In the 1970s, aircrewmen joining Pacific Fleet aviation squadrons went through a mandatory two-week syllabus of land- and sea-survival training in southern California prior to reporting for duty. Training for survival on land (called SERE, and pronounced “sear,” an acronym for “survival, evasion, resistance, and escape”) was a vestige of the recent Vietnam experience, when the fleet’s attack and fighter squadrons had reluctantly helped populate Hanoi’s Hoa Lo Prison. SERE’s climax was a period locked up in a replica prisoner of war camp the Navy had faithfully recreated in the high desert, near Warner Springs, that was so shockingly realistic it featured authentic torture, muttered confessions, and occasional broken limbs. (The sensation of drowning on the “water board” was especially vivid and terrifying.) A clinical psychologist acting as a safety observer, and probably scrutinizing the “war criminals” and their “guards” with equal professional interest, supervised everything covertly.
The effect of the few days of abuse in the camp was powerfully magnified by the fact that it came at the very end of both phases of survival training, during which entire time students had no food and little sleep. The experience was so miserable that graduates cached copies of their SERE course completion certificate in safe places, so that they could always prove they had been there and done that, and would never have to go to Warner Springs again.
SERE, especially the stumbling, forced marches with your head enshrouded in a bag that stank like wet fur or the hours spent squatting in a tiny, wooden crate alone with a sour-smelling urine pail and your thoughts, fixed an image into each crewmember’s mind of what being held in any Communist bloc country would be like.1 North Korean captivity would be the worst, a ferocious assault on your mind, body, and patriotism. Torture and merciless interrogation. Turnip soup to eat, or less. Compared to that or to a North Vietnamese standard, interrogation by the Russians might be less painful and more sophisticated, perhaps, but its goal would be the same: secrets, the yielding up of any classified knowledge each man might have. In terms the crew would have understood, after SERE, they were “safety wired in the resist position,” trained to expect the worst and to deal with it.
Measured against the deliberate abusiveness of SERE, the at-sea phase of aircrew survival training was positively benign. Happily so, it had to be repeated with every assignment to a squadron, paired with an ascent to thirty thousand feet in a low-pressure chamber to experience befuddling hypoxia and a flight physiology/night-vision update.
Survival at sea training (DWEST, deep water survival training) comprised beachcombing with paratepee-building ashore, and a parachute harness drag, raft cruise, and helicopter hoist at sea. (“Sea” was the San Diego Bay off the Naval Amphibious Base at Coronado. There the southbound California current, transporting water from the Gulf of Alaska, kept the surface temperature at a chilling 54 degrees F year around.) Everyone aboard AF 586, except Gary Hemmer, was a DWEST graduate.
Like the hyper-realistic SERE, DWEST was built entirely around the needs of aircraft carrier aviators: bailing out over water; getting out of the parachute’s harness and into a one-man raft; being rescued quickly thereafter by a helicopter. A maritime patrol aircrew could expect none of this. While a bailout from an Orion was possible in theory (P-3s did carry a backpack parachute for each ditching station), it was strongly discouraged in the flight manual. “Thorough consideration should be given to the consequences of scattering flight crew members over a large area of ocean without benefit of life rafts,” the manual intoned soberly, and then it continued: “The command ‘Prepare to bail out’ (when over water and a great distance from land or surface vessels) should be issued only after it is determined that ditching cannot be safely accomplished. Bailout should be conducted with the aircraft circling to avoid widespread separation of crewmembers.”
Stringing the members of a crew out across the open ocean with nothing but each man’s personal survival equipment was a near-certain death sentence for everyone. The P-3 did not carry one-man rafts, and practically never operated near helicopters. In short, DWEST did not include any training especially relevant to the crew of a multiengine aircraft that went down far from a friendly aircraft carrier battle group, its plane guard destroyers, and hoist-equipped helicopters. Nothing about lining up to abandon the aircraft, launching the rafts as the plane sank, and surviving the hours, or even days, that might pass before rescue. The squadrons tried to fill some of this gap with crew ditching drills, walkthroughs of the exit procedures outlined in Section V of the Flight Manual, but these were static, dry land exercises and lacked realism.
