Content Warning: This chapter contains graphic details of a helicopter crash and the recovery missions.  

On the night of December 20, 2010, a Puerto Rico National Guard helicopter is on a counterdrug mission. It is a fairly new UH-72A Lakota participating in Operation New Dawn, a joint National Guard and Justice Department operation, and it is headed toward Vieques to support 43 arrest warrants resulting from a seven month investigation.

On board are four National Guard members and two Justice Department prosecutors. The weather is bad, with fast-moving, powerful thunderstorms in the area. Just before 1900, a low level wind shear warning is transmitted for the area. A few minutes later, the Lakota disappears off radar and is no longer responding to radio calls.

The Coast Guard is notified that the helicopter is missing, and the ready H-65 from Air Station Borinquen is launched. The first crews find a debris field and see fuel in the water near the last known position. They also find the first body floating near the crash site. The crew searches throughout the night and is relieved by a second crew that continues searching throughout the next day for the remaining five missing people.

On the night of December 21, the Operations Officer calls me. He tells me that a Puerto Rico National Guard helicopter has crashed and that I need to be on scene searching the next morning at first light. I get in touch with my Aircraft Commander to do some mission planning before attempting to get some sleep.

We take off the next morning in the darkness and head toward the crash site. I am holding on to hope that we will find survivors out in the warm Caribbean waters. Just as we are arriving on scene, we hear a report that fishermen have found two bodies washed up on the beach in the area.

I still have hope.

We plug in our search pattern over the debris field and begin our search. I stare down at the water intently, hoping to find someone alive. Every whitecap, sea turtle, or piece of debris looks like a person, and our adrenaline spikes every few moments as we search.

I didn’t realize during “Vapor” Walsh’s speech at my winging that while out on these missions, I would also be praying for a miracle. It is hard to put into words how absolutely gut wrenching it is to know that there might be someone out there, and you can’t find them. It is hard to accept that you can’t always be that miracle.

There are long periods of solemn silence as our crew stares at the water. Sometime in the morning, another body is found in the shallow waters off the beach. Now only the two pilots are still missing. I try to tell myself that they are trained, like I am, in underwater egress and water survival. They probably made it out and are still swimming around, hoping we will find them. Eventually, we are out of gas and land at Isla Grande Airport to refuel.

After a quick break, we take off again and begin searching with new search patterns based on the changing tides, currents, and drift patterns. The torture continues, and we hope for a miracle that never comes.

By this point, the National Guard has created a whole mobile incident command post on the beach. We can see tents, vehicles, and personnel all along the shore. I can feel that they are all watching us. They are all hoping we find their soldier alive, and every time we circle or come into a hover to investigate something, that little bit of false hope stings more and more.

As the day goes on, I begin to second-guess everything. Am I looking hard enough? Am I looking in the right places? What could I possibly have done to find these pilots who are still out there missing?

Again, we land in Isla Grande exhausted. We are all drained from continually trying to find a way to hope and systematically having it broken down. In between flights, while we are refueling, we all lie silent in the airport FBO, trying to recharge enough to go back out there and do it all over again.

Our third flight is more of the same, except I think we all start to come to the stark realization that nobody has survived this crash. We continue to search and hold on to every remaining bit of hope. We continue to conduct search patterns passed from Sector and scan the ocean for any signs of life.

Then my biggest fear is realized as the Flight Mechanic calls out a body floating face down in the water, with a tattered green uniform and boots visible just beneath the surface.

The Aircraft Commander establishes a hover with the body off the right side of the helicopter. I report the position to Sector and request a small boat to recover the body. The nearest small boat is 20 minutes away. There is no time to dwell on what we have found. We only have about 30 minutes of on-scene time left before bingo fuel, when we will have to depart the scene in order to have enough gas to land back at Isla Grande and refuel.

Hoisting bodies is a last resort for a helicopter crew, so with the boat en route, we decide to mark the position by deploying a MK-25 smoke flare. We go through the procedure and throw the flare into the water near the body. Once it hits the salt water, the flare activates, and thick white smoke billows out of the canister. Now that the position is marked, we transition to forward flight to conserve fuel and continue looking for the one remaining pilot.

After a long 20 minutes, the small boat arrives in the area. They see the smoke marking the position and immediately determine that the water is too shallow for their boat to approach. We continue to orbit while we discuss it with them, and just as we are at the furthest point away from the body, the MK-25 smoke flare extinguishes.

We rush over to the last position we marked, where we can still see some remnants of smoke, but we can no longer find the body. Finding a person in the water alive, waving and splashing, is extremely difficult. Finding a body floating just under the surface is nearly impossible.

We only have around 10 minutes of fuel remaining now as we frantically try to relocate the body. We retrace our path and fly a short pattern directly over the last known position, but we find nothing. There is a lot of current, and it is pushing toward breaking waves crashing over the shallow reef. We search for another 10 minutes, and just as we are about to hit bingo fuel, I spot the body out the left side of the aircraft. I take the flight controls to keep us in position where we can see the body and establish a hover.

Hovering over the water is challenging under any circumstances. With a giant rotor spinning overhead, the helicopter pushes the surface of the water away from you in every direction, making it difficult to gauge movement. We are trained to find things in the water, like bubbles floating on the surface, seaweed, debris, anything we can use as a hover reference to ensure we are in a stable position.

My only hover reference is the clearly deceased pilot.

I am staring at his lifeless body because it is the only thing around for me to maintain position off of. I maintain a hover for several minutes while the Aircraft Commander makes radio calls and figures out our best course of action. Bingo is rapidly ticking down, and now we only have a few minutes left on scene.

