PEOPLE CONFUSE LOYALTY WITH AFFECTION. You do not have to like someone to be loyal to them. The members of our team in Benghazi did not always like each other while doing everyday work when we were deploying. Oz and I have very different personalities, and we often got on each other’s nerves, but when we were under attack on September 11, 2012, we trusted each other and fought side by side. I respect him and would always want to have him on my team. There is no question about where his loyalty lies.
You do not even have to know someone to feel loyalty toward them. I feel loyal to the Ranger Battalion and to the special operations community, even though I don’t know each member personally. I know that every man and woman in that community is willing to sacrifice themselves in the name of the United States and for the person fighting alongside them.
I was raised to be loyal to the United States of America. I wanted to protect and defend my country. In the big picture, loyalty might require that a person be able to put the sovereignty of this nation ahead of their own ambitions. But being loyal to the United States does not mean that you always need to agree with its leaders. When my brothers and I fought in Benghazi, our government left us to die. When some of us returned home, there were people in our government who tried to cover up the truth of the events of September 11, 2012.
And yet I am loyal to the country, to the flag, and to my brothers. I have redeployed as a contractor to protect American citizens and interests. My first redeployment as a contractor after Benghazi was to Yemen. I remember some people could not understand how I could return to the Middle East, or why I would want to continue to help, even peripherally, a government that had disappointed me in such a profound way. The answer is that I still feel loyal to this nation and I know that there are still great people here. I know that the United States is an imperfect country, but it is still the greatest country in the world, and I will continue to protect and defend it, as I was trained to do.
Pararescue Jumper (PJ) Master Sergeant Joseph “Scott” Gearen has had one of those careers that is humbling, even if you don’t know everything he had to battle just to do his job, which entailed putting his life on the line—numerous times—for the United States. Scott’s loyalty to our country is inspirational and his fierce determination is instructive.
I have heard Scott describe himself as an ordinary guy with an extraordinary job. I would agree that he has had an extraordinary job, but I’m not sure how ordinary he is. Scott retired from the Air Force in 2002 as a master sergeant E-7, after serving twenty-two years as a pararescueman.
A lot of civilians know about special ops, and especially about Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. But fewer people know about pararescuemen, who are part of the Air Force and are generally attached to other special forces from all branches of the military.
Pararescuemen are the most elite rescue unit in the United States, and their motto is “That others may live.” Called PJs—for Pararescue Jumpers—they are incredibly versatile medics who can SCUBA dive and parachute and are tasked with combat search and rescue and the medical treatment of soldiers. Pararescuemen are trained to rescue air crews who have gone down behind enemy lines, but their job doesn’t stop there. Who else can be called if an airplane goes down in a desert, on top of a mountain, or in the middle of the ocean? PJs have helped to recover and treat civilians in humanitarian rescue efforts around the world and have offered support for NASA missions.
They don’t get a lot of the glory, but PJs have been part of many of the military’s most dramatic and famous recent missions, including parachuting into Panama with Army Rangers in 1989 during Operation Just Cause; the 1993 mission in Somalia recounted in Black Hawk Down; the rescue of Jessica Lynch, the soldier who had been taken captive during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003; and the recovery in 2005 of Marcus Luttrell, who alone survived an attack in Afghanistan in which three other Navy SEALs were killed (depicted in the movie The Lone Survivor). PJs have also been involved in many more missions that remain secret.
Scott was part of one of the most specialized units in the military, working with a SEAL team from Dam Neck, Virginia, and an Army unit from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Scott was assigned to both combat search and rescue units and was a team member in the establishment of the first Air Force special tactics team, which is known as the 24th Special Tactics Squadron.
He misses his work as a PJ. “I’d do it now if I could,” he told me recently. “We wore civilian clothes and did real-world missions. I miss the camaraderie and the relationships you build, and I miss the things we did.”
He laughed when he thought about his work: “Some stuff, like climbing mountains, trekking across glaciers, SCUBA diving, snow skiing down Mont Blanc, wilderness survival, and even jumping out of airplanes, are things people pay thousands of dollars to do. Of course, we were doing it in order to be ready to perform a rescue anywhere, anytime, day or night.”
Becoming a PJ is no joke. To qualify as a pararescueman takes almost two years, among the longest special operations training courses in the service and one of the toughest. The vast majority of those who try for it drop out. Those who make it have to complete, among other things, the Air Force Combat Diver School, the Army Airborne School, and the Army Military Free Fall Parachutist School, and become paramedics certified by the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians. At the time of this writing, there are no women who have qualified as PJs, and there are many more men who have not qualified as PJs as well.
Scott is hard core, even among the elite group of accomplished PJs. But his path to becoming a member of that group was not a straight one.
Scott had graduated from high school in Tampa, Florida, and was attending junior college while working as a butcher in a grocery store. The year was 1979, and Scott says he wasn’t too inspired about getting up to go to work and school most mornings and was intrigued when one of his buddies suggested going to see a military recruiter.
