Afghanistan, Irish Girls, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

This is what really happened:

Paddy Crowe, a retired ferry captain living on the Aran island of Inish Oirr (Inisheer) answered his phone at 11 ’o’clock that Thursday morning.  

‘I’m calling you because I’m not sure what to do,’ a voice said.  They were calling from the ‘back’ side of the island.  ‘I’m out here with a child, and I think I see something in the sea.’  

‘Oh?’ Crowe asked.  ‘What do you think you see?’  

‘I don’t know, but I know those girls are missing.’

Crowe called the Coast Guard.  This was 13 hours into the frantic search for paddleboarders Sarah Feeney and Ellen Glynn, who had been swept off Furbo Beach, in the northeast of Galway Bay, the previous evening.  

The Irish Coast Guard had already been dealing with numerous false sightings.  Still, over the radio they contacted the ferry JACK B, running between Doolin and the Aran Islands, and urged them to keep a sharp lookout, and for the first time they directed a helicopter, RESCUE 117, one of its giant Sikorsky S-92’s, to proceed south from where they had been searching.  

The voice of commercial fisherman Patrick Oliver came up on the radio.  ‘Valentia Coast Guard, this is the JOHNNY O, JOHNNY O; you getting us there on Six-Seven?’

‘JOHNNY O, this is Valentia Coast Guard on Six-Seven.  Go ahead.’

‘For your information, we’re at [the fishing bank] Killa Patch and just heard there’s a possible sighting.  Is that toward inish Oirr, or is that nothing?’

‘Roger - a member of the public on Inish Oirr is reporting a possible sighting in the south side of Foul Sound, between Inish Oirr and Inish Mann [the next Aran Island], over.’

‘We can head in that direction.  We’re about four miles away.  We can check it out.’

‘ . . . 117 is in the area.  If you can proceed and give it a look over, that’d be much appreciated, over.’

‘Yeah, that’s no problem.  We’ll head in that direction now.’

Said Patrick Oliver on ‘The Miracle in Galway Bay,’ a radio program produced by Irish broadcaster RTE, ‘We just took off as fast as possible.’

Apparently, the waves were still huge at that time of the morning, which would make spotting the girls that much more difficult, and if that caller to Captain Crowe was on the ‘back’ side of the island and looking at the Foul Sound and not the South Sound, then Sarah and Ellen were swept much further to the West than I or certainly the Irish Coast Guard imagined.  

These are among the revelations in the RTE broadcast [and now, a podcast].  The truth of the matter is a great deal more heroic and emotionally intense than I was able to convey in that blog post a few clicks back, entitled ’Two Fathers.’   Still, trying my hand at a rippin’ yarn was the most fun I had writing in a long time.  As a father I wanted to depict the duality of the job, helplessness and fear on one hand, and the power of the protector riding into the storm on the other.  The problem with fiction is that it reveals more about the author than the subject at hand.  

According to RTE, Johnny Glynn, Ellen’s father, had already largely lost his composure by sunrise Thursday, when he and Ellen’s mother were on the Clare coast.  Hours later, at Furbo Beach with his family when his phone rang with news of the rescue, he was a profoundly blubbering, sodden wreck.  He did not drop to his knees and clench his fists like he had just scored the game winner in Ireland’s Senior Challenge Cup - and even when he did score in 1991, Glynn was at a dead run when he picked up a perfect pass.  He blasted the ball past a goalie who never had a chance and was moving so fast that he flew past the goal and hurdled a barrier between the field and the frenzied crowd in the stands.  It’s on YouTube.

Still, Johnny Glynn, sports hero, professional footballer, and household name for decades, was a mighty oak felled by the prospect of losing his daughter.  

Of course, Patrick Oliver knew nothing about the search as he went to bed on the night of Wednesday, August 12.  However, the next morning, as soon as they heard the news, he and Morgan rolled out to join the search.  He did immediately grasp that with a northeast wind the girls had been swept far beyond where anyone was looking, and interestingly, he made sure to bring his credit card, figuring that they’d be out pretty far and would have to refuel in the Aran Islands.  Running out of fuel was not only possible; it was likely, meaning they’d have to anchor and call somebody to come get them.  18-year-old Morgan suggested they ‘bring extra slack,’ additional lengths of line, in case they had to anchor in deep water.  

After that radio call, once they had sped to where the girls might have been sighted, they slowed to a stop and looked in every direction as they rose and fell on two-meter waves.  Suddenly Morgan spotted what looked like ‘a black stick a mile and a half in the distance.’  Sarah had seen them and was waving her paddle.  

