Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

“She’s interesting, to say the least,” he notes with wry amusement. “About 5:00 P.M. we expressed to her how important it was to ‘raise yer hand now before the weather gets really snotty.’ The straps that kept her comfy had broken, and she’d lost her drogue and sea anchor and bonked her head, and there were 15-foot seas with maybe 20-foot swells and winds at 35 to 40 knots and it was forecast to get worse over the next 96 hours—so that probably played a role in her decision [to be rescued]. We [flew out and] got on scene with about 20 minutes of light left. We lowered the swimmer in the water. She got in the water, and he put a strop [rescue sling] around her.”

  “They give me instructions to put on my immersion [survival] suit and jump in the water so the swimmer could attach me to a winch,” Roz recalls. “So I’m sidling over the side and have a life ring from the tanker under my armpit and a [waterproof] pelican case off my hip, and the immersion suit is a hundred sizes too big with the feet flapping off me. I wallow toward the swimmer, and the Brocade seems to want to follow me. The wind is blowing her almost over on top of me, and he hitches me up to this hook and makes me let go of the life ring, and after a long time the line goes taut. As they’re hoisting me into the helicopter, I look down on my boat, and she gets smaller and smaller. I felt horrible leaving her behind. It might be the correct and sensible thing to do, but I just hated being rescued, even though these were great guys, really nice, sweet guys, who did their job well and professionally.”

  Roz did almost everything right in preparing for her journey, which is why she lived to try again in 2008, becoming the first woman to row solo from San Francisco to Hawaii, the first leg of her quest. As the old salts say, though, “What the sea wants, the sea will have.”

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  he oceans that cover 71 percent of our blue planet’s surface are a rougher, more challenging frontier than any encountered by terrestrial or space explorers. The seas pummel us with an unbreathable and corrosive liquid medium, altered visual and acoustic characteristics, changing temperatures, depths, and pressures, upwellings, tides, currents, wild animals, shifting chemistry, sudden storms, and towering waves. The ocean is both the crucible of three billion years of evolutionary life and the generator of great tempests that can devastate our coastlines. It is the driver of climate, weather, rain, and snow, a source of recreation, transportation, energy, protein, security, and endless poetic wonder. The ocean’s blank indifference to human endeavor also makes it awesome, inspiring, and deadly in ways few of us fully comprehend.

  Among those who come close are people like Lt. Steve Baxter, Lt. JG Kevin Winters, Aviation Mechanic Second Class Jason Bauer, and Aviation Survival Technician (rescue swimmer) Chief Chuck Wolfe, who flew the mission to rescue Roz with the support of their operations center staff, two C-130 aircrews, and the crew of the cutter Dorado. They are among some forty-two thousand active members and eight thousand reservists of the U.S. Coast Guard.

  Unfortunately, not all their search and rescue efforts go so well. My friend David Guggenheim is a widely respected marine explorer, conservationist, and licensed pilot of deep-diving research submersibles.

  In the summer of 2007, this short, wiry scientist with a closely trimmed salt-and-pepper beard led a dive expedition into the unexplored Pribilof Canyon in the Bering Sea off Alaska, discovering hitherto unknown deepwater coral and sponge gardens amid swarms of aggressive squid fifteen hundred feet below the surface. In 2008 he continued his long-term efforts to identify and protect pristine reefs, mangroves, and turtle-breeding beaches along the Gulf Coast of Cuba.

  Thirty-three years earlier, on November 28, 1976, he’d been a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. “It was a miserable, cold, foggy, rainy, raw-to-the-bone day, and my dad [William L. Guggenheim] had gone fishing for stripers in Delaware Bay,” he recalls. “I decided to be with my girlfriend that day, and everyone he asked had a different reason, so he went by himself. We had a 23-foot SeaCraft with twin 150 Mercurys, which were big [outboard] motors back then, and that boat was his pride.

