What he’s basically saying is that he and Lengel had enough experience and confidence to believe that once they got over the edge of the cliff, they were going to be able to fly away, as opposed to dropping like a rock. They still have the problem with the engine that went bad, so for this trick to work, the copilot would have to keep his hand on the overhead throttle, moving it forward and back as necessary for the remainder of the flight in order to bypass the DEC lockout and make power adjustments every time the pilot moved the collective to go up or down.
While the maneuver they were about to attempt was dicey, the backenders had flown with Cahill enough that they believed he knew what he was doing. Finally the moment came. He clicked the intercom switch and said, “Hey, I’m gonna go ahead. We’re gonna go for it.”
With his hands on the controls and his heart in his mouth, Lt. Thomas Cahill flew Gecko 17 off the hill—directly into complete blizzard conditions with no visibility whatsoever.
Within seconds they were able to make radio contact with his wingman, and he told them their plan. The flight up to K-2 would be abandoned. He said, “Look, we’re obviously not going to make it over these mountains. We’re just going to fly reverse routing on the same path that we came in on, and we’re going to recover back into Bagram airfield.”
Each of the two helicopters has an ELMO, an Electronic Layered Map Overlay, that drops a dot on the computerized map display at five-second intervals, indicating the position of the helicopter. They’d gone down in a very narrow canyon about fifteen miles northwest of Bagram. What he was telling the pilots in Gecko 18 to do was to precede them, and fly back where they came from by connecting the dots. Even though that course would put them over the antiaircraft emplacements they’d overflown on the way north, it didn’t concern Cahill. “Because at this point, it was complete blizzard conditions. Freezing. I really wasn’t too worried about those guys; I was more worried about keeping this helicopter flying.”
And he was going to have to fly it behind the less experienced pilots in Gecko 18. “My wingman was just ahead of me when we flew off the hill, and the gorge that we were in was too narrow to do a lead change. So I directed him to get on his moving map and just fly us by reverse routing, back out of the mountains.”
If they’d been in weather that gave them decent visibility on the other helicopter, the plan would have been relatively easy to execute. And if the queen had balls, she’d be the king. Decent visibility for the flight back, unfortunately, was just going to be a dream. The viz got so bad, they quickly lost sight of each other. That called for refining the plan.
The map display updates every few seconds by dropping a flashing dot on the map marking their current position. As the craft moves, the dot stops flashing but remains in place, and the next one flashes. While following the dots would keep them on course, it wouldn’t keep them from colliding with each other. Cahill’s order was, “Start calling your airspeed out to me [on the FM interplane radio channel]. I will hold the same airspeed and also hold our point-three Tacan separation.” The Tacan is a device that sends a signal from one helicopter to the other that tells them the distance between the two helos, although it doesn’t indicate whether the accompanying helo is left or right, in front of or behind them.
“We were holding anywhere between seventy and eighty knots, and as a turn would come up, they would tell us, ‘In three seconds, seventy-degree turn to the right’ or ‘forty-degree turn to the left.’ And they would count it down, ‘three, two, one, turn.’ ”
If the tactic sounds familiar, it may be because the submarine commander used the exact same method in The Hunt for Red October.
Cahill continued explaining how they made it work flying blind in the Hindu Kush. “As soon as he would turn, I would wait about three seconds, and then I would start my turn. That’s how we kept separation. It didn’t work out one hundred percent of the time.”
That last comment is ultrasubtle understatement of the type common to people who do this sort of thing for a living. Cahill explains what it “not working one hundred percent of the time” really means, “Once lead got disoriented a little bit and didn’t realize he started zeroing his airspeed out, I could tell we were getting close to him, just because our Tacan was counting down toward zero. And then I could start to see the glow of his tail rotor light; it became this giant halo. So we made an immediate left turn, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree left turn, and what we didn’t realize as we made that turn was that we were actually flying over a large peak that was coming up from the bottom of the canyon. And about a hundred and eighty degrees through the turn, we just missed impacting terrain by about two or three feet.
