Several complicated direct-action missions involved a quarter of the 9th SOS MC-130Ps conducting five in-flight refuelings of seven MH-53s over a nine- or ten-hour flight. The MC-130Ps would split into two two-ship elements for the “yo-yo”; while two were down low refueling helos, the other two would be up high taking on fuel from a KC-135, and then they’d swap positions three or four times during the flight. A single gallon of fuel could be passed from a KC-10 to a KC-135, then to an MC-130P, and finally to an MH- 53 to be burned. The amount of contingency planning and “what if” scenarios required to execute such a complex aerial plan are mind-numbing, but the 9th never missed an air refueling control time.
And the 9th couldn’t wait to welcome back the crewmembers of Ditka 03.
They are transported from the hospital at K-2 to the airfield, and as the Combat Shadow’s ramp opens, they can see a huge American flag hanging in the plane’s cargo bay. That’s when the tears begin.
Three hours later, the plane comes in for a landing through the nighttime smoke and haze at Jbad. It taxies to the maintenance area at one end of the airfield, and as the ramp opens, the crew of Ditka 03 can see the entire maintenance unit standing at attention, another huge American flag next to the formation. What’s more, the maintenance guys are wearing complete regulation uniforms, a feat that even the most zealous commander in a combat zone would be hard-pressed to make happen.
And as aircraft commander Maj. John Cline, copilot Capt. Jason Wright, navigator Maj. George Akins, flight engineer M.Sgt. Jeff Doss, loadmaster S.Sgt. Chris Langston, and radio operator S.Sgt. Rodney Young walk off the ramp, the entire assembled group snap a formal salute.
Then the party begins.
The Badass Crew of 0213
By T.Sgt. Stacey A. Quarles
An engine mechanic for MC-130P Tail Number 0213
(Read to the crew at their welcome-home party)
Some heroes live
Some heroes die
Some heroes fly
In the Afghan skies
You are our heroes
For what you have done
You landed a plane
Where it couldn’t be done
You have done the impossible
You make us proud to be a team
You are the badass crew
Of Zero Two One Three
* * *
At the U.S. Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, several thousand miles to the east, however, things are not as happy. Loadmaster Jeff Pohl is being well cared for, and plans are being made to transport him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center near Washington, D.C. What’s happening with Maj. Don Tyler, however, is another story; it’s why you should never assume you’re out of the woods till you’re out of the woods.
When Tyler arrived at Landstuhl, he was wearing a huge cervical collar because there was still concern that he might have a broken neck. Despite the fact that he was still in excruciating pain from the shoulder injury, it was his neck that became the focus of medical concern. Once they did a CAT scan and discovered that he had no cervical fracture, they removed the collar, arranged for him to once again call his wife, and within hours ordered him to leave the hospital.
At three in the morning, less than forty-eight hours after riding a plane into the side of a mountain and wearing only a hospital gown and paper flip-flops, doped up on painkillers that were not doing the job, United States Air Force Maj. Don Tyler is unceremoniously discharged from Landstuhl and told to check himself into billeting on the base. He manages to get a ride part of the way, but completes the journey on foot. It’s raining and the temperature is in the mid-thirties. He has no clothes, no shoes, no money. His dog tags and wedding ring are missing. All he has left is an ID card and a credit card, without which he wouldn’t be able to pay the twenty-four dollars a night the billeting facility charges.
At four A.M., after getting ordered back to his room from the tiny self-serve kitchen where he was trying to get a hot cup of coffee—the hospital gown didn’t quite measure up to their dress code—he gets to bed. Three hours later he reports back to the hospital for more X rays. The doctors want to make sure the bone in his upper arm is in place. It is, and the next thing he knows he has a release in his one good hand telling him to fly home on a commercial aircraft. He is no longer Landstuhl’s problem.
When Tyler first related this story, it sounded far-fetched. Landstuhl has long had a reputation in the public media as the place in Europe where the U.S. military brings its casualties. It’s the largest American hospital outside the United States. It has approximately 110 physicians, 250 nurses, 900 enlisted personnel, and 550 civilian employees. Landstuhl has 162 beds, with an expansion capacity in excess of 310 beds. It’s the only Army medical facility to house an Air Force Aeromedical Evacuation Unit.
