So it all comes down to the nav calculating the speed, direction, wind drift, and altitude correctly, and then taking maximum advantage of the clear conditions in order to spot the target strobe on the ground quickly, then calling the precise point at which the jumpers were to go out. Then it’s a matter of the jumpers doing what they’ve trained to do, and preparing to counteract Murphy’s Law, should it come into play.
That’s why Sine begins briefing the “what-ifs.” They’ve all been on parachute jumps where you don’t land where you’re supposed to. It could be a mistake by the navigator, or unexpected wind, or you’re just in a bad situation and there’s nothing you can do about it. Normally the worst that happens is you land off the drop zone. Occasionally it can mean a close call with power lines or other hazards. For this drop, the “other hazard” is a minefield. The other major “what-ifs” are, What happens if someone on the team gets hurt on landing, or they have a problem with their parachute and one man is lost? Is the priority finding the missing PJ, helping the injured one, or getting aid to the casualty who was blown up by the land mine?
Sine says they’d try to do it all simultaneously, using the Aussies on the ground who are more dialed into what’s going on around them than the PJs. His concern is minimized by the fact that they each carry radios and signaling devices, and even though they deploy in teams, each man is trained to be self-reliant, even when hurt.
In Bill Sine’s mind, free-fall jumping from the open ramp of an HC-130 in the dark of night to a flashing strobe light adjacent to a minefield three thousand five hundred feet below is a good time. It all has to do with conditioning, control, intelligence, and preplanning. Conditioning is definitely not an issue for Sine. At forty-four, he’s in as good shape as he was when he became a PJ at age nineteen. It just takes him longer to stay that way now. (He does it with a five-mile run every other day; on his off days he swims fifteen hundred meters and visits the gym.)
As for intel, by the time they’re ready to jump they know that there is no hostile threat in the area other than land mines; they know their victim’s right leg has been blown off in the explosion. He has compound fractures of his lower left leg, a fractured femur, fractured arm, and fractured jaw, his face was cut badly by shrapnel, and he has shrapnel wounds all over his body with indications of internal damage.
The Aussies had splinted what they could. They’d stopped the bleeding as well as they could. They had a tourniquet above the amputation site. Their medic had tried to start an IV to get fluids into him, but had trouble finding a good vein amid all the puncture wounds. It had been two hours since the incident, and his blood pressure was very low.
With all that information, Sine is able to preplan what they’ll do once they’re on the ground, assigning specific tasks to Sergeant Carroll and Airman Wilkes. Now it is up to the navigator to put them on the drop zone. As for control, once the PJs leap out of the plane, it’s all up to them.
While the loadmasters in the cargo bay have put on night-vision goggles for the drop, the pilots up front decide that since they’re flying into the sunset, and the sun has just gone below the horizon, they can actually see better without NVGs. The plan is to put them on after they watch the PJs land, then hang around to refuel the two helicopters that are currently racing to the scene of the incident, and shepherd them back to Kandahar.
At six minutes out, the ramp is opened and Sine does a final check of everyone and their gear—parachutes on their backs, rucksacks right below the groin in front, and rifles on their left sides. Even though there’s a full complement of Aussie SAS on the ground, the PJs are prepared to play an active role in their defense should the need arise. They’ve got the M-4 rifle, a 9mm pistol, and an assortment of knives and grenades, all of which has to be properly secured for a dive into the aircraft’s 130-mph slipstream.
Before the ramp was opened, communication was difficult, as it always is in the back of a Herc. But now, the only way to be heard is to stick your mouth next to the other guy’s ear and yell. The fact that everyone is wearing earplugs doesn’t exactly help the situation. Wilkes says that Sine’s instructions were pretty standard: whoever’s lowest is the guy you follow in. You do what he does; turn where he turns. If all goes well, that guy will be Sine, picking out the pattern that they’ll fly, determining whether or not they need to do S-turns to burn off altitude before they head for the flashing strobe. He reminds them that the landing is critical. Follow the leader all the way down. They don’t want one PJ hooking around the target to the left and another going to the right. That leads to collisions, and over a minefield, a collision could get ugly very quickly.
