Chris Young wouldn’t quarrel with that evaluation of their medical skills. He’s quite clear in saying that PJ medical training is directed solely at trauma care. How do they keep a patient alive, with the best chance of recovery, for as long as it takes to get him to someone like Dr. Burlingame? In Operation Enduring Freedom, where distances are great and transportation difficult, that might mean twelve hours after they’ve extracted the casualty from the Humvee that struck a land mine. PJs don’t do sick call in garrison; they don’t generally go on long-range patrols with special operators nor take care of things like earaches or sprained ankles.
What they do is work day in and day out to maintain their bodies in peak condition so that when a Ditka 03 slams into a mountain, they’re ready, willing, and able to get to, stabilize, and rescue the survivors.
PJ team leader Chris Young has no recollection of how many times the pilots tried to hit the refueling drogue this time before they managed to make it stick and top off their tanks. He’s deep into monitoring radios, trying to get a mental picture of the crash site, trying to gather as much information as he can get and put it out to his teammates. Young knows that the instant they step off the helicopter and are no longer tied to its radios, CCT Gabe Brown will be his communication link to all of the air assets that are orbiting or en route to their location. Nothing in the area of responsibility takes precedence over a rescue mission; everyone wants a piece of the action, and they can all monitor SATCOM. Chris has to make certain that when that moment comes, the CCT knows what frequencies to dial up on his radios and what call signs to be listening for. Being able to simultaneously communicate with the wide variety of aircraft inbound to their position requires a unique kind of concentration; in this instance, they aren’t under fire, but lives could hang in the balance.
One thing Brown knows for certain is that the skies above them probably have or are about to have more air traffic overhead than a slow-moving car chase on a Los Angeles freeway. He surmises correctly that the RCC is already repositioning fighter aircraft to provide cover, should it be needed, and additional tanker aircraft will be diverted from other operations so that those fighters won’t have to travel too far to tank up and return.
Young had handpicked Jason Cunningham to join him for this overseas assignment. He’d been made aware that the young senior airman was coming through the pipeline and had kept tabs on him. Once Cunningham arrived at Moody, Young took him under his wing. He’d taught Jason a lot at Moody. They were both prior-service types—Jason from the Navy and Young from the Marine Corps. He liked the younger man’s medical skills and admired his motivation. And he really liked the fact that Jason was a dedicated PJ; he wanted to do the mission. “The really bad part about our job,” says the team leader, “is for us to do our job, harm has to happen to other people. I remember Jason saying before we came over, ‘I don’t want anything bad to happen, but I’m going to get a really good mission.’ ”
USAF aircraft down. Eight survivors. PJs on the scene—or almost there. Without a doubt it’s a really good mission, and for Cunningham, this is to be the first real-world test of his pararescue skills, and he doesn’t want to screw it up. He knows that Young’s responsibility will be the big-picture stuff: coordinating rescue on the ground, assessing the threat from hostile forces, dealing with available air assets. That means he and Miller are going to have primary responsibility for treating and moving patients. The one thing he can do right now is to lighten his kit as much as possible, exiting the helicopter with only those things he’ll really need. The first to go are the chicken plates in his body armor, the ceramic, dish-shaped pieces designed to stop bullets as well as shrapnel above waist level. With no apparent threat of hostile fire, that’s twenty pounds he can do without. He debates about the ammunition for his M-4 rifle, and then decides to hang on to the minimum basic load that he’s carrying. When he’s finished, the pack he’ll go out the door wearing weighs at least one hundred pounds.
Keary Miller has been in the Air Force for eleven years, all of it as a PJ, and risen to the rank of tech sergeant. He was under fire in Bosnia during a search for two French fighter pilots who’d gone down, but didn’t make the pickup, which he says is a matter of luck—or being in the right place at the right time. “I’ve seen guys be on alert on a location for sixty, seventy days, and then the day after they rotate out, a mission goes. Or a guy fresh out of school will get a mission, and guys have been in fifteen years haven’t done a mission. It doesn’t have much to do with how great of a PJ you are, but more with timing and luck.”
