Don Tyler was finally allowed to retire from the Air Force, after one final insult: Neither he nor any of the other injured crewmen of Ditka 03 was awarded the Purple Heart. Despite the fact that the injuries occurred while they were flying through hostile enemy territory on a mission to insert a special-operating-forces reconnaissance team, they were told they didn’t qual if y for the medal because their injuries were not the direct result of enemy action.
The minefield jump team (left to right): S.Sgt. Jason Baird, T.Sgt. Richard Carroll, 2d Lt. Matt “Moose” McGuinness, Sr.M.Sgt. Bill Sine, and SrA Randal Wilkes, Jr. (Courtesy of Bill Sine)
CHAPTER 7
FREE-FALLING TO A MINEFIELD
FEBRUARY 16, 2002
Air Force 2d Lt. Matthew Sean McGuinness is one of those guys with an irre pressible personality, certainly the life of the party when he was an enlisted PJ, a staff sergeant, and probably no different as a Penn State undergrad and national all-star rugby player. Now that he’s a commissioned officer, and one of the first CROs to boot, he’s trying hard to rein it in a bit. But he’s made it through the PJ indoctrination course, followed by the training pipeline where they become experts at everything from HALO (high-altitude, low-opening) parachute jumps to scuba in order to make certain they can bring their high-level medical skills where they’re needed. Guys like that don’t repress easily. That probably accounts for his liking to tag-end the story of being the CRO for a history-making, combat rescue free-fall jump to a patient by saying, “I’m a Gemini and I like long walks on the beach.” Bottom line: Matt “Moose” McGuinness is an easy guy to like—even with the David Letterman-like gap between his front teeth that an Army nurse at Kandahar has been fantasizing about ever since she met him.
He’s completely dedicated to the twenty pararescuemen under his command. It’s his job to make sure they’re current in all their skill requirements. He’s also their sponsor when they want things like advanced urban warfare training that’s not in the budget, or better equipment, such as lightweight in terteam radios that not only improve combat efficiency but knock thirty pounds off their already overstuffed rucks. Before the Air Force opened up the PJ career field to officers, the people the PJs had to report to were flying officers, who weren’t necessarily interested in going out on a limb to be their advocate. Now, with McGuinness, the brass knows that the guy making the pitch is a prior PJ; his pleas carry more weight, and as an added bonus, his prior experience had already earned him the respect of the men in his command. But don’t ever forget that these are PJs, so all that respect doesn’t stop them from employing the military’s penchant for acronyms and teasing McGuinness about being a FAG—a “former action guy.”
Matt came to the 38th Rescue Squadron at Moody AFB directly from Officer Training School. He spent ten months adjusting to his new role in life before being deployed with half a dozen PJs to Shahbaz Air Base at Jacobabad, Pakistan, where one cold mid-February day he drew the assignment as troop commander for the PJs on an HC-130 mission. This was new territory for McGuinness, who had always trained on rescue helicopters and, as an enlisted man, had been a PJ team leader on the HH-60G Pave Hawks. Now he was out of the dirt and supervising HC-130 transload missions, where combat casualty evacuation teams fly into hot areas, pick up patients, and take them to a more secure location, from which they can be transferred to a jet transport and taken to American hospitals in Germany, or stateside for a higher level of care.
Late on the afternoon of February 16, 2002, the on-alert PJ crew consisting of team leader Sr.M.Sgt. Bill Sine, assistant team leader T.Sgt. Richard Carroll, and SrA Randal Wilkes, augmented by McGuinness and S.Sgt. Jason Baird, draws a mission aboard King 22 (“King” is the stateside designation for an Air Force Rescue plane; it’s being used here because the actual aircraft radio call signs are still being used in OEF). That particular HC-130 had been flown halfway around the world from Valdosta, Georgia, to Pakistan in four twelve-hour days by a crew commanded by Maj. Terry Crabtree, a nineteen-year Air Force veteran. Their mission is to move some personnel from the 66th Rescue Squadron, a helicopter unit out of Nellis AFB, Nevada, from Kandahar in Afghanistan, and take them up to K-2 at Karshi-Khanabad, Uzbekistan. Then they are to return to Kandahar, and back to their home base in Pakistan.
