It made sense to the Coasties. CDO Averill walked over to the SAROPS monitor, looked over Jason Rodocker’s shoulder at the area on the screen where the particles were densest, found the midpoint, noted the latitude and longitude, and in effect drew a straight line with his finger from the helicopter’s position east to the boundary of the drift, then four-pointed that line to north and south. The finger drawing produced just what Deal had asked for: a basic trackline search that would take the MH-60 south-southeast through the heart of the search area for ten miles, head it north for ten miles, then veer it north-northwest, boxing off the search and pointing the helicopter toward home on Cape Cod. There’s your pattern, Averill in effect was saying. Fly those positions, check the water within that box for thirty minutes, then fly on home.
“Check the buoys too, if you see any,” Averill suggested. “People like to grab onto things if they can.” The crew of MH-6002 had been thinking the same thing all day: Boy, if I were out here, I’d sure look for something to grab onto.
At 2:46 p.m. they started flying Averill’s line, and it was just a few minutes before three when Ray Jamros saw a red ball, saw the pole of the highflyer above it, and saw what looked to him like an arm waving.
“I see him! I got him!” Jamros shouted. “Mark mark mark!”
That was the signal, delivered at two minutes to three on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 24, 2013, for Mike Deal to punch a button annotating the helicopter’s current position. He did so as Jamros made a hard, quick turn and came into a hover. First from one hundred feet, then from fifty feet above the surface of the water, the four exhausted, bleary-eyed members of the helicopter crew saw the madly waving, water-pounding, probably screaming-his-lungs-out guy in the water and confirmed that they had found their man. “It was,” says Mike Deal, “the greatest feeling in the world.” Fatigue fled. The Coast Guard team was energized and in motion.
Within seconds they had run down the rescue checklist. Rescue swimmer Bob Hovey violated regulations and did not take the time to put on the wetsuit he carries in summer. A licensed emergency medical technician, Hovey knew from experience that the relief that can flood an individual who is on the verge of being rescued can lower the person’s blood pressure so much he may lose consciousness, and he didn’t want to take any more time than absolutely necessary to ready himself. Hovey did switch quickly out of his flight helmet into his swimmer helmet, equipped with mask and snorkel, and he replaced his boots with water shoes over which he fitted his fins.
Hovey also knew that a person in fear of drowning might try to climb onto the rescuer and hold on for dear life, which can endanger both rescuer and the person the rescuer is trying to save. So he mentally ticked off the checklist of combative swimming skills the Coast Guard had trained him in—ancient martial arts for confronting an enemy in the water so you can both slide out of an unwanted clinch and take control of a person who may be breaking down.
Helmeted, finned, but still in his flight suit, Hovey was ready, just waiting now for the helicopter to get into the right position.
Chapter 14
“It’s Over”
2:58 p.m.
The jet that passed me by is long gone. I am back to staring at a faraway helicopter that is looking for me the same way the song says a lot of us look for love—in all the wrong places. The minutes are ticking by, and the day is growing older. Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Thirty minutes. Forty minutes. I’m thinking how I will rope myself to the highflyer in some way so that, if the worst should happen, there will be a body my family can bury. I don’t want to just sink to the bottom and never be found.
I am feeling cold now, and I am a little afraid I may fall asleep. Take a nap and die, I think. So I try hard to stay awake.
I hear again the big thundering sound of the helicopter, and it seems not so far away anymore. It seems to be coming toward me. Actually it is coming toward me. It is coming right down the barrel at me. I throw one boot in the air and start smacking the water with my hands and with the boot. I am splashing, I am waving like crazy, and I am screaming my lungs out. Stupidly. Because who can hear anything in this noise?
Now the helicopter is hovering above me. It is stopped above me. I can read USCG on the bottom of it, and I see a guy peering out the open door on the side of the cabin. They see me!
It’s over. I’m going to be saved. It’s really over now. I take a deep breath—such a deep breath.