The Navy also offered a cold-weather survival training program, at the Canadian Forces Base at Comox, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, but its subject was arctic survival techniques on land. No one had thought it necessary to combine cold-weather training with DWEST, even for volunteers. Realistic training for cold water survival would have been too close to the real thing, like practicing bleeding. It was assumed you could do it if you had to. Cynics thought they would never have to, that no one could survive a P-3’s impact with the water.
The men in the rafts were enduring something they had never experienced before. Water does not have to be at or even near freezing temperature for whole body immersion to have a fatal effect, and death from exposure can come in warmer water and more quickly than is commonly understood. At a water temperature under 40 degrees F, most unprotected adults, meaning those wearing street clothes or less, will be helpless or unconscious in thirty minutes and dead in ninety. The U.S. Coast Guard publicizes two “Rules of 50” that dramatize the effects of 50-degree F water—still not warm, but fully 18 degrees above freezing—on the human body. First, an average adult has only an even chance of surviving a fifty-yard swim in fifty-degree water. Second, a fifty year old has only an even chance of surviving fifty minutes in fifty-degree water.
Every man aboard AF 586 was wearing a QD-1 anti-exposure suit over a Navy-issue flight suit and an assortment of underwear and civilian clothing, but only Master Chief Shepard was wearing the prescribed winter flight suit beneath his QD-1. This full ensemble, the Navy said, “is designed and has been shown in laboratory tests to provide adequate exposure protection for a minimum of six hours of immersion in 45–50° F water.” Flight gear (crewmembers’ jackets, flight suits, gloves, and sunglasses), however, was purchased out of the same fund allocation that paid for jet fuel, hydraulic fluid, and engine oil. Few squadrons purchased much winter gear, and it was not always available when ordered.2
Warmly dressed in a winter flight suit beneath his QD-1, Shepard fared reasonably well. Hemmer would almost certainly owe his life and his remaining twenty years to Shepard’s careful choice of clothing that morning and to the other man’s ministering care.
Only one man in the Mark-12 wore the inflatable hood accessory of the anti-exposure suit. The other twelve either did not know about the hoods or could not find theirs. When not using them to bail with, they continued to wear the white aviator’s helmets they had put on when Condition V was first set forever ago. The helmets were a poor alternative to the hood. Because of the circulation pattern of blood in the body, approximately one-third of total heat lost is radiated from the head. The hard hat, specifically designed for good air circulation around the head, did not have the insulating qualities of the hood, but it was more familiar and its rigidity might have imparted a sense of security that the flexible hood could not.
Some had found the anti-exposure suit’s accessory mittens, but other survivors were still wearing their thin, Nomex and leather flight gloves (“Gloves, Flyer’s, Summer,” in the curious, backwards nomenclature of the Navy’s supply system). In between gut-churning heaves and soon after dark, Moore had marveled at the fluorescent glow of his wet gloves, doused by glowing marine organisms. These single-ply gloves were good for the intended purpose, flash fire protection, but when wet they were totally unsuited for retaining heat and preserving manual dexterity.3
Since turning for the SAR scene, Sinyavin had battered its way east for five hours at full speed, during the final miles following CG 1500’s burning flares on the surface, beneath the airplane nervously chivying it along. It approached the area sometime after midnight, with CG 1500 still overhead, but now carrying only a few more hours of fuel on board.
Nearing the rafts, Porter asked the Russian to have all the ship’s exterior lights turned on and to sound its foghorn. Maslov understood the request for the lights, but not for the horn.
“Maslov, horn please.” The lights came on.
“Bill, Bill, I do not understand. Speak slowly.”
Porter’s response was quick and clear: “Honk, honk, honk.” Laughter from the crew.
“OK, Bill. I understand.”
Sinyavin’s horn began to moan. Downwind, but with their hard hats on, it is doubtful the survivors heard the signal before they saw the ship.
Finding of Fact. At approximately 0145, crewmen from the Sinyavin picked up the first four survivors from the Mark-12 raft. The Sinyavin put a small boat in the water to execute the pick-up. Those picked up initially included Lieutenant (junior grade) Gibbons, Lieutenant (junior grade) Ball, Petty Officer Moore and Airman Reynolds.
