PART II
6
Miami Springs, Florida
Fall 1980
I stepped out of my little house in Miami Springs and checked the late-afternoon sun. It already hung low on the horizon to the west, casting long shadows across my quiet neighborhood’s tree-lined streets. Clear skies. A beautiful day was brewing, but I was in a foul, dark mood. I checked my watch and did some math. I had fifty-five minutes to do seven miles.
I jogged off the porch and hit the street. Thanks to the trees, there is always shade in Miami Springs. I never ran a set route, just always chased that shade.
Nine years and half a lifetime had passed since I first left home for the military. The air force sent me to Lackland for my initial training that weeded out some of the prospective PJs. I learned that while I was a capable swimmer underwater, swimming on the surface with my head up was slowing me down. It took a lot of effort to retrain myself to do that, but I was helped by my PJ classmate Steve Hutchinson, a state champion swimmer. I was far from the fastest surface swimmer in my class, but I was strong and could stroke forever. I was sent to Key West for U.S. Naval Underwater Swimmers School, where I most certainly did not tell the instructors that I was civilian SCUBA qualified. My first PJ sergeant at Lackland, the legendary Jon Hoberg, had told me to keep that to myself or I’d get hazed mercilessly. After finishing there, I went on to Benning for airborne school, where I learned to love to parachute out of C-130 transport aircraft. The visceral thrill of every jump gave me a wicked rush. Parachuting and subsequently skydiving became a lifelong passion as a result, though I was never that great at it.
I turned down a shady street and picked up my pace. The sun was fading faster now. I checked my watch. Forty minutes, then I’d have to be home and hit the sack early for my shift at the firehouse at 0630 the next morning.
Dark mood, dark times. I loved being a PJ, I loved being in the military. It was adrenaline rushes for an altruistic purpose—to save lives. Everything had fallen into place, and I was happy.
How did it go so wrong? I didn’t want to think about that.
From U.S. Army Airborne School, I got orders to Spokane, Washington, to attend the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program. There, we learned what to do if a rescue went bad and we were trapped behind enemy lines. We practiced escape and evasion techniques, then spent the second half of the course in a simulated prisoner of war camp. We learned to resist interrogation and how to work together to escape. During one effort, my fellow prisoners simulated a race riot and began a fight. Our guards rushed to break it up, and during the melee, I slipped away. The first time we tried this, the guards hunted me down with dogs and caught me. This time, I made it out, scored a bologna sandwich from the instructors, then was put back in the camp to undergo the rest of the exercise.*
I ran through the pockets of the golden rays of dusk as I heard airliners landing at the nearby airport. They passed overhead with a whining roar as they made their final approaches to the runway. Miami Springs was an otherwise quiet little community tucked between the airport and Hialeah. It was a great, middle-class kind of town with its own police force and good schools. It would have been a perfect place to raise a family.
I lived alone in the house I’d purchased.
A few years before, I’d met and soon married a younger girl. We had no idea what marriage entailed, being young and totally unready for the commitment. The house was to be where I’d raise my family. We had a daughter together, but not long after she was born, our marriage collapsed. I fought to gain custody of my daughter, but that was a no-win fight with the court system of the day, which favored the mother at every turn.
The end of the marriage was difficult enough, but I loved my little girl in a way I never knew I could connect before she arrived in my life. Having that bond eviscerated me. The pain morphed to anger. I dealt with it by working out fanatically. I lifted weights every other day, ran four times a week. Yet even that exhausting regimen wasn’t helping. Each day, I sank deeper and deeper into anger and depression. I just wanted my daughter back.
When we finished SERE school, those of us left went through our final phase of our program, then called transition training. We became fully certified combat medics—EMT-2s.
The most challenging training was the Mountain Phase. Here we mastered sophisticated climbing disciplines and finished that phase with a weeklong exercise knee-deep in Utah snow. Yes, my first time ever in snow was wearing snowshoes and lugging seventy pounds of gear. Easy day.
The training culminated with a night SCUBA jump from a C-130. Once we did that, we would be welcomed into the brotherhood of PJs.
That night for us came in late November 1972. It was cold as balls, and the wind was blowing at over twenty miles an hour. We’d already scrubbed the jump three times due to weather. One more, and our instructors told us they’d send us home for the holidays and we’d have to return to finish the program in January. Going home without our coveted maroon berets? Hell no!
We all begged our sergeant to let us take the risk of the beyond-regulation winds. I leaped out of that C-130 into a pitch-black winter night, falling toward an unseen Utah lake two thousand feet below. wearing a full SCUBA kit that weighed about 130 pounds. My chute opened; I swung down and hit the lake to be instantly bathed in near-freezing water. My partner, Steve Birkland (a.k.a. Jolly Green), splashed down nearby, and we swam quickly to each other. In seconds, the intense cold rendered our hands useless. We fumbled around, helping each other out of our chutes, shivering from the cold. Just as things started getting really dicey, our rescue boat showed up and the crew pulled us aboard. We unzipped our wetsuits just enough to cram our throbbing hands under our armpits. They felt like ice cubes.