“Those Guys Are Crazy”
Scott thought the military sounded exciting, and he was interested in seeing some of the world. The recruiter gave Scott some videos to help him learn about the possibilities for service. One of those videos showed a man who introduced himself as a pararescueman. Scott had never heard of a pararescueman. The guy on the screen put on SCUBA gear: the mask, fins, snorkel, air tanks on his back, the whole kit. Then this guy got into a big airplane. Scott didn’t know it at the time, but that plane was a C-130. He watched other men in the video secure a parachute to the top of the tanks on this guy’s back and hang some bundles on the front and back of him, and then the plane took off.
A few minutes later, the plane’s doors opened, and this guy jumped out and parachuted into the ocean. Scott stopped the video right there, turned to the recruiter, and told him that he wanted to be a PJ.
“Those guys are crazy,” the recruiter said to Scott. “Are you crazy?”
The recruiter explained that Scott would have to go into the Air Force with an open general status and that he would have to earn the right to try to become a PJ. It wasn’t guaranteed. Scott didn’t know what open general was, but he made the choice that day to join the Air Force and knew that he was going to volunteer to be a PJ.
Eighteen months later, Scott had completed the selection course, passed all of the physical challenges and psychological evaluations, and earned his maroon beret. The maroon beret that PJs and combat rescue officers wear symbolizes the blood sacrificed by fellow pararescuemen killed in the line of duty and their devotion to aiding those in distress.
Scott was assigned to the 67th Air Rescue and Recovery Squadron in England until 1983, when he got an assignment as an instructor in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
But he wanted to be more active in the field, so he applied when the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) requested pararescuemen from the Air Force. In December 1984, Scott was on his way to North Carolina to become part of the first PJ unit in JSOC. Scott’s unit, which had a global mission that was shrouded in secrecy, was made up of combat controllers, pararescuemen, and intelligence specialists. Scott would soon find himself working with the most elite special operations units in the world.
He was right where he wanted to be.
“There is nothing like the feeling you have when you are just about to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, especially at night,” he told me. “You feel the weight of all that SCUBA and combat and medical gear, and the engine of the plane sounds like a freight train while you’re in the air somewhere over the ocean. You do get scared, but when the doors open and the cargo area fills with that rush of air, the fear just evaporates. You make a choice and you do your job.”
On February 3, 1987, Scott was in Virginia, attached to a Navy SEAL team getting ready for a parachute jump training session the next day. It was an ordinary training day. In preparation for the jump, Scott reviewed a number of medical procedures with the guys on his team, including how to stop uncontrolled bleeding and how to make emergency airways.
Hitting the Ground at One Hundred Miles an Hour
The next morning was bright and clear, but cold. The ground was frozen and the temperature was in the low thirties when Scott and his buddies stopped at a convenience store to get snacks and coffee on their way to the drop zone where they would conduct their training exercise. Scott’s next memory is of being on the field, rehearsing the drop as a dirt dive. It would be an ordinary jump, a beautiful one, into blue skies. This jump would be Scott’s ninetieth. “I felt comfortable,” he said. “The weather was great. This was going to be a typical jump, with all standard procedures.”
Scott doesn’t remember loading the airplane that morning, but he can imagine how it must have gone, because the process does not vary from jump to jump. When the airplane is loaded, a jump master communicates between the pilots and the jumpers in the back of the plane. When the plane gets to a safe altitude, the jumpers take off their seatbelts and the jump master begins using hand signals to communicate, telling the jumpers when to stand up and when to stand by. Six fingers from the jump master means six minutes; one finger means one minute. Everyone in the airplane understands what is going on. At 13,000 feet, the jump master yells, “Go!” and points at the open door. The jumpers exit in an orderly manner and do what they had planned during the practice dirt dive. Each jumper wears an altimeter on their wrist and falls to a predetermined altitude before opening their parachute.
During the free fall, the jumpers will “fly” themselves into a formation, sometimes a circle, and mentally note where everyone is. At a predetermined altitude, the jumpers break off, turning 180 degrees from the circle and flying away from the group for several seconds. The purpose of this maneuver is to get everyone far enough away from each other so they can open their parachutes without becoming entangled with one another.
“It’s almost like driving a car,” Scott said. “You learn how to fly your body, to direct yourself to turn away from the group and go into a delta, or tracking, position, with your hands back along the sides of your body. Your speed increases in that position and the air pushes you forward, which gets you away from everybody. When you are away from other jumpers, you return to your flat and stable position, facedown facing the ground, and you deploy your parachute by pulling the deployment handle.”
Scott’s jump went routinely—initially, Scott said. But then it didn’t. “Another person, an Air Force team member, was still in free fall above me and determined that he didn’t have enough time to avoid hitting me. He instinctively balled up in a cannonball position and crashed through my canopy. The impact destroyed my canopy, shattered my skull, and knocked me unconscious. I imagine that he crashed straight into my head and face, based on my injuries.”
Scott does not remember hitting the ground at one hundred miles an hour. He didn’t see the two SEALs in the air spiraling behind him, steering their canopies to get to him as fast as they could. “I don’t remember anything after getting ready to jump,” he says. “But I do remember doing that training the day prior with the guys on the team about first-aid skills and how to stop uncontrolled bleeding. I’m so glad they were paying attention.”
