COAST GUARD AST, HURRICANE SANDY 2012 — Three days in the air and one memory I still trip over

I was a rescue swimmer out of Air Station Atlantic City when Sandy came up the coast. Three days in the helicopter, snatches off rooftops in Staten Island and Long Beach Island, then a long swim-deploy for a woman who had been in the water under a piece of siding for I do not know how long. She did not make it. I think about her every October when the weather turns. She was approximately my mother's age. That is the specific thing that lodges. Not the cold, not the swim, not the rotor wash. The age. Coasties don't talk about the dead the way the other branches do. We don't have the same memorial tradition. The body count is smaller and the missions are rescue, so the deaths feel like our failure rather than our cost. That is a distortion. The water kills people. We are not gods. We do what we can. I told my Vet Center group about her in 2019. I had been sitting on her for seven years. The other guys in the group — two Marines, an Army medic, an Air Force loadmaster — did not have a single smirk in them when I said I was a Coastie. The Vet Center specifically is the place where the branch hierarchy is set down. I needed that more than I had known.