EP-3E crewmembers hold vivid
memories of ordeal in China
By Jennifer H. Svan, Stars
and Stripes
Jason Carter / Stars and Stripes
EP-3E crewmember Lt Patrick Honeck hugs his family at an April 14 a huge homecoming
celebration at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, Wash. |
Despite breakfasting at the White House and eating hot dogs with the
owner of the New York Yankees, the EP-3E crew still firmly recalls the pig intestines and
fish heads they were served in China.
More members of the 24-person crew return to duty Friday, some for
the first time since the March 31 midair collision that thrust them into the international
limelight. A welcome-back ceremony is planned for eight of the soldiers from Misawa Air
Base, Japan, Friday at the Naval Security Group Activity.
Their Aries II surveillance plane — which landed on Chinese soil
after being butted and damaged in midair by a Chinese F-8 fighter jet — also
apparently will be allowed to leave China in one piece after weeks of wrangling.
Crewmembers have been pursued, feted and flattered. Their phones rang
off the wall, and their families woke to find reporters camped out on the front lawn.
Diane Sawyer came to their doors.
But weeks of rest and relaxation and celebrity status haven’t
erased 12 days of captivity in China, when the crew wondered why they hadn’t been
released to U.S. officials. For Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Ramon Mercado Jr., it started
when he looked out his window to see the Chinese pilot fly under the EP-3 wing and
“tried popping up.”
“His tail hit our No.1 propeller — the first engine on the
port side. From there, he shot forward, hit our nose," he recalled. “The
[second] collision popped us to the right and then to the left.”
The deafening noise still lingers in the ears of Navy Lt. Patrick
Horneck, 31.
“There was a lot of crunching, a couple of thumps.”
The second collision cracked the bulkhead underneath the nose cone,
he said. Wind rushed through the torn fuselage into the cabin.
“We had to yell among each other to communicate. It was
definitely a moment of fear,” he said. The midair tangle could have been deadly if
not for the Navy plane’s detachable nose, which broke off.
“If it had been a one-piece frame, we would have been a
fireball,” Mercado said. “We were just very lucky.”
But it didn’t feel lucky at the time. The plane plunged almost
upside down toward the South China Sea.
“I was by the window. All I saw was water,” Mercado said.
“I was terrified. My biggest fear is crashing in a plane or drowning.”
The pilot, Lt. Shane Osborn, and co-pilot Lt. j.g. Jeffrey Vignery,
righted the plane after an 8,000-foot vertical descent. The plane had lost power in two of
its four engines and had few working controls, Horneck said. Some crewmembers, who had
hastily strapped on their parachutes in case they had to bail out, didn't realize until
they were on solid ground that the plane had landed safely.
The plane touched down at Lingshui military base on Hainan island,
about 60 miles from the collision. As the Chinese swarmed the aircraft, the crew felt the
fear of the unknown.
“We didn’t know if they were going to physically abuse us,
mentally abuse us, or how long we were going to be there,” Horneck said.
The first three days, the crew spent at the humid, tropical and
mosquito-infested Lingshui military base, surrounded by rice paddies. They stayed in
Chinese military officer quarters, primitive by American standards, split two to a room,
the three women to a room, and Osborn by himself. They were allowed to move about freely
on the upstairs floor of the building.
The beds were stiff — like sleeping on a box spring and piece of
plywood covered with a sheet, Horneck said. The rooms had a small living room with wooden
furniture.
The toilet was a hole in the ground. The shower flowed from a nozzle
on the wall into a drain on the floor. The rooms were air-conditioned, but “we had to
keep the doors open to keep the smell from the bathroom [from] getting overwhelming,”
Horneck said.
The water was shut off during the day, but the Chinese provided
bottled water for drinking during the day.
“We don’t know if it was water conservation or what,”
Horneck said.
Soap, shampoo and a small pack of detergent were provided.
Undergarments were hand-washed in the sink and hung up to dry in the rooms. The
crewmembers washed their uniforms about seven or eight days later, Horneck said.
In their rooms they wore what Mercado described as “almost like
a basketball uniform” with an adidas logo, provided by the Chinese. One or two guards
kept vigil in the hallway.
“They were respectful. I wasn't fearful of them,” Mercado
said.
The soldiers passed time playing cards and sleeping. They were
summoned in the middle of the night for interrogation.
The Chinese wanted information from the EP-3 crew, but never exerted
physical force, Horneck said. They tried to psychologically break down the crew’s
resolve.
“They would start with some topic that was benign, like your
name and rank, then what you did on the plane,” he said.
The crew was allowed to receive e-mails from home. Horneck, though,
was told he didn’t get any.