Scott’s skull was fractured on impact and he lay on the ground, blood filling his mouth and throat. Scott was convulsing and gasping for breath. The jumpers who had been behind him in the air rolled him over from his back onto his side. Men on the scene told Scott later that it seemed as though a gallon of blood gushed from his throat when they rolled him over from his back. Scott is still not sure exactly how many bones in his body were broken in the fall, but he had many fractures in his face and head and in his vertebrae, he was missing teeth, and his hard palate—which separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity—was split all the way back to his throat. Blood poured out of the opening in his palate and filled his mouth, making it difficult for him to breathe.
Scott landed about a mile from the drop zone in a spot inaccessible to helicopters. So Scott’s teammates used a poncho and tree branches to fashion an impromptu litter on which they carried him a quarter mile to the nearest opening in the trees. There, a helicopter landed, picked him up, and whisked him to Portsmouth Naval Medical Center. Scott got to the hospital about an hour after the accident, but the amount of blood he lost from the split palate was substantial: he needed a blood transfusion—he thinks it was eleven units—at the hospital.
“I’m Not Ready to Go Yet”
Scott had a powerful vision at some point in time between the initial fall and when his teammates first cleared his airway. “I experienced the most peaceful, wonderful feeling. It’s hard to explain it now, but I felt aware of my consciousness in a way I had not felt before. There was a softness surrounding me. I was surrounded in a soft white light, a field of energy or love. I’m not sure what to call it. I knew that I was leaving my body.” Scott described this experience to me matter-of-factly. “There was a bright area in the right field of my vision, with three figures in silhouette. We were communicating telepathically as I moved toward them. I felt very welcome, and I was getting closer and closer. I heard a voice say, ‘It’s time to go now,’ and I thought, ‘But I’m not ready to go yet.’ I turned my head away from the figures and they began to recede.”
Scott is not sure if he had this experience during the fall, right after the impact, or sometime later. But he has no doubt that it happened. Scott was raised a Southern Baptist and grew up learning Bible stories and remembering to say his prayers, but he has had a different kind of faith since his accident. “God is real,” he said, “and even though I don’t want to die, I no longer fear death. It is not the end.”
Scott’s next memories are of drifting in and out of consciousness in a hospital. That must have lasted for two or three days, but he had no concept of time. “I knew something was wrong,” he said. “I couldn’t talk because of the tubes in my throat. In my mind, I thought I was trying to move my head. At one point, I thought I might be blind because I couldn’t open my eyes, but then a doctor pushed my eyelids open. I remember realizing that I was alive but that something was wrong.”
Scott was disoriented, and he didn’t know the half of it. In addition to fracturing his skull, he had suffered a concussion in the fall, which knocked him unconscious. “I couldn’t really see or move; I couldn’t talk,” he said. “At some point, someone put a pen in my hand and I wrote two questions: ‘Will I see? Is my neck broken?’”
After hearing that his neck wasn’t broken, Scott felt more hopeful. “Somehow, I knew it was going to be okay,” Scott said. “I had a weird, calm feeling. I knew I was in the best hands possible.”
Scott underwent a series of excruciating surgeries, including a procedure called a cricothyroidotomy, in which an emergency airway is opened, and an eleven-hour operation to reset his bones, affix internal plates and screws, and realign his face. His jaw was wired shut.
Because Scott could not be intubated during the reconstructive surgeries, his surgeons had no choice but to cut through the same spot in his throat during each surgery so that they could insert a breathing tube and thereby ensure he got the oxygen he needed.
Fighting for His Life, and Then for His Job
After a month, Scott was ready to try getting out of his hospital bed. He recalled, “I needed help to stand up, and it was kind of scary making that first step. I was still wired up and attached to IVs and very weak after lying down for a month. I walked maybe five or six feet that first day. It was [the] most I could do.” Scott was a husband and a father at the time of the accident. His son was five years old, and he went to stay with his grandmother while Scott’s wife moved into an apartment near the hospital.
Scott got out of bed every day after that and walked a little bit farther. After another month, Scott’s doctors released him from the hospital on the condition that he would return every day for rehab. Three months later, the doctors took the wires out of his jaw.
As he fought—first for his life and then for his full physical recovery—Scott realized that he was also going to have to fight for his job. He didn’t feel angry. “It wasn’t personal,” he said. “The military is a big system and sometimes the system is the system.”
Three months into his recovery, Scott was still getting special duty pay, as though he were still jumping out of airplanes and SCUBA diving. He laughed when he remembered the Air Force clarifying his status: “Eventually, the system caught up to me and wanted to take it all back at once. All of a sudden, I had zero pay but I still needed to put food on the table.”
Scott got a part-time job selling the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Scott would set up a booth in a local mall or connect with potential customers through local community facilities. “I had to talk even though I still had a tube in my throat,” he said. “Every time I wanted to say something, I had to cover the end of the tube and force the air in my lungs out past that hole and over my vocal cords. I got plenty of weird looks.”
