Letters From War – Déjà-Vu

By Don Harward

The other day, we were racing across the desert at fifty feet. The airspeed indicator read a comfortable 135 knots and the rotor blades were smoothly doing whatever they do up there, going round and round. We were in the number two position at an extended 45-degree angle from lead on the left side. I was on the controls and was keeping us at about a quarter mile spacing; close enough to keep lead in sight, but far enough away so as not to provide a “nice juicy target” for some guy on the other team. I like flying “cross panel”—looking across the cockpit and out of the other pilot’s windshield at the other aircraft—because it allows me an occasional quick scan of the instruments while maximising the time I spend looking outside. Flying at that airspeed and altitude, one is pretty safe from fast little metallic flying things but only half a hiccup away from becoming a flaming ball of aluminium; it’s a fun little balancing act between the right and left edges of human existence.

Which reminds me of something I heard one of my combat medics say a couple years ago as we raced to transport a wounded patient to a CASH (Combat Army Surgical Hospital). When I noticed that the usual frenzy of activity in the back had stopped and the guys were just looking out either side of the aircraft, I asked how the patient was doing. The medic paused briefly and simply said, “His injuries were inconsistent with life!” Think about that for a moment…Isn’t that sobering? Back in the present, I realised that hitting the ground at the speed we were travelling would produce exactly the same results.

The leg we were flying was a routine one at just under an hour. When I say “routine”, keep in mind that—unlike the airline guys who can sit back and check their stocks while cruising along at flight level three seven zero—ours is hands-on stick-and-rudder flying, second by exciting second. Even so, it is not always exciting enough to keep the mind from occasionally wandering and in a moment of déjà-vu, while my view outside stayed the same, in my mind, it all suddenly changed. As my aircraft vibrated heavily from the six massive rotor blades beating over my head, I was suddenly back in a hot and sweaty Chinook in another, different desert and another desert war.

My mind recalled the old sounds, feelings and smells of our MH-47 as we raced across that earlier desert at breakneck speed towards southern Iraq. We had three pilots in the cockpit—I was the mission commander and Dave was flying the aircraft. A third pilot sat in the jump seat behind us with the sole task of monitoring our altitude; if it dropped below 75 feet, it was his job to call “Climb, climb, climb!” If the pilot on the controls did not respond immediately, he was tasked to reach forward and pull the collective up to save our lives!

The mission was a hairy one. It was night-time and the weather was awful, with a ceiling of barely a hundred feet and half a mile visibility. Despite the conditions, we had the proverbial pedal to the metal as we raced northwards to try to save a downed Air Force pilot whose day had not been good. According to his wingman, their flight had been launched upon by an SA-6. This is a particularly nasty—and not so little—surface-to-air missile that will hunt you down and absolutely kill you. The wingman had witnessed the missile actually strike his leader’s F-16 and blow the back end completely off his plane.

That was the bad news. The good news was that the front half had survived with a precious American life still on board; the pilot had pulled the “Hail Mary” handle and ejected. Less fortunately, although the F16 pilot had survived the missile strike and subsequent ejection, he had landed very close to the guys who had shot him down; this guy wasn’t very lucky at all.

I was the standby CSAR (combat search and rescue) pilot that night and was, well, standing by when I got a message to go and see the Colonel. I walked into Lieutenant Colonel Bailey’s office to find the executive officer waiting for me. “Don, he’s waiting for you in Ops; get over there right away.” I entered the classified area to find Colonel Bailey and the intelligence officer looking at a computer monitor. As I joined them, the intelligence officer recognised me and started explaining what had just happened almost three hundred miles away. As he explained what everything was, I quickly noticed there was a lot of really bad stuff packed onto that screen—and no friendlies. Then his finger tapped on a little dot on the screen. “We think that’s our man,” he said, looking at me.

Colonel Bailey was an excellent commander with a hardcore Ranger core, the mind of a Rhodes scholar and the heart of a loving father. He searched me with a stare that settled everything in my mind. His strongest trait was an uncanny ability to really know his men and after our many desert experiences, he knew me well also. He simply said, “Don, I’m not going to order you to do this one.” He paused to allow his words to sink in, then he continued. “But I’m not going to stop you either!”

The weight of those words was massive; I realised that this wasn’t about me. This was the real deal; it was the very reason I was an officer—the moment of reckoning that every warrior wants and dreads, all at the same time. I had a crew to consider. As well as the three pilots, there were three gunners, three long-hair types and three combat medics from another armed service. If we were to go, Colonel Bailey would also send two Blackhawks to shoot our way in to the pickup point. If I said yes, then perhaps some—or possibly all—of those people might not be coming home that night—including me. The decision was mine alone to make. I respectfully asked for a moment and left the room.

Officially, I was in charge. However, anyone who knows anything about the military also knows that its non-commissioned officers are its strength and backbone. I went straight to George, a Special Forces Master Sergeant and a veteran of special operations in Vietnam and more than twenty years of hard army living. Even though I was officially in charge, I was not as “blooded” as George. He had seen more than his share of bad stuff and had “been there” far more often than I had. Tonight was probably going to be a tough mission. George commanded a tremendous amount of respect from all of us, and his wisdom and judgment were unquestionable.

Everyone’s eyes followed us as we walked outside. I carefully explained the situation to George. After I gave him everything I had, he kicked the dirt around with his boots, thought for a moment, looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Sir, I don’t know about you, but I sure wouldn’t want to be on the ground up there all alone.”

We locked eyes as I weighed his words carefully: “OK, George; it’s a go. Get the crew and aircraft ready; I’m going back to Ops.”

“Roger that, Sir,” he replied, and gave me a firm slap on my shoulder.

