Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  At dinner in the Wrangell’s galley, I ask the CO how much he bench-presses, which sparks gales of laughter from the crew. Matt’s a competitive guy. He says, “315 pounds,” not sure if he’s been set up.

  Later, on the darkened bridge, I notice the screensaver image for their Web log-in is a photo of “Our fallen hero,” Nate Bruckenthal, in the same desert camo they all wear out here. The XO, twenty-four-year-old Gordon Hood, reflects on what a unique opportunity this mission is for “new guys” like twenty-year-old Rook Roebuck to get experience.

  “The service trusts our people very young. It trusts mankind and the training that they give us. We’re looking at the pain and war that surrounds oil, but still when people say it’s a war for oil I don’t think it’s that simple, because most of these supertankers are not going from here to the States. They’re going all over the world.”

  He’s right. It’s not that simple, although much of this Iraqi oil will in fact find its way to the United States. The production and distribution of fossil fuel has at the beginning of the twenty-first century become the largest industrial combine in human history. The armed protection of that global system of energy commerce is the largely unquestioned reflex of a U.S. foreign policy that all too often undermines the very principles of democracy these young men and women have come here pledged to defend.

  T

  he next morning, a British Lynx helicopter buzzes us, making several attack profile runs, the door gunner so close you’d think he could knock the digital cameras out of the Wrangell crew’s hands with his machine-gun barrel.

  Later they call general quarters and fire off the .25 mm bow gun with its thump and blast, big spouts of water appearing ahead of us amid whiffs of cordite that wash away as we surge forward. Twice they have to cease firing and change course as real targets, dhows and freighters, pop up on our horizon.

  Over the next two days, we head south, first to KNB, the Kuwait Naval Base, and Camp Patriot, where U.S. troops play sand volleyball behind concrete blast walls. From there it’s on through fields of oil platforms burning off natural gas and the crowded shipping lanes of “Tanker Alley” to the small island kingdom of Bahrain, where rich Saudis cross the causeway every weekend to drink and whore.

  On the last leg of the trip, Lieutenant Moyers and Lieutenant JG Hood muster their crew on the Foc’sle. Matt reminds them that they have to keep their anthrax shots up to date—the military’s very keen on that—and also details the ammunition offload at the pier and emphasizes they have to have paperwork for anything taken off the boat when it goes into dry dock.

  He then gives out Iraq Campaign Medals to the crew for their just completed deployment. “This is a big deal,” he tells them. “Less than one percent of people in the Coast Guard will ever see this.”

  After the crew’s dismissed, John Harker reminds Matt that he still needs to reenlist. Matt administers the oath to him, there by the bow with a freshening breeze. At 7:50 A.M., John “Harpoon” Harker raises his right hand and swears his allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, to uphold and defend it.

  “Sorry we couldn’t do this in a more interesting place,” Matt says as they shake hands, “but at least you did it at sea where it matters.”

  John, a qualified heavy weather Bosun, tells me his next assignment will be as executive officer of the 87-foot cutter Flyingfish, out of Boston. The Gulf’s been interesting, he says, but he’s really looking forward to getting back to New England, to his wife, kids, and family, and to doing what he and the Coast Guard do best—and are best known for: rescuing people and saving lives in big, angry, dangerous seas.

  CHAPTER 7

  Surfmen

  “Twelve- to sixteen-foot waves are good conditions to train in. Above that

  you’re more surviving than training.”

  —BOSUN’S MATE BILL ARMSTRONG, INSTRUCTOR, COAST GUARD

  MOTOR LIFEBOAT SCHOOL

  “You can only do what you can.”

  —CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER RICKY SPENCER RECALLING A RESCUE IN WHICH

  TWO PEOPLE WERE SAVED AND ONE DIED

  The coast off the Columbia River on the Oregon/Washington border is known as the “Graveyard of the Pacific,” the site of some two thousand shipwrecks over the last two centuries. With a watershed draining a quarter million square miles, the Columbia holds the second-largest volume of river water in North America, in some years even surpassing that of the Mississippi. It can discharge 262,000 cubic feet per second into the ocean, creating a four- to seven-knot current and depositing thousands of tons of sediment, generating large standing waves along with “sleepers” that can grow from flat calm to triple overhead in the few minutes it takes for the winds to shift or a long ocean swell to meet a sandy shallow.

