“I only wish I’d had a video. They could have played it at the school. The training is there for a reason, and you have it ingrained so it kicks in when you need it. When I swam under them the pilots were like ‘What were you doing?’ I told them, ‘What I was trained to do.’ ”
T
he next day in Elizabeth City I find the sixth-week students in a classroom disassembling a water pump. They’ll also learn how to pack a pump and a parachute and train as emergency medical technicians in Petaluma, California.
The school graduates about forty swimmers a year. Among its alumnae are three active-duty women, including AST Sara Faulkner, who hoisted over fifty people, including four babies, from apartment balconies and a sunken tennis court during Katrina. The last man she hoisted up told her he loved her.
The instructor gives the class a break to talk to me. They’re a gangly, downy-cheeked, not very rugged-looking group. Obviously looks can be deceiving.
“I was gonna join the Air Force but decided the Coast Guard is a lifesaving service and it’s on the beach. I always liked the water and the ocean,” says twenty-one-year-old Brandon Decardenas.
“My dad was in the Coast Guard, and I wasn’t the college type,” Chris Ensley, also twenty-one, explains. “I don’t like guns or killing people, but I like this job and serving my country. I did triathlon to train for this, but I was best at biking and running, not swimming.”
“I joined the Coast Guard to be an AST,” Keith Charters, twenty-three, volunteers. “I swam in college, and I just like every aspect of it.”
“I also joined to be a rescue swimmer,” says David Dobias, twenty-one, from Denver. “I saw the movie preview for The Guardian and went to the recruiter the next day.”
“So what did you think of the movie?”
“It’s corny, but it’s the truth. Every time you go out you’re helping someone.”
I ask him where he got the scar that runs along his scalp line. “Rock climbing in Turkey as a kid. My parents were in the Air Force.”
Shane Moore is twenty-two and grew up in Long Beach, California. “My dad and brother are in the Army, my brother-in-law in the Marines, and they all said don’t join. My sister’s in the Coast Guard, and she likes it. So I joined to be a flight mechanic and got in and saw the swimmer program and decided it was the best of the twenty-two jobs [enlisted ratings] available. You get time to work out and stay healthy, and they pay you to swim.”
Four of the five of them, it turns out, are from service families. Four of them want to go to Kodiak when they graduate because that’s where the action is. Keith Charters wants to go to Cape Cod because that’s where his wife is.
I tell them scientists I’ve talked to say there will be more storm surges, also more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, because of fossil-fuel-driven climate change. That will mean that in their careers they are likely to see more disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
“That’s great!” Chris Ensley exclaims, then gets embarrassed. “I mean, you don’t want a hurricane to happen to other people or boats to sink, but you do want to be able to do what you’ve trained for. I mean, their bad day is our good one.”
Not always. Instructor Jason Bunch was an AST in Kodiak for seven years and involved in a famous case with Bob Watson where a small airplane with four people on board crashed into the side of a mountain in the fog. Two died on impact. Jason had to carry a Stokes litter seven hundred feet up a steep slope full of scree and shale and then cut one of two women out of the plane, working his way through sheet metal and wires. “The plane was teeter-tottering as we worked, and we finally got her free and took her [back down the mountain] and hoisted her, but she died.”
“So there was one survivor and three deceased?” I ask.
“No, there were two survivors and one of them died,” he corrects me with some vehemence. I understand. He’d worked hard to keep her alive, a survivor, not a statistic, and like Kevin Costner said in the movie, you remember the ones you’ve lost.
Lost in the Glare
You also remember your first and last rescues, according to Lt. Cdr. Jeff Janzen, who actually looks a bit like Kevin Costner. A former rescue swimmer, he’s now CO of New York’s Maritime Safety and Security Team.
“My first two guys were on a brand-new 22-footer, and the owner had forgotten to put the boat plug in,” he recalls. “They pulled the engine and it started sinking. They set off a flare and it explodes in front of our helicopter. So here’s a reminder. Don’t point your flare at the helicopter that’s trying to save you. I did a fifteen-foot jump, and we’re twenty-five miles offshore, and we rescued him and his buddy, but he didn’t really want to go because he was pissed off his boat was sinking.
