At the time Don Erbey's plane smacked down high on the Knik Glacier Sunday, Aug. 8, 2010, Alaska Air National Guard Tech Sgt. Angel Santana believes he was probably watching soccer, or "futbol" as its known back home in his native Guatemala. Maj. Jesse Peterson was sitting around "doing homework or whatever it was," as best he remembers. Both men, along with Master Sgt. Al Lankford and Tech Sgt. Chris Uriarte, have stronger recollections of the small but important details that came with the first report of Erbey's accident.

There was a Piper Cherokee down in the Chugach Range north of Anchorage. Five people had survived the impact and were still alive. They needed rescue, and they needed it soon. "We heard they were not dressed for the weather," Peterson said.

As always in these situations, there was a sense of urgency, but no particular worry about the job ahead. The pararescuemen of the 212th Rescue Squadron, PJs as they are commonly called in the 49th state, tend to think of their Alaska missions as "training." What they do up here is hard and dangerous, but it does not compare to the dangers they are preparing for in future military missions. Air Force PJs are tasked with the difficult and dangerous job of going behind enemy lines to recover pilots shot down in combat. In the "Rescue Season,'' author Bob Drury describes the PJs as the warriors "frequently referred to in the corridors of the Pentagon as "the Special Forces you've never heard of."

"In contrast to the SEALS and Green Berets, who number in the thousands, there are no more than 400 PJs scattered around the world ... So demanding are the physical and mental rigors of (their) selection course that it is not uncommon for a class of 90-odd candidates to graduate fewer than a dozen. These few survivors then enter The Pipeline, 18 months of even more grueling physical and medical training designed to push them beyond their normal limits."

This training never stops, either. On a stormy fall day above a hostile Cook Inlet, it is not uncommon for a group of PJs to be found parachuting out of the back of a four-engine C-130 Hercules cargo plane into the cold, dark water below where, hopefully, a self-inflating Zodiac dumped from the plane along with them will perform as expected.

Likewise, you might encounter a group of these guys heading off into a blizzard in May high on 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, where the environment is in some ways even more hostile than in the Inlet. Ordinary mountaineers are well advised to avoid following them up the mountain into a gathering storm because the PJs train hard -- very, very hard.

PJ training is vigorous in the hopes it will make Alaska rescue missions comparatively easy. And for Alaska-trained PJs, these rescues sometimes do involve little more than hopping aboard a HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter flown by some of the best pilots in the world for a ride out to find a lost snowmachiner out of gas, or to pick up a hiker whose fallen in the mountains and broken an ankle, a leg or worse. Trained medics, the PJs have used their experience in emergency medicine to stabilize many of the inept or simply unlucky before loading them aboard the helicopter for a life-saving medevac. The PJs' expectation on this Sunday afternoon was for a pretty standard retrieval along those lines.

"The original plan was that we were just going to pick them up," Uriarte said. "We were at the section waiting for the helicopter to arrive" within 30 to 45 minutes of the call out, Santana added. By then, a National Guard HC-130 was already in the air over Erbey's crashed, single-engine plane. The HC-130 would fly top cover to coordinate what was expected to be a pretty tame operation, all things considered.

Mother Nature quickly slaughtered that expectation.

The Gulf of Alaska storm that had roared in to force Erbey's plane out of the sky was now hammering the glacier. Winds in excess of 50 mph swirled snow and rain into a white nothingness. The helicopter pilots, flying on instruments most of the time, spent hours looking for holes in the clouds that would allow a glacier landing. When that proved impossible, two attempts were made to drop supplies to Erbey and his four stranded passengers, Fred and Mary Jan Lantz, and their adult sons Patrick and David. Unfortunately, neither drop got close enough for the Erbey or the Lantzes to see, let alone retrieve.