The 40th Combat Air Brigade
"I don’t turn down the opportunity to go on rescue missions, because that’s what we do."
- Sgt. George Esquivel, 40th CAB
(Quick note – I am doing an online talk about the Battle of Britain for the Boeing Museum of Flight next Thursday at 6pm PST. It's all-ages, so I won't horrify any children, and there's a Q&A after. If you're interested in checking it out, here's a link to the Facebook page where they'll be posting the participation link.)
Ok, so 2020 is a nightmare hellscape, and it doesn't really matter if you thought the Dark Future was going to look like 12 Monkeys, Children of Men, Robocop, Idiocracy, Blade Runner, or the Mayan Apocalypse because we're basically just getting some mixture of all of those ingredients blended together by a +1 Demonic Hellscape Blender into a horrifying black sludge and then shot directly into our faces by a flamethrower at point-blank range -- only instead of getting to spend the End Times power-sliding around bombed-out ruins in hot rods while wearing bandoliers of 5.56 and lobbing 40mm grenades at Mad Max villains in armor forged from traffic signs and football shoulder pads, instead we have to watch the whole thing from our garbage-pile home offices while day-drinking, looking up recipes for toast, and panic-checking that we remembered to mute our audio on boring-ass Zoom meetings ten seconds after shouting profanity or ripping the world's largest fart.
Anyone who jokingly mutters that "things can't get any worse this year" should be required by international law to immediately burn incense, throw some salt over their right shoulder, and violently sacrifice a goat to the Roman goddess Clementia.
So hey, speaking of which, did you hear that California is completely engulfed in flames at the moment? A state that is already pretty well-known for being a blazing inferno three months out of the year is somehow now having their worst fire season ever – something like 3 million acres of land have caught fire, leaving dozens dead and thousands of buildings torched to the ground, and despite the heroic efforts of 16,000 California firefighters tirelessly working inhuman hours and pushing their bodies to the brink of exhaustion every day to battle this monstrosity, there are still something like twenty major wildfires currently blazing through the state causing destruction and mayhem on an apocalyptic scale. Like I said, choose the form of your destroyer – the California apocalypse went with Reign of Fire as their model, except, sticking with the theme of "apocalypse but not awesome", we don't get any cool dragons flying around and we don't get to see Christian Bale attack Smaug by jumping out of a Blackhawk armed with nothing but a pair of Viking axes and weapons-grade ab definition.
One of these wildfires, the Creek Fire, blew out of control over Labor Day Weekend, ravaging the countryside south of Yosemite National Park. Spurred by strong winds, hotter-than-normal temperatures, and disastrous gender-reveal parties (sorry, couldn't help it), these fires surged through the forests outside Fresno at amazing speeds, ripping and incinerating everything in their path. The speed and force of the smoke and flames can't be overstated, and, in the span of just a few hours, this wildfire had spread to a point where 200 people suddenly found themselves completely cut off and surrounded by a wall of towering flames. All roads were cut off, the fire was completely uncontained and raging out of control, and two attempts by heroic California Fire crews to evacuate the survivors were driven back by a wall of heat, smoke, and flame. As the sun seat on September 7, 2020, Cal Fire was out of light, out of time, and those people seemed doomed to a terrible, bleak fate.
Enter the California National Guards' 40th Combat Air Brigade.
The National Guard is a unique branch of the United States Armed Forces, because, most of the time, Guardsmen are just regular guys. They live at home, serve one weekend a month and two weeks during the year, occasionally get called up to active duty, and mostly just have regular day jobs living and working in the community. They're ordinary men and women with a part-time job helping out the community when needed. Sometimes they'll get called in to help with search-and-rescue when a hiker gets lost in the forest or something, and every so often they'll do a tour in the Middle East, but mostly they're fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, and ordinary people in the community.
And when these guys heard that 200 of their neighbors were cut off from safety and in danger of being burned alive by an out-of-control wildfire, they knew there was only one thing to do.
I debated titling the article after the pilots who undertook this daring helicopter mission to save the stranded survivors of the Creek Fire – CWO5s Kipp Goding and Joe Rosamond – but in reality it was the entire 40th Combat Air Brigade that came together to undertake one of the most amazing and heroic rescue missions in the Guard's history. This was a team effort, not a rogue mission, and from the commander, pilots, and crew chiefs down to the mechanics, flight crew, comms and flight controllers these were all regular people who got the call in the middle of the night that people needed saving, and they all gritted their teeth, grabbed their combat fatigues, and ran out there to save lives.
