Helicopter Rescue

This next adventure of mine was in no way directly affiliated with my local volunteer fire department. I say so not just because so many rules were broken that day, but it was only through my affiliation with the fire department that I was asked to go on this mission. My real, paying, day job was working at the local lumber mill. Whenever someone at the mill got hurt, the boss would send for me because I was the only one working at the mill that had had any formal medical training. I’d run over to the fallen mill worker, patch up his wound, tell him, “I’ve been hurt worse eating chicken,” slap him on the back, and tell him to get back to work.

One day while I was manning my lumber-stacking post, one of the mill owners came driving up toward me honking his horn and waving madly at me to hurry up and get into his brand new truck. I dropped everything and sprinted down the stairs and jumped into his cab. That's where I learned that he had a helicopter coming to pick me up in five minutes because he had an injured logger in the woods. At first, I thought he was a joking, but my interest peaked as we drove out the front gates and almost got airborne crossing the highway to reach the airport that stood directly across the street from the mill. I turned to the mill owner, “You're not kidding me are you?” The owner said, “No, we have a man down in the woods and I have a helicopter en-route to pick you up.” Reminding him that I didn’t have any first-aid supplies with me, he radioed over to the different divisions at the plant and told each of them to bring over their big first aid kits that hang on the walls around the mill. Sure enough, within just a few minutes, forklifts, jitneys, and old mill pickups were speeding across the highway to me with first aid kits. I kept quietly wondering to myself; doesn’t the Coast Guard or National Guard normally do this kind of helicopter rescue thing?

By this time, the other two mill owners had arrived at our impromptu heliport. Anyone who has ever seen these big white medical chests know that, in a real emergency, they are practically useless because each of the bandages has been individually wrapped. When you are treating a wound that is bleeding profusely, you need a handful of 4 x 4’s to slap on the injury to soak up the blood and help make the wound clot. So, here I have these three wealthy mill owners knelling down in the dirt going through a series of first aid kits to make up one for me that would be suitable for field first-aid. They tore open the individually wrapped bandages and stacked the 4 x 4’s together, got all the gauze rolls in one spot, made sure we had some tape and threw out the tweezers, aspirin and other silly things they throw in theses kits to appease OSHA.

Sure enough, off in the distance I began to hear the recognizable whomp-whomp sound of a chopper flying low and fast. With one quick circle around our improvised staging area, sending the discarded bandage wrappers flying everywhere, the pilot set down beside us and signaled for me to load up. So, with a spine board in one hand and our new “field ready” first aid kit in the other hand, I ducked down under the rotor blades and loaded myself into the whirlybird. Now, I had flown in helicopters a few times before, so that wasn’t new to me, but sitting right beside the pilot was new. All helicopter pilots wear those dark aviation glasses so you can’t see their eyes. This one signaled for me to put on the headset lying in my seat. Before I was even properly buckled into my seat, with a roar from the engine and a big surge of energy, we soared upward, circling up out of the landing zone for altitude.

With my seatbelt finally fastened and my mic and earphones in place, the pilot asked in his deep voice, "What rescue squadron are you with, buddy?" I answer, “Uhhh… Mill Rescue One?" He swiveled his head like an owl toward me and stared at me for a few seconds with those dark glasses on, and then, without saying a word, turned his head forward as we flew south. I began to get really concerned when I saw the Oregon Tunnel was passing below us. My EMT certification is only valid in Oregon, that tunnel is on the border between Oregon and California, and we had just flown into the adjoining state. Clearing my voice so as not to sound nervous before triggering the mic, I ask the pilot in the deepest voice I could muster given my nervousness, "Ahhh, where we going?” He rattled off some kind of coordinates I had never heard before in my life, but I just answered back in a even deeper voice, “Roger” I had heard that line in a movie once.

So a half-hour or more later, we came screaming over some mountainside to where this injured logger was supposed to be. Have you ever heard the old saying, looking for a needle in a haystack? Well, that’s what it felt like we were doing. After several quick, roaring banked turns and, I think, maybe one loopty-loop, I spotted loggers on the ground waving their hardhats to get our attention. Looking around to see what road we are going to be landing on, there were, to my surprise, no roads in sight. This location turned out to be a one square mile helicopter logging site in the middle of a wilderness area. They were flying out the cut timber several miles to a landing area away from the wilderness. The logger had been bucking the trees into removable lengths when he was catapulted several feet into the air before landing on a sharp snob of a broken-off limb that pierced deeply into the cheek of his buttocks. By keeping his butt muscles tightly clenched, he had kept himself from bleeding too profusely. The problem was that he had gotten hurt at 10:00 AM, it had taken awhile for his buddies to hike out to where they could make radio contact for help, and it was now 3:00 PM— this injured logger had been bleeding and clenching a long time.

