Departing Awards: “We Don’t Do This Alone”

I’m the kind of guy that wins all his arguments three days later in the shower. When I haven’t had an argument in a while, I dig up the past and say all the things I was supposed to but didn’t. I have a library of apologies, thank-yous, perfectly timed insults, and goodbyes that I cycle through.

The goodbyes have been on my mind lately. 

In the Coast Guard, when a member leaves a unit, there is usually some kind of ceremony. They can be as simple as a certificate of appreciation and a handshake from the CO, or a bit more elaborate with a presentation of a plaque with awards and rank earned at that unit.

Some departures are awaited in great anticipation because we all knew the person leaving was either going to tell one of their stories or give someone in leadership the middle finger, with all due respect. Other departures were waited for like a cubicle employee watching the clock on a Friday. Some folks you just want gone from your life. Not dead, but definitely someone else’s problem. Spend enough time at a unit and you will see the full range of human emotions surrounding the concept of “Goodbye” and/or “Good Riddance.”

My first tour was a bit of a disaster, and I left without ever saying goodbye to anyone; the Irish Exit as it were. My second unit was quite the opposite. The mess deck was crowded with people staring at me as one of the LTJG read out the narrative to my Achievement Medal. It was a laundry list of collateral duties I’d picked up out of sheer boredom, curiosity, and a high turnover rate for an overworked unit with less than 80 people.

The award is read to the crew while you and the CO stand there awkwardly holding the blue Naugahyde (faux leather for the under 35 crowd) wrapped certificate whispering small talk back and forth around fixed smiles. Then there is an awkward silence while the crew waits to see what you’ll do. Like watching the fuse on cheap black-market fireworks, never quite sure if you’re going get a dud or lose an eye. They watched and waited, some of them grinning in anticipation, some with half a wince on their face waiting for the XO to slap me down with a boat paddle for saying something unforgivable.

I’d built up a reputation as being free with my opinion to the point of insubordination. I once asked a visiting O-4 (Lieutenant Commander) if he could please tell our TACON (tactical control unit) on the east coast “to pull their heads out of their collective asses and read the watch-to-watch pass down?”. On another memorable occasion, after spending three days tearing apart a dubious longline shark trawler looking for drugs, I walked into the OPCEN and loudly proclaimed “I smell like the morning after double coupon night in a one whorehouse town!” I said this with the door open and as I let it close it revealed the CO (the captain of the cutter!), leaning on the chart table with the SATCOM handset to his ear. Apparently, everyone on the secure net, and therefore every unit between Bermuda and the Galapagos, heard me.

This was the same captain who handed me my departing award. Did I mention it’s awkward?

I stood there as the crew stared. I forgot everything I’d practiced saying in the shower. All the bad stuff that had happened was suddenly irrelevant. All the good stuff that really mattered was between me and the shipmates who were there when it happened. I half remembered drunk port calls, and close calls out on the water that really should have killed us. I looked at the 75 or so faces and all I could say was “We don’t do this alone.”

And then it was over. I’d be gone from there in two months and out of the Coast Guard. A dirty civilian again with a plaque and some sea time.

I think back to that departure and all the ones I’d witnessed before it. For the longest time I kicked myself in the shower for not saying what I needed to, or for not saying what I thought they needed to hear.

I was trying to tell them to take care of one another, to be a shipmate and care about the guys that you really don’t like as much as you do your battle buddies. There was a guy on the crew I could not stand, he just pissed me off at every opportunity. One night we almost lost him in a collision with a target vessel. As much as he and I butted heads, in that moment I just wanted to hear his voice on the radio saying he and the boat crew were alive. I should have told him that before I left.  

So, if anyone out there served with me aboard Coast Guard Cutter Active between July 2014 and January 2018, here is what I meant to say:

“We don’t do this alone. We’re a crew. This job is dangerous, difficult, and stressful. We are banging around the ocean on a fifty-year-old ship built and maintained by the lowest bidder. We do the mission sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away from friendly units with janky comms and clapped-out engines. All we’ve got out here is each other. You may think you hate the guy sleeping across from you, but when it all goes to shit you’re going to try to save him, and he’ll probably do the same for you, out of spite if nothing else.

You’re going to have some dark days. Lose sleep, forget to eat, and get stressed to the point you lose everything but your military bearing. Ask someone for help, even if all you have is just one guy who you can tolerate. When someone asks you for help, be the shipmate you would want to have.

Out in water we’re all we’ve got. We can’t do this alone.”

_______________________________

This first appeared in The Havok Journal on May 21, 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.