  “When I got back to my dorm room later, the phone was ringing. It was my mom, who was really worried. It was dark and he wasn’t home. He usually called when he was off the water. So I said I’d call the Coast Guard and called the Cape May [New Jersey] station and said, ‘My father’s overdue. He’s been fishing in Delaware Bay, and his boat registration number’—I still remember it—‘DL111G.’ As I was reading it off, the guy was saying it with me, ‘111 Gulf,’ like he already knew the number, and that’s when I knew this was something pretty serious.

  “He said, ‘Yes, sir, the Cape May–Lewes Ferry captain radioed in that he saw a vessel going in circles with no one aboard and a fishing line in the water.’ It was about three miles from shore, and they were going out to recover the boat. This was the end of November, and the water [temperature] was in the forties. I had to get home by trolley, bus, and subway. My mother and brother and some family friends were all there, as well as ‘Uncle Phil’ and his wife, Elaine. I wanted to drive down but they said they would.

  “We drove down in the rain, and it was after midnight, and they were just bringing the boat in. Later, looking at the depth chart, I could tell that at one point he was in very shallow water—probably trolling on Prissy Wicks Shoal, where there are a lot of fish, but it’s a difficult place because of the chop and currents. I think he was setting the second line and got catapulted over the back.

  “After waiting around a while, the rest of them went home and left me to keep watch as the Coast Guard did their search and rescue. I didn’t have a place to stay. I just sat on some vinyl bench at three in the morning, and these guys would stop to say hello and talk to me. It was something I needed. They brought me a blanket to let me sleep on that bench. They also got me water and told me they’d have helicopters up the next morning at first light and not to worry, but at first light it was so foggy you couldn’t see anything. They brought me food and coffee. It wasn’t till the afternoon the helicopters could go up, but they didn’t see a thing.

  “It was clear he couldn’t have survived, so, maybe it was the next day, I got his car and went up the beach and walked along the edge looking out, and I could see these guys were still at it. My perception as an eighteen-year-old kid was these guys were doing a major military operation with all this radio chatter and helicopters and boats for two days, and I couldn’t believe all these people were working so hard for us even though it was a lost cause.”

  He pauses to have a gulp of his mojito in the D.C. bar where we’re meeting. He stares at his drink but is really looking back at a hole punched in his heart more than three decades ago.

  “They stayed in touch for a year or so just to check in to say if they found anything. They understood how, with no body recovered, how hard it is to lay things to rest. They found a skull two years later off Cape May, but it was of a younger person [his dad was forty-nine]. My brother and I are now resigned to not having that closure.

  “Later I became a marine biologist, a scuba diver, a lot of things my dad would have enjoyed. At the synagogue I gave a eulogy, and I said I didn’t want people to hate the ocean. It was the place we could be father and son together. It was the place he loved.”

  As for the Coast Guard, “Thirty years later I still remember their professionalism and how human they were to me. It wasn’t a phony humanism. It was real.”

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  very day the U.S. Coast Guard responds to 123 distress calls for help and rescues some fourteen people who could tell you stories just like Roz’s and David’s.

  The Coast Guard claims to have saved over 1.1 million lives since its founding more than two hundred years ago. It’s even hung a banner to that effect on its boxy faded blue headquarters building at Buzzards Point in a run-down waterfront section of Washington, DC. Of course, that 1.1 million figure includes some 350,000 illegal migrants it’s taken off the water, mostly Cubans, Dominicans, Haitians, and Chinese, who are generally not too pleased to see the white-hulled cutters o
f the Coast Guard unless they are in the actual process of capsizing and drowning.

  So let’s say the real number is closer to three-quarters of a million people saved. That’s still a lot of lives saved, a lot of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers who made it back to shore alive thanks to America’s Rescue Warriors.

  So why have there been more books, movies, Web sites, and articles about the U.S. Marines, Navy, even Navy SEALs, than about America’s preeminent lifesavers and multimission maritime service? What makes uniformed services that kill people seem more interesting than those whose primary mission is to save lives?

