Anthony Simone doesn’t remember much these days. The effects of a traumatic brain injury are so severe that he refers to his iPod as “my brain.”
But the five men from Pedro 66, he remembers.
In a hallway at Edward Hines Jr. Veterans Affairs Hospital in Hines, he traced the names tattooed on his chest.
Wiz, his fellow pilot. Smitty. Gentz. Flores. White.
Five airmen from Pedro 66, an Air Force combat rescue helicopter, were killed after their aircraft was shot down in Afghanistan in 2010.
Simone, the co-pilot, and Christopher Aguilera, the aerial gunner, survived.
They don’t need Memorial Day to remember. Every day is Memorial Day.
“I knew them. I loved them. I would do anything for them,” said Simone, who now lives in Joliet. “I still pray for them every night.”
This weekend, for the first time since the 2010 crash, Simone, 32, will take part in Memorial Day parades, riding on floats in his native southeastern Pennsylvania.
Growing up under a flight traffic pattern in tiny Jonestown, “That’s all he wanted to do was fly something,” said his father, Dave Simone.
Simone graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, became a commercial pilot, then enlisted in the Air Force. He met his wife, Andrea, who grew up in Joliet, through mutual friends. They were married a week after she graduated from Loyola University Chicago.
When Simone finished flight training, he was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, home of the 66th Rescue Squadron, where he attained the rank of captain.
Simone flew a Pave Hawk helicopter, picking up the wounded — military members and civilians — in isolated spots, often behind enemy lines. Leaving Andrea behind with their infant son, he deployed twice to Iraq, then in 2010 was sent to Afghanistan.
“It was pretty heated in Afghanistan in the Helmand valley,” said Lt. Col. Daniel Duffy, commander of the 66th Rescue Squadron. Pedro 66 was flying rescue missions every day, sometimes several a day.
On June 9, the squadron’s helicopter was shot down as it approached Forward Operating Base Jackson in Helmand province to pick up a critically wounded British marine.
Though a maneuver called autorotation could have put the helicopter into a kind of controlled crash, the pilot — Aguilera remembers Simone being at the controls at that moment — instead steered away from the base to avoid coming down on the troops below. The helicopter crashed a half-mile away.
Four men were killed immediately: Staff Sgt. David Smith, flight engineer; 1st Lt. Joel Gentz, combat rescue officer; and pararescuemen Senior Airman Benjamin White and Tech. Sgt. Michael Flores.
Pilot Capt. David Wisniewski — “Wiz” to his colleagues — and Simone suffered severe traumatic brain injuries. Aguilera suffered multiple injuries and fractures, and burns over 50 percent of his legs.
Wisniewski died 23 days later at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
Simone, whose skull had to be partly removed to ease swelling of the brain, was flown to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where his family, including baby Will with Andrea, gathered.
He was in a coma for six weeks. When he awoke, he couldn’t speak or respond to commands, and could barely move.
“He had to start from the beginning, like a baby learning to speak again,” Andrea Simone said. “He would say something, and to him it was a word, but it wasn’t to us.”
Simone faced a lengthy rehabilitation, and the outcome was unclear. But those around him also faced a fearsome task.
Someone had to tell him that five fellow airmen — including two he had flown and lived with during their entire 31/2-month deployment — had died in the crash he had survived.
“We waited till he was out of his coma and started to get coherent,” said his father, Dave Simone, a former Marine. “We didn’t want to traumatize him.
“We said, ‘Tony, the other survivor is right above you,'” he said. Aguilera was in the same hospital, a floor above Simone.
On a pad he was using to communicate, Anthony Simone wrote, “What do you mean?”
“I said, ‘Tony, there’s five gone,'” his father said.
His son simply looked at him.
His family wasn’t sure how much he understood, and how much his reaction had been affected by the brain injury.
“He wanted to cry, but he just could not,” said Jeanne Simone, Tony’s mother. “Since his injury, Tony has not been able to really show emotion like he wants to. He’ll say to you, ‘I want to cry; I feel like I should be crying. But I just can’t.'”
As soon as he learned about the crash, his father said, Anthony Simone worried that he was somehow responsible. “He thought he did something wrong as a pilot,” Dave Simone said.
He still sometimes blames himself.
