Interview With a Pararescue Jumper

“I Am An American Airman.

I Am A Warrior.

I Have Answered My Nation’s Call.

I Am An American Airman.

My Mission Is To Fly, Fight, And Win.

I Am Faithful To A Proud Heritage,

A Tradition Of Honor,

And A Legacy Of Valor.

I Am An American Airman.

Guardian Of Freedom And Justice,

My Nations Sword And Shield,

Its Sentry And Avenger.

I Defend My Country With My Life.

I Am An American Airman.

Wingman, Leader, Warrior.

I Will Never Leave An Airman Behind,

I Will Not Falter,

And I Will Not Fail.”

-Airman’s Creed

Prior to taking my practice PAST test with my recruiter and “PJ Bob” I had actually met the PJ before. One day I was contacted by my recruiter and told to make myself available to come down to his office for a DEP meeting. At this point in time I myself wasn’t officially a Delayed Entry Program member as I had yet to complete my MEPS evaluation and sign my contract so I wasn’t required to attend the DEP meetings every month.

I don’t know if it is just my recruiter or the branch of the Air Force itself but I’ve heard that Navy and Marine DEP candidates are required to attend DEP meetings 1-2 times a week, whereas with my recruiter I know our meetings were merely once a month.

Anyways, I made sure to get there early and I even brought my Mom along, as she wanted to meet the Pararescue Jumper as well. Upon arriving to my recruiter’s office, which was mostly empty save for a couple other individuals who arrived early, I was greeted my two Airman sitting behind my recruiter’s desk. One instructed me to sign in for the meeting but I informed him I wasn’t a DEP candidate yet but that I was there to meet a PJ. At hearing this he seemed to perk up and told me that he was the PJ and introduced himself as Airmen First Class “Bob”. (I change the names of individuals in my blog so as not to reveal there identity as I don’t have their permission to write about them and seeing as how this is a Special Forces member I though it best to omit.)

“Call me Bobby though,” he insisted.

“I can do that Bobby,” I replied with a huge grin on my face.

I was almost overwhelmed at meeting this kid he wasn’t what I expected. He was still but a kid, only 22 (a year older than me), and built almost identically as myself. I’ve never been a bulky guy, but rather skinny and lean. As I’ve grown older and gained muscle I still haven’t bulked up. I expected a PJ to be well… bigger.

Immediately I hit it off with Bobby as he began talking about his training and a few very general things. Prior to meeting him I compiled a list of questions to be sure to ask him when we met, I never once referred to them. I soaked in every word Bobby said. He described basic training as being a hindrance to his fitness as he actually got out of shape in basic. He told me that because of the amount of physical training (PT) the Air Force Special Forces candidates must do that they have been separated into their own “Warrior Flight.” So basically when I get to basic I can expect to be in a flight consisting of only men (as most of the Special Forces jobs restrict females) and more PT than that of the other flights… Fine by me. He told me that during basic they were told that they would be given time to train in the pool to keep up their swimming fitness but that it never occurred.

“Hopefully,” said Bobby, “by the time you guys get there they’ve worked out all the kinks and get you some pool time.”

“That would nice,” I replied.

We then began talking about the point of interest: Indoctrination.

Bobby described to me in detail everything I’ve read or seen in the documentaries.

“Dude,” he said, “The first few weeks, don’t make friends. You know the fail rate is high and that most all of these guys aren’t going to be there in just a few weeks. So don’t make friends, because when they quit, and they will quit, it just that much more of a punch in the gut if they were your friend. The whole process is just surviving the onslaught the instructors inflict upon you, but you just got to think to your self never quit, never quit. Never quit.”

“It’s all mental bro,” he continued. “Yeah physically it hurts but you got rationalize it. Rationalize everything! Think to yourself you can’t quit on a Monday, the week just f!@#ing started. On Tuesday you can’t quit, because s!@# it’s only the second day of the week, you can’t quit. Wednesday, forget it your halfway through it’s hump-day and your almost over the hump. Thursday, well damn I’ve made it through most of the week I got to keep going now. Friday, f!@# its Friday who quits on a Friday with the weekend staring them in the face. Then it gets to be Saturday and I mean it’s the weekend come on. It doesn’t matter what the instructors do to you because the sole fact that it’s the weekend makes things better. Finally, Sunday… man you just made it through the entire week, what’s one more day?”

“That’s what you got to do. Rationalize everything! Guys would get freaked out because they start thinking about the whole week. If your always two weeks into the course and you start thinking about what you have to do tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that, and then the week after, and that’s only the third week. That is when guys start mentally defeating themselves. You can’t do that”

When he said this it reminded me of something I read in Marcus Latrell’s book Lone Survivor and something he recounted that their captain said to them, “Don’t think about each individual event, just think about what it is you have to do now. Eventually it is going to end if you just focus on one element at a time your going to get through it. Just do what is required of you right here, right now and before you know it the course will be over.” (This isn’t verbatim of what was said in the text, but seeing as I lack the physical text in front of me at this moment because I loaned it to a Navy friend, you get the idea. This is the core of what he said.)

Bobby went on to enlighten me in regards to the roommate situation. Telling me that I will have the pleasure of rooming with many individuals during the Indoc course because of the people who quit. When individuals start quitting you will be reassigned to other rooms with other roommates he said that wasn’t important but what is important is if a roommate starts talking negatively, leave. Find another roommate.

“That s!@#$ contagious! You will notice as you get further along into the course and guys start making friends that some of them will quit together. They will talk about it in their room about how they’re thinking about quitting or how dumb the whole process is. Whatever, it is… just get out. Leave that room, because it follows people and sticks in their heads. You can’t think like that or be around that. Make sure your roommate isn’t one of those. If he is find another quitter and make your roommate move into his room.”

