Positivity: Heroic teen followed in hero dad’s footsteps
This is a long read, and carries a multiple-hanky alert.
May 24, 2009
There are heroes among us, everyday heroes who never get recognized. Some will say Master Sgt. Michael Wert became a hero the moment he left Alma and joined the Marine Corps. He served in relative obscurity, another veteran doing his job, just like millions before him.
Others will say he became a hero on a spring day two years ago, when he ran into the Atlantic Ocean and tried to save two children who were drowning. Without thinking. Without hesitation. Risking his own life for someone else. But is that surprising? Really? For a Marine, whose dress uniform was filled up with honors and awards? What did he do in the military to earn those awards? His wife still doesn’t know. His career was top secret. And he didn’t feel the need to explain and make her worry.
But there are others, of course.
Everyday heroes among us.
What about Drummond Figg, an emergency medical services worker who swam into that same ocean, on the same day, to try to save Wert, holding him up, sharing his breath, nearly getting lost at sea himself?
And what about Katrina Wert, the most unlikely hero of them all? A 15-year-old girl who ventured into the ocean, scared and nervous, shaking “like crazy,” following the example of her father.
Katrina would face the most difficult dilemma of all: Do you save two strangers? Or do you save your father?
Dad gave his life, now family is finding peace
Footprints in the sand. Two tracks. Leading to the edge of the water. Disappearing in the waves. It was a few weeks before Memorial Day, and there were no lifeguards on duty in Atlantic Beach, N.C. — swim at your own risk. In the ocean, two boys bobbed in the chest-high water. “I just saw a shark,” one boy teased. He was 10 years old with dark skin, dark hair and dark eyes. The other boy was David Greeson, a 12-year-old from Mebane, N.C. He weighed about 90 pounds. His skin was pale and he had sun-bleached dirty blond hair. “We were just messin’ around, talking,’ ” David remembers. The boys had met about 30 minutes earlier and they were having fun laughing and splashing in the waves. They had lost track of time. Lost track of the beach.
It was May 5, 2007, and the weather was postcard perfect — blue skies, 70 degrees, light breeze. The water looked calm and safe.
But under the surface, a strong westward current cut along the ocean floor; it was if the sea had come alive and started to tug the boys out to danger. The rip tide along this beach can be so fierce that local TV stations air updates about the currents during weather reports.
Tourists often enter the water without realizing the threat.
David tried to take a step toward the shore — his mother had a strict rule about never going out past his waist, which he had already unintentionally broken — but the rip tide snatched his legs. “It felt like my feet were slipping out from the bottom,” David said, “and I started getting pulled back.”
Lost in anger
Down the beach, Katrina Wert was lost in teenage angst. Katrina, who was then 15, was mad at her dad, Master Sgt. Michael Wert. Just because.
“This is going to make me look like a brat, but I was sitting there, doing nothing,” said Katrina, now 17. “It was absolutely boring.”
Tall and slender, Katrina is confident and animated, quick to laugh and smile. But above all, she is brutally honest, even about herself.
“I was having a pity party,” she said.
Anguish at the shore
Pam Greeson got out of a chair and saw her son, David, about 75 yards off shore, stuck in a rip tide. She panicked and ran into the water wearing an ankle-length skirt. She stopped, afraid she couldn’t swim out to him.
Greeson screamed: “Help! My boy is in the water! Help!”
Wert, a Marine who grew up in Alma, stripped down to his green, military-issue PT shorts and ran across the beach.
“Stay calm,” Wert said, running past Greeson. “Keep your eyes on them. I’ll swim out to them.”
Greeson said she felt a sense of calm from Wert — a man with a barrel chest and a bald head who had served in the Marines for 18 years. Highly decorated, Wert worked as an intelligence chief at Central Command under Gen. Tommy Franks at the start of the war in Iraq.
His wife and three children watched from the beach as he swam toward the boys.
“He was a very strong-looking man,” Greeson said. “I had no reason to doubt him.”
Greeson could still see the boys as Wert entered the water. “They dredge that beach a lot and there is a drop off,” she said.
Wert’s wife, Debbie Wert, grabbed her cell phone and called 911, but she grew frustrated when she was transferred and the phone’s battery died.
Katrina saw her father run into the ocean. After a while, he reached the boys. “You could still figure out they were people, but you couldn’t make out who was who,” Katrina said. “It was icky. It was really bad.”
Ready to die
The boys grew exhausted, trying to tread water, fight the current and struggle to keep their heads above water.
“I’m going to give up,” one boy said. “I can’t swim anymore.”
David, a Christian, decided he was ready to die, too. He attended a private Christian school and played in his father’s Christian rock band.
“Are you saved?” David asked the other boy.
If he wasn’t, David figured that he would spend his last moment on Earth witnessing his faith.
“Yeah,” the other boy said.
“That’s good,” David remembers thinking. “We’ll meet each other heaven.”
David’s head slipped below the surface and he gulped salt water.