The helicopter moves off because the rotor wash is so violent it could plow me under. It hovers even lower, and just as I turn my back, I see the guy harnessed onto the cable and coming down out of the door. I wait for him. He taps me on the shoulder. “Sir,” he says, loud and clear, “I am a Coast Guard rescue swimmer, can you turn around for me?” I do as he asks. I’m looking at him, and I know I have my life back.
I think he asks me if I’m okay, if I’m injured, if I can let go of my boots so they don’t turn into dangerous projectiles.
“Am I okay?” I shout. “Hell, I’ve got two more days left in me.”
But I really don’t, and when the guy tells me, “Sir, we’re in control now. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of everything,” every muscle in my body just unclutches, just eases and lets go. The relief feels like a warm, golden liquid running through every vein and capillary in my whole body, from my brain to my core to my toes and into every fingertip. I’m just limp, only vaguely aware that my boots are floating away.
The swimmer grips me in a body tow around the neck, and I remember the boots.
“My boots!” I say to him. “They saved my life. Can we get them?”
He hesitates maybe a second. “Sure,” and he swims me over, grabs the boots, and hands them to me, then swims me over to the extraction point.
Now the guy is raising his arm, palm inward, signaling to the guy I can see hanging out the side of the helicopter, and the basket is being lowered over the side. “Sir,” my rescuer says to me—never in my life have I been addressed so formally so many times—“we are going to hoist you into the helicopter, and I want to warn you there will be extreme rotor wash that will feel like BBs fired at your face, so turn away from it.” He pauses. “Very important also: keep your arms and legs inside the basket, and when it starts swinging, just relax. The flight mechanic up there will deal with it.”
The basket lands right next to me on the water surface. I’m thinking: Not only is the Coast Guard saving me, but they’re doing it with pinpoint accuracy.
The swimmer rolls me into the basket. “Keep your hands inside no matter how much the basket swings, and just hold on,” he says, and then I am being reeled up. I am blown away because I have been saved, but even so, when I get up above two stories high, swinging in midair in that basket, I have to close my eyes. I don’t ride roller-coasters either.
The next thing I know, the flight mechanic is hauling the basket into the cabin, then is rolling me out of the basket onto my knees. I manage to sit, and the flight mechanic sends the hook back down. I tell the copilot, “Please, you’ve got to call my boat.” He hands me a headset. I hear him telling the command center to try to raise Anthony. “Anna Mary, Anna Mary, come in. This is the Coast Guard.”
“Coast Guard, this is Anna Mary.” It is Anthony’s voice. Unmistakable.
“Anna Mary, we have John Aldridge. He is alive and well.”
“You got him? You got him? He’s alive?”
I can hear the elation and the relief in Anthony. I can even hear the rolling shouts and cheers from captains he is connected to down the line. I have only a headset, so I can’t reply, nor do I have the strength or the will for such a conversation just yet. But it doesn’t matter at all right now.
From the cockpit the copilot tosses me a bottle of water. “You have got some will to live,” he says to me, but I can’t get the water down my throat. My whole mouth feels completely swollen. I seem to be able to talk, however. “I got too many people who love me to die,” I tell the copilot.
Then the sw
immer is back up in the cabin, and we are heading off. I feel great, am totally fired up. I must appear to be completely out of control to these guys, who don’t seem to be able to believe they’re talking to me. They are all my rescuers, and I get their names—Ray and Mike, pilot and copilot working the controls in the cockpit, and back in the cabin with me, blond, bespectacled Ethan, the flight mechanic, and dark-haired Bob, the swimmer who came and got me. “Sorry we can’t get you to Montauk,” Hovey says to me. “We have to take you to Cape Cod.”
