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It's April nineteen ninety five and we're in the Atlantic Ocean, one hundred and four kilometers away from land. The water is cold, the wind is high, the waves are strong. Captain Brian Yudell is fighting for his life. He's just survived the highest speed ejection from a US fighter aircraft at nearly one three hundred kilometers per hour. He feels like his body has just collided with a freight train. The salt water is making him painfully aware of the
open wounds that cover his broken body. Brian starts to pray. He has to get home to his wife, who is four months pregnant with their first child. It'll be four grueling hours of until Brian is rescued. I'm at Middleton and this is head Game today, an unbelievable story of perseverance, strength and return to the sguise. Brian, you welcome to my podcast, head Game. How are you?
I'm well, how are you? Sir?
I'm always going to listen it to me, that should recording you, sir, take me back to when you first got into any type of aircraft and the fascination of flying. When did that first hit you.
I'm a multi generational pilot, so it's in the DNA. My father was a fighter pilot for thirty one years, and I started flying when I was nine years old. Aviations all I know. I've been an airplane my whole life. So yeah, it was just a natural progression for me to follow in those footsteps.
I suppose being around that twenty seven that's just embedded in you, whether you like it or not.
Right, it's good and it's bad because he got no slack.
So yeah, I can imagine.
You know. I remember complaining once.
And once only once.
Only yes, and I said, you know, I'm tired. I was. I was in the middle of pilot training and they they do all of the things, they try to give you twenty five hours worth of stuff and twenty four hours to do it, and oh, by the way, you got to find some time to sleep. And and so I remember complaining called him up and I was like, man, Dad, I'm just I'm just really tired. He goes, you don't know tired, he goes, wait till you get to combat. You work when you have to, and you sleep when
you can, and you just you just go. You put it on and you go, and if there's a little break, you can take a nap. But when it's time to go, it's time to go.
That's the classic military I suppose way is and that it's when you can grab that nap, grab it because you don't know when the next one's coming.
It's exactly right.
Tell me what happened on the eighteenth for April nineteen ninety five, we were.
On a night training mission. Standard I was number three of a four ship. We were doing what we call a surge week, where.
So when you say number three of a fourth ship, there's four four aircrafts and your number three correct.
This particular night, we're going to go out and do what we call two v two aired air intercepts. That's where two aircraft are going to pose two aircraft at night. It's really a targeting and sorting exercise. It's a communications event.
You're not really shooting live you're not shooting live munitions at each other, but it's the ability to effectively communicate between the two aircraft between the four people in those two aircraft and effectively figure out what the presentation is that the opposing group is giving you effectively communicate that between the aircraft, properly target and sort, sort and target those two aircraft and then put missiles in the air so that you're not both targeting one aircraft or you know,
it's it's a lot of calm discipline. You know. The success I help people war hasn't changed in a thousand years. And whether you're blowing a bugle or banging on a drum or waving a guide on, it's the ability to effectively communicate is the side that's going to be. It's going to prevail because I can communicate effectively, we can put we can put force concentration in. So we're doing
our thing. We were actually on our fourth intercept, this airplane that had some mechanical problems and what we call ground aboard it twice the week before. What that means is is they started the airplane up and for whatever reason, it didn't pass it's built in tests, and so they gave it back to maintenance to work on. When I showed up at the airplane, the first thing we do is, we salute the crew chief, we pick up the maintenance forms,
We review the maintenance forms. I could see that this airplane had some previous discrepancies that were still kind of coming up with issues. But supposedly it was a good aircraft. So we do our walk around, We climb in the jet, We start to jet up, and it runs through its test and it failed three different tests. The central computer was not operating properly, the display processor was not operating properly, and the heads up display failed. And so we called
out maintenance. Maintenance plugs into the aircraft and we start talking about it, and they said, well, you know what's been fixing it before is just turn it off and turn it back on. Just recycle it. Boy, I tell you what, people say that to me. Yeah, right exactly. But people say that to me, I just want to choke them. And so so we turned it off and we turn it back on, and we repeat this multiple times, and finally we've got a good airplane. There were no
spares to step two. All the other jets were broken or being utilized, so it was love the one you're with. So we worked it and worked at work it. Finally we got a good airplane. We taxied probably five minutes after the other three aircraft did. We have contingencies. Every military operation has contingencies because you know your initial plan very rarely is going to go as planned where you
don't roll x into some contingency operations. So they had a contingency if I wasn't able to get down there, but we were able to get down there with them, get armed up, and we launched. We met up with an air to air refueling tanker, a casey ten that was parked in an air refueling track. We cycled through. We got about four thousand pounds of gas each, and then we went out into what we call the Whiskeys.
