The Perfect Storm

by Sebastian Junger

  Brown takes a seat at the back of the room, notebook in hand, and endures a long and uninteresting meeting. Someone brings up the fact that the Soviet Union has disintegrated into different countries, and U.S. fishing laws need to be changed accordingly. Another person cites a Boston Globe article that says that cod, haddock, and flounder populations are so low that regulations are useless—the species are beyond saving. The National Marine Fisheries Service is not the sole institution with scientific knowledge on pelagic issues, a third person counters. The meeting finally adjourns after an hour of this, and Bob Brown gets up to talk with Gail Johnson, whose husband, Charlie, is out on the Banks at that moment. Charlie owns the Seneca, which had put into Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, a few weeks earlier with a broken crankshaft.

  Did you hear anything from your husband? Brown asks.

  Yeah, but I could hardly get him. He’s east of the Banks, and they’ve got bad weather out there.

  I know they do, Brown says. I know they do.

  Brown asks her to call him if Charlie hears anything about either of his boats. Then he hurries home. As soon as he arrives he goes up to his bedroom and tries the single sideband again, and this time—thank God—Linda comes through. He can hear her only faintly though the static.

  / haven’t been able to reach Billy in a couple of days, Linda shouts. I’m worried about them.

  Yeah, I’m worried too, says Brown. Keep trying him. I’ll check back.

  At six o’clock that night, the time he generally checks in with his boats, Brown tries one last time to raise the Andrea Gail. Not a sign. Linda Greenlaw hasn’t been able to raise her, either, nor has anyone else in the fleet. At 6:15 on October 30th, two days to the hour after Billy Tyne was last heard from, Brown calls the Coast Guard in Boston and reports the vessel missing. I’m afraid my boat’s in trouble and I fear the worst, he says. He adds that there have been no distress calls from her and no signals from her EPIRB. She has disappeared without a trace. In some senses that’s good news because it may just mean she’s lost her antennas; a distress call or EPIRB signal would be a different matter entirely. It would mean absolutely that something has gone wrong.

  Meanwhile, the news media have picked up on the story. Rumors are flying around Gloucester that the Allison has gone down along with the Andrea Gail, and that even the Hannah Boden may be in trouble. A reporter from News Channel Five calls Tommy Barries wife, Kimberly, and asks her about the Allison. Kimberly answers that she talked to her husband the night before by single sideband and that, although she could barely hear him, he seemed to be fine. Channel Five broadcasts that tidbit on the evening news, and suddenly every fisherman’s wife on the East Coast is calling Kimberly Barrie to ask if she has any news about the fleet. She just repeats that she talked to her husband on the 29th, and that she could barely hear him. “As soon as the storms move offshore the weather service stops tracking them,” she says. “The fishermen’s wives are left hanging, and they panic. The wives always panic.”

  In fact the eastern fleet fared relatively well; they heave-to under heavy winds and a long-distance swell and just wait it out. Barrie even contemplates fishing that night but decides against it; no one knows where the storm is headed and he doesn’t want to get caught with his gear in the water. Barrie keeps trying Billy every couple of hours throughout the night of the 28th and the following day, and by October 30th he thinks Billy may have drifted out of range. He radios Linda and tells her that something is definitely wrong, and Bob Brown should get a search going. Linda agrees. That night, after the boats have set their gear out, the captains get together on channel 16 to set up a drift model for the Andrea Gail. They have an extremely low opinion of the Coast Guard’s ability to read ocean currents, and so they pool their information, as when tracking swordfish, to try to figure out where a dead boat or a life raft would have gone. “The water comes around the Tail and wants to go up north,” Barrie says. “By talking to boats at different places and putting them together, you can get a pretty detailed map of what the Gulf Stream is doing.”

