Recon EXTRA Archive

Guardian Angel Guides Descents

By:  Terese Schlachter,“RECON” Senior Producer   

 

It’s hard to keep a good man down- especially one who’s holding the world record for the highest parachute jump.  In 1960, then Captain Joseph Kittinger floated in a balloon gondola nearly 103- thousand feet above earth, then jumped out.  He was testing parachute systems and other gear. What it didn’t seem to test were his nerves.

“I’d made the jump a thousand times in my mind so when it came time to go I said a silent prayer, hit the button and jumped,” the retired Colonel told SSgt Josh Hauser.

He couldn’t have known that a dozen years later his nerves would be tested again, in a very different descent.

“I was leader of a (mission) over in Hanoi … probably 100 airplanes … and I started chasing a MiG.  I was very close to getting him- to shooting him down – when another MiG crawled up my rear and shot me down,” recalls Col Kittinger.  “I was immediately hog tied, thrown into a vehicle and taken … to the Hanoi Hilton.”

He spent eleven months there as the senior ranking officer among the newest captives, who were kept separate from those who’d been taken prisoner earlier.

“You have to make decisions that affect other men’s lives in a very hostile environment.”  But Kittinger says they were able to maintain discipline and seniority and it became like another tour of duty.  He spent 30 days in solitary confinement. 

“When the US started bombing Hanoi and I heard that first bomb come down I knew it was the B-52s.  I knew the war was over.   I was in the deepest, darkest dungeon there was in Hanoi and they needed that area for the B-52 crews they were shooting down so they moved me into another prison cell.”  He wound up with American POW’s who’d been held for six or seven years.  “It was like Rip Van Winkle,” Kittinger says, “For the next 40 days I was interrogated by the guys in that room about hair styles and what was going on in the world!”  He was released in March of 1973, but calls the experience one of the greatest of his life.  “Every one of us was a better person when we came out of there.”

The Colonel retired in 1978. But the former POW and record-holder wasn’t finished accumulating titles.  In 1984, he was the first solo balloonist to cross the Atlantic Ocean.   One early morning, during that passage, he made radio contact with a random nearby commercial flight.  Turns out, his wife, Sherry  and his crew were on board.  The pilot let them chat for a while.  Sherry and the crew were all in Italy a day and a half later when he landed – grounding it at about 30 miles per hour.

“I got knocked out of the gondola and fell about ten feet and hit the only rock within a half mile and broke my foot,” he told Josh.   “But it was an awful lot of fun.”

Of all of his adventures he counts as the “hairiest” the 1989 Gordon Bennett Cup- the premier event of world balloon racing.  Somewhere over Baja he stalled and ran out of ballast.  The water temperature was 59 degrees. “If we went in the water we were dead.  We finally started drifting and about four o’clock in the morning we landed on an uninhabited island, and that saved us.”    

The name of the island: Guardian Angel.  Probably not the first time Kittinger’s run into his. 

 

In 2012 Kittinger played a key role in the Red Bull Sratos launch in which Austrian Felix Baumgardner broke the Colonel’s own record.  Kittinger currently lives with this wife in Orlando.  His story and other adventures in military ballooning are featured in “RECON: Lighter Than  Air”.  Click here to watch! 

By Terese Schlachter, Senior Producer, “Recon”

Shawn Hibbard looked into the belly of a shark, and knew his life could be different.  He was three years old.

SSG Hibbard worked as a sniper, supporting route clearance in Afghanistan.  Over 36 months of deployments he suffered four concussions.  He recently sat on a panel alongside two former NFL players, Commissioner Roger Goodell, several brain injury experts, and Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno, to talk about mild traumatic brain injury.  After that, he helped us out with our latest “RECON”, called “IMPACT” –about how TBI affects players and soldiers.  Way before that, Shawn lived with his mom, his aunt, his brothers and his cousins at Bob Sandy’s Trailer Park in Stephens City, Virginia.

“There were six kids and two adults living in that trailer,” Hibbard told me.  “I remember riding my bike around, playing a lot. We were told not to go in certain trailers or houses because of the drugs.  There were lots of sketchy people.”

His mother was no stranger to the local culture.

“She was an addict.  I always had cigarette burns on my legs and ribs. Once she cut me with a knife.”

So one day the brothers,  six-year- old Paul, four- year- old Tommy and the three- year -old Shawn, hatched a plan.  They would escape, and make their home in the belly of the 60-foot shark they’d seen at Dinosaurland.

