The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

by Sebastian Junger

  Ruvola finally breaks out of the clouds at 9:28, only two hundred feet above the ocean. He goes into a hover and immediately calls for the ditching checklist, which prepares the crew to abandon the aircraft. They have practiced this dozens of times in training, but things are happening so fast that the routines start to fall apart. Jim Mioli has trouble seeing in the dim cabin lighting used with night-vision gear, so he can’t locate the handle of the nine-man life raft. By the time he finds it, he doesn’t have time to put on his Mustang survival suit. Ruvola calls three times for Mioli to read him the ditching checklist, but Mioli is too busy to answer him, so Ruvola has to go through it by memory. One of the most important things on the list is for the pilot to reach down and eject his door, but Ruvola is working too hard to remove his hands from the controls. In military terminology he has become “task-saturated,” and the door stays on.

  While Ruvola is trying to hold the aircraft in a hover, the PJs scramble to put together the survival gear. Spillane slings a canteen over his shoulder and clips a one-man life raft to the strap. Jim Mioli, who finally manages to extract the nine-man raft, pushes it to the edge of the jump door and waits for the order to deploy. Rick Smith, draped in survival gear, squats at the edge of the other jump door and looks over the side. Below is an ocean so ravaged by wind that they can’t even tell the difference between the waves and the troughs; for all they know they are jumping three hundred feet. As horrible as that is, though, the idea of staying where they are is even worse. The helicopter is going to drop into the ocean at any moment, and no one on the crew wants to be anywhere nearby when it does.

  Only Dave Ruvola will stay on board; as pilot, it is his job to make sure the aircraft doesn’t fall on the rest of his crew. The chances of his escaping with his door still in place are negligible, but that is beside the point. The ditching checklist calls for a certain procedure, a procedure that insures the survival of the greatest number of crew. That Mioli neglects to put on his survival suit is also, in some ways, suicidal, but he has no choice. His duty is to oversee a safe bailout, and if he stops to put his survival suit on, the nine-man raft won’t be ready for deployment. He jumps without his suit.

  At 9:30, the number one engine flames out; Spillane can hear the turbine wind down. They’ve been in a low hover for less than a minute. Ruvola calls out on the intercom: The number one’s out! Bail out! Bail out! The number two is running on fumes; in theory, they should flame out at the same time. This is it. They are going down.

  Mioli shoves the life raft out the right-hand door and watches it fall, in his words, “into the abyss.” They are so high up that he doesn’t even see it hit the water, and he can’t bring himself to jump in after it. Without telling anyone, he decides to take his chances in the helicopter. Ditching protocol calls for copilot Buschor to remain on board as well, but Ruvola orders him out because he decides Buschor’s chances of survival will be higher if he jumps. Buschor pulls his door-release lever but the door doesn’t pop off the fuselage, so he just holds it open with one hand and steps out onto the foot-board. He looks back at the radar altimeter, which is fluctuating between ten feet and eighty, and realizes that the timing of his jump will mean the difference between life and death. Ruvola repeats his order to bail out, and Buschor unplugs the intercom wires from his flight helmet and flips his nightvision goggles down. Now he can watch the waves roll underneath him in the dim green light of enhanced vision. He spots a huge crest, takes a breath and jumps.

  Spillane, meanwhile, is grabbing some last-minute gear. “I wasn’t terrified, I was scared,” he says. “Forty minutes before I’d been more scared, thinking about the possibilities, but at the end I was totally committed. The pilot had made the decision to ditch, and it was a great decision. How many pilots might have just used up the last twenty minutes of fuel trying to hit the drogue? Then you’d fall out of the sky and everyone would die.”

