Eight tours of duty, substituting for someone else, Chuch Isaacson's life changed

Soldier, wife seek return to normal life a year after devastating crash
Jason Smathers — 8/17/2008 2:57 pm

SUN PRAIRIE -- For Chuck Isaacson, each day gets a little closer to normal.

To demonstrate, he bends forward in his wheelchair, his upper body coming to rest at a 45-degree angle, as he slowly rights himself.

"If I had tried that before, I would have just fallen to the floor," he said.

Isaacson and his wife, Brenda, realize he has a long way to go. They also know he has come a long way already. Especially considering how close he came to death.

On Feb. 18, 2007, Brenda was waiting for a phone call from Chuck, a National Guard staff seargent stationed in Afghanistan. It was part of Chuck's daily routine to call his wife, but this day was special -- it was the couple's second wedding anniversary.

But when the phone rang, it wasn't the call Brenda expected. Instead of her husband on the other end of the line, it was the Army, giving her the jarring news that Chuck had been involved in a serious accident.

Chuck Isaacson, 28, enlisted in the Wisconsin National Guard as a wheel mechanic in February 1997, just months before graduating from Wisconsin Rapids Lincoln High School. After five years of Guard service, Isaacson enlisted in the Army in September 2002. He was assigned to a unit in Fort Campbell, Ky., where he was re-classed as helicopter repair specialist.

His unit served seven tours of duty in Afghanistan and one tour in Iraq. Isaacson served as a back-ender in most of these flights, where he performed checks and inspections on the plane while in flight.

"When you're flying in a combat zone, there's always inherent risk in that," Isaacson said. "Anything's possible."

Yet during his eight tours of duty, he had never been in any crashes, nor any life-threatening situations.

But when Isaacson finally found himself in trouble, it couldn't have happened at a worse time. In addition to it being his anniversary, the accident came five days before he was scheduled to return home, to a house he and Brenda had just bought three months earlier.

And it came on a day when he wasn't even scheduled to fly.

After substituting for another member of his crew, Isaacson and 21 others took off from a base in southern Afghanistan in a Chinook helicopter. The crew had been cleared for takeoff, and had no warning of unfavorable weather conditions ahead. Soon, the Chinook was in the middle of a snowstorm.

"I've spent close to 700 hours flying around in Afghanistan and Iraq and this was probably the worst storm I've ever encountered," Isaacson recalled in an interview at his apartment on Friday.

When the helicopter started taking on ice, it lowered its altitude. One of the aircraft's engines unexpectedly shut off and the helicopter plummeted to the ground, crashing only 50 yards away from the Kabul-Khandahar highway.

"I remember falling from the sky. I don't remember the crash and I remember lying out there for three hours," Isaacson said. "After that, I don't remember anything for about four days."

The crash claimed the lives of eight members of the crew, and injured the other 14. It took three hours for medical help to arrive.
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