“It was a tactic they used to try and break up the crew,”
he said, “to get some people thinking, ‘Why are some of these guys getting
e-mails from families, and I’m not getting anything?’ It was an example of the
mental tricks they tried to play on us. They knew we were really tight as a crew.”
Almost from the beginning, Osborn was isolated from the group.
“Because he was the mission commander, they thought he had the
most information to give,” Horneck said. “When he stopped giving anything, they
tried to use isolation techniques to get information out of him.”
The group fought back.
One day Osborn was taken for an interrogation and didn't reappear for
a long time, Horneck said. The crew officers protested with a hunger strike, refusing to
eat until they could see Osborn.
“We told them our crew integrity was just as important as
eating,” Horneck said.
The Chinese appeared to be alarmed by the officers’ behavior,
Horneck said.
The Chinese insisted Osborn was OK and brought higher-ranking
officials to convince the group to eat. By this time it was late at night, and the
officers had skipped dinner.
“After a lot of arguing, they let us go down and see
Shane,” Horneck said. “Initially, they told us they had taken him far away. It
turned out the whole time he was right down below us in another room. He was asleep when
we went down there and had two guards with him.”
The U.S. officers asked to eat with Osborn. The Chinese said if the
pilot did join them, he would have to sit alone and would not be allowed to communicate.
“He sat down at the table with us; we ate and were talking to
him,” Horneck said. “Somebody passed a watch to him, because he was complaining
he didn’t know what time it was.”
“Initially, I don’t think anybody on the crew thought
[about] what a big deal it was going to turn into,” Horneck. The United States
“has a fairly good relationship with China. We thought we’d be turned over to
our folks, who would bring our plane out, and we'd be flying missions again.”
That belief was shattered on Day Three of captivity, when the crew
was transferred to Haiku, a northern city on the island with a military and civilian
airfield. Traveling down a freeway, the Americans noticed exit signs in English for the
airport. They thought they were going to be released.
“When we ended up in a hotel in Haiku, it was a big
downer,” Horneck said.
Horneck said he believes the group was moved closer to dignitaries
and other American officials who had flown to the island to speak with the crew.
The soldiers were given plenty of food, but it wasn’t
particularly pleasing to their American palates: rice, noodles and
“questionable” meat, Horneck said. Fish heads were served at first, as were pig
parts, such as stomach lining.
“Eventually, they realized we weren't into fish heads,”
Horneck said. “We started getting Spam and a lot of vegetables.”
Mercado said he liked the beef and jalapenos.
“We had a lot of eggs, sometimes fried, sometimes
hard-boiled,” he said.
The crew staged a second but unsuccessful hunger strike that lasted a
few days to protest being unable to communicate except during mealtimes.
The Chinese didn’t budge, Horneck said.
Some crewmembers lost weight, while others became ill, Horneck said.
“We had people with all different types of medical
problems,” Horneck said. “Some from the shock of the event, some from food, some
from random things.
“One of the females had a really bad headache for four days. We
worried she might have gotten a concussion in the accident,” Horneck said.
China and the United States finally ended their standoff over whom
was to blame for the collision, and the soldiers were released. After two days of
debriefing, they came home to anxious family members and a public eager to hear more about
their ordeal — and a media chomping at the bit to feed that curiosity.
Mercado, who was responsible for all the electronic, communication
and navigational equipment aboard the EP-3, was on his last air mission March 31 before
his next assignment. After four years at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, Wash., he's
headed to San Diego, where he’ll be an instructor in his field.
He’s had three weeks of convalescent leave to digest what’s
happened to him.
“Of course, I wished it never happened,” he said.
“It's going to affect me for the rest of my life: the thought in the back of my head
that I almost died in a plane crash. Flying is what I do all the time. It’s in my
mind now that I have a pretty risky job.”
But he doesn’t plan to give it up.
“I love my job.”
Horneck doesn’t know when his next surveillance mission will be.
“That depends on how we’re going to treat China in the
future,” he said.
Whenever the time comes for Horneck to step inside the cockpit,
he’ll be ready. He’s not the least bit afraid to fly, and there’s been no
nightmares.
“I don’t have any problem going back out and doing the same
mission again,” he said, adding this caveat: “I don’t know what I’ll
feel like if an airplane pulls up to me like that again.”
Back to May stories
Page Two news roundup
Stories from April, 2001
Stories from March, 2001
Stories from February,2001
Stories from January, 2001
Stories from December, 2000
Stories from November, 2000
Stories from October, 2000
Stories from August and September, 2000
Stories from June and July, 2000
Home |
