Anchorage Daily News

Eyes wide open and unblinking, Jake Collins first met Master Sgt. Paul "Red" Reddington on an August morning that Collins will never remember and Reddington will never forget.

Collins, the 23-year-old Wasilla basketball coach, was on the precipice of death from hypothermia that day in 2006 when Reddington and other rescuers arrived like gods out of the thin air of the Wrangell Mountains.

They were there to deliver what doctors say now was a miracle.

A nasty fall while sheep hunting had left Collins in a coma. His father was his sheep-hunting companion. After spending a night with his comatose son huddled in the mountains, the elder Collins left his son alone and near death to make a daylong trek back to civilization to summon a rescue.

Late on the night of Aug. 19, he contacted the Slana Ranger Station of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

Reddington, a pararescue specialist with the Alaska Air National Guard's 212th Rescue Squadron, was one of those standing watch at the squadron's base in Anchorage when the call arrived.

By 1 a.m., he was aboard a HH-60 Pave Hawk rescue helicopter thundering east toward the wilderness.

Over the Wrangells, the winds were pounding. Pave Hawk pilot Maj. Rick Watson worried that he couldn't hold a hover over Collins because a downdraft might push the helicopter into the ground. Watson decided he'd have to drop Reddington and Kentucky-based pararescueman Robert Rosentreter in a valley a mile and a half below.

An alder-bashing, bear-dodging march through darkness lit periodically by flares dropped from an HC-130 Hercules circling overhead got them close.

Reddington eventually located Collins from the sound of the heavy breathing that he, an experienced Alaska outdoorsman, first feared was the huffing of a bear. Collins' body temperature was dangerously low, below 88 degrees. Trained as a paramedic, Reddington knew how close to death that put the young man.

He wanted the helicopter to hoist Collins out, but Watson said that was impossible.

So Reddington and Rosentreter loaded the young man in a pole-less litter and half-dragged, half-carried him to a possible hoist site a quarter-mile away. It was murderous going.

"Just nasty boulders and slippery,'' Reddington would observe later, but the rescue specialist didn't think so much about the terrain as he did about those unblinking eyes of Collins.

Reddington worried that, having gone so long with his eyes open and unmoistened, Collins risked losing his vision if he survived. If.

That was a big if even as Watson made the tricky hoist from a sketchy mountain shelf picked by Reddington, got Collins into the Pave Hawk and turned for Anchorage, leaving Reddington and Rosentreter on the ground to kill time and await a later pickup.

Today, a year and a half after what was for Reddington in many ways a typical operation, Collins is alive and well. Still recovering from brain trauma, he is back at work running the youth basketball program at the new AT&T Sports Complex in Wasilla.

He recently passed the test to get his driver's license back, and doctors expect his recovery to continue until not even his friends and family notice the extent of the injury he suffered.

And 42-year-old Red Reddington is retiring after a distinguished, 25-year career in which he registered 134 "saves." That's how the pararescue specialists count those they retrieve from the wilderness or battlefield in what are often life-and-death situations.

Collins considers Reddington, a father of four who stayed in touch to monitor the young man's recovery, an American hero. Reddington sees himself simply as a man doing a job the best he can. He's a little embarrassed that anyone, other than his fellow pararescuers, is taking note of his retirement.

"What someone ought to do is a good story about a whole unit," he told a reporter.

RESCUES IN WILD COUNTRY

At almost any level -- firefighter, paramedic, policeman, pararescue specialist, emergency-room doctor -- the business of saving lives is not so much a job as a calling. There are big adrenaline rushes and huge emotional rewards.

Trained paramedics are schooled in mountaineering, wilderness survival and open-water rescue; the pararescueman's primary mission is to find and recover American pilots shot down in combat. The secondary assignment, at least for the Alaska-based 212th, is to maintain a 24-hour rescue alert for missions anywhere in the 49th state.

From near the 20,320-foot summit of Mount McKinley, North America's highest peak, to hundreds of miles out in the Gulf of Alaska, there's nowhere these guys won't go to save a life.

The danger they face here is only enhanced in the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Reddington has done his duty there, but says the only time he remembers being slightly scared was on a night parachute jump into the North Pacific Ocean almost 1,000 miles off the Alaska coast.

He wasn't nervous about the jump; he's made about 750 of those over the years.

What worried him was the inflatable boat. The boat is parachuted out of the plane before the pararescuers jump. It is supposed to be on the water waiting to help them. It is supposed to open and inflate on impact.

"If the boat doesn't work," Reddington said, "you're screwed."

Nobody can swim 1,000 miles back to land, and one man bobbing in a vast sea is a hard target for a helicopter to locate and recover.

That's why in training, pararescuers have spotter boats standing by to pick them up if the inflatable doesn't pop up.

But this was not training. This was a rescue mission launched under almost impossible conditions to aid the crew aboard a freighter drifting in the Gulf of Alaska.

But this is the sort of action that drew Reddington to the pararescuers.