Like the others, he’s trained for years to handle everything from fast water—he’s based at Louisville, Kentucky, with the 123rd Special Tactics Squadron, which can be called out when the Ohio River floods—to the kind of mountainous terrain they’re flying over. Miller, too, is concerned about the weight they’ll be carrying, but opts to keep his body armor.
The pararescuemen are dressed in “full snivel gear.” Young laughs: “Y’know, sniveling, whining, crying, ‘It’s cold!’ Windstopper Gore-Tex, fleece, extreme-cold-weather boots, extreme-cold-weather gloves. The really bad part about our job is we spend a lot of time in the helicopter doing nothing. And so when you’re sitting around doing nothing, flying around at over ten thousand feet at night, it’s really cold. And you just sit there and shiver. So we try and dress for that.” Finally, they get word from the pilot: They have the fuel they need; they’re flying back to the crash site and are authorized to put the PJs on the ground.
Inside the wrecked plane, Pilot Cline, Copilot Wright, and the shooters are struggling with their next problem: how to get Jeff Pohl, who’s no longer trapped, onto a litter and out of the plane. They realized from the outset that it would be impossible to bring a litter to his side, get him on it, and then carry him out. What that means is that Pohl is going to have to help extract himself. With a lot of coaching and encouragement, he manages to do it by crawling over and around the wreckage till, exhausted and racked with pain but fighting to remain conscious, he reaches a spot where they’ll be able to get him onto the litter. That’s when a blast of cold air sweeps through the wrecked fuselage, plastering everyone with driven snow. Chalk 3 is coming in for a landing and has flown directly overhead.
The helo’s pilots begin to settle into a spot, decide it won’t work, pull out, and opt for another a bit higher up the knoll. This one works, and an hour and four minutes from the time of the crash, the PJs are on the ground, about fifty to seventy-five yards uphill from the plane. It takes Young about two seconds to realize that evacuating the injured isn’t going to be a walk in the park.
Wearing his medical rucksack and brimming with energy for his first combat rescue, Jason Cunningham steps off the helicopter first. Wile E. Coyote couldn’t have done it any better. Whoof! He’s up to his chest in almost five feet of snow. It gives Young the only laugh he’s had in hours.
If it had been near Aspen in the Colorado Rockies, someone would’ve been charging big bucks to bring skiers to this pristine powder. But it’s Afghanistan, and Cunningham knows there are men who need his help just yards away, and the thin crust atop the powder keeps breaking as he tries to use his arms to push himself out of it. Finally he figures the only way he’s going to move is if he takes off the ruck and throws it down the hill. Then he’s able to climb out of the hole, crawl across the snow to the ruck, and throw it again.
Keary Miller, meantime, has stepped off the ramp and into snow that comes up to his waist. He immediately sets out for the wreck, initially moving side by side with Young, and instantly feeling the effect of the thin air. “It’s not normal; you’re sucking wind two minutes into the mission. You’re breathing cold air. And sweating.” On the way downhill, he takes a fleeting moment to flip up his NVGs, the better to absorb the scene. Ditka 03 looks like a taxied 130 sitting in the snow. “There’s some busting, obviously, a little snow over the nose, but the wings are pretty much intact.” He remembers thinking that it was an amazi
ng sight, but he couldn’t give voice to the thought “because you’re doing everything you can to get a breath. You’re moving as fast as you can and you take one of those snap photos in the back of your mind while you’re breaking the snow.”
Despite the subzero temperatures and windchill, all three of the PJs are sweating profusely. The snivel gear, so essential when they’re cooling their heels inside the helicopter, has become a nuisance and is quickly removed in favor of the Air Force-issue Gore-Tex parkas to block the wind. Headgear is a simple balaclava, but by the time they’ve moved a significant distance downhill, they’ve even pulled those down around their necks.