That's the warning areas off the coast of the United States, the East coast the United States, and that allows us to be able to train like we fight, meaning we can go supersonic without blowing windows and knocking china off the walls and you know, really getting people upset with us. It also gives us the actual time compression. When you've got two airplanes coming at each other over the mock,
things happen very quick. You might be one hundred and fifty miles away, but that one hundred and fifty miles away. When you got a closure rated over one thousand miles an hour, we'll go.
By a thousand miles an hour.
So it's you have to be thinking fast. You have to stay ahead of what's going on.
You're specializing it before it happens exactly.
And that's why we practice this over and over and over, so it becomes where you start to see things happen before they happen. You know what's going to happen before they happen, and then you just execute. And if things aren't going the way you want them to go, you have a specific outrange, and that's a range be no range.
We will be no closer than this. If we don't have our ducks in a row, we don't have eything doped out, we're out and you get out, and it's like get out before you like you mean it, and then come back and try to re engage again. But this particular event, we got our gas, we went out and the first two intercepts went off without a hitch, and about forty five minutes into the flight, we were on our third intercept, and this was the first one
where myself and my wingman. We're going to play what we call red air the adversary side, and we're going to give them a presentation that was prominent from the old former Soviet Union tactics. We bring them into res cell what we call resolution cell, where basically fingertip formation. My women is on my left wing about three feet off, and we're going to be cruising in and then when we get to a range where I know that they would be firing their first salvo, we're going to split apart.
My women's going to do a ninety three turn drop down to a lower altitude block. We divide the airspace into altitude blocks for safety of flight, because when they separate and you don't know where people are, especially at night, you can't see them. Ye want to see them that you exactly, so you have your safe haven at a
specific altitude block. And our block was a ten to four zeros to four block, which means ten thousand to fourteen, twenty to twenty four thousand, thirty to thirty four thousand, and the other two aircraft had the fives to nine, so it'd be five to nine, fifteen to nineteen, twenty five to twenty nine, so so forth, so my women they drop down to the ten to fourteen block and I'm still at twenty four thousand. We're in a right hand turn, and we're about one hundred degrees through the turn.
With believe it or not, the lessons from my father. So my father always taught me. He says, always trust your instruments, because that's I had to when I was little. I couldn't see out. But he goes, always listen to the airplane, because if you're in tune with the airplane and you're listening to it, airplanes will talk to you, and if you are listening, they'll tell you what they're doing. And what I was seeing in my instruments. Now it's a pitch black night. There's no moon, no stars, no
discernible horizon. Everything in my world is in that hood's up display, and what I'm seeing is twenty four thousand feet forward or notts in a sixty year right hand turn. But what I'm hearing is this airplane is getting fast. I'm hearing the wind rushing over the top of the campy. Something didn't seem right, and so I brought up a different display down on a color screen between my legs
that gives me similar information in a different format. That display was showing us pointed straight at the water, and instead of twenty four thousand feet and four hundred knots, we were now at seventeen thousand feet and six hundred knots. So I'd already lost seven thousand feet and didn't even realize it until I could start hearing that wind rushing over the canopy. I didn't pick up on it. The airplane always trims for one g, so you don't have
a fill sensation in the stick. It's not like, oh, I can feel the wind load as it increases. The airplane automatically adjusts for that. So my only indication was that sound, that wind rush over the canopy. When I brought that up, I looked at I was very startled because I'm now not where I thought I was, and now I've got to try to figure this out. Well, there's a thing we learned. It's called recognized, confirm, and recover. Well, I recognize we've got a problem via sound and via sight.
