7
ON THE RAMP, MADDEN'S STOMACH FELT LIKE IT was in his nose. He had experienced precipitous loss of elevation before in wind shears, but that was not in combat. The tossing now disoriented him. Which direction was up? He stared at the pump in his fist and the fluid can in his hand. He was cranking the handle as fast as the pressure allowed.
A voice called, “Fifty feet. I got an LZ in sight.” Madden stopped pouring a third can of fluid long enough to grab Slab, who was braced against his M-60.
“Get all your guys on the floor! We're goin' in hot!”
“Huh?”
He threw Slab to the floor; the team got down. Back at his station, Madden heard Mack say, “Controls are locking up again.” He pumped harder.
“Twenty-five feet.”
Madden thought, I'm dead. That was his last thought.
The Chinook ramp hit the ground first, taking the full brunt of the impact, with the right side high, on the verge of rolling over. The collision with the ground tossed Madden to the ceiling against the gearbox and driveshaft above his head. He flew back down and hit the floor and went back up again and hit the ceiling and came back down, like a ping-pong ball. The impact cracked his helmet. He suffered compression fractures of four vertebrae, two broken ribs, and disc and nerve injuries that, even after four surgeries, would never be fully repaired.
When he woke up, the MAKO 30 team had already run off the aircraft. Madden rose unsteadily on his feet and told Prod, on the left ramp clearing his head and coming down from the shock of hanging out over nearly 2,000 feet of open air, “Get your 60 and get out of the airplane.” Madden grabbed his own M-60 and a 750-round ammo can. Leaving out the back was like running on Jell-O, and as a final insult, he slipped on the hydraulic fluid and fell off his own ramp.