Scott says that he felt neither anger nor the desire to blame anyone for the circumstances in which he found himself. He just wanted to get better.
During the summer of 1987, less than six months after the accident, the personnel center of the Air Force caught up with Scott and offered him a medical retirement. He declined it. “I wanted to retrain as a pararescue and be a PJ again,” he said. “I was alive. I had a lot to look forward to.”
Scott was given the opportunity to cross-train, but he didn’t want that either. “The Air Force is responsible for healing you as much as you can be healed,” he explained. “They said my current career field was no longer possible, since I still had a two-inch tube sticking out of my throat, so my job was over unless I wanted to go be a trainer in a gym or something. But I didn’t want to do that. Three weeks later they called me back to say they were going to take away my Air Force specialty code and classify me as an airman awaiting retraining.” Scott still wanted to retrain as a pararescueman and be a PJ.
Scott was making progress, but it was relative. “I was unable to eat solid food, and since all I had done was lie in a hospital bed, I had gotten so skinny I looked like a prisoner of war,” he told me. “I hadn’t been able to move much in the hospital, so my muscles atrophied and of course my jaw was wired shut,” he said. “There was a McDonald’s in the hospital that drove me crazy because I could smell it. All I wanted was to eat a french fry! I used to try to wedge a Popsicle stick between my teeth and try to turn it in a vertical position just so that I might open my mouth a quarter of an inch and bite a single french fry. I couldn’t do it!”
What he could do was to force one of those french fries between his teeth and into his mouth. But even that did not help him achieve his goal. Unable to chew it, he nearly choked trying to swallow it.
The Air Force flight surgeon offered Scott a medical discharge—again. Scott looked him straight in the eye and said, “I want to continue doing my job as a pararescueman. I want to recover and at least have the opportunity to be a PJ again.”
The surgeon paused, then said, “It’s on you.”
“I was thirty at the time of the accident,” Scott said, “and I turned thirty-one while I was recovering. I still had my whole life in front of me and pararescue was the only work I wanted to do.”
Scott had been a fit 185 pounds at the time of the accident, a regular runner, biker, and swimmer. After his ordeal, he was an emaciated 150 pounds. “As bad as it was, I wasn’t depressed or discouraged,” he said. “My confidence was connected to a sense of being in good hands, I think, with my doctors.”
Rebuilding his fitness proved to be a slow process, but Scott was lucky. He hadn’t damaged his spinal cord. He could walk, he could exercise, and eventually he started running. Progress came in tiny increments, but it came: “I would do one push-up, then two, and then ten. I just kept pushing,” he said.
“People have a choice, you know? I know I could have left. I made a choice to stay. I made a choice to be alive. That informed everything I did after the accident.”
The multiple surgeries had left Scott with an area of inflammation called a granuloma: scar tissue formed where he had received the initial cricothyroidotomy on the day of the accident. As the scar tissue thickened, it blocked Scott’s throat and made it difficult for him to breathe.
Scott didn’t want to tell anyone about the complication because he was afraid that he would be sent back to the hospital or deterred from his goal of returning to active duty. But eventually he found it so difficult to breathe that he could not sleep, and he sought medical care.
A cycle commenced where doctors removed scar tissue from Scott’s throat, which gave him a few weeks of relief before the tissue regenerated and Scott was suffocating again. Then the doctors repeated the procedure.
“Like Nails Hitting Your Face”
The scar tissue grew back so quickly that Scott’s medical team concluded that he needed a tracheotomy, an incision into the windpipe. This procedure restored Scott’s ability to breathe, but left him with a tube sticking out of his neck that he had to cover every time he wanted to talk.
Over the following eight months, Scott underwent nine laser surgeries on the granuloma. Between the surgeries, he ran and lifted weights and hoped that his throat could be fixed. It was more than an annoyance. It was a potential career buster.
“I couldn’t swim because of that tube,” he said. “I never lost sight of my goal to become a PJ again, and I needed to swim, but I couldn’t do that while I had the hole in my throat.” Training includes an extensive swimming component because the underwater needs on the job can be high. Many pararescue candidates drop out during the swimming phase of the training.
“The training is intense because there is no room for error on this job,” Scott said.
“Imagine doing a water rescue with helos hovering over you with their rotors spinning,” Scott said. “It’s like you’re in a hurricane, and the water can feel like nails hitting your face.”
In early 1988, Scott was still an airman awaiting retraining, living his life while breathing through a tube in his throat and looking for a better solution. He finally found one from a former member of the Marine Corps Reserve who was working in Boston as a surgeon. Dr. William Montgomery, who had invented flexible tracheotomy tubes, told Scott that his trachea was about the size of the eraser on a pencil.
“That is the size of a baby’s trachea,” Montgomery told him. “It’s no wonder you can’t breathe.”
Over the course of two surgeries, Montgomery reconstructed Scott’s trachea. By August 1988, Scott was finally able to get rid of the breathing tube permanently—and swim again. Two months later, he was ready to take the physical training (PT) test.