“My cousins helped us. They made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and filled a thermos with Kool-
Aid.”

And the threesome set out.  About a quarter mile down the road they stopped at a house to ask directions.  The family pointed them in the direction of the park, asking no questions of the shirtless, shoeless trio.

Soon, only a fence stood between the boys and the belly.  Shawn, the youngest but biggest, went over along with Tommy. But Paul had epilepsy and cerebral palsy and couldn’t make it on his own.  It was while they were pushing Paul over, the police arrived. Shawn tried to make a run for it, but in the end they all wound up in the back seat of the cruiser.  As they sat at the police barracks eating their sandwiches, social services quietly took over.  His brothers were eventually adopted by a family in Pennsylvania.  Shawn spent the next several years in foster care.  At the end of his first decade, he thought he’d finally found a home, but his adoptive mother was both physically and mentally abusive.   Four years later he was back in foster care, living with Greg and Peggy Holt. 

“That’s who I call mom and dad,” he says of the Holts, who, when Shawn turned 17 agreed to allow him to join the Army Reserves.

“I wanted to take ownership of my life… for the first time I could say this was something I was doing for myself rather than obeying a court order,” Hibbard said. “I was used to being a protector so it’s a natural role for me. I like leading by example and showing that I care about my soldiers.”

He also devotes hours each week to at-risk kids, mentoring them mostly in sports.  He’s forming a baseball league for kids near Winchester, Virginia. And he coaches a few local football up-and-comers individually.  There aren’t a lot of experienced coaches in the area and the schools can’t always give them the right kind of exposure. So Shawn watches out for them, making sure they get the right kind of advice and maybe better invitations to teams and sports camps.

“I can relate to the kids’ problems.  If I can do it they can. No excuses. They have the cards they were dealt. They can either lay them down and give up or they can fight for the hand they need.”

Shawn says no one expected that he would one day have a successful career and a family.

“I see myself in every kid. Because I didn’t have the childhood a lot of kids have.“

Shawn Hibbard may not have made it into the shark’s mouth that summer day in 1982.  But he’s been to the Belly of the Beast and come out all the better for himself, his soldiers and the kids he coaches.         

To see more of Shawn’s story and learn more about Traumatic Brain Injuries among the military and members of the NFL, click here.

By Steve Fluty, Recon producer

More than 70 years ago, the US War Department came to the Delaware State coast to make ready a line of defense against an enemy fleet of warships.

And it was a band of citizen soldiers, young men from small towns across the  state, that did much of the heavy lifting – to help transform a desolate stretch of beach into a fortress known as Fort Miles.

Manning some of the largest artillery weapons in the U.S. military, they were ready to hurl death and destruction at an enemy warship 15 miles or more out in the Atlantic. Fort Miles, named for Lieutenant General Nelson Appleton Miles, was one of a network of coastal artillery fortifications along the U. S. East and West coasts. And with the onset of World War Two – it was part of an effort to defend America’s homefront.

“It was America’s first true homeland security” says Gary Wray, President of the Fort Miles Historical Association. “Dunes of Defense” – the August 2012 Recon – journeys back to a time and place when units of the Delaware National Guard were called to service to help build Fort Miles and to man its coast artillery guns.

Going to War

“Heard a knock at the door, it was a soldier. He said ‘get back to fort as quick as you can get there.’ He said ‘we’ve been attacked’.”

That was the news Horace Knowles came face-to-face with on December 7, 1941. A place called Pearl Harbor in Hawaii had been attacked by Japanese forces.

And the soldier went on to say “we will now be at war.”

Maybe you can imagine what it’s like for an 18 or 19 year old young man from small-town America facing a world that would change forever. “Pearl Harbor was their 9/11,” says Wray.

It brought a new sense of urgency to the work underway at Fort Miles. By December 1941, they were already digging deep into the dunes of Cape Henlopen to build a fortress of big guns. Knowles had joined the Delaware National Guard in 1939 and was now serving in the 261st Coast Artillery. And troops of the 261st were among those called to action in the buildup at Fort Miles.

From the early days of the war and well into 1943 they kept digging, kept building, kept training. They walked the beaches on patrol. Their guns were at the ready. They performed their duties, day after day.

