Summary
Mike Flood gave 20 years to the United States Coast Guard, with a detour through Kansas that nearly killed him. He returned to service, retired as a Commander, and walked into the Seattle Seahawks the same year it was saved from relocation. What he built there reaches far beyond football. Football fills the seats. Mike Flood shows up for the people in the community it creates.
The File Cabinet
The file cabinet was in the basement, next to the furnace. Mike Flood was fourteen years old when he moved downstairs after his younger brother took his room. He was not looking for anything in particular when he started going through the drawers. He was a kid with time and a piece of furniture he had not opened before. What he found in it was a story his father had written about a young enlisted Marine, a man the other men called the Fox, who had served under Mike’s father when he was a lieutenant in Korea. The Fox had been killed in action. The story was not a report or a summary. It was something closer to a memorial. His father had written, in detail, about who this man was, what made him worth knowing, and what it felt like to lose him.
Mike had grown up with a father who was tough, focused, and not given to sentiment. He had won the Silver Star and the Bronze Star and did not talk about either one. The story in the file cabinet was the first proof Mike had that his father felt things the way other men felt things.
“He just knew he had to get it done.”
“I never knew that about my father, that he felt he would take to heart other people to that degree,” Flood says. “When you’re young, you don’t understand that stuff about your parents.”
He did not ask his father about the decorations for years. Not until he was a pilot himself, stationed at Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak in Alaska, did he finally say the words. His father agreed to explain on a drive from Seattle south, and for the first time told what had happened. He and his men had been pinned down at the base of a hill in Korea. The Chinese held a machine gun bunker at the top and were sending fire down the slope. Mike’s father and his senior enlisted man started up together, and then the senior man stayed back to manage the situation below.
Mike’s father went to the top alone. He took out the enemy. He received the Silver Star.
His father confessed to him that he was scared. “He just knew he had to get it done, because his guys were gonna die if he didn’t.” That sentence would follow Mike Flood for the next fifty years.
Two Languages, One Household
He grew up in a household where the Catholic Church and the United States Marine Corps occupied the same space without contradiction. He attended St. Matthew’s elementary school, eventually became an altar boy, though it took longer than it should have. He got sent home more than once. He was, by his own account, not particularly well-behaved.
“They go together perfectly.”
In the early 1960s, when nuclear war with the Soviet Union felt less like possibility than certainty, the Pope urged Catholics to pray the rosary for world peace. At Saint Matthew’s they drilled in preparation for a nuclear attack. At home, Mike’s father organized something different. The kids were marched into the living room and told to kneel at the couch. The family prayed the rosary together. Not as suggestion. As practice.
“You’re the first person to ever ask me that,” he says, “and it’s so insightful that you did, because you’re exactly right, they do go together. They go together perfectly.”
Both systems, he says, are organized around the same core: duty, sacrifice, and something that matters more than you do. Whatever a person carries inside comes through in both of them. The language is different. The expectation is the same. His father held the discipline side of the equation. His mother held the warmth, and neither one allowed self-pity to survive very long.
He remembers the day he ran away from home for half a day, came back angry about something, and was not further punished. He was listened to instead. “That made me realize I could express myself and not have to suffer for it,” he says.
That lesson lasted. It shaped how he learned to argue for his crew without needing to outrank the argument, and it shows up now in how he walks into a room full of veterans who have stopped believing anyone is listening.
Ops Officer, Pacific Coast, 1994 to 1996
The SAR calls came at all hours. From 1994 to 1996, Mike Flood served as Operations Officer at a Coast Guard Air Station on the Pacific coast. When a search and rescue situation opened, he was the one the station notified. He either drove in or stayed on the phone. Either way, the decisions moved through him.
Most pilots who end up in that role come from the air side of the house. Flood came in with something unusual: three years as a boat maintenance officer before ever holding the Ops billet. He had visited all three boat stations in his group, learned the hulls, the crews, the limits of each vessel in rough water. That background gave him something the decision-making chair required.
“I felt better knowing the 52 was out there.”