In order to be returned to flight status, Scott needed to pass a physical test at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and he needed to obtain a waiver from the surgeon general of the Air Force. Scott had been training hard, and he knew he was going to pass that PT test, a series of timed runs and swims. “In the end, I didn’t struggle a whole lot with that,” he said, shrugging at the thought.
But Scott was worried that his head injury and the amount of time he had been unconscious after the fall were going to make it hard for him to get the medical waiver. The amount of time that Scott spent unconscious after the fall was never fully determined, which made it tricky to predict how the doctors would feel about restoring his flight status. Scott felt like he needed a miracle to get his job back.
There is usually a space on military medical forms where you are supposed to describe your health. When Scott was filling out his forms for the waiver and got to this space, it would have been standard for him to write something like, “My health is excellent.”
Scott wrote, “My health is excellent. I run a seven-minute mile. Can you?” He had done everything in his power to get his job back. Now his future was in someone else’s hands.
“I got a phone call from my doctor a couple of weeks later to say that the paperwork was back, and could I come down and discuss it,” he said. “I was so anxious as I headed down there. He handed me a sheaf of papers, and all that I saw was this note from the doctor under my cocky answer about the seven-minute mile. The doctor had written, ‘Maybe, but I can answer the whole question. What about medications?’”
At that point, Scott recalled, “I thought it was over, that I was done for. But then I looked at the second page and I saw that big stamp of approval, ‘Medically Acceptable.’”
Scott was a PJ again.
Another Jump, Another Malfunction
Two weeks later, and eighteen months after the accident, Scott did his ninety-first free fall. Once again, there was a malfunction. “We jumped out of a C-130 over the Gulf of Mexico at 13,000 feet and planned to open our parachutes at 3,500 feet, but after I pulled the ripcord handle I did not feel the normal opening shock of the parachute, and I knew something was wrong,” he told me.
“I looked over my shoulder and my parachute was trailing out of the pack. I went through the emergency procedures in my head. I knew I had between five and ten seconds to make a choice. As I was shaking the risers, trying to help the parachute to open, I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe this is happening. I might be having another bad landing.’”
At 2,700 feet, Scott knew he needed to go to his emergency handle, but just as he reached for the reserve parachute, his primary parachute opened after all. That jump was a water jump and officials determined later that the parachutes they had been using for water jumps were not opening properly because the material would stick together and briefly resist coming apart after opening. These particular canopies were eventually taken out of service.
Over the course of his career, Scott did a total of about five hundred free falls and static falls before he was finally medically retired—after twenty-two years of service. He still deals with pain from the injury and other smaller injuries he incurred over the years.
“I wouldn’t go to the flight surgeon unless I really couldn’t stand it, because I didn’t want to be grounded, to be off status waiting to be healed,” he said.
Scott believes that PJs understand the risks of their position, and he has no regrets. “You’re going to get banged up on this job,” he said. “If someone gets through a tour as a pararescueman without any injuries, he was either very lucky or else he never left his desk!”
Soon after Scott returned to work as a PJ, he accepted an assignment as an instructor at the Pararescue School at Kirtland Air Force Base in Texas, where he volunteered to instruct the Civil Air Patrol Pararescue Orientation Course, called PJOC, for teenagers. The Civil Air Patrol is an organization of civilians interested in aviation who volunteer to act as an auxiliary to the Air Force in emergency situations and who provide assistance to other agencies and organizations, like local police, when needed. PJOC is still run by active-duty PJs who instruct young cadets who might someday join the Air Force and try to become PJs themselves. It was while Scott was teaching this course, on August 2, 1990, that Iraq invaded Kuwait.
“I knew they were going to need combat search and rescue and I wanted to be there,” he said. But as an instructor in a training unit, he was not on an operational team.
When he got back from Kirtland, Scott drew up a list of volunteers from his unit who were willing to go into the combat zone. Three months later, Scott was on his way to Southwest Asia as a volunteer for Desert Storm. He deployed to Saudi Arabia to the 1723rd Special Tactics Squadron and was asked to lead the combat search and rescue team.
At the forward operating base, Scott came across Major Corby Martin, an MH-53 helicopter pilot who had been a lieutenant when they were both stationed at Royal Air Force Woodbridge in England. While assigning PJs to helicopter crews, Corby told Scott he wanted Scott to join him on his crew. Scott didn’t know it at the time, but Corby had been a lead planner for Eager Anvil, the mission that kicked off Desert Storm.
The plan was to fly fast and low at night, over desert terrain, and lead a group of Army Apache helicopters to neutralize the Iraqi air-defense system.
When you are part of a crew like that, everyone is responsible for calling out anything they might see. That night, Scott saw light coming out of the darkness. At first, he thought he was seeing a motorcycle headlight, but Scott quickly realized that it was a missile coming toward them, and he called it out by clock position.
The pilot made an evasive maneuver and they all avoided certain death. They made it to their objective, the mission was successful, and a gigantic hole was opened in the Iraqi air defense, allowing US and Allied forces to enter. “There were so many aircraft in the air it looked like the sky was flowing in the opposite direction that night,” Scott said. If Scott had not worked so hard to be a PJ again, he would have missed this important battle.
