On February 9th, 2007,
the Coast Guard Cutter Mellon was
tied to the dock in Dutch Harbor with its helicopter, an H-65 Dolphin, parked in
a PenAir hanger near the airport. During a school group tour of the helicopter
that morning, a student asked about the strobe light on the rescue swimmer’s
dry suit.
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| Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer Willard Milam |
The rescue swimmer
giving the tour, Petty Officer Willard Milam, 41, told the kids the light was
for the rescue swimmer himself, in case he ever had to let the helicopter crew
know he needed help. The kids asked him if he’d ever used it, and he said no, in
the 14 years he’d been jumping out of helicopters into the water, he’d never
had to light that strobe.
Eighteen hours
later, just before midnight, Milam and some of the other helo crew were uptown
shooting pool when the aircraft commander on the Mellon called to tell him that a 406 EPIRB signal from the 42 foot
fishing vessel Illusion was going off
in Makushin Bay, 50 miles away on the other side of Unalaska Island.
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| H-65 Dolphin helicopter |
After some discussion about the frequency of accidental EPIRB
alerts, the helo took off into 40 to 50 mph winds with gusts over 60 and quarter
mile visibility. They flew in heavy turbulence at 150 feet to keep below the
ceiling, expecting to tell the captain of a seaworthy boat in Makushin Bay to
turn his EPIRB off.
But there were no
deck lights in Makushin Bay, and nothing on the radar screen. Instead the
pilots saw two strobes faintly blinking, and flying closer, a tiny steady white
light- the kind that sits on the top of a life raft. And then off the right
side of the helo a red aerial flare glowed in the mist. Milam put his fins on
and got ready to be lowered into the night and a15 foot sea.
The summer
before, Milam had been set to retire, but when the Coast Guard offered him
another Alaska tour he re-enlisted. He loved Alaska, and was easily talked into
re-upping. But as he looked down at the black water he thought, “I pulled my
retirement letter for this?”
Once in the
water, he swam where the helo’s searchlight pointed and saw the raft’s light blinking
between the waves. When he climbed in he found four men in street clothes huddled
inside- “two Russians and two Spanish speaking gentlemen.” Somehow they had
lost their survival suits, and one of the men was hypothermic and not fully conscious.
Milam knew he had a problem- the men would have to get into the water to swim
to the basket, and the water was 40 degrees. Getting them into the water would
be issue number one, but in a few minutes they might not be responsive enough to
swim or climb into a basket anyway, regardless of their opinion of getting wet.
Milam told the
helo crew about the situation, and advised they bring they basket right up to
the door of the raft. But after a conversation in the helo, the crew chief
radioed that they’d lower their own survival suits down, giving up any chance
of survival for themselves if anything happened to the helicopter.
The tether line
came down, but as Milam slid off the door sill of the raft to retrieve it, he
felt water flooding into his suit. Somehow the suit had been compromised between
the time he’d swum to the raft and now. He grabbed the tether line, but with
the weight of the water around his legs he needed the fishermen to help him back
in.
And already his
thinking was becoming muddled from the cold. Straddling the doorway as the survival
suit bags came down on the tether, he unhooked them all at once, thinking they
were tied together, but they fell off the hook separately. Two immediately blew away from the raft. Milam
told the men to get their hypothermic friend into a suit first while he retrieved
the two floating suits. When he returned with the suits he was shivering.
Milam pulled
the hypothermic man, now in a survival suit, into the water and headed for the
basket. Milam would tell an interviewer later that “The last place a guy that was on a boat
that just sank wants to be is back in the water after he’s been in a raft,” and the man panicked and fought Milam until he pushed him into the
basket, signaled to the crew chief, and up he went.
But when Milam turned back to the
raft it was now some distance away and only the dome light was visible between
the waves. He realized that with his suit full of water and the cold working on
him there was no way he could catch it as it drifted away in the wind.
For the first time in his career, he
hit his emergency strobe. They hoisted him up and tipped him into the
helicopter, his suit so full of water he could barely move. They considered
lowering the basket and letting the fishermen get themselves in unassisted, but
they were down to 15 minutes of fuel before they had to leave. Milam told them
there was no way they’d get all three of them in 15 minutes without his help. And they all knew that if they didn’t have
enough fuel to get all three men now, and had to leave someone in the raft
while they flew back to Dutch Harbor to refuel, the raft would be God knows
where by the time they got back.
Milam told them he had fifteen
minutes of mojo left- he’d go down and get the men into the basket. At the door
of the helicopter he puked into the rotor wash, and then they lowered him into
the sea.
The three remaining men were in their
survival suits, but the next man to be hoisted tried to climb on the outside of
the basket. Milam fought to make to sit down, and finally simply threw him in. He
told the two remaining men to calm down, they were good, just go with it. The third
man went up with no problems.
But the last fisherman, the skipper,
jumped feet first into the basket when it arrived for him. He went through the
webbing, the basket tipped upside down, and he came up on his belly with the
basket on his back, struggling to keep his face out of the water. The cable was wrapped around the basket and at
one point it became wrapped around the fisherman’s neck too, but the crew chief
paid out enough slack to keep it from going taut. “Had that cable gone tight we
wouldn’t have had to worry about rescuing that guy,” said Milam later.
He struggled to get the skipper
untangled but the man tried repeatedly to climb on top of him, until Milam executed
a “front head hold release,” a full palm in the face, which got the man into
the basket. Milam watched it go up. All the fishermen were now in the
helicopter.
Then the cold really set in. When the
basket went down again the crew chief could see that Milam’s arms weren’t
coming out of the water as he tried to swim for it. He was done, but the pilot somehow
maneuvered the basket around and dragged it under Milam, pulling him out of the
water like scooping a piece of cheese with a Triscuit.
When they landed in Dutch Harbor
Milam remembers walking two of the fishermen to the ambulance, but he learned afterwards
he didn’t walk any survivors to the ambulance, it was the aircraft commander
and a paramedic who walked him to the ambulance. He was pretty out of it for
awhile, but they warmed him up and he walked out the clinic four hours later.
"They flat out told me for
the rest of my life that I would get colder easier. And I do notice -- I spend
a lot of times outdoors-- that I do wear one extra layer here, you know. I can
see now, (the doctor) was right…I do
feel a little colder, but it's not like life or death.”
For their actions that night, Milam and the rest of
the crew- Lieutenant Commander Joseph Carroll, Lieutenant Devin Townsend, AST1
Willard Milam and AET2 John Maghupoy- received numerous awards, among them the
Captain Frank A. Erickson Rotary Wing Rescue Award, “for extraordinary skill
and courage in carrying out a rescue on February 9, 2007.”
A lot of fishermen have been pulled out of the water
by the Coast Guard, and a lot of fishermen have not survived to see a
helicopter or a C-130. Knowing that, it’s sometimes easy to see the dangers of
a fisherman’s life in high contrast to the imagined comforts and safety of a 378
foot cutter, or the supposed ease of flying around in a helicopter or a big
airplane and being home for dinner every night. But it’s worth remembering, and
this story is proof of that, that the Coast Guard too has its own stories of
risk and heroism and survival, often accomplished at the far edge of human
abilities and technology for small glory and modest pay.
Sources for this article include a 2008 Coast Guard Oral History
interview of Willard Milam, and a Coast Guard News article from January 16,
2008.
