At about the same time as Barbara Tyler was being notified, the squadron was also trying to reach Jyl Cline, the wife of the pilot. She’d come home from her job as a budget analyst with a weapons contractor at Eglin Air Force Base, changed into sweats, and was on the treadmill saying the rosary when she noticed the phone ringing. Figuring whoever was calling would call back, she ignored it. Five minutes later it rang again, three times, and then the caller hung up. “Strange,” she thought. It happened several more times, when suddenly, “Somebody was banging on the front door.” Her two Labrador retrievers began barking, and the banging continued.
Now Jyl was scared. This had been going on for half an hour. She grabbed the phone and called her brother down the street, and as she did so, she looked through a window and saw a man in a green flight suit walking back toward her front door. She recognized the man as an officer in John’s squadron. He said, “Jyl, let me in.”
“I said no, and started crying,” she recalls. “I remember saying, ‘Some thing’s happened, hasn’t it?’ and he said, ‘Yes. Jyl, open the door. There’s been a crash but John is alive.’ ”
She opened the door and let the officer in. He said, “There’s been a crash. He’s alive and he’s in American hands. You need to come to the squadron for a briefing.”
The timing of the notification of the families is extraordinary. The crash happened at three-thirty A.M. Afghan time, on February 13 (coincidentally, 0213 was the tail number of the Ditka 03 aircraft), which computes to four-thirty P.M. at Eglin Air Force Base on February 12. Officers from the 9th Special Operations Squadron were knocking on the door of the wives’ homes by six P.M. local time, less than ninety minutes after the crash—and while the Ditka 03 crew was still on the mountainside. It’s conceivable that at the moment Jyl Cline was being notified, her husband was still on his hands and knees inside the wreckage, trying to dig the injured loadmaster out.
Changing into the same black jeans and sweater she’d worn to work that day, Jyl rode to the base with her brother and sister-in-law for the briefing that was to begin at eight. “When I walked into the squadron, I was overwhelmed. I opened the door and there were green flight suits beyond the eye, and they were all staring at me. And I knew right then John was dead; I knew he was.”
Only four of the crewmembers were married at the time of the crash, and only three of the wives were in the area that night. Eventually, Jyl Cline, Barbara Tyler, and Amy Akins, the wife of the other navigator, were all gathered in a private room for a briefing by the squadron commander. Jyl recalls the colonel saying, “There’s been a crash as they were coming along a mountain ridge. We’re unsure of the injuries, although we do know that there are some arm and back injuries. As we get more information, we’ll keep you informed by the minute.”
And then he said, “God shined on us tonight because he’s going to bring eight heroes home.” Jyl Cline promptly fell apart.
After a group prayer, the wives were told that their husbands would be home in two days.
By eleven-thirty Barbara Tyler was back home, where the unit’s acting squadron commander called her with updates throughout the night. She also heard from the commander of the hospital at Hurlburt, who filled her in on Don’s condition, even to the point of telling her what the X rays taken at the British hospital were showing.
What made the situation especially difficult for her to explain to the kids was that their dad shouldn’t even have been on Ditka 03 when it slammed into the mountain. He should have been retired, a civilian, out of the Air Force. But he’d been caught in what the military calls “stop loss.” It can cover everyone in the service, or be job specific. Don was a navigator; the Air Force was short of navs; ergo, the Tyler family’s plans for Don to retire and build a new home not far away were put on indefinite hold.
During that first night, Barbara says she must have answered the phone forty times, but the one that came around two-forty-five was special. She picked up the phone to hear her husband say, “I’m okay. I’m coming home.” No preliminaries, no “Hello,” just, “I’m coming home.”
Barbara recalls that his speech was “really, really bad, and his voice was very weak.” She asked, “What’s wrong with your speech? Did you hit your head?”
Don replied, “My mouth is dry. I’m coming home. I gotta go.”
“That was it,” she says. “The whole conversation took less than twenty seconds.”
