Twenty-Five Years Ago Today

Twenty-five years ago this morning I was awakened by a phone call from the Assistant Squadron Duty Officer at VT-25 with the words no pilot ever wants to hear. "Mr. Patterson, we need you to come in right away. There's been an accident."

I was on the night schedule and had landed close to midnight, and didn't get to bed until about 2 a.m. I was scheduled for another night flight so I had slept in that morning. The call came at 8:30. "I'm coming," I said. I threw on a flight suit, quickly shaved and ran out to my car. Chase Field at Beeville, Texas was about ten miles from my apartment, but I walked into the Ready Room before nine.

I was the acting squadron Safety Officer while we waited for a pilot to complete Safety School at Monterey, California. An investigation was already being launched and I would be a big part of it. A UH-1 Huey helicopter was coming up from Corpus Christi to fly a Navy photographer and two other investigators to the site, but I decided to go in a van with supplies and equipment for the investigation rather than wait. It was about 45 miles to the crash site in a wooded farmer's field north of Naval Auxiliary Field Goliad, and as we passed a Navy fire truck returning to base we waved them down to get directions. We weren't far, a right turn on the next dirt road and a couple miles to a gate in the field. Military police had already cordoned off the area. We found the site, set up and started walking the crash area. We got there before the Huey.

Six students on an early event had taken off from Chase in TA-4J Skyhawks and made the five minute trip to Goliad to practice landings for their upcoming carrier qualifications. One by one they reached the initial and turned south for the Goliad runway. Something went wrong with the fifth student to arrive and he flew into the ground. The student behind him was the only witness to the crash. The investigation would determine that in turning to the field, the pilot had apparently been distracted changing radio frequencies. The initial was only 600 feet above the ground, and at 400 knots in a tight turn the plane lost altitude. The pilot apparently looked up to see his predicament at the last second. The wings came level, but the rate of descent was too great.

When we arrived the area looked like a battlefield; small fires, blackened earth and scorched bushes, smoke drifting across the scene and the smell of sulfur. We found some broken tree tops and lights from the plane where it had come down, and then the spot where it had hit the ground. It landed on a tree and flattened it, ripping the roots out so quickly that the dirt came up from the ground and covered the tree. The plane then caught a very hard mesquite tree at the root of the right wing. The wing ripped off and the plane began to tumble end over end. The engine at full bore kept on going until it had shed itself of the entire plane and finally stopped about four hundred yards from the initial point of impact.

We at first were puzzled about what happened to the wing. The plane was in a million pieces, but we couldn't find any wreckage of the wing. We finally found the landing gear at the base of a very large tree and then looked up. The entire wing was hung up in the branches of the tree. Moving forward through the scattered wreckage we started finding body parts. Then in the crook of a little v-shaped tree I knelt down over the most horrible thing I have ever seen. (Stop if you're squeamish.) The left side of the pilot's head, down to the jaw, the face gone, the left half of the neck down to the shoulder, and the left arm, all connected, lay right in the crook of that little tree. Just above on a branch parallel to the ground hung his g-suit without a burn mark on it. The positive ID was made from the dental records on that jaw, but we already knew who he was. Farther ahead we found his feet, one in a boot and one out. Then the cockpit where his pelvic and femur bones, completely devoid of any flesh, still sat in the seat. Then we found his heart with the aorta still attached.

I've never been in combat. I don't know how soldiers and Marines on the battlefield are able to cope when they see their comrades blown apart. I don't know how emergency crews that clean up after terrorist bombings or airline disasters handle it. All I know is that for me for weeks afterward every time I bent over the sink to brush my teeth the vision of those remains in the crook of that tree were in front of me.

As an instructor I made it a point every time I flew with a student for the first time to give him a Gospel tract and invite him to church. Only a couple ever came and none more than once. This particular student was a Marine and I had given him a tract. The last time I had flown with him was two months earlier. He was about to start the Air Combat Maneuvering syllabus, and he got into my back seat to go along for the ride on an ACM hop that I was leading. We did several setups with a student pilot in that stage. I remember his enthusiasm for the flight when in one engagement in a maneuver called a rolling scissors with student behind me I pulled the nose of my airplane up into a stall forcing him to fly out in front of me, and as I dropped the nose he was a sitting duck.

"Wow!" my passenger shouted over the intercom. "That was awesome." He was a nice young man by everybody's account. He had done well in training up until that one momentary lapse. I had the privilege of flying in a Missing Man formation over the base at his memorial service.

We picked up the body parts, put them in bags, and put them in coolers with ice to transport back to the flight surgeon for the autopsy, but we ran out of ice and room in the coolers so some bags were just sitting on the floor in the back of the van. Before we got home the van smelled like a meat locker at a butcher shop. The interesting thing was there was no blood, just chunks of flesh. The flight surgeon told me later it was the result of something called the Venturi effect, which happens when a body is torn apart so violently that the blood literally evaporates.

I never knew his spiritual condition. He was just a good guy, didn't get into trouble. But I couldn't get passed the question, Had I done enough? I think it must be that those in combat develop a coldness of heart, a way to put it behind them and forget it. It almost seems the only way they could keep their sanity. I don't say this as a criticism, but just as a way of trying to reconcile what I saw one time, with what some people have seen multiple times. For me, I don't want to forget. I don't want to lose the conviction of that question that was so penetrating then. "Have I done enough?"

Twenty-five years ago today.