On Serving in Peace and War
For me, the war begins September 8th, because of
events on the 8th and 9th.
Most of my military service was in peacetime. When I was a fit young tiger, the call didn't come. But it was on my watch that the Iranian hostage mission went off (I was in Monterey, California, at the Defense Language Institute). When Grenada was taken down, I was in Phase II, Light Weapons, of the Special Forces qualification course. One of my classmates, who had been at 2nd Ranger Battalion before coming to SF, went to visit his Ranger replacement in Womack Army Hospital the day before the wounded man succumbed. It didn't do his head any good, that's for sure.
The only guy in my own Ranger class from my original hometown, Philip Grenier of Worcester, Mass., was killed in a helicopter midair on that operation. Military operations involve humans, stress, and machinery, and so are practically begging for accidents.
Most Americans never knew we fought a war in El Salvador. There wasn't much fighting for our guys, compared to what the El Sals had to do on their own, but Greg Fronius was killed by mortar fire one hectic night. I met him a few times in the Q, and guys I knew vouched for him, which is a big thing. Your reputation starts on the first day (or for a guy like me who was on a SOTA at a Group already, it starts before that -- the day you sign in). Greg's reputation was good when I met him, before anyone knew he'd die on a fire-swept parade ground to help a bunch of foreigners live free.
I didn't lose any friends when the blight of Noriega was lifted from Panama, but I didn't participate, either (I was in a unit that specialized in the Arctic). At the time of Desert Storm, I was still in an Arctic-oriented unit, a Reserve unit, and we did go to Norway, and skied up and down the Dovrefjell, and came back windburned and cranky to a bus with three-foot-high-lettering, "Welcome Home, Desert Storm Heroes." Not an ego booster, that.
It wasn't until Afghanistan that my nation's war was my, personal, war. But my war got started the weekend before, although I didn't know it at the time. I'll explain if you read more.
The thing that put me in mind of all this was this post at the Powerline blog. John Hinderaker (rhymes with cinder rocker) notes that the US had a higher casualty rate in peacetime for the years for which he has numbers (83-96) than in Iraq.
He's off in one trifling detail, which is that the 18,006 were for worldwide operations, and while the press usually throws the Afghan and, for example, Phillipines casualties in with the Iraq ones, they're not counting all the GIs that manage to whack themselves in traditional GI ways, drinking and driving or exploring the corners of a Japanese superbike's performance envelope. Still, the man has a point. All we hear from the self-proclaimed peddlers of history's first draft with reference to Iraq and Afghanistan are stories about US casualties, denuded of context. Sometimes these losses are gleefully reported, as when Ted Koppel periodically reads the names of the dead, clearly enjoying each one. And like most long-serving soldiers, I've lost more people when the war wasn't on. The most shocking and unwelcome news was of an event on September 8, 2001, an event that almost none of you have heard of, but that affected a family as powerfully as some of the bad news from the stans has done.
Most of my military service was in peacetime. When I was a fit young tiger, the call didn't come. But it was on my watch that the Iranian hostage mission went off (I was in Monterey, California, at the Defense Language Institute). When Grenada was taken down, I was in Phase II, Light Weapons, of the Special Forces qualification course. One of my classmates, who had been at 2nd Ranger Battalion before coming to SF, went to visit his Ranger replacement in Womack Army Hospital the day before the wounded man succumbed. It didn't do his head any good, that's for sure.
The only guy in my own Ranger class from my original hometown, Philip Grenier of Worcester, Mass., was killed in a helicopter midair on that operation. Military operations involve humans, stress, and machinery, and so are practically begging for accidents.
Most Americans never knew we fought a war in El Salvador. There wasn't much fighting for our guys, compared to what the El Sals had to do on their own, but Greg Fronius was killed by mortar fire one hectic night. I met him a few times in the Q, and guys I knew vouched for him, which is a big thing. Your reputation starts on the first day (or for a guy like me who was on a SOTA at a Group already, it starts before that -- the day you sign in). Greg's reputation was good when I met him, before anyone knew he'd die on a fire-swept parade ground to help a bunch of foreigners live free.
I didn't lose any friends when the blight of Noriega was lifted from Panama, but I didn't participate, either (I was in a unit that specialized in the Arctic). At the time of Desert Storm, I was still in an Arctic-oriented unit, a Reserve unit, and we did go to Norway, and skied up and down the Dovrefjell, and came back windburned and cranky to a bus with three-foot-high-lettering, "Welcome Home, Desert Storm Heroes." Not an ego booster, that.
