Fog of SAR

In years past, pilots were given a hearty breakfast before a wartime mission. Eggs, toast, and bacon were consumed with a healthy dose of skepticism for what lay ahead. Such thoughts on my mind, I finished off an omelet paired with perfectly crisped breakfast potatoes and sipped strong dark-roasted coffee from a porcelain mug at a Hilton in downtown Miami. Meanwhile, 200 miles to the south, a maritime blitz of migrants was leaving Cuba in homemade boats, aiming north for the Florida coast. Carrying what meager supplies they could scavenge, little more than some food, a change of clothes, and a plastic gallon jug of water, they’d set off in the dead of night to evade Cuban authorities. Why it happened, we never quite knew; perhaps living conditions had deteriorated once again beyond some undefined threshold, or perhaps a rumored shift in U.S. policy had been spreading from town to town along the Cuban coast. Regardless of what spark ignited the fire, the Florida Straits were heating up with more men, women, and children adrift on the open sea each day.

Deployed from our home unit in North Carolina with a crew and a C-130J Super Hercules, today would be our first full day patrolling, with the intent being detection, interdiction, and the protection of life at sea. The Coast Guard had surged ships, aircraft, and personnel to southern Florida, all under the auspices of an ongoing operation named Vigilant Sentry. A secondary and growing concern was the possibility of a simultaneous surge of Haitian migrants. Already overwhelmed with Cuban interdictions south of Florida, we were at risk of being outflanked if a wave of Haitian boats approached from the east.

The action, however, was concentrated for now in the Florida Straits, and that’s where I wanted to stay. My organizational archnemesis, a character we’ll call ‘Mr. Magoo’ who was a cubicle-dwelling minion with persistent yet indirect oversight of our deployed operations, wanted us to relocate to Guantanamo Bay. Having dealt with him for years, I had no doubt a spreadsheet on his desk was tracking the cost of my morning omelets. If Mr. Magoo could tell his boss that he’d saved $100 in lodging and per diem costs, the tens of thousands of dollars in wasted jet fuel transiting back up to the Florida Straits each day was, in the alternate and bizarre universe of headquarters’ strategic thought, a win-win.

But this wasn’t my first time out on the humanitarian dancefloor, and much to Mr. Magoo’s consternation, I had a few tricks up my sleeve. In Miami, at the Coast Guard base out of which we were staging, an assortment of migrant supplies grew, intended for Guantanamo Bay and the looming Haitian threat. Consisting of palletized clothing, food rations, blankets, flip-flops, life jackets, and more, the air-bound cargo expanded to the point where their own smaller aircraft could hardly make a dent in moving any substantial volume. Lucky for me, a C-130 loves to haul cargo. It wasn’t my place to pitch the idea to the higher-ups, but I knew the guy whose job that was. The two of us devised a plan where every few days we’d haul two or three pallets down to Guantanamo Bay, offload, fly over the north coast of Haiti, verify no wave of migrant ships had set sail, then speed back to the Straits and get back in on the action until we ran out of fuel for the day. Mr. Magoo was no doubt fuming at his desk, but for the time being, we’d stay close to the epicenter. And I’d have a decent cup of coffee at the Hilton each morning before we set out—an operational win-win.

Ninety miles separate Cuba from the Florida Keys, which may not seem like much, but problems arise when the wind, seas, and currents don’t cooperate. The Gulf Stream, a notoriously strong eastward flow of water, is pinched between Cuba, the Bahamas, and south Florida, where it can accelerate to nearly five knots, surpassing the speed of most homemade rafts. For many, reaching the south coast of Florida is a futile act. If their raft breaks down, their homemade motor quits, or they are weakened from exposure and no longer able to paddle, the hapless mariners find themselves pulled eastward around Florida and pushed north into the Atlantic. Exposure and dehydration alone under a tropical sun ensure that many never make it that far.

