At the heart of the helicopter rescue portion of the Air Force Reserve Command’s contribution to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort are the crews flying 10 to 12 hour missions picking up as many as 184 survivors on a single mission.
At the very center of that heart pararescuemen can be found who have risked life and limb so that others may live.
Tethered by safety harnesses in the back of HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters, the PJs, as they are more commonly referred to, have a truly unique perspective of the devastation, especially on the human part of the equation, wrought by the category four hurricane.
For one pararescueman from AFRC’s 304th Rescue Squadron, it was more than an eye-opening experience.
“My first flight into New Orleans was at nighttime,” said Tech. Sgt. Keith Berry, who is based in Portland, Ore. “I got here on Sept. 1, and they sent me out the following night.”
Equipped with a night-vision monocle attached to his helmet, Sergeant Berry’s view of the ground at night is a garish, greenish version of what was visible in the daylight; with his unaided eye, it is inky blackness.
Typically, pararescuemen and their crews come from the same unit; however, the rescue effort for Hurricane Katrina blended active-duty and guardsmen with the reservists on each flight.
Sitting in the helicopter’s doorway opposite Sergeant Berry was Tech. Sgt. Isaiah Staley, a reservist from the 306th Rescue Squadron at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz.
Heading south from here, the helicopter passed over dozens of communities blacked out by massive power failures. Besides the power outages, the first indications of the storm’s passage were the wind-felled trees, all of them toppled toward the west, bowed to Katrina’s fury.
Structural damage to the buildings below soon became more evident and more severe. As they approached communities along the Gulf of Mexico, there was total devastation.
Passing over islands where homes once stood, all that remained were the upright columns that once supported them. Across the bay, on the shoreline along the mainland, were what is left of those homes -- huge rafts of debris clogging every stream and inlet feeding the Gulf.
As Sergeant Berry’s helicopter passed over Lake Pontchartrain, the scene that greeted him over New Orleans was like one from another world.
“It was like one of those ‘War of the Worlds’ type movies,” he said. “Through my (night-vision) monocle, I could see other helicopters flying at 600 to 1,000 feet with their (infrared) lights on.
“From each helicopter you could see this big cone of light pointing down at the ground and all over you could see (them),” he said. “They looked like monopods trolling around everywhere you looked. You could see them coming in to hover, and you could see people being hoisted up under them.”
Flames from a large fire in an industrial area flared in his night-vision device, and he could see a couple of buildings here and there that were evidently operating on generator power.
“We started to fly a grid pattern over one of the blackened areas where you could see water in the streets,” Sergeant Berry said. “Then we saw a flashlight below. We swung around, came into hover and we saw it again.”
Sergeants Berry and Staley climbed into their strops, horse collar-like devices used to raise and lower pararescuemen on the hoist, and they descended into the surreal darkness of the flooded city.
Alighting onto a roof, they removed the strops and scampered along the roof line to the edge. The helicopter flew away and orbited in the distance to allow the two Airmen to be able to hear any calls for help. Sergeant Berry lay down on the roof and looked over the side to see who was below.
“I shouted out, ‘We’re from the United States Air Force and we’re here to rescue you. Do you need to leave?’” he said.
The response was not what he expected when the man indicated that he did not and that he was OK.
“I thought to myself that this was not getting off to the best start,” Sergeant Berry said. “It was like, ‘I’m here to rescue you,’ and he didn’t want to go.”
After determining the man had enough food and water, he had no medical problems and there was no one else there to be rescued, the helicopter returned to retrieve the two pararescuemen.