  Late on the night of the 30th, Bob Brown calls the Canadian Coast Guard in Halifax and says that the Andrea Gail is probably proceeding home along a route that cuts just south of Sable Island. He adds that Billy usually doesn’t call in during his thirty-day trips. The Canadian cutter Edward Cornwallis—already at sea to help the Eishin Maru—starts calling for the Andrea Gail every quarter hour on channel 16. “No joy on indicated frequency for contacting Andrea Gail” she reports later that morning. Halifax initiates a communications search as well, on every frequency in the VHF spectrum, but also meets with failure. The fishing vessel Jennie and Doug reports hearing a faint “Andrea Gail’’ at 8294 kilohertz, and for the next twelve hours Halifax tries that frequency but cannot raise her. Judith Reeves on the Eishin Maru thinks she hears someone with an English accent radioing the Andrea Gail that he’s coming to their aid, but she can’t make out the name of the vessel. She never hears the message again. A SpeedAir radar search picks up an object that might possibly be the Andrea Gail, and Halifax tries to establish radio contact, without success. At least half a dozen vessels around Sable Island—the Edward Cornwallis, the Lady Hammond, the Sambro, the Degero, the Yankee Clipper, the Melvin H. Baker, and the Mary Hitchins—are conducting communications searches, but no one can raise them. They’ve fallen off the edge of the world.

  The Rescue Coordination Center in New York, meanwhile, is still trying to figure out exactly who is on the crew. Bob Brown doesn’t know for sure—often owners don’t even want to know—and even the various friends and family aren’t one hundred percent certain. Finally the Coast Guard gets a call from a Florida fisherman named Douglas Kosco, who says he used to fish on the Andrea Gail and knows who the crew are. He runs down the list of crew as he knows it: Captain Billy Tyne, from Gloucester. Bugsy Moran, also from Gloucester but living in Florida. Dale Murphy from Cortez, Florida. Alfred Pierre, the only black guy on board, from the Virgin Islands but with family in Portland.

  Kosco says that the fifth crew member was from the Haddit—Tyne’s old boat—and that Merrit Seafoods in Pompano has his name. I was supposed to go on this trip, but I got off at the last moment, he says. I don’t know why, I just got a funny feeling and stepped off.

  Kosco gives the Coast Guardsman a phone number in Florida where he gets messages. (He’s offshore so much that he doesn’t have his own phone.) I think they may have gone shorthanded—I hope they did, he says. I don’t think Billy could’ve found anyone else so fast…

  It’s wishful thinking. The morning Kosco left, Billy called up Adam Randall and asked him if he wanted a job. Randall said yes, and Billy told him to get up to Gloucester as fast as possible. Randall showed up with his father-in-law, checked the boat over, and got spooked like Kosco had. He walked off. So Billy called David Sullivan and happened to catch him at home. Sully reluctantly agreed to go, and arrived at the State Fish Pier an hour later with his seabag over his shoulder. The Andrea Gail went to sea with six men, a full crew. Kosco doesn’t know this, though; all he knows is that a last-minute decision five weeks ago probably saved his life.

  At about the same time that Kosco confesses his good luck to the Coast Guard, Adam Randall settles onto the couch in his home in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to watch the evening news. It’s a rain-lashed Halloween night, and Randall has just come back from taking his kids out trick-or-treating. His girlfriend, Christine Hansen, is with him. She’s a pretty, highly put-together blonde who drives a sports car and works for AT&T. The local news comes on, and Channel Five reports a boat named the Andrea Gail missing somewhere east of Sable Island. Randall sits up in his seat. That was my boat, honey, he says.

  What?

  That’s the boat I was supposed to go on. Remember when I went up to Gloucester? That’s the boat. The Andrea Gail.

  MEANWHILE, the worst crisis in the history of the Air National Guard has been unfolding offshore. At 2:45 that afternoon—in the midst of the Satori
rescue—District One Command Center in Boston receives a distress call from a Japanese sailor named Mikado Tomizawa, who is in a sailboat 250 miles off the Jersey coast and starting to go down. The Coast Guard dispatches a C-130 and then alerts the Air National Guard, which operates a rescue group out of Suffolk Airbase in Westhampton Beach, Long Island. The Air Guard covers everything beyond maritime rescue, which is roughly defined by the fuel range of a Coast Guard H-3 helicopter. Beyond that—and Tomizawa was well beyond that—an Air Guard H-60 has to be used, which can be refueled in midflight. The H-60 flies in tandem with a C-130 tanker plane, and every few hours the pilot comes up behind the tanker and nudges a probe into one of the hoses trailing off each wing. It’s a preposterously difficult maneuver in bad weather, but it allows an H-60 to stay airborne almost indefinitely.