I am dehydrated and very cold, and I can feel my swollen, salt-encrusted, burned-to-a-crisp face beaming from ear to ear. “I don’t give a shit where you take me,” I tell them, and the guys laugh. Cape Cod, Cape Hatteras, Cape of Good Hope—any cape or no cape for all I care. I can’t believe what a class act these Coast Guard guys are: they send boats and planes and whatever to pull me out of the water, and then they apologize for not taking me to my front door. I’m alive, I’m saved, I’m going home, I have my whole life back, and I am wild with excitement. Psyched! Psyched to be alive, psyched to be in this helicopter. I’m looking out the window, and I’m answering the questions the guys are asking. The adrenaline is racing through me, but this is a whole other kind of adrenaline—not the kind from twelve hours ago, when I was sure I was going to die and the adrenaline rush was from terror, my heart beating out of my chest in such a scary way. This adrenaline is a rush of euphoria. It is intense, and it is not subsiding. I feel so good.
The guys are asking me questions about what happened and what it was like to be in the water. “Were you really there for twelve hours?” one of them asks. “Yeah, but you know, it wasn’t so bad,” I hear myself say.
“Do my parents know I fell overboard?” I ask, and when they nod yes, I joke with them, “Fuck!” I say. “My mother is going to kill me!” But what I’m thinking is that anger is not at all what she has been going through. I don’t really want to think about what she and my father have been going through.
“Can I get a selfie?” Hovey asks, bringing my mind back to where I am. I shiver. As sunburned as I am, I feel cold. Somebody wraps me in a blanket, and the copilot, Mike Deal, takes a photo of me. I’m just a guy everybody is hanging out with, and neither they nor I can believe it.
We’re coming into the Coast Guard air station at Cape Cod, and I see an ambulance on the tarmac. There are maybe a dozen Coasties standing in a formation, and there is another stack of people over on the left. This is my first inkling that my disappearance has had a wider impact than on just me and Anthony.
I put my boots on so I don’t have to carry them when we land, but the truth is, I cannot walk. The skin on the inside of my thighs is rubbed raw from sitting on the rope, and my leg muscles, understandably, are on strike. The crew that saved me grabs me under the arms and walks me to the ambulance. Cameras click, lights flicker, and then I am on my back in the ambulance, where they tell me that my core temperature is 94—no wonder I’m cold.
I am wheeled into the hospital entrance, into an area that is like the triage room, and the place is chaos. I suppose it’s because it is high summer on Cape Cod, and people are probably doing all sorts of stupid things that land them in the hospital—not unlike me. Everybody is on a cell phone, and I ask a total stranger if I can borrow his—I need to call my mother.
Like everybody else, I really don’t know anybody’s phone number anymore—except my mother’s. To make a call, I mostly just push a button next to a name. I also know that neither of my parents ever answers the phone if they don’t recognize the number of the person calling. My mother won’t recognize this number, but I figure I’ll take a chance.
She answers. “Hello?”
“Ma! Did you miss me?” She bursts into tears. “Ma,” I say, “you didn’t think you’d get rid of me so easily, did you?”
“How are you?” my mother asks me.
“I’m fine, totally fine.”
“Are you all right? How are you?” I can tell that my mother is only half listening to the words. All she can hear is my voice, that I’m alive. That’s okay. I get that. That I’m really alive is all she needs to know.
“Ma, I’m really fine. Really. You know, the boots saved my life.”
“That’s good. It’s so good to hear your voice. How are you? Are you sure you’re okay?” She is mouthing these words. She doesn’t care. She just wants to hear me.
“I’m sure. Really.”
I give back the phone because I am suddenly being wheeled into a room where the medics go to work on me. Tests, more tests, IVs pumping warm fluids into me. My sunburn equates to a second-degree burn, they tell me. My retinas are burned, and I have rope burns and a rash under my arms—probably from clutching the rubber boots. The ice cube they give me because I am so thirsty burns my tongue and the roof of my mouth painfully. Another hour and a half passes before I can swallow.
The hospital is so crowded that they wheel me out of the room—which I guess they need for somebody really sick—into a hallway near the nurses’ station. I lie there with my IVs, waiting for my hydration levels to get right. Nobody comes near me. Nobody rinses me off or changes my clothes or anything. I finally flag down somebody heading for the nurses’ station to complain about the rope burns. “Can you find me a salve or something?” I beg. A nurse comes at last with a cooling cream.
