Killough, himself, has suffered six injuries during his career, all of them in parachute mishaps, and all of them he remembers as though they just happened.
“Let’s see, I cracked a vertebra in my neck, I compressed a disk, I cracked my back, I broke two ribs, and I busted my ankle. All while jumping. Except for one, they were all under a static line chute. Two of them were because I wasn’t paying attention and hit the ground when I wasn’t ready for it; landed with my feet apart and straight up and jarred my back. My ankle I broke free-falling. I slipped going out, so my foot was still in the helicopter, and the aircraft hit me. Cracked my ankle on that one.” The list is recited as though it’s no big deal, just all in a day’s work.
Dan’s management style is a quiet one, but intense when need be. During a high-altitude parachute-training jump into the drop zone at K-2, one of the PJs sprained his ankle. When Dan saw that Ed Ha, a relatively new pararescueman, had jumped wearing standard suede desert combat boots rather than the expensive, high-tech leather boots that he had not only researched, but fought to get the money allocated so he could buy them for his guys on the civilian market, the fire in the master sergeant’s eyes could have burned a hole through concrete. But he never raised his voice; never used profanity.
Questioned as to whether his rebuke had been tempered because an outside observer was there, with a tape recorder running, Dan said no. The reprimand was what was warranted for the situation. And what does it sound like when a less understated response is called for? He demonstrated at half-intensity: “Airman Johnson, sit down and shut up. This is a one-way conversation.” He would have easily had the airman’s undivided attention.
Killough’s big concerns at Jbad are that his airmen stay current with their training, and that the equipment he’s bought them is maintained to the highest standards, so it’s always ready to go. Unlike regular military units, there’s very little that’s uniform about the PJ’s kit. He says, “The only thing you can find that is standard among pararescue gear is that no pararescue gear is standard. The only thing that’s consistent is the inconsistency. If I were to pick up that vest, I’d have to get to know it first and find out what’s going on about it. I have my stuff configured specially so that nothing’s on the front of my body, so if I’m ever on my belly, I don’t have to expose myself any more, give myself any kind of a bigger profile.”
PJs are forever creating new pockets custom-tailored to the toys they’ve been given. A standard piece of equipment back at Moody and in their deployed location is a heavy-duty sewing machine, where the men make their own modifications.
The clothing and boots they brought with them for the environmental extremes of OEF generally do not come through the military supply system. Killough says, “With the changes in the military ordering system and unique nature of our job, we’re authorized to buy off-shelf stuff. Most of the bosses, especially me, I fight to buy the best stuff. To keep the guys alive. Why make them wear two inches of fleece or down when I can have it down to a half inch of high-tech fabric and be better equipped?”
Dan enlisted in the Air Force to be an F-4 crew chief, but learned about pararescue in basic, deciding to join when he realized that the Air Force was willing to teach him to do everything he would be paying to do in his spare time. “I was lucky. I happened to come straight out of high school, join the military, found a job I love. Sure, there might be something out there I might like more, but I couldn’t imagine it. I could’ve gotten out and made more money if I felt like it. Money’s nice, but it definitely isn’t my driving motivation in life.”
He’s a self-declared introvert who tried marriage once before realizing that for him, the job is more important. Now, in an introspective moment, he questions whether he could make it “on the outside.” Clearly, with his management skills, his teaching ability, and his physicality, he has skills that transfer to the civilian world. But the sense is that what he’d really miss is the brotherhood that PJs acknowledge, but seem to speak of only at formal occasions or when tragedy occurs.
At Jbad, where the hardest thing to do is wait for a mission, one ear tuned to the radio while ordinary life goes on, Dan is planning for a return to Moody, and ultimately retirement. The only thing that could get him more excited than a rescue mission will be taking delivery on the new pickup truck that he bought while at Jbad, and will be using to haul around the fifth-wheel trailer that he plans to live in, parked somewhere in a piece of Georgia wilderness owned by Moody Air Force Base.
