He approaches Langston first. There must be something about meeting a guy for the first time who you know is there to save your ass, because Chris remembers the conversation verbatim. “When he looked at me, I said, ‘I’m the least hurt,’ so he went to each one of them, and he came back to me last, and he said, ‘Hey, how’s everything going?’ I said, ‘Everything’s going great. I’m a little startled right now, but everything’s going great.’ He asked me where I was from, and when I told him, he said, ‘Hey, my name’s Senior Airman Jason Cunningham, PJ, United States Air Force.’ I said, ‘Hey, good to go.’ He said, ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ I said, ‘I’m fine. Not that I can feel or anything. I’m perfectly fine.’ He said, ‘Okay, just keep drinking water.’ Then he went back to each one of the other guys.”
Don Tyler also remembers Cunningham’s arrival. “He was like a ray of sunshine in that dark night. He pretty much put his face right in my face, ’cause it was so noisy and screamed at me, ‘Sir, I’m Airman Cunningham, and I’m your PJ.’ He had a small chem light in his mouth as he was hovering over me. I remember just looking up and seeing that chem light in his mouth, and he was checking me for injuries. He hooked up an IV bag—and I was just begging for some painkiller. Finally he started giving me some morphine.”
While waiting to see if Tyler will get some relief from the painkiller, Cunningham steps across the helicopter to see how flight engineer Jeff Doss is doing. Doss recalls, “He’d come up to me and asked me how I felt, and I remember telling him that my neck was sore, my back was sore, but the worst part was my tailbone was killing me.
“I remember distinctly him screaming at me, ‘Don’t move!’ And at that point, I kind of froze and didn’t do anything unless he told me to. He was very forceful. He got my attention.”
Cunningham leaves for a moment, then returns with a backboard and straps Doss to it; then he goes back to check on Tyler. The morphine drip isn’t making a perceptible difference in his pain. “He kept giving me morphine, morphine, morphine, and I was not getting any relief. I kept asking him, and he said something like, ‘Sir, I can’t give you any more. I’ve given you the limit.’ I said, ‘You’re giving me fuckin’ placebos!’ And I thought it was kinda funny when I said it, and then he kinda grinned at me. I guess he wasn’t, but I wasn’t getting any relief.”
During Cunningham’s treatment of Tyler, the shooters who had gone down to help at the crash site board, and Chalk 1 lifts off.
By this time, Rodney has endured the fuel soaking into his skin long enough. “This stuff is burning, and it’s burning up my thigh and inner thigh, and it’s starting to get to the family jewels, and I start getting nervous. I know it’s gasoline, and for some reason, the irritation is spreading. So then I look over at Cunningham, who seems to be just tidying up in his bag. I think he’s done with Tyler, so I say, ‘Hey, c’mere for a second. I got some gas all over me. It’s starting to burn really bad down here. We gotta get this off.’ So he cuts off my flight suit pant leg, rips up the inseam, and then he rips up the side of my torso and up my arm, so I got half a flight suit just hanging on me. And he gets some water or saline, and the cotton gauze pads, and he starts wiping it down. He gets close to the jewels and says, ‘I think you can handle it from here.’ ”
Back in Chalk 3, the PJs are concerned that Jeff Pohl might not survive the two-hour flight back to the FST team at Bagram. They’re kneeling on the floor in the back of a freezing cold helicopter doing roughly 150 mph thousands of feet up in the Hindu Kush mountains with the rear ramp and windows wide open. They’ve got a sleeping bag ready for Pohl, but it hasn’t been warmed because they didn’t leave anyone on board sitting in it. Somehow they’ve got to get him out of his soaking-wet clothing and into the bag without making things worse. So they begin cutting the injured man’s clothes off of him, one appendage at a time, covering him up with a sleeping bag, then peeling back another section and cutting that off. What they discover is that while moving him up to the helicopter, they managed to pack snow between his body and his Gore-Tex jacket, effectively lowering his body temperature even more. So while some of them scoop the snow out and try and dry him off, the two PJs are activating MRE food-warming heater packs and packing them around the now barely conscious patient.