There’s a brief, rote discussion of what to do in the event of a malfunction of the main chute. In short, they’re to cut away the main and deploy the reserve, which is also a steerable chute, exactly the same as the main. The only significant difference is that it comes out of the pack somewhat faster than the main because its pilot chute is nonporous—when it hits the air, it immediately inflates and yanks the reserve out of its pack.
While the PJs are getting their last-minute briefing, the two loadmasters are securing loose equipment, and, according to PJ Randy Wilkes, “They were looking at us like we were nuts.” The loads had certainly watched PJs jump out of 130s before—HALO jumps off the ramp from as high as eighteen thousand feet, at night, with all preparations taking place in a blacked-out aircraft and everyone wearing night-vision goggles (until the actual jump, when the PJs take the goggles off). Or static line jumps out the side paratroop doors from as low as five hundred feet, daytime and nighttime. But to hurl yourself into space knowing that a slight miscalculation could put you in the middle of an uncharted minefield? Perhaps the loadmasters have a point.
At that moment, there is still some concern on Bill Sine’s part that the JSRC is going to deny them permission to insert the PJs. It has happened on other missions when someone in the command structure comes down with a case of weak knees. The thinking is that if the jump goes well, no problem and “attaboys” all around. But if it goes badly, anyone who is perceived to have authorized it is subject to being second-guessed. So it’s much easier to say no. Nevertheless, Major Crabtree chooses to go proactive. He has the radio operator confirm that the ground unit wants the PJs to jump. And then he simply tells the JSRC, “We’re inserting the PJs.” Case closed. By the time the powers that be at Prince Sultan Air Base can discuss it, Sine, Wilkes, and Carroll will be safely on the ground. Or so Crabtree hopes.
As the 130 comes into the area, the cockpit crew very quickly spots the flashing strobe. While there is some discussion of letting the PJs jump on that first pass over the area, it is decided to do a left-hand racetrack pattern and give the nav time to set up the drop properly. That’s when Murphy arrives on scene and enforces his law: “If it can go wrong, it will.” The nav’s Self-Contained Navigation System fails. “At the worst possible time.”
Now things will get interesting for the twenty-eight-year-old Symon, a former special ed teacher turned HC-130 Combat Search and Rescue navigator. Perhaps this is the right time to mention the confidence CSAR types have in their training and their ability to get the job done. A bit of CSAR humor makes the point. The Air Force is not anal about its crews wearing unofficial insignia on their flight suits. That explains the omnipresence of one of the more popular shoulder patches seen in the combat zone: a blue-and-yellow patch (or the DCU brown version, among other color combinations) featuring a silhouette of Elvis singing into a microphone, beneath which it says CSAR. And around the top and bottom, it reads, If he’s out there . . . we’ll find him.
Essentially, Lieutenant Symon says, “No SCNS, no problem. I’ll do it the old-fashioned way.” It’s that “old-fashioned way” that long ago led to navigators being affectionately called “naviguessers” by their crewmates. Never mind that he’s too young to have been there when the old-fashioned way was the only way.
A veteran navigator in the 71st Rescue Squadron, Capt. Steven K
line, says that making a navigator-controlled jump mission like this one work comes down to the aircrew, and the nav in particular, having a good working relationship with the jumpmaster and the PJs. “It goes to credibility, because if they know you and they’ve jumped out of your airplane before and they can say, ‘Hey, I’ve never really had a bad drop with this guy,’ they’re more often than not going to trust you and go to your release point. . . . With the PJs and AFSOC as well, things are built on reputation and your skills, so you have to be good at what you do. It’s when they don’t trust you, when you don’t know the other guy, that’s where some of the issues start coming in.” It’s appropriate to note here that more than one Air Force navigator avows that the “rectal database” is quite often the source of definitive pronouncements. That’s a polite way of saying that they pull it out of their ass.
Fortunately for all involved, even though he is young and without a lot of experience, Lieutenant Symon is confident that he can make this drop come out right, and the crew—including the PJs—know from past experience that he has his act together.