Beginning not long after nightfall, Dave Reynolds thought that he saw the lights of a ship on the horizon. He was to think that for most of the night, but the “lights” remained fixed in place hour after hour, faint and just on the edge of vision. Gibbons later decided they must have been flares from the other raft, but the lights could have been imaginary, too.
When the survivors really did see Sinyavin approaching a mile or two away—first, the cyclopean searchlight probing toward them, then the rest of the ship—the men in the rafts “lit up the sky” with signals by one account. So much so, that Reynolds thought the constellation of smokes and flares on the water risked confusing the rescue crew. It did not. By then, after eleven-plus hours in the water, “lighting up the sky” could not have meant an especially impressive display. It was taking the men as long as fifteen minutes to load and fire a single pencil flare, and when Mys Sinyavin materialized out of the night, there were only four rounds left aboard Gibbons’s raft.
In the air, a red flare ignited in front of CG 1500. It came from the Mark-12. “Bill, Bill,” Sinyavin called, “we see.”
On Sinyavin’s bridge, Captain Arbuzov carefully maneuvered his ship so as to form a protected lee in which his boat could do its dangerous work, and slowed to a near stop. In the incandescent beam of the “projector” on Sinyavin’s bridge, Arbuzov saw the Mark-12 and its entangled SAR kit, and thought that he was seeing two rafts. Then Sinyavin put one of its small boats in the water. The ship’s senior navigator, V. N. Storchak, had been selected to be chief of the boat. He went over the side with V. N. Kushkin, the mechanic assigned, and they set out for the raft.4
Matt Gibbons’s luck continued to hold out. Sinyavin’s motor whaleboat got to the Mark-12 raft first, and picked up the four men inside. In fairness, Gibbons, Ball, Moore, and Reynolds could be judged lucky only in comparison to those in the smaller raft. Despite the cover, they had been sitting in waist-deep water for hours. All were terribly cold. Moore, in particular, was in desperate condition. Hours before he had been shaking violently, followed by incoherent mumbling and then, ominously, he had become still and silent.5
Conditions in the larger raft were bad enough that its occupants would probably have survived the others only by a matter of hours, perhaps into daylight but almost certainly not through the day, Friday. A few weeks after the rescue, Matt Gibbons recalled that when the whaleboat pulled alongside, “we were far gone. We could talk, and we could see and we could hear, and a couple of us could move our hands, but that was about it.”
Arbuzov had Storchak’s first report, that three survivors (actually four) had been recovered, relayed to CG 1500, overhead. It was then that he learned from Porter there was another raft in the water, two miles north.
In Moscow, nine time zones east of Kamchatka, roughly twelve hours after Ambassador Toon was instructed to approach the Soviets for help, the Ministry of Defense called the embassy to report that four survivors were now aboard Mys Sinyavin. Those floating half-submerged in the Mark-7, living and dead, had to wait until the whaleboat picked them up forty-five minutes later.
Finding of Fact. At 0200 Coast Guard 1500 departed the scene due to low fuel. At that time, Mys Sinyavin was proceeding to the second raft.
At CG 1500’s radio station behind the cockpit, PO Ray Demkowski had been copying weather reports for Shemya, Adak, and Cold Bay during the flight. Just as Sinyavin turned to head to the second raft, Lt. Cdr. John Powers, plane commander of CG 1600, called Porter to tell him they were diverting to Adak because of crosswinds at Shemya. The wind was now directly across Shemya’s lone runway, and above the limit for safe landing. Until then, Porter’s plan had been to land there, too.
The crew of Coast Guard 1500 had good reason to be proud of their performance as they left station. After a seven-hour Adak-to-Adak round trip, they had flown to the SAR area and in darkness and poor weather, dropped a radio and raft package, successfully kept in contact with the rafts for hours, guided a Russian trawler directly to the site, and been overhead to witness the start of the pickup of the survivors. Most of that at just a few hundred feet of altitude above the stormy ocean, at night. All of it with only two pilots and a single flight engineer.