As Chris Young feared, hypothermia is a big problem. PJs are trained in measures to actively rewarm a patient—feeding him a high-sugar drink of hot water mixed with a packet of sugary, energy-producing Jell-O, or giving him massive amounts of warmed IV fluids. But an initial examination indicated that the victim’s pelvis was unstable. Pushing fluids runs the risk of elevating his blood pressure, which can cause him to throw a blood clot and increase internal bleeding. And internal bleeding is one of the few things PJs can’t do anything about. The only treatment for that, they kid, is bright lights and cold steel—surgery.
The helicopter ride highlighted another aspect of training that Air Force pararescuemen receive that other far-forward medics don’t: providing high-level treatment inside a blacked-out, crowded aircraft that’s often bouncing through the sky in what seems like three dimensions at once. One training exercise to prepare them for moments like this is to place a volunteer patient—“Airman, lie down on the litter; you just volunteered to be the victim”—in the bed of a pickup truck, and with his buddies bouncing the truck up and down to simulate a rough plane ride, the trainee has to start an IV in the volunteer’s arm. And that’s routine training.
Even as he’s working on the loadmaster, Young is trying to keep tabs on the other two survivors they’ve brought on board, and just moments after they’ve lifted off, he sees a flash of panic race across the pilot’s face. Cline has just recalled that he’d told the other five crewmembers to get on the first helicopter, but has never confirmed that they’d done so. Chris speaks to the aircraft commander, who makes a radio call. Within a minute or two he has the answer. “We got eight. Five on the other helicopter, you three here.”
With that question resolved, Cline needs something to do. Every time he leans over and tries to talk to the injured loadmaster, he gets in the PJs’ way and they have to push him aside. The problem is figuring out a way to keep the pilot involved in the process, but out of their way. Finally Keary Miller suggests he move down to Pohl’s feet and see what he can do to warm them up. “I reached up underneath the sleeping bag and just kind of started rubbing Jeff’s feet, and they were just frozen bricks. And at that point, y’know, the whole night I didn’t experience any terror or horror or any real fear. For some reason, I don’t know why your mind gloms onto certain things, but I was preoccupied with the idea that Jeff might be disfigured from this thing. That he might lose any fingers or toes terrified me. That was the thing that burned in my mind. ‘My God, I do not want to be responsible for disfiguring someone.’ ”
So he starts blowing on the loadmaster’s toes, a moment Chris Young hasn’t forgotten. “I’m looking around, looking for the aircraft commander. And he’s actually down at my patient’s feet. He’s got his head underneath the sleeping bag, blowing on his feet and rubbing on them.” Young gets a quizzical look in his eyes. “It’s really odd to see a major curled up around some enlisted dude’s feet, blowing on ’em.”
At that moment, no one has time to reflect on the fact that the patient whose life and limbs they’re trying to save doesn’t have to be in this predicament. But for the decision of Lieutenant Colonel Buss, they could have had him out of the wreckage in minutes, instead of his being trapped, bleeding and reaching the brink of a frozen death. Despite his West Point education, where he should have learned the importance of caring for one’s troops, Lieutenant Colonel Buss never even bothered to walk fifteen feet back from the cockpit to the freezing cargo area of his own helicopter to offer encouragement to five guys who had just cheated death and were hurting. Perhaps he couldn’t face men who needed medical attention knowing he’s the one responsible for their having none for well over an hour?
Major Cline stayed bes
ide Jeff Pohl for the duration of the flight to Bagram. “People were handing me those little pocket chemical warmers, so I started wrapping those around the toes on his broken leg, and trying to rub and rub and rub. And then I ended up touching his other foot, and it was just a frozen brick; that was supposedly his good foot. So then I started rubbing both feet.
“I guess it was almost a two-hour helicopter ride, and about halfway through the flight, Jeff started flexing both of his ankles, started moving both of his feet. A wave of relief came over me. I thought, ‘Hey, the wiring is still there, it still works.’ Once he started moving his feet around, moving his ankles around, I thought, ‘Hey, y’know, maybe . . . It’s all small shit from here on out. Jeff’s okay, we didn’t kill anybody.’