Here’s how we looked at it. If this were to be our “last” mission, we would make our last few hours or minutes—or whatever—truly honourable. If this were to be our day of days then we would do it as men, with our heads held high.

I cannot go on without mentioning the influence of Russ Carmody, who was my company commander at the time. Russ had been a warrant officer and flew Cobra attack helicopters in Vietnam. He was the consummate warrior and a dammed good leader, and his pilots were “his boys.”

During one of our “father-son” chats long before this mission arose, I asked him how he did it—how he climbed into a cockpit to go up against odds so heavily stacked against him. He told me he could do it because he had lived a good life. He was a good father and had a loving wife. The nation had been good to him and he had done things that most people couldn’t even dream about. Continuing, he explained that we had been specially selected and carefully trained to become our nation’s silent warriors. There were no others able to do the missions we did; it was up to us to paint our story on the canvas of history and our responsibility to pay back the nation that had blessed us so richly. With honour, we would do exactly that.

With Russ Carmody’s words in my mind, it was as if my heart were tattooed with the red white and blue flag; it swelled with resolve and I was able to make that important, necessary switch in gears that told me it was about others and not about me.

I told Colonel Bailey we were going to give it a try. Grabbing my hand to shake it, he simply said, “God speed, Don. Go get him.”

A couple of hours later, it was a hell of a mess—there was no other way to describe it. The situation in the target area had deteriorated to the extent that with so much steel being put into the air by anti-aircraft fire, the other F-16s had to bug out. However, the Air Force guys wouldn’t give up. Other fighter pilots continued to drop bombs in an attempt to “soften up” the area that they knew would soon be crossed by helicopters making a desperate attempt to get their guy. An Air Force MH-53 “Pave Low” special operations helicopter was busy making its way to the target area from a different direction, while we were “threading the eye of the needle.”

An airborne platform directed our flight through the various obstacles, and our crews were at their limits dealing with the terrible weather and visibility—and the enemy situation. Our MH-47 had a FLIR (forward looking infrared), which wasn’t doing a particularly good job of seeing through the dense fog. Our NVGs (night vision goggles) were also at their limits, since it was darker than the inside of a bucket of black paint. About all we could see was the ground just below the aircraft, and virtually nothing in front. Despite being unable to see, we were pushing it along at around 140 knots. Although the weather was bad, we knew the sun would be up in a couple hours and we would be big fat sitting ducks. We had very little time to prosecute this mission and get the heck out of Dodge.

Rather unexpectedly, the Pave Low reported arrival over the target. Those guys were getting shot at by everything. Looking at our mission computer, we knew we would also be there soon. We got a call from Colonel Bailey who ordered us to land where we were and await further orders; the plan was changing rapidly. Because the Pave Low was taking so much fire, it was feared that, it, too, would get shot down, leaving only us to pick everyone up. We landed in the middle of nowhere and the two Blackhawks landed one on either side of us. The long hair guys alighted and immediately set up a perimeter a couple hundred metres away. Through their headsets, they communicated the ground situation back to us.

Everyone listened to the battle frequency on Satcom (satellite communications radio) as the Pave Low tried repeatedly to get to the downed Air Force pilot. Eventually, we heard the call that made me sick; the F16 guy had probably only had a ten percent chance of making it in the first place and his luck had just run out. The call to return to base was an emotional low-of-lows for us. We had put everything on the line and flown in the worst conditions any of us had ever seen, but in spite of all that effort, we had lost him anyway and were coming home empty handed.

Later, after sunrise, we rendezvoused with the Pave Low guys at a forward base. The downed pilot had been talking to them on his survival radio. As they tried to locate him amidst all the mayhem, they heard him say, “They got me; they got me. Get the hell out of here!” I can hardly remember the rest of the mission, but for some reason, remember other inconsequential things. For example, I remember that after talking to the Pave guys, I sat down on the floor beside a big green air conditioning unit bearing a brass plate that said “Trane Corporation, Clarksville, Tennessee”. By irrelevant coincidence, at that time, I actually lived in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Only a few weeks after this mission, I was back home in the US. As I flew across the Appalachian mountains north of Ashville, North Carolina, my head was still in some sort of wacky transition between there and Iraq. The crew I was flying with hadn’t been over for desert fun, but were getting ready to go. I don’t know why, but for some reason, they must have been talking about tactics, when someone said the words “taking fire” on the intercom. Whatever they were talking about, those were the only words I heard.

In a split second, I had that aircraft in a 60-degree bank and about two ball-widths out of trim. I aimed for a narrow draw to my right, sure in the knowledge that if I could just have two or three more seconds, I could get our giant Chinook down into that narrow valley and we might just escape. As I clawed for the ground in a crazy emergency descent, rolling ever more steeply, it suddenly occurred to me that this was North Carolina! Slowly, I rolled the aircraft level, increased power for a climb and placed the aircraft in trim. My heart was doing about 170 beats a minute. I took a couple of deep breaths, looked over at my co-pilot and said, “You have the controls.”

He had one of those “What the heck was that?” looks on his face and one of the crew chiefs in the back was saying, “Big Don, it’s OK; it’s OK. No one is shooting at us. I’m sorry.” I drew another breath and said, “Please, don’t ever do that again.” For most of the rest of the flight, almost no one spoke. Later that night, I heard them talking about how they thought I was still in the war and was wrapped way too tight. And you know what? They were right.

I was undoubtedly suffering from some stress-related syndrome, which I am sure some psychologist could name, but I didn’t care. I knew that healing could be found under an ancient chestnut tree in Maryland. There, a week later, I sat in an old homemade wooden chair and listened to my father—himself a veteran who had seen and lived through many horrors in the skies over Nazi Germany. As the wind blew gently through the branches and spring leaves above us, slowly and with the skill of a surgeon, his measured words finally brought me back home and away from that war.