“Every now and then I could add something to the decision on which vessel to send out,” he says. “I remember one case where the seas were high and the disabled vessel was heavy, so I persuaded the boat station CO to send the 52-footer, versus the 44-footer.”
“The 52, even though it was slow, had greater capability for dealing with rough seas,” he says. “I felt better that night knowing that the crew was out there in the 52 when sea conditions were extreme.”
He knew from other operations officers that not every mission ends the way it should. That knowledge does not leave you, and he carried it through both years of the role, along with the awareness that the crews on scene were the ones who made things succeed or fail, not the man on the phone deciding which hull to send.
“That’s something that’s on your mind,” he says. “It’s not what you’re thinking about primarily. But at the end of a mission, or at the end of your career doing that, you’re gonna feel better having everyone succeeded.”
During his two years in that role, every crew member he sent out came home. Three weeks before this conversation, a rescue swimmer from Air Station Astoria did not. “It’s a terrible feeling for the entire Coast Guard when someone doesn’t make it back.”
“I never considered that to be the difference.”
Ask him what it felt like to be the person whose decision was the difference, and he shakes his head before the question is finished.
“I never considered that to be the difference,” he says. “The performance of the crews, the people on scene, that’s what makes missions succeed. I just try to put them in the right situation.”
On C-130 missions out of Kodiak, he made a habit of asking his crew what they thought before every flight, not as formality but as actual inquiry. If a crew member’s idea was equally good, he did it their way so they knew they had a voice. If his way was better, he explained why. He held enough confidence to know the mission could be done. He held enough humility to keep listening. That was the line, and he learned early that it had to be walked precisely. Hi wife, Marty knew when he was back because she could hear the C-130 engines go into reverse in the early morning hours. They lived right on the flight line. That was her signal.
The Forgotten Branch
Forty thousand people, divided across hundreds of stations, operating in conditions that range from hurricane water in the Gulf to the Bering Sea in winter. The Coast Guard does not receive the attention the other branches do, and Mike Flood is not particularly bothered by that. But he wants people to understand what the work actually costs.
“We have the same discipline and mission focus that the other services have,” he says. “There’s a great brotherhood and sisterhood in the Coast Guard so that everybody feels like they’re part of a family.”
The danger in Coast Guard service tends to be elemental. It is not usually the people you are trying to save. It is what surrounds them. The rescue swimmers understood this better than anyone. They trained harder than most, and sometimes, when a person in the water was too critical to wait, they stayed behind and told the crew to come back for them later.
“You’ve got to be one brave man or woman to jump in that water,” he says. “There were times when our rescue swimmers would pull somebody out of the water, and they’d say, get them to the hospital. Pick me up later.”
Kansas
He left the Coast Guard the first time because he and Marty had been trying to adopt, and every time they got close, the orders moved them. Florida told them directly: you’re going to move again, and we can’t place a child with a family that won’t stay. So he got out. He had a friend named Steve in Kansas who crop dusted, and Mike liked the idea for his next endeavor. Mike bought a Weatherly Agricultural spray plane and set up in Fort Scott, where no other dusters were spraying at the time. Within a year, they had adopted a baby, named him Dan, and their dream of having a family had begun.
“It looked like a Christmas tree stuck in my wing.”
What happened in the months before that was a different kind of story. He was low over a field full of trees, checking whether the spray boom was working, when he glanced right and hit a treetop. The tree was lodged in his left wing.
“The plane rolled over to 90 degrees to the left, and I looked down at the ground and thought, this is it,” he says. “Somehow, I slammed in right rudder and right aileron and got the plane straightened out.” The tree fell out of the wing as he cleared the high-voltage power lines. He had just enough speed to pull the nose up over a barbed wire fence hidden by upcoming bushes, clearing it by inches.
“It looked like a Christmas tree stuck in my wing,” he says.
The right strut dug into the April mud and broke off when he landed. He got out, surveyed the damage, and started walking toward the road. Marty was out there somewhere, riding in a pickup with Steve, who had come to Fort Scott to say hello. It took two hours for them to find each other. On the ride back to town, Steve said: “When you get bucked off the horse, you wanna get back on, right? You can use my plane and finish the job this afternoon.” Mike spent a couple of hours back in town with old Doc Lyons. Then he went back out to the airfield, borrowed Steve’s Piper Pawnee, and finished the job. Steve gave him the plane to use for the rest of the summer.