I seared those words into my brain.

“What about Extended Training Day? How was that?” I asked.

“Oh man, ETD was insane. The whole time your in this zone, you are out it. They are making do workout after workout and you just do it. During the pool sessions though bro, that’s where it got crazy. You would be hearing that air horn going off constantly.”

(Bobby is referring to the air horn the instructors make quitters use after declaring that they no longer wish to remain in Indoc).

“And that’s another thing, don’t carry that f!@#$%! air horn bro it’s toxic.”

“What do you mean,” I inquired.

“The instructors make you carry it,” he replied. “Trust me dude, you don’t not want to carry that thing it has toxic gas in it or something man. You would see someone volunteer to carry it and I kid you not they would be blowing that thing a little while later. You know you are doing whatever on a ruck or something and in someone’s pack it starts getting jostled around and you hear it go off for the entire ruck run that shit eats you up bro. I remember one time my teams commanding officer told me to carry it, I was like ‘Pffffft… you can carry that your own damn self… sir!’ and I walked off. He made someone else in our class carry it because he knew about its poisonous powers and sure enough the next guy to quit later on in the week was the guy carrying it.”

I forget the exact number but I believe Bobby told me that ~125 candidates started Indoctrination but by the time they reached ETD only 40 remained and after there were a mere 26. From everything I had heard from the reading I’d done and the videos I’ve watched this was still quite high that far into training. I asked him out of those 26, how many graduated Indoc and 13 was his response. Out of those 13, only 5 completed the “pipeline” on time. This surprised me and I made it a point to ask, he said the biggest thing was due to guys making dumb decisions during the rest of their subsequent training. One such incident involved a potential PJ drunk driving which results in an immediate Dishonorable Discharge from the Air Force.

God, I couldn’t imagine.

“What about the pipeline training how was that?” I asked.

“Oh dude, that s!@# was fun bro. At first we went to Ft. Benning for our jump training and man that was boring though I must admit. Probably the most boring part of the pipeline training. It took us 3 weeks to complete it. Dude, I could easily complete all of those jumps in 24-hours… easy. You’ll be told that you have a jump and so you get your chute packed and meet in the hangar and wait. You’ll be waiting all day and finally as its starting to get dark they’ll tell you, after 6 hours of sitting there doing nothing, that there is to be no jump that day. Waste of time dude.”

“After that we went to dive school and that was easy, you come out of Indoc as a freaking fish bro that didn’t phase me a bit. Then we had our Egress training that was fun. They put you in a replica helicopter that they can submerge into the water at will and pull it back out. I remember we did that training with the Combat Controller’s as well and they had us go in as teams.”

“They let the CCT’s in first and they started freaking out as soon as the simulator crashed into the water. The instructors tell you that you are not allowed to unbuckle until you are fully submerged and these guys were flipping out reaching for their harnesses. It was chaos. Once they were fully submerged they went to the door and couldn’t get it open and started freaking out letting bubble of air escape, it was funny.”

“Next they put us in and boy did we toy with them. Once we were fully submerged we just sat there and eventually unbuckled ourselves. Instead of just going for the door and bolting we all swam around explore the cockpit and just chilled, the instructors hated it,” Bobby explained with a wicked grin. “It was great.”

“Finally we opened the door and came out and the instructors flipped on us yelling at us for messing around and not taking it seriously. So they decided to challenge us and filled the simulator with a bunch of extraneous objects: pots, pans, a freaking Gatorade cooler. To make it even tougher they put a bunch of mannequin babies in with us that we had to rescue before fully exiting the simulation.”

“So we sat there buckled in and as the cockpit sank and tilted, I look up and the cooler is coming right at me and busts me in the face. As we become fully submerged the water in front of me is red because I’m bleeding from my nose. I immediately grab two baby mannequins and open the door and bolt out. My buddy, this big hulk of a guy proceeded to grab like six babies and go for the door. But her couldn’t get out due to the babies coupled with the size of his frame. So he starts tossing babies out the door and swims out. That s!@# was hilarious!”

At this point in time we had been talking for quite a while and he brought us to the back of the recruiter’s office where a pull-up bar hung from the ceiling.

“Let’s see how many pull-ups you can do,” he said.

And so me and the other two PJ wannabes did some pull-ups and sat and picked his brain some more. We asked him about how long is a PJ deployment and he said approximately 120 days, but that they deploy more frequently. We discussed the typical career progression of a Pararescue Jumper and he said that it depends on what that person wants to do but that anything is an option. He did reveal that a lot have started making the jump to becoming a Combat Rescue Officer, which works in tandem with PJ’s in that they help coordinate the missions but don’t have a direct hands on role with patients.

When it seemed every question I had in my mind was finally answered I remembered one.

“What is Black Thursday?” I asked. “I’ve heard it mentioned in the video documentaries and tried researching it but nothing comes up, what is it?”

“Bro, I can’t even begin to describe it. It’s… it’s… it’s something you are just going to have to experience for yourself,” he said with a wicked grin. “You see the instructor sitting up on his lifeguard chair with his shades on, man does it look evil. Then you hear those words, Black Thursday and your heart just sinks.”

“Oh boy, I can’t wait,” I replied enthusiastically.

At this point in time we talked about meeting up to do some training and exercises at some point later in the week, he gave me his phone number and we parted ways. But I would see him a few more times before he returned to his unit.

Never Quit… Never Quit… Never Quit.