From standing at the boats’s stern, Morgan actually ran to the controls and slammed the JOHNNY O into motion, his ‘instincts taking over,’ he explained.  

As cool as Nelson striding the quarterdeck, Patrick Oliver was absolutely in his element.  The story of his losing a friend whose body was found just beyond a search zone is true, as is the part about his scaling back his lifeboat commitment.  The friction with those in authority was purely my invention, a means of making him an all the more the epic Hero: hardened by years at sea, ready to answer the call to glory as summoned by Fate or the Gods, and destined to beat the doubters at their own game.  

Yeah, that definitely says something about me.  

If Patrick Oliver was communicating on VHF Channel 67, then his call ‘We got ‘em!’ to the Valentia Coordination Centre must have stopped heartbeats the length of Galway Bay.  All around the weeping Johnny Glynn, Furbo Beach transformed into jubilation, horns honking and people jumping and shouting in celebration.  One of the Oliver daughters, interviewed by a TV news crew, described how social media also went berserk.  Her father - dopey old Dad, of all people - was all over Snapchat, Instagram, and WhatsApp . . . and everyone was going completely mental.  

At any rate, I wrote a story that said more about me than it did the the rescue of Sarah Feeney and Ellen Glynn.  I’d like to think that on some level I captured some truths.

That’s the magic - and danger  - of storytelling.  Even when an author is making things up, they can reveal a truth that a reader will seize upon.  Authors write the stories they need to - innocently or not - and readers are captivated by what they need to hear - again, innocently or not, which makes for a matrix of various possible outcomes.  

Consider the position of the Irish Coast Guard, who faced a government inquiry after the incident.  How did they not find these girls, they were asked.  How did the thermal sensors and the night vision gear on the helicopters not help, and how on earth were they miles and miles off from where the girls were found?

I had worried that this was the most far-fetched part of my story, but it turned out to be utterly true.

The sheer size of the waves made visual searches extremely difficult, and both the waves and the weather negated the workings of the electronics, was the explanation.  

Why were they so far off with their search zones, mule-headedly believing that despite howling northeast winds the girls would be in the inner bay?  The explanation was that inflatable paddle boards were not included in the software the Coast Guard used to predict drift trajectories.  [That’s a revelation from the podcast: the girls were on inflatable boards, which were blown along by the storm even faster than foam boards would have been.)

That’s the Irish Coast Guard’s end of the transaction, which I can’t imagine a great many people are going to buy.  Software?  Have they no mariners in the Coast Guard?  Patrick Oliver, the saltiest dog out there, worried that he’d be so far out to sea, he’d run out of gas.  

In his book DERELICTION OF DUTY, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster depicts a Joint Chiefs of Staff who told President Lyndon Johnson ‘only what he wanted to hear’ about the war in Vietnam.  They never provided him practical military advice, preferring instead to escalate a bombing campaign that only confused activity, in the form of bombing raids and body counts, with actual progress.  

This brings us to the Greek Tragedy of the Afghanistan occupation, which has come to a crashing end in recent days.  According to scholar Robin Bates, the fate here was inevitable.  The American public, like the audience Aristotle described, undergoes catharsis as the result of the contradiction they witness: ‘They simultaneously believed that something could have been done and that nothing could have been done.’

“Three presidents allowed an unwinnable war and an unrealizable project to go on and on, like the Theban plague, because they didn’t want to be blamed for exposing America’s helplessness, as Biden is being blamed. It certainly may be true that Biden could have handled the withdrawal better—we can debate about that—but I suspect that his critics’ major grievance is that he’s exposing them. If the foreign policy establishment doesn’t scapegoat the president, it will have to admit it screwed up royally, that the project was a fool’s errand from the get-go. Teiresias’s words to Oedipus apply equally well to them: “You have your eyesight, and you do not see.”

We did not spot a problem as general after general assured us that as hopeless as things appear to be, Afghan Forces would be suitably trained in short order.  Bates also says, “We thought that a trillion dollars and the world’s most powerful military could save women and girls from fundamentalist patriarchy and are now paying emotionally for our arrogance.”   The problem with fiction is that it reveals more about the author than the subject at hand. 

As with Johnson and Vietnam, we were misled because we were willing to be.  With any luck, this story will be instructive to future generations, because it certainly hasn’t done us any good at the time.  

Stories about rescues and loving fathers are a lot more fun - even when they contain amazing surprises: it was a phone call from someone walking on a beach with a little kid that saved the lives of those two girls.