Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  Coasties tend not to be overly romantic about their “assets,” seeing their historical succession of boats and aircraft as so many useful tools needed to meet their maritime missions.

  Still, pilots who flew the HH-3 Pelican, a variation on the Vietnam-era “Jolly Green Giant,” tend to keep an open hangar in their hearts for it. They speak of this large, amphibious helicopter with admiration whether they’ve used it as a rescue boat in rough seas or a transport wagon for sedated grizzly bears.

  Capt. Chip Strangfeld in San Diego keeps a framed picture of his old H-3 Pelican on his office wall. He recalls landing it in seven-foot seas during a rescue off Cape Cod in the early 1980s. “We had one survivor who made it probably because he was fat. His thin buddy died of hypothermia. We didn’t have time to get the swimmer outfitted, so we did the water landing. I had the radioman take the window out in the rear so he could look back at the tail, ’cause if the tail went under we were gone, and a couple of times with the waves rising up behind us he’d call, ‘Up! Up! Up!’ and I’d lift off before we were finally able to land [long enough] and pull these guys in.”

  “It was a great helo—a little underpowered, and the avionics were not very advanced by today’s standard, but it was a dump truck. You could load anything into it,” recalls now retired Capt. Mike Moore, a former Alaska pilot and service chief of aviation forces.

  “We had this Canadian goose [the dusky Canada goose] that was an endangered species nesting near Cordova, near the Copper River delta, and Fish and Game told us the brown bears [were] eating the goslings, and [they asked us] if they could bring them to our forward deployment site, could we move them away? So they’d bring these bears they’d darted two or three at a time and we’d forklift them into the back [of the H-3 Pelican], shackled and muzzled, and fly them to Yakataga. A vet flew with them with an extra hypodermic in case they came to, and there was a Fish and Game officer with a high-powered rifle between the bears and the cockpit. We moved about fifteen of them [sixteen, in fact], and by the time they made their way back to the Copper River the geese would have grown their feathers and be able to escape from them. Today you couldn’t fit more than one grizzly in an H-60, I figure.”

  Ever the skeptical reporter, I confirm his story in the scientific literature. The helo-bear relocations took place in May 1987. Wildlife scientists, apparently having little in common with rocket scientists, later figured out it would be easier to relocate the newly hatched goslings than the grizzlies.

  While the Pelican was a much beloved aircraft, little love was lost on the early production models of the HH-65 Dolphin, a Coast Guard version of the French company Aerospatiale’s 1982 Dauphin. Under the “Buy American Act,” passed by Congress back in 1933, over 50 percent of an aircraft purchased by the Department of Defense or Coast Guard has to come from American sources. Since the 65’s advanced U.S. aviation electronics package wasn’t enough to meet that requirement, the service decided to buy its composite airframe without the Turbomeca Arriel engines it came with and instead installed less powerful American-manufactured Lycoming engines. The result, while legally defensible, had all the engineering elegance of a Porsche Boxster with a Saturn Ion engine.

  “The old 65s were a piece of shit. I never felt safe flying in one. They were just underpowered,” says Russ Scheel, an otherwise taciturn Montana-bred rescue swimmer.

  “It flew at the edge of the envelope all the time. It made for very ‘finesse-ful’ pilots, if that were a word,” says the more diplomatic Capt. Dave Brimblecom, a longtime 65 pilot who now directs the Coast Guard Academy’s Leadership Development Center. “The model A was at maximum weight almost every takeoff. You had to be careful with the A’s and B’s. You couldn’t come in too fast or too steep [or they’d crash]. The B’s had the same engine, just different avionics. The C model [first introduced in 2005 by Eurocopter and now the fleet standard] changed the engine and the nose.”

  There were other problems as well.

  “We had core engine power turbine cracking [in 2003 and 2004]. The engines blew up,” recalls Capt. Werner Winz, CO of Air Station San Francisco. “We fixed some of those core engine problems, but the engine control system was not so well fixed. ‘Buy American’ handicapped it [the aircraft].”

  Also, along with gearbox problems, the 65’s side doors tended to pop off in flight.

