After pretraining, as it's called, the survivors enter a period known as "the pipeline"—scuba school, jump school, freefall school, dunker-training school, survival school. The PJs learn how to parachute, climb mountains, survive in deserts, resist enemy interrogation, evade pursuit, navigate underwater at night. The schools are ruthless in their quest to weed people out; in dunker training, for example, the candidates are strapped into a simulated helicopter and plunged underwater. If they manage to escape, they're plunged in upside-down. If they still manage to escape, they're plunged in upside-down and blindfolded. The guys who escape that get to be PJs; the rest are rescued by divers waiting by the sides of the pool.
These schools are for all branches of the military, and PJ candidates might find themselves training alongside Navy SEALs and Green Berets who are simply trying to add, say, water survival to their repertoire of skills. If the Navy SEAL fails one of the courses, he just goes back to being a Navy SEAL; if a PJ fails, he's out of the entire program. For a period of three or four months, a PJ runs the risk, daily, of failing out of school. And if he manages to make it through the pipeline, he still has almost another full year ahead of him: paramedic training, hospital rotations, mountain climbing, desert survival, tree landings, more scuba school, tactical maneuvers, air operations. And because they have a wartime mission, the PJs also practice military maneuvers. They parachute into the ocean at night with inflatable speedboats. They parachute into the ocean at night with scuba gear and go straight into a dive. They deploy from a submarine by airlock and swim to a deserted coast. They train with shotguns, grenade launchers, M-16s, and six-barreled "mini-guns." (Mini-guns fire six thousand rounds a minute and can cut down trees.) And finally—once they've mastered every conceivable battle scenario—they learn something called HALO jumping.
HALO stands for High Altitude Low Opening; it's used to drop PJs into hot areas where a more leisurely deployment would get them all killed. In terms of violating the constraints of the physical world, HALO jumping is one of the more outlandish things human beings have ever done. The PJs jump from so high up—as high as 40,000 feet—that they need bottled oxygen to breathe. They leave the aircraft with two oxygen bottles strapped to their sides, a parachute on their back, a reserve 'chute on their chest, a full medical pack on their thighs, and an M-16 on their harness. They're at the top of the troposphere—the layer where weather happens—and all they can hear is the scream of their own velocity. They're so high up that they freefall for two or three minutes and pull their 'chutes at a thousand feet or less. That way, they're almost impossible to kill.
THE H-60 flies through relative calm for the first half-hour, and then Ruvola radios the tanker plane and says he's coming in for a refueling. A hundred and forty pounds of pressure are needed to trigger the coupling mechanism in the feeder hose— called the "drogue"—so the helicopter has to close on the tanker plane at a fairly good rate of speed. Ruvola hits the drogue on the first shot, takes on 700 pounds of fuel, and continues on toward the southeast. Far below, the waves are getting smeared forward by the wind into an endless series of scalloped white crests. The crew is heading into the worst weather of their lives.
The rules governing H-60 deployments state that "intentional flight into known or forecast severe turbulence is prohibited." The weather report faxed by McGuire Air Force Base earlier that day called for moderate to severe turbulence, which was just enough semantic protection to allow Ruvola to launch. They were trained to save lives, and this is the kind of day that lives would need saving. An hour into the flight Dave Ruvola comes in for the second refueling and pegs the drogue after four attempts, taking on 900 pounds of fuel. The two aircraft break apart and continue hammering toward Tomizawa.