It wasn't until Afghanistan that my nation's war was my, personal, war. But my war got started the weekend before, although I didn't know it at the time. I'll explain if you read more.
The thing that put me in mind of all this was this post at the Powerline blog. John Hinderaker (rhymes with cinder rocker) notes that the US had a higher casualty rate in peacetime for the years for which he has numbers (83-96) than in Iraq.
The media's breathless tabulation of casualties in Iraq--now, over 1,800 deaths--is generally devoid of context. Here's some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one.That's right: all through the years when hardly anyone was paying attention, soldiers, sailors and Marines were dying in accidents, training and otherwise, at nearly twice the rate of combat deaths in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 to the present. Somehow, though, when there was no political hay to be made, I don't recall any great outcry, or gleeful reporting, or erecting of crosses in the President's home town.
He's off in one trifling detail, which is that the 18,006 were for worldwide operations, and while the press usually throws the Afghan and, for example, Phillipines casualties in with the Iraq ones, they're not counting all the GIs that manage to whack themselves in traditional GI ways, drinking and driving or exploring the corners of a Japanese superbike's performance envelope. Still, the man has a point. All we hear from the self-proclaimed peddlers of history's first draft with reference to Iraq and Afghanistan are stories about US casualties, denuded of context. Sometimes these losses are gleefully reported, as when Ted Koppel periodically reads the names of the dead, clearly enjoying each one. And like most long-serving soldiers, I've lost more people when the war wasn't on. The most shocking and unwelcome news was of an event on September 8, 2001, an event that almost none of you have heard of, but that affected a family as powerfully as some of the bad news from the stans has done.
To start with, I wasn't there. The mission was
routine for our unit -- some live-fire immediate action drills on the range at
Ft. Drum -- and I had an annual meeting in Florida. (I was on the board, so I
couldn't duck it; part of being a Guardsman is juggling two masters). Some of
the other guys couldn't be there, either. The CO and the sergeant major were
required to be at a command and staff meeting -- I can't remember, now, whether
it was at Ft Bragg or in Alabama.
But on the range, something went terribly wrong. Team 31 conducted a routine react-to-far-ambush drill, which involves everyone taking cover, firing back, and withdrawing. But one man didn't withdraw.
"Hey, c'mon, Rich, we gotta go," one of the other guys said. He thought Rich C., the team's weapons sergeant for many years -- this was my old team from Newburgh, New York -- was just lying there. "C'mon buddy, quit goofing off."
And then Rich moaned.
Somehow, one of the other guys -- the investigation was never able to determine who it was -- fired at least one round well off-axis. That round penetrated Rich's Kevlar helmet, and parts of the bullet, the helmet, skull and hair sprayed into, and a couple of them through, Rich's skull. The bullet took him low below the right ear and continued up into his head, making a terrible mess. Some parts of it came out the upper left frontal lobe area.
Rich was intermittently conscious, but he was confused. He begged them to take his helmet off; it was hurting him. So they took the helmet off and lay it beside him, not daring to look in it, while they tried to stop the bleeding by the light of their flashlights.
"Oh, God, take my Kevlar off. It's hurting me," he said. Another soldier told me later that a chill passed all through him when he heard Rich ask that, and the chill didn't leave. He kept asking for his helmet to be removed, even though it already was.
Stopping the bleeding was hard. First, heads have a lot of blood vessels, and second, Rich kept moving around spastically.
Later, they would look at the helmet, and then cops would look at the helmet, and ultimately experts from Natick Labs would look at the helmet. The Kevlar was a great success... nothing made it through both sides, kind of like the half-tracks at Kasserine Pass -- the bullet just went in and kinda bounced around.
(This is a coupon of Kevlar cut from Rich's helmet where the bullet penetrated. It was studied, the layers of the aramid cloth separated, to see if the helmet could be improved, after it had been examined for evidentiary purposes during the multiple investigations of Rich's accident).
Another Rich, a medic, Rich S., was key to saving the wounded man, Rich C's, life. By lucky happenstance we had a surgeon there with us, and several highly trained medics, but Rich S's civilian job is as a trauma EMT. He took charge of the patient, while others took charge of trying to get help. Rich was rushed to a civilian hospital... the team members, indeed the whole unit, were more or less placed under house arrest at Drum.
