I want to tell you about the year of my life that was the culmination of everything that came before it, but then became the antithesis for everything that came after. This is going to be something like a war memoir, only I never got to fire a shot. This is the story of my last deployment and what it meant to me. I think the best way to tell the story is in three parts, one for each of the major events that happened during this year and how I have had to learn to live with it since. Part one will be my favorite part, the story of our rescue missions in Japan. There is no ambiguity on this one, we just did something great.
Since the day I arrived at Annapolis, we were a nation at war. In fact, during my first summer of indoc, our commandant repeated that phrase about 10 times a day with all of the sanctimony of a cathedral choir. Just an aside, this particular officer was recently indicted for selling influence to Qatar, so maybe the self-righteousness was a bit misplaced. The point is to say, that even from day one in uniform, I knew I was going to be in a war somewhere. Annapolis was the place where I received my training as a guardian of society, and I couldn’t help but get caught up in the gravity of the situation we were sure to enter.
After college, I decided to become a helicopter pilot. On the very first day of flight school in early 2007, they sat us all down and explained how the next several years of our lives would play out. As a helo guy, this meant that my job was to get my wings, get through my H-60 training, get to a squadron and get qualified as an aircraft commander. If everything went to plan, I would be leading people into combat in the spring of 2011. Once my training began, I learned I was a pretty good pilot but needed some work as an officer. I was highly competent, but also highly contentious, and I really had to learn to become a better team player. This will become more important later in the story.
I got my wings and got through my follow-on training just in time to meet my squadron right after they left for deployment. My first real day in the Navy was about 48 hours of flying from the West Coast to the Middle East, and I landed onboard the ship still chronically sleep deprived from survival school the week prior. My squadron was so nice and welcoming that they played a three-day practical joke on me to get things started. That first deployment ended up being a lot of fun, and since I was such a colorful character, I managed to earn three different call signs by the time we got home. Just for the record, if you’re ever in Thailand, don’t approach the beautiful tall ones unless you like surprises.
Once we got home, we had about 16 months before we were scheduled to go back again. This was going to be the real bulk of my training, as I had to be qualified as an aircraft commander by the time we left. The time from when you enter flight school until you get your final tactical qualification in the aircraft is an incredible grind. My whole life was devoted to this pursuit, and I ended up studying much more than I did to get my masters in engineering. I made it though, and I managed to get qualified during the first week after we left home for deployment.
That summer before deployment ended up being one of the most fun times of my life. I got to take a series of short trips with my best friends to Canada, Hawaii, and Tahoe and I got paid to fly planes and shoot stuff. I also happened to meet a girl about a week before we left for the first time. What started as a date to a baseball game had turned into a full-fledged relationship by the day we left for deployment. We had agreed to move in together if we made it through the time away from each other, and I guess it all worked out since we were married nine years ago this month.
I think my point here is to set the stage for what was to come. I had trained my whole adult life for the time where I was going to be the guy leading others into combat. I was going to get to do it with the closest friends I had ever had, a group of my brothers and sisters that I would literally kill and die for. However, I also had to leave behind the first girl in my life that ever interested me for more than two weeks. The goodbyes were hard, but this was what my life was meant to be.
The first month of our deployment was incredibly boring, as we had an issue with our ship and had to spend a few weeks tooling around off the coast of California. This got to be downright infuriating at times, as we would stop by our home airport for supplies but couldn’t go home. I did get to see my girlfriend on one of these trips for about an hour, but for the most part all we did was train and wait. After the issues were fixed, we made a beeline across the Pacific to try and get back on schedule. They even had to cancel our first port visit, which would become an incredibly frustrating theme of the next seven months.
We were a couple of days from arriving at our first exercise in Asia when we all got called into the ready room late in the evening. Our CO had brought us in to let us know that an earthquake had just hit the area and the resulting tsunami had caused major damage in Japan. Since our ship was only a few hours away, we arrived shortly thereafter off the coast of Sendai, Japan to help. The next month would easily be the most rewarding experience of my life, and I can live the rest of it knowing that what I did meant something.
As a helo pilot, you always have to learn to be flexible. In fact, we have an obnoxious habit of saying “Semper Gumby” whenever the mission changes, and we are trained on how to adjust on the fly to any situation that may pop-up. My ability to do this was really put to the test in Japan. I had just gotten qualified as an aircraft commander a few weeks prior, but since I was the junior one in the squadron, I was going to be a copilot for most of my missions. Luckily, I got paired with another lieutenant and a couple of younger air crewmen for my flights, so we always got to have fun. Once we arrived on-scene, we started to fly some search and rescue missions looking through miles of debris for survivors.
