It was Sunday, quiet and mild aside from the two Ospreys' dual rotors thrumming the chests of the Marines packed inside. The sortie was just over a mile away from its objective -- an airfield the troops aboard were meant to seize -- located on a sparsely populated island north of Australia's mainland.
The flight on Aug. 27, 2023, was part of a routine training exercise with the Australian military. It came weeks before the Marines' rotation to the Pacific was set to end. Lima Company was tasked with seizing two airfields on Melville Island, and Capt. Joshua Watson was in charge of leading the 38 Marines aboard the two Ospreys to their objective, which was nicknamed "Cheetah."
Watson, then a first lieutenant and executive officer for Lima Company, was in one of the aircraft, call sign Dumptruck-12, which trailed behind the lead Osprey. He was keyed into the aircraft's intercom, listening to the chatter from its crew as it approached its final descent to the objective, not knowing what awaited him and his Marines in the coming seconds.
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The pilots and crew chief were "calm, cool and collected," he said, even as the two Ospreys nearly collided, causing the fuel-heavy aircraft he was in to bank dramatically -- once, twice, three times, before it began to plummet nose-down.
"I didn't have any thought or indication that something was going wrong until I heard 'brace for impact,'" Watson said in an interview with Military.com on Thursday. He relayed the signal to the Marines in the troop cabin -- they were going to crash.
The impending tragedy would prove fatal to the three aircrew: Both pilots, Capt. Eleanor LeBeau and Maj. Tobin Lewis died, crash-landing the Osprey in a way that would allow the 20 other passengers on board to survive, Watson said.
"They didn't give up," he said. "They flew the aircraft all the way to the ground, and I truly owe my life to them, and I wouldn't be here ... and you can say the same for 19 others."
Cpl. Spencer Collart, the crew chief, survived the initial impact but returned to the burning wreckage in an attempt to save the pilots at the cost of his own life. He was posthumously awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal last year, the service's highest noncombat award for acts of valor.
"[It's] hard to believe, but he got [the full company of] 108 infantry Marines excited about going to ride on a V-22 and execute a mission on a Sunday, just the way he presented himself and carried himself was awesome," Watson said of Collart, describing him as having an "absolute phenomenal attitude."
Watson, an infantry officer at the time, also earned that same award for his actions in the aftermath of the crash, for which he was honored in a ceremony Feb. 28.
Lewis, who took control of the aircraft in the moments before it crashed, gripped the controls with both hands, pulling back on the cyclic in an attempt to level the Osprey out and slow its speed into the trees, which Marines later said were getting closer and closer as a stall warning blared into the troop cabin amid the perilous descent.
"And after I heard 'brace for impact,'" Watson said, "it was about three to five seconds later and we were on the ground."
The Osprey hit the ground in Melville Island's jungle forest before skidding 200 feet. Trees sheared the aircraft's tail off and the Osprey "burst into a fireball" on impact, according to a subsequent mishap investigation.
"I'm alive" was Watson's first thought post-impact. It was fleeting as he absorbed the chaos around him. Smoke, fire and debris filled the cabin as alarms blared -- his ankle was broken. The Marines were in shock; some were unconscious. He saw a light punching through the smoke toward the rear of the aircraft, marking the only exit amid the flames.
"Leave everything and get out the back," he recalled saying in a first-person account of the crash published last month. Watson explained that he unstrapped himself and, as he checked the Marines to his left and right, began tending to his radio operator, who was unconscious.
He pushed the radio operator to the aircraft's rear ramp, ushering other Marines out as he checked under seats and wreckage to make sure no one was trapped. Within two minutes, the Marines in the troop cabin were out of the flames. Watson was the last to leave the cabin.
"I tried to be as deliberate as I could in that moment to make sure that there was no one remaining onboard," he told Military.com. "I had a feeling that I was gonna have one shot to make sure everybody got out due to the nature of the fire in the crash."
Thinking the aircraft might explode, Marines started to scramble away as others worked to free another service member pinned underneath the fuselage of the Osprey. Watson began directing other leaders to control the chaos.
He sent two to sweep the area to make sure they had everyone accounted for. Three Marines were missing -- LeBeau, Lewis and Collart.
Watson assigned two noncommissioned officers and a platoon commander to get the surviving Marines to a casualty collection point, where they began treatment. The corpsman's medical bag was lost in the crash so Marines had to rely on sparse individual first aid kits, or IFAKs, to tend to casualties.
Watson radioed to the section of AH-1Z and UH-Y1 helicopters circling above, which had accompanied the Ospreys on their flight. The helicopters couldn't land because the forest was too dense. While coordinating higher-level casualty care, Watson directed the remaining Marines to move the injured more than a mile away to their intended airfield.
"He guided multiple rescue helicopters into position and facilitated the insertion of several medical teams," a news release announcing Watson's award said. "Watson was the last Marine to recover and transport to Royal Australian Air Force Base Darwin, where he and his Marines received treatment for their injuries."
Watson said that, from day one, accountability is drilled into every Marine officer's head. When he signed his original contract to join the Marine Corps in 2016, he did so with the intention of flying himself. But when he went to The Basic School, where new officers are trained, he switched to infantry.
"You fall to your level of training, you don't rise to the occasion," he said. "I one hundred percent felt that."
Watson has "come full circle," he said, now being stationed at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, where he is a flight student and slated to fly rotary-wing aircraft. It was at Pensacola where he received the award for valor late last month.
In his interview and written reflections, Watson asserted that training and preparation were critical to his and his Marines' success in the chaotic scenario. Communication, accountability, rehearsals, equipment inspections -- tasks that can occur well before takeoff -- proved crucial and life-saving in hindsight.
"There's no book answer for a lot of these questions," he said. "But [it was] training, experience and the trust in everyone that really got us to the answers."
