Free Deadliest Sea by Kalee Thompson Page B

was at least an hour-and-a-half flight away. His crew had already had four and a half hours of flying time. A crew is “bagged,” or grounded, after six hours in the air. Of course, if they were in the middle of a rescue, they would keep going until it was over, but in this case, Tripp’s crew would have close to six hours on them before they even reached the troubled ship. Tripp knew it didn’t make sense for his crew to respond, and Troup had reached the same conclusion.
    Tripp held out the phone for Bonn: “It’s for you.”
    Minutes later, Bonn was knocking on doors to wake the rest of his crew: pilot Brian McLaughlin, flight mechanic Rob DeBolt, and rescue swimmer O’Brien Starr-Hollow. Though at thirty-nine, Bonn was older than McLaughlin and had more years of flying experience, McLaughlin outranked him in the Coast Guard.
    The younger pilot was tall, six foot four, and lanky, with pale skin and sharp features. He had enrolled in the Coast Guard Academy right out of high school in Hanson, Massachusetts. As a kid, McLaughlin had been in the Civil Air Patrol, a sort of military Boy Scouts. In eighth grade, he attended a Civil Air Patrol camp that included a visit to the Coast Guard Air Station on Cape Cod. He left with a new goal in life: to become a Coast Guard pilot. He decided his best route was the Coast Guard Academy. It was one of the most difficult schools to get into in the country. The tuition was free, and the academic standards were high. McLaughlin was a trumpet player, a self-declared band geek, and the Academy had a band, of course. The school wasn’t far from his home, just a couple of hours away in New London, Connecticut. He applied, and got in.
    It wasn’t a typical college experience. McLaughlin reported to New London in July 1995, for Swab Summer, a six-week basic training program for new cadets. There, he learned to sprint through obstacle courses, to fire an M-16, and to recite the Academy’s cadet mission statement: “To graduate young men and women with sound bodies, stout hearts, and alert minds, with a liking for the sea and its lore, and with that high sense of honor, loyalty, and obedience which goes with trained initiative and leadership; well grounded in seamanship, the sciences, and amenities, and strong in the resolve to be worthy of the traditions of commissioned officers in the United States Coast Guard in the service of their country and humanity.”
    Along with about 240 other first-year cadets, McLaughlin spent his freshman year in New London walking silently in the hallways and greeting any upperclassman he encountered by name. In the embarrassing instances when he couldn’t recall a name, he had to greet the older student with “sir” or “ma’am.” Glancing down at the name tags embroidered on the upperclassmen’s uniforms was forbidden—new cadets were required to keep their chins up and their gaze straight ahead at all times. At meals, the freshmen sat together under strict silence in the cafeteria—the “ward room” they called it, just like the officer’s dining room on a ship. McLaughlin was instructed to sit straight up, with a fist’s distance between his back and the back of his chair. He was taught to “square his meals,” by raising a fork straight up from the plate to a few inches in front of his face before bringing it forward into his mouth.
    The students were forbidden from closing their dorm-room door any time there was a cadet of a different year, or of the opposite sex, in their room. Freshmen were allowed to date only within their own class, and upperclassmen could date only one year in either direction (no senior/sophomore relationships allowed). Romance rules weren’t relevant to McLaughlin, who had started dating Amy Lundrigan, from the neighboring town of Whitman, at the end of high school. They went together to their senior prom and decided they’d stay together when McLaughlin left for the Academy that summer.
    There were no phones