Search and Rescue behind Enemy Lines
In January 1991, PJs under Scott’s leadership as the noncommissioned officer in charge rescued Navy pilot Devon Jones a day after his F-14 was shot down over Baghdad. It was the first combat search and rescue behind enemy lines since Vietnam.
When Scott returned from Desert Storm, he was selected to be the first Air Force instructor at the Army Special Forces Underwater Operations School, or SCUBA school, in Key West, Florida.
“It was a rough assignment, but somebody had to do it,” he joked. After three years of teaching, Scott became restless and took a position on the special tactics team in England.
Over the next four years, he led the team in rotations in Southern Italy made necessary by the conflicts in Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. During the Serbian conflict, Scott’s team needed personnel from other units. One of these pararescuemen, Jeremy Hardy, had been in Scott’s Civil Air Patrol Pararescue Orientation Course ten years earlier, when Jeremy was fourteen.
Jeremy credited Scott with inspiring him then to become a PJ. That meant a lot to Scott. “You just never know when or where or how you might influence someone,” he said.
Scott was medically retired in 2002. “I tried to stay in, but this time the system really caught up with me,” he said. Scott experienced many injuries, aches, and pains during his career that he was often reluctant to bring to anyone’s attention for fear of missing a mission. “You don’t want to be categorized as DNIF [does not include flying] for a common cold or a sprain,” he said. “I sucked up injuries my whole career.” In 2002, Scott experienced a more intense version of what he had come to consider “normal” back pain. When he finally saw a flight surgeon, he was told that he had been walking around with four slipped discs and four herniated discs, and that about a third of his vertebrae were broken and had slid out of alignment. Scott was grounded, and that started the process of his medical retirement.
Scott went on to provide security as a contractor at the US Embassy in Baghdad and at a gold mine in Indonesia. He has also worked for the Department of Homeland Security.
“I’ve done a lot of exciting things since I left active duty, but I would enlist in the Air Force again today if I could,” he said.
Most servicemen are familiar with DD Form 214, the Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty. “The last line on that form says I could be recalled at any time to active duty, and every time I read it, I think, what the hell are they waiting for?” he said.
He recalled his job as a PJ “the adventure of a lifetime.”
“The things we got to do, the friendships and bonds I built with my teammates. I’m guessing that a normal civilian job does not provide that. When you fly with a helicopter crew, you build something with the entire crew. You may all die together. When you are out there on the line, you are in the fight for your life and for the life of the person next to you.”
I know what he means and I understand the powerful draw of that brotherhood. Scott credits that brotherhood for much of his success. “I have always been part of a team,” Scott said. “Early in my life, it was baseball and football; later in my career, I was part of a special forces team, a SEAL team, the Air Force team, and of course, my family. I played a part in my own recovery, but I couldn’t have done it without my family or my team.”
Scott is humble and matter-of-fact about the sheer grit he has displayed over many years, but he is lavish with his praise for the people who have played a role in his recovery and career. When I follow his lead and think about myself as a member of a team, and remain conscious that my choices will affect other people in ways that I might not anticipate, I consider the larger implications of my own conduct and the conduct of the people with whom I work.
Scott projects a remarkable sense of calm. I’m betting that his attitude comes from living a life fully in sync with his values and goals. “Everyone is going to have good days and bad days,” Scott said. “But no matter how bleak your future may look, don’t quit. You have got to dig deep and find something that motivates you. You don’t know what you are capable of until you break the boundaries you think you have around you.”
I am humbled by Scott’s tenacity and perseverance in fighting to put himself back on the line by becoming a PJ again after such an enormous accident. Remember that PJs are responsible for rescue and recovery. There are sailors, Marines, airmen, and soldiers who get into situations where they go above and beyond and save the day, but that is the job—day in and day out—of pararescuemen.
No one would have faulted Scott for taking a medical retirement or a less taxing job after his fall. But Scott wanted to be a PJ again—and he made it happen. “I thought it was the greatest job in the world; I did it because I loved it,” Scott said. “And the funny thing is that most people don’t know that the Air Force has this job at all.”
When I am deploying, I need to trust that my brothers and sisters downrange have my back. I want the people I work with to know that they can count on me, so I don’t want to do anything that would make them find me untrustworthy. That requires a commitment of loyalty in my private conduct as well as in my public conduct.
For example, fraternization is occasionally a problem in the military, just as it is in many other workplaces. One of the many reasons that fraternization needs to be discouraged is that it can destroy loyalty within a unit. Fraternization breeds distrust. I don’t ever want to question whether someone has my back, or whether someone in my squad, my platoon, or even my company has met the standards they need to meet in order to do their job. If someone is in an inappropriate workplace relationship, they are giving me reason to doubt their integrity and their qualifications. That will interfere with the loyalty team members need to have in order to be successful.