“I think I was the one flying, not Wiz. So basically it was all my fault,” Anthony Simone said during a recent physical therapy session at Hines. Even though he knows he did everything possible to avert harm, he said, he sometimes feels responsible.
But it was neither pilot’s fault, said commander Duffy, who at the time was director of operations at Nellis Air Force Base.
“They did absolutely nothing wrong,” he said. “In fact, their actions probably saved more people on the ground.”
“If we had autorotated, we would have killed Pedro 67 (the other helicopter on the mission), probably ourselves and about 20 Marines on the ground,” Aguilera said.
Simone is haunted by the role of chance.
Wisniewski was sitting where Simone ordinarily sat. As the pilot in command, he was training Simone for the leadership role. As he had done on other flights during their deployment, Wisniewski had put Simone in the pilot’s seat on the right side while he had taken the co-pilot’s seat on the left.
“I should be dead now, but I’m not,” Simone said. “I’m standing here talking to you.”
The four men based at Nellis — Simone, Wisniewski, Smith and Aguilera — had been scheduled to come home a week earlier. But their replacement crew’s airlift had been delayed, so their deployment was extended another week.
Aguilera underwent 21 surgeries, and after a grueling rehabilitation deployed to Africa. He returned in April and remains on active duty at Nellis. Last week, he learned he has to have one of his legs amputated
“It’s not easy, saying to yourself, ‘Why did I survive, and why did five of my brothers die?'” he said. “Some of those guys had children, brand-new babies.
“Why was I chosen to go on and be the most healthy one? I look at Anthony Simone and say, ‘Anthony Simone should be in my position.'”
Simone’s parents attended Wisniewski’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery. “It was bittersweet,” Dave Simone said. “Because our son survived, and theirs didn’t.
“You could think it to death, why God took five and left two here. I have no idea. I have no idea.”
Some families of the those involved in the crash have stayed in touch.
“We knew there was going to be survivor guilt even before we met these guys. How could there not be?” said Judy Gentz, Joel Gentz’s mother.
She and her husband, who live in Grass Lake, Mich., are psychiatric nurse practitioners. Her husband has worked in a Michigan VA hospital for 25 years.
“We hold no anger, no blame,” she said. “It’s been very important to our family that Tony and Aggie (Aguilera) know we are happy there were survivors; that they can, in a way, represent that whole crew.”
Simone and his family moved to Joliet two years ago to be near Andrea’s parents. He spends several days a week in therapy at Hines.
A surgically implanted titanium plate covers his skull; beneath his short-cropped hair, the scar runs from one ear over the top of his head to the other. One of his big toes had to be amputated because of burn damage and infection.
He has trouble with memory and decision-making. He has limited use of the left side of his body and none in his left arm. Nerve and brain damage has left him with a nasal, monotonal voice. His balance is poor, and it takes so much effort for him to walk that he gets quickly winded.
Even so, in November Simone walked up the stairs to the top of the Willis Tower in the Skyrise Chicago fundraiser for the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. His father walked behind him. It took him 21/2 hours.
In addition to 3-year-old Will, Anthony and Andrea Simone have a 9-month-old daughter, Avery.
“She’s our revenge,” Andrea Simone said. “She wasn’t supposed to be here.”
Most of the recovery from a brain injury comes in the first year. Simone is still making progress: In physical therapy the other day, he managed the challenge of putting on his sunglasses while standing up. But radical improvement is unlikely.
Simone wryly acknowledges his reality with phrases he has embroidered on the baseball caps he collects obsessively: “Titanium Cranium,” “one-armed, 7/9 brained, 9-toed” and “Semper Gumby” — a play on the Marine motto, but this one meaning, “Always Flexible.”
The crash of Pedro 66 was the deadliest for Air Force personnel at war in more than five years. All the airmen were awarded the Purple Heart and air medals.
The 66th Rescue Squadron has retired the helicopter’s call sign. “There will not be another Pedro 66,” Duffy said.
Three streets at Nellis Air Force Base will be renamed Wisniewski, Smith and Pedro 66. Two streets at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona have been renamed for Flores and White, who were based there.
In the Memorial Day parades this weekend, Simone will ride a float he asked his parents to make bearing the names Wisniewski, Smith, Gentz, Flores and White.
Simone doesn’t always remember his Joliet address.
But the fallen men of Pedro 66, he’ll never forget.