  The helicopter is strangely quiet without the number one engine. The ocean below them, in the words of another pilot, looks like a lunar landscape, cratered and gouged and deformed by wind. Spillane spots Rick Smith at the starboard door, poised to jump, and moves towards him. “I’m convinced he was sizing up the waves,” Spillane says. “I wanted desperately to stick together with him. I just had time to sit down, put my arm around his shoulders, and he went. We didn’t have time to say anything—you want to say goodbye, you want to do a lot of things, but there’s no time for that. Rick went, and a split second later, I did.”

  According to people who have survived long falls, the acceleration of gravity is so heart-stoppingly fast that it’s more like getting shot downward out of a cannon. A body accelerates roughly twenty miles an hour for every second it’s in the air; after one second it’s falling twenty miles an hour; after two seconds, forty miles an hour, and so on, up to a hundred and thirty. At that point the wind resistance is equal to the force of gravity, and the body is said to have reached terminal velocity. Spillane falls probably sixty or seventy feet, two and a half seconds of acceleration. He plunges through darkness without any idea where the water is or when he is going to hit. He has a dim memory of letting go of his one-man raft, and of his body losing position, and he thinks: My God, what a long way down. And then everything goes blank.

  JOHN SPILLANE has the sort of handsome, regular features that one might expect in a Hollywood actor playing a pararescueman—playing John Spillane, in fact. His eyes are stone-blue, without a trace of hardness or indifference, his hair is short and touched with grey. He comes across as friendly, unguarded, and completely sure of himself. He has a quick smile and an offhand way of talking that seems to progress from detail to detail, angle to angle, until there’s nothing more to say on a topic. His humor is delivered casually, almost as an afterthought, and seems to surprise even himself. He’s of average height, average build, and once ran forty miles for the hell of it. He seems to be a man who has long since lost the need to prove things to anyone.

  Spillane grew up in New York City and joined the Air Force at seventeen. He served as a teletype maintenance repairman for four years, joined the Air National Guard, “guard-bummed” around the world for a year, and then signed up for PJ school. After several years of active duty he scaled back his commitment to the National Guard, went through the police academy, and became a scuba diver for the New York City Police Department. For three years he pulled bodies out of submerged cars and mucked guns out of the East River, and finally decided to go back to school before his G.I. Bill ran out. He got a degree in geology—“I wanted to go stomp mountaintops for a while”—but he fell in love instead and ended up moving out to Suffolk to work full-time for the Guard. That was in 1989. He was 32, one of the most widely experienced PJs in the country.

  When John Spillane hits the Atlantic Ocean he is going about fifty miles an hour. Water is the only element that offers more resistance the harder you hit it, and at fifty miles an hour it might as well be concrete. Spillane fractures three bones in his right arm, one bone in his left leg, four ribs in his chest, ruptures a kidney, and bruises his pancreas. The flippers, the one-man raft, and the canteen all are torn off his body. Only the mask, which he wore backward with the strap in his mouth, stays on as it is supposed to. Spillane doesn’t remember the moment of impact, and he doesn’t remember the moment he first realized he was in the water. His memory goes from falling to swimming, with nothing in between. When he understands that he is swimming, that is all he understands—he doesn’t know who he is, why he is there, or how he got there. He has no history and no future; he is just a consciousness at night in the middle of the sea.

  When Spillane treats injured seamen offshore, one of the first things he evaluates is their degree of consciousness. The highest level, known as “alert and oriented times four,” describes almost everyone in an everyday situation. They know who they are, where they are, what time it is, and what’s just happened. If someone suffers a blow to the head, the first thing they lose is recent events—“alert
and oriented times three”—and the last thing they lose is their identity. A person who has lost all four levels of consciousness, right down to their identity, is said to be “alert and oriented times zero.” When John Spillane wakes up in the water, he is alert and oriented times zero. His understanding of the world is reduced to the fact that he exists, nothing more. Almost simultaneously, he understands that he is in excruciating pain. For a long time, that is all he knows. Until he sees the life raft.

