Spec Ops Angels Blog

There is the Medal of Honor presented to the family of Airman 1st Class William H. Pitsenbarger, who was fatally wounded in 1966 while treating soldiers in a South Vietnamese jungle.

There is an al-Qaida AK47 rifle from the 2002 Battle of Roberts Ridge, in which Senior Airman Jason Cunningham died while caring for injured and wounded soldiers.

Students walking these small hallways understand they are standing in the footsteps of pararescuemen whose names evoke the sacrifices they could be called upon to make.

“These kids know they are going to be shot at. … They are very, very serious,” Barnard, 42, said of his airmen.

Soon, the school will make room for more students, and the scattered facilities will be consolidated onto a campus.

With the Air Force looking to boost from 88 to 140 the number of airmen who graduate annually out of the two-year-long pararescue course, the school has started the first phase of building a $64 million campus at Kirtland.

The Air Education and Training Command unit broke ground Nov. 9 for a five-story training tower topped by two mock-ups of aircraft cargo bays and loading ramps. From the tower’s heights, students will practice skills such as fast roping to the ground.

The old school is spread across several parts of Kirtland. An instructor in the school headquarters building who wants to check up on a surgical class has to walk or drive about three-quarters of a mile between buildings. Students must walk a similar distance between their dormitories and many of the teaching areas.

The master plan for the new school gathers most of the Kirtland facilities into a common campus where the base’s Zia Park housing area had been.

The campus plan includes dormitories, a gym, urban combat training area, surgical skills training buildings, administrative and classroom buildings, and a “heritage hall” of memorabilia from past pararescue operations.

A memorial will feature a statue of Pitsenbarger. The pararescue community is hoping to raise about $320,000 from private donations for the memorial.

One essential part of the course that won’t change with the new facilities is the requirement that students have “gumption,” said Barnard, who graduated from the enlisted course in 1989 and was later commissioned as a combat rescue officer.

“You can’t be scared to scuba dive. You can’t be scared to hang over the side of a rock with a rope. You really can’t be scared of anything,” he said.

Of the airmen who apply to become pararescuemen or rescue officers, about 25 percent will make it through the indoctrination course at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, Barnard said.

The applicants who do the best at Lackland arrive with discipline and physical toughness. They might have been on a school wrestling or water polo team or raised in a military family.

Of those who reach the Kirtland school, about 98 percent will graduate.

Today, the school annually graduates four classes of students, with the average class numbering 22 airmen, Barnard said.

The school typically has an enrollment of 140 to 170 students and a cadre of 45 instructional personnel.