That first day was a bit insane, and there was an excitement in the air within our squadron as we couldn’t wait to help out. I had been picked to stand watch that day since I worked in the operations department and we were sure to have constant plan changes I would need to help solve. Through the early part of the day, we had been notified that the radiation alarms were going off around the ship. By midday when our first crews had landed, all of our pilots were showing up in the ready room stripped of their clothes and wearing paper gowns from medical. At lunch we had on the news in the wardroom and understood why this was happening - the nearby Fukushima nuclear plant had started to melt down. Because of the danger of travelling north by road from Tokyo, we were the only game in town to help the Japanese forces in the north of the country get supplies to the survivors on land.
Our first flight brief was scheduled for 0300 that morning, and our plan was simply to fly towards a sector on land and find out who needed help. The ensuing preparation was the weirdest for any flight I had ever done. We had to don CBR gear (the stuff saved for nuclear war) to preflight the aircraft and take iodine tablets to deal with any radiation we might encounter. It was also very cold that morning, and we hit freezing rain and snow more than once on our 40-mile trip towards the beach. By the time we got on-station, we had gotten some info on groups that needed supplies.
On our first trip inbound, we were directed to a school where we were supposed to drop off supplies. The situation on the ground was the most surreal thing that I had ever seen. We first crossed the beach near a port, and if I close my eyes today I can still see it. This area was home to a series of fishing villages, and the entire port facility and been destroyed, leaving nothing but miles of debris and capsized vessels. One boat had been completely lifted out of the water and rested on its side perpendicular to a two-lane road a few hundred feet from the shoreline. As we continued inbound, we saw entire neighborhoods that had been completely destroyed - all that was left was the concrete foundations of the several hundred houses that existed a few days prior.
When arriving at the school, we had a nice big field in which to land the aircraft. We had expected this to go like other relief missions, where people would dangerously storm the aircraft looking for supplies. What we found instead was that the Japanese people had formed a line to help offload the aircraft and then politely gave us a list of necessary supplies, mostly food and water. After each offload, we headed back out to our ship and gathered more supplies. We even got the chance to land onboard the Japanese amphibious carrier, which had the most efficient flight deck crew I had ever seen in my life.
As we were finishing up our last scheduled drop-off of the day, we received an urgent call from our E-2 overhead. They let us know that there was an urgent medevac required in the city, but we were pretty sketchy on the details. Since the power plant meltdown had closed the roads, we needed to fly the person to a medical facility TBD. We were told that the medevac was near a lat/long coordinate, and that the person was within about a half-mile of that location. We were the only aircraft with enough gas to complete the rescue, but we were having issues with our GPS which had stopped working.
At this point, we had to figure out a way to make this work. I became the full-time navigator, and with the help our wingman and a paper chart, we found our way to the area where we needed to be. Once we got on scene, we started to search for collections of people where we could possibly find our patient. We saw two likely destinations split a few hundred yards apart, one a school and one a soccer field. Our aircraft split up between the two landing zones, and made an approach to the soccer field. At that point, a group of aid workers came running out and let us know that we had found the right place. Our wingman was getting low on gas for transit and was forced to leave for home. Our crewmen left the aircraft with a rescue litter and arrived back about 10 minutes later with a patient to load onto our aircraft.
Once we were back in the air, the next step was figuring out where to take our patient. We had found out from the other aid workers on the ground that the patient had a ruptured appendix and needed to get immediate surgical support. My job in the aircraft was to communicate and find a place to take the patient, and first we planned to head to our own ship since we had a surgeon and ORs onboard. As we started to head home, we were ordered instead to return to the Japanese amphibious carrier. We were quickly given coordinates and redirected to the ship. There was a bit of a language barrier coming inbound, but we were able to safely land and transfer the patient for surgery. We found out later that week that the man had survived and was recovering well from his surgery.
The next couple of weeks played out much like this first day, as we would depart every morning just after dawn to deliver supplies to those that needed them. Along the way, it was incredibly heartening to see the people on the ground working hard to survive after losing everything. By the time we left, we had delivered hundreds of thousands of pounds of supplies to the local populations, and I had some great stories to use in later job interviews about my problem-solving skills.
Looking back on these experiences today, it really is the best example of the great part of the military. I was part of a team that was so attuned to each other, that with very little directio
n we were able to help a large group of people survive the most difficult thing they had ever faced. We also got the chance to make a meaningful sacrifice, by continuing to fly even with the uncertainty caused by the nuclear reactor meltdown. In the years since, I and some others from our squadron have developed autoimmune issues stemming from this time. For me, my skin changes color as it slowly loses pigment, but when I look at the spots on my body, I know that it was worth it. I never once questioned if we should keep doing what we had trained to do, and even knowing the costs in hindsight, I would gladly do it again. This was the best thing I have ever done in my life.
That just about does it for part one, and next time we will explore some very different experiences and feelings that came after we left Japan. I hope you come back for part two, where I will face a machine gun for the first time and try to make sense of going to war without firing a shot.