  Spillane may be alert and oriented times zero, but he knows to swim for a life raft when he sees one. It has been pushed out by Jim Mioli, the flight engineer, and has inflated automatically when it hits the water. Now it is scudding along on the wave crests, the sea anchors barely holding it down in the seventy-knot wind. “I lined up on it, intercepted it, and hung off the side,” says Spillane. “I knew I was in the ocean, in a desperate situation, and I was hurt. I didn’t know anything else. It was while I was hanging onto the raft that it all started coming back to me. We were on a mission. We ran out of fuel. I bailed out. I’m not alone.”

  While Spillane is hanging off the raft, a gust of wind catches it and flips it over. One moment Spillane is in the water trying to figure out who he is, the next moment he is high and dry. Instantly he feels better. He is lying on the wobbly nylon floor, evaluating the stabbing pain in his chest—he thinks he’s punctured his lungs—when he hears people shouting in the distance. He kneels and points his diver’s light in their direction, and just as he is wondering how to help them—whoever they are—the storm gods flip the raft over again. Spillane is dumped back into the sea. He clings to the safety line, gasping and throwing up sea water, and almost immediately the wind flips the raft over a third time. He has now gone one-and-a-half revolutions. Spillane is back inside, lying spread-eagle on the floor, when the raft is flipped a fourth and final time. Spillane is tossed back into the water, this time clinging to a rubberized nylon bag that later turns out to contain half a dozen wool blankets. It floats, and Spillane hangs off it and watches the raft go cartwheeling off across the wave crests. He is left alone and dying on the sea.

  “After I lost contact with the raft I was by myself and I realized my only chance of survival was to make it until the storm subsided,” he says. “There was no way they could pick us up, I’d just ditched a perfectly good helicopter and I knew our guys would be the ones to come out and get us if they could, but they couldn’t. They couldn’t refuel. So I’m contemplating this and I know I cannot make it through the storm. They might have somebody on-scene when light breaks, but I’m not going to make it that long. I’m dying inside.”

  For the first time since the ordeal began, Spillane has the time to contemplate his own death. He isn’t panicked so much as saddened by the idea. His wife is five months pregnant with their first child, and he’s been home very little recently—he was in paramedic school, and in training for the New York City marathon. He wishes that he’d spent more time at home. He wishes—incredibly—that he’d cut the grass one more time before winter. He wishes there was someone who could tell his wife and family what happened in the end. It bothers him that Dave Ruvola probably died taking the helicopter in. It bothers him they’re all going to die for lack of five hundred pounds of jet fuel. The shame of it all, he thinks; we have this eight-million-dollar helicopter, nothing’s wrong with it, nobody’s shooting at us, we’re just out of fuel.

  Spillane has regained his full senses by this point, and the circumstances he finds himself in are nightmarish beyond words. It is so dark that he can’t see his hand in front of his face, the waves just rumble down on him out of nowhere and bury him for a minute at a time. The wind is so strong it doesn’t blow the water so much as fling it; there is no way to keep it out of his stomach. Every few minutes he has to retch it back up. Spillane has lost his one-man life raft, his ribs are broken, and every breath feels like he is being run through with a hot fire poker. He is crying out in pain and dawn isn’t for another eight hours.

  After an hour of making his farewells and trying to keep the water out of his stomach, Spillane spots two strobes in the distance. The Mustang suits all have strobe lights on them, and it is the first real evidence he has that someone else has survived the ditching. Spillane’s immediate reaction is to swim toward them, but he stops himself. There is no way he is going to live out the night, he knows, so he might as well just die on his own. That way he won’t inflict his suffering on anyone else. “I didn’t want them to see me go,” he says. “I didn’t want them to see me in pain. It’s the same with marathons—don’t talk to me, let me just suffer through this by myself. What finally drove me to them was survival training. It emphasizes strength in numbers, and I know that if I’m with them, I’ll try harder not to die. But I couldn’t let them see me in pain, I told myself. I couldn’t let them down.”