Here’s the technical explanation of how Symon planned to put the PJs right on the drop zone. Note that “WAG” in navigatorese means “wild-ass guess,” and that the PJs are jumping with parachutes that can counteract as much as twenty knots of wind.
“We had a right quartering headwind at about thirteen knots, pretty light, at three thousand feet. Every time they jump there are a couple of components. One is forward travel distance; how far forward the aircraft’s velocity is going to push them before they stabilize. It’s a good WAG to go at two hundred fifty to three hundred yards of forward throw. Every seven knots of wind at that altitude is going to give us two hundred yards of drift as well. So we had thirteen knots at three thousand feet; surface winds are calm, according to the Aussies on the ground. The minefields were all located south of their position. Our safety zone was to the northeast. I computed that they need to drop about five hundred to six hundred yards to the right, and about five hundred yards short. And that’s what we went with.”
Symon says on that first racetrack around, “I didn’t feel comfortable; my nav systems weren’t running. Usually you can back up your computations with your systems. With that failure, and using procedures I’d never used before, I called ‘no drop.’ I was nervous. The PJs are lean forward kind of guys. They’ll jump out. You realize they’ll do just about anything, so at times you have to reel them in a bit. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to hurt them.”
Crabtree recalls him saying, “I don’t see the minefield; I don’t see the drop zone. No drop!” If someone—anyone—calls a “no drop,” it’s never challenged, because at the moment it happens, only the person making the call knows why he’s doing it. That’s not to say that it didn’t put Crabtree on edge. He knew the nav had never done a free-fall drop before. Nevertheless, he did pointedly tell his crew that they had to make this happen.
In the back of the plane, the three PJs on the ramp are surprised when the green light doesn’t come on, especially since they can see the blinking strobe that the Aussies are using to mark the drop zone. One of the loads begins waving a clenched fist, the indication of “no drop.” Sine turns back to Lieutenant McGuinness and mimes the question, Why didn’t we go? He’s concerned that someone has vetoed the jump. The lieutenant, who’s still on headphones, asks a quick question, and then shouts that they’re coming around for another shot at it.
In the cockpit, the flight engineer, Sr.M.Sgt. Art Millard, is trying his damnedest to get the SCNS back on-line, but Murphy prevails. It isn’t coming back up. So the nav leaves his position behind the copilot and, as the veteran aircraft commander put it, “Symon basically got up in the window and kind of did it the old-fashioned way, using his years and years of experience—which was none.”
Symon says that he tracked the strobe light through the pilot’s left window, then “we tracked it, tracked it, tracked it, and called the green light,” which the copilot flipped on, sending the PJs off the ramp.
However he manages to do it, the young navigator calls for the green light at precisely the perfect moment, and the three PJs go off the ramp with Lt. Matt McGuinness proudly watching them go. He would have loved to have jumped with them, but realized early on that three guys on the ground for one casualty was adequate, especially with two Pave Hawks inbound to the site carrying four more PJs.
The moment of the drop is one he’ll never forget.
“I thought it was the greatest. The night was black, inky black. I mean, it was phenomenal. They’d set up a big defensive perimeter on the ground and they had one overt strobe out there. It was blinking, and it looked like you were flying over a sea of blackness with hills on either side, and then there’s—bing!—the light out there. It was awesome to be a part of it.”
Maj. Terry Crabtree had a very different reaction to the jump. His moment of highest anxiety was the instant the three PJs left the aircraft, “because at that point I have no control over what happens next.”
No matter how much Lt. Matt McGuinness lobbied to make sure his men had the opportunity to go, no matter how firmly Sine, Carroll, and Wilkes said they could jump to the target and avoid a minefield that had already blown one man’s body to pieces, it was still on Crabtree. “If anything should happen, that’s something I’d have to live with for the rest of my life.
“Obviously, for those guys probably, it’s the other extreme, y’know? Now they’re under canopy, they’re in control. But until they land on the ground, we do an orbit, we watch ’em land; it’s a bit nerve-racking.”