Balancing Competing Loyalties
Sometimes people get confused about competing loyalties, especially in the military. When soldiers begin to serve, they might think that the unit comes first and family comes second. That is what I thought. I was wrong.
It is challenging but possible—and important—to strike a balance between job and family. It can be difficult to strike that balance. In a firefight, of course, the unit is most important in that moment. When a unit is training to go overseas, that unit is often more important day to day.
When I was overseas, I sometimes found it hard to maintain contact with my family. Early on, I was often working for more than twelve hours at a stretch without access to a phone. But it was my responsibility to be in touch with my family. When my training was over and my deployment was done, I was going home to my family.
I don’t think that I have always done my best to let my family know how important they are to me. That was especially true when I was younger. Even though I relied on my brothers in combat, when everything was over we all returned home to our loved ones. Those of us who had not been cultivating our relationships at home often did not find the support we needed there. As a result, we were not as strong when we subsequently returned to our units.
Shared experiences can promote loyalty, especially when the experiences are intense. In the Ranger unit, struggling together built loyalty. My loyalty to the 75th Ranger Regiment grew stronger as I went through the daily routines of training. The effort required to meet expectations as a Ranger, or a SEAL, or a PJ is enormous, and as I put in the effort to meet those expectations, I identified more strongly as a Ranger.
Training to become a Ranger is brutal. I was in good shape when I got into the Army, but if the physical challenge and discipline required even in basic training were a swift kick in the nuts, then the Ranger Indoctrination Program was a full beatdown.
My natural athletic ability combined with the training I had undergone for football through college had given me a good fitness base, but the physical demands of Ranger Indoctrination were more punishing than anything I had experienced before.
The pressure that we were all under to pass, just to remain in the class, built loyalty within the squad because we were all suffering together. I developed loyalty to the 75th Ranger Regiment because I was inspired by the challenges put in front of me. I was pushed to my limits, but as I met the expectations and survived to train another day, my loyalty to the regiment and to my brothers grew stronger.
“If You Step Out, You’re Done!”
We were sweating and training together and depending on each other to get each other through. Each one of us had things we struggled with, and everyone had a bad day here and there. I remember doing ruck marches during the infantry courses and watching guys fall out. Most days, I could carry two rucksacks and still keep up, so if a guy was starting to fall out, I would take his ruck, and literally lighten his load so that he could keep moving.
Someone did that for me during my final march in the Florida phase of Ranger School. I had been pushing the limits of my endurance for weeks by the time we got to the end of the Florida phase. I had been given an extra sleeping bag to carry on this particular ruck march, and I had bungeed it into a ball on the top of my ruck.
The addition to my pack didn’t make it any heavier, but it also didn’t allow my machine gun to settle properly. My shoulder began to hurt as soon as I started moving. After about six miles, I started to fall back. We still had six or seven miles to go. My shoulder was killing me, and the pain was radiating into my lower back. I stepped out of line to try to adjust the backpack, but the Ranger instructor noticed right away and shouted at me to fall back in: “If you step out, you’re done!”
I remember thinking, “I can’t believe this is happening.” The idea that I might not make it, that I might not graduate, with only seven miles left in my entire Ranger School experience, seemed impossible, since up until that night I had always found being able to carry heavy rucks easier than most, but not on this night. At that moment, an Infantry Officer Basic Course guy approached me and said, “Paronto, give me the machine gun.”
He was not a particularly strong guy, and I had actually helped him several times over the previous few weeks. I was relieved, but also embarrassed, to have our positions reversed. “You’ve been helping me this whole way,” he told me, and held out his hand to take my weapon. I handed it over and took his much lighter M4 carbine in exchange.
I finished the march, and credit that achievement to my lightened load and the grace that came from having received help in my moment of need. That exchange happened because the members of our unit had developed loyalty by sharing daily routines and experiences, and by helping each other to complete group tasks.
Teamwork builds loyalty. When there is a common mission, one person can’t do everything, so you depend on each other to accomplish tasks. During basic training, we used to have marksmanship competitions, where our group would do dry-fire drills—in which live ammunition is not used. In that case, I wanted to come out on top because the whole team had to shoot well and I didn’t want to let anyone down.
Leaders can also inspire loyalty. Some of my instructors were veterans from Somalia, and even if I didn’t always know the details of what they had done, I knew where they had been and a little bit of what they had survived. When these veterans were preparing us to be Rangers, they were sometimes harsh, but I respected their judgment and their wisdom. I understood why they were making us suffer. We knew we would each need to depend on the guy next to us. I have a better chance of surviving on the battlefield if I do all I can to make sure the guy next to me survives, because we protect each other.
I will always be loyal to the Ranger Battalion. When bad things happen downrange, I know that I can talk to my brothers, and I know that we can pump each other up or rally around each other in times of need. But as I have gotten older, I have begun to pay more attention to the way I demonstrate loyalty to my family.
Learning to Cherish Family
I don’t know that anyone in the Army ever told me to put my unit before my loved ones, but I absorbed that message and became caught up in the intensity and immediacy of my Ranger responsibilities at the expense of my responsibilities to my family.
