SIX

Reporting to the 129th Rescue Squadron at Moffett Federal Airfield in Silicon Valley was the beginning of the happiest part of my entire career. I was worried that I’d be bored flying stateside missions after two back-to-back tours in Afghanistan, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Flying with this unit was everything I had ever hoped for as a rescue pilot.

I was one of three pilots assigned to the elite Counterdrug Task Force flying unit named Team Hawk. On my first day of work, I walked into the Team Hawk room, and the first person I saw was a burly guy who was concentrating so hard it looked like he was going to bite his tongue off, pecking the computer keyboard in what only distantly seemed like an attempt at typing. He looked up and broke out into a huge grin that matched mine. It was Steve Burt, my cigar-smoking buddy from KAF.

“Well, holy shit. Look what the cat dragged in. How the fuck are you?” Steve asked as he got up to give me a shoulder-slapping hug. I breathed a huge sigh of relief—I was back with my people. I greeted the other two pilots, who had also become friends of mine in Afghanistan. Something in my chest untied—I’d found my home.

One of the other two pilots was my new boss. Finn was the Team Hawk Commander and a huge part of why I was in California in the first place. He and I had become great friends in Afghanistan, and it was ultimately his decision to hire me. Finn was the perfect example of a clean-cut all-American pilot. He was a good ol’ Midwestern boy who had graduated from the Air Force Academy and was married to a teacher. To me, he always looked the way I imagined Ender from Ender’s Game all grown up. He had a quiet demeanor and wasn’t a huge guy, but his fiery Irish side would come out now and then when he was really spun up about something. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday he ends up a senator from the Buckeye state of Ohio.

The third Team Hawk pilot was Dave. Over the years, Dave and I would become close friends, and I could always rely on his loyalty and sound judgment. He and I didn’t always agree on tactics, but he was a good pilot and a great friend.

After visiting my new team, I ventured out into the rest of the squadron to see who else I could bump into. One of the first people I saw was another good friend I’d made at KAF. He hailed me warmly and asked me to take a walk with him to the admin building. I could tell he wanted to talk to me in private.

“So, I just wanted to give you a heads-up because I know what you faced in New York,” he began in an ominous voice. “You’ll find ninety-nine percent of the people here are thrilled to have you. You have a great reputation in rescue for being a good stick and a mission hacker.”

A mission hacker is someone who relentlessly hits the mission, volunteers for the difficult flights, focuses on their career, and won’t hesitate to jump out in front when the bullets start flying. It’s a great compliment to a pilot, and I took it as such while also bracing for the “but” that would inevitably follow.

“But one of the guys here did fight hiring you,” he continued. “He doesn’t think women should be on our crews, and you’re going to have an uphill battle convincing him otherwise. I debated whether or not to even tell you, but I think you should know. Hell, I think he’d tell you to your face if you asked him. His name is Doug Sherry, and he’s a former Army pilot.”

As it turned out, I already knew Doug, and it didn’t surprise me in the slightest. All in all, he was actually a well-respected, reasonably decent guy. He wasn’t your run-of-the-mill chauvinist—in other words, he didn’t seem to hold a low opinion of women based on his own insecurities, and he didn’t shove it in people’s faces. Maybe he’d had some sort of experience with a mediocre fellow soldier on which he based his opinion, but that wasn’t enough to scare me off. I actually looked forward to showing him what I could do.

One thing I did know was that, first and foremost, Doug was a damn good pilot. And I figured that once he saw that I was an asset to the team, he’d probably come around. I thanked my friend for the intel, though—it was good to know that he’d fought the decision to bring me on board. I’d have to be very careful about trusting Doug.

I certainly wouldn’t be able to avoid him—he was always around. Doug walked around everywhere with an unlit, disgustingly wet stub of a cigar in his mouth, as if he had just walked off the set of Hogan’s Heroes. He’d make crude jokes as he swapped his cigar to the other side of his mouth, coining new insults on a daily basis. “That guy’s a total doucher,” he’d drawl, inventing new words as he went. He was quite a character. Despite our differences, though, I can say that the unit was better off for having him on the team. Things just wouldn’t be the same around there without him.

Of course, as I was running around processing into the unit that first day, I bumped right into him.

“Hi, Doug!” I said, muffling my discomfort and painting on a cheery face.

“MJ.” He nodded to me. “Welcome to Moffett. Don’t fuck up.”

It was actually more than I had hoped for from him. After all, it was solid advice. Don’t fuck up. I managed to convince myself that his statement was coming from a place of genuine concern for my success and well-being. Maybe.

