Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  On our next approach, Louis warns, “The winds seem to be buffeting us. You’re out of control slightly.” We abort and slide left, heeling over so that I can now see the painted circle on the flight deck and the circular steel grate, like a manhole cover, inside of it where the talon is supposed to grab on and pull the helo tight against the deck.

  The ship tower radios to say our pitch has increased to about three to five degrees. “You’re fine for day landings, but . . .” The transmission goes blurry. The limitations for landing on this ship are seven to eight degrees of pitch and four to five degrees of roll.

  For his ship landing qualifications, Jamie needs to do fifteen daytime landings followed by ten night and twelve NVG (night-vision goggle) landings. Louis figures this will take us about three hours, including hot-gassing on the deck (refueling with the engines running).

  The cloudy sky is turning an ominous gunmetal gray. Jamie will not be doing his HIFR qualifications tonight. That’s a helicopter in-flight refueling, an emergency procedure where the hoist is dropped and a gas line reeled up from the cutter and married to a fuel plug in the door frame. This allows the 65 to stay airborne if the seas have gotten too rough to land, the flight deck is obstructed, or the helicopter is damaged.

  I watch Amy, the flight mechanic, use a bar and stick to control the slide and swivel chair she’s installed behind the pilots’ seats by the open door.

  “You have a green deck,” the tower announces.

  We come in again and drop like a freight elevator to a surprisingly light landing, which fails to please Louis. “You want to hit it hard, like a controlled crash, to get that talon in there,” he says. The talon is a small attachment on the belly of the copter that looks like a hydraulic bolt cutter with a downward-facing head.

  The Navy has a different approach to landing helicopters on its smaller ships, dropping a cable to a “haul-down” winch that reels them in like a kite. The Coasties prefer to drive their aircraft down to the deck themselves. The Coast Guard’s new National Security Cutter will guide them in with an infrared beam to a moving sled that will lock on to a probe on the helicopter’s bottom instead of having the talon lock on to the ship.

  Earlier I’d mentioned that I’d been on an aircraft carrier observing Navy jet fighter pilots getting their nighttime landing qualifications, having to catch one of four arresting wires on an eight-hundred-foot moving runway with their F-18 Hornets fully cranked in case they “bolted it,” sparking the deck with their tailhooks and then having to take off again with their afterburners blazing. Navy pilots say this is the hardest thing you can do in aviation, harder than flying combat missions.

  “I’ll put landing on a 210 [-foot Coast Guard cutter] in a helicopter at night with the rotor two feet from the infrastructure against those guys trying to catch that third wire,” Louis Parks counters.

  We do a few more circles and wave-offs as the Alex Haley steams hard into the wind. I feel like I’m getting to know all the cutter’s rust strips and smudges. We get in close to the boat, hovering over its deck and then bang! That one felt more like a controlled crash. “You’re consistent now,” Louis says approvingly. I can see a blue helmet nod acknowledgment from the right front seat.

  “Remember, keep looking at the horizon.”

  Louis calls the tower asking about their numbers, sounding concerned. We take off, circle again, drop rapidly, and then bam! whoosh, whoosh. This is kind of scary in that we hit hard, then seem to bounce up on the tires, the helicopter leaning over right and left, as if it wants to skitter and hop off the deck and would except for that small talon claw. Louis gets back on the radio and asks about tens. One of the blue-suited guys runs a bag out and hands it to Amy. We take off and make a steep turn back toward land.

  “That was some crazy, squirrelly shit,” Louis declares. “That last one was getting demanding even for me, and I mean this is for training. So we’re done. We don’t need this.” He gets on the radio to the air station. “We’re five minutes out and complete.”

  “You did a good job,” he tells Jamie. “The main thing was we got you exposed to it and talking to the boat, but we hit with three sets of tens, and that last one was two tens and they didn’t tell us. That cutter has the highest [allowable] limits, and that was still too high.”

  Climbing out of the 65 back at the air station, Louis reflects on our evolution, “I’ve done about a thousand ship landings, and that was in the top dozen”—for “squirrelly shit,” he means.