  “Mere description can give but little idea of the terrors of the bar of the Columbia: all who have seen it have spoken of the wilderness of the ocean, and the incessant roar of the waters, representing it as one of the most fearful sights that can possibly meet the eye of a sailor,” warned Navy Cdr. Charles Wilkes, who, as a lieutenant, led the famed U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–42. His small fleet made it through the waters of the western Pacific and Fiji, Antarctica, and the Southern Ocean only to lose their sloop of war Peacock to the Columbia bar. The deadly break where that ship foundered is now known as Peacock Spit and its nearest buoys as Death Row. These are the big wave generators where the Coast Guard regularly trains its heavy weather boat drivers.

  P

  redictably, the Graveyard of the Pacific is quiet as a grave with lumpy six-foot swells the week I visit the Coast Guard’s famous Cape Disappointment National Motor-Lifeboat School in the small fishing town of Ilwaco, Washington.

  “Should have been here last week. It was breaking sixteen to eighteen feet,” the CO, Chief Warrant Officer Ricky “Spence” Spencer, tells me, sounding like every surfer I’ve ever known. Indie, his black lab, gets up from under the desk and gives me a couple of compensatory licks on the hand.

  In the front hall of the station is the Master Board with rows of surfman’s “checks,” small brass badges that a hundred years ago were exchanged by surfmen from adjoining lifesaving stations to prove they’d completed their beach patrols. In 2002, individually numbered checks were brought back to recognize newly certified surfmen. There are around eighty-five of these elite boat drivers now in the Coast Guard, including three women. It can take four to seven years to get certified and prove in the eyes of your fellow surfmen that you can—as a matter of course—manage a rescue in thirty-foot seas with fifty-knot winds, or take your boat into eight-foot shorebreak and make a rescue without getting smashed onto the rock and sand. Those kinds of conditions require that the best boat drivers get stationed at the Coast Guard’s twenty-one surf stations, sixteen of which (including the school) are located on the West Coast between Morro Bay, California, and La Push, Washington, on the Quillayute River. There are also fifty heavy weather stations, on the Great Lakes and elsewhere, that can see equally wild conditions, just not on such a regular basis.

  The lifeboat school conducts six heavy weather classes for about seventy-two students a year. It’s also wrongly famous for its rollovers and the idea, subtly reinforced by a generation of Discovery Channel documentaries, that flipping a boat is something its instructors encourage.

  “I rolled a boat as a student in 1991. That may be the last time a boat rolled here,” says Scott Lowry, the school’s tall, shaven-headed executive officer. “The [newer] 47s are so buoyant I’m not sure they could even do a 360. I was in a 44[-foot-long motor-lifeboat]. We were in eight- to ten-foot surf, and I started the inbound run, and all of a sudden the seas stood up to sixteen foot and a wave broke and we did a 360 roll and 180-degree turn and I was blown out of the seat and just remember I held my breath and I was going to breathe and realized I was underwater and it was light, dark, light again and we were back up with the swell and I could taste and smell diesel fuel. One guy said he’d counted to fourteen s
econds. The surfman [instructor] grabbed the helm, and I was able to reach up and push the throttles for power, and we got out of there. The mast had broken off and gave one of the crew a goose egg on his leg, and we were all, the eight of us on board, all a little banged up and bruised.”

  Spence, the CO, may hold the world record for rollovers. He got what he describes as “bubble massages” in 1977, ’83, and ’86. “I was never driving when I rolled,” he quickly adds. “The Surf community looks down on people who’ve rolled boats.”

  Still, the school has its occasional “knockdowns,” where the self-righting boats go over more than ninety degrees.

  “Last year we had a knockdown. No injuries or anything,” Spence recalls. “This year we had someone take a break too hard and the boat went airborne and we had a young gal break her wrist.”

  I sit in on a classroom discussion on how to do a safe tow and how to pass a metal drum with a dewatering pump to a flooded fishing boat.