While the team leader stops short of the downed plane in order to establish a choke point—a place where he can keep track of the number of people going downhill and coming back up—Miller and Cunningham join the survivors inside the rear of the fuselage. Pilot Cline offers, “Obviously we’re very happy to see those guys. They took control at that point. Jeff was busted up pretty bad. You’ve got to assume some sort of neck and spinal injuries and that kind of stuff. I was handling Jeff’s head; they gave me all the commands, quickly give us the tutorial on how to move him. We had a stretcher from inside the aircraft, but we still had to get him out. It was very confined, very cramped.”
And very noisy. Helicopters landing in bad-guy land keep their engines running in the event they need to make a hasty departure. With one 47 Echo downhill, and another uphill, the rescuers are getting hit with all that noise in stereo as they try to make themselves understood by the people whose help they need to get the loadmaster out of there without further injury.
Cline and the others move Pohl onto the stretcher and finally get the stretcher out of the aircraft into the snow. For a brief moment the pilot allows himself to think that they’re home free. Then he actually begins to comprehend that the second helicopter has landed a couple hundred feet up the hill from their position, and he knows it has just begun. He compares it to being in a nightmare where you’re being chased, but you can’t run away.
The good news is that once they have their patient outside the plane the PJs can actually move with relative ease. In the cramped space where they found Pohl, they couldn’t do more than a cursory assessment of his condition. Now Miller and Cunningham do the basic ABCs—checking to see that he’s maintained an airway and stopped bleeding, and making sure his circulation is good.
Pohl quickly curls into a fetal position on the litter. It’s one of the signs of hypothermia, and is to be expected. How bad off is he? Miller says, “I kind of thought he was critical, that he needed to get out of there. Not very alert, not really talking to us. Not really knowing what’s going on. So there was some urgency to get this guy out of here.”
It’s at this point that Chris makes the decision to split up his team. He orders Cunningham and CCT Gabe Brown to head for Lieutenant Colonel Buss’s helicopter and look after the five survivors who are already there, opting to keep the pilot and copilot close by, not only so they can help move the loadmaster up the hill, but because he surmises that while they’ve been so involved in the efforts to extract Pohl from the wreckage, the full impact of what’s happened hasn’t hit them yet. It’s when they have time to sit down and do nothing but reflect on the disaster that they’ll be in danger of lapsing into depression and shock. Besides, with five potential patients on the other bird, novice PJ Jason Cunningham already has his hands full.
If the trip down from the helicopter to the plane, breaking through the snow’s crust and sinking waist-deep, had its comical elements, the trip back up the hill is nightmarish. Two shooters, the pilot and copilot, and both PJs begin a six-man litter-carry of the 175-pound loadmaster. Miller says, “It was literally, move a couple feet, take a couple breaths, move a couple feet.”
Young knows the only way they can get it done is with “straight-up manpower. You’re in the snow, and everybody, one-two-three, you lift it up, move it, and set it back down. And then you reposition and you just keep moving until you get him up into the helicopter.”
For Copilot Wright, the climb up the hill was the hardest climb of his life. “I felt like I was slowing people down at that point; I just couldn’t breathe, and you’re trying to move and you’d fall down, and the guy in front of you is falling down, the guy behind you, and then the litter would tilt and he’d start to slide off it or fall down the hill. You’d just reach in to grab him to hold him on there. Everybody was just kind of chugging and chugging, and after a while, we get to the point where we’d move five feet and stop, and then finally we got to the end of the climb, right at the helicopter, and it was just about four feet away from where we were sitting to getting him in the helicopter, and nobody could move, we were just so exhausted.”
