|
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska — To look at him, you
wouldn't know that he was a decorated combat veteran or that he had
just retired after serving 25 years of his military career in the
rescue community.
For all cursory observations, he could be
anybody.
Senior Master Sgt. Doug Widener, a pararescueman (or
PJ) who retired from the 212th Rescue Squadron April 1, 2015 sat at a
coffee-shop table eating his lunch, dressed in every-day clothes on
a warm, spring afternoon and recounted the years that led him from
New Orleans to the Alaska Air National Guard, with whom he deployed
four times to Afghanistan, and finally to a newly endeavored second
career with the Anchorage Fire Department.
|
Senior Master Sgt. Christopher “Doug” Widener embraces his daughter after receiving a Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor during a ceremony at the Talkeetna Theater on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Nov. 3,
2012. In November 2010, Widener conducted more than 20 missions in 5 days in Afghanistan that ultimately saved 19 lives while under enemy fire.
(Image created by USA Patriotism! May 13, 2015 from photo by Lt. Bernie Kale, Alaska National Guard Public Affairs
Office)
|
A humble start
Selfless service was in his
blood. His family had a history of service to the country,
and after graduating from high school in 1990, he worked
briefly in the civilian workforce before he decided to
answer the calling in his heart.
“I got out of high school and worked downtown
there for about a year and then decided that I wanted to
look for something more,” Widener said. “I knew service was
something I wanted to do, just in what capacity, I wasn't
sure.”
Joking about the movie, "Top Gun" and its
influence in the late 1980s, Widener said he wanted to be a
fighter pilot. After an unsuccessful attempt to get into a
service academy, he tried to figure out how he could become
a pilot. This was when he spoke with a recruiter.
“The recruiter said, ‘Oh, you want to be a pilot? Well we
can start you off in the enlisted force and then if you want
to transition, you can get your degree,' and that's how it
all started. I started off humbly as an aircraft mechanic,
and ironically enough, I started off working on
helicopters.”
The Lord has a way of guiding you to
the right place, he explained.
“After going through
avionics training, my first assignment was with the 66th
Rescue Squadron out of Las Vegas,” he said.
There, he
worked on HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters.
“That was when
Pave Hawks were brand new,” Widener said. “They had that new
plane smell and very low hours and very little maintenance
issues at all. That was just after the first Gulf War, give
or take, and they didn't have half the wear and tear on them
that they do now.”
It was this initial assignment
that exposed Widener to the rescue community, where he soon
found his true calling.
That others may live
“I was pretty dead set that I was going to be a
mechanic and then go to the academy and become a pilot,” he
said reminiscently. “But then flash forward, and there I am
in Las Vegas, working as a mechanic, getting exposed to the
rescue mission and the rescue environment. What I saw with
this group of guys, the PJs, I was very attracted to the way
they took care of each other, the way they related to each
other, their mentality and their attitude on life. It looked
like a really admirable way to serve your country. I started
looking into that, and then after one deployment to Kuwait,
I applied to cross train in 1993 to become a PJ.”
At
the time, he was 23 years old. He would emerge from the
training pipeline two and a half years later – a PJ.
“It started with the selection course down in Texas,” he
elaborated, “then on to dive school, airborne school,
survival school up in Washington, water survival down in
Florida, freefall parachuting which is now in Yuma, but then
it was at Fort Bragg, but the majority of it was at Kirtland
Air Force Base.”
The training pipeline for the
pararescue community is said to be one of the toughest in
the military, with a reported washout rate of more than 75
percent. Mindset was everything.
“No matter how bad
it gets, you're not going to tap out and quit, you're not
going to let your discomfort level get the best of you,” he
said. “One of things that is really remarkable, is most of
the people involved in this line of work, what I've found
was that the majority of people that I've had the pleasure
to work with, they're extraordinary in their desire to do
extraordinary things. They're not necessarily the most
extraordinary athletes or thinkers, we're just normal
people, but we have this immense desire to be successful.
Not everybody in this career field looks like Captain
America. We come in all shapes and sizes. We all bring
something to the table; the common thread is everybody has
the extraordinary desire to help people, to sacrifice and
pay whatever price is necessary.”
After graduating
from the pipeline, his first assignment as a PJ was with the
23rd Special Tactics Squadron out of Hurlburt Field,
Florida. After just two and a half years there, he and his
wife packed up their truck, drove across the country to
Washington state and began their move to Okinawa, Japan,
where he was assigned to the 33rd Rescue Squadron.
It
was while he was with the 23rd STS in Florida that he first
heard about the 212th Rescue Squadron in Alaska.
“We
did a deployment for the Bosnian conflict,” he said, “and a
couple of guys from Alaska came down to augment the team. I
was asking questions about what Alaska was like, and they
started telling me about the unit and the mission. The
Alaskan team has a certain mystique among the rescue
community. There's an understanding about the guys on the
team up here; it's a very pure form of being a PJ here
because you get exposed to all the different disciplines.”
Widener explained that with the size, terrain and
varying weather conditions of Alaska, the civil alert
commitment of the Alaska Air Guard's rescue community
requires them to often put to use the many specialized
skillsets they train for, including mountaineering,
parachuting, and land and water survival.
“That
operational reality of being asked to do your job and
needing to rely on your training on any given day is very
unique and very special among the rescue community,” he
said. “That's what drew me up here, that mystique. Some
people have called it PJ heaven up here.”
When he was
nearing the end of his contract in Japan, Widener decided
that he wanted to explore the option of switching to the ANG
in Alaska. After hearing about some job openings in the
212th RQS, he conferred with his wife about the possibility
of the move. Neither of them had ever been to Alaska at that
point.
