The Perfect Storm

is because it rips the anemometer off the mast, but pilot Ed DeWitt reports that his airspeed indicator hit eighty- seven knots—a hundred miles an hour—while he was in a stationary hover. The Tamaroa’s course to the downed airmen puts them in a beam sea, which starts to roll the ship through an arc of no degrees; at that angle, bulkheads are easier to walk on than floors. In the wheelhouse, Commander Brudnicki is surprised to find himself looking up at the crest of the waves, and when he orders full rudder and full bell, it takes thirty or forty seconds to see any effect at all. Later, after stepping off the ship, he says, “I certainly hope that was the high point of my career.”

The first airman they spot is Graham Buschor, swimming alone and relatively unencumbered a half mile from the other three. He’s in a Mustang survival suit and has a pen-gun flare and the only functional radio beacon of the entire crew. Brudnicki orders the operations officer, Lieutenant Kristopher Furtney, to maneuver the Tamaroa upsea of Buschor and then drift down on him. Large objects drift faster than small ones, and if the ship is upwind of Buschor, the waves won’t smash him against the hull. The gunner’s mate starts firing flares off from cannons on the flying bridge, and a detail of seamen crouch in the bow with throwing ropes, waiting for their chance. They can hardly keep their feet in the wind.

The engines come to a full stop and the Tamaroa wallows beam-to in the huge seas. It’s a dangerous position to be in; the Tamaroa loses her righting arm at seventy- two degrees, and she’s already heeling to fifty-five. Drifting down on swimmers is standard rescue procedure, but the seas are so violent that Buschor keeps getting flung out of reach. There are times when he’s thirty feet higher than the men trying to rescue him. The crew in the bow can’t get a throwing rope anywhere near him, and Brudnicki won’t order his rescue swimmer overboard because he’s afraid he won’t get him back. The men on deck finally realize that if the boat’s not going to Buschor, Buschor’s going to have to go to it. SWIM! they scream over the rail. SWIM! Buschor rips off his gloves and hood and starts swimming for his life.

He swims as hard as he can; he swims until his arms give out. He claws his way up to the ship, gets swept around the bow, struggles back within reach of it again, and finally catches hold of a cargo net that the crew have dropped over the side. The net looks like a huge rope ladder and is held by six or seven men at the rail. Buschor twists his hands into the mesh and slowly gets hauled up the hull. One good wave at the wrong moment could take them all out. The deck crewmen land Buschor like a big fish and carry him into the deckhouse. He’s dry-heaving seawater and can barely stand; his core temperature has dropped to ninety-four degrees. He’s been in the water four hours and twenty-five minutes. Another few hours and he may not have been able to cling to the net.

It’s taken half an hour to get one man on board, and they have four more to go, one of whom hasn’t even been sighted yet. It’s not looking good. Brudnicki is also starting to have misgivings about putting his men on deck. The larger waves are sweeping the bow and completely burying the crew; they keep having to do head counts to make sure no one has been swept overboard. “It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, to put my people out there and rescue that crew,” Brudnicki says. “Because I knew there was a chance I could lose some of my men. If I’d decided not to do the rescue, no one back home would’ve said a thing—they knew it was almost impossible. But can you really make a conscious decision to say, ‘I’m just going to watch those people in the water die?’”

Brudnicki decides to continue the rescue; twenty minutes later he has the Tamaroa in a beam sea a hundred yards upwind of the three Guardsmen. Crew members are lighting off flares and aiming searchlights, and the chief quartermaster is on the flying bridge radioing Furtney when to fire the ship’s engine. Not only do they have to maneuver the drift, but they have to time the roll of the ship so the gunwale rides down toward the waterline while the men in the water grab for the net. As it is, the gunwales are riding from water level to twenty feet in the air virtually every wave. Spillane is injured, Mioli is incoherent, and Ruvola is helping to support them both. There’s no way they’ll be able to swim like Buschor.

Spillane watches the ship heaving through the breaking seas and for the life of him can’t imagine how they’re going to do this. As far as he’s concerned, a perfectly likely outcome is for all three of them to drown within sight of the ship because a pickup is impossible. “My muscles were getting rigid, I was in great pain,” he says. “The Tarn pulled up in front of us and turned broadside to the waves and I couldn’t believe they did that—they were putting themselves in terrible risk. We could hear them all screaming on the deck and we could see the chemical lights coming at us, tied to the ends of the ropes.”

