Battlefield Ukraine

Once in a Movie

As Lieutenant Colonel Rob Fortney descended below 7,000 feet, he started to get a good picture of the landmarks below. It was 2200 hours so it was dark, but it was also a full moon, which meant he could still make out some of the fast-approaching landscape. He saw Lake Yassy that he had pointed out to Ricky, and he knew exactly where he needed to go to meet up with his co-pilot. From the darkness below, he also saw the lights from several buildings and houses. His main concern now was making sure he steered himself towards an acceptable landing spot and did not injure himself.

With the ground quickly getting closer and closer, he bent his knees slightly, just as he had been taught. As the terrain rushed up towards him, he landed and rolled to the side, just as they had been told a million times. The technique worked; he spun and then quickly detached his parachute, rolling it up. Once he had it gathered in his arms, he ran towards the forested area where he stashed it inside some bushes. In the daylight it would be found, but at least he had hidden it from plain sight. Now he needed to make his way through the forest, towards the edge of the lake they had identified as their rally point. Then he could wait for his partner to arrive.

After trudging through the woods in the relative dark for roughly thirty minutes, he came to the area of the lake he believed to be roughly where they were supposed to meet and waited. After nearly twenty minutes, he decided to try and use the emergency radio he had. He was reluctant to use it since the signal could be triangulated and give away his position, if the Russians were listening for it. However, seeing that they were in the middle of nowhere, he thought the chances of that happening were relatively small.

Pappi made a couple of attempts on the radio to establish contact with Ricky, but received no reply. Finally, he heard something faintly, but then the sound grew louder. Dogs… they were barking loudly, and then he could hear men’s voices yelling something in Russian. He wished he could understand what they were saying. It was at that moment that Pappi decided he needed to get moving, even if it meant leaving his co-pilot behind. He couldn’t sit there waiting while those dogs and enemy soldiers got closer.

As Pappi made his way through the woods, he came across a small stream. Rather than trying to ford the stream and continue to move through the woods in the direction of Belarus or Latvia, he waded into the stream and proceeded to move with the water. He hoped that by walking through the stream, it would throw the dogs off of his scent. “After a mile or so of walking in the stream, I will return back to dry land and resume my overland trek to freedom,” he thought. “I saw it in a movie once, so it has to work, right?” Although it had been nearly two decades since he had been through SERE school, he thought he vaguely remembered them telling him to do something like this as well.

Three hours went by. His feet were killing him. The sound of the dogs began to drift further away until he no longer heard them. Looking at his watch, he knew it would be dawn in a few more hours. He needed to find a place to rest for a while; he wanted to continue, but after five hours since ejecting from his bomber, he was exhausted. He had been in the air flying for nearly seven hours before he was shot down, and had been awake for nearly that long before his flight. The stress and the long hours he had been working these past several weeks was starting to overtake him. He also knew if he was captured his ordeal would only be beginning, which is why he needed to find a good hiding spot to set himself up and rest.