  Believing that their chances will be slightly less negligible in a group, Spillane slowly makes his way toward the lights. He is buoyed up by his life vest and wetsuit and swimming with his broken arm stretched out in front of him, gripping the blanket bag. It takes a long time and the effort exhausts him, but he can see the lights slowly getting closer. They disappear in the wave troughs, appear on the crests, and then disappear again. Finally, after a couple of hours of swimming, he gets close enough to shout and then to make out their faces. It is Dave Ruvola and Jim Mioli, roped together with parachute cord. Ruvola seems fine, but Mioli is nearly incoherent with hypothermia. He only has his Nomex flight suit on, and the chances of him lasting until dawn are even lower than Spillane’s.

  Ruvola had escaped the helicopter unscathed, but barely. He knew that the rotors would tear him and the helicopter apart if they hit the water at full speed, so he moved the aircraft away from his men, waited for the number two engine to flame out, and then performed what is known as a hovering auto-rotation. As the helicopter fell, its dead rotors started to spin, and Ruvola used that energy to slow the aircraft down. Like downshifting a car on a hill, a hovering auto-rotation is a way of dissipating the force of gravity by feeding it back through the engine. By the time the helicopter hit the water it had slowed to a manageable speed, and all the torque had been bled out of the rotors; they just smacked the face of an oncoming wave and stopped.

  Ruvola found himself in a classic training situation, only it was real life: He had to escape from a flooded helicopter upside-down in complete darkness. He was a former PJ, though, and a marathon swimmer, so being underwater was something he was used to. The first thing he did was reach for his HEEDS bottle, a three-minute air supply strapped to his left leg, but it had been ripped loose during the ditching; all he had was the air in his lungs. He reached up, pulled the quick-release on his safety belt, and it was then that he realized he’d never kicked the exit door out. He was supposed to do that so it wouldn’t get jammed shut on impact, trapping him inside. He found the door handle, turned it, and pushed.

  To his amazement, the door fell open; Ruvola kicked his way out from under the fuselage, tripped the CO2 cartridge on his life vest, and shot ten or fifteen feet to the surface. He popped up into a world of shrieking darkness and landsliding seas. At one point the crest of a wave drove him so far under the surface that the pressure change damaged his inner ear. Ruvola started yelling for the other crew members, and a few minutes later flight engineer Mioli—who’d also managed to escape the sinking helicopter—answered him in the darkness. They started swimming toward each other, and after five or ten minutes Ruvola got close enough to grab Mioli by his survival vest. He took the hood off his survival suit, put it on Mioli’s head, and then tied their two bodies together with parachute cord.

  They’ve been in the water for a couple of hours when Spillane finally struggles up, face locked up with pain. The first thing Ruvola sees is a glint of light on a face mask, and he thinks that maybe it’s a Navy SEAL who has airlocked out of a U.S. submarine and is coming to save them. It isn’t. Spillane swims up, grabs a strap on Ruvola’s flotation vest, and cla
mps his other arm around the blanket bag. What’s that? Ruvola screams. I don’t know, I’ll open it tomorrow! Spillane yells back. Open it now! Ruvola answers. Spillane is in too much pain to argue about it, so he opens the bag and watches several dark shapes—the blankets—go snapping off downwind.

  He tosses the bag aside and settles down to face the next few hours as best he can.

  ONE can tell by the very handwriting in the District One incident log that the dispatcher—in this case a Coast Guardsman named Gill—can’t quite believe what he’s writing down. The words are large and sloppy and salted with exclamation points. At one point he jots down, apropos of nothing: “They’re not alone out there,” as if to reassure himself that things will turn out all right. That entry comes at 9:30, seconds after Buschor calls in the first engine loss. Five minutes later Gill writes down: “39-51 North, 72-00 West, Ditching here, 5 POB [people on board].” Seven minutes after that the tanker plane—which will circle the area until their fuel runs low—reports hearing an EPIRB signal for fifteen seconds, then nothing. From Gill’s notes: