In summer of 2021, my daughter Katie and her husband, Dom, told us us that Dom would soon be suspending his Air Force Reserve duty to reactivate for the Kabul evacuation.
As a C17 pilot, Dom would be returning to active duty to fly transport jets in our US evacuation from Afghanistan.
I was enthusiastic about Dom’s acceptance of that mission. I encouraged him with the assurance that it would be a job— long time coming— that needed to be done.
In August, 2021 Major Dom and his USAirForce crew delivered 116 soldiers of the 82nd Airborne and its leadership to Kabul airport, to defend the air field during the evacuation. Hours later, he and copilot Lt. Kyle Anderson piloted our first evacuation flight out of Kabul airport. That fateful day was August 15, 2021.
But there was a problem.
Upon landing at Kabul on the previous night, the crew discovered that the runway had been breeched. There were unexpected, unauthorized people out there. Their presence was an unwelcomed threat. In their surprise, our crew had no way of knowing if the trespassers were armed and/or dangerous. Nor did the two pilots know if they could effectively perform a takeoff without danger to their own crew, the aircraft, and the trespassers themselves.
As our crew learned later, those people were desperate to escape the Taliban. They had been congregating in darkness along the runway, hoping to get a place on a big jet to fly out of Afghanistan.
In spite of efforts by our ground personnel to contain them, some of those unauthorized evacuees managed to sneak out there onto the runway that night and continued to do so the next day.
This was no small problem for a big transport jet mounting up speed on a runway. With takeoff speed mounting, that dangerous “breech”—people— on the runway suddenly required manuevers that the pilots had never before performed, feats of aircraft control that Dom had not thought possible. But that day’s sudden security breech— real, live, people— demanded that sudden, improvised extraordinary feats be performed with the controls of that a big C-17.
Even so, intensely thorough Air Force training had prepared pilot and crew to make the best of the situation, as they strove, skilfully, to get airborne into the wild blue yonder.
But, praise God, flight Commander Dom and his crew managed to get airborne with 153 passengers who were delivered safely to Qatar three hours later. They thus completed not only the mission they had been given - but much more beyond. It was the first non-combatant evacuation flight of what would become a two-week endeavor by the US military to evacuate as many people as possible from Afghanistan.
By late afternoon, EST of 16 Aug—insofar as my wife can recall dates and times— our daughter Katie had reported in a phone conversation that Dom had said something about “the most difficult day of his life.”
At Travis Air Force base, April 1, 2022, Lt. Colonel Dominic Calderon, my son-in-law, received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Also receiving the award were his crew. Pictured here, Dom is standing on the right. Behind him is Copilot, 1st Lieutenant Kyle Anderson. Standing with them next to the C17 picture is Staff Sergeant Dennis J. Gonzalez-Furman of 437th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, who served as Crew Chief, performing aircraft maintainence tasks. On the left side, standing next to the picture is loadmaster Master Sergeant Silva J. Foster, with loadmaster Senior Airman Michael Alan Geller on the far left.
The Distinguished Flying Cross Medal is awarded to any officer or enlisted person for heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight.
The award was authorized by an Act of Congress in 1926.
In receiving the award, these airmen joined the ranks of nine other historic aviators, including Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post and the Wright brothers.
Together with the the crews of more than 200 later evacuating flights, they performed the mission that had been assigned to them.
They got the job done: a flying in the dark, no walk in the park.
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