Pilot Cline remembers the ordeal this way: “It’s five feet of snow uphill two hundred feet, and every second or third step two or three of us would break through up to our waist in snow and fall and drop the stretcher. We’re moving him inches at a time, and it just seemed like forever. I think it took us over twenty minutes just to go the two hundred feet up to the helicopter, much less being under the rotor blast, freezing him. He’s already freezing to death right in front of us, and we’re underneath the rotors. Once we got inside the rotor disk and it was blowing some hot exhaust on us, it was a little better, but there was a while there where I just couldn’t believe this was real. It was like living in a cartoon. Deliverance is a hundred feet away in that helicopter, and it was all we could do to move him six inches at a time, a foot at a time.”
The PJ team leader doesn’t actually know how long the uphill carry took. He does know that he makes a point of staying in top physical condition, and this rescue whipped him. “I just remember that by the time we got there, I could barely breathe. Y’know, you’re moving this guy and you’re at that altitude and making all sorts of weird breathing noises. Everything else is frozen around you, but then you notice, ‘Hey, I’m sweating. Wow. This is bad.’ ”
What may be a bad moment for Young is actually a victory for Ditka 03’s pilot. “When we finally got in the helicopter, it was a rush. The weight of the world got off me, to see the guys in there. The PJs were just machines. I mean, that’s the thing. This team was amazing.”
While the two PJs and Pilot Cline board the helicopter with the injured loadmaster, Wright realizes he has to go back down to the wrecked plane and retrieve the crypto bag and other classified items. “Standing there, I felt like I was dying, but I knew I had to go back. There was no way I couldn’t go back.”
As he starts the arduous downhill trek, Wright gets his first good look at the wrecked plane, sitting in the snow, and recalls thinking, like the teenager who borrows Dad’s car and wrecks it, “Oh, man, are we in big trouble now.”
“When I got down there, there were two guys coming around the plane with the stuff, and I grabbed it out of their hands to make sure they had the right stuff. I had put it outside when I came out earlier, ’cause I’d made several trips back and forth to get stuff that John was asking for. And I grabbed a couple other things.”
Now he’s got to climb back up the hill with the two shooters. But even though he knows the helicopter is waiting for him so they can take off, he has to beg for a moment’s rest, shaking off one of the shooters who’s trying to help him. “If he pulled on me,” he later said, “I would just fall down, I was breathing so hard.”
Inside Chalk 1, “Radio” Rodney Young’s normally ebullient personality has officially become a casualty of war. After hearing flight engineer Jeff Doss say, “My back hurts. My butt hurts. What happened?” one time too many, he explodes. Doss thinks he remembers Radio saying, “Look, if you ask me this again, I’m gonna kill you.” He’s not sure, because he had gotten an extreme headache, which he now realizes was partially due to the concussion he’d suffered in the crash, but was also due to the fact that Rodney is soaked in fuel. Doss says, “It was like sitting next to a pile of gas-soaked rags.”
Rodn
ey would not quibble with that description. In fact, he’d likely blame his short temper on the fact that the jet fuel that sprayed him when the tank above his radio position ruptured has now soaked through his clothes to his skin. And it burns. The sensation starts in his legs, and, much to his chagrin, it is working its way up.
On the opposite side of the helo, Chris Langston is concerned that there is nothing he and George Akins can do for Don Tyler except snuggle up and try to keep him warm. Someone had tossed a sleeping bag over them, but they are still sitting directly on the cold metal deck. To make matters worse, Tyler can’t remain sitting upright—he keeps sliding and falling over, which just sharpens the pain emanating from his shoulder. The cold he can cope with; he’d grown up in Michigan. But he’s never experienced pain like this before.
Finally, close to ninety minutes after the crash occurred, Radio watches help arrive in the person of pararescueman Jason Cunningham. “He gets in the helicopter, he’s got snow caked all over his pants, and he’s lugging this big-ass backpack. And we’re blocking his way. He’s trying to lug this thing over us through the helicopter, so I kind of move my legs, make way for him.”
No one asks what took him so long to get there, but the PJ offers a humorous explanation. “I just had to go from one side of the airplane to the other side of the airplane with this big one-hundred-fifty-pound pack. Whew! That’s a long way to carry this pack.”
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