I've got to try to confirm this. Unfortunately, I only have my head's at display, and I have my attitude indicator on this color display here, and then there's a standby. Unfortunately, that standby is not accurate, and you'll turn out of traffic this way and it'll precess that way. What is
primary designed for is if you lost electrics. It's a gyro stabilized machine attitude indicator that I could cage and it would give me about eight minutes of stabilized attitude information to be able to get down through a weather deck. But it's not going to be used for some kind of out of control type recovery instrument. The second part of the problem was that color display. We would turn the brightness in contrast of that display down quite low so that it wouldn't cast a big colorful glow on
the inside of that bubble canopy and create disorientation. And so I had to sit there and try to figure out what that actual display was telling me. And then I could see the disparity between the two. I could see the airspeed spinning up. I could see the altitude spinning down. But I've got to try to figure out in my upside down, my right side up, how many degrees knows low am I? And so now I have to stop, and I have to turn the brightness and contrast of this display up and it wasn't like a
riostat where I could just go like that. It was rocker switches. So I'm sitting here pushing buttons like this to try to get the brightness. And the display turned up and we are traveling fifteen hundred feet per second straight at the water. So we started the maneuver at a second. Yes, we started the maneuver at twenty four thousand feet. I realized we had a problem at seventeen
thousand feet. From seventeen thousand feet to ten thousand feet, I'm working this problem, so that's seven thousand feet, so I basically had five seconds roughly to figure this out make a decision either try to recover the airplane or command the ejection. When we got through ten thousand feet, we're now supersonic. I'm eighty degrees nos low inverted, and
I realized that there is no way. One I'm not going to bet my life that this is even telling me the true and two I don't think I can pull out of this dive without ripping the wings off or blackness out or both. And at that point I just commanded the ejection and got in a body position and pulled the handles in that length of time, four thousand feet. Additionally, additional four thousand feet went by. We're now at six thousand feet. I'm pulling the ejection handles.
A canopy goes off at forty five hundred feet. Dennis DW. Dennis White was my back seater. He went out at three thousand feet. I left the cockpit at fifteen hundred feet and I got my shoot roughly about five hundred feet above the water. Had had I waited even a third of a second longer to pull the handles, I would have impacted the water still in my seat and
been killed. So when you talk about seeing ahead, predicting things, making those decisions, the decision to get out is made before you ever get in the airplane.
So when your Powa chute deploys, are you strapped into the chair when you land.
No, I had about twenty five twenty to twenty five seconds under the canopy before I hit the water. So the way it works is you separate, you leave the aircraft in your seat, and the seat is incredibly smart. It has an altimeter in it and it has pedo tubes on either side, so it knows how the seat knows how fast it's going, and it knows what's attitude
it's in, and it knows what altitude it's at. So from that it makes a decision, do I need to keep him with the seat until we get down to a lower altitude, or do I got to get him out of this seat and get him a main choot immediately. And in this case, because we were going so fast, it actually threw out a miniature drag chute to try to slow us down. But then it has to be able to cut that dragshot away and then get the main canopy open and separate you from the seat. All
of that happens in milliseconds. So it was able to get me slowed down enough to where the main choot wasn't destroyed upon deployment because of the excessive speed that we were traveling. So it kicks me out of the seat. I'm hanging under the canopy. I could fill the cold night air on my face. I could hear the parachute ruffling above me. I knew where I was. I also knew I was going into the ocean. And then immediately your training kicks in. You do what it's called a
post ejection checklist. It's canopy visor mass seat kit. I'll be used here prepare release. I mean it's that ingrained and so I look up at my canopy. I couldn't see it was pitch black. Visor masks were supposed to take our visor put it up on top of our helmet discarder mask. I didn't have to worry about that step. The whole helmet was gone. Seat kit when we deploy, when we separate from the seat, we're actually sitting on a seat kit which contains a one man life wrapped