“That was the one time of night where Troy Durocher’s voice inflection changed considerably, ’cause it came right out his side of the helicopter.”
Durocher recalls the event vividly. “Initially it started off as rain, went to snow and cloud—we were inside the cloud of snow. Gecko 18 slowed down and almost fell out of the sky. What happened is they flew into a zero-zero condition where they could not see anything, and they kind of slowed, slowed, slowed back trying to fly, thinking, ‘Hey, maybe I just need to slow down. I’m going through this stuff too fast.’ Well, when they did that, we don’t have the power to maintain flight, so we were going to do a three-sixty turn coming behind them. While they’re doing this, they don’t have the power, either, to maintain flight, and they started falling out of the sky, and their flight engineer tells them, ‘Nose it over, nose it over!’ And we hear this on the radio: ‘I’m nosin’ it over and goin’ for it.’ ”
When Gecko 18’s pilot unintentionally zeroed out his airspeed, it pitched the nose of the helicopter up. The pilot got disoriented, and the ship started falling back on its tail. Then they went to about fifty degrees nose-low, gained airspeed back, and then leveled the aircraft out. Disaster had been very close. They were only about fifty feet above the valley floor when they recovered.
Durocher didn’t have much time to ponder the other helicopter’s maneuver, because his bird was having its own problems. “As we get into the beginning of our three-sixty turn, we get hit by some wind, and it’s weird. Six months, maybe eight months prior to this flight, I had a dream that we had crash-landed on the face of a mountain. And it just popped into my head at this time, as we were making this turn, that this is the exact same moment in my dream. And I just knew we weren’t going to make it, and I started screaming, ‘Power! Power! Power! Power!’ And no kidding, there’s a mountain that we didn’t see in front of us, and we ended up clearing it. Our altitude warning system was set at fifty feet, and she went off four times before we came across and she stopped talking.”
The “she” is the female voice used by the device to get a pilot’s attention. She says, “Low altitude, low altitude, low altitude.” The lowest altitude Cahill told the crew he read on the radar altimeter was ten feet. That’s measured from the belly of the helicopter, which has an entire undercarriage hanging from it; they actually had cleared the mountain by only six or seven feet.
Cahill recalls that Durocher yelled for him to climb, but they didn’t have the power to do that. “Looking through my chin bubble”—that’s the clear plastic windshield in front of his feet, figuratively on the chin of the helo—“it’s black, and then all of a sudden I see terrain just a couple of feet below us, passing us by. Let’s just say that it probably brought my blood pressure up a couple of points.”
Durocher remembers that they continued flying through snow showers for another thirty minutes—Cahill thinks it was only ten minutes. “Everyone was so focused, it was amazing,” says the gunner. “You’re only hearing out of every guy what you need to hear. ‘Clearance on the right, clearance on the left. I got good viz up in front.’ It’s clicking right on. The bird in front of us is saying, ‘Okay, we got an eighty-degree turn to the right here in a minute.’ And they did it, and all of a sudden it’s just rainy and they’re out of the mountains, over open terrain just north
of Bagram.”
“There was a little town there, at the base of the hill,” says Cahill. “I could start to make out some lights of an old village, and the visibility and the ceiling greatly improved. It was still snowing and raining, but at least we had about a thousand-foot clearance to the clouds, and I could see more than five miles out.