  In the engineering locker, next to the barn (boat garage) where they have an aluminum-hulled 47-foot surfboat up on blocks waiting for an engine replacement, I’m given a red and black Mustang drysuit to climb into through its zippered waist. Bosun’s Mate Bill Armstrong will drive the boat I’m on, one of four doing today’s training rotation. Bill’s a hefty guy with a shaved head, now covered in a black balaclava as the air temperature has dropped to around twenty degrees.

  The boathouse is at the end of a steeply wooded peninsula of fern, Sitka pine, and Douglas firs shared by the school and the Cape Disappointment Surf Station with its less than tourist-friendly motto, “Pacific Graveyard Guardians.”

  Bill drives the boat from atop its open bridge as our small flotilla pulls away from the dock, out through the channel, and past an ocean buoy. Some of the students have yanked their balaclava hoods down over their faces, making them look more like death-squaders than lifesavers.

  “Coming up,” Bill announces as we surge forward into the biting wind, passing a big inbound car ship.

  We set up for towing exercises in a seven-foot swell. The 47 we’ve partnered with is rolling with the seas. We circle around to approach it from up swell with student coxswain Michael Daray of the Michigan City, Indiana, station at the controls.

  “Remember the Fifty-Fifty Rule. Keep fifty percent of your attention on the line, fifty percent on the [approaching] swell,” Bill instructs.

  As we close in on the other boat, a few students and crew on our fantail gather up the line. One of them tosses it to a fellow student on the bow of the other boat.

  “Now watch that line opening up,” Bill tells Michael, watching his student’s hands on the double throttles.

  Off in the distance I see the black-hulled Coast Guard buoy tender Fir heading out from Astoria, Oregon.

  “OK. Stop. Let’s go forward twenty-six.”

  From the fantail the line tosser calls, “Thirty feet on deck.”

  “Close it up. Square it up. You’ll still have to back down a little more.”

  “Forty feet out.”

  “Pivot on port. More power on the pivot. You don’t want to be left in the trough.”

  “Crab pots on starboard bow about twenty-five yards,” one of the students warns Bill.

  “I’ll keep an eye on them,” he responds. “Make the boat do what you want—square it to the swell and tow point to tow point,” he instructs as they tie off the towrope to the cross-shaped Samson post on our stern.

  The other 47 closes suddenly, approaching within feet. A student wonders if they aren’t too close.

  “I’m watching [fellow instructor] Scott [Slade],” Bill tells him. “I’ve been working five years with Scott. If he’s looking nervous, he’ll indicate that, and I’ll back our boat off.”

  Heading in to shore a few hours later, Bill points out a big red buoy with its cage missing and bell exposed.

  “Last month we had 115-mile gusts and forty-foot waves that took the top off that buoy.”

  Nearby the two-thousand-ton Fir is listing over, working hard to pull up a similar surf buoy onto its buoy deck for inspection and cleaning.

  “It’s different out here,” Bill explains. “Sometimes it can get all jumbled up. Twelve- to sixteen-foot waves are good conditions to train in. Above that you’re more surviving than training.” He’s from North Carolina and joined the Coast Guard after graduating from college. I ask why he didn’t enter Officer Candidate School.

  “ ’Cause I got a job I don’t hate, and that’s worth a lot,” he says. Like rescue swimmers, surfmen are all from the enlisted ranks. They also run most of the surf stations, which is why the officer corps has sometimes neglected them. As we pull back into the Ilwaco channel, a bald eagle watches us from atop one of the wooden poles where the old canning docks used to be.

  The surf station, down cove from the school, does over three hundred rescues a year plus, since 9/11, escorting ten freighters a day heading upriver to Portland with cars and fuel or to pick up grain. The station has two 47-foot rescue boats, an old 52-footer, and three fast, highly maneuverable 25-foot Defenders with twin Honda outboards.

  “The Coast Guard plays the role of both maritime police and fireman. The 25 is like our police cruiser, the 47 like our fire truck,” explains the station’s chief, Lt. Jamie Frederick, a rare officer in charge.

  When I get back to Spence’s office at the Motor Lifeboat School, he’s on the phone with his wife. She wants him to pick up a hundred-pound bag of feed on his way home.