and two survival kits. But one's called a rucksack kit. The other's called a grab and dough kit. The rucksack kit falls away on a fifteen foot lanyard that pulls the one man life raft out. It falls away on a fifteen foot landard that's hooked to my right hip, and the weight of that rucksack kit pulls a pin on a CO two cartridge that partially inflates that wrapped So hanging below me, fifteen feet below me is a
one man life raft. Fifteen feet below that, it's that rucksack kit, and zipped into the inside flap right up underneath my butt is that grab and go kit, which is about the size of a fireplace log. The rucksack kit contains everything you need for long term survival. The grab and go kit contains duplicate items, but it's mostly for rescue. It's got your flares and water and radio
and signal mirror whistle things like that. Yeah, So, as I'm coming down on the chute, I get to my line preserver and I look down and my life preserver looked like shredded rags hanging around my neck. And then I got a bit concern because I know I'm going into the ocean and if I don't get to something that floats, I'm going to be a dead man. And I'm hoping that my life preserver hanging fifteen feet below
me that I can't see, doesn't look like this. So somewhere I had the presence of mind, and I think this is where the exceptional training comes in, because I was able to think clearly, I was able to keep my wits about me, and I just had the presence of mind to reach down and I grabbed that lanyard and with my teeth and my one arm, I reeled that life wrapped up to me and just at the point I grabbed a hold of the raft, I could tell it was inflated. I went from hanging under the
canopy to about ten feet under the water. Having hold of that inflated wrap pulled me back up to the surface. Otherwise I would have drowned. I'm in mid fifties water temperature the sea states about three to five feet. The wind's blowing about ten knots, and I'm starting to be drug. My shoe catches wind and I'm starting to be drug through the water. There's a very smart man. A lot of the stuff that we have in our survival kits are as a result of somebody in the past dying
from not having this. So what we have is the pyrotechnic device on our risers, and when they sense the salt water, if there's a charge and it blows your rises away, it sounds like two shotgun shells going off on either side of your head. So I came to rest, still holding onto the raft, and that's when I went to try to kick my legs to get into the raft. And when I did, the top half of my leg would go one way and the bottom half would go
the other. And when I kicked my left foot. My foot would flip around backwards and then it flip around forwards, and they were both useless. And then this arm is bent back like this, so I've got one functioning arm with a separated shoulder. I'm in five foot seas. I know if I don't get into this raft that I'm going to die of hypothermia. I'll go unconscious and that'll be that. And so I'm trying to get in. I'm
trying to get in. I can't get in. I'm trying to push this raft underneath me, and the wave would come up and the raft would want to flip over on top of me, so I'd have to let it go like this and then I'd get it back up underneath me. And I tried probably ten times, and I just couldn't get in, couldn't get in, And now I'm literally to the point of exhaustion, and I thought, this is it. I'm going to die tonight.
Is that what you thought, Brian? Did you actually think to yourself, right, I'm not going to make this, this is me.
I'm gone, Yeah, And that's when I stopped everything. I'm we wonder where I get my strength from my father? My father got it from his mother. My grandmother was an incredibly strong woman, and she always taught me that we don't get to choose the day we're going to have. We get to choose how we're going to deal with it, and we should be prepared for whatever the day brings physically, mentally, emotionally,
and spiritually. And she says, if you're in and a situation that you have no control over and you need help, you pray for what you need, not for what you want. And so I put my head down on the raft and I say, God, I can't die tonight. I've got too much to do. I've got My wife was four months pregnant with our first child, and I thought to myself, how selfish of it would be for me to not be there and for her to get that knock on the door. I did not want her to get that knock on the door.
Your wife was four months pregnant at this time?
Exactly?
Did that thought process went through your head? Just as I suppose you're going to give up, It's like, I can't give up. I've got to stay alive. My wife is pregnant, I've got a child on the way. And was it that for that ultimately switched things up.
