It began as an ordinary conversation.
“He called me to say, ‘Happy birthday,’ and I asked him how things were going,” Bill Ashenfelder said. “He said, ‘I had a rescue last night.’ I thought it was part of his training. Then he started to explain it.”
As Bill would learn, his son was lowered 70 feet from a helicopter into the nighttime Pacific Ocean, where he saved a stranded fisherman who was bordering on hypothermia after 12 hours adrift.
“Chris is as low-key and mellow as you can possibly be,” Bill Ashenfelder said. “Even with this story he was slowly explaining it, and I was like, ‘Wait a minute dude, this is a really big deal.’ I’m super proud of him.”