The unit called Jyl Cline every two hours through the night with updates on John’s location and condition. They told her when he was en route to the FST team at Bagram, and when he arrived there; when he was on the way to K-2, and when he arrived there. The first call told her that they already knew John was capable of walking and appeared to have no serious injuries. At four-thirty in the morning her phone rang and it was John, on a radio patch from the hospital at Karshi-Khanabad, where they both had to say “over” at the end of each thought. “He was there with his crew and said he wanted to be with them because it was very therapeutic to stay together. His voice was elevated when he told me how happy he was to be alive. He said, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t believe we did this and walked away.’ He was very upbeat, very positive.”
Before John left on his deployment to Operation Enduring Freedom, Jyl had given him a scapular that had been carried by her father, a B-17 bomber pilot in World War II. He’d been shot down twice, and survived, and Jyl thought it might be a good omen for her husband to carry it. He agreed, and before each flight removed his wedding ring—all jewelry must be removed before flying—and would wrap it in the small piece of blessed cloth, and place it in the zippered pocket of his flight suit directly over his heart. In that first phone call, John told her, “I touched my heart, and I thought it saved your Dad’s life, and it saved me.”
Having injured servicemen call home as soon as they’re able had developed almost into policy in Operation Enduring Freedom. The military had to do it in response to two separate and distinct problems created by the miracle of modern communications. One problem was described as “the CNN effect,” even though it wasn’t network-specific. Television coverage in the war zone was extensive—although not as omnipresent as it would be in Iraq—and almost as soon as reporters learned that Americans had been wounded or injured in a crash, the report would be broadcast. Even though they didn’t announce names of the injured, nor their unit designation, loved ones back home would typically get a call from a friend saying that, for example, “a C-130 just crashed.” Well, there are a lot of C-130s flying around OEF, but human nature being what it is, until it can be ruled out that it’s not your significant other’s plane, the possibility remains that it might be.
The other problem was the result of servicemen overseas having relatively easy access to the military’s DSN telephone network and e-mail system. All it took was one man to call or e-mail back home to his wife or girlfriend, who would then get on the phone to other spouses in the unit, and before any official notification could be made, the spouse of the injured GI would get a well-intentioned call expressing concern, or worse, condolences.
That explains the Army field telephone being thrust into Don Tyler’s hands as soon as the medics felt he was capable of conveying the notion that he had, indeed, survived the crash. It also explains the brevity of the call; he was on morphine and other painkillers and was in no condition to chat.
With their patients turned over to the FST unit, the three PJs, Chris Young, Keary Miller, and Jason Cunningham, raided the unit’s supply room and restocked their med rucks. When they went back out to clean up the helicopters and prepare for the next mission, Jason took advantage of the lull to relive the events of the night with Chris, describing what symptoms each patient exhibited, and asking his mentor if he’d handled each one properly. As the senior PJ would have expected, Jason had performed flawlessly.
It was while they were cleaning up that Cunningham reminded Young that he had predicted they’d get a good mission. Young said, “Hey, this isn�
�t how it always happens. It’s the luck of the draw.”
Exhausted from the activities of the previous night, Young had one more thing to do before he could get some sleep: attend the mission debriefing. In the Air Force, everyone who participates is encouraged to speak his or her mind, irrespective of rank or position. It’s the time to call a spade a spade, sort it out, and learn from the experience. That’s the Air Force. What Young discovered was that the Army doesn’t play by the same rules. This debriefing in the command tent was being presided over by Lieutenant Colonel Buss, the mission commander whose judgment vis-à-vis the PJs was seriously in question.
At the end of the session, they typically go around the room, asking if anyone has any questions or anything they want to add. When they got to the Special Tactics Team, Young rolled a verbal grenade onto the table. “Yes, sir, why did it take us an hour and four minutes to get down to the patients?”
At first Buss attempted to mollify the staff sergeant with his the-helicopter-needed-fuel explanation. Young wasn’t buying it. “Sir, I was fighting hypothermia in my patient the entire time because of this hour and four minutes he was lying in this aircraft wreckage.”