They were poor in Kansas in the ways that are not small. No insulation in the house, blankets in the winter, and in the summers over 100 degrees they drove to the air-conditioned grocery store with the baby and walked the aisles until the sun went down. If they got a milkshake, it was a big deal. When Flood eventually rejoined the Coast Guard and heard people complaining about their lockers being moved to the second deck, he understood something they did not yet know about themselves.
“There are a lot worse things,” he told them. “Don’t worry about it.”
He had not been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease yet, but his body knew something was wrong, and flying on bad days was getting harder. When one of his most-used herbicides was taken off the market, he made a decision with both faith and practicality behind it. He rejoined the Coast Guard and was grateful in ways he had not been the first time through. Shannon came home at one month old while they were stationed in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. MyKaila came later, through his Seahawks years, at seventeen. She is thirty now, and she is their daughter.
The Vote That Kept the Team
His last flight in the Coast Guard ended the way most Coast Guard flights end: a landing, the engines winding down, handshakes all around. He went inside and found a yellow Department of Transportation note on his desk. Paul Allen had called. He and Allen had known each other since Washington State, where Flood had been something of an organizer among the twenty men who lived together in their residence. Allen wrote in his memoir that Flood was the “wry ringleader.” Allen had remembered, years later, that people from different backgrounds had found a way to function together in that house and thought Flood could help with what came next.
“We won it 51 to 49.”
In 1996, the Seattle Seahawks were going to Los Angeles unless someone stopped them. Allen was considering buying the team, but the decision required a statewide vote on a new stadium. Flood’s job was to go across Washington and make the case for why it mattered.
“We won it 51 to 49,” he says. “Or else the team would have been in LA.”
The vote passed. Allen bought the team. Flood joined the organization and started building things that did not yet exist. He stood up the IT department, the website, the community department, and fan development, drawing on his Coast Guard experience with collateral duties to give each one structure and a chain of command. The booster club that had 700 members and 15 chapters when he arrived now has 10,000 members and 37 chapters, with 21 more applying. Last year, those fans logged 34,000 hours of volunteer time and raised $760,000 in their own communities. The community staff is now seven people, and Flood also helped stand up Task Force 12, twelve veteran services organizations coordinated through the Seahawks, reaching veterans through therapeutic dogs, agricultural programs, minority veteran outreach, and women veteran networks.
“They find veterans who are struggling mentally and physiologically sometimes, and give them hope and camaraderie so they can improve their lives,” he says. “That kind of stuff is just as important as doing a search and rescue mission.”
What Connection Actually Means
Some of the messages that find Mike Flood arrive because of the Super Bowl, because the Seahawks had a good season or a hard one, or because someone saw a player do something on the field that mattered to them. That is the door. What happens after someone walks through it is usually something different.
“Those relationships always go beyond, or most of them go beyond, just saying hey, thanks,” Flood says. “Because I tend to get a personal relationship with people once I know.”
“It’s not about recognition or anything that comes with it,” he says. “It’s about the support over time, being there for each other, and celebrating when something good happens for someone else.”
He earned a master’s degree in special education from UNC Chapel Hill, taking his classes at Elizabeth City State University while stationed in North Carolina. The degree is not in sports management or communications. He chose it because the subject matter forced him to reckon with how different people actually are from one another, and how reaching someone requires finding what is specific to them. That same reckoning shows up in the work he does now, whether the person across from him is a fan, a veteran, or someone who has stopped believing they belong anywhere.
“You can reach people, but you can’t use the same techniques to reach everybody,” he says. “You’ve got to really be in tune to how you can reach somebody.”
“If they know that you truly listen to them and understood them,” he says, “you might be able to do something with them and for them.”
“Where’s that little strand of spirit?”
There is a Marine he met four years ago who was going through a hard time. That man now does work for other Marines, and Flood sends him Seahawks gear occasionally. He calls him an agent of the team, and means it.
