out. Cheney’s natural authority and clarity helped avoid a complete mad scramble and kept a steady flow of men out the door. They were used to filing out this way on parachute jumps, so the line moved fast. Still, it was torture for the men at the rear of the line. “Don’t panic!” Cheney kept screaming. Fitch stood opposite him in the doorway, regulating the flow. In their haste, many of the men stumbled when they hit the ground, which created pileups just outside the door. They scrambled to get to their feet, run, and clear the way.
Ray Doyle, a loadmaster on one of the other tankers standing more than a hundred feet away, was knocked over by the force of the initial explosion. Jesse Rowe, a crewman on another of the tankers, felt his plane shake and the temperature of the air suddenly shoot up. Burruss saw the plane erupt as he stepped off the back of his C-130. He was carrying incendiary explosives to destroy the disabled Sea Stallion, coming down the ramp, and the sight of it buckled him. He sat down, watching the tower of flame engulfing the plane, and thought,
Pilots quickly spread the word to their crews that they had not been attacked, which eased some of the initial confusion.
Still inside the burning plane, Haney was near the end of the line of men trying to get out. He and the men around him had been jarred alert by the noise and impact outside the plane and saw blue sparks overhead and toward the front. Then the galley door at the front of the plane blew in and flames blasted out along the ceiling.
“Haul ass!” shouted the man next to him, leaping to his feet. Captain Smith, who had dozed off, woke up to see men trying to gain footing on the shifting surface of the fuel bladder and at first thought it was amusing, until he saw flames. He and the others at the front of the plane began running as well as they could, fearing they would never outrace the flames around them, acutely aware that beneath their feet were thousands of gallons of fuel. Ahead, men were jammed in the doorway. Haney threw himself out when he finally reached the door and dropped down hard on the man who had jumped before him. They both scrambled up and ran until they were about fifty meters away, then turned to watch with horror.
One of the soldiers, Frank McKenna, had fallen asleep before the commotion and awoke to flames and to men lining up to jump from the plane. He ran to join them, assuming they had been attacked in the air and were now evacuating a burning plane. He looked around frantically for a parachute, didn’t see one, and when it was his turn to jump he just flung himself out the door belly-first, in arched skydiving position, and collided hard with the earth a split second later. It had all happened so fast he didn’t have time to consider the folly of free-falling without a parachute. As he later told his buddies, “One problem at a time.”
Fitch felt it was his duty to stay until all the men were off, but it was hard. As the flames rapidly advanced he realized that not everyone was going to make it. Instinct finally won out and both he and Cheney leapt out the door, falling when they hit the ground. Other men crashed on top of them. They helped each other up and out to where the others were now watching, brightly illuminated by the enlarging fire.
Staff Sergeant Joe Byers was one of the last struggling to escape. He was a radio operator on the plane’s crew and his seat was in the front of the aircraft behind the cockpit. As soon as he realized the plane had been hit by something, he started moving toward his evacuation door, which happened to be the starboard troop door in the rear, the only way out. When he dropped down the small flight of stairs from the flight deck, he was shocked to see the inside of the cargo hold ablaze and nearly empty. He started crawling across the fuel bladders toward the door, scarcely able to breathe. He thought he was going to die. The door looked miles away, fire was all around him, and he was crawling across tons of fuel. But he kept going.
Fitch ran to what appeared to be a safe distance, then turned around, lifting his weapon, still assuming they were under attack, looking for the enemy and instead seeing an awesome and ugly sight. Crouched like a huge dragonfly, its rotors still turning, a helicopter was mounted on top of the plane. He realized it wasn’t an attack, it was an accident.
He saw two more men jump out, one of them Byers, whose flight suit was burning. Other men rushed to put out the flames and to drag him clear. Then ammunition started cooking off—all the grenades, missiles, explosives, and rifle rounds—causing loud cracking explosions and throwing flames and light. The Red-eye missiles went off, drawing smoke trails high into the sky. Then the fuel bladder finally ignited. A huge pillar of flame shot skyward in a loud explosion that buckled the fuselage. All four propellers dropped straight down into the sand and stuck there, like somebody had planted them. One last man came flying out of the open troop door, Sergeant James McLain, blown out by the force of the blast. He hit the ground so hard it damaged his back. His flight suit was in flames. Sergeant Paul Lawrence ran back toward the fire to grab him and pull him to safety. McLain was badly burned.
In the cockpit of the chopper, set now on top of the C-130, Schaefer had blacked out on impact. He awkened from his blackout sitting crooked in his seat, the chopper listing to one side, with flames engulfing his cockpit.
“What’s wrong, Les? What’s wrong?” he said, turning to his copilot, but Petty was already gone. He had jumped out the window on his side.
Schaefer heard a scream behind him and turned to grab the arm of Dewey Johnson, his crew chief, who had been with him since Vietnam. He took his helmet off and pulled on Johnson’s arm again, and then heard his friend scream once more in agony and drop away from him.
The pilot shut down the engines and sat for a moment, certain he was about to die. Then for some reason an image came into his mind of his fiancee’s father—a man who had always seemed none too impressed with his future pilot son-in-law—commenting during some future family meal about how the poor sap’s body had been found cooked like a holiday turkey in the front seat of his aircraft, and something about that horrifying image motivated him. His body would not be found like an overcooked Butterball; he had to at least try to escape. He ejected the window on his side and, as fire closed over him, burning his face, he threw himself into the flames.
He dropped a good distance to the ground, landing hard, and he lay stunned for a long time, badly burned and half blind. When he saw pillars of flame shooting up around him—patches of fuel-saturated sand were catching fire—he forced himself to his feet and ran from the erupting wreckage.
He and Petty escaped, badly scorched. One of the backup C-130 pilots got out, but the two main pilots, two navigators, and one crewman were not so fortunate. They and all three of Schaefer’s crewmen, including Arkansas-born George Holmes, perished.
The exploding plane and ammo sent flaming bits of hot metal and debris spraying across the makeshift airport, riddling the other four working helicopters, whose crews promptly began climbing out and moving to a safe distance. Most of the men had no idea what was going on, just that a plane and chopper had exploded. The air over the scene had been heavy with the odor of fuel, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that all the other aircraft were going to burst into flames as well. The three remaining C-130s began taxiing in different directions away from the exploding wreckage. There was chaos on the ground. One of the Delta medics kept shouting over the engine noise and wails of the wounded, “Look in your E and E kit and get me some Percodan!” which was misheard by one group of men who huddled over a map on the ground.
“What are you guys doing?” they were asked.
“Didn’t you hear? We’re going to E and E to Percodan,” one said.
Word of the calamity reached the command center in Wadi Kena with the following hurried report: “We have a crash. A helo crashed into one of the C-130s. We have some dead, some wounded, and some trapped. The crash site is ablaze. Ammunition is cooking off.”
Jerry Uttaro, piloting one of the tankers, started taxiing away from the blaze when he heard debris raining down on top of his plane. Desert One was lit up like a homecoming bonfire rally, complete with fireworks. He got only a few feet when some of the Delta operators, fearing that he was leaving without them, ran out in front of his plane to stop him. Uttaro told his radio operator to go down and explain to the idiots in front of his airplane that he was just trying to avoid being the next log on the fire and that he wasn’t going to strand them.
Fitch saw one of the other C-130s move away and then turn back. He ran to it and began banging on its starboard troop door. It taxied on a bit farther and then came to a stop. The door slid open.
“I’ve got to get some people on here,” he shouted. The crewman objected at first that they were already full but quickly relented.
“Load as many as you can,” said Fitch. Some of his men climbed into that plane, then it taxied on and took
