As he plummeted through the air toward the ocean below, Gary McGuire fought to fix a broken parachute. A routine training mission can go haywire in an instant for Air Force pararescuemen, and this was one of those moments. “I think the guy responsible for packing our chutes was hung over or something,” McGuire said. He deployed his reserve chute, but it became tangled in the first. McGuire heard both canopies “pop like a towel” as he fell faster toward the water. He survived by striking the ocean feet first, knifing through the surface. McGuire joined the Air Force in January 1972, following in the footsteps of his father, who served as a combat medic, and two older brothers who earned Purple Hearts in Vietnam. Already a civilian scuba diver, he volunteered for pararescue after learning training with parachuting, diving and mountain rescue. Earning the maroon beret meant enduring underwater swims on a single breath, mile-long swims, relentless exercises and training in some of the most unforgiving terrain instructors could find. McGuire later served at Fairchild Air Force Base and in Okinawa, where his duties included preparing for a possible Skylab capsule recovery and supporting missions involving the SR-71 Blackbird. Pararescuemen trained for the same conditions they might face on an actual rescue, regardless of the danger. The jump that nearly killed McGuire occurred during a training exercise. “We trained just like the real McCoy,” he said. That training prepared McGuire for the kind of mission he later faced in the South China Sea, where he and his partner, Randy McCullough, searched for survivors after a ship sank during a hurricane. The crew followed a trail of debris before McCullough spotted a patch of yellow in the water. It was an overturned life raft. “There was no rescue that day,” McGuire said. Not every mission ends in a successful rescue. Many do not. But this mission showed why pararescue has one of the most difficult training pipelines and highest attrition rates in the military. Pararescuemen are expected to enter the worst conditions imaginable, even when there is no guarantee anyone can still be saved. McGuire said the job carried a one-word description: hero. But he never thought of himself that way. “You don’t feel heroic at all,” McGuire said. “You just feel like, you know, I’m getting up and going to work today, and you don’t know what that’s going to hold.” Decades later, as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, McGuire said Americans cannot change what happened before their lifetimes, but they are responsible for what they leave behind. “The only thing you can do is be responsible for what you do while you’re alive,” he said. “If you can make things better than they were before, then you’ve been at least moderately successful.” For McGuire, that means remaining committed to the country’s ideals, even when it falls short of them. “Work every day toward making a more perfect union,” he said. “As long as we’re doing that, we’ve got a chance.”