Life Thirty Minutes at a Time

On a cutter, you’ve always got an eye on the clock. If you stand a watch, which almost everyone does, your days are broken into four-hour chunks; six per twenty-four-hour day: midnight to four a.m., four to eight, eight to noon, and so on through the day.

You are expected to show up thirty minutes early so the prior watch can pass down pertinent information. Therefore, if you have the 0000 to 0400 watch, you’re at your station by 2330 and get relieved at 0330 when the next watch stander shows up for their pass down.

That thirty minutes, though, that’s what really kept me ticking over to the next task, like a drive pawl pushing against the teeth of a ratchet gear. I automatically buffered all my tasking with a half hour on the front end.

Standing the JOOD watch (Junior Officer of the Deck) on the bridge meant plotting and logging the cutter’s position every thirty minutes. There was additional tasking at the top and bottom of the hour depending on the mission and the CO’s standing orders. The boring watches left me counting down the number of position fixes until I could go below. The busy ones often left me slapping down an ugly fix on the chart while I worked to multitask the events at hand.

In the OPCEN, it depended on whether we had an asset deployed. Small boats and fixed-wing aircraft had to check in with us every thirty minutes to verify they were still there. Helicopters every fifteen, as they have a bad habit of falling out of the sky—or just landing for lunch and not telling anyone. On slow nights, we had a few kitchen timers we kept resetting to remind us to check the secure message feed, glance at the radars, or just get up and move to stay awake.

Engineers had their own set schedules in the main space that involved getting cheek to jowl with the massive main diesel engines while they were running. It was common to see them walking around the cutter, clipboard in hand, as they checked gauges, all while dripping in sweat like they’d been in the shower with their clothes on. You could almost set your watch by when they checked what gauges. They had a policy where the roving watch stander would check to see if the oncoming personnel were awake thirty minutes prior to their report time.

The thirty-minute segmentation of the day worked its way into everything else we did: sleeping, eating, downtime, PT. I used those thirty-minute blocks to plan my day, sometimes falling back into basic training survival mode where all I had to do was keep going until I had at least ninety minutes where no one would bother me. “If I can just make it to 1530 when we knock off day work, then I can sleep for (checks watch)… long enough.”

A typical sleep cycle is about ninety minutes for the average person, and most folks get around five cycles a night. Sleep on an older cutter—especially one that is undermanned for its mission set—is an inconsistent luxury. You get to where you nap when possible and try to get in at least one full cycle at the first opportunity.

When it came to crawling in bed, though, there was a problem. According to policy, if we got into our racks for any reason, we were supposed to change out of our uniforms for sanitary reasons. That takes precious time, though, and it wasn’t like we had space to put away our dirty clothes. It boiled down to two questions: how long until laundry day, and how many days had I been wearing the pants I had on?

If I only had thirty minutes, I’d just pull off my boots. If I had an hour or more, I’d actually take off my pants and hang them up, but stay on top of the covers. More than two hours meant I could actually take the time to wipe down with a rag and cold water at the sink, then crawl in the rack to try and sleep.

It helped that I never actually used the prison-quality sheets and blankets issued to us. I made the bed to military standards, then slept in a sleeping bag I could quickly roll up and hide when the Master at Arms did an inspection walk-through.

If it seems like I put too much thought into the mental math of catching a cat nap, understand that I use the example to illustrate how far down into the weeds of our lives that thirty-minute time limit got. After four years, most of us were doing it subconsciously to the point where we could plan a seventy-two-hour evolution in our heads and stick to it without a hiccup.

I left the cutter in 2018, and I still find myself running my day from the top to the bottom of the hour, doing the math on how many sleep cycles I can squeeze in before I have to be somewhere, or what I can get done between now and the end of the day. My three-year-old is learning about clocks and time, and I find myself breaking up his day in the same way. I still stand watch too—it’s in an emergency operations center now—and instead of four-hour chunks, the watches are twelve to sixteen hours long. The half-hour checks are for rainfall totals and river flood stage.

Life, and now crisis, a half hour at a time.

______________________________________

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.