Before the jump, Bill Sine was thinking of all the options, all the choices he had to make, and all the things that could go wrong. “Then once I had all my logic squared away, then it was making sure all our gear was good and that I didn’t screw anything up, ’cause I’m running this whole thing, right?”
They were using the protocol for jumping with the RAMZ package, which they did all the time from three thousand five hundred feet. Technically, since they were not on static lines that automatically open their chutes, it was a HALO jump. On a true HALO jump, the navigator needs to use a special formula to calculate winds at various altitudes all the way down to three thousand five hundred feet, then do additional calculations for the final portion of the drop. That made this drop from three thousand five hundred feet a much easier proposition to deal with. Symon said it was more of “a hop ’n’ pop than a HALO.”
When the three PJs get the green light, they leave the ramp no more than a second apart. First goes Sine; he waits five seconds, then pulls his ripcord. Then Carroll. His is a three-second delay, and he pulls. Then Wilkes, who jumps and, the instant he’s stabilized in the air, he pulls. Timing it this way keeps them grouped together, but out of one another’s way. Then it’s a matter of playing follow-the-leader all the way down to the ground.
Normally on a tactical jump, the PJs wouldn’t be wearing lights. In training, they jump with enough light sticks to rival the Goodyear blimp on a game night. But given that there is almost no threat of hostile fire on this jump, McGuinness suggests that each of the jumpers should put on one blue chem light. It wouldn’t be visible from the ground, but they should help the jumpers keep track of each other. Sine feels the suggestion is a good one, so when they jump, each of the PJs is wearing a single blue chem light tied to a loop on the back of his harness. While a blue light stick might not be much to key on, with no lights on the ground to destroy their night vision, it’s good enough.
The first thing Bill Sine does once he’s under canopy and pointed in the direction he needs to fly is look around for the other jumpers. “Boom, I saw two good canopies and saw their lights. It’s crystal clear. I see my two guys behind me, and they don’t have any problems. Then I concentrated on driving for the LZ.”
An HC-130 doing a HALO drop moves at about two hundred feet per second. With less than a second delay as they exited, the jumpers are somewhere between one hun
dred and two hundred feet apart, and stacked at different altitudes.
While the cockpit crew continues to go through nerve-racking moments waiting to hear if the guys have landed safely, the jumpers are actually enjoying themselves. They left the plane at three thousand five hundred feet up, roughly a third of a mile short of the target, and a third of a mile to the right. Once they pop the canopy, they’re going with the wind. Sine’s initial reaction once his chute opens is that they jumped a bit too far away from the target, although he quickly changes that opinion when he realizes that, even if the nav was cheating a bit on the side of caution, they’re going to be right on the money. His guess that the nav was cheating, he learns later, is accurate. Symon was intent on keeping them away from the minefield, so when he picked the jump point, his thinking was, “Worst scenario, they’d drop in two hundred meters short in that safety zone, and walk up.”
The choice Bill Sine now has to make is whether they need to do some lazy S-turns to bleed off altitude, or if they’re far enough away to just hold course almost all the way to the impact point, and at just the right moment hook around to land like an airplane, into the wind. What he quickly discovers is that the nav’s seat-of-the-pants calculations were dead-on accurate. No S-turns are needed.
Randy Wilkes is enjoying the moment. He’s managed to remove the foam earplugs that everyone riding on an HC-130 wears, and all he can hear is silence—and the wind rushing past. Looking down he can see the other two PJs, and beyond them the strobe, and “all the red chem lights marking where you didn’t want to land.” At this point in his brief Air Force career, the Georgia native had been a PJ for less than a year. He came to the PJ pipeline from the Reserves, where he repaired radar and communication gear on HC-130 aircraft. He’d never been much for outdoorsy stuff, and since he smoked, wasn’t setting any records for being in great cardiovascular shape. But he had read about the PJs and was determined to become one. His ten weeks in the indoctrination course at Lackland AFB, Texas, turned into twenty, because the first time through he failed sit-ups in the seventh week—he was one short in the allotted time. But he had the one quality that veteran PJs say matters more than physical conditioning or strength: a will to make it through, to refuse to quit.
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