By Tom Trask, SOWF Ambassador
During my last year of college and ROTC at Embry-Riddle in Arizona, I had a chance to apply to fly helicopters in the Air Force. I had no idea that the Air Force even had special operations units, after all there were only 5 squadrons total at that time. My favorite engineering professor had flown H-2s in Vietnam for the Navy and the idea of flying rescue helicopters seemed like a great way to pay back my ROTC scholarship until I could get out and get a real job designing new airplanes. My dad was the senior enlisted advisor for a fighter Air Division, and told me, “You’ll never make it past Major if you pick helicopters!” I wasn’t planning on staying in long enough to make Major, so when I got selected and my orders were changed from Reese Air Force Base to Fort Rucker, now Fort Novosel, for flight school, off I went to Alabama. By the way, I even got to meet CW-4 Novosel on the day of his retirement in 1985 at the Rucker O’Club.
While I was in flight school, my Army civilian instructor pilots and the officers in the Air Force squadron regaled us with tales of various missions and aircraft that we might fly once we had earned our wings. I was particularly intrigued the day the experimental XV-15 came to land on the parade field. They said, “you Air Force guys need to go down and see this thing because you will be flying tiltrotors in Air Force special operations.” I saw the XV-15 come over the parade field at 250 knots, go into a steep bank to a 360-degree turning approach while it transitioned to a helicopter to land all in about 90 seconds. I was hooked and started trying to figure out how I could get that mission. The first step was you had to take another Air Force helicopter assignment and do well. I flew UN-1N’s in a rescue unit in California. The next step would be an assignment to the only special operations helicopter squadron flying the MH-53 at Hurlburt Field, and I had no idea how it would change my life when I got selected.
It was a different environment from the first week I arrived in 1988. You could feel that it was a family, and a very tight, kind of closed family as well. You had to earn your way in and have patience. At first, I didn’t think I’d ever get on the flying schedule, but gradually I and the other new guys started to work our way in. I flew the invasion of Panama and turned right around to the Gulf War later that year and was in and out of Bosnia shortly thereafter. I was part of the family, and I was starting to build a family of my own at home, which made me look at my Special Operations family differently, understanding the sacrifices that the spouses and children had to make. I started to look at the risks we took from that perspective. The Gulf War 160 SOAR crash that killed Chuck Cooper, who was a Fort Rucker classmate, was the first time that a loss felt personal. I was on the base they were trying to get back to when it happened.
Several years later, I had the privilege of being the Ops Officer in the same squadron where I started. We had four MH-53 squadrons by then and I was leading operations in Kosovo when we had a crash back at Fort Bragg during an exercise that killed the Tail Gunner, Kurt Upton, who was a brand-new father. I was familiar with the Special Operations Warrior Foundation (SOWF), and I knew the history, so I knew that Kurt’s child would have college taken care of. I was deployed so I didn’t get to see the foundation in action, but I know that the entire family, which included SOWF was there for Kurt’s young family.
A few years later, I was commanding an Air Force rescue group at Moody Air Force Base. At the time, the decision had been made to move the rescue units underneath the Air Force Special Operations Command, and we were in the process of making that transition, while at the same time maintaining deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. An MH-60, call sign Komodo 11, crashed on a dark stormy night in Afghanistan, killing a crew of six and leaving behind six children, while trying to rescue two Afghan children severely injured by an IED. I was back at Moody and my first thought was not about SOWF. We were not part of the special operations family yet, though about half the crew had served in special operations units previously. Unfortunately, many of you know the difficulties of dealing with notifications and funerals. One crewmember was a single mother, and another had a fiancé who was planning the wedding only weeks away after his scheduled redeployment, so she received no notification or formal support from the government. But the second day after the mishap, the reps from SOWF drove through the front gate looking for my office. They wanted to explain to the families that they would be covering every bit of education for those children. I said, “but we’re not part of SOF yet”, and the answer was a very curt “close enough”!
The aircraft commander of that MH-60 was a close friend of mine. We had flown at Hurlburt together. Several years later, his son called and asked if he could come talk to me about the crash. He was looking for more details as to the mission and the circumstances and was trying to make a decision of his own on whether or not to serve. SOWF paid for his double major in aviation and chemistry. Today Major Matt Stein is a pilot-physician, Flight Surgeon, and experimental Test Pilot at Edwards Air Force Base. I know he is proud of the sacrifice his dad made trying to save two young Afghan children, and I understand that the sacrifices Matt made along with all of our families are tremendous.
I had the blessing of being in the special operations family directly for 30 years. And yes, I finally did get to fly that CV-22 tiltrotor, more than twenty years after that day on the parade field as we stood up the CV-22 schoolhouse in 2006. Let’s just say that wasn’t the smoothest acquisition program. And I got to fly the first MH-53 into the boneyard in Tucson AZ as a cap to the flying part of my career. And I never did get out of the Air Force to design airplanes. What I got was a family that I’m still proud to be part of and I’m thrilled to be an Ambassador for the Foundation so that I can have a small part of taking care of our families for a long time. SOWF has evolved over the decades in spectacular fashion, adding programs that cover every facet of our educational needs, from equipment, tests, and college prep, to trade schools, to Med schools. A four-year college education is not for everyone, but everyone needs the appropriate education for them.