“My last rescue was a fishing vessel that was swamped twenty-five miles offshore. These six guys are following me around while I’m trying to set up a pump for them, and I finally say, ‘Why are you following me?’ They say, ‘Well, you’re the swimmer. None of us know how to swim.’ So we got more dewatering pumps on board, and I got them busy, and we kept it afloat.”
S
ometimes I feel like I’m interfering with Darwin’s selection,” AST Dennis Moyer tells me in the swimmer shop at Air Station San Francisco. He was called in during two weeks of rain and flooding in Northern California in December 2005. “Up in Hopland a lady was drunk during the flooding, a chronic alcoholic. She was told to go home and drove down a flooded road and off into a flooded vineyard field.
“We were on our way elsewhere and were flagged down by people on the road. They waved us over, and we saw this car covered up to its roof by water. They put me on a direct [hook]. She was on the driver’s side of the car. The water had formed an eddy where she’d opened the door. It was pushing a big volume of water into the vee where the door and frame came together, and she was struggling. I dropped down on an angle and got shoved into this vee, and she’s hysterical and I can’t lift her. She’s saying we’re going to die, and she’s just barely got her chin above water. So I feel down her side and realize she’d gotten her leg wrapped around the seat belt coming out. So I get my knife out and I cut it free. She was scared, she was convinced we were going to die, but I cut her loose and we got her out of the water.”
Dennis’s buddy, AST Kelly McCarthy, who’s been listening, tells me he decided to join the Coast Guard after watching Baywatch one drunken night in college. He’s a big guy with green eyes and Prince Valiant–type bangs. He’s done a number of SAR cases and rescued a surfer trapped for two days in a cove, but his best story is also a cautionary tale for those who think the life of a rescue swimmer is all tragic heroics and adventurous derring-do.
“This guy got in a fight and then ran from the cops, and they got him up against a cliff [in Pacifica, just south of San Francisco], and he was faking it like he was going to jump and then slipped and fell to the bottom.
“So they put me off to the side of the cliff on the hook. There were all these bushes of poison oak, which I’m super allergic to, and they flew me right through the poison oak. I just put my arms up and hoped my drysuit would keep it off me. The firemen had already reached the guy, and he’s bleeding all over the place, and the firemen say he’s HIV positive. So now my drysuit is full of poison oak and HIV blood is all over. I’m trying to put a backboard under him, but the cliff’s too steep. So this fireman uses his hands as a foothold for me so I can get up there and slip the litter under this guy. The fireman’s a paramedic, and I’m an EMT, so we hoist the guy and the fireman to the helicopter. Now I have to climb up the cliff covered in poison oak and HIV blood. When I get to the top the firemen just look at me, shake their heads, and hose me down.”
He says his favorite posting was four years at Air Station Detroit, “freshwater and no sharks.” San Francisco, of course, is famous for being in the heart of the “Red Triangle” that runs from Monterey out to the Farallon Islands and back to Stinson Beach in Marin County north of the Golden Gate. There are more human-shark “encounters”
here than anywhere else on earth, mainly because it’s a prime seal breeding area and white sharks sometimes mistake surfers in wetsuits for seals.
“We were doing a [training] recovery off Monterey last week,” Kelly reports, “and the swimmer was halfway down the cable, and our pilot saw something bigger than a dolphin messing around with the SpongeBob [dummy], so we canceled. So if we’re going to get off the hook [in training], we’ll probably do it off Ocean Beach [a San Francisco neighborhood with big shorebreak]. Till now we’ve been going to the sea buoy that’s eighteen miles out, halfway to the Farallones.”
Still, sharky waters aren’t going to keep him from maintaining his proficiency. After I get the standard briefing on how if our helicopter hits the water it will flip upside down and I should hang on to a point of reference before exiting through a window underwater, I climb into a 65 and take one of the swimmer seats (i.e., cushions) in the back next to Kelly.
