In other words, for Howk, it was just a good day’s work. “From my perspective, our guys do things that I don’t think are that big of a deal.” Other people, even those in the Air Force, see it much differently. “I’ve been out and actually done training missions simulating the pickup of a downed pilot where we’ve fast-roped off a helicopter and gone and snatched the pilot, and this was a captain in the Air Force who was awestruck by the whole thing. He’s standing there, and all of a sudden we’re right there, just taking him. And he has no clue that we’re even in the area, other than he knew there was a helicopter there. That was it. But he didn’t know we came out of the helicopter, he didn’t know that we were right there in front of him, and we grabbed him before he even knew it. He knew he was going to be rescued, yes, but he just didn’t grasp the concept. Then I go home, and my family, they don’t really have a clue about what exactly I do. I mean, they know what my job is, they know basically what I do. But that’s about it.”
Howk is fairly sanguine that his wife, Heather, whom he’s known since 1996, understands both him and the pararescue mission. “She’s been around the job, and she knows what we do. I’m sure she worries about it, but she doesn’t think that I’m going to do anything that’s gonna mess me up. If something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.” Deployments happen too, but neither Howk nor his wife expected him to be gone as much as he has been since being assigned to the 38th at Moody. In the year before his deployment to Operation Enduring Freedom, he was away from home for 220 days.
On a mid-December night outside the Jbad HAS the temperature is in the forties. At first glance, it looks as though it’s snowing. What’s actually filling the air is a cloud of smoke and particulate from the burn-pit fires on the base, and from the coal-burning fires in thousands of homes surrounding the base. The pungent air is thick enough to taste, and accounts for the residual cough that many who are stationed there for months will take home with them. If the appearance of snowfall in the Pakistani desert isn’t eerie enough, throughout the night the air is pierced with the yelping of jackals, and on an almost hourly basis with the sound of trumpets and the voice of the muezzin in the city, calling the faithful to special worship for the Eid al-Fitr. While it might be politically correct for the Americans inside the surrounding wall and concertina wire to acknowledge that the sounds merely represent the observance of religious customs by the local people, the fact that many of those people are known to be fanatically hostile to the Americans in their midst makes the sounds seem ominous.
On a typical night, after the movie, some of the guys pile into the Humvee and drive the mile to the main base for midnight chow. That’s a choice of breakfast items—the pancakes and French toast are actually better at night than they will be rewarmed for breakfast at 0600—or leftover items from dinner. (In the early days at Jbad, the tale is told that the 71st would send a scout to the dining hall to determine what color the scrambled eggs were. If the eggs weren’t properly cooked, which was often, they’d range from green to brown. But on those days when they came out yellow, the scout would return with the word, which would quickly spread all over the base, and there’d be a mad dash for breakfast.)
It’s a reasonable bet that no matter what he chooses to eat—even if it’s just potato chips—Killough will apply a liberal dose of hot sauce. As someone in the dining hall remarked, hot sauce can even make concrete taste good, which is perhaps why miniature bottles of Tabasco are part of the standard amenity kit packed with each MRE.
Sometime after midnight chow, the PJs disperse. Disney opts to go to the gym about the same time that the LT decides to go for a run. Other PJs can be found heading to the gym well after two in the morning.
What becomes apparent after spending more than a week at Jbad, Kandahar, or Karshi-Khanabad is that the day of the week and the time of day hold little meaning for those serving here. Were it not for a “day” indicator on electronic wristwatches, it’s likely that most couldn’t even tell you what day it is. With the exception of those manning the 71st operations center during daylight hours, the Air Force flies most scheduled missions at night. Crews go to bed at three or four in the morning and sleep until noon or later. It’s not unusual to be passing someone on the way to the shower at two in the afternoon and have him or her say, “Good morning.”
At Kandahar, the living is not nearly as luxurious as at the other two bases. The PJs have a tent that serves as squad room, day room, supply room, and kitchen. Nominally in charge by virtue of the fact that he is a tech sergeant (select), is Justin “Soup” Campbell. True, the visiting Chief M.Sgt. Bob Holler is the ranking enlisted man for the entire 38th Rescue Squadron, but once the chief goes home, Soup is it.