(Coincidentally, on this same night, crews from the 66th are ferrying a pair of HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters from Bagram, northwest across the Hindu Kush mountains, to K-2. Two PJs are aboard each of the birds. When all the relocating is finished, there will be helicopter CSAR assets at K-2 to cover the northern half of Afghanistan, and helicopter assets remaining at Kandahar to cover the southern portion of the country.)
In airborne alert status, the HC-130 has a fully equipped PJ team on board, briefed for the mission with current radio codes and authentication data in case they should parachute in or otherwise end up on the ground, and one or more of them should become an evader.
The paratroop seats on the right-hand side of the cargo compartment from the wing area back to the paratroop door are flipped up to accommodate a row of metal chests containing PJ gear. And up forward, a steel container holds even more of the PJs’ equipment, including a variety of parachutes. Most of that equipment stays on board the King aircraft. Before each launch, the PJs would back a truck up to the plane’s ramp and load their personal gear, weapons, and medical rucks containing drugs that had to be kept under lock and key.
On this Saturday evening in February, King 22 is halfway into its mission, having just taken off from Kandahar with the passengers and equipment, when they begin hearing radio traffic about a convoy going out to an accident site. An Air Force CSAR crew hearing about an accident responds in much the same way a hungry lion does to a herd of wildebeest: They want a piece of the action, so their radio operator makes their presence known.
The response comes quickly. The Joint Search and Rescue Center (JSRC) at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, asks them to return to Kandahar in preparation for a medevac transload. Crabtree turns the aircraft around to begin his approach back into Kandahar, and discovers that what had been blowing sand on their initial trip in is now a full-fledged sandstorm with visibility down to near zero. With no ground navigation aids available for use, King 22’s navigator, twenty-eight-year-old 1st Lt. Brian Symon (pronounced Simone), computes a self-contained approach into the field, using the aircraft’s high-tech radar and navigation instruments to vector them to a safe landing. The instant the plane comes to a halt on the ramp in front of the bullet and shell-pocked facade of Kandahar International Airport, the loadmasters begin dumping the helicopter personnel and the cargo bound for K-2. Their relocation up north can wait. The loads have to prep the rear of the plane for litters.
Still short on information, including how many casualties they should expect, when, and in what condition, the radio operator, S.Sgt. Kevin Rolle, begins asking questions. What he gets back are coordinates for an accident site, which he reports to the nav so it can be plotted on a map. The results are confusing.
“That can’t be right,” Symon says. “That’s two hundred fifty miles away.” As more information flows in, they realize the accident they are being asked to prep for is different from the one they’ve been hearing on the radios—one in which a vehicle has rolled over on an airfield with minor injuries.
Randy Wilkes recalls Bill Sine going up to the cockpit, then coming back and saying that the mission is not a transload; it’s a guy who’s a couple of hours away. “Then it was kind of like a light went on in his head. He says, ‘Hey, we can get there and jump in on this guy before the helicopters can get there.’ ”
After takeoff, Sine runs up to the front of the plane to discuss the notion with the aircraft commander and the nav. What they determine after looking at maps is that the terrain where they’re headed is benign, primarily flat desert on the western edge of Afghanistan, near the Iranian border. The only geographic feature of even minor concern is a nearby river.
Until this miss
ion, most of their flying has been over and through the mountains, areas where terrain is arguably their biggest worry. That the PJs are, in the parlance of the Air Force, “leaning forward” to do the jump isn’t surprising. Fortunately for them, the aircraft commander is also, in the words of the nav, “a leaning forward kind of guy.” The upshot? When Sine gets back, he’s all smiles—and all business. “We’re jumping,” he says.