Climbing away from Sinyavin and the rafts, and now heading for Adak an hour or so behind John Powers, Porter and his flight engineer, Darryl Horning, puzzled over the C-130 flight manual’s maximum range tables. Elated by the rescue but exhausted by their long day, the two could not make any sense out of the close columns of numbers they were reading and simply pulled the power back to a setting they agreed must be “pretty close” to the correct one for maximum range, and headed east.6
Porter’s departure meant that there would be no U.S. aircraft overhead the rafts and Sinyavin until Adak’s second Ready Alert flight arrived on top. In the meanwhile, and with no direct contact with the Soviet trawler, Washington asked the embassy in Moscow to pass a request to the Soviets: “Appreciate rescue assistance of Mys Sinyavin. Please instruct Sinyavin to continue search and rescue until all fifteen (15) aircrewmen are recovered. U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Jarvis expected on scene [Saturday, midday] with medical assistance. Request transfer survivors to Jarvis.”7
A few hours later, now with aircraft overhead the trawler again, Juneau repeated the request through the radio station at Adak, adding the detail that Jarvis was proceeding at “best speed.” The American objectives would remain the same throughout the SAR effort: to keep Sinyavin on station and searching for other survivors until Jarvis arrived and to gain custody of the men as soon as a transfer at sea could be done.
When Coast Guard 1500 neared Adak just after 4:00 A.M., Bill Porter could not follow Rescue 95825’s example and head for better weather at Cold Bay. Porter had enough fuel for a couple of tries to get on the ground at the naval station in front of his nose, but not enough fuel to go anywhere else. Leaving the rafts two hours earlier, he had immediately decided on Adak as their destination when CG 1600 told them Shemya was closed because of crosswinds, and Adak it now had to be.
Bill Porter did fine. He flew a ground-controlled, precision radar approach to Runway 23—Adak’s controller quietly reciting flight path and glide slope information over the radio as Bill eased CG 1500 down over Zeto Point—broke his approach off under the overcast when he had Adak’s Runway 23 lights in sight, and banked right then left to land on Runway 18. One-eight was more nearly into the wind and just as long as 23, but it was not aligned with the precision radar that had brought Porter’s C-130 in sight of the ground.
Porter later wrote that his GCA approach to Adak was “O.K.,” and maybe it was, but tiny Adak can be a challenge to get into under ordinary conditions. At night under low clouds, banking hard to stay inside of Mount Moffett looming off the right wingtip, unseen but nearly four thousand feet high, in high winds and after a twenty-three-hour day, it had to have been hairy. Especially during that brief, disorienting moment after Runway 23’s lights went out and before 18’s lights went on. He taxied in to park next to CG 1600. Then Darryl Horning, thick moustache drooping as if in fatigue, chained their aircraft down facing south, props feathered and into the wind. Cans of beer in hand, the crew went to debrief.
Finding of Fact. Between 0100 and 0230, Petty Officer Brooner and Airman Garcia succumbed to exposure. Brooner and Garcia both became very quiet. When they did try to talk, their speech was indecipherable. Garcia slipped from the raft and or fell into the water and was observed floating face down in the water shortly before pick-up.
Assailed by the brutal cold, the survivors were shrinking inside themselves, fading in and out of consciousness, but still fighting back. At one end of the raft, Flow, Shepard, and Wagner took turns trying to keep Rich Garcia awake and out of the water. At the other end of the small raft, Caylor and Forshay were desperately trying to keep Jim Brooner between them alive the same way, trying to get him to talk, to stay awake, to sit up out of the water. For a time, in an effort to get him above and out of the water entirely, they stretched Brooner atop their legs, swaddled ineffectually in the equipment kit’s single-ply Mylar “blanket.” It is doubtful that the well-intentioned effort made any difference to Brooner, who by then was probably beyond any help his crewmates could offer.
Survivor accounts of the deaths of Brooner and Garcia early Friday morning are sketchy and fragmentary. Their observers were rapidly losing acuity. Gary Hemmer did not remember much after the RC-135S appeared and nothing at all after XF 675 dropped the SAR kit until Sinyavin’s whaleboat came alongside. By the time the last two sensor operators died, the five others in the Mark-7 raft were close to death, too, and comprehending very little anymore. John Wagner, who had noticed before midnight that the two were moving less and less and that Brooner was sliding into the water and Garcia was slumping in the raft, only remembered not being “too concerned” hours later about either man.
