… in the back of a pickup truck doing about 30mph through a saltwater carwash while holding a rifle.

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Ever ridden a mechanical bull? Well, do that for two hours in the back of a pickup truck doing about 30mph through a saltwater carwash while holding a rifle.

Very respectfully

OS3 K.  Aud

USCGC Active, WMEC 618

2016 09 15 Thursday

I was sitting on the couch in third class berthing waiting for the Damage Control drill to kick off. We all knew it was going to be a main space fire with full evolution from initial action to de-smoking with ram fans. Then the law enforcement alarm sounded: “NOW, set LE phase 1, set LE phase one, Bravo team on deck…”

Fifteen minutes later I was having my spine shorted one impact at a time as we pounded our way across the open ocean in six-foot swells with three-foot waves. They were hitting on the starboard quarter, so the water was swelling up from behind us at a difficult angle. The coxswain couldn’t read the water because we were chasing the wave action instead of hitting it head on. 

The OTH Mk IV (over-the-horizon, mark 4) is a jet drive cutter boat designed to go out beyond its parent vessel’s line of sight. For a boat of its size and capabilities, it’s fast. Fast enough that falling out while at its maximum speed could break an arm or crack a rib. At the time, we were only doing about twenty-five knots. Every time we crested a wave, the coxswain had to throttle back to keep the bow-heavy craft from slamming into the next oncoming wall of water. Sometimes we got lucky, and the stern stayed wet (in contact with the water’s surface) so the landing was somewhat softer. Occasionally the waves stacked on top of the swells, and we sailed off the edge of a ten-foot wall of water into open air.  There was a moment of weightlessness as we all gritted our teeth, flexed our bodies as tightly as possible, and prayed we don’t fall too far. 

We always did though. The landings were always hard. The hull pancaked like a flattened hand slapping the surface of a pool. We caught our weight on our feet and tried to brace with our knees and hips as we drove our “shock mitigating” saddle seats to the deck in a secondary impact. SLAP-BANG.  As the seats bottomed out, we all pitched forward trying not to bounce off the dash or the person in front of us. About one wave in ten sends us airborne like that.  As the weather worsened, each one was a little bit worse than the previous. 

This went on for miles and hours. 

Shortly after getting underway a squall line caught us. Each frothing impact with the water was joined by thirty knot winds driving needles of water into our exposed faces. My boots filled to their tops within the first ten minutes of our trip. At least it was warm out there. The wind blew across our headset microphones making communication impossible. Which left us two options, we could use one hand to cover the mouthpiece leaving only one to brace ourselves, or we could down to idle speed while we made a radio broadcast. That would have been the equivalent of a police cruiser having to pull over during a high-speed chase to use its radio. The boat was brand new, and someone turned on the VOX setting on our headsets. No one in the boat trained on the new comms gear, and no one on the cutter could find the manual to tell us over the radio to turn it off. 

The low overcast rain clouds made it impossible to tell direction, the sun may as well not have existed.  There was lighting on the horizon when we went into the water, but I didn’t get a bearing on it before we left. The horizon, when we could see it, was the only “terrain feature” to reference out there as the cutter has long since disappeared behind us. 

My existence was reduced to two instances; bone jarring, painful impacts that break the boat’s forward inertia… and a rough, undulating, asymmetric roller coaster. That rolling uneven ride was accompanied by the buffeting roar of wind and turbo diesel howl. Static bursts of radio comms from the cutter guided us haphazardly across the ocean. Every updated course put the target further away or in a completely different direction. The ship’s radar couldn’t maintain a fix in this sea state.

We changed course for the umpteenth time and drove off into nothingness. Loose gear and debris floated up from the deck and I clutched my rifle hard to my chest once more. Waiting in weightlessness. Time slowed down and the only thoughts I had is that broken bones heal, and that if the boat rolled and stayed upside down, I had to ditch the weapon and focus on getting my seat belt off…

The bow impacted with the oncoming wall of silver-edged cobalt blue. The angle was perfect, and the nose of the Mk IV was driven straight up. The mass of the boat pivoted around the impact point and the stern (where I am sitting) hits with as much, if not more, force than the bow. I was riding the fast end of a lever.

The seats fully compressed their suspension springs and coils, slamming into the deck again as our bodies absorbed the rest of the impact. Time was still moving slower than it should as the warm sea washed over us. My right forearm was wrapped around the rifle, got caught between it and the hand hold at the front of my seat. Inertia caused all aboard to pitch forward yet again. The coxswain bounced off the steering wheel as both he and the pursuit mission commander caught the dash console with their helmets. My left hand slipped off the handle that pinned my right arm and I ended up with my weight hunched over it. All the air was driven out of me as the body armor dug into my gut and compressed my chest. I waited for the water to stop cascading off my goggles before pushing back and attempting to breath. 

Time resumed and the coxswain had already throttled up to climb the wall of water that had so effectively arrested our progress. Everything hurt. Muscles that have been flexed nearly constantly for the last hour had moved beyond simple burning into a throbbing ache. I could the feel strain of connective tissues at each joint as sharp pulling sensations that ended in hot needle points. The damaged meniscus of my left knee was a slightly more stringent cry than my hips, back, and shoulders, but just barely. 

A new update came over the radio. We hadn’t gained any distance on our target and the weather was deteriorating further. With the rain doing a fair impersonation of a sand blaster on my face I couldn’t help but think “Really, you don’t say? What was your first clue?”

Sitting in the boat we had a height of eye of maybe seven feet at best. In ten-foot seas we may as well have been blind. Lateral line of sight from wave tip to wave tip was forty feet at best. They decided to recall us. I was too tired to feel anything but frustration. With the mission called off we had to slog back through that mess to find the cutter. 

Thankfully we were allowed to go much slower on the return trip. The roller coaster ride was still rough, but the reality obliterating impacts were few and far between. We slowly climbed hill-sized swells of water to slide down their backs, over and over for another hour. Eventually it was over, and we were being hoisted into our cradle at the starboard davit. Laboriously I gathered my weapons, gear, and pelican cases then went forward to unload and stow. 

Everything hurt, and what’s worse is that if we found a new target we’d do that song and dance all over again. I wouldn’t mind it so much if we actually caught the target, but that business of abuse for nothing was overrated at best.

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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on November 18, 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.