Buena Vista SAR Volunteer Turns 30-Year Air Force Career Into Novels

Gunnison —A Blackhawk helicopter crashes near St. Elmo under suspicious circumstances. That’s the inciting incident in HAVOC, the fifth book in Cam Torrens’ Tyler Zahn series. But for folks living up here, the question isn’t really about the fictional crash site. It’s whether the man writing about it is actually doing the work in our valleys, and if so, how that reality bleeds into the fiction.

Torrens answers that directly. He’s been a volunteer with the Chaffee County Search & Rescue team for seven years. According to the Colorado Sun, he also chairs the board for the Buena Vista Public Library and lives in Buena Vista with his spouse. Before he was a novelist, he was an Air Force officer for thirty years. He piloted the first mobility aircraft into Iraq during the Iraq War and served as the United States air attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He spent four years as a professor of aerospace studies at Virginia Tech.

That background matters because it explains why the protagonist, Tyler Zahn, feels so familiar to locals who know what a SAR callout actually looks like. In the books, Zahn is a middle-aged Air Force veteran who moved to Chaffee County for a fresh start. He wanted a volunteer niche that didn’t involve the type of leadership responsibility he had in the Air Force. He finds his home in search and rescue, but he can’t help getting involved when trouble arises. By HAVOC, Zahn is a deputy reserve sheriff for Chaffee County and still working with Search & Rescue.

Torrens wrote in the Colorado Sun that he didn’t start the series until just before the COVID pandemic. He’s been writing ever since. When asked what drew him to the genre, he used a comparison that stuck with me: “I tell people it’s like saying ‘I’m really good at eating…how hard could it be to learn how to cook?’ Two different things!”

He’s not pretending the transition was seamless. He admits it was harder than he expected. The HAVOC nomination as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in the Mystery/Thriller category was, in his words, “a real honor and an indicator that I’m still learning…and improving!”

For context, the novel is a dual timeline story. One thread follows Zahn in Chaffee County after the crash near St. Elmo. The other jumps back to a mission into Iraq, featuring the helicopter aircrew. Torrens noted that he spent a lot of time in that environment during his career, so the military details aren’t just set dressing. They’re drawn from experience.

Let’s do the math on his local footprint. He’s a father of six. He volunteers with SAR. He sits on the library board in Buena Vista. He’s a neighbor. The fact that he writes about St. Elmo and Chaffee County means the geography in his books is real to people who drive those roads. When Zahn has to prioritize what comes first — his family, his heart, or his civic duties — it’s a tension that resonates in small communities where everyone knows everyone else’s schedule.

Torrens said his experiences with his SAR team have provided enough adventures to fictionalize for years to come. That’s a practical statement, not just a creative one. It means the next book is likely to draw from recent calls, recent weather events, or specific terrain challenges in our mountain ranges.

The practical bottom line for locals is simple: the author lives here, works here, and volunteers here. When you read HAVOC or its successor, Diverted, which came out earlier this fall, you’re reading about the same landscape that shapes your daily commute and your property values. The fiction is grounded in the volunteer work that keeps this county functional when things go wrong up high.