Rescue Warriors Read online

  Rescue Warriors

  Also by David Helvarg

  50 Ways to Save the Ocean

  The Ocean and Coastal Conservation Guide

  Blue Frontier

  The War Against the Greens

  Rescue

  Warriors

  The U.S. Coast Guard,

  America’s Forgotten Heroes

  David Helvarg

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  RESCUE WARRIORS. Copyright © 2009 by David Helvarg. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press,

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Photographs on pages 1, 57, 77, 101, 153, 173, 225, 279, and 307 courtesy of the

  United States Coast Guard.

  Photo credits as follows: NyxoLyno Cangemi (1); Tom Gillespie (57); Tom Sperduto (77, 173);

  Adam Eggers (101); Jeffrey Pollinger (153); Mark Jones (225); Mark Piber (307).

  Photographs on pages 31, 127, 197, and 249 by David Helvarg. Courtesy of the author.

  Design by William Ruoto

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Helvarg, David, 1951–

  Rescue warriors : the U.S. Coast Guard, America’s forgotten heroes / David Helvarg.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36372-7 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-312-36372-9 (alk. paper)

  1. United States. Coast Guard—History. 2. United States. Coast Guard—Biography. 3. Heroes—United States—Biography. 4. Rescues—United States—History. 5. Lifesaving—United States—History. I. Title.

  VG53.H45 2009

  363.28′60973—dc22

  2008044633

  First Edition: May 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the Guardians who’ve crossed over the bar,

  “so that others may live,”

  and to my own departed, who continue to inspire me

  to do good work:

  Eva Lee (Helvarg)

  Max Helvarg

  Richard Cross

  John Hoagland

  Nancy Ledansky

  Deborah Helvarg

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  You Have to Go Out

  1

  New Orleans Saints

  2

  The Boot and the Factory

  3

  Hamilton’s Legacy

  4

  Calling All Boats

  5

  Gunners

  6

  Warriors

  7

  Surfmen

  8

  Aviators

  9

  Frontiers

  10

  Duck Scrubbers

  11

  Deepwater

  12

  Red, White, and Black

  13

  The Next Surge

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the wake of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, during which the Coast Guard saved over thirty-three thousand lives, Time magazine dubbed it “the little service that could,” and I was able to convince my agent, Kevan Lyon of the Sandra Dykstra Literary Agency, that this was a story that could engage anyone who’s ever walked a beach, sailed an ocean, or felt the unnerving tug of an undertow. Living by the beach in Del Mar with a daughter who surfs, she got the idea pretty quick. She also proved to be a helpful reader and critic throughout the process.

  Sitting in his prow-like office in the famed Flatiron Building in New York, publisher Tom Dunne indicated that he recognizes a good story when he hears one but would rather see it written down. When family loss and work conflicts caused me to ask for a deadline delay, Tom proved both tolerant and gracious. Editor Joel Ariaratnam also proved to be an engaging and insightful reviewer and critic of my work in progress.

  The Coast Guard gave me tremendous access to its people, stations, boats, cutters, and aircraft in more than a dozen states, including Alaska and Hawaii, as well as Washington, DC, Bahrain, and the North Arabian Gulf.

  In addition I traveled with and spoke at some length to more than four hundred active-duty and reserve members of the service, from trainee recruits to Commandant Thad Allen. I regret I was unable to incorporate all their tales of human and physical adventure into one volume. I just didn’t have the heart to kill as many trees as would be necessary to begin to tell the full story of America’s Rescue Warriors.

  Given the rapid change in rank and postings among this smallest of the armed services, I’ve chosen to identify active-duty people by their rank and location at the time I interviewed them between 2005 and 2008 rather than try to update the reader with career minutiae that could only be of interest to their parents, spouses, and service detailers. Again, my apologies to any captain who’s now an admiral, E-6 who’s since made chief, or retired lieutenant commander now running a dive charter in the South Pacific.

  I did find the public affairs specialists of the Coast Guard, both full-timers and those for whom it’s collateral duty, to be genuinely helpful and professional, unlike some other military services, companies, and agencies I’ve dealt with. Among those who tolerated me over time are Commander Andrea Palermo in DC and Dan Dewell in California. Also thanks to Joe Bowes and brothers Jim and Brendan McPherson at headquarters, Bill Carson in Cape May, Dave French at the academy, Jim McGranachan in New York, Dan Molthen in North Carolina, Marsha Delaney in Hawaii, Rachel Behrens in Bahrain, and Kurt Fredrickson, Richard Brahm, and Steve Bonn in Kodiak. Coast Guard historian Dr. Robert Browning and his staff at headquarters were also more than tolerant and props to Chief Kimberly Smith for helping us find our photos.

  To all the mariners, watchdogs, public servants, sailors, fishermen, and other informed sources who helped provide me varied perspectives for this work, I’m sorry I can’t individually acknowledge each of you for your time, knowledge, and considered opinion. Some of you are probably just as glad I can’t.