A moment later, PJ Sergeant “Rusty” Atkins handed us a flask. “Congratulations and welcome aboard, PJs!” I still get goose bumps when I relive that moment, and not because of the cold.
Sadly, a few years later, Rusty took his own life. In the long run, the scars from what warriors witness are not always survivable.
In my head, I was there in the Utah night, freezing my ass off. But as I ran in Miami Springs that early evening, it was still hot. That sticky, humid Miami heat that I’d lived in most of my life. I was used to the tropical climate, but I still didn’t like to run in direct sun, so I hopscotched from shade patch to shade patch, zigzagging through the neighborhood as more planes began taking off and landing from our airport.
By the time I was assigned to my first PJ unit, the Vietnam War was over. I had been ready to go, wanting to do my part. Fortunately, for my mom’s sake, that didn’t happen. Instead, the air force sent me to the 301st Air Rescue Squadron at Homestead Air Reserve Base, just south of Miami. I was going home, now part of one of the most elite outfits in the military.
I served a total of two years on active duty, then transferred to the 301st on reserve-only status. Jim Wilson was a fellow PJ and one of my mentors in the unit back then. In his civilian life, he was the fire captain for the then Metro Dade Fire Rescue. He talked me into joining. That was not a path I ever would have explored on my own, but Jim knew I was always looking for action, and he assured me the life of a firefighter/paramedic would never disappoint.
He was not joking.
I checked my watch. Ten minutes left. I was almost home now anyway, so I pushed the pace even harder for this final stretch. I made it back to the house and went inside for a quick shower and a light meal, then hit the sack.
At the firehouse, we worked twenty-four-hour shifts followed by two days off. One on, two off. That sounds like a great life, but there was a reason. Nothing I’d ever experienced in the military or in the streets of Miami prepared me for the things we saw and did during those days riding rescue in the violent streets of greater Miami. As an EMT, I rode to scenes of horrific violence and tragic accidents. We saved some, lost others. I tried to wall off the losses, but sometimes I revisited them in my sleep.
The worst of the worst came on a day we responded to a scene where a boy of about ten had slipped and fallen into a backyard swimming pool while drinking a glass of orange juice. He hit his head and was knocked unconscious. His mom found him floating facedown in the pool. We rushed to the house, and I started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while my partner did chest compressions. We got him to the ambulance. His mom rode shotgun.
My partner kept up with the CPR. I got on my knees in the back of the ambulance, whose floor was an easily cleaned diamond-pattern metal grate.
As the mom watched, panic-stricken from the front of the ambulance, her son vomited three times into my mouth. Each time, I turned and spit out bile and orange juice, then continued working on him. Our driver sped through the streets breaking every law of the road to get us to the hospital. When we skidded to a stop and flung the doors open, some nurses with a gurney were there waiting for us. We laid him on it and rushed him into the emergency room, where the docs were ready and prepped for him. One of the docs looked him over and said, “Good job, guys; he’s nice and pink. We’ll take it from here.”
As I stumbled out of the emergency room, pants torn and knees bleeding from the cheese-grater floor in the back of the ambulance, my nose picked up the rancid scent the adrenaline had blocked. A nurse saw me and asked me if I was okay.
“Yeah…,” I mumbled. She could see I wasn’t. She rushed over and stuck some smelling salts under my nose. Just for a second, but it was enough to bring me back from the shock I was falling into. A moment later, the boy’s father pulled up and sprinted through the ER doors.
When we got back to the firehouse, we learned the kid didn’t make it.
I’ve had nightmares about that call ever since. Sometimes months go by, sometimes years. But I’ve never been able to shake that one. The boy always returns. I still hope and pray that he somehow knows how hard we tried to save him.
For all the bad days, I still loved the work; it was rewarding, and every call brought a new adventure. There were moments of levity and moments where we saved a life. Once, we responded to a 911 call to find a man high on PCP flinging a couple of cops around like rag dolls. His girlfriend lay bleeding from a gunshot wound on the bed behind him. To get to her, we knew we had to help subdue the boyfriend first. My partner, Frank, went high, and I went low. We careened into the drug-crazed madman, knocked him off his feet, and held him down so one of the cops could cuff him. It took four of us to do it—two EMTs and two cops. But we got to the girlfriend in time, stabilized her, and sped her to the hospital in our rescue truck, where the docs saved her life.
Between shifts, I continued my military career with the air rescue unit at Homestead. But by 1978, I’d gone to nearly every course they could send me to except German Ski School and Arctic Survival School. I applied for both for four years and kept getting denied. “What does a PJ in South Florida need with cold-weather classes?” was the invariable response. I tried to reason with them. “How many wars are fought in Florida?” But it did no good.