The pilot’s deep voice came through my ear phones, “I want you to stand out on the landing rail (outside the helicopter) and watch my tail rotor. Make sure I don’t hit anything while I’m landing.” I turned my head to the pilot, owl-like and said, “WHAT?!!” Clearing my throat again, I said, “What?” without the benefit of any dark aviation glasses to conceal my big eyes. He elaborated, "If we hit anything with the tail-rotor, we’ll be going down in a blaze of glory," which meant Blaze would be dying. So, unbuckling, I nervously climbed out the door—holding on for dear life, I stood on the rail watching intently the small trees blowing around close to our tail rotor, reassuring the pilot over the mic, “Looks Good...Looking good” until I felt the helicopter's skid touch-down on something. Looking forward for the first time in several seconds, I was shocked to see the main overhead rotor was missing hitting a stump in front of us by only a few inches. This crazy pilot (they're all crazy by the way) not having a clear area in which to land had set down onto a log, and by keeping the machine throttled just so, he was able to hover with just one of the landing runners balanced on this huge log. Over my ear phones I heard the pilot yell, “Go get him!” Now I’m thinking to myself, the farther away I can get away from this wind-machine blowing crap everywhere around in this forest, the better my chances to survive when this maniac crashes. With no hesitation, I grabbed my improved first-aid kit from the chopper and away I went.

Remember now, I have told you several times that during each rescue you learn something new. In this particular case, too, I learned a great lesson— always, always remember to take your head set and mic off before jumping down out of a hovering helicopter. If you don’t, you, too, could find yourself hanging underneath this massive machine with the mic caught in your mouth like a fish caught on a fishing hook, your legs dangling precariously above ground. Meekly climbing back aboard and quickly taking the head set and mic off this time and placing both back in the seat, the pilot turned to me and gave me another icy stare. This time, just before his eyes turned forward again to concentrate on his job at hand, I could sense that he was thinking, "I thought the Coast Guard or National Guard normally did rescues like this."

Down the huge log I ran toward the fallen logger. The other loggers were hiding from the flying debris behind trees and stumps, pointing in the direction of their injured comrade. I suspect that they, too, thought the farther they could stay away from this tornado-making machine, the better chances they would have of living when this bird went down. Sliding down into the hole in the forest where the injured logger found himself, I finally got a look at his injury—it looked as if it hurt like hell. He had bled a lot; he was now tired and weak from keeping his butt muscles tight for so many hours to keep from bleeding to death. I asked him if he could stand and he indicated that he could. I told him this was going to hurt something awful, but I had to pack his wound with as many 4 x 4’s as I could and then I was going to grab him and haul him up that log and throw him in that chopper. He unhesitatingly nodded OK because we both knew that pilot could not hold his position forever. I crammed him full of bandages, like plugging a dike, and away we went up that log. With one of his arms around my neck, with his weight lifted up on my hip and one of my hands firmly clamped onto the cheek of his butt to keep the dressings in place, we climbed back through the wind tunnel that had tree limbs and flying debris sailing everywhere. I pushed him into the backseat of the chopper face down, so I could treat his wounds better once we got aloft...if we got aloft. I had to crawl under the suspended log the pilot was hovering on to load myself though the back door behind the pilot so I would be able to take care of my patient's wound. I had no sooner gotten in the helicopter, almost gotten the headset on that was in hanging behind the pilots seat and was just about to say, “I’m safely aboard,” when the pilot lifted off hard—he punched it with everything that machine had. I looked down at my new logger friend whose scared eyes were as big as saucers now. He inquired, “Do you do this kind of thing often?" I lied to that poor man and told him, "Hell yes! I am Mill Rescue One." I have never been so glad to see Oregon come back into view, to see the hospital in Grants Pass come into site and, ultimately, the total relief I felt when that chopper touched down on solid ground. And that was the end of the short history behind Airborne Mill Rescue One.