While the radio operator seems to be dealing with their situation quite well, the flight engineer is having problems. “I’m cold, I’m cold,” he’d say to Rodney. “What happened?” Rodney would respond, “Hey, dude, we crashed. We’re in a helicopter.” But that wasn’t the end of it. “Three or four minutes later, he’s like, ‘What happened?’ I’d tell him again. And this probably happened eight to ten times. ‘What happened? I’m cold. My butt hurts. What happened? I’m cold. My butt hurts.’ Y’know, a repetitive thing from him. I’m, like, ‘Good Lord! Get it together!’ ”
Back at the crash site, everyone has finally gotten out of the forward part of the plane. Copilot Jason Wright comes out the cockpit escape hatch, and then realizes that navigator Don Tyler, with his busted-up shoulder, can’t possibly climb the ladder and shimmy down the rope. He goes back inside where he finds the nav just standing there dazed, moaning in pain. Having spotted a gash in the fuselage just aft of the cockpit, Wright guides Tyler down the stairwell and maneuvers him over, under, and around wreckage, until finally they emerge from the plane. Then he begins walking the nav down to the waiting helicopter. Tyler remembers feeling helpless, or worthless, because he couldn’t help anybody. While he had some injuries, including a knee that was cut and bleeding and a slice through his cheek, they were minor compared to the destruction his shoulder had suffered in the crash. Unfortunately, the two experience the same kind of travail as the others had on their walk to the helo. They take a few steps, and then fall through the snow. Wright is walking abreast of Tyler, who’s clutching his injured left arm with his right hand. Every time the injured nav would fall, he’d reach out to grab him, but just being touched triggered a powerful pain that shot through Tyler’s entire body. Finally he screams, “No! No! No, don’t touch me!” and manages to make the rest of the downhill hike without help, even though it means that every time he falls through the snow, he has to dig himself out using just his right elbow.
When the pair get to the helicopter ramp, crewmen inside motion Tyler to come around to the side door. They’ve finally figured out that after their ordeal, the Ditka 03 crewmembers don’t have the strength to haul themselves aboard. Tyler indicates he’s done walking, so one of the guys makes a stirrup by cupping his hands together. Tyler steps up into it with one foot, and they toss him up and onto the ramp, then prop him up against the inside wall next to Rodney Young, and cover him with sleeping bags.
At the crash site, aircraft commander John Cline is focusing on the one crewmember trapped in a plane that he knows still has the potential to blow up at any moment. Squeezing through a tear in the side of the fuselage, he moves around a corner of the Benson tank and joins Langston at the trapped loadmaster’s side. A quick assessment convinces him that they’ll need help with the extrication. He tells Langston to walk toward the helicopter and tell them what’s needed. As Chris is doing so, he meets the copilot, who has returned to the crash site with one of the special forces troops.
“What’s the situation?” asks the special operator.
Langston responds, “We’re all alive; we got one guy that’s stuck.”
“How stuck?”
“He’s stuck pretty good; we’re going to need some help.”
“Okay, go toward the helicopter and see the guy with the radio. Tell them to call that CSAR bird, and tell them to bring the REDS kit.”
Langston is five feet, eight inches tall, standing in snow that’s up to five feet deep—up to his armpits. Moving through it is a struggle, not a stroll. He estimates it took him ten minutes to get to the guy with the radio. On the way down he passes a string of special ops troops coming uphill who stop him and ask if he’s okay. Langston’s response is a mantra: “CSAR bird, REDS kit.”
Every time an SOF soldier looks at him, he says, “CSAR bird, REDS kit.” Finally he reaches the crewman with the radio near the back of the helicopter. “Hey, we need to call the CSAR bird with the REDS kit.”
The crewman responds, “It’s already on its way.” But the simple fact is that it isn’t. The CSAR helicopter—Chalk 3—carrying the three PJs who were the designated search and rescue team, is off in the distance somewhere, hoping that their pilots will have better luck refueling off Ditka 04 than they’d had off Ditka 03.
