Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 28, 1994 TAG: 9403280110
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JODI EDNA KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: POPE AIR FORCE BASE, N.C. LENGTH: Long
From high above rolling hills carpeted with pine forest, the precise swath cut by the runway looks too narrow for a roller skate, but it grows large in a hurry as airplanes hurtle toward it in a final rush to land.
And that swoop homeward brings to sharp focus, for one fleeting second before the landing bump, the daily swarm of humanity that surrounds this field where soldiers are trained to jump from airplanes.
Day after day and year after year, the roar of people and planes practicing for war went on with unbroken routine.
From this airfield, tearful loved ones sent their soldiers off to face danger - in Grenada, in Panama, in Kuwait - and welcomed them home again. It was not a place for them to die, until things went wrong on a sunny Wednesday afternoon.
They both were cleared for landing.
The small, sleek F-16D fighter plane and the elephantlike C-130 cargo plane turned and nosed downward as the runway rapidly began to spread out underneath them.
The jet had led a flight of four fighters on an exercise run at the bombing range near this sprawling military reservation. The C-130 had been practicing takeoffs and landings since its load of paratroops jumped into Fort Bragg's drop zone.
It was 2:18 p.m., and the worst Air Force disaster in more than a decade was unfolding. It would cost 23 soldiers their lives, and leave more than 80 seriously injured. Many suffered burns over 90 percent of their bodies, and more deaths are expected.
How did two planes end up on a collision course?
"Obviously, there was a failure to communicate," said Brig. Gen. Bobby Floyd, a wing commander.
As the two planes began to converge above, Army Sgt. Terrance Winslow emerged from a classroom where he was learning to lead paratroops on missions.
He had discarded his heavyweight camouflage shirt and the distinctive maroon beret of the 82nd Airborne in the heat of an early spring afternoon. Winslow, a 22-year-old Persian Gulf War veteran with a pierced left ear, wandered across the staging area known as the "Green Ramp" in his brown T-shirt, green camouflage pants and black jungle boots.
Sgt. Darrayl Livingston, 31, listened in another room as an instructor taught how to load military aircraft. Airman 1st Class Martin A. Kayter, 20, was inside a cargo plane, preparing to take paratroops out for a training jump.
Outside, Capt. Jesse Farrington, 35, readied parachutes and soldiers.
He looked up.
"I noticed two puffs of smoke," Farrington recalled. "I said, `That's odd.'"
Then he saw two parachutes floating in the clear-blue sky.
"Ejection!" Farrington screamed.
The nose of the F-16D had clipped the rear of the cargo plane, ripping off part of the tail and sending it wobbling on toward the runway. But the fighter careened out of control, and the pilot and navigator ejected into the trees as the warplane ricocheted across the runway, its metal seams tearing apart as it went.
It slammed into the nose of the parked C-141 cargo jet that Kayter was readying for flight.
"All of a sudden, I heard someone say, `Oh, my God, the plane's crashing, crashing, crashing,' " said Lt. Eric Sones.
Then, there was a series of booms.
Kayter was knocked to the ground as his aircraft, on a visit from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, shook violently. When he stood up, pieces of his plane were falling to the ground. He watched as flames shot 60 feet into the air and consumed the right wing.
Sgt. Christopher Soles, 23, was blown out of his chair inside a large shed and then pummeled by pieces of the roof.
Capt. Michael Taylor, alerted by Farrington's yell, ran three steps and dove behind a mock plane used for training.
"When I hit the ground, I didn't think I was going to get up again," said Taylor, 35, whose hands were burned.
Sgt. Milan Obradovic, 25, opened a classroom door and peered at mayhem.
A giant fireball, described by some as 75 feet in diameter, roared through the staging area where more than 500 soldiers from Fort Bragg had been going about their daily business.
Searing-hot metal, flung from the jet, whipped through the air in the rolling blaze, a swirling ball of death.
"It happened slow, like freeze-frame, but really very fast," Sones said.