“In my job here, and in the Coast Guard, I’m interested in seeing what it is inside everyone,” he says. “Where’s that little strand of spirit that’s talked about in religion and talked about in the service? Where is it?”
“How do you identify it?” he says. “How do you live with that, primarily, instead of being held to circumstances that are going on?”
That question started in a basement in Seattle, over a file cabinet, in the mid-1970s. It has not stopped yet.
On Transition
He left the Coast Guard twice. The first time was intentional, driven by a family he wanted to build and a system that kept moving him before he could build it. The second time was final, and what kept him from drifting either time was the same thing: a mission that needed doing immediately and people who needed him to show up for it.
“I missed the brotherhood,” he says, “but I was so intent at 32 to 34 on making something happen for myself that it wasn’t too bad.”
“If you feel like you’re part of a family.”
He wrote a lot of letters in Kansas. Long-distance calls cost too much. One of his Navy friends from flight school came to visit, and that made a difference. When he came back to the Coast Guard after Kansas and rejoined a station full of people who had lockers and flight lines and a common mission, he understood what he had been missing. The camaraderie was not a soft thing. It was structural. It was what made hard work sustainable over time.
“If you feel like you’re part of a family, part of a team, you can do a lot of things and have a happy life,” he says. “You don’t have to be necessarily working for the team directly. We all do things together. And I think that inspires and uplifts a lot of people.”
He knows some veterans do not find that after they leave. He tries to be part of what helps them get there. Marty has been with him through all of it, 51 years now, and the family they built by staying put long enough—Dan at three days old in Wichita, Shannon at one month in North Carolina, MyKaila through the Seahawks years at seventeen—is evidence of what it looks like when someone commits to a place and the people in it.
There is a pool table at the Seattle VA hospital. After Mike Flood’s father, COL George Flood, died, his mother Phyllis asked what should be done with it. It was a beautiful table, heavy and substantial, the kind that takes a crew of people to move. His brother Kevin organized the lift. They loaded it into a truck and drove it to the VA. Flood was already working for the Seahawks by then, had visited the VA hospital in his organizational role, been in the rooms, and understood what was missing. When his mother suggested the pool table, he knew exactly where it belonged.
“Something from my family was now transferred to the people who were going through a lot at the VA,” he says. “It made us all very happy to see people using it.”
They held a dedication ceremony. New things went up on the walls. The room became something it had not been before: a place where veterans could gather, take a shot, lose a game, and be in the same room with someone else who understood what it cost to get there.
Not the football team. Not the rescue missions. Not the crop duster banking away from a Kansas treetop with a Christmas tree stuck in his wing. The through line is the room. Who is in it. Whether they know someone walked in there to make sure they would not be alone.
A Silver Star in a file cabinet. A rescue swimmer in the North Pacific, waiting. A plane held together over a Kansas barbed wire fence by one man’s grip on the controls.
The pool table is still there.
Resources
Seattle Seahawks Task Force 12 | seahawks.com/community Twelve veteran service organizations coordinated through the Seahawks, connecting veterans with peer support, therapeutic programs, and community.
Veterans Crisis Line | Dial 988, then press 1 | veteranscrisisline.net Free, confidential support for veterans and their families, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Give an Hour | giveanhour.org Free mental health care for veterans, service members, and military families provided by volunteer licensed professionals.
Seattle VA Medical Center | va.gov/seattle-health-care Full-service VA medical center serving veterans across the Pacific Northwest, including mental health, primary care, and specialty services.
National Resource Directory | nrd.gov Nationwide database connecting wounded warriors, veterans, and military families to programs and services across all fifty states.
About Mike Flood
Mike Flood served 20 years as a pilot and operations officer in the United States Coast Guard, retiring as a Commander in 1997. He holds a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s degree in special education from UNC Chapel Hill. Since 1997, he has served as Vice President of Outreach and External Affairs for the Seattle Seahawks, where he built the organization’s community, IT, and fan development infrastructure and helped stand up Task Force 12, a coalition of twelve veteran service organizations. He and his wife Marty have been married 51 years. They live in the Seattle area.
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