Buss sat there in front of the forty or so people in the tent and took a respectfully delivered tongue-lashing for a little bit. Finally, as one person recalls it, Buss said something like, “Sergeant Young, sit down and be quiet.” It wasn’t surprising that the lieutenant colonel appeared not to like having his judgment publicly questioned by an Air Force E-5, especially an E-5 who believed in his heart that he’d just watched interservice rivalry nearly kill his patient. Moments later, non-Army personnel in attendance were asked to leave the meeting, so the flight crews could do an “in-house debrief.”
Young and other PJs in Operation Enduring Freedom knew that prior to the Ditka 03 mission, the Army special operations helicopter units were less than thrilled about being told by the joint command to carry Air Force PJs on their birds. Army officers contended that their own medics were quite capable of carrying out the CSAR mission. They had the training; they even had their own version of the REDS kit. The difference is that it’s not their bread and butter.
Chris Young is realistic about the skills of pararescuemen. As self-assured as he and his colleagues are, they’re not the type to overplay their hand. But if there’s a lesson learned from the Ditka 03 mission, one that he wants the Army, Navy, Marines, and even the Coast Guard to understand, it’s this: “If I had to go into a foreign land and treat the natives and all that, that’s a Special Forces medic’s job. They do that better than absolutely anybody. Nobody tries to say that they can do water missions better than the Navy SEALs. Our main thing is trauma, trauma care on airframes, especially helicopters, things like that, blacked out, and rescue is what we do better than anybody else. Why? That’s our sole purpose in life.”
Over the next few weeks as combat and accidents claimed American lives, Jason Cunningham found time to reflect on war, his role in it, and what could happen. He wrote a letter to be given to his wife, Theresa, if the worst should happen. In it, Jason apologized for not always being the best husband and for the hardships she would face if he died. It was not an atypical letter for a young man new to combat and seeing death close at hand for the first time to give to a buddy.
I could not leave this earth without saying good-bye to you. I will miss you and the girls immensely, wrote Cunningham. You have always been the best wife. I want you to know I died a happy man, happy that I met you and happy that I have two wonderful girls.
Chris Young, who is five years older than Jason, was much more circumspect about his situation when he talked with his wife on the phone after she’d seen reports of the Ditka crash on CNN. “She was pretty amped up about it, because she knows all the different airframes we fly on, and when I talked to her, she asked, ‘Were you involved in a C-130 crash?’ and I was, like, ‘Uh . . . ’
“ ‘I got two questions: Were you on it or were you the one who rescued it?’ I said, ‘We rescued it.’ She said, ‘Okay, that’s fine.’ ”
Young has thought a lot about what he does—what they do, and why they continue to do it. “The main thing that I love most about being rescue versus being a Marine is that when you’re in almost all the other services, what you do is the result of somebody’s political will. ‘This would look good,’ or ‘that would look good,’ or, ‘what if this? Give them this mission, or that mission.’ And in rescue, we don’t have to worry about that. We have without a doubt the most righteous mission in the entire military, because we don’t have to worry about bad intel, going in and hitting the wrong target or anything like that, or having a bomb stray off course. When we go in, we’re going to get an American or one of our allies, and that’s it. It doesn’t get any better than that. We’re recovering our friends. That’s what we live for.”
Radio operator Rodney Young’s slit-open flight suit has been replaced with a hospital gown so small he risks arrest for indecent exposure when he steps outside the FST unit. Neither modesty, nor the fact that he could freeze his ass off, keeps him from grabbing this opportunity to enjoy his first cigarette since leaving Jbad. And there is only a moment’s hesitation when he discovers that the pack of Newports that had been in his fleece jacket have been marinated in jet fuel. This is combat, where you smoke ’em if you got ’em. No matter what they’ve been dipped in.