  The obvious solution to the major problem was to retrofit the Dolphins with the more powerful engines they were designed for. By the early twenty-first century, with the global helicopter market expanding, Turbomeca USA was manufacturing its gas turbine engines in Grand Prairie, Texas. You couldn’t buy more American than that. The engines were purchased and installed at the Coast Guard Aircraft Repair and Supply Center (ARSC) in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. These new “Charlie” models saw their earliest action in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and have since won over their flight crews with their improved power and reliability.

  I ask Captain Brimblecom if he has any complaints about the new version, which continues to be upgraded.

  “It used to look more like a dolphin with its extended nose,” he grins. “The new C model [with a larger nose, housing cameras and avionics] looks more like a platypus.”

  The only problem with the Coast Guard’s HH-60 Jayhawks is that they’re aging. When I was in Alaska, three out of four were in the hangar for maintenance or repair. When new, Coast Guard Jayhawks required twenty hours of maintenance for every flight hour. Today it’s more like forty. Still, with many 60s having already flown two-thirds of their useful lives, there’s no replacement aircraft under serious consideration—though a few Jayhawk pilots keep pictures of the new Sikorsky H-92 Superhawk posted on their walls like pinups of some unattainable supermodel.

  You’re Going to Puke on Yourself

  Among the Coasties’ best-known heroes are the aviation survival technicians (ASTs), or rescue swimmers, who drop out of helicopters in order to pluck people from stormy seas and drowned cities. The program’s origins can be traced back to February 12, 1983, when the coal ship Marine Electric sank in a storm off Virginia. By the time the first Coast Guard helicopter arrived on scene, the ship’s crew of thirty-four had been in the frigid water so long they’d become hypothermic and were unable to grab on to the lowered rescue basket. By the time a Navy helicopter with a rescue swimmer was dispatched to the scene, only three of the crewmen were still alive. In 1984, Congress ordered the Coast Guard to establish its own rescue swimmer program to prevent this type of tragedy from recurring.

  I

  drive to Building 33 at Air Station Elizabeth City, where five AST students are outside the nondescript sand-colored pool house doing chin-ups. They drop off the bars and begin doing push-ups on small medicine balls. “Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight . . .” Tim Kessell, one of their trainers, counts out the pace. To qualify as rescue swimmers the students will have to do sixty push-ups in under two minutes, seventy sit-ups, and eight pull-ups and chin-ups and to run two miles in under fourteen minutes, swim five hundred yards in under ten, do four twenty-five-yard laps underwater with thirty-second breaks, and tow a buddy two hundred yards.

  After their push-ups they do crunches with their knees up on a wooden rail, then resistance training and wind sprints before a forty-five-minute run. I look over at the Pasquotank River, notice a flock of Canada geese, and wonder if they’re a required part of Coastie physical training.

  Today’s class will do one and a half hours of outdoor PT, one and a half hours of pool conditioning, and thirty to forty minutes of “water confidence.”

  “Confidence” techniques listed in their instructor’s manual include Hypoxic Laps, Underwater Laps, Underwater Knots, Brick Laps, Brick Tread, Brick Swim, and Buddy Brick, which involves two students pushing a brick across the bottom of the pool. Only one at a time can surface to take a single breath. The manual also directs the instructor that during the Buddy Breathe exercise (where a snorkel is passed between two students treading
water facedown), “no more than two breaths in a row can be taken away from a single student” (by placing a hand over the snorkel when the student is desperately trying to get air).

  The Coast Guard began setting its own training standards after the drowning death of a nineteen-year-old Navy recruit held underwater by his instructors at the Navy’s rescue swimmer program back in 1988.

  “In the real world you’re going to puke on yourself, your heart rate will go through the roof, and you’ll get really tired,” instructor Jason Bunch tells me. “We fatigue them before they go in the pool, then toss them and turn them around, which is like a heavy sea state. They learn that the fatigue factor doesn’t matter. Fear of failure is a motivator just like fear that you will die.”

  Jason is five-nine with a closely trimmed mustache, a shaved head, intense blue eyes behind dark shades, and a lean swimmer’s body. Tim Kessell also has the shades and shaved head but tends more toward a harbor seal’s physique.