Were it not for the fact that Chief M.Sgt. Bob Holler came to OEF from Moody in order to spend Christmas with his guys, Dan would be the senior NCO in charge of all PJs in the theater. That includes the guys at Karshi-Khanabad and Kandahar, who fly in two-man teams on HH-60G helicopters, and his team at Jacobabad, where three- or four-man teams fly missions on the C-130s. With a shortage of team leaders holding jumpmaster ratings for both free fall and static line chutes, Dan found it necessary to run the PJ mission from Jbad. There, he flies regularly on the Hercs, which is admittedly less exciting duty than on the helos. Of course, flying on the 130s, there’s always the chance that a jump mission will come along, and even after more than eight hundred jumps and four serious injuries, that’s a thrill he doesn’t get enough of.
“Leaving an airplane, it’s almost complete sensory overload. Especially when you first start jumping. You get the wind hitting you in the face; you know you’re falling. It’s hard to explain; it really is. It’s one of the best adrenaline rushes out there. Every time you pull the cord, it’s, ‘Okay, is it gonna work this time?’ And as soon as you get a full canopy, then you’re looking for the drop zone, your other jump partners and trying to get down. For me, the only reason to use a parachute is to slow your descent so you don’t die on landing. The fun part’s the free fall. I’ve been free-falling for seventeen years now, and still every time I leave the airplane, my stomach ends up in my throat. It’s a combination of excitement and fear.”
Fear? After seventeen years and more than eight hundred jumps?
“Oh, yeah. If you do anything like that, mountaineering, rock climbing, jumping, even some types of diving, when you lose respect for what you’re doing, that’s when you die. You’ve got to realize that you’re throwing your body out of an airplane high up in the air, and, unlike civilian skydiving, I might have a sixty-pound ruck on me, an O2 bottle, a weapon, and it can be hard to control. That’s a lot of things for your parachute to get hung up on when you deploy it.”
Dan says he’s never had a canopy failure, but that he’s about three hundred jumps overdue for one, given the average failure rate of one in every five hundred jumps.
The HAS at Jbad is set up differently than at K-2, with the day room/kitchen/ briefing room actually in a double-walled, insulated, heated/air-conditioned tent that one enters from inside the HAS. The tent is carpeted—shoes to be removed upon entering the room—and furnished with an assortment of couches, equipped with computers that hook into both military and civilian Internet, and has as its focal point a fifty-inch plasma television screen that visitors are assured is essential equipment for training purposes. Use of the screen and attached DVD player for a nightly gorefest of Hollywood’s blood iest movies is merely for testing purposes, in order to ensure that the gear will be in working order when needed for official use.
A perusal of the PJ DVD library could lead one to believe that as a group, they have an unhealthy interest in mayhem. The closest thing to a comedy on the shelf is Dirty Harry.
On any given evening, four or five of the PJs will be watching a movie, Terra might be cooking, Kip might be in the back doing laundry, Disney is on the Internet or back in his room playing guitar, Dan may be checking training records or watching the film, and Lt. Rob Taylor is doing what young officers in charge do—paperwork.
There are always at least three PJs on alert status, which means that they’re either in the HAS, where the op center can reach them by phone, or carrying a radio if they’
re elsewhere on the base. What they’re listening for is the call that tells them there’s a potential mission. If it comes over the radio, all they may hear is the code word and a number—“Houdini fifteen, Houdini fifteen, Houdini fifteen.”
When that happens, the alert crew immediately goes to the central area of the HAS and gets their rucksacks, which weigh roughly eighty pounds each when packed for a mission. Someone will open the weapons locker, and they’ll grab their M-4 rifles and 9mm pistols. One of the nonalert guys will jump into the driver’s seat of the truck already backed up to the HAS door, and in less than ten minutes, they’ll be on their way out to the alert bird parked at one end of the runway. The truck gets backed up to the open loading ramp, and in another two minutes all the PJ gear is on board, and they’re ready to roll. Sometimes the plane will take off immediately; other times they’ll sit and wait, perhaps for a couple of hours, while the Joint Search and Rescue Center (JSRC) decides whether or not to launch them.
That’s the way it works when an alert occurs. But most often the hours are filled with the routine tasks of life, made more difficult by the fact that they’re on an extended camping trip, and everything from eating to bathing is that much more difficult.
