in the pitch dark of the bombed-out fourth-floor hallway, he couldn’t see what was causing the pain. Sine was bleeding, but true to PJ form, decided that it was “nothing like copious,” so he didn’t need to worry about it right away. His plan was to get out of the building, find the other PJs, and begin helping casualties, and he thought he was up to the task. Years later he realizes that he was doing some things that were probably not normal.
“I got halfway down the stairs—they’re all broken—from the fourth floor. I thought I should be down at the ground level—I’d been traveling for a long time. And so I stopped and I yelled out, ‘Can anyone hear me? Hey, am I on the ground floor or the basement?’ Of course no one answers, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m in the basement.’ I spent probably a year and a half in this place through the rotations, and I [realized] there’s no basement in here; I just must not have gone far enough.”
Sine continued down until he could see a strange kind of yellow light from the outside. Pushing his way out the front door, he found a surreal scene with people on the ground screaming and PJs and medics already establishing a casualty collection point in the center of the compound. He walked up to a female medic whom he knew, working on one of the injured, and said, “Hey, Rachel, what’s up?” “That’s when I knew I wasn’t right. She looked at me kind of funny—I guess I didn’t look too good. My arm was compressed and twisted, like the muscle hadn’t popped back. Crunched. My calf was like that, too. They thought that both of them were broken, but they weren’t.”
About this time, his head started to clear a bit and he hooked up with another PJ, S.Sgt. Mike Atkins. The two retrieved their med kits from the Humvees in the parking lot, and suddenly it hit Sine that he hadn’t seen his roommate, Eric Castor, who had been sitting at his computer in their room when the bomb went off.
The two bloody PJs rushed back to the front door where a cop was guarding it. “You can’t go in there until the rescue people get here,” he said. “So we said, ‘We are the rescue people.’ ” With their shrapnel wounds and dripping blood, they didn’t look like it, but the guard lent them his flashlight and they picked their way up to the fourth floor. That’s when Sine realized that the front of the building was gone. “When you look in [to his room], just sky.” He felt there was no way Eric could have survived the blast. But at that moment, three other PJs coming from the gym arrived and told him they’d seen him. Castor had suffered many injuries, none of them life threatening.
Later, when Sine spoke with Eric, he learned his friend had been sitting in their room, typing on the computer, and it just so happened he was doing something on e-mail and he hit Enter just as the bomb went off. “And of course now he’s flying through the air, a giant explosion, and for just a split second, he was, like, ‘Okay, this practical joke stuff has gone too far.’ ”
The five PJs quickly decided to clear all the rooms in the building, looking for people who were still alive. They immediately found a group of about six in the stairwell—pilots that they knew—and started bandaging them and taking them outside. Sine was beginning to have trouble walking, so they set up a picnic table out in front and he did all the medical treatment while the others went back into the building, bringing out more injured and marking where the dead were located. When other members of the rescue squadron arrived, he used them as litter bearers to carry the most serious victims to the casualty collection point.
About an hour—maybe two—after the blast, the PJ he’d first linked up with came over to him with a complaint. He was holding a torn shirt to his head, and said, “This is really annoying, ’cause I’m trying to work on people and the blood keeps getting in my eye. Can you take a look at it?” Sine removed the bloody shirt and discovered that Atkins had a hole in his temple the size of his little finger, and the blood was spurting from it because his temporal artery had been severed. Sine took an entire role of Kerlex gauze, put it on, and then grabbed an Ace wrap and “really cranked it down. You’ve got to put a lot of pressure on the artery. I did that, and he’s waiting for a second to see if the blood starts coming back in his eye. It didn’t, so he’s like, ‘Oh, cool,’ and took the other medical kit and went off back to do his thing.”
Six hours later, when they took him to the hospital, doctors had to sew Atkins’s artery back together. They also discovered he had a piece of a door stuck through his calf. About the same time, Sine also went to the casualty collection point. He was examined and shipped off to the local Saudi hospital, where they determined he had no broken bones but was suffering from the after-effects of a concussion, so they sedated him and put him to bed.
Consider for a moment everything Bill Sine had just been through, all of which he regards as more or less normal for the career field he’s chosen. Then, he says, things began to get strange. “Somebody wakes me up at six in the morning and says he’s from the Bahrainian Associated Press and wants to ask me some questions. I told him what my name was and that I was in the building, very basic stuff like that. And he left. An hour or so later, the phone rings in my room. It’s the Today show office in London, and they’re waiting to do a phone interview with Bryant Gumbel. I didn’t even know where I was. I didn’t know the n
ame of the hospital, anything. The base didn’t even know where I was.” NBC had gotten the AP story off the wire with Sine’s name in it, and tracked him down in his room and was all set to put him on the air, live.
Even in his stupor, Sine knew that Air Force Public Affairs would have his ass if he spoke without clearing the interview with them, and that’s what he told the NBC News producer on the phone. Within minutes, NBC London had connected him with Air Force Headquarters Public Affairs. He was told that he could talk about his personal experiences, but couldn’t comment on questions about security. Formalities aside, he was switched to New York and in seconds was on the air live with Gumbel.
Sine’s parents in Ohio saw the interview and that’s how they learned their son was all right. As soon as he hung up with NBC, the hospital phone began ringing off the hook. CNN said if he’d do an interview, they’d conference in his mom, and then get him on the line with his twelve-year-old son, Billy (now a nineteen-year-old who wants to be a PJ), and his dad in Melbourne, Florida.
Ultimately, the Air Force evacuated Sine and his roommate, Castor, to Landstuhl Hospital in Germany. It was then that Eric told him that the back of his computer chair had shielded his body from much of the bomb blast, and that he’d crawled out into the hallway and saw someone covered in rubble. Because of Eric’s condition, he was unable to stop and help. The person Eric had seen was Sine, who now realizes he’d been unconscious for at least fifteen minutes, although in his mind, there had been no break in time.
It was at Landstuhl that Sine had to lead a mini-insurrection to get himself and his buddies released from the hospital and flown back to the States in order to be present at the memorial service with President Clinton for the nineteen who died.
As can be imagined, managing a group of type A independent thinkers can be a job and a half. During the last four months of 2002, that job fell to M.Sgt. Dan Killough, a thirty-eight-year-old with twenty years in the Air Force. (Decidedly uncomfortable with personal publicity, he agreed to talk on condition that his real name is not used.) Dan saw action during Desert Storm, where he and a PJ only three months out of school medevacked eight coalition fighters whose armored personnel carrier took a round through the side, resulting in burns and shrapnel wounds.
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