Higher-power couple: ace pilot Cholene Espinoza and White House correspondent Ellen Ratner are more than just a power couple. Witness their hands-on work to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

She's naturally affable, with an easygoing manner and a soft drawl that plays down her major accomplishments. So out author Cholene Espinoza will never let you know how hard she's working to promote her new book. But there's no covering up the high stakes. Without this money, kids in Pass Christian, a small Gulf Coast community slammed and flattened by Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005, will be playing after school on a toxic waste dump. Every penny Espinoza earns from her compelling memoir, Through the Eye of the Storm (Chelsea Green, $14), goes straight to the nonprofit she started with her life partner, Ellen Ratner. The money will build a youth center in Pass Christian, which is located just east of the town of Bay St. Louis in Mississippi's Harrison County.

The New York couple spends a few days there every six weeks or so, working on their secular foundation with the Reverend Rosemary Williams, the United Methodist minister whose vision to build the community center predates the storm and who still fights to rebuild the lives of her congregants and their neighbors in the Pass Christian-DeLisle area.

For Ratner and Espinoza, this project is the latest adventure in a pair of extraordinary lives. Together and separately, they have walked the corridors of power and traveled the world. Ratner, a 54-year-old journalist who's worked in 50 countries, commutes during the week to Washington, D.C., where she reports on the White House for Talk Radio News Service and is heard on over 500 radio stations across the United States. She's also a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

Espinoza, 41, is a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate who flew military missions over Iraq during the first Gulf War. These days she's a United Airlines pilot who can show you the friendly skies in any one of the seven aircraft she's qualified to handle. She's been around the world too, in the cockpit of the U-2 spy planes she flew for the Air Force. The second of only six women ever to fly a U-2--in which pilots soar at 70,000 feet while outfitted in a space suit with supplemental oxygen--Espinoza belongs to one of the most exclusive high-altitude clubs on earth.

More exclusive still is the club of elite pilots who write well enough to moonlight as war correspondents.

In 2003, Espinoza went back to Iraq not once but twice, as a reporter instead of a combatant. "Yeah," she says laconically, "Ellen asked me to work once again as an embedded journalist in Iraq. That was June 2003. I'd already embedded there in March." On that trip the high-flying Espinoza covered the war from the right seat of a Humvee belonging to the 1st Tank Battalion of the U.S. Marine Corps.

The purpose-driven couple laugh as they remember their first vacation together. Paris? Rome? No. Ramallah, in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. Ratner insisted on going, because she felt they could help, and they did--after they talked their way out of being detained at the Jordanian border.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last August, Espinoza was the one who felt compelled to take action. Her time in Iraq had convinced her that America's response to the humanitarian crisis there wasn't enough to alleviate suffering. Now, she knew, the devastating hurricane was creating many of the same dire conditions in the United States. Watching the storm build, then seeing the tragedy begin to unfold on television, Espinoza recalls, "was like watching someone trapped in a burning car or building. I cannot go on, I felt, until I at least try to help them."

Ratner called Shantrell Nicks, a woman from the Gulf Coast she'd met on a plane a few months earlier, and asked, "Do you need any help in Pass Christian?" The answer was an unqualified yes. Within days Ratner and Espinoza had set up a supply chain anchored in Ratner's hometown, Memphis, and linked to the disaster site by a chain of friends.

Now visiting the Gulf Coast has become a regular part of their lives. "We fly there on commercial jets," Espinoza explains. "I hitchhike on the jump seat and Ellen buys a round-trip ticket. We bring money and friends and family."

Espinoza, Ratner, and their posse do anything and everything they can to make life better for residents. "Right now it's about bringing resources to rebuild, either in materials or cash," Espinoza says. "We take potential donors to the area to assess the need, which inspires them to provide sweat equity or financial equity. We help people with their loan, insurance, and grant applications. We assess housing needs. We meet with local officials and partners. We visit people we've worked with since the beginning to follow up. We collect audio and video in order to tell their stories. We constantly compare what life is like for the community we're involved with compared to places where institutional aid is being distributed, then we work to make up the differences on our end."

Ratner has put her own health on the line for the couple's post-Katrina work. After several surgeries on a detached retina that got worse after every trip to Mississippi, Rather is now legally blind in her right eye. Undeterred, she's also contributing proceeds to the foundation from sales of her own book, Ready, Set, Talk.

When you ask what drives this marriage of polar opposites, Espinoza jokes: "This is debatable. I'm having some buyer's remorse." Then she gets serious. "Ellen's always willing to put herself out there for the weary and the worn," Espinoza says. "She can't turn her back on someone else's pain and injustice. She doesn't go on vacation, she goes on a poverty tour. Charity is her highest value. If you don't do it, she's there to remind you, no one else will."

As for Ratner, she says Espinoza replenishes the unrelenting energy that has made her reputation in Washington: "She's extremely loving. When I do get discouraged and moody, Cholene really encourages me to remember my values and remember what I'm there for."

Stroh is a writer based in Washington, D.C. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.