At the end, nothing worked. Brooner, who regained just enough strength to grasp ineffectually for Wagner’s strobe light in a last spasm of life, died with the lights of Mys Sinyavin in sight, with Forshay and Caylor still working on him. No one at the other end of the raft noticed. They were too busy with Garcia and Hemmer to see what had happened a few feet away. Gibbons would describe Caylor as in very bad shape when the pilot was finally brought aboard Sinyavin. Brooner’s death so close to rescue had crushed him.
Jim Brooner was twenty-three when he died. Rich Garcia, twenty, was barely two years out of Oak Grove High School, in San José, California, when he died. Randy Rodriguez was younger by one year, just nineteen. Why did only the youngest men in the rafts die?
“The will to survive is often directly influenced by the ability to survive,” noted the Pacific Fleet commander in his fifth endorsement to the investigation. “Whether a rescue situation is 5 minutes in length or 12 hours in duration, the energy and stamina required, as opposed to that available, can end up being the difference between life and death. Accordingly, Commander, Naval Safety Center is requested to insure that guidance on the importance of physical fitness is continuously emphasized to all concerned.” What the commander had in mind in this homily on physical fitness is not completely clear. It is possible that the staff officer in fleet operations who drafted the letter simply could think of nothing much to say eight months after the ditching.
There was, in fact, nothing about the physical condition of the crew mentioned in the investigation or the four prior endorsements, but all crew members were required to pass Navy flight physicals and given that, and their relatively young age, it is probably reasonable to assume that they were in much better than average health and physical condition. The Safety Center’s accident report does not add anything about physical condition beyond the height, weight, and certain body measurements of the crew.
Grigsby, thirty-six, was eleven years older than the crew average, but only two years older than both his passengers, who lived. The reports of his behavior once out of the aircraft are equivocal, and it is unclear why he, alone, did not make it into a raft. Perhaps the inflated lobes of his LPA made it impossible for Grigsby to swim to a raft as some others did, or perhaps his first choice to head for the less crowded but more distant Mark-12 set up the failure. By the time he gave up on the Mark-12, he apparently was too spent to make it to the drifting Mark-7. (Forshay had dithered in the same way, but in the end managed to join the crowd already in the small raft.)
The patrol plane commander is assigned to the no. 1 raft in the event of ditching, that is the Mark-7 raft on the port side that Rodriguez and Moore were unable to launch. It is possible that Jerry Grigsby might have survived had the no. 1 raft been launched, inflated, and lying close aboard the fuselage when he rose through the hatch out of the cockpit, the last man out.
Afloat, alone in an LPA life jacket and exposure suit, he should have been able to survive for as long as six hours—sadly, that would have made no difference in his fate. More likely, he was numb in minutes, unconscious not long thereafter, and dead a few hours later. Almost certainly he was gone before sunset. The relatively brief search that continued on Friday was almost reflexive, and could not have been done in the expectation of finding either Grigsby or Miller, and not alive.
The fact that only the three sensor operators died of exposure in the rafts led to a lot of speculation and at least to one bizarre theory. The most common thesis is hinted at in the Pacific Fleet endorsement quoted above: the will to live. None of the three was married. This condition led some to the easy conclusion that because these men were single, they “had nothing to live for” and, in the enervating conditions aboard the small raft, simply gave up and allowed themselves to die.
The same idea reappears in a letter from the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery to the squadron in late February 1979: “Intangibles: In going through the clothing of the three fatals they were at least, if not better, dressed than many who survived [sic]. They were small men, which would cause them to lose heat more rapidly. It was interesting that all three were wearing leather jackets.8 I don’t know if this was a factor in their death or not, but we do know that coat is not a very good thermal garment. Nothing I saw of their clothing and anti-exposure suits made me believe that they were less protected than the others. We do not know what constitutes ‘the will to live’ or how to teach it, but one must consider it a factor.”
The bizarre theory goes like this. They were allowed to die by other members of the crew to ensure that the Soviets would not somehow extract from them their technical knowledge of antisubmarine warfare. This truly fantastic explanation neglects the inconvenient fact that Shepard, the most experienced antisubmarine warfare technician aboard, and Hemmer, who knew more about U.S. Navy ocean surveillance systems and their capabilities than anyone else, were “allowed” to live.9
An even darker rumor made the rounds of some squadron hangar decks at Moffett Field. AF 586’s “Os” (officers), it was whispered, had pushed the three “Es” (enlisted men) overboard, in order to have more room in the raft for themselves.
A less conspiratorial explanation was sought in the condition of the anti-exposure suits. It was known that most suits had eventually leaked, even the seemingly intact ones. In Sinyavin’s galley and sickbay, the Russians had poured cold water out of each man’s boots, a mixture of salt water, urine, and sweat.10 Ed Flow estimated his boots held only one pint. Ed Caylor guessed up to half a gallon. Gibbons estimated a gallon.
In the wing commander’s February 1979 endorsement to the investigation, the anti-exposure suits aboard PD-2 were described as “in very bad condition and leaked—most of these rubberized anti-exposure suits are eight-to-ten-year-old salvage items obtained from the Air Force and have begun to deteriorate.” In fact, as a careful canvas of the survivors the next month revealed, this was an exaggeration.
All of the suits had been inspected and functionally tested in November 1977 and inspected again (without testing) in June 1978, as required. Before the ditching, crewmembers had the presence of mind (and the time) to inspect the suits as each was put on. None exhibited any defects prior to use, so it is likely that the rips found on Forshay’s and Rodriguez’s happened when both men exited the aircraft, an unfortunate but probably unpreventable event.
Twelve of Crew 6’s QD-1s came back with the survivors. The nine Navy suits averaged nine years of age; the three ex–Air Force suits averaged six years. All of them were subjected to careful inspections, looking for design deficiencies, evidence of neglect and abuse before the ditching, and of material failure during the night in the water. The result of the inspections was anticlimactic: the suits had worked. Under the grim conditions off Shemya, however, they could not have been expected to work forever or even for long. Twelve to 18 hours appeared to be the maximum, better than the specification prescribed.11
Whatever lacking (or losing) the will to live might mean, as an explanation for the death of three healthy young men it sounds suspiciously like the discredited nineteenth-century medical notion that held “melancholy” was either the cause of fatal disease or the predisposition for it. In this antique view, depression, fear, and grief eventually had fatal consequences; conversely a “hopeful disposition” was “most unfavorable” to the development of disease.12 The most likely explanation for the deaths of the three youngest men in the Mark-7 is probably the most obvious one. Slightly more susceptible to the cold than their crewmates for whatever reason—small size, light weight, and low body fat were likely factors—and in the least seaworthy raft by the luck of the draw, Rodriguez, Brooner, and Garcia died of exposure first.
The absence, or presence, of a “hopeful disposition,” the will to live, probably had little to do with what happened in the rafts that night. Beginning with Hemmer and then the others on the Mark-7, and perhaps with Moore on the Mark-12, the remaining ten would probably have died sometime later on Friday had not Sinyavin emerged out of the night when it did. It is possible that Matt Gibbons, heated by some special strength, might have hung on until early Saturday, but even he did not think so.13
Finding of Fact. At approximately 0230, the small boat from Mys Sinyavin picked up the six remaining survivors, as well as the three dead. All were extremely weak and unable to effectively move or walk without assistance. All survivors were taken aboard Mys Sinyavin.
Porter had told Sinyavin that a second raft was two miles away. Once Storchak had Gibbons’s group aboard his boat, he abandoned the now-empty Mark-12 and told Kushkin to steer north toward the other raft.
