His time in the PJs was so short, Wilkes couldn’t possibly understand his good fortune in getting this mission. He wasn’t even supposed to be in Afghanistan. Four months earlier he’d broken several ribs in a training accident aboard a helicopter. The belt he was wearing around his waist didn’t detach properly, slid up around his ribs, and cracked them. He was just getting back into shape when on a Thursday afternoon he was standing in Bill Sine’s office at Moody and Sine asked him if he wanted to go. He said yes. Sine said, “Okay, you’re going with me.” By Monday morning they were on the Rotator out of Baltimore, and a week later he was bunking in a hardened aircraft shelter on the flight line at Jacobabad. Since then he’d flown several times, but no real rescue missions. And now he is part of the team parachuting to a casualty on what is, even for a twenty-seven-year veteran like Bill Sine, a mission of a lifetime.
Knowing that Wilkes and Carroll are having no problem with their chutes and staying right behind him, Sine begins to set up for his landing. “About halfway there I’m realizing, okay, this is going to work. We’re going to be right on this thing.” He flies past the strobe, makes a U-turn behind it, and spots the target again, going to what he considers “fifty percent brakes” on the toggles of his chute. At about two hundred feet up, he releases his equipment and allows the seventy-pound ruck to slide down so it’s riding on his feet. That way there’s no risk of it starting to pendulum, pulling him off his mark. When he sees he’s about to hit the ground, a bit more than twenty feet up, he lets the ruck slide all the way off.
He lands precisely on target, hitting the desert scrub considerably harder than he’d expected to, and dropping into a PLF—a parachute landing fall. By the time he’s back on his feet, Wilkes and Carroll are also safely on the ground. “That part of the mission had the most potential for screwups, for things happening that are out of my control. Anyone having a malfunction, getting hurt on landing—breaking an ankle or a leg, hitting a hole on landing, something like that. Once that was all done, I’m on to ‘patient mode.’ ”
As they began to gather their parachutes, Aussies materialize around them. “Don’t worry about that, mate. We’ll take care of your parachutes.”
Sine does a brief introduction that ends with, “Where’s your bud?”
In King 22, the radio operator gets word that all three jumpers are down safely, and passes the good news on to the cockpit. That gets a quick sigh of relief, and it’s on to the next problem for the navigator. “We got the helos coming in, and I’m worried about vectoring them, as well as trying to figure out how to get back to Kandahar. Plus we had to refuel the helos and make sure we had enough fuel to get back ourselves.”
The Aussies lead the trio of PJs no more than fifty yards, to the side of a huge crater in the ground. The front of the demolished vehicle is still in the crater, and the injured man just a few feet away. Very quickly they learn his name is Andy, and his wife had just given birth to their first child five days earlier. Clearly they don’t need the additional motivation, but the Aussies want them to know.
Sine had assigned Wilkes to take care of med-kit management and Carroll to actually assist him in treating the soldier. It’s now more than two hours since the injury occurred, and things are not looking good. While the Aussie medic had a tourniquet on the stump, they learned that it had taken five to ten minutes to reach Andy after the explosion. Even though he was bleeding profusely, no one could ignore the possibility that there were additional mines buried in the area and just run to him without checking.
Thirty minutes before the PJs landed, their patient’s blood pressure was only 70/40. Now Rich Carroll can’t even get a blood pressure at all, even though he finds that Andy has a high pulse rate. The condition is called compensated shock, because the heart is beating faster as it tries to compensate for the lack of blood volume. Sine’s prepared for the worst: He has one of the others keep an airway kit handy because he’s expecting the man to crash at any second.
The first problem is to start a good IV. Easier said than done. The explosion had sent dozens of pieces of shrapnel into the victim, and finding a good, big vein where blood is flowing well is almost impossible. Doing it by dim flashlight doesn’t make the task any simpler. So Sine does it by feel.
“When we tried to take a blood pressure, put the cuff on, we were having trouble getting a blood pressure. And I just had to leave it on, pumped up. So that’s like the tourniquet you normally put on. And after a while, we were wiping his arm down and by then I could feel a little thing right there [in the crease of his right arm]. I could feel it, and got it right in there. Nailed that thing the first time. Good flow and just bombproof, perfect, not shaky, y’know?”
All the while they’re working on him, the patient is semiconscious. Sine can hear him saying something like “My leg’s hurt,” and the friend who’s at his head, talking to him, telling him, “That’s just the pressure of the bandages, y’know, we’re gonna get you out of here.” What Sine would like to do is intubate the patient, to give him the best airway possible in an effort to oxygenate what little blood he has in him. But he knows that you can’t intubate a conscious patient—it’ll trigger a strong gag reflex that will just cause more problems.
They continue to work on the patient, plugging holes where they can, pushing fluid, administering drugs, but by the time the helicopters arrive, the situation isn’t improving. The first one comes in, guided to a landing at precisely the same spot where the PJs had landed almost an hour earlier. Sine turns the patient over to the primary PJ on the Pave Hawk, T.Sgt. Patrick Harding, a friend of his with an even higher emergency medical technician rating. With the patient in critical condition, Sine doesn’t want to lose time briefing the PJs on the HH-60G, so he tells Wilkes to climb aboard and continue working on Andy during the ride back to Kandahar. The second helo has come in right behind the first, giving Sine and Carroll just a few seconds to say good-bye to the Aussies, and board it for the ninety-minute-plus ride back to its base.
