Schaefer lifted the nose of his craft. His crew chief Dewey Johnson jumped out to straighten the nose wheels, which had been bent sideways when they’d landed. Straightened, they could be retracted so they wouldn’t cause drag in flight. Johnson climbed back in and Schaefer lifted the chopper into a hover at about fifteen feet and held it, kicking up a wicked storm of dust that whipped around the combat controller on the ground. He was the only thing Schaefer could see below, a hazy black image in a cloud of brown, so the pilot fixed on him as a point of reference.
To escape the dust storm created by Schaefer’s rotors, the combat controller retreated toward the wing of the parked C-130, but seeing only a blurry image of the man on the ground, and concentrating on his own aircraft, Schaefer didn’t notice that he had moved. He kept the nose of his blinded chopper pointed at him, and as the combat controller moved, the helicopter turned in the same direction.
“How much power do we have, Les?” asked Schaefer, performing his usual checklist.
“Ninety-four percent,” said his copilot Les Petty.
Then Schaefer heard and felt a loud, strong, metallic whack! It sounded as if someone had hit the side of his aircraft with a large aluminum bat. Others in the desert heard a cracking sound as loud as an explosion but sharper-edged somehow, more piercing and particular, like the shearing impact of giant unmoored industrial tools. The marine pilot’s rotors had clipped the top of the plane, metal violently and loudly cracking into metal in a wild spray of sparks, and instantly the helicopter lost all aerodynamics, its cushion of air whipped out from beneath, and it fell with a grinding bang into the C-130’s cockpit, an impact so stunning that Schaefer briefly blacked out. Both aircraft were engorged with fuel and the sparks caused by the collision immediately ignited both with a powerful, lung-emptying thump! that seemed to suck all the air out of the desert. It formed a huge blue ball of fire around the front of the C-130 and then rocketed a pillar of white flame three hundred feet or more into the sky, in a split second turning the scene once more from night into day.
Beckwith pivoted the moment he felt and heard the crash and started running toward it. He pulled up short the length of a football field away, stopped by the intense heat, and thought immediately with despair of his men, Fitch’s entire White Element, trapped.
Inside the C-130, Fitch had felt the plane begin to shudder, as though the pilots were revving the engines for takeoff. There were no windows and he couldn’t tell if they were moving yet. Then he heard two loud, dull thunks. He thought maybe the nose gear or landing gear had hit a rock or a divot, but when he looked toward the front of the aircraft he saw flames and sparks. His first thought was that they were under attack.
He had removed his rucksack, and leaning against it was his weapon, an M203. He grabbed it and stood in one motion. Beside him the plane’s loadmaster, responding wordlessly to the same sight, pulled open the troop door on the port side of the plane. It revealed a solid wall of flame. Fitch helped him slam it down and push the handle in to lock it. He and the men were sitting and standing on a thousand gallons of fuel, and they appeared to be caught in an inferno.
“Open the ramp!” Fitch shouted, but it lowered to reveal more flames. The plane was going to explode. Loaded as it was with fuel, it was an enormous bomb, and it was enveloped in fire. The only other way out was the starboard troop door to the rear of the plane above two-thirds of the distance to the tail, which had been calmly opened by three of the plane’s crewmen. That doorway proved blessedly free of flames. Men were piling out of it before it was completely opened.
One of them was the Hercules crewman Walton, who had been trying to walk to the front of the plane to get a cup of coffee, picking his way through the crowd of men while keeping his balance on the shifting fuel bladder, when he heard the collision and felt the plane tilt forward and then shake from side to side. He fought his way out of the door and dropped six feet to the desert floor. Men were raining on top of him so fast he couldn’t stand up. He rolled until he found himself under the plane, surrounded by fire. Then a marine grabbed him beneath both arms, hauled him into the clear, and shouted, “Haul ass, brother!”
Still inside the plane Cheney, a bull of a man with a big deep voice, kept shouting, “Don’t panic! Don’t panic!” as the men crowded toward the only escape. Flames spread rapidly from the ceiling of the plane and were wrapping down on both sides. Fire ignited a primitive flight instinct that none of the men could control. One of the junior air force crewmen was knocked down and was being trampled by the aggressive, fleeing Deltas, when Technical Sergeant Ken Bancroft fought his way to the man, picked him up, and carried him to the doorway and out. Cheney’s natural authority and clarity helped avoid a complete mad scramble and kept a steady flow of men out the door. They were used to filing out this way on parachute jumps, so the line moved fast. Still, it was torture for the men at the rear of the line. “Don’t panic!” Cheney kept screaming. Fitch stood opposite him in the doorway, regulating the flow. In their haste, many of the men stumbled when they hit the ground, which created pileups just outside the door. They scrambled to get to their feet, run, and clear the way.
Ray Doyle, a loadmaster on one of the other tankers standing more than a hundred feet away, was knocked over by the force of the initial explosion. Jesse Rowe, a crewman on another of the tankers, felt his plane shake and the temperature of the air suddenly shoot up. Burruss saw the plane erupt as he stepped off the back of his C-130. He was carrying incendiary explosives to destroy the disabled Sea Stallion, coming down the ramp, and the sight of it buckled him. He sat down, watching the tower of flame engulfing the plane, and thought, Man, Fitch’s whole squadron gone, those poor bastards. But then he saw men running from the fireball, as if they were fleeing hell itself.
Pilots quickly spread the word to their crews that they had not been attacked, which eased some of the initial confusion.
Still inside the burning plane, Haney was near the end of the line of men trying to get out. He and the men around him had been jarred alert by the noise and impact outside the plane and saw blue sparks overhead and toward the front. Then the galley door at the front of the plane blew in and flames blasted out along the ceiling.
“Haul ass!” shouted the man next to him, leaping to his feet. Captain Smith, who had dozed off, woke up to see men trying to gain footing on the shifting surface of the fuel bladder and at first thought it was amusing, until he saw flames. He and the others at the front of the plane began running as well as they could, fearing they would never outrace the flames around them, acutely aware that beneath their feet were thousands of gallons of fuel. Ahead, men were jammed in the doorway. Haney threw himself out when he finally reached the door and dropped down hard on the man who had jumped before him. They both scrambled up and ran until they were about fifty meters away, then turned to watch with horror.
One of the soldiers, Frank McKenna, had fallen asleep before the commotion and awoke to flames and to men lining up to jump from the plane. He ran to join them, assuming they had been attacked in the air and were now evacuating a burning plane. He looked around frantically for a parachute, didn’t see one, and when it was his turn to jump he just flung himself out the door belly-first, in arched skydiving position, and collided hard with the earth a split second later. It had all happened so fast he didn’t have time to consider the folly of free-falling without a parachute. As he later told his buddies, “One problem at a time.”