They suffered several days of abuse from the CID and the command and staff of the 10th Mountain Division before all those non-geniuses finally figured out that nobody had deliberately shot Rich, and the unit had not deviated in any material way from approved SF procedures. Meanwhile, the polyester-pants PFCs of CID amused themselves by playing Sherlock Holmes, pulling the team members in one at a time and saying things like, "we know that you were sleeping with his wife, but we don't think that means you shot him, although it looks pretty bad for you. Tell us about the affair, come clean on that, and we'll make sure you don't get in trouble for anything you didn't do." Members of the team who were cops and detectives in civilian life were appalled.
Needless to say, CID didn't find anything, although they kept it up for months. But after a couple of days the team members were released. Their weapons were all retained as evidence (CID fired them for ballistics, then let them sit and corrode without cleaning for weeks. Ballistics was a forlorn hope, as the surgeons determined the bullet pieces would have to stay where they were, unless Rich died. So CID prayed for him to die, and everyone else prayed for him to live...
The next day, September 9, 2001, I got the grim news that Ahmad Shah Massoud had been murdered. The US had lost a difficult, but irreplaceable ally, in a part of the world where we had few allies. I had studied Afghanistan long and hard. I thought I understood Massoud. I didn't understand why we backed him so little, and backed people who did not have his vision, like Gulbuddin Hekmatayar. I figured that there were probably a lot of things that the real policy experts knew and I didn't; after all, I just read the published material, and an occasional intelligence report. My unit's area of expertise was the Andean Ridge. Or the Caribbean. Or Bosnia -- we had three different tasking letters. But we were guerillas by training and inclination, and Massoud was the prince of guerillas. I never got to meet the man that Hamid Karzai calls the Esteemed, but that didn't stop me from esteeming him, and I was morose and glum. I didn't have any idea that a friend I knew much more personally lay near death, and, of course, none of us what lay just days ahead.
I was still in Florida on Monday when I got a call from Joe, one of the medics in the company. Joe was in tears; "We shot Richie, man. He's not gonna make it." It took a long time for me to understand what he was saying. My friend was in a coma. He was going to die, the docs said. They were gonna try, but they had seen enough of these things not to spread false hope.
It was not possible -- not Rich! He was not the smartest guy on the team -- we often wondered how he ever got past the mental testing or the minimum GT score of 110 for SF -- but he was probably the most entertaining and the most universally loved. His wife was going to be a widow, his four kids -- or was it five, Joe and I agreed he was always coming in with new baby pictures -- were going to be fatherless. The family didn't have a penny to its name, just a shabby house and ramshackle old car and a mountain of debts that we'd all tried counseling RIchie on.
Why couldn't it be me? I had no kids, and my ex-wives wouldn't miss me. Why Rich?
But the fact of the matter is, what we do is dangerous. A feller can get hurt doing this, and year-in, year-out, someone did. The day I arrived at 10th Special Forces Group, green as a fern, the unit was in the paper: a young NCO had gotten tangled in brush and had died of hypothermia in a stream, right in the tiny on-post training area. What had I gotten into? And until I left Group in 1985 to go to an intelligence assignment, we lost one man every major exercise, and usually -- there being only a thousand odd men in an SF group, and one of our battalions being out of sight and mind in Germany -- it was someone I knew.
The year before I got there, it had been the Group Commander, Col. Cutolo, in a jeep crash in Sculthorpe, England. He'd been drinking (to put it mildly).
One of the radioteletype operators from Signal Company electrocuted himself -- those things have 50,000 volts inside, and he opened it up to fix something while it was energized -- on Flintlock 1981.
That fall, my buddy Gary F. got tangled with Sergeant First Class Miguel Mitchell on exiting an aircraft. At the time, the drill was for the high man, and the high man only, to pull his reserve chute when two were entangled and falling. The theory was, both would ride the single reserve to a hard but survivable landing. Gary called to Mitchell, who neither answered nor pulled. Finally Gary pulled his reserve -- to hell with the high-man procedure -- and just barely saved himself. Mitchell bounced. He left a wife and three kids. (Gary survived, survived many other jumps and Grenada too, and is a successful businessman today).
When I finally got to the Q Course, a couple days after I finished Phase I, the instructor we had all agreed was our favorite, SSG Murray, died in a motorcycle accident.
