The official motto: “These things we do, that others may live.”įor many across the armed forces, however, the PJ is a cowboy. By the Vietnam War, Pararescue was an official unit, wearing its signature maroon beret, the color a symbol of its blood sacrifice, and its insignia: an angel cradling an earth. So two medical corpsman parachuted down and stayed with the men for over a month, tending to injuries until they could reach safety. The only route to reach the men was by air. A C-46 had failed and the dozens of airmen it carried had bailed out over the jungles between China and present-day Myanmar. The unit traces its lineage to 1943 during the Second World War. But what he learned after enlisting only made him more excited. His mind was set on the Special Forces, and when he learned about the PJs, he signed up. He had decided to leave college, to join the military, and to begin a new life. Clair walked into a military recruitment office in Portland, Maine. The insignia of the 103rd Pararescue Squadron. The Tamar’s skipper comes over the line now, sounding frantic through the PJs headsets: “ You have to get the ship. They radio their status to the aircrew, still flying above, and then contact the ship’s captain. They cut its parachute, pop its straps, dewater the boat’s engine. Then, spotting the beacon through a breaking crest, he makes for the crate as each successive jumper hits the waters around him, fights the seas, unstraps, and follows close behind. He swims clear and surveys his surroundings. The ten-foot swells drag him from peak to trough. Clair maneuvers his parachute, unstrapping mid-air as he chases the blinking beacon. It contains the team’s only hope of reaching the Tamar: an inflatable rubber boat and a motor. The crate was cut from the aircraft just before his own departure. He turns, searching the night for another white light, a strobing beacon attached to a canvas-wrapped crate. Clair can see it, the Tamar, its flooding deck lights radiating blurry white against the surrounding black. Nor does he deviate off course or lose his bearings. The red line yanks open his parachute, and he’s struck by 130 mph winds. Clair duck-steps up to and then over the ramp’s edge. Which is what these PJs, based out of Westhampton Beach, Long Island, are doing on this April night, 2017-nineteen hundred miles east of home. Coast Guard in particularly challenging missions. When they are not deployed overseas, these PJs are back home, on call, offering emergency support to the maritime community and the U.S. Many of these PJs have served together in Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Africa. The seven PJs aboard the aircraft tonight, members of the 103 rd Rescue Squadron, a unit of the New York Air National Guard's 106th Rescue Wing, represent one of the military’s few reserve Special Ops units. Trained to jump from planes and perform surgery aboard helicopters, they are the airmen who arrive when the Navy SEALS call 9-1-1. Their mission entails rescuing personnel caught in ambushes, injured in IED explosion, trapped behind enemy lines. Air Force Pararescue-parajumpers, PJs for short-elite Special Operations soldiers whose name few know. Air ForceĪ light by the ramp door turns red, and the airmen ready for departure. The 625-foot vessel Tamar from above before jump. The two other men-charred, skin flayed-wait now without pain medicine. Within hours of the explosion, two of the sailors died. The captain’s message was routed from Lisbon to Portsmouth, then to Boston, and on to the airmen in Long Island. The men’s injuries were severe, requiring expert attention. and Portuguese Coast Guard helicopters as well as rescue boats. They were in the middle of the Atlantic the nearest land-the Azores Islands-was over five hundred miles to the east. In his distress message, the ship’s captain wrote that the men had been burned from head to toe. Earlier that morning, there had been an explosion onboard, some unknown ignition that had set fire to four sailors working inside the hull. At the next command-“ HOOK UP!”-they clip their parachutes’ red static lines to a steel cable running over their heads.įifteen hundred feet below, their target: the Tamar, a commercial shipping vessel two thirds into its voyage from Baltimore to Gibraltar. Their faces are lit only by the lambent glow of chemlights. He turns back to his men, each strapped with over a hundred-and-fifty pounds of gear. A low blanket of clouds blots out the moon and stars and erases the distinction between the black sky and the black Atlantic Ocean beneath. It brushes past the seven airmen seated in rows, sending stray pieces of paper, fabric, and tape fluttering in the thin air. The jumpmaster screams the command over the roaring engine, and the back hatch of the HC-130 aircraft yawns open into night.
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