Shortly after King 22 takes off, the 66th Rescue Squadron launches two of its HH-60G Pave Hawks helicopters from Kandahar, sending them to the same coordinates. The procedure is similar to contingency plans that had been used by the rescue units based at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, guarding the northern no-fly zone over Iraq (Operation Northern Watch), and units based in Kuwait covering the southern zone (Operation Southern Watch). The rule of thumb is that if the HC-130 can get to the site a half hour or more ahead of the helicopters and drop PJs to the victims, it makes sense to do it, treat the casualties, and wait for the helicopters to come in and pick up both the victims and the PJs. In Afghanistan, the fixed-wing aircraft not only have the advantage of speed over the 60s—they can fly almost twice as fast as the helicopters—they can also fly above the mountains, whereas with the weight of personnel and fuel on board, the helicopters are limited to an altitude of about ten thousand feet. This slows them down, forcing them to fly through mountain valleys and passes, often in bad weather rather than over it, and sometimes in range of enemy artillery.
Staying in radio contact with the airborne mission commander orbiting in an AWACs plane, Rolle elicits more information about the situation that causes Crabtree to start rethinking his decision. They’re going to arrive on scene right around sundown. But that’s not the problem. What he’s learned is that they’ll be dropping PJs to an accident site immediately adjacent to a sizable minefield that’s already claimed one victim. The veteran pilot knows that as the aircraft commander, he’s responsible for everyone on the plane, including the PJs. If he lets them jump and something goes horribly wrong, it is his ass on the line, because he had the authority to say no.
Thus far in OEF there had been at least two previous opportunities where the notion of inserting PJs by parachute had been considered. In both cases, the senior officers involved rejected the option as being too dangerous. PJs in the rescue coordination centers arguing on behalf of the jump missions had the clear impression that the people in authority didn’t know that precision free-fall jumping from an HC-130 was in the pararescue bag of tricks, something they regularly train to do.
There’s an irony here that isn’t lost on the PJs. Despite the allusion to “parachute” in the official “pararescueman” designation, and the acronym “PJ,” which comes from their designation as “pararescue jumpers” in 1947, they still find themselves working for commanders who regularly use those names yet fail to acknowledge a PJ’s ability to safely jump out of an aircraft and precision-fly his chute to within a few feet of a designated target.
Fortunately, Crabtree doesn’t opt for the safe and easy way out and cancel the jump. Instead, he passes the sobering information about the minefield to Lieutenant McGuinness, the only one of the PJs still on headsets. Moose approaches Sine with the news. “Bill, fifty meters to the west of where you’re jumping, there’s an active minefield.”
The lieutenant says Sine thought about it for a second. “You could see his mind working—and then it was, like, ‘Okay.’ Y’know what I mean? It was cool.”
The ground unit turned out to be a five-man patrol of Australian SAS special operators accompanied by an American Air Force combat controller who had been on a recon mission in the desert of extreme western Afghanistan when, out of nowhere, there was a loud explosion. The patrol didn’t know if they were getting mortared or possibly hit by friendly fire. The last thing any of them considered was an antitank mine—until they got a look at their Long Range Patrol Vehicle. But that took a minute or so. It was hard to judge time, because when the blast went off everything seemed to be happening in what combat vets describe as “slow time.” People were crawling, looking for cover. There was a lot of ringing in their ears, like an annoying high-pitched tone that blocked normal communication. It felt like they just didn’t know what to do, like life itself was on hold for one big pause. And then their training took over.
One of the SAS soldiers, thirty-three-year-old Sgt. Andrew Robert Russell of Perth, Western Australia, had suffered major injuries in the blast, including loss of a leg. Without aerial evacuation to a surgical hospital, there was no way he would make it. Even though several of the Australians had combat medical training equivalent to the American Army’s 18-Delta medics, it was apparent to the CCT that Russell needed immediate medical attention at a level that could be provided only by pararescuemen.
In the CSAR Herc, Sine, Carroll, and Wilkes, with the help of Baird and McGuinness, and the loadmasters, T.Sgt. Charles Woods and S.Sgt. Rick Walker, begin to jock up for what the team leader has now decided will be a HALO jump. With a minefield adjacent to the target, they need as much control as possible on the drop, and Sine’s twenty-seven years of experience tells him that a static line jump is wrong for the circumstances.