The guns of Fort Miles never saw those enemy warships. The German surface fleet never came. And by war’s end, the coastal artillery fortification and its big guns were largely obsolete. But the wartime buildup at Fort Miles served another purpose for Horace Knowles and other members of the Delaware Guard. It prepared these hometown boys for a global conflict raging beyond the shores of their home state.

For some of Delaware’s young troops there was more to come. While they never fired a shot in anger at Fort Miles, their service was in its own way preparing them for war on another front — in Europe and the Pacific.  Many Delaware National Guardsmen would eventually transfer out of coastal artillery units and head for training with field artillery units bound for war.

Horace Knowles was among them. It was 1944, Mr. Knowles tells us, when he volunteered for transfer into a unit heading to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

He would go on to serve in Europe, and says his unit would eventually conduct “mop up” operations.

“I knew it was going to be rough,” says Knowles. “I didn’t know whether I would be back home or not. But I was going to do my best, while I was there, and I did.”

Eye-to-Eye with the Enemy

Service members who remained on station at Fort Miles finally did get to meet the enemy, as the war was nearing an end in May 1945. During the war, the German Navy didn’t send a surface fleet, but they sent their submarines – the U-boats – and they became a menace to allied shipping along the Atlantic coast. “The coastline had been scourged by U-boats for four years…and nobody had ever seen one,” said Gary Wray.

But military personnel stationed at Fort Miles could see the results. “They were actually here on the beaches and were able to watch as allied shipping was being torpedoed right off the coastline,” says Michael Rogers, who participates in the 261st Coast Artillery reenactment unit.

“You could stand out here on top of the great dune…..and at night see shipping on fire,” according to George Contant, an historian with Delaware State Parks.

And so it was something of an event when U-858 and its crew – after surrendering off the coast and under the watchful eye of a US naval escort – made its way dockside to Fort Miles, Delaware. “They brought the boat in on May the 14th 1945.” says Gary Wray. “And that’s an important date

because it’s the first time an enemy combatant ship is surrendered to the United States since the War of 1812.”

Watch the latest episode of Recon: Dunes of Defense on The Pentagon Channel.

By Terese Schlachter, Recon producer

There are any number of circumstances that can leave a person speechless.  And sometimes, it’s really for the best.

That was the case in many of the instances described in TAPS founder Bonnie Carroll’s recent workshop called, “Say What? The Things People Will Say” – in the wake of a military death.I sat in on the workshop during TAPS National Seminar over Memorial Day weekend.  Bad enough that these folks had lost husbands, siblings, sons and daughters, mostly to war. They were then forced to endure sometimes shocking grave or casket-side clumsiness.  Some of the examples were breath-taking, and vast enough to be categorized.

“Minimizers” are what Carroll calls those who wish to diminish the tragedy. The sentence usually starts with “At least…”, as in the popular,

“At least you got some money, right?”

There’s also, “At least there was no wife or children to take the money.”

There’s more.“At least you had him for 17 years.”“At least you’re young.”

“At least your children are old enough to remember him.”

“At least your college is paid for.”

One fiancé was told, at the funeral, “At least it happened before you made it legal.”  What??  I don’t even get that.

Then there are the “intruders”- those who won’t or can’t stop asking questions.  The audience couldn’t help but laugh, albeit darkly, at one woman’s story about trying to buy a car. The salesman asked, “Where is your husband?” As if this wasn’t bad enough in itself, he pushed her to tell him that her husband had died in Iraq.

The woman explained to the TAPS crowd, “In rural North Carolina, ‘Iraq’ sounds like “a wreck” as in ‘My husband died in a (car) wreck.” After several cultural exchanges they agreed that Iraq was a country and the US was at war with it.  Then he wanted to know how her husband died. Specifically. She put him off best she could before becoming exasperated and blurting,

“He took his gun, put it to his head, and shot it.”’

A salesman, silenced.

Here’s one I never thought was offensive, until I heard a room full of grieving people react.“God needed him more than you.”   Think about how that sounds to a bereaved wife and mother of three.

“You’ll find someone real soon.”   Now, I’ve never lost a spouse, but I suspect childcare, finances, and general loss of emotional support are a little higher on the list of a widow’s concerns, than dating.“My dog died a month ago.” No. No. Nooooo.