—

I’d only just arrived in California, but we had to hit the ground running at Team Hawk. I jumped right into our counterdrug operations, which meant that we flew a variety of different missions. On marijuana eradication missions, we pulled cargo nets full of marijuana plants out of the national forests. We also supported the ground forces or local law enforcement on their missions, and we occasionally even landed our helicopters at schools to show kids that staying off drugs could be “cool.” We laughingly called those our “Hugs Not Drugs” missions. I do think we reached some of the kids, but most of them seemed to only want to hear about whether or not we were armed and if we had ever killed anyone.

One of my favorite Gunners to fly with was TieJie Jones. His first name was pronounced “TJ,” and he was a seasoned Gunner who was a valuable member of our squadron. TJ hailed from somewhere in the Virgin Islands. He had the muscular build of a warrior but the demeanor of a retired gunslinger living the good life on a beachfront property somewhere.

Those of us who flew with the 129th during the summer of 2008 would always remember our time there. The operational tempo that summer was insane. We jumped from one thing to the next, starting with a planned Counterdrug Task Force operation called Operation LOCCUST, which stood for Locating Organized Cannabis Cultivators Using Saturation Techniques. It was a huge, multiorganizational campaign, ultimately resulting in thirty-six arrests and more than $1.4 million of cannabis eradicated, and it required us to fly out of Ukiah in the heart of marijuana country. The locals didn’t bother masking their disdain for us, knowing that we were out there depleting their supply and raising their prices.

Once, we were sitting in the grass behind the shut-down, parked helicopter, just relaxing between missions as the fuel truck was getting us ready to go back out, when we heard the loud, incessant honking of a car horn. I turned to look and saw a truck full of hippies flipping us off and shaking their fists at us. I chuckled and shook my head. Like the vast majority of my colleagues, I had never tried pot before, due in large part to the fact that we were regularly and randomly drug tested. We all knew that would be an exceedingly stupid way to end a career and flush all of our hard work down the toilet, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one curious about the lifestyle.

Our work for Operation LOCCUST was thrilling but extremely grueling. We constantly maxed out the time we were allowed to fly, and we kept our downtime to the absolute minimum required by regulation. The commander even occasionally approved extended hours, which was not something they did lightly. If there had been any mishaps, the investigation board would have jumped down his throat for approving the overtime. But we were professionals, and we had all lived through a number of brutal and difficult situations in our careers thus far. We just bonded even more closely and collectively enjoyed the suck. A cold beer and great camaraderie at the end of the day usually made up for the heat exhaustion and the unforgiving pain in our backs from twelve hours in the vibrating, rattling aircraft.

—

Toward the end of the two-month operation, we were all looking forward to the upcoming break that most of us planned to spend back at home. At the time, California was experiencing one of the worst wildfire seasons in recent memory, so before we were able to leave, we were immediately retasked with helping the local firefighters protect homes and forests from the devastating destruction of the blazing infernos. We’d be fighting to protect the same forest out of which we had just been pulling marijuana.

Flying through wildfires was an incredible ordeal, almost like navigating through a terrible storm. The smoke was so thick, we couldn’t rely on vision alone to navigate. In order to be able to see each other in the choking cloud, our maintenance crews marked up our camouflaged helicopters with hot pink and neon orange paint. It was quite a sight to see our tough-as-nails, war-fighting machines covered in hot pink candy-cane stripes up the refueling probe, along with a three-foot-tall pink “J94” painted on our belly and tail to signify our call sign, Jolly 94.

For large operations such as LOCCUST and wildfire suppression, we would augment our core Team Hawk crew with aircrew from the rest of the squadron. My crew included Rhys Hunt, who was my Aircraft Commander and our squadron’s director of operations, the second-in-command behind our squadron commander. Steve was our Flight Engineer, and Matt Rymer was our very experienced Gunner. Matt’s call sign was “Blue” as in “You’re my boy, Blue!” from the movie Old School, and he was an easygoing, smart dude who was always quick to smile.

The four of us had flown together on LOCCUST missions, and we were kept together as a crew as we were rolled into the wildfire-suppression undertaking. The locals, it appeared, were just as mad at us on these missions, despite the fact that this time, we were trying to save their crops, not to mention their houses.

The way the wildfire-suppression flights work is that firefighters on the ground tell us where they want us to drop water. Usually this means we fly through smoke and toast our butts a bit in the heat in order to drop water next to an active fire to help them keep it from spreading. We had to find the water ourselves somewhere, so we were authorized to “dip” from any water source we could find. This often meant ponds on private property and, in this area in particular, ponds that fed irrigation pumps for (you guessed it) cannabis fields.

