299 Days: The Preparation

Chapter 2 What a Beret Can Do for a Loser

Civil Air Patrol (CAP) was the Air Force auxiliary. They had a cadet program for high school kids. Back in those days, CAP was responsible for much of the search and rescue for small civilian planes. With all the mountains around Forks and the rest of western Washington, they had plenty of work. CAP also provided military training like drilling and basic Junior ROTC kinds of things. The Air Force and the other military branches got a lot of recruits out of CAP. It was the best way a high school kid could see if the military life was for him or her.

And, for a sheepdog like Grant, CAP was heaven. They actually went out and rescued people in plane crashes. What could be better for a sheepdog than that?

Steve Briggs joined the tiny Forks squadron of CAP because he wanted to go into the military when he graduated from high school. Steve told Grant all about how cool it was: getting to fly in planes and occasionally helicopters, wearing military uniforms, saluting, getting to go out in the woods and looking for crashed airplanes.

“We spend almost every weekend training,” Steve told Grant. Weekends away from home—Grant was in.

Grant learned the basics of military culture. He learned how to salute and how rank worked. He learned about uniforms. He also learned the bare basics of how a military unit operated, which would be very valuable later.

Pretty quickly, Grant became the cadet squadron commander of the Forks squadron. He was really good at motivating people and making them want to be around him. He treated each and every cadet like a valued member of the team. Fellow “losers” felt especially at ease around him because he could see their potential and figure out a way for each of them to shine. Grant managed to get the very best out of people.

His first role in search and rescue was “base support.” CAP operated out of little air civilian airfields where their small Cessna search planes would go out and look for the crashed plane. Cadets couldn’t fly the planes; adult CAP volunteers did that. Since CAP was so small, every search team member needed to know just about every role. This included fueling small planes and taxiing them. Grant learned this quickly.

Base support also included making sure the aircrews had food and a place to sleep. Grant was an organizational whiz. He would get local restaurants and hotels to donate to the search effort. Another task at the search base was dealing with the press when they were covering a story about an airplane crash. He first got noticed by the CAP leadership for his ability to handle the press at age sixteen. He was a fresh-faced teen in a uniform who would keep the newspaper and occasional TV reporters updated on the status of the search. He artfully dodged questions asking for information that wasn’t public. He was amazingly articulate and mature for a kid.

That was great, but what Grant really wanted was to go out into the woods and actually do the searching. Grant, being a hillbilly kid, was good at the outdoorsy search and rescue parts of CAP. They learned how to survive in the woods, navigate with a compass, use radios, climb rocks and repel down cliffs. Out in the woods, Grant wasn’t a loser. He was a leader. He was rescuing people. He was in his element. His guys loved him.

The CAP cadets were the junior, extremely junior, civilian version of the Air Force pararescue special operations squadrons who would search for crashed military aircraft and crews behind enemy lines. The Air Force searchers were called “PJs” which stood for “parajumpers.” One of the adult CAP officers, Capt. Smithson, was a PJ in Vietnam. Grant and all the other cadets idolized him. CAP cadet searchers were about 1/1,000th as tough or skilled as the Air Force PJs but the fifteen to seventeen year-old CAP cadets convinced themselves they were “just about” PJ material, which was laughable, but harmless.

Grant planned on joining the military. He wanted to try out for the PJs. While that would be very cool, he would be happy doing just about anything as long as it was far from Forks. He went to the nearest “big” town, Port Angeles, and talked to the Air Force recruiter.

He learned that one of the complications from his birth prevented him from joining. He was born without pectoral muscles on the left side of his chest. The pectoral muscle locks the arm in place when it’s lifting or holding a lot of weight. The lack of a pectoral muscle didn’t affect anything in everyday life except that he couldn’t hold heavy things up easily with his left arm, or do pushups or pull ups.

Grant was disappointed that he couldn’t join the military, but he would be fine with just going to college far away so he could become a white collar guy living in a nice house. Anything as long as it wasn’t in Forks.

Another CAP experience shaped Grant and directly contributed to how he handled future big events. During Grant’s senior year of high school, he earned his way, along with Steve, onto the elite statewide CAP search team called Squadron 3. There were six cadets on the team out of the 1,000 or so in the state, although only about a hundred tried out for the team. But still, they were elite. A loser like Grant had never been “elite” before. It was awesome.

While he was pretty good at the search and rescue things like land navigation, he wondered why he got into Squadron 3. There were guys in Squadron 3 who were way better than him at the technical aspects of search and rescue. He asked their commander, the former PJ, Capt. Smithson, what Grant did to get selected for the Squadron 3.

“You remember,” Capt. Smithson asked Grant, “the land navigation final course where your team carried a team member in a stretcher for six miles through the woods?” Capt. Smithson was smiling.

“Yes, sir,” Grant said. He thought for a while but was embarrassed to say what was true. Finally, Grant said, “I was leading the team but I made a wrong turn at the ridge and we came in second. I thought I wouldn’t make the team for that.”

“Oh, yeah, that wasn’t good,” Capt. Smithson said. “I’d forgotten about the wrong turn. But do you remember what you did when you got back to base, Matson?”

“Not really, sir,” Grant said. Then he thought some more.

“Well, I went back out, linked up with the teams that were still running the course and encouraged them.”

Capt. Smithson was smiling even wider then. “Exactly,” he said. “You went back out and motivated the others. You were cracking jokes and getting them focused on getting the job done. That’s why you’re in Squadron 3. You’re a born leader, Matson.”

Later in life, Grant would understand why he went back out to motivate the stragglers. He knew what it was like to come in last and he felt for the guys who didn’t come in first. He wanted all of them to make it across the finish line with their chins up high.

As members of the Squadron 3, they were the only CAP cadets who got to wear a beret and jungle fatigues (like the PJs). At age seventeen, Squadron 3 thought they were the baddest asses on the planet. That beret was the second most important thing to him. The first was his team members.

Grant would do anything for his team members. They would do anything for him. The team was like a gang; one that saves people’s lives, not one that hurts people. It was hard to get in, but once they were in, the teammates had each other’s back. The team would go through a lot together, and they got through it because they helped each other. They shared scarce food out in the woods. They would carry a guy’s gear when he was hurt. Their life was literally in each other’s hands, like when one is climbing a cliff and another teammate has the safety line. They shared victories together like rescuing someone in a plane crash, which Squadron 3 did on more than one occasion. They would do anything—absolutely anything—for their team members. Grant would never forget that feeling. He would have that same feeling decades later with another team.

CAP Squadron 3 was the best thing to happen to Grant up to that point in his life. He was confident. He knew he was good—really good—at something important. He was “elite.” He had respect from his CAP peers. It was the exact opposite of being a loser at Forks High School. Squadron 3 was precisely what Grant needed.