On Flintlock 83 we did a live Fulton STAR extraction for the last time. The rope broke and Master Sergeant Cliff Strickland fell some 250 feet to his death before his teammates. Cliff had politicked hard to get that plum rope ride. We never, ever, did STAR again except with dummies, and the AIr Force finally cancelled it permanently in 1996.
(Don't think that it was just my unit, 10th Special Forces Group, under a black cloud. In 1983, a guy I would later serve with was the only survivor of his 101st Division company, because he was at Ft Campbell when their airplane crashed in Gander, Newfoundland. Most of his battalion, actually, was rubbed out -- and most of them married men, because the single and married guys voluntarily swopped so that the married guys could take the first plane).
On Flintlock 84 we didn't kill anyone. I'm not sure why. The Air Force was experimenting with a new blind drop technique and it was a thunderous failure. Dozens went to the hospital with broken maxilla, mandible, cranium, vertebrae, pelvis, femur, or some painful combination of the above. A month after the exercise, we still had guys in German hospitals who couldn't be moved. One young trooper, Jay, fell off a tree he was climbing down and never had control or sensation below the waist again.
Later in 1984 one of the unit's NCOs who had gone to Korea for a short tour died in an accident, I have always heard it was with a land mine. I got assigned as NCO assistant to the casualty notification officer, a man with whom I had long generated deep and mutual antipathy. I think we'd both agree, that even discounting our mutually disagreeable company, that was the worst duty we ever had to do. Full stop.
And the hits just kept on coming. Doing an Armed Forces Day show, for crying out loud, in 1985, one of the clinic (not SF) medics rappelled off the end of the rope and was still fifteen feet up. He received crippling spinal injuries also. He wasn't even a qualified trooper but he was a good guy -- a favorite of all of ours -- and so of course he was given the plum of being in the show.
Around the same time a helicopter crashed, as it turns out, due to the failure of a 50-cent part. The pilot used the last seconds to try to reduce the impact, or no one would have survived. The team medic, Jerry T, had ironically been a crew chief on a helicopter, back when SF had its own air, and for a time was in my social circle. He lived two houses down from one of my best friends in housing on Devens at the time of the accident. Jerry was trapped under parts of the helicopter and couldn't move... he listened to his teammates and the Black Hawk crewmen calling for help. But he was in terrible pain himself, bleeding, and couldn't move. And the cries gradually got weaker.... Jerry lived. Some of the others did, too, some didn't. One guy got his rifle shoved through his chest by impact forces, and he exsanguinated pretty quickly.
I'm sure I'm leaving out some of them. This hasn't been a pleasant trip down Memory Lane, but anybody with 25 years in SF can meet or beat this story. It's a dangerous business.
It begins to sink in, in these circumstances, that we don't need an enemy to have casualties. They can be a by-product of training. And I think that what we do in SF is pretty safe compared to what, say, naval aviators do. Those guys have a dangerous job (and casualty stats to back that statement up).
Richie C. did come out of his coma, finally. "Miracles do happen," the doc said, "and we love it when they do. You understand, we can't count on them." There are so many stories about Richie's recovery that I can't tell the ones I know, and I know that I don't know them all. Amazingly, he still has all his marbles, he still has his personality, he still has his own zany sense of humor. (In cerebral cortex injuries, this is an unusual outcome). His SF career is over; the injuries altered his field of vision and he never recovered full use of one arm and leg. He also lost his civilian job, which required a degree of athletics. He and his family are getting by. The Army's clerks and the VA, not surprisingly, tried to hose him on his disability pension, but it looks like he'll come out alright in the end.
The unit recommended the medic, Rich S., whose prompt and correct treatment saved Rich C's life, for a medal. The state National Guard headquarters slapped the application down. It didn't bother him; everybody who mattered knew what he had done, and loved him for it. Nobody made a big deal out of it, of course. But having Rich C. still on the blade rather than the root side of the grass is a wondrous thing.
At the first unit Christmas party after his accident, Rich attended in a wheelchair. We who had written him off were deliriously happy -- even those of us who weren't drinking, which was a minority. War was in the air, and he said, "don't go, guys, don't you go over there until I'm ready." But, of course....