The mechanic, Rich Martin, climbs in after removing the wheel chocks.
“Want to take off, sir?”
“Absolutely,” Cdr. Wayne Brown assents. “San Francisco Tower . . .”
“Good morning, Coast Guard helo. You can take a Hunters Point departure.”
We taxi and lift off, the nose dropping as we lean over, gaining altitude above SFO’s United hangers and head out over San Francisco Bay. I watch the two pilots doing their thing. Unlike in fixed-wing aircraft, the lead pilot is seated to the right.
No one is a natural-born helicopter pilot, not when you have to work the cyclic stick between your legs for power and to climb and descend, while handling the collective paddle by your left hip, pitching the blades to take you back and forth and left and right, while also working the foot pedals for hovering, keeping the nose straight, and, as another way to move left and right, directing the tail rotor. Also, since European-built helos like the Dolphin have their rotors spinning in the opposite direction from American copters like the Jayhawk, when you transition from one to the other you have to remember to reverse your foot movements. It can all be mastered, though, and the best helicopter pilots soon get reputations as good “sticks.”
Kelly is in his swimmer meditation mode, his legs stretched out atop his SpongeBob dummy, his mask, snorkel, yellow jump helmet, and black fins resting on his lap. We fly over the new spans of the Bay Bridge heading north toward the delta. A few geese briefly join us in formation.
A 41-foot utility boat from Station Vallejo calls on the radio.
“638, good morning. Thanks for coming out today on a short-term request, sir.”
“We’re just going to do some basket hoists when you’re ready.”
“Roger that.”
“Do you have any wind down there?”
The mech puts a gunner’s belt on me so I can stand up and take some pictures.
“Coming left. Visual descent. Stabilize at fifty feet.”
“Gonna put our rescue swimmer on the deck,”
“Floats armed—good door speed—doors open,” Rich Martin announces. He helps Kelly hook the cable to his TRI-SAR for a direct descent before Kelly swings out the door.
The mech guides the pilot over the 41-foot boat when the pilot can no longer see it from the cockpit.
I look down and see three Coasties, a gal and two guys, standing on the aft deck of the boat under the rotor wash.
Kelly starts dropping down on the cable toward them. I take some shots of his progress while MK Martin runs the show.
“Forward right.”
“Forward right fifty.”
“Forward right twenty.”
“Hold! Swimmer on deck. Swimmer off the hook.”
They next go through a couple of evolutions, dropping a trail line and lowering the basket to the deck, then recovering it with the boat stationary and with the boat under way.
“That’s awesome how quickly you did that,” Commander Brown compliments Rich. “We’ll finish and do rescue swimmer evolutions. Pick him up with the hook.”
“Go right fifty. Going right thirty and going right twenty. Speed good. Forward. Prepare to take the load . . .”
I take pictures as Kelly comes back up on the hook and is swung inside the cabin.
They fly a short distance away from the 41.
“I’ll do a free fall. Vector two evolutions total,” Kelly says.
“Deploying Rescue Randy,” Rich announces on the ICF.
Rescue Randy, aka SpongeBob, is a red cushion with sewn-on arms and lead-shot-weighted legs so that it floats vertically in the water the way a person would. Rich tosses it unceremoniously out the door.
We circle around after it’s away. Kelly then drops out the open door from about eight feet up in his yellow and orange drysuit.
We circle around again. He’s on the radio. “I am at your three o’clock, a quarter mile.”
“He’s gonna be in the glare,” Rich warns the pilots. The bay is a diamond-sparkled shimmer.
“I’m at your two o’clock.”
It takes me some time to spot a dot in the water not far from the 41-footer. I realize how hard it is to see a person in the water, even on a clear day when you know where he’s supposed to be and he’s wearing a yellow helmet and carrying a shark’s red chew toy.