  The station ops boss, Don Dyer, is in the open hangar dressed down to head home in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. His ten-year-old son is seated nearby on a mule, a white towing tractor. Louis tells Don the evening was “a little too sporty. There was 10 degrees of pitch. I mean, Jiminy Christmas.”

  I’m staring at the tall muscular pilot thinking, “Jiminy Christmas? These guys really are Boy Scouts.”

  As I leave that evening, a few mechanics are still working in the brightly lit hangar with the PA blaring Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” into the warm Hawaiian night.

  T

  he Hawaiian island chain is the most isolated archipelago in the world, thousands of miles from anywhere else. Uninterrupted winter waves encountering the islands’ steep sides make for world-famous big surf.

  The steepness of these tropical islands also reflects their origins as volcanic mountains spawned from the depths of the sea. Hawaii is one of those rare places where you can actually see the land grow. I remember going bodysurfing with my friend Charlie Landon on a black sand beach on the Big Island in 1989. A year later we walked atop the still crunchy Kalapana lava crust past the tops of charred palm trees where the beach had been covered by two-thousand-degree molten lava a few months earlier. A quarter mile farther on, big waves were crashing against a newly created thirty-foot-high coal black cliff. Another two years passed, and we were able to hike that now rock-hard lava field to where the cliff had eroded away to a new black sand beach being caressed by the sea. Soon sprouting coconut seeds would wash ashore.

  The Coast Guard’s 14th District does its missions on the 12.2 million square miles of Pacific that surrounds Hawaii, an area two and a half times the size of the continental United States.

  Air Station Barbers Point on Oahu’s South Point embodies Hawaii’s sense of isolation even though it’s located on the state’s most urbanized island. South Point includes a sprawling, largely abandoned naval air complex and a National Guard base.

  To get to the station you have to drive down a lonely two-lane tarmac road through sandy brush, thick with scrub and palms and old ammo bunkers that look like overgrown jungle temples. The road turns and runs along a little-used white sand beach fronting on cobalt blue waters that seem a perfect slice of paradise only twenty degrees hotter. The fenced-in air station includes two large hangars for its four Dolphin helicopters and four big Hercs, Hercules C-130 transports.

  The swimmer shop is a long room facing the beachfront road with racks of survival gear, a parachute rigging table, a locker room, a giant movie poster of The Guardian, a hanging fiberglass shark, and a wall quiver of eighteen paddleboards and surfboards.

  “We’ve had kite-surfers in trouble right out front here,” Roger Wilson, a rangy forty-year-old rescue swimmer who’s hanging out in his black swim trunks, tells me. “We’ve thrown our boards over the fence and paddled out for them and beat the copters. We did that three times so that ops [the air station’s operations center] got mad at us. Now we have to call them and tell them if we’re going to do that.”

  I tell him about some of the Coast Guard’s windsurfer rescues around San Francisco Bay and also their rescue swimmers’ white shark encounter.

  “We’ve moved our training here from where we were chased out of the water by a big tiger shark,” he counters.

  Tiger sharks aren’t the only thing that can rip your flesh in Hawaii. So can what the Hawaiians call “aa,” spiny, bristling fields of jagged lava rock that cover tens of thousands of
acres across the island chain.

  Roger Wilson can’t forget an aa helicopter rescue he made on the Big Island in 2004.

  “We had this plane crash up in a lava field. I spotted it. There were two people standing in the plane waving to us. It was really just the outline of the plane. It had burned down to the ground. The helicopter couldn’t land because it would have blown out all its tires. Plus it’s not stable [the aa].

  “They lowered me down, and I medically assessed. I had to do it quick because the 65 didn’t have much fuel left. Both people had second- and third-degree burns, and the pilot was missing. I got the lady first ’cause I was concerned about her airway [breathing]. The guy was badly burned, too. Neither had shoes on, and they were surrounded by these sharp aa [lava] rocks. I lifted her and put her in the basket. I talked to the guy about the pilot, and he told me which direction she’d gone off in. I then told him I’d have to walk him to the basket. He was a big guy, and I couldn’t carry him. It was tough, but I got him there and the helo picked him up.