  For thousands of years, warfare has been the main rite of passage by which young men proved themselves as warriors and heroes and, if they survived, went on to become the leaders of their clans, tribes, and nations.

  Today, given the social and economic interdependence of an increasingly crowded planet, and faced with growing impacts from environmental disasters including extreme weather events linked to climate change, terrorism, droughts, bombings, migrant surges, industrial poisonings, and pandemics, we may be seeing the emergence of an alternative role model for our youth.

  In the future our warriors, heroes, and leaders may more often arise from the ranks of young women and men willing to go in harm’s way to confront a wide but unknowable range of catastrophes in unusual and dangerous settings on a planet that’s more than two-thirds saltwater. That, to me, sounds very much like the definition of a “Coastie,” a member of the United States Coast Guard.

  Tracing its origins back to the earliest days of the republic (1789 or 1790, depending on whether you prefer lighthouses or wooden boats), today’s Coast Guard has evolved into a service that, despite limited resources and overworked vessels and aircraft, seems genetically unable to decline any job involving moving bodies of water, be they fresh, brackish, or salty.

  In addition to saving lives, the Coast Guard:

  conducts port and waterfront security patrols

  directs port traffic

  responds to water pollution and oil spills

  seizes illegal drugs and migrants at sea

  regulates and inspects recreational, commercial, and fishing vessels, as well as U.S.-flagged vessels under construction

  inspects offshore energy production and delivery facilities

  enforces fishing regulations and marine mammal protection laws

  investigates maritime and bridge accidents

  licenses mariners

  maintains and repairs buoys, lighthouses, and other vital aids to navigation

  provides boating safety courses to the public, largely through its volunteer auxiliary

  trains and works with foreign coast guards

  fights in foreign wars

  carries out icebreaking operations at both poles and on the Great Lakes

  supports scientific research at sea

  does whatever other jobs it’s called upon to do in order to guarantee the safety, security, and stewardship of America’s blue frontier

  The Coast Guard’s unofficial slogan used to be “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back.” Today it takes a more measured approach to its search and rescue efforts, tempering its historic tendency toward iron-willed recklessness with a mission-based risk-assessment calculus married to constant on-the-job training.

  As a result, Coast Guard men and women can do things like drop a rescue swimmer from a helicopter into a raging ocean as the pilot, flying blind to the action, trusts his or her winch mechanic to avoid ensnaring them in the wildly gyrating rigging, mast, or superstructure of a sinking vessel. Qualified surfmen can tow sailors out of harm’s way in thirty-foot seas and fifty-knot howling winds or dash into big shorebreak to rescue a drowning surfer or kayaker without bottoming out and smashing their surfboat onto the rocks and sand. In places like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, they were able to repeat this type of “evolution,” or task, for days on end, entrusting their lives to different people on different days thanks to their standardized training and practiced ability to surge resources almost anywhere needed or else improvise solutions on the spot.

  “The normal average Coastie’s attitude is ‘I don’t know how I can get it done, but I know I can do it, it’s just figuring it out,’ ” explains Chief Warrant Officer David Lewald, one of the heroes of Katrina.

  Of course, there are also bound to be problems in a service that has been perennially shortchanged financially, prey to the whims of Washington politicians, and the recent poster-child for contractor malfeasance in a fleet expansion program that left the sea lions guarding the salmon pens. Historically the Coast Guard has been shuffled between various government departments, most recently in 2003 when it moved from the Department of Transportation to the massive new Department of Homeland Security, whose short history of dysfunctional behaviors would embarrass a Jerry Springer or a Dr. Phil.

  In addition, by September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard had gone through a decade of funding cutbacks and “streamlining” and was about to see another 10 percent hit on its budget. Coast Guard Commandant Adm. James Loy warned that the service, famed for “doing more with less,” was at risk of becoming a “dull knife.”

  Since the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, the Coast Guard has seen its budget grow from $5 billion to $9 billion, but much of that has been for security-related functions and counterterrorism. There has been little parallel growth in its marine safety and environmental protection missions, whose historic core competencies have now been put at risk.