Visit the hospital’s Web site and you get a sense of its importance:
LRMC has played a major role in many world events. Today, LRMC provides medical treatment to casualties injured during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. LRMC treated the victims of the USS Cole bombing in October 2000. The hospital has also played an integral part in the repatriation of the three American soldiers who were taken prisoners of war in Yugoslavia in March 1999, and treated American and Kenyan victims of the U.S. Embassy bombing in Nairobi in August 1998. In 1994, it served as the treatment point for hundreds of Bosnian refugees injured in the Sarajevo marketplace bombing, as well as treating victims of the 1988 Ramstein Air Show disaster, and the victims of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. During Operations Desert Shield and Storm in 1990/1991, more than 4,000 service members from that region were treated at the facility, and more than 800 U.S. military personnel deployed to Somalia were evacuated and treated here.
Is it conceivable that the drugs he’d been given for pain had addled Don Tyler’s brain? Could he be making it all up? It’s preposterous to think that a hospital whose very name is synonymous with the best medical care the U.S. military can offer would toss a seriously injured, hurting, drugged, virtually naked Air Force navigator out into the street on a cold winter night.
But that’s what happened. And the individual who verified it is none other than Maj. Brian Burlingame, the surgeon who initially treated Don Tyler when the PJs brought him to the FST team at Bagram, and who is now chief of surgery at the Womack Army Medical Center at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. Here’s what Dr. Burlingame said when presented with Tyler’s story:
“Well, first of all, I can tell you, I’ve heard that story about Germany over and over again. It makes me ill. You can put this in your book, and I can probably get spanked for it, but I don’t care. In Stars & Stripes, they’re always writing, ‘Landstuhl did this—they rushed this patient from combat and had emergency surgery, something like three days after his injury,’ which anyone who knows about medicine, is bullshit. They take all the credit. And our sick patients, yeah, they give great care to, but the guys that have been injured and aren’t critical . . . Now, in his case, Tyler had a significant injury that was sort of glossed over. But time and time again, guys that were injured, they just discharge from the hospital and send them to housing.”
When Ditka 03 slammed into the mountain, Don Tyler suffered what Burlingame described as an “inferior shoulder dislocation.” The doctor says it’s extremely rare, “and it causes a lot of damage.
“And when he came in, his pulse was gone, and he couldn’t feel his fingers. Okay? He had what’s called a neurovascular deficit. And relocating his shoulder, pulse comes back, neuropathy gets better, but it does nothing to treat the trauma that caused the injury. Basically, you do the reduction in order to get blood flow back to the fingers . . . again, our job [at the FST unit] is to get him fixed on life-threatening problems and get him out of there.”
The surgeon’s expectation is that when Tyler was seen at Landstuhl there would have been “a high index of concern for the exact injuries” he sustained to his shoulder, and that they “w
ould have followed it up immediately with an MRI/CT scan. One or the other . . . I think that’s what they would’ve done, as opposed to doing nothing and letting the guy go home.”
Even more shocking than the treatment Don Tyler didn’t receive at the hands of the vaunted Landstuhl medical team is the fact that Dr. Burlingame wasn’t shocked to hear of it.
“It’s a serious indictment on Landstuhl, and we’ve complained about it. I didn’t realize how bad it was until after I got home and talked to guys that went through Landstuhl. And some guys said, ‘Oh, I got great care there,’ but then you hear other guys that maybe weren’t ICU, y’know, sick as shit, that had this exact same thing happen to them. And to me it was very distressing. I don’t know the people up there, why it happened, what their thoughts were, but I’d certainly like to find out.