It'll give you superhuman strength, Yeah, absolutely, because I took that raft. I took that raft and I shoved it down into the base between my legs like this. I threw my shoulder into it like that, and I rode the wave up. And when I crested the top of the wave and went down the backside, my body flipped right into the raft and I was sitting there perfectly, and my leg from the knee down was hanging ninety
to the right over the side. My foot was turned around backwards and folded up underneath me, and this arm was a bit back like that. And I'm looking at this. I'm thinking to myself, you can't live out here looking like this. You're going to be out here a long time. You can't sit here and be looking at yourself like this. So you got to straighten yourself out. This is one of those times where it's better to look good than
to feel good. And so I I grabbed my leg and I heaved it in and it went from ninety right to ninety left. It's now resting across the top of my other leg, and I'm thinking, oh, that doesn't look right either, So I shoved it down into the base of the raft. I pulled my foot out from underneath me and got it pointed or in the right direction. Brought my arm around and immobilized it into my harness.
And now I know I didn't structurally fix anything, but I'm if I'm going to be out here, I want everything pointed in the right direction.
Yeah.
So now I'm starting to go into shock. I'm shaking uncontrollably. I know that if I don't stop and treat myself for the shock, that I'm going to go unconscious. And at that point, I reached down to my g suit pocket. We have these pockets on the legs, and I opened the zipper where I always kept a water bottle. I stuck my hand down into that pocket to retrieve that water bottle, and the water bottle had been blown right through the bottom of the pocket and was gone. Well,
I was kept my wallet in the other pocket. I wanted to see if it was there. Opened the zipper and stuck my hand down in there, and my wallet was also blown through the bottom of the pocket and it was gone. And then I started thinking, crap. I got to cancel credit cards. I got to go get a new driver's license.
I lastly, you tell me that that didn't go through your head.
That is exactly what went through my head. I'm thinking, somebody is good, that's wallet's gonna wash up, and somebody is gonna get twenty bucks. And that was a lot of money back in the day.
But Brian, do you think do you think that way of thinking just just strats the mind from the bigger issues? You know, it keeps you alive on to me, doesn't it, because you know you're just trying to keep the mind active if you're trying not to, like you said, go into shock. So I suppose all these little things that you're thinking about a positive distraction from not actually looking at the big up problem, which is you can't move. You're now floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
with one arm. Ultimately, and col you're probably not going to make it out there.
I have had the privilege of meeting and speaking to numerous Vietnam POWs and people that have gone through just incredibly insane things, and there's one common denominator that I have found in all of those people. The events are different, there's a lot of similarity between the events, but the one common denominator I have found is a sense.
Of humor the face of adversity.
That's exactly right. To find humor in the darkest places. If you can laugh at yourself and the situation that you're in, that's half the battle right there.
I was hoping you're going to say that, because that's one of the War Marine core values is humor in the face of adversity. And it's so true. It works.
Live it, love it, laughing man, Just just freaking deal with what you got in front of you and trudge on through. And things can always get worse. I mean, you know, I picture where you're at, where I'm at in the situation that I'm at, But you know what, I'm still alive. I'm still bringing in and out. And the other thing that I tell people, I said, is we all set these goals, right, Well, every goal has a set of sub goals. You'd go trying to attack
this goal. It's overwhelming, but you attack each sub goal, and each sub goal that's successful gives you confidence to keep going. And that's what that night was all about. It was a little victories exactly. That leads to the ultimate of surviving the situation.
So talk to me about these Neil victories. So obviously you sort your legs out the visual thing of right, I need to look droper because psychologically is going to help me. How did you get through those moments because you're were You're in the water for like five hours.
I used to teach survival, and one of the things that I always taught was to survive what I called the survival rule of threes. The survival rule of three say, you can only survive about three seconds if you don't have the will to survive. And my will was to get home to see my wife. That's going to keep you moving, that's going to keep you motivated. You can survive about three minutes without air, either from drowning or suffocation.