He was an 18-year-old Minnesota boy in a U.S. Air Force boot camp more than two decades ago when he felt the call. For the first time, he was exposed to the world of the elite Air Force Special Operations Command's pararescuemen, the guys most Alaskans know simply as "PJs." Reddington watched a movie about them in action.

"I said, 'Oh boy, I want to do this,' " he said. "I knew right away I wanted to be one of them."

Superiors tried to talk him out of it. At 5-foot-6, Reddington doesn't fit the mold for the prototypical pararescuer. Only one in 100 who enter pararescuer training complete it. He was likely to wash out. But Reddington was undeterred.

"I'm not a real tall guy, and I'm not a super-stud athlete," he said. But he is fit and determined, qualities that got him through the first eight weeks of training.

"That's where you lose most people," he said. "We started with 70 or 80. We were down to 12 after eight weeks."

There is a lot of water training in those first eight weeks. Water training requires a clear head in situations that can be incredibly frightening.

"They basically try to drown you," Reddington said.

He survived -- one of seven in the class. The Air Force posted him to Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho, but it lacked the action Reddington wanted.

By his second year of service, he asked for assignment to Elmendorf Air Force Base. Alaska is the busiest pararescue section in the country, so busy that pararescuers from the Lower 48 regularly rotate north to train, knowing they'll be busy.

"If I didn't get to Alaska,'' Reddington said. "I was going to get out."

Luckily, he got to Alaska. He's been here ever since -- first with the Air Force at Elmendorf, then with the Air National Guard at Kulis after it took over Alaska's pararescue operations.

"The Guard has been awesome," he said. "It's the same as active duty, but you get to stay in one place," aside from duty rotations to Afghanistan, Djibouti, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

"The first 10 years, I was probably gone 150 days (a year) or more," Reddington added. "When you're single, you can be gone all the time. The travel is fun."

Reddington isn't single anymore. He's married with four children, the oldest in kindergarten.

'GETTING BEAT UP'

Pararescuer Skip Kula, a buddy of Reddington's, is scheduled to retire this summer after 30 years on the job. Pararescue takes a toll on the body not unlike what professional athletes experience, and Reddington doesn't know how Kula has done it.

"He still runs around here like a 20-year-old," Reddington said. "He's amazing.

"I feel like I'm getting kind of beat up. I want to get out before they tell me I have to get out. You gotta go sometime."

Though Reddington has avoided major injury, he notices an increasing creakiness in his body each morning.

"It's mainly joint pain," he said, "back and neck and knees."

That is one of the signs it's time to retire. Reddington starts counting the other on his fingers, clicking off the names of some of the now-dead pararescuers he has known. All told, there are only about 350 of these guys in the country. Reddington knows about 40 who've died on the job or in job-related accidents.

Reddington will miss the action, he knows, but he won't miss the risks.

"I do not think it's going to be too hard (to leave),'' he said, a view aided by a new job that will keep him at the section.

He has signed on as a private contractor to work as the 212th's dive master.

"I'll still be around," he said, although he knows it won't be quite the same.

The 212th is an active section. Six times Reddington went to train on McKinley, reaching the summit three times. More than 500 times he was dispatched on rescue and recovery flights, searching for lost snowmachiners, retrieving fallen climbers, rescuing hunters.

"It's good training for combat because you're going through the same thought process," he said. "The only difference is you're not getting shot at."

Either way, the situations are often intense. Over the course of the years and the missions, Reddington has come to know many of the people he's rescued, as well as fellow parajumpers on a deeply personal level. The section, Reddington said, has largely become "a bunch of brothers with different mothers."

People there are family to him, and they to him.

"He's a great guy and a good friend," Kula said. "He's there when you need him, and even if you don't need him, he's there asking, 'What can I do to help?' "

"Red set the standard for selfless service," added Maj. Thomas Stevens, commander of the 212th.

MEMORABLE THANKS

Most people rescued by the 212th never bother to say thanks. They disappear back into their own lives almost as fast as the rescue squadron delivers them to safety.

Most but not all.

A few like Collins and William Dick of Anchorage come back to express their gratitude.

Dick was a Federal Aviation Administration technician aboard an ERA Aviation helicopter that crashed in Cook Inlet off Fire Island during a snowstorm in October 2001.

Three people died. Dick and Steve Durand, also of Anchorage, were the only two to get clear of the wreckage and make it to the surface of the frigid water.

"We got the call a minute after the helicopter went into the water, and we took off within 11 or 12 minutes," Reddington remembered.

In snow and blowing snow, it took precious minutes to find the site of the wreck and begin the search for survivors. Dick, who broke his back, was bobbing in frigid water. By the time he was located, his body temperature was down to 86 degrees. That's the temperature at which organs begin to fail.

"These two guys were very hypothermic," Reddington said, "but we were able to get to them in time."

Dick later told Reddington he was starting to fade away when the Pave Hawk appeared almost magically in the sky. Reddington remembers that Dick said he felt very calm, convinced that he was going to die.

Thanks to Reddington and the 212th, however, Dick survived. He eventually sent Reddington a thank you card. The pararescuer cherishes it still. It reads simply:

" 'One hero can save a life,' William Dick."

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Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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