“We see our patients, and we think they do great, but we don’t know how they do once they leave us. Interestingly enough, we get zero follow-up from Landstuhl. They won’t return our phone calls. I mean, we’re down at the front lines, making an effort to call back or e-mail back, and they wouldn’t give us the time of day. The only time that we’d ever hear anything about our patients is when we’d call back, we’d e-mail back to Walter Reed. Our buddies are back at Reed, and they tell us what was going on with the guys. And that’s only a fraction of all the folks that went out.
“Let me tell you, scary enough, he [Tyler] is one of many that that happened to, or I should say not ‘one of many’; he’s one of several that I know of that’s happened to.”
An athlete with a torn rotator cuff quickly learns that not only can’t he throw a pitch, he can’t tie his shoes, buckle his belt, zip his fly, put on a shirt, or perform any number of other tasks that he’s used to doing with two hands. Don Tyler didn’t just have a torn rotator cuff. He’d just about shredded every muscle and tendon from his left shoulder blade in back all the way around to his collarbone in front. It’s an extremely painful injury, and the pain is made worse by any bumping or contact with the affected shoulder. That’s why the notion of trying to get from Germany to Fort Walton Beach, Florida, on his own, is not a pleasant one.
His problems continue at Landstuhl, this time with the travel office. They want to see his orders. He doesn’t have orders; the Air Force doesn’t require them before they let you get carried onto a medevac flight from the combat zone. Not even for Army guys. When Tyler took off on his secret mission into Afghanistan aboard Ditka 03, he hadn’t expected to be flying home at all in a few days, much less on a commercial flight.
After three hours of getting nowhere with the travel office, he finally manages to contact Capt. Chris Willard at his home unit in Florida. Within minutes Willard faxes orders and authorization for Landstuhl’s travel office to issue a one-way commercial ticket home. They book him on a Delta Airlines flight from Frankfurt to Atlanta, connecting with a puddle jumper to Fort Walton Beach.
The next problem is finding something to wear on the flight home. Fortunately, his unit happens to have someone who accompanied him from K-2 to Landstuhl, and this individual is able to round up a pair of donated pants and a shirt that fits reasonably well. What he couldn’t find for Don are shoes that fit, so he gives the major his own tennis shoes. They are at least one size too small, but after he’d suffered the consequences of hitting a mountainside, tight shoes barely nudge his annoyance meter.
Tyler spends some time on his last night at Landstuhl visting Jeff Pohl, who has not yet been shipped out to Walter Reed. Then he tries to get some sleep.
At four-thirty the next morning, Tyler boards the shuttle van for what he describes as a very bumpy, very painful ninety-minute ride to Frankfurt’s huge international airport, where German security guards, in his words, “freaked out.” He is practically a textbook case of fitting the profile of a terrorist: on a one-way ticket, the reservation made at the last minute, no luggage, and obviously on drugs. Finally, they let him board the Delta jet for a ten-and-a-half-hour flight to Atlanta, and as he settles carefully into his seat, he begins to think that the nightmare that had begun just a few days earlier is over.
He’s wrong.
Don Tyler lands at Hartsfield International Airport and has to clear U.S. Customs and Immigration, plus airport security, in order to get into the concourse where the flights to Fort Walton Beach depart. Déjà vu strikes again. No luggage, no passport—just a military ID card—poorly dressed, wearing ill-fitting shoes that make him walk funny, unkempt, and the pain in his shoulder is keeping him from speaking up clearly when questioned by security personnel.
So on February 15, three days after slamming into a mountain on a mission to get the terrorists who attacked America, U.S. Air Force Maj. Don Tyler is profiled as a potential terrorist and shunted to the side for additional screening.
“Would you please remove your shoes?”
“Hey, look, I’m in serious pain. I was in an accident over in the war. I can’t even bend over to take my shoes off.”
They insist, “Take your shoes off.”
“I can’t. If I take them off, I won’t be able to put them back on.”
“If you don’t take them off,” says the officious security person, “you’re not getting on your flight.”
Somehow, he manages to endure the pain and get his shoes off, then gets them back on again, and makes his flight, and later that evening lands at Fort Walton Beach, where he is greeted by his wife Barbara, their two children, and members of his unit.