You can survive about three hours in extreme conditions extreme cold or extreme heat. I have a thermaa heat stroke, whatever. You can survive about three days without water, three weeks without food, and three months without human companionship. Before you're putting smiley faces on volleyballs and them Wilson, you know. So that's that's your roadmap for success is how what do I need to do and when do I need to do it? First of all, I want to. I
want to get home to see my wife. Second of all, I got to get out of that water and into this raft that's going to keep me from drowning. And the next point is build my home so that I don't die of hypothermia because the waves are still crashing in and I've got to get my home built. And that's manual inflation. And there's three components to that raft,
and only the main donut ring partially inflates. You have to complete that inflation, and then you have to inflate the floor, and then a spray shield pup tent that pops up over the top of you. My face was so distorted I couldn't create a seal around the tube to blow that up. I had to grab the valve with my teeth, clamp my hands down around my lips to create the seal. My lips stuck out past my
third finger. That's how distorted my face was. So there was a point where I'm sitting there laughing at myself and how funny I must look with my lips stuck out like a duck. And I blow and I blow, and it was like blowing up party balloons for your kid's birthdays. You start getting lightheaded, and I like God, I got to take a break. I pulled the tube out of my mouth. The first time I did, the valve didn't self seal, and about half the air that I just blew in leaked out before I could get
the valve turned off. So on subsequent attempts, I'd grab the valve with my teeth. I'd clamp my hands down around my lips in the tube. I'd twist to open the valve, I blow the air in, and I twist it back off when I needed to take a break. It took me two hours to get my home built and then get the water bailed out. So it's about step by step through those processes. You just don't stop. People that don't survive usually it's because of misprioritization or
they just give up. The one thing you have absolute no control over is when you're going to get rescued. What you have one hundred percent control over is are you going to be alive when you get rescued. Meaning let's focus on what we have control over, not what we don't.
And so you've got your house in order after two hours. Took me through the next couple of hours because coh those hours went by car like days, didn't they.
It's it's all relative, I mean. And you anybody that's been through the training, I don't care. You've been through the training. You know it's going to suck. It's just that's just the way it is. It sucks, right, here's where you are deal with it is what it boils down to. So what I did during those hours that I was out there after I managed to get my raft inflated, my home built, the water bailed out. Now
I've got to stay focused on a task. I can't just sit here and start thinking about, oh, miserable me. I have to start thinking ahead, what's the next step.
I love that, Brian. There's no time to feel sorry for yourself in a situation like that, is there There's no mentality, there's no oh look at me, pull me. You know, I'll just lie here now. And because that's when ultimately you give up. I think that's a really really important message, is you know, you've just got to keep going. There's no time to feel sorry for yourself.
There isn't and you just have to keep working, keep working, keep working. And so what I did is the harness the flashlight that was attached to my harness was blown off during the ejection. But many things in that survival kit weren't waterproof, and one of them was the flashlight that was in the survival kit wasn't waterproof, so the first wave that came by shorted it out and that was it. I was in a black raft in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of the night.
No moon, no stars, no flashlight, no anything in this little cocoon. I've got to figure out what I have available and where it is. So I pulled each piece of it equipment out of my rucksack kit. I felt for what it was, and I started locating it alphabetically up and down my legs so that I knew where
things were. I filed myself with survival equipment up and down my legs, so that way, if I needed something, I at least knew the general direction of where to go to find it, rather than sitting around digging in a kit for it. And that kept me occupied for a good another hour. And the last hour that was tough because I had pretty much accomplished everything and now it was trying to stay conscious. I knew I was bleeding. The back of my leg was dashed open, my face
was all cut. You can tell everywhere you're bleeding in saltwater. And I knew that if I went to sleep or even took a nap, that I may not wake up. I don't know if I have head injuries, internal injuries. So I've got to stay focused and keep moving, keep driving, keep going. So periodically I would pull the side of the raft down and I would yell for Dennis. I just yelled Dennis's name. And I'm sure you've been there.
But if for those of you've never been in a in the middle of the ocean, all you hear is waves crashing and windblowing. That's it. And even if the sun angle is just right and the sea state is calm, there's only about a seventy percent chance if they know the area that they're going to be able to find you at night. That drops to zero. In fact, since then, I've been able to fly with a lot of we call him Coasti's coast guard guys who have gone out
on all of these calls. And one guy I was speaking with, he goes, he just he was very quiet for the longest time and we're flying and he goes, you know, I've just I've just been sitting there thinking, he goes, You're not supposed to be here. He goes. I have been called out on hundreds and hundreds of case is for people that are out in the open water, and of those hundreds cases, we either didn't find anyone, or if we did find them, they were gone, they
were dead. I actually facilitated my own rescue. They didn't find me. I found them by staying awake and staying engaged and staying active. About the time, I've had really run out of things to do. I mean, I was telling myself jokes, which they're not funny when you know the punchlines, you know. But I was working on a delivery to you.