“About every ten minutes, I’d give this helpless glance up to the PJs. They were taking his vitals. I don’t know what the procedure is, but obviously they were keeping the field hospital updated on his vital signs every ten minutes or so, radioing his blood pressure and everything. Every time, I was just begging for some feedback, and they’d give me the thumbs-up, hey, he’s doing all right, he’s alive, he’s conscious, he’s working. I tell you, aside from their technical expertise at trying to save somebody, they had a bedside manner that was exactly what I needed.”
Copilot Jason Wright had never been in an MH47 before this flight. He recalls being a bit uncertain when he finally climbed aboard and walked to the front, where the PJs were already working on the loadmaster. Chris Young handed him a sleeping bag to cover up with, and an MRE heater to warm his hands. “I couldn’t feel my hands at all. It was freezing. The first thing he said to me was, like, ‘What branch are you?’ and I said, ‘Air Force,’ and he said something like, ‘The best damn branch’ or something like that to me. Then introduced himself and he’s, like, ‘Hey, I’m Chris Young, a United States Air Force PJ.’ I was so impressed at that point, because finally I knew someone else was in control of the situation and was going to take care of it, and I felt better about it, at least.
“It made me realize that he was going to take care of Jeff, and I could relax for a second. I hadn’t been able to sit still for a second to realize what had happened. So it was weird, because I’d seen it in a movie before, and I’d thought, ‘That’s kind of corny that they’d say that to you,’ but it was weird to me when it actually happened. I can’t believe how much it calmed me down and made me feel better about what was going on, at least. He sat me down and got me in a sleeping bag, got me warmed up, and I was just like, ‘This guy’s the man. I’ve got nothing to worry about, ’cause he’s going to take care of Jeff.’ ”
Part of Chris Young’s bedside manner included keeping the pilot and copilot Cline from knowing just how bad off their loadmaster was. The truth? The PJs thought they were going to lose him. Chris Young says Pohl’s level of consciousness kept fluctuating. “We were fighting hypothermia in him; I knew he had internal injuries; he could only be saved by a surgeon. It’s not like he had a gunshot wound and I could stop the bleeding. He had internal injuries and there was nothing more we could do. At one point I went to the [special operations] team that was on board the aircraft and I asked them to pray for my patient. And one of the guys says, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I said, ‘Honestly, I think he’ll die before we land.’ ”
Nevertheless, the two PJs and one SAS medic continue to do what they can for Pohl, while keeping an eye on the other two crash survivors. The conversation they had with the ambulatory survivors really has several purposes: to put them at ease, to assess their condition, and to make certain that once the stress of actually surviving the crash subsides, they haven’t lapsed into depression or shock. Once Young has Cline involved in caring for the loadmaster, he turns to the copilot, who is just sitting there, staring into space. “In a crash like that . . . you can’t let people dwell on what they just did. You have to give them something else to think about, something to keep their mind active. And so I told him, ‘Hey, sir, I need your help over here.’ And he said, ‘Oh, oh, okay.’ We wanted his help and he was eager to provide it. Once we got him into the fight, he was talking to my patient the whole time, making sure he’s conscious. We kept asking him questions over and over again: ‘Do you know where you are? Do you know what happened? Where did you go to high school? How long have you been in the Air Force?’ Things like that, just so everybody has a part in the game.”
Wright remembers being told, “ ‘Do not let him go to sleep. You gotta keep him awake; don’t let him go to sleep at all.’ So they were watching me when I was watching him. I would talk to him, and he would respond to my voice. I’d say, ‘Jeff, open your eyes,’ and talk to him about anything I could talk to him about. And they would be watching, ’cause if I looked down and his eyes were closed, I’d see a hand come in and tap him or shake him, even flick him on the cheek.”
For more than two hours, including time for aerial refueling, the two PJs, the surviving pilot and copilot, and at least one special operator tend to Jeff Pohl. For Wright, the flight seems to take forever, and it is made even longer by the fact that they can all see that Jeff’s condition appears to be worsening.
By the time they land at the American base at Bagram, the sun is coming up. Medical personnel back a Humvee up to the ramp at the rear of Chalk 3, and rush Pohl to the FST facility in the base of the control tower. At the same time, the five Ditka 03 crewmembers who are with PJ Jason Cunningham aboard Chalk 1 have also landed and are brought to the hospital. Maj. Brian Burlingame was in charge of the facility and remembered examining Pohl.