Loadmaster Chris Langston discovers that his smokes have also become a casualty of the crash. The pack he kept in his lower leg flight-suit pocket was bloodstained. He’d managed to nick his shin during the crash and it took three stitches to fix it properly. Chris is also getting used to being called “Ninja Boy,” the nickname someone laid on him after learning about his perfect midair somersault during the crash.
Several hours after arriving at Bagram, the Ditka 03 crew is put aboard a medical evac Herc for the ninety-minute flight to Karshi-Khanabad. To stave off frostbite to vital parts, Rodney had managed to borrow jeans and a sweatshirt from another airman. A special in-flight medical team attended loadmaster Jeff Pohl, the only crewmember in critical condition. Navigator Don Tyler, his recently set shoulder still giving him off-the-scale pain, is doped up for the trip. Flight engineer Jeff Doss is still strapped to a backboard.
At K-2, more X rays of Tyler’s shoulder are taken, and it’s determined that he and Pohl will be sent by giant C-5 Galaxy jet to the principal U.S. military medical facility in Europe, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, five kilometers from Ramstein Air Base, near Frankfurt, Germany. Aside from the fact that his pain isn’t under control, all Tyler remembers of that six-hour trip is that he spent four hours of it trying to pee, which is a good trick when you’re on your back, strapped to a gurney. He’d been told that a catheter with his name on it was standing by in case he couldn’t. It was an effective motivator.
Meantime, the remaining six members of the crew are hospitalized for observation—and they get an overabundance of that, medical and otherwise, since they’ve taken on the mythic role of “the crew that crashed their plane into a mountain and walked away.”
The day after they arrive is Ash Wednesday. Even though only a couple of the men are Catholic, it somehow is decided that they’ll go to Mass en masse. So, wearing hospital gowns and slippers, they walk the quarter mile down muddy roads to the tent that serves as the chapel in the middle of the drab tent city that has been built over the past couple of months.
Back at the hospital, they have access to phones, computers, and food that is head and shoulders above the bulk tray rations being served at Jacobabad.
And they have a lot of time to sit together and contemplate what they’d been through. Pilot John Cline says they were six very happy guys. “We were giddy. I mean, we were looking around at each other, ‘Can you believe that we just put an airplane into the side of a mountain, and we’re all sitting here bull shitting about it?’ And we skipped all the brooding. There was no terror, there was no horror, no depression. It was all just, ‘B
oy, we’re really happy to be here. We’ve dodged a pretty big one.’ ” Now, confident that they’re all okay and their two crewmates are in good hands, all they are waiting for is their release from the hospital, and a ride back home to Jacobabad.
Strange as it may seem, there is some apprehension about going back to their unit. Not because they are going to have to face a grueling safety board investigation into the cause of the crash, but because they don’t know whether their fellow airmen will be looking askance at them.
They don’t need to worry. It turns out that the plan had been to put them on a regular intratheater shuttle flight back to Jacobabad, but according to Jeff Doss, another crew in their unit made a big stink about that. “No, they’re our guys; we’re gonna go pick ’em up.”
Doss says, “That was huge for our mental state, because you crash an airplane on a mountain and you wonder how you’re going to be received back at your unit.”
The unit in question is the 9th Special Operations Squadron (SOS). Elite among units at Eglin AFB, the 9th SOS is actually part of the 16th Special Operations Wing ten miles away at Hurlburt Field in the panhandle of Florida. Operating out of K-2 through November 2001, then out of Jbad thereafter, the 9th SOS personified the “Anytime, Anyplace” motto of the 16th Special Operations Wing. Cline says they were so reliable for helicopter air refueling that typically conservative Army planners abandoned their practice of always having a backup ground refueling site; it simply wasn’t necessary. If the 9th said they would be there, they would be there. The 9th is famous among Air Force MH-53 crews for their ability to instantly adapt to changes on the ground. According to Ditka 03’s pilot, quick action and innovative thinking by 9th crews averted disaster on several high-priority OEF missions. He says that in one case, a 9th crew appeared out of nowhere deep in enemy territory to refuel an MH-53 that had less than two minutes of fuel remaining.
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