  The Air Guard dispatcher is on the intercom minutes after the mayday comes in, calling for a rescue crew to gather at “ODC,” the Operations Dispatch Center. Dave Ruvola, the helicopter pilot, meets his copilot and the C-130 pilots in an adjacent room and spreads an aeronautical chart of the East Coast on the table. They study the weather forecasts and decide they will execute four midair refuelings—one immediately off the coast, one before the rescue attempt, and two on the way back. While the pilots are plotting their refueling points, a rescue swimmer named John Spillane and another swimmer named Rick Smith jog down the hallway to Life Support to pick up their survival gear. A crewcut supply clerk hands them Mustang immersion suits, wetsuits, inflatable life vests, and mesh combat vests. The combat vests are worn by American airmen all over the world and contain the minimum amount of gear—radio, flare kit, knife, strobe, matches, compass—needed to survive in any environment. They put their gear in duffel bags and leave the building by a side door, where they meet the two pilots in a waiting truck. They get in, slam the doors shut, and speed off across the base.

  A maintenance crew has already towed a helicopter out of the hanger and fueled it up, and flight engineer Jim Mioli is busy checking the records and inspecting the engine and rotors. It is a warm, windy day, the scrub pine twisting and dancing along the edge of the tarmac and sea birds sawing their way back and forth against a heavy sky. The pararescue jumpers load their gear in through the jump door and then take their seats in the rear of the aircraft, up against the fuel tanks. The pilots climb into their angled cockpit seats, go through the preflight checklist, and then fire the engines up. The rotors thud to life, losing the sag of their huge weight, and the helicopter shifts on its tires and is suddenly airborne, tilting nose-down across the scrub. Ruvola bears away to the southeast and within minutes has crossed over to open ocean. The crew, looking down out of their spotters’ windows, can see the surf thundering against Long Island. Up and down the coast, as far as they can see, the shore is bordered in white.

  IN official terms the attempt to help Tomizawa was categorized as an “increased risk” mission, meaning the weather conditions were extreme and the survivor was in danger of perishing. The rescuers, therefore, were willing to accept a higher level of risk in order to save him. Among the actual crews these missions are referred to as “sporty,” as in, “Boy, it sure was sporty out there last night.” In general, sporty is good; it’s what rescue is all about. An Air National Guard pararescue jumper—the military equivalent of Coast Guard rescue swimmers—might get half a dozen sporty rescues in a lifetime. These rescues are talked about, studied, and sometimes envied for years.

  Wartime, of course, is about as sporty as it gets, but it’s a rare and horrible circumstance that most pararescue jumpers don’t experience. (The Air National Guard is considered a state militia—meaning it’s state funded—but it’s also a branch of the Air Force. As such, Guard jumpers are interchangeable with Air Force jumpers.) Between wars the Air National Guard occupies itself rescuing civilians on the “high seas,” which means anything beyond the fuel range of a Coast Guard H-3 helicopter. That, depending on the weather, is around two hundred miles offshore. The wartime mission of the Air National Guard is “to save the life of an American fighting man,” which generally means jumping behind enemy lines to extract downed pilots. When the pilots go down at sea, the PJs, as they’re known, jump with scuba gear. When they go down on glaciers, they jump with crampons and ice axes. When they go down in the jungle, they jump with two hundred feet of tree-rappelling line. There is, literally, nowhere on earth a PJ can’t go. “I could climb Everest with the equipment in my locker,” one of them said.

  All of the armed forces have some version of the pararescue jumper, but the Air National Guard jumpers—and their Air Force equivalents—are the only ones with an ongoing peacetime mission. Every time the space shuttle launches, an Air Guard C-130 from Westhampton Beach flies down to Florida to oversee the procedure. An Air Force rescue crew also flies to Africa to cover the rest of the shuttle’s trajectory. Whenever a ship—of any nationality—finds itself in distress off North America, the Air National Guard can be called out. A Greek crewman, say, on a Liberian-flagged freighter, who has just fallen into a cargo hold, could have Guard jumpers parachute in to help him seven hundred miles out at sea. An Air Guard base in Alaska that recovers a lot of Air Force trainees is permanently on alert—“fully cocked and ready to go”—and the two other bases, in California and on Long Island, are on standby. If a crisis develops offshore, a crew is put together from the men on-base and whoever can be rounded up by telephone; typically, a helicopter crew can be airborne in under an hour.