And there are no medics on the ground at all. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. How can that be? According to PJ team leader Chris Young, the SOAR medic on this operation is aboard Chalk 2, which is the designated medevac bird on the mission, and Lieutenant Colonel Buss sent that helo back to its deployed base once he got permission to abort the infil mission. It never landed at the crash scene.
That leaves the question of just who made the evaluation Lieutenant Colonel Buss says he got from his ground troops indicating that none of the survivors had life-threatening injuries. Ignore for a moment that Buss opted to send the PJs on a chase for fuel even before his own helicopter landed, before the ground troops on his helicopter struggled the hundred yards uphill to the crash, and before his ground troops knew what was going on with Jeff Pohl inside the wreckage. Ignore all that for the moment, and just concentrate on this exchange when Buss was interviewed about the incident ten months after it happened:
“Once I got on the ground, I unbuckled from the jump seat and I was kind of in the cabin, kind of talking on the radio and moving around, mostly because I was freezing my ass off. I don’t know how cold it was up there, but . . . at that point, we had a series of aircraft cycled through overhead, fast movers overhead, providing us our combat air control over the top of us. I’m talking to all those folks; I’m talking to the big command and control aircraft above us, talking to the command post back in the rear. I’m constantly on the radio answering questions and requesting things and briefing people on stuff.”
Buss clearly was a very busy man. However, had he let the CSAR team land, he would have had the opportunity to hand off almost all of the communications to the CCT, who is an integral part of the embedded special tactics team. T.Sgt. Gabe Brown had half a dozen different radios, from SATCOM to UHF, in his hundred-pound pack, and is uniquely trained to handle a cacophony of contacts with overhead aircraft and higher headquarters such as the Joint Search and Rescue Command at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia. But the CCT couldn’t do any of that from the inside of a helicopter that was miles away, trying to get gas. And as long as Buss was preoccupied with radio traffic, he wasn’t focusing his attention on the actual rescue of the crash survivors.
Here’s Buss again, explaining why he felt comfortable sending Chalk 3 for gas without first inserting the PJs: “I thought with the status of the patients, all ambulatory except one, and the one guy was coherent and didn’t have life-threatening injuries—”
“But how did you know that?” he’s asked.
“I got the report from the folks. The ground force was on board my aircraft, went over there and was talking to me on the radio, so they’re sending me back reports of the status of the patients. I thought the most important thing was to get my Chalk 3 some fuel, which he did, and then I brought him in to land. I don’t know, time-wise, how much longer it took him to get there after us, but it was probably thirty minutes after we landed there.”
He adds, “I wanted to get those guys [the PJs] in there, but we had medics on board my aircraft. And, as I said, there were no life-threatening injuries at that point, so I sent him to get his fuel, which he did successfully without further incident.”
The consensus of the PJs and the Ditka 03 crew is that it took more than an hour before Chalk 3 was able to return and land. (Buss later said, “We were on the ground for over two hours doing this whole thing, so I kind of lost track of time.”) In that time, was Buss certain that a medic who was on his aircraft was attending to Pohl, making informed assessments of his condition, and relaying those informed reports back to him? Not exactly.
Question: “So, just a Ranger medic is with the unit that’s on your helicopter?”
Buss replies, “Right. I don�
�t think it was a Ranger in this case, but I don’t know who it was. But most of the ground forces we have, have medically trained personnel. And I think in this case they did have a medic.”
He thinks they had a medic? He’s being interviewed ten months after the crash, and he still doesn’t know? One minute he says, “We had medics on board my aircraft”; the next he’s saying, “I think . . . they did have a medic.” Here are the facts: If they had a medic—it’s if because the mission they were on is still classified and the Special Operations Command won’t release information to the public about the makeup of the ground forces involved and precisely what they were doing—that medic didn’t get close enough to lay hands on Jeff Pohl, to examine him, to check his breathing, take his blood pressure and pulse, to attempt to stop the external bleeding, to stabilize his broken pelvis before any attempt by his crewmembers to move him was made. Pohl says no medic examined him while he was trapped in the plane. And for the record, Don Tyler says he wasn’t examined by any of the ground troops either, not at the crash site, not even when he managed to make it inside Buss’s helicopter, where he sat moaning in excruciating pain from his mangled left shoulder.