“I gotta tell you, from the time we impacted to that point is about forty-five minutes. That’s the first time in the night where I knew, I thought, ‘Well, okay, we’re gonna make it now.’ Because the whole time flying back out of the mountains, it was touch and go. I thought, ‘Really, I don’t know if we’re gonna make it outside these mountains, but we’ll just keep trying.’ ”
A few minutes later they landed at Bagram and shut down the engines. Cahill says it was an indelible moment. “It’s funny, because I remember when we landed, complete silence in the crew. I’ll never forget Caleb. Caleb Ethridge walked around the side of the helicopter, came up to me, and just gives me a hug and says nothing. Then looks at me and goes, ‘Dude, I’ve never been so scared in a helicopter in my life.’ And then he said, ‘Thanks.’ ”
When they checked the helicopter, the only damage they could find was to the rotor caps, which were badly chewed up. Cahill knew that in the HH-60G, “when you start losing pieces of your rotor system, an imbalance starts, and then usually it leads to losing everything. For some reason that night, even though we have four rotor caps chewed up, I’m telling you, I did not feel anything in the flight control system. And I don’t know if that’s because I didn’t feel it, or I didn’t care about it, y’know what I mean? Because I just wanted to get home. I just wanted to get wheels down somewhere that had food and a place to sleep.”
It took three days before he was able to call Cheyane and wish her a belated happy birthday.
When gunner Troy Durocher finally had a chance to talk with his wife, Lisa, he didn’t lay the story out minute by minute. He says, “I tell her that I’m the best at what I do, so don’t worry. And she believes me.” He laughs heartily. “Silly her!”
American soldiers on alert in the freezing cold of the Shah-e-Kot valley during Operation Anaconda (U.S. Army photo by Specialist David Marck, Jr.)
CHAPTER 9
RECON BY CASUALTY
MARCH 2-4, 2002
Throughout his high school days in Bakersfield, California, Caleb Ethridge dreamed of joining the military to travel the world for four years, then get out. He also knew that with his good grades, he could get into the Air Force, avoiding the fate of his buddies who were being scooped up by the Marine Corps recruiters.
When he was a junior in high school, he went digging through the closet in the office of the local Air Force recruiter who had been touting his becoming a cop (there are more security police in the Air Force than any other occupational specialty) or a linguist. That was where he found the literature about pararescue, and he was hooked. “That’s it. I want to do that.”
After graduation, he gave college a shot, but he didn’t like the lifestyle. So he hooked up with a buddy who was also interested in pararescue, and before they were inducted, the two of them got themselves into shape. Using a pamphlet they’d found describing the physical requirements to get out of the indoctrination course, they ran mile after mile and worked themselves up to swimming three thousand meters freestyle in decent time.
It wasn’t that Ethridge had been out of shape, just that he was realistic about what it would take to become a PJ. In high school he was a star athlete, lettering in both football and wrestling. It was at a physical exam for football that the doctor told him he’d probably overdone it lifting weights in eighth and ninth grade and stunted his growth. That was when Ethridge began to figure out why he hadn’t grown taller than five-ten, while both his father and younger brother are six-two.
As things turned out, not getting any bigger than five-ten, 185 pounds, didn’t hurt him in the struggle to become a PJ. “You have little guys, and then you have these huge guys, but for the most part, most special operators are all about medium build, medium height, five-ten, six feet, like hockey-player size, and I think that’s because they have a combination of both speed and power. They can get up and run long distances; they can pick up something heavy. They’re right in the middle, because if you’re all huge and muscular, you can’t run twenty miles to get away from bad guys. Eventually you run out of bullets and you gotta run, you gotta get away. And then there’s the little guys—those guys are studs. The smallest guy on our team can rock-climb like you wouldn’t believe. One-arm pull-ups. Just amazing.”
What it takes to make it out of the ten-week PJ indoctrination course at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, is not only endurance and power, but the ability to manage stress, and the tenacity not to quit. Over the years, the pararescue school faculty has devised various forms of underwater torture designed to sort out the candidates who can handle stress from those who can’t.
It all begins with a basic supposition: Can there be anything more stressful than knowing you’re running out of oxygen? Caleb Ethridge went through it in 1997, and remembers it like it was yesterday.
“We had to tie knots underwater, and the instructors said, ‘You either tie ’em right, or you’ve got to go back down and do them again.’ They usually brought you back up and smoked you, so you pretty much want to stay down there and finish it. You block out of your mind that you’re underwater, you’ve been swimming for two hours and are totally exhausted, and you’ve got to hold your breath down at twelve feet and tie all these stupid knots—a bowline, a girth hitch and a square knot.
