Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
In a 1955 snowstorm, one man jumped from 10,000 feet to lighten a plane and save three officers.
By MATTHEW WAITE
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 29, 2001
HOLIDAY -- Standing face to face with an Air Force general, John Horan received a medal on Monday -- Memorial Day -- for an act of heroism nearly 46 years ago.
The two saluted while the national anthem played outside the VFW Club on Bartelt Road in Holiday. Gen. Gary Heckman attached the Soldier's Medal, honoring valor in the armed services during peacetime, to Horan's Veterans of Foreign Wars Honor Guard uniform.
There were no words, no speeches. Horan, 69, of Palm Harbor honestly didn't think the day would come when he was recognized for what he did.
He had gone through most of his life satisfied that he was alive, and three other men were alive, because of what he did.
"Time has passed," Horan said Monday. "It was over 45 years ago. That's taken the edge off it."
It was December 1955, not long after Sgt. Horan had returned to the United States from Army service in Korea. He had met his first wife in Japan, and she was coming on a Navy ship into Seattle. So he began hitching rides on Air Force planes from Fort Bragg, N.C., where he was stationed with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team.
The last leg, from Moses Lake, Wash., over the Cascade Mountains and into Seattle on Dec. 18, put him on a C-45 light transport plane with an Air Force major and two lieutenants.
As they flew through a snowstorm, the wings began to ice over, and the wing de-icers weren't working. The plane started to get heavy, slowing down and losing altitude. They needed to lose some weight or the plane was going to crash.
Horan, a paratrooper by training, already had a parachute on and looked at the Air Force officers, specifically their shoes. Black shiny dress shoes, compared with his jump boots.
"Did you ever jump before?" Horan asked one of the lieutenants.
"No."
"I don't think you'll make it," Horan said. "Let me jump."
And with no further ado, Horan opened the door and lunged out into a snowstorm. The plane lightened up just enough for the others to turn around and make it back to Moses Lake.
This jump was anything but routine for Horan. It was his 29th, but his first free fall. He jumped from 10,000 feet, far higher than paratroopers normally jump from.
And it was snowing. Blinding white snow unlike any the Massachusetts native had ever seen.
Once he could see the ground, Horan steered clear of massive Douglas fir that would mean death if he got hung up in them, and aimed for a clearing.
"It was about the best jump I ever had," Horan said, remembering his descent. "It was like landing in a marshmallow."
But what made for a soft landing almost killed him during the next four days.
Horan started walking in jump boots -- thin, leather boots never meant for trudging through waist-deep snow. He relied on his training. Every hour, he would stop, take his boots off, put his socks under his armpits to warm them up and rub his feet, forcing blood through his nearly frozen toes.
A day after he landed in the mountains, Horan found an abandoned cabin. After breaking in, he took his boots off to find his feet frozen.
"I knew they were frozen," he said when he first saw them. "I never really thought they were frozen (before seeing them), maybe because I couldn't feel them."
Horan knew that frozen flesh would eventually kill him. He had to get out, and had to somehow keep his feet out of the snow.
For more than a day, Horan stayed in the cabin, trying to build snowshoes. He tried using cedar shingles from the roof tied to his boots. They broke under his weight.
Then he used an old inner tube from a tire. He cut it up, tied it to his boots, and into the snow he sank.
On his third day in the wilderness -- Dec. 20 -- Horan found a shelf from the icebox in the cabin. He found another, tied them to his shoes, and started walking.
They worked. He wasn't waist-deep in snow.
"It was still a foot, but at least I wasn't wading in it," he said.
For the rest of the day, through the night, into his fourth day and on into the afternoon, he walked.
"It was easy to freeze to death," he said. "I knew if I lay down, I would never get back up."
In the evening, Horan came upon another cabin. Two men walked out, going to get more firewood. When they saw Horan, they knew who he was -- the whole area knew the military was looking for him.
The two men took him in, and not long after, a doctor friend pulled up to the cabin to put chains on his truck before continuing his trip into the pass. The doctor immediately started to care for Horan.
"He gave me a hot cup of tea," Horan said. "It was the best cup of tea I ever had."
Horan was taken to a nearby hospital, and would, for the next 11 months, stay in one Army hospital or another.
Doctors waited to see whether Horan's feet would recover. They never did. All 10 toes were eventually amputated, and Horan had to learn to walk again.
"And I never caught a cold through the whole thing," he said.
Horan would be discharged from the Army, go on to have children and grandchildren, and retire from the U.S. Postal Service in Massachusetts. He moved to Florida in 1990.
Four months ago, Jack Kennedy, the captain of the Honor Guard at the VFW in Holiday and a former colonel in the Army, heard a friend of Horan's tell the story.
"That's Soldier's Medal material," Kennedy said Monday, recalling hearing the story.
Kennedy asked Horan about it, and asked whether it was okay if he petitioned the Army for the medal.
Three months later, the medal was approved.
"John deserves it," Kennedy said. "He should have gotten it a long time ago."
Horan is more humble about the experience.
"A lot of people have asked me over the years why I didn't get a medal," he said. "I don't know. I was alive. They were alive, the other people. That's all I cared about."
- Staff writer Matthew Waite can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6247 or (800) 333-7505, ext. 6247.