  “We shifted assets to security, and we’ve failed to keep pace on the safety and environmental side,” Adm. Craig Bone, commander of Coast Guard District 11 in Alameda, California, told me a few hours after a container ship hit the San Francisco Bay Bridge in late 2007, spilling fifty-three thousand gallons of toxic bunker fuel and inspiring widespread criticism of the Coast Guard’s response.

  At the same time, the Coast Guard opened up a new rescue station in Barrow, Alaska, to respond to increased maritime traffic on the Arctic Ocean, where climate change is turning the once icebound Northwest Passage into a viable shipping route and creating a fifth U.S. blue-water coastline for the service to guard.

  To meet all its mission demands effectively, the Coast Guard will probably have to double in size and funding over the next decade and then double again by 2030 until it is closer in size to the U.S. Marine Corps than to the NYPD. This, of course, will be a hard thing to make happen in hard times, especially for a service that doesn’t have many champions in Congress or the executive branch.

  Still, despite many serious challenges, it’s almost counterintuitive that what I discovered in reporting on the U.S. Coast Guard is a part of government that works. In terms of value per taxpayer dollar, it’s up there with public libraries, national parks, water reservoirs, fire departments, and Fourth of July fireworks.

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  first sensed I could write a good in-depth book on the Coast Guard while reporting from the post-Katrina hurricane disaster zone in the fall of 2005. As I traveled the devastated Gulf region, I made several calls to their 8th District Headquarters—which covers the Mississippi River basin and had relocated from New Orleans to St. Louis—to see if I could get onto the Coast Guard air station south of the flooded city. In the past, when working on stories involving the Navy, I’d always had to go through the Pentagon chain of command and sometimes wait as long as six months to get approval for interviews or air station or shipboard visits.

  When I finally got through to St. Louis, however, the Coast Guard lieutenant at the other end of the line wondered why I didn’t just go down to the station and ask at the gate for whoever was doing public affairs that day. He gave me directions. The PAO (public affairs officer) at the battered air station, which looked like a combination combat airstrip and refugee camp, buzzed me in, pointed me to the hangers, and apologized that she was too busy to escort me. In short order I was doing interviews, walking the flight line, and getting offers to fly
over some damaged oil rigs.

  What impressed me most that day was finding a military service that allows its people not only to act on their own but also to speak for themselves. Adm. Thad Allen, Coast Guard commandant from 2006 to 2010, insists that “total transparency breeds self-correcting behavior.” He argues that because the Coast Guard has to work with the public and various maritime stakeholders every day of the year, it can’t be operationally effective unless it’s open and aboveboard in ways that would scare the security briefs off the other armed services.

  So I was given an unprecedented amount of access for this book that I may have abused—only in the sense that I probably rode more rigid-hull inflatables, cutters, surfboats, fixed-wing aircraft, and helicopters than was absolutely necessary to complete it. On the other hand, how could I describe the mix of altruism and adrenaline that inspires so many Coasties if I didn’t get out there and ride along with them?

  Like most Americans, particularly the 53 percent of us who live within fifty miles of a coastline, I’ve always had some awareness of the U.S. Coast Guard and the fact that it works to save sailors in distress.

  During seven years living on a cliff in San Diego, I’d been witness to and peripherally helped out in several rescues, including one with local lifeguards and a Coast Guard helicopter standing by. I’ve gone through Coast Guard safety inspections on friends’ boats that sometimes seemed too exacting and heard more than one commercial fisherman complain about its enforcement of fishing and safety rules. I’ve heard environmentalists complain about its slowness to establish and enforce pollution regulations. I’d even heard some Navy folks speak less than respectfully of their fellow sea service.

  For all that, I don’t know of a waterman or woman, mariner, or sailor who doesn’t feel a bit safer catching sight of the white and orange of a passing Coast Guard cutter or aircraft.