  “They bought a third horse,” he tells me, hanging up. “She says, ‘It’s the one you said looked so nice.’ I don’t know.” He shrugs, grinning in contented defeat, the crow’s-feet around his eyes crinkling. Since his last assignment was the Coos Bay Surf Station in Oregon, and since they have two teenage girls in high school there, the rest of the family decided to stay put when he transferred. Now he’s what they call a geographic bachelor, driving five hours south on weekends to be with them. When he finishes up at Cape D, he’ll have thirty-four years in the service and retire.

  Looking out the window, I see the 52-footer cruising in, one of four still in service here in the Northwest. Built almost fifty years ago, it has the charm of an old single-action Remington revolver, solid, heavy, and dependable. It’s not just for show, however. It can tow up to 750 gross tons where a 47 can only tow 150. A year ago, this low-slung workhorse towed a 220-foot fish processing ship out of harm’s way after it lost power near shore in twelve-foot seas.

  “Today it was out laying a memorial wreath,” Spence informs me. The day before, there’d been a memorial service marking the January 11, 1991, sinking of the trawler Sea King off Peacock Spit during which two fishermen died and EMT Charles Sexton sacrificed his life so that others might live, including the Sea King’s two surviving crewmen.

  Today marks an even greater loss. On January 12, 1961, a crab boat, the Mermaid, was caught in monster surf near Peacock Spit. Two Coast Guard vessels from Cape D, a 40-foot utility boat and a 36-foot motor-lifeboat, went to assist. They called for additional assistance, and the Triumph, a 52-footer, arrived from the Oregon side and took over the tow. The 40-footer then capsized, but its crew was rescued by the 36-footer. Unable to get back across the bar, they headed out to sea and found refuge on the storm-tossed Coast Guard Columbia River lightship before their boat also went under. Shortly after that, the Triumph capsized. The fishermen aboard Mermaid were able to rescue one of its crew. Two more 36-foot lifeboats arrived from the Oregon side and put the Mermaid under tow. Then another giant wave hit, snapping the towline and sinking the Mermaid. Five of the six Coast Guardsmen aboard the Triumph died: John Culp, John Hoban, Joe Petrin, Ralph Mace, and Gordon Sussex. So did the two fishermen aboard the Mermaid. Miraculously one of Triumph’s Coasties made it to shore alive, where he was found by a search team below the Cape D lighthouse a few hundred yards from where we’re now seated.

  Indie, the Labrador retriever, walks around the desk to visit Spence.


  “Now he’s going to put his head in my lap and look up at me to let me know he wants to be fed,” which is what the dog does. “He’s been out on some rescues. I got him a red light for his collar ’cause he wants to jump in and join in the rescues.”

  I ask Spence about his best rescue.

  “I get emotional about it because of the father-son thing,” he tells me up front. “I was in Tillamook [Bay Surf Station in Oregon] in August of ’87. I remember the swells were like canyons, but [Machinery Technician Third Class] Steve Meshki and I had to take the faster boat, the 30-footer, because we knew that there was a capsized craft out there and that there were people in the water [and time was of the essence]. So we made it across the bar, and we had to zigzag up the coast [10 miles among mountainous breakers] to Nehalem Bay. What was real weird is we got on scene and we’re in the middle of the breaks and can’t see where they are and this voice I heard says, ‘Turn left ten degrees and go,’ and I was in the middle of the breaks and just did that, and there they were. The father was lying on top of this capsized 18-foot boat. We picked him up, and he’d already lost his dad, but he begged us to get his son and we saw him [the boy] just kind of lying there in the water with his eyes open and staring and his arms out.

  “We threw the heaving line and it landed between his arms, and we hoped he’d reach for it, but he didn’t. Then we got close enough and we threw the ball [attached to the front of the heaving line], and it crossed his arms and it kind of hooked him, the line tangled in his arms, and I managed to hold the 30-footer steady as I’d get hit by the breaks till he was close up. Everything was in slow motion, it seemed like, and Steve is kind of dragging him in gently, and then Steve yells, ‘He’s sinking!’ and I shouldn’t have, but I left the helm, and we both went over to the starboard side and just kind of reached down into the churning water and felt something and grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up and into the boat. Steve started CPR, and the kid started coughing.