“The skinny on him is that he came in, he had critical injuries, and in the broad spectrum they were potentially life-threatening, but he was not going to die right now. He needed significant care. Pretty much everyone’s hypothermic when they come in. He needed to be warmed, he needed fluid, he needed blood, he needed an orthopedic surgeon, and he needed a general surgeon to assess the rest of his wounds.”
Burlingame had no idea what the PJs had gone through to get Pohl to his forward hospital in survivable condition. “It’s tough, because I see the product they bring me, but I don’t see what they had to go through to get it. Occasionally I hear stories about the environment, the conditions of, ‘He was stuck beneath this thing; I had to use these devices to get him out.’ For me, it’s always just fascination that, ‘Wow, how wonderful what you guys do.’ And it’s kind of the same thing when people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, you guys, you do a great job, you do wonderful stuff,’ and it’s like, ‘This is easy; this is no big deal.’ And that’s how they talk about their job, y’know. ‘Oh, hey, you went in, you brought these eight guys out. You’re phenomenal.’ They’re like, ‘It’s no big deal. We just did our job. It was not hard.’ They’re very matter-of-fact. The only thing they ever embellish on is the depth of the snow. I think it goes from, like, four inches to four feet over the course of a couple of discussions. But other than that, they’re very humble as a group when it comes down to game time.”
In the hospital, medics treat the cuts on Don Tyler’s face and knee. Then they take him a couple of hundred yards to the British medical facility, where X-ray equipment is available. It’s quickly determined that he has what one doc describes as “a horrible dislocation of his left shoulder,” and will need to have it reduced immediately. Since they will need to take a postreduction X ray, there is no point dragging him back to the American OR for the procedure to, in layman’s terms, put his upper arm bone back in the socket.
Don recalls being told, “ ‘We’re going to put you to sleep with the gas and set your arm.’ It was a beautiful thing—they had a pretty blond nurse with a British accent holding my hand as they put me to sleep.”
The operation is performed under general anesthesia by an American orthopedic surgeon and nurse-anesthetist working side by side with a British surgeon in the Brit hospital.
At roughly the time the helicopter with the PJs lands at the crash site, word gets back to the 9th Special Oper
ations Squadron at Hurlburt Field in the Florida panhandle that the crash had occurred.
The eleven-hour time difference made it just after six P.M. CST Monday evening. The squadron immediately attempted to notify the wives of the married crewmembers, but when they were unable to get through on the phone to tell Barbara Tyler about the accident—her daughter was on the computer tying up the line—they sent an Air Force captain out to the Tyler home with orders to pick her up and bring her back to the base, where she’d get briefed.
Unfortunately, when the uniformed Air Force officer pulled up in front of their home, Mrs. Tyler was several miles away, watching their son take his tae kwon do lesson, and their thirteen-year-old daughter was home alone. When the officer came to the door, she wouldn’t let him in the house, but, recognizing the unit patch on his shoulder, she figured he was legitimate, so she kept the door locked, went into the kitchen and wrote down her mom’s cell phone number, and handed it through the door to the officer.
The captain returned to his car and called Barbara. “Mrs. Tyler, there’s been a problem with Major Tyler’s plane.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Well, I can’t tell you that,” he responded, adding, “but all I can tell you is, he’s alive.”
She immediately began trembling. Then she got a grip. “The first thing that went through my mind is, ‘Okay, he’s alive. My kids can’t hear this unless they hear it from me.’ The second thing was not to frighten them, because I didn’t have enough information to give to my kids. I didn’t want them to get the pieces of information that I was going to get; I wanted them to know in a calm way.”
The captain wanted to know where she was; his orders were to pick her up and bring her to the base. But until she made arrangements for someone to watch the children, she wasn’t going anywhere, so she refused to provide her location, telling him instead to call her back in five minutes. In that interval, Mrs. Tyler made arrangements for friends to take care of the kids. When the captain called back from his car parked in the Tylers’ driveway, she said, “You’re going to see a woman walk across the lawn and come into my house and take care of my daughter. Once that happens, then please come get me.”
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