Almost as soon as the helicopters lift off, Andy crashes. Wilkes says, “His breathing went to crap, and he quit moaning and groaning and was just kind of lying there. You could tell he was hurting really bad. I think it might’ve been the movement, just moving him.”
Very quickly the situation goes from bad to worse. Wilkes does what he can to help his patient breathe, but it is obvious that his respiratory rate is dropping. Harding is using a stethoscope, trying to find a pulse in the carotid artery on his neck, then in his arms, but can’t find it. When his eyes are unresponsive to light, they begin performing CPR while continuing to force air into his lungs. About an hour into the ninety-minute flight, Andy dies. The PJs continue doing CPR all the way back to Kandahar, where they turn him over to the Army FST team that has an operating room in the airport’s terminal building. But nothing can be done. His injuries were too great, he’d lost too much blood, and he was too far from a surgical hospital when his vehicle hit a mine. One of the surgeons tells Sine that if the injuries had happened right in front of his surgical tent, the man would still have had only a fifty/fifty chance of making it.
Two weeks later, Wilkes, Carroll, and Sine appear before a medical board to debrief the case. The PJs have been arguing for months that they should be allowed to carry whole blood on their missions. They and the doctors know that just pushing fluids into an injured patient’s circulatory system doesn’t do anything to increase the oxygen-carrying capacity of his blood. If the patient is suffering from a critical loss of blood, only a transfusion of red blood cells can do that, and even though medics in past wars have been able to administer blood, it hadn’t been okayed in Operation Enduring Freedom. Policies on the use of blood are reportedly as politicized in the military as they are in the civilian medical world, and the rules for processing and administration of blood since the onset of the AIDS crisis have only become more complicated. As a result of what they learned from this mission, that policy is changed. With strict guidelines in place,
PJs are permitted to carry units of O-positive blood—the universal donor type—with them on subsequent missions.
One other medical advance did come out of this mission. Sine discussed with their flight surgeon the problem of being unable to intubate a semiconscious patient. As a result the doc taught the PJs a technique called “rapid sequence intubation.” It involves administering a combination of paralyzing drugs that shut off the gag reflex. The procedure itself has risks because they’re basically paralyzing the patient for a little while, but in certain cases, such as the one they’d just handled, it might have allowed them to establish an airway before putting him aboard the helicopter. That would have meant that the PJs caring for Andy on the long flight back would not have had to perform CPR and intubate him in a pitch-black, cramped situation.
That said, Sine and his team don’t beat themselves up over losing the patient. “When I analyze it,” says the veteran PJ, “everything went unbelievably smoothly. If I would’ve scripted this thing, I couldn’t have done any better—except having the patient survive. But all phases, from insertion to recovery, it couldn’t have gone any smoother.
“The Australians were real grateful that we’d made the attempt that we had, the U.S. with the 130 and the helicopters. We mounted a pretty major effort to try and help them out. And so they were real appreciative of it. We all wished the outcome had been different.”
When he got back to their home base in Pakistan, Bill Sine sent his son Billy, who wants to be a PJ, an e-mail: “Check with so-and-so at work and he’ll fill you in on my latest adventure.”
Eight months after the jump mission, Randy Wilkes left the Air Force. “I want to have a family, and I want to be there. A lot of guys are gone when their kids are taking their first steps and saying their first words—this job keeps you going pretty good.”
In July 2003, Sr.M.Sgt. Bill Sine retired from the Air Force. All three PJs who jumped to the minefield—Sine, Wilkes, and Carroll—were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for the mission.
Disputed territory. The Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan. (Michael Hirsh)
CHAPTER 8
EVIL IN THE VALLEY
FEBRUARY 27-MARCH 2, 2002
Just call him “Hots.” It’s easier to remember that than how to pronounce H-O-T-A-L-I-N-G. (It’s ho-tal-ing.) Of course the military isn’t really concerned with how to pronounce his name. When they want him, they get on the radio and call for Jaguar 18—or whatever his current working call sign is. That’s because T.Sgt. Jim Hotaling is a CCT who’s specially qualified as a SOTAC with expertise in the kind of CAS that’s needed in OEF by U.S. CENTCOM, which borrowed him from U.S. SOCOM, which found him in the USAF Reserve, which called him back to active duty as an IMA from his job as a Washington state trooper.
Need a translation? Okay, here goes.
Hots is a Combat Controller who not only can do airfield seizures and airfield surveys and run air traffic control, he’s qualified in Special Operations Tactical Air Control, which means he’s skilled at calling in close air support as needed in Operation Enduring Freedom, which is being run by the United States Central Command, which borrowed him from the United States Special Operations Command (both of which are joint service commands—Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines—headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, Florida), which found him in the Air Force Reserve, which called him up as an Individual Mobilization Augmentee from his job as a Washington state trooper, making him the only enlisted CCT Reservist on active duty in the entire United States Air Force.