Meantime, back inside Ditka 03’s crushed tail section, a desperate effort is under way to keep the trapped loadmaster alive until competent rescue help can arrive. With the help of two of the SOF shooters, the pilot tries digging the snow out from under Pohl, then grabs anything he can find—sweatshirts, mats, cardboard—and stuffs it under Pohl to provide some insulation. “Jeff was amazing,” recalls Cline. “He was stuck in there, busted up pretty bad, but he was cracking jokes and keeping us calm as we were trying to get him out of there.”
When copilot Wright returns to the plane, Cline tells him to find the crash ax and anything else they might be able to use to pry Pohl out. He begins looking around in the dark, trying to find it, when Cline reaches up and hands him an emergency exit light. Wright says, “I’d forgotten they pull right off the wall and you can walk around with them. For some reason I didn’t remember that, and when he handed it to me, I was, like, ‘Duh, I knew that all along.’ ” He ends up finding the ax as well as a couple of other poles he thinks might be useful as pry bars. He also finds one of the litters they carry on the plane, and passes that back as well.
Copilot Wright remembers Pohl saying, “This is a Kodak moment; can you get to my camera?” Wright says, “I remember thinking that I couldn’t do it, because if we didn’t get him out or something happened to him, I couldn’t explain to somebody that I was sitting there taking pictures rather than getting him out.” (Someone else found the camera and snapped a picture, which didn’t turn out.)
The likelihood of a bad outcome is staring everyone in the face. Two shooters inside the plane and one outside are hacking away at the metal with their commando knives as though their own lives depend on it. As good as those weapons might be in hand-to-hand combat, they aren’t up to this task, and it’s frustrating them to the point that one of them growls, “Where are they at with the REDS kit to get him out of here?” And another responds, “It should be here by now!” No one knew that the REDS kit and the PJs to operate it are miles away, refueling.
At the Joint Operation Center in Jacobabad, Pakistan, PJ T.Sgt. Ryan Schultz had been awakened as soon as controllers learned there was an MC- 130P down. Schultz had been at Jbad a month earlier, when a Marine C-130 crashed with no survivors—that crew lived right next door to the PJs—and as he began getting his team ready to deploy, he thought this would be another body-recovery mission. When he learned there were survivors, but that the special-tactics team hadn’t been inserted, he couldn’t believe it. “I was flabbergasted. It just blew my mind. If they had taken the PJs in first, they’d have had those guys off that mountain in less than thirty minutes. If they’d gone in with the REDS kit—all they needed was the ax out of there—ten seconds, the guy would’ve been out. All they needed was probably two inches to get his ankle out.”
But the five men working desperately to get Jeff Pohl out couldn’t get an inch, much less two. The crash ax on the 130 is similar to what civilian firemen use. With it, you can bash a hole in a bulkhead or wall, but it’s hardly a precision instrument to be swinging in a confined place where a victim is trapped. In contrast, the PJs’ ax has a sharp point at one end to poke a hole through aircraft aluminum; the other end of the extendable handle has what amounts to a giant lever-action can opener—sort of like the old military P-38 that GIs used for years to open C-ration cans.
Next they try to use a cargo strap to bend the metal. They’re able to pass one end through a hole in the crushed bulkhead, then try simultaneously lifting the strap from outside and inside, but they have no leverage.
The shooter working on Pohl outside the aircraft had cut his boot off, then cut the leg on his flight suit. While they can’t see bones protruding, everyone can see that the load’s leg made a hard right turn at the shin, right where it poked through the wall.
Inside, Jeff is complaining to Cline that his hands and feet are cold. “I ended up stripping off all my survival gear and just laying it down around him and putting his hands inside my flight suit to keep his hands warm.” But it is a stopgap measure, and everyone can sense it, including the trapped man.