Take the prosaic matter of just doing the laundry. At K-2, Brown and Root, the civilian contractor that runs the dining facility, maintains the water supply, and cleans the latrines, provides a laundry service that’s free for everyone on the base. No such luck at Jbad, where doing laundry is a do-it-yourself proposition for the 780 Air Force and Army personnel. Laundry facilities are located in a very large tent that holds twenty commercial washers and as many dryers. Detergent is supplied in boxes and barrels—no shortage there. What clogs up the works is the limited water supply to the base, which means the washers take forever to fill, which means there’s often a line of people waiting to use them.
Obviously, this use of common facilities is way too much hassle for the PJs. Readers should note that certain details in the following have been omitted to protect operational security and the always-important TT&P (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures).
Sanitation facilities, as previously noted, improved from basic Porta Pottis, through various types of multiholers, up to the so-called Cadillac shower facility. However, the PJs are still using a tent adjacent to the HAS that has RV-type toilets with a flush pedal. Considering their other rather luxurious amenities, this seemed curious.
Master Sergeant Killough was politely tweaked about the situation, with the notion that it’s surprising that a Cadillac shower unit didn’t somehow just show up in the middle of the night, replacing the tent and trough setup. His two-word response was telling: “Too obvious.”
Only when Terra Barrington conducted a tour of the back of the HAS did Killough’s comment make sense. There, to the surprise of the visitor, was a private shower, one of the heavy-duty washing machines, and a double dryer next to a utility sink. How they got there is answered with little more than a shrug. How they got connected with appropriate water and electrical hookups is pure genius. In fact, how the PJs got an armed forces TV connection, phone service, Internet hookup, and extra heating and air-conditioning units, on their timetable, is a tribute to prior planning and an understanding of how the military functions in ways that will never be found in any official manual of policy and procedures. As a very senior NCO said, “We’re going to make our lives as comfortable as we can. And through hook or crook, we accomplish that goal. I could tell these guys, ‘Hey, I need this,’ and they’ll go out and find it. And I don’t ask how they got it, ’cause I really don’t care, as long as we get it.”
While the attitude sounds anarchic, it’s really a paradigm for the way pararescuemen are taught to think in the field, where they’re on their own, charged with saving the lives of wounded who may be hours away from a doctor’s care. The mission is saving a life; they’re taught methods that have been known to work in the past. But if those methods aren’t doing the job, they’ve got the green light to use their smarts and intuition.
The greatest change that’s come to the PJ career field in recent years is the advent of their own officer corps. While the backdoor, NCO-to-NCO method worked well for quality-of-life matters, the fact that PJs didn’t have their own officers to represent them at higher levels of command adversely impacted larger operational issues. As a small part of a much larger squadron whose main job was flying helicopters or Hercs, the PJs’ needs were often neglected.
In 2000, that changed, as the career field known as CRO—combat rescue officer—was set up. The first two officers were virtually hand-selected by the NCO cadre. Maj. (now Lt. Col.) Vinnie Savino had been Director of Operations (DO)—second-in-command—of the elite 24th Special Tactics Squadron at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina. Much to the chagrin of the STS community, Savino gave up a promising career there to head up the new 38th Rescue Squadron at Moody. Maj. Terry Johnson, who’d been special tactics liaison officer to HQ, U.S. Armed Forces Europe, joined him at Moody to be DO of the 38th, then was asked to stand up the 58th Rescue Squadron at Nellis AFB, Nevada.
One of the first of the newly minted CROs is twenty-four-year-old Robert Taylor, an Air Force Academy graduate who gave up a guaranteed slot in pilot training to opt for pararescue. Taylor was the first CRO candidate to actually go through the indoc program.