  The class started out with ten students six weeks ago. One of the remaining six has just gone to the sick bay with an injured quad.

  “I’ll talk to Doc and see if there’s something wrong with him or if he’s talked himself into an injury,” Jason says before going on to explain how in water confidence training they try to induce “the panic mechanism” in the students and then see how they respond.

  I ask if that means they’ll be seeing those black dots floating in the water (from hypoxia, or lack of oxygen) that I recall from when I almost drowned in big surf off San Diego.

  “They’ll all see that a few times,” he assures me. “A swimming pool environment is a safe place for them to do that. You want to overload them but factor in their level [of training over the sixteen-week course]. If you did week twelve stresses at week two you’d get 75 percent attrition [instead of the 50 percent dropout rate the program averages]. On the other hand, we’d have a 99 percent pass rate if this was all dry PT. People don’t know their limits in the water till they find them. Ensley [one of the five students working out today] is a second-generation Coastie, and Charters was on his college swim team. The other three never swam a lap in their lives.”

  As they head off on their run, I check out the pool. At twenty-five by ten yards it’s what real estate agents would call “cozy,” plus it belongs to the Supply Center and so has to be given up during family swim time.

  After seeing it, the producers of The Guardian decided to shoot their Swimmer School training scenes at a larger pool in Shreveport, Louisiana, to make it seem more “realistic.” That may have helped inspire Congress to finally fund construction of a new fifty- by 25-meter Olympic-sized pool soon to open.

  Building 33’s pool area includes climbing ropes and pulleys hanging from the angled roof’s rafters and a twelve-foot jump tower with a helicopter cable hoist and rescue basket. I notice some water pistols on a shelf and a plastic bucket reading PAIN AND FEAR GOES HERE. One of the wall banners reads HOME OF COAST GUARD HELICOPTER RESCUE SWIMMER SCHOOL, with a logo of a round bomb on a parachute. This goes back to the early survivalmen who dropped ordnance from biplanes. Today’s survival technicians want to change the logo from a bomb to crossed swim fins.

  The AST students, Ensley, Moore, Charters, Parsons, and Dobias, return from their run and, after a five-hundred-yard warm-up swim, begin doing laps carrying blue rubber-coated ten-pound bricks. They do half a lap underwater and half a lap holding the brick above the water. Brandon Decardenas returns from the doctor with orders to sit the day out. The two instructors are joined by Senior Chief Jeffrey Danner, who will act as the “pool deck monitor.”

  The students are pulled out of the water. Jason orders Parsons, a tall, dark, lanky student with a buzz cut, onto the tower.

  “He’s failed the Drop and Pick Up twice, and you get three chances, so his stress level is going to be way up,” Jason explains as we climb the stairs to the platform. Parsons is now seated at the top of the stairs attached to a safety strap as he would be in a helicopter.

  “Parsons. You got your head screwed on tight?” Jason inquires as Tim Kessell swims to the center of the pool in a green flight suit.

  Jason sets up the scenario. “We have seven minutes of gas on board. Get down with the survivor. Signal what device you want.” Parsons unclips his strap, gears up, moves over to sit on the platform edge, and pushes off with his hands, dropping twelve feet into the water. He swims deep underneath Tim to approach him from behind.

  “That was the crappiest underwater approach I’ve ever seen,” Jason complains. Parsons tells Tim to calm down and then takes him in a modified rescue hold. Tim acts calm, then “panics” and takes Parsons underwater with him. “Lost control of the swimmer,” Jason notes. Parsons regains control.

  “He’s not doing what we showed him to do. He should dunk him.”

  Parsons signals for the strop. Jason lowers it on the hoist cable. Tim twists around so they’re now facing each other.

  “You can’t put him in a strop like that,” Jason shouts down, his eyes boring holes in the water. Parsons is blinking, looking around wide-eyed. He regains control of Tim, holding him from behind, but has now lost his mask.

  “He lost control of the survivor. He’s not doing what we showed him to do. Look at his eyes. You can see the fear in his eyes,” Jason notes quietly. Tim struggles a little more, and Parson loses control again.