  While many contributed to this book, any faults, errors, and omissions are, of course, the copyeditor’s. No, only kidding. They’d be mine, though hopefully they’re not here. I should also demur with a quote from Richard Henry Dana Jr., who at the conclusion of his nonfiction work Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, wrote, “Whatever attention this book may gain, and whatever favor it may find, I shall owe almost entirely to that interest in the sea, and those who follow it, which is so easily excited in us all.”

  INTRODUCTION

  You Have to Go Out

  I was riding with another Coast Guard crew, this time in the air rather than on the sea, though they could be anywhere that’s close to water. Our orange HH-65 Dolphin helicopter landed in the rain, and Art Vega, the mechanic and rescue hoist operator, jumped out and did his walkaround under the still-turning rotor blades. On the left side he saw the four-foot by two-and-a-half-foot engine cowling gone and the shrapnel holes it had left in the rear stabilizer and thought, “It’s amazing we’re still alive.”

  With additional nicks and scratches on the rotor blades, it was also amazing none of us had felt anything while flying over Texas from Air Station Houston to Corpus Christi at 150 knots during the Coast Guard response to Hurricane Ike. We’d done some aggressive maneuvering, banking 45 degrees in tight circles over a 25-foot boat floating upside down off the storm-battered city of Galveston and then circling to check out what looked like a body in the sand but turned out to be marine debris near a navigation buoy that had been pushed ashore.


  “We were probably descending when it happened,” Lt. Ed Aponte, the twenty-nine-year-old pilot and aircraft commander, speculated, staring at the damaged tail stabilizer. “We were very, very lucky. It’s pure luck we didn’t crash.” Then he asked me to take a picture of him and his three crewmates standing by their helicopter.

  Despite a bad habit of having its side door pop off in midflight, the Dolphin tends to be a very forgiving aircraft, although ten days earlier, on September 4, 2008, a crew of four had died when another Coast Guard 65 crashed during a training mission off Honolulu. I’d been on Oahu at the time and was surprised when I got back to the mainland to find little or no national coverage of the accident. I figure the least people who go into harm’s way to help others deserve is that we remember their names. Their names were Thomas Nelson, forty-two, Andrew Wischmeier, forty-four, David Skimin, thirty-eight, and Joshua Nichols, twenty-seven.

  In 2008, as in 2004 and 2005, the hurricane season was an active one. While I’d been in Hawaii, Gustav had threatened New Orleans with another Katrina-like disaster before weakening and making landfall west of the city.

  Now Hurricane Ike had blown up into a nine-hundred-mile-wide monster threatening Texas. On Friday, September 12, I drove from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area to Air Station Sacramento, where a big four-prop C-130 Hercules was standing by to take two helicopter replacement crews from San Francisco and Humboldt Bay to Texas; Ike was expected to strike there within twelve hours. I arrived at the station gate as they were holding a memorial service for their fallen aviators in Hawaii. They had little time to mourn, however. Within two hours we were airborne, landing at Air Station Corpus Christi, 180 miles south of the Galveston/Houston area, about an hour before Ike hit there as a Category 2 at 2:00 A.M.

  The Coast Guard was already “in the game,” having earlier that day helped rescue ninety-four people trapped by the tidal surge while also dealing with a 500-foot freighter adrift in the storm. They’d also redeployed many of their helicopters, Falcon jets, small boats, and cutters to other parts of Texas and Louisiana to wait out the storm’s worst so they could then ride in on the back side of the hurricane and begin saving lives as they’d done three years earlier in Katrina and in countless other storms.

  Early Saturday morning a Falcon jet took off from Corpus, flying into 50-knot winds, to get survey video of the flooded coast. They also launched five of their small 65s on SAR—search and rescue—missions. A short time later I flew on a second Falcon to Houston. We flew over the battered and flooded coastline past Galveston. Unlike on the Mississippi coast after Katrina, most houses here and in other hard-hit areas [excepting the Bolivar Peninsula] were still standing. We passed over Galveston Bay, a few small oil slicks and a Coast Guard buoy tender heading out from its boat station, where all the cars in the parking lot were piled on top of each other like Matchbox toys. 90 percent of the navigational buoys in the Houston Ship Channel were lost to the storm and would have to be replaced in order to restore maritime commerce.

  When we landed at Air Station Houston at Ellington Field, there was no power or water, and a couple of NASA hangers had collapsed. There were Coast Guard fuel trucks and cots, however, and by the end of the hot, muggy day the “Coasties” had rescued over a hundred more people and a dozen pets and begun transitioning from SAR to medical evacuations and survey missions. Coast Guard small boats were also operating in flooded communities from Sabine Pass, Texas, up to Louisiana and Arkansas.

  Capt. Bill Diehl, a slim guy with a gray crew cut and sharp blue eyes, was running the frontline response from Houston, where they’d suffered moderate wind damage and a citywide blackout. Earlier Saturday he’d gotten some big tugboats to help prevent a 680-foot bulk carrier that lost power from running into the 610 highway bridge. The C-130 Herc I’d come in on was now tasked to fly over the offshore oil rigs with a safety officer and look for damage. At least half a million gallons of crude oil would spill in and around the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the storm.

