The Rank His Family Laughed At
What a Pararescueman Actually Does
“I’ve flown with your son and brother for the better part of three years,” he said. “I’m going to tell you what he’s been doing while you were deciding what to do with his money.”
My mother’s hand went to her mouth. My father set his drink down on the side table and didn’t pick it back up.
Master Sergeant Reyes didn’t raise his voice once. He talked about the pipeline, the two years of training with a failure rate higher than almost anything else in the entire military, most people who start it never finishing. He talked about deployments where the job isn’t to fight, it’s to go into the worst five minutes of a stranger’s life and get them out alive, sometimes by rope, sometimes by boat, sometimes by carrying them.
He didn’t give details he wasn’t supposed to give, and he didn’t need to. He said enough. He said there were people walking around today, fathers and mothers and somebody’s kid brother, who were alive because of decisions I’d made in situations most people would not survive standing still in, let alone acting in.
He mentioned, almost as an aside, that there was a commendation working its way through the process for the most recent one. Not a medal for show. The kind of thing that gets read once at a ceremony most of your own family never bothers attending, because they assumed the ceremony was for someone more important than their own son.
He told them about a night, some months back, when a downed aircrew was stranded in terrain that made a straightforward extraction impossible, and how the job that night had come down to one person getting lowered into a position nobody else on the team could reach in time. He didn’t use names. He didn’t need to. He said the crew came home to their own families because somebody was willing to be that person, and that the somebody standing in this driveway, in a uniform his own sister had just called a joke, was the one who went down on the line that night and the one who came back up carrying the last man out himself.