He joined the Air Force at age eighteen to be a PJ. His father wasn’t thrilled with that career choice, but backed off after a recruiter told him that he needn’t worry about his son, because there was no way he’d make it in pararescue. Soup says he heard that and said, “Well, we’ll see. There’s no way in hell I’d ever quit, because ever since I was a little kid, my old man told me, ‘You’re not quittin’ anything. If you start something, you finish it.’ So there’s no way I could ever call my dad and say, ‘Yeah, I quit.’ ”
At that point he didn’t know that part of what the instructors do at indoc is to try to make the candidates quit, and when that realization struck him, he knew he’d just have to mentally “suck it up, because I wasn’t about to let them beat me.” That doesn’t mean there weren’t times that he came close to throwing in the towel.
“There’s times when you’re sitting at the bottom of the pool and you’re drowning and going, ‘What the hell am I doing here? How did I end up here at the bottom of the pool with weights strapped to me?’ ”
About eighty men started indoc with him. He didn’t graduate the first time around because of stress fractures in his foot. That set him back to the beginning, and he had to do the ten-week indoc all over again. The second time around, another eighty started the course. At the end of the pipeline about fifteen months later, seven graduated.
Were they physically stronger than the seventy-three who didn’t graduate? Probably not. Were they better swimmers? Not necessarily. Smarter? Maybe, maybe not. What all seven had was the tenacity not to quit. A psychologist could probably have a field day with the graduates. Some, like Soup, make no bones about the fact that they’re determined to meet the expectations of a demanding father, no matter how unfair or unrealistic those expectations may be. But no matter the reason, the instructors are looking to find men for whom quitting is not an option.
S.Sgt. Rob Disney is another PJ who may be proving to a demanding father who had been a Marine that he can tough it out. Indoc was hell, but quitting was not an option. “In the first four weeks, the object is, ‘Don’t quit and don’t get hurt.’ That’s the only way, really, to fail out until after the fourth week, when you start getting tested on your ability. The first four weeks is just train-up. They teach you how to do everything that you’re going to get evaluated on for the next six weeks after that. And then as long as you don’t get hurt, don’t quit, and continue to meet the standards, you graduate the course.”
What he’s glossing over in his fond remembrance of indoc is the effort the instructors went through to make them quit. Consider buddy breathing. “Buddy breathing is two guys, one snorkel, and both of them wearing their masks. And the object is, don’t let go of your buddy, don’t let go of the snorkel, and don’t come up for air. And it’s two men passing the snorkel around, and you have one or two instructors on you. And at a certain point, the instructors can block two breaths from you by putting their hand over the end of the snorkel or pushing the snorkel into the water.”
What they’re trying to do is induce a sense of panic in the PJ candidates. The ones who succeed are the ones who relax and realize that they can control the sense of panic.
“On any breath of air, when you’re passing the snorkel between the two of you, it feels
like just an eternity’s going by, because you’re getting rolled, and you’re getting twisted, and you’re getting pushed to the bottom. And you push off, and they push you back down. But the reality is that you’re in such good shape that you can hold your breath for between two and three minutes at a time if you’re just at a good rest. So even while they’re harassing you, you can hold your breath easily up to a minute. You’ve always got a little reserve left over.”
The trick is that while the instructors know about the air reserve, in the beginning, Disney and the other PJ candidates didn’t. “By the end of it, you start to get the picture. But you get so caught up in the fact that, ‘I just tried to breathe, and I can’t,’ that weighs heavy on your mind when you’re down there. You have to think it through. If you try to take a breath and they stop you, the easiest thing to do—not the easiest; the hardest thing to do but the best thing for you to do—is to pass it off. Pass it to your buddy. If he gets a breath blocked, the first thing he needs to do is not freak out and try to pull it to his mouth and take another breath. The best thing for him to do is pass it off to me, because if I get another breath blocked, then I can pass it back to him, and then it’s going to come back to me, and I’m going to get the breath, because that’s two blocked breaths. They have to give you that third breath. That’s the rule and we all know it. So you just stay calm and keep your head in the game, and things pan out.”
