Jimmy Settle receives the Purple Heart from Brig. Gen. Charles Foster, commander of the 176th wing of the Alaska Air National Guard.
heavy neoprene hoodie, the whole shebang, but none of that gear mattered. That horrible sting of cold sucked the wind right out of me, even though the only thing exposed was my face. Luckily I had a snorkel, but my lips around the rubber mouthpiece instantly froze. The moment I broke the surface, the outside of my mask iced up. I couldn’t see. I tried to lift the bottom of my mask up to make sense of the world around me. I needed to locate two things: 1. Roger. 2. The helicopter and the hoist cable. The powerful rotor wash from the thumping blades lifted the seawater and blasted what felt like thousands of ice needles into my face. I had to keep dunking my face into the water to seek protection from this barrage of little flying spikes, and after doing this a couple times I got seawater on the inside of my mask, so now it was double iced, a [blinding] thick layer of frosted crystal covering the inside and out. The chopper left us for a moment. I could hear only the splashing of the ocean around me. I reached up into my hoodie to pull my earplugs out. I wanted to be able to hear Roger and be ready when the chopper came back. It took us a minute to find each other. At this point, everything was still routine training. Both of us were adjusting to the shock of the icy water, steadying our breathing, and floating, waiting and watching for something blacker than the night sky to appear above us and drop the hoist, a thick silver metal cable, the diameter of a pencil, with a big heavy double hook—one side for humans, the other for cargo. “There it is,” Roger yelled. The cable dangled just a few feet from my head. Then, as quickly as it appeared, it zipped off horizontally and away from us. Out
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of reach. In that moment, I lunged toward where it sat in the water. “No!” Roger yelled. The urgency in his voice reminded me of one of the important rules about water work. You don’t swim for the hoist. Especially if you are rescuing someone with the Stokes litter or are too gearladen to swim with any speed. The swimmers in the water let the experts in the bird above do their job. They are the best in the business, some of the most skilled helicopter pilots on the planet. They will get the hoist to you. The crew above kept trying to get the hoist to Roger and me. But something wasn’t quite right. Each time the line appeared close enough for one of us to grab, it rocketed away again. After one too many times of the hoist landing just out of reach, Roger yelled to me, “Go for it, Jimmy!” And I did. I dove for that hook with all I had. With the combination of adrenaline and years of water training, I should have swum like an Olympian. But now, with all my gear, and the heaviness of the deep cold gripping my body, and my clumsy numb limbs, I could only flail like a little kid. That blazing swim speed was probably reduced to a knot at best, and the attempt to reach the hoist only a few feet away required maximum effort. I ignored the scream of pain from my
frozen body and lunged with a giant kick, clawing with the frozen clubs that were my hands. Just a few feet from my outstretched glove, the hoist shot off again. I couldn’t. Grab. It. They kept trying, for nearly twenty minutes, to get the hoist to us, to no avail. And then the black sky above us lit up. The chopper lights blazed over us. Through the ice blasting my face, I watched as the helicopter, tail down, suddenly scooted backwards— actually flew backwards—and anyone knows that is not how a bird that size is supposed to fly. As quickly as that happened, the aircraft hovering above us corrected itself and—whoosh!—the Pave Hawk flew off. Gone. The thump of the HH-60 grew faint, replaced by silence and a soft tinkle, like someone was gently shaking a chandelier. For a moment, neither of us said a word. We didn’t know what had gone wrong, but whatever it was, it wasn’t good. We were already freezing, and now we’d been left behind. Roger turned to me and said, “Well, now what, Jimmy?” Jimmy Settle is a decorated Air Force veteran. He wrote Never Quit with Don Rearden, Alaska professor, playwright, and author of The Raven’s Gift.