On December 17, 2000, Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City, North Carolina, performed one of the most heroic rescues in the history of the service. The cruise ship SeaBreeze I was listing, battered by hurricane-force winds and thirty-five-foot seas. The ship and the lives of its thirty-four crewmen were in imminent peril. A rescue helicopter arrived and, seeing that the vessel could capsize at any moment, hoisted twenty-six of the crew to safety, a record for a single helicopter rescue. A second helicopter, designated for the celebration of the Wright brothers' first flight, arrived on scene in time to rescue the remaining crew. Rear Admiral Carlton Moore tells the complete history of this daring rescue, including never-before-printed radio messages from the rescuers.

On December 17, 2000, Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City, North Carolina, performed one of the most heroic rescues in the history of the service. The cruise ship SeaBreeze I was listing, battered by hurricane-force winds and thirty-five-foot seas. The ship and the lives of its thirty-four crewmen were in imminent peril. A rescue helicopter arrived and, seeing that the vessel could capsize at any moment, hoisted twenty-six of the crew to safety, a record for a single helicopter rescue. A second helicopter, designated for the celebration of the Wright brothers' first flight, arrived on scene in time to rescue the remaining crew. Rear Admiral Carlton Moore tells the complete history of this daring rescue, including never-before-printed radio messages from the rescuers.

The former head of the Coast Guard's Search and Rescue Division discusses the war on drugs, refugee smuggling, and oil spills, as well as rescue work, and describes the new equipment and techniques used by the Coast Guard.

Two yellowing envelopes in a long-untouched file, unmistakably of U.S. Army origin but addressed to a North Carolina housewife, caught the attention of her son as he sorted her papers after her death. The postmarks, Virginia Beach, VA., and dated in 1942, were puzzling, as was the official return address: 111th Infantry C.T., Mobile Defense Force. While the 111th regimental combat team could be deciphered, the Mobile Defense Force was not a recognizable term. The letters inside instructed her on the duties of a coast watcher, and evoked memories stored since childhood: The sickening thump of torpedoes striking U.S. ships just off the Currituck Outer Banks and the flare of flames, particularly when a tanker was hit, that were clear even to a youngster on his front porch 8 miles inland. Each boom and pillar of fire revealed that more men were dying in the freezing waters off North Carolina's barrier islands that winter. How did the United States get into such straits that its life was threatened as the Axis juggernauts rolled across Western Europe and Asia? What transpired during the crucial years when the outcome of the war could go against the United States as Axis aggression flooded the Atlantic with U-boats striving to cut the stream of ships laden with weapons, troops, and food flowing to the beleaguered British Isles - the last Allied outpost near the Continent? How did the Allies achieve victory first against the U-boats, then the war, for as Napoleon observed: "It is only a step from victory to disaster. "

This story is about a day in August 1918 when the ocean off Rodanthe, North Carolina, was ablaze. The day when 51 British merchant sailors desperately struggled to escape their tanker loaded with gasoline after it had been torpedoed by a German U-boat. The day when six courageous Coast Guardsmen, tossed by waves of fire in a small boat, entered the hellish dark and deadly inferno of explosions and toxic fumes and navigated a confusing maze of swirling black smoke, imperiling their lives to rescue strangers in distress. It was the day when American lifesaving history was made.