Throughout the welcome at the airport, Don was smiling through the pain. “When I returned home the adrenaline starts pumping and you’re just so psyched to be with your family, nothing else matters. I was hurting, but there were also about forty people who had come there to greet me, so I tried to put on a good face.” When he got off the plane, he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring—it had disappeared after the crash. But his wife fixed that problem stat. “As soon as Barb greeted me at the airport, she slipped my ‘real’ wedding ring on my finger. When I deployed in December, she bought a twelve-dollar Wal-Mart special wedding ring, because we knew it would get lost or stolen. What a woman!”
Tyler spends the next five days in a reclining chair in his living room, enduring never-ending pain in his left shoulder. Finally Barbara is able to get him an appointment for an MRI at the Eglin Air Force Base Hospital, a test that should have been done at Landstuhl in order to determine precisely what was wrong.
The diagnosis based on the MRI is decipherable only by individuals with advanced degrees in anatomy, physiology, or orthopedic medicine. The medical mumbo-jumbo boils down to the following: complete, full-thickness tear of various tendons, partical tearing of various muscles, dislocation of the biceps tendon, and additional problems related to the shoulder blade and the upper arm bone. The good news? No fracture.
Surgery is performed on March 4, 2002, followed by ongoing exercise and physical therapy to recover range of motion that one orthopedic surgeon says he would never completely recover.
Back in Afghanistan . . .
Within hours of the crew finally being evacuated off the mountainside, the order was given to destroy the plane. It wasn’t until weeks later that Major Cline was able to watch the Predator surveillance video of the destruction. He says, “The first two-thousand-pound bomb hit 0213 dead center, where the wings connect to the fuselage, and right where the fuselage fuel tank (still full with eleven thousand pounds of fuel) was located. Huge fireball, pieces of aircraft flying all over the valley, but when the smoke cleared, the flight deck forward of the crew entrance door was still pristine. Not even a broken window.
“So another strike aircraft dropped two more two thousand pounders on the flight deck section. Good enough, until the next day when 0213’s emergency locator transmitter started going off, clogging up the emergency UHF frequency. The ELT is located high up in the aircraft’s tail section. It had apparently separated and slid down the hill a ways after the first bomb hit. So a third airstrike had to be ordered to
shut the ELT up.
“The plane truly had a tenacious heart.”
The positive welcome home the Ditka 03 crew receives from their buddies is echoed by not only their own unit’s leadership, but by commanders higher up. After a two-and-a-half-hour debriefing directly from the six uninjured crewmembers, the Joint Special Operations Air Component Commander (JSOAC/CC) decides they will all be returned to flight status immediately after their safety interviews are complete. Several Air Force fliers familiar with the situation say this is especially gutsy on his part, because the final conclusions from the formal safety investigation were many weeks away, and he would be severely second-guessed if any of Ditka 03’s crewmembers, especially the aircraft commander, Maj. John Cline, were involved in even a minor incident or had any kind of mechanical malfunction requiring the normal cursory safety review.
It takes eleven days just to get the safety investigation board assembled and transported to the theater, after which they conduct six days of interviews and field work before heading back stateside to conduct their deliberations. Cline says that Col. Tommy Hull, an MH-53 helicopter pilot by trade, told him, “We send you folks out into some very tough environments to accomplish some very tough missions. Thank God you never gave up. You obviously did a lot of things right to be sitting here right now, and you’re all way too valuable to just be sitting around while there are still missions to be done.”
As a pilot, Hull understands the agony the crew is going through in the limbo of waiting to be allowed to fly again, and opts to put them back in the saddle rather than keep them grounded while the safety board evaluates their performance on the crash mission. Consequently, each crewmember is given his choice of whether to stay and fly more missions, or to go home and fly stateside missions. Flight engineer Jeff Doss and radio operator Rodney Young elect to return home immediately. Cline, navigator George Akins, and loadmaster Chris Langston all stay and fly several more combat missions before returning home. Copilot Jason Wright, who had joined the crew only three weeks before the crash, elects to complete his whole ninety-day rotation before returning home.
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