I shouldn’t be here. It should have been me who burned up, covered with flaming jet fuel on the side of a New Mexico mountain that fall morning. It’s been more than 20 years now that we lost that aircrew and it still bothers me to this day.
I was coming off a night shift managing Air Force maintenance operations on HH-53 rescue and special operations helicopters. As my ground crew was getting ready to launch an aircraft on a combat-training mission, my boss told me the flight crew wanted a crew chief to fly with them to take care of any problems that may arise during the mission. “Your flight crew’s planning mountaintop and desert operations today. They want you with ‘em. I know you’ve been up all night, but it’s your ride if you want it.”
The HH-53, is a large, surprisingly agile combat helicopter designed to fly and fight under the harshest of conditions. It’s operated by a flight crew of three, and during combat or rescue operations will carry two or three pararescuemen and possibly a crew chief, like me. In combat configuration we were equipped with titanium armor and three machineguns. At 16 tons, it can take a beating from ground fire, fly on only one of two engines and lose majors portions of its rotor blades, as long as it has enough air beneath them.
On this day the crew would run out of air in which to fly.
Being the number one pick for an assignment has its benefits. It tells you that you are highly regarded; people trust you. This was a compliment that I had to turn down, however. “Thanks, Chief,” I said. “can’t fly today, got a bad gut.” I didn’t like to begin a flight with an upset stomach, and the Chief didn’t want us to, either. It’s not good business, anyway, because a sick crewmember is a useless one; he might as well stay home.
“Okay, pick someone,” he said. “it’s just crankin’ and bankin’ and rabbit-chasin’; no guns today.”
I suggested a replacement. John, a young sergeant who worked for me, had proven himself trustworthy.
John was in his mid-twenties and had come to us as a crew chief on B-52 bombers. What I remember best about him was his willingness to do any job and his excitement to learn. He seemed to be happy to be working on the world’s most sophisticated helicopter, the HH-53.
I also recall he had a slight fear of heights, especially when walking around 12 or 15 feet above the ground on the rounded, and quite often oily, surfaces of the HH-53. There was that one day I was sitting on top of the stabilizer making an adjustment to the tail rotor. I asked John to bring me a tool. To do so, he would have to walk out on the tail boom with no handholds, no safety net or harness, just the air around him and the pavement below. I told him he would be okay, he was safe, it just took some getting used to.
As he carefully walked out to the end of the tail boom, he shifted the weight of the helicopter causing it to bounce a little, almost imperceptibly, except to John, who could feel every quiver in the airframe. Of course, it didn’t help that with every step he took, I would bounce a little to try and make the little quivers turn into what must have seemed to him like big, roiling waves. He got quite a laugh out of that, once he was safely back on the ground.
John was more than just a good mechanic and technician, he was the father of two small children, a boy and a girl. He often spoke about his wife and kids.
As he was coming off the flight line, I grabbed him by the arm. “Hey, call Operations, you’re going for a ride today, unless you got something better to do.”
When I offered him the chance to fly his face lit up and he bolted for the phone to give his wife the news and tell her that he’d be home for dinner. I never called mine when I flew. I just went, damn the consequences. He was so excited; it was his first flight.
So, off John goes with two pilots, two flight engineers and the absolute joy of a child looking forward to a day at the county fair. But this ride was better than that at any fair. John went flying, I went home to bed.
About mid-day the phone rang.
“The helicopter is down. Missing, west of the base, in the mountains. Forest Service reports a plume of smoke. Black smoke. Oily smoke. Chief wants you to come in, we’re launching.”
By the time I reported to the squadron, the crew of an H-1 rescue helicopter had arrived at the crash scene. They report survivors and ask for a larger helicopter and more pararescuemen. And body bags.
I flew out to the crash site the next day with another crew chief. There was little left of 32,000 pounds of combat helicopter and crew. We could identify burned armor, parts of gearboxes, pieces of rotor blade. And an empty boot, still laced up.
I sat there on a hillside viewing the scene of so many wasted dreams, and was dumbstruck.
A rancher found part of a main rotor blade more than a mile away.
From what we could tell, the helicopter approached the mountains from the east, flying close to the ground in a terrain-following combat mode, maybe 500 feet from the ground. As they traveled west, the forested ground started sloping upward, almost imperceptibly to an aircrew flying more than a hundred miles an hour. At some time in the flight, as the aircraft began getting closer to the ground and running out of precious air space, it started chopping down pine trees like a fully armed, multi-million dollar lawnmower. This probably lasted for maybe, five seconds.
To think that for a final, horrifying five seconds as the crew realized there wasn’t a Goddamn thing they could do but die.
And, die they did. When the helicopter, an HH-53 air rescue and special operations helicopter designed to fly under any conditions, flew into the hard, New Mexico landscape, the front end crumpled like tissue paper. The pilots’ titanium armor seats ripped loose from their moorings and carried their occupants deep into the soil and then emerged again with the remains, skittering like children’s toys thrown across a room. The operational flight engineer, seated in a sling-like nylon seat between and just behind the pilots, instantly became part of the landscape. His non-operational counterpart was probably sitting behind him and to the left, from where he was thrown into, and through the avionics compartment behind the co-pilot. Then again, maybe not. It could have just enveloped him as it traveled backwards with the rest of the quickly evaporating aircraft. Or, was the rear of the helicopter merely moving forward at a hundred or so miles an hour sweeping men and machinery with it as it ceased to be anything recognizable?
But John, John was thrown free. Like most crew chiefs, he was probably standing in the back of the aircraft, holding onto the airframe so he would be safe as the aircraft twisted and turned through the countryside like a ride at the fair.
Yeah, John was thrown free, but not without being enveloped in burning jet fuel and hydraulic fluid that must have made him look like a Fourth of July flare as he slammed into the ground at close to 150 miles an hour.
The initial rescue crew recovered John, ministered to his wounds (they reported having a difficult time determining exactly what was John and what was…God only knows) and flew him directly to the base hospital. Once there his burned clothing and skin and pieces of New Mexico were cut from his now unrecognizable, young form.
John lasted, (I won’t say “lived”) another few weeks and died with his wife by his side.
So, I come back to my issue. One early New Mexico morning I had a chance to fly and I turned it down because of a stomachache. A friend took my place, and in my place he died. He suffered for days and I was too afraid, too cowardly, to even go and see him as he lie on his deathbed in my place.
John left behind a family, two children, a boy, not much more than a toddler, and a girl, not much older than that. And he left a wife, now a very young widow, who was so proud of her man. Because of me they lost the promise of a happy life as a family, growing and laughing and sharing each other’s love. Because of me.
And yet I remained to go on with my life. Unscathed. Untouched. Unbroken and unburned. All because someone else went in my place and did my duty.
What I would give now to make it right. What I would give now to see that fine young man who trusted me as I assured him he would be safe, high up on a helicopter, so close to the ground.