“I was just too tired,” David said later. “I couldn’t keep swimming.”
Wert reached the boys and his tone was reassuring. “Stay calm,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”
David remembers clinging to Wert. “We kind of held onto him as he swam,” David said, “kind of like on his shoulders.”
Wert became exhausted, fighting the current, trying to keep the boys afloat under difficult conditions. Suddenly, he stopped swimming and started to drown.
“I lifted his head up and tried to wake him up, but his head fell back into the water,” David wrote in a July 5, 2007, letter to the Wert family. “He was drifting out, so we had to let go of him.”
Terrified but determined
Back on the beach, Katrina kept her eyes focused on the three heads out in the water. But they didn’t seem to make any progress toward shore.
“They were going sideways,” she remembers. “They weren’t coming in.”
Debbie Wert grabbed a boogie board and planned to swim out to help.
Katrina snatched it and took off: “I was like, ‘Mom, I’m going to go out there.’ Because I’m a good swimmer.”
Katrina straddled the board and paddled. She was scared. She remembers “shaking like crazy.”
“What if they are all dead and I get stuck out here?” she thought.
David was athletic and smart — a good student who got A’s and B’s.
“I was just about to die when I saw Katrina coming,” he wrote in a letter to Wert’s family. She pulled them onto the board.
“They were trying to go to sleep on my board,” she remembers. “I told them, ‘You are not going to sleep. I’m not going to drag you in. Kick!’ ”
Only one option
Katrina saw her father about 15 feet away. She figured he was fine — he was so strong and seemed invincible.
Michael Wert was in fine physical condition. The day before, he had reenlisted because being a Marine was more than his job; it was his calling. He was an avid runner, just like Katrina, and he helped coach her high school cross-country team.
Halfway back, Katrina realized she could no longer see her father. He wasn’t following her, as she had expected.
“Where’s my dad?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” David said. “He’s gone.”
“No, he’s right there,” Katrina answered.
“No,” David said. “He stopped moving.”
“I started freaking out,” Katrina said.
“Dad!” she screamed. “Dad! Dad!”
No answer. For a moment, she thought of leaving the boys and going back to find him. Should she save the boys or her father? Was her father already dead? If she left the board with the boys, would they all die? What if her father was all right?
One of the boys yelled at her: “Kick! Kick!”
Just as her father had gone off to war to do his job, prepared to sacrifice his life for something bigger — for his unit, for his country — Katrina did the same.
In that split second, her choice was not really a choice. She had only one option: Complete the mission, do her job. No matter the sacrifice. Just as her father had taught her through his words and deeds.
And she kept moving toward shore, away from him.
Katrina became exhausted. She was trying to battle the current and cling to the board and take care of the boys and doubt filled her mind. She was scared that none of them would make it. She got the boys past the line where the waves break and she tried to touch the sandy bottom but couldn’t. “I told them not to let go,” she said.
As they walked the final steps toward the beach, David knew that he was out of trouble.
“I thanked Katrina 20 million times,” he said.
“Is my dad all right?” she asked.
She fell to her knees. “I was so exhausted. I started crying and lost it.”
Desperate attempt to revive
Drummond Figg, a member of the Atlantic City Fire Department, swam out to Wert, yet another risking his life to save a stranger.
Figg was tired from the long swim, but he started rescue breathing, sharing his breath with the Marine. Figg tried to keep Wert’s face out of the water. “It seemed like forever; treading water and breathing for Mike, waiting for help,” Figg wrote in a letter to the Wert family.
Figg tried to bring Wert to shore, swimming with the waves, but he couldn’t see land. Finally, he switched directions and spotted the beach.
Figg crawled out of the surf, exhausted and sick because he had gulped seawater several times.
EMS personnel worked on Wert for about 20 minutes, administrating CPR and heart defibrillation, as Debbie Wert and Pamela Greeson prayed together.
“They thought he had a pulse,” Debbie Wert said. “We thought there was a chance.”
But he was dead.
A doctor told Debbie Wert that her husband had drowned. There was no autopsy. “From what everybody told me, Mike had both of them in each arm,” she said. “He was basically using his legs to swim.”
A father, a teacher
Debbie and Michael were high school sweethearts at Alma High School. He had enlisted in September of 1989. Eventually, he worked in intelligence, although he never told Debbie exactly what he did.
They had lived in so many places, from Okinawa, Japan, to Tampa, that Debbie Wert decided to have him buried in Alma, where he was raised.
When Katrina was born, her father, a mountain of a Marine, watched in teary-eyed wonder as she entered the world and he cut the umbilical cord. He might have cried more than her mother.
When Katrina was a toddler, he used to toss her into the air, making her mother gasp, but Katrina loved it. Her eyes lit up and she giggled, always feeling safe in his hands.
Michael Wert taught his daughter to fish and to hunt, exposing her to his love for nature. Through his words, through his actions, he had taught her about God and faith, about a love of country, about sacrifice and courage and doing the right thing under the most horrendous situations. ….
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