I performed my cutaway, enjoyed a short free fall, and seconds later saw a nice full reserve expand above my head.
All of us were wearing push-to-talk radios. The comms wire extended down my right arm from my radio and helmet to my right hand. Generally, when you push the button and talk, everyone on your stick is supposed to hear you.
I wanted to alert my team and tell them that I would meet them on the drop zone. But when I pushed the button and talked into the radio, I could manage only a mumble. The pain in my neck and jaw was so intense that I couldn’t open my mouth enough to make anyone understand what I was saying.
I palpated my jaw and realized that it was dislocated and way to the left of where it should be. So I did to myself what I had done to dozens of other people in ER. At around eight thousand feet, I placed my thumb on my bottom teeth, pushed down hard, and jerked my jaw right. It popped into place and hurt like hell!
Then I got back on the radio and said, “Guys, I had a cutaway.”
I landed approximately a thousand feet away from the target, grabbed my chute, and jogged over to catch up with the rest of the team.
Another time, on a deployment in Key West, I came very close to drowning during a night static-ship takedown. We were doing a four-hour oxygen dive on Dräger with a six-man boat crew, navigating in a crowded harbor through pilings, with all sorts of ship noises overhead.
Once we arrived at the target ship, we set a vertical de-rigging line from the hull of the ship, with loops in it for each diver. We attached the pole and ladder to the line as we all removed our Drägers, fins, and weight belts and attached them to the de-rigging line, continuing to breathe through the mouthpiece attached to the inhalation hose.
As I was waiting for the verbal signal to surface in the pitch-black water, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t breathe. My first thought was that the inhalation hose had gotten twisted with the constant moving up and down around the de-rigging line.
So I felt along the hoses, but I found no kinks or twists. I also rechecked to make sure that the open/close valve on my mouthpiece was open. It was.
Next, I reached for the O2 bottle, thinking it had somehow been shut, but it was open too. I repeated these procedures three times.
Meanwhile, my head started to hurt. So I reached up to my swim buddy and shook his fin. I motioned to him that I was out of air. But neither of us could see anything.
I put my hand on his mouthpiece, indicating that I wanted to buddy breathe with him, but he didn’t understand my signal and backed off.
All I could think to do was repeat my emergency procedures again. So I checked my hoses, mouthpiece, and O2 bottle. My head felt like it was about to explode. Now my only option was to swim up to the bottom of the ship with my hand over my head in case I hit the hull headfirst. I desperately wanted to take a mouthful of seawater and end the agonizing pain that I was in. It was a horrible thought, and one that still shames me.
Using the hull as a guide, I made my way to the side of the ship and approached the surface. But the ship was close to a large structure and I couldn’t squeeze through.
By this time it felt like someone had thrust an ice pick in my brain. Every nerve in my head was screaming.
With no idea how much time had elapsed or how many seconds I had left, I kicked on a steady course, hoping to find an opening to the surface. My body started to sink. I was running out of steam.
During the last moments underwater, I saw a light and followed it. I swam from midship to bow and surfaced! Then quickly uttered a prayer of thanks.
I swam to the portside of the ship, where my teammates were going up the ladder, and joined the stack. The light I saw was actually a moonbeam.
After the op, during the hot wash, where we discussed all phases of the op in detail, I told the team what had happened. It turned out to have been a very unusual malfunction in which the inhalation butterfly valve in my mouthpiece had sealed in the shut position.
I was lucky to be alive.
Despite the constant training activity, guys on the team complained that we weren’t getting enough real-world ops. Some felt that ST-6 had become a political show horse, something the military trotted out to impress the big money folks in DC.
Since I was the only corpsman on my assault team, I rarely got time off. Anything we did as a team that involved danger—which was everything—required my presence. Even if a small group of guys was sent off to do breaching or ordnance disposal, I had to go with them.
My family life was completely on hold, which made my wife, Kim, unhappy, since I was never home. We were actually deployed about three hundred days a year.
When I asked for leave to attend my sister’s wedding, I was told that I couldn’t go. I got the same answer when my second sister was married. I still regret missing their weddings.