Author tells of Hurricane Katrina's Coast Guard heroes

This article first ran May 31, 2006.

Some of Hurricane Katrina’s rescue workers paid a price for their heroic efforts, Coast Guard Commander Martha LaGuardia-Kotite says.

LaGuardia-Kotite’s new book, “So Others May Live,” chronicles the 20-year history of the Coast Guard’s rescue swimmers, with the last chapter devoted to their lifesaving efforts in New Orleans after Katrina struck last year.

“If they get a traumatic job, it does affect them,” LaGuardia-Kotite, a former Destin resident, said in an interview. “Inside 10 days, helicopters and rescue swimmers saved 7,000 people — imagine the stress.”

The book describes how the rescue workers had to cope with deciding which of thousands of stranded people needed immediate help the most; the risks of mid-air collision with 150 rescue helicopters in flight; and coping with hostile, hungry, terrified storm victims.

“In this time-frame, there was no way to get counseling,” LaGuardia-Kotite said. “It was get up in the morning and go again.”

LaGuardia-Kotite said she’d learned to love writing while attending Fort Walton Beach High School. When she joined the Coast Guard — now a reservist, she spent 10 years on active service — she saw that many service members disliked talking to the press, so she stepped up to the plate as a public affairs officer.

Her book, she said, is a personal work, not an official Coast Guard publication. She said the inspiration was wondering “what would compel someone to risk their life to save a stranger? What does it take for someone to take that risk and come back alive?”

The answer she said, is that “besides the gratification of saving another human being’s life, a lot of them are adrenaline junkies. They love the rush that they get from the danger and risk that it takes.”

“So Others May Live” describes how, in the early 80s, Congress directed the Coast Guard to “provide a trained and capable individual to ... rescue people from the water.” The book says while the idea had been tried before, it took the Congressional mandate to make the initiative a service-wide success.

Over the following two decades, LaGuardia-Kotite said, rescue swimmers have gone from a last resort to an “American Express card” — rescue missions don’t leave home without them. The swimmers, she said, perform waterborne rescues from stranded ships, rescues from sheer cliffs, from floods, from caves and even saved a man on the bring of being swept over Niagara Falls.

“With flight crew assistance, these swimmers risk their life to reach out and save a stranger in diverse environments, ocean hurricanes, oil rigs, floods,” LaGuardia-Kotite said. “These people sacrifice their own safety for someone caught in a chaotic life threatening situation ... mentally they overcome their own fear which enables them to risk their own life to save someone else.”

LaGuardia-Kotite said writing the book had been a great experience, but one that took much more time and effort than she’d expected. She couldn’t have done it, she said, without the support of her husband, Peter Kotite.

“I’m most proud of the fact that these amazing people, the rescue swimmers and their air crews trusted me to tell their stories,” she said. “I hope that through this book, I’ve honored their heroism. They are stories of people that deserve as much recognition as possible.”