Rhys was an excellent Aircraft Commander. Instead of doing everything himself, he knew he had a young Co-Pilot next to him who was eager for experience. One day, as unnerving as I’m sure it was for him, he let me take the controls while we were filling our water bucket. The bucket was a two-hundred-gallon, parachute-like neon orange assembly that attached to the cargo hook on the belly of the helicopter.

As I flew the helicopter over the water source, I could hear the backenders calling out, “Twenty feet . . . fifteen . . . ten . . . five, four, three, two, hold . . . filling . . . hold . . . hold . . . okay, start back up.” At this point, I started to slowly lift the bird up, so that the bucket would open and fill with water as we climbed. This is a rather delicate operation. You’re asking a lot of your engines to lift this much extra weight, and at the higher elevations that can be a recipe for disaster. In the event of an emergency or a power loss, both pilots are ready to hit the dump switch, which releases all of the water out of the bottom center of the bucket. With all of this at the forefront of his mind, Rhys was carefully guarding the controls as I was “on the dip,” as we called it.

“Who the fuck is this guy? Twelve o’clock,” Steve called out as I breathed evenly, trying to hold a perfectly stable hover and slow climb while keeping all parts of the aircraft out of the water. If I crept forward, I’d have to correct backward, which would put the tail lower than the nose. It was incredibly dangerous if you weren’t holding a very solid hover. I flicked a glance out of the front of the aircraft to see an angry, bearded middle-aged man on a quad bike yelling at us from a small hill about ten feet above the water level. This put him pretty much eye-to-eye with us, so a sense of unease began to permeate the cabin. Either he was mad that we, at some point, had confiscated his weed, or he was pissed that we were taking his water in the middle of a drought. Either way, it wasn’t a good situation. He could throw something at us and possibly hit a rotor, and we’d end up drowning in this twenty-foot-deep shit hole all because we were trying to save his house. Hell, even worse, he could shoot at us and we’d have absolutely no way to defend ourselves.

“Okay, that’s it. You’re clear,” Blue said over the intercom. He didn’t need to tell me twice. This was music to my ears, as I couldn’t wait to get away from this lunatic.

“Transitioning forward,” I announced as I slowly pushed the stick forward and pulled up the collective stick to my left to give the engines the power to go from a hover to forward flight. Unfortunately, the lunatic was directly in our takeoff lane, as the trees around us precluded a different track. We’d have to fly right over him, which was less than ideal.

“Oh shit. Water’s away,” Blue reported with a chuckle. I quickly glanced over at Rhys. He had an expression of “uh-oh” on his face. I looked down. Someone must have accidentally tripped the bucket dump switch, because the guy on the quad had just gotten a two-hundred-gallon bath.

“Ha! Got you, you fucker!” Steve shouted, to uproarious laughter erupting from both Blue and Steve.

Rhys looked down at the collective he had carefully been guarding. His thumb had accidentally hit the switch during the climb.

“Um . . .” he began. “Yeah, let’s go find another dip.”

We all had a good chuckle and began looking for a different pond. I kept flying. It was okay with me. The guy had looked like he needed to cool off.

With a new bucketful of water, we flew back into the action. We stayed just high enough above the flames to prevent damage to the aircraft, but it wasn’t uncommon to get a bit overheated after twelve hours spent roasting like a marshmallow over a campfire. We were careful not to get too close, but sometimes we pushed it. That day, we were flying as low as we safely could en route to our spot (chosen for us by the firefighters on the ground), when we saw a large tree on fire on a hill to our left. I don’t know if everything around it had burned down or if it had always been taller, but the seventy-foot tree stood at least thirty feet above everything around it, and it was completely engulfed in flames.

As we passed it out the left door, we got a little too close, and I could feel the skin at the nape of my neck start to sting like a bad sunburn. I was surprised that Blue hadn’t said anything behind me, but about three seconds later, he started coughing loudly.

“Okay, that was too close,” he blurted out. “I inhaled so much heat that I couldn’t breathe or talk there for a minute. I thought my visor was going to melt!”

Rhys glanced at me as he continued flying straight ahead. We weren’t used to the effect on the aircraft and crew of flying to the side of the fire. We had been concentrating on flying high enough above it.

“Yeah, let’s not do that again,” he said.

At the end of each day, we all smelled like chain-smokers and suffered from heat exhaustion. The trip from the aircraft to our motel was usually pretty quiet, as half of the crew ended up dozing off, exhausted. Sometimes we’d hit a drive-through on the way back, but usually we all just wanted a shower and a decent night of sleep.