Over the years, I have come to understand that the rock of my family on which I rely creates a positive energy that fuels me. The support of my family is what has allowed me to deploy again. When I have been lost, my loved ones are the people who have helped me find my way.
I called Tanya, my wife, as soon as I had access to a telephone after our fight in Benghazi ended. I wanted to tell her I was okay and I wanted to tell her what had happened.
My wife was my first call in less dramatic circumstances, too. In 2006, I had volunteered to do a surveillance walk in Kabul late at night. I was disguised as a local government worker, walking around on my own. On these kinds of jobs, we were tasked with doing surveillance on specific apartments, or locating particular people or vehicles in order to verify information from our assets, or getting a general lay of the land.
This assignment was in a neighborhood that was dangerous not just because of the potential Taliban activity but because of ordinary crime. The plan was for me to get dropped off in one spot and then walk a few miles in and out of particular blocks and buildings before getting picked up at another point.
The tricky thing about this operation was that I wouldn’t have the standard kind of backup we like to have. Placing a full team nearby would have been so conspicuous that it would have compromised the whole operation.
Instead, I had one guy—named Popeye—who was supposed to be circling the area in a vehicle. If I needed rescuing, Popeye might be coming from five minutes away. Five minutes may not sound like much time, but it can be an eternity if you are in trouble.
Dressed like a government worker in trousers and a suit jacket, I was dropped off at dusk. I was carrying a concealed Glock 19 pistol but no body armor. This was early in my career, and I remember feeling nervous as I walked along those narrow streets in the twilight. I could feel adrenaline racing through my body, and I felt as though all of my senses were amplified. You could call it paranoia. As I moved through the neighborhood checking things off, I was acutely conscious of how long it would take for backup to get to me if something went wrong, so I walked as quickly as I could without calling attention to myself, but still trying to efficiently complete my surveillance of the area.
When I got the information we needed and made it to the pickup location without an incident, I discovered that everyone on my team was waiting and full of questions, asking me what I saw and strategizing about how to put the intelligence to use. I was amped up and wanted to talk about it, but the person I really wanted to tell was Tanya. I called her as soon as I got back to the base and told her as much as I could without compromising OPSEC (operational security). When I think about that now, I am motivated to continue to work harder to balance my loyalties to all of my teams and live in a way that reflects my values.
We are each part of a larger team or series of teams. We are each responsible for cultivating the self-awareness and the honesty needed to assess accurately our own character. Part of being honest with yourself requires clarifying your own values. Loyalty is at the core of any well-functioning unit. I feel loyal to my family, to the members of my units, and to the United States and its Constitution, which I have vowed to protect and defend.
You have to ask yourself: If I don’t feel loyalty to this unit, what am I doing in this unit? Why am I a part of this organization? Why am I a part of this family? Why am I in this marriage?
Those are some heavy questions. Answering these questions will require clarifying your goals and values. If your loyalty is truly not there for any particular relationship, then you shouldn’t be there. If you do want to be there, you need to figure out how to locate and display your loyalty. Either way, you need to fix yourself.
Being loyal means carrying out your responsibilities and accomplishing your assigned tasks—even if, at that particular moment, you dislike your leaders and your unit. That also holds true for members of your household and your coworkers. You can display your loyalty by committing to accomplishing your mission, even if you don’t have the tools you need. When you are someone whom others can trust and depend on, you are living loyalty.
A lack of loyalty will destroy a unit or a department or a family, because mistrust will develop and the unit’s cohesion will weaken. In my line of work, you are there to serve your country. If you are not loyal to the United States and don’t have a vested interest in your brothers and sisters in arms, you will not give fully of yourself. You may be in a situation where you have to put the interests of your unit, or your country, ahead of your own. If you don’t feel that bone-deep loyalty, you may not do it.
Team America
What if we started thinking about the United States, all the people of America, as one team? What if we all operated as though we each had something to contribute? What if we had a mutual commitment to our team, as leaders, and as those being led? I think our country would look pretty different.
I’m not arguing for blind loyalty. True loyalty requires speaking up if you think something is wrong. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone makes bad calls.
You can’t be a good soldier without obeying your leaders; you have no choice in the matter. But soldiers are not supposed to obey unlawful orders, which underscores the point that no one man or leader is higher than the Constitution.
Unfortunately, sometimes you find a leader who lacks the moral integrity to stand up for his or her troops if a decision is made that might threaten the mission.
Sometimes you find leaders who refuse to yield on principle when circumstances mandate that they yield. This will then force a soldier to fall back on other core values, such as duty. Being able to identify and resist injustice within a unit will lead to a stronger overall organization. Bad leadership can occur in any organization, from a family to a police department to the military. You can demonstrate your loyalty by calling out bad leadership when you see it.
Loyalty keeps you connected to people who care about you. Those people are often your family members, but they don’t need to be related to you. Whoever they are, you need those people in order to be your best self. You cannot be a lone wolf in the military and you cannot generally be a lone wolf in life. You may lose the support of your loved ones if you are disloyal, and then you will become vulnerable to people who may not have your best interests at heart.