  “Going in I’d seen that there was this huge ravine off to the left and had grabbed chem lights [that give off an eerie green glow when you shake and bend them] and also grabbed an extra flashlight, and after the helo left [while a C-130 remained circling overhead] I listened to see if I could hear anything. I started heading down the cliff [side of the ravine]. It was pitch-black. I had on my boots, TRI-SAR [vest], EMT [medical] pack, regular cliff rescue gear. So I hiked down and left chem lights on high points of the lava field as a trail, and finally after a while I could hear her crying in the distance, ‘Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.’

  “I shouted down in the dark, ‘When you see my flashlight, call out,’ and then [as he used its beam to search below] she was there. I threw chem lights down to her so I’d know where she was when the flashlight was off and climbed on down [150 feet]. She had second-degree burns and third-degree on her arm, and I knew we couldn’t hoist her from there. I told her to rest and we’d have to climb out.

  “Her clothes had burned off, and she was cold and sweaty. It was misting and cool. I took off her wet shirt and put my long-sleeved tee on her, and we headed up. I had to carry her partway. She was tiny, like five-three and 110 pounds.

  “I pressed her bad arm in toward me so if we hit some rocks it wouldn’t be on that side and got her to the top with some breaks because she was tired and dehydrated, and I talked to her. When we were out [of the ravine], I talked to the C-130 on the radio, and they could see the chem light trail, and I told her, ‘See, we didn’t leave you.’

  “I went back to the plane wreck and turned on the strobe and said, ‘We’ll try to get to the wreckage.’ We made it a little more than halfway before the helicopter returned and hoisted her in the basket, and I went back to collect my helmet and other gear and got lifted off on the hook. My boots were completely shredded from the aa.”

  As he concludes his story, the SAR alarm sounds, two claxons and a PA voice announcing, “Windsurfer on the north shore.”

  “Looks like you got a good one, Darrell!” He grins at the on-duty swimmer.

  “Yeah, if HFD [Honolulu Fire Department] don’t get there first,” Darrell Leciejewski worries as he gears up.

  • • •

  I

  n contrast to the remote-seeming Barbers Point Air Station, the Coast Guard station on Sand Island and 14th District Headquarters in the Federal Building on Ala Moana Boulevard occupy the heart of Honolulu’s urban waterfront.

  The Integrated Support Command on Sand Island is adjacent to the Matson Shipping Terminal and municipal sewage treatment plant and just across the harbor channel from the cruise ship docks. Along with a small boat station, two 378-foot High Endurance Cutters, the Rush and the Jarvis, are based here, as are two buoy tenders, the Walnut and the Kukui, a MSST team, and other units, close to a thousand people in all. Additional small boats and cutters are based on Kauai, Maui, and the Big Island.

  Local missions include fisheries patrols, port security, escorting military vessels in and out of Pearl Harbor, inspecting cruise ships and cargo vessels, and guarding humpback whales from overeager boat operators getting too close to the sentient giants.

  In recent years the Coast Guard has also threatened to arrest environmental protestors, including fifty surfers and kayakers who blocked the 350-foot Hawaii Superferry from making its inaugural landing on Kauai in August 2007. Among the demonstrators’ complaints was fear the massive high-speed car ferry would run over humpback whales.

  Because of the long distances involved in doing fisheries enforcement, the smaller cutters, the 87s and 110s, form MULEPATs—Multi-Unit Law Enforcement Patrols—with the 225-foot buoy tenders that can supply and refuel them at sea. When I visited Sand Island, one of these patrols had just busted a long-line (multiple hook) tuna fishing boat with bundles of illegal shark fins onboard.

  “MULEPATs are more common out here. When we send 110s out with a buoy tender it extends their legs [operational range],” explains Lt. Cdr. Matt Salas, who used to serve on the buoy tender Walnut. He’s now the District 14 Command Center supervisor.

  “Ours is the largest district with the fewest people,” he tells me as we wait in the hallway outside the Command Center on the ninth floor of the Federal Building while they sanitize it of classified documents. “Just imagine trying to rescue someone in California with your ambulance in Connecticut.”

