#Navy waves patch skin

When they are not deployed overseas, these PJs are back home, on call, offering emergency support to the maritime community and the U.S. Many of these PJs have served together in Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Africa. The seven PJs aboard the aircraft tonight, members of the 103 rd Rescue Squadron, a unit of the New York Air National Guard's 106th Rescue Wing, represent one of the militaryвЂ™s few reserve Special Ops units. Trained to jump from planes and perform surgery aboard helicopters, they are the airmen who arrive when the Navy SEALS call 9-1-1. Their mission entails rescuing personnel caught in ambushes, injured in IED explosion, trapped behind enemy lines. Air Force Pararescue-parajumpers, PJs for short-elite Special Operations soldiers whose name few know.

#Navy waves patch skin

The two other men-charred, skin flayed-wait now without pain medicine.ДЄ light by the ramp door turns red, and the airmen ready for departure. Within hours of the explosion, two of the sailors died. The captainвЂ™s message was routed from Lisbon to Portsmouth, then to Boston, and on to the airmen in Long Island. The menвЂ™s injuries were severe, requiring expert attention.

and Portuguese Coast Guard helicopters as well as rescue boats. They were in the middle of the Atlantic the nearest land-the Azores Islands-was over five hundred miles to the east. In his distress message, the shipвЂ™s captain wrote that the men had been burned from head to toe. Earlier that morning, there had been an explosion onboard, some unknown ignition that had set fire to four sailors working inside the hull. At the next command-вЂњ HOOK UP!вЂќ-they clip their parachutesвЂ™ red static lines to a steel cable running over their heads.ДЇifteen hundred feet below, their target: the Tamar, a commercial shipping vessel two thirds into its voyage from Baltimore to Gibraltar. Their faces are lit only by the lambent glow of chemlights. He turns back to his men, each strapped with over a hundred-and-fifty pounds of gear.

A low blanket of clouds blots out the moon and stars and erases the distinction between the black sky and the black Atlantic Ocean beneath. It brushes past the seven airmen seated in rows, sending stray pieces of paper, fabric, and tape fluttering in the thin air. The jumpmaster screams the command over the roaring engine, and the back hatch of the HC-130 aircraft yawns open into night.