WEBVTT 00:01.472 --> 00:12.387 I was a Master Sergeant pararescueman. I was standardization and flight evaluation, and I ran the Rocky and Bullwinkle free-fall parachute team….school. 00:13.833 --> 00:16.357 How long were you in the military? 00:16.693 --> 00:35.562 I was in the Army for two years, 1970 and ’71. I joined the unit in 1975, and I left in 1988. And on June 13th, 1978, our unit was coming back from training in Plattsburgh Air Force Base. 00:35.940 --> 00:50.345 Coming down Lake Champlain, they hit weather when IFR and trying to return the base, and unfortunately, they hit just below the peak of Trembleau Mountain. 00:52.791 --> 01:05.988 Last year we started planning this, in June, and it was passed due for a few of us because we never really had gone to the mountain, to the incident site. 01:06.355 --> 01:27.106 We do honor the guys from Jolly 85 every year at a dinner, and every year on Veteran’s Day a lot of us, including the current PJ team, go to the national cemeteries on Long Island, Pinelawn and Calverton, and visit the graves and honor those people there from the unit. 01:27.416 --> 01:38.461 PJs, aircrew members, unit members. We’ve been doing that for a long time, but we never have gone to the extent that we have done for this last year. 01:38.750 --> 01:56.143 King 111 was a 130 crash in Albuquerque in 1986, and I was watching that, reading about that one time as they did that memorial and I said it’s time for us to do this memorial, and we started that. 01:56.497 --> 02:08.587 We formed a committee. Myself, Tim Malloy, Kevin Carrick, Bill Hughes, Mike Warren, Ed Fleming, his wife Jean, Anne Hill, and Curt Silverstein. 02:08.996 --> 02:12.951 Was it hard for you to get everybody together to do this? 02:13.383 --> 02:27.111 No not at all, not at all. Everybody was on board and when we approached the unit, they were also on board for their help. When we came up into the Keeseville area, everybody here went above and beyond. 02:27.128 --> 02:40.270 The VFW Post, the owner of the mountain, people who lived at the bottom of the mountain, they could not do enough for us to make it, you know, to make it perfect, and they go above and beyond, so everybody was working together. 02:41.016 --> 02:43.992 Awesome, so you had great community buy-in? 02:44.723 --> 02:58.370 Yeah, you know it wasn’t about just somebody doing something, it was about a whole group of people finally honoring and getting the families together and saying, you know, we lost these guys, but we haven’t forgotten these guys. 02:58.835 --> 03:02.624 Did it bring back any memories of 85? 03:03.582 --> 03:19.132 It did bring back memories and it brought back how we had that loss and how the unit has to deal with that loss, and we all wanted to help the unit in their loss. I’ve talked to some of the families from Jolly 85 and they wanted to help the families from Jolly 51. 03:19.514 --> 03:40.765 Throughout our career, in rescue, air rescue, there’s always been accidents. Pararescuemen, airplanes, 130s, helicopters, doesn’t matter, every now and then something happens, and it always brings, it’s that type of a job. 03:41.119 --> 04:08.336 It’s the best job in the world, but it’s hazardous, and we help people. We’re there to help people in common need. Combat, humanitarian, middle of the ocean, middle of the mountains, we’re there to help as a unit and when that happens, like Jolly 51 happened, we can help and sympathize with these people and support them. 04:08.352 --> 04:22.972 It’s ironic that this happened almost 40 years later when we’re trying to do that planning. Sometimes words can’t describe what we have done and what we’ve gone through, and we lost friends. 04:23.243 --> 04:40.484 Those families lost families. There are people who will never see their husbands again. There are kids that will never really grow up with a father, and right now we’re seeing grandchildren who know about their grandfather, but only through hearsay, and we help them. 04:40.964 --> 04:50.353 We want to keep it going. This is a great unit. It means a lot to us, and we support it totally.