As I am hovering, the image of this pilot is being permanently seared into my memory. I keep thinking about the boots, and it makes everything so human. He is not just a body floating in the water. He is a man who laced up those boots the other night and said goodbye to his loved ones before going out on a mission. He is a man just like me.

I start to wonder if he knew what would happen, if he was scared, what the last thing he thought of was, if his family knew. Once I start to think about his family, I want to fall apart, but I do what I am trained to do. I bury all of it because I know I am hovering low over the water, with no fuel left and tough decisions to make with the crew.

The only option is to bury any part of me that is trying to be human in that moment.

The body is rapidly drifting toward the breaking waves, and we know if we don’t hoist immediately, we will be out of gas and the body will likely not be found again. The Aircraft Commander leads a brief discussion, and we all agree it is what we have to do. He takes the controls and maneuvers to place the body on the right side of the aircraft.

“Rescue check part two for direct deployment of the rescue swimmer.”

“Rescue check part two complete. Ready aft for direct deployment of the rescue swimmer.”

“Go on hot mic. Check swimmer.”

“On hot mic, checking swimmer. Swimmer ready.”

“Conn me in.”

The flight mechanic lowers the rescue swimmer to the body, and the swimmer uses a quick strop device to secure the body to himself. Our bingo annunciation is flashing, and we are out of fuel to make it back with our required reserves. The flight mechanic brings the swimmer back up toward the cabin, but we make another difficult decision once he gets up to the door. The Rescue Swimmer had mentioned that if we bring the body into the cabin, the helicopter will be grounded for maintenance until it can be decontaminated. We need to keep the helicopter up so that it can still be used as a search asset. We discuss this as a crew and the flight mechanic leaves the swimmer outside the cabin, hanging from the hoist hook, with a dead body attached to him.

The Aircraft Commander calls for us to depart the water. I look back in the cabin to make sure the swimmer is secured and the cabin is ready. The image I see when I turn around will haunt me forever, and I have never been able to describe it in words. I immediately feel sick, and panic tries to overtake me, but I know I need to lock it up and get back to the mission.

I bury that image somewhere deep and continue on to the next task.

We have no more fuel to play with and still need to drop off the body. We can’t fly over downtown San Juan with our rescue swimmer and a body hanging off the side of the aircraft. I immediately establish comms with Sector and tell them that we have hoisted the body and intend to drop it off at the National Guard incident command post set up on the beach a few miles away.

Sector notifies the command post that we are inbound. We do our best not to fly down the populated beach and head to where the command post is. As we approach, there is a line of soldiers on the beach standing at attention and saluting. They stand proudly, ready to honor their fallen teammate.

We have no time to waste and roll up on scene fast, immediately sandblasting the saluting detail, blowing their covers off as they fight not to stumble in our sand filled rotor wash. We lower the swimmer, and he unceremoniously unclips the quick strop, leaving the fallen pilot in a pile in the sand. We immediately pick up our swimmer before departing and covering the body and the rest of the soldiers with one more layer of sand.

I feel awful. I feel like it is the worst thing I have ever done. He deserved so much more than that.

So much more.

I again bury the image of the sand-covered body left in a heap and keep it together for the flight back to Isla Grande. We land way over six hours of flight time, which is the limit for any crew to fly in a day, so now we will be spending the night in San Juan. After we shut the aircraft down, the Aircraft Commander gets a call from the command to make sure we are okay. They offer a chaplain and Critical Incident Stress Management, or CISM. The Aircraft Commander asks all of us if we are okay.

I lie and say I’m fine.

We all do.

We spend that night in a hotel room near the airport. I call Natalie and tell her a little bit about what happened. I can’t bear to tell her any details, but she knows I am in pain. It is one of the loneliest nights of my life. Alone in that hotel room, with the images of that pilot replaying in my head, haunting me. I barely sleep, and when I do, I have nightmares about crashing, the body, and those boots.

The Coast Guard prepared me to do a mission, to be there to save the day when someone needs it the most. They never could have prepared me for this night, when I feel like I failed and had to face my own mortality as a hover reference.

I am no stranger to failing. I failed plenty at the Academy and in flight school, but this kind of failure causes pain I never could have imagined. I thought my whole life that this job would only be about showing up and saving the day. I never considered how badly it would hurt to show up, search with everything I have, do everything possible, and come up short.

Some days, there is no miracle.

All I had accomplished in my life, overcoming everything to become a pilot, saving a father on my first duty day, is forgotten as I cry alone in that hotel room that night.

It is also more than just the failure. I don’t want to admit it to myself, but I am afraid. Flying over wrecked helicopter parts and coming face to face with a dead pilot is a stark reminder of how unforgiving this job is.

It takes more than a month before they recover the last remaining pilot. The National Guard is going to have a memorial service for the fallen crew and invites us to attend to thank us for what we did. I refuse to go. I am too afraid of facing the family and the rest of the soldiers, and I can’t relive the tragedy through the eyes of his loved ones. More than anything, I still feel awful for the way we left his body on the beach, and I’m not sure I will ever be able to forgive myself for that.

Author’s note: It took me 16 years to tell anyone this full story. I tried to bury it somewhere deep, but I struggled badly. For weeks, I would wake up in a panic after vivid nightmares. Some of those nightmares continue to this day. This event happened a few days before Christmas, and despite being around friends and family, I felt no joy as the results of that crash played over and over in my mind.

The reason I want to write my story is because I hope to help others. I have spent a career trying to help people lost at sea, but now I believe my hard-learned lessons can reach people who need them. Please learn from me: if you experience anything traumatic, talk to someone about it. I tried to be tough, but I learned that no matter how deep I tried to bury these memories, the scars never healed. I also learned how many other people are struggling with similar scars.

None of us are alone.

I’m here for you.