Life is Weird in the Coast Guard

Author’s Note: In 2014, I was stationed at Maritime Force Protection Unit Kings Bay. An odd unit at best. Despite being trained in communications and navigation, I spent more time handling cannons and machine guns that I ever did a radio. We also weren’t on traditional military vessels. We were on a heavily modified platform supply vessels that had been leased to the Navy with a contracted civilian crew and Coast Guard personnel for military authority. If it sounds confusing believe me, it was worse in person when you got into the details.

2014 01 03

New sounds woke me up. Well, not new, it was familiar enough that it didn’t startle me awake so much as alert me to change. It was the rattling hiss of pipes under pressure and the whine of a hydraulic pump. Hydraulic noises meant the crane mounted on the deck just aft of my cabin was in use. I could barely hear the rumbling rush of water through a bow thruster way up forward. If it weren’t for the full-throated roar of diesel engines I could have heard the pair of aft thrusters as well. On a steel ship you feel as many of the noises as you hear. It was low tide, and the ship shuddered as the engine noises and cavitation from the props set up odd harmonics between her flat bottom and the shallow channel floor.    

I took in all the sounds as I opened my eyes in the dark cabin and knew within a thousand yards our location. We were minutes away from tying up at the pier.  As I stood up from my bunk, I could feel the ship rotate on its vertical axis, spinning in place so she could back into her slip like a big rig in a marshalling yard.

I got dressed in the dark by feel and habit. T-shirt, socks, boots, blousing bands, etc., only turning on the light after I’d checked everything by feel. The same old face stared back at me out of a mirror that was vibrating so hard it blurred the edges of the stress lines that were starting to show at 28 years old. The ship was put together in a hurry in the dark by a committee, so everything shook like a sonofabitch. At her max speed you could watch welded seams part and rivets ping across the room while you mixed daiquiris on the chart table.

A voice in my head barked like a bored but determined Company Commander in basic training.

“Get your ass in gear, get to work, damn the cold. You have a warm wife to get home to.”

I got to work. It was earlier and colder than the last time I was out on deck twenty-some-odd hours prior. I undogged and lifted a port hole cover to peek outside. Frost on the glass hid all but the roughest details and made the harsh lights of the docks into haloed globes. In short, I couldn’t see a damn thing. I grabbed my watch cover (ski cap), and gloves then headed out on deck.

The damp winter wind of coastal Georgia bit into my clean-shaven face like a cleaver through hamburger. For the hundredth time I cursed the admiral that did away with beards (Admiral Yost, 18^th Commandant of the Coast Guard). There is a good reason men who work the ocean in winter grow them. I strode across the deck with purpose, like it was my ship, and I had places to be. Truthfully, I was cold and wanted to get moving to warm up.

I met my shipmates at the forward cannon mount. They were already hard at work dismantling the weapon system. Like autopsy doctors working over a corpse, we picked the gun apart. Instead of loops of intestine I pulled out belts of linked 25mm SAPHEI-T (Semi-Armor Piercing High Explosive Incendiary with Tracer) ammunition.

The business end of each inch-thick bullet was banned with colors like a coral snake to tell loaders exactly what they were holding. Each color indicated what the rounds could do: black for armor piercing, yellow for high explosive, orange for incendiary. Not that we needed any of that. The bullets were an inch thick and just under five and half inches long. If we had to shoot someone, there wouldn’t be enough of the adversary left to care about fire or explosions after a couple dozen of these half pound steel pins ripped through them at about 2200 mph.

I pondered all the cold math of ballistics and ordinance and our mission as we counted each bullet then counted them again, checking the integrity of the links as we went. Just in case someone managed to sneak aboard in the dark in 14-foot seas to break open the gun and steal a few. The cold was biting harder, and I could feel myself getting grumpy and bitter. A front must have come through in the night.

All that bullet counting, and all we did when the Russians showed up was wave at them.

The cannons were broken down and stowed away one piece at time. Most of the pieces were heavy enough to require two people to carry them. About halfway through putting away the “smaller” .50 caliber heavy machine guns someone shouted down from the bridge wing of the ship. I was instructed to find a float coat and go handle lines for the 87s. Looking south down the channel from the gun mount I could just barely make out the mast lights of the two patrol boats in fading darkness.

[Editor’s Note: “87” refers to an 87-foot Marine Protector class vessel capable of performing search and rescue, law enforcement, fishery patrols, drug interdiction, illegal immigrant interdiction and homeland security duties up to 200 miles offshore]

Dawn was approaching.

Maybe ten minutes later I was an appreciable hike away from the Godforsaken cannons and their ammo and I was sweating like I’d run a mile. A float coat is a life preserver and insulating jacket rolled into one. It is too warm to have on in anything but a New England winter gale. Even then it’s too warm if you are doing any kind of labor.

I stood on the floating dock and waited. I stood in the 20-knot wind and spray coming from the water since it made wearing the coat more comfortable. Everything between my belt and boot tops was numb. Everything under the coat was slick with sweat. Steam poured out of the unzipped collar and glowed slightly in the grey pre-dawn light and mercury arc flood lamps of the pier. At least I looked cool.

It is required to wear a floatation device when line handling in the event that you fall in and hit your head. This serves two purposes. It keeps an unconscious person from drowning. It also prevents a conscious person from diving or swimming out of the way of the approaching vessel, making it all the easier to crush them against a pylon or sea wall. I mulled this thought over and wondered how long it would be until I got some coffee.

I am not a morning person.