A line (probably the line to the sea anchor) trailing in the water from the Mark-7 fouled the rescue boat’s propeller, delaying by a few, intolerable minutes the recovery of the desperate men on the second raft. By the time Sinyavin’s boat finally arrived alongside the Mark-7, the raft had deflated to the point that its two sides were closing in on each other, pulled together by the weight of the men and water. To the living men inside, it must have been as if the sea were almost finished swallowing them. No one in the small raft could move. With the last survivor aboard, before the Russian boat crew turned for Sinyavin, they watched the Mark-7 sink.14
All the men from the P-3 had to be lifted into the boat and, later, from the boat to the trawler’s deck. Shepard remembered Sinyavin’s whaleboat as a small boat, sixteen to twenty feet, with three men aboard. That length would have made it no bigger, perhaps much smaller, than the waves its crew was challenging. In high seas, the whaleboat had to keep way on while its crew collected the desperate Americans. To stop dead in the water would have been to lose control of the small boat, and risk broaching and then capsizing. Forshay was fearful of being dropped into the water by the large Russian fisherman leaning over the bow to scoop him out of the raft. The boat might have been larger than Shepard remembers, because its crew probably totaled five, and all ten survivors and the bodies of the three who had died were taken to Sinyavin in a single trip.
Sitting in the boat next to Gibbons and Forshay as the three held a quick, groggy muster, Caylor realized for the first time that Butch Miller must not have escaped from the aircraft.
The recovery of Sinyavin’s whaleboat, now packed with dead and nearly dead Americans, aboard the mother ship demanded outstanding seamanship. Once alongside, the small boat was tossed up and down twenty feet at a time by the waves, while the crew wrestled with the rope falls hanging down from the ship’s davits. A misstep could result in being crushed between the ship and its boat, battered by a swinging block, or being knocked over the side and into the water.
Just after 5:00 P.M. Moscow time, the Defense Ministry’s 3:10 P.M. status report on survivors to the American embassy was amended: there were now ten men aboard the trawler, and Mys Sinyavin was continuing the search for the others. The condition of the survivors was unknown. (It would later develop that no one in Moscow knew if the trawler had a doctor aboard.)
A more complete report soon came from the deputy director of the USA Division at the foreign ministry. The “Soviet vessel has taken on board ten survivors of P-3 crash. Three dead crewmen have been found,” he said, and the “remaining two crewmen are reported by American survivors to have been killed.”
Finding of Fact. All survivors were immediately taken to either the ship’s dispensary or the galley. They were taken out of wet clothing, given warm blankets, hot tea, hot baths, and were treated for exposure by the ship’s doctor. They were then taken to bed and watched carefully over the next 24 hours. The care they received was excellent, in the opinion of all survivors.
The men of the Soviet fishing fleet off Kamchatka were all cold-water sailors, among the world’s most experienced, and Sinyavin’s small medical staff was necessarily expert in the treatment of exposure. The immobile, barely animate Americans being carefully lifted aboard presented the ship’s medical officer, A. Safronenko, with a familiar, albeit especially acute, problem. As they remember it, everyone was immediately brought below to the ship’s sickbay or galley, stripped in a steam room, wrapped in warm blankets and given hot tea, then bread and jelly and hot baths.
“Core temperature” is the temperature of the heart, lungs, and brain, the vital center into which life retreats as the body progressively loses heat. Normal is 37 degrees C, 98.6 degrees F. Beginning at 35 degrees C, the cerebral metabolic rate begins to decline quickly, a survival mechanism protecting the brain from the reduction in oxygenated blood flow to the head. Below 35 degrees C, all other vital life processes are caught in a sort of biological entropy also. Everything slows and stiffens. At a core temperature of 34 degrees C, amnesia starts to drain the mind. With the loss of another degree or so, stupor sets in.15 A few more, and hallucinations start. Even while the body cools, the muscles of the heart’s ventricles (its high-pressure pumps) continue to contract, but at some low temperature, they beat spasmodically (“fibrillate”), effectively disrupting the organ’s pumping action.
Based on descriptions of the survivors’ symptoms, days later American doctors at Yokota believed that the survivors’ core temperatures when they were lifted aboard Sinyavin early Friday morning were in the range 28–31 degrees C. If that is a reasonable estimate, then the survivors’ first day’s rehabilitation aboard Sinyavin was more complex and its outcome more uncertain than they knew or remembered. Their knowledge of what was happening to them, and memories of the experience, were victims of exposure, too.