Overwhelmed by the onslaught, an armada of Coast Guard small boats and cutters intercepted as many as they could each day. Overhead at 1,000 feet or so, my own crew battled confusion during that first week, losing count of how many different targets we were tracking at any given time. At the end of each day, we compared notes to keep a running tally. Four migrants in a Styrofoam raft, three in a makeshift motorboat, eight in a wooden open-hulled sailboat with a tarp for a sail; our daily count often numbered somewhere in the high dozens. Many more were pushed eastward by the Gulf Stream, ending up aground on the craggy shoreline of the uninhabited western Bahamas, their vessels smashed and sunk against the rocks and coral. Devoid of vegetation, shelter, or water, we’d fly low over the interspersed islands and count bodies waving at us from the outcroppings.

We carried some equipment on the plane that could be dropped by parachute, most of which was intended for sinking boats. This consisted of dewatering pumps, life rafts, and a few watertight cans stuffed with survival equipment. In the first week, we air-dropped nearly all of it to migrants on bits of gnarled coral jutting up and out of the dark blue water. A pump did them little to no good, so we pilfered first aid kits, food rations, and emergency water packets from our own plane’s inventory, packing in as much as we could before flying low over the rocks and dropping the kits from the opened ramp of our C-130. Back at Miami each evening, my guys snuck around the base ‘borrowing’ more gear for the next day’s flight, and I fended off Mr. Magoo’s incessant calls for lower-cost lodging.

Even with my crew’s nocturnal prowess, we ran out of supplies after the first week. A day prior, we’d dropped first aid kits, food, and water to a dozen or so migrants on a rock near the Cay Sal Banks. I’d called up my chain that evening and asked if they could send a cutter to pick them up, but the following morning, no one could confirm their status. In fairness, the entire operation was chaos, best described as the Fog of SAR. Imperfect at best, its outcome depended on the sum of 1,000 individual decisions made by young men and women all trying to do their best with little more than a partial picture of an ever-shifting battlefield.

Our tasking that morning was to push westward and work our way east over the course of the day. Taking off from Miami, I shrugged that off and headed south, for the little piece of rock we’d flown over the day before. Sure enough, the migrants were still there. Some of them had used our first aid kit from the day before to bandage wounds. Two of them lay motionless, their lethargy telling me that time was not on their side. We had one can and one parachute left. Packing it with as much water, food, and first aid as they could, my crew rigged the kit for aerial delivery. Overflying the island, we followed our procedure just like we’d trained back home and just like we’d been doing all week. But at the release point, the package remained tethered to the static line which was clipped to the plane. It now hung just below the tail of our aircraft, spinning wildly in the slipstream, the parachute having been torn away.

My dropmaster, kneeling at the ramp, grabbed his knife to cut the static line. We were now a half mile away from the migrants, and they would not be getting a second drop of supplies; once cut, it would freefall away from the plane, down to the open water, and eventually sink, its contents thus useless. I was mad. We had rigged the package wrong, but it wasn’t that mistake bothering me. It was the entire operation that was getting under my skin, and the hung gear threatening to impact our horizontal stabilizer was the physical manifestation of that frustration. Up until that moment, I’d felt in control. The simple act of ‘helping’ helps make some sense of it all. But now the odds were insurmountable. That damn Fog of SAR, the one I’d been fighting all week, was winning.

“Don’t cut it.” I wasn’t even sure I’d spoken the words, but I had, and in doing so I’d broken a rule. I’d trained to cut hung gear away as it posed a risk to the flight controls. I’d taught the new guys and girls to cut the gear away when I trained them. And now I’d just done the opposite, partly out of frustration, but also stubbornly convinced that we would still make this work. At 200 feet, with a can flailing at the end of a static line just below the tail, I worked the plane around in an easy banking turn back towards the rock. “When I tell you to, cut it,” was all I said. It was an ad-hoc plan to try again and with a few words, my dropmaster and I were synced up on the same page. A long minute passed as we arced back around, but once upwind of the small island, flying perpendicular to the wind, and just before we were abeam the rocks, I called out, “Cut, cut, cut.”

The can of supplies landed in the water just off the island. Without a parachute to soften the fall, the can was damaged on impact and started sinking. Two migrants jumped in, grabbed it, and swam back to the relative safety of their little island. It was the second time in my career where I realized my hands were shaking at the controls. But we’d made it work. With their resupply, we pointed back to the west, and I radioed in asking slightly more forcefully for a cutter to pick them up, which thankfully happened later that evening.