The first 87-foot cutter, the Sea Dog or Sea Dragon I can’t remember which, made her first approach then waved off. The boxy superstructure kept catching the wind like a crude sail. The helmsman, I couldn’t see if it was her skipper or one of the boatswains’ mates, made a second pass only to have the wind shift on them. They tried a third time as their deck boss called distances to the docks. I pointed to a horned shaped cleat by my foot. The deck boss shook his head. I point to the next one down and get a nod.

“HEADS UP ON THE PIER!” someone shouted as a faded red bag sailed past my ear trailing a bright yellow rope behind it.

There’s an unofficial game of chicken where deck hands try to hit the line handlers on the dock. The line handlers stand their ground and move as little as possible while trying to catch the bag. Not everyone does it, but it can be fun if both parties are in the mood for it.

I caught the yellow line as it landed on my shoulder then hauled it in until I had the eye of the heavier mooring line. I dropped the eye over the cleat then moved to the next to repeat the process three more times. The deck crew wound up hauling the cutter in by hand. The tide and wind were against the skipper and there was no way for them to safely drive her into such tight quarters.

I had a few minutes before the second cutter arrived. It was light enough to read by that point and I could make out the other 87 on its way in from about a mile out. I watched her make her approach from on top of one of the piers larger machine rooms. That high up the wind was cold enough to make me glad for the coat. The iron clouds rolled by overhead making the dawn’s progress hard to judge.

In places where Islam is practiced and calls to pray are sung from mosque towers, the day begins when you can tell a dark hair from a gray one in a man’s beard. In the maritime places it is when the mercury gas flood lights wink out. The incessant buzz of high wattage lights cut off abruptly.

Day had begun.

I made my way down from the shed roof to the 2nd cutter’s berth on an adjacent dock. It was maybe twenty feet over from where I tied off the first cuter. Since this was a U.S. Navy pier, it was a five-minute walk around painted off safety zones, pylons, machinery, then back down another needlessly long pier.

“HEADS UP ON THE PIER”, I pointed, hauled, dropped the eyes and set the brow. I waved to the helmsman who gave me the thumbs up, so I turned and walked the quarter mile back to my ship. Despite all the clutter around the cutters’ berths there’s still enough room between them and the ship to land and launch multiple helicopters.

Once aboard I found the guns stowed but unsecured. My shipmates all had the air of tired men who just wanted to go home. The lock on the weapon storage space couldn’t engage so all the guns and parts had to be stowed somewhere else. “Somewhere else” was the armory bunker a third of a mile up the pier. In my head I ran down the long list of people and military grade equipment that continually made the mission more difficult than it had to be.

This is the short list.

• Cheap lithium grease that breaks down in sea air and fouls locks.
• Icey decks with no deicing fluid.
• “Government approved” armory locks that corrode in the barest hint of salty air.
• Graphite lubricant that doesn’t work in humid environments.
• Narrow ladder wells (stairs) designed by people who’ve never carried anything heavy or bulky.
• Engineers who refuse to put handles on heavy awkward things like cannon parts.
• Navy regulations that prevented us from using the shipboard crane because the hydraulic fluid wasn’t Navy approved, despite it being higher quality than Navy standard.  

It took a while, but we eventually moved several cannons, machine guns, and a lot of bullets off the ships; there was a sister ship to the one I was assigned to and by policy if one boat stored weapons ashore, both did.

About an hour after finishing up, I was walking up to my house; a three-room rental that had once been a detached garage. The sun was fully up and hidden by a sky the color of raw lead. I was daydreaming about how warm the bed was going to be when I heard the dogs announce my arrival. Too tired to dig through the dozen odd pockets of my uniform and parka for keys I knocked. This sent the dogs into a frenzy.

Blearily my tall, lovely, redheaded wife opened the door to let me in. Hugs, licks, kisses, wagging tails, and cold coffee from yesterday were my welcome home. As soon as I got inside, she retreated to the bed with the pups while I showered off the funk of the mission.

We’d been married all of four months at that point and it was still a new feeling. I wondered about it, and my morning as I sat in the lukewarm water of the bathtub. I thought about things while vainly trying to scrape silver white grease off my hands. Out of context and through the eyes of a civilian, it was probably an odd series of events. Who wakes up, handles millions of dollars of explosive ammunition, machine guns, remote controlled cannons, then ties up two patrol boats, all before breakfast? Well, I did, along with about forty other people at my unit. The part that struck me was that being married was weirder than my job.

I have been told I think too much.     

I eventually gave up on removing the lithium grease as the water got too cold and I got too tired to care. As I slid into the sheets shivering slightly from the bath, I tried not to think about the fact that I would have to do the whole thing in reverse in about 18 hours.  

Life is weird. 

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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on October 16, 2024.

K.C. Aud has made a career of being lucky and has managed to find something positive in nearly every poor decision he’s ever made, even if it was only a new perspective on how not to do something.

Enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard in 2010 he became an Operations Specialist (radio and navigation) and did his first tour in Georgia guarding submarines from drunk fishermen. In 2014, tired of the heat and the bugs he transferred to a 210-foot medium endurance cutter in Washington state. The cutter then regularly deployed to the hot and buggy west coast of Central America to hunt down drug runners. Aboard USCGC Active he traveled 94,194 miles and personally handled enough cocaine to keep a small country high for a decade. Somewhere in there, he learned to write, if not spell.  

Three years later, daunted by the prospect of spending the rest of his career in a windowless command center, he separated from active duty. After 13 different jobs ranging from beer brewer to dairy farmhand, to machinist, to Navy civilian contractor, he reenlisted in 2020 as a Coast Guard reservist, changing rates to Maritime Law Enforcement Specialist. When not helping the Navy assets in the Puget Sound troubleshoot radios, he’s on drill in Seattle doing water cop stuff and or flailing away at his keyboard. Though married and now a father, he misses the mission. 

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.