  “This is going downhill.” Jason shakes his head. “Try to get him underwater,” he yells at Parsons. “In real life it sucks to lose your mask,” he says. He turns on sprinklers from the tower, adding a light waterfall to the scene as Parsons finally secures the strop and brings Tim up with him. Parsons then tries to hang on to the hook after they disengage on the platform.

  “Give me the hook,” Jason orders. “Who said you do that? Who? Get off my platform.” Parsons slowly, reluctantly drops back into the pool. They order him to retrieve his mask “It’s over there on the bottom of the ocean.” Tim points to the deep end.

  “He didn’t do the proper dive, didn’t have control. He was panic struck the whole time,” Jason notes. Tim agrees.

  “He didn’t flutter kick, didn’t plane you out. It was a crappy signal—don’t know if there was any verbal signal.”

  “He threw his mask away,” Tim adds as they climb down and walk around the pool. “Get your gear off, knucklehead. Get in the female head,” Jason tells the abashed student while continuing his discussion with Tim. “He didn’t want to flutter kick. He was scared.”

  They go over to the pool deck monitor, who is not a trainer and can therefore be judged a dispassionate observer. “Me and Tim talked it out,” Jason begins.

  “It’s a no-go,” Senior Chief Danner replies.

  “Me and Tim think he didn’t hit his criteria, didn’t gain control of the survivor,” Jason continues like a dog gnawing on a bone he can’t let go of.

  Tim goes into the locker room to talk to the dropped student about his future options.

  The class is now down from ten to five.

  W

  ith nothing said, they move on to their next evolution, disentangling from a parachute in the water. They bring a parachute to the edge of the pool and lower a small raft into the pool. Ensley dresses up in a flight suit and helmet and climbs into it. One of the other students turns to Jason. “Is there going to be a raft in the test?”

  They use a suspension line to raise the parachute; then Dobias and Moore jump it over the raft into the water. It blossoms above the “pilot” like a dragon’s wing before settling on top of him like a wet rag.

  Charters is now on the tower in his tee and trunks, black mask, snorkel, fins, and TRI-SAR combination life vest and harness. He jumps off and swims up to the silk-covered raft.

  “I’m with the U.S. Coast Guard! I’m here to help you. Are you hurt?” he calls out before pulling the “pilot” out from under the parachute by his lan-yard. He swims Ensley around the pool, supporting him on either side of his hip, helping him to
remove his chute harness one arm and one leg at a time, shifting his grip, checking his spine, and then going underwater to make sure there are no loose shrouds still entangling him. The harness sinks and settles on the bottom. He swims Ensley to the rescue basket, gets him inside, and signals for it to be hoisted up to the platform.

  Moore is next through the evolution, following the same procedure.

  “See how he’s doing it—flutter kicking on his side, good snorkel management—he has his hip in it,” Jason notes. “Stress played a huge role in the [failed] kid not doing so well.” Moore is followed by Dobias, who also clears the attachments and backpack harness from the “pilot” after making sure he’s uninjured. Ensley goes last, swimming toward a new “pilot.”

  “Don’t grab him across the chute. Go to the closest point to get him,” Jason instructs.

  A month later I’m in Hawaii talking to Roger Wilson, a rangy, sun-etched forty-year-old AST with an easy smile. “I remember we got this call out of Charleston [South Carolina], the one they dream about,” he tells me. “This Marine Corps F-18 Hornet went down, and when we got there the plane was still visible with one wing out of the water and both crewmen in rafts. I could tell the veteran from the rookie. The veteran pilot had cut his parachute lines away. The rookie hadn’t and was waving a flare at us. I free-fell in, and the other guy seemed calm, so I decided I’d get the guy who seemed panicked while I was fresh. I swam up and read him the script. ‘I’m Roger Wilson, and I’m here to help you. Does anything hurt?’

  “ ‘No, no,’ [the rookie said].

  “I cleared the chute in the water. I asked him if he had a chest strap on and got that removed, clearing the chute out of the way. I did the spinal tap, got the helo, and came up with him. I free-fell back for the other guy, who was so relaxed I thought he might be injured. I swam up, and he said something kind of light like ‘Unbelievable day we’re having.’