At Jbad, he’s being mentored by Master Sergeant Killough. Clearly, there’s a mutual respect at work. The LT was the man who had to represent the PJs whenever conflict arose with the 71st ERQS, the unit that owns the HC-130 aircraft on which they fly. Consequently, it was in Killough’s best interests to make sure he understood what the issues were and what his men needed in order to do the job. True, Savino made a tour of the theater of operations to stand up the 38th Expeditionary Rescue Squadron, but the day-to-day working relationship must be maintained, massaged, and negotiated by the young lieutenant, often with a lieutenant colonel who didn’t necessarily see the PJs as an integral part of a Herc crew. (It’s fair to say that the leadership of the 41st ERQS, which flies the Pave Hawk helicopters out of K-1 and K-2, treats the PJs more as fellow crew than back-end passengers.)
Lieutenant Taylor was to have been a third-generation military pilot. His grandfather flew B-24 bombers in World War II, his father flew C-130s in the Navy, and he grew up knowing that he had to apply to at least one military academy. Since Air Force had the best soccer team, that was where he went, doing a semester at West Point in his junior year. His grades were good enough to guarantee pilot training, but he learned about the CRO career field, called his fiancée (an Academy grad who became a pilot), and said, “This is what I want to do.” His class at indoc started with fourteen men; only four graduated.
Clearly, making the commitment to sacrifice one’s life that others may live is not something a man does lightly. But in Taylor’s case, it’s a commitment that fills a personal need that he clearly articulates.
“The greatest thing in life, the greatest thing you can do to better yourself or to find happiness, I found, is to be selfless. And there’s no more selfless way in life than to give your life for somebody else’s life. And it’s something I’ve just always believed and always known that if I were ever in a position, I would be willing to do that. Obviously, there’s a great deal of patriotism and loyalty embedded in me.
“I love taking care of my people,” says the young LT. “It’s a great opportunity to learn and to lead, and to be part of something that’s so much bigger than myself. It’s not just me being selfless, but it’s three hundred men now, and a legacy of one thousand men who have stood up and said, ‘Pick me. If someone must go, then send me.’ I’m pretty proud of the people I associate with and the people that I call myself a part of.”
One of the people he’s talking about is T.Sgt. Ken Howk, a thirty-year-old with ten years in the Air Force, some of it as a PJ in a Special Tactics unit stationed at Mildenhall, England. For the action in Bosnia, his unit pulled rotations at Brind
isi, Italy, flying airborne alert for scheduled bombing missions. The first “real” mission he got came in June of 1995, when pilot Scott O’Grady was shot down. Ultimately, in a manifestation of turf warfare over CSAR rights that would continue into Operation Enduring Freedom, the Marines made that pickup.
Shortly after the O’Grady mission, a French Mirage jet was downed and the PJs participated in a weeklong search to find the crew. The second night of the search remains memorable. Howk recalls, “We got lit up almost every corner we turned. I mean, we had, I think, eight or ten rounds through the helicopter. You could hear them just plinking around on the inside. It was pretty exciting, actually. I remember I was on the tail, and they have a tail gunner there, too, and I was just lying there, searching out with my NVGs. We’d actually come over this road, and there was somebody shooting up at us. And I could see, with my NVGs on, the rounds just shooting past the tail. I don’t know how it never hit anything on the tail, but you could just see the rounds coming right by us. And he buried the fifty-cal [machine gun] right on top of him. It was pretty awesome. But as we were coming around that corner, they said that somebody got hit up in the front. We went up to the front of the helicopter, and one of the door gunners had taken some shrapnel in his leg. And I was looking past him out the door, and this house just started lighting up the helicopter with everything it had. We were no more than a hundred feet off the ground—and the door gunner and the tail gunner at the same time just laid a barrage of fire on this house and pretty much quelled the fire that was coming from it. Then the other gunner also took some shrapnel in his knee, which turned out to be nothing big. But we ended up flying back across the Adriatic, and apparently they hadn’t relayed exactly what was wrong with our helicopter or how many rounds we’d taken or the status of the personnel, so the head shed was pretty paranoid. They thought the helicopter was going to go in the drink, so they had us covered with all kinds of CSAR assets on the flight back. Then we landed, and they’re out there with chalk circling all the holes, and I think there were eight or ten holes in the helicopter and blades. There was actually one right through the middle of the fuselage; that was a pretty good-sized one. But that was about it for that.”
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