Clearly, it takes a special breed of guy who can keep his wits about him when most people would be screaming for help. It’s not surprising that those who’ve made it through indoc to the battlefield begin to reflect back on those first days with similar thoughts.
Soup Campbell says, “That’s what it comes down to . . . we’re a different breed, and that’s why there’s only so many of us who are ignorant enough to not quit and to say, ‘Hey, yeah, I’m drowning here, I’m going to pass out, but I’m not getting out of this pool and quitting.’ It’s the same mentality you have when you’re lying there going, ‘Yeah, I’m shot and I’m bleeding to death here, but I’m not going to let these guys die on me.’
“When we got tasked, I was one of the first volunteers. I wanted to come over here and do my job that I’ve trained to do. That’s not saying that I’m some kind of war junkie, ’cause that’s not what it is. But the action, the adrenaline, the job satisfaction of saying, ‘Yes, I actually went out into a combat situation and saved people and did my job that I trained to do for years.’ To save people and to go get people when they needed help and have no other hope. That’s what I’m here for; that’s what I signed up for.”
The kind of motivation and commitment that Soup brings to the job is what the senior pararescue NCOs attempt to instill in the PJ candidates as they go through the hell of indoc and then, if they make it without quitting, on to the specialized training in the pipeline.
Comparisons to other elite special-ops forces, especially the Navy SEALs, are inevitable. The major difference seems to be a much less pronounced need for PJs to swagger. PJ T.Sgt. Ryan Schultz says, “I’ve worked with SEALs a lot, so I know how to deal with them. Some people, they go with the rivalry kind of thing, and you’ve just got to realize that their mission’s different than our mission. And work around it. SEALs are cocky, so is STS, and so are PJs and controllers. We don’t walk around with a broomstick up our ass like SEALs do. We don’t think the world revolves around us. Whereas SEALs do. You walk into a room with SEALs, you can tell.”
The difference, says Schultz, has to do with the ego buildup he believes SEALs get. “It’s brainwashing, basically, is my opinion. They’re told over and over and over again how good they are, and there are instances where they are good, and there are instances where they’re bad. It’s like a fighter pilot. You got to tell a fighter pilot how good he is so he’ll go fly over the lines and do the mission. Same thing with a SEAL. You tell him that nobody’s going to hurt him.
“As far as capabilities, across the board, we’re all fairly equal in ability, athletics. If you want to stop and do push-ups, we’re not iron-pushers for the most part, like a lot of SEALs are. They’ve got to see how much they can bench, but we can go run forever, and we can go swim with them, ’cause I’ve done it.”
A ranking PJ NCO has a more incendiary way of looking at the SEALs’ need to let everyone know that they’re the baddest dudes on the block. “You know what they say. Big watch, little dick.”
Chief M.Sgt. Bob Holler, who at forty-six years old is still psyched about pulling alert and flying missions out of Kandahar, is used to hearing people—including many that they work with—say that PJs are just plain crazy. After spending the afternoon at Kandahar doing snatch and grab exercises on the end of a cable suspended from a hovering helicopter, it’s not surprising that the chief would disagree with that assessment.
“When a prospective pararescueman gets through his training, especially what we now call the indoctrination training down at Lackland where the washout rate is eighty-five percent, that individual at that point is reborn. You take somebody who is, if not doubtful, they’re not aware of what their true capabilities are as a human, as a team member. And you test them to the point where all of a sudden they wake up, they’re reborn. They realize, ‘Hey, I can do whatever I set my mind to.’ And because of that mentality, that mind-set, and the team cohesiveness that we instill in those schools, you get a group of us together and we can do anything that we put our minds to.
