Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  I

  think of all the places it’s ever been, the Department of Homeland Security is the best place for the Coast Guard unless they had a Department of the Oceans,” Roger Rufe now tells me.

  Roger left the Ocean Conservancy in 2006 to become director of operations for DHS, where he’s working to develop adaptive capabilities packages along the lines of the Coast Guard’s Deployable Operations Group.

  Unlike many of the political appointees in DHS, Roger’s background as both a Coastie and a conservationist allows him to recognize that the homeland is threatened by more than just jihadi terrorists and that while we may or may not ever see a dirty bomb go off in America there will always be another hurricane season. Which is another reason he isn’t willing to give up the Coast Guard.

  “I just can’t imagine a new government reorganization taking place now,” he tells me. “I’d say it’s nigh impossible in the absence of something like 9/11.”

  Senator Cantwell of Washington isn’t so sure. “The jury is still out on Homeland Security,” she says. “When you have these asymmetrical threats to our country, is a centralized linear bureaucracy the best response? When we had these drills in Puget Sound for protecting our ferries, people said the Department of Homeland Security wasn’t there but the Coast Guard was. They see the Coast Guard as something that’s unique and also local.”

  Of course, 9/11 wasn’t the first time there was a historic shift in the Coast Guard’s direction and priorities. There were huge shifts as a result of Prohibition in the 1920s, World War II, the Drug Wars of the 1980s, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

  The trick is not to track the distortions but to find a balance, recognizing that while certain security threats are not going away, others are just as rapidly emerging. It doesn’t take particular insight to see that beyond the threat of terrorism, climate change is going to require a huge shift in priorities and resources. Not only will increased response to extreme weather events such as hurricanes and flooding be required, but more attention will have to be given to America’s increasingly ice-free fifth coast on the Arctic and to the maritime migration routes from poorer impacted nations like Haiti, where food riots broke out in the spring of 2008, followed two weeks later by the drowning death of more than twenty Haitians trying to flee by boat to the United States.

  There’s no question that the Coast Guard could take on a much more central and robust role in fulfilling its historic mandate as America’s “Guardians of the Sea.”

  A Department of the Ocean incorporating the Coast Guard, NOAA, and some marine policy offices from the State Department and elsewhere might serve the nation well in protecting, exploring, and restoring our last great wilderness frontier. Plus, who better to confront environmental lawbreakers and pirates than Coasties with 57 mm deck guns? Of course, I’m not talking about what’s politically feasible in today’s Washington; I’m talking about what would best serve the public interest.

  In any case, and wherever they might settle over time, America’s Rescue Warriors need the capacity to meet the growing challenges of our new millennium, a capacity in terms of people and dollars they don’t presently have, a capacity we as a nation need to give them.

  M

  uch about the Coast Guard is still missing from this book. There are the lighthouses, those sentinels of the sea they continue to operate and maintain after 220 years; there are the two Coast Guard astronauts, Bruce Melnick and Dan Burbank, who looked down from space to see their area of responsibility as the entire blue part of our blue planet.

  There’s the Inland Coast Guard that gets little notice until there’s flooding and tornadoes in the Midwest or a highway bridge collapses. There’s the honor guard on parade, the Field Intelligence Support Teams on the docks, the Baltimore shipyard, the Maritime Law Enforcement Academy, international trainers, and attachés from the Green Zone of Iraq to the Gulf of Guinea, not to mention Officer Snook, the anti-water-pollution fish mascot. There are civilian tool makers like Darnell Chamblee at the Aircraft Repair and Supply Center fabricating jewelry like three-piece universal joints that would take twenty-four months to order from the manufacturer, and the thousands of Coast Guard Auxiliary volunteers with their force-multiplying boats and airplanes such as Linda Vetter in San Francisco and Dan Charter in New Jersey. The Coast Guard has its own art program, museum, and foundation, along with an operational language and nomenclature for getting “into the game.” It has, in anthropological terms, all the trappings of a culture except for a rejection of “the other.” Instead, theirs is a culture based on a willingness to sacrifice, “so that others may live.”

  T

  wo miles off New Jersey’s Cape May Lighthouse, we put on our helmets and take off our rings and watches to avoid degloving injuries in which the flesh could be stripped away. The first Dolphin 65 approaches from the north. We fold down the black whip antennae on the side of the 47-foot surfboat, though there are still plenty of mast obstructions to foul a line as we beat against a light chop. The helo’s mechanic stands in the open door of the 65 and lowers the rescue basket to the two crewmen on the aft deck. They ground it with a short-handled baton so that the static electricity that can build up in the cable doesn’t shock them, then snag it and bring it aboard. It’s about the size of a shopping cart, and I’m amazed one or even two large fishermen can fit inside it, provided their survival instincts have kicked in. The copter pulls up the basket and makes another practice run, this time coming up on our wake with a weighted trail line. After the crew snags it, the mechanic attaches the basket and puts it on the winch line. The 65’s swimmer has now squeezed in next to him, sitting in the small open door thirty feet above us.

  We next stop dead in the water. They fly away and return to repeat the evolution. With the rolling of the boat in the two- to three-foot seas and the battering downdraft from the helicopter, it’s actually harder doing the recovery stopped than under way.

  The wild lily-pad ripples look like natural art, though I suppose I’d find their symmetrical patterns less pleasing if I were in the water getting blasted by the cyclonic prop wash, trying to breathe through blinding pellets of salt spray.

  The boat crew gives the thumbs-up with arms spread, and the mechanic, now twenty-five feet above us, reels in the cable and basket through his gloved hand before they roar off. A second 65 approaches from Atlantic City, and we go through another training evolution with them.

  After they leave, we take off. Lt. Cdr. Steve Love of the Cape May Boat Station (where they once searched for my friend David Guggenheim’s missing dad) lets me take the controls. I hand them back before we approach the Lewes Ferry Terminal and head up a marshy channel. They inspect some pier pilings jutting into the canal as a possible hazard to navigation. A monarch butterfly flits past us. Steve tells me how three days earlier they picked up some people from a marine mammal stranding center and helped them recover a seal that was entangled with fishing line and unable to eat because the filament had tied up around its mouth. “He still tried to bite us, though.”

  Back offshore we pass a whale-watching boat, and the tourists all wave to us. “We pulled two people off a capsized sailboat here two weeks ago,” Steve says, then grins. “We rescue people, too.”

  Then he points to a spot near the 150-year-old Coast Guard lighthouse, his expression changing. “This tour boat, they lost a Boy Scout overboard about a year and a half ago. We recovered the body about a month later. We kept looking, thinking that that might help the family. You think about losing a child like that, that’s the hard part of our job.”

  The sun is shining brightly, though the air has cooled. The water is that deep blue cobalt color of the open sea and I realize how, when I’m done writing this book, I’m going to miss these honorable guys and gals.

  If honor, respect, and devotion to duty can still resonate as a calling for tens of thousands of young people going in harm’s way on our ocean frontier to keep us safe, I’d say that makes a pretty good case for the U
.S. Coast Guard being the blue in our red, white, and blue.

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