  On Sunday I flew with them to Mobile, Alabama, to pick up a Ford Expedition, extra water, and a crew from the Gulf Coast Strike Team, one of the Coast Guard’s environmental response units. Their team leader, Cdr. Virginia Kammer, told me that most of Houston’s petrochemical complexes were undamaged, but a fertilizer plant had sprung a leak, and there were other reports of hazardous spills to investigate.

  We flew them back to Houston, where things were now jumping. C-17 cargo planes were unloading, a bigger Coast Guard Jayhawk was on the flight line with the 65s, and TV cameras were rolling as the secretary of homeland security got off a Customs helicopter and onto his personal jet a day ahead of the president’s visit. A minute later an F-16 fighter jet screamed off the runway.

  Despite some fifteen deaths in the first days alone, billions of dollars in damage, and some three million people who were without power, I thought Ike was more of a mess than a national disaster, an assessment Captain Diehl agreed with. A lot of the cleanup and recovery to come would take place on barrier islands where people had built stilt houses on concrete pads on the sand and then ignored evacuation orders. Few of them died because Ike wasn’t all it might have been and God loves fools.

  Along with hurricane response, I’ve also had the chance to see the Coast Guard perform many of its other maritime missions. I’ve been fortunate in never having to be a “customer” of their search and rescue service, but a few of my friends have been.

  I

  t was a bit like being in a car parked on a train track when suddenly a train piles into the side of you,” Roz Savage says, recalling the moment a wave capsized her partially enclosed 23-foot rowboat 140 miles off the coast of California. “There’s this huge shock wave through the boat and the boat’s hitting and hitting and hitting and you are bouncing off the wall and all the objects in the cabin that aren’t tied down are flying around you and you are hoping that you remembered to stow everything that’s sharp! Eventually the boat comes to rest and you are lying on [strapped to] the ceiling hoping you closed all the vents and hatches and that the boat’s going to come the right way up again and you hold your breath, and it seems like a long time but eventually, slowly, it starts to roll back into position and everything that was flying clockwise before is now flying counterclockwise, but of course it doesn’t end up where it started out.”

  It would be another two days, August 23, 2007, before my environmental project was rescued by my book project. The Blue Frontier Campaign, a nonprofit group I founded based on an earlier book, works for the protection of our public seas. One of our projects was Roz’s quest to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific. She was doing this to raise awareness of our oceans at risk, though now it was the plucky, slight thirty-nine-year-old Englishwoman who was at risk. The year before, she had rowed across the Atlantic. In July ’07, we’d held a launch party for her new trip by San Francisco’s Golden Gate, but the onshore winds wouldn’t let up for a month, and when she finally did launch from farther north, they held her close to the coastline for over a week before a storm came on her. Her rowboat, the Brocade, capsized a second time that Tuesday.

  On Wednesday she had a new experience. “A powerful wave rear-ended my boat. I shot down my bunk, my sleeping bag tobogganing over the slippery vinyl of the mattress. I came to an abrupt halt when my skull collided with the wall at the end of the cabin. I sat up. Blood trickled down my face. I explored the damage with my fingers. It didn’t seem too bad. I dabbed the blood away with a washcloth and lay back down on my bunk to try to sleep.”

  Unfortunately, sleep would be denied her. The boat capsized yet again after the sea anchor that kept it facing into the waves tore away. Again she banged her head. She also lost the restraining straps that kept her secured to the floor, along with her GPS and other external communications masts. When she went outside on her safety line to check on the missing sea anchor, she was inundated by a huge ice-cold wave.

  She then got on her satellite phone
to discuss her situation with her land crew and Hawaii-based weather guy, still convinced she could “tough it out.” Someone decided to report her predicament to the Coast Guard, however. Soon a big Coast Guard C-130 prop plane from Sacramento was flying overhead, and a 576-foot tanker, the Overseas Long Beach, had been diverted to her side. The ship, part of the Coast Guard–administered Amver (automated mutual-assistance vessel rescue) system, provided her some leeward shelter from the rough seas while also trying to get her a new sea anchor without coming so close as to swamp her.

  Eventually they were able to toss one down to her, but it didn’t work when she deployed it. Meanwhile the C-130, low on fuel, had to return to base to be replaced by a second aircraft. An 87-foot Coast Guard cutter, the Dorado, also set out to meet her but was forced to turn back due to worsening weather.

  While she discussed her situation with the Coasties through much of Thursday, her rowboat was rapidly drifting out of the 150-mile range of their HH-65 Dolphin rescue helicopter waiting to be launched from the Humboldt Bay Air Station.

  Later I spoke with Lt. Steve Baxter, the pilot who eventually picked her up.

  “You’re a friend of hers?” he asks.

  “Yup.”