—

About three days into the firefighting, we started having a lot more fun. We were becoming firefighting pros. We had no idea how long we’d be there, so we had to make the best of it. Before long, we felt like we could identify different areas of the forest by the look and smell of the smoke, as each unique type of tree burned differently.

“Wow!” I exclaimed one morning as we began our first trip into the cloud of smoke. “This smells like crap. I hope we’re not over a trash site.”

“I hope there aren’t any animals down there,” Rhys added. “It sort of smells like a skunk.”

“Great,” Steve piped in. “That’ll really help me score with the front-desk chick.”

“Oh, sure, Steve,” I said, laughing. “It’s the smoke smell that’s keeping you from getting laid. Whatever you need to tell yourself.” I could never resist giving Steve good-natured shit.

We all laughed, and the intellect of the day pretty much went downhill from there as we traded jabs and laughed at one another. We even started giving the other pilots on our radio frequency shit when they would hit bingo fuel before us and have to return to the airport for more gas. This was ridiculous, as we all knew, because your skill doesn’t determine your fuel flow, but it was good-natured ribbing about having the guts to squeeze one more dip out of your empty fuel tanks. We may have even pushed it a little too much ourselves, flying until we were running on fumes as well. Eventually our fun day came to an end, and it was time to drive back to the motel. On the drive home, Blue pointed out a diner on our normal route, and despite our exhaustion, we all jumped at the chance to stop and grab a bite to eat before returning to the motel.

It was during this meal that I began feeling like maybe the heat exhaustion was getting to us. Everyone was laughing that sort of uncontrollable giggling you get when you’ve been up too long or working out in the sun too much. We devoured our dinner and ordered more food, eyeing the pies in the glass display case. I’m not sure who started it, but then we began texting other crews, trying to see who would come and join the party. We were having way too good a time to just call it a night.

Eventually, Rhys thought it would be funny to start texting our Squadron Commander. No one seemed to realize that this wasn’t a great idea, given that it was ten o’clock at night. We all started ribbing him just as hard as we’d been doing among our crew all day. Then he hit us with a sobering response.

I glanced down at my phone when my text notification dinged, and what I read just about made me lose my dinner. I locked eyes with Rhys across the table and realized he had gotten the same text.

Are you guys high? the text said. I think we’re going to have to test your whole crew when we get back.

We looked at each other for about three seconds in terror . . . until Rhys let out a “Pffttt” and began laughing his ass off. I followed suit, laughing at the ridiculous suggestion. Then, a few seconds later, I stopped laughing. Oh my God, we were all high! The fire we had been working all day must have been a cannabis field, and a good-sized one at that.

We told Blue and Steve, and they shook their heads in disbelief. None of us had any experience to tell us what being high felt like, so we all started looking around at one another, laughing and panicking at the same time.

“Oh crap,” I murmured. “Steve’s eyes are bloodshot!”

“Steve’s eyes are always bloodshot,” replied Blue. He was right, of course, and we enjoyed another good laugh. Everything was a lot funnier than usual that night.

We never did get that urine test, but I think we all knew what was going on. I was just glad to have finally experienced it, and I couldn’t have picked a better group of guys to hit it with than good ol’ Jolly 94.

—

Soon enough, thankfully, the wildfires died down, and it started to look like we’d get that much-anticipated break we were hoping for at the end of LOCCUST. But the summer of 2008 wasn’t through with us yet. Hurricane Ike was just about to hit Houston, Texas, so our team was mobilized to head down there and help pluck folks who were too stubborn to evacuate off of their roofs. The government didn’t want another Katrina on its hands, so we stood ready to launch.

There were a few crews who landed in driveways and boarded the scared, cold survivors, but for the most part, we just spent a good deal of time searching, flying around in the crappy weather to see if anyone waved at us. We even had a few of our PJs patrolling a street looking for anyone who needed help. Rumor has it that the PJs actually commandeered a fire truck whose keys were left in the ignition, but I wasn’t there to see that. Knowing those guys, I certainly wouldn’t have put it past them, though.

After that mission, we did get something of a break. There were missions and training here and there during the next few months, but the focus was mainly on spin-up training to get us ready to head to Afghanistan in the spring. As the date of my next deployment neared, I thought about all we had been through that summer. I had grown close to Team Hawk and had spent hundreds of hours in and out of the aircraft with Rhys, Finn, Steve, and others. I had no idea who I’d be crewed with in Afghanistan, and I trusted everyone in my unit, but I was really hoping that Steve would be my FE. I knew that he was one of our best, and I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather have my back in combat. Whoever I ended up flying with, I had a good feeling that this deployment would be a very different experience from the last. I was right.