This also seems to remind the staff to move me again. “We’ve got a room for you,” the orderly or whatever says, as he pushes me into what looks like a storage closet with a lot of crutches hanging from the walls. At least it’s quiet.
Then I get a visit from the hospital press liaison. There’s a reporter here from Newsday, the Long Island newspaper—would I talk to her? Sure. Happy to. She comes upstairs into my little storage closet, and I tell her my story.
Chapter 15
Saved
3:05 p.m.
“They got him!”
Sean Davis blurted out the news being blurted out to him from the MH-60 helicopter, and the watchstanders in the New Haven command center, to a man, stood, cheered, and high-fived one another.
“Let’s confirm that,” said CDO Mark Averill, although he too was smiling. No way Averill was going to report to his boss, Jonathan Theel, until he was sure Aldridge was alive, well, and in Coast Guard hands. Nor, he knew, would Theel report to the Aldridge family unless he had absolute certainty that the report was true.
But Davis’s shout over the radio was also heard in the glass-walled communications suite in the Coast Guard station in Montauk, where Jason Walter, the officer in charge of the station, now back from patrol in the small response boat and trying to juggle the demands of the numerous constituencies on site at the station, also wanted the facts confirmed. For one thing, Walter knew from experience that there can actually be many a slip between spotting a person in the water and getting that person safe and sound into a helicopter and en route to a medical facility. He was aware of stories about individuals who were found alive, then died in the basket or in the helicopter because the stress to their bodies had simply been too great.
Compounding this hesitation was the fact that some twenty family members and friends of John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski were on the porch—tense, stressed, grieving. Reporters from various news outlets were starting to call the station, asking for “status updates.” And local law enforcement officials continued to look over the Coasties’ shoulders, ready to “assist” and/or take over the operation at a moment’s notice. The bottom line was that Jason Walter was not going to make a move until he heard something more definite than “Sounds like a helicopter got him!”
He called the New Haven command center.
By this time Averill had confirmed to Theel and to Commander Heather Morrison, the officer in charge of Sector Long Island Sound, that Aldridge was indeed alive and well, cold but responsive, elated to have been saved, and on his way to air station Cape Cod for transfer to the hospital. Theel asked Averill again whether Mark was sure about the ne
ws, and he admits that Averill’s assurances gave him goosebumps and sent him pretty much running into the command center to join the cheering.
He then got on the phone to Montauk Station and instructed Jason Walter to bring the family inside the building and to put the phone on speaker. Walter told himself that if it was going to be on speaker, it had to be good news, but of course, he couldn’t be sure. He headed out to the porch, approached Cathy, and asked if she and the other family members would please come into his office—Commander Theel from the command center in New Haven needed to speak with them.
That’s when Cathy got scared. She called for Tommy, who was down at the station dock. He came running up the lawn to the porch where she could grab onto him if she needed to. The four of them—Cathy, Tommy, Jillian, and Teresa walked inside. Cathy remembers a long walk down a long hallway into Walter’s private office, not unlike the storied long walk of the condemned waiting to hear their fate. They stood in a circle around the desk and waited while Walter clicked the phone onto the speaker setting. You could have heard a pin drop in that room as they listened to Jonathan Theel, with military formality, introduce himself. Cathy thought at first that she was hearing a rote recitation: name, rank, and serial number kind of thing—like something out of a manual of operations. Then Theel said, “We have located John Aldridge”—he rattled off the coordinates of where—“and he is alive and well.” Cathy almost didn’t hear what came after that, which was Theel saying that Johnny was on his way to Cape Cod for medical treatment—it hadn’t been possible to fly him back to Montauk.
Cathy, Tommy, Jillian, Teresa all did what people do when they are joyful: they yelled and wept and hugged one another, relief serving as simultaneously a balm and a trigger to excitement. The Coasties joined in the elation; it was a good day all around for Station Montauk. Earlier in that afternoon, when she realized that no one had eaten a thing all day, Cathy had dispatched Tommy’s partner, Rob Howard, for pizza. The food arrived in the middle of the party and was shared between Coasties and civilians.
A Speck in the Sea Page 16