The boys went to Afghanistan through the Dreaded Afghan Winter, as the press had given up calling it when it didn't hurt us enough to please them. Our battalion lived a charmed life, with none killed and only a handful of wounded -- only two seriously. The battalion commander got shot, but was back in command in two days -- doped to the gills but it didn't seem to affect his command style much. Another man lost a foot to an antitank mine. But everyone who flew over, flew back.
We had to medevac a couple of guys from our team (I was one), but not for anything serious.
But while we were there, we listened to the radio, pulling for a 7th Group team in a pitched fight where they lost two guys. A helicopter coming to get some desperately ill Afghans at our base camp, diverted to a closer camp instead to take their casualty, and after picking the casualty (also an Afghan)up, they hit the tanker for some fuel, then flew into a hillside. Nobody made it.
Just before we went to Afghanistan, a young man trying out for our battalion was shot and killed by a jumpy cop who had forgotten that Special Forces was conducting an exercise in his North Carolina town. I don't think he's any less a hero than Rich, and I think Rich is a hero.
And, like me, I bet he's just as glad that ghouls like Ted Koppel and Cindy Sheehan aren't "honoring" his name. There are benefits to being one of the peacetime fallen.
But on the range, something went terribly wrong. Team 31 conducted a routine react-to-far-ambush drill, which involves everyone taking cover, firing back, and withdrawing. But one man didn't withdraw.
"Hey, c'mon, Rich, we gotta go," one of the other guys said. He thought Rich C., the team's weapons sergeant for many years -- this was my old team from Newburgh, New York -- was just lying there. "C'mon buddy, quit goofing off."
And then Rich moaned.
Somehow, one of the other guys -- the investigation was never able to determine who it was -- fired at least one round well off-axis. That round penetrated Rich's Kevlar helmet, and parts of the bullet, the helmet, skull and hair sprayed into, and a couple of them through, Rich's skull. The bullet took him low below the right ear and continued up into his head, making a terrible mess. Some parts of it came out the upper left frontal lobe area.
Rich was intermittently conscious, but he was confused. He begged them to take his helmet off; it was hurting him. So they took the helmet off and lay it beside him, not daring to look in it, while they tried to stop the bleeding by the light of their flashlights.
"Oh, God, take my Kevlar off. It's hurting me," he said. Another soldier told me later that a chill passed all through him when he heard Rich ask that, and the chill didn't leave. He kept asking for his helmet to be removed, even though it already was.
Stopping the bleeding was hard. First, heads have a lot of blood vessels, and second, Rich kept moving around spastically.
Later, they would look at the helmet, and then cops would look at the helmet, and ultimately experts from Natick Labs would look at the helmet. The Kevlar was a great success... nothing made it through both sides, kind of like the half-tracks at Kasserine Pass -- the bullet just went in and kinda bounced around.
(This is a coupon of Kevlar cut from Rich's helmet where the bullet penetrated. It was studied, the layers of the aramid cloth separated, to see if the helmet could be improved, after it had been examined for evidentiary purposes during the multiple investigations of Rich's accident).
Another Rich, a medic, Rich S., was key to saving the wounded man, Rich C's, life. By lucky happenstance we had a surgeon there with us, and several highly trained medics, but Rich S's civilian job is as a trauma EMT. He took charge of the patient, while others took charge of trying to get help. Rich was rushed to a civilian hospital... the team members, indeed the whole unit, were more or less placed under house arrest at Drum.
They suffered several days of abuse from the CID and the command and staff of the 10th Mountain Division before all those non-geniuses finally figured out that nobody had deliberately shot Rich, and the unit had not deviated in any material way from approved SF procedures. Meanwhile, the polyester-pants PFCs of CID amused themselves by playing Sherlock Holmes, pulling the team members in one at a time and saying things like, "we know that you were sleeping with his wife, but we don't think that means you shot him, although it looks pretty bad for you. Tell us about the affair, come clean on that, and we'll make sure you don't get in trouble for anything you didn't do." Members of the team who were cops and detectives in civilian life were appalled.
Needless to say, CID didn't find anything, although they kept it up for months. But after a couple of days the team members were released. Their weapons were all retained as evidence (CID fired them for ballistics, then let them sit and corrode without cleaning for weeks. Ballistics was a forlorn hope, as the surgeons determined the bullet pieces would have to stay where they were, unless Rich died. So CID prayed for him to die, and everyone else prayed for him to live...