Only Gary Hemmer’s condition at the time of rescue did not have to be deduced later. He was carried aboard Sinyavin with a body core temperature of 28 degrees C, so one of the ship’s crew would tell the American officers during the two days they were steaming towards Petropavlovsk. The ship’s medics worked to revive Hemmer through the rest of the night in sickbay. Long after the others appeared out of immediate danger and had been removed to bunk beds in crew’s quarters, Hemmer was still being carefully thawed back to life, a degree at a time.16 The danger now was “rewarming shock,” a fatal drop in blood pressure if blood is allowed to flow freely into suddenly reopened capillaries. Like the others, Hemmer had to be warmed from the inside out.
Midday Sunday in Moscow, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs officer would report to his American counterpart that “the condition of the survivors was very serious and all were on the verge of death at the time of rescue.”
The Sinyavin left the crash site not long after daylight, heading almost due west. Needing repairs, full of fish, covered with barnacles below the waterline, and running across the seas, at times Sinyavin made good only eight knots. On the way, the ship’s master, Captain Arbuzov, would explain to Moscow by radio that Mys Sinyavin’s progress to Petropavlovsk was being impeded by heavy weather and by ice floating on the surface of the sea. It would arrive in port late Saturday, 29 October, local time or very early Sunday morning.
Like Porter, Captain Arbuzov had reason to be proud of what his crew had done. In the understated words of TASS correspondent Mikhail Khanukh, Abruzov’s sailors had “displayed courage and self-sacrifice under difficult conditions. . . . Ten Americans owe their lives to the speedy and bold actions of the Soviet seamen.”
Two other Soviet fishing vessels, the Mys Belkina and Gorodok, would come from the Bering Sea to join the search at the datum, and look for the still-missing crewmembers. At 5:25 A.M., the second Patrol Squadron 9 P-3, Delta Foxtrot 704, would arrive on station to resume the rescue effort. Several Soviet military aircraft would appear in the area, too. Their presence would be reported to the Rescue Coordination Center as “not hampering search efforts” by the Americans. The immediate sense of relief that Russians and not North Koreans had rescued the crew gave way quickly to the realization they must be headed to the Soviet Union.
The survivors were assigned to two compartments for the cruise into port. Caylor’s bunkroom was loud and bright around the clock, with a radio on continuously and Russians coming and going seemingly at random. Despite his exhaustion, he found it difficult to rest. Caylor thought the noise and lights were part of a diabolical Soviet program to disorient him before interrogation; he had heard of the technique at SERE school and thought he recognized it here. Only later did Caylor realize that he was sharing the berthing space with some of Sinyavin’s sailors, who had work to do and watches to stand. On reflection, Caylor would later describe his time on Sinyavin as “great,” and considering the alternative, it certainly was.
Bruised a rich purple the color of eggplant from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine, Bruce Forshay lay in an upper bunk of the other bunkroom for most of two days, grateful to be alive and emerging only to go to the head.17 The others, excepting Hemmer, regained mobility fairly rapidly and by the second day were moving more or less freely in a small area belowdecks, through the passageways connecting the neighboring berthing and messing spaces of the ship. Gibbons and Moore roamed the ship, sightseeing as much as they could.
The men and women of Sinyavin’s crew—the eleven women were aboard as laundry and scullery maids, and as cooks and “girlfriends”—showed a friendly curiosity toward their passengers. (The unfamiliar Velcro fasteners on the Americans’ flight suits, a technology evidently not yet available on Sakhalin, attracted special attention.) At least one American thought that he was offered female company for a night. The officers were invisible. Only one, assumed to be the political officer, ever made an appearance. They never saw the ship’s master, Captain Arbuzov.
No one told them anything, but everyone on the aircrew understood that the few days on board the trawler might be a brief interlude between their ordeal on the rafts and a very different ordeal in the hands of their surprise hosts.
Before they disembarked, most were strong enough to down Sinyavin’s regular ration of borscht, salted meat, cabbage, sour cream, and sweet tea several times. Several remember the permanent tureen of hot kvass, a mildly alcoholic cider, in the crew’s lounge as having special restorative powers.