Finally, I’d had enough. I left the air force and joined the National Guard, joining the Twentieth Special Forces Group, and aspiring to earn the coveted Green Beret. I was slated to go to the legendary Q Course but hadn’t received a slot yet.
Still, I wanted something more. The action is the juice, and I always chased that rush. Still, this time was different. I didn’t feel like I was on the right path. I was drifting into a life I never asked for that seemed to be somebody else’s destiny, not my own.
I also needed to get out of Florida. Home had become a painful grind, and I thought a change of venue might help, along with a new challenge that could absorb my attention.
I sent in handwritten applications to the CIA and the Secret Service; I even tested for the latter. But this was right after the Senate’s Church Committee hearings had badly damaged the CIA after it revealed some of the Agency’s excesses during the 1950s and ’60s. The practical upshot from the hearings led to restrictions in the way the CIA could operate. Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905, which banned political assassinations. Jimmy Carter expanded that with EO 12036 a few years later.
Additionally, the means through which the Agency was allowed to collect intelligence was restricted following the hearings.
The bad press and the new limitations left the CIA badly damaged politically and practically.
I ended up applying to the Secret Service after the CIA told me it had no full-time positions available that matched my skill sets. Yet in the spring of 1980, the Agency reached out looking for a medic who could work a short-term contract supporting the famed Special Activities Division (SAD). Responsible for all covert and paramilitary operations, SAD was the elite part of the CIA that carried out the more kinetic stuff. It was where the action was, and I loved being a part of it.
Initially, I worked out of the medical offices in Langley. We built med kits, and I did some lab work. Then in late June 1980, I flew to Arizona to support a two-week desert survival course where I worked with actual operators and officers. It was the chance of a lifetime.
I was young and fit and eager to impress, so beyond teaching some medical aspects of desert survival, I took on every extra duty I could. At night, I would test the students’ situational awareness as they were out trying to escape and evade the instructors. It was a lot like SERE school in some respects, so I would find some high ground and watch them disperse in pairs. I’d sketch a map of their approximate locations, then go sneak up on them after dark.
Once, I crept within a few feet of two students and heard them chatting back and forth to each other. When one of them said, “Man, I’d give anything for a pizza right now,” I jumped out of a thornbush and shouted, “Pizza delivery!”
They pretty much shat themselves. I slipped away just as their shock turned to laughter. But lesson learned: you gotta be vigilant. Not knowing I was cheating, the students thought I was some sort of CIA Native American tracker!
A few days later, we’d guided a class to a nearby well, where they were to hunker down for the night. The day had been well over 120 degrees, and the water source was obviously much appreciated—at first.
The students discovered a dead mouse in the well’s bucket. The stench was considerable. They could not bring themselves to drink from it. They protested to me, demanding fresh water. I asked them if they’d boiled the well water and put iodine in it. They said yes. So I asked for one of their canteens, drank half of it, then poured the other half down my pants.
“If it’s clean enough for my crotch and my throat, it should be good enough for you.” I handed back the canteen and walked off.
At the end of the two weeks, I emerged from the desert and called home on the Fourth of July. My mom answered, sobbing. My beloved Abuelo Emilin had died that very morning in Cuba. My grandmother had woken up to find him holding her hand after passing in his sleep.
I returned to an empty house in Miami Springs filled with a deep sense of loss and a profound loneliness. The dark anger and pain I’d been feeling for months turned even more acidic. Instead of a refuge, the house served as a constant reminder of the heartbreak and pain I’d been dealing with for almost a year now. I didn’t fear physical pain. But heartbreak? I had no answer for it.
The next morning after my shift at the firehouse, I went for my run through the shade. I got back bathed in sweat, still unable to get out of my own head. If I didn’t figure out something, it was going to come out in some volcanic, very bad way. For weeks, I’d been snapping at people who were only being social. I was looking for a fight, some outlet to blow off the steam. Nothing was working. I didn’t know what to do.
I poured a glass of water and went out to the porch to sit in the sun, frustrated that I couldn’t break out of this darkness.
Inside, the phone rang. The interruption annoyed me, but I got up to answer it anyway.
“Prado.”
“Hey, Ric, this is Russ,” came a voice. I recognized him as one of the CIA officers from Special Activities Division whom I had just worked with in Arizona. “Not sure you remember me—”
“I remember you,” I said.
“I have a really important job that you may be interested in. Would you be willing to come up and talk about some work?” he asked.
Hell yes, I would. Get me the hell out of here.
“Short or long term?” I asked.
A pause. “Long term.”
I didn’t hesitate. “I’m in.”
“Great. When can you get to D.C.?”
It was a Thursday. Heart racing, excitement building, I replied, “Will Monday work?”
“Excellent. See you then.”
I was bound for Langley at last, and soon enough I would leave this empty house behind forever.