“My wife was pretty surprised about the idea,
but she was really supportive of it,” he said. “So, after
four years in Japan, I separated from the Air Force and
enlisted in the Air National Guard. That was in 2001.”
Widener was barely into his new house when 9/11
happened.
“We had just moved here, no furniture in
the house, things still in boxes and then BANG!” he said
while making a loud clap with his hands, “the whole world
changed.”
One step at a time
Throughout the next 14 years, Widener's operation tempo
never slowed down. He would go on to deploy in support of
Operation Enduring Freedom four times to Afghanistan – 2003,
2008, 2010 and 2012. But even between deployments, the
mission continued.
“Up here, even in our day to day,
when you're in between deployments, it's as if you're always
deployed with our mission,” he said.
Widener
recounted the deployments and the Alaska rescue missions,
and the one consistent element to all of it was that
everything to him was an opportunity. His eyes scanned the
light through the coffee shop window as he replayed the
memories of his career.
“I was part of an expedition
team on Denali in 2005,” he reminisced. “We spent two and a
half weeks and had an amazing rescue above 17,000 feet. The
next year, I had the opportunity to go back on Denali as
part of a four-person climbing patrol. We got to walk in
from Wonder Lake; it was just an exceptional experience. I
remember getting out of the Suburban at Wonder Lake, getting
to the ranger station and thinking ‘wow, how do you start
that journey?' You just take that one step at a time.”
In 2012, Widener was awarded the Distinguished Flying
Cross with Valor for his actions while deployed to
Afghanistan in 2010. In the span of five days, he conducted
more than 20 missions that ultimately saved 19 lives while
under enemy fire.
He then mulled over a rescue
mission from 2011 on Mount Hayes.
“These guys were
stuck at 11,000 feet,” he recalled. “The weather was coming
in on them, their tent is gone and they're in a snow cave.
It really brought to light again that it's always the
teamwork factor in how these missions are executed. Even
though I had the opportunity to be the guy on the end of
rope, went out and got these guys and brought them back to
the helicopter, the pilots did this hover/forward flight
because the winds were coming off the nose above 40-50
knots. We're on this ridgeline, and Brian Kile just perched
the helicopter on this knife-edge ridge. John Romspert's got
me on this belay, and I run out on this ridge, and there's
thousands of feet on either side, and I snatched these two
guys up and brought them back inside.”
He then
recalled one of his career highlights as being the senior
enlisted PJ during his last deployment to Camp Bastion in
Afghanistan in 2012.
“From start to finish, I just
couldn't have been prouder of the way everybody performed,
the mentality, the professionalism and operational success
that everybody had,” he said. “Over a four month period, it
was something like 305 saves and 280 missions. It was a very
busy, high intensity, fast-paced time in the Helmund
province. That whole deployment was one of the highlights of
my career.”
From the mountains of Afghanistan, to the
mountains of Alaska, the meaning of his life was measured in
his work – work that he felt was his purpose in life, guided
always by his faith in the Lord.
“In my experience,
God gave me these abilities,” he said somberly. “I've had
immense peace with knowing that I'm doing what he designed
me to do. How do you deal with the more unpleasant or ugly
side of what we get to see; how do you carry that weight and
not let the horrible things that you endure and not let it
permeate in your life? It's my trust in the Lord. And
knowing him, I don't have any fear. It's not living your
life with reckless abandon; it's a knowing that because you
have purpose, you live your life with an open hand, instead
of living dominated by fear and what could happen, and
instead, trying to live each day to the fullest.”
Despite the faith, however, the human body is a finite
vessel. Considering all of the things he's done throughout
his career, he explained, he feels fortunate that he is
still in one piece.
“That I'm sitting here now after
all of this, still healthy, still functional, it's an
amazing blessing,” he said smiling. “After all the parachute
jumps, scuba dives, helicopter hours, it's what I'm most
thankful for. I've had great people taking care of me and
made sure that I've gotten to go home to my family when the
job is done.”
Since moving to Alaska, Widener and his
wife brought two daughters into the world, he said. Despite
the dangers of his line of work, he never felt that he
should stop pursuing his commitment to service.
“The
questions I've often been asked,” he explained, “is, ‘How
can you do what you do and be a father? Aren't you scared of
something happening to you, and now that you have kids,
shouldn't you tone it down a bit?' My response to that has
always been, no. Period. My daughters would want me to live
my life to the fullest. In order for me to be a great
husband and father, I have to live to my fullest potential.
For me to back away from that out of fear or out of
reservations, that's not fulfilling the potential of my
life.”
And with that said, after 25 years, Widener
felt it was time to retire from life in the military.
Although this chapter is ending, he recently began pursuing
another career with the Anchorage Fire Department.
Still, as anybody who has spent more than half their life
devoted to a single cause would, he feels he's going to miss
the community he leaves behind.
“I've had an amazing
career and had some unbelievable opportunities that I've
been able to take advantage of,” he said. “I'm extremely
thankful for every moment, even the tough ones, because even
the difficult times over the past couple of decades helped
forge me into the man I am today. It all contributes to your
strength. It's about the organization, the people, the
experiences that I've been able to have and the people I've
been able to have those experiences with. It's not just the
PJs. It's everybody involved, from the aircraft maintenance
technicians, pilots, fuels technicians, the supply
technicians and the people in medical. We may be the ones
that touch the person at the very end of the mission, but it
takes all of those people to make it happen.”
By U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Edward Eagerton
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2015
Comment on this article
| Distinguished Flying Cross Recipients |
More Heroes |