The ropes are difficult to catch, so the deck crew throw the cargo net over the side. Lieutenant Furtney again tries to ease his ship over to the swimmers, but the vessel is 1,600 tons and almost impossible to control. Finally, on the third attempt, they snag the net. Their muscles are cramping with cold and Jim Mioli is about to start a final slide into hypothermia. The men on deck give a terrific heave—they’re pulling up 600 pounds dead-weight—and at the same time a large wave drops out from underneath the swimmers. They’re exhausted and desperate and the net is wrenched out of their hands.

The next thing Spillane knows, he’s underwater. He fights his way to the surface just as the boat rolls inward toward them and he grabs the net again. This is it; if he can’t do it now, he dies. The deck crew heaves again, and Spillane feels himself getting pulled up the steel hull. He climbs up a little higher, feels hands grabbing him, and the next thing he knows he’s being pulled over the gunwale onto the deck. He’s in such pain he cannot stand. The men pin him against the bulkhead, cut off his survival suit, and then carry him inside, staggering with the roll of the ship. Spillane can’t see Ruvola and Mioli. They haven’t managed to get back onto the net.

The waves wash the two men down the hull toward the ship’s stern, where the twelve-foot screw is digging out a cauldron of boiling water. Furtney shuts the engines down and the two men get carried around the stern and then up the port side of the ship. Ruvola catches the net for the second time and gets one hand into the mesh. He clamps the other one around Mioli and screams into his face, You got to do this, Jim! There aren’t too many second chances in life! This is gonna take everything you got!

Mioli nods and wraps his hands into the mesh. Ruvola gets a foothold as well as a handhold and grips with all the strength in his cramping muscles. The two men get dragged upward, penduluming in and out with the roll of the ship, until the deck crew at the rail can reach them. They grab Ruvola and Mioli by the hair, the Mustang suit, the combat vest, anything they can get their hands on, and pull them over the steel rail. Like Spillane they’re retching seawater and can barely stand. Jim Mioli has been in sixty-degree water for over five hours and is severely hypothermic. His core temperature is 90.4, eight degrees below normal; another couple of hours and he’d be dead.

The two airmen are carried inside, their clothing is cut off, and they’re laid in bunks. Spillane is taken to the executive officer’s quarters and given an IV and catheter and examined by the ship’s paramedic. His blood pressure is 140/90, his pulse is a hundred, and he’s running a slight fever. Eyes PERLA, abdomen and chest tenderness, pain to quadricep, the paramedic radios SAR OPS [Search-and-Rescue Operations] Boston. Fractured wrist, possibly ribs, suspect internal injury. Taking Tylenol-3 and seasick patch. Boston relays the information to an Air National Guard flight surgeon, who says he’s worried about internal bleeding and tells them to watch the abdomen carefully. If it gets more and more tender to the touch, he’s bleeding inside and has to be evacuated by helicopter. Spillane thinks about dangling in a rescue litter over the ocean and says he’d rather not. At daybreak the executive officer comes in to shave and change his clothes, and Spillane apologizes for bleeding and vomiting all over his bed. Hey, whatever it takes, the officer says. He opens the porthole hatch, and Spillane looks out at the howling grey sky and the ravaged ocean. Ah, could you close that? he says. I can’t take it.

The crew, unshaven and exhausted after thirty-six hours on deck, are staggering around the ship like drunks. And the mission’s far from over: Rick Smith is still out there. He’s one of the most highly trained pararescue jumpers in the country, and there’s no question in anyone’s mind that he’s alive. They just have to find him. PJ wearing black 1/4” wetsuit, went out door with one-man life-raft and spray sheet, two 12-oz. cans of water, mirror, flare kit, granola bar, and whistle, the Coast Guard dispatcher in Boston records. Man is in great shape—can last quite a while, five to seven days.

A total of nine aircraft are slated for the search, including an E2 surveillance plane to coordinate the air traffic on-scene. Jim Dougherty, a PJ who went through training with Smith and Spillane, throws a tin of Skoal chewing tobacco in his gear to give Smith when they find him. This guy’s so good, Guardsmen are saying, he’s just gonna come through the front door at Suffolk Airbase wondering where the hell we all were.