Hots is a veteran of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, participated in humanitarian missions in Somalia, and in Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, as well as in other assignments that his military biography cloaks as “foreign internal defense training missions.”
Jim married while on active duty in the Air Force; seven years ago he and his wife, Sue, had a son. When military life began to take a toll on family life, he got out of the Air Force and became a Washington state trooper, but stayed in the Reserves. September 2001 was a big month for the Hotalings. They learned that they were going to become parents for a second time, and they watched workers put the finishing touches on the dream house they’d built. Then terrorists attacked the United States, and the Air Force needed Jim back. The day they closed on the house was the day he put his uniform back on and kissed Sue good-bye. In a matter of weeks he was in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the only American assigned to a team of Aussie Special Air Service Regiment commandos sent into the desert on a reconnaissance mission.
While PJs are burdened with a rucksack full of medical gear, CCTs go on missions looking like field reps for Radio Shack. Not only do they have an assortment of radios that let them communicate directly with every type of aircraft being flown in OEF, they also carry SATCOM devices. There’s more. Since the military has not yet developed an array of camouflaged solar panels that CCTs can wear atop their headgear, they also have to carry enough batteries to power each of their radios for the duration of the mission. On top of that, they’re toting the standard weaponry and ammunition that special tactics troops need, plus water, rations and, if luck is with them, mission-appropriate clothing. Early in his tour in Afghanistan, Hots operated in deserts where the temperature topped eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and in mountains where it dropped to fifteen below. Missions often began at a base altitude of three thousand feet and topped out at eleven thousand feet. Getting there was not half the fun.
“We did a two-thousand-foot vertical ascent, and with that amount of weight, it’s almost impossible to do. It took us two and a half days to climb that, and we were averaging about a hundred yards an hour. That’s how slow we were moving.
“The entire time, you’re just thinking to yourself, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ But you put yourself in an out-of-body situation. You just have to put yourself in that mind frame that you’re living for that one moment. You can’t think about tomorrow, you can’t think how much it sucks, you just gotta focus and do it.”
If the physical task weren’t enough, the fact that he was the only American on a recon team of Aussies added a little competition that he really didn’t need at that moment. “You can’t be the quitter out of the group. You can’t be the American that quits in front of these other countries, ’cause they’re the best of the best of their country. And here you are, the American, you’ve got to jock up and be right with them. So it was tough. Every step you think about just stopping. But you can’t do that; you can’t do it. It’s the mental game that you play with yourself.”
And he hasn’t yet mentioned the people who tried to kill him.
Hots had been in country just two days, hardly enough time to figure out that you can’t find a cold one, much less any kind of beer at all, on the growing U.S. air base at Kandahar, the onetime Taliban capital, when he was matched with the five-man SAS team and assigned a five-day reconnaissance mission on an enemy facility. His unit, with its six all-terrain vehicles, was inserted by helicopter, and then moved several kilometers toward their objective at the edge of a desert training camp. Roughly four hundred meters from where they were going to establish a covert observation post, they concealed the ATVs in a wadi—a dry creek bed in the desert—by putting them up against the embankment and covering them with dried vegetation. Then they moved on foot to a position that was elevated a good two hundred feet above the target, still about a third of a mile away, and settled in to watch.
Two days into the mission they were compromised by low-tech enemy assets: a shepherd walked right up to them. To say they were shocked understates the situation. The problem was only temporarily resolved when the one man on the team who spoke both Arabic and Farsi barked the order, “Get the flock out of here.”
Predictably, the shepherd immediately went into the camp and notified Al Qaeda, which came after them in four-wheel-drive vehicles mounted with .50-caliber machine guns. Discretion being the better part of valor, Hotaling and his team immediat
ely beat feet back to their all-terrain vehicles and started escape and evasion procedures. With the control faceplate for one of the radios on his back strapped to his left wrist, and earpieces in both ears—one SATCOM and the other line-of-sight—he was able to communicate and drive the ATV at the same time. As soon as he radioed that they’d been compromised, he got a response from a Navy P-3 that happened to be in the area. The P-3, originally a submarine hunter, is part of an intelligence-gathering unit called “the Gray Knights” that has airborne video-surveillance capabilities. Almost immediately, the eyeballs overhead reported that the bad guys were closing in.
Staying and fighting was not an option. The team carried only small arms and a sniper rifle. Hots himself had his M-4 rifle and 9mm pistol—not nearly enough firepower to bring to bear against a horde of heavy machine guns. Luckily, the escape was happening in broad daylight, so not only was the plane overhead able to watch both the pursuers and the pursued, he was able to direct their escape.
Hots says, “He was literally telling us, ‘Take a left now, take a right, now take a left. They’re six hundred meters from you. Okay, they’ve stopped. Go this way, go that way.’ So he actually directed our escape.
“If the enemy had gotten within small-arms range, I was obviously going to prosecute with fighter aircraft, but we were able to break contact with them through the use of the observation aircraft.”
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