  It takes eighteen months of full-time training to become a PJ, after which you owe the government four years of active service, which you’re strongly encouraged to extend. (There are about 350 PJs around the country, but developing them is such a lengthy and expensive process that the government is hard put to replace the ones who are lost every year.) During the first three months of training, candidates are weeded out through sheer, raw abuse. The dropout rate is often over ninety percent. In one drill, the team swims their normal 4,ooo-yard workout, and then the instructor tosses his whistle into the pool. Ten guys fight for it, and whoever manages to blow it at the surface gets to leave the pool. His workout is over for the day. The instructor throws the whistle in again, and the nine remaining guys fight for it. This goes on until there’s only one man left, and he’s kicked out of PJ school. In a variation called “water harassment,” two swimmers share a snorkel while instructors basically try to drown them. If either man breaks the surface and takes a breath, he’s out of school. “There were times we cried,” admits one PJ. But “they’ve got to thin the ranks somehow.”

  After pretraining, as it’s called, the survivors enter a period known as “the pipeline”—scuba school, jump school, freefall school, dunker-training school, survival school. The PJs learn how to parachute, climb mountains, survive in deserts, resist enemy interrogation, evade pursuit, navigate underwater at night. The schools are ruthless in their quest to weed people out; in dunker training, for example, the candidates are strapped into a simulated helicopter and plunged underwater. If they manage to escape, they’re plunged in upside-down. If they still manage to escape, they’re plunged in upside-down and blindfolded. The guys who escape that get to be PJs; the rest are rescued by divers waiting by the sides of the pool.

  These schools are for all branches of the military, and PJ candidates might find themselves training alongside Navy SEALs and Green Berets who are simply trying to add, say, water survival to their repertoire of skills. If the Navy SEAL fails one of the courses, he just goes back to being a Navy SEAL; if a PJ fails, he’s out of the entire program. For a period of three or four months, a PJ runs the risk, daily, of failing out of school. And if he manages to make it through the pipeline, he still has almost another full year ahead of him: paramedic training, hospital rotations, mountain climbing, desert survival, tree landings, more scuba school, tactical maneuvers, air operations. And because they have a wartime mission, the PJs also practice military maneuvers. They parachute into the ocean at night with inflat
able speedboats. They parachute into the ocean at night with scuba gear and go straight into a dive. They deploy from a submarine by air-lock and swim to a deserted coast. They train with shotguns, grenade launchers, M-16s, and six-barreled “mini-guns.” (Mini-guns fire six thousand rounds a minute and can cut down trees.) And finally—once they’ve mastered every conceivable battle scenario—they learn something called HALO jumping.

  HALO stands for High Altitude Low Opening; it’s used to drop PJs into hot areas where a more leisurely deployment would get them all killed. In terms of violating the constraints of the physical world, HALO jumping is one of the more outlandish things human beings have ever done. The PJs jump from so high up—as high as 40,000 feet—that they need bottled oxygen to breathe. They leave the aircraft with two oxygen bottles strapped to their sides, a parachute on their back, a reserve ’chute on their chest, a full medical pack on their thighs, and an M-16 on their harness. They’re at the top of the troposphere—the layer where weather happens—and all they can hear is the scream of their own velocity. They’re so high up that they freefall for two or three minutes and pull their ’chutes at a thousand feet or less. That way, they’re almost impossible to kill.

  THE H-60 flies through relative calm for the first half-hour, and then Ruvola radios the tanker plane and says he’s coming in for a refueling. A hundred and forty pounds of pressure are needed to trigger the coupling mechanism in the feeder hose—called the “drogue”—so the helicopter has to close on the tanker plane at a fairly good rate of speed. Ruvola hits the drogue on the first shot, takes on 700 pounds of fuel, and continues on toward the southeast. Far below, the waves are getting smeared forward by the wind into an endless series of scalloped white crests. The crew is heading into the worst weather of their lives.