The pilot wasn’t optimistic. “It just ended up getting to the point where he was fading, he was starting to get glassy-eyed and said, ‘Hey, you guys are really going to get me out of here, aren’t you?’ ”
Apparently he recognized that they were trying to free him without hurting him anymore, and it wasn’t working. Jason Wright said, “We were pulling on him, we were doing like a one-two-three, and John had his head, I was in the middle, and the guy on the outside was kind of pushing the skin. Another guy was guiding it from inside. We’d go ‘one-two-three, move,’ and the guy on the outside is, like, ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ It looks like it’s taking the meat off of his bone, like filleting the skin off his leg. And we said, ‘What do we do?’ And at that point exactly, Jeff was just, like, ‘Just get . . . just pull, just get me out of here,’ and that is all we needed.”
The shooter outside scoops up handfuls of the hydraulic fluid that is soaking into the snow and slathers it up and down Pohl’s injured leg while rescuers inside cut as much insulation as possible from around the aircraft structure where it has trapped Pohl’s leg.
Then Cline says, “Let’s go do it,” and they pull harder, once, then again. Pohl recalls hearing “all the bones crunch at that point.” They pop him free, but break his ankle in the process. Now it’s a matter of keeping him alive till they can get him off the mountain.
PJs Chris Young, Keary Miller, Jason Cunningham, and CCT Gabe Brown (Courtesy of S.Sgt. Chris Young)
CHAPTER 6
THE MOST RIGHTEOUS MISSION
FEBRUARY 13, 2002
The special tactics team being bounced over and through the forbidding Hindu Kush mountains inside Chalk 3 still can’t believe that the only guys with the training to save those eight lives, with the gear to save those lives, with the mission assignment to save those lives, haven’t been allowed to get to the injured as quickly as possible. Didn’t M*A*S*H teach us the military helicopter was invented to facilitate fast treatment of the wounded? The only military acronym that fit this situation to a T was SNAFU (a World War II creation that means “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up).
However cold and uncomfortable they are as involuntary passengers on the helo’s assigned mission to refuel before passing Go, collecting $200, or treating patients, they knew that the survivors are colder and more discomfited, especially the one trapped in the wreckage. They were well trained enough to know that he could have survivable injuries but succumb to hypothermia. The circumstances for it are ideal: a trauma victim, trapped and unable to move about to stay warm in a subzero environment, lying in contact with cold metal, clothes soaking wet from melting snow and fuel. Then comes the capper—if he had already become severely hypothermic and the other survivors or
the SOF troops attempt to move him improperly, they could unwittingly trigger a fatal heart attack as cold blood from his extremities pours into his heart.
Knowing that they’re going to be put on the ground once Chalk 3 tanks up, the pararescuemen are running medical treatment checklists in their minds. Assuming all the survivors are breathing and any bleeding has been controlled, the biggest dangers are shock and hypothermia. Right behind those is the possibility that well-intentioned but untrained folks can do a lot of permanent damage transporting victims who might have fractured their skulls, necks, or backs.
That’s why the Air Force spends, on average, a million bucks or more to train each of its PJs to be the most technically proficient members of the entire U.S. military in the conjoined skills of rescue and trauma care.
Maj. Brian Burlingame is chief of general surgery at Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home base of many of the special-ops forces fighting in Operation Enduring Freedom. At the time of the Ditka 03 crash, the thirty-six-year-old West Point graduate was on duty at Bagram, Afghanistan, where he commanded the 274th Forward Surgical Team. This is one of the so-called FST units that have replaced MASH outfits in the modern Army. The doctor has worked with the entire array of “far-forward medics” in the U.S. armed services, including the three PJs aboard Chalk 3, Young, Miller, and Cunningham. He calls them “some of the best prepared medically” he’s come in contact with.
“What makes the PJs special is that they have the medical ability, and they have the ability to get people out of bad places. I’m not an expert in the operational ‘how to get a guy out of a burning aircraft’ stuff that they do, or how to get a guy out from a flipped Humvee, or how to get a guy out of a firefight. They’re good at it, and their peers respect them for that and think they’re good at it. There are guys out there, organizationally—you’re not going to hear this from a lot of people—that are better on an across-the-board spectrum of medical care. But they’re not as good at going into bad places and pulling people out of there.”
None Braver Page 19