Tyler sent me this little note following her wedding to Preston last month, along with the accompanying article:
I wish you could have been there the day after the wedding. I literally married a hero…
The following article was written by Joe Darby for the Sunday, November 06, 2005 issue of The Times Picayune and can be found reprinted at www.nola.com
Honeymooner turns into a real lifesaver
Gulf undertow tests Coast Guardsman
Sunday, November 06, 2005
By Joe Darby
West Bank bureauA newlywed wife’s insistence on retrieving an extension cord used at her wedding in Destin, Fla., led her Coast Guard husband to rescue two women who were being pulled away from shore by a strong undertow.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Preston Lambert, an aviation electronics technician at the New Orleans Coast Guard Air Station in Belle Chasse, said the cord had been left at a condominium along the Gulf of Mexico where they had been married Oct. 22, three days before the incident.
He said his wife Tyler told him, “We have to get the cord and we need to get it now.”
It was only a short walk from the condo to retrieve the cord, but the timing was propitious.
“As we approached the condo where we had been married, we thought we heard a faint cry for help,” said Lambert, who grew up in Houston and now lives in the Slidell area. “I was wondering, did we really hear anything? We were on top of a 20-foot bluff, so I walked over to the edge and I saw four females in the water.”
He ran to the beach, took off his shirt and new wedding ring and jumped in. Two of the women were close to the shore and relatively safe, so he swam to the other two, who were struggling in a choppy surf.
At first, he expected little trouble. “I was actually thinking they were OK. It was not until I stopped swimming and tried to put my feet on the ground and felt the undertow on my legs” that Lambert said he realized the situation was serious.
“The one farther out seemed in shock, like she was lost and dazed,” he said. “The other one was panicking, crying and yelling. I held the one who was in shock by the arm and told her we needed to swim sideways to the beach, and I told the other one that I was with the Coast Guard and asked her to calm down.”
Lambert said the father of one of the women, who were Auburn University students, paddled out with a small inflatable raft. The man, in his 40s and fully clothed, was winded by the time he reached the swimmers, Lambert said.
Lambert placed one of the women where she could hold onto the raft and began to swim with the other one. As a helicopter flight mechanic who routinely flies on Coast Guard rescue missions, Lambert said he had undergone personal survival training but not training in rescue procedures.
They were fighting 4-foot breakers as well as a strong undertow. “That was the strongest rip current I’ve ever felt,” he said. During the struggle, the current pulled them about 10 feet farther out to sea. “The dad slipped off the raft and I was starting to wonder if I was going to end up a victim myself.”
Finally, they managed to get close enough to the shore so that “I got my footing underneath me and then we were able to make it to the beach,” he said.
What Lambert did not say was that he had undergone knee surgery in September.
Cmdr. Scott Kitchen, executive officer of the Coast Guard Air Station, said that fact made the act even more heroic.
“Here he was, on his honeymoon and recovering from the surgery, and he was in the water saving people, doing what Coast Guard people do,” Kitchen said. “It’s humbling to me to be part of an organization in which young men and women put their entire lives into their job.”
Lambert said his bride watched the rescue and told him she had been confident everything would turn out all right.
“She was never worried about my actions. She knew the training I received would keep me safe. When I got back in she was happy,” he said. “I really can’t remember a lot (of what happened) on the beach (after the rescue), but ‘I love you’ was a word that was put out there.”
