By Scott Longman as recounted by Lt. Col. Charles Schlom
The phone rang a little after midnight.
It launched deeply unwelcome grappling hooks someplace into my consciousness, dragging my brain up to the light, and oh-so-miserably into the land of The Awake. But the first words into my ear firehosed away those hooks:
“This is a MAST activation. There has been a mass casualty event. This is not say again not a drill. Report to Libby Airfield immediately.”
Switched ON.
MAST is Military Assistance to Safety and Traffic, a program brilliantly designed to integrate stateside military helicopters to respond to certain civilian life-threatening emergencies. The program was an outgrowth of Vietnam, where the military in general and the Army in particular developed and refined a MEDEVAC program that was so quick and efficient that it dropped the “died of wounds” percentages to the lowest point of any war in all of human history.
Learning from that, the Department of Defense coordinated with the Department of Transportation and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to form the MAST program. The basic idea was that the military had an enormous number of highly trained, heavily experienced aircrews, flying helicopters that were usually larger, faster, more capable and desperately more expensive than what almost any civilian agencies had. Why not make that first-in-world-history leviathan system available to save the people who paid for it?
I jumped into a flight suit—affectionately known as a “Zoom Bag”—and boots, snatched my helmet and sprinted to the car. My quarters were off Fort Huachuca. I had a long way to go and, to resonate Jerry Reed of Smokey and the Bandit fame, a short time to get there. Fortunately, I was driving one of the great sports cars of the era, a Nissan 240 SX.
I am a great respecter of engines, and I usually let the 240’s plant get good and warm before I demanded performance, but not tonight. Acutely mindful of not endangering other traffic, I dialed the Nissan up, gradual at the merge and then powershifting up to aircraft speeds.
There is such a thing as “rescue adrenaline.” It is in us.
Human life, maybe a lot of human lives, were hanging in the balance and I was a critical part of at least a segment of that rescue.
I roared through the open-post gate and kept hauling ass to the airfield. Better to ask forgiveness than permission. If the MPs disagreed, I had three words: “MAST Mass Casualty.”
I slid hard into a parking space at the airfield, next to the Flight Ops hooch. My crew chief and my co-pilot were already there, along with an Army nurse. Typical military aviator that I am, the very first thing I noticed was that the nurse was gorgeous. Anyway, that’s where we learned what little we were to know before arriving at the scene: a packed Greyhound bus had slammed into an 18-wheeler on Highway 10 with catastrophic consequences. First responders had begun survivor extraction and triage at a nearby clinic, but the local hospital didn’t have anywhere near the capacity or expertise to handle these kinds of wounds. That’s where we came in.
We ran out to the bird, a UH-1H Huey. While not a dedicated medical evacuation [MEDEVAC] chopper, it did have mountings for litters and plasma bags, and my crew chief instantly configured the whole setup for casualties. I fired the massive 1,400 hp turbine engine and absorbed the wonderful sound, joined by the rotor starting to scythe 48-foot cuts through the air. We ran thorough the pre-flight, set course, and hauled ass.
When we arrived over the triage site, there was no air traffic control. Adding to that, it was pure black dark, and we did not have night vision goggles at the time. We countered with a search light and a very sharp lookout. In the face of this accident, the system had triggered every emergency responder possible: our intended LZ already had a Customs and Border Patrol UH60 on it. While our landing was not fast it was extremely dangerous—we were in an unknown area never intended as an LZ, with phone poles, light poles and high tension wires, and we were doing it in the dark. We set down in the adjacent strip mall.
The first casualty I saw was a guy with a brutal compound fracture of the femur. A second looked like he was dying; it turned out to be a heart attack. We quick-loaded seven victims and pulled pitch for University Medical Center in Tucson. The nurse yelled in my ear that she was losing one of them. I dumped the nose and shifted power, tail up.
We left the blackness of our route in and arrived in a dazzling, dense urban landscape. Our course was through a surreal forest of tall buildings, aiming for a tiny helipad smack in the middle of Tucson. We transferred the wounded to the hospital staff. We heard later that everybody lived. We then blasted off to Tucson International Airport for a priority refuel. Lather, rinse and highspeed repeat.
Finally, there was nothing more to be done; all the victims had been transported. As we lifted off from the triage site, I felt that massive endocrinologic drain that comes in the aftermath of extended adrenaline. Coupled with zero sleep that night, I was beyond spent. We were all beyond spent. I set us down on the Huachuca flightline, ready to collapse.
But the whole high-testosterone male thing wasn’t quite shut down yet.
As we walked away from the flightline, I asked for and received the nurse’s phone number.