F
lying at night over the Caribbean in a Coast Guard Falcon, we spot a blinking light in the pitch-dark. I figure the highly trained crew will be able to ID it quickly, but after making four passes as low as two hundred feet off the water, using their night-vision goggles and high-tech FLIR (forward-looking infrared) surveillance cameras controlled from the tactical workstation in the back of the jet, the best image they can generate is of some digital circles and squares. They agree there are probably no buoys this far out. They turn on all their lights, including their landing lights, and make another low pass to see if they get a response from below. Nothing. There’s also nothing on emergency radio Channel 16. The pilot announces that we’re now low on fuel. They report the coordinates of the mysterious blinking light to Key West and leave the scene still not sure what it is we’ve just seen.
Of course, if you’re searching for a target that doesn’t want to be found, if it’s smugglers, say, that have stopped dead in the water in midocean and thrown a blue tarp over their boat, your odds of finding them are about as good as your odds of winning the lottery.
Which is only to say it’s a really big ocean out there. Even the Great Lakes have a great amount of surface area to search that doesn’t get any better when it’s covered in ice and snow.
Still, after flying with their crews as well as visiting their SAR centers, I’m convinced that if you’re lost, in trouble, or making trouble on the water, Coast Guard aviators are the people most likely to find you.
Of course, many of them would demur, which makes me worry that in writing this book my style of loud improvisation is not well suited to their quiet professionalism.
The first few times I talked to Lt. Cdr. Dan Molthen, for example, who was my public affairs contact for my visit to Elizabeth City, the tall, bald, bony pilot didn’t think to mention his rescue of twenty-six survivors from a foundering cruise ship in thirty-five-foot seas, his work with Rescue Swimmer Sara Faulkner saving dozens of people in New Orleans, or his involvement in the famous La Conte rescue in Alaska.
“Naval aviators are known for their rampant egos,” writer George Hall concluded in a 2002 article for Flying magazine, “but these guys are so modest and self-effacing that you want to slap them . . . They sound like firemen: glad to be of service, it’s just the job, it’s what we’re trained to do.”
To be fair, you could say the same about almost any Coastie. They’re generally happy if they’re respected by their shipmates, do their jobs well, save some lives, live the Boy Scout and Girl Scout oaths, and catch some awesome rides along the way.
CHAPTER 9
Frontiers
“I asked a friend, ‘What’s it like here?’ She told me, ‘It’s three thousand miles
>
of fetch [open water that allows waves to build].’ ”
—MASTER CHIEF JOHN PETRIE, ON HAWAII
“It’s wild and the weather is crappy, which gives you the case fodder,
so if you want medals and big cases you go to Alaska.”
—SENIOR CHIEF LEWIS HART, ON ALASKA
“It’s a great deck,” Lt. Cdr. Louis Parks assures Ensign Jamie McGinty, his trainee. “Keep forward and down and look at the horizon.”
From my rear cabin position behind mechanic Amy Kitmacher, I can see the black radar and com tower of the Alex Haley through the pilot’s wind-shield, then big white roll-up hangar doors and bang! we hit the flight deck hard. As soon as the talon has locked us on to the swaying deck, we’re released and lift off again, sliding away to the left so I can now see down the length of the 282-foot Medium Endurance Cutter we’ve just landed and launched from.
The Alex Haley is stationed out of Kodiak, Alaska, but is now steaming off Hawaii in six- to eight-foot seas from a passing tropical storm. A converted Navy salvage ship, it’s been on patrol for months, so its hull is festooned with dripping rust stains and its white paint has taken on a gray salty tinge. I can see the yellow-jacketed landing signal officer and blue-shirted tie-down gang hunkered low on either side of the helicopter hangar bay. We do another approach from the stern as the Alex Haley cuts through the ocean at ten knots. I look out the open side door toward the lowering horizon and bang we land again, though not quite as jarringly this time. We take off and circle around.
“You’ve got the proverbial string tied to your ass and the deck,” Louis is instructing Jamie, who, as a Direct Commission Officer who transferred from the Army, has never had to land a helicopter on a ship before. “Look out about forty-five degrees at the horizon. Just see the deck with your peripheral vision.”
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