Even though PJs can jump with the round MC1-C chute from as low as five hundred feet, the disadvantage has to do with the technical capabilities of the parachute itself. A static line parachute has a very low forward drive, which means that if any significant wind comes up, the PJ is going to be blown off course and is less likely to land safely on target. On the other hand, the rectangular free-fall chute has roughly a twenty-knot forward drive; flown properly, it can cancel out a twenty-three-mph wind, and be flown to a precision landing. But you can’t use it at five hundred feet because there won’t be enough time for the jumper to pull the ripcord, settle under the canopy, get his bearings, and fly to the target. Although the free-fall chute requires a higher cloud ceiling and more altitude for the jump, the trade-off in maneuverability is worth it, especially when they’re jumping near a minefield on an almost moonless night.
The PJs and the cockpit crew need to agree on a jump altitude that’s high enough to give them the control they need, but not so high as to make calculating the effect of the wind on the jumpers a rigorous exercise. The concern is that while Crabtree, the aircraft commander, and Capt. James Woolsey, his copilot, have flown many such missions, Brian Symon is a newly minted navigator and has never done a nav-controlled free-fall jump, not even in training. If Symon blows it and puts the jumpers out past the calculated point, they may have no choice but to land in the minefield. Neither the maneuverability of their chutes nor their skill at flying them might be enough to allow them to make a 180-degree turn and fly into the wind, back to the drop zone.
While the PJs are figuring out the jump altitude, the airborne mission commander overhead in an E-8 J-STAR surveillance and attack targeting plane continues to relay information between the Aussies on the ground and the rescuers. On the one hand, Crabtree is being told that the Aussies definitely need the Americans’ medical expertise to keep their man alive. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to get any PJs killed trying to save the guy, and knowing they’re near a minefield makes the drop iffy.
One obstacle gets removed when the Aussies relay that they can mark the drop zone with a flashing strobe light, but Crabtree needs more before his comfort level will be raised enough to let the guys jump.
“Can they mark the actual perimeter of the location of the minefield?” The question is relayed by the AMC. And the answer that comes back is the right one. “These guys were good,” says the pilot. “Before we even asked them, they had already put red chem lights around the perimeter of the minefield as they knew it.” Then he relays Sine’s request, asking them to place the strobe marking the DZ at least fifty yards back up the road they had already traveled, the thinking being that if their vehicles had passed over the area, it was reasonable to assume the PJs could land there safely.
In the cargo bay, Sine and McGuinne
ss confer on possible choices for a jump altitude. Then Sine chooses thirty-five hundred feet. He says, “We had talked about various altitudes if we had the opportunity to use the free-fall parachute, but when I actually had to think about it seriously, when I was actually confronted with it, I decided to go at the low altitude and use the RAMZ procedures, because that’s something we do all the time, so it’s familiar to everybody.”
RAMZ is the acronym for Rigged Alternate Method Zodiacs, the inflatable rubber boat and thirty-five-horsepower engine that can be deployed by three PJs jumping with steerable chutes from the rear of an HC-130, dropping into the ocean near a ship that needs medical help, or to pick up survivors.
In addition to keeping the routine for this jump as familiar as possible, Sine has another concern about jumping from an altitude higher than three thousand five hundred feet at night. The higher you go, the more lights you’re likely to see. While he expects to be jumping into the Afghan desert, where there should be no other lights, from the cockpit Major Crabtree is already surprised to see the lights of an Iranian city just across the border. The possibility is admittedly remote, but even a vehicle headlight could cause confusion for someone free-falling at two hundred feet per second.
One other factor goes into Sine’s decision to drop from three thousand five hundred feet. “If anyone has a problem on the jump—their load shifts or they go into a spin or a tumble—they can ignore the five- or three-count and just pull right off, because they’re not going to be that far off no matter what they do.”
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