It started with the unit commander, Colonel David Hall, whose Twitter feed or whatever started blowing up with insane photos of fires raging around homes in his area – the bonkers videos of people driving through flames to escape the inferno or watching in horror as walls of flames streaked towards their homes like they'd been cast forth by a mythic-level Wizard. He knew something needed to be done, so he called the 40th into action.
Godling, Rosamond, and the rest of the unit responded. In less than an hour, two rescue helicopters – a twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook and a UH-60 Blackhawk – were fueled up and scrambled into action.
When Cal Fire got the radio call that two National Guard helis were en route to evacuate the trapped people of Creek, they thought these guys were nuts. It was too dangerous, they said – there's limited visibility, extreme heat, it's pitch-black and the entire LZ is covered in impenetrable black smoke. Not only that, but steady 22mph winds were feeding the inferno like a fireplace bellows and 35mph guts were blasting it an unpredictable, shifting manner that presented extreme danger not only for controlling the helicopters but also from preventing a sheet of fire from suddenly being redirected directly into your cockpit canopy. Then, if you somehow made it, you'd need to set your 98 foot-long, 12-ton helicopter down in a very narrow LZ that was less than 50 feet from a treeline that was currently on fire. Their advice was to set the helis down just outside the fire, wait for the smoke to clear, and attempt the evacuations after things had settled down a bit.
But if it was nuts to fly a military Black Hawk in there with night vision goggles, then what were the chances the folks trapped in the flames were going to have with an F-150 and a heat blanket? This was the 40th's own backyard – literally. The men and women of the 40th Combat Air Brigade lived here, trained here, and knew these areas. These were their friends, neighbors, and people that owed them money. And they weren't going to leave these people behind.
"Just tell us where the people are," Chief Joe Rosamond radioed back. "We're going to go get them."
Cockpit view from Rosamond's Chinook.
So the Chinook and the Black Hawk plunged into the smoke. Visibility was real bad – about 1200 feet, which isn't much when you're cruising speed is 180 miles an hour. Navigating entirely with night vision because nothing else would penetrate the clouds of black smoke, Rosamond and Godling hurtled ahead, relying on their instruments and their experience to get them through. Both men later said that this was the most dangerous and nerve-wracking flight of their lives – and both men were 20+ year vets who had survived multiple combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But then, after a harrowing ride, the Guardsmen broke through the heat, fire, and flames into a clearing where the terrified people of Creek were huddled together, surrounded by an ever-closing circle of flames. Whatever the 40t was expecting, this was worse. As one crew chief put it, "I was met with the worst sight of my life. A lot of people referred to the sight as apocalyptic, and I agree."
But over the din of the helicopter rotors, the men of the 40th could hear the faint sound of the people below cheering.
The Chinook set down, and the two crew chiefs ran forward to start triaging survivors to evac the highest-risk people – the injured, the children, and others who needed help. A chinook is designed to carry a platoon of infantry, somewhere around 30-50 people, but they packed 65 civilians in the back – many of them suffering from burns, injuries, or smoke inhalation. Many were children – including a two week old newborn baby.
The Chinook lifted off, guided by the Blackhawk, and they flew back through the fire towards Fresno, where a team of fellow Guardsmen – men and women of the 40th Combat Air Battalion who had VOLUNTEERED to get out of bed that night, drive to the base, and triage wounded – were waiting to help. The Chinook landed, unloaded, sent some people to the hospital, treated others on site, and helped survivors get in touch with family and loved ones. The survivors were cheering, crying, and grateful.
But their work wasn't done.
They went back for more.
And then they made a third trip.
"It was very emotional… especially when I looked back and saw children who are the same age as my children." -Sgt Cameron Powell, 40th CAB
The pilots had to take a different route both times, because the winds had changed and the wall of fire was rearranged differently, but, despite all odds, the crew of the 40th Combat Air Brigade managed to extract everyone from imminent danger. Flying all night, through 10 hours of missions, with the last sortie returning at 2am, the exhausted, tired crew managed to pull 242 people (and 16 pets) from imminent danger and almost certain death. Then, over the next few days, the 40th made more trips into the inferno, pulling a total of 396 people and 27 animals from danger in just 48 hours. As I write this, they're still flying missions to assist operations, primarily by scooping water from lakes and dumping it onto the fires.
All seven crewmembers of the CH-47 Chinook and UH-60 Blackhawk – WO1 Ge Xiong, CWO2s Irvin Hernandez and Brady Hlebain, CWO5s Kipp Goding and Joseph Rosamond, and SGTs Cameron Powell and George Esquivel – received the Distinguished Flying Cross this past Monday.
“We appreciate the praise that we’re getting, but we’re not a godsend or special people, we’re just ordinary people that did our job. This is what we do and we love it.”