Halfway through a flight towards the end of the second week, we found two rafts caught up in the worst of the Gulf Stream. One had a slight chance of making landfall in the Keys. The second, further south and making no headway, had no chance at all. We radioed to the task-saturated command center who noted the two rafts then asked us to push west and help a small boat locate a raft somewhere south of Marathon. Half an hour later we were overhead as that raft was intercepted. Our tasking was then to stay overhead until the migrants were all accounted for. With fuel running low, I asked what the plan was for the two previous rafts we’d found and was met with radio silence. Below us, the situation was stable. Further east, not so much. I turned back towards the two rafts.

That Fog of SAR was hitting the command center hard. They were overwhelmed and losing the bigger picture. A larger patrol boat, not too far west of us was listening in on the same frequency when I asked for it to be diverted to the two rafts getting pulled towards the Atlantic. That request was quickly denied. There’s an inertia of sorts with tactical confusion, where it builds on itself, and not in a linear way. It’s an exponential curve that only worsens until someone breaks the chain. The Coast Guard refers to this as a ‘bias for action.’ I had nothing to drop to those two rafts; all I could do was orbit them and watch as they got sucked out to sea. In that moment I needed help. I needed someone else to break the rules. Seconds later, the radio crackled to life and the patrol boat’s Commanding Officer alerted the command center that he was breaking off from his assigned tasking and following us towards the two rafts. As daylight faded over the Florida Straits, they recovered nearly two dozen migrants from both rafts. Whoever that CO was, I owe him a beer. He too seemed to enjoy cutting through the fog.

As the second week ended, Hurricane Ian was poised to make a near-direct hit on Key West. The flotilla of Coast Guard cutters all pointed east towards the Old Bahama Channel to avoid the storm, which necessitated a pause in interdictions in the Florida Straits. There was a good chance that the flow of migrants had slowed but not entirely stopped. The 90-mile run to Florida was impossible in those kinds of conditions, but I feared that word of the hurricane had not made its way up and down the Cuban coast. Even if we were to fly into the Straits again, there was nothing that could be done until the storm passed and the cutters returned. In addition, most airports in south Florida were shutting down in advance of the hurricane-force winds, to include the base we were using. We were soon going to be homeless. No doubt Mr. Magoo was salivating at the idea of us twiddling our thumbs in Guantanamo Bay.

As if things couldn’t get any more frustrating, our tasking for the day blew my mind. Another character, who we’ll call ‘Captain Andy-Pants’ was the senior officer in charge of the cutters moving eastward along the northeast coast of Cuba towards Hispaniola. Very proud of himself and his new title as Commander of a Surface Action Group, Captain Andy-Pants floated the idea (get it?) for us to fly down and get aerial photos of his little armada as it steamed eastward. I was bordering on livid at this point, but the higher-ups were in support of a photo opportunity, and they stood firm on the idea.

I asked, “You want me to fly through a hurricane to take pictures of your boats?”

The officer on the other end of the line replied, “And patrol, if you can, but yes, we’d like to get some pictures of the Surface Action Group underway. We’d like to use them for social media.”

That part of the region was quiet, we’d been running supplies back and forth for two weeks and hadn’t seen any indicators of migrant activity coming up from Haiti or the eastern tip of Cuba. “I’ll try,” I said. “But if the weather gets ahead of us, I’m not punching through a hurricane for Facebook.”

We were the only aircraft on the ramp that morning and as we finished fueling and went about our preflight, I looked up at the dark sky and swirling low clouds. To our south and west, the Florida Straits were a no-man’s land of hurricane force winds and churning seas. It would be a few more days before the Coast Guard could resume operations. To our south and east, Captain Andy-Pants, in my mind at least, was busy polishing his medals and donning his dress whites for his moment in the limelight.

We took off into low level windshear, our shoulder-straps holding us down in our seats as the plane jolted up and down and pointed east over the water. As we climbed up, I fidgeted with the weather radar and scaled out until we could get a good picture of the storm south of us. One of the stronger bands from Hurricane Ian was now whipping its way around counterclockwise, a sea of yellow and red radar returns stretching east over the Bahamas. I looked at my copilot and grinned just a bit. Chock it up to the Fog of SAR, but Andy-pants would have to take a selfie. We turned north, for home, to live and fly another day.

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