The Rescue Season: The Heroic Story of Parajumpers on the Edge of the World - Hardcover

Drury, Bob

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684864797 ISBN 13: 9780684864792

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2001

Synopsis

Provides an intriguing account of the challenges faced by the 210th Alaska Pararescue Squadron during their daring rescue of three English climbers on the West Rib route of Mount Denali--the highest peak in North America. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Bob Drury, a contributing editor at GQ, has written for Men's Journal, Vanity Fair, and Details. For years he was a foreign correspondent, crime reporter, and sports columnist for the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and New York Newsday. He lives in East Hampton, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: Alaska Envy

It is my duty to save lives and to aid the injured. I will be prepared at all times to perform this duty quickly and efficiently, placing it before personal desires and comforts. These things I do, that others may live.
-- The Pararescueman's Code

The origins of Alaskan rescue contain the simplicity and obscurity of the frontier itself. The high north's harsh winters are more than metaphor, and each community's values are forged by their dark, brutal nature. This insidious essence seeps into the soul, and from downtown Anchorage to the smallest Inupiaq village the dual perils of isolation and loneliness are acknowledged realities. A professional rescuer in Alaska faces a complex web of small judgments and compromises that, like a spider's threads, are woven in unexpected combinations. A flat summer sea can turn into a cauldron within minutes. An alpine storm will strand a climber mere yards from his tent.

Or, as U.S. Air Force Master Sergeant Mike Wayt now considers on this Friday morning, May 21, some British idiot traversing one of Denali's fickle flanks will wander away from his climbing partners and never be heard from again.

As a member of the Alaska Air Guard's 210th Pararescue Team, Mike Wayt does not have to be involved in a rescue to feel his stomach churn each time one of his crewmates heads out from headquarters, especially when the rescue involves battling Denali. In reflective moments, the men of the 210th often think of themselves as a sort of modern-day equivalent of Mallory's Arthurian knights, a collective embodiment of the warrior spirit at its best and brightest, contributing to the quality of their fellow human beings in time of peace. These knights consider Denali their fiercest dragon -- unique, immense, deceiving, and never less than potentially fatal even to those who know it best. Last night, for instance, the thirty-odd members of Wayt's pararescue team each felt as if he was a member of Pete Katinszky's crew as the pilot vectored the mountain searching for Antony Hollingshead and Nigel Vardy. They monitored the military rescue frequencies or called into headquarters for hourly updates. And when they heard the news that the mountain ranger Daryl Miller and the Lama pilot Jim Hood had finally recovered the Brits, a silent cheer rose from every member of the squadron no matter where he was.

Now, this morning, the sky above Mike Wayt is feathered with high-filling cirrus as he follows the contrail of another C-130 heading back into the Alaska Range in search of the third British climber, an auto mechanic from Staffordshire named Steve Ball. Mike has been on the horn to The Section, as the parajumpers refer to their Anchorage headquarters, and knows his teammate and friend Technical Sergeant Mark Glatt is a member of the Herc's crew. He hopes Glatt will be the first to spot the Brit.

Mike looks across his backyard to the north, across the coastal flats, where pearl gray clouds, billowing and ominous, are frosting the ripsaw crests of the Chugach Range. Although it is nearly June, a season of twenty-hour days and bruised-colored nights, spring snow in the Chugach is far from unusual. Mike turns to his thirteen-year-old daughter and smiles. Stephanie Wayt stands indolently, hands on hips, pondering the storm battering the lofty minarets five miles away. A limp volleyball net lies in the wet grass at her feet.

No worries, Steph, Mike says in what he hopes is his most reassuring tone. The mountains will trap those clouds.

Like most children of the arctic, Stephanie is something of an expert at tracking the path of a squall from its birth far out over the Aleutian Islands to the moment it begins tacking up the Gulf of Alaska like a dark, menacing pirate fleet. She can usually guess from the height of the vaulting cumulonimbi -- the towering Qs -- which storms will ricochet off the mountain chain and bounce back into the spruce-covered foothills that sheathe the Wayt's neighborhood, and which ones will wring themselves out on the corrugated peaks. As she and her dad gaze solemnly across the watershed that holds the city of Anchorage, a crenellated sugar bowl carved by the confluence of the Knik and Matanuska Glaciers some 10,000 years ago, Stephanie knows intuitively that this storm will play itself out in the Chugach. Still, she loves her father, so she smiles brightly and mimes an exaggerated gesture of relief before turning to plant the poles for the volleyball net.

Mike holds a steady gaze on his daughter. No longer his gangly colt, all arms and legs and clomping feet, she is already nearly as tall as her mother, and shafts of sunlight reflect off her long buttermilk hair. In this trick of light and shadows Mike sees instead of a little girl a young woman with the bearing of an arctic wolf. In contrast to her father, with his lank black hair and arched Asian cheekbones, Stephanie is graced with her mother's pert nose, and the merest trace of her Japanese grandmother's delicate, almond-shaped eyes. She carries herself in a manner Mike, the only Japanese-American parajumper in the U.S. Air Force, would deem regal.

Mike keeps his eyes upon her as he sidles toward his backyard barbecue grill, unable to shake the feeling that his pararescue team is in for a long couple of days.

Mike Wayt likes to joke that he was born with a silver rip cord in his mouth. His father, Chief Master Sergeant Ron Wayt, led a nomadic existence as an Air Force aerial photographer who flew spy missions over Russia, snapping pictures of Soviet nuclear silos from the backseat of an F-104, and his three sons were reared on air bases up and down the Pacific Coast. As perennial outsiders, the Wayt brothers were acutely aware of the arcane, often baffling prejudices toward Japanese in the wake of World War II, as well as the unforeseen manner in which these prejudices can complicate life. All three learned to fistfight at an early age.

Mike was the youngest, and something of a jock. He was also smart enough to anticipate the limited career opportunities for a 140-pound Japanese-American tailback. Surprising no one who knew him, he enlisted in the Air Force immediately after graduating from high school. Mike's character, after all, had been hammered on the anvil of military tradition, and as early as basic training his drill instructors had pegged him as a lifer. He adapted smoothly to the daily grind and rigors of service life. What he loved best about it was being outside. For as long as Mike could remember, he was enthralled by the outdoors.

When Mike wasn't playing sports, he'd spent much of his youth traversing the woods. Depending on where his father was stationed, there'd be boar hunts in northern California, or salmon fishing down on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. If nothing else, there was always a mountain that needed climbing. As a student his favorite courses had been the field trips he took with the Young Adult Conservation Corps, and after basic training he applied for a position as a field instructor at the Air Force's survival school at Fairchild Air Base in Washington State.

He augmented his survival training by passing the three-week parachute course at Army jump school at North Carolina's Fort Bragg, and within two years he'd qualified as both a survival instructor and parachute instructor at Fairchild. Then, after four years of "walking with my dick in the dirt" through the high passes of the Cascades, he'd accepted an invitation from a superior officer to switch "career fields" and enroll in the pararescueman's indoctrination course down in San Antonio, Texas.

Mike knew a little about the PJs. A few had passed through survival school up at Fairchild, and he'd eyeballed them good. Hell, he figured, whatever it is they do, if they can do it, so can I. He wasn't too solid on the specifics. Bu

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0684864797
• ISBN 13: 9780684864792
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 238