Doing the Right Thing, the Right Way, for the Right Reasons

If you’re in the military long enough you’re going to encounter suicide. I showed up at Coast Guard basic training on October 18^th, 2010, and signed on the dotted line one last time as a civilian. Less than four years later, a shipmate who reported there with me was dead by their own hand. It’s going to be someone you knew, served with, or at the very least interacted with on a semi-regular basis. You encounter stories about members who gave zero indication they needed help and then one day they don’t show up to work. You usually hear about it at lunch or over a card game or at the bar one night.

“Hey did you hear about so and so?”

“Nah, saw him Thursday at the exchange. What happened?”

“Yeah, they found him dead in his apartment this morning. Suicide”

You never expect that answer. You’re expecting a crazy story about finding them drunk and naked in the parking lot or caught in an affair or something else equally stupid. Sometimes it’s good news like they made the cut for advancement, or the medical board didn’t drum them out.

You see the posters and flyers everywhere with the suicide hotline printed in bold numbers alongside messages to reach out if you need help. You hope and pray that if your shipmates or battle buddies need help that they’ll call you or anybody when they’re on that ledge.

Of all the training sessions we’re forced to sit through, of all the slow deaths by PowerPoint we endure, very few cover what to do when you get that phone call. There is the Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST), but you have to volunteer for it. All I can remember from the course is to keep the person talking, keep them engaged. At the time there wasn’t much in the way of a refresher course to update training and keep skills sharp.

Like most things in the military, you train and hope you don’t freeze when it all goes sideways.

Several years ago, shortly after I separated from active duty to get my head screwed on straight. I got a random message in the dark hours of the morning. I was between jobs at that point because I was awake after 0130 and doom scrolling through social media and job postings trying to fall asleep.

What was odd is that the message was from a boot camp shipmate I hadn’t spoken to in nearly ten years, and they wanted to talk. All the red flags in my head went up as I became fully awake. Out of habit, I grabbed a legal pad when I answered the phone and started taking notes. Johnson (not their real last name) initially messaged me to vent their frustrations and get my opinion on why it was taking CGIS (Coast Guard Investigative Service) so long to process their case. Once they found out I was a VA (Victim Advocate) the floodgates opened.

They’d been raped multiple times by another service member.

We talked about all the gory details of the ongoing investigation and how after well over eight years they still hadn’t seen an arrest or trial for their attacker. For the next three hours, we talked while I sat at my kitchen table taking notes and trying to recall the VA course I’d passed a few years prior.

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I could hear the alcohol-fueled false cheer that creeps into a person’s voice after they’ve worked up the courage to do something. I wanted to ask Johnson if they’d been drinking, if they were safe, but couldn’t find the words. When someone is pouring out their heart how do you pause mid-conversation to ask, “By the way have you been drinking, and do you have the means to kill yourself handy?” Might as well ask someone with severe palsy to help you disarm the faulty trigger on live ordinance.

Eventually, we worked our way around to that topic and Johnson assured me they were not suicidal, at the moment. It’s a hell of a thing to be relieved that you’re helping a person process the trauma of being a rape survivor instead of talking them back from that permanent ledge.

No, I take that back, it is a truly fucked up thing to be relieved about.

Johnson was on the east coast and sounded like they were starting to sober up with the sunrise there. They thanked me, sounding as exhausted as I felt. I couldn’t tell if I’d helped any at all. By the time we hung up, I had two pages of notes on my legal pad.

I felt completely useless.

It was just light enough where we lived at the time that I stepped outside onto our back porch to have a smoke and calm down. Summertime dawn comes early in Washington state and in July you can read a newspaper by 0430.

In my anger and frustration at my shipmate’s pain, at my inability to help, I took too dense a pinch of tobacco and had to relight the damn pipe, twice. Once it got burning, I smoked too fast, overheating the cherry to the point I cracked the burlwood bowl. I only smoke a pipe to remember a grandfather and I break it out maybe once a month when I get lost in my head. The nicotine hit like a truck, and I could feel the chemical shiver run through me. Dopamine for the brain and adrenaline for the blood; it’s a subtle rush but it’s there.

Temporarily calmed, if not focused, I thought through my options. I had enough information on that legal pad to hunt down Johnson’s attacker and deal with them myself. Thankfully I didn’t have the money to follow through on that line of thought. Righteous rage is not the proper mental state to plan a murder.

I stood there, smoked, and felt my rage turn into despair; from too hot for rational thought to dead inside in about five minutes. I knew deep down that their case was one of many, not just in the Coast Guard but across all branches of service.

I wanted so desperately to hurt the one that hurt them, to make Johnson’s attacker suffer to the limits that a human can endure. I wanted to be the one to do it, all while knowing that killing the person that irreparably harmed my shipmate would not solve the problem. It might not even bring them closure. CGIS was still building the case and it would take them all of half an hour to pull phone records of everyone involved. My number would stand out like a flare on a moonless night.

Having given several official statements for investigations and been interviewed as a witness for both NJPs and court martials, I know in my head that investigations take time. Court cases might come years after the crime has been committed, even with overwhelming empirical evidence. That said, it is enraging to know that a fellow service member had still not gotten ANY justice after so long.

At the time, Johnson’s attacker was still serving in the Coast Guard, thankfully at a different unit. 

I haven’t heard from them since that call. The few times I’ve reached out they haven’t returned my messages. I have kept my distance out of respect and burned the pages after sitting on them for a year to keep me out of trouble.

Aside from my wife, I hadn’t planned on ever telling anyone about that call, but in light of the CGIS Operation Fouled Anchor I felt compelled to share this redacted version along with other bad memories.

I can remember the victim that admitted to fending off superiors and then begging me not to say anything because it was easier to just let it go. They said they would deny that anything happened if I made a report and would refuse to cooperate with the unit’s Victim Advocate. They were a boot camp shipmate as well. I wasn’t a VA at the time and didn’t really know the rules surrounding that kind of admission. As far as I know, they never reported it.

I am starkly reminded of an impromptu holiday party that I missed. It turned ugly and ended in a court martial. Rapid justice (sort of) was had for that night, but it still never should have happened in the first place. I was invited but decided not to go out of fear of something happening and being guilty by association. Now I wonder if I should have gone and stayed sober to protect my shipmates. Maybe I could have prevented what happened.

Other service members have told me about being harassed, ignored when they said no, pressured, and assaulted. All of them asked me to keep quiet because “Making a report would be worse than what happened.”  

At the same time, I was there when a false accusation got a decent person drummed out of the service. A few years later I watched as another tore apart a neighboring unit and eventually ended several careers, despite the accused not having committed a crime. Those false claims somehow hurt more because of the damage they do to legit victims’ credibility.

In retrospect, I am not surprised I was so stressed by the time I left active duty.

January 30^th, 2012, then Commandant of the Coast Guard Admiral Papp released a statement titled Shipmates 19: Respect Our Shipmates – Duty Demands Courage in which he said, “Let me be clear: there are no bystanders in the Coast Guard.”  What do you do when those shipmates ask you to listen but not get involved? VAs are not mandatory reporters.

Duty Demands Courage… The first line on page ten of the Marine Leaders Handbook, courage is doing the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.

Would it have been courageous to report the perpetrators of the criminal sexual acts, knowing full well the stigma it would force on the victims? Would it be right to force the victims through the embarrassment of an investigation knowing that without hard evidence the charges would likely be dismissed, assuming they were ever filed in the first place?

If there are no “right” things do I pick the least wrong, or just go with two out of three? With about seven percent of all sexual misconduct accusations being false, is it a safe bet to take matters into your own hands and deal with the accused on your own?

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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.