  We enter the long, windowless room with his glassed-in office at one end of it. There are three watch standers on duty by two tiers of consoles facing a six-screen video wall. Off to the left is a TV with CNN playing, and on top of that a black and white security monitor showing the hallway we just left. Paris Hilton saunters across the CNN screen for a news-free moment. Fox News appears on the right quadrant of the media wall squeezing the gray map of the Pacific down to four panels. There are twelve red emblems in the shape of tin cans showing on the map. They are paired off by long connecting lines, like half a dozen extended barbells.

  “These are first-pass satellite hits. The first time it hits, the source of the signal can be at either end [of the barbell],” Matt explains. One of the cans changes color from red to yellow off the coast of China. “That hit on a second [satellite] pass [eight hours later] and got a stronger signal,” he explains. “The signal indicates an EPIRB—emergency position-indicating radio beacon— off the coast of China. The other end of that signal line is somewhere between Midway and Kwajalein twenty-five hundred miles away. We get a rash of these hits every morning off China. It’s the waking giant.”

  “China generates a lot of signals,” the enlisted watch stander behind us agrees.

  A week earlier the center’s watch floor had been crackling, the bullpen’s eight chairs filled and its phones ringing as the staff coordinated the kind of four-thousand-mile long-distance search and rescue case the center is famous for.

  I

  n the past the Command Center has diverted an aircraft carrier to pick up a sick fisherman, vectored (directed) ships in to meet an airplane crash-landing in midocean, and dropped a Navy SEAL team by parachute from a Coast Guard C-130 to treat a shark-bite victim in the western Pacific.

  This time, July 10, 2007, it was a Panamanian-flagged 420-foot Chinese log carrier, the Hai Tong No. 7, with twenty-two on board that went down during a raging typhoon 375 miles northwest of Guam. It was en route from Papua New Guinea to China when it sent out an EPIRB signal that cut off twenty minutes later.

  “The EPIRB came in, and we knew there was a storm in the area and had another classified source [the U.S. Navy monitors all sea traffic] saying there was an AIS [ship transponder] in the area, so we let Guam be first responder and we assumed the role of SAR mission coordinator,” Chief Warrant Officer Mike Wood explains.

  The Coast Guard in Guam issued an immediate broadcast calling on Amver vessels for assistance. Amver, the automated mutual assistance system, is like an Amber Alert for the oceans. Over three thousand commercial ship captain
s will divert to help sailors in distress, knowing they would do the same for them. The Coast Guard refers to mariners who come to the aid of others as “Good Samaritans.”

  In this case the container ship Horizon Falcon, the bulk carrier Ikan Bilis, and four other Good Samaritans responded.

  When the Horizon Falcon got on scene some forty-eight hours later, it reported an oil slick and rafts of floating logs. The Command Center then dispatched the buoy tender Sequoia from Guam, requested air support from the Navy, which launched a P-3 Orion aircraft out of Kadena, Okinawa, and scrambled two of its own C-130s out of Barbers Point.

  The P-3 arrived on scene a few hours after the Horizon Falcon and spotted three people in orange survival suits floating amid debris. It directed the closest vessels to them and started dropping flares. The Horizon Falcon was able to recover two of the survivors out of twenty-foot seas. A three-man crew from the Falcon and the first survivor they picked up had to abandon the rescue lifeboat after it was damaged by a breaking wave and climb the ship’s pilot ladder to escape. An able-bodied seaman was then harnessed to the ladder and repeatedly submerged by waves before he was able to get a grappling hook onto the second survivor and the two of them were winched clear of the sea. They never reached the third sailor. The Ikan Bilis recovered eight more Chinese sailors who’d been tossed around in their survival suits for two days. That left eleven men still unaccounted for.

  Lt. JG Lisa Aguirre was one of the Coast Guard pilots from Barbers Point sent to join in the rescue mission.

  “Because we’re only allowed to fly twelve hours, on the way to Guam we sometimes have to stop at Kwajalein, but the winds were with us, so we got a straight flight to Guam in 11.6 hours,” she tells me. “We deadheaded our crew, so we slept in the back [while another crew flew the plane]. Then they refueled us in Guam. We put in maximum fuel [sixty-three hundred pounds]—that took about an hour—and then our crew took over and flew to the search area.