Within five seconds, flames had engulfed everything and everyone for several hundred feet. The C-141 exploded, its 55,000 gallons of fuel spewing across the staging area. A snack truck blew up. Skin burned. So did cars. And guns.
"It seemed like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - that huge fireball rolling toward us," said Lt. Col. Paul Vicalvo, a chaplain who knelt to pray with dying soldiers.
It wouldn't stop.
And soldiers, primarily from the elite 82nd Airborne, couldn't move fast enough.
Several were trapped in a mock-up of one of the cargo planes from which they parachute. They had no warning, for their backs were to the runway as their instructor explained how to avoid tangling parachute lines.
The flames engulfed them, and many died.
"It looked," Winslow said, "like a nuclear explosion."
Breathing became painful as intense heat and thick black smoke filled the air. But it was the stench the soldiers remember most, a combination of burning metal, jet fuel and human beings.
"You ain't never going to get rid of the smell," said Staff Sgt. Brian Whelan.
If there was any salvation in the face of disaster, it came from the fact that these were not typical plane-crash victims.
These soldiers didn't panic, and they didn't flee. Those who weren't caught in the blaze and blinding smoke ran into it, hoping to rescue their buddies.
Some of them caught on fire, too.
"You'd put a fire out, and your pants would catch on fire, then the person who put you out would catch on fire," Sones said.
Many used their bare hands to stifle flames.
They also had to duck bullets - 22 mm rounds that were "cooking off" as the F-16D sizzled, sending projectiles helter-skelter through the staging area. Soldiers found themselves simultaneously diving from flames, dodging ammunition and trying to tug their colleagues to safety.
Paratroops drenched in flames ran through the area aimlessly. Livingston, a medic, rolled some of them in dirt to squelch the fire. It didn't always work.
One man was on his elbows, burning. "I rolled him over," Livingston said. "His face was gone, melted away."
He covered the dead man's head with a shirt.
Obradovic yanked a large silver fire extinguisher from a wall, pointed it at soldiers and squeezed the handle. Foam sprayed forth. But it wasn't sufficient to stop the flames.
Other soldiers filled canteens and helmets with water. Still, the flames roared on.
Army Chaplain Gerald Bebber tried to douse flames on a soldier by smothering them with his fatigue shirt. But, he said, jet fuel had soaked the soldier's clothes and his skin.
"Every time I thought the flames were out, they began to smolder again," he said. Finally, he scooped dirt onto the man's chest, arms and legs.
Staff Sgt. Timothy Gavaghan used his hands to pull the Army belt off a soldier. The soldier's uniform had burned off his body, but the belt was holding burning scraps of underwear to his skin, Gavaghan said.
Sones and Spec. Christopher Atkins tried to resuscitate one soldier. But they couldn't find a vein on his burnt arm for intravenous fluids, and they weren't able to push any fresh air into his heat-filled lungs.
A number of would-be saviors were forced to give up.
"The first guy I came to, he was sitting there, dead, with his arms out," Winslow said, demonstrating a prayerlike pose. All of the victim's clothes had been burned off; all of his skin was singed. He wore only a helmet.
"The second guy, his arm was gone," Winslow said. He said he grabbed a parachute, snipped off the nylon cord and tied it around the man's arm, a crude tourniquet. It was too hot to hold.
Winslow said he and another soldier placed the man on a slab of wood torn from a building and carried him to a truck.
"I don't know if he lived or not," he said.
Wide, green Humvees, jeeplike military vehicles made famous during the Gulf War, shuttled troops to Fort Bragg's Womack Army Medical Center, where they were diagnosed in the back yard.
One soldier hung out the rear of a truck, his arms akimbo, "almost like he was crucified," said Army Spc. Brian Powell.
"It was like a battlefield," Bebber said.
A battlefield, only worse, several experienced soldiers insisted.
"When you go to combat, you expect to see that stuff," said Obradovic, who was in Iraq during the Gulf War. "You get your mind geared up for it.
"This is peacetime. And these are people we know."
by CNB