Boatswain’s Mate, U.S. Coast Guard

I’ve been in the Coast Guard 18 years. I joined because I wanted to be one of the aviation survival men. All of my tours have been at small boat stations or on cutters. I’ve always enjoyed everything I’ve done, but it’s sort of ironic that 18 years later I finally got the chance to get out on a helicopter and do something in a search-and-rescue capacity.

A transiting tug [Valour] was traveling north near Frying Pan Shoals, N.C. [near midnight on Jan. 17, 2006]. At some point, they knew they were taking on water. There were gale force conditions — 35-40 knot winds and 18-20 foot seas. One of the crew members fell overboard, a second fell down a ladder and ended up breaking his legs, and a third had a heart attack. The tug was going down pretty quickly, and they tried to release the barge [it was towing], which they did successfully, and then abandoned ship.

We had an HH-60 on scene, but because of the sea conditions they weren’t able to hoist the people up. There were nine people total on the tug, and the six who were uninjured went in the water. Luckily, there was a tug, the Justine Foss, in the area [that answered Valour’s distress call]. They recovered five people out of the water [another was rescued by the helicopter].

The [abandoned] barge had 5.5 million gallons of black oil onboard. They wanted to secure the barge so it didn’t get up on the shoals and break apart. We had one boat that could get out there and tow the barge, but it was in Fort Macon, N.C., which was 40 miles north, so it had about a six-hour transit before it could get to the barge. So two other Coast Guard members and myself were flown down [from Fort Macon] in a Marine Corps helicopter [from Cherry Point, N.C.]

When I got in that morning, the [operation] had been ongoing all night. They inserted us onto the barge. The tug [Justine Foss] was eventually able to make an approach and we were able to tie into an emergency breakaway bridle and take the barge in tow.

It was so quick getting everything together that I didn’t even realize anyone had lost their life. It was neat getting the barge in tow and making sure it didn’t inflict any type of environmental disaster, but it took awhile to sink in: people lost their lives [the missing crewman was never found, another went down with Valour when it sank and a third died during the rescue].

There’s good and bad in the military. You’ve got to take both. My job has always been coming into work and enjoying what I do. Most people join the Coast Guard because it’s a humanitarian organization, and people are drawn to an organization where you help people. That was a big draw for me.

Sometimes we help people on the water, and, more often than not, we get opportunities to help people out that we just work with.

It felt good to have a small part in preventing an environmental disaster. The risks were high and the outcome could have been disastrous. There were a lot of people who made a big impact that day.