One of the more thought provoking remarks wasn’t brought up at the workshop, but talked about by Vice President Joe Biden, who’d been a speaker earlier at the conference.  In 1972 his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident.  He told the TAPS audience the comment that would really shake him to his core was, “I know how you feel”.  The whole room nodded in agreement, some even laughing.  The words may have been well meaning, but most wouldn’t have the slightest idea how it feels to suddenly lose a husband, son, daughter, sibling, fiancé or friend to war.

In truth, it seems there is very little that can be said to provide comfort in the wake of a death. Maybe it’s not that important to fill the space between “I’m sorry” and a simple shoulder.  Maybe the best comfort is the silence provided by simply listening.

Watch the latest episode of Recon: Defeating the Dark on The Pentagon Channel.

By Terese Schlachter, Recon Producer

Pentagon Channel

If you watched Recon:  Lives & Lyrics, you heard some songs written by service members and performed by professional singers/songwriters.  They were created at a Lifequest’s “Music Camp”,  held in Colorado Springs, last January.  We couldn’t work all the great songs they wrote into a whole hour of “Recon” so we’re bringing you more in “Recon Extra”.

Sometimes, maybe because I’m a writer, I actually think about the motivation behind song lyrics. Did one of the members of Train wake up one morning with an actual lipstick stain on the left side of his head, inspiring the lyrics for “Soul Sister”?   And even after Steven Tyler openly dissected the creation of “Sweet Emotion” in his book, “Walk This Way”, I’m not sure I get it. Still, I know the lyrics and like millions, sing right along in the soundproofed quarters of my car.

Conversely, I was able to spend a couple of days in the presence of real songwriters, witnessing real stories from service members, and watch them turn hours of conversation into sometimes snappy, sometimes mournful  lyrics.  The songs have turned in my head for several months now, so I know a lot of them by heart. The come to me at various times during the day. But in these cases I know the people who collaborated to write them and I understand the motivation.  It’s been fascinating.

“ I shot my gun at the enemy

And they paid me back with an IED…”

So goes the second verse of the song called, “I’m Still Here” which was inspired when Georgia first met the former Marine that January weekend in Colorado Springs. The scar across his scull says it all.  He told Georgia about learning to walk and talk again, regaining his hearing, balance and sight.  Then he added, “But I’m still here, I guess that’s good!”  His smile makes you so glad he is. And the song Georgia and he wrote together sums it all up in a hippy hoppy nutshell.

 “I had to learn my ABC’s

  All over again

  But that’s fine with me

 Cuz I’m still here…

I can see

I can hear you

I am free

I assure you

My body’s been through hell

But I served my country well.”

Soon your toes are tapping and you’re humming along with Angel’s story. It’s become Angel’s song.

Songwriter Radney Foster described Sgt Kenny Sergeant as a guy “who’s never met a stranger, and could talk a tree right out of the ground.”  So you could understand how a ride in a medevac- as a broken back caused his legs to slowly numb – might have been a lonely one.  And you could understand how he came up with enough lyrics to write three songs with songwriter Darden Smith. 

“I can cry on my way back

In a freedom bird or a medevac.

I been hit a time or two

But I still got a job to do

It is what it is

 And I do it all for you…”      

                                                                                               

Music camp is a way for us to turn these soldiers’ stories into songs,” says Smith. “I’m always looking for songs – this is like a gold mine of stories.” 

Sergeant Nick Denning has come out of three deployments as a combat engineer fairly physically unscathed, having survived seven explosions and a sniper’s bullet.  But his friend, Sergeant Matt Ingraham was killed when an IED blew up the truck Denning was driving.  In the song he and Radney Foster wrote, called Faded Glory, he compares himself to a tattered American flag.

 “… just like the flags tattered by the wind

Black bag flutters from the black hawk spin

My brothers  lifted to the heavens as the rotars wail

Woulda called me a hero, but I feel like I failed.

Like the colors left out in the rain

All my heart knows is pain

Where Old Glory once flew so high

Now it’s all but passed me by…

Faded Glory…” 

Nick has two sons for which he wrote another song called, “A Little Boy’s Prayer”.  It’s so touching and moving that Smith can barely perform it without choking up.  And now it’s something Nick can pass on to his boys.

The talents of the songwriters, Middleman, Smith, Foster and Jay Clementi are apparent when you hear the songs. The stories behind them might not be so obvious. But they are real and true and worth considering, maybe even eventually hollering-out-on-the-highway worthy, especially for other service members with whom the songs will likely resonate.