I'm to your quite sane.
So yes, I'm slapping myself in the face. I'm, you know, yelling for Dennis. I'm doing everything I can think of. Just try to stay conscious and lo and behold. I heard a unique sound off in the distance. And once you've heard it once, you never forget that sound. And it was the turboprops of the sea one thirty hercules aircraft.
It's a unique sound. And I heard those turboprops way off in the distance, and I peek out and I could see the position lights of the aircraft flying a pattern, and then often the distance beyond that, I could hear the faint rotor walk of at age sixty, and I thought, oh my gosh, they're out here, and they're serious about getting me out of here tonight. And I thought to myself, if I don't make contact with them, they're never going
to find me. So now, all of this whole time that I've been in the water, it's been nothing but survival, and now it's time to shift gears and start thinking about rescue. But even while you're thinking about the rescue, you're still surviving. You don't stop surviving. That's the mindset you have to have. So I'm frantically trying to get to my survival radio. Back then it was a PRC ninety radio. It had two frequencies, uniform guard and then
a uniform backup guard. And so I turned the radio on, turned the volume up, pulled the antenna up, and I was kind of shocked that I didn't hear eelts. I thought, Okay, why am I not hearing ELTs? And I started transmitting. I thought i'd be hearing Dennis working the rescue. I didn't hear that. I started transmitting my call sign swored nine to three May Day, and no response. I must have tried a dozen times, and I tried the backup frequency and still nothing. And then I went back to
the primary frequency. I'm like, now I'm thinking, crap, my radio doesn't work. But this is all I have. And so I kept trying, kept trying, and finally the pilot of the C one thirty answered back. That was amazing. Well, I was just like, oh my gosh, they know I'm alive.
So how did that conversation go? You just put out your call sign? And then someone got back to me saying that I'll read you loud and clear.
Loud and clear, And then they went into authentication process. They want to do authentic. I go, I can understand if we're in a combat zone, but I'm sixty five miles ouf the coast of North Carolina. How many people do you think are down here? And why don't you just rescue all of us? Yeah? Why don't you rescue all of us? We'll work out the pleasantries when I
get on board. They're asking me the middle to my social security to the last four they're asked me whether the street that irew grew up on all those those security questions, and there was a reason. At the time, I thought, this is the nuttiest thing I've ever seen. But the reason that they were doing that is because my wife had gotten the dock on the door. She is four months pregnant. Knock comes. It's a chaplain, a doctor's quadron, commander's quatern commander's wife. They were going to
notify her that we were down and missing. And so when they were trying to figure out who it was, they didn't want to call my house and it be Dennis, or call Dennis's wife and be me. So they're trying to sort that all out. So for me though, it was like, why are we wasting time? I'm me, I don't care, Just luck come get me. And then obviously they don't want you to use in your name over the radio because all the media listening in and everything. So I said, you've got me, and then I knew
I was going home. I'll never forget the picture of that rescue swimmer, Jim Peterson. I still keep in touch with him. It's been twenty nine years and we still talk every year. The last thing I had to do was let the air out of the spray shield and get it down, and I knew when I did, the waves are going to start coming in, and the wind's going to start blowing in, and things are already getting miserable because I've started to move around again. I get
the spray shield deflated. He comes swimming up to me and he introduces himself. He says, I'm Coastguard rescue swimmer Jim Peterson. I'm here to rescue. I said, well, I'm Air Force Captain Brian new Dell, and I'm here to be rescued. Let's get the hell out of here.
I love that, I SI, Brian, thank you ever so much for coming on the podcast. Phenomenal story, phenomenal lessons and huge inspiration and I listened to all the best of the future.
Buddy, Hey, pleasure beating you, being able to speak with you. It's an honor. Thanks so much.
Thank you so much for joining me on head Game. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any of our incredible stories, and leave me a review wherever you're listening. I'm Matt Middleton. Catch you again next time.