Warrior's Creed by Roger Sparks

Author:Roger Sparks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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To be honest, 90 percent of a pararescueman’s career is window gazing. Part of the job is sitting at the window of a loud rumbling Pave Hawk or a droning C-130 for hours on end, lost in thought, and looking out at terrain so beautiful a person could become numb to the landscape if he’s not careful. I’d spend time imagining places I might return for adventure someday. When you’re an avid ice-climber and you spy a straight vertical ice waterfall that is turquoise blue and rises up two thousand feet, you can’t help but dream big. I could look down and know for certain that no one had climbed those falls. Right away I’d ask the pilot, “Can you get a way point where that icefall is? I’d love to come back out to spend some quality time.”

Sights like monstrous icefalls or volcanic mountains jutting out from the ocean take your breath away. The view isn’t always pleasant, though, and usually when the PJs are needed, that means the weather conditions are too treacherous for anyone else to respond. In those situations there is nothing to see out the window, or, if you’re looking out the window, it’s part desperation or concern about what you’ll see. In times like that—zero visibility, whether it’s snow, or rain, or fog—you’re relying on the skills of some extremely gifted pilots, and on luck. Your life is no longer in your own hands. After a while you become inoculated to any concerns for your own well-being at that moment, because there is nothing you can do but hold on and interact with what the crew tells you. Sometimes you never get to the folks you’re supposed to rescue, and you become the one who needs rescuing.

One of many examples of this came when we took a call for a sinking fishing boat off the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea. We flew directly into a typical Alaska storm, the sort of monster on the weather radar that would get a name anywhere else. One crew would burn their effective crew day flying the fourteen hours just to get the helo in position for the rescue. Myself and an additional PJ flew in a C-130 for the eleven hundred miles from Anchorage to Adak Island. Once we landed in Adak we would relieve the crew that flew it that massive distance. From there we take the helicopter out toward the site of last known location of the fishing vessel.

All the guys in my crew were very solid and Alaska seasoned. Rick was the pilot and one of our best, a legend within Alaska rescue. I’ve been in an aircraft where he’s done things that were supernatural. I’d be asking myself: What just happened? He understands everything about the needed torque of the aircraft to get us to a specific altitude, and then, once he would get us there, he knew how to let the aircraft fall at a specific rate to lose torque to pick up rpm to keep the thing from crashing.

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