“And because of what we do, the jumping, the diving, the climbing, the modes of transportation that we use to get to a patient or extract him from danger, commonly called adrenaline sports in society, we need that mind-set that says, ‘Hey, give me a task and I’ll figure out how to do it. I’ll go through the wall, over the wall, around the wall, but I’ll get it done’—yeah, we could be called crazy. But it’s not crazy; it’s calculated, we’re going to press until we get it done.”
Holler, who is a connoisseur of good cigars and Thai food, and has been skydiving since 1976—he was on the world-record large-formation jump with 281 other jumpers—has developed his own exercise regimen that PJs half his age and twice his height can’t do. (Okay, that’s an exaggeration—he’s five-seven and there are no PJs over eleven feet tall.) Here’s his description of the routine.
“It’s a calisthenics pyramid set, starting with pull-ups. You do one pull-up, followed by two curls with forty-five pounds of weight, two dips, two push-ups, twenty-five bicycle crunches. Then you do two pull-ups, four curls, four dips, four push-ups, twenty-five bicycle crunches. And then you go to three pull-ups, and then six, six, six, twenty-five; four, eight, eight, eight, twenty-five; five, five, ten, ten, ten, twenty-five, and so on and so forth. You work that pyramid up to however high you can get it. Right now I’m up to nine, and then you work it all the way back down. And the totals come out to whatever number you reach, you square that number. So that workout is eighty-one pull-ups, one hundred and sixty-two curls, one hundred and sixty-two dips, one hundred and sixty-two push-ups, and three hundred and seventy-five bicycle crunches. Now, if you do the math, that doesn’t work out, because actually I don’t start with one. I start with three; I combine one and two together. So I actually do three, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, three.”
And he does it all in less than an hour. “So you’re busting your ass. It’s both an aerobic and anaerobic workout.”
Lest one get the impression that the chief is a by-the-rules administrator, hung up on physical fitness and doing the mission, he volunteered to tell a “Charlie” story. “Charlie” is an ugly wooden doll that was brought back in the sixties by two PJs who had a jump mission near Fiji. Somehow, Charlie became the symbol of all things pararescue, and possession of the doll imbues the unit that has him with a level of pride not even attainable in combat. Shortly after Charlie arrived in the United States, one PJ unit stole him from the guys who brought him back. And that began what the Chief describes as “forty year
s’ worth of shenanigans and exchanges of Charlie.”
While the liberation of Charlie from the possessing unit is not quite governed by the Geneva Convention, there are rules. But they’re PJ rules. “You probably have a flavor for PJs well enough now to know that we don’t really abide by rules much. But it’s supposed to be a game of stealth, where you use brain and stealth and mission planning to abscond with Charlie, rather than pure numbers and muscle. Although I’ve seen some pretty good fistfights. One of the most dramatic Charlie stories that I’ve been witness to was at Kirtland, at a pararescue graduation ceremony.
“Portland had Charlie at the time, and they had built this extravagant thick steel sedan chair. Well, that’s what they had built for Charlie, this big, heavy steel cage with carrying poles. And they drove up in a van in the parking lot at the officers’ club there at Kirtland, and started bringing him up, and they were immediately attacked by some instructors and a whole shitload of students. And we’re talking a service dress affair, blues, ribbons, y’know, everybody’s got shiny boots. They had a brawl out in the parking lot. We’re talking fists-to-the-face brawl. I was in the bar having a beer—not something I do on a normal basis—and somebody ran in and said, ‘Chief, Chief, they’re fighting out in the parking lot.’ So I ran out to the parking lot, and there’s a blue Air Force van hauling ass right in front of the entranceway, and there’s a kid hanging off the left rearview mirror, being dragged down the street, and I ran out yelling, ‘Stop that motherfuckin’ van!’ Screeech! I started questioning them—‘What the hell’s going on?’—and it was a madhouse. There were guys with ripped coats, ribbons all over the ground, berets everywhere. Guys were bleeding, ripped ties. And it was a mess. It was, like, wow. I said, ‘You guys, you can’t be dragging each other down the street on the side of a moving vehicle. What if he fell down and got run over?’ I was doing the chief thing. And so everybody gets settled down and everybody’s putting their uniforms back together.
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