The next day, September 9, 2001, I got the grim news that Ahmad Shah Massoud had been murdered. The US had lost a difficult, but irreplaceable ally, in a part of the world where we had few allies. I had studied Afghanistan long and hard. I thought I understood Massoud. I didn't understand why we backed him so little, and backed people who did not have his vision, like Gulbuddin Hekmatayar. I figured that there were probably a lot of things that the real policy experts knew and I didn't; after all, I just read the published material, and an occasional intelligence report. My unit's area of expertise was the Andean Ridge. Or the Caribbean. Or Bosnia -- we had three different tasking letters. But we were guerillas by training and inclination, and Massoud was the prince of guerillas. I never got to meet the man that Hamid Karzai calls the Esteemed, but that didn't stop me from esteeming him, and I was morose and glum. I didn't have any idea that a friend I knew much more personally lay near death, and, of course, none of us what lay just days ahead.
I was still in Florida on Monday when I got a call from Joe, one of the medics in the company. Joe was in tears; "We shot Richie, man. He's not gonna make it." It took a long time for me to understand what he was saying. My friend was in a coma. He was going to die, the docs said. They were gonna try, but they had seen enough of these things not to spread false hope.
It was not possible -- not Rich! He was not the smartest guy on the team -- we often wondered how he ever got past the mental testing or the minimum GT score of 110 for SF -- but he was probably the most entertaining and the most universally loved. His wife was going to be a widow, his four kids -- or was it five, Joe and I agreed he was always coming in with new baby pictures -- were going to be fatherless. The family didn't have a penny to its name, just a shabby house and ramshackle old car and a mountain of debts that we'd all tried counseling RIchie on.
Why couldn't it be me? I had no kids, and my ex-wives wouldn't miss me. Why Rich?
But the fact of the matter is, what we do is dangerous. A feller can get hurt doing this, and year-in, year-out, someone did. The day I arrived at 10th Special Forces Group, green as a fern, the unit was in the paper: a young NCO had gotten tangled in brush and had died of hypothermia in a stream, right in the tiny on-post training area. What had I gotten into? And until I left Group in 1985 to go to an intelligence assignment, we lost one man every major exercise, and usually -- there being only a thousand odd men in an SF group, and one of our battalions being out of sight and mind in Germany -- it was someone I knew.
The year before I got there, it had been the Group Commander, Col. Cutolo, in a jeep crash in Sculthorpe, England. He'd been drinking (to put it mildly).
One of the radioteletype operators from Signal Company electrocuted himself -- those things have 50,000 volts inside, and he opened it up to fix something while it was energized -- on Flintlock 1981.
That fall, my buddy Gary F. got tangled with Sergeant First Class Miguel Mitchell on exiting an aircraft. At the time, the drill was for the high man, and the high man only, to pull his reserve chute when two were entangled and falling. The theory was, both would ride the single reserve to a hard but survivable landing. Gary called to Mitchell, who neither answered nor pulled. Finally Gary pulled his reserve -- to hell with the high-man procedure -- and just barely saved himself. Mitchell bounced. He left a wife and three kids. (Gary survived, survived many other jumps and Grenada too, and is a successful businessman today).
When I finally got to the Q Course, a couple days after I finished Phase I, the instructor we had all agreed was our favorite, SSG Murray, died in a motorcycle accident.
On Flintlock 83 we did a live Fulton STAR extraction for the last time. The rope broke and Master Sergeant Cliff Strickland fell some 250 feet to his death before his teammates. Cliff had politicked hard to get that plum rope ride. We never, ever, did STAR again except with dummies, and the AIr Force finally cancelled it permanently in 1996.
(Don't think that it was just my unit, 10th Special Forces Group, under a black cloud. In 1983, a guy I would later serve with was the only survivor of his 101st Division company, because he was at Ft Campbell when their airplane crashed in Gander, Newfoundland. Most of his battalion, actually, was rubbed out -- and most of them married men, because the single and married guys voluntarily swopped so that the married guys could take the first plane).
On Flintlock 84 we didn't kill anyone. I'm not sure why. The Air Force was experimenting with a new blind drop technique and it was a thunderous failure. Dozens went to the hospital with broken maxilla, mandible, cranium, vertebrae, pelvis, femur, or some painful combination of the above. A month after the exercise, we still had guys in German hospitals who couldn't be moved. One young trooper, Jay, fell off a tree he was climbing down and never had control or sensation below the waist again.
Later in 1984 one of the unit's NCOs who had gone to Korea for a short tour died in an accident, I have always heard it was with a land mine. I got assigned as NCO assistant to the casualty notification officer, a man with whom I had long generated deep and mutual antipathy. I think we'd both agree, that even discounting our mutually disagreeable company, that was the worst duty we ever had to do. Full stop.
And the hits just kept on coming. Doing an Armed Forces Day show, for crying out loud, in 1985, one of the clinic (not SF) medics rappelled off the end of the rope and was still fifteen feet up. He received crippling spinal injuries also. He wasn't even a qualified trooper but he was a good guy -- a favorite of all of ours -- and so of course he was given the plum of being in the show.
Around the same time a helicopter crashed, as it turns out, due to the failure of a 50-cent part. The pilot used the last seconds to try to reduce the impact, or no one would have survived. The team medic, Jerry T, had ironically been a crew chief on a helicopter, back when SF had its own air, and for a time was in my social circle. He lived two houses down from one of my best friends in housing on Devens at the time of the accident. Jerry was trapped under parts of the helicopter and couldn't move... he listened to his teammates and the Black Hawk crewmen calling for help. But he was in terrible pain himself, bleeding, and couldn't move. And the cries gradually got weaker.... Jerry lived. Some of the others did, too, some didn't. One guy got his rifle shoved through his chest by impact forces, and he exsanguinated pretty quickly.
I'm sure I'm leaving out some of them. This hasn't been a pleasant trip down Memory Lane, but anybody with 25 years in SF can meet or beat this story. It's a dangerous business.
It begins to sink in, in these circumstances, that we don't need an enemy to have casualties. They can be a by-product of training. And I think that what we do in SF is pretty safe compared to what, say, naval aviators do. Those guys have a dangerous job (and casualty stats to back that statement up).
Richie C. did come out of his coma, finally. "Miracles do happen," the doc said, "and we love it when they do. You understand, we can't count on them." There are so many stories about Richie's recovery that I can't tell the ones I know, and I know that I don't know them all. Amazingly, he still has all his marbles, he still has his personality, he still has his own zany sense of humor. (In cerebral cortex injuries, this is an unusual outcome). His SF career is over; the injuries altered his field of vision and he never recovered full use of one arm and leg. He also lost his civilian job, which required a degree of athletics. He and his family are getting by. The Army's clerks and the VA, not surprisingly, tried to hose him on his disability pension, but it looks like he'll come out alright in the end.
The unit recommended the medic, Rich S., whose prompt and correct treatment saved Rich C's life, for a medal. The state National Guard headquarters slapped the application down. It didn't bother him; everybody who mattered knew what he had done, and loved him for it. Nobody made a big deal out of it, of course. But having Rich C. still on the blade rather than the root side of the grass is a wondrous thing.
At the first unit Christmas party after his accident, Rich attended in a wheelchair. We who had written him off were deliriously happy -- even those of us who weren't drinking, which was a minority. War was in the air, and he said, "don't go, guys, don't you go over there until I'm ready." But, of course....
The boys went to Afghanistan through the Dreaded Afghan Winter, as the press had given up calling it when it didn't hurt us enough to please them. Our battalion lived a charmed life, with none killed and only a handful of wounded -- only two seriously. The battalion commander got shot, but was back in command in two days -- doped to the gills but it didn't seem to affect his command style much. Another man lost a foot to an antitank mine. But everyone who flew over, flew back.
We had to medevac a couple of guys from our team (I was one), but not for anything serious.
But while we were there, we listened to the radio, pulling for a 7th Group team in a pitched fight where they lost two guys. A helicopter coming to get some desperately ill Afghans at our base camp, diverted to a closer camp instead to take their casualty, and after picking the casualty (also an Afghan)up, they hit the tanker for some fuel, then flew into a hillside. Nobody made it.
Just before we went to Afghanistan, a young man trying out for our battalion was shot and killed by a jumpy cop who had forgotten that Special Forces was conducting an exercise in his North Carolina town. I don't think he's any less a hero than Rich, and I think Rich is a hero.
And, like me, I bet he's just as glad that ghouls like Ted Koppel and Cindy Sheehan aren't "honoring" his name. There are benefits to being one of the peacetime fallen.
Posted: Wednesday - August 24, 2005 at 11:07 PM
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Published On: Aug 06, 2007 08:06 PM
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Published On: Aug 06, 2007 08:06 PM