“Well, I got to the square knot and I tied a granny knot, right over right, right over right. I knew it was wrong, so I untied it, and then I tied right over right, right over right again. I just kept on tying it. I’m on the bottom of the pool, and I passed out. Everyone else is up, done. They ended up going down and pulling me up by my shirt. I knew that I was holding my breath and it’s unnatural and it’s hurting and it sucks, but I gotta finish this. I have to do this so I don’t have to do it again, when it would suck even more.”
And what’s a wanna-be PJ who doesn’t make it do in that situation? Ethridge also remembers seeing that—and it wasn’t pretty. “This guy was six-two, just looked like somebody in the movies who was already in. He looked like he’s a PJ or a SEAL. But doing his underwaters, he ended up crapping in the pool, he was so stressed out. He came up. He couldn’t do it. And he freaked out. They ended up taking him to the shower room. He’s yelling, ‘I can’t fuckin’ do it! I’m fucked up in the head!’ and on and on. And I thought, ‘If anybody can make it, this guy can make it.’ So you’re seeing these guys cry and crap in the pool. You doubt yourself, like, ‘Shit, how am I gonna make it?’ But you do.”
One of his fellow PJs, twenty-five-year-old S.Sgt. Robert Disney from De catur, Illinois, survived an HH-60G helicopter crash on takeoff into a full brownout. His team leader was S.Sgt. Matthew White. Not unexpectedly, Disney remembers the crash and its aftermath as though it happened in slow motion—yesterday. “My teammate called the other helicopter to let them know that there were survivors. The incident’s forever etched in my mind. The special forces guys showed up, and there was mass confusion. I can still see Matt standing up on top of the helicopter and saying over the buzz of conversation, ‘Everybody listen up! Everybody shut up! Here’s the situation. We’ve got a helicopter that just crashed. We got six people inside, everybody’s okay but they need to get checked out medically. We’ve got classified documents, and we’ve got weapons on the inside that need to come out. And we need to get a security perimeter set up. Now, let’s make it happen.’ And Matt standing on top of that helicopter, saying that, doing that, taking command of the situation, it’s something I’ll never, ever forget.”
They just did what they had to do, when they had to do it, and afterward, Disney connected it with the water torture at indoc.
“The point of it isn’t to see how well you can hold your bre
ath. What better way to test your reaction to stress than to take away your oxygen supply? Under stress, your heart rate increases, which increases your oxygen demand, so they put you underwater and see if you can control it. It doesn’t matter how well you can swim, how well you can run, and how well you can do push-ups or sit-ups. It’s how you react to stress, and that’s why the pool is the place where people lose it, and that’s why the people who graduate that school end up being the pararescuemen of today, because they are able to handle the kinds of stresses that are put on them in combat. They can keep their heart rate down, their head together, and get the job done.”
The success of Air Force Combat Search and Rescue lies in the selection of the right people for the job, and training them so they can do it under circumstances that would make many folks lose more than just their concentration in the pool. While the PJs are unique, credit certainly has to be given to the pilots—male and female—and backenders who get them where they need to be.
The crews have their own unique sense of humor, which is clearly in evidence outside the rows of dusty brown tents they occupy a half mile from the flight line at K-2. Under an American flag flying from the top of one is a hand-lettered sign that proudly announces:
The man in charge of those CSAR helicopter crews sitting at Texaco FARP on the day Operation Anaconda began was Lt. Col. Lee dePalo, a sixteen-year Air Force veteran who spent ten years flying special operations helicopters before coming to CSAR and ultimately taking command of elements from the 66th Rescue Squadron at Nellis AFB, Nevada, that were sent to Operation Enduring Freedom. DePalo is convinced his men are well